Comments on NY’s Decision on Same-Sex Marriage

First, George Weigel’s salty comments on NY voting for same-sex marriage: “What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.”

Second, Karen Zacharias: “I’ve never understood why Christians are supposed to be appalled at the notion of Gay people marrying. You’d think if we were going to be appalled over something it would be the divorce rate in this country. But then that might really step on some toes, if we started making divorced people feel bad for being divorced.  To be clear, I don’t think the Church — any church — ought to be forced to marry Gay people, or any other people for that matter. I believe the State has no business telling the Church what to do. Same goes for the Church. My mama and daddy didn’t marry in a church but they managed to build a decent union all the same. I have no problem with Gay people getting married in New York or anywhere else. It’s a civil matter as far as I’m concerned. I don’t see what the big fuss is all about. I think Gay people are going to finally figure out what the rest of us have known for a long time: It’s not getting married that’s the problem. It’s figuring out how to stay married. I’ll be curious to see if Gay people do any better a job at staying happily married than the rest of us do.” And…

Third, Al Mohler: “But what this statement really means is that many Americans, including many in the political class, simply fold their moral convictions when they conflict with the lifestyles or convictions of a friend or relative. Thus far, whenever the people of a state have had their say, marriage has been defended as the union of a man and a woman. Same-sex marriage has been made legal by courts (such as in Iowaand Massachusetts) and by legislatures in some northeastern states. If current trends continue, the American map of marriage will reveal a deep and consequential division between states which recognize same-sex marriage and those who do not. Given the central importance of marriage to our civilization and culture, it is hard to imagine how such a mixed moral landscape can last. Add to this the fact that President Obama has instructed his own Attorney General not to defend the Defense of Marriage Act in courts. In the end, it is difficult to know how one can exaggerate the importance of the New York’s shift on marriage. New York is not merely a highly populous state – it also includes the nation’s most significant city in terms of economics, business, and cultural influence. The legalization of same-sex marriage represents nothing less than a moral revolution, for what the law allows and recognizes, it also approves. Last Friday was a sad day for marriage and, if the advocates of same-sex marriage are right, it was also a sign of things to come.”