Natural Marriage is Not Bigotry—It’s Biology

Written by 

Frank Turek | May 13, 2014

What reasons, other than religious reasons, might someone want to keep marriage defined as only the union of one man and one woman? There are actually thousands of reasons. They are born each day. Marriage must be protected to protect children.

How does that follow? How will children be affected by broadening the definition of marriage? To discover the actual truth about this complicated issue of same-sex marriage, it’s important to be correct rather than politically correct. 

Let’s start by identifying the main reason we have marriage laws in the first place. The main reason the government is involved in marriage is not to recognize that two people love one another or have a romantic affinity for one another. We don’t have marriage laws to recognize the fact that you get a tingle when Barbara wears that blouse. Why should the state care about just romantic feelings?

The real reason governments have an interest in promoting natural marriage because only natural marriage perpetuates and stabilizes society. Strong marriage laws encourage men and women to procreate and then stay together to mother and father their children. That benefits children and all of society because children raised in biological two-parent homes  tend to do better and cause society much less trouble than children raised in other situations.

Why is this so? Because men and women are different. Mothering and fathering are different. A mother brings unique benefits to her child that a father cannot provide and vice versa. Same sex couples always deny children in their care either a mother or a father. Only natural marriage can provide and protect the parenting unit that every child deserves—a mother and a father. That’s why limiting marriage to a man and a woman is not bigotry—it’s biology . It’s based in the biological facts of nature and the needs of children.

Homosexual activists inadvertently admit this in arguing for same-sex marriage. While they assert that men and women are the same—that there’s no difference between homosexual and heterosexual relationships so those relationships should be treated equally—their entire case denies that point. If men and women were really the same, the activists would simply marry someone of the opposite sex—which according to them is the same as someone of the same sex—and be done with it. The very reason they are demanding same-sex marriage is precisely because they know men and women are drastically different.

Since same sex and natural marriage are different behaviors that result in different outcomes, they should not be treated equally. The law must treat people equally (which it already does) but not their behaviors. When the law treats these different behaviors equally the cultural understanding of marriage changes and children get hurt.

The law is a great teacher. It shapes opinions and behaviors for generations to come. Wherever same sex marriage becomes law, the public doesn’t come to see two types of marriage—natural and same sex. It comes to understand that marriage is genderless. In other words, by dropping the gender requirement, the law helps teach society that marriage is a genderless institution merely about the romantic desires of adults and nothing about the needs of children. Well, if marriage isn’t about the needs of children, then what institution is about children? Do we really think we can divorce children from marriage and avoid negative consequences?

We can’t. In fact, we’ve been experiencing negative consequences since no-fault divorce laws passed in the 1970s. Those laws make dissolving a family too easy and should be repealed. They also help teach people that marriage is only about the desires of adults, not the needs of children. If marriage is all about my happiness and not the needs of children, then I should get divorced if I’m not “happy.” The law is teaching me that if the tingle is gone I should move on. No wonder families break up at alarming rates, and children are damaged in the process. Making marriage genderless through same sex marriage will further hurt children by annihilating their connection to marriage completely.

Making marriage genderless also impacts what we teach our children. In Massachusetts , for example, parents now have no right to even know when their kids as young as kindergarten are being taught about homosexuality, much less opt out of it. Why are we indoctrinating five year olds with any information about sex, especially homosexuality? And why is California now mandating that homosexuals must be identified in public school curriculum and only depicted in positive ways? Nothing negative can be said even if it’s true! That’s not education; that’s propaganda. Our education system is politicized and propagandized and our children are the victims.

Some states even dictate how parents educate and counsel their children outside the schoolroom. California, along with New Jersey, now make you a criminal for counseling your own child out of unwanted homosexual desires. Do you realize the totalitarian nature of this? The state has given itself the obligation to indoctrinate your children into homosexuality and taken away your parental right to counsel them out of it. Are you the parent of your own child or is the state? Is this still America?

If all of these observations make you mad, don’t blame me—I didn’t make up the facts of nature. I didn’t make up the fact that men were made for women and that babies only come from their unions. I didn’t make up the fact that mothers and fathers are different and bring unique parenting skills and benefits to their children. I didn’t make up the universe in such a way that children tend to turn out better when raised by a biological mom and dad. I didn’t make up the fact that we all have desires we ought not act on, regardless if we are born with those desires or acquire them in life. These aren’t “my” truths or my morality. They are self-evident truths. They are not hard to know—just sometimes hard to accept.

It can be summed up this way: Conservatives try to adjust their behavior to fit the facts of nature. Liberals try to adjust the facts of nature to fit their behavior. No matter how well intended, the latter is an impossible approach that often leads to tragic results .

If we truly love and care for people, we won’t abandon self-evident truths and celebrate destructive behavior. When we do, not only do children get hurt, so do many others..... 

The Incorrect Assumption of Transgenderism....by Elizabeth Prata

The following article is taken from a blog entitled, "The End Time".  The author of both the blog and article is Elizabeth Prata.  Thank you Elizabeth for a very informative and God honoring article on a very culturally divisive issue.

"...what is in the mind cannot be questioned."

The above statement was from Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, and the author of "Try to Remember: Psychiatry's Clash Over Meaning, Memory, and Mind".

It is from an excerpt from an Opinion-Editorial article that appeared in the Wall Street Journal last week by Dr. Paul McHugh, formerly head psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins University. [HTStand to Reason Blog] from which the above was taken. Their title was "Why the First Hospital to Do Sex-Reassignment Surgeries No Longer Does Them"

I thought Dr. McHugh's point about anorexia and bulimia was especially poignant. The comment about the 20-fold higher suicide rate of surgically transgendered patients in latter years having 'no explanation' was also poignant.

Christians have the explanation. The explanation is, the trans-gender seeker person is vigorously rebelling against God and denying His sovereignty over creation, including their own creation as a man or a woman. Rebellion against God and denying Him always leads to despair- because rebels have no hope.

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Halifax, Canada: "The familiar stick figures remain, so as not to confuse anyone used to looking for them to point the way to a washroom. But now Capital Health has added a third figure to the signs on some of its single-stall bathrooms in Halifax to represent transgender people, in a move designed to signal a welcoming environment to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender individual."

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Satan actively seeks moral decline. He seeks it in the individual and he seeks it in society. In attacking the family satan has had success in bringing about an acceptance of divorce, and an acceptance of homosexuality- at least as it's presented in the news and the media. The next frontier for acceptance of perversity is transgenderism, and polyamory (Multiple wives, or multiple partners under one roof.)  If satan can corrupt the marriage institution and pervert the nuclear family, thus normalizing terrible sin, he will have accomplished his goal, which is to rebel against God's holy standards. Getting an entire society to rebel is icing on the cake. (Romans 1:32).

Dr McHugh's information is of interest because transgenderism is the next frontier of satan's active battlefield. The cherry on top of the icing on the cake is that after getting individuals to fall, and after getting a culture to fall, is to get these perverted notions accepted by thechurch. It has been an onslaught lately.

Several weeks ago, a church identifying as Southern Baptist repudiated the biblical standard for sexuality and voted to keep a pastor who'd reversed his position on homosexuality as a sin. The reason for the pastor's change of heart? His son came out as gay, and rather than repudiate the sin in his son and go through the Matthew 18 process, the pastor chose to repudiate Jesus instead. His church voted to keep the gay-affiring pastor, thus the congregation repudiated Jesus also. In these cases I am reminded of Revelation 3:20. Jesus is outside the door of the church, knocking to come in.

The Presbyterian Church USA voted this week to change their constitution declaring marriage as a union between two people, rather than specifically between a man and a woman.

In the face of the swelling tide of gender role and sexual reversals, last week the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating in part, "The separation of one's gender identity from the physical reality of biological birth sex poses the harmful effect of engendering an understanding of sexuality and personhood that is fluid."

And this piece by Dr McHugh agrees, medically, biologically, and psychologically. Transgenderism is in the mind, it is a desire, an appetite. It is a disorder, not a biological reality.

Acknowledging transgenderism as a sin and not a disorder does not diminish the pain and anguish the gender confused individual possesses. However the glory of the Gospel is that Jesus died to pay for all sins, and to bring peace between Himself and sinners. Any and all sin, confusion, and anguish can be covered and helped by repentance and submission to the Great and Holy Comforter. He is a man of Sorrows Himself, understanding our pains and woes. He will help. Repentance, means a true rejection of one's sin, and in this case pleas to Jesus will be heard. It doesn't mean that one's anguish over sin will be immediately dissolved, but He sends a Helper in the Holy Spirit to aid us in resisting temptation. More than that He gives us HOPE, and changes our focus from self  to Him, that is always the greatest and most magnanimous place to start the path to true peace.

Here is Dr. McHugh

[P]olicy makers and the media are doing no favors either to the public or the transgendered by treating their confusions as a right in need of defending rather than as a mental disorder that deserves understanding, treatment and prevention. This intensely felt sense of being transgendered constitutes a mental disorder in two respects. The first is that the idea of sex misalignment is simply mistaken—it does not correspond with physical reality. The second is that it can lead to grim psychological outcomes.

The transgendered suffer a disorder of "assumption" like those in other disorders familiar to psychiatrists. With the transgendered, the disordered assumption is that the individual differs from what seems given in nature—namely one's maleness or femaleness. Other kinds of disordered assumptions are held by those who suffer from anorexia and bulimia nervosa, where the assumption that departs from physical reality is the belief by the dangerously thin that they are overweight….

Psychiatrists obviously must challenge the solipsistic concept that what is in the mind cannot be questioned. Disorders of consciousness, after all, represent psychiatry's domain; declaring them off-limits would eliminate the field….

We at Johns Hopkins University—which in the 1960s was the first American medical center to venture into "sex-reassignment surgery"—launched a study in the 1970s comparing the outcomes of transgendered people who had the surgery with the outcomes of those who did not. Most of the surgically treated patients described themselves as "satisfied" by the results, but their subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who didn't have the surgery. And so at Hopkins we stopped doing sex-reassignment surgery, since producing a "satisfied" but still troubled patient seemed an inadequate reason for surgically amputating normal organs.

It now appears that our long-ago decision was a wise one. A 2011 study at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden produced the most illuminating results yet regarding the transgendered, evidence that should give advocates pause. The long-term study—up to 30 years—followed 324 people who had sex-reassignment surgery. The study revealed that beginning about 10 years after having the surgery, the transgendered began to experience increasing mental difficulties. Most shockingly, their suicide mortality rose almost 20-fold above the comparable nontransgender population. This disturbing result has as yet no explanation but probably reflects the growing sense of isolation reported by the aging transgendered after surgery. The high suicide rate certainly challenges the surgery prescription….

At the heart of the problem is confusion over the nature of the transgendered. "Sex change" is biologically impossible. People who undergo sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental disorder.

For certain individuals whose condemnation was written about long ago have secretly slipped in among you. They are ungodly people, who pervert the grace of our God into a license for immorality and deny Jesus Christ our only Sovereign and Lord. (Jude 1:4)

And yet, our gentle Lord encourages us with this verse,

But you, beloved, building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life. (Jude 1:20-21)