Why Fight Same Sex Marriage? (Observations from 2012)

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Jesus That Matter Podcast, I'm your host John Harris. We are going to talk about an article from 10 years ago.

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We're taking a trip down memory lane today. Before I do though, before we take that trip, I want to introduce you, if you haven't heard about it, to our sponsor for this particular episode,

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I mean, it's still good stuff. And you can go get some at GoldRiverCO .com. So let's talk about the article that we're going to talk about today.

01:49

Someone sent me this. So this is a listener -generated episode. And they just said, John, read this.

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This is interesting. 10 years ago, this article was written in Touchstone Magazine. Now, I don't get

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Touchstone Magazine. I'm not endorsing Touchstone Magazine. The article is interesting to me. It's by Douglas Farrow, who teaches at a university in Canada.

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And what he argues here, or predicts, is basically what's happened.

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And I remember very well those days before Obergefell. I remember the climate.

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I remember political conservatives. Broadly speaking, we're pretty united against same -sex marriage, the legislation that would have enshrined that as part of the marriage institution.

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And today, that's just not the case. It's really like someone flipped a switch as soon as Obergefell happened.

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It's like, okay, we don't oppose that anymore. And 2015, to me, that was the year. That was the year so much changed.

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And two primary issues, I think, led to everything else. And I just say that it's the two

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M's. It's monuments and marriage. And we gave up marriage. And when we gave up marriage, we gave up gender.

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We gave up so much more than marriage. And that's what I think most people at that time, even, who were supporting

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Obergefell, they did not realize. In fact, I have a friend of mine who, an atheist, someone who,

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I think still an atheist, but someone who doesn't agree with Christianity, and was pro same -sex marriage in 2015.

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Well, that person is no longer pro same -sex marriage. And because they were shrewd enough, they thought deep enough to realize, well, this is what it's led to.

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And I think there are others that have that same view, but probably in the minority at this point.

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And we see how the left engineers culture. We see, or society. We see how it, in like year 2000, even to 2010, vast majority of Americans against that.

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That's not marriage. We don't call that marriage. We don't codify that in our law as marriage. I mean, just against that.

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And in just a few short years, they were able to completely change the way that Americans felt about this.

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And I think a number of factors were present in getting Americans to accept this.

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And all of them, all of them bad, all of them either corrupt or just bad, flawed argumentation.

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But I think the increase in technology and pornography and the numbing of American minds to sexual perversion,

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I think also the implicit messages, sometimes not so implicit, but just the normalization of these, quote unquote, alternative lifestyles in television shows and in advertising.

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And so you just got used to seeing it a lot more. I think there was a lot of big celebrations in the media when someone would quote unquote, bravely come out.

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And so this encouraged more people to come out and more people, especially with their celebrity status, who saw people with platforms coming out, they decided to,

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I mean, it's a monkey see monkey do, right? We were gonna follow that example. And so you had more people in your circles.

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This is a personal thing. So people who, let's say in their families, they didn't really know anyone who identified with any of these lifestyles, all of a sudden, they do know one or two people maybe in their circle of friends and family who are starting to identify with these things.

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And all of that, so many other things I probably could mention, the corruption of the

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Republican Party and the failure to argue this properly. And then after it seemed like it wasn't gonna be a popular thing to stop arguing on, to give up that fight.

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And what has it led to? It's led to where we are now. And it just opened Pandora's box. And the same thing with the monument stuff.

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2015, that was the year that stuff really started. And it was the same thing. Political conservatives didn't wanna fight it.

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They just, well, let's kind of give that up. And now we're downstream from that. And we see what happened in 2020 with the

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BLM stuff. We see now how there is a concerted effort to target actually just mainstream

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American figures at this point. Founding fathers, even Abraham Lincoln. I was, if you haven't seen it, you can watch

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American Monument. Last year, I was filming for some of it. And I was in Portland and Seattle. And I was even in places in the

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South. And I know others who helped film that project went to all sorts of places.

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To New York City, went to Louisiana. And just trying to get the general vibe from particular areas in which there were controversies over monuments, what's happening, who has the momentum, who has, and it's overwhelmingly, the left mobilizes for these things.

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And once they're done, they don't go home. They're plotting the next move.

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Okay, what's the next thing we can take down? And conservatives, I don't know what it is. I don't know if they just think, well, once we give them this, then they'll stop.

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Then we can negotiate. We'll give them the gay marriage thing. And then, okay, they're not gonna push it any farther. And of course, they played that game with us.

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They played that game. They said that this wasn't gonna affect your marriage. This is all it did.

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There's only one thing it does. It just extends to those who wanna visit each other in the hospital, this status that they have been denied and it won't affect anything else.

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It's just for them. And of course, that wasn't true. Of course, we should have known that. But unfortunately, too many bought that explanation.

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And the same goes for the monument stuff. If we, well, we just take the flag down in South Carolina, that Confederate flag that sits over that South Carolina Soldiers Memorial.

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We just take that down. We just, okay, let's just give them that. Let's give them, they can take the Confederate stuff.

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That's, you should know, that doesn't, that's never where it ends. They don't stop.

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They use this, they apply the same logic over and over and over again. You gotta say at the beginning, no, we're not letting this logic fly.

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This isn't the correct logic to use. This is, what you're doing is you're jumping a number of steps to connect something that doesn't need to be connected.

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That's not the reason that this monument was put there. It's not the reason the symbol is there. It's for the purpose of honoring those who sacrificed their lives in defense of their home state.

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It's really just a general statement, a general message of we honor the veterans that have fought for this state throughout time.

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And that's all it is. And if you wanna make it anything other than that, then you're the one that's out on a limb here, trying to really impose your own set of values upon something that does not reflect the values you're trying to impose.

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So you're not letting someone define the institution, whether it's marriage or monuments. You're not letting those who erected these things, in the case of marriage, it's

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God. You're not letting the authors of these institutions, essentially, the inventors, the creators, the people who define the meaning of these things to define the meaning.

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You're allowing others who later come along and say, I'm gonna impose my meaning to define the meaning of these symbols, these institutions, et cetera.

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Now, we can lament that all day. That's not the purpose of this podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to just, in the moment we're in right now, in 2022, what are the issues that are on the horizon for us?

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And will we think appropriately about them, the way that Douglas Farrow thought about the institution of marriage back in 2012?

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Will we have the foresight to know where things are leading? And there's a number of issues we could do this on.

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The precedents that are being set right now in regards to the pharmaceutical companies, medical establishment, and the government, and now the lines that are blurred between them.

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What is going to happen long -term to our healthcare as a result of this?

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There are voices, if you wanna call them prophetic, but there's voices out there warning about this. Frontline doctors being one of the main recognizable voices.

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Former VP of Pfizer being a recognizable voice that are warning, this is where we're going to go.

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This is going to be a medical, a tyrannical state. And it already kind of is, but it's just gonna get worse.

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Other issues, the immigration issue. And have you ever thought of this question?

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What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean? Does it mean that you land here from flying from another country and you're immediately, because you're on American soil, you're an

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American, and you get all the benefits of being an American? No, of course not. What does it mean? What kinds of things should we require?

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There's a lot of sacrifice and work and generations of development that have led to the point we're at where the benefits that the government gives to people are available and the rights that, of course, we enjoy in this country and the conditions we live in.

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And should those be extended worldwide? That's the sinking boat issue. If you do that, then you don't have those rights and those benefits and those privileges anymore because you can't sustain the scale at which people would come here if it was just anyone can come.

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But we're right now, right as I speak, there are about 500 ,000 people.

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There have been about 2 million who have entered the country since Biden became president. And there's 500 ,000 right now on the border just waiting, as I understand it, to come in.

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And I believe it's this week there's a change in policy where they don't have to evict someone right away because of the

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COVID issue. So what's this gonna do? What's it gonna do to you?

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It's not gonna affect your American citizenship. It's not gonna affect your Social Security check. It's not gonna affect your elections.

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It's not gonna affect your way of life or any of that. It's just let these poor people come in.

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Well, of course it's going to affect all of these things down the road and more. But will we actually make the, will we be able to see the assumptions today and where they lead tomorrow?

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I think Douglas Farrow did this about same -sex marriage. And there's a million other issues that we could talk about that are being debated today, but I won't bore you with that.

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In the closest, I guess, in regards to this is the whole idea of transgenderism and whether or not males and females have any rooted in reality, objective reality differences in the created order.

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Do they have actual differences that must be recognized by society in order for society to function correctly?

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And the answer that we're consistently getting today is no, there's really no difference. And even the conservatives, so -called conservatives are trying to play fast and loose with this one.

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They're picking and choosing what little fights they wanna be involved in, but they're moving with the

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Overton window to the left. And more and more, the differences, more and more things are just becoming androgynous.

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And what does that do? Well, I think Douglas Farrow even had some good ideas on that because Pandora's box was open in 2015.

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And four years before that, or rather three years before that, when this article was written, Douglas Farrow had some really good thoughts on it.

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So let's take a trip down memory lane. Let's read this and let's just see with someone 10 years ago who didn't know, at least from experience, what was gonna happen.

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Let's see if they accurately predicted what actually happened and on what basis they accurately predicted what happened so that we can do the same in our day and age.

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Douglas Farrow writes, why fight same -sex marriage? Even in America where the outcome is not yet decided, there appear to be good reasons not to.

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The optics are poor and the mandate seems uncertain. Prospects for victory appear slim, resources that might be reserved for more important fronts, abortion, for example, are squandered in defense of an institution to which our modern urban society is no longer committed.

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Industrial economics, reprogenetic technologies, and new ideas of autonomy, not to speak of new moralities, have called into question many of the assumptions on which that institution has always been based.

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Moreover, it is perfectly plain to anyone following the fight closely that same -sex marriage is merely a proximate goal, something to be abandoned as quickly as it was invented when its work is done.

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Can it really be worth fighting then? The answer is yes, for reasons that become clear when we take account of the work it is meant to do.

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And what is that work? Positively, to normalize homosexual relationships. Negatively, to denormalize heterosexual monogamy.

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Those who claim that they want homosexual relationships to be more like a monogamous heterosexual relationships may or may not be sincere, but they represent no significant constituency.

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Now, some think, and I think what he's saying there is that if you run the numbers on a number of partners, for example, that a homosexual individual have as compared to a heterosexual, that it's not really much of a comparison, that by and large, at the time, if you remember, the argument was what about these committed long -term homosexual relationships of two guys that have been married to each other, supposedly, but they don't have the paperwork for decades and decades.

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And he's just saying, well, that is such a minuscule amount of people within that community, or within that group of people,

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I should say, that it's not really, it's not significant.

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Now, some think that this larger project can be left to market forces, but others think that heterosexual monogamy as the source of widespread discrimination against alternative sexualities and lifestyles must be repudiated as a social standard.

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Same -sex marriage is the tool of choice for doing that. By redefining marriage as a union of two or more persons, rather than as a union of one man and one woman, the offending norm is removed from the body politic with a single incision.

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Afterwards, a wider assault on homophobia and heterosexism can follow. And do we see that today?

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Do we see what he's talking about here in 2012? I think to some extent, yeah, we do see that.

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And the polygamy thing has not, it's interesting to me how this progressed, because some were saying, well, it's gonna be polygamy.

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They're gonna, immediately, it's gonna be these polyamorous relationships, polygamous relationships.

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And I've seen this, to some extent, be more normalized. As far as legally codified,

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I think there's been steps made in that direction, but it's not been as, it certainly has not been as mainstream as the transgender stuff.

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The transgender push seemed to be the next rung. That was the next thing to push for. And perhaps the reason for that is because you can make a case that someone who's transgender is this suffering victim, and you pull the heartstrings, proclaim them the underdog, which is one of the reasons that there's sort of a goof up with the women's sports stuff, because it's like, well, now they're not the underdog.

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And that's the only reason, I think, that there's been pushback against this, because as long as they were the underdog, you couldn't question a victim.

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Well, now that, well, women who lose to biological men are victims, then conservatives are starting to try to rally on something.

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But you can see that that principle doesn't hold, because some of the same conservatives will turn right around and congratulate Dave Rubin for having surrogate children with his quote -unquote gay husband.

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So it's like, there's no actual standard fixed in a creative norm. It's just victimology going back and forth, and the conservatives at this point are almost as bad at this as the left is.

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They just have their victims. And so, anyway, so what

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Douglas, what's being argued here by Douglas Farrow is that this same -sex marriage is just a tool, it's a stepping stone to something else, that it's not the end in and of itself, it's just a means to something.

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And that's one of the things that I think was missed, that same -sex marriage was not an end.

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It wasn't ending there. Even despite what activists said, it was a means to something else. And that something else is just a complete redefinition of marriage.

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It's actually the removal of any definition for marriage. And once the norm is removed, then it's

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Pandora's box. So he says a wider assault on homophobia and heterosexism can follow.

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This is exactly what we have now. This is exactly what we have now. And even converging with the critical race stuff, whiteness is these hetero, it's, in fact,

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I've seen this a number of places. If you have a stable mom and dad and you come from a home which had that kind of stability, well, you're blessed with some kind of white privilege that you need to kind of check yourself for.

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And so there's a fusion here. This heterosexism is associated now with white culture, with European culture, with Christianity.

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It's all kind of in the same bowl of stew. Douglas Farrow writes, tools need to be crafted, of course, in social debates carefully framed.

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That has already been done with remarkable skill. The knife that is poised to remove the traditional definition of marriage from America has been honed at both ends.

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The one edge is shaped by an appeal to our best instincts, the love of liberty and the liberty in love.

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This is the emotive edge, flashing with winsome pictures of same -sex families, disturbing antidotes about marginalization.

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It also plays on feelings of repression and guilt. As one young woman quoted in the Associated Press put it, they love and they have the right to love.

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And we can't tell somebody how to love. Last night, I was watching a, it was a town over from me, two towns over.

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We had someone from my church who was making a speech at this particular board meeting for, it was the school board meeting.

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And I will probably be doing some episodes on this actually because I thought as I was listening, as I was watching actually some of the testimony,

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I thought this is really good stuff to examine. And it's the same, and this particular issue was on a very offensive book that the school board made the right decision in this case to ban from their library.

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It had been there and they took it out. And there were, as I understand it at least, there were other school districts in the area who actually voted to keep these books.

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That's very concerning. So the school district though, that I'm referring to though decided, no, we don't want this particular book.

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And a bunch of students from the high school came out and this is their whole argument against the banning that book.

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You can't tell, who are you? Who are you to dictate to us what we should be reading, who we are, that's really the root of it.

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You're telling us who we are. And we need this book to help us navigate and figure out who we are.

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We, you don't look to biology anymore. You look to these emotional experiences. That's the assumption behind this. It's the assumption behind this.

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You look to emotional experiences to figure out who you are. And so that's the narrative that's happening now.

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And I think moving forward, this is going to be stronger and stronger and stronger.

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The self -expression, getting in touch with yourself, fully realizing who you are sexually as being sexuality, as being part of that is just something that is, it's canon.

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It's inerrant, it's infallible. You can't question it. That's it, it's human experience is infallible and inerrant.

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And it's very subjective obviously, but it's being treated as if it's a higher form of truth than scientific analysis or divine revelation.

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So anyway, the other edge, he says, is the harder, more rational edge is shaped by an appeal to autonomy and equality.

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Not content with the anecdotal, it drives home the case for rights. Rights not merely to love as one sees fit, but to equal recognition of that love by the state.

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Hence also to the recognition of the wrong, both morally and constitutionally of the traditional definition of marriage that privileges the heterosexual norm.

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In America, this knife was first wielded in Massachusetts in the 2003 Goodridge Court, which concluded as follows, barred access to the protections, benefits and obligations of civil marriage, a person who enters into an intimate exclusive union with another of the same sex is arbitrarily deprived of membership in one of our community's most rewarding and cherished institutions.

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That exclusion is incompatible with the constitutional principles of respect for individual autonomy and equality under law.

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Now, by the way, by the way, this whole argument, it fails because actually, technically speaking, there are no rights that were taken away.

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There were no, if someone wants to, if they're interested in a relationship between a man and a wife, between a mom and, future mom and dad, between a man and a woman, then they are free to engage in that.

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Any person who thinks of themself as homosexual is free to partake in the marriage, a marriage relationship, at least at this point, as long as they, it was an actual marriage relationship.

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And that, and the thing is that the idea was that that marriage relationship was not defined by the state arbitrarily.

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That marriage relationship was recognized by the state because it was actually defined by the creator.

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And the creator has left us this definition as seen not only in special revelation, which the

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United States founded in a Christian context, but also in natural revelation.

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Biology itself screams that the man and the woman are made for each other and they are, they fit together.

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So that's the world we once lived in, the world that is no longer. And because the logic of court rulings like that have now gained sway.

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And well, you have to extend this, you have to broaden or change really, or get rid of, that's really what's happening, that definition of marriage so that other people can call their relationships a marriage.

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Massachusetts later sued the federal government for attempting through the Defense of Marriage Act to enshrine in law the status quo.

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The suit claimed that in enacting DOMA, Congress overstepped its authority, undermined state's efforts to recognize marriages between same -sex couples and codified an animus toward gay and lesbian people.

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Not wishing to be implicated in that animus, the White House has declined to defend DOMA, the fate of which has yet to be decided.

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If DOMA fails, same -sex marriage will succeed in the courts of state after state with the de jure normalization and denormalization of which we have spoken.

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So the Defense of Marriage Act was I believe signed by Bill Clinton. And then the

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Obama administration decided we're not going to defend this. I mean, think about that. We are to the point, you know,

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Donald Trump would be more pro -LGBT than Bill Clinton was and more pro -LGBT in some ways, in some ways, than Obama's first term was.

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That's how far, that's the Republican Party. And then I compared them to the Democrat Party from a few decades previous.

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The Bonds of Marriage, he writes this. Alarmed about all of this, various champions have sprung to the defense of marriage, which they are now reduced in a concession

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I regard as a mistake to calling traditional or historic marriage. Over the past decade or so, they have tried to reframe the debate by highlighting the abiding contributions of that institution while avoiding as far as possible the appearance of animus against homosexuals.

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Exactly what I saw at the meeting last night. You had a bunch of activists go up, high school activists, and say to the board, the school board, they say, look, we're really upset that you're anti -gay, anti -LGBT, and you're gonna contribute to the number of suicides in our group.

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And what was the response? No, no, no, no, no, we're not. We love LGBT, we're just concerned about some graphic content in this particular book that is under review.

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That's the same thing that was tried. That's why it won't work today, by the way, just won't work today. It was, let's not, this is one of the other reasons we're doing this.

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Let's not use the same failed arguments over again. That didn't work back then, it's not gonna work today.

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Because back then, that was the same thing. It's like, oh, no, no, no, you can, it's fine. You can be in your relationship, and we affirm that.

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You can have this, you can have a status, a legal status, but it can't be marriage.

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That's all, we just want that word, we want that. So those contributions are manifold, and a good deal of emphasis has rightly been placed on the positive social and economic outcomes that marriage continues to produce.

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But at the center, indispensable to the rest is the service marriage does to the bond between a child and its natural parents.

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Sex makes babies, and babies need a mother and father, as Maggie Gallagher likes to say. I remember Maggie Gallagher.

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They had the Rainbow Coalition, right? They had all these people from different races represented to show that we are the

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Rainbow Coalition for traditional marriage. And so much of this, and I appreciate the people who tried to really hedge against this, but so much of it was, the premise was, it's a social good.

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So it's not on, the arguments aren't based on what's rooted in creation. The arguments are more based on what's actually practically good for mankind, for our citizens.

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And that should be a consideration. It should be. It definitely should be, but is it the basis? Is it the primary thing that should be argued?

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It should be that this is grounded in creation, and as a result of that, we can see that the benefits of living within the will of God, the will of our creator.

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Same -sex marriage proponents, for their part, are forced to set aside this concern. On their view, the parent -child bond lies beyond the immediate purview of marriage, as does the particular sexual act that produces children.

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Marriage is simply the formalization of an intimate relationship between adults. If those adults happen to produce or obtain children, well, that is another matter.

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Moreover, their bond with those children does not require any particular family structure to support it. Good outcomes can be had from diverse family structures.

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Enter Dave Rubin, right, and all the conservatives congratulating him. The debate about what constitutes a family and about outcomes for children is an increasingly lively one.

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It is largely driven, however, by the normalization, agenda that underlies same -sex marriage. The irony of this can hardly be missed for same -sex marriage, as courts in North America have made clear, is predicted on a denial of procreation or child -rearing as a definitive interest.

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Marriage is about adult bonding, and adult bonding is all there is to marriage. That's a good point, that if you just reduce it to, it's just an arrangement that adults have constructed for mutual benefit because they happen to be sexually aroused by one another, and that's what marriage is basically reduced to, or companionship could be part of this as well, then you're missing out, kind of like, here's a key function that marriage was intended to produce.

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There's kind of something else here, right? And those things are good. Those things are important. Marriage is an image of Christ in the church.

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There's a relationship there which shows a heavenly reality. It's a great mystery. There's also a created reality here in the temporal world which has effects in the afterlife, and that is the production of babies and the raising of them.

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The champions of marriage respond that they are very much in favor of adult bonding, which the institution is indeed meant to serve.

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That bonding, though, good in itself, is for a purpose beyond itself, however. It is for a purpose of public as well as private interests, the purpose of procreation and child -rearing.

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It's not necessarily, they point out, to hold that procreation constitutes the only good of marriage in order to recognize that procreation is an essential good of marriage, nor for the matter is it necessary to hold that a childless marriage is not a marriage, at least where the childlessness is not deliberate, a matter rightly shielded from public scrutiny.

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But they insist that to exclude procreation as an essential or defining good makes nonsense of marriage.

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Alan Keyes had a whole thing on this, I remember, when he was debating Obama years and years and years ago for, was it

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Senate? I think Senate in Illinois. And Obama brought this very thing up.

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Now, it's interesting to me, because Obama then was pro -traditional marriage, so their debate must have been, at the time,

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I don't know if it was marriage or if it was just civil unions or whatever it was, Obama was saying, well, yeah, but, you know, marriage, two people that are barren marry, and that's, we call that a marriage.

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That's a good, positive thing. And Alan Keyes, his whole argument, and I think because we've been dumbed down and Americans aren't able to, in general, now, at this point, where we are, we're not able to really think in deep philosophical terms or deep terms in general.

31:44

Alan Keyes' argument just didn't even work, I think. But it actually works, logically, it just didn't work on, it didn't, it wasn't able to be communicated to the people that he needed to get votes from.

31:56

But the argument essentially was, look, in principle, that's what a marriage ought to produce, in principle.

32:02

You know, and he's, I think he had an apple, and he's like, look, here's an apple. You can have an apple that's got worms in it, it's got all, you know, there's problems with the apple.

32:10

Is it still an apple? Yes, it's still an apple. Is it still, can you still take a bite out of it? Yes, you can still take a bite out of it. We don't hold up the wormy apples, or the apples that are, you know, a little old and shriveled up, or something.

32:22

We don't hold those up as, this is the ideal apple, or this is what an apple should be. This is, it's actually very platonic, what

32:28

Alan Keyes was saying, in a way. But it's very Christian, that there is, there is a standard, there is what marriage ought to be, and ought to produce, to be fruitful and multiply, and then there's the fact that they're sin.

32:41

There's the fact that we have a curse upon this world, and there are, things don't always function the way that they're supposed to.

32:48

That's the Christian understanding from the beginning. But that's lost on a crowd that doesn't believe any of that.

32:55

For them, they've already bought into the idea that there is no design behind any of it. So you have two groups, and this has been going on forever, and it's going, well, for, like, since my lifetime.

33:05

That's not forever, but my lifetime has been going on. And now it's just, it's coming to a breaking point, where you have one side that kind of thinks, and most of them now populist, people, the people, because those with platforms don't believe this as much, but the people, a lot of people out there, at least, conservative households across this country, traditional households,

33:27

Christian, even broadly generic Christian households, think there's a created order.

33:33

There's, someone created us for a purpose and made that purpose known in such a way we can know what that purpose is in general.

33:40

And you have a bunch of people that believe that. And then you have a bunch of people who don't think that's the case.

33:45

No, there's no creator. We get to make our own reality, and the biggest, the highest good is our self -expression, including sexual self -expression, and that's who we know who we are.

33:54

It's not because we're told that from creation. It's because, in design, it's because we create, we design, we're

34:03

God. That's really, behind all this, that's the argument. That's what's being debated, and yet rarely do people from either side come out for a breath of air to say, wait a minute, what are we actually assuming?

34:20

We're assuming totally different things here. So we have these debates where we're arguing about the, well, what's better for society over here when, in reality, we're back here, and that's what's determining what we believe over here on the surface.

34:34

So he says, surely that is correct. The third century Roman jurist Modestinus captured the common understanding of marriage with the following definition.

34:43

Marriage is the union of a man and a woman and a consortium for the whole of life involving the communication of divine and human rights.

34:51

This is gonna be very key moving forward. State recognition of this is important. The union and these rights exist not merely for their own sake, but also and especially for the sake of the intergenerational concerns of progeny and property, with a view, that is, to the conditions necessary for the founding and flourishing of the family.

35:10

The rights involved are divine as well as human because marriage is generative, and hence pre - as well as pro -political because what is found through marriage is in the 20th century language of the

35:20

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the natural and fundamental group unit of society.

35:27

The same elements that found expression in Modestinus perjured and prospered in the

35:34

Augustinian understanding of marriage as an institution entailing not one, but three interwoven goods, proles, fides, and sacramentum.

35:43

Procreation or fruitfulness, that is, loyalty or faithfulness, and bonding or sacred union.

35:51

That societies shaped by these understandings took the unusual step of making marriage monogamous testifies to the seriousness with which each of these goods was regarded.

36:02

Precisely in its service to the others, it was by developing them in their mutuality, moreover, that heterosexual monogamy, to use the language of its detractors, created the conditions for the new and deeper respect for women and for children that until recently has characterized the

36:17

West. And this is a great argument. This is, what he's saying, it hasn't always been this way, guys. That's what he's saying, it hasn't always been this way.

36:25

Now, there's a recognition across societies, most human societies in the world, that yes, men and women get together and they produce babies.

36:33

Otherwise, those societies that don't recognize that, they can't see that, then they have a hard time.

36:38

You don't produce babies, right? So this has been a recognition. But this idea, though, this Christian idea that we should respect women and children because we understand on a deeper level that a marriage is about procreation and fruitfulness, but also loyalty and faithfulness and bonding and sacred union, that these three things mutually support one another, that these three things make up a marriage, that these are virtues which must be from learned in the school, master of the family, learned in the home, and then it has an effect throughout the rest of society that these things are cherished and valued.

37:18

There was a time when you could shake someone's hand, you didn't have a contract. And today, we're very litigious. I mean, it goes into everything.

37:25

A lack of respect, it starts in the home. And when you defeat the home, then you're gonna just wait for the consequences across all of society.

37:35

We're seeing it, we're seeing it. And so he's saying that there's actually a societal, there's a social interest in making sure marriage is defined properly.

37:46

There's a social interest here. And I remember reading the book of Plymouth Plantation.

37:51

I think I went, I've read it a few times. I read it again last year, William Bradford's Diary of the Pilgrims. And it's explicit in that book.

37:58

You'd think these are Puritans, really, theologically. And in that book, he says, just obvious, well, he says marriage is a civil institution.

38:07

He's like, what? It's a civil institution. Marriage is an institution recognized and codified by the governing authorities.

38:17

You affect much more than just yourself when you engage in this kind of an institution.

38:23

It's very interesting to go back and read how marriage, it would have been insane for them at that time, at least, to think about marriage in terms of the libertarian argument today.

38:34

It's just something you do at your church and has no effect on anything else. And it's just a religious institution.

38:40

Therefore, society shouldn't recognize it. Governments shouldn't recognize it. That would have been ridiculous to them.

38:47

It's like, of course, what about all the laws pertaining to inheritance? There's adoption, and well, there's the parental rights.

38:59

And I mean, you're gonna just mess everything up at a fundamental level if you change this. But marriage, he says, for some time has been under feminist attack for its putative institutionalization in the name of divine rights, of oppressed patriarchal tendencies.

39:15

This attack, coordinated as it is now with the Rawlsian assault on religious or comprehensive doctrines in the public sphere, has helped create a very different set of conditions, the conditions necessary for the advent of same -sex marriage.

39:27

And same -sex marriage, by eliminating the first good, has begun to unravel the whole fabric of marriage, setting up something else in its place, an institution not intrinsically connected to the family, or at all events, not connected to the natural family.

39:41

The divine and human rights belonging to marriage are thus beginning to disappear, as I want now to make clear.

39:48

Now, this is key. The divine and human rights belonging to marriage are thus beginning to disappear.

39:54

He wrote this in 2012. The rights belonging to marriage are beginning to disappear.

40:01

What is he talking about? He says, everyone has the right to marry and to found a family. He's quoting the universal declaration, and the family thus founded is entitled to protection by society and the state.

40:13

Parenthetically, we should observe that everyone really does mean everyone. Though, of course, not everyone wills to marry or is able to do so, it is ludicrous, then, to propose that same -sex marriage expands the pool of those who have the right to marry.

40:24

It does no such thing, since everyone already has that right. As I pointed out some time ago, only if marriage is redefining as a union of persons, rather than the union of man and woman, is it possible to argue that homosexuals have been barred access.

40:37

So, he's basically saying there's already a definition switch by even making that argument, because marriage is not fundamentally a union of people, of atomized beings, right?

40:50

It's not just people, it is man and woman. And by the way, how are we gonna hedge against, if it's just people that are adults, that are 18, was that the magic number?

41:00

How about, you know, what about children? What about, so you can see where you could put in anything.

41:06

How about my cat, you know, can, why just people? Why discriminate against other species?

41:13

It does no such thing. Moreover, since what same -sex marriage offers, which has not to do with founding a family, is indeed something other than a marriage, and he says, he quotes an article here, let's keep going.

41:26

We should observe that when a family of some description is founded by a same -sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent -child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect.

41:38

Let me read that again. We should observe that when a family of some description is founded by a same -sex couple, it is always founded by violating the natural parent -child bond that marriage is intended to nurture and protect.

41:50

In other words, what about the rights of those children being brought up into a something called a family but they don't have the same natural parent -child bond.

42:02

What does it do to them? It deprives the child, he says, whether in the same way that divorce does or in the more innovative technological way of its prima facie right to its own mother and father.

42:14

In other words, humans don't have a right to a mother and father, to be born into that natural union that the

42:22

Creator set up. But we should notice something else as well and not merely parenthetically, something too little notice either by the detractors or by the champions of marriage.

42:30

Same -sex marriage violates the natural parent -child bond in every family and the right of the family to protection by society and the state.

42:42

This is big guys, this is big. How so? In Rerum Novorum, Pope Leo XIII rightly described the family as a society, very small, but nonetheless a true society and one older than any state, with rights and duties peculiar to itself, which are quite independent of the state.

43:04

This society founded more immediately in nature is what the Universal Declaration has in mind when it speaks in Article 16 of the family, the family status as natural.

43:12

That controversial adjective is deployed only in this one specific article, allows it a certain priority over civil society and the state.

43:21

The latter share an obligation to protect the family, but the family is not at their disposal. In other words, you don't have the right, the government has no right to just tamper with this.

43:31

This is pre -government, this is something that exists in the natural state, this is something part of the design of creation, something that the

43:36

Creator set up. State can only come in and protect it, and they don't legitimize it, they recognize it, and they protect it, and part of the protection is protecting children that are raised in this arrangement.

43:53

This is a normative arrangement that the state is now, it has an obligation to protect, and there is no obligation to protect it once you change, once you annihilate the very definition of it.

44:11

So you're gonna lose the rights, so in the name of promoting these rights, well you lose human rights, you lose the right of children, you lose the right of women to protection in this.

44:21

We are seeing now, I'm seeing this with personal situations, but I'm seeing the, and this happened way before same -sex marriage, because this is all part of one big enchilada, but the whole no -fault divorce thing, and what's happened now where the protections that once existed for even women in a divorce no longer exist.

44:47

A man can just say, this is in the state of New York, I don't want you anymore, and it's over with.

44:56

There's still, I mean they still have to pay in some cases, you get a good lawyer though, you can arrange things in such a way that you get off scot -free.

45:11

Same -sex marriage dispenses with all of that, however, by exercising sexual difference.

45:18

With its generative power, it deprives itself of any direct connection to nature.

45:24

The unit it creates rests on human choice, as does that created by marriage. But whether monogamous, polygamous, or polyamorous, it is a closed unit that reduces to human choice, rather than engaging choice with nature.

45:38

And its lack of generative dimension means that it cannot be construed as a fundamental building block.

45:46

Institutionally then, it is nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older, more basic than the state itself.

45:58

Indeed, it is a creature of the state, generated by the state's assumption of the power of invention or redefinition, which changes everything.

46:06

Six years ago, he says, which would have been 2006, when same -sex marriage became law in Canada, the new legislation quietly acknowledged this.

46:16

In its consequential amendments, section Bill C -38 struck out the language of natural parent -blood relationships from all

46:23

Canadian laws, wherever they were found. These expressions were replaced with legal parent, legal relationship, and so forth.

46:30

That was strictly necessary. Marriage was now a legal fiction, a tool of the state, not a natural and pre -political institution, recognized, and in certain respects, age, consanguinity, consent, exclusivity, regulated by the state.

46:46

And the state's goal, as directed by the courts, was to assure absolute equality for same -sex couples. The problem?

46:51

Same -sex couples could be parents, but not parents of common children. Granting them adoption rights could not fully address the difference.

46:59

Where natural equality was impossible, however, formal or legal equality was required.

47:06

To achieve it, heterosexual marriages had to be conformed in law to homosexual marriages. The latter produced non -productive units constituted not by nature, but by law.

47:15

The former had, therefore, to be put on the same footing, and were. He quotes the

47:25

Alberta Law Review, 2005. Someone wrote, it is to denaturalize the family by rendering familial relationships and their entirety expressions of law.

47:33

But relationships of that sort, bled as they are of the stuff of social tradition and experience, are no longer family relationships at all.

47:41

They are rather policy relationships defined and imposed by the state. Here we have what is perhaps, he says, the most pressing reason why same -sex marriage should be fought.

47:50

Listen up. And fought vigorously. It is a reason that neither the proponents nor the opponents of same -sex marriage have properly debated or thought through.

47:58

In attacking heterosexual monogamy, same -sex marriage does away with the very institution, the only institution we have that exists precisely in order to support the natural family and to affirm its independence from the state.

48:10

In doing so, it effectively makes every citizen a ward of the state, by turning his or her most fundamental human connections into legal constructs at the state's gift and disposal.

48:21

You are owned by the state. You are owned by the state. That's what he's saying. Once this takes place, and there's nothing, the government's not obligated to recognize something that's an authority over itself.

48:32

The government merely creates and erects its own reality, and it has its own categories for what's in acceptable relationships, and you can fit into their categories.

48:44

And on that basis is how you live. And on that basis is how your rights, quote -unquote, are defended.

48:50

But they're just produced out of thin air by the government. You feel like lately maybe your rights have been a little devalued?

48:57

I don't know. Maybe in the last few years? I don't know. Maybe this whole virus thing could have contributed to that?

49:03

You think that you don't feel quite as free in the United States anymore? The government thinks that it has more power than it actually does?

49:11

Well, when you ascribe to the government the power to create, and you get rid of the creator, then of course that's gonna happen.

49:21

He quotes another book that he wrote that he has tried to provide a larger account of this and to show how it leaves the parent -child relation open to increasing intervention by the state.

49:30

So why can't the state just, if the state is the one that creates the organization that you've now, you're part of this, you're a party to, marriage, why can't the state just come in and take your kids?

49:39

Why can't the state just change its mind on, there's really not much, philosophically speaking, stopping it if you want to be consistent.

49:48

The current cover for that intervention is the notion of children's rights, meaning far too often the right of the child or whatever it is that the state, acting on behalf of the adults other than its parents, want it to have a good education in state ideology.

50:00

For example, which these days includes diversity training and alternative family structures. That should surprise no one, for if marriage is not procreative, it is not educative either.

50:10

Where is the educative authority to be transferred, if not the state whose paterfamilias, power, increases as the rights and freedoms of the natural family diminish?

50:18

And what will the state do with its newfound power, if not use it to undermine further the sphere of the family and the sphere of the church or religious community as well?

50:25

The two spheres where divine and human rights independent of the state are located.

50:31

And we saw this, we saw this in Canada very clearly. The state thinks that it is the master of the church, the state thinks it is the master of the family, it can prevent someone from passing the bar exam, you're not able to be certified as a lawyer if you don't agree even with their definitions of marriage.

50:51

You can, they'll shut your church down if they think it's a health risk. They had a bill that was in committee here in the state of New York where the governor could just arbitrarily decide someone's a health risk and put them in a camp.

51:02

It didn't make it out of the committee, thank goodness, that was right around the time the Cuomo scandal stuff happened, but it could have passed.

51:08

It was a potential bill that could have passed. The state thinks that it has the right to everything, to create reality, to determine what happens to you.

51:18

You have no rights left in this kind of a world. It's whatever the state tells you. The state becomes

51:24

God. That's what happened when gay marriage was passed. That's what he's saying, and it's part of a lot of other things that have led to this, but he's saying that's really what we're engaging in here, that the definitive power for defining reality is the state now.

51:40

And people, it's hard for people because they didn't think deeply about it, many of them.

51:46

They didn't make these connections, but we're feeling the effects of them. We're starting to. That's gonna get worse.

51:52

Accelerated unraveling. I spoke of an unraveling. Those who point to places like Canada as counter -evidence, gleefully observing in their own preferred metaphor that the sky has not fallen in jurisdictions with same -sex marriage either take others for fools or make fools of themselves.

52:05

With an institution as basic as marriage, one must think in terms of centuries, not mere months or years, which, by the way, we saw in the

52:11

United States in 2015. Remember that? Oh, hey, the sky hasn't fallen. Everything seems to be normal.

52:17

Yeah, well, yeah, of course. It's gonna take years.

52:23

And by the way, it started. It started. We're seeing the effects of this. There are, he says in 2012 in Canada, signs of a certain acceleration.

52:31

It took some 200 years for Jeremy Bethlehem's essay on pet pediastri, pederastri, can

52:38

I pronounce this? Yeah, pederastri, I think, something like that, which first observed that objections to homosexual acts were rooted only in prejudice to find political expression in the demand for same -sex marriage.

52:53

There are, however, signs of a certain acceleration. It took some 200 years for Jeremy Bethlehem's essay on pederastri, which first proposed the objections to homosexual acts were rooted in only in prejudice to find political expression in the demand for same -sex marriage.

53:09

There's a long view here that that the objective that basically critical theory against people who would object to homosexuality.

53:18

That's been going on for a rudimentary form of it for centuries, and here we are now. It has not taken long at all for activists in this tradition, aided by the development we will touch on later, to produce the so more radical

53:28

Yogyakarta agency, which they are presently trying to entrench in the

53:34

United Nations and impose on states. The Yogyakarta principles on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity was crafted in 2006 as a master plan for the next phase of the war on heterosexual monogamy.

53:51

The document dispenses, as does heterosexual same -sex marriage legislation, with the binary logic of male and female that has hereto governed human society.

53:59

Now, this is in 2012. 2012 in this document was 2006. 2006, 2012, people were like, what?

54:07

Of course there's men and women. Yeah, they can have their gay marriage thing, but there's men and women. And he's saying, uh -uh. You pass this, you lead to that.

54:15

It presupposes instead the very different binary of homosexual and heterosexual orientation. A binary that can more easily be cracked and broken down into a kaleidoscope of gender identities.

54:24

It then reads into a long list of human rights, including the right to found a family and the right to education, a warrant, or a demand for the protection and promotion of the interests of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

54:37

Now, this is where, like, people like Ben Shapiro, to pick one example, are completely off.

54:43

They're completely wrong. They're completely, it's dumb. And as fast as he can speak, you know, and as many smart things, sounding things, he might happen to say, he's just absolutely wrong on this.

54:55

Because that, this has been his whole argument. It's like, well, you know, same -sex marriage is fine. I think we should support that. I'm a social libertarian.

55:01

But whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on. Like, men can't be women. Women can't be men. There's only two genders. You can't have it both ways.

55:08

That's what this gentleman is arguing. He's saying that was the agenda from the beginning. What this means in practice is an all -out assault in every society, sector of society, on heterosexism or heteronormativity.

55:21

That is, on anything that seems to privilege the male -female binary or the nuclear family. Here in Quebec, there is even a government white paper mapping out the strategy.

55:29

Same -sex marriage, it says, served to consecrate the legal equality of same and opposite sex couples. It is in time now to press on to full social equality by eradicating all forms of heterosexuals' bias.

55:41

The commandments imperiously delivered to the nations of Yogyakarta by a self -declared panel of experts thus finds local expression in a policy replete with warnings about systemic investigations of infractions and rigorous monitoring and assessment mechanisms.

55:58

In other words, the government's gonna be watching you, making sure you're not promoting any of that homophobic stuff or anti -trans stuff.

56:08

There is then a further vital reason why same -sex marriage must be vigorously contested, namely that no peace is to be had by capitulation.

56:15

Like it or not, the great struggle is underway. Marriage, if you please, is the Sudetenland and its concession is the precursor to a cultural blitzkrieg.

56:26

That line has aged well. 2012, and we're ten years later, marriage is the

56:32

Sudetenland and its concession is the blitzkrieg, is the precursor to a cultural blitzkrieg.

56:38

That's exactly what happened. Well, you know, it'll be fine. Just let them have that. And then what do we see upon us immediately?

56:47

Deconstructing orientation. Mr. Farrow writes, to be sure there are weapons in this arsenal of the

56:53

Yogyakartans that are prone to misfire. Take, for example, the term orientation.

57:00

The main task of that term has been to mediate the transition from male -female binary to the heterosexual -homosexual binary.

57:07

For that strategic purpose, it has maintained the aura of a hated naturalism. Orientism, like sex, is something fixed by nature and can therefore compete with sex as a fundamental consideration in law and public policy.

57:20

The very concession of orientation was a poison pill. By the way, this is a poison pill

57:25

Al Mohler gave us in 2014 in the Southern Baptist Convention at the URLC.

57:31

And he's up there saying, I repent of denying the existence of orientation. Because guess what? Al Mohler knew.

57:36

He's smart enough to have known. If you buy into this category that there's just these orientations that people have, then you legitimize same -sex marriage.

57:45

You legitimize same -sex marriage, then you legitimize all the transgender stuff, and you get rid of gender completely, and everyone can define themselves, and the government can sanction it, and we're just automatons.

57:55

We're just individual humans with an all -powerful government, and there's no mediating family structure that the government has to recognize because it's pre -government.

58:03

That's the whole pendulum here. But Al Mohler took a step in the wrong direction here. He took the poison pill.

58:10

And not just him, there are many who did it. And so this article is rightly arguing from 2012 that this is bad.

58:17

Don't buy into the orientation stuff. In the present phase, the term has new work to do.

58:24

It is to be understood as referencing to each person's capacity for profound emotional, affectional, and sexual attraction to, and intimate and sexual relations with, individuals of a different gender, or the same gender, or more than one gender.

58:34

Which is to say it has become a more malleable term, capable of taking as an adjective each or all, not merely both.

58:42

So when you buy into that term, he's saying the binary, the male -female thing, and when you buy into this, you're now extending.

58:54

You're saying that the reality is more than just this. It's more than just the affections that are associated with, and appropriate for, and designed for men to have towards women, and women to have towards men.

59:08

You're now legitimizing more than that. It's not just homosexuality. It's other things.

59:14

It's weird. It's unusual fetishes people have. It's all kinds of things. Pedophiles naturally, hence in some sense, appropriately, desire sex with children.

59:23

Children, on the other hand, being vulnerable in various ways, need to be protected from sexual advances by adults. So we tell pedophiles that they must restrain themselves, or find other outlets for their sexual urges, which is discriminatory.

59:33

A parliamentary committee in Canada recently found itself being backed into this very corner, and the panic was palpable.

59:41

So on what basis do you protect children from adults with these urges? What do you appeal to? If you buy into this, well, it's a legitimate orientation someone has.

59:51

That's, you know, just like someone's orientation for heterosexual adult relationships, and you know what, how do you manage that?

01:00:01

There is no way. And philosophically, this has to lead to pedophilia being recognized in some way, for consistency's sake.

01:00:10

The only thing keeping some of this stuff back is just the residual effects of Christianity in our

01:00:18

Western context, and how people in the United States are kind of grossed out by it. But just remember, 20 years ago, they were grossed out by and indignant, or 30 years ago, by homosexuality.

01:00:28

So we're making the same arguments, making the same mistakes that we did in 2015, again, and the speed has accelerated.

01:00:37

We can try to justify discrimination by proceeding to a balance of harm argument, of course, but we cannot then avoid the implication that there exists no invulnerable rights to sexual self -expression, or indeed to public approval of a so -called orientation.

01:00:52

And if this is true for pedophiles, perhaps for consistency, we should call them pedosexuals, pedosexuals.

01:00:59

It is true also for homosexuals and heterosexuals. There may be or arise real and present dangers to society to justify repression of one or both of the latter as of the former.

01:01:10

And the same is true for any other tendency or orientation. I'm gonna see how long it's a long article.

01:01:18

And so I don't know how much longer I want to go just because we let me let me just skim some things for you.

01:01:26

We just don't have a lot of time here. But he says unfolding the logic, he says, alternatively, we can attack one of the premises, so as to invalidate the conclusion altogether, we might attack the first premise by saying that pedophilia is unnatural and moral, that is in itself, as such is an illegitimate attraction, a morally and psychologically misdirected orientation that indeed, is the traditional view.

01:01:49

But of course, the traditional view does not recognize orientation as a protected category in the first place.

01:01:55

That's the key thing here. Orientation isn't a protected category. It's it's there. That's you're inserting new things into the whole discussion of this, these relationships, in order to legitimize certain behaviors.

01:02:10

When you do that, to say that an orientation must be misdirected or illegitimate is to say that it cannot serve as a person's sex serves to qualify one for legal protection.

01:02:19

In other words, to attack the first premise is to fall back into an old biological objectivism and into the despised public policy of a pre benthamite era.

01:02:29

Perhaps then we are not prepared to attack the first premise recognizing that if we do attack it, we must either show that pedophilia is not really an orientation at all, or be prepared to overturn the jurisprudence and legislation entrenching orientation as a protected category.

01:02:42

This is the problem. In that case, we may prefer to attack instead the second premise and avoid in that way the troublesome and discriminatory conclusion restrain yourself or else.

01:02:52

That puts pedophiles in the position that homosexuals, or for that matter philandering heterosexuals once were in.

01:02:58

Some attack the second premise only from the perimeter, so to speak, arguing for a narrower construal of the word children.

01:03:05

That is, for a lowering of the age of consent, but that only postpones the problem rather than solving it. Others attack it at its core.

01:03:11

Children, they say, may benefit from sex with adults. It depends how the pedophile handles the child in question. This view is certainly not new, but today it is voiced much more openly than ever it was, because it is the only view that is actually consonant with the unfolding logic of our jurisprudence and legislation.

01:03:26

It is the only alternative to admission of error. Nevertheless, it generates profound discomfort and even meets with firm resistance because it penetrates to the very bedrock of natural law, bringing into view the problem of pedophilia.

01:03:38

Hidden in the coils of the term orientation is an uncomfortable reminder that we can and do tell people how to love.

01:03:45

That is a powerful sentence. Bringing into the view the problem of pedophilia hidden in the coils of the term orientation is an uncomfortable reminder that we can and do tell people how to love.

01:04:00

In other words, you buy into this orientation business. You say it has legal protection. There's no way to avoid pedophiles having that same exact legal protection if you're going to be consistent.

01:04:15

And the only thing that we can rely on now is inconsistency, because the logic has already been adopted as a matter of common law.

01:04:26

Orientation may be a vulnerable point in the vocabulary of the Yogic cartons, just as the arbitrary exclusion argument is the reason for the

01:04:33

Goodridge Court. But before attempting to probe such vulnerabilities in public debate, it behooves the supporters of marriage to face a more still glaring weakness.

01:04:42

I refer, of course, to the problem of contraception. In 1968, in the midst of the furor surrounding the

01:04:52

Humanae Vitae, Elizabeth Anscoby delivered a paper in Toronto that laid bare the fuller significance of contraception, of the new offer of sex without children, that would make nonsense of marriage.

01:05:09

1975, contraception and chastity, she asked with disarming frankness, if you can turn intercourse into something other than the reproductive type of act, then why should it be restricted to the married?

01:05:21

Restricted, that is, to partners bound in a formal legal union whose fundamental purpose is the bringing up of children.

01:05:27

In fact, if that is not its fundamental purpose, there is no reason why marriage should have to be between people of opposite sexes.

01:05:35

There is no need to rehearse her entire argument, which the may do for himself, but Anscoby was quick to recognize that too many marriages supporters were still reluctant to admit, namely, that if contraceptive intercourse is all right, then so are all forms of sexual activity.

01:05:52

This is the idea that sexual activity should at least have the potential to produce a child, and that, in fact, this gets into a whole discussion of Hebrew law and why, you know, what was the reason for the rule against having sexual intercourse during a woman's cycle, and it's,

01:06:13

I'm not getting into all that right now. In fact, the Protestant, well,

01:06:19

I shouldn't say Protestant, but the evangelical view by and large has been that contraception's okay as long as it's not an abortifacient.

01:06:27

And that's the view that I've held for, and really by default, I think, held for years.

01:06:32

I've been rethinking this to some extent, and thinking in terms of, you know, this is such a recent thing, and of course, you know, someone usually brings in the cycle.

01:06:43

You can plan, you know, which days to be intimate as to avoid that, and I've just been,

01:06:50

I'll be honest with you all, I'm not prepared right at this moment to come down super hard on this, but I think it's hard for me to get away from, because the whole thing, here's the whole thing for me.

01:07:04

The whole deal with this is, well, it's not a sin to, right? It's not a sin to use some form of contraception.

01:07:12

And in my mind, the deal is, I don't know if that's the right question to ask.

01:07:19

Is it not a sin to? I rather go with more of an affirming standard. Well, what's the design of this institution?

01:07:28

What ought we to be doing? And there's no, I'm not trying to heap guilt on anyone who is involved in that, and contraception, that's not a abortifacient.

01:07:35

Abortifacient's clear -cut, that is different. You're murdering someone, that's a little different. But preventing the implantation and stuff like that, while trying to still have the sex act,

01:07:46

I'll be honest with you, I do wonder about that to some extent. I do wonder about that to some extent.

01:07:53

And no, I'm not saying it's a sin. See, that's the thing. But there is this connection, there is this this disconnection,

01:08:02

I should say, that exists. And however you come down on that debate, all right? Which is fine, you can have it in the comment section, that's for a different episode.

01:08:11

However you come down on that debate, you have to grapple with the fact that there has been a disconnect between sexuality, the sex act, and having children.

01:08:21

And it's been so far disconnected that it's not even seen as the two ought to be related to one another.

01:08:28

It's that, you know, when you have time and want, this is where our culture is at now, when you have time and you just want to have kids and you're ready financially and all the rest of it, you know, then you can do this.

01:08:38

But you should have sex, you know, way before that, and you can have sex. And if you just say we're done, then you can.

01:08:43

So that's, and I realize, I know people are gonna call me for even questioning this, you know, I'm crazy or something.

01:08:50

I'm just, I'm not telling you I'm even decided fully on this. I'm just, I'm trying to grapple with it myself.

01:09:00

Broadly put, to embrace contraception is also to embrace the utilitarianism that governs the Benthamite approach to sex.

01:09:06

That approach sets aside the question of the intrinsic nature of an act and of its ordering by the human agent to its proper ends in order to concentrate solely on its capacity to maximize pleasure or happiness.

01:09:18

That's the danger really. What is sex about then? Is it just pleasure? Is it just happiness? Or, you know, is it just even emotional bonding?

01:09:26

Is it, what is it? Should there be a component of at least the potential for children could be produced?

01:09:32

That could be Abraham and Sarah. It could be, you know, we're past the childbearing age, but the potential, in theory, is still there.

01:09:38

And in a perfect world, that potential would be there. In so doing, it makes it impossible to distinguish morally between contraceptive and non -contraceptive intercourse or between intercourse and other kinds of sexual activity, including sodomy, in a way that can sustain marriage as an institution.

01:09:53

I think this is a good argument. I think it's one that you have to get around if you want to do the pro -contraception thing.

01:09:59

It's a difficult one. Because why not? If that's all it's about, then what, sodomy, you know, you could have that in a heterosexual union.

01:10:07

There's a book, Mark Driscoll wrote this book years ago, Real Marriage. I remember I read it and it got weird at the end.

01:10:14

I remember thinking, man, this is weird, because he talks about the sex acts that are appropriate for heterosexual couples.

01:10:19

And he talks about this issue in there, and it's like, yeah, you know, if both parties consent to it, then this is totally legitimate.

01:10:26

And I remember thinking, like, what? Like, you're literally damaging someone in this act. And, well, if, you know, both parties, if you can do it in a certain way, and they're,

01:10:35

I'm like, and like the alarm bell is going off in my mind, like, wait, but that's not what that's designed for, right?

01:10:42

The design thing kept coming, like, that's not what that's designed for. And, and, and I think that's, that's the, the thing that you have to get around if you want to do, if you want to argue for those things, is how would this not be a blank check for other, other actions, other, other things that don't lead to children, but those are now permissible somehow.

01:11:03

So you just have, you have to have your boundaries. And maybe, maybe someone can make a decent argument out there, but I think he, he, broadly speaking, historically speaking, he's right.

01:11:11

If the introduction of these things and, and these technologies and drugs and everything else is when you start, you start seeing this sexual revolution, it all came together.

01:11:23

All right. Let's, let me see here. I want to skip ahead here.

01:11:35

Christians are not the only ones in positions to understand what Augustine and Leo XIII and Paul VI understood that marriage resides at the very foundation of culture.

01:11:45

They're not the only ones who have the reason to be concerned about all this. Christians may, however, be the only ones capable of standing against contraception, which is their particular duty.

01:11:53

So he goes on about contraception. America, he says, will experience no different fate unless its

01:11:59

Christians are emboldened to attest, not merely as the Manhattan Declaration attests, but also, and more especially as, and Scombe attests, attested both that marriage is a gift, something we receive with creation, not something we invent, and that only what is capable of being a marriage act is natural sex.

01:12:20

Of the latter, we scarcely need any more reminders since we are constantly surrounded by them. Perhaps we still need to recall, however, how

01:12:26

Christianity once revolutionized the pagan world. How, for example, it raised the stakes of in -marriage, not only by insisting on monogamy, but also the benefits for women and children, also by sacramentalizing it, declaring an institution belonging to the natural law open to divine grace in such a way as to found the domestic church, the secular image of an eschatological reality.

01:12:45

These were monumental achievements, true revolutions at once, spiritual and political, and turned marriage into a prize worth fighting for by connecting it to both what humans are and to what they may hope to be.

01:12:56

Christians of all people should not be surprised or cowed by those who are now seeking to seize the prize for through political and jurisdictional maneuvers.

01:13:06

They should understand, however, the seriousness of the situation, for our society can never really be post -Christian.

01:13:12

It can only lapse into a sub -pagan parody of its Christian heritage, which is just what we are witnessing with same -sex marriage.

01:13:19

And I would agree, in the area that I'm in right now, I was shocked when I came back to some of the things

01:13:25

I've seen in some places where transgenderism is on the rise, but also witchcraft is everywhere.

01:13:31

We're going to pre -pagan. We're going to pre -pagan. It's not like we're just, oh, secular. No, secular is a temporary situation at best that leads right into, because man's religious, into a pre -pagan religion.

01:13:44

And that's where we're going. Though our society now applauds almost any kind of loving union, it admits to sacramentum but sexual self -expression.

01:13:53

It admits no sacramentum but sexual self -expression. So there's nothing sacred anymore. Though it professes the highest respect for women, it no longer requires or expects fideis from either men or women.

01:14:03

So fidelity. Though it preaches progress, it is uncommitted even to proles, that is to the own secular future.

01:14:10

It prattles about children's rights but denies them even the right to life. It is a society that no longer knows what love is and no longer believes that humans may hope for, that humans may hope for very much.

01:14:24

Perhaps only Christians can present this society with a kind of mirror in which it can truly see itself for what it is.

01:14:29

But a mirror clouded by the contraceptive mentality is no use at all. To offer it such a mirror is a decidedly unserious gesture, a parody of a parody.

01:14:37

So it seems that, for Christians at least, the fight against same -sex marriage will have to begin at home."

01:14:42

It's an interesting piece. And the contraception thing, like I said, I'm not,

01:14:50

I think that there are Christians who can make a decent case.

01:14:56

And again, the case usually rests though on it's not a sin. It's a very negative case. You can make a decent negative case for contraception.

01:15:03

But as far as a positive case, I think it's very, it's difficult. I don't know that that's the linchpin of all of this.

01:15:09

I think that definitely, there is a connection there somehow. There is. But I think a lot of the things that he talks about here are very true.

01:15:18

Because what are we arguing about right now? In, now we're in 2022.

01:15:23

What's the argument? The argument is that children are being threatened by Disney.

01:15:30

That there's grooming going on. That there is an attack on their innocence.

01:15:37

That they, and behind that, they don't have the rights to remain, that shouldn't even be a protected thing.

01:15:43

Protecting children from the corrupt, corrupting influences of sexual perverts. That's something that now a large segment of society thinks that you can, children can see what they want.

01:15:54

I just watched last night on this hearing that I was talking about that, well, children are going to watch pornography on the internet.

01:16:00

So you might as well have stuff in the school. That's the argument now. That you shouldn't shield children from these things.

01:16:07

Well, why not? Well, because we've given up the idea of a nuclear family rooted in creation.

01:16:13

It just, we don't have it anymore. Where it's just state -imposed categories based on subjective orientation, which is just based on pleasurable experience, which is apparently the identity -forming thing that makes us who we are primarily.

01:16:30

That's all we have. And when that's all we have, then there is, why would you, would you want to protect the children's innocence?

01:16:37

From what? Why should they even be innocent? What? They should explore themselves sexually, shouldn't they?

01:16:45

And the sooner they figure it out, the better for them because they'll have their identity more, they'll be confident in themselves.

01:16:51

They'll have an identity. They'll know who they are. It's good. It's healthy, right? That's a good thing for them to explore.

01:16:58

The whole idea to protect them rests on the premise that we already know who people are.

01:17:05

We have an identity that's been given to us and it blossoms in time, that there is a, that there is an awakening of that at an appropriate time for when those responsibilities someone has are able to be appropriately managed and sustained with a level of maturity that's able to rear children and provide for them and protect them and nurture them.

01:17:34

And so if that's not part of the equation, if the production and raising of children and forming a home as contributing members of society, that's not connected with sexuality, then yeah, if sexuality is just about finding yourself and having pleasure, then why not?

01:17:57

I mean, Disney can do what Disney wants to do and that should be perfectly fine. You can have whatever books in the schools.

01:18:04

That should be perfectly fine to expose children to these ideas at certain ages. And so you're losing protection of children.

01:18:13

You're losing the rights of children. And like I said, you're losing the rights of women too in all of this. Husbands can just divorce women.

01:18:19

They can just go to the next woman and there's hardly any consequence for that kind of thing. And that'll be less and less so as we go.

01:18:26

And women can do that to their husbands as well. But children need a father.

01:18:32

So this hurts the children. It hurts the wives. And I think that's one of the reasons we have the

01:18:40

Me Too stuff is it's sort of this alarm bell going off that like, well, we need protection.

01:18:47

We need protection because we've given up the very basis for protection, but we still need protection.

01:18:52

So it's all resting on some kind of a victimology. But of course, consent then becomes the only thing that legitimizes sexual behavior.

01:19:02

And there is nothing else. It's not within a pre -political organization, the family, that was specifically designed to protect the people.

01:19:11

And I'm not saying every family is perfect at all. Not at all. But it's certainly a great deal better than being atomized individuals.

01:19:18

I mean, the family, who you marry and all of that, I mean, that was a decision that you made with great counsel and families were involved.

01:19:24

And it wasn't something that you just haphazardly did on a whim in Las Vegas.

01:19:29

It wasn't supposed to be that. So we've been devaluing marriage for a long time. But we're to the point now where these social justice causes are coming in, in order to fill this gap that has been left behind by leaving behind the created order.

01:19:44

And it's not a good thing. It's a very bad thing. It's a very unhealthy thing. Children need to be directed and they need to be told what the truth is of the situation, that they're actually, there's a hope there.

01:19:58

Not a hopelessness is what we're seeing now with suicide rates, with drugs, with all that. No, there's a hope. When you play with your dolls, you know, as a female or the boy plays with his action figures or whatever, they're already rehearsing something that rings true about life.

01:20:16

They're already looking forward to a day when they're gonna, when a girl plays house, she's preparing for the day that she'll be the woman of the house.

01:20:23

When she progressively learns to take on responsibilities and do them well from her mother, ideally, she is learning how to be a woman who's going to be a good wife and a good mother.

01:20:36

And she perpetuates that. And that whole thing has been just hijacked now.

01:20:42

That those aren't, that is not an important thing to value. It's whatever, whatever her self -expression should be.

01:20:48

That's what we should just value. And we shouldn't limit that self -expression because maybe she wants to do things that are taboo for religious people, quote unquote, but we know that that's just their arbitrary idea, right?

01:21:01

And it's not an arbitrary idea. It's rooted in creation. It's, it's just, it used to be called common sense.

01:21:08

So anyway, I thought it was an interesting article. And sometimes I want to talk about articles that are more positive that get us to think that's the only reason

01:21:14

I did this. I don't always want to just deconstruct in the minds of the postmodernists, but in my mind, just analyze a negative article.

01:21:24

I want to, I want to talk about some positive things at times. And so this was,

01:21:31

I think, a good article. Now it's a depressing topic in some ways, seeing where we've fallen, but I think it's an example for us.

01:21:37

Let's not make the same mistakes. And I, and I wouldn't just encourage you think through, just really think through in your own minds, this transgender debate, and we'll be talking about it some more.

01:21:46

This debate over semi -pornographic material in the schools, this debate over what

01:21:52

Disney's doing, and what's, what are the premises that we need to keep in mind as we argue these things?

01:21:59

Why shouldn't someone support Disney, for instance, right? What are they doing that's wrong? You know, it's, well, they're corrupting children.

01:22:06

Well, why is, how is that corrupting children to let them explore options, right? You have to somewhere get back to, there are a limited set of options that were baked into creation that we need to recognize for the protection of those children.

01:22:22

Without that, you're just, you're, you have nothing. And I saw that at that, the

01:22:28

Wappinger School Board meeting that I was talking about. It's just, that was the same thing. They, they, it was so arbitrary.

01:22:34

The people that wanted to ban the book primarily, their argument was, well, it's just going to make people uncomfortable. It's going to make people uncomfortable.

01:22:41

We should ban it. Well, goodness gracious. I mean, I guess you could make arguments to ban a lot of things is that's the only reason.

01:22:47

There's got to be something deeper than that. This is such a fundamental issue. So that's all for today. And yeah, and think about the contraception thing.

01:22:53

I'm still thinking about that myself. And, and it's something that I'm gonna have to work through. And I realize some of you in this audience are probably on squarely on one side of that.

01:23:01

And some of you are squarely on another side. Of course, abortifacients, that's another topic, but you know, is it right to partake in sexual acts or to partake in, in, in certain barrier methods or whatever to prevent the possibility of pregnancy?

01:23:18

Is that a right thing? I think at one time that that's the majority of evangelicals thought that, but was this always the case?

01:23:26

I don't know. I don't know that that was always the case. It didn't seem to make sense to me. That just wasn't even a thought until the sexual revolution,

01:23:33

I think, and maybe a little before that, but certainly the industrial revolution. Yeah, of course you had before that you had certain, you had, you know, timing methods and things like this and other sexual acts.

01:23:43

But, you know, as far as the barrier methods that became more commonplace and the drugs that became more commonplace that mess with hormones and things like that, you know, that, that was, that was more new and it accompanied, it accompanied this revolution of sexuality is, is actually about self -expression instead of there's, and there's no responsibility attached to it.

01:24:06

And of course we know that there is. So just think about that whole thing. I think it's, it's something worth pondering and, uh, coming out maybe on one side or the other, or at least just saying,

01:24:15

Hey, there, there's a point to be made here. At least we can see that there's something to this. And at the very least, even if you are supportive of contraceptions, uh, contraception, and, um, uh, that's not abortifacient at the very least,

01:24:28

I think you can, we can at least all admit here that the marriage relationship was meant to, uh, at least have the potential to produce children and raise children, that that relationship and sexuality in general, broadly speaking, was intended to have that feature as a primary thing that was connected to it, to the production and then the raising of children.

01:24:54

Uh, that's, and, and of course it goes beyond that, much beyond that. But that was, uh, one of the, the primary reasons, uh, that biologically we have this.

01:25:04

Of course, there's a spiritual union that happens there too. There's much more than that, but that is, but it doesn't just because it's more than that doesn't mean it's less than, than that.

01:25:12

So I hope this was helpful for some of you. God bless, uh, more coming. We'll talk about this kind of thing and I'll get specific.

01:25:18

We'll talk about, I'll show you some video from that, uh, Lord willing that, um, uh, school district meeting.

01:25:24

We'll talk about, uh, the debate that's happening here locally and, uh, and, and there's many more things, man,

01:25:30

I got a bunch of episodes, uh, in the queue, but, uh, uh, this is a long one. So hopefully this prodded you to think.