Same Sex Marriage Controversy

I appreciate that kind introduction and it only seems like the, yes, thank you.

If you all do not want to be blinded by the glistening from the chrome dome, you would definitely want to do something with that.

Actually, I thought you were reaching for the air conditioner there and then the light started blinking, so I'm not sure what's going on. It probably just seems like 170 times,

Ed, and I did want everyone to notice, however, because we didn't get a chance. You didn't introduce me.

Is that why you didn't introduce me? You're saving it for the end. Okay. All right. Well, this was actually the ninth great debate that we had here on Long Island, and we were sort of reminiscing about old times, and the second year

I was out here, I actually stayed at Ed's home, and that was the last time I was ever invited to do that, and so I'm not sure if the snoring got to him or just what, but it's always been good to get a chance to come back here to North Shore.

Some of my most memorable debate experiences have taken place here as well, and we won't go into that this evening, but it is good to be with you.

I'm going to be using a number of different passages of Scripture this evening, so those of you who are sitting there with your Bibles at the ready will get there in just a moment.

I actually have some good news to share with you, and that is that in my home state of Arizona, I live in Phoenix, and please, for those of you who remember the 2001

World Series, do not stone me for that, but that's okay.

I know Ed's a Mets fan, so he's going, yeah, all right, but anyway, in Arizona today,

I got news, and I had heard that this was happening, the Supreme Court upheld our

DOMA law. DOMA is becoming a word that people now understand what that means. DOMA means

Defense of Marriage Act, and the Supreme Court was examining that as to whether it was constitutional, and at least on the state level in Arizona, that law has been upheld as of today.

Sometimes we get accustomed to all of the bad news that it's nice once in a while to hear some good news in the process.

But what has brought us to a situation where, and I would imagine even back when we first started coming out, when

I first started coming out in 1996, I would imagine if we had sat down and said, what do you think are we talking about 10 years from now, 8 years from now?

What's going to be the big social issues that we're facing? I really doubt that the subject of marriage and the definition of marriage and the nature of marriage would have been the first thing.

We may have thought about it within the context of maybe a type of situation where you have marriage seminars and things like that.

Those are very popular, but to actually be speaking about the very definition of marriage and how we as believers can interact with a society that is redefining marriage, redefining it not only in the context of what was understood in the founding of our nation, the original intent of those who created this land that has been so blessed by God, but also when you think about it down through history itself, there is an easily discernible definition of what marriage is.

And so I don't think most of us would have been thinking, oh, well, things are going to progress so quickly at such a rapid pace that we would be discussing such things as cloning and the definition of marriage and all these issues that, yeah, some people were talking about them, but let's be honest, it seemed like it was so far off.

It didn't seem like it would be something we'd be talking about, but when you think about it, we live in a generation where we now see the result of multiple generational implanting of certain secular ideas, not only in the minds of those who do not bow before the

Word of God, but let's face it, in our own minds as well. We cannot escape the society in which we live.

We cannot escape the influence of the billboards along the road, the films, television, radio, the printed media, now the internet.

All of us are deeply impacted by these mechanisms whereby the society presses its shape upon us, seeks to conform us to its image.

Every day, pressure is placed upon us as believers in Jesus Christ to be conformed to the image of the society around us.

And what is that society teaching us? It has become, and let's use the right terms here, it has become orthodoxy in our society to no longer believe that we are created beings.

It has become the orthodoxy of our society to view ourselves as the chance random result of the tossing of the cosmic dice.

We might have come into existence, we might not have come into existence. There is no purpose because there is no creator.

And I'm not talking here just about, it is a part of it, but just about the debate of evolution and creation in seven days or lots of periods of time.

Sometimes we get distracted at some of the details in that debate and lose the fact that when this nation was founded, the vast majority of people, including the leaders who wrote the founding documents, believed that man was created in the image of God.

Now some of them may not have thought that we could know much about God, but they were still convinced that we were created in the image of God.

And hence life had certain properties, certain values, and mankind has certain responsibilities before God.

There was a foundation, there was a basis for morality, for law, for ethics, and sexuality.

There was a belief that since we are created by God, there was objective meaning and objective truth and that there was a purpose in human life, a purpose above and beyond what could simply be the result of the toss of that cosmic dice, how things have changed.

Without a creator, we are left to our own devices to define meaning, truth, and morality.

What is right and wrong for the vast majority of our fellow citizens today, and sadly, functionally for the vast majority of Christians, is that which is obtainable through polls, through voting.

If you can get enough people to vote for something, then it must be right. The idea that there are transcendent laws, that there has been a revelation from God that gives to us an understanding of how we as human beings are to behave in such a way as to reflect the image of God, as to bring honor and glory to Him, that's no longer a part of the thinking of not only the vast majority of our society, but as I keep saying, so many in the church as well.

The idea that God created me, not just humankind as a general, just sort of wound up the human race and He's gone off on vacation someplace.

The idea that God created me as an individual, that what

I have as my gifts and as my deficits comes from His hand and it's for His purpose.

That's a radical thought today. It's a biblical thought, but it's a radical thought for many, many people.

And hence, as we look at our society and see how rapidly things are changing, I would suggest to you that the rapidity is due to the fact that we have now seen generations who have had it pressed upon their minds, there is no creator, there is no objective truth.

While there might be objective truth in physics, there might be scientific objective truth, but the idea of objective truth in morality or ethics, the idea that we have transcendent responsibilities, there's no longer a basis for that.

And so our society finds itself in transition because you see, without those objective revelations, things like duty, self -sacrifice, honor have no basis.

We still have those who have been raised to embrace those things, but if the foundations are gone, how long will it be before those things are no longer passed on to our young people?

How long can a nation stand without those foundations? So we approach a time in our society where we as Christians are being called once again to know our faith far better than we thought we were going to have to know it.

What do I mean by that? Well, if we want to do what the

Bible commands us, and the Bible commands us, every one of us, not just those who call themselves apologists, but to all believers, the command is given, be ready to give an answer for the hope that is within you, yet with gentleness and reverence.

Now, you'll notice it does not say, be ready to preach to anyone. It says, give an answer to.

The assumption is someone's going to ask you. They're going to see something about the way you live, something about the way you think, something about the way you speak that sets you apart.

And we need to remember, those early Christians lived in a very, very, very godless society just like we do.

They lived in a society where immorality was rampant, where you didn't have abortion mills.

What you did is if your wife had a baby and it turned out to be a girl and you didn't want the girl, then you just simply left the baby outside overnight and the roving dogs would take care of your problem for you.

Christians didn't do that. Your earliest Christian documents speak against doing that.

And so there would be something that would be different about these people that makes someone go, why do you think differently?

Why do you act differently? And you see today, we face a situation where the

Word of God, the Bible tells us that God instituted something called marriage.

Before there was ever a constitution, before there was a state, before there was a government, before there was a king, before there was a congress, before there was any governmental authority amongst men, the first thing that God established was marriage.

And God defined it, and God says it's good, so what do we

Christians do when we encounter a society that has decided, you know what? It doesn't matter what human history has said.

It does not matter what the founders of this nation believed and what they would have said. We should know by now the original intention of the founding fathers is irrelevant in our society today.

What they intended anything to mean, no one cares. But people are saying today, it does not matter what history has said.

It does not matter what marriage was. Under the guise of civil rights, we are going to change the meaning of marriage.

How can anyone get away with that? Well, if you don't believe there's a Creator to define marriage, then marriage just becomes all institutions of men, just become things that we can mold and shape, and of course to Christians, what motivates man in doing this?

What does Romans 1 tell us? What is man who remains in rebellion against God outside of Christ Jesus, what is every man and woman and cognizant child doing every day?

They are suppressing the knowledge of God, holding it down, exercising efforts to suppress that knowledge.

And that can take lots of forms, it can take religious forms, it can take atheistic forms. But you see, if you don't want to deal with the

God you know who's there, you have to suppress that knowledge. You have to replace it with something else. And you don't want to be reminded by what you see in the society around you of the

God you're trying to ignore. And you see God established marriage.

And so another way of rebelling against God, another way of suppressing that knowledge, you may have established it,

God, but we're going to change it. We're going to change it. Turn with me, if you will, please, to the second chapter of Genesis.

If you brought only your New Testament this evening, that's going to cause a problem. This is not merely some cultural issue.

So many even what calls itself the church today are saying, well, look, all we can do is address things culturally.

All you see in the New Testament are cultural norms. They can change from culture to culture. Well, there may be some commandments in the

New Testament in regards to certain things that were happening, say, in Corinth that may have been culturally relevant.

But when we talk about men and women and their roles and marriage, Paul never says, oh, this is wisdom for you now.

No, instead he says, he goes back to Adam and Eve. He goes back to the creation. This is how God made man to be.

You can't get too much farther back than Genesis chapter 2, beginning at verse 15, then the

Lord God took the man and put him into the Garden of Eden to cultivate and keep it. The Lord God commanded the man, saying, from any tree of the garden you may eat freely, but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die.

Then the Lord God said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable.

The Hebrew term refers to correspondence, like a key that goes into a lock, corresponds with that particular lock.

I will make a helper that is suitable, corresponding for him.

The ground the Lord God formed every beast to feel and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them and what other man called a living creature, that was his name.

The man gave names to all the cattle, the birds of the sky, and every beast of the field, but for Adam there was not found a helper suitable for him.

There was not found one that corresponded to him. God brings to Adam this whole representative sample of all that he's created, all the living creatures and people have mocked that idea, but you see

God's doing something. Adam sees all of it and there's nothing there like him.

Adam is unique. You see that's one of the truths that's no longer believed in our society, is it?

You know there are people who actually speak out against what they call speciesism.

Yes, there's another ism out there that we need to be politically correct about. There are people who speak out against speciesism.

What's that mean? They don't think that we as human beings should view ourselves as being different or especially superior to any other species, especially those species that are the closest related to us.

So there are people seeking rights for chimpanzees, orangutans,

I'm serious, I'm absolutely serious, you chuckle. In fact, when you promote those kind of things, they put you in charge of ethics at large universities and things like that because that means you're smart and scholarly.

There was nothing found in the created order that corresponded to Adam and Adam saw this.

He could not have helped but see it. Adam is now convinced of his uniqueness.

So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and he slept and then he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that place.

The Lord God fashioned into a woman the rib which he had taken from the man and brought her to the man. Now God could have just simply gone, poof, and there's

Eve. God had already formed all the other animals. Adam would not have been shocked at God's creative ability.

But there is a reason why God did this the way He did it. There is a relationship between man and woman in humanity that is not mirrored in the male -female capacity of animals.

You see that? Nowhere else does God make the female from the male.

They were just created that way and they were created that way primarily within those species, obviously, that use that kind of reproduction.

They were created that way to reproduce. But there's something more.

There's something far more for humans. God made

Adam male and then He made Eve a female, but He made her from Him.

So there is a relationship that cannot be denied and cannot be reduced to that which exists solely in the created order amongst the animals.

He brings her to the man. Verse 23, the man said, this is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She shall be called woman because she was taken out of man. Adam's a bright guy.

Adam recognizes that this beautiful creature before him is utterly different than anything that he's seen.

And he's seen, God's brought him everything. Here is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.

She was taken from me. He knows that she is special.

There is the correspondence. She is not his mirror image.

I'm sure he noticed that very quickly too. People joke.

They say, oh, it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve. Well, it's true, but you see, you missed the point there if you don't think about it.

You see, a homosexual relationship by nature has no correspondence.

It's a mirror image. That correspondence that Adam knew did not exist between he and anything in the created order existed between he and Eve.

But it could not exist between he and another male. Lord Jesus is going to bring that out as we'll see in a moment.

Verse 24, for this reason, a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.

These words cannot be understood outside of a recognition that God is the one who has established this relationship and that this relationship is of a male and a female, a man and a woman, who as a result of becoming one flesh become father and mother and start the process all over again.

It does not say father and father. It does not say mother and mother. Father, God's design for the family is to provide in that father and that mother the examples that will produce the next generation who will likewise understand what it means to be a father and what it means to be a mother, and that those are not the same things.

Now, some of you might say, oh, wow, what if someone dies? What about all the single family households?

We're talking here about how God began the family, and when you have the tragic death of one or the other, does not the

Bible tell us that that person is free to remarry? It does.

Oh, but in our society, there's so much divorce. Yes, there is, but my friends, the abuse of God's institutions does not excuse the redefinition of God's institutions.

Is the fact that many in our land do not take seriously their vows, is that not a fact?

Yes, it is. Has that not led to much of what we face today? Yes, it has. But the abuse of God's creative will does not give us license to then redefine

God's creative will. A man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife.

That's marriage, and that's why I don't even like to use the phrase same -sex marriage. That's like talking about male pregnancy.

I'm serious. It's an oxymoron. It's an oxymoron. Marriage in the meaning of the word, here 1 ,400 years before Christ, and we're talking when

Moses wrote this, and that was long after the actual event, here in the ancient writings of Jews and Christians, we have recorded for us what marriage is.

It's a man and a woman, and it's an amazing thing that modern people can be so arrogant.

So arrogant as to think that, well, you know, there's been a couple thousand generations before me, but what do they know?

Let's change it. He shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and they shall become one flesh, correspondents.

That cannot happen between a man and a man and a woman and a woman.

That's not marriage. Whatever else you want to call it, it's not marriage.

Ah, but some say, Genesis, oh man, can you believe this?

Here it is, 21st century, and there are still people in our society that are trying to address the difficult issues by looking back at the book of Genesis.

That's amazing. Well, you know, there's someone else who addressed this, and this fellow's actually got a fair amount of popularity these days.

He had his own movie out recently, and that's really how people view it, isn't it?

Let's look at Matthew chapter 19. I unfortunately saw a television program, and they were talking about how

Jesus is in. Did you know that? Jesus is popular these days. Well, didn't mean it quite that way.

Jesus' clothes are in. It's popular in Hollywood today to wear Jesus' clothes.

I guess, like I said, he's got his own movie, so it's going to be the number one hit, and so let's go with the flow.

So you've got these people who have no concept of what faith and repentance is, no idea of what the cross is all about, but they've got

Jesus' plaster all over their clothes. So Jesus is in, and so maybe what he had to say would be somewhat relevant.

Here in Matthew chapter 19, some Pharisees came to Jesus, verse 3.

They were testing him. They were trying to trip him up. They asked him a question that was one of the major questions that divided the two major schools in rabbinic

Judaism of the day, Shammai and Hillel. Hillel had a more liberal view, Shammai a more conservative, hardline view.

They asked him, is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all? For burning the toast, for having a bad hair day, whatever it might be.

And he answered and said, have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said for this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

That was not the answer normally given by either the Shammites or the Hillelians.

Jesus always broke through those molds. But notice his response.

I guess there was a craze a while back, what would Jesus do? But what would Jesus say?

I think we can see here. Have you not read, Jesus held them accountable for the

Scriptures, Jesus held them accountable for what they possessed, what they claimed to have knowledge of.

Have you not read that he who created them, hmm, the idea of the existence of a creator fundamental to Jesus' beliefs.

He who created them from the beginning made them male and female. Now, in answering this question about the nature of marriage,

Jesus starts off, where? Creation. What was God's intention? And how do we know?

We know from Scripture. We know because there's a creator and from the beginning he had a plan and he had a purpose.

And he made them male and female. Now, God is the one who decided what kind of person you were going to be.

I know. There are many people who say, well, you just, God made a mistake.

You don't understand what it's like to be me. I've always, I've always known, you know what happened last

Monday, other than Massachusetts beginning to perform homosexual marriage, right?

What else happened that we should mark on the cultural decay calendar? Anyone remember?

The Olympics. The International Olympic Committee cleared transsexuals to participate in the

Athens Olympics. Now, East Germany had been doing that for a long time, but that was back in the

Cold War. That was a different issue. Don't you remember some of those ladies? Man, I'll tell you,

Helga scared me, you know, wow. But that was back when, you know, you're adding up the number of free gold medals versus Soviet gold medals and that was a different issue.

They said transsexuals can now participate in the Olympics. And I've heard people say, you just don't understand,

God didn't make me the way He made you. God didn't make me the way

He made you. I've never been, I debated a homosexual minister on the subject of our talk tonight at the

University of Utah just a few weeks ago, first weekend in April. And you might say,

Utah? Yes, there is a metropolitan community church in Salt Lake City.

Probably not the largest of the churches in Salt Lake City, but they're there. And we debated this issue.

And you may be wondering, his primary presentation was how none of those passages about homosexuality in the

Bible were about him. God had told him, God had revealed to him that all those passages about homosexuality are about people who are idolatrous.

If you're idolatrous homosexual, then those passages are about you. During the question and answer period,

I was asked, well, what would I say if my son came up to me and said,

I'm a homosexual? I said, well, one excuse I would not buy would be one that would go along these lines.

Let's say they brought him home and the police bring my son home and he was just found breaking into a store and stealing things.

If my son looked at me and said, Dad, I know what the Bible says about thievery, but you need to understand

God's told me that those passages aren't about me. Those are about idolatrous thieves.

I love God, and so those passages aren't about me. The exact analogy I used, because my opponent had just said, well,

God told me these passages. I know they're against homosexuality, and I'm a homosexual, but you see,

God made me this way, and so he told me they're not about me. God made every one of us, and you might look at yourself and say, boy,

I wish he had done this differently. I wish he had done that differently. We spend billions each year, cosmetic surgery, to try to change things, don't we?

And he made each one of us, and each one of us has things that we have to fight against. There are some people that have a propensity for drunkenness.

The Bible says don't be drunk with wine. It doesn't say not to drink, it just says don't be drunk with it. Well, if you have a propensity to it, does that mean, well, it must not be about me?

No. That means that's an area where you are going to have to especially focus your attention, especially seek after God's help.

You're going to have to grow and be sanctified, especially in that area. There are some people that are just simply drop -dead gorgeous.

There are some ladies that are just simply beautiful.

And some of them keep that beauty through most of their lives. There are some guys, they can eat anything.

It doesn't matter. They've got six -pack abs. I've got a keg. It's just not fair.

Their hair, you know, I mean, it's just not, their teeth are straight and they never had braces.

And it's just not fair. But you know what? A lot of those folks that are drop -dead gorgeous know it, don't they?

In fact, they're some of the most shallow, callous, arrogant people you'll ever meet.

People see those beautiful women, oh, what would it be like to be married to her? It would be bad, man, let me tell you.

It would be bad. And vice versa. So you say, oh, this great gift,

God's a beautiful person. But that means that person, what does the Bible say? Don't adorn yourself with the external, cultivate humility.

I know what I have to fight against, it's called arrogance, pride.

I mean, if you get to do certain things, you get to get certain training, get certain grades in school, it's so easy to look down on everybody else.

Man, you've got an IQ as big as your shoelace, you know that, you know? It's real simple, it's real easy.

The temptation is always to use my intellectual gifts to make someone look silly, and I've done that, and it's wrong.

You see, each one of us, each one of us, because the way we're made, we have to identify those things we have to fight against.

And if someone says to me, but you don't understand, I've got these urges. Well, the Bible says to fight against it.

Oh, but I can't. Really? Who defines you? The one who made you or your culture?

You see, when Jesus began to answer this question, He said, He who created them from the beginning, made them male and female, and He has laid out for us what those roles mean in Scripture.

And let me tell you something, that equality we saw of man and woman, that relationship, that correspondence, that was radical in its day, radical.

We have so many people say, oh, Christianity, it puts women down. They're confusing the idea that since Christianity recognizes different roles for men and women, that means that women are put down.

In reality, the creation story we just read from Genesis was one of the most radical concepts that had ever been enunciated amongst men when it was first written down.

Jesus said, He made them from the beginning, male and female, and said, and then we have the quotation. And notice, it doesn't say, and Moses said, it doesn't say, and later redactors said, the said is

God. For Jesus, when you read Genesis, you're reading the words of God.

Now was He confused? Oh, He was just a product of His day. Really, you're going to trust your salvation to a product of His day?

I think we sort of need to have the same view of Scripture that Jesus had, especially if you happen to believe that Jesus was who the

Bible said He was. For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.

So they are no longer two, but one flesh. But please notice something.

Here's Jesus' gloss, His further interpretation of what marriage means.

What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.

From the time I was old enough to even begin to understand what this stuff was all about, I had it drummed into my head in a very, very, very, very conservative church.

Marriage is for life. Now, I've come to understand that there are sometimes tragic consequences and circumstances that come into people's lives, and I don't believe that divorce is unforgivable, but one thing's for certain.

I'm awfully glad that I had it drilled into me, that marriage is a human institution wherein

God acts and joins a man and a woman together.

When we stop believing that, when we start thinking it's something the state does, the state can join anybody the state wants to.

I mean, let's face it. Given the argumentation that's being used today, shouldn't there be polygamy in Utah?

Shouldn't fathers be able to marry sons, mothers, daughters, brothers marry brothers, sisters marry sisters?

Why not? You see, once the foundations are gone, well, because we can't get enough people to vote for it.

Give it time. Let Hollywood work at it long enough. Present enough positive characters with that particular, quote -unquote, orientation, and you'll get enough people.

Does that make it right? Is that what we've become? No longer a nation of law and morality, but a nation of polls?

We've all focused upon, you've all attended a marriage ceremony, what therefore God has joined together.

Let no man separate, and our minds automatically think of, yes, okay, God's put His blessing upon this.

This union is decreed by God, and it has God's blessing, and it's a divine institution.

And let no man separate this. There's no men out there should be trying to get that woman to go with them, and no women and vice versa, and there needs to be fidelity and faithfulness, and all that stuff, and all of that is true.

And it is a measure of where we are in our society that we now have to think this phrase through backwards.

What do I mean? What God has joined together, let no man separate, but do not let man join together what

God does not join together. Don't call a marriage that which

God does not create as a marriage. I hear so many people saying, well, you know, not for me.

That's not my kind of thing, but hey, you know, if somebody else wants to do it, that's fine. Doesn't hurt me.

Really? Really? Doesn't hurt you. Yeah, what somebody does someplace, you know, doesn't have any effect on me.

Wow. Not only does that show a tremendously simplistic view of how we are related to one another in a society, you know,

I've heard that one used many times, ah, you know, what I do in my own home, you know, I can blast my brain on heroin or cocaine, it doesn't matter.

What do you care? Get out of my life. And then, of course,

I have to pay the taxes for their medical bills and I have to dodge them when they're dumb enough to get in a car and get on the street and maybe hit my family when they break into my house to get money to buy more of their drugs.

Listen, we don't live on an island. And you see, just as someone might have said 50 years ago, ah, well, if they get a divorce, hey, it doesn't affect my marriage, oh, yes, it does.

Anybody who knows anything about marriage knows that when you're dealing with a marriage in trouble and within that family, there have been divorces and maybe both those people have gone through those situations.

You know it complicates things. You know it impacts us. We don't live on an island.

God does not bless the union of two men.

Our society cannot overthrow God's teaching. God's law told us,

Leviticus 18 and 20, that for a man to lie with a man is an abomination. It's to -e -va.

Now, I know on West Wing, they blew that all away, didn't they? Oh, yes, they had the president refute that.

Not that they have any political agenda on television, but we were told that that same

Old Testament law says that you're not supposed to be wearing any type of blended clothing. And they brought up the dietary laws.

And so how can you say that's still relevant? Well, it happens to be the same passage of Scripture that Jesus quoted more often than any other passage of Scripture.

It happens to be where you get love your neighbor as yourself. That also happens to be the only place in the Bible where you have prohibition against bestiality and incest.

And if you can't tell the difference between those ceremonial laws that marked off the people of Israel as the people of Israel and those moral prohibitions that are a part of that law, then you're not even trying,

Mr. President. If I had had the opportunity. I didn't get that opportunity.

So how do we give an answer? We can't give an answer until we ourselves are firm in our conviction and understanding that marriage is, in fact, a divine institution.

I am so thankful that last August, I and my wife and two children accompanied my parents.

I gave them their first limousine ride of their entire lives.

And we went to downtown Phoenix, which in comparison to you all's downtown is a little bit small, but we had a lovely dinner at one of those restaurants that goes around, you know, slowly, thankfully.

And we had a wonderful time. You know why we did that? Because we were celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary.

Fifty years. My wife and I will have our 22nd this

June. That's a wonderful blessing. I was so thankful to have my children with me because, see,

I look in the future and I go, what? Well, my children, my son just graduated from high school last week.

My daughter's 15. What are they going to face? What are their children going to face?

Will they even know there are European countries and so many people want us to become like Europe. I would rather move to anywhere.

I'm sorry, beautiful history, but you know what's going on in that place these days. Humanism has taken such deep root that there is such general despair.

And there are certain Scandinavian countries where it is unpopular to be married. There are couples who are marrying in secret because it's so culturally unpopular to be married.

And generally, what happens over there, sadly, over time, it gets here.

It gets here. What are my kids, what are my grandchildren going to be facing? I don't know.

But I know that they'll always remember, grandma and grandpa, they'll always remember what a precious thing it is that there over dinner we heard the story about how on their honeymoon, grandma got the crazy idea of climbing this mountain.

So they climbed the mountain, didn't realize that coming down is a whole lot more difficult than going up, and they basically slid all the way down this thing on their rear ends, which caused all sorts of pain and agony and various sundry difficulties.

And they laugh. But you see, there's two people who stuck it out for 50 years.

That's becoming a rarer thing these days, isn't it? It is.

How do we give an answer? We need, first of all, to be convinced in our own mind, marriage is a divine institution.

And if you haven't thanked God for yours recently, you might want to.

Because it's really easy to look out there, it's really easy to say, oh, that's bad, that's wrong.

But you see, we're going to have a much stronger position upon which to stand if we're consistent.

Before I look at somebody else and say, oh, no, you need to understand, God joined the man and the woman.

Yeah, but how easy it is, how easy it is to slip into worldly thinking about that relationship.

How easy it is for us husbands to think so lightly of our wives, to not see her as the special creation of God that corresponds to give her the honor that is due to her.

Ladies, I won't talk about what you're supposed to do because I'm on the wrong side of the fence to do that, but you know, we need to start there.

And then when we can passionately speak about what God's Word says about what marriage is, then we explain why that can't exist between two men.

God has defined, and it should cause any believer some amount of thought to realize that we are facing a situation where the government of our nation may well redefine what

God Himself has said in His Word. What will we do? Will we count the cost?

What if there is a government edict that identifies what

I'm saying this day as hate speech? You know what happened recently in Canada, right?

It's called C -250. Guess what's been added to Canada's rather burgeoning and broad definition of hate speech?

Pretty much everything I've said tonight has been added to that. Oh, well, there's an exception for religious groups, really?

How long do you think that's going to last? In fact, I didn't bring it with me, but I read a quote from a

Canadian writer in Toronto. And in commenting and celebrating the passage of C -250, this woman said that, now preachers will need to think twice before they misuse

Leviticus 18 and 20. Tonight, the government gets to officially exegete

Leviticus 18 and 20. Yeah, that's exactly what's going on.

That's not far from here, folks. And there are many people in our society that look to Canada, oh, isn't it wonderful?

Isn't it lovely? That's what they want here. What will we do?

I've said for many years, there are those who want to see hate crimes legislation applied to the preaching of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And some people go, oh, man, one of those Baptist fundamentalist wackos out there, you know, he's probably, you know, going to move to Montana, you know.

I don't think that I've been far off the mark. It's happening a whole lot faster than I thought it would.

And so we have to ask ourselves the question, will we count the cost? Is God's truth important enough for us to stand firm in regards to it?

Can we see that it's God's right to define what marriage is and that we need to be able to explain that to others?

It's not any lack of clarity in God's Word. Let's face it, for most of us, we recognize that to stand firmly on God's truth on this matter is to make ourselves unpopular in the culture around us.

Who will we fear, God or the faces of men?

That's the question. Let's pray together. Our Heavenly Father, indeed, we do thank

You for this opportunity and the freedom that we still have to gather in this place and to address these issues.

And Lord, I pray that by Your Word, You would convict all of us here. Convict us of the importance of Your truth, of Your institution of marriage.

Help us positively to be thankful for the blessings You've placed in our lives.

And then, Lord, as we have opportunity, may we give testimony to Your grace,

Your sovereignty, and to Your power in the society in which we live. We pray all these things in Christ's name.

We have time this evening for a couple of questions, if anyone has a question they would like to ask. Yes, sir, these are the same ties and...

I'm sorry. The FMA, Family Marriage Act?

Yeah, Family Marriage Amendment. Oh, the amendment. Yeah, do you know that they're trying to let

Christians or anybody to oppose same -sex marriage? Do you know anything about that? Well, I understand that the

President has taken a stance in support of an amendment to the

Constitution. I don't know what's going to happen here because basically what we're facing is a difference between states' rights and the federal

Constitution and federal judges, and we saw how that works out in Alabama. And so, for example, my own state, just today, said no to that.

Well, what happens when that comes up against something else or when, let's say, California says yes, we're in the same...we're,

unfortunately, in the Ninth Circuit Court, the most leftist liberal circuit in the

United States, actually. And so, what would happen then? If they side with California, then our will is overthrown.

So, it seems to me that, fundamentally, it's going to have to come down to a national decision.

Does this nation, do we as a people, have the moral commitment to what marriage is that would be required for that kind of thing to happen?

I don't know. I don't know. This is rhetorical,

I'm sorry. You mentioned polygamy and other crazy possibilities, sister -sister, mother -father, and so on.

I assume you do know, in that crazy direction, that, for instance, in France, you can marry the dead, and they have been doing it since 1959.

I'm quoting from the New York Times, roughly the last two or three days of February, and they are still doing it.

You know, it doesn't, when you say, when we talk about polygamy being crazy, it was practiced and is still being practiced in what's called

Arizona City or Colorado City in the north rim of the Grand Canyon, and, of course, in Utah for quite some time.

There are over 30 ,000 polygamous marriages in Utah and northern Arizona, southern Idaho, even to this day.

And the toll is a terrible thing to observe. The Mormons also seal in marriage to the dead.

That's not unusual there either. So really, when you think about it, there's only one other area that I didn't mention, that's because I knew too many people would laugh, and it's not really a laughing subject, but the fact of the matter is, the head of the

Department of Ethics, and I don't have these notes in front of me, so please, if I get the wrong place or the wrong relationship, please don't get too upset.

But a very well -known philosopher, head of the Department of Ethics, I believe at Princeton, has openly, he's the same fellow who believes that mothers should be given 18 months, that up to 18 months you should have the right to kill your child if you decide that they're not what you want.

That's after birth, okay? This man has also openly stated that he has a very rewarding sexual relationship with his dog, and he is the head of ethics.

And you're looking at me like, come on, he's also big into this simian rights thing, orangutans, apes, so on and so forth, should be given rights equal to our own.

And you go, but that's, I know, but you see, 100 years ago, no one would have ever thought of that.

No one would have ever thought of almost any of this. And right now we just go, oh, you're kidding.

But once the foundations are gone, where do you go? What's left? Foundations.

And there's a chance that if the Lord doesn't come back in 100 years from now, someone will say, do you believe that back in, at the turn of the 21st century, they were so barbaric that they didn't even allow men to marry men?

Oh, there's no question about it. Where does it end? Only the Lord knows. But every other society that has gone down this road, we know what's happened to it.

Can this be something maybe that already took place? I mean, we don't have like biblical records when you get back to Sodom and Gomorrah, and I know

Rome, too, was... The records were burned. And I know the

Roman culture also was very depraved. So could there have been this mentality, and this is not something new for our generation, so to speak?

Well, yeah. The Roman records do indicate to us that there was a very thriving homosexual population in the

Roman Empire, and in Greece. The Greeks were well aware of this.

In fact, that's one of the things that's important for you to know. You might be going, I'm uncomfortable talking about this. One thing to think about, though, is that one of the arguments made against the

Bible's relevance on this subject is that Paul could not have understood modern homosexual concepts.

That's not true. Plato's Republic and other writings of Plato had clearly laid out even monogamous homosexual relationships.

And Paul obviously had read these things. He was a man of letters. He was exposed to these things. He lived in Tarsus, where, again, we know that because the games and so on and so forth, there was a thoroughly

Roman city. And so people will always say, oh, well, that can't be about a monogamous loving relationship because Paul wouldn't have known about that, and that's not true.

They did know about it. Those things did exist. And societies developed different ways of dealing with them and even regulating them.

But as you might notice, all those societies are no longer current societies. All those nations fell from within, and as most of you know, in world history.

The Romans, when the city of Rome was sacked by Alaric in 410, which was when most people date the fall of the western half of the

Roman Empire, the military force that came into Rome was minor. In fact, if Visigoth just came in, they sort of looked around and said, okay, and left.

But the scar that was left on people's psyche, that military force would have been repelled by half of a legion 300 years earlier.

It wasn't military force that destroyed Rome. It was the moral decay within the empire that destroyed that empire that had spanned the known world for centuries.

And I don't want to start preaching here again, but let's face it. There is, in our own minds, in our own thinking, yes, it's true.

Right now, today, one -on -one military conflict would whip anybody. The problem is we are proud of that, and we trust in that.

We say, oh, that could never happen to us. How many times does the Bible tell us? It's foolishness to trust in a nation's military capacity.

Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, not whose God is their appetites.

We need to be consistent at that point. Can you comment in Romans 1 how it talks about women exchanging natural relations for natural ones before it talks about men?

I know that someone made a comment, something saying that it seems like the women abandoned natural relations before the men did.

And I know that there's more male homosexuals than female homosexuals. Is there an order to that?

Well, you'll notice it says, for even their women. I think the point there is that Paul is saying that this twisting of the creator -creation relationship and the result of being given over by God is so extensive that even their women, that is the unusual aspect, even their women abandoned the natural function of the man and burned with desire one toward another.

And so I see the emphasis there as being, it is so extensive that it even goes to the women, as you yourself noted.

Male homosexuality has been much more documented down through history and, of course, is referenced in the

Bible much more frequently. In fact, some would argue that that's the only explicit reference to lesbianism in the

Bible. But the point is, here this being given over even goes to the point where the women do so, and then he mentions the men afterwards.

So I don't think that there's a relationship like that. I think the relationship is it even goes this far. I think that's the emphasis that he gives there.

By the way, I'm not sure how many of you had the opportunity, but in, I think, 2001,

I think was the year, I debated Barry Lynn of the American Civil Liberties Union and Americans United for Separation of Church and State here on Long Island on the subject of homosexuality.

It wasn't homosexual marriage, that was not the big burning issue as yet, but on homosexuality.

And if you did not get an opportunity of seeing that, the transcript of that debate is posted on the

Focus on the Family website, and the DVDs and CDs, MP3s of that debate are available through our website, aomin .org.

And if you want to hear the common argumentation coming from Barry Lynn, who you see all the time on television, then that would give you an opportunity of seeing how to respond to that and how it can be responded to.

Some of you may know that he threatened to sue us to suppress the distribution of that videotape.

We instead took him to court and won the day before depositions are going to be taken, he gave up, and we can distribute that tape, an amazing thing for a man who stood before Congress and defended child pornography as a guaranteed

First Amendment free speech right, wanted to use the courts to suppress us from distributing a videotape of a public debate he did wherein he lost.

I guess that stuff is only for one side of the society to have to worry about, that free speech stuff.

So that is available if you wish to get it from us. I want to thank you for coming tonight, in addition to giving us the

Word of God tonight, which is powerful and true and edifying. I just want to say that for all of my life,

I have felt alone until tonight. Because I didn't know that there was anyone else in the room.

I didn't know that there was anyone else that struggled with that intellectual pride. And now

I think I have found someone on my level that I can relate to. And who also struggles with tie colors.

For those of you that don't know, James White wore this tie in 1997 when he first came here to speak.

And when he came back in 1998, he brought this tie as a gift to me, so I've had it ever since.

And I occasionally wear it at other times, too. But it really is... Occasionally.

It's good to know that I have a kindred spirit when it comes to that intellectual thing that I struggle with so often.