Strange Bedfellows?

I stumbled across a fascinating article on marriage in World Magazine this week. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of The Ruth Institute, a group that promotes traditional marriage, has a unique view of the subject coming from her training as an economist. She reminds us that in traditional society, family is the bedrock on which systems rest and no-fault divorce, cohabitation, sex outside of marriage undermine that foundation. Economically speaking, it has been shown that single parent households make up a large part of the population which lives in poverty. The interesting thing Morse points out is that there are also long range economic consequences to society from children not raised in a traditional family. She asserts, "By one estimate we’re spending over $100 billion dollars a year on dealing with the consequences of out-of-wedlock childbearing and family breakup and family breakdown [through] the criminal justice system and the cost of welfare, health, and education."

Morse implies that the debate over gay marriage overlooks the fundamental basis of marriage saying, "that the essential public purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children, and to one another. That is still true no matter how much you love your gay neighbor or your lesbian classmate." Young people today want so much to be tolerant of diversity that they often ignore the societal and personal costs of the diversity agenda. In a related article in the same issue, World reprints a sermon by John Piper in which he challenges believers to consider the inherent discontinuity of man-man and woman-woman "marriages." Piper suggests something I have long believed, that the family is the truest representation of the imageo dei we can understand. Subtracting one gender from the family unit subtracts from its perfection as the image we are intended to portray.

 

Even more interesting, Morse draws a parallel between the ideology of the political left and the dissolution of the traditional family. "For people on the radical left, equality is their primary value. But it doesn’t even make sense to think about families in terms of equality because babies are never the equal of the parents and men and women can never be equal in the sense of baby-making and child-rearing and development." Morse then draws a shocking parallel with Marxist beliefs that "monogamous marriage as just as oppressive as private property and capitalism." Today's progressives stridently deny any validity in such a connection, but the similarity is undeniable.

 

Hence we discover the strange conjunction of the pro-abortion and pro-gay marriage factions of our society. It does appear to be a cause of the left to demolish the traditional family. Morse compassionately concludes her article by calling believers to prepare to deal with the fallout of a political decision in favor of gay marriage. "Just as the pro-life movement has spent a lot of effort helping women deal with the physical and psychological fallout of abortion, we need to deal with the victims of the sexual revolution and help them to be whole so that we can move forward in society, whatever the political structure may turn out to be." Sound advice. Sounds like what I imagine Jesus would have done.