The pressure to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples keeps increasing. The impression is given that thousands upon thousands of gays and lesbians are unable to do the one thing they want to do more than anything else -- that is, have a wedding.
As if to prove the point, the U.S. Census Bureau announced that it would be counting same-sex households in the 2010 census. In August the Bureau announced that there are nearly a million. I was surprised by the small number.
But this past week, they reduced their estimate of same-sex couple households by nearly 30 percent. In fact, it turns out that there are fewer than 650,000. That’s about six-tenths of 1 percent of total U.S. households.
But an even greater shocker for me was the number of same-sex married households. Gay marriage is legal in six jurisdictions. In Massachusetts, it’s been the law since 2004. Same-sex couples can get married, for example, in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., and live anywhere because nobody’s enforcing DOMA anymore in view of litigation. And yet there are only 131,729 households headed by a married same-sex couple. That’s two-tenths of 1 percent of married households. Talk about the tail wagging the dog!
This census data exposes the two biggest myths created about gay marriage.
The first is that there’s a huge demand for it. No way! In fact, there’s hardly any demand at all. Gay couples are not lined up at city halls hoping for a marriage license.
The second myth is the so-called “marriage equity” argument: That this is just another civil rights movement. Are you going to tell me that it was possible to fuel the civil rights movement with 646,000 couples, when only 131,000 had a real stake in it? It’s laughable.
I have never believed that gays wanted to marry. Their behavior by its very nature is too promiscuous. Gay relationships are for the most part sexually open rather than exclusive.
For us to redefine marriage, thereby altering thousands of years of human history, ignoring all of the benefits marriage offers to individuals, cultures, civilizations and — above all — children, for the sake of 646,000 same-sex households, only 131,000 of which are married, is madness.
Gays and lesbians don’t want marriage; they want their sexual choices affirmed as normal and moral. And that’s what’s behind the blacklisting, boycotting and suing anybody who even questions homosexuality. They don’t want anyone telling them that how they live is morally problematic. Gays are actively trying to destroy marriage and will take away our freedom of speech and religion in order to do it.
Does this take the church off the hook? No. For years we have helped deconstruct marriage, winking at cohabitation and allowing easy divorce. We’ve allowed politicians to pass bad divorce laws and to loosen the moral standards surrounding marriage. Now it’s all coming back to haunt us. But our job is to rebuild marriage as a sacred institution and to stand our ground and defend it, come what may, from what appears to be a small, tiny minority.
Chuck Colson's daily BreakPoint commentary airs each weekday on more than one thousand outlets with an estimated listening audience of one million people. BreakPoint provides a Christian perspective on today's news and trends via radio, interactive media and print.
Publication date: October 4, 2011
