Commentary:What 'Gay Marriage' Really Means for America     5/19/2004
By Robert Knight

There is no stopping point for further redefinitions of the institution.

Just so Americans understand what we're in for with the creation of legal homosexual "marriage" in Massachusetts, here is some perspective.

Marriage, as a civic institution in Massachusetts, has been destroyed, not "expanded."

The very first homosexual couple "married" in the "gay" Mecca of Provincetown told the Boston Herald about their new "commitment":

[Jonathan Yarbrough] says the concept of forever is "overrated" and that he, as a bisexual, and [his partner Cody] Rogahn, who is gay, have chosen to enjoy an open marriage. "I think it's possible to love more than one person and have more than one partner, not in the polygamist sense," he said. "In our case, it is, we have, an open marriage."

"Marriage" in Massachusetts not only fails to require the presence of a wife, or a husband, but is not even tied to monogamy anymore.

Elsewhere in Massachusetts, a newborn baby was left last year in the pew of a Catholic church. A married couple stepped forward to take care of her. But when the couple applied to adopt her, social services instead gave the girl to two lesbians. By design, this girl will never know a father's love.

She's not the only victim of social engineering. During the March 11 debate in the Massachusetts Legislature over "gay" marriage, State Sen. Therese Murray, D-Plymouth, boasted, "Forty percent of children adopted have gone to gay and lesbian families." If Sen. Murray is correct, homosexuals, who constitute less than 3 percent of the population, are being given enormous preference over mom-and-dad families.

Homosexual activists say that marriage as the union of one man and one woman is "discriminatory," and that we no longer need a wife in a marriage, or a husband in a marriage. Also, it no longer matters in the least that children need both a mother and a father.

In a free country, deluded people can believe all sorts of things, and act accordingly on their own. But when the law imposes this understanding on everyone, government is creating lies and eventually will use force to promote acceptance of the lies.

In the old Soviet Union, the government routinely lied to the people – so much so that the Russian people became cynical and dejected. They developed a repertoire of black humor to cover their pain. We didn't think it could happen in the United States, but we were wrong.

The government of Massachusetts is telling its citizens that a union without a wife or a husband is a marriage. This bizarre lie will be imposed, through government force, on all institutions – from businesses to public schools – and it will result in immediate legal action in many other states, as activists try to use the Bay State's betrayal of marriage as a lever to destroy it elsewhere.

It's no use offering "civil unions" as a compromise. Appeasement doesn't work. If the state officially sanctions and promotes homosexuality, there are no longer any grounds to make distinctions in family law. Children, like the hapless baby girl in Massachusetts, will be placed routinely in fatherless or motherless households. Who could object?

And once the moral distinction between marriage and homosexuality is lost, there is no stopping point for further redefinitions of the institution. Why not bless three or more who say they feel they are "married"? And why should churches which refuse to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies continue to enjoy tax-exempt status? Why, indeed, should the Boy Scouts not welcome homosexual men to take boys into the woods, if we cannot make any moral distinctions whatever or face charges of bigotry?

During the Supreme Court hearings on the Boy Scout case in 2000, pro-life pastor Rev. Rob Schenck was sitting in the audience next to the White House liaison for "gay" issues. Thinking the pastor was a fellow liberal, the woman whispered, "We're not going to win this case, but that's OK. Once we get 'hate crime' laws on the books, we're going to go after the Scouts and all the other bigots."

In Canada and Sweden, it is now a hate crime to criticize homosexuality in any fashion, including saying that marriage is once and forever the union of a man and a woman. How long will it be for the United States – in the name of "tolerance" – to criminalize the notion that marriage is God's way of blessing us and that homosexuality is immoral and unhealthy?

Homosexual activist Michaelangelo Signorile wrote in 1996 that homosexual "marriage" would be:

... the chance to wholly transform the definition of family in American culture. It is the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statutes, get education about homosexuality and AIDS in the public schools, and, in short, usher in a sea change in how society views and treats us.

So, next time you hear one of the newly "married" couples on television saying it's just about "being fair" and helping "loving couples" achieve equality, understand that something far more radical is underway.

One more thing. Activists will be saying in the coming weeks: "'Gay' marriage happened, and the sky didn't fall." No, radical social change does not happen overnight. When Uncle Sam began issuing welfare checks to unwed mothers, it took several years to destroy black families and achieve an out-of-wedlock birthrate of 85 percent in some cities.

"Gay marriage" has an inexorable logic that leads us to the destruction of the most basic moral understandings. And it contains the seed of totalitarianism as this lie is imposed, through government force, on those of us who believe God when He said in Genesis, "A man shall leave his mother and father, and join his wife, and they shall become one flesh."

Whenever you're tempted to think this will blow over and won't amount to much, think of that baby girl in Massachusetts.

It is now up to average Americans to decide whether they will submit to a sexually perverse and oppressive future, or to hold public officials accountable for bringing this down upon us and our children and grandchildren.

Robert Knight is director of the Culture & Family Institute, an affiliate of Concerned Women for America. Reprinted with permission of WorldNetDaily.

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