Defending Marriage: Answering the Tough Questions

The Public Purpose of Marriage…

A collection of lines and arguments that Focus on the Family has learned work best in the many public debates we have done on the issue of the same-sex family. These soundbites have also been tested by focus groups and rated very strongly.

• Marriage is a common good, not a special interest.
• Every society needs natural marriage -- as many men as possible each finding a woman, caring for and committing himself exclusively to her -- working together to create and raise the next generation.
• No society needs homosexual coupling. In fact, too much of it would be harmful to society and that is why natural marriage and same-sex coupling cannot be considered socially equal.

A Civil Rights Issue...?

• There is no civil right to deny children their mothers or fathers, which is exactly what every same-sex home does. There is no civil right to conduct a vast, untested social experiment on children.
• It is an affront to African-Americans to say having past generations being prevented from taking a drink from a public water fountain or being sprayed down by fire hoses in a public park was on par to laws preventing a man from marrying another man. The comparison is shameful.
• Civil rights leaders strongly reject this assertion. Jessie Jackson explains, “Gays were never called three-fifths of a person in the Constitution...and they did not require the Voting Rights Act to have the right to vote.”1

Where Does It Stop...?

• If, as Andrew Sullivan says, “The right to marry whomever you want is a fundamental civil right,” how do we say “no” to a woman who wants to become the third wife of a polygamist…?2
• How do we say no to grooms Jonathan Yarbrough (a bisexual) and Cody Rogahn (a homosexual) –- the first same-sex couple in Provincetown, MA to receive a marriage application –- who explained to the press “…it’s possible to love more than one person and have more than one partner… In our case… we have an open marriage…”3
• When posed with the question “Why draw the line at two people?,” same-sex marriage advocate Cheryl Jacques of the Human Rights Campaign said, ”Because I don't approve of that.”4…well, that brings an important question to mind:
• How come your “because I don’t approve of that” objection to polygamy is more reasonable than my “I don’t approve of that” objection to same-sex “marriage”? (This line has even won strong applause from hostile audiences!)

Is Allowing Same-Sex 'Marriage' Like Allowing Interracial Marriage...?

• Striking down the ban on interracial marriage affirmed marriage by saying any man has a right to marry any woman. Same-sex "marriage" redefines marriage.
• Marriage has nothing to do with race. Marriage has everything to do with bringing men and women to build a domestic life together -- creating and caring for the next generation.
• Racism was about keeping races apart and that is wrong. Marriage is about bringing the genders together and that is good.
• And it is very different for a child to say, “I have a Korean mother and a Hispanic father” than to say, “I have two moms.” (There are no negative child-development outcomes from being raised by interracial parents. There are thousands of social science studies showing negative outcomes for children who are denied their mothers and fathers.)5
• Sexual preference is nothing like skin color. Homosexuality is not a civil right.

FMA: Why Would We Write Discrimination Into the Constitution...?

• Why would you write radical family redefinition into the Constitution?
• Our United States Constitution is going to be changed one way or the other. Either a small handful of unaccountable, activist judges are going to write a radical new definition of marriage into the Constitution, or, the American people can protect marriage constitutionally through the option the founding fathers provided via the amendment process.
• Supporters of the Federal Marriage Amendment (FMA) did not just dream up the need for such an amendment. We have been forced into this battle because a very small few want to constitutionally redefine marriage for all of us. Same-sex activists brought this fight to all of us.
• When, as president, Bill Clinton signed into law the federal Defense of Marriage Act, defining in federal law that marriage is between a man and a woman, no one accused him of writing “discrimination” into federal law as The New York Times and others have accused President Bush of doing regarding his support of a federal marriage amendment.

Conclusion…

All of the family experimentation over the past 30 years – no fault divorce, the sexual revolution, cohabitation, fatherlessness -- have all been documented failures, harming adults and children in far deeper ways, for longer periods of time, than anyone ever imagined. Why do we think that this radical experiment will somehow bring good things? All we have is (opponent’s name’s) promise that everything will work out fine. Well, the advocates of each of these other experiments assured us the same thing. Their promises were empty. We all know that men and women are necessary for the family and that no child should intentionally be denied her mother or father in order to fulfill your adult desires. That is why we cannot accept the same-sex family. It serves no public purpose.

View Why Not Gay Marriage, a PDF slide show of this article's content. Feel free to utilize this visual presentation in equipping individuals to intelligently answer the same-sex family proposal and defend natural marriage. To display full screen slides in Acrobat Reader® press CTRL+L. Use "Page Up" or "Page Down" to scroll through the presentation.

Glenn T. Stanton is Director of Social Research and Cultural Affairs and Senior Analyst for Marriage and Sexuality at Focus on the Family. He is also author of Why Marriage Matters: Reasons to Believe in Marriage in Postmodern Society (Pinon Press), and more recently, My Crazy, Imperfect Christian Family (NavPress, 2004). He also co-authored the book, Marriage on Trial: The Case Against Same-Sex Marriage and Parenting (Inter-Varsity Press, 2004).

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