Michael Brown - The Bigots Against Marriage Equality

We hear it from gay activists day and night, “This is about marriage equality. We believe in marriage for all.” In reality, what most of these activists want is a redefinition of marriage that suits them alone. For the rest, they want anything but equality.

Writing in Australia, Bill Muehlenberg notes that polyamorists have challenged the Green Party’s declaration that they support “Marriage for All.” The Australian press reported that, “The Greens have declared they have a clear policy against support for polyamorous marriage as they pursue their case for same-sex marriage. Greens marriage equality spokeswoman Senator Sarah Hanson-Young has declared . . . . ‘Our bill clearly states marriage “between TWO consenting adults” and that is the Greens’ position.’”

This statement was released after “Senator Michaelia Cash . . . challenged the Australian Greens to state their position on polyamorous marriage. This follows the disclosure that polyamorists have made submissions to the Greens’ Senate Inquiry on Marriage Equality. ‘Sarah Hanson-Young must explain whether she does support “marriage for all.”’”

Marriage for all? Hardly. Marriage equality? Not a chance.

Muehlenberg’s sarcasm is well-placed: “Shame on those intolerant, bigoted and hate-filled Greens. They are a disgrace. Instead of being open, inclusive and tolerant, they are just redneck haters who are denying lovers their dreams. How dare they exclude so many people from their basic right to love and marry?”

Really, it is remarkable that Senator Hanson-Young could declare emphatically that marriage is “between TWO consenting adults” without any apparent sense of embarrassment and without recognizing the extreme irony of her statement.

Throughout recorded history, marriage has never been the genderless union of two consenting adults. It has always been the union of one man and one woman, although in many cultures it has been (and continues to be) the union of one man and one or more women. This means that it is far more radical to redefine marriage as the union of any two people than it is to redefine marriage as the union of a man and a woman and additional partners.

On what basis, then, can advocates of same-sex “marriage” argue for their right to marry the one they love while refusing that right to other consenting adults? To say, “But marriage is the union of two people” carries no weight at all, since that is simply the definition they have made up (like calling a motorcycle a truck or calling a plane a car).

In case we have forgotten (and it appears that many have), the reason marriage requires two people is because it requires a man and a woman. Otherwise, why emphasize the number two? Why not three or more? Or why not just one?

After all, Nadine Schweigert, recently married herself, explaining after her ceremony that, “I feel very empowered, very happy, very joyous . . . I want to share that with people, and also the people that were in attendance, it’s a form of accountability. . . . I was waiting for someone to come along and make me happy. At some point, a friend said, ‘Why do you need someone to marry you to be happy? Marry yourself.’”

Well, why not? If there can be same-sex marriage, why not self-marriage? As crazy as this sounds, it’s happening.

A 30-year-old Taiwanese woman married herself in 2010, while an audience member watching Anderson Cooper interview Nadine Schweigert decided that she now wanted to do the same after her recent engagement broke off. Why not? After all, it wasn’t that long ago that the notion of two men marrying or two women marrying was considered just as crazy. (It is telling that the article on the Anderson Cooper website ends by asking, “What do you think? Is it too much?”)

Back in Australia, Rebecca and James Dominguez, the country’s most prominent polyamorists, have written to the Senate that, “The legal definition of marriage itself has changed over history, such as the removal on restrictions of inter-racial marriage and the provision for divorce.” And, “Just as we have allowed changes in the past to things considered ‘traditional’ (equality of women, humanity of non-white people), we can change ‘traditional’ understandings of things now.”

But of course. As Muehlenberg notes, “Now why is it that these ‘arguments’ sound so very, very familiar? Oh yeah, they are the exact same ‘arguments’ being used by the pro-homosexual marriage crowd. Absolutely identical. The reasoning for polyamory and group marriage is 100% identical to the reasoning for homosexual marriage.”

Indeed, “Once you throw out the fundamental core criteria of marriage (proper gender, proper number, etc) then of course anything goes. And we are seeing this played out before our very eyes at this very moment. And all along the homosexual activists have the gall to mock those who warn of a slippery slope, as they claim that group marriage and other combinations will never be demanded.”

This puts the same-sex “marriage” activists in a precarious position: Either they truly support “marriage equality” and “marriage for all,” embracing polyamorous marriages and self-marriage (and God knows what else), which means that the slippery-slope argument is true, or else they demonstrate the very intolerance and bigotry of which they accuse us.

Either way, they prove our point: Marriage must not be redefined.

Dr. Michael Brown

Michael Brown holds a Ph.D. in Near Eastern Languages and Literatures from New York University and is the author of 20 books. He has served as a professor at a number of seminaries and hosts the nationally syndicated, daily talk radio show, the Line of Fire.

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