Ethics & Religion
June 28, 2018
Column #1,923
Same-Sex Marriage Can Now be Overturned
By Mike McManus

The decision by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to retire gives the United States a new opportunity to reconsider whether same-sex marriage should be the law of the land.

My hope is that President Trump decides to appoint a justice who believes that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. If he does so, America will have had a three year period during which relatively few people married someone of the same gender.

For it was only three years ago Tuesday, that the Supreme Court ruled in Obergefell v. Hodges that same-sex couples have the same right to marry as opposite-sex couples. To mark the occasion, Peter LaBarbera, creator of Americans for Truth about Homosexuality, invited a number of speakers including me - to speak on behalf of traditional marriage in front of the Supreme Court.

It was a raucous event, with gay activists taunting those of us who were supporters of traditional marriage between a man and a woman.

I offered ten reasons to oppose gay marriage. First, I noted that most gays are not interested in marriage. Gallup reports that only 10.2% of gays and lesbians have married - though all could have done so after the 2015 Supreme Court ruling on Obergefell.

Second, I noted that by votes of 50 million to 30 million, 32 states passed constitutional amendments that limited marriage to unions of one man and one woman. However, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in Obergefell to overturn those votes by millions of Americans.

I charged at the time that the decision was "corrupt" because "Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Elena Kagan had performed same-sex weddings," and should have recused themselves since their actions "demonstrated they were not impartial judges."

Had they done so, the vote would have been 4-3 to uphold state rights to define marriage, instead of a 5-4 vote to force gay marriage on America.

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a dissent in which he called the decision by five unelected lawyers a "threat to American democracy because it robs citizens of the freedom to govern themselves." He was right. Some 50 million people voted for traditional marriage vs. only 30 million for gay marriage.

The issue is not merely legal. All children need a mother and a father. The healthiest children are raised by a married mother and father. However, same-sex marriage deliberately deprives the child of a mother or father - and therefore is detrimental to children.

Traditional marriage is sexually exclusive, while gay unions are not. Lifetime infidelity dropped in the 2000s to 16% for males and 10% for females, according to W. Bradford Wilcox, Director of the National Marriage Project of the University of Virginia. By contrast, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that homosexuals had four partners per month.

Is that an atmosphere in which to raise children? Obviously not!

Certainly, Scripture is clear. Genesis 2:24 states, "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh."

By contrast, consider Romans 2:27: "The men abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed indecent acts with other men and received in themselves the due penalty of their perversion."

What "penalty?"

First, homosexual men are only 4% of the population, but have had half of all new HIV infections and 85% of syphilis cases.

Second, homosexual men are virtually banned from donating blood, due to their likelihood of transmitting HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases. They are required to provide evidence that they have not had sexual relations with a male for at least a year.

Third, gay men live 20 years shorter lives than heterosexual men.

Finally, it should be noted that gay sex is a choice. No one has to do it. And there are many gays and lesbians who spent decades in a gay lifestyle - who have changed to a heterosexual orientation, and have been happily married to someone of the opposite sex for years. Several of them testified at the rally at which I spoke on Tuesday about their decision to abandon gay sex or lesbian sex for a traditional marriage.

Justice Anthony Kennedy provided the key vote with liberals that forced America to accept same-sex marriage.

It is now time for the President to appoint a conservative Supreme Court Justice who believes that marriage is the union of a man and a woman.

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Copyright (c) 2018 Michael J. McManus, a syndicated columnist and past president of Marriage Savers. To read past columns, go to www.ethicsandreligion.com. Hit Search for any topic.