Society

Editor’s Note: This is another in a series of excerpts from the book “The War in Heaven Continues: Satan’s Tactics to Destroy You, Christianity, the Family, the Constitution, and America” by Gary Lawrence.

Next week:       “You Work; I’ll Eat”  

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“Male and female created he them” goes the biblical phrase. But that was before Facebook, which now presents over 50 gobbledygook definitions to choose from when it asks your gender. Cisgender heteronormative, for example, is the supposedly sophisticated way of saying male and female cis being the opposite of trans, and gender, hetero, and normative more or less self-explanatory.

To distort such basic words as male and female, and make them just one category in a list of many variations, dilutes and cheapens God’s highest creations. And makes it easier to change society’s thinking about marriage.

If important words lose meaning, so do the concepts for which they stand.

Two facts must guide our thinking:

1.   We had our sexual identity before we came here. We were spirit sons and daughters of heavenly parents in our pre-earthly existence.

2.   Marriage was instituted before death. Adam and Eve were married in the Garden of Eden before the Fall.

That God created marriage before man created governments not only buttresses the doctrine of eternal marriage, but also tells us don’t mess with it. Man cannot change eternal institutions.

But Satan keeps trying in three ways:

Mock make marriage negative through ridicule. It’s old fashioned, stupid, archaic, a symbol of male oppression, out of date, restrictive, unequal, and bigoted because it excludes other arrangements of love.

Ignore make it neutral by skipping it. Erase the stigma of cohabitation by claiming marriage is unneeded, superfluous, no big deal. A recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that half of all American women are cohabiting.[1]

Expand make it positive by adding definitions. If marriage is so good, let others in on it. Apply the label to any and every combination of desires and orientations. Smother it with love, dilute it, weaken it, and, in time, destroy it.

Same-sex marriage is not Satan’s end goal, but merely one step in a cleverly disguised process. Not only do LGBT leaders want same-sex marriage to have the same status as natural marriage, they want unconditional approval of homosexuality. And no preaching against it.

One of the most shocking diatribes ever issued in a Supreme Court holding happened in June 2013 when Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing in the Windsor case for a 5-4 majority, assumed that opposition to same-sex marriage automatically means hatred of gays, and that the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), passed by large bi-partisan majorities in 1996, has “no legitimate purpose.” That somehow there is no difference between marriage as established by God and variations established by man, that all marriages must be treated equally, and that DOMA improperly declared that same-sex marriage “is less worthy than the marriages of others.”[2]

Justice Kennedy blasted supporters of natural marriage for supposed bigoted motives that our presumed intent is to disparage, injure, degrade, demean, humiliate, and place same-sex couples in second-tier marriages by “refusing to acknowledge a status the State finds to be dignified and proper.”

Dignified and proper? How far we have traveled.

Justice Antonin Scalia attempted to restore a bit of reality to that august body by arguing in dissent, “[To] defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history.”

(Sadly, there was not one mention of God by either side. Not one.)

Justice Kennedy and his cohorts fell for the claim that marriage is about love and commitment more than about procreation and stable families headed by a man and a woman. So did the federal judge who overturned California’s Proposition 8: “Indeed, the evidence shows Proposition 8 does nothing more than enshrine in the California Constitution the notion that opposite sex couples are superior to same-sex couples.”[3]

If love and commitment were indeed the prime features of marriage, then the superiority of one form over another could not be argued because no human metric exists that can objectively measure such things to the satisfaction of all parties.

However, marriage is more than love and commitment. It is the institution through which God wants children brought into the world. The word superior may be offensive to the equality-obsessed, but how can one argue that what God has created is not superior to what man creates?

Whether the Supreme Court legalizes same-sex marriage will no more end this battle than Roe v. Wade ended the abortion argument. It will get unpleasant. We will be attacked for defending natural marriage. The person out of step with man’s wisdom will be labeled hateful hate that can be justifiably returned, will go the rationalization of the secular religion, who will clothe themselves in moral garments as they unleash their pseudo-righteous vituperation.

Elder Dallin H. Oaks counsels us:

In this determination we may be misunderstood, and we may incur accusations of bigotry, suffer discrimination, or have to withstand invasions of our free exercise of religion. If so, I think we should remember our first priority to serve God and, like our pioneer predecessors, push our personal handcarts forward with the same fortitude they exhibited.[4]

Elder Neil L. Andersen adds: “While many governments and well-meaning individuals have redefined marriage, the Lord has not.”[5]

One cannot embrace the restored Church and approve same-sex marriage. They are incompatible.

Long live cisgender heteronormativity in its original form.

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Gary Lawrence is a public opinion pollster and author who lives in Orange County, California.

He welcomes comments at [email protected].