If you got married to another person because you love them and want to spend your life with them – you are one of the reasons why the institution of marriage is being weakened.
That’s according to a new paper being circulated by the Institute on Religion and Democracy and Alan Wisdom, vice president for Research and Programs at IRD:
Among the trends weakening the marital bond is the “ideal of romantic love” – a love that is all about “two people who love each other.”
(Wisdom) argues that romantic love tends to isolate the couple, marginalizing the traditional third parties to the marriage, which include families, the community, the church, the state, and even God himself.
“All are reduced to spectators applauding the all-conquering love of the two,” he points out.
So, if you love your spouse, you’re an enemy of marriage, according to the IRD, and are in cahoots with the gays and lesbians to ruin this esteemed institution. To strengthen your marriage then, you should immediately dispense with all love for your partner – otherwise you leave the door open to gay marriage, polygamy, and eventually bestiality!
But, Wisdom is not finished. Marriage is also being eroded by its deal with the government to recognize the rights and privileges of these godless heathens who dare to love one another in their union:
“If marriage is just another contract, then there is no necessary reason that it has to be a permanent or total union,” he states. “The law increasingly treats the spouses as two autonomous individuals in a temporary and limited partnership. The biblical notion of the two sexes becoming one flesh has retreated from view.”
“If marriage is an infinitely flexible contract, then the possibility of marriages joining members of the same sex – or even marriages involving more than two parties – is increasingly plausible.”
Wisdom might want to check his Christian history. It was John Calvin and his Protestant friends who gave us government recognition of marriage with his Marriage Ordinance of Geneva in 1546. So, we can lay the blame for opening the door to marriage equality for gays and lesbians squarely at Calvin’s feet.
The IRD paper really smacks of desperation to knock down the two main arguments for marriage equality for gays and lesbians: love, and government benefits and responsibilities. In doing so, they reduce marriage to nothing more than the meeting of a male and female body for, what exactly? If it’s not for love, what is it for? Mere reproduction? If IRD is serious that love and government recognition of rights and responsibilities of marriage are really what’s destroying marriage then let’s go back to the days of dowries and arranged marriages that enlarge the economic prospects of the families involved. If this is what they truly believe, I want to see them advocating for loveless marriages that have no state recognition. When does the campaign begin, IRD?
Since love and government benefits have no place in marriage, what then is the point of entering into this institution? Wisdom tells us that the true nature of marriage is to open “a window to understanding both God and humankind.”
That should be a shock to all those happily married atheists and agnostics. But, wait, they probably love their spouses and expect the government to recognize their marital contract, so they’re really enemies of marriage anyway.
