While you were sleeping

The West's great difficulty in understanding why homosexuality is wrong is our failure to understand marriage, or to be precise our failure in marriage- divorce.

Just as much as divorce affects and destroys families so too does it effect or psyche. The first real effect of divorce is that we stopped understanding marriage for what it is, and began to see marriage as what we made it to be. We stopped living by the laws of marriage and started to make-up new ones to fit our purpose. The problem was that we forgot what that purpose was. Marriage is not what you make of it, marriage is what it makes you!

Marriage is based on difference. The natural difference between man and woman that when they become one through marriage, makes them both something that they weren't before- a husband and wife. Nothing revolutionary so far, it's just that we have forgotten what this means. Marriage makes a family because it is the other person who makes me something different. As a husband or wife you stand in a unique relationship to that other person, not simply because I want it, but rather because the difference between us combined with that freely chosen relationship means that I have a particular duty and responsibility to that other person, and that other person has the same level of responsibility towards me. In divorce we loose sight of that- we make up the rules, the game depends on us and that relationship I have with another is what I say it is and thus can end when I say it ends.

If marriage is what we say it is, then marriage can indeed become anything we want. This is how the completely inscrutable unreality of gay marriage gets into the picture.

Put simply, the idea of homosexual marriages gets things round the wrong way- and not just the most obvious things. We don't make up the rules as we see fit, rather the rules make us fit to live the life. We don't make up the responsibilities then make the relationship, rather it is that relationship that makes the rules. The rules of marriage rely on this difference between man and woman- only in union do they make sense.

This something new expressed as union is most easily seen in children. That reality of husband and wife and the making of something new is expressed most perfectly in children. Gay marriage is the exact opposite. It's make up the rules, get into a relationship yet there is no difference. That lack of difference is sterility.

No matter what we say or how we protest, so long as the reality of divorce means that we make a mockery of marriage, then the task of convincing the world that gay marriage is a further mockery is a battle that we are fighting uphill and into the wind.