Should Conservatives Concede the Gay Marriage Debate?
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Michael Knowles, matt Walsh, and Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire.
With the Respect for Marriage Act in the news cycle, conservative commentators like Matt Walsh, Michael Knowles, and Ben Shapiro from The Daily Wire have aggressively rejected redefining marriage to include same-sex couples. Shapiro has gone as far as suggesting Republicans who vote for the “Respect for Marriage Act” should be excommunicated from the party. At the very least, conservatives want Senator Mike Lee’s amendments added, so religious liberty can be protected.
But many Americans, including those on the right, have given up that fight. De-transitioner Chloe Cole has been boosted by the right as of late, but she thinks their rigid stance will hurt conservatives. “Reintroducing the gay marriage debate in 2022 is political suicide for conservatives, especially given the recent election woes.” When asked specifically about the RFMA and religious liberty concerns, Cole said conservatives should focus on that part of the bill, instead of “whipping out old rhetoric from 2008.”
But let’s consider life back in 2008, particularly in California where Cole is from. The nation was shocked when one of the most liberal states in the country banned same-sex marriage. The Prop 8 “Yes” campaign was largely driven by the cooperation of the church, and minorities uniformly voted in favor of the ban. Black voters were a whopping 70%. But even some Democrats supported the ban. The “Yes” campaign was simply superior and ran ads stating something their opposition, at the time, claimed was propaganda.
They said if same-sex marriage was legalized, children would have to learn about it in school. Kate Kendell, who was with the “No on 8” campaign, claimed the legalization of same-sex marriage “would have no affect on education,” according to NPR.
Obergefell v. Hodges was later decided by the Supreme Court, and life dramatically changed.
Today, parents have to fight to get sexually explicit LGBT books out of the library, like This Book is Gay. The media and politicians all over the country went ballistic because Florida passed a bill stating you can’t teach sexual orientation and gender identity to grades K-3 and older children if deemed inappropriate. Disney, which has a “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” came out against the bill.
Today, we have Drag Time Story Hour in libraries and educators admitting on Tiktok they come out to their elementary students as trans and non-binary. Books about drag queens and gender identity have become recommended reading material for pre-K and up. Beloved children's shows like Blues’ Clues have pride parades led by drag queens, and lessons with pansexual flags. Sex education in school isn’t merely about preventing pregnancy and STDs. It’s about gender identity and normalizing sexual behaviors. The Guttmacher Institute criticizes abstinence-only education for multiple reasons, including that it will “emphasize heterosexual relationships as the expected societal norm and not only ignore, but often undermine, the sexual health and overall well-being of LGBTQ youth.”
Biological males are beating women in swimming, track, skateboarding, and more. And because of guidance from the Biden administration, your school lunch programs are at risk if you don’t allow biological boys into girls’ locker rooms and onto their teams.
Conservatives are often mocked for talking about slippery slopes. Well, this is an instance where we wish we were wrong. We would have gladly taken the L.
If anything, the Yes campaign lacked imagination. Children aren’t merely being taught they can marry the same sex. They’re being taught they may not even be boys or girls. They could be both or neither.
This threat of radical gender theory is where many on the right would like to direct our attention. After all, there are gay allies who fiercely fight for the safety of children. Children should be able to enjoy their adolescence without being introduced prematurely to inappropriate sexual content and themes. I very much appreciate groups like Gays Against Groomers. I want to uplift them over San Francisco’s Gay Men’s Choir, who sang about “coming for your children,” or The Washington Post columnists who say children need to see kink at pride parades.
However, the redefining of marriage and gender identity has glaring similarities: the rejection of gender roles and key distinctions rooted in biological realities.
Marriage is not simply about love. Love is not a requirement to get married, nor would we tolerate any and every pairing simply because they claimed to feel deeply for one another.
Jack Hunter recently wrote in an op-ed for Based Politics in favor of same-sex marriage. He said, “homosexuality was unquestionably part of the human condition.” Being attracted to multiple people is much more a part of the human condition than same-sex attraction, yet I don’t see a lot of articles stating, “the conservative case for polygamy and polyamory.” At least, not yet. We don’t celebrate or even tolerate everything that is a part of the “human condition,” nor should we.
Marriage is not simply consenting adults signing contracts and getting tax breaks. If it were, there’s no reason why two is the magical number. Why not joint-file as a trouple or a foursome?
Marriage is a social institution and should be about uplifting and building families. Alan Keys once said, “Where procreation is in principle impossible, marriage is irrelevant.” He clarified his position stating it’s not based on particular circumstances (such as an elderly couple beyond child-bearing age). “But when it is impossible, as between two males or two females, you’re talking about something that’s not just incidentally impossible. It’s impossible in principle. And that means if you say that’s a marriage, you are saying marriage can be understood in principle apart from procreation. You have changed its definition in such a way, as in fact, you destroy the necessity for the institution, since the only reason it has existed in human societies and civilizations, was to regulate from a social point of view the obligations and responsibilities attendant upon procreation.”
Nowadays, we have the technology to get around this. We’ve seen pictures of gay men laying on hospital beds with their newborns, produced from an egg donor and gestated by a surrogate. They breed children with the purpose of not knowing their mothers and living without them. Lesbian couples and single women do the same, building children with no intention of having a father.
The question is, do you believe in the complementary nature of men and women raising these children, together? Do you believe children inherently deserve a mother and a father? Whether you believe in the creation mandate and biblical definition of marriage—affirmed by Jesus in the New Testament—or if you simply believe in the evolutionary natural order, you can’t get away from the reality of male and female.
Do you believe this dynamic is easily interchangeable? If it’s not, it’s worth preserving when possible.
Matt Walsh is famous for asking, “What is a woman?” If the answer is “an irrelevance to your child’s upbringing,” it’s not difficult to see how we’ve created and encouraged a diminishing of women. This is on top of the diminishing of the father, which has devastated communities—particularly black—for decades.
Gay marriage isn’t and never was about liberty. A decade ago, Christian baker Jack Phillips was sued for not baking a cake for a same-sex wedding. In 2022, Phillips is in court again for not making a gender transition cake. Why is their privilege to coerce more powerful than Phillip’s first amendment right to freely exercise his religion? Christians don’t clock in and clock out. Being a “living sacrifice” is part of our “reasonable service,” to our Holy and unchanging God.
There’s always going to be another goalpost shifted. If conservatives concede ground for political expediency, they’ll keep moving until they’re also left-wing. There will be only one party, just on one spectrum of extremes.
Since same-sex marriage became legal across the nation, social acceptance of sodomy has gone into overdrive, from entertainment to businesses putting more effort into Pride Month than Black History. They’ve done this by desensitizing, jamming, and conversion. This strategy was outlined by Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen in After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s. This expert marketer and psychologist laid out a “propaganda campaign” to flood the public with gay-related advertising, portray anti-gay “institutions as antiquated, backwaters, badly out of step with the times,” and convert the population to their favor.
“Please don’t confuse Conversion with political Subversion…By conversion we actually mean something far more profoundly threatening to the American Way of Life, without which no truly sweeping social change can occur. We mean conversion of the average American’s emotions, mind, and will, through a planned psychological attack, in the form of propaganda fed to the nation via the media.”
The right to marry wasn’t the endgame. Coercing religious people to violate their faith or face losing their businesses, like florists, photographers, and licenses for adoption agencies isn’t the endgame. Obtaining access to children they cannot naturally make is not the endgame; two men have recently sued New York City to make them cover in vitro fertilization and IVF for their selected surrogate. Driving niche market actresses like Candace Cameron Bure to make their own obscure networks isn’t the endgame. She’s been the subject of scorn from the media for a solid week. If Bure can’t make Christmas movies without being accused of bearing responsibility for a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado, how can there be an endgame?
There isn’t. There’s always a lane further to the left. If the gay lobby has milked everything possible out of the LG&B, there are plenty of other letters, numbers, and symbols they can use. There’s too much political power and money associated with this “community,” and they are too good a club to cudgel their political opposition: Judeo-Christian values and “the American Way of Life.”
If the Supreme Court hadn’t redefined marriage and if there wasn’t such an aggressive marketing campaign to solidify that decision in the hearts and minds of individuals, would we have such an explosion of gender identity today? If conservatives and religious institutions didn’t lay down so quickly, would we have a presidency pushing gender affirmation socially, chemically, and surgically? I think not.
The harm done to Chloe Cole was horrific, but it was nothing that happened overnight. Cole’s parents consented to puberty blockers and chopping off her healthy breasts, but they were emotionally blackmailed by propaganda that continues to persist. “Would you rather have a son or a dead daughter?”
But Cole’s parents were blackmailed into a lie. Regardless of surgery or drugs, you can’t make a female into a son; you can only scar your daughter. Sex and gender are too meaningfully intertwined, and our institutions should protect and uplift this objective truth.
Another objective truth, outlined by social sciences, is “there are three mechanisms that seem to explain why marriage matters. It’s biology, its gender, and it’s stability.” Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., who researches and writes about marriage, bioethics, religious liberty, and political philosophy, lays this out in books and lectures, and he’s certainly not alone.
Ideally, men and women should get married, stay married, raise their children, and build communities. That isn’t to say there aren’t outliers. Some biological parents can be a terror, and many single, stepparents, or parents who adopt can be absolute joys and raise thriving children. But as a means of public policy and what we choose to promote as a society, Alan Keys had it right. “Where procreation is in principle impossible, marriage is irrelevant.”
Redefining marriage to simply fit intense emotional companionship or the financial interest of consenting adults, doesn’t explain why marriage should remain a union solely between two individuals. If the state no longer sees a vested interest in protecting the marital relationship as one centered around the family, it should pack up its bags and get out of the marriage business. Take the libertarian approach, that many conservatives like Ben Shapiro now argue, and leave us be. The state can still respect contracts, so we can visit each other in hospitals and so on. But when it comes to the institution of marriage, it can continue to matter in our churches and communities, but it certainly shouldn’t become a tool to beat the religious right into submission.
Though, I’m certain, that is part of the endgame. Tolerance isn’t enough. “COEXIST” bumper stickers are a lie. The Left requires laying down God to worship their golden calf.
Conservatives could take Cole’s approach and simply drop the conversation entirely. It would be easier in our present day. It’s certainly an emotionally charged issue that touches allies, friends, followers, and thought leaders I admire. In the long run, it will not be good for society. And what exactly are conservatives “conserving” if not the bedrock of civilization?
