IDENTIFYING REAL THREATS TO TRADITIONAL MARRIAGE

News Item culled from the headlines

LDS Church 'grateful' for Proposition 8 support

Preserved from the Deseret News Internet Newsservice
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/1,5143,705260852,00.html
By Carrie A. Moore Deseret News
electronic scrapbook entry for Published: November 5, 2008

Gay marriage is once again banned in California after the nation's most hotly contested citizen referendum ended in victory for Proposition 8 supporters, backed by major fundraising and grass-roots organizing by members of the LDS Church.

Elder L. Whitney Clayton, a member of the church's Presidency of the Seventy who helped lead the church's support for Proposition 8, told reporters during a press conference Wednesday that he doesn't have a monetary total for how much money was donated by Latter-day Saints. He did say it was "considerable and generous" and that church leaders are "grateful for the sacrifice" made by members who participated in the campaign.

He said the church, as an institution, did not contribute directly but did pay for hotel and travel expenses for him and other leaders who participated in the effort.

The California vote was considered too close to call late Tuesday, with word coming Wednesday morning that the referendum to amend the California Constitution — defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman — had won.

The victory for supporters leaves questions for thousands of gay couples who married in the past few months after the California Supreme Court struck down a previous voter referendum on the issue and legalized gay marriage there earlier this year.

Prop 8 supporters maintained that the court's 5-4 ruling did not reflect the will of California voters and would put their children at risk for indoctrination by putting gay marriage on par with traditional marriage.,

In recent weeks, several news organizations have said The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was pivotal in the political fight, bringing in millions in financial backing for Prop 8 and organizing its members as part of a grass-roots campaign by conservatives throughout the state.

© 2008 Deseret News Publishing Company | All rights reserved


RIGHT ASCENSION COMMENTARY
for adult readers

Many people regard marriage as a domestic arrangement between two people. Most people probably do not even think of marriage in terms of legal definitions. The real traditional definition of marriage is a covenant between four entities. Repeat Four entities -- not two.

1. The man

2. The woman

In secular societies

3. The culture in which the man and the woman live

In religious societies

3. God, represented by the reverend clergies

And — the group whose interests have become more or less mislaid in the whole recent marriage controversy.

4. Children.

Children, David O McKay once observed, deserve a family and a pure unencumbered birth. That means a father and a mother in a married covenant, and legal documentation. There are sound economic reasons for insisting on this arrangement, for as David Frum recently observed in an editorial:

“The argument over same-sex marriage has become worse than a distraction from the challenge of developing policies to ensure that as many children as possible grow up with both a father and a mother in the home. Over the past 30 years, governments have effectively worked to change attitudes about smoking, seat-belt use and teenage pregnancy. Changing attitudes about unmarried childbirth may prove more difficult. Yet it is a fact that the only way to escape poverty is to work consistently — and that even after welfare reform, low-skilled single parents work less consistently than the main breadwinner in a low-skilled dual-parent household.”

California’s marriages are the least of California’s political problems these days. However, California’s Proposition 8, which defines in the California Constitution that marriage is between one man and one woman, serves a misguided public relations function. The proposition gives the appearance of action and reform when, in fact, it actually does way too little way too late for the cause of marriage.

Homosexual unions have not damaged marriage irrevocably.

Heterosexual unions of the nineteenth and twentieth century damaged marriage as an institution.

The Heterosexuals, after all, introduced polygamist marriage to North America in the 1830s.

Heterosexuals invented la casa grande and la casa bonita, which is a euphemism for describing a household with a husband, a wife, and several mistresses.

Heterosexuals liberalized no-fault divorce laws, making it possible for one man to go through multiple women over the course of a lifetime.

Heterosexuals popularized the concept of contraception, which is to say sexual activity without children.

Heterosexuals defined unions between men and women, especially older men and women, without the consideration or possibility of procreating children as “marriages” when they were actually “domestic companionship arrangements."


THE CALL TO ACTION

We should not blame homosexuals for the appalling state of modern marriage when the heterosexuals did the most damage to the institution.