If Love Is Love, Why Not Three Men ‘Marrying’?
If “love is love” and “everyone should have the right to marry the one they love,” then why can’t any number of people come together in “marriage”?
On Valentine’s Day, three men in Thailand were “married,” and immediately, they became an Internet sensation.
As reported on gaystarnews.com, when Joke, Bell and Art posted their “wedding” pictures online, “the Internet went crazy,” with one Facebook post receiving 50,000 Likes and more than 1,000 comments.
Why not? After all, “love is love,” right? How can any gay activist object? As Art commented on Facebook, “Love occurs unconditionally and is not limited to only two people. Love brings peace to the world.”
For years I’ve been talking about our ongoing descent into sexual anarchy, also warning that the moment you redefine marriage, you render it meaningless.
The events in Thailand simply confirm what we’ve been saying all this time: If marriage is no longer the union of one man and one woman, then it can be anything: Two men, two women, three men, three women, or an almost infinite number of other possibilities.
Why not?
Last year we heard about a lesbian threesome that got “married”; we’ve heard about people “getting married to” themselves; we’ve heard about people “marrying” animals and inanimate objects. Others encourage “open marriage” or being “monogamish,” while still others advocate “polyamory” or the “swinger” lifestyle.
Why not?
If “love is love,” what’s wrong with any of these relationships if they’re all based on “love”?
Wasn’t this the very message President Obama tweeted out when the Supreme Court overturned DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act) in 2012, namely, “Love is love”?
For years, gay activists have had no answer for a simple question: If marriage is not the union of a man and a woman, why does it require two people? Why not just one? Or why not three or more?
If a gay activist says, “But marriage is the loving, long-term commitment of two people,” the answer is simple: “Says who? That’s just your new definition. Where did you get the idea it was two people if not from its historic, natural meaning?”
And so, if I’m “bigoted” because I don’t recognize same-sex “marriage,” then gay activists (and their allies) are just as “bigoted” if they don’t recognize three men (or women) “marrying.”
G.K. Chesterton once said, “Don’t ever take a fence down until you know the reason it was put up.”
That saying can readily be applied to marriage: There’s a reason that foundational societal structures exist, and we tamper with those structures at our own risk.
Late last year, I received a request from a new website called debateout.com, asking if I would participate in a written debate on whether consensual, adult incest should be legal.
When the interviewer from DebateOut called me to respond to her questions about incest, she mentioned that, “of course,” this was a big topic of discussion these days among young people.
Yes, the question of whether adult incest should be legalized was now a major topic of debate, just as I have warned for some years now. (See here, here and here for examples.)
The debate was posted on Dec. 16, and out of the 5 participants in the debate, I was the only one who stated that consensual adult incest should never be legal. All the other participants, including a professor and a psychoanalyst, advocated for removing the laws against consensual adult incest.
Are you surprised?
But what’s the problem? Love is love, right? As long it’s consensual, who can say no to love?
When I did the interview on incest, I used the same Chesterton quote, explaining there was a reason that incestuous relationships, even consensual ones, were wrong.
It’s the same with marriage.
Those who have taken down the fence of marriage as God intended it have opened up a Pandora’s Box of possibilities, none of them good.
Interestingly, this is in harmony with the goals of many pioneer gay activists who despised marriage and wanted to overthrow it as an antiquated, patriarchal, abusive institution.
As stated almost a decade ago by Jack Nichols, an influential, pioneer gay activist, “Nonprocreative same-sex relationships have a particularly redeeming quality, namely, that they take place between people who are the same and can therefore, theoretically at least, welcome others into affectional relationships that bypass exclusivity. This, conceivably, could promote a maximization of affection through communal contact, replacing today’s failing models of exclusive, neurotic, narrow, monogamous duos.”
Not surprisingly, I haven’t heard gay activists renouncing the new “throuples,” and it’s not likely they will, since to do so is to shoot themselves in the foot.
This underscores one of the fundamental flaws of the entire gay revolution: It has within itself the seeds of self-destruction.
I address this in my newest book on outlasting the gay revolution, due out later this year, but for the moment, here’s a word of encouragement: The more you hear about throuples and swingers and open marriage and polyamory and the like, the more our point is demonstrated. Society redefines marriage to its own harm.
Put another way, this is a social experiment doomed to fail, and those who uphold marriage as God intended will be well positioned to endure the storm.
So, don’t lose heart or lose hope. Hold fast to marriage as God meant it to be, and in the end, you and your family will be the envy of society.
Michael Brown is the author of 25 books, including Can You Be Gay and Christian? and host of the nationally syndicated talk radio show “The Line of Fire.” He is also president of FIRE School of Ministry and director of the Coalition of Conscience.