Same sex... marriage.

Same sex marriage is gaining ground, fast. There's no question that the truth-based community is losing this fight. Some observations:

1) Gays don't actually care about marriage, in any significant numbers. Few gays marry, even where it is legal.

2) Homosexuals didn't devastate marriage. Heterosexuals have caused enormously more damage to marriage than gays have or can. Millions and millions of us have wrecked our marriages with selfishness, infidelity, and just plain stupidity. We made divorce easy and adultery commonplace. We reduced marriage from the sacrament that it is-- an image of the Holy Trinity (father, mother, and child)-- to a temporary legal arrangement, open to nullification for the most adolescent and venial of reasons.

3) The culpability of the gay marriage movement in the destruction of marriage lies more in the emerging victory of the pagan culture it exemplifies than in the specific damage it will cause. Same sex marriage will certainly degrade marriage, but gays will always be pikers compared to the degradation that heterosexuals have inflicted on marriage.

4) The pagans are winning because they have taken control of the culture. For the most part we are using their terms and logic. Checkmate.

5) The primary impact of the legalization of gay marriage will not be on marriage but on religious freedom. The legal imprimatur conferred to gay unions will rapidly lead to suppression of Christian praxis in the public square. Christians will be forced to collaborate with gay matrimony in innumerable ways-- Christian wedding photographers, florists, venue owners, musicians, teachers, government employees, churches and pastors will have to choose between livelihood and faith. It's already happening. It will be a tsunami when gay marriage is legal everywhere.

This use of government force to drive Christians from the public square by forcing us to deny our faith or lose our livelihood is already happening with the contraception mandate, and has been tested and refined in decades of legal assault on Christians in the courts on issues such as teaching of evolution and public displays of crosses and creches. This is the next step. The Christophobes used to call the police if we asked questions in school about Darwinism or put a manger on the courthouse lawn. Now the haters will call the police if we demur on the purchase of contraception or on renting our banquet hall for Bruce and Steve's wedding reception.

The gay marriage movement has nothing whatsoever to do with marriage of gays. It is an Alisnkyite checkmate--

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules. “You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.”

Gay marriage has everything to do with elimination of faithful Christians from the public square.

We cannot beat this by imitating their language and logic. When we use their terms, we have already lost. We are living in a rapidly de-Christianizing and paganizing society, ignited with astonishing evil, and marriage is being transformed to serve other purposes, like a cathedral turned to a brothel. No amount of debate and sociological exegesis will save marriage if we forget that marriage transcends law and civilization and cultural breezes. Marriage-- real marriage between a man and a woman-- is part of what it means to be human.

We have probably lost this fight and this culture already. But the truth remains: marriage is a sacrament. The life-long union of a man and a woman open to new life is the image of God with us.

What remains for us is to tell the truth, without compromise and without fear.