Recently, the Barack Obama became the first sitting POTUS to endorse same sex “marriage”. Let me walk into the zone of controversy by stating my own personal moral convictions. I fully expect that anyone who reads this will be ticked off by something I say here.

First of all:

1) Homosexual intercourse is sin.

and lest you think that I am just opposed to homosexuality – let me share the rest of my list.

2) Fornication is sin. For those of you without a clue, this is sex outside of a marriage relationship.
3) Adultery (having sex with someone who is married to someone else, or conversely, having sex with someone who is not the one you are married to) is sin.
4) Masturbation is sin.
5) Lustful thinking is sin. Thinking about sex with someone other than your spouse is sin. (that makes the entire industry of pornography a sin)

This doesn’t prevent me from having friends who do these things. This doesn’t prevent me from caring about and for people who do these things. This doesn’t cause me to judge or condemn people for doing these things. Why, because at some point in my life, I, myself have done many of these things. I, like every other human currently on this planet, am a sinner.

So I don’t inherently have any anger or hatred of the LGBT community. That isn’t my issue. I have no issue with laws that give their relationships the same legal rights as a “marriage”. I don’t have a problem with their advocating for their cause, and their desire to be treated equally under the law with me. I have known many people who are gay or bisexual, and some I consider friends, whose company I enjoy. I find it uncomfortable that many in the LGBT community want to silence my voice, by saying the if I call their lifestyle sin, that is hate speech. I think that this kind of rhetoric is unfortunate, because instead of allowing a conversation about the merits of either position, it simply shuts down the conversation. So before you judge me for my views, grow up and listen. Just because we don’t agree, doesn’t make me wrong.

Why, because law of sin and law of the land are not the same. OK, Christians, please understand this. God’s law is not the law of the land. We really do not want MOSAIC LAW. Seriously. We sure don’t want Rabinic Law. Laws are national or municipal policies enacted for the benefit of society, or so many would have you believe. We can talk about church law and policy as described in the New Testament, but as far as I read the scripture, it only applies to Christian believers, not anyone else. We don’t live in a Christian Nation, we live in a nation with a majority of people who claim to be christian. Our nation was not founded exclusively on Christian principles, the founding fathers were somewhat diverse, with a large contingent of Deists who as I understand are the ancestor of the current Unitarian church – which is mostly not Christian. Our founding fathers were mostly educated, pragmatic men, who were willing to risk their necks to put a stop to the kind of tyranny that most monarchies were during the age of enlightenment. The two issues that pushed men to migrate from the old world to the new world were economic opportunity and religious freedom. Not in any sense the implementation of a religious state, that was the exact opposite of what they wanted. Our founding fathers drew on Judeo-Christian principles, as well as secular philosophy and their own understanding of human nature, history, and justice.

Back to the issue at hand. Sin. The problem is that we like sin. We like sexual sin. For the last 50 odd years, we have been slowly chiseling away at the taboos and moral norms that existed that prevented “right-thinking” people from screwing around. We have gone way out of our way to normalize all sorts of social sexual behaviors that 50 years ago, people mostly did in secret. We have gone way out of the way to reduce social, legal, and natural consequences of these behaviors through medical means (contraception, and cures for STD’s), and political means (legalizing abortion, promoting contraception, and reducing censorship), and social means (like using the media to continually expose our society to these behaviors and practices in talk, television, and film formats). Along with that has come the social de-marginalizing of the Gay community. Over time, the law of the land has become more lenient and relaxed towards lifestyles that express behaviors that according to God’s law are sexual sin.

I expect that this is a perfectly natural process. The old world is probably 30 years ahead of us in this regard. In some ways, they have always been more comfortable with human sexuality – America has long been a very prudish country – almost in denial of human sexuality.

My complaint is really semantic, more than anything else. Marriage is not about sex, it is about God’s sanctioning a relationship where sex is legitimized. Marriage is not about a family, it is about God’s sanctioning the family unit has his plan for population management. Marriage is not about society, but about God’s sanctioning the basic unit of human society and the His plan for human caring for one another.

So for me, saying that two individuals, whose relationship is defined by God’s law as sin, can enter into a relationship that is sanctioned by God, is problematic. All of the law of the land stuff, is merely that. The fact that our law of the land recognizes and defines marriage specifically as an explicitly mentioned unit of society, does not give the law of the land the right to change the definition. So pick another word, and ascribe the same recognition, and benefits to that kind of a unit of society. That is what the law of the land can do. But please don’t call it “marriage”. Because in fact, it is a different kind of relationship, and a different kind of societal unit.