If you listen to Lyle Shelton from the Australian Christian Lobby, you might get the idea that Christianity teaches that the only legitimate purpose for sex is procreation and that marriage exists to sanction sex. Having children, therefore, is the fulfillment and meaning of marriage.
This is, of course, utter rubbish. It is not procreation that determines and establishes the value of marriage.
Orthodox theologian, Paul Evdokimov, writes, “Both the preservation of the species and selfish sexual pleasure reduce the partner to a mere tool and destroy his dignity. Love alone bestows a spiritual meaning upon marriage, and justifies it by elevating it to perceive the countenance of the beloved in God, to the level of the one and only icon…”
We are not breeding machines.
St. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople in the late 4th century and an important Early Church Father, said: “When there is no child, will they not be two? Most certainly, for their coming together has this effect, it diffuses and commingles the bodies of both. And as one who has cast ointment into oil, who has made the whole one, so in truth it is also here… Marriage is the intimate union of two lives, the sacrament of love.”
Love is the unitive factor in marriage, and not the structure of sexual compatibility nor the capacity to produce offspring.
The 19th Century Russian writer (and friend of Dostoevsky), Vladimir Solovyov, contested the view that the meaning of sexual love was for the propagation of the species.
“…among animals that reproduce themselves solely in the sexual way (the vertebrates), the higher we go in the organic scale, the more limited is the power of reproduction and the greater the force of sexual attraction” and that therefore “sexual love and reproduction of the species are in inverse proportion to each other: the stronger the one, the weaker the other… until at last, in man, there may be intense sexual love without any reproduction whatever.”
On Q&A last night, Lyle Shelton made the bizarre claim that changing the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples would break the “primal bond between a mother and her baby”.
“We did take Indigenous children and babies from their mothers and give them to loving families but the error we apologised for was for taking them from their biological mother and father,” he said. “Through assisted reproductive technology, we are taking the child from their biological father or their mother and giving them to someone else.”
Seriously Lyle? Could you have thrown your net any wider?
As Dr Kerryn Phelps said, “What’s that got to do with marriage?”
Former Speaker Anna Burke was also quick to slap him down.
“I actually sat in the Parliament when [Julia] Gillard gave that very moving speech about those women losing their babies,” she said. “I think to equate that to marriage equality is an absolute abomination for what those women went through.”
Feeding into the weirdness was also a discussion about the Safe Schools program prompted by this question.
CELLA WHITE asked: I’ve taken my children out of Frankston High School because of the content of the Safe Schools program. I have no religious affiliation but I believe it is biology that defines what sex you are, not radical gender theory. I did not feel comfortable with my daughter sharing a toilet with the boys who wish to identify as girls and withdrew her enrolment into year 7. Are my concerns legitimate?
Ms White went on to say that parents hadn’t been informed about the program and later, that the school didn’t in fact have any transgender children there. Her child wasn’t even at the school yet.
Cella, your concerns are a ridiculous confection based on misinformation you have been fed by people like Cory Bernardi and George Christensen about problems that don’t exist.
In one breath, these people are expressing concern for the welfare of the children of gay couples, and then in the next saying they object to a program specifically designed to address the social stigma these kids face, a problem which stems from the intolerance and ignorance of people like Cella White and Lyle Shelton.
Recent studies have shown that children of same-sex parents enjoy better levels of health and wellbeing than their peers from traditional family units. Lead researcher Doctor Simon Crouch said children raised by same-sex partners scored an average of 6 per cent higher than the general population on measures of general health and family cohesion. For these children, as for children who are themselves gender diverse, bullying and stigma are the greatest threats to their well-being.
The ACL is a political organisation based in Canberra who the ABC described as “a conservative Christian lobby group providing Biblical solutions for social issues.”
In 2012, then managing director of ACL, Jim Wallace, suggested that a homosexual “lifestyle” was more hazardous to health than smoking. The ACL also criticised the government in 2010 for working with a gay advisory body to assist its decision making as “disgraceful and pandering to a minority”.
Those opposed to marriage equality and the Safe Schools program would have us believe that the views of the minority are being forced on the majority heterosexual population. What is actually happening is that the views of a very vocal minority of bigots and fundamentalists are purporting to represent Christians. These people are overrepresented in Parliament and are using their public platform to spread misinformation, division, intolerance and hatred.
Thanks to the cowardice of Malcolm Turnbull, this vitriol will only get worse while our politicians procrastinate and the homophobes get louder and more desperate with their propaganda campaigns.
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