Complexity

Our illustration for this Page relates to homosexuality/heterosexuality, a leading topic of discussion and contention as this is being written in 2014.  The context of the issues related to gender relationships rivals the complexity of drug addiction.  The simple life in the agricultural context has disappeared.  It is interesting that in a matter of just a few years the electorate in my home state moved from illegality of same-sex marriage, and was at the point of making it a matter of constitutional law to rejection of any amendment, and in the next legislature changing the state law to admission of same-sex marriage.  It all happened that fast.  There is no doubt that some highly controversial human practices are now making rather rapid movement toward acceptance.  Even the legalization of the free use of some narcotics is taking place.  At this writing we do not yet know where the liberalization of formerly forbidden practices will take us.  The shift has caused a rift in the church causing wider divides between evangelical congregations and liberal ones with some clergy trapped on both sides relative to the changes.  In all the problems, matters have not been made ugly in public confrontations, but less public contexts have been hurtful.  It is to general advantage that differences made public and ugly in the evolution controversies of the twentieth century have not emerged in this controversy.  There have been remote scenes of nonsense reported, but little bordering on uncivil extravagance of language and fierce mien.  These kinds of issues are managed with prayer, honest debate, and the recognition that the general public has gradually moved away from the expectation that government will recognize objective and moral values.  Legislation is now determined by the vicissitudes of the electorate.  Perhaps it has often been so, but the analysts acknowledge that the electorate has become more secularized.  That will likely continue in the foreseeable future so to make laws that may be paradoxical, even contradictory.  This appears when appeals are made to definitions.  For example, the former definition of marriage held the assumption of generating children.

Regardless of our religious faith, and its influence on personal lives, mankind has been afforded freedom to do whatever the society will permit.  Permission, in the nature of things, does not mean approval of decisions.  The general society will face some complexity in the course of daily life in the combination of a marriage approved for one person each from two genders, and a marriage approved between two persons of the same gender.  For example, the history of families shows that effective families have had a balance between the gender male father, offering something more and different from the gender female mother in the nurture of children.  We know that families with effective fathers are more likely to have balanced sons in society, than those having absent or abusive fathers.  Part of the modernization reduces the place of the mother in the home, even shifting her values and psychology related to her children.  All this and much more relates to the human problem to be addressed in the secular society.  Sex and marriage, perhaps friendship, needs to be reviewed for meaning.  Multiple marriages, bestiality, pedophilia, co-habitation, and other sexual experiences are molding much of general culture without our deliberate permission.

For those belonging to a spiritual society (that outside of nature, but impinging on nature) the problem becomes even more complex in that a specific set of values is imposed on persons and their actions with others of their faith, and the society of many or no faiths.  We already know that human beings are highly suggestion-prone.  They are faced with decision-making long before they are competent to evaluate the options for truth.  The story can be extended with other concepts to be resolved.  What if, in place of historical marriage that identifies our families we made a legal alternative that might be recognized as Brothers and/or Sisters.  Two men may be joined in ceremony and legal incorporation as Brothers or Friends.  They may be offered all the legal benefits of a married heterosexual couple, but severed from the biological base on which marriage has always been identified.  It is likely that the homosexual attraction is based on intense friendship that goes awry.  The identity of same-sex marriage not only reduces the spiritual concept of marriage, but the humanistic as well.  The issue wasn’t meant to take the course it has.