A parable from history. (Cue cute "birds singing, tra-la-la music")
Before the first European arrived on the North American continent, there were those to whom we now refer as "native Americans". (Generally, the term refers to the people indigenous to the United States.) These people groups lived here a long time before anyone arrived from the "old world". They had tribes, communities, property, their own civilization. They hunted and farmed and even had their own kind of industries.
The Spanish settled here in 1519 and the English arrived and established Jamestown and Plymouth while the French set up their first settlements in what is now Canada in the early 17th century. At first, we all got along pretty well. We had our small colonies and they had ... the rest of the continent. Then the European settlers got it in their heads that they needed to educate the natives, to "civilize" them. When frictions arose from this effort, it became a war. Some of the fighting was in self-defense -- the settlers were defending themselves. Some was in aggression for expansion and pacification.
When the European settlers pushed into the plains hunting buffalo and beavers, the Great Plains tribes took offense. Now, all these settlers wanted was "hunting equity", to share the land, to simply have what was theirs. But these unreasonable, backward, traditionalist native Americans felt that they had lived there all this time and that the plains had always been theirs. The settlers used a variety of tactics, from open war to "education" to "improving the lives of the natives" via things like the railroad. It was all with the best of intentions, and while I'm sure the indigenous people didn't understand, being too narrow-minded and all, the settlers eventually achieved their "equity" by simply stripping from the tribes what had always been theirs and taking it for themselves. Of course, by the time they got done with it, the hunting and the territories didn't look anything at all like it used to, but it's okay because equity was what was important, and those old, right-wing native Americans ended up in a much better place, I'm sure.
Moral of the Story: Taking what isn't yours to convert it to what you want it to be does not fall in the category of "equity".
4 comments:
Wow, I didn't know you felt that way.
Yeah, kinda comes as a shock, doesn't it?
The analogy falls flat because buffalo were a resource and more specifically an exhaustable source of food. Showing up somewhere and demanding a significant share of the food supply is a far cry from what is denied to heterosexual married couples in a society that allows same-sex marriage.
But let's look at this more closely... what does allowing same-sex marriage deny to heterosexual married couples? I think many people would make the case that it cheapens the institution by altering its meaning.
So the question I will ask is this... Does the State of New York (for example) allowing same-sex marriage cheapen a Catholic, Methodist, or Baptist marriage?
Anonymous: "The analogy falls flat"
While certainly no analogy is perfect, you would apparently disagree with the premise that "Taking what isn't yours to convert it to what you want it to be does not fall in the category of 'equity'."
Anonymous: "What does allowing same-sex marriage deny to heterosexual married couples?"
The popular approach. "How will it hurt you if they allow it?" Rephrase the question. "How will it hurt marriage if you strip off the meaning, redefine it to mean something quite different, and then apply it to a radically different arrangement?" What does it deny us? Marriage. But I've answered more fully here and here. I gave an example of the smaller problem of communication. In two posts I talked about what was at stake in general and to Christians. I wrote about the cost of changing the definition and how it would affect me. As a Christian, it is a serious matter in terms of biblical definitions and big pictures. (Seriously, I had no idea I had answered this question so many times. See how common the question is?)
Yes, redefining marriage to mean something it has never been cheapens marriage. No, that's not sufficient. It obliterates it.
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