The political debate rumbles on, and we’ve heard the principle arguments repeated endlessly: On one hand, the right of gays to seek the same legal protections available to straights, and on the other hand, the mainstream desire to preserve an ancient and fundamental institution. Perhaps there’s a more appropriate way to look at this. Seems to me there’s an element of narcissism on both sides of the standard argument: On one hand, MY rights; on the other hand, MY tradition. But maybe it’s not about YOU. Marriage may make us happy (or miserable, as the case may be), but its primary purpose is to create a stable environment into which children will be born and nurtured through adolescence. Certainly both our statistics and common sense tell us that children do vastly better if they grow up with loving parents, a mother and a father. For this reason, I’d rather view the battle for marriage as a children’s rights issue, rather than a ME ME MINE issue.

Looked at from this perspective, the problem with gay marriage isn’t that it’s objectively any worse than (and it may actually be better than) the broken homes and single parents and all the other indications that modern marriage is a ruined institution. The problem with gay marriage is fundamentally symbolic: It’s the societal acknowledgement of how far marriage has fallen. If not for the specter of gay marriage, we could continue to pretend that we’re still functional. We could pay our hypocritical respects to our ideal, even if that ideal no longer translates into any semblance of reality.

If you get past the politics and the rants, you’ll hear many conservative Christians acknowledge as much. They understand that winning the battle against gay marriage doesn’t mean a thing unless marriage itself once again becomes respected and meaningful.

Just as the 2nd Amendment wasn’t adopted to protect your right to hunt, so the institution of marriage wasn’t created to deliver spousal health insurance and inheritance. Don’t let the politics distract you from the big picture. This battle is in one place but the war is elsewhere.

In ancient times before Abraham, pagans sacrificed their children to idols. This is a matter of historical record. Then, as our tradition would have it, God gave us the example of Abraham and Isaac to declare an end to ritual human slaughter. In our modern, enlightened era, it seems we’ve created a new form of child sacrifice. Children have become disposable. Most of us know this is our fundamental problem. Some say that the government must step in and pick up the slack with day care and the like. Others argue that the parental commitment must be enforced. The liberal/conservative divide forms roughly along these lines. This is where the war is.

Bottom line: If we’ve lost marriage, then it really doesn’t matter what becomes of gay marriage. Think about this before you jump back into the culture war.

…in this interview Tammy says the following:

….So it is a self-obsession based in victimhood. Now I was raised on the left to believe that in fact this was life and death, that we’re going to destroy you before you destroy us. Now that is almost non-existent on the right, if you will. I don’t see that kind of – there’s certainly some paranoia when it comes to the extreme right – but the level of paranoia and narcissism really drives all the decision making (on the left).

I’ll give you an example when it comes to gay marriage. If Christians are against gay marriage, the gay elite don’t believe that’s because the Christian is concerned about tradition, concerned about the future of this nation, or has a series of issues (with it) surrounding their faith, instead, of course, the gay elite says, “Oh, they’re homophobes.”

They’ve made a decision because they hate me, that they’re thinking this way because of me, that they’re making that decision because they want to hurt me – as opposed to, that they may be against gay marriage because, again, of faith, because of the importance of the tradition of marriage. In fact, God forbid should they ever consider that it might not have anything to do with homosexuals at all, but it has everything to do with (people’s) families, that kind of deeper thinking beyond one’s self, they’re incapable of….