# LCMS Convention Proceedings_St. Louis Missouri_2016_S124
# Machine transcription, uncorrected — CHI Digital Archive (demonstration)

So, the first thing to say is that gays and lesbians
aren’t to blame for that. There was a crisis of marriage going on in the United States long before the
Obergefell decision. Something took place 50 years
ago where heterosexuals bought into a liberal lie
about human sexuality. They bought into the liberal
ideology that came out of the sexual revolution.
And it’s only after two generations of heterosexuals
making a mess of marriage and the family with the
introduction of the hook-up culture, the normalization
of premarital sex, the more-than-skyrocketing rates of
nonmarital childbearing, cohabitation, no-fault divorce, the doubling of the rates of divorce. Only after
straight people failed to take monogamy, exclusivity,
and permanence seriously for two generations can
five unelected Supreme Court justices say that sexual
complementarity doesn’t matter. That’s what got us to
where we were this time last year. It’s two generations
of Americans failing to take marriage seriously that lets
the court say this part of marriage doesn’t matter either.
But here’s the problem: the legal redefinition of
marriage enshrines in our fundamental law a fundamentally misguided understanding of the human
person, of the human family, and of the nature of
marriage. Because what it does is it takes the definition of marriage and the vision of sexuality that the
sexual revolution gave us—that consenting adults
should do whatever consenting adults want to do—
and it elevates that principle to a constitutional right.
And so we will see that it will enforce this new vision
of marriage—this new vision of the family, this new
vision of the human person—on all dissenters.
So what’s next in terms of the legal understanding
of marriage, and what does it mean for civil society?
The redefinition of marriage will lead to further
social harms and the breakdown of the family. The
sexual revolution led to the redefinition of marriage;
the redefinition of marriage will now further exacerbate the harms of the sexual revolution.
If 40 percent of all Americans right now are being
born to single mothers, how will we insist that fathers
are essential when the court has said that fathers
are optional? You can’t send both of those messages
simultaneously. Either a child deserves both a mother and a father, or men and women are functionally
interchangeable—moms and dad are replaceable.

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UPON THIS ROCK

Second, how will we say that monogamy, exclusivity,
and permanency are to be expected? That they’re
normative. That they go to the heart of what marriage
is if marriage is no longer built on sexual complementarity. If you think about the philosophy of marriage,
it’s sexual complementarity that explains why it is
monogamous, because it’s one man and one woman
who can unite as one flesh. Once you say that the
male/female part of marriage no longer matters, it’s
harder to see what’s magical about twosomes. What’s
special about the number two when you say that you
have the right to marry the person you love? Why not
say that it’s the right to marry the people you love?
Why should marriage be “ ’til death do us part” if
marriage is simply about consenting adult romance?
With romance, you can fall into it, and you can fall
out of it. You can fall into love, and you can fall out of
love. Why would it be a permanent union if it’s not a
comprehensive union?
We can expect to see further damage to the institution of marriage itself because of this court’s decision.
A way of thinking about this is that the redefinition
of marriage leads to the reordering of society. If our
human laws don’t reflect the truth, if man-made laws
don’t reflect the natural law and the divine law, then
government will have to both refashion human nature and then reorder society, while coercing the dissenters. So let me take those two points in turn. First,
refashion human nature. Second, reorder society.
Refashion human nature. How quickly did we see
the LGBT movement shift from the LGB to the T
once they saw that the redefinition of marriage was
going to be a slam dunk at the Supreme Court? It was
the weekend before oral arguments at the Supreme
Court that Bruce Jenner did his two-hour primetime interview with Diane Sawyer on 20/20. That
was only a year and three months ago, and prior to
that point, most Americans—and I would venture
most people in your pews—hadn’t ever considered a
transgendered bathroom or a gender-neutral locker room in a public school. And now one year after
the redefinition of marriage, if we are unable to say
that marriage unites male and female, that children
deserve a mother and a father, it’s not surprising that
the Obama administration is redefining what it is to
be male and female.

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