Worldview and Marriage
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create for same-sex couples the same legal rights and privileges that it already created for opposite-sex couples. That assumption – that government creates marriage – is an instance of the idea of legal positivism, the secularist and naturalist’s logical conclusion that law is not the mind of God or some set of first principles existing in the world of ideas or the nature of things. Rather, it is whatever those who make the law say it is. Legal realism takes that proposition a step further – that law is made by whoever has power and is nothing more than what the powerful say it is. Justice Holmes once wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “I used to say when I was young, that truth was the majority vote of that nation that could lick all others.” To our question, “What is real, what is the nature of things,” realism answers that things are whatever the powerful say they are. Thomas Hobbes wrote about it in Leviathan, and George Orwell in 1984. The Christian view is that reality includes the physical universe, but is not only that universe. Those who have not misspent their youth reading idealistic and solipsistic philosophy may not be aware that there have been very serious people who believe this world is not real, but is instead an illusion or perception of the mind. Christianity rejects that view out of hand as nonsense. “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” But Christianity assumes that reality also includes the super-natural or extra-natural. God and the Logos exist prior to and apart from creation and are knowable in an incomplete but still meaningful way. Put differently, Christianity asserts that Truth is Truth, regardless of what the powerful may say. Robert Bolt wrote about this in A Man for All Seasons, where Thomas More, talking specifically about marriage, refuses to concede that Henry VIII’s marriage to Katherine of Aragon is null and void, even though the king has the power to declare it so and to behead More for disagreeing. More says rhetorically, “Some men think the Earth is round, others think it flat; it is a matter capable of question. But if it is flat, will the King’s command make it round? And if it is round, will the King’s command flatten it?” I once put it this way in a legislative hearing. “A law declaring that marriage is between one man and one woman does not deny equal protection to same-sex couples any more than a law declaring that 2 + 2 = 4 denies equal protection to 5 and 6.” Christian View of Marriage Genesis Design: Marriage as a Divinely Created Institution Genesis establishes the Judeo-Christian view of marriage. God said, “Let us make man in our image. . . . [M]ale and female created he them” (Gen 1:26). The man and woman were each blessed by the other. “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet [or ‘appropriate’] for him” (Gen 2:18). And having created them, God said, “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth” (Gen 1:26-28). Thus marriage between one man and one woman is inherent in human nature, created by God for two complementary and inseparable purposes: (1) the happiness of the man and woman who comprise it, and (2) the production of children as the natural consequence of its