CRITICS OF THOSE WHO express concern about the efforts to re-define marriage in America often chide, asking whether they’re trying to take the nation back to the fifties and Leave It To Beaver. Unfortunately, their policies of benefits for homosexual and heterosexual live-in lovers takes us back even further. . . to places called Sodom and Gomorrah.

FOR THE FULL LENGTH of human history, marriage has consistently been established upon the coming together of male and female, the two parts of humanity. It is only in the last few seconds of human experience that a small, but legally powerful minority has had the arrogance to say that nature is intolerant. Now, that small group is using its influence to bring to bear the force of government to authorize their perspective onto everyone else.

CIVIL RIGHTS? Fortunately, the state does not own marriage, it did not create marriage, and it is not the state’s job to define or re-define it. It is the state’s responsibility to echo the judgment of nature, of culture and human experience. Marriage is larger than the state. It is the first and foundational human institution.

WHAT ABOUT THE RIGHT OF EACH CHILD to have both a mother and a father? Certainly that is not a civil right — one that is awarded by the state. Both a mother and father is the God-given provision for a child. Why are the sexual preferences of some adults dictating what kind of family in which a child will be raised?

UNDER RE-DEFINITION, marriage becomes merely an emotional relationship that must become elastic and flexible enough to include any grouping of "loving" adults. Any narrowing of that vision to include only male and female (which ALL human civilizations have done until now) is tantamount to saying that nature is intolerant and wrong!

ONCE MARRIAGE IS RE-DEFINED other words are re-defined. "Parent" begins to mean nothing more than "sexually active adult." "Family" becomes any number of sexually active adults having custody of some child or children. "Mother" and "father" become only empty words. How does a little boy raised by two "mothers" learn how to become a man, a husband, and a father? How does a girl raised by two men learn what it means to be a woman, a wife and mother? Just because one of her "fathers" is effeminate does not mean that he can form a young lady.

GENDER, UNDER RE-DEFINITION, becomes nothing as well. Since re-definition of marriage means same-sex partners are just like a male husband and a female wife, no necessary, qualitative differences can be tolerated, because if real differences did exist, a man would need a woman and a woman would need a man. In this new re-defined marriage system, gender becomes something like personality type.

MARRIAGE SENDS A MESSAGE to the future as it gives birth and fashions the children that come forth. Like time capsules — used at special events to some how enshrine the moment and the epoch when they were placed — children will carry the present with them. Clearly, however, they are much more than a collection of relics stuffed into a container to be opened at some future point in time. They themselves are a living document of the present. The question Kentucky is about to decide is this: What message will we be sending forward in and through our children? Will they carry the message of marriage as a loving husband/father and loving mother/wife, or will they have to re-define it because of their exposure to a world of relational and sexual chaos resulting from the current push for legal authorization?