Ten reasons why we are winning on gay "marriage"

I don't write much on gay rights. As a heterosexual man, it is not a subject that directly touches me. To be honest, I feel a bit of a fraud.

That said, I do take an interest in oppressed groups, especially if there is an overlap into areas of interest where I have more experience.

Tom Gilson writes a blog called The Thinking Christian that I follow. He is not your typical Christian blogger, inasmuch as he is actually very lucid and the quality - if not the content - of his writing is of a high standard.

In today's RSS feed I came across one of his latest posts entitled '10 reasons we are losing on gay "marriage"'. I couldn't help myself.


There is only one reason why you are losing on gay marriage; because you are wrong.

TG1. We have been strategically oblivious. The gay-rights insurgency has been following a strategy published more than twenty years ago. Their plan had significant vulnerabilities we could have dealt with effectively in the early 1990s. Instead we paid no attention, and now the challenge is exponentially harder. Their strategy’s weaknesses remain, but the gay rights movement has amassed cultural strength to compensate.

TS1. I couldn't care less, as a heterosexual man myself, about a 'gay agenda'. The link you provided seems perfectly reasonable to me. If there is intolerance and bigotry in society regarding a particular way of life that does no one else any harm, it seems obvious that someone would put together some form of P.R. campaign to highlight acceptance of their right to self-determination. It is, I should imagine, no different than someone setting out the case for acceptance of civil rights for slaves, women and non-segregation. If it is acceptable for these movements to solidify their image in their plight against their oppressors, why should it be any different for GLBT or atheist groups?

TG2. We are unequipped to use our own best weaponry. There are many powerful, love-centered, natural-law arguments against gay “marriage,” but how many of us know what natural law is, or how to understand and present it in this case?

TS2. You are, indeed unequipped to use your own best weaponry. There are many powerful, love-centered, natural-law arguments against any form of “marriage”.

TG3. Even were that not the case, we live in a culture that is impervious to good reasoning, having little education or experience with genuine critical thinking, and being accustomed instead to the manipulations of sloganeering and imagery.

TS3. It is true that the U.S. is generally impervious to good reasoning and poor educational standards. This is highlighted in the numerous studies that show a clear correlation between higher standards of education being synonymous with higher levels of organic atheism and a lower level of intolerance to GLBT issues.

TG4. Lacking awareness of how to use own best weaponry, we are left with picking up our opponents’ missiles—that same sloganeering and imagery—and lobbing them back half-spent.

TS4. It is not 'missiles' you find hurled at you, but reason. Perhaps that is why it is thrown back half-spent.

TG5. We have yielded authority to empirical research “experts,” forgetting that no one has any empirical information yet on what will come of a multi-generational experiment in gay “marriage.” Lacking a scientific reason to oppose gay “marriage” we have needlessly assumed we have no reason.

TS5.Same sex marriage is not a multi-generational experiment in gay “marriage”. It is about affording people the right to live in loving relationships on an equal footing with people of other sexual persuasions. How do you think the multi-generational experiment in slave, women's and non-segregationist "rights" is going? And as I have already stated, you natural law argument is not without devastating consequences for marriage for anyone.

TG6. We have been weak in understanding, advocating for, and practicing the proper meaning of marriage among ourselves.

TS6. I couldn't agree more.

TG7. We are embarrassed to be involved in a “culture war,” having accepted the liberal message that it’s unseemly and that we’re responsible for it. We’re not. They invaded existing culture with dangerously disruptive cultural ordnance. We are simply trying to hold ground.

TS7. It was the existing culture you say has been invaded, that your religion was responsible for. As such, you have every reason to be embarrassed with your involvement in a “culture war”. You are not, as you state, simply trying to stand your ground against a dangerously disruptive cultural ordnance, you are, in fact simply trying to stand your ground against a civic rights movement that in no wise can be said to be any more dangerous than any other rights movement. 

TG8. We are overly cautious over what we might lose—tax exemptions, jobs, reputations—by standing up for what is right.

TS8. Why on earth would affording same sex marriage mean you would have to give up tax exemptions or jobs? I would say that is the most ludicrous argument against it I have ever heard, but then you continue. Reputations? Really? You think your reputation has anything to do with human or civic rights? I would love to hear that defended.

TG9. We have never adopted a mindset of training for battle. Training is hard. It takes discipline, study, and the courage to face potential losses. But we have either misunderstood what it takes to prepare for a fight like this one, or we’re embarrassed to think of ourselves as being in it, or we’re unwilling to pay the price for our nation’s and our children’s spiritual, cultural, moral, and political health and safety.

TS9. You should be embarrassed to be 'in it'. Your children’s spiritual, cultural, moral, and political health and safety are not in any danger from allowing equal rights to people.

TG10. Where we have not made the above mistakes—where we have understood, reasoned, loved, and practiced well—our voice and presence have been stifled by the educational, cultural, and media elite, who have ensured that their message would shout out above all. (We could examine the reasons that has happened, but that’s for another day.)

TS10. As I started this response, you are just wrong.

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