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Gay marriage news is everywhere with counties, towns, and states marrying and giving in marriage. If by now you've thought, Enough already! imagine how Chuck Colson feels. The guy's been speaking out on gay marriage for at least eight years.

In 1996, in Christianity Today, Colson asked "Why Not Gay Marriage?" He was writing in response to the Supreme Court decision in Romer v. Evans. The court concluded that a referendum was unconstitutional when Colorado voters decided to exclude references to sexuality from the state's civil-rights protections. The court said that omission would create an animus toward homosexuals. Colson decried the ruling: "The logic of Romer could easily be used to define as bigotry any law against gay marriage (not to mention polygamy and other deviations from the traditional norm)."

How prescient. Seven years later Colson almost the same thing in his reaction to the Supreme Court's ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, which banned laws against sodomy. "Gays hailed the decision as the prelude to homosexual 'marriage' in America-and they're right. It's the prelude, as well, to legally sanctioned polygamy, incest, pedophilia, and bestiality."

Years ago, gay activists said striking down sodomy laws was one step toward gay marriage. Only months after the Lawrence decision, officials in San Francisco, Oregon, New Mexico, and New York began issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.

As Colson and others warned, signs have been everywhere for the past ten years. In 1996, CT reported on the possible consequences if Hawaii legalized gay marriage: "Tens of thousands of homosexual couples would find their way to Hawaii, though it is far from settled whether their marriages would be recognized back on the mainland." Such a concern prompted the Defense of Marriage Acts passed by many states and by Congress in 1996.

At the time, Steve McFarland of the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and Justice said, "I can't think of a more critical and potentially divisive issue that we face today. On it rests the future of the family as we know it in America."

Christian and conservative groups have been uniquely unsuccessful in even slowing the progress of homosexual activism, despite evangelicals occupying the highest positions in government.

In response, many suggest a sort-of retrenchment of the Christian family. Dwight Ozard, then editor of Evangelicals for Social Action's Prism magazine, said, "We have given in to our culture's and to most other cultures' notion that marriage is essentially an economic partnership or a legal or social contract. But marriage is not fundamentally that. It is two people being made one flesh in a spiritual act that God makes a reality through the church."

More recently, Mary Stewart van Leeuwen echoed Ozard's opinion. "Judgment begins in the house of the Lord," she said. "We're practicing serial monogamy ourselves." Christians ought to display the winsomeness of marriage, van Leeuwen said, even when marriage is difficult. There are advantages to sticking together.

In a CT forum on evangelicals and public policy, Professor of Sociology Tony Campolo said such failures shows the bankruptcy of trying to affect culture through public policy. Campolo said, "The American family is in serious trouble. Divorce rates are at astronomical levels. Desertion rates are scaring everybody to death. But the problem with the American family is not due to gays wanting to live together in committed relationships. I'm not endorsing this, but the gays want to get married. It is the heterosexuals who want to get divorced. We're beating up on gays for what is, in fact, a problem in America in general."

However, efforts to maintain a traditional definition of marriage almost inevitably lead to accusations of hatemongering and the idea that evangelicals want to push their morality on the rest of the country. One gay rights activist called religious groups opposing gay marriage "hate groups." "I worry that we end up looking to the world as a group of gay-bashing, insensitive people who are the enemies of the gay community," Campolo said. But there is also danger in looking like the rest of the country, as Chuck Colson recently noted. Engaging culture is one of the marks of an evangelical.

Efforts to ban gay marriage have merits, as CT recently editorialized. Even evangelicals supportive of civil unions are not ready to back out of the marriage debate. Encouraging people to participate in marriage, as God ordained it, benefits everyone who enters into it.

Ironically, evangelicals can take a hint from the other side. The Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund has been working for years in order to increase the acceptance of gay marriage. The group's marriage project coordinator told CT, "We want public discussion in every state and every community. Americans deserve to hear the real-life stories of real-life couples, stories that will challenge the stereotype." She said conservatives have been hesitant to make a convincing case against gay marriage because they come across as hateful. Lambda's coordinator said, "The side that's able to talk freely and proudly and righteously about their cause, I think, is the long-term winner."

Many, including C.S. Lewis, have advocated defining Christian marriage as distinct from civil marriage. Evangelicals for Social Action's Ozard said, "This would allow the church to make a moral statement against same-sex marriages without denying what are perceived as civil rights."

Though such an effort may raise a host of other debatable issues, Christians can, in effect, make such an argument by telling "the real-life stories of real-life [Christian] couples, stories that will challenge the stereotype." In such a campaign, Christians can display the joy, the love, and the freedom that God has built into the institution.

Copyright © 2004 Christianity Today