The Words of the Marianov Family
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The Words of the Marianov Family |
Bishop Harry Jackson: The institution of marriage is unique in our society and it's being hurt by gay marriage. The institution of marriage serves broad societal purposes. Gay marriage will lead to degradation of the nuclear family. Family structures that promote positive environments should be culture's aim, he says
(CNN) -- The institution of marriage is unique. Yet today we find it being under constant attack from liberal, immoral forces. It is the one institution that binds women and men together to form a family, and this serves broad societal purposes; it provides the school of love for each new-born child. And each child should deserve the right to be born in a loving family with father and mother. Children are definitely hurt by gay marriage.
We witness the irrational comparison being made between racism and opposition to same-sex marriage, but this is particularly offensive to me as a parent.
It is not bigotry, it is biology that discriminates between same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples.
A marriage requires a husband and a wife, because these unions are necessary to make new life and connect children to their mother and father. Today's liberal anti-family trends will not stand the test of time and history.
Advocates of making same-sex marriage a legally recognized right claim that this will have no impact on traditional marriage -- that it can peacefully coexist alongside traditional marriage. On the contrary, it will have profound impacts. It will create a conflict for people of faith (and nonreligious people as well) who fervently believe in traditional man-woman marriage and the law.
The Bible is so clear in its support of heterosexual marriage there is little need for us to go through an exhaustive definition of biblical marriage versus the types of unions allowed by law today. The Scriptures say in Genesis 2:24 that a man is to leave his family and cleave to his wife. This concept is repeated in Matthew 19:5 and Mark 10:7. All the scriptures in the Bible concerning marriage presuppose heterosexual marriage. We Unificationists also believe that only on the foundation of having good an loving families we can rise youth governed by ethics and conscience. We desire families that can serve as an ongoing school of love. Whenever Rev. Moon discusses families, he is referring to a three generation home, not just mom and dad and their children.
Children should grow up being loved every day by their parents, siblings and grandparents as well as being close to other relatives. We need to continue to develop our love foundation until the day we pass over to the next world, because our main purpose in this life is to develop our hearts -- our ability to love.
We have to teach our kids to believe in traditional marriage. But if we teach them that same-sex marriage is normal, we are giving them a confused message. Saying that gay marriage is a civil rights that is normal, we are saying that husband and wife marriage is not normal. At the end, gay propagators are those who have racist attitude towards the family. What they are trying is to annihilate the family as an institution.
We can teach our children at home that marriage is between a man and a woman, but our children's public schools will teach them that marriage includes same-sex couples. Both would be "equal marriages" under the law.
Where will this finally lead us? In Massachusetts, where a ruling legalized same-sex marriage in 2004, kids in public schools are reading books depicting same-sex families. At a California charter school in 2008, kindergartners' parents objected when a school newsletter alerted them to "National Coming Out Day;" a parent told a local ABC-TV affiliate that a teacher at the school screened a film to kindergartners the previous year showing gay families.
These kinds of ill-advised social experiments may produce a host of unexpected consequences. If gay marriage is allowed, the nation will soon begin to experience an increased degradation of the nuclear family -- resulting in fewer kids being raised by both a mom and a dad.
Beyond that, those of us who believe in traditional marriage and are in a regulated profession -- such as counselor, physician, attorney or accountant -- and act in concert with our beliefs, may be vulnerable to losing our professional license and our livelihood.
We can be a religious charity faithfully fulfilling our mission by serving our community, such as by providing adoption and other services, but if we refuse to provide those services to a same-sex couple, we have the choice of abandoning our beliefs or ending our mission.
In 2003, Adoption.com was sued by two California homosexual men, who claimed illegal discrimination because the agency refused to serve homosexual couples. The agency lost the lawsuit and no longer serves adoptive parents in California.
An even more substantive danger lies in the consequences of gay marriage on the next generation. Redefining marriage redefines family. Changing the concept of family will change both the definition and the pattern of parenting.
What will the landscape of America look like if same-sex marriage is legalized across our nation? Social scientists report what most Americans have always known: Both boys and girls are deeply affected in biological and psychological ways by the presence of their fathers.
If the American family loses the presence of the birth dad in the home, there will be huge consequences to the growth and stability of the next generation of children in that family.
For example, repeatedly, scholarly studies focused on adolescence show that early onset of puberty in girls is associated with negative psychological, social, and health problems including depression, alcohol consumption, and higher teenage pregnancy. An eight-year study of girls and their families showed that a father's presence in the home, with appropriate involvement in his children's lives, contributed to daughters' reaching puberty at a later age.
Despite the incredible adaptability of children, our entire culture should advocate for family structures that promote the most positive environments for coming generations.
In addition to fighting the marriage redefinition, leaders from all sectors of our culture, including our churches, must work hard at improving heterosexual marriages. Counseling, modeling, and interventions are needed to help ailing marriages. Both battles must be fought if our families, which are the incubators of future societal greatness, are to be protected.
Let's not fall victim to the circling argument of our opposition. We simply need an army of bipartisan leaders to strategize, organize, and prioritize the protection of marriage.
"What do you think is God's
ultimate purpose for creating human beings? It is to experience joy
through relating with ideal families filled with true love."
Sun
Myung Moon
What does an ideal family look like? First, each person in the family is an owner of true love. When God first created human beings, He made Adam representing all men, and Eve representing all women, with the intention that they become owners of true love. The quickest way for them to cultivate a character of true love was to secure a parent-child relationship with God, whereby they could live attending God as their Father. They were to have followed the path of living as one family with God.
What is the center of the universe?" The "parent–child" relationship. Nothing is more important or more precious than the relationship between parent and child. This is because it defines the fundamental relationship between the Creator God and human beings.
Then, what defines the parent-child relationship? Three things: love, life and lineage. The first is love. We can love with true love because God, our True Parent, first loved us with true love. God created human beings out of His absolute love, to be His partners in love. This relationship forms an axis of love, linking God the Father with human beings as His sons and daughters.
Could there be anything higher or more precious than to be a son or daughter of God? If anything were higher, then surely human beings would aspire to attain it. But there is nothing higher. Do you think that when the omniscient and omnipotent God created Adam and Eve, He secretly reserved the highest position for Himself and made Adam and Eve to be only second best? We cannot imagine that God would do that to His children, to His partners who share absolute love with Him.
As our eternal True Parent, God invested Himself 100 percent in the creation of human beings and endowed us with the right to equal status with Him, to participate in His work as equals, to live with Him, and to inherit from Him. God bestowed upon human beings all of His attributes. Though God is the absolute being , He cannot be happy alone. Adjectives such as "good" and "happy" cannot apply to any being that lives in isolation. They apply only where there is a dynamic mutual relationship. Imagine a professional singer who finds herself on an uninhabited island. She may sing at the top of her voice, but with no one to listen, will it bring her happiness? In the same way, even the self-existent God absolutely needs a partner with whom to share love in order to experience joy and be happy.
Next is life. How shall we live to become God's partner and return joy to Him? In other words, how shall we live to become children of God, people whom God delights to call "My son," or "My daughter," because He sees in us a divinity equal to His own? How can we become God's partners in completing the work of Creation, partners who will inherit the entire creation? This is my answer: We should emulate the ideal that God set up at the beginning of His creative acts. At the beginning of the Creation, God acted upon the principle of living for the sake of others. In other words, everything that He did was for the sake of His creations, whom He hoped would develop into His partners of true love. The practice of true love is the nucleus of God's creative activity.
Therefore, to become God's children, our first responsibility is to resemble Him. We need to embody true love. The way to embody true love begins with living as a devoted child, then a patriot, a saint, and finally a divine son or daughter of God. At that stage we can experience the innermost emotions of God's heart and resolve the grief that He has experienced for tens of thousands of years since the Fall of Adam and Eve.
God is almighty. It was not due to any shortcoming or lack of ability that He has been imprisoned in great pain and has endured immense suffering behind the scenes of history. Rather, there are provisions in the Principle of Restoration, which He has not been free to disclose, that called Him to wait with forbearance until Adam and Eve's positions, lost at the human Fall, were recovered through the appearance of the perfected "Second Adam." Although God is all-powerful, He will not set aside the eternal laws and principles that He Himself established.