Curt Hendley or The Happy Husband
Recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that our constitution guarantees consenting adults the right to perform pretty much any sexual act they can physically accommodate. Shortly after that ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled that nothing in the state constitution prevented a legally binding marriage between two people of the same sex. Throughout everything, there has been a movement among religious and political conservatives to add an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as “the union of a man and a woman.” I have avoided the topic here because it is a political powder keg, and to discuss it would be to veer slightly away from my stated purpose of celebrating marriage. But I figure I can weigh in once.
As I was formulating my thoughts, for some reason I imagined myself at a rally in Washington. I imagined tens of thousands of people gathering on a day when Congress and/or the Senate were meeting to debate and vote on the marriage amendment. And I imagined being given the opportunity to address the crowd. What follows is the text of my imaginary speech:
Marriage is a legal, physical, spiritual, lifelong commitment one man and one woman make to each other. We know that. Everyone knows that. Any attempt to alter that definition is an attempt to undermine and eventually obliterate it. The current effort to legally legitimize same-sex marriage mocks a sacred institution, but society has been systematically undermining marriage for hundreds of years. Is there any aspect of marriage that has not been delegitimized?
We have allowed this to happen. We have undermined marriage ourselves. If society still held the institution as sacred and treated it as such, same-sex marriage wouldn’t even exist as an idea. We need to bring back commitment. We need to bring back devotion. We need to bring back love.
If you are a husband, love your wife. Make her the only woman in the world to you. Sacrifice yourself to help her achieve her dreams. Be the leader of your household, and be the type of leader that wants the family to love and respect each other and achieve things that its individual members cannot achieve alone. Serve your wife. Serve your children. Show them what it means to serve one another. Show them by example how Jesus treated people. Make your marriage sacred.
If you are a wife, love your husband. Love him actively and constantly. Never let him doubt that he has the undying devotion of a good woman, the best woman, the only woman in the world to him. The world tears him down every day. You build him up. Be his advocate as much as he is yours. Keep God at the center of your family. Make your marriage sacred.
I don’t know what the federal legislature will do today. I don’t know how the courts will respond. I’m afraid, though, that we’re in a losing battle. In a democracy, the law exists to protect what we value most. In the United States, the law does not protect marriage. What we should do now is build marriage back up. Make it an institution worth protecting. If we can make marriage sacred again, we can show the world how God intended it to be. I truly believe that when we demonstrate how marriage should work, then even if the law recognizes non-sacred relationships, people will look at the pretenders and say, “Who are you trying to fool?”
Check out other articles on the Happy Husband site, where marriage is celebrated. It is refreshing to see that in the example of Marriage God has set aside a remnant, if you will.