Marriage adrift

Not that I am making any new insights here, but today’s opinions weave a tangled web. I subscribe to my alma mater’s, UConn, daily newspaper The Daily Campus to keep up on the basketball teams and also to stay informed of the opinions of today’s college students. Here is a letter to the editor questioning the value of the institution of marriage. Marriage: a misguided Tradition
His arguments against marriage are less sex (necessary for mental health), poverty from the eventual divorce, fidelity (the author is a male), and puts on paper what’s should only be in the heart. I fear this isn’t an April Fool’s article. I don’t think he is gay since this is the normative gay male lifestyle yet they want to have the right to marry like heterosexuals.
Nicholas D. Kristof over at the NY Times also has a problem with marriage. In his March 30th article, When Marriage Kills, he blames the Bush administration for emphasizing Abstinence, Being Faithful, Condoms in that order in AIDS aid to Africa. Since cheating husbands don’t receive enough emphasis on condoms and they can’t be faithful, the Bush administration is at fault for those wives’ infections. He contravenes his theory since the condom message is loud and clear enough for the interviewed prostitute to concede she’ll get 4x more money from the truckdrivers who patronize her if she’ll let them not use a condom.
Elsewhere, Dalia Lithwick, over at Slate, criticizes pro-marriage people for tossing the sacred contract aside in order to save Terri Schiavo’s life, Till Death - or Tom Delay-Do Us Part, the subtitle is The “sanctity of marriage” is suddenly negotiable. She concludes,
There is just no evidence that Michael Schiavo is an unfit guardian. Sure, it would make for a better Harlequin Romance if he'd spent decades pining alone at his wife's bedside; if he hadn't found himself a girlfriend and some kids. But he and Terri were—and still are—married, and the law has always treated that bond as sacred: serious, inviolate, till-death-do-us-part serious, until the parties themselves decide otherwise.
Not only would it make a better Harlequin Romance, it’s the relationship that Jesus has for his church, his bride. It’s the picture he wants believers to live out as living metaphors of his love for us. See Eph 5:25-35
Husbands, go all out in your love for your wives, exactly as Christ did for the church--a love marked by giving, not getting. Christ's love makes the church whole. His words evoke her beauty. Everything he does and says is designed to bring the best out of her, dressing her in dazzling white silk, radiant with holiness. And that is how husbands ought to love their wives. They're really doing themselves a favor--since they're already "one" in marriage.
No one abuses his own body, does he? No, he feeds and pampers it. That's how Christ treats us, the church, since we are part of his body. And this is why a man leaves father and mother and cherishes his wife. No longer two, they become "one flesh." This is a huge mystery, and I don't pretend to understand it all. What is clearest to me is the way Christ treats the church. And this provides a good picture of how each husband is to treat his wife, loving himself in loving her, and how each wife is to honor her husband. (The Message)
So us pro-marriage people aren’t pro-Harlequin, but pro-self sacrifice, pro-other centered. When Terri’s husband found himself a new wife in deed if not in formality, he disqualified himself from that sacred bond, unless he got Terri’s forgiveness. The “parties,” plural, did not decide anything about the sanctity of this bond. This is what makes the court’s ruling in his favor incomprehensible. If there ever is an example of the letter of the law killing this is it. Yes, technically, they are married. But in reality at best he is a polygamist, at worst a murderer. Which answers the question this letter writer to the Daily Campus why the public tried to answer this “private” decision The Humiliation Concludes. He thinks it is not our place to “to judge someone when he's acting in accordance with the law.” The ultimate sign of the end of the times is his conclusion that “As much as the right to die needs to be explored and discussed, individual lives do not.” As I noted in my previous entry, if his life is in jeopardy from the law, he will prefer his individual life discussed.
The saddest part of this is our culture of death cannot even agree with Stalin who said, “One death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic.” Our culture is no longer traumatized by one immoral death. We are barely moved by statistics. One million abortions a year in God’s country doesn’t move a lot of people. But that goes back to the point of marriage. What the non-Christian doesn’t understand is that maariage is about dying to oneself, which happens to lead to a greater existence than offered by the swinger style. It was just as crazy then as it is now to hear Jesus’s words from Matthew 16:25-27
For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it. What good will it be for a man if he gains the whole world, yet forfeits his soul? Or what can a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in his Father's glory with his angels, and then he will reward each person according to what he has done. (NIV)
That’s all from this married, pro-life fool for Jesus.

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