In the years leading to the Supreme Court's seminal Obergefell gay marriage decision, whenever I wrote or spoke about so-called "marriage equality" I always tried to make what seemed like a subtle distinction.
I argued that what we were collectively discussing wasn't merely an effort to redefine marriage, but rather an attempt to un-define it as a meaningful institution. Many people dismissed that as semantic gamesmanship. After all, wasn't the Court simply expanding the definition of marriage to include one more kind of relationship?
No, it wasn't.
If marriage can mean both a union that is inherently male-female and one that is inherently not, then marriage no longer possesses a defining essence at all.
All of this recently came back to my mind when I saw a video from New Saint Andrews College where scholar Jeff Shafer eviscerated Justice Anthony Kennedy's poor logic in Obergefell.
A fundamentally unserious attempt.
Hokum and hooey all the way through.
Shafer's ability to succinctly expose the decision's philosophical incoherence was so compelling that I tracked down a longer essay he had written on the gay marriage debate.
In it, Shafer argues that marriage isn't merely one institution among many. It serves as the organizing reality that gives meaning to countless other human relationships:
Husband
Wife
Mother
Father
Son
Daughter
Male
Female
Even the significance of the human body itself derives its public meaning from the larger institution of marriage and family. Once the whole is redefined (or undefined), the parts inevitably begin to lose their coherence as well.
Understanding this helps explain why our cultural debates moved so quickly from "marriage equality" to today's gender wars. It isn't that same-sex marriage caused transgenderism. Rather, both arise from the same philosophical premise. If male and female are no longer essential to the institution of marriage, then the law has already conceded that those categories are not fundamental realities but flexible constructs whose meaning can be renegotiated.
It's not difficult to see how this becomes a common thread that begins to weave its way through our cultural experiences. I looked at some of my most recent columns and saw it:
When Anne Hathaway described social justice in language that mirrored Christianity, I argued that progressive ideology wasn't inventing new moral categories so much as borrowing Christianity's architecture while replacing Christ with a different story.
When I wrote about transgenderism and preschool classrooms, I argued that our culture had stopped asking whether its ideas were true.
When I reflected on Ariana Grande, I suggested that compassion itself has been redefined until affirming someone's self-perception is considered more loving than helping them discover reality.
At the time, I thought I was writing about different subjects. In light of Shafer's thesis, it's clear they're all asking the same question:
What happens when you remove the organizing truth that once held an entire system together?
Shafer's key insight is that when we change the whole, we inevitably change the parts. Once marriage ceases to be a created reality grounded in the union of man and woman, words like mother, father, male, female, and eventually even person begin to drift because the context that anchored them has been removed.
Christians have always believed that reality possesses order and structure because it was created by a logical God whose design is intentional rather than arbitrary. It's the reason words mean something, relationships mean something, and ultimately why truth itself can be known. The more our civilization drifts from and rebels against that created order, the more every category built upon it begins to wobble.
That's why our cultural war debates increasingly feel as though they're about everything all at once. In a sense, they are.
Once the foundation is removed, it isn't just one room of the house that begins to crack.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.
