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There will certainly be other unintended and unforeseen consequences to such a radical overhaul of marriage, said Van Leeuwen. "Forty years ago everybody thought [no-fault] divorce was the solution to everyone's problems, and it was not going to be harmful to adults and children. It was going to be beneficial to them," she said. "We have 40 years of data on the fallout of the divorce culture and social scientists all across the political spectrum, religious and atheist, are pretty much agreed that divorce is not a minor blimp on the developmental landscape of anybody.I think we're going to find that the fallout of this in terms of people's development is probably not entirely what we expected."

Gay marriage may not just change the development of children, said the Center for Public Justice's Skillen; it may change society's entire concept of parenthood. Because gay couples cannot produce children on their own, Skillen predicts, hopeful parents may seek to "rent wombs" and deny children the right to know their biological parents. "It is going to be increasingly possible to produce, buy, and sell children, because in addition to adoption, that is the only way homosexual couples can 'have' children."

Rethinking civil unions
Few evangelicals disagree with such opposition to gay marriage. A November poll from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 81 percent of white evangelical Protestants oppose allowing gays and lesbians to marry legally. Only 12 percent supported such actions.

But Skillen, Mouw, Van Leeuwen, and others are part of a small minority: evangelicals who oppose gay marriage but support some form of civil union legislation. The Pew poll found that 20 percent of white evangelical Protestants agree to "allowing gay and lesbian couples to enter into legal agreements with each other that would give them many of the same rights as married couples." That's only an 8-percentage point difference from those who supported gay marriage. Three quarters of white evangelicals polled opposed such benefits.

Likewise, several Christian political advocacy organizations have formed a network called the Arlington Group to press for a federal marriage amendment specifically banning such legislation.

Mouw says he has "more sympathy" for such efforts than he did in 1999, when he moderated a Christianity Today roundtable discussion of the pros and cons of civil unions. "It just looks like anything that we do that concedes something in this direction will simply be used as a stepping stone to push us even further in the direction that we don't want to go," he said.

Though Mouw blames the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and other municipalities for forcing the issue, he still believes that Christians cannot merely oppose gay marriage. "We need to translate [beliefs] into concerns about policies and the public arena in a pluralistic society" already in marital turmoil, he said.

"We are seeing in our society an increasing proliferation of lifestyles. We ought to consider extending beneficial social and legal arrangements for persons who live together in the same household and are not married."

Skillen agrees that it may be necessary to provide for such legal arrangements. However, he believes that making homosexuality the center of civil union legislation would discriminate against non-gay, committed relationships. " [If] gay people living together in bonded commitments should not be discriminated against, or kept from the privileges that marriage partners get … then it's not right to discriminate against me living with my mother and taking care of her," he said. A broadly worded civil union without regard to sexual practice can be a biblical way "to help people care for one another," Skillen said.

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March (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48