A Marriage Proposal: The Case for Traditional Marriage

Knight & Rose Show — Wintery Knight and Desert Rose

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A Marriage Proposal: The Case for Traditional Marriage

October 29, 2022

Knight & Rose ShowWintery Knight and Desert Rose

Wintery Knight and Desert Rose discuss the definition of marriage. We talk about why government is interested in marriage. We discuss two different re-definitions of marriage. We explain how each re-definition of marriage affected society, culture and children. We answer objections to traditional marriage. We end the episode by talking about Jesus' definition of marriage. This episode contains mature subject matter. Listener discretion is advised.

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Show notes: https://winteryknight.com/2022/10/29/knight-and-rose-show-episode-28-a-marriage-proposal-the-case-for-traditional-marriage

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Transcript

Welcome to the Knight and Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out in an authentic Christian worldview. Today's topic is a marriage proposal. The Case for Traditional Marriage.

I'm Wintery Knight. And I'm Desert Rose.

(dramatic music) - Welcome to the Night in Rose Show, where we discuss practical ways of living out an authentic Christian worldview.

Today's topic is, A Marriage Proposal, The Case for Traditional Marriage. I'm Wintery Night. - And I'm Desert Rose.

- In today's show, we're going to be discussing the topic of marriage. What is marriage? Why is the government interested in marriage? How has the definition of marriage changed over time? What effects have these changes had on society? So why don't we start with what is marriage? Sounds good. Marriage is a union of one man and one woman in a permanent exclusive bond.

Another way of saying that might be one man and one woman for one lifetime. A primary goal of marriage is to create unions that have the potential to provide children with a stable environment so that they can grow up in a secure, healthy environment that allows them to thrive. And marriage is also beneficial for Christians because we are partnering with someone who's in a good position to influence our development and our relationship with God.

I think of a marriage partner as like, in some ways, a mirror who reflects back to us, so we can see kind of our sin, our strengths, things like that, and become more conformed to the likeness of Jesus. - Excellent. So where do we get this definition? This must be somewhere in the Bible I'm thinking, 'cause it certainly isn't the cultural consensus right now.

- Right, right. The definition comes from, first of all, reflecting on the natural law, the design of the universe, which reveals best practices for relationships, stability, and the flourishing of children. But you're right, it is in the Bible.

This definition is in Genesis 2, and it's affirmed by Jesus in Matthew chapter 19 verses four through six. We'll show why this definition is critical, even though, as you mentioned, it's not necessarily popular today. - So what is the government's interest in marriage? - Good question.

Yeah, so government is involved in marriage because nations depend on the reproduction of new citizens who are responsible and moral and productive. Government gives couples certain privileges, like tax advantages, in order to encourage them to form stable marriages for raising up good citizens. The future of the nation depends on this, and so it makes sense for the government to incentivize this.

So nations are more prosperous, for example, when the next generation is able to follow the laws and produce valuable goods and services, rather than being dependent on others. Nations are in a much better position to deter aggressive neighbors if they have a large, well-trained, patriotic military. - Yeah, that makes sense to me.

I was just reading some papers about demographics and how we have an aging population that is increasing, and yet we're not making enough new taxpayers to be able to cover the expenses of these retiring people. So that just struck out as a reason why government might wanna encourage couples to create children who can follow the law and be productive enough to earn an income to pay the taxes for all these other social programs that we have. Even if you just think about the type of children that we're trying to create, like these elderly people, they need medical care.

And so we have to create children who are intelligent enough and law-abiding enough and productive enough that they can go into these medical fields, get these medical degrees, and then get jobs in the medical industry so that we have producers of healthcare products and services. - Yeah, exactly, and that same thing could be said of a variety of fields that the next generation would go into. And the reality is that raising children who benefit society is far more likely as an outcome if those children are raised by married, biological mother and father.

So we're gonna talk a lot about that. - Right, yeah, and that's why the definition of marriage matters, because when the definition of marriage changes, it's possible that the changes make it less likely for us to achieve the goal that marriage was designed to achieve and produce the results that marriage is designed to produce. - Yep, exactly, yeah, yeah, when you talk about that, I think of a really excellent book that's come out in the past couple of years by Katie Faust called "Them Before Us," and "Them" refers to the children, "Us" refers to the adults, and it talks about how we need to put them before us.

- That's clever. - Yeah, it is, yeah. And in her book, Katie provides numerous studies showing why it's critical that children be raised by their biological mother and father whenever possible.

Statistically, when children are not raised by their biological mom and dad, they are far more likely to have all kinds of problems in a variety of areas, from education to relationships, career, physical health, mental health, and just a whole host of areas. We tend to think that marriage and even having children is about our happiness as adults, but studies show that when we approach marriage and child rearing that way, children actually suffer. When enough children suffer, of course the entire society pays the price, and really that's where we are today.

Katie Faust also offers this image that has really stuck with me since I read her book, and she talks about how if you notice, when a child's biological parents show love to one another, the child actually feels loved as well. That provides a sense of love and security. Yeah, to the child himself or herself, when they see their parents showing love to one another, and that is not the case actually in other types of relationships.

That's really kind of the only relationship where sociologists, psychologists have noticed children or anybody feeling kind of a third person type of love, if you could describe it that way. Okay. And there are actually several reasons for this.

So, fathering has certain benefits. What the mother has to offer has certain benefits, and children learn what's important to look for in a relationship by seeing the interaction of a man and a woman who are committed to staying together despite their disagreements, their aging, their financial troubles, their health problems. When they see their parents who they came from, sticking together, loving one another, bringing to the table different things, and persevering in all things, it is a very unique, secure environment for their thriving.

Interesting. So, marriage was designed as a child-centered institution, but marriage has actually been redefined twice in order to promote the interests of adults over the interests of children. Yeah, you're right, actually.

I get the impression sometimes that Christians think that marriage has only been redefined very recently in the last, what, five years or so, but actually marriage was redefined before that, federally in the 1980s, I believe, when no-fault divorce became the law of the land. And so, this first redefinition of marriage was a no-fault divorce, which allows the person filing for divorce to do so for any reason or for no reason at all. And as a result of passing this law, the number of divorces skyrocketed.

Today, the divorce rate is around 42% for first-time marriages. It's about 60% for second marriages, and it's about 73% for third marriages. And the reason, of course, for this law was that the adults decided it was better for them.

It was most certainly not for the children that no-fault divorce became law. Yeah, if their relationship is making them unhappy, then they are thinking, "Well, I'll just get out of it. "I'm not happy." And not thinking about what effect that instability will have on the children.

So, I actually went digging around for some studies, and I found one in a psychiatry journal on PubMed. I don't know if people know about PubMed, but it's a website hosted by the NIH, like the National Institutes of Health. Anytime I'm trying to do anything like lift weights, change my diet, whatever, I always go on PubMed, and I just search for what I'm looking for.

So, I looked up searching for the effects of divorce on children, and I found a paper called "The Effects of Parental Divorce on Children." And I thought that this paragraph from the abstract was just perfect and would take the place of a lot of other studies that we could cite. So, it says this, "Herein, we present our observations about children "whose parents separated or divorced "to increase the awareness of physicians "about the negative effects of divorce. "Individuals affected by parental divorce "have a higher risk of developing "a variety of mental health conditions, "including emotional and behavioral disorders, "four-school performance, depression, anxiety, "suicidal ideation, suicide attempt, distress, "smoking, and substance abuse." And suicidal ideation, I think, is just having the idea of doing that.

- Entertaining the idea, yeah, thinking about it. Yeah, that's really different than what we hear a lot of adults saying, which is that children are resilient, they'll be fine, they'll deal with it. I don't need to worry about them.

But what is also interesting is that the effects are different for boys and girls. Girls are also more likely to experience weight gain and to engage in promiscuous sexual behavior at an earlier age. One thing that I found surprising is when there's another man in the house, like a boyfriend or a stepdad with a divorced mom, girls are also likely to start menstruating earlier.

And girls in that situation, of course, will have a much higher risk for teen pregnancy, which often leads to a cycle of fatherless children, poverty, behavioral problems, things like that. - Yeah, they're looking for affection from a male. That's not present in their home.

So those are some common effects for girls. We actually did a whole episode on Black Lives Matter talking about crime. I think we quoted some papers showing that the root cause of crime was fatherlessness.

When fathers are present and involved in the homes, then boys tend to avoid criminal behaviors. - Yeah, exactly. - On this topic about the effects of divorce on children, I recommend a couple of books that I have.

One of them is called "Between Two Worlds, The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce." That's by Elizabeth Markert. And then this other one I read a long time ago called "The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce." That's by Judas Wallerstein or Wallerstein. So that was the first redefinition of marriage.

It benefits the adults. It hurts the kids. What was the second redefinition of marriage? - So that would be same sex marriage, which is more recent.

This eliminates the requirement for complementary sexes in a union of marriage. So instead of making a commitment to produce children organically and to raise them up, the focus moved to the emotional feelings of the adults, regardless of who they have feelings for, who they're attracted to. - Okay, so that's just more of the same, right? It's just like no fault divorce again.

Let's do what's best for the adults and we will ignore the needs of the kids or the effects on the kids. We could have probably cited a bunch of studies showing the importance of having a mother do certain things for the child and a father do certain things for the child. So my first thought is in a same sex relationship, where are you gonna get the mothering or the fathering? - Right, right, exactly, yeah.

And actually I think a lot of Christians don't realize that this attitude toward marriage and children has also infiltrated their thinking, the attitude that we can approach marriage and child rearing in any way that it takes to make adults happy. So a lot of Christians will say, well, I don't support same sex marriage. I don't support same sex adoption.

But I think it's also important that we take a look at ourselves and reflect on, well, do I have this attitude that marriage is about me, my feelings, what makes me happy, or do I see it as other centered, as primarily being about honoring God and raising up children who do the same? - Okay, so let's look at some of the effects of same sex relationships on children. So I found a article about a study that was published back in 2015. The article is called "Emotional Problems Among Children with Same Sex Parents, Difference by Definition." This is what the article said.

It's talking about research. It says this, "A new study published in the February 2015 issue of the British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioral Science appears to be the largest yet on the matter of same sex households and children's emotional outcomes. Results revealed that on eight out of 12 psychometric measures, the risk of clinical emotional problems, developmental problems, or use of mental health treatment services is nearly double among those with same sex parents when contrasted with children of opposite sex parents.

The estimate of serious child emotional problems in children with same sex parents is 17% compared with 7% among opposite sex parent after adjusting for age, race, gender, and parents' education and income. Rates of ADHD were higher as well, 15.5% compared to 7.1%. The same is true for learning disabilities, 14.1% versus 8%. - Wow, that's significant.

- Big differences, and that was a large sample size. So there's another article that I'm gonna quote from about another piece of peer-reviewed research, and this is what it says. "A study published in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household, Analyzing Data from a Very Large Population-Based Sample, Reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65% as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married opposite sex couples, and gender matters too.

Girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates." - Wow. - So much of the research on same sex parenting is actually biased in favor of same sex relationships, but when you look at those studies, what you find is they use very small sample sizes that the people who are responding are self-selected rather than being random samples or representative samples or population-based samples, and they also don't use control groups for comparison. So if you've ever taken a course about how to do studies, these are the kinds of things that make for a bad study.

- Yep, exactly, yeah. And actually in the pro same sex studies that I've seen, parents are often answering for their children. So of course, if you ask a parent who's married to someone of their same gender, if you ask them, how are your kids adjusting, how are they doing? Of course, they're gonna say, "Oh, my child doesn't have any problems at all." They're doing great with our same sex marriage and family, we're wonderful.

- Yeah, that's why I liked about those two studies that I quoted. It's like very large sample sizes, and you're measuring graduation rates. So it's not relying on, hey, how are you guys doing as parents without either a mother or a father? And they're like, "We're doing great." And the child's like, "I can't say anything.

"I have to live with these people." So that's not the best way to do research, but unfortunately, a lot of the same sex parenting research is done that way. Actually, there are books about this. So on the topic of research that's biased in favor of same sex parenting, I actually can recommend a couple of books.

So the first one is called "No Differences, "How Children in Same Sex Households Fair," edited by Anna Samuels. And the second one is called "Same Sex Parenting Research, "A Critical Assessment" by Walter Shump. The latter book talks about the problems of bias and faulty research methods common to these pro same sex parenting studies.

- Okay, so yeah, why don't you talk about what some of the factors are that might lead to these poorer outcomes for children of same sex partners? - Yeah, so I did a bunch of research on this, and one of the places that came up when I was searching is actually a government of Canada website called Statistics Canada. They had a couple of articles, both that came out in 2018. The first one is called "Intimate Partner Violence, "Experiences of Sexual Minority Women in Canada." And this is what they found.

"The rate of physical assault by an intimate partner "for sexual minority women is 43.9%, "while the rate for heterosexual women is only 22.5%." So about half. The rate of sexual assault by an intimate partner for sexual minority women is 26.5%, while the rate for heterosexual women is only 11%. - Wow, so the rates for sexual minority women are double that of heterosexuals.

- About double, yeah. So they had one for men, and that one was called "Intimate Partner Violence, "Experiences of Sexual Minority Men in Canada." And they did the same graphs in each of the articles, so I'm just gonna give you the numbers. "The rate of physical assault by an intimate partner "for sexual minority men is 29.7%, "while the rate for heterosexual men is only 10.2%, "like triple." - Yeah.

- "The rate of sexual assault by an intimate partner "for sexual minority men is 16.4%, "while the rate for heterosexual men is only 1.8%." - Holy cow. So sexual minority men are more than eight times as likely to experience sexual assault as a heterosexual man? - Yeah, and the funny thing is, is if you notice, the rate of physical assault was highest for sexual minority women, and in fact, lesbian relationships have the highest rates of domestic violence. And the reason we're bringing this up is to talk about why is it that these relationships are unstable and might take away some of the benefits for children of stability.

And I think that that's one of the factors that might make it unstable. Another one is infidelity rates. So I went looking around and found an article about some research in the Archives of Sexual Behavior Journal, and this is from 2018 as well, and this is the title of the research paper.

Open Relationships, Non-Consensual, Non-Monogamy, and Monogamy Among U.S. Adults, findings from the 2012 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior. And just so you know, that National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior is a huge data set, so you can, you know, there's no bias in there. But what they found is, it's not a selected sample or anything like that.

And here's a quotation, talks about rates of infidelity. So overall, prevalence of infidelity was about 8% for heterosexuals, 14% for gay participants, and 6% for lesbian participants. So it's like, lesbians do better there, and the gay males are about, yeah, 14 to eight.

So it's nearly double. - Yeah. - Overall, prevalence of open relationships, that's relationships where people just do whatever they want, there's no exclusivity, is 2% for heterosexuals, 32% for gay males, and 5% for lesbians.

Again, the lesbians do not too bad there, but the gay males are, cheating is very prevalent. - Yeah, yeah. It sounds like when you take away the female influence from two men, they engage in shocking levels of infidelity.

Wow. - Yeah, I think men, like just think about stereotypes about men just for a minute. Men typically feel this sexual desire for women just outside of any relationship context.

You know, they see a woman who's very attractive and they think things about them. - Right. - So in male-female relationships, what happens is the woman has a female nature, she exhibits femininity, and that causes men to kinda cool it about these sexual desires for other women and they kinda focus on male roles, like protecting, providing, and moral and spiritual leading, especially when children arrive.

You know, the men are like, wow, this is my little group of tiny people and I'm going to take over leading and caring for them and teaching them. They get disinterested in relationships with women they don't know. That's actually a topic of a famous book by George Gilder.

He had a book called "Men and Marriage." I don't wanna agree with that book completely, but he says that women have a civilizing effect on men's out-of-control sexual nature. - Interesting, yeah. What about with relation to stability and divorce? - Yeah, so I found another article about divorce and instability from a journal called Marriage and Family Review, and this is from 2020.

And the title of this research is Stability Rates of Same-Sex Couples with and Without Children. And this is what it says. A 2019 study using three large sample sizes from the United States and Canada found that same-sex couples with children divorced at a rate of 43% over the study period, as opposed to 8% for heterosexual couples with children.

- Wow, so homosexual couples with children were five times more likely to divorce than heterosexual couples with children. - Yeah, more than five times. - Yeah, more than, wow.

- Yeah, again, the lesbian relationship, surprisingly, for me, had the highest rate of relationship and stability. - Yeah, that is interesting. Yeah, I'm thinking about, you know, imagine growing up as a child and being exposed to intimate partner violence and infidelity and divorce.

You know, I've read quite a bit about this in the past year or two, and the problem isn't necessarily that the people in the same-sex relationship are bad or that their relationship is bad even. The problem is that these relationships are missing the influence of one of the sexes. - Right.

- So there are no male corrections on the woman's flaws. There are no female corrections on the man's flaws. And children don't get to learn what to look for in a mate by watching the commitment and behaviors of their parents.

- Yeah, like even you and I, we have one of each, you know, for this show. And when we're preparing our outlines for what we're gonna be talking about and who's gonna be doing the research, you know, there's times when I'm, you know, a bit harsh and abrasive, and you weigh in and say, "I'll take out that, say it a different way." And this actually happens to me a lot whenever I'm writing something. I send it to my female friends and they say, "Okay, if you wanna be productive, you wanna phrase it a different way than what you've done." And the first draft is never like the final product, so.

- Yeah, and I imagine if you had, and I don't really even have to imagine, I've seen this, when you have, you know, just a group of females working together, writing articles, a lot of times if a male reads it, they're gonna say, "Why are you being so nice? What is your goal here? Are you gonna, this isn't gonna necessarily challenge anybody. So, let's, you know, what's the point here? Let's drive it home a little harder." - Yeah, it takes a mix to do really nice work. So, let's talk more about the consequences of same-sex marriage.

So, the old norms of marriage, as we mentioned before, were monogamy, complementary sexes, permanence, and exclusivity. Sometimes people will fall short of that, but everybody knew what the goal was. And now, because we are equating all of these different arrangements with the word marriage, then some of these behaviors from these other groups are kind of creeping into what it means to be married.

- Yeah, in fact, they've had to invent new words to describe relationships, like marriage relationships. So, you might've heard a few of these, actually, that I'm thinking of. One of them is monogamish.

Have you heard that word? - Monogamish? - Yes, yes. It's like, kind of like monogamy. This word comes from gay activist Dan Savage.

And it means relationships where partners are allowed to commit infidelity as long as they're open about it. - So, it's like monogamous, but not really monogamous. - Right, right.

Exactly. It's like monogamish. - That's terrible.

This is just more instability, you know, that is gonna make the kids' lives miserable. They're gonna be in the room, and there's gonna be people cycling through that house. - Yeah, yes, exactly.

Right, right. So bad for kids. Yeah, how about this one? Wed Lease, have you heard of that? (both laughing) So, I'm sure you've heard of a car lease.

- Yes. - Yeah, so this word means that people marry for a certain amount of time, and then they get to decide whether or not to extend the lease based on whether or not they're feeling happy about how it's going. So, kind of like a car.

- So, more adult selfish. Yeah, but it's more adult selfishness. How does this help kids, you know, to be changing people who are raising them every couple of minutes? Okay.

- Disaster, yeah. So, I know you've heard of polyamory. And yeah, this refers to sexual relationships involving more than two people.

So, also disastrous. But we're quickly moving to this being more and more common. So yeah, just like you pointed out, whereas before, government would privilege child-centered marriage with certain benefits.

Now, sexual minorities are demanding the same benefits as traditionally married couples. - Yes, like if marriage can be anything and there's no longer these marital norms, then people who are doing things in a non-standard way are gonna say, "Hey, where are my marriage benefits?" I actually found a couple of articles really recently about this. So, one of these is just from, we're recording this in mid-October, and one of these articles is just literally from early October.

This is from the New York Post. I'm just gonna read the title of this article. New York City Judge Rules Polyamorous Unions Entitled to Same Legal Protections as Two Person Relationships.

- Wow, yup. - Yeah. - Shocker.

- Yeah, and there's another one from the Post-Millennial, which is also pretty recent, and the title of that one is this. Gay men sue New York City to gain access to women's bodies. Claim surrogacy is a fertility treatment.

They're looking for subsidized surrogacy as a fertility treatment, I guess. - Unbelievable, yeah, exactly. And as you know, surrogacy separates children from their biological mother.

And IVF is a process by which unborn human beings are frozen or thrown away so that selfish adults can have their own dreams come true. If they want children, they haven't been able to have it the natural way. A lot of, I think a lot of Christians also don't know this, that they'll be against abortion, but then be pro-IVF, in vitro fertilization, and not realize that more human beings are frozen and discarded, thrown away through IVF, than through a single abortion.

Yeah, a lot of, when I've raised this with acquaintances of mine, they'll always come back with, yeah, of course they're entitled to the same government benefits. Why do you have a problem with that? I just wanna make the point that it makes sense for society to have the government give benefits to relationships that create healthy, moral, responsible, taxpayers, citizens. But as we saw from these studies, these non-traditional relationships are not good at producing these results on the whole.

And the concern here is that every time we redefine marriage, it becomes less and less stable for the adults, as well as the children. This is traditional marriage that produces excellent results. It should be incentivized, but just calling marriage whatever we want and giving benefits for that makes no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, definitely. It seems like the trend is to just focus on whatever the adults want. And even though this is introducing conditions that are not good for the children, depriving them of mothering and depriving them of fathering and depriving them of stability, it seems like nobody cares.

And we're just gonna keep going in this direction. So I guess hopefully this podcast is gonna equip people who care about children to be able to say, well, let me explain why I disagree with this. So we have one more consequence of the second redefinition of marriage to talk about, and that's just religious liberty.

I'm sure everybody's heard about this. One of the kind of the scary things about this second redefinition of marriage is that Christians who are committed to traditional marriage, natural marriage, they can be dragged into court for refusing to participate in these same sex ceremonies. So somebody who's a florist or a baker or a wedding photographer, they can get into trouble for saying, I don't want to participate in a marriage, a ceremony that disagrees with my religion and my worldview.

- These are not theoretical concepts. These have happened. The florist, bakers, photographers, yeah.

These types of business owners have been dragged into court, have had their businesses threatened and in some cases taken away entirely because they didn't celebrate same sex ceremony. - Yeah, I think it's faithful for Christians to defend the biblical definition of marriage. It's kind of disturbing to me that these stories don't get any more attention from Christians.

And instead we seem to be very committed to, love everybody and-- - Yes, affirm everybody, affirm each other. - We're getting kind of close to the end now. So let me give you some challenges that I've heard about this child centered marriage definition that we've been talking about.

Sometimes people will say this to me, well, the same people who are concerned about opening up marriage to allow same sex couples, they're probably opposed to interracial marriage too. Aren't those the same thing? - Yeah, I've heard this objection too. And look, the reality is from what we've seen in the studies, the important thing for children is that they get mother nurturing, they get father nurturing and they have a stable permanent environment.

Skin color does not affect any of that. Also from a children's rights perspective, interracial marriage and gay marriage are exact opposites. In fact, a friend of ours pointed this out when we were talking about these issues and she's right.

Interracial marriage unites children's two parents and connects them to both heritages, right? Whereas same sex marriage always separates a child from at least one parent and from half of their heritage. So these are not, these cannot be equated. These are actually polar opposites.

One connects the child and another separates the child from their heritage. - It's kind of neat, like that's, some people are saying, well, we should open up marriage to numbers of three, you know, three people, truffles and four people. - Yes.

- But when you create it, when you, when two, you know, a man and a woman create a child, there's always two people present, you know, who are creating this child. And then when the child arrives, both of those people have an interest in raising this sort of mini version of themselves that they've created together. And so there's kind of a commitment there.

And that commitment is present in an interracial marriage. Both of those people created that they work together to create that child. So you're not gonna have these kinds of problems of saying, you know, the child's saying, where are my biological mother and father? Where did I come from? And they're gonna be present to say, we're right here.

We look a bit different, but we're right here, you know? - Yeah. - Well, let me give you another challenge here. Have you ever heard this one? Why doesn't the government just stay out of the marriage business? And that's actually a really popular view, even among some kind of libertarian leaning, you know, conservatives.

- As you know, no fault divorce was actually sold to the public as the government getting out of the marriage business. But after it became law, like we pointed out earlier, the divorce rate skyrocketed and actually then government became more and more involved in all sorts of aspects of people's lives when they were divorced. So for divorced people, the government is involved in who gets what, what wealth transfers take place, who gets custody of the children, who gets visitation rights and when and how, and how often, who counts as a parent.

The government is involved in all kinds of issues that they were not regularly involved in before we had no fault divorce. So now government has to be involved in marriage in order to advocate for the rights of children because children are not represented in the contract between the adults. You know, in addition, there are studies that show that taxpayers have to pay huge amounts of money to deal with the fallout of broken families.

We were looking at a study recently that said it costs about $112 billion per year of taxpayer money to deal with-- - Billion with a B? - With a B as in bravo, yes. $112 billion per year in taxpayer funds because of things like single mother welfare, the need for more law enforcement resulting from the crimes committed by fatherless boys and funding of prisons and things like that. So it's extremely expensive and involves lots of government to have no fault divorce as the law of the land.

- Yeah, I remember seeing that study. I think the lead researcher was a guy named Ben Scafidi. He's an economics professor at Georgia College and State University if people wanna check that out.

So one more question. I like these challenges 'cause this is what makes it comfortable for people to talk about these issues. What would you say to people who say that, who are non, you know, sexual minorities, and they're saying, well, we would like to own property together, we would like to have a hospital visitation ability, we would like to file joint tax returns.

Would you say no to that or how would you respond to that? - Well, two thoughts. First of all, keep in mind that these benefits are there to give an incentive to men and women to form stable marriages and to produce children who are moral, responsible, productive members of society. And then also I would say, you know, we can extend some of these benefits to sexual minority couples without calling it marriage, but it's not marriage, we can't call it marriage.

It has a completely different effect and outcome. So sure, you know, maybe hospital visitation, why not? Property ownership, you know, maybe that's something like, similar to going into business together or something like that, but it's not-- - They can have a contract. - You can have a contract, right, exactly.

But you don't have the type of union that, you know, that gets children involved and that gets, you know, incentives to have children and be loyal and raise them well. - Right, yeah, I think people should understand from what we're presenting here that we are not interested in regulating other people's lives, like let them love who they want, let them live how they want, let them raise any children that they have, you know, that they have from like a previous marriage or something that's, you know, related to them. But when we talk about the concept of marriage and government incentives for marriage, the interest that the government has in marriage is the interest in tying the man and the woman who create the child together legally so that they are going to be present during the development of that child in the long term.

That's the reason why we have this concept of marriage. And if people are living some other way, they are allowed to do that. But we don't associate that with the word marriage and we don't incentivize that in the way that we do with marriage.

I know that's gonna be a little grating for some people, but I think we need to be careful as voters what we provide incentives for, whatever you tax, you get less of, whatever you subsidize, you get more of. - Yeah, and I think we need to be careful as Christians about what we celebrate and what we affirm because what other people are doing actually does have a significant impact on society as a whole. - Okay, so we've come to the nearly the end of the podcast and I was wondering if you could tell us all what you want our listeners to take away from all this information that we presented.

- Good question, yes, I love application questions. Let's see, let me go ahead and read from Matthew 19 verses three through six. I referenced this at the beginning of the podcast.

The Pharisees come up to Jesus and they test him by asking this question. "Is it lawful to divorce one's wife for any cause?" And Jesus answered, "Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female and said, therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh.

What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate." I think that's a critical teaching and it covers a lot of what we've been talking about. Today, so many self-proclaimed Christians support no-fault divorce and same-sex marriage and new creative forms of accessing children. And they celebrate even Christians choosing bad marriage partners because yay, it's a wedding, it's a party, it's a union, it's something to celebrate.

They attend same-sex marriages, ceremonies. They think that Christianity means affirming everyone in their sins and not defending the teachings of Jesus. And so I guess what I'd wanna leave people with is that Christians have very solid ground to stand on when we say that there is a problem with redefining marriage and that Christians should defend the biblical view of marriage that Jesus taught, which is complementary sexes, permanence and exclusivity.

- Yeah, and I think it becomes easier for people to be a little countercultural on these issues of no-fault divorce and same-sex unions if they've maybe read a little bit about it and say, well, I've looked at the evidence and these are the concerns that I have. That makes them bold and maybe we could do a better job at preparing to have those discussions. - Absolutely.

- I think that's a good thought for us to end on. So listeners, if you enjoyed the podcast, please help us out by sharing this podcast with your friends, writing a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. I noticed that we got a couple more reviews on Spotify and we're up to 20 reviews on Apple.

So that's good, keep them coming. Also, please subscribe and comment on YouTube and hit the like button wherever you listen. We appreciate you taking the time to listen and we'll see you again in the next one.

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