The World According to Oatney

Vote to protect marriage November 7th

I write today in defense of the most undermined and maligned institution of our age-matrimony. In today's climate, it is under threat in ways that we as a society could not have fathomed 50 years ago. The national divorce rate is now over 50%-that means that more half of all marriages end in divorce. Half a century ago, the number was a fraction of that. The majority of those marriages involve children who feel stuck in the middle. Over a third of all children in our country are now born out of the bounds of wedlock-over 70 percent of minority children are born out of wedlock. Children born out of wedlock are twice as likely to end up living in poverty.

The solution of certain people on the Left to the decline of marriage is not to take steps to save the institution for the benefit of society. They would rather continue down the road of social disintigration by redefining the very nature of the institution itself. Instead of marriage existing between a man and a woman, it can now exist between two men or two women as well as a man and a woman, and in theory it may exist between numbers of men and women. If it can be redefined one way it can be redefined in any and every conceivable way. In the stuff of irony, the Left is using the divorce statistics that no-fault divorce laws have created, laws that they or their political and social anscestors in "the faith" helped to bring about. The common argument that is presently in use is that traditional marriage isn't working, so why not allow for marriage to be redefined? What they don't tell you is that liberal divorce laws have greatly increased the ability to undermine marriage, and the present situation is the end result.

Marriage is under attack from every direction-it has been for years-and the push to redefine it is simply the latest salvo in the larger war against the traditional family in America. The left has been extremely successful in redefining what a nuclear family consists of in the rest of the Western world-a decline in the influence of Christianity has accompanied the decline in the traditional family in every Western nation where it is seen to be effective-that, of course, is a dream come true for many on the Left.

The war on marriage and the family has been, in fact, largely successful. It has been the major success of the left in America and around the world and the decline of marriage and the family is the greatest hope the Left has of semi-permanent social control. It should not surprise the Left that people are drawing a line in the sand and saying "no more."

Members of the homosexual community are telling Tennesseans and people around the country that this is about bigotry and hatred toward the gay community. While I realize that most of these folks will not believe my words, I say with honesty and sincerity that nothing could be further from the truth. I do not care who-or what-you or anyone else chooses to have sex with. That is very much your business, and I do not hate you for it and it doesn't effect whether I would have you as a neighbor or a friend. When you want to use your business as a means to try and change the very bedrock of society itself, that IS MY BUSINESS. We seek to protect the last vestages of the culture and the society that it took 2,000 years to build. The social fabric of our country has already been ripped to shreds by liberalism, but the Left is not satified with that, they want to blow the bedrock of that society-marriage and the family itself-to bits, tear it asunder from top to bottom.

Genesis 2:22-24:


And the Lord God built the rib which he took from Adam into a woman: and brought her to Adam. And Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man. Wherefore a man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife: and they shall be two in one flesh.


My pastor last Sunday pointed out that he never believed that 30 years ago he would have to stand in the pulpit at Mass and explain that the Church teaches that marriage exists only between a man and a woman. So successful has the crusade of the Left been to redefine marriage that even churches must now teach to adults what was three decades ago a first grade Sunday School lesson.

This isn't about bigotry-it is about the preservation of the social order that was ordained before anyone walking the earth was ever born or thought of-either you believe in that order or you do not. Vote to preserve what shred of the family is left on November 7th. I urge all of my Tennessee readers to vote in favor of the Amendment to the Constitution of the State of Tennessee which forever maintains the definition of marriage contained in the Holy Bible.

Labels: Tennessee politics

posted by Deacon David Oatney @ 12:05 PM