Scholar Claims Heterosexual Attitudes Have Helped 'Gay' Activists Undermine Marriage
by Bill Fancher
August 21, 2006
(AgapePress) - - A pro-family researcher feels heterosexuals must share the blame for the debate over same-sex "marriage" taking place in America today. Dr. Stephen Baskerville says heterosexuals need to look at the way they have treated marriage before blaming the same-sex marriage push on homosexual activists.
Baskerville is a political science professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, and president of the American Coalition of Fathers and Children. The researcher is also a prolific author of articles and books and an outspoken pro-family activist.
While known to many for his positions on fatherhood and fathers' rights, Baskerville also has strong opinions on the societal debate over how marriage and family should be defined -- that is, whether their definitions should be broadened to embrace such notions as same-sex marriage, homosexual adoption, and other non-traditional familial arrangements.
According to the author and political science teacher, this highly-charged conflict between traditional marriage and family defenders on the one hand and homosexual activists and same-sex marriage proponents on the other crystallizes a controversy that has arisen not suddenly but gradually, over decades. "The reason we are having this problem today," he declares, "the reason it's come to this head, is because of changes that have been going on for the family for at least 40 years."
And of these changes, Baskerville asserts, "the most neglected of all ... is no-fault divorce." This legal term describes any divorce in which the spouse seeking the termination of the marriage does not have to prove the other spouse did anything wrong; he or she only has to state a reason recognized by the state. In some places, simply charging "incompatibility" or "irreconcilable differences" is enough.
No-fault divorce and the family court are two huge influences in the debasement of the institution of marriage, the Howard University professor contends. And, he notes, heterosexuals have abused marriage in other ways over the last few decades.
Several pro-family advocates have noted that heterosexuals' increasingly casual attitudes about unwed pregnancy, unmarried cohabitation, marital infidelity and other sex outside marriage have helped to undermine the integrity of the traditional marriage and family, even as divorce has done. Many acknowledge that same-sex marriage activists did not invent the trend of compromising the biblical meaning and significance of marriage.
Pastor Larry Christenson, author of The Christian Family, states something similar in some of his statements on this issue, Baskerville recalls. "Christenson ... says commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage," the professor says.
"It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it," Baskerville contends. He says many homosexual activists will admit that it is because marriage today is taken so lightly -- and because it appears to pose no barrier to promiscuity -- that the institution of marriage has become attractive to those who engage in the often promiscuous homosexual lifestyle.
Bill Fancher, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
