Ozzie and Harriet: Sexual Revolutionaries

Maybe same-sex marriage didn't start with the Will and Grace generation, but with the Ozzie and Harriet generation.

In an op-ed in today's New York Times, Stephanie Coontz charges that Focus on the Family's James Dobson is too understated when he charges that same-sex "marriage" redefines traditional understandings of family. Coontz, director of public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, argues that homosexuals didn't start the revolution. Heterosexuals did, a long time ago. Writes Coontz:

Heterosexuals were the upstarts who turned marriage into a voluntary love relationship rather than a mandatory economic and political institution. Heterosexuals were the ones who made procreation voluntary, so that some couples could choose childlessness, and who adopted assisted reproduction so that even couples who could not conceive could become parents. And heterosexuals subverted the long-standing rule that every marriage had to have a husband who played one role in the family and a wife who played a completely different one. Gays and lesbians simply looked and the revolution heterosexuals had wrought and noticed that with its new norms, marriage could work for them, too.

When it comes to the question of marriage as a love relationship, Coontz oversimplifies things a bit. Marriage in the Jewish and Christian traditions has always had a strong  erotic and affectional component. Note Jacob and Rachel, Ruth and Boaz, the Song of Solomon. But Coontz is precisely right that the redefinition of marriage didn't begin with social revolutionaries in Massachusetts and San Francisco. This is why it will never work for Christian churches to stand against same-sex "marriage," while remaining silent about working mothers, daycare, the contraceptive culture, and egalitarian marriage roles.

The reason it is so difficult to convince Christian Harry and Mary that same-sex marriage is wrong is that we rely on Christian radio to inform Mary about the issue while she is rushing from her second job to pick up little Jimmy from the day-care center for church soccer league while Harry's on the golf course with the guys. What we don't stop to ask is whether "same-sex marriage" is all we've ever known for a long, long time.

Coontz diagnosis is on target, while her antidote, surrender to a malleable definition of marriage, is deadly. The answer is for counter-cultural churches and families to model something alien to both Ozzie and Harriet and Will and Grace: marriage that points to the mystery of Christ and his church.