Marriage is not just any relationship. It predates the law and the Constitution, and is an anthropological reality, not primarily a legal one. No civilization can survive without it, and those societies that allowed it to become irrelevant have faded into history.

It's one thing to have the idea that a cow is now a horse. It's another to use the power of the law to impose this delusion on everybody else. Same-sex "marriage" is a direct attack on freedom of conscience for millions of people.

Marriage is the union of the two sexes, not just two people. It is the binding of two families, and the foundation for establishing kinship patterns and family names, passing on property and providing the optimal environment for raising children.

Marriage is the only type of coupling capable of natural reproduction of the human race - a man and a woman. Children need mothers and fathers, and marriage is society's way of obtaining them.

Even childless marriages are a social anchor for children, who observe adults as role models. Children learn crucial things about family life by seeing relationships up close: interactions between men and women, husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, and parents to children of the same and opposite sexes.

Human experience and a vast body of social science research show that children do best in married, mother-father households. Junk science can't change that, nor can it prove that people are "born gay" with no hope of change.

After Massachusetts legalized homosexual "marriage" in 2004, the Catholic Church had to shut down its large adoption agency, and later in the District of Columbia. This denies orphans one of the best chances of being adopted in an intact household with a mother and father. Collateral damage. Shrug.

Marriage laws have been part of the cultural and legal structures for thousands of years in all societies long before the modern "gay" movement became active in the 1970s. It is profoundly misleading for media to refer to marriage laws as "gay-marriage bans," as if the laws never had any purpose other than excluding same-sex couples.

Citing laws in some states that once barred interracial marriage is also misleading. The very essence of marriage - the joining of the two sexes - was never at issue when the Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia (1967) struck down Virginia's law barring interracial marriage.

Hijacking the moral capital of the black civil rights movement to turn a wrong into a "right" is part of a detailed strategy in the 1989 book "After the Ball," by public relations experts Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, who advised: "In any campaign to win over the public, gays must be portrayed as victims in need of protection so that straights will be inclined by reflex to adopt the role of protector."

They suggested branding people with traditional values as "haters" and "bigots."

That PR strategy has worked like magic, pounded into the American psyche over and over via the media, Hollywood, the educational establishment and liberal corporations that have become willing accomplices.

Many well-intentioned people, such as students in "gay-straight alliances," unknowingly aid what is fast becoming a totalitarian movement.

Businesses that decline to recognize nonmarital relationships are being punished through loss of contracts. Christian-owned firms have been fined or ruined in New Mexico, Oregon and elsewhere for declining to service homosexual ceremonies. People are being fired or denied credentials.

In 1994, writer Michelangelo Signorile urged activists to "fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution."

Contrast that with what Jesus said about marriage, reiterating God's directive in Genesis:

"From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother, and the two shall become one flesh."

People need not burn bridges with friends and loved ones who differ on this issue. All people are precious, created in God's image, and all are subject to various temptations - and hope for change - during our lifetimes.

We must speak the truth in love, and never, never surrender to the demand that we lie to our Creator, to ourselves and to our children about what is right and wrong - and what constitutes a marriage.

Robert Knight is a columnist for The Washington Times.

Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/4/knight-recovering-the-meaning-of-marriage/#ixzz2y2I0kLwm