Ryan Anderson explains why gay marriage doesn't exist

Here is a 4-minute clip well worth watching for its logical, lawyerly speech regarding marriage. The responder is Ryan Anderson. Ryan T. Anderson researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation.

The homosexual man at the microphone is asking why he, as a married gay man, can't have the same tax advantage when it comes time to file IRS tax returns, as a heterosexually married couple.




Anderson is brilliant in his response. The homosexual man doesn't seem to understand the underlying principle of what Anderson tried to get at three times, so finally Anderson answers the gay man's question within its limited scope. But he does that brilliantly too.

Then the man said,

“This at last is bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called Woman,
because she was taken out of Man.”

Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:23-24)

Anderson said in part:

Marriage is a union of sexually complementary spouses, a permanent, exclusive union- man & woman, husband & wife, mother & father. If you're not interested in entering into that sort of union, you're not being discriminated against.

What you're asking us to do is redefining marriage to include "the adult relationship of your choice." The relationship of your choice happens to be a same-sex couple. There are other adults who want to redefine marriage to include a relationship of their choice, which may be the same-sex throuple, or the opposite sex quartet.

It's like this. There is the color red. Red is known, it is certain. It is defined "of a color at the end of the spectrum next to orange and opposite violet, as of blood, fire, or rubies."

EPrata photo

Now say some people came along and wanted to add yellow to the color red. They agitated for it, proclaimed, exhorted, fought for yellow to be added to red, just because they thought that would be good.

EPrata photo

And say that they were successful in getting yellow added to red. You don't have red anymore. You have orange.

Because red and yellow make orange. Once you mix another element into the red, it becomes something else, and the old definition won't fit anymore. People will not recognize the old thing because now it is a new thing.

Once you add same-sex humans to the old definition of marriage, it isn't marriage anymore and it isn't recognizable.

The homosexual man asked as a final question, why he, Anderson didn't think that he, the gay man, had the right to get married.

Anderson concluded with this:

It's not that you don't have a right to get married, it's that what you are seeking out, isn't marriage.