Betraying Our Non-Monagomous Ancestors

[Llwellyn]

Have we betrayed our promiscuous non-human ancestors by choosing to enter into monogamous marriages?  What do you think?  What did we owe the individuals pictured in the image below?  Should we repent of heterosexual monagamous marriage with sack-cloth and ashes, for the crimes that we have committed against our promiscuous ancestors?  My answer to this question is a "yes" and a "no":  With great shame and regret, I admit that we have broken earlier moral rules;  we have turned our backs on the earlier laws of nature.  The first marriage between a man and a woman was as morally repugnant and shocking as we would regard a swingers party today.  In that sense, we have betrayed our ancestors in a selfish way, doing what "felt good" instead of doing what was our duty.  It is vicious and foolish to strike out independently and to aim at originality in ethics -- "There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."  Proverbs 14:12, 16:25  

 

On the other hand, every now and then, someone is born with the right to be original, and his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruit.  The experiment of monogamy is to be judged not simply by the morals of the past, but by how well it satisfies values we can, with intelligence, create in the present.  The audacious experiment of heterosexual marriage by those two original perverts has worked:  it is now a tested and proven hypothesis in the year 2015 for our species in North America and Europe.  On the whole, then, we must conclude that no ethical philosophy is possible in the old-fashioned Platonic or Abrahamic senses of the term.  We must always wait on the results to determine if our experiments of creating new values are proven by the facts.  The highest ethical life -- however few may be called to bear its burdens -- consists in conformity to new rules when the old rules have shown themselves to be too loose for the actual case.

 

How can we apply this analysis to the Gay Marriage debate today?  I think one observation that can be made is the following:  We have been too permissive in allowing Christians to disregard the committed relationships of gay men and gay women.  The time for permitting their licentiousness is now over.  Christians must now conform to rules which are stricter and more appropriate for the times in which we now live.  We are no longer the carefree innocents living on the plains of Africa, but now have more and stricter duties to one another.