Voices of Faith Speak Out: The Real Assault on Marriage

A conversation with Rev Dr Nancy E. Petty, Senior Pastor of Pullen Memorial Baptist Church in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“One of the actual threats to marriage in our society today...comes from people misusing the Bible to define marriage. If you look at the Old and New Testaments, you will not get one picture only of what constitutes marriage. In fact, often in the Bible, men had numerous wives, and women were bought and sold as property. The claim that the Bible defines marriage for today is false....

“The real assault on marriage is to be found in right-wingers’ support of inequality within marriage, with a man given more power than a woman. If you look at what Jesus said about relationships, he calls us into relationships that are loving, just, compassionate and equal. Where [anti-marriage activist] Crouse says that love is not the most important thing in a marriage, her argument is morally, spiritually and ethically bankrupt. The real assault on marriage is Crouse’s use of hateful language spoken in a total void of what love means. For obvious reasons, it does not work well, generally, for a homosexual person to marry a heterosexual one. Where one social group, feeling itself superior, is beating another group down in order to get ahead, that is not talking about what is of value in loving commitments, and it certainly is not an authentically Christian way of being. The foundational Christian message is to love one another.”