The Greatest Threat to Marriage

When I said in a post on Evangelical First Things in Public Life that homosexual unions were not the greatest threat to marriage, I was called “soft” on the issue of same-sex marriages. This made me laugh out loud, because I’m not and because it was probably written by someone has never been married or hasn’t had a serious martial problem (yet).

The greatest threat to the institution of marriage is bad marriages and the decisions and choices that make them bad.

One of my longtime friends, Nancy C. Anderson, is dispensing advice to people in troubled marriages in her book Avoiding the “Greener Grass” Syndrome How to Grow Affair-Proof Hedges Around Your Marriage and at crosswalk.com.

She writes in a recent column:

“If you're struggling in your relationship and feel like you've grown apart from your spouse, today can be the day of new beginnings. I know how lonely, desperate, and exhausted you may feel, because I've felt that way. I was in a marriage full of emptiness. Ron and I were both selfish, angry, and critical; but we aren't anymore. Well . . . I'm still a little selfish, but mostly our lives are full of light and love -- and yours can be too. We admitted our faults, ask for forgiveness, changed our behavior and decided to love each other. Our feelings eventually caught up with our actions and we slowly grew a lovely "green grass" marriage in own backyard”

Joe at Evangelical Outpost has a good post on the dangers to marriage. He writes:

"Social conservatives spend an inordinate amount of hand-wringing over the threat to traditional marriage posed by the legal recognition of same-sex relationships. Gay marriage is, of course, a legitimate concern. But it would take an army of homosexual rights activists several decades to do as much damage to the sacred institution as heterosexuals have done by tolerating no-fault divorce and the repeal of common law marriage. The looming threat pales in comparison to the present danger of destructive marriage laws which have, for at least one young woman, literally become a matter of life and death."

--James Jewell