On the contrary, it will have profound impacts.” – In 2010, Bishop Harry Jackson penned an article at CNN.com titled, “ Same-sex marriages will hurt families, society” in which he stated, “Advocates of making same-sex marriage a legally recognized right claim that this will have no impact on traditional marriage - that it can peacefully coexist alongside traditional marriage. – A pamphlet produced by the Family Research Council argued that if gay marriage were legal, fewer married people would “remain monogamous and sexually faithful.” It went on to say, “Worse than this, people would be more likely to get divorced after gay marriage is legal.” And because tragedy always comes in threes, the pamphlet adds that legalizing gay marriage would result in “lower birth rates than if it had not been legalized.” And they are easily accessible via a global information search engine that researchers are now calling “Google.” To wit: Some conservatives responded that this was “straw man” and a “bogus red herring.” They contended that conservatives never made such arguments. Karen Swallow Prior, an author and professor at Liberty University whom I respect, objected that “no conservative Christians ever made that argument.” Another said I was “mocking an argument that no one is making.”īut there are plenty examples of such arguments being made by high-level conservative Christian leaders in recent history. On the day of the decision, I posted a satirical tweet about how millions of straight conservative Christians were shocked to discover their marriages had not actually been harmed by the Supreme Court’s decision. But as the dust settles and reality sets in, we’re already witnessing signs of social amnesia. The decision, though expected, plunged conservatives into varying states of mourning, uncertainty, retreat, and retrenchment. He dubbed it “ social amnesia.” Others since then have also noted the tendency of groups to collectively repress history, usually because remembering the facts is not in the group’s best interest.Ĭonservative Americans-and particularly conservative Christians-lost a decades-long cultural battle last week when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage nationwide. In the 1970’s, UCLA history professor Russell Jacoby studied trends in the collective forgetting of groups of people. Often the losers knit together a version of past events that disposes of the more damning details and casts their side in a more favorable light. – (Image courtesy of Dave Schumaker – ) History is not always written by the victors. Expect social amnesia as Christians debate sexuality.
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