wfn.org | [LCMSNews] Kieschnick supports marriage amendment

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	LCMSNews -- No. 128
	November 4, 2003

	Kieschnick encourages members
	to support marriage amendment

	LCMS President Gerald Kieschnick is encouraging support for a
proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would define marriage
as only the union of a man and a woman.

	Kieschnick took up the marriage issue in a letter to Missouri
Synod Lutherans, released Oct. 23 via various LCMS e-mail lists.

	In the letter, Kieschnick says that supporting the proposed
Federal Marriage Amendment -- by contacting ones senators and
representative to Congress, for example -- is one way to honor a
resolution adopted by the 1998 Synod convention. That resolution urges
Lutherans to give a public witness in word and deed to heterosexual
marriage as an estate to be held in honor by all and kept inviolate.

	Incredibly, the day may be coming when the legal definition of
marriage in our country is changed forever -- when marriage becomes
whatever people want it to be, involving whatever sexes and
configurations of spouses are desired, Kieschnick says in his letter.
He notes that efforts are under way to legalize same-sex marriage.

	The Federal Marriage Amendment was introduced in the House of
Representatives as House Joint Resolution 56 (H.J. Res. 56). To become
an amendment to the Constitution requires approval by a two-thirds vote
of each the House and the Senate, then ratification by three-fourths of
the states.

	As a church, we are of one mind that homosexual unions come
under categorical prohibition in the Old and New Testaments (Lev.
18:22, 24; 20:13; 1 Cor. 6:9-20; 1 Tim. 1:9-10), and that in the
beginning, the blessed Trinity instituted marriage to be the life-long
union of one man and one woman (Gen. 2:24; Matt. 19:4-6 ...),
Kieschnick wrote, quoting from the 1998 convention resolution.

	But, he added, the issue is not simply a matter of Christian
thinking.

	Marriage at all times and in all civilizations (with the
disastrous exception of polygamy and other failed anomalies) has always
joined a bride and a groom (gender-specific terms) -- who are then
wife and husband, mother and father, of the family, Kieschnick
says.

	The institution of marriage is trans-cultural, trans-religious,
and trans-historical, the letter continues. To tinker with its
meaning, to change the fundamental vocabulary of what marriage has
meant throughout the history of the world, is to eat away at the edges
of our society. It is to threaten the very center and cornerstone of
that society -- the family unit - through which society is continued and
new life comes into being.

	Kieschnicks letter says that marriage is so intrinsic to the
very fabric of society and the essence of life itself, that we can ill
afford to look away when others, after thousands of years, suddenly try
to recast its sacred meaning.

	*********************************

	If you have questions or comments about this LCMSNews release,
contact Joe Isenhower Jr. at joe.isenhower@lcms.org or (314) 996-1231,
or Paula Schlueter Ross at paula.ross@lcms.org or (314) 996-1230.

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