Neighborhood Ministries

Liberals are continuing to push their agenda in spite of overwhelming opposition to it. They are burying a provision to legalize same sex marriage in a spending bill to sneak it in without anyone noticing it. Spending bills are large bills and it is easy to hide things in it you don’t want people to notice and when the spending is needed, conservatives are afraid to vote against them because they have popular support. Contact your Congressman and ask them to support an amendment to remove it from the bill. It has no place in a spending bill. Since insurance companies, Social Security, and others allow special privileges for spouses. Revising the marriage code to include gays would add a lot of people in those privileges. Social Security is already stretched to the max and adding large numbers of “spouses” who could then receive Social Security benefits, even though many of them would not be paying into the system, would further drain the fund. The same thing would occur with insurance companies who would have to include large numbers of recipients who are high risk because of homosexual behavior. In addition, homosexual relationships are far more unstable than heterosexual ones. Most heterosexual individuals have one or two partners at most in their lifetime but homosexual individuals often have numerous partners over their lifetime. All of those partners could potentially be eligible for Social Security or insurance survivors benefits, drawing on payments made by one individual.

Gays however,  realize the importance of marriage and are fighting hard in just about every State to legalize marriage among Gays. Gays are intent on getting the right to marry because that will show that society recognizes the union of two men or two women and therefore it is a legitimate lifestyle. Marriage also has benefits. When society recognizes two people as married, it bestows on them certain benefits. It protects the woman’s rights to Social Security and the right to the couple’s possessions to the survivor in the event one of them dies. Without a legal marriage, the woman has no right to any possessions they hold in common unless he wills them to her which requires probate of his estate and can be very expensive. It also protects her rights if he decides to leave her by granting her child support to help her care for any minor children she has. Unmarried people have no such protection. Gays want those benefits.

Liberals are pushing for an expansion of marriage to include same sex couples while few people are calling to hold the line on the definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. The majority of people seem to think it doesn’t matter because marriage is no longer important. It does no good to argue that marriage is the ideal state that God seeks for us because most people today do not believe in God or if they believe that He (or it) exists, they don’t feel that He/it really cares about us. Without seeing an advantage in marriage, believers often say it is better to be married but encourage others to abandon their marriage when the going gets tough. If we are to gain a hearing among unbelievers, we must demonstrate that it is better to be married than to be single, and since God made us and knows what is best for us, it is wise to heed His advice. Therefore, I have just posted a course on the importance of Family and Gender on Udemy for those who  want a full discussion of it. (see Neighborhood Ministries of NW Ohio website post of 9/7/2022)

Liberals in Congress are trying to push through a bill called “Respect for Marriage Act” that will open marriage to just about anyone who wants it. Contrary to the title, it shows no respect for marriage.  Heterosexual people are losing interest in marriage. Almost 50% of families are now headed by single parents. Recent statistics show that the number of divorces is decreasing but it is due more to the fact that fewer people are getting married, than because more marriages are remaining intact. The number of women with children who have never married is also continuing to increase. The growing number of children coming from single parent homes see no need to marry and are more likely not to marry, or if they do marry, they are not prepared to deal with the normal give and take of marriage because they have never seen it worked out and often end up divorced. As a result, the number of single parent families is continuing to increase with no end in sight. Unless God’s people help the world understand the importance of marriage, our society will collapse.

In response to the Supreme Court decision in 2015, the Social Security Administration extended survivor’s benefits to survivors of beneficiaries who were in same sex marriages. In 2021, it further extended benefits to survivors of same sex unions who were not married but who claim they would have married if they had been able to. Almost one out of ten social Securities recipients receives survivors benefits, many of them are minor children who have lost a parent who received Social Security. Social Security was designed to help the elderly who could no longer work and those dependent on Social Security beneficiaries who lost their support due to the death of the recipient. The Social Security fund is already threatened with becoming insolvent due to raids by Congress on the fund for other purposes. Extending it to a large number of people who could marry, solely to get Social Security benefits, or even worse, to extend it to people who could claim a relationship that doesn’t legally exist, is to further endanger the people who depend on it. Congress needs to enact a law requiring those receiving survivors benefits to be legally married to or a direct dependent of a beneficiary.