What does health reform have against marriage?

In an piece titled “Obamacare’s taxes to hit incomes under $250,000,” WorldNetDaily columnist Bob Unruh writes about a report that alleges 14 increases on Americans earning less than $250,000.

Published by Janice Shaw Crouse, a senior fellow at Concerned Women of America’s Beverly LaHaye Institute, the article notes the fact that supporters of the health care bill did not talk about the marriage tax penalty and “the fact that it will redistribute wealth from married couples to cohabiting couples.” It concludes by mentioning that instead of encouraging financial independence, it “creates another avenue of dependency through health insurance subsidies.”

I just want to know what the supporters of health reform have against marriage?

Is it because you are so sure everyone has the right to health care you are willing to trash the most sacred of human institutions? Are you now going to use the old, moth-eaten argument that you have been discriminated against for so long that now it is your turn to discriminate? Are you not even aware marriage is good health care policy?

I still remember the day I walked into my insurance agent’s office with my new bride on my arm, ready to establish my own policy apart from my parents. At 22 years of age, Gene Sleeper looked me in the eye and told me my rates were going to go down. He said they would have gone down a little bit when I turned 25, but getting married was a much bigger decrease. Why? Because marriage tends to make a man drive more carefully, more safely.

When he drives by himself, he is thinking about what is waiting for him when he gets home. And when he has his wife in the car, he has something with him of great value.

Study after study indicates marriage is good for society, and when it comes to motor vehicles, the benefit is in lives and property saved. Why destroy what we know to be good?

Perhaps it is because so many hate God, who gave us this institution. As outlined in Genesis, Chapter 2, it is the first of three institutions God ordained. Given on the very first day of man’s creation, God wants us to understand that marriage is the very foundation of society. Marriages turn into families, which blossom into communities, cities, states and, eventually, countries. In our day, marriage establishes lineage, which not only anchors us to our past but guides us in our future as our blood is no longer strong enough to support offspring of direct kinship relations without congenital abnormalities. Again, another plus on the side of marriage.

Marriage is so sacred to God that when Jesus was here on this earth he corrected two abuses of it that had risen over the 4,000 years of history up until that time: the first being polygamy and the second, divorce. Both of these practices codified in their laws, yet both inventions of men. To both of these Jesus said in Matthew 19 that, “from the beginning,” God’s intention was for one man to marry one woman, and that marriage should last until death do them part.

Perhaps it’s because some hate that the Bible calls sex outside of marriage sin. I just had a man assert to me the other day that sex with many people was great just as long as you were smart and intelligent about it. But the reason sex outside of marriage is sin is because it is an act of selfishness. It is what you get out of it. It doesn’t care about the other person so much as it cares about gratifying the appetites of the flesh — and it sure doesn’t care about the occasional offspring it produces “by accident.”

Marriage, on the other hand, is about what you put into it. God blesses sex within marriage because it is the surrendering of self for another, and then when children do arrive, it is the giving oneself for those others. Note God’s blessing on the faithful marriage bed: no sexually transmitted disease. Sorry, but destroying it won’t remove God’s cursing of fornication, adultery or any other sexual perversity.

I would just like to hear one good reason why marriage needs to be attacked in order to promote health care reform. Health reform now appears to be just a Trojan horse with deadly contents on the inside.

Ron Hamman is pastor of Independent Baptist Church of Wasilla. Contact him at 357-4229 or ron.hamman@gci.net.