One of the reasons I have confidence in the eventual success of our defense of true marriage is that the left must overreach. They cannot help themselves. In order to end marriage in America, in the world, they have to brand anyone who opposes them a bigot. They have to label and libel. It’s what they do.
This spring, they have been on a roll. Some politicians and some talking heads throw up their hands as they throw in the towel. “It’s inevitable,” they sigh.
Well, I take inspiration from those saints of the past--Peter, Paul, and Mary. Relax, O’Reilly, I’m not thumping my Bible at you. I don’t mean Saints Peter and Paul and the Blessed Virgin Mary, I mean that amazing folk music trio.
Peter, Paul, and Mary got their start in New York’s Greenwich Village and proceeded from there to become a national sensation in the early 1960s. Their greatest moment may have been when they performed their hit song, “If I had a hammer” live at Dr. Martin Luther King’s great Civil Rights March on Washington on August 28, 1963.
That was a great event, to be sure. And it was some years before the American left started singing “if I had a hammer and sickle.” But my favorite Peter, Paul, and Mary song remains “The Wedding Song.”
It’s an amazing song that must have been played at a million weddings since those halcyon days when this folk rock phenomenon hit the pop music scene. It’s wonderful just to consider the lyrics. “What shall be the meaning of becoming man and wife?”
For nearly fifty years, until her untimely death in 2009, Mary Travers teamed up with Paul Stookey and Peter Yarrow. They performed at every peace rally, every anti-nuke, pro-McGovern rally. They were an indispensable part of the political and social left.
I’m not unaware of the spectrum colors in this Paul Stookey YouTube recording of the Wedding Song. That adds a note of irony to his performance.
Question for the left: Are Peter, Paul, and Mary bigots, too? Is the mere fact that they knew what marriage was for fifty years enough to brand them as hate-filled?
Didn’t we all know what marriage was before some of us evolved? And here’s another delicious irony: If we had all evolved as President Obama has evolved, there might be no conflict at all. We might not be here.
Of course, even the most enthusiastic backers of punctuated equilibrium would find it hard to imagine an evolution in Nature as rapid as that of Barack Obama. In 2008, he said: “Marriage is between a man and a woman, and God is in the mix.” Who moved?
