I am seeing a lot of chatter recently about overturning Obergefell, and I get this strange, sinking feeling like we’re standing on a patch of mud yelling at the sky because the house is leaning. We point at the Supreme Court like that’s the engine of this whole thing.

Newsflash. It isn’t. That court decision was the receipt.

The purchase happened decades earlier, in living rooms, classrooms, sitcoms, pulpits that went soft, and a thousand quiet theological surrenders no one wanted to argue about because arguing feels rude.

The truth is, a nation does not legalize what it still believes is wrong. It legalizes what it has already baptized as good. Law is downstream from that. Always has been. Always will be. You can scream at the river all you want, but the spring is somewhere else.

I think about it the same way I think about overturning Roe. Roe didn’t crack because the church discovered a new verse. It cracked because people started seeing something they had been trained not to see. Grainy ultrasounds flickering like ghostly lanterns. Tiny hands. Heartbeats. Limbs that weren’t theory anymore.

The argument shifted from “my body my choice” to “what is that?” Science didn’t invent the unborn—it betrayed the lie.

Marriage is harder. Marriage doesn’t show up on a monitor with a pulse and a thumb. Its wounds are slow burns. No sirens. No blood on tile. Just fatherless boys twenty years later. Lonely women wondering why nothing sticks. Fertility rates falling through the floor like a trap door. Civilizations aging like exhausted men with bad knees. The damage doesn’t immediately scream—it sighs. And in a culture addicted to immediacy, sighs get ignored.

Here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud. The debate was never really “Should two men marry?” That’s the surface splash. The real question—the foundation, the root system, the tectonic plate underneath the whole mess—is “What is a human being?”

If a human is an autonomous bundle of wants with a body attached like optional hardware, then of course marriage bends around desire. Why wouldn’t it? Desire becomes sovereign. Identity becomes self-authored. Biology becomes background noise. In that universe, Obergefell isn’t rebellion—it’s just consistency.

But if a human is created—embodied on purpose, male or female on purpose, ordered toward ends he did not invent and cannot revise like correcting a bug in a Microsoft program—then the whole framework flips. Then, marriage isn’t a customizable emotional contract. It’s a structure built into reality, like gravity or lungs needing air. You can ignore it. You can mock it. You can rename it. But you can’t make it not be there. The consequences just wait patiently.

And here’s where we have to swallow something bitter. We keep arguing outcomes. God starts with design. We cite statistics, but scripture starts with “In the beginning… male and female.” We talk about consequences like we’re presenting a public health study. Yet, the Bible talks about “creation order” like it’s the wiring diagram of the universe.

You cannot defend Christian sexual ethics while quietly accepting secular anthropology. That’s like trying to run Windows on a toaster and wondering why it keeps smoking. If man defines himself, the case is already over. You lost before you opened your mouth.

So when I see coalitions of conservatives stirring, organizing, trying to push the conversation back toward sanity—and yes, they deserve credit for the courage to even touch the third rail—I find myself wanting to grab them by the shoulders, not to discourage, but to steady. Because if this becomes just another policy skirmish, it’s going to fizzle like a spark in wet grass.

This isn’t mainly a courtroom fight. It’s a creation fight.

The church has to recover marriage not as a lifestyle upgrade, not as a sentimental Hallmark arrangement, not as “the traditional view”—that phrase alone sounds like it belongs in a museum gift shop—but as a creation structure. A built-in feature of reality. Male and female not as costumes or vibes or personality settings, but as embodied truths that say something about the God who designed us, about humanity, about fruitfulness, about how life actually continues.

Children have to come back to the center of the picture. Not as optional add-ons. Not as a cute possibility. But as the natural overflow of what marriage is for. The state’s interest in marriage has never been candlelit dinners. It has always been the next generation. The culture erased that purpose, then wondered why the institution became shapeless.

And then there’s the part no manifesto can fake—lived evidence. Churches full of brittle, miserable marriages cannot preach design with credibility. If Christian homes look like the same chaos but with Bible verses taped on the fridge, the argument collapses under its own weight.

We must demonstrate stability.
Joy.
Faithfulness when it’s not glamorous.
Fruitfulness when it’s costly.

At bottom, this isn’t about winning a talking point. It’s about whether we will admit that God’s commands are not arbitrary restrictions, but descriptions of how humans actually function. The rules aren’t fences dropped from the sky to block fun. They’re guardrails bolted to the edge of reality. Ignore them, and the drop is still there whether you believe in it or not.

Maybe that’s why this feels so uphill. We’ve been fighting at the policy level—and we should be, make no mistake—while the foundations eroded underneath us. We tried to prop up the house while quietly agreeing that the blueprints were negotiable. Laws may be able to restrict evil for a time, but they can’t hold up what theology has already surrendered.

And until the church relearns how to say, without flinching and without apology, that God made humans male and female on purpose—and that this purpose is good, wise, and life-giving—every legal victory will be temporary, and every loss will feel like a surprise that shouldn’t have been one.