Marriage Besieged?

Tonight I was watching Religion & Ethics Newsweekly on PBS (I recorded it from Friday night). The first report was on the Pope's recent visit to Spain where Catholicism is declining. The Pope spoke about how "marriage is besieged on many fronts." And the thing I can't figure out is -- I'm married -- where is it -- how is it being besieged? I swear I can't figure out where in God's name there is any threat to the relationship Kathy and I have going on.

Today as we were driving back from the movies we heard on the radio someone talking about being married 14 years. I told Kathy that it sounded like a long time -- and then I realized we've been married almost twice that long - 26 years. It's such a weird feeling. So -- across these 26 years I can't think of a single way in which I feel like our marriage is threatened by anything happening in the larger community -- nation or whatever.

I can't figure out for the life of me why, for example, people talk about the desire for gay and lesbian people to have both the right and the rite of marriage as a threat to me. Heck, it seems to me that if someone wants to get married so badly even though it is not legal for them to do so - you ought to sign those people up for marriage right away.

When I hear people talk about this -- particularly religious folk (not only Christians but predominantly Christians) -- I keep wanting to hear specifics. How do they experience the threat to marriage in their personal lives?

I've met with a few couples recently who are planning on getting married. None of them seems to feel threatened by anything in the larger culture in preparation for getting married. It just seems so nuts.

It feels like something that would happen if children were running the country rather than adults. This is what I mean -- if you are a kid (okay...let's be more specific -- when I was a kid) -- if I had something and somebody else I knew had the same thing I could be a little envious of it. I could convince myself that somehow they had a better version of what I had. It's juvenile. But I grew out of it, thank God. Is our country in arrested adolescence? Aided and abeted by our political and religious leaders?