Last night I saw a TV preview for a new show by the producers of Glee. The show, The New Normal, features a grandmother, mother and daughter, and a gay couple. The mother needs money to support her daughter’s future, and the men, who want a family of their own, are paying to have her be their surrogate. The grandmother seems more morally traditional and has problems with the gay couple, which are ridiculed as outdated and “racist” by a woman in the preview. One pivotal line of the preview is when the gay men ask the mother if she’s really okay with having the baby for them. She responds with a smile, “Love is love, and family is family.”

Let’s unpack that statement. It’s a tautology, a statement that is circular in reasoning and is thus always true under any possible circumstances. Often, tautologies are simply meaningless. For example, Polonious’ line in Hamlet, “Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is’t but to be nothing else but mad?” Another fun example is the following limerick:

There once was a fellow from Perth
Who was born on the day of his birth.
He got married, they say,
On his wife’s wedding day,
And he died when he quitted the earth.

Although tautologies are often quite uninformative, they can be used to imply another meaning quite effectively. For example, “I’ll get there when I get there,” is used to challenge someone who is hurrying the speaker to arrive somewhere faster. “It is what it is” is used to calm someone who is unhappy with the way things are going. And “I am who I am” communicates that I cannot change, usually when a change in my behavior has been suggested. Therefore, tautology can be a rhetorical device that defuses expectations or outside influences on the meaning of a phrase by defining the phrase with itself.

Now let’s go back to the statement “Love is love” for a moment. What the mother was saying to the gay man is, “I am okay with your homosexual love, because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions or expectations on what you have with your husband, and belie its being called love. Nothing defines love except love itself.”

Nothing defines love except love. It is self-existent. Is that true? For those that espouse belief in YHWH, the God of the Bible, it is not. Love is defined not as a self-existent phenomenon or experience, but by Him.

God is love. (1 John 4:8)

If God defines love, then what he says about it matters. Suffice it to say, for now, that God’s message throughout the Bible is pretty clear that love, in the romantic (eros) sense, is reserved for the protected santcum of marriage.

Which takes us to the second statement: “Family is family”. Is family as good as it can get in whatever form it may take? Is family a self-existent self-affirming bond that can happen between any people? In a sense of the word, yes, “family” simply means the people you are committed to in phileo love, who you do life with. I think of the 90’s sitcom Full House, where widowed father Danny Tanner enlists his brother-in-law and his best friend to help raise his three daughters. Close, unique family bonds of love existed in that house.  But that’s not the sense of “family” that The New Normal means; the show is grasping for more ground with the word. It’s talking about a core family, the kind that blossoms crucially from marriage and eros love. In fact, I believe we could use “marriage” as a synonym for what they mean. The woman says to the gay man, in essence, “I am okay with your homosexual family (marriage), because no outside influences have the right to impose their definitions and expectations on the kind of relationship you have with your partner. Whenever two people decide to be family, they are lawfully family, because nothing defines family except family itself.”

Nothing defines family except the people in the family. “Two mutually consenting adults.” Is this true? Not if you believe in the God of the Bible. The family/marriage was instituted by God and defined by Him.

Then the Lord God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him… And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man… Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. (Genesis 2:18-24)

When two people enter marriage, they enter a state designed and instituted by God. In the Garden of Eden, God designed woman especially for man. Indeed, God brought the woman to the man Himself. “Therefore a man shall leave…” means that the enduring human institution of marriage is based on this act of God in the Garden. God created family between a man and a woman, for special purposes, not only for compatibility and complementation, but also for reproduction (which cannot be naturally replicated by other adaptations of the family), and beyond even that, for the analogous manifestation of his love-relationship to his people, the Church (Ephesians 5:22-33). God Himself “joins together” what no man can separate (Matthew 19:4-9). God is intimately involved in this union; it does not just have to do with two willing partners.

So, are the ideals of love and family subject to any outside definition? We are faced with a choice: Either we submit our definitions of love and family to God, believing him to be the wellspring of wisdom, whose laws are for our good, or we submit God to our definitions of love and family, making love and family ultimate, making them good and right whenever the heart invokes them. “God [according to concept of him that is compatible with my interests] would never say something like that. He wants us all to be happy.”

What then will reign in our hearts with the self-evident force of tautology? For my part, I prefer to say with joy, “God is God, and his definitions are his definitions.”