I’m deeply in love with my wife, and she’s my best friend, and yet we share different viewpoints of life, which I think is one of the things that holds our marriage together. She came from Texas, and she has an optimistic view of life. I came from Detroit and have a very pessimistic view.
I chose ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ specifically ‘cause I had just made ’The Bourne Identity’ and made a film that glamorized being an action hero, and I wanted to make the exact opposite. I wanted to make a movie that glamorized maintaining a marriage, and that made the action hero part seem easy and made the marriage part seem hard.
Earlier, my priority was only work. I worked like a dog before I got married. After marriage, once you have a baby, time management is difficult. Your responsibilities change, your priorities change. And you have to concentrate on them if you have to work out your life. Your career is just a part of your life. For me, my family is my life.
We’re so immaturely cynical as a culture. We’re not wise enough to look at an institution like marriage and to really things about what it means and what it signifies. It signifies a place where people can tie the ropes of their lives together so that they’re stronger. It signifies a place where people can tell the truth to one another.
When we are baptized and confirmed, when brethren are ordained to the priesthood, when we go to the temple and receive our endowment, when we enter into the new and everlasting covenant of eternal marriage – in all these sacred ordinances, we make solemn commitments to keep God’s commandments.
I’ve just concluded – since President Obama endorses the same-sex marriage, advocates homosexual people, and enjoys an attractive countenance – thus if it becomes necessary, I shall travel to Washington, D.C., get down on my knee, and ask his hand.
I’ve interviewed presidents and royalty, rock stars and movie stars, famous generals and captains of industry; I’ve had front row seats at Super Bowls, World Series, and Olympic Games; my books have been on best-seller lists, and my marriage is a long-running success.
As marriage and the family institution constitute the foundation and chief cornerstone of civil society, it is of the greatest moment that the marriage-tie should never be dissolved save for the most urgent reason. I cannot assent, however, to the doctrine that it should never be dissolved at all.
Anyone who watched George W. and Karl Rove while the former was governor of Texas will recognize a familiar pattern. Like much of Bush’s social policy – from faith-based social services to railing against gay marriage – women’s issues are one of the bones they’ve decided they can throw to the Christian right.
American liberals have become addicted to the courtroom, relying on judges and lawyers rather than elected leaders and the ballot box, as the primary means of effecting their social agenda on everything from gay marriage to assisted suicide to the use of vouchers for private-school education.
From 1865 to 1965, my race, the black race, was one of the most competitive, entrepreneurial, Christian, moral races in our country. We had the highest percentage of entrepreneurs in the country, the highest percentage of marriage in the country.
The key to a happy marriage is myself being absent for long periods of time. My wife Leesa and I will celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary next year, but if my comedy gigs petered out and I was around the house more, we’d 100% be getting divorced.
I honestly believe you can never tell if a relationship is going to last. In my own marriage, which is going on 14 years, I don’t think of it as ‘I’m going to be with this person forever.’ Instead, I think of more like, ‘I’ll probably be with this person for the next six weeks. Then I’ll re-evaluate.’
The doctrine of marriage depends on Genesis being true. If there’s an absolute authority, and if God’s the Creator, He made one man and one woman. Jesus came and said that marriage is between a man and woman. If Genesis is not true, we’re just animals, and marriage is just whatever you want to make it to be.
I learned to cook in self-defense. My wife doesn’t know what a kitchen is. In the first month of our marriage, she broiled lamb chops 26 nights in a row. Then I took over. I used to mind her not caring about food, but no more – as long as I can eat what I want.
I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.
Same-sex marriage is not the final nail in the coffin for traditional marriage. It is just another road sign toward the substitution of government for God. Every moral discussion now pits the wisest moral arbiters among us – the Supreme Court, President Obama – against traditional religion.
HBOS had robbed me of my marriage, my family, my businesses, my longstanding friend and business partner, my income, my investments, my self-respect, my reputation, my privacy, my physical and mental health. It cost me my security, my image rights, my collection of classic cars – and very nearly my life.
To enter upon the marriage union is one of the most deeply important events of life. It cannot be too prayerfully treated. Our happiness, our usefulness, our living for God or for ourselves afterwards, are often most intimately connected with our choice. Therefore, in the most prayerful manner, this choice should be made.
I’m 0 for 3 with marriage – the scoreboard doesn’t lie, never has. So what we all have is a marriage of the heart. To sully or contaminate or radically disrespect this union with a shameful contract is something that I will leave to the amateurs and the Bible grippers.
There are many deaf people who couldn’t imagine living in a marriage without someone who doesn’t speak their language. For me, I believe that hearing or deaf is fine as long as both parties are willing to communicate in each other’s language. But if there’s no communication, then the marriage, I believe, will be difficult if not doomed.
Political conservatives need to recognize that multicultural politics is converging with leftist politics, and not only on ‘social issues’ like same-sex marriage. Our Constitution is also on the chopping block, and if you don’t see that, you haven’t been paying attention.
‘Mr. Peanut’ is not about a man who dreams of killing his wife; that’s jacket copy, to me. ‘Mr. Peanut’ is about the dynamism of marriage and the distances – some tragic, some redemptive – that marriages travel over time, and those travels ain’t always pretty.
In articulating all my feelings about marriage equality, I almost don’t know where to begin. And perhaps that’s part of the problem. Why do we have to explain ourselves when it comes to issues of fairness and equality? Why is common sense not enough?
There’s a slippery slope in regard to authority. If you say that the history in Genesis is not true, then you can just take man’s ideas as true. When you go outside of Scripture, why shouldn’t you just reinterpret what marriage means? So our emphasis is on the slippery slope regarding authority.
