Earlier this year, a Baltimore Maryland Circuit Court judge ruled in favor of nine gay couples, ruling that Maryland?s law defining marriage as being between a man and a woman violated the state?s Constitution. In the ruling, Judge M. Brooke Murdock stated: ?Although tradition and societal values are important, they cannot be given so much weight that they alone will justify a discriminatory statutory classification,? the decision states. ?When tradition is the guise under which prejudice or animosity hides, it is not a legitimate state interest.? Pro-gay marriage advocates were jubilant, stating it takes them ?one step closer to ensuring that the right of equal protection applies to everyone.?
With the ruling, Baltimore became another victim of judicial activism and intentional constitutional misinterpretation. And now the Pandoran box has been opened. Shall equal protection apply also to polygamy, and if so, what about other sexual groups? What bothers me is the inability to have any sane dialogue on this issue. Just like race relations, the issue is so clouded with name-calling and emotions that people have just stopped thinking. If you are against gay marriage you must hate gays, the argument follows, and that is just not true. I am against polygamy for exactly the same reasons, but I do not hate them either. (And actually, polygamy has more historical support.) So, what is really behind this attack on the values that has served our country for centuries? Sometimes it is just as simple as gays who just want to be married, but for others I feel there is a deeper issue. I think some want to fundamentally rewrite society. Take the review on the book Virtual Equality, where the author draws attention to the
tension between gay activists who simply want rights, such as the right to marry, adopt children or serve openly in the military, vs. those who want liberation, that is, to fundamentally change the institutions of marriage, the family and society as a whole. Put another way, rather than fighting for a place at the table, liberationists want to replace the table all together. In fact, they want everyone to be sitting in the living room on the floor in a circle. The link is here.
Though the novel 1984 was a work on fiction, Orwell does a great job of illustrating the concept that those who control words control society. As I said in an article previously, I continue to hear many people talk about the concept of discrimination (which means to show partiality, bias, or prejudice) and intolerance as a justification for moral relativism. The truth is that the progressives are using these words to demonize those standing against them and thus allow their ideas to spread easier. This is the reason for the ever- growing attacks on Christianity and their value system. I am the first to say most discrimination is wrong, but the left is misusing such words as discrimination, intolerance, and hate in an effort to make it impossible for those who do not share their values to disagree with them. For example, it is nearly impossible today to criticize urban culture without being called racist, and that is a misuse of the word racist. All cultures and beliefs should be held to critique at one time or another, to not do so is exceedingly dangerous. Like political correctness and newspeak, progressives are using these words as an effort to control behavior by controlling words. But is intolerance and discrimination always a bad thing? Or to put it in another way isn?t it just for concepts like pedophilia not to be tolerated? Thus intolerance is not always a bad thing; it depends on its context. However these words and concepts are being cleverly misused in order to modify our culture progressively. In the end it is as simple as this, to tolerate everything means to believe in nothing.
Many ultra-liberals have very different lifestyles that the average American. Some are as radical as the feminist Catherine MacKinnon, who once said ?all heterosexual intercourse is rape.? Many are outright hostile to traditional Christian concepts of right and wrong, and thus they are attacking these concepts. It can be easily summed up by this famous quote, ?If God is dead, all things are permissible.? (And for those who are ready to name call: I don?t hate gays. There has always been gays, and always will. And they should be left alone and have all the same individual right save marriage. I am even in favor of civil unions. But the activists will not stop with that. And they have fought well, some progressive groups calling themselves the People for the American Way, which is quite absurd, but reads a lot better then People for the Homosexual Way or Radical Liberal Way. But it is all how you market yourself, and currently progressives are better then conservatives in this regard.
Throughout history marriage has been the bedrock of our society, and if marriage is tampered with, so is our society. I believe changing the meaning of definitions of values has consequences. If the meaning of marriage becomes open to interpretation, then thus it will have no meaning at all and the institution itself will be dead. Think I?m reaching? Well, liberal groups have attacked the definition of the word family for decades, and thus the concept of a nuclear family (the traditional definition of a family) has died in many inner city African-American communities. The result is more crime, more teen pregnancy, and so on. Whatever the liberal liars say, studies has shown children with a mom and dad tend to be more successful then those without. Now with the transgender movement even the concept of sex is under attack. What does all these different views mean at the end? Well if a definition means different things to different people, then it can be further watered down to mean anything. And a definition that means anything ultimately it does not mean anything. Or, to sum it up. moral relativism ultimately means no morals at all. It is already happening. Think about what marriage, family, decency meant a few decades ago, and what they mean now. I think this is the end goal for the most radical liberal, to destroy marriage, traditional values, and perhaps even such basic concepts as male and female.
Ms. Maggie Gallagher, in her excellent article, In Defense of the Family, makes some excellent points about the state of affairs in Massachusetts, and how changing the definition of marriage may ultimately change the definition of gender.
Gov. Romney was in Washington, D.C., making the single most eloquent and articulate defense of our traditional understanding of marriage I have heard from an American politician.
Then he asked the question we should all be asking: “Given the decision of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. . . Should we abandon marriage as we know it and as it was known by the framers of our Constitution? Has America been wrong about marriage for 200 plus years? Were generations that spanned thousands of years from all the civilizations of the world wrong about marriage? Are the philosophies and teachings of all the world’s major religions simply wrong? Or is it more likely that four people among the seven that sat in a court in Massachusetts have erred? I believe that is the case.”
The advocates tell us the skies have not fallen in Massachusetts; nothing has changed, they assure us. Romney points out that small things have already begun to change, foretelling the bigger, sadder changes to come. First, the marriage licenses change so they no longer read husband and wife but “Party A” and “Party B.” The Department of Health insists that birth certificates also change. The line for mother and father becomes “Parent A” and “Parent B.”
So far the governor has resisted, but ultimately the same court that could see no reason why marriage involves a husband and wife other than “animus” will decide whether or not we still think the language of mothers and fathers is appropriate. …
The transformation of mother and father into “Parent A” and “Parent B” is the model of the paradigm shift now underway in Massachusetts. The distinctive features of the union of male and female are going to have to be removed from our notions of marriage and family. The experience of same-sex couples will become the new norm for family life, because the “unisex” idea that gender has no public significance is the only model that can be construed as “inclusive” of both opposite-sex and same-sex unions. The result is not neutrality but the active promotion of a new unisex ideal, in which the distinctive features of opposite-sex relations will be submerged, marginalized, cast to one side, and redefined as discrimination in order to protect the new court-ordered public moral standard of the equality of same-sex and opposite-sex couples.
Here’s Gov. Romney’s estimate of the future: “[C]hanging the definition of marriage to include same-sex unions will lead to further far-reaching changes that also would influence the development of our children. For example, school textbooks and classroom instruction may be required to assert absolute societal indifference between traditional marriage and same-sex practice.” from Marriage Debate.
Some may think I exaggerate. But have you ever noticed how many of the liberals who are often for gay marriage in the same breath are also some of most hostile towards traditional values and often marriage itself? (and those people who don?t see the use of a social institution are the last people who should be allowed to reform it.) I argued with a liberal once who argued strongly for gay marriage. Later, he told me he thought marriage was a harmful institution and did not see anything bizarre or contradictory in his thought process. (I also spoke with a N.O.W. worker, who after attacking my conservative values, admitted she was having an affair with a married women. She was for gay marriage and saw nothing wrong with her behavior at all. But perhaps I should not have been surprised that some who are the most flexible with their meanings and values also are those most likely to hold them to little regard.)
This is the slope, if you allow gay marriage, someone is going to push for polygamy. (And I would like a logical reason to allow gay marriage and not to allow polygamy.) Someone else will push for something else, and in the end the definition of marriage will have no meaning at all. And I think that is the point. I believe that some really do want gay marriage, but, again, I think the deeper agenda of some others is to destroy traditional values and marriage itself. Think I?m exaggerating? Again, many pro-gay rights advocates have admitted their end goal is to change the fabric of society itself. In short, if a definition is open to interpretation, how much meaning can it have? And that is the danger to our values, to the very fabric of our society.
Finally, 10 percent of the population has no right to dictate terms to 90 percent of the population. If the activists want some attempt at legitimacy, put it to a state referendum, and let the people decide, not some judge. But most of the activists know they will loose that way, and thus they have decided the judicial route is more productive. Sadly, I have noticed many of the conservative blogs have been rather quiet on this issue. It appears to me that many has unknowingly accepted a slow surrender in the cultural war, thinking that simply voting once every few years is enough. The Republican Party itself, in my opinion, has not confronted some of the core moral issues in this culture battle. Though their election strategy in the past has proven successful, they might find themselves continuing to win election battles but loosing in the end the war, the cultural war. It is our culture, and in the end it is up to us to defend
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