Via The Blaze
Campus Reform Correspondent Cabot Phillips played “Candidate’s Cribs” with young people in front of the White House. After trying to guess which Presidential candidate has lived in a series of mansions, many of them were shocked to find out that Hillary Clinton had lived in all four of them.
Is America really that great? Or is the United States just like any other nation? Outsiders tend to be the best judge of character, and Nick Adams, a best-selling Australian author and political commentator, gives an outsider’s view of the USA.
What kind of people is Pope Francis surrounding himself with? The fact that this Pope decided to choose German professor John Schellnhuber as his chief climate change advisor is raising a lot of eyebrows. Schellnhuber doesn’t believe in God, but as you will see below, he does appear to believe in ‘Gaia’. Schellnhuber has also advocated for the establishment of an “Earth Constitution”, a “Global Council” directly elected by the citizens of the world, and a “Planetary Court” that would serve as the pinnacle of a planetary legal system. In addition, he believes that the “carrying capacity” of our planet is less than one billion people. This is the man that the Pope has chosen to advise him on the issue that Pope Francis has made the centerpiece of his papacy.
The concept of ‘Gaia’ has deep roots in ancient paganism. Many of the advocates of the ‘Gaia hypothesis‘ do not consider themselves to be religious, but in reality it is a kind of “scientific pantheism”. This quasi-scientific theory was popularized by James Lovelock in his book entitled “Gaia: A New Look At Life On Earth“, and apparently this is a theory that Schellnhuber endorses. The following is an extended excerpt from a recent article by William M. Briggs…
In the Gaia Principle, Mother Earth is alive, and even, some think, aware in some ill-defined, mystical way. The Earth knows man and his activities and, frankly, isn’t too happy with him.
This is what we might call “scientific pantheism,” a kind that appeals to atheistic scientists. It is an updated version of the pagan belief that the universe itself is God, that the Earth is at least semi-divine — a real Brother Sun and Sister Water! Mother Earth is immanent in creation and not transcendent, like the Christian God.
What’s this have to do with Schellnhuber? In the 1999 Nature paper “‘Earth system’ analysis and the second Copernican revolution,” he said:
Ecosphere science is therefore coming of age, lending respectability to its romantic companion, Gaia theory, as pioneered by Lovelock and Margulis. This hotly debated ‘geophysiological’ approach to Earth-system analysis argues that the biosphere contributes in an almost cognizant way to self-regulating feedback mechanisms that have kept the Earth’s surface environment stable and habitable for life….
Alan Keyes defends the Natural Law position while Alan Dershowitz defends the legal positivism side of the philosophy of law. This debate is long… so you really must love the intricacies of legal philosophy and Natural Law. This is Alan Keyes at his best.
(Mark Levin audio at the bottom of the post)
Above Audio Description
“…As for me and my family, we will worship Yahweh” (Joshua 24:15). Gregory Koukl has a challenging word of encouragement for the believer. We will have to fortify our will here in America to defend truth. Such a defense requires sticking to your guns (proverbial, not real), which, may have consequences for employment, acceptance, and the like. See more at http://www.str.org/
Breitbart has this interesting note of newspapers practicing a form of bigotry against Christians:
A newspaper in Harrisburg, PA has announced henceforth it intends to censor certain views about marriage deemed no better than racism, sexism, anti-Semitism.
John L. Micek, editorial page editor and formerly state capital reporter, made the announcement shortly after the Supreme Court handed down its imposition of gay marriage on the county. Micek wrote:
“As a result of Friday’s ruling, PennLive/The Patriot-News will no longer accept, nor will it print, op-Eds and letters to the editor in opposition to same sex marriage.” In a Tweet later in the day, Micek doubled down, “This is not hard: We would not print racist, sexist, or anti-Semitic letters. To that we add homophobic ones. Pretty simple.”
Feeling the heat, Micek later appeared to back down just a bit, but did he? “Clarification: We will not foreclose discussion of the high court’s decision, but arguments that gay marriage is wrong/unnatural are out.” ….
The above sort of reminds me of the many famous pictures (below) of leftist tyrants that merely removed people from pictures… as if they never existed. Likewise, the left will begin to reject that Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, Siddhārtha Gautama, Moses, Confucius, Jesus ~ on-and-on ~ have never supported these relations as mainstream. But we will start to get an expunging of history and historical giants of religious and moral theory as not as “enlightened” as the “liberal elite.” This generation knows better than all the preceding history and our own in order to say, using VtheK’s adaptation:
Liberal Elite: I say “elite” almost tongue and cheek. Elite in the past would mean a small group of people who were very wealthy or a condensed group of people who either were specialists in their field or thought they were. And these Elite would PLAN[icon name=”bullhorn” class=”” unprefixed_class=””] for others what they themselves either wanted or could never hold to themselves.
Today, however, with a generation growing up with getting participation trophies for anything they were involved in, passing out birthday cards to everyone in a classroom so people’s feelings are not hurt, or not playing sports that would have competition as its goal (winners or losers) or exclude a gender… elite is the entire swath of progressive liberals.
Some may not even know how to classify themselves as fitting into this camp. They may not have even the tools presented to them through high-school and college to self reflect on their worldview. It doesn’t matter, even if they do not know they have a worldview guiding their lives, they have allowed progressivism to do it for them, blinded by good intentions, not knowing every tyranny was for “good intentions.”
Who are the liberal elite? Half our nation. Elitist in the idea of their hubris and ego (controlling gender and weather through legislation, and changing God’s or Natures edict of the ideal environment to raise children). All have given themselves a pat on their back and a participation trophy. Elitist in that they have rejected 5-to-6 thousand years of man (written history) applying things to see if they work or do not work. Elite in their vacuous “atta boys.” Elite in the fact that they have swallowed empty accolades and propaganda dressed up as “equality.”
LEGENDS in their own minds.
The men who wrote our Founding Documents were students of history and philosophy, religious and political.
The Elites of today are students of their own good-pleasure or in a constant flux of emotive states… doing only what makes them tickled pink inside.
 Hitler |
 Castro |
 Lenin |
 Stalin |
Mao
The Bible is different however. It is here to stay… even in those socialist, virulently anti-Christian countries and movements… Christianity survived. While I think the American Church will start to feel the persecution and stresses of most of the Church in other places of the world… we Americans are a different breed. We live under the greatest document of restrictions on a government… and clear advice for stopping a government that is out of control — and it is out of control:
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” Scalia said.
“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
The conservative justice railed against his fellow justices, calling the majority opinion “egotistical” and pointing out that the justices were a homogeneous group that didn’t represent the people. As proof, Scalia pointed out that many went to the same law schools, and none were evangelical or protestant Christians.
“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation,” Scalia said…
the Fifth Amendment is that emergency parachute. Here is Mark Levin proposing an option for us to consider:
…If you look at the way the court ruled, then you see that it opens the door to broader discrimination against churches… I predict there are going to be staged same-sex weddings just to challenge churches to marry same-sex couples, to draw attention to themselves, to get something through the courts, eventually to erode tax exempt statuses…
~ Alexander Marlow, Breitbart’s Editor in Chief
Above video:
Gay marriage advocate and author of “Speak Now: Marriage Equality on Trial” said on MSNBC’s “Melissa Harris-Perry” on Saturday that religious people will not have much freedom to discriminate gay marriage due to religious purposes, which is an “important protection for gay rights.”
“With regard to the religious liberties defenses, Chief Justice Robertson pointed out that Justice Kennedy didn’t leave much running room for people of religious objections to same-sex marriages. That’s an important protection for gay rights, that there’s no religious right to discriminate.”
Again, Gay Patriot:
…Does anyone expect the activist left to be satisfied with their political victory? If you’ve studied the history of the Civil Rights movement, you know they didn’t stop after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. There are plenty of new frontiers for the Lesbian Gay Bullying Totalitarians to pursue and keep the donations to the Sharptons and Jacksons of the HRC and other professional activist organizations rolling in:
No, this is not the end. This is nowhere near the end. This is just another milestone on the road to our social Pyongyang. The Supreme Court has rejected the rule of law twice in two days in favor of the whims of a Judiciary Politburo….
Cathy Ruse likewise has a short list:
Anything goes… s-o-o we will have temples for prostitutes in the service of the pagan gods? Christianity stopped women from being chattel, created monogamous marriages as it came to influence government… which created the safest environment for offspring to be raised in. But people who say they are for protecting women are reverting to pagan ideas that will created chattel out of women, as I clearly show.
(Gay Patriot h/t) Hours After Gay Marriage Ruling, Politico Op-Ed Calls for Legalized Polygamy
Man, that slope was slippier than it looked.
Just hours after the Supreme Court ruled that gay marriage must be the law of land, Politico ran an op-ed calling for the full legalization of polygamy. Indiana doctoral student Frederick DeBoer argues that “the moral reasoning behind society’s rejection of polygamy remains just as uncomfortable and legally weak as same-sex marriage opposition was until recently.”
“Now that we’ve defined that love and devotion and family isn’t driven by gender alone, why should it be limited to just two individuals?” he writes. “The most natural advance next for marriage lies in legalized polygamy—yet many of the same people who pressed for marriage equality for gay couples oppose it.”
DeBoer agrees with Chief Justice John Roberts that the reasoning in Obergefell v. Hodges could just as easily apply to polygamous marriages as gay marriages. He notes that now that child-rearing has been rejected as the rationale for marriage, traditional arguments against polygamy have been weakened….
HotAir gets into the mix with liberal douche Sally Kohn:
Now that the courts have made a near-sweep on same-sex marriage, Sally Kohn wonders why polygamy should be any different:
Back in the early days of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender movement’s push for marriage equality, this slippery slope to polygamy was pragmatically taboo. After all, arguments about gay marriage leading to polygamy were lobbed almost entirely with the purpose of derailing the gay rights agenda. And there was also something inherently offensive about making the connection, along the same lines of suggesting that gay marriage would lead to people marrying goats. …
[P]olygamy, as it generally is practiced in the United States, is a predominantly heterosexual enterprise—like heterosexuality (or the male ideal of heterosexuality) on steroids. After all, while the percentage of married women who have affairs has risen in recent decades, married men still do most of the cheating. Conservatives concerned about the high rate of divorce in America should stop blaming gay marriage but instead heterosexual infidelity—a prime culprit in 55 percent of divorces.
If couples want to bring cheating out of the deceitful shadows and instead incorporate it openly into their relationship—plus have more hands on deck for kids and more earners in the household in a tough economy—who are we to judge?
In conversations since the decision I get the, “you are defending your religious point of view… what about others religious or non-religious viewpoints?” Firstly, I use — typically — non-Biblical responses. My Same-Sex Marriage Page makes one point using the Bible, the other five and secular worries that should make one consider the issue. I have written an entire chapter in my book dealing with the natural law response to the issue. I also note that at no time in history has this idea of same-sex marriage ever been even contemplated to be of equal value to society. No religious leader or major moral thinker that helped shape sour society or others ever thought different.
So, while I try to stay away from either expressly or even using my faith in the majority of the argument… lets say I were to do so? So What! Here is [lesbian] Tammy Bruce:
Even if one does not necessarily accept the institutional structure of “organized religion,” the “Judeo-Christian ethic and the personal standards it encourages do not impinge on the quality of life, but enhance it. They also give one a basic moral template that is not relative,” which is why the legal positivists of the Left are so threatened by the Natural Law aspect of the Judeo-Christian ethic…
…these problems don’t remain personal and private. The drive, especially since this issue is associated with the word “gay rights,” is to make sure your worldview reflects theirs. To counter this effort, we must demand that the medical and psychiatric community take off their PC blinders and treat these people responsibly. If we don’t, the next thing you know, your child will be taking a “tolerance” class explaining how “transexuality” is just another “lifestyle choice”…. After all, it is the only way malignant narcissists will ever feel normal, healthy, and acceptable: by remaking society – children – in their image.
Tammy Bruce, The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left’s Assault on Our Culture and Values (Roseville: Prima, 2003), 35; 92, 206.
Justice Without Absolutes?
The French Revolution was fueled by rhetoric about the “rights of man.” Yet without a foundation in the Judeo-Christian teaching of creation, there is no way to say what human nature is. Who defines it? Who says how it ought to be treated? As a result, life is valued only as much as those in power choose to value it. Small wonder that the French Revolution – with its slogan, “Neither God Nor Master,” quickly led to tyranny accompanied by the guillotine. The American Revolution had its slogan as well, and it goes to show how different the understanding of human nature was in these two revolutions. The end result of our freedom also goes to show the validity in “the eternal foundation of righteousness” in which they were set. (Tellingly, the Revolutionary slogan of the U. S. was, “No King But King Jesus!”)
According to C. S. Lewis (professor of medieval and Renaissance literature at Oxford and Cambridge universities, and a philosopher in his own right) one source of the “poison of subjectivism,” as he called it, is the belief that man is the product of blind evolutionary process:
“After studying his environment man has begun to study himself. Up to that point, he had assumed his own reason and through it seen all other things. Now, his own reason has become the object: it is as if we took out our eyes to look at them. Thus studied, his own reason appears to him as the epiphenomenon which accompanies chemical or electrical events in a cortex which is itself the by-product of a blind evolutionary process. His own logic, hitherto the king whom events in all possible worlds must obey, becomes merely subjective. There is no reason for supposing that it yields truth.”
First mock Conversation
Second Mock Conversation
Third Mock Conversation
(Francis Beckwith & Gregory Koukl, Relativism: Feet Planted in Mid-Air (Baker Books; 1998), p. 144-146.)
SELF-DEFEATING
“Most of the problems with our culture can be summed up in one phrase: ‘Who are you to say?’” ~ Dennis Prager
So lets unpack this phrase and see how it is self-refuting, or as Tom Morris[1] put it, self-deleting.
➤ When someone says, “Who are you to say?” answer with, “Who are you to say ‘Who are you to say’?”
This person is challenging your right to correct another, yet she is correcting you. Your response to her amounts to “Who are you to correct my correction, if correcting in itself is wrong?” or “If I don’t have the right to challenge your view, then why do you have the right to challenge mine?” Her objection is self-refuting; you’re just pointing it out.
…Such “exclude religion” arguments are wrong because marriage is not a religion! When voters define marriage, they are not establishing a religion. In the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the word “religion” refers to the church that people attend and support. “Religion” means being a Baptist or Catholic or Presbyterian or Jew. It does not mean being married. These arguments try to make the word “religion” in the Constitution mean something different from what it has always meant.
These arguments also make the logical mistake of failing to distinguish the reasons for a law from the content of the law. There were religious reasons behind many of our laws, but these laws do not “establish” a religion. All major religions have teachings against stealing, but laws against stealing do not “establish a religion.” All religions have laws against murder, but laws against murder do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to abolish slavery in the United States and England was led by many Christians, based on their religious convictions, but laws abolishing slavery do not “establish a religion.” The campaign to end racial discrimination and segregation was led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist pastor, who preached against racial injustice from the Bible. But laws against discrimination and segregation do not “establish a religion.”
If these “exclude religion” arguments succeed in court, they could soon be applied against evangelicals and Catholics who make “religious” arguments against abortion. Majority votes to protect unborn children could then be invalidated by saying these voters are “establishing a religion.” And, by such reasoning, all the votes of religious citizens for almost any issue could be found invalid by court decree! This would be the direct opposite of the kind of country the Founding Fathers established, and the direct opposite of what they meant by “free exercise” of religion in the First Amendment.
Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 31.
Historian Alvin Schmidt points out how the spread of Christianity and Christian influence on government was primarily responsible for outlawing infanticide, child abandonment, and abortion in the Roman Empire (in AD 374); outlawing the brutal battles-to-the-death in which thousands of gladiators had died (in 404); outlawing the cruel punishment of branding the faces of criminals (in 315); instituting prison reforms such as the segregating of male and female prisoners (by 361); stopping the practice of human sacrifice among the Irish, the Prussians, and the Lithuanians as well as among other nations; outlawing pedophilia; granting of property rights and other protections to women; banning polygamy (which is still practiced in some Muslim nations today); prohibiting the burning alive of widows in India (in 1829); outlawing the painful and crippling practice of binding young women’s feet in China (in 1912); persuading government officials to begin a system of public schools in Germany (in the sixteenth century); and advancing the idea of compulsory education of all children in a number of European countries.
During the history of the church, Christians have had a decisive influence in opposing and often abolishing slavery in the Roman Empire, in Ireland, and in most of Europe (though Schmidt frankly notes that a minority of “erring” Christian teachers have supported slavery in various centuries). In England, William Wilberforce, a devout Christian, led the successful effort to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself throughout the British Empire by 1840.
In the United States, though there were vocal defenders of slavery among Christians in the South, they were vastly outnumbered by the many Christians who were ardent abolitionists, speaking, writing, and agitating constantly for the abolition of slavery in the United States. Schmidt notes that two-thirds of the American abolitionists in the mid-1830s were Christian clergymen, and he gives numerous examples of the strong Christian commitment of several of the most influential of the antislavery crusaders, including Elijah Lovejoy (the first abolitionist martyr), Lyman Beecher, Edward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe (author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin), Charles Finney, Charles T. Torrey, Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, “and others too numerous to mention.” The American civil rights movement that resulted in the outlawing of racial segregation and discrimination was led by Martin Luther King Jr., a Christian pastor, and supported by many Christian churches and groups.
There was also strong influence from Christian ideas and influential Christians in the formulation of the Magna Carta in England (1215) and of the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the Constitution (1787) in the United States. These are three of the most significant documents in the history of governments on the earth, and all three show the marks of significant Christian influence in the foundational ideas of how governments should function.
Wayne Grudem, Politics According to the Bible (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2010), 49-50.
This talk became Chapter 3 of Lewis’ book ‘Mere Christianity’ and was called ‘The Reality of the [universal] Moral Law’
This third talk became Chapter 4 of Lewis’ book ‘Mere Christianity’ and was originally called ‘Materialism or Religion’
This essay contains the essence of Lewis’ arguments in his fascinating short book ‘The Abolition of Man/Humanity’
Dylann Roof claims Blacks are violent losers, meanwhile he himself goes into a church and executes nine black people. Is he just a hypocrite and a coward?
Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of gay marriage shows just how much trouble American democracy is in.
In a strongly worded dissent, the conservative justice wrote that he did not care that gay marriage was now legal, but he said that the court’s ability to make this decision represented a threat to democracy.
“Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court,” Scalia said.
“This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
The conservative justice railed against his fellow justices, calling the majority opinion “egotistical” and pointing out that the justices were a homogeneous group that didn’t represent the people. As proof, Scalia pointed out that many went to the same law schools, and none were evangelical or protestant Christians.
“To allow the policy question of same-sex marriage to be considered and resolved by a select, patrician, highly unrepresentative panel of nine is to violate a principle even more fundamental than no taxation without representation: no social transformation without representation,” Scalia said…
Two… yes, the number 2, has now become an objective concept in law over and above millions of years of evolution (Natures Law), or God’s Law (Natural Law) honing [or creating] the ideal that is the “male-female” relation. Both ideas, “Natures Law and natures God” (from the Declaration of Independence), under-girded the philosophy of the moment that wrote the greatest document/contract in human history.
The mission of the church in the West has just changed. Soon the number 2 will fall by the relativistic roadside to plural marriages. All these non-ideal familial structures (according to Nature or natures God) will erode the religious freedom the Founders set up.
But we have a generation that neither looks to history for guidance or to any religious/moral authority outside themselves.
This experiment will eventually fall into the edict of the French (Jacobin) idea of equality in outcome… And to be clear, the guillotine soon followed. Tyranny never follows far behind forced outcomes.
The priority of the male-female relationship is just a larger piece to the puzzle called “deconstructionism.”
“Everything I have said and done in these last years is relativism by intuition…. If relativism signifies contempt for fixed categories and men who claim to be bearers of an objective, immortal truth… then there is nothing more relativistic than fascistic attitudes and activity…. From the fact that all ideologies are of equal value, that all ideologies are mere fictions, the modern relativist infers that everybody has the right to create for himself his own ideology and to attempt to enforce it with all the energy of which he is capable.” — Mussolini
Here is a portion of a short commentary by Gay Patriot:
…Does anyone expect the activist left to be satisfied with their political victory? If you’ve studied the history of the Civil Rights movement, you know they didn’t stop after the passage of the Civil Rights Act. There are plenty of new frontiers for the Lesbian Gay Bullying Totalitarians to pursue and keep the donations to the Sharptons and Jacksons of the HRC and other professional activist organizations rolling in.
No, this is not the end. This is nowhere near the end. This is just another milestone on the road to our social Pyongyang. The Supreme Court has rejected the rule of law twice in two days in favor of a Judiciary Politburo…
Two short articles by R.R. Reno that have impacted me a lot just reading them through once. It seems that this is the best, considering our current climate, response that is conservative and conservatively libertarian for our [again] current culture.
Government Marriage
A constitutional right for men to marry men and women to marry women is a done deal. That’s how I read the Supreme Court’s decision not to hear cases in which lower courts ruled that marriage laws in various states that recognize unions only of a man and a woman are unconstitutional. Lower courts will continue to draw this conclusion. If portions of the country resist, the Supreme Court will very likely intervene and find a right to same-sex marriage amid the penumbras and emanations of due process or equal protection.
We are thus fast approaching a fundamental distinction between government marriage and church marriage. Government marriage is… well, it’s hard to tell. The courts have studiously ignored traditional arguments about the meaning of marriage. That’s not surprising, because all thick descriptions of marriage end up focusing on the male—female difference, which isn’t very useful if your goal as a judge is to find a constitutional right of same-sex marriage.
Given this new legal reality, what are we to think and’ do? First, we need to recognize how miserably we have failed. We sought to convince our fellow citizens of some simple truths. That marriage is a universal institution found in all cultures. That it properly organizes, regulates, and sanctifies the sexual union of male and female. That to say otherwise is unprecedented, strange, and unwise as a social policy. We tried to speak these truths in many different ways but without success.
Clarity about our failure need not entail giving up on the arguments we’ve made. Sometimes things need to be said because they’re true. But facing our failure should lead us to a keener sense of what we’re up against. It’s very hard these days to speak about men as men and women as women. Last month I wrote about the perverse way in which political correctness prevents us from talking about the problems of date rape and sexual assault in a manner that acknowledges the unique sexual vulnerability of women. We have the same problem when it comes to marriage. Our culture dreams of equality so complete that the male—female difference becomes irrelevant. Why do we need an institution to regulate the union of men and women if there aren’t any real differences between men and women?
Our current culture of the intimate life adds to our confusion. Widespread cohabitation makes marriage seem increasingly irrelevant. Our date-then-fornicate social mores run counter to the traditional claim that we should discipline our sexual instincts in accord with the limitations imposed by the institution of marriage. The fact that this culture shapes a great deal of our lives and those of our children, friends, and relatives makes our situation all the more troubling. How can we speak clearly about marriage if we participate in trends that obscure its proper meaning?
And then there’s the general fear we all feel about being “judgmental.” We take for granted the minute regulation of our economic relations. We accept extensive educational expectations and adopt rigorous regimes of exercise and dieting. But when it comes to sex and sexual “identity,” our culture finds regulation suspect, even odious. This involves more than solicitude for our perennial hedonistic impulses. Anxious efforts to secure “transgendered” rights don’t focus on sexual relations at all. Those rights secure the freedom for a male to think of himself as—and to be treated by others as—a female, and vice versa. Most people I know roll their eyes when talk turns to the rights of the “transgendered community.” But they also shrink from saying anything censorious. To give full voice to traditional moral judgments about sex, sexual identity, and relationships is insensitive, puritanical, or just plain bad manners.
In this respect, Pope Francis is both very right and very wrong. We have not found a way to talk about sex and marriage, at least not one we’re confident will humanize, which is what clarity about moral truth should do. But he’s dangerously wrong to suggest that the way forward is to “obsess” less. The opposite is the case, for as both Roger Scruton (“Is Sex Necessary?”) and James Kalb (“Sex and the Religion of Me”) observe in this issue, our age is already obsessed with sex. If we don’t speak—if our church leaders don’t speak—we’ll be absorbed into our culture’s way of thinking, and our children will be catechized by progressive creeds of sexual liberation.
In the new regime of redefined marriage, we need to think long and hard about what we need to do—or refuse to do. For example, I can’t see how a priest or pastor can in good conscience sign a marriage license for “spouse A” and “spouse B.” Perhaps he should strike those absurdities and write “husband” and “wife.” Failing that, he should simply refuse the government’s delegation of legal power, referring the couple to the courthouse after the wedding for the state to confect in its bureaucratic way the amorphous and ill-defined civil union that our regime continues to call “marriage.”
More generally, I think we need to make a simple change in the way we talk about marriage. I propose dropping the term civil marriage and adopting the term government marriage. In the past, the state recognized marriage, giving it legal forms to reinforce its historic norms (or, in more recent decades, to relax them). Now the courts have redefined rather than recognized marriage, making it an institution entirely under the state’s control. That’s why it’s now government marriage rather than civil marriage. On this point I believe in the separation of church and state. The Church may participate in civil marriage. It should not participate in government marriage.
A Time to Rend
Getting out of the government-marriage business is exactly what Ephraim Radner and Christopher Seitz now urge. They’ve formulated a pastoral pledge. It requires ordained ministers to renounce their long-established role as agents of the state with the legal power to sign marriage certificates. I find their reasoning convincing. Easy divorce, prenuptial agreements, a general tolerance of cohabitation, the contraceptive mentality—this degrades and obscures the meaning of marriage. But redefining marriage so that male—female complementarity is irrelevant? That’s a fundamental contradiction of the moss fundamental meaning of marriage.
Here’s the pledge:
In many jurisdictions, including many of the United States, civil authorities have adopted a definition of marriage that explicitly rejects the age-old requirement of male-female pairing. In a few short years or even months, it is very likely that this new definition will become the law of the land, and in all jurisdictions the rights, privileges, and duties of marriage will be granted to men in partnership with men, and women with women. As law-abiding citizens, we join in according the appropriate legal recognition to these partnerships where and when they are accorded the legal status of marriage.
As Christian ministers, however, we must bear clear witness. This is a perilous time. Divorce and co-habitation have weakened marriage. We have been too complacent in our responses to these trends. Now marriage is being fundamentally redefined, and we are being tested yet again. If we fail to take clear action, we risk falsifying God’s Word.
The new definition of marriage no longer coincides with the Christian understanding of marriage between a man and woman. Our biblical faith is committed to upholding, celebrating, and furthering this understanding, which is stated many times within the Scriptures and has been repeatedly restated in our wedding ceremonies, church laws, and doctrinal standards for centuries. To continue with church practices that intertwine government marriage with Christian marriage will implicate the Church in a false definition of marriage.
Therefore, in our roles as Christian ministers, we, the undersigned, commit ourselves to disengaging civil and Christian marriage in the performance of our pastoral duties. We will no longer serve as agents of the state in marriage. We will no longer sign marriage certificates. We will ask couples to seek civil marriage separately from their church-related vows and blessings. We will preside only at those weddings that seek to establish a Christian marriage in accord with the principles articulated and lived out from the beginning of the Church’s life.
Please join us in this pledge to separate civil marriage from Christian marriage by adding your name.
For a long time Christianity has sewn its teachings into the fabric of Western culture. That was a good thing. A Christian culture is not the same as a Christian community. No society is a church, no matter how thoroughly Christian its ethos. But as David Bentley Hart has written so eloquently, such a society will participate, however imperfectly, in the heavenly civilization of love. But the season of sewing is ending, and we need to separate that which is Christian from cultural forms taken over and reshaped for post-Christian purposes. Now is a time for rending, not for the sake of disengaging from culture or retreating from the public square, but so that our salt does not lose its savor.
We have posted the pledge on firstthings.com. Signatures welcome.
R.R. Reno, First Things, December 2014 (Num 248), 3-5.
See my “Racial History of the U.S. – Page”
I posted the below on a friends FaceBook… thought I would share it here:
The issue I see is almost a “pop” outrage. Democrats feel good in taking down something they put up in the 60’s as a middle-finger to the government telling them to desegregate. (Sort of like them getting rid of trans-fats after they replaced coconut oil and lard with it… they fix the problems they cause… decades later.)
I learned something during this whole thing. This is not the confederate flag. It is specifically Gen. Lee’s Battle Flag and was put up by a Dixiecrat. This Dixiecrat (Ernest Frederick “Fritz” Hollings served as a Democratic United States Senator from South Carolina from 1966 to 2005) stayed a Democrat till his dying day ~ like almost every Dixiecrat!
…. QUOTE BREAK:
➤ “…virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” ~ Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;
…I am personally glad for this “outbreak” of faux-concern because it allows for discussion of Democratic racist history and hands me opportunity to note campaigners of Hillary Clinton on stage with shirts sporting Che Guevara, a racist homophobe who killed blacks, homosexuals, banned rock music, engineers, priests etc… as well as Obama campaign offices with Che Guevara hanging on the wall behind them.
…. QUOTE BREAK:
➤ “…not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” ~ Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.
While Amazon and Wal-Mart took down the Stars and Bars, campaign pins for Clinton-Gore with the Battle Flag behing them -or- Hillary Clinton with the Battle Flag are for sale on eBay as well (below-left). I love it… it is a giant cesspool of leftist hypocrisy, and when I engage in conversation with people [beyond their bumper sticker beliefs that keep them warm-and-cozy in their political mirage… I get entire Starbucks soo quite you could hear a pin drop.
One girl was shuffling soo much as I pulled out a book that I purchased off of the Akiba bookstore of Trinity United Church of Christ (Obama’s church of twenty years) and read these two quotes [after clearly explaining where I bought the book to my two compatriots… this was the time no one in Starbucks was talking]:
➤ “White religionists are not capable of perceiving the blackness of God, because their satanic whiteness is a denial of the very essence of divinity. That is why whites are finding and will continue to find the black experience a disturbing reality” ~ James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, p.64
And then I read this one from Mein Kampf:
➤ “The personification of the devil as the symbol of all evil assumes the living shape of the Jew” ~ Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
The only noise I could hear is a young college student shuffling to my left. It was as if I was exorcising a demon from her as she was moving soo much after having her protected world inhabited by reality.
And this is the point a very left-leaning professor makes. To have people in the camp he is in merely label people as ~ sexist, intolerant, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, racist, bigoted ~ makes my job easier. Because one someone is labeled, the person doing the labeling stops learning, refuting, checking facts and history.
And I slice them up one side and down the other like the 1972 movie Shogun Assassin.
Keep this faux outrage coming, I love it. I wake up every morning and look in the mirror and say… proudly, “my party is the party of Lincoln… we set people free. The new plantation keeps them subservient.”
[Well, I don’t say that every morning… I just try to gauge if I am gonna take a dump before or after my cup of coffee.]
