Posted on 11/26/2012 7:34:08 AM PST by Kaslin
One significant development in the recent election was votes in four states approving same sex marriage initiatives. Until now, all previous state referenda to approve same sex marriage – 32 of them - failed.
The Wall Street Journal editorial page – a place where conservatives usually turn for intellectual capital – saw this as cause for celebration.
According to the Journal, marriage definition should come from voters, not from court orders. Americans, they argue, have “shown themselves more than capable of changing their views on gay marriage the democratic way.”
In other words, our definition of marriage should follow process, not principle. Let voters decide.
“As views on gay marriage change, and a growing number of Americans support it, politics will follow. This is how it’s supposed to work.”
I’d guess if I asked the Wall Street Journal editors if the American constitution should be viewed as a “living document” – if our understanding of its words and what they mean should be open to change to reflect attitudes of the moment – they would say “no.”
Liberals think the constitution should be re-engineered every few years like an iPad.
So it is not surprising when liberals, for whom tradition is meaningless, trash once sacred institutions in favor of impulses of the moment.
But it does surprise me when those whose politics are supposedly right-of-center, who view America’s founding documents as sacrosanct and give the highest priority to preserving their integrity, are cavalier regarding the integrity of an institution thousands of years older than our constitution.
But it’s a point of view not uncommon.
In the 1850’s, Stephen Douglas proposed solving the dilemma of whether slavery should be permitted in new states by suggesting that they should just vote. What could be more American than submitting the question of slavery to the democratic process of each state?
To this Abraham Lincoln observed: “God did not place good and evil before man telling him to make his choice. On the contrary, He did tell him there was one tree, of the fruit of which he should not eat, upon pain of certain death….I should scarcely wish so strong a prohibition against slavery in Nebraska.”
Lincoln’s rejoinder to the idea of “popular sovereignty” – that states should vote to determine if slavery would be legal – was that there are core truths – truths that define right and wrong, good and evil - that precede the democratic process.
To reject this premise is to buy into moral chaos. Which is what we are approaching today.
The claim that somehow it is a sign of a healthy, free society that by way of the vote we can re-write our language, our dictionary, our oldest, time-tested traditions is a sign of how lost we are.
Same sex marriage advocates argue that their efforts will save the embattled institution of marriage. But this takes a symptom of the disease and calls it a cure.
As American society has become more self-centered and materialistic, family and marriage have been imploding.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 1960 72 percent of American adults were married. This dropped to 51% in 2011.
Marriage and family is the pillar of any healthy society. It is the institution through which children are born and raised and through which time-tested truths and values are transmitted from one generation to the next.
To deal with the crisis of the collapse of family and marriage by redefining what they are is the sign of a society losing its way.
Fortunately, America is still a free country. Individuals can make their own choices about how they choose to live.
But taking personal choices to deviate from our social standards of right and wrong, true and false, and decide to change those truths and standards, so that nothing is any longer considered deviant, is a bridge to nowhere.
I think a lot of businesses will “go galt” and cut benefits back to “employee only”, no spouses, no family. That would put a dent into the so-called advantages of same-sex unions.
Ancient Greece.
No one is “redefining marriage”. That would be like “redrafting the law of gravity”. Both are impossible, because both were created by God and are thus outside the purview of man.
No, we are instead attempting to hide from marriage. Or more specifically, we’re trying to hide from its various and sundry implications - for the individual and the society; for the man, the woman, and the children; for the lawmaker, the judge, the neighbor, and the stranger.
Marriage restrains, organizes, and orders. And for some, that just really cramps their style!
Marriage is the first human institution created by God.
Homosexuality is an abomination.
So, what better way for leftists to show their defiance and shake their fists in God’s face than to promote homosexual “marriage”?
Good points and I agree with all of them.
My wife called to remind me I am off to my annual physical this PM and to stay off my web sites, so time to sign off. The mere thought of someone wanting to reconsider excactly what marriage is sends my blood aboil. I can see some more BP meds in my future.
Amen.
It’s those like Mrs. Parker who step into the debate and lose it for us. By using our opponent’s language (”redefining marriage”), she concedes, adopts, and endorses our opponent’s fundamental premise (that marriage is capable of redefinition) - the one on which the entire debate rests.
Once she has conceded that marriage is defined and can therefore be redefined by man, her final redoubt is “tradition”. (And how’s that going to sell in American culture, hmm?)
She should’ve quoted Lincoln and called it a day. She’d have done less damage to marriage that way.
alas, no jewish version...
See, right there seems to be one thing people have a tendency to forget. Marriage as it is today sanctioned by the courts does not mean that it is sanctioned by God. And any church that says that God ok'd for homosexuals to marry is going to burn in the last days.
Unfortunately, the opposite is also true. As generation after generation of "citizens" are breed, raised and taught that there is nothing to ever be ashamed of, proud or or responsible for, societal norms degrade into moral bunkruptcy.
We are a nation where there are few proud Americans that hold onto a moral code (religious or otherwise). There was a time when people worried about the reputation of their Sir Name (as a minimum standard).
The trend follows thousands of years of human history. So I suppose we shouldn't be surprised. Our founders warned that, if not guarded and defended constantly, our Republic and individual liberty would not last. They built our nation on the dependency of the citizen's moral standards (largely fait based). They put the hope of our nation on the citizens keeping the politicians in check and the governance to a minimum. They wanted a government that was A-moral (no compassion - just business and limited at that).
We have failed as a nation. I'm not sure how to turn it around now that the great majority is lost.
These heterosexuals have long since adopted the underlying value system of gay marriage: adult gratification via sterile sex.
This is what millions, tens of millions of straight couples achieve via hormones, spaying, and the suction curette.
That's why the LGBT agenda is supported by straight voting constituencies. Straights have been practicing gay marriage for over 40 years.
Not all societies need be mourned at their demise.
If this nation persists in pursuing this abomination, America will be sentenced to wandering in the wilderness till her demise.
UPS pulled all funding to the Boy Scouts of America, 10 million a year, because they will not let homosexual single men lead 6-12 year old boys camping in the woods.
I think you need to read the column through again and if necessary several time, because she is not saying what you believe she is.
Under various labels, primarily that of "liberals" and now, "progressives," their efforts were directed at dismantling the foundation upon which individual liberty was built--recognition of a "Creator," "laws of nature and of nature's god," "Divine Providence," and "the Supreme Judge of the world"--all clearly acknowledged in that Declaration of Independence!
As of 2012, as is evidenced by some of the facts discussed by Parker, their work has not been without a consequence in our national life. First, the Founders' ideas had to be turned upside down, and everything else follows.
In the Pope's speech in Germany a few years ago, he observed:
"A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures." We also might add that such "reason" may be incapable of preserving a culture where ordered liberty is treasured.
The following essay restates some of the founding philosophy. Everything that flows from ignorance of that philosophy helps to explain why other supporting institutions fall into disarray.
"Man ... must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator.. This will of his Maker is called the law of nature.... This law of nature...is of course superior to any other.... No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this: and such of them as are valid derive all their force...from this original." - Sir William Blackstone (Eminent English Jurist)
The Founders DID NOT establish the Constitution for the purpose of granting rights. Rather, they established this government of laws (not a government of men) in order to secure each person's Creator endowed rights to life, liberty, and property.
Only in America, did a nation's founders recognize that rights, though endowed by the Creator as unalienable prerogatives, would not be sustained in society unless they were protected under a code of law which was itself in harmony with a higher law. They called it "natural law," or "Nature's law." Such law is the ultimate source and established limit for all of man's laws and is intended to protect each of these natural rights for all of mankind. The Declaration of Independence of 1776 established the premise that in America a people might assume the station "to which the laws of Nature and Nature's God entitle them.."
Herein lay the security for men's individual rights - an immutable code of law, sanctioned by the Creator of man's rights, and designed to promote, preserve, and protect him and his fellows in the enjoyment of their rights. They believed that such natural law, revealed to man through his reason, was capable of being understood by both the ploughman and the professor. Sir William Blackstone, whose writings trained American's lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:
"For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the...direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws."
What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:
"Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due.."
The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation."
Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.
An example of the harmony of natural law and natural rights is Blackstone's "that we should live honestly" - otherwise known as "thou shalt not steal" - whose corresponding natural right is that of individual freedom to acquire and own, through honest initiative, private property. In the Founders' view, this law and this right were inalterable and of a higher order than any written law of man. Thus, the Constitution confirmed the law and secured the right and bound both individuals and their representatives in government to a moral code which did not permit either to take the earnings of another without his consent. Under this code, individuals could not band together and do, through government's coercive power, that which was not lawful between individuals.
America's Constitution is the culmination of the best reasoning of men of all time and is based on the most profound and beneficial values mankind has been able to fathom. It is, as William E. Gladstone observed, "The Most Wonderful Work Ever Struck Off At A Given Time By he Brain And Purpose Of Man."
We should dedicate ourselves to rediscovering and preserving an understanding of our Constitution's basis in natural law for the protection of natural rights - principles which have provided American citizens with more protection for individual rights, while guaranteeing more freedom, than any people on earth.
"The end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom." -John Locke
Footnote: Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
Okay, I re-read it. Is there something I’m still missing?
She’s not debating whether marriage IS re-definable, but whether we SHOULD re-define it. She’s critical of “democratic” re-definition (i.e. Lincoln/Douglas “popular sovereignty”).
She’s already lost the debate. Tradition is of no greater value than a referendum, and perhaps less. And if she thinks - like Maggie Galagher does - that the debate can be won by appeals to common sense(!), well then she needs to find something else to write about.
Marriage is defined. It cannot be undefined nor re-defined by man. Tradition and common sense are mere evidentiary testimony as to the truth of marriage. They are not themselves the truth, nor are they substitutes for it. And should they fail or be abandoned, marriage still is what marriage always was. Anything else is a fraud.
This is where we must make our stand, by saying “This is what marriage is” rather than “This is why marriage should be (insert opinion here).”
You are both correct, marriage is an institution defined by God. Since man has decided we can “redefine” this institution based upon popular vote, we know where this will lead. Why stop at gay marriage?
The real problem is stated so well in the book The Harbinger, God has removed America’s divine protection. Obama, marriage, marijuana legalization (in WA State), more abortions, more freebies, etc are the path America has chosen. Our failure to repent and take a moral stand has determined our future. There is some serious pain to come, all will suffer unfortunately. Expect a 911 or Sept 2008 type event in the not-to-distant-future.
Hope I am wrong.
schu
What's the point?
It's symbolic of his struggle against reality.
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