[Torie]

Well, at least one lawyer managed to discern that little subtle distinction to which you allude. :)

[risk]

Apparently, the Ohioan is asking us to accept legal positivism. In a nutshell, it's the notion that ethics and the law are two separate issues, and a controlling sovereign is required for arbitrating the law. That can be any particular authority, such as democratic rule or judicial arbitration. He's not content to say that men are free to argue the merits of law (including its morality) until they finally decide what it should be. If it's arguably Christian, then a sovereign exists to arbitrate it out of existence, namely the judiciary.

Others of us are arguing from either a position of natural law, or one in which natural law takes precedence over the authority of our positivist sovereignty.

Samuel Adams referred to natural law as being the source of our rights in his famous Rights of the Colonists speech to the Boston town meeting in 1772. Our Declaration of Independence refers to the laws of nature and nature's God. I would suggest that it will be possible to make an excellent case for proving the intent of our founding fathers to establish natural law as our fundamental system for determining the "correctness" or "merit" of laws.

So long as America is free, and Americans recognize that our rights come from outside the state, from something on a higher plane than ours, something far more eternal than our corruptible opinions and preferences, then we will recognize that mankind is not free to establish sovereigns to determine the laws that rule us. We will not first look to human "progress" or today's "social conscience" fad for arbitration on law. Nature informs us that one man and one woman unite to conceive, bear, nurture, and educate children as a couple. No artificially construed "right" exists outside this simple, observable process. No earthly sovereign can undo that natural fact. Therefore, we are not obligated as citizens to support other arrangements. That this would violate their natural expectations of the system of marriage would be a violation of Locke's agreement of consensual government between citizens and their state.