In Obergefell v. Hodges, five un-elected Justices
ignored the expressed will of an overwhelming majority of Americans, ruling
that the definition of marriage as the union of one man and one women, which
has existed for thousands of years, is unconstitutional. In the process the
majority dispelled the concept “that we are a government of laws, not of men.”
In dissent, Justice
Scalia (may he rest in peace) wrote that the majority opinion is “a threat to
American democracy,” and “This is a naked judicial claim to
legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with
our system of government…. A system of government that makes the People
subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be
called a democracy.”
We must recall that of
the 35 States that voted on the issue of same-sex “marriage”, 32 States chose
to preserve the traditional definition of marriage. In Obergefell, the
Court appraised the laws of Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. In
each of these states, an overwhelming majority of voters voted in favor of
traditional marriage: 88% in Tennessee, 74% in Kentucky, 62% in Ohio and 59% in
Michigan.
Chief Justice Roberts,
doing away with the majority’s legal basis for same–sex marriage, determined,
“The right it announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s
precedent.” He wrote, “The Constitution itself says nothing about
marriage, and the Framers thereby entrusted the States with “[t]he whole
subject of the domestic relations of husband and wife.”
Up until Obergefell, since the founding of our
nation, and for the last approximately 2,000 years of Christianity, across all
civilizations and cultures, the definition of marriage has been the same—the
union of a man and a woman. Indeed, Christ said:
“Have you not read that from the beginning the
Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall
leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become
one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God
has joined together, no human being must separate.” (Matthew 19: 4-6)
Considerer the
following. In 1857, the Supreme Court used the same
substantive Due Process rationale as in Obergefell in its Dred Scott decision
to protect the rights of slaveholders to own slaves as property. As Chief
Justice Roberts observed, “Dred Scott’s holding was overruled on the
battlefields of the Civil War….”
This decision, similar
to the Courts creation of the constitutional right to abortion in Roe v Wade,
will not end the debate.
In the short term those
who do not accept the ruling in Obergefell
must ensure that federal and state laws are enacted that will protect the
religious freedom of Christians to speak out and to practice their faith.
They must also begin to counter the slick, meaningless slogans used by
homosexual advocates such as “marriage equality.”
Families are a sine qua non for the survival of our
country. Nevertheless, people who want to have sex with members of the same sex
will not be satisfied until every vestige of opposition to same-sex “marriage”
is demolished. Already a wave of persecution has begun against those
opposed to their agenda. Princeton law professor Robert George pointed to
the
increasing oppression of Christians who oppose a redefinition of marriage.
He said that business owners, adoption agencies and workers in several states
have already been threatened, pushed out of their industries, or forced to
violate their consciences in order to operate their businesses. The Professor
pointed out that many government employees have been subjected to disciplinary
action and threatened with termination for expressing their biblical views on
marriage. Unquestionably there will be efforts to revoke the tax-exempt status
of the Catholic Church as well as other Christian organizations that teach that
marriage is the union of a man and woman. The list will continue on. Put on the
armor of Christ.
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