While I don't hear the sound of artillery in the distance advancing toward our home in the Maryland suburbs, I have heard for a long time and increasingly so, what I perceive to be ominous sounds of executive, legislative, and juridical barrages emanating from nearby Washington, DC, encroaching upon our personal and religious freedoms, threatening not only our American way of life, but the human dignity of all.
Having grown up within a mile of the Beltway during the Cold War, the greatest fear dominating my childhood and adolescence was that I might one day look up and see a brilliant mushroom cloud rising over DC. At the time, it never occurred to me that the biggest threat to our nation would come not from a foreign enemy, but from within the halls of power in our nation's capital.
Our government Leviathan is very real and has grown to previously unimaginable proportions. Its ever-increasing reach seems to know no bounds. And what was once perceived to be Leviathan's mostly fiscal threat to the health and well-being of our nation is now a monstrous moral threat.
Leviathan's vast bureaucracies are now its foot soldiers, who have busied themselves with weaponizing executive edicts, errant court rulings and out-of-control regulatory powers against all who disagree with our Ruling Elites never-ending social/moral engineering experimentation.
When will a critical mass of Americans of every race, creed, and color wake up and recognize Leviathan's hot breath on the napes of all our necks, and finally exclaim, once and for all, "Enough is enough?"
Same-Sex Marriage: What is it really?
The Supreme Court's 2015 ruling on same-sex marriage -- and let's start off by calling it what it really is: genderless, anti-conjugal, anti-complementarity, anti-rational marriage -- has no foundation. Far from being built on rock or even sand, it rests precariously on the head of a pin, on the evanescence of modern sophistry and emotion. There is nothing there to uphold this decision, pulled from a penumbra -- from the shadowy twilight surrounding our Constitution -- while the enormous cumulative mass of human history, of every single major world religion and tradition, of biology, of human reason and natural powers of observation weigh against what five men and women, robed in black, seated on the highest court in the land, have wrought.
United States Supreme Court Justices
Kagan, Breyer, Ginsberg, Kennedy and Sotomayor
at the 2013 State of the Union Address
Our country, along with most first world countries, has been lulled into believing that genderless, anti-conjugal, anti-complementarity, anti-rational marriage was and is inevitable. But inevitability rests with primordial, immutable natural Truth, not contemporary falsehood or popular fashion.
And so while current efforts to preserve religious liberty remain vitally important, they actually circumvent the real battle, unintentionally aiding in the maintenance of the pretentious euphemism. Battling solely on the grounds of religious liberty is tantamount to bowing to this strange ideology -- a type of foreign occupying force, if you will -- which has overtaken our land.
The real battle, the valiant battle -- the heart of the matter -- is to unmask the lie which multitudes, especially Christians, have bought into via our own dullness and passivity.
A Blanket of Dullness, Darkness, and Depravity
A blanket of dullness, darkness and depravity has been settling over our nation and the rest of the 'civilized' world for a hundred years, eclipsing light and truth for many. And while we might correctly recognize evidence of this as it plays out in society – in popular culture, in politics, in our judiciary, in our educational system – the real battle begins and resides elsewhere: What we now see happening is occurring because Christians have allowed their own minds to become dull, darkened, and depraved. We've allowed this to happen, not out of malice toward God or bad intentions, but because our dull minds have resulted in weak wills and a weakened, impotent, often confusing and contradictory witness to the Gospel – a cafeteria Gospel, an a la carte form of faith which allows us to embrace the simple and easy while steering clear of that which is more difficult and challenging, requiring thought and determination, honest self-examination and change.
The fact is, whatever the battle for religious liberty was preceding Obergfell, it was a more manageable one until the lie of the century -- or the euphemism of the century, if you will -- was enshrined by the Supreme Court. This has been followed by an avalanche of moral consequences. Now tyranny is at our doorstep. Just ask certain bakers, florists, photographers, reception hall and B&B proprietors. Just ask children who are held in contempt by bureaucrats in our school systems if they refuse to share bathrooms with members of the opposite sex. They'll tell you it's true.
And for those who roll their eyes at the mention of slippery slopes when it comes to this ruling, our president, his administration and members of the judicial, academic, and media elite and their vast bureaucracies are now robbing children of their God-given, biological identity. This is not compassion on anyone's behalf by any stretch of the imagination. It is pure, unadulterated child abuse. Ironically, elites who think of themselves as progressives continually prove themselves to be a force for regression, bringing us all back to a time and a form of culture that proceeded respect for human dignity and rights.They unwittingly condemn vast swaths of individuals, especially the youngest and most vulnerable, to their dark machinations.
Ronald Reagan once said that if we Americans don't fight for freedom within our own shores, "One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free." Today Reagan would be moved to amend his comment: "One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free... and the human dignity of all was respected and upheld."
SCOTUS: Condemning the Same-Sex Attracted to Exclusion from Conjugal Marriage
Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the majority in Obergfell v Hodges (the 2015 landmark Same-Sex Marriage Case), concluded that for gays and lesbians:
"Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization's oldest institutions."
Yet in constructing such an opinion, Justice Kennedy has accomplished the opposite of what he set out to do: He condemns gays and lesbians to exclusion from conjugal marriage – from the only true definition of marriage, and sentences us to a sterile, synthetic life apart from marriage. He insists that people have a right to define themselves, and yet it is our humanity, our biology, and not our self-perceptions which define each of us. His words are perhaps the most diabolical, anti-human judgment to be issued by a member of the United States Supreme Court since the Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade decisions.
In attempting to somehow manufacture "equal dignity" for mono-gendered couples, the United States Supreme Court has set in motion unintended consequences, with many children, same-sex attracted people, and rising generations set up to become collateral damage.
Let's be clear: Gays and lesbians don't want marriage. They want something different from marriage. Gays want a committed, sexual relationship with another man. And in practice, sometimes these relationships are monogamous, but the vast majority will quickly evolve into open relationships of one sort or another. Why? Gay monogamy tends to become very boring very quickly because of the missing component of complementarity.
Non-homosexuals (the 98.3% of Americans not identifying as gay or lesbian) are able to find and cling to their "missing half" who completes them. However, the elusive fantasy man that most gays long for and spend their lives searching for is an impossible dream.
Quentin Crisp, in his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant, identified the conundrum facing most gay men: "If the Great Dark Man met me, he would not love me. If he did love me, he could not be my Great Dark Man." In other words: If I found my dream man, no matter how masculine and virile, if he were interested in me either sexually or romantically or both, he could no longer be the man of my dreams, for he would no longer be 100% "straight." His appeal would be utterly lost. One senses the snickering of the Father of Lies somewhere in the wings behind the hopeless, discouragement-fraught dreams of many gay men. No wonder so many become depressed, never finding themselves truly attached to another. There is no enduring unitive function and the procreative function of marriage is completely absent in homosexual "marital" acts. There is no well of eternal meaning from which to draw.
Varnishing mono-gender relationships with the term marriage and its accouterments does nothing to bring a new day of hope to lesbians and gays.
The Immutable Meaning of Marriage: An Ensign, Beckoning to All
In the spring of 2015, I originated an Amicus Brief for the United States Supreme Court which came to be known as "Same-Sex Attracted Men and Their Wives" and which was submitted in the Obergfell v. Hodges case in support of allowing states to maintain the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman. Twelve same-sex attracted men, married to women, contributed to this effort. Our goal was to let the Justices know our stories -- stories which have been regularly suppressed by the media. We are not supposed to exist. Our existence -- and the thriving of our families -- threatens to undermine the narrative that same-sex marriage is the only route to happiness for the same-sex attracted.
Here is the conclusion of our brief which sums up the message we wanted the justices to hear:
Striking down man-woman marriage laws on the basis of constitutional discrimination would thus send a message to the same-sex attracted that there is only one choice for them, that man-woman marriage is unattainable, that they are acting against their nature for desiring it, and that pursuing it will be dangerous for them, their spouses, and their children.
But the opposite is true. The man-woman definition of marriage is not an insult; it is an ensign, beckoning to anyone -- regardless of sexual orientation -- that the union of a man and a woman is of unique significance in light of its procreative power and complementary capacity.
The man-woman definition of marriage -- conjugal, complementary marriage -- is an ensign not because it is a good idea, or the best among many. It is a bright ensign because it is the truth, undeniably displayed in nature and in each of our physical beings. We are made male and female, as complements to each other. And when male and female come together, they form a single procreative organism. The suggestion that the marriage of infertile couples is a logical inconsistency which throws open a door to genderless marriage is a ruse, a straw man argument. Whether they produce children or not, they become that single procreative organism.
When two males or two females attempt to join together sexually, they remain two males or two females. To base marriage solely on romantic or sexual interests requires averting our minds from easily discernable truth.
Our stories are not based on "reparative therapy," so-called attempts to "pray away the gay," or other efforts to change sexual orientation. Rather, we fully accept the reality of our same-sex attractions and fully affirm our individual self-worth, just as we are. We also attest that our attractions do not dictate our relationships. While we may not have a choice about our attractions, we do have a choice about our relationships. And rather than choose the now culturally acceptable and popularly celebrated "traditional" same-sex relationship, we instead have chosen marriage to a woman.
Here's what the proponents of same-sex marriage and the many who have passively accepted its arrival may never be able to comprehend: Sex within marriage is about generously giving of ourselves, not taking what our eyes and minds covet. I would rather live freely according to reason, in harmony with the universe, than as a prisoner living according to the dictates of nothing more than hormone-triggered impulses.
The Supreme Court has now finalized and federalized the message -- that for the same-sex attracted, marriage to a member of the opposite sex is an impossibility, even meaningless, and only same-sex marriage can bring gays and lesbians the personal and family fulfillment and happiness that is the universal desire of the human heart.
That one-size-fits-all message is false, yet this is what five members of the court have set in stone. The bright shining light of natural law is there for all to see, as it was for the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, as well as for every single major world religion and tradition throughout human history, yet last year five sets of eyes turned their gaze away from that bright light, as if truth had been eclipsed, and instead they peered covetously into the surrounding penumbra, dragging marriage -- and the very meaning of male and female -- into a twilight world.
Portions adapted from Doug Mainwaring's forthcoming book, Marriage, Ground Zero: The Real Battle Dawns. Last year he originated and coauthored an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals consolidated same-sex marriage cases (Obergfell v Hodges), popularly known as "Same-Sex Attracted Men and Their Wives". Doug can be reached at doug.MGZ@aol.com
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