There have been a bunch of things happening lately that have been getting my goat. There are so many interconnected problems that I am not sure where to begin. I find myself in the position of the person who when asked what time it is tells you how to build the watch. Unfortunately many of these issues can not be addressed with short sound bites. That is largely because in order to explain why a sound bite or slogan is invalid one has to do more than just shout a counter slogan or sound bite. In many cases one cannot really determine why a specific argument is generating so much heat without stepping back to look at the much bigger picture that the area under contention relates to. When one does that one usually finds that people are disagreeing about that specific point because it is symptomatic of how their world views differ from one another. But without addressing the larger issues all one can do about the point in question usually involves generating more heat than light.
I suppose the first place to start is by considering the question, what is law? There are several ways this question can be answered. One of the more popular ways that this has been answered throughout history is that the law is whatever the government says it is. Every tyrant, despot, dictator, leader, oligarch, monarch and all their various assorted henchmen will agree unanimously on this point. I suspect that there are even people active on this board who might give their knee jerk assent to this proposition without thinking about it. That’s all well and good if those people want to live as somebody else’s dog. Or perhaps they entertain the idea that they want to be the master holding everybody else’s dog leash? Regardless, that’s not the system I would choose to live under, and that’s not the way the system here is supposed to work.
So, what’s the system we’ve got here supposed to be all about? In order to deal with that one has to go back into history and look at what happened. I know there are many people who cannot be bothered with history. There are words which can be used to describe such people which are not pleasant. I will simply point out the quote attributed to Santayana that “those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it” (or words to that effect). I will comment that history does tend to repeat itself, and over the past couple of millennia the price has been going up each time it does so. Last but not least, I will note that one can’t even figure out whether or not things are getting better or getting worse unless they have enough of a background in various types of historical data to be able to plot a trend line.
With that in mind, let’s look at what the people who played a major role in creating our system said that the role of government should be.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
For those who are not familiar with such things those are the first two sentences of the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. According to that government’s job is to help people protect their unalienable rights and government’s just power comes from the consent of the governed. From this it follows that if the government takes powers that the people have not consented to that such use of power would be unjust.
So, is there a way to determine which powers government can justly exercise? In this country that’s supposed to be determined by the Constitution. The Constitution is the supreme law of the land, and any statute, rule, regulation, whatever, must be in agreement with it in order to be valid. There are multiple Supreme Court decisions affirming that statement, and indicating that unconstitutional statutes, rules, regulations, whatevers, are void from their inception, not from the date of the decision so branding them as unconstitutional.
But given that last is the case then who gets to decide whether or not something is unconstitutional? The Supreme Court? That is normally considered to be standard operating procedure. But that overlooks a very important point. The Founding Fathers had been under British jurisprudence where things were governed by an unwritten constitution. They had multiple problems with that. So for their country they created a written Constitution. That way the average man on the street wouldn’t need to rely on the court system to figure such things out for him. He would just be able to read the Constitution for himself and come to his own decision as to whether or not the statute, rule, regulation, whatever he was being subjected to was actually valid. If as a result of this little exercise a large enough percentage of the population decided that the statute, rule, regulation, whatever, was in fact unconstitutional and refused to obey it, and or refused to vote to convict people of violating it in jury trials; then it was effectively nullified regardless of whether or not the Supreme Court ever actually ruled on it. No lawyer need be consulted. This is one of the more important examples of the consent of the governed being required as the basis for government action.
So, in what is arguably the most egregious case in U.S. history, we recently had 5 out of 9 Supreme Court judges legislate from the bench to redefine what marriage is in this country. This is totally unconstitutional on its face for multiple reasons. The first is that the power to legislate has been granted exclusively to the Congress. Therefore the Supreme Court does not have the legitimate authority to legislate anything. Neither has any portion of the federal government been given the Constitutional authority to regulate marriage. Last but most definitely not least, by acting in an area that had long been held to be the province of religion, the Supreme Court had just effectively established an unnamed national religion where homosexual marriage is valid. And if all that were not enough, in Kentucky upwards of 70% of the voters there had voted to amend the State Constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. So the consent of the governed in Kentucky and in other States where similar amendments had been made to their State Constitutions just got thrown out the window by the judicial fiat of the Supreme Court. But without the consent of the governed there can be no just exercise of governmental power.
However, in this case, there is actually an even more important matter to consider. It would not matter if all 9 Supreme Court Justices, all 435 Representatives, all 100 Senators, the President, the Vice President, all the federal government Department Heads, all the members of the American Bar Association and even an overwhelming majority of the American people were proclaiming that something was law. From the standpoint of traditional Judeo Christian religious beliefs there is no power on this earth that has the legitimate authority to override God’s Moral Law. Period. End of discussion.
When confronted with a situation where God’s Moral Law is in conflict with the statues, rules, regulations, whatevers of some earthly government the only recourse left to the sincere believer is to determine what level and kind of resistance they will offer. Period. End of discussion.
Now to consider the case of “marriage equality” on its face it will first be observed that for all practical purposes it is the intellectual and logical equivalent of saying that “2 plus 2 equals 5”. I will note first of all that the ancient Greeks who were no strangers to homosexuality and were definitely familiar with the concept of marriage would never have countenanced “homosexual marriage”. They would have viewed it as being logically absurd. And given that ancient Greek culture was seen as being especially acknowledging of homosexuality one could not simply brand them as being a bunch of foaming at the mouth raving homophobes.
Then the Romans came along. They had been left with an incredibly difficult task. But they managed to rise to the occasion and succeed. The Romans actually turned out to be more perverted than the Greeks. And even the Romans did not countenance homosexual marriage. I will state furthermore that I am totally unaware of any civilization level culture in any location at any time from earliest recorded history right up to a decade or so ago that would ever have countenanced homosexual marriage.
Now, if all we were dealing with was a small minority of silly people marching around proclaiming the intellectual and logical equivalent of “2 plus 2 equals 5” and then going home to perform whatever perverted acts turned them on, I really wouldn’t care that much. Also if all we were talking about was homosexuals desiring to have a “church wedding”, then God knows that there are more than enough apostatized and damnably heretical so called “Christian” churches that any homosexual “couple” anywhere should be able to find a place where they would be welcome to make a mockery of God’s sacred institution of marriage in something that resembled a Christian church. And again if that was all we were talking about I really wouldn’t care that much. God Himself will permit people to engage in acts which will result in their burning in hell for all eternity. Given that is the case then it makes little sense for me to get either overly concerned about that or even attempt to prevent it somehow.
Unfortunately for everybody concerned events of the past few months have shown that what was actually intended was far more of a serious problem than that. We have seen florists, bakers, restaurant owners and other service industry providers in several different States subjected to legal action and fined out of business. Not because they were totally and completely refusing to serve homosexuals and or other minorities under any circumstances. Not because they were being active on the forefront of attempting to oppress homosexuals and or other minorities. But simply because when they were asked to provide services for a homosexual wedding they stated that their religious beliefs prevented them from taking any part/having any role in such a ceremony.
Given that I have made clear above that for any sincere believer civil disobedience/passive resistance to statues, rules, regulations, whatevers that violate God’s Moral Law is mandated there should be no surprise at all over that sort of response. Indeed, a case could be made that the homosexuals in question were actively seeking out people who they knew in advance would be likely to be unable to provide services for their weddings for the sole purpose of subjecting them to court action when they refused. Thus what is at stake is not a question of a tiny minority of silly people attempting to do perverted things on their own. It is a question of the extent to which sincere believing Christians can be persecuted because they can not in good conscience go along with whatever the latest legal fashion that violates God’s Moral Law happens to be. In which case we are talking about setting in motion a train of events which has the potential to tear the country apart at the seams.
As if all of the above were not controversial enough, there is even more burning thermite and molten lava that needs to be played with. It is quite common for homosexuals to loudly proclaim that, “I was born this way”. By portraying themselves as helpless victims of genetically miswired genetalia/sexual desires they go on to claim two additional things as a result of that. The first is that they can not be held to be responsible for their actions. The second is that they are exactly the same sort of minority as any racial group would be.
The general rule though is that the more loudly a liberal shouts something, the more likely it is to be false. This is no exception. There is no valid scientific evidence which supports the homosexuals’ claim. In order to demonstrate this I will briefly look at two lines of evidence. The first is that it can be demonstrated that a person can change their sexual orientation over time by exercising a certain amount of will power and effort. But if that is the case then homosexuality has just been demonstrated to be something that isn’t genetically hardwired because it can be changed.
The second and more conclusive piece of evidence has been offered by identical twin studies. If homosexuality were either hardwired or the result of a significant genetic component, then it should be almost impossible to find instances where one member of a pair of identical twins was homosexual and the other was not. At the very least one would expect under those circumstances that if one member of a pair of identical twins was homosexual, the observed probability that the other twin was also homosexual would be well above 50%.
Well, identical twins have been very intensively studied through time. This is because observations about what things they have in common and what things they don’t can provide the sorts of insights into human genetics that you simply can’t get in any other way. Some of these studies have covered thousands of pairs of identical twins scattered over a dozen or more countries for time frames spanning decades. In some cases the twins were raised together, in other cases they were raised separately. While there was some variation in the observed probability that one homosexual twin would have a sibling who was also homosexual, the highest probability that was actually observed was … 14%. Thus the claim that there is a significant genetic component to homosexuality fails the test most likely to demonstrate that claim beyond a shadow of a doubt. Thus homosexuals are not “born that way”. Thus they have no claim that they cannot be held to be responsible for their actions. Thus they are not a “racial” minority.
It would be remiss of me if I did not mention the good news before I ended this rant. Because it can be demonstrated that homosexuals are not helpless victims of genetically miswired genetalia/sexual desires, then they can change. They do not have to burn in hell for all eternity. Their sins can be forgiven and they can have the same hope of salvation that any other person who becomes a sincere believer in Jesus Christ would have. But there are certain steps that must first be observed. They have got to decide that they want to change. They are going to have to earnestly and sincerely repent. This means that they have to admit that they were wrong and stop engaging in homosexual activities. They have to do their level best to live the remainder of their lives in accordance with God’s Moral Law. If they do those things, publicly announce that Jesus Christ is their Lord, and believe that he was raised from the dead then God will extend saving grace through their faith and they will be able to enter the kingdom of heaven just as anybody else could.
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