The Pagan Roots of Same-Sex Marriage (Yesterday's Pagans are Today's Liberals!)

In order to understand properly how we’ve gotten where we are when it comes to marriage and the homosexual agenda, one must first understand that this drastic change from long-held attitudes towards sexuality and family is not as sudden as it appears. Our obsession with sex and the attacks on the City of God (as Augustine put it) did not begin with the 1960s sexual revolution in America.

For millennia human beings have sought to shed the tenets of our Creator and go our own way. This is especially true when it comes to our sexuality. Much of the history of ancient Israel, as described by the Old Testament, included the struggle of the Jewish people with idolatry, false gods, and sexual immorality. Chief among these false gods which often drew Israel away from the God of Abraham was Baal.

Baal was the proper name for the most significant god in the Canaanite pantheon. When the judges ruled Israel, there were altars to Baal in Palestine. During the notorious reign of Ahab and Jezebel the worship of Baal was prolific. In spite of the warnings from the prophets (including the dramatic demonstration on Mt. Carmel by Elijah), the struggle between Baalism and the worship of God continued for centuries.

The worship of Baal included offering of incense and sacrifice—including human sacrifice. However, Baal worship was chiefly marked by fertility rites. It was believed that Baal made the land, animals, and humans fertile. In other words, Baal was seen as the god of “sacred sexuality.” To encourage the god to carry out these functions, worshippers would perform lewd sexual acts. Baal temples were filled with male and female prostitutes for such purposes.

The female consort to Baal was Ashtoreth. This goddess was also associated with sexuality and fertility. The worship of Ashtoreth also included obscene sex acts. Israel forsook the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and served “Baal and the Ashtoreths.” (Judges 2:11-23).

A third rival to the one true God was Molech (or Molek), the god of the Ammonites. The worship of Molech included the fire sacrifice of infant children. Ashtoreth is also seen as the female consort to Molech. Dr. Jeffrey Satinover describes the relationship between the “virgin-whore who copulates and conceives, but does not give birth (Ashtoreth) [and] the god to whom the unwanted offspring of these practices were sacrificed (Molech).”

In the Old Testament, 2 Kings records Josiah, the king of Israel, ordering the destruction of “all the articles made for Baal and Asherah (Ashtoreth)…He also tore down the quarters of the male shrine prostitutes…[and] the quarters where women did weaving for Asherah.” Josiah also “desecrated Topheth…so no one could use it to sacrifice their son or daughter in the fire to Molek.”

With the rise of abortion (in lieu of sacrificing unwanted children at the altar of a heathen god, we do it in the hygienic atmosphere of a clinic), adultery, divorce, fornication, homosexuality, pornography, prostitution (especially the child sex trade), and so on, modern American culture makes the misled ancient Israelites look rather righteous. The same philosophy that led Israel astray is well at work in the U.S.: paganism.

Occultist, bisexual, and habitual drug user Aleister Crowley described the creed of paganism well: “Do What Thou Wilt.” As Satinover notes, whether expressed openly or tacitly working behind the scenes (with many individuals completely unaware of the philosophy to which they’ve surrendered), pagan principles are quickly coming to dominate our public morality.

The great lure of paganism is that the moral demands are few. Such demands are decided by each individual, and thus we have the chaos that stems from moral relativism. What was once deemed immoral, shameful, and even illegal is now a matter of “civil rights.” Abortion is declared a “right;” marriage is a “right” and thus is defined however it suits an individual; pornography is a matter of “rights,” and on and on.

And once a moral standard is successfully moved away from the truth, the next group that finds itself outside of the standard will look again to move it. Thus we get abortion apologists, such as Planned Parenthood official Alisa Snow who recently testified before the Florida legislature, who can’t even bring themselves to defend an infant born alive as the result of a botched abortion.

Such conclusions are unsurprising, when, as I noted last year, prestigious publications such as the Journal of Medical Ethics, give extreme pagan thought credibility by running articles like “After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?” which tragically argues that newborn babies are not “actual persons” and do not have a “moral right to life.”

Such fluid morality is also how we go from the decriminalization of sodomy to demands for same-sex marriage. Summing up the pagan position in the current debate over marriage, writing for the Huffington Post, Max Londberg of the University of Oregon asks, “[I]f you love someone enough to tie the knot, then who the expletive is to say you can't do so?”

Also, in 2011 Andrew Viveros was hailed (by the Mainstream Media) as the “first transgender student in the United States to be crowned prom queen at a public school.” Despite being born a boy and having male reproductive organs, Viveros wants to be a girl. Full of pagan pride, and perfectly articulating the pagan creed, Viveros boldly declared, “It's OK to be who you are, it's OK to do what you want to do.”

In other words, the modern pagan has changed little in over 3,000 years. As the book of Judges also records about the ancient Israelites, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

Copyright 2013, Trevor Grant Thomas

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason

Trevor and his wife Michelle are the authors of: Debt Free Living in a Debt Filled World

tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com