In the ongoing debate on the definition of marriage (yes, it rages on, see
Kentucky and
Virginia), I have
made it clear
more
than
once
that both sides are making a moral argument, and thus it is futile for anyone
to decry the “legislating of morality.” I have also made it clear that, whether
the issue is marriage or homosexuality, and whether one appeals to Scripture,
Natural Law, or
science,
the morally superior position lies with the conservative Christian views on
these matters.
When I ask a liberal upon what moral authority he relies
when he reaches his pro-homosexual/same-sex marriage conclusions, inevitably
the answer is the U.S. Constitution. No doubt, throughout our history, in order
to further the pagan liberal agenda, liberal jurists have “interpreted” the
U.S. Constitution nearly beyond recognition.
If you doubt my use of the word “pagan,” consider that, 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).”
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, and “Do
What Thou Wilt” is a guiding philosophy for
one of the major
U.S. political
parties.
Thus, displays of the Ten Commandments on public property
are ruled to violate the U.S. Constitution, while businesses peddling
pornography are seen to be protected by it. When ruling on a matter pertaining
to the Constitution, courts ultimately will rely on the words and deeds (though
often rather selectively) of our Founders as evidence to the correct
interpretation of the words of the Constitution.
One would have to have been raised by squirrels (or be a
cast member of an MTV reality program) to be an adult in the U.S. and not at
least have heard of the “Separation of Church and State.” In declaring
government religious (mainly Christian) expression unconstitutional, the courts
refer to the First Amendment, and they interpret that amendment through the
words of Thomas Jefferson in a letter that he penned to the Danbury Baptists,
which declared “a wall of separation between Church and State.”
For over 70 years, time and again U.S.
courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have referenced Jefferson’s “Wall” in
order to restrict religious (almost exclusively Christian) expression in America.
Thus, as we weigh and debate marriage in the U.S., it would be an ironic
travesty not to consider the words and deeds of our Founders as we draw our
legal conclusions.
I submit (with sad and stunning trepidation that such a
submission is even necessary) that not one single Founder would give the notion
that marriage is anything other than the union of one man and one woman more
than a half-second’s thought before (rightly) concluding that such an idea is
either a terrible joke or spoken by a lunatic.
First of all, forget marriage; the idea that homosexuality
should be considered normal and acceptable behavior would be deemed a wicked
and ridiculous conclusion by our Founders. Under British law, sodomy was a
capital crime. Sir William Blackstone was a renowned and favorite English jurist
of our Founders, and his Commentaries on
the Laws of England served as the basis of legal jurisprudence in America.
As David Barton remarks, “In addressing sodomy
(homosexuality), [Blackstone] found the subject so reprehensible that he was
ashamed even to discuss it.” Nevertheless, Blackstone declared:
“What has been here observed…the infamous crime against
nature committed either with man or beast. A crime which ought to be strictly
and impartially proved and then as strictly and impartially punished….I will
not act so disagreeable part to my readers as well as myself as to dwell any
longer upon a subject the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature [sodomy]…A
taciturnity observed likewise by the edict of Constantius and Constans: …(where
that crime is found, which is unfit even to know, we command the law to arise
armed with an avenging sword that the infamous men who are, or shall in future
be guilty of it, may undergo the most severe punishments).
“THIS the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law
of God, determine to be capital. Of which we have a signal instance, long
before the Jewish dispensation, by the destruction of two cities by fire from
heaven: so that this is an universal, not merely a provincial, precept.”
Following the same moral precepts, each of the original 13
colonies treated homosexuality as a serious criminal offense. Thomas Jefferson
himself authored such a law for the state of Virginia, prescribing that the punishment
for sodomy was to be castration. (You think modern courts will look to this for
guidance?)
New York’s law read, “That the detestable and abominable
vice of buggery [sodomy] . . . shall be from henceforth adjudged felony . . .
and that every person being thereof convicted by verdict, confession, or
outlawry [unlawful flight to avoid prosecution], shall be hanged by the neck
until he or she shall be dead.”
Connecticut’s
law read, “That if any man shall lie with mankind as he lieth
with womankind, both of them have committed abomination; they both shall be put
to death.” Georgia’s law (surprisingly—at least for today’s liberals) did not
call for the death penalty, but stated, “Sodomy . . . shall be
punished by imprisonment at hard labour in the penitentiary during the natural
life or lives of the person or persons convicted of th[is] detestable crime.”
It is also noteworthy that the due process clauses of the
Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments (the Fourteenth Amendment being ratified in
1868) did nothing to prevent all 50 U.S. states, including each state
that entered the union after 1868, from enacting laws against homosexual
behavior. As recently as 1961, sodomy was a felony in every state in the U.S.
In other words, for nearly 200 years and without any
Constitutional conflictions or any serious debate, homosexual behavior in America
was seen as immoral and therefore illegal. Thus, we see that the Founders do
nothing but support the traditional (biblical) view of marriage.
Sadly, this history has escaped many of our current jurists
and politicians—even so-called conservatives. For example, last year Ohio GOP
Senator Rob Portman, who, for several years was frequently in the conversation
for national office, reversed himself and declared his support for same-sex
marriage.
According
to Portman himself, two years ago, his son Will announced that he was gay.
Not wanting to stand in the way of his son’s opportunity “to pursue happiness
and fulfillment,” is, evidently, what led to Portman’s change of heart when it
comes to the definition of marriage.
Writing for New York Magazine, Jonathan Chait (a supporter
of same-sex marriage)
described
Portman’s decision as a “moral failure, one of which he appears unaware.”
According to Chait, this “moral failure” is due to the fact that Portman “opposed
gay marriage until he realized that opposition to gay marriage stands in the
way of his own son’s happiness.”
Chait goes on, “Portman ought to be able to recognize that,
even if he changed his mind on gay marriage owing to personal experience, the
logic stands irrespective of it: Support for gay marriage would be right even
if he didn’t have a gay son. There’s little sign that any such reasoning has
crossed his mind.”
Notice that? Chait is appealing to a moral standard (one of
which he appears unaware). Chait decries Portman’s “moral failure” while
appealing to logic, reason, and what is “right.” What makes Portman’s seemingly
self-serving conversion a “moral failure”?
After all, isn’t looking out for one’s children noble
behavior? Why must Portman think of others (or, as Chait puts it, “consider
issues from a societal perspective”) to be considered moral, himself? What
standard is Chait using?
Of course, Chait is appealing to Natural Law (more on this
later). He has rightly recognized Portman’s apparent hypocrisy. However, by
appealing to what is “right” in one situation, but ignoring it in another, he
is sawing off the limb upon which he is sitting. For millennia, guided by
Natural Law, civilizations the world over have deemed homosexual behavior as
immoral.
No less than the U.S. Supreme Court has said so. As recently
as 1986, the U.S. Supreme Court declared, “Proscriptions against [homosexual]
conduct have ancient roots. Sodomy was a criminal offense at common law and was
forbidden by the laws of the original 13 States when they ratified the Bill of
Rights. . . . In fact, until 1961, all 50 States outlawed sodomy, and today, 24
States and the District of Columbia
continue to provide criminal penalties for sodomy performed in private and
between consenting adults. Against this background, to claim that a right to
engage in such conduct is ‘deeply rooted in this Nation's history and
tradition,’ or ‘implicit in the concept of ordered liberty’ is, at best,
facetious [silly].”
Of course, the Court reversed itself in Lawrence
vs. Texas in
2003, declaring that, “The
petitioners [Lawrence and Garner] are entitled to respect for their private
lives. The State cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by
making their private sexual conduct a crime.”
In his dissent,
Justice Scalia correctly concluded that, “Today's opinion is the product of a
Court, which is the product of a law-profession culture, that has largely
signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda, by which I mean the agenda
promoted by some homosexual activists directed at eliminating the moral
opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct.... [T]he
Court has taken sides in the culture war, departing from its role of assuring,
as neutral observer, that the democratic rules of engagement are observed.”
Unsurprisingly, after gaining the legal justification for
homosexual sex, the next moral domino in the sights of the homosexual agenda
has been marriage. On November 18, 2003, just four-and-a-half months after the
Lawrence
decision, the Judicial Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in favor of
legalized same-sex marriage. Thus
Massachusetts
became the first state in the
U.S.
to grant marital rights to same-sex couples.
The Chief Justice
of the Massachusetts court, Margaret Marshal,
referenced Lawrence in the ruling: “Our obligation is
to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code.”
But “mandating our own moral code” (“Do What Thou Wilt”) is
exactly what supporters of the homosexual agenda seek to do. Again, what
existing moral code are they using to justify homosexual behavior? They rarely,
if ever, appeal to one. The argument is simply, there are some people who want
(it makes them “happy”) to engage in homosexuality, thus “liberty of all”
dictates that it should be allowed.
The majority in Lawrence also concluded that, “[Liberty] gives substantial protection to
adult persons in deciding how to conduct their private lives in matters
pertaining to sex.” Of course, no such conclusions have been reached when it
comes to prostitution, or polygamy, or incest, or bestiality. In other words,
liberals have decided that homosexuality deserves special privilege when it
comes to the law and “private sexual conduct.”
And thus we see the real goal of the “so-called homosexual
agenda:” the legal legitimization of homosexuality across all of America.
After all, if it makes liberals “happy” then it shouldn’t be illegal. And if
it’s not illegal, well then, it must be moral (or, in the words of Chait,
“right”).
Of course, making things “right” means that there is a
standard to which we all are (or should be) held. As I noted at the beginning
of this piece, and despite frequent notions to the contrary, as we argue and
debate the issues of our day, ultimately each of us relies on such a standard,
or some notion of right and wrong, or fair play, or rules, or morality, or
whatever you want to call it.
What’s more, the very foundation of our government depends upon
such a notion. In fact, the foundation of any good government, culture,
society, or virtually any situation where human beings interact with one
another rests upon what used to be called Natural Law.
Our Founding Fathers understood this well. However, the idea
that liberty, good government, and just laws have their roots in Natural Law,
or “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” did not begin with the founding of America.
For millennia many philosophers, politicians, priests, and lay people alike
knew the role that Natural Law should play in the “Governments [that] are
instituted among men.”
Jim Powell, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and an
expert in the history of liberty, credits the Roman philosopher and statesman
Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 B.C. to 43 B.C.) with expressing the “principles
that became the bedrock of liberty in the modern world.” Cicero was the leading lawyer of his time,
and Thomas Jefferson credits him not only with influencing the Declaration of
Independence, but also with informing the American understanding of “the common
sense” basis for the right of revolution.
“True law,” as Cicero
called it, is the “one eternal and unchangeable law [that] will be valid for
all nations and all times, and there will be one master and ruler, that is God,
over us all, for he is the author of this law…”
“[The] Law of Nature” wrote English philosopher John Locke
(who also profoundly influenced our Founders), “stands as an eternal rule to
all men, legislators as well as others. The rules that they make for other
men’s actions must…be conformable to the Law of Nature, i.e. to the will of
God…”
Blackstone declared in his presuppositional basis for law
that, “These laws laid down by God are the eternal immutable laws of good and
evil…This law of nature dictated by God himself, is of course superior in
obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries,
and at all times: no human laws are of any validity if contrary to this…”
C.S. Lewis concludes that, “Natural Law or Traditional
Morality [whatever one chooses to call it]…is not one among a series of
possible systems of value. It is the sole source of all value judgments. If it
is rejected, all value is rejected. If any value is retained, it is retained.”
Throughout the early colonies, the incorporation of Natural
(or “Divine”) Law was prevalent. The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut (the
first constitution written in America), as well as similar documents in Rhode
Island and New Haven, specifically mentioned that their civil law rested upon “the
rule of the word of God,” or “all those perfect and most absolute laws of His.”
References to, not vague religious babble, but specific
biblical texts, such as the Ten Commandments,
can be found
in the civil law of every original U.S. Colony. It is a fact of history that
throughout our pre-Colonial, Colonial, Revolutionary period and beyond,
America’s
lawmakers and laws were steeped in Natural Law. Of course, this is why each of
our original 13 colonies treated homosexuality as a crime.
Thus we can conclude that from the beginning our government
has been “legislating morality.” All law is rooted in morality. “Laws without
morals are in vain,” said Ben Franklin. Not only that, but as I implied above,
every debate we have is rooted in morality.
It is absurd and ignorant to lament conservative Christian
efforts when it comes to abortion, marriage, and so on as some attempt to
“legislate morality.” The other side is attempting the very same thing! In
fact, the lamenter (whatever his political persuasion) has also taken a moral
stand. Thus, he is like the bank robber who calls the police because his
get-away car gets stolen.
What’s more, those who attack Natural Law (because an attack
on a position that stems from Natural Law is an attack on Natural Law) do so
with arguments that are derived from Natural Law. It is a self-defeating
effort.
As Lewis puts it, “The effort to refute [Natural Law] and
raise a new system of value in its place is self-contradictory. There never has
been, and never will be, a radically new judgment of value in the history of
the world. What purport to be new systems or (as they now call them)
‘ideologies,’ all consist of fragments from [Natural Law] itself, arbitrarily
wrenched from their context in the whole and then swollen to madness in their
isolation, yet still owing to [Natural Law] and to it alone such validity as
they possess.”
In other words, it is folly to make moral arguments in favor
of sound fiscal policy (take note my Libertarian friends), same-sex marriage, a
woman’s “right to choose,” and so on, all the while decrying the “legislation
of morality.” Americans simply need to decide by whose morality they want to be
governed.
(See a version of this column at
American Thinker.)
Copyright 2014, Trevor Grant Thomas
