Given the public outcry about the federal court's order for
the removal of Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments display,
I'm surprised there isn't as much alarm about the Massachusetts
Supreme Court decision to sanctify gay marriage.
In the Moore case you have a federal court telling a state
court that it can't symbolically recognize the God of the Bible
as the source of our laws (or otherwise). In the Massachusetts
case you have a state court ruling that the Bible can't be
the source of our laws. I think the latter has even graver
implications.
Follow me on this. There is little question that the institution
of marriage between a man and woman was ordained by the Bible.
Genesis 2:24 says, "Therefore shall a man leave his father
and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall
be one flesh." That is a prescription for man and woman
to be joined, not man and man or woman and woman.
The Massachusetts Court ruled that because
the Massachusetts Constitution "affirms the dignity and equality of all
individuals" and "forbids the creation of second-class
citizens," homosexuals have a right to marry.
This should be no surprise, as it is a result of a logical
progression in our jurisprudence toward radical individualism
-- the rights of the individual trump everything else -- including
the interest of the majority in establishing a moral and stable
society.
Since the United States Supreme Court in its
recent sodomy case (Lawrence vs. Texas) reaffirmed the Court's
earlier pronouncement
that "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all,
not to mandate our own moral code," it's hardly a surprise
that a state court is following suit. The Massachusetts court
is doing precisely that: forbidding the state legislature from
mandating a moral code -- at least one with Biblical roots.
The oft-repeated lie that "we can't legislate morality" has
finally born its poisonous fruit. Of course we can legislate
morality. We always have. We must. Try looking at the criminal
code of any state or the federal system and tell me it isn't
based on morality. Look further into our civil law and try
to deny that much, if not most, of tort law and contract law,
not to mention property law, are rooted in our traditional
(Biblical) moral beliefs.
It is not just for mercantile reasons that men are prohibited
from breaching contracts. And punitive damages in tort law
are awarded not to compensate the victim, but to punish the
tortfeasor. Punishment -- that's a moral concept.
Not only are our statutory and common law rooted
in biblical morality; at a more fundamental level, so is
our constitution.
If we remove that foundation, the fabric of our society will
unravel, and we'll eventually lose our liberties -- ironically,
at the hands of those claiming to champion freedom. And, by
the way, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in demolishing traditional
marriage, is itself legislating -- that's right, I said "legislating," not "adjudicating," morality.
Secularists in our culture and on our courts are not just
turning the First Amendment Establishment Clause on its head
and using it as a weapon to smother religious liberty for Christians.
They are further attacking our Judeo-Christian foundation by
promoting individualism to the extreme -- to the exclusion
of Biblical truths.
In the abortion cases, the mother's personal convenience taken
to an obscene extreme trumps the very right to life of the
baby made in God's image. In the Massachusetts gay marriage
case, the Biblical concept of marriage is summarily and arrogantly
rejected by four robed anti-culture warriors in favor of the
newfound sanctification of homosexual behavior.
We might as well just be blunt about what's happened. According
to our renegade courts, the government is not just forbidden
from endorsing the Christian religion, it must now disavow
its Judeo-Christian heritage. It must bastardize itself.
Sadly, chillingly, it's all based on a lie: that the Framers
intended to create an impregnable wall of separation between
religion and government. But whatever the Framers believed,
they certainly didn't intend to bastardize government from
its Biblical parentage the instant it was spawned. What sense
would it have made for them to build our Constitution on the
solid, immovable rock of Biblical principles, then immediately
uproot that foundational anchor?
The courts are making quite clear their disenchantment with
this wonderful document we call our Constitution, as they dismantle
it bit by bit. If the prescient John Adams was correct that
our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people,
perhaps before too long it will not be suitable for us.