An opponent of same-sex marriage protests outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington June 18.(CNS photo/Carlos Barria, Reuters)
Posted on 06/26/2015 3:47:29 PM PDT by NYer
In the wake of the Supreme Court’s marriage decision, these sober thoughts occur:
(1) The Supreme Court of the United States [SCOTUS] has rendered a decision that puts the Court at odds with the Constitution, with reason, and with biblical religion.
(2) SCOTUS has gotten it wrong before. It got it wrong on race in Dred Scott and it repeated the mistake in Plessy vs. Ferguson (which upheld segregated public facilities). It got it wrong by concocting a constitutional “right” to abortion-on-demand in Roe vs. Wade and doubled-down on that mistake by getting it wrong on abortion again in Casey vs. Planned Parenthood. Now SCOTUS has gotten it wrong on marriage. There are remedies to SCOTUS getting it wrong; one of them is a careful re-examination, during the 2016 campaign, of the theory of “judicial supremacy,” which holds that the Constitution means whatever a majority of the Court says it means.
(3) The marriage battle was lost in the culture long before it was lost in the courts. The foundations of our culture have eroded; now, the New Normal insists that literally everything is plastic, malleable, and subject to acts of human will. The result is a moment of profound moral incoherence in which understandings of human nature and human happiness that have stood the test of experience for millennia are being discarded as mere rubbish – and those who resist trashing the moral patrimony of humanity are dismissed as irrational bigots, religious fanatics, or both. This New Normal is willfulness-on-steroids, especially when that willfulness involves human sexuality. Nothing, it seems, constitutes aberrant behavior – except the public defense of traditional virtue.
(4) The Catholic Church in the United States bears its share of responsibility for this incoherence. It was clear sixty years ago that the old mainline Protestant cultural hegemony was fading, that an alternative cultural foundation for American democracy was necessary, and that a new cadre of citizen-leaders, capable of articulating the moral truths on which the American democratic experiment rests, had to be raised up – and the prime candidate for doing all that was the Catholic Church. It might have happened. But too much of the Church’s clerical and lay leadership lost its nerve after Humanae Vitae; the window of opportunity closed amidst the maelstrom of the Sixties and the decadence of the Seventies; and the forces of incoherence won the day .
(5) The New Normal will not leave the Catholic Church alone. Like everyone else who contests the New Normal’s ideology of Anything Goes, the Catholic Church will be aggressively attacked for daring to oppose that ideology. So the Church must learn, fast, how to play good defense, defending the right of our people and our institutions to be themselves; it will do a service to America in the process. (A good primer for thinking through these issues is the recent pastoral letter by Cardinal Donald Wuerl of Washington, Being Catholic Today: Catholic Identity in an Age of Challenge.)
(6) The long-term answer to the New Normal – and to the dictatorship of relativism the New Normal is trying to impose on the universities and professions (without encountering much resistance), on traditional religious communities (less successfully, so far), and on individuals (through reprehensible but effective bullying and shaming) – is the re-conversion of the United States to right reason, moral truth, and a biblical way of seeing the world. This is a multigenerational project; it will necessarily be ecumenical and interreligious. From the Catholic point of view, the only possible response to the New Normal is a robustly evangelical Catholicism: one that displays true happiness in lives of solidarity with others; one that links that happiness and solidarity to friendship with Jesus Christ and the truths his Church teaches, inviting others to consider “a still more excellent way” [1 Corinthians 12.31].
(7) And that means a thorough catechesis of the Catholic people of the United States, not least through preaching: preaching that forthrightly challenges the too-often-typical Catholic shrug at the New Normal; preaching that calls Catholics to deeper friendship with Christ, meaning deeper conversion to his truth.
Catholic ping!
It will be very interesting to see the can of worms that will be opened if a Catholic Priest, Baptist Minister, or Mormon Elder gets put in prison by a left-wing judge for contempt of court for refusing to perform a same-sex wedding.
45 Communist Goals
Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35 January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals [1963]:
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to "eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them "censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal, natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the "big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to solve economic, political or social problems.
The “new normal”: same as the old abnormal.
No, the Catholic Church will not change. What will probably happen is that there will be a challenge of a gay wedding somewhere, then a lawsuit, then the Catholic Church will drop its tax exempt status and stand firm for traditional marriage. Or there might be only legal marriage — and no more Holy Matrimony.
Our priest spent nearly 20 minutes on this at a daily Mass today. He won’t be here this weekend since he is traveling to Chicago for the weekend to be with an aunt who is dying. So we will get our Sunday sermon on this next week.
Watch it play out.
Think back to the sexual abuse and how it insidiously began with one case.
Same thing will happen here....they hate the Catholic Church because it stands for truth. So they (the homosexuals) will attack.
Instead of bickering Catholics and protestants had better unite or else.
Next on the agenda will be attempting to force churches to perform same-sex marriages. I don’t have much confidence that the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses of the1st Amendment will survive that one.
The homosexual “marriage” ruling was issued by a Catholic. All this talk about “the Court” obscures the fact that this is the work of one man named Anthony Kennedy. Apparently an arrogant, power-obsessed, ideological zealot. He “knows better” — to use his own words at oral argument — than the common wisdom of the human race for all of recorded history.
In a sane country, Anthony Kennedy would be impeached as soon as Congress returns from Independence Day recess.
Shouldn’t Kennedy also be excommunicated by his Church, for waging aggressive war against society and its fundamental underipinning, the family?
And all four of the dissents were written by Catholics.
But a couple of Catholics voted for it too.
If fit had split along those lines, wouldn’t it have been a 7-2 decision? Or is my math off.
I agree.
I would like to point out the current religious affiliations of each member of the U. S. Supreme Court:
There are six Roman Catholics currently serving on the court (Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia, Sonia Sotomayor, and Clarence Thomas) and three Jews (Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Elena Kagen).
Nary a Protestant Christian.
Roberts, Scalia, Alito and Thomas all voted against it.
A. Kennedy and Sotomayor were the apostate Catholics here. I was very disappointed in Kennedy.
It’s a Roman house divided then. There are SIX Catholic-affiliated members of the U.S. Supreme Court.
All these decisions against Roman Catholic values are being handed down by a Roman Catholic members-dominated U.S. Supreme Court.
Get YOUR religious house in order. Then perhaps you can pontificate to FReepers who are Christians but not Roman Catholics.
As I said above, disappointment in Kennedy.
Sotomayor is a supposed lesbian nominated by Obama.
What could I possibly say?
“Nary a Protestant Christian.”
Blame obviously lies with all the Catholic and Jewish presidents who are determined to keep Protestant Christians off the court.
The last four Protestant Christians on the court: Rehnquist, Stevens, O’Connor, and Souter. All nominated by Catholic or Jewish presidents. By mistake.
Freegards
“Catholic” Justices: Kennedy/Roberts/Alito/Scalia/Thomas/Sotomayer
“Jewish” Justices: Kagan/Breyer/Ginsburg
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