Posted on 03/20/2013 5:57:00 AM PDT by Kaslin
Within the next few months, Justice Anthony Kennedy will likely rule that same-sex marriage is mandated by the Constitution of the United States. The ruling will offend both common sense and Constitutional law. But it will nonetheless become the law of the land. With it, states will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages; same-sex marriage will enter the public school lexicon; religious institutions will be forced to recognize same-sex marriages or lose their tax-exempt status. Religious Americans will be forced into violating their beliefs or facing legal consequences by the government. The First Amendment's guarantee of religious liberty will largely become obsolete.
There is only one way to stop this development: Get the government out of the business of marriage. Right now.
States and localities originally gave tax benefits and crafted specific legal systems in order to incentivize Americans to get married and have children within the context of marriage. But those legal institutions have been undermined over the past several decades by a culture that degrades marriage and child rearing. Incentive structures that used to provide the cherry on top of good moral decision-making no longer matter enough to drive such decision-making.
That gap between culture and the legal system has led to a cycle of defining deviancy down, with government taking the lead. The view of the value of marriage in American life changed in the 1950's and 1960's; the left used that cultural shift in order to legitimize no-fault divorce laws, legal custody and child support arrangements that incentivized divorce and social welfare systems that incentivized unwed motherhood.
The last bastion of the old value system was the state's approval of traditional marriage. But thanks to a decades-long cultural shift away from marriage, the left is now in position to use the levers of government to redefine the institution once and for all -- and in the process, destroy the American religious culture that under-girds American freedom.
Unlike the movement to retract laws restricting sexual behavior, the same-sex marriage movement has never been about freedom in any real sense. The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting freedom to copulate; same-sex copulation has been effectively legal in this country for decades, and formally legal since Lawrence v. Texas (2003). The push for same-sex marriage is not about wanting legal benefits available to heterosexual couples; same-sex couples are largely able to make contractual arrangements to achieve those benefits, and in many states, civil unions equate legally with marriage.
The push for same-sex marriage is about placing the power of government in direct opposition to traditional religious viewpoints.
And conservatives cannot stop that push unless they are willing to restrict government power. Conservatism has always been about preventing the power of government from invading the lives of citizens. Leftism has always been about using the power of government to restrict the behavior of others. It is time for conservatives to recognize the reality of their situation, realize the dangers inherent in their insistence on government interventionism and act quickly.
Getting the government out of marriage would mean voluntary lifestyle arrangements governed by contract -- a practice that has roots stretching back millennia. Religious people would not be forced by the state to approve behavior they find morally problematic. They would not have to worry about their children being taught about such behavior. Conservatives would be forced to rebuild a culture of marriage rather than focusing on a crumbling legal bulwark.
Conservatives lost the culture. Then they lost the law. They can only regain traditional values by removing legal coercion and incentivization from the table -- the left will never hesitate to use those means -- and focusing once again on the raising and production of children within a culture of traditional morality.
Problem is....what is already happening...momma has ten children...5 boyfriends, collects welfare and we pay. It’ll be a bigger snowball.
imho the government should have zero interest in whether someone is married or not.
Government has no interest in promoting a stable society?
Hmmm... I’ll have to think about that.
make any government involvement in marriage such as taxes etc. be changed to a ‘domestic partnership’ as the legal definition.
Let churches/synagogues be responsible for marriage and those clergy can fill out the government partnership paperwork as well as their church’s ‘marriage certificates’
don’t want to go to church? go to the justice of the peace, where you will only get a partnership certificate...
Same thing is true with illegal immigrants. We’ve always had ‘em, but when the state was not giving away free stuff to all comers it was not a big deal. Now it is.
Not so unusual. My wife and I are religiously married (Jewish). The state has no business in my marital statis. Most of my wife family immigrated to Israel from the Ukraine. According the her it is common in Israel to marry without civil license.
The push for same-sex marriage is about placing the power of government in direct opposition to traditional religious viewpoints.
Ben Shapiro is absolutely correct here. I wish he weren't. But he is.
Marriage is a institution outside of the bounds of government. People who live on a desert island with no government can marry and respect the marriage of others. God invented marriage, not man.
Government was happy to get into the marriage business because when we gave tax exemptions based on marital status, or when we taxed a person’s estate upon their death, or when the State stepped in to direct the disposition of an estate, or when we used the State to enforce marital fidelity, we had to allow the State to define who was “married” and who was not.
And with all things Statist, the secular State’s definition of marriage came to have more weight in society than God’s definition.
God defines marriage as being between men and women. While many men whom God called righteous in the Bible practiced polygamy, Jesus said is quoted in Matthew chapter 19 that from the beginning of humanity, it was God’s intent that marriage would only be one man and one woman.
God defines sexual relations between people of the same sex as sin, that is immoral. In Revelation 22:15, a book dictated to John by Jesus, God tells us that anyone who practices sexual immorality will not be granted eternal life.
But these are ecclesiastical considerations that are outside of secular government, that is unless we want government to police sexual behavior between consenting adults based on the standards of the Bible, that is if we can agree what those are. Do we want Congress to have that debate?
Maybe it is time to get government out of the marriage business and to return it to the private sphere. The problem for me today is that people who want to call themselves “married” against God’s law (as I read it) are willing to use the State to force me to recognize that marriage, which I cannot do. The want to have the State’s public education system indoctrinate my children that homosexual marriage is “normal”. They want to force me to subsidize the homosexual marriage in the tax code just like the godly marriage is subsidized.
If the State must force me to acknowledge its power to declare two men to be “married”, then I must support efforts to remove that power from the State. If people who don’t want God defining their personal morality demand a separation of church and State then let us also have separation of marriage and State as well. If those people don’t want any displays of the Ten Commandments in government buildings, they cannot hide behind the Commandments that protect marriage when it comes to homosexual “marriage”.
I doubt if it ever happens. There’s people on both sides who want the state involved for completely different reasons. One one hand you have conservatives who recognize that a good state can potentially be condusive to a good culture by promoting traditional marriage through gov’t. On the other hand you have statists and homosexualists who see the state’s involvement as a way to punish and keep punishing those who will never buy into ‘gay marriage’ with state power. Statists like that that many are conditioned to think the state defines marriage, it provides too much control of the culture to give up.
Freegards
That may, in fact, be the goal here, where the Government can then hide behind "single people are not being treated equally", in the future, and Revenues can thus be increased by eliminating deductions/Benefits for Married Filings.
Dittos...
And it’s not “traditional religious viewpoints” they are opposed to. They hate Christianity and Christians.
Here in Maryland many couples have their Federal taxes go up because they get married, not down.
Mainly couples with no kids.
Why?
Alternative minimum tax takes away all their deductions and it is triggered by married couples combined income over a limit (a good incentive to have the wife work part time and take care of the kids)
Married couples working at the grocery stores dont have this problem though.
Hopefully the gays will be nailed by this, if the SCOTUS does this.
If you run a business that could provide services to the public, you will be sanctioned if you decline to treat gays as non-gays. For example, if you run a wedding photography business, you will be sanctioned if you decline to photograph a gay wedding. This has already happened in California and New Mexico [1].
You may lose control of your own property. [2]
You might have to go out of business to stay true to your principles, so as to avoid being fined or sued into bankruptcy. [3,4]
From the article:
“Wedding vendors elsewhere who refused to accommodate same-sex couples have faced discrimination lawsuits — and lost. Legal experts said Discover Annapolis Tours sidesteps legal trouble by avoiding all weddings.
“If they’re providing services to the public, they can’t discriminate who they provide their services to,” said Glendora Hughes, general counsel for the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. The commission enforces public accommodation laws that prohibit businesses from discriminating on the basis of race, sexual orientation and other characteristics.”
To advance the legal case that a marriage between two people of the same sex is no different than a marriage as God defines it, the US Justice Department will base their arguments before the Supreme Court that a child does not need, nor have a right to a mother. [5]
In short, gays will demand that non-gays accept them as moral equals, which they are not and cannot be. When the State says they are equal it is forbidden for a private citizen to dissent from that status. In doing so, they seek to force me to give them approval for something that I will never approve of. It is that last point that galls gays the most.
Curiously, when advocates of gay marriage are asked if their policy also would allow polygamy or polyandry, they recoil in horror and insist that it does not. However, logic demands that it does. I would ask how same-sex parents are going to react in the future when, for example, Utah public schools officials require that teachers instruct the children that LDS-related polygamy is just as “normal” as same-sex “marriage”. The fact that this will be an issue will show yet again that gay “marriage” is not about marriage at all it is about forcing the rest of us to approve of repugnant sexual immorality, something that LDS polygamists never demanded.
After same-sex marriage causes polygamy to be recognized polyandry won’t be far behind. Brave new world!
[1] Refusing To Shoot Gay Marriage Is Discrimination, Says New Mexico Appeals Court
http://www.popphoto.com/news/2012/06/refusing-to-shoot-gay-marriage-discrimination-says-new-mexico-appeals-court
[2] Judge Rules Christian facility cannot ban same-sex civil union ceremony on its own premises
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/judge-rules-christian-facility-cannot-ban-same-sex-civil-union-ceremony-on
[3] Opposed to same-sex marriage, company ends wedding business
Trolley owner says move made to avoid potential lawsuit
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-ar-annapolis-trolley-suspends-wedding-servic-20121225,0,7100399,full.story
[4] Baker refuses to make wedding cake for lesbian couple and ‘calls them abominations unto the Lord’
Aaron Klein, owner of Sweet Cakes in Gresham, Oregon is the subject of a state investigation after one of the brides-to-be filed a complaint
[5] DOJ: Children Do Not Need—and Have No Right to—Mothers March 3, 2013 By Terence P. Jeffrey
http://cnsnews.com/news/article/doj-children-do-not-need-and-have-no-right-mothers
I once lived in a relatively sane society.
This was the fundamental choice placed before Mitt Romney when he was governor of Massachusetts. Their supreme court declared that ALL existing marriages were in conflict with the ‘law’ and thus would be declared null and void lest the state no longer required marriage to mean ‘the union of a man and a woman.’
Had he called the bluff of the state supreme court on the matter, and protected marriage by no longer letting it be a tool of politics, this snowball would have melted away and the state would have reversed course, as I doubt that the state supreme court wanted to contemplate the legal ramifications of undoing more than 200 years of marriage.
When did Shapiro start writing satire?
I don’t remember him being completely stupid, so this article has to be satire.
(Yes, I added the keyword)
Correct. The government is involved in marriage only because of the money and control of the population. Think about it. Income tax calculations, “entitlement” requirements (social security, ADC, welfare, social security) and the consequences of inheritance and property ownership. There are huge bureaucracies connected with all that and the cost.
To eliminate the involvement of government in marriage, education, and a huge list of other functions would revive the nation. But it will not happen, because this is all about control, subjection and social engineering. It is planned that way by the lefties. They want us all so dependent that we cannot make any decisions for ourselves.
Failure planned from the top. Despotism.
The only way out of the mess we are in is to DownSize DC and the state and local bureaucracies. That would have consequences that many would not at this point easily accept.
Actually the present statist style of government is not particularly interested in strong or stable family relationships. That's why they subsidize and encourage single parent families, and that's one reason there has been a steady increase in the number of children born outside of marriage.
To a government seeking to expand its role in society replacing the family as the primary caregiver is a wonderful tactic. We saw that on display in the last presidential election, where Democrats campaigned on how they, once in power, would take care of women's needs. Notice how our current president never takes to the bully pulpit to encourage young women to get married before having children.
So as it stands today I don't think you can characterize the government as a supporter of family life. They may want a stable society of people dependent on government, but they most certainly don't want a stable, family based society with little need for a strong central government. Recent actions by the Justice Department underscore the animosity of the federal government to families. Amazingly, when we have millions of illegal immigrants, the DOJ is litigating against a family of Swedish homeschoolers who are seeking asylum in the USA so they can continue to home school.
Given the hostility of government towards traditional families and religious institutions, it would be better if they simply had nothing to do with marriage. After all, why should any adult have to ask permission from the government to get married?
The first step in promoting a stable society is to reduce the negative effects of a large, overbearing government which is damaging the very institutions, like marriage and families, that society really depends on.
The current 1984 style fascists are promoting “anti-families”.
The goal is dependence on nothing and no one but the State.
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