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"But on the flip side you'd be surprised how many divorcees there are who think it's the other folks who are ruining marriage. Yes, even here on FR."

Flipside yet again are the gay bishops who lecture on social fabric and the need for a greater 'social responsibility'; apparently setting a good example is not part of it, sending your money to the church is.Robert J Ringer in his books talked about the moral line-drawers. Everybody wants to do what they want to do and in our "pro-choice" moral environment, you can concoct whatever set of rules that suits you fine, and damns others. And then there is the line from our local Sammy and Bob talking about the kind of baptists who think "Jesus loves me, he just cant stand you".

Let me make an extended rant on the wider and deeper import of this trend. I am of the 'live and let live' stripe regarding the so-called 'gay lifestyle' and sexual behaviors . Yet something in this ruling feels violative. Why?

In the end, nobody individually is 'ruining' anything, viz. marriage or otherwise. That's how sin works - it begs to be let through the cracks. for the alcohlic, 'just one drink', for others "It's just a (fill in theblanks)". This is an accumulative and collective phenomenon, where the institution is degraded through negative action and built up through positive action. So with marriage too. This latest degradation is a part of a many-decades-long process of destroying the concept of many things, including marriage, as sacred promises held above even strictures of law. Now, if it is legal - it is good; and everything you can do is by definition 'good' since it supresses your 'expression' to be bound by any limits. Result? there is no good nor evil nor distinctions - the goal of cultural socialism is acheived.

And the constant drive by the enablers who want to 'define deviancy down' and force the rest of society to accept some wider and stranger set of rules that must be acceptable to society. Those who dont accept the 'new morality'? They are ostracized. Witness the recent attacks on the boy scouts over not allowing gay scoutmasters. Attempts to broker true 'live and let live' fail, because in this culture war, one side wants dominance not a peace. The organized vanguard of the new morality once wanted 'tolerance', then 'acceptance'; now niether tolerance nor acceptance is given to those who dont agree to the new PC morality of the sexual libertines.

Yet moving to the result of amorality defies human belief. We know in our hearts there is a right and there is a wrong and there is a difference. Even to those who see the world in grays know that there is a dark and a light. Every heroic act is an act of creation, and ennobles who we are as well as our world. And without that nobility, that sense of pursuing the best in what we can do, we feel ourselves cheated even as we cheat the world of our best.

If there are those who claim you can just patch up sexual morality by pretending homosexuality is just heterosexuality with different targets, I say - good luck! I dont think the tattered remnant of sexual morality can be repaired when anything to any other consenting adult is considered acceptable. The Bishop who is the gay Gene offends not merely because he is homosexual, but because he divorced a wife to do it and it living in an arrangement and has done things that all of scripture denotes as sinful. What would he call sinful? What is left? The kids and sheep are safe - for now.

Lost in the shuffle then is morality. Morality is about the duties we owe to ourselves, to eachother and to God. Those duties flow from our habits and habits from our thoughts and intentions. To the Christians of Western culture at one time, the stuff of everyday living was the stuff of sin: Gluttony, envy, greed, lust, pride, etc. Every aspect of these seven deadly sins was about control of our basic impulses - about self-denial.

Nowadays our cafeteria-morality collides with our self-help-rationalism and consumerism to deny sin its place. This is partly a good thing. Guilt aint all its cracked up to be, and the practical and psychic rewards of treating our internal mindstate as basicly healthy but needing "self-improvement" seems better than the path of overbearing sin. Some need to know that God is there when life overwhelms them and they 'hit bottom'. But for others, the 'sin' is not gluttony but being a bit overweight and the penance is aerobics; the 'sin' is not lust, but not having the right pickup lines to succeed. Self-denial? We deny its existence and its utility.

Materialism and rationalism have spun a web that externalizes every problem even while it locks in our internal desires and justifies them as healthy. This is why the narcissistic "Gay Lifestyle" cant be supressed by our culture, which is wholly narcissistic from the fad-conscious to the keeping-up-with-the-jones materialists; it's as if Todd and Gregg just picked a different 'lifestyle choice' off the racks at the mall - who are we to argue, busy making our own choices in the material world that accepts everything and denies nothing? It seems unfair that a culture so attuned to gratifying all sorts of desires would deny the basic impulses of a small subset ( 3% is small in demographic terms, but big enough in the 'narrowcasting' marketing world; big enough for "Gay Tourism" to take off.)

Lost, then, is the morality of self-denial - if we ever had it. (Perhaps it was just the roughness of life that made it seem like a moral strictness. Prosperity makes it easier to be 'good' but so hard to be ascetic.) Some dont lament this change in mores - 'no boundaries' and 'do what you want' is their motto. Some understand the trade-off and see the loss of propriety as a true loss of innocence; they'll want to strike a moderate bargain. Others stand athwart history yelling "stop!". And the last - in my mind the real dangerous ones - are the cultural socialists who tear down the old and build their own morality on the rubble of the old.

I suggest yet another response. Events change. Technologies change. Languages change. Even what works and what doesnt changes. But the human heart and principles that speak to us are timeless. Find the true rock of timeless principles and stand firm on that.

We need if anything to grab ahold of the *intention* of a moral order and not lose sight of it, no matter how much the 'innovation' of cultural socialism tears down traditional mores. If traditional mores fall, much will be lost, but all is not lost. In the end a "neo-traditionalism" can emerge and defeat cultural socialism, as has democratic (neo)-free-market economics defeated Communism. I just wonder if our fate is to be like Europe, pro-death to the point of cultural, social and physical suicide. The choice, death or life, is always timely yet timeless.

(PS. I dont know if the above is gibberish or wisdom, it's just what I feel in my bones right now.)

Look WOSG, I was going back to some earlier posts and ran across your 272 post. Now I dissagree with a whole lot of it as you may expect by now, but I have to respect your depth of thought in this area.

My primary impression is that you have a particularly traditional moral outlook. And from that perspective and the more something or someone strays from that foundation of beliefs, they more wrong they are. and the more harm they cause to society as a whole. As opposed to just being different.

And that is fair enough from a personal perspective. But my argument is that by and large it is the Gov's job to view both objectively and morally equivelent. Now this leads to some pretty distasteful stuff frommany of our poinst of view. But that is freedom for you. The limitations of such objectivism need to rest almost exclusively on the harm or direct rights infringement to others.

But clearly you are a thougtful person - more so than some parts of my posts asserted.

So let me ask you and others here one question.

If "marriage" was to be defined as a union between man and woman, but all rights and privileges of marraige under civil law were granted to gay couples who commited them selves in a "Civil Union" or some similar term.
(Stopping short of family issues were children are concerned, because that is a whole other can of worms - I realise that that would inevitably be the next battle, but lets deal with each separately on their own merits)

Could you be in favor of it?