California's Epic Battle For Marriage And Religious Liberty (MUST READ!!!)

They say we are tired of culture wars. Tell that to the California Supreme Court, which didn't sound tired at all when it lobbed a big, fat hand grenade into the marriage debate.

Ideas have consequences. And the California court endorsed two big, brand-new, very bad ideas.

The first idea is that the internationally recognized human right to marry includes same-sex marriage. In U.S. constitutional law, fundamental human rights are those deeply rooted in our traditions. Not even in Massachussetts or in New Jersey could the courts quite stomach the idea that same-sex marriage is deeply rooted in those traditions.

Not even the European Court of Human Rights or the United Nations Human Rights Committee has so ruled. In 2003, the European Court of Justice ruled, "Article 12 of the European Convention on Human Rights protects only traditional marriage between two persons of opposite biological sex." (For excerpts from these and other marriage cases see "Is Marriage Discriminatory?" at www.marriagedebate.com.)

So in rooting around for precedents, the California court had liberal recourse to our neighbor to the north, Canada. Like Canadian courts, the California court grounded same-sex marriage in a larger human right to form families of choice and to have the government sanction all family forms as having equal dignity. Polygamy anyone?

Moreover, Canada is the country that ought to be voted "Most Happy to Persecute in the Name of Tolerance." Just last week the Orwellian "Human Rights" Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Christian Horizons, a charity that runs homes for developmentally disabled adults, engaged in illegal discrimination when it tried to ensure that its employees were practicing Christians who accepted Christian sexual teaching on adultery, fornication and homosexual sex. Worse than the $23,000 fine is a government edict that the organization submit to a re-education plan to change the group's attitudes.

So the second big idea endorsed by the California court is even less promising: Sexual orientation should be treated just like race under the California equal protection amendment, subject to "strict scrutiny." This is another historic first for a U.S. court.

This is a ruling which, if left undisturbed, means that Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Muslims who see marriage as the union of husband and wife, and view sexual activity as best confined to marriage so defined, are in the exact position as racists under California law. In Great Britain, a similar idea recently led a court to fine an Anglican bishop $100,000 for refusing to hire an openly gay man -- as a youth minister in one of his parishes.

There are religious liberty defenses under the U.S. Constitution for youth ministers, but not for Christian schools, physicians, social workers, teachers, attorneys, psychiatrists, counselors or tax-exempt charities. The First Amendment will not protect us if our own governments (through the courts) decide that, for example, my Catholic faith is in itself a form of bigotry.

If gay rights advocates don't really mean this to happen, why don't they stop asking courts to rule in this way?

I'd love to get beyond the culture wars in this country. But so far, there are few signs that the courts, or the people who disagree with me, are content to let me.

Fortunately the people in California do not have to accept this outrageous and sweeping ruling. Working with Protect Marriage, NOMCalifornia.org (a project of the National Organization for Marriage, of which I am president) has raised $1 million this spring to get a state marriage amendment overturning this ruling on the ballot in November. The 1,122,000 signatures we have helped gather are far more than the 690,000 needed to qualify. We expect certification this June. The next step is to raise $10 million to get the message out.

In November, voters in California, like voters in Florida, will have a chance to go on record: Should four judges overrule more than 4 million Californians who voted for Proposition 22 in 2000? We will fight for marriage and we will win.

“.. and there was not one major religious leader or thinker in Jewish or Christian history prior to the present generation who argued for same-sex marriage. ..
“Clergy and laypeople who stand the Bible on its head, no matter how well-intentioned they may be, are thoroughly distorting Judaism and Christianity. Intellectual honesty demands that they either support same-sex marriage solely from a secular standpoint or create a new religion from which to do so. If Judaism and Christianity do not stand for man-woman marriage and the father-mother family, they stand for nothing.” ~ Dennis Prager
http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/2537

Tuesday, May 20, 2008
California Decision Will Radically Change Society
By Dennis Prager
http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/DennisPrager/2008/05/20/california_decision_will_radically_change_society

Americans seem mesmerized by the word “change.” And, by golly, they sure got it last week from the California Supreme Court. It is difficult to imagine a single social change greater than redefining marriage from opposite sex to include members of the same sex.

Nothing imaginable — leftward or rightward — would constitute as radical a change in the way society is structured as this redefining of marriage for the first time in history: Not another Prohibition, not government taking over all health care, not changing all public education to private schools, not America leaving the United Nations, not rescinding the income tax and replacing it with a consumption tax. Nothing.

Unless California voters amend the California Constitution or Congress amends the U.S. Constitution, four justices of the California Supreme Court will have changed American society more than any four individuals since Washington, Jefferson, Adams and Madison.

And what is particularly amazing is that virtually none of those who support this decision — let alone the four compassionate justices — acknowledge this. The mantra of the supporters of this sea change in society is that it’s no big deal. Hey, it doesn’t affect any heterosexuals’ marriage, so what’s the problem?

This lack of acknowledgment — or even awareness — of how society-changing is this redefinition of marriage is one reason the decision was made. To the four compassionate ones — and their millions of compassionate supporters — allowing same-sex marriage is nothing more than what courts did to end legal bans on interracial marriage. The justices and their supporters know not what they did. They think that all they did was extend a “right” that had been unfairly denied to gays.

Another reason for this decision is arrogance. First, the arrogance of four individuals to impose their understanding of what is right and wrong on the rest of society. And second is the arrogance of the four compassionate ones in assuming that all thinkers, theologians, philosophers, religions and moral systems in history were wrong, while they and their supporters have seen a moral light never seen before. Not a single religion or moral philosophical system — East or West — since antiquity ever defined marriage as between members of the same sex.

That is one reason the argument that this decision is the same as courts undoing legal bans on marriages between races is false. No major religion — not Judaism, not Christianity, not Islam, not Buddhism — ever banned interracial marriage. Some religions have banned marriages with members of other religions. But since these religions allowed anyone of any race to convert, i.e., become a member of that religion, the race or ethnicity of individuals never mattered with regard to marriage. American bans on interracial marriages were not supported by any major religious or moral system; those bans were immoral aberrations, no matter how many religious individuals may have supported them. Justices who overthrew bans on interracial marriages, therefore, had virtually every moral and religious value system since ancient times on their side. But justices who overthrow the ban on same-sex marriage have nothing other their hubris and their notions of compassion on their side.

Since the secular age began, the notion that one should look to religion — or to any past wisdom — for one’s values has died. Thus, the modern attempts to undo the Judeo-Christian value system as the basis of America’s values, and to disparage the Founders as essentially morally flawed individuals (They allowed slavery, didn’t they?). The modern secular liberal knows that he is not only morally superior to conservatives; he is morally superior to virtually everyone who ever lived before him.

Which leads to a third reason such a sea change could be so cavalierly imposed by four individuals — the modern supplanting of wisdom with compassion as the supreme guide in forming society’s values and laws. Just as for religious fundamentalists, “the Bible says” ends discussion, for liberal fundamentalists, “compassion says” ends discussion.

If this verdict stands, society as we have known it will change. The California Supreme Court and its millions of supporters are playing with fire. And it will eventually burn future generations in ways we can only begin to imagine.

Outside of the privacy of their homes, young girls will be discouraged from imagining one day marrying their prince charming — to do so would be declared “heterosexist,” morally equivalent to racist. Rather, they will be told to imagine a prince or a princess. Schoolbooks will not be allowed to describe marriage in male-female ways alone. Little girls will be asked by other girls and by teachers if they want one day to marry a man or a woman.

The sexual confusion that same-sex marriage will create among young people is not fully measurable. Suffice it to say that, contrary to the sexual know-nothings who believe that sexual orientation is fixed from birth and permanent, the fact is that sexual orientation is more of a continuum that ranges from exclusive heterosexuality to exclusive homosexuality. Much of humanity — especially females — can enjoy homosexual sex. It is up to society to channel polymorphous human sexuality into an exclusively heterosexual direction — until now, accomplished through marriage. But that of course is “heterosexism,” a bigoted preference for man-woman erotic love, and therefore to be extirpated from society.

Any advocacy of man-woman marriage alone will be regarded morally as hate speech, and shortly thereafter it will be deemed so in law.

Companies that advertise engagement rings will have to show a man putting a ring on a man’s finger — if they show only women fingers, they will be boycotted just as a company having racist ads would be now.

Films that only show man-woman married couples will be regarded as antisocial and as morally irresponsible as films that show people smoking have become.

Traditional Jews and Christians — i.e. those who believe in a divine scripture — will be marginalized. Already Catholic groups in Massachusetts have abandoned adoption work since they will only allow a child to be adopted by a married couple as the Bible defines it — a man and a woman.

Anyone who advocates marriage between a man and a woman will be morally regarded the same as racist. And soon it will be a hate crime.

Indeed — and this is the ultimate goal of many of the same-sex marriage activists — the terms “male” and “female,” “man” and “woman” will gradually lose their significance. They already are. On the intellectual and cultural left, “male” and “female” are deemed social constructs that have little meaning. That is why same-sex marriage advocates argue that children have no need for both a mother and a father — the sexes are interchangeable. Whatever a father can do a second mother can do. Whatever a mother can do, a second father can do. Genitalia are the only real differences between the sexes, and even they can be switched at will.

And what will happen after divorce — which presumably will occur at the same rates as heterosexual divorce? A boy raised by two lesbian mothers who divorce and remarry will then have four mothers and no father.

We have entered something beyond Huxley’s “Brave New World.” All thanks to the hubris of four individuals. But such hubris never goes unanswered. Our children and their children will pay the price.

Anticipating reactions to this column — as to all defenses of man-woman marriage — that it or its author are “homophobic,” i.e., bigoted and unworthy of respectful rejoinder, it is important to reaffirm that nothing written here is implicitly, let alone explicitly, anti-gay. I take it as axiomatic that a gay man or woman is created in God’s image and as precious as any other human being. And I readily acknowledge that it is unfair when an adult is not allowed to marry the love of his or her choice. But social policy cannot be made solely on the basis of eradicating all of life’s unfairness. Thus, we must love the gay person — and his and or her partner as well. But we must never change the definition of marriage. The price to society and succeeding generations will be too great.

That is why Californians must amend their state’s Constitution.

Read comments (over 200): http://www.townhall.com/Columnists/DennisPrager/2008/05/20/california_decision_will_radically_change_society

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0504/prager050404.asp
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/GregoryKoukl/2007/02/11/same-sex_marriage_%E2%80%94_challenges__responses

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.