Maybe others more knowledgable than me can connect the dots because I am not sure I can carry the weight of this food fight alone. That said, let me point out gay marriages are simply a measure of how far we have collectively drifted from any concept of how a free society works and what mechanisms are are important to that society.
It should not be a surprise that once government has inserted itself as the one ton gorilla in a three way contract between two individuals and a bureaucracy it will then proceed to define the terms of that contract in any way it sees fit.
What does surprise me is that more Pastors and others of faith cannot coherently explain what traditional marriage is and ought to be.
Historically, marriage has been akin to a sacrament consummated before God and witnessed by a congregation in religous setting such as a church or synagogue. The Catholic Church, for example, calls it the "Sacrament" of Marriage.
At some point a movement began to have all births at central facilities known as hospitals(ostensibly for hygenic reasons) which removed the record of those births from the family Bible and the local Church and centralized Birth Records at the Government Facility known as the Courthouse.
It was a natural progression to then keep a record of marriages at the same location-the Courthouse.
Soon, a civil marriage was the only requirement for people to achieve legitimacy as honorable members of Society.
As far as I can tell, marriage has always been a combination of sacrament and political and economic union.
In a society where nearly everyone is expected to have a "job" (as opposed to employment or work)and that "job" automatically includes "withholding" for Social Security and other taxes as well as restrictions on where and how you can save or invest your money it should surprise no one that elements of Society expect access to the same endowments that are currently imposed on the "honorable" members of that Society.
The important question is how did we paint ourselves into this corner and when will our presumed moral Leaders begin to lead us out of the wilderness?
Step one is for all Churches and Religious Entities to immediately renounce their 501(3)(c) status.
Until they do that they serve Mammon and Government and not God and have no room to quarrel with "same sex" marriages.
It is part and parcel of a larger problem and will not be fixed until the larger problem is fixed.
Excuse me while I go scramble into my asbestos suit.
Best regards,
Plato's Euthyphro and Apology are great illustrations. Socrates advances the argument to Euthyphro that, piety to the gods, who all want conflicting devotions and/or actions from humans, is impossible.
Likewise, morals are such a construction of idols used by the Left as a rationale for them to demand compliance to their wishes in politics, which most often are a skewed mess of fallacies in logic. Morals are a deceptive replacement for the avoidance of sin. If a person believes in a God, it is the conviction of the Holy Ghost by which they are guided and not by the idolatrous vanities of morals constructed by others.
Considering that 90% of people tend to be more influenced by the visual, television has become a new religion. It is analogous to Plato's cave allegory and the Oracle of Delphi. Television as a propaganda tool helps create visual phantasms (or as Thomas Hobbes called them, 'phantastical images') of the brain.
There are three ways people are influenced according to the school of behavioral psychology - - visual (sight), auditory (sound), kinesthetic (emotion). The kinesthetic or 'feeling' is also based on olfactory and tactile sense, much like Pavlov's salivating dogs. Visual images and sound portrayed can be used to anchor emotional and/or conditioned responses desired by those that present them, which in the case of television, is the Leftist television media, actors who create phantastical images in film, and Leftist politicians who pander to symbolism over substance (like Rush always says about them).
The visual aspect of that phenomenon is also used by the print media to a degree. Interactive talk radio requires thought; television does not and relies on this as a means to influence viewers...
They worship for gods 'those appearances that remain in the brain from the impression of external bodies upon the organs of their senses, which are commonly called ideas, idols, phantasms, conceits, as being representations of those external bodies which cause them, and have nothing in them of reality, no more than there is in the things that seem to stand before us in a dream...'
Like the necromancy of the late Senator Wellstone's funeral rally, or "funerally" (see the Steven Plaut article, The Rise Of Tikkun Olam Paganism
http://www.arutzsheva.com/article.php3?id=1760, in reference to the Wellstone brand of Judaism), the use of Martin Luther King Day, or constantly invoking the "spirit of the '60's," the Left attempts to raise spirits of the dead as a totem for worship. This was also done with respect to Diana, Princess of Wales, following her "tragic" death in 1997.
Consider the seemingly coincidental circumstance that Diana is also the name of a pagan Greek goddess, and idolatry. The figurative deification of Princess Diana and the massive outpouring of public grief are a form of civil worship. The heaping of flowers at Kensington Palace as if it were a shrine, melodramatic eulogizing and the political expressions of how the world should comply with her posthumous intent concerning certain issues is a modern use of idolatry. Royalty magazine, in a special edition, had a large drop quote spanning across two pages: "She needed no royal title…to generate her particular brand of magic." The whole magazine was dedicated to pet Leftist political causes mixed in with the pictures and soliloquy about her sainthood.
This idolatry also partly played into the modern conflict of pagan vs. Judaic concerning her billionaire playboy lover, Dodi Al Fayed. Although many consider Islamic belief to be of Judaic origin, it is pagan. The crescent symbolizing Islam was also used to symbolize the pagan goddesses (Diana, Isis, etc.) and is used by modern neo-pagan nut cases as an icon. The use of the bedrock at the Dome of the Rock and the meteorite at the Kaaba as an excuse to label it an Islamic holy site, is idolatry. This is contrary to the idea that Muslim faith is monotheistic.
There is a clear connection between modern neo-paganism and ancient paganism related to Islamic conflict with the Judaic roots of Christendom. A focus on how this is manifested in a modern sense only requires a look at pop-culture icons in entertainment, sports "heroes," and attempts by the Left to use a pseudo-Christian sense of pagan moralistic idolatry to demonize political opposition. (I present to you U.S. Senator Rick Santorum as a useful example.)
Astrology is another blatant example of pagan idolatry. What else is it? The planets have the names of pagan gods. The constellations are grouped as phantastical images of mythical legends. The astrologers are revered as prophets by psychotic, neurotic adherents in frequent fanatical devotion to any musings these charlatans utter. The proliferation of psychics, seers, soothsayers, healers, gurus, etc., etc., ad nauseum, is a social psychosis, an occulted (or masked) promotion of Leftist propaganda (see the Paglia lecture at Yale
http://www.bu.edu/arion/paglia_cults00.htm). Marxism and their forms of Cultural Marxism are a religion, a collection of cults. In many cases they worship a dead Karl Marx like some (and I stress some) Christians worship a dead Jesus, and not a living God. This is no more apparent than in the practice of enshrinement and regular grooming of Lenin's corpse in the former Soviet Union, the use of Princess Diana, Martin Luther King Jr. and others.
It is the religious fervor associated with the pro-abortion advocacy. The societal practice of abortion is ritual mass murder upon the altars dedicated to idolatrous vanities, a collective human sacrifice to pagan idols. It has a similitude to the Teutonic paganism of Adolph Hitler, whose idolatry was the idea of a "master race." In effect, this genocide was a mass human sacrifice to those pagan idols.
The idolatry of perversion is another totem of the Left. Homosexuality is an idolatry of perversion. Gay marriage advocacy is a cult of perversion. Pornography is an idolatry of perversion. Much of television, movies, and the literary culture of the Leftist elite in print, are nothing more than a cleverly masked promotion of their Marxist cult (that is to say, masked much like actors of ancient Greek drama).
The Left is properly identified with a 'confederacy of deceivers (and perverts) that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavor, by obscure and erroneous doctrines.'
The Left is obsessed with erecting idols, images and symbols to hide their agenda(s), as well as to expand their congregation in these cults of perversion...