Posted on 07/30/2002 9:09:34 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Due Process Is Dead in Massachusetts.
“It being the public policy of this Commonwealth to protect the unique relationship of marriage in order to promote, among other goals, the stability and welfare of society and the best interests of children, only the union of one man and one woman shall be valid or recognized as a marriage in Massachusetts. Any other relationship shall not be recognized as a marriage or its legal equivalent, nor shall it receive the benefits or incidents exclusive to marriage from the Commonwealth, its agencies, departments, authorities, commissions, offices, officials and political subdivisions. Nothing herein shall be construed to effect an impairment of a contract in existence as of the effective date of this amendment.”
For the last week, I have been reeling with images from the July 17th travesty in the Massachusetts state house, when a special constitutional convention met for the third time in as many months to consider a proposed amendment that would define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Senate president Tom Birmingham (who is running a dwindling campaign for governor of this state) had said earlier in the week and again that morning that he was going to do “everything in my power to stop this mean-spirited and hateful issue from coming to a vote.” This time, he got someone else to do his dirty work: Brian P. Lees (R-Springfield), the senate minority leader, moved to adjourn the meeting before the amendment could be addressed. 137 members voted to adjourn; 53 voted not to adjourn. Fifty votes were required to carry the issue of the Amendment to the ballot—which obviously could have carried easily, leaving the question of what a marriage is—or is not—up to the voters of this state in 2004.
More than 130,000 voters signed the Protection of Marriage Amendment petition in the fall of 2001. 76,607 of those signatures were certified. 57,100 certified signatures were required in order for the petition to come before the constitutional convention. According to the Massachusetts Family Institute, 83% of Massachusetts voters polled agree that marriage is important to the family, and 60% support defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
On July 17th, I went to the state house to be present for (I presumed) an historic vote. Before I went into the State House, I stood for about a half hour with about sixty staff and volunteers for the Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage for a nearly silent rally. Some of us stood and chatted and others held up signs that said, “Let the People Vote for Marriage in 2004.” And most of us watched somewhat warily as homosexuals and lesbians harassed members of our group. At around 1:15, I went into the State House.
I couldn´t get near the gallery. The doors were closed until about 1:50, but there must have been 750 people in the house chamber area ahead of me, perhaps 250 pro-homosexual rights supporters to the rest of us who favor traditional values. The senators entered the chamber at 2:00 pm. At 2:17, they strolled out with smug smirks on their faces. Opponents of the amendment erupted into cheers, and the rest of us into boos and hisses. Almost immediately, there was a frenzy of sympathetic media interviews with lesbian members of the Massachusetts congress, and their supporters—and then the taunting and jeering began. The Marriage Amendment, for all intents and purposes, was dead. And we all knew it.
The only pro-marriage supporter I know of who made it onto the news that night was a black woman who took issue with a sign that pronounced, “We want OUR civil rights!” When she challenged that statement and was verbally assaulted, she lost her temper and was ushered out of the building by armed guards. The whole episode was filmed; what made it onto the news that evening was the woman being taken out, loud with rage, her little boys in tow. Some of us were standing outside the capitol afterward, pondering the whole mess as we waited for busses to take us back to the places where we had gathered for this momentous day. A homosexual came along and began reviling us. We were silent in response. He then sighted the black woman and got very in-your-face with her, his nose possibly a foot away from hers. He spoke in low, seething tones. We could not hear him, but her demeanor made it pretty obvious that he was being extremely unpleasant to her. The busses came along and the woman and her children crossed Beacon Street—and he walked beside her, puffing smoke into her face and muttering at her the entire time. None of us (including I, shamefully) did anything to try to stop him.
My own involvement with the Protection of Marriage Amendment began when I signed the petition at my local grocery store last fall. I asked for copies and carried them around with me to collect more signatures, rather surprised at how many people were willing to sign it. Very few I asked did not.
After the first constitutional convention met on May 8th of this year to discuss the Amendment, as required by the Massachusetts Constitution, and then closed without a vote, a friend who works for Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage called and asked if I would contact the voters in my town who had signed the petition, and ask them to contact our state senator and representative in support of the Amendment. I said yes, and began calling a few days later. Again, I was amazed at the responses: about a third of those I spoke to, while they had signed the petition, were reluctant to call Ms Walrath or Mr. Antonioni. They expressed concerns about voicing their opinions on such a “controversial” matter to their elected officials. The other two-thirds assured me that they would.
On June 19th, the date of the next special constitutional convention to consider the Marriage Amendment, I took a few hours of personal time from work and met my friend at the State House for the vote. When I arrived at the Boston Common, the meeting place for volunteers from the Mass Citizens for Marriage, I was surprised that there weren´t more people there, including, apparently, members of the opposition. I was told that my friend was already inside, so I hurried through the security area into the State House and went to the House gallery where she and her two little sons, aged two and five, were waiting. I sat down next to them.
It was about 1:15. The meeting was scheduled to begin at 2:00.
Although there was one kind guard in the gallery, as we waited for the vote, some of the other guards became verbally abusive. One woman guard in particular was unkind to an MCM staff member seated in front of me. The guard poked her shoulder to get attention, and poked it so hard that the woman winced and rubbed it as she turned to her. The guard spoke provokingly to her, threatening to remove her if she distributed any badges, and then said that she must remove the bag of badges or be ejected from the gallery. After a moment of discussion, a male guard joined them, the staff member said she would not distribute anything (she had not done so to that point) and the guards withdrew. [Most of us in the gallery were already wearing the badges, which said only, “Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage.”]
My friend seemed uncharacteristically quiet and when I asked why, told me of an incident that had just happened to a friend of hers as she was walking into the state house. A group of homosexuals and lesbians approached and began threatening her and the others with her, tormenting them with anti-religious slurs. The attempts met with no response. One of the activists then centered on her and tried more aggressively to get her to respond, verbally abusing her until she was in tears. When she said nothing, the activist spat, “I hope your children choke and die in front of you!”
And we´re called “mean-spirited and hateful?”
At the rally last Wednesday, homosexual and lesbian members of their media (mostly unidentified members, unless we asked them) milled among us asking questions and photographing us. While I was speaking with the brave man who exposed the Fistgate scandal some time back, a photographer from the Bay Windows ("New England's Largest Gay and Lesbian Newspaper") recognized him and began snapping photos of him and then of me, standing only about three or four feet away and zooming in with her lens. She took one after another, until he asked her to stop and said he really thought two was more than enough. She went on to someone else.
Before I entered the capitol building a few minutes later, I was approached by a young man and woman who identified themselves as members of the Homosexual Communist Media. He thrust a microphone into my face and asked why I was there. I did not speak well or smoothly to them, but I did speak: I told them I was there in support of the marriage Amendment. He asked why I supported it, and I told him, and also mentioned that more than 80% of voters polled in Massachusetts felt that [heterosexual] marriage was important to the family structure, and that 60% favored defining marriage as between one man and one woman.
The young man cut me off instantly, “Oh! So you´re in favor of mob rule!”
I frowned and said quietly, “That´s not mob rule—”
“Well, then, call it educated mob rule!”
I frowned again, waved him away and said, “I have nothing left to say to you.”
Before I left him, he insisted that I take a flier for the Homosexual Communist Media. I gave him one of ours, which he refused, but instead of throwing his away, I decided to read it. I´m glad I did. It began:
“The Homosexual Communist Media is an art collective based in Amsterdam. We have just founded a Boston faction, to begin subverting American morality and social culture...” (The italics are mine.)
Had I thought a little quicker, I would have said to him,
“You´re too late. It´s happened already.”
Pardon me. It was your statement that "As long as due process is observed, the State has the power righteously to compel, and to forbid" that confused me. Even as I re-read it, it seems to me to say the state is unlimited in it's power provided it follows a due process. This is at odds with the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights.
While the United States is not omnipotent, its powers are not nearly as circumscribed as your formula flatly states they are. Article I of the Constitution is a long list of enumerated powers granted the U.S. Government under the Constitution by the Sovereign People.
Article I, section VIII, lists seventeen very specific powers. The list is hardly long and the powers are very clearly circumscribed.
I ask again....
Are you saying that you would kill homosexuals if you thought you'd face no risk of prosecution?
Either there is such a thing as an ultimate moral authority (i.e. G-d) or there is not. If there is, then this nation has the right and the responsibility to determine the requirements of that authority and to codify them into law. That would give the government the moral authority to define family and to pass laws along that definition.
If there is not, then this nation derives its moral authority from its governing documents. In that arrangement the will of the people determines what is right and what is wrong. Also, if there is no ultimate moral authority then the rise of the Third Reich was right because it was lawfully voted in. However, once established the people's support was not an issue because it became a totalitarian government that did not derive any of its authority from the governed.
You want to base your argument that there is no overriding moral authority on moral authority, similar to your claim of a right to ignore moral authority. (There are no rights if there is no ultimate moral authority.) It's a paradox that won't support itself.
Which is it?
Shalom.
Here and there.
Consider that Jesus is King of Kings, and what we have in this post is a government (Massachusetts), that believes that it is it's own god.
If we ignore any one of God's three great institutions of the New Testament (church, family, and the state) then I can guarantee you that those institutions will corrupt themselves, and our evangelism will fall on deaf ears within a generation. More people now listen to the government than the church as to what is right and wrong.
Are Christians to have nothing to say about abortion. Or a government that grows increasingly Messianic and openly corrupt with every passing year? Or an educational system that teaches untruths? Or a culture that has become coarse and decayed?
As for direct political involvement by the New Testament church, I would point you to Acts 5:29. There is the first principle. Then I would point you to Acts 16:37-40, where Paul demands that the corrupt authorities make a public show of their mistake in beating and imprisoning a Roman citizen.
God has a plan for the government. As I said, it is not the churches primary responsibility, but if we ignore it it will come back to haunt us. Indeed it already has. Jesus came for a very specific purpose - to save that which was lost and establish His kingdom.
The government, however, uses force constantly. That is the nature of the state. You are furious that I would insist on a moral standard by which to govern.
Yet even now our government follows a particular moral standard, one that in many ways comes from the Christian viewpoint of our founders. Murder, rape, kidnapping, thievery, persecution - we consider these things to be objective moral wrongs and we punish them. We believe (though less and less) that human beings have inherent dignity as created in the image of God. Not every nation does.
So you see that right away our government applies a particular moral standard and disregards others.
If I may be so bold, you would not want to live in a secular society. You would not wish for one if you understood what it entails. A secular society has no basis whatsoever for the dignity of man. Any rights a person has in a secular society are given them by the state. And all the lame discussions in the world by atheists about the "rights of man" does not change the fact that they have nothing to call upon higher than themselves. A secular society would end in tyranny, either by the state or by man. It always has and it always will.
That's what they would want. Then you would be arrested for assault, and the cops would have an excuse to toss out all conservatives from the area for "rioting". Meanwhile, you will not have noticed the gay activist had a dozen friends hanging around discretely, ready to jump to his defense upon your assault and having a legal excuse to pound you into the ground in the process of "arresting" you.
Leftists are only brave when they have the advantage of locally superior numbers, and are confident that the police will protect them against you, but not you against them.
The solution is to pick your battles for when YOU have superior numbers
I have not had time to read this entire thread. Which post of yours are you referring to? I'd like to read it.
Shalom.
They think they do, however, due to two problems. One is pride, the other is a very small imagination.
On the pride front, secularists believe that if they have decided something is true then everyone will eventually agree with them. If someone disagrees it is due to the fact that the someone either doesn't have access to the same facts or isn't bright enough to figure out what the secularist is saying. The idea that someone may be bright, have access to the same facts, and draw a different conclusion is a foreign idea. I can still remember the dismay of my friends in college when they would tell me some fact that they thought would blow the whole argument out in the open and I would say, "I know that. SO????"
They also have very little imagination. They think that the way things are now is the only reasonable way they would or could be. In America we have a basically moral society because we are still drawing on the "moral bank account" left to us by previous generations. Many of us realize this and recognize that the account is depleted if not overdrawn. But the secularists think that America is so moral because morality is obvious and any casual observer would establish property rights, personal rights, etc, the same way that we have them established now. The idea that a rational argument (absent a moral authority) could be made for a society where murder is not only legal but encouraged is beyond their imagination. However, they don't recognize the limits of their imagination due to pride (see previous paragraph).
In the end, they trip themselves up because they insist on rights based on some limited notion of reality that they can not defend, but must demand you accept as axiomatic.
Shalom.
That's a very good point, thanks.
Thomas Jefferon's proposed penal code for the state of Virginia called for the death sentence for those who commmit sodomy. That's a good start.
I hear in Afghanistan, the Taliban pushed a wall over on sodomites as prescribed in the Koran.
I didn't know you were a Muslim. What other facets of the Sharia would you like to see enacted here in the US?
Don't forget to live by WWOD--"What Would Osama Do".
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