Obama and his toady, John ‘the traitor’ Kerry just got a deal allowing Iran to have nuclear weapons. Oh, I know that’s not what they claim it is. Mark my words, that’s what the Mullahs think it is.
So naturally, the big news story of the day is Indiana wedding cakes. Not just any wedding cakes, mind you but wedding cakes for same sex weddings.
I can’t speak for all Christianity but for Catholics like me, marriage is a sacrament. Simply put, that means we take it very seriously. There are only seven sacraments in Catholicism and very few people ever experience all seven. They are Baptism, Eucharist (taking Communion), Reconciliation (we still call it ‘confession’), Confirmation, Marriage, Ordination and Last Rites.
Since Catholics who take Holy Orders don’t marry, very few people are both married and ordained, although it does happen. Some sacraments are only needed once; Baptism, Confirmation and Ordination. Once you’ve had any of these, you’re literally good forever. The Church will recognize marriage more than once under special circumstances; death of a spouse or annulment. The concept of ‘annulment’ is difficult for most folks to understand. I’m no Catholic scholar, I’m just a person who thinks about this stuff a lot. This is what I think. Take it for what it’s worth.
Marriage, in the Christian tradition, is not just a legal construct by which we agree to love, honor and cherish each other. In the Church, it’s called “Holy Matrimony” because there is a spiritual element to it, beyond the emotional and biological. All that bit about two people becoming one and what God has joined together no man can put asunder.
In the spiritual realm, a married couple walk around autonomously but their spiritual selves are like two cups of water that have been poured into the same container. They are one.
You can think of it as a magic trick, if that makes it easier to understand. Except that the magic is real.
And sometimes it doesn’t work. Like glue that fails to bond, sometimes all the rites are performed but the bonding just doesn’t take. I’m not talking about falling out of love, here. I’m talking about taking actions that damage oneself and one’s spouse like cheating, abuse, refusal to take the responsibilities of a husband or wife, abandonment. These are all symptoms that the bond of matrimony didn’t take. An official annulment is simply a recognition that what should have been a holy union, isn’t. Annulment doesn’t make your kids bastards. It doesn’t erase the emotion or time put into the attempt to be married. It gives the participants a chance to try again to get it right. The Church wants people to be happy and nothing is a greater contributor to a life’s happiness than a good marriage. Even secular social scientists haven’t been able to debunk that and believe me, they’re trying.
For two millennia, Holy Matrimony in the Christian tradition has meant one man and one woman. A bride and groom. (I say ‘for two millennia’ because who knows what those wacky Episcopalians will come up with by next year? Their church was founded on divorce.) Why a male and female?
Biology.
When God created species, he split them into male and female. It is only when the male and female get together that they are able to become creators of life, the act that brings us closest to being like God, the Creator. I’m not talking about sex here but the whole shebang; make the baby, have the baby, raise the baby, love the baby, love each other, build the future. That’s a heck of a lot more than hooking up.
The way I see it, God gave us the ability to reproduce. He instilled in us the biological imperative to do so. Then, because he loves each and every one of us and it was easy to guess the kind of mess we would make of things, he taught us how to control these urges so as to not hurt each other.
Rape is a heinous sin. Promiscuity is a dangerous path. Pornography is an abomination, turning what should be beautiful into something horrible. Prostitution treats people like commodities, much like slavery. People should never be seen as a commodity or a product or a thing to be used by others. All of these sins and crimes rob people of their humanity.
Sex is the act through which new life is created and it should be treated with respect. It’s Nitroglycerin yet modern culture treats it like a toy.
Monogamy is good for people. Done right, it’s the recipe for a happy life. Even done wrong, it limits the damage. Humans are pack animals, not even a solitary hermit like me wants to go through life alone. I like to be alone but I’m never lonely. I have an enormous extended family; I can be in a crowd who loves me anytime I want.
I used to be in favor of gay marriage. I thought the only argument against it was religious and since the government can’t enforce religious beliefs on the people, where did they get off refusing to allow same sex couples to marry?
It’s a perfectly logical, libertarian stand.
But an honest look at the societies that have instituted same sex marriage reveals a disturbing truth about human nature. When you remove the sanctity of marriage (through divorce, polygamy, shacking up or breaking the male/female paradigm) you end up removing marriage from society.
This is not the fault of homosexuals.
For the last fifty years, western nations and the heteros who make up the vast bulk of the population have made a complete bollocks of the institution of marriage. We made it too easy to get married, too easy to get divorced, too easy to pretend to be married, too easy to enjoy all the privileges of married life and we took away the stigma of promiscuity, unmarried pregnancy and illegitimacy.
What have we gotten for our troubles? Marriages falling apart at alarming rates leading to fewer people getting married at all and skyrocketing rates of kids being born into fractured families to parents who never married and more half related siblings than ever before. Is this what a healthy society looks like?
We have young men growing up without fathers, looking to unhealthy role models for clues as to how to become men. We have young women using sex to find the male approval they should have gotten from their dads. We have ‘families’ in which a new ‘daddy’ is installed every year or so. We have statistics showing that the greatest risk to children is the unrelated adult male living in their homes.
We have chaos.
None of this is the fault of homosexuals.
If straight folks could be trusted to behave themselves, same sex marriage would be non-issue. Unfortunately, in societies that ‘redefine’ marriage, what they invariably end up with is a culture in which marriage is no longer taken seriously.
You could certainly argue that marriage stopped being taken seriously a long time ago, so why deny same sex couples the chance to enjoy its benefits? To this I would answer; I think marriage is worth saving.
The Libertarian in me thinks same sex couples should get all the legal benefits of marriage. Let them file joint tax returns, be each other’s next of kin, have rights of attorney, confidentiality and inheritance. Make them go through the hell of divorce if they decide to split up.
But you can’t ignore the biology.
The biology is what creates babies and I happen to think that’s a pretty big deal. A culture that doesn’t think or care about what’s best for babies is a culture without a future.
Years ago, Pope John Paul the Great spoke against gay marriage, calling it a life issue. I thought “Huh? How?” This was when I still held to my libertarian take on the issue. Now, Pope JPII was no fool. He saw firsthand some of the greatest evils in the world, some of the worst things served up by the 20th century, which just happens to have been the bloodiest, most violent century in human history. Since human history is an unbroken tale of cruel, bloody violence, that’s really saying something. Two world wars and three tyrannical regimes that used the slaughter of millions as a way to achieve their utopian ends…Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan and the Conquistadors were pikers compared to Hitler, Mao or Stalin.
So when he said same sex marriage was a life issue, I had to look into what he meant.
In a nutshell; equating reproductive sex with recreational (non reproductive) sex cheapens human life.
This is not to say that people who practice one or the other type of sex don’t value human life. What we’re talking about here is not individual virtue but societal values.
Forty three years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that individual privacy concerns made laws against abortion unconstitutional. It became legal to kill the baby during the first trimester of a pregnancy.
Fast forward three decades and the argument was over the legality of killing the child as long as its head was still in the birth canal. More people than you might believe are ready and waiting to argue over the age a child must attain before its parents can no longer just kill it and move on. Barack Obama supports this view.
In those decades, thanks to the option of killing the baby, should all other forms of birth control fail, promiscuity, child abuse, sex trafficking, illegitimacy and teen parenthood and all its attendant poverty and crime skyrocketed. Violent crime committed by younger and younger perpetrators has also climbed at an alarming rate. Did you think kids born into a culture that uses murder as ‘birth control’ would respect the lives of others?
In 2012, the federal Congress, controlled by the Democratic party, forced through the Affordable Care Act, which mandates everyone buy health insurance. Pretending to make that easier to do, the government insisted that the states set up state run insurance exchanges. Part of the ‘debate’ involved whether or not abortion, sterilization and contraceptive services should be offered. Keep in mind, state run insurance means it will be paid for by the taxpayers.
Huge numbers of Americans still identify as Christian and lots of Christians still oppose these things. Plenty of Christians find abortion every bit as horrific and soul damaging as slavery and genocide.
There’s a bumper sticker that’s been out there for years: “Don’t like abortion? Then don’t have one.”
Yeah, that’s the ticket. Don’t like slavery? Then don’t buy one. Don’t like the Holocaust? Then don’t join the Nazi party. Don’t like racism? Then don’t join the KKK. Don’t like rape? Then don’t dress….wait, that one is a little too on the nose in blaming the victim, isn’t it? It’s the philosophy of the morally retarded.
The First Amendment guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of religion and freedom of association. Political Correctness demands that it be abolished but the left isn’t quite confident enough to come right out and say it yet. PC has been waging a winning assault on speech for years. Just ask Mark Steyn. The Affordable Care Act can’t survive as long as freedom of religion and freedom of association still exist as constitutional rights.
Enter gay marriage.
Don’t like gay marriage? Then don’t participate in one.
WHAT??? FUCK FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION, SCREW FREEDOM OF RELIGION, YOU GET YOUR ASS OVER HERE AND BAKE THAT CAKE, ARRANGE THOSE FLOWERS AND CELEBRATE LIKE YOU MEAN IT!!!
As I said earlier, I think monogamy is a good lifestyle for everyone. The libertarian in me supports it on a personal level. But the Christian in me understands that it’s a dangerous public policy and this is why. Compelling bakers, florists and caterers to acknowledge, accept and celebrate same sex unions is not the end game here; this is only the opening gambit of a much larger strategy that has been in play for nearly a century.
Gay weddings are the perfect tool to demonstrate to the American people that freedom of association is passé, freedom of religion is frowned upon and the entire first amendment is…over.
That’s the reality that must be drilled into the collective American skull.
Why, you may ask?
Because the ability to hide behind the First Amendment right of religious liberty has been a thorn in Big Brother’s ass for long enough.
Once religious liberty has been abolished, with any luck at all, the vast majority of American’s will have been herded into state health insurance exchanges and we won’t have to put up with any more nonsense about contraceptives, sterilization, euthanizing the old and sick and most importantly, abortion being morally abhorrent.
If you don’t believe me on the importance of abortion to the Big Government Left, see the current debate in DC regarding the abolition of international sex trafficking. The Democratic party won’t support the bill because it won’t fund abortion overseas. Even if most American’s didn’t object to paying for abortions all over the world, wouldn’t you think sex trafficking, particularly of minors, would be important enough to budge a half inch on abortion?
It’s not. Paying for abortions all over the world is more important to the Democrat party of American than protecting women and children all over the world from being sold into slavery as sex objects.
Again;
Making American taxpayers support abortion all over the world is more important to the Democrat Party than protecting women and children from being sold into slavery as sex objects.
This flap in Indiana over the RFLA isn’t about wedding cakes.
It isn’t even about keeping abortion legal and available.
Its about abolishing the very idea of objecting to it.