Reality Check 101

 Defining moments have seldom guided the development of America’s civil character without being enshrined in her Constitution.  Without exception, the amendments which reflect those historic moments stepped all over someone’s perceived rights. 

Every one of the first ten amendments, the Bill of Rights, were extremely intrusive upon what world governments at the time assumed to be their rightful privileges of power and authority over those they ruled.  It took fourteen  years of trying to get it right before the Constitution as a whole, including the Bill of Rights, was finally ratified.  Even then there were significant groups of citizens that were dissatisfied. 

The perceived right, for example, of slave-holders to own other human beings won the day as it would for decades following.  A state’s “right” to preserve slavery was supported all the way to and including the Supreme Court.  It took our own blood soaking our own soil before the issue was legally resolved in December of 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.  Did I say resolved?  To this day there is a significant racist population.  They would love to have some of those nineteenth century “rights” again.

If senators Leahey, Kennedy and other of their persuasion including Michigan’s own Levin and Stabenow, choose to frame their opposition to the Marriage Protection Amendment in terms of civil rights, they will cheapen the bloody cost of black Americans’ freedoms.  If they claim homosexual “marriage” as a states rights issue, they will demonstrate either sincere ignorance or side-stepping deception.  Mysteriously, propagators of this idea never mention how frivolously the wills of states have been trodden upon over the last twenty four months by royal decrees from an unelected federal judiciary.

Equally offensive in the marriage amendment debate is the willful manipulation and distortion of the rights concept itself.  There are a few facts that need to be understood.  First, having a particular psychological, intellectual, or emotional orientation in common with a group of people (large or small) does not spontaneously generate rights.  If that were the case, there could be no thirteenth, fourteenth, or fifteenth amendments to the Constitution.  The desired ninetieth century style rights of millions of racists would have been violated.  In spite of this very elementary principle, our senators would have us accept same-sex “marriage” as a right simply because some (not all) homosexuals feel they deserve it.

 A second principle flows from the non-spontaneous generation principle; that rights are granted not self-existing.  If rights cannot be generated simply because someone wants them, someone has to decide what deserves “rights-hood” and what doesn’t.  In the case of the United States, a compact was formed among the people through their representatives.  Based upon their approval, through the process of officially declaring independence, forming a confederation and finally ratifying a constitution, that compact became the law of the land.  The people, through the formation of the republic, defined and instituted, granted if you will, particular rights both to government and to themselves.

Ultimately, whileAmerica formulated and consecrated its social/political compact, God, somehow, in ways men cannot fathom, preserved His will and authority.  The responsibility of rule was granted to our government with the Divine expectation that its ordinances would honor human dignity (derived from God’s image in man) and righteousness (derived from God’s holiness).  Government has neither the authority nor the right to grant anything to its citizens which desecrates either.  According to the Biblical text, same-sex “marriage” does both.  Therefore, government, as a part of its divine mandate, must defend the created order.  To do otherwise is to be in rebellion.

 In the final analysis, there is no justification for same-sex marriage.  It does not exist as a right simply because some desire it.  It cannot be justified through any present or past social or legal compact.  Finally it flies in the face of the obvious created order and is ultimately an affront to God Himself.  This most fundamental moral challenge is scheduled for a vote in the U.S. Senate in mid July.  Will those hallowed halls be shaken with cries for decency and the rule of law or will we whimper?