Liberal activists respect neither natural law nor positive law. What God and the people have joined together, they feel perfectly free to put asunder. Marriage, by their lights, is a purely human institution that they can make and remake at will.
This unholy cause has been on display during Holy Week at the Supreme Court, where activists, such as Hillary Rosen, declared loudly that “procreation is not the point of marriage.”
Apparently Jesus Christ was mistaken on this point. He seemed to think that marriage had to do with the two sexes coming together and becoming “one flesh,” a biological impossibility for homosexual couples. Perhaps Scripture will have to be rewritten to reflect our superior understanding of things: “Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his boyfriend, and they become a family through assisted reproduction or the local adoption agency.”
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Jesus Christ said that marriages take place on earth but not in heaven, a teaching which turns in part on marriage’s origin as procreative: mortal men need to reproduce; the immortal don’t. Perhaps that teaching will have to be revisited and doctoral dissertations will be written on why “gay marriage exists in heaven.”
Not that opposition to gay marriage is peculiar to Christianity. Almost all cultures and religions have opposed it. As Justice Samuel Alito noted this week, its origins are so novel that the cell phone and the Internet predate it.
Yet the culture grows more and more demanding of it, a demand which has now risen to the Supreme Court. According to press prognostications, DOMA is likely dead. The Supreme Court will almost certainly strike it down. Justice Elena Kagan drew “gasps” of horror when she pointed out on Wednesday that one of the reasons for the Defense of Marriage Act was to “express moral disapproval” of homosexuality. The press is calling this a “gotcha” moment in the hearing, as if Kagan had caught Congressmen out in an act of cannibalism.
Such gasps confirm what Justice Scalia had predicted in the court’s previous Lawrence v. Texas ruling. If “moral disapproval” of homosexual conduct is deemed by the court unconstitutional, he told Justice Anthony Kennedy, the right to gay marriage will become a certainty. Kennedy pooh-poohed that comment at the time. But it is coming true before our eyes.
Judicial activists like Kagan rule according to what they call the “living Constitution,” which is nothing more than a euphemism for sheer willfulness. There is no reason to suppose that they won’t eventually apply it to gay marriage.
Justice Scalia’s question on Tuesday to Ted Olson, the lawyer representing the side that seeks to overturn Proposition 8 (the other case the Court heard this week), captured the caprice of this position: “We don’t prescribe law for the future. We decide what the law is. I’m curious, when did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage? 1791? 1868? When the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted?”
Olson scrambled for an answer. He couldn’t give a precise date but suggested the right to gay marriage suddenly appeared within the document the moment enlightenment dawned on modern Americans: “It was constitutional when we as a culture determined that sexual orientation is a characteristic of individuals that they cannot control.”
“I see,” replied Scalia. “When did that happen?” Olson: “There’s no specific date in time. This is an evolutionary cycle.”
It is hard to believe that such threadbare arguments could sway the Supreme Court to destroy the definition of marriage for all 50 states. But they might. The Court has shown itself capable of inventing rights out of thin air, drawing upon the very bogus “social science” and “evolving” consensus that Olson cited.
Previous cultures didn’t need teams of social scientists to tell them whether or not orphaning a child is bad for him. They took it for granted that orphans were worse off than children born to a father and mother known to them. But this culture, in its vast wisdom, has “studied” the question and concluded that a deliberate policy of depriving children of mothers and fathers is wonderful for them. The experience is “equal” to all other experiences, we’re told. Two fathers or two mothers are just as good as a mother and a father.
One wonders how many of these children plucked from adoption homes or “assisted reproduction” labs and placed in the arms of gay couples will agree. What would once have been called child abuse is now considered the height of enlightenment. This has to be one of the first cultures in history to take outright pride in a planned policy of orphaning children and exposing them to immorality.
What a profoundly unserious and careless culture. It speaks of the “unconditional love of children” in the same breath as “abortion rights” and “genderless” marriage. Should the Supreme Court succumb to this culture’s lies and nationalize gay marriage, its authority, which is already shaky, will be completely shot.
(Photo credit: Reuters/Art Lien, March 26.)