American
Tragedy: Now Gird Up Your Loins
by
Robert A. J. Gagnon
Today,
June 26, 2015, a day of national tragedy, the Supreme Court of the United States
rendered what should rank as the worst decision of the Supreme Court of the
United States in the lifetime of every living American (rivaled only by Roe v.
Wade) and at least one of the two or three worst decisions since the Court's
inception (compare the Dred Scott case).
Five
lawless judges (all four Democrat-appointed judges: Obama's Sotomayor and Kagan;
Clinton's Ginsburg and Breyer; and one traitor appointed by Reagan: Kennedy)
defeated four Constitution-abiding judges (four of the five Republican-appointed
judges: Bush Jr.'s Roberts and Alito; Bush Sr's Thomas; and Reagan's Scalia) to
foist "gay marriage" on all 50 states. Five unelected lawyers have acted as
legislators and imposed their arbitrary and extreme leftwing ideology on all the
American people, culminating the judicial tyranny over the past two years that
has preempted the democratic process.
Chief
Justice Roberts is right in declaring this ruling to be "an act of will, not
legal judgment.... Just who do we think we are?" Justice Scalia is right in
saying that this ruling is "a threat to American democracy." Justice Alito is
right in warning that the decision "will be used to vilify Americans who are
unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.... The implications [of comparing
traditional marriage laws to laws that denied equal treatment for
African-Americans and women] will be exploited by those who are determined to
stamp out every vestige of dissent."
Unless
this decision can be reversed soon through the next two presidential elections
and the retirement/replacement of renegade SCOTUS judges (Ginsburg is first up,
followed by Breyer), this will turn out to be the greatest American tragedy for
the civil liberties of persons of faith, for the cause of sexual purity in the
United States, and for the lives of persons struggling with same-sex attraction.
Prepare for a reign of persecution and abuse of people of faith as hateful,
ignorant, and discriminatory "bigots" and the moral equivalent of racists in
every area of life in which people of faith intersect with the secular realm,
individually and in their religious institutions, with a profound negative
impact as well within most mainline denominations.
As
individuals, people of faith will be aggressively indoctrinated, fined, denied
advancement, fired, intimidated, and subjected to ceaseless verbal abuse in
public and private schools, at institutions of higher learning, at places of
employment in public and private sectors, and throughout the main communication
organs of the media and entertainment industry. Their institutions and
businesses will be set on a collision course with the state: denied government
funding, contracts, and loans; denied accreditation and tax-exempt status; and
subjected to government harassment.
Contrary
to what deceived and deceiving proponents of "gay marriage" have argued,
homosexual relationships will not be tamed by marriage but rather will destroy
it and render it meaningless. The institution of marriage will not so much
conform homosexual activity to the Christian understanding of marriage
(lifelong, monogamous, procreative, balancing the sexes) as be transformed over
time to accommodate to virtually any type of adult-consensual union. It will
eradicate the very basis in creation and nature for defining marriage as
complementary of body and monogamous: a male-female foundation. Taking account
of sexual differentiation at any level, even opposition to cross-dressing and
"transgenderism" and sex-distinguished bathroom facilities, must now be treated
as malicious.
The
warnings of the dissenting judges follow in the political footsteps of no less a
Founding Father than Thomas Jefferson:
"To
consider the judges as the ultimate arbiters of all constitutional questions ...
[is] a very dangerous doctrine indeed, and one which would place us under the
despotism of an oligarchy. Our judges are as honest as other men, and not more
so . . . and their power [is] the more dangerous, as they are in office for life
and not responsible, as the other functionaries are, to the elective control.
The Constitution has erected no such single tribunal, knowing that to whatever
hands confided, with corruptions of time and party, its members would become
despots" (Letter to William Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820).
"The
great object of my fear is the Federal Judiciary" (Letter to Judge Spencer
Roane, 1821).
"One
single object. [will merit] the endless gratitude of the society: that of
restraining the judges from usurping legislation" (Letter to Edward Livingston,
March 25, 1825).
The
dissenting judges also have a legacy in Abraham Lincoln, who in his First
Inaugural Address in 1861 warned the nation in connection with the Dred Scott
decision:
"The
candid citizen must confess that if the policy of the government, upon vital
questions, affecting the whole people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions
of the Supreme Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between
parties, in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their own
rulers, having, to that extent, practically resigned their government into the
hands of that eminent tribunal."
**********
Five
renegade Supreme Court Justices now propose to define sexual morality for us
all. Their view of marriage is opposed to no less a moral authority than Jesus
of Nazareth. Those who like to say that Jesus changed the Law of Moses fail to
note the direction of change. The Six Antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount make
clear that the change is not toward greater license but toward greater demand,
making the law more internally self-consistent (Matthew 5:17-48).
When
Jesus addressed the issue of marriage in more detail (Mark 10:2-12; parallel in
Matthew 19:3-9), he quoted Genesis 1:27 (actually just a third of it: "male and
female he [God] made them") and 2:24 ("For this reason a man may . be joined to
his woman and the two shall become one flesh"). These two texts stress the
foundational character of a male-female prerequisite of the marital/sexual bond.
Consistent with the Six Antitheses, Jesus directs change toward greater demand,
not greater license, appealing to the twoness of the sexes, "male and female,"
as a basis for limiting the number of partners in a sexual union to two, whether
serially (no remarriage after invalid divorce) or, implicitly, concurrently (no
polygamy).
Once
the two halves of the sexual spectrum are brought together, moderating the
extremes of each sex and filling in the gaps, a third party (or more) is neither
necessary nor desirable. In ancient Israel women had always been bound by a
strict monogamy requirement (no polyandry, i.e. multiple husbands) and did not
have right to unilateral divorce. Jesus declared that the Law of Moses had
accommodated to male "hardness of heart" in permitting them multiple wives. No
longer, Jesus said. In effect: "I'm closing that loophole by appeal to God's
male-female prerequisite in creation." The duality of the sexes in sexual union
is the foundation or predicate for limiting the number of partners in a sexual
union to two.
For
those who question that this was what Jesus was doing in citing Gen 1:27c and
2:24, we have a nice history-of-religions parallel from a sectarian Jewish group
known as the Essenes (the Qumran community was a monastic nucleus for "town
Essenes"). In a document known as The Damascus Covenant written more than
a century before Jesus' time, the Essenes forbade polygamy ("taking two wives in
their lives") among their members because "the foundation of creation is 'male
and female he created them'" (Gen 1:27) and because "those who entered (Noah's)
ark went in two by two" (Gen 7:9; DC 4.20-5.1). In other words, they
appealed to the same one-third of Gen 1:27 to which Jesus would appeal more than
a century later, as a basis for revoking an allowance for polygyny (multiple
wives). They correlated this verse with a reference to the Noah's ark narrative
where the precise phrase "male and female" reappears in connection with an
explicit "two," True, they didn't go as far as Jesus' later extension to invalid
remarriage after divorce (it is easier to prohibit concurrent polygamy, polygamy
proper, than to extend the principle to serial polygamy, divorce-and-remarriage
for any cause). Yet they did use God's intentional sexual design of "male and
female" in Gen 1:27c as a basis for arriving at a principle of duality in
number.
The
Essenes called this "male and female" element of sexual ethics "the foundation
of creation." That is exactly how Jesus is viewing it. That makes Jesus' view of
a male-female prerequisite for sexual unions, extrapolated from God's creation,
an essential part of his teaching, foundational to all other principles in
sexual ethics (as we would expect in dealing with creation). Homosexual practice
is an obvious direct assault on that foundation because it disregards a
male-female prerequisite as having any foundational significance. Indeed, it
violates it. That makes homosexual practice a greater violation of God's will at
creation than polyamory, which is a violation of a principle only secondarily
extrapolated from a male-female requirement.
To
propose, as some revisionists now do, that "gay marriage" and the elimination of
a male-female prerequisite is a new work of the Spirit overlooks the fact Jesus
moved in the opposite direction by tightening the implications of a male-female
requirement. It is likely, then, that those who view "gay marriage" as a new
work of the Spirit have confused a work of the flesh with the work of the Spirit
and disregarded the Lordship of Jesus Christ so far as the definition of
marriage (and thus acceptable sexual relations) is
concerned.
Granted,
in addressing a ruling by SCOTUS we are dealing with a civil, not religious,
matter. Yet five renegade Justices now claim to be able to pronounce
authoritatively on a moral matter in the absence of any clear direction from the
Constitution of the United States. As Scalia put it in his dissenting opinion,
"They (the majority of Justices) have discovered in the Fourteenth Amendment a
'fundamental right' overlooked by every person alive at the time of
ratification, and almost everyone else in the time since." Marriage as an
institution is older than the Constitution, by millennia. The framers of the
Constitution had no desire to change the definition of marriage inherited by
them from the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, much less the most foundational
element of all: the male-female prerequisite accepted by virtually all religious
and civil traditions worldwide. In pretending to be moral arbiters for us all in
the absence of (or, perhaps, in spite of) clear direction from the Constitution,
these five Justices have stepped outside their field of expertise and
jurisdiction into a sphere where a citation of Jesus' own views becomes
appropriate.
**********
This
ought to be a day of national mourning and a day of rededicating ourselves to
live sexually holy lives, repenting of what we have failed to do and now doing
what we still can as a city on a hill and a light for the world to restore
constitutional liberty and personal morality to the nation and its institutions.
I
am not saying that Christians should be driven by fear of what the state can now
do to us. No, Christians must always exhibit the boldness of speech that
characterizes free people of the commonwealth of heaven. Christians should
respond in faith rather than fear in this moment of American Crisis.
Jesus
has assured us, "Look, I am with you all the days till the end of the age"
(Matthew 28:20), just as God assured his people Israel: "He will go before you.
He, Yahweh, will be with you. He will not abandon you or leave you. Do not be
afraid and do not be terrified" (Deuteronomy 31:8). We know how the End turns
out. God wins. God's name will one day be revered as holy by all, willingly or
not. God's kingdom will come. God's will shall be done on earth as it is even
now being done in heaven.
So
let us clothe ourselves with the whole armor of God (truth, righteousness, the
gospel of peace, faith, salvation, the word of God, and prayer) to engage this
struggle that is not merely against "flesh and blood" but against "spiritual
forces of evil" (Ephesians 6:10-20). And as Jesus reminded us, if you are going
to have fear, don't be so much afraid of human beings, who can (at most) kill
only the body. Fear God "who can destroy both soul and body in hell" (Matthew
10:28).
Let
us take to heart the apostle Paul's words in Romans 8: No "pressures of life or
tight straits or persecution" or "any other created thing will be able to
separate us"-those of us who are under the controlling influence of the Spirit
of Christ-"from the love of God that in Christ Jesus our Lord." "Rather, in all
these matters we are super-conquerors through the One who loved us." For God
"cooperates" with the Spirit who prays within us, working "for the good in all
things for those who love God," the good consisting of "being conformed to the
image of his Son." Who among us does not want to look more like Jesus and to
resemble his beauty, the beauty of a life given over wholly to God?
Among
my favorite verses are these: "What then shall we say to these things? If God is
for us, who is against us? The One who did not spare his own Son but handed him
over (to death) for us all, how will he not also, together with him (Jesus),
graciously bestow to us all things?" (Romans 8:31-32). If God offered even his
very Son for us, in order to redeem us, he will not spare us any truly good
thing now. He will continue to lavish his grace on us. He loves us more deeply
than we can fathom for endless ages.
Yet
this is not a call to moral sloth. On the contrary, "Let us not be bad in doing
what is good for in due time we will reap (our harvest of eternal life), if we
do not slack off" (Galatians 6:9). As the ancient image conveys, this is a time
for "girding up our loins."
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