Snap Out of It

The proponents of what is called (with unintentional hilarity) gay marriage express the gaiety for which they are named by crowing and gamboling with delight that the Supreme Court has declined to do its core Constitutional mission of interpreting the law, and chastise and check the abuses of activist judges overruling the sovereign votes of the decent and sober majority.

They should perhaps rein in their gay celebrations: gay marriage cannot be justified either in law or logic. This means the law has just departed from the environs of law and logic.

The gay partisans should instead recoil with dread, for the thing, by being given into their hands, is effectively destroyed. Whatever meaning or sanction the pairs of homosexuals are seeking out of the pretense of marriage is destroyed by the very fact that it is a pretense, not a marriage.

I am not speaking about an abstraction, but as a matter of law. The way law works, for those of you who are unfamiliar with the basic principle, is that once a precedent is established, until and unless it is definitively overruled, it has controlling authority over every case standing on similar facts, and the degree of similarity is the core of what all legal arguments are about.

This ruling, now left to stand, will and must create more havoc with family law, with testaments and estates, divorce laws, property laws, far more than if the government simply decreed marriage to be a private contract. No matter what the desires and tastes of the reformers, and no matter their promises, once set in motion, the law operates by a logic and by an inertia of its own.

Let us take it as a given that all men are sinners, and that my personal motives are malign beyond description. Nonetheless, if I speak the truth, my words are true, no matter what my motives are, and if an malign man says twice two is four, the statement is true. Those who argue that twice two is three must address the argument given, not the man who gives it. It is a sign of the deep mental corruption of our times that I must preemptively fend off the yawningly irrational personal attacks and informal logical error that just so happens to be the only counterargument ever encountered to an argument in favor of chastity, marriage, decency, sexual normalcy.

Such nonsense is predictable to the point of tedium. Gossipy, shrill and groundless accusation is the way schoolgirls maintaining a clique punish dissenters, not the way sober men debate the great issues of the day. If one argues that the law concerning marriage must concern marriage and does not concern sodomy, if one argues that a thing is not its very opposite, if one argues that twice two is four and not three, the only response will be an eructation of scorn directed against the speaker, not a response addressing the points spoken.

That said, for those who read these words with the eyes of sober men, with a refined sense of logic and a stern and clear understanding of justice, let us turn to the matter:

First, there are those, including a surprising number of conservatives, who hold that it is a matter of fundamental moral right that two sodomites who wish to solemnize their alliance with a marriage-like ceremony or civil union should be seen and celebrated by the same customs, mores, and obligations society beholds and celebrates a husband and wife establishing a family. We should throw rice, and cheer, and teach our children that such unions are romantic and healthy and normal and permanent, and we should scorn and condemn, and perhaps punish at law, those who teach their children otherwise.

Second, there is a parallel legal argument that it is a matter of fundamental justice that the same legal privileges and rights awarded to a marriage couple should be extended to an alliance of sodomites, such as tax loopholes and hospital visitation rights and child custody and survivor’s benefits.

Third, there is a technical legal argument that the Fourteenth Amendment is properly interpreted to mean that should a state government treat a married couple and an alliance of sodomites with two different ergo unequal rules, such is a violation of the Constitution.

Fourth, there is a Civil Rights argument that for a private individual to refuse to do business, to hire, or to serve a pair of sodomites who wish to represent themselves as a married couple is a violation of the fundamental human dignity of the sodomites. The argument here is that the same penalty at civil law should obtain which prevents, for example, a diner from refusing to serve Negroes, or seating them only in the back of the restaurant. This argument mainly applies to businesses such as bakers, caterers, photographers whose services are purchased for weddings, to bake wedding cakes and such, or to institutions renting halls, or clergy performing the ceremony.

Finally, there is the libertarian argument that a man’s vices are private, and that the state should have no power to say as to which marriage ceremonies shall be recognized and which not recognized, allowed or prohibited, for the same reason that the state should have no power to interfere with private contracts.

Let us take matters in reverse order, starting with the Libertarian argument.

There are two insurmountable obstacles to the Libertarian argument: first, Libertarianism, in reality, requires that both side of a dispute agree to rely on peaceful, non-coercive means to settle the dispute. In other words, it is obvious that if one side refuses to promote or pass laws supporting his side, but his enemy does not refuse, the enemy without hindrance will prevail. Second, the state can and must and does interfere in matters where no peaceful and non-coercive means to settle disputes of this kind is possible. In the current case, marital status effects disputes about marriage and family matters, divorce, child-rearing, education of the young, and inheritance laws.

The first Libertarian argument can be safely ignored as irrelevant to the real world as things stand now.

If, at some point in the future, the pervertarians pushing the gay agenda wish to stop using gays as their mascots, and stop using gay issues as a battering ram to smash in the doors of the Church, then indeed, in that pastel-pink future, faithful Churchgoers could live in a commonwealth where sodomy was legal, in the same way sabbath-breaking or idol-worship is legal, praying for the sinners but not calling upon legal sanctions to harass them. All that would be required is for the pervertarians likewise to agree not to call upon legal sanctions to harass Churchgoers.

But keep in mind most pervertarians are not homosexuals themselves, or have anything they stand to gain personally from abolishing marriage in the name of marriage equality. They are enemies of the Church, and have found a convenient stick with which to beat the Church: they can claim that laws against sodomy, or laws acknowledging marriage, are just like the Jim Crow laws the Democrats enacted in the South after the Republican Union smashed the Democrat institution of slavery. What the connection is between race-hatred, which is an irrational antipathy of a whole racial group of man based on a trivial external characteristic no one can control or change, and a moral opprobrium against sexual perverts, which a rational antipathy against those individuals who freely decide to transgress the bounds of law and of nature, is a mystery of the Democrat faith. It is a talking point, something said without substance, neither meaningful nor meant to be believed, merely an emotional appeal, like calling someone a bad name, or calling an atrocity by an nondescript euphemism. It is a word-fetish.

The point is that even if the gays themselves wanted to live in peace with the Church, not approving of each other but tolerating each other, the pervertarians using the gay issue as their battering ram and their excuse to batter the Church will not allow that to happen.

There are many examples. I will mention but one: the Bible has been outlawed in Canada, and quoting from it is a hate crime, at least in cases where sins are condemned. Or, rather, sexual sins involving unnatural acts: http://christiannews.net/2013/02/28/canadian-supreme-court-rules-biblical-speech-opposing-homosexual-behavior-is-a-hate-crime/

The Supreme Court of Canada has ruled that Biblical speech opposing homosexual behavior, including in written form, is essentially a hate crime.

On Wednesday, the court upheld the conviction of activist William Whatcott, who found himself in hot water after distributing flyers regarding the Bible’s prohibitions against homosexuality throughout the Saskatoon and Regina neighborhoods in 2001 and 2002. The 7-judge panel consisted of Justices Beverly McLachlin, Louis LeBel, Marie Deschamps, Morris Fish, Rosalie Abellia, Marshall Rothstein and Thomas Cromwell.

“The Bible is clear that homosexuality is an abomination,” one flyer that was found to be in violation stated, citing 1 Corinthians 6:9. “Scripture records that Sodom and Gomorrah was given over completely to homosexual perversion and as a result destroyed by God’s wrath.”

Another flyer, entitled Keep Homosexuality Out of Saskatoon’s Public Schools, was written in response to the recommendation of the Saskatoon School Board that homosexuality be included in school curriculum. The Supreme Court declared the document to be unlawful because it called the homosexual acts that would be taught to children “filthy,”

The thing speaks for itself. It is illegal in Canada to quote the Word of God while speaking in favor of not teaching small children to celebrate and applaud a grotesque and unnatural sexual perversion.

Think it cannot happen here? It already is happening: http://www.caintv.com/unreal-city-of-houston-subpoen

… in June the Houston City Council passed, and Mayor Parker signed, a “human rights ordinance” that panders in numerous ways to activists pushing for gay and “gender identity” rights, including a requirement that men be allowed to use women’s bathrooms and vice versa. Not surprisingly, many local pastors opposed the ordinance, and more than 17,000 residents filed referendum petitions to get it repealed – which the city blatantly threw out alleging “irregularities”.But lest you thought Houston politicians were done playing hardball with their critics, not a chance.

[Houston’s] City attorneys, in an unusual step, subpoenaed sermons given by local pastors who oppose the law and are tied to the conservative Christian activists that have sued the city.

City attorneys issued subpoenas last month during the case’s discovery phase, seeking, among other communications, “all speeches, presentations, or sermons related to HERO, the Petition, Mayor Annise Parker, homosexuality, or gender identity prepared by, delivered by, revised by, or approved by you or in your possession.”

The subpoenas were issued to several high-profile pastors and religious leaders who have been vocal in opposing the ordinance. The Alliance Defending Freedom has filed a motion on behalf of the pastors seeking to quash the subpoenas.

The subpoenas are supposedly to see if pastors had in any way violated the law by using the pulpit to preach about the law. Aside from the obvious First Amendment problems here, the pastors weren’t even involved with the petition drive, so the city had no basis for issuing them subpoenas.

Not that this would stop them. The secular cultural left smells blood when it comes to gay rights, and they think they are now free to take any action – no matter how unconstitutional or illegal – against those who oppose the gay agenda…

Big picture: If a city can subpoena a pastor’s sermons just because the pastor preaches from the book that includes 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and other passages that call homosexuality sin, then we no longer have freedom of religion. At all. Period.

Which is the purpose of the exercise.

So, O Libertarians, we Christians find ourselves in a position where no compromise nor peaceful coexistence is possible because the Pervertarians, the Left, the Democrats, the Progressives, the Cultural Marxists, that amorphous blob of darkness that continually changes its name each time the public becomes of aware of who and what the name masks — they will not leave us in peace. For us to drop the sword of the magistrate now is not burying the hatchet; it is unilateral disarmament. The Sabbath-breakers and idol-worshiper are willing to leave us alone to worship and live our lives as we see fit. The Pervertarians, no matter what falsehoods they mouth, have abundantly proven by their actions that they will not.

But even if the situation in the real world were not so dire and clear, even on theoretical grounds, no matter what the situation, the Libertarian argument must fail: because marriage is not a contract. It does not involve two people dealing with each other at arm’s length for the exchange of goods and services or even for the exchange of sexual favors. Attempts to call marriage a contract are as phoney as calling it a bicycle or a three-ringed circus or a jar of sour gooseberry jam.

A marriage is a covenant for the foundation of a family, and also the building block of civilization. It is the primary mechanism by which civilization reproduces itself, and the legal and moral foundation for the race to reproduce. For an allegedly sex-obsessed age, this generation seems not to notice the most blatantly and painfully obvious thing about marriage: marriage is all about sex and sexual reproduction and children and families.

When a wife divorces a husband, the dispute over how to split shared property cannot be settled by the parties themselves, nor the rights and duties surrounding child-rearing. The matter must be settled by a court of law or public magistrate for the same reason that invasions from over the border by Huns must be settled by the public legal authority: because no private and voluntary system can enforce due process, uniformity, equality, and finality.

Even the commercial contracts to which the Libertarians awkwardly analogize the marriage covenant can rarely if ever be settled merely by private and mutually voluntary negotiation or private arbitration. Such arbitration agreements inevitably contain provisions referring the matter to the civic authorities if negotiation breaks down.

If a libertarian commonwealth were founded starting with a blank slate, and all marriages were handled in the same fashion as hiring a woman as a permanent live-in prostitute (which would be perfectly legal under a libertarian commonwealth) the moment the first child in the commonwealth is born, assuming the child is not treated as chattel but as a human being with rights, he has a right to be raised by his parents, who are under a natural duty to nurse and house and feed and rear and govern and educate and protect him — and these rights predate all human institutions, indeed all human law and writings, as they are derived from nature.

All that would happen in such a blank slate commonwealth is that the contract law would evolve into a specialized branch outlining the duties and obligations of filial and maternal obedience and child-rearing which would be indistinguishable from family law. Some legal theory would be created to make the natural duties of child-rearing controlled by the rubric of mutually beneficial private contracts, but there would be no contract. Babies do not sign contracts.

Privatizing family law is as unsound and unlikely an idea as privatizing the Navy, and letting all-volunteer militias fund and build and man the battleships.

In a commonwealth with a powerful, popular and Established Church enjoying exclusive and authority over matters of marriages, trusts and estates, inheritance and so on, the Church rather than the secular authority would handle family law and apply the coercive measures needed, but I doubt this is what the Libertarians who wish to abolish family law altogether, and replace it with contract law, have in mind.

Turning from this arid area of speculation to a more practical matter, the next question is whether there is a civil right by which a sodomite couple wishing to purchase the services of cake-bakers and wedding photographers and wedding planners, rent chapels or halls, or call upon Christian Churches to solemnize their vows of sodomy, must be served.

If a wedding dress tailor refuses to sew a pair of bridal gowns for a pair of lesbians wishing to enter into an unnatural, abominable, and truly sad and pathetic mockery of marriage, is that tailor the same as a clerk or cook refusing to serve Negros at a department store counter or diner?

The difference is so painfully obvious that I have trouble bringing myself to believe all Liberals and an embarrassing number of conservatives do not grasp the answer.

Our friend the Libertarian would say that the clerk and shopkeeper for any reason or no reason has the right to deny service to anyone, either due to the customer’s race or for any motive, fair or foul, honest or hateful, full stop. Let us consign that answer, for better or worse,  to an academic discussion having no bearing on the present case.  The fact of reality is that this is not the law as it stands in the United States in the current generation. There are abundant court cases confirming the interpretation of the Civil Rights Act and the Fourteenth Amendment as granting to any potential customer a right to be served or sold any good or service offered to the general public, not to be denied on the basis of race.

Now, nothing in the civil rights law says that if a man offers firearms for sale to the public, he is required to sell a gun to a member of a minority who tells him he means to use the weapon to rob a bank.

Nothing in the law says that a house-painter who offers his skills to the public is required to accept a job from a member of a minority who asks him to paint graffiti on the Washington Monument, or a mustache on the Statue of Liberty.

Nothing in the law says that a tap dancer who offers his skills to the public is required to accept a job from a member of a minority who asks him to trample the crucifix, or burn the flag, or spit on his mother’s face.

Indeed, nothing in the law requires me, a writer who offers his skills to the public, to accept a job from a member of a minority to follow his orders to pen a 3000 word document containing nothing but blasphemy against my God, treasonous sentiments against my nation, or filthy insults against my wife.

This is simply not what the civil rights law says and not what it is meant to say.

Likewise here.

When a baker or a tailor or a Church renting a hall to a pair of sodomites whose express the intention to make a mockery of the sacrament of marriage and desecrate it, a faithful Christian cannot aid, participate, or assist this desecration, lest the sin be his. He is not asking Caesar to draw the sword of the magistrate to prevent the desecration — our First Amendment as a matter of law makes all protection of sacred things to be a private matter, handled, if at all, by the customs and non-coercive mechanisms of courtesy and shame — he is merely asking Caesar to be excused from doing that which his religion forbids, that is, namely, materially aiding and abetting in the commission of a notorious and public sin.

It simply baffles me that I hear few or no conservatives address this argument. The baker, under our current laws, has no right to refuse to sell a gay man a cookie if such cookies are offered for sale to the general public. This is because selling a cookie is not prohibited by the baker’s religion, or else he would not be offering them for sale to the general public. The florist willing to sell a wreathe to a gay man holding a funeral again violates no stricture of religion. But asking the baker to bake a wedding cake or the florist to make a bridal arrangement to celebrate a gay so-called wedding does clearly and unambiguously propose that the baker and the florist aid and abet the desecration of the marriage sacrament.

No matter what the civil rights laws say, the First Amendment clause concerning the free exercise of religion overrules this. If the florist or the baker is being asked to desecrate something their religion holds sacred, they have a right not to be forced to participate, the same right they have not to be forced by public law to offer incense to an idol.

Any law that requires a man to trample a crucifix, or burn a Torah, or make and worship and image of Mahound, is null and void as a matter of primary Constitutional principle, and enjoys an endless line of court cases to support this construction.

Note, please, that this is a non-issue as far as real gays and lesbians are concerned: any of them can find a Jewish or Anglican or Unitarian baker or a florist, or a lapsed Catholic. The non-Christians and lukewarm Christians and lapsed Christians by such astronomical numbers outnumber the serious, practicing Christians who might voice a serious objection to the desecration of marriage, that a pervert couple who actually just wants a cake or a floral wreathe can easily obtain it, and no one stands in their way, not in America, not in this generation.

Only those who are seeking to make an issue out of it, to pick a fight, to disturb the public peace, and to trample the Constitution in the name of all-inclusive diversity (or whatever the bafflegab non-word of the day is today) have the time and patience to track down the practicing Christian bakers and florists to demand they publicly humiliate their faith by betraying Christian teaching.

So the legal argument that civil rights are being offended fails both as a matter of law, since the Free Exercise Clause is controlling legal authority, and as a matter of practical fact, since the matter only comes up for perverts seeking to be offended by hunting out those rather few Christians with faith enough and loyalty enough to defy the perverts and turn away their business.

And only their business in this one area: the bakers and photographers and florists and hall renters will sell and rent to them their skills and facilities for any other purpose other than a wedding.

The Christians will happily bake birthday cakes and sew confirmation dresses and rent halls for gay dances or any other purpose whatsoever, because we have no objection to sinners existing. We are all sinners. But the Christians would also refuse to bake cakes, sew dresses, take photographs, and rent halls to a man marrying his sister, or a man marrying as two wives, or a man marrying a child.

We do not refuse to participate in desecrating marriage because we hate desecrators, but because we love marriage.

It is because marriage is  sacred, a thing established by God whom we dare not disobey, not because sinners are sinful, that we ask you to take your business elsewhere. It has nothing to do with you. It is not all about you.

Get over yourself. Unglue your eyes from the looking glass, Narcissus. Snap out of it.

All we ask is that you not compel us to participate in your blasphemies and desecrations when you commit them. All we ask is to be left in peace.

So the Fourteenth Amendment argument fails because the cases are not parallel between a baker who refuses to be hired (and it does not matter who hires him, gay or straight) to help celebrate a gay wedding that desecrates his religious faith, and a baker who refuses to bake anything for Black customers. The first is protected by the Free Exercise Clause and the second is not.

We turn now to the more general legal argument, which says that, as a matter of fundamental fairness and equality, we cannot afford the right to marry to a man and his wife unless we also extend that right to a sodomite and his catamite, or to two lesbians. The argument is that the law should be blind to the difference between the sexes and sexual orientations, just as it is blind to the fame or wealth or race of the citizens, and is thus obligated to treat all equally, by their acts.

This argument is so utterly insincere and fallacious that I have difficulty imagining why any man finds it persuasive, or thinks others will. It is the same as the argument that, since it is legal for a man to marry his bride, he should be able to marry his mother or sister, or to marry a pair of twins, or to marry a women currently married to another man, or marry an animal, a slave, a child, a corpse, an inanimate object or national monument, or anything else his fancy says.

Now, one might object that slaves, children, monuments, corpses and animals cannot give informed consent to marriage. Christian marriage requires consent, but no other religion, so far as I know, requires it: hence consent is not a central and essential property of the mating ritual we call marriage, but the ability, at least in theory, to mate and form a sexual dyad, a couple, is and must be a central and essential property.

But even putting that question to one side, the lack of informed consent does not apply to incestuous marriages, polygamous marriages, or bigamy. Your adult sister or mother can give her informed consent, and so can the Barnstable twins  and so can Draupadi.

Moreover, as Antigone and King Rehoboam and King Edward VIII will testify, such matings are indeed matings, and will in the natural course of events produce offspring.

The alliance or agreement between two men or two women to masturbate each other, while it is a sexual or sex-like act, is not copulation, is not mating, and is not sex.

It is the stimulation of the sex organs without the actual mating act, the act of sex.

As far as I can tell, the strongest argument as to why this alliance should be granted the formalities and solemnities and legal rights of marriage is that the feelings of the homosexuals toward each other are the same romantic and tender feelings as a man toward his wife or her toward him.

So if the feelings are sexual but the sexual act is by nature impossible between them, the argument is this is feeling is sufficient to justify the calls for equality, equal rights, and to have the laws concerning paternity and inheritance apply to them, even though the pair is not a couple and cannot have any biological offspring.

If we grant this argument, then the same argument applies with more force to incestuous marriages, polygamous marriages, marriage to a fertile but underage teenager, or bigamy. Indeed, the argument is more forceful in such cases, because mating is biologically possible between such pairs. A man and his sister or a man and his second concubine form a couple, a male-female dyad.

Now, the libertarian argument at this point is to say that, just as granting homosexual allies who masturbate each other the same solemnities and legal rights as a man and wife who copulate, we should grant such rights and solemnities likewise to Oedipus and Jocasta, Solomon and his three hundred wives, Joseph Smith and his dozen wives, Mohammed and his child-bride Aisha, and (why not?) Pasiphae and her bull.

The problem is one of definition. If marriage is, like posting a valentine card, nothing more and nothing less than a public expression of affection, erotic longing, and romantic tenderness, then the object of the affection should not matter as far as the law is concerned. But if that is all marriage is, it is not marriage. It is not a legal institution at all, merely a symbolic expression of sentiment.

Defining marriage as a public expression of private sentiment is the same as abolishing marriage altogether. While, given the state of the law and the customs concerning contraception, fornication, adultery and no-fault divorce, a strong argument could be made that marriage de facto has already been abolished in any serious or binding sense, nonetheless, as a matter of law, it has not.

The question of abolishing marriage has already been discussed above, and, I trust, conclusively: the thing is merely impossible. As stated above, the attempt to reduce marriage to a private contract is vain and illogical. The only real result is that marriage vows will no longer be enforced, and will create no legal ramifications.

If marriage is defined as a public oath which binds one to a law that will identify paternity, this has no bearing on homosexual alliances one way or another: the question never comes up. Paternity in the case of adoption is voluntary, and the person to be recognized as the guardian of the child, with the legal rights and duties to govern and rear the child, are clearly identified, and again this has no bearing on the role of marriage in identifying paternity.

If marriage is defined as a public oath which binds one to a law that will punish unchastity, so that a bachelor copulating with a willing maiden is licit and legal, but a married man runs afoul of a public law against adultery, all one need say is that none of the pervertarians are asking for this or even discussing it. I am also not sure what the applicable law would be to try a case where a man was accused of cheating on his homosex partner to whom he had vowed to ‘forsake all others’ by copulating with a maiden.  The concept is innately risible. Are the gays now celebrating because the state will penalize them for committing sodomy outside their avowed single partner to whom they have vowed exclusive and lifelong love? Should the dubious privilege of no-fault divorce be granted them? What about annulments on the grounds of an inability ever to consummate the marriage?

If marriage is defined as a mating ritual to solemnize a male-female couple who have vowed themselves to each other, and to serve all the above purposes and many more, then the wish of homosexuals to participate is meaningless. It is not through some cruelty that the law forbids male to copulate with male; it is a fact of biology. Marriage is a copulation ceremony used to cement, celebrate, and enforce the bonds of love (or of cynical mutual convenience) that form the sexual dyad that reproduces the species and forms the family unit. We don’t need gay marriage to cement the reproductive bond between a man and his mate.

The pervertarians do not want gay marriage recognized at law for this purpose: the ceremonial and legal bond tying together the reproductive dyad has nothing to do with the pervertarian cause. All they want is to shatter the bond. They say they are shattering this bond in the name of equality, but the progressives and their spiritual forbears have been trying to untie the knot of Christian marriage since the days of Henry VIII. Equality is merely the latest excuse. Privacy and population-prudence was the excuse used to usher in contraception; convenience was the excuse to usher in no-fault divorce.

Civilizations have a choice whether to recognize and enforce the union of man and wife as a sacrament, or to ignore and discourage such unions and pretend they are a private matter, like friendship, and ignore the social ramifications and implications of family loyalties, inheritance, property, childrearing. Those civilization who chose the former prosper; those who chose the latter fall into increasing disarray, and the generation of bastards, reared by no fathers, having no emotional ties to and stable social organs, tend to cluster in gangs for their own protection, and tear the body politic to shreds.

So the assault of the giants called law and custom against the Olympian mountain of marriage cannot end in any other way: the mountain will stand, and those who seek to tear the mountain down will fall beneath the landslides they unleash.

Marriage serves a variety of purposes, not the least of which is to delimit with whom copulation is licit versus illicit. Since copulation, in the natural course of things, is directed toward the end result of reproducing the young, marriage laws also treat with trusts and estates, wills and inheritances, child-rearing, custody and support. These things cannot be applied to an alliance of sodomites or lesbians in any logical way, or any way that comports with common sense or common law.

If a man is hired for pay by a lesbian couple to father a child which they will then claim as their own by adoption, and then they divorce, either the law (as it now does) holds him liable to a duty to rear and protect the child as its father, or the law (as it soon must, given the logic of homosex) must hold him able to divest himself of that duty by contract, which, in effect, makes the child a chattel, a parcel to be bought and sold. In the first case, the father has the burdens of fatherhood without the right as a father to his child, and in the second case, the child has no rights as a child to his father and mother, or even his human right not to be bought and sold. And likewise for a surrogate mother negotiating with a pair of sodomites.

The possibilities for legal mischief and absurdity is rife: it gives our unelected judges the right to decide that strangers unrelated by blood to the child, such as the ‘marriage partner’ or live-in lover of a lesbian who bears a bastard from the seed of a hired man, is the one who bears the duty of child-rearing. The judges will be deciding and re-deciding the definition of marriage on a case by case basis, with no guide but their personal discretion, and, since the law will be in a state of confusion, personal whim.

The least convincing argument commonly encountered is the claim that gay so-called marriage will not harm nor even influence nor touch real marriage. I am, once again, unable to comprehend what relation this argument has to reality, or even what it is purporting to argue. Affirming gay marriage as a matter of law affirms that marriage is not marriage, that there is no such thing as marriage, that the thing called marriage is actually its own direct opposite. I cannot see how the abolition of marriage fails to harm marriage. That is the harm of which none greater can be conceived.

No matter what sentiment or kindly fellow-feelings to our neighbors suffering from the scourge of same-sex sexual attraction, the fact of the matter is that, if their sexual adventures are licit, then there is no sexual action which is illicit, save those that are illicit on other grounds (as when force or fraud is involved). This means that there is no dividing line between licit versus illicit sex, allowed partners versus not allowed. But the whole point of marriage is to draw a dividing line between licit versus illicit, allowed versus disallowed sexual partners.

Ergo celebrating an alliance or agreement of sodomites only to masturbate each other (perhaps forsaking all others and perhaps not, as they like) as if that is a marriage vow is inescapably the same as rendering all marriage vows to be of none effect.

The counterargument is that once marriage is (all but in name) abolished in order to allow sodomites to pretend they are married, the normal people are unharmed, on the grounds that they too can pretend to be married.

The fact that the pretense of marriage is not marriage is not addressed by this counterargument.

The fact that married couples do not want to pretend to be married but to be ACTUALLY married, and to live in a society where custom and law discourages and deters violations of the marriage vows, is dismissed without being answered.

Well, ladies and gentlemen, serious folks and even more serious romantics do not want to pretend to be married. I want to be married.

When I vow a vow, I want society to hold me to it. There is no point in wagering if you cannot be made to pay.

If society lets every man for himself decide how seriously his vows are to be taken, logic says all vows fall to the least common denominator, and become, not vows, but merely words expressing one’s current, and perhaps passing, sentiment.

Once the marriage vow is held, as a matter of law, to be everything and nothing, to apply to illicit as well as to licit sex, to apply to natural as well as unnatural sexual acts, to apply equally to chaste desires as well as perverse desires, then society will not and can not hold anyone to his vows.

So, the argument that, as a matter of law, the institution of marriage must be applied equally to those whose coupling can form a marriage as it is applied to those whose mutual masturbation is the direct opposite of marriage fails as a matter of simple logic. Equality does not mean abolishing the thing to be shared equality.

Equality means that we should not have one set of laws for sinners suffering same-sex attraction as for sinners suffering from other temptations and false desires. And this is the exact situation we have at present: any man, gay or straight, drunk or sober, can marry any woman not his blood-relation who is of age and can give informed consent to the vow, just as any man of any race, origin, or sect can.

No man, gay or straight, of any race or origin can wed two wives, or wed a child or another man’s wife, even with the other man’s consent.

Equality is preserved: the same law applies equally to all, and their race and so on, including whatever sexual temptations, natural or not, they suffer, simply and absolutely are not taken into account by the law.

Nothing in any statute, now or in the past, in any jurisdiction in America or in the English-speaking world, says “Men not sexually attracted to other men may not marry a woman, but men attracted to women may.”

Whether or not a man suffering this unnatural sexual perversion has the desire to wed is beside the point. I do not want to learn to fly a plane, but it would in effect abolish the licensing of pilots if I were to call (in the name of Equality) for non-pilots to receive piloting licenses by demonstrating an utter inability to fly. Under such a law, the ability to fly and the inability are treated as one and the same, which is to say, obtaining a piloting license no longer means anything. Under such a law, obtaining a piloting license means you had the hankering to go get a meaningless bit of paper.

Turning from the legal to the moral argument, the argument here is that as a matter of morality, society should allow each man the maximum scope for liberty as is consistent with an orderly and law-abiding society; and moreover it is no place for the force and majesty of the law to enforce moral rules, and that sexual perversions, if kept private, are not a legitimate concern of the public.

This argument can be dispensed with in a word: it is not pertinent, even if true, to this discussion. We are not now discussing what two people do in the privacy of their own home, but what the public law concerning marriage versus the abolition of marriage should be. That marriage laws are necessary for a law abiding society is too obvious a point to discuss: absent marriage laws, either the state claims all property of a man who dies without a will and gives it arbitrarily to whomever the presiding probate judge sees fit,  or the state treats all matings that produces a child as a de facto marriage, a common law marriage, and imposes on the biological father the financial and moral duty to rear the child, and the state grants that child a claim in the estate of any deceased father, marriage or no marriage. The legal nightmare can only be imagined, since no record would be kept of such matings, and every child would have to be identified by medical test.

The neutrality of the law toward moral questions is a chimera, a figment as unimaginable as an octagonal triangle. Either the law recognizes marriage, in which case the law deters unchastity and encourages chastity by rewarding it with its due dignity; or the law renders marriage to be of no legal effect, in which  case the law encourages unchastity by granting it equal respect with chastity, and deters chastity by robbing it of its due dignity.

You have sold your birthright for not even a mess of pottage: you have given away the most precious, civilizing and crucial institution of civilization, and in return, you get a false promise of equality.

You get nothing.

Such a state is not equality. It is not even tyranny. A tyrant at least is in charge of something, and can make decrees and give orders which have his name on them. I doubt one person in ten, or a hundred, reading these words knows, off the top of his head, without looking it up, the name of a single one of the judges who overruled the state constitutions of these states and spat in the face of each and every voter.

This is the one thing worse than tyranny: this is anarchy.

This ruling, now left to stand, is that any judge of any level can overrule valid state constitutional amendments on core features clearly matters of local jurisdiction, can decree all voters to be ‘irrational,’ and can redefine institutions older than written history to mean anything and nothing, on the grounds that, if two people want to clam to be married, no one  can dispute the claim.

The way the law works is this: the claim of a polygamist to marry many wives cannot be held as false if the claim of two men to be married is true, not if the mens’ claim rests on nothing but their desire to make the claim, for the polygamist can likewise entertain the desire to make the claim. And likewise for any number of persons in any condition, such as the congregation of a Church — why cannot all the Unitarians or Unificationists, for example, all marry each other as a group, en masse, and form one, big happy family?

And, once marriage is not sacrosanct, what other institution is left?

What makes anyone think private contracts for the sale of goods will be held in more reticent respect than the mutual vows of man and wife to form a family?

If any random judge, at any time, based not on the law but on the judge’s personal political opinions about what is just and unjust, can overrule the marriage institution, the most ancient and most worthy of respect of all institutions, then there is no basis in law or logic to prevent that judge (or any officer at any level of government) from overruling, redesigning, rewriting, or abolishing any church, any priesthood or sacred brotherhood, any school or university, any academic or scientific institution or body doing research, any aspect of the criminal justice system, or civil or administrative courts, any military or paramilitary arm or service, including the Boy Scouts, any police force, any corporation or industrial institution, the arts and entertainment, the medical community, the press, any family business or social club or civic society.

If marriage is not sacrosanct, safe from arbitrary and fickle amendment by unelected lunatics, none of these are safe.

None of these institutions have any power to conduct themselves as they see fit; all are now vulnerable to amendment or abolition by a random stranger in a black robe drunk with power, and acting with dismissive and arbitrary powerlust. What makes you think some random judge in California will not outlaw, let us say, doctor-patient privilege, or lawyer-client privilege? Or the spelling of words in the dictionary, or anything else he sees fit? Is your relationship to your doctor or your attorney more sacrosanct than your relationship to your wife?

Marriage is a private institution that merits public recognition for a variety of legal reasons, most particularly those dealing with adultery, child-rearing, and inheritance.  Absent marriage laws, the State will be thrust in the role (as has largely already happened) of deciding the paternity on a case by case basis of every child born, and compelling absent or (much more likely) abandoned fathers to support children being reared by the biological mother’s current live-in lover of either sex or any number; and all taxpayers likewise to help the mother foot the bill.

In Christian marriage, God, the Husband and the Wife, all three, together form the irreducible unit of the marriage. In antichristian unmarriage, the gaily-named and frivolous jabberwocky called gay marriage, the three are the person, the second person, and Caesar.

You are all making the state the center and main stay of your marriages. But this is hardly a reason for gaiety.

At the same time, this precedent unmoors the state from any legal precedent limited the jurisdiction of judges or defending the sanctity of marriage or, indeed, of any institution. With this, a precedent has been set which allows any non-elected officer has just as good a reason to break or rewrite  or ignore the law as to enforce it. It is the death of law as a concept.

Laugh, fools, laugh. Enjoy your triumph. You have thrown open the gates, not to a returning hero, but to a barbarism of chaos.

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ADDENDUM: The day after the above column was written, this news came out:

http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/10/new_america_ordained_ministers_threatened_with_jail_unless_they_perform_same_sex_marriages.html

Alliance Defending Freedom attorneys filed a federal lawsuit and a motion for a temporary restraining order Friday to stop officials in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, from forcing two ordained Christian ministers to perform wedding ceremonies for same-sex couples.

City officials told Donald Knapp that he and his wife Evelyn, both ordained ministers who run Hitching Post Wedding Chapel, are required to perform such ceremonies or face months in jail and/or thousands of dollars in fines. The city claims its “non-discrimination” ordinance requires the Knapps to perform same-sex wedding ceremonies now that the courts have overridden Idaho’s voter-approved constitutional amendment that affirmed marriage as the union of a man and a woman.

“The government should not force ordained ministers to act contrary to their faith under threat of jail time and criminal fines,” said ADF Senior Legal Counsel Jeremy Tedesco. “Many have denied that pastors would ever be forced to perform ceremonies that are completely at odds with their faith, but that’s what is happening here – and it’s happened this quickly. The city is on seriously flawed legal ground, and our lawsuit intends to ensure that this couple’s freedom to adhere to their own faith as pastors is protected just as the First Amendment intended.”

The couple would face 180 days in jail and up to $1000 in fines per day if they dared to adhere to their religious beliefs.