Sunday, June 29, 2008
Gay marriage threatens our culture
From the RoundTable blog
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Jim Ludington
Ludington is the executive director of Arise America Ministries and an adjunct professor of history at Liberty University. He lives in Roanoke.
The question has been asked whether Virginia will honor homosexual "marriages" performed elsewhere. I hope and pray that our legislature will have the common sense and decency to prevent that from happening.
But no matter what judges and legislatures decide -- there will never be a "marriage" between two men or two women.
Marriage is a beautiful concept that was created by God, not government. It joins two lives together to establish a family, and families provide the core unit where children, the next generation that will lead and protect us, are created and nurtured. That family unit is of utmost importance -- it is the basic unit of any society. And this biblically defined family is the strong foundation upon which our nation was built.
Strong families create strong nations, and our culture remained strong because we worked to keep the family pure. For centuries we discouraged marital infidelity, fornication and out-of-wedlock pregnancies, because those acts were harmful to the family and weakened the core of our culture. When we relaxed our standards in these areas and chose to ignore nearly every form of immorality, we opened the door for the perversion that demands acceptance in our culture today.
Sadly, we have not hit bottom yet. Once homosexual "marriages" are accepted in our courts of law, any group will be able to demand the right to marry. Polygamists, for example, are waiting patiently for the uproar over homosexuals to die down. Then they will take their demands to court, and with homosexual "marriages" established, our courts will have no legal standing to prevent plural marriages. We must understand that once true marriage has been redefined by activist judges and reinforced by legislatures, all restrictions on marriage must be removed. Otherwise each new group will claim unconstitutional discrimination, and a growing body of case law will support them.
If polygamy doesn't bother you, just wait. It gets worse. Pedophiles have been fighting around the world for children to be able to give legal sexual consent, and they are succeeding. In some nations, the age is now 12 years old, and is still falling, slowly and incrementally. Some states in the U.S. now allow 14- and 16-year-olds to give limited sexual consent and, in some cases, to marry. But if homosexual "marriages" stand, the ages will fall ever lower. Pedophiles want all age restrictions removed, and again, if we accept homosexual unions, we will have no legal standing against any form of perversion. And if hate crimes continue to proliferate, we will be guilty of a felony if we object to their behavior.
In the early days of Christian Europe and later the United States, marriage was strictly a church function. The various forms of governments that existed over the centuries, including the most powerful monarchies, had little or no control over marriage. A man and a woman were joined together in the church, married in the sight of God, family and friends -- not government. Births, deaths, baptisms and divorces were recorded there as well, because only the church officiated over family and personal events.
Early Christians for the most part obeyed the biblical admonition to keep church and family disagreements out of the courts. But as the influence of the church declined, church members were more inclined to bring property, inheritance, divorce and child custody cases to civil courts.
In our modern world, government has a keen interest in record keeping, and now documents all personal and family events in great detail. The church has been relegated to a symbolic role and can be left out completely, even in marriage, if couples choose a civil ceremony.
Yet here we are, stupidly standing by while activist judges destroy the basis of our culture, and indeed, our civilization. We seem completely oblivious to the fact that our constitution places the power of government in our hands. We hold the power to impeach judges (through our congressional representatives), and to elect those who will legislate for the good of the majority, not a perverse minority. But by what criteria do we elect our representatives?
History records the stories of good people, like the Germans who watched Nazis take over their government, who have seen their nations destroyed. We still have time to stop our destruction, if we care enough to act.
