Far worse than the threat from international terrorism is the aggressive process of secularisation that has gripped our country, and most of Europe, and which is becoming ever more frenzied. For example, I guess not many people are aware that it is against the law for state schools to teach the Christian faith as true. Teachers are allowed only to teach about religions. This is atheism by decree, for the only perspective from which one can teach about all religions is the secular perspective. So our children are not brought to a sense of holiness and awe, but are merely taught the meanings of religious terms as sociological descriptions. This deprivation of the spiritual is a form of child abuse.
And then there are the Sexual Orientation Regulations which make it illegal to discriminate on moral grounds between forms of sexual coupling. One might put this epigrammatically: what was once a mortal sin is now only a lifestyle choice. I supported the Homosexual Reform Act back in the 1960s on the grounds that it is not right to criminalise people on the grounds of their sexual orientation.
But the many people who believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised never intended that this should create the proselytising Gay Liberation Movement. The Act decreed that homosexual acts should be “between consenting adults in private” Between means involving two; adult meant 21; and private means behind locked doors. But now the love which once dare not speak its name, shrieks at us in high camp from decorated floats along the high street.
[i]I supported the Homosexual Reform Act back in the 1960s on the grounds that it is not right to criminalise people on the grounds of their sexual orientation. But the many people who believed that homosexuality should be decriminalised never intended that this should create the proselytising Gay Liberation Movement.[/i]
And this is why the term “slippery slope” was coined for this type of fiasco.
Count me with Mr. Mullen: I’m one of those who was, and is, in favor of decriminalizing homosexual sex between consenting adults. I’m in favor of civil marriage for gays. But the pendelum has swung much too far in the opposite direction now, where expressing one’s vehement disapproval of homosexuality can get you a visit from the constabulary.
Jeffersonian, do you consider yourself a Christian? If so, I just have to ask, how can you be in favor of civil marriage for gays? The Bible clearly defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
It’s the type of statements that you make here that are causing grave concern for those seeking Christ. It’s creating a stumbling block for them if there’s even an inkling of compromise on the TRUE message in the Bible. It’s causing grave CONFUSION!!!!! about what the Bible really says. Do you really want to be a party to that?
Mugsie
Because I believe in the separation of church and state. I’m foursquare against gay marriage in my church, as any of my posts here will confirm, but believe that our secular government should not exclude gays from entering into this civil arrangement.
Jeffersonian:
So you are in favor of homosexual partners receiving social security payments on the basis of their “spouses” work, as my mother did from my dad? You are in favor of other social benefits married couples have – not the least being official societal approval – should be extended to same-sex couples?
Jeffersonian, I respectfully disagree with your opinion. Our great commission as Christians is to work at gathering all people into the flock. No one can honestly do that and still (at the same time) believe that “secular government should not exclude gays from entering into this civil arrangement.” I believe that we are to follow the authority of our land, EXCEPT where it states what goes AGAINST what God commands. God made clear in the Scriptures that a marriage is only a joining of one woman and one man. That is our direct command from God NOT to believe that any government of any kind should allow gays entering into a civil “marriage” arrangement. In condoning such a “marriage” are we not condoning what is contrary to Scripture? In condoning what is contrary to Scripture are we not then being hypocritical? I believe we are.
We need to be faithful to God to the core. In all things, even in secular areas where we live, we are to proclaim only the TRUTH as given to us in Scripture. Don’t you agree as a Christian? I just can’t (as a Christian) draw a line in the sand and say secular government can do this and I’ll agree with them (in their area), and in my little world of Christianity (in my church) I won’t agree with them. We are commanded to evangelize the world. I just can’t have two totally opposing opinions about the same thing and still call myself honestly Christian about it.
Mugsie
Why have state marriages at all? If two people want to contract with each other over how to share financial or other arrangements, let them do so. Why we need to encourage procreation or marriage in the secular state that is building walls to keep poor people out is beyond me anyway.
We already see the slippery slope in NH in the church now; priests are using the license of the secular state to override the clear intent of both the international Communion and their limp HoB’s instructions.
Tom Roberts, Canada has also legislated that civil marriage is legal. The current PB Hilty recently stated that this affects what their church should believe. This is a perfect example of the evil effect that “secular” beliefs have on the church. Our responsibility (as Christians) is to stand up and proclaim the TRUTH as it was given to us in the Scriptures REGARDLESS of what secular society does and believes. Not only are we to proclaim this to our fellow Christians (in our church), but to all the world. That is our Great Commission. In no way are we to conform to the secular world. Our job is to help it conform to Christ. PB Hilty has clearly shown his lack of authentic Christianity is the recent statements. We are not to follow his example.
No Gay Libertarian Act should be approved by anyone who honestly calls themselves Christian. Homosexual activity is contrary to Scripture and that is all we need to know. Our job is to promote only the truth and disarm any who proclaim and attempt to promote anything other than the TRUTH.
No, we are not giving consent to abuse those afflicted by homosexuality. We are only stating that we won’t approve any Acts that approve of that activity at any level. Our responsibility as Christians is to bring those suffering with homosexual desire to Christ so He can help them heal. They need strongly to accept Him into their lives so He can do that. Approving secular Acts to give them any freedom with their sinful desires is telling them they don’t need to come to Christ. In doing such things, we are going against Christ. That is NOT what we are commanded to do.
Mugsie
8- I agree with everything you said. My principle point which you didn’t address is to take the secular taint away entirely from marriage by getting the state out of that issue entirely. What happens in Sodom stays in Sodom, so to speak. We as a church would prefer to build “Jerusalem In England’s green and pleasant land.”
[blockquote] My principle point which you didn’t address is to take the secular taint away entirely from marriage by getting the state out of that issue entirely. [/blockquote]
#9, I apologize that I didn’t address this statement above. I do agree with you there. In taking marriage entirely out of the secular area, then the “civil” problem would be eliminated. Churches of Christ would have to adhere to Scripture and only allow marriages of one man and one woman. They certainly couldn’t use their “secular” laws as excuses for approving nonbiblical forms of marriage within the church, as PB Hilty and some others are attempting to do in our present time.
Mugsie
Mugsie, I assume you would like the state to get out of the divorce business, as well. Jesus spoke against it (and not, certainly, about same-sex civil or church-blessed unions).
11- that is an obvious conclusion from the thread above. Secular contracts which would replace marriage can be terminated as in the same way of similar contracts for insuring partners in business. So it would pass in replacing ‘marriages’ which are not Christian marriages with contracts between adult parties, plus there would already be an extravagance of case law and precedent for how to deal with parties who don’t see matters today as they did yesterday.
It would probably put new teeth into the concept of ‘civil unions’ as well, as contractual ‘pre nuptials’ would be as common as auto titles. Unless such contracts specified the frequency of conjugal rights, I wouldn’t anticipate the secular courts caring one way or another who slept with who for how long.
[i]Why have state marriages at all? [/i]
Because marriages stabilize the community.
13 Really? They might be an incontrovertible part of Christian Tradition and Scripture, but here we are talking of a society that routinely uses pseudo Christian marriage for its own purposes which are quite at cross purposes to those of the Church. So why should we Christians chose to have our rites (and in the Catholic case sacraments) lowered to the the lowest common denominator?
[blockquote]So you are in favor of homosexual partners receiving social security payments on the basis of their “spouses†work, as my mother did from my dad? You are in favor of other social benefits married couples have – not the least being official societal approval – should be extended to same-sex couples? [/blockquote]
FWIW, I’m against anyone getting Social Security payments for any number of reasons, not the least of which is the fiscal abyss this program is headed for. But if heterosexual couples can get them, I don’t see any reason why homosexual couples shouldn’t be able to, as well. I’d leave the decision about other tangible benefits to the private sector and the decision on whether to grant “societal approval” to individuals.
Yes, marriage really does stabilize the community, making it a safer, more secure place. Mr. Roberts, I have no idea what you are saying. Marriage is not a specifically Christian matter, as cultures all over the world and all through history have known. Heavens, when did this become radical thinking?
Certainly, law should reflect good and bad. Liberals and conservatives both believe this, although they disagree on particular matters that should be outlawed. Certainly the public square is a complicated, diverse place, but should the Christian voice be denied a place when we know the keys to a decent, peacable community? Consider divorce: is this society a better place to live now that divorce is a simple, socially acceptable matter?
Marriage is a natural good; sodomy intrinsically evil. Will society be a better place if sodomy is sanctified in law? How long will it be until Americans, like Canadians, are hauled before tribunals because they don’t wish to promote same-sex relationships? How long before, as in England, the police are talking to you if you don’t approved of sodomy? Will Catholic Charity chapters all over the country be forced out of the adoption business?
The original post is the bitter voice of experience. Do we wish to replicate that in the U.S.? How long do you think it will be until churches are sued on the basis of “discriminating” by refusing to “marry” same-sex couples?
I agree with Words Matter. One of the foundations of Western Civilization is life-long traditional marriage. In Islam, marriage is a civil contract, easily broken (at least for men). With no-fault divorce, we have created much the same situation; with sexual libertinism, we have created a society in which large numbers of children are raised outside of marriage entirely, and this new step, same-sex unions, completely blurs the distinction between the sexes. We’re already seeing the results of all these experiments in the deteriorating behavior of children cut loose from any kind of societal structure.
Peter Mullen comes from that very English, ‘Oxbridge’ even, region of High Church conservatism, the sort that calls to mind Edward Norman (and what has happened to him? is he still an Anglican?) – impeccable in its classical music taste, orthodox but not Roman, cool and restrained, and disparaging towards evangelicals; the sort that made concessions to social liberalism in the 1960s, partly because it quietly harbored a significant homosexual and misogynist element within itself. However, the move in the CofE towards WO and the overt promotion of homosexuality proved unstoppable, leaving Mullen now with a sad awareness of the law of unintended consequences. Britain is headed towards ever deepening social conflict in the years ahead, and the CofE will be one of the victims.
16+17 I would agree that if society’s goal was to create a righteous community then your analysis is correct. Unfortunately, our social goals as well as how we politically generate social outcomes are often antithetical to what you are describing. Saying that laws should reflect good and evil presumes that our legislatures and courts are a suitable mirror for what is absolutely good or evil. Instead we have the current situation in which laws are passed which represent pluralistic moralities, and at times less moral status than that (e.g. the federal and state budget processes and their consequences).
My point is that we have two totally different definitions of marriage and two completely skew expectations of what costs and benefits pertain to those dissimilar institutions. It is a bit like the word “trailer”, as in “use your trailer when you move to NYC”. A trailer could be a U haul or a 40 foot rear part of a tractor-trailer. They both do about the same things, but using one has logistical implications completely different than the other. My perception is that your believing secular marriage and church marriage to be one and the same is as apt as believing all trailers to be the same.
So when you bring up the possibilities that churches would be condemned for discriminatory behavior on the subject of marriage, I would say that this would be a commendable outcome indeed. However, I believe that your fear will come about under any future scenario anyway, and that churches will have to be explicitly discriminating if they are to be churches at all, rather than comfortable social clubs as ecusa intends itself to be.
Instead, I’ve proposed that the discrete outcomes that society intends for such unions be legitimized but kept semantically separate from the entirely different outcomes that the church intends. I believe that logically meets your intentions in all its functional parameters, and more important, gives a church the ability to say “we don’t marry people who are unready for marriage”.
I could describe my problem with your stance in a practical way as well. One wag once asked “What is the most important and unlicensed social function that can destroy lives due to its participants being totally untrained and practically unrestricted in its forms?” Answer: parenthood and raising children. I would submit to you that secular marriage is practically as bad, given the low bar we have instituted over time for participants to enter into that relationship and then exit from it. If you allow me agreement on this current status of the Western family within our secular states, why do you wish to put church marriage into that same functional context, or even the same semantic context?
Mr. Roberts,
I’m not talking about religious marriage. I’m talking about civil unions, which are functionally “marriage” in the secular state. If we wanted to have separate civil and religious processes for marriage (like the Europeans), that would be fine with me, but I would still oppose civil unions/marriage for same-sex couples. Actually, we more or less do have separate processes, except that we allow for one person – the ordained minister – to do both.
The purpose of governmental functions, such as the making of laws, is to promote an harmonious and peaceable community. In other words, I want to walk to the 7-11 with a reasonable expectation of not getting mugged along the way. Social stability enhances that. Stable marriages are more likely to produce stable children who are less likely to put a gun in my face and demand my wallet. We give certain tangible benefits to couples who enter into these relationships, plus a legal imprimatur that [i]does[/i] matter. See my comments above and consider the situations developing in Canada, Britain, and Sweden WRT same-sex issues. I don’t think the low level of stability of same-sex unions merits the social rewards (tangible as well as non-tangible). This has nothing to do with religious rites or sacraments and everything to do with the community where I live being a safe place.
20 Then you will have to make the case, in purely secular terms, that statistics which you are saying exist (“low level of stability of same-sex unions”) are:
1. sufficient justification for forbidding all such unions
2. given #1, that there are no other unfavorable situations meriting similar treatment, e.g. the union of two adolescents who have both been cited for multiple DWIs
I’ll grant that family instability is a gross social problem. I’m just not sure that you can pin it just to a very restricted number of groups that happen to align along our religious injunctions on a circumstantial basis. Instead, if society actually wanted to address this problem coherently, it would have to fashion some secular basis for discerning both the benefits of family coherence and those degenerate influences that mitigate against family coherence. That basis, again, would probably not be religious in nature, and well might contradict any religious precepts. Saying that society should inculcate ‘good’ and eschew ‘evil’, when neither is cogently defined in secular terms, is nearly pointless, both in the case of creating families or marriage/civil unions, or in any other intervention of the government into the lives of its citizenry.
The state’s interest, as a matter of the the First Amendment, is in civil unions, not marriage. They are not the same. The combining of couples in an agreement that has legal characteristics and carries benefits derived from the state is sufficient cause for the state to be vitally concerned. Can we have civil unions – which are really legal partnerships with specified benefits – with more than two people? Of course, if legislators create such a category, for the same reason that other kinds of partnerships can have multiple partners.
But marriage is a spiritual matter. Does the state have an interest? Of course, but it has no power to intervene for First Amendment reasons. Can churches marry homosexuals? Of course, but they cannot call these Christian marriages nor can the churches call themselves Christian. TEC is no longer a Christian church and should be excluded from all Christian gatherings and organizations.
This is not a difficult set of concepts, and the original essay speaks to how the fad-power of an agenda can override the clear and obvious. For the situation to come to a head, we will have to wait for more-than-two unions and marriages to force society to make crucial decisions.
What is exceedingly strange to me in this matter is the acceptance of sodomy, for it has surely become an accepted practice. Is it simply that sodomy has become common among heterosexuals, that a sex-obsessed and jaded generation has turned to sodomy as a a variant of sexual congress because all the usual practices have, from excess, become boring? Or is it that a series of narcissistic, exhibitionistic generations have created a culture that is indistinguishable from homosexual culture, and that narcissism and sodomy have a inherent connection? I do hope that someone will address this issue. Larry
21 cont.- Let me give an example of the type of issue which I believe your approach to social issues brings. We all know AIDS is spread by sexual promiscuous behavior, predominantly. Two people who practise abstinence until marriage and don’t practise adultery thereafter probably won’t get it. Now, African churches have pointed out that such chaste behavior is precisely what Scripture recommends to all people, and being free of the threat of AIDS is just a serendipitous benefit of trying to lead a righteous life. Christian marriage is a good thing, both spiritually and socially. I think you should be with me thus far.
But no church ought to say to the state that adulterers or promiscuous singles ought to be shot, imprisoned, or castrated. Such draconian measures would surely decrease the AIDS infection rate, and in the long term be a social benefit. Secularly, there would be little to argue that such measures could not be implemented for utilitarian reasons, asides from the political observation that such punishments would affect virtually all extended families in countries with high AIDS infection rates, and hence would be rather unpopular.
So, in prescribing your social remedies, keep in mind that secular state intervention in the citizens’ lives should be rare and only in cases of being able to assert that the commonwealth’s existence hangs upon the success of such interventions. Saying that two people should not live together with contractual rights in that relationship appears to me to be such an secular overreach which should be avoided unless ALL such relationships can be proven as defective, just as shooting all people infected with AIDS ignores many of them still being contributing members of society.
Mr. Roberts, what in heaven’s name are you talking about? What I am saying has nothing to do with forbidding same-sex couples to live together or shooting people with AIDS. Any two or more people are welcome (in my mind) to live together and do whatever they want in the privacy of their homes. If they wish to enter into contractual relationships, they are certainly welcome to do so. If they want to leave their property to one another, more power to them. If they want to make living wills and specify visitation rights, that’s just peachy. These, of course, are the complaints gay couples have made (in my hearing, btw)
But you apparently are willing to cross the line and bring these relationships into the public square, creating a new thing that will give homosexual couples the legal rights of a married couple. It is that to which I object. And that alone.
Of course, all of that tolerance I expressed in the paragraph before the last is what Peter Mullin is saying he thought in the 60s. And look what England has become today.
Sorry about my lack of clarity.
The struggle over same sex relations really turns on home standards; for now, most parents will do all in their power to keep homosexuality and its culture away from their children, whatever the sociological/legal/moral arguments others advance for it. Parental attitudes are certainly impervious to sophisticated views based on the separation of church and state. Parents, and sympathetic non-parents, will write, demonstrate and vote against the elevation of same-sex relationships. All other argument (see some of the posts, above) leads to endless jiggering and obfuscation with no resolution possible. Again, the crux of the issue is political. At the end of the day (unless changes are produced by judicial fiat) those wishing to elevate either the temporal or ecclesiastical status of same-sex relationships must put their money where their mouths are, must be prepared to argue plainly and openly with parents that homosexuality and/or its culture are not harmful to children. It appears BTW this is now the case in TEC.
26 I wouldn’t contradict you’re overall assessment of “most parents”, but there are quite a few urban school districts which have school boards who are elected but whom don’t fit your description of “to argue plainly and openly with parents that homosexuality and/or its culture are not harmful to children”. Instead they simply acquiese in an increasingly amoral administration of the district. Practically, some school districts won’t fire teachers for sexual misconduct until the police show up with a felony child abuse warrant. In an eerie parallel to the RC abuse scandals, they just transfer the problem teacher around.
22 Larry Morse: “What is exceedingly strange to me in this matter is the acceptance of sodomy, for it has surely become an accepted practice. Is it simply that sodomy has become common among heterosexuals, that a sex-obsessed and jaded generation has turned to sodomy as a a variant of sexual congress because all the usual practices have, from excess, become boring?…I do hope that someone will address this issue.”
What an invitation, Larry…
Your obsession with sexual practice is very disturbing. I’m not clear what practice you are labeling “sodomy,” but if it is what I [i]think[/i] you mean, then you are generating stereotypes that are unwarranted.
Tom, #27
Maybe my estimation of the state of parental resolve was too rosey, too across-the-board. You’re right, of course, that many in authority, including parents, are slouching toward an end that, in our life time, and in that of the Church Fathers, was ‘unthinkable.’ Still, moral fiber survives. It is discernment and critical thinking that are wanting; too many cannot see that homosexual pervasiveness is, overwhelmingly, a re-occurring cultural phenomenon, and one of our own making. It has little to do, as purported, with genetic make-up. The exposition of Grecian culture, in Robin Lane Fox’s latest book on the ancient world, shows an upper and middle society culturally fueled by homosexuality. Genetic? I don’t think so. Is it possible that our leaders (you mentioned school board members and priests), through neglect, cowardice or design are leading us to another “golden age” of perversion? The trick will be (much as we did with developers in our rural county in Virginia) to make apologists for and broadcasters of homosexuality come out and defend the directions they would take us (the developers BTW were forced to do so and were handily defeated in November). Turning up the heat on these people is the best defense we have.