In one sense, the decision was almost inevitable, given the trajectory of both the culture and the federal courts. On the other hand, the sheer shock of the decision serves as an alarm: marriage is being utterly redefined before our eyes, and in the span of a single generation.
Judge Waddoups ruled that Utah’s law against consensual adult cohabitation among multiple partners violated the Constitution’s free exercise clause, but a main point was that opposition to polygamy did not advance a compelling state interest. In the background to that judgment was the argument asserted by Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy to the effect that the only real opposition to any form of consensual sexual arrangement among adults would be religiously based, and thus unconstitutional.
Kennedy made that assertion in his majority opinion in the 2003 case of Lawrence v. Texas that struck down all state laws criminalizing homosexual behavior””and the Lawrence decision looms large over Judge Waddoups’s entire decision.
A fine, objective, non-alarmist critique. I disagree with Al Mohler on lots of things. But on the Culture War issues he’s right on. In particular, he is admirably clear in tracing the trajectory that has landed our society in such deep, deep trouble: the fateful, disastrous separating of sex from marriage, and of both from reproduction. And Mohler is also rigtht that the advent of No Fault Divorce was likewise a cultural disaster.
There are actually mountains of empirical research data that show beyond any reasonable doubt that it is in the interests of the nation (or the states) to promote the stability and health of marriages, not least as the optimum environment for the raising of children, but also because the breakdown of marriages is inexorably linked with all sorts of severe social problems that cost taxpayers billions of dollars a year. Not least, there is abundant empirical data that shows conclusively that the breakdown of the family, not least in the African American segment of the population, directs correlates with the massive failure of our public schools to educate lots of students adequately.
The federal judge in Utah has chosen to ignore lots of available research and tons of empirical evidence that our society does indeed have a compelling interest in upholding the institution of marriage.
So what’s next? After polygamy is legalized, polyamory can’t be far behind. And after that, incest might become “normalized” and freed from legal proscription. I mean, why not? If you have two consenting adults, anything goes, right?. (according to the lawyer for the defendant).
And after that, why limit sex to two consenting ADULTS? Why not allow paedophilia? For in the end, the slippery slope has no bottom. If there are no objective, universal moral standards written into the universe by our Creator, then anything goes.
That’s what happens when an antinomian society loses all capacity to set boundaries on that all-holy “right” that trumps all others: “privacy.” Whatever happens behind closed doors is absolutely no one else’s business, right??
This is what happens when even many Christians in a society that’s in moral free fall cease to believe that there is any such thing as natural law.
Historically, Richard Hooker and +Joseph Butler are two of the prime examples of great Anglican theologians who strongly upheld the Thomistic concept of natural law, including a moral law that was as universal as the law of gravity.
A confused, profligate society like ours that prizes personal freedom above all else, even unlimited freedom in the fundamental realm of sexual behavior, and which puts such personal freedom even above the welfare of children or values it more than the adequacy of the school system, is a society that is on a death spiral, consigning itself to self destruction. Remember the moral rot and decay that doomed the Roman Empire. It was only overrun by barbarians invading from the outside after it had already withered away morally due to the corruption of the population inside the empire.
David Handy+
Indeed. Why is any such society worth defending?