We’re told that judges have no right to refuse to impose laws they feel to be unjust, civil servants have no right to refuse to participate in a state sanctioned activity they feel is unjust, pharmacists and doctors are denied conscience protection and businesses have no right to refuse to do something which goes against the moral convictions of the owners. But, they do not apply this to themselves. Thus, we’ve seen governors and attorney generals who refused to defend/enforce the laws defending the traditional concept of marriage.
Americans seem to be so blind to the fact that the these arguments are only applied in one direction, denying religious freedom to Christians with a moral conviction that a law is wrong, while giving license to any other group (ethnic, gender, religion, sexual preference). What we have is the replacing the rule of law with diktats aimed at favoring the allies of politically approved ideas and harming those opposed to these ideas. The sad thing is, in the past we have lionized people who stood up to the state and said, “I will not comply with an unjust law.” These heroes in American history recognized when a judicial ruling or a law was unjust because it forbade them doing what they felt morally obligated to do.
The common tactic to justify this injustice is to try to link their cause to the Civil Rights Movement. For example, proponents of “same sex marriage” try to point to segregation laws in the 19th and 20th centuries and claim that the belief that marriage can only exist between one man and one woman is the same thing as oppressing African Americans. But that is a false analogy. The two sides are not equivalent. One can affirm that a person has rights as a human being without indulging a moral behavior believed wrong. But the Civil Rights movement existed because the laws of the time denied the fact that African Americans had certain rights as human beings.
In fact, the banning of interracial marriage (so often equated with the defense of traditional marriage) was a legal invention that invented an artificial barrier between male and female on the basis of determining that one ethnicity was inferior to another. That intention to discriminate is not present in the defense of traditional marriage. The defense of marriage recognizes that male and female runs across all national, ethnic and religious lines and those categories do not change what marriage is.
But “same sex marriage” does change what marriage is, by denying the complementarity of the genders as what marriage is intended to accomplish. The concept of “same sex marriage” reduces marriage to a legally recognized sexual relationship—something we do not accept as a valid definition of marriage, and something we will not cooperate with.
However, rather than actually try to discuss our concerns, the tactics today are very much similar to the attacks on Christianity in the times of Pagan Rome…making false accusations about what Christians believe in our opposition to what is morally wrong. Then, like now, Christians were charged with “hatred.” In that case, the charge was “hatred of the human race.” Here, it is “hatred” of the people who benefit from something we call morally wrong. The fact that we deny the charge is ignored—just as it was ignored in Roman times. If we will not do what those in authority want, we can expect to suffer whatever people can get away with inflicting on us (even when the Imperial government of Rome did not persecute Christians, many times governors and mob rule did).
Christians were accused of false crimes like cannibalism and incest in the times of Pagan Rome. We are accused of hating women and people with same sex attraction. Then and now, we deny these charges are a part of our belief. If anyone who professes Christianity committed such crimes, they would be acting against what the Church teaches. The fact is, while loving a person means treating them with all the dignity which belongs to being a person, this love does not require us to do for them what we believe is morally wrong.
Note this distinction. Contrary to accusations, we reject the claim that we support the mistreatment of people because of their actions and reject the claim that our refusing to support what we believe is morally wrong is rooted in hatred. We also reject the antics of extremists who invoke the name of Christian while actively doing things our religion forbids against those we believe do moral wrong.
America has a choice to make. Either our nation can act like the Roman Empire (except using lawsuits, fines and prison instead of lions) unjustly persecuting us because we refuse to do what we think is morally wrong, or it can act like what our Founding Fathers intended in limiting the government—forbidding it to interfere with our moral obligations to do good and avoid evil.
No comments:
Post a Comment