Apple: You Can't Be Pro-Marriage: You're Anti-Gay

The "pro-gay" agenda is the default position so: Apple Pulls anti-gay app from iTunes store. As has been pointed out: first, mere toleration of a behavior, then, acceptance of it, then, required affirmation of it...followed by censorship for criticism of it, then punishment for criticism. (But it is a private company.) (Written from an Apple/Mac computer....)

Oh, the "anti-gay app" happens to be the Manhattan Declaration.

Comments

[bathos]

We're pretty much all "pro-marriage." Couched in good-mannered formality or not, the "pro-marriage" Manhattan Declaration really is anti-gay. It's the only reason it has to exist, for god's sake! If you're going to dish it, own up to it at least. It's like reading a really boring passive aggressive email.

Please keep in mind that even throughout American history, there have always been religious groups that worked very hard to fight something and ended up being ‘wrong.’ Today, we all like to think we’re the Christian descendants of the Abolitionists -- not the massive Christian pro-slavery movement (which, btw, produced tons of polite material like the M.D., and fashioned all its arguments directly from scripture and ‘science’). And don’t we like to think we’re all the Christian descendants of the very, very small minority of Christians who believed women should be free and equal citizens? The ones that were called unnatural, un-Christian and godless?

Western religion plays out this way over and over. It’s a tired old story for anyone paying attention. Maybe people will stop doing it some day. In the mean time, each time society moves on from an injustice and our sense of right and wrong becomes that much better calibrated, we can pretend we come from an unbroken line of people who believed the same things we believe now. Your descendants will most likely be blissfully unaware that you and your camp created complex reimaginings of the past and present just to hide your deeper bigotry and justify continuing inequality.

[Jim Kushiner]

Bathos, seriously: Is there any "marital arrangement" you would oppose? Polygamy? Brother/sister/cousin/aunt? Threesome, Foursome? Spell it out. Spell it the contours of the proposed marital law and its principles. And don't forget to abolish inequality for polyamorists, please.

[Bull]

"followed by censorship for criticism of it, then punishment for criticism." And then marginalization by the neo bourgeoisie, followed by a pyre of Kindles and Nooks and iPads in the pale moonlight.

This has nothing to do with inequality. We are all created in God's image and equals before Him. It is God's intentions that are up for grabs here. God knows there's enough grace to allow for disagreement. You're free to believe or not.

Unless you are of Bathos' ilk. Then you're labeled a religious bigot.

(By the way: "You and your camp..." Gay. Camp. Funny! I get it.)

[R.C.]

It is irrational to simultaneously believe the ancient creeds of the Christian faith, and to believe that the authors of those creeds, and of the New Testament, and all the Christian moral teachers for two thousand years were wrong about teachings fundamental to the Christian moral code.

Such a view is stupidity incarnate; the view of a person who values the social lubrication of political correctness far above the logical rigors of truth.

Were it true, it would indicate such fallibility that one could confidently say that either Christianity is false, or that no one alive knows what Christianity is. No one reading the New Testament and the Fathers with an open mind can doubt this.

Thus one can be absolutely sure: Either men sexually gratifying other men is an objectively disordered activity for the human organism -- on the level of pica, or the old stories about Romans eating, then vomiting to eat again -- or the Christian faith is false.

Of course the vast majority of those who seek oxymoronic notions like "gay marriage" do not believe that Jesus is God's Son anyway, and are perfectly happy to see a few of those who do reject the birthright of their second birth in favor of a mess of pottage stewed from two parts cognitive dissonance and one part spaniel-like longing to "fit in." Such a recipe cannot sustain real human souls for longer than a generation at most, and those who adopt it will have atheists, not Christians, for children.

But those who have some lingering attachment to Jesus Christ should know better than to be tossed to and fro by the winds of doctrine in this way. Are they really Jesus' sheep? Then they ought to know His voice better.

You, bathos, ought to know His voice better.

The pro-gay agenda is bigotry even when self-inflicted. It views complex human persons as animals and says: "What the heck; they can't control themselves, so we might as well identify them not by their humanity, but by their sin, and call them not persons, but simply 'gays'."

It is those who are true to the faith -- who agree with Christ and His Apostles that willful sex with anyone other than an opposite-gender person to whom one is already married eventually is a sacrilege against the sacrament of marriage and, if not repented of, leads in the end to the damnation of the soul -- who will also have the strength of character to defend the gay minority when they are weak.

It is those who try to help those wrestling with the behavioral disorder of Same Sex Attraction -- to help them overcome temptation rather than to drink it to the dregs -- who will die martyrs rather than allow an unfettered mob of anti-gay persecutors kill every person with disordered sexual preferences.

I will defend with my last breath the basic human rights and intrinsic human dignity of those whose sexual temptations are different from mine -- for I cannot deny that while mine are different in character, they are no less sinful, and I am no less in need of a Savior! -- even if, with my penultimate breath, I must turn to one of them and say, "by the way, sodomy is still morally wrong."

Jesus Christ asks exactly that. He is the Way, Truth, and the Life; He came to bear witness to the Truth.

[Bob Srigley]

I might have hoped for some deep thinking from "Bathos," but unfortunately the comments seem be just floating on the surface of the contemporary currents.

To tar-brush Christians with the pro-slavery element in the South while ignoring the Christian anti-slavery movement in the North led by William Weld and others is a serious distortion. Much like crediting the civil rights advances to socialists and ignoring the Christian foundation laid by MLK.

There is no lack of left-leaning Christians who are willing to champion the gay agenda. One index as to whether they are following the leading of the Lord whose ministers they claim to be is if they are suffering any persecution from the world for their efforts. I rather doubt that the pro-slavery Christians suffered for their views any more than pro-gay Christians in our time, this being one of the perks of the false prophets as opposed to the true.

[Magister Christianus]

R.C., your comments were so brilliant, so eloquent, so forceful that I had to share them in my post on this issue, http://bedlamorparnassus.blogspot.com/2010/11/i-am-officially-ist.html. God bless you, my friend, for such a sharp pen wielded so mightily in defense of truth in the name of the One Who is Truth, Jesus Christ.

[Michael Bauman (not Dr.)]

R.C, your comments are the best I've seen. Thank you.

In further reply to bathos (bathouse?) however it must be said without Christianity slavery would still be widespread in the world and women would still be chatel. There is no major culture in the world that does not have a Christian foundation which does not practice or condone slavery. The non-Christian cultures worldwide are also noted for their belief that women are barely human. Christians have not always lived up to Christian principals, but that is a vastly different story.

As RC points out only an anthropolocy that equates one's sexual desire with one's humanity can posit any equivalence between approving same sex attraction and slavery or treating women as property.

[Kirsten]

It never fails: the pro redefine-marriage crowd's revolting tactics, attempting to co-opt the sufferings of black americans for their petty cause.

[Tony Esolen]

People should read Dawson on the institution of slavery, and how it was first transformed and then slowly leached out of the world by Christians and Christian thought.

On the issue of pseudogamy: I would like to hear from a single heterosexual father of a son who, if he caught his son behind the woodshed with something in his mouth, would not cut off his right hand to have it be a cigarette rather than something else. It is perfectly natural and reasonable for us fathers to want our sons to grow up with the matter-of-course expectation that boys grow up to be men who marry women and raise families, and not to be corrupted by men or other kids with the same-sex attraction problem, nor to have their same-sex friendships cast under suspicion by themselves or others. We want something approaching a wholesome childhood and adolescence for them, and yes, that means -- for those of us who take our Christian faith seriously -- that we acknowledge that heterosexuals have done far more to degrade marriage than the relatively few homosexuals have done. How we treat men who are attracted to other men is a different question -- with charity as fellow sinners who must bear a burden that most people find impossible to imagine, but who must also, for the good of all young people and not just those few who suffer what they have suffered, refrain from expecting the rest of us to celebrate their troubles.

Check out the article by Huw Raphael, in the archives.

[Benighted Savage]

In further reply to bathos (bathouse?)

I think in this case it's pronounced "bath-house." :^(

[Rob G]

"on the institution of slavery, and how it was first transformed and then slowly leached out of the world by Christians and Christian thought."

Yep. The U.S. was one of only two nations where slavery wasn't eliminated peacefully, and it was the Radical Abolitionists, the liberal/progressives of their day, who ended up being pro-war. There were, mind you, quite a few anti-war abolitionists but you don't hear much about them.

For liberal/progressives to take credit for eliminating American slavery while not acknowledging their part in the responsibility for the war is to utilize selective memory, which is exactly what Bathos accuses Christians of.

(Lest anyone start calling me a neo-
Confederate, I hasten to add that none of this should be construed as reducing the South's responsibility for their part in Civil War. I am simply objecting to the standard liberal narrative that the Abolitionist movement was all goodness and light, and that the war was entirely the South's doing.)

[Ian]

Shouldn't this comment box have been shut down after the first "Bath house" quip? It was ridiculous and offensive. You guys really do come off sounding like a bunch of bigots. Is it too much to ask that people at least be charitable toward one another? Isn't it better to love much than to hate a little?

[Benighted Savage]

Shouldn't this comment box have been shut down after the first "Bath house" quip? It was ridiculous and offensive.

Actually, I think my quip neatly encapsulates the ideology -- perhaps myth would be a better word -- of the ultra-"primitive promiscuity" which underlies Bathos' position. It may be offensive to point out that an ideological position has not just spiritual but material and social correlates -- in this case, sodomite bath houses -- but it is nonetheless (and sadly) quite true. The sodomite "community's" attempt to paper over the hyper-promiscuous myth-they-live with a faux marriage certificate is redolent of a certain pathos, which inspires in me deep sadness (not hatred).

[Ian]

Unbelievable. Do you actually *know* any gay people? And if promiscuity was your concern you should actually support marriage equality.

The only reason to be against gays in the military or gays getting married is because you personally find being gay icky and because the Bible says so. Fine. But we live in a secular society and no one is going to force you into a marriage with a person of the same sex. It's not a good enough reason deny a select group of people what everyone else takes for granted as a pretty basic civil right.

[Deacon Michael D. Harmon]

But of course, it's not "a pretty basic civil right." Civil rights adhere to individuals, like the right to life. All of us have it in equal measure. If marriage were a civil right, then it would adhere to me and my sister equally, and we could be married. But of course it does not, and the same applies to men who want to "marry" other men, or women to "marry" other women. You may find the denial of such impossible arrangements to be icky, or wrong because GLAAD says so. Fine. But we live in a society under the guidance and protection of God, and no one can force Him to refrain from judging it according to His righteousness. Your desires are no reason to deny the true nature of human beings and corrupt an institution established by divine power and under divine authority. We cannot lie to our children about this by permitting such illicit relationships to usurp the honorable name of marriage.

[Ian]

I'm sorry but this is baloney, Mr Harmon. I understand that the technical definition of a 'civil right' may be arguable, but I stand by my phrasing ("what everyone else takes for granted as a pretty basic civil right"). I wonder if your definition would stand up to much scrutiny (Loving vs Virginia), but I'm not a legal scholar and, really, that's beside the point.

It simply seems to me that the state either needs to be out of the marriage business entirely (let it trade in civil unions with any number of personal configurations, and save "marriage" as a non-legal category for churches, synagogues, etc.), or it needs to allow the benefits of the civil institution of marriage to be shared by all citizens without discrimination. And certainly, DADT needs to be repealed either way. Can you imagine something comparable in the civil sphere - for instance, if you could be fired by your employer for being openly gay?

If we live in a society under the guidance and protection of God, then let God do the protecting here, please.

[RL]

Ian, if I may point out as irenically as possible why you are wasting your time arguing in this manner in this forum: You are arguing from the assumption that the "pretty basic civil right" is the "right to marry the person you love," or something similar. The people with whom you are arguing proceed from the assumption that the right is rather the "right to enter into marriage," the latter term signifying an institution with a fixed nature that, so our Lord taught, is from the beginning, when God made mankind male and female, and that has been understood to have that fixed nature in very nearly all societies in recorded human history (understanding that there is and historically has been room for tinkering around the margins concerning what is or is not a licit or valid marriage). From the perspective of your interlocutors, considerations of what is "fair" to homosexuals or what constitutes decent or equal or non-discriminatory treatment for homosexuals don't enter into it; on their assumption, a man simply cannot marry another man, nor a woman another woman, any more than a horse can have five legs just because I choose to call its tail a leg.

Whether we are at liberty to redefine marriage to conform to contemporary ideas about equality or non-discrimination or the like is a separate question from the degree (if any) to which and the means by which our society ought to discourage sexual relations outside marriage, whether heterosexual or homosexual, although the questions are of course related. And I will add that it is not per se bigoted to believe that valid arguments exist in favor of some degree of social opprobrium against extra-marital sexual relations generally and against homosexual relations in particular. Those arguments are not exclusively religious nor visceral in character, and they do not become bigoted merely because they are offensive to people who believe that homosexual relations are not per se immoral.

If you wish to pursue your argument here, perhaps you should answer Mr. Kushiner's question to bathos, above: Suppose the state adopts a regime like the one you propose. Should there be any limits at all? If so, what should they be? Presumably there ought to be a requirement of consent, and ancillary requirements such as minimum age, mental competence and the like. Would you be OK with polygynous or polyandrous unions? Group unions? Incestuous unions? If polygamous unions are acceptable, must all the existing members of the union consent before a new member can be added, or only some? Are all members of a polygamous or group union responsible for all children of all members, or only for their own? It would be nice if the parties could be counted on to work this sort of thing out for themselves, but human beings are notoriously bad on average at reaching sensible, rational agreements where matters of the heart, the loins and the inheritance are concerned. My point here is that the change you propose is more revolutionary in purely legal terms than you appear to acknowledge, and may have more unintended consequences than you think. A prudent caution about unintended consequences is one of the non-religious, non-visceral and non-bigoted reasons for resisting the current drive for same-sex marriages.

[Ian]

Thanks for the lesson in pedantic condescension, RL. Believe me, I’m fully familiar with why I’m wasting my time engaging on this issue in this forum. I’m a semi-regular visitor and former subscriber to Touchstone. Every time I visit Mere Comments I ask myself why I bother. You’re certainly entitled to your own sounding chamber, I suppose, but I don’t enjoy seeing people like Bathos get bullied and insulted.

Since I’m a glutton for punishment, however, I’ll attempt to answer the question posed in your third paragraph. If the state got OUT of the marriage business (as I suggested above), any of these might be acceptable, I suppose. Civil unions offered by the state would merely allow parties to share legal burdens, property, liability, etc. It would be in the interest of most couples married in churches to enter into these civil unions at the same time, since church marriage would have no legal force. Entering into such unions might also be in the interest, for example, of elderly spinster sisters who live together, or even members of a monastic community. The state’s concern in such unions would have nothing to do with the sex lives (or lack thereof) of those who enter into them. Of course, laws would still be required to prevent harm (to minors, to potential offspring of incest, etc.) whenever possible. Parents of children (legally adopted or natural) would still be parents. Churches and other religious communities would be free to delimit “marriage” however they see fit.

None of this is very realistic, of course, since the state isn’t going to get out of the marriage business. That’s just not a cultural option in this place and time. Which leaves us with legal same-sex marriage as the next-best choice, as I see it. The churches need not endorse it. It's an issue for the secular state. And the state should never be in the business of telling churches they must bless same-sex unions (or any other unions, for that matter; it’s just not the state’s role). You’re right, of course, that change like this opens up a host of new questions that will have to be dealt with in the future. But not wanting to deal with hard questions is a poor reason for neglecting to correct a wrong.

[RL]

Ian, I did not mean to be pedantic or condescending, and if my post came across that way, then I apologize. I take it we agree that dialogue is impossible given the lack of common premises, and there is no value in arguing about who has insulted whom or who is (or sounds like) a bigot.

[Huw Richardson]

Without wishing to enter the marriage debate, since someone has cited my article of 2003 at least allow the author to cite his own recantation, or, at least, the second thoughts in "Hell Reconsidered"

http://raphael.doxos.com/comments.php?id=P2488_0_1_0

My first article, as published in Touchstone, was quite happy to blame everyone for my sins - liberals, liberal religion, liberal politics, etc. Truth is my sins were (and are) more internal and quite unrelated to my sexuality: but rather to my own ego. So, I could have committed the same sins as a straight boy - as do many of my straight friends daily and I do often enough as well. Sex is only the vehicle that gets the most milage (and the most pay for a starving writer from a good magazine).

My earlier article may have supported some in their own journey, but I fear, mostly, it has supported the anti-gay crowd in their own agendas. I did not intend that. So, invoke me not in support for the "good of all people" as I have recanted that view or, as I said, if you will cite me, at least acknowledge the recanting as well.

[Thomas Aquinas]

The following links contain graphic materials, and they are all apps found on iTunes. Ask Mr. Jobs why these are "appropriate."

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gay-kama-sutra-sex-positions/id361083790?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scruff-gay-bear-finder-for/id380015247?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grindr-gay-bi-curious-guy/id308956623?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/swingers-club/id386102786?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/300-sex-positions-adult-love/id385262935?mt=8
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/gay-sex-visual-guide/id393521739?mt=8

[John Willard]

Perhaps this will seem like an Ad Hominem attack, but I don't think it is. As far as I can tell: so far Ian has accused people or their posts of being or appearing:

ridiculous
offensive
bunch of bigots
hateful
pedantic
condescending
bullies
insulters

I haven't found any insults towards Ian and I have only seen one apology, from RL to Ian.

I often wonder why the tolerance crowd always seems to come off as quite so intolerant. Maybe because they are.

[Benighted Savage]

And if promiscuity was your concern you should actually support marriage equality.

It's not my only concern, but I don't see how how civil "marriages" for male sodomites will magically solve the promiscuity problem (especially if, as Stanley Kurtz argues here, it's not seen as a problem). Also, given the fact that the prospect of suffering and death via AIDS didn't stop the promiscuous behavior, what makes you think that a legal document would? Sorry, this call for sodomite marriage strikes me as being further evidence of a hunger for an anarchic "primitive promiscuity" that won't limit itself to homosexual activity.

And I do support marriage equality. Any one woman should be legally able to marry any one man (as long as they are not close consanguines).

[R.C.]

ITEM 1: What Marriage Is, What Government Is, What Rights Are

Marriage predates government, and as an institution may not justly be redefined by government.

It cannot, because all just powers of government are derived from the consent of the governed, and are delegated (see the clear language of Amendment X) to the government by the governed through the instrument of a constitution. The U.S. government has not been granted the power to redefine marriage; it is not in the Constitution.

Nor could it be. The right to marry is among the just rights granted to men by their Creator. But the right to define marriage was reserved by the Creator.

A person cannot delegate to an employee any just authority he himself does not rightfully have. (Example: I can delegate to an employee the authority to chop down a tree in my yard, since I have that authority. I cannot delegate to an employee the authority to chop down a tree in your yard, because I myself do not have that authority to begin with.)

As a matter of observable fact, the right to redefine marriage has not been delegated to government. But that right has not even been delegated to human individuals by God, so it could not have been lawfully delegated to government.

God grants to individuals the right to marry any person with whom there is the slightest chance they might conceive a child. This is an intrinsic unalienable human right.

A man has no right to marry a man because (a.) it's a contradiction in terms and (b.) God granted no such right.

This is not a church-state issue but a What-Are-Rights issue and a Where-Does-Government-Derive-Its-Just-Authority issue. Unalienable rights are not created by the state, but by God; that they are either protected by the state, or not, does not say anything about their existence, but only the justice of the state (or lack thereof).

ITEM 2: The Purpose of Human Sexuality

Human sexuality is ordered towards procreation. It can be exercised in other ways, just as human appetite can be exercised in non-nutritious ways. But it is intrinsically disordered for a man to masturbate another man, just as (and for the same reason that) it is intrinsically disordered to eat sheetrock or thumbtacks. Whether one can attain some pleasure from it is irrelevant; whether one can entirely avoid injury from it is irrelevant. Pica and same-sex-attraction equally represent behavioral disorders from any objective standpoint.

Marriage is partly intended to foster healthy (non-disordered) use of human sexuality. "Gay Marriage" would foster the prolonging of a disorder and is thus a net negative to society, dehumanizing it and devaluing sexuality by reducing it to a drug from which the two partners get a "fix."

[Huw Richardson]

RC, saying rights come from your deity rather than, say, Krishna or Kali , and that you, rather than a Hindu priest or a tribal shaman somewhere, knows the revealed definitions you state makes it a church-state issue.

You can not make religious rules into secular laws in this county. It is as as simple as that. Live your faith, don't expect my tax dollars to force anyone else to do so!

[Ian (again)]

My posts are being deleted by an admin, it seems, or my IP address has been flagged. I've tried to respond three times today (so far), and each of my posts have been deleted after I had already seen them approved and (momentarily) live on the site. I don't appreciate that. I just wanted to say that Mr Willard was right, and to apologize for offending anyone with my own name-calling.

I also wanted to know if any of you had gay friends? I certainly do, good friends I've known my whole adult life who happen to be gay. They are some of the most kind, compassionate, intelligent, hardworking people I know. You should want such good friends and neighbors. I love and admire them. Some of them have been in relationships far longer than I've been married to my wife. We’re not talking about abstractions. We're talking about real human beings who fall in love and build lives together and sometimes raise families. They did not choose being gay anymore than you chose being straight. God saw fit to bring them into the world as the people they are. Knowing and loving my friends, it's inconceivable to me that they don't deserve the same kind of legal recognition from a *secular* state that my wife and I enjoy. Really, it’s as simple as that.

[Rob G]

"Knowing and loving my friends, it's inconceivable to me that they don't deserve the same kind of legal recognition from a *secular* state that my wife and I enjoy. Really, it’s as simple as that."

You may think it is that simple, but it's not. You haven't answered the questions posed above as to where you draw the line w/r/t other sexual relationships and their legal status. What do you do with NAMBLA, for instance? Or polyamorists? If two men can "marry," why not three men? If you are willing to throw out tradition and natural law regarding the sex of those who can marry, are you willing to throw it out also regarding their number or their age?

Please note that this is not a fallacious "slippery slope" argument, as the pro-homosexualists often portray it. I'm not saying that the above scenarios will necessarily occur should homosexual "marriage" be approved. What I am saying is there will be no solid legal or moral ground to prevent them from occurring should any movements arise (and why shouldn't they?) to normalize such things as pederasty or polyamory.

After all, it was a mere 40 years ago or so from when the APA woke up one morning and decided, against thousands of years of tradition and moral teaching, that homosexuality was not disordered. Who is to say that any other manifestation of sexual deviance will not be normalized in like manner?

[Christopher Hathaway]

Ian, the difficulty with having "gay" friends is that it presupposes that you accept their gay identity as a true indicator of their person. But you should be aware by now that many here do not think that way. Many of us here may have "gay" friends in the same way we have alcoholic friends. We have friends who struggle, or not, with a behavior that we see as personally and socially destructive. How much friends we can be, how much we are allowed to be friends to them depends upon how much in agreement thay are with us that their behavior is wrong.

People don't like being around others who disapprove of their behavior. That is fairly universal. I have lost friends because I could not accept actions they have made which they refused to repent. I was forced to take sides, my convictions or them. In the case of a divorce I was forced to choose losing one friend or the other. I chose to lose the friend who was closer to me because she was in the wrong. It was a loss I grieve, but she set the terms.

So it is with many of my past friends who chose moral paths I could not travel or bless. Having worked in the theater earlier in life I had quite a few gay aquaintances, and some good Christian friends who I later found were secretly struggling with homosexual desires, or secretly not struggling that much. Some have stayed out of the gay life and have been quite frank about the struggle, and as a man who struggles against my own sin I can relate (Who honestly can't). One very good friend I had, my closest at the time, had lived as a homosexual in NYC as an actor. He was struggling to live free of that but then he moved back to NYC and I haven't heard a word from or about him. I tried to trace him down in NYC but couldn't. I can only imagine that he has gone back to that life.

He was, and may still be a friend. Is he gay? Well, not to get Clintonian, but that depends upon what the meaning of "is" is. You have to deal with questions of ontology and anthropology. What makes us who and what we are? Nature or nurture, or is it God? What defines us, our actions or our desires, or our deepest aspirations? Can the nature God created in us be bent or molded? By what? Can it be reshaped back to fit God's original intention?

When you say that God has made some people gay you gloss over all these questions in order to make it "simple as that". But such simplicity will greatly complicate our ability to deal with the question of moral responsibility in other areas. If "God saw fit to bring them into the world as the people they are" does that apply to all forms of behavior? Does God make a bully to be that way? Does he "make" addicts? Does he "make" sinners? The recognition of evil entails that we know there is a good which ought to be but in this instance isn't. Things are not always as God intended.

As to deserving legal recognition, doesn't this presuppose that what is being recognized is in fact identical to marriage? A man deserves to be recognized as a human being because that is what he is. A cat does not deserve this recognition, though PETA may have different ideas, but PETA is insane. Recognition of this kind is not an act of love. It is a matter of factual awareness. If I get a mail order medical "degree" do I have the right to have that recognized by the state? I may be as nice and loving and worthy a human being as the guy who attends a credited medical school, but our credentials are not the same and the state has no obligation to treat them the same.

What you are proposing is changing the definition of the oldest and most fundamental human institution in civilization in order to make a gesture of approval and acceptance to your gay friends. It is not just your approval you are offering. You want to make all of society as a whole approve. You want to forbid society making the observation that the marriage of a man and woman is unlike any other union.

What other definitions shall we change? Shall we redefine parenthood? Can I claim my cat as a child in order to receive the same benefits as others who have human children? Some people treat their pets like children (Perhaps they would treat their children like pets). is it discriminatory not to recognize their pets as children? Yes it is. But so is recognizing that margerine is not the same as butter, and that a hammer is not a screw driver.

Changing the meaning of things to make people feel better is one of the great diseases of our age.

[Michael Bauman (not Dr.)]

"Changing the meaning of things to make people feel better is on of the great diseases of our age"

What Ian and others miss is that creation is hierarchical, fallen and not the same thing as God.

There is a hierarchy of being, a hierarchy of values and a hierarchy of belief. Not all being is ontologically equal (the mistake of PETA); not all values are equal: some choices really are better and healthier than others. Some choices are down-right deadly to oneself and to others; not all beliefs about God, the nature of man and creation and how we are to interact are equal or even correct.

IMO the whole 'rights' language creates a false egalitarian impression that makes just discrimination possible (perhaps virtuous discernment is a better term).

Also the frequently heard cannard that religion should not determine law is utterly false. It is used only to invalidate Christian expression which is un-Constitutional. Law always follows faith, even if that faith denies God or his action in the world. So the real argument is which faith is going to be the foundation of our law.

The huge change here is not just about marriage it is the movement to change the basis of our law from a Chrisitan orientation to a non-Chrisitan, non-theist foundation. (Anyone who seriously argues the Christian foundation of our law has no knowledge of the Justinian Code nor of Blackstone)

Any one who seriously argues that the U.S. Constitution was designed to protect the state from religion is either ignorant or ideologically delusional.

To my knowledge, the only societies that have attempted such a move to replace a theist foundation of law by a non-theist have become murderous, repressive and self-destructive, i.e. revolutionary France, the communist countries, the National Socialists, and countries formed on a cult of personality.

As Christopher pointed out, just because something is, does not mean that it is the way it is supposed to be. Our sin introduced disorder and disharmony into creation. Two great descriptions: Romans 1 and the Silmarillion by Tolkein.

Homosexuality and other sins are the result of loving the created thing more than the creator. We abhore so deeply conforming our lives to the truth that we ascribe to God every act against Him that we do not wish to take responsibility for. We attribute all of our evil to God.

Reminds me of Flip Wilson and his "Church of What's Happenin' Now" but instead of "the devil made me do it" we have taken the blasphemous step of saying..."God made me do it"

Lord have mercy.

[MCModerator]

Comment deleted for violating the posted ground rules:

"A blogger may convey wholehearted contempt with "I will pray for you" or similar false pieties. Such condescension may be discovered and deleted."

[c matt]

The churches need not endorse it. It's an issue for the secular state.

Yeah, sure. That will all change with the first lawsuit. What if a church refused to recongize a state sanctioned "union" by refusing employment benefits to the "spouse"? Or same sex couple counseling, or (to pull a completely imaginary one out of a hat) refusing to provide a facility to a same sex wedding (or photograph it), or hosting a "same sex" dating site or bulletin board? Because the SSA crowd would NEVER ever dream of imposing their view of marriage on others - they just want to be left alone to pursue their own interests.

[c matt]

Please note that this is not a fallacious "slippery slope" argument

In the logical sense, "slippery slope" arguments are technincally false (the conclusion that Y must necessarily follow from X). But in the practical, lived historical sense, slippery slope arguments often prove to be true and are quite valuable. They are based upon the lived experience of human nature. Because we live in an historical, practical and not purely logical reality, they are still valid arguments for the political arena.

But I agree, your argument is not a slippery slope one, although I would have no problem with such a slippery slope argument when discussing political solutions/issues.