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Should government get out of the marriage business?

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Here are three articles by Jennifer Roback Morse posted at The Public Discourse. The articles answer the charge from social liberals and libertarians that government should “get the government out of marriage”.

Here’s the first article which talks about how government will still be involved in marriage, even if we get rid of the traditional definition of marriage, because of the need for dispute resolution in private marriage contracts. She uses no-fault divorce as an example showing how it was sold as a way to get government out of the divorce business. But by making divorce easier by making it require no reason, it increased the number of disputes and the need for more government intervention to resolve these disputes.

Here’s the second article which talks about how the government will have to expand to resolve conflicts over decisions about who counts as a parent and who gets parental rights. With traditional marriage, identifying who the parents are is easy. But with private marriage contracts where the parties are not the biological parents, there is a need for the state to step in and assign parental rights. Again, this will require an expansion of government to resolve the disputes.

Here’s the third article which talks about how marriage is necessary in order to defend the needs and rights of the child at a time when they cannot enter into contracts and be parties to legal disputes.

The third article was my favorite, so here is an excerpt from it:

The fact of childhood dependence raises a whole series of questions. How do we get from a position of helpless dependence and complete self-centeredness, to a position of independence and respect for others? Are our views of the child somehow related to the foundations of a free society? And, to ask a question that may sound like heresy to libertarian ears: Do the needs of children place legitimate demands and limitations on the behavior of adults?

I came to the conclusion that a free society needs adults who can control themselves, and who have consciences. A free society needs people who can use their freedom, without bothering other people too much. We need to respect the rights of others, keep our promises, and restrain ourselves from taking advantage of others.

We learn to do these things inside the family, by being in a relationship with our parents. We can see this by looking at attachment- disordered children and failure-to-thrive children from orphanages and foster care. These children have their material needs met, for food, clothing, and medical care. But they are not held, or loved, or looked at. They simply do not develop properly, without mothers and fathers taking personal care of them. Some of them never develop consciences. But a child without a conscience becomes a real problem: this is exactly the type of child who does whatever he can get away with. A free society can’t handle very many people like that, and still function.

In other words I asked, “Do the needs of society place constraints on how we treat children?” But even this analysis still views the child from society’s perspective. It is about time we look at it from the child’s point of view, and ask a different kind of question. What is owed to the child?

Children are entitled to a relationship with both of their parents. They are entitled to know who they are and where they came from. Therefore children have a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union, since that is ordinarily how kids have relationships with both parents. If Mom and Dad are quarreling, or if they live on opposite sides of the country, the child’s connection with one or both of them is seriously impaired.

But children cannot defend their rights themselves. Nor is it adequate to intervene after the fact, after harm already has been done. Children’s relational and identity rights must be protected proactively.

Marriage is society’s institutional structure for protecting these legitimate rights and interests of children.

I recommend taking a look at all three articles and becoming familiar with the arguments in case you have to explain why marriage matters and why we should not change it. I think it is important to read these articles and to be clear that to be a libertarian doctrine does not protect the right of a child to have a relationship with both his or her parents.  Nor does libertarianism promote the idea that parents ought to stick together for their children. Libertarianism means that adults get to do what they want, and no one speaks for the kids.

The purpose of marriage is to make adults make careful commitments, and restrain their desires and feelings, so that children will have a stable environment with their biological parents nearby. We do make exceptions, but we should not celebrate exceptions and we should not subsidize exceptions. It’s not fair to children to have to grow up without a mother or father just so that adults can pursue fun and thrills.

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N.T. Wright lectures on the seven mutations caused by resurrection of Jesus

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Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: let's take a look at the facts
Sherlock Holmes and John Watson: let’s take a look at the facts

Here’s a lecture from N.T. Wright, whose multi-volume case for the historicity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus seems to be getting a lot of respect from the other side, (although I strongly disagree with his economic and political views, which are naive at best). Wright has taught at Cambridge University, Oxford University, Duke University, McGill University, and lectured on dozens of prestigious campuses around the world. He’s published 40 books.

Here’s a video of his case for the resurrection:

You can read a written version of the lecture here.

N.T. Wright’s historical case for the bodily resurrection of Jesus

Wright basically argues that the resurrection cannot have been a myth invented by the early Christian community, because the idea of the Messiah dying and being bodily resurrected to eternal life was completely unexpected in Jewish theology, and therefore would not have been fabricated.

In Judaism, when people die, they stay dead. At the most, they might re-appear as apparitions, or be resuscitated to life for a while, but then die again later. There was no concept of the bodily resurrection to eternal life of a single person, especially of the Messiah, prior to the general resurrection of all the righteous dead on judgment day.

Wright’s case for the resurrection has 3 parts:

  • The Jewish theological beliefs of the early Christian community underwent 7 mutations that are inexplicable apart from the bodily resurrection of Jesus
  • The empty tomb
  • The post-mortem appearances of Jesus to individuals and groups, friends and foes

Here’s the outline of Wright’s case:

…the foundation of my argument for what happened at Easter is the reflection that this Jewish hope has undergone remarkable modifications or mutations within early Christianity, which can be plotted consistently right across the first two centuries. And these mutations are so striking, in an area of human experience where societies tend to be very conservative, that they force the historian… to ask, Why did they occur?

The mutations occur within a strictly Jewish context. The early Christians held firmly, like most of their Jewish contemporaries, to a two-step belief about the future: first, death and whatever lies immediately beyond; second, a new bodily existence in a newly remade world. ‘Resurrection’ is not a fancy word for ‘life after death’; it denotes life after ‘life after death’.

And here are the 7 mutations:

  1. Christian theology of the afterlife mutates from multiples views (Judaism) to a single view: resurrection (Christianity). When you die, your soul goes off to wait in Sheol. On judgment day, the righteous dead get new resurrection bodies, identical to Jesus’ resurrection body.
  2. The relative importance of the doctrine of resurrection changes from being peripheral (Judaism) to central (Christianity).
  3. The idea of what the resurrection would be like goes from multiple views (Judaism) to a single view: an incorruptible, spiritually-oriented body composed of the material of the previous corruptible body (Christianity).
  4. The timing of the resurrection changes from judgment day (Judaism) to a split between the resurrection of the Messiah right now and the resurrection of the rest of the righteous on judgment day (Christianity).
  5. There is a new view of eschatology as collaboration with God to transform the world.
  6. There is a new metaphorical concept of resurrection, referred to as being “born-again”.
  7. There is a new association of the concept of resurrection to the Messiah. (The Messiah was not even supposed to die, and he certainly wasn’t supposed to rise again from the dead in a resurrected body!)

There are also other historical puzzles that are solved by postulating a bodily resurrection of Jesus.

  1. Jewish people thought that the Messiah was not supposed to die. Although there were lots of (warrior) Messiahs running around at the time, whenever they got killed, their followers would abandon them. Why didn’t Jesus’ followers abandon him when he died?
  2. If the early Christian church wanted to communicate that Jesus was special, despite his shameful death on the cross, they would have made up a story using the existing Jewish concept of exaltation. Applying the concept of bodily resurrection to a dead Messiah would be a radical departure from Jewish theology, when an invented exaltation was already available to do the job.
  3. The early church became extremely reckless about sickness and death, taking care of people with communicable diseases and testifying about their faith in the face of torture and execution. Why did they scorn sickness and death?
  4. The gospels, especially Mark, do not contain any embellishments and “theology historicized”. If they were made-up, there would have been events that had some connection to theological concepts. But the narratives are instead bare-bones: “Guy dies public death. People encounter same guy alive later.” Plain vanilla narrative.
  5. The story of the women who were the first witnesses to the empty tomb cannot have been invented, because the testimony of women was inadmissible under almost all circumstances at that time. If the story were invented, they would have invented male discoverers of the tomb. Female discovers would have hampered conversion efforts.
  6. There are almost no legendary embellishments in the gospels, while there are plenty in the later gnostic forgeries. No crowds of singing angels, no talking crosses, and no booming voices from the clouds.
  7. There is no mention of the future hope of the general resurrection, which I guess they thought was imminent anyway.

To conclude, Wright makes the argument that the best explanation of all of these changes in theology and practice is that God raised Jesus (bodily) from the dead. There is simply no way that this community would have made up the single resurrection of the Messiah – who wasn’t even supposed to die – and then put themselves on the line for that belief.

And remember, the belief in a resurrected Jesus was something that the earliest witnesses could really assess, because they were the ones who saw him killed and then walking around again after his death. They were able to confirm or deny their belief in the resurrection of Jesus based on their own personal experiences with the object of those beliefs.

News

Alliance Defending Freedom defeats secular left fascist Colorado Civil Rights Commission

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Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign
Gay activist vandalizes pro-marriage sign

When we last heard about Jack Phillips, we had good news: he won his case against the Colorado LGBT fascists at the Supreme Court. But they weren’t done persecuting him, yet! Almost immediately after the SCOTUS win, they charged him again for refusing to bake another LGBT cake. Fortunately for Jack, the Alliance Defending Freedom defended him again.

Here’s the latest from Daily Wire:

Christian cake artist Jack Phillips has scored a major victory after facing years of continuous persecution for his religious beliefs from LGBT activists and the Colorado Civil Rights Commission.

The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian nonprofit that advocates for religious freedom and traditional values, announced Tuesday that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission “will dismiss its most recent charges against cake artist Jack Phillips in the wake of newly discovered evidence of the state’s ongoing hostility toward religious freedom.”

In response to the clearly-targeted harassment of Mr. Phillips, ADF attorneys filed Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Elenis.

“We’re pleased that the state will be dismissing its case against Jack,” said ADF attorney Kristen Waggoner, who represented Phillips in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. “This is the second time the state has launched a failed effort to prosecute him. While it finally appears to be getting the message that its anti-religious hostility has no place in our country, the state’s decision to target Jack has cost him more than six-and-a-half years of his life, forcing him to spend that time tied up in legal proceedings.”

This sort of coercion by the secular left happens all the time.

I’ve reported on this blog about fake hate crimes, vandalism, violence, threats, death threats, attempted firings, actual firings, and many other power plays. So why do secular left fascists insist on persecuting people who disagree with them on moral issues? Why are they so comfortable using polical power to coerce others against their conscience?

Well, it turns out that there are some behaviors that the Bible calls sinful. And when people perform those behaviors, they start to feel guilty about what they are doing. That’s because God made people to not sin. Now, some people deal with these feelings of guilt about their sin by repenting, and turning towards God, and trusting him. But others just shut their minds to the evidence for God’s existence, e.g. – the Big Bang cosmology, the fine-tuning, the origin of life. Without God, they are forced into the view that objective morality, free will, and moral duties are all illusory. But they still feel badly about their sin. In order to deal with those bad feelings, they try to force everyone who still accepts morality to celebrate their abandonment of morality. And when asking others to agree doesn’t work, they go on to shame, silence and/or coerce others. And as we’ve seen on this blog, this can involve doing pretty much anything you can imagine. Sin makes people do terrible, terrible things to those who disagree with sin.

Are Christians tolerant?

Now let’s switch sides. What does a Christian do when faced with disagreement from a non-Christian? Well, Christians learn by watching God what to do with sinners. What does God do? God provides evidence of his existence to those who are open minded, and he leads those who trust him to make better moral decisions so that they don’t harm themselves and others by being self-centered. Christians also debate and disagree with arguments and evidence. Also, consider that God could squash everyone who disagreed with him right now, but he doesn’t. He’s giving them their whole lives to decide what to do with him. He offers evidence, forgiveness and leadership to those are open-hearted, and open-minded. But the others, he just leaves alone for now. And that’s what Christians do with non-Christians. We leave them alone. While a non-Christian is still alive, they have to be appealed to rationally, and treated with love and care. They have value because they were made in the image of God, to know the God who made them in a personal relationship. Christians believe that if a person doesn’t believe in Christ as Lord and Savior, then that person shouldn’t be forced to act as if they do by threats, violence, etc.

Tolerance and the secular left

But what about the secular left? The secular left are fascists, because they want Christians to behave as if they were non-Christians. And that’s why Christians need to do everything they can in the realm of law and policy to prevent secular leftists from getting into power. Secular leftists can’t ground objective morality or natural human rights on their worldview. Human rights have no meaning for secular leftists – they’re just nonsense. So, for them, anything is permissible in their quest to force others to approve of them. That’s why secular leftists need to be kept as far away from political power as the East is from the West. If you want to know what happens when they get it, just look at the atrocities committed by atheistic regimes in the 20th century, e.g. – the Soviety Union. People on the secular left are not moral people. Morality is the furthest thing from their minds.