Tag Archives: Same-Sex Marriage

News

How would gay marriage affect your marriage?

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The Daily  Signal explains what it costs for those who refuse to celebrate same-sex marriage.

Excerpt:

A bakery owner in Oregon broke down in tears while discussing the fallout of her and her husband’s decision not to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple on the basis of their Christian beliefs.

Earlier this year, the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries found “substantial evidence” that Aaron and Melissa Klein, owners of Sweet Cakes by Melissa, discriminated against the lesbian couple.

They now face a fine in excess of $150,000.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Signal on Friday at the 2014 Values Voter Summit, Aaron said the fee would “definitely” be enough to bankrupt the couple and their five children.

[…]In January 2014, the Kleins were charged with violating Oregon’s Equality Act of 2007, a law that protects the rights of the LGBT community.

[…]Melissa and Aaron Klein are in the process of appealing the decision handed down by the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries. Following threats, vicious protests and boycotts, they have also been forced to close their bakery.

Melissa told The Daily Signal the charges have “definitely impacted us pretty hard financially.”

“This was not the first time we’ve served these girls,” said Aaron, maintaining their refusal was not about the couple’s sexual orientation, but rather, about their religious convictions.

Sometimes, when a person is doing something they know is wrong, they will try to drown out their conscience by getting everyone around them to tell them that what they are doing is actually right. But what happens when the people around them don’t perform? Well, if you’re on the secular left, that’s where the fascism comes in. On a secular worldview, you can’t ground human rights. They don’t exist. So when a secular leftists is confronted with a lack of approval for his sinfulness, he turns to government to punish anyone who disagrees with them. Even if it means violating their fundamental human rights. The gay couple in question could have gone somewhere else, but instead they chose to punish people who disagreed with them in order to push their agenda by coercion.

I think a lot of atheists like to console themselves that even if God exists, that they will be OK because they never did anything really bad. You know, like rape or murder. And those things are indeed terrible, and definitely worthy of capital punishment now, and an eternity of separation from God later. But I think there is something even worse than those things. Jesus says that the most important commandment is for a person to love God with everything he has. I think that when a secular leftist uses the power of government to force Christians to break their allegiance to Christ, that they are doing something worse than rape or murder, (in terms of final judgment – not criminal law). And this is in addition to the widespread support for abortion (which is murder of an innocent child) that is widely supported in the atheist community.

You definitely do not want to be found to be one of those people who made Christians feel ashamed of taking the teachings of Jesus on sexuality seriously on that day. I really think it would be nice if atheists stopped kidding themselves about being good people. You’re not good people. We might treat you nicely, because you were made to know God and so have the same value as anyone else, but that doesn’t mean you are a good person. In fact, atheists cannot even ground objective morality rationally in their accidental universe. I guess we should not be surprised, then, when we see them using government to force their nihilism on people of faith.

Here is atheist morality:

The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.

(“God’s Utility Function,” Scientific American, November, 1995, p. 85)

That’s why they can do these things. Because for them, rape, murder, anything – are all neither praiseworthy nor prohibited. There is no moral oughtness on atheism. And if they have enough power, then it just leads them to behave like the atheist Josef Stalin did in his ruthless suppression of free religious expression. Killing millions of people is no problem for atheists. There is no evil and no good, as Dawkins says. I think what this intolerance towards Christians for their faith is a slippery slope that leads to the kind of religious persecution that we have seen against people of faith in atheist regimes of the past. This is not speculative. Atheists have been willing to kill in order to protect their worldview from challengers. I think fining Christians $150,000 in order to bankrupt them is a step on that path. They lack the power today, but not the will. History teaches us that there is a deep hatred for Christianity inside atheism, and there are no limits to how far they will go to act on that.

You can read more about atheist morality in this post where I talk about Richard Dawkins’ support for extramarital affairs and infanticide. Like I said, if you’re an atheist, there is no evil and no good. It’s so strange to me when they try to make moral judgments. Like a monkey trying to write a novel. They act so outraged but really they have no standing to declare anything right or wrong. It’s not grounded in their worldview, and it’s important to understand what we are dealing with when we meet people who cannot distinguish right from wrong, and have no problem with coercing others against their consciences. It’s easy to see where Stalin and Mao came from, isn’t it?

News

Could the same libertarian impulse that led to gay marriage lead to incest marriage?

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Here is an article from The Week, a liberal publication. (H/T Dina)

Excerpt:

You should really care that the German Ethics Council (a government committee) haspronounced that Germany’s laws banning consensual incest between adult brothers and sisters ought to be abolished.

Now, it’s not because Germany’s laws directly affect the United States; they don’t, of course. And even within Germany itself, the ruling party of Chancellor Angela Merkel has indicated that it doesn’t plan on following the council’s recommendation.

The reason why Americans — and especially American liberals — should care about the council’s ruling is that it gives us a glimpse of America’s future.

The German council’s position is based on the claim that “the fundamental right of adult siblings to sexual self-determination” overrides all other moral considerations, including “the abstract idea of protection of the family.”

Right now, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act because they thought that there is no possible reason for defining marriage as one man and one woman other than “the desire to “‘disparage,’ ‘injure,’ ‘degrade,’ ‘demean,’ and ‘humiliate’ our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual”. So does this rationale for allow gay marriage apply to incest marriage?

Well:

Well, how long before the majority wants to and believes it can get away with declaring a constitutional right to sibling incest?

Don’t laugh. As with same-sex marriage, the principle has already been established. In a notorious passage of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that upheld the constitutional right to abortion, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote that “at the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, of the mystery of human life.” Kennedy relied on the same passage in his majority opinion in Lawrence. The German Ethics Council expressed a similarly libertarian ideal of sexual autonomy in its ruling in favor of sibling incest.

[…]Note that the German Ethics Council also held that the prospect of a brother and sister producing children with genetic defects cannot be used as a reason to deny them a right to marry. After all, disabled couples are not prohibited from procreating under German law, even though they have a greater-than-average chance of producing disabled kids. The same is true, incidentally, under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.

Indeed. If people should be allowed to marry whomever they “love” then, there can be no prohibitions on polygamy or incest marriages. Don’t they “love” each other just as much? Well, then those are both “marriage”, too. But maybe that’s OK with the secular left – they never liked that whole “morality” thing anyway. So long as the selfish grown-ups are happy, why should we care about children’s needs or social stability at all?

Commentary

This woman’s husband left her for his business partner and took her kids

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A striking story from the Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

In the fall of 2007, my husband of almost ten years told me that he was gay and that he wanted a divorce. In an instant, the world that I had known and loved—the life we had built together—was shattered.

I tried to convince him to stay, to stick it out and fight to save our marriage. But my voice, my desires, my needs—and those of our two young children—no longer mattered to him. We had become disposable, because he had embraced one tiny word that had become his entire identity. Being gay trumped commitment, vows, responsibility, faith, fatherhood, marriage, friendships, and community. All of this was thrown away for the sake of his new identity.

Try as I might to save our marriage, there was no stopping my husband. Our divorce was not settled in mediation or with lawyers. No, it went all the way to trial. My husband wanted primary custody of our children. His entire case can be summed up in one sentence: “I am gay, and I deserve my rights.” It worked: the judge gave him practically everything he wanted. At one point, he even told my husband, “If you had asked for more, I would have given it to you.”

I truly believe that judge was legislating from the bench, disregarding the facts of our particular case and simply using us—using our children— to help influence future cases. In our society, LGBT citizens are seen as marginalized victims who must be protected at all costs, even if it means stripping rights from others. By ignoring the injustice committed against me and my children, the judge seemed to think that he was correcting a larger injustice.

[…]At the time of the first ceremony, the marriage was not recognized by our state, our nation, or our church. And my ex-husband’s new marriage, like the majority of male-male relationships, is an “open,” non-exclusive relationship. This sends a clear message to our children: what you feel trumps all laws, promises, and higher authorities. You can do whatever you want, whenever you want—and it doesn’t matter who you hurt along the way.

[…]Our two young children were willfully and intentionally thrust into a world of strife and combative beliefs, lifestyles, and values, all in the name of “gay rights.” Their father moved into his new partner’s condo, which is in a complex inhabited by sixteen gay men. One of the men has a 19-year-old male prostitute who comes to service him. Another man, who functions as the father figure of this community, is in his late sixties and has a boyfriend in his twenties. My children are brought to gay parties where they are the only children and where only alcoholic beverages are served. They are taken to transgender baseball games, gay rights fundraisers, and LGBT film festivals.

Both of my children face identity issues, just like other children. Yet there are certain deep and unique problems that they will face as a direct result of my former husband’s actions. My son is now a maturing teen, and he is very interested in girls. But how will he learn how to deal with that interest when he is surrounded by men who seek sexual gratification from other men? How will he learn to treat girls with care and respect when his father has rejected them and devalues them? How will he embrace his developing masculinity without seeing his father live out authentic manhood by treating his wife and family with love, honoring his marriage vows even when it’s hard?

My daughter suffers too. She needs a dad who will encourage her to embrace her femininity and beauty, but these qualities are parodied and distorted in her father’s world. Her dad wears make-up and sex bondage straps for Halloween. She is often exposed to men dressing as women. The walls in his condo are adorned with large framed pictures of women in provocative positions. What is my little girl to believe about her own femininity and beauty? Her father should be protecting her sexuality. Instead, he is warping it.

Without the guidance of both their mother and their father, how can my children navigate their developing identities and sexuality? I ache to see my children struggle, desperately trying to make sense of their world.

When I was younger and considering marriage, I thought a lot about no-fault divorce and how I would feel about my wife leaving me because she wanted to find herself in Europe, or something. I thought about the feminist judge who would give her custody of our children, and force me to pay alimony and child support. Marriage did not seem like a good risk to me then. I guess part of me always thought that feminists would be the only bad guys in this sexual revolution, and men and children were the victims of feminist selfishness. But this woman’s story really makes me realize how women can be just as much the victims of judicial activism as any man was under no-fault divorce laws. That story she told about the activist judge just made my blood run cold. What must that have been like for her, to lose custody of her kids and have them put into the “gay lifestyle” Grindr-style environment? My heart goes out to her.

Previously, I blogged about Dawn Stefanowicz‘s story of growing up with a gay father.