marriage protection

The Standard of Liberty Voice
For God,Religion,Family,Freedom
A publication of The Standard of Liberty Foundation
www.standardofliberty.org
June 9, 2006, #23

Fresh Error, Fresh Sin – The Marriage Protection Amendment
and Gay Pride in Salt Lake City

I had a dream last night that it was the end of the world. There were bombs dropping everywhere – I could see multiple explosions dotting the valley from my perch on a hill. But the bombs made no noise. From each soundless explosion spewed clustering coils of white smoke. As if in slow motion, the wormlike fingers multiplied and grew, spreading outward in every direction. It was obvious to me there was no defense; these grotesque multi-fingered hands would soon grope their way into every nook and cranny on the face of the earth and strangle all human life. I woke up wondering if it would be a slow, agonizing death or a mercifully quick one.

Some dreams are worth paying attention to. Our greatest modern-day thinkers and religious leaders have been saying for decades that we have set ourselves up as a nation for a not-so- gradual cultural demise, that is unless we rally and begin winning some of these battles.

One such battle occurred on Capital Hill this past week. There are reasons why the United States Senate turned down the possibility of a Marriage Protection Amendment, and I doubt that any detractor’s decision was based on the only possible good reason to oppose it: the stark reality that we shouldn’t need it. To quote Cal Thomas, “That a president of the United States would feel compelled, for whatever reason, to make a public statement that marriage should be reserved for men and women is a leading indicator of the moral state of the union. . . . He may as well have stated the equally obvious that the sun rises in the east.” 1 C. S. Lewis put it, "Wherever any precept of traditional morality is simply challenged to produce its credentials, as though the burden of proof lay on it, we have taken the wrong position." 2

Yes, the whole thing is incredible. But here we are. One reason we are here is because we the people have psychologically relinquished the foundations upon which our republic stands. To paraphrase Edmund Burke, good men have done nothing, evil has triumphed, and we are now reaping the usurious consequences.

Like a broken-spirited wife lifting her arms to ward off the blows of her angry, abusive husband, we have allowed ourselves to believe we are in a no-win position. We have been brought to a pathetic defending of the self-evident, while the self-evident (all that is normal, true, real, best, and right) continues to be thrashed – devalued and demonized – in every kind of public arena.

Has there ever been a time like this? Sure, there have been pockets of insanity such as Hitler’s reign, but the modern civilized world as a whole strives to rightly identify and obliterate such evils as soon as humanly possible. But something is basically different today. Evil exists, as always, but unlike any other time (except perhaps Noah’s), evil thrives under a protective blanket of worldwide public justification. For example, the National Review reports that at the World Cup, arguably the biggest sporting event in the world beginning its every 4-year, month-long games as I write, the German government is shipping in what some now call “sex workers” and building huts around the stadium for spectators to more conveniently make use of this public service. “[Prostitution] is now officially endorsed . . . welcomed into the fold of ‘inclusive society.’” 3

Another example closer to home is Salt Lake City’s Gay Pride Days. This past weekend, on the 29th annual such celebration, Steve loaded up the tripod and video camera and drove to downtown Salt Lake to record this gathering. An estimated 15,000 showed up for the two-day festivities. There were 100 parade entries. The following is a sampling of what occurred.

On the main city streets many adults walked around and rode on floats dressed only in tight-fitting underwear. Several flaunted their private body parts and physically imitated all manner of sexual acts. Normal-looking girls standing in groups kissed each other passionately on the lips. Men were dressed in varying degrees of women’s clothing including outlandish evening gowns and make-up. Some people were dressed in bits of black leather and chains. There were a number of small children present led by adults who acted as if the environment surrounding them was perfectly normal and family-friendly. Our public servants, the SLC police, watched over these proceedings while being paid overtime at a cost of $60,000 to the city. A booth run by the police department ostensibly assayed to recruit from among the gay population. Another booth targeted the LDS population, incredibly attempting to excuse licentiousness through holy scripture. Several candidates rode in shiny convertibles waving and smiling, unabashedly pandering to this crowd for votes to attain public office such as county sheriff, county mayor, and Utah Legislature. In one corner, very few protestors (two or three) tried very badly and in vain to convince the gay pride participants of the error of their ways.

My reaction? These are obviously very sick and mixed-up people; I worry that some have sold their very souls. Caught up in bad behavior, they must continually justify it by soliciting for public acceptance. I feel terribly sorry for them mostly because they do not know their true intrinsic value and seem to be finding meaning and purpose in a disordered, dangerous, and dead-end lifestyle. And yet to our shame we pretend these poor people are perfectly normal and that all this debauchery is harmless. This is not authentic concern, but spoiling indulgence. Said C. S. Lewis, "Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal." And "Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness."4

Every six months or so I reread an excellent speech about gay marriage by Midge Dector. She said, “Thus doth compassion, combined with a certain willful blindness, make cowards of us all. A culture grown sick with the refusal to uphold common wisdom - not to speak of common sense - sinks to requiring the services of politicians in the face of difficulty.” It won’t work, she said, and this week she was proved right. She further explains that the majority of male homosexuals, who are inclined toward promiscuity, do not want marriage at all. With great emphasis Dector points out, “They do not want what the rest of us have - they want to bring the whole house down.” 5

Indeed, an SLF reader reports that a piece in the most recent edition of the Advocate, the premier gay magazine, admits that “gay” is over. “It’s being replaced with terms like queer, questioning, open, fluid. Matt Foreman of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force stated, ‘We as a movement can take pride that we opened this door for young people to be much more fluid about sexuality, gender, gender roles, orientation and sexual behavior than any other generation in history. That’s what the gay movement has contributed to society and that’s a tremendously good thing.’”

No Matt, it’s a tremendously bad thing.

But all is not lost. Contrary to popular opinion, we live not in a democracy where self-appointed groups can change the rules according to societal trends but in a republic where elected representatives promise to follow an unchanging set of true principles upon which its government stands. If they don’t follow those principles, the people are obliged to turn them out of office and find someone else who will. Even bad judges can be impeached. Robert Bork points out that local officials and school boards have greater effects on culture than do national politicians. 6

Thank goodness for our republic. As soon as possible, we can vote out evil or weak representatives and vote in good and strong ones. We can run for office or support and encourage others to do so. For instance, LaVar Christensen and Jim Matheson are running for the U. S. House of Representatives in Utah’s second congressional district this coming November. We encourage you to study their positions to see which most closely matches up with yours.

Midge Dector urges us, “ to resist all attacks on the way we live . . . to stick up for ourselves . . . to be as mighty a force in the culture as we are entitled to be if nothing else by virtue of our sheer numbers.”7 According to Robert Bork, the public will can save our culture from the creep of destruction illustrated in my dream. He says our only hope is a religious revival and the revival of public discourse about morality, and that we need to regenerate “a robust self-confidence about the worth of traditional values that the relativism of modern liberalism has already seriously damaged.” 8

Wrote C. S. Lewis, "Every uncorrected error and unrepented sin is, in its own right, a fountain of fresh error and fresh sin flowing on to the end of time." 9

He’s referring to our sins, our errors. There is much to do. Let’s roll.

-Stephen & Janice Graham

1. “Say ‘yes’ to same-sex ‘marriage,’ and you’ll never say ‘no’ again,” The Salt Lake Tribune, June 8, 2006.
2. From The Abolition of Man, 1943.
3. Roger Scruton, “Old Profession, New Toleration,” National Review, June 19, 2006, 42.
4. From The Problem of Pain, 1940.
5. “Civil Unions: Compromise or Surrender?”, Imprimis, Nov. 2004.
6. From Slouching Towards Gomorrah, 1996.
7. See # 1.
8. See #5.
9. See #4.

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