The Standard of Liberty Voice
For God,Religion,Family,Freedom
A publication of The Standard of Liberty Foundation
www.standardofliberty.org
August 10, 2005, #4

Light Lunch, Heavy Topic

Yesterday I met Richard Wilkins. He is the managing director of the World Family Policy Center and a professor at the J. Reuben Clark Law School at BYU who has the distinction of having argued before the United States Supreme Court. To me his name has become synonymous with the current fight to defend the traditional family institution. Some months ago he had been kind enough to read my book, My Darling from the Lions, after which we had corresponded via email. My husband Steve first met him at the recent World Family Policy Forum where he had invited us to have lunch at a later date. So there we were in the Wilkinson Center Sky Room sitting at a linen-covered table with a view of the summer day against Mt. Timpanogos. We talked about, oh, just this and that, like what can be done to preserve the natural family as the preferred and protected ideal unit of society, exclamation point. We were well into conversation when the server brought our lunch. Not that a menu has to match the topic of conversation, but the triangular half veggie sandwich sitting on my plate beside a few thin slices of melon and a lone strawberry struck me as a curious contrast to the weighty matters we were discussing.

We asked Richard how the Forum (the sixth annual) went. He said he thought it went well. There were 38 ambassadors and other high level officials in attendance. I told him how I had been making my way through the huge stack of technical material Steve had brought home from the Forum which had opened my eyes like never before to the very real dangers threatening our way of life. How can we make this information accessible to the general public? I wanted to know. That’s a problem, he explained. It’s happened so fast. And it scares people. If you blurt out all this data helter-skelter people will think you are a crazy extremist. They just don’t want to hear or believe all this bad news.

I asked him if there is a real possibility that the law could force churches to perform gay marriages. To my surprise he did not throw his head back and laugh uproariously. No, he took my question with all the seriousness of an attorney approaching the bench. He explained that current law in the European Union may forbid the teaching of certain passages of scripture relating to homosexuality on the ground that they constitute “hate speech.” On the other hand, the European Union also protects the right to practice religious beliefs. “There are going to be conflicts always,” he said, “and courts have balanced things for years.” (The thought crossed my mind about how my trust in our judicial system had lately been seriously compromised.) “But the current dangers are somewhat greater than in the recent past,” Richard went on.

“According to some legal theorists,” he said, “there are two tiers of human rights – primary rights and secondary (or instrumental) rights. Autonomy rights include things like sexual orientation and personal religious beliefs, but preaching or teaching religious views in public moves beyond “personal beliefs” and is seen as secondary or ‘instrumental.’” In Europe, he stated, some believe that “secondary rights cannot justify infringing autonomy rights – that is why Sweden recently prosecuted a preacher for teaching that homosexuality is a sin.” He stated that he did not know “how far this might go,” but could not “dismiss” the idea that churches might lose the right to perform “legally binding marriages if they do not agree to marry same-sex couples." Now there's some food for thought.

What I understand from this is that various world governments – perhaps our own – could one day conceivably punish churches for the doctrines they espouse. It seems that the goal of the radical gay agenda is systematic social revolution through the infiltration and break-down of family, education, science, government, media, even church– every known societal entity. Scary.

Our host had hardly touched his sumptuous-looking salad and was already late for another meeting. “I used to try to do it all,” he told us, “but it was impossible.” He said that citizens need to support the political action groups. People like him gather the information. People like us have to back them up. Don’t get discouraged, we told each other as Richard hurried off.

Steve and I finished our lunch in silence. We sat there for a while feeling strangely empty. “The desserts look good,” I mentioned with a sigh. We ordered, and the server brought us a huge chunk of pitch-black chocolate cake flanked by two forks. I took extra-big bites and chewed nice and slow. Now that was more like it.

-Stephen & Janice Graham


Copyright 2005 by Standard of Liberty Foundation, Inc. All rights reserved.

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