We Cannot Compromise on Morality or Rights

We Cannot Compromise on Morality or Rights

By de Andréa
November 20, 2014

History proves that if a society allows even one millimeter of encroachment on a moral issue or a right, that society will eventually lose both of them altogether.  And in the process it looks like one has opened a can of worms!

Just days after the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the right of states to define marriage as one man and one woman, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court is being urged to affirm the decision, because if it doesn’t, states might not even be able to regulate the “species” of marriage partners.

All one needs to do is to read a copy of the American Constitutional Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments, and after reading each of the God given rights, ask yourself if this right has been incrementally encroached in any way.  And if you are honest and aware of the anti-constitutional laws that have been passed by our state and federal legislatures over the past one hundred years you will have to come to the eye opening conclusion that we have essentially lost all of our rights as they were written and intended.  Moreover what we have left have become privileges not rights!

I’m no prude but if one is at least over 50 years old so one can see the change over the years, one just needs to get on the internet or watch television these days to recognize that we as a society have near totally lost our moral character.  

And the point here is, that it started with just one little compromise, one very small encroachment that may even have seemed like a good idea, an improvement, at least that is the way it is sold.  Yes! We have to do this for the good of sociality, it’s only fair!  And that is the foot in the door.

Take a look at the Second Amendment which is a definitive example of runaway incremental encroachment.  The right itself states that it “shall not be infringed.”  And yet there have been outright bans on citizens’ rights.  We have a president that is doing his best to disarm the Nation.  This didn’t happen overnight, but began with one small regulation that was sold as a reasonable idea for a safe society.  This happened in the face of an extensive study by John Lott Jr proving what the Framers already knew more than 200 years ago that the more guns in the hands of law abiding citizens the safer society is, stating that the Second Amendment is “necessary to the security of a free State.”  

"They that can give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania (1759)

“If ‘marriage’ for example means fulfilling one’s personal choices regarding intimacy, as the appellants insist, it is difficult to see how states could regulate marriage on any basis,” said a friend-of-the-court brief filed in a Louisiana case. “If personal autonomy is the essence of marriage, then not only gender, but also number, familial relationship, and even species are insupportable limits on that principal and they all will fall.”

This is not just a slippery slope on which the appellants wish to set us, it is a bottomless pit into which they desire to throw us. It is clearly within a state’s right to define marriage between and man and a woman when that licensing restriction passes rational basis review.

It was in 2008 when the nation was in the midst of a series of more than 30 state elections in which voters chose to affirm traditional marriage that the California Supreme Court, on its own initiative, created “same-sex marriage” in the state.

In a dissent from that opinion, State Supreme Court justice Marvin Baxter said: “The bans on incestuous and polygamous marriages are ancient and deep-rooted, and, as the majority suggests, they are supported by strong considerations of social policy. … Our society abhors such relationships, and the notion that our laws could not forever prohibit them seems preposterous.”

Yet here, the majority overturns, in abrupt fashion, an initiative statute confirming the equally deep-rooted assumption that marriage is a union of partners of the opposite sex. The majority does so by relying on its own assessment of contemporary community values, and by inserting in our Constitution an expanded definition of the right to marry that contravenes expressed statutory law.

Baxter went on to say “Who can say that, in 10, 15 or 20 years, an activist court might not rely on the majority’s analysis to conclude, on the basis of a perceived evolution in community values, that the laws prohibiting polygamous and incestuous marriages were no longer constitutionally justified?”

The newest warning comes in a brief filed in the Louisiana case by the Thomas More Law Center.

The case developed when voters in Louisiana, by a 78 percent to 22 percent margin, defined marriage as the union of one man and one woman. Homosexual activists sued, but the law was affirmed at the district court level by Judge Martin C. Feldman, who said the state was under no constitutional obligation to recognize same-sex marriage.

The brief explains: “If ‘marriage’ means whatever a political activist, a cherry-picked plaintiff, or an appointed judge wants it to mean, it means nothing. If it has no fixed meaning, it is merely a vessel for a judge’s will. It is used as a subterfuge for judicial legislation. And as Montesquieu observed: ‘There is no greater tyranny than that which is perpetrated under the shield of law and in the name of justice.’”

The filing represents tens of thousands of churches and ministries including more than 3 million members in the United States.

“Same-sex attracted individuals have never lawfully been forced to attend different schools, walk on separate public sidewalks, sit at the back of the bus, drink out of separate drinking fountains, denied their right to assemble, or denied their voting rights. The legal history of these disparate classifications, i.e., immutable racial discrimination and same-sex attraction, is incongruent. Yet, courts continue to mistakenly draw upon this incongruence as the basis for what they now deem ‘marriage equality,’” the brief says.

“The appellants wish to replace the morality of the Judeo-Christian tradition on which our country was founded with the trendy, relativist morality of political correctness.”

Another brief, from the Alliance Defending Freedom, outlines the benefits to society of the traditional family of a married mother and father and their children.

“Man-woman-marriage laws substantially further the state’s interest in linking children to both of their biological parents. Therefore, those laws easily satisfy the deferential rational-basis standard that applies here,” the brief says.

“The people of Louisiana – and every state – should continue to have the freedom to affirm marriage as the union of a man and a woman in their laws,” said ADF Senior Counsel Byron Babione. “The district court in this case was right to conclude, as the U.S. Supreme Court did in its Windsor decision last year, that marriage law is the business of the states. States that choose to affirm marriage as a man and a woman have vital reasons for doing so.”

Headed for Supreme Court?

Last week a three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the rights of voters in four states – Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee – to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The decision followed a long list of federal court decision that have adopted the premise that “equality” of marriage means there is no difference between the sexes.”  Oh really!  Maybe it’s the federal court that needs some counseling.

The U.S. Supreme Court recently had refused to take on any same-sex marriage cases, allowing the movement to expand into about 30 states, but the 6th Circuit decision may change that, according to analysts.

Mat Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, which has fought on behalf of traditional marriage, said, “With a divide in the appeals court rulings, the Supreme Court will likely take up the issue.”   

Traditional marriage is logical

And the judges wrote: “Once one accepts a need to establish such ground rules, and most especially a need to create stable family units for the planned and unplanned creation of children, one can well appreciate why the citizenry would think that a reasonable first concern of any society is the need to regulate male-female relationships and the unique procreative possibilities of them. … People may not need the government’s encouragement to have sex. And they may not need the government’s encouragement to propagate the species. But they may well need the government’s encouragement to create and maintain stable relationships within which children may flourish. It is not society’s laws or for that matter any one religion’s laws, but nature’s laws (that men and women complement each other biologically), that created the policy imperative. And governments typically are not second-guessed under the Constitution for prioritizing how they tackle such issues.”

Here’s a partial list of recent cases in which Christians have been targeted by homosexual activists:

·         New Mexico Christian photographers Jon and Elaine Huguenin were sued by two lesbians under the state’s “sexual orientation” law after declining to photograph the lesbians’ “commitment ceremony.”

·           The Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association in New Jersey, was convicted of “discrimination” after two lesbians, Harriet Bernstein and Luisa Paster, decided to hold their commitment ceremony on the Methodist-run association’s popular family friendly boardwalk. After that, Ocean Grove quit the wedding-hosting business.

·        The Aloha Bed & Breakfast in Hawaii, a Christian business, was forced to “accommodate” two Southern California lesbians after a judge ruled the B&B violated state law when the owner told Taeko Bufford and Diane Cervelli she wasn’t comfortable having them stay together in her home due to her religious beliefs. Aloha has since been ordered by the state “to provide a room to any same-sex couple that wishes to stay there.”

·        In Illinois, Christian B&B owners Jim and Beth Walder are being sued by homosexual activist Todd Wathen, who demands monetary damages, attorneys’ fees and “an order directing [the Walders] to cease and desist from any violation” of the state’s Human Rights Act.

·        Vermont’s Wildflower Inn paid a settlement and shut down its wedding reception business after the ACLU won a $10,000 civil penalty for two lesbians. The settlement also requires the inn’s owners to place $20,000 in a charitable trust for the lesbians.

·        Oregon’s “Sweet Cakes by Melissa” bakery shut down after declining to bake for a “gay wedding.”

·        The owners of Indiana’s “Just Cookies” were charged with “discrimination” under the city’s “sexual orientation” law for refusing to fill a special order for “rainbow cookies” for an LGBT group.

·        Iowa’s “Victoria’s Cake Cottage,” whose owner Victoria Childress refused to provide a wedding cake for a homosexual couple out of “convictions for their lifestyle.”

·        Oregon’s “Fleur Cakes,” joined “Sweet Cakes” in refusing to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple and is being boycotted by homosexual activist groups.

·        Washington state’s “Arlene’s Flowers,” whose owner Barronelle Stutzman declined to provide flowers for the wedding of a same-sex couple who had long frequented her shop, faces two lawsuits after refusing to fill an order because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ.”

·        Texas’ “All Occasion Party Place,” a Fort Worth venue, refuses, on religious grounds, to rent out a banquet hall for same-sex wedding receptions.

·        A Christian T-shirt maker in Kentucky was targeted by the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Human Rights Commission for refusing to print “gay pride” designs for a local homosexual group.

·        Chris Penner, owner of the Twilight Room Annex bar in Portland, was fined $400,000 under the Oregon Equality Act for excluding transsexual men who, dressed as women, had been alienating other customers by using the women’s restroom. According to the Seattle Times, 11 people – calling themselves the “T-girls” – “will get the money, with awards ranging from $20,000 to 50,000.”

·        The Catholic Church was forced to shut down successful adoption agencies in several states because it opposes adoption by homosexual couples.

·        Christians have been kicked out of college counseling programs because they oppose homosexuality and therapists are prohibited by law from helping young people overcome unwanted same-sex attractions.

         What if we used that same logic in dealing with someone who had an unwanted urge to KILL?

  

Thanks for listening – de Andréa

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