In a few hours the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that will decide if the people of California have the right, under the U.S. Constitution, to forbid same-sex marriage. I am astounded that it is even a question. But, I suppose, I shouldn't be astounded. There has been a 40 year campaign to see the normalization of homosexual behavior. The entertainment media has been full of sympathetic portrayals of homosexuals since as early as I can remember. When I was a little boy, 8 or 9 years old, there were two television shows that had homosexual caracters: Soap and Three's Company. I didn't know until later, probably in my early teens what the shows were about, but there they were, polluting my mind; and polluting the minds of my countrymen. If one watches Glee or - and here I am guessing because I do not have a television machine and only stream a few things over the internet - or other television shows, then one can witness the constant overt persuasion.
And it seems the country has been persuaded. But why? What has changed? This is what I think has changed. Two things. The first of them is Disney. It is Disney's fault. They have been telling kids since the 1930s that marriage is about happiness and romantic feelings. Prior to that, I think everyone understood that marriage was about property and children, and if one was a Christian it was also about salvation. When did divorce laws in America begin to liberalize? In the middle 1950s and 1960s, when those kids raised on Disney movies and other fantasies about marriage began to be legislators and judges.
Abandonment and adultery and incurable insanity had been the usual grounds for the rare divorce. But then "cruelty" or "mental cruelty" were added. And in in California in the 1960s up to 70% of divorce case plantiffs were asking for divorces for such cruelties as "she refuses to make dinner", and "he swears at me". And in 1970 at the urging of lawyers and judges, Caifornia made the first "no-fault" divorce law in the United States. (A black mark on Ronald Reagans record.) And marriage, in the pursuit of individual happiness, became completely separated from its original purpose: The generation of and provision for children.
The second thing that contributed to the acceptance of the idea of homosexual marriage is a lack of mental training. Are you surprised I did not say a lack of evangelization, or a decline in the percentage of Christians? Perhaps, that is what I should have said for Natural Law is an important outgrowth of Christian theology, but many of the people who favor homosexual marriage are Christians. They think of it as unfair to forbid the happiness of marriage to people who have homosexual urges. (There's that happiness thing again.) No, the problem is lack of mental rigor and training.
The first time I really thought about the subject was in 1988. I was witness to a man getting a "bad conduct" discharge from the Army for committing homosexual sodomy. Of course, being a Christian, I knew what he did was wrong, but I was interested in why the United States Army cared. So I decided to try and figure it out.
It only took a couple of days, but I reasoned out the Natural Law on the subject (I had been introduced to the concept by Francis Schaeffer), though I am sure my understanding was crude. Later, in my mid-20s and when I joined the Conservative Book Club, I read a little pamphlet the book club sent me by Harry V. Jaffa that stated much more precisely and elegantly what I had figured out for myself a few years earlier. The worth-reading pamphlet is titled Homosexuality and the Natural Law.
So now, here our country is, poised at the cusp of complete moral collapse. It has reached the nadir of the death spiral St. Paul described in Romans 1:18-31. I do not think we can be a free people very much longer. Our Constitution was not written for a wicked people, and as Benjamin Franklin predicted, we can not but now fall into despotism.
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