Marriage Rulings Put Religious Liberty at Risk posted by John Sorensen on Jul 01, 2013

Many are celebrating last week’s U.S. Supreme Court decisions in favor of homosexual marriage as triumphs for the “freedom to marry.”

They’re not, of course. What the Court has done is hand us all a huge loss for liberty. Instead of expanding freedom, this pair of rulings shrinks it and puts religious liberty very much at risk.

The freedom we Americans have enjoyed since 1776 is jeopardized when popular culture and ruling elites go all in for what the Bible calls sin. Samuel Adams, one of America’s founders and a Christian who organized America’s very first tea party, said “public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.” Benjamin Franklin said “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” That was the shared view of America’s founders who took their moral instruction from reason and revelation, or what the Declaration of Independence calls the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”

The Supreme Court does away with both in these rulings which offer disturbing evidence that America’s moral capital is nearly gone.  Robert Bork detailed America’s moral and cultural slide in his 1996 book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah. With these rulings, we’re almost there.

And don’t think there won’t be pain for all from the new “morality” just endorsed by the High Court. Jettisoning God’s law—which He gave in love for our good—comes at great cost. As Dr. Kennedy and others have said, we don’t so much break God’s laws as we break ourselves upon them.

We’re already seeing the circle of liberty grow smaller as homosexual “marriage” advances. Florists, bakers, wedding photographers, even a scenic seaside Christian retreat center in New Jersey, have all been dragged into court or harassed for refusing, based on Christian principles, to do business with homosexual couples:

• Washington’s attorney general sued a 68-year-old florist after she refused to provide a long-time customer with flowers for his “wedding” with another man.
• A Colorado baker faces up to one year in prison if he loses a discrimination complaint brought against him for refusing to sell a wedding cake to a homosexual couple.
• A photo studio in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has been fighting for five years to overturn a $7,000 fine imposed by the state Human Rights Commission for refusing to shoot the exchange of vows between two lesbians.
• In 2012, a New Jersey judge ordered the Ocean Grove Camp Meeting Association, a Methodist facility that dates to 1870, to rent its beachside facility to a lesbian couple for their “wedding.”

Many homosexuals want to win the “freedom to marry” for themselves and take the freedom to disagree away from others. Harvard law professor Mary Ann Glendon said in 2004 that “one foreseeable effect of [homosexual marriage proponents’] success will be to usher in an era of intolerance and discrimination the likes of which we have rarely seen before.”

Boy, was she right:

• A baker in Hood River, Oregon, said she has “been receiving voice mails and email messages wishing for the destruction of my business and my own death” after refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple.
• Defenders of homosexual marriage raged last year against a 14-year-old girl who told the Maryland Senate that marriage should be reserved to a man and a woman.  YouTube comments included: “If I ever see this girl, I will kill her. That’s a promise.”
• §  Even the U.S. Supreme Court has little tolerance for those who think (along with most people for most of human history) that marriage is for one man and one woman. To think that way, the pro-homosexual marriage majority said, is to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” homosexuals. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said in dissent that the majority had effectively labeled opponents of homosexual marriage “enemies of the human race.”

We’re celebrating America’s 237^th birthday this week but the liberty this nation has enjoyed since that first July 4^th is under assault as never before. Which is why we should pay heed to one more quote from Sam Adams: “He … is the truest friend of the liberty of his country who tries most to promote its virtue.”

And the only way to promote true virtue is to introduce men and women to Jesus Christ. I hope you’re doing that. It’s the only hope for this nation or any other.