By Larry Lambert
There is a great divide within America. The split is led by zealots who seek to supplant Christianity and its ideals with a new, idolatrous religion, “progressivism.” The destruction of the institution of marriage and the inculcation of children into its priesthood is the latest manifestation of this new faith and its goal to transform America.
You can see it championed on television and even glorified and reaffirmed from the pulpits of many churches. Unfortunately, the activists who are working diligently to radically change America seem to be winning.
With victory after victory in the courts, the current push for gay marriage has morphed into a new orthodoxy. Gay rights, or “marriage equality”, has emerged into the public square with all the protected status of a sacred cow, with enough privilege to legally trump any and all other protections, including the 1st Amendment.
We have become a nation based on the ideal that some people are more protected than others, with the consequence that the Constitution, and laws, are meaningless as long as the courts uphold progressive dogmas about their version of “equality.”
In other words, progressive ideology dealing with gay rights has established federal protections that directly challenge the rights and protections of others. The signs of gay politics infringing on the basic rights established in the 1st Amendment arose twelve years ago with Lawrence V. Texas. Privacy law was then used to create a “right” to same sex marriage whole cloth, which has been pushed to the forefront ever since.
Once the Supreme Court threw out California’s Propostion 8 and let the lower courts decide the question of same sex marriage, gay ideology became established with the protected status of the 14th Amendment.
Let’s not pretend that this doesn’t come at a cost, not least to children. Donald P. Sullins (Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents: Difference by Definition, Catholic University of America, British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science 7(2):99-120, 2015, January 25, 2015) completed a well researched sociological study showing that children raised by same-sex parents don’t fare as well emotionally as children raised by opposite sex parents, especially by biological parents.
The study is based on some solid sociological methodologies and has something to say about the effects of same sex parenting. Predictably, it has been excoriated by the PC crowd of progressives, especially those who will allow no dissent against the new idol of same sex marriage.
Not only was the study trashed, the author will be publicly flogged, the school where he resides will be protested, and the journal in which his paper appeared was slammed, as the equality thought police pushed for a retraction.
It’s fast becoming clear that same-sex marriage advocates have become the latest in a long line of progressive attack dogs. In the name of “equality” and “fairness,” they have created a dogma that is so closed minded, so intolerant, and so radically immoral, that most other progressive ideals seem tame and civil by comparison.
This shouldn’t surprise us. It is a characteristic of our age that if people want any gods at all, they want them to be gods who do not demand much, comfortable gods, smooth gods who not only don’t rock the boat, but don’t even row it, gods who pat us on the head, make us giggle, then tell us to run along and pick flowers.
The people pushing gay marriage would have been right at home fashioning a golden calf while Moses communed with God. Thus progressives want to create God in their own image, and what an image it is.
The apostles of this new religion can make the most outrageous and blatant claims because their philosophy rejects truth, ethical and otherwise. They have renounced a universe that has moral absolutes of right and wrong and are therefore free to lie, cheat, steal, and yes murder, because in their eyes, they worship a deity who blesses and justifies their every action, no matter how crooked or perverse.
That deity is an idol, the golden calf of the self, a false god who suffers no dissent, and anyone who disagrees with its dogmas deserves ridicule and retribution. This includes Christianity.
Christian morals and values are odious to those whose practices are shamed by them, and the progressive movement has put up an impressive and unrelenting attack on those values in an attempt to undermine them for all time. The devaluation of the institution of marriage has been one of their success stories, but it’s not a stopping point for them.
Make no mistake, the progressive movement, which champions same-sex marriage as a right, believes firmly that the whole of Western Civilization, including Christianity, is a curse that must be removed from the world.
Don’t expect them to fold up their tents and go home when they have achieved their goal of gay marriage in every state of the Union. That’s just a beginning, a battle along the way to what they hope will be a new world in which Christianity, and the culture which arose from it, is no more.
With full confidence in Christ, we must not underestimate our very real enemy.
Larry Lambert is a consultant, he lives in the Arizona highlands.
