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Some Thoughts
on Obergefell v. Hodges
By Kate Burch
Listening to Rush Limbaugh yesterday as I was doing some scutwork in
the house, I heard him ask why there was no public outrage, no flurry
of demonstrations in the streets, following the Supreme Court rulings
last week, particularly the one requiring all states to license and
recognize same-sex “marriage.”
For a fact, there is plenty of outrage, but I think there is also
plenty of resigned hopelessness. We saw the totally inappropriate
floodlighting of the White House with rainbow colors; an unrestrained
celebration that also sent a cautionary message to those who would dare
protest. We learned that Father Jonathan Morris, a Fox News
contributor from the Bronx, was spat upon as he walked to dinner
dressed in his clerical garb by two participants in an LGBT celebratory
parade following Friday’s ruling. We have read how more and more
nations have passed laws legitimizing something that is really
impossible and nonsensical, and we conclude that it is futile to push
back—that destruction of the basic institution of society is
inevitable, and we had better just get used to it. We see that
the “Progressive” juggernaut has thoroughly infiltrated public
education and the media; that our children are early indoctrinated with
the new orthodoxy and young people whose primary source of news is
their devices are informed by the left-leaning spokespeople
alone.
As not only the definition and meaning of marriage, but even of gender
is twisted and distorted beyond recognition, one may determine one’s
status on the basis of feeling, not reason and reality. As a
mental health professional, I was there when the powers-that-be bowed
to, or enthusiastically embraced, reassignment of homosexuality to a
“normal variant” rather than a disorder. To call a condition that
afflicts less than 3% of the population “normal” constitutes violence
upon the English language. As it stands now, people who
want to undergo a sex change based on their unhappiness with being male
or female, are still officially deemed to be suffering from a mental
illness. We won’t have long to wait, I fear, before we will have
another new “normal variant.”
Marriage is much, much more than a matter simply of “who you
love.” The nature of the human person, created as male or female,
remains unchanged and unchangeable. Marriage is, of its nature,
the union of one man and one woman in the only arrangement that brings
forth children. Marriage is the institution that connects
children to their mothers AND THEIR FATHERS, providing for their safety
and for their healthy development. Marriage is not merely an
arrangement for the legitimization of inheritance and transfer of
benefits and decision-making authority—those issues can be dealt with
easily without a marriage contract. The state should not
concern itself with whether people with same-sex attraction cohabit and
designate their partners as their heirs or their beneficiaries.
Neither should five unelected lawyers presume to turn reality upon its
head.
The likely dire consequences of the tragic mistake made by the Supreme
Court last week for our First Amendment rights to religious liberty are
not difficult to predict. It has started already. Francis
George, the recently deceased Catholic Cardinal of Chicago, said, in
part, in 2010, “I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in
prison, and his successor will die a martyr in the public square.”
It is for those of us who believe in the Constitution, and who believe
that there is objective truth and will not be distracted by the newest
shiny thing, to reach out with love and support to all people and to
promote and defend the authentic and immutable meaning of
marriage. The last sentence of Cardinal George’s 2010 statement
was, “His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and
slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in
human history.”
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