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Neither Friend of Court or Culture: Obama Asks Supreme Court to Undermine Marriage

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There is a new resistance movement and we must take our place within its ranks. We must become rebels of love.

On February 28, 2013, the Department of Justice of the Obama  Administration filed what is called a Friend of the Court or Amicus Brief in the case styled Hollingsworth v Perry.It should have come as no surprise to those who have been actually watching Barack Obama and his administration - and not simply buying into the sophistry which they offer with such regularity.

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P>WASHINGTON,DC  (Catholic Online) - On February 28, 2013, the Department of Justice of the Obama  Administration filed what is called a Friend of the Court or Amicus Brief in the case styled Hollingsworth v Perry. The entire brief can be read here. I understand the use of such briefs. I have filed many in various capacities over the years. In this instance, the President is neither a friend of the Court or the Culture.

The basic claim the President based his renunciation of the Institution of marriage upon can be reduced to this one sentence out of the brief. "Proposition 8's denial of marriage to same-sex couples, particularly where California at the same time grants same-sex partners all the substantive rights of marriage, violates equal protection. The Fourteenth Amendment's guarantee of equal protection embodies a defining constitutional ideal that "all persons similarly situated should be treated alike."

For those who actually thought that this was all about equal access to benefits - and were sucked into the civil union or civil partnership camp - the revolutionary strategy was hatched a long time ago.  I wrote concerning a unique twist on the plan in 2010 in England here.  The Human Rights Campaign  is the leading Activist organization in the United States pursuing the strategy. 

They stated on their web site in 2010, "Only marriage can provide families with true equality. However, domestic partnerships and other forms of relationship recognition, though limited, provide important and tangible protections." The idea was simple. Set up the current case at the US Supreme Court by forcing a conflict between the States. Then use the Equal Protection Clause argument.

If you examine their cases, and their legislative lobbying you discover quickly that the Civil Union strategy was only a stepping stone and subterfuge. It was a stop along the way to the goal of eliminating the special status given to true marriage and the family and society founded upon it. They intended to replace marriage with a counterfeit using the same word and then build a new social order. That is why I call it a Cultural Revolution.   

It should have come as no surprise to those who have been actually watching Barack Obama and his administration - and not simply buying into the sophistry which they offer with such regularity. Although it is Federal law, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) has been unilaterally rejected by the Justice Department of the United States under the Obama administration.

They simply refused to enforce this law because they consider themselves to be the source of the law - rather than the elected servants of the rule of law. The Act has also been assaulted in the Courts by homosexual equivalency activists in a strategic effort to move this case to the United States Supreme Court.

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This should also have come as no surprise to court watchers who recognize the strategic use of Courts and legislatures by the leaders of what is best called the Homosexual Equivalency movement. The leaders of this movement insist that homosexual sexual practices are morally equivalent to the sexual expression of marital love between a man and a woman. They also now insist that the State and Federal Government treat homosexual relationships as legally equivalent to marriage.

Supporters of the homosexual equivalency movement use the catch phrase marriage equality now, in an Orwellian act of verbal engineering. By the term they intend to make what can never be a marriage - a homosexual or lesbian partnership - to be a marriage, by a pronouncement of a Court or a legislature. They also then accuse those who defend true marriage of being against marriage because we will not redefine it to include homosexual or lesbian partnerships.

If they are successful in their next move they will soon place the police power of the State behind a newly contrived right for people to decide whether they are men or women, in spite of the truth. It is called the gender identity movement. It could conceivably result in any changeable grouping of cohabiting relationships - where the people engage in sexual acts with one another and want to be called a marriage - being given the status of a marriage.  

The Cultural Revolutionaries have a President of the United States leading the effort. President Obama is behaving like a new Caesar. Whenever a secular leader insists that we obey his dictates rather than the Natural Law, he is demanding to be worshipped. He has made himself the arbiter of the Moral Law, determiner of what is right and what is wrong. This role belongs to God alone, not President Obama.

With the leadership of this new Caesar, a different social order is being constructed where the positive law of the Nation will force us all to call to be a marriage what can never be a marriage. If we do not, we will face the police power of the State. The leaders of the revolution have convinced the main stream media to frame efforts to defend marriage as opposition to gay persons or couples. They have been joined by collaborators in the Judiciary and some elected officials who view themselves as liberators when they are injuring the common good and threatening the foundation of civil society.

The struggle we face in a declining western culture growing increasingly hostile toward the Church is in reality a clash of worldviews, personal and corporate. It involves competing definitions of human freedom, human dignity, and human flourishing. It is a contest over the very foundations of what constitutes a truly human and just social order. We insist that true marriage and family have been inscribed by the Divine Architect into the order of the universe. That is because they have. Truth does not change, people and cultures do; sometimes for good and sometimes for evil.

Marriage is the first society into which children should be born, learn to be fully human, grow in virtue, flourish and take their role in families and communities. We must not be afraid to make the claim that children have a right to a mother and a father. They do. Of course we care about the single parent family and the many broken homes.

However, their existence does not change the norm necessary for a stable and healthy society. In tact marriages and families are the glue of a healthy and happy social order. We need to be a visible, palpable reflection of this truth about marriage and family in our own lives. To live a faithful marriage is now countercultural.

Our claims concerning life and marriage are not outdated notions of a past era but provide the path to a future of true freedom. Nor is our position simply a religious position. We insist upon the existence of a Natural Moral Law which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason. It is not what Caesar says but what a Divine Architect has written into the Natural Law which is knowable by all men and women through the exercise of reason.

This is not only a Christian position. It is the ground upon which every great civilization has been built. It is the source for every great and authentic human and civil rights movement. The Natural Law gives us the moral norms we need to build societies and govern ourselves. It should also inform our positive law or we will become lawless and devolve into anarchy.

In the United States and the Nations of the West there is a growing effort to suppress our rights to free expression, association and participation. This is reflected in a brazen effort to censor any speech which questions the cultural slide into the abyss of relativism. Efforts to prevent our vocal and public defense of the objective truth about marriage and the family are not succeeding. That was evident on January 13, 2013 in the streets of Paris, France where hundreds of thousands gathered to defend marriage and the family and society founded upon them.

The Guardian reported "Several hundred thousand people massed at the Eiffel Tower in Paris on Sunday to protest against President François Hollande's plan to legalise gay marriage and adoption by June. Three columns of protesters, waving pink and blue flags showing a father, mother and two children, converged on the landmark from different meeting points in Paris. Many came after long train and bus rides from the provinces.

"Hollande has pledged to push through the law with his Socialists' parliamentary majority but the opponents' campaign has dented public support and forced deputies to put off a plan to allow lesbian couples access to artificial insemination. Champ de Mars park at the Eiffel Tower was packed, but turnout estimates varied widely. Organizers claimed 800,000 had protested, while police put the number at 340,000."

Similar Rallies were recently held in the Philippines and in Australia. A March for Marriage is planned for the United States of America on Tuesday, March 26, 2013. It is strongly supported by the Catholic Bishops of the United States. It has brought together an interconfessional, multi-racial, bi-partisan coalition for a future of true freedom. You can read more about the March here

It will be the first of many efforts to come. It marks the beginning of a burgeoning movement which has historic consequences.
 
True marriage is the preeminent and the most fundamental of all human social institutions. It is a relationship defined by nature and protected by the natural law that binds all men and women. It finds its foundation in the order of creation. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage.

The institutions of government should defend marriage against those who would redefine it. Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract.

When sexual behavior between two men or two women is viewed as the foundation of a right to marry- and those who oppose this edict of a new Caesar are characterized as being against the freedom to marry and equal rights - the revolutionary plan advances and the common good is threatened.

To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To confer the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy.

Theologians and Philosophers speak of ontology as the science or philosophy of being. For example, a rock is a rock and not a cabbage; a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Marriage is ontologically between a man and a woman, ordered toward the union of the spouses, open to children and formative of family.

The enforcers of this new order, whether ruling from the bench or misusing their office in the Legislative and Executive branch, unchecked by any balance of power, have followed what the legal positivists have long proclaimed, "The law is what the courts say it is."

Christians must not participate in the destruction of the institution of marriage and the erosion of the social order built upon it. We must become what St. Josemaria Escriva once called "rebels of love":  "Nowadays it is not enough for men and women to be good. Moreover, it is not good enough to be satisfied with being nearly. good. It is necessary to be 'revolutionary'.Faced by hedonism, faced by the pagan and materialistic wares that we are being offered, Christ wants objectors! - rebels of Love!" (The Furrow #128)

Not only does the Natural Law affirm marriage, the Sacred Scriptures and unbroken teaching of the Church confirm that marriage is between one man and one woman. Of that there is no doubt. Those who attempt to argue otherwise in the various Christian communities are lying, ill informed or  being disingenuous. They are also false teachers.  

Catholic Christians must fully participate in and even now lead the defense of Marriage. After all, in the face of other Christian communities backing away from orthodoxy, our Church is the most vocal in the defense of marriage - and the family and society founded upon it. That means we will face the brunt of the persecution which will come. It has already begun. We need to be ready for it. 

In his Christmas address to the Roman Curia, then Pope Benedict XVI pulled no punches. Many of the reports on the address in the main stream media were not only inaccurate, they were not journalism. Rather, they were propaganda. His entire address  should be read by all Catholics, other Christians, other people of faith and all people of good will.

He raised the  questions we must take up affirming, "the question of the family is not just about a particular social construct, but about man himself - about what he is and what it takes to be authentically human. The challenges involved are manifold. First of all there is the question of the human capacity to make a commitment or to avoid commitment."

"Can one bind oneself for a lifetime? Does this correspond to man's nature? Does it not contradict his freedom and the scope of his self-realization? Does man become himself by living for himself alone and only entering into relationships with others when he can break them off again at any time? Is lifelong commitment antithetical to freedom? Is commitment also worth suffering for?"

"Man's refusal to make any commitment - which is becoming increasingly widespread as a result of a false understanding of freedom and self-realization as well as the desire to escape suffering - means that man remains closed in on himself and keeps his "I" ultimately for himself, without really rising above it."

"Yet only in self-giving does man find himself, and only by opening himself to the other, to others, to children, to the family, only by letting himself be changed through suffering, does he discover the breadth of his humanity. When such commitment is repudiated, the key figures of human existence likewise vanish: father, mother, child - essential elements of the experience of being human are lost."

In his apostolic exhortation on the Eucharist, the Sacrament of Charity, Benedict XVI summarized the duty of the Catholic faithful in the current assault on authentic marriage:  "Marriage and the family are institutions that must be promoted and defended from every possible misrepresentation of their true nature, since whatever is injurious to them is injurious to society itself."

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church wrote in 2003 "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose."

"No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

To limit marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To insist with the police power of the State that we pretend otherwise does not serve the common good. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor can they create a new right to marry for those who are incapable of marriage.

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Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract. Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society.

There is a new resistance movement and we must take our place within its ranks.  We must become rebels of love.

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