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News just broke that the Supreme Court has struck down the federal definition of marriage as a union between a man and a woman. This is an extremely disappointing development, but not a surprising one. This trajectory has been set in stone for quite some time.
I’ve become increasingly convinced in recent years that the only way to keep government from re-defining marriage is to keep them out of it altogether. That position has been rejected by a lot of Catholics, and I can understand why, but I respectfully think this is proof of why they’ve been wrong.
It’s also proof of why whenever we centralize power over moral and social issues at the federal government level, there is an inevitable moment when that moral imperative is turned against us. We give them an inch, and they take a mile. The American people don’t want this, just like they don’t want unfettered abortion or Obamacare. But that has ceased to matter. He who has the power makes the rules, and we’ve handed them the power through our activism to have Washington involved in legislating every social issue we care about.
It’s time to stop the madness. George Washington said it best: “Government is not reason; it is not eloquent; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master.” If we want to stop the government from continuing to destroy our sacred rights, our civil liberties, we must starve it. We must deprive it of power. We must remind those in Washington that they have forgotten their place, that they serve us, not the other way around.
So what’s next? What does today’s ruling mean?
First, it means that we’ve lost the war for the definition of marriage. A tiny minority of the population has changed thousands of years of social tradition. I can’t fault those who will fight this decision and organize around it, but in my view, their fight will never rise above a valiant, but ultimately futile, effort.
Second, and perhaps more importantly, this paves the way for the Catholic Church to become a hate group. When Father Joseph tells the homosexual couple that he can’t celebrate their “wedding” ceremony, he’ll be on trial for hate crimes and discrimination before he knows it. The First Amendment, like the Second, the Fourth, the Fifth, and the Tenth is being thrown under the bus.
This also means that religious groups, if they want to retain any semblance of autonomy, are going to have to give up their tax-exempt status. It’s done. The government wants its pound of flesh. Even without tax-exempt status, it’s not any guarantee that the “hate crime” designation or discrimination lawsuits can be avoided — just ask the business in Colorado being sued for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple or the photographer in New Mexico still in hot water over refusing to photograph a gay “wedding” or the florist in Washington state being sued BY THE STATE for not providing flowers, again, for a gay “wedding.”
If you think these incidents are outliers, you’re living in a fantasy world. Cases like this will come faster and faster following the ruling today. The government is using intimidation to force its agenda, from the IRS intimidation of tea parties to these lawsuits against Christian businesses to the threat of constant and overarching surveillance.
And boy oh boy I can’t wait until just opposing gay marriage on moral grounds becomes a crime, and they can then go into the big archive of emails and phone calls in the NSA database and find all the evidence of us talking about it in the past. Suddenly, you’re a political dissident, after the fact.
I wish I could offer a solution. I’ve got a lot of thinking and praying to do, as do we all.
UPDATE: In an early report, I thought that I had heard that Justice John Roberts was in the majority, and had reported such here. I’m now seeing reports that he was part of the dissenting group. I wanted to clarify the facts for the record, and I apologize for the error.