Same Sex Civil Marriage: The Saddest "I Told You So" of Them All

It happened: SCOTUS has struck down the provision of the Defence of Marriage Act that denied federal recognition to same-sex civil marriages, and basically “punted” on Proposition 8 on a standing issue.  The latter doubtless seals that provision’s fate.

One of the reasons I find myself getting away from blogging on political issues is that I find myself taking positions on issues that not only don’t get blowback from the left, but don’t get any reaction from “my side” either.  I have an array of officials in my church and other ministries who have access to what I think, and I don’t think that after working for same church for 13 1/2 years I am a complete non-entity.

The whole business of same-sex civil marriage is the most frustrating issue of them all.  I have taken the position for the last six years (and indirectly long before that) that civil marriage needs to be abolished.  I said that Proposition 8 was “ill-advised” the year before it passed, and we now know that is true.  Marriage a) was instituted by God and b) antedates the state, so same state doesn’t have any rights to it.  On the other side, it is intellectually dishonest for those who believe that sexual freedom is the key freedom–and that includes just about all the left–to exalt marriage for any reason.

But Christian activists refuse to even consider breaking the formula–set first by Calvin’s Geneva–that the state can decide who is married and who is not and that ministers can become agents of the state.  You can’t get them even to discuss the matter.  They act like it came down from Mount Sinai and that’s it.  There are a few people on the right that are starting to put things together (Glenn Beck is one of them) but so far they have had little impact on the Christian establishment’s thinking.

Same establishment went into this debate without considering the nature of its assumptions and simply crowned the state’s prerogative as a given.  This, of course, has played right into the hands of LGBT activists, whose aims in obtaining civil marriage go far beyond the ephemeral “rights” that come with it.  The result we have now is a direct result of this mistake and another: that popular will could trump élite unity, another typical Evangelical fallacy.

So here we are.  We’ll hear endless lamentations on the demise of the family and what not, but as long as we pursue a game plan of dubious Biblical support and merge our love of God with love of country (and by extension, whether we like it or not, love of state) we’re going to keep getting hit upside the head with one adverse court decision after another.

At this point there are only two silver linings out there.

The first is that the country our elites have created for us is unsustainable.

The second is that what SCOTUS gives the IRS takes away.  As I noted earlier this year, the “fiscal cliff” settlement included a serious marriage penalty.  So the message of our government to high-rolling gay and lesbian couples (and that’s a good part of them) is simple: “You’re married!  Now pay up!”