For quite some time now there has been a great debate about whether this country should liberalize our marriage laws. We are on the precipice of making a monumental and historic decision on whether we will, as a nation and as great society with unparalleled freedom, recognize homosexual marriage on par with heterosexual marriage.
There are two conflicting principles here:
1. The Judeo-Christian ethic that defines the moral character of our founding fathers and the vast majority of our nation, thereby defining those who commit homosexual acts as immoral.
2. Democracy’s imperative to protect the rights of any identifiable group to be free to practice any and all behaviors as long as those behaviors do no individual or communal harm... and leave any moral issues behind the church door.
In a free non-sectarian society such as ours here in the United States, where religious doctrines are not a part of that society’s charter it behooves the government to protect the rights of any non-religious minority against the tyranny of a religious majority whose guiding principles are governed by religious doctrine. This argues in favor of granting rights to a homosexual population who does not harm the majority through their practices.
However, any nation which claims to have concepts of morality cannot divorce itself from their religious origins no matter how much they claim to be a moral nation without them. Furthermore morality cannot be relative, for then it loses all real meaning and becomes simply a whim of the times... the so called zeitgeist which is fickle at best and can become evil at worst.
This then becomes a dichotomy: Do we sacrifice absolutist concepts of democracy in order to maintain the moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian heritage? Or do we sacrifice our religious heritage upon the alter of unfettered freedom at any cost?
What cost? It is nothing short of the decay and the ultimate destruction of civilization as we know it. Because once relativism takes hold as the definitive morality of a free society then nothing but a whimsical public that is strongly influenced by a powerful entertainment industry will begin to accept any and all of even the most morally reprehensible of behavior.
It is this industry based in Hollywood which is saturated with an ethic of moral relativism and guided mostly by a profit motive which is the driving force behind the current moral decay. Combine this with a huge percentage of the public whose insatiable appetite for pornography is demonstrated by the virtual explosion of available pornography on the internet and everywhere else... and it can and only lead America down a path of self destruction.
Hollywood constantly pushes the envelope of what is considered acceptable sexual behavior to be presented to the public. The most recent example is the newly released feature film “Brokeback Mountain” a movie about two “gay cowboys” which as I understand it contains the most explicit sexual scenes between two homosexuals ever filmed by a mainstream Hollywood production company. With moral relativism as a guide, can bestiality, incest, pedophilia, and ...God knows what else!... be far behind? All of this can easily become as acceptable as apple pie, if presented in gradual fashion over time. Is this what we want for our county’s future? I hope not.
It therefore becomes necessary to choose the absolute morality as defined in the Judeo-Christian ethic over the complete freedom of an unfettered free democracy and not accept gay marriage as equal to heterosexual marriage. To equalize homosexual marriage with heterosexual marriage could take us down the slippery slope of the suicide of Western civilization as we know it.
The buck has to stop here.
