By DEXTER DUGGAN
How harshly and how soon will Catholics and other traditionalists start to suffer penalties after the Supreme Court’s June 26 invention of the alleged fundamental constitutional right for homosexuals to “marry” each other in Obergefell v. Hodges?
Indeed liberal opinion has transformed the courthouse rapidly. Only short decades ago the deadly public-health threat of the “AIDS Plague” among homosexuals was major news. But that had to be edged off the front page if awarding marriage certificates to engage in this sort of behavior while relying on medication could seem to make sense.
Obergefell isn’t the first time that the High Court has declared basic legal protection and honor for something that core Catholic teaching proclaims to be grave sin, placing the nation’s legal system in direct opposition to widely shared moral beliefs, instead of specifically denominational beliefs.
The court’s 1973 invention of an alleged national right to permissive abortion of defenseless babies in Roe and Doe would be the most glaring precedent, drawing the distinction between being legally good Americans and morally good people.
Abortion subsequently has been sown throughout the nation, with most neighborhoods likely having some mothers who were sucked into its whirlpool. But they likely don’t demand that neighbors share in celebrating their memories of bad choices.
Even high-volume abortionists go their daily way without barging into bakeries, flower shops, and even churches to demand that they be honored for the very fact of being abortionists.
It’s different with conscience-stricken aggressive homosexuals, trying to quell their inner moral turmoil and shame by frequently proclaiming their “gay pride,” and expecting that society reverence it, too.
Now they have the contrived national legal backing to demand, not merely expect.
In their eyes, how could the government, which is run by many of their friends including top man Barack Obama, ever do business with or bestow grants and aid on any church or other organization that refuses to accept their ideology? How could the U.S. legal system still accept supposed bigotry and intolerance as basic Church beliefs?
Dissenting High Court justices in the narrow, 5-4 Obergefell decision warned on June 26 that additional cases of homosexual “rights” inevitably must be expected in court. As homosexual activists quickly voiced their demands for further action, The Washington Post headlined, “Gay-rights supporters push beyond marriage to broader legal protections.”
Nationally known homosexual activist George Takei — “Mr. Sulu” of Star Trek — quickly was heard on the radio saying that work remains to be done, specifically saying that religious people shouldn’t be allowed to impose their views on others.
The Supreme Court having just imposed Takei’s view on the nation only whetted his appetite for more activism.
It wasn’t simply people with “same-sex attraction” who pushed Obergefell all the way to the highest court. It was rapacious political activists whose goal wasn’t to be left alone by others, but instead to hammer all the rest of the nation into submission.
When given the opportunity to vote in states on “same-sex marriage,” the majority of people voted against it. Rather than let democracy continue to work, the majority in Obergefell specifically declared that time had expired and the court was imposing its mandate.
Before Obergefell, some small merchants already had been told by local or state officers to pay huge fines simply for declining to provide services that directly would honor “gay marriage,” violating their consciences.
It wasn’t that a bakery in the middle of a vast desert had refused to offer a slice of cake to save the life of a lost and starving homosexual. It was simply that some arrogant administrative officials of government were determined to punish severely any merchant who dared decline to extend a personal blessing for a homosexual wedding.
This was a frightening warning to the rest of society’s people to change their consciences and very way of thinking.
No matter how many other merchants were more than ready to provide a service, a particular Christian merchant had to be smashed into conformity, too. The Christian’s very life wasn’t being demanded yet, but the freedom to continue earning a living was.
How much worse will it grow with disoriented, false marriage now declared to be a fundamentally recognized legal component of homosexual identity?
Writing in strong dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia said he wished “to call attention to this court’s threat to American democracy,” an action lacking “even a thin veneer of law.”
Although the people of the United States may amend the Constitution, or legislators may take action as times change, Scalia said the Obergefell majority instead chose to act with “a naked judicial claim to…super-legislative” power.
Scalia also described the court’s action as a “judicial Putsch” — “putsch” being generally defined as an attempt by a group to overthrow a government — that claimed to discover something in the Constitution that all the court’s great minds in history had overlooked.
The Obergefell majority of June 2015 is sure that the marriage “institution as old as government itself, and accepted by every nation in history until 15 years ago, cannot possibly be supported by anything other than ignorance or bigotry,” Scalia mocked.
“And they are willing to say that any citizen who does not agree with that…stands against the Constitution.”
He also warned that the court may end up gutting itself. With each of its decisions that improperly takes power from the people, and isn’t based on the law, Scalia said, “we move one step closer to being reminded of our impotence.”
In their dissents to Obergefell, both Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted the impending perils to people of faith, with Alito pointing to the risk of people “being labeled as bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.”
Thomas said the majority justices were warned that their decision will “have unavoidable and wide-ranging implications for religious liberty. . . .
“It appears all but inevitable” that conflict will occur, Thomas said, “particularly as individuals and churches are confronted with demands to participate in and endorse civil marriages between same-sex couples.”
He foresaw “potentially ruinous consequences for religious liberty.”
The only black member of the Supreme Court, Thomas dismissed the assertion often made by homosexual activists that legalizing same-sex “marriage” is merely another step on the path of progress that allowed white-black marriage.
Dissenting from Obergefell, Chief Justice John Roberts pointedly asked why the majority accepted the restriction of marriage to only two persons while overthrowing the restriction to opposite sexes.
“If the majority is willing to take the big leap,” Roberts said, “it is hard to see how it can say no to the shorter one” of plural marriage.
As for the nature of the majority’s unsupportable and arbitrary action, Roberts commented, “If an unvarying social institution enduring over all of recorded history cannot inhibit judicial policymaking, what can?”
The tendency of government is to grow. Sinful government succumbs even worse to this temptation, expects honor for sin, and laughs, or snarls, at those who dare disagree.
Less than a century ago, the aggressively secularist Mexican government launched a harsh campaign against the Catholic Church and its believers there for being backward. It forbade church services and even executed long rows of innocent Catholics by hanging them from telephone poles.
Fighting back, independently organized, faithful Catholic Cristero troops went into actual armed, prolonged warfare until the Mexican government had to back off.
Moreover, looking across the ocean, we saw innumerable religious people confined and executed by 20th-century National Socialist and Communist governments.
We’re not yet at the point of Berlin or Moscow, but the Mexico City type of secularist political aggression is drawing closer.
Not so long ago in the U.S., an unrepentantly sinful way of living out same-sex attraction was generally realized to be harmful to the individual and society in the present moment, and deadly to the person’s prospect for Heaven. Yet now it struts about as constitutionally mandated rights, preparing to subjugate others.
What more warnings do Obama’s elitists need before religious people are driven into open rebellion to defend their freedom, faith, and family against his dictatorship?
In a June 26 statement, Catholic Charles LiMandri, president and chief counsel of the California-based Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund, shared the concerns of many when he said:
“Today may very well go down in history as one of the darkest days in American jurisprudence. In his decision creating a right to same-sex ‘marriage,’ Justice [Anthony] Kennedy dismantled the fundamental right of the people of our nation to govern themselves. The five members of the Supreme Court who are forcing this decision on our country are also disrupting the nuclear family as [the] basic building block of society. . . .
“When political correctness trumps truth, then justice in our courts cannot be achieved, and what follows is legal anarchy and tyranny,” said LiMandri, describing recent events as “the final wake-up call to all freedom-loving Americans, or the future of our nation is very bleak indeed. In the meantime, people of faith, who place their hope and trust in God, take comfort in the knowledge that His truth and justice will ultimately prevail.”
And Alan Sears, president, CEO, and general counsel of the internationally activist, Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), told supporters: “We are in perilous times. The key foundation for the marriage disaster was laid by precedents set in Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird. These cases were clearly cited by the Supreme Court and were decided during the period when Christians had disengaged themselves from the legal system.
“That legacy gave us Roe v. Wade and 57 million dead,” Sears said. “That legacy now gives us Obergefell v. Hodges, and who can even foresee the terrible harms that will come — countless children who will be intentionally deprived of their mother or father, and a culture so confused that up seems down and down seems up on countless fronts. . . .
“ADF will continue to stand for those whose rights of conscience are under attack, and for those whose rights of conscience will soon come under attack because of this decision. . . . God has made it clear what ADF is called to do. Will you make us ever more a part of your daily prayers? We need Him as never before and we know without Him we can do nothing,” Sears said.
Just after Obergefell was announced, national conservative radio host Laura Ingraham said, “This could be a period of very dark retribution” against religious people. She recommended prayer because she foresaw persecution coming widely.
Later the same day, national radio host Sean Hannity wondered about the fate of churches that hold to the traditional view on marriage. “There is a storm coming,” he said.
Despite the pretense that the Supreme Court firmly is guided by precedent, the chief justice noted in his dissent that the court markedly has changed its path from some of its historic decisions, certainly including racial segregation.
Indeed, on the subject of homosexual privilege the court has completely reversed itself since the 1980s, although in the wrong direction.
However long it takes the court to open its eyes to the vast damage it has begun on “gay marriage” obviously is unknowable now. But consider what it took to make the U.S. liberal intellectual elite repent of their romance with racial purification.
In his column in the June 10, 2012, New York Times on eugenics, Ross Douthat recalled that breeding away the “unfit” was a special enthusiasm of the American elite, “often political and social liberals,” before World War II.
One of their favorite ladies, Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, spoke forthrightly about creating a human “race of thoroughbreds.”
Adolf Hitler’s racial purifiers found inspiration and ideas from the U.S. eugenics movement of that era. It’s not as if racialist ideas all only wafted westward from Europe to the U.S. (That’s another reason current U.S. liberals’ denunciations of racism ring so empty, considering that their forebears might well have been in the forefront of “scientific racism” that they refuse even to account for today.)
Let’s hope it takes less than putting religious people into concentration camps, as they were in Europe in the 1940s, before the Obergefell Supreme Court comes to its senses.
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