Recently I came across somebody who was for homosexual marriage but who insisted that the allowing of buggery marriage wouldn’t allow other abominations like marriage between groups, or marriage between man and beast or marriage between adults and children. Below is some of the interaction.
Maggie,
That having been said, I would like to throw out a couple points of (respectful) disagreement or, at least, commentary. First, I think the United States was well down the road of removing a Biblical justification for disallowing anything a long, long before gay marriage was ever on the table. Gay marriage doesn’t accomplish this removal of Biblical justification for our laws, since that was already a done deal long before the Massachusetts and other state courts considered whether prohibitions on gay marriage violate constitutional equal protection clauses.
Bret,
Maggie, you’re right about this. Gay marriage is just the latest consequence from being consistent with moving law off the only rational basis that it has. Law presupposes a lawgiver. Get rid of the idea of a transcendent lawgiver and what replaces the basis for law is an immanent lawgiver which in turn yields the consequence of relativism in the legal realm. Gay marriage though, perhaps exhibits most clearly that These United States has removed the Biblical justification for law.
Maggie
The premise behind the court decisions prohibiting laws against gay marriage is an old one. The premise was that any law that makes distinctions among categories of people must have a “rational basis,” and the rational basis cannot be God’s Word, since basing legislative decisions on God’s Word would be a state endorsement of religion in violation of the first amendment.
Bret,
First of all what standard shall we use to describe “rational basis.” I would contend that the only way to find a “rational basis” is by using God’s Law-Word as the transcendent standard. I would go one step further and say that the concept of “rationality” itself cannot be consistently arrive at apart from an appeal to God’s transcendent Law-Word.
Second, I don’t know why using God’s Word as the rational basis is a violation of the first amendment but using man’s autonomous law word as the rational basis isn’t likewise a violation of the first amendment. Indeed, as the law order is always reflective of and descends from religious a-priori commitments there is no possibility of having any rational basis that isn’t a violation of the first amendment.
Maggie,
(I don’t mean to imply that God’s Word cannot be rational; rather, that an argument that boils down only to, “God said so,” does not meet the “rational basis test” under our laws.) It seems that the heart of the argument is really about whether church and state should be separated in the manner I have just described. I think it should be, and I am guessing that you think otherwise!
Bret,
Maggie, it is not possible to separate Church and State. Our defacto State Church in our country today is the Government schools, and our defacto officially state religion is humanism.
Still, I agree that we need to do better than arguing by saying “God said so” though that certainly is always the place we must start. We start with “God said so” and we move on to explain why God’s saying so is the stuff of which the good life is made of.
Magie,
I disagree that the Bible is the only possible basis for proscribing certain activities such as bestiality. Many other moral codes (probably most moral codes) abhor cruelty and unnecessary suffering. A corollary of those principles is that one should not engage in sexual relations without meaningful consent from the other being involved. I don’t think you have to be a Christian to be morally opposed to animal cruelty, such as torturing an animal for sport (as opposed to killing it for food) or subjecting an animal to sex for the sole purpose of sexual gratification (as opposed to breeding an animal for purposes of increasing one’s livestock).
Bret,
Apart from a transcendent God it is not possible to define what cruelty. For that matter, apart from a transcendent God who cares about cruelty or suffering? Apart from a transcendent God I don’t know why anybody would be concerned with meaningful consent.
Now its quite true that you don’t have to be a Christian to be morally opposed to animal cruelty but you do have to be a Christian to be able to be consistent about any moral opposition in regard to the cruelty of animals.
Maggie,
If there ever were a push to legalize bestiality in the United States, I would be happy to join with the readers of this forum in vigorously opposing it.
Bret,
Your problem Maggie is you’re so yesterday. If you had been alive 100 years ago I suspect your biblically conditioned moral instincts would have said the same about homosexuality. But now you live in times where the winds of morality have changed and so you find homosexual marriage acceptable. I suspect if you had been born 50 years in the future you would be for bestial marriage. You’re simply a reflection of your times and culture.
