A Voice in the Wilderness In Defense of "Mere Conservatism"

Mohler’s Take On CA Decision

Dr. Albert Mohler (president of Southern Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY) wrote a very interesting column on the decision by a federal judge in CA to overturn Prop 8.  It's worth a read, no matter what side of this issue you may fall upon.

An excerpt:

In a breathtaking and brief sentence, Judge Walker asserted: “Gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage; marriage under law is a union of equals.”

Until this verdict, such language had never appeared in a decision of a Federal court. If gender is no longer “an essential part of marriage,” then marriage has been essentially redefined right before our eyes.

The religious liberty dimensions of the decision are momentous and deeply troubling. While Judge Walker declared that the religious freedoms of citizens and religious bodies were not violated because no such body is required to recognize or perform same-sex marriage, the very structure of his argument condemned religious and theological objections to homosexuality and same-sex marriage as both harmful and irrational.

Beyond this, Judge Walker claimed to read the minds of California’s voters, arguing that the majority voted for Proposition 8 based on religious opposition to homosexuality, which he then rejected as an illegitimate state interest. In essence, this establishes secularism as the only acceptable basis for moral judgment on the part of voters. The judge’s statements condemning religious opposition to homosexuality speak for themselves in terms of animus.

Read the full article here.

This judge has decided he knows better than the voters, but more than that, he believes he knows better than thousands of years of historical, cultural, and religious tradition (and teaching).  Marriage has never been defined as Judge Walker would have it be defined.  All men and women are created equally, but not all of their actions deserve to be recognized as being equal in their form, function, or merit.