OPINION:
It’s a good thing Barack Obama is not in charge of defending the law of gravity, or we’d all be floating up to an airless death. Allow me to take off the gloves. As one who helped draft the first version of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), I regard Mr. Obama’s order to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon DOMA’s legal defense as lawless, reckless, arrogant and a violation of his oath of office. I think it is an impeachable offense.
I’m just warming up.
Mr. Obama, plus Hillary Rodham Clinton and countless other prominent Democrats - and some useful-idiot Republicans - have been pretending to support marriage while doing everything in their power to undermine it.
If you doubt what they intend, check out Brian Camenker’s shocking expose “What same-sex ’marriage’ has done to Massachusetts.” Mr. Camenker, who heads the group MassResistance, is warning the nation that there will be no quarter for those who think homosexuality is wrong and that marriage is the union of one man and one woman. Putting Catholic Charities out of the adoption business was just the beginning, followed quickly by brainwashing children in government schools and denying people jobs.
Mr. Obama and his minions are counting on our being so shellshocked by the trillions in debt and the spectacle of public-employee union mobs that we won’t notice their ongoing effort to homosexualize America. As newly elected Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel would say, “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.”
Of course, when you’re doing things that demand a powerful moral response to match the offense, it helps to face such rhetoric as House Speaker John A. Boehner’s reaction:
“While Americans want Washington to focus on creating jobs and cutting spending, the president will have to explain why he thinks now is the appropriate time to stir up a controversial issue that sharply divides the nation.”
How about: “This is wrong. This is tyrannical. And we will not allow it on our watch.”
Why do so many Republicans, when faced with brash evil, respond with concerns about timing or procedure? Where is Ronald Reagan when you need him?
Mr. Obama and the Democrats, emboldened by the tepid response, are attacking morality from all sides. They are rushing to impose a homosexual law on the nation’s armed forces even before the process has been certified. They are starting with our troops in harm’s way in Afghanistan. Rules? What rules?
They are laying the foundation in a federal hate-crimes law for “hate speech” and expanding a federal stranglehold over education that someday will brook no dissent.
Mr. Obama often misquotes Scripture, which gives some folks the impression that he’s a devout Christian. Maybe he is. But do devout Christians carry water for the culture of Sodom or support partial-birth abortion? This is the man who wants a government monopoly over your most intimate medical decisions and those of your family.
Let’s get back to what presidents are supposed to do, regardless of their religious avowals. They are chief executives, and the Constitution does not empower them to dispense with laws they deem unconstitutional, as President Obama has done with DOMA.
Presidents execute the laws enacted by Congress. Article II requires the president to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
It’s quite a stretch to insist that undermining the very law that ensures that states won’t be forced to accept a moral meltdown does any of that. Until very, very recently, America’s laws - as in the rest of the civilized world - always reflected the traditional definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.
Marriage predates any known human government. It is not open to debate except where lunatics have taken over the asylum and can’t see any difference between John and Mary tying the knot and John and Fred playing house.
Utah, which had a Mormon population that advocated polygamous unions, was denied statehood until it passed a law ensuring that only one-man-one-woman marriages would be recognized legally.
The key case was Murphy v. Ramsey (1885), in which the Supreme Court upheld Congress’ right to make polygamy and bigamy illegal in U.S. territories and a requirement for statehood:
“For certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, fit to take rank as one of the coordinate states of the Union, than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guarantee of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement.”
World magazine culture critic Gene Edward Veith notes that the homosexual drive to gain marital benefits is destroying marriage itself as people abandon commitment and embrace the “gay” notion of serial monogamy with “sex partners”:
“This sort of reductionism - a spouse is nothing more than a sex partner, so a sex partner is the same as a spouse - misses the point of what marriage is and what its role in society amounts to. … marriage is being defined down. As marriage becomes unnecessary - not just for job benefits but for adopting children, inheriting property and being socially acceptable - the whole nation will be ’living in sin.’ “
Hoover Institution research fellow Stanley Kurtz has chronicled the acceleration of societal uncoupling from marriage in Sweden:
“Marriage is slowly dying in Scandinavia. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. … Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex marriage has locked in and reinforced an existing Scandinavian trend toward the separation of marriage and parenthood.”
By declaring his intention to allow radical judges to find a “right” to homosexual “marriage” in the U.S. Constitution, Mr. Obama is pouring gasoline on a bonfire that is destroying the legal protections of marriage - and civilization itself.
Robert Knight is a Washington Times columnist, senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and the author of “The Truth About Marriage” (Coralridge.org, 2010).
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