By Deacon Keith A Fournier
(c) Third Millennium, LLC

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The United States Supreme Court rendered its majority decision in Lawrence v Texas on June 26, 2003, reversing its long held precedent outlawing sodomy. Then, in the Goodrich opinion, issued on November 18, 2003, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts found that not allowing homosexuals to “marry” was suddenly “unconstitutional” under their State Constitution.

One day Chicken Little was walking in the woods when -- KERPLUNK -- an acorn fell on her head. "Oh my goodness!" said Chicken Little. "The sky is falling! I must go and tell the king."

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The United States Supreme Court rendered its majority decision in Lawrence v Texas on June 26, 2003, reversing its long held precedent outlawing sodomy. Then, in the Goodrich opinion, issued on November 18, 2003, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts found that not allowing homosexuals to “marry” was suddenly “unconstitutional” under their State Constitution. After all the years that that Massachusetts Constitution seemed to support marriage as between a man and a woman, these new Oracles in Black Robes suddenly discovered the new “truth”.

The front line troops of the Cultural Revolution are forcing the crack in the door to a wide-open status and using the judicial branch of the government to refashion the culture. Make no mistake; the winds of the new Cultural Revolution are blowing at gale force and the portals of this brave new world now open before us.

Days after the Lawrence opinion was released, I read a “news” story in my local Sunday Paper entitled “Gay pride Events Strive for Family Friendly Environment.” It spoke of the new “families” of Dad and Dad, Mom and Mom and adopted, surrogate or manufactured baby. The main character in the “news” story was quoted in its conclusion:” My hope is that gay and straight will evaporate, to be replaced by the terms ‘with children’ and ‘without children’, where I just get treated like any other family guy.”

We are in the beginning of a social and Cultural Revolution in America. What has happened?

In the interest of understanding how these developments have occurred and developing a fitting response, let’s examine some relatively recent events in Christian history. We may have laid the seeds that allowed this new order to take root in our own back yard.

Contraception

The Christian Church had unilaterally taught that sexual expression, as a language of the body, was meant to be communicated only in the marriage bed. Conjugal love was a gift of the self to the beloved. Within marriage, it participated in both the unitive (bringing the spouses into a deeper unity) and the procreative (always open to the fruit of new life) dimensions of love and, in that way, revealed the very mystery and wonder of God’s plan for the entire human race.

In other words, contrary to pagan world views, sexual acts in the Christian world view were intended to have deep and lasting meaning and were not simply an inevitable response to a kind of hydraulic impulse that had to be satiated. This teaching revolutionized entire cultures and freed them from a debauched view of sexual activity that had led to multiple forms of a form of slavery to unrestrained urges.

Oh, I know that several streams within Christianity lost track of this deeper meaning and got caught up in various forms of error regarding the beauty and dignity of human sexuality. But fortunately, marriage was preserved as an institution in every society that the Christian world view influenced.

Marriage and family became the basis upon which civil society was founded and they preserved the framework for fidelity and environment for love that encouraged both the birthing and rearing of healthy children.

The 1930 Lambreth Conference of the Anglican Church cast aside this unbroken Christian teaching. It rejected the clear Christian teaching that every expression of conjugal love should always be open to the fruit of such love, new life. This Christian vision of the beauty and deeper purpose of sexual activity that had raised the dignity of sexual expression in every culture in which it was proclaimed was actually undermined by a segment of the Christian Church.

The teaching that had helped to form the foundations of Western Civilization and was reflected in our institutions and our laws was undermined first in our own household. The leaders of this denomination in western Protestantism unilaterally declared that contracepted sexual acts were now acceptable.

Why, because they said so.

Afterwards, sexual expression, once held in the highest esteem in the Christian tradition, was slowly denigrated to a form of use of the body of another for ...