By Deacon Keith A Fournier
© Third Millennium, LLC

On May 17, 2004, in my home State of Massachusetts, the power of an unbridled Judiciary and the thorough lack of authentic Christian influence on the culture of contemporary America have converged in the first volley of the cultural revolution. Seven “couples” of the same sex will be “married” in an act of “legal alchemy”. The alchemists of old maintained they could change one metal into another. Their claim was a lie. So too, those who under the authority of the State purport to make these relationships of people of the same gender a “marriage” are engaged in a delusion.

True marriage is the preeminent and the most fundamental of all human social institutions. It is a relationship defined by nature itself and protected by the natural law that binds all men and women. It finds its foundation in the order of creation. Civil institutions do not create marriage nor give anyone a “right” to marry. The institutions of government should, when acting properly, defend marriage against those who would redefine it. In Massachusetts, the black robed arbiters of a new social order have done just the opposite.

Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. For example, the ban on polygamy and age requirements were enforced in order to ensure that there was a mature decision at the basis of the Marriage contract. Heterosexual marriage, procreation, and the nurturing of children form the foundation for the family, and the family forms the foundation of civil society. In now “redefining” marriage, these renegade Justices and their complicit public officials have imperiled the stability of our society and struck a blow against the common good.

The “Supreme Judicial Court” of Massachusetts has now “redefined” marriage in order to grant some feigned legal equivalency to co-habiting paramours (homosexual or heterosexual) and to confer governmental benefits upon them. This act of arrogance of power does not serve the common good. It also is not a true marriage.

To “limit” marriage to heterosexual couples is not discriminatory now, nor has it ever been. Homosexual couples cannot bring into existence what marriage intends by its very definition. To now “confer” the benefits that have been conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual paramours is bad public policy. In this new “alchemy”, the “officials” of the Imperial State of Massachusetts have taken upon themselves the “power” to change the truth.

Theologians and Philosophers speak of ontology as the science or philosophy of being. For example, a rock is a rock and not a cabbage; a man is a man and a woman is a woman. Marriage is ontologically between a man and a woman, ordered toward the union of the spouses, open to procreation and forms the foundation of family.

These alchemists are as fraudulent in their claims as their ancestors. History will one day record that their claims were destructive and false. The enforcers of this new order, ruling from the bench, unchecked by any balance of power, have simply followed what the legal positivists have long proclaimed, “The law is what the courts say it is.” They have also joined a cultural revolutionary force more potentially lethal to the common good than Chairman Mao’s reign of terror.

Make no mistake; those who claim that this is simply a matter of “tolerance” are actually the most intolerant. They will now unveil their long planned strategy of forcing their brave new world on the rest of us. Watch how intolerant they are of those who, though respecting the dignity of every person, including homosexuals, also insist that marriage is what it is and not what some renegade Court redefines it to be.

The current cultural situation we face as Christians in America is not an unfamiliar one. We need to see it now in terms of Christian history. I do not care how “scientifically advanced” we think we have become, or how “modern” the issues purport to be, we humans do not really change all that much, at least without grace. The struggle we are engaged in as Christians in contemporary western culture still concerns a clash of worldviews, personal and corporate, and competing definitions of freedom.

Remember, in the circles of cultural and social revolutionaries, Christians (at least orthodox, faithful ones) are often presented as unenlightened, forcing “our view” on others. When, in fact, our positions on marriage, family, authentic freedom, the dignity of every human person, and the nature of truth as objective…. are what actually frees people from the bondage of disordered appetites. These truths are objectively true for all men and women. We were made for relationship. We were structured for authentic love and human flourishing within family and a society founded upon family.

The early ...