Gay Marriage Crisis: It’s 1939 Again

America's “gay marriage” crisis is galloping ahead so fast that commentators can hardly keep up with it.

Just on February 12, for instance, while Massachusetts legislators met in a constitutional convention to try to ban homosexual “marriages,”

• Local authorities in San Francisco, on their own initiative, issued marriage licenses and performed “ceremonies” for hundreds of same-sex “couples.”
• More than 3,000 churches in Massachusetts, 1,000 Roman Catholic, some 2,000 Protestant (representing every denomination except the Unitarians), 100 Orthodox, a number of Jewish congregations, and 25 Muslim mosques, jointly issued a statement opposing “gay marriage” and demanding that the law recognize one and only one definition of marriage: one man, one woman. (The letter was first released February 7. See cwfa.org.)
• U. S. Senate majority leader Bill Frist said Congress would have to act fast before “gay marriage” spread to all 50 states “like a wildfire.”
• After the San Francisco courts failed to act, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on February 20 directed the state attorney general to get a higher court to halt the “gay marriage” uprising. The attorney general, whom Schwarzenegger inherited from the Gray Davis administration, at first defied the governor. But by the next morning, he'd promised to be in the California Supreme Court by February 27, asking the justices to uphold the state laws.
• President George W. Bush spoke to the issue on February 24. Defiance of the law by San Francisco's elected officials, he said, demonstrated the need for a Constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. “After more than two centuries of American jurisprudence, and millennia of human experience, a few judges and local authorities are presuming to change the most fundamental institution of civilization,” he said. “Our nation must enact a Constitutional amendment to protect marriage in America.”

Let's examine these developments, bearing in mind that there will be more to report before we can post this article.

Ah, the Rule of Law

Every time someone tries to erect or preserve a Ten Commandment's monument, liberals squeal about a threat to “the rule of law” (by which they mean the latest arbitrary court order by a liberal judge).

The sham marriages performed in San Francisco conformed to no law recognized (at this writing) anywhere in this country. So why were they performed at all?

Because the gay militants' strategy is this:

• Go ahead and do the “marriages,” relying on the fact that the legislative and judicial machinery of America will need months, if not years, to catch up.
• Use that time interval to establish a fait accompli , so that by the time Congress does act, the gays will be able to say, “What! After all this time, you're telling us our marriages are invalid? That's not fair!”
• Present themselves as injured parties, and they will play for sympathy and get it from America's own dishonest liberal media and from international lefty sob-sisters like the BBC and the United Nations. If that doesn't make Congress back down, they're sure to find friendly judges who will rule that the “marriages” must stand.

That's how they interpret the rule of law.

Finally, the Church Speaks

Like most of America, the churches paid little attention to this while it was building up to a crisis. Like most of us, church leaders probably thought “gay marriage” would never really happen. Why stick their necks out, why risk being pilloried in the New York Times when the thing was only hypothetical? Ignore it, it'll pass.

Well, it didn't pass.

Now, at last, the churches move to defend society. Now (when the threat has grown to ominous proportions; when the gay militants have the courts, the media, Hollywood, and the education establishment in their back pockets) now the churches act. We can only pray that they are not too late.

Let's not waste time criticizing the churches for shilly-shallying. Rather we must insist that they keep on acting and never let up.

On this issue, the churches must never give in, never. No matter what Congress does or does not do, no matter what the courts decide, the churches must never accept “gay marriage.” If they ever do, they will not be churches anymore. They'll just be buildings where a lot of people gather to feign worship of a God whom they do not obey.

The Mouse that Roared

While liberal judges ran roughshod over the Constitution and culture for years, Congress looked the other way.

Unlike the churches, the House and Senate had a constitutional duty to define and enact the nation's laws. This they did not do, while courts usurped the legislative function.

Why did our legislators remain idle while judges at every level of the court system brazenly tinkered and tampered with basics of the American polity such as religious expression, parents' authority over their own children, and the right to life itself? These issues the judges removed from the purview of the people's elected representatives, and Senator Frist and his colleagues did not a single thing to rein them in.

Well, we all put them there, didn't we? We, the voters, have elected leaders who don't lead, representatives who represent only the assorted special interests, spokesmen who are mute on all the vital issues of the day. And we, America's Christian voters, are more to blame than anyone.

We might have expected more from our executive branch, too, even though the greater Constitutional burden is laid on the legislative.

Clearly Schwarzenegger hoped he would not have to get involved in this issue. He must have expected the San Francisco courts to act promptly to uphold California's unambiguous laws defining marriage. When they didn't, the buck was finally passed to him, and he reluctantly accepted it.

Christians and conservatives would have liked President Bush to speak up sooner. As a leader who makes no secret of his profession of the Christian faith, the President must now stand tall.

What will all of these leaders do, if the courts continue to defy them? What will they do if the judges continue to usurp legislative and executive authority, continue their arbitrary and tyrannical campaign to impose “gay marriage” on America?

Stay tuned.

As our commonwealth tumbles into rampant godlessness, we must face up to the truth that we have never insisted (or even expected) that our leaders do otherwise. Now we're on the point of seeing our whole way of life turned upside-down, and we wonder how it could have come to this.

Britain and France waited until 1939, when Nazi Germany was at the height of its power, to confront the threat they could have so easily snuffed out five years earlier. They didn't fight until their enemies were at their strongest and they were at their weakest. But for the grace of God, they would have been utterly destroyed.

As our society goes into a meltdown, our enemies abroad (which include more than just the terrorists) seek our deaths. They are doing everything in their power to obtain nuclear weapons and incinerate our cities. (This comes on the heels of revelations by a high Pakistani nuclear scientist that he offered nuclear weapons' technology to anyone willing to pay the price.)

All in all, it seems a very bad time to be offending God and removing ourselves from His protection.