|
Dear Friends of the Natural
Family,
Please read the important
article below from Don Feder, our Communications Director. We are grateful for
your support as we promote and defend marriage and the natural family.
Blessings,
 Lawrence D. Jacobs
Vice President, The Howard
Center for Family, Religion & Society
Managing Director, World
Congress of Families
Originally published at WorldNetDaily. Tuesday, August 31, 2010
[Click here to read original]
QUEERLY BELOVED
If marriage is lost,
we lose everything
Exclusive: Don Feder says right-wing intellectuals have lost sight of a crucial fact in 'same-sex' debate
By Don
Feder
Memo
to conservative defeatists: Surrender on gay marriage is surrender on marriage –
which is surrender on the family and, ultimately, surrender on civilization.
Last
Saturday, Glenn Beck held his Restoring Honor rally in Washington, D.C. An
estimated 300,000 to half a million people came from all over the country. The
Fox News host made the event an interfaith revival. "America today begins to
turn back to God," Beck declared.
But
while America turns back to God, Beck turns his back on God's law. Hey, that's
catchy!
A
guest on the "O'Reilly Factor" in early August, Beck was asked, "Do you believe
that gay marriage is a threat to the country in any way?" Answer: "No I don't.
Will gays come and get us?" Apparently, this jocularity was meant to belittle
the bumpkins who oppose turning marriage into a free-form institution.
Beck
then quoted his hero, Thomas Jefferson (who thought the French Revolution was
groovy): "If it neither breaks my leg nor picks my pocket what difference is it
to me?" Apparently, demolishing the institution of marriage, and undermining the
family, should be matters of supreme indifference to those fighting to save
America from the clutches of Obamaism.
Beck
is one of a growing number of conservative opinion makers who are either
agnostic on the issue or have decided to earn tolerance-points with the
establishment by backing here-come-the-grooms. They include The View's Elizabeth
Hasselbeck. ("I actually support gay marriage.") and Ross Douthat, poodle
conservative of the New York Times op-ed page, whose hair-splitting here makes
the late William F. Buckley Jr. sound coherent.
Then
there's Ann Coulter who's speaking at Homocon, the September extravaganza
sponsored by GOProud, which seeks to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, paving
the way for the imposition of same-sex marriage nationwide, and the Republican
congressional leaders who are falling all over themselves to attend a Sept. 22,
D.C. fundraiser for the Log Cabin Republicans.
Ann
says, "Giving a speech is not an endorsement of every position held by the
people I'm speaking to."
Does
that mean if a group of Hamas supporters organized for balanced budgets and
homeschooling, Coulter would appear at their Jihadcon? Ann's 2007 book was
titled: "Godless: The Church of Liberalism." Perhaps her next book will be
called "Unprincipled: The Church of Ann Coulter."
This
unwillingness to fight for the family, on which civilization depends, is another
sign of the failure of modern conservatism. The right can win a thousand battles
against big government and lose the war for America's future, if it surrenders
on marriage and the family.
America's social traumas – illegitimacy, juvenile crime, drug abuse,
female-headed-households – can all be traced back to the decline of the family,
which started with the Great Society in the '60s, accelerated with no-fault
divorce in the '70s, continued with the rise of cohabitation and reached its
culmination with strange-sex marriage.
Offering competing models, socially sanctioned, undermines heterosexual
marriage. Two men engaged in what used to be described as unnatural acts, become
the legal/moral equivalent of a man and woman (husband and wife), joined by
faith and tradition, doing society's essential work of childbearing and
child-rearing.
Schools will teach that any living arrangement is as good as any other.
Employers will be forced to provide "family benefits" to same-sex couples,
regardless of religious scruples.
The
state will be required to place children with gay couples for adoption, –
depriving them of the father/mother role models necessary for successful
adjustment. In Massachusetts, Catholic Charities ended its adoption program (the
largest in the state), rather than submitting to placing children with
homosexuals, as required in the nation's first gay-marriage state.
Ultimately, gay marriage will put churches and Bible-believers in the crosshairs
– including Beck's LDS Church, which was viciously attacked for supporting Prop.
8.
Homosexual activists (among the most driven ideologues on the planet) will
insist that all churches perform same-sex ceremonies – and push for withdrawal
of charitable tax status of those that refuse. Hate-crime laws will be applied
to the ministers and priests who preach Leviticus or Romans 1:26-27. In Europe
and Canada, clerics have been hauled before human-rights tribunals for defending
their faith from the pulpit.
Conservatives who support gay marriage will have to stop ragging on liberals for
their elitism.
Voters
of 30 states have amended their constitutions to prohibit recognition of
pseudo-marriages, by an average vote of 67 percent. In 2008, in the most liberal
state in the nation, 7 million Californians cast their ballots for the only
definition of marriage that makes sense.
Glenn
Beck (self-styled populist) is telling them their views are inconsequential, and
that he's willing to let the courts inflict gay marriage on their cringing
heads. Don't they know that these mock marriages (dearly beloved of the
establishment) neither break Beck's legs nor pick his pocket?
All
they do is accelerate the decline of an institution as old as human society. How
can we say yes to gay marriage and no to polygamy, group marriage, cohabitation,
child brides and other lifestyle choices seeking official sanction?
Unfortunately, many conservative intellectuals have lost sight of a crucial
fact: American exceptionalism rests on three pillars – faith, family and
freedom. Remove any one, and the entire structure collapses.
How
can you have a strong economy without strong families? As economist Ludwig Von
Mises noted, deferred consumption is necessary for capitalism to work. That
means individuals willing to sacrifice for the future – and that means families.
Without the family, it doesn't matter how many times we defeat socialism
(nationalized health care, government takeover of business, soaring deficits,
redistributionism), in the end, we lose – which is why the left has made
same-sex marriage its priority, and why it is less tolerant of dissent here than
anywhere else.
Conservatives who don't understand this understand nothing. |