Attempts to restore morality in law will fail if they are not founded on the supremacy of God
How can you say to your brother, let me remove the speck from your eye, while ignoring the plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye. (Matt. 7:3-5)
As the third millennium approaches, we are witnessing, on an unprecedented scale throughout the industrialized world, the wholesale recognition of perverse sexual behaviours as a benign or even favorable lifestyle. Violent and degrading practices such as sado-masochism are no longer considered by many psychiatric colleges as categorically deviant forms of sexuality. More and more, in fact, we are seeing gross and indecent paraphilic behaviour eliminated from the lists of what is perverse or just plain evil.
Now we, who claim to hold fast to the time-honoured definitions of family and marriage as well as the proper use of the sexual faculty, do wonder how such an ostensible minority opinion has held an enormous sway over our judiciaries and legislatures, and how our political candidates can all tout a misplaced belief in the legitimacy of sodomy and other paraphilic behaviour, while elevating it to the status of a racial quality, to which no civilized being can have any rational opposition.
Such deviancy is the inevitable end of ideologies like liberalism and egalitarianism. Yet none of these can claim any power over us without our conscious consent – and this consent has been given, step by step, in a series of precedents established with our blessing through our courts. It is a blessing that has come about from our own desire to throw off the moral restraints of the civilization once known as Christendom. Once these restraints are removed will society not do otherwise than walk a path leading into the pit of moral relativism, at the bottom of which lies complete libertinism?
When sexual morality is thus unfettered, the sodomite is clearly seen running well ahead of the pack in pursuit of the ultimate libertine experience. Therefore, in order to understand the unnatural behaviour of the few, we must first explore the unnatural behaviour of the many, and how society in general unknowingly put its feet on the path toward libertinism. “Unknowingly,” I say, because if people 40 years ago had realized that what they perceived as seemingly harmless actions would be laying the foundations for the legalization of sodomy, they would have ceased and desisted right there.
The first step towards libertinism was the recognition of divorce. (One should remember when discussing the origin of divorce in Christian civilization that Henry VIII was technically seeking an annulment from Catherine of Aragon, not a divorce. There is a world of difference between the two, but I will not go into it here.)
The institution of divorce came about through the establishment of civil marriage. The state, now given the authority of the Church through a series of revolutions, toppled the sacrament of matrimony from the status of an insoluble covenant to the level of a soluble legal contract. By claiming power to unite a man and a woman in marriage, the state was also forced to recognize purely legal challenges to these unions, even to their dissolution. Indirectly, then, by the interference of the state in a matter reserved solely to the discretion of the Church, adultery was legalized.
Adultery is a sexual act which violates the covenant of marriage. We know with certainty that marriages witnessed validly by the Church are recognized by God. There is, however, a high degree of uncertainty as to whether or not certain marriages enacted by the state share that same status. Christ’s condemnation of the “perverse and adulterous generation” asking Him for a sign was not directed at a society enamored of extra-marital affairs. He was, rather showing His disdain at the issuance of “certificates of divorce” for any and all reasons.
Step two on the road to libertinism came in the state’s inevitable recognition of common-law marriage. Two people living in a sexual union now had a legal claim on each other at the dissolution of that union. What had once been an illegal arrangement now became not only common law but common place. Still, despite such relaxation of the moral code, these unions were approved by the state as existing only between a man and a woman.
God has granted to women the honour and privilege of bearing and nurturing children. To men, He has given the secondary function of providing for the material needs of the family. While virtually nothing will stop the libertine male from being promiscuous once he has abandoned all moral precepts, the inevitable consequence of pregnancy will always make the woman much more pragmatic even if she shares the libertine ideal. Nature, therefore, made her a bulwark against the moral weaknesses to which men as a group are especially vulnerable.
In view of this, step three in the emancipation of the libertine could only be brought about by divorcing the sexual act from its natural end of procreation. This was accomplished in part by the legalization of contraceptive devices. The Church and the state, as long as the state was subject to the moral law, were united in recognizing the need to protect women against men who would use them so perversely. Only now, as women clamour for the “right” to be libertine, has the state withdrawn its protection.
The use of natural, abstinence-based methods of spacing children, rather than being a precursor to contraception, actually serves the opposite effect. Those who for whatever reason wish to delay the conception of new life through abstinence and chastity develop a poignant awareness of the natural link between the sexual act and the conception of new life, a link which contraception obscures.
Still, however, as long as contraceptives continued to fail (as invariably they do at some point or other), the “penalty” of pregnancy still loomed over the seeking-to-be-libertine female, and stymied the efforts of the all-too-libertine male. There had to be a backup plan – a safeguard – to insure that no obstacle could impede society’s progress towards complete libertinism.
Only one option remained: the child conceived under such circumstances must die.
It is high time that we admit that abortion on demand (rather than the imposition of some occult conspiracy against man by some mythical and shadowy overlords, population controllers or judicial tyrants) is only the end result of the democratic majority’s own insistence of divorcing the sexual act from its primary function of procreation, and utilizing it for cheap and perverse gratification of the flesh. It is, in fact, the natural consequence of abandoning the Church established by Christ (Mt. 16:18; 1 Pt. 1:20) and embracing the church of Lucifer (Gen. 3:5).
The precedent for legalized abortion comes directly from a people seeking to be libertine. The power to commit such atrocious crimes against human life comes, once again, from a people wishing to rule themselves through a democratic state that has no allegiance to – and is actually antagonistic to – the moral dictates of God and His Church. By moving our government toward upholding a libertine society, we have, in fact, required it to embrace the destructive concept of “separation of Church and state” which currently holds sway. Politicians are not required to check their morals at the doors of the legislature, they only need check their Christian morals. With libertinism comes a host of other “isms,” including egalitarianism and pluralism, putting the church of Lucifer on equal status with the Church of Christ!
Step four on the road to complete libertinism – the legitimization of sodomy – then becomes inevitable. If two people can engage in the sexual act merely for the pleasure derived from it, without regard to responsibility or emotional attachment, then how can we as a society confine that act solely to taking place between a man and a woman? We cannot. To allow the one, we must allow all others. Nor can we even confine such actions to adults only.
The next logical step, then, in a society seeking full libertinism, will be the complete sexualization of children and their unimpeded availability to the pedophile. It is unavoidable. There is no other recourse for a people who have demanded that the state enact their libertine lifestyle into law. Whatever laws they do have restricting the actions of pedophiles will fly in the face of their mandate to the state that they be allowed to pursue sexual licence to the bitter end. And if such laws are not struck down by the judiciary, then the judiciary can be said to have failed in its task from the state.
From the time that we first granted the state authority over the making and breaking of the marital bond, this has been the unavoidable outcome, and all that has held up the full implementation of complete libertinism has been, as all legal arguments are, a war of words and of setting down their definitions in laws to which all must be subject.
The linchpin of all words used in these legal arguments is “liberty.” It is therefore in the definition of these words that the war between morality and libertinism is waged.
All law is designed to put restrictions upon our freedom and our liberty. Only when these goods are understood as necessarily involving limitations can it be said that true freedom and liberty have been achieved. But when freedom and liberty become defined as a licence for each individual member of society to do as he or she pleases with no regard for the common good, then all impediments to complete libertinism are removed, and all laws demanding adherence to moral absolutes become redundant.
The next crucial word in defining these terms is “consent.” As long as two people consent to engage in the sexual act, so the argument goes, then the state has no right to interfere. Yet the fallacy of this argument is plainly seen in the fact that the state has every right to interfere with two consenting adults seeking to buy or sell illegal drugs, since such trafficking carries with it a high price of social responsibility.
And so we come to the next word defining what limits can and should be placed upon our liberties and freedoms: “responsibility.” It is evident that the divorcing of the sexual act from all responsibility, by placing the responsibility on the use of contraceptives or recourse to abortion (that is, only those who decide to carry through with the resultant pregnancy become retroactively responsible for their sexual activity), is what impedes the state from enacting laws or enforcing existing laws which restrict our freedom in this area. Yet the state in a democratic nation is merely a reflection of the people. There are times, it is true, when the state goes beyond its powers and seeks to impose things that were not mandated, but the democratic process has been proven quite capable of correcting such abuses.
Why, then, has our government for the last 30 years insisted on the legal availability of abortion, and the recognition of sodomy as a legitimate alternative lifestyle, when statistics clearly show that the majority of the people are opposed to these things? The answer is, of course, that even though most people when asked directly will not support abortion on demand or homosexual “marriages,” they have in fact, however inadvertently, requested the state to do exactly those things by empowering it to grant them a libertine lifestyle. For one cannot in all good conscience say that only a select group be allowed to be libertine while restricting such licence to others. Nor can we define the responsibility inherent in the sexual act as equal to that of eating a chocolate bar, and hope to restrict it to adults only.
The whole process began when the state, by the mandate of its citizens, was no longer subject to the moral imperatives of the Church. It was advanced by granting the state the right to trespass into areas of jurisdiction once confined solely to the Church. There was no need for the state to usurp these powers through conspiratorial or clandestine means. They were fully ceded to it by a people that would no longer subjugate themselves to God and His Church and who would no longer recognize an authority higher than themselves.
How, then, can society find its way back from the path to complete libertinism? There can be only one way: to make the state once again subject to the moral imperatives of God’s holy commandments (Eph. 3:10). We must subject our politicians to the most rigourous moral scrutiny, using as our litmus the definitions of morality taught by the Christian Church, which were ordained by God from the beginning as applying to all people. We must also abandon our own infatuation with libertinism.
