I’m tired of this subject. I have already written extensively on the subject on human rights and same-sex marriage (SSM). It’s become so contentious that I have become the object of the worst forms of name calling and derision, which have often progressed into personal threats and intimidation. Just yesterday, one blog-world atheist found out where I teach – the telephone and fax number – and tried to encourage his fellow-atheists jam up their lines, simply because they disagreed with my stance on human rights, expressed in a prior essay. Sometimes, there are even intimations of violence.
Even though it’s becoming obvious to many that our social climate is beginning to boil over, this hasn’t stopped our power structures – the media, the university and government – from using the most inflammatory language to describe those who oppose SSM. We are routinely termed “bigots,” “hate-mongers,” “homophobes,” and just plain “idiots.” However, our Secretary of State has just upped the stakes by comparing us to murderers:
• In a speech [December 8, 2011]designed to convince the world that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said religious objections to homosexuality should not stand in the way of vigorous United Nations action to promote the homosexual rights agenda. On Tuesday, Clinton said promoting the global acceptance of “gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people” is “one of the remaining human rights challenges of our time,” likening the effort to ending racial, sexual, or religious discrimination. She noted that perhaps the “most challenging issue arises when people cite religious or cultural values as a reason to violate or not to protect the human rights of LGBT citizens.” These objections, she said, are “not unlike the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation.”
http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/hillary-clinton-religious-objections-to-homosexuality-like-supporting-honor?utm_source=LifeSiteNews.com+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=4aa198a190-LifeSiteNews_com_US_Headlines12_09_2011&utm_medium=email
Comparing us to murderers will just further inflame the viciousness, especially when coming from the government of the USA. If we are murderers, then it becomes justified to treat us as murderers. At first, we had been compared to Nazis and the KKK by the luminaries of our society. When this comparison stuck, then it became easy to make the argument, “If we deny the voice of the Nazi and the Klansman, we should also deny the voice of the anti-SSM bigot.”
This perverted reasoning has banished our voice from the mainstream media, the schools and the university, replacing it with scorn which has understandably flowered into contempt and discrimination. Christians and Christian groups have now been barred from the universities for expressing opinions that have now been deemed “bigoted.”
The hypocrisy has reached levels that would have been thought unbelievable just a few decades earlier. We are charged with “discrimination” by those who discriminate against us. We are charged with “hate speech” by those who show no reservations about using hate speech against us. We are charged with “bullying” by the bullies who routinely silence us. We are charged with denying the human rights to others by those who deny us the human rights of freedom of speech and religion upon which this great nation had been founded. We are systematically vilified for merely expressing our opinions – opinions that had traditionally constituted the fabric of all the nations of the West.
We have been called “unjust” by those who would deny us justice. And now we are likened to murderers. If we have become so contemptible, it is unsurprising that we are treated with contempt. Evidently Clinton doesn’t believe that the levels of scorn directed toward the church are yet great enough, and so now we have become like murderers.
We still have laws against pedophilia and incest. Should this nation be regarded as a nation of “murderers” because we still affirm these “discriminatory” laws, thereby denying human rights on the basis of our traditional values? Isn’t our justification for maintaining such “antiquated” laws like “the justification offered for violent practices towards women like honor killings, widow burning, or female genital mutilation,” according to Clinton?
Presently, pedophiles, now termed “minor-attracted people,” are making their bid to find sanction under “human rights.” World magazine writes:
• Homosexuality shook off its status as a mental illness in 1973 when the American Psychiatric Association removed its entry from the DSM. Societal acceptance wasn’t far behind. Now activists are casting pedophilia as just another sexual orientation.” (December 17, 2011, 68)
And why not! If SSM is a human right, why shouldn’t pedophilia be one also? However, I don’t think that Clinton would regard those who would maintain statutes against pedophilia as comparable to murderers. But why not? Even to raise this issue is now regarded as “homophobic?” But are we murderers because we would vote against the right to have multiple wives or husbands? Are we murderers because we insist on maintaining the right to teach our children chastity until marriage? Aren’t we denying the human rights of minors? Should we be treated with contempt because of this?
Clinton would deprive us of our human rights and our vote, claiming that the human rights of SSM should trump everything else:
• The secretary of state added that nations must pass LGBT civil rights laws, even when they offend the majority of a nation’s citizens. “Leadership, by definition, means being out in front of your people when it is called for,” Clinton said. “[W]e are each free to believe whatever we choose…But progress comes from changes in laws.”
In her estimation, the majority vote no longer counts. She is not alone in this opinion. A single judge was able to overturn California’s vote in favor of Proposition 8, limiting marriage to one man and one woman, simply because he deemed it “unconstitutional,” even though there is nothing in the Constitution protecting SSM or anything like it. In other words, “My prejudice reigns uber alles!” Clinton tries to build her case on “evolving” values.
• She stated worldwide “opinions are still evolving” on homosexuality as they did with slavery, and “what was once justified as sanctioned by God is now properly reviled as an unconscionable violation of human rights…In each of these cases, we came to learn that no [religious] practice or tradition trumps the human rights that belong to all of us,” she said.
Why should we regard the latest values as the best? Why the presumption that we are evolving into something better? Is this notion anything other than the tyranny of modernity – the newest is best?
Besides, where then do human rights come from if not from religion? If its origin is no higher than the nation itself, then Clinton has no right to say that her own Western values (religion) are any more valid than those of nations that reject SSA. By leaving God and His transcendent truth out of the equation, Clinton is engaging in nothing more than cultural imperialism, saying, in effect that, “Our Western values are more valid than yours!”
Clinton is also denying her own nation’s religious basis for human rights. Our Declaration of Independence powerfully affirms:
• When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
The Declaration wisely appeals to a source higher than the laws of England – to “the laws of nature and of nature's God [which] entitle them.” Without God, there exists no authority upon which the new Federation could find rationale for their decision to break from England and from its existing laws:
• We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
A right can only be “unalienable” if it cannot be trumped by “evolving” ethical standards. Recognizing that our rights find their origin in religion – in God Himself – secures their immutability.
Clinton has nothing upon which to base her assertion that SSM represents a human right. Why should her assertion carry more weight than the assertions of other nations? Without this higher moral authority, her stance is no more than cultural imperialism. This is also something that will play well in Muslim nations, which want to make the case that the West is imperialistic and decadent. Clinton’s “evolving” standards have not only polarized this country, but they also serve to polarize internationally.
Even worse, without the sanction of God, we cannot escape the mire of moral relativism – morality is no more than our sentiments and social conventions! If this is the case, we have no rational basis upon which to make a moral claim. If we try to do this, we can say no more than, “Well, this is our social convention, and I feel it should be yours also!”
Meanwhile, the words of the Bible are reiterated once again:
• Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: "For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered." (Romans 8:35-36; Psalm 44)
Nevertheless, the Apostle Paul assures us in the next verse, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.”
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