Can We Legislate Morality?

There is a whole lot of talk these days about how we must not attempt to legislate morality in this country. Of course, this national discussion has been going on for quite some time, but with recent events in our national history it is hugely intensifying. Considering the basic proposition, I have a sincere question for those who put it forth. If not morality, then upon what do you suppose the laws of our nation were founded?

The current call for removing morality from legislative consideration is most often bandied about with regard to the issue of amending the Constitution to define marriage as being between one man and one woman. The alarmist claim is that to do so would actually deny Constitutional rights to a very large cross-section of the American populace. In point of fact, we are not actually talking about a "large" cross section of the populace in the first place. But, let us delve into the matter anyway.

To claim that a Constitutional Amendment to define marriage somehow denies Constitutional rights is simply "glass half empty" thinking. Someone recently asked me why, if it was such an important national issue, the Founding Fathers did not ban, or even mention, homosexual marriage in the Constitution in the first place. Using this logic, the implicit claim seemed to be that since there was homosexuality in their day, and since the framers were not evidently concerned about it, we would actually somehow be violating the intent of the Founding Fathers if we were to move ahead with pursuing such an Amendment today.

Well, the framers of the Constitution made specific provisions for Amendments to the original document because they foresaw circumstances precisely like the national discussion we are having today. To claim that the absence of the issue in the original document proves the framers would frown on our current attempts to amend are simply incorrect. In fact, they themselves gave us The Bill of Rights through 10 such Amendments when the intent of those was not found to be included in the Constitution itself.

The right of the People to amend the Constitution is not some radical new idea, and those seeking to amend it today in order to specifically define marriage as being between one man and one woman are decidedly NOT attempting to deny any Constitutional Rights to anyone, but are rather attempting to make clear the longstanding and - until recent days - clearly understood meaning of marriage, which is one of the foundational pillars of the American Society as governed by our Constitution.

The framers of the Constitution did not have, among them, people such as the mayor of San Francisco or the activist judges of the Massachusetts high court. The only reason we are even talking about this issue today is the fact that the homosexual community has become radically activist. There is an attempt underway to force an acceptance, indeed even a national endorsement, of their lifestyle… which the vast majority of the country’s population still considers immoral and outside the range of beneficial legal endorsement for the national interest at large.

To summarize that, the push to amend is not an attempt to take away any rights (this is the glass half empty perspective), but a simple push by the usually silent moral majority in this nation to once and for all clearly define - at the national level - what we have always known marriage to be (this is the glass half full perspective). In other words, we’ve always known what marriage was before, but for reasons not of our own making it now seems necessary to commit that definition to law.

To my knowledge, no “moral” group or association is currently attempting to legislate homosexuality itself out of our midst. We are simply moving to prevent those who are homosexual from subverting the venerable institution of marriage. Personally, I am all for contractual homosexual property rights, hospital visitation rights, and the right to live together peacefully. This is not necessarily based on any Christian principles I’ve discerned from my Bible, but on a secular understanding of the intent of the framers of our country’s founding documents.

I cannot, however, support any supposed "right" to force employers and/or federal, state and local governments to give full "spousal rights" to members of homosexual unions, because, quite simply, those specific "benefits" are not actually inalienable rights. They are benefits which, over the years, have been extended to promote a family lifestyle, generally with the expectation of children, which has been thought to prove a certain steadiness of character, an ability for long term dedication and commitment, and a specific reliability that employers have long sought in those that they employ; and which our own government - until recent years - sought to encourage in the people of this nation as a whole.

Many folks point to the fact that divorce rates are so high among heterosexuals today that any such supposed "meaning" is long since lost. They attempt to use that claim as a basis for now expanding the meaning of marriage to include so-called alternate lifestyles. The fallacy in this thinking is that they are saying, in effect, “Since the wheel already has a few broken spokes, we might as well remove ALL the spokes and make the thing just one grand loop of inclusion.”

The problem is, to do so would destroy the entire original useful purpose of the "wheel". It was not made to be a loop of inclusion; it was made to be a wheel, of which the spokes are an integral part. The thing to do, in the case of marriage, is NOT to further destroy an institution that has been broken to a certain extent in recent years... but rather to once again work to rebuild and strengthen it, returning it to its once great glory.

You can call that an Ozzy and Harriet mentality all day long, if you wish, but the fact still remains that our entire society was in far greater shape back in the days of Ozzy and Harriet than it is today with all the societal decay that has been foisted upon us in the last 40 or 50 years by the "free thinkers" among us who have decided to throw off God in favor of selfish, self-serving, self-seeking, self-empowering, self-realizing, self-actualizing, and self-aggrandizing hedonist philosophies that are today ruining the very fabric of America.

We can do so much better than what we have already done. And perhaps, just perhaps, the time has finally come for one more Amendment to our greatest national document. It certainly gets my vote.