Cameron’s Tory backlash to ‘Gay Marriage’

Telling children that there is nothing wrong with homosexuality is not the same as indoctrination.

Lord Carey expressed a perfectly valid view, but came up against a prejudiced judge.
What was truly shocking was the contempt expressed by Lord Justice Laws for the Christian faith. He said (P23):
‘The Judaeo-Christian tradition, stretching over many centuries, has no doubt exerted a profound influence upon the judgment of lawmakers as to the objective merits of this or that social policy.’
‘has no doubt’? The Christian faith is the very foundation of our legal system. Our constitution has the Christian faith at its heart. Our Queen made a solemn vow to defend it and the legal system built upon it.
It is Laws LJ who is in for a pasting, and at a higher court than any on earth.

Andrew, thank you; thank God for people like you! You have a good grasp of what’s going on, obviously a thinker, with a Christ-controlled mind. To be able to then produce such a succinct account of your thoughts makes it so easy to read and understand, and you have hit the nail on the head over and over again. I might just add that God is fully in control of all that is going on, even the homosexual agenda. He raises up these people and gives them an open field, until His will has been achieved through them, and then He deals with them – suddenly, without remedy. He has done it over and over again throughout history (Babylonians, Assyrians, Nazis, etc.,) and will continue to work like this whenever He wishes. If all these things were not under His control, He might be a very great person, but He would not be God. Everything is under His control, all the time. To Him be all the glory, for ever and ever. We must fight, but knowing the battle is the Lord’s, and we’re on the winning side, just as Satan is already defeated because of the Cross. God bless you, Andrew.

People who put equality above other values have a problem? Surely Jesus would have preached the opposite.

Absolutely. Governments should do that throughout the world.
In the UK we have homosexual propaganda in schools actually mandated by law.
And we think we are civilised.

Marriage is a creation ordinance from Almighty God, and the church has a duty to remind people of it. That means David Cameron has no authority to ‘dictate the law’ as you put it and change the law on marriage. We have now posted links to our previous stories on this issue so you can read more about all the practical difficulties.

Nathan, I wanted to interact with your comment, “I don’t see why you lot are getting so worked up over this marriage isn’t just a Christian tradition it is in all cultures so why do you act like your religion is the authority on this subject if it was then people who get married in synagogues and other cultures places of worship shouldn’t count ether there for Christianity’s rules can’t dictate the law on this matter.”

To start with, the Christian tradition of marriage has also been shared by all the major faith traditions, and until recently by most pagans. But let’s assume for a minute that you are correct and that our opposition to gay marriage is little more than a dogmatic insistence that our religion be treated as an authority on this subject even among a population that has largely abandoned the Christian religion. I dispute that this is what we are doing, for we have made arguments that do not merely appeal to religion but also to nature, and to the inability of homosexuals to consummate their, so called, ‘marriages’. But leaving that aside for a moment, let’s assume that this is what we are doing.

In that case, my challenge to you would be: if it is inappropriate for us to force the Christian understanding on the rest of the population, why is it legitimate for homosexuals to force their definition of marriage onto the rest of us? For note carefully, it is not just who wish to be in a same-sex ‘marriage’ who will be affected by these plans, but all of us. For they are saying that marriage for ALL of us is little more than a species of the genus “union of persons.” I have interacted with the problems inherent in this view here and I would value your feedback.

Laws to introduce same-sex ‘marriage’ would also change things for ALL of us (not just same-sex couples) by reconfiguring the relationship of the family to the state. For unlike heterosexual marriage, which exists in nature and is then recognized by the state, homosexual marriage is an abstract legal entity with no natural or existential existence. It therefore can only exist when the state steps in to declare a relationship to be a marriage. Now to be sure, within the paradigm of traditional marriage there are sometimes hard cases and it is not always clear whether something can count as a marriage and this requires the state, but at the centre there is a recognizable reality that is pre-legal, and the hard cases arise by virtue of how far removed we are from the centre. But there is no comparative ‘centre’ for determining what a normal same-sex marriage would be within a state of nature. Indeed, what counts as “a committed and loving relationship between two persons” is incredibly vague and open to any number of interpretations or further applications. Indeed, once marriage is divorced from nature like this, then in principle there is no limit to the types of relationship that can have the status of ‘marriage’ or ‘family’ conferred on it by the state.

All this has enormous implications for how we understand the relationship between the family and the state, as suggested earlier. By rearranging the very nature of what it means to be married, gay marriage affects all of us, including those within heterosexual marriages. This is because family can no longer be considered a pre-political institution that is recognized by the state on the basis of natural and biological realities, for these natural and biological realities are being expunged from the essence of what a marriage is. Indeed, if consummation is unnecessary for a same-sex union to be called a complete marriage (even putting aside the question of what would count as consummation within a same-sex context), then what determines whether or not a heterosexual marriage is complete? Once again, the only thing left to determine what actually makes something a complete marriage or a legitimate family is the law itself. But once we concede this, the question arises: are traditional marriages and families also the construct of the law? For consider, if homosexuals and heterosexuals are really “equal” before the law, then logically heterosexual marriage must collapse into being little more than a legal construct as well. Indeed, marriage and family become mere adjuncts of the state after the removal of the de facto conditions that make the traditional family a pre-political institution in the first place. No longer is family something that, in the words of Douglas Farrow, “precedes and exceeds the state.” No longer is the family a hedge against the totalitarian aspirations of the state because no longer is the family prior to the state.

This is not mere hypothetical speculation about what ‘might’ happen if same-sex marriages are legalized. Canadian theologian Douglas Farrow has shown that after Canada legalized same-sex marriage, even traditional marriage began to be perceived as little more than a legal construct, with the result that everyone became the de facto wards of the state. In his book Nation of Bastards: essays on the end of marriage, Farrow criticized “the novel idea that the state has the power to re-invent marriage.” He warned: “By claiming such a power the Canadian state has drawn marriage and the family into a captive orbit. It has reversed the gravitational field between the family and the state… It has effectively made every man, woman, and child a chattel of the state, by turning their most fundamental human connections into mere legal constructs at the state’s disposal. It has transformed those connections from divine gifts into gifts from the state.” Echoing these concerns in his Touchstone article ‘Why Fight Same-Sex Marriage?’, Farrow observed that: “Institutionally, then, [marriage becomes] nothing more than a legal construct. Its roots run no deeper than positive law. It therefore cannot present itself to the state as the bearer of independent rights and responsibilities, as older or more basic than the state itself. Indeed, it is a creature of the state, generated by the state’s assumption of the power of invention or re-definition…. In doing so, it effectively makes every citizen a ward of the state, by turning his or her most fundamental human connections into legal constructs at the state’s gift and disposal.”

Most people are not aware of how gay marriage will undermine the traditional family because it does so in ways that are subtle and ubiquitous. However, once gay marriage is introduced into a nation, it undermines the integrity of every family and every marriage in the nation. It does this by rearranging the family’s relationship to the state. The state which legalizes gay marriage is a state that has assumed the god-like power to declare which collections of individuals constitute a ‘family.’ But by this assumption government declares that both marriage and family are little more than legal constructs at best, and gifts from the state at worst. In the former case, marriage and family lose their objective fixity; in the latter case, we become the wards of the state.