By Dan Merritt, Advocate Reporter
Fireworks went on sale this past weekend, each one, whether exploded on land or in air, proclaiming the freedom we enjoy here in the good ol’ USofA.
Late last week, our nation’s Supreme Court said that same-sex couples have the freedom to marry.
But what of us who disagree with the Court on religious grounds? Will we enjoy the freedom, because of our religious views, to choose to not recognize such marriages?
After all, the first amendment to the constitution guarantees freedom of religion which includes the right to exercise that religion without state interference.
That is, can a pastor or a priest refuse to conduct a marriage ceremony in a church for a same-sex couple? Or decline to do so because of their religious beliefs to conduct such a marriage in a secular setting?
Or what of a member of that pastor’s or that priest’s flock. Particularly a business owner providing a service. Can that person, because of his/her religious conviction, refuse to provide that service for a gay couple’s wedding?
We’ve already seen in some instances in our “free” country how that exercising of one’s religious conviction has played-out: punitive fines on the “offending” believer.
Or what about priests or pastors proclaiming from the pulpit scriptural commentary on homosexuality, much less homosexual marriage.
Will they be allowed in light of this ruling to expound for their flocks what the scriptures teach?
And the scriptures teach plenty. The Apostle Paul in Romans 1, starting at verse 18 states (New Living translation):
“But God shows his anger from heaven against all sinful, wicked people who suppress the truth by their wickedness … So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies.
“They traded the truth about God for a lie … God abandoned them to their shameful desires. Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other.
“And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.
“Since they thought it foolish to acknowledge God, he abandoned them to their foolish thinking and let them do things that should never be done …”
It was pointed-out in media commentaries last week that the Supreme Court ruling pertains only to the government. That religious institutions can still choose whether or not to marry same-sex couples.
But Chief Justice John Roberts, who disagreed with the Court’s 5-4 decision, said there will be legal confusion galore in this whole thing.
“ ‘Hard questions arise when people of faith exercise religion in ways that may be seen to conflict with the new right to same-sex marriage,’ ” he said, as quoted by the Reuters news agency.
“Roberts gave as an example a religious college that provides married student housing only for opposite-sex couples.”
Fellow dissenting Justice Anthony Scalia echoed Roberts and his concerns, but painted a darker view of the Court’s decision as being one that is a “threat to American democracy.”
A full-scale governmental “bullying” of citizens who do not agree, he seems to suggest.
“Today’s decree (Friday, June 26) says that my Ruler,” Scalia writes, “and the Ruler of 320 million American’s coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.
“This practice,” he continues, “of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.”
He goes on to point-out that this unelected Court —which answers to nobody, not even God evidently — is “hardly a cross-section of America.”
Instead they are all graduates of either Harvard or Yale law schools, eight of them having grown-up on the coasts of the US and not one of them being an evangelical Christian or a protestant.
These are “religions that make up significant chunks of the American population,” according to Scalia as quoted the “The Hill” on-line publication.
Scalia wrote of the Declaration of Independence, which our nation’s upcoming July 4 Independence Day celebrates. Fireworks bursting commemorate the American Revolution and all subsequent wars and battles by this country to maintain freedom.
But how far does freedom go? When does it become license and turn from glorious to glaringly ugly? Awfully out-of-bounds?
Rev. Franklin Graham, son of world evangelist Billy Graham, said last week that the Court was very much out-of-bounds with it’s ruling.
“ … the court … did not define marriage” in the first place, he notes.
“And therefore (the Court) is not entitled to re-define it.”
He continues: “Long before our government came into existence, marriage was created by he One who created man and woman — Almighty God — and His decisions are not subject to review or revision by any manmade court.”
As mentioned earlier, Justice Roberts predicts tremendous legal confusion in light of the Supreme Court’s decision. Graham predicts persecution.
“It sets the stage for persecution of believers committed to living by the truth of God’s Holy Word.”
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