By Brian Fahling, Esq.
November 20, 2003

(AgapePress) - Civilization, like life itself, has certain organic properties. When those properties are altered, the organism ceases to function properly and ultimately perishes. Marriage, the union of a man and a woman, is organic to civilization; it is quite literally its life-giving force. On Tuesday, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court altered the institution of marriage at its most fundamental level when it decreed and ordered that it is what it is not -- a union of two men, two women, or a man and a woman.

The Massachusetts court's decree created a head-on collision with reason and the unbroken testimony of the ages: From marriages come families, from families, clans, from clans, tribes, and from tribes, nations. It is not merely the procreative force of the male-female union that gives life to civilization; it is the normative relationship reflected in this union that nurtures, instructs, and superintends societal life at every level. The entire matrix of human civilization is ordered within this life-creating and sustaining paradigm.

The Massachusetts court, like the United States Supreme Court -- which recently ordered the nation to view same-sex sodomy as normative -- has tampered with our cultural DNA, and the consequent mutation will reap unimaginable consequences for Massachusetts and our country.

For the first time in the history of political society, a civil authority has declared that deeply embedded moral norms will henceforth no longer be normative. The only historical event that comes even close is the French Revolution, and that gave us the Reign of Terror in the name of liberty.

We have been handed a culture war.

In order to impose their will on society, courts had to fundamentally alter the nature of constitutional government. Prior to this era of law and morals by judicial fiat, politics in America was about disagreement and compromise mediated through elections and within legislative bodies. Disagreements occurred at the margins of social intercourse, if you will, because there was essential agreement about the nature of man, including consensus on the moral norms that have been obliterated by the courts over the past 30 years.

The magisterial decree of the Declaration of Independence regarding the dignity of man and the source of his rights is the accredited fountainhead of all political rivers. Polarities on the political spectrum are synthesized into a sort of equilibrium through the art of compromise. Politics, then, is a dialectic about how government can best protect and serve men and women who are created in the image of God. Reasonable minds differ over how government might go about doing this, but it is a disagreement over means, not first principles. Political dialogue, however, has been replaced by the raw judicial power of men and women who are unaccountable to the people whose society they are altering and destroying.

Just as one cannot compromise on the laws of physics when building an aircraft, compromise is not possible on such questions as who is human or what is marriage; if you want an answer to these questions that is precisely opposite the answer society has given since the beginning of time, then you must have it decreed so by a court. That is because legislators reflect the people they serve and courts do not; passing a law declaring, for example, that same-sex sodomy is normative is inconceivable in the legislative context. Only a court is capable of such intellectual dishonesty, moral bankruptcy, and unbounded arrogance.

The courts must be herded back into their constitutional corral and made to discard their lab coats. They have stolen from us the right to govern ourselves and order our lives according to the moral frame that is woven into the very fabric of our humanity.