Supreme Court ruling jeopardizes Missouri heterosexual marriage law
Don HinklePathway Editor
July 1, 2003
We are on the precipice.
America is poised to mock God by redefining the family after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26 decision striking down the so-called Texas Anti-Sodomy Law. This devastatingly landmark ruling makes it "unconstitutional" for states like Missouri to outlaw homosexual conduct and is a virtual invitation for homosexual activists to revisit the court and plead for homosexual marriage. (The Supreme Court ruling invalidates Missouri’s sodomy law prohibiting oral and anal sex between same-sex couples and will likely lead to Missouri’s law — declaring marriage as being only between one man and one woman — as unconstitutional).
The Massachusetts Supreme Court is expected to approve homosexual marriage within a matter of weeks and when an appeal from Massachusetts reaches the U.S. Supreme Court there is good reason to think — after its June 26, 6-3 decision – that the Supremes will approve homosexual marriage. Only three nations in the world recognize homosexual marriage: Canada, The Netherlands and Belgium.
While homosexual marriage alone would be devastating to our nation, there are other, more far-reaching implications resulting from the court’s June 26 ruling. Among them:
— By recognizing the fundamental right to relationship privacy, the court has bolstered one of the pillars of Roe v. Wade. By finding that privacy in "intimate conduct" between adults is a constitutionally protected right, it will make it harder for a future court to overturn the Roe v. Wade precedent.
— The court has now laid the foundation for future rulings that will invalidate state laws banning bigamy, sex with minors, adult incest, bestiality, and obscenity.
— The activist nature of the six justices striking down the Texas law is now exposed for all to see. The court ruled in 1986 that a similar Georgia law was constitutional. By reversing course and declaring sodomy a constitutional right, "we see how little value justices give Court precedents when they want to impose an agenda on the American people," said Joey Davis, Missouri director of Concerned Women of America. By creating a constitutional "right" to sodomy, the court is now in the business of creating law rather than interpreting it (our Constitution).
— The ruling also means that schoolchildren will be taught that homosexual sodomy is normal, healthy and the equivalent of marital sex. "It will intensify efforts to attack the next barrier to total sexual ‘liberation,’ the laws regarding the age of consent," said Robert Knight, director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute.
Justice Antonin Scalia, who joined Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas in dissenting, wrote that the majority of the six justices have "largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda" aimed at "eliminating the moral opprobrium that has traditionally attached to homosexual conduct. It is clear from this that the court has taken sides in the culture war.
"This reasoning leaves on shaky, pretty shaky grounds, state laws limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples," he wrote.
"Many Americans do not want persons who openly engage in homosexual conduct as partners in their business, as scoutmasters for their children, as teachers in their children’s schools, or as boarders in their home. They view this as protecting themselves and their families from a lifestyle that they believe is immoral and destructive. The court views it as ‘discrimination.’"
Southern Baptists in Missouri have already taken a strong stand against homosexuality, but the church, in general, vacillates. While an activist court pushes its immorality on our nation, perhaps the greater issue for Christians in America is how they will answer this question: When the government declares homosexual marriage legal, will we follow the government or will we follow God?