UWE SIEMON-NETTO
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It’s hard to say what is more depressing about the same-sex
marriage madness: Is it the huge triumph of its proponents who have turned this
into a human rights issue in the befuddled public mind? Or is it the profound
inability of its opponents to argue in a coherent manner that would appeal not
just to Christians but all people with commonsense and a sense of right and
wrong?
Take Bill O’Reilly, the incarnate proof that ignorance in
areas where knowledge was once considered essential for being part of the
educated class -- theology, philosophy, the law, logic and ethics, for example
-- has become a formula for success in this era of massive media moronization.
Here is O’Reilly’s opinion on whether homosexuals should wed:
“The compelling
argument is on the side of homosexuals. That’s where the compelling argument
is. We’re Americans. We just want to be treated like everybody else. That’s a
compelling argument, and to deny that, you have got to have a very strong
argument on the other side. The argument on the other side hasn’t been able to
do anything but thump the Bible.”
O’Reilly is of course a child of the execrable Sixties;
still, I wonder who taught him critical thinking in his Catholic school, at
Boston University, my Alma Mater, and, Heaven help us, Harvard. Arguing
irrelevantly that “gay marriage” should be a matter for the states to settle,
he gets it wrong on virtually every point except one, which he articulates crudely
and insultingly by calling it “Bible thumping.”
He is right in as much as Christians are ill advised to argue in the
public square on the basis of Scripture, which is meaningless to
nonbelievers. But he doesn't know the real reason why what he calls
Bible thumping makes no sense in this context; it has not occurred to
him that Christians would have an infinitely stronger argument if they
appealed to natural law. It is to the shame of O’Reilly’s Catholic
teachers in the nineteen sixties as much as many catechism instructors
of today’s evangelicals, and most practitioners of the legal profession,
that they have simply discarded natural law thinking, which had guided
our and other civilizations for millennia.
It is a catastrophe with enormous genocidal consequences that
this universal ethical code no longer applies, to wit Roe V. Wade, which
prompted the slaughter of 56 million unborn babies in the last 40 years. By
and large natural law parallels Mosaic Law but is independent of it. It
is not part of what theologians call the revelatio
specialis (special revelation), which is only found in the Bible. But it is
definitely part of the revelatio generalis
(general revelation) that has been given to all of humanity. It is what Martin
Luther called the lex inscripta, the law written upon everybody’s heart,
according to the Apostle Paul.
You don’t have to be a Christian, a Jew or a Muslim to know
that it wrong to suck the brains out of an unborn child’s head in order to make
the skull collapse thus facilitating the little corpse’s removal from the
mother’s womb. You know it’s wrong because Natural Law is inscribed in
your heart regardless of whether you are a Christian, a Buddhist, a Hindu or a
nonbeliever, which is why there exists an Atheist
and Agnostic Pro-Life League.
By the same token, no belief system other than the tyrannical
confusion governing the minds of declining empires would consider the physical
union of two people whose parts don’t fit and who therefore cannot procreate a
“human right.” Let these two negotiate other rights for themselves, but please
don’t equate this with marriage and family, the keystone of any healthy society
since time immemorial. Call marriage an order of creation, as Christians would,
or call it just commonsensical, as the rest of mankind will affirm. Both are
valid arguments. So why drag the Bible, which is holy to us, into the
hyperbolic sewers of narcissistic politics?
What the “gay rights” agitators demand is as insane as would
be the claim of plumbers to the “human right” of being called dentists. It’s
time to wake up, take a cold shower, shake ourselves and realize that this
cannot be so, even if Fox commentators, who are supposedly of the side of the
traditionalists, insist on the contrary.
If Christian theologians wish to contribute to the survival
of a sane and free system, they should urgently begin teaching natural law
again: to the public in general and specifically to media stars such as
O’Reilly and his entourage of beautiful blondes and brunettes, almost all with
law degrees but apparently with scant knowledge of the lex inscripta governing human conscience. As for the rest of the
mainstream media marching in ideological lockstep, allow me to sigh: God help them!
Dr. Uwe Siemon-Netto, a
veteran foreign correspondent, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology
and Public Life in Capistrano Beach, Calif.
Well, what interested me is the Eastern Orthodox church,Emperor Justinian stated that married is male and female and some of the lay people in the Orthodox church and some priests are now interested in allowing gay marriage since they live in a protestant country while the Orthodox in Russia want therapy for being gay. Th Eastern Orthodox tend to be ignorant on the Justinian Law codes or Leo Law Codes because their is an anti-law thinking in their theology since they complain about Catholics or Protestants on theology being too much into the law. Justinian Code has a natural law argument that animals are male and female for procreation and in humans this is called married.
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