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Opposition to same-sex marriage is a violation of the separation of church and state.
I do not want the state running the church or the church running the state, but this objection completely misses the mark. First, even if one were to accept the erroneous, court-invented claim that the Constitution requires a strict separation of church and state, opposition to same-sex marriage would not be unconstitutional. Churches and the Bible also teach that murder, rape, and child abuse are wrong, but no one says laws prohibiting such acts are a violation of the “separation of church and state.” In fact, if the government could not pass laws consistent with church or biblical teachings, then all criminal laws would have to be overturned because they are all in some way consistent with at least one of the Ten Commandments.
Second, there are churches on both sides of this issue. In other words, some churches actually support same-sex marriage. So if there is a strict separation of church and state, then I suppose we cannot put the pro-same-sex marriage position into law either, right? Homosexual activists don’t want to go there.
This “separation of church and state” objection involves a failure to distinguish between religion and morality. Religion involves our duty to God, while morality involves our duty to one another. Our lawmakers are not telling people how, when, or if to worship—that would be legislating religion. But lawmakers can’t avoid telling people how they should treat one another— that’s legislating morality.
As we point out in our book, Legislating Morality,76 contrary to popular opinion, all laws legislate morality. Morality is about right and wrong, and every law legally declares one behavior right and its opposite wrong.
So the question is not whether we can legislate morality; the question is, “Whose morality should we legislate?” We should not legislate my morality or your morality, but the morality—the one we inherited, and not the one we invented; the one our founders declared is “self-evident” because it has been endowed on us by our Creator.
If you have a problem with the morality, don’t blame me. I didn’t make it up. I didn’t make up the fact that men are not made for other men, or that sex outside of natural marriage leads to destruction. Those truths are part of the “Laws of Nature,” as the Declaration of Independence puts it, and we only hurt ourselves and others by suppressing those truths so we can do what we want.
For thousands of years, we have legislated the self-evident truth that men are meant for women. Now suddenly homosexuals—long critical of conservatives for trying to “legislate morality”—are trying to legislate their own morality in the form of same-sex marriage. They want to ignore self-evident truths and impose their own invented morality on the entire country.
The only question is this: Should we continue to legislate the inherited morality that nurtures the next generation (natural marriage), or the invented one that entices it to destruction (same-sex marriage)? I think the answer is self-evident.
Compliments of Correct, not Politically Correct, authored by Frank Turek. For more information, visit www.impactapologetics.com.
76 Frank Turek and Norman Geisler, Legislating Morality, (Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and Stock, 2003).
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