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Contrary to Obama Constitution Does Not ‘Guarantee’ Same-Sex Marriage

In an interview with the New Yorker, President Obama said he thinks “the Equal Protection Clause [of the U.S. Constitution] does guarantee same-sex marriage in all 50 states.” He better think again.

It seems that every new law that’s being imposed on us is built on the foundation of the Fourteenth Amendment, the most litigated part of the Constitution. It’s a legal wax nose easily shaped to fit every liberal cause.

Any group, real, imagined, or manufactured can appeal to the Fourteenth Amendment for the creation of a new set of rights.

These renegade judges are making laws out of thin air. There is no moral basis for their decision regarding sexual behavior which is fundamentally different from a person’s skin color.

How is it rationally possible to think that same-sex couples, when compared to heterosexual couples that were designed to procreate and live together as a couple made one (Gen 2:24), are in the same definitional category? The Constitution does not say a thing about same-sex marriage. In fact, it doesn’t say anything about marriage. It doesn’t say anything about murder, rape, stealing, etc. the Constitution rests on something more morally foundational.

There is no discrimination taking place when a statute says that people of the same sex cannot marry since the law applies to everyone equally. There is no special class called homosexuals. The entire LGBTQIAA alphabet soup is a social construct. People may want to identify as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual as well as be an Ally of the movement, but making up designations does not change the fundamentals that make marriage what marriage is by Someone’s design.

But how do we arrive at a definition of marriage? Lawyers who have tried to defend “traditional” marriage have done a poor job since neither they nor the courts have a moral pou sto, a moral place to stand. What basis for morality are judges using today as the foundation for their rulings? There was a time when there was a prevailing worldview where it was agreed that God was the “Supreme Judge of the world,” as the Declaration of Independence states.

Lawyers trying to defend against same-sex marriage go before judges are ill-equipped since they, like the judges they face, have made a back room deal that there is no higher law than man. Humanistic law has been the foundation for jurisprudence since Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was published in 1859.

The first book-length critique of Darwinism was written by Charles Hodge (1797–1878), professor of systematic theology at Princeton Theological Seminary. Hodge’s What Is Darwinism? ((Charles Hodge, What is Darwinism? And Other Writings on Science and Religion, eds. Mark A. Knoll and David N. Livingstone (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Book House, 1994).)) was published in 1874 and expanded his earlier assessment of the theory that appeared in his multi-volume Systematic Theology1 that was ublished in 1873. His critique of Darwinism was “based on his central objection that Darwin’s theories excluded intelligent design from any part of natural selection or evolution. Therefore, to Hodge, Darwinism was in effect atheism and by its very nature incompatible with Christianity.”2

Hodge wrote that Darwinism “excludes God; it excludes intelligence from everything.”

With God out of the frame, everything is permissible and flexible. If an inert chemical bath that spontaneously appeared billions of years ago can evolve into you and me, then people with incompatible sex organs can get married.

It’s here that today’s judges stand, and it’s here that defenders of so-called traditional marriage also stand. They have no defense.

Rosaria Champagne Butterfield “was a tenured English professor at Syracuse University, a skeptic of all things Christianity, and in a committed lesbian relationship. Her academic specialty was Queer Theory, a postmodern form of gay and lesbian studies. Today Butterfield is a mother of four, a homemaker, and wife of a Presbyterian pastor named Kent. They live in Durham, North Carolina.”

What made the difference? It came by way of a letter in response to an article she had written in a local newspaper. The letter was written by Ken Smith, then-pastor of the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church:

“It was a kind and inquiring letter. Ken Smith encouraged me to explore the kind of questions I admire: How did you arrive at your interpretations? How do you know you are right? Do you believe in God? Ken didn’t argue with my article; rather, he asked me to defend the presuppositions that undergirded it. I didn’t know how to respond to it, so I threw it away.

“Later that night, I fished it out of the recycling bin and put it back on my desk, where it stared at me for a week, confronting me with the worldview divide that demanded a response. As a postmodern intellectual, I operated from a historical materialist worldview, but Christianity is a supernatural worldview. Ken’s letter punctured the integrity of my research project without him knowing it.”3

We need to puncture the integrity of the courts’ basis for determining what is morally right or wrong. Judges need to face a Higher Court of appeal, but this will never happen if we try to make our arguments with the same materialist worldview they are using.

Given the materialist foundation for law in our society, there is no moral basis for anything in the Fourteenth Amendment, including the abolition of slavery found in the Thirteenth Amendment.

  1. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1873] 1968), 2:4–41. []
  2. Matthew Ropp, “Charles Hodge and His Objection to Darwinism: The Exclusion of Intelligent Design—A Case Study of American Anti-Darwinism in the Late 1800’s.” []
  3. (Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert: An English Professor’s Journey into the Christian Faith, ex. ed. (Pittsburgh, PA: Crown & Covenant, 2014), 8. []
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