The Church, the State and Homosexuals
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| English: Julia Gillard (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
One of the great threats which loom with Julia Gillard and the Greens is the very real possibility of greater inroads by the homosexual lobby. Though she has angered homosexuals with her own personal lack of support for homosexual marriage even though she lives with her boyfriend outside of marriage. Her response is you don't need to damage marriage to do what you want. She being the highest person in the land proves that you don't need a marriage certificate to be equal or respected.
She believes she has both and so can homosexual without marriage.
So what’s the Christian to do? What should we be fighting for with respect to the state civil unions and possible federal changes to the Marriage Act? And what are the legitimate battle lines?
Since the culture war is waged so fiercely in the arena of rhetoric, it is vital that we seek to fight with a logical precision. We must not let ourselves forget that in the culture war, the media is less like Switzerland and more like Austria, a puppet in the hands of the bad guys. So, when the political debate on homosexuality centers around civil rights legislation, we must listen and think carefully.
Many oppose special rights, but are in favor of equal rights. The Federal Labor implemented 137 changes to the law for equality for homosexuals. What should Christians do? Equality before the law is a virtue both in natural law and in God’s Word (Job 31:13–23).
But what about marriage? Is it legitimate for the believer to enjoin the state in refusing to recognize homosexual marriages? Is this even a battle we should be waging?
Christians do not approve of homosexual marriage. It’s just that the state can no more decree that two men or two women are married than it can decree that pigs fly. Marriage is a covenant relationship ordained by God between a man and a woman.
If homosexual marriage is a manifest impossibility, why shouldn’t we make the state recognize that truth? Because begging the state to say it isn’t marriage is to concede ground in the culture war that we should never give up.
The state leaves its legitimate bounds by defining theological terms.
I don’t want the state to say what marriage isn’t any more than I want the state to say what marriage is. In short, I want the government out of the marriage business. They don’t belong there. The function of the government is to protect life and property from force and fraud. The prohibition against fraud includes an obligation to enforce contracts. That would apply to marriage. If I have publicly sworn allegiance to my bride, and committed to love her exclusively she may bring a grievance against me with the state should I prove to be unfaithful. That is the function of the state with respect to marriage. The same, however, could apply to homosexuals.
If two homosexuals were to contract together, each swearing to share their earthly goods, to love and cherish, and to cease engaging in unnatural (or natural) affections with anyone else, let them do it. The state should aid them in the enforcement of their contract, but they still cannot call it marriage.
The push for assorted legal tidbits by the homosexual lobby is at the base a push for cultural legitimacy. Not wanting to grant that legitimacy, it is understandable that Christians would want to stop that process. The problem is that as long as we fight the battle on legal grounds we have already conceded an invaluable asset, the right to determine legitimacy.
These same principles apply to perhaps the even more emotional issue of homosexuals who want to adopt. While the thought of children being raised in such in environment is chilling, even more chilling again is the specter of the state being in a position to determine who may and who may not adopt, or worse still, raise the children they bore. If we call upon the state to define the family, what will we do when the state decides that Christian families are no longer families? Christians cheered when one grandmother sued for custody of her grandchild who was being raised by his “two mommies.”
We would do well when wrestling with these issues to remember Paul’s injunction to the church in Corinth, “I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people. Yet I certainly did not mean with the sexually immoral people of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or idolaters, since then you would need to go out of the world. But now I have written to you not to keep company with anyone named a brother, who is sexually immoral, or covetous, or an idolater, or a reviler, or a drunkard, or an extortioner—not even to eat with such a person. For what have I to do with judging those who are outside? Do you not judge those who are inside? But those who are outside God judges” (1 Cor. 5:9–13).
When we ask the state to punish the homosexual we ask the state to be the church. And they make for a lousy church.
Is homosexuality a sin? Yes, and an abominable one. Should it be a crime? I think not. Let the state be the state, the church be the church, and let God be God and judge.
