Same-Sex Marriage

This morning I learned that last night the Supreme Court ruled same-sex marriage as a legal right in the United States of America. Immediately upon hearing it, I wanted to cry. I felt so much sadness and so much loss for our country. (The same way I felt, unfortunately, when Obama became president, more specifically the second term.) I feel like this was one more giant step in the wrong direction. I can't say I was very surprised, though. It was extreme disappointment, but certainly not surprise. When we as a nation forget about God and put religion and faith in the background, we will inevitably What once made this country so great that everybody wanted to flock to it, was that we were a moral and a free people. Because we are so quickly losing our morals, we are giving up our freedoms as well.

Supporting that argument, John Adams said, "we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.  It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

In Frederic Bastiat's The Law he says "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law-two evils of equal magnitude, between which it would be difficult to choose. It is so much in the nature of law to support justice that in the minds of the masses they are one and the same. There is in all of us a strong dispotition to regard what is lawful as legitimate, so much so that they falsely derive all justice from law."

We have set up a false standard of what is right and wrong based on our man-made laws. They have ignored any principles of natural law. But as former Supreme Court Justice Dallin H. Oaks said, "But man’s laws cannot make moral what God has declared immoral."

I'm going to quote again from Bastiat, this taken from his essay, What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen, because I think it's very applicable for this situation.

1.1

...a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen; we are fortunate if we foresee them.

1.2

There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen.

1.3

Yet this difference is tremendous; for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favorable, the later consequences are disastrous, and vice versa. Whence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good that will be followed by a great evil to come, while the good economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.

1.4

1.5

 ...Two very different masters teach him this lesson: experience and foresight. Experience teaches efficaciously but brutally. It instructs us in all the effects of an act by making us feel them, and we cannot fail to learn eventually, from having been burned ourselves, that fire burns. I should prefer, in so far as possible, to replace this rude teacher with one more gentle: foresight.

We haven't even begun to understand the effects of this ruling. The family is the basic unit of society in the mortal and eternal realms. Marriage between a man and a woman is the safest and best way to ensure proper procreation, and a stable environment for the raising and nurturing of children. We can try (and have tried) a number of different ways to form "families". Time and time again we are shown that the equal team of one man and one woman raising children together is always the best scenario. Do we really think we can plan or construct a family better than God himself designed? We must look to the future of our own children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren when making decisions-especially binding legal decisions-for that is what ensures the continuation and success of any society or nation. I fear that we will be reaping the negative consequences, "what is not seen", for many generations to come.

(Disclaimer: I apologize if this isn't very well articulated, I just had to spit out my knee-jerk reaction.)