left as a response to Newsweek cover story about the positives of gay marriage:
I've been reading Garry Wills' discussion in American Christianities of James Madison's "Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments", in which Madison argues against the role of the state in enforcing religious policies. One bit that's always struck me, and that Madison addresses, is the idea promulgated by the evangelical anti-gay activists that if the state doesn't step in and "protect" us from that which they abhor, we will all go to hell. Is what they advocate so fragile that it can only be sustained by intervention of the state and all that implies -- courts and police force and mandated school curricula? Madison contended that if religion was so weak that it required the intervention of the state to sustain itself then it is best rejected rather than made more suspect via state dictate. Surely, says Madison, the right religion's "innate excellence and the patronage of its Author [God]" is adequate to sustain it. If it needs the state then this need serves only "to foster in those who still reject it a suspicion that its friends are too conscious of its fallacies to trust it to its own merits."
Is "traditional marriage" itself not strong enough to withstand sharing the world with "same sex marriage"?
3 comments:
It always amazes me that so many modern "conservatives" seem to pay little or no attention to their intellectual roots...
But then, so many modern Christians don't seem to pay much attention to the "Rebel Jesus" either.
I found that once I switched the expectation that conservatives would be loyal to their professed principles for the expectation that they would be grubbing purely for advantage (with lies as the main content of their "verbiage") allows me to predict their behavior with far greater accuracy. Ditto Christians.
Post a Comment