Geplaatst:14 jun 2006 11:37 - Gewijzigd: 14 jun 2006 11:37

Fight for truth

There is a tremendously important battle coming up to defend marriage in the United States. The Senate is scheduled to vote this week on a constitutional amendment that defines marriage as only the union between one man and one woman. Realists will tell you that it is hard to get 67 senators to agree, followed by a ratification vote in three quarters of the fifty states. Still, already 19 states have voted for such a law.

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The United States is the only Western country left in which orthodox Christian values are still part of mainstream politics. This is a fight for truth. May it ignite a new momentum not only in America but also in Europe and Canada for Christians to fight back and stop or reverse unjust laws.

Marriage is not a narrow minded Christian doctrine we are trying to impose on other people. Marriage is not even a Western idea. Liberalism did not invent it. It is a global phenomenon as old as any recorded human history. Just as the moral law is God given, so is the life long bond between one man and one woman.

Marriage is part of fundamental moral law, often referred to as natural law and as such precedes positivist law or law that is based on popular consent. For example, when a majority in a constitutional democracy wants to set apart ten per cent of the land for park use, we can call that a positivist law.

Laws against lying (perjury) and against murder and theft are more than majority wishes, they are also moral imperatives. The moral law forms the core of natural law in our societies.Modern Liberalism has forgotten that natural law is the bedrock of democracy. As people in the West have lost touch with their Bible, so have they acquired a distorted view of the role of Liberalism in history. What has emerged is a one sided view of individual rights. Only one question is asked to decide what freedoms (rights) an individual can have: does the right directly limit the rights of others. If not, such a right must then be granted and protected.

Those who want to bend the natural law of marriage to fit radical individual rights say they are fighting for equality. Some even compare their fight to the struggle for equal rights in race and gender. But natural law immediately tells you that their claims are bogus. God created all races and both genders with equal rights. Slavery as practiced in the USA south was a glaring sin. President Abraham Lincoln recognized that the blood drawn in the Civil War was God’s punishment for sin. There is also no basis in natural law to deny women any political or economic rights.

Martin Luther King knew that natural law had to be the foundation of any law for it to be just law. He wrote: „An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”

There is no natural law that says man’s individual sexual freedom takes precedence over marriage. Rather it says that sexuality outside of marriage is harmful to both the individual and to society. Do we have a right, as James Dobson has asked, to write into law that a child does not need both a father and a mother?

May the USA fight become a cause for all Christians in Europe and Canada to renew the effort to overturn laws that are now destroying the foundation of our society: the family.Alexander Moens - The author is professor of international relations at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.