Loading...by Patrick J. Buchanan – January 15, 2002
While Americans remain focused on the war on terror and the doings at Enron, a decisive battle in the culture war will be fought out this month in the California State Assembly.
At issue is Assembly Bill 1338, which would extend all the benefits of marriage to the pairings of homosexuals, known as “civil unions.” To Ken Connor of Family Research Council, AB 1338 “is the most serious threat to marriage since the states foolishly embraced no-fault divorce in the 1960s.” That is no understatement. For here is how the bill’s crucial section reads: “Any statute or provision of California law that applies to marriage, marital status or a marital relationship shall apply in the same respect to civil unions.”
An up-or-down vote on AB 1338 must come by the end of January, and FRC and Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family have thrown all their reserves into the battle. To defeat this revolutionary law will require the votes of all 30 Republican members of the assembly and at least 10 Democrats.
That such a bill could become law in a state that not long ago was the bastion of conservatism should send a sobering message to the Right. Those who told us that we had won the cultural war were whistling past the graveyard.
But why is the counter-culture of the 1960s succeeding in its overthrow of our traditional Christian-based culture, when all our great religions and all our sacred books from the Torah to the New Testament to the Koran teach that homosexuality is unnatural, immoral and ruinous to body, soul and society alike? Why is the gay rights lobby succeeding in California, where 61 percent of the electorate and over 70 percent of Hispanics voted, in Proposition 22 in 2000, to affirm that marriage is a union between one man and one woman?
Why are so few willing to fight when the awful consequences of the homosexual lifestyle are before our eyes every day? Not only are all-male couplings inherently barren, male sodomy has been the principal means of the transmission of the virus that causes AIDS, which has taken the lives of as many Americans as World War II.
A few years back, a survey of obituaries in the homosexual press found the average age of out-of-the-closet male homosexuals at death was 39 for those who had died of AIDS and 42 for the rest. This is what the Pope means when he speaks of a “culture of death.”
How can a practice that, if universally indulged, would lead to the extinction of the species be normal and moral and good, as the state of California may now be about to declare urbi et orbi?
Just as the correlation between heavy smoking and early death from emphysema, lung cancer and heart disease has been established beyond refutation, so too, has the link between male sodomy and a short life. Yet, that deadly sexual practice is the very sacrament of the civil unions the California Assembly is being asked to sanctify.
Meanwhile, as the assembly confronts its moment of truth, San Francisco’s public schools are instructing first-graders in the propagandistic lie that homosexual unions are as good and natural and normal as marriage. The Jesus of the Bible is a loving God, but he promises harsh judgment upon these corrupters of children:
“But who shall offend one of these little ones who believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea.”
Why are traditionalists, who remain America’s majority, on the defensive on this issue? The answers lies in moral confusion and fear. Politicians fear being branded a homophobe or a bigot by a powerful and vengeful homosexual lobby, and its fellow travelers in the press. Second, conservatives feel uncomfortable arguing moral issues. Their attitude often runs something like this: As long as the homosexuals do not bother me, why not give them what they want, so they will leave us alone and we can get on with the business of cutting taxes?
What the “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” conservatives fail to recognize is that the end result of the triumph of the cultural and moral revolution underway in America is a decadent, dying society and nation. For a house built upon a moral lie cannot stand. When their country is at risk, they cannot declare neutrality.
The truth must be spoken again and again. All lifestyles are not equal. And by the way in which they define themselves, male homosexuals are killing themselves. The state of California may declare otherwise, but that will not make it true.