Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Part I

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Is Same-Sex Marriage is ‘Back’ in the Public Discourse? The New York Times Asks the Question Openly

It was 10 years ago in 2015 that the Supreme Court of the United States handed down the Obergefell decision, mandating, legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states. And that was a seismic decision handed down by the nation’s highest court. And it did not come out of a vacuum. It is in a long line of liberal decisions that basically remade personal identity, remade marriage, remade the family, and to some degree, attempted to remake gender and even biological sex in terms of legal categories. But the big point is that that was 10 years ago. And the way the moral progressivism movement works, the way the moral revolutionaries work is that they work for this goal, then they achieve that. They work for the next goal that was unthinkable when the first goal was announced.

And then they achieve that. They work towards the next goal. And in their understanding of time, there’s no going back. The progressivist understanding of history is, well, it’s described by the words progressivist. In other words, they see history as a progress going forward. And that progress in moral terms means that the old morality is forever giving way to a new morality. The old thing, marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the exclusive union, covenant union of a man and a woman that has to give way to a legal arrangement, which says the man and the man and the woman and the woman can be the same thing.

The important thing to recognize is that even though the progressivist imagination has hold of our society, there are signs that the imagination is breaking a bit. So just a matter of days ago, the New York Times ran an article, a full-page article in the print edition, and the headline was “A Shifting Tide Over Same-Sex Marriage.”

Okay? Here’s what’s really interesting. If you had said, okay, the New York Times has a headline story, “A Shifting Tide Over Same-Sex Marriage,” you would expect the story is going to be about the toward same-sex marriage, toward acceptance of same-sex marriage, just a routinization of same-sex marriage, institutionalization of same-sex marriage. That’s not what this is about. This is actually about efforts about which the paper is warning by the way, on the part of those who want to say, “Hey, let’s reconsider this whole idea of same-sex marriage.”

So the title of the article, again, the headline, A Shifting Tide Over Same-Sex Marriage, the subhead is this, “State Efforts Urging the Supreme Court to Reconsider its Landmark Ruling Have Not Advanced, but They Have Reopened the Issue.” Okay? Now on the Left, what is that telegraphing? It’s telegraphing. Hey, they did it to Roe V. Wade. They can do it to Obergefell the Supreme Court decision legalizing same-sex marriage in 2015.

And this points to several things in worldview consideration that are important to us. Number one, we need to understand that the Left, the ideological Left has its own understanding of history and that understanding of history moves in only one direction, and that direction is towards a secular eschatological goal of a completely re-engineered society, even to some degree a re-engineered human being. And so you have this progressivist idea that is built into what amounts to a secular eschatology, but you also have an understanding that history can go only one way. Baked into the progressivist vision as the idea that history’s like an arrow. It points in one direction. It can never be reversed. You consider the Industrial Revolution, can that be reversed? Well, not apparently. You talk about the development of many technologies such as digital technologies. Can that be reversed? Are we going back to a pre-digital age? Of course not. Modern medical anesthesia. Do we want to go back to a period without anesthesia for surgery? No, we do not.

The progressivist understanding of morality is that it works exactly the same way. You don’t want to go back to an era pre-anesthesia, you don’t want to go back to an era pre-antibiotic. You don’t want to go back to an era pre-digital, even if you wanted to, you can’t. And so the argument is all the institutions of society are going to have to give way and there’s no going back. But now you have this full-page article, you have this headline, “The Shifting Tide over Same-Sex Marriage.” And you know what the big issue for our consideration is that, that headline, it sort of indicates or warns that the tide just might be going the wrong direction. Now let’s just think about this for a moment in terms of plausibility.

Let’s just try to understand what’s going on here. Number one, we think about moral change. And yes, the big story in moral change has been in the liberal direction, the progressivist direction, and that’s not an accident. And as a matter of fact, those on the Left largely believe in a form of inevitable secular liberal progress. And honestly, there’s some on the Right who fear that that might be true. And so there are some on the right who are more conservative, but they’re saying, “There’s no way to reverse these things. There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle once you have a society that goes this far.” 

But let me just point out that I’m old enough to know that there is a stronger pro-life conviction on the part of the American people now than was the case in 1973 when Roe V. Wade was handed down. Now, you have to be of a sufficient age to know that that’s true, but I guarantee you it is true.

Now, we haven’t conclusively won that battle. And by the way, obviously the battle goes on and from a Christian perspective, the likelihood is that that battle is going to go on until Jesus comes, but it is a battle to which we are called and we need to understand that surrender is not an option. And once again, we need to understand that we have regained some ground there. And you look at even the issue say, of abortion and the abortion decision in 1973. You see the situation is very different now. We have a big battle, but at least we’re in a battle. You can look at some other issues as well. Most importantly, right now, the transgender issue, the Left thought it was marching forward, inevitable progress. Nothing can stop us now, you had court decision after court decision, institution after institution, just go with the transgender revolution until someone said, “That’s actually a boy on a girl’s team.” That doesn’t work.

And so all of a sudden there has been a slowdown in terms of the progressivist agenda. You could say even the agenda of the moral revolutionaries on that issue. Now this is a full-page article, “A Shifting Tide over Same-Sex Marriage.” Is the tide shifting? Well, I think from a conservative Christian position, we’d have to say it probably hasn’t shifted all that much. But the fact that it’s shifting it all does tell us something important. A sustained effort to recover the rightful understanding of marriage is something to which we are called. It’s an assignment that we have been given. It’s our job to do it. And the good news is that evidently we’re scary enough at that, that it merits a full-page print article in the New York Times.

Well, all right, so what’s going on here? Amy Harmon is the reporter and the report begins. “It has been more than a decade since same-sex marriage dominated the national political discourse. Public opinion turned rapidly towards acceptance well before the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a national right in 2015. By 2021, a Gallup poll showed most Americans, including a majority of Republicans, favored legal recognition of such marriages and head of the Republican National Convention in 2024, Donald J. Trump ordered the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman removed from his party’s platform.” Okay, so inexorable liberal progress, right? Then this, “But in state legislatures across the country this year, there’s new activity on the same-sex marriage front and echoes of the issues long contentious past.” Okay, there’s the warning. Here’s what follows, “In a half dozen states, Republican lawmakers have introduced resolutions urging the Supreme Court to overturn its 2015 decision, Obergefell V. Hodges in Tennessee, a republican legislators proposed a new category of covenant marriages between one male and one female. And in several states, including Virginia and Oregon, Democrats are laying the groundwork to repeal old state statutes and constitutional amendments that prohibited same-sex marriage which could come back into effect should Obergefell be overturned.”

All right, so how seriously should the readers of the New York Times take this? Is this the sounding of an alarm? Is it a five alarm fire? Here’s the next sentence, and I quote, “No one is suggesting that reconsideration of the decision and Obergefell is imminent. Still, the number of state measures, proposed signals and effort to shift the perception of same-sex marriage as an established civil right. Leaders on both sides of the issue say.” Well, we’re going to leave the New York Times article at this point. The interesting angle here is just to see how the New York Times introduces the issue.

And you’ll notice it’s exactly following the script of liberal progress. “We won this, the battle’s over and we should be moving on to the next thing.” And yet there’s some people who want to move backwards. You need to see that’s exactly the kind of progressivist argument that is used now against the Dobbs decision in 2022. Repealing the Roe V. Wade decision legalizing abortion in all 50 states. And you can see the same logic is here so far as the left understands history, it only moves in one direction. And sometimes conservatives and conservative Christians thinking through a Christian worldview, sometimes we can fall prey to thinking the same thing. And it is because the evidence surely points in that direction except for corrections, except for corrections and reversals. And the point from the Christian worldview is not that we win every cultural battle, that’s not what we’re promised at all.

But the fact is, that we are to remain faithful. We have to contend for what we know to be true, and that simultaneously is because of the Christian worldview. It’s not only what we know to be true, it’s what we know to be good for humanity and for human flourishing. And so we have to stay in the battle. But it is really interesting to note that there are people on the other side who are worried that maybe there actually is a battle because they thought the battle was over. They’re moving on to the next front. We’ll get to that in a moment too, by the way.

Part II

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Same-Sex Marriage vs. Religious Liberty: The Left’s Argument Against the Reversal of Obergefell Reveals the Constitutional Weakness of Their Case

But right now I want us to consider what we are facing When you have an establishment that has reoriented itself around a definition of marriage that includes a man and a man and a woman and a woman. Just consider what would be undone if hypothetically, Obergefell were to be reversed.

Now there is one other section of this article I find really interesting, and again, I’ll credit the New York Times. Their coverage is almost always serious and well-informed. Even when I disagree with it, it’s well sourced and it’s thoughtful. Here’s what they say, “Experts say that any real challenge to Obergefell would probably come not from state legislative recommendations, but from lawsuits that aim to highlight conflicts between the rights of same-sex couples to marry and religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.” That’s one sentence. “Then in 2020, justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito denounced harm they said Obergefell had caused for religious freedom even as they turned down an appeal in a case involving a Kentucky County clerk who was jailed after refusing to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple.”

All right, I want to go back to that first sentence in this section because it really reveals a lot. This is the kind of sentence that Christians need to learn to dissect is the kind of sentence that should kind of set off a notice, a notification on our screen. Something’s going on here, I’ll go back to it. “Experts say that any real challenge to Obergefell would probably come not from state legislative recommendations.” Here’s what they say, “But from lawsuits that aim to highlight conflicts.” And here’s where the words get really interesting, “Between the rights of same-sex couples to marry and religious freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment.” Oh, you need to get this, you need to understand this, you need to hear this. They just accidentally gave away the store. And sometimes you just need to notice when this happens because it’s an amazing point of perhaps even accidental candor and honesty here because they pose this as a battle between two different rights.

That is the right of same-sex couples to marry. That’s on the one hand. And then religious freedom on the other, except they follow the words, “religious freedom” with the words “guaranteed by the First Amendment.” Okay, so here’s an honest issue that Christians need to keep in mind. Nobody has a flat vision of rights. That’s impossible. None of us believes that every right or anything claimed to be a right is on an equal basis with every other right or every other thing claimed to be a right. And so is there a right to same-sex marriage? We don’t believe that’s a right at all, but we do believe that the right to marry is grounded not only in long constitutional order, and established law going back for millennia, but also in creation order. But then you ask the question, all right, what does it mean when someone says, “Well, here’s a right for same-sex couples to marry, and then here’s a right of religious liberty grounded in the First Amendment.”

Well, that’s an acknowledgement that by the way, there are numerous amendments, but the Big 10 are the top 10 known as the Bill of Rights. There’s a necessary understanding that the rights that follow, well, let’s just put it the way we said it. They follow the First 10, the Bill of Rights. And by the way, there is no amendment to the US Constitution redefining marriage. That is first of all a court decision, just about 10 years ago, and then federal legislation that followed years later. It’s not a constitutional right. The Supreme Court did claim in the Obergefell decision in 2015 that there was a constitutional guarantee of same-sex couples to marry. But you’ll notice that’s a tenuous argument. It was a divided court and to put the matter bluntly, the words aren’t in the Constitution and the constitutional framers didn’t have an imagination that even could have been extended to something called same-sex marriage. Just try arguing that in 1780 in Boston.

Something else we need to notice also appears later in this article, and that is the argument made by some legal experts, and I’ll concede they have legal expertise, but of course that expertise is on both sides of the equation. You have people who are well-trained, they have good law degrees arguing this from two different directions. But you have the statement here that there are some who are concerned with what would happen if say Obergefell were to be reversed. Listen to this. The source cited is Brad Sears, Senior Scholar at the Williams Institute at UCLA’s Law School. That’s a program that studies LGBTQ demographics, so you know which side he’s on, “millions of people have changed their lives and relationships as a result of Obergefell.” He continued. “I believe that a majority of the members of the court will take that seriously.”

All right, all right. That’s a serious argument. I believe it’s a seriously bad argument, but I want to seriously consider why it is a bad argument. It’s a bad argument because it is based in this understanding that if the court makes a mistake, it shouldn’t fix it. And that’s the very argument that the Left was using about the Roe V. Wade decision that was reversed in 2022. In the Dobbs decision, there were people who were making the argument, even if Roe was wrongly decided in 1973, and most of them were saying, we’re not saying that, but some of them had criticized the basis of the decision in 1973. Their argument was that even if Roe was wrongly decided in 1973, there are too many people who now have personal experience based upon that legal precedent for you to reverse it. You’ll see they’re using the very same argument now about Obergefell and same-sex marriage.

I don’t want to give conservative Christians any false confidence here, but I do want to say it has to be interesting to us that the other side is getting nervous and if they’re down to making the argument that reversing a bad decision would lead to well, difficulties for some people, that’s a bad argument and I don’t think the conservative majority on this Supreme Court is likely to take that argument very seriously. But there’s another basic conservative affirmation and that is that change, even needed change often takes a fairly long time to accomplish. And we have a big battle before us on the issue of the integrity of marriage. We also have, we as Christians are confident, the truth on our side and we have an even deeper concern for human flourishing and for the good of humanity than the other side has even when they operate out of what they believe are their own motivations.

The reality is faithfulness is our call and faithfulness is not over the short term, it’s over the long haul. And the other issue is that sometimes you’re just given an indication that the other side is somehow newly concerned that the battle is not conclusively won in their direction. That has to be for Christians, at least interesting.

Part III

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Yesterday’s Perversion Could Be Today’s Argument Over Morality: The Sexual Revolution Progresses to New Arguments for Pedophilia

But having dealt with that issue, and I think it’s of clear importance to us, I need to shift to another issue because the argument is actually very closely related and the issue is of such urgency and importance we have to discuss it. But I want to tell you upfront, this is an issue that’s more difficult to discuss. It’s also an issue in which at least at this point, the vast majority of Americans are unified. The question is, for how long? The theory of the moral progressives is that moral change takes place in one direction towards greater personal autonomy, greater liberty and all the rest.

But the question is, are there any limits to that? And at least on the left, there has been for the most part an acknowledgment that there have to be limits when it comes to their sole, many times their sole singular moral criterion, which is consent. And so the argument against pedophilia or the sexual exploitation of children has come down to the fact that children are not qualified to give consent, therefore, it is not morally right. Okay, so we as Christians don’t begin there. We as Christians begin necessarily with thou shalt not. This is a non-questionable issue among Christians. It is a clear biblical prohibition. It is also a violation of creation order. But I bring it up today simply because City Journal, and in this case the reporter is Robert Verbruggen, indicates the inevitable rise of the question of legalizing something like pedophilia. The headline in his article is “This Group Wants to Affirm [he has put in quotation marks] “’Pedophilia.’” and he’s talking about a new movement which is called, well, it’s spelled out with numbers and letters B4U-ACT, which is described as, “A Maryland-based organization founded in 2003 to support pedophiles or as they call them, minor attracted persons or MAPs.”

Now don’t worry, I’m not going to go in any graphic detail here, but I do want to say, Christians need to pay attention to this. And the moment we say, “I’m not going to pay attention to something like that.” It’s the moment that we give the other side the opportunity to move out of the darkness into public light, unobstructed and un-confronted. And you know this is inevitable. I wrote a book more than 10 years ago now, in which I made the argument that this is an inevitable next thing. Because if you declare that there are no fixed rules of sexual morality and basically that there are no wrongful forms of sexual attraction or what the Left would call an orientation, you look at that and you recognize that this is inevitable. And so even though the society has very clear rules and laws, some of these rules and laws begin to at least become, well, a bit uncertain when you look at, for instance, what about digitally produced technology in which there’s no actual child?

All kinds of just really, really difficult issues here once you go down the logic of the sexual revolutionaries. Now Verbruggen in this article says, “Historically mental health professionals have classified pedophilia as a paraphilia, a psychiatric disorder characterized by an abnormal or harmful sexual interest in anyone or anything other than a legally consenting adult.” “For decades, clinicians treating pedophilia have sought to manage clients’. Harmful impulses prevent abuse and protect potential victims.” Well, the whole point of an article like this is to say, well, that was then, but this is now. Now you have a group that is trying to argue a more value-neutral understanding of pedophilia. Of course, they’re not referring to that. They’re calling it again, “minor attracted persons.” As Verbruggen tells us, “B4U-ACT, however, advances a different model. The group believes that attempts to offer pedophilic desires are not just ineffective but unethical.” Interesting argument there alarm goes off. “And it insists that efforts to reduce patients attraction to children through,” “reconditioning methods or sex drive-reducing drugs are harmful. Drawing direct comparisons to conversion therapy for homosexuality.” Bomb.

Now we just talked about that because the conversion therapy came up in the course even of just say the larger LGBTQ array. And the fact is that you have, for instance, some people who are saying that a parent say to a child, “You ought not to do that.” That’s a form of conversion therapy and should be made illegal. And so the use of the term conversion therapy is supposed to send chills down the moral spine. They’re warning that’s what it could become. And of course, Christian’s looking at this say, “This is just undisguised moral insanity.” But the whole point of the city journal coverage is to point out that yesterday’s insanity can become today’s political platform.

This is how the moral reasoning works. Listen to this, “B4U-ACT repeatedly compares pedophilia with homosexuality, likening the stigma gay people once faced to the ‘oppression,’ [let’s put in quotation marks] ‘experienced by pedophiles.’” And then Verbruggen goes on to say this is a misleading comparison and obviously is he’s making a very urgent point here, “Unlike adults in same-sex relationships, children can never consent to sex with adults equating these fundamentally different forms of sexual conduct erases the moral and legal distinction between adult relationships and child victimization.” Exactly right. But this is where Christians looking at the same argument would have to say, this is basically how every move in the sexual revolution has progressed. That is exactly what has taken place. It is erasing moral and legal distinctions that we believe are absolutely important, even vital to human well-being. So worry not, I’m not going any further into this particular issue, but we are going to have to watch it.

And there was a time when Christians said, “We can’t talk about that. That’s unspeakable.” Well now it’s law according to the US Supreme Court, there were times in which people said, “We can’t talk about abortion because that’s one of those things that is outside of our moral universe. Let’s just keep it there, not think about it.” And then the Supreme Court says, “Well, wake up. You’re going to have to deal with it.” And I fear the same thing is true with this issue as well, and it’s a wake-up call. Sometimes we just need to understand what’s going on on the other side and how that’s breaking into mainstream cultural conversation to understand the enormity of the challenge we are facing.

Part IV

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India Bombs Pakistan in Retaliatory Strike: Theology Is Clearly in the Background, As Are Nuclear Weapons

But then finally, we need to take note of very troubling headlines coming out of the tensions between India and Pakistan. Go back to the second half of the 20th century and Indian independence, and come to understand that from the time of say the end of World War II forward, India’s history was utterly transformed as it gained its independence.

But one of the byproducts of that is that you had the development of two, indeed, even more than two states. We’re going to have to deal with that separately, but at a future time, what we need to understand is that you had Hindu majority, India broken apart from Muslim majority Pakistan, and it was never a clean break. And there have been tensions from the very beginning. There are two huge complications and that has to do with Kashmir. That is a region claimed by both India and Pakistan, beautiful stunningly beautiful border region. And the conflict over Kashmir has been intense going all the way back to the origin of the separation between India and Pakistan, sometimes known as The Partition, but there’s more to it than that. And you have to add to it the danger that both Pakistan and India are armed with nuclear weapons.

And so thankfully, very rarely have we seen two nuclear armed countries go to an exchange of fire like this that has taken place. Late yesterday, the New York Times reported that that India, “Had conducted strikes on Pakistan two weeks after an attack by armed militants killed more than two dozen civilians in Indian administered Kashmir.” So India saying it was attacked first by Pakistan, it is now returned the fire. And so it’s going to be very interesting. The Indian government said, “Our actions have been focused, measured, and non-escalatory in nature. No Pakistani military facilities have been targeted.” Okay, a couple of things we need to see here very quickly. One is that when a nation undertakes a strike like this and says, “Hey, it was very carefully measured. It was non-escalatory in nature.” It means it’s not trying to raise the effort to raise the tensions to a new level, but it’s trying to have some kind of satisfaction that justice has been done.

But of course, both sides have to agree on that. Otherwise, there is an escalation. And that’s why such a thing like this is so dangerous on both sides. It’d be interesting to see how Pakistan responds if Pakistan responds. We’ve seen some interesting things going on between say, Israel and Iran on some similar kinds of dynamics.

But the second thing I want us to observe, and with this we’re going to have to close. Theology matters. It just needs to be on the front page of the New York Times, which I don’t think wants to take theology very seriously. Theology does matter. India and Pakistan are not just geographical neighbors. They are nations separated by a partition. And the partition was largely over the question of religion. Hindu-dominated India and Islamic-dominated Pakistan. The division was theological as much if not more than geographical. So you have all kinds of people telling us that we live in a secular age in which theology doesn’t matter. Look at this story and understand, you bet. Even with the risk of nuclear war somewhere on the horizon, theology matters. And we as Christians know it always does.