Just this week, the Supreme Court handed down two
long-=awaited cases dealing with gay marriage. Before I became a minister, I
taught judicial process, so I am well positioned to look at issues of law and
Christian ethics in regard to its decisions. Our eldest daughter came to visit
this week, and I recalled with her my consternation at President Clinton’s
craven political calculation to sign the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and
his recent discovery that he should not have singed it.
Some of our readers may be a bit confused how the equal
protection clause of the 14th Amendment, directed toward states,
could be used as a gloss on the fifth Amendment, dealing with the national
government. Ever since 1954 when the Court struck down state-imposed school segregation
in the District of Columbia, the Court ruled tha the liberty portion of the due
process clause of the 5th amendment was made more clear and precise
by the wording of the 14th Amendment.
Justice Kennedy has made a long personal journey himself. he
signed on to the :anti-sodomy” decision in the eighties, but authored its
repudiation I at the start of the new century. It is striking how often the
word, dignity, appears in his decision. Part of equal protection analysis is
determining if a law’s distinction is based on the creation of a ‘suspect”
class of citizens. Kennedy over and over refers to the bigotry and bias
inherent in the DOMA law. Equal protection means that government needs a reason
to separate classes of people, especially if they are a minority class who has
been subject to invidious discrimination. To him, we cannot admit two
standards, two classes of marriage, or we run afoul of the sense of the words
on the court’s edifice, equal justice under law. For years, the court has ruled
marriage to be a fundamental conern for the liberty, the private decision for a
couple. Now it has been extended to more of our citizens.
Some in the church will see the case as preaching the gospel
to the church, and others decry it as an intrusion into matters of private
morality and an attempt to dictate a new morality apart from religion to our
citizens. For forty years, my own denomination, the PCUSA, has struggled with
the issue in varying ways, in a see-saw of tolerance and prohibitions. Part of
the struggle has been one of Biblical interpretation. Some pull the relatively
few comments against same-sex relations and seek to make a principle from them.
Some have moved a long way on the issue. Jim Wallis, the religious evangelical
but political liberal, has moved a long
way a the issue and has come to the point where he sees people of good will
able to take up either side of the issue. He is troubled by the wholesale
rejection of the young of the judgmental, hypocritical, and negative morality
of so many church leaders.
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