Remember the good old days when our devout Founding Fathers explicitly wrote language into our Constitution defining marriage for our new country? Neither do I, but Mat Staver and Matt Barber of the Liberty Council sure do. No matter that no mention of marriage is made in the original document. Staver and Barber are so certain about the intentions of these men when they put quill to parchment that there is no question they would fully side with the fundamentalists in our modern debate over marriage equality. Perhaps they would even advocate we be put to death for our audacity to go against the social norms of 1787. It's such a beautiful thought to ponder.
Mat Staver: There's no place in the Constitution that you could stretch it to mean same-sex marriage. At the time of the founding of this country, obviously no one even thought about the fact that two men and two women would be wanting to marry. It is just absurd to even think about that. It has always from that moment on been considered a crime against nature. Again, you go back to nature. If you go back to what they called these act of same sex is Crimes. Against. Nature. Nature being just the natural law. The revealed law plus the natural law that we are actually able to see and understand, that governs the universe. That governs our interaction.
Matt Barber: Yeah, the abhorrent sexual behavior. The twisting of normal human sexuality that is involved, that would be involved in order to consumate a so called same sex marriage. In all thirteen of the original US colonies was a crime. In some of the, in many of the colonies a crime punishable by death. Now, do we advocate that now? No, of course. But the point is, that was the mind-set of the framers as they drafted the Constitution. There's no way they would ever have intended that they would twist and deconstruct the fundamental cornerstone institution of marriage in order to put the government's official stamp of approval on a crime against nature.
That is awfully big of Matt Barber to say that he doesn't advocate the execution of gay people today. Our crimes against nature don't rise to actually hanging us, except perhaps in far off Uganda. No, here in the United States we buggers and bull dykes should be thankful Christians don't want to kill us anymore. We should shut up and be grateful that they merely want to keep us from obtaining the rights and freedoms intended for only those morally righteous folks who Mat and Matt find deserving.
It is ridiculous that we are still having to argue with these people over the abundantly clear intentions of the authors of our Constitution regarding separation of church and state. It is indisputable that they saw clearly that this great experiment would not work if religious zealots held sway within our government.
"The Government of the United States is NOT, in ANY sense, founded on the Christian Religion." -- John Adams
"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes."
-Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 6, 1813.
"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."-Thomas Jefferson, February 10, 1814
"... I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between church and State."-TJ Jan. 1, 1802
In an excellent article found at
The Bilerico Project, Victoria A. Brownworth relates a story about George Washington and the discharge of a gay soldier in his army.
Renowned gay historian Randy Shilts makes the case for Washington's ever-pragmatic as well as compassionate approach to same-sex relationships in "Conduct Unbecoming: Gays and Lesbians in the U.S. Military."
Shilts details how Washington merely signed the order for discharge of a soldier caught in flagrante with another soldier, and suggests that if Lt. Col. Aaron Burr had not forced the issue, the soldier might have remained at Valley Forge instead of being the first documented case of a discharge for homosexuality in the Continental Army on March 15, 1778 at Valley Forge.
The soldier was court-martialed by Burr, but that was the extent of it. Washington did not flog him, imprison him or as Jefferson had required as part of Virginia law as punishment for sodomy, have him castrated. Washington could also have had the soldier executed. He did none of these things. The soldier just walked away.
Staver and Barber twist themselves into knots to avoid acknowledging the reality of the founding of our country and the men who were there to keep people like them from turning it into a Theocracy. That is the truth behind the intention of our Constitution whether the fundamentalists like it or not.