    In this seminar we will get an update on the fallout of the recent Supreme Court decision and its impact on marriage and witness. We will also look at what a godly Christian witness can do in these trying times.     

ASI 2015: Lift Him Up

<div> <div> <div> <div> <p>In this seminar we will get an update on the fallout of the recent Supreme Court decision and its impact on marriage and witness. We will also look at what a godly Christian witness can do in these trying times. </p> </div> </div> </div> </div>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Health & Family

Jennifer Schwirzer

The Seven Deadly Relationship Sins - And Their Replacements

Allen Lloyd

Faster Than the Speed Of Light- How Medical Missionary Work Can Encircle the Globe Quickly

Don Mackintosh

Same-Sex Marriage, Your Marriage, the Sabbath, and Present Truth

Bob Hunsaker

The (Epi)genetics of Sin and Salvation: The 3rd and 4th Generation Effect

What we're going to try and cover today, where are we in terms of this discussion, how did we get here, the abandonment of coverture and the historic definition of marriage, same-sex marriage is a tipping point and what should we do.

The recent ruling of the case of same-sex marriage occurred on June 26, 2015, And the court decided in a 5 to 4 decision that the 14th Amendment requires the state to license a marriage between 2 people of the same sex, to recognize a marriage between 2 people of the same sex when their marriage was lawfully licensed and performed out of state.

So the law of the land in America, they saw great benefit in not being ununited in their approach to this issue, and so they did not let states go their own way in this ruling, and they said, we want to all do the same thing.

And of course, people were, Some were very upset with this because it was taken out of the legislative process and was decided by 9 attorneys and there's been a lot of discussion of that.

More recently then, this month, there's another bill that's being suggested in the Senate following up that Supreme Court decision, the Equality Act that will expand that ruling that was made by the Supreme Court to various areas of business and employment, education, and it's getting great traction because many people are beginning to get behind that in actually 1 side of the house, if you will, and on the other side as well.

A vast change of a definition that really has been there for millennia, and then agitation to take that definition, that redefinition, and expand it into every area of society.

Well, as you may remember, this debate has gone on for some time and there was a rapid change that began around 2007 and 8, you can see there, and the opinion of the country basically flipped.

You might say that the final movements were rapid ones, And there was a flipping of the understanding of marriage, the Defense of Marriage Act that was passed back during the Clinton administration was, you know, jettisoned by this recent Supreme Court ruling.

It was interesting to read and listen to all the oral arguments leading up to the decision.

How many of you were able to listen to those or read those?

I'm not saying it was something you had to do, but it certainly was interesting and as I read through those, I went through them more in depth, like I said, in those other presentations, but I want to kind of cut to the chase today.

Arguing for the same-sex marriage, Mary Bonauto of Gay and Lesbian Advocates, who's been a defender of many of these cases, got into a dialogue with the Chief Justice Roberts, and as they began discussing and talking about the definition of marriage, I just will remind you of some of the things that the Supreme Court justices said in their oral arguments.

Every definition that I looked up prior to about a dozen years ago defined marriage as unity between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife.

Justice Antonin Scalia added, I don't know of any society prior to the Netherlands in 2001 that permitted same-sex marriage.

Even during oral arguments, Justice Kennedy, who would ultimately write in favor of same-sex marriage, had the question, this definition has been with us for millennia and it's very difficult for the court to say, oh well, we know better, which is exactly what they did.

But at that point he was questioning that.

And then Justice Samuel Alito, well, how do you account for the fact that as far as I'm aware, until the end of the 20th century, there never was a nation or a culture that recognized marriage between 2 people of the same sex.

How can we infer from that that those nations and those cultures all thought that there was some rational, practical purpose for defining marriage in that way, or is it your argument that they were all operating independently based solely on irrational stereotypes and prejudice.

And this was really the line of reasoning for those that were on the court that were against same-sex marriage, and that was that there was a millennia of precedent and there must be a good reason for that.

In a response to that question and then in the response that Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion for the recent ruling, kind of follow the same kind of reasoning.

And again, those just coming in were talking about how did we get where we are in this particular case.

Your Honor, my position is that times can blind, and if you think about the example of sex discrimination, and what it again, I assume it was protected by the 14th Amendment, but it took over 100 years for this court to recognize that a sex classification contravened, was in conflict with the Constitution.

And then came, and then she cited these cases, which we'll look at briefly, Craig v.

So let's just look at those briefly because when we enter into discussing what the court is trying to think, we have to look at how they got there.

Oklahoma passed a statute prohibiting the sale of non-intoxicating 3.2% beer to males under the age of 21, but allowed females over the age of 18 to purchase it.

So the statute was challenged as a 14th Amendment equal protection violation by a man who was over 18 but under 21 and an Oklahoma vendor of alcohol.

So that was the first kind of thing, like can you treat the genders different concerning alcohol?

The court held that the gender classifications made by the Oklahoma statute were unconstitutional.

So that was the first kind of discussion about, you know, should they have a difference based on gender for alcohol?

Hartwick in 1986, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a 5-4 ruling that constitutionality of a Georgia sodomy law criminalizing oral and anal sex in private between consenting adults when applied to homosexuals.

And the majority opinion that was written by Byron Wright was that it was a fundamental right that the Constitution did not confer a fundamental right to engage in homosexual sodomy.

Concurring with that, Justice Warren Burger cited the ancient roots of prohibitions against the homosexual sex, quoting William Blackstone, which is an English jurist from the late 1700s, description of homosexual sex as an infamous crime against nature worse than rape and a crime not fitted to be named, Berger concluded in his concurring opinion that to hold that the act of homosexual sodomy is some way protected as a fundamental right would be to cast aside millennia of moral teaching.

And so this 1986, not so long ago, for those of us who are a little bit older, the opinion was that moral teaching could be appealed to.

Evans, it was the first Supreme Court case to address gay rights since that case we just mentioned.

And the court decided in a 6-3 decision that a state constitutional amendment in Colorado preventing protected status based upon homosexuality and bisexuality did not satisfy the equal protection clause.

But that was all going to change in the next case, in Lawrence v.

The landmark decision, 6-3 ruling, the court struck down the sodomy law in Texas, and by extension, invalidated sodomy laws in 13 other states, making same-sex sexual activity legal in every U.S.

The Court overruled its previous ruling on the same issue that we had just cited, Bowers v.

Hartwick, when it appealed a challenged Georgia statute and did not find a constitutional protection of sexual privacy.

In the majority opinion, and this was the same person that penned the majority opinion of the last same-sex Marriage Act that we just had, that we mentioned at the beginning.

Justice Kennedy said, the court upheld that homosexuals had protected liberty interests to engage in private sexual activity, that homosexual moral and sexual choices were entitled to constitutional protection, and that moral disapproval did not provide a legitimate justification for Texas law criminalizing sodomy.

In other words, something outside the law as defined by the justices, does not allow you to be the basis of moral disapproval.

Justice Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion, the petitioners, Lawrence and Garner, are entitled to respect for their private lives.

The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.

Kennedy reviewed the assumption the court made in Bowers using the words of Justice Berger, it's a concurring opinion in the case that condemnation of homosexual practices is firmly rooted in Judeo-Christian moral and ethical standards.

So Make no mistake, when the court said you're no longer going to have moral standards guide you, it was specifically speaking about Judeo-Christian moral guidance.

Another way of saying the Bible no longer can guide in these areas.

It was wrong that we let it guide before.

So now fast forward to Windsor, 2013, a landmark civil rights case in which the United States Supreme Court held that restricting U.S.

Federal interpretation of marriage and spouse, in other words, what does the word marriage and spouse mean, to apply only to heterosexual unions as was cited in the Defense of Marriage Act, was unconstitutional.

In other words, marriage and spouse can apply to others rather than a heterosexual couple.

So now can you see then how the court has been moving and how we got where we are.

So it was a detachment from the Judeo-Christian moral ethic, in other words, being guided by the Bible in any way, and then just a reinterpretation without any of that guidance.

I don't know if this is appropriate to say, but I'll just say it.

Anytime that we as individuals or families or churches decide that we're going to kind of go away from the moorings of scripture, we can get very interesting places very rapidly.

I think that should be a lesson to all the groups I mentioned.

And now the abandonment of coverture and the historic definition of marriage.

Coverture was a new word to me and I'll talk about it here.

In the dialogue and the oral arguments leading up to the landmark decision, there was a discussion by the justices concerning this particular word, and we'll just go through it and you'll see it.

Wouldn't you be asking for this relief if, but you wouldn't be asking for this relief, said Justice Ginsburg, if the law of marriage was what it was a millennia ago, I mean it wasn't possible.

Same-sex unions would not have opted into the pattern of marriage, which was a relationship, a dominant and subordinate relationship.

Yet it was marriage between a man and a woman, but the man decided where the couple would be domiciled, in other words, live, and it was her obligation to follow him.

We have changed, continued Justice Ginsburg, our idea about marriage.

There was a change in the institution of marriage to make it egalitarian when it was not egalitarian.

And same-sex unions would not fit into what marriage once was.

So here in the High Court they said, look, we've changed into an egalitarian model.

According to Justice Ginsburg, it ended as a result of this court's decision in 1982 when Louisiana's head and master rule was struck down and no state was allowed to have such a marriage anymore.

Would that be the choice that a state should be allowed to have, to cling to marriage the way it once was.

Interesting discussion, what would you say?

I guess I was reading something that was not on your screen, sorry about that.

Bonato, who was listening, affirmed what she said by saying this, that's correct, I mean for centuries we had, and Europe had, this coverture system where a woman's legal identity was absorbed into that of her husband and men and women had different prescribed legal roles.

And again, because of equality and changing social circumstances, all of those gender differences in the rights and responsibilities of the married pair have been eliminated.

And that, of course, is a system in which committed same-sex couples fit quite well.

So in other words, the reasoning of the court was that because Coviture had been done away with, or the reasoning of Justice Ginsburg and Bonato in the oral arguments, and then ultimately the decision that was reached in June was that Coviture was done away with, the relationship between men and women.

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Series

Health & Family

Same-Sex Marriage, Your Marriage, the Sabbath, and Present Truth

Transcript

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Parent Series

Parent Conference

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Recorded

Attachments

Parenting ~ Heart to Heart

God’s Word the Parent’s Guide

59m

The Church of the Living God

39m

Morning Devotional: It's War Time

It’s Wartime - Part 4: War in a Garden

50m

Unlocking Prophecy

10- The Beast’s Greatest Conspiracy

1h 8m

Jesus Throughout the Bible

1h 17m

Of Prophecy and Praise

39m

Preparing for the Crisis

02 Self Quarantine: Stay at Home

34m

Prayer

02 Prayer

57m

Contemplative Prayer: A Clear and Present Danger

1h 12m

The Almost Overmastering Delusion

54m

Christ in You: The Hope of Glory

1h

Sound Doctrine