Marriage and Sodomy

Strange bedfellows.....

by Karl Denninger, June/July 2003

Just a short while ago the United States Supreme Court decided that a Texas Sodomy law, which served to prohibit sexual relations between persons of the same gender, was unconstitutional.

It can be easily argued that the Texas statue was breathtakingly poor from the outset.

However, what the Supreme Court said in their decision was to draw one of the few bright lines we have seen over the last 30 years in delineating marriage, family law, privacy interests and the individual's relationship with the state.

It is long past the time where we should, as a society stand up and take notice of what has been elucidated here - and take decisive action, as the citizens of this land, to restore marriage to its rightful place in our society.

So exactly what is marriage anyway, and why do we have it in our social lexicon?

I guess that depends on who you ask - but I think there are some definitions that reasonable people, certainly the majority of people in this nation, can agree on.

Let's list them:

• Marriage is the social process of forming redundancy among adults in what is known as a "family."
• One of the primary purposes for such redundancy, if not the only completely-defensible one, is to provide dependents - children - with a more-stable framework under which to be raised.
• In general, marriage is seen as a permanent, "for life" commitment, and in fact nearly all religious ceremonies specify some form of "commitment vow", or oath, that states as much.

Yet is this real? Is this what society truly holds? Let's look at a contemporary Illinois Appellate Court judgment from 1997 to see what the courts say about marriage and family life:

NO. 5-97-0108 IN THE APPELLATE COURT OF ILLINOIS:

....When two people decide to get married, they are required to first procure a license from the State. If they have children of this marriage, they are required by the State to submit their children to certain things, such as school attendance and vaccinations. Furthermore, if at some time in the future the couple decides the marriage is not working, they must petition the State for a divorce. Marriage is a three-party contract between the man, the woman, and the State. Linneman v. Linneman, 1 Ill. App. 2d 48, 50, 116 N.E.2d 182, 183 (1953), citing Van Koten v. Van Koten, 323 Ill. 323, 326, 154 N.E. 146 (1926). The State represents the public interest in the institution of marriage. Linneman, 1 Ill. App. 2d at 50, 116 N.E.2d at 183. This public interest is what allows the State to intervene in certain situations to protect the interests of members of the family. The State is like a silent partner in the family who is not active in the everyday running of the family but becomes active and exercises its power and authority only when necessary to protect some important interest of family life.

So indeed, "marriage", as the state views it, is whatever the courts and the public say it is when they elect legislators, and when those legislators pass laws dealing with marriage and family law.

Specifically, every State of the US holds the following about marriage:

• Either party may end the marriage at any time and for any reason, or for no reason at all, irrespective of the vows you have taken and the promises you have made to one another, and irrespective of the form in which those vows and promises were made.
• Either party may attempt to pursue up to the entire marital estate, irrespective of their fault in the marriage.
• Adultery, or even homosexuality, is not admissible in many states, and in virtually all states even egregious and outrageous fault is not necessarily dispositive in terms of the disposition of assets of the marriage.
• Abuse of the legal system to gain a tactical advantage through the filing of false claims of abuse of either the children or the adults are not only routinely not punished when discovered, but are in many cases actively encouraged by various groups and attorneys. The consequence of this is that even by the most conservative estimates at least 30% of all restraining orders issued during such proceedings are based upon knowingly-false allegation.
• Either party may file legal process to deny the full care and custody of the children to the other, with or without cause, at any time pre or post-dissolution, and again, without fault being determined the fundamental liberty interest in care, custody and control of one's offspring may be denied to either parent solely upon the demand of the other.
• In place of care, custody and control of one's offspring, one may be ordered to pay money to the other party in the former marriage, based again upon nothing other than the other party's demand and claim that such a substitution for actual parental care is "in the best interest of the children."
• Third parties, including but not limited to grandparents and other relatives, may even intervene to gain as much or even more access, care, custody and control of your offspring than you have subsequent to such a dissolution of your marriage.

So..... to those who are divorced, and going through hell - brought about by your ex-spouse litigating custody and visitation issues, or even bringing them in the first place - you consented to this treatment, and to this jurisdiction, when you got that marriage license!

Further, those who are alarmed by the recent Supreme Court decision striking the Texas Sodomy law have good cause to be alarmed - but not because suddenly gay people may be able to have a "legal marriage."

In truth the religious right - and many mainstream Americans - have finally woken up (at least in part) to the truth about marriage in the United States - it is not what you and your spouse agree it is, rather, it is whatever the STATE decides it is - now, tomorrow, or next year!

The truth is that you do not need a "license" to be "married" by a faith.

You only need a marriage 'license" if you want the state to interfere in your relationship, define what it is, define how it is to be conducted and ultimately define the process for dissolution of it.

Do you want all of those things? Or do you want your marriage to be as you, and your spouse define it, before whatever form of deity you choose, with whatever promises, vows and penalties that this faith and deity should proscribe, and you should choose to accept?

Which is it?

If you want a "state marriage", then have one. But realize that by having one you are lying - intentionally - before God at that altar should you celebrate that marriage in a church and include any vow of perpetuity in the ceremony. You are doing so because you are well aware that the government is a "silent third party" in your marriage, that the state, and not you, has defined what a marriage is, that the state, and not you, has defined what constitutes grounds for terminating that marriage, and that the state, and not you, has defined how you shall separate your lives should that marriage fail.

If you are a member of the clergy, and you allow to be included, or even insist to be included, any perpetual commitment vow in your marriage ceremonies, you are committing a fraud upon the public and the celebrants of that marriage. Worse, you are committing an intentional fraud upon the sacramental nature of the ceremony you are performing in that church!

If you are a Catholic Priest, or any other faith in which marriages that are defective in their intent at their inception are presumptively void, EVERY MARRIAGE YOU HAVE OR DO SO CELEBRATE IS AND HAS BEEN VOID FOR FRAUD.

EVERY SINGLE ONE.

The act of signing and affixing your seal to the state license, which makes the state that "silent third party", ratifies and confirms the intentional deception practiced before the altar. This decision of an appellate court, and dozens before and after it, confirm what many have said throughout the years - you are an agent of the state, not your faith, when you affix your signature and/or seal to their papers.

So given all this in evidence, what can we do - those of us who do not desire to consent - about this situation?

We have a number of options - and duties. Specifically:

• We must not in any way consent to this treatment. This means that we must not obtain or consent to a state-issued "marriage license." By doing this we void the state's jurisdiction over us in family law matters, as we have refused (intentionally) to consent to their oversight.
• If we are married now, we have an obligation to revoke this consent. This means a legal (but not religious) divorce, filed for the explicit purpose of renouncing this oversight.
• If we wish to have a religious marriage, or are in one now, we have an obligation to form the appropriate legal protections, on our own and out of whole cloth, that protect marriage and family life as we and our body of faith see fit.
• If we are members of a body of faith, we have an obligation before our faith to insist that our pastor and others in that house of worship uphold the standards of our faith as regards marriage and family. For essentially all faiths, this will require that those faiths cease honoring and signing off on state marriage licenses. If we support a house of worship in any way - with our attendance, with our money, with our efforts or time - we are ratifying and approving of their actions. As such it is imperative that we withhold that personal and financial support for as long as these houses of worship insist on intentionally derogating the sacrements they claim to honor - and our families.
• We have a duty to inform our children, before they reach the age of adulthood, about the issues involved and insure that they make an informed decision as adults about their own family life. Hollywood, peer pressure and other influence all conspire to provide a "lily-white" view of what marriage is. The truth is something entirely different - and we have an obligation to insure that our children are aware of the truth.

If we fail to act, we are ratifying - agreeing to - the treatment of marriage as the state defines it - and have little cause to complain when we are "burned" by the very system we have consensually participated in.