Uprooting Our Biblical Foundation

David Limbaugh
Friday, Nov. 21, 2003

Given the public outcry about the federal court's order for the removal of Judge Roy Moore's Ten Commandments display, I'm surprised there isn't as much alarm about the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to sanctify gay marriage.

In the Moore case you have a federal court telling a state court that it can't symbolically recognize the God of the Bible as the source of our laws (or otherwise). In the Massachusetts case you have a state court ruling that the Bible (can't be the source of our laws. I think the latter has even graver implications.

Follow me on this. There is little question that the institution of marriage between a man and woman was ordained by the Bible.

Genesis 2:24 says, "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." That is a prescription for man and woman to be joined, not man and man or woman and woman.

The Massachusetts court ruled that because the Massachusetts Constitution "affirms the dignity and equality of all individuals" and "forbids the creation of second-class citizens," homosexuals have a right to marry.

This should be no surprise, as it is a result of a logical progression in our jurisprudence toward radical individualism – the rights of the individual trump everything else – including the interest of the majority in establishing a moral and stable society.

Since the United States Supreme Court in its recent sodomy case (Lawrence vs. Texas) reaffirmed the Court's earlier pronouncement that "Our obligation is to define the liberty of all, not to mandate our own moral code," it's hardly a surprise that a state court is following suit. The Massachusetts court is doing precisely that: Forbidding the state Legislature from mandating a moral code – at least one with biblical roots.

The oft-repeated lie that "we can't legislate morality" has finally borne its poisonous fruit. Of course we can legislate morality. We always have. We must. Try looking at the criminal code of any state or the federal system and tell me it isn't based on morality. Look further into our civil law and try to deny that much, if not most, of tort law and contract law, not to mention property law, is rooted in our traditional (biblical) moral beliefs.

It is not just for mercantile reasons that men are prohibited from breaching contracts. And punitive damages in tort law are awarded not to compensate the victim, but to punish the tortfeasor. Punishment – that's a moral concept.

Not only are our statutory and common law rooted in biblical morality; at a more fundamental level, so is our Constitution. If we remove that foundation, the fabric of our society will unravel, and we'll eventually lose our liberties – ironically, at the hands of those claiming to champion freedom. And, by the way, the Massachusetts Supreme Court, in demolishing traditional marriage, is itself legislating – that's right, I said "legislating," not "adjudicating," morality.

Secularists in our culture and on our courts are not just turning the First Amendment Establishment Clause on its head and using it as a weapon to smother religious liberty for Christians. They are further attacking our Judeo-Christian foundation by promoting individualism to the extreme – to the exclusion of biblical truths.

In the abortion cases, the mother's personal convenience taken to an obscene extreme trumps the very right to life of the baby made in God's image. In the Massachusetts gay marriage case, the biblical concept of marriage is summarily and arrogantly rejected by four robed anti-culture warriors in favor of the newfound sanctification of homosexual behavior.

We might as well just be blunt about what's happened. According to our renegade courts, the government is not just forbidden from endorsing the Christian religion, it must now disavow its Judeo-Christian heritage. It must bastardize itself.

Sadly, chillingly, it's all based on a lie: that the Framers intended to create an impregnable wall of separation between religion and government. But whatever the Framers believed, they certainly didn't intend to bastardize government from its biblical parentage the instant it was spawned. What sense would it have made for them to build our Constitution on the solid, immovable rock of biblical principles, then immediately uproot that foundational anchor?

The courts are making quite clear their disenchantment with this wonderful document we call our Constitution, as they dismantle it bit by bit. If the prescient John Adams was correct that our Constitution is made only for a moral and religious people, perhaps before too long it will not be suitable for us.

Back to Main