c. 1996 Religion News Service

(Charles W. Colson, former special counsel to Richard Nixon, served a prison term for his role in the Watergate scandal. He now heads Prison Fellowship International, an evangelical Christian ministry to the imprisoned and their families. Contact Colson via e-mail at 71421.1551(AT)compuserve.com.)

(RNS)-With a dramatic flourish, San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown recently advised President Clinton to”stay away”from his fair city lest the president find himself under attack by homosexual activists.

Why?

Because Clinton had announced not only his belief that marriage should remain an exclusively heterosexual affair, but that he would sign legislation assuring the same. These transgressions had apparently inflamed a significant portion of the local population, and Brown feared he would not be able to ensure the chief executive’s safety.

Yet for all the great huffing and puffing in the papers and on the talk shows, this issue has already largely been settled. Homosexual marriage, it seems to me, is all but inevitable.

No, these unions will not be blessed by the democratic process. Once again, Americans have been relieved of the trouble of debating the course of their own affairs by the Supreme Court. Its recent decree in the case of Romer vs. Evans did much more than overturn Colorado’s Amendment 2, which banned local ordinances that gave homosexuals protected status. In the decision, the court stated that legislation informed by traditional moral standards, such as Amendment 2, is beyond the pale.

The decision, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, contained an interesting addendum:”A second and related point,”the justice writes,”is that laws of the kind now before us raise the inevitable inference that the disadvantage imposed is born of animosity toward the class of persons affected. If the constitutional conception of equal protection of the laws means anything, it must at the very least mean that a bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group cannot constitute a legitimate governmental interest.””Inevitable inference”is the key phrase.

In the Roe vs. Wade and Casey vs. Planned Parenthood abortion decisions, the Supreme Court referred to alleged harms against women, but did not attribute those harms to malicious intent on the part of legislators seeking curbs on abortion. But as I interpret the Romer decision, the Court has leaped to a truly extraordinary conclusion: Legislation informed by traditional morality _ as Amendment 2 clearly was _ is”born of animosity”and therefore malicious in intent.

The Court majority seems to have swallowed whole the homosexual lobby’s line on Amendment 2. During the statewide campaign that preceded the vote, opponents of the measure often invoked the slogan,”Hate is not a family value.” The clear inference _ or”inevitable inference,”as Justice Kennedy might have it _ was that anyone who did not believe homosexuals should enjoy especially protected status was a hater.

This is a terrible slander, but the motivation behind it is easy to see. Traditional morality does hold that certain behaviors, including homosexual conduct, are wrong. This belief did not grow on a bush, but is firmly based on Judeo-Christian religious teaching, as is much of our law. It seems a safe assertion that lawmakers from Moses’ time to ours could support Amendment 2 without a hint of bigotry.

In order to effect the revolutionary change in society that homosexual activists seek, traditional moral teachings (or at least some of them) are redefined as manifestations of social pathology. Kennedy and six of his colleagues on the court apparently agreed.

There are interesting parallels between Romer and the Roe vs. Wade decision that made abortion legal. It was the Roe decision that began the great assault on America’s moral consensus that is perfected in Romer. In both cases, legislation developed through the political process was overturned. And both cases were built on falsehoods.

In Roe, as we now know, Jane Doe had not in fact been raped and had not had an abortion, as the Court was led to believe. In Romer, the people of Colorado had not attacked homosexual behavior at all. Sodomy had been legalized in Colorado decades ago, and there was no talk of changing the status quo.

All the people of Colorado were saying in approving the measure was that a person’s sex life should not make him or her special in the eyes of the law. This is hate?

Perhaps we will soon find ourselves imitating Denmark, where Christian ministers who voice traditional beliefs on homosexuality can be charged with verbal assault. In a similar vein, according to Focus on the Family, a conservative Christian organization in Colorado, when radio psychologist James Dobson criticizes homosexuality on the air, Focus on the Family cannot air those programs in Canada, because such statements violate Canadian broadcast law.

More significantly, the Court has once again made it clear that the law no longer reflects the beliefs and goals of the mass of people it purportedly serves, but instead reflects the belief that the law’s chief mission is to protect the primacy of the individual.

Consensus is dead. Choice, the one-word creed of our era, has become the sacrosanct value.

MJP END COLSON