California Family Minute

Just last week, the definition of “marriage” tilted further left on mainstream television. NBC bowed to pressure and opened its annual wedding contest on the Today show to include homosexual couples. Defining terms is the focal point of major public-policy debate, and opponents of traditional faith and family are winning the argument – by changing the terms. 

In the last decade or two, homosexual activists have slowly and incrementally impacted culture and worldview. In the enclaves of West Hollywood and San Francisco – and neighborhoods nationwide – activists stirred pools of acceptance. They created domestic partnerships and civil unions, legally recognized relationships that gave them some key advantages once reserved only for married couples. 

Massachusetts first opened the door to homosexual marriage in 2003. In Goodridge v. Department of Public Health, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court redefined the centuries-old definition of marriage “to mean the voluntary union of two persons as spouses, to the exclusion of all others.” Since that time, the people of 30 states have enacted constitutional amendments to protect traditional marriage, and legislators or judges have approved homosexual marriage in Connecticut, Iowa, New Hampshire, Vermont, and the District of Columbia.

In California, domestic partnerships, created by legislation in 1999, were slowly expanded until they encompassed virtually all the rights and benefits of traditional marriage. This gave way to several attempts by the California Legislature to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples, and the people responded with the successful marriage-protection constitutional amendment Proposition 8, which is awaiting a federal court decision in San Francisco. 

In the California Legislature, where domestic partnerships had been successfully expanded, SB 906, authored by openly homosexual Senator Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), has passed the Senate and is currently awaiting a vote on the Assembly floor. This legislation would recast “marriage” as “civil marriage,” a move that could be used to undermine marriage’s definition. 

Courts – which have been friendly to the expansion of homosexual “rights” – rely on specific terms in law in making decisions, and such a redefinition of marriage could be used to revamp or create other “classes” of marriage. Recently, a federal court in Massachusetts found that the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), Clinton-era legislation that maintained the one-man, one-woman marriage definition, was unconstitutional. 

Consciously coined by homosexual activist Kevin Jennings, a former teacher, to win the advantage in the war of words, the term “safety” quickly became the mantra of pro-homosexual advocates within the public schools. Jennings was a controversial figure from the get-go and made a career of normalizing homosexual behavior under the guise of promoting the safety of all children – except those who disagree with his viewpoint. President Barack Obama appointed Jennings to head the Office of Safe & Drug Free Schools, a federal agency to help reduce drug, alcohol and violence and to foster character and citizenship among the nation’s students.

The final outcome of this terminology revisionism may be redefining religious liberty. As our culture deals with issues of tolerance and truth, the essence of an unchanging reality or truth – with moral implications of right and wrong – has shifted to a subjective truth that can be molded according to one’s personal beliefs. Christian beliefs, with their adherence to a moral code, are considered archaic, as absolute standards of accepted behavior threaten humanist philosophies of self-actualization and rationalism.

“Freedom of speech” is now redefined more narrowly, and offending the sensitivities of another person is often used in courts of law to attempt to silence the public expression of personally held convictions. Those holding to a biblical worldview are especially vulnerable to such intolerance. For example, a Catholic professor at an Illinois state university was recently fired for explaining the Catholic Church’s beliefs about homosexuality, in a course on Catholic tenets! While such a circumstance is outrageous, it has become commonplace in Canada, where same-sex marriage has been legal since 2003. 

Under the Obama administration, pro-homosexual rights have been greatly expanded, and the United States is quickly catching up to its neighbor to the north. In addition to Kevin Jennings, a homosexual activist with a 17-year history of twisting homosexual policy as “safe schools,” President Barack Obama has appointed a record level number of openly homosexual individuals to his administration.

Earlier this year, the president appointed Georgetown professor Chai Feldblum to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which enforces federal employment law. An outspoken lesbian, Ms. Feldblum has repeatedly said that she expects sexual orientation “rights” (which she terms sexual liberty) to trump religious liberty, a right given in the Bill of Rights.

Political sleights of hand are nothing new in agenda promotion, but these attacks on Christianity and our foundational freedoms are cause for alarm. In recent months, experts have begun watching a curious change in phraseology within the Obama administration – replacing “freedom of religion” with “freedom of worship.” The president himself began the trend in his remarks at the memorial for the Fort Hood shooting and continued the trend on a subsequent trip to China and Japan. 

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton adopted the terminology in a speech at Georgetown University earlier this year. Enumerating a list of freedoms, she included “freedom of worship,” along with the freedom to “love in the way they choose.” These turns of phrase are troubling to national and international policy watchers and earned mention in the 2010 annual report of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. 

Such a change in terms could be simply varying rhetoric, although the abundant use of the new term – to the exclusion of the phrase “freedom of religion” – is troubling especially in light of continued attempts to marginalize Christian beliefs. Many experts believe that the change in terms is step one in limiting the term freedom of religion to one’s home or place of worship – and removing it from the public square. Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom told Christianity Today, “Freedom of worship means the right to pray within the confines of a place of worship or to privately believe. It excludes the right to raise your children in your faith; the right to have religious literature; the right to meet with co-religionists; the right to raise funds; the right to appoint or elect your religious leaders, and to carry out charitable activities, to evangelize, [and] to have religious education or seminary training.”

Famed statesman and orator Daniel Webster said in 1834, “God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it.” These threats to our very liberty are real and encroaching upon our culture, and we must stand prepared to defend it. Those who cherish our religious liberties must recapture the words and definitions of the debate, and with prayerful involvement seek to return our culture to one where biblical beliefs are respected.