Same-Sex Marriage Activists Have Launched a Religious War

By Nicholas Stix

March 16, 2004
A Different Drummer, Men’s News Daily, and all over the ‘Net.

Seeing Rosie O’Donnell condemn President George W. Bush just after she “married” her girlfriend, Kelli Carpenter, was bizarre in a tiresome sort of way. O’Donnell claimed, “We were inspired to come here by the sitting president and the vile and vicious and hateful comments he made.”

If O’Donnell had any sense of humor or irony, she would look at herself in the mirror and say, “Gee, for such a tolerant, open-minded person, I sure do condemn and vituperate an awful lot, especially on what should have been the happiest day of my life.”

Maybe I’m some sort of pervert, but I don’t recall bearing anyone in the world any ill will on my wedding day, much less having decided to get married, just to spite someone.

O’Donnell is in the habit of changing her rationalizations for her “wedding,” at a moment’s notice. First, it was a reaction to her inability, during her lawsuit last fall against Gruner & Jahr/Bertelsmann, the publisher of her defunct magazine, to use “spousal privilege” to keep her girlfriend from being called to testify. Her “marriage” couldn’t be a desperate attempt at publicity for her forthcoming book, considering the tens of millions of dollars she lost, due to her failed TV talk show, her failed magazine, and the bomb of a Broadway musical she produced about gay pop star, Boy George, could it?

But I’m less concerned with O’Donnell’s opportunism, than I am with her vileness, her viciousness, her hatefulness. I have my policy differences with President Bush, but I do not question his compassion or tolerance, which are inseparable from his Christian faith.

But if you disagree with Rosie O’Donnell, you’re a “hater,” pure and simple. I’m focusing on O’Donnell, because I think she exemplifies the gay movement. Like New Yorkers, gay activists are the most compassionate, tolerant people on earth – just ask them, they’ll tell you. But disagree with any of their demands, and they’ll yell things at you that would make a guest on The Jerry Springer Show blush. (The first time I tried to see the movie Basic Instinct, in early 1993, I think it was, gay vandals shut down the theater with stink bombs, to “protest” that the serial killer was bisexual. Not that they would admit that it was they who had done the deed. As a heterosexual couple walked away from the theater at Manhattan’s Union Square, a lesbian vandal yelled at the woman, “Go home and fake some orgasms!”)

And the thing gay activists hate more than anything else, is Christianity.

Now, I could get arrested for saying this in New York, but the gay campaign for same-sex marriage is a war on Christianity. And while I’m apparently not permitted to say the following anywhere in America, America is a Christian nation … and you don’t have to be a Christian to recognize this. (I’m a Jew.)

It was the unique mixture of political freedom and Christianity that produced in America the most religious nation in the West, and the freest, most religiously tolerant nation on Earth. (Some commentators speak of attacks on “Judaeo-Christian ethics,” but I have to confess ignorance of any “Judaeo-Christian” religion.)

Secularists insist that the “constitutional wall of separation of Church and state” forbids discussing religious issues in political debates. To which I say: Show me where it says that in the Constitution.

The notion of a “constitutional” wall of separation of Church and state derives from a personal position Thomas Jefferson took in a letter to an acquaintance 200 years ago. But secularists like it, and so they have projected it onto the Constitution. Better similes, more in tune with the Constitution, would be of a “balance” or even a “dance.” Besides, secularists aren’t even true to Jefferson; they seek not the separation of religion from government, but the burying of religion, as one would bury radioactive waste. In any event, the First Amendment does not suggest a wall:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The part before the first comma is known as the “Establishment Clause”; the part immediately following it, is known as the “Free Exercise Clause.” Together, they balance each other. Gays and other radical secularists seek to nullify the Free Exercise Clause, and replace the religious assumptions of the Establishment Clause with anti-religious ones. And so, instead of the government not giving preference to any particular denomination, secularists and gay activists demand that government be hostile towards, and use its coercive power against religion, excepting, that is, Islam.

Gay activists deny that if they succeed in imposing same-sex marriage on America, that they will seek to force it on religious institutions. To anyone who believes them, I say, I have a great deal for you on a slightly used bridge. For years, homosexual activists denied that they sought same-sex marriage, right up until the moment, last June 26, that the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Texas sodomy law.

I predict that if gay marriage becomes the law of the land, religious freedom will be a dead letter. Gays will use the same carte blanche interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment they have used in demanding same-sex marriage, in which “equality” somehow always requires that they be “more equal” than others, to demand that churches and synagogues be forced by the state to perform same-sex marriages (or lose their tax-exempt status, be sued, their clergymen arrested, and/or houses of worship shut down by government officials), that devout Christians be forced to rent apartments to gay couples, and that Christian organizations be forced to hire openly homosexual applicants.

And once they have gotten enough gay “hate crime” and “anti-discrimination” laws passed at the state and federal level, gay activists will have people prosecuted, merely for disagreeing with them. That’ll take care of freedom of speech.

Why are gay activists so intent on forcing Christianity to submit to them? Because Christianity is foundational to America, and they want to replace America’s foundations with those of their own choosing. And because Christianity condemns sodomy, and gay activists will not abide being told, “No.” Theirs is a totalitarian will. They will have their way, even if it means having The Bible censored, and remaking God in their own image.