As I’ve pointed out recently, members of Congress tend to name pieces of legislation the exact opposite of what the bill actually does.
The “Respect for Marriage Act” is no different. With all of the incessant re-naming of names going on in the Biden DC swamp, it’s difficult to tell if members of Congress are attempting to redefine marriage or respect. My reading of the bill and the tea leaves indicates that they’re attacking both.
While liberals and libertarian-minded Republicans might be comfortable advocating for unencumbered familial status without regard to the negative societal consequences, conservatives should continue to make a stand for the foundation of the family unit as the union of one man with one woman in marriage.
Conservatism can be defined as understanding what was effective in the past and working to apply those proven principles to new challenges as they arise. Conservatives are fundamentally concerned with ordered freedom, living a virtuous life, and promoting things of enduring worth.
Conservatism, at the root, is a desire to preserve what is good. If two millennia of a Biblical and historical understanding of marriage isn’t something to conserve, is there anything at all that is?
H.R. 8404 is an intentional affront to the millions upon millions of Americans of faith who adhere to Biblical values regarding marriage and parenthood. The legislation is a free-for-all of morality when it comes to both marriage and sexuality. Conservatives shouldn’t enable the repudiation of marriage to ameliorate or alleviate the fleeting feelings of those who refuse to even define what a woman is.
Activists who insist upon mothers being deleteriously demoted to “chest feeders” won’t stop with reducing marriage to whatever they want it to be. Marriage, as gender and definitions seem to shift, will be fluid. Equity without regard to logic isn’t worth pursuit. The unmooring of human sexuality is intentional and dangerous. We cannot look the other way as our way of life is eroded from the very foundation upon which it sits.
We cannot live and let live as fluid pronouns and premature messages regarding sexuality are pressed upon even our children in public schools and spaces. We cannot cast aside the strength of our convictions as we watch preschoolers labeled as transgender and the innocent subjected to sexual deviance they cannot fully comprehend. We cannot claim that Americans can do whatever they please because “it’s a free country” when only the most radical set of opinions are permitted to be spoken aloud or accepted as truth.
To be American used to be described as “motherhood and apple pie." Now, we’re ridiculously relegated to “birthing people and crickets” while our Congressmen happily play along. Our Senators must stand strongly against the continued re-defining of and degradation of women and the sacred institution of marriage.
The Anti-Marriage Act would run roughshod over the basic principles of federalism by requiring the validity of any one state’s definition of marriage in every state without any parameters whatsoever, moving beyond the current recognition of same-sex marriage — polygamy, open marriages, throuples, incestual marriage, and marriage between children and adults. Sound like a leap?
Not in this anything goes, moral relativist, hyper-sexualized society we find ourselves in. Small children being targets sound a little too crazy to believe? The Pennsylvania Department of Education recently declared that three-year-olds can be transgender. In a world of racist babies and transgender toddlers, there is no such thing as "too crazy."
Think we’re immune because we live in a red state like Alabama? Think again. This piece of legislation is literally the federalization of sexual immorality in perpetuity.
Our civil system wasn’t built for and cannot handle the weight of institutional immorality. John Adams said, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion...Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Make no mistake, this Act seeks to destroy religious freedom, unless your entire idea of religion is relegated to the fanatical secular humanist progressivism that reigns in Biden’s America. To be clear, a Biblical desire to affirm the dignity of friends and family members who might identify as LGBT is rooted in the rightful conviction that every person is an image-bearer of God with inherent value that ought to be treated with decency and respect.
However, while treating individuals in our lives with dignity, conservatives should treat this legislation with every single smidgeon of the contempt that it deserves. Marriage, the union between one man and one woman, is a foundational key to a strong society; marriage strengthens social norms, is essential for the welfare of children, and is the bedrock of every successful country in modern history.
Unmoored liberals and libertarians continue to ignore and/or redefine the term marriage to the detriment of the American people. As USSC Justice Alito asserted, for millennia “marriage was inextricably linked to the one thing that only an opposite-sex couple can do: procreate.” Elevating adult sexual gratification over the security of society and the development of children is a relatively new iteration of how society thinks about marriage, and it is abhorrent.
Justice Alito also opined that those who disagree with same-sex marriage “will risk being labeled bigots and treated as such by governments, employers, and schools.” Unfortunately, Alito’s prediction has been proven true time and again. Small businesses, wedding vendors, schools, adoption agencies and churches have battled disparagement, threats, and lawsuits over sincerely held religious beliefs regarding marriage.
Specifically, discrimination policies have been weaponized by every level of government to intimidate and punish those who believe in the biblical definition of marriage. The passage of this Act will elevate and federalize those weapons.
Further, the rejection of traditional marriage and sexual norms have already borne societal consequences past the marketplace (kiddie drag shows, furries in schools, biological men being nominated for woman of the year, irreversible transgender teenage surgeries, and the mainstreaming of child objectification come to mind) but it is our children and their children who will bear the full brunt of our country’s complete abandonment of Biblical principles on sex if we allow it to happen.
Look around: it’s not a pretty picture. With the passage of this Act to federally institutionalize sexual moral relativism, the trajectory will only get worse.
This Act hastens the fall. The truth hasn’t changed. Defend truth. Defend marriage.
Stephanie Holden Smith is an experienced policy analyst, political commentator, and public speaker. Smith has worked and volunteered in Governmental Affairs in Alabama since 1997, including lobbying for a Fortune 500 company and serving as Deputy Director of Finance for the State of Alabama. She is currently the principal of Thatcher Coalition LLC. To contact Stephanie, please go to http://thatchercoalition.com. The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the policy or position of 1819 News. To comment, please send an email with your name and contact information Commentary@1819News.com.
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