American Moral Values: Narrowed or Prioritized?
It’s a cheap shot to criticize socially conservative American “values voters” for narrowing the political litmus test to abortion and same-sex “marriage,” because “narrowing” and “prioritizing” are two different things.
Can there be a higher priority or a more compelling moral issue than three thousand six hundred babies dying every day? If a child is born poor, he at least has some chance of escaping poverty. If he is killed before he is born, he doesn’t have a chance of escaping his mother’s womb.
We lose more babies through abortion every year than the total fatalities in all of the wars in which we have ever participated, commencing with the French and Indian War and including the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I, and Gulf War II. What’s wrong with religious people who are not making this their paramount issue?
Again, I would contend that supporting traditional marriage is not narrowing, but prioritizing. Marriage is the basic building block of human society. A couple of years ago, I was lecturing at Harvard. During the question-and-answer period, a student asked me the following question concerning my opposition to same-sex “marriage”: “You seem like a nice guy. Why would you want to interfere in the personal, private relationship of two individuals?”
I answered that marriage is anything but a personal, private relationship. That is one reason the state requires a license to get married. Marriage is a social and civic institution with profound social responsibilities, obligations, and impact. Every society in human history has severely regulated who may get married to whom, and under what circumstances they may dissolve the relationship, precisely because of this institution’s enormous importance to the entire society. Same-sex “marriage” is a cultural and social issue with profound moral, social, and public policy implications.
By Richard Land
Christian Post Guest Columnist
Thu, Nov. 29 2007
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