Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 10, 1993 TAG: 9303100391
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
MAN PLAYS GOD GUTTING FOUNDATIONS TWICE IN NEW YORK
TWO FOUNDATIONS in New York City were attacked in recent days.One, at the World Trade Center, was caused by a bomb. Although there was tremendous loss of life and property, the structural damage will be repaired.
The other occurred at the Municipal Building, where 109 couples showed up to register as "domestic partners." A new city law grants many rights previously reserved to heterosexual married couples to people of the same or opposite sex who want to live together without, as they used to say, benefit of clergy (though there are now sufficient clergy who will do anything, including "marry" homosexuals). The damage from this assault on the nation's primary social foundation is substantial and may be very difficult to repair.
For $20, the domestic partners receive what they have long sought - a degree of societal approval for what used to be known as "living in sin," before sin died off, like an extinct species.
Just as married couples do, domestic partners employed by the city now will be able to take unpaid leave when they wish to care for a new child. They'll also have the same rights as married spouses to visit partners at municipal hospitals and city jails. And they'll have the same standing as married couples in qualifying for apartments and in inheriting a lease in residential buildings owned or overseen by city housing agencies.
This law fulfills a goal first outlined in 1970 at a homosexual convention in Philadelphia. Delegates called for "the abolition of the nuclear family because it perpetuates the false categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality." A lesbian workshop demanded the "destruction of the nuclear family," which the statement called "a microcosm of the fascist state."
At a 1972 meeting of the National Coalition of Gay Organizations in Chicago, participants demanded the "repeal of all legislative provisions that restrict sex or number of persons entering into a marriage unit; and the extension of legal benefits to all persons who cohabit regardless of sex or numbers."
For more than a century, the Supreme Court has ruled that a family begins when a man and woman legally marry. Given the evolutionary principle that now permeates the law, and its tailoring by judges to fit the customer, it is probable that even this definition might change.
Since the 19th century, the Supreme Court has consistently refused to sanction polygamy, bigamy or any other relationship that would define a family as beginning from a source other than the uniting of a man and woman in legal matrimony. It has written of the male-female marital bond as "the true basis of human progress."
In Griswold vs. Connecticut (1965), the court said, "Marriage is a coming together for better or for worse, hopefully enduring, and intimate to the degree of being sacred. It is an association that promotes a way of life."
So, too, does the "domestic partner" arrangement promote a way of life - a way of life that is an assault on the most important building block of any society: the traditional concept of family.
Marriage, like law, has its roots in the Bible, which says, "A man shall leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife; and they shall be one flesh." Since that book and so many other foundational principles of this country have now been symbolically "burned" by the political-correctness police, appeals to such a standard increasingly fall on deaf ears.
Yet, the principle remains and is beneficial to those who heed it and to a society that upholds it.
In his once widely read "Commentaries on the Laws of England" (1765), the great British legal scholar William Blackstone saw law as flowing from a Creator, who not only endowed humans with certain rights, but also established rules for a social order which, if followed, would profit individuals and society.
"Man, considered as a creature," wrote Blackstone, "must necessarily be subject to the laws of his Creator, for he is an entirely dependent being." Blackstone said the will of Man's Maker is "the law of nature" and "this law of nature, being co-equal with mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other . . . no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this."
Sadly, in New York City and in increasing numbers of places, people like Mayor David Dinkins in effect have declared themselves God, and are busy destroying the foundation of the law of nature and the bedrock principles of history. This can cause destruction far greater and more long-lasting than any single bombing. Los Angeles Times Syndicate