Politics and Religion should not be ALLOWED to clash (Part 1)

Just before I wrote this editorial (about six months ago) for the prototype issue of With This Ring magazine, Washington State’s Supreme Court upheld a ban on gay marriages. A decade prior, Hawaii’s Supreme Court affirmed same-sex couples’ freedom to marry, only to have the decision overturned by a subsequently passed law that gave the state a newfound right to ban gay marriage.

In 2000, in something of a placation, the state of Vermont (under Howard Dean’s leadership) created a new matrimonial category—“civil unions”—that it has endowed with selected key rights and privileges of marriage; New Jersey followed suit just this past October. In May 2004, Massachusetts became the first state in the Union to legalize same-sex marriage (through judicial activism rather than the passage of an equalizing law) -- and it remains the only one to have done so.

One might rightly call me both imperialistic and patriotic, but the United States has long seen itself—and been positioned by so many counties around the world—as a “light unto the nations.” It’s with intended irony that I describe a country embroiled in a long-overdue Equal Marriage Rights Movement using a quote from the Hebrew Bible, for that same holy book defines homosexuality as an “abomination.”

In such light, perhaps it’s thankful that modern and flourishing statehood has proven itself, time and again, to be veritably irreconcilable with a religious view of the world. (An Evangelist President waging an unpopular war in the formerly theocratic nations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Jewish State battling its Arab-Muslim neighbors for the umpteenth time in its 58 year history should certainly stand as cases in point.)

The affirmation of religious faith was outlawed as part of the Pledge of Allegiance; yet no judge or citizen has publicly challenged the religious roots of American morality— the sanctity of marriage as a case-in-point.

“Any man who lies as a man as he lies with a woman—both have committed an abomination and shall surely be put to death.” Thus sayeth the Lord in Leviticus 20:13…but no divinity can hold sway on the sovereign territory of these United States. Or did we forget that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”?

Religion, it has been said, should unify people—still it tears our bonds asunder. Throughout history, religion has been pedestalled as the basis for curtailing freedoms, with abject disregard for the example it is supposed to set. So if it takes yet another movement to remind the leaders of this fine country that its citizens are exponentially smarter than even the Founding Fathers believed, and perfectly capable of wise tolerance, then With This Ring magazine is proud to carry the colors of the Equal Marriage Rights movement.