Today's Moral Mind Field. - I received a question yesterday from Swami Prem on what my thoughts were on the upcoming Marriage Amendment Vote in the Senate tomorrow.
So let me see if I can cobble them together.
My first thought is that it should be unnecessary to have a marriage amendment to the Constitution of the United States. But then it should also be unnecessary to have a slavery amendment and a woman's suffrage amendment.
I am of course thinking of the ideal. Ideally, the morals of people should be enough to govern their actions and not do things that harm themselves and those in society, but the reality is that standards are needed to mark a society's boundary lines of acceptable behavior. So, today we find ourselves at one of those unwritten societal lines and must decide if it is to be drawn on the paper that marks our boundaries.
Of course what brings us to this line is different from the slavery and woman's voting issues which sought to reinforce the equality of men and women which were inherent in the document already. Instead, this issue of same sex marriage championed by a minority of people is one not of equal rights but of forced acceptance of behavior. The behavior being the sinful act of homosexuality.
There was a time when such a law was not needed to protect the family institution of marriage, but the slow erosion over the last half century of morals through things like no-fault-divorce, single parent homes, and activism of people seeking acceptance for their immoral behaviors whether it is drugs, homosexuality, group sex, pedophilia, or bestiality will and is now forcing our society to make, or not make, a stand for its continued moral and future existence. It is a stand that would not have been necessary had the High Court of America forfeited it's duty to uphold law instead of making law when it decided that the people had no right to decide that sodomy was a sin and a crime.
So I think, faced with the realities of life in America, leaders and people of conscious must stand up and draw a line if the country of America is going to continue to be the standard that pulls the rest of the world up to higher and better pursuits of freedom which lead to prosperity and health.
I've called my Senators and I suggest everyone do the same in an exercise of the freedom that is ours won by the blood of so many people waged over many years in securing and protecting that privilege.
I subtitled this post, Today's Moral Mind Feild, because it is obvious that the media today is avoiding the subject of this important vote in the Senate. The talking heads are silent, the news print is failing to take up the banner, and even much of the Internet media is blissfully moving onto other topics less explosive and divisive when our country is faced with a very important decision of direction and morality. Oh, you can find mention, but it is buried. A little digging brought me to an article today from Helen Dewar and Alan Cooperman of the Washington Post.
Dewar & Cooperman inform us that now the Senate Republicans are losing their steam on the issue and that the vote is now, from what I can surmise, all together in question. So despite many citizens calling in over the weekend and sending eMails and letters to representatives the decision is floundering like so many other decisions of morality that our government officials have shuffled around for several decades now.
Perhaps, like so many other times, the politicians sought only to use this as a vote getter in their states. I for one will remember their failure to press the issue or the obstruction of it.
