What we propose to do today is to legitimize that which both the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God clearly reveal to be illegitimate. We propose, as a society, to solemnize, and affirm as acceptable and appropriate, what our Creator has declared, both by natural and special revelation, to be a violation of his created order.

It may be, as Time magazine declared in its April 8 cover story, that the debate is effectively over, and America has already decided, whatever the Supreme Court says, that same sex couples should be granted the right to marry. Certainly the drumbeat for marriage equality seems louder by the day.

Those who oppose it are ridiculed as hopelessly out of step with the times, homophobic, moronic or downright hateful. Who in his right mind can be opposed to equality? But if this is the road we are choosing to take, as a nation, some of us are compelled to warn of danger ahead.

Ultimately, the issue comes down to this: Are humans merely the result of random molecules in a random universe formed from a random explosion? Are we simply the chance byproduct of time and slime, with no designer, no preexistent creator? Then, if you think it through, the concepts of right and wrong, morality and ethics have no ultimate meaning. Human life has no more intrinsic value than that of a snail, or a paramecium, and we have no grounds upon which to declare that it is “right,” for example, to protect and nurture a child, and “wrong,” when you are hungry, to kill and eat him.

Or to bring the matter painfully closer to home, we have no grounds to say it is wrong to enter an elementary school and kill a few dozen children out of a desire to get your name on a list of mass murderers. We can say that at this point in our development as a species, we don’t approve of it. We can legislate against it. But we cannot declare it is inherently wrong, or evil, because such terms have no meaning in a world without a creator.

America’s laws have consistently described marriage as the union of one man and one woman, because our founders believed that, as our Declaration of Independence put it, we are subject to “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” The phrase “the Laws of Nature” refers to natural revelation, what we learn from the world God has made. The laws “of Nature’s God” refers to special revelation, what we learn from the word God has revealed.

English Jurist William Blackstone, widely recognized as among the most influential in the framing of U.S. law, through his Commentaries on the Laws of England, wrote: “Upon these two foundations, the law of nature and the law of revelation, depend all human laws, that is to say, no human laws should be [allowed] to contradict these.”

When throughout our history we became convinced that some of America’s laws did contradict those foundational truths, we changed those laws, sometimes through a long and painful process.

For example, some who benefited from the vile African slave trade attempted to justify it by pointing out that slavery was condoned under Old Testament civil law. But that slavery was much more like what we would call indentured servitude, with strict regulations protecting the servants. The whole corrupt African slave trade was built upon human trafficking, a crime punishable by death (Exodus 21:16). We did away with the slave trade precisely because it clearly violated the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.

What we propose to do today is to legitimize that which both the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God clearly reveal to be illegitimate. We propose, as a society, to solemnize, and affirm as acceptable and appropriate, what our Creator has declared, both by natural and special revelation, to be a violation of his created order.

It’s true that homosexuality is only one of several ways that mankind has distorted the sexual intimacy intended for marriage. If we are to be consistent, we cannot ignore fornication, adultery, prostitution, sex-trafficking, bigamy, incest and pedophilia, to name a few. But our society is not placing its seal of approval on such distortions — at least not today. One need not be a prophet to imagine what another decade or two may bring if we remove the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God as the foundation for our law.

What happens to any edifice when its foundation is destroyed? As Dostoevsky put it, “If there is no God, all things are permissible.”

Russ Sukhia is a Teaching Elder in the Presbyterian Church in America and is Pastor of Liberty PCA in Owings Mills, Md. This article appeared in the Carroll County Times and is used with permission. 

[Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]