Deacon Keith Fournier Reaping the Whirlwind: In the wake of the Obergefell opinion, is legalizing polygamy next?

Aug 30, 2016

In June 2015, the United States Supreme Court issued their majority opinion in Obergefell v Hodges.  Five lawyers manufactured out of whole cloth a faux “right” for two men or two women to do what they are incapable of doing; that is, to enter into a marriage. They claimed to have found such a new “right” in the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution, apparently next to the “right” to take the life of children in the womb through procured abortion for any reason throughout all nine months of a pregnancy.  

In the wake of that horribly written, unconscionable, and unreasonable opinion of five lawyers, activists within the LGBTQI community have been enforcing it as an edict across the nation. They are also using it to suppress free speech, free association, and the free exercise of religion. A tsunami has been unleashed, as cultural revolutionaries uproot the moral foundations of the social order by removing the unique role which the marriage bound family has long served as the first cell of civil society.

These architects of a new cultural revolution are also hell-bent on compelling faithful Christians across the confessional spectrum to deny their deeply held religious conviction that marriage is solely possible between one and one woman. Failure to do so may soon bring punitive measures as the police power of the state is unleashed against those who refuse to bend the knee to a new Caesar. It is already bringing the soft persecution which accompanies such ideological pogroms once they are unleashed.  

I have written about the quagmire the Obergefell opinion unleashed. The classical Christian position concerning the nature of marriage and the objective truth concerning sexual difference as a gift and a given, is not simply a religious position. Classical Christians insist there is a natural moral law which can be known by all men and women through the exercise of reason which confirm these truths.

Belief in such a natural law is woven throughout the founding documents of the American experiment in ordered liberty. That is because the founders stood on the shoulders of the giants of Christendom. It is also the source and support of every authentic human and civil rights movement. The natural law gives us the moral norms we need to build truly good societies – and to govern ourselves with equity. It must inform the civil and criminal law, or a nation soon devolves into tyranny and anarchy.  

To confer by a governmental fiat the benefits conferred in the past only to stable married couples and families to homosexual or lesbian paramours is a radical social experiment which has now been foisted upon the West by social engineers. To use the police power of the state to punish those who disagree is not only unjust, it leads to a form of state sponsored oppression which is specifically anti-Christian. Faithful Christians cannot and will not ever deny the undeniable, that marriage is between one man and one woman, intended for life and open to life.

I write as a Catholic Christian. The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith of the Catholic Church explained it well in 2003: "The Church's teaching on marriage and on the complementarity of the sexes reiterates a truth that is evident to right reason and recognized as such by all the major cultures of the world. Marriage is not just any relationship between human beings. It was established by the Creator with its own nature, essential properties and purpose."

The instruction from this Vatican watchdog over doctrine insists, "No ideology can erase from the human spirit the certainty that marriage exists solely between a man and a woman, who by mutual personal gift, proper and exclusive to themselves, tend toward the communion of their persons. In this way, they mutually perfect each other, in order to cooperate with God in the procreation and upbringing of new human lives."

The hostility toward Christians in the West is increasing. Efforts to compel compliance with this social experiment are coming on multiple fronts. For example, Christians who seek to engage in the legal profession are now in the crosshairs of these social engineers. Mat Staver, the founder and chairmen of Liberty Counsel and I opined in 2015 that advisory opinions from state supreme courts could exclude Christians from serving on the judicial bench.

The American Bar Association just proposed an amendment to Rule 8.4 of its Rules of Professional Conduct which could have the effect of accusing Christian lawyers who refuse to deny the nature of marriage or to affirm that gender identity is fluid, of committing professional misconduct.

Government has long regulated marriage for the common good. Examples, such as the age of consent, demonstrate how proper regulation ensured the free and voluntary basis of the marriage bond. No civil institution, including the United States Supreme Court, has the authority to redefine marriage. However, those five lawyers sitting on the Supreme Court have done just that. I use the expression five lawyers in referring to the justices who wrote the Obergefell opinion not only to express my utter disdain for the opinion, but because Justice John Roberts used the phrase.

In an independent dissenting opinion he wrote, “But for those who believe in a government of laws, not of men, the majority’s approach is deeply disheartening. ... Five lawyers have closed the debate and enacted their own vision of marriage as a matter of constitutional law.”. I have been a lawyer for thirty-six years and appeared as co-counsel at the Supreme Court several times on constitutional cases. I have never heard one of the justices refer to his or her colleagues as a “lawyer”. I believe it was his way of underscoring the fact that the majority opinion had no basis in the law and rejected any claim to legitimacy.   

I suggest that in a post-Obergefell America, we are just beginning to reap the whirlwind.

I was among those who suggested that manufacturing a faux legal framework to give the status of a marriage to homosexual or lesbian partnerships would open up a Pandora’s box, making it impossible to exclude any set of relationships from claiming the same legal status. Further, I contended that it would only be a matter of time before activists would use the Obergefell opinion to lift any other restriction on marriage.

The Catholic Herald reports that Hamza Piccardo, a founder of the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy, recently insisted, “there is no reason for polygamy not to be legalized after the Italian government passed a law to recognize the union of same-sex civil unions.” There is an alliance being forged between some within the Islamic community and the new left, based solely in their joint desire to eviscerate the Jewish and Christian roots of the West.

Crux News reported that Piccardo further opined, “If it’s only a matter of civil rights, then polygamy is a civil right… Myself and millions of people don’t agree with homosexual unions, and yet it’s licit and we respect them. Those interested in them are a minority, as polygamists would be. Society as a whole can accept everyone.” In the wake of Obergefell, is polygamy next?

The Lord spoke to Israel through the Prophet Hosea concerning their rejection of His law. “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7) In rejecting natural marriage, the Supreme Court of the United States certainly sowed the wind. A whirlwind is “a weather phenomenon in which a vortex of wind (a vertically oriented rotating column of air) forms due to instabilities and turbulence.”  We are living in a whirlwind of instability and turbulence.

May God give us the grace and the courage to rise to the hour and defend marriage and the family and social order founded upon it in the days ahead.