Martyrs are not made overnight.

The Court Opens Door 

to Christian Persecution

by Deborah Sturm

Plutarch, the first-century Greek moralist who outlined four stages of a civilization, said that a society that has become libertine is in its next-to-last stage before its final descent into tyranny. When tyranny is mentioned, most people, if they are old enough to remember, think of Mussolini and his secret police or Hitler and his jack-booted thugs. After all, dictators are essentially cowards who not only operate in ambiguity but invariably get underlings to do their bidding. Under the current Obama administration, government bodies such as the National Security Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the Environmental Protection Agency, to name only a few, are amassing more and more power and becoming increasingly intrusive and tyrannical. Obama himself really doesn’t have to say anything to the heads of these agencies. Forget paper trails. All he needs to do is give a “wink and a nod.”

Add one more body to the tally of tyrants who may have gotten Obama’s “wink and nod.” The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has given its affirmative nod to homosexual marriage by striking down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). The wording of their decisions doesn’t matter. After all, if the SCOTUS is not against homosexual “marriage,” it is for it, just as our Lord said whoever is not for Him is against Him.

Furthermore, the SCOTUS betrayed a lack of judicial restraint as evidenced by an appeal to emotionalism in criticizing the defense of traditional marriage as serving to “degrade or demean,” to cause “injury and indignity,” to “disparage and injure” same-sex couples. Attorney Andrew M. Greenwell, citing the dissenting judges, particularly Justice Scalia, points out that the “fundamental premise of the majority opinion … is that any sort of held view that marriage and its benefits should be limited to one man and one woman … can only be motivated by ‘malice’ and ‘bigotry.’”

And it is this fundamental premise, which may seem ambiguous, that is extremely dangerous. UnlikeRoe vs. Wade, that led to the bathing of the American landscape with the blood of the innocents, this decision has the added potential of criminalizing the speech of anyone who supports traditional marriage. Indeed, pro-lifers have a tough time, particularly in healthcare, but the added emotionalism of this latest decision will be more far-reaching in attacks on the First Amendment.

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