Framing the Conversation: It's Got A Good Beat & I Can Dance To It - I'll Give It An 85

Since I haven't blogged about this lately, a quick review:

• I'm a conservative evangelical pastor of a Southern Baptist church who has been (very) happily married to my wife for 18 years.
• I believe homosexuality is one of many sexual sins - all of which subvert & warp God's intent for one woman/one man marriage.
• I hate the way most discussion about this stuff devolves into "dork recess" (thank you, Sports Night). My reason(s) for this series of posts is my attempt to frame the conversation in more reasonable, gracious & thoughtful terms.

OK, now that we've got that out of the way, let me point you to a thought-provoking article by someone who doesn't agree with me but raises some very important questions. Linda Holmes is a lawyer, blogger & freelance writer - I've recommended her work on this blog before (particularly her commentary on Survivor). Her online article, Marriage Rights & the Myth of Activist Judges (at GetLegal.com), questions one of the premises under which a number of folks have attacked the legal decisions here in California - the validity of judicial review in the face of the vote of the electorate.

Those of us who support a Biblical view of marriage have to deal with this stuff - we must make our cases without accusing judges of usurping power... when historically, that's the role we have asked the judiciary to play in this country. We've put the courts in the position of the kids on American Bandstand - listen to a snippet & rate the record. It's not fair to accuse them of hijacking the legal system when we're the ones who gave them the headphones.

There's a profound difference between saying that the court acted unwisely or that the principles they used (sexuality as a protected class, for example) are bad law... and saying that the court acted illegally. So, what do we do now? For starters, we have to argue for the marriage amendment based on reason, not on emotion. The Catholic bishops of New York have done a fine job with their position paper, Statement on "Same-Sex Marriage". Go read it.