Guest Post by Representative Paul Ingabretson
As we are carried full speed into the legitimization of homosexual marriage in New Hampshire those of us who have tried and failed again to resist find ourselves once again examining the direction in which we are now moving as a society. Unless the Governor actually vetoes HB436 we are facing not only the legal ratification of, but the state’s blessing on, homosexual lifestyles as something they can never truly be. In the process we are falsely and wrongly implying the acceptance of the people themselves many of whom are truly offended in their consciences at the very idea of doing so. The party that has historically expressed outrage that a state should involve itself in individual moral choices has found itself in a classic political hypocrisy. Instead of simply ceasing the criminalization of persons for their moral choices (that happened long ago) it has changed the stakes and replaced in law the time honored morality of the past with a new morality for our age.
Instead of promoting the rational and healthy Constitutional standard of one man, one woman (ideally married for life without outside sexual liaisons) we now honor with marriage those whose unhealthy sexual behaviors go against nature itself. Where once we elevated liberty of conscience we now elevate and endorse the tolerance of libertine behavior. Where once our state honored the bonds of matrimony for the protection of children we now offer easy divorce – oh, well, for the injured innocent child. Where once we as a state welcomed the contributions of the church with its moral standards we now want political separation from it. Moral ambiguity is now taught in public schools. Actual morality must give way to tolerance. It is virtuous to look the other way. It is now immoral to even speak accurately of a dangerous behavior as the once higher standard of freedom of speech gives way to the fiendish hate crime. The old order of the self-evident truth is gone and a new age of “whatever” has dawned. Morality is dead, welcome to the new morality.
Even the question of rights is upside down when we now have the right to be compelled to go to school. When minor children have a right to have surgical procedures as long as it is related to eliminating a baby gotten as a result of enjoying their right to participate in sex play before adulthood but parents should have no right to manage their offspring in either area. They do have the right to pay the bills of course, or else. So, as usual we wind up with more questions than answers. Like, is it time to return to the self-evident and the universals and the tried and true values of all time or should we continue down this strange evolutionary path?
"To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea," according to Thomas Jefferson. Yet we, in the ambiguity of our acts, undermine the very idea of unchanging and universal virtues. We are allowing our politicians, ever the chimerical lot, to negotiate the meaning of the word “is.” By saying nothing we are accessories after the fact.
