Today we give thanks to God for the wisdom and courage of U.S Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito,  Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett for holding that the “Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey are overruled; [and] the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

The syllabus (i.e., summary) in Dobbs v. the Jackson Women’s Health Organization outlines the major arguments addressed by the majority:

• Without any grounding in the constitutional text, history, or precedent, Roe imposed on the entire country a detailed set of rules for pregnancy divided into trimesters much like those that one might expect to find in a statute or regulation.

• Until the latter part of the 20th century, there was no support in American law for a constitutional right to obtain an abortion. No state constitutional provision had recognized such a right. Until a few years before Roe, no federal or state court had recognized such a right. Nor had any scholarly treatise. Indeed, abortion had long been a crime in every single State.

• Attempts to justify abortion through appeals to a broader right to autonomy and to define one’s “concept of existence” prove too much. … Those criteria, at a high level of generality, could license fundamental rights to illicit drug use, prostitution, and the like. What sharply distinguishes the abortion right from the rights recognized in the cases on which Roe and Casey rely is something that both those decisions acknowledged: Abortion is different because it destroys what Roe termed “potential life” and what the law challenged in this case calls an “unborn human being.” None of the other decisions cited by Roe and Casey involved the critical moral question posed by abortion.

• [T]he Court cannot allow its decisions to be affected by such extraneous concerns [i.e., stare decisis/precedent]. A precedent of this Court is subject to the usual principles of stare decisis under which adherence to precedent is the norm but not an inexorable command. If the rule were otherwise, erroneous decisions like Plessy would still be the law.

Writing for the Court, Justice Alito made mincemeat of the lousy arguments proffered in Roe and Casey, but the political invertebrate Chief Justice John Roberts did what he does best. He tried to swim smack dab down the middle of this roaring river. Hard to do without a spine. The political Roberts voted with the majority but refused to overturn Roe and Casey despite numerous leftist legal scholars acknowledging for decades that Roe lacked any grounding in the U.S. Constitution.

Justice Thomas again renewed his quest to revisit “substantive due process” jurisprudence, which he argues “has harmed our country in many ways,” and, therefore, “we should eliminate it from our jurisprudence at the earliest opportunity.” He shares this view with Justices Antonin Scalia and Hugo Black as well as Robert Bork and many other legal scholars.

Thomas has long argued that because of the “erroneous” nature of substantive due process jurisprudence, “in future cases, we should reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents, including Griswold, Lawrence, and Obergefell.”

Those cases addressed, respectively, the purported constitutional right to access contraception, the purported constitutional right to engage in homosexual sodomy, and the purported constitutional right of two people of the same sex to marry.

To be clear, Thomas’ argument regarding substantive due process jurisprudence has nothing to do with his moral view of contraception, sodomy, or marriage. Rather, he is making an argument about the constitutional basis—or lack thereof—of substantive due process doctrine, which Justice Antonin Scalia too criticized:

The entire practice of using the Due Process Clause to add judicially favored rights to the limitations upon democracy set forth in the Bill of Rights (usually under the rubric of so-called “substantive due process”) is in my view judicial usurpation.

Justice Hugo Black was similarly critical of substantive due process doctrine in Griswold:

[T]here is no provision of the Constitution which either expressly or impliedly vests power in this Court to sit as a supervisory agency over acts of duly constituted legislative bodies and set aside their laws because of the Court’s belief that the legislative policies adopted are unreasonable, unwise, arbitrary, capricious or irrational. The adoption of such a loose, flexible, uncontrolled standard for holding laws unconstitutional, if ever it is finally achieved, will amount to a great unconstitutional shift of power to the courts which I believe and am constrained to say will be bad for the courts and worse for the country. Subjecting federal and state laws to such an unrestrained and unrestrainable judicial control as to the wisdom of legislative enactments would, I fear, jeopardize the separation of governmental powers that the Framers set up and at the same time threaten to take away much of the power of States to govern themselves which the Constitution plainly intended them to have.

Leftists mock Thomas for his substantive critique of substantive due process mischief. They do so because they fear losing the power of the Court to act as a supreme law-making body. Well, they did fear that while they controlled the Court.

But Thomas’ critique is not a fringe critique, and he may have at least one ally on the Court: Justice Neil Gorsuch.

Now, the arduous work of changing hearts and minds that have been corrupted by nearly fifty years of leftist propaganda becomes even more urgent.

We need to donate more money to crisis pregnancy centers, both to help mothers who are considering abortion and to repair damage from domestic terrorists like Jane’s Revenge that promises violence to organizations that seek to protect children in their mothers’ wombs.

We need to pour money into creative, compelling public service/social media campaigns and the arts in order to elicit support for protecting preborn babies.

We need to elect wise, courageous state leaders who stand boldly for the sanctity of lives that pro-abortion activists deem unworthy of life.

We need to pass fiscal and social policies that end—rather than create—poverty, and we need to create a culture that doesn’t think a solution to poverty is baby sacrifice.

And we need to educate our children in places that teach that humans in their mothers’ wombs are sacred and that neither their developmental status, nor their convenience for others, nor their imperfections grant to their mothers the moral right to have them killed.

And we need to pray ceaselessly for the least of these. We must pray that incipient human lives are able to survive the dangerous waters of their mothers’ wombs.

Listen to this article read by Laurie:

https://staging.illinoisfamily.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/The-Nightmare-of-Roe-Ends.mp3

Written by Pastor Scott Lively

What we call the pro-family movement is a component of the larger conservative movement and deals with matters of sexuality and the natural family. Its American roots are in the cultural backlash to the Marxist revolution of the 1960s that turned family-centered society on its head and swapped the Judeo-Christian morality of our founding for Soviet-style “political correctness.”

Before the 1960s there wasn’t any need for a “pro-family” movement because family values had been the overwhelming consensus of the western world for centuries. Indeed, so surprised were Americans about the cultural revolution that it took nearly twenty years for the conservatives to mount a truly effective response to it. That came under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.

The 60’s revolution was not grounded in the Marxist orthodoxy of Lenin and Stalin, but the Cultural Marxism of Herbert Marcuse’s Frankfort School, which envisioned sexual anarchy, not a “workers revolt,” as the key to dismantling Judeo-Christian civilization. The natural core constituency for this ideology was the underground “gay” movement whose dream of social acceptance was not possible without a complete transformation of American sexual morality. Thus, beginning in the late 1940s, Marxist organizer Harry Hay, so-called “father of the American gay movement” was also “father” of the (then hidden) army of “gay” activists most responsible for the “culture war” that exploded in the 60’s and continues today.

America’s Marxist revolution was therefore a “sexual revolution” whose overwhelming success vindicated Marcuse’s destructive vision and became the primary tool of the one-world government elites for softening resistance to their domination by breaking the family-centered society which is every nation’s greatest source of strength, stability and self-sufficiency.

Importantly, though primarily driven behind the scenes by “gays,” the first goal was not legitimization of homosexual sodomy but the normalization of heterosexual promiscuity. This was the motive and strategy that drove “closeted” 1940s and 50s homosexual activist Alfred Kinsey’s fraudulent “science” attacking the marriage-based sexual ethic as “repressive” and socially harmful. It also drove the launch of the modern porn industry, beginning with Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Magazine (Hefner called himself “Kinsey’s pamphleteer”). It drove and defined the battles in the courts where sexual morality was systematically “reformed” by Cultural Marxist elites on the U.S. Supreme Court: contraception on demand to facilitate “fornication without consequences” (Griswold v Connecticut 1966), abortion on demand as the backup system to failed contraception (Roe v Wade 1973), and finally legalization of homosexual sodomy (Lawrence v Texas 2003).

Note the thirty year gap between Roe v Wade and Lawrence v Texas. That major delay in the Marxist agenda was achieved by the election of Ronald Reagan, under whom the pro-family movement became a major political force. That gap also highlights a critical fact: that “street activism” may be essential to any political cause but the real key to the culture war is the U.S. Supreme Court. By 1981 when Ronald Reagan took power the Marxists had nearly succeeded in collapsing the nation’s family and economic infrastructure and the LGBT juggernaut had come completely out of the shadows and taken its place at the head of the cultural blitzkrieg it had been steering from the beginning. Reagan stopped that juggernaut by putting Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court, the lion of constitutional originalism who wrote the majority opinion in Bowers v Hardwick (1986) which affirmed (not created) the constitutional right of states to criminalize homosexual sodomy and other harmful sexual conduct in the public interest.

Reagan and Scalia stopped the sexual revolution in its tracks and made it possible for the pro-family movement to begin restoring family values in society, which we strove diligently to do. I got my start in Christian social activism in those heady days and served as State Communications Director for the No Special Rights Act in Oregon in 1992 which forbade the granting of civil rights minority status based on sexual conduct. We fell short in Oregon but a Colorado version of our bill passed the same year. We had in essence won the culture war with that victory given that the Supreme Court had previously ruled that minority status designation required three things: a history of discrimination, political powerlessness, and immutable (unchangeable) status (such as skin color). We had a slam-dunk win on at least two of the three criteria and it would have been just a matter of time before we passed the No Special Rights law from coast to coast.

However, Reagan had been prevented by the elites from putting a second Scalia on the court in the person of Robert Bork, and was forced by the unprecedented political “borking” of Mr. Bork to accept their man Anthony Kennedy to fill the seat instead. Just ten years later, Kennedy served his function by writing the majority opinion killing the Colorado law in Romer v Evans (1996), audaciously declaring that the court didn’t need to apply its three-part constitution test to the No Special Rights Act because it was motivated by “animus” (hate) and thus did not represent a legitimate exercise of the state’s regulatory authority. The ruling was all the more outrageous given that it was only possibly through a blatant abuse of the court’s own judicial authority. Kennedy’s “disapproval = hate” lie set the tone for the political left from that point forward.

In Lawrence v Texas, Kennedy delivered the coup-de-grace to Justice Scalia by striking down Bowers v Hardwick and brazenly ruling that “public morality” cannot be the basis for law. Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority in all five SCOTUS opinions that have, in essence, established homosexual cultural supremacy in America, including the infamous and utterly unconstitutional Obergefell v Hodges (2015) “gay marriage” decision. He is, in my opinion, the worst and most culturally destructive jurist in the history of the court: the culprit (among many villainous candidates) most responsible for the current dysfunctional state of the family in America.

So where’s the “bright future” amidst this lamentation? It’s in the promise made and so-far kept by President Donald Trump to appoint only constitutional originalists to the supreme court. It is in the pleasantly surprising discovery that his first pick, Neil Gorsuch, seems from his first comments as a “supreme” to be a perfect choice to fill the “Scalia seat” on the court. It is in the hopeful rumors that Anthony Kennedy is about to retire, and the simple fact that ultra-hard leftist Ruth Bader Ginsberg and leftist Steven Broyer are of an age that their seats could at any time be vacated by voluntary or involuntary retirement.

In short, the bright future of the pro-family movement is in the hands of the man we hired to drain the swamp in Washington DC, and who hasn’t yet backed down in that fight despite the remarkable scorched-earth campaign of destruction and discreditation being waged against him by the establishment elites of both parties, Hollywood and the media.

I must admit that after Obergefell I began to think that the pro-family movement had lost the culture war, but I now believe there is real hope, not just for reclaiming some lost ground, but possibly of reversing all of the “gains” of the hard left over the past half century. A solid majority of true constitutional originalists could actually restore the legal primacy of the natural family in America fairly quickly, and our cultural healing could quickly follow.

As the leftist elites and street activists continue their all-hands-on-deck attempted “borking” of President Trump, let’s not forget why they’re doing it. His political survival means the end of theirs. I can’t think of a brighter future than that for our nation.

This article was originally posted at ScottLively.net

According to a 2011 Gallup poll, Americans thought that 25 percent of the population was gay (meaning one out of every four people), while those aged 18-29 put the figure at closer to 30 percent (meaning almost one in every three people). The reality is that less than 2 percent of the population is gay (meaning fewer than one in 50 people), and many gay leaders know this is true.

People of America, you have been duped.

For many years, we were told that “one in every 10 Americans” was gay, a figure based on the massively flawed 1948 study of Alfred Kinsey. (Kinsey actually relied on data from male prisoners to come up with his statistics.)

Even though gay activists knew the figure was inflated, they used it as a convenient lie, since, as two leading gay strategists noted in the late 1980s, “there is strength in numbers.” (For details, go here.) As expressed by a gay leader a few days ago, “The truth is, numbers matter, and political influence matters.”

In other words, if Americans realized that less than 2 percent of the population was gay rather 10 percent (let alone 25 percent), they would have a very different view of “gay rights.”

To be sure, it is wrong to bully or oppress or mistreat anyone based on gender or ethnicity or romantic attractions, so that is not the question. And whether gays are 1 percent of the population or 90 percent, they should not be mistreated.

But you don’t overhaul the legal system to the point of attacking freedoms of speech, conscience, and religion based on the sexual and romantic desires of a tiny percentage of the population, nor do you engage in a massive social experiment, like redefining marriage, because of a statistically tiny group of people.

Back in 2003, in their official brief in the landmark Lawrence v. Texas U.S. Supreme Court decision, a major coalition of 31 gay and pro-gay organizations used the figures of 2.8 percent of the male population and 1.4 percent of the female population as identifying as gay, lesbian, or bisexual.

This means that these activist organizations were fully aware that the 10 percent figure was completely bogus and yet they never protested when that figure was used to advance their cause. Why expose such a useful lie?

In 2011, UCLA law school’s Williams Institute released a study done by Dr. Gary J. Gates, who serves as the Williams Distinguished Scholar at the Charles R. Williams Institute on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law and Public Policy. His official bio also states that, “Dr. Gates co-authored The Gay and Lesbian Atlas and is a recognized expert on the geography and demography of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender  population. … Many national and international media outlets regularly feature his work.”

According to Dr. Gates, just 1.7 percent of the population identifies as gay, with about the same figure identifying as bisexual.

Contrast this with an informal poll I conducted while speaking at a Christian youth conference last month, asking these committed young people what percentage of the population was gay. (Some of these kids were home schooled and most seemed less aware of the more notorious cable TV shows, so they were less worldly wise than your average young people.) The first teen answered, “Thirty percent.” The second said, “Forty percent.”

Where in the world did they get such ridiculous figures? You can thank the media for that, by which I mean the sitcoms, dramas and movies along with the major news outlets. (For an enlightening Pew Research survey, go here.)

But this is where things get very interesting. For years gay activists worked to get a sexual-orientation question on the CDC’s National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a document of major importance in both government policy and public perception.

That question was included in the 2013 survey, and the results, released last month, made for shocking story lines: “1.6 percent of adults self-identify as gay or lesbian, and 0.7 percent consider themselves bisexual.”

These figures approximated the ones used by conservative leaders for years, because of which we were mocked as liars and vilified as haters. Now the government confirmed what we knew to be true.

Gay and lesbian leaders weren’t happy with the results, with Dr. Scout, director of the nonprofit CenterLink’s Network of LGBT Health Equity, stating, “If we really are 2 percent vs. 4 percent, it means people are going to say, ‘OK, I’m only going to care half as much.'”

How about changing that to, “If we really are 2 percent vs. 25 percent, people are going to say, ‘OK, I’m only going to care one-twelfth as much.'” And take note: Dr. Scout only claimed that 4 percent were gay.

Bisexual leaders were concerned as well, with Ellyn Ruthstrom, president of the Bisexual Resource Center in Boston, opining, “For such a respected survey as the NHIS to produce such a small number is a blow.”

“It’s just going to make it harder for us when we’re going out and talking to people about the bisexual population,” she said. “We have a real hard time already with people not taking the bisexual identity seriously.”

But it gets more interesting still. An article in the Washington Post entitled, “Gay rights groups dispute federal survey’s estimate of population,” notes that the 2013 National Adult Tobacco Survey came up with results that “more resembled what gay-rights groups had expected. It found that 3.5 percent of Americans considered themselves gay, lesbian or bisexual, with 1.9 percent labeling themselves gay or lesbian, and 1.6 percent identifying as bisexual.”

This means that gay-rights groups knew full well that, rather than being one in 10, their numbers were closer to one in 50, with fewer than one in 60 identifying as bisexual.

The truth is that America has been lied to and duped, and gay activists have been complicit in the deception, if not actively leading the way in the ruse. With the new survey out, it’s time to expose the lies.

The reality is that fewer than one in 50 Americans identify themselves as gay, out of which only a minority wants to be “married.”

How foolish, then, to redefine marriage, restrict freedoms of conscience, speech, and religion, and engage in a massive social experiment based on such a tiny percentage of the population.

We won’t be duped again.

This article was originally posted on the ChristianPost.com website.

One year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on the Defense of Marriage Act, this much is clear: Justice Antonin Scalia is a prophet.

Back in 2003, when the court handed down the decision in Lawrence v. Texas, striking down all criminal statutes against homosexual acts, Scalia declared that the stage was set for the legalization of same-sex unions. That was 2003.

“Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned,” wrote Scalia.

He was proved to be absolutely prophetic when, just ten years later, the court ruled in United States v. Windsor that the Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional — thus striking down the federal statute defining marriage exclusively as the union of a man and a woman.

Once again, Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, while Scalia handed down a fiery dissent. As before, Scalia was prophetic.

Even though the Court did not rule that same-sex marriage must be legal in all states, it set the stage for that to happen. As Scalia wrote: “As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.”

One year later, it is abundantly evident that we did not have to wait or listen for long.  Almost immediately, challenges to state laws and constitutional amendments prohibiting same-sex marriages erupted.

In a staggering series of decisions at the federal and state levels, judges explicitly cited the nullification of DOMA and the central arguments of the Windsor decision in striking down those laws and constitutional amendments.

A year after the death of DOMA, not one major decision has defended any of these statutes or amendments. Kennedy’s opinion has been cited as authoritative in virtually every one of these judicial actions.

This has meant that in a single year, the legalization of same sex marriage has become a reality or received a positive judicial action in states including Utah, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Virginia, Texas, Pennsylvania, Oregon and a host of other states far from where such unions had previously been recognized.

A year later, it is clear that the Supreme Court remains the central political institution of moral transformation in America.

A year later, it is also clear that the court was riding a vast change in public opinion.

We must also see that the time is almost at hand for that transformation to be made complete, at least in terms of the legalization of same-sex marriage in all 50 states.

What was not clear a year ago was the velocity of this transformation. Even the architects of the revolution are expressing surprise at the speed of these judicial actions.

By the end of this summer, the Supreme Court will likely need to revisit the question once again, this time responding to the cavalcade of lower court decisions the high court spawned.

There is very good reason to expect a decision mandating same-sex marriage coast-to-coast in the Court’s next term, with a decision to be handed down just a year from now, almost to the day.

Furthermore, the Obama administration has been pushing the agenda vigorously, with the federal government now aligning all agency policies in line with the Windsor decision – even extending to areas the decision was never intended to reach.

Where does that leave committed Christians?

Those of us who believe that human flourishing depends upon the recognition and honoring of marriage as exclusively the union of a man and a woman see this transformation of marriage into something radically different as a grave threat to human society and human happiness.

We do not argue that these damaging effects on society and its individuals will be immediately apparent, but we are sadly confident that the subversion of marriage will bring devastating effects over time.

In retrospect, we can also see that previous subversions of marriage set the stage for the radical redefinition of marriage in our times.

Our failure to answer the challenge of rising divorce rates was, eventually, fatal to our effort to defend marriage against its redefinition in terms of gender. Some of us saw this danger at the time, but there was no adequate effort to oppose the devastating impact of divorce.

The larger sexual revolution also plays an incalculable role in this transformation. The moral separation of sex and marriage among millions of Americans removed any hope of establishing a lasting consensus on the central importance of marriage and its essence as a monogamous man-woman union.

A year after the death of DOMA, it is also clear that very real threats to religious liberty now loom before us. This is perhaps the inevitable consequence of a moral revolution of this scale.

Will the government now coerce the consciences of churches, religious institutions, schools, colleges, social service agencies, and the like? There is now strong evidence that government at every level will attempt such coercion. Will America abandon religious liberty for the sake of erotic freedom?

Those of us who believe same-sex marriage to be a moral impossibility now face a very daunting challenge — how to live in a society that is moving so rapidly against our moral worldview, even as the society shared that worldview for over 2,000 years.

We face the challenge of finding how to relate to our neighbors and contribute to the common good when we see that very society undermining human flourishing in the name of sexual liberty.

A year after the death of DOMA the listening and the waiting are almost over. The revolution is almost complete. The shoe is dropping fast.

One thing is clear to all – no one was exaggerating when the Windsor decision was declared by both sides to be revolutionary.

We can all agree on that much, just one year after the revolution was declared.

This article was first published on the CNN Belief Blog.

Written by Matthew J. Franck

Today, we face a movement to accomplish on a societal level what those who embrace morally condemned behavior have always sought as individuals: rationalization.

Governor Rick Perry of Texas recently made waves when he was asked whether he thought homosexuality is a disorder. He replied that he was not professionally qualified to pronounce on a medical or mental health question, and then added, “Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that . . . I may have the genetic coding that I’m inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way.” As you might expect, this answer—which many millions of Americans might honestly have given—caused a bit of a ruckus.

If you wonder whether you would feel confident giving Perry’s answer, or have doubts whether it is even a defensible answer to give, you should read Robert R. Reilly’s latest book, Making Gay Okay: How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Changing Everything. This is a very important book, and Ignatius Press should be commended for publishing it.

Among the “LGBT” activists and their allies who have lately been so successful in transforming our culture’s understanding of love, marriage, and sexual integrity, Reilly’s book will be hated and denounced. It is likely that many of those who denounce the book most strongly will not actually read it. They will certainly not squarely confront or refute its arguments.

By contrast, among those who feel beleaguered by the culture war over same-sex marriage, who have shrugged and decided to live with the fraud of “marriage equality” in hopes of obtaining some civil peace, Reilly’s book will probably just be ignored. That is unfortunate, because Making Gay Okay is a very powerful account of how LGBT activists have so successfully conquered—or at least subdued—the hearts and minds of such people. It is also unfortunate because LGBT activists will not allow for a civil peace on any terms that friends of a free society can accept.

From Tolerance to Cultural Conquest

This must have been a hard book to write. Sometimes, it is a hard book to read. Reilly tries to keep the descriptive material to a minimum, but some degree of rather unsettling description is unavoidable, given his thesis. That thesis is that the overturning of longstanding laws against morally proscribed sexual acts, the push to change the psychiatric profession’s view of sexual “orientation,” the drive for acceptance of open homosexuality in the military, in the Boy Scouts, and in our educational system, and the campaign for same-sex marriage are all about one thing: transforming our society’s attitude toward sodomy. As he puts it in one concise formulation:

The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest because the rationalization upon which it is based requires the assent of the community to the normative nature of the act of sodomy.

Reilly’s insistence on the centrality of the act of sodomy to our culture war over marriage and sexuality is bound to be off-putting even to some readers inclined to his overall view. He has multiple chapter titles beginning “Sodomy and . . . ,” and he refers throughout the book to “sodomitical relationships.” But this blunt and fearless way of arguing only illustrates the Nietzschean “transvaluation of values” our society has undergone. It is now widely considered a violation of the norms of decency in civil discourse to remind people publicly of what were only a generation ago the norms of decency in private behavior as well as public life.

Reilly is right, however, to be tough and unyielding on this point. His touchstone is nature, and his argument is that nature has equipped men and women to enter into one-flesh unions that are both unitive and procreative (here he might have usefully referred to a book powerfully supporting his view, What Is Marriage?). We human beings have a nature both sexual and rational, and our flourishing and happiness cannot be achieved except in accord with our nature.

What distinguishes some persons from others where “sexuality” is concerned is not a different nature, as though “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were distinct human types or “identities,” but different desires, propensities, and, finally, behaviors. The choice to engage in particular sexual behavior is a matter of free will about which moral judgments can be made. Reilly relentlessly stresses the question of behavior, asking whether we are willing to consider sexual behavior, like other behaviors, as properly governed by the ends of human nature and human flourishing. Thus also his insistence on naming the behavior that one side in the “sexuality” wars wants approval for, and that the other side would rather not think about or talk about.

This is not a book that relies on revelation or scripture in any way. As Reilly notes, it was the ancient Greek philosophers who first came to the insights about nature on which he relies. By contrast, the idea that our nature is malleable, that we can remake ourselves to suit our desires, was ushered in by Rousseau. Only with the dominance of this distinctly modern notion did it become possible for age-old moral strictures on sexual behavior to be burned to the ground and replaced by new strictures of our own making. Only a Rousseauian view that nothing about human nature is fixed could give rise to a culture in which it is possible to redefine marriage to include relationships once considered to be intrinsically immoral.

Privacy Jurisprudence, Sex, and Diapers

Ours is a famously tolerant age. One may search high and low, without success, for advocates of reinstating the harsh legal consequences that once attended the discovery of sexual relations between man and man, or woman and woman. In most American jurisdictions, the criminal laws on sodomy were repealed, modified, or simply unenforced long before the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas struck them down in 2003. Therefore, that ruling did not change much about the practical dangers of running afoul of the law for committing sodomy; they were practically nonexistent already.

But it is one thing for a culture to become increasingly relaxed about such things, as some people reject old moral norms and others are persuaded to think no great harm will come from decriminalization. Such a change is a matter for social negotiation to work out and for prudence to decide. It is quite another thing for the highest court in the land to declare that criminal laws reflecting age-old moral sensibilities about the harm that comes from disordered sexual behavior—sensibilities that are still as defensible as ever—violate a constitutional “right” that can only be derived from fraudulent premises in constitutional law.

Such a ruling embeds new norms of right and wrong in law. Standards of right that were once expressed in the law are now condemned as wrongful discrimination, while conduct once considered degrading and shameful is now considered fitting and proper. The road from the Lawrence ruling to the judicial pronouncement of same-sex marriage as a constitutional right is a short one (as events quickly proved), especially when it is paved with platitudes about the “dignity” of an alleged “class” of persons who can only be identified by reference to their avowed interest in “intimate” conduct with others. This is question-begging with a vengeance.

Reilly rightly notes that “it would be wrong to assign the major share of blame” for the legal somersaults of recent years “to the homosexual apologists.” The blame largely belongs to the partisans who gave us the “privacy” jurisprudence of the U.S. Supreme Court, which began in Griswold v.Connecticut (1965) by breaking “the first link in the chain connecting sex and diapers” and declaring a right of married couples to use contraception. The progression continued in Eisenstadt v. Baird (1971) and Carey v. Population Services (1977), which declared single adults and minors had the same right. Most horrifyingly, Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) declared and reaffirmed a right to kill the unborn child in the womb. “Abortion,” Reilly remarks, “brings to completion the denial of procreative sex by nullifying its effects, which are seen as accidental.”

In this legal regime—pioneered by people with no particular interest in homosexuality—the constitutional “rights” to commit sodomy and to obtain recognition of same-sex relationships as “marriages” are not very surprising. The “freedom” to do what the law hitherto condemned seems easy to justify once human sexuality’s unitive and procreative nature is denied, and the “equality” claim soon follows for the relationships most deeply characterized by this denial.

Casualties of the Assault on Nature

What are the casualties of this assault on nature? The first one is truth. We must believe, contrary to the evidence of our own experience and observations, that sexual “orientation” is somehow immutable, fixed from birth. (Yet we must also believe that “gender identity” is a “social construct.”) We must believe that no one with same-sex attractions can or should do anything to resist them, though we may know people who have done so and believe it has been good for them.

A second casualty is our institutions. We must believe that institutions from the military to the Boy Scouts will suffer no ill effects from the introduction of open homosexual relations in their midst. We must believe that it is good for students from kindergarten to college to be marinated in a sexual ideology that runs contrary to the moral and religious beliefs of the adults who brought them into the world and desire a morally healthy future for them. Our medical and mental health professions must have their notions of healthy and normal behavior sacrificed on the altar of political pressure.

Our faith communities must be turned inside out by revolutions in received doctrine that have been their patrimony for centuries. Our diplomacy must be compromised by the espousal of an ideology that offends the governments and populations of other nations whose friendship is important to the United States. Our Constitution, the rule of law, and republican self-government must be traduced in order to manufacture a specious “marriage equality.”

A third casualty is the next generation. We must believe that the institution of marriage itself will not be wounded further by a fundamental redefinition, after the injuries already inflicted by the sexual revolution’s message of “liberation” through contraception, “population control” through abortion, and no-fault unilateral divorce. We must believe, on the basis of shoddy “social science” backed by ruthless ideologues, that children are no better off being raised by their own biological parents, married to one another in a lifelong union, than in a household headed by people who are in and out of sexual relationships with other adults, whether of the same or the opposite sex. We must believe that dads and moms are optional, interchangeable parental units. Better social science about children’s welfare, as well as the accumulated wisdom of human history, must be suppressed or discredited, by fair means or foul.

The final casualty is freedom itself. We must believe. No public deviation from the new orthodoxy can be permitted, and even private deviations are suspect. No baker, photographer, or florist can be permitted to dissent from the redefinition of marriage, even or especially on explicitly religious grounds. No employer—public, commercial, nonprofit, or religious—can be permitted to demur from the redefinition of marriage in its conditions of employment or the benefits it attaches to marital status. No social service agency or religious charity can be allowed to act on the conviction that children should be placed with a married man and woman as adoptive or foster parents. No couples seeking to adopt or foster children can be allowed to do so if they hold retrograde opinions on sin, sex, and marriage. No one who holds such opinions may be permitted to teach young people, from pre-school to graduate school. No one must be allowed to counsel confused youngsters who have questions about where their sexual desires are leading them, if the counseling offered does not affirm the new ideological normal.

We must believe. As Robert Reilly underscores in this searingly effective book, what we face today is a movement to accomplish, on a collective and society-wide basis, what those who embrace morally condemned behavior have always sought to accomplish for themselves as individuals: rationalization that what’s wrong is right. If we are to remain true to the cumulative wisdom of our civilization about human nature and the conditions of human flourishing, we must respond as fearlessly as the author of Making Gay Okay and say—it’s not.

Matthew J. Franck is Director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

This article was first published on The Public Discourse website.