THE WANDERER, NOVEMBER 27, 2003

JOSEPH SOBRAN'S
WASHINGTON WATCH

Sodomites All

     The supreme court of Massachusetts has ordered the 
state's legislature, within 180 days, to revise the law 
to accommodate same-sex "marriage." Judicial arrogance is 
nothing new, but this takes the cake. The court isn't 
even pretending that it's merely "interpreting" the law; 
it's demanding that elected officials legislate a 
perversion of the ancient and universal understanding of 
the most basic social institution in the world.

     Now it's up to liberal Massachusetts to do what 
neither any other state nor the U.S. Congress has ever 
had the fortitude to do: impeach justices who flagrantly 
abuse their office and usurp power. If it fails to do so, 
there are indeed no limits.

     Did anyone see this coming? Well, yes. A long time 
ago. When the law legitimated divorce, it effectively 
reduced marriage to the status of a more or less 
temporary sexual contract. It wasn't only Catholics who 
saw that this might lead to anything, even if nobody 
could imagine that it would elevate even sodomy to equal 
status with natural relations.

     On the other hand, maybe someone did imagine it, but 
refrained from predicting it for fear of sounding absurd 
and disgusting. G.K. Chesterton, prescient as always, 
wrote of "the superstition of divorce," by which he meant 
that if there was such a thing as divorce, there was 
really no such thing as marriage. Elsewhere he pointed 
out that a law, like a dog, follows its own nature; when 
we make a law, its inner logic may lead to all sorts of 
consequences we can't foresee.

     Many people did foresee that divorce would, quite 
logically, reduce marriage to the level of fornication; 
but they should also have seen that it would, just as 
logically, reduce marriage to the level of sodomy.

     As the "gay" Catholic pundit Andrew Sullivan 
recently crowed, "We are all sodomites now." He meant 
that by accepting contraception as normal, the great 
majority of Americans have surrendered any basis for 
condemning homosexual acts.

     Even more recently, Sullivan has written that he can 
no longer bear to attend Mass, because of the Church's 
"intolerance" of homosexuality. Since he has also 
announced that he is HIV-positive, you might think he'd 
have certain second thoughts; but apparently not. 
Apparently St. Paul's warnings to the Romans about the 
natural penalties of sodomy -- written long before anyone 
had heard of AIDS -- prove only that St. Paul was 
"homophobic." Of course in those days we were not all 
sodomites yet.

     "The world's gone mad today, And good's bad today," 
as the (sodomite) Cole Porter wrote in "Anything Goes." 
Prophetic, eh? Two or three generations ago even a 
sodomite could see where we were headed! And today, a 
sodomite who dares to call himself a Catholic actually 
celebrates the fact that we have now gotten there. 
Congratulations, Mr. Sullivan.

     I once knew a man, now dead, who had divorced, left 
the Church, and married a divorced Catholic woman with 
two children. He knew what the Church had to say about 
that. He knew what his pious parents thought about it. 
Did he complain about the Church's "intolerance"?

     Never. He taught his stepchildren to say grace 
before meals and sometimes took them to Mass. One of 
them, in fact, became a Catholic in large part because of 
his influence, though he didn't realize it.

     That was my stepfather. I was the boy. I never heard 
him breathe a word against the Church. He never confided 
his feelings to me, but after I became a Catholic I 
slowly came to understand. He could commit what he knew 
were sins, but he couldn't bear to try to justify them to 
a child. Unlike so many lapsed Catholics, he never 
suggested that he was right and the Church was wrong. 
Dear old man, whatever your sins, may God have mercy on 
you for that! In spite of everything, you taught me 
humility, grace, and charity.

     But I digress, rather spectacularly, from the topic 
of the latest ruling of the supreme court of 
Massachusetts, which has already earned the praise of 
Senator Edward Kennedy. Who -- to digress again -- is the 
youngest brother of the president who was assassinated 40 
years ago, having been elected despite the wholly 
unfounded suspicion that he would rule America as an 
agent of the Vatican. By now, as I have often pointed 
out, the Kennedy family has been thoroughly cleared of 
any such suspicion. If anything, the enemies of the 
Church owe the Kennedy tribe their deepest gratitude for 
saving America from Catholic influence.

     To give Senator Kennedy his due, we may add that he 
has also done his part to save America from *Protestant* 
influence, to the extent that Protestantism retains 
elements of the Faith. This too was utterly unforeseen in 
1960. Senator Kennedy himself -- never a very imaginative 
man -- would have thought it bizarre to predict that by 
the year 2003 he would become a defender of sodomy in any 
form.

     But liberalism itself is a continual digression. 
Nobody can divine its next trend. Even its most profound 
critics, including John Henry Newman, have been unable to 
anticipate its particular fads. It may, or may not, 
embrace pedophilia next. On what principle can *any* 
perversion be ruled out?

     Human cynicism is bottomless. So is its 
rationalization. Original sin includes the endless 
inventiveness of self-justification, scandal, and 
seduction. Sullivan, like so many liberals (though he 
calls himself a conservative), is too self-absorbed to 
consider, or care, whether he is helping lead others into 
mortal sin.

     The Massachusetts ruling hardly comes as a shock. 
Yet again a court has suddenly "discovered" that the 
latest liberal fad is a constitutional imperative.

     This is fishy on its face. Are we expected to 
believe that the right to "marry" a member of one's own 
sex was implicit in the state's constitution all along, 
and that the court only happened to realize this just 
now, when homosexual propaganda has become fashionable? 
What a coincidence! It reminds one of another judicial 
"discovery" that a constitutional right of "privacy" 
forbids laws protecting unborn children from violent 
death -- a realization that had eluded everyone since 
1789, but suddenly occurred to the U.S. Supreme Court 
just when abortion had become trendy.

     Setting aside the merits of the particular issues, 
such arbitrary judicial fiats are directly opposed to the 
very principle of the rule of law of which the courts are 
supposed to be the pillars. Even those who like the 
results should be alarmed when a tiny group of men, 
unelected and appointed for life, can impose their will 
on a whole society this way.

     If these justices aren't impeached for their coup 
against marriage, it will only confirm that the people of 
Massachusetts have no defense against an irresponsible 
judiciary. But we probably can't expect the legislature 
to take such a step. Liberals like high-handed courts and 
depend on them to achieve their agenda, especially its 
unpopular features. Their favorite way of dodging 
responsibility is to say, "The Constitution made us do 
it!" -- especially when they're making constitutional law 
meaningless.

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                                        --- Joseph Sobran

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