“We shall obey God rather than man”

The Lutheran Missouri Synod responds to the Supreme Court’s further rejection of representative democracy yesterday:

A one-person majority of the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong – again. Some 40 years ago, a similarly activist court legalized the killing of children in the womb. That decision has to date left a wake of some 55 million Americans dead. Today, the Court has imposed same-sex marriage upon the whole nation in a similar fashion. Five justices cannot determine natural or divine law. Now shall come the time of testing for Christians faithful to the Scriptures and the divine institution of marriage (Matthew 19:3–6), and indeed, a time of testing much more intense than what followed Roe v. Wade.

Like Roe v. Wade, this decision will be followed by a rash of lawsuits. Through coercive litigation, governments and popular culture continue to make the central post-modern value of sexual freedom override “the free exercise of religion” enshrined in the Bill of Rights.

The ramifications of this decision are seismic. Proponents will seek to drive Christians and Christian institutions out of education at all levels; they will press laws to force faithful Christian institutions and individuals to violate consciences in work practices and myriad other ways. We will have much more to say about this.

During some of the darkest days of Germany, a faithful Lutheran presciently described how governments lose their claim to legitimate authority according to Romans 13…. “We shall obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29). Christians will now begin to learn what it means to be in a state of solemn conscientious objection against the state.

One almost has to laugh at the disingenuous way in which the rainbow lobby is frantically claiming the matter to be settled. Nothing could be further from the truth. As the Lutheran pastor observed, the issue is now as settled as abortion in the USA, which means it will now become a much bigger and more divisive political issue than before.

The most significant problem with the decision has nothing to do with the actual issue at hand, but the way in which it rendered hundreds of millions of votes cast over decades to be totally irrelevant. The whole point of voting on divisive political matters like this is to avoid politics by other means. But when voting is no longer a permissible option, what else does that leave?

Nor was conscientious objection the only response to the decision, as ISIS took a decidedly different approach to the #LoveWins hashtag. “#Love”, such as it is, already has a bodycount.

 That’s “diversity”? It sure all looks the same to me.