How Can @KirstenPowers10 Ever Abandon Her Idolatry of Equality?

Posted on | February 24, 2014 | 84 Comments

In a column called “Conservative Christians Selectively Apply Biblical Teachings in the Same-Sex Marriage Debate,” Kirsten Powers and Jonathan Merritt accuse Christians who refuse to provide goods and services for gay weddings of being hypocritical cherry pickers. According to their argument, consistency dictates that vendors who refuse to bake cakes for gay weddings should also boycott “unbiblical” heterosexual weddings. . . .
A same-sex wedding is the ceremonial blessing of behavior the Bible condemns. Affirmation of homosexual practice is intrinsic to gay nuptials. There is no need to ask the history of the couple or their reasons for marrying in order to figure out whether or not the marriage is one that God would approve. In contrast, while two heterosexuals wishing to marry may or may not be obeying God’s commands, the institution itself is one that God has affirmed.

Things that are obvious from a common-sense perspective — if somebody’s asking for two grooms on a wedding cake, this is not a “marriage” that any Bible-believer could be expected to endorse — are obscure to those blinded by ideological abstractions. Chief among these is the Left’s idolatrous devotion to Equality:

Gay activists do not construe their “rights” in terms of liberty, but in terms of radical and absolute equality. They insist that same-sex relationships are identical to — entirely analogous to and fungible with — traditional marriage.
Common sense resists this assertion, perceiving something fundamentally false in the gay marriage argument. Yet it seems common-sense resistance can only be justified by resort to religious faith, through the understanding that men are “endowed by their Creator” with rights. Eliminate the Creator from discussion, and it becomes impossible to refute the activists’ indignant demand for equality.

You can go read the whole thing, just in case you’ve forgotten what I wrote in November 2008. I have long since tired of trying to get people to understand how we got here: Once you buy into the falsehood that men and women are equal, in the sense of being identical and interchangeable, then you must deny the natural purpose of sexual dimorphism and reproductive biology.

If therefore the differences between men and women are to be explained away as “socially constructed,” and if sex roles are rejected as an oppressive imposition of the “heteronormative patriarchy” — for this is what feminist ideology teaches — then not only are same-sex unions equal to traditional marriages, but homosexual couples must be deemed morally superior to heterosexuals, because gay pairings do not involve the male oppression of women.

“PIV is always rape, OK?”

Why does Kirsten Powers not see this? If you follow the Left’s logic of “gender” to its inescapable conclusion, you must not merely legalize same-sex marriage, but you must abolish the patriarchal institution of heterosexual marriage and suppress the Judeo-Christian moral code that supports traditional marriage. Homosexuality must not merely be tolerated, but refusal to applaud sodomy must be stigmatized as “hate.” One can perceive a possible future in which young people who reject gay advances will be accused of “homophobia” on that basis alone.

Kirsten Powers does not see where the logic that justifies gay marriage leads and where, in fact, it has already led us: LGBT activists angrily demanding the harassment and suppression of Christian “bigots” who disagree with the gay-rights agenda.

The devotees of Equality are enemies of Liberty, and their fetishistic attachment to an intellectual abstraction requires them to reject religion, custom and. common sense. Ultimately, the Left must not only destroy the Christian church and the traditional family, but they must also wreck the entire system of government established by our Constitution.

Kirsten Powers says she has become a Christian, so why is she still worshipping at the blood-soaked altar of Equality?

Category: Feminism, Gays, Marriage, Religion

Comments

84 Responses to “How Can @KirstenPowers10 Ever Abandon Her Idolatry of Equality?”

Pete
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:16 am

The irony of leftists pushing Darwinism, yet not seeing the evolutionary dead end inherent in the abnormality of homosexual acts is glaring.
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:23 am

Care to guess whether Ms. Powers has deigned to actually read the Bible she presumes to instruct us about? It always kills me when Progressives insist that relying on Biblical teaching for a position is an improper appeal to authority, but are the first to invoke the “judge not” injunctions or whatever, when they’re losing an argument based solely on philosophical, non-biblical grounds.
Ivory
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:32 am

The entire article by Merrit and Powers is completely illogical. Actually was surprised at just how vacuous and shallow their article is. Thought they were better thinkers and writers.

What they fail to realize is that most orthodox churches do regularly screen couples for marriage before allowing a wedding to take place in their church. Precisely because biblical Christians (and orthodox of other faiths) do hold that a marriage is a divine covenant instituted by God and holy before Him. Biblical Christians believe this is a holy worship service UNTO GOD.
To say that our government must now have the right to force Christians or any other faith to participate in a sham, a falsehood, according to their faith – is to now tell citizens that they must commit adultery in their own relationship with God.

Wrong. Powers and Merrit get it completely wrong. And many others will follow their lead. They should be ashamed.
M. Thompson
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:50 am

Their concept of Equality sounds suspiciously Procrustean to me.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:52 am

Any defence of (traditional) marriage predicated solely or primarily on Christianity is doomed to fail!

Too many Christians continue to act as if they alone “own” this venerable institution and they’re alienating a sizable number of non-religious people or people of other religious traditions—potential allies—who abhor homosexual “marriage” at least as much as they do…
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 8:56 am

I’m a “Darwinist” and I see this “evolutionary dead end” and the abnormality of homosexuality (and the horror of socialism) in that light!
Jeanette Victoria
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:03 am

It’s not traditional marriage it’s NATURAL marriage. It how men and women were designed, anything else is in fact unnatural
darleenclick
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:33 am

who are these Christians who “own” it? Do you think that Orthodox or Conservative Rabbis are pro-SSM? Mormons?

Any couple of people who want to set up housekeeping have the benefit of private contracts, or civil unions. But if the couple is not one man/one woman, adults, consenting and outside of a degree of consanguinity, then it is not marriage.

Period.
rmnixondeceased
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:40 am

Exactly. Theirs is the social construct (in as far as their concept of society relates) not the natural and normal sexual dimorphism that God intended.
darleenclick
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:41 am

the Powers/Merritt article is rife with sloppy thinking (or deliberately perverse). Take just these two sentences:

“But in order to violate a Christian’s conscience, the government would have to force them to affirm something in which they don’t believe. This is why the first line of analysis here has to be whether society really believes that baking a wedding cake or arranging flowers or taking pictures (or providing any other service) is an affirmation”

The first is about the Christian (or Jew) individual’s own conscience. The second is about “society at large”. In essence, “society” gets to decide what an individual Christian is allowed to believe. And a marriage is a belief that predates even Christianity and has never in any recorded history been a union of same sex people.

The article was insulting on more than one level.
richard mcenroe
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:51 am

I normally don’t challenge someone else’s path to salvation, but I’m beginning to suspect Ms. Powers of a certain spiritual opportunism here.

I mean she says she’s a Christian but I think at best she’s managed Episcopalian…
richard mcenroe
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:53 am

The CA gays were all over the Mormons there about Prop 8 as soon as they figured out confronting black Baptists in their own neighborhoods was a bad idea.

In short, in about one day.
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 9:59 am

I would suggest it’s not “sloppy thinking” but deliberate bad faith. It has been apparent for a long, long time that the purpose of the gay marriage debate has been to destroy marriage by requiring social sanction, approval and celebration. Otherwise, one would simply buy a cake and affix one’s own double groom or double bride and leave the rest of us alone.
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 10:16 am

You touched on the two key points, common sense, and Scripture.

Man and woman are not interchangeable. For a person of Powers’ obvious intelligence and education level these are otherwise unavoidable conclusions based upon either source.

She can deny the common sense notion of man and woman through myriad esoteric, or academic sophistries. That simply brands her as one sort of intellectual.

But she cannot, in any legitimate fashion, adhere to such beliefs, while claiming to be a member of a faith rooted in the Bible. And this is not some obscure aspect of one or two Books, this is a theme that appears almost from The Beginning and carries all the way through into each and every Gospel.

In this relativistic day and age we are told we should not question the asserted belief of another. Mencken, the devout atheist said “we must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.” He intended that as an assault on religion, based upon the unavoidable truth that it always resides within humans. Humans with the all too obvious human foible of self- biased and non-disinterested human judgement.

So, while we can accept – at face value- Powers assertion that she does indeed have a religion, there is nothing that should impede us from circling the square and saying that whatever her religion may be it is not one based upon the Bible.
dwduck
February 24th, 2014 @ 10:19 am

There are plenty of those arguments being made. Trouble is, that “sizable” number sees Christians making them and says “oh noes teh Bibles” and runs away.

The leftists pull the same card — once you out yourself as Christian, the only possible reason you could be disagreeing with them is because of the Bible, so shut up. Which makes it doubly disappointing to see this same crap happening on the right.

If you can’t put aside your enmity towards believers in general, or Christians specifically, to work together on common issues, well, then, have fun with Ron Paul, I guess.
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 10:32 am

Have you actually read any Darwin?

Darwin pretty much excluded humans from any ordinary process of natural selection precisely because we have free will and moral choice.

Yes, in Descent of Man he essentially argued we have carried with us some psychological baggage from the times prior to our transition into humans.

But even he wasn’t so foolish as to think that once we became human natural selection continued to operate in anything remotely resembling the way it operates on the rest of the world.
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 10:33 am

. . .the only possible reason you could be disagreeing with them is because of the Bible, so shut up.

Quite true. It’s a variant of the “poisoning the well” rhetorical device, except the non-Christians use it as a means to isolate themselves from Truth. That is, it doesn’t matter if the assertion is true, it only matters who’s saying it. We see it all the time in the comments here. Invariably, the person bringing up the Bible or “Christo-fascism” is a leftist trying to disparage a non-Biblical argument.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 10:55 am

You’re right!

My complaint is about those who are losing this battle over marriage because the Bible seems to be their weapon of choice, and the Bible is USELESS in the courts and legislatures…

The Left and the religious zealots have turned this into a religious debate… And the zealots are losing!
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 11:15 am

Too many people who self-identify as Christians seem to believe the Christianity is merely a system of ethics which can be modified ad hoc to suit the circumstances, as opposed to a perception of reality which supersedes mere human whims or social convention. There are core beliefs; it’s not a buffet. One cannot pick and choose depending upon one’s company or what one wishes those beliefs to be.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 11:26 am

To these “Christians” who claim Jesus loves everybody regardless, I like to cite Matthew 18:6…
pabarge
February 24th, 2014 @ 11:37 am

Kirsten Powers says she has become a Christian, so why is she still worshipping at the blood-soaked altar of Equality?

Ask Fox News how much they pay her.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 11:51 am

It’s not me you have to convince… But the “oh-noes-teh-Bibles” crowd, i.e. young people, are actually yawning about this precisely because they see it as a religious struggle! And we need them on our side…
storibund
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:01 pm

So much for the assurances from the “gay community” that they’d never, ever target churches:

http://www.charismanews.com/world/40685-millionaire-gay-couple-sues-to-force-church-wedding

Yes, it’s the UK. But anyone who thinks this isn’t already in the works for the US needs to get their head out of the sand.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:02 pm

Well, you will never see yours truly “disparage” a non-Biblical argument posted by a proclaimed Christian!
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:03 pm

Valid or not, your point inverts the point of the discussion.

This is no longer about ‘defending traditional marriage.’

The fight is now about defending religious liberty and freedom of conscience.
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:07 pm

Some, at his juncture, might choose to point out that precisely this sort of issue became inevitable once people decided that one could be a follower of Jesus without being a follower of His Church.

Erasmus saw the problem clearly.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:17 pm

You can fall back and defend the second line… I’m still trying to hold the beach!
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:24 pm

The quote is not about God lacking any love for the sinner. What Jesus is saying is that there are worse things that can befall a man than drowning in the depths.

But even so, I’m note sure you are getting the gist of it, let me put it in modern context.

It would have been better – for him- that that pervert who was out trolling for a little victim, had been crushed by a run away dump truck before he came upon that ten year old walking home.

But even that does not fully encompass the issue, since what he did was sexually assault and murder her. None of which puts her salvation in jeopardy.

As far as we know he did not cause her to lose her faith. In the eyes of God that would be the greater sin.

It’s a tough love, but it is love.
dwduck
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:27 pm

Perhaps, then, instead of parroting the leftist party line — “holding the beach”, I think you call it — you could start working out how to defend religious liberty to this crowd and how to reach across the divide to work together. Lead by example, and all that.
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:32 pm

You are being flanked.

Think of it as refusing the line.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:34 pm

I had the people running those “Gay-Straight Alliances” in our public schools in mind… You know, those “try-it-you’ll-like-it” pervs!
Quartermaster
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:46 pm

“Kirsten Powers says she has become a Christian, so why is she still worshipping at the blood-soaked altar of Equality?”
The answer is simple. She bought into a pseudochristianity where God is only love and will not judge us according to His law. Such people are in for a very rude, and final, awakening.
I try to warn such people when I encounter them. It is uniformly a lost cause, but God requires we do so anyway.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:46 pm

I’m trying! One mind at a time…

All I’m trying to do is advocate for a more secular approach to winning the “culture wars” because, from where I sit, it does not look like “thumping the Bible” has worked out very well for us!
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:46 pm

To an extent, Darwin was co-opted by those who desperately wish God does not exist, by extending Natural Selection to a point beyond all reason. Thus, we have arguments, such as “God does not exist because Evolution!; Evolution! is true because God does not exist.”
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:57 pm

You know, Paul, if you keep making such glorious sense like this in your final days, I’ll have to stop ignoring you!
ThomasD
February 24th, 2014 @ 12:58 pm

Agreed, my point was to draw a distinction between the neo-Darwinians (e.g. Dawkins, et.al.) and the things that Darwin actually said.

I’m still no fan of Darwin. I do accept the science of evolution (ie. descent with modification,) but think his theories largely weak and often disproven.

In general I think our understanding of the process is so profoundly inadequate for any pronouncements of the sort routinely made these days.
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:02 pm

God is indeed merciful. But Mercy is meaningless unless there is Justice first. Ms. Powers has a very immature, anthropomorphic, Santa Clause view of God which, while comforting in the short term, is no where near the reality which actually exists.
dwduck
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:20 pm

Again, I reject the assumption that a Christian making an argument is necessarily thumping a Bible. I’m not sure why you’re having so much difficulty recognizing this…
Adjoran
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:25 pm

As liberals are wont to do, Powers conflates two quite different things and comes up with novel ideas. Monogamous marriage predates Christianity and even Judaism, although those religions sanctify the institution as a gift from God. It has cultural reasons and roots well beyond the religious.

It suited the “gay marriage” movement to associate marriage with religion exclusively, enabling them to claim the state was favoring a religion by denying their “rights,” but society gains much from marriage that their unique form doesn’t offer.

But if you wish to look at it from religions’ POV, that’s also possible for believers, of course. But the religions don’t change just because some believers question some doctrines. Powers’ Christianity is beginning to look like the smorgasbord variety – “I like this, yes, have some of that, but no, I don’t like that or that or that.”

The Catholic bible is missing that chapter.
Adjoran
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:27 pm

I would note that “sloppy thinking” and “bad faith” are not mutually exclusive. In fact, on the left they more or less go together.
Zohydro
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:28 pm

I didn’t say that…
rmnixondeceased
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:33 pm

Heaven forfend! I deserve ignoring and shunning for my past behaviors!
RS
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:37 pm

The Catholic bible is missing that chapter.

So is this Protestant’s Bible.
dwduck
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:46 pm

Right — you assumed it.
Evi L. Bloggerlady
February 24th, 2014 @ 1:52 pm

Matthew 5:17-20
RKae
February 24th, 2014 @ 2:03 pm

Satanists have been slowly creeping out of the shadows since the mid-’60s. Shouldn’t be long before they demand that Christians bake them wedding cakes for the “Marriage of the Beast.”

I suppose Ms. Powers will call it “cherry-picking” when a Christian declines THAT business.
RKae
February 24th, 2014 @ 2:15 pm

Think about it: If all you hear from the anti-gay-marriage side are Biblically-based arguments, then that means that everyone else has abandoned the fight. Just like abortion, there will soon be only Christians fighting it. (And please don’t send me a link to some secular group that is fighting it. Yes, there are some. But their voices are small.)

Without a strong conviction – an absolute – then the line can always be nudged slowly enough that any idea can be made acceptable. It’s just a matter of the propagandists finding the right wording for their argument.
Kirby McCain
February 24th, 2014 @ 2:36 pm

Hell yeah Adjoran, fertility is central to all of the pre – Christian religions. Pagans struggling for survival and living off the land had a keen awareness of nature. They understood the impotency of homosexuality. This is why men would have multiple wives even into the time of the Old Testament. It was a survival strategy. We value peace and we’ll be glad to let these people have equal access to the market place, etc. But they will never respect our beliefs, our faith or our way of life because their survival depends on them having access to our children. They must vilify us with their lies to destroy our children’s respect for us. They engage in this crusade against our faith and our family oriented lifestyle because they must.
RKae
February 24th, 2014 @ 2:44 pm

Polygamy is a lousy “survival strategy.” It doesn’t produce more children; it just shrinks the gene pool.

The polygamist compounds here in America have to take boys and young men out and dump them on the side of the highway and exile them “for breaking the rules.”

The women there are having the same number of babies as women did in the ’50s baby boom. They’re just doing so with fewer husbands – an incredibly bad idea.
Nan
February 24th, 2014 @ 2:49 pm

Natural law is written on man’s heart.