Okay, I will. But doesn’t America have same sex tolerance laws? What sort of reverse discrimination is happening in your country?
Not very observant, are we!
If America was a tolerant, good place, then there would have been no need for a Civil Rights era and desegregation, because blacks would have been considered equal from the start.
Are you
serious?
OK, some history on slavery - slavery was only sanctioned in North America by the Virginia Statutes of of the 1600s. Until then, slavery was a convenient way landholders could get cheap labour after the supply of indentured labour from England dried up. The first Statute that treated black slaves as being different was a Virginia Statute of 1650, which forbade them the right to bear arms. In 1662 those born to slaves were deemed to be slaves. In 1667 it was decreed that Christian baptism did not make a slave free. Up until then, European convention held that Christians could not be slaves. In 1705 it was decreed in Virginia that if a slave owner killed a slave while admonishing him, there was no crime. You can read the Virginia Statutes
here. Over time, the laws became more and more oppressive in the southern states.
Come forward to the 1800s and focus on Thomas Jefferson. He was born into a slave owning family and society, yet he obhorred it. He spent most of his life fighting against slavery. In 1815 he wrote the following -
Where the disease [slavery] is most deeply seated, there it will be slowest in eradication. In the northern States, it was merely superficial and easily corrected. In the southern, it is incorporated with the whole system and requires time, patience, and perseverance in the curative process.
He recognised that vested interests had made slavery an indispensible part of the southern economy and lifestyle. The largely agrarian southern states had a vested interest in maintaining slave labour. The more industrialised north did not. The emancipation movement began in the mid 1700s and yet it took nearly a hundred years to come to fruition, because vested interests fought the proposal. Read about
Somersetts Case, in which Britains Lord Chief Justice Mansfield wrote that -
The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law.
Note how he wrote of Positive Law. He differentiated Natural Law from man made, or Positive Law, which is either legislation, decree, or custom. mansfield knew that vested interests stood to lose large amounts of money with his ruling, yet he over ruled custom by asserting Natural Law reasoning. Still, it took nearly a hundred more years before the Natural Law argument won out.
Have you considered the idea that your understanding of Natural Law is wrong? How do you know that equal rights for gays is not a part of Natural Law?
Equal rights for gays is indeed part of Natural Law. Just as it is for Negroes and anyone else. Gays currently have the same rights and privelidges everyone else has before the law. The thing is, they wish to overide Natural law to win something which goes beyong simple equality.
How can equal rights for gays overthrow Natural Law? Doesn’t NL exist regardless of whether it is put into place or not? So why does it matter if for example, gay marriage becomes legal in America? Did slavery overthrow NL?
natural Law overthrew slavery. Now, gays wish to overthrow natural Law morality to get what they want. Enshrining the right to “marry” in legislation means overturning the definition of marriage as being between a man and a woman and ‘normalising’ same sex acts and unions which can never be considered as being ‘normal’ according to Natural Moral Law. In fact, same sex acts are not, have never been and can never be the “equal” of heterosexual sex acts. Hence the debate…
If you’re right, gay marriage will still be wrong. And you can keep on holding that opinion, it’s just that gays and their supporters won’t care.
Gay “marriage” will always be wrong in an objective sense, regardless of what laws are written. Just as slavery was wrong, regardless of what customs, decrees and Statutes were written.
