The Unholy Union of Church and State.
This is a guest article by Ebon, longtime reader and frequent commenter. Ebon is a British, bisexual Luciferian Satanist. He is also trained in law, has been an semi-professional wrestler and teaches self-defense to young women. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did.
Buffy
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” ~ Charles Dickens
I was intending to talk today about the reaction to the Iowa decision, how the right is throwing around accusations of forcing gay marriage on Iowans (proving that they don’t understand the principle of judicial independence) but their reactions have been all too predictable. My favourite was the Representative (Steve King, R-naturally) who described same-sex marriage as “our worst nightmare”. Really? Gay people getting hitched is your worst nightmare, really? Dude, you have no imagination.
The Iowa decision is a triumph for the Constitutional principle of equal protection and, obviously, for the gay rights movement (or, my preferred name, the Common Humanity movement). According to Yahoo News , the first marriage licenses would be issued in roughly three weeks. Congratulations to everyone who will be getting hitched in the near future.
But, to change the mood completely; Baghdad, we have a problem. When Iraq formulated a new constitution in 2005, the new Constitution made Islam the official state religion and, while claiming to preserve the rights of other believers (although, interestingly, not of atheists), proclaimed that Islam was the primary source of law ( Section One, Article Two). Subsection A provides that no law may be established which “contradicts the established provisions of Islam”. Why is that relevant to a blog called The Gaytheist Agenda? Well, because that leads to this; Iraq has plans to start executing 128 men, at least five of those are guilty of no other crime than being activists for gay rights in Iraq. Iraqi LGBT, the nation’s main (and seemingly only) gay rights organisation alleges that many more of those prisoners are there primarily because they are gay.
There is a reason why both of our nations guarantee freedom of religion. There is a reason why your nation (but not yet my own) has no state religion and there is a reason why I am, although a man of faith, passionately interested about keeping church and state apart and this case is a good example: Mixing church and state brings out the worst in both. It allows the state to claim divine guidance for its political actions and it allows the church the power which has largely been denied to it for centuries. Your Founders, when they wrote the Constitution, had just come through a long and very nasty war where the opposing state (my own and the irony is not lost on me) could and often did claim to be acting with the approval of the divine. They knew how easily church and state could corrupt one another. Baron Acton warned us that power tends to corrupt and absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely. When the power of the state and the power of the church are combined, how close are we to absolute power and, by Acton’s prediction, to absolute corruption?
That’s a question I leave to your imagination. What I can say for certain is that the governments of both our nations allowed Iraq to enact a constitution based in religious law and the government that swore to uphold that Constitution is about to kill 128 men, at least some of whom are guilty of nothing more than loving other men.
“Is your god such a worldly god that he must play at politics?” ~ Sir Francis Walsingham
