You New Around Here?
Douglas Wilson
February 10, 2015
We have
some truly encouraging news from Alabama on the same sex mirage front,
but before getting to a defense of all that, I would like to dispatch
the developing meme that this is just the desegregation battle all over
again.
So, a generation ago, there was a showdown between Alabama and the Feds over segregated schools, when Alabama leaders defied federal orders to desegregate their schools. And the meme is that this is just “history repeating itself.”
But strip away all the additional complicating factors, which are always there, a generation ago Alabama was being pressured to quit doing the wrong thing. Now they are being pressured to quit doing the right thing. A generation ago, the Feds had the moral high ground. Now the Feds are actively campaigning for the normalization of sexual perversion, which is not, you might take care to note, the moral high ground.
Right? Wrong? These are odd words, stranger. You new around here?
Look. Racial bigotry is a sin. Sexual perversion is a sin. The fact that the respective players in these two battles were and are Alabama and the Federal Government is completely beside the point. Those who glibly point to that as though it settles everything are like those who think that a son who once participated in an intervention over his mother’s alcoholism has thereby earned the right, twenty years later, to pressure her into committing tax fraud. No, no. Let’s go over this carefully. Drunkenness is a sin. Fraud is a sin. They are both sins. Whoever is championing the sin is the sinner.
Now, that settled, we should make a point of applauding the heroic resistance being mounted against our tyrants, who, not content with being perverts themselves, want to promulgate their licentiousness with a club. Nine counties in Alabama have complied. The majority of counties, 46, have gone on strike, refusing to issue any marriage licenses at all. Twelve counties are refusing to issue licenses to same-sex parodies.
Madison, in Federalist 47, said this about tyranny:
“The accumulation of all powers,
Legislative, Executive, and Judiciary, in the same hands, whether of
one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or
elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
The essence of tyranny is not found in goose-stepping soldiers, missile parades, or dictatorial mirror glasses. The essence of tyranny is found in consolidated and arbitrary power. That power has taken shape in our grasping and overweening federal government, and once tyranny has gotten to these levels, the only way to deal with it is by means of active resistance.
We should want to choose the point of resistance carefully, and this situation in Alabama seems almost ideal for it. All the issues of right and wrong should be immediately graspable by ordinary people. There should be defined lines of resistance. There should be lesser magistrates who are willing to uphold the law, resisting the subversion of law from above. And once we have those elements, there should be simple defiance, sweet defiance. Just say no. Try and make us.
So I would encourage Christians all over the country to support what is going on there, actively, openly, and energetically. Start by dismissing those who say that Roy Moore is a “firebrand.” Not at all. He is just a free man, and we don’t see many of them anymore. We are not sure what they are supposed to look like any more.
And as you mediate on these things, here is a little Orwell for you. “In a time of universal deceit – telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
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