Family is basic building block

President Bush has been back in the news in the last week, pushing a constitutional amendment that establishes the institution of marriage as being between one woman and one man. Period.

The amendment is aimed at corralling run-away, liberal federal judges and hamstringing local officials who want to perform same-sex marriages.

In today’s column, I’ll point out two things: the absurdity of the notion of having an amendment and why we must pass it, and two, why family is important.

Over the course of the few years, I’ve written volumes of family-value columns because I firmly believe that the family is the most basic building block of life. It is the foundation of the rest of our lives.

Several years ago in Mississippi, I ran for the state legislature. Got beat in my primary, but that’s another story all together. I did a lot of campaigning on the restoration of the family and what the state can do to build up the family unit rather than burn it down. I firmly believe that many – if not all – of the ills we face in the South find their root in the fundamental collapse of the family. Black, white, red or yellow, the problem transcends race, creed and socioeconomic status.

Stumping gave me an ample opportunity to listen to a wide variety of responses to this pro-family stance.

One person’s comment, in particular, stands out relative to the pro-family discussion. He was a businessman – an insurance broker, in fact – who knew me and my primary opponent personally.

His comment was, in effect, that until a man and a woman were married and had children, their lives had not yet been validated. In essence, he said that people could have no clear understanding of family values without having families of their own.

Now, whether or not you can agree with that assumption, it’s a valid argument, and – after having four children – is one with which I wholeheartedly agree.

Families are defined by the members of the clan, and even in large, extended families, parents bear the responsibility for steering the family unit toward health, wealth and prosperity.

Until you’ve had children of your own, don’t make assumptions that you have strong family values.

That could offend some readers, and if it does I offer my apologies now.

Let me clarify my position here: I believe that God ordained the institution of marriage (reference Genesis 2:20) and established the family (Genesis 4:1). I believe that God’s intended natural order is that man and woman be married and procreate.

When any piece of that equation is altered, nature is fundamentally tilted.

Personally, I don’t believe homosexuality is right. I’d try to council anyone against the lifestyle.

Now that’s cleared up, it’s a ridiculous proposition that our nation is considering a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

The concept of having to have such an amendment is ridiculous because there’s a higher law that already sets that rule up. It’s God’s law. The United States shouldn’t have to reinvent that wheel for the U.S. Constitution.

However, we are forced – by today’s society – into doing just that.

Let me be clear in my position: We need this amendment. It’s serious, and it’s a serious issue in light of the same-sex marriages being allowed today.

The Constitution has been amended just 27 times, and only once in the last 33 years (1992, dealing with the compensation of members of Congress). Only 12 amendments have been ratified in the past 134 years.

The Bill of Rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights – all major moves for this nation.

Now, another move – to establish guidelines for marriage – is required to once and for all define the boundaries of marriage.

My supposition is that our nation operates under the God. That’s in the pledge. That’s in the motto, and it’s in the Constitution.

Where we go amuck is when judges rule outside the context of the religious heritage the Constitution was based upon.

That clarification is found in the Declaration of Independence, yet the document is rarely, if ever, referenced by the courts.

Because of this, we’ve seen individual religious freedoms – as well as community religious freedoms – trampled at every turn in the past 50 years.

Let’s look at the Declaration for a moment:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness …

Right there, the 56 signers of the Declaration established the parameters upon which all laws of the land are to be based: the “Laws of nature and of Nature’s God,” … “their Creator.”

Without that light being cast on the Constitution, I believe we end up with a result that requires the ratification of a 28th Amendment establishing the boundaries of marriage and protecting the traditional family.

If we don’t, the national discussion will shift to dealing with the effects of uprooting God’s natural order, and you can reference Exodus 5-12 on what happens when God’s natural order is upset.