Eagle Forum’s Virginia Armstrong, who leads the group’s Court Watch Project, writes in a “Court Watch briefing” today that the Supreme Court’s recent decisions on the Defense of Marriage Act and Proposition 8 have displaced the “Judeo-Christian/Constitutionalist worldview” in favor of “Humanism/Reconstructionism,” which she warns “wreaks havoc with the concepts of absolute truth and inherent logic of the Law.”
Armstrong writes that the gay rights cases have pushed America to the “breaking point” and into the “danger zone” that will undermine the rule of law.
Has America has bent over backwards too far in its spiritual, moral, and constitutional life so that we are in danger of “breaking”? This question is central to our current series of Court Watch Briefings. The question has been precipitated by America’s Culture War and echoes the anguished cry of the Father in the famous musical production, “Fiddler on the Roof,” who felt that revolutionary changes in his world were pushing him to the “breaking point.”
We are proving that America is indeed in the “danger zone” and is in dire need of a massive “straightening up process.” Nothing more clearly demonstrates this fact than the recent same-sex marriage decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court — Perry v. Hollingsworth and Windsor v. U.S.
The Humanist/Reconstructionist position on epistemology is fatally flawed at every turn, as revealed in the pro-homosexual court decisions in Hollingsworth v. Perry and Windsor v. U.S. We must remember that Perry/Windsor reflect far more than the specific issues and positions of the immediate parties to the cases. Rather, they afford us a panoramic view of the entire homosexual rights battle and should be viewed in that light.
The real conflict in Perry/Windsor and similar cases is that of the whole Culture War conflict — the War of Worldviews between Humanism/Reconstructionism and the Judeo-Christian/Constitutionalist worldview. What is at stake, as Harold Berman demonstrates in his analysis (to which we have been referring), is the “very collapse of our entire Western legal tradition.” The Perry/Windsor epistemology wreaks havoc with the concepts of absolute truth and inherent logic of the Law — key components of the Western legal tradition outlined by Professor Berman. And as Nancy Pearcey of Houston Baptist University’s Schaeffer Center so cogently states, “The clash between these two understandings of morality [the Judeo-Christian v. the Humanistic] will determine whether liberty is gained or lost in the 21st century. It is imperative to reassert the transcendent moral truths that undergird freedom in every society.”