On DOMA, Obama's just being himself

After a little feigned deliberation, Obama has announced his "decision" to withdraw the U.S. government from participation in cases arguing in support of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), legislation passed when Bill Clinton was in the White House. I've received e-mails from several well-known conservative organizations with breathless subject lines like the one that speaks of Obama's "betrayal of the American people." Another announces "Obama comes out of the closet on marriage."

These subject lines make about as much sense as the Obama faction's contention that his decision has something to do with the fact that some federal judges have concluded that the DOMA is unconstitutional. Obama has little or no inclination to respect the Constitution. He has little or no inclination to respect the unalienable right involved in the defense of the natural family. Just as he promotes the physical elimination of the child's life through abortion, he tacitly promotes eliminating the prospect of the child's life from the definition of marriage. That's what's involved in the assertion that as such, homosexual couples can lawfully marry without eviscerating the natural basis for the definition of marriage.

Government doesn't endow people with the ability to procreate the species. The Creator takes care of that. Like all unalienable rights, those associated with the natural family exist in consequence of this endowment. A couple that cannot, by nature, procreate has no claim to those rights. Nor can government grant them a semblance of it without impairing the claims of one or both of the parents biologically implicated in the physical conception of the child. The DOMA simply makes more explicit the government's obligation to secure the Creator-endowed unalienable rights of the natural family. This obligation precludes government from fabricating other rights that impair them. In this respect, granting homosexuals the right to marry is like granting plantation owners the right to own slaves.

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Judging by the evidence of his career as an activist and politician, Barack Obama does not now nor has he ever subscribed to the doctrine of Creator-endowed unalienable right the U.S. Constitution involves and implements. He is by his own admission a devotee of socialism. His speeches and actions reflect the substitution of History for the Creator as the judge of human actions and the authority for human rights. As far as he is concerned, marriage is whatever those who control the government say it is, without respect to any rights associated with the bonds and obligations inherent in the way the Creator made humanity to be (human nature).

For reasons best known to themselves, many self-styled "conservative" leaders and organizations have been at pains to ignore the evidence. Some have declared emphatically that we must take Obama at his word. But we know from sad experience that in general many politicians say whatever serves their political advantage. We know from particular experience with Obama (repeated almost daily) that he is one of them. Why would any sane person take him at his word? It makes no sense, except we note that some people are motivated by fear that they will be called racists if they question his word in any way. Thus (with apologies to the Bard of Avon) "cowardice doth make liars of them all." Unfortunately, the truth sacrificed on the altar of their fear includes the truth about Obama's utter contempt for the self-evident truths from which the American people derive their claim to liberty.

Obama is not coming out of some closet. He is simply reverting to type (i.e., acting according to evident, not hidden tendencies, incidentally repressed). He has not suddenly betrayed the American people, except in the same way that he has, throughout his public career, disregarded and betrayed the principles that make them free. This betrayal of principle has led him to prefer the guidance and instruction of people like Jeremiah Wright, the close associate of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Farrakhan has been honored and supported by such openly avowed and active enemies of the United States as Moammar Gadhafi.

If Obama's affinity for hard-line socialism hadn't led me to see through his faint professions of respect for the Creator-endowed institution of marriage, the obviously deep and lingering influence Islam exerted on his upbringing would raise suspicion from another point of view. Obama's ill-concealed hostility toward Israel and his pursuit of policies that have the effect of encouraging the supremacy of violence-prone Islamic imperialists in the Muslim world force me to doubt that the damage he has done to America's national security and international influence is just a matter of abject incompetence.

The greatest thinkers about war, such as Sun Tzu or Clausewitz, recognized that moral factors may ultimately determine the outcome. Destroy the moral cohesion of an enemy, and you can defeat him without costly battles. Is it just a coincidence that someone so comfortable consorting with ideologies and people inimical to America's way of life and liberty joins, by hook or crook, in the elitist assault against the moral basis of America's unparalleled success as a democratic, constitutional republic?

Moreover, by wrongly identifying America's idea of human rights with outcomes that contemn the basis for human and natural family life, leftists like Obama hand to our enemies throughout the world the opportunity to set the natural piety of people everywhere against the ideas of human rights thus identified with the American way of life. By promoting the shibboleth of "secular democracy," they ignore the God-fearing reality of America's heritage. In the Islamic world, by making it appear that God-deriding "democracy" is the American-backed alternative to violence-prone Islamic imperialism, this false secularization of the moral basis for constitutional, democratic self-government makes it repugnant to people of decent piety who might otherwise embrace a form of government that effectively acknowledges the authority of the God who made us all.

Obama's abandonment of the moral vision on which the American republic was founded thus undermines our domestic morale even as it empowers potent enemies of our survival as a free people. We need to stop pretending that this is a surprising coincidence. It only "surprises" those still blinded by cowardice, partisanship or selfishly ambitious calculation.