I am sure that I speak for many of you when I say that I am saddened by Republican Sen.

Portman's announcement that he now supports gay marriage. As you might be aware, he is but the latest highprofile Republican to hop on board that bandwagon. Former Vice Pres. Cheney long ago came out in favor of gay marriage. Just a few weeks ago, three former Republican governors, some former Republican congressmen, a former Republican White House chief of staff, and a former Republican national security adviser announced that they, too, are now proponents of gay marriage. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich (author of Rediscovering God in America) likewise changed his position. Many of you had believed in those men and women. You had been convinced that they sincerely held to your Christian convictions and that, no matter the personal sacrifice, they would stand alongside you. All along, we were telling you that they were in fact just using you for your votes, and that to them you were little more than a voting block to be bought on the path to ever greater political power. You refused to listen, though, and instead spread fabulous tales of their godly deeds. You put their names in your front yards, in your windows, and on your cars and trucks. You told your children that they stood for Jesus Christ. Some of you, overwhelmed with zeal, went so far as to say that the party that they represented had been happily established by God, and that no other political body was righteous in His sight. You were so faithful to them! But now, with the tide of popular public opinion, they are receding from your convictions and washing their hands of their affiliation with you. They are abandoning you. Gradually, godly Christians, the Republican Party is divorcing you, choosing instead to align itself with the people whose convictions it suspects characterize those who will write the history books in the near future. They care less about how God appraises them than how the majority of their countrymen appraise them. They even seem to care less about how generations centuries from now will appraise them than how their living constituents will. And, it probably would not sting as much as it does if they had not promoted themselves as champions of godliness when they had been seeking and winning your votes. As unfortunate as this turn of events has been, there is reason to smile: godly Christians of the USA, we are now free. We are free. The horrible, ungodly union between us and a party infected with the vices of greed, gluttony, xenophobia, war-mongering, and disdain for intellectualism is being ended by that party itself; fading now into the regrettable past is the union that wrested you, my brethren, from your duties to peace, charity, and unity. Soon, you will have no powerful friends left in the US Government. You will be alone with God, and finally at liberty to unite with the godly throughout the world. At last forcibly sanctified from such an un-Christian alliance, it is my personal hope that we will all take the opportunity to reflect upon aspects of our culture that have been detrimental to our spiritual wellbeing. For instance, consider the ideological paradigm common among us Americans, which can be broken down as follows: Dismiss the lessons of the past, for wisdom brings about a safe and therefore boring existence. Live for the present, and pursue sensual pleasure and emotional happiness, consequences be-damned. The worst of consequences testify to the best of experiences. A life absent of mistakes is a failure, and a life full of them is ideal. Forsake the ways of your forefathers, for they were inferior to you by virtue of the fact that they preceded you. Amoral strategies are immoral if their most famous employers are immoral. One can never have enough power over oneself, nor enough liberty to exert it however one wishes. But, any amount of power over anyone else is wicked and dangerous.

To live for oneself is selfishness, but to live for another is co-dependence. The latter is worse than the former. You are a victim of chance, an animal cursed with woeful self-awareness of your miserable plight. Revolt, therefore, against Nature from whose womb you were expelled without your consent. Rage against any walls that organized society has built around you. Let the rebel be praised and the king be booed. Such are the thoughts that underlie the American zeitgeist, the spirit and ideology of our country. And, what have been the fruits of this ? Look around: unwed mothers with unwelcomed pregnancies, absurdly high divorce rates, violently abusive husbands, shamefully unfaithful wives, negligent parents, rampant STIs, and inter-generational communication breakdowns. Marriages have become temporary arrangements whose divorces and annulments move any children involved closer toward their own failed marriages and toward becoming poor parents themselves. Here, few are the daughters who have good relationships with their fathers, and fewer still are the adult sons whose biological parents have remained married, if they ever were at all. So uncertain is a parent's role and so unreliable his or her presence at home that family, the foundation of society, is now perceived as secondary in importance to fickle but more extra-familial relationships. Children no longer mature into adults, but into societal and psychological failures known as adolescents, intelligent but self-destructive sprites whom even the eleven year-olds of better times long past would have considered embarrassments to the race of Man and consigned to the subterranean world of thugs and prostitutes. In contrast to our present failures, the successes of our forefathers in maintaining stable families and raising responsible men and women testify that our society has devolved. That is all to say nothing of the sudden and artificially procured rise in popularity and commonality of homosexuality. That which was once a tabboo subculture now lusts for and is plotting to overtake your sons and your daughters. Nor is it to say anything of the epidemic of gender confusion spreading with religious zeal throughout our schools and our media. Brethren, so far have we strayed from the Divine will that the very things that He has since before ancient times desired of us -- things that would benefit us, things that would restore us to health -- have become so frighteningly and offensively foreign to us that we have barricaded ourselves from embracing them with manufactured laws and artificial mores. Most Americans submit passively to the cycle of failure into which our country has pulled itself, and in doing so observably bring ruin upon their family lines and further doom this society. But your own fates might not yet have been sealed. You, and with you the families you have sired or will sire, can still ascend to higher heights than these lowest of depths. Together, let us make way toward the greener pastures of our forefathers, the pastures our countrymen dare not approach. You and your children can still return to a world wherein pregnancies are welcomed, where babies are born to married fathers and mothers; a society wherein husbands are gentle to their wives and wives are faithful to their husbands, parents are attentive to their children, and children honor their parents. In the coming days and years, when the contrast between the darkness and the Light is clear and the Light behooves you to stand on its behalf, will you turn your gaze? The voices of our forefathers call out to us, encouraging us to return dignity and stability to our family lines. We must not forsake them; we

cannot afford to forsake them. Neither can we afford to forsake the future cries of the children and grandchildren of ours who are not yet even conceived. Those prone to American pride and naivety might be inclined to say that our democratic process will at length remedy this present crisis. I would that you be mindful of this: democracy enforces the expressed will of the majority. It is most beneficial when the majority is wise, virtuous, properly educated, and personally responsible. The reverse is also true, and happens to be characteristic of the present: it is least beneficial when the majority is foolish, vile, improperly educated, and personally irresponsible. Some of you already acknowledge this, but oddly enough still place faith in the people that the majority elects. Elected powers, though, are reluctant to implement any significant changes that run counter to the majority's will, for they know that the majority will swiftly remove them from office if they do. Because the significant changes necessary for the ethical revival of our society would conflict with the will of the majority, our elected leaders will surely never implement them. Thus, it is vain to entrust the well-being of our family lines to the personifications of the foolish majority. Very soon, the Supreme Court will act to legalize gay marriage, acknowledging it as a right and its defense as a national duty. This will be despite the fact that the majority of the current justices were appointed by Republican presidents. Friends, not only will this reenforce the impropriety of associating the Republican Party with godliness, but it will also demonstrate that the defense of rights and the ensuring of the well-being of citizens do not always overlap. Indeed, the importance of the latter is and always has been universally acknowledged; the importance of the former, though, emerges from a novel and initially enchanting idea that has been at one time or another seriously questioned by every region that has entertained it. When the laws change this year to the detriment of the well-being of our country, know this: it will have been born in and of a system that considers the ensuring of well-being less important than the defense of rights, a system that distant generations will discuss and debate in the same manner as we today similarly treat the collapsed systems of ages long past. Do not rush to make the Obama Administration the scape-goat, as some of us are presently inclined to do. It is our naive systematic confidence in the alleged ability of poorly educated and unenlightened citizens to manifest infallibility and the wisdom of sages upon voting with their ballots, their bank accounts, and their time that has procured our increasingly evident moral descent. In a democracy, it is the citizens, not the representatives they elect, who are ultimately to blame for the misdeeds of those representatives. In a democracy, every triumph as well as every failure, every beneficial trend and every plague of corruption, is to be attributed to the people. Heaven, help us; take from us the scepter which we have shown ourselves incapable of wisely wielding... So long as the ways by which we live are determined by impious, vicious, and poorly educated citizens or the representatives they elect, this trajedy will continue. We must either effectively educate citizens and instill them with virtue and piety, or leave the adult decisions up to someone who is adult in all his or her faculties. So long as a country's "parents" fear what might happen if they discipline their "children" or force them to do things that they do not want to do, that country will be nothing more than a bunch of rebellious toddlers who hold their parents at bay by threatening to call Child Protective Services. Within almost each of us who are bachelors and bachelorettes are the seeds of generations yet to come. To babes yet to be conceived, most of us are known as grandparents. We must live to their benefit, breathe to their benefit, and prepare for them a good name into which to be born. For, we do not belong to ourselves, but to the little ones who will draw from us their identities. The voices of a people yet to be born and the voices of children already born and suffering in this country implore us to reexamine the foundations of our American culture. My friends, my wise friends, we must be willing to

sacrifice whatever pride we have been harboring in our ill national culture in order to save ourselves, save our children, and restore dignity and honor to our family lines.