America’s evolving standard of decency
“I think the country is evolving, and I think there is an inevitability for a national consensus on gay marriage,” Vice President Joe Biden said last week on Good Morning America. Earlier in the week, President Obama signed a new law banning the 17-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, which prohibited those serving in the military from proclaiming their sexual orientation. At a press conference afterward, Mr. Obama said his own views were “evolving” on the matter:
[T]his is going to be an issue that is not unique to the military, this is an issue that extends to all of our society, and I think we’re all going to have to have a conversation about it. … It’s pretty clear where the trend lines are going.
In an interview with The Advocate, Mr. Obama said the next natural step is to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act (doma). “[M]y belief was when I first came in, and it continues to be, that by getting ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ done, we sent a clear message about the direction, the trajectory of this country in favor of equality for lgbt persons,” he said. “The next step I think would be legislatively to look at issues like doma and enda [Employment Non-Discrimination Act].”
The “don’t ask, don’t tell” controversy in recent months has revealed shifting views in American society. Even conservative commentators have recently spoken out in support of homosexuals, as we wrote this past summer.
In May, columnist George Will said on an abc talk show that those people who rejected the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal “were not very intelligent.” He said a repeal would symbolize “the evolving standards of decency that mark a maturing society.”
Washington Times columnist Robert Knight disagreed: “This plunge into moral relativism could mean that Sodom and Gomorrah had evolved into a more ‘maturing society’ than, say, Jerusalem under King David. Or America under Abraham Lincoln.”
Columnist Stephen Flurry added, “It’s like saying the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were smarter than God.”
In The Epistles of Peter: A Living Hope, editor in chief Gerald Flurry writes, “Today, we have become so ‘sophisticated’ that sodomy, or homosexuality, is regarded as good, rather than the abomination God says it is (Romans 1:22-32). The Bible is clear in its condemnation of the sins of Sodom (Isaiah 1:10; 3:9; Jeremiah 23:14)—and of the certainty of those sinners being severely punished (Isaiah 13:19; Jeremiah 49:18; Lamentations 4:6).”
