First, the bad news: I was watching a program called “60 Minutes” last night (June 28, 2015) that outlined how fraudulent our society has become: not the occasional Ponzi scheme or politician who lies, but wholesale “identity theft”. A former master of theft, now serving time in prison, gave some examples of how easy it is to buy social security numbers that belong to individuals and turn them into bogus data that cheats the Internal Revenue Service out of billions of dollars. And, what is more, the IRS knew about it (actually, “knows” about it because it is ongoing), but handed out checks to the swindlers anyway. They didn’t have the time to check the personal records of the phony people applying for tax redemptions.
This is not an isolated instance. The program went on to tell of problems within the Veterans Administration’s hospitals and how thousands of veterans were denied the immediate medical help they needed. Records were falsified, with doctors, nurses and others a part of the scheme.
Then there was the ugly news: The U.S. Supreme Court had just voted—in a 5 to 4 decision—that homosexual and lesbian “marriages” (called “same sex marriages” by the media) were now legal in all 50 states. Judge Kennedy, a leading proponent for the “rainbow” cause wrote “No union is more profound than marriage…Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.”
Did I read that right? Didn’t he say that marriage was profound and, elsewhere, that it was sacred? Sacred implies that it has something to do with God. We are told about God in the Bible and there we read that homosexuality is a sin—it is not something “sacred”. Judge Kennedy is entitled to his own opinion, but he is a fool to say that same-sex marriage is sacred.
The Chief Justice, John Roberts, who was one of the dissenters, reminded Americans that the decision had nothing to do with the Constitution. His message to gay marriage supporters was this: “Celebrate the achievement of a desired goal. Celebrate the opportunity for a new expression of commitment to a partner. Celebrate the availability of new benefits. But do not celebrate the Constitution. It had nothing to do with it.”
Good news: I didn’t see any. Of course it is perspective and the people I see as sexually deviant think they now have the best of both worlds: they can marry whomever (perhaps some day it may be “whatever) they want and it is not sin. That would indeed be good news if it were true. Of course there are many sins mentioned in the Bible, but I am not interested at this point in many sins—I am looking in particular at one. I don’t think we should be tolerant of sin–we should ask God for mercy and forgiveness.
Even the criminal who cheated the IRS out of millions of dollars had “good” news. He gets four years in prison, with less for working out a deal with the very government he defrauded, and probably has a bit of cash stashed away awaiting his future release.
The end result: the good is bad and the bad is really ugly.