Indiana State Senator and Tea Party member Mike Delph was disappointed by the failed measure to get a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage and civil unions on his state's 2014 ballot.
The contentious amendment, known as HJR-3, died in February in a Senate vote (keeping it off the ballot until 2016 at earliest). But still hurting from the failure, Senator Delph has written a personal column entitled, “Opponents of Christian values don't fight fair.”
His main takeaway is:
If I have learned anything over the last months in the HJR-3 debate, opponents of traditional Judeo-Christian values don't fight fair or with honor. They fight to win, and to date have been very successful.
After that backhanded compliment, he says that because all rights regarding marriage come from God, the government cannot create or remove any new rights regarding marriage. Thus, the government should just stay out of marriages entirely and let churches regulate it like God wants:
Rights come from God and are inalienable, meaning they cannot be taken away by man, or more important, by government… Not even courts have the power to create or remove rights. So how can a right exist that does not come from our Creator and what modern rights do we honestly believe are divinely inspired as opposed to invented and imposed by a left-wing orthodoxy?
Probably the biggest mess of all was when the government started involving itself in marriage. Tax benefits, estate planning benefits, societal legitimacy are all things traditional marriage brings participants.
Now there is evidence that not only will businesses be sued for operating according to their own faith traditions, but churches themselves can be sued if they refuse to ordain a union their God rejects.
Keep in mind that the businesses being sued for rejecting LGBT customers ran afoul of public accomodation laws and not marriage laws like Delph says, so gay marriage has nothing to do with those cases. Furthermore, there has never been one instance ever of an LGBT person trying to force a church to marry them. Never. Ever.
Fun sidenotes though: Delph's brother Stephen is gay and Delph got punished by his own own caucus for tweeting about HJR-3's lack of votes before the news went public.
He is also “the only US politician who accepted a donation from BP's political action committee in the period after its Deepwater Horizon spill and spoke out in favor of the company in defense of its critics.”
