Skip to main content

Unnatural, Civil Laws and Same-Sex 'Marriage'

 Orthodox Christians are deeply concerned with laws passed in post-Christian, Western societies that are against nature.  This raises the question of what constitutes good law and bad law.  The law in America that recognised same-sex ‘marriage’ (Obergefell v. Hodges), is a good example of bad law.  Christians are calling for the repeal of this law and Chief Justice John Roberts dissented from it.[1]

Laelius begins his speech on law in Cicero, On the Republic, saying:

'True law is correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant, everlasting’ (3.27).[2]

Here we have five criteria for true law: it is reasonable, accords with nature, is universal, is constant, and is everlasting .  True law is distinguished from the more simplistic laws of society that get passed and repealed for expediency at a particular time, like traffic laws.  Only laws established in accordance with nature, as decreed by the gods, are true laws.  Many societies pass bad laws, like the ignorant and inefficient physician prescribing deadly medication.  Thus, 'law is a distinction between just and unjust things, modeled on nature, the most ancient and chief of all things, to which human laws are directed that visit the wicked with punishment and defend and protect the good' (Cicero, On the Laws 2.13).  The point is that civil laws unrelated to natural law should not even be called laws.

A law allowing or defending same-sex 'marriage' is a law that is not only unrelated to nature but is a law defending what is against nature.  Such a law fails each of Laelius's five criteria.  It is unreasonable in defying the meaning of ‘marriage’.  Marriage does not define close relationships or sexual activity, nor is a small unit of mutually engaged persons.  It is not merely a contract. That which elevates marriage and family to something higher is where both are associated with laws of nature.  Marriage has to do with procreation that produces a family.  Same-sex ‘marriage’ only mimics this, perhaps by borrowing children in one way or another (surrogacy, adoption).  It redefines ‘parents’ from being mother and father to being merely two adults.

Same-sex marriage is also contrary to nature.  It defies God’s intent in creation.  God created male and female, with the express command to be fruitful and multiply.  Marriage between a man and a woman is natural and God’s intended purpose for two opposite genders becoming ‘one flesh’.  Civil laws that are not grounded in natural law are temporary and functional, like speed limit signs on a road.  One can hardly reduce marriage—the very basis of human flourishing—into something like a speed limit law.  Cicero cautions against civil laws that have no higher source than legislative or judicial pronouncements: ‘But truly the most foolish thing is to think that everything is just that has been approved in the institutions or laws of peoples’ (On the Laws 1.42).  Also, ‘But we can divide good law from bad by no other standard than that of nature’ (On the Laws 1.44).  He adds that both laws and what is considered honourable and disgraceful must be rooted in nature (1.45).  Typical language to describe homosexuality in antiquity was that homossexuals lived ‘against nature’ (so also Paul in Romans 1.26-27).  What a law claiming that homosexual marriage is legal amounts to is a merely civil law establishing a dishonourable practice as though it was grounded in nature when it is not.

Same-sex marriage has never been approved in history, even if rare instances of people in history are recorded in which two persons of the same sex dwelt together as husband and wife.  A law establishing this, however, is something entirely new.  It is not universally acknowledged and lacks any historical warrant.  It also lacks constancy because it has no historical precedent.  It is a court’s ruling at a particular time of cultural decay that will not have universal approval, will lack constancy, and will not be everlasting.

The Church is right to speak truth to authorities, even in an anti-creational, atheistic culture that at one time claims things to be natural that are unnatural and at other times denies that nature plays any role in establishing ‘local truths’.  This waffling is characteristic of a society that wishes to reject what Cicero saw as necessary: law must have grounding in nature, and what is natural is what is grounded in God.  Our Western society is an experiment in rejecting the grounding of civil laws in nature and under God.  To this culture, the Church can join with the Roman jurist and philosopher, Marcus Tullius Cicero, of the 1st century BC, to assert, in the words of Laelius, that ‘true law is correct reason congruent with nature, spread among all persons, constant, everlasting’.  Our challenge, however, is that what is considered right is increasingly grounded only in law itself and not in nature and God.  Cicero warned:

But if rights were established by peoples’ orders, if by leading men’s decrees, if by judges’ verdicts, there would be a right to rob, a right to commit adultery, a right to substitute false wills if those things were approved by the votes or resolutions of a multitude (On the Laws 1.43).

To these examples, we might add in our day same-sex marriage.  The law affirming same-sex marriage in the USA came into effect with a 5-4 vote of the nine Supreme Court justices--an example of what Cicero warned against.  A majority by a single vote among only nine justices created a law that opposes nature, reason, and God.  Unfortunately, this is not hypothetical but a travesty, as were Cicero's examples.  We live in a dystopian culture opposing the natural order.  As Christians, we call for the removal of so distorting and unnatural a law that was 'approved by the votes ... of a multitude' of five to four on the Supreme Court.  Civil laws must never be passed on matters against God's law writ large in nature.


[1] Cf. Jack Jenkins, ‘Abortion fight won, conservative Christians mimic Dobbs tactics to go after same-sex marriage,’ Religion News Service (March 26, 2025); Adelle M. Banks, ‘Southern Baptists seek overturning of same-sex marriage,’ Religion News Service (June 11, 2025).  See the Southern Baptist's resolution, 'On Restoring Moral Clarity through God’s Design for Gender, Marriage, and the Family': https://static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/content/uploads/2025/06/5-on-restoring-moral-clarity-through-gods-design-for-gender-marriage-and-the-family.pdf. 

[2] Marcus Tullius Cicero, On the Republic and On the Laws, trans. David Fott (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014).

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

‘For freedom Christ has set us free’: The Gospel of Paul versus the Custodial Oversight of the Law and Human Philosophies

  Introduction The culmination of Paul’s argument in Galatians, and particularly from 3.1-4.31, is: ‘ For freedom Christ has set us free; stand firm therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery’ (Galatians 5.1). This essay seeks to understand Paul’s opposition to a continuing custodial role for the Law and a use of human philosophies to deal with sinful passions and desires.   His arguments against these are found in Galatians and Colossians.   By focussing on the problem of the Law and of philosophy, we can better understand Paul’s theology.   He believed that the Gospel was the only way to deal with sin not simply in terms of our actions but more basically in terms of our sinful desires and passions of the flesh. The task ahead is to understand several large-scale matters in Paul’s theology, those having to do with a right understanding of the human plight and a right understanding of God’s solution.   So much Protestant theology has articulated...
Post a Comment
Read more

Alasdair MacIntyre and Tradition Enquiry

Alasdair MacIntyre's subject is philosophical ethics, and he is best known for his critique of ethics understood as the application of general, universal principles.  He has reintroduced the importance of virtue ethics, along with the role of narrative and community in defining the virtues.  His focus on these things—narrative, community, virtue—combine to form an approach to enquiry which he calls ‘tradition enquiry.’ [1] MacIntyre characterises ethical thinking in the West in our day as ethics that has lost an understanding of the virtues, even if virtues like ‘justice’ are often under discussion.  Greek philosophical ethics, and ethics through to the Enlightenment, focussed ethics on virtue and began with questions of character: 'Who should we be?', rather than questions of action, 'What shall we do?'  Contemporary ethics has focused on the latter question alone, with the magisterial traditions of deontological ('What rules govern our actions?') and tel...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Virtues of a Failing Culture

  An insanity has fallen upon the West, like a witch’s spell.   We have lived with it long enough to know it, understand it, but not long enough to resist it, to undo it.   The very stewards of the truth that would remove it have left their posts.   They have succumbed to its whispers, become its servants.   It has infected the very air and crept along the ground like a mist until it is within us and all about us.   We utter its precepts like schoolchildren taught their lines. Its power lies in its claims of virtuosity, distorted goodness.   If presented as the vices that they are, they would be rejected.   These virtues are proclaimed from the pulpits and painted on banners or made into flags.   They are established in our schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries.   They are the hallucinogen making our own cultural suicide bearable, even desirable.   They are virtues, but disordered, or they are the excess or deficiency of...
Post a Comment
Read more