Here's an especially relevant excerpt:
Thus we should pray and work that marriage would be understood and treated in our land and by our government as a lifelong union of one man and one woman.
If someone asks, Why do you impose your religious conviction on the whole culture, we answer: all laws impose convictions on a culture. And all convictions come from worldviews. They don’t come out of nowhere. People argue for laws on the basis of a certain view of the world. What needs to be kept clear is that voting for a law (a prescribed or proscribed behavior) does not mean voting for the worldview behind it.
A person with an atheistic worldview may argue that, since there is no God, human life is the most sacred thing there is and therefore it is appalling to kill little humans in the womb. Or a Christian may argue that, since there is a God, humans created in his image ought not to be killed in the womb. Therefore a pro-life vote may not be a vote for either worldview. The same thing is true for the meaning of marriage. The way laws (and amendments) come into being in a pluralistic democracy like ours is the convergence of enough different worldviews on the same prescription for behavior—when enough people with different worldviews have the same idea of how we ought to behave.
Being an indigenous Christian in that setting means working to shape the culture into behaviors that reflect the revealed will of God, even if only externally, and dimly, and embraced by mercy for very different reasons than our own.
John's distinctions are very helpful but Connecticut's lawmakers don't even pretend to be concerned only with regulating external behavior.
Rep. Michael Lawlor is transparent about his desire to legislate private attitudes. He is not prescribing behavior, he is imposing a worldview, "public attitudes and private attitudes towards homosexuality. That is really what is at the heart of this ... That's what it is all about. And recognition of same-sex marriage is the most symbolic acknowledgment that homosexuality simply apprears to be a normally occurring phenomenon in nature." Lawlor offers no rationale for proposing same-sex marriage legislation, he identifies no interest of the state in this, except as a symbol that homosexuality is normal and natural.
Sen. Andrew McDonald's rationale is that same-sex couples are required "to justify to the outside world the love that you have in your heart and that is wrong. That is wrong and unacceptable." Again, though he claims he doesn't want to undermine anyone's religious faith, he, nevertheless, asserts that "the people" of Connecticut have decided to confer respect and moral approval on same-sex couples.
Against what John Piper describes as the norm, laws regulating external behavior merely, the co-chairmen of our Judiciary Committee led our legislators to endorse a worldview; behavior is just symbolic.
Who is imposing beliefs in Connecticut, now?
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