Bill…I think we are not quite at odds here. I completely understand your rationale for the stance you have taken.
However, there is a very strong, clear, coherent distinction that needs to be made, and I’m going to jump up and down until the point is made.
You can stand opposed, by your faith, to taking a particular action. This is America; you are privileged to do so. And you may find your faith leading you to take a particular action. With rare exceptions, you are privileged to do that as well.
Those exceptions are where the “secular ethic” of the country has found a particular action to be contrary to the public good, and so enacted laws forbidding it. For example, a member of a fringe sect worshipping the Lamborghini Countach as the ultimate expression of the Spirit of Technological Progress and Glenfiddich single-malt as the ultimate expression of the Spirit of Human Exaltation Through Mind-Altering Substances is not therefore permitted to express his faith through drunk driving. (Silly example, but it works.)
On the other hand, with those rare exceptions, the moving spirit of American individualism has tended to allow to anyone the privilege to do what he or she wants within such bounds, regardless of what the individual doing the review of such behavior may think of them. I personally consider that the scruples of Jehovah’s Witnesses regarding the Pledge of Allegiance are ludicrous. But I can understand where they see it as violating the Second Commandment, and I respect their right to refuse to take the pledge, and would defend it.
What I do stand opposed to, from whatever source and regardless of how I may personally believe, is the tendency of people to believe, not only that they have the Truth, but that that Truth must be forced on others. This would be equally true if Pastor Jeremiah T. Barefoot of the First Truth Holiness Church tries to get the teaching of evolution banned in public schools or if R. Ingersoll Jones of the National Society of Skeptics tries to get public schools to show that theism is superstitious bunkum.
When you say you are opposed to gay marriage, I and mostly everybody else posting here can support you. None of us would force you to enter into one. When you say that, because you are opposed to gay marriage, no gay person should marry, you have crossed the line into regulating other people’s behavior by your beliefs.
I could be sarcastic and say that you should not care about the judgment of God being called down; certainly He will recognize His own and save them from the punishment He wracks on the rest of us sinners. In point of fact, I recognize that you are acting from love of your fellow man in trying to avert that wrath. I happen to think you and your President of the 12 Apostles are dead wrong on the issue. That is a matter of belief, and can only be debated.
Where we come into conflict is in your trying to force your beliefs on me, or more specifically, on the half-dozen gay people that post here regularly and their several million compatriots in America. And I think their rights demand to be defended, because taking their rights is step one on a slippery slope that ultimately prohibits me from expressing my faith and making my own choices. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it far better than I can. I suggest his remarks to your reading.
Now there’s something meatier. 