A.

Homosexual activists have achieved what Americans 50 years ago would have thought impossible and unthinkable. In addition to systematically securing legal sanction with the help of liberal judges who act as legislators, they are gradually convincing more and more Americans that same-sex relations should be accepted as legitimate behavior. In 1965, 82% of men and 58% of women said that homosexuality represented a “clear threat” to the American way of life. By 1993, only 66.3% of the American population believed that sexual relations between two consenting adults of the same sex were always wrong (Singer and Deschamps, 1994). A 2001 Gallup poll showed a continuation of a slow, but steady, liberalization of American public opinion toward homosexuality (Newport, 2001). A poll in the same year by the Barna Research Group found that nearly half of all adults (48%) believe that sexual relations between consenting adults of the same gender should be legal. Two years later, Gallup found that six out of ten Americans feel that homosexual relations between consenting adults should be legal. This is the highest level of acceptance of the legality of homosexuality that has been measured over the 26 years that Gallup has been asking such a question. A slightly smaller percentage (54%) says that homosexuality should be considered an acceptable lifestyle (Newport, 2003).

Observe the obvious erosion of American moral sensibility—from 82% to 46% in just 40 years. This alarming desensitization process is typical of human civilizations throughout history (cf. the Old Testament nation of Israel). Those who are ignorant of the past are indeed doomed to repeat it. The extent to which America has digressed from its original moral moorings becomes shockingly apparent when one examines the stance taken by American society for the first 150 years of its national existence. For example, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a ruling in 1885:

For certainly no legislation can be supposed more wholesome and necessary in the founding of a free, self-governing commonwealth, fit to take rank as one of the coordinate States of the Union, than that which seeks to establish it on the basis of the idea of the family, as consisting in and springing from the union for life of one man and one woman in the holy estate of matrimony; the sure foundation of all that is stable and noble in our civilization; the best guaranty of that reverent morality which is the source of all beneficent progress in social and political improvement (Murphy v. Ramsey, emp. added).