By custom, the “minister of the day” — the clergy invited to open each day in the state House of Representatives — keeps the prayer non-partisan. He or she is supposed to be praying on behalf of all Georgians, not in advocacy of just some.
But the Rev. Bryant Wright, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention, would have none of such niceties. Invited to open Wednesday’s session, Wright seized the opportunity to lecture on the controversial issue of gay marriage, warning legislators that they faced a conflict between religious liberty and what he dismissed as mere “erotic liberty.”
It’s a clever phrase, “erotic liberty”. You take the lifelong emotional, romantic, legal, social, spiritual and yes erotic commitment of marriage to the person whom you love, and in the case of gay people you reduce it to how they’re going to get their jollies, so to speak. There’s a lot of bigotry smuggled into those two simple words.
The novel formulation comes from the Rev. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He sees a rising conflict between religious liberty, which is real, and erotic liberty, which he believes does not and should not exist.
“Over the course of the last several decades, we have seen this revolution coming,” Mohler writes on a seminary blog. “Erotic liberty has been elevated as a right more fundamental than religious liberty. Erotic liberty, foreign to the founders of this nation, now marginalizes, subverts, and neutralizes religious liberty.”
That’s just wrong. The Bill of Rights may not list anything remotely close to “erotic liberty,” but it exists nonetheless. As Mohler himself acknowledges, “the framers of the Constitution did not believe they were creating rights within the Constitution, but rather acknowledging rights given to all humanity by ‘nature and nature’s God’.”
Let me stress that: Basic human rights exist independent of government; government merely acknowledges and protects rights. And the right for free adults to marry whom they choose is hardly some novel new theory. As far back as 1967, in a 9-0 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court called marriage “one of the basic civil rights of man,” concluding that “The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men.”
The case they were deciding was Loving v. Virginia, which finally voided state laws barring interracial marriage. Then as now, some people — including the Southern Baptist Convention — still argued that there was a biblical basis for laws barring what they considered “unnatural” relationships.
As Leon Bazile wrote 50 years ago:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and He placed them on separate continents. And, but for the interference with His arrangement, there would be no cause for such marriage. The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”
And who was Bazile? He was a Virginia judge, and with those words he injected his own religious beliefs into the law as he sentenced Richard Loving, a white man, and Midred Jeter, a black woman, for daring to exercise what today would be called “erotic liberty.”
