I used to smile every time I saw a man walking up and down London’s Oxford Street in the 1970s wearing a sandwich board with the words “The end of the world is nigh”. I thought he was crazy. But I would not be chuckling if I saw him now because he might just have a point.
Our world has become unrecognisable since those days in many respects because the human race is losing all sense of right and wrong and behaviours that societies deemed wrong in my youth are now being accepted as normal.
People are not easily shocked anymore; they have seen it all on television, movies or video games. Real life and virtual reality have become blurred. There are very few taboos, especially in the West, and those who stand against such taboos being broken are attacked by the politically correct crowd for infringing on the human rights of others.
For example, men are changing into woman both figuratively (new men) and literally and are being hailed by the media as courageous for doing so. One of the signs that the Day of Judgment is approaching in #Islam is men imitating women and women imitating men.
No one can expect everything to remain the same. I am all for change, but not change for the worse and there are some fundamentals recognised by all religions that are eternally unchangeable or should be. Marriage is one of them.
Until recently, marriage has always been defined as a union between a man and a woman but nowadays prominent dictionaries, like Merriam-Webster, has added an alternative definition “the state of being united to a person of the same sex…” This means that schoolchildren will grow up believing that there is nothing unnatural about men marrying men or women marrying women.
The state of matrimony has been devalued and defiled in the eyes of many, in particular Christians who hold to matrimony being a holy union blessed by God. Christian couples threatened to divorce because making marriage a free for all makes a mockery of the institution.
Nevertheless the US Supreme Court has recently ruled that states can no longer ban same-sex marriages. One Texas pastor said he would rather burn to death than sanction such marriages. Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee is calling on Christians to engage in civil disobedience to protest the court’s decision. Another GOP presidential hopeful, Ted Cruz, has accused Supreme Court judges who voted in favour as having re-written the constitution.
As you will have gathered by now, I am a traditionalist. People signing civil contracts to protect their rights is one thing but marriage that has been redefined in #America is quite another. Despite my personal views, I do not disrespect the Supreme Court’s ruling under the banner of ‘personal freedom’ because what Americans permit in their homeland is not my affair.
But I must say that I was taken aback by the joyful embrace of that ruling by the president of arguably the greatest country on earth, President Barack #Obama, who described it as having “made our union a little bit more perfect”.
He emphasised his wholehearted approval by tweeting using the hashtag LoveWins, to write: “Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else.”
#Obama has reneged on his election manifesto that stipulated his support for civil unions but not for same sex marriage which conflicted with his Christian beliefs. “What I believe, in my faith, is that a man and a woman, when they get married, are performing something before God…We have a set of traditions in place that, I think, need to be preserved,” he said in 2008.
He was right then but somewhere along the road he changed his mind…or did he? According to his former adviser David Axelrod, he had been deceitful in that he championed same-sex marriage all along but hid that fact due to political expediency.
For a president who is supposed to represent all his country’s citizens, his promotion of “Love” on social media is undignified and misleading. Is he saying that anyone who stands against this federal law does not know what love is?
Celebrating unnatural relations - considered by #Judaism, #Christianity and #Islam as well as other faiths as an abomination - is a poke in the eye to people who take their religion seriously and sends a terrible message to his nation’s youth because he has not only assented to the concept of same-sex marriage, he has gone so far as glorifying it, holding it up as something innovative to be emulated with the words “ripples of hope cascade outward and change the world”. So now the planet’s most powerful man wants the whole world to follow suit!
Here it is important to note that another of the signs indicating the approach of end times is the prevalence of homosexuality. Yet another is that the virtuous will be despised for their beliefs. And that is exactly what is happening in the US today. Those who speak out in defence of marriage between a man and a woman, guided by their faith, are being characterised as homophobes.
One would imagine that President #Obama would have had more important matters on his mind last weekend than the promotion of gay marriage when terrorists were slaughtering innocents on three continents and the self-ascribed #Islamic_State (IS) is crucifying or burying children alive for the ‘crime’ of not fasting during Ramadan.
People are being massacred in mosques and churches, synagogues are being attacked, and the righteous are being condemned for holding values that have underpinned family structures for thousands of years. Again, Muslims believe that precursors to the Day of Judgment include “Good people will observe silence due to fear of wicked persons’ foul speech” – and there are no peoples more silent than Iraqis and Syrians trying to survive in #Islamic_State-controlled areas. Radicals who cruelly impose their will on others at the point of a gun or a knife represent the other side of #Obama’s ultra-liberal coin.
Times they are a changing that is for sure. I am a man who believes in progress and looks to the future but I can not help but feel nostalgic for the western world that was when children were brought up with immutable values; a time when right and wrong was laid out in black and white terms, not in shades of grey. I miss the days when those who stood up for time-honoured principles were respected not vilified for expressing their opinions just because those opinions might offend a minority. A world without rules or behavioural red lines is one where the only ruler will be chaos.
The Supreme Court’s decision has chipped away at #America’s much-trumpeted values. The dignity of the Presidential Office has been compromised. The country that was once held high as a beacon of light is not quite as bright. Only the Creator knows the time of our judgment but if we continue down this slippery slope, that day will likely come soon.