Apologies for the lame joke in the title of this post, but I just couldn’t pass it up! Thanks to Clawhammer PR for bringing this story to my attention.
The Reticent‘s Chris Hathcock recently denounced the May 8th passage of Amendment One, North Carolina’s constitutional amendment prohibiting the legal recognition of domestic unions, including same-sex marriages. The amendment, which has made North Carolina a national focal point for the issue, defines marriage as solely a union between a man and a woman, and expands an existing North Carolina law banning gay marriage.
Said denunciation primarily came last week in the form of re-posting an image (which I’d already seen multiple times on Facebook) depicting various types of marriage, as described throughout the bible and in the laws of biblical times. However, in this particular context, Hathcock directed his message specifically at the Reverend Billy Graham:
The Reticent is collectively disappointed in North Carolina’s passage of an exclusivist, misguided, and ill-informed piece of legislature today. The mind reels. It is all too clear what really fueled those voters that checked “For” which is terribly disheartening. Billy Graham took out an ad in 14 NC newspapers proclaiming his support and we quote him: “The Bible is clear…”. Alright, then we would like to posit the following as other examples of marriage found in that text.
Mr. Graham has already displayed — on far too many occasions to count — his sick and twisted version of Christianity which has nothing to do with loving thy neighbor or any sort of a golden rule. Therefore, his direct support of a law which serves no positive or helpful purpose whatsoever, and exists only for the sake of excluding rights and liberties from a specific group of citizens, comes as no real surprise.
The reasoning in this case, though, seems to be the source of Mr. Hathcock’s frustration: there’s plenty of outdated (and just plain wrong) information written in the bible, so it makes little sense for anyone to base their entire lives on something that was written thousands of years ago. But even disregarding that, it certainly makes less sense for any law in this country to be based solely on a religious text (without any other grounds for that law’s existence), when (according to Black’s Law Dictionary) the First Amendment to the United States Constitution includes a provision “that prohibits the federal and state governments from establishing an official religion, or from favoring or disfavoring one view of religion over another.”
Anyway, apparently if you make a public statement that is contrary to a decision made by majority vote in certain places — California, for example — it just gets dismissed as another case of Hollywood liberals and most people barely even notice. However if you do the same thing in a place like North Carolina, I guess it’s a much bigger deal. Following that post, it seems a great deal of argument erupted (both for and against the legislation), prompting a second post a day later:
The anger and vitriol on all sides of the current debate in our home state and country is troubling to us. And further we do not want to entertain any further debate on our page because all we want to do is make music. The thing that is most staggering and regretful in all of this is that it seems we as a people cannot have an earnest discussion about this. Are we only capable of venom and hostility? I’m not about to tell you what to think, there are enough people doing that in all our lives already. But regardless of your stance, if we can’t all sit down and have a reasoned, honest, and legitimate discussion of this issue – we will only tear further apart. Once more, we do not wish to use this page to play host to any debate or soapboxing. Yet since we made a statement (which we thought was mild and humorous) we have found it clearly necessary to bring closure to this can of worms. Here ends our political ranting.
Very well, we can let the discussion end here and talk about music instead.
