Liberty Counsel Chairman Mat Staver yesterday spoke to Vic Eliason of Voice of Christian Youth America on Crosstalk, where the two agreed that legalizing same-sex marriage nationally “would be the same as pronouncing the death sentence on America.”
Staver, who is also the dean of the Liberty University School of Law, even went so far as to say that marriage equality would “obliterate” morality, marriage and “the idea that there even is a God,” along with harming children, parents and society at large.
Eliason: You know as we see the comments, one website indicated that if the court strikes down marriage as we know it that it would be the same as pronouncing the death sentence on America that many of us know and love, recount the days of Sodom and Gomorrah as returning to our culture. Your thoughts?
Staver: Well I think so. Same-sex marriage is ultimately the abolition of gender; it’s ultimately the abolition of any moral behavior with regards to human sexuality. This whole assault on marriage is really an attempt to obliterate not only morality but Judeo-Christian morality, to obliterate marriage and to even obliterate the idea that there even is a God.
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Staver: You’re going to have people lose their professions, you’re going to have parents lose their rights, you’re going to have churches and other avenues of religious free exercise ultimately throttled and marriage and morality are going to crumble. Children are ultimately going to pay the price and society will suffer.
He later cited California’s law barring the use of ex-gay therapy on minors as an example of how gay rights represent “a direct assault on the very core of our liberties and morality, marriage and even God.”
Staver described Rob Portman, Karl Rove and Reince Priebus as “cockroaches” which “start running” once “you flip on the lights” over their comments on gay marriage, and Eliason said of the Log Cabin Republicans: “Is there nobody to clean the cockroaches out?”
After discussing George W. Bush’s failure to pass the Federal Marriage Amendment, Staver joined other Religious Right leaders like Mike Huckabee, Tony Perkins and Gary Bauer in warning about the emergence of a “third party” and a “mass exodus” from the GOP “if the Republican Party were to adopt same-sex marriage.”
Staver: You know it’s like going into a building at night and you flip on the lights and all of the sudden the cockroaches start running, and I think this same-sex marriage issue has shown the cockroaches within the Republican Party, the RINOs: Republican In Name Only. That’s why we lost the 2008 election, that’s why we lost the 2012 election, because they put forth their party person who is not really a conservative and doesn’t resonate with the American people and couldn’t carry a conservative message and articulate it if it was handed to them.
Go back to George W. Bush, George W. Bush surrounded himself by a number of people that were not conservative and in fact though he was elected in 2004 on a marriage mandate, that was what ultimately pushed him across the line; remember that was the time when thirteen states passed constitutional amendments, eleven of them actually on the day he was elected, and Ohio was a key state and Ohio had marriage on the ballot and that pushed him over the top. He had a marriage mandate and coming into 2005 we asked him to push forward with a Federal Marriage Amendment; instead, he and Karl Rove backed away. They tried to reform Social Security, which was not a mandate of his, and he failed and we lost that opportunity.
So now you have Karl Rove and you have [Reince] Priebus and some others, [Rob] Portman, they’re going down a way that ultimately will split the Republican Party. I can tell you what, if the Republican Party were to adopt same-sex marriage, if they were to do that, evangelicals will leave en masse and that will create a third party. No one wants to create a third party, they want to work within the system, they want to make sure that it advances freedom and liberty and the sanctity of life and marriage, but if the Republican Party goes down that road you can bet that there will be a mass exodus from that party and it will not win elections again for many, many years in the future.
Eliason: You know Mat, as we look back to a term that isn’t new but they call them Log Cabin Republicans and that of course was the group that favored homosexual involvement and moral decadence, as I define it, but this was the liberal element. When I saw that happen years ago down in my heart I thought: Is there nobody to clean the cockroaches out? Why do you coexist with that?
