Steve Deace once again hosted far-right activist Michael Peroutka on his radio show to discuss the talk show host’s latest column on same-sex marriage and why we should not “validate relationships western civilization, heavily influenced by Biblical moral teaching, has up until now said for over a thousand years were immoral, destructive, and counter-procreative.” Peroutka explained that “the state has perverted” what “God called marriage,” and if we followed God’s laws then there would be “no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage.”
This can’t last, we are killing our own children, we are burying our own country; at some point reality has to set in. I like to use the term ‘reality,’ another term you use in your article you talk about if we can ‘wave a magic wand’ and that’s interesting because that’s an allusion to illusion. But what we really need is a dose of reality, what we need to do is wave reality over this situation and go back to what God called marriage, not what the state has perverted the definition to be but what God called marriage. That’s what we need to return to. There is no way we are ever going to validate homo or sodomite-unmarriage because God defined marriage as between a man and a woman once and forever.
Apparently the reason we aren’t following God’s moral code on the issue of marriage or other social issues, according to Peroutka, is because of the Union’s victory in the Civil War, or as he called it: “The War Between the States.”
He argued that the South’s defeat opened the door to a “huge black hole of centralized power,” which means that people began looking to the government, rather than God, as the source of their rights.
Peroutka said that “the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men,” who can then change the meaning of concepts like marriage.
Somehow we don’t think that this neo-Confederate logic is going to do a lot to help marriage equality opponents rescue their plummeting poll numbers.
Deace: What we’re coming down to here is: What is the law? Who determines it? How do we know that’s the right determination? Who gets to essentially apply and impose their interpretation of where the law comes from and what the law is? And we’re seeing that played out and frankly divisively with the marriage issue.
Peroutka: That’s right. When you ask me a question about this issue or other social issues, I always go back to these two standards: What does God say and what does the Constitution say? I don’t go to what many people, political talking heads, go to: What is politically effective? What does conservatism say? What does the Republican Party say? I go where our founders would’ve gone and where they did in fact go to declare their independence from Great Britain, they said: What does God say about this? And then in this case, what does the constitution say? So those are the standards I’m always going to use, it’s a new issue but it’s the same standard.
Deace: It’s the standard that founded this country, all the way from the Puritans to the people that ratified the Constitution.
Peroutka: And ever since, well there have been a number of watershed events in American history that have taken us away from this view that I’m describing, this American view. One of them was ‘The War Between the States.’ Ever since then there’s been this huge black hole of centralized power that’s formed in Washington D.C. People sometimes talk about ‘The War Between the States’ as being about the issue of slavery, I believe that history is written by the winners, it wasn’t about that at all. What it was about was consolidating power into the hands of a few people.
One of the best ways I’ve ever heard this explained to me was I was at a formal dinner party one time and a number of us at the table, a couple of gentlemen were talking about this issue and one lady piped up and she said, “Now don’t you start talking about that my great-great-granddaddy fought for the state of Illinois.” A gentleman at the table looked at her and said, “Mam, your great-great-granddaddy didn’t fight for Illinois, he fought for Washington D.C., maybe New York City, the banking interests, and by so doing he conquered Illinois, along with South Carolina and Tennessee and Alabama.” It was one of the best ways I think I’ve ever heard it explained because the real effect of the War and the Reconstruction after the war was to take the very foundation of our understanding of our rights away from us, that is to say that they come from God, and put them in the hands of men and say that they come from the Supreme Court or they come from the legislature or they come from the executive.
