Our Bugchasing Elites

I need to expand a bit on one of the things I said in my sermon to the 5 sexual non-Euclideans on the Supreme Court. What I said was this:

“What your Court has actually done in settling this farrago of nonsense upon us is to place three options before us. First, either same sex unions will once again be rejected by all fifty states, with homosexuality therefore returning to the closet, or second, your decision will stand in all fifty states, and the faithful church in America will go off grid and underground in various ways, with all that implies, or third, the Union will come apart. From reading your opinion, you plainly do not know what you are doing or what you have done. When Scripture tells us that a throne is established by righteousness, it is the high end of folly to attempt to establish anything on the alternative foundation of wicked unrighteousness. “It is an abomination to kings to commit wickedness: For the throne is established by righteousness” (Prov. 16:12).

What I want to do here is point out that the first option seems like a miracle of reversal, unlikely in the extreme. And the second option seems unlikely to me also, for various reasons that are tied in with my view that the third option is already happening. Not only is it happening, it is a process that is already well-advanced. So you don’t have to go back up and count, that third option is that the Union is coming apart. While this is not the end of the world, we are still confronted with Eliot’s alternative concerning it — bang or whimper?

When something ends in a whimper, this is just another way of saying that can happen without anyone really noticing.

In a fallen world, any corporate body maintains its health and integrity through its ability to fight off infection and disease. In short, bodies need immune systems. This is true of families, it is true of churches, it is true of nations. When an alien principle comes in, the “body” can either fight it off or be unable to fight it off. Consequently, any body without a functioning immune system has AIDS. That body does not die of AIDS — it dies of whatever it was that it could not fight off.

By way of illustration, consider this PCA church in Portland, which has virtually no immune system at all. This statement is admittedly on the high end of silly, but the question posed by it is “what happens now?” If a PCA church can actually talk as if sodomy is adiaphora, such that we can all leave these “political” differences at the church door and come in to worship Jesus together, then obviously that congregation is sunk. But what happens in the broader PCA? Is the Northwest Presbytery of the PCA sunk also? Depends. If charges are brought, and Intown is frogmarched to the curb, then the PCA still has an immune system and good on them. But if nothing happens, or if the whole thing gets buried under a pile of two-kingdom blather, then the PCA is sunk also.

One commenter on Facebook pointed out that it did not seem coincidental to him that this is occurring in the same presbytery that tried Peter Leithart for heresy a couple of times. We shall see, but I think that it might be more telling that it is the presbytery that failed to convict him. I am not saying anything about the merits of the Leithart case, obviously, but it is worth noting that it is at least possible he was exonerated because this is a body that would be reluctant to discipline anybody for anything. This new situation should shed a good bit of light on that. Presbyteries that discipline will sometimes discipline the wrong guy, and presbyteries that won’t discipline will sometimes exonerate the right guy. Because this is so confusing the Lord will sometimes give us a PCA church in Portland that tries to handle sexual perversion as though it were a tomayto/tomahto thing. In short, if the Northwest Presbytery acts promptly on this, then the Leithart acquittal has some meaning. If they float off down the rainbow river, then the Leithart exoneration has a cloud over it.

What about nations? More particularly, what about ours?

Let me try to set up an analogy. Picture a family with twelve kids. The parents are exhausted and have plain given up trying to discipline the kids, and the task of trying to maintain some kind of moral order falls to the older kids, who can still remember a time when the family was more structured than it is now. The older kids try to obey their parents because they can see what would happen if everybody quit, but taking one thing with another what we’re seeing is ever increasing bedlam.

The older kids in this illustration are those conservative citizens of the United States who believe that the fundamentals are still basically intact, and we are just one or two good elections away from turning things back around. This is why they are hesitant to try the lesser magistrate option. They believe that if they successfully told the federal government that abortion was now going to be illegal in Texas, let us say, or that two dudes will be able to marry in Oklahoma when pigs fly, then some really bad consequences would descend upon us. The whole thing would fall apart, and that would be worse than whatever bad laws are being imposed on us. In other words, same sex mirage must be tolerated, or abortion, or else “America gets it.”

In other words, hostage taking works — until somebody figures out that the hostage is already dead.

What would happen, we reason, if the central government speaks and absolutely no one listens? We think that this would be unimaginable. We imagine it would be unthinkable. I hate to break it to you, but we are already almost there. The problem is that the successful examples thus far are all coming from the irresponsible and disobedient younger kids, with the older kids still trying to hold the family together. But what will happen when the older kids throw it in?

Try this thought experiment. A mid-sized city in eastern Washington has a unique city council election and they find themselves with a strong majority of hard line conservatives. The same thing happens in the two surrounding counties. They all take counsel together and pass an ordinance that will simply shut down the one abortion clinic, and ten minutes later they pass an ordinance that will prohibit any of the county clerks from issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples. With me so far?

Now the uproar will be considerable. The younger disobedient and insolent children will charge the older children with their failure to honor the rules of the household. After all, they will say, “we must obey father and mother,” come what may. Rule of law, rule of law!

Right. The city concerned already has twelve marijuana shops, in flat defiance of federal law. The city concerned is one of the over two hundred sanctuary cites around the United States, solemnly dedicated to a refusal to cooperate with the feds on immigration law. Whatever legal theory allows lesser magistrates to ignore Law A may certainly be employed to allow them to ignore Law B. Or so it would seem.

One last thought, a thought that will have to be developed further I know. There is more of a likelihood that the feds would step in to enforce their abortion laws or homosexual laws because defiance of these laws would be to return us to a center that wants to hold. What our ruling elites are not trying to do is govern the United States — what they are trying to do is orchestrate and manage its decline. They are pursuing the whimpering end. The citizenry might notice a bang.

In homosexual circles, bugchasing is when men pursue sexual partners with HIV so that they might contract it themselves (or run the risk of contracting it). Ruling elites, in both church and state, who refuse to discipline in terms of scriptural and/or natural law are simply that. Bugchasers.