Philadelphia finds new ways to celebrate

Happiness, in the debased sense, has been achieved by the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. This was evident everywhere in Philadelphia, birthplace of America, during my Third of July tour last Friday. A new ethos was in the air.

All that had been lacking for complete suppression of truth and conscience (Romans 1:18) had been supplied a week earlier by five justices, who conferred absolution on the citizenry’s most unseemly urges. (I know a maker of fine hookahs for high-end head shops who felt sort of OK about his profession but feels much better now that Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Alaska have legalized marijuana for both medicinal and recreational use. Such is the power of legalization.)

Thus the personal innate conscience, formerly clinging to life by a thread, is now safely dead. Make homosexuality legal and you have evidently made it moral. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote in A World Apart: “Every conflict is solved by the letter of the law and this is considered to be the ultimate solution. If one is right from a legal point of view, nothing more is required, nobody may mention that one could still not be entirely right. …”

One stop on my tour Friday was the old Congress building hard by Independence Hall, where the guide trumpeted that whole classes of people who were not acknowledged at the start of our national history have gradually won their rights as the populous has became more enlightened. He mentioned African-Americans and women, but the clear dot-dot-dot inference was the addition of gays. There is something specious—but extremely powerful—about seeing homosexuals as being of a piece with the pattern of unfolding civil rights.

A few blocks east and north of Independence Hall sits Christ’s Church, established in 1695 and the place of worship for 15 signers of the Declaration of Independence. As the tour guide pointed to where George Washington, Ben Franklin, Robert Morris, and Betsy Ross had their rented pews, a woman in a clerical collar rushed in and interrupted him to say his presence was requested for the start of the “rainbow service.” Before excusing himself, the guide mentioned that besides American independence, the city was celebrating the 50th anniversary of the first homosexual rights march in front of Independence Hall.

All of which reminded me of George Washington’s armchair with a sun carved into its back, on the podium in the hall of the Second Continental Congress. James Madison said Ben Franklin mused of it to him, saying, “I have often looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting.”

Seek the good of the land in which we are increasingly in exile by our faith (Jeremiah 29:7), and ask the Lord that we may see the healing rays of the rising sun once more.