Let’s just look at what Pope Francis said. He said, according to this documentary and according to his own words in the transcript, he said that he is in favor of legalizing civil unions.
Now what would that mean morally? It would mean giving sanction, state government sanction to same sex relationships. And according to those relationships, a formal recognition that would include virtually all of the rights of marriage, but without the name of marriage. Now, how exactly did that turn out, for instance, in Western nations? Well, it didn’t turn out to be very stable and we predicted it at the time. These halfway measures, indeed, they’re more than halfway, but not all the way to declaring marriage at this point, they were unstable. They’re unstable because even though they did grant to same sex couples, the opportunity for a legal recognition, it was not a legal recognition that was exactly the same as marriage. Now you go to the Supreme court of the United States. One year after the Pope is reported to have made those statements about endorsing civil unions. In 2015, the United States Supreme court handed down the Obergefell decision legalizing same sex marriage in all 50 States, it was a legal and moral atrocity.
For Pope Francis to attempt to normalize homosexuality is to say that Holy Scriptures are false, that our sins really don’t matter, and that we can continue living in them,” Graham told his nine million Facebook followers. “If that were true, then Jesus Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection wouldn’t have been needed. The cross would have been for nothing.
These comments about Pope Francis’ support for civil unions are an incandescent display of a point I’ve made repeatedly through the years: the Evangelical Right is intensely hostile to the notion of a secular state; they want, in fact, a theocracy.
Marriage is not a sacrament in the secular state, but something more akin to a contract. What is more, except for the protection of minors, the secular state has no licit interest in the sex lives of its citizens — even if Our Invisible Friend is obsessed with the whereabouts of some 3.5-billion whatsits. If such as Mohler and Graham actually believed in the Enlightenment ideals that America is founded upon, they’d get that.
The unhappy but uncomplicated truth is that the Evangelical Right has the spirit of a Fifth Column, intensely hostile to American ideals and determined to see them undone. If it were otherwise, they would recognize that the Obergefell decision is a step toward fulfillment of America’s promise.