Conservative activist Alan Keyes says that Ireland’s decision to approve marriage equality in a national referendum is just as wrong and unjust as “if the people of Germany voted tomorrow to renew the Holocaust.”

“[W]ould the cardinal say the German state is duty-bound to re-open the death camps?” he asks, referring to a Roman Catholic cardinal who said that he would respect the vote. Respecting the marriage equality law, Keyes writes today in WorldNetDaily, is the “kind of spurious legalism” that “helped goose-step Germany into Hell in the last century.”

Keyes adds that the Nazi Holocaust comparison is not off-base since “misleading millions of people into mortal sin will be a spiritual holocaust.”

“It’s déjà vu all over again.” In an article at LifesiteNews.com, I read that, in response to the referendum in Ireland favoring homosexual “marriages,” Walter Kasper, a German cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, said: “A democratic state has the duty to respect the will of the people; and it seems clear that, if the majority of the people wants such homosexual unions, the state has a duty to recognize such rights.” So if the people of Germany voted tomorrow to renew the Holocaust, would the cardinal say the German state is duty-bound to re-open the death camps? That kind of spurious legalism helped goose-step Germany into Hell in the last century. Do German cardinals now propose to do the same to the Roman Catholic Church in this one?

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Surely misleading millions of people into mortal sin will be a spiritual holocaust, with quite possibly eternal consequences. Does Cardinal Kasper think those spiritually deadly consequences are unreal? We learn from another Lifesitenews report that one of Cardinal Kasper’s liberal co-conspirators, Cardinal Reinhard Marx, is “well-known for his support for the ‘Kasper agenda’ and a prominent defender of the ‘value’ of homosexual unions.” Of course, the term “value” is valueless except in the context of some standard of judgment. Given the Catholic Church’s reliance upon natural law as an expression of God’s will, it’s reasonable to assume that both these cardinals still uphold that standard.

So what value does God assign to homosexual relations? For males, the Old Testament scroll of the law calls such relations an abomination (Leviticus 20:13). That term suggests a negative value, as does the death penalty the Torah prescribes for homosexual behavior.

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Finally, when he asserts that it is right to follow the majority’s will when they purport to approve as lawful what God condemns as odious under the law, Cardinal Kasper is following the trendy idolatry of self-willed freedom, wrongfully abused, that now defames the name of right. By doing so, he casts away God’s standard of natural right. And he accepts an understanding of sovereignty that even pagan philosophers rejected. A sovereign act must always take account of the common good. When that good is not being respected, sovereign authority is not in play.

In such a circumstance, the will that purports to wield the sovereign power is not an exercise of sovereign right. It is a wrongful abuse of power that people of good will have, in principle, a duty to resist, not to obey. And this is true whether the specious exercise of sovereignty is that of the Irish people, the U.S. Supreme Court or the people of the United States, however assembled.