Separation of church and state being forgotten

I appreciate the passion with which Michael Dunn pursued his firmly and deeply religious convictions regarding the sanctity of marriage.   Most high school students actually spend more of their day at school than at any other venue. School thus becomes a place where a student is initiated into a society that is ethnically diverse, culturally eclectic and composed of a student body of many different religious faiths.   As a former high school psychologist with over 20 years of clinical experience, I have found that the only difference between heterosexual and homosexual students in the types of problems that they came to me with was the object of their sexual preference.

In every other way, the homosexual students were dealing with the same angsts and “stress and strain” of adolescence that played such a significant role in the lives of the heterosexual students.   Research has proven that a homosexual orientation has its etiology (origin) in the years before the advent of formal schooling. That is, gay people later on in their lives all say that they knew that they were inherently different from their peer group during their preschool years. It is only with the arrival of adolescence that they are physiologically, cognitively and emotionally mature enough to “out” themselves.   Recorded history, going as far back as three millennia, reveals that the percentage of the population that is homosexual has always varied between 3 and 5 percent and that this percentage is consistent across all nations, ethnicities, cultures and religions.   The above factors point to an innate and inherent etiology in the formation of a homosexual orientation.   Switching gears, Dunn made it abundantly clear that his concept of traditional values is 100 percent synonymous with an evangelical Christian theology that is New Testament-based.

It is my well-researched understanding that any publicly elected official’s fidelity and allegiance, while carrying out their public duties, is solely and only to their state and federal constitutions (and thus by juridical definition,  not to the Koran, the Old or New Testaments or any other body of religious works that violates the Establishment Clause).   Religion deals with moral absolutes, and people and the world, in general, are a mixture of failings, foibles, strengths, weaknesses and a multiplicity of thoughts and feelings that run from A to Z and back again. As such, religion . . . splits the world into “heretics, apostates and infidels.” The result (is) tens of millions of people (persecuted or killed), whose only “sin/crime” was to have a different way of believing and worshipping  than the dominant religion of their time, place or country of origin.   The form of democracy that I adhere to was defined so succinctly by conceivably our most famous and beloved president, Abraham Lincoln: “Of the people, by the people, and for the people.”

All the people. Marc Rogers, PhD Thousand Oaks