Blackstone and Montesquieu give us helpful general definitions of ‘law’.  Blackstone in his Commentaries says it is a rule given by a superior that an inferior must obey; Montesquieu, the necessary relation of one thing to another due to their unchanging natures (opening chapter of The Spirit of the Laws).  With the passage of the falsely-named Respect for Marriage Act by the US Congress (with lots of Republican support), both definitions are trampled upon.

This terrible Act will require the States to honor all marriages contracted in all other States, including those between couples other than the traditional male/female kind.  As marriage can exist only between one man and one woman, Montesquieu’s definition is broken – a man ‘marrying’ a man and so on represents a falsehood and therefore cannot be lawful.  And as marriage of one man with one woman was given by a superior (God – see Genesis 2:24, St. Matthew’s Gospel 19:4-6) to an inferior (mankind), the redefinition of marriage in the Act to include other arrangements breaks Blackstone’s definition.  Thus, according to the most basic definitions of law, the Respect for Marriage Act has nullified itself and should be obeyed by no one.

Human sexuality is really not a thing for the States to be careless with.  Fr. Joseph Gleason, an Orthodox priest in Illinois who fled the US with his family during the Marxist Obama years for saner ground, recounts some essential history for us about the fate of societies that embraced sexual debauchery, including this:

#2 — Canaan

Why were the Canaanites destroyed? They had sinned in many ways, for many years. But what particular sins finally brought judgment down upon them? Why did God finally send Israel with instructions to wipe out all of the inhabitants of Canaan?

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman. It is an abomination. Nor shall you mate with any animal, to defile yourself with it. Nor shall any woman stand before an animal to mate with it. It is perversion. ‘Do not defile yourselves with any of these things; for by all these the nations are defiled, which I am casting out before you. For the land is defiled; therefore I visit the punishment of its iniquity upon it, and the land vomits out its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 18:22-25)

Many people know that God sent Israel to destroy the Canaanites, and to take over their land. Few people realize that homosexual sex was one of the reasons why this judgment took place.

Fr. Joseph concludes,

In many biblical cases, God was patient with people even in the midst of many sins. But when they finally descended into the debauchery of sodomy, God’s patience wore thin. Judgment was knocking at the door.

These Scriptures have been handed down to us from God’s prophets. And they suggest that sodomy is not just your average run-of-the-mill sin. In many cases, sodomites brought down destruction on entire cities, and even upon entire nations.

We need to keep these lessons in mind when we consider what America has legalized and celebrated on a national level, mandating homosexual “marriage” rights in the Supreme Court, and lighting up the White House itself with a profane homosexual-pride rainbow. In the seven years since this took place, the homosexual movement has continued to advance, corrupting the culture and government at every turn.

Sodomites have taken the very sign of peace which God gave Noah, and they have twisted it into a symbol for sodomy.

Is this a level of blasphemy which God will choose to overlook?

But despite these warnings, many in the States are re-embracing the old pre-Christian deities, like Ishtar, whether knowingly or unknowingly.  Rod Dreher writes,

The second — and most interesting — god in Cahn’s book is Ishtar (Astarte/Ashtoreth/Venus/Inanna), the Babylonian goddess of love, pictured above. She was the goddess of sacred prostitution, of transgression, and the blurring of boundaries. Did you know that she was also the goddess of gender fluidity? I thought that was too on the nose to be true, but it is. This is easy to discover from authoritative sources online, but here’s a very short bit from Psychology Today:

‘The Mesopotamian Ishtar, the beautiful goddess of fertility, love, war, and sex, was sometimes represented with a beard to emphasize her more bellicose side. She could change a man into a woman, and the assinnu, kurgarru, and kuku’u who performed her cult had both male and female features.’

Cahn asks what it would mean for America to fall into the worship of Ishtar?

‘We would expect a transformation to begin that would alter the realm of sexuality. With the goddess’s entrance we would expect biblical standards and ethics surrounding sexuality and marriage to begin to erode. We would expect the moral foundations and values that had undergirded Western civilization for nearly two thousand years to begin overturning.

‘In short, we would expect there to be a revolution in the realm of sexuality — a sexual revolution.’

More:

‘Not only did Ishtar introduce, promulgate, and champion sexual immorality — she sanctified it; she declared it holy. Sexually immoral acts were part of her cult and worship, performed as rites in her temples and shrines. So in the grip of her spirit, the same thing began manifesting in American and Western culture. Sexual immorality was now not only accepted but treated as sacred.

‘Now it was the former standards and restraints that were seen as sinful, puritanical, repressive, and evil. And the one who opposed the newly sanctified sins or failed to adequately revere them was now treated as something of a heretic, and the opposition to the new morality as something akin to blasphemy.’

With the blasphemous Respect for Marriage Act (RfMA), we have reached the end of the usefulness of the current union between the States.  When the Federal City (we no longer want to tarnish the name of General George Washington by associating it with that place; credit to the great Southern historian Dr. Clyde Wilson for the alternative name) begins issuing orders (honor sexual immorality, or else…) that will bring about the spiritual and physical destruction of the peoples of the States, it has become necessary, at the least, to disobey the order, to nullify it, and, at the most, if the Feds try to force the resisting States to surrender to their will, to leave the current union altogether.  And there is no mistaking it:  The RfMA includes provisions to force States to comply, something court rulings, as bad as they are, are unable to do:

The bill would additionally require every state to recognize every same-sex marriage that “is valid in the State where the marriage was entered into.”

The bill also has a “private right of action” clause, which would allow “any person who is harmed by a violation of subsection (b)…[to] bring a civil action in the appropriate district court of the United States against the person who violated such a subsection for declaratory and injunctive relief.” Likewise, attorneys general would be able to bring civil action against any person who violates the law.

Secessionist sentiment is already rising.  Both Daniel Horowitz and Dr. Steve Turley have shown that conclusively.  It may be about to explode thanks to anti-laws like the RfMA.

Wise political leadership at this moment is crucial.  The grifters/careerists like Billy Nungesser and telegenic comedians like John Kennedy (who try to persuade people to take deadly covid jabs with ridiculous singing and who push for wars that turn out to be money laundering operations for Establishment politicians of both parties) need to step aside so that the more honorable warriors like Eric Schmitt and Jeff Landry can take the helm of their respective States and steer us out of the dangerous waters into which we have sailed.

Gov. DeSantis (who, quite the opposite of folks like Sen. Kennedy, is calling for Big Pharma to be held liable for the harm their covid injections have caused to numerous people) would be well advised to avoid the federal swamp, where his gifts and energy would be wasted, stay on as Governor of Florida as long as the folks there will let him, and continue to build her up into a leadership position in the world of nations.  Her GDP in 2021 of just over $1 trillion puts her at the 19^th largest economy on the list of GDP by country, just behind the agricultural powerhouse of the Netherlands and just ahead of the energy powerhouse, Saudi Arabia.  Whether inside a new union of Red States or standing on her own, the future of Florida would be brighter than a lot of other places with DeSantis and likeminded disciples at the helm.

If it sounds unusual to speak of separate, sovereign, independent States, it is well to remember that States have existed as independent countries in the past, Texas most famously, but also North Carolina and Vermont.  That is also what the 13 colonies are recognized as in the treaty that ended the War for Independence with Great Britain:  13 separate countries (Article 1^st, Treaty of Paris).  And that is what all 50 States remain today in their essence.

Believing that much good will come out of Republicans in the Federal City, who hate their own base voters and who failed miserably when they had plenty of power during Trump’s presidency, is wishful thinking.  State- and county-level action is where our efforts need to be focused.

The folks at the Tenth Amendment Center are fond of quoting James Otis, Thomas Jefferson, and others that a federal action that is not authorized by the Philadelphia constitution is not a law; it has lost all authority to compel us to comply with it.  The same is true of laws that contradict the Great Constitution that the Holy Trinity brought into being along with the rest of creation that defined and settled all relationships between things for all time, a system and pattern of laws that is found in the Bible, in natural law, and so forth (C. S. Lewis called it the Tao in The Abolition of Man).

We have argued before that State nullification would be carried out most effectively if there were a single officer responsible for that task (the constitutional ombudsman), rather than trying to herd the cats in the State legislature, etc., every time such an occasion arose.  Nonetheless, each State’s government in its totality retains the authority to review and nullify unlawful federal actions unless and until such a specification is made.  Given the conditions that we are entering into thanks to the RfMA, their protective actions will be more necessary than ever.  Quoting Mr. Dreher again,

Philip Rieff observed that sexual morality was the linchpin of Christianity, the thing that most set it apart from paganism. Rieff, writing in the 1960s, said that the West was losing Christian sexual morality, and that the pastors of the era did not realize that they were going to lose far more than that. And indeed, it has come to pass.

. . . The early Christians saw that every human being had dignity, as bearers of God’s image. They saw that pagan sexual morality was cruel and vile, and they firmly stood against it. Once again, you see the threat that they posed to this social order — a social order that was spiritually corrupt as well.

Just like us. When I see our own anti-Christian protesters, including Antifa, ranting against Christians for opposing abortion, or the sexualization and emasculation of children via Drag Queen Story Hour and transgender propaganda, I hear echoes across twenty centuries of the Ephesian mob chanting, “Great is the Artemis of the Ephesians!” in an effort to work themselves up into carrying out an anti-Christian pogrom.

This is how going to the Seven Churches of Revelation gave me a better understanding of our own time, and its challenges. Let the reader understand. The “winsome” strategy of some Christians today is absolutely no match for what we are up against.

For our protection, our governors, State legislators and judges, sheriffs, and other State and local officials must either relentlessly nullify immoral, unconstitutional edicts coming from the Federal City like the RfMA, or clear the way for secession, followed by either independence for each State or a new union of like-minded States under an explicitly Christian constitution.  These do exist in the world.  Greece’s for example has this for a preamble:  ‘In the name of the Holy and Consubstantial and Indivisible Trinity’.  And it also includes other explicitly Christian sections in Article 3.  Ireland’s preamble is similar:  ‘In the Name of the Most Holy Trinity, from Whom is all authority and to Whom, as our final end, all actions both of men and States must be referred’.

These new State-countries would still have to deal with stay-behind networks of Leftists, but these would be easier to deal with in the absence of the support of the behemoth federal bureaucracy; some would likely move voluntarily rather than live under the ‘fascist rule’ of Red States.

Outside of the government, citizens need to continuously lobby State and local officials to do their duty in regard to the above.  The Virginia Resolutions of 1798, which James Madison had a hand in crafting, spell out that duty with a powerful clarity:

 . . . in case of a deliberate, palpable, and dangerous exercise of other powers, not granted by the said compact, the states who are parties thereto have the right, and are in duty bound, to interpose, for arresting the progress of the evil and for maintaining, within their respective limits, the authorities, rights, and liberties, appertaining to them.

And above all, every Christian, in or out of government, needs to be ready to follow the example of the Apostles, and of all the holy martyrs and confessors who came after them, and declare to all who would have us reject Christ and sacrifice at the altars of woke or else face severe punishments, ‘We must obey God rather than men’! (Acts of the Apostles 5:29)

The legalization of homosexuality and the protection of their ‘marriages’ means persecution of Christians and the destruction of the culture they have built up over 2,000 years.  It is already happening.  If any of the States want to avoid that horrible desolation, they must fight with the two most potent weapons they have:  nullification and secession.

May God help us!

Walt Garlington
Louisiana State Sovereignty Committee