Grothman: Same-Sex Marriage an Insult to Civil War Soldiers

I know, that seems like a weird headline. And it is. But Glenn Grothman, the Tea Party congresssman from Wisconsin, actually did make that argument. Allowing gay people to get married insults those who fought in the Civil War, he says, because they were fighting to make America more Christian. And he meant the north, for crying out loud.

“Our president during the Civil War was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, who was known as the most biblical of presidents, somebody who quoted the Bible a lot,” he said. “In the Civil War, some 600,000 people died in a country that was much less populated than that today. And it was a much more religious country and I think a lot of people who died fighting in that war felt they died fighting for a religious cause, you know, ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ and all that.

“I think it would shock those people who died in that war to find out the constitutional amendment which was ratified kind of as a culmination of their great efforts and their great deaths would be 150 years later, a little less than 150 years later, used by these five robed, arrogant, robed people to take this constitutional amendment and say that that constitutional amendment that was drafted after the Civil War was in fact an amendment designed to say that same-sex marriage had to be legal.”

He added that the decision is “particularly offensive” given that the 14th Amendment was “drafted by a people who felt they had just engaged in a strong religious war to further a Christian lifestyle by getting rid of slavery.”

Actually, the religious fervor was almost entirely on the pro-slavery side. Nowhere does the Bible condemn slavery, in fact it endorses slavery many, many times, including in the New Testament. The slaveowners taught Christianity to their slaves precisely because they believed it would make them more docile and less likely to revolt or try to escape. Every single secession declaration and the constitution of the Confederate States of America stated over and over again that they were seceding explicitly in order to maintain the institution of slavery, which was divinely inspired.