“Does anybody know what time it is? Does anybody really care?” are the lyrics to a song released by the band, Chicago, in 1969. Good questions and appropriate to our time. The time for our governor, legislators, and Christian leaders to not care about the most important legal and political issue of the next fifty to one hundred or more is about to slip past them; when that window closes, everyone will be made to care about what they have not yet seemed to care about.
 
I was stirred to this thought last week by a 27-minute speech by attorney Jeff Shafer of the Hale Institute and a podcast comment by Rosaria Butterfield who was a tenured professor at Syracuse University teaching feminist and queer theory before becoming a Christian.
 
What drives feminist and queer theory? Archetypes.
 
Mr. Shafer spoke on a subject given little consideration today—archetypes—even though we utilize them every day.
 
For example, Dr. Butterfield used some kind of mythical archetypal woman as the foundation for developing feminist theory, which minimizes men and turns them into the antagonists that women must overcome to achieve the various ends represented by the mythical archetypal woman.
 
That theory easily lends itself to the queer theory she taught. Male and female as archetypes under the larger archetype of human being are dissolved into a mythical unisexual archetype. With this theory, the categories of sex—male and female—are the antagonists and must be overcome to achieve this higher state of being. And that brings me to what Mr. Shafer said.
 
In contrast to the archetypes for these new social theories, Shafer noted, rightly, that the marital relationship between male and female was once considered the primeval defining archetype for all interpersonal social relationships.
 
But we must appreciate that the archetypal predicates for this social institution were male and female, understood to mean unalterably differentiated human beings, though equal in their fundamental nature.
 
Queer Theory became the fundamental archetype for law in 2015.
 
For reasons I will explain, the queer theory of human and social meaning was enthroned in our nation’s legal philosophy by the United States Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
 
As Shafer noted, the Supreme Court, by defining the civil marital relationship “into a non-procreative and same-sex relation and status, renounced its [previous] form and meaning, transmogrifying it into its antithesis.”
 
Put another way, the archetypal social institution defining the nature and foundation of all social “relationality . . . was jurisprudentially described and converted into a psychologically affirming tool and right of fruitless individuality” (Jeff Shafer). In other words, marriage is now defined as what makes any two people feel good about themselves.
 
Civil government marriage, by jurisprudential definition, is now a queered institution.
 
What makes this is a serious, civilization-redefining problem.
 
We may not think of this as a serious a problem because our tendency as moderns is to think of law in bits and pieces, to turn a phrase from Francis Schaeffer. As Mr. Shafer noted, law today is seen as “directed at isolated events,” such as marital relationships, parent-child relationships, or, regarding COVID mandates, doctor-patient relationships without any thought of there being any common conceptual roots inhering in and therefore defining the entire field of law.
 
But that’s wrong. The law, like everything God created, “is a mutually informing whole with an effective imperative toward unity among its parts” (Shafer’s speech). That’s because God is a unity within His “parts”; the distinctives of the persons of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit still form a unity.
 
It is not without reason that Scripture says creation reveals the glory of God, and this unifying feature in law respecting its disparate parts is part of that glory. It is inescapable.
 
Therefore, the primary question in law is which archetype for human beings and social relationships will the law orient itself around and conform to: male and female as unalterably differentiated, but equal kinds of human beings or queer theory?
 
Does this analogy help?
 
Think of having plantar fasciitis in your right foot or a bunion. An abnormality localized to the one foot.
 
It is not that you now have no right foot, but you will begin to walk abnormally to conform to the abnormality and reduce the pain. But that will affect your hip which will affect your back. But the left foot will now be under stress, and that brings its consequences. Without corrective measures, everything will begin to hurt.
 
Similarly, when Obergefell repudiated the archetypes around which the law has ordered and organized our individual lives and our social relations for centuries, that did not mean that we now have no law on those subjects of human meaning; it only means our law must adjust itself to this new thing, and the whole of the law must become abnormal in comparison to what it was.
 
Shafer put it this way, and if you care about parental rights, please consider this carefully:
   
This is why I do not support any legislation, as currently drafted, enacting parental rights, despite the good intention of the sponsors. These new laws must eventually be interpreted according to queer theory because that theory now informs our legal landscape.
 
Rosaria Butterfield is “woke” about what time it is. Are you?
 
Rosaria Butterfield recently said she will no longer write for the be-kind-above-all-else Gospel Coalition or Christianity Today, because “we disagree about what time it is. We disagree about whether we live in a post-Obergefell world.”
 
Her last statement tells me she is awake as to the time we are living in. She understands that in a “post-Obergefell world” the former archetypes for society and the law that shape and hold us together have been repudiated.
 
What she and other non-lawyers like Eric Metaxas may or may not understand is that every day that goes by the law is marshalling its forces into a new unity to make everyone conform to the new archetypes.
 
That is already happening to those who bake cakes and arrange flowers for weddings. The new legal paradigm will come for everyone if our leaders don’t help wake the rest of us up, too.
 
The alarm clock is sounding in Tennessee for our governor, legislators, and Christian leaders.
 
An alarm clock for those Christians who lead us in state government and those who are charged by God with shepherding the Body of Christ is about to go off. The “clock” is Senate Bill 1110/House Bill 1386 known as the Marital Contract Recording Act.
 
The bill provides an alternative to the post-Obergefell archetypes by acknowledging the archetypes that decision wanted to repudiate. It asserts that those millennia-long creational archetypes of man and woman and marriage have not been abolished.
 
It does so by asserting that if a man and woman are competent enough to enter into a common law legal representation agreement with attorneys such as those who serve in the legislature—William Lamberth, Johnny Garrett, and Andrew Farmer—and their agreements are enforceable against their unlicensed-by-the-state clients [1] who don’t pay them that same man or woman can form a marital relationship that the law must enforce without first getting permission from the state.
 
In other words, the bill affirms what I think all Christians would affirm, namely, that the marital relationship is not created by civil government statutes but by the nature of the promises made between a man and woman.
 
After they have married, the man and woman can file an affidavit with the County Clerk informing the world that they have married. The affidavit serves as proof in place of a license.
 
Why, under the bill, can only a man and woman do that?
 
Because the Western Legal Tradition upon which our law is grounded used the archetypes the former justices on Supreme Court sought to repudiate and the bill relies on that tradition.
 
The bill effectively denies that human nature and our entire legal foundation can be repudiated by a 5 to 4 vote of four unelected Justices on that Court.
 
The window of time is closing.
 
If our Christian governor, Christian legislators, and Christian church leaders do not act now, they will give the post-Obergefell world yet another year to organize law around queer theory.
 
It will be interesting to see what they do with Senate Bill 1110/House Bill 1366.
 
I hope they know what time it is. I hope they care.