Destroying the Ban on Interracial Marriage
by Pastor Don Elmore
May 25, 2014
Scripture Reading: Judges 10:6-9
Judges 3:7-8“And the children of Israel did evil in the sight of the LORD, and forgot the LORD their God, and served Baalim and the idols. There the anger of the LORD was HOT against Israel, and he sold them into the hand of Cushan-rishathaim, king of Mesopotamia; and the children on Israel served Cushan-rishathaim eight years.”
What was the sin that was responsible for causing Israel’s God to be hot against them? Verses 5 and 6 tells his that it was interracial marriages!
Judges 3:5-6 "And the children of Israel dwelt among the Canaanites, Hittites, and Amorites, and Perizzites, and Hivites, and Jebusites: And they took their daughters to be their wives, and gave their daughters to their sons, and served their gods.”
Notice that the 2 ½ tribes of Israel that dwelt on the eastern side of the Jordon, lived in the land that was formerly controlled by the Amorites. Moab dwelt in the southern portion of this land when they were in existence.
After Israel was delivered from this servitude, they once again committed evil in the sight of the LORD and they were put in servitude to Moab for 18 years. But after the children of Israel cried unto the LORD, the LORD raise up a deliverer who freed them from the Moabites and they had rest for 80 years.
Bloodlines
I recently was sent a book via email that was written by John Piper. He is one of the leaders of the reformed theology and he has already written twenty-eight books. He is a Calvinistic preacher, who is a member of the Reformed Presbyterian Church. The book that I received was entitled, “Bloodlines; Race, Cross, and the Christian.”
He was born in 1946; four years after I was born. He lived his youth in Greeneville, South Carolina and when he was sixteen years old his home church voted to not allow Blacks into their services! He lived in the middle of America’s separatism. He confesses that he was a Southern racist.
Well, what changed John Piper from a racist to an integrationist; from a separatist to a person that promotes interracial marriages? Piper writes about when he was a senior in college (Wheaton College) that he and his future wife went to the great Urbana Missions Conference in December, 1967. At that meeting there was a question that was answered by a former missionary to Pakistan during a question-and-answer time before thousands of students.
The student’s question: “What if your daughter falls in love with a Pakistani while you’re on the mission field and wants to marry him?” This was a very important question to Mr. Piper, for he writes that one of the unshakeable reasons why segregation was right was the perceived wrongness of interracial marriage. “Perceived wrongness” of interracial marriages?
The former Pakistani missionary’s answer: “Better a Christian Pakistani than a godless white American!” Piper admits that this answer had a great impact on both him and his future wife. This answer was the changing moment in their lives. But it is not true.
This is used all the time in the argument against interracial marriages. A godly marriage is based on faith, not race. But that is not true; it is a lie. It is a subtle lie that is based on their false gospel. Answers in Genesis also uses this argument. In Ken Hamm’s heretical book, One Blood, they give the reader three types of marriages to consider:
- A Black Christian male and a White Christian female.
- A White Non-Christian male and an Asian non-Christian female.
- A White Non-Christian male and a White Christian female.
Answers in Genesis asks the following question: Which of the three impending marriages listed above does God counsel against entering into?
Answers in Genesis says on page 90 of their book, “One Blood,” that “the answer is obvious – the third one. According to the Bible, the priority in marriage is that a Christian should marry only a Christian.” They totally ignore what race a person is, because to them it doesn’t matter; it is just faith. To them, there is only one race, the human race and everyone is eligible to marry anyone else.
Now, where does the Bible teach this doctrine? Does the Bible ever give its approval for a White person to marry another White person who is not a true believer? The Book of Genesis (27:41-33:20) gives a very good story about the picking of a wife for Jacob. Esau had married two Canaanite women from the town of Heth and his mother, Rebekah, said to her husband, Isaac that she was grieved in her mind about what Esau had done. She wondered, if Jacob would also marry a Canaanite, what good would her life be then?
So, Isaac counselled Jacob to go to Syria and join up with Rebekah’s family (Bethuel, Rebekah’s father) and look for a wife amongst them. Jacob found one of the daughters of Laban who was his mother’s brother to be his wife. Her name was Rachel.
After staying for twenty years, Jacob was called to go back to Palestine. So Jacob leaves Rachel’s family and returns with eleven of his sons, one daughter, his two wives (Rachel and her older sister) and their two handmaids. But notice what the Bible says:After Laban traveled from Syria and finally caught Jacob, he asked him: Why did you steal my gods from me? Jacob told Laban that he could search all throughout his (Jacob’s) possessions and if he found his gods he could murder the person who had taken them; “for Jacob knew not that Rachel (his wife) had stolen them.” Rachel had stolen the gods of her father. Rachel was of a different religion than of knowing the true covenant God.
- Can a Pakistani, Japanese, Canaanite, Korean, Black African and all other races be part of the covenant that God made with His people? Who do you find in the Old Covenant (Old Testament) writings and who do you find in the New Covenant (New Testament) writings in the Bible who fits this description of being elected by God through the covenant that He made with their fathers.
It should be called the “Old Covenant” and “New Covenant” and not as most, if not all the Bibles today have it: the “Old Testament” and “New Testament.” Can you name one Pakistani person (meaning a non-Israelite) who became part of the Covenant seed? So, how can a Pakistani person become a Christian? That is Judeo’s big mistake. Israel is supposed to be an apartheid nation, not as what the world’s great freemasonic statue indicates: that is, it welcomes all of the world’s different races into the nation to be mixed equally together like a tossed salad.
More of Piper's Story
After graduating from Wheaton College, John Piper then went to an unnamed seminary in California. There one of his professors wrote a 208-page syllabus or reading called “Readings in Racial Prejudice.” He wrote that these readings were absolutely shocking. But that he still had this reading on the shelf across the room in his study.
Piper then admits that in 1971, he wrote a research paper on Interracial Marriage. The professor approved of his exegesis and gave him a grade of A- on it. Piper writes that this biblical study on interracial marriage that he did in seminary was to him a settling of the matter. He has not gone back from what he saw there. The Bible, he says, does not oppose or forbid interracial marriages, but sees them as a positive good for the glory of Christ. This statement is wrong!
Then where did Piper go? He spent the next three years in Germany. He wrote that when he visited Germany that “Germany’s history of horrific racist Nazism was only twenty-six years old.” He was living close to the Dachau concentration camps, preserved with its “Nie Wider” (Never Again) memorial. He wrote that they (he and his wife) went there, but failed to mention that they totally ignored their Savior command and became enthralled with the doctrine of the Pharisees. Notice what he writes: “Living in the literal and figurative shadow of such horrific effects of racism solidified the merciful reorientation of my mind.”
After his graduation from the University of Munich in 1974 in took a job at Bethel College in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. Then he decided that his desire was to become a pastor. So, in 1979 he accepted a call to become a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. The neighborhood was very multicultural and diverse. It was in this neighborhood that they raised four boys and when he turned fifty-years-old they adopted a Black girl!
What is missing? There was not even one word in his book that told of the covenant that God made with the fathers of the people of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and his seed. No mention that this seed eventually became the nation that was ruled by God Himself. He sat in the inner court in the Temple. There was no mention of the separation of the two kingdoms, the divorce and how after the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ; how the message came to the divorce House of Israel which reestablished them back into the covenant family.
And you know how John Piper interprets Ephesians 2 and Romans! Is God the God of the Jews only? Is He not the God of the Gentiles also? Yes, of the Gentiles, also. And, of course, he writes that the “Gentiles” refers to all kinds of racial and ethnic groups. Piper refers to these racial groups as being uncircumcised, without the anointed people, aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope and without God in the world.
Piper also writes that one of the most celebrated marriages in the Bible, and the one that gave rise to the line of King David, and finally to Jesus, was the marriage between a jew and a Moabite—the marriage of Boaz and Ruth. What the book of Ruth illustrates is that there was no absolute rule in God’s Word forbidding marriage across racial and ethnic lines. What the Bible does forbid is the marriages of a believer and unbeliever. Surprise! One of the Universalists favorite sayings.
And Piper stands not alone on this point. Most commentaries, seminaries, preachers and therefore common popular “Christian” opinion, promote the unbiblical doctrine of the impure genealogy of Jesus Christ. They say that one of His ancestors, Ruth, was racially “a Moabitess.” Therefore, the entire family tree beginning with the offspring of Ruth and her husband Boaz is tainted with the impure “gentile” blood of Ruth, the Moabitess.
I will give the statement from one very popular Bible and one very popular commentary:
Companion Bible; Page 361: “Two books with names of women: Ruth, a Gentile, marries a Hebrew husband; Esther, a Jewess, marries a Gentile husband. Two tokens that Gentiles, as such, were to be blessed only through Abraham’s seed….”
Matthew Henry Commentary; Page 275: “In the conversion of Ruth the Moabitess, and the bringing of her into the pedigree of the Messiah, we have a type of the calling of the Gentiles in due time into the fellowship of Jesus Christ our Lord.”
In the eyes of these dispensationally influenced commentaries, they symbolize the supposedly non-Israelite Moabitic blood of Jesus with the non-Israelite gentile conversion that they believed occurred after the supposed rejection of Christ by Israel. In other words, they are looking for any biblical support that they can find in the Scriptures that will support their false claim of universalism!
Ancient History of the Land of Moab
Ruth was not a Moabite; but an Israelite. The Moabites started from an incestuous relationship between Lot and one of his daughters who hired a Mesopotamian diviner by the name of Balaam to sabotage the Israelites (Numbers 22--24). By the time of this incident of Baalpeor, the Moabites were no longer a racially pure people. When the Israelites arrived in the Transjordan, Sihon, a king of the Amorites, had defeated the previous king of Moab and absorbed much of the Moabite territory as far south as the Arnon River.
The Israelites first asked the Edomites for a free passage through their land on their journey to the Promised Land. Israel said that they would not pass through their fields or vineyards and not drink water from their wells. They would travel on the Kings’ Highway; but Edom said that they are not allowed to pass through their land or they would be at war!
So, Israel went to the east of Edom. Next they came to the country of the Moabites. They asked them the same thing that they had asked of the Edomites. But the Moabites also refused them the right to pass through their land. The Israelites pass to the east of Moab.
Thirdly, they ask the Amorites if they could pass through their land. The Amorites not only refused the Israelites but they attacked them in a major battle. God was with His covenant people and they completely destroy the Amorites to the River Arnon.
Biblical history shows that the Moabites were conquered and taken into captivity by the Amorites:
Numbers 21:26-29: For Heshbon was the city of Sihon, the King of the Amorites, who had fought against the former King of Moab and had taken all of his land out of his hand even unto Arnon. Wherefore they who speak in proverbs say, Come into Heshbon, let the city of Sihon be built and established; For there is a fire gone out of Heshbon, a flame from the city of Sihon: it hath consumed Ar of Moab, and the lords of the high places of Arnon. Woe to thee, Moab! Thou art undone, O people of Chemosh: he hath given his sons that escaped, and his daughters, into captivity unto Sihon, King of the Amorites.
The Moabites were almost completely slaughtered and the remainder of them were taken into captivity unto the Amorites. A portion of the Moabites south of the river Arnon remained unmolested, and these caused trouble for Israel later on.
What the serious Bible scholar must understand is that during the Joshua period, the Israelites destroyed the Amorites, who had absorbed the Moabites, killing and/or displacing both of them. Upon driving the Amorites (+ absorbed Moabites) out of the Promised Land, it is recorded at Joshua 18:7 that half of the tribe of Manasseh, along with the tribes of Gad and Reuben, moved into the former land of the Amorite/Moabite east of the Jordan. It was later, during the Judges period that an Israelite lady from the conquered land of Moab by the name of Ruth journeyed with their mother-in-law Naomi back to Bethlehem. Yes, Ruth was an Israelite, NOT a Moabite!
The Amorites now added to their occupied land; the land of the Moabites, which was located on the south and east portion of the Jordan River. Then the Amorites, who occupied the entire eastern portion of the Jordan River were subsequently wiped out by the Israelites (Numbers 21:33-35; Deuteronomy 2:23-37). The land became occupied by the Israelites tribes of Gad and Reuben and ½ of the tribe of Manasseh (Deuteronomy 3:12-16; 29:8).
Thus it is likely that Ruth’s being known as a Moabite was a mere geographic term of convenience, much like Moses’ being referred to as an “Egyptian” in Exodus 2:19:
“And they said, An Egyptian delivered us out of the hand of the shepherds, and also drew water enough for us, and watered the flock. And he said unto his daughters, And where is he? Why is it that ye have left the man? Call him, that he may eat bread. And Moses was content to dwell with the man; and he gave Moses Zipporah, his
daughter.”Was God so inconsistent that He rewarded Boaz for mixing his seed with a Moabitess after He had punished by death many Israelites who had done the same thing just a century earlier?
During Israel’s wilderness 40 year journey, “…the people began to commit harlotry with the daughters of Moab” (Numbers 25:1). This race-mixing by Israel, which was the result of the advice given to the King of Moab by Balaam, resulted in a plague which killed all 24,000 of the Israelite men who had mixed their seed with the Moabite women. Does it really make any sense that a century later Boaz is not only NOT put to death for marrying a Moabitess, but they are both (Boaz and Ruth) rewarded and blessed by producing the royal seed of God’s Throne?
- Was Naomi’s family the only Israelites who left Bethlehem-Judah to sojourn in the land of Moab because of the famine? If Elimelech and his wife Naomi, with their two sons left Bethlehem to live on the other side of the Jordan River, why is it not possible that Ruth and her family could not have done the same thing? Usually, it is more than four people who flee from a famine area! Would it have been possible for Ruth’s grandparents or parents to have moved to the land of Moab many years before Elimelech and his family? How many other Israelites families fled from the famine area of Judah?
- Why would the Moabites allow some Israelites to live in their land to escape the famine in Judah, while they did everything in their power to destroy them just a century earlier? It doesn’t seem to make much sense that the Moabites would hire Balaam to “curse Israel so they could overcome them and drive them out” (Numbers 22:11), and then later, welcome these same bitter enemies with open arms to live in their own land in order to spare many Israelites from starving to death in their nearby homeland. Why would the Moabites try to destroy the Israelites and then later provide them with farmland in their own country in order to keep many of them alive? The Moabites would not and they did not -- because they didn’t live in the “Land of Moab” at that time.
Was Ruth called a “Moabitess” because she was one racially or because she lived in the former land of Moab? Was Moses called an “Egyptian” (Exodus 2:19) because he was one racially or because he had lived in the land of Egypt? Obviously, Moses was an Israelite who had lived in the land of Egypt.
Ruth could not have been a Moabite racially because of a little know Biblical fact of history: there were absolutely no Moabites living in the former territory of Moab while Ruth was living there! Ruth was living in the land of Moab while the judges ruled Israel and the LORD was king.
The time of the Judges was the period of Israel’s history from the death of Joshua until the establishing of the Monarchy with the crowning of Israel’s first king; King Saul. This governmental era lasted approximately 300 years from around 1400 B.C. until 1100 B. C. So Ruth was living in the land of Moab during this pre-Monarchy time of Israel’s history.
The land of Moab that Ruth was living in while married to one of Naomi’s sons, was originally east and south of the Dead Sea, extending from the River Jabbok on the north to the River Arnon on the south; and from the Dead Sea and Jordan River on the west across the plains and foothills into the mountains to the east. From the name of the people who once lived there, it was called “Moab” and it kept that name for many centuries, even after all the Moabites were gone from it.
When the Israelites entered the Promised Land, after their 40 years of wandering in the Exodus, the land of Moab was the first territory they conquered. God had commanded them to totally exterminate the former occupants in the lands they were to settle: and in Moab, they did so. At that time, about 1450 B.C., Sihon, King of the Amorites, had conquered and occupied the Kingdom of Moab, and was the ruler when the Israelites came in.
Deuteronomy 2:32-34 "The Sihon came out against us, he and all his people, to fight at Jahaz.And the LORD our God delivered him before us, and we smote him, and his sons, and all his people. And we took all his cities at that time, and utterly destroyed the men, and the women, and the little ones of every city; we left none to remain….”
After they conquered the “Land of Moab,” the Israelite army journeyed north and similarly completely destroyed King Og and the Amorites. As a result, the entire area east of the Jordan River was settled by the tribes of Reuben, Gad and half of the tribe of Manasseh, after all the original inhabitants: The Moabites and Amorites had either been killed or driven out.
Deuteronomy 3:16“And unto the Reubenites and unto the Gadites I gave from Gilead, even unto the river Arnon, half the valley, and the border even unto the river Jabbok, which is the border of the children of Ammon.”
All of this was accomplished about 1450 B. C. From that time on, this land of Moab, that laid between the rivers Arnon and Jabbok, was entirely inhabited by Israelites only – in sharp contrast to the land west of the River Jordan; because in the old lands of Moab and the Amorites none of the enemies of Israel were left alive, while on the other side of the Jordan, many Canaanites continued to dwell in their cities scattered among the land inhabited by the 9 ½ tribes of Israel plus the teaching tribe of the Levites. The racially pure Israelites living in the old land of Moab were often called “Moabites,” just as those pure Israelites living in the old land of Gilead were often called “Gileadites,” and those pure Israelite in New Testament days who lived in Galilee were often called “Galileans.”
Three hundred years later, 1143 B. C., we find evidence that the Israelite occupation of the lands of Moab and the Amorites was still unbroken. Read carefully the conversation between the ninth Judge of Israel, Jephthah, and the King of Ammon. The King of Ammon wanted the old lands of Moab and Ammon to be restored. He wanted to reoccupy the lands that his ancestors had lost to Israel in the war that was fought over three centuries previously. Jephthah answered the King’s demands by asking a revealing question that proves once again that Ruth cold not have been a Moabite racially:
Judges 11:26“…while Israel dwelt in Heshbon and its towns, and in Aroer and its towns, and all the cities that are along by the borders of Arnon three hundred years? Why therefore, did ye not recover them within that time?”
For three hundred years since Israel’s occupation of the land east of the Jordan River, there had not been any Moabites who lived in the country or land of Moab! Ruth lived in this land about 130 years after the Israelites of the tribes of Reuben and Gad began to occupy this old land of Moab and 170 years before the King of Ammon tried to reclaim the old territories. It was also during this time that Elimelech, a man of Judah, with his wife Naomi and his two sons were driven by famine out of Judah; and “went to sojourn in the country (or land) of Moab” (Ruth 1:1). Note the accuracy of that expression: Not among the people of Moab, but in the land of Moab, which was occupied by Israelites exclusively. His sons married women of that country – one of them being Ruth, who became an ancestor of David, and through David an ancestor of Jesus Christ. Ruth could not have been of any race or nation but Israel, for no others lived there.
Ruth was a pure Israelite. King David was a pure Israelite. If Ruth was a type, she was not a type of non-Israelite gentile being married to her near Kinsman; but she represents the Israelite gentile (northern kingdom) being married to her near Kinsman, Jesus Christ; a descendant of Boaz (of the tribe of Judah), born in Bethlehem—very possible in the same stable where Ruth had been proposed to by her Kinsman-Redeemer (Ruth 3).
- The most convincing thing that proves that Ruth is an Israelite, is that Boaz was a near Kinsman to Ruth. Boaz was from the tribe of Judah and there was one other man who was a closer near kinsman to Ruth than Boaz was. For Boaz to marry Ruth, the other man must decline his responsibility.
There is a divine law regulating redemption of property that a kinsman redeemer was involved with is given in Leviticus 25:25-34. The law concerning a brother’s duty to raise up seed to the deceased, the levirate law, is given in Deuteronomy 25:5-10. These laws pertained to Israelites only. Boaz and Ruth had to both be Israelites or the law of kinsman-redeemer could not be used.
Let see how the United States Supreme Court changed the law about interracial marriages in 1967 and how this affected the attitudes of the people of the states.
Map of United States of America, by the date of the repeal of the anti-miscegenation laws:
No laws passed (grey)
Before 1887 (green)
1948 to 1967 (yellow)
12 June 1967 (Red)
Conclusion
The enforced mixing of the races was an open invitation for young people to become romantically involved. It should be added that the integration of the public schools, colleges, and universities of this nation did not come easily. President Dwight Eisenhower called the full force of the United States Army, in full armor gear and loaded weapons, to enforce Brown v. Board of Education in Topeka. An army of 10,000 United States soldiers standing at gunpoint permitted the first Black student to enter Little Rock, Arkansas public schools.
Federal troops also were used in a number of schools, including Universities in Mississippi and Alabama. The forces behind the full integration of America gained a groundbreaking victory when the shameful U.S. Congress, in concert with President Lyndon Johnson, passed the Civil Rights Acts of 1964. This legislation provided State enforcement and protection for the full integration of American society. In addition to the liberal pulpits across denominational Christianity, this paved the highway for interracial marriage.
The plague of interracial marriage gained its greatest victory when the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia, 1967, struck down a Virginia statute prohibiting Whites from marrying non-Whites. The high court ruled that Virginia could not criminalize the marriage of Richard Loving, a White, and his wife Mildred, a Black, who had married nine years earlier in Washington D.C.
Note that at this time (1967), the boundaries between White and Black marriages were still clearly drawn. In 1967, Sidney Poitier in the film Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? (a comedy built around parents’ acceptance of an interracial couple) was without question groundbreaking for most Americans. I would be remiss if I did not indict Hollywood for the major role the film industry played in promoting interracial marriage in numerous films, especially later. Anyway, the case of Virginia v. Loving opened the floodgates, and statutory laws in a multitude of states that prohibited interracial marriage were declared unconstitutional. Since this ruling, the number of interracial marriages has soared across America. Black/White marriages increased from 65,000 in 1970 to 422,000 in 2005, according to the U.S. Census Bureau figures. Factoring in all racial combinations, Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld calculates that more than 7% of America's fifty-nine million married couples in 2005 were interracial unions.
To the glory of God, a few churches and private schools, hold the line and practice absolute separatism in one's personal life, family, church, and neighborhood. These people still hold to an enduring truth that was held sacred in the United States from Jamestown (1607) until Loving v. Virginia, 1967. For 360 years, interracial marriage was prohibited by statutory law in the United States. Why a law should be considered appropriate for 360 years suddenly become unconstitutional? The God Whom we separatists’ love and serve is the same God Who speaks an unchanging, enduring, and living Word. God is not color blind. He created every race distinct and separate and considered His creation good (Genesis 1:31). Interracial mixing, integration, and marriage destroys our God’s original design for every race and turns the culture into a living Babel of confusion of faces. What God has decreed, let no man rend asunder!
- Remnant Christians must be convicted to obey the law of “kind after his kind” mentioned ten times in Genesis 1:11-31. The original design of God was that every distinct and separate race should reproduce after its own kind alone. Interracial marriages destroy both races forever.
- Remnant Christians must be convicted to honor the principle of God's Original Design. They must allow the integrity of every race to be preserved by carefully practicing racial separatism in marriage, the church, neighborhood, and personal friendships: "Wherefore come out from among them, and be ye separate, saith the Lord, and touch not the unclean thing and I will receive you, And will be a Father unto you and ye shall be my sons and daughters saith the Lord Almighty." (2 Corinthians 6:17-18.)
- Remnant Christians must purpose to covenant with God as did ancient Israel in the days of Nehemiah to preserve the racial heritage of their sons and daughters: “... and all they that had separated themselves from the people of the lands unto the law of God ... and entered into a curse, and into an oath, to walk in God's law ... that we would not give our daughters unto the people of the land, nor take their daughters for our sons.” (Nehemiah 10:28-30.)
- Remnant parents must exert the same zeal as that which Rebekah and Isaac exercised. Genesis 27:46 reveals the grief of mind that Rebekah suffered in her son Esau's marriage and her concern for her son Jacob's future bride. In order to get rid of Rebekah's concern and assuming responsibility as a good father, Isaac sent his son Jacob to the house of Bethuel to find an acceptable wife (Genesis 28:1-3-4). Jacob found a bride with one of his own race. Answers in Genesis and John Piper would say that God would not accept this marriage because it was not based on religion only.
- Remnant Christians who have already compromised their heritage with interracial marriage must follow the model for the racial preservation of their family as found in Ezra chapter 9 and 10. Not only were those who had married “out of kind” wives ordered to divorce or separate from them, but also they were ordered to send the mixed “mongrel” children born to them away with the non-Israelite spouse: “Now therefore let us make a covenant with our God to put away all the wives, and such as are born of them, according to the counsel of my lord, and of those that tremble at the commandment of our God ....” (Ezra 10:3.)
Do you realize that when I was born over 60% of the states in America forbid interracial marriages? You couldn’t marry a person from another race. That was eliminated in 1967. Now, it won’t be long till the jews eliminate all restrictions against marriages of the same-sexes. What sin is to be eliminated next?
May God have mercy on our souls!
Blessed be the LORD God of Israel.