Gay marriage – Ascended Master Answers

TOPICS: Do you want to learn through understanding or hard knocks? – nation has a right to make gay marriage legal – only the middle way beyond extremes gives proper understanding – the flourishing of sexual perversions – unbalanced tolerance creates social problems – basing a nation’s laws on divine principles while upholding the separation of church and state –

Question 1: In light of what you said about the cause of homosexuality, what do you think about the United States or a single state recognizing homosexual marriage on par with heterosexual marriage?

Question 2: I wondered if you could comment on the subject of homosexuality. It’s a very hot issue in Sweden today because the church is going to decide whether homosexuals can be married in church or not. I know that you have commented on this earlier on the website but can you please clarify it a little more, because I think it would help a lot of people. Why is homosexuality not God Truth, so to speak?

Answer from ascended master Jesus through Kim Michaels.

The issue of gay marriage is a good example of the dilemma faced by modern people, and I will talk about the situation in both the United States and Europe.

As we have said, everything is created out of the two polarities of the expanding and contracting forces. We have also said that you can create something that is sustainable only when you have a balanced interaction of the two forces, and this can be attained only through the Christ consciousness. If you are unbalanced, you go into the consciousness of duality, which perverts the two polarities by taking them into their extremes. This is the consciousness of anti-christ. Although for a time this state of consciousness can seem to have some power on earth, it will eventually cause the unbalanced creation to self-destruct.

The Law of Free Will is the ultimate law in the material universe. This law gives people the right to make any choice they want. Yet there are no free lunches, as the popular saying goes. The Law of Cause and Effect will make sure that everyone will receive as they have sown. So the choice faced by all human beings is simply this: how do you want to learn your lessons in life?

Do you want to learn your lessons by doing whatever you want and then reaping the consequences of your actions? Or do you want to use certain guidelines which enable you to learn from the mistakes of others so that history does not have to repeat itself in every generation? In other words, do you want to learn by seeking a higher understanding, or do you want to learn through the school of hard knocks?

If you read my teachings on the spiritual cause of homosexuality, you will discover that homosexuality was not created by God, and therefore it is not a natural or necessary part of creation. Because of the Law of Free Will, a nation has a right to create civil laws that recognize homosexual unions. Yet can a nation truly make a free choice without understanding the inevitable consequences of its actions? How can you exercise freedom of choice if you do not have a proper understanding of the consequences of your choices?

Throughout history, God has attempted to give people an understanding of the consequences of their choices. This has been done through a variety of spiritual teachings that describe the Laws of God. I am aware that many religions, such as the Catholic Church, have perverted these teachings and created a culture based on fear and judgment. I am aware that many truly spiritual people recognize the fallacy of this judgmental approach, and therefore they have become accepting and tolerant. Yet I must tell you that being overly tolerant is as incorrect as being overly judgmental. Only the middle way between the two extremes will give you the proper balance and understanding.

Although the United States is an older democracy than the nations of Europe, it is a younger nation. One effect of this is that the U.S. is still more affected by black-and-white thinking, as can clearly be seen by the fact that fundamentalist Christianity has greater power in the U.S. and in fact largely originated there. So although we have a nation that in its constitution guarantees separation of church and state, a fear-based form of Christianity still has a greater influence on the national psyche and on politics than the founding fathers and the ascended masters intended.

One way in which this can manifest is an imbalance in the fear-based tendency to feel threatened by those who are different. This has caused America to see itself as being in opposition to Muslim fundamentalism, and in an unspoken way even to Islam as a religion. This has caused the U.S. to engage in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which have already stretched the armed forces to the breaking point. If the U.S. was misled into one or several other such wars, it could wreck the economy.

In contrast, many nations in Europe have a long history of warfare amongst each other, and of course Europe has seen two world wars and the Holocaust on its soil. This has forced most European nations to move out of black-and-white thinking, but some of them have been caught in gray thinking instead. And this is, of course another form of imbalance. Black-and-white thinking takes the expanding force of the father too far into the extreme, and gray thinking takes the contracting force of the mother too far.

As an example, consider the nation of Holland which has very lenient laws towards drugs, prostitution and pornography. The inevitable consequence of this lenience is that these practices will flourish. As one consequence, you have children who at a very early age are literally sold into sexual slavery (homosexual and heterosexual) either through pornography or prostitution. You have children who grow up among adults who use drugs on a daily basis. To cope with the abuse, many of these children begin to use drugs at a very early age. Simply consider what kind of adults such children will grow up to become. Simply consider the amount of social problems that this can create for a nation.

Then consider that the nation of Holland has a very elaborate welfare system in which the state pays for all manner of social problems. Is it difficult to predict that there might come a point when the cost of social problems is so great that the tax base can no longer support it? When people are so burdened by psychological problems that they can no longer hold a job and pay taxes, what will happen to the economy? Then what will the nation of Holland do to find the money to attempt to solve the social problems that it has created through its own leniency?

So as the U.S can be bankrupted through wars, Europe can be bankrupted through social problems or the economic woes you have seen in Greece, Spain and Portugal, which also spring from the unbalanced mother consciousness, where people are not willing to take responsibility for their lives and multiply their talents. Now consider how this influences how societies deal with the issue of homosexuality and gay marriage. Again, the U.S. tends to be too INtolerant and Europe tends to be too tolerant. But now consider how this relates to the issue of balancing the father and mother element.

Again, the Law of Free Will is the most basic law of this universe. And as I explain in my discourse, there are some people for whom it is part of their process of transcending human sexuality, that they end up going through homosexuality for one or several lifetimes. As I said, this is not necessary, but it is the result of people’s choices, and a free society must allow people to learn their lessons their own way, as long as it does not unduly interfere with other people’s free will. Thus, it is simply a fact of life, that a certain percentage of the population will be homosexuals, as has indeed been the case in every time period in known history.

The real way to transcend homosexuality is through the Christ consciousness, yet in today’s society that is not a short-term solution. So for a person who is in tune with the mother element, it is obvious that homosexuality will be around for the foreseeable future, so society needs to find a balanced way to deal with it. And the past approach of ignoring it simple will not work in this new age.

Again, if people are unbalanced in the father element, they will tend to be intolerant, and thus they will resist that society recognizes gay unions of any kind. And if people are unbalanced in the mother element, they will say that homosexuality should be recognized as natural and thus gay couples should be allowed to marry, even in churches, in order to have the same recognition as heterosexual couples.

Yet the balanced perspective of the Christ mind would find a middle way. The exact way to deal with the issue can vary, and it will vary from the U.S. to Europe. Yet the bottom line is that since homosexuality is currently part of life, it is necessary for society to recognize a legally binding union between two homosexual people. If they desire to have a more committed relationship, society should afford them the same practical, legal and tax-related benefits as heterosexual couples.

The question left is what a society calls such a union: marriage or something else, such as “civil union.” In the U.S. the federal government should – for now – leave this up to the states, and also leave it up to them if they will even allow homosexual unions. In Europe, this will obviously be up to individual countries.

However, I do suggest that it is a reasonable approach to say that marriage is a religious institution, meaning that only when the ceremony takes place in a church, do you call it marriage. For unions – hetero- and homosexual – that take place in a government office, you call them all civil unions or a similar word. This allows for a distinction between church related unions, where people are then free to uphold a traditional Christian view of homosexuality and marriage, and a new type of civil unions. This will then afford homosexual couples the same legal and tax benefits as heterosexual couples.

I am aware that some will want homosexuality to be recognized by society and even by religions as natural, and thus they will want to use the word marriage. Now, as I have said, homosexuality truly is not natural, but again we must bow to free will. If some people want to create a church that allows homosexual marriage, then that must be allowed to outplay itself. Indeed, in the U.S. the government can do nothing about this because of the separation of church and state.

In Europe the situation is slightly different because some nations have a state church or a church that is supported by taxpayer funds. In such a case, a government does have the constitutional authority to require a church to perform gay marriage.

However, I would consider it unfortunate if a government would make this a mandate. A church should be aligned with the reality of God, as it is defined by the church’s doctrines, and a civil government should not interfere with this. Thus, I suggest that some nations in Europe might consider enacting the same kind of separation between church and state as seen in the U.S. Stop having one church that is the state religion. A nation could still allow a certain percentage of taxes to go to support religious institutions, but this could be distributed among many organizations based on their membership. This would be far more democratic than the present situation, where the majority supports a state church that is only a attended by a small and rapidly shrinking minority.

If you have a church that recognizes homosexuality, allows openly homosexual clergy and allows homosexual marriages within the church, then you have already proven that you have a church that is separated from God’s reality and now has become an entirely earthly institution—as I have said is the case for the Church of England after the king made himself the head of that church.

This, of course, is allowed, if the people want that kind of a church—then they get the church they deserve. And the people have a right to choose whatever they want for their society and then, as they experience the consequences of it, have another opportunity to rethink their former choice. This is how the law of free will outplays itself. And as we have said before, if people will not learn from Divine Direction, they must learn from the school of hard knocks, and some will not learn until the knocks become very, very hard.

Yet I hope some will begin to see that there is a fundamental difference between seeking a balanced approach and allowing society to be held hostage by people in either extreme. If you apply the unbalanced father approach and become very judgmental of others, a nation will indeed make a severe karma. If you go to the other extreme and say that homosexuality is natural, is according to God’s principles or even created by God, then you will also make severe karma. The only way to avoid making karma is to find a middle way, where you recognize the purely practical need to give homosexual couples the same legal rights as heterosexual couples without requiring society to recognize homosexuality as natural or ordained by God.

I am not saying hereby that there is only one way to deal with this – or any – issue. You currently have a situation on earth where everything is heavily influenced by the consciousness of duality. Thus, in most cases, there is no one ideal approach. It is a matter of accepting where society is at and then striving to take society to the next step above its present level. That is why laws should be based on this balance between the mother – based on what is here now – and the father—the vision that we can indeed go higher. When that balance is found, a society can indeed find a way to deal with any issue that is not karma-making, because it keeps that society in the flow of self-transcendence.