Gay Marriage; Redefining Reality

An excellent comment from George Weigel in the National Review on the recent decision to legalise same-sex marriage in New York.

“Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness.”

Read the article here.

Homosexual activist speaks at ‘Christian’ festival - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

I know that Peter Tatchell is not every gay person but he is representative of a large tract of gay people, a gay icon and leading spokesman for the gay cause; hence his appearance at the Greenbelt Festival. When are the liberal-minded, naive Christian fellow-travellers of the gay agenda going to learn that this is not simply about a man preferring to have sexual relations with a man instead of with a woman. It is about the liberalising of sexual practices in general, the licensing of perversion, the promotion of promiscuity and the destruction of those standards that have made ours a civilised, Christian and stable society.

“Mr. Tatchell is well known for his view that the age of consent should be lowered to 14 for homosexuals. On his website he states that if children under 14 have consensual sex, and if there is no greater than a three year age differential, there should not be a prosecution.

Mr. Tatchell is also a strong advocate of pornography which he believes is good for people. In his book “Safer Sexy: The Guide to Gay Sex Safely” he writes approvingly of sadomasochism, bondage, infidelity, orgies and public cruising for sex.”

Greenbelt has always been controversial, seen by many as a Christian version of Glastonbury with its alternative agenda, but they now seem to have lost any connection they had with their Christian identity and will disappoint many many of its fans while confirming the worse fears of their critics.

Homosexual activist speaks at ‘Christian’ festival - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

Christian preacher arrested by homosexual police officer for saying that homosexuality is a sin - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

Gays in uniform are now taking the law into their own hands. It is not enough that they are legal, they have to make anyone and everyone who disagrees with them illegal. They as fascist as any right-wing movement that defames and condemns them. Mail on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens wrote:

‘The Public Order Act of 1986 was not meant to permit the arrest of Christian preachers in English towns for quoting from the Bible.  But it has.  The Civil Partnerships Act 2004 was not meant to force public servants to approve of homosexuality.  But it has.

‘The Sexual Offences Act of 1967 was not meant to lead to a state of affairs where it is increasingly dangerous to say anything critical about homosexuality.  But it did.

‘And the laws of Britain, being entirely based upon the Christian Bible, were not meant to be used by a sneering judge to declare that Christianity had no higher status in this ancient Christian civilisation than Islam, Buddhism or Hinduism.

‘But it has come to that this week,’ he wrote.

‘We have travelled in almost no time from repression, through a brief moment of mutual tolerance, to a new repression.  And at the same time, the freedom of Christians to follow their beliefs in workplaces is under aggressive attack.’

Christian preacher arrested by homosexual police officer for saying that homosexuality is a sin - CCFON.org - Christian Concern For Our Nation

Gay marriage plan threatens churches says Bishop of Winchester -Times Online

So here’s the deal. Gay people insist on the right to marry. I don’t think it is meaningfully possible and object on social and religious grounds. But we live in a liberal democracy so I can hardly deny others the privilege that democracy affords me. But that is not enough – it never is. They want enshrined in law the right to marry in religious premises. Of course, there are already those liberal churches that afford this privilege without legal coercion but that is not enough – it never is. So the final situation stands something like this:

You have no right to force me as a gay person to comply with your religious code but I want enshrined in law the right to force you to act against your religious conscience. Nice!

‘Church of England clergy will be sued for discrimination if they refuse to “marry” homosexuals under a proposed law, a bishop has warned. Other religious leaders fear that churches that refuse to bless civil partnerships might be forced to close…

Don Horrocks, of the [Evangelical] alliance, said: “We understand the Lords’ desire to allow a few liberal religious groups to have freedom to follow their consciences. But other religious groups must not be forced to betray their consciences by facing lawsuits if they fail to allow a civil ceremony.

“This amendment hugely confuses the distinction between civil secular ceremonies and religious ceremonies, as well as the nature of marriage, and has major implications for the UK’s matrimonial laws which haven’t begun to be thought through.”’

Now this is going to upset some people I know personally but it has to be said. It is never enough, whatever you do to enshrine gay rights in law, it is never going to be enough.

In the UK there are calls for all kinds of “traditional” gay activities to be acceptable and legally protected now that basic gay rights are recognised. This includes the right to participate in cruising, the frequenting of public places for the purposes of casual sex – see here. It seems some wish to be free to liaise in places like the infamous Highgate Cemetery for instance without let or hindrance (shades of Joe Orton)

What next? The right to organise and participate in cottaging? As a young man I was more than once the target of such activities and I can tell you it is not the happy-go-lucky and wholesome activity some might have you believe. But this is the way it is going as the gay programme embraces any and all sexual activities once considered aberrant and wrong. The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender movement (LGBT) is vocal and growing in its call for the acceptance of any and everything that would overturn the accepted and traditional mores and customs of society. Likeminded people gathering around a common cause, or an example of my enemy’s enemy is my friend?Sociologist Mary Bernstein said:

"For the lesbian and gay movement, then, cultural goals include (but are not limited to) challenging dominant constructions of masculinity and femininity, homophobia, and the primacy of the gendered heterosexual nuclear family (heteronormativity). Political goals include changing laws and policies in order to gain new rights, benefits, and protections from harm." (Bernstein, Mary (2002). Identities and Politics: Toward a Historical Understanding of the Lesbian and Gay Movement. Social Science History 26:3 (fall 2002).

The “cause” is anarchic then and not simply about being accepted but about creating a social chaos out of which this new, promiscuous order will rise. Promiscuous?

There are faithful and good people who remain in gay relationships for a lifetime, this I know personally. But casual and promiscuous sex seem to be the overwhelming norm in the gay community. So, on one hand you have people that seek, reasonably in many eyes, to be accepted in homosexual relationship as equals in the wider society with heterosexual partnerships. But then you have many in that same community seeking to have the same wider society give licence for their promiscuous agenda.

Of course, when such concerns are expressed we are met with the same cry - “Homophobia!” Its a lot like talking to a Mormon who will cry “Anti-Mormon!” But crying foul and damning your critics as blind and ill-informed enemies hardly helps to move the discussion along and does nothing to address the genuine fears and concerns of intelligent people.

Gay marriage plan threatens churches says Bishop of Winchester -Times Online