Focus on the Family is gearing up for its first run as sponsor of an annual student-led event that helps students share the hope of God’s love and truth with classmates.
The Day of Dialogue, formerly known as the Day of Truth, which is being headed up by Candi Cushman, is scheduled for April 18. Read more…
It seems the editors of Mississauga News Magazine are utterly incensed that the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board near Ontario, Canada would not allow a student to form an official Gay/Striaght Alliance club at one of their secondary schools:
The nerve! This is a human rights issue and the Catholic board is coming out — excuse the term — on the wrong side of the argument.
Yeah, yeah… How dare those bigoted, homophobic, hate-mongering Christians manage their own schools according to their own religious precepts?
The editors of the Mississauga News are not the only self-appointed culture police to swing into action:
from LifeSiteNews.com:
In response, NDP [New Democratic Party] education critic Rosario Marchese called on Premier Dalton McGuinty to force GSAs into the Catholic boards, and the homosexual lobby group Egale denounced the board and the authentically-Catholic group Courage in a March 22 open letter to the Ontario government.
Well then, how about this? What if that same Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board were to show that they are not ‘anti-gay’ in some other way?:
from LifeSiteNews.com:
At an equity conference next month, Ontario’s Dufferin-Peel Catholic school board will feature several homosexual activists including one gay magazine reporter who covered the 2010 Toronto Pride Parade, with video showing him gleefully interviewing various Pride participants, including men dressed in sado-masochistic thongs. Read more…
From the FRC article:
As the president of the Family Research Council (FRC), an organization that has filed amicus briefs defending both Proposition 8 and DoMA, I am troubled by the lightning-fast integration of concepts and actual language from the Attorney General Letter into the Motion to Vacate Stay. Let me repeat: the Motion was filed within two-and-one-half hours of Attorney General’s press conference. Consequently, I am deeply concerned that officials at the Department of Justice were collaborating with the litigants in the Proposition 8 case. Even the appearance of collusion between the Department of Justice and litigants is highly damaging to the rule of law in America.
ABAjournal.com:
The school argued (and still argues) that banning “Be Happy, Not Gay” was just a matter of protecting the ‘rights’ of the students against whom derogatory comments are directed. But people in our society do not have a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or even their way of life.
So they needed a court to explain that citizens don’t have “…a legal right to prevent criticism of their beliefs or even their way of life…”, huh?
Well I’m just glad we got that cleared up.
How often have we all heard pro same-sex so-called ‘marriage’ folks vehemently insist that Christians will not have to be politically or socially marginalized for them to get their way.
And yet this is happening in Great Britain where, if I’m not mistaken, same-sex ‘marriage’ isn’t even recognized yet – just civil unions.
On another site, this story was aptely titled Christianity isn’t dying, it’s being eradicated.
by GoPride.com News Staff
Chicago, IL — A group of Chicago-area ministers and political leaders will hold a press conference on Monday — the national Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., holiday — denouncing any connection between civil rights and gay rights.
“The recent passage of the ‘civil unions’ bill has been trumpeted by some lawmakers as an achievement to civil rights. It is not,” the anti-gay Illinois Family Institute (IFI) said in a press release.
IFI and the Catholic Conference of Illinois lobbied hard to block the passage of the Illinois Religious Freedom Protection and Civil Union Act (SB 1716) in Illinois, which passed on Dec. 1, 2010. Read more…
More press over Dr. Morse’s scarf statement.
By Alexandra Petri
Even now, in the midst of all the hubbub over Don’t Ask Don’t Tell repeal, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the Ruth Institute, based in San Diego, wants the rainbow back from the “Rainbow Coalition” of gay rights activists.
“We can’t simply let that go by,” she told OneNewsNow. “Families put rainbows in their children’s nurseries. Little Christian preschools will have rainbows…Noah’s Ark and all the animals…. Those are great Christian symbols, great Jewish symbols.” Read more…
by Becky Yeh
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse of the San Diego-based Ruth Institute rightly argues that the rainbow is a sign of God’s covenant with man, and she says proponents of Proposition 8 – California’s measure that passed in 2008 to define marriage as between a man and a woman — are the original “rainbow coalition.” Read more…
The Southern Poverty Law Center (I was going to attempt a comment here, but I just can’t stop shaking my head…). So, here’s Radio Derb:
In case you hadn’t noticed, let me bring to your attention the current big push by a mass of leftist groups acting together to shame out of public life all criticism of homosexuality.The so-called Southern Poverty Law Center is out in front of the effort. This nest of crooks, whose financial and ethical shenanigans have been exposed innumerable times, starting with their hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, in 1994, this gang of thieves is still being held up by our left-wing media as an unimpeachable authority on who should or should not be accepted as respectable contributors to public debate. Read more…
This election season, some friends of mine have made a project of reporting on the actual pro-abortion, pro-gay views and activities of a candidate. The husband in this husband and wife team researched the candidate’s positions on abortion and same sex unions. He wrote up a flyer, reporting this information. The wife translated the flyer into Spanish. Together, they went to the Catholic Church the candidate attended, and posted the flyers on the windshields of cars that were parked on PUBLIC PROPERTY near the Church. The candidate and her supporters, including the parish priest, as I understand it, were outraged. They ripped the flyers off the cars, and were generally rude to my friends.
Here is what I don’t understand: if you hold pro-abortion, pro-gay views, why don’t you tell your constiuents about this? Why wasn’t the candidate delighted that my friends were acurately informing the public about her views? Why is she running for office in a working class Hispanic district, if she doesn’t share the views of her constituents? My preference would be for her to tell people what she stands for, and let the chips fall where they may. I wonder why this isnt’ her preference and procedure as well. In other words, being pro-abortion and pro-gay is evidently, something to hide in some districts.
And for all my Friends with Wrong Ideas who read this post all the way to the end to see if I am violating my non-profit status by unlawfully endorsing candidates, I have one thing to say.
Ha! Made you look!!!
I have been reading the new book, Never Enough, by William Voegeli at Claremont McKenna College, with great interest. His theme is that the advocates of the welfare state have never been able to give a coherent account of the proper size and scope of their ambitions. How much assistance to the poor is enough?
I think he is correct about the “Progressive” economic agenda. But I believe there is an even more insidious and destructive part of their agenda: their revision of what we might call the “sexual constitution.” The radical forms of feminism, as well as the destruction and redefinition of marriage, are part of restructuring the fundamental rules of engagement between women and men, and between adults and children. I have come to the conclusion that the Left’s inability to define limits is no accident.
My thesis is that the impossibility of achieving the agenda is precisely its appeal to the Left. In economics, it is impossible to eliminate all income differences in even a partially free market, since the huge variation in personality, abilities and behaviors that are normal among human beings are precisely the basis for differences in income. Yet, if the Radicals are able to create a moral urgency around “equality,” they will have justified an unlimited amount governmental power.
The feminists have insisted that any difference between men and women are the results of unjust discrimination and hence must be eradicated. The government must “do something,” to eliminate these differences. However, since men and women really are different, Read more…
There are a few more podcasts up for your listening pleasure–one from our recent “It Takes a Family” conference, and the other two are interviews of Dr J on Issues, Etc.
Dr J gave the opening talk at ITAF 2010; entitled Marriage and Freedom in Society, it discusses what marriage does for society and some of the consequences (especially those relating to children) if we choose to dissolve or weaken it. Some of the areas she covers include divorce law, state intervention, and parenthood.
The two Issues, Etc interviews discuss the response to Judge Walker’s attitude about the Prop 8 case (Shot in the Arm…or the Foot?) and another group of Mama Grizzlies, this one opposed to Sarah Palin (Sarah Palin vs. Mama Grizzlies). Dr J’s exposition on the arrogance of both subjects is excellent.
From RealClearPolitics:
But for Judge Walker there is an odor of illegitimacy about merely “moral” views expressed in legislation, especially when morality finds support in religion. Thus he declares that Proposition 8 expresses only a “private moral choice,” not a considered public morality. And thus in his tendentious “findings of fact,” he makes the astonishing claim-purporting to be a fact found at trial, not a judgment of his own-that “religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful . . . harm gays and lesbians.”
Perhaps here, in this nadir of absurdity, we have found the real fundament of the judge’s thinking. Citizens who wish to defend the institution of marriage as they and their families have known it all their lives, and for countless generations, are irrational bigots. Worse still, if they are moved to act because of the union of their faith with their moral opinions, they are crazy religious folk, bent only on harming others whom they merely “dislike” on grounds that cannot possibly be defended before a tribunal of right-thinking people. And those others, the same-sex-couple plaintiffs? They must be rescued from the “harm” to their feelings that results from their exclusion from a historic civil and moral institution that has never hitherto been thought to have been built for them.
The bludgeoning going on here in the name of “tolerance” and “equality” is amazing. Read the whole thing here.
Michael Medved has an opinion piece worth reading over at AOLnews.com on the recent Prop 8 ruling. I think the 7 points he makes are very well-stated and cogent to the discussion.
1. “Proposition 8 was a mean-spirited ban on gay marriage.”
Proposition 8 banned nothing. The ubiquitous headlines describing this voter-mandated change in the California Constitution as a “gay marriage ban” amount to an egregious example of journalistic malpractice. The entire proposition consisted of only 14 words: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” This simple statement imposes no restrictions and issues no commands regarding the behavior of private citizens; it merely demands a change in the actions of government. Proposition 8 did nothing to interfere with gay couples in registering for state-recognized civil unions, participating in church ceremonies consecrating their love, forming lifetime commitments, raising children or concluding comprehensive contractual arrangement to share all aspects of life and property. The proposition simply says that government will not get involved in any of these private or public processes by calling such relationships a marriage.2. “Proposition 8 singled out gays and lesbians for discriminatory treatment.”
The proposition never mentioned gays, lesbians or any other individuals, whatever their sexual orientation. It didn’t discriminate among individuals; it drew distinctions among relationships. Under the proposition, a gay male and a straight male would face exactly the same options in marriage; there is no relationship open to the straight citizen that’s denied to his gay neighbor. The fact that gay people want government sanction for a different sort of relationship, creating radically new forms of marriage, reflects their desire to transform institution, not a demand for equal, long-established rights.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
We’ve discussed on this blog before how if same-sex ‘marriage’ is allowed to be masqueraded as a civil right, then all First Amendment rights that have to do with moral and/or religious beliefs will thereafter be trumped by any so-called right predicated on ‘gender identity’. And in fact wherever same-sex ‘marriage’ has been recognized the right to freely and fully practice one’s faith, express one’s beliefs – in speech or in writing, or even participate in the political process has been severely abridged whenever exercising any of those rights would offend LGBT sensibilities. (Canada is an excellent case in study…) Read more…
(July 21, 2010) We’ve already podcasted Dr J’s talk from this rally, “It Takes a lot of Faith to Believe in Same-Sex Marriage.” She also recorded two of the other speakers. Bishop Harry Jackson and Pastor Derek McCoy both discussed the importance of the vote in the defense of traditional marriage.
To date, 31 states have voted to define marriage as occurring between one man and one woman. Maine overturned same-sex marriage by People’s Veto, and all the states that have enacted same-sex marriage have done so through the courts (Vermont used its legislature as well).
(July 20, 2010) We’ve already podcasted Dr J’s talk from this rally, “Why Not Privatize Marriage?“ She also recorded two of the other speakers. Bishop John Smith, the ninth bishop of Trenton, discussed how marriage compliments the uniqueness of men and women. Jim White, former Supreme Director of the Knights of Columbus, encouraged civic participation and accountability of government officials.
(July 21, 2010) This podcast is a rebroadcast of Family New in Focus’s coverage of NOM’s bus stops in Rhode Island and Annapolis. The original is available here; listen below or on our podcast page.
Father John Codega, priest in the diocese of Providence and advisory board member to Rhode Island’s chapter of the National Organization for Marriage, was also at Providence’s “Summer of Marriage” rally on July 18 with Dr J (see “The Problem(s) with Same-Sex Marriage, Part 2″). The shouting and chanting you hear are the rainbow protestors, who also attended the rally. We also have a few other reports of how they tried to disrupt the rally (here, here, here, here & here, here, and here) as well as audio and video (here, here, here, and here). Much of this is also on our blog.
Dr J is on NOM’s Summer Marriage Tour for the next several days–she’ll be traveling down the Eastern seaboard, meeting new people, and giving short talks in each city at which the bus stops. These talks are also available on our podcast page.
In this 10-minute talk (delivered July 15 in Manchester, New Hampshire), Dr J answers the question “Is it true that same-sex marriage affects everyone?”
Click here to listen!
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