Gay Marriage Follies

by

gay marriage

Today, we learn that Ireland has voted to legalize gay marriage. A Catholic Church spokesman said something very intelligent.

If the measure is passed, Catholic churches will continue to decide for themselves whether to solemnise a marriage.
The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Eamon Martin, has said the church may look at whether it continues to perform the civil side of solemnisation if the change comes in.

I think this is where all this is going. The alternative is to see the Church attacked for the tax exemption, which may happen anyway. Many mainline Protestant churches are seeing membership collapse as the clergy swings far left and gets into the gay lifestyle.

There is also a very good essay at Ace of Spades today.

First, a jeweler in Canada makes rings for a lesbian wedding, then, after the lesbians find out he doesn’t approve for religious reasons, he is attacked.

Nicole White and Pam Renouf were looking for engagement rings a few months ago and eventually landed at Today’s Jewellers in Mount Pearl where the couple said they were given excellent service and great price for their rings.

“They were great to work with. They seemed to have no issues. They knew the two of us were a same-sex couple,” Ms. White told Canada’s CBC news. “I referred some of my friends to them, just because I did get good customer service and they had good prices.”

BUT…

A friend of the couple went in to the store to purchase a ring for his girlfriend and saw a poster that read “The sanctity of marriage is under attack. Let’s keep marriage between a man and a woman,” CBC reported May 16.

The friend took a photo of the poster and sent it to Ms. White, who said she had no idea about the poster until that point.

“It was really upsetting. Really sad, because we already had money down on [the rings], and they’re displaying how much they are against gays, and how they think marriage should be between a man and a woman,” Ms. White said, CBC reported.

Horrors !

They demanded their money back. After much pressure, they got it and the Jeweler paid for his beliefs. So much for “equality.”

Ace goes on…

Fundamental Concepts – Born on Third Base

None of these ideas trumpeted by the Left are new. They have all been tried before, and we know the result. Socialism does not lead to an egalitarian society, it produces a stratified one, with a little pocket of wealth and a whole lot of serfs. Jettisoning the rule of law for the rule of man doesn’t result in prosperity, it results in poverty. Silencing freedom of speech creates intellectual stagnation. Forcing people to deny reality in favor of mandated, government approved “facts” gives a dysfunctional, paranoid population incapable of functioning as a greater whole.

The Soviet Union should have been enough example of how Socialism doesn’t work. It is all about power. Some people prefer money, some power and some go into politics to get both (like the Clintons).

Nobody cares. This third base on which we find ourselves, this brilliant, shining city on a hill, why, of course it’s the natural order of things. Things have been like this for their entire lives, there’s no way life could be any different. Freedom and prosperity weren’t created, they aren’t the result of generations, no, millennia of human trial, effort, thought and debate, they just are.

You and I know that that’s not the case, and the inability of many on the left to recognize this is one of the things that is so frustrating when interacting with Progs. Their flat out denial that it’s true is one of the few things that fill me with a full-blown rage. The really sad thing is that by the historical evolution of current society, if they are successful they will find themselves in a world antithetical to their own best interests. Here’s an example.

The lesbian ring story fits here. Those lesbians have no concept that anything could be different.

Instead, today, they walk into a shop, order a pair of custom rings for their “wedding”, are treated with courtesy and respect, and go on about their business. Equality is here. They made it. That’s not even third base, that’s home plate.

But that’s not good enough, these people think they are still in the batter’s box, desperately dodging chin music from a homophobic pitcher, so, since the jeweler personally believes in traditional marriage, he must be destroyed. So what happens, if, having achieved an objective, having convinced society at large of the rightness of their cause, a group keeps pushing further, demanding not just equal treatment, but preferential?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, something is happening. Leftists are not very interested in history or foreign affairs. They assume that what exists has always existed and that things can only get better.

if western society has been so weakened by constant attacks on its founding principles that it recoils from those principles and allows the demanding minority to get its way in the name of fairness or in fear of being called homophobic, then that society is ripe for takeover by a society more confident in its own founding principles. That’s what is happening in Europe, the confident interloper is Islam, and I really don’t think it all ends well for the gays.

Europe is having trouble understanding what is headed their way.

ISIS is sending the ‘prettiest virgins’ they capture to slave markets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, where they are sold as sexual objects to the highest bidder, the United Nation’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict has said.
After the depraved militants attack their villages, they strip the girls naked, conduct virginity tests, evaluate their bodies and send them to twisted auctions, Zainab Bangura claims.

She discovered the gruesome extent of Islamic State’s sexual crimes against young women – particularly from Iraq’s Yazidi minority community – after collecting information from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.

Meanwhile gay marriage advocates attack traditional Christians.

Hugh Hewitt has a worthwhile post on this.

Advice to graduates: Don’t take our way of life for granted

34 thoughts on “Gay Marriage Follies”

  2. I’m guessing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if a large part of the “yes” vote in Ireland wasn’t simply a repudiation of the Roman Catholic church.

  3. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a large part of the “yes” vote in Ireland wasn’t simply a repudiation of the Roman Catholic church.”

    I agree. I was in Ireland back in 1977 and went to Mass in Wexford. It was an amusing experience. Outside stood all the men smoking while their wives were in Mass and the doors had a little collection box with a sign, “No Copper.”

    That was before all the scandals.

    The US Church had similar scandals after the seminaries were taken over by gays and feminist nuns in the 60s. There is a pretty good book called, Goodbye Good Men about this story. I read it years ago and it is still in print and in Kindle so somebody is reading it.

    I think John Paul II cleaned out some of the trash but I haven’t been around the Church in years. I did see John Paul II say Mass in St Peters and my wife was goosed by a pervert standing behind us during it.

  4. Silent Church in Ireland. The Prelacy chose shame and has gotten War.

    The Irish Identity becoming wrapped up in being Catholic is a turn of History between England and Ireland that is a long, complicated tragedy.

    The effect of the Penal Laws not to mention Cromwell’s Puritan Soldiers was to make the family more important than ever. It’s how we survived.

    I’m Irish-American. The Family immediate and extended [clan] is what being Irish means. The Church is a vehicle for Family, period.

    There is no family friendly agenda with gay marriage, nor is it Anti-pederasty [risible]. Or pro-Irish.

    I suspect this is a function of anti-establishment resentment combined with rage against the church over molestation scandals. This doesn’t help [except for sex tourist industry] but it made the voters feel less powerless.

    The net effect of this Law is Ireland has just become a gay tourist sex mecca, and gay couples adopting boys shall shortly follow. That’s the benefit we don’t hear as motive.

    Now of course the Irish Church is silent out of shame, and possibly Blackmail as well. That was the experience of the American Prelacy, and sadly in American seminaries is where so much of this came from is American seminaries.

    The threat to the Irish family is as usual economic hardship and unemployment, although becoming the Thailand of Western Europe won’t improve matters.

    The Irish have just voted back Cromwell’s Puritans into Ireland, there for booty as never before.

  5. “to make the family more important than ever. It’s how we survived.”

    This is what happened in Serbia while it was governed by the Turks. The Orthodox Serbs hate the Bosnian Serbs because they converted to Islam and became city dwellers and prosperous while the Serbs remained in family and tribal units.

    This is probably some of what is the problem with Arabs who have never had a competent government and, aside from the problems of Muslim theology, were dependent on family and tribal solidarity to survive.

    I wonder if they will ever be able to govern themselves without tyrants.

  6. So within less than 30 years Ireland went from banning contraceptives and divorce plus large families to being a trailblazer for gay marriage. Quebec went from being overtly religious with 8 child families being common to being the most secular part of their Canada with the lowest birthrates. Spain seems to have gone the same way, possibly in reaction to the Franco years. But maybe these swings from one ‘extreme’ to another are not so extreme but merely indicative of a relatively collectivist society – relative that is to the more individualistic and perhaps steadier countries like Britain and the USA.

  7. I wasn’t too clear in making my point above. What I meant was that in more collectivist societies there is more pressure to conform. There may also be more genuine comfort in demonstrating social solidarity. So whether they are religious or militantly secular they tend to be have an “all in” mentality once they’ve decided on something. The more individualistic Anglo-Protestant countries have more competing ideas in the public space that prevent or temper societal conformity.

  8. The Church of Rome has almost completely discredited it’s self with it’s homosexual priests. The new pope is a breath of less fetid air.

    It is somewhat delicious, I do enjoy strange tastes, that this organization, so damaged by hidden homosexuality, is now openly homophobic.

  9. “The new pope is a breath of less fetid air.”

    The new Pope seems to be another “Liberation Theology” Marxist Jesuit.

    John Paul II was the breath of fresh air after Paul VI, “the Mafia Pope” according to Malachi Martin, many of whose books I have read. I particularly endorse his theory that John Paul I was murdered by the KGB and that is why his successor took that name.

  10. Gee, it’s almost like believing Christians should always wear some kind of visible sign or something, to indicate a warning to all right-thinking, tolerant and upright citizens thinking of doing business with them, or initiating a friendly conversation, or renting property to them, or anything. I know! Maybe a fabric patch or armband, with a cross embroidered on it, in yellow, or some other bright color. This would spare the poor dears the awful embarrassment, y’know – of having to deal with those icky judgmental Christianists.

    Yes, I am being heavily sarcastic … but you never know, these days; very likely there are people around who will think it a perfectly splendid idea.

  11. Mike K
    John Paul II was the breath of fresh air after Paul VI, “the Mafia Pope” according to Malachi Martin, many of whose books I have read. I particularly endorse his theory that John Paul I was murdered by the KGB and that is why his successor took that name.

    Then there are conjectures which place the blame for John Paul I’s death not on the KGB, but on the CIA.Murder in the Vatican: The CIA and the Bolshevik Pontiff, about John Paul I, speculates along these lines. The basic theme of the book is that the CIA etc. killed John Paul I,which is a very bad thing, but John Paul I was a Bolshevik plant from the moment he entered seminary- which the book considers a good thing.His mother was a devout Catholic, while his father was a Red. His father convinced him to burrow from within. It is implied that the Reds paid for his initial time in the seminary.

    How much of the book is fiction, I have no idea. There is a scene where John Paul I as a young seminarian in the 1920s has a Russian for a roommate. The Russian points out that while there were hordes of homeless children/orphans in Italy, in the Soviet Union there were no homeless children. Which either the author and or the future Pope accept as fact. Whereas today it is very easy to find out that in the Soviet Union of that time there were quite a few homeless orphan children, the consequence of the loss of millions of lives in the Civil War and in the ensuing famine in the early 1920s.
    I read enough of the book to conclude that if yes, he was a Bolshevik plant, then killing him wasn’t necessarily such a bad thing. Which is not what the author wanted me to conclude.

  12. Surely, at some point, Americans will recognize the core values of western culture were reinforced by (and often defined by) our Judao-Christian heritage. Or maybe not. It certainly doesn’t seem to have dawned on academia, our current administration, our media. And surely little can be more appalling than the examples commenters on here have noted.

    Long comment but this has been bothering me for a while – for a lot of reasons, of course. I, rather more often than I’d like, hear from friends at not just different but diametrically opposed positions on this.

    Fifty years ago if someone asked me, I would have said I was for gay marriage. I knew couples that were committed then – one of them still is, and by now we are talking about 50 years (a better record than a good percentage of traditional marriages). But I’ve gotten married, had children, thought more seriously about religion, thought more seriously about child raising. In general, I’ve grown up and begun to assume that thousand year traditions arose because they reflected reality; what goes on forever and everywhere probably works.

    Of course, like most, I believe society and the law should recognize same sex unions in appropriate legal terms, a commitment from which inheritance, property rights, etc. would be governed in a way not unlike that of heterosexual unions. I would certainly expect to treat a gay couple as a couple in my home.

    But I have begun to suspect that some are either deeply insecure about the “rightness” of their cause (so insecure they need to destroy every “denier” or “doubter”) and/or motivated by the thug’s desire to bully others’ actions, minds, consciences. (I refuse to call that the Puritan’s belief – few were more Calvinist than Roger Williams, who saw it as worse to try to coerce the conscience of one person than to rape all the women on earth. If he said it more forcefully and was a bit of a fanatic, that kind of fanaticism is certainly at odds with the bitter force used on the seller of rings.)

    Generally speaking, liberty and our bill of rights protect minorities. Our victim culture gives a false (because willingly given rather than intrinsic to their cause and their numbers) sense of their power. At this point, I’d observe that the tactics – in culture, business, and religion – have pretty well turned off someone who took one of the first homophile courses in the country, who used to give the gay group a discount on their newsletter at her copy shop, and who doesn’t attend church with any regularity. I doubt that is the desired effect.

    Our hearts go out to the particular, policy should come from the general. But if we are to depend on the social sciences for our definition of the general, our wait may be long. Social science’s role in reporting on human behavior is compromised. Social scientists (like all researchers perhaps) want to turn over old “prejudices” and often those old prejudices came from experience gained painfully through generations.

    Our culture, our church, but also biology, thousands of years of tradition, and our own instincts lead us to think that the two bonds are not exactly the same. This generation doesn’t understand how the really odd – and certainly not inevitable – separation of sex from procreation in our generation and procreation from sex in the next has defined their world. This would seem more deeply strange than anything else about our time to generations just a few years back, certainly to those of a couple of thousand years ago.

  13. Where are the family-formation theorists? If the prosperity and freedom of the west required a certain kind of family, what kind of society will result from the homo/pedo/poly/zoo-marriage of the future?

    What will we name our new society now that foolish notions of the West in marriage, false witness, and freedoms are gone?

    For the record, I believe anyone should be allowed to marry any gender of any age of any species in any number and compel in word, thought, and deed and by law the obeisance and obedience of everyone else.

  14. “The Church of Rome has almost completely discredited it’s self with its homosexual priests.”

    As have all those pedophile, rapist teachers.

  16. I have no problem with gay people and if they want to get legally married, I see no reason to stop them. I’m very bothered by the thought-crime tactics of the emerging Gaystapo. But that seems to be standard leftism – disagreeing with them should be a crime. Stalin and these people would understand each other.

    Oddly for them, Stalin punished homosexuals with five years at hard labor (I just looked it up). And when you support the emergence of stalinist tyranny, which these people are doing, you may not get what you wished for. But then it’s too late, as so many Russians discovered.

  17. “The basic theme of the book is that the CIA etc. killed John Paul I,which is a very bad thing,”

    I doubt the CIA could ever keep that secret. The KGB was very good at it.

    To this day, I do not know if Angleton was right or wrong.

  20. On another blog, Powerline, there was a discussion of “Liberation Theology” and I thought of the troubles the Anglican Church is having, at least in my community. Some of it is gay politics.

    The local Anglican Church got fed up with the Anglican national organization and disassociated itself. The story is interesting and tells us about the courts and religion. St James was a very wealthy parish in a rich suburb.

    Years of conflict over doctrinal and ideological differences with the Episcopal Church had led to a tense and frayed relationship. Under Bunyan’s leadership, steps to disassociate with the Episcopal Church were initiated as a result of controversial decisions made at the General Convention in the summer of 2003, most notably, the confirmation of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, Gene Robinson. In August 2004, this decision, along with other theological differences, led the rector, wardens, and vestry to vote overwhelmingly to disaffiliate with the Episcopal Church and to affiliate with the conservative Anglican Church of Uganda. A parish vote also supported the decision. St. James was soon joined in secession by All Saints Church in Long Beach and St. David’s Church in North Hollywood. All three churches were then sued for their property by the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles and the national Episcopal Church.

    They had built these three churches but, after winning in the trial courts, the California Supreme Court ruled against them and the church buildings are closed and for sale.

    St. James is currently considering taking its case back to the trial court level and possibly an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.[4]

    In May 2013, Judge Kim G. Dunning reaffirmed her May 1 order to return the property to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.

    The sexual orientation of Judge Dunning is unknown. Unlike the appeals court judge who threw out Prop 8 and then married his gay lover.

    A comment by a former member of the congregation.

    When I traveled back to Long Beach by car, I drove past the site on 346 Termino Avenue, and found the once familiar sign out front changed to “Anglican” instead of “Episcopal”. The whole place was surrounded by an iron fence, higher than 6 feet tall, and the entire place was deserted. It was as if I was standing at the grave of a beloved friend, long dead. I recall that when I was a young member, the place was constantly bustling with activity, with people rejoicing together in service of God and the Church.

    I wonder who will buy the buildings ?

  21. I am assuming all those homosexuals in the photo are Irishmen. Wanna bet more than a few of them have been called “Lucky Pierre”?

  22. Along with the ascension of the shadowy 44th and the weird circumstance that put the Argentine socialist in the Vatican, it’s a setback for civilization.

  23. If you’re against pederasty you’re against Gay Men.

    If you’re against pederasty you’re Homophobic, you just don’t know it yet.

    Ireland is lashing out at the establishment – of which the Church is seen part of – over economics as much as anger over pederast priests.

    As far as the vagaries of democracies favors in good times or bad the voters are basically just a very large jury, and the Gays had better advocates in the form of far outspending opposition on the campaign.

    Ireland’s real problems are economic misery bought about by boundless corruption of the Financial and Political Class, this is a flashy distraction.

    In the long run Gay Men will learn why they were in the closet in the first place, as will the rest of us.

    Because if you’re against pederasty you’re homophobic.

    If the Irish want to become some sort of Asian culture that looks the other way at this sort of thing, then I’m changing my name and good riddance.

    I suspect I’ll die under my name.

  24. Ginny writes: “Of course, like most, I believe society and the law should recognize same sex unions in appropriate legal terms, a commitment from which inheritance, property rights, etc. would be governed in a way not unlike that of heterosexual unions. I would certainly expect to treat a gay couple as a couple in my home.” . While she is free to do whatever she pleases in her own home, I take it Ginny believes civil society should provide a kind of marriage by some other name for truly committed gay couples. Such a thing is not possible. The world started with civil unions and, as night follows day, followed gay marriage. This was never about the things Ginny refers to above, which could have been (and still can be) taken care of by last wills and testaments, living wills, advance directives, and private contracts. What this has always been about is what Kennedy talks about in his original post and all the comments, including Ginny’s, echo. (BTW, the gay couple Ginny knows who are still together after 50 years is VERY much the exception to the rule. Study after study has shown gay couplings are a whole lot less stable than straight marriages, even given marriage’s current benighted state.)

    Ginny also seems to possess a particular reverence for commitment, but commitment in and of itself is not necessarily praiseworthy. The people who ran the Nazi death camps were certainly committed as are the ISIS murderers of today. And, please, no one commit the weary fallacy of strawman by claiming I am morally equating committed gay couples with Nazis and ISIS. I am merely pointing out that not all commitments are praiseworthy. For a commitment to be such, what one is committed to must be commendable. Gay couplings, because they contrary to nature, are, in their essence, not commendable. Though they may be occasions for individual actions that are commendable, these commendable actions do not flow from the gay couplings themselves. They are accidental to them.

    As Ginny herself indicates in her remarks, marriage is a whole lot more than life- long commitment. No. 1601 of The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up, I submit, the view of all defenders of traditional marriage, irrespective of their religious affiliations: “The matrimonial covenant, by which a man and a woman establish between themselves a partnership of the whole of life, is by its nature ordered toward the good of the spouses and the procreation and education of offspring.”. Obviously, gay couplings are deficient when it comes to the latter. They are, however, equally deficient when it come to the former. Once again, gay couplings are contrary to nature. Thus, they are inherently incapable of being ordered to the good of those in them. Even if, as noted above, they can, accidentally, be occasions of good, they are innately occasions of evil and more than merely occasions.

    I have not offered any arguments for gay couplings’ being contrary to nature, not because there are none, but for two reasons. First, it’s impossible do so cogently in a (relatively) short comment such as this. Second, given the general tenor of this dialogue, to do so would seem to be an instance of preaching to the choir. In any event, the well know instability of gay couplings referenced above is one piece of evidence of their inability to be ordered to the good of those who comprise them.

    I’ll close with a paragraph from an article by G. K. Chesterton scholar Dale Ahlquist: “Chesterton referred to [Oscar] Wilde’s homosexual behavior as a ‘highly civilized’ sin, something that was a worse affliction among the wealthy and cultured classes. It was a sin that was never a temptation for Chesterton, and he says that it is no great virtue for us never to commit a sin for which we are not tempted. That is another reason we must treat our homosexual brothers and sisters with compassion. We know our own sins and weaknesses well enough. Philo of Alexandria said, ‘Be kind. Everyone you meet is fighting a terrible battle.’ But compassion must never compromise with evil. Chesterton points out that balance that our truth must not be pitiless, but neither can our pity be untruthful. Homosexuality is a disorder. It is contrary to order. Homosexual acts are sinful, that is, they are contrary to God’s order. They can never be normal. And worse yet, they can never even be even. As Chesterton’s great detective Father Brown says: ‘Men may keep a sort of level of good, but no man has ever been able to keep on one level of evil. That road goes down and down.’”. The history of gay “liberation” over the past twenty-five years is a proof of the good Father’s maxim.

  25. The Gay Rights Movement has been an exercise in tolerance this far. Most of it is a result of the AIDS epidemic which was seen as a tragedy and the fact that it was the result of an explosion of promiscuity was ignored. Those of us who were in medicine and had experience with gay communities knew that all sexually transmitted diseases were epidemics in that community were not terribly surprised at what happened. One early theory of AIDS was that it was due to exhaustion of the immune system from repeated STDs.

    The current aggressive behavior of gay rights “activists” is sort of the standard in this society where civil rights and affirmative action have shifted from remedial effort by the majority community in sympathy with blacks’ trials to demands for special privilege.

    It is a fact that gays constitute about 3% of the population and blacks about 13%. I just wonder if it is wise to take advantage of the present era of tolerance and sympathy to declare war on the vast majority, depending on the civilization it has created. A few, a very few, voices in the black community are starting to ask what would happen to them if whites disappeared. I would include Asians in that hypothetical as they are seen by blacks as whites even though Asians have their own issues.

    The rise of militant Islam, which has none of the tolerance of the civilization in which the “activists” thrive, seems almost evidence of some historical irony.

  26. “One early theory of AIDS was that it was due to exhaustion of the immune system from repeated STDs.”

    The Duesberg hypothesis was another theory that gathered some traction for awhile which proposed that HIV didn’t cause AIDS but drug use did. Of course, the thought police quickly put the kibosh on that one.

  27. “Homosexual acts are sinful, that is, they are contrary to God’s order. They can never be normal. And worse yet, they can never even be even.”

    A very good example of the actual reason organized religion exists. It’s to control the people. Your god is simply your whip you use to frighten people so they will stay in line.

    Disgusting.

  28. To PenGun:

    Or, more simply, what Ahlquist says might be true, in which case “the people” ignore it at their peril. Which reminds me of a story about Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher. One day a militant atheist came to Buber and demanded that he prove God exists. Buber refused. As the atheist began to flounce out, Buber called after him, “But are you sure He doesn’t?” The atheist later said that, while he remained an atheist, Buber’s question had haunted him every day of his life. Now, there was, at least, a thoughtful and honest man.

  29. I was hoping the Terry Bean incident would have gotten some traction, what with the new media and all, but not much to be found. Back in the early eighties their was an infamous case in Ma. involving members of the notorious NAMBLA. I realized that these guys existed, but didn’t know that there was an above-ground support organization. After all the grim details came out, and the excessively lenient sentences were handed out, the story disappeared from the media. Since then I’ve been amazed at how they seem to avoid long term confinement.

    http://michellemalkin.com/2014/12/03/nothing-on-terry-bean/

  30. “Your god is simply your whip you use to frighten people so they will stay in line.”

    Actually, I think religion is a simple set of ethical rules to assist those who do not have as much time or education to work out all these issues with the time and knowledge required.

    You, of course, are immune to those rules of ethics and prefer license.

    I am agnostic. I am not nearly arrogant enough to assume I know things you obviously take on faith.

  31. “The atheist later said that, while he remained an atheist, Buber’s question had haunted him every day of his life. Now, there was, at least, a thoughtful and honest man.”

    Ahh but I am not an atheist. I have been a follower of the Buddha for over 50 years now.

    God is a human creation. I guess to make it all less scary, and as I said, to further patriarchal control systems. I don’t care about god. Your creation is a simple cudgel beside the Diamond Sword that cuts through confusion and doubt, freeing beings from their chains.

  33. “I suspect the Buddha, like all great teachers, must have often experienced the truth of Matthew 7:6.”

    Perls before swine. That’s why I am here.

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