Saturday, June 29, 2013

Hope it is not habit

 
   

 

 
Another double euthanasia in Belgium


Another case of a loving couple choosing euthanasia so that they would not be separated has emerged in Belgium. Last Monday, 90-year-old Leopold Dauwe and his 89-year-old wife Paula Raman were euthanased, surrounded by their children and grandchildren. "Together we walked the road. Together we left," was the message on their memorial card.

The couple had been married for 64 years. Neither had a terminal illness but they were both in failing health and living in a nursing home. “They chose to act before [death]. The entire family supported their decision 100 percent," their son-in-law told the Belgian newspaper De Standaard.

Details of the case are sketchy, but it seems that the husband had always considered euthanasia while the wife had religious reservations. As they grew weaker, however, she changed her mind.

In January, 45-year-old deaf twins who were going blind chose euthanasia together because they had nothing to live for. That case made headlines around the world, but the euthanasia of Leopold Dauwe and Paula Raman has barely been reported at all.

Source: Bioedge

Informed Consent even For Royals

 
  contributors 


Don’t the Royals have a right to genetic privacy, too?


The London Times splashed the genetic heritage of Prince Harry and Prince William across their front page recently. It claimed, based on genetic analysis of two of their distant cousins by a company called Britain’s DNA, that they have Indian ancestors. This was eagerly taken up by the media in Britain and India, as he will be the first monarch with Indian ancestry.
But as Alex Hern, of the New Statesman, asks, shouldn’t the Royals have been consulted before violating their genetic privacy? “Our DNA is the most basic data we have. No-one should have to find out what it contains by looking at the front-page of a newspaper,” Hern pointed out.
“There is a wider issue at stake here, which is that the story reveals information about the genetic make-up of someone who has not consented to any DNA tests. Thanks to the fact that mtDNA is exclusively inherited along the maternal line, the company could test two other people with the same maternal heritage as William and Harry, and then run the story on them 


Source: Bioedge

Abortion Myths

 

The ‘crack baby’ myth - another debunked ‘reason’ for abortion

Have you been given this scenario to justify abortion before?
“What about a baby whose mother is addicted to crack cocaine and will be born with an addiction to crack? Would you rather that baby suffer horribly and have a terrible life?”
How do you respond? Usually, I reply with something like the following:
File 1925
“No, of course I wouldn’t rather have the baby suffer. No one wants a baby to suffer. However, I wouldn’t kill a child as a solution to her potential suffering. Shouldn’t we always seek to eliminate suffering- not the person who is suffering?” Or “Do you think there are ways we could help the baby without killing her?”

We help people in need, not kill people in need.
I often hear the crack baby scenario from high school students, leading me to wonder where they encounter all these poor children born to mothers with terrible addictions.  I was surprised to learn from an article in the Globe and Mail that this scenario, popular in the imaginations of today’s teenagers, came from a myth promulgated in the 1980’s.
In that decade, there was public outcry about the devastating situation of babies born the crack addicted mothers. Pictures of teeny, “crack-babies” undergoing withdrawal like symptoms after birth were widespread. The fate of these children was deemed void of hope.

This prediction is now recognized as a myth because it turns out the fate of the children born in this situation is not a life full of unimaginable suffering. Recently, a researcher at the University of Maryland had a review published in Pediatrics which summarized the findings of 27 different studies following the lives of these “crack-babies” into their teenage years.  The studies did not find any severe outcomes for children whose mothers had used cocaine during their pregnancy, although it seemed that they sometimes functioned slightly lower than their peers as an adolescent, for example, achieving slightly lower test scores. Their development and well-being was much more affected by their family environment, which is something we actually can help to improve. The worries about their futures were largely exaggerated and not based on good evidence.

Many children do start off disadvantaged in life and this is a tragedy. But it is no argument for killing children. The seed of potential rests within these disadvantaged children, and given proper care, any child can overcome the challenges placed on their path towards thriving. Our society wouldn’t tolerate the slaughter of children in foster care who are struggling with the effects of their parent’s poor choices, so why would we kill those same children simply because they still reside in the womb?

The myth of the crack babies just underlines the point pro-lifers have been trying to make for years--the circumstances of your conception and birth do not have to seal your fate. People have an amazing ability to overcome significant obstacles and achieve things that smaller-minded people declare impossible.  Even if things look grim, we can never predict what will or will not happen in someone’s future. A child born in desperate circumstances can live a happy, productive life as an adult--unless we kill her before she gets a chance.

Source: LifeSite News

Abortionist in Chicago Area

 

Community opposition to Chicago area abortionist Cheryl Chastine is growing

A crowd of three dozen pro-life activists assembled Wednesday in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park to protest outside Total Wellness Inc. — the family practice office of Dr. Cheryl Chastine, the “registered agent” of the recently opened South Wind Women’s Center abortion clinic in Wichita, Kansas.

Chastine doesn’t want her regular patients and her Oak Park neighbors to know she’s an abortionist, and one doesn’t have to think about it very long to understand why.
Pro-Abortion Activists Help the League Expose Chastine As an Abortionist
That’s the whole point of our protests: to make sure that Chastine’s patients and the surrounding community know that she is an abortionist. And at our protest Wednesday, we got some big help getting our message across from a most unlikely source: pro-abortion activists.

When we got to Chastine’s office about 15 minutes before our scheduled start time, we found that a group of about 20 pro-abortion activists from the NARAL’s Illinois Choice Action Team was clustered in front of the building holding various signs, the largest of which read, “Abortion providers are heroes.”
 
How about that?  They were doing our job for us!
Truly, the presence of pro-abortion activists gave our protest a much bigger impact, and upped the level of controversy in the community significantly. Proof positive is that on three separate occasions yesterday, residents living in the area who, until that time, had no idea they had an abortionist’s office in their midst, spontaneously joined our protest.
Next month, Chastine’s office will be moving to a new location, also in Oak Park, about a mile north of the current location. So our regular protests will be moving as well. And her new office-to-be, located at 720 Lake Street, is even more conducive to protesting, with its significantly greater foot and car traffic.
Watch this space for developments, and in the meantime, check out a Flickr set of pictures from yesterday’s protest here.

Reprinted with permission from prolifeaction.org

Source LifeSite News

Friday, June 28, 2013

Promoting ObamaCare


 

Cosmo gets ObamaCare makeover: Feminist magazine to promote new healthcare law

June 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Readers of the magazine Cosmopolitan are in for a shock this fall when their sex advice columns, trendy fashion spreads, and magical makeover solutions will be crowded out by feature stories promoting ObamaCare.
The Obama administration has recruited the magazine to promote its controversial bill to its 18 million readers via feature stories beginning this fall, as the bill takes effect.
The magazine will continue its coverage of the Affordable Care Act into 2014.
With a readership heavily targeting women between 17 and 38 years of age, Cosmo is an ideal publication for the administration to popularize ObamaCare’s “free” birth control, as well as other aspects of the law dealing with reproduction.

Cosmo’s editor-in-chief, Joanna Coles, explains the introduction of public policy and fiscal impacts of health care decisions to its pages saying, “This stuff is really important. It’s life-changing for a lot of people.”
The content change is not restricted to its glossy pages. Cosmo’s social media outlets will be peppered with the information about the bill as well.
Another hot topic that Coles anticipates covering is the introduction of insurance exchanges and subsidies, which will be made available in October. Financial publications such as Forbes are reporting these exchanges will increase insurance premiums for American consumers.
 
ObamaCare has also been criticized for its Individual mandate, which penalizes those who are not compliant, and for forcing taxpayers to pay for abortions. Many companies across America have already filed lawsuits with the Health and Human Services abortifacient contraception coverage mandate.

The Obama administration has stated it is also trying to get professional athletes to promote ObamaCare, reportedly contacting both the NFL and the NBA.
Several hundred Planned Parenthood clinics are promoting the bill, which is forecast to swell the abortion provider's revenues, as well.

Source: LifeSite News

Culture of Death


27 million people trapped in human trafficking: U.S. govt report

June 26, 2013 (blog.heritage.org) - The release of the State Department’s latest Trafficking in Persons Report (TIP) revealed that Asia is home to some of the worst perpetrators of illegal human trafficking.
China has now joined the ranks of Russia, North Korea, Iran, and a handful of other countries as Tier 3 violators of human trafficking laws. Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, Maldives, Micronesia, Sri Lanka, and Thailand were placed on the Tier 2 Watch List for their lack of compliance with human trafficking laws.

China’s designation as a Tier 3 country authorizes the U.S. to place sanctions on non-humanitarian and non-trade-related aid. Whether President Obama imposes such sanctions will be determined over the next 90 days. Sanctions could impact U.S. support for aid from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund as well as some aid coming directly from the U.S. to China.
 
China has been on the Tier 2 Watch List for nine years. The past two years, China has a received a waiver and maintained its Tier 2 Watch List status due to efforts at implementing new anti-human trafficking laws. This year, due to its failure to take remedial action, it slipped to Tier 3.
China is a source, transit point, and destination for trafficking victims. Forced labor has been documented at an estimated 320 state-controlled Chinese re-education camps. According to the TIP report, Chinese women were trafficked to every continent.

North Korea has long been designated as a Tier 3 country due to its labor camps that imprison 200,000 or more people. These prisoners are subjected to both forced labor and unimaginable brutality. Women and children trying to escape into neighboring countries are often trafficked as sex workers or brides, making freedom nearly unattainable.
Worldwide, there are an estimated 27 million people caught in the mire of human trafficking—including an estimated 1.2 million children. From persecuted religious minorities in Burma (such as the Rohingya) to sex slaves in Cambodia, the atrocities are innumerable.
Reprinted with permission from blog.heritage.org

Humm- &36,000 in fines not paid yet


  

Chicago abortion clinic continues stall tactics to avoid paying $36,000 fine

A hearing was held on Tuesday, June 18 in the case of People of the State of Illinois v. Women’s Aid Clinic of Lincolnwood in Cook County Court in downtown Chicago, and  Women’s Aid Clinic owner Larisa Rozansky is continuing her stall tactics: As has happened in four of the past five hearings in the case, Rozansky didn’t bother to show up in Judge Alexander White’s courtroom.
The state Attorney General’s office filed suit [PDF] against Women’s Aid in August 2012 after the notorious abortion facility refused to pay the $36,000 fine assessed against it by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) following an September 2011 inspection that uncovered deplorable conditions and several serious violations.

Rozansky has appeared in court for only one of the hearings in the case this year. On April 16, she showed up with a stack of paperwork—but without an attorney. Judge White reminded her that because Women’s Aid Clinic was a corporate debtor, it must be represented by an attorney.
Rozansky then told Judge White that she didn’t have the money to hire an attorney, to which he responded that the issue was not whether she personally had the money to hire an attorney, but whether Women’s Aid Clinic had the money to hire an attorney.
She replied that Women’s Aid Clinic doesn’t have the money, either, and that it had filed for bankruptcy [PDF] in October 2011 because it had no assets (although that case was dismissed a month later).

Still, that would explain Rozansky’s March 13, 2012 letter [PDF] to William Bell of the IDPH in which she claimed that Women’s Aid Clinic “does not exist and does not have any assets or associated bank accounts.”
And yet, while supposedly “not exist[ing],” the facility still continued to do business under the name “Women’s Aid Clinic” for several more weeks. What’s more, the name “Women’s Aid Clinic of Lincolnwood” was the name that appeared on the facility’s May 2012 eviction order [PDF] brought on by the $50,000 in back rent owed to its landlord.
As reported previously, Women’s Aid Clinic has since moved to Chicago and changed its name to Women’s Aid Center, and is still in operation.
 
Clearly, Women’s Aid Clinic-now-it’s-Women’s Aid Center is in dire financial straits, so it’s no surprise that Rozansky is refusing to pay the $36,000 fine by continuing to employ stall tactics to draw the legal process out as long as she can.
But she can’t draw it our forever. At the June 18 hearing, Judge White granted Assistant Attorney General Vincent Kan’s request to serve a turnover order for nearly $38,000 on Women’s Aid Clinic/Center.

The next hearing date in the case is July 18.  Watch this space for developments.

Abortion Clinic = “Health Care Business”? Nope.
A couple things to note about the aforementioned bankruptcy filing [PDF] in October 2011: Not only did Women’s Aid owe their bank nearly $70,000, but they also owed $65,000 to RH Donnelley (the Yellow Pages publisher) and Yellow Book.
One suspects that Larisa Rozansky pays her advertising bills about as often as she shows up to court hearings.

It’s also interesting to note that under the heading “Nature of Business,” the box for “Health Care Business” was not checked.  Instead, the “Other” box was checked.
As we’ve been saying for years, Abortion Is Not Health Care — and in moments of honesty, even the abortion industry agrees.
Reprinted with permission from networkedblogs.com
Source: NRLC News

Latinas and Abortion


40 Years of Roe, 40 Years Too Many

Statement of Raimundo Rojas, Director of Latino Outreach, National Right to Life
National Right to Life Convention
Dallas, TX
UnbornPain3Today, the single most dangerous place for a Latina in these United States is still in her mother’s womb.
That isn’t hyperbole nor is it an opinion – it is a tragic fact. Latinas constitute approximately 16 percent of US female population but account for nearly 24 percent of all abortions. Not convinced? Before the sun sets today, 835 Latino babies will have been aborted – over 300,000 by the end of this year.

The tragedy is further deepened because most of us come from pro-life countries, and contrary to what skewed liberal polls try to infer– Latinos self identify as pro-life.
So why does the disproportionate number of abortions within Hispanic neighborhoods continues to grow? Why do so many of us partake of an activity that goes so against our most basic mores & cultural traditions? I believe the answer to that is equal parts assimilation and targeting.
For 40 years – 40 years too many – the pro-abortion culture of death has been the prevailing culture which has attempted to influence almost every aspect of American life for Hispanics and non-Hispanics alike. The tentacles of American assimilation trap many young Latinos into turning their backs on century-old beliefs.

Latinos newfound ease for choosing abortion also has a deeper, darker and more sinister explanation. For decades the abortion industry has gone after my community with a fervor not seen since Margaret Sanger first began her “weeding out” crusades.

An over abundance of ads for abortion in monolingual papers and 960252_10152800512235147_1419959233_nflyers published expressly for Latino neighborhoods; Planned Parenthood’s choice for a Mexican-American chaplain; the many Spanish language pro-abortion web-sites aimed specifically at Latinas; and the ridiculous over-abundance of abortion clinics in barrios across the United States all contribute to the high Hispanic abortion numbers.
Mercifully, America seems to finally be coming to terms with the realization that unborn babies feel pain, that they dream, and that they suffer immensely as they are dismembered in their mother’s womb. That realization, as difficult as it has been to come-by for White America has been even more difficult in the Latino community due in part to a language barrier and the reluctance by Spanish- language media to promulgate those facts.

It’s our job, our duty and responsibility at the National Right to Life Committee to educate within the Hispanic community and get life-saving and life-affirming information to them. We aim to make our communities aware of the reality of abortion and the availability of life-saving alternatives.
Being pro-life is the most Latino thing to be – we just need to remind ourselves of the how and the why.

Source:NRLC News

" Never-Borns"


Miscarriage and the “never-borns”

By Dave Andrusko
Ultrasound34I’m not entirely sure the headline and sub-headline fully convey what JJ Keith actually wrote—“My miscarriages made me question being pro-choice: I was devastated when I lost my pregnancies, and I wondered: Does grieving this way mean abortion is wrong?”—but in its confusion and complexity it does capture the conflict in her heart.
Ms. Keith had three miscarriages before she carried two pregnancies to term—a preschool son and daughter whom she obviously loves and adores.
It won’t be along strictly party lines–pro-lifers versus pro-abortionist—that explains why one person reads her Salon essay differently from another. She is firmly pro-choice but she appears to be making a good faith attempt to make sense of her ideology in the face of how much she mourns those lost children. She puts it this way:
“It doesn’t make any sense to me, at least not intellectually, but I feel like I have five children — two born and three who were not born, which is a point-of-view that is hard to reconcile with being pro-choice.”

But there are more than a few casually dismissive comments made about the babies she miscarried. One person will read that as clear evidence Keith does not really value prenatal life. I don’t. I think it’s as much a defense mechanism as it is to demonstrate solidarity with pro-abortionists or to under-appreciate unborn children.
And how do you read this paragraph?
“Once I finally did give birth to a real live baby, I was surprised to learn that pushing out a fully formed human is only marginally more painful than ejecting a clump of cells the size of a pencil eraser. How is it that babies are born in hospitals surrounded by nurses offering ice chips while never-to-be-borns are leaked out in OB-GYN waiting rooms, on bathroom floors and in the gussets of soon-to-be-trashed underwear, only very rarely with any kind of support other than a prescription for Tylenol with codeine. That hardly seems fair. There should be ice chips for everybody.”


I read it to say that even though the child early in pregnancy is tiny, the loss of him or her is a big, BIG deal.
To be sure, later she makes the kind of off-putting remark that could tempt you to conclude she is insincere. Again, that’s not how I read Ms. Keith. She hurt, a lot, when she miscarried. To this day she doesn’t understand how people do not grasp the magnitude of a baby lost to a miscarriage. The loss to her—and to every woman?–is “substantial.”

She affirms her “pro-choice” credentials more than once—but not in the usual pro-abortion cant. A non-religious woman she goes back and forth on where these babies are and whether they are “waiting” for her. In the end she concludes they are not waiting because “they never were.”
Really? I think not. The final words of her essay are not my “never-weres” but “my never-borns.”

Source: NRLC News

Gosnell Again


 

Gosnell surprises court by rejecting plea bargain on drug charges

By Patrick B. Craine
Convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell
Convicted murderer Kermit Gosnell

PHILADELPHIA, June 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Jailed abortionist Kermit Gosnell surprised a federal courtroom this morning when he rejected a plea bargain on charges that he illegally dispensed prescription drugs from his West Philadelphia ‘house of horrors’.
Gosnell, 72, did not explain why he was rejecting the plea bargain, which would have given him 20 years in prison, served concurrently with his three consecutive life sentences. A trial has been set for Sept. 9th.

Kermit Gosnell leaves the courtroom after being convicted of first degree murder.
“You can counsel a horse to water but you can’t counsel him to drink,” said Gosnell’s attorney, Jack McMahon, according to reporter Sean O’Sullivan of Delaware’s News Journal.
Gosnell simply was “not ready to do this,” added McMahon, who also pointed out that Gosnell has no concern about time in prison because of his previous convictions.
Gosnell was originally scheduled to enter a guilty plea on June 12 but it was postponed to this morning.

The late-term abortionist was found guilty last month on three counts of first-degree murder, as well as involuntary manslaughter and hundreds of violations of Pennsylvania state abortion law. Judge Jeffrey Minehart sentenced him to three consecutive life sentences. The abortionist escaped the death penalty by agreeing to waive his right to appeal.
Prosecutors say Gosnell wrote thousands of prescriptions for such highly addictive medications as OxyContin, alprazolam, and cough medicine containing codeine. According to NBC 10, Gosnell wrote as many 200 prescriptions in one night.
Patients paid him $20 per script and the employees an additional $10 or $20.
They accuse Gosnell of making at least $200,000 peddling prescriptions between June 2008 and February 2010.
In all, Gosnell earned an estimated $1.8 million a year at his filthy facility, located at 3801 Lancaster Avenue.

It was the allegation that Gosnell ran a “pill mill” that led police to raid his abortion facility on February 10, 2010, where they stumbled upon the extent of his abortion-related crimes and unsanitary conditions.

Source: NRLC News

Texas Gov Rick Perry


 

Texas Gov. Perry’s rousing speech gives NRLC 2013 an inspired beginning

By Dave Andrusko
Pro-life Texas Gov. Rick Perry addresses the National Right to Life Convention as NRLC President Carol Tobias looks on.
Pro-life Texas Gov. Rick Perry addresses the National Right to Life Convention as NRLC President Carol Tobias looks on.

Even for veteran NRLC convention goers, it would be difficult to imagine a better start, a better ‘take off’ for the 43rd annual National Right to Life Convention than what a huge audience heard this morning at the Opening General Session in Dallas, Texas.

No doubt the presence of pro-life Gov. Rick Perry explained the banks of cameras and loads of reporters. Since Tuesday, Texas has been in the news, first because of a raucous pro-abortion gallery which made passage of an ominous pro-life bill impossible in the state Senate, and second because an undeterred Perry told the crowd he was bringing legislators back “to finish their business”—and that he would put “pro-life measures at the top.”

Perry made clear that parliamentary maneuvers such as the filibuster which were used was one thing, “mob tactics” and the “hijacking of the democratic process” quite another.
Gov. Perry was one of a quartet of inspirational and motivational speakers at the Opening Session. Elizabeth Graham of Texas Right to Life welcomed attendees who had come from around the nation. NRLC President Carol Tobias delivered a stirring call-to-arms speech while Notre Dame Professor of Law O. Carter Snead critiqued the “morally incoherent” legal and cultural perspective that gave us abortion on demand and attacks on embryonic human beings.

Mrs. Tobias laid out the challenges before us at the same time she reminded us of the strengths that power the greatest Movement for social justice of our time
.
Early on she reminded her audience of the atrocities of abortionist Kermit Gosnell, who was recently convicted of three counts of murder. Mrs. Tobias asked THE question brought to the fore by Gosnell, who aborted hundreds of babies alive (according to the grand jury report) and then murdered these viable children by severing their spinal cords.

What is the difference, she asked, between this “and pulling the baby apart piece by piece, in the womb? Same baby, same deadly, painful result.”
Mrs. Tobias concluded by quoting from the late, great Bob Casey, governor of Pennsylvania, who once wrote that our “cultural unease with abortion, this refusal to drop the subject, is the most hopeful sign of health.”

To which Mrs. Tobias added,
“Other nations, sadly, have more or less learned to live with it; they don’t see it as anything to get worked up about. But not here. This thing—this horrible things, so contrary to our ideals, our inclusiveness, our kindness, our love for one another—has been grafted onto American society.
“But it is not a functioning organ. It won’t take. It won’t heal. The body rejects it.”

Source: NRLC News

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Remove this Woman From Office

 

Nancy Pelosi: ‘Thank God’ for gay ‘marriage’ rulings

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 27, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Among those celebrating the two Supreme Court's rulings handed down yesterday that favor the homosexual political agenda is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told Politico her first reaction was, “Thank God.”
Pelosi, who regularly identifies herself as a "devout" practicing Catholic, said the Deo gratias poured out of her heart the moment she heard that the High Court effectively overturned her home state's Proposition 8 and invalidated a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) by a 5-4 margin in two cases.
Nancy Pelosi
 
“I was thinking when we were walking over here, 'I’ll be devastated if it’s anything other than that' for two reasons,” she said. “For what it means for the lives of people first and foremost, but secondly it’s clearly unconstitutional. I’m glad to hear that the court agrees.”
Another prominent figure who expressed gratitude that DOMA was repealed is the same president that turned the federal marriage bill into settled law for 17 years. President Bill Clinton, who signed DOMA without fanfare or a photo op in a late night ceremony in 1996, said, By overturning the Defense of Marriage Act, the Court recognized that discrimination towards any group holds us all back in our efforts to form a more perfect union. ”
His wife, former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, joined his statement. During her tenure as Secretary of State, Hilary put the promotion of homosexuality at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, a tactic continued by her successor, John Kerry.

“We are also encouraged that marriage equality may soon return to California,” they said. “We applaud the hard work of the advocates who have fought so relentlessly for this day, and congratulate Edie Windsor on her historic victory.”

President Clinton previously repudiated his own incremental measures to promote and normalize homosexuality when he applauded the decision to repeal the “Don't Ask, Don't Tell” military regulation. Don't Ask Don't Tell was also passed under his watch.
Other liberal Democrats voiced their support for yesterday's rulings.
The nation's first openly homosexual Congressman, Barney Frank, told MSNBC the ruling was “very, very important,” because homosexuals “haven’t been getting their benefits” from the federal government. “We’ve had a series of efforts in our country to make sure people are included in all those wonderful things,” he said.

President Obama telephoned the plaintiffs in both cases from Air Force One as he traveled to Africa, telling the lesbian couple at the heart of the Proposition 8 Hollingsworth v. Perry case he was “proud” of their “leadership.”
The White House later released a photograph of President Obama telephoning Edith Windsor, who sued to repeal DOMA.

Source: LifeSite News

At Odds Redefining Marriage and Religious Freedom

 

Same-sex marriage and religious freedom, fundamentally at odds

June18, 2013 (thepublicdiscourse.com) - Marriage and religious freedom will stand or fall together.
In recent essays here at Public Discourse, Mark Regnerus argued that same-sex marriage would harm marriage for everyone, and John Smoot argued that it would be bad for children in particular. Today I want to show the damage that redefining marriage does to religious freedom. At bottom, even the defense of religious liberty is a struggle over what is true and false about the meaning of marriage.
Should the truth about marriage—that it unites men and women so that children will have fathers and mothers—be defied by the laws of the land, we cannot expect the religious freedom of those who believe in that ancient truth to be respected under the new dominion of falsehood.
After all, if redefining marriage to include same-sex couples accords with justice and moral truth, there is no good reason for the new legal order to make room for “conscientious” religious dissenters, for clearly their consciences are malformed and unworthy of respect. Thus the fate of religious freedom, for scores of millions of Americans, stands or falls with the fate of conjugal marriage itself.
Some astute observers have noticed the dimensions of the problem and called attention to it. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty filed a brief in both marriage cases now pending in the Supreme Court, arguing that the Court should not interfere with democratic legislative processes in this field, because only such processes can result in public policies that will prevent church-state conflict in the future. The brief describes many of the problems I will discuss below, but in the end I think it is too hopeful that same-sex marriage and religious freedom may be reconciled by lawmakers to any significantly greater extent than by judges.

Two groups of prominent religious liberty scholars (one led by Robin Fretwell Wilson, the other by Douglas Laycock) have written letters (such as this one from Wilson’s group) to state legislators and governors considering same-sex marriage bills, imploring them to include various statutory provisions that would afford some protection to religious freedom. Both groups have signally failed to achieve much, if any, meaningful accommodation of religious freedom in the recent legislative enactments of same-sex marriage in New York, Minnesota, Rhode Island, and Delaware.
The victorious legislators either do not see the conflict, don’t care about it, or actually welcome its arrival, relishing the further victories yet to come over the “bigotry” of religious dissenters. The last of these possibilities may be the likeliest, as Robert P. George suggested nearly a year ago here at Public Discourse. If so, our situation is dire indeed.

The “Wedding Day” Is Not the Real Issue
A great show is sometimes made in legislatures of how generously the advocates of same-sex marriage are willing to treat their adversaries, by assuring them that no Orthodox rabbis or synagogues, and no Catholic priests or parish churches, will ever be dragooned into giving their blessing to same-sex unions under the name of marriage. This sort of statutory “exemption” has become routine.
But the exemption is pointless because it is already accomplished by the First Amendment. No one thinks that any state could constitutionally coerce dissenting ministers, imams, rabbis, or priests into presiding over same-sex wedding ceremonies, or commandeer their sacred places of worship for such ceremonies.

Yet by pretending that such fears are in some way valid or genuine, same-sex marriage advocates keep the focus on them, cultivate the impression that their adversaries are worried about this matter and practically nothing else, and then declare that they have “compromised” in some full and fair way with the only real concerns on the other side by offering redundant legislative assurances. Every single state (as well as the District of Columbia) that has enacted same-sex marriage through its legislature has play-acted this dumbshow.

No state, on the other hand, has credited or accommodated the religiously grounded objections of other private actors—professionals or small business owners—to being dragooned into offering their services on the wedding day to same-sex couples. There are several well-known cases of bakers, photographers—even a religious nonprofit property owner—facing grave legal jeopardy for their refusal to offer their services or facilities in contradiction of their felt obligations to witness to the truth about marriage as it is taught by their faith.

When the above-mentioned religious liberty scholars have pleaded for accommodation of such persons and groups, they have gotten exactly nowhere. It seems that for same-sex marriage proponents, the religious freedom of saying “no” to same-sex weddings belongs only to “religious organizations,” not to similarly situated religious persons, despite the obviously personal character of the First Amendment’s free exercise of religion.
But the deepest conflicts between same-sex marriage and religious freedom will not occur on the day that couples tie the knot.

When the Honeymoon Is Over
Churches and other religious organizations are major employers. They operate schools, universities, hospitals, hospices, and clinics; social service agencies, retirement homes, eldercare and childcare facilities, food pantries, and soup kitchens; and other charitable ministries of every kind. They employ teachers, doctors, nurses, psychologists, counselors and clinicians, caregivers, food-service workers, housekeeping and grounds staff, even pool lifeguards. These religious ministries typically present themselves as equal opportunity employers, and they mean it.

Can they continue to do so in the redefined-marriage legal regime? If a church ministry hires someone in a same-sex marriage, or employs someone who enters such a marriage; or if it declines to hire such a person, or treats him or her adversely if already employed—in any of these scenarios there is trouble ahead, if federal, state, or local employment law considers it wrongful discrimination to treat persons in same-sex marriages differently from men and women in marriages.
 
The “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination law, affirmed 9-0 by the Supreme Court in the Hosanna-Tabor case in January 2012, will be no protection at all, since there is no way to shoehorn all these roles and functions into that exceptions category, no matter how broadly “minister” is defined. But to date, there is no state that has seen fit to accommodate the religious conscience even of avowedly religious ministries in this respect, let alone the consciences of religious persons doing business in the for-profit and nonprofit sectors.
Or consider public accommodations law, which can cover equal access to healthcare services, marriage and family counseling, daycare, adoption services, as well as religious schools and universities that are open to taking students of every faith or none at all. Churches and other religious bodies are among the largest providers of health, social service, and educational opportunities, but they understandably consider themselves obliged to provide them in keeping with the moral dictates of their faith.

The clash between the redefinition of marriage and religious liberty in this area was painfully evident when Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, after a century of operating an adoption agency that matched children with new parents, ceased offering this service to the community rather than be forced by the state to place children with same-sex couples contrary to Catholic teaching. Just two states—Connecticut and Maryland—permit religiously affiliated adoption and foster-care agencies (but no others) to place children exclusively with married moms and dads. But even this came at a price no other adoption agency must bear: these agencies are now ineligible for any share of public funds that the states may provide.

Consider also the laws at various levels of government against housing discrimination. If a religious university offers housing to married student couples, will it be charged with discriminating if it denies such housing to same-sex married couples? Only two states with same-sex marriage—New Hampshire and New York—make any exemption for “religious organizations” in such situations, and it is not exactly settled that a university such as St. Anselm or Fordham would fall under these exemptions.

Control of Education
And on the subject of universities and schools, consider the matter of the accreditation of higher-ed programs and whole institutions, and the control of curriculum in primary and secondary education. Already we can see individual degree programs compelled by accrediting bodies, in fields such as counseling, to conform themselves to the transformed understanding of marriage and sexuality, as some religiously dissenting students have discovered to their cost.

Whole colleges and universities are themselves accredited by regional private accrediting associations—and the accreditors are in turn accredited by the US Department of Education, and recognized by the DOE as authoritative regarding which institutions grant valid degrees and enroll students eligible for federal aid of various kinds. If and when the regional accreditors and the DOE decide that the norm of “respect” for same-sex marriage must pervade higher education, which religious colleges and universities will keep standing firm in the winds that will blow?

In K-12 education, state authorities typically mandate that all schools, public and private, religious or secular, meet certain curricular goals and standards. This is fairly uncontroversial when it comes to math, science, even history. But will states mandate the teaching of the new understanding of marriage and family, and force it on religious schools? The possibility is not terribly remote.

The Tax Man Cometh
Finally, consider the matter of tax exemption. In its 1983 ruling in Bob Jones University v. United States, the Supreme Court affirmed, by an 8-1 vote, the power of the Internal Revenue Service to declare that it was “contrary to public policy,” since the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Court’s own 1967 decision in Loving v. Virginia overturning bans on interracial marriage, to grant tax-exempt status to a religious university that admitted both white and black students but forbade them to date and marry one another. All nine justices presumed the sincerity of the university’s stated religious rationale for its policy, and none of them (even the lone dissenter) thought it mattered a bit. The Court’s decision forced Bob Jones University to change its policy.

One can deplore that university’s former policy and applaud the change that was forced on it. But we must recognize that the Bob Jones precedent is a loaded gun waiting to be picked up and used against religious schools, universities, social service agencies, hospitals and clinics, and charitable ministries of all kinds. If same-sex marriage is the new normal, and dissent from it on religious grounds is the new bigotry, then with a stroke of a pen the IRS can destroy the tax-exempt status of every para-church institution in the country that is not on board with the redefinition of marriage—and perhaps of the core institutions too, the churches, synagogues, and mosques themselves.

The Law as Moral Teacher
And after all, if the new meaning of marriage represents progress toward a more just society, why shouldn’t the coercive power of the state be deployed in all these ways? Religious freedom has its limits, it will be said. Correction: This is being said, in all the liberal-dominated legislatures where marriage has been redefined in recent years, which is why so little accommodation is being made for religious conscience, and why such tiny accommodations as have been made are almost certainly doomed to be evanescent, repealed in coming years as the vestiges of old compromises with backwardness that are no longer necessary.

And the Bob Jones example points up the perfect reasonableness of this view, if those who hold it are right about marriage: we do not make room even for “private” bigotry in our society without imposing costs, not even bigotry with a religious basis.

The transformation of the law to redefine the meaning of marriage will be bad for marriage, bad for children, and very bad indeed for those people of faith who want to maintain their faith’s teaching on marriage, in their religious institutions and in their work. The preservation of meaningful religious liberty, it turns out, is inseparable from the preservation, in our legal order, of the truth about marriage. They stand or fall together.
Reprinted with permission from thepublicdiscourse.org

Polygamy Next

 

Is the DOMA decision a new Roe v. Wade?

June 26, 2013 (AlbertMohler.com) - On the last day of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today on two same-sex marriage cases. Both are important cases, and both will go far in redefining the most basic institution of human civilization. The Court knew it was making history, and a majority of justices clearly intended to make history, and future generations will indeed remember this day. But for what?

In the first decision handed down today, the Supreme Court found that the Defense of Marriage Act, passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996, is unconstitutional. Specifically, it found that the Federal government’s refusal to recognize a same-sex marriage that is legal in a state to be unconstitutional. The Court left in place the DOMA provision that protects states from being required to recognize a same-sex union that is valid in another state.
With the logic in place from today's DOMA decision, it is only a matter of time before the Court mandates gay "marriage" across all 50 states. 
 
In the Proposition 8 case, the Court’s majority held that the plaintiffs in the case, representing the people of California, lacked legal standing to appeal the lower courts’ decisions that found Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional. In 2008 a majority of voters in California passed a constitutional amendment that defined marriage in that state as the union of a man and a woman, effectively overturning a California Supreme Court ruling that had legalized same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court’s ruling in that case today means that the decision of the Federal District Court stands, presumably meaning that same-sex marriage will be legal again in California. This is presumably the case, but not necessarily, because of disputed provisions in California law. Courts in that state will have to sort out those issues.

Of the two decisions handed down today, the DOMA decision is, by far, the most important and wide reaching. In the Court’s majority opinion, written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the Court has ruled that Congress had been motivated by a specific moral animus against homosexual marriage and homosexual citizens when it passed DOMA. As such, the Court ruled that DOMA is unconstitutional.

Is the DOMA Decision a New Roe v. Wade?

It is virtually impossible to exaggerate the future impact of the DOMA decision, but it is not yet a new Roe v. Wade.  Instead, it sets up a future legal challenge from any citizen in any state that does not have legal same-sex marriage. The Court’s decision in that future case, surely not long in our future, will be the new Roe V. Wade – a sweeping decision that would create a new “right” that would mean the coast-to-coast legalization of same-sex marriage. Today’s decisions do not take us there, but they take us to the precipice of that sweeping decision. That is especially true of the DOMA case.
Striking at the heart of DOMA, Justice Kennedy wrote: “The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.”

As evidence of this judgment, Kennedy cited a document from the House of Representatives in 1996. That statement proposed that DOMA expressed “both moral disapproval of homosexuality, and a moral conviction that heterosexuality better comports with traditional (especially Judeo-Christian) morality.” That document went on to state that DOMA would protect the government’s “interest in protecting the traditional moral teachings reflected in heterosexual-only marriage laws.”
In the view of five justices, that meant the death of DOMA. They ruled that the only reason that Congress passed DOMA in 1996 was because it wanted to single out same-sex couples to be denied access to marriage, and it did so on moral terms. As Kennedy argued in his majority opinion, “The avowed purpose and practical effect of the law here in question are to impose a disadvantage, a separate status, and so a stigma upon all who enter into same-sex marriages made lawful by the unquestioned authority of the states.” In doing so, he argued, the Congress had passed a law that “violates the due process and equal protection principles applicable to the Federal Government.”
Nevertheless, even as Justice Kennedy castigated Congress (and presumably former President Bill Clinton) for making moral judgments, he could not resist moral judgments of his own. He wrote of our society’s “evolving understanding of the meaning of equality" and declared that the states have the right to confer on same-sex marriages “the equal dignity” of a mariage between a man and a woman. By finding that the moral judgment of Congress in opposing same-sex marriage was wrong, he asserted, quite forcefully, that opposition to same-sex marriage is rooted in animus or hatred. In other words, Justice Kennedy, joined by four other justices, believes that opposition to same-sex marriage is wrong. In condemning a moral judgment, he arrogantly made a moral judgment.
The immediate effects of the striking down of DOMA’s federal definition of marriage are not specifically clear. It does mean that the Federal government will now be required to recognize any same-sex union declared to be legal in any state, extending full recognition and extending all federal marriage benefits to that same-sex marriage. The Obama Administration will have to make myriad decisions about how this is to be done. Interesting, this will put President Obama, who last year “evolved” into full support for legal same-sex marriage, on the hot seat once again.

Scalia the Prophet
Back in 2003, when the Supreme Court struck down all state laws against homosexuality, Justice Kennedy also wrote that majority opinion. That opinion, in the case Lawrence v. Texas, set the stage for today’s majority opinion authored by the same justice. In 2003, Justice Kennedy argued that laws restricting homosexual acts and relationships were driven by moral animus against homosexuals and homosexuality. He acknowledged that this moral judgment is both venerable and deeply rooted in the moral traditions of Western civilization, but he condemned such laws and, writing for the majority, struck them down. He employed the very same logic today, in striking down DOMA.

Back in 2003, Justice Antonin Scalia issued a scathing dissent to Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. “Today’s opinion dismantles the structure of constitutional law that has permitted a distinction to be made between heterosexual and homosexual unions, insofar as a formal recognition in marriage is concerned. If moral disapprobation of homosexual conduct is ‘no legitimate state interest’ for purposes of proscribing that conduct … what justification could there possibly be for denying the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples?”

Justice Kennedy insisted in 2003 that the Lawrence decision did not involve homosexual marriage and did not imply any necessary recognition of same-sex unions. In response, Scalia retorted: “This case ‘does not involve’ the issue of same-sex marriage only if one entertains the belief that principle and logic have nothing to do with the decisions of this Court.” He concluded: “Many will hope that, as this Court comfortingly assures us, this is so.”

As Justice Kennedy himself made abundantly clear today, Justice Scalia was right ten years ago. Justice Kennedy’s protestations that the Lawrence decision did not involve same-sex marriage were wrong. It is hard to avoid the moral conclusion that he was then both intellectually dishonest and disingenuous. The decision handed down today proves Justice Scalia to have been a prophet. He told the truth, and Justice Kennedy, in his own words, has proved Scalia to have been right.
In an equally scathing dissent handed down in the DOMA case today, Scalia called the decision “jaw-dropping.” He castigated the Court’s majority for usurping the democratic process and for condemning all opposition to same-sex unions as “irrational and hateful.”
Even though the Court did not rule today that all states must legally recognize and allow for same-sex marriages, the handwriting is on the wall. Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion implicitly invites any citizen who resides in a state that does not allow for same-sex marriage to claim that his or her constitutional rights are violated on the basis of the Court’s opinion handed down today. You can count on a challenge of this form arising in short order.
As Justice Scalia noted in his dissent today, “As far as this Court is concerned, no one should be fooled; it is just a matter of listening and waiting for the other shoe.”
The Court’s majority did not want to pay the political price that a decision as immediately sweeping as Roe v. Wade would have cost. Instead, the majority decided to send a clear signal that such a case will now be well received. It struck down DOMA by employing a logic that, as Scalia noted, cannot stop with the striking down of DOMA. It can only stop with the full legalization of same-sex marriage in all fifty states by judicial fiat.

But wait, for there are more shoes to drop. In his opinion today, remember that Justice Kennedy wrote these crucial words: ”The history of DOMA’s enactment and its own text demonstrate that interference with the equal dignity of same-sex marriages, a dignity conferred by the States in the exercise of their sovereign power, was more than an incidental effect of the federal statute. It was its essence.”

What about laws against polygamy? Was Justice Kennedy even aware of just how sweeping this statement would be? Laws against polygamy were explicitly passed in order to “interfere” with the “equal dignity” of multiple-spousal marriages. Justice Kennedy’s opinion, now the Court’s decision, destroys any legal argument against polygamy.

The Christian Church and Marriage
The Christian church does not ask the U.S. Supreme Court, or any other human court, what marriage is. Marriage is a pre-political institution defined by our Creator — for his glory and for human flourishing. Today's decisions will create serious religious liberty challenges for all churches, Christian institutions, and Christian citizens in this nation. But the greatest impact of these decisions is the further marginalization and subversion of marriage. The destruction of marriage did not start recently, and it did not start with same-sex marriage, but its effects will be devastating.
Christians will have to think hard — and fast — about these issues and our proper response. We will have to learn an entire new set of missional skills as we seek to remain faithful to Christ in this fast-changing culture.
And, as warned by Justice Scalia, we do so knowing that we are waiting for the other shoes to drop.
Reprinted with permission from AlbertMohler.com

LifeSite News

He is such a man of his word


Obama: I won’t force churches to hold gay ‘weddings,’ so there’s no religious liberty threat

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Barack Obama is attempting to reassure the nation that today's Supreme Court ruling paving the way for same-sex “marriage” in California poses no threat to religious liberty, because the government has not forced churches to conduct gay “wedding” ceremonies.
“On an issue as sensitive as this, knowing that Americans hold a wide range of views based on deeply held beliefs, maintaining our nation’s commitment to religious freedom is also vital,” President Obama said in a statement today. “How religious institutions define and consecrate marriage has always been up to those institutions. Nothing about this decision – which applies only to civil marriages – changes that.”
President Obama congratulates Edith Windsor, the plaintiff i
President Obama congratulates Edith Windsor, the plaintiff in the Supreme Court DOMA case, from Air Force One.
 
Following today's decisions striking down a portion of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and overturning the voters' will by throwing out California's Proposition 8, Christians see their religious freedom under attack.
They found little comfort in a presidential vow not to violate the First Amendment inside the sanctuary.

“In 2008, as a presidential candidate, he said that he couldn’t support legal recognition of same-sex marriage. Now he fully supports it, describes opposition (that is, his own former position) as 'discrimination enshrined in law,' and welcomes a Supreme Court decision that 'righted that wrong,'” Phil Lawler wrote at CatholicCulture.org.
The president also said DOMA “treated loving, committed gay and lesbian couples as a separate and lesser class of people.”

“So again, how long do you expect Obama to wait before applying pressure to the churches?” asked Lawler. “Which way is the wind blowing?”
The president would not necessarily have to instigate a crackdown to pressure individuals who hold traditional values to participate in same-sex nuptials.
“Our litigious society guarantees that someone will sue to force churches into gay marriage, and our activist judiciary guarantees that they will get the outcome they desire somewhere. It’s going to happen,” noted Bryan Preston at Pajamas Media. “And Obama and/or his allies will be supporting the lawsuits when they come, tweeting that they’re accomplishing 'something special.'”
Bloggers at Weasel Zippers said the reassurance and affirmation of religious liberty rang hollow coming from “the man trying to force the Catholic church to cover birth control and abortifacients.”
 
In fact, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius used similar language to defend the ObamaCare contraceptive/abortifacient mandate, writing that it did not “affect an individual woman's freedom to decide not to use birth control.”
On the other hand Obama administration Science Czar John Holdren wrote in the 1977 book Ecoscience that “compulsory population-control laws, even including laws requiring compulsory abortion, could be sustained under the existing constitution.”

Source LifeSite News

Open Season

Sex outside the bedrooms of the nation

“There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation,” a tousled, sweaty-looking Pierre Trudeau told a clump of reporters outside the House of Commons in 1967. It was, history now tells us, an iconic moment.
Trudeau’s phrase rapidly became a slogan: “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation”—which, in turn, was becoming a secular dogma. Across North America and indeed, the morally ravaged husk of what was once known as “Christendom,” the sexual fascists of the Relativist Revolution demanded that we all recognize that the only Truth was that there was no Truth, the only absolute was moral relativism, and that the churches slam their doors and keep their meddlesome standards of morality to themselves. They were seemingly oblivious to the fact that they were imposing a new morality of their own—one without a foundation, without objectivity, and completely based on feelings. It was philosophical iconoclasm, if not vandalism; as Pierre Trudeau noted wryly in the same interview, he had “knocked down a lot of totems and overridden a lot of taboos.”

Traditionally speaking—from the Victorian era (inaccurately famous for flaunting prudishness) to shortly after the Second World War—Western civilization was generally of the opinion that being civilized meant acting civilized, and that one of the prime indicators of that was the general lack of public disrobing as well as a consensus that love-making should remain an intimate experience behind closed doors. Then the Sexual Revolution arrived, with all that it entailed—the gay liberation movement, the radical feminist movement, and the indiscriminate propagation of “free love.” All of these considered public nudity as a means of making a point, however mysteriously (a feminist baring her chest to protest misogynist men defining her worth by it has always struck me as somewhat counter-productive.) While Trudeau and countless other less eloquent culture warriors courageously spoke up for their right to live life without irritating inhibition and claimed to be removing the State from the bedroom, what they actually did was open the bedroom door and invite it onto the streets.
We’ve gone from one extreme to the other. On the one side of the spectrum, there is mistaken Christian prudishness, the damaging idea that sex is somehow shameful. On the other hand, we have objectively crude and wildly exhibitionist “Gay Pride Parades” and “Slut Walks.” These are not considered to be optional festivals hosted by tiny minority groups. No, politicians who refuse to attend events like the Gay Pride Parade are loudly labelled blatant heretics by the high priests of the New Moral Order, which is of course not an order at all, but a proud lack thereof. They don’t want the State to be outside the bedroom anymore, they want the State in the bedroom—loudly applauding the acts they see taking place, refraining from any judgement but one of approval, and perhaps even paying for pills and bits of rubber to ensure that such acts do not go awry and result in reproduction or infection. 
 
Think of Toronto Mayor Rob Ford, whose repeated lack of attendance at Gay Pride has been a cause of constant outrage to the press and many of his fellow politicians. Before he finally caved and appeared at a Pride event this week, he was asked by one exasperated radio announcer if, “for the love of God,” he would attend a Gay Pride event. (Attempting to define either “God” or “love,” of course, would have certainly complicated the issue.)
Close the church door, open the bedroom door. Morals and values have no place in public, while at the same time the Sexual Revolutionaries demand that we fund their practices with our tax dollars, and that churches accept (if not endorse) their practices without moral condemnation. It would seem that there is such a thing as bad churches, but no such thing as bad sex. “Good sex,” of course, means simply that at least one of the humans engaging in the interaction experienced some measure of fleeting enjoyment. A highly subjective and meaningless way of describing something—as G.K. Chesterton once noted, “The word ‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”

Public nudity is accepted in many places in our culture (Amsterdam recently legalized sex in a famous public park), but any reference to God and the Moral Law are definitely not, as governing bodies consistently confuse freedom of religion with freedom from religion. Your prayers are not welcome in public, but your privates are. The Emperor has no clothes, but is quite enjoying it—so long as the chilly breezes of moral truth don’t leak out of drafty cathedrals to cause discomfort.
It is shocking to consider just how far today’s society has fallen in what is considered suitable for public consumption and what is not. It borders on the absurd—a public Christian prayer might offend a non-Christian, but a simulated orgy disguising itself as a “parade” surely will not offend anyone. (Many cities fund the Gay Pride Parade.) Surely some discussion of morality and what that entails should inform the discussion of what types of legislation should be enacted? All legislation, after all, reflects someone’s morality. This new morality, to paraphrase David Frum, believes it more honorable to fornicate in the mud of Woodstock than to fight in the mud of Guadalcanal. This new morality is one with dangerous consequences. As is proven by shattered corpses of aborted pre-born children brought about by millions of frivolous coital encounters, the Sexual Revolutionaries may not have found something they’re willing to die for.
But they have found something that they’re willing to kill for.
Reprinted with permission from unmaskingchoice.ca

Source: LifeSite News

Tragic Decision

  s

US Bishops: ‘Tragic day for marriage and our nation’

WASHINGTON, June 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The following statement is the reaction of the United States Bishops conference to the U.S. Supreme Court decisions June 26 striking down part of the Defense of Marriage Act and refusing to rule on the merits of a challenge to California’s Proposition 8.  It was issued in the name of the leading voice of the Bishops on the matter, Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone of San Francisco, chair of the U.S. bishops’ Subcommittee for the Promotion and Defense of Marriage and the president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops Cardinal Timothy Dolan.

The full statement follows:
Today is a tragic day for marriage and our nation. The Supreme Court has dealt a profound injustice to the American people by striking down in part the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The Court got it wrong.

The federal government ought to respect the truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, even where states fail to do so. The preservation of liberty and justice requires that all laws, federal and state, respect the truth, including the truth about marriage.
It is also unfortunate that the Court did not take the opportunity to uphold California’s Proposition 8 but instead decided not to rule on the matter. The common good of all, especially our children, depends upon a society that strives to uphold the truth of marriage.
Now is the time to redouble our efforts in witness to this truth. These decisions are part of a public debate of great consequence. The future of marriage and the well-being of our society hang in the balance.

Marriage is the only institution that brings together a man and a woman for life, providing any child who comes from their union with the secure foundation of a mother and a father.
Our culture has taken for granted for far too long what human nature, experience, common sense, and God’s wise design all confirm: the difference between a man and a woman matters, and the difference between a mom and a dad matters. While the culture has failed in many ways to be marriage-strengthening, this is no reason to give up. Now is the time to strengthen marriage, not redefine it.
When Jesus taught about the meaning of marriage – the lifelong, exclusive union of husband and wife – he pointed back to “the beginning” of God’s creation of the human person as male and female (see Matthew 19). In the face of the customs and laws of his time, Jesus taught an unpopular truth that everyone could understand. The truth of marriage endures, and we will continue to boldly proclaim it with confidence and charity.

Now that the Supreme Court has issued its decisions, with renewed purpose we call upon all of our leaders and the people of this good nation to stand steadfastly together in promoting and defending the unique meaning of marriage: one man, one woman, for life. We also ask for prayers as the Court’s decisions are reviewed and their implications further clarified.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

God Have Mercy

 

BREAKING: Supreme Court paves the way for homosexual ‘marriages’ in California in Prop 8 decision

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Supreme Court has issued a ruling that could lead to the resumption of same-sex “marriages” in the state of California after a thin majority of justices held that the state's voters had no legal standing to challenge a court decision striking down Proposition 8.
Under federal law, they said, the people of a state have no legal recourse if a popular initiative is struck down by judicial decree.
After a vigorous debate, the voters of California passed Proposition 8 in November 2008 by a margin of 52-48.

After a lower court threw out that the voter-supported constitutional amendment – which defined marriage as a union between one man and one woman – Governor Jerry Brown, then the state's attorney general, as well as other elected officials refused to appeal the decision. Instead, a coalition of voters and private citizens cited their right to defend the measure in court.
Under state law, they argued, the voters may defend such a law in court, if their elected representatives do not go to court on their behalf. However, the court ruled that state law was irrelevant in a federal case such as this one.

The justices declined to rule on the underlying issue of redefining marriage, specifically whether they believe that this or any other state ban on same-sex "marriage" meets constitutional scrutiny. Opponents of the law had argued any ban on homosexual "marriage" would violate the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection clause.

By a 5-4 margin, justices vacated the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision on procedural grounds and remanded the case to that liberal court, instructing the court to dismiss the appeal.
Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion, joined by much of the court's liberal bloc – Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Stephen Breyer - and the conservative Antonin Scalia.
“We have never before upheld the standing of a private party to defend the constitutionality of a state statute when state officials have chosen not to. We decline to do so for the first time here,” the justices wrote in their decision, Hollingsworth v. Perry.

“Because petitioners have not satisfied their burden to demonstrate standing to appeal the judgment of the District Court, the Ninth Circuit was without jurisdiction to consider the appeal." They concluded, "The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is vacated, and the case is remanded with instructions to dismiss the appeal for lack of jurisdiction.”

The decision came moments after the court, by a 5-4 margin, struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutional.
Pro-family groups reacted swiftly to the decision, saying it disenfranchised the popular will of the people and left the issue of marriage in legal limbo.

"We are disturbed that the court refused to acknowledge that the proponents of Proposition 8 have standing to defend Proposition 8," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council. "This distorts the balance of powers between the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The Court's decision allows the executive branch to effectively veto any duly enacted law, simply by refusing to defend it against a constitutional challenge. Ironically, by refusing to defend the law, California's executive branch has also denied the nation any definitive ruling on the constitutionality of defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The Supreme Court's definition or marriage is irrelevant, some argued, while denying the common assertion that gay "marriage" is "inevitable."
Fr. Shenan J. Boquet of Human Life International wrote, “Since marriage is an institution that predates any government, the nature and definition of marriage were never in doubt, and thus could not justly be changed by any court or vote.”

"What is inevitable is that the male and female relationship will continue to be uniquely important to the future of society," Perkins said. "The reality is that society needs children, and children need a mom and a dad. We will continue to work to restore and promote a healthy marriage culture, which will maximize the chances of a child being raised by a married mother and father."
“We must continue to demand that our political leaders recognize and protect this most natural institution especially in this time of intense bigotry and discrimination toward those who defend marriage in the public square,” Fr. Boquet stated.
Developing....

Source: LifeSite News