Anglican Mainstream

By Brendan O'Neill, MercatorNet

To invite the government to give us phony equalities by recognising gay marriage is to invite greater state intervention into our personal lives.

I think one of the most maligned words in the English language is “discriminate”. These days that word is mostly used negatively. It is primarily used to mean making harsh, even oppressive judgements against people based on their sex, or their sexuality, or their ethnic origins.

The more positive — and in some senses truer — meaning of the word discriminate is getting lost. And that truer meaning is the cultured ability to perceive or note the differences between things. The use of discrimination in a quite honourable and even clever way, as a means of making judgements about the different values attached to different things, is being buried beneath the more common use of the D-word to describe every slight against individuals or groups.

That is a shame, I think, because we really need to recover the ability to discriminate. More accurately, we need to recover the important role of making judgements and recognising the differences that exist in our society and in people’s life experiences. And the reason we need to do that is because we live in an era of what we might call phony equality. An era in which what is presented to us as “equality” is in fact homogenisation; the imposition of sameness; a tyranny of relativism; ultimately, the denial of people’s right to exercise even that clever, cultured form of discrimination and to make judgements about the different ways in which people live. In such a stifling climate of top-down sameness, it is really important that people take a stand and be discriminating.

The gay marriage issue captures brilliantly how degraded the notion of equality has become. If you listen to government ministers and gay-rights campaigners, you will believe that gay marriage is all about equality, all about equal rights. It is referred to as “equal marriage”, to drum the point home. And of course, this means that anyone who criticises gay marriage can be written off as a friend of inequality, and no one wants to be thought of in that way.

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From Hansard May 20

I strongly support my hon. Friend the Member for Gainsborough (Mr Leigh), and I want particularly to home in on two issues: education and the armed forces. First, on education, I think that there is complete confusion. To a certain extent, the right hon. Member for Tottenham put his finger on the point: those who have a view contrary to his will not be allowed to express it in our schools, without being punished for so doing.

Richard Drax May I confirm that the view stated by the right hon. Member for Tottenham (Mr Lammy) is, in essence, a direct attack on free speech in this country, which has been held dear for hundreds, nay thousands, of years?

Sir Gerald Howarth With respect to my hon. Friend, I do not think that the right hon. Gentleman is attacking free speech, but he is professing a view of which ordinary people out there will take note. That is what is leading to the chilling effect, the intimidation—[Interruption.] It is no good the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) looking in astonishment; she should talk to some of the staff in this place and find out how intimidated they feel about expressing a view on these matters. Surely Opposition Members have also had the experience of expressing a forthright view when talking to constituents —I am not politically correct, and given my certain age, I tend to express a forthright view—and of being told that we may say such things but that they cannot do so. They tell me in words of one syllable that they fear they will lose their jobs if they articulate the same view as I express.

Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab) Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

Sir Gerald Howarth No, I will not give way yet.

The House ignores at its peril the chilling effect that already exists out there—although it is now okay for us to discuss immigration, thanks to the Leader of the Opposition, who has recognised that there is huge public concern and has graciously sanctioned our speaking about it in terms that, in previous times, he might have dismissed as being racist.

There are people out there who will be intimidated by this legislation. I have to say to my hon. Friend the Minister that I entirely agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Mr Brazier), who made the point that, at the end of the day, his assurances, and those of his Front-Bench colleagues, are utterly worthless.

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By Brendan O'Neill, Spiked

[...]  Another example of phony freedom is gay marriage. Here, too, it seems pretty clear to me that what is in fact an authoritarian instinct on the part of our rulers is being dressed up, and accepted by many people, as an expansion of liberty. The driving force in the gay-marriage campaign is the desire of the state to get its foot further in the door of private life, to assume something like sovereignty over how our most intimate relationships are defined and understood. Yet it is promoted as a new liberty, graciously being bestowed upon gays by a caring government.

Time and again, the language of freedom is used to undermine the experience of freedom. In such circumstances, libertarians must devote themselves to explaining what freedom really means, or what it ought to mean, beyond the word itself.

They must expose phony freedom. They should do this firstly by reminding everyone that freedom is always something you must fight for. Freedom must always be wrestled from authority. In fact, it is in the very process of fighting for freedom that you become free, or at least aware of your capacity to exercise and enjoy freedom. Through using reason, thinking independently and making demands of officialdom, our freedom grows; it expands; it becomes more possible.

If a freedom is given to us, then it isn’t freedom. It is a contradiction in terms to be ‘granted freedom’. When the government calls a press conference to announce that it is granting us smokefreedom, or freedom from hate, or gay-marriage freedom, then it’s incumbent upon libertarians to ask: what’s going on here? Be critical, be conscious, be aware that, historically, all freedoms worth having have been won through serious intellectual or physical struggle.

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by Bill Muehlenberg

It has been a truism in the past few decades that whenever special rights and especially marriage rights are granted to homosexuals, then there will be a corresponding loss of freedoms for everyone else. Democracy is weakened, freedom is undermined, and a soft tyranny ensues.

There are now many, many hundreds of examples of this, and I have documented one case after another of this. Everything changes when homosexual marriage is legalised, and the rest of society suffers as a result. The case of New Zealand is a perfect illustration of all this.

Since that nation legalised homosexual marriage on April 17, the bitter fruit has already been made manifest. For example, the idea of a slippery slope, which the activists claim does not exist, is already in full view. Within days of the vote on marriage, other activist groups came out of the woodwork demanding their “rights” as well.

This is how one New Zealand media outlet began the story: “A group is calling for the Government to consider legalising multi-partner marriages. The group set up a Facebook page just before the Marriage Amendment Bill passed through Parliament last week, legalising gay marriage.

“A statement on the page described multi-partner – or polyamorous – marriage as ‘responsible, adult, committed non-monogamy,’ and said all committed loving relationships between adults regardless of number should be respected and given legal acknowledgement.

“‘Some Australian Greens have now got a lobby group going, there are several MPs around the world coming out as poly and poly-friendly and it seems the time is right to at least bring it to the attention of the New Zealand public and New Zealand parliament,’ the group said. ‘This will be a long-term project but with the rest of the world getting on the bandwagon legal multiple partner marriages/unions may one day be accepted’.”

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by Alan Craig

By Albert Mohler

We should have seen it coming. Back in 1989 two young activists pushing for the normalization of homosexuality coauthored a book intended to serve as a political strategy manual and public relations guide for their movement. In After the Ball: How America Will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90s, authors Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen argued that efforts to normalize homosexuality and homosexual relationships would fail unless their movement shifted its argument to a demand for civil rights, rather than for moral acceptance. Kirk and Madsen argued that homosexual activists and their allies should avoid talking about sex and sexuality. Instead, “the imagery of sex per se should be downplayed, and the issue of gay rights reduced, as far as possible, to an abstract social question.”

From The Independent

Dozens of protesters were arrested at a rally against same-sex marriage today, as left-wing lawmakers brought forward the deadline for the adoption of a law that will allow gays and lesbians to tie the knot.
 
About 70 people were detained after they tried to set up a camp outside the National Assembly, the lower house of parliament, near the banks of the Seine. The government sped up the approval process with a decision to call a final vote on gay marriage legislation on next Tuesday, weeks earlier than initially planned, according to a source.

The Senate, the upper house of parliament, which like the National Assembly is under left-wing control, backed the Bill last week.

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By David Landrum, EA

Why is it that, the more freedoms we are given, the more laws we seem to need? The Leveson Inquiry and the accompanying public debate has not got to the root of this core problem: you won't improve ethics if you ignore morality. Recommendations on the future of press regulation are evidently needed and the focus of much attention, after all, the press is interested in what concerns their future.

But it is vitally important to step back from the frenzy surrounding the media scandals, corruption, inquiry and now the report and ask more foundational questions about the place of ethics in our media. This crisis echoes a broader crisis of public leadership across all of society, whether it's politics, banking, finance, even our education system. Albert Camus once observed that: "A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world." There is a lot of talk about ethics in public life, but little acknowledgement that ethics flow from a moral framework. If we don't accept the indispensability of morality, no number of new laws and regulators will make men and women good.

The Leveson Inquiry has exposed how truth and transparency are vital for a healthy society – and how our media has shown a frequent disregard for its value. Too often we seem to be trying to cultivate public ethics in a vacuum: how can we expect honesty without a high regard for truth? It's (literally) impossible to have honesty in the media without having truth as an objective for reporting. With media outlets competing for power and profits, each one seeks to present its own worldview at the expense of the other. Fuelled by a pervasive myth of secular neutrality, the outcome is a subtle but apparent manipulation of facts and reality to suit a particular agenda – all of which has the effect of reducing public trust.

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From Evangelical Alliance

Evangelicals across Scotland are being encouraged this month to submit responses to the Scottish government's consultation on the draft Same-Sex Marriage bill which closes on 20 March.

As Westminster continues to debate the fallout from the recent vote on same-sex marriage, attention has now focused on the latest stage of the Scottish government's plans to redefine marriage north of the border. It is a fairly sad by-product of the current constitutional debate that with the referendum looming large Scottish politics has gone fairly quiet with large scale national policy decisions waiting until 2014. While this debate brings remarkable opportunities for Christians to engage with the national conversation (more news to follow from the Evangelical Alliance Scotland soon), in terms of government legislation it means there is very little emanating from the corridors of Holyrood.

The one exception to this is of course the Scottish government's Marriage and Civil Partnership (Scotland) Bill published in December. This bill, in common with its counterpart in Westminster, legislates for the introduction of same-sex marriage and also the registration of civil partnerships on religious premises. It also amends the law of marriage in a number of ways, including proposals for a third category of marriage known as 'belief' to incorporate humanist ceremonies.

The Evangelical Alliance in Scotland has played an active role in the Scotland for Marriage campaign that has sought to campaign against these proposals and we have attempted to share why we believe God's best pattern for society is built on a foundation of marriage as currently defined between a husband and a wife. We are aware of the great sensitivities regarding this issue and our aim has been to articulate this message in a gracious, compassionate and sensitive way while promoting the radical nature of the gospel that is available to all people regardless of background or lifestyle, and where we are all called to repentance and transformation equally before God.

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by Peter Saunders, CMF

Freedom to disagree and the right to private conscience are fundamental liberties in any truly open society. Yet, the Government has utterly failed to consider the impact on civil liberty of its plans to redefine marriage.

The Coalition for Marriage has just released a new leaflet outlining ten ways redefining marriage would damage civil liberty.

If the meaning of marriage changes in law, they argue, based on expert legal opinion that:

1.Teachers in state schools will be forced to endorse the new definition of marriage. Those that refuse could be disciplined or even dismissed. Such action would be legal.

2.Parents will ultimately have no legal right to withdraw their children from lessons which endorse the new definition of marriage across the curriculum.

3.NHS/University/Armed forces chaplains could be lawfully fired by their employers if they express, even outside work time, the belief that marriage is between one man and one woman.

4.Foster carers could be legally rejected by local authorities on the basis that they fail to embrace the new definition of marriage.

5.Public sector workers could be demoted or dismissed for expressing support for marriage between one man and one woman.

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By Denyse O'Leary, MercatorNet

American universities are discouraging students from expressing controversial views.

considered bastions of intellectual liberty. No more. In Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End of American Debate liberal atheist Greg Lukianoff, a founder and the current president of the influential Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), says those days are over. The new reality is:

by Bill Muehlenberg

One need not be a hard-core Communist or anarchist to bring about the end to freedom and democracy – simply push for special rights for homosexuals, and all this happens quite readily. We have heaps of proof of this, and each new day we see more examples of how the militant homosexual agenda is spelling the end of faith, freedom and family.

One simply has to look at where special rights for homosexuals – including marriage rights – have been in place to see all the destruction and mayhem already being unleashed. Simply consider the situation in just one country – Canada, where special rights for homosexuals have been given for quite some time now, and homosexual marriage has been legal since 2005.

What is happening there is simply shocking, and we now can see perfectly well just how undemocratic and totalitarian the homosexual agenda really becomes once it is enacted into law. The situation in Canada is very bleak indeed, and getting worse by the day.

Two lengthy articles have recently appeared which document the loss of freedom and the erosion of democracy in Canada thanks to the homosexual militants and their supporters amongst the social and political elites. It makes for scary reading, but it needs to be made widely known.

The first piece by Michael Coren is worth quoting at length. He reports, “It’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred.

“In 2011, for example, a well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for ‘the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage.’ He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriage campaign. The case is still under appeal, in human-rights commissions and, potentially, the courts.

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By Charlie Butts, One News Now

From NOM

Dr. McCaskill, the first African-American PhD Gallaudet University has ever produced, was suspended from her job when the university discovered that she had exercised her core civil right to sign a petition in Maryland for putting gay marriage before the people for a vote.

She didn't take the insult or the attacks lying down—she's fighting back!

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By Brian Brown, NOM

You may not know her name but you should. She is the first black deaf woman to be granted a PhD by Gallaudet University, a national university for deaf people.

Until a few days ago, she was Gallaudet's chief diversity officer.
 
But then someone complained about Dr. McCaskill.

Was it about her job performance? Did she make a mistake? Fail in a key duty? Treat someone wrongly?

No. The complaint against Dr. Angela McCaskill consists of one fact and one fact alone: she exercised her core civil rights by signing a petition to put the question of marriage on the ballot for the voters of Maryland.

That's it. But that in itself was enough for Gallaudet to relieve Dr. McCaskill of her responsibilities and to place her on paid leave while they "investigate" her!

This is a very sad day in America. African-American Christians, it seems to me, are paying a disproportionate price for exercising these core civil rights to speak, to vote, to donate and to organize on behalf of marriage and traditional views on sexuality. Consider these examples:

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From Christian Concern

A District Judge, sitting at Brighton Magistrates' Court announced today that all charges were being dismissed against Christian pro-life campaigner Andy Stephenson. The case against his fellow campaigner, Kathryn Sloane, was dismissed on Thursday of last week (13 Sep) during the same trial.

All charges against both campaigners have therefore now been dismissed. District Judge Nicholson's reasoning in the case is expected at 2pm tomorrow (18 Sep).

Andy and Kathryn were supported by the Christian Legal Centre and were represented in Court by human rights barrister Paul Diamond and Mr Michael Phillips.

Andy and Kathryn, members of the campaign group Abort67, were arrested in June 2011, whilst demonstrating silently in the vicinity of Wistons Clinic, operated by leading abortion provider BPAS, in Brighton. As part of its public education project, the group, which has held peaceful protests outside the establishment for 5 years, displays images of aborted babies but does so silently and without harassment.

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From Christian Concern

by Jennifer Roback Morse, MercatorNet

Fast food activism at its best: the groundswell of support for traditional marriage will embolden people to stand up to bullying by the Thought Police.

Nine Days that Changed the World is a book about Pope John Paul II’s nine-day trip to Poland in 1979. The Pope’s pilgrimage laid the groundwork for the revolution of conscience that eventually brought down the Communist regimes throughout Eastern Europe. Thus those nine days really did change the world. Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day could very well be the One Day that changes our world this year.

[...]  On Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day, millions of people saw that they were not alone. All those ordinary Americans who decided to Eat More Chicken were standing in line for religious freedom, for the institution of marriage, for free speech. They sat in the traffic jams out of respect and gratitude for the Cathy Family for taking a stand.

Every one of us who stood in one of those lines, or who sat in one of those traffic jams or who gloated on facebook over the photos, can see that we are not alone.

We are tired of the oppressive lies of the sexual revolution. We know that men and women are different, not interchangeable. We know that marriage is about children and what they need, not just about adults and how they feel. We know that sex is much more than a sterile recreational activity. We know that every sexual act is deeply significant, even when we treat our sex acts as meaningless and our sex partners like toys.

We believe that God loves each and every person into existence. We believe our spousal love is meant to be an image of God’s fruitful and faithful love. We are not ashamed to believe these things.

On Chick-Fil-A Appreciation Day, millions of Americans saw that they are not alone. We know we can say what we think in public.

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By Sean Collins, Spiked

Supporters of same-sex marriage have opened up a new front in America’s Culture Wars in recent weeks – by targeting a chicken-sandwich restaurant. The call to boycott Chick-fil-A over comments made by its CEO reveal how the debate about same-sex marriage is moving in an increasingly illiberal direction.

[...]  As welcome as it was to see many stand up for free speech, the focus on First Amendment rights missed the bigger picture. While making principled references to Voltaire, these critical liberals were still using the Chick-fil-A issue to expand the definition of what it means to be ‘homophobic’, so that it now includes the mere utterance of support for traditional marriage. It is noteworthy that Chick-fil-A does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation – it has gay employees and it serves gay customers. A franchisee in Chicago has held fundraisers for gay and lesbian groups.

Advocates for same-sex marriage want expressions of support for traditional marriage to be considered beyond the pale and unworthy of debate. It is amazing how fast this issue is moving. Three months ago, Obama was against same-sex marriage – is anyone who espouses that view today now anti-gay and ‘repugnant’? Obama launched his political career in Chicago – was he out of line with ‘Chicago’s values’ until his conversion to the gay-marriage cause 90 days ago? Same-sex marriage has been voted down in all 31 states where it was on the ballot, including in California – are these states filled with ‘bigoted and homophobic’ people?

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From Christian Concern

Following the intervention of the Christian Legal Centre, Gloucester City Council has issued a statement apologising for stopping a Christian group from handing out leaflets and admitting it was wrong to stop them.

The apology follows the threat of legal action after Gloucester City Council told a group of Christians that they could not distribute Christian literature in the town’s city centre.

The tracts were being handed out by members of at least ten city churches during ‘Bible Day Gloucester’ last month.

But council staff prevented the leaflets from being given out on the day, claiming that the group had breached by-laws that were specific to the town. Gloucester Council has prevented the handing out of leaflets by Christians on several previous occasions.

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