By Lisa Nolland

In the Government’s proposals for ‘Equal’ (?) Marriage, the categories of consummation and adultery are not applicable to SS (same sex) couples.

As the proposal stands, ‘married’ SS couples only appear able to commit adultery with someone of the opposite sex. ‘Adultery’ with someone of the same sex will have no legal status. 

However, adultery still exists and is an operant category for heterosexual married couples.

This double standard is so bizarre that legal opinion is now saying that ‘adultery’ will have to go: one cannot have totally different sets of rules for those who are ‘equally’ married. 

The concept of adultery has served a vital role in terms of boundaries, expectations and responsibilities. Sexual fidelity matters, yet Government proposals signal that in law it will not for SS marriages.

If 'equal marriage' is to be equal the legal significance of adultery will ultimately, if perhaps inadvertently, be lost for the rest of us. 

This is one way SSM damages real marriage. The rules will have been re-written for all.

This will touch not only your marriage but that of your heterosexual children and grandchildren.

Poly relationships have recently been featured in the Independent (loving and committed lesbian triad, with a home, children etc).

In the blog, Full Marriage Equality, polys claim: ‘Polyamory isn't for everyone, but it is for some. Why should they be denied their right to marry? There isn't a good reason. All denying them their civil rights does is make them second-class citizens based on their love. They're together. That's not going to change. Why not let them marry?’ And elsewhere: ‘We will reach full marriage equality; it is just a question of when’ (emphasis added).

Poly unions have also been promoted in the pages of the Guardian and the Mail:   See http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/U.K. (press UK, to right on side bar) for more.  Tired of being closeted, polys 'came out' last August (25th) on ITV's 'This Morning': http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJxdI4MZj88

If love and commitment are the sine qua non, then how will the government be able to refuse those demanding plural marriage? 

JONAH  May 2012  Bart Roberts  (AM comment:  Below contains material whichi is graphic but in our view honest, truthful and necessary.  These matters must be dealt with; not to address them compounds the problem.)  

Introduction by the Author:  A person new to the process of change of sexual orientation bluntly asked me, “Does anyone ever succeed in escaping same-sex attractions (SSA)?  When I responded in the affirmative, he asked several more specific questions and what follows is the reply I sent which describes several of my personal experiences and changes within me that impacted my current level of healing. 

After writing this piece, I decided to save it in my journal because I believe it summarizes my reflections and personal experiences. I also gave my friends at JONAH permission to publicize this article because they thought what I wrote may be helpful to others undertaking the same journey. 

Please forgive any implied or expressed notion that I can't or won't ever slip. "Falling down" is part of life's experiences but "getting back up" or "back on track" is what allows us to know we are alive. A religious proverb tells us that the righteous man is one who may fall seven times but he remains strong enough to get back up each time in order to overcome his challenges. Read the rest of this entry »

This glowing portrayal of a non-religious, 'open' biexual family in the United Church of Canada's 'United Church Observer' indicates how profoundly  the denomination's theological and sexual norms have changed, and the likely future of this branch of Protestantism.  Many believe  TEC is on a similar pathway, though I am not aware that it has come out in public support of active bisexual trios. That is the next obvious cohort for the 'listening process', is it not?

By Pieta Woolley, ucobserver

For the past five years, computer techie John Robert Bashinski has shared his Montreal row house with two partners — one female, one male — and the trio’s kindergarten-aged daughter. It’s a polyamorous relationship — on the surface, hard to distinguish from polygamy, but in many ways, the polar opposite.

Egalitarian, secular and non-institutional, the family’s relationship is founded on the personal freedom of each of the three partners, he says. All three adults see other lovers outside their primary unit. Weekly, the partners also rotate on date nights, a two-adult romantic evening, while the third does childcare. It’s just your average three-parent “open” relationship, in other words. Bashinski reports they’re very public about it yet never harassed in their progressive, family-oriented neighbourhood.

The household’s vibrancy is a relief for Bashinski. For 20 years between 1980 and 2000, he endured a marriage that ran out of steam soon after it began. Work brought him from the United States to Montreal. That’s when he met his current partners, and the new arrangement got his groove back. More sex, more love, more life.

“Polyamory seems to be on the upswing in the zeitgeist,” says Bashinski, who is a spokesperson for the Canadian Polyamory Advocacy Association (CPAA). “There may not be way more people publicly doing it, but it is becoming more visible, and more people are thinking of it as a valid option.”

Read here

Canada legalized gay 'marriage' in 2005, following the Netherlands (2001) and Belgium (2003).  At the time few understood that  other sexual minorities who made the same claims and on the same basis as gays and lesbians were waiting in the wings. Few seemed to realise that this decision would have profound consequences.  A few of us were concerned about 'the slippery slope', but were written off as extreme. What is now occurring however is that these various other sexual minorities are getting increasingly restive.  If it only takes love and commitment to make a marriage, well, what about them?  The example below is of a heterosexual poly ('plural loves') East Side Vancouver family.  Read the rest of this entry »

According to Sondra Solomon, Esther Rothblum and Kimberly Balsam’s ‘Money, Housework, Sex, and Conflict:  Same-Sex Couples in Civil Unions, Those Not in Civil Unions, and Heterosexual Married Siblings’, Sex Roles, Volume 52, Nos. 9/10, May 2005, there was a marked difference between the sexual attitudes and behaviours of gay men in civil unions and their heterosexual married male sibling counterparts. This path-breaking research was conducted on the inaugural cohort of gays and lesbians entering civil unions in trend-setting Vermont during the first year of this new legislation (2000-2001). The claims its authors make are impressive: ‘This cohort of couples will serve as the pioneers for our understanding of issues that face same-sex couples in legalized relationships in the United States’ (p. 574).  Read the rest of this entry »

See below for Professors Solomon and Rothblum's pathbreaking research on the different groundrules for love, commitment and sexual exclusivity among gay men in civil unions in Vermont, the first state in the US to legalize them. 

Newswise — Advocates and opponents of civil unions and/or marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples in Massachusetts and California would be wise to look to a Vermont study for insight into the attitudes and motives of couples joined in civil unions the first year of this landmark legislation. The recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's ruling closely matches the 1999 Vermont Supreme Court decision leading to the legislature's approval in 2000 of civil unions that give gay couples many of the same benefits married couples enjoy.

Read the rest of this entry »

I would like to clarify the use of statistics from my article found here:  http://www.anglican-mainstream.net/2012/03/08/good-reasons-why-ssm-is-a-bad-idea-1/  

Please note, first, that the survey it quotes (1) relates to men who identify with the gay community. Gays who do not identify with the gay community will not necessarily conform to the patterns which emerged.

Second, the roughly two-thirds preference for open partnerships (more accurately, 65%) in this survey was based upon these statistics:  44% of the respondents had had both a main partner and other casual partners while 24% had had only one sexual partner. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. G.K. Chesterton

I.             Adolescents, schools and sex ideology

As children grow into adolescents, it is appropriate to educate them about issues of human sexuality, but again, the standard fare offered by the authoritative Sex Education Forum (SEF) and related bodies has aspects which are hugely problematic. 

Given the attention to LGBT issues under the guise of tackling homophobia in  secondary schools, other than what has already been said (in relation to children), three additional points need to be made. Read the rest of this entry »

It isn't that they can't see the solution. It's that they can't see the problem. G.K. Chesterton

Society now appears to be realising what many have known for some time:   that increasing numbers of children and teenagers are being sexualised, cognitively and affectively, leading to sexual debuts years before the legal age of consent (AOC), which is 16. Indeed, we now know that the state essentially endorses the sexual behaviours of school girls 13 and younger through Primary Care Trusts’ confidential provision of contraception; thousands of girls have been offered such ‘family planning’ aid in the last year through school-based sexual health clinics and other initiatives.[i] Read the rest of this entry »

From Queerty.com

Dr Jennifer Roback Morse interviews Miriam Grossman, MD, author of "Unprotected" and "You're Teaching My Child What?" and a psychiatrist formerly with the UCLA Student Health Service.

The CA Assembly recently passed and Gov Brown signed, SB 48, mandating gay friendly instruction in all CA public schools, K-12. Catholic University of America recently announced that they would abolish co-ed dorms and move to all single sex dorms. In the wake of that decision, a DC attorney announced that he will sue them for sex segregation which he claims violates the DC Human Rights Law. Whatever became of sex education as a way of promoting good health and conservative values?  Listen to Dr J and Dr. Grossman as they discuss these crucial issues: July 18, 2011. For more on Dr Roback Morse see here

Update:  I have family in Seattle Washington who signed this petition, and as of today, they have not been threatened, vandalized etc.  But we must stand with those signatories who were. One great way of doing so is to sign the Manhattan Declaration and pass it on to all your contacts, perhaps with this link, to describe why it is now so necessary! 

A federal court in Tacoma, Wash., has been asked to order that the names of signatories of a state petition seeking to protect traditional marriage be redacted to protect them from death threats from homosexual activists…According to the filing, "When some activists could sense that intimidation was not working … they resorted to threatening the families – even the children – of supporters. In one case, the perpetrator threated to 'kill' the supporter's child and the whole family; in another, to 'harm' the supporter's family; and in another, to rape the supporters' daughter."

Read here

The impact of gay marriage (see the coverage on NY) on the rest of us is just beginning to be manifest — see below from the New York Press, especially on 'non-monogamy' (formerly known as 'the affair' or 'being unfaithful'). According to its practitioners, gay marriage operates according to different ground rules from traditional marriage, which make it more progressive and trendy, even more therapeutic (!), than traditional marriage. This sexual opening up of marriage, launched by gay marrieds, may (or may not) work for them, but for the rest of us this is extremely worrying.  Marriage has meant sexual exclusivity (in theory, and often in practice) and been the means by which women and men attached to each other and to the children their sexual union had created, bonding them together to rear their offspring, who need both a mother and a father. Opening this up to other partners will destroy (or at least seriously damage) this mechanism; who most loses are the ones with greatest vulnerabilities, the children. Below is from the important poly site:  http://polyinthemedia.blogspot.com/.  

From gender-role squabbles to non-monogamy: What straight couples can learn from same-sex couples to be happier in their own marriages.

…Varied approaches to sexuality is probably the most taboo of the constructs that same-sex couples may import into marriage, and one that Coontz approaches very delicately. "I want to be very careful about how this is phrased, but there is a prevalence among some same-sex relationships, particularly gay male relationships, to establish long-term commitments while allowing for nonmonogamy," she says. "While this is not for every opposite-sex couple, just as it is not right for every same-sex couple, it is one of the ways that some people may handle the pressures of a world where people want partnerships but live long lives and have frequent opportunities." Read the rest of this entry »

[...]  Just a week ago, about 300 placard-waving opponents and supporters of the proposed anti-homophobia policy got into a tense confrontation outside the Burnaby School Board office. While critics of policy 5.45 say it would infringe on parents' rights, sexualize schools and is being pushed by proponents of a leftwing ideology, its supporters say it's a key element in combating homophobia's verbal and physical manifestations in schools.

"It was just great to see so much support from everybody in the room," said Burnaby School Board chair Larry Hayes, who along with fellow school trustees has been inundated with feedback ….

While the original theme of the breakfast was same-sex marriage, the event's organizers decided in the end to embrace a broader concept of queer relationships…

Kiki Christie, founder of Victoria Poly 101, challenged the audience to reconsider the heteronormative ideas that dominate society's view of partnerships. She highlighted social networking site Facebook and its limited relationship option tags as a prime example of how "couple normative" ideas permeate society and limit the choices of those who might identify differently. 

Read here

From Jennifer Roback Morse

The correct answer:  Less than 4 tenths of one percent, or 0.4%.

All these numbers come from combing information about gays and lesbians from Census Snapshot, US, 2007, ¹ with information from the US Census Bureau, American Community Survey,² describing the general population.

As of 2005, an estimated 270,313 of the U.S.’s children are living in households headed by same-sex couples. According to the American Community Survey, there were a total of 73,131,688 persons under the age of 18 in the US in 2005. (Calculated by subtracting total number of persons over 18 (215,246,449 from total population of 288,378,137.) Dividing the 270,313 children in households headed by same sex couples by the total number of children under 18 in the US, yields a figure of .00369, which is the less than 4 tenths of one percent figure given as the correct answer. This number is not reported by the pro-gay Williams Institute. Read the rest of this entry »

by Anne Morse, The Ruth Institute

Philip M. Sutton, Ph.D., LMFT, LCSW, LP

We All Need Our “P’s” to Travel the 7 “C’s”

Some Suggestions for Responding Wisely to Another's Unacceptable Behavior

This portion of our talk covers what we as parents, other family members, friends  and/or pastoral caregivers can do, cannot do, may do, and ought not do to respond in love to the knowledge that a loved one, or a person to whom we are ministering, desires or is engaging in behavior which we believe is unacceptable and which may be harmful to him or her, and others. (It also may help us to consider how to love (more) wisely someone afflicted with a chronic or terminal disease or other unwanted suffering.)

I. The Seven “C’s” (please don’t count too carefully!):

·        We do not Cause our loved one’s unacceptable behavior. Things that we have or have not done may have Contributed to our loved one’s developing this desire for or habit of unacceptable behavior. Be wary of excessive or “false” guilt!

·        We cannot Cure, Control or Change our loved one’s unacceptable behavior. Be wary of a false sense of (over-) responsibility!

·        We may not Condone, excuse or enable behavior that is harmful to our loved one, ourselves, or others. “Misguided mercy” is not loving!

·        We can Communicate our Concern(s) and feelings about- and when wise, lovingly Confront- our loved one’s – and if relevant, our own- behavior.

·        We can show Compassion to our loved one and ourselves (especially over past hurts, weaknesses, and things they or we did or didn’t do; and Cry, i.e. grieve or mourn, our sadness, anger, and fear over their- and our-actual or anticipated suffering.

·        We can Confess what we did or did not do that may have harmed or been uncomfortable to our loved one, to God, our loved one, and supportive family, friends, etc. When necessary, our Contrition, wisely expressed, may lead to the giving and/or receiving of forgiveness, which may serve as the basis of re-Conciliation, if it is possible and wise to (re-)Construct mutual trust.

·        We can Care wisely for our loved one and ourselves in a Committed way., including staying Connected to family and friends who support us.

Read the rest of this entry »