The Pope has again launched into what is becoming a disturbing mantra: gay marriage is threatening the future of mankind. Now that the Mayan apocalypse has passed, it appears the Pope is ready with a substituted menace of loving gay couples marrying. Pope Benedict XVI insisted that gender theories supporting homosexuality are false and that the world must confront “the question of what it means to be a man, and what it is necessary to do to be true men.”
The Pope criticized theories suggesting that homosexuality is natural and insists that “[t]he profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious . . . it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears.”
The statement again relies on this false assumption that gay marriage is a threat to family and procreation. The opposite is clearly true. Many such couples want to have children either by artificial insemination or adoption. Same-sex marriage expands the number of families, not reduce that number.
Source: Telegraph
We wonder about the immaculate conception and wonder if indeed there was an artificial insemination involved with the birth of Jesus. We wonder too why there needs to be marriage between men and women. The lawyer in our congregation says he is getting out of divorce law if gay marriage takes effect in these parts. He says that the arguments he hears now are bad enough. Yet we wonder why the Pope is weighing in on this topic. The Mayan Calendar was on his mind.
“I can see no benefit to society from it’
The benefit is in allowing them full access to the bvenefits of their American citizenship unfettered by the sectarian bonds associated with religious zealotry. And it’s not all about you.
“Gays are NOT denied the right to marry at all. Millions of gays have married persons of the opposite sex.”
And yet there are still laws prohibitting such unions. So, it’s hardly moot.
“such as brother sister unions, father daughter etc.”
Red Herring Alert!!!
“Gays are NOT denied the right to marry at all. Millions of gays have married persons of the opposite sex.”
And yet there are still laws prohibitting such unions. So, it is hardly moot.
I am sorry, I thought you were an intelligent person, but the quote shows you are not. Maybe you could show me any marriage law in the country which has a test for heterosexuality or gayness, and then prohibits marriage to a person of the opposite sex on that basis of being gay. If there are any such laws, THEN it would be discrimination and illegal under the Constitution. The state has every right to define what constitutes marriage as long as it does not discriminate unfairly and with no legitimate state interest in it. The fact is that if one takes the position that not allowing persons of the same sex to marry is discrimination, then it also must be unfair discrimination to prohibit plural marriages.
Vital Moors, also whales.
The Pope is the head of a tribe of flock fleecers spread around the world. In order to fleece a flock the flock must be viable. For a flock to be viable there must be breeding and offspring of young sheep and goats. If there are no young sheep then there is no fleece in the future. So, if you are a Catolic and you flock to the church seven days a week to “Take Mass” and you pay up when the plate comes by, you must not veer off the path of righteousness and take something up the arse now and then. And if you did, say three Hail Marys and go home chastised. Fess up Festus. And pay up.
Cameron
The people here who support same-sex marriage support same-sex marriage. It’s not that we oppose the Catholic Church’s stand on the subject or the Evangelical movemet’s or Islam’s position or any other opposotion. We support same-sex marriage as a legal and binding contract, the full implementation of the rights os all Americans to have access to all the legal advantages our Constitution grants that citizenship as well as accepting every person’s choice for love and companionship. The comments on this thread and the fact they appear today as opposed to the other times they’ve been expressed is the occassion of the Pope’s recent comments on the subject. Had a similar comment been made by a similarly high ranking Imam representing the Islamic view, the reaction would be the same. Particularly for those of us who are atheists, the specific brand of religion one follows to justify their irrational homophobia is irrelevant.
rcampbell, as a fellow aethist I do not support gay marriage since I can see no benefit to society from it. The state has the unquestioned right to set and define the terms of legal contracts and who may take part. There are no laws agaist co-habitation now, or adultery, etc.. We DO deny lots of people the right to marry the person who they choose to love, such as brother sister unions, father daughter etc.. Does that mean the state has taken their freedom? I do not think so.
Gays are NOT denied the right to marry at all. Millions of gays have married persons of the opposite sex. so to state that gays cannot marry is simply NOT true. There is NO gayness test before the state issues a marriage license. The law does NOT prohibit gays from marriage at all. The state has every right to set the terms of marriage, just as it has the right to deny plural marriages. Using your definition of freedoms, then polygamists are denied their rights and have lost their freedom.
When the Pope speaks, people listen…..
They listen to the King of the Pedophile Priests…
To the former Hitler Youth member…
To the former Nazi Army member….
To the dean of the pink beanie crowd who are controlled by Remulak….
When he starts mimicing the phrase: “We are from France”, then we are all in trouble.
Can Beldar chimne in on this topic?
Interesting.
If the Catholic Chuch offers a postion on homosexuality they are criticised from one end of the earth to the other.
When the largest religious faith in the world takes an adverse postion on homosexuailty, that is, those of the Islamic faith that follow the teachings of the Qur”an, most of these same critics run and hide and are nowhere to be seen. You see they are totally gutless unless it is christianity that takes a position based on their faith and then of course they are tough guys.
The following is a very small extract from the Mission Islam public web site. There is a great deal to read on the subject there (and the Churches are just as justified in taking a stance based on their faith as are others based on theirs whether you agree with their faith or not).
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“The Islamic Society of North America:
Dr. Muzammil Siddiqi of the ISNA said: “Homosexuality is a moral disorder. It is a moral disease, a sin and corruption… No person is born homosexual, just like no one is born a thief, a liar or murderer. People acquire these evil habits due to a lack of proper guidance and education.””
“There are many reasons why it is forbidden in Islam. Homosexuality is dangerous for the health of the individuals and for the society. It is a main cause of one of the most harmful and fatal diseases. It is disgraceful for both men and women. It degrades a person. Islam teaches that men should be men and women should be women. Homosexuality deprives a man of his manhood and a woman of her womanhood. It is the most un-natural way of life. Homosexuality leads to the destruction of family life.”
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Please show me where all the opposing views and public critics are? ………. Anyone??????
As I said. Gutless wonders.
Me – well I could not care less about any of the churches or the homosexual community or any other “community” for that matter .
Everyone should just mind their own business, stop their agitating, disharmonious and divisive behaviour and get on with their own lives. It is not going to happen though.
Is the pope gay?
How else can we explain his virulent campaign against homosexuals?
“What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence,” Bertrand Russell wrote, “is an index to his desires – desires of which he himself is often unconscious.” The Vatican’s current obsession with homosexuality suggests that something interesting might be going on. Are some of the Church’s most powerful cardinals struggling with their sexuality? Could the Pope himself be gay?
The Holy Father launched his fiercest attack on gays, insisting that the World Pride festival in Rome was “an offence to the Christian values” of the city. Homosexuality, he maintained, is “objectively disordered” and “contrary to natural law”.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF), the Church’s sinister enforcement agency, forbade a priest and a nun from ministering to gays in the United States, after they refused to sign a statement testifying that “homosexual acts are always objectively evil”. Gays, the Vatican believes, bring their misfortunes upon themselves. “When civil legislation is introduced to protect behavior to which no one has any conceivable right,” the CDF asserts, “neither the church nor society at large should be surprised when … violent reactions increase.” Gay rights campaigners maintain that between 150 and 200 gay men are murdered in Italy every year.
For this reason, if for no other, we should take this papal bull seriously. So let us examine the two main themes of the Vatican’s edicts: homosexuality, it maintains, is both immoral and unnatural.
Morality is surely meaningless unless it refers to the impact we have on other people. Interestingly, even the Vatican appears unable to point to any ill-effects of safe sex between consenting gay adults, other than to suggest that its acceptance might “deprave” or “corrupt” other people. What this appears to mean is that they might be led away from the teachings of the Church. Heterosexuality is quite another matter. Reproduction among prosperous people has a demonstrable impact on the welfare of others: thanks to the depletion of resources and the effects of climate change, every child born to the rich deprives children elsewhere of the means of survival. In a world of diminishing assets, being gay is arguably more moral than being straight.
The claim that homosexuality is “unnatural” is more interesting. This could mean one of two things. Perhaps the Pope is suggesting that it lies beyond the scope of “normal” human behaviour. If so, this has uncomfortable implications for an association of old men who wear dresses, hear voices and practise ritual cannibalism.
Alternatively, he might be suggesting that homosexual behaviour is at variance with that of the non-human world. Here too, however, the Church has a problem. “Biological Exuberance”, a book by the science writer Bruce Bagemihl, documents homosexuality in no fewer than 470 animal species. He shows how groups of manatees carouse in gay orgies; how male giraffes start “necking” and end up fornicating, how female Japanese macaques will pair off for weeks at a time, fondling each other and having sex.
As New Scientist magazine records, at the beginning of the last century the embarrassed keepers of Edinburgh Zoo had repeatedly to re-christen their penguins, after they found that the loving couples they observed were not all that they seemed. Female roseate terns sometimes mate with each other for life, allowing themselves to be fertilised by males, but making nests and bringing up their young together. I would hesitate to describe what pygmy chimpanzees, orang-utans or long-eared hedgehogs get up to, even in a liberal newspaper.
The world’s wildlife, in other words, is depraved. But we would be hard put to call it unnatural. Self-enforced celibacy, by contrast, is all but unknown among other animal species. If any sexual behaviour is out of tune with the natural world, it is surely that of the priesthood.
My guess is that the Pope is not gay, but that he has found in homosexuals a necessary enemy, an external threat which allows the Holy See to justify its iron grip on the lives of the faithful. Though some brave priests and bishops have sought to resist its excesses, for centuries the Vatican has picked on the victims of existing prejudice and persecution. It is no longer allowed to burn heretics and witches at the stake, so now it preys instead upon homosexuals and pregnant women, exposing gays to violent abuse, seeking to prevent even the rape victims of Kosovo from taking the morning-after pill.
Homosexuality is surely both natural and moral. Can the same be said of the Pope?
Ariel said:
“As for the Pope, what you want him to throw out almost two millennium of reasoned Catholic doctrine for your sensibilities?”
That sounds as though you are of the mind, that the length of time a belief is held, validates the belief. I’m guessing you can see the logical flaw in your own observation.
“It isn’t a question of damage, but terms.”
Nothing in his most recent remarks came close to “terms.”
If you avail yourself to the Vatican’s own website, you can read the Pope’s remarks in their entirety, which included the following statement:
“The campaign for granting gays the right to marry and adopt children is an “attack” on the traditional family made up of a father, mother and children.”
By definition, the word “attack” involves damages. If the subject was “terms” I’m guessing he would have used different language.
“Even though Catholic. All embraced his partner as meaningful to him.”
And how exactly does an honorable Catholic square this “embracing” with Doctrine?
“If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.”
(Leviticus 20:13)
In the not too distant future, I suspect the entire yammering over same-sex marriage will be seen as a silly social spat that people “used to have,” kind of like women exposing their legs.
* November. ’03 – Massachusetts’ top court ruled that same-sex couples had the right to marry. The first legal same-sex marriages in the United States took place in Massachusetts in 2004 following the decision.
In ’08, Democrat governor Deval Patrick signed a law that allowed out-of-state same-sex couples to marry in Massachusetts, repealing a 1913 law that banned marriages not considered valid in the couples’ home states.
* October, ’08 – Connecticut legalized gay marriage, when its high court overturned a ban on same-sex marriage. Local authorities began issuing marriage licenses in November.
* May,’08 – California Supreme Court ruled that gender restrictions on marriage violate state equal rights protections.
October ’09, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that recognizes same-sex marriages performed in other states that went into effect on January 1, 2011.
* April, ’09 – Iowa’s Supreme Court issued a unanimous ruling that a gay marriage ban violated the constitutional rights of gay and lesbian couples. The state’s first legal same-sex weddings took place later that month.
* April, ’09 – Vermont lawmakers overrode a governor’s veto of a gay-marriage bill, making the New England state the first in the country to legalize gay marriage with a legislative vote. Its law took effect on September 1 that year.
* June, ’09 – New Hampshire authorized same-sex nuptials.
* November, ’09 – Maine’s law permitting same-sex marriage was repealed by a “people’s veto.” The law was approved by Maine’s Legislature but was not implemented after it was overturned by a popular vote.
* December, 09 – The District of Columbia’s City Council voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the region. This came after the council voted to recognize same-sex marriages performed in other states where those unions were legal.
* August, ’10 – A federal judge in California struck down the state’s ban on same-sex marriage as unconstitutional.
* June, ’11 – New York became the sixth U.S. state to allow gay marriage. More than 21,000 gay and lesbian couples from New York would marry within the first three years.
* February, ’12- The Washington state Senate passed legislation to legalize gay marriage on February 2. The bill is now before the state’s House of Representatives, where it is expected to win swift approval.
* February, ’12 – A U.S. appeals court ruled that California’s gay marriage ban violates the constitution in a case that is likely to lead to a showdown on the issue in the Supreme Court.
You don’t need to be Nostradamus to see how this debate will end.
Gene and OS,
You are both correct.
“I suspect that sooner rather than later, the Supreme Court will rule on the obvious – “marriage” is a contract, and “gender is entirely immaterial.”
First of all gender is not sex: it’s the term to describe masculine, feminine, common, or neuter, in language. That it was grabbed to describe human sexuality is deplorable, and that so many have embraced it is even more deplorable. Then again many of those same think decimate means the same as exterminate…though for a different reason. H.L. Mencken gives why.
We have two sexes, with the outlier hermaphrodite which is still an expression of the two, but permutations of bonding don’t need the word “gender”, nor does acknowledging that some people are born the wrong sex. Gender is a euphemism needed by people that can’t face the variability of human sexuality, they have to put it in different terms to deal with it. We have two sexes as the base, by reproductive organs, the expression beyond heterosexuality is a variation. So what, big deal.
“gender is entirely immaterial”. Your phrase lends to the argument that marriage “is between two loving people” so used by homosexual agenda groups to reframe the term marriage. It’s dishonest. Face the term head on, except its meaning, and make something new. Sex isn’t immaterial.
The reason I write “make something new” is it would be clearly defined, with limits. The agenda phrase, which I’m using but you didn’t, of “between two loving people” allows the marriage of any two people. That shouldn’t be determined by percentage of population, or your religious or biological or genetic prejudice. The phrase has no meaning otherwise except the prejudice of the user, his arbitrary limits, the same limits used on homosexuals.
Currently in the USA, there are a number of married couples that are brother-sister unions. They had no idea, no knowledge of their relationship because of various separations, adoption, halves, however and whatever. By the argument that marriage is between “two loving people”, why shouldn’t their marriages be accepted? Don’t vary from my words this paragraph, you’d be dishonest, and don’t give the genetics issue (a lot of unrelated people, Jews and Tay-Sachs for example, shouldn’t marry). If you bring up incest, after what I wrote, you must be Catholic, or Episcopalian, or Protestant, or post-Protestant. Or just prejudiced by definition.
Hey for all you strict traditionalists …..any historian will tell you that a true historical traditional marriage is between one man and as many woman he can afford, or steal ….one man and one woman is in the course of human events a fairly new invention….
raff, if Jesus was pissed off at the moneychangers, one does not have to speculate very much about what he would think about the denizens of the Vatican and their leader. I have no doubt they would excommunicate Him for heresy.
raff,
Almost all organized religion is predicated on some animals being more equal than others. How can you be in if there is no outside?
Well said OS. If gays can’t marry the person of their choice, they are not as free as the rest of us. How could any religion be against equal treatment r all people?
Ariel sez: “As for the Pope, what you want him to throw out almost two millennium of reasoned Catholic doctrine for your sensibilities?”
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Robert A. Heinlein
Ariel, I am sorry for your recent loss. Condolences.
“I’m for civil-union but not same-sex marriage.” That may be the compromise. I am not opposed to that as long equal rights for each. But I am not gay either, and I can understand why any gay person takes offense to a different label.
I am curious if not too personal… did you suspect prior to your brother’s revelation. Good for him anyway to have the courage to do so – better late than never. It has to be difficult to live a lie like that.
I hope you were being facetious with that last sentence. If not, I will pray for you. 🙂
“And once again I ask, what “damage” can same-sex marriage possibly do to the human race, that countless millions of rotten heterosexual marriages haven’t already done.”
Add more? It isn’t a question of damage, but terms. Obviously, I’m for civil-union but not same-sex marriage. Just terms we can argue about forever. I go with Elton John on this.
As a personal aside: My step-brother has only come out in the last few years; he has had a wonderful partner for the last 13 years. I finally got to meet him at my mother’s wake this month, with a big hug (I am not a hugger, hate hugs, but he was worth it for the happiness he gives my step-brother).
My step-brother should have got the balls to say it so many years earlier like I did as an atheist in the 60’s. He knew my mother and I would be on his side (we’ve both been on the side of recognizing homosexual partnerships by law in some way since the late 60’s and very vocal about it to family and friends), and acknowledged that to me at the wake, but couldn’t bring himself to face his father and his brothers. Yet all accepted, even if with reservations, even though Catholic. All embraced his partner as meaningful to him.
As for the Pope, what you want him to throw out almost two millennium of reasoned Catholic doctrine for your sensibilities?
Hey Popey, F U !!!!
Pete9999 — LMAO, FOTF