Cardinal Keith O'Brien has an article in today's Telegraph on the proposed re-definition of marriage. Here is a taster.
If same-sex marriage is enacted into law what will happen to the teacher who wants to tell pupils that marriage can only mean – and has only ever meant – the union of a man and a woman?Read the whole article here: We cannot afford to indulge this madness
Will that teacher’s right to hold and teach this view be respected or will it be removed? Will both teacher and pupils simply become the next victims of the tyranny of tolerance, heretics, whose dissent from state-imposed orthodoxy must be crushed at all costs?
4 comments:
When the Attlee Government legislated to regulate marriage, it simply presupposed that marriage could only ever be the union of one man and one woman. No one said anything, because it was so obvious.
Of course there have always been other things as well. But they were and are, in the technical sense of the word, deviations. The union of one man and one woman is the universal norm, simply as a matter of fact. Ask yourself why that should be, and what makes us think that we in the Postmodern West are so much wiser in these matters than everyone everywhere else and at every other time.
There is simply no comparison with, for example, interracial marriage, which has never been illegal in this country, and which has only ever been so anywhere if specific legislation had been passed to that effect. By contrast, redefining marriage to include same-sex couples is only legal anywhere because specific legislation has been passed to that effect.
This is one of the three most dramatic and most drastic proposals that Parliament will ever have considered. Ever. It ranks even with the recent legalisation of human-animal hybridity and the recent permission of two persons of the same sex to be listed as the parents on a birth certificate. But is Ann Widdecombe right to call for a referendum? No. We do not need a referendum. We need MPs who will just say no. Even retrospectively, repealing such legislation if it had already been enacted.
With the nature of marriage up for debate, we should seize the opportunity and the initiative.
The extension to relatives of the right to contract civil partnerships, which do not need to be consummated, since not even Tony Blair could devise a way of enabling the Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith (the present title derives not from Henry VIII but from Edward VI, and was conferred not by the Pope but by Parliament) to grant Royal Assent to legislation making legal privileges conditional on sexual acts other than that, within marriage, which constitutes the consummation of marriage. The present restriction of civil partnerships to same-sex couples is an expression of triumphalism; it is a way of saying, "We are the masters now".
The entitlement of each divorcing spouse to one per cent of the other's estate for each year of marriage, up to 50 per cent, and the disentitlement of the petitioning spouse unless fault be proved, thereby restoring the situation whereby, by recognising adultery and desertion as faults in divorce cases, society declared in law its disapproval of them even though they were not in themselves criminal offences.
The entitlement of any marrying couple to register their marriage as bound by the law prior to 1969 as regards grounds and procedures for divorce, and to enable any religious organisation to specify that any marriage which it conducts shall be so bound, requiring it to counsel couples accordingly.
And the statutory specification that the Church of England be such a body unless the General Synod specifically resolve the contrary by a two-thirds majority in all three Houses, with something similar for the Methodist and United Reformed Churches, which also exist pursuant to Acts of Parliament, as well as by amendment to the legislation relating to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy.
That would be a start, anyway.
A robust and clear teaching on the Judeo-Christian concept of marriage. I also liked his quotation of Art 16 of the U N Declaration on the definition of marriage!
Would that his episcople colleagues elsewhere in the UK were even half as assertive of their Catholic Faith!
His Eminence is wrong about one important point. It is not the "tyranny of tolerance" but the tyranny of INTOLERANCE!
Less than one percent of the population are now presumed to have the right to dictate to the rest of us. Whereas Parliament in its wisdom once ruled that homosexual acts between consenting adults in private ought to be legal, we are now on the verge of it being compulsory. And probably in public.
But to no avail, to judge by some of the comments online, and also the 'response' by the Telegraph blogger Dan Hodges, who describes the cardinal's article as a 'morally and intellectually bankrupt rant'. We need to put more emphasis on the natural law argument, to defuse the perception that opposition to gay 'marriage' comes only from religious bigots, and to get the point across that the Catholic Church has no more authority to define/redefine marriage than Parliament.
Post a Comment