Same Sex Marriage - the Plebs Vote

A postal vote has been ordered, to allow the people of Oz to show their hand as to whether Oz should legitimise same-sex marriage for the tiny minority that say they want it. As with all such irregular means of voting it will attract the inputs of those who are strongly for and strongly against, with a very large number who will not bother. 

But the strongly-for will be aided by those who are swayed by rhetoric, mendacity, peer pressure and the massive advertising by the 'corporate' bodies who are scared of being bailed-up by rent-a-crowds. They may well fall for the lies and cowardices of 'community leaders', especially in Local Councils which are dominated variously by marxists, socialists, feminists and greens.

Just as the MPs will in the Federal Parliament, who will 'listen' to the Vox Populi  and go ahead and vote with their own preconceived biases, probably along party lines but disguised in a Penn and Teller 'conscience' vote.  Hey it is all fun and games in Oz politics.  Sleight of hand from con artistes (the MPs, not Penn and Teller). The people just do not count.

Obviously there has been some talk in the Tavern. 

Even I was asked by some customers which way I would vote. As if there were any doubt.  Mind you, I do not have a good track record with marriage, m'self, and can hardly take a holier-than-thou stance. But then it ain't about me, is it ?

A 'V.I.P.' stopped by for a few pints and had a say in the matter, and a cogent, well balanced and 'understanding' say he had. So much so that he dominated the discussions. Therefore I had to suggest he stay over for a few days and while he talked he could let a few others get some views in.  

Who knows, his points may change a mind or two and in a better direction than another prominent person who some time ago gave her name to the Village it takes to raise a child outside the Tavern's hedges.

Changed her mind... to get the hater's vote.

There are many arguements on both sides, not the best of which is the accusation that even discussion of it will lead to poor homosexual people doing nasty things to themselves in despair, and that nasty 'straights' will villify them, bail them up in the street and 'hate' them.  The LGBT crowd seem to know a lot about Hate.

So far the only hateful thing done has been a homosexual fellow trying to blow up a Christian organisation's office building.

Gay activist did bomb ‘research’ before ACL hit

The man accused of driving a burning van laden with gas bottles into the Australian Christian Lobby headquarters was a gay activist who disliked the group because of its “position on sexuality” and had searched online how to make plastic explosives and a pressure-cooker bomb.

Court documents tendered to the ACT Magistrates Court yesterday reveal Jaden Duong had also run searches about gay marriage in other countries and, a month before the alleged attack at 10.45pm on December 21 last year, had searched for the “Australian Christian Lobby”.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/gay-activist-did-bomb-research-before-acl-hit/news-story/53500c374454344cc24a29b3303dd26c?nk=1dc4d9f3f2a05effc85fce79fb2efc8a-1502945006

After the blast at the group’s Canberra headquarters in Deakin, which gutted the ground floor and caused $100,000 of damage, police said the  

attack was not “politically, religiously or ideologically motivated”

and referred to it as a “car fire”.

Hmmmmm. I guess we know how the legal people will vote !  The police were part of the cover-up before the flames had died down.

According to documents tendered in court, soon after the explosion, police asked Mr Duong why he had picked the location. “Because I dislike the Australian Christian Lobby,” he allegedly replied. 

The Australian understands he previously had volunteered on the political campaign of a gay activist politician and for an LGBTI organisation in San Francisco.

A person describing himself online as Jaden Duong was also a contestant in the Mr GAPA 2014 pageant hosted by the Gay Asia Pacific Alliance Foundation in San Francisco.

Mr Duong’s LinkedIn profile says he volunteered for political organisation San Francisco Moderates and San Francisco-based social entrepreneurship organisation StartOut, which offers “education, networking, mentorship and access to capital in order to foster entrepreneurs and great business leaders in the LGBTQ community”.

The Australian can also reveal that a Jaden Duong joined the ACL’s email list on July 7 last year before unsubscribing on August 23.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner Andrew Colvin told a Senate estimates hearing earlier this year that authorities believed Mr Duong knew the building he drove into in December was the ACL office, but that he was not driven by an ideology based on anything the Christian lobby had said or done.

OK. With that as a background. Let us hear some of what Anthony Fisher, our distinguised guest had to say. Note to that he said very much the same before, several years ago.

Same-Sex 'Marriage': Evolution or Deconstruction of Marriage and the Family?

Same-sex marriage is not the evolution of marriage but its further hollowing out, not the liberation of that institution from the confines of religion and prejudice so much as its deconstruction. 

The campaign to redefine marriage has recently gained such momentum - with now three and soon four bills before the Commonwealth Parliament - that many think it is inevitable. This can leave those with misgivings feeling that they are already losers in a done deal.

 http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2015/07/24/4280213.htm

Some think it is the inexorable progress of liberty and equality - which leaves the doubters on "the wrong side of history."

'Equality'. 'Wrong side of history'. These are like Penn and Teller's magic incantations.  Keep your eye on the ball.

In this context supporters of classical marriage are presumed to have no real arguments to offer. So here I want to offer some reasons - not decrees from on high or from the past, not expressions of hatred or prejudice - but reasons I hope anyone can understand. I also hope these reasons prove persuasive and helpful in proclaiming and witnessing to true marriage among families, friends and colleagues.

Regardless, I hope this will help explain why Australian law has always held, and many people still hold, that marriage is for people of opposite sex.

I will examine five common slogans in this debate - that it is all about justice, that sexual differences do not matter, that it is all about love, that it is all about the numbers and that it does not affect me. 

Along the way, I will be offering some reasons for preserving the classical understanding of marriage rather than redefining it to include same-sex "marriage" (SSM).

1. "It is all about justice"

Recently, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Michael Kozoi wrote that all opposition to SSM stems from hatred, pure and simple. 

But if that were true, then all the recent high-profile converts to SSM were previously homophobes or liars - including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Penny Wong and others. If they were not in fact bigots when they previously thought and said marriage was for a man and woman, then it should not be presumed that those who now hold that view are bigots either.

In reality, of course, we all know and love someone with same-sex attraction. We recognize that people of the same sex can love each other, sometimes deeply; that they express this in ways that seem similar to the ways married men and women express their love; and that some people want to commit to this in a public ceremony. 

They are usually good-willed people, who feel they are missing out on something precious. Because we want the best for them, we feel the tug of the view that everything that makes opposite-sex couples happy should be open to them too. We want no more of the discriminatory or violent treatment that such people often suffered in the past and sometimes still suffer.

After all, God made every person unique and irreplaceable, as His beloved images in this world, and if God loves people with same-sex attraction, so must the Church. 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the recent bishops' pastoral letter, Don't Mess with Marriage, teach that every human being, regardless of race, religion, age, sex or sexual orientation, deserves our reverence; that all forms of unjust discrimination must be opposed; that everyone is entitled to justice and compassion; and that the challenges of healthy and chaste friendships are for every human being, whatever their attractions. If Christians have not always talked that way or walked their talk, we should repent and do better in future.

These cogent points are spoken loud and clear for anyone to hear. But.... the LGBT crowd are not all 'good-willed people. I would hazard that most are not.  They not only do not hear, they refuse to hear.

It is encumbent upon people of goodwill to give the reasons that Anthony provides here and to offer friendship to those afflicted. They are mostly, unfortunately, consumed with hatred and with so much to spare that they project it onto those or good will on the Christian side.

But when it comes to what the law is or should be, not all differential treatment is necessarily unjust. 

Women's hospitals are closed to men; programmes for Indigenous Australians are targeted to them; primary schools enrol only children. These different treatments are not discriminatory because the differences upon which they are based are reasonable ones. Women, children and Aborigines merit particular assistance. So if our marriage laws recognize and support man-and-woman relationships for good reasons, the preservation of those laws will not necessarily be unjust to other kinds of relationship. 

Under any marriage law, some relationships will not be recognized as "marriage" - siblings, mere cohabiters, "throuples" and so on - but unless we know what marriage is, we cannot judge whether this restriction treats all citizens justly. To put it another way: we all support marriage equality - treating all real marriages equally - the question is: What is a real marriage?

2. "Sexual differences do not matter"

Until recently the answer to the question What is marriage? was obvious: every serious culture, religion, philosophy and legal system in the world understood marriage as "the union of a man and a woman, to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life."

So it is that a man and a woman undertake not merely to live together but "to have and to hold" as "husband and wife" - that is, to do what husbands and wives do, including engaging in acts of love-making that are potentially life-making.

But if marriage is a natural institution that pre-exists Church and state, why should governments get involved at all? 

For one reason only: because the "marital acts" that bring children into the world also seal and express the "marital unions" that provide for the long-term nurture of those children. 

Marriage binds those whose love-making was life-making both to each other as husband and wife and to those children as mother and father. 

Ah, old terms with provenance, being expunged as we speak, from Gummunt documents, in favour of 'Parent A and Parent B'.  This whole SSM bizzo is just one part of a multi-pronged attack.

The benefits to children of having the contributions of both a Mum and a Dad, committed to each other and to them over the long haul, are well-established in human experience and social science research. In that sense, marriage is the best Department of Population, Health, Education, Welfare and Crime Prevention we have ever come up with! 

Other friendships may do other good things and be worthy of support; but only marriage unites a man and a woman and  

directs their complementary sexual-reproductive natures to the having and rearing of children. 

And that is why, uniquely of all human relationships, states have an interest in their success.

The Catholic Church, following the clear teaching of the Old Testament, of Christ Jesus and of the Apostle Paul, has always taught that marriage is that unique institution whereby "a man leaves mother and father and cleaves to his wife so that the two become one flesh" (Genesis 2:24; Mark 10:1-16; Ephesians 5:21-32) and so may "be fruitful and multiply" (Genesis 1:27-28). 

Recent popes have explored the rich significance of our sexual differentiation as male and female and of marriage as a comprehensive bodily, emotional and spiritual union - one that brings and holds together people and values that otherwise have a tendency to fall apart: men and women, sex and love, love-making and life-making, babies and parents. 

St. John Paul II, for instance, elaborated a contemporary "theology of the body" in which the long tradition about sex being for marriage and marriage being for man and wife was shown to be rich in argument and profound in implications.

In his recent, much-praised encyclical on caring for the environment, Laudato Si', Pope Francis also suggests we must accept ourselves in our bodily being, our masculinity and femininity, accept the Creator's gifts specific to our own sex and to the opposite sex, encounter someone different and find mutual enrichment in bringing those gifts together in marriage. 

The difference and complementarity of man and woman is the anthropological reality "at the foundation of marriage and the family." 

This too is challenged by the same LGBT crowd, taking their lead from Feminists claim that such realities are simply 'social constructs'. 

Marriage should not, this Pope suggests, be the subject of endless manipulation according to passing ideological fads.

Would that it were just a passing ideological fad. What it is in fact is a barrage of destructive ordnance designed to destroy marriage altogether.  I shall get to that.

Of course, this ancient wisdom that marriage is inherently opposite-sex is not peculiar to Catholics: Christians share it with Jews and Muslims; the three great Abrahamic religions share it with the other world religions of the ancient world and since; the world religions share it with more local ones, for example, Australian Aboriginal and Pacific Islander religions; and religious traditions share it with most secular philosophies, legal systems and cultures. Though customs around marriage vary between cultures and over time, there is remarkable consistency about these four dimensions of marriage:

• that it unites people of opposite (but complementary) sex;

• that this union is intended to be faithful ("to the exclusion of all others");

• that this union is potentially fruitful ("to have and to hold" each other as "man and wife" do and so open to children); and

• that this union is final ("till death do us part").

In almost every case, a fifth dimension has been that this union is regarded as sacred.

This Anthony fellow, you will realize is the Most Rev. Anthony Fisher, O.P., Archbishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, and he delivered the Order of Malta Defence of the Faith Lecture of which you have just read a bit.

It will continue in the next post, along with several other customers putting their $50 worth.

But before you rush to fill your pots, let us just look at one remark I made, about the destruction of marriage. I do not make that up. 

Micah Clark told us:-

Homosexual Activist Admits True Purpose of Battle is to Destroy Marriage

Even knowing that there are radicals in all movements, doesn’t  lessen the startling admission recently by lesbian journalist Masha Gessen.  On a radio show she actually admits that homosexual activists are lying about their radical political agenda.   

She says that they don’t want to access the institution of marriage; 

they want to radically redefine and eventually eliminate it. 

 https://illinoisfamily.org/homosexuality/homosexual-activist-admits-true-purpose-of-battle-is-to-destroy-marriage/

Here is what she recently said on a radio interview: 

“It’s a no-brainer that (homosexual activists) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist.  

…(F)ighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change, and that is a lie. 

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago. 

Let us get this hypocrit's message understood. She doesn't want a 'fiction' of her life but she lies about what she is doing to Marriage.  

(Source: http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/lifematters/why-get-married/4058506)

For quite some time, the defenders of natural marriage have attempted to point out that the true agenda behind the homosexual demands organizations is not marriage equality; it is the total unraveling of marriage and uprooting traditional values from society.  (This will ultimately include efforts to silence and punish some churches that openly adhere to their religious teachings about marriage and sexual morality.) 

While few have been as vocal as this lesbian activist was in this interview, we do have numerical (sic) examples proving her point.  When given the opportunity to marry, after laws have been struck down relatively small percentages of homosexuals actually bother to marry compared to their heterosexual counterparts.  This raises question about the true need to unravel marriage for the “fair” extension its benefits.  Only 12 percent of homosexuals in the Netherlands marry compared to 86 percent of their heterosexual peers.  Less than 20 percent of same-sex couples already living together in California married when given the chance in 2008.  In contrast, 91 percent of heterosexual couples in California who are living together are married. 

 Clearly this is about cultural change and tearing down the traditional family ethic, since it seems that most homosexuals living together neither need nor desire to marry, though they do desire to radically change marriage.

 Gays and lesbians are free to live as they choose, and we live in a society which roundly applauds them doing so like never before in our history, but they do not have the right to rewrite marriage for all of society.

I shall fill your glasses now so you can prepare yourself for the ongoing discussion, which I shall get to soon.

Meanwhile, on the issue of 'Justice', and 'equality' it has to be pointed out that in Oz the unmarried who live together have exactly the same rights as married people anyway. They can make a Will handing on all their wealth when they die to their 'partner: they can make one another beneficiaries of superannuation and bank accounts; they can jointly take out a mortgage and buy/sell property. 

Marriage is not a huge issue to the vast majority of Australians who mainly seal their partnerships in Registry Offices rather than in a Catholic Church, 'in the sight of God'. To a Catholic those are not real marriages anyway. 

But as we see from the lady, it is not about that. It is about destroying Marriage entirely

Pray.

Pax