The surest way to persecution is to say, 'It can't happen here.' - by Fr. George W. Rutler

In CERC  

Our parish is blessed with a shrine to Saint Thomas More.

 

The young artist who painted it after Holbein was a refugee from communist Eastern Europe.  He did such a good job that Cardinal Egan, dedicating it, said that he would not be surprised if this were the original. 

 

We recently celebrated the joint feasts of Thomas More, who was Chancellor of England, and John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester.  Their personalities were different in many ways, and it was almost a miracle that an Oxford man and a Cambridge man got on so well and eventually were canonized together.  

The Act of Succession and the Act of Supremacy were the challenges that King Henry VIII threw at them, and the saints returned the challenge.  The issues were rooted in natural law:  the meaning of marriage and the claims of government.  These are the same issues that loom large today.  

Whatever our courts of law may decide about these matters, Saint Thomas says:  "I am not bound, my lord, to conform my conscience to the council of one realm against the General Council of Christendom."  In 1919, G. K. Chesterton predicted with powerful precision that great as More's witness was then, "he is not quite so important as he will be in a hundred years' time." 

For every courageous saint back then, there were many who instead took the safe path of complacency.  More's own family begged him to find some loophole, and — after the sudden deaths of eight other bishops — Fisher was the only one left who acted like an apostle.  Those who opted for comfort and wove the lies of their world into a simulation of truth had a banal and shallow faith that Pope Francis has called "rose water."  It is a good image, for rose water is not blood and cannot wash away sin.  

The "Man for All Seasons" wrote to his beloved Margaret from his cell in the Tower of London:  "And, therefore, my own good daughter, do not let your mind be troubled over anything that shall happen to me in this world.  Nothing can come but what God wills.  And I am very sure that whatever that be, however bad it may seem, it shall indeed be the best." 

The "Fortnight for Freedom" extended from the vigil of the feasts of Fisher and More to July 4, but its prayers continue, as the Church's many charitable and evangelical works are threatened by our present government's disdain for the religious conscience, most immediately evident in the Health and Human Services mandate and the redefinition of marriage.  In 1534 Henry VIII's arrogation of authority over the Church was quickly followed by a Treasons Act which made it a high crime to criticize the King.  In contemporary America as in Tudor England, the surest way to let that happen is to say, "It can't happen here."
 

The Court and Marriage: The Culture War Deepens - by Hadley Arkes

In The Catholic Think 

The Week of Waiting:  I had spent the first three mornings this week at the Supreme Court, bracing myself for what the Court would deliver on the issue of marriage. And by this time, people know that the decisions Wednesday marked a turn in the culture war. 

Mark Twain said of Wagner’s music that, “it isn’t as bad as it sounds.” But these decisions were worse than they sounded. Some of our friends have sought gamely to pretend that the political contest will go on, contesting marriage state-by-state. And indeed it must. But we will have to summon our genius to find different paths.  

The Court did not exactly produce a Roe v. Wade for marriage. It did not, in one stroke, sweep away all laws that refused to permit same-sex marriage. But the judges put in place the premises that are sufficiently decisive, and all it requires now are the litigants sure to come forward to complete the work.    

They will challenge the laws that make no provision for homosexual marriages and the constitutions that forbid them. They will need only to cite the charged language of Justice Anthony Kennedy in U.S. v. Windsor, striking down Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996. And that will supply a sufficient ground for sweeping away any lingering barriers to same-sex marriage.

In Section 3 of DOMA, the Congress stipulated that “marriage” would refer only to “a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife.” But to Justice Kennedy this affirmation of the meaning of marriage bristled with hatred and condemnation. In affirming marriage as the relation of a man and woman, Congress showed a disposition to “disparage” and “demean” gays and lesbians, to deny their “equal dignity” and affect them with a “stigma.” 

As Justice Scalia pointed out, Kennedy was essentially charging with bigotry the people who had drafted this bill, but also the 85 Senators and 347 congressmen who voted for it, along with the president (Clinton) who had signed it. Hate-mongers all.

As it turned out, I was one of the architects of DOMA, and I had led the testimony for the bill in the Judiciary Committee of the House in May 1996. Justice Kennedy’s scathing remarks on the mind that brought forth DOMA seemed to stop just short of attaching my name.  

But it’s worth recalling what brought some of us then to press for DOMA. The Supreme Court of Hawaii had installed same-sex marriage in that state. The question was whether couples could marry in Hawaii, and then, through the Full Faith & Credit Clause of the Constitution, bring their marriages back home to other states. In this way, one state could in effect “nationalize” same-sex marriage. 

A state could refuse to honor marriages coming in from other states if it bore a moral objection, registered in its laws, to those forms of marriage (say, of persons below a certain age). But coming soon was the decision of the Court in Romer v. Evans, which threatened to knock out that prop of authority for the states. Sure enough it came, with the key lines from Justice Kennedy.  

He famously held there that the moral aversion to the homosexual life “seems inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects; it lacks a rational relationship to legitimate state interests.” Centuries of Jewish and Catholic teaching could be reduced then to an “irrational” passion, an “animus.” No law that cast an adverse judgment, then, on the homosexual relation could find a reasoned ground of justification. And therefore a state could not incorporate any longer in its laws an adverse judgment on the homosexual life.

If that were the case, a state could not refuse to honor a same-sex marriage coming in from another state. That is what brought the need for DOMA. The Congress would give guidance to the courts and support the authority of the states in refusing to credit those marriages.   

The Court on Wednesday affected not to touch this part of DOMA. But Justice Kennedy’s premise surely will, for it is the premise that has worked its way through all of the litigation since then.  In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), Justice Kennedy held that the state could not justify laws on sodomy because there was no rational ground on which to condemn the homosexual relations that people pursued in their private lives.  

He insisted at the time that this judgment entailed no “formal recognition” of any other relation – namely, “marriage.” To which Justice Scalia famously said, “Do not believe it.” 

Only five months later, the Supreme Judicial Council of Massachusetts invoked Kennedy’s words in the Lawrence case in striking down the laws on marriage in the Commonwealth and installing same-sex marriage. And Kennedy invoked Lawrence again in striking down DOMA on Wednesday. As Justice Scalia remarked, we are simply waiting for the “second shoe to drop.”   

The activists will come forward to test the laws in the various states, including the laws that offer no recognition of same-sex marriage. And all that a judge needs to do now is invoke Kennedy’s overheated language in U.S. v Windsor. To use an old line, discussing marriage now without Justice Kennedy is. . .like playing Hamlet without the first grave-digger.  

And this is the work of a Catholic jurist.  On all of this, more later.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia: ‘jawdropping’ decision declares traditional marriage supporters ‘enemies of the human race’ - by John Jalsevac

WASHINGTON, D.C., June 26, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In a scathing dissenting opinion released yesterday, Justice Antonin Scalia lambasted his fellow Supreme Court Justices for striking down a critical part of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) and predicted that it will only be a matter of time before the court finds a Constitutional right to gay “marriage.”

Scalia labeled Wednesday’s decision “jaw-dropping,” calling it “an assertion of judicial supremacy over the people’s Representatives in Congress and the Executive.”

He said that the founding fathers created a judiciary with limited power in order to guard the people's "right to self-rule against the black-robed supremacy that today’s majority finds so attractive.” 

In the majority decision, authored by Justice Kennedy, the Court struck down the provision in the Clinton-era DOMA that prohibited the federal government from providing the benefits of marriage to homosexual couples who had been “married” in a state where gay “marriage” is legal. 

Justice Kennedy wrote that DOMA in “invalid” because “no legitimate purpose overcomes the purpose and effect to disparage and injure those whom the State, by its marriage laws, sought to protect in personhood and dignity.” 

Justice Scalia slammed the clear implication that the mere act of believing in traditional marriage means someone is driven by a desire to “disparage” or “injure” homosexuals. 

“[T]o defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements,” he wrote, “any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution.” 

“In the majority's judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement,” he continued. “To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to ‘disparage,’ ‘injure,’ ‘degrade,’ ‘demean,’ and ‘humiliate’ our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual."

“All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence - indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history," his dissent continued. "It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.” 

Scalia accused the majority of making the issue one of “black and white”: “Hate your neighbor, or come along with us.”

Click "like" if you support TRADITIONAL marriage.

“The truth,” he said, “is more complicated.”

It is hard to admit that one's political opponents are not monsters, especially in a struggle like this one, and the challenge in the end proves more than today's Court can handle. Too bad. A reminder that disagreement over something so fundamental as marriage can still be politically legitimate would have been a fit task for what in earlier times was called the judicial temperament. We might have covered ourselves with honor today, by promising all sides of this debate that it was theirs to settle and that we would respect their resolution. We might have let the People decide.

The famously conservative associate justice also ridiculed the majority’s promises that the DOMA decision was not making any statement about the constitutionality of gay “marriage” itself. 

“It takes real cheek for today's majority to assure us, as it is going out the door, that a constitutional requirement to give formal recognition to same-sex marriage is not at issue here,” he said, “when what has preceded that assurance is a lecture on how superior the majority's moral judgment in favor of same-sex marriage is to the Congress's hateful moral judgment against it.” 

“I promise you this,” he declared. “The only thing that will ‘confine’ the Court's holding is its sense of what it can get away with.” 

Scalia also lambasted the majority for even daring to issue a decision at all, let alone a decision striking down the federal statute. 

“We have no power to decide this case,” Scalia wrote. “And even if we did, we have no power under the Constitution to invalidate this democratically adopted legislation. The Court’s errors on both points spring forth from the same diseased root: an exalted conception of the role of this institution in America.” 

“The Court is eager — hungry — to tell everyone its view of the legal question at the heart of this case,” he stated. 

By weighing in on the hot button issue, said Scalia, the court “has cheated both sides, robbing the winners of an honest victory, and the losers of the peace that comes from a fair defeat. We owed both of them better.” 

“I dissent," he wrote.

The Supreme Court, You and Me, and the Future of Marriage - by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson and Robert P. George

In The Public Discourse 

Here we’ll describe just what the Court said and didn’t, what it got wrong, what that means in practice, and where it leaves the fight for a sound marriage culture

Here’s the least reported fact about yesterday’s rulings on marriage: the Supreme Court refused to give Ted Olson and David Boies, the lawyers suing to overturn Prop 8, what they wanted. The Court refused to redefine marriage for the entire nation. The Court refused to "discover" a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. Citizens and their elected representatives remain free to discuss, debate, and vote about marriage policy in all fifty states. Citizens and their elected representatives still have the right to define marriage in civil law as the union of one man and one woman.

And we should continue doing so. Already, in the wake of yesterday’s ruling, Governor Mike Pence of Indiana has called on his state to pass a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Marriage matters for children, for civil society, and for limited government. Marriage is the institution that unites a man and a woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to any children that their union produces. And that’s why the government is in the marriage business. Not because it cares about adult romance, but because it cares about the rights of children.

If you believe, as we do, in the importance to children and to society of the marriage-based family, then of course you were hoping for different results in yesterday’s marriage cases. But you probably also put your trust in the institutions of civil society—in that vast arena between man and state which is the real stage for human development. And in that case, you never expected a court of law to do our work for us, to rescue a marriage culture that has been wounded for decades by cohabitation, out-of-wedlock child-bearing, and misguided policies like no-fault divorce. Your only question at 10:00 AM yesterday was whether the Supreme Court would leave us the political and cultural space to rebuild that culture, or get in the way.

The answer was that the Court would leave us some space—for now. Five justices in United States v. Windsor have seen fit to put the republic on notice. While coy on state marriage laws, they have held that we the people—through overwhelming majorities in Congress and a Democratic President—somehow violated the Constitution in enacting the Defense of Marriage Act.

Here we’ll describe just what the Court said and didn’t, what it got wrong, what that means in practice, and where it leaves the fight for a sound marriage culture.

What Happened in Windsor and Perry

In United States v. Windsor, the Court heard a challenge to Section 3 of the federal Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as a male-female union for federal purposes created in federal law. Justice Kennedy and the four more liberal justices—Kagan, Sotomayor, Breyer, and Ginsburg—struck down that section. Dissents were filed by Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, and Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas.

In the second case, Perry v. Hollingsworth, the Court considered Proposition 8, the referendum in which California citizens amended their constitution to preserve conjugal marriage in state law. The California attorney general, normally responsible for defending such laws, refused in this case, so Prop 8’s proponents stepped in. But the Court ruled that they had no standing—no legal right—to do so. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority opinion, joined by Justices Scalia, Ginsburg, Breyer, and Kagan. Justice Kennedy dissented, joined by Justices Alito, Thomas, and Sotomayor.

What That Does—and Doesn’t—Mean

The Supreme Court did not strike down all of DOMA, just Section 3. It left intact Section 2, which prevents the states from being forced to recognize other states’ same-sex marriages. This leads to the broader point that not a single justice said anything against the validity of any state marriage policy, including state conjugal marriage laws. That means, of course, that not a single justice voted to strike down Prop 8. Instead, the Perry majority ordered the Ninth Circuit Court to set aside (“vacate”) its own ruling against Prop 8.

That leaves us with some confusion as to the status of Judge Vaughn Walker’s district court decision that ruled against Prop 8. Some scholars think Walker’s decision must be vacated, too. Each same-sex couple seeking to marry in California would then have to sue for a special kind of court relief, applicable only to that couple. Others think that Judge Walker’s decision would stand, but they debate whether it would apply to all state officials or only the county clerks named in the suit. Governor Jerry Brown, for his part, has directed all county clerks to begin issuing same-sex marriage licenses. This will surely be challenged in state court by the proponents of Prop 8.

Trouble Spots

The Court ruled that Prop 8 proponents were not the right party to bring the suit. Wherever vague and conflicting standing doctrine points, its application here eviscerated the California referendum process. That process was designed to let citizens pass laws, and amend their constitution, to check and balance government officials. If those same officials can effectively veto provisions of the state constitution by refusing to enforce and then refusing to defend them, the point of the referendum process is defeated.

Meanwhile, it is hard to criticize the basis of the DOMA case because it is hard even to say what that basis is. The opinion begins with a learned reflection on how family law has historically (but not exclusively) been left to states. Yet it refuses to strike DOMA down just on that ground. After all, DOMA leaves state family law intact as ever. It controls only how the federal government allocates federal money and benefits when it comes to marriage. Congress can’t impose on the states in this matter, to be sure; but then why would the states be able to impose on Congress?

The Court also doesn’t rest its decision just on equal protection principles, though these too are discussed. If equality required Congress to cover same-sex partnerships with its marriage-related laws, wouldn’t the same be true of the states? Yet the majority claims to reach no decision on the latter.

Finally, the Court doesn’t just rely on the principle that the government can’t deny liberty without due process. On the Court’s own accounting, that rule protects substantive rights only when they are deeply rooted in our nation’s history and traditions. But as of 13 years ago, no jurisdiction on our planet, much less in our nation, had enacted same-sex civil marriage.

So if not federalism, or equality, or due process, then what? What is the basis for the Court’s ruling? As Justice Scalia points out, the Court itself won’t say. It discusses each of these principles before refusing to rely squarely on any. As for how they might stretch, multiply, merge, or pile up to support the Court’s holding anyway, several theories have arisen. But even some who cheer the decision have called its reasoning less than coherent or satisfying.

Justice Kennedy, for his part, is just sure the Constitution prevents the federal government from treating opposite- and same-sex state marriages differently. All he knows, in other words, is that Section 3 of DOMA must go.

In fact, we would have been better off had he stopped there. DOMA, he goes on to insist, must have been motivated by a “bare desire to harm,” or “to disparage and to injure.” Its sole purpose and effect is to “impose inequality,” to deny “equal dignity,” to “humiliate.” He infers all this from a few passages in its legislative history about defending traditional morality and the institution of traditional marriage, from its effects, and from the act’s title. Most importantly—and scandalously, given his obligations as a judge—Kennedy does so with nothing more than passing reference to arguments made for DOMA in particular, and conjugal marriage in general. How else could his reasoning leap from the people’s wish to support a certain vision of marriage, to their alleged desire to harm and humiliate those otherwise inclined?

The effect of this refusal to engage counterarguments is the elevation of a rash accusation to the dignity of a legal principle: DOMA’s supporters—including, one supposes, 342 representatives, 85 senators, and President Clinton—must have been motivated by ill will.

The Heart of the Problem—and Solution

The bottom line? The defense of conjugal marriage matters now more than ever. It won't be long before new challengers come. But whether they succeed may depend on how vigorously the democratic debate is joined by what Justice Alito describes in his clear-eyed dissent.

In his DOMA dissent, Justice Alito goes out of his way to frame the central issue of both cases: They involve, he writes, a contest between two visions of marriage—what he calls the "conjugal" and "consent-based" views. He cites our book as exemplifying the conjugal view of marriage as (in his summary) a “comprehensive, exclusive, permanent union that is intrinsically ordered to producing children.” He cites others, like Jonathan Rauch, for the idea that marriage is a certain commitment marked by emotional union. And he explains that the Constitution is silent on which of these substantive, morally controversial visions of marriage is correct. So the Court, he says, should decline to decide; it should defer to democratic debate.

The Court is likelier to defer to democratic debate if it believes there’s a genuine debate to defer to. If the conjugal view’s supporters are instead cowed into silence, or convinced to forfeit on the ground that loss is “inevitable” anyway, five justices will see no obstacle to imposing the consent-based view nationwide.

Never mind that this emotional companionship rationale entails that moms and dads are interchangeable. Never mind that it makes nonsense of other norms of marriage, unable as it is to justify the limits of permanence, exclusivity, or monogamy. Never mind that by its logic, the law’s “discrimination” against multiple-partner bonds, too, would embody a “bare desire to harm” those most satisfied by other bonds.

The point is that by assuming the consent-based view, the majority in the DOMA decision took sides in the very debate it was claiming to sidestep out of respect for state sovereignty. Had the justices taken the trouble even to describe conjugal marriage supporters’ reasons in their own terms, it would have become obvious that these weren’t bigots but garden-variety political opponents.

So our first task is to develop and multiply our artistic, pastoral, and reasoned defenses of the conjugal view as the truth about marriage, and to make ever plainer our policy reasons for enacting it. That will make it more awkward for the justices to apply their DOMA reasoning in a future challenge to state marriage laws. Only conjugal marriage supporters can decide—by what they do next—whether the Court, when it next returns to marriage, will find a policy dispute lively enough to demand its deference.

Our second task is to take a long—and broad—view. Whenever and however the legal battle is won, our work will have only begun. Despite the Court’s libels against half their fellow citizens, this debate is not about “the bare desire to harm” any group. Indeed, for conjugal marriage supporters it is not, ultimately, about homosexuality at all. It is about marriage. The proposal to define marriage as nothing more specific than your top emotional bond is one way to erode its stabilizing norms, so crucial for family life and the common good.

But it is just one way.

Before same-sex anything was at stake, our society was already busy dismantling its own foundation, by innovations like no-fault divorce and by a thousand daily decisions to dishonor the norms of marriage that make it apt for family life. Atomization results from these forms of family breakdown—and from the superficially appealing idea that emotional closeness is all that sets marriage apart, which makes it gauche to seek true companionship and love in non-marital bonds. Part of rebuilding marriage will be responding to that atomization—reaching out to friends and neighbors suffering broken hearts or homes, or loneliness, whatever the cause. That, too, will make the conjugal view of marriage shine more brightly as a viable social option.

In short, winning the legal battle against redefinition is only a condition of winning the political one. And winning the political one is only a condition (though necessary) for rebuilding a healthy culture.

Yesterday's most important developments in that broadest struggle, of course, did not happen at a marble courthouse in Washington, but in a million minds and hearts and households across the country, as people chose in ways great and small to honor—or not—the demanding ideals of marriage and family, and community. As champions of civil society, we always knew that. Yet it would be naive to deny the law's effect on those ideals. That's why the courthouse matters—and why we must keep up our witness to the truth about marriage, by word and deed, until it is safely beyond judicial overreach.

Cultural imperialism on the march - Obama Promotes Gay Pride Worldwide - by Robert R. Reilly

In MercatorNet

As June approaches, get ready for the official celebration of “Gay Pride Month” by US embassies abroad.

If sodomy and same-sex marriage are constitutional rights, what is their relationship to American foreign policy? Despite the tremendous controversy regarding these issues within the United States, the Obama administration has gone ahead and placed them at the center of US diplomacy. Why? In Libido Dominandi, E. Michael Jones wrote that the rationalization of sexual misbehavior “could only calm the troubled conscience in an effective manner when it was legitimized by the regime in power… [which] went on in the name of high moral purpose to make this vision normative for the entire world.”

Therefore, the Obama administration, after promoting homosexual rights and marriage in the US, has undertaken the task of universalizing the rationalization for sodomitical behavior and is doing so with high moral rhetoric – in this case, by appropriating the language of human rights.

The effort began in earnest on International Human Rights Day, December 6, 2011, with a powerful pair of events. President Obama issued a memorandum for the heads of executive departments and agencies, directing them “to ensure that US diplomacy and foreign assistance promote and protect the human rights of LGBT persons”. Mr Obama said that, “The struggle to end discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) persons is a global challenge, and one that is central to the United States commitment to promoting human rights”.

The departments and agencies included the Departments of State, the Treasury, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Commerce, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the Export Import Bank, the United States Trade Representative, and “such other agencies as the President may designate.” All US agencies engaged abroad were directed to prepare a report each year “on their progress toward advancing these initiatives”.

Austin Ruse, president of the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute, explained,

“They have directed their embassies everywhere to monitor and assist domestic homosexual movements whether the host country and their people accept it or not. The US is very powerful and can force governments to submit to its social-policy views. They are intent on forcing homosexual ‘marriage’ and homosexual adoption on countries that are offended by such things. They are intent on forcing sexual orientation and gender identity as new categories of non-discrimination that will trump the rights of religious believers… Most people recognize that the homosexual lifestyle is harmful to public health and morals. The effect of the Obama policy is to offend billions of people and force this view on reluctant governments. This is most especially offensive to countries that are predominantly Christian and Muslim. In fact, Christianity and Islam are among the chief obstacles of this agenda and policy.” 

State Department sophistry

While President Obama took the action, Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, gave the rationale in an International Human Rights Day speech on the same day, December 6, in which she proclaimed that that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. She also announced that the US would give more than US$3 million to a new Global Equality Fund in order to help civil society organizations promote homosexual advocacy.

Mrs. Clinton came energetically to the defense of those “forced to suppress or deny who they are to protect themselves from harm. I am talking about gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people”, whom she described with a strong Rousseauian echo as “human beings born free and given bestowed equality and dignity…” But, if they were born free, why are they not free now? No doubt, because society oppresses them, just as South Africa once oppressed its black population through apartheid – an example Mrs. Clinton gives. But history overcame that, and since, as Rousseau taught, man is a product of history, history can overcome this, too. Thus, Mrs. Clinton ends with the admonition, “Be on the right side of history”.  

It is a testimony to the influence of Rousseau that Secretary Clinton should have appealed to history for the vindication of “gay” rights rather than to moral principle. Had it been the latter, she would have had to say rather that, in order “to protect themselves from harm”, LGBT persons should “suppress” precisely that part of themselves inclined to indulge in disordered sexual acts, just as anyone should resist their inclinations to immoral acts, whatever their kind.

Mrs Clinton averred that “being LGBT does not make you less human”. That is certainly so, unless you consistently give in to one of these disordered inclinations. In a parallel case, being an alcoholic also does not make you less human. However, practicing alcoholism by living life in an inebriated stupor does make you less human in the Aristotelian sense that it impairs your Nature or incapacitates you fulfilling it. If it is virtue that enables man to reach his natural end in becoming fully human, then it is vice that prevents him from doing so, thus making him less human.

Fully embracing the rationalization of the same-sex cause, Secretary Clinton espoused “gender identity” as equivalent to being black or being a woman. It is “who they are”. In a moment of humility, she stated that, “my own country’s record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country.”

It was? What was it? Being homosexual or lesbian was not a crime in the United States, so what was she referring to? Mrs. Clinton never said, but the it to which she alluded is sodomy, the elephant in the room. She repeated the mantra that “it is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay…” and “it should never be a crime to be gay”. One would have to agree in so far as persecution of and violence against homosexuals is concerned but, as Austin Ruse has pointed out, “Such attacks upon individuals are already recognized as violations of human rights in international law particularly in the 1966 Covenants implementing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other existing treaties”. This, then, is moving beyond that to the moral and legal endorsement of certain behavior. Some governments continue to have laws against homosexual acts, which is not the same thing as violating their rights as human beings. Was Mrs Clinton saying that it is a violation of human rights to declare sodomy illegal?

Apparently, for that would be consistent with an understanding of Section 1 in the Obama directive, instructing agencies abroad to engage in “Combating Criminalization of LGBT Status or Conduct Abroad”(emphasis added). What kind of conduct might this be? The only conduct that is or has been consistently criminalized by many countries is sodomy. Morally speaking, sodomy is a fairly unattractive act. Why should it not be criminalized? Perhaps there are prudential reasons for not doing so, but what might be the moral objections to such laws?

The somewhat evasive answer in the Presidential Memorandum is because “no country should deny people their rights because of who they love…” In her speech, Mrs Clinton echoed this response and set this test: “We need to ask ourselves, ‘How would it feel if it were a crime to love the person I love?’”

Well, that depends.

What if the person one loves is already married? What if the person one loves is a sibling? How about a teacher in love with a student? Or a pastor in love with a choir boy? Or an uncle with his niece? Acting upon any of these loves in a sexual relationship is, in most places, a crime. It is not so much whom one loves, but how one loves. How it would feel does not really matter since, in each of these cases, it is morally wrong to sexualize the relationship. Feelings do not change the moral nature of an act.

Why, if all the above cases deserve prohibition, do homosexuals deserve an exemption when it comes to sodomy? Secretary Clinton never said why we should feel for them and not for any of those mentioned above, nor did she raise any of the above examples of criminal love as violations of human rights. Why not?

Rationalizing immoral behaviour

As with all rationalizations for moral misbehavior, Mrs. Clinton’s speech was rife with denials of reality, three of which came in one sentence. She said, “Now, there are some who say and believe that all gay people are pedophiles, that homosexuality is a disease that can become caught or cured, or that gays recruit others to become gay. Well, these notions are simply not true”.

Well, these notions have to be seen as not true for her to promote the “gay” agenda internationally and get away with it. I have never met anyone who believes that all homosexuals are pedophiles, but many of them are certainly pederasts. By setting up the pedophile straw man, Mrs. Clinton avoids this unpleasant reality. Whether homosexuality is a disease or not (it is certainly a disorder), there is ample evidence that it can be cured. Of course, a fair number of people float into homosexuality in their youth and float out again as they mature – no cure required. So much for its being an immutable characteristic.

Others who have become immersed in this life and who later wish to leave it have successfully done so through a variety of therapies. In 1995, the New York Times reported that “Dr Charles W. Socarides offered the closest thing to hope that many homosexuals had in the 1960s: the prospect of a cure. Rather than brand them as immoral or regard them as criminal, Dr Socarides, a New York psychoanalyst, told homosexuals that they suffered from an illness whose effects could be reversed.” Dr Socarides said that his cure rate was about one third. For Secretary Clinton to deny this is an enormous disservice to the very people whose rights she purports to be defending.

Lastly, the bigger the lie, the bolder the assertion – as in Mrs. Clinton’s outright denial that “gays recruit others to become gay”. In my professional career in the arts, I witnessed such recruitment, saw its occasional success, and was several times the object of it. Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the homosexual subculture could not possibly make such a statement.

Otherwise, Mrs. Clinton could have referred to homosexual literature, such as Lavender Culture (1994), in which Gerald Hannon described the need for a youth recruitment campaign: “I believe…we have to behave in a certain way vis-à-vis young people. I believe that means we have to proselytize… The answer is to proselytize. Aggressively so”. He added that, “To attract young people to the gay movement in large numbers should be the challenge to the next phase of the movement. It is a challenge we have set ourselves…” This is not to say that all homosexuals recruit, but to assert that none do is a complete denial of reality – which, after all, is the point of the rationalization.

The State Department celebrates

What this is all about was very clear from the 2006 Yogykarta Principles on the Application of International Human Rights Law in relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, adopted by the International Commission of Jurists, the International Service for Human Rights, and homosexual activists to influence the interpretation of the articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, all UN human rights treaties, and international law as a whole. One requirement of the Principles is to: “Repeal criminal and other legal provisions that prohibit or are, in effect, employed to prohibit consensual sexual activity among people of the same sex who are over the age of consent…” This is the nub of the issue. It is not the status of homosexuals that is so much the matter, as it is the status of their conduct.

In 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France introduced a statement at the UN General Assembly, titled Joint Statement on Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity and Human Rights. It proclaimed that, “We urge States to take all the necessary measures, in particular legislative or administrative, to ensure that sexual orientation or gender identity may under no circumstances be the basis for criminal penalties, in particular executions, arrests or detention”. The Statement was signed by 66 nations.

Under the George W. Bush administration, the United States declined, but in 2009 the Barack Obama administration signed the Statement. While the Statement did not go as far as the Yogykarta Principles, it was clearly headed in that direction. The majority of the criminal penalties it was decrying were not, as the Statement disingenuously suggests, aimed at orientation, but at activity. It is the activity that must be vindicated and blessed as a universal human right.

One of the most immediate results of the priority given to the homosexual cause by President Obama and Secretary Clinton has been the profusion of “gay pride” commemorations and celebrations in US embassies abroad. June is the month singled out for this because, in 2000, President Bill Clinton declared June “Gay and Lesbian Pride Month”, with the last Sunday reserved as Gay Pride Day. June was chosen to commemorate the anniversary of the Stonewall riots as the beginning of “gay” liberation. Ever since, every government agency has observed it. As of 2011, it moved overseas as part of US foreign policy.

Therefore, the US Embassy in Islamabad celebrated its first-ever lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) “pride celebration” with an event on June 26, 2011. The embassy said the purpose of meeting was to demonstrate “support for human rights, including LGBT rights, in Pakistan at a time when those rights are increasingly under attack from extremist elements throughout Pakistani society.” Richard Hoagland, the US deputy chief of mission, was quoted on the embassy website, as saying, “I want to be clear that the US Embassy is here to support you and stand by your side every step of the way”.

However, it is Pakistan’s Penal Code, not extremist elements, that, in Section 377 (introduced at the time of British colonialism), states, “Whoever voluntarily has carnal intercourse against the order of nature with any man, woman or animal, shall be punished… with imprisonment of either description for a term which shall not be less than two years nor more than ten years, and shall also be liable to fine.”

If the Pakistani embassy in Washington DC held a public event in which it encouraged that the domestic laws in the United States be changed in order to re-criminalize sodomy, we might be somewhat surprised and irritated. Why should the Pakistani people be less annoyed by the US Embassy telling them to change its laws in order to decriminalize sodomy? Why exactly is that our business?

All Islamic groups in Pakistan condemned the “pride” event as a form of “cultural terrorism” against democratic Pakistan. Students protested against what they called “the attempts of the United States to promote vulgarity in Islamic societies under the pretext of human rights”. One speaker at a demonstration said, “Now the United States wants to project and promote objectionable, unnatural, abnormal behaviors under the pretext of equality and human rights, which is not at all acceptable… If you destroy the morality of the society, you have destroyed it completely.”  

In Nairobi, Kenya, June, 2012, the US Embassy hosted what is thought to be the first “Gay Pride” event in that country. John Haynes, a public affairs officer at the US embassy, introduced the event: "The US government for its part has made it clear that the advancement of human rights for LGBT people is central to our human rights policies around the world and to the realization of our foreign policy goals". Homosexual acts are illegal in Kenya, just as they were in parts of the United States until 2003. Now, as part of our foreign policy, apparently we tell Kenya to change its laws.

The US Embassy in Vientiane, Laos, proudly displays webpage news from its 2012 “first-ever Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Pride event on June 25 in Vientiane. The event, called ‘Proud to be Us!’, was produced by a group of young Lao LGBT activists and featured music, dance, skits, and dramas exploring issues faced by LGBT people in Laos today, such as discrimination, gender roles, and sexual health”.

On the webpage of the US Embassy in Prague, Czech Republic, a joint statement was issued which the US ambassador, Norman Eisen, had signed. It declared: “On the occasion of the 2nd annual Prague Pride Festival (2012), we express our solidarity with the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities of the Czech Republic in their celebration… The Prague Pride Festival reminds us that ensuring LGBT rights is an important aspect of fulfilling our broader international human rights commitments since the full recognition of those rights is still one of the world’s remaining human rights challenges. Safeguarding human rights and guarding against intolerance requires constant vigilance in the Czech Republic, as in all our countries. Therefore today, we align ourselves with the Prague Pride participants…”

This type of thing at US embassies has become standard. As then-Secretary of State Clinton proclaimed in June, 2012: “United States Embassies and Missions throughout the world are working to defend the rights of LGBT people of all races, religions, and nationalities as part of our comprehensive human rights policy and as a priority of our foreign policy. From Riga, where two US Ambassadors and a Deputy Assistant Secretary marched in solidarity with Baltic Pride; to Nassau, where the Embassy joined together with civil society to screen a film about LGBT issues in Caribbean societies; to Albania, where our Embassy is coordinating the first-ever regional Pride conference for diplomats and activists to discuss human rights and shared experiences”.

Forcing other countries to adopt US standards

As in Pakistan, there has been some blowback from the effort to legitimize sodomy and promote same-sex marriage. When the acting ambassador in El Salvador, Mari Carmen Aponte, wrote an op-ed in a major Salvadoran newspaper, La Prensa Grafica, implying that the disapproval of homosexual behavior is animated by “brutal hostility” and “aggression” by “those who promote hatred”, a group of pro-family associations fought back. On July 6, 2011, they wrote,

“Ms. Aponte, in clear violation of the rules of diplomacy and international rights laws, you intend to impose to (sic) Salvadorans, disregarding our profound Christian values, rooted in natural law, a new vision of foreign and bizarre values, completely alien to our moral fiber, intending to disguise this as ‘human rights’… The only thing we agree with from your article, is to repudiate violence against homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, etc.; Against these, just the same as against skinny, fat, tall or short ... This of course does not mean accepting the legal union between same sex individuals or to add new types of families like bisexual, tri-sexual, multi-sexual and the full range of sexual preferences. Not accepting the legitimacy of ‘sexual diversity’ does not mean we are violating any human right. There can be no talk of progress if this is how ‘modern’ is defined. We prefer to feel proudly ‘old fashioned’, keep our moral values, preserve our families and possess the clarity of what defines good and evil.” 

As mentioned above, Secretary Clinton said that “gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights”. The problem with this should be self-evident. The promotion of gay rights must come at the expense of the promotion of human rights because the two notions are immiscible. One is founded on the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and the other on moral relativism, which eviscerates the very idea of natural rights and the natural law on which they are based. If you have one, you cannot have the other. You have your rights by virtue of being a human being, and not by anything else – not ethnicity, not religion, not race, not tribe, not sexual orientation.

I deplore, for instance, the persecution of Baha’is in Iran and the persecution of Ahamdis in Pakistan. Being a Baha’i or being an Ahmadi no doubt constitutes the identity of these people who are being persecuted. Nonetheless, there is no such thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights: there are only human rights. And our defense of them comes precisely at the level of principle in the inalienable right to freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom of expression.

Were we to construct such a thing as Ahmadi rights or Baha’i rights or “gay” rights, we would be eviscerating the foundations for those very human rights, which have to be universal by definition in order to exist. If one has rights as a Baha’i, what happens to those rights if one converts to, say Christianity? Does one then lose one’s Baha’i rights and obtain new Christian rights? What happens to one’s “gay” rights if one goes straight?

One does not possess or attain rights in this way. They are inalienable because one possesses them by virtue of one’s human nature – not due to any other specificity regarding race, class, gender or religion. Either they exist at that level, or they do not exist at all. If someone tries to appropriate human rights for something that applies to less than everyone, then you may be sure that they are undermining very notion of human rights. If there are abuses, and this includes abuses against homosexuals, then they should be opposed from the perspective of human rights, not manufactured rights that obtain to just a specific group.

If the United States wishes to promote democratic principles and constitutional rule in other countries, but insists on inserting a manufactured right such as “gay” rights as integral to that program, it will be rejected overall by religious people and by those who, through the examination of moral philosophy, have arrived at the existence of human rights from natural law. If we wish not only to make ourselves irrelevant, but an object of derision in the Muslim and other parts of world, all we have to do is openly promote the rationalization of homosexual behavior, which is explicitly taught against as inherently immoral by Islam and, in fact, by every minority religion in those Muslim-majority countries, including Christianity and Judaism.

If we wish to make this part of American public diplomacy, as we have been doing, we can surrender the idea that the United States is promoting democracy in those countries because they are already responding, “If this is democracy, we don’t want it, thank you; we would rather keep our faith and morals.” This approach not only undermines the foundation of human rights abroad but here, as well.

But, of course, democracy is not the real goal; the goal is the universalization of the rationalization for sodomy. This is now one of the depraved purposes of US foreign policy. The light from the City on the Hill is casting a very dark shadow.

Si compartes tu fe cristiana en el Ejército de Estados Unidos, un consejo de guerra; si dices que eres gay, bienvenido

In ForumLibertas

En un impresionante ataque sobre los derechos de expresión religiosa de los soldados estadounidenses, la administración que lidera Barak Hussein Obama ha lanzado un comunicado confirmando algo impensable: cualquier soldado que profese el cristianismo desde ahora puede ser presentado ante un consejo de guerra y ser encarcelado con una baja deshonrosa del ejército. Eso sí, hace casi dos años la misma Administración revocó la política 'Don't ask, don't tell' (no preguntes, no cuentes) que prohibía a los homosexuales revelar abiertamente su orientación sexual si querían servir en las fuerzas armadas del país

Ahora, el Pentágono afirma que "el proselitismo religioso no está permitido dentro del Departamento de Defensa... las cortes marciales y los castigos no judiciales serán decididos caso por caso...". Esta declaración sigue a una reciente reunión entre funcionarios del Pentágono y el activista anti-cristiano Mikey Weinstein, quien ayudó a diseñar los nuevos castigos para los cristianos que se atrevan a cometer "el crimen de odio" de compartir su fe con otros.

Weinstein es el director de la Fundación Libertad Religiosa Militar, y dice que los cristianos, incluyendo capellanes son culpables de "traición" por compartir el evangelio de Jesucristo y también son culpables de cometer un acto de "violación espiritual" tan serio como "una violación sexual". También afirmó que los cristianos que comparten su fe en las fuerzas armadas son "enemigos de la Constitución".

De este modo los asesores del presidente Barack Obama en el Pentágono están confirmando que los militares cristianos que compartan su fe estarán cometiendo un crimen “y como resultado: prisión. Esto incluye a capellanes militares y oficiales que son ordenados clérigos de su fe (en su mayoría pastores cristianos y rabinos judíos” cuyo servicio desde la fundación de la milicia estadounidense bajo George Washington tiene como propósito enseñar su fe y ministrar las necesidades espirituales de las tropas que acuden a ellos en busca de consejo, instrucción o apoyo emocional.

Esta regulación limitará severamente las expresiones de fe judeo-cristiana en las fuerzas armadas, incluso entre amigos cercanos. También podría abolir el cargo de capellán en el ejército, ya que no permitiría que los capellanes (o algún miembro del servicio, para el caso) hablar de su fe.

En respuesta a los planes del Pentágono, el teniente general retirado Jerry Boykin, quien ahora es el vicepresidente ejecutivo del Consejo de Investigación Familiar (FRC), dijo en Fox & Friends el miércoles por la mañana: “Es ambiguo lo que quieren decir con ‘proselitismo’. Creo que tienen sus definiciones un poco confundidas. Si usted está hablando de la coerción es una cosa, pero si estás hablando del libre ejercicio de nuestra fe como soldados individuales, marineros, aviadores e infantes de marina, especialmente para los capellanes, que creo que lo peor que podemos hacer es detener la posibilidad de que un soldado sea capaz de ejercer su fe”.

Pero los homosexuales ganan visibilidad

Esta política ligada al laicismo agresivo que quiere limitar la visibilidad del cristianismo en la vida pública contrasta con el hecho de que en julio de 2011 el presidente de Estados Unidos, Barack Obama, revocara formalmente la política 'Don't ask, don't tell' (no preguntes, no cuentes) que prohibía a los homosexuales revelar abiertamente su orientación sexual si querían servir en las fuerzas armadas del país. La prohibición databa de 1993.

El Congreso había revocado la normativa en aquel diciembre, pero ésta necesitaba que tanto el presidente como el Pentágono certificaran que permitir que los gays sirvan en el Ejército revelando abiertamente su orientación sexual no afectaría la disciplina militar, algo que ambas instituciones hicieron.

En un comunicado emitido por la Casa Blanca, Obama anunció que tanto él como la cúpula militar habían completado dicha certificación.

"Hemos dado el último gran paso para poner fin a la discriminatoria ley 'No preguntes, no cuentes', que minaba nuestra disposición militar y violaba los principios estadounidenses de igualdad y justicia", sostuvo el mandatario.