A Reflection on the Passion of Anger and the “Miserable Truce” of the Modern Age - by Msgr. Charles Pope

In AW 

We live in a culture that tends to treat anger as a taboo. One common tactic to unsettle an opponent is to accuse them of being angry. It is amazing how easily humiliated and defensive one can make an opponent by using this tactic. Yes, it is amazing how quickly the one accused of “anger” will be thrown off his game and feel the need to resort to denials or euphemisms such as:

1. I am NOT angry! (which is usually said angrily and is usually a lie).
2. I am not angry, I am just frustrated! (But frustration is a euphemism for anger, yet, as a euphemism it somehow feels less humiliating).
3. I am not angry…You’re the one who is angry! (and thus the terrible charge of anger must be denied and shoved back, instead of owned and appreciated as an energy or passion for what matters).
4. Of course I’m angry, but who would not be angry when talking with an idiot! (And thus the charge is only tacitly or partially accepted since its cause is purely extraneous).

Rare indeed in the American setting is someone who will respond in a way that both admits anger and owns it as something positive and important, perhaps by saying: “I am angry. And I am angry because I really care about this matter. I am not merely a neutral observer. I fully admit I have an agenda, an agenda I passionately believe in, and I experience grief and anger when what I value is dis-valued. Yes, I am angry, and I care about this.”

Of itself anger is just a passion, an energy that is stirred forth when we sense that something is wrong. Sensing what is wrong or threatening, our anger is stirred, energizing us for action, whether mental, physical or both. The body is actually involved as adrenaline is released.

The Bible does condemn vengeful anger but also teaches of anger that is not sinful: Be angry, but sin not (Eph 4:26). The sinless Jesus also exhibits a lot of anger (e.g. Luke 11; Mark 10; Matthew 17:17; Matthew 21:15; Matthew 26:8; Mark 10:14; Mark 14:4 John 2, John 8, inter al) and indignation modelling that anger is sometimes the appropriate response.

Yet somehow we are stymied and easily felled by the charge that we are angry. We tend to live in egotistically soft, thin-skinned times. The pervasive relativism seems to require that if we are going to believe in something we ought not hold it too strongly, because then we might have an “agenda” and actually let slip that we think there is a truth to be upheld and insisted upon. And, according to modern “rules” having an “agenda” i.e. thinking certain things are surely true, is Wrong, with a capital “W.” Perhaps too there is the over-appropriation of tolerance, an necessary component in a pluralistic setting, but not an absolute virtue.

Whatever the causes, anger, an ordinary and necessary human passion, is humiliating to most modern westerners. And to be accused of being angry is something most try quickly to squirm out of.

And yet I will say plainly, we need more of it. I do not speak of a mere fisticuffs rooted in violent outburst or of the simple ugliness and persoanl disrespect evident on blogs and issued from the anonymous safety behind the computer screen. But rather, I speak of an anger rooted in love and a deep commitment to the truth, an anger that emerges because we see the harm caused by lies, deception, error, sin and injustice.

Lovers fight, lovers get angry, and well they should, for when love is in the mix, things matter, truth matters, error and harm matter. Lovers want what is best, not merely expedient or convenient.

Author Dale Ahlquist, says a lot of this better than I can. Writing in his recent book, The Complete Thinker where he synthesizes the thought of G.K. Chesterton Ahlquist says:

Chesterton illustrates the point about “the twin elements of loving and fighting”…..Modern philosophies have tried to do away with this paradox…But fighting and loving actually go together. You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it….To love a thing without wishing to fight for it is not love at all…

The connection between two such apparent opposites points to the idea that truth is always an amazing balancing act….If we lean too far in one direction or the other, we lose our balance. Thus, both militarism and pacificism represent a loss of balance.

Militarism is simply bullyism, the strong having their own way. Pacifism is a lack of loyalty, a promise not to defend the innocent, the helpless, the defenseless.

The Church has always had to maintain the precarious balance of truth, whether in war or in anything else….

Sometimes the only way to stop the fighting is to fight. Sometimes the only way to end a war is to win it—but only as an act of defense, not as an act of aggression…..

The sword is an important symbol of Christianity. It is not only in the shape of a cross; it is the scriptural symbol of truth, which cuts both ways—because error comes from opposite sides.

Chesterton also says he likes swords because “they come to a point”, unlike most modern art and philosophy.

Yes, lovers fight, lovers get angry. And the anger of the Greatest Lover of them all, God, is evident in the downward thrust of the cross into the soil of this world and its manifold lies and half truths. The cross is the downward thrust, like a sword, of God’s non placet to the rebellion and error this world holds so arrogantly.

And yet, that downward thrust is also open in love as seen in the outward arms of cross, the outstretched arms of Christ. At the very center of the cross where anger and love unite is the heart of Christ.

Yes, love and anger are closer than we moderns will often admit or fathom. Love says there are certain things worth fighting for and being angry about. But its anger is not egocentric, it is other-centric, focused on God, the truth and the dignity of those who are meant to walk in truth. Ahlquist says, in loving our enemies, we want to convert them so they are not our enemies anymore. Ultimately, we want to get our enemies to join our side.

And thus, some things are worth fighting for and about. Ahlquist continues:

No sane man has ever held, that war is a good thing….But the… occasion may arise when it is better for a man to fight than to surrender….War is not the direst calamity that can befall a people. There is one worse state, at least: the state of slavery.

While a good peace is better than a good war, even a good war is better than a bad peace.

[And thus the] Church on earth is called the Church Militant. War is a metaphor, and it would not work as a metaphor if it were not a reality, a reality that we have to live with.

This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce.”

And that last line is a very telling description of the modern age: a miserable truce. Everyone is walking on eggs, afraid to offend and suppressing the truth on account of this fear. And thus our anger gets suppressed, renamed, and turned inward. Some has said that the definition of depression is “anger turned inward.” Not a bad diagnosis of a time like this when vast percentages of us are on anti-depressants and other psychotropic medicines to manage the “miserable truce” that is the false peace of these times; a peace rooted not in truth, but in the compelled silence of PC, euphemisms and thinly veiled politeness.

Perhaps too that is why such ugliness erupts from time to time, especially in more anonymous settings like blog com-boxes where we, who have forgotten how to have a good argument in person, or how to manage and appreciate our anger in normal ways, act so ugly and engage in sometimes savage and unkind personal attacks.

This sort or anger, often evident in political settings as well, is not about truth or love, it is about scoring, it is about winning with little regard to truth or love. But the Church militant without love is not the Church.

At the end of the day, though, anger has its place in the context of love, and decent fights are necessary for those who love. Without a proper appreciation for these, we end up with the gray fog of a “miserable truce” that is the modern West.

Lessons from France on the Myths of Same-Sex Marriage - by Robert Oscar Lopez

In The Public Discourse

If the recent French mobilizations against same-sex marriage have taught us anything, it’s this: The LGBT lobby has misrepresented its cause’s relationship to time and history. Illinois Democrat Greg Harris stated in a National Public Radio piece what the lobby has been claiming for years:

Folks know this will be a vote that history will remember . . . And I think a lot of folks are deciding they’re going to want to be remembered on the right side of history.

The proponents of same-sex marriage like polls. A Gallup poll published in mid-May showed public support for their cause rising from 27 percent in 1996 to 53 percent this year. Pew’s survey data reflect a more modest rise, from 35 percent in 2001 to 49 percent in 2013, but the upward march is still clear. In April 2013, the Williams Institute published a state-by-state analysis that reflected a steady growth in the number of states, such as New York, in which more than 50 percent of respondents supported same-sex marriage.

Less often mentioned are certain caveats in all these polls. For instance, in Gallup’s poll respondents were asked to choose between supporting or opposing same-sex marriage, without being offered a third option such as civil unions. The data from the Williams Institute show that liberal California is still only at 50 percent for same-sex marriage, perhaps because the state has domestic partnerships already. Minnesota residents only supported same-sex marriage by 43 percent, despite their popular vote to reject a constitutional ban in 2012 and despite the legislature’s hurried process of legalizing it in the state.

Nevertheless, two assumptions have determined the way pundits have interpreted these data.

One assumption is that the increase in support will be consistent over time rather than fickle. We can name this the Inevitability Assumption, a quasi-Marxian or at least Hegelian view that History is beckoning in one direction and there will be no turning back.

The second assumption is that more people accept same-sex marriage because they have more reliable information about what it entails. This is the Enlightenment Assumption, the notion that there is a transcendental benevolence in same-sex marriage, which can rely on the good and the true, if not the beautiful, to be vindicated by the diffusion of knowledge.

A recent piece in the Los Angeles Times offers a digestible version of the Enlightenment Assumption: “Knowing a gay person is a key factor in rising support of gay marriage.” The example of Ohio Senator Rob Portman is Exhibit A for this line of reasoning: All Portman had to do was put a face on the issue, in the form of his gay son’s visage, to be persuaded to the cause.

If we combine the Inevitability Assumption and the Enlightenment Assumption, the resulting concoction is the message that predominates in American propaganda: Gay marriage is on the right side of history because history will take us in only one direction, based on the most fundamental of human goods: knowledge of the truth.

Assumptions and Fallacies

These assumptions are in fact fallacies. More than any other populace, the French have laid them bare with their four massive “manifs” or mobilizations (November 17, January 13, March 24, and May 26).

These four mobilizations are credited as the largest mass uprising in France since the famous revolts of May 1968. As many as 60 percent of French respondents supported same-sex marriage in the fall of 2012, but the level of support now hovers around only 39 percent, with 54 percent supporting “civil unions” only. It is no wonder that the French government has had to shield itself and its LGBT benefactors from outrage with an increasingly totalitarian modus operandi encompassing tear gas and other familiar police-state tactics.

The French resistance to same-sex marriage has demonstrated that an ostensibly progressive nation that had little issue with homosexuality as a moral question can change its mind, not based on ignorance of reality, but based on knowing more about what same-sex marriage really means. 

Sorry, LGBT lobby, the French are sending your soufflé back to the kitchen.

The French had little issue with the PACS, or domestic partnerships, passed in the 1990s. The nation is not a die-hard right-wing country, as we know from the fact that Socialists took over the government in 2012.

Yet millions of French citizens stormed the streets of Paris and dozens of other cities to block same-sex marriage. Despite attempts by the international press to paint the “Manif pour Tous” and the “French Spring” as a band of intolerant Catholic reactionaries, polls show that a comfortable majority of the French people share their view of the same-sex marriage law, even if some within that majority are not eager to join in the street protests.

The drop in support for same-sex marriage came with education and broader public debate. As the French knew more gay people individually and learned more about the ramifications of their legalized marriage on the community at large—especially children and poor communities overseas targeted for adoption and surrogacy—they liked the idea of same-sex marriage less and less.

The text of the law that passed bears the scars of a public backlash. For instance, both insemination rights for lesbian couples and gestational surrogacy rights for gay men had to be scrapped by President François Hollande’s government because of their horrendous unpopularity. (Both insemination and surrogacy are subject to broader bans in France than in the United States.)

Adoption was included in the final bill that went through the French parliament, over the strenuous objections of adoptees of all stripes, ranging from a fifteen-year-old writing in Boulevard Voltaire to Cyril Langelot to Benoît Talleu, an eloquent Franco-Vietnamese teen who addressed 700,000 French marchers on January 13.

Benoît’s adoptive father, Franck Talleu, was inexplicably arrested two and a half months after his son’s famous speech. Police detained him for wearing a sweatshirt with the children’s rights blazon on it. The arrest was widely viewed in France as proof that the Hollande regime had to employ invasive practices to cover up the unpopularity of its pro-LGBT proposals.

While same-sex adoption survived massive protests, its chances are going to be rather slim because of the long waiting list of heterosexual couples looking to adopt. Since France’s public controversy, now Russia has refused to authorize any more adoptions into the country and India has blocked surrogacy by same-sex couples. It will be more difficult for same-sex couples to mask their purchase of babies through surrogates abroad as international adoption.

The French attorney general Christiane Taubira tried to skirt the French ban on surrogacy with a memo allowing the government to treat overseas babies conceived by surrogate mothers as adoptees eligible for citizenship. Instead of quiet acquiescence to this sleight, she sparked mass protests against the merchandizing of women’s wombs. The shocking turn in the Washington Post, with an unprecedented column criticizing surrogacy by Kathleen Parker, might be evidence that the French street revolution set off a chain reaction that eventually brought even a super gay-friendly American publication like the Post to face the grim business behind same-sex parenting.

The French government’s attempts to scrub these controversial aspects of the same-sex marriage bill quietly didn’t work. As the public contemplated the problems with sperm banking and surrogacy, they grew increasingly suspicious of everything the LGBT lobby was promoting about its “families.” This happened despite all the assurances from Hollande’s ministers that the marriage bill would not lead to a boost in artificial reproductive technology.

Fallacy #1: The Inevitability Assumption

France proves that no opinion trend on any graph can be taken for granted as perpetual. In the United States we knew this already; we simply weren’t aware that we knew it. We know from the abortion debate that what seems like a steady march of acceptance can actually grind to a halt or reverse.

The Gallup polls on abortion show how unpredictable the trends in opinion can be, for the number of “pro-choice” Americans peaked in 1996 at 56 percent, then declined to 45 percent today, while pro-life opinion gained significant ground, albeit in fits and starts (only 33 percent of Americans were pro-life in 1996, compared to 48 percent today).

If we take a step back and examine how the international LGBT lobby has fought for same-sex marriage, we see that the lobby’s leaders must be equally aware that nothing is inevitable about acceptance of same-sex marriage, regardless of what they say publicly. Rather than patience, haste has characterized their tactics.

It would not be necessary to push the case for same-sex marriage so fervently in the Supreme Court if the electoral victories in Maine, Washington, and Maryland were truly confidence-inspiring signs of the movement’s inexorable march toward mass public approval. Nor would it have been necessary for the lobby to rush same-sex marriage through the Minnesota legislature when polls showed that fewer than 45 percent of the state’s voters really wanted to redefine marriage.

In France, the same sense of haste was also evident. Debate was noticeably cut short by the government. During the hearings leading up to the introduction of the bill in Parliament, only religious groups were invited to express objections. On February 15, 2013, when 700,000 petitions were presented to the nation’s Economic, Social and Environmental Committee (CESE) asking for full research into the impacts of the same-sex marriage bill, the French government committed a possibly unconstitutional act and deemed the petitions “unacceptable.”

The process of passing the law also quickened. The vote in the Senate was held ahead of schedule and only conducted with a show of hands, so that it was impossible to record which parliamentarians voted for the law and which voted against it.

Fallacy #2: The Enlightenment Assumption

Rather than maximize people’s access to information about the impact of same-sex parenting, the lobby has sought to suppress journalistic and academic investigations into areas such as surrogacy, which give people pause with time and reflection. While it is impossible to know the inner thoughts of people running advocacy groups, it is reasonable to conclude that they opt to force same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting through the legislatures and courts at lightning speed, before people have the chance to stop and think about what they are signing up for. (The recent examples of California and Illinois are telling; in both states the large number of people who have gay friends did not lead to easy passage of same-sex marriage, but rather may have triggered a backlash resulting in California’s Proposition 8 and the failure of same-sex marriage last week in the Illinois legislature.)

The other myth that the French pitilessly debunked was the myth of the lovable gay lobby. Since I’ve spent almost my whole life immersed in the LGBT community, I’ve known good and bad people who identify as “gay.” But the attacks of LGBT activists against people who disagree with them are matched by their willingness to subvert other people’s interests to their own. The lobby’s mistake was to try to butter up the French with the usual platitudes about love and bullying.

The French are a tough crowd. I learned this when I took to the stage at the March 24 manif and fielded the boos from over a million marchers at the mention of “homophobia.” They weren’t booing me, thank goodness; they were booing the idea of people accusing someone of homophobia for asking obvious questions about the logistics of surrogacy contracts for gay men like Perez Hilton. The crowd cheered me on for most of my six-minute talk. But the moment was educational.

Whereas in the English-speaking world we observe some British conventions of privacy and politeness, it is never a good idea to tell French speakers that some questions are off- limits. They are a blunt people. It’s one thing to get booed by a few hundred people in a gymnasium. It’s completely another to stand below the Arch of Triumph and hear over a million French people boo at the same time. You feel the zeitgeist with much more force. It seems like the buildings, the sky, the trees, and even the birds overhead are groaning at you. This is not a scenario that will allow you to fudge facts.

Hence in France, the average person’s instinct is to ask the questions and draw the comparisons, which Americans consider taboo for the same-sex marriage movement.

They ask: What kind of crazy country wants to erase gender? The answer: Sweden, where mental illness has skyrocketed since the imposition of gender theory in schools.

They ask: Where the heck are lesbians going to find sperm for a baby? The answer: sperm banks, which are coming under fire from the adult children of anonymous sperm donors, including Alana S. Newman, who testified against homosexual fertility subsidies in California. As it turns out, knowing who one’s father is matters more than same-sex parenting peddlers care to acknowledge.

They ask: Isn’t gestational surrogacy a lot like the historical abuses that human beings committed during the times of slavery—buying and selling people, removing children from their heritage, in order to satisfy an adult consumer desire? The answer: Yes, and let’s not forget eugenics and cultural genocide.

During my time in France, shuttling around with Frigide Barjot and other leaders of the marriage movement, I felt transported to an alternate universe. I suppose that is what “French” is—an alternate world crafted through language. It’s a world where truths aren’t bucked and disguised so easily, a world where arguments aren’t ever settled, and claims to a “consensus” invite people to riot. Strangely, the home country of Roland Barthes, author of the famous book Mythologies, is not an easy habitat for political myths like the Inevitability Assumption and the Enlightenment Assumption. France has sneezed—will America catch cold?

O elo mais fraco (2) - por A. Marinho Pinto

In JN

O que se está a passar em Portugal com o debate sobre a coadoção revela a anomia cívica da nossa sociedade e, sobretudo, a degradação a que chegou o nosso regime democrático. Um setor ultraminoritário da sociedade, que age como uma seita, impõe arrogantemente a suas certezas e insulta e escarnece dos que exprimem opiniões diferentes. O fanatismo heterofóbico dos seus prosélitos leva-os a apelidar de "ignorantes", "trogloditas" ou "homens das cavernas" todos os que ousam pôr em causa as suas certezas. 

O que se viu no programa Prós e Contras da RTP, na semana passada, foi a atuação de um grupo bem organizado de pessoas lideradas por um fanático que, no intervalo do programa, subiu ao palco e se dirigiu a mim para me dizer que eu estava a usar no debate os mesmos métodos que os nazis tinham usado contra os judeus (!!!). Esse delírio injurioso foi depois retomado em alguns órgãos de comunicação social, blogues e redes sociais, por outras pessoas imbuídas do mesmo fanatismo e da mesma desonestidade intelectual. Já, em tempos, uma das próceres da seita, a dra. Isabel Moreira, me chamara PIDE, para assim "vingar" a atual ministra da Justiça das críticas certeiras que eu lhe dirigia. 

Afinal, parece que é nazi dizer que o movimento LGBT (lésbicas, gays, bissexuais e transexuais) atua como um lobby que influencia os centros de decisão política devido à preponderância que muitos dos seus elementos têm no Governo, no Parlamento, na Comunicação Social, nas empresas e nos partidos políticos. Sublinhe-se que os partidos de Esquerda aprovaram a lei sobre a coadoção exatamente no momento em que o povo mais preocupado (distraído) está com a austeridade que lhe é imposta pelo Governo e pelo presidente da República. Foi, portanto, assim, à sorrelfa, com a ajuda cirúrgica da Direita, que se aprovou uma lei que ofende a consciência da esmagadora maioria da população.

O que se viu naquele programa da RTP foram exercícios de manipulação, de intolerância e de vitimização por parte dos defensores dessa lei e quem manifestou opiniões contrárias foi sumariamente apelidado de "ignorante" ou então brindado com estridentes risadas de escárnio. Eu próprio fui, no final do programa, veementemente apelidado de ignorante pelo líder da seita e por algumas histéricas seguidoras que o rodeavam. 

O casal de lésbicas que ali foi exibir triunfantemente a gravidez de uma delas e proclamar o seu orgulho por a futura criança ser órfão de pai é bem o exemplo da heterofobia que domina a seita. Que direito tem uma mulher de gerar, deliberadamente, por fanatismo heterofóbico, uma criança duplamente órfã de pai (sem pai e sem nunca poderem vir a saber sequer a identidade dele)? Com que fundamento o Estado se prepara para entregar a essas pessoas crianças que, por tragédias familiares, perderam os seus verdadeiros pais? É para que sejam destruídas (ou impedidas de nascer), no imaginário dessas crianças, todas as representações que elas têm (ou possam fazer) do pai ou da mãe que perderam?

Esse fanatismo mostra bem o que essas pessoas são capazes de fazer em matéria de manipulação genética com fins reprodutivos - como, aliás, uma das lésbicas deixou subtilmente anunciado no Prós e Contras. Mas isso será mais tarde. Para já o que importa é garantir que, em nome da felicidade onanística de alguns adultos, se possam entregar crianças a "casais" em que o lugar e o papel da mãe são desempenhados por um homem e os do pai por uma mulher. Seguidamente, para não discriminar os gays e as lésbicas, substituir-se-ão nos documentos oficiais as palavras "mãe" e "pai" pelo termo "progenitores" tal como já se substituíram as palavras "paternidade" e "maternidade" pela neutra "parentalidade". 

E quando estiver concluído o processo de "engenharia social" em curso, então passar-se-á à engenharia reprodutiva com vista a permitir que duas mulheres possam gerar filhos sem o repugnante contributo de um homem ou então que dois homens o possam fazer também sem a horrorosa participação de uma mulher. Estarão, então, finalmente, corrigidos dois "erros grosseiros" da evolução: o de ter dividido os seres humanos em dois géneros e o de exigir o contributo de ambos para a fecundação e para a criação dos seus filhos.

Arcebispo de Braga critica muito severamente a lei da co-adopção de crianças por homossexuais

In RR 

D. Jorge Ortiga estranha que os defensores desta lei “só agora se lembrem das crianças abandonadas”, quando o mesmo grupo defendeu a lei do aborto “que mata por ano 20 mil crianças”.

O arcebispo de Braga classificou hoje a lei da co-adopção como “o mais recente atentado contra a família na sociedade portuguesa”, considerando que quem a defende apenas quer angariar mais argumentos para justificar o seu “casamento camuflado”.

Para D. Jorge Ortiga, que falava na missa dominical, no Santuário do Sameiro, aquela lei, já aprovada na generalidade, “ofende a dignidade humana das crianças e, por inerência, atenta contra o futuro sociedade portuguesa”.

O prelado acusa o “grupo defensor” daquela lei de querer “aproveitar-se” da fragilidade jurídica das crianças e da “distracção” dos políticos, focados na “salvação” económico-social do país, para “satisfazer os seus caprichos e escrúpulos sectários, de modo a angariar mais argumentos ‘a posteriori’ que justifiquem o seu casamento camuflado”.

“Neste período concreto da história do nosso país, em que atravessamos uma das piores crises económicas de sempre, e os níveis de pobreza, emigração e desemprego atingem números recordes, é interessante notar como este grupo específico se serve deste cenário trágico para, tacitamente, conseguir a aprovação de uma lei que atenta contra a dignidade das crianças”, criticou.

Na homilia da missa dominical, no Santuário do Sameiro, D. Jorge Ortiga considerou ainda “muito estranho” que os defensores da lei da co-adopção “só agora se lembrem das crianças desprotegidas, abandonadas e órfãs, oferecendo-lhes uma ‘bondade humana’ tão hipócrita, quando, outrora no passado, pouco ou anda fizeram por elas”.

“E, como se isso não bastasse, ainda há bem pouco este mesmo grupo defendeu a lei do aborto, essa lei que mata por ano 20 mil crianças no nosso país”, acrescentou.

Lembrou que “a adopção existe para proteger o superior interesse da criança e não o interesse dos pais que querem adoptar”.

Sublinhou que a criança “tem direito a ter um pai e uma mãe, o direito a conhecer a identidade do seu pai e da sua mãe biológicos e o direito a ser educado num ambiente familiar sadio, que lhe proporcione uma formação integral da sua personalidade, algo que só a família natural (homem e mulher) lhe pode oferecer”.

“Será que os deputados, que se recusam a diminuir o número de membros da Assembleia da República e que ainda há bem pouco tempo ignoraram as 92 mil assinaturas a pedir um referendo sobre a legalidade do casamento defendido por este grupo, irão novamente aprovar uma lei que ofende a dignidade humana das crianças e, por inerência, atenta contra o futuro sociedade portuguesa?”, questionou.

O Arcebispo Primaz formulou votos para que os deputados, “num assunto tão delicado, superem a ideologia partidária e ouçam verdadeiramente o querer dos portugueses, que os elegeram”.

O parlamento aprovou a 17 de Maio (com 99 votos a favor, 94 contra e nove abstenções), na generalidade, um projecto de lei do PS para que os homossexuais possam co-adoptar os filhos adoptivos ou biológicos da pessoa com quem estão casados ou com quem vivem em união de facto.

Contudo, há dúvidas sobre se a lei chegará sequer a ser discutida na especialidade, uma vez que o calendário poderá não permitir que o processo se conclua a tempo do fim da sessão legislativa.  

"What is Marriage?: Man and Woman, a Defense" Part 3/3 - by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George

"What is Marriage?: Man and Woman, A Defense" Part 2/3 - by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George

"What is Marriage?: Man and Woman, A Defense" Part 1/3 - by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George