No one goes to court to force Catholic priests to marry divorcees, or Anglicans to do so without going through the required procedures, or Orthodox rabbis to perform mixed marriages, or what have you.
But the limitlessly funded homosexualist lobby, by far the most powerful in the country, is an entirely different matter. It certainly will pursue clergy all the way to financial ruin, to prison, to nervous breakdown, to suicide, to whatever you care to mention, for having had the temerity to do anything other than spontaneously acknowledge the self-evident rightness of whatever that lobby might happen to have demanded.
And it can.
And David Cameron thinks for some reason that the Gaystapo will play nice.
ReplyDeleteThey will with him, of course.
ReplyDeleteOf whom are they really representative? Where is the clamour for this? The homosexually inclined probably divide between those who are satisfied with civil partnerships and those who don't do monogamy.
Cameron is deliberately picking a fight in order to define himself against the opponents of this change, whom he envisaged as in or around his own party. I don't think that he quite expected the lead to come from the Catholics, among whom Tories are a distinct minority in England or Wales and almost unheard of in Scotland. Shows how little he knows.
Muslims, people who go to the black churches, the Catholics in all those marginal seats in the North West and the West Midlands, Cameron must have some sort of electoral death wish. Not even in Brighton do the gays decide elections, local or parliamentary.
ReplyDeleteThen again, how well were the Tories ever going to do among Pakistanis, Bengalis, West Indians, West Africans, or the Irish-descended Scousers, Mancs and Brummies? A chance to reconnect with the core vote. As you might put it: Ed Miliband, over to you.
Anonymous has a point. The Tories never got on with ethnic minorities, who are more conservative than most white British people.
ReplyDeleteWe all need to face the reality that gay marriage is part of Britain's covert anti-natalist population policy, along with abortion and favouring unwed mothers over married mothers in the benefit and tax system.
That's the only real reason that gay marriage has suddenly been promoted and will be steamrolled through by the government. Labour would have done the same. All parties have subscribed to cover population policy since 1967. Read Ann Farmer, 'By their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign'. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2008.
Ann is a signatory to the Lanchester Declaration, and a contributor to a forthcoming edited volume of mine. A review of her books will appear in my next monograph.
ReplyDeleteLimitlessly funded? By whom or what? (no, I am not trolling; I really would like to know, and so would a lot of other people.)
ReplyDeleteWouldn't we all? But it is quite obviously the case. Stonewall clearly has access to resources beyond the wildest dreams of most lobbyists. When, exactly, did Peter Tatchell last have a proper job? And so on.
ReplyDeleteA few points to note - as David points out, no-one will be forcing Roman Catholic or Anglican clergy to do anything they don't want to - this legislation applies solely to civil ceremonies in secular buildings. But why should the two Churches above prevent those faiths and demoninations - Liberal Judaism and the United Reformed Church, for example - from marrying their gay brothers and sisters? My father's house has many rooms...
ReplyDelete"Where is the clamour for this?", David asks. Why withold rights from people who want them? Different but equal? We know that that really leads to second class citizens as the experience in the US teaches us. And here's a thing - it's not just gay people who want the right to marry, many heterosexual people want their gay friends and relatives to have the same rights as them as well.
Ultimately, it's all about the love of two people and their public display and commitment of that - something most grown ups can appreciate.
And of course it's not anti-natalist - it won't make more people gay, people who are going to have babies are going to have babies. People who aren't, won't.
Time to stop being less pharisee like and more accepting and loving of the people we share our life and lives with.