The Law Is Eroding Our Right To A Set Of Beliefs

Published by The Telegraph UK on 18 January 2011.

Telegraph View: The right to act in keeping with one's religious faith is being set against the right not to be offended – and is losing.

The owners of a Cornish hotel who refused to allow two homosexual men to take a double room were judged at Bristol county court yesterday to have acted unlawfully. Peter and Hazelmary Bull argued that, as Christians, they did not believe unmarried couples, whatever their sexual orientation, should share a room at their hotel. They said it was a policy they had operated since opening their doors for business 25 years ago. Indeed, their hotel website describes their hotel as "family-run for families" – which prompts us to ask why the couple, Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy, should have wanted to stay there in the first place. They had an absolute legal right to do so, of course, and no one could possibly condone a refusal to give them a room on the grounds of their sexuality. The Bulls said they based their refusal on their "married couples only" rule, a fine point given that the two men are civil partners.

Judge Andrew Rutherford, awarding Mr Hall and Mr Preddy £3,600 damages, told the Bulls that their views were out of date and added: "It is inevitable that laws will, from time to time, cut across the deeply held beliefs of individuals and sections of society." It should surprise no one that the Bulls received such short shrift from the courts and that their strongly held religious convictions should count for so little. Last year, Gary McFarlane, a Christian sex therapist, was sacked by Relate, the relationship charity, because he refused to counsel a homosexual couple. His case was taken up by Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, who said Christians are being persecuted because a strongly held conviction that homosexuality is wrong is being superseded by laws outlawing discrimination on grounds of sexual discrimination. The McFarlane case went to the Appeal Court, which found against him. In a similar case, a registrar who refused to conduct civil partnerships because they were against her religious beliefs was sacked. In both cases, the aggrieved parties could have gone elsewhere to be counselled or married, just as Messrs Hall and Preddy could have found a different hotel.

The right to hold religious beliefs, and to act in keeping with one's faith, is being set against the right not to be offended – and is losing. This is a dispiriting trend in a free society. The views of the Bulls will seem to many to be old-fashioned, even distasteful – but they have every right to hold them. A pervasive climate of political correctness, however, is driving such beliefs to the margins; the law is out of kilter. It no longer protects the freedom of the believer in the way that it defends the interests of those who consider themselves discriminated against. As we have argued before, this is an unhealthy imbalance that needs to be redressed – if not by the courts, then by Parliament.

A Father's Love Should Be For Life

Published by The Telegraph on 20 January 2011.

The law should reflect that parenthood is not just a woman's job, says Allison Pearson.

Keith Macdonald is called Britain’s Most Feckless Father. Admittedly, competition for that title is fierce, but Keith established a comfortable lead on Monday night when BBC1’s Panorama asked him to name his children. Tall, wan and sepulchral as a Dickensian undertaker, Keith was hesitant at first, trying to recall the eight children by eight different women that his 25-year-old loins had spawned. He managed the first six names, but then, with two children still to go, he got stuck, shrugged, took a stab at the seventh before finally admitting defeat...

Giving life to eight blameless babies who will never know a father’s love and care, appears to be acceptable, but using a condom is repugnant. Welcome to 2011: post-morality and stigma-free. One in eight children under five will never meet the man who donated half their genes. Seventy per cent of young offenders were raised in a lone-parent home. It’s an anguished statistic. “I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father’s protection,” said Sigmund Freud...

What takes your breath away is not just the social and ethical carnage that the change has wrought, but the speed with which it happened. As the Labour MP Frank Field says: “We’re the first generation in recorded history where society has not made the man who begets a child responsible for that child.”...

Frank Field, who has taken on the role of ''poverty tsar’’ for the Coalition, has suggested schools should start giving parenting lessons. I would go further. Boys need to be taught that fathers are not just sperm donors, they have an irreplaceable protective role to play in their children’s lives. Girls need to be taught that treating the father of your baby as if he’s a turkey baster with a benefits cheque attached is as damaging as it’s cruel...

Read more here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/allison-pearson/8270249/A-fathers-love-should-be-for-life.html

Celebrating the thoughts & vision of Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra

Greetings from IDEAS,

On behalf of the President of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), I would like to invite you to a public forum celebrating the thoughts and visions of Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra, in conjunction with celebrating Almarhum Tunku's birthday and the first anniversary of IDEAS.

Almarhum Tunku's family members will also grace the event with their attendance.

This event will include a presentation on IDEAS' achievements in 2010 and a panel discussion. Tentatively, we expect to debate Malaysia's economic reform programme, particularly the NEM and ETP, vis a vis the vision of Bapa Malaysia and the issues around how Malays and Bumiputeras will be affected by the changes. The attached document provides background for the discussion.

The details are as follows:

Date: 8th of February 2011 (Tuesday)

Time: 10am-12pm (Doors open for registration from 9.30am)

Venue: The Auditorium, Memorial Tunku Abdul Rahman Putra, Jalan Dato' Onn, Kuala Lumpur (map: http://bit.ly/hJxbhO)

Dress Code: Smart Casual

Light lunch will be served.

Kindly RSVP to aizuddin@ideas.org.my & admin@ideas.org.my by Thursday the 27th of January 2011, confirming the number of guests that will be attending with you. As this event is free and open to the public, we would be grateful if you could pass this invitation to others in your network.

Please do not hesitate to contact us should you have any queries regarding the event.

Regards,

Programme Officer
Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS)
K3 Taman Tunku, Bukit Tunku,
50480 Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Tel: +60 3 6201 6334
Fax: +60 3 6201 5334
Mobile: +6013 299 8334
Web: www.ideas.org.my

What the Military Must Learn from the Church

Published by National Catholic Register on 23 December 2010. By Tim Drake.

In Michael Rose’s 2002 book Goodbye! Good Men: How Catholic Seminaries Turned Away Two Generations of Vocations From the Priesthood, he explores the Church’s own period of openly accepting homosexual seminary candidates. Many seminaries celebrated the intimacies of homosexual relations, which are directly opposed to true “brotherhood.”

Rose describes the “lavenderization” of seminaries such as Chicago’s Mundelein Seminary and the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, and the homosexual culture present there even into the 1990s.

It is this culture that gave rise to the ordination of homosexuals who later went on to become serial abusers, men like Daniel McCormack, who reportedly had engaged in homosexual relations prior to and during his time at Mundelein. After his ordination, Father Daniel McCormack molested at least 23 boys.

The connection between homosexuality and abuse was clearly demonstrated in 2004’s The Nature and Scope of the Problem of Sexual Abuse of Minors by Catholic Priests and Deacons in the United States, otherwise known as the John Jay Report, which was conducted by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and commissioned by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.

According to the John Jay Report, 81% of the victims of clerical sexual abuse were males, the majority of whom were between the ages of 11-17.

Dr. Paul McHugh, former psychiatrist in chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, has said that the report shows that the Catholic abuse crisis was “homosexual predation on American Catholic youth.”

Psychiatrist Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons has echoed that.

“The John Jay report has revealed clearly that the crisis in the Church is not one of pedophilia but of homosexuality. The primary victims have not been children but adolescent males. Fitzgibbons told Catholic News Agency that “every priest whom I treated who was involved with children sexually had previously been involved in adult homosexual relationships.”

It has always been the policy of the Church not to accept homosexuals as priests. For three decades that policy was egregiously disregarded. Following the sexual abuse crisis in the Church, and the results of the John Jay Report, the Church reaffirmed its policy in the 2005 statement, “Instruction Concerning the Criteria for the Discernment of Vocations with Regard to Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of their Admission to the Seminary and to Holy Orders.”

That statement indicated that “the Church…cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so-called ‘gay culture.’” Furthermore, the statement went on, “Such persons, in fact, find themselves in a situation that gravely hinders them from relating correctly to men and women.”

In an accompanying Vatican commentary on the statement, Monsignor Tony Anatrella argued that theologically, homosexual priests cannot effectively incarnate either the “spousal bond” between God and the Church, or “spiritual paternity.”

“He must, in principle, be suitable for marriage and able to exercise fatherhood over his children,” wrote Monsignor Anatrella. Because the priest acts in the “person of Christ,” Anatrella said that the Church calls only “men mature in their masculine identity.”

“The Church has the right to refuse holy orders to those who do not have the requested attitudes or who, in one way or another, are not in harmony with the teaching it has received from its divine master,” he added, saying that the homosexual tendency was actually a “counterindication to the call to holy orders.”

Homosexual relationships caused a deep fracture in the priestly male fraternity. Pseudo-intimacy and intrigue replaced the outward looking evangelization of apostolic brotherhood. Bishops were unwilling to discipline the abusive priests under their charge. The Communio became divided. Religious leaders hid their own homosexual proclivities. The worst priests desacralized the liturgy and their vows and their priestly identity, while good priests often became isolated, fearful, and rigid. All priests were maimed.

What will be the result once the military has been compromised by disordered love? What will happen when an 18-year-old recruit finds himself in an unequal power differential with a superior officer who wants something more than push-ups? What’s likely to happen when brotherhood is tested on the field in the midst of battle?

Albert Einstein once said that doing the same thing, yet expecting different results, is the definition of insanity.

Is there some relationship that all of us can understand, which is deeply harmed by eroticization? That relationship, of course, would be the family. This is why the incest taboo is universal. The relationship of brothers in a family is powerful because there’s absolutely a sexual taboo which disallows eroticizing that relationship. Just as incest destroys the family as a body, the eroticization of male-male relationships destroys true brotherhood – the kind of brotherhood that is necessary for group strength and unity.

According to the report of the Pentagon’s Comprehensive Review Working Group, 62% of service members predicted potentially negative effects from the repeal. 67% of U.S. Marine combat forces said that putting homosexuals in their units would hurt their effectiveness in the field. 48% of Marines said that it would hurt their effectiveness in “intense combat situations.”

General James Amos, commandant of the Marines, told reporters that the distraction of having homosexuals in the ranks could cost Marines their lives.

When the loyalty of a brother soldier is corrupted – whether in barracks, cockpits, or foxholes – the strength of a nation’s military is severely compromised.

Disordered love leads to disordered loyalties.

Take, for example, the case of open homosexual, Army specialist Bradley Manning. Asreported by the U.K.’s “The Telegraph,” Manning is the soldier who was demanding “equality on the battlefield,” and spent more than eight months downloading hundreds of thousands of classified documents and cables, which he later leaked to Wikileak.org creator Julian Assang.

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/what-the-military-must-learn-from-the-church