Today, we learn that Ireland has voted to legalize gay marriage. A Catholic Church spokesman said something very intelligent.
If the measure is passed, Catholic churches will continue to decide for themselves whether to solemnise a marriage.
The leader of the Catholic Church in Ireland, Eamon Martin, has said the church may look at whether it continues to perform the civil side of solemnisation if the change comes in.
I think this is where all this is going. The alternative is to see the Church attacked for the tax exemption, which may happen anyway. Many mainline Protestant churches are seeing membership collapse as the clergy swings far left and gets into the gay lifestyle.
There is also a very good essay at Ace of Spades today.
First, a jeweler in Canada makes rings for a lesbian wedding, then, after the lesbians find out he doesn’t approve for religious reasons, he is attacked.
Nicole White and Pam Renouf were looking for engagement rings a few months ago and eventually landed at Today’s Jewellers in Mount Pearl where the couple said they were given excellent service and great price for their rings.
“They were great to work with. They seemed to have no issues. They knew the two of us were a same-sex couple,” Ms. White told Canada’s CBC news. “I referred some of my friends to them, just because I did get good customer service and they had good prices.”
BUT…
A friend of the couple went in to the store to purchase a ring for his girlfriend and saw a poster that read “The sanctity of marriage is under attack. Let’s keep marriage between a man and a woman,” CBC reported May 16.
The friend took a photo of the poster and sent it to Ms. White, who said she had no idea about the poster until that point.
“It was really upsetting. Really sad, because we already had money down on [the rings], and they’re displaying how much they are against gays, and how they think marriage should be between a man and a woman,” Ms. White said, CBC reported.
Horrors !
They demanded their money back. After much pressure, they got it and the Jeweler paid for his beliefs. So much for “equality.”
Ace goes on…
Fundamental Concepts – Born on Third Base
None of these ideas trumpeted by the Left are new. They have all been tried before, and we know the result. Socialism does not lead to an egalitarian society, it produces a stratified one, with a little pocket of wealth and a whole lot of serfs. Jettisoning the rule of law for the rule of man doesn’t result in prosperity, it results in poverty. Silencing freedom of speech creates intellectual stagnation. Forcing people to deny reality in favor of mandated, government approved “facts” gives a dysfunctional, paranoid population incapable of functioning as a greater whole.
The Soviet Union should have been enough example of how Socialism doesn’t work. It is all about power. Some people prefer money, some power and some go into politics to get both (like the Clintons).
Nobody cares. This third base on which we find ourselves, this brilliant, shining city on a hill, why, of course it’s the natural order of things. Things have been like this for their entire lives, there’s no way life could be any different. Freedom and prosperity weren’t created, they aren’t the result of generations, no, millennia of human trial, effort, thought and debate, they just are.
You and I know that that’s not the case, and the inability of many on the left to recognize this is one of the things that is so frustrating when interacting with Progs. Their flat out denial that it’s true is one of the few things that fill me with a full-blown rage. The really sad thing is that by the historical evolution of current society, if they are successful they will find themselves in a world antithetical to their own best interests. Here’s an example.
The lesbian ring story fits here. Those lesbians have no concept that anything could be different.
Instead, today, they walk into a shop, order a pair of custom rings for their “wedding”, are treated with courtesy and respect, and go on about their business. Equality is here. They made it. That’s not even third base, that’s home plate.
But that’s not good enough, these people think they are still in the batter’s box, desperately dodging chin music from a homophobic pitcher, so, since the jeweler personally believes in traditional marriage, he must be destroyed. So what happens, if, having achieved an objective, having convinced society at large of the rightness of their cause, a group keeps pushing further, demanding not just equal treatment, but preferential?
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, something is happening. Leftists are not very interested in history or foreign affairs. They assume that what exists has always existed and that things can only get better.
if western society has been so weakened by constant attacks on its founding principles that it recoils from those principles and allows the demanding minority to get its way in the name of fairness or in fear of being called homophobic, then that society is ripe for takeover by a society more confident in its own founding principles. That’s what is happening in Europe, the confident interloper is Islam, and I really don’t think it all ends well for the gays.
Europe is having trouble understanding what is headed their way.
ISIS is sending the ‘prettiest virgins’ they capture to slave markets in the Syrian city of Raqqa, where they are sold as sexual objects to the highest bidder, the United Nation’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict has said.
After the depraved militants attack their villages, they strip the girls naked, conduct virginity tests, evaluate their bodies and send them to twisted auctions, Zainab Bangura claims.
She discovered the gruesome extent of Islamic State’s sexual crimes against young women – particularly from Iraq’s Yazidi minority community – after collecting information from Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.
Meanwhile gay marriage advocates attack traditional Christians.
Hugh Hewitt has a worthwhile post on this.
Advice to graduates: Don’t take our way of life for granted
Tags: al qeada, gay marriage, Islam, politics, terrorism
Noted elsewhere that this is all a “holier than thou” death spiral from the Left. It reminds me of the last days of Nazi Germany where the Gestapo was interrogating Guderian, then head of the armed forces, for two days over the plot on Hitler while the Red Army was closing in.