What Religious Liberty?
The Incredible Ever-Expanding Dead End
Anti-Cure, Anti-Life
Whose Values in
Education?
Toppling
Dominos
Anti-Christians
don't have to be Hypocrites but Many Volunteer
Intolerant Tolerance
The Emperor's
Clothes or a Cheap Tuxedo
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part I
The Myth of
Hitler's Pope, Part II
Embryonic
Stem Cell Research Again
The Madness of
Secularism
"Don't Impose Your
Religion on Me"
Dictatorship of Relativism
Two Babies at Christmas
Living Will or Death
Warrant?
Court Ordered
Slow Motion Torture-Death Sentence
Men in Black
A Lot of Hot Air
The Culture War
Battles
"Stay with us, Lord"
Secular-to-English Dictionary
Moral Guidance for
Catholics in this Election
Christians
Losing America
Stem Cell Wars
Catholic
Pro-Abortion Politicians and Communion
Useful Idiots
Who Killed Jesus?
A Primer on Gay
Marriage
Whose Side are You
on?
Vouchers Revisited
Real and Fake
Cloning Bans
Broken Compasses
No Room in the Inn
Killing Fields
Revisited
Gay but not Merry
Adam and Steve?
The Battle for the Court
Victimless Crimes
More Salt, Please
The Next Big Fight
When Religion
Becomes Evil
Virginity Making a Comeback?
You've Come a Long Way,
Baby
The Incarnational
Approach
The Many Meanings of ACLU
Things Your Media Never Told
You
A Nasty Little Secret
Two Points of View on the Birth of Jesus
You Gotta Kill Them. How Else
Are They Going To Learn?
Perplexing Christmas Questions
How Do You See Christ Today?
Now that there is Another Ewe, will there be
Another You?
What is Conscience Anyhow?
Divorce of Love and Life
What Counts as a Mass?
What is a Covenant?
I Wish I had Your Faith
Are there Too Many Decrees of
Nullity?
Dutch Treats
Ecumenism
Going from Baby Doe to Granny Doe
Comments of Evangelium Vitae
The Exception Corrupts the Rule
Good Morality or
Good Medicine
Generation-X'ers Smart in Every Way But
One
A Matter of Good Breeding
Herod and Pontius Pilate at the
Polls
Hitler's Pope or Righteous Gentile?
The Unknown God
What exactly is wrong with
homosexuality?
Ideology Trumps Science, Reality,
and Common Sense
What Exactly is an Indulgence?
Infallibility and Error in the Church
Pilate Asked, "What is Truth?"
The Truth about Families
New Killing Fields
Choice of Language and Language of
Choice
A Lexicon for Our Day
Why are there so many bodies?
Marijuana, Medicine or Menace?
Medical Research and Ethics
Meditation
"You Taught me well,
Mommie dearest"
Moral Fallout
Neutral on the Wrong
Side
"These are the
Nineties After All"
Many are Wed but Few
are Married
"...Prepare him for
additional obligations"
A Useful Lie
A Partridge in a
Pear Tree
Religious Persecution in
the U.S.?
What Makes a Person a
Person?
The Point of a Point of
View
Politically Correct,
Morally Depraved
Population
Controllers out of Control
Practical Dreamers
Social Progress
through Immorality
Shall we Do Evil for
Goodness Sake?
Reason and Faith
Resurrection Glory
Same Sex Marriages?
Pearl of Great Price
"I used to be
schizophrenic, but we're all right now"
Sexual Morality
Irrelevant in Judging Public Officials?
Undesirable Side Effects
Some News is Good News
SOSSLQ's, not POSSLQ's
Spoils of Splits
Why Attend Mass
Every Sunday?
Is it All Right to Pull
the Plug?
An Appeal for Intolerance
Topics Catechetical
A Voting Catechism
A Moral Guide to
Voting
Vouchers: Has Their Time Come?
What Child is This?
What did they die of?
You are the Man
You may be a liberal
if...
Get Rid of that Worthless
Relative
Planned Un-Parenthood
Weighing Pro-Life Issues
Prior to Voting
|
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by Monsignor James C. Brunner |
Faith Points |
The Next Big Fight
The US Supreme Court will decide by next June the constitutionality of the Texas law forbidding sodomy. You may react to this with a big yawn but if you study the matter more deeply you might awake from your slumber.
This is being presented as a second civil-rights movement. Homosexual activists argue (without any evidence that qualifies as science) that their sexual orientation is a genetic inheritance, like race, and thus they deserve the same kind of civil protections that the nation has extended to blacks. They maintain that their orientation is an inborn, unchangeable fact, and should not receive moral disapproval. This portends normalization of homosexuality throughout the culture, including a strong push for homosexual marriage, open gays in the military, open gays as Boy Scout leaders and school teachers. Disapproval of homosexual behavior will be labeled prejudice that in the past has led to lynchings, church burnings, and the Holocaust. You would be attacking what God made instead of their filthy activity. If the Court declares Texas sodomy statutes unconstitutional the decision will be used as a bomb to destroy any law that does not treat homosexuality on an equal basis with heterosexuality.
The Court could grant homosexuals their own “Roe v. Wade” decision, a constitutional guarantee that could (a) undermine scores of laws governing the traditional family, (b) affect education, (c) curtail free speech rights, and (d) enhance the spread of sexually-transmitted disease.
A favorable decision would jeopardize if not overturn laws that have a definition of marriage embedded in them from tax laws to custody laws. It could weaken if not wipe out the Defense of Marriage Act, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” laws, and laws that prevent adoption of children by homosexual couples. Due to the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause same-sex behavior would be entitled to the same legal rights as heterosexual behavior. It could impact on laws governing tax, inheritance, insurance, immigration, and any other laws that recognize marriage as a special relationship. The state could not make laws that reserve sex for marriage and it would undermine laws against prostitution, incest, and even age-of-consent laws. In the UK the homosexual lobby is pushing for elimination of all sexual laws. “Since recreational sex is a natural activity and popular pursuit, all laws which seek to control it should be abolished.” The activists are consistent at least on one point: if recreational sex is morally acceptable there should be no laws against it. Persons who attempt to justify recreational sex in contraception and in other practices should be aware of the implications of approving these things.
A great many studies show that children do best when they live with a mother and father. Why should the government give legal recognition to homosexual unions that by definition cannot furnish a father and mother? Giving recognition to gay unions could undermine the family unit.
A favorable decision could affect education profoundly. Already proponents of the gay agenda have developed curricular material designed to win acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle. But they want more than that. They want to eliminate heterosexism which they define as the “institutionalized assumption that everyone is, or should be, heterosexual, and that heterosexuality is inherently superior to, and preferable to, homosexuality.” Public school teachers enthusiastically promote teaching of homosexuality even as many of them fail to produce minimally literate and numerate graduates. Under the pretext of keeping homosexual students safe homosexual activists are allowed to write and distribute curriculum promoting a gay ideology while denying the same right to pro-lifers and religionists to promote their ideology.
This advocacy of homosexuality is already undermining the rights of parents in education. A new California state law requires teaching all K-12 students “to appreciate various sexual orientations.” The Novato Unified School District in California has authorized pro-homosexual assemblies without prior notice or parental consent. The Los Angeles Unified School District has sexually explicit instructional materials for use in “diversity” and “safety” programs for elementary through high school students, which include instructions on homosexual sodomy and a glorified account of lesbian pedophilia. At Santa Rosa High School invited homosexual activists “talked about using cellophane during group sex and said that ‘clear is best because you can see what you want to lick.’” At Hale Middle School in Los Angeles during an AIDS education course “12-year olds were presented graphic descriptions of anal sex and tips on how to dispose of used condoms so parents don’t find out.”
A nationally conducted Zogby International poll of parents found that 71% of them opposed sex education programs that teach that homosexual love relationships are comparable to heterosexual relationships. No compulsory system of public education should be allowed to teach a worldview that the majority of taxpayers who fund it cannot support. Here is another instance among many in which the so-called neutrality of public schools is shown to be a cruel hoax.
A favorable decision might construe citing the condemnation of homosexuality in the Bible as hate speech. That is how the Los Angeles City Council has identified a program to change homosexual orientation. There are already under consideration restrictions to criticisms of homosexuality in Sweden. These would even prohibit preachers from condemning homosexuality from the pulpit. Sweden is so liberal that it would prohibit the practice of freedom of speech and religion. Liberals have no problems with contradictions of this sort. A Canadian citizen was fined $6,000 for inserting an advertisement in a newspaper quoting Leviticus 18:22 which labels homosexuality as an abomination. A European Christian channel was fined $32,000 by Britain’s Independent Television Commission for a similar offense.
A favorable decision could promote the spread of AIDS. A Harvard Medical School study of 4,000 high school students found that “gay-lesbian-bisexual youth report disproportionate risk for a variety of health risk and problem behaviors, engaging in twice the mean number of risk behaviors as did the overall population. Nearly two-thirds (63%) of all AIDS cases result from homosexual contact. Homosexuals have 50% of all syphilis cases even though they are only 1% of the population. The average age of homosexuals dying with AIDS is 39. The average age of homosexuals who die from other causes is 41. Only 50% of homosexuals live to age 65 as compared to 78% of heterosexual males who live to 65 or older. American Family Association president Gary Glenn wrote, “Individuals who choose to engage in homosexual behavior put themselves at dramatically higher risk of domestic violence, mental illness, life-threatening diseases such as AIDS, cancer, and hepatitis, and premature death by up to 20 years.” Homosexuality is not so much an alternate lifestyle as it is an alternate deathstyle.
The spread of the AIDS virus is a threat to national security, says CIA chief George Tenet. He told a Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “The national security dimension of the virus is plain: it can undermine economic growth, exacerbate social tensions, diminish military preparedness, create huge social welfare costs, and further weaken already beleaguered states.” Any law or teaching that homosexual behavior is normal, positive, or harmless is not only negligent but reckless.
Depending on the Supreme Court’s ruling the legal fights in this area will be numerous and huge.
(Printed May, 2003)
