Children and Religious Freedom Lose as “Gay Equality” Wins in Britain

By Peter LaBarbera

TAKE ACTION — Call your U.S. Representative and Senators (202-224-3121) and politely convey your opposition to the new “Hate Crimes” bill that includes “sexual orientation” (HR 254), and ENDA, the “Employment Nondiscrimination Act.” Also, call or write President Bush (202-456-1414) and urge him to veto these two top “gay’-priority bills if they are passed by the Democratic Congress.

If enacted, HR 254 and ENDA would federalize “sexual orientation” law, creating the long-term foundation for widespread anti-religious tyranny in our nation in the name of pro-“gay” tolerance. To see two good ads featuring victims of Pennsylvania’s “hate crimes” law, click on www.stophatecrimesnow.com. Events in Great Britain should warn us about the grave dangers ahead…

Blair: ‘Gay Rights’ trump religious freedom

When homosexual activists and “gay equality” win, Christians and religious freedom lose. So do children who need a mom and a dad, as the world is witnessing again in Great Britain.

Prime Minister Tony Blair unwittingly cut to the nub of how “sexual orientation” laws inevitably destroy religious freedom when he said that Britain’s “gay”-inclusive nondiscrimination laws should not exempt Catholic adoption agencies that refuse, for reasons of faith, to place children in homosexual households:

“There is no place in our society for discrimination. That’s why I support the right of gay couples to apply to adopt like any other couple. And that way there can be no exemptions for faith-based adoption agencies offering public funded services from regulations that prevent discrimination.”

Under Blair’s “compromise,” Catholic adoptions agencies will have 21 months to comply with the “sexual orientation” laws, but some say they would rather close down than violate their religious beliefs, BBC News reports.

Christians are fast becoming second-class citizens in Western nations that have bought into the ideology of homosexuality as a civil right. In Canada and France, legislators recently were fined for publicly criticizing homosexuality. In 2004, pastor Ake Green was jailed for a month for preaching –– in his small church in Borgholm, Sweden –– that homosexual behavior is an egregious yet forgivable sin. And recently, a British couple told how they were denied the chance to adopt because it was determined that their Christian faith might “prejudice” them against a homosexual child put in their care.

Britain’s “gay adoption” travesty parallels that which followed the triumph of homosexual “equality” and legal “same-sex marriage” in Massachusetts. Last year, Catholic Charities of Boston ceased all adoption operations in the state after being told that under Massachusetts’ pro-“gay” nondiscrimination law, only agencies that place children in homosexual-led households would get licensed by the state.

Catholic doctrine states that it is “gravely immoral” to put children in such homes:

As experience has shown, the absence of sexual complementarity in these [homosexual] unions creates obstacles in the normal development of children who would be placed in the care of such persons. They would be deprived of the experience of either fatherhood or motherhood. Allowing children to be adopted by persons living in such unions would actually mean doing violence to these children, in the sense that their condition of dependency would be used to place them in an environment that is not conducive to their full human development. This is gravely immoral and in open contradiction to the principle, recognized also in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, that the best interests of the child, as the weaker and more vulnerable party, are to be the paramount consideration in every case.
Source: Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, “Considerations Regarding Proposals to Give Legal Recognition to Unions between Homosexual Persons”

But “gay rights” tramples religion in post-Christian England, where the government has lately even set out to prosecute “homophobic” speech. It is almost inconceivable that the same country that gave us the rule of law and limited government –– and powerfully gifted Christian preachers like George Whitfield who helped shape America –– now bows down to the homosexual revolution of organized sin masquerading as “civil rights.”

Queer, indeed.

“Breeders” Still Required
Sad as it is, this is a marketing story for the ages: in a few short decades, “gay liberation” activists went from including the notorious “man-boy love” group NAMBLA in their “pride” parades and mocking married couples as “breeders” –– to passing “sexual orientation” laws worldwide that put government officially in the role of defying Nature and Nature’s God, to quote our Declaration of Independence.

But is it progress to empower a legal and cultural revolution that criminalizes the common sense idea that society should put the welfare of children first by favoring natural parenting (mom and dad) over an experimental version (dad and male lover) that models perversion to innocent children in their own home?

Let’s be clear: Nature discriminates against homosexuality. Same-sex arrangements can never be “equal” to the God-ordained institutions of marriage and family. They cannot produce children by themselves. Homosexual partners cannot acquire a child without involving heterosexual procreation in some way.

Yep, those irritating “breeders” come in handy once in a while.

Heterosexual couples and larger society, on the other hand, do not need homosexuality to produce children. All but the most corrupted souls can see the divine purpose in male and female physiology. Men and women were made for each other. Conversely, there is no purpose to same-sex behavior. If you have a beef with that, take it to the Creator, but don’t take it out on the children.

Kids are not guinea pigs in some adult “gay” experiment. They need a mom and dad. The Catholic Church is right. Shame on the British –– and our own Massachusetts –– for boxing churches and charitable religious groups out of the business of providing stable homes for children –– all to satisfy a radical sexual lobby.

Are religious exemptions the answer? Hardly. Already, the Left is circumscribing the definition of exemption to be as narrow as possible: in Illinois, the ACLU argued that it’s OK for a church to fire a homosexual pastor, but not the church janitor who declares that he’s “gay” and proud of it (because the janitor was not “hired to transmit doctrine”).

We simply cannot trust the radically pro-homosexual ACLU to protect our freedoms.

Moreover, religious exemptions put the government in the untenable position of dispensing fundamental (not newfangled) rights to some while denying them to others. If Muslims and Christians are exempted from oppressive “gay” laws, what about secular people who also oppose the homosexual agenda? Do they surrender their freedom of conscience because they don’t go to church?

Zero-sum game
Chai Feldblum, a lesbian professor at Georgetown University (which I thought was “Catholic”), and one of the world’s leading experts/activists on “sexual orientation” law, admits that it is a zero-sum game between protecting religious freedoms and granting rights based on “GLBT” (gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) orientations. Someone wins, and someone loses.

Speaking at a Beckett Fund symposium (click HERE for a PDF of her paper), Feldblum takes pains to acknowledge that religious people will lose their freedom to act on their belief that homosexuality is wrong under “sexual orientation” laws. Nevertheless, she believes that “sexual liberty should win in most cases” to protect “the dignity of gay people.”

In other words, homosexual activists win, and we lose. To affirm a group of people practicing changeable, destructive and sinful behavior, we must trample on the freedoms of moral-minded Americans, even if it means putting children at risk.

I appreciate Chai Feldblum’s sympathy, but it cannot not substitute for the loss of our God-given freedoms. I don’t know about you, but I will not surrender my liberties without a fight.

The late, great Milton Friedman said, “A society that puts equality … ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.” He may have meant that for economics, but the same applies in the social realm.

Homosexual activists and their straight liberal allies value their revolutionary quest for sexual egalitarianism above your freedoms of religion, conscience, association and even speech. It appears that they have won in Britain. If you care about freedom in the United States of America, you must stop them from winning here.

Footnote: I highly recommend reading Maggie Gallagher’s excellent (May 15, 2006) article in the Weekly Standard, “Banned in Boston: The coming conflict between same-sex marriage and religious liberty.” It touches on the Boston Catholic Charities adoption pullout and the Beckett Fund symposium on “gay” versus religious rights.