The gay community is celebrating US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s blunt speech in Geneva on Human Rights Day on December 6. “Gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights,” she declared. The speech marks a major new initiative by the US to promote gay rights around the world. President Obama has directed American agencies to combat the criminalization of LGBT status and conduct. A fund has been established to support gay and lesbian lobby groups overseas. “We must go further and work here and in every region of the world to galvanize more support for the human rights of the LGBT community,” Mrs Clinton said sternly.

She compared opposition to gay and lesbian rights to Islamophobia and anti-Semitism. “Let us be on the right side of history, for our people, our nations, and future generations, whose lives will be shaped by the work we do today,” she declared.

Some of her words sounded downright ominous for countries which oppose “expanding the circle of human rights”. “When we see denials and abuses of human rights and fail to act, that sends the message to those deniers and abusers that they won’t suffer any consequences… click here to read whole article and make comments

Heaven and Earth are ruthless;
To them the Ten Thousand things are but as straw dogs.
The Sage too is ruthless;
To him the people are but as straw dogs.

A “straw dog“ was a ceremonial object used in place of an actual dog in ancient Chinese sacrifices. Sacrificing a dog made from straw fulfils the requirements of ritual without the cost or the burden (or the mess) of killing an actual hound. A straw dog looks the part and plays its role, but no one really cares about its loss. It is form without substance, a placeholder without value.

This verse from theTaoist classic, the Dao De Jing, tells us that a sage should emulate Heaven and Earth in viewing the people as straw dogs, looking upon them with a ruthless (literally “not compassionate”) detachment. From a Western perspective this does not sound like sage advice. We appreciate above all else the primacy of the individual and the value of personal feelings. We are eminently empathic and easily won over by the emotional narratives of others. So in the debate over same-sex marriage, people have… click here to read whole article and make comments

The extent to which people will go to advance their rationalizations for sexual misbehavior grows ever more amusing and ambitious, with consequences, however, that are less jolly. The ultimate level of absurdity has now been reached by the claim that justice requires the legalization of same-sex marriage. Consider the following two protestations.

Celebrating the recent passage of such a law in New York, Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen wrote: “I am the brother of a woman in a longtime same-sex relationship... This is a cause whose justness has long been apparent to me. The opponents have no case other than ignorance and misconception and prejudice.”

And when Edwin O'Brien, the Catholic archbishop of Baltimore, attempted to remonstrate with Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, a Catholic, over his sponsorship of a same sex marriage bill, the Governor responded that: "When shortcomings in our laws bring about a result that is unjust, I have a public obligation to try to change that injustice."

So now it is no longer tolerance, but the demands of justice that seem to require legally equating homosexual marriage with heterosexual marriage, something no other civilization in recorded history has… click here to read whole article and make comments

In June the New York State Assembly approved same-sex marriage, 33 votes to 29, making New York the sixth state out of fifty to issue marriage licences to gay couples. The press of the entire world conveyed the impression that gay marriage has become mainstream in American culture and therefore it is only a matter of time before it is recognized in the whole country.

The truth, for the time being at least, is the exact opposite. Every time the issue has been put to the people in a referendum, the outcome has been a round “NO”. This has been the case everywhere, even in states that are in the vanguard of modernity and permissiveness, like California. Thirty-one states out of fifty have held referendums and in every case the majority of ordinary people voted against same-sex marriage.

If this is the case, then why did it pass in those six states? Thanks solely to either courts of law or to politics pressured by intense campaigns, capable of mustering huge amounts of capital.

The current federal law was signed in 1996 by President Bill Clinton and is known as DOMA, an acronym for… click here to read whole article and make comments

For LGBT teens who face adversity and intolerance…
There’s no place in society for hatred and bullying…
You have an amazing future in front of you…
And an entire community in your corner…
We promise you. It gets better.

(From the It Gets Better video by the San Francisco Giants baseball team.)

*****

What’s not to like about the It Gets Better Project?

After all, bullying is bad. Compassion is good. And who could object to offering hope (to suicidal LGBT youth) and insisting on change (from a hostile, bullying culture)?

Especially when the project Saves Lives.

So what’s not to like? Plenty. For starters, it’s the brainchild of Dan Savage, “America’s leading sex-advice columnist.” (Sample his advice here. Warning: graphic.)

The It Gets Better Project caught the cresting wave of media interest that followed several tragic suicides of gay teens. Savage and his gay partner, Terry… click here to read whole article and make comments

 

Same-sex marriage creates a clash between upholding the human rights of children with respect to their coming-into being and the family structure in which they will be reared, and the claims of homosexual adults who wish to marry a same-sex partner. It forces us, as a society, to choose whether to give priority to children’s rights or to homosexual adults’ claims. This problem does not arise with opposite-sex marriage, because children’s rights and adults claims with respect to marriage are consistent with each other.

Reasons matter 

Many people who oppose extending the definition of marriage to include same-sex couples do so on religious grounds or because of moral objections to homosexuality. In contrast, my arguments are secularly based and, to the extent that they involve morals and values, they are grounded in ethics, not religion.

Moreover, I oppose discrimination on basis of sexual orientation and believe that civil partnerships, open to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples, are the most ethical compromise in terms of balancing respect for children’s rights and fulfilling adults’ claims to mutually protect each other, for instance, with respect to inheritance, property… click here to read whole article and make comments

Three years ago Texas authorities caused a sensation in the United States with a raid on the polygamous Mormon sect living at Yearning For Zion Ranch, during which 401 children were taken into state custody. The pretext for the crackdown was not so much polygamy, although it is a crime in Texas, but forced sex with under-age girls taken as wives by older men. In other words, the wellbeing of children was the main issue.

Community leader Warren Jeffs, already in trouble before the raid, is currently in jail awaiting trial in Texas on sexual assault and bigamy charges. If he sits tight a bit longer, though, the bigamy charge may collapse; with same-sex marriage apparently in the bag, polygamy is looking like the next big thing in the United States -- and no-one seems to care what happens to the kids.

While Jeffs has been cooling his heels in clink, television networks have promoted his cause by rolling out shows such as Big Love and Sister Wives. The Browns of Sister Wives, all four of them,… click here to read whole article and make comments

Across Australia homosexual activists are seeking to redefine marriage to include same-sex relationships. Fortunately, although to some surprisingly and disappointingly, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has affirmed her personal support of marriage remaining what it always has been, a commitment between a man and a woman.

A key argument for keeping marriage that way is that it protects children, since social science shows that children do best when raised by a married mother and father. However, the campaign for same-sex marriage has always displayed scant regard for children’s rights.

The latest state to recommend the radical re-ordering of the lives of some children is South Australia. Recently a parliamentary committee, after a year-long inquiry, reported back with seven recommendations on same-sex parenting. These include extending assisted reproductive technology to lesbian and single women, making the partner of the birth mother a co-parent legally and on the birth certificate, allowing altruistic surrogacy to same-sex couples and allowing same-sex couples the ability to adopt children.

These recommendations come as no surprise. It appears the inquiry never intended considering the broader and long-term impact on… click here to read whole article and make comments

 

Is there anything of substance to be gained for homosexuals from the current quest for same-sex marriage?

At its inception, the “gay rights” movement could reasonably present itself as a struggle against societal oppression. Forty years ago, American law in most states punished homosexual acts as criminal offenses. In many cases the penalties attending such laws were severe. In Bowers v. Hardwick—the 1986 Supreme Court decision upholding Georgia’s anti-sodomy statute—Justice Lewis Powell observed with understandable concern that the law at issue in that case permitted a sentence of up to twenty years in prison for the commission of a single homosexual act.

In addition to such a legal landscape, homosexuals confronted a rather censorious culture. Mainstream America not only looked upon homosexual acts with disapproval, but also treated homosexual persons as objects of ridicule (at best) and hostility (at worst).

This is not to concede the claim often deployed by gay rights activists that such traditional laws and mores were based upon nothing but an irrational and malicious hatred of homosexuals. Such a claim unjustly overlooks ancient philosophical and… click here to read whole article and make comments