“They [homosexuals] should have the benefits and civil rights of the state, but this is not a sacramental union our church will ever sanctify,” he said. “But civil marriage, in the spirit of American democracy, they have the right to ask for that.”

These positions seem to present a fair and reasonable perspective that maintains a balance between the Orthodox Church’s unwavering support for traditional marriage and her absolute rejection of all homosexual unions, and the secular and democratic society we live in. On closer inspection however, the reality of such moderated and accommodating views exposes a danger that may not have been considered when such support was given for these legalized civil unions.

These positions seem to present a fair and reasonable perspective that maintains a balance between the Orthodox Church’s unwavering support for traditional marriage and her absolute rejection of all homosexual unions, and the secular and democratic society we live in. On closer inspection however, the reality of such moderated and accommodating views exposes a danger that may not have been considered when such support was given for these legalized civil unions.

Developments in the Catholic Church over the last few years confirm that advocating for any legislative support of legalized civil unions that have similar legal standing to traditional marriages is unwise. Even if, in the beginning, such secular civil unions do not have the full bundle of societal “rights” that marriages enjoy, it will not take long for our legal system to grant them such protections and privileges.

Looking at what has already happened in states like Massachusetts and recently in Washington D.C. with Catholic Charities, one of the nation’s oldest adoption and foster-care placement agencies, gives us a hint of what can and will occur. Catholic Charities was forced to cease operations when their adoption services were deemed discriminatory to homosexuals because of Massachusetts and Washington D.C.’s same-sex “marriage” laws. Faced with prosecution by the state unless it compromised its religious beliefs, this Christian organization closed its social services operations, ending an 80-year history of helping vulnerable children in need of traditional parents and families. The Catholic News Agency reports:

“Although Catholic Charities has an 80-year legacy of high quality service to the vulnerable in our nation’s capital, the D.C. Government informed Catholic Charities that the agency would be ineligible to serve as a foster care provider due to the impending D.C. same-sex marriage law,” […]

“Foster care has been an important ministry for us for many decades. We worked very hard to be able to continue to provide these services in the District,” said Ed Orzechowski, president and CEO of Catholic Charities D.C. “We regret that our efforts to avoid this outcome were not successful.” […]

The D.C. City Council’s law recognizing same-sex “marriage” required religious entities which serve the general public to provide services to homosexual couples, even if doing so violated their religious beliefs. Exemptions were allowed only for performing marriages or for those entities which do not serve the public.

While at first glance these legalized civil unions do not appear to hurt anyone or interfere with the Christian Church’s mission, in at least two instances we see the devastating consequences of the state demanding that Christian institutions place children in same-sex “families” in direct violation of the doctrines of the Church and the member’s religious beliefs and practices.

“To operate in Massachusetts, an adoption agency must be licensed by the state. And to get a license, an agency must pledge to obey state laws barring discrimination—including the decade-old ban on orientation discrimination. With the legalization of gay marriage in the state, discrimination against same-sex couples would be outlawed, too.”

The closures of Catholic Charities hurt not only the countless innocent children that will no longer be placed in traditional families, but also the many couples that wanted to adopt these children and would have raised them in a home with a mother and a father.

Once such civil unions are given any legal standing, other states and even the federal government will quickly follow the legal precedents set in Massachusetts and DC. The state can then compel all religious institutions that support traditional marriage in their social services to either recognize same-sex unions and act contrary to their religious and moral beliefs, or cease operations altogether. These legalized civil unions are the unfortunate stepping stones the state has and will use to promote an anti-Christian and anti-traditional marriage agenda to the society at large, to the detriment of innocent children and traditional couples looking to adopt.

Resources

Banned in Boston

Same-sex ‘marriage’ law forces D.C. Catholic Charities to close adoption program

Catholic Charities Adoptions

HT: OrthodoxNet Blog

Dennis Prager

by Dennis Prager | 4/6/2010

Leftism functions as a secular religion, and its adherents understand that the major obstacle to the dominance of Leftist policies and values is traditional religion, specifically Christianity. With the demise of Christianity in Western Europe, Leftist ideas and values came to dominate that continent. America, the most religious industrialized democracy, remains the great exception. [...]

When a town in Iowa seeks to rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday,” you know America has problems.

Those of us who affirm the Judeo-Christian values that have constituted the basis of America’s values since before the founding of the United States expect such things on the two coasts. The West Coast and the East Coast (at least down to Virginia) have largely abandoned the God-based morality of the Declaration of Independence and all the Founders.

Yes, all the Founders. Even the so-called deists, while not theologically Christian, were ethical monotheists, i.e., strong affirmers of ethics rooted in the will of the Creator. As Steven Waldman, no conservative, writes in “Founding Faith,” a book that has been praised by Left and Right, “Each felt religion was extremely important, at a minimum to encourage moral behavior and make the land safe for republican government” (italics added).

We have, therefore, looked to the American “heartland” to keep the religious basis of American civilization alive. That is why, Iowa’s history of “progressivism” notwithstanding, it was disconcerting to learn last week that the city of Davenport had announced it would rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday.”

As reported by ABC News:

“Taking a recommendation by the Davenport Civil Rights Commission to change the holiday’s name to something more ecumenical, City Administrator Craig Malin sent a memo to municipal employees announcing Good Friday would officially be known as ‘Spring Holiday.’

“The Civil Rights Commission said it recommended changing the name to better reflect the city’s diversity and maintain a separation of church and state when it came to official municipal holidays.”

Given the importance of Good Friday to Christians, when news of the recommendation became public, there was a national as well as local outcry, and the recommendation was rescinded.

In explaining the recommendation, Tim Hart, the civil rights commission’s chairman, said, “We merely made a recommendation that the name be changed to something other than Good Friday. Our Constitution calls for separation of church and state. Davenport touts itself as a diverse city and given all the different types of religious and ethnic backgrounds we represent, we suggested the change.”

That the Davenport City Council did not endorse the commission’s recommendation is important to note, but not significant. What is significant is that the civil rights commission and the city administrator of an American city — a heartland city — would recommend that Good Friday be replaced by the meaningless “Spring Holiday.”

It is significant for these reasons:

1. There really is a war against Christianity.
Leftism functions as a secular religion, and its adherents understand that the major obstacle to the dominance of Leftist policies and values is traditional religion, specifically Christianity. With the demise of Christianity in Western Europe, Leftist ideas and values came to dominate that continent. America, the most religious industrialized democracy, remains the great exception.

2. Why not abolish Christmas?
If a religiously diverse population and the separation of church and state demand abolishing government recognition of Good Friday, why not treat Christmas similarly and rename it “Winter Holiday”? This was asked of Mr. Hart, the civil rights commission chairman. His response, in the words of ABC, shows the level of thought that is characteristic of the Politically Correct: “The commission, he said, discussed changing Christmas, but decided enough other religions celebrate Christmas too. Hart, however, could not name one. ”

3. Civil rights organizations are not about civil rights.
The ACLU and other left-wing organizations that have noble sounding civil liberties and civil rights names have a problem similar to the one the March of Dimes had once polio was conquered: What to do now? Civil liberties and civil rights are extraordinarily well protected in America. If the ACLU and the innumerable civil rights commissions ceased to exist, and a few smaller and politically neutral groups took their place, civil liberties in America would benefit. As is obvious from the Davenport example, these groups do not really function as civil rights or civil liberties organizations. They are organizations that promote left-wing agendas. And no Leftist agenda is greater than minimizing the influence of Judeo-Christian religions, specifically Christianity, on American life.

4. Good Friday as an American holiday reminds Americans that this is a religious society.
Leftism opposes America’s three great values — what I call the American Trinity (see, for example, my video on the American Trinity at prageruniversity.com) — “E Pluribus Unum,” “Liberty” and “In God We Trust.” The Left uses diversity and multiculturalism to undermine E Pluribus Unum (“From Many, One”). It substitutes equality (of result) for liberty, and the powerful state for the powerful free individual. And it seeks, perhaps above all, to replace “In God We Trust” with a secular society and secular values. If it had a motto, it might be “In Science (or Secularism) We Trust.” The elimination of Good Friday as an American holiday is just one more such battle in this war.

5. Non-Christians offended by Good Friday as an American holiday are narcissists.
The Left tells us that non-Christians are offended by the government celebrating Good Friday. As a Jew, permit me to say that any non-Christian offended by Good Friday or Christmas gives new meaning to the word “narcissist.” To seek to erase the name Good Friday is an exercise in self-centeredness and ingratitude that is jaw-dropping. We non-Christian Americans live in the freest society in human history; it was produced by people nearly every one of who celebrated Good Friday, and we have the gall to want to rename it?

6. PC (Political Correctness) should be renamed OTL (Offends the Left).
Most Americans will characterize the Davenport attempt to rename Good Friday “Spring Holiday” as Political Correctness. That it is. But the term itself is Politically Correct. Like everything PC, the term itself hides its true meaning, which is Leftism. Political Correctness is invariably produced by the Left. The term, therefore, should not be PC; it should be OTL, “Offends the Left.” It is very unfortunate for America that it isn’t. Americans would have much greater clarity as to the Second Civil War now taking place — from San Francisco to Boston to, yes, Davenport, Iowa.

HT: DennisPrager.com

The way Bill Maher sees it, resistance to ObamaCare is all God’s fault. Why? Because so many people believe in this “schmuck” who lives in the clouds…and this belief, in turn, intensifies opposition to ObamaCare.

This leftist social critic, anti-Christian crusader, and HBO comedy show host warned God at the end of last week to back off, to allow smart people like himself and Barack Obama and the New York Times editorial board to push the God-fearing “ignoramuses” aside this week and take control of the nation’s health care.

He told this to “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” guest host Lawrence O’Donnell on MS-NBC. Although mainstream media didn’t provide us with God’s reaction (God is a hopeless conservative, persona non grata for legacy networks and newspapers), Maher most certainly cheered the three viewers in the audience of the NBC news cable operation, who had taken time off from pecking out obscenities on the Daily Kos website to get a dose of leftist smarts.

Welcome to the world of Bill Maher. He urges the “vicious, horrible character” known as God, who is less real than the “lint that lives in my navel,” to stand aside while Obama and Pelosi and Reid “scare the American people” into ObamaCare. Maher added his voice to the progressive chorus urging the president to “go gangsta” on the majority of Americans, who, as our president put it, still cling to God and guns.

Enough about human dignity and “inherent” God-given rights! What business does a Christian, a “Wal-Mart shopper who resurfaces driveways with [his] brother-in-law,” have questioning a Harvard-trained president who, assisted by our media and political elites, has put together a cradle-to-grave health care system? Rights?! To people who have that “neurological disorder” known as religion, whose belief in God “stops [them] from thinking”?

For Maher, God is behind the mass stupidity of the American people. Or rather, it’s belief in God, a fairy tale that refuses to go away. Obamacare, in which educated atheists make decisions for the God-fearing masses, Maher says, will be the biggest step our elites can take to fix the stupidity emanating from religious America.

Bill Maher Explains His Hatred of God, Religion, and Christians

God is the reason why these “idiots” dare defy Barack Obama, the Democrats, and the media and entertainment elite. Were it not for belief, these Christians and Jews and plumbers and waitresses, each an individual who “disgusts me,” would stay out of the health care debate, leaving it to their evolved betters.

Evolution confers rights. Progressive brilliance derives from evolutionary superiority, not a fairy tale that produces “babbling, barely house-broken, uneducated being[s],” Maher says. He includes in the latter Sarah Palin, Fox News hosts, and the huge swaths of Wal-Mart shoppers between Washington, D.C. and Beverly Hills. Stupidity is a gift from the “sky god.”

And that’s why this week will be a giant step for the natural order of humanity, when our president (who “can’t help it if he’s a magna cum laude Harvard grad” whom you don’t like “because he’s smarter than you”) and his elite advisers assume control. ObamaCare is the beginning of the end for God and women like Sarah Palin, who, Maher says, sharpens her analytical skills “by talking to her Down syndrome son.”

Women, “retards,” dogs and cats — same difference, Maher says. All are in need of direction from their betters. And we’re going to give it to them, he tells cheering audiences at universities across the nation, because — as an official “Ivy League Celebrity” — we know best.

Not that Maher has anything against women. No, he loves women, especially when they meet the business end of his fist…or a hammer to the head wielded by his fist, as one account of Maher displaying loving, atheistic fondness for a girlfriend puts it. Bruises administered by the Time (magazine)-stamped “high-minded” culture critic appear to be a constant of Maher’s relationships with women, as a number have accused.

Hey, what’s a bit of abuse among friends? Just trying to get these women to understand their proper place, knock a bit of that culture-generated Christian nonsense out of them. After all, Darwin evolved woman to be naked and in bed, or, as a former girlfriend complained to the New York Post, behaving as “a Muslim woman with my head wrapped, walking 10 paces behind my man.”

And that’s why Maher has no problem with sharia law coming to the United States. Anything but our Judeo-Christian “arrogance parading as humility.” At least Islamic nations are smart enough to understand that the few should lead the many…and that even women in a burkas have what it takes to fulfill their functions, as attested by “the word ‘Juicy’ on their ass!”

This is true enlightenment, Maher tells cheering audiences. This is the intelligence, the attitudes, the values that will save the United States from a God who is just something that the Brothers Grimm came up with, a Judeo-Christian God who insists in the “crock” known as the Bible that men and women have equivalent dignity and rights.

Equal!? Equal!!! Leave it to our mass fantasy, the Christian Jack-and-the-Beanstalk, to not understand that women exist “for the pleasure of men” and that breasts evolved so that we can have “real men hanging off them.”

And so Maher cheers on ObamaCare, a giant step toward government of the enlightened. We’re going to see progress this week, he says — the kind of progress that only an educated and godless elite can bring.

Godless — that’s the key, he emphasizes. God is small-town diners, churches, and parades. But godless-America atheism is Ivy League and Manhattan and Washington, Beverly Hills and Boston, where dignity comes — as it should — from brains, position, and government.

ObamaCare America is Maher’s America, he says, where every woman is guaranteed treatment…after he takes a hammer to her head.

HT: American Thinker

A large wooden cross was placed at an Air Force Academy worship area for pagans and other Earth-centered religions, prompting an investigation by academy officials, though some caution that it’s hardly “destructive behavior.”

Mikey Weinstein, founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, said an Air Force Academy staffer spotted the cross — erected with railroad ties — lying against a rock at a worship area for pagan groups at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Jan. 17.

Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier, a self-described pagan who sponsors the group that worships there, said the incident was similar to someone leaving a pentagram or a pagan symbol at the academy’s chapel altar and claimed he and others are victim of a hate crime. In an e-mail to Weinstein’s group, Longcrier said his group had been “thrown under the bus by the system we trusted” and that the “hate crime” has been ignored.

David Cannon, director of communications at the Air Force Academy, said the incident remains under investigation. He declined to indicate whether it could be classified as a hate crime pending completion of the probe.

Cannon said that if a cadet were behind the incident, the Air Force would have the power to prosecute. If a civilian did it, the case could be taken up by local authorities.

“Until (the investigation) is over, we can’t classify it as anything,” Cannon told FoxNews.com, adding that it remains unclear whether cadets were involved.

In a statement issued Wednesday, Lt. Gen. Mike Gould, the Air Force Academy’s superintendent, said the school will take “appropriate action” if a cadet were indeed responsible.

“Our message is simple: we are taking this incident very seriously and conducting an inquiry,” Gould’s statement read. “We absolutely do not stand for any type of destructive behavior or disrespect for human dignity.”

Regardless of who left the cross, some critics say Gould’s characterization of its placement as “destructive behavior” is inaccurate.

“What I think people are saying here is, ‘We reject the idea of paganism and we are expressing another religious symbol,’” said Herb London, president of the Hudson Institute, a Manhattan-based think tank. “I’m not sure I would characterize that as a destructive act. A symbol put next to another symbol does not represent destructive behavior. It’s somewhat exaggerated — you have your symbol, we have our symbol.’”

London said the incident is akin to placing a Hanukkah decoration in close proximity to a nativity scene.

“It’d be one thing if there was a harmful act, but to have competing symbols, I’m not sure I would put that in the category of destructive behavior,” London continued. “What is being expressed here is the view of the Judeo-Christian as opposed to the pagan tradition.”

Weinstein, whose New Mexico-based group represents more than 16,000 active duty and retired servicemembers, said the incident was “clearly” a hate crime and characterized any denial of that assertion to be preposterous.

“We don’t think, we know it was a hate crime,” said Weinstein, who compared the incident to spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue.

“It has the same impact, the same hurt, the same marginalization,” he said Thursday. “That circle is their mosque, their church, their synagogue.”

While the incident is “clearly insensitive and inappropriate,” Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, also cautioned against applying that “destructive” label.

“This is a serious affront, it’s insensitive, it’s unacceptable — without saying it’s vandalism, without saying it’s a crime,” Gaziano said. “And that’s the way I think both sides should treat this. Some people can go too far in saying it’s destructive or vandalism. It’s serious notwithstanding, but it’s not vandalism and it’s not destructive of the property.”

Gould, meanwhile, said the Earth-centered spirituality group that meets at the worship area falls within the definition of religion as defined in the United States Air Force Instruction 36-2706: “a personal set or institutional system of attitudes, moral or ethical beliefs and practices held with the strength of traditional religious views, characterized by ardor and faith and generally evidenced through specific religious observances.”

Gould said the addition of the Earth-centered worship circle was done in response to requests of both cadets and active duty personnel.

“Therefore, it our obligation, my obligation, to accommodate the group’s religious requirements in a manner that is fair and consistent with other religious groups who are accommodated at the Academy,” Gould’s statement continued.

Gould said the worship area — a stone circle atop a hill overlooking the academy’s visitor center — is the latest addition to other sacred spaces for Protestants, Catholics, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists.

“Cadets learn that to succeed as an Air Force officer we must be able to support and respect the people who we lead, serve with and fight alongside even if they do not share our personal beliefs,” Gould said. “Cadets learn that every servicemember is charged with defending freedom for all Americans and that includes the freedom to practice a religion of their choice or to not practice any religion at all.”

. . . more