Category Archives: Global: Marriage and Family

AP: Senior members of the Church of Scotland voted Monday to let some congregations choose ministers who are in same-sex relationships – an important compromise that must still pass further hurdles before it can become church law.

Catholic Culture: Pro-family activists in Croatia have collected well over 200,000 signatures on a petition calling for a referendum to amend the country’s constitution and define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Telegraph: David Cameron will rely on Ed Miliband’s help to force gay marriage laws through Parliament and in return accept a Labour plan to consider civil partnerships for all.

AP: Czech President Milos Zeman is being criticized for refusing to grant a university professorship – the nation’s top academic title – to a critic of his, allegedly because the man is also a gay rights activist.

Religion Clause Blog: Today’s Deutsche Welle reports that in Afghanistan’s Parliament, lawmakers have withdrawn a bill that would have instituted a number of protections for women.  The action came after  religious parties complained that the proposed law was un-Islamic.

Daily Mail: Thousands of anti-gay protesters, including Orthodox priests, picketed a gay pride parade in Georgia today, with some threatening to lash homosexual activists with stinging nettles . . . In extraordinary scenes that saw chaos spread through the capital, those occupying the street held posters reading ‘We don’t need Sodom and Gomorrah!’ and ‘Democracy does not equal immorality!’

Christian Institute: The Government has said it will consider whether to allow heterosexual couples to have a civil partnership rather than a marriage, at a cost of up to £4bn. Equalities Minister Maria Miller hopes the promise of a review will buy off votes and give a smoother ride for the same-sex marriage Bill.

AP: The survey, released on the International Day against Homophobia, is important, she said, because “for the first time, we see how much fear there is still around.”

AP: Thousands of anti-gay protesters, including Orthodox priests, occupied a central street in Georgia’s capital Friday, with some threatening to lash with stinging nettles any participant in a gay pride parade which was to take place there.

AP: Portugal’s Parliament has passed a law allowing same-sex married couples to adopt their partners’ children, but lawmakers rejected legislation granting gay couples the same adoption rights as heterosexuals.

NPR: There’s growing pressure in Australia for the government to legalize gay marriage after New Zealand became the 13th country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage earlier this month.

Christian Concern: David Burrowes, Tim Loughton and Jim Shannon are amongst the MPs who have tabled an amendment to the Marriage (Same Sex) Couples Bill to allow a public vote to be held on the same day as the 2015 general election.

Catholic Culture: US embassies abroad are preparing to celebrate Gay Pride Month in June, even in countries where homosexual behavior is outlawed.

Guardian: A group of Conservative MPs has proposed a referendum to allow the public to vote on gay marriage in one of several amendments aimed at watering down the bill to legitimise same-sex weddings. More than 100 MPs may support the call for a referendum, sources said.

CNSNews: Hong Kong’s top court granted a transgender woman the right to marry her boyfriend Monday in a watershed ruling that falls short of allowing same-sex marriage.

LifeSiteNews: Britain’s Royal College of Psychiatrists has been accused of bias and submitting “seriously flawed” and even “fraudulent” evidence to the government’s consultation on the gay “marriage” bill.

CNN: Zambian police rearrested two men this week on charges of engaging in homosexual acts “against the order of nature,” a rights group said.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: About one-third of the Human Rights Office’s overall expenditures is paid from its regular budget, she explained, while two-thirds comes from extra-budgetary sources. Nordic countries – especially Norway – are unabashedly aggressive in pushing abortion. Now they are outsourcing – or laundering – their promotion of homosexuality through a UN agency.

The Times: High Court judge Sir Paul Coleridge is unapologetic about his Marriage Foundation’s efforts to keep families together.

Christian Concern: The local election results are showing massive losses for the Conservative party. This was by no means inevitable but David Cameron’s insistence on pursuing the same sex ‘marriage’ agenda has undoubtedly contributed to this dramatic result.

Christian Concern: According to The Times, the Prime Minister has been told that he must uphold traditional Conservative values to prevent core Conservatives from abandoning him for Nigel Farage.

Christian Institute: A man’s sex change has been affirmed in a Church of England service, said to be the first of its kind. The transsexual man who is known as Susan Musgrove, 60, underwent surgery last year and has now been publicly blessed as a woman at St Andrew’s Church in Northumberland. The curate of his Church designed an affirmation liturgy for the service after they got the go-ahead from the Bishop of Newcastle.

First Post: The meeting, chaired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, saw ministers expressing differing views on the clause which seeks to provide a share to a woman in her husband’s residential property, including inherited and ‘inheritable’ premises, in case of divorce, sources said.

Robert Zaretsky at the NY Times: Tocqueville and Gay Marriage

But why does Catholicism wield such influence in a country where scarcely 5 percent of the population attends church? In their new book, “Le Mystère français,” Emmanuel Todd and Hervé Le Bras map out the persistence of a Catholic mentality in large parts of France despite the withering of religious practice. This “zombie Catholicism,” they observe, reveals itself in professional and domestic differences between husbands and wives, community and family activities, and the vitality of “free schools” (Catholic private schools).

CNSNews: The federal government is spending $355,825 in taxpayer dollars to develop a “culturally relevant stigma-reducing intervention” program for the transgender population in India.

Christian Institute: Yesterday, over 300 local voters protested outside David Cameron’s constituency office in Witney, Oxfordshire, against his plans to redefine marriage.

Christian Institute: The Conservative Party faces losing hundreds of seats at the local elections tomorrow because of the Prime Minister’s plans to redefine marriage, according to a new poll. The survey also shows that many voters are turning to UKIP over the issue.

The Guardian: Member of UN taskforce on population says for young people, sex is not as controversial as it is for governments.

AP: More women are initiating divorces in Uganda, a conservative East African country where women are becoming empowered to leave a bad marriage in a way their mothers could not, rights activists and legal experts say.

Anglican Ink: The Anglican bishops of the West Indies have urged their governments to hold fast and resist pressure from Britain and the United States to legalize gay rights and gay marriage.

Breitbart (also on the Drudge Report) : A woman in Spain recently gave birth to the first child born in the village of Los Giles in 45 years, causing a stir in the village.

Christian Institute: The Presbyterian Church in Ireland is calling on MLAs to vote against a motion supporting same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland on Monday.

LifeSiteNews: Homosexual couples are attempting to force the issue of gay “marriage” in Mexico by registering their marriages at the municipal level, sometimes with the connivance of sympathetic politicians, according to reports by the national media.

LifeSiteNews: In an astonshing display of gentleness in the face of a vile attack, the head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, remained calmly seated with eyes closed in prayer Tuesday as four topless women attacked him with shouts and curses and doused him with water.

RT.com: The head of the Upper Chamber, Valentina Matviyenko, told President Putin that the Russian Foreign Ministry was already working on changes to the adoption agreement with France.

LifeSiteNews: Responding to a groundswell of public opinion, the Supreme Court of India has asked the government to respond to a public interest litigation (PIL) petition that seeks to ban online pornography.

Washington Blade: Six Colombian LGBT rights advocates have visited D.C. and two other states this month as part of a State Department-sponsored trip to learn how activists, politicians and government officials in this country advance civil and human rights.

UNUSA: Today these young students begin a journey that will connect them with the United Nations and its work around the world for years to come,” said UNA-USA Executive Director Patrick Madden.

Breitbart.com: President Vladimir Putin on Friday said Russia could change its agreements for the adoption of Russian children with France and other Western states that are legalising gay marriage.

AP: Officials in a liberal Stockholm suburb that discourages gender stereotypes have decided to open a gender-neutral changing room in a local high school to avoid students being classified as male or female.

Times of London: Police fought running battles with protesters in central Paris last night after the French parliament approved legislation authorising same-sex couples to marry and to adopt children.

Christian Concern: A special event has been held at the Council of Europe in relation to two UK Christians who are seeking a referral to the Grand Chamber in their religious freedom cases at the European Court of Human Rights.

Christian Institute: Same-sex marriage has been legalised in France, under the most unpopular president since the 1950s according to a new poll. Yesterday the socialist-majority National Assembly voted 331-225 in favour of gay marriage and adoption, despite massive public unrest about the issue.

LifeSiteNews: Just one week after the passage of gay ‘marriage’ legislation in New Zealand, it has been revealed that a group has been formed whose goal is to have group marriages recognised in law.

Christian Institute: report for the Church of Scotland on same-sex relationships has suggested an order of service for a civil partnership blessing. The liturgy contains ideas for scripture readings, including passages about David and Jonathan, and Ruth and Naomi.

NY Times: On Tuesday afternoon, France is expected to become the 14th country to legalize marriage for all couples, regardless of gender or sexual orientation.

Daily Mail: Hymns have been dropped from assemblies at a Church of England school which has also introduced separate prayer rooms for girls and boys to cater to its mostly Muslim students. Daily assemblies at Slough and Eton Church of England Business and Enterprise College, where 75 per cent of pupils are Muslim, are not based specifically on the Bible, but may make reference to it alongside other religious texts.

France24: French papers react to demonstrations yesterday for and against same-sex marriage. Left-leaning Libération says the anti-gay marriage camp is becoming more and more homophobic.

Doug McNeil at International Socialist Organization of NZ: The International Socialist Organization supported the campaign for equal marriage rights from the very beginning and, in a very modest way, we have done what we can, along with hundreds of other groups and individuals, to win this battle. We are proud of this. We will be all the prouder joining in the struggles to come. Working-class LGBTI people still have a world to win. I hope this victory so far away will give new energy and determination to everyone involved in the fight for equal marriage rights in the USA. Your fight is our fight. Our victory is your victory.

Telegraph: Not so in France, where it’s turned incredibly French. It’s surprising to discover that, in a country with a proud tradition of secularism and political liberalism, only a slight majority of Frenchmen support the bill to legalise gay marriage that faces the National Assembly on Tuesday – and opinion is evenly split on a parallel bill to let gay people adopt children. More remarkable still has been the scale of the opposition’s street protests: the largest drew 340,000 to Paris in a demonstration of popular will normally associated with the Left. This has received very limited coverage in the European and American mainstream media, where there also seems to be a veritable blackout about the state’s violent response.

LifeSiteNews: 77 people changed the institution of marriage in New Zealand from a conjugal union with the potential for generating children and providing them with the nurture of their own mother and father into “a union of 2 people regardless of their sex, sexual orientation, or gender identity” with the potential for systematically depriving children of their mother or father, or both. All in the name of “love”. Starting in August.

Independent: Scuffles broke out in the French parliament in the early hours of as right-wing opposition to a gay marriage law becomes increasingly strident and ill-tempered.

Christian Institute: A motion supporting same-sex marriage will be debated in the Northern Ireland Assembly later this month – despite MLAs rejecting a similar move in October last year.

Telegraph: Churches are facing a rebellion in the pews over gay marriage, a wide-ranging study of religious attitudes on the issue suggests.

KairosFocus: At least, if we want to understand what is happening in our time as a radical and destructive secularist innovation, the homosexualisation of marriage under false colour of law, proceeds apace across the world like a seemingly unstoppable juggernaut in the name of “equality” and “rights.”

Christian Institute: Plans to redefine marriage have “thrown up so many unforeseen difficulties and inequalities” that they should be dropped by David Cameron, Ann Widdecombe has said.

Times of Zambia: Home Affairs Deputy Minister Steven Kampyongo said in an interview yesterday that the Government and Church mother bodies recently held a meeting and it was resolved that the country will not recognise any practice that abrogates the biblical, cultural and social norms of society. “We have just had a detailed consultative meeting with the church and top on the agenda was the issue of gay rights.

LifeSiteNews: Since last Friday, public demonstrations against same-sex “marriage” and adoption in France have been escalating, not only in Paris but also in remote provincial towns and even abroad among French expatriates. The Senate’s approval of the gay marriage bill (known as the “loi Taubira,” after the Justice Minister that proposed the text to the legislature) has sparked off a wave of anger, and groups of determined young people all over the country have decided to make their presence felt.

Reuters on Yahoo News: Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois told a meeting of French bishops the planned marriage reform, which the government has speeded up amid mounting pressure from opponents, was a sign that society had lost its capacity to integrate different views.

Union Bulletin: Vietnam should legalize same-sex marriage immediately, the deputy minister of health was quoted as saying today by local media . . . The National Assembly is scheduled to discuss allowing same-sex marriage when the law is reviewed in May.

NDTV.com: New Zealand is poised to become the first Asia-Pacific nation to legalise same-sex marriage in a parliamentary vote that gay rights advocates on Tuesday hailed as a milestone for equality.

The Advocate: A transgender woman in Hong Kong is asking the city’s highest court to overturn a lower court’s ruling that she cannot marry her boyfriend because she was assigned male at birth.

The New Civil Rights Movement: In 2010, Thailand was elected to a seat on the powerful United Nations Human Rights Council. Thailand had a history of abstaining from voting in favor of UN resolutions on sexual orientation and gender identity, …

Turtle Bay and Beyond: The constitutional convention backs the extension of marriage rights to same-sex couples, the Irish Times reports. With this decision, Ireland seems set to join the fold of countries that want to destroy the institution of marriage by re-defining it beyond recognisability. But it could still be prevented, as a popular referendum will be needed.

Bloomberg: An anti-gay-marriage protest in Paris yesterday turned into a lightning rod for anger over President Francois Hollande’s economic policies.

AFP: France’s National Assembly decided Monday to bring forward the final vote on France’s gay marriage bill to April 23, raising the prospect of more mass demonstrations by opponents in the coming days.

Education News: One of the UK’s leading Islamic organisations has warned that plans to revise the school history curriculum risk ignoring the Muslim contribution to western civilisation – an omission that will only foster alienation.The Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), which claims to represent more than 500 Islamic organisations, is calling for “everyone who cares about the education of British schoolchildren” to lobby the Department for Education (DfE) as the end of the consultation period on the plans looms.

Breitbart: I consider the phenomenon called feminism very dangerous,” said the powerful Patriarch Kirill in a speech delivered Tuesday and posted Wednesday on the official Russian Orthodox Church website. “Feminist organisations proclaim a pseudo-freedom of women, which should be manifested outside marriage and family.”

The Age: Larousse, the authoritative French dictionary, has infuriated right-wing MPs after it altered its definition of marriage to a union of “two persons” rather than “between man and woman”.

Religion Clause Blog: In Lim Meng Suang v. Attorney General, (Singapore High Ct., April 9, 2013), a Republic of Singapore trial court refused to declare Singapore’s ban on male homosexual conduct to  be unconstitutional.

The Drudge Report has linked to this InfoWars report: Photo of Gay Man Who Walked Through Muslim Suburb of Paris With Boyfriend Causes Shock.

Reportedly, the victim was in a French Muslim neighborhood known for criminal activity. Yet, many are attempting to blame the crime on those who oppose marriage redefinition. See, e.g, reports on Google News.

Boston Globe: Uruguay’s lawmakers were debating Wednesday night whether to legalize gay marriage.

Guardian: The Church of England has ruled out offering blessings to same-sex couples, insisting that such public gestures belong only to heterosexual marriage.

UPI: A key article of a bill that would allow same-sex unions in France cleared the Senate on a 179-157 vote following 10 hours of floor debate.

Reuters: A Supreme Court case that challenges a law requiring anti-prostitution policies for HIV/AIDS programs seeking federal money has generated a split among nonprofit groups that counsel sex workers overseas.