The divide between progressive and traditionalist bishops at the Synod was basically on how to treat people on the wrong side of sexuality, that is, those who are into cohabitation, the divorced and remarried, and same-sex unions. The progressives would like to be nice, caring, accepting, welcoming, non-judgmental, merciful, compassionate and even bend “the rules” backward a bit to accommodate those in such situations. On the other hand, the traditionalists insist on Christian morality, truth, Church teaching, renunciation of sin, repentance for wrongdoing, and healing the wound rather than just putting balm on it.

This article is relevant to this “debate” (it is a long read but very important for you to understand the battle that is raging around us). It is not a question of being nice, as indeed we as Christians should be “nice” and compassionate, but rather it is whether being “nice” threatens the very well-being of what we hold dear. By being nice, would we be chipping away at the solid foundation of our faith and of Christian morality? By being nice and keeping quiet about sin, repentance and hell, would we eventually find ourselves defending lost causes (faith, family, life, sexual morality), as a selfist, materialistic and even hedonistic culture overwhelms us?

The anti-family, anti-life, homosexualist forces want us to be nice, to be tolerant, to simply love. Well, be assured that when they start to get their way, they will be (and already are) the most intolerant and hate-filled, wanting to destroy our Judeo-Christian life and values. They will go to the extent of violent oppression and persecution.

There will be a year of discussion and discernment by the people of God, leading up to the Ordinary Synod in October 2015. So make your voices heard.

Stand up now for the authentic faith of Jesus Christ!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How the pro-family movement helped spread ‘gay marriage’ across America

The “gay marriage” steamroller is in the news again, with another big win in the courts. Pro-family people across the country are wringing their hands in anguish. How is this happening? Well, it’s about time we started being honest with ourselves. In many ways, the biggest help to the homosexual cause has been the dishonesty, incompetence, and cowardliness of the pro-family movement itself in dealing with this issue.

On Monday, Oct. 6, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it would not review any of the seven appeals from five states where federal judges had “struck down” the states’ bans on “gay marriage.” This decision not to act is seen as a major blow.

It is not altogether final. There are two other federal cases pending, and if either of those rule to uphold the ban (which is likely) many experts predict that the Supreme Court will then take it up and decide. In particular, the Sixth Circuit is most likely (though not certain) to rule to uphold the ban.

However, it looks to be a losing court battle in the long run. Just a decade ago no one would have dreamed that the federal court system would be forcing such a perverse thing on Americans, especially where they’ve voted overwhelmingly against it statewide.

How did we get to this point?

Until just a few years ago, “gay marriage” was still an anomaly that took enormous effort to “legalize.” It had been voted down in 31 states in a row. In a few states the homosexual lobby was able to get activist state judges to rule their way, starting with Massachusetts in 2003. But their main successes came from a campaign of expensive and sophisticated lobbying in a handful of liberal state legislatures.

In 2012 they were able to win in their first four statewide referenda by outspending the pro-family opponents by enormous margins. And additional liberal state legislatures fell to their lobbying blitz. But most of the country was still unreachable by that radical agenda.

Then came the DOMA and Prop 8 decisions by the US Supreme Court in 2013. 

 That was the watershed moment that opened the floodgates. In the months since, the homosexual movement has been on a roll in the federal courts. With astonishing speed, they persuaded dishonest, activist federal judges to cavalierly overturn state laws and even constitutional amendments in state after state that banned “gay marriage.”

This didn’t happen by accident. The homosexual movement put together an extremely well funded and well planned campaign to push this through the courts. It included:

1. Bringing together skilled attorneys, staffs, assorted experts

2. Shrewd judge-shopping

3. A very well crafted, emotionally compelling legal argument

4. A media and public relations juggernaut

5. “Training” sessions for judges on “gay marriage” by sympathetic bar associations

6. Psychologically focused lobbying of judges and other high officials (e.g., telling them, “it’s on the right side of history” – the classic Marxist dictum)

7.  Effectively using the influence of a new generation of gullible, liberal activist federal judges (many of whom were unopposed by Republicans in their Senate confirmations)

The main legal hammer was the clear misuse of the Fourteenth Amendment “equal protection” clause, which was endorsed by the US Supreme court in the DOMA ruling. On its face, it’s an absurd attempt at legal reasoning that depends on such ideas as homosexuals being a legitimate “class” of people, rather than simply people engaging in perverse and dangerous behaviors. But it is now an “official” legal construct with the imprimatur of the Supreme Court, and can be wielded with considerable power.

Most of this was happening below the radar of the average person, so these cases looked like a relatively normal set of circumstances, not the gargantuan legal blitzkrieg that it actually was. In fact, it’s likely that nothing like this has ever been seen before in America, or anywhere else.

The resulting string of federal court losses have had the psychological effect on the pro-family movement as happened in early WWII with the Japanese takeover of the Pacific. Virtually everything fell, and that momentum seemed unstoppable.

The incompetence of the pro-family legal side

As overwhelming as the “gay” blitzkrieg was, it would not have been successful without the terrible incompetence of the lawyers on our side. This included pro-family lawyers, state attorneys general, and even private lawyers hired to assist.

It's painful for us to discuss this. We are reluctant to sound unkind to the pro-family legal people who worked hard on these cases. But this is such a horrible outcome that something must be said.

Many of you may recall that we had a similar reaction to the pro-family legal team in our analysis of DOMA and Prop-8 cases. 

Both of those cases suffered from an unaggressive and short-sighted approach that bordered on malpractice. The pro-family side did not present a credible case in either one. They were deathly afraid that telling the truth about homosexuality might offend someone. By not effectively countering the absurd arguments and assumptions by the homosexual movement, they made it easy for the judges to rule as they did.

The handling of the Prop 8 case was so bad that the Federal District Court judge ­ the "out" homosexual ­ rebuked the pro-family lawyers for the lack of evidence they presented! It was almost as if the judge had no choice but to rule against us, based on what he had to work with.

Since then, the same losing strategy has been repeated over and over across the country. Similar to the Prop 8 debacle, in some cases it's been so pathetic that the judge almost had no choice but to award the ruling to the homosexual side.

Many conservatives were furious at the nasty manner that Federal Judge Richard Posner slapped down the arguments from the lawyers of Wisconsin and Indiana. The pro-homosexual press certainly had a field day with it. But if you read the reports carefully, you can almost feel a bit of empathy for Posner having to listen to pathetic legal arguments that never went beyond “marriage is a tradition” or that “ it’s about the welfare of children.” 

It’s especially frustrating to know that there are so many excellent and unassailable (albeit not “politically correct”) arguments and facts about homosexual behavior that were never used.

The pro-family lawyers refused to consider using the vast storehouse of medical dangers, diseases, psychological problems, addictions, domestic violence rates, multiple partners, “gay pride” perversions, or suicidal behavior, etc. associated with homosexuality, as counter-arguments. They wouldn’t bring up natural law or morality. They certainly would not talk about the emotional trauma suffered by children growing up around homosexual behavior. Nor would they talk about the ex-gay movement (proof that homosexuality is not inborn) and the changes that come with healing.

Instead our side came up with only soft arguments like "every child needs a father and a mother," “marriage is about procreation, ” the need to respect “the long history of traditional marriage,” and similar blather. In fact, many lawyers on our side accepted civil unions as a reasonable alternative and had no argument against homosexual "parenting" ­ which made their "mother and father" argument impossible to defend.

Logically speaking, if homosexual behavior is not dangerous and immoral, but simply something we don’t prefer, then there is no reason not to let same-sex couples marry. Our people made their own case virtually unwinnable.

Possibly even worse, they accepted the concept of homosexuals as a “class” of people, which led right into the absurd pro-gay-rights interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment (see above).

The decades-long capitulation of the mainstream pro-family movement

To be fair, the recent legal fight only reflected the ideological decay that has enveloped most of the pro-family movement across America. Though most people probably haven’t even noticed it, this has emasculated our movement severely.

Current Massachusetts State Law still describes homosexuality as "the abominable and detestable crime against nature." The Bible has similar exhortations. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how today’s mainstream “pro-family” movement in America sidesteps, compromises, and capitulates on the issue.

This problem is most pronounced when you look at it in context over time. In the early 1990s the national homosexual movement began pushing an informal list of demands, which they vigorously pursued in nearly all their actions. 

Those goals from the early 1990s included:

• Tolerance of homosexual behavior in general society
• Homosexuality as not immoral, but natural
• The concept of loving homosexual couples as a legitimate part of society
• Homosexuals as a “class” of people protected in law, not a behavior
• Official legal sanctions of homosexual “civil unions” (marriage was to wait until later)
• Acceptance of the concept of young “gay students” ­ who need protection in schools
• Acceptance of homosexual couples adopting children
• Laws to ban discrimination against homosexuality in the workplace

 At the time they seemed outlandish and offensive. But now ­ incredibly ­ every one of those demands is accepted in some way (or not publicly challenged) by the mainstream pro-family movement in America.

Furthermore, it is almost impossible to find a pro-family group that will speak publicly against any of those demands; on the contrary, many pro-family groups will rebuke you as “hateful”  if you do.

A few examples (out of hundreds we could bring up):

• Numerous state and national pro-family groups have publicly supported civil unions and refused to challenge the concept of  “gay” adoptions.  
• The president of a national pro-marriage organization was featured in a video of his visit to the home of notorious anti-Christian hater Dan Savage and his “husband” to show his tolerance of their lifestyle.
• In 2009, the founder and then-board member of a national pro-marriage organization told a crowd at Boston College Law School, “It’s possible that gay couples could on average be much better parents than opposite-sex couples precisely because they don’t have children as a result of sexual passion.”
• This year, a major theme of the annual rally of a national pro-marriage organization was “tolerance” and showing that we’re “not haters.”
• Recently the largest pro-family group in Utah posted a nasty attack against a longtime Utah pro-family leader because she had described gay parenting as “child abuse.”
• To our knowledge, no national pro-family conference (generally held in Washington, DC) has had a speaker on homosexual medical issues or the homosexual agenda in the schools.

Much of this comes about because pro-family people are afraid of liberals and don’t want to be called names. They want to be seen as “reasonable.” They want to be nice. There is a lot more cowardice in the pro-family movement than most of us would like to admit.

A great deal of this also emanates from a deeply flawed  interpretation of Scripture, which puts being “nice” and “loving” on a higher level than stopping evil, protecting children, or even telling the truth. This is the first religious-based movement we know of ­ certainly in America ­ that has done that.

We can learn a lot from the emerging pro-family groups in other countries. From Jamaica to Africa to Eastern Europe and beyond, we have seen pro-family groups that are fearless, truthful, and understand the battle very clearly.

And to be fair, there are some U.S. pro-family groups on the state and national level ­ and many smaller informal groups ­ that do the right thing. But sadly, they are in the distinct minority.

A misguided grasp of the constitutional role of courts

Can a federal judge re-define marriage years after a state’s voters have had their say? Does the US Constitution give the federal government authority over this kind of issue? Many feel that it’s a ridiculous idea and an unbelievable stretch constitutionally.

In fact, the framers of the US Constitution and most state constitutions intended for the courts to have very narrow powers, usually limited to disputes over a case at hand. They did not want judges to be able to act as unelected dictators, creating, changing, and removing laws as they pleased, and re-defining basic terms or changing their intent. Judges have always been known to be imperfect, and are often swayed by emotion, the political climate, and egotism. The infamous Dred Scott decision is often brought up as an example, but there are many others.

Within hours of the October 6 notification by the Supreme Court, top public officials (including some “conservative” Republicans) in Colorado, Wisconsin, Indiana, Utah, and Virginia declared that gay marriage was now “the law of the land” (or similar rhetoric) and announced that they would immediately begin to comply.  In other states, officials are holding back.

It brings back memories of 2004 when then-Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts was passionately advised by numerous legal commentators around the country to push back and not extend the Goodridge “gay marriage” ruling to the entire state. There was no legal requirement for him to do anything, they argued. But instead, Romney declared that “it’s the law now” and went ahead and began implementing "gay marriage."

Indeed, many scholars have argued that courts’ rulings outside of their particular cases are not “law” and officials are not compelled to treat them as general law. Furthermore, what we have now are simply more “Dred Scott” types of decisions by a federal judiciary that is out of control. State officials and citizens must look at it in that light.

Conclusion

In the context of history one can’t overstate how insane the actions of the federal courts have been in their “gay marriage” revolution. They are declaring the equivalent of 1 + 1 = 3, that the fictional construct of “gay marriage” (with its nonsensical label “marriage equality”) not only exists but must be recognized by an unwilling citizenry.

We have all suffered because pro-family groups, religious groups, and legal groups have too often taken the easy road and have abandoned their moral obligation to tell the truth. It saddens us to have to say that so bluntly, but it's true.

A refocusing of our movement, at least by those willing to take on the battle, must take place.

Reprinted with permission from MassResistance