Every year in December, the Pope delivers an address to the Roman Curia. The annual speech has been dubbed “The State of the Union” for the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope gave this year’s address earlier today, and it is already making waves—for all the right reasons. News reports and punditry have focused most of their attention on the speech’s implications for gay marriage—namely that the Pope opposes same-sex unions of any kind. Nevertheless, the focus on the legal question of gay marriage is a rather shallow analysis of the speech. Make no mistake. The Pope’s words are nothing less than a broadside against any notion of same-sex marriage. But…
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What about openly homosexual Boy Scout leaders?
Gallup recently conducted a poll of American attitudes about homosexual rights. In keeping with recent trends, a majority of Americans (53%) say that they favor same-sex marriage. A majority also favors inheritance rights, health benefits for partners, and adoption rights for gays and lesbians. There is one little item in this poll that caught my eye. While 63% of Americans say that discrimination against gay people is a problem in our country, a majority of Americans (52%) say that openly gay adults should not be allowed to serve as Boy Scout Leaders. This begs the obvious question. If Americans believe that discrimination against gays is a problem, why do they…
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Receding Men and Rotting Hollywood
Peggy Noonan takes a hard line against the vulgar fare that seems to be so ubiquitous in the material coming out of Hollywood. She begins by noting the general malaise that has fallen over our country. She writes: We are making more sick teenagers and young men now, not fewer, and this is going to continue as our culture breaks up. I think we all know this, deep down.
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The show went on at “Saturday Night Live”
Even Saturday Night Live acknowledged the national mood in their cold open last night. I don’t remember ever seeing anything like this from SNL. (HT: Russell Moore)
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How will the Supreme Court rule on gay marriage?
As I wrote last week, the Supreme Court has decided to hear two cases on gay marriage. SCOTUS will likely hear oral arguments in March and render a decision on the matter by June. Everyone is speculating at this point about how the court will rule. Gay marriage advocates are feeling the wind at their backs, and many of them are expecting a decision favorable to their cause. They may very well be right, and gay marriage may be the law of the land by the beginning of next summer.
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Why aren’t we calling it the “royal fetus”?
As you have probably already heard, Kate Middleton is pregnant. Her offspring will be third in line for the British throne. The media have been abuzz with the news. In fact, I would say that they have been downright obsessive about it. With all this coverage, I just have one question. Why is it that I have yet to hear or read anyone refer to her unborn child as the “royal fetus”? Oh, I’m sure someone has used the term “fetus,” but it seems to me that the preferred term is “royal baby” or “child,” even though the Duchess of Cambridge is in the very early stages of pregnancy (e.g.,…
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A Year of Living Gay
We’ve seen Rachel Held Evans’ A Year of Biblical Womanhood and Ed Dobson’s The Year of Living Like Jesus, and now there a new “year of…” hitting the shelves. For one year, Timothy Kurek decided to live as a gay person. Kurek comes from an evangelical background, but he turned his life upside down in order to produce his new book The Cross in the Closet. He did everything that a person would need to do in order to make himself appear to be gay. He had to “come out of the closet” to his family and friends. Which means that he lied to them for a year. He took…
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Banning Public Nudity in San Francisco…Sort of
San Francisco is preparing to pass a law that would prohibit nudity in most public places. According to the Associated Press, lawmaker Scott Wiener spearheaded the effort after “constituents complained about the naked men who gather in a small Castro plaza most days and sometimes walk the streets au naturel. He persuaded his colleagues last year to pass a law requiring a cloth to be placed between public seating and bare rears, yet the complaints have continued.”
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What does the election reveal about us?
This piece by George Weigel is perhaps the most insightful commentary that I have read yet about the meaning of Tuesday’s election. Here are some highlights, but pay particular attention to the conclusion. The American culture war has been markedly intensified, as those who booed God, celebrated an unfettered abortion license, canonized Sandra Fluke, and sacramentalized sodomy at the Democratic National Convention will have been emboldened to advance the cause of lifestyle libertinism through coercive state power, thus deepening the danger of what a noted Bavarian theologian calls the “dictatorship of relativism.”
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Affirm the Sacred – Preserve Marriage
Song of Songs 8:6 – Place me as a seal upon your heart, like a seal upon your arm. For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as unyielding as the grave. It flashes like fire, the very flame of the Lord. Mark 10:6 – God made them male and female. Genesis 2:24 – For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be united to his wife. And the two will become one…