national review

Over at OrthodoxyToday.org, Fr. Hans Jacobse looks at why gay activists in California are now attacking places of worship:

So what explains the aggression of homosexual activists especially toward churches in California and elsewhere? Is it just because they lost the vote or is something else at work?

The homosexual lobby argued that marriage is a fundamental right denied to homosexual couples. They overlook the fact that homosexuals already have the “right” to marry. They just can’t marry a member of the same sex, just as a man can’t marry multiple women, a woman multiple men, a father to a daughter, a brother to a sister, and so forth. Nothing is “denied” to them that is not denied to everyone else.

“Unfair” they protested and indeed it is. But fairness to those who seek new definitions of marriage is not a concern of the moral tradition. There are compelling reasons why the convention is what it is (children need both a mother and father being one of them), and tinkering with it fosters even greater instability and suffering — as the epidemic of broken heterosexual marriages attest.

The fact that the prohibition against homosexual marriage is grounded in the moral tradition is not lost on the activists. That’s why they attack churches. Churches are the cultural institutions that represent that enduring tradition. (It’s not lost on the Black community either. Most Blacks resent that the language of the Civil Rights Movement was hijacked by the homosexual lobby — 70% voted to uphold traditional marriage.)

Read “Moral Tradition and the Assault of Gay Activists” on OrthodoxyToday.org

Also see “Legislating Immorality” over on NRO:

The wisdom of hate-crimes legislation aside, there is no doubt that a lot of hate is being directed at Mormons as a group. But why single out Mormons? And why now?

Dozens of church bodies — including the Catholic Church, the Orthodox Christian bishops of California, and a wide variety of evangelicals — supported the proposition. It’s also worth considering that, while gay-rights advocates cannot discuss same-sex marriage for more than 30 seconds without making faulty analogies to Jim Crow-era anti-miscegenation laws, some 70 percent of blacks voted for Proposition 8. While there have been a few ugly racist statements by gay-rights supporters, such vile sentiment has been restricted. Not so the hatred directed at Mormons, who are convenient targets.

To date, 30 states have voted on initiatives addressing same-sex marriage, and in every state traditional marriage has come out on top. But somehow the fact that Mormons got involved during the latest statewide referendum constitutes a bridge too far? In truth, Mormons are a target of convenience in the opening salvo of what is sure to be a full-scale assault on much of America’s religious infrastructure, which gay activists perceive as a barrier to their aspirations. Among religious groups, Mormons are not the biggest obstacle to same-sex marriage — not by a long shot. But they are an easy target. Anti-Mormon bigotry is unfortunately common, and gay-rights activists are cynically exploiting that fact.

The passing of William F. Buckley last week at the age of 82 produced an outpouring of remembrances that continued through the weekend with Michael Kinsley’s “Tales from the Firing Line” in the New York Times. National Review Online has assembled some of the best here, of which one of the best of the best is William McGurn’s “God and Man and Bill” originally published in the Wall Street Journal.

Christianity Today also republished a fascinating 1995 interview with Buckley on the subject of Christian political activism. In “Conversations: W. Buckley: Listening to Mr. Right” Buckley tells interviewer Michael Cromartie this about the growing influence of conservatives in politics:

What we see here is a mobilization of people who are properly horrified by what they see going on in Hollywood, in the growth of single-parent families, and so forth. They’ve figured out that our foundations need restoring, and I have never doubted that those foundations are religious. So this is how they reach the general public, as religious people rather than as political people. Their affinity is much closer to conservatives than to liberals for the obvious philosophical reasons.

I’m not frightened by it. But I think it’s important to keep the matters discrete and to know when you are talking about one thing and when you are talking about something else.

See also this exchange between Buckley and Cromartie on the publication of Buckley’s Nearer, My God: An Autobiography of Faith, in 1997.

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