It's Not Only Islam that Threatens Our Freedoms

If you, like me, are worried about the Islamization of the West because it will erode our civil liberties, like freedom of speech and freedom of conscience, you should carefully consider that there are other trends in our society that have nothing to do with Islam but are taking us in the same anti-libertarian direction, both giving too much power to the government and at the same time paving the way to quasi-totalitarian societies, thus indirectly enabling Islamic supremacism to flourish and do its damage.

I am examining here the case of Britain, but the pattern is similar in many other Western countries. The UK government is trying to make us believe that its proposed introduction of a gay marriage law is a progressive move with the declared purpose of giving gays equal rights of which they are deprived at the moment. But this is not true: in fact homosexuals of both sexes already have equal rights, due to the legalization of civil partnerships.

This is so much true that many gays don't want same-sex marriage. This is from the website Gays against Gay Marriage, and is written by a gay:

I don’t understand the reasoning behind the suggestion that civil unions or some other marriage equivalent, with all the benefits of traditional legal marriage, are somehow not good enough. Olbermann seems to be saying that it is only the exact legal label applied to heterosexual unions — actual “marriage” — that will do. But why? What is the reason that it’s not good enough? Allow me to put my Freud hat on.

For gay supporters of marriage, this may be an attempt to force society to recognize and, well, love their love. It’s a way to make up for the rejection many of them felt by their hick Christian families, or their meathead peers in school as a child. The fact is, they will hate you even more if you are allowed to get married. Now, I don’t deny that it is hilarious and delightful to make bible beaters uncomfortable — the idea of a religious government official forced to legally refer to two men as “husbands” puts a smile on my vindictive face — but inflicting pain on one’s enemies alone is not reason to call for gay marriage.

Ben Summerskill, the Chief Executive of the UK lesbian, gay and bisexual equality organisation Stonewall, the largest gay equality body in Europe, famously said in an interview with Pink News: "Lots of gay and lesbian people don’t actually want marriage". Stonewall refused to endorse same-sex marriage until it was intimidated and pressured to do so by other gay groups: "Mr Summerskill also accused PinkNews.co.uk of running an 'unethical campaign' against Stonewall after it asked every LGBT rights organisation/ political group to outline their stance on marriage equality. Only Stonewall refused to answer."

In an article entitled I'm a gay man who opposes gay marriage. Does that make ME a bigot, Mr Cameron? (a reference to the Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg's calling of opponents of gay marriage "bigots"), journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce wrote (all emphases in this post are mine):

Now, a submission by the Church of England into the Government’s consultation on gay marriage has warned of an historic division between the Church’s canon law — that marriage is between a man and a woman — and Parliament.

It suggests the schism could even lead to ‘disestablishment’, a split between the Church and the State, and the removal of the Queen as Supreme Governor of the Church.

Despite the opposition of every major faith group — notably the Catholic Church — Mr Cameron is arrogantly pressing ahead with an issue which excites his chums in the metropolitan elite, but which disregards the sentiments of millions of ordinary people who, as poll after poll has shown, are against it.

Even some of the Prime Minister’s admirers concede that the policy has less to do with offering equality to the gay community and more to do with decontaminating the allegedly ‘toxic’ Tory brand.

Perhaps the Prime Minister has calculated that anyone who stands up and argues against his proposals will be branded a homophobe and a bigot.

Well, Mr Cameron, I am a Conservative and a homosexual, and I oppose gay marriage. Am I a bigot?

And what about Alan Duncan, the first Conservative MP to come out as gay? Mr Duncan, the International Aid Minister who is in a civil partnership, is implacably opposed to gay marriage.

So is Dr David Starkey, the celebrated historian, who is openly gay...

Yet I understand the Government’s Equalities office, having approached a polling company to test the opinion of the gay community, then decided not to go ahead.

Were the officials worried what the conclusions might be? None of my gay friends want gay marriage to be written into law...

The truth is that no one has been able to explain to me the difference between gay marriage and a civil partnership. I have asked ministers and friends. None has an answer.

But I do. We already have gay marriage — it’s called civil partnership. Why can’t Mr Cameron just leave it there?

A gay man wrote in a letter to a London newspaper:

I am the surviving civil partner of a long-term gay relationship. The state has recognised this relationship fully in all my dealings since my civil partner’s death from cancer in 2007. I do not support 'gay marriage’ because the term adds nothing of substance to what I already have received and needlessly offends some members of certain religious faiths (which, incidentally I do not hold).

One of the first openly homosexual MPs and the first to enter into a civil partnership, former Culture Secretary and Labour MP Ben Bradshaw,

said homosexuals had already won equal rights with the introduction of civil partnerships and had "never needed the word 'marriage' ".

The Labour MP claimed the Prime Minister's motivation was simply to try to show that the Conservatives had modernised their views of society...

"This isn't a priority for the gay community, which already won equal rights. We've never needed the word 'marriage'."

So, if the gay community already won equal rights, why is Prime Minister David Cameron pushing for same-sex marriage?

Cameron is the true representative of a political class that tries to enlarge the size of government and increase what it can control.

Personal relationships don't need to be regulated by the state. The only exception is marriage, for the reason that it is a unique relationship: it has the capability of producing new life, and the role of society is to protect the vulnerable, of whom children are a prime example.

If their parents don't look after children, society will have to. Hence the legalization of marriage between a man and a woman, an institution which pre-dates law and church in human history. There is a rational reason for this legalization, namely to ensure that the natural parents take responsibility for their children in front of society and the law.

No other relationship can produce children, which is why no other relationship needs to be regulated in the same way.

But regulating what does not need to be regulated and legislating on matters that don't require the intervention of the law is what governments do when they want to extend their sphere of influence and grow their power.

We also have to understand the repercussions of this new, proposed legislation on censorship and the freedom of speech, which will be endangered in a way which has echoes of the blasphemy laws demanded by Muslims.

The methods used by Islamic supremacists, like death threats, are also similarly used. MP David Burrowes, during his speech in the Commons debate on the bill, described how he had been called a Nazi and a bigot and subjected to death threats because of his views. "His children had been told that their father is a bigot and a homophobe."

Once the bill on same-sex marriage legalization becomes law, automatically everyone who publicly disagrees with the view behind that law will be doing something at best subversive and at worst illegal.

People can even be threatened with legal action, arrested, prosecuted or otherwise silenced for expressing a different opinion: this is what has been happening in countries where same-sex marriage has been legalized, like Canada for instance.

Since the introduction of same-sex marriage there in 2005, relatively few gay couples got married, but what happened to freedom of speech and conscience is terrifying. Canadian author and broadcaster Michael Coren writes:

In the few debates leading up to the decision, it became almost impossible to argue in defense of marriage as a child-centered institution, in defense of the procreative norm of marriage, in defense of the superiority of two-gender parenthood, without being thrown into the waste bin as a hater. What we’ve also discovered in Canada is that it can get even worse than mere abuse, and that once gay marriage becomes law, critics are often silenced by the force of the law.

...it’s estimated that, in less than five years, there have been between 200 and 300 proceedings — in courts, human-rights commissions, and employment boards — against critics and opponents of same-sex marriage. And this estimate doesn’t take into account the casual dismissals that surely have occurred.

In 2011, for example, a well-known television anchor on a major sports show was fired just hours after he tweeted his support for ‘the traditional and TRUE meaning of marriage’. He had merely been defending a hockey player’s agent who was receiving numerous death threats and other abuse for refusing to support a pro-gay-marriage campaign. The case is still under appeal, in human-rights commissions and, potentially, the courts.

The Roman Catholic bishop of Calgary, Alberta, Fred Henry, was threatened with litigation and charged with a human-rights violation after he wrote a letter to local churches outlining standard Catholic teaching on marriage. He is hardly a reactionary — he used to be known as ‘Red Fred’ because of his support for the labour movement — but the archdiocese eventually had to settle with the complainants to avoid an embarrassing and expensive trial…

What has become painfully evident is that many of those who brought same-sex marriage to Canada have no respect for freedom of conscience and no intention of tolerating contrary opinion, whether that opinion is shaped by religious or by secular belief.

There have been a lot of cases in Canada and elsewhere that we can consider big infringements of freedom of speech, concerning people who disagreed with the law.

Legalizing same-sex marriage means that the law is saying that same-sex marriage is right, fair and in fact it's a recognition of equality between homosexuals and heterosexuals, in fact this is the way in which both the bill and the whole debate in the UK are framed.

So, everyone who disagrees with something like this which is put in terms of equality of rights will de facto, automatically become a bigot. This has far-reaching consequences for the freedom of speech. If we are serious about freedom of speech, we should understand all these implications of the bill on same-sex marriage.

In numerous ways not homosexuals themselves, who in many cases are opposed to same-sex marriage, but some homosexual activists are acting like Muslims, in that they are trying to impose their views on everybody else and classifying everyone who disagrees with them as bigot, homophobic in one case and Islamophobic in the other.

Even the ad hoc pejoratives newly created for the purpose of ad hominem attacks are similar, with the insistence on the -phobic suffix. When I say "Muslims" I intend the term in a general sense, not a universal sense, i.e. not every Muslim will comply with what the Quran commands, not every single Muslim will be and do what the Quran preaches, prescribes and requires, but the latter, although not being what every Muslim is and does, is what every Muslim should be and do, hence the generalization, but not universalization, in my use of the term "Muslim" here.

The passing of the law on same-sex marriage would have these serious consequences, among others: teachers in state schools will be forced to teach pupils about it and endorse it, or they may be lawfully disciplined or dismissed; parents will not be free to withdraw their children from such lessons, and legal action could be taken against those who do; children will be taught to disregard their parents' opinion as "bigoted", creating a division between kids and parents; NHS/University/Armed Forces/Police chaplains could be legally fired for expressing disagreement even outside work time; so could public sector workers; foster carers could be lawfully rejected by local authorities if they disagree; registrars will be forced to act against their conscience, and conscientious objectors will be fired; churches, synagogues and other places of worship could be forced to perform same-sex marriages if the European Courts overturn the UK government's position on this issue; the Church of England may have to disestablish or face legal action because, as the established Church, it will be obliged to marry same-sex couples; clergy who disagree with same-sex marriage, but belong to denominations that don't, could be taken to court if they follow their conscience; dissenting faith-based charities will be penalized in a number of ways, from a ban from hiring public facilities to being closed down, as has been the case of adoption agencies.

All this because the UK government has chosen to interfere with people's personal relationships, which it has no business of doing, and to decide what the definition of marriage should be, which society, and not government, should decide.

And not because this is an issue that many people care about, not even many gays. The majority of public opinion is actually against same-sex marriage. Opinion polls indicate that, when the rights offered to homosexual couples through civil partnerships are clearly explained, most people in the UK oppose same-sex marriage.

Many polls have been commissioned by both sides of the debate, but using small samples and therefore unreliable. The largest and most statistically significant poll so far is the British Social Attitudes Survey (BSA) 2008, which asked:

“About how same sex couples should be treated in law. Which comes closest to your view … they should be allowed legally to marry OR should be allowed legally to form civil unions, but not marry OR should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition for their relationships?”

The result was: 33.7 % replied that they should be allowed to marry, and 62.6 % answered that they should not (putting together the second two responses).

I'll end with a quotation from the article by Andrew Pierce linked to above:

Mr Cameron seems to have learned nothing from the follies of the Labour government when it comes to imposing an equalities agenda on Britain’s leading faiths.

In 2007, Labour passed legislation which effectively ordered Roman Catholic adoption agencies to place children with same-sex couples.

Now I have to declare an interest in this aspect of the argument: I spent the first two years of my life in a Catholic orphanage in Cheltenham run by nuns and, to this day, I am eternally grateful to the Catholic Children’s Society which placed me in a loving home with my adoptive parents, who cared for me as one of their own. But, disgracefully, societies like the ones that rescued me and thousands of other abandoned children have now been forced to close down because the Catholic Church understandably could not accept the Labour government’s diktat — which ran contrary to its sincerely-held beliefs.

As a lapsed Catholic, I am not going to defend that Church’s teaching that homosexuality is a sin, but to force its adoption agencies to close on a point of moral principle was a scandal which has resulted in countless vulnerable children being denied the possibility of loving homes. What madness!

And for pity’s sake, which gays would have gone to Catholic agencies in the first place?

Those terribly depressing consequences of Labour’s sweeping changes should serve as a warning as the Tory-led Government presses on with the rewriting of the centuries-old tradition of marriage.