"Gay" Leader Sentenced for Paedophilia

You won't see the news in the mainstream media. After all, this is not a priest.

44-year-old Stefan Johansson, former President of the RFSL (Riksförbundet för homosexuellas, bisexuellas och transpersoners rättigheter), or the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals, was sentenced on 24 October to five years in prison and ordered to pay 60,000 euros for pain and suffering caused by rape, pimping and paedophilia.

Founded in 1950, the the National Association for the Rights of Homosexuals, Bisexuals and Transsexuals is Sweden's largest organization of its kind, with more than 6,000 members. The RFSL was recognised in 2007 by the United Nations as a non-governmental organisation with consultative status. In Sweden, the RFSL was in 2009 one of the main promoters of the legalization of homosexual marriage.

According to the indictment, he administered alcohol and drugs to minors in order to have sexual intercourse with them, and he also alleged to have embezzled $ 3,000 that were supposed to be donated to AIDS research.

On his Facebook profile, he published among other things, an invitation to a [sic] "Education Day", which was organized on 18 July 2013 for "LGBT people with experience in the sale of sexual services" and specializes in "young people who prostitute themselves on the Internet".

The Homo-Imperial Association as an Offshoot of the Gay Lobby ILGA

The RFSL was the Swedish branch of the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), which in turn has promoted pedophilia for about ten years and is certified there at the UN as a non-governmental organization with consultative status, the European Section and in the EU , The RFSL always maintained pedophile contacts to a workgroup as well, which have campaigned for the legalization of sexual relations between adults and minors.

ILGA has openly revealed since 2001 that the majority of their funding is obtained directly from the European Commission. The gay lobby is thus financed by the European taxpayer. And the rich. In 2012 alone, 1,017,055 euros flowed from the EU Commission in the ILGA-coffers. That's more than 52 percent of the annual budget. Over such a windfall, other, more widely socially relevant associations were also pleased.

Gay lobby: Funds Come From the EU and George Soros

Among the other sponsors, there is the ubiquitous in the left-liberal spectrum, financier George Soros, who contributed 200,000 euros, which is more than ten percent of the total budget. ILGA today enjoys consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). This is a position that was long been denied it, because the homo-association refused to condemn "sex between adults and children". But then it was possible that the gay lobby has brought this last dam to collapse, without having to relinquish these positions.

And now Johansson's conviction follows, who was certainly not in the last rank of gay lobbying. Most media take no notice of such news, however. With their gender-ideological blinders on, they do not see what they do not want to see. A flimsy pretext can always be found where the crimes are trivialized. Most editors are also much too busy to demand ever new and radical gay rights, as they would deal with the dark side of their ideological zeal. Self-criticism anyway, has not been a strength of ideologues nor of those who ride the waves of fashion. The results of this attitude are known. Stefan Johansson is one of them. Only: The public should know nothing of it if possible.

For Sexual Relativism and Homophilia the Tide Is Turning

There are undoubted similarities between Muslim activists on one hand and LGBT and feminist activists on the other.

Both groups want to impose their views - and now, with same-sex marriage, laws - on everybody else.

And both react badly when they don't succeed.

At the moment, as I previously wrote, the trend towards total normalisation of homosexuality is experiencing a setback. Maybe people start having enough of it, and are waking up.

The above video shows events on 23rd-25th November, when a loud and threatening mob attempted to storm the Cathedral of San Juan Bautista (John the Baptist) in Argentina.

In the video, 7,000 lesbian and pro-abortion feminists mock, abuse, spray-paint, sexually harass, spit on and physically assault 1,500 young Catholic men just for forming a human shield, standing and praying around their own Cathedral, so that the activists could not storm in, desecrate and ransack it. Displaying their "tolerance", the feminists spray-paint writings the nicest of which is "Burn the church".

Then they burn an effigy of Argentinian-born Pope Francis. The similarity of behaviour with Muslim crowds is astonishing. The feminist, LGBT mob even ululates, as Muslim women do. Savagery replicates barbarism.

Many other similar attacks have been perpetrated against Christians, churches and other Christian symbols by homosexual activists, feminists and - guess whom - Muslims. Assaults that, had they been directed against the perpetrators themselves, would have been called "hate crimes", but committing them against Christians, for some inexplicable reason, makes them OK.

In Croatia, on 1st December people voted in a referendum to support the definition “marriage is matrimony between a man and a woman”, definition which will now become part of the country's constitution. 450,000 petition signatures were necessary to call for the referendum, but the pro-family campaigners collected 750,000 in only two weeks in a country of about 4.4 million (this would be the equivalent of getting 54 million signatures in the United States).

Two thirds of the electorate voted in favour of this new Constitutional Amendment: 66% to 34%. Liberty Counsel website elaborates and accuses:

Earlier this year, the Croatian government drafted a bill that would create homosexual “life partners.” Recognizing this as a step towards same-sex marriage, the Catholic Church organized the citizens’ referendum. The citizens stood strong against government, media, and even international pressure.

“The Obama administration is working to undermine marriage and family around the world,” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

According to a White House fact sheet outlining President Obama’s actions, Advancing LGBT Rights at Home and Abroad, the Obama administration is actively proliferating homosexuality around the world:

• Working with the Global Equality Fund, LGBT Global Development Partnership, and government and private-sector partners to train LGBT leaders;

• Working with our embassies overseas and civil society on the ground to develop strategies to advance LGBT status in countries around the world;

• Supporting resolutions specific to LGBT issues;

• Cosponsoring the UN Human Rights Council resolution on LGBT rights; and

• Ensuring that LGBT persons are included in broader human rights resolutions.

In 2014 the United States will host an international conference of homosexual donors and activists to coordinate and strategize LGBT international public policy initiatives.

“The memories of so-called ‘progressive’ regimes controlling society are fresh in the minds of Eastern Europeans. They know if the people stand united, they can overcome these ‘progressive’ ideals that wreak havoc on families and communities,” Staver points out. Croatia joins Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, Hung[a]ry, Lithuania, Bulgaria, and Latvia in passing laws to affirm natural marriage.

“President Obama’s anticolonial ideology is shrinking America’s influence in national political affairs, but he is a colonist when it comes to forcing his anti-God and anti-values ideology upon foreign countries. Obama’s ideology is morally bankrupt and anti-American,” says Staver. [Emphasis added]

Indeed, Eastern European countries, although generally poorer than their Western counterparts, seem to be more politically aware and intelligent than those. Having experienced socialism (for Marx, the first stage towards communism) and a communist government, they know what those evils really are like, and correctly recognise Western "liberal" agendas in various areas, from the welfare state to the normalisation of homosexuality (not to mention transexuality), as different faces of the same monster they knew in the bad old days.

In Croatia, the referendum campaign came in response to proposals by the current Leftist government to extend marriage-like benefits to homosexual partners. Having witnessed what happened in the West, where this kind of stealth approach has led to homomarriage and same-sex couples' adoption rights - and we haven't seen the end of the process yet -, the Christian, pro-family activists have been endowed, so to speak, with the power of prediction and been able to stop this train of events before desensitisation stepped in and it became too late.

Similar story in Slovenia, Croatia’s neighbour which shares borders with Italy and Austria. In March 2012 the people of Slovenia rejected Leftist social engineering by repealing a new “Family Code” adopted the year before by the Slovenian Parliament, which would have cleared the path towards complete equalisation of the homosexual and conjugal marriage and towards homosexual child-adoption. It was the first referendum of this kind in an EU member state, and is likely to become an important point of reference for any further legislation in this area in Central Europe.

The piece "Croatia: post-communist nomenklatura wants to re-define marriage, but civil society resists", written before the Croatian referendum, explains:

In both Slovenia and Croatia, the debate around so-called “LGBT rights” evidences the growing disconnection between the ruling classes (which, due to their lack of genuine moral and intellectual qualities, one would hesitate to describe as “elites”) and the population. In both countries, politics and economy are under the control of a small – mostly ex-communist – nomenklatura seeking to ingratiate itself with the influential pressure-groups that currently act as opinion-makers throughout the greater part of Western and Northern Europe. These elites believe that, in order to be worthy members of the EU, their countries need to recognize same-sex “marriages”, and be it against the declared will of the people.

The nomenklatura’s contempt for democracy becomes apparent in a statement by the country’s president Ivo Josipović, a former communist, who said he had doubts “whether we need such a referendum”. The Minister of Social Politics and Youth, Milanka Opačić, called the referendum “expensive and completely unnecessary”. In addition, the Prime Minister of Croatia, Zoran Milanović, called the referendum “completely pointless” and said that “this will be the first and last time that such a referendum is announced”.

Pointless? Yes, because the government appears determined to simply ignore the outcome of the plebiscite. The Minister or [sic] Public Administration, Arsen Bauk, has defiantly announced that, in case the referendum is successful (and the introduction of same-sex marriages thus becomes impossible), a new bill will be drawn up to grant homosexual partnerships the same legal rights as marriages. Since the fall of Communism, one has never seen a Croatian politician treating a democratic expression of the electorate’s will with such arrogance.

However, arrogance and brazen contempt for democracy are by now known to be the trademarks of the homosexualist lobby. It suffices to remember the way in which the French government violently cracked down on the peaceful participants of a demonstration against the re-definition of marriage, or the fact that the European Commission funds the budget of ILGA-Europe, a radical homosexualist lobby group, with more than 1 million Euro of taxpayer’s money every year – a contribution without which this fake “non-governmental organization” would simply cease to exist.

But in the meantime, the real civil society is slowly awakening. The foreseeable outcome of the referendum in Croatia will provide further encouragement. [Emphasis added]

I conclude with Matt Barber, who writes in WND's article "America's chief export: Immorality":

Indeed, under this president, America’s chief export has become immorality. Sexual deviancy, murder of the unborn, redistribution of wealth and other evils have been sanitized and propagandized as “basic human rights.”

Thus, when this arrogant man stands before the U.N. and decries those nations that refuse to embrace his special brand of pagan relativism, we shouldn’t be surprised if those nations push back.

And so they push back...

For instance, there has been, of late, great weeping and gnashing of teeth among mainstream media – and other circles of intolerant “tolerance” – over successful efforts by several foreign governments to stem the tide of “LGBT” propaganda within their own sovereign borders.

Russia, India, Croatia, Peru, Jamaica and even Australia, for instance, along with other nations, are now moving to inoculate themselves from the fast-metastasizing cancer of sexual relativism.

Having witnessed, from afar, the poisonous results of such propaganda here in the U.S. (the hyper-sexualization of children, the deconstruction of natural marriage and family, the rampant spread of sexually transmitted disease, religious persecution and the like), there seems an emerging global recognition that the radical “LGBT” agenda – a pet cause of Obama’s – is not about securing “human rights,” but, rather, is about promulgating moral wrongs.

The world is finding that forcing others to “tolerate” – indeed, to celebrate – unfettered licentiousness, under penalty of law, is as harmful to society as is said licentiousness to those who practice it...

While America may be lost (though I pray not), it would seem that her traditional values – values still shared by many, if not most, of the American people – are, nonetheless, gaining momentum abroad.

And that is encouraging.

Now let’s pray those values come full circle.

The Fight Against Redefining Marriage Is Not Over

I've received the latest email news from Coalition for Marriage, saying that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has climbed down from its proposal of merging official figures for same-sex and traditional marriage with “no differentiation possible”. This would have airbrushed true marriage from official data.

Before the proposal was implemented, an ONS consultation asked whether it was “important” that “some tables” could show separate heterosexual and homosexual marriage figures, which received an enormous volume of responses from Coalition for Marriage supporters insisting for separate figures.

The ONS has now released a statement saying that it is not going to combine the figures, but “will publish marriage and divorce statistics in the future where figures for opposite sex and same sex couples are shown separately”.

Coalition for Marriage comments: "So the statistics for traditional marriage are not to be a state secret."



After the passing of the homomarriage law in Britain, several people have given up hoping and fighting.

This episode shows that there are still many differences that we could make. The homosexual marriage experiment may still not succeed, especially in the long term. Changes made can be reversed.

A piece of evidence for that comes from the PS to the email, saying:

[T]he Australian High Court has overturned a same-sex marriage law in the Australian Capital Territory. The law was passed a few weeks ago, but the judges unanimously ruled that it was inconsistent with federal law, which defines marriage in Australia as the union of one man and one woman.

Is Homosexuality as Harmless and Healthy as Political Correctness Dictates?

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others.

Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when the house becomes a suffocating repository of towering piles of junk and old newspapers that this behaviour is called "hoarding" and treated as a disease.

So, it is the consequences that signal pathology.

Paedophilia is considered an illness because it is believed that children and young people under the age of consent will be harmed by sexual relationships, especially with adults.

Incidentally, the very fact that the age of consent, even in the Western world alone, varies considerably and can be as low as 13 in Spain and as high as 18 in the USA shows how unclear and uncertain many of our notions about sex ethics are.

Therefore, so the current consensus goes, paedophilia is an abnormality and homosexuality, for example, is not purely because of the consequences, harmful in the former and innocuous in the latter.

This is the received wisdom, the present-day orthodoxy and dogma which, interestingly enough, is very different from that of not just 100, or 50, but even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage, for instance, was still generally regarded as, well, queer.

So, if we think that our ideas were so terribly wrong then, they might as well be wrong now, and maybe in a decade or two from today they will have changed all over again, in the same or in the opposite direction.

"Homosexuality" can refer to two things: homosexual tendency and homosexual behaviour. As in many other cases in psychology and psychiatry, it is the acting on the tendency, namely the behaviour, that can more appropriately be considered pathological or not.

If we look at homosexual behaviour in men, we see persons who are prepared to take extraordinary, lethal health risks in order to satisfy their tendency.

Male homosexuals are at very high risk of contracting the AIDS virus and other sexually transmitted diseases, disproportionately high in comparison to the heterosexual population:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in 2010 a study conducted in 21 American cities, showing that one in five MSM (men who have sex with men) had HIV...

A coincidence, you say? No, the way HIV, the AIDS virus, spreads has a lot to do with homosexual behaviour.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.

This is from the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal government agency:

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

The often-repeated wishful thinking "panacea" of the use of condom is just that, a wishful thinking myth.

Male homosexual behaviour may reduce life expectancy up to 3 times more than smoking. This is what "Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men", a peer-reviewed study published in the Oxford Journal of Epidemiology, says:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men [for smokers is 7 years less]. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Are men engaging in sex with other men only harming themselves, although that in itself would be sufficient to recognize this behaviour as psychologically pathological?

Actually no, the risk spreads to society at large. Tuberculosis is increasing in the world, "and 'the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history' largely, as the authoritative medical journal The Lancet explains, thanks to the spread of HIV: 'Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis'."

All this shows that male homosexual behaviour has consequences that, if political correctness and fears of being ostracized as a "homophobe" - things that have nothing to do with medical or psychological considerations - did not stand in the way, would rightly make it classified as pathological.

O'Neill Got It Wrong: Gay Activists Want More than Liberation, not Less

Brendan O'Neill totally missed the point.

He compares the gay radicals of the past who did not want marriage because they saw it as a form of oppression to the LGBT movement of today who demand same-sex wedlock, and concludes that the latter have become bourgeois and integrated, renouncing the radical ideology of the beginning, when Stonewall was young and fighting for liberation from matrimony, not enslavement by it.

The point he misses is that the homosexual activists have become more radical, not less.

What they demand from society now is a total redefinition of marriage, something that goes to the core of this institution and pierces it through the heart. They want to shape society in their own image, not just more or less politely ask society to leave them alone.

What was a negative request, "Do not interfere with our personal lives", has become a much stronger, positive demand, "Change the meaning of marriage to fit our bill".

This can be seen especially clearly when you consider the LGBT movement's request for same-sex marriage in church, when it is obvious that the people who intend to take advantage of this "right" do not believe in the precepts of the Churches whom they would require to celebrate their wedding.

It is transparent that church gay marriage is a travesty of Christian marriage, as I have written elsewhere:

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the [British] TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception [bar abolishing the minimum age of consent]?

Sorry, Gays, Equality Is a Different Thing

The TV news channel Russia Today's CrossTalk programme for once had a debate (in the above video) I am glad to report on.

"Unimarriage?", on the subject of gay marriage, was a discussion among the UK's prominent gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, UK Independence Party's Member of the European Parliament Godfrey Bloom and Thomas Peters of the USA's National Organization for Marriage who works in Washington DC.

It was introduced thus:

Should same-sex marriages be accepted? What's driving the change in the institution of marriage? Are equal marriage rights democratic? Why aren't civil unions enough for gay couples? And if marriage is about love and the emotional needs of adults, then what about their children?

The programme was also exceptional in that the supposedly "moderator" Peter Lavelle did not intervene with opinions of his own.

One of the recurring claims of the conversation was Peter Tatchell's insistence that the right to marry is one of the human rights recognized by the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights and to deny it to homosexuals violates a principle of equality for all individuals.

But is it true that opposing gay marriage means discriminating and denying equal rights to homosexuals?

Tatchell confuses equal rights with equal treatment. Equality for individuals who are different results in different treatment.

Peter Singer, a moral and political philosopher much respected by the Left and certainly one of the thinkers of our time who will be included in future history of philosophy books, begins his classic work Animal Liberation with a comparison between the objections usually raised against the case for moral equality of animals to humans and the derisive attacks that greeted the publication of early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the late 18th-century.

One of the most frequent of those criticisms was to highlight the factual differences between men and women (analogous to the possible use of the differences between human and nonhuman animals to counter Singer's argument).

Singer responds to both in the same way: equal consideration of interests (the utilitarian Singer does not use the terminology of "rights") does not require equal treatment. The treatment for different sentient beings, the moral objects, will be different if their interests are given equal consideration (if they have equal rights).

The Australian philosopher says that equality does not entail that dogs have the right to vote because humans do and men have the right to abortion on demand if women do.

The incongruity of the idea that equality requires non-differential treatment in all cases can be seen if we think of, for instance, children not being allowed to drive a car or vote, even if they wanted to: developing the logic of Tatchell's argument to its full consequences would require giving children all the rights that adults have, including, for instance, driving and voting.

In the specific case of marriage, children, close blood relatives, threesomes are not allowed to marry, even if they so wished: are all those persons discriminated against? Most reasonable people would not think so.

This is probably why the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights that Thatchell invokes in his support does not include sexual orientation among the characteristics that should not limit the right to marry. It says:

Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family.

Virtually nothing of what Peter Tatchell said throughout the debate had a leg to stand on.

His assertion that polls show that a majority favours same-sex marriage was dismantled with ease by Thomas Peters of the National Organization for Marriage. He explained that in 30 out of the 34 times when people were given the possibility to vote on this they voted against gay marriage. Polls on this subject are not reliable because people tend to say they are favourable to it even when they are not, since they think it makes them look good.

In these Orwellian times when accusation of "homophobia" are thrown so liberally (pun half-intended) it seems a highly plausible explanation.

In addition, "polls claiming a majority support redefining marriage offer those they poll a false binary choice between redefining marriage and no legal recognition whatsoever".

In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron has been accused by the polling company ComRes to misrepresent its polling data in order to claim popular support for redefining marriage:

Andrew Hawkins, Chairman of the polling company, wrote to David Cameron to “put the record straight” about the number of people who are in favour of the Government’s plans to redefine marriage.

The Prime Minister had responded to a letter from MP Cheryl Gillan, in which she criticised the proposals. He said that more Tory-leaning voters were in favour of same-sex marriage than were put off by it.

Support

But Andrew Hawkins said his polling showed that redefining marriage was unlikely to win back support from disillusioned voters.

He also said it was “simply not the case” that all the published polls show more voters are in favour of same-sex marriage, something the Prime Minister asserted as fact in his letter.

Mr Hawkins said the level of agreement that marriage should stay as it is, varies between 55% and over 70%.

Ignore

He said that taking the polling as a whole, it is hard for David Cameron to ignore the fact there is less support for gay marriage than he makes out.

He said “the policy is likely to make it harder to retrieve many former Conservative supporters” and the issue is having a “detrimental effect on local Associations.”

Andrew Hawkins referred to a recent ComRes poll which showed that six out of ten Conservative Party chairmen believed the policy would lose the party more votes than it would gain.

Election

Earlier this week, Chancellor George Osborne said that gay marriage would win the party the next election, a claim quickly refuted by the Coalition for Marriage.

C4M Director Colin Hart said: “Yet again the Government’s spin doctors are trying to claim that redefining marriage is a vote winner. Quite the opposite is true.”

More than 610,000 people have signed the Coalition for Marriage petition to keep marriage as it is.

Tatchell's presentation of his battle for gay rights as a lonely one could have been realistic a few decades ago, but these days everybody knows that it cannot be delivered with a straight face. Peters pointed out that the three main associations for same-sex marriage in Washington receive many times the money his small organization gets, not to mention Obama's support and the Decmocratic Party's inclusion of legalization of gay marriage in its manifesto. Peters also said he receives death threats.

UKIP MEP Godfrey Bloom argued that the gay claims, with which he used to agree, have now gone too far, and threaten other people's liberty, as in the case of Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife B&B owners who were successfully sued by a gay couple for offering them two rooms rather than one.

Peters summed up some of the reasons to keep marriage between a man and a woman:

There's an awful lot of civil society -- churches, communities, government -- that is all built to support marriage because marriage isn't easy. It's not easy to get men and women to commit to raising the children they make with their bodies. But that's what civil society has been doing and a healthy society does that. It is difficult and gay marriage makes it difficult for all of civil society to enshrine that value that children deserve a mom and a dad, and that men and women should stick around and love and raise the children they make with their bodies, and the distraction of gay marriage has made it impossible for things like the Catholic Church, for things like political/civil government to give that message and so when you say "gay marriage won't hurt anyone" it already has because now when I try to say "a child deserves both mom and a dad" you jump in and say "that's against equality!" and so you can actually see already that the more gay marriage becomes accepted and enshrined in law the more difficult it will become for the rest of us to communicate this life-saving propagating message for the next generation.

We must also not forget how the redefinition of marriage could pave the way to allowing for Islamic polygamy to become acceptable:

Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

Associated Press Bans the Use of "Islamophobia", "Homophobia" and Other Words

The major news agency Associated Press (AP) has recently decided to put an end to the use of "Islamophobia", "homophobia", "ethnic cleansing" and other politically charged words in its highly influential The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law, generally called the AP Stylebook.

The book, annually updated, is a guide for style, usage, grammar, punctuation and reporting principles and practices used by reporters, editors and others in the US newspapers, news industry, magazines, broadcasters, public relations firms and so on.

Although not all publications use it, the AP Stylebook is regarded as a newspaper industry standard.

Therefore, the decision of making these changes, which will appear in the next printed edition that usually comes out in June, has particular importance.

The online Style Book now says that "-phobia," "an irrational, uncontrollable fear, often a form of mental illness" should not be used "in political or social contexts," including "homophobia" and "Islamophobia." It also calls "ethnic cleansing" a "euphemism," and says the AP "does not use 'ethnic cleansing' on its own. It must be enclosed in quotes, attributed and explained."

"Ethnic cleansing is a euphemism for pretty violent activities, a phobia is a psychiatric or medical term for a severe mental disorder. Those terms have been used quite a bit in the past, and we don't feel that's quite accurate," AP Deputy Standards Editor Dave Minthorn told POLITICO.

"When you break down 'ethnic cleansing,' it's a cover for terrible violent activities. It's a term we certainly don't want to propgate," Minthorn continued. "Homophobia especially -- it's just off the mark. It's ascribing a mental disability to someone, and suggests a knowledge that we don't have. It seems inaccurate. Instead, we would use something more neutral: anti-gay, or some such, if we had reason to believe that was the case."

"We want to be precise and accurate and neutral in our phrasing," he said.

This is an obvious improvement, since"homophobia" and "Islamophobia" are terms coined with the sole purpose of denigrating an opponent in a debate, as ad hominem attacks, and are devoid of any real meaning: they say more about the people who use them than about those they refer to.

Regarding "Islamophobia", David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have written a pamphlet on the word's origins that can be ordered or read for free online, entitled "Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future":

The U.S. is slowly but certainly accommodating the view that free speech, when it comes to religious (i.e. Muslim) matters, is suspect. We have come to this point, in large part, because of the growing success of the idea that any criticism of Islam is actually a pathology, rather than a legitimate exercise of free speech. It is, in other words, “Islamophobia.”

In their pamphlet, Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future, David Horowitz and Robert Spencer document how the origin of the word “Islamophobia” is a coinage of the Muslim Brotherhood. They show how the Brotherhood launched a campaign, by ginning up “Islamophobia” as a hate crime, to stigmatize mention of such issues as radical Islam’s violence against women and murder of homosexuals, and the constant incitement of many imams to terrorism. The authors make the case that “Islamophobia” is a dagger aimed at the heart of free speech and also at the heart of our national security.

Regarding the political use of the suffix -phobia generally, it is interesting to note, as Peter LaBarbera does, how unequally and uni-directionally it is employed; *-phobes never belong to the dominant orthodoxy, but always to the class of those who dissent from it:

We at Americans For Truth, like our peers in the pro-family, conservative movement who stand in principled and faith-based opposition to the LGBT political and cultural agenda, do not “fear” homosexuals. We simply disagree profoundly with the normalization of homosexual behavior and the elevation of homosexuality and “gay” identity to “civil rights” status.

Of course, there are people who do fear homosexuals, but there are also people who fear conservative Christians. So isn’t it odd that “homophobia” (and “Islamophobia”) became mainstreamed in America’s media-driven lexicon, while “Christian-phobia” did not? (And now transgender activists, piggybacking off the semantic success of their homosexual allies, are pushing the equally dubious “transphobia” to advance their agenda.)

You could easily fill ten large books with examples of abuses of the tendentious term “homophobia” and its derivative, “homophobe,” in the same-sex debate. Advocates of homosexuality and foes of biblical sexual morality would never allow themselves to be categorized and caricatured as “phobes” — our friend John Biver posits the Secular Left as “morality-phobia” HERE — yet they pretend that somehow “homophobia” objectively describes opposition to homosexuality. That’s because to far too many homosexual advocates, the end justifies the means, and the “gay” cause advances when its critics are cynically and falsely cast as hateful and fearful creeps.

We will have more on this story. For now, it is gratifying to see AP make a move toward neutrality, objectivity and fairness in its coverage of homosexuality.

It's extremely telling that Associated Press decided to drop both "Islamophobia" and "homophobia" simultaneously, because their origin and usage as denigratory terms, free-speech attacks and thought-policing instruments are remarkably similar.

It is really good news that someone in a position of influence in the media has started taking notice. And it is not the first time:

First the Associated Press announced that it would continue using “Illegal Alien” instead of “Undocumented American”, “Accidental Border Crosser” or “Beautiful Dreamer” on the grounds that it was well… technically accurate.

...The Associated Press is not taking a conservative position here, but we have reached such a point of cultural decay that fact-based positions that derive their grounds from reason and proof are already innately conservative. Or as George Orwell put it, “We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

The left’s counterattack on behalf of homophobia is already irrational, even from the standpoint of their own interests, because it communicates mental problems when the goal is to communicate bigotry.

Slate argues that homophobia is just like arachnophobia. The argument is wrong on a number of levels. The most simple level where it’s wrong is that the subject under discussion is not even fear. It’s dislike. The Guardian and several other media outlets have churned out pieces arguing that dislike of homosexuality is primarily motivated by fear. But that’s an opinion and the very argument testifies to a news media that is hardly able to distinguish fact-based reporting from opinion-mongering.

Finally there is something Orwellian about describing political or religious views in terms usually employed for mental illness. It skips past discussing what people believe or do to claiming intimate knowledge of their motives and passing judgement on their sanity. It’s reasonable for the AP to opt out of such heavily politicized and inaccurate language that claims to report on the state of mental health, rather than the state of events.

Church Gay Marriage Is a Travesty of Christian Marriage

Today, during a conversation I was just about to use the word "family", when I realized that I don't know what "family" means anymore.

This is a semantic, and therefore logic, problem.

In logic, the 19th-20th century German philosopher Gottlob Frege distinguished between the two characteristics, the two dimensions of a concept: its meaning or significance and its sense.

The meaning or denotation is the class of objects to which the concept refers, which is comprised by it. You could see it as its extension.

The sense or connotation are the concept's descriptive qualities, the information it conveys.

If you say "cat", the meaning of the concept is all cats; its sense is a domestic, feline, carnivorous creature who hunts, purrs, has whiskers and ears of a certain shape etc. The concept expresses both.

There is an inverse proportion between the two: the larger the meaning the narrower the sense and vice versa.

A concept like "universe", just because it has a vast meaning of an all-including class of objects, has practically no sense, in that it has very little descriptive, or delimitative, power.

Defining a word means exactly that, giving it borders that restrict it.

If you say "everything", the meaning is infinite and therefore the sense is tiny. If you ask someone what he did today, and he answers "everything", he conveys little or no information.

So, about "family".

In this case, the reason why we don't know what it means any more is obvious. A couple of homosexuals, married or not, with or without children, is now considered a family. Even 3 people of either or any sex who had a ménage à trois and lived together would be considered a family. An unmarried (heterosexual, because we have to specify these days) couple each of whose members was married to someone else with whom they had children (living with either parent) is considered a family. The list is endless.

And again, by extending the meaning of "marriage" to the point of making it burst, we have enormously shrunk its sense, which has become very vague now. Hence, I could not use the word today when I needed it.

Many things have caused this unwelcome development. I want to focus here on the homosexuals' ever extending demands for their "rights".

It's OK for them to do what they want, as for everybody else, as long as it does not harm others.

Here we have got to the point when the gays' demands are harming others.

First, the direct victims are the children, either adopted or born through some artificial or concocted means (IVF or sex of one of the couple with a third person), that a homosexual couple can now legally call their own.

Freud was probably the first to say that a mother and a father have, among other things, the crucial task of being a model through example, showing their children what the different sexual roles are. Many things that Freud thought were wrong, but this is still considered true, this is what most psychologists think today.

Nobody denies - yet - that there are two sexes, and that they have important differences.

The children of these homosexual couples, having two mothers and no father or two fathers and no mother, will very likely grow up confused about sexual roles and differences, and this is not going to bring happiness and psychological balance but the opposite. They will probably become homosexuals in a disproportionate number of cases, compared to the others.

When in the next few years or decades the consequences on these children will become apparent (and in particular when it will be clear that they are not happy people), that may signal the start of a backlash against all this giving homosexuals whatever they ask for.

The other victim is indirect, and is society. It's all of us. The family is a vital part and foundation of society, and diluting its sense and value - obviously not just through "gay marriage" and all that, but also through many other unsavoury developments among heterosexuals - has already produced terrible outcomes (the underclass, with rise in: crime, welfare dependency, teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases, and others) and is going to continue doing so.

Homosexuals are not discriminated against any more. Like blacks, they are not victims anymore.

Wake up. The people discriminated against have changed, the oppressors have become oppressed.

Now, when there is a civil dispute between gay activists and people who have different views, the former will always trump the latter, as Peter and Hazelmary Bull, the Christian husband and wife owners of a B&B in Cornwall who were successfully sued by a male homosexual couple for offering them two rooms rather than one, experienced first hand.

The excuse most commonly given for this perversion of the law is to say: the B&B is a public business. There's a lot to answer to that. First of all, the couple did not send the homosexuals away, they just offered them two separate rooms. No law can oblige a hotel or B&B to offer one particular room instead of another; even reserved rooms can sometimes be replaced by others.

Second, pub landlords are entitled to throw out or refuse entry to whomever they like, they don't even need to justify that with motives. It's often said that the reason for this is because they have to maintain order in the pub, but in reality they have the power to use that right at their discretion, they may simply throw out whomever they dislike. So, why should people who run a hospitality business not have the same right? Night clubs refuse admission to people for simply wearing the wrong clothes and nobody talks about human rights violations, which would be ridiculous.

Third, I think that the law of contract should enable everybody to freely enter the contract or not. A business, public or not, should have the right to refuse to serve whomever they like. In fact, they do. Banks, for instance, may refuse to open an account without any valid reason.

I believe that the "public business" motivation is just an excuse, and the real reason is just that the gay agenda must take precedence over everything else.

If anybody has any doubt, just look at the new law about to be introduced in the UK that allows gay marriages to be celebrated in church, which Prime Minister David Cameron has yesterday backed.

Gays say that they just want to be like everybody else, but the fact is that they are not like everybody else. If you, either by choice or not (I don't think that anybody knows really) live a homosexual life, go the full length, accept your diversity and live according to it.

What's the sense of living as a gay but at the same time imitating heterosexuals and doing things which are definitely not gay, are the essence of not being gay, like having children?

In the case of the church gay marriage law, the Church of England rightly protested that clergy should not be forced to perform ceremonies that go against their beliefs and doctrines. The government's reply that they will not be forced was ridiculous, because, as the Church answered, they will be forced not by the law itself, not by democratically elected representatives of the people, but by unelected, unaccountable, undemocratic judges of European or international courts in the hands of whom the certain legal actions initiated by homosexuals will eventually end.

We must not forget that, for believers, marriage is a sacrament; and for non-believers, what's the point of wanting to marry in church other than mocking the Church?

There was a male gay couple interviewed on the TV. One of the two, in late middle age, with all the seriousness in the world said: "I want to marry in a church because this is the way I was brought up". One should ask: were you also brought up to have a homosexual relationship? And, if you can accept to depart from your background and education in one aspect, what's wrong with doing the same for the other aspect as well?

If as a gay couple you got married in church, it would not mean anything, because the creed and doctrine behind the sacrament of marriage does not include unions of this kind. It would be an empty ritual, a gesture without significance behind it.

It would confuse form with substance, appearance with reality. It would be a travesty.

It would be like thinking that a man wearing a wig and fake breasts is a woman. He may look like a woman, but he is not; similarly, a church gay marriage may look like a Christian marriage, but it is not.

Homosexual wedding in church is an insult to the people who believe, it's like an enormous joke at the expenses of Christian clergy and faithful alike. Why does a homosexual really want to marry in church knowing that, given the Christian teachings on homosexuality, that "marriage" is meaningless, if not to give Christianity the finger?

Why should gay activists want to make a mockery of other people's genuine Christian beliefs? And why should the British government want to give in to this offensive request, as it has already done to all other gay requests without exception?

Actually no, there is an exception, at least until now: the demand to lower or even abolish the minimum age of consent to sexual intercourse for homosexuals. This demand comes from associations like the North American Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA) founded in 1978 before the pederasty issue became vastly exposed, and is an activist homosexual and paedophilia coalition group whose primary stated aim is to overturn US statutory rape laws.

In short, it asks for pederasty to be made legal. Among NAMBLA advocates are well-known homosexual activist figures, like David Thorstad and the leader of the LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) rights movement Harry Hay, and was part of the American gay rights movement for a long time, participating in marches and gay pride parades. It is not just an American phenomenon, though. Our own Peter Thatchell, Britain's leading gay activist, also supports underage sex.

French Minister Threatens to Expropriate Church

Showing that the socialists of today are no less totalitarian than those of Stalinist times, as they try to make us believe, or, since we are talking about France, no less authoritarian than the Jacobins during their revolutionary Reign of Terror, Cécile Duflot, French Minister of Territorial Equality and Housing - to give the woman her full title - in the government of Socialist Francois Hollande, has announced that she will carry out the requisition of properties from the Catholic Church and other institutions by the end of the year to house homeless people.

Bring back the good old times of the French Revolution, Cécile! Like in 1791, when the Jacobins decided to expropriate the Church to offset the debts of the state.

Duflot is a member of the Green Party, confirming the metaphor of environmentalists as watermelons, green outside but red inside.

Hers was not a request, but a real threat. On 3rd December, in an interview with Le Parisien, she said she found the solution to the winter cold problems faced by the homeless, adding that she would not understand if the Church did not share the government's goals of solidarity and hoping that there will be no need for a showdown: "Therefore the Church must provide its unspecified 'semi-empty properties' to accommodate the poor, or else".

The prestigious Le Figaro wrote in an editorial the next day: "It is the latest insult in the series of attacks that this minister delivers against an institution that interferes with her fight for homosexual marriage. It is irresponsible. Francois Hollande would do well to pay attention to the training of his ministers."

Duflot's attitude is not easy to understand: the French Catholic Church in effect has historically always been involved in helping and offering shelter to the homeless.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Paris, in a joint statement  with the religious organization Corref, said: "The church did not wait for the threat of requisition by the minister Madame Duflot to take initiatives”.

Someone also remarked that on November 14 of last year, when Caritas France presented its initiative to help the homeless in the winter, minister Duflot, although invited, did not attend.

And France's main national business daily, Les Echos, said that the Church is "by far the institution most committed to serving the homeless, also in terms of providing them with properties and accommodation." The same thing has been confirmed by Paris Prefecture (local authority).

Italian sociologist Massimo Introvigne, head of the Centre for Religious Freedom established by Italy's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, made some interesting observations:

The minister's threat is absurd, considering that the Catholic Church is the largest organization that provides homes for the homeless in France, and in this field its private charity is much more efficient than the state's public assistance. As the bishops have pointed out, the Church could do even more if it did not have to face bureaucratic obstacles that sometimes come from an entrenched anticlerical hostility prevalent in sectors of the French administration.

In short, for some governments all pretexts are good to attack the Church, and today targeting its real estate assets, with taxes and threats of requisitions, has become one of the main ways to attempt to silence it when its interventions are a problem.

"Gays" are More Equal than Christians

UK Prime Minister, "Conservative" David Cameron, has today backed an enormous policy change introducing same-sex marriages in churches in Britain.

Tory MP Peter Bone said the PM’s party was split 50-50 and predicted that several government ministers would vote against homosexual marriage.

He added: “Despite the PM’s assurance, the redefinition of marriage — because of the European Convention on Human Rights — will force churches to marry same-sex couples. This will outrage millions of people and hugely damage the Government in electoral terms.”

Not surprisingly, both Labour and the other party in the government coalition, the clueless Liberal Democrats, support "gay" marriage, and the LibDems have tried hard to push Cameron to back it.

Christian Today newspaper writes in the article PM's assurances on gay marriage 'meaningless':

Mr Cameron said today that he was a "massive supporter" of marriage and did not want gay people "to be excluded from a great institution".

What hypocrisy and what arrogance! Showing that you are a "massive supporter" of something by depriving it of its meaning, opening the way to its destruction.

I think that the most likely reason for Cameron's decision to back homosexual marriage in church was a quid pro quo, a compromise with his LibDem coalition partners who wanted a reform of the House of Lords. He could not agree to that, but in an exchange of favours he accepted to go ahead with "gay" marriage, which the Liberals had been calling for.

Some commentators have also acutely pointed out that, in the polls, popular support for Cameron is well above that for the Tory Party, and so it is in his interest to keep a distance from the rest of his party by showing a liberal, modernizing face, which does not cost him anything to do. After all, Christians in today's Britain don't matter.

He also insisted that churches would not be forced to conduct gay marriages if they did not want to.

"But let me be absolutely 100% clear, if there is any church or any synagogue or any mosque that doesn't want to have a gay marriage it will not, absolutely must not, be forced to hold it," he said.

Mr Cameron added that MPs would have a free vote on the issue.

His assurances of church protection, however, have failed to convince the CLC [Christian Legal Centre], which provides legal support to Christians experiencing discrimination.

CLC director Andrea Minichiello Williams said: "If this moves ahead the courts’ interpretation of equality legislation will not provide any effective protection from litigation for churches who do not wish to perform such ceremonies, whatever the Prime Minister says now. Any such assurances are meaningless.

“At the Christian Legal Centre we have seen countless cases where Christians have been forced out of their jobs for their refusal to condone and promote homosexual practice. Their views have not been respected or accommodated and Mr Cameron has ignored their plight.

“This does not bode well for British Christians if further legislation is passed. Assurances to churches who do not wish to perform same-sex ‘marriages’ fly in the face of all the evidence."

The CLC has itself faced difficulty because of its defence of traditional marriage.

A marriage conference organised by the organisation earlier this year almost had to be cancelled when two venues - the Law Society and the Queen Elizabeth II conference centre - pulled out of hosting it at the last minute.

Both centres said the bookings had been cancelled because the CLC's views on marriage contravened their equality policies.

The organization Coalition for Marriage (they have a petition going that you can sign at their website, as I have done) has declared:

Introducing same-sex weddings in churches and other religious premises is a radical departure from the consultation proposals. Ministers promised that religious believers could not be forced to hold weddings of homosexual couples because it would not even be possible to register them in churches or other religious premises.

But now that promise has been broken. Christians, Jews, Muslims and others will be exposed to the legal nightmare of equality and human rights laws, as well as the intrusion of the European courts. We have no confidence in so-called ‘safeguards’ Ministers will offer.

Legal advice from leading human rights lawyer Aidan O’Neill QC has made clear that the only completely safe course for churches will be to stop hosting weddings altogether, a massive change to Britain’s social landscape. He has also shown that, quite apart from the issue of buildings, individual people from any background who believe in traditional marriage face damage to their careers or even dismissal from their jobs, especially teachers, chaplains, foster carers and others in the public sector.

The Bill to redefine marriage will be published in the New Year. We understand there were behind-the-scenes attempts to publish a wafer-thin Bill next week to avoid proper scrutiny of the details by Parliament. Thankfully that seems to have been prevented by internal arguments.

UK: Man Demoted for His Christian Views Wins under £100 in Compensation Case

A country where you can demote an employee because he does not share your views and get away with it - Mr Smith remains in his demoted position - is getting dangerously close to a totalitarian state where there is control over what people may or may not think.

We can jokingly call it "political correctness" but it is deadly serious.

My definition of political correctness is this: the orthodoxy, namely the ideology that is dominant in both senses of the term - dominant because most widespread, and dominant because it is imposed with non-democratic means, through the use of force.

What I find most ironic is that the people who hold politically correct views and force everyone else to embrace them are the very same people who are horrified at the Counter-Reformation times' Catholic Church's use of dogma and heresy as a way of controlling ideas and hence people.

The only difference between the methods used by the masters of PC and the Inquisition is that in the intervening centuries the penal system of punishment has changed and instead of torture and burning at stake we have destructions of heretics' careers and livelihoods.

A Christian who was demoted for posting his opposition to gay marriage on Facebook will receive less than £100 compensation after winning his legal action for breach of contract.

Adrian Smith, 55, lost his managerial position, had his salary cut by 40% and was given a final written warning by Trafford Housing Trust (THT) after posting that gay weddings in churches were "an equality too far".

The comments were not visible to the general public, and were posted outside work time, but the trust said he broke its code of conduct by expressing religious or political views which might upset co-workers.

To be allowed to upset or offend is the essence of freedom of speech: there is no call for restriction on expression that does not offend anyone.

Mr Justice Briggs, in London's High Court, said the trust did not have a right to demote Mr Smith as his Facebook postings did not amount to misconduct. He added that the postings were not - viewed objectively - judgmental, disrespectful or liable to cause upset or offence, and were expressed in moderate language.

As for their content, they were widely held views frequently to be heard on radio and television, or read in the newspapers. He said he had "real disquiet" about the financial outcome for Mr Smith, whose compensation was limited to the small difference between his contractual salary and the amount actually paid to him during the 12 weeks following his assumption of his new, but reduced, role.

If Mr Smith had begun proceedings for unfair dismissal in the Employment Tribunal, rather than for breach of contract in the county court, there was every reason to suppose he would have been awarded a substantial sum - but Mr Smith had said that by the time he had raised the necessary funds, the time limit for such proceedings had expired.

The judge said: "Mr Smith was taken to task for doing nothing wrong, suspended and subjected to a disciplinary procedure which wrongly found him guilty of gross misconduct, and then demoted to a non-managerial post with an eventual 40% reduction in salary. The breach of contract which the trust thereby committed was serious and repudiatory. A conclusion that his damages are limited to less than £100 leaves the uncomfortable feeling that justice has not been done to him in the circumstances."

Later, Mr Smith said: "I'm pleased to have won my case for breach of contract today. The judge exonerated me and made clear that my comments about marriage were in no way 'misconduct'. My award of damages has been limited to less than £100. But I didn't do this for the money - I did this because there is an important principle at stake."

Matthew Gardiner, chief executive at Trafford Housing Trust said: "We fully accept the court's decision and I have made a full and sincere apology to Adrian. At the time we believed we were taking the appropriate action following discussions with our employment solicitors and taking into account his previous disciplinary record.

"We have always vigorously denied allegations that the trust had breached an employee's rights to freedom of religious expression under human rights and equalities legislation and, in a written judgment handed down on 21st March 2012, a district judge agreed that these matters should be struck out. This case has highlighted the challenges that businesses face with the increased use of social media and we have reviewed our documentation and procedures to avoid a similar situation arising in the future. Adrian remains employed by the trust and I am pleased this matter has now concluded."

France: Over 100,000 March against Gay Marriage

The photo above is of a previous, unrelated pro LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) demonstration.

This is the current story:

More than a hundred thousand people attended rallies across France Saturday in protest at plans to legalize gay marriage, according to police figures obtained by AFP.

In Paris alone, 70,000 people turned out at one rally, said police — organisers put the figure at 200,000 — while another 22,000 protested in the southeastern city of Lyon, said police, and up to 8,000 in the southern city of Marseille.

Why Paedophilia Concerns Have Come to Override Basic Rules of Law

Whether or not the BBC, as the Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson argues, should prove that the programme Newsnight was not acting with malice towards senior Tory politician Lord McAlpine wrongly accused of paedophilia by an abuse victim, one thing is clear.

The current obsession with paedophilia seems to have erased or greatly diluted the basic legal principles that a person is innocent until proven guilty and, even more importantly, that the burden of the proof is on the accuser.

Paedophilia and, to a lesser extent, rape have become such politically incorrect crimes that they are treated as if they were worse than even murder or mutilation.

Yet losing life or a limb is certainly worse than being a victim of sex crimes.

When another child abuse scandal connected to the BBC, that of Jimmy Savile, emerged, we heard a never-ending number of celebrities and commentators repeating ad nauseam that children must absolutely be believed without a doubt in the world when they make this kind of accusations, almost implying that disbelief is a crime in itself and echoing similar assertions made about rape and women who claim to have been raped.

Nobody should be believed absolutely and undoubtedly: children, adults, women and men. People who say they have been victims of a crime are witnesses; and it is a well known fact that crime witnesses are highly unreliable, as this latest case concerning Lord McAlpine confirms for the umpteenth time.

This applies to all crimes: the least unpopular as much as the most hated ones. It has nothing to do with the severity of the crime, or how much it is disliked, or how strong emotions it arises.

It is a simple rule of law. To punish an innocent is worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

In the case of paedophilia, even accusing an innocent may be worse than to let a guilty off the hook.

"To call someone a paedophile is to consign them to the lowest circle of hell – and while they are still alive" correctly writes Boris Johnson.

But why have we got to this point of insanity, where paediatricians have been lynch mobbed for having the same prefix as paedophiles (from the Greek for "child") in their name and accusations can fly around and be believed so liberally?

The reason is very simple. Starting from the 1960s "sexual revolution", strongly if not entirely consciously influenced by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich theories that repressing sexual impulses is not good for you, sexual activity has been removed from the moral sphere.

Contemporary, influential moral philosopher Peter Singer writes in his Practical Ethics that ethics should not concern itself with sexuality, and that driving a car, due to what he believes to be its environmental impact, raises more moral issues than having sex.

This new dogma has been readily and happily accepted by a majority opinion, leading to such nice results as multiplication of marriage breakdowns, adultery, divorces, broken families, abortions, illegitimate births, multiple partners and fathers, AIDS, increase in sexually transmitted diseases, homosexualist agenda being imposed on everybody, incest and Muslim polygamy made quasi-legal or accepted.

But public opinion, seeing where all this was going, namely that sex with children woud be next on the list of morally permissible activities, strongly drew a line at that. Something similar happened with rape.

Given the very confused ideas about sexuality and morality that prevail in our societies (and I grant that the subject is complex), all the furore about paedophilia (and to a lesser degree rape) derives from and is directly proportional to the eagerness and almost desperation with which all other forms of sexuality have been embraced without a thought in the world.

It turns out that sexual activity is not beyond the realm of ethics after all.

Obama Endorses "Gay" Anti-Christian Bigot

The video shows Dan Savage, a homosexual activist who created It Gets Better Project to help homosexual teens survive bullying during their teenage years.

It sounds good and nice, until you realize that Savage is himself full of the hatred he accuses others of nurturing.

He utters anti-Christian bigotry every time he opens his mouth. He praises violence against people who disagree with him.

He tells kids to f..k their teachers, preachers, parents.

All this is vile but maybe, with all the important events going on, not worth getting out of our way to draw attention to, since he will be one of the many homosexualist militants who do similar things.

But this bigoted, hateful, inciting to violence individual is endorsed by Barack Hussein Obama, Vice President Biden, and White House staff on the White House's own website, with links to Savage's website.

The anti-bully is a bully himself. Yet another, the umpteenth reason to vote for Romney against the bully-in-chief Obama on November 6th election day.

Christian Values Erosion Opens the Way to Muslim Polygamy

A typical example of how the erosion of our Christian values has left us without defence against the encroachment of Islam is that of polygamy.

Multiple divorces and remarriages in the West have created a situation which is similar to polygamy with a man or a woman having more than one family. The only difference with Muslim polygamy is that men and women in the Western variant of polygamy are on an equal footing or rather, if there is a discrimination, it is against men.

In these circumstances, Muslim polygamy has been a much more easily accepted practice, with authorities and police in Western countries turning a blind eye to it, than it would have been the case in the past, when people knew what the word 'family' meant, before the time of constant redefinitions of the term to include homosexuals, threesomes, incestuous couples and all the ever-expanding circle of relationships that the concepts of marriage and family must now apply to.

As it is, it's not clear what the ethical basis for the rejection of Muslim polygamy should be, since we have allowed things that have similar consequences for the children, for instance, left in many cases without a clear father figure or even without a father at all, as in the case of single-mother 'families'.

In many ways, there are a lot of similarities between Muhammed and Henry VIII: they both formed religious principles around their physical needs and personal desires.

Consenting Adults, Homosexuality, Incest, Polygamy, Bestiality: Defining Acceptable Sexuality

I don't normally watch The Jeremy Kyle Show, a sort of TV programme on the British underclass and its troubles, although it can be interesting at times.

Last night I watched it. There was a homosexual couple of two men, said to love each other very much. One had been adopted as a child, so he didn't know who his family were. The couple discovered that they were in fact half brothers. This revelation caused them much grief and an emotional state which was repeatedly described as "devastation".

Now I am genuinely asking this question.

What is the moral difference between incest and homosexuality? Not many years ago homosexuality was considered reproachable, now it isn't but incest is, in a few years' time, if current visible trends continue, incest will no longer be.

Let's start from the beginning. Initially, there was a prevailing position condemning homosexuality both morally and criminally.

This was, I believe, wrong, and so started believing many people.

The idea that homosexual orientation and behaviour were not per se unethical began to prevail, leading to a liberal attitude towards them.

So far, so good. What happened next was not so good, though.

Homosexuality, in the common usage, refers to two things: the inclination or orientation of sexual attraction for people of the same sex and the behaviour that acts on that inclination.

There has been a leap from decriminalising homosexuality and considering it as a legitimate and acceptable behaviour to assuming that same-sex sexuality is not a problem, in any sense of the word: and this is a big leap.

The new concept that established itself in public opinion about sex was that everything was morally acceptable among consenting adults.

But is this simple formula really standing even a superficial scrutiny?

For instance, what about incest? If the people "committing" it (and the very fact that we can still use this verb which we couldn't use in reference to homosexuality shows the double standard) are consenting adults, what then? Is it considered OK?

An obvious objection to putting the two on the same level could concern the biological problem of the increased genetical handicaps of the offspring from two close blood relatives. This, though, is easily surmountable by assuming that a) the incestuous couple is homosexual (as in our TV show case), or b) the incestuous couple is infertile for several reasons (the woman is past menopause, or the individual(s) involved are sterile through natural or induced causes).

In that case there is nothing to object to incest, if we accept that all sex between consenting adults is right. And if we do object to incest but not homosexuality, why then? There is here a glaring contradiction, which shows how confused and inconsistent our ideas about sexual morality are.

In fact, incest will in all likelihood become acceptable probably quite soon:

Most European countries have laws against incest between lineal ancestors/descendants, and between full siblings. However, in most countries these laws are no longer enforced if the incest takes place between consenting adults.

... UCLA law professor Eugene Volokh has questioned the rationale behind laws prohibiting incest, at least as they apply to sex between adults.[Emphahsis added]

In Argentina and Brazil, similarly, incest between individuals above the age of consent is permitted.

In Italy, a new law implicitly recognizes incest by recognizing children of incestuous relationships.

Once upon a time, there was a witch hunt mentality against homosexuals, now there is a witch hunt attitude against so-called "homophobes", i.e. people who disagree with the current orthodoxy and received wisdom on homosexuality. Nothing has changed ethically in this 360-degree reversal in public opinion, except the victims.

The question is: if homosexuality is accepted not simply in the sense of society's and state's non-interference with somebody's personal choices but also in the sense of suspending any judgement, moral, psychological, psychiatric and medical, about homosexuality and its consequences, that means much more than liberalism and tolerance. That means dangerous limitation to freedoms of thought and speech, fundamental human rights.

If we then move to same-sex marriage, moreover, this is no longer just a personal choice: it's a choice that concerns all society, because marriage is a social institution, as well a Christian sacrament, and is central to society, so what happens to it concerns us all and will have consequences for us all, not just homosexuals.

This is a genuine question, not a rhetorical one: is anyone capable of offering rational (I underline "rational") reasons why homosexual marriage should be allowed and not marriage of an incestuous couple, marriage of a threesome, or marriage between a man or woman and his/her pet or any other animal, or indeed any other form of marriage, if desired by the relevant parties?

If anybody has such reasons founded on rationality and logic, I'd be interested to hear them.

New Archbishop of Glasgow Under Fire for Comments on Homosexuality

Or rather for telling the truth.

A conservative Catholic just appointed as archbishop of Glasgow has been condemned for appearing to link the death of a Labour MP last year with his homosexuality.

Philip Tartaglia, whose appointment as the next archbishop of Glasgow by Pope Benedict was made public on Tuesday, suggested the premature death of David Cairns, a former minister, was connected to his sexuality, when he spoke at an event this year.

Cairns, himself a former Catholic priest and a widely respected Scotland Office minister, died unexpectedly aged 44 last year from complications from acute pancreatitis, shocking his family, friends and colleagues.

Tartaglia is an outspoken critic of Scottish government proposals, due to be published imminently, to legalise gay marriage and is also tipped as a successor to Cardinal Keith O'Brien as head of the Roman Catholic church in Scotland.

Currently bishop of Paisley, Tartaglia suggested at a conference on religious freedom and equality at Oxford University in April that there may have been hidden or unexplained links between Cairns's premature death and his sexuality.

In response to a question from an audience member about the suicide of a gay author in the US, the bishop said: "If what I have heard is true about the relationship between the physical and mental health of gay men, if it is true, then society is being very quiet about it.

"Recently in Scotland there was a gay Catholic MP who died at the age of 44 or so, and nobody said anything, and why his body should just shut down at that age? Obviously he could have had a disease that would have killed anybody. But you seem to hear so many stories about this kind of thing, but society won't address it."

Tartaglia's remarks were condemned by Cairns's partner, Dermot Kehoe, and Tom Harris, the Labour MP for Glasgow South, blogger and a close friend of Cairns, who became the first former Catholic priest to sit in the Commons after winning Inverclyde in 2001. Harris said the bishop's comments were "ill-informed tripe".

Kehoe, who was Cairns's partner for nearly 15 years, told the Scotsman: "This is genuinely very upsetting and painful for David's family and friends. I can't believe that someone who claims to be a man of God and is seeking to give moral leadership should speak from such a position of ignorance.

"I don't care what his views on gay marriage are, but to bring in my dead partner to justify those views is wrong."

Harris wrote to Tartaglia, describing his remarks as "hurtful and ill-informed" and urged him to reconsider them.

His letter says: "I was privileged to be one of David's closest friends. His friends and family have spent the last year trying to come to terms with his tragic loss from complications arising from acute pancreatitis.

"Your public assertion that David's illness might in some way be connected to his sexuality and lifestyle was not only unsupported by any evidence, but was, I fear, unworthy of your position as a leader in the church."

A spokesman for Tartaglia said: "Responding to a question from an audience member, Bishop Tartaglia agreed that the health risks of same-sex behaviour were largely unreported.

"He mentioned the premature death of a young high-profile gay MP in this context. There was no intention to cause offence and he regrets that anyone may have been upset.

"In the case of the MP concerned, his funeral was conducted in the Catholic church and pastoral support offered to his family and friends." [Emphasis added]

The archbishop was addressing a real problem that the mainstream media don't want to face. Regardless of specific cases, medicine considers anal sex - when is the last time you even heard or read this expression? - to carry more risks than other sexual activities. Even the ultra PC NHS says so.

An additional problem is that many deaths related to AIDS - of which the main way of transmission is from man to man, at least in the West ("In 23 European countries, the new cases of HIV in men who have sex with men rose 86 percent between 2000 and 2006.") - are from diseases resulting from the weakening of the auto-immune system due to AIDS.