Irish Marriage Equality Referendum Draws Near

[loinburger]

Same-sex marriage is now legal in 20 countries worldwide.

Surely if Ben and his ilk keep making the same tired arguments against gay marriage then this trend will reverse itself

"We're trying to protect the family!"
"How is gay marriage a threat to the family?"
"'**** you,' that's how!"

A better way to protect the family is to have priests stop molesting children.

[Ben Kenobi]

Surely if Ben and his ilk keep making the same tired arguments against gay marriage then this trend will reverse itself

What tired arguments? You used to say that children in kindergarten wouldn't be taught gay marriage. They are. You used to say that 'Christians would never be forced', but they have. You used to say that Christian businesses wouldn't be hurt by this, but they are. You used to say that Christians of all stripes wouldn't be targeted but they have. What about Christian adoption agencies? Shut down. Christian schools? Shut down. All because they disagree with you and have the temerity to teach it.

So far every prediction I've made since 2005 has come true. Gay marriage was never about tolerance, but about enforcement. You are trying to force everyone to approve of something that is sinful and the problems aren't going away.

What do you expect a Christian to say? 'This is great'? Or do you expect us to just stay quiet?

What are you going to do when the Sharia folks start executing folks, Loin?

Are you going to call on the Christian community to save your worthless hides?

Why should we bother? You want your revolution. Good luck with defending it.

[Ben Kenobi]

After five years you can apply for citizenship. But as I say, this is not unique to the ancestry visa. You could be in the UK on any visa that gives you leave to remain - such as a work visa, or EU citizen. Ben's claim is wrong at face value, or through his contortion of the common language, a completely valueless statement

EU citizens have different privileges but so do citizens of the Commonwealth. You've still not refuted my claim. I never argued that only folks like me had this opportunity, only that I would have had this opportunity had I had a British grandfather.

Which *is* true, no matter how you slice it.

As for 'good character', I have a clean criminal record. Given all the Jihadist you're importing, it's not a high bar to clear.

[loinburger]

What tired arguments? You used to say that children in kindergarten wouldn't be taught gay marriage. They are. You used to say that 'Christians would never be forced', but they have. You used to say that Christian businesses wouldn't be hurt by this, but they are. You used to say that Christians of all stripes wouldn't be targeted but they have. What about Christian adoption agencies? Shut down. Christian schools? Shut down. All because they disagree with you and have the temerity to teach it.

So far every prediction I've made since 2005 has come true. Gay marriage was never about tolerance, but about enforcement. You are trying to force everyone to approve of something that is sinful and the problems aren't going away.

What do you expect a Christian to say? 'This is great'? Or do you expect us to just stay quiet?

What are you going to do when the Sharia folks start executing folks, Loin?

Are you going to call on the Christian community to save your worthless hides?

Why should we bother? You want your revolution. Good luck with defending it.

Those tired arguments

It's always sad and amusing when you compare the sinfulness of gay marriage to the sinfulness of, e.g., murder

[C0ckney]

Those tired arguments

not just tired, but actually insane. "if you allow gay marriage we christians won't help you when muslims start executing people!" um, yeah. it's hardly surprising that people support marriage equality.

[giblets]

China is largely atheist and hasn't been taken over by Muslims

[giblets]

Also, most of the US Marine Corps is gay and they're already fighting the jihadists.

[rah]

Are you going to call on the Christian community to save your worthless hides?

If history is any indication, they'll probably be trying to kill Christians.

[loinburger]

The reason that Ben and company won't be helping to fight the jihadists is that they'll realize that they're actually on the same side. "You believe in bigotry, hatred, and vengeance too? Awesome, let's go kill some liberals and enslave some wives!"

"Oh, you believe that Jesus was a prophet, not the son of god? That's fine, I pretty much ignore everything he had to say anyway, so let's agree to disagree."

[Aeson]

Gay marriage is the first step to Sharia Law! Because ... um ... Muslims love gays or something

[loinburger]

I think the Muslims' plan is to destroy Christian families by legalizing gay marriage, because as soon as gay marriage is legalized then all married Christians are going to get divorced and disown their children and get abortions and so on (I'm not sure why they're going to do this, but Ben assures us that this is what is going to happen and why would we doubt what he has to say?). With no more Christian babies being born the Muslims will have nobody to oppose their worldwide takeover.

[Dauphin]

EU citizens have different privileges but so do citizens of the Commonwealth. You've still not refuted my claim. I never argued that only folks like me had this opportunity, only that I would have had this opportunity had I had a British grandfather.

Which *is* true, no matter how you slice it.

As for 'good character', I have a clean criminal record. Given all the Jihadist you're importing, it's not a high bar to clear.

Haha. So all Jihadis around the world can now claim to British. This logic is awesome.

[kentonio]

Gay marriage is the first step to Sharia Law! Because ... um ... Muslims love gays or something

Yeah, I was trying to wrap my head around that logic. Today homosexual love, tomorrow Sharia law!

[kentonio]

Although it does amuse me that they think that if we were ever under an existential threat and needed some super soldiers to save us, we'd turn to members of a religion who preach forgiveness, mercy and pacifism..

[C0ckney]

The Irish Catholic church is changing its tune – soon the Vatican will too
Joanna Moorhead

The gay marriage vote has forced Catholic leaders to face a simple reality: that a church without worshippers wouldn’t be a church at all

At the start of this week it looked, briefly, as though there had been a rare outbreak of common sense in the Catholic church – an institution that has known very little of that (and a good deal worse) over recent years.

After the Irish vote on gay marriage, which saw 62% vote in favour of a change to the constitution to allow gay people to marry, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin said the church needed to take “a reality check” and “not move into denial”. The church, he said, had lost its connection with young people, and needed to work to reconnect with them.

This sounded interesting, even potentially exciting, to a liberal Catholic like me, who believes there are some things worth fighting for in our church, even if we do have to elbow our way through a lot of men in frilly cassocks to reach the treasures at its centre. But two days later, it seems business-as-usual has returned.

From Rome, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s number two, says Ireland’s vote was “a defeat for humanity”, adding that he was “deeply saddened” by it, and that the answer for the church is to “strengthen its commitment to evangelisation”.

In other words, he is advocating exactly the route Martin seemed to be warning against: bulldozing the popular will, proclaiming anew that he and his fellow churchmen are right, and anyone with a different view is wrong, while flagging up that the church will be doing more of what it’s done before (and badly) for the last few decades: in other words, trying to frighten and cajole people into toeing the line.

Depressing though Parolin’s response is, I still see a chink of light in Martin’s words. What he was talking about, you see, was something the Catholic church hasn’t given a fig about in all its 2,000-year history: democracy.

Of course, it’s still light years away from understanding what most of us believe, which is that truth and right are more likely to be found in common consensus than in autocratic dictatorship. But for a Catholic leader, even the mention of a phrase like “reality check” is groundbreaking.

This, after all, is an organisation that has chosen to ignore reality, even when it is up close, personal and staring it in the face. I’m thinking of issues such as contraception, which it continues to pronounce against, while the vast majority of Catholics are more than happy to use it; and child abuse, which it refused to acknowledge, even as the files on its criminal priests stacked up and grew dusty on the desks of cathedral offices the world over.

So why is the Dublin archbishop conceding to a reality check, and will anything convince the cardinal in Rome to do the same? No, say conservative Catholics. But as a liberal Catholic, I think they’re wrong, because when you look at what made Martin change his tune in Dublin, you realise it’s something that will eventually tap at the door of St Peter’s, and then the Vatican clerics will be forced into the rethink the Irish ones are having right now.

That much-needed intervention is the people power that dramatically reduced the number of regularly mass-going Irish Catholics (now atabout one in five, down from 90% 30 years ago), and which has, in the resounding yes vote in Ireland, socked it to the Catholic hierarchy like never before.

Because, rest assured, the vote in Ireland was about kicking the priests where it hurt, as well as about opening the doors to gay marriage. If the priests oppose it, we’re in favour of it: that’s been the mantra in Ireland, and after generations of abuse and betrayal from clerics and an institution that purports to follow and exemplify Christian values, it’s easy to see why.

What led to Martin’s radical rethink was simple: the fear that he will soon be leading a church without any followers. For thousands of years, the men at the top of the Catholic church thought power flowed just one way: now, at long last, they’re realising it’s not that simple. Because a church with no worshippers wouldn’t be a church at all, and the men who run it would have no power any more.

They’d better do something quick. I have an idea: they could start emulating the life of a preacher who lived in poverty 2,000 years ago. Whatever made me think of that? As reality checks go, that one really would take some beating.