Friday, April 20, 2007

Gay Activists Reversing 800 Years of Progress

From "Requiem for the Magna Carta" by Scott Lively, posted 4/11/07, at Defend the Family

...To the global homosexual political movement, the freedom to speak certain words from the Bible is a freedom which cannot be allowed. Wherever this movement has obtained power, it has exercised it to deny freedom of speech. In January of this year a Catholic member of the Kamloops (British Columbia) City Council was fined $1,000 by the local Human Rights Commission for stating his opinion that homosexuality was "not normal or natural." The Human Rights Commission, following the law in all such cases, then paid the $1,000 directly to the homosexual complainant (this law has provided the incentive for complaints, true or false, by homosexuals all over Canada). In 2004, in Borgholm, Sweden, Protestant pastor Åke Green was sentenced to one month in prison for reading a sermon in his church on the Biblical view of homosexuality. In 2006, nine Glasgow firefighters were ordered to undergo "intense diversity training," and one was demoted with a large reduction in salary, because they refused to put on their uniforms and distribute fire-safety fliers at "Scotia Pride," a homosexual event in which participants publicly lampooned Christianity. Similar news items are now available everywhere in the press, the broadcast media, and on the Internet. Those who wield power in the homosexual movement have not concerned themselves with the niceties of their critics'
human rights.

It is as a reversal of the larger course of human rights history that this "repeal" of the first clause of the Magna Carta has its most profound effect. Upon the philosophical foundation of the Magna Carta is built the Bill of Rights of the United States Constitution, and on that foundation rests the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the basis of human rights provisions throughout all of contemporary international law. And it is no accident that the freedom of the church figured so importantly in that crucial early step in the development of human rights law. For the medieval church, though a flawed human institution in many ways, was the permanent repository of the concept of the value of the individual human soul, its essential dignity and worth. When selfish and arrogant kings and warlords wielded power for their own ends, there was often asylum for their victims in the church and respite in its courts.

It is within this history that the whole ideology of human rights took shape, the placing of certain individual human freedoms beyond the reach of temporal powers. These freedoms alone support the democracies which have sprung up everywhere on our planet. We should be deeply grieved that this great backward step has been taken, merely at the insistence of a determined interest group which will brook no opposition.