Of course a constitutional ban on "gay marriage" must be overturned. No
way it can be valid. That appears to be the mindset of a gay rights
group in Oregon, as documented
here.
One can only hope that the Defense of Marriage Coalition is correct, and
that the challenge will not succeed.
There is quite a bit that is objectionable in
this
article from the Christian
Science Monitor. I'm not exactly sure where to start. How is an
understanding of marriage as binding "more restrictive"? I would say it
is "more accurate." On the plus side, it appears that some places are
looking at the same sort of marriage preparation classes that the Church
requires. Once again, it raises the specter of statistics suggesting
that making divorce less accessible would somehow increase domestic
violence. In general, I am leery of statistics, but it would be nice to
have a set of my own to wave back and say "no it doesn't." A governor in
Michigan seems to have the right idea: get the state out of the lives of
the citizens, "But the decisions men and women make about marriage are
private decisions. State government should not expand its role into such
private matters." Also raised in this article is a less obvious but
really much bigger issue. We have fallen incredibly far if a law that
says the state shall presume "that a husband is the father of any child
born to his former wife within 300 days of a divorce" cannot even be
taken for granted! Heaven help us.
What in the world is Cardinal Cottier thinkingâ½ This crazy cardinal over at the Vatican has managed to err in three ways at once! First and foremost, how is it that a cardinal does not know that you do not choose "the lesser of two evils," but rather that you choose the one guaranteed way to end evil: abstain from it. He's advocating condom use because it might help slow the spread of AIDS. Never mind that simply not having sex when infected, and not having sex with multiple people would go far, far further to halt the spread of AIDS without choosing an evil at all! Next he thinks that condom use would slow the spread of AIDS. Given the failure rate on condoms, such that they will not even effectively stop sperm, how in the world does he think they will slow the spread of AIDS? And the failure rate is generally computed when they are "used correctly," which means there must be a way to use them "incorrectly" presumably with a higher failure rate. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, he said all this where it could be quoted, and make it to the press. So now the press gets to cheer and spread the word about "the growing number of influential Catholic Church figures questioning the official Vatican ban on condom use." And they get to go on to say "The point is that the Vatican is slowly being forced to admit by some of its most authoritative churchmen that this is a complex moral argument which does not allow for a simple overall ban on the use of condoms." By the way, both of these quotes are from this BBC article. This is why there is such a thing as "scandal" and why it is considered as serious as it is.