Sending “the LGBT soufflé back to the kitchen”
Robert Oscar Lopez of the California State University system reflects on the French protests against “gay marriage.” What he sees is an encouraging rebuttal to the propaganda that family redefinition is historically inevitable and the product of an enlightened populace.
Lopez points out that knowledge of faux marriage’s impact on children and even on women in other parts of the world contributed to the shift in French opinion
During my days as a priest in Los Angeles, I listened to lib prot icon George Regas lecture diocesan convention about our need to affirm all things gay. “If you just get to know these people… just get to know them…”
In those days, I was typical liberal seminary produce. I was fine with inclusion and fairness. I grew up near Silverlake and Hollywood, and gay people were a normal part of my life. It was in meeting and interacting with Fr. Regas’ bunch - Episcopal gay activists - that my opinion shifted. Their crazed tribalism, their blindness to consequences on the wider church, their insistent distortion of the Bible even when presented with overwhelming contrary evidence and their knee jerk zealotry for anti-Christian causes beyond their own led me to give up gay marriage as anything remotely Christian.
I’m not sure an appeal like Lopez’s will resonate here in the U.S., because the heterosexual majority, with its serial marriages and “baby moms and baby dads,” long ago gave up on the well being of children as a defining quality of marriage. “Gay marriage” is coherent here because so many Americans buy the false gospel of individual satisfaction in all things.
But Lopez does show that in some settings, “experience” works against the advocates of the latest thing, and that claims of “enlightenment and historical inevitability” are foundations of sand.
The French resistance to same-sex marriage has demonstrated that an ostensibly progressive nation that had little issue with homosexuality as a moral question can change its mind, not based on ignorance of reality, but based on knowing more about what same-sex marriage really means.
Lopez points out that knowledge of faux marriage’s impact on children and even on women in other parts of the world contributed to the shift in French opinion
While same-sex adoption survived massive protests, its chances are going to be rather slim because of the long waiting list of heterosexual couples looking to adopt. Since France’s public controversy, now Russia has refused to authorize any more adoptions into the country and India has blocked surrogacy by same-sex couples. It will be more difficult for same-sex couples to mask their purchase of babies through surrogates abroad as international adoption.
The French attorney general Christiane Taubira tried to skirt the French ban on surrogacy with a memo allowing the government to treat overseas babies conceived by surrogate mothers as adoptees eligible for citizenship. Instead of quiet acquiescence to this sleight, she sparked mass protests against the merchandizing of women’s wombs. The shocking turn in the Washington Post, with an unprecedented column criticizing surrogacy by Kathleen Parker, might be evidence that the French street revolution set off a chain reaction that eventually brought even a super gay-friendly American publication like the Post to face the grim business behind same-sex parenting.Lopez also outs “gay marriage” advocates as aware that reasoned reflection (hear that, “three legged stool” tools?) works against them
If we take a step back and examine how the international LGBT lobby has fought for same-sex marriage, we see that the lobby’s leaders must be equally aware that nothing is inevitable about acceptance of same-sex marriage, regardless of what they say publicly. Rather than patience, haste has characterized their tactics.As is often the case, loud cries of “Justice!” tend to be appeals to ignorance.
During my days as a priest in Los Angeles, I listened to lib prot icon George Regas lecture diocesan convention about our need to affirm all things gay. “If you just get to know these people… just get to know them…”
In those days, I was typical liberal seminary produce. I was fine with inclusion and fairness. I grew up near Silverlake and Hollywood, and gay people were a normal part of my life. It was in meeting and interacting with Fr. Regas’ bunch - Episcopal gay activists - that my opinion shifted. Their crazed tribalism, their blindness to consequences on the wider church, their insistent distortion of the Bible even when presented with overwhelming contrary evidence and their knee jerk zealotry for anti-Christian causes beyond their own led me to give up gay marriage as anything remotely Christian.
I’m not sure an appeal like Lopez’s will resonate here in the U.S., because the heterosexual majority, with its serial marriages and “baby moms and baby dads,” long ago gave up on the well being of children as a defining quality of marriage. “Gay marriage” is coherent here because so many Americans buy the false gospel of individual satisfaction in all things.
But Lopez does show that in some settings, “experience” works against the advocates of the latest thing, and that claims of “enlightenment and historical inevitability” are foundations of sand.
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