Tag Archives: Law

News

Australian apologist makes the case against gay marriage proposal

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The Labor Party of Australia is trying to push for gay marriage, so Matthew Hamilton of Aristophrenium blog sent them an argument against it.

Excerpt:

Man-woman marriage is an important social good. As a group, as a rule, and by nature, marriages produce children. The public purpose of marriage, therefore, associates the children produced from it to their father and likewise associates the father to their mother. This cohesiveness serves to foster the best environment within which to raise children2, over and above all other forms of family combinations, and is in this real sense, a unique arrangement to be promoted.

By contrast, same-sex unions, as a group, as a rule, and by nature, cannot produce children without the involvement of a third party. Homosexual unions are socially infertile; while some homosexual partnerships do involve children from previous relationships or conceived through IVF, these arrangements are intentionally designed to deny children the nurture of one or both of their biological parents. While two homosexuals can be loving parents, it defies common sense that a homosexual man can be a good “mother” to a child, and likewise that a homosexual woman can be a good “father” to a child. Author and lawyer Dawn Stefanowicz, writing of her experience growing up with a gay father, remarked: “What makes it so hard for a girl to grow up with a gay father is that she never gets to see him loving, honoring and protecting the women in his life3.”

I think it’s important to make those two points. Boys need to have a father as a role model and girls need to have a mother as a role model. And the children also need to see, up close, how men and women get along in a loving relationship – one that is not built on lust, but on commitment. By the time children grow, their parents are already into middle-age, usually, and the affection is more likely to be based on self-sacrifice and commitment. It’s important for children to have that example of women caring for and listening to their husbands and husbands providing for and protecting their wives.

Hamilton also writes about the threat to religious liberty posed by gay activists:

Where same-sex marriage is legalised (and even in some instances where it is not yet legal), ordinary citizens, business owners, religious believers and not-for-profit organisations will have their religious liberties and values and freedom of speech curtailed:

  • In Jan 2011, hotel owners Peter and Hazelmary Bull from Cornwall, UK, were ordered to pay $6000 in damages to a homosexual couple who sued them for declining to offer a room as it violated their hotel policy to only make board available to married couples4
  • In Illinois, Washington DC and Massachusetts, US, Catholic bishops voluntarily closed the Church’s adoption and foster-care organisations rather than comply with new non- discrimination laws following the legalising of same-sex marriage in those states which would have forced them to place children with same-sex couples5
  • Massachusetts, US, 2005, father David Parker was arrested after talking with his son’s school about opting his son out of mandatory pro-homosexuality teaching6. (Charges were later dropped.)
  • New Mexico, US, 2008, a Christian photographer was sued by a lesbian couple after refusing to shoot a gay wedding7
  • Canada, 2008, evangelical pastor Stephen Boisson was fined $5000 and banned from expressing his biblical understanding of homosexuality8
  • UK, Church of England lawyers state that legalising same-sex marriage in England will effectively force churches to comply9
  • UK, housing manager Adrian Smith was demoted10 after posting a criticism of the UK’s new gay rights law on his personal Facebook page, on his own time
  • Derbyshire, UK, Christians Mr and Mrs Johns denied the right to be foster parents11 after refusing to teach children in their care that homosexuality is an acceptable lifestyle

And recently in Canada, some provinces have introduced gay-activist propaganda into the schools, as well as making it illegal for homeschooling parents to tell their children that there is anything wrong morally with homosexuality.

Matt makes a pretty good case. I know that both the UK and Australia are both facing gay marriage bills right now. It’s always a good idea for pro-marriage, pro-family conservatives to be able to make a secular case against gay marriage. Here’s my case against same-sex marriage.

Videos

What is intelligent design? Dr. Stephen C. Meyer explains in this video

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A MUST-SEE lecture based on Dr. Stephen C. Meyer’s book “Signature in the Cell“. (H/T Chris S.)

You can get an MP3 of the lecture here. (30 MB)

I highly recommend watching the lecture, and looking at the slides. The quality of the video and the content is first class. There is some Q&A (9 minutes) at the end of the lecture.

Topics:

  • intelligent design is concerned with measuring the information-creating capabilities of natural forces like mutation and selection
  • Darwinists think that random mutations and natural selection can explain the origin and diversification of living systems
  • Darwinian mechanisms are capable of explaining small-scale adaptive changes within types of organisms
  • but there is skepticism, even among naturalists, that Darwinian mechanisms can explain the origin of animal designs
  • even if you concede that Darwinism can account for all of the basic animal body plans, there is still the problem of life’s origin
  • can Darwinian mechanisms explain the origin of the first life? Is there a good naturalistic hypothesis to explain it?
  • there are at least two places in the history of life where new information is needed: origin of life, and Cambrian explosion
  • overview of the structure of DNA and protein synthesis (he has helpful pictures and he uses the snap lock blocks, too)
  • the DNA molecule is composed of a sequence of proteins, and the sequence is carefully selected to have biological function
  • meaningful sequences of things like computer code, English sentences, etc. require an adequate cause
  • it is very hard to arrive at a meaningful sequence of a non-trivial length by randomly picking symbols/letters
  • although any random sequence of letters is improbable, the vast majority of sequences are gibberish/non-compiling code
  • similarly, most random sequences of amino acids are lab-proven (Doug Axe’s work) to be non-functional gibberish
  • the research showing this was conducted at Cambridge University and published in the Journal of Molecular Biology
  • so, random mutation cannot explain the origin of the first living cell
  • however, even natural selection coupled with random mutation cannot explain the first living cell
  • there must already be replication in order for mutation and selection to work, so they can’t explain the first replicator
  • but the origin of life is the origin of the first replicator – there is no replication prior to the first replicator
  • the information in the first replicator cannot be explained by law, such as by chemical bonding affinities
  • the amino acids are attached like magnetic letters on a refrigerator
  • the magnetic force sticks the letters ON the fridge, but they don’t determine the specific sequence of the letters
  • if laws did determine the sequence of letters, then the sequences would be repetitive
  • the three materialist explanations – chance alone, chance and law, law alone – are not adequate to explain the effect
  • the best explanation is that an intelligent cause is responsible for the biological explanation in the first replicator
  • we know that intelligent causes can produce functional sequences of information, e.g. – English, Java code
  • the structure and design of DNA matches up nicely with the design patterns used by software engineers (like WK!)

There are some very good tips in this lecture so that you will be able to explain intelligent design to others in simple ways, using everyday household items and children’s toys to symbolize the amino acids, proteins, sugar phosphate backbones, etc.

Proteins are constructed from a sequence of amino acids:

A sequence of amino acids forming a protein
A sequence of amino acids forming a protein

Proteins sticking onto the double helix structure of DNA:

Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone
Some proteins sticking onto the sugar phosphate backbone

I highly, highly recommend this lecture. You will be delighted and you will learn something.

If you want to read something more about the material that he is covering, there is a pretty good article here.

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Commentary

How faith, virtues and marriage are declining among blue collar Americans

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Brad Wilcox writes about a new book entitled “Coming Apart” in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

So much for the idea that the white working class remains the guardian of core American values like religious faith, hard work and marriage. Today the denizens of upscale communities like McLean, Va., New Canaan, Conn., and Palo Alto, Calif., according to Charles Murray in “Coming Apart,” are now much more likely than their fellow citizens to embrace these core American values. In studying, as his subtitle has it, “the state of white America, 1960-2010,” Mr. Murray turns on its head the conservative belief that bicoastal elites are dissolute and ordinary Americans are virtuous.

Focusing on whites to avoid conflating race with class, Mr. Murray contends instead that a large swath of white America—poor and working-class whites, who make up approximately 30% of the white population—is turning away from the core values that have sustained the American experiment. At the same time, the top 20% of the white population has quietly been recovering its cultural moorings after a flirtation with the counterculture in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, argues Mr. Murray in his elegiac book, the greatest source of inequality in America now is not economic; it is cultural.

He is particularly concerned with the ways in which working-class whites are losing touch with what he calls the four “founding virtues”—industriousness, honesty (including abiding by the law), marriage and religion, all of which have played a vital role in the life of the republic.

Consider what has happened with marriage. The destructive family revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s has gradually eased—at least in the nation’s most privileged precincts. In the past 20 years, divorce rates have come down, marital quality (self-reported happiness in marriage) has risen and nonmarital childbearing (out-of-wedlock births) is a rare occurrence among the white upper class. Marriage is not losing ground in America’s best neighborhoods.

But it’s a very different story in blue-collar America. Since the 1980s, divorce rates have risen, marital quality has fallen and nonmarital childbearing is skyrocketing among the white lower class. Less than 5% of white college-educated women have children outside of marriage, compared with approximately 40% of white women with just a high-school diploma. The bottom line is that a growing marriage divide now runs through the heart of white America.

This whole article is worth reading, because it talks about some of the other areas that are declining in middle class America. I have added the book to my wishlist.

It seems as though Theodore Dalrymple’s description of the British lower classes in his book “Life at the Bottom” has come to America. He argues in that book that the new moral relativism of the elites works well enough for them because they have money, but it is very harmful to the poor, if the poor adopt moral relativism. I always believed that America would be safe from moral relativism. Recently, I was trying to argue with some British Christians about how the secularization of Britain was leading to the decline of marriage and the nuclear family. I point out their 45% out-of-wedlock birth rate, and they pointed out our 40% out-of-wedlock birth rate. We are right behind them, and it really makes me sad. Children need a mother and a father to take care of them.

When arguing with liberals about the importance of marriage, I like to use two good articles from the Heritage Foundation. I argue that when marriage goes, many bad things happen, like child poverty and child abuse. You would think that the government would do something about the decline of marriage, but people on the secular left often don’t like marriage, because there are traditional roles for husbands and wives that clash with their feminism. They don’t like the working father and the mother staying at home – not even if that creates the most stable environment for the children