Some friends of mine in New Zealand sent me this article.

Excerpt:

A homosexual man is taking the Anglican Bishop of Auckland to the Human Rights Tribunal after being rejected for training as a priest.

A hearing begins today following a complaint from the man, who says he feels discriminated against because of his sexuality.

It is understood the man – who is in a sexual relationship with his partner – has wanted to enter the church’s training programme for priests for years.

But after applying to enter after years of study, he was rejected by the Bishop Ross Bay, who approves entrants.

Bishop Bay told One News last night that he was simply following the church’s doctrines.

The man was rejected “by reason of the defendant not being chaste in terms of canons of the Anglican Church,” the bishop said.

That means that anyone wanting to become ordained needs to be in what the Anglican Church deems to be a chaste relationship – a marriage between a man and a woman or committed to a life of celibacy.

In a statement to the tribunal, the complainant says he “felt totally humiliated that I had spent six years of my life in study, for a process that I was not permitted to enter because I was a gay man and in a relationship”.

“My humiliation and disappointment continue to this day.”

And this humiliation is so terrible that the government has to step in and drag the church in front of a secular court to pass judgment on Judeo-Christian values.

And here’s another story from Mercator:

Family First New Zealand has received notification that government’s Charities Commission intends to deregister the charity. Why? Family First has a traditional view of marriage being one man and one woman. The commission’s investigation began just after NZ’s gay marriage debate started last year.

The decision means that the organisation will no longer be exempt from income tax and, more importantly for a non-profit, donations to it will no longer be tax-deductible.

“This is a highly politicised decision which is grim evidence that groups that think differently to the prevailing politically correct view will be targeted in an attempt to shut them up,” says Bob McCoskrie, National Director of Family First NZ.

New Zealand recently decided to legalize gay marriage, and now we are seeing some of the repercussions. This is exactly what happened in Canada as well, where Christians are regularly dragged in front of Human Rights Tribunals and Human Rights Commissions for refusing to affirm the goodness of homosexuality and gay marriage. There, Christians can be tried by non-Christians for months and even years. They are never found innocent, and can look forward to being censored, forced to apologize, fined, etc. Why? Because once gay marriage is made legal, it becomes a crime to disapprove of homosexuality or disagree with gay marriage.

Legalized gay marriage is not compatible with religious liberty. We as a society have to choose one or the other.

UPDATE: Bill Muehlenberg’s commentary on New Zealand, gay marriage and liberty.