“I fail to understand how secular powers and government agencies should think they are in a position to tell the church that she is wrong in her internal rules and regulations, even though these have directed and shaped the life of the church during the last 2,000 years. However, this is what we face today. If the Human Rights Tribunal should choose to interfere with the church’s governance, this will be most shocking. The tribunal has no authority to place itself as an arbiter of canonical precepts.”
Unless they decide they do.
Hey Philboy, let’s also talk about ending the tax subsidies made to Suzuki’s foundation, all the left-wing not for profit organizations, feminist groups, racial groups, language groups, academic organizations, and liberal front groups who use their tax status to spread corruption, decadence and evil.
Posted by: anselm at September 12, 2009 4:22 PM ”
I do believe poster anselm is on to something here;
tax exempt organizations (non profit and all that) BUT not a penny, not a halfpenny not a dust particle of a penny from gubbamint. wtf hold does this plethora of special interest groups have on the public teat anyway???
is steve-o harpoon a man of his word or just clucking a script in order to stay in power?
Black Mamba:
“‘Gay marriage’ is a stalking horse – or maybe I mean a Trojan Horse – for polygamy. There has never been a culture which sanctioned homosexual ‘marriage’, because marriage is fundamentally about reproduction and child-rearing.”
Not really. Marriages were used for all sorts of things, including political alliances and business deals. You can easily have procreation without marriage, so the institution isn’t required on that front. Meanwhile, many nations accepted – and some even formally recognized – homosexual relationships. Really, marriage was just a transfer of the woman from the father to the husband, which made homosexual unions a relationship between equals, and made marriage nothing more than a formal transfer of property.
You’re right, though – polygamy has been the norm in any society which is exposed to hardship. Depending on the circumstances societies would practice either Polygyny or Polyandry, although the former was much more common.
Rweally, there’s no reason not to allow any form of marriage since today marriage just a contract between free individuals. Whether that contract includes a man and a woman, two men, two women, or a dozen assorted individuals, should be irrelevant. Let people make up their own minds instead of having a bunch of 30 year old virgins in funny robes trying to tell them what to do.
p.s.
soldier on rightists, on day we will hear the welcome peel of the death knoll of HRCs in this once great land.
it is our only hope to a return to greatness; free of the fear of devastating state sanctioned political correctness.
unless, unless, steve-o harpoon DOESN’T HAVE THE GOD%$%%^%AMN GUTS TO STRIKE THE DEATH KNOLL SOUNDER and pursues his infatuation with a mirage (minority govt !!!) of powah.
So Alex, got a problem with virginity have you? I suppose you made a point not to marry one, eh? Must be fun knowing that you were hardly the first. Usually it’s your sort who accuses priests of being perversly sexually active. Make up your mind will ya! Just out of curiosity Alex, when is the proper time to “lose” your virginity?
“So Alex, got a problem with virginity have you? I suppose you made a point not to marry one, eh? Must be fun knowing that you were hardly the first.”
I haven’t bothered marrying, but I’ve had my share of virgins, thanks. I’m not sure what the big deal is. I’d rather have an experienced woman any day.
“Just out of curiosity Alex, when is the proper time to ‘lose’ your virginity?”
Mine? 15. Yours? I don’t know. One day you’ll find a nice girl, and you’ll know when the right time comes.
What Philboy is really saying is that the Catholic School system should be forced to accept students from the general public, educate them, but not receive money from the public coffers. So who will pay for the education! Obviously nobody paid for his!
Philboy is on another rant. The Catholic school system teaches the same subjects, math and science etc. as the other schools. In most schools, they have 30 minutes of Christian ethics a day. . And bye the bye philboy, check the class averages out in the Catholic School systems, especially in the USA, as compared to public schools.
“Philboy is on another rant. The Catholic school system teaches the same subjects, math and science etc. as the other schools.”
Oh, ok. So then you’d have no problem with publicly funded Muslim schools, right?
Alex – “reproduction AND child-rearing.” The “and” is very important.
When you say “many nations accepted – and some even formally recognized – homosexual relationships”, my guess is you’re talking about the ancient Greeks. While most of the Greek city states in the classical period eroticized certain male relationships in a lot of complicated ways, the idea that homosexual partnerships – to use a frame of reference that would have made no sense in the 5th c. B.C. – were considered in any way analagous to marriage is simply untrue.
If you’re talking about someplace else, please to provide reference thankssomuch.
What’s the “hardship” connection? Explain how that works, would you?
Polyandry’s only ever been practiced in the Himalayas; it’s a complete historical freak.
And here’s something you have ass-backwards (no pun…); while “political alliances and business deals” were something marriage was sometimes “used for”, the institution couldn’t have been “used for” that if it didn’t already exist, could it? I mean, it’s not like someone solidified a dynastic arrangement by aquiring some important guy’s daughter and then had a wonderful brainwave and realized: Hey, we could BREED! Neat! Fringe benefit! So again, the bedrock of marriage is…
But you know, none of this really matters. My point was that soon there’s going to be a serious attempt in the West to legitimize polygamy, a horribly misogynist practice that at this point thankfully is very alien to our culture; and that this attempt will be a means of pushing us towards allowing Sharia law to be practiced openly. Your thoughts are along the lines of “hey, sounds cool! Let’s all just get together in groups of any sort and form ‘contracts’ of some kind, or whatever”.
Groovy, baby.
Alex: So rather than listening to 30 year old virgins, we should give a listen to you? Now I’m unsure of what your “share” of virgins is, but I have to wonder if there weren’t any offspring and what became of them. And I do know something about young maidens, and that is that they tend to fall swiftly and deeply in love with young stalwarts like yourself (unless of course these were 30 and 40 year old virgins) but I suppose we can just kiss those off, what’s it to us, as long as we get what we want.
Oh yeah Alex, we should let our young people take they’re advice from winners like you!
Oh man, I seem to have embarrassed pillboy into silence! That’s amazing.
Kate, do I get a prize?
None of you get a prize. If you continue to use my comments section like your own private chat room, I can always close them down.
Do you understand? The message at the top of your input form is not a joke, and I”m frankly getting tired of people wasting my bandwidth to flood this site with back and forth crap.
I was saying, Black Mamba, that it wouldn’t be a bad idea at all for the Church to get out of the wedding biz, especially now that the laws of the land are totally counter to Christian teaching — no matter what “progressive” Christians are pushing on their dioceses and congregations.
‘Not a bad idea for the state to perform legal marriages and, then, if a couple wishes to have their union blessed by God, they can come to the church after the civil ceremony and receive a blessing. In that way, everyone is happy, I suspect, and priests/ministers are not put in the compromising position of being asked — or commanded by a Human Rights Commission — to perform “marriages” which run completely counter to the teaching of the Christian Church and the priest’s/minister’s conscience.
I realize that activist gays might go to a priest/minister to ask for a blessing just to rock the boat, but they could be directed to the Metropolitan Community Church and Brent Hawkes’ ministrations, That’s a bridge that would have to be crossed if/when … And, of course, there will always be clergy who are so “progressive” that they’d bless the union of two tea cozies, but that’s another issue for another time … 😉
BTW, great riposte to Alex’s impertinent improvisations.
No problem Kate. My apologies. Your place, your rules.
The church is within its rights to refuse to reinstate the gay man as altar server, and the separate school board is entitled to hire Catholic teachers only.
The first is a private matter, and is covered by freedom of religion.
The second is slightly more complicated because the schools are considered “public”, but the fact remains that the system is paid for out of tax funds from Roman Catholic parents who want their kids brought up in the way they see fit, and if that means hiring their own to do the teaching, that’s fine. Ideally there would be no “public” education system at all, parents would provide for their own kids’ education, and there would be no issue; it would be like joining a private club.
One notion that has arisen in Charter jurisprudence is that “the Charter applies only to government”. That’s not really true; a constitution is supposed to be a litany of individual rights that government is supposed to protect: the right to life is a bar against the crime of murder, which is not perpetrated by government, for example. Unfortunately, this view of the Charter has left the door wide open for courts to say that private relationships can be covered by human rights commissions – with all the amateurism, fanaticism and bullying that you find therein. This is how the commissions end up negating the Charter and destroying our rights. The jurisprudence is ugly, believe me. If you want to be sickened by a Supreme Court decision, try Blencoe (from the year 2000).
Technically, all the “anti-discrimination” stuff violates the right to freedom of association, excepting for government officials. So do most of the labour decisions, like Lavigne and Health Services and Support (2007). We’ve seen the SCC violate freedom of expression repeatedly: Keegstra & Taylor, Irwin Toy, Thomson Newspapers, Harper, for example. The Chatterjee decision this year violated the fundamental right not to suffer legal penalties without being charged with a crime. Pretty soon, we won’t have any rights left at all.
A very thoughtful post, nv53.
Though Christians and the Catholic Church, in particular, seem to be a favourite whipping boy of Canadians’ (particularly the “open,” (sic) “tolerant,” (sic) and “diverse” (sic) crew), the continued attacks on their rights to freedom of conscience, religion, and expression, are dangerous precedents with dire consequences for all Canadians. As nv53 points out, “Pretty soon, we won’t have any rights left at all.”
Thanks, Kate, for this post.