BRUSSELS (ChurchMilitant.com) - Brussels is getting backlash from Poland for flying a gay flag outside of the European Parliament.
On Thursday, a rainbow flag was hoisted up in front of the building for the first time in its history, marking "International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia."
Despite outcry from Polish conservatives, the European Union said, "Regrettably, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) persons in Europe are still subject to serious discrimination and maltreatment on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity."
Ryszard Legutko, co-chairman of the European Conservatives and Reformists group, said in a letter to the European Parliament that Thursday's initiative displayed "just one lobby group."
He questioned why the Parliament would not promote other unofficial "international days" like those celebrating museums, beer or students.
Since 1990, May 17 has been remembered as the anniversary of the removal of homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases of the World Health Organization.
But Legutko blasted the display of a rainbow flag, saying it endorses a "moral revolution" that privileges same-sex couples. There are "practically no ... attacks" on those with same-sex attraction, Legutko emphasized.
There are 'practically no ... attacks' on those with same-sex attraction.
This didn't stop the European Commission and European External Action Service, also in Brussels, from illuminating its headquarters with the colors of the gay flag.
Frans Timmermans, vice president of the European Commission, said, "It's time we put an end to the widespread discrimination against LGBTI people together."
However, Legutko instead recommended hoisting a flag with a fish — a symbol of Christianity — to symbolize the millions of Christians suffering persecution worldwide.
Poster Comment:
Many of us are sick and tired of politicians kissing the asses of queers! Resurrect the law that outlaws homosexual acts and proselytizing today's thoroughly confused youth. The belong hidden under a rock.
Widespread LGBTQI discrimination? Where? When? By whom? If it happens there must have been major stories in the press. But nothing.
Instead what I see are Christians being slaughtered and persecuted by the thousands over the last 20 years and not a word from the atheistic marxists in Brussels, London, Berlin, Paris.
In my opinion what's acquired is the predisposition to homosexuality -- as with the predisposition to pedophilia, alcoholism, drug use, smoking or being overweight, to name a few.
Doesn't mean you have to engage in that behavior, or that you're entitled to engage in that behavior, or that the rest of us have to accept that behavior as normal.
Doesn't mean you have to engage in that behavior, or that you're entitled to engage in that behavior, or that the rest of us have to accept that behavior as normal.
That is true. The only behavior we HAVE to engage in, involuntarily, is breathing and excreting.
So, the question is: what are you ENTITLED to engage in? I think we would both come down on the side of saying "What the law of our land lets us do."
So then it's purely a question of what that law should be (and who decides).
I think that the law should let people have whatever sex they please with other consenting adults, and I think the law should not give any recourse to those who dislike that. And that's actually what our law DOES, right now, so I am content with it.
The only question, then, is whether or not we have to ACCEPT legal behavior as "normal". You and I both don't think that homosexual activity is "normal". It's deviant. I shrug my shoulders at it because I just don't care what people do. You are horrified by it. I think it's important that you don't get to express your horror legally in any way, that you essentially have to passively accept something you really don't like, even if you don't think it's normal at all, because the law says it's legal.
In the same vein, I know that abortion is the intentional pre-meditated murder of an innocent unborn child. It horrifies me, and if I had the power, I would outlaw it and punish those who commit it. But the law is against me, so however abnormal I find the activity and the law, I just have to lump it. If it's important enough to me, I can emigrate to get away from that law, or I can persuade other people to agree with me and get an administration in there that will put five like-minded people on the Supremes.
In general, I find the liberalizing and relaxing of legal restraints on personal liberty to be a very good thing and I support it. I think we went too far with abortion, but everything else seems, on balance, positive to me. Including letting gays have whatever sex they want to have. I don't care. And I don't think that people who DO care, like you do, should have any say in it. So the law is permissive, and the politics have to be strong enough to stop you in your tracks. One of us is going to be unhappy. In general, moralistic, puritanical and racist types have had their politics beaten down and beaten back over the course of American history, and greater and greater liberty has emerged. I strongly support that trend, both of freeing people from puritanical laws, and of putting into place the political and legal structures to prevent your side from regaining momentum to ever be able to change any of the rules back.
Ergo, for example, in the case of race, not only did slavery and segregation need to be formally outlawed on paper, but we needed the FBI and internal intelligence and law enforcement apparatus of state to go in and smash the KKK and related organizations, to prosecute and persecute and beat them down sufficiently that people recognized that they would pay a heavy social, economic, political and economic price if they sided with the losing side of that fight. The past was racially oppressive. People did not change their minds easily. So once the racists were defeated in physical and legal battle, they needed to be forcibly oppressed by the government, persecuted, so that people would be afraid to join their ranks or mouth support for them, for fear of their own well being.
This was effective. The KKK was once a mighty organization that struck fear into many, both physical fear on the ground and also in the halls of power. But they were defeated and reduced, to the point that only a crazy person on the margins who was so filled with racial hatred that he would be willing to give up any prospects of a decent job or a normal life would join.
In some lands in history, masturbation was a mortal sin, and was punished violently through public whipping or worse. Unmarried heterosexual fornication and gay sex in private between consenting adults both fall into the category of masturbation: things that are nobody's business, that nobody should be able to punish. Since some people want to, and are unhappy if those things are allowed, those people have to be kept unhappy, by making damned sure they cannot wrest back control of the law to reimpose their views.
In general, I find the liberalizing and relaxing of legal restraints on personal liberty to be a very good thing and I support it.
Well, that would work in a society consisting solely of responsible adults -- as would most Libertarian ideas.
But our society also consists of impressionable children along with irresponsible adults who expect, nay demand, the rest of us to pick up the tab when things go bad for them.
Well, that would work in a society consisting solely of responsible adults -- as would most Libertarian ideas.
But our society also consists of impressionable children along with irresponsible adults who expect, nay demand, the rest of us to pick up the tab when things go bad for them.
Meaning, your argument is specious.
My argument is the law of the land. Your argument is your own reasoning, and it has not persuaded the bulk of the American people.
Our laws already permit consenting adults to perform whatever sex acts they please in private, and also on film for the Internet to see.
Our laws recognize that impressionable children should be protected from such things, and so we have an age of consent, we have rules against pornographic information being distributed or viewed by minors. We have ages of legal marriage.
We have struck what we, as a society, consider to be a reasonable balance between adults' rights of sexual liberty, and the need to protect children from sex before they are mature.
You don't agree with where the society has drawn the line. I do, so I include myself as part of the "we" that have set the rule where we have set it.
It would be one thing if you were taking the position I do on abortion - that it is evil, and wrong, and SHOULD BE outlawed, but is, in fact, legal. I call the law itself evil in the case of abortion.
If you did that regarding the laws of sexual liberty, because you disagree with the degree of permissiveness in our society, then I would have little to say to you other than that we disagree on the amount of sexual liberty there should be.
Trouble is, though, that's not what you are arguing. You are speaking as though your opinion on these matters IS the law, as though you are the final arbiter not of right and wrong, but of what the law IS. And you are not. The law IS, in fact, precisely where I think it ought to be on the subject: very broad personal liberty, with some protection for children - but not so much protection for children that private adult sexual behavior, and public adult affectionate non-sexual behavior (hand-holding, kissing, snuggling), is restricted. Where the law IS, is where I think it should be. You object to it quite strongly, but you speak as though your opinion, which is NOT the law, and which, in fact, has absolutely no force or authority in our society (just as my opinion on abortion has no authority in our society), WERE the law.
You have called my "argument" specious. It's not specious. It is operant. It is authoritative. The Law IS what I have said I like, and it IS NOT what you think on the subject.
So, you can lament how bad things have become that our laws are so permissive - O Tempus! O Mores! - and there's little I could say to that other than "I disagree". But when you take the tone of a king, or a grand inquisitor, as though you are the arbiter of what the law is and what arguments are acceptable - well, I have to call you out on it, because that's just not true.
Someone like Stone could come along and say that the law of society is beneath the Law of God, and that I am some sort of evil heathen for wanting societal laws to be less restrictive than the laws of God. At least then he would be able to refer to an actual law that our civil laws breach. I do precisely that when speaking of abortion, which is the pre-meditated murder of innocent children, under the law of God - but NOT under the law of the state in which we live.
There's a realism to the way I discuss these things. There's an authoritarian unrealism to the way that you discuss it. Your viewpoint USED TO BE the law of the land, just as slavery and segregation USED TO BE the law of the American South. But the South lost that fight, and now the law down South is a law that most there opposed at one point. Likewise, the law of sexual restriction and illegality of homosexual or unmarried heterosexual contact has been swept away. The folks who believed in those old laws fought for them, against people like me, who fought against them. They lost. The law on those subjects is what I say it is, and what I want it to be, not what they say it is.
With abortion, I've clearly lost the battle at present. Not sure whether the war can eventually be won or not on that front. But I never make the mistake of equating my personal opinion of things with the law. Where the law agrees with my opinion, I am happy. Where it doesn't, I am sad or irritated. In no case do I do what you do, and assert that my opinion, where its faction has already lost control of the law, is nevertheless "the law". It isn't.
