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.
Unmarried heterosexual fornication and gay sex in private between consenting adults both fall into the category of masturbation
Not exactly. Into category of mutual masturbation falls female homosexuality and sometimes male homosexuality. Heterosexual fornication is not a masturbation.
Serious unnatural sin is anal sex, also among heterosexual couples, perhaps lighter in the later case.
At least so say canons of the Orthodox Church that deal with sins and penance.
Not exactly. Into category of mutual masturbation falls female homosexuality and sometimes male homosexuality. Heterosexual fornication is not a masturbation.
I did not mean the mechanics. I meant to say that these are all grave sexual sins, according to the dominant religions anyway.
Obviously the Orthodox Church and the Catholic Church have different views of sex. Masturbation is, and always has been, a very grave sin - a mortal sin of sexual immorality - in the Catholic Church. The catechism confirms this. So, while I agree with you, based on the mildness of the Torah towards this sin, calling it a mere uncleanness, the Catholic Church holds masturbation to be porneia, a gravely disordered sin, and notes that the mental aspect involved constitutes lust in the heart and mind, which Jesus identified as adultery. So, our discussion has uncovered another enormous difference between the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic Churches, and a very ancient one.
Perhaps harshness of Latin Church toward minor sexual transgressions is a result of mandatory celibacy that affected mindset of their clergy?
BTW, the church canons that I mentioned are from long before Schism, so perhaps Western attitudes were formed by the scholastic celibate scholars during Middle Ages?
I wonder how much hypocrisy was involved there and guilt tripping?
The Catholic Church says that its moral views on this date from the early church, from long before the Schism. So, this is an example of something on which the Church that was once united always disagreed, apparently, between East and West. In a similar vein, the Eastern Orthodox allow remarriage after divorce. I don't know if they always have, but they do now. The Catholic Church never did - to the point of losing England on account of it.
Yes, we DO say. And you fellows in Eastern Orthodoxy say that your way of doing things is the way it has always been. And in truth, documentary evidence of both positions existing simultaneously exists.
Which REALLY means that the Church was never actually united way back then, it was just so spread out and had such greater issues pressing that these differences that have always separated East and West did not come to the forefront for about a millennium.
When they did, and Europe was stable enough that Christians could fight about these differences that were always there, they did fight about them, and each claimed - truthfully - that THEIR way of doing was "original".
There hasn't been REAL Christian unity in belief or doctrine since the beginning. The Acts of the Apostles are full of the contentions of the Apostolic generation, and it never got better than that afterwards.
Neither the Catholic NOR the Orthodox Churches would ever want to admit THAT, so each goes on believing itself to be authentic and original, which is actually true, but each considers all other ways to have "fallwn away" from the original purity, which each asserts they alone represent. And that is patently false.
Those who are honest enough to admit that the evidence shows greater diversity than most would like, are quick to then change the discussion to questions of hiearchical authority.
From my perch, the failures of both churches on that score are howlingly self-evident.
Then the Protestants came along and blew things up.
Meanwhile the Oriental Orthodox could claim that BOTH the Catholics and the EO have lapsed into error and heresy, but if they did claim such a thing, nobody would listen or care, because, really, who are THOSE PEOPLE to have an opinion. Theological wisdom from Africa or India or the deep middle east? Please!
My own view: the Quakers have gotten it more right than anybody else, as far as actually listening to God goes.
