Same-sex marriage – going global?

(Now Updated) When Laura Bush, Colin Powell and Dick Cheney come out for same-sex marriage, you know the tide is turning. Respect for Marriage Coalition describes itself as “a partnership of more than 80 civil rights, faith, health, labor, business, legal, LGBT, student, and women’s organizations working together to end the Defense of Marriage Act and grow support for the freedom to marry.” Continue reading

Sorry Cardinal O’Brien, but reality is redefining itself

If you are still unpersuaded of the need for secularism to prevail in politics, then consider the latest religious intervention. Britain’s most senior Catholic is dominating the news agenda today with a hyperbole-laden polemic against the prospect of men being allowed to marry men, and women being allowed to marry women.

Cardinal Keith O’Brien starts, of course, from the theological premises set down in the Vatican’s 1975 Declaration on Sexual Ethics. Same sex attraction may be unavoidable, but is nevertheless ‘a serious depravity’; to act on that attraction is ‘intrinsically disordered’. Continue reading

Valentine wish: equal love rights for gay & straight

Our Valentine’s Day wish is for ‘Equal Love‘. We seek love equality. All couples who love each other should be treated equally and without discrimination. This means an end to the twin legal bans on same-sex civil marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships.

Every couple should have the option of a civil marriage or a civil partnership, as they wish. In a democratic society, we should all be equal before the law. Continue reading