Tag: families

Huge rally in Rome against gay unions

Hundreds of thousands of Italians gathered in Rome on Saturday to demonstrate against gay unions and the teaching of gender theories in schools, as Prime Minister Matteo Renzi tries to push a civil union bill through parliament.

Holding aloft banners reading “The family will save the world” and “Let’s defend our children”, a sea of people crammed into the San Giovanni square near the Italian capital’s historic centre to support family values.

The square, which can hold an estimated 300,000 people, was overflowing with the young, elderly and parents with toddlers, an AFP photographer said, with many more demonstrators spilling into nearby streets. Organisers for their part said one million people were taking part. Italian police never provide figures for demos.

“In my children’s schools they are talking about families made up of two fathers or two mothers, without asking parents’ permission,” said 41-year old doctor Giuseppe Ripa, adding: “It’s dangerous and wrong.”

Fellow protester Piero Uroda, a 78-year-old pharmacist, said it was “not honest to say these things to the very young, it’s not like they are students who can debate these ideas.”

“I don’t want gay marriage or gay adoption, the natural family is like ours,” he said, pointing to his relatives gathered around.

‘Defending children’s future’

The protest comes as the Italian senate examines a civil union bill, which Renzi wants to see go to a vote in the coming weeks, with the aim of legislation being enacted before the end of July.

The call for Italy to keep pace with its western European neighbours on the issue has grown stronger since Ireland voted overwhelmingly in favour of gay marriage last month.

But rights activists warn it will be no mean feat for the leader of the centre-left Democratic Party to find allies across the political spectrum, blaming an excessive influence of the Catholic clergy on the political class.

While a survey published by Italian daily La Stampa at the end of May found that 51 percent of voters would support gay marriage, protesters in Rome said the state should stop trying to interfere in sexual or gender education.

“We are asking for families based on marriage be respected, and stressing the central role parents play. We forcefully reject the attempt to sneak into the curriculum projects which aim to destroy children’s sexual identities,” said Massimo Gandolfini, spokesman for the “Defend our children!” committee.

There were both cries of support and derision from the political sphere. Matteo Salvini, rising star on the far right and head of the Northern League party, sent a Facebook “hug for all the mummies and daddies protesting peacefully in Rome to defend their children’s future.”

Vincenzo Brana, head of the long-standing Arcigay gay rights association in Bologna, was quick to point out that “today is World Refugee Day”, with hundreds of thousands of migrants in Italy facing an uncertain future.

Their problems “are an urgent issue which concerns us all. Those who take to the streets to talk of other things show they are living on another planet, and I would recommend leaving them on that planet alone.”

Source: AFP

‘Redefining marriage will lead to fall of Western civilization’

Dr. James Dobson, who founded the highly influential groups Focus on the Family and Family Research Council and now runs Family Talk Radio, is warning that if the U.S. Supreme Court redefines marriage as analysts predict, the ruling will presage the “fall of Western civilization.”

“I do not recall a time when the institutions of marriage and the family have faced such peril, or when the forces arrayed against them were more formidable or determined,” he writes in a letter distributed to his hundreds of thousands of supporters.

“Barring a miracle, the family that has existed since antiquity will likely crumble, presaging the fall of Western civilization itself. This is a time for concerted prayer, divine wisdom and greater courage than we have ever been called upon to exercise,” he writes.

The author has frequently has tangled with the Obama administration.

At one point he warned America is heading toward “depravity.”

He also, amid his lawsuit against the administration over Obamacare’s abortion requirements, told the president he would refuse to obey any law that required him to participate in the killing of an unborn child.

“I believe in the rule of law, and it has been my practice since I was in college to respect and honor those in authority over us. It is my desire to do so now. However, this assault on the sanctity of human life takes me where I cannot go,” he wrote in an open letter to the president.

WND also reported that when Dobson spoke to the National Day of Prayer in Washington, hundreds stood and cheered him.

‘Hurtling’ toward Gomorrah

His newest comments were written for distribution to constituents of the organization he founded after leaving Focus on the Family in 2003, Family Talk, which features the daily radio show “Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson.”

“We … are not simply ‘slouching toward Gomorrah,’ as Judge Robert Bork warned in his best-selling book; we are hurtling toward it,” he writes. “The old earthen dam that has held and protected the reservoir of Judeo-Christian values since the days of our Founding Fathers has given way.”

If the Supreme Court redefines marriage, he says, “an avalanche of court cases will be filed on related issues that can’t even be imagined today.”

Religious liberty “will be assaulted from every side.”

“You can be certain that conservative churches will be dragged into court by the hundreds,” Dobson writes. “Their leaders will be required to hire people who don’t share the beliefs of their denominations and constituents. Pastors may have to officiate at same-sex marriages, and they could be prohibited from preaching certain passage of Scripture. … Prison is also a possibility.”

He says Christian businesses and ministries, as already has happened to florists and bakers, will be forced to serve at same-sex ceremonies, and Christian colleges “may be unable to teach scriptural views of marriage.”

A foreshadowing can be seen in Obama’s recent demand for laws that prevent parents from seeking professional therapy if their children are dealing with a sexual identity crisis. Already law in a couple of states, Obama’s plan would require counselors to accept homosexuality in all such cases.

“What business does this man have telling parents how to help their confused and disoriented kids even after they have been abused and exploited sexually? This is outrageous!” Dobson says.

Also, anyone with a state license soon could be coerced into adopting the state definition of morality.

Textbooks would be rewritten, and public schools soon would teach children “gay and lesbian concepts.”

All of which, he writes, defies the facts of marriage.

“The institution of the family is one of the Creator’s most marvelous and enduring gifts to humankind. It was revealed to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and then described succinctly in Genesis 2:24, where we read, ‘For this cause, a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh.’ With those 20 words, God announced the ordination of male-female marriage, long before He established the two other great human institutions, the church and the government,” he writes.

Every civilization has held to that understanding of marriage until now.

“God help us if we throw the divine plan for humankind on the ash heap of history,” he said. “Down one path are millions of strong and vibrant families with their children growing up in the fear and admonition of the Lord. Down the other path is a nation drifting away from its spiritual roots in a culture that will teach a dangerous ideology to today’s younger generation and those yet to come.