marriage – praag.org

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.

‘Racist’ Israeli group campaigns against Jewish-Arab marriages

A far-right Israeli group that agitates against Arabs in the name of religion and national security is forcing the Jewish state into a legal and political balancing act as it tries to contain sectarian violence.

Among their activities, Lehava activists yelling “Death to the Arabs” picketed the wedding in August of a Muslim to a Jewish woman who converted to Islam. Now three members have been charged with an arson attack on a cross-faith school in Jerusalem last month.

Members of Lehava protesting outside an Arab-Jewish wedding

Communal tension has been rising following last summer’s Gaza war, in which more than 2,000 Palestinians died, and feuding over access to Jerusalem’s holiest site. This has spilled over into Palestinian street attacks on Jews, including the killing of four rabbis and a Druze policeman at a synagogue.

Illustrating the risk of sectarian violence, a Palestinian youth was burned to death in July by Israeli assailants in alleged revenge for the killing of three Jewish teens by militants in the West Bank.

The authorities are under pressure to deal with anyone encouraging Jewish retaliation against Israeli Arabs and Palestinians. Efforts to tackle Lehava, however, may be complicated by guarantees of free speech and sympathy for the group among a minority of Israelis.

Lehava, whose name means “flame” but is also a Hebrew acronym for “Preventing Assimilation in the Holy Land,” denies wrongdoing and says it is the target of a political witch-hunt.

Police rounded up 21 Lehava members, including its leader Benzion Gopshtein, after the attack on the school where Jewish and Arab children study together. The raids suggest a crackdown on Lehava, and maybe a ban, is in the works.

The three men charged with the arson attack have yet to enter a plea, while Gopshtein argues he is being targeted for what he says, not what he does.

“I’m being investigated for public comments I made about co-existence, even though I never advocated violence,” he told Reuters after being released from police custody. Lehava’s policy was to stay within the law, he said, but he declined to condemn the school attack.

Gopshtein, who put the number of Lehava members at 5,000, said the authorities “are bothered that we have such broad support, which is why they’re carrying out arrests.”

An Israeli official described the Lehava arrests as part of a drive to stamp out hate speech. Among those facing charges are eight Palestinians from East Jerusalem accused of encouraging attacks on Israelis over social media. But the official said securing convictions against Lehava activists on possible charges of inciting racist attacks would be harder.

“Their public statements have been less unequivocal,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is a complex matter, especially as we do not want to intrude on legal rights to freedom of expression.”

Incitement to violence on racial or religious grounds carries a 5-year prison sentence in Israel, 20 percent of whose citizens are Arabs. When felonies are committed as a result of such incitement, hate-crime legislation empowers judges to double the standard penalties.

Hard-core views

Lehava’s core cause is discouraging romances between Jews and gentiles, saying it is campaigning to preserve Judaism.

While such relationships are rare in Israel, the group has disseminated names and pictures of Arabs suspected of courting Jewish women, and critics accuse it of using vigilantes to threaten the men with violence.

Lehava has also urged Israeli businesses not to employ Palestinians from the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem, branding them as “tomorrow’s terrorists.”

Gopshtein was a disciple of the late Meir Kahane, a U.S.-born rabbi who advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israel and the Palestinian territories. Gopshtein, 45, said he had previously had run-ins with the police for disorderly conduct while active with Kahane’s movement Kach, which was banned from Israeli politics as racist in 1988.

Asked whether Lehava might similarly be outlawed, the Israeli official said: “That possibility will be examined.”

Mainstream Israeli leaders have condemned the arson attack and other racist incidents. The arrests were led by a police taskforce set up last year to tackle violent far-right Jews.

Tamar Hermann, a sociologist and pollster with the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), said state action against Lehava had only followed repeated complaints by left-leaning petitions and media commentators.

Such pressure on police, Herman added, may be offset by the growing ranks of Israelis who sympathize with Lehava. An IDI poll to be published next month found 21 percent of Israeli Jews identify themselves as “religious nationalists,” she said, while about three percent hold “hard-core” views against gentiles.

“The rise of extreme religiosity that we are seeing in the Middle East, and even in Europe and the United States, is happening in Israel, too, and I don’t see it as merely a counter-reaction to Arab hostility,” Hermann said.

Menachem Landow, a retired official of the Shin Bet security agency, argued against banning Lehava, saying its ideology “would simply morph and find a new legal home.”

“The trouble-makers here are generally from a certain sector of Israeli society, dislocated young men from pious backgrounds, who simply hate Arabs as part of a race theory and are looking for a framework in which to act on that hatred,” he said.

“They have to be tackled individually,” Landow added, noting police had used these tactics against Israeli soccer fans whose anti-Arab taunts have at times escalated into race riots. – Reuters

Love is a dying tradition: work is eliminating families

by Charlene Smith

Don’t cry if you’re no-one’s Valentine, love is a dying tradition as marriages and family life disappear according to a rush of new studies released this month.

The Brookings Institute in the United States reported on February 3 that, “Fewer Americans are married today than at any point in at least 50 years.” This correlates with data in the same report that says while half of women didn’t work 40 years ago, it is rare for women not to work now and they’re waiting longer to have children, if at all. Today in the United States a third of first time mothers are older than forty and around 10 percent of men and women are choosing not to marry at all.

Vicky Eriksson of human resources training group The People Element said, “ours are the most job-focused generations ever. We work longer hours -up to 500 hours more a year according to stats – and because we have become so consumed with accumulating degrees, status, and wealth, the other significant need for successful humans – good relationships – falls by the wayside. Yet, stats of the wealthiest one percent of Americans who earn 40 percent of that country’s wealth reveal that 48 percent are in stable, happy, long-term marriages. The very wealthiest have learned the secrets of successful relationships, the rest of us have not.” Figures for South Africa show rampant divorce, multiple marriages and a very high ratio of struggling single mothers.

The Organisation of Economic CoOperation and Development also released a report early in February saying that marriage in Western nations (including South Africa) is a dying trend. “Since the 1960s the family has undergone significant transformation. In many countries, the extended family has all but disappeared, and the traditional two-parent family has become much less widespread as divorce rates, re-marriages, cohabitation, single parenthood and same-sex partnerships have all increased.

“Families have seen more mothers take up work in the labour market, their adolescents spend longer and longer in education and training, and the elderly members of the family live longer and, increasingly, alone.”

Vicky Eriksson and Karin Wellman of The People Element said they were increasingly engaging with people in workshops who had chosen to give up relationships to devote time to their career. Eriksson said, “women especially tend to choose to focus on their career in their early years and then consider a relationship in their late thirties or early forties when they are at the top of their careers. But a relationship requires compromise and some struggle to do that after achieving success in the workplace. This can lead to personal stress and sadness later on.”

Wellman and Eriksson said they were so concerned by the high levels of stress in the workplace that they were organizing a conference on People Effectiveness @ Work to be held at the Midrand Conference Centre on the 8th of May 2012 “It will be a one day bootcamp to look at ways to help individuals and workforces to transform and cope with stress in ways that don’t disable their work performance or their family or personal life.”

Wellman pointed out that OECD figures on the breakup of relationships -especially families – were now imposing significant costs on economies, “In Britain that figure is now £42bn per year and rising, according to the Relationships Foundation. Family breakdown costs more than the entire defence budget in that country. In Britain and here most of the cost to the economy comes from benefits and tax credits that support single parents and their children. Today in Britain there are two million single parent families: there were one million in 1980. In South Africa most children are now being raised in single parent families.”

Recent demographic projections performed by OECD countries suggest that the next 20 years are likely to see a continuation and even acceleration of changes in household and family structures. In particular, the numbers and shares of single-adult and single-parent households are expected to increase significantly, as is the number of couples without children.

In Britain today, 40 percent of all children can expect to see their parents split up before their 16th birthday. At least half of family breakdown takes place within the first three years of childhood. (However, the latest study from the Centre for Social Justice and the Bristol Community Family Trust estimates that, of children born today, no less than 48% will see their parents split by their 16th birthday.)

OECD research has shown that, of all countries (not just the 30 member countries), the UK has the fifth highest lone parent rate, after Latvia, Estonia, the Czech Republic and the US.

Globally divorce rates have gone up about six fold since 1960.

It is estimated that in most developed nations including South Africa up to 15 percent of babies are born without a resident biological father.

Eriksson said, “It’s worth reflecting on these sobering statistics this Valentine’s day, we talk a lot about love, but today we say those words and forget it’s ancillary: commitment, which in turn is part of responsibility. We are good about our responsibilities in the workplace, but have forgotten responsibility for our personal happiness and for those closest to us. Maybe now is the time for a values check.”