It can’t happen here.
It will happen here.
It is happening here.
The state now forces Christian bakers to bake wedding cakes for a homosexual marriage. Christian florists are ordered by the courts to provide flowers for a same sex wedding or face ruinous fines. Keep in mind, the baker and florist have no problem providing their services to the same homosexual sex couples for ordinary orders. They simply do not want to be part of a ceremony to which they object.
Thus, religious freedom is buried under the fashionable hysteria of the latest and loudest grievance group.
After these two legal precedents it’s but a short hop and skip to forcing priests and rabbis to perform same sex marriages. This religious intolerance is now the law of the land in Denmark, and will soon make its way to our shores.
The country’s parliament voted through the new law on same-sex marriage by a large majority, making it mandatory for all churches to conduct gay marriages.
Denmark’s church minister, Manu Sareen, called the vote “historic”.
“I think it’s very important to give all members of the church the possibility to get married. Today, it’s only heterosexual couples.”
Under the law, individual priests can refuse to carry out the ceremony, but the local bishop must arrange a replacement for their church.
The far-Right Danish People’s Party mounted a strong campaign against the new law, which nonetheless passed with the support of 85 of the country’s 111 MPs.
“Marriage is as old as man himself, and you can’t change something as fundamental,” the party’s church spokesperson Christian Langballe said during the debate. “Marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman.”
Karsten Nissen, the Bishop of Viborg, who is refusing to carry out the ceremonies, has warned that the new law risks “splitting the church”.
“The debate has been really tough,” said Mr Sareen, an agnostic who has pushed hard for the legislation since taking his post last autumn.
“The minority among Danish people, politicians and priests who are against, they’ve really shouted out loud throughout the process.”
The first gay marriages will take place as soon as June 15. This contrasts with neighbouring Norway, where bishops are still debating the correct ‘ritual’ for the ceremonies, four years after a 2008 parliamentary vote in favour of gay marriage.
Stig Elling, a travel industry millionaire and former Right-wing politician, said he planned to marry his partner of 28 years next week.
“We have felt a little like we were living in the Middle Ages,” he told Denmark’s TV2 station. “I think it is positive that there is now a majority for it, and that there are so many priests and bishops who are in favour of it, and that the Danish population supports up about it. We have moved forward. It’s 2012.”
Denmark has been a pioneer in gay rights since 1989, when it became the first country in the world to offer civil unions for gay couples.
Source: The Telegraph
Why is no one making the cartoon (or something like it) a reality? Where are the conservative lawyers and advocacy groups with lawsuits based on these absurd precedents? All “anti-discrimination” laws are pure tyranny and provide an immediate basis for the most ridiculous kind of coercion. How much imagination does it take to come up with a case forcing “progressives” to violate their principles, whatever they may be?
In the 40+ years since the legal travesty of Roe vs. Wade, libertarians should have been taking the “right to privacy” which the court created therein to its absurd limits, and perhaps someone would have woken up. This is all another example of how good people let themselves be taken advantage of by the ruthless evildoers in our midst.
I get really tired of this. There is a right to privacy. You could call it the right to be left alone if you like.
We do not get our rights from the Constitution. In the Constitution, several of our rights are expressly guaranteed by imposing restrictions on the government — restrictions that have been eaten away over the last centuries, but still exist to anyone wishing to pay attention to the dead letter that our Constitution has slowly become.
Check the 9th Amendment (http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am9.html) which states that just because some rights are specified in the Constitution doesn’t mean that there are no others retained by the people. Look again at the 10th Amendment (http://www.usconstitution.net/xconst_Am10.html) that identifies the few things enumerated in the Constitution are what the federal govt is restricted to and the countless things not enumerated remain with the states and the people.
So, yeah, that SCOTUS justice who found emanations and penumbras overstepped the Constitution by overriding the states and the peoples’ reserved rights to decide the issue and imposing unconstitutional federal superiority over those states’ and peoples’ decisions did get the concept of a right to privacy correct. That justice, who deserves to remain nameless, overstepped his constitutional bounds by imposing federal superiority, not by referring to a right to privacy.
This is one sign of a culture and society beginning to reach the nadir of its decline. I will not comply.
This scenario has been my fear for quite a while and I don’t think it will be long before we see a lawsuit in the US. It certainly CAN happen here; the IRS will threaten the loss of tax-exempt status for those churches who refuse to comply. The targets will be the Catholic church and evangelical Protestant denominations, because they are the least likely to voluntarily marry homosexual couples. Churches that already ordain homosexual clergy won’t see a problem with this kind of edict.
How many Muslims in Denmark ? Does this apply to mosques, too ? I doubt it.
It’s a bit hard to have any sympathy for an established church. They made the Faustian bargain.
In the case of modern Denmark, what bargain? No one is compelled to worship there.
It’s a government church. After all, they have a Church Minister. (That’s not a minister in the US English sense of “preacher”, but rather a government minister which US English calls a Secretary.)
A church that agrees (or desires) to be an established church — a government church — makes the Faustian bargain of surrendering its integrity to government control.
Does the church have real power of any sort? If not, in what sense are they established?
“We have felt a little like we were living in the Middle Ages,”
He’s right. It is like medieval times. In the matter of religious coercion and freedom of conscience, that is.