When clergy gets into partisan politics they cannot possibly be repreenting their paishoners. Fr. Gravel, is one example, his liberal social views aside, by running for the Bloc Quebecois alienated me, and about half of Quebec’s population by that fact alone.

http://www.egale.ca/index.asp?lang=E&menu=37&item=348

Fr Dowd, I agree with your analysis that the Left, particularly the New Left of the 60ies revived feminism with its marxist analysis. There were a number of books I remember reading when the pill came out and was widely adopted as freeing women from biology. Shulamith Firestone comes to mind. Germaine Greer went along with it for a while, until she had a change of heart, and I find her later books more interesting reading than her earlier ones, as they have a good dose of common sense missing in her Female Eunuch tome. Motherhood went under a particularly hard rap in those days.

In discussing the gay marriage issue with gays and lesbians, what always struck me was how they completely insisted on divorcing marriage from procreation. This was an essential condition of the argument for equality. And if hetero couples have only one or two kids, this can be easily matched by gays who adopt, inseminate, or surrogate. Hence the argument that not allowing gay marriage was discrimination against the kids of gays.

So, the root of gay marriage lies in the reality that hetero-sexuals began behaving like gays long before gays ever thought of marriage. I see the gay marriage issue as also arising out of the AIDs crises, where leaders in the gay community were looking for healthier behaviour models in the early 90ies. Then the thought of “why should the DINKs get it all” was not too far behind.

It is when families have seven or eight kids, that the differences become apparent, and the equality argument can no longer hold. Given the fact that we are all sitting on a demographic time bomb, I suspect that once the pendulum starts swinging, things will correct themselves pretty quickly.

The New York State courts had the courage to admit that discrimination in favour of heterosexual couples marrying was in the interests of the state, and France, is certainly holding to the principle of defending the biological parent-child link by keeping marriage, adoption, and artificial means of procreation exclusively for heterosexual couples. Both countries are more successful at maintaining their birth rates than Canada has been.

I don’t know if there was anything “wrong” with the old blog, but at one point it began to sputter. I suspect a lot of bloggers go through that – a sense that you don’t quite know what to say next. Also, my health had taken a turn for the worse about 2 years ago, and that did not help in the blogging enthusiasm department. But things feel “fresh” again.

Can I assume from the smiley that’s a good thing?

Or would you prefer I bail outta here…

Eric

P.S. Besides, was there anything wrong with your old blog?

You are correct, Father I did read it that way. Or, more precisely, as non-adults. The other types of young people all fall into the category of “adults.” In this case, there are MANY outside influences of all sorts of behaviour we might find difficult to condone (putting it lightly). For instance, I find the cultural influence to “get ahead” by any means and make the most money possible to be disastrously unhealthy. But adults make their choices. I am primarily concerned about how we do or don’t protect the non-adults from these forces.

The girls kissing example is indeed a good one, one I’ve addressed in class more than once. However, I never saw it as a “danger” leading to authentic lesbianism; rather I approached it as a loss of dignity, self-respect, etc. Which is the important issue here, not the fact that it is another girl being kissed.

As for the curriculum change: I was recently at another meeting for the E&RC program. They were discussing how Native spirituality was going to be included, and, after over a year of trying to get experts to validate that part of the program, one of the experts said “The fact is, most Natives are Christian now.”

One of the teachers said, “I am not going to teach that! They were converted by force long ago and I won’t legitimize what happened by teaching that.” This teacher’s error was that she felt it was okay to ignore a reality because she didn’t like how the reality became real (although her history was a bit off too). In a similar vein, Gay Marriage is part of the Canadian “Landscape of Marriage” now, whether we like it or not. It cannot simply be ignored; it has to be mentioned even if the teacher does not approve this “legitimizing.”

Is the alternative simply ignoring or pretending it doesn’t exist or isn’t an issue?
Eric

I did not scoff at your experience with College St Louis; I am sorry if you took it that way. Instead, I wanted to point out that such things are expressley NOT in the curriculum per se; I have seen and worked with the various curricula and it is not offcially present. Hence, I was wondering if it was the actions of a particular school instead of “the wacky education the province of Quebec shoves down our throats!”

I hope that was clearer.

Best,

Eric

http://www.egale.ca/index.asp?lang=E&item=1176

To quote:

Egale’s vision is to help make schools across Canada a safe and inclusive place for lesbian, gay, bi, trans and questioning youth, for children of LGBT people, and for LGBT teachers and school staff. To do so, schools must not only have proactive and comprehensive discrimination and harassment policies, they must also ensure the presence of an inclusive curriculum and positive role models.

1. Let’s be nice.

2. Eric, the two quotes you put in your first comment need to be read carefully. “Young people” is a broad term – I think you read it as “high school students”, when in fact it includes college and university age people. As well, this “encouragement” is not necessarily something coming from teachers (without excluding that) but something coming from media and peers. The whole “girls kissing” phenomenon that we see among young people right now, where a girl is cheered if she makes out with another girl in front of an audience, is an example of this (there was a whole episode of the highly-popular show Friends dedicated to this topic, I might add).

As for the second quote, which contained an actual mention of children, I didn’t say that the educational system has yet been changed, but simply that the approval of same-sex marriage legitimizes such a change. And yet, as Rachelle has herself pointed out, we do see tentative attempts to make such changes.