Gay Marriage in the News: Four Articles

Irish Same-sex marriage vote: How a Minority achieved a Majority

“For years leading up to Ireland’s civil partnership legislation, a small nongovernmental organisation (NGO) – the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN) – along with its many supporters and collaborators, worked quietly and methodically toward this day...." Keep reading

Ireland same sex marriage vote: Catholic Church needs a 'reality check', says Archbishop

A senior Archbishop has urged the Catholic Church in Ireland to move out of "denial" and take a "reality check" after the vote in favour of same-sex marriage. Keep reading

Gay marriage will split the Catholic Church

Ireland, for so long the most overtly Catholic state in Western Europe, has voted for gay marriage by a stupendous margin – 62 per cent. Never before has a country legalised the practice by popular vote.

It would be naive to ask: how could this happen? Hatred of the Church is one of the central features of modern Ireland, thanks not only to the paedophile scandals but also to the joyless quasi-Jansenist character of the Irish Church, which was handed complete control of education in the Free State after partition in 1922. (Many of its priests were outstandingly holy and charitable, but you’ll get your head bitten off if you suggest that in today’s anti-clerical republic.)

Anyway, I don’t want to focus on Ireland. Homosexuality as an issue is a greater threat to the Catholic Church worldwide than the sex abuse scandals. Here’s why.... Keep reading

Jesus did refer to homosexual practice in his teaching. He identified as one of the evils coming from the human heart "pornia," which is sometimes translated as "fornication" but which his audiences would have understood to have include sexual activity between members of the same sex as well as members of the opposite sex.

The Failure of Winsomeness

The United States has avoided Europe’s fate for a long time, but the churches here have finally lost the ability to coast on cultural momentum. The churches that don’t retrench around building their internal strength and coherence around orthodoxy — and that requires far more than catechesis, but it requires at least that: teaching our story to our children — and evangelizing from that position of strength, aren’t going to survive. The overculture is just too strong. The forces of atomization and desacralization are very hard to resist.

This is a reality that many Christians, Christians of all kinds, do not want to face. I know very little about Evangelical culture, so prior to Q, I asked a prominent Millennial Evangelical, a thinker I greatly respect, to tell me what I might expect there. He told me that Evangelicals, especially those of his generation, have a particular blind spot about the broader culture. In his view, they have a naive understanding of cultural dynamics, and think that they will be more acceptable to the mainstream if they simply behave with more winsomeness towards them. Keep reading