Gay marriage

[Maguire01]

Obviously not nifan
Thats why they are forced to withdraw services in these cases.

But should they be? That was the question.

Obviously not.
I thought i answered that clearly.

But you had a problem with them being forced to comply with the law, no?

I have a problem with the law not giving religious organisations any exceptions based on their beliefs.
Like if the N.I government mandated that a Union Jack be flown at all playing fields for example.

I'm not sure I understand your analogy.
And to what extent do you think religious beliefs should be exempt from the law?

[J70]

Live and let live lads... 

I agree.

Which is why I advocate that gay people get the same rights and priveleges as straight people.

[nifan]

Is it not contradictory to overlook the rights and opinions of Christians while fighting so hard for equal rights for others?

There has been a major shift to the point where Christians are now the minority and in some cases the outcasts.

Funny when yesteryear's minority became today's majority everyone stopped caring about the minority......and equal rights went out the window....

Only equal if it includes everyone's beliefs (apart from the Christians)

What rights are christians denied that other people are afforded?
Christians are covered by equality legislation and many people have used it on these grounds.

You can have your opinion on gays rights to marry, adopt etc. but that should not adictate law.

Similarly many atheists look at the negative aspects of organised religion, but they may not simply make it illegal. Nobody proposes that christian parents shouldnt be allowed to adopt for example.

[Mayo4Sam]

As long as they can not adopt children.

eh, Why?

Just does not rest easy with me. A traditional mother and father parentage is more suitable in my opinion. Just my opinion by the way so don't all get in a wee hissy fit about it.

EC, given your avatar what would you say if I said I wasn't happy with a black couple adopting a white child, that it just didn't sit well with me?

The arguments on here are laughable, lads have no doubt about it this is just as bad as discrimination over colour, religion, any other arbitrary excuse for discrimination.
By the rationale here:
- Kids whose lose a parent are raised incorrectly, worse than if they had two daddies?
- Kids who anyway can be bullied are out too, so anyone geeky kid with buck teeth, big ears, etc

It's beginning to sound a bit like Hitlers vision

[GAA_Talk]

Clearly Puckoon they're unfit parents cause there's something wrong with them 
Maybe EC is afraid they'll catch the gay?

It's people and comments like EC that are the problem, thinking they are all liberal but basically with a different stereotype.

Why wouldn't they be allowed adopt? Surely it's whether two (or one or three for that matter) people will provide a loving and stable home for the child?

Hilarious 

[The Iceman]

Chistians are being forced to go against their belief systems.
Christian organisations are being forced to facilitate gay adoption, they are being forced to provide contraceptive and abortive medication to employees.
These instances and cases are what I have a problem with and this is where I would ask for exceptions to the law.....

[Captain Obvious]

Doesn't Chistians change there belief systems as they go along? 

[Puckoon]

Then perhaps Christian organizations shouldn't get involved in a la carte charity work where their belief systems* are compromised.

Belief system being Family A deserve help, Family B do not.

[Maguire01]

Chistians are being forced to go against their belief systems.

So regardless of how 'off the wall' your belief system is, it should be accommodated?

[The Iceman]

Chistians are being forced to go against their belief systems.

So regardless of how 'off the wall' your belief system is, it should be accommodated?

Thats the way the world seems to be going, yes.

[Maguire01]

Chistians are being forced to go against their belief systems.

So regardless of how 'off the wall' your belief system is, it should be accommodated?

Thats the way the world seems to be going, yes.

Eh, no. What if your belief system is that black people, or women are inferior?

[The Iceman]

Chistians are being forced to go against their belief systems.

So regardless of how 'off the wall' your belief system is, it should be accommodated?

Thats the way the world seems to be going, yes.

Eh, no. What if your belief system is that black people, or women are inferior?

You miss my point Maguire.
Two men being married and adopting kids surely could be considered "off the wall" but it's accommodated......
Two men and one woman all being married to each other and sexually active with each other and living in an open relationship at the same time surely could be considered "off the wall" but it is accommodated......

[J70]

Are they being forced to facilitate gay adoptions?

On the health insurance thing, where do you draw the line if you allow catholic hospitals etc to withold birth control? If I work for a Jehivah's witness-owned company, can they omit blood transfusions from my health plan?

[fitzroyalty]

Some people are missing the point. The varying standards of parenting in society is irrelevant - when is a single parent/abusive/alcoholic etc ever going to apply to adopt a child? And in what country would they even be allowed to!?!

What it all boils down to is what provides the best environment for a adopted child to grow up in and IMO that is one where there is a loving mother and father.

[heganboy]

the religious exemption is in the papers in the US today:
from the NY Times

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/whose-conscience/

In the escalating conflict over the new federal requirement that employers include contraception coverage without a co-pay in the insurance plans they make available to their employees, opposition from the Catholic church and its allies is making headway with a powerfully appealing claim: that when conscience and government policy collide, conscience must prevail.

The rhetoric in which this claim is put forward grows more inflammatory by the day. "The Obama administration has just told the Catholics of the United States, 'To Hell with you!' " according to Bishop David A. Zubik of the Diocese of Pittsburgh. The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, a nondenominational organization that litigates on behalf of religious interests, is circulating a petition under the heading: "The Obama Administration is giving you one year to stop believing" (a reference to the one-year delay the regulation offers to religious employers). Mitt Romney, the likely Republican presidential nominee, joined the chorus this week, calling the regulation "a violation of conscience."


This aggressive claiming of the moral high ground is close to drowning out the regulation's supporters, inside and outside of the Obama administration. Maybe I'm missing something, but I haven't seen a comparably full-throated defense of the regulation, issued last month by the Department of Health and Human Services, except on pure policy grounds. (And there are indications this week that even some in the administration, or at least in President Obama's campaign apparatus, may be getting cold feet.) While the policy grounds are fully persuasive – the ability to prevent or space pregnancy being an essential part of women's health care, one that shouldn't be withheld simply because a woman's employer is church-affiliated – the purpose of this column is to examine the conscience claim itself, directly, to see whether it holds up.

An obvious starting point is with the 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women who, just like other American women, have exercised their own consciences and availed themselves of birth control at some point during their reproductive lives. So it's important to be clear that the conscientious objection to the regulation comes from an institution rather than from those whose consciences it purports to represent. (Catholic women actually have a higher rate of abortion than other American women, but I'll stick to birth control for now.) While most Catholics dissent in the privacy of their bedrooms from the church's position, some are pushing back in public. The organization Catholics for Choice, whose magazine is pointedly entitled Conscience, is calling on its supporters to "tell our local media that the bishops are out of touch with the lived reality of the Catholic people" and "do not speak for us on this decision."

But suppose the counter-factual – that only half, or one-quarter, or five percent of Catholic women use birth control. The question would remain: Whose conscience is it? The regulation doesn't require anyone to use birth control. It exempts any religious employer that primarily hires and serves its own faithful, the same exclusion offered by New York and California from the contraception mandate in state insurance laws. (Of the other states that require such coverage, 15 offer a broader opt-out provision, while eight provide no exemption at all.) Permitting Catholic hospitals to withhold contraception coverage from their 765,000 employees would blow a gaping hole in the regulation. The 629-hospital Catholic health care system is a major and respected health care provider, serving one in every six hospital patients and employing nearly 14 percent of all hospital staff in the country. Of the top 10 revenue-producing hospital systems in 2010, four were Catholic. The San Francisco-based Catholic Healthcare West, the fifth biggest hospital system in the country, had $11 billion in revenue last year and treated 6.2 million patients.

These institutions, as well as Catholic universities – not seminaries, but colleges and universities whose doors are open to all – are full participants in the public square, receiving a steady stream of federal dollars. They assert – indeed, have earned – the right to the same benefits that flow to their secular peers. What they now claim is a right to special treatment: to conscience that trumps law.

But in fact, that is not a principle that our legal system embraces. Just ask Alfred Smith and Galen Black, two members of the Native American Church who were fired from their state jobs in Oregon for using the illegal hallucinogen peyote in a religious ceremony and who were then deemed ineligible for unemployment compensation because they had lost their jobs for "misconduct." They argued that their First Amendment right to free exercise of religion trumped the state's unemployment law.

In a 1990 decision, Employment Division v. Smith, the Supreme Court disagreed. Even a sincere religious motivation, in the absence of some special circumstance like proof of government animus, does not merit exemption from a "valid and neutral law of general applicability," the court held. Justice Antonin Scalia wrote the opinion, which was joined by, among others, the notoriously left wing Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist.

A broad coalition of conservative and progressive religious groups pushed back hard, leading to congressional passage of the tendentiously titled Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It provided that a free exercise claim would prevail unless the government could show a "compelling" reason for holding a religious group to the same legal requirements that applied to everyone else. After a Catholic church in Texas invoked that law in an effort to expand into a landmark zone where no new building was permitted, the Supreme Court declared the Religious Freedom Restoration Act unconstitutional as applied to the states. The law remains in effect as applied to the federal government, although its full dimension remains untested.

Senator Rob Portman, an Ohio Republican, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday asserting that the contraception regulation violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and it's not unlikely that one or more lawsuits may soon test that proposition. The question would then be whether the case for the mandate, without the broad exemption the church is demanding, is sufficiently "compelling." Such a case would pit the well-rehearsed public health arguments (half of all pregnancies in the United States are unintended, and nearly half of those end in abortion – a case for expanded access to birth control if there ever was one ) against religious doctrine.

The court has recently been active on the religion front. In a unanimous decision last month, the justices for the first time recognized a constitutionally-based "ministerial exception" from laws concerning employment discrimination. An employee deemed by a church to be a "minister" – in this case, a kindergarten teacher in a Lutheran school who had received ministerial training and taught some religion classes – cannot sue the church over an adverse employment decision, the court held in Hosanna-Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church and School v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The plaintiff, supported by the federal government, had argued that the 1990 Employment Division v. Smith decision precluded the recognition of a ministerial exception from generally applicable employment laws. Rejecting that argument in his opinion for the court, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. explained: "But a church's selection of its ministers is unlike an individual's ingestion of peyote. Smith involved government regulation of only outward physical acts. The present case, in contrast, concerns government interference with an internal church decision that affects the faith and mission of the church itself."

That language is certainly suggestive of deference, beyond the employment area, to a church's doctrinal claims to special treatment. But while all nine justices signed the opinion, that doesn't necessarily mean that all nine would agree on its application to the contraception requirement. The question would be whether a church that has failed to persuade its own flock of the rightness of its position could persuade at least five justices.