In many wars one side at least is not interested in a negotiated settlement. They are not into detente. They want total victory pure and simple. The Nazis were not interested in compromise but in total world domination. The Communists may have talked detente, but they wanted to take over the whole world.
The radical Muslims do not want peaceful coexistence, but a universal caliphate with everyone submitting to Allah. And the radical homosexual lobby is not at all interested in live and let live, with a bit of give and take. They want their agenda fully implemented with all opposition smashed.
Anyone reading my posts here will have numerous clear examples of this. The militants have declared war on faith, family and freedom, and they will not quit until they achieve complete hegemony in every sphere. They resent the very notion of compromise.
In my book Strained Relations: The Challenge of Homosexuality I document this quite carefully. And when the new third (expanded and revised) edition comes out there will be heaps more documentation on all this. They want to crush all opposition and be victorious altogether – they will not settle for anything less.
Now, are there lots of homosexuals who just want to be left alone and do their own thing in private? Yep, there sure are. If that was all we were up against, I would likely not even have spent twenty years writing my book. But unfortunately this is not the case.
There are plenty of militants who have stated categorically what they want and how they plan to achieve this. It is to these activists that I constantly am addressing my remarks. They in fact started this war, not my side. They declared that they wanted to destroy marriage and family, neutralise religion, and diminish freedoms everywhere in order to force-feed their radical agenda upon everyone else.
And as long as they declare war against all that I hold near and dear, I will keep resisting. That in part is why this website exists, and why I am willing to put up with the almost daily barrage of hate mail and the occasional death threats. Faith, family and freedom matter to me, and they are worth defending.
And in any such war where the other side has declared their intentions of total domination, talk of compromise is of course simply out of the question. Such talk is merely appeasement, and simply gives the other side more ammunition with which to finally knock us all off.
There can be no compromise here, and pro-family and pro-faith folks who think they can come up with some kind of deal here are kidding themselves big time. But these are not just my thoughts. Princeton University’s McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Robert P. George has recently come out stating exactly the same thing.
On the homosexual marriage issue he rightly argues that we either stand for religious liberty, or homosexual marriage, but we simply cannot stand for both – one or the other must give way. His entire piece is well worth carefully reading, but let me offer some tantalising selections from it:
“In the name of ‘marriage equality’ and ‘non-discrimination,’ liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined. It was only yesterday, was it not, that we were being assured that the redefinition of marriage to include same-sex partnerships would have no impact on persons and institutions that hold to the traditional view of marriage as a conjugal union? Such persons and institutions would simply be untouched by the change. It won’t affect your marriage or your life, we were told, if the law recognizes Henry and Herman or Sally and Sheila as ‘married.’
“Those offering these assurances were also claiming that the redefinition of marriage would have no impact on the public understanding of marriage as a monogamous and sexually exclusive partnership. No one, they insisted, wanted to alter those traditional marital norms. On the contrary, the redefinition of marriage would promote and spread those norms more broadly.
“When some of us warned that all of this was nonsense, and pointed out the myriad ways that Catholics, Evangelicals, Mormons, Eastern Orthodox Christians, Orthodox Jews, Muslims, and others would be affected, and their opportunities and liberties restricted, the proponents of marriage redefinition accused us of ‘fearmongering.’ When we observed that reducing marriage to a merely emotional union (which is what happens when sexual reproductive complementarity is banished from the definition) removes all principled grounds for understanding marriage as a sexually exclusive and faithful union of two persons, and not an ‘open’ partnership or a relationship of three or more persons in a polyamorous sexual ensemble, we were charged with invalid slippery-slope reasoning. Remember?”
Just as I have done countless times now, he lists some of these very real cases of anti-religious bigotry and attacks on freedom. He then discusses what marriage is – and always has been – really all about: “Since most liberals and even some conservatives, it seems, apparently have no understanding at all of the conjugal conception of marriage as a one-flesh union—not even enough of a grasp to consciously consider and reject it—they uncritically conceive marriage as sexual-romantic domestic partnership, as if it just couldn’t possibly be anything else.
“This is despite the fact that the conjugal conception has historically been embodied in our marriage laws, and explains their content (not just the requirement of spousal sexual complementarity, but also rules concerning consummation and annulability, norms of monogamy and sexual exclusivity, and the pledge of permanence of commitment) in ways that the sexual-romantic domestic partnership conception simply cannot. Still, having adopted the sexual-romantic domestic partnership idea, and seeing no alternative possible conception of marriage, they assume—and it is just that, an assumption, and a gratuitous one—that no actual reason exists for regarding sexual reproductive complementarity as integral to marriage.
“After all, two men or two women can have a romantic interest in each other, live together in a sexual partnership, care for each other, and so forth. So why can’t they be married? Those who think otherwise, having no rational basis, discriminate invidiously. By the same token, if two men or two women can be married, why can’t three or more people, irrespective of sex, in polyamorous ‘triads,’ ‘quadrads,’ etc.? Since no reason supports the idea of marriage as a male-female union or a partnership of two persons and not more, the motive of those insisting on these other ‘traditional’ norms must also be a dark and irrational one.”
He goes on to note how any compromise here is doomed to failure: “The fundamental error made by some supporters of conjugal marriage was and is, I believe, to imagine that a grand bargain could be struck with their opponents: ‘We will accept the legal redefinition of marriage; you will respect our right to act on our consciences without penalty, discrimination, or civil disabilities of any type. Same-sex partners will get marriage licenses, but no one will be forced for any reason to recognize those marriages or suffer discrimination or disabilities for declining to recognize them.’
“There was never any hope of such a bargain being accepted. Perhaps parts of such a bargain would be accepted by liberal forces temporarily for strategic or tactical reasons, as part of the political project of getting marriage redefined; but guarantees of religious liberty and non-discrimination for people who cannot in conscience accept same-sex marriage could then be eroded and eventually removed. After all, ‘full equality’ requires that no quarter be given to the ‘bigots’ who want to engage in ‘discrimination’ (people with a “separate but equal” mindset) in the name of their retrograde religious beliefs. ‘Dignitarian’ harm must be opposed as resolutely as more palpable forms of harm.
“As legal scholar Robert Vischer has observed, ‘The tension between religious liberty and gay rights is a thorny problem that will continue to crop up in our policy debates for the foreseeable future. Dismissing religious liberty concerns as the progeny of a “separate but equal” mindset does not bode well for the future course of those debates.’
“But there is, in my opinion, no chance—no chance—of persuading champions of sexual liberation (and it should be clear by now that this is the cause they serve), that they should respect, or permit the law to respect, the conscience rights of those with whom they disagree. Look at it from their point of view: Why should we permit ‘full equality’ to be trumped by bigotry? Why should we respect religions and religious institutions that are ‘incubators of homophobia’? Bigotry, religiously based or not, must be smashed and eradicated. The law should certainly not give it recognition or lend it any standing or dignity.
“The lesson, it seems to me, for those of us who believe that the conjugal conception of marriage is true and good, and who wish to protect the rights of our faithful and of our institutions to honor that belief in carrying out their vocations and missions, is that there is no alternative to winning the battle in the public square over the legal definition of marriage. The ‘grand bargain’ is an illusion we should dismiss from our minds.”
Quite so. The distinguished Professor has much more of value to say in this very important article, so I encourage you to read the entire piece. When the other side says it wants to annihilate you, the smartest recourse is to actually believe what they say, and act accordingly.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/07/5884
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