CRUX NOW: Tens of thousands march against gay marriage in Mexico

NORMAL HUMAN MARRIAGE WINS! -CD2000

Associated Press September 25, 2016
Via CruxNow

Demonstrators take part in a march organized by representatives of the National Front for the Family, in Mexico City, Saturday, Sept. 24, 2016. Dueling marches, in support and against Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto’s push to legalize same-sex marriage, gathered at the Angel of Independence monument. The two sides were kept apart Saturday by hundreds of police and barriers erected around the city's iconic monument. (Credit: AP Photo/Marco Ugarte.)

In Mexico City on Saturday, tens of thousands of people marched through the city streets to demonstrate their opposition to the legalization of gay marriage, in a protest that many Mexicans saw as the country's powerful Catholic Church flexing its muscles.

MEXICO CITY - Tens of thousands of people marched through Mexico City on Saturday in opposition to President Enrique Pena Nieto’s push to legalize same-sex marriage.

Organizers of the National Front for the Family estimated at least 215,000 people participated, and while that number could not be immediately confirmed, it was clearly one of the largest protest marches in Mexico in recent years.

Dressed mainly in white and carrying white balloons, the marchers held banners warning against same-sex marriage and demanding parents’ right to control sex education in schools.

“We are not against anybody’s (sexual) identity,” said Abraham Ledesma, an Evangelical pastor who traveled from the border city of Reynosa, across the border from McAllen, Texas, to participate in Saturday’s march.

“What we are against is the government imposition … of trying to impose gender ideology in education,” Ledesma said. “As religious leaders, we don’t want to be forced to marry same-sex couples and call it marriage.”

Others carried signs saying “an adopted child deserves a mother and a father.”

On the other side of a police barricade separating the two sides at Mexico’s Independence Monument, a far smaller crowd of same-sex marriage supporters - perhaps a couple hundred - listened to music and speeches.

“They may be the majority,” said Felipe Quiroz, a gay activist and school teacher. “But just because they are the majority, doesn’t mean they can take rights away from minorities. That would lead us to a dark period, to fundamentalism.”

Many saw the massive march as the Roman Catholic church flexing its political muscle in a country where about 80 percent of people identify as nominally Catholic. In May, Pena Nieto proposed legalizing same-sex marriage nationwide. It is currently legal only in some places such as Mexico City, the northern state of Coahuila and Quintana Roo state on the Caribbean coast.

But in June, Pena Nieto’s party suffered unprecedented losses in midterm governorship elections, and his party has since put the proposal on the back burner in Congress.

Activists say opposition to same-sex marriage played a role.

Jose Medrano, a university professor, came to Saturday’s march from the northern state of Chihuahua, where the ruling party lost the governorship in June to the conservative, pro-Catholic National Action party.

“We may have influenced this, because the proposal (for same-sex marriage) was presented just a few weeks before the elections, and a lot of people were against it,” said Medrano.

BE WARNED! The Metropolitan Church of Christ founded by Troy Perry on October 6, 1968 now in the Philippines!

Looks like Catholic. Acts like Catholics. Celebrate like Catholics. But THEY ARE NOT CATHOLICS and THEY DO NOT REPRESENT THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH! They copied Catholic rites. They copied Catholic creed. They copied Catholic liturgy. And they copied Catholic priestly vestments and appearances but DO NOT BE DECEIVED. They are now in the Philippines and spread their Satanic deceit and lies. Stay away from their liturgy for it is an abomination one! -CD2000

The Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), also known as the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), is an international Protestant Christian denomination. There are 222 member congregations in 37 countries, and the Fellowship has a specific outreach to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender families and communities.

The Fellowship has Official Observer status with the World Council of Churches. The MCC has been denied membership in the US National Council of Churches, but many local MCC congregations are members of local ecumenical partnerships around the world and MCC currently belongs to several statewide councils of churches in the United States. -Wikipedia

Former lesbian on why it’s ‘cruel’ for Church leaders to go soft on same-sex relationships

Pete Baklinski
Posted in Wed Nov 12, 2014
Source: LifeSiteNews

Robin Beck, 59

Robin Teresa Beck, 59, lived through 12 lesbian relationships over the course of 35 years before her dramatic conversion to the Catholic faith and healing from homosexuality, just five years ago.

Read LifeSiteNews’ coverage of Robin’s dramatic story here. Read the full interview here.

Beck spoke with LifeSiteNews over the phone from her home in Michigan in the Detroit area about everything from the impossibility of creating a healthy gay relationship, to why lesbian relationships can never fulfill the emotional needs of women, to how she believes God looks on people struggling with homosexuality, to how the Church should approach homosexuals.

Her experience with same-sex attraction and the gay lifestyle gives her insight into what is at the heart of homosexuality and why it is fundamentally incompatible with the human person and with Christianity.

“Our Creator said that a man leaves his mother and father and comes together with his wife and the two become one flesh. God’s creative design was for men and women, not for men with men or women with women,” she said.

Beck explained further: “It’s like if one day I think my car should become a boat and I plunge it into a river thinking this is totally passible. But General Motors begs to differ. If I toss aside GM’s plan for the car and drive into the river, the car will sink and I will drown. God created us. He knows and tells us the way he made us to be. You have to put your soul in alignment with Scripture. From my experience, it is impossible to have a healthy gay relationship because it goes against the way God made us to be.”

Beck called it “cruel” for any religious leader to look favorably on homosexual relationships, saying if they only knew about the suffering, darkness, and brokenness tied to the lifestyle, they would never even consider condoning it.

“[P]eople do not see homosexuality for what it is,” she said.

“I think because I was so broken and so totally sickened by my sin that for me it was like: ‘I’m never going back there. I don’t care if Pope Francis gets in the chair and proclaims homosexual behavior is no longer a sin — which of course he can’t do — but if he did, I would be like: ‘No, I’m sorry. It is a sin.’ I don’t care who tries to tell me otherwise. I am just resolute on that.”

People who love God and neighbor need to reach out to people struggling with homosexuality with truth and love, Beck said.

“The Church needs to lovingly say to this person: ‘This is not who you are. Acting on same-sex inclinations is never going to bring you to a place where you can have a right relationship with God. In fact, if you go this way, you are heading down a destructive path. The good news is we love you, we are going to be patient with you. If you fall a thousand times, we will still be there for you.’”

Religious leaders need to start confronting homosexuality head-on, Beck said, because it’s the only way to offer any real help to people struggling in this area.

“Priests need to stop people-pleasing. They need to speak the truth in love. If people pack-up and go away, well, so be it. When their lives get broken, they’ll be back. And they’ll be back at a place that truly is a hospital, where people can find true comfort and healing.”

Beck said religious leaders need to start leading the faithful in acts of repentance for all the ways in which humanity has strayed from God’s plan for sexuality.

“We Catholics are in big trouble. It’s as if we are just taking orders from the world instead of from God. People need to get on their knees and repent. The Pope needs to call us to get on our knees and repent. The Church is supposed to be the light. We are supposed to stand fast with Truth and not compromise with the world.”

To those struggling with unwanted same-sex attraction, Beck has words of hope and consolation.

“God can heal you of the struggle,” she said. “I know it’s not a very popular message, but I know it’s true because for 35 years I was in it and now, thanks to him, I am no longer. If God can heal me, God can heal anybody.”

LGBT Agenda Is a Demonic Attack on the Family, Cardinal Sarah Warns U.S.

Source: ChurchPop

François-Régis Salefran, Wikimedia Commons

Same-sex marriage, transgenderism, and divorce are demonic attacks on the family, Cardinal Robert Sarah warned in his keynote speech for the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. early on Tuesday, May 17th, 2016.

“This is about defending ourselves, children, and future generations” he said, according to LifeSiteNews, “from a demonic ideology that says children do not need mothers and fathers. It denies human nature and wants to cut off entire generations from God.”

He listed examples of this evil ideology: “Do we not see signs of this insidious war in this great nation of the United States? […] The legalization of same-sex marriage, the obligation to accept contraception within health care programs, and even ‘bathroom bills’ that allow men to use the women’s restrooms and locker rooms.”

“Should not a biological man use the men’s restroom? How simpler can that concept be?”

He also pointed to divorce and cohabitation as destructive, especially for children.

“The rupture of the foundational relationships of someone’s life – through separation, divorce, or distorted impositions of the family, such as cohabitation or same sex unions – is a deep wound that closes the heart to self-giving love [unto] death, and even leads to cynicism and despair.”

“These situations cause damage to the little children through inflicting upon them a deep existential doubt about love. They are a scandal – a stumbling block – that prevent the most vulnerable from believing in such love, and a crushing burden that can prevent them from opening to the healing power of the Gospel.”

He lamented that new problems are compounding the old ones. “Sadly, the advent of artificial reproductive technologies, surrogacy, so-called homosexual ‘marriage,’ and other evils of gender ideology, will inflict even more wounds in the midst of generations we live with.”

“This is why,” he concluded, “it is so important to fight to protect the family, the first cell of the life of the Church and every society.”

His speech is reported to have been received with thunderous applause from the audience. The program also included Speaker Paul Ryan, Fr. Paul Scalia (son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), and Sr. Constance Veit from the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Anglican Communion on the Brink of Formal Schism

Deep divides between member churches of the Anglican Communion, over homosexuality and other issues, could precipitate its breakup as early as this week.

by EDWARD PENTIN Posted in 01/11/2016 for National Catholic Register

Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby

CANTERBURY, England — The Anglican Communion stands on the verge of formal schism this week, as its leaders began meeting Monday to discuss the issue of homosexuality and other matters in Canterbury, England.

The five-day meeting, called by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, is seen as a last-ditch attempt to keep the ecclesial community together following a long-running dispute over homosexuality and deeper differences over how Anglicans should interact with today’s largely secular, post-Christian society.

The global summit of 38 primates of the Anglican Communion, which claims to have 85 million followers worldwide, is usually held every two years, but it hasn’t convened since 2011, principally because of the dispute over homosexuality. This week’s meeting will also discuss other issues such as religious violence and climate change.

Since 2003, when Episcopalians (the American branch of Anglicanism) made an active homosexual bishop, divisions have deepened between largely Western Anglicans, who would like to see greater acceptance of homosexuals in the church, and those, mostly in Africa and Asia, who argue it is contrary to Scripture and 2,000 years of Christian teaching. Tensions increased last year when the Episcopal Church moved towards solemnizing same-sex “marriage.”

Pressure has also been building in the run-up to this week’s meeting with more than 100 Anglicans, including the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral in London, sending a letter to the archbishops of Canterbury and York urging repentance for treating homosexuals as “second-class citizens.”

“The time has come,” they wrote, for Anglicans to acknowledge that they have failed in their duty “to care for LGBTI members of the Body of Christ around the world.” The Anglican Communion, they added, needed to “apologize” for not “challenging ill-informed beliefs about LGBTI people.”

The signers of the letter said they understood there are “differing ways of interpreting the Scriptures” but urged the primates to be “prophetic” and “Christlike” in dealing with “our LGBTI sisters and brothers who have been ignored and even vilified for too long.”

The Anglican bishop of Oxford, the Rt. Rev. David Ison, even argued for change by seemingly equating those opposed to acceptance of homosexual practices with ISIS. “The sexuality divide focuses the big question facing the whole of humanity,” he told Christian Today. “How do we treat people who are different from us? The forces of Daesh (ISIS) in Syria seek to eradicate difference and make everyone else like them, through violence and the threat of death.”

Vocal Opposition

But other Anglican leaders have been equally vocal in their opposition to the move. As the Anglican Communion cannot excommunicate people or provinces, bishops in favor of Christian tradition have formed a group, the Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON), which is threatening to break away entirely unless “godly order” is restored.

Reports say Anglican archbishops from Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Sudan, Rwanda and Congo will probably stage a walkout within a day or two of the inauguration of the summit. They are calling on British and U.S. prelates to publicly give up their support for same-sex “marriage” and actively homosexual bishops.

The Rt. Rev. Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican bishop of Rochester, England, said he does not agree with the argument that there can be “different interpretations of Scripture” on the issue. “The Bible is clear on many things, including its teaching on human sexuality, and the Church has upheld that teaching for 2,000 years,” he said.

Of the 38 Anglican provinces, only eight are in favor of acceptance of same-sex unions: the U.S., Canada, Scotland, Wales, New Zealand, South India, South Africa and Brazil.

Since becoming archbishop of Canterbury in 2013, Welby has tried to keep some semblance of unity, most notably by appointing a Nigerian, Rev. Josiah Atkins Idowu-Fearon, general secretary of the Anglican Communion. Unity in the Episcopal Church has also been helped by having an African-American evangelical, the Rt. Rev. Michael Curry, as its presiding bishop since last November, although some do not believe his election will be of help. Furthermore, Welby has already said he thinks it might be a good idea to effectively dissolve the Anglican Communion and replace it with a much looser grouping.

Vatican Perspective

The Vatican, meanwhile, is watching events in Canterbury closely. It argues that, for dialogue between Rome and Canterbury to effectively continue, the Anglican Communion must stay as one, but it recognizes that its dispersed authority model makes that an almost impossible task. It is perplexed at Anglicans’ wish to allow local and regional bishops to decide on doctrinal matters without seemingly having a sense of what is owed to the communion as a whole, but recognizes that Welby is not, as he has said himself, an “Anglican pope.”

Some see the problems affecting the Anglican Communion as similar to those facing the Catholic Church and all Christian denominations. Father Ed Tomlinson of the Anglican Ordinariate of Tunbridge Wells in England has argued that what is dividing the body of Christ is a more fundamental issue than just homosexuality. Rather, he contends, it is being caused by “modernists” who have “lost their faith but do not wish to lose their Christian culture and identity.” The miracle that is needed, he believes, is for the Church to “wake from slumber, stand for truth and refute error.”

For Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, author of Anglican Orders: Null and Void?, the only doctrine in the Church of England "is the doctrine that there is no doctrine."

He told the Register Jan. 11 that since Anglicans began "openly to defy" their belief in "even the sola Scriptura to which they once clung — for instance by manufacturing a homosexual 'bishop' in contravention of the biblical teaching that homosexuality is wrong because it is medically dangerous to its practitioners — they abandoned even scriptural doctrines and thereupon ceased to be a 'religion' in any recognizable sense."

He said that is why the churches in Africa, which still adhere to the scriptural doctrines, "no longer recognize Anglicanism as their own."

"The Anglican religion is no longer anything much to do either with England or with religion," he said. "It has a questionable past, an uneasy present and no future."

For now, the Vatican is hoping and praying that Welby can hold the Anglican Communion together, but if there were to be a definitive split, it would try to continue dialogue across the divisions, speaking to both parties if necessary.

Edward Pentin is the Register’s Rome correspondent.