Media Ignore Impending Collision: Gay Rights vs. Religious Liberty

Thank God for the alternative media.

Unlike the big newspapers and TV networks, small conservative online news sites are reporting the growing threat posed to religious liberty by the burgeoning homosexual rights movement.

Two indispensable Web sites, Canada's Life Site News and America's One News Now, have carried a stunning series of articles in the past few days about critics of homosexuality being attacked by the governments of Great Britain, Northern Ireland, Belgium and Canada.

Britain's Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor Will Defy Law Forcing Homosexual Adoption [1] Northern Ireland MP Investigated for "Homophobic" Remarks [2] Belgian Bishop Cleared of Charges for Church Teaching on Homosexuality [3]

No country is harder on religious believers than Canada, where a modern-day star chamber called the Canadian Human Rights Commission is cracking down on Christian preachers who dare to repeat what the Bible says about homosexuality. 

Alberta Pastor Fined $7000 and Ordered to Publicly Apologize and Remain Silent on Homosexuality [4] Canadian Catholic Priest Accused of Hate Crime [5]

The homosexual rights movement is not really an effort to win civil rights for a supposedly oppressed minority.  It's a war against Western civilization's Judeo-Christian moral order, joined now by many non-homosexuals who support rewriting society's moral code.  The goals are to win social acceptance of alternative sexual “lifestyles,” especially homosexuality, and to make room for a revolutionary new sexual code that glorifies self-indulgence and embraces promiscuity. 

Hedonism and homosexuality cannot be legitimized without displacing the Bible's restrictions on sex and God's design for the family.  The revolutionaries are going about it the obvious way, in our litigious society—through the courts.  By redefining traditional sexual morality as bigotry, the sexual revolutionaries are using the law to assail the rights of speech, association and religion of anyone who disagrees with them. Using “sexual orientation” statutes and hate crimes laws, they are attempting to silence anybody who believes that homosexuality is a sin, not an acceptable alternative “lifestyle.” 

A Canadian Catholic magazine editor, Father Alphonse de Valk, warns in his editorial, “Fascism Has Come to Canada”: [6]

So we move from [former Canadian Prime Minister] Trudeau's 1967 slogan “there is no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation” – falsely used to destroy traditional morality – to the new slogan that the state will determine people's moral thinking. 

Why aren't the liberal newspapers and broadcasters reporting these stories?  As politically savvy secular institutions that back homosexual rights, they may be reluctant to publicize religious victims of the movement.  They appear to be following in the footsteps of Walter Duranty, the New York Times foreign correspondent who won the Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of Stalin's Soviet Union. 

In the 1930s, Duranty downplayed the realities of the Soviet gulag, where 10 million or more people died.  He lied about Stalin's deliberate starvation of millions of people in the Ukraine.  Even though his deliberate misreporting has been thoroughly documented, the Times has never removed Duranty from its list of staff who have won Pulitzers.  Nor has the Pulitzer committee withdrawn the award.

For Duranty, loyalty to political ideals trumped journalistic ethics.  In defense of Stalin, Duranty explained, “You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.”

The current journalistic cover-up of the homosexual activist movement's assaults on freedom is not the same in degree as covering up the Gulag, but it's the same in kind.  It is an abdication of responsibility and a professional disgrace. And it is one more reason that alternative media that report honestly are rapidly growing. 

Brian Fitzpatrick is Senior Editor at the Culture and Media Institute, [7] a division of the Media Research Center.