UK Roman Catholic church-funded marriage agency backs gay and unmaried parents

Terry Prendergast, the chief executive of Marriage Care, claimed there is “no evidence” that children do better if they are brought up in a traditional two-parent family.

He claimed that those who live together out of wedlock are trying to lead good lives but find themselves “consigned to the dustbin” by the church.

His comments – to be made this weekend to Quest, a group of homosexual Catholics – go directly against the church’s teaching, which holds that homosexuality is sinful and that families should be based on the marriage of a man and a woman.

Mr Prendergast said: “We see, for example, that statistically children do best in a family where the adult relationship is steady, stable and loving – you should note here perhaps that I stress adult, not married, since there is no evidence that suggests that children do best with heterosexual couples.”

He claimed that God was present in the relationships of married, homosexual and cohabiting heterosexual relationships where there was “commitment, consent and covenant”.

He went on: “They want to live good lives according to the precepts of the Gospels. They are an advert for the Church, an advert that the Church often ignores or consigns to the wastebin.”

See Catholic church-funded marriage agency backs gay and unmaried parents Telegraph.co.uk

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LGBT Legal And Advocacy Groups Decry Obama Administration’s Defense of DOMA

We are very surprised and deeply disappointed in the manner in which the Obama administration has defended the so-called Defense of Marriage Act in Smelt v. United States, a lawsuit brought in federal court in California by a married same-sex couple asking the federal government to treat them equally with respect to federal protections and benefits. The administration is using many of the same flawed legal arguments that the Bush administration used. These arguments rightly have been rejected by several state supreme courts as legally unsound and discriminatory.

We disagree with many of the administration’s arguments, for example, that DOMA is a valid exercise of Congress’s power, is consistent with Equal Protection or Due Process principles, and does not impinge upon rights that are recognized as fundamental.
We are also extremely disturbed by a new and nonsensical argument the administration has advanced suggesting that the federal government needs to be “neutral” with regard to its treatment of married same-sex couples in order to ensure that federal tax money collected from across the country not be used to assist same-sex couples duly married by their home states. There is nothing “neutral” about the federal government’s discriminatory denial of fair treatment to married same-sex couples: DOMA wrongly bars the federal government from providing any of the over one thousand federal protections to the many thousands of couples who marry in six states. This notion of “neutrality” ignores the fact that while married same-sex couples pay their full share of income and social security taxes, they are prevented by DOMA from receiving the corresponding same benefits that married heterosexual taxpayers receive. It is the married same-sex couples, not heterosexuals in other parts of the country, who are financially and personally damaged in significant ways by DOMA. For the Obama administration to suggest otherwise simply departs from both mathematical and legal reality.
When President Obama was courting lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender voters, he said that he believed that DOMA should be repealed. We ask him to live up to his emphatic campaign promises, to stop making false and damaging legal arguments, and immediately to introduce a bill to repeal DOMA and ensure that every married couple in America has the same access to federal protections.

 

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