Cameron, Like Henry VIII, Will Have to Face the Martyrs

The Daily Telegraph (UK) ^ | 1/14/13 | Cristina Odone

[marshmallow]

The Prime Minister has been warned that he risks opening the door to the persecution of Catholics, writes Cristina Odone

The pink complexion of the sportsman, the jowls of the bon viveur and an inscrutable gaze that only Hilary Mantel could decipher: Henry VIII and David Cameron have much in common. More than 1,000 Catholic clerics – bishops, priests, abbots – agree. They wrote to this newspaper on Saturday to warn the Prime Minister that he risked copying Henry’s example: by tampering with marriage he would open the door to the persecution of Catholics.

Once gay marriage is legal, secularists can rely on a host of equality laws to prosecute a conscientious objector who fails to promote it. The Government has offered guarantees to the Churches; but the gay rights lobby will target these, chipping away at the fringes of such measures. Cameron may pledge that a Catholic priest will not be forced to celebrate a gay marriage; but what about his church hall being used for a same-sex wedding party?

Catholic professionals, too, will be challenged: a Catholic who teaches in a state school that marriage between a man and a woman is the ideal model will be barred from the classroom. And what of Catholic marriage counsellors? Will they be allowed to practise what their priests have preached for millennia? Catholics will be prosecuted and persecuted. So will other Christians.

But, just as was true in Henry’s time, plenty of them are willing to be martyred for their conscience. This is bad news for the Prime Minister: martyrdom (so long as it doesn’t cost innocent lives) earns grudging respect. Gay rights campaigners knew this in 1987, when Marshall Kirk and Erastes Pill wrote The Overhauling of Straight America. To win the sympathy vote, they said, a few activists would......

[Slyfox]

It will be a dry martyrdom for sure as parents work to fend off not just the example of gayness abounding, but even that neighbor next door who insists on smoking his own homegrown pot in his backyard and you have to keep your windows shut tight because it smells so bad and the cops can't do anything.

The old adage will be quite forgotten: Do whatever you want to do as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

[wolfman23601]