European Union Advances “Gay Marriage” Agenda

www.Remnantnewspaper.com According to Life Site News (May 2, 2006), the European Union (EU) continues to favor the homosexual movement’s program at the expense of national sovereignty and religious rights. A new law, effective May 2, 2006, effectively orders the countries of the Union to “facilitate” homosexual partners who have “married” in their home countries and want to live or travel in countries where their unions are not legally recognized.

The law is intended to allow EU citizens to move around the Union as freely as they do within their own countries.  It will force countries to allow nationals of other EU states to live permanently in the new country without visas or residency permits. The law applies not only to EU states, but also to individuals who may move and then use the courts to force member states to comply. As a result, homosexual couples may use the European Courts to force sovereign countries to recognize their unions when registering in their new country. The law will require states to carry out investigations into the nature of the relationship and determine if the partners are in a “long-term stable relationship.”

Although only five EU member states (Austria, Denmark, Slovenia, Slovakia and the United Kingdom) have ratified the decision to date, European justice commissioner Franco Frattini warned national governments that the law was “immediately applicable” – whether ratified or not. “The main provision is that you can recognize marriages or partnerships only when the hosting country has similar provisions,” said Frattini, a former leader in the Italian Socialist party and a long time member of Silvio Berlusconi’s government, who was appointed to the EU to replace Rocco Buttiglione, a Catholic opposed to the homosexual movement’s legal inroads into European politics.

“In those cases where there is no direct obligation to recognize, member states must facilitate entry and residence of partners in a durable relationship after a concrete assessment. This new provision will facilitate the situation of gay couples across Europe,” said Frattini.

Three countries of the EU, the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain have laws which allow homosexuals to imitate lawful marriage. Britain, Germany and a number of other countries have accommodated homosexual unions with some form of civil recognition. Other states, however, such as Poland, Italy and Malta have resisted the push by lobbyists for “gay marriage.” As a result, the threat of coercion, an increasingly common method of EU politics, is directed against them.

Comment: The 2004 rejection of Rocco Buttiglione as EU Commissioner for Justice, Freedom and Security was the result of his speaking out plainly on what he called the “soft totalitarianism” of the European Union (EU), a philosophy that “wants to have a state religion ... an atheist, nihilistic religion ... that is obligatory for all.”

The most dangerous gangsters are not the muggers and second-story men who want your Rolex watches and silver candlesticks. They are the well-organized, ruthless ones who know how to circumvent the law – or, worse, make the law work for them. The EU talks a huge game about “rights.” However, the movers and shakers of the EU are painfully aware of one thing. Try as they may to deny or downplay it, Catholic sentiment and teaching covers the majority of its territory. And so comes the question: “How do we tell millions of Catholics that a rejection of their moral beliefs is the ‘moral’ way to live?”

The reply? We don‘t tell them to reject their convictions. We order them to do it. In October of 2005, the E.U. Network of Independent Experts on Fundamental Rights drafted their recommendations on a variety of “human rights issues.” While paying lip-service to those religious believers who may conscientiously object to such things as abortion and homosexuality, the EU’s uber-intelligentsia made no bones about their loyalties. In addition to wringing their hands over the possibility that “religious conscientious objection” may interfere with the abortion agenda, the experts also opine about the human right of “homosexual marriage”:

Any form of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation (as would result from the refusal to celebrate a marriage between two persons of the same sex where this institution is recognized), and any violation of the right to marry of transsexuals, should not be tolerated, and the public authorities should ensure in such circumstances that other officers will be available and willing to celebrate those unions.

If these recommendations by the EU experts sound like grounds for anticlerical (i.e., anti-Catholic) persecution, that’s because they are. Rocco Buttiglione summed-up the situation succinctly in an EUpolitix.com interview: “There is an anti-Italian lobby, there is an anti-Christian lobby and there is a lesbian and homosexual lobby. They have all organized together.” Welcome to the European Union’s “Brave New World.”

“Roll Over, Dan Brown”

On April 4, 2006 Simon & Schuster published The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity, written by James D. Tabor, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. On April 28th, The Charlotte Observer printed excerpts from the book.

"I'm ready to let the average reader know what we scholars actually discuss,” said Tabor in an April 7th interview with ABC News. “And if it's shocking, it's shocking. You don't have to accept it. Jesus had a father." Basing his theory on “first- and second-century Rabbinic and Greek texts” and the fact that “all humans have a human father,” Tabor goes on to suggest that the possible name for Jesus’ human father was “a man named Pantera, who either was or became a Roman soldier.”

Tabor believes that, contrary to New Testament teaching, Jesus and John the Baptist were twin Messiahs.  He says that early texts anticipated more than one Messiah and that the practice of baptism suggests that they were acting similarly in their respective ministries. "The great embarrassment that the Christians faced,” says Tabor, “was that it was well known that John had baptized Jesus—not the other way around! Jesus had come to John and joined his movement—which in the context of ancient Judaism meant that Jesus was a disciple of John and John was the rabbi or teacher of Jesus."

In addition to Tabor's claims that Jesus had an earthly father and a fellow Messiah, his book also argues that it was Jesus' intention to build a dynasty on earth. Tabor says that it was Jesus' half-brother James who would inherit the title role of dynastical king after the crucifixion. "That Jesus has four brothers and at least two sisters is a ‘given’ in [the gospel of] Mark, our earliest gospel record,” writes Tabor in The Jesus Dynasty. Referring to the Apostle St. James as the “beloved disciple” of St. John’s Gospel, Tabor claims that, when Jesus died, “he turned his movement over to his brother James, the eldest, and put his mother into James's care.”

Publisher Simon & Schuster hails The Jesus Dynasty as “a bold new interpretation of the life of Jesus and the origins of Christianity .... an alternative version of Christian origins, one that takes us closer than ever to Jesus and his family and followers.” They also claim that the book “will change our understanding of one of the most crucial moments in history.”

Comment: Why is it that the books with the stalest premises are the ones always touted as “bold,” exciting new tomes that will change our lives forever? Come on, Jesus as the son of a Roman soldier named Panthera? This bit of Talmudic tripe is old hat, to put it mildly.

Dr. Donald Carson, an expert in New Testament history from Trinity University in Illinois and a critic of Tabor’s book, says the Panthera theory is “presented in the book as this great find that has been suppressed,” even though it has been around for centuries. “There is nothing new here,” he continues, “except the association of names that go back, at the end of the day, to reports of the enemies of Christianity from the second century.”

In fact, Tabor is so desperate to attribute a human father to Jesus that he will head off into flights of fancy which are, somehow, supposed to be accepted at face value on account of his prodigious credentials in the fields of biblical studies, biblical languages, biblical archaeology, etc.

While clinging to the very unscholarly apocryphal concept that Joseph was an old man when he married Mary, Tabor resorts to the ancient Jewish practice of “Levirate Marriage,” in which the oldest surviving unmarried brother was obligated to marry his deceased brother’s widow, as a means of preserving the lineage:

Given this information, a rather different but historically consistent picture begins to emerge. Jesus was born of an unknown father, but was not the son of Joseph. Joseph died without children, so according to Jewish law ‘Clophas' or `Alphaeus' became his ‘replacer,' and married his widow, Mary, mother of Jesus.

Given this information? Given what information? This is nothing but patchwork speculation – take a fact from column A and add it to one from column B – disguised as historical research and geared towards the “Jesus dynasty” agenda. And, just in case you don’t get his point, Tabor makes the preposterous claim that “no one in the early church even imagined” the doctrine of Mary’s Perpetual Virginity.

"What Dr. Tabor has done is assumed that the whole thing cannot be," said Donald Carson. "It is a sham and therefore the evidence has to be jiggered, it has to be selectively appealed to in order to take away the evidence of God actually doing something in space, time, history.  At that point, no amount of evidence will ever convince him unless he's open to the possibility that Dr. Tabor himself is wrong.”

Tabor wants desperately to shock and amaze us with “new” facts. But how many honest readers – i.e., those who do not revel in the debunking of Scripture for purely subjective reasons—will be bowled over by scholarship that mistakes St. James for the “Beloved Disciple,” fails to understand who the “brothers” of Jesus really are, and refers to Jesus’ baptism by John the Baptist as the “great embarrassment” of Christianity? Tabor strives for fireworks, but the excerpts from his book provided in The Charlotte Observer are the usual duds.

Reparation March Draws Crowd To Manhattan Lounge

A “prayerful protest and reparation” march for the blasphemous off-Broadway play, Mary, Like a Virgin: A Divine Musical Experience, was sponsored by the Priestly Order of the Society of Saint Pius X (SSPX) on Thursday, May 4, 2006, outside Dillon’s Lounge (254 W. 54th Street, between Broadway and 8th Avenue, NYC), where the play has been running since opening on March 23rd.

Mary, Like a Virgin was written and is performed by Braden Chapman, who bills himself as “Mimi Imfurst, New York’s Most Retarded Drag Queen.” Press notes for the play provide this summary:

After 2000 years of praise, idolization and expectation the girlfriend of God and the mother of Christ is ready to tell her side of the story. Through song and story, both legend and perceived reality, Mary shares the sometimes hazy details of her relationship with God, her adventures with Joseph, the deliverance of Christ, the aftermath of his death, her struggle with eating disorders, and a life in show business.

A review by Eva Sandoval in The L Magazine, a Manhattan “local events guide,” provides the following insight into the show’s character:

The spangly blue and white robes of her “Salvation Armani dress” plunge to showcase her bosom and are cut high at the thigh to reveal shapely gams; she belts popular song parodies, quaffs from a sacramental cup in between wry jokes and stores half-eaten snacks in a basket holding Jesus’ childhood artwork. This is the Virgin Mary — brought to you by drag artist “Mimi Imfurst” Braden Chapman for a lounge act “confession.”

In late April, the SSPX sent out a call to “all faithful Roman Catholics devoted to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of the Word Incarnate, Jesus Christ, God and King, to a prayerful protest and act of reparation.” The intention of the event, which was led by Fr. Gerardo Zendejas, was to “pray as many Rosaries as possible to make reparation for this heinous mockery of the Immaculate Mother of God.”

A description of the reparation march was posted the following day (May 5, 2006) on the play’s website, virginmarylive.com, which is accessible via Braden Chapman’s own website:

At 7:45pm the first protesters arrived and began to chant the rosary repeatedly in front of the theater. The protesters, who grew in number to about 125 continued to chant, pray loudly, and sing. At 8:30pm, a parade of an estimated 500 protesters passed down West 54th, while looping back to Shubert Alley. The parade was lead by 4 priests, followed by fellow clergy members in robes, altar boys, giant 12 foot crucified Christs, life size Mary statues carried on platforms, and hundreds carrying small statues of Mary and signs filled with messages of hate and judgment.

Comment: “Messages of hate and judgment?” Hey, you’ve got to give “New York’s Most Retarded Drag Queen” credit for trying. The homosexual lobby, its sympathizers and its related gender-addled affiliates, simply do not get the concept of “peaceful protest.” When protesters organized by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property met outside the Somerville Theater in Massachusetts in 2002 to pray Rosaries in  reparation for the sacrilegious play, Jesus Has Two Mommies, they were met by a counter-demonstration whose leader wore a devil mask and screamed “Give up, give up! Your God is dead! Jesus lost!” through a bullhorn, along with a host of blasphemies and profanities.

Braden Chapman has defended his play from accusations of blasphemy:

Mary, while a holy and amazingly selfless woman, probably had emotions and feelings just as any other woman might have. My intention as both playwright and performer is to paint the most realistic and human picture of Mary in a contemporary setting: musical theatre. She is my muse.

The name of the game is justification. Remember Chris Ofili's elephant-dung spattered “Holy Virgin Mary” painting, which was on display at the Brooklyn Museum in 2000? We were told then that for Ofili (a Catholic who went to church, “but not regularly”), the painting was devotional, that the use of the dung was about “the complexity of interweaving his own African heritage with traditional Eurocentric interpretations of Mary.” That didn’t really explain why the artist adorned the painting with images cut out from pornographic magazines, but, hey, what do the unwashed masses know?

While blasphemy can be the result of ignorance – recall the jokes you’ve heard that depended upon it for “humor” –  a deliberate, sustained attack on Our Lady is a different matter. Braden Chapman’s assaults on Mary are not merely ignorant off-the-cuff remarks or youthful bravado. They are the result of a studied callousness. The play had to be conceived, written, staged and performed, week after week. If Chapman actually believes that  Our Lady was a “holy and amazingly selfless woman,” as he claims, he would shut down his play immediately, even on the purely “secular” understanding that it is an unwarranted attack against a good person who has never done him any harm. Instead, the press material for  Mary, Like a Virgin informs us that “this show is the first in a series of Mary’s shows including an upcoming Christmas show expected to debut this winter,” and that the play “has been extended through June 1st and a limited tour will follow this summer and fall.”

The organizers and participants of the May 4th reparation march are to be congratulated and thanked for their public defense of Mary’s honor.

Palace Of Ancient Greek Hero Found?

 “On a deserted green hill above the Aegean Sea, archeologists have unearthed what may be the palace of Ajax, one of the greatest heroes in Greek mythology,” according to Dina Kyriakidou of  Reuters (May 2, 2006).

Six years of excavations at the site of Kanakia, on the southwestern tip of Salamina island, have revealed a maze of stone walls making up at least two major palatial complexes, the settlement around them stretching down to the natural port. The building with the two great halls covers 8,070 square feet and has 33 rooms on four levels. The idyllic location on Salamina island perfectly matches historical references, a fact which led archeologists to wonder whether the scattered stones here might have formed one the most famous kingdoms of pre-historic Greece.

"I had early indications but I wasn't certain I had discovered a palace until we found the twin ceremonial halls," said Yannos Lolos, the Ioannina University archeologist heading the excavation. "It's one of very few cases where a Mycenaean palace can be linked to a top hero of the Homeric poems."

In Homer’s Iliad, the epic story of Greek cities joining forces to wage war on Troy and recover Helen, the kidnapped queen of Sparta, Ajax is described as a massive man and a great warrior, second only to his cousin Achilles. An icon of strength and dignity, he is mentioned by several writers of the ancient world and appears among the early suitors of Helen, "the face that launched a thousand ships." In fact, the Greeks gathered 1,186 ships to sail against Troy, including 12 offered by Ajax.

According to Yannos Lolos, the archeological finds at the Kanakia site match the general profile of the legendary Ajax, who owned ships and got involved in piracy in the eastern Mediterranean. He said that the ruins of Ajax's Salamina show that the city was abandoned around 1,200 BC, when the Trojan war ended, but there were no signs of violence or haste: "Why it was abandoned is a great mystery ... Ajax was the last king; maybe after his death the system collapsed.”