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Email: "Irish Bishops Lobby Against Gay Unions, Call for Conscience Protections"

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BY LifeSiteNews.com By Hilary WhiteDUBLIN, June 18, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) – While Irish legislators prepare to pass civil partnership legislation, the country’s Catholic bishops conference has issued a last minute call for a halt to the plans. Failing that, they said, parliament must allow for “greater recognition of the proper autonomy of Churches and the right to social and civil freedom in religious matters.”  “This includes the right of individuals to the free exercise of conscience,” they said. The planned legislation includes a provision to force civil marriage registrars to comply with requests from homosexual partners. Under the bill, a civil registrar who conscientiously refuses to carry out such a ceremony will face criminal prosecution, a possible fine and up to 6 months in prison. Similar penalties will be meted out for anyone refusing for reasons of conscience to rent meeting facilities for homosexual partnership ceremonies. “This Bill is an extraordinary and far-reaching attack on freedom of conscience and the free practice of religion – which are guaranteed to every citizen under the Constitution,” the bishops warned. The bill creates “a new and dangerous expansion of State power. Conscientious Catholics, Protestants, Muslims or Jews are effectively being told by the Irish State that they need not apply for a position as a Civil Registrar.”Speaking from their annual summer general meeting, the bishops called on legislators to refuse to create “civil partnerships” for homosexual couples, saying that to do so would create a legal equivalency that would threaten the underpinnings of Irish society. Citing the Irish constitution’s recognition of marriage, the bishops said the bill “is not compatible with seeing the family based on marriage as the necessary basis of the social order and as indispensable to the welfare of the Nation and the State."“Nor does it ‘guard with special care the institution of Marriage, on which the Family is founded.’”“By making civil partnerships as like marriage as possible, the Bill is preparing a situation where, in the future, calling same-sex unions ‘marriage’ will seem only a small step. Indeed it is likely that, in day-to-day language and in the media, civil partnerships will be referred to as ‘marriage.’”This March the bishops released “Why Marriage Matters,” a document outlining their position, a key point of which is that natural marriage protects children. Marriage, they said, “is the intimate cradle of life and love where children learn the values and actions that will make them good Christians as well as good citizens.”Without protection in law for marriage, “the State would, in effect, intentionally deprive children of the right to a mother and father.”In Britain and other jurisdictions where “gay marriage” or homosexual civil partnerships have been created, legal conflicts have immediately emerged over the rights of religious objectors. The UK has seen a flurry of cases in which Christians in many public roles have been silenced or sacked for refusing to accommodate the homosexualist ideologies.Read LSN’s extensive coverage: http://www.lifesitenews.com/search/index.html?q=UK+christians&sa=Go http://www.lifesitenews.com/news/irish-bishops-lobby-against-gay-unions-call-for-conscience-protections/

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