News

SAN ANTONIO, February 8, 2013, (Cardinal Newman Society) – The New Civil Rights Movement, a homosexual activist blog, is celebrating reports that Our Lady of the Lake University (OLLU), a Catholic university in San Antonio, Texas, has become the first Catholic school in Texas to revise its student handbook to protect students, faculty and staff of the university from discrimination based upon “sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression.”

“By embracing this full vision of equality, we can realize the best nature of who we are and what we stand for at OLLU,” said Leda Barnett, assistant professor of political science.

Work to change the handbook began in 2005 with Cynthia Squiabro-Kee, then a graduate student at the University, and her efforts to establish a Gay/Straight Alliance. That group was formed by 2007. In early 2012, The Alliance posted a petition on the Change.org website seeking community support for their efforts to revise the university handbook with fully inclusive policies.

Image

A resolution was submitted to the Student Voice Assembly for approval, seeking to “include the statement of ‘sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression’ to all relevant policies within the student handbook.”

After meeting with representatives of The Alliance, Equality Texas, the Rainbow Coalition and GetEQUAL TX, Jack Hank, OLLU’s vice president for Student Life, worked on revisions to the policy with the university’s attorney. On January 16, 2013, Hank announced approval of the policy change by the OLLU Student Life Council.

Click “like” if you want to defend true marriage.

Pope Benedict XVI, in his Christmas address to the Roman Curia in December, warned against the dangers of celebrating “gender” outside of male and female.

“The attack we are currently experiencing on the true structure of the family, made up of father, mother, and child, goes much deeper,” said the Holy Father:

While up to now we regarded a false understanding of the nature of human freedom as one cause of the crisis of the family, it is now becoming clear that the very notion of being – of what being human really means – is being called into question…. According to this philosophy, sex is no longer a given element of nature, that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society. The profound falsehood of this theory and of the anthropological revolution contained within it is obvious. People dispute the idea that they have a nature, given by their bodily identity, that serves as a defining element of the human being. They deny their nature and decide that it is not something previously given to them, but that they make it for themselves. According to the biblical creation account, being created by God as male and female pertains to the essence of the human creature. This duality is an essential aspect of what being human is all about, as ordained by God. This very duality as something previously given is what is now disputed. The words of the creation account: “male and female he created them” (Gen 1:27) no longer apply. No, what applies now is this: it was not God who created them male and female – hitherto society did this, now we decide for ourselves. Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will. The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man’s fundamental choice where he himself is concerned. From now on there is only the abstract human being, who chooses for himself what his nature is to be. Man and woman in their created state as complementary versions of what it means to be human are disputed. But if there is no pre-ordained duality of man and woman in creation, then neither is the family any longer a reality established by creation. Likewise, the child has lost the place he had occupied hitherto and the dignity pertaining to him. Bernheim shows that now, perforce, from being a subject of rights, the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain. When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to create oneself, then necessarily the Maker himself is denied and ultimately man too is stripped of his dignity as a creature of God, as the image of God at the core of his being. The defence of the family is about man himself. And it becomes clear that when God is denied, human dignity also disappears. Whoever defends God is defending man.

 This article originally appeared on the Cardinal Newman Society website and is reprinted with permission.