So the Pope is at it again, not quite spreading season's greeting - more accusing gender studies of threatening the future of mankind. You can probably accuse gender studies of all sorts of things (lacking a sense of humour at times for instance) but threatening mankind I think is something of a stretch. Only a man who has presumably lived a completely celibate life could think that hetero-sexuality needs protection from academic theory. Like American evangelicals who are so convinced that gay marriage threatens straight marriage - you have to really ask what is going on inside the mind, unless it a fear of modernity and loss of control more generally.
Benedict XVI said that the "Church speaks of the nature of the human being as man and woman, and demands that this order of creation be respected." Some have argued that this isn't an outright attack on gay people, but that will of course depend on what Benedict sees as the "order of creation". Very little of his previous high profile statements would lead one to suspect that this would be a liberal interpretation.
On a related note, Polly Tonybee notes some interesting research(towards the end) that suggests church goers are more likely to nick newspapers that non-church goers. Make of that what you will. But on that vaguely atheistic point, Happy Christmas to all.
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Gay marriage dosn't have to threaten normative marriage for it to be problematic. Some of us - hundreds of millions, perhaps a few billion - think marriage is more than a functional and legal construct, it's also sacred (a concept that itself is hard for some people to understand).
Personally, I think the Israeli model is best: gay couples effectively have all the legal trappings of marriage, but not the sacred ones. It's a good compromise.
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