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When attempting to capture yourself for someone else, it's always intimidating to use the phrase "I am." Life is a journey to find out what you are, and sometimes saying "I am" anything seems, at best, premature. I can tell you my name. It's Mariah Proctor. And I can tell you that I attend Brigham Young University and aspire to be a student of storytelling and the communication of passions and ideas; though, my majors are Theatre and German.
Five of my six roommates are engaged to be married, and, as I watch the couples in my household interact, it keeps me thinking a lot about what I expect out of that marital commitment, as well as what I want to be able to do for another person and what I want them to do for me. The Reel Love Challenge became a perfect outlet for me to finally share some of those thoughts. To be something definitively is scary, but I can say that I am a lover. I am meant to love and be loved. I believe in marriage because I believe in a commitment to love, and I think too many people have given up on both of those concepts. I won't give up.
~Mariah
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by Maggie Gallagher, founder of the National Organization for Marriage
Last month, facing the problem of Muslim assimilation, British Prime Minister David Cameron denounced multiculturalism and called for a new “muscular liberalism” as the basis for a shared national identity.
Applauding conservatives, beware.
For Cameron’s new liberal muscles were pumped this week at Owen and Eunice Johns, whose religious objections to homosexuality were used to bar them from becoming foster parents.
I wrote about this case recently, but Cameron’s comments call renewed attention to the underlying dynamic now being launched in the Western world: the end of liberal multiculturalism and the launch of liberal monoculturalism. It’s not a pretty sight.
Owen and Eunice Johns, by all accounts, are two of the nicest people you would ever want to meet. They emigrated to Great Britain from Jamaica, raised their own children, and took in foster children during the 1990s.
Recently, they decided to share their home and their love with abused and neglected children again. They applied for the requisite foster-care license. As part of the home study, they were asked this question by the Derby City Council: “Would you tell a child that it was all right to be homosexual?”
No child had ever complained about the Johnses’ treatment in their home. This case is not even about whether the Johnses are permitted to mention Christian beliefs around a foster child.
As Daily Mail columnist Stephen Glover put it, “The (Johnses), who are Pentecostal Christians and were born in Jamaica, do not hold their views in any aggressive or hectoring way. They seem to be strikingly good people, and have fostered very many children. They were simply unable to respond in the affirmative to this question posed by Derby City Council.”
A British court ruled that a commitment to orientation equality “should take precedence” over the Johnses’ religious liberty, or their freedom of speech.
And this week, the newly buff Cameron called the exclusion of the Johnses “appropriate,” and went on to lecture that Christians must be “tolerant and welcoming and broad-minded” toward gay relationships. (What? Not enough to be prime minister? He wants to be pope too?)
In Great Britain, Christians are now effectively second-class citizens, judged "unfit" to care for foster children. If they are unfit to foster children, logically they are also unfit to adopt, and possibly as one British lawyer suggested to the press, unfit to parent their own children, too.
Could it happen over here?
Yes. We see the first steps of the muscular liberalism process at work already in the state of Illinois, in its probe of evangelical, Lutheran and Catholic foster-care agencies for discrimination against gay couples in foster care. For the ACLU and the gay rights community, suddenly the right to live as we choose isn't good enough. Any foster-care agency that does not place children with gay couples now must be discriminated against by the government in the name of anti-discrimination.
Keep reading.
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