Posted on 01/03/2015 5:13:13 AM PST by NYer
As Christians around the world got ready to contemplate the innocence of the child Jesus, last week the Russian Orthodox Church took on a UNICEF paper that says children have LGBT rights.
The Patriarch’s Commission on the Family of the Russian Orthodox Church released a scathing statement criticizing a UNICEF position paper that urges countries to protect LGBT rights because, it says, it is in the “best interests of children.” The Commission turns the tables on UNICEF and says: “Placing children to be raised by same-sex couples is a gross violation of the rights and interests of a child.”
The Orthodox Commission said it was “gravely concerned” that UNICEF would throw its weight behind what it calls notions that are “devoid of sound international legal basis” and “contrary to most of the nations’ traditional cultures, as well as norms of natural and religious morality.” As a result, the commission says it is “harmful to the international community and will undermine the moral legitimacy of UNICEF and other UN bodies.”
The UNICEF paper acknowledges that “there is no binding international instrument that explicitly addresses discrimination against individuals based on their sexual orientation and gender identity.” At the same time UNICEF cites the non-binding opinion of UN experts on the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), which monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, to elevate sexual orientation and gender identity to the level of categories of non-discrimination like race, sex and religion.
The same UN committee told the Catholic Church this year that its doctrine on abortion was a human rights violation, and told Israel that circumcision is a violation of the bodily integrity of the child.
The position paper goes beyond a mere acknowledgement of the CRC’s interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It also purports to instruct countries on how they are to report to the Committee on the Rights of the Child: “CRC member states and signatories should report on discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, including discrimination and bullying in schools and educational establishments.”
UNICEF invites countries to repeal laws that criminalize the promotion of homosexuality to minors or that prohibit the association of children with LGBT adults, such as the one that Russia passed last year, and then “equalize the age of consent for both heterosexual and homosexual conduct.”
It also recommends providing “LGBT couples and their children with the legal recognition of their family ties.” On this the Patriarch’s Commission had a few choice words: “UNICEF should know that children are born of a union of a man and a woman, not of a same-sex union. It is in the best interests of a child to be born into and raised by family, so that he can know his loving and caring father and mother.”
The Commission ends by calling upon the international community to “use every legal means to stop international bodies from abusing their capacities in such a manner.”
Ping!
Waiting for Francis to chime in. He has a comment on just about everything else. Whose side will he take?
Good. Maybe the Western church ought to join them.
The same Russian Orthodox Church who has nothing but praise for a Russian govt and military that daily rapes young men in the military, a govt that is the largest human trafficking criminal organization in the world, and invades neighboring countries killing thousands.
My grandmother used to say, "Only the spoon knows what goes on inside the kettle." We don't know what their church suffers in that country, under that government.
I'm certainly no scholar, but I look at Putin and see Stalin without the fake smile. In an atheistic society that treats its own military as you said, how much worse would they treat the church?
How much persecution do we NOT know about, and how much propaganda about the Russian Orthodox Church do we hear? We don't know and we can't judge. We can only offer prayers to God on their behalf as fellow Christians.
God bless you!
The same Russian Orthodox Church who has nothing but praise for a Russian govt and military that daily rapes young men in the military
If the Americans say Sodomy is right it must be right.
The ROC is run by a "former" and unapologetic KGB agent who walks around with 10,000 dollar watches and then has incompetent Russian Photoshoppers remove the watch from off his wrist to look better in photographs (because they're supposed to be impoverished). And as for the parishioners? The majority if Russians identify as Russian Orthodox, but only 1 or 2 percent even go to church.
If we are to pray for the ROC, it is that it loses its power, burns to the ground, so that Christians in Russia can practice their faith without persecution.
What Free_life wrote is correct.
I just don`t see how that should make the Russian orthodox Church wrong for not supporting the homosexual agenda.
Do you honestly think Putin would allow that?
It's not a matter of the ROC being wrong for not supporting the homo agenda. It's that the ROC actually supports the homo-agenda insomuch that it is an arm of a criminal regime that, through the KGB, has largely worked behind the scenes to cause cultural degradation in the West-- which it now condemns while simultaneously ignoring it in their own midst.
It’s not a matter of the ROC being wrong for not supporting the homo agenda.
I don`t like communists either, but it just tells me how bad a situation the U.S is in.
There’s plenty of others who are not Muslim or ROC who do not have a great time over there.
I don't doubt that for a moment! The original topic centered on the ROC.
It’s complicated over there is what I am getting at.
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