This article, ‘Pro-Life’ Drugstores Market Beliefs, tells about new pharmacies that are opening that refuse to stock morning after pills. Mostly a Catholic phenomenon, these shops also refuse to carry contraceptives, as well as tobacco and racy magazines. Some observers are outraged, but I salute them.

Notice that this is not a “two kingdoms” issue. The moral law DOES apply in God’s secular kingdom. God’s spiritual kingdom, though, contrary to popular assumption, is NOT the realm of law but rather the Gospel.

In this article, A Marriage Form Will Just Be Icing On Our Cake - washingtonpost.com, a lesbian woman in California talks about getting married to her partner. In doing so, she gives an excellent explanation of why the institution of marriage is, literally, coming apart:

Over the last 10 years or so, as the country has been talking about same-sex marriage, and as my relationship with Ellen has evolved, I’ve come around to the idea that marriage isn’t one institution. Marriage is one word we use to describe a whole suite of institutions. Marriage is about money and property, love and religion, procreation and companionship. For most of history, nobody thought to distinguish between all of those different parts of marriage, because a wedding was the moment when a couple came together in all those ways. The day the priest blessed a couple, they became a single legal entity. That day, they moved into a new house together and had sex for the first time. The myriad distinct ways two people can put their lives together were rolled up in a single event.

In the past several decades, that has changed, for both straight and gay people. Couples routinely live together and have sex before marriage. Babies are born to unmarried women, mostly without scandal. Couples might buy a house together but keep separate bank accounts. A wedding, gay or straight, is not necessarily a moment of great transition so much as it is a simple marker of a years-long process.

I can’t pretend to speak for the people who are against gay marriage, but I think this is part of what they mean when they say that gay marriage will unravel the whole institution. Our national conversation about gay marriage has already shown how the different elements of marriage — legal, religious, romantic, economic, civil, procreative — have become independent. Any couple can decide to be romantic and economic partners, living together because they are in love, without a church wedding and without ever having children. We have friends, a straight couple, who have two children and a joint mortgage but are not legally married. Now, adults have the prerogative to mix and match the various things that make a marriage in whatever way they choose. It’s just that when gay people do it, it’s more obvious that “marriage” has already been deconstructed.

This article, Seeking Common Ground in Faith - washingtonpost.com, is just standard ecumania, but at the end comes a staggering statement: “Intolerance means demanding that people practice only one religion.”

I have heard others express the view that a person in this day and age really needs to practice more than one religion. (Thus we have the female episcopal priest who is also a Muslim.) Only postmodernists, having rejected reason with its sensitivity to contradictions, could think it is possible to assent to the beliefs of two different religions at the same time. But notice how this latest position (to which, according to the article, no one at the ecumaniacal gathering dissented) ups the ante: You are “intolerant”–the postmodernists’ One Deadly Sin– if you do NOT allow for more than one religion.

The old relativism allowed for the diversity of the various religions. The new relativism does not allow the various religions to be diverse, in the sense of their being separate and different, but rather insists that they all be amalgamated into a new polytheistic pantheon.

This is how Rome handled the religious diversity of its empire, bring all of the different deities into one Pantheon and allow all religious practices under the auspices of the Divine Emperor. Religions that would not go along, of course, such as Christianity, had to be exterminated in the name of religious harmony and toleration.