An outstanding resource for the fight for marriage

David van Gend's book has provoked outrage, but it is an eloquent defence of the weak and vulnerable

Campbell Markham | Sep 30 2016 | comment

from Washington Post

Stealing from a Child: the Injustice of 'Marriage Equality
By David van Gend. Connor Court Publishing, 2016, 273 pages.

This morning I showed my eldest daughter (and journalism major) a copy of David van Gend’s new book. “Oh dear”, she said, smiling wryly at the provocative title and garish LGBT rainbow cover. I said, “The printer refused to print this book. They had a contract, and pulled out at the last minute. ‘Due to the subject matter and content,’ they said.” “I’m not surprised,” she replied, sadly.

And I was.

There was no outrage. No sense of injustice. No anger that books are slain at the press. No frustration that an entire point of view is squelched at the source. She didn’t agree with the printer, but she accepted their action as normal. The Index Librorum Prohibitorum rides again in 21st Century Australia.

But we can thank the printer—the Opus Group—for the far greater interest that this will stir up forStealing from a Child. Just as the old Index became a kind of must-read list for free-thinking university students, many more will now want to get hold of “The book they refused to print,” “The book they didn’t want me to read.”

The questions is, is Dr van Gend’s book worthy of such a keen interest?

At first, those who are familiar with the literature will find Stealing to be a thorough and thoroughly referenced compendium of the main arguments against marriage redefinition.

Dr van Gend shows yet again how marriage redefinition institutionalises motherless and fatherless parenting. He denounces the profound injustice of removing children from their parents for the sake of adult aspirations. He explains how marriage redefinition will make the dangerous pseudo-scientific claptrap of “Safe Schools” mandatory; and how it opens a Pandora’s box of other perversions of marriage. We are shown yet again how the new ideology erases the important and beautiful male-female distinction, how it brings our children under state control, and how it calls down stern persecution upon all who dissent.

Anyone who fancies that “the sky will not fall” after marriage redefinition is in for a salutary rude shock.

So Stealing from a Child is, at the very least, an outstanding resource for the fight for marriage. But this is no cut-and-paste job. The tested and unanswerable arguments are restated with the freshness and enthusiasm and vigour that we have come to expect from the author.

Don’t expect a passive read. Prepare instead to be compelled to confront hard evidence, to think hard, and above all to act. For the stakes are too high, and we cannot slumber irresponsibly in a warm bed of lazy thought and lassez faire inaction while an entire generation is exposed to the catastrophe of marriage and family redefinition.

As Dr van Gend urges again and again: You cannot go on being inanely “nice” while untold harm us inflicted on your neighbours. You cannot go on being the “useful idiots,” gormlessly lying down before the brainwashed fanatics of the sexual revolution.

Stealing is not a literary book, but it is eloquent, and manly in the best sense of the word: strong, courageous, and vigorous in its defence of the weak and vulnerable.

At its heart, Dr van Gend lays bare the cultish nature of “marriage equality.” In a key chapter he likens the movement to ancient Gnosticism: the religion for rich 3rd Century Westerners with too much time on their hands, who pursued freedom in a “truth” separated from the true nature of the world we live in. Intriguingly, in his recent scientific dissection of the Safe Schools curriculum, Professor Patrick Parkinson likened the Safe-Schools movement to Scientology, a brand of Gnosticism for rich 21st Century Westerners with too much time on their hands.

Both doctors have lifted the lid on “marriage equality,” and exposed its cultish core.

For like a cult, “marriage equality” has a strict canon of beliefs, built on pseudo-science rather than fact. Like a cult, it takes the hard evidence and scientific rigour that refutes its dogma—that threatens to alarm her devotees—and either ignores it, or derides and dismisses it without reasoned argument. Like a cult, devotees must not question the dogma, and those who do are smeared and banished and ostracised. Like a cult, followers are made to believe that those who oppose them are evil. Heretical books must be prosecuted or, better, not even printed.

In return the cult offers its docile followers pleasing rewards: the freedom to do and be whatever one chooses to do and be. But like every cult, the freedom that “marriage equality” promises is a mirage. Reality bites, and the innocent victims, the children and the vulnerable, will suffer the most.

Yes, the cover of Stealing from a Child is alarming and provocative. And its content—hard and bracing truth delivered with eloquent energy—is even more so.

It will prove more than worthy of whatever interest its censorship will provoke. Buy it, read it, and pass it on.

Campbell Markham is a Presbyterian pastor in Hobart, Tasmania. He blogs at Campbell Markham: thoughts and letters.

We have quite a feast of articles to end the week. A couple of highlights: In a very thoughtful article British ethicist David Jones looks back on the Paralympics and discusses an issue raised by Belgian medal-winner Marieke Vervoort with her support for euthanasia: does Belgium’s willingness to hasten death account, in part, for its rather muted support for Paralympians compared with Britain’s?

Also on end-of-life issues, Michael Cook highlights the beautiful testimony of a senior editor at The Washington Post on caring for her husband as he died of cancer: “It was the best seven months of my life,” says Tracy Grant. (Video and article link.)

Michael’s post earlier in the week on sabotage of a new Australian book by David van Gend on same-sex marriage has drawn so many fiery comments (259 at last count) that we have given the opponents of free speech another target: a review of Dr van Gend’s book by Campbell Markham.

And for something completely different, try Mathew Otieno’s piece about Kenya’s indie computer games, feeding a market that is as insatiable as anywhere in the world, it seems. For all the Western hand-wringing about Africa, it often sounds very much like one’s own neighbourhood.