The bizarre obsession of US President Barack Obama and British Conservative leader David Cameron* with forcing homosexual marriage on their respective countries has brought them into direct confrontation with both the new Pope and the new Archbishop of Canterbury, head of Britain’s established Anglican Church, who now appears, unlike his immediate predecessor, to possess some sort of backbone. It may even lead to a trial of strength between the conservative religious and the political institutions of the two countries.

The Pope has recently urged the Archbishop to continue proclaiming “the importance of the institution of the family built on marriage, a value that you yourself have had occasion to recall recently”. (So much for Cameron’s tortuous rationalisation that he is in favor of homosexual marriage because it is a good old conservative value – what, one wonders, would Churchill have said about that?)

The two political leaders’ campaign represents, beyond itself, a sinister expansion of State power: an assumption that the State has the right to direct social engineering even in such intimate matters, and to go against the accumulated wisdom of the whole history of human society, and this at a time when it is coming to be almost universally accepted – as the human animal seems to have always known in an inchoate way – that the absence of both a father and a mother is one of the most maiming psychological handicaps a child can endure.

The two religious leaders made a joint statement defending “the institution of the family built on marriage” – a coded attack on homosexual marriage – at about the same time as Obama’s speech and probably in answer to it.

No previous president or prime minister – indeed no serious political leader outside certain of the totalitarian countries in moments of extreme ideological madness – has previously made such a deliberate (if nuanced and somewhat disguised) attack on the traditional family unit as have Obama and Cameron.

A good many people must have been disgusted by the spectacle of the President of the United States at the so-callled Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transsexual Pride Month celebration in the East Room of the White House on June 13.

The president not merely endorsed homosexual marriage but was introduced by two nine-year-old twin girls, named Zea and Luna, who he called up to lisp out the joys of life with “two mommies.”

“We asked the president for his support of gay marriage,” the children said to a rousing cheer from the audience, “because we have two moms who are just as good as other parents, and they love us a lot.” (Zea and Luna also asked the president “to help make it harder for bad guys to get guns,” and they requested more funding for schools – especially for art and physical education programs.) The repellent vice-President Joe Biden hovered dutifully in the background, lending his own endorsement.

It was a spectacle likely to further convince the single-minded enemies of the United States that a country whose chief executives take part in such events will probably not survive long and certainly not deserve to.

It was one of those occasions when Obama discarded the appearance and rhetoric of a consensus politician and shows himself as a ruthless social engineer. He claimed: “From Minnesota to Maryland, from the United States Senate to the NBA, it’s clear we’re reaching a turning point.” This is in accord with what Obama said before he took office: “We will fundamentally change the United States,” This might have been taken at the time as no more than a left-of-centre politician’s rhetoric within the democratic polity (FDR might have said the same thing of he New Deal or the Tennessee Valley Authority), but which now appears, in the light of many different events, as a warning of a radical and permanent plan of social engineering, which involves the deliberate weakening of a variety of US institutions, including, arguably, Christianity.

If by “a turning point” in this particular context he meant homosexuals were now free of legal penalties or even social disapproval, that is one thing — and many people would be pleased or at least ready to interpret his words that way and probably to agree with them. They can be seen as typically bland and almost meaningless. But they could also mean something a great deal more radical and socially malevolent.

Many people, who would agree that the law has no place in bedrooms — and this would include many homosexuals — would draw the line, at least at present, at what looks like the President hovering around the government-approved sexualisation of children.

Although any suggestion that homosexuality is related to child sexual abuse is indignantly repudiated by some, we see here a definite step towards blurring of the lines in as far as pre-pubescent children are being exposed to homosexual propaganda and encouraged to regard it as at least a valid alternative to a normal family life-style. A barrage of government-sponsored school texts and readers are now making the same point. If the President of the United States encourages grade-school children to praise their “two mommies” the mental barriers against general sexual lawlessness have taken a real hit.

The step from this to child-adult sexual activity is surely a much smaller one than is the case with a family or society observing traditional norms and values of sexual behaviour.

Obama also invoked Martin Luther King, who was, as far as we know, completely heterosexual and (as a Baptist minister would undoubtedly, like his namesake, Martin Luther) regarded homosexuality as a deadly sin.

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* Kevin Rudd, perhaps following pragmatically in the footsteps of President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron, announced shortly before being returned to the office of Prime Minister, his stunning conversion away from opposing same-sex “marriage” to supporting it. Mr Rudd announced that his opposition to same-sex marriage had made him an “unreconstructed dinosaur” in the eyes of young people. Please see Morris Randall’s article, “Kevin Rudd and marriage equality”, on page 6. (Ed.)