The High Court in Belfast yesterday refused to make same-sex marriage legal in the jurisdiction.  Mr Justice O’Hara said: “It’s not the role of a judge to decide social policy, that is for the Executive and the Assembly under our Constitution.”  Two gay couples took the case and argued that the refusal to legislate for same-sex marriage breaches their entitlement to family life and marriage under the European Convention on Human Rights. In the proceedings, Northern Ireland was described as “a blot on the map” seen by the rest of the world as backward-looking and divided. The judge however said the challenge was going against all recent European case law. “Put simply, the Strasbourg court has not recognised any right to same-sex marriage,” said Mr Justice O’Hara. In a separate case, the judge also ruled there was no discrimination in the North’s refusal to recognise same-sex marriages from elsewhere in the UK, treating them instead as civil partnerships. He said: “The Strasbourg court has held that same-sex marriage is not even a (European) Convention right. While it’s open to government and parliament to provide for it, they are not obliged to do so and whether they do so is a matter for them, not the courts.” He added: “The judgment I have to reach is not based on social policy, but on the law.”

The Archbishop of Glasgow, Philip Tartaglia, has said that although old-fashioned Protestant bigotry may have faded, more “sophisticated” forms of discrimination have taken its place. Speaking to a convocation of priests in Philadelphia, he said: “Atheists and secularists in the 1960s and 1970s were content to ignore or mock the Catholic Church, but today many see her as the single most formidable threat to their notions of justice and equality, particularly when it comes to matters of human sexuality. If the Church dissents from today’s new rulebook for the human person – and she must – then she should expect rough treatment.”

He said the hostility came from a “new ‘religious’ consensus” formed from a “combination of scepticism, consumer appetite and political intolerance”. “It masks itself with progressive vocabulary, but its targets tend to be practising Christians.”

The West has failed to do enough to protect Christian minorities in the Middle East, the Syriac Catholic Patriarch has said. “I can tell you, we’ve been not only abandoned by the Western countries, but even we have been betrayed,” Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan told The Southern Cross, newspaper of the Diocese of San Diego.

“We Christians in the Middle East … are the indigenous communities of these countries,” Patriarch Younan said, noting that it was in this region that Christianity was born. “We’ve been there for millennia and we have been always persecuted. And now … our very survival is at stake.” Regrettably, Patriarch Younan said, Western leaders have succumbed to “pandering” and utilizing “politically correct language” in their dealings with the Middle East. He said that, unless the United States and European nations demonstrate that they have the political will to speak honestly with the region’s leaders, helping them to create “a civilized constitution” and insisting that they separate religion and politics, “there is no hope for the future.”

The High Court in Belfast will decide tomorrow if same-sex marriages will be recognised in the North for the first time ever. A trio of cases are being adjudicated that cover two separate issues. One is whether same-sex marriages from elsewhere in the UK should be regarded as such in the North. Under current law, they are treated as civil partnerships. Secondly, the Court must decide whether marriage laws in the North itself might be redefined so that same-sex marriage would be made legally available. The cases have been under consideration for almost two years by Mr. Justice O’Hara and are being dealt with at the same time because of the close nature of the issues.

A recent report from CBS News in the US that Down Syndrome births have been “almost eliminated” in Iceland revealed an awful truth behind that reality. Far from Iceland having found a cure for the condition, or a means of treating it in utero, instead they have simply been clinically efficient in screening for the disease and aborting those children found with Downs. Close to 100% of women in Iceland who received that diagnosis aborted their unborn babies. However, another dark truth revealed that some Down Syndrome births still occur because the prenatal testing is not entirely accurate.  “Babies with Down syndrome are still being born in Iceland,” said Hulda Hjartardottir, head of the Prenatal Diagnosis Unit at Landspitali University Hospital. “Some of them were low risk in our screening test, so we didn’t find them in our screening.”

CBS faced a backlash for its reporting with actress Patricia Heaton tweeting, “Iceland isn’t actually eliminating Down Syndrome. They’re just killing everybody that has it. Big difference.”

The leader of the DUP, Arlene Foster, has told a pro-life group that they will do “everything in their power” to preserve the North’s strict anti-abortion laws. She was meeting with Youth for Life NI, who are a youth branch of Precious Life, as part of their ‘lobby for life’ campaign.

Precious Life said in a statement that Mrs Foster acknowledged Northern Ireland is “definitely under pressure to change its pro-life laws”, however she “firmly assured us that the DUP will do ‘everything in our power’ to safeguard our current laws and protect the most vulnerable in our society.”

“It is so incredibly important to lobby for life at this present point in time because of the stark threat to unborn children here as Northern Ireland faces a great deal of political instability,” Precious Life said.