zOMG! 'Alive' warns of societal breakdown!

An editor's piece in the latest issue of the always interesting Alive! "newspaper" has some rather bold statements to make regarding proposed legislation concerning same-sex marriage et al and how this will apparently contribute to the breakdown of society (really, that old canard again?). Full text of the article follows:

Tax-payer to be hit, Christian basis of society being undermined
Minister Dermot Ahern proposes to give legal standing to one-sex and non-marital relationships. This will set in motion a policy that will seriously undermine marriage and family life, and threaten religious freedom. Intended or not, it will also shift our society further from its Christian basis and its concern for the 'common good', towards a liberal individualist basis. The guiding principle will no longer be the good of the whole community, but a policy of giving each individual maximum space to pursue his or her own desires, choices, preferences, 'what I want'. So if two men want to 'marry' each other, let's allow it. And if a man wants three wives, or to marry his cat, let him have that too. Never mind the social cost.
The shift from a Christian to a liberal basis for society has been under way for some time in Ireland. It lies behind the introduction of divorce, mothers being pressured into the work force, the campaign for a 'right to choose', unreasonable pay demands and so on. It is a dangerous course for us to be taking. Of its nature, the liberal agenda cannot stop until it has disintegrated society, creating in the meantime untold suffering. So, campaigners may point out that the family based on marriage is, in general, by far the best environment in which to rear children. Study after study may confirm what common sense tells us about the value to a child of a mother and father united in marriage. Research may show that the most stable and stabilising unit of society is the family based on marriage. But the government is not interested.
It knows all this already. It also knows that, under EU law, its legal change will likely lead to homosexual adoptions. And it knows that this change will hit tax-payers hard. While all this may be regrettable, it will not be allowed to stand in the way of the new vision. But are we going to simply let this happen? Or do we care enough to oppose it?

Leaving aside the fact that I highly doubt Minister Ahern was proposing either polygamy or legalised bestiality, as the author suggests, there are a number of glaring errors here. First is the claim that this new legislation would somehow threaten religious freedom, an accusation the author clearly realises is false as he makes it at the beginning of his piece and never mentions, references or clarifies it thereafter. Second, the insinuation that increasing the freedom of the individual to pursue their own happiness in life is a bad thing is telling of the desire of the religious to maintain control over our temporal existence. Thirdly, the comment regarding "mothers being pressured into the work force" seems to me a thinly veiled criticism of the equal rights of women and clearly favours the 50's-housewife-nuclear-family model of things, a statement so outrageous in 21st-century society as to defy belief were it not issued from a source so renowned for their backwards view of life. This is an insult to feminists and indeed all people in favour of equal rights and should be taken as such (not to mention a smear against every brave suffragette who fought and perhaps even died so that future generations of women might finally be recognised in holding equal status in society). Finally there is the cheap shot of appealing to the tax-payer's wallet (okay, there was also the whole screed about the breakdown of family units and societal values etc. but that is such an old story and has been brilliantly refuted by people more eloquent than I time and again). Any attempt to change the fundamentals of a society and the laws that govern it comes at a price Mr. Editor, but to see the rights of those individuals previously excluded by mainstream society upheld in courts of law, to see the talons of religious dogma loosen still more their hold on the hearts and minds of the Irish people - for that I would pay the price many times over.