Churches face court challenge

Barrie Drewitt-Barlow, one half of a well-known British homosexual couple, says he and his civil partner will go to court to force churches to host same-sex weddings.

The Government bill passed recently legalising homosexual marriage included measures to protect churches from being forced to perform same-sex weddings.

"I am still not getting what I want," Mr Drewitt-Barlow told the Essex Chronicle. "The only way forward for us is to make a challenge in the courts against the church. It is a shame that we are forced to take Christians into a court. 

"It upsets me because I want it so much - a big lavish ceremony, the whole works."

The couple, who I understand have five surrogate children, were the first British same-sex couple to be named on their children's birth certificates in 1999.

The city council in San Antonio, Texas, the seventh largest city in the US, is considering an ordinance preventing anyone who disagrees with same-sex marriage from working for the city government.

And in Santiago, Chile, some 300 protesters for abortion rights stormed into the city's cathedral during mass, tore out pews and carried them into the street, destroyed a confessional, spray painted blasphemous texts and climbed on altars and undressed.

We live in dangerous days.