To the Editor:

Religion is gone from our public schools and there seems to be very little chance of getting it back. Parents who want to give their children a religious education must send them to a religious school or homeschool, while they are forced to support the public schools through taxation.

There was some hope that the Republican party--the supposed party of family values--would come to the aid of cash-strapped parents who want to give their children a religious education. But a recent vote by many Republican members of Congress, including Elise Stefanik and Lee Zeldin, in favor of the recognition of homosexual marriage puts the party's commitment to tradition and family on very shaky ground.

Though homosexuality has been practiced since biblical times, it is only recently that homosexual marriage has been recognized by governments.

Even in ancient Greece, where pederasty was tolerated to a certain degree, no one would ever have dreamed of any kind of official recognition of homosexual marriage. Marriage was very much something between a man and a woman, and the aim of marriage was family and children.

The same went for ancient Rome.

Though the Emperor Nero married his favorite boyfriend, Sporus, after having had the young man emasculated in order to preserve his youthful qualities (this of course millennia before the advent of puberty blockers), that type of marriage was something for mad Roman emperors only. Indeed, the satirist Juvenal writes with indignation of a private homosexual marriage: "The contract is witnessed...the 'bride' reclines in the husband's lap...Could you possibly be more aghast or think it more monstrous if a woman gave birth to a calf?...He's wearing the bridal train and veil!...O, Romulus, Father of Rome, why has this evil befallen the shepherds of Latium?"

The Christian understanding of marriage has always been that it is between a man and a woman. As Matthew the Evangelist writes: "Have ye not read that he who made them from the beginning made them male and female? For this cause shall a man...cleave to his wife, and they two shall be one flesh."

Religious parents want their children to learn traditional values and morality and do not want them homosexualized and transgenderized in the public schools. When high-profile Republicans recognize homosexual marriage, these parents have to face the distressing truth that there is no political party today that takes their concerns for their children into consideration.

Kevin Beary
Colton