to them, but that they make it for themselves." "The manipulation of nature, which we deplore today where our environment is concerned, now becomes man's fundamental choice where he himself is concerned,http://www.realmantg.com/thread-514825-1-1.html," he said. It was the second time in a week that Benedict has taken on the question of gay marriage,toms shoes reviews, which is currently dividing France, and which scored big electoral wins in the United States last month. In his recently released annual peace message, Benedict said gay marriage, like abortion and euthanasia, was a threat to world peace. The Vatican went on a similar anti-gay marriage media blitz last month after three U.S. states approved gay marriage by popular vote. After the peace message was released last week,cheapest toms shoes, gay activists staged a small protest in St. Peter's Square. On Friday, gay activists sharply criticized the pope's take on gender theory and insisted that where gay marriage has been legalized, families are no worse off. Italy's main gay rights group Arcigay called the pope's comments "absurd, dangerous and totally out of synch with reality." And a coalition of four U.S. Catholic organizations representing gay, lesbian and transgender people said the pope had an "outmoded" view of what it means to be man and woman. "Increasingly Catholics in the United States and around the world see what we see. Catholics, following their own well-formed consciences, are voting to support equal rights for LGBT people because in their churches and communities they see a far healthier, godly and realistic vision of the human family than the one offered by the pope," according to a statement from the groups Call To Action, DignityUSA, Fortunate Families, and New Ways Ministry. Church teaching holds that homosexual acts are "intrinsically disordered," though it stresses that gays should be treated with compassion and dignity. As pope and as head of the Vatican's orthodoxy watchdog before that, Benedict has been a strong enforcer of that teaching: One of the first major documents released during his pontificate said men with "deep-seated" homosexual tendencies shouldn't be ordained priests. For the Vatican, though, the gay marriage issue goes beyond questions of homosexuality,http://bbs.cdibuy.com/forum.php?mod=viewthread&tid=255180,toms the shoes, threatening what the church considers to be the bedrock of society: a family based on a man, woman and their children,http://www.qinlinbbs.com/home.php?mod=space&uid=201231&do=blog&id=1275017. In his speech, the pope cited Bernheim as lamenting how a new philosophy of sexuality has taken hold, whereby sex and gender are "no longer a given element of nature that man has to accept and personally make sense of: it is a social role that we choose for ourselves, while in the past it was chosen for us by society." He said God had created man and woman as a specific "duality" "an essential aspect of what being human is all about." Now, though, "Man and woman as created realities, as the nature of the human being, no longer exist. Man calls his own nature into question. From now on he is merely spirit and will." The Vatican's opposition to gay marriage has been falling largely on deaf ears. In addition to the U.S. election gains, the