My gay friends are also friends with my family. And they’re glad that we have a healthy heterosexual relationship and a healthy relationship with our kids. But they want to be respected too—their rights, their relationships—and not be scapegoated for things that have nothing to do with them.
I had this conversation with Focus on the Family, and I said I agree with you that family breakdown is a huge crisis, a serious crisis. And I don’t think the Left talks about that enough. My neighborhood is eighty percent single parent families. You can’t overcome poverty with that, with eighty percent single parent families. But how do we reweave the bonds of marriage, family, extended family, and community, to put our arms around the kids? And it’s not just in poor neighborhoods. Kids are falling through the cracks of fractured family in all classes and neighborhoods. So I said to them, I want to rebuild family life and relationships, but explain to me how gay and lesbian people are the ones responsible for all that? which is what their fund-raising strategy suggests. And after about an hour and a half they conceded the point. They said, Okay Jim, we concede that family breakdown is caused much more by heterosexual dysfunction than by homosexuals. But then they said, We can’t vouch for our fundraising department, which says a lot, I think.
Yes, it’s bullshit. But it brings in the bucks. Gay rights wasn’t even a blip on the radar of the religious right until Anita Bryant showed them that it made the fundies come out to the polls in droves, and open their wallets wide to anyone who said they would smite the queers for Jesus. And as long as it keeps making them money, they’ll keep right on waving the gay bogeyman, no matter how obvious it is to everyone that even they aren’t swallowing the bullshit they’re spreading about homosexuals. The fundies have no conscience, and the con artists who are praying on them have no shame.
‘Twas ever thus in the business of hate mongering. I could feel sorry for the little old granny ladies who throw their social security checks at these con men…except for this knife in my heart, and in so many others’, with their names on it. Kinda like those little brass name plates you sometimes see on the backs of pews. Remember, every small tithe of $500, allows us to buy enough stones to properly execute one homosexual in accordance with biblical teachings. These stones are hand polished in our Christian owned and operated factory in Ecuador, and every one has a copy of The Lord’s Prayer hand engraved on it. For an extra $500, we’ll add the personal dedication of your choice (30 characters or less…remember spaces count the same as letters). Give one as a gift. Use it to remember a dearly departed loved one…
Via Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin… Dr. Joe Nicolosi of NARTH will be lecturing in London on June 22-23, 2007 on the subject of The Time for Truth – is gay real?
A conference for professional counsellors and therapists, pastoral care givers, church leaders, and those who are dealing with or affected by homosexuality.
Contact: Dr Lisa Nolland
ls.n@hotmail.co.uk
NB. Dr Nicolosi will take a scientific rather than an explicitly Christian approach.
And a good thing that is too, since you folks probably don’t want to hear from any Christians on this matter, do you? Or does this no longer apply…?
Thou shalt bear no false witness against thy neighbor.
The evidence that biology, genetics in part, perhaps development in the womb in part, determines sexual orientation is now so overwhelming even the mainstream news media can see it too. How else to explain the older brother effect, and that it only works for right handed boys? Yet Nicolosi persists in his junk science dogma that male homosexuality is caused by a poor father/son relationship. So why are these ersatz men of god inviting this quack to speak to them about homosexuality, and not a real scientist?
Simple. It comforts them to know that they’re beating on people who in at least some sense, choose to be homosexual. Let us have the pseudo science that tells us homosexuality is caused by a broken family relationship, rather then the honest science that tells us it is simple random biology that is neither chosen nor changeable…because the pseudo science allows us to blame homosexuals for not seeking treatment for their condition, because the pseudo science allows us to keep blaming the homosexuals for every evil thing we do to them, in the name of Christ, in the name of love. Nicolosi helps them shift the blame for all the pain and heartbreak they have ever brought down on the lives of gay men and women, onto their victims. Nicolosi will come to them as a man of science, and they, the men of God, will wash, wash their hands of every wrong they’ve ever done to innocent lovers in his junk science, and lift those hands in praise afterward. Then they’ll take up their holy clubs, and start beating on gay people again in completely clear conscience.
Of all the moral positions the anti abortionists generally take, the easiest one to discern the honesty of is the argument from the sanctity of life. Life, they aver, begins at conception, thereby making abortion murder. Fine. You can always tell the folks who argue this position in good faith, from the ones who don’t, because they’re the ones who also have a passionate concern for the welfare of children After they’re born. When you see someone babbling about the killing of innocent babies on the one hand, while supporting public policies that take food out of the mouths of living children, and which put healthcare beyond the reach of their families, then you know you’re dealing with a fraud. They don’t give a good goddamn about innocent children. Their motives are elsewhere, and the dishonesty of their rhetoric is enough to give you a pretty good clue where that elsewhere probably is.
It’s the same with religious arguments over homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals. Scanning Google News this morning, I came across this news article in The Age (Australia), concerning the current hostilities in the Anglican church over homosexuality. Whenever someone starts pontificating about the tensions in various religious sects over homosexuality, you know they’re not really willing to look the beast in the eye when you see them starting from a premise of good faith on everyone’s part…
Not only is it divisive, it seems almost impossible to resolve because the opposing camps believe so strongly that they are right, that conscience demands they take the stand they do, and that they speak for God.
Er…no. But it’s true that some folks expect you to accept their declarations of their faith and devotion to God at face value. That needs to stop.
Those Christians who say homosexual acts are always wrong – and it is the act, not the orientation, they condemn, though gays don’t think this is a very meaningful distinction – do so because the Bible says so.
Here’s the problem with this: how often do you see these people who are standing pat on the bible’s anti-gay verses, living their own lives by the rest of it as well? Just as you can tell who the frauds are in the abortion arguments by a passionate devotion to the right to life that begins at conception and ends at birth, you can tell who the frauds are in an argument over homosexuality, by an absolute devotion to the word of God that begins with all the biblical proscriptions against homosexuality, and comes to an abrupt halt wherever the bible starts telling heterosexuals what to do with Their genitals.
It isn’t the people of faith who are the problem here. The problem is the people of bad faith. We can’t have honest discussions about homosexuality, and the rights of homosexuals in this country, until we start demanding that the people of bad faith either come clean about what they really believe, or step aside and shut the fuck up. Because all they’re doing…deliberately doing…is poisoning the well for the rest of us. Shoving them aside until they’re ready to start speaking their mind instead of trying to incite and manipulate and short circuit the political conversation is the first order of business.
You think the bible is crystal clear about homosexuality do you? Fine. But you think that divorce should be legal? Had a divorce yourself have you? Oh…two? On your third wife now are you? But the bible is clear about homosexuality you say? No compromise with what God has condemned is it? Well…okay…until you’re ready to have an honest discussion about this, just shut the fuck up while the grownups talk among themselves.
Max Blumenthal writing for The Nation has an article up about the career of Jerry Falwell that is must reading while the republican candidates for president are busy singing his praises. Most folks know the man’s recent history all too well…
In 1984, Falwell called the gay-friendly Metropolitan Community Church "a vile and Satanic system" that will "one day be utterly annihilated and there will be a celebration in heaven." Members of these churches, Falwell added, are "brute beasts." Falwell initially denied his statements, offering Jerry Sloan, an MCC minister and gay rights activist $5,000 to prove that he had made them. When Sloan produced a videotape containing footage of Falwell’s denunciations, the reverend refused to pay. Only after Sloan sued did Falwell cough up the money.
Falwell uttered countless epithets over his long life…
…but it’s his beginnings that the republicans who are calling him a saint now, would probably like us all to utterly forget. Point of fact, the religious right itself has been busy rewriting that part of their history for the past couple decades. For generations after the trouncing fundamentalism got during the Scopes trial, fundamentalists held themselves apart from the secular world. Falwell himself said that "Preachers are not called to be politicians, but soul winners", though at the time he was hurling that one at Martin Luther King Jr. But it was the sensibility of the breed for generations.
They would all have us all believe now, that it was largely Roe v. Wade that brought fundamentalists into politics. It wasn’t.
Falwell started his career like a lot of them did, preaching segregation…
Decades before the forces that now make up the Christian right declared their culture war, Falwell was a rabid segregationist who railed against the civil rights movement from the pulpit of the abandoned backwater bottling plant he converted into Thomas Road Baptist Church. This opening episode of Falwell’s life, studiously overlooked by his friends, naïvely unacknowledged by many of his chroniclers, and puzzlingly and glaringly omitted in the obituaries of the Washington Post and New York Times, is essential to understanding his historical significance in galvanizing the Christian right. Indeed, it was race–not abortion or the attendant suite of so-called "values" issues–that propelled Falwell and his evangelical allies into political activism.
As with his positions on abortion and homosexuality, the basso profondo preacher’s own words on race stand as vivid documents of his legacy. Falwell launched on the warpath against civil rights four years after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision to desegregate public schools with a sermon titled "Segregation or Integration: Which?"
"If Chief Justice Warren and his associates had known God’s word and had desired to do the Lord’s will, I am quite confident that the 1954 decision would never have been made," Falwell boomed from above his congregation in Lynchburg. "The facilities should be separate. When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line."
Falwell’s jeremiad continued: "The true Negro does not want integration…. He realizes his potential is far better among his own race." Falwell went on to announce that integration "will destroy our race eventually. In one northern city," he warned, "a pastor friend of mine tells me that a couple of opposite race live next door to his church as man and wife."
As pressure from the civil rights movement built during the early 1960s, and President Lyndon Johnson introduced sweeping civil rights legislation, Falwell grew increasingly conspiratorial. He enlisted with J. Edgar Hoover to distribute FBI manufactured propaganda against the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and publicly denounced the 1964 Civil Rights Act as "civil wrongs."
In a 1964 sermon, "Ministers and Marchers," Falwell attacked King as a Communist subversive. After questioning "the sincerity and intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations," Falwell declared, "It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed."
But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…
In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.
While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."
Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.
"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."
Dig it. It wasn’t abortion. It wasn’t militant homosexuality. It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism. It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools. It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy. It was their tax exemption. It was money.
Seen in that light, a lot of things fit nearly into place. Their exaltation of the profit motive over helping the needy, their outright contempt for the poor, like spitting in the face of the man who said it was easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle then for a rich man to enter heaven, their private jets, their mansions, their palace like mega churches, their weighty investment portfolios. And that stunningly blind eye all these righteous men of God have been turning to the massive corruption of the Bush administration. They’re not hypocrites after all. It was about money right from the beginning. It’s still about money.
The spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans said Monday he has agreed to an urgent request for a meeting with U.S. church leaders as the Anglican fellowship nears a split over the Bible and sexuality.
Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, visiting Canada for a spiritual retreat with the country’s Anglican bishops, said he would meet with U.S. Episcopal leaders in the fall.
"My aim is to try and keep people around the table for as long as possible on this, to understand one another," Williams said at a news conference at the Anglican Church of Canada headquarters.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, has said that the churches of the Anglican Communion must be safe places for gay and lesbian people. His comments come in a welcome to an interim report on the Anglican Communion’s Listening Process, a commitment to listen to the experience of homosexual people.
Williams warns that the challenge to create the safe space for the voices of gay and lesbian people to be heard and for their dignity to be respected is based on a fundamental commitment of the Communion.
"The commitments of the Communion are not only to certain theological positions on the question of sexual ethics but also to a manifest and credible respect for the proper liberties of homosexual people, a commitment again set out in successive Lambeth Conference Resolutions over many decades," he said. "I share the concerns expressed about situations where the Church is seen to be underwriting social or legal attitudes which threaten these proper liberties.
The problem of course, is that even the local homophobes really don’t give a rat’s ass anymore what Williams thinks, never mind the ones in Africa…
Bishop blocks gay youth worker’s job
A leading bishop has fuelled the controversy over the Church of England and equality after being accused of refusing to employ a youth worker because he is gay.
The Bishop of Hereford, the Right Reverend Anthony Priddis, blocked the appointment of John Reaney, 41, Reaney’s lawyers say, despite the unanimous decision of an interview panel, including two vicars, to give him the job.
Reaney, from north Wales, claims he had been told after the interview that confirmation that he had got the job from Priddis was just a formality. Instead he was subjected to embarrassing and intimate questions about his private life before being informed by letter that he could not be offered the job because he was a practising homosexual.
On Wednesday the bishop will appear before an employment tribunal in Cardiff to defend his decision. In the first case of its kind, his lawyers are expected to argue that lay appointments by the Church of England should be exempt, as are clerical posts, from anti-discrimination laws.
Anni Holden, a spokeswoman for the Diocese of Hereford, said: ‘We expect the same sexual standards of behaviour from our support ministers or lay ministers as we do of clergy.’ The standard they expect is based on a statement from the House of Bishops in the Nineties which said it was acceptable for staff to be gay but that they must remain celibate.
Reaney’s lawyers will argue that his rejection was based purely on his sexuality, and heterosexual staff were never asked similar questions about their private lives.
The case will highlight the controversy in the Church of England facing Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, below, and could exacerbate the conflict between Christian beliefs and equality laws that are aimed at protecting the rights of gay and lesbian people.
Ironically enough, the problem facing his church, and Christianity itself these days, is pretty neatly summed up by Williams himself…
No-one reading this report can be complacent about such a situation, and the Church is challenged to show that it is truly a safe place for people to be honest and where they may be confident that they will have their human dignity respected, whatever serious disagreements about ethics may remain.
But it is precisely the human dignity of homosexuals that people in his church are having "serious disagreements" about, not ethics. How you answer the ethical questions depends on how you answer the fundamental question of the humanity and dignity of homosexual people. If you think homosexuals are some kind of human vermin, a cancer on the church, then you’re sure as hell not going to make your church a safe place for them. And you’re not going to want anyplace outside the church be a safe place for them either. Your calculation is simple: wherever homosexuals are safe, nobody else is. Therefore, homosexuals cannot be safe anywhere. You are going to do everything in your power to sweep them into the gutter where you think they belong, for the sake of your church, and your community. Well…really…for the sake of your cheapshit prejudices. But this is what Anglican archbishop Peter Akinola, is encouraging the government of his country to do. It is what the Americans who have now aligned with him would wish their government could. A safe place for homosexuals is the last thing these people want. They want a purge, and not just in the church pews either.
The really sad thing is that even in this new document, Williams cannot bear to actually take a stand For the human dignity of gay people. At a glance it seems that he is, but by glossing over the nature of the serious disagreement he’s undercutting the very stand he would like everyone to think he’s making. You can’t simultaneously insist that the human dignity of gay people must be respected, and at the same time agree that it is debatable.
First it was the liberal Bishop of Chelmsford, John Gladwin. Now Sir Elton John is the latest to be hit by trouble over plans to visit the Caribbean island of Tobago. As we reported, Gladwin had to cancel a diocesan visit to Trinidad and Tobago after opposition from conservative Anglicans. Church leaders are now trying to ban Sir Elton from visiting in April, when he is due to play in the Plymouth music festival. According to reports running on agency wires today, it is feared that if the musician, pictured here with his partner David Furnish, even sets foot on the island his presence there might tempt local people to become gay. The Jamaican Gleaner is reporting however that the singer will be allowed to take to the stage. Apparently, a clause in Tobago’s immigration laws bans self-confessed gays from entering the country, although it is thought that none has actually been turned away.
The Archdeacon for Trinidad and Tobago, the Ven Philip Isaac, said the star’s openly gay lifestyle and the fact he had a partner did not conform to ’biblical teachings’. He said Christian principles dictated that a ‘man should not lie with a man’. The Anglican Archdeacon said: ‘The artist is one of God’s children and while his lifestyle is questionable he needs to be ministered unto. His visit to the island can open the country to be tempted towards pursuing his lifestyle.’
What a jackass. And let it be said, the man’s another Anglican Bishop on a crusade against homosexuals. I wonder if he’s so much as uttered a single breath of censure toward the violence against homosexuals now sweeping the Caribbean. Or is that just another stupid question on my part. Whatever the Episcopalians decide to do regarding the ultimatum gutter crawling haters like Ven Philip Isaac have given them, the damage is already done, the wounds already carved into the hearts of thousands of gay Christians and their families, and their friends. It’s not the Episcopalians who need to repent. The Anglican church will be repenting for this for generations.
GILLETTE, Wyo. A lesbian couple in Gillette have been told they can’t receive communion at the church they’ve attended since 1998, in part because they publicly opposed a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing gay marriages. Leah Vader and Lynne Huskinson have attended Saint Matthew’s Catholic Church since 1998, and were married two years ago in Canada. Earlier this year, when the Legislature considered a bill that would have barred Wyoming from recognizing such marriages, the two said the bill amounted to discrimination.
Last week, they got a letter from the Reverend Cliff Jacobson of Saint Matthew’s, telling them they can no longer receive communion, in part because of their public position.
Jacobson says the church reaches out to homosexuals, but that it must do so within its own moral structure. He says the Cheyenne Diocese played a role in the decision to bar the women from receiving communion.
(emphasis mine…) Yeah the church reaches out to homosexuals. With a clenched fist. This is just the first crack of the whip. They’ve been hinting for years now that they’ll start using communion, and possibly even excommunication, as a way of punishing dissent. It’ll come down on the gay people in the pews first, because we’re the easy target. But heterosexuals who don’t vote the way Pope Ratzinger dictates, or who are politically active in politically incorrect ways, will be next. Never doubt that.
…I believe this is a vital issue in the life of the church. The hope of wholeness and holiness of life is integral to the Gospel message. Jesus didn’t die on the cross to save us from throwing gum wrappers on the sidewalk or using the wrong fork to eat our tofu, he died to save our deepest selves from our darkest sins. And, because we are created with human bodies full of hormones and fallen psyches full of what my friend Bill Stafford calls "disordered affections," many of those deepest sins will involve our sexuality. We are not given new life and new power in Christ so we can do what we darn well please. We are not our own, we are bought with a price, says St. Paul. Therefore, he says, we are to glorify God with our bodies.
…
In August of 21003, ECUSA’s General Convention created an uproar when it decided to endorse and bless the consecration to the office of bishop a man publically and proudly living a homo-erotic relationship. This unprecedented decision–made in the face of international pleas that it not take place–created an uproar in the whole Christian and, indeed, the entire mono-theistic world. The Anglican Communion, under the direction of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, created a commission to explore how the communion could and should respond to this provocative, unilateral action by one small branch of the Anglican Communion…
…
The Episcopal Church needs to be called to just the sort of repentance and humility it says it believes. Only that sort of clear, forthright repentance can lead to reconciliation…
Church ousts him after ‘inappropriate relationship’
An Orange Park priest and leading voice in the theologically conservative Anglican movement in America has been stripped of his clerical credentials after having "an inappropriate relationship" with an adult female church member, the parish’s top lay leader said Monday.
The Rev. SAMUEL C. PASCOE was removed Feb. 10 from his position as senior rector at Grace Church (Anglican) and lost his ministerial license as a result of the relationship, said David Nelson, senior warden of the former Episcopal congregation.
Pascoe, who is married with three sons, said he couldn’t comment on the situation and referred all questions to Nelson.
Pascoe, 56, for several years has been an outspoken critic of the Episcopal Church USA for what he and others see as the denomination’s increasingly progressive interpretation of Scripture and its growing acceptance of homosexuality.
When the denomination elected an openly gay priest as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003, Pascoe helped lead a movement that resulted in his and several other parishes quitting the denomination and its Jacksonville-based Episcopal Diocese of Florida. He sharply criticized Florida Bishop John Howard for refusing to quit the national church.
"He’s known nationally, for sure, and he’s probably the biggest player in Florida," said David Virtue of Virtueonline.org, an Internet-based Anglican news and commentary site with about 4 million readers.
Pascoe led his parish into the Anglican Mission in the Americas, then orchestrated a $4 million fundraising campaign to build new facilities after the congregation left Grace Episcopal property in 2006, Virtue said.
Virtue said the tragedy isn’t for the Anglican movement but for Pascoe and his family.
"He is a godly evangelical who struggled for the faith, led his parish out … and started all over again, and then suddenly this," Virtue said. "It defies all reason."
The Rev. Kurt Dunkle, a spokesman for Howard and the newly installed rector at Grace Episcopal Church, said the diocese has no comment.
Nor did the Rev. Neil Lebhar, a spokesman for the Anglican Alliance of North Florida and another leader of the region’s Anglican movement.
Nelson said the parish was informed of the relationship and Pascoe’s status during Ash Wednesday services last week and again in services Sunday.
"It’s a painful thing that has taken place," Nelson said. "And it’s difficult for Sam given the comments he has made" on issues of sexual morality.
Ah…just blame the homos. That’s the routine in that glass house you call a church isn’t it? It isn’t Sam’s fault, whatever he did that was…inappropriate. It’s ours…right? Because Gene Robinson became a bishop poor Sam just lost all his moral bearings and he couldn’t help himself. Blame Gene Robinson. Sam’s a righteous man of God so it can’t be his fault he’s a jackass. It has to be the gays fault. Blame us. That’s what you think we were put on this earth for after all, isn’t it?
Couldn’t You At Least Have Offered A Moneyback Guarantee?
…and…a blender?
Here’s Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll on the Montel Williams show, briefly discussing how they came to find themselves in reparative therapy. Two things are worth noting here: Peterson went in of his own free will, while Lance was forced into it by his parents. Peterson left of his own accord, finally accepting himself just as he was, and remained very close to both his parents. Lance is now estranged from both of his.
This conversation is all too brief, but I guess that’s the format of the Montel Williams show, to flit from one topic to another to another during the course of an hour. Someone should sit those two down together for a long talk on camera where they can talk about their experiences in more depth, how it felt, what it did to them, what their lives are like now: the one who went in of his own accord out of devotion to God, and the one who was forced in against his will.
And here’s a clip from a Boston Legal episode about a man suing his ex-gay ministry. Great line at the end…
John…are you reading this? Have you given Lance’s parents back their money yet? Bring families together do you? Ever tell Lance you’re sorry? Ever find where you buried your conscience? You had one once…didn’t you? Do you remember what it was like…way back then…to have a conscience…?
Kevin-Douglas Olive responds to this post and to all your comments and mine, and he implores us all not to hate the Groffs. Quakers are some of the most decent people I’ve ever met in my life.
I’ll post my own response later…I want to take some time to think over what he wrote. But in the meantime you should go read his comment, and remember that a Christian wrote it, the next time you hear the kook pews hollering out for war and vengence and hate in the name of Christ.
A Little Friendly Advice From The Great Unchurched…
Here’s a remarkably sane bit of commentary about the Anglican schism-in-progress over at the London Times Online: Pray Lift Your Eyes Above The Belt. The author, Libby Purves, notes that this isn’t the first time there has been outrage in the pews over inclusiveness.
We have seen this crab-scuttle towards Rome before. When the Anglican Synod accepted women priests in 1992 numbers of high-profile Anglicans turned Catholic in disgust. The other theological differences — the Real Presence in the Eucharist, Papal infallibility, priestly celibacy — seem suddenly no longer to matter, compared with the horrible prospect of women priests.
The following is the sound of a nail being squarely hit by a hammer…
It would be refreshing if the Churches would step back from this stance, and make it clearer that the evil in adultery is not the sexual act but the betrayal of trust, the cruelty, the endangering of children’s happiness. The deep wickedness of rape and paedophilia is not about desire but about misuse of power, invasion, oppression and injury. The sinfulness of promiscuity and prostitution is not about sex but about using another human being for transient pleasure without caring for the physical and emotional damage you do. The Church’s ministry to gays could preach only honesty, gentleness, and commitment, rather than agonising about genital practices. Christianity could just grow up, and stop treating sex as if it were innately toxic or radioactive and yet irresistibly interesting.
Yes.
Let the Churches concentrate on condemning promiscuity, infidelity, exploitation, predation — whether gay or straight. Nobody asks them to go the full Gay Pride, bathhouse-culture route; but let them recognise kindness and mutual support as virtues, and bless all honest unions. Let them condemn proselytising from either side, making it clear that there is nothing cool or clever about random sexual tourism, any more than there is anything evil in being born gay. It just happens. Being gay can, without doing any violence to the Gospels, be accepted as a potential route to holiness.
It won’t be. They’ll squabble and fudge and cling to their hierarchies and their terrors, and some will scuttle to Rome and Rome will feel smug. And the rest of society will sigh and turn away, thinking that Christianity has nothing to offer. Howl, howl, howl!
Yes, yes, yes. Go read the whole thing. This has been your morning dose of Yes There Is Sanity In This World Now Go Get On With Your Own Life…
A January news article in The Christian Science Monitor quotes Ian Douglas, professor of Mission and World Christianity at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., on the troubles now facing the Episcopal church as it continues to schism over homosexuality. Observing that the Anglican Communion’s tradition of inclusion is being put to the test, Douglas goes on to say, "Part of the problem with the Anglican community today is that the different constituencies are so convinced of their own truth, that they say they have no need of others – and that goes against Anglican tradition."
In other words, the blame for the hostility toward homosexuals now raging through the Episcopalian Church is at least partly the fault of gay people, who are too convinced of their own truth to listen to others. On the other hand, you could argue that gay people have been beaten over the head with the viewpoint of people like the Archbishop of Nigeria Peter Akinola (who supports a proposed Nigerian law which would ban gay people in that country from so much as sitting down together in a public restaurant) for generations. What part of their own truth, should gay people renounce in order to accommodate others like Akinola?
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
