I keep plugging Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, because he’s a really decent guy, and in these times of religious right triumphalism this nation needs more voices like his. Had there been more Baptists like him in my life growing up, I might still regard myself as one.
Haggard has waged this political battle against homosexuality while living a lie. That requires two, related responses. The first is on a political level. Haggard and his allies have been fighting a political fight — they have been trying to wield power to force others to comply with their wishes. And it’s perfectly legitimate to respond to power with power…
…
But the second response — which I can’t ignore — has to do with Ted Haggard the person who is, among other things, my "brother in Christ." There’s a script for how this will play out in the evangelical community — a script written out on that very same NAE page cited above:
… homosexuality [is] a sin that, if persisted in, brings grave consequences in this life and excludes one from the Kingdom of God.
Individual Christians, ministers, and congregations should compassionately proclaim the Good News of forgiveness and encourage those involved in homosexual practices to cease those practices, accept forgiveness, and pray for deliverance as nothing is impossible with God. Further, we should accept them into fellowship upon confession of faith and repentance, as we would any other forgiven sinner.
All that language — forgiveness, deliverance, confession, repentance — really means here only that Haggard needs to go back to living a lie. If he agrees to live that lie, and with clenched teeth to continue proclaiming that others must join in living that lie, then Haggard will be "accepted" back "into fellowship."
Haggard is now seeking "spiritual advice and guidance," and there are tens of thousands of Very Nice Christian people praying for him. But his spiritual guides and advisors are all going to tell him to follow that script. Those people praying for him are all praying for him to follow that script. And that script is evil. That script is a lie.
For Christ’s sake, enough with the lies. The last thing Haggard needs is to be "accepted" into a fellowship that cannot accept who he really is. Both he and that fellowship have just been given an opportunity to abandon lies. I’m praying that they will recognize that opportunity and take it.
Go read the whole thing. I ping Fred’s blog often. You should too. At the end of her novel about the life of the poet Simonides, The Praise Singer, Mary Renault writes, "In all men evil is sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men." It’s a moral roadsign we can all try to keep in view, regardless of our spiritual or political beliefs. And it is the touchstone by which you can see, clearly, what distinguishes the militant religiosity of the right. This country desperately needs more people like Fred in the public discourse, who keep doggedly trying to rouse within others, their better nature.
It is the tragedy of these times, not only for the Christian faith in America, but also the American Dream, which once upon a time offered the promise of religious freedom to the oppressed people of the world, that the arousal of ugly passions that turn neighbor against neighbor has become nearly synonymous with Christian politics in America. And the religious right is not completely to blame for it either. Secular and cynical politicians, republicans largely, have been using the fierce hatreds of that one strain of American Christianity as a crowbar to break this nation into ever smaller and smaller warring factions, the better to win elections. And they’re supported in that, by secular and cynical big businesses, who don’t give a good goddamn about religion, but about keeping big business friendly republicans in power.
Regardless of our spiritual beliefs, simply as American citizens, we all have a stake in making sure other Christian voices can be heard too. We can demand that our news media not routinely accept the pronouncements of the Dobsons, the Falwells, and the Robertsons, as "the Christian point of view". We can demand that whenever religion is brought into the public discourse, that the religious right is not given a free pass to define Christianity in the popular culture. Every one of us, whether we ourselves are Christian or not, have a stake in how broadly the Christian experience is represented in the media. Because the voices of peace and reconciliation must not be shut out of the conversation. Because a house divided against itself cannot stand.
(Denver, Colorado) Evangelist Ted Haggard, one of the leaders of a proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Colorado, stepped down from the ministry of his 14,000-member New Life Church in Colorado Springs after a male escort alleged he had a three year pay-for-sex affair with Haggard.
Haggard denies the affair, but in an afternoon news conference said that he was stepping down to allow church elders to conduct an investigation. Haggard also said he was voluntarily resigning as president of the multimillion- member National Association of Evangelicals.
After a day of whirlwind controversy surrounding New Life Church and its leader Ted Haggard, who went on administrative leave earlier Thursday, the acting Senior Pastor, Ross Parsley tells KKTV 11 News that Pastor Haggard has admitted to some of the indiscretions.
Thursday morning, Mike Jones went on a Denver radio talk show and said Pastor Haggard paid him for sex over the past 3 years. Jones also claims Haggard did drugs with him. Pastor Parsley says Haggard admitted that some of the allegations are true, but not all of them. The church is not saying what Haggard admitted to.
That’s the way this dance usually goes. First, denial. Then what Nixon aid John Ehrlichman once called the modified limited hang out. Coming next…the tearful confession and rehab.
Harper’s Magazine did a profile of Haggard in an article back in May 2005, titled Soldiers Of Christ …
The city’s mightiest megachurch crests silver and blue atop a gentle slope of pale yellow prairie grass on the outskirts of town. Silver and blue, as it happens, are Air Force colors. New Life Church was built far north of town in part so it would be visible from the Air Force Academy. New Life wanted that kind of character in its congregation.
“Church” is insufficient to describe the complex. There is a permanent structure called the Tent, which regularly fills with hundreds or thousands of teens and twentysomethings for New Life’s various youth gatherings. Next to the Tent stands the old sanctuary, a gray box capable of seating 1,500; this juts out into the new sanctuary, capacity 7,500, already too small. At the complex’s western edge is the World Prayer Center, which looks like a great iron wedge driven into the plains. The true architectural wonder of New Life, however, is the pyramid of authority into which it orders its 11,000 members. At the base are 1,300 cell groups, whose leaders answer to section leaders, who answer to zone, who answer to district, who answer to Pastor Ted Haggard, New Life’s founder.
The picture that emerges of Haggard isn’t of just your usual babbling pulpit thumper, but an archetype of the new breed of confrontational, militant and coercive Dominionist. Haggard fancied himself, a Spirit Warrior…
He was always on the lookout for spies. At the time, Colorado Springs was a small city split between the Air Force and the New Age, and the latter, Pastor Ted believed, worked for the devil. Pastor Ted soon began upsetting the devil’s plans. He staked out gay bars, inviting men to come to his church; his whole congregation pitched itself into invisible battles with demonic forces, sometimes in front of public buildings. One day, while he was working in his garage, a woman who said she’d been sent by a witches’ coven tried to stab Pastor Ted with a five-inch knife she pulled from a leg sheath; Pastor Ted wrestled the blade out of her hand. He let that story get around. He called the evil forces that dominated Colorado Springs—and every other metropolitan area in the country—“Control.”
Sometimes, he says, Control would call him late on Saturday night, threatening to kill him. “Any more impertinence out of you, Ted Haggard,” he claims Control once told him, “and there will be unrelenting pandemonium in this city.” No kidding! Pastor Ted hadn’t come to Colorado Springs for his health; he had come to wage “spiritual war.”
So Haggard, there in the shadow of Cheyenne Mountain, built himself a command base of his own from which to wage spiritual warfare…
The Prayer Center—a joint effort of several fundamentalist organizations but located at and presided over by New Life—houses a bookstore that when I visited was called the Arsenal (its name has since been changed to Solomon’s Porch), as well as “corporate” prayer rooms, personal “prayer closets,” hotel rooms, and the headquarters of Global Harvest, a ministry dedicated to “spiritual warfare.” (The Prayer Center’s nickname in the fundamentalist world is “spiritual NORAD.”) The atrium is a soaring foyer adorned with the flags of the nations and guarded by another bronze warrior angel, a scowling, bearded type with massive biceps and, again, a sword. The angel’s pedestal stands at the center of a great, eight-pointed compass laid out in muted red, white, and blue-black stone. Each point directs the eye to a contemporary painting, most depicting gorgeous, muscular men—one is a blacksmith, another is bound, fetish-style, in chains—in various states of undress….
In the chapel are several computer terminals, where one can sign on to the World Prayer Team and enter a prayer. Eventually one’s words will scroll across the large flat screens, as well as across the screens around the world, which as many as 70,000 other Prayer Team members are watching at any point in time. Prayers range from the mundane (real-estate deals and job situations demand frequent attention) to the urgent, such as this prayer request from “Rachel” of Colorado: Danielle. 15 months old. Temperature just shy of 105 degrees. Lethargic. Won’t eat.
Remember that passage from the Bible, where the devil tempts Jesus with kingdoms of the earth, and all the worldly power therein? There is no poor sucker more vulnerable to the temptations of power, then someone who wants to save the world. Particularly one who needs desperately to save the world, because they’re utterly unable to save themselves. Control won, and it wasn’t much of a contest. The hook was already in him when he arrived aimlessly in Colorado Springs, and when he saw that vision of a glittering city of spirit warriors his own magnificent redemption in the making of it was too much to resist and Control just reeled him in. It was his own spirit he needed to worry about. But you have to know yourself to win that battle, and Haggard, apparently, didn’t want to know.
This is from an interview with Haggard, quoted on Ex-Gay Watch…
The biblical argument could be made, but not in this particular case. In Washington, D.C., our argument has to be the fact that the greatest benefit to society and to our culture and to the children of our nation would be to instill in our Constitution that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. It would be devastating for the children of our nation and for the future of Western civilization for us to say that homosexual unions or lesbian unions or any alteration of that has the moral equivalence of a heterosexual, monogamous marriage.
So that needs to be inculcated into the Constitution, otherwise we run the risk of a Supreme Court decision that will say that a gay couple living together and a heterosexual couple living together have the same standing under the law.
If the only same sex intimacy the man ever permitted himself to experience was secretly with anonymous call boys, then it isn’t surprising that he’d feel that heterosexual coupling was a superior, more wholesome form of human union. You see the same thing happening over and over with these closet cases. Consider Mark Foley…
In 1992, as a Navy lieutenant, Thorne-Begland announced he was gay during a nationally televised interview, helping to lay the groundwork for the military’s "don’t ask, don’t tell" policy. Four years later, after Foley voted for the Defense of Marriage Act, Thorne-Begland called to complain.
"I said, how could you vote against me, my family, your own self-interest?" recalled Thorne-Begland, now an attorney for the city of Richmond, Va. He said Foley responded, "I could never compare any relationship I have ever had to the nature of my mother and father’s relationship."
When you see your sexual nature as something innately broken and unwholesome, then you’re going to seek out broken and unwholesome sexual encounters. It’s not a matter of proving to yourself that being gay means having nothing but brief, barren assignations. It’s because you don’t believe down in your gut that it could ever be anything more.
And when you see other gay people fighting for equality…well…you just know in your gut that those kinds of relationships aren’t equal, can never be equal. Because that brokenness inside of you is all you know. But you’re not broken because you’re gay…you’re broken because you threw your sex life into the gutter. Just like the gay haters told you to.
And when you see other gay people holding on to their spirituality, steadfastly insisting that God does not condemn them, or their love, you just know in your gut that they’re deceiving themselves. God condemns them, because you condemn yourself. Just like the gay haters taught you to.
I have a YouTube posted in the previous blog, that’s a satirical salute to all the closeted gay people in Washington working to deny equal rights to gay Americans. The list is amazingly big, and as the film makers go through one name after another, with Judy Garland singing "Over The Rainbow" in the background, you really realize how much damage these people are doing, not only to the gay community as a whole, but to the American Dream as well. At the end of it, a banner on the screen reads, "It’s okay, boys… A closet is just a bedroom, with no self respect."
A former LIA "client" and now booster takes issue with this post of mine. Here’s my reply…
—–
> I, having been a client at LIA (March, 2005), would like to know some of
> Lance’s horrendous experiences caused by his time there.
A client were you? Swell. You know the difference between being a "client" and being an inmate…right? There’s the beginning of the horror right there buddy, and what’s disturbing right off the bat about your comment is that you seem utterly unable to even notice it. So you my friend, are part of the horror.
Those kids are not in there by choice. Most of them had either made peace with their sexual nature, or were at least beginning to, when they were dragged into LIA by parents terrified from the cesspool of anti-gay propaganda that the religious right vomits into the public discourse, much of which John happily repeats. Joe Stark was on Pat Robertson’s 700 club, mindlessly babbling that gays only live an average of 36 years. Where the hell did he hear that claptrap, if it wasn’t John? Even Paul Cameron isn’t claiming 36 years. But John doesn’t seem to care where he gets his facts on homosexuality, as long as they’re sufficently ugly.
For months at least, if not longer, John was linking his LIA website to a group called The International Organization Of Heterosexual Rights, and using their bogus statistics to paint a picture of homosexuals and homosexuality that was relentlessly perverse and disgusting. After community activists started pointing out how unChristianly it was to be linking to a hate site, John pulled the link. But he kept their bogus fact sheet online. So at least for a time (I haven’t been there recently), people visiting his site were still being given this crap from a hate group…only they weren’t being told who the source of this information was. Dig it. John responded to the accusation that he was spreading hate rhetoric, not by taking it down, but by making it harder for people to discover that the facts on his website were coming from a hate group.
I think part of the reason he does it is because he knows that it frightens parents, and that’s his last best source of clients now: Helpless gay teens who cannot legally refuse his dangerous blend of anti-gay religiosity and junk psychology. As more and more comes to light about the practices of these ex-gay ministries, and their spectacular rates of failure, fewer and fewer grown adults are checking in. So the kids, who cannot legally refuse, are his last best source of income, which he needs to keep the operation afloat. Never mind what it does to kids, to their parents, to the bond between parent and child…John’s on a mission from God, and Gods don’t feel shame.
Imagine a teen who is left handed. Imagine they’re told that their left-handedness is unnatural, perverse, a God condemned abomination. Imagine sending that kid to a place that claims to be able to treat left-handedness through prayer and counseling, and establishing a closer relationship to Jesus. They claim that left-handedness is a form of addiction, that using your left hand to do things like writing is no different from people who use their hands to rob, assault, and murder, people and animals. Imagine that left-handed kid being forced to sit next to grown men who’ve used their hands to do all manner of cruel and perverse things to animals and humans alike, while the staff of this treatment facility is telling him, perhaps not so much in word but sure as hell in deed, that he’s no better then those men. Someday, his desire to use his left hand instead of the God ordained right hand, will lead him into all manner of brutish, deviant, ugly acts.
Imagine this kid trying desperately…trying, trying with all his heart and soul to pray away his left handedness. But he can’t…he’s left handed. And every time he feels the urge to use his left hand, it only serves to remind him that he doesn’t love God enough, that he’s headed for the same life that all those robbers, and murderers live. He’s going to become just like them one day…
What does that sort of thing to to a kid? Well we all know what it does to an adult because it happened. Does the name Jack McIntyre ring any bells? Or has John finally erased all memory of Love In Action’s bloody birth? McIntyre was one of LIA’s first clients (I say client because he went in of his own accord…a choice of free will that neither Lance nor Zach nor any kid in the horrifically misnamed Refuge "program" are allowed) A few months ago I finally stumbled on a copy of his suicide note. You want to know what the horror is my friend? Well…take a peek into the Pit then…
TO: Those left with the question, why did he do it?
I loved life and all that it had to offer to me each day.
I loved my job and my clients.
I loved my friends and thank God for each one of them.
I loved my little house and would not have wanted to live anywhere else.
All this looks like the perfect life. Yet, I must not let this shadow the problem that I have in my life. At one time, not to long ago, that was all that really mattered in my life. What pleased me and how it affected me. Now that I have turned my life over to the Lord and the changes came one by one, the above statements mean much more to me. I am pleased that I can say those statements with all the truth and honesty that is within me.
However, to make this short, I must confess that there were things in my life that I could not gain control, no matter how much I prayed and tried to avoid the temptation, I continually failed.
It is this constant failure that has made me make the decision to terminate my life here on earth. I do this with the complete understanding that life is not mine to take. I know that it is against the teachings of our Creator. No man is without sin, this I realise. I will cleanse myself of all sin as taught to me by His word. Yet, I must face my Lord with the sin of murder. I believe that Jesus died and paid the price for that sin too. I know that I shall have everlasting life with Him by departing this world now, no matter how much I love it, my friends, my family. If I remain it could possibly allow the devil the opportunity to lead me away from the Lord. I love life, but my love for the Lord is so much greater, the choice is simple.
I am not asking you to sanction my actions. That is not the purpose of my writing this at all. It is for the express purpose of allowing each one who will read this to know how I weighed things in my own mind. I don’t want you to think that, ‘I alone,’ should have been the perfect person, without sin. That would be ridiculous! It is the continuing lack of strength and/or obedience and/or will power to cast aside certain sins. To continually go before God and ask forgiveness and make promises you know you can’t keep is more than I can take. I feel it is making a mockery of God and all He stands for in my life.
Please know that I am extremely happy to be going to the Lord. He knows my heart and knows how much I love life and and all that it has to offer. But, He knows that I love Him more. That is why I believe that I will be with Him in Paradise.
I regret if I bring sorrow to those that are left behind. If you get your hearts in tune with the word of God you will be as happy about my ‘transfer’ as I am. I also hope that this answers sufficiently the question, why?
May God Have Mercy On My Soul.
A Brother & A Friend.
No. May God have mercy on yours, because I don’t have any to spare for the likes of you. Jack McIntyre killed himself, rather then make one more promise to God he knew he could not keep. Bad enough John Smid is doing this to grown adults. Now he’s dragging kids into his little psych room, where he’ll sit them down right next to grown men who have engaged in the most extreme sexual perversions imaginable, and let them know that they’re just like those men are, that their sexual orientation will lead them into all of that and worse. This is what John is subjecting gay teenagers to. He takes in kids who are more or less fine with their sexual orientation, or getting there, and puts his crowbar to their self esteem and tries systematically to utterly destroy their deepest sense of their inner selves, to make them see their sexual nature as ugly and perverse and foul, and that only a relationship with Jesus can save them from their homosexuality. But it won’t. They’re Gay. What happens is that they loose their faith, and often enough, loose their family too. But as long as the checks clear, John doesn’t seem to mind.
> I speak on behalf of LIA, not only because I believe in what they’re doing, but also
> because I care a great deal about John Smid and the LIA staff.
If you care about any of them then you need to do whatever you can to convince them to stop tormenting gay people, and particularly gay teens who are content with who they are. John is trying his best to gut their ability to ever feel good about themselves as gay people, and ever experience what it is to love and be loved, body and soul. He is systematically trying to put as much fear and loathing into teens and adults of their sexual nature so that they’ll never be able to love wholeheartedly without feeling ashamed and dirty. To assault someones sense of self to the point where they cannot see one of this life’s most wonderful, beautiful, amazing things as anything other then ugly and perverse is a crime against them of absolutely staggering magnitude. To do that to children is a crime against humanity.
> Zach Stark’s opinion of "reparative therapy," as it’s being dubbed, variegated a
> great deal after his experience at LIA. "Love In Action has been misrepresented
> and what I have posted in my blogs has been taken out of perpective and context,"
> as Zach is quoted at 365gay.com on 8-1-05. My question to Lance is this: What
> specific occurrences at LIA made your experience so horrendous?
As for Zach…I’m a little fuzzy about how you expect a kid who was forced into ex-gay therapy against his will, and who said in an update to that blog post you’re quoting from there that he could only post blogs his father approved of, to speak out publicly against his treatment. Actually, I’m being sarcastic. You know damn well he couldn’t. Since he’s still underage, and cannot speak for himself without suffering whatever consequences his parents (you know…the ones who put him into LIA in the first place) can dictate, it’s unreasonable to expect him to get on a soapbox about his feelings toward LIA. If I were you though, I would strongly suggest that his silence on the matter since those first couple of posts speaks volumes.
I was with Lance at a protest against reparative therapy in Silver Spring, Maryland. John Smid was there too, but too cowardly to come out to the line and speak with Lance himself. One of the other LIA staffers, a new guy, did come out because, as he said, he wanted to hear from Lance himself why he was upset about what LIA did to him. Lance gave him an earful, the gist of which was that he resented being made to feel horrible about himself simply because he’s gay.
John likes to boast that he brings families together. What happened to Lance after he left LIA was horrible, and he finally had to move out because his mom had become so abusive. The day he moved out, his mom cornered him and started beating the crap out of him. He’s told this to reporters and gave a more detailed account to Morgan Jon Fox who is doing a documentary on the LIA protests. Morgan and Lance let me sit in on the interview to take some photographs and Lance’s story nearly brought me to tears and I had to concentrate on what I was doing and I almost couldn’t. John did nothing, nothing for that family, except tear it apart. Oh…and he cashed the check.
You care about the LIA staff do you? Then dig up whatever stunted whithered stump of a conscience any of them still have left in them, and make them see two things they really, really need to see. First, that they are committing a monstrous assault on the human identity of the people they’re "treating" and their capacity to love and accept love from another. Second, that John has no brakes, and one of these days he’s going to push a gay kid too far and then they’re be more then Jack McIntyre’s blood on the LIA account books, and if you think the judgment on LIA has been harsh up till now, you haven’t seen anything. Yet.
Michael J. Fox asks the voters of Missouri
to support Claire McCaskill
(Click on image to go to website and view)
Digby says "As I look at all these issues that have come to the forefront in the last few years, I’m struck by how dumb it is to let the Republicans claim the mantle of values and morality." And yet somehow we did. It’s one thing for people to say they’re "pro-life" and another for those same people to champion war, excuse torture, and turn an indifferent eye to sickness and poverty, and the rape of the environment. They call themselves "pro-family" and take every chance to put the screws to families all over America, and their elderly parents, for the sake of the profits of billionaires. They demand the right to set standards of marriage and fidelity and sexual conduct for everyone, that they cannot live by themselves in their own private affairs. They lie through their teeth about gay people, and demand respect for their sincerely held faith. It’s all bullshit. It’s long past time for the rest of America to call them on it.
Your gay and lesbian neighbors have been staring into this sewer for decades now and the only thing that keeps surprising me personally, is how big the lies have to get before anyone in the mainstream news media notices the stench. But it isn’t the big outrages like Foley you should be paying attention to. It’s the quick little moments of flinching guile, when even though honesty won’t hurt them, they still can’t own up to anything. Let me show you one I came across this morning, while reading the news.
Pure. Think about that word for a moment. Think about the images it conjures. Pure. Edinburgh University’s course on Christian marriage is called, "Pure". It teaches students Orthodox Christian teaching on relationships and sex. It teaches chastity before marriage and so on. Oh, and incidentally, that homosexuality can be cured. Well…maybe not just incidentally …
Students nationwide have expressed their outrage after a Christian course aiming to ‘cure’ homosexuality piloted at Edinburgh University.
Students at the university began protesting the PURE course after it was discovered to recommend homophobic literature, such as What Some of You Were by Christopher Keane, which details the stories of "ex-gays" who have been “cured” of their homosexuality by the power of Christianity, and how "gay relationships are characterized more by promiscuity than by fidelity."
In response to the course, students at Edinburgh set up a Facebook group called "Stop Pure", which has enlisted 1,400 members within a fortnight. Students from around the country have joined from universities such as Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews and Kings College London.
Group creator Lucy Chambers said: "We want to use the group to help make students aware of the issues raised by the presence of this course on our campuses and to encourage them to make a stand. Facebook is a great means to contact lots of students up and down the country in the space of a few minutes.
"We have already set in motion a process whereby our students’ association is investigating the course and it is our hope that we will be able to use the group, or perhaps set up a new one, to affect change nationwide."
Which, in their own way, is something the creators of "Pure" also have in mind…
The controversy surrounding the course called Pure, began after pilot courses were held at Edinburgh University. The pilot was deemed a success and the Edinburgh University Student newspaper printed details of the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship plans to roll out the courses across Britain.
But just because the Colleges Christian Fellowship is teaching kids that homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex, and that they can pray their dirty godless habit away, that doesn’t mean they’re homophobic mind you…
The [University’s Student Representative Council] has already been backed by the university’s chaplain, who said the course can no longer be held at the chapel for fear of upsetting people. But Matthew Tindale, a [Christian Union] staff worker, has denied it is discriminatory against homosexuals.
He said: "This is looking at the orthodox view on marriage, which says there should be no sex before marriage.
"If a heterosexual man came along who sleeps around, I am sure he would find it uncomfortable too.
Homosexuals don’t love, they just have sex…
"This is not about discriminating against homosexuals.
"Christian teaching shows that all sin is treated the same way, whether you are homosexual or heterosexual."
Now, look at that for a minute, look at the flinching guile in that statement. He could have said, "Yes but the bible calls upon us to discriminate." But he didn’t do that. Instead he threw out a cheap sophistry. Now think again about what "pure" means. Does the word "truth" also come to mind? As in, Honest? Genuine. Real. Pure. Here we have a course that is ostensibly about marriage, which is in fact more about spreading ex-gay propaganda then it is about marriage, and it’s called "Pure". The only thing that’s pure about it is its animus toward gay people. But the defenders of "pure" cannot even be honest about that much.
If a totalitarian state, like the old Soviet Union, decreed a law forbidding Christian religious worship, could it plausibly argue that the law did not discriminate against Christians, because everyone had to obey it, even the atheists? Yet here is a man from the Christian Union claiming that their course does not discriminate against homosexuals, because even heterosexuals are forbidden from having homosexual relationships. A fact which has heterosexuals all over the world crying in their beer I’m sure. Or…you know…not.
A course on purity in relationships taught by louts like these is a bit like a course on economics as taught by Ken Lay and the board of Enron, or Dick Cheney and Haliburton. All the lofty concepts of mutual honor and respect and trust and faithfulness between lovers, are merely waved around here like a street gang’s colors, and serve no higher purpose then to ennoble bigotry and make bigots respectable. And what the students attending this course pay in tuition, is everything fine and noble and decent within themselves, that they could have become. The reason this course and the people teaching it should be thrown off campus isn’t so much that it’s anti-gay, but that it degrades the very thing it purports to elevate and preserve, and thereby every trusting kid who sits through it, gay or straight.
No stream rises higher then its source… "Pure" makes the sacred a slave to the profane. But it had to. Look at the sort of people who created it. Now look at every other thing this sort has ever done in the name of Values and Morality. If you’re still wondering how the figureheads of the religious right, James Dobson and his like, could instinctively jump to the GOP’s defense in the matter of Mark Foley, you must still think that they really believe the things they say about morals and values and righteousness. No. They only wear those things, so you won’t see them for the gutter crawling scum that they are.
A new Bible translation is causing controversy after it cut out difficult parts surrounding economic justice, possessions and money.
The new bible version, released by the Western Bible Foundation in the Netherlands, has created a storm by trying to make the Christian gospel more palatable.
According to Chairman Mr. De Rijke the foundation has reacted to a growing wish of many churches to be market-oriented and more attractive. "Jesus was very inspiring for our inner health, but we don’t need to take his naïve remarks about money seriously. He didn’t study economics, obviously."
Oh obviously. And we can ditch all that love thy neighbor crap too apparently. But I reckon we already knew that.
This is a joke btw…
Hundreds of Western Bibles have been sold in the first few weeks, whilst anxious Christians filled newspapers and web logs with their doubts.
Sometimes Christians seem to have more anger than humour, however. The names of the board, ‘De Rijke’ (meaning ‘the rich’) and ‘Fortuijn’ (meaning ‘fortune’), as well as the holes in the pages of the Western Bible hint to the truth: the Western Bible is a joke.
…but you want to bet that in a couple years folks will be reading devotedly it in the pews of mega churches from one end of America to the other?
I wonder how many American Baptists realize their faith originated with the Dutch. There’s an old joke about how one Dutchman is a belief, two Dutchmen are a church, and three Dutchmen are a schism.
WASHINGTON, October 19, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – In their semi-annual meeting held in Baltimore in November of this year, the American bishops will be voting on a new document meant to help clarify the Catholic Church’s teaching on homosexuality and "those with the homosexual inclination." The document is entitled "Ministry to Persons With a Homosexual Inclination: Guidelines for Pastoral Care"
Catholic News Service reports that the document condemns homosexual activity of any sort but is careful to reinforce the necessity of treating those individuals with a homosexual inclination with "respect, compassion and sensitivity."…
Hahahahaha! Respect, compassion and sensitivity anyone…?
A gay-rights advocacy organization is denouncing the firing of a campus safety officer at Marian High School, saying she was dismissed because she publicized that she’s a lesbian.
"It’s a horrible lesson to the young women at that school," said Jeffrey Montgomery, executive director of the Triangle Foundation in Detroit.
The officer, Charlene Genther, 55, was in her sixth year at the Catholic, college-preparatory school for girls. A former Detroit police officer, she has a daughter who graduated from the Bloomfield Township school in 2001.
Her firing has prompted Marian alumnae to action. A petition at www.petitionspot.com/petitions/genther that seeks an apology for Genther and the gay and lesbian community had gathered 136 signatures by Wednesday.
Genther said Wednesday that she has been in a committed relationship for 28 years and that it was no surprise to anyone at the school that she is a lesbian. She and her partner often attended school events, chaperoned dances and went to parent-teacher conferences.
But last week, when she began publicizing her autobiography, "Badge 3483: A True Story," which addresses the relationship, she was fired.
Genther said Sister Lenore Pochelski, the school’s president, gave her the news Friday, two hours after a local newspaper reporter interviewed her about the book. She said Pochelski said she wouldn’t have gotten fired if she hadn’t gone public with the book.
"She was very clear," Genther said. "She said it was because my lifestyle does not coincide with the teachings of the Catholic Church. I personally felt she was having a hard time firing me. …
"But she was firm that she had to go along with the teachings of the Catholic Church."
Pochelski confirmed that Genther was terminated, but said she would not comment on her termination out of respect for personnel and confidentiality issues.
"She was a great employee," Pochelski said. "We’re grateful for her generous service."
Their gratitude is worth its weight in gold. But it isn’t just gay people who need to be beaten over the head every now and then with all the respect, compassion and sensitivity the catholic church can muster. Anyone who dares regard the homosexual as their neighbor, as fellow citizens, clearly needs a little respect, compassion and sensitivity too.
CORNWALL, Ont. – The altar rail is no place for confrontation between Catholic politicians and the clergy who want them to fall into line, Washington’s archbishop emeritus said Tuesday.
But if a politician consistently and publicly defies the church, he should be denied communion, Theodore Cardinal McCarrick told the Conference of Canadian Catholic Bishops meeting here this week.
”You have no choice in the matter. That person should not partake of communion. Sometimes you just have to do it.”
In Canada, some priests threatened to bar MPs from communion and church activities over their stance on abortion and same-sex marriage.
In the last U.S. election, McCarrick was caught between hard-right Catholics and Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry, a Catholic who supported access to abortion and gay rights.
Hardliners said bishops who gave communion to pro-choice candidates were spineless and not ”real Catholics.” Others were horrified that something as sacred as the eucharist could be withheld as a punishment and used as a political weapon.
Respect. Compassion. Sensitivity. What these things actually mean, depends on your point of view. Is the homosexual your neighbor, or an inferior being of some kind…an emotional cripple with an intrinsically disordered sexuality at best, if not a willing tool of Satan, part of a new ideology of evil, whose struggle for equality is a threat to the existence of civilization itself? How you answer that question, defines the meaning of respect, compassion, and sensitivity with regard to gay people. Which makes these occasional avowals of respect, compassion, sensitivity, and so on from the Catholic church far less important, then that consistent and immovable affirmation of dogma, that homosexual relationships are against god’s plan.
Against that standard of measure, respect, compassion, and sensitivity simply cannot mean the same thing when extended to gay people, that it does when extended to everyone else. And if you think that the staggering mountain of evidence that the love of same sex couples is as meaningful, as essential, as life affirming for them as the love between opposite sex couples, might one day convince the Catholic hierarchy that god’s plan is a tad bigger then their dogmas, then you are a moral relativist. The Bishops here in Baltimore have something to say about that too…
The document addresses the fact that America is suffering from "moral relativism in our society" and a "widespread tendency toward hedonism" which makes the Church’s teaching on homosexuality difficult for some to hear.
A Catholic man I met on the job once, told me that it isn’t so much access to God that the church provides, as Truth. That’s important to understand. What "the church" provides, is Truth. When the Catholic hierarchy talks about "moral relativism", what it means is "seeking Truth from a source other then the church". That’s not the same meaning most people get from that phrase. When you think "moral relativism" you generally think of a kind of subjectivism, where every belief is held to be equally valid. But that’s not what the Catholic hierarchy means. As far as they are concerned, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, James Dobson, Fred Phelps, Dr. Laura…everyone…who thinks Truth can possibly be anything but what the Catholic church tells them it is, are all moral relativists.
To let the facts guide you is moral relativism. To judge a thing based on the evidence at hand is moral relativism. To let nature speak for itself is moral relativism. To believe what you see with your own two eyes is moral relativism. Truth is what the church says it is, because only the church Has Truth. If you believe anything else, you are a moral relativist. And if you’re wondering how an institution that not only turned its back on the victims of child abuse, but actively protected the abusers can even think of itself as embodying Truth, then consider that it is precisely because they believe it that those abuses, of the children, of the trust of the faithful, could happen in the first place.
It isn’t the quest for Truth that turns people into gutter crawling thugs, it’s the belief that they and they alone embody it.
There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts – obedient ghosts, or tortured ghosts.
It is said that science will dehumanize people and turn them into numbers. That is false, tragically false. Look for yourself. This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. it was done by ignorance. When people believe they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.
Science is a very human form of knowledge. We are always at the brink of the known, we always feel forward for what is to be hoped. Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. In the end the words were said by Oliver Cromwell: "I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken".
…We have to cure ourselves of the itch of absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch people.
-Jacob Bronowski "The The Ascent Of Man "
It is precisely the same callow vanity that feels no qualms whatever in firing "a great employee", in demanding politicians ultimately heel to their will as a condition of grace, in turning the joy and happiness of same sex couples into ash, that imposed itself on helpless children, over and over again, and then demanded they and their parents suffer in silence. Truth. What does it mean to extend respect, compassion, and sensitivity to the homosexual? What does it mean to extend them to an altar boy? To his parents? To the faithful? It isn’t power that corrupts absolutely. It’s arrogance.
Frank Rich in the New York Times the other day, gave the Mark Foley scandal some much needed, if incomplete perspective. I’d link to it but they have it behind their subscriber only firewall…
If anything good has come out of the Foley scandal, it is surely this: The revelation that the political party fond of demonizing homosexuals each election year is as well-stocked with trusted and accomplished gay leaders as virtually every other power center in America. "What you’re really seeing is the Republican Party on the Hill," says Rich Tafel, the former leader of the gay Log Cabin Republicans whom George W. Bush refused to meet with during the 2000 campaign. "Across the board gay people are in leadership positions." Yet it is this same party’s Congressional leadership that in 2006 did almost nothing about government spending, Iraq, immigration or ethics reform, but did drop everything to focus on a doomed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.
The split between the Republicans’ outward homophobia and inner gayness isn’t just hypocrisy; it’s pathology. Take the bizarre case of Karl Rove. Every one of his Bush campaigns has been marked by a dirty dealing of the gay card, dating back to the lesbian whispers that pursued Ann Richards when Mr. Bush ousted her as Texas governor in 1994. Yet we now learn from "The Architect," the recent book by the Texas journalists James Moore and Wayne Slater, that Mr. Rove’s own (and beloved) adoptive father, Louis Rove, was openly gay in the years before his death in 2004. This will be a future case study for psychiatric clinicians as well as historians.
So will Kirk Fordham, the former Congressional aide who worked not only for Mark Foley but also for such gay-baiters as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma (who gratuitously bragged this year that no one in his family’s "recorded history" was gay) and Senator Mel Martinez of Florida (who vilified his 2004 Republican primary opponent, a fellow conservative, as a tool of the "radical homosexual agenda"). Then again, even Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania senator who brought up incest and "man-on-dog" sex while decrying same-sex marriage, has employed a gay director of communications. In the G.O.P. such switch-hitting is as second nature as cutting taxes.
Just so. When the Log Cabin republicans start yapping that the republican party isn’t as homophobic as the democrats paint it, they’re right as far as it goes. In much of the party machine, the gay bashing is purely opportunistic. But that doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse. They know gay people…they work with gay people every day. They know what contributions we make to our country, to our communities, to our neighbors. They know from first hand day to day experience the humanity of the people they are throwing to the wolves every election cycle for votes. Yet they do it anyway.
And now the story in the news media is about how the republicans have been playing the religious right for votes all along. Well imagine that…
“Tempting Faith’s” author is David Kuo, who served as special assistant to the president from 2001 to 2003. A self-described conservative Christian, Kuo’s previous experience includes work for prominent conservatives including former Education Secretary and federal drug czar Bill Bennett and former Attorney General John Ashcroft….
He says some of the nation’s most prominent evangelical leaders were known in the office of presidential political strategist Karl Rove as “the nuts.”
“National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy,’” Kuo writes.
But the hypocrisy doesn’t stop there, or rather, it doesn’t Begin there. On a Sixty Minutes interview the other day, Kuo delicately as possible for someone in his position, cast a glance at it…
Part of the problem, he says, was indifference from "the base," the religious right. He took 60 Minutes to a convention of evangelical groups – his old stomping ground – and walked around the display booths, looking for any reference to the poor.
"You’ve got homosexuality in your kid’s school, and you’ve got human cloning, and partial birth abortion and divorce and stem cell," Kuo remarked. "Not a mention of the poor."
"This message that has been sent out to Christians for a long time now: that Jesus came primarily for a political agenda, and recently primarily a right-wing political agenda – as if this culture war is a war for God. And it’s not a war for God, it’s a war for politics. And that’s a huge difference," says Kuo
Via Pam’s House Blend, you can get an even better look. Condi Rice recently swore in openly gay Mark Dybul as Global AIDS Coordinator. What was all the more remarkable, coming from an administration that has cynically perfected the art of gay bashing for votes, the ceremony was conducted with Mark’s partner Jason right there next to him, and Jason’s mother in the audience, who Rice referred to in her remarks as Mark’s mother-in-law.
A spokesman for a family-advocacy group in Washington, DC, is expressing disgust with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s swearing in of an openly homosexual man as global AIDS coordinator
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven…
The ceremony involved Secretary of State Rice and the swearing in of Mark Dybul, an open homosexual, as the nation’s new global AIDS coordinator…
Blessed are they that morn: for they shall be comforted…
An Associated Press photo of the ceremony also shows a smiling First Lady Laura Bush and Dybul’s homosexual "partner," Jason Claire. During her comments, Rice referred to the presence of Claire’s mother and called her Dybul’s "mother-in-law," a term normally reserved for the heterosexuals who have been legally married.
Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth…
We have to face the fact that putting a homosexual in charge of AIDS policy is a bit like putting the fox in charge of the henhouse…
Bless them that curse you…
…for her to treat his partner like a spouse and treat the partner’s mother as a mother-in-law, which implies a marriage between the two partners, is a violation of the spirit if not the letter of the Defense of Marriage Act…
Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself…
According to news reports, in all three cases the men’s homosexual partners held the Bible on which the oath of office was sworn.
And by chance there came a certain priest that same way, and when he saw him, he passed by. And likewise a Levite…Then a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came nigh unto him, and when he saw him, had compassion on him…
The hypocrisy of the republican party angers me greatly. But it doesn’t disgust me half as much as the braying herd in America’s suburban tract cathedrals, who would gladly have nailed the one who preached love and peace and concern for the poor and powerless hard to the cross themselves, if they had to spit the nails out of their mouths to do it.
(Wellington) As leaders of New Zealand’s Presbyterian Church prepare to vote on whether to ban gay clergy all 500 members of the body which will decided the issue have received bumper stickers in the mail declaring that "gays are a cancer".
Two versions of the bumper stickers were sent to all members of the Presbyterian Assembly – the body that sets the Church’s policy and direction.
One sticker reads "Gays aren’t welcome in our church, help us let New Zealand know". The other says "Gays are a cancer in our church, let’s keep them out of leadership".
No one has taken responsibility for producing or mailing them, but church leaders say they had to have come from someone with access to the names and home addresses of Assembly members.
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism"
and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient"
cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church
as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history:
Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal.
First he dismissed 81-year-old Mary Lambert from the Diaconate Board of the First Baptist Church along with two members, claiming there were attendance issues.
Now the Rev. Timothy LaBouf has dismissed Mary Lambert as a Sunday School teacher for an adult class after she’s been on the job for over 50 years, claiming that his interpretation of the Bible is that a woman is prohibited from teaching men.
Lambert has been a church member for 54 years and a long time Sunday School teacher but got a letter dated Aug. 9 from LaBouf and the board saying that the Bible says a woman can perform any job, as long as its outside of the church.
LaBouf, who has been pastor at the church for about two years, and is also a member of the Watertown City Council, quotes the first epistle to Timothy which hold "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent".
Lambert received the letter signed by Kendra LaBouf, wife of the pastor. "A woman should learn in quietness and full submission" the letter said. "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became sinner".
The Rev. Timothy LaBouf, who also serves on the Watertown City Council, issued a statement saying his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a city leader in Watertown, where all five members of the council are men but the city manager who runs the city’s day-to-day operations is a woman.
For all the digs and jokes about MySpace, I’m finding it a cheerful place to meet people and chat about this and that. That’s more then I expected when I joined, which btw was only so I could communicate with other people in the center of the Love In Action protests back in the summer of 2005. A fun MySpace thing are the random surveys and questions people exchange with others on their friends list, via ‘bulletins’. One came my way a few days ago, a dare of sorts, and reticent little dweeb that I still am inside, I decided to risk it myself:
ONE QUESTION
You get to ask me 1 Question (TO MY INBOX)…any one question, no matter how crazy it is, and I promise to answer it truthfully…the catch is…you have to repost this and see what people ask you….so go for it…
I got a few bites, some of which really made me think. One asked me how I would compare my hopes and fears about my future and the future of my country now, as compared to when I was 21. Considering that I turned 21 within a few weeks after Nixon resigned, the question really floored me: the more I thought about it, the more I realized how vastly different America is now, from what it was then, and how far down the right wing has dragged us since those days, since Reagan. I’m still pondering my answer to him, but it’s really hard to look at how much damage has been done.
Another one came the other day asking me what my proof of the existence of God is. In another survey I’d joked that beautiful guys were my proof that there is a God. My questioner, an atheist, wanted a bit more detail.
The question managed to open the door a tad to that place inside of me where I talk to God; where I’m still a six year old boy, laying on his back on a warm summer night, looking up at the stars and wondering what they are. I thought I’d share my answer. The country is in a grip of fundamentalist hysteria, the central conceit of which is that those of us who aren’t "bible believing Christians" have no faith, no spirituality, no reverence, no sense of awe and rapture, no morals, no values higher then the pleasure of the moment. We’re all just skating by, just cheating our way through life. But it is not those of us who are willing stand before the creation, before the great work of nature, just as we are, and let it speak for itself, who are the cheats.
No…that was just me being ironic. You hear heterosexual guys saying the same thing about beautiful women being their proof that there is a god.
Until you get to the point that you can even say you understand how the universe was created in the first place, I really don’t think you can claim you have a proof that there is a creator. My thoughts about God are mostly along the lines of Frank Lloyd Wright, when he said "I believe in God but I spell it Nature." I don’t look to the bible or any sort of holy writ, other then the natural world, which I take to be the firsthand testament of the creator itself. When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird. But I admit the natural world reveals no objective evidence of a creator. And that doesn’t really surprise or distress me. I am fine with that and not really interested in whether others share my spiritual beliefs or not. Just that we’re all free to live by our conscience in these matters. I care very much about that.
I feel a great spiritual exaltation whenever I contemplate the fundamentals of physics and nature, and a deep spiritual gratitude toward whatever it was that created this amazing and beautiful universe, and whether or not it amounts to any sort of consciousness, or anything a human mind could grasp as being an consciousness, is not a question I can answer, or worry about all that much. I ponder it often but I don’t worry about it. I have no proof to offer you or anyone else, nor any doctrine nor creed nor theology to impart, other then don’t stop asking questions, and don’t be afraid to discard answers that don’t work anymore. The tree that stops growing is dead.
It’s the flagpole at one of those churches that look nothing like churches, just down the road from Love In Action in Memphis. The church it’s in front of has no steeple, nothing at all in it’s style or structure to suggest that it’s even a church at all. It looks from the road, like your basic office building. Seems the god of the white upper class, at least in the bible belt these days, likes its sanctuaries to look like either office buildings, or shopping malls. A look perhaps befitting fundamentalism’s new emphasis on worldly things.
I can’t say much about the rest of the bible belt because I haven’t wandered there much, but Memphis seems to have more megachurches that look like shopping malls per capita then the rest of America has shopping malls. There’s Germantown Baptist, which I visited the last time I was down there. Nestled in the midst of a very well-to-do suburb of Memphis, it has it’s own tennis courts, day care, and big screen TV’s inside the sanctuary, so the folks in the back rows can see what’s happening on the stage. Then there is the place the locals call Six Flags Over Jesus…Bellevue Baptist Church. I’ve not been there yet, but the locals say it not only has the big screen TVs mounted on either side of the stage like Germantown, but TV cameras mounted on cranes that can pan around and capture all the action for the TV audience. It’s got a bookstore, A GRACE Family Life Center, a JOY Christian Recreation Complex, a Love building, a Praise building, a really nice website where you can find a link to their Live Sermon Webcast, and a User Agreement with this wee notice:
Hypertext Link: You may provide a hypertext link to this web site on another web site only upon the receipt of written consent from Bellevue. To receive such consent, fill out a request form. Upon receipt of written consent, you may provide a link in the following manner: (a) the link points to the URL http://www.bellevue.org and not to the pages within the site; (b) the appearance, position or other aspects of the link do not create a false impression that Bellevue is associated with, or endorses, another web site, church or product; (c) the link does not dilute or damage Bellevue’s trademarks, service marks or goodwill; (d) the link does not display Bellevue’s web site with frames. Bellevue may revoke its consent to the link at any time in its sole discretion.
We all have to protect our brand I guess.
Okay…so much so obvious. You’ve all heard me going on about megachurches before. But last night I was surfing my bookmarks and via The Flypaper Theory I discovered World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church, and I think they’ve done them all better. World Overcomers Outreach Ministries has a grand Walk Of Nations entranceway, a bookstore, a gym, an Olympic sized swimming pool, a bowling alley, a video arcade, and a pool hall. I’m a bit surprised they don’t have a bar somewhere in there too. The next step, is for someone to put a floating megachruch on the river somewhere, with a casino inside. But to make sure they leave their competition in the dust, World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church are even building their own Statue Of Liberty.
Well…kind of…
Our Lady Of Manifest Destiny, as PeskyFly puts it. I had to stare at it for about five minutes before I could convince my brain of what my eyes were seeing. The torch is gone, replaced by a cross. The tablet that once read July 4th, 1776, has been replaced by the ten commandments. And yes, they will unveil the thing tomorrow, on the fourth of July, 2006. According to this article in the Memphis Commerical Appeal, the seven spikes on her crown that represent the seven seas of the world has been changed to signify the seven redemptive names of Christ. The crown itself has been inscribed with the name "Jehovah". An old colossus, to replace the new one given this nation as a token of esteem once upon a time…
The New Colossus
by Emma Lazarus
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
The lamp of course, had to go, because the golden door has to go. Yearning to breath free are you? Don’t you know that freedom is only possible if you believe what we tell you to believe, live how we tell you to live, and worship how we tell you to worship? Democracy is a lie straight from Satan, because only the devil would think up a system of government that gives heathens the same rights as the righteous. Think about it. True freedom means doing what we tell you to do and thinking what we tell you to think because we’re righteous and if you’re not one of us then obviously you aren’t. Give your conscience to us and you’ll be free. We’ve got a really swell video arcade and pool hall you can while away the hours between sermons in. And the TV reception inside the church is great. Have you visited our gift shop yet?
The Archbishop of Canterbury has outlined proposals that are expected to lead to the exclusion of The Episcopal Church of the United States from the Anglican Church as a consequence of consecrating a gay bishop.
The US branch of Anglicanism faces losing its status of full membership of the Anglican Church in the wake of its consecration of the openly gay Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire, an act which has propelled the worldwide church to the brink of schism.
The final straw came when The Episcopal Church failed to "repent" of its action at its General Convention in Columbus, Ohio earlier this month, and failed to vote through a moratorium on any more gay consecrations.
Dr Williams is proposing a two-track Anglican Communion, with orthodox churches being accorded full, "constituent" membership and the rebel, pro-gay liberals being consigned to "associate" membership.
All provinces will be offered the chance to sign up to a "covenant" which will set out the traditional, biblical standards on which all full members of the Anglican church can agree.
But it is highly unlikely that churches such as The Episcopal Church in the US, the Anglican churches in Canada and New Zealand and even the Scottish Episcopal Church would be able to commit themselves fully to such a document.
These churches and any others that refused to sign up could opt to cut ties to Canterbury altogether, or could choose to remain in associate status.
This is not simply a victory for bigotry…it’s a milepost along a highway of blood. Homosexuals will die, never doubt this, as a result of the religious passions Williams is now pouring gasoline on. After the holocaust you’d think they’d know better, but it seems that lesson was only Lets lay off the Jews for a while and bash the homosexuals instead. Once upon a time the Catholic church, and then the Protestants, insisted that Jews were Christ killers who deserved what they got. You can argue that lead directly to the Ovens, but in fact the killing had been going on for centuries. By the reckoning of normal population growth statistics, and starting from the count of the number of Jews in the holy lands at the time of Jesus (the Roman occupiers kept meticulous records in the manner of all totalitarian states…), I’m told there should be about 240 million Jews walking this earth, right now, right this moment. In fact there are about 18 million. Hitler didn’t do all that…
We shall see how defenders of the Church take pains to distinguish between "anti-Judaism" and "antisemitism"; between Christian Jew-hatred as a "necessary but insufficient" cause of the Holocaust; between the "sins of the children" and the sinlessness of the Church as such. These distinctions become meaningless before the core truth of this history: Because the hatred of Jews had been made holy, it became lethal. -James Carroll, "Constantine’s Sword"
The holocaust made antisemitism something you’re not supposed to preach from the pulpit…at least not while outsiders are looking. But on the other hand Leviticus gives a free pass to people who kill homosexuals in the name of God, and judging from the reaction in some quarters already to Williams’ decision to expel everyone who doesn’t think homosexuals are unclean, the mob is ready for a little Leviticus action…
And get it they will. I strongly doubt it is any coincidence, that the rise in gay bashings and killings worldwide has come at a time when Catholic and Protestant church leaders, in America and in the third world, are busy calling homosexuals a threat to everything from children and marriage and family to the existence of civilization itself. Rowan Williams has not only signed onto this pogrom, whatever his future protestations that he means gay people no harm, by throwing his church into schism because some churches weren’t treating gays as the unclean god condemned sinners they are, he’s now poured gasoline onto it. The Gays Split The Church, isn’t quite as good as The Jews Killed Christ, but it will do nicely.
No Dr. Williams…our blood is not upon us. It is upon you.
HENNINGER: This is a footnote to our gay marriage discussion: A woman in India last week married a snake. I would like to ask the proponents of gay marriage–which violates, after all, traditions going back through all of human history–to now absolutely, positively guarantee that the next movement is not going to be allowing people to marry their pet horse, dog or cat. And you know What? Given the "anything goes" culture we live in, I don’t think they can deliver that guarantee.
Well you’d think that if people could marry snakes, Henninger would be delighted to know it, since that would mean he’d finally be able to marry an equal. But…look at this. This isn’t a babbling street lunatic, it’s the fucking editor of the editorial page of the goddamned Wall Street Journal. What drooling moron gave that man a job?
Ironically enough (and you need a high tolerance for irony in this struggle), these are usually the same kook pew bigots who complain that the black civil rights movement has been co-opted by the homos. Fine. If that movement is not responsible for ours, then ours is not responsible for whoever comes next. You judge each movement on the merits of its claims to justice, not on the merits of every possible other case.
Villagers welcomed the wedding in the belief it would bring good fortune and laid on a feast for the big day.
Snakes and particularly the King Cobra are venerated in India as religious symbols worn by Lord Shiva, the god of destruction.
Das, from a lower caste, converted to the animal-loving vegetarian Vaishnav sect whose local elders gave her permission to marry the cobra, the world’s largest venomous snake that can grow up to five metres.
"I am happy," said her mother Dyuti Bhoi, who has two other daughters and two sons to marry off.
"Bimbala was ill," Bhoi told local OTV channel. "We had no money to treat her. Then she started offering milk to the snake … she was cured. That made her fall in love."
Das has moved into a hut built close to the ant hill since the wedding.
Earlier this year, a tribal girl was married off to a dog on the outskirts of Bhubaneswar.
If this story proves anything it’s that for sure marriage means different things to different people in different cultures. Note the association of the snake with their deity. If you want to talk about traditions going back through all of human history, there aren’t any much older then associating animals with deities and using them in one way or another to express religious veneration. Yes that seems very odd to the modern western sensibility, but we’re not exactly free of all that earth god essentialism ourselves. Considering that Henninger is probably part of one of the many mainstream American religious sects that practice a symbolic form of ritual cannibalism (this is my body…), I don’t think he should sniff too loudly at the religious practices of others. And what is this redemption by the blood thing (the blood of the lamb as they like to say), if not an echo to a distant past that was chock full of dead sacrificial animals…and humans? In my theological moods, I like to think this is why we’re warned against idolatry: by venerating the physical, we loose sight of the spiritual. But the fact is that we in the west are not so far away from that tribal earth god past as we might like to believe. A little more respect for other cultures, walking their own walk from the human past into the human future, wouldn’t kill us.
Marriage to animals is not our way in the west. Marriage as a union of two adult human beings is. To love honor and cherish. In sickness and in health. For richer or for poorer. ‘Til death do us part. That is our way. Same sex marriage changes that not one iota.
Via Ex-Gay Watch… Steven Fales was excommunicated from the Mormon church when reparative therapy failed (surprise, surprise) to make him heterosexual. He divorced, was separated from his children, and then his church…
“When I was getting excommunicated, I found it so bizarre and fantastical, I could not believe what was happening,” Fales says after a recent rehearsal of "Mormon Boy" alongside his Tony-winning director Jack Hofsiss.
“Part of me as a man of the theater was like, ‘This is a good story,’“ he says. “And the budding activist in me, who was starting to get it, was like, ‘You know what? This is happening to all kinds of people—someone needs to write about this.’“
The theater also proved to be therapeutic, offering him a “soft place to land” after being excommunicated, which he calls “a medieval, barbaric practice.”
“What do you replace the church of your birth with? That’s how fragmenting it is to be no longer Mormon,” Fales says. “It’s a cult tactic used to control and suppress, and if you buy into that mind-fuck, then it can really do a number on you.”
Thankfully, theater offered Fales a new sense of communion.
No offence to my readers of different faiths, but this is why I am eternally thankful I was born into a Baptist household, and one that believed, as Baptists always used to believe, in soul competency, and the primacy of the relationship between the individual believer and God. It’s not that you cannot be excommunicated from the Baptist faith, it’s that the concept itself is utterly meaningless. At worst you can be tossed out of your local church, which can be traumatic enough; but you are always free to find another, more welcoming congregation. A Baptist does not regard the church as an instrumentality of God. It is a community of believers, important in it’s own right, but not an instrumentality. There are no instrumentalities. There is only the personal relationship you have with God which is always direct and intimate. No one can take that from you. No one. No one can stand between you and God. No cleric, no church, no authority of state or church, no one, nothing. That is bedrock. Or used to be anyway. It’s what I was taught all through childhood, and though I no longer regard myself as a Christian (I have a hard time with forgiveness, otherwise today I might be a Unitarian…), I still believe it.
I have no idea what I would have done, what I would have become, if I had to face excommunication, and actually believed I was being separated from God. I think it might have killed me. Fales is right. It is medieval and barbaric. I’d call it grotesquely arrogant as well. He is one strong hearted soul. I so much admire all the excommunicated ones who made it to the other side of the pit of heartbreak, still holding on to their humanity, and their spirituality. It speaks so much to the strength of the human spirit.
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