Tuesday, March 27, 2007

“Crossover Day” bad news for Genarlow

The Macon Telegraph:

“The General Assembly shall meet in regular session on the second Monday in January of each year, or otherwise as provided by law, and may continue in session for a period of no longer than 40 days in the aggregate each year....”
- Article III, Georgia Constitution

Day 30 in the 2007 General Assembly passed Tuesday with hardly a whimper. Day 30, or “Crossover Day” in each legislative session, is important. If legislation hasn’t passed either the House or Senate, it’s dead until next year, and a lot of bills, some controversial, some not, will have to wait until Jan. 8, 2008 for further deliberation. [...]

A bill that should be passed in the Senate but is a long shot is SB 37. It would allow judges to revisit 1,100 teenage sex offenders, specifically Genarlow Wilson, who is serving a 10-year sentence for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old when he was 17. The Legislature made such crimes misdemeanors in 2006.

It looks like Johnson wins. Genarlow’s mom is not giving up:

Juanessa Bennett, spent most of her day Tuesday at the state capitol pushing for a change in the law that might lead to the release of her son.

“I hope to accomplish something today so that everything is near an end, and Genarlow and a lot of other kids will have a shot at a bright future,” Bennett told 11Alive’s Jerry Carnes.

UPDATE, real bad news:

[T]he Senate adjourned before taking up Wilson’s bill.

His attorney, B.J. Bernstein, was furious.

“The entire country has been looking at Georgia, and what we’re doing, and how we approach our teens,” Berstein said. “And what do they do? They don’t even vote on it, they just drop it.”

SEE ALSO: Genarlow Wilson sits in prison, Eric Johnson gloats.

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

God, gays, Judas and a bloodthirsty God

In his WaPo column today, God and His Gays, Harold Meyerson looks at the Rev. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, who wrote in his blog last month that scientific evidence suggests that gays are born that way - but there is biblical justification to use hormonal science to fix them.

Meyerson observes that:

Mohler’s deity, in short, is the God of Double Standards: a God who enforces the norms and fears of a world before science, a God profoundly ignorant of or resistant to the arc of American history, which is the struggle to expand the scope of the word “men” in our founding declaration that “all men are created equal.” This is a God who in earlier times was invoked to defend segregation and, before that, slavery.

This is a God whom vast numbers of this nation’s self-professed believers (not to mention its nonbelievers, such as I) neither heed nor like very much, particularly the young, who in growing numbers support gay marriage and certainly don’t consider gay coupling any more sinful than they do straight coupling.

Meyerson’s reluctance to believe people will accept “the God of Double Standards” reminds me of a Fresh Air interview with religion scholars Elaine Pagels and Karen King about their new book, Reading Judas: The Gospel of Judas and the Shaping of Christianity.

These two scholars tell of early Christians’ - on the losing side of history - reluctant to accept the notion of a bloodthirsty God:

Ms. PAGELS: I’d like to go back, too, to the question, you know, why would, you know, finding meaning in the death of Jesus. The fact is that as Karen and I were thinking about it, we realize that this is what all of the gospels do. I mean, these are people after the fact, after the fact of this brutal execution saying, `What does it mean?’ And “gospel” means good news so the question is what kind of meaning can you find in this kind of story, and all of the gospels look for that.

GROSS: Now, if you just look at the gospel of Judas, is Jesus’ body resurrected?

Ms. PAGELS: After the death of Jesus, we know that many people quit the movement because they said they just thought they were wrong. They gave up. Then, as you know, some people said he was alive and the stories about what--how he was alive, some people said he was physically alive, some people said they saw him in a dream or a vision or something like that. And so the stories, many of them in the New Testament suggest that his body came out of the grave and that became what most people think of as the Easter story, you know.

This text takes a very different point of view and says, no, Jesus is alive, yes, but it’s not about a body getting out of a grave. It’s about the spirit that lives even when the body is killed.

GROSS: So, do you think if you were actually able to ask the person who wrote this gospel that they would tell you they did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus?

Ms. PAGELS: Yes, what we love about this text, what is adventurous about looking at gospels like this or the gospel of Mary or the gospel of Thomas, is that they don’t give you the answers that Christians think they expect, like Jesus died for your sins or Jesus rose from the dead, you know, or this kind of thing. They will say, yes, we’re Christians but they take the gospel to mean something quite different and we realize that there were many ways of exploring it, and that’s what we lost when we lost all these other texts.

GROSS: So there’s no reference in the gospel of Judas to Jesus dying for the sins of others?

Ms. PAGELS: Many Christians think that, you know--what does it mean to be a Christian? It means you believe that Jesus died for your sins, that God loves the world and sacrificed Jesus to show how much he loves the world. This is a Christian who says, `Well, what kind of God are you talking about then? I mean, are you saying that God wants to--God will not forgive sins unless his own son is tortured and killed in a horrible way? I mean, is this a bloodthirsty God like those gods that wanted human sacrifice like the Inca gods or something like that? So this author says that’s a horrible picture of God.

RELATED: Stephen Colbert’s take on - and impression of - Mohler is on Motherload. And I did find the opening monologue. I still can’t figure out how to link to it.

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

D’Souza’s vision

Andrew Sullivan spells it out in an extraordinary review of Dinesh D’Souza’s The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 (no link, Google it if you’re so inclined) in the New Republic:

This is the central argument of D’Souza’s book: that cultural globalization is the last chance for theoconservatism in its death match with liberal modernity. If a majority of Americans do not support a system of government resting on an external and divine moral order, then the obvious next move is to enlist the billions of fundamentalist believers in the developing world to forge a global alliance. If you combine the premodern patriarchs among the Christians of Africa and Asia and the Muslims of the Middle East and pit them against the degenerate, declining individualists in the West, a global theoconservative victory is possible.

That is D’Souza’s vision, and he is not shy about it. The test case for this strategy can be seen most graphically in the Anglican Church. Theoconservative Episcopalians in Northern Virginia have sought protection under a Nigerian prelate who believes that even speech about homosexuality should be criminalized. If theoconservatism cannot work as a govern- ing majority in the First World, then it is time to forge an alliance between half of America with the Third World.

One has to admire at least the frankness with which this secessionist strategy for conservatism is laid out. “How can we use the war on terror to win the culture war?” D’Souza asks in a final chapter called “Battle Plan for the Right.” Notice here that defeating the forces of Islamist terror is merely instrumental to the deeper struggle to defeat modern individualism and autonomy. The idea of a common American commitment to the Constitution’s guarantees of individual freedom and autonomy is secondary to the global battle for the “external moral order.” Loyalty is not to country, but to a worldwide theoconservative ideology. Like the Marxists of old, the theoconservatives see their movement increasingly as global, resting on eternal truths, and not compatible with the “liberal morality” of their autonomous bourgeois fellow Westerners. [...]

Just to be clear: D’Souza is arguing that a democracy under divine authority and subject to theological truth is “a perfect expression of the conservative understanding of American democracy.” Why should we be surprised that he wants an alliance with theocratic autocracies in the devel- oping world? In D’Souza’s eyes, both the American Constitution and traditional Islam have a common foe. “Secularism is the common enemy,” D’Souza quotes a Muslim scholar as saying. “Men and women in the West who are still devoted to the life of faith should know that those closest to them in this world are Muslims.” In a spectacular attempt to prove he means exactly this, D’Souza throws into the mix an excoriation of Turkey as excessively secular. Atatürk’s “militant secularization of Turkey is being reversed,” D’Souza notes, “and on balance it is a good thing. Muslims have the right to live in Islamic states under Muslim law if they wish.”

D’Souza is rehearsing the mainstream view of the religious right with respect to the notion of separating church and state. They oppose it, and so does he. But with what a twist! Where he differs from the religious right is in his willingness to find the proper political authority, the proper models of political virtue, in Islam. Islam and Christianity together: that is D’Souza’s dream. He does not seem especially interested in God. He writes nothing about his own faith, whatever it is. His interest is not in the metaphysics or the mysteries of religion, but in the uses of religion for social control. (Somewhere Machiavelli is smiling.) In the goal of maintaining patriarchy, banning divorce, outlawing homosexuality, and policing blasphemy, any orthodoxy will do.

What about that subtitle?

D’Souza does not believe that the cultural left “helped 9/11 happen.” He believes that the cultural left made 9/11 happen. D’Souza, again, never speaks of God or his own faith in this book: his causality includes nothing supernatural. In his view, the cultural left “actively fostered” the murder of three thousand Westerners without any indirect assistance from the Almighty. In his words: “Thus when leading figures on the left say, We made them do this to us,’ in a sense they are correct. They are not correct that America is to blame. But their statement is true in that their actions and their America are responsible for fostering Islamic anti-Americanism in general and 9/11 in particular.”

Friday, March 09, 2007

As expected, Schmeling appeals

SoVo:

An appeal of a Lutheran clerical panel’s decision to defrock the gay pastor of an Atlanta church is the latest move in a showdown within the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America over whether pastors involved in same-sex relationships should lead congregations.

After a four day trial in January, a 12-member jury of ELCA clerics decided Feb. 7 that Bradley Schmeling, pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church, violated ELCA pastoral conduct guidelines, which allow openly gay clergy members to serve congregations, but condemn same-sex relationships as sinful.

The decision criticized the prohibition on same-sex relationships, and gave Schmeling until Aug. 15 before his name should be removed from the ELCA clergy roster - opening a six-month window during which Schmeling can appeal the decision and seek to overturn current policy.

In its ruling, the jury also asked the ELCA to reconsider its rules regarding gay clergy members - which it termed “bad policy” that may conflict with the church constitution - during its biennial Churchwide Assembly, slated for Aug. 6-12 in Chicago. The ruling also noted the success of Schmeling’s six-year tenure as pastor of St. John’s Lutheran Church in Atlanta.

Schmeling took the first step in retaining his job this week by filing an appeal of the decision, which he says he mailed March 6.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

A constitutional right to solicit sex from an undercover policeman?

I have to say the pastor’s got a point. What are cops doing out cruising for this kind of thing?

Authorities allege that [Rev. Lonnie W.] Latham asked the undercover policeman to come up to his hotel for oral sex.

Latham’s attorney, Mack Martin, filed a motion to have the misdemeanor lewdness charge thrown out, saying the Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 decision Lawrence v. Texas that it was not illegal for consenting adults to engage in private homosexual acts.

“Now, my client’s being prosecuted basically for having offered to engage in such an act, which basically makes it a crime to ask someone to do something that’s legal,” Martin said.

Both sides agree that there was no offer of money, but prosecutor Scott Rowland said there is a “legitimate governmental interest” in regulating offers of acts of lewdness.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Oklahoma has filed a brief alleging that Latham’s arrest also violated his right to free speech.

Before his arrest, Latham had spoken against same-sex marriage.

He has since resigned as pastor of the South Tulsa Baptist Church and stepped down from the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, where he was one of four members from Oklahoma.

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Gay Pastor Loses Ruling, But Not His Flock—Yet

From the AP via The Washington Post:

Many in the 350-member Atlanta congregation say they don’t plan to let the Rev. Bradley E. Schmeling leave the pulpit Aug. 15, as ordered last week by an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) disciplinary committee because he is in a gay relationship.

Defying the order could end Atlanta’s oldest Lutheran church affiliation with the ELCA, cutting off the small church and its members from the large denomination’s resources, including community service programs, hymn books and access to synod officials for guidance on legal, financial and spiritual matters. [...]

Much like a trial, a closed-door disciplinary hearing committee of 12 ELCA members, both lay and clergy, heard evidence for nearly a week in January. Seven of them felt the rule as stated left them no choice but to defrock Schmeling. But the committee also wrote that, if not bound by the church’s rules, they “would find almost unanimously that Pastor Schmeling is not engaged in conduct that is incompatible with the ministerial office” and would order no discipline.

Further, the committee suggested that the ELCA remove its rule and reinstate gay clergy who were removed or resigned because they were in a same-sex “lifelong partnership.”

At the ELCA’s last national meeting in 2005, a proposal to allow synods to decide if they would accept a pastor in a same-sex relationship failed after getting nearly half the 1,000 votes, short of the required two-thirds majority.

St. John’s members and gay rights groups hope Schmeling’s case will provide the final push for change.

August should be interesting.

Evolution’s a Jewish plot and the earth don’t turn

Sent out to lawmakers in Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio from right here in Georgia:

“Indisputable evidence - long hidden but now available to everyone - demonstrates conclusively that so-called ‘secular evolution science’ is the Big-Bang 15-billion-year alternate ‘creation scenario’ of the Pharisee Religion,” reads the letter that went out under [Georgia State House Republican Rep. Ben] Bridges’ name.  “This scenario is derived concept-for-concept from Rabbinic writings in the mystic ‘holy book’ Kabbala dating back at least two millennia.”

It seems that the actual author or analyst, I guess you might say, was a fellow named Marshall Hall, the husband of Bridges campaign manager, Bonnie Hall.  Then they sent it out over Bridges’ signature to state legislators in Texas, California, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio.  And they didn’t stop by letting the cat out of the bag on evolution.  They also blew the whistle on all this hokum about the earth revolving around the Sun. 

Barnes’ memo pointed fellow state legislators to the information at fixedearth.com which rails against the “a mystic, anti-Christ ‘holy book’ of the Pharisee Sect of Judaism” and claims that “the earth is not rotating … nor is it going around the sun.” They’ve even caught on to the “centuries-old conspiracy” on the part of Jewish physicists to destroy Christianity.

Our man Bridges won’t even offer a Tim Hardaway-like apology (read: forced + fake) like the one issued by Texas Republican Warren Chisum. Chisum is Texas House Appropriations Committee Chair and he used the state House operations system to distribute the memo throughout the Texas state legislature.  (Here’s Chisum’s cover letter and the Bridges’ memo.)

Bridges is not returning calls; a good thing. He acknowledges “considering filing legislation this year to remove evolution from Georgia’s public schools” and denies having anything to do with the memo this way:

Bridges said the views in the memo belong to Hall, though Bridges said he doesn’t necessarily disagree with them.

“I agree with it more than I would the Big Bang Theory or the Darwin Theory,” said Bridges, who sponsored unsuccessful legislation in 2005 that would have required Georgia’s teachers to introduce scientific evidence challenging evolution. “I am convinced that rather than risk teaching a lie, why teach anything?”

Obviously, if he had his way, we wouldn’t!

RELATED: Scientific American’s 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Creationist defeat in Kansas

The Guardian:

School authorities in the American heartland state of Kansas have delivered a rebuff to subscribers to the notion of intelligent design by voting to banish language challenging evolution from new science guidelines.

In a 6-4 vote on Tuesday night, the Kansas state board of education deleted language from teaching guidelines that challenged the validity of evolutionary theory, and approved new phrasing in line with mainstream science.

It was seen as a victory for a coalition of moderate Republicans and Democrats, science educators and parents who had fought for two years to overturn the earlier guidelines. [...]

Despite this latest setback proponents of intelligent design remain active across the US. In the last five years, anti-evolution legislation has been introduced in 24 state legislatures and similar policies were under consideration in at least 20 states, according to the National Centre for Science Education in California.

Thursday, February 08, 2007

Schmeling verdict: defrocked but…

AJC:

An Evangelical Lutheran Church in America jury Thursday called for the removal of Schemling from the clergy roster for defying church policy that bans clergy from same-sex relationships. Schmeling’s removal takes effect Aug. 15 -€Â” four days after the ELCA has a chance to debate the policy at its church wide assembly in Chicago.

Yet a detailed reading of the decision -” and even the timing of Schmeling’s removal -€Â” convinces the 44-year-old pastor and his supporters that he eventually may be vindicated.

Schmeling and his supporters pointed out that a majority of the 12-member jury concluded that “no discipline of any sort” should be imposed against the pastor. The jury, noting the growth in St. John’s congregation and its support for Schmeling, also called for the ELCA to change its ban on sexually-active gay clergy at its church wide assembly, supporters said.

“They were so clear that my [same-sex] relationship didn’t interfere with my ministry and even more, they said the policy was bad and unconstitutional,” Schemling said. “That was a courageous and bold decision.”

Gays in the Military (& State Department) yesterday

Yesterday it was reported that Rep. Marty Meehan (D-MA), is planning to introduce a bill to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. The latest Harris poll finds 55% of Americans think gays and lesbians should be allowed to serve openly.

But the best Don’t Ask Don’t Tell fun of the day came during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on the State Department budget where Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) told Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice:

“(I)t seems that the military has gone around and fired a whole bunch of people who speak foreign languages - Farsi and Arabic, etc.,” Ackerman said. “For some reason, the military seems more afraid of gay people than they are (of) terrorists, but they’re very brave with the terrorists,â€Â� he continued. “If the terrorists ever got hold of this information, they’d get a platoon of lesbians to chase us out of Baghdad,” Ackerman said.

He went on to urge Rice to consider hiring military linguists discharged under the federal “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” ban.

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

Dobson’s distortions described

TRUTH WINS OUT RELEASES YOUTUBE VIDEO OF YALE PROFESSOR ASSERTING FOCUS ON THE FAMILY LEADER JAMES DOBSON DISTORTED HIS RESEARCH

It’s not the first time. Or the first Wayne Besen YouTube video on the academic cherry-picking Dobson does. See also NYU’s Carol Gilligan.

Tuesday, February 06, 2007

Ungay

In only three weeks:

The Rev. Ted Haggard emerged from three weeks of intensive counseling convinced he is “completely heterosexual” and told an oversight board that his sexual contact with men was limited to his accuser.

That is according to one of the disgraced pastor’s overseers, who on Monday revealed new details about where Haggard has been and where he is headed.

The Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur also said the four-man oversight board strongly urged Haggard to go into secular work instead of Christian ministry if Haggard and his wife follow through on plans to earn master’s degrees in psychology.

Slate has more.

Monday, February 05, 2007

Gay clergy debate

The AJC today:

Ron Miller is a member of Druid Hills Presbyterian Church in Atlanta who says he would have “no problem at all” accepting a gay pastor.

But the genial church elder says he’d rather focus on something else - and so should other churches.

“A lot of time and energy is being spent by governing bodies and individual churches over this issue,” Miller says. “That time could be devoted to the real mission of the church: helping the poor, the homeless, the community at large.”

Miller’s frustration reflects the weariness in several Protestant denominations. After years of fighting over the acceptance of gay clergy, some church leaders say they’re exhausted. The nonstop battles are draining the life from their congregations and driving members away.

Yet church members slog on through the gay clergy debate because leaders can’t seem to devise a solution that satisfies both sides.

I’m not so sure that’s why. I think the activist evangelical Religious Right has been fanning the flames, keeping the battle alive. And I find comments like the opening quotes from Miller hopeful; they are consistent with the assessment of Laurie Goodstein, New York Times national religion correspondent, as articulated in her podcast talk Backlash: Are Evangelicals Disillusioned with Politics? Hers is an argument I find compelling.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Is there a post abortion syndrome?

Emily Bazelon has a piece in the Times Magazine today asking, Is There a Post-Abortion Syndrome? Research tells us there’s not, though anti-abortion activists - like Intelligent Design and Ex-Gay advocates - use their own to satisfy their predisposition to believe. Among the consequences:

Eighteen states include in their materials a description of abortion’s psychological effects. According to a 2006 analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, seven of these states describe only harmful effects. South Dakota’s informed-consent law requires physicians to give patients written state-approved information that supplies a link between abortion and an increased risk of suicide, though no causal connection has been found. Both the patient and the doctor must certify that the patient has read and understood the materials; failure to do so is a misdemeanor offense.

Does such a law violate a doctor’s constitutional right to free speech? Robert Post, a Yale law professor, argues that the state should not be able to force doctors to convey inaccurate or misleading information. South Dakota’s law “endangers the integrity of physician-patient communications, because it threatens to transform physicians into mouthpieces for political majorities,â€Â� he writes in a coming law-review article. [...]

Reva Siegel of Yale compares South Dakota’s use of criminal law to enforce a vision of pregnant women as weak and confused to the 19th-century diagnosis of female hysteria. These ideas can make and change laws. The claim that women lacked reliable judgment was used to deny women the vote and the right to own property. Repressed-memory stories led states to extend their statutes of limitations. Women who devote themselves to abortion recovery make up for the wrong they feel they’ve done by trying to stop other women from doing it too - by preventing them from having the same choices.

It’s an important piece. READ IT.

Saturday, January 20, 2007

Atlanta minister on trial this weekend

You’ll recall his grave sin was entering into a committed relationship. All was fine when he was gay and single. WaPo:

Members of the oldest Lutheran congregation in Atlanta washed their pastor’s feet—and he washed theirs—in a gesture of mutual support as he prepared to go before a tribunal that may defrock him for living with another man.

The church trial of the Rev. Bradley E. Schmeling, 44, began yesterday behind closed doors at a downtown Atlanta hotel and was scheduled to continue through the weekend.

It is the latest in a series of similar trials in several mainline Protestant denominations, where growing numbers of congregations are installing gay men and lesbians as pastors despite rules against non-celibate homosexuals in the pulpit.

Emphasis mine. The tide won’t stop until it turns.

TUESDAY UPDATE: Hearing’s over. Could be up to two weeks before we know the verdict.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Atlanta pastor: out, proud, defrocked?

He says he’s been out and gay from the start. it’s only when he entered into a relationship that he got in trouble:

The popular head pastor of a Northeast Atlanta church will soon know whether he can remain at the pulpit. Hearings get underway Friday for Pastor Brad Schmeling who is openly gay.

Pastor Brad Schmeling has preached behind the big red doors of St. John’s Lutheran Church for the past 6 years. When it comes to his personal life, he proudly says the only thing that has changed is that he’s now in a committed relationship. Because of that, he knows he could be de-frocked.

“Because I am in a lifelong committed relationship, the Bishop has filed charges,” explained Pastor Brad.

Of course this is absolutely backwards. A single closeted pastor is more likely to get caught up in the kind of behavior that we read about in the newspapers. 

Thursday, January 04, 2007

Embezzling Catholics

This is astounding:

A survey by researchers at Villanova University has found that 85 percent of Roman Catholic dioceses that responded had discovered embezzlement of church money in the last five years, with 11 percent reporting that more than $500,000 had been stolen.

The Catholic Church has some of the most rigorous financial guidelines of any denomination, specialists in church ethics said, but the survey found that the guidelines were often ignored in parishes. And when no one is looking, the cash that goes into the collection plate does not always get deposited into the church’s bank account.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

Has the global Christian community lost its moral bearings?

I think it’s good that those seven Episcopal parishes in Virginia voted to secede and ally themselves with the Nigerian archbishop who believes that gays should be jailed and their free speech curtailed. Let’s get real and be clear as to what this battle is all about.

I point again and again to Russell Shorto’s summer 2005 Times’ Magazine piece, What’s Their Real Problem With Gay Marriage? It’s the Gay Part:

I found no one among the people on the ground who are leading the anti-gay-marriage cause who said in essence: ‘’I have nothing against homosexuality. I just don’t believe gays should be allowed to marry.’’ Rather, their passion comes from their conviction that homosexuality is a sin, is immoral, harms children and spreads disease. Not only that, but they see homosexuality itself as a kind of disease, one that afflicts not only individuals but also society at large and that shares one of the prominent features of a disease: it seeks to spread itself.

Today it’s worth rereading John Bryson Chane, still the Episcopal Bishop of Washington, in the WaPo last year:

It’s no secret that the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion are engaged in a bitter internal struggle over the role of gay and lesbian people within the church. But despite this struggle, the leaders of our global communion of 77 million members have consistently reiterated their pastoral concern for gays and lesbians. Meeting last February, the primates who lead our 38 member provinces issued a unanimous statement that said in part: “The victimization or diminishment of human beings whose affections happen to be ordered towards people of the same sex is anathema to us.”

We now have reason to doubt those words.

Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria and leader of the conservative wing of the communion, recently threw his prestige and resources behind a new law that criminalizes same-sex marriage in his country and denies gay citizens the freedoms to assemble and petition their government. The law also infringes upon press and religious freedom by authorizing Nigeria’s government to prosecute newspapers that publicize same-sex associations and religious organizations that permit same-sex unions. [...]

Surprisingly, few voices—Anglican or otherwise—have been raised in opposition to the archbishop. When I compare this silence with the cacophony that followed the Episcopal Church’s decision to consecrate the Rt. Rev. Gene Robinson, a gay man who lives openly with his partner, as the bishop of New Hampshire, I am compelled to ask whether the global Christian community has lost not only its backbone but its moral bearings. Have we become so cowed by the periodic eruptions about the decadent West that Archbishop Akinola and his allies issue that we are no longer willing to name an injustice when we see one?

I also feel compelled to ask the archbishop’s many high-profile supporters in this country why they have not publicly dissociated themselves from his attack on the human rights of a vulnerable population. Is it because they support this sort of legislation, or because the rights of gay men and women are not worth the risk of tangling with an important alliance?

The bigger their brawl the more likely people are to pay attention. The broad Christian public of this nation will not support these draconian attitudes.

Thursday, December 14, 2006

Emerging evangelical moderation?

Probably not. But with two Colorado Megachurch pastors revealed as gay, some church members are beginning to wonder:

Coming out just one month after prominent evangelical leader Ted Haggard resigned as head of the National Association of Evangelicals amid allegations that he had paid a former male prostitute for sex, Barnes has sparked discussions over the Church’s attitude toward homosexuals.

“We (evangelicals) may have talked about the evils of homosexuality in attempts to justify our position and not been as evenhanded or fair in representing the homosexual community as we should have been,” Craig Willford, president of Denver Seminary, told the Post. “At times, we have probably over-generalized the lifestyle and made villains out of people who live in homosexuality.”

Meanwhile, in Alabama:

Walk into Covenant Community Church of Birmingham, Alabama, on a Sunday morning, and you’ll see a scene reminiscent of any other evangelical church across the state. The sanctuary is crowded with congregants greeting each other before the service. The minister chats with the deacons, the organist arranges his music on the stand, and children escape their parent’s grasp momentarily to run up and down the aisles. But Covenant is unlike most churches in Alabama. Its pastor, J.R. Finney II, is gay. So are most of its congregants. Founded in 1981 with 12 members in an unmarked storefront, today Finney preaches to a flock of 350 in a two-building complex that can barely contain the congregation’s growing numbers. And, while Covenant is the largest gay church in the state, it is not alone. From major cities like Montgomery and Huntsville to working-class towns like Gadsden, gay-led, gay-founded churches are flourishing in the heart of the conservative South, providing gay Alabamans with a supportive environment in which to worship. Across the state, there are six gay-focused churches, and even more “open and affirming” Episcopal, Unitarian, and United Church of Christ congregations.

Yet these churches represent more than the spiritual side of Alabama’s gay community; they act as its political center. Since 1969, when the rebellion at New York’s Stonewall Inn gave rise to the modern gay rights movement, gay communities across the country have fought for equal rights mostly through secular organizations. But, in Alabama, where 78 percent of residents identify themselves as born-again Christians, these churches are at the forefront of the gay rights movement. [...]

To be sure, secular organizations contribute greatly to Alabama’s gay rights movement. Equality Alabama reaches 2,000 people through its e-mail list and has experience lobbying the legislature that the churches lack. But, with just a handful of gay-friendly representatives in the state parliament, its influence is limited. In Alabama, where there are more than 8,000 same-sex couples--four times the number in Vermont, which became the first state to grant civil unions in 2000--the fundamental problem is invisibility. “I had my own legislator tell me there were no gay people in his district,” Fontaine says. According to one Covenant member, “Many [gay] people still believe what they were taught--that we’re unworthy of God’s love and that we’re second-class citizens.”

The church, however, convinced fellow church member Luwanna Rhodes to speak up. “Several years ago, I never thought I would be political,” she says. “But as I’ve grown spiritually and realized that God is OK with who I am, I can be a voice for people that are not able to come out.” With that mustard seed, a new kind of gay activism is taking root across the state of Alabama.

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

The Christian Embassy & The Pentagon

Sunday the Times told us of the government funded evangelizing in our prisons. Monday the WaPo told us of evangelizing in the military. This from NPR:

GUY RAZ: The Pentagon’s outer ring of corridors is called the E-ring and if you’re an important functionary or military chief, you get an office in the E ring. If you’re really important, you get an office in the E ring with a view of the Potomac, like the defense secretary.

Now if you’re really, really important inside the important place that is the E ring, you get access to the Pentagon’s executive dining room. And early every Wednesday morning, the executive dining room is turned into a breakfast prayer hall run by a private evangelical group called the Christian Embassy. It’s a group that is lucky enough to have an office inside the Department of Defense.

Here’s a recording of a recent prayer breakfast held in that dining room. The speaker is a prominent evangelical minister, James Kennedy.

Mr. JAMES KENNEDY (Christian Embassy Prayer Breakfast): And I often thought that the only reason anybody would not accept the gift of eternal life and Christ was either they hadn’t heard of it or they were insane.

RAZ: Insane is precisely how Mikey Weinstein would describe that prayer breakfast you just heard, not because it happened, but because it happened at taxpayer expense inside the Pentagon. So Mikey Weinstein and his group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, is on a - well, a crusade.

Mr. MIKEY WEINSTEIN (Military Religious Freedom Foundation): To try to wake the American people up to understand that we apparently have a radicalized evangelical Christian Pentagon within the rest of the Pentagon.

RAZ: Mikey Weinstein is a lawyer and a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy. His dad was a career naval officer. His two sons are cadets at the Air Force Academy now, and one is off to Iraq in a month. He’s preparing a possible class action lawsuit against the Pentagon for allowing what he calls -

Mr. WEINSTEIN: The creation of a theocracy of a particular fundamentalist perspective within our own military branches.

Here is the Christian Embassy’s illicit video. The Christian Embassy’s website archives the Wednesday Prayer Breakfast Audio Messages in a section of resources titled ”I work at the Pentagon.”

I wish Mikey Weinstein and the folks at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation well.

Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Conservative Jews Allow Gay Rabbis and Unions

NYTimes:

The highest legal body in Conservative Judaism, the centrist movement in worldwide Jewry, voted yesterday to allow the ordination of gay rabbis and the celebration of same-sex commitment ceremonies.

The decision, which followed years of debate, was denounced by traditionalists in the movement as an indication that Conservative Judaism had abandoned its commitment to adhere to Jewish law, but celebrated by others as a long-awaited move toward full equality for gay people.

“We see this as a giant step forward,” said Sarah Freidson, a rabbinical student and co-chairwoman of Keshet, a student group at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York that has been pushing for change.

But in a reflection of the divisions in the movement, the 25 rabbis on the law committee passed three conflicting legal opinions - one in favor of gay rabbis and unions, and two against.

In doing so, the committee left it up to individual synagogues to decide whether to accept or reject gay rabbis and commitment ceremonies, saying that either course is justified according to Jewish law.

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Reading the Bible the gay-friendly way

The Boston Globe:

Trying to rebut this view is a movement led by people who are both gay and Christian who say that the Bible is on their side.
In the battle over gay rights and same-sex marriage, those who oppose both often cite Biblical passages which, they believe, clearly state that homosexuality is wrong.

“Most people think that the attitude of gay Christians is, ‘Who cares what the Bible says?’ when in reality, we care deeply what the Bible says,” said the Rev. Jeff Miner , pastor of the Jesus Metropolitan Community Church , a gay-friendly congregation in Indianapolis. He led a forum on the topic last weekend at Arlington Street Church. “We think there are a lot of powerful, affirming things that are in the Bible that have been ignored.”

Those affirming messages were detailed by Miner and forum co-leader John Tyler Connoley in their 2002 book, “The Children are Free: Reexamining the Biblical Evidence on Same-sex Relationships.” The book served as the text for the forum, sponsored by an array of gay-friendly local church groups, which drew about 200 people.

Most of the forum was devoted to passages that the authors say treat homosexuals and heterosexuals equally. In the Old Testament, claim the authors, Ruth’s covenant with Naomi, which includes the memorable phrase, “Wherever you go, I will go; wherever you live, I will live,” actually refers to a committed same-sex relationship. They also offered a different interpretation of a story that appears in both Matthew and Luke, in which a centurion asks Jesus to heal a man who is typically identified—misidentified, says Miner—as the centurion’s servant.

“That story’s often preached about in straight churches,” said Miner, but “nobody bothers to mention that the Greek word used to describe the sick man is the word used in the ancient world to describe your same-sex partner.”

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Catholic outreach

I’m as critical of the Catholic bishops’ document adopted yesterday that struggles to come to terms with gay people as Pam is. But I’m sitting here thinking that the fact that they’re grappling with it the way they are means we’re winning this battle.

I was surprised and pleased to find that one of those quoted questioning the approach was from here in Georgia:

A few bishops voiced concern Monday that the guidelines, on which a final vote is expected Tuesday, would not help them reach out. Bishop J. Kevin Boland of Savannah, Ga., said the distinction between calling homosexuality a disordered inclination and insisting that gay people are not disordered would be lost on gay men and lesbians.

“I think that is quite reasonable for the heterosexual, but for the person with the inclination it will be very hard to accept,” Bishop Boland told the conference. “To apply it pastorally can be quite difficult.”

Saturday, November 11, 2006

Haggard restoration

Ted Haggard’s going into spiritual restoration. This is what those who claim to cure homosexuality brag about:

“I see success approximately 50 percent of the time,” said H.B. London, vice president for church and clergy at Focus on the Family, the conservative Christian ministry in Colorado Springs. “Guys just wear out and they can no longer subject themselves to the process.”

Those who fail “end up selling cars or shoes or something, and being miserable and angry the rest of their lives,” London said.

Some success, eh? And don’t you just love the loving way they embrace those who try but fail?

Yesterday I listened to Monday’s Open Source on Homosexuality and the American church. This comment is from Jeff Sharlet, who wrote the May 2005 Harper’s piece on Haggard’s church:

This whole idea of purity as a way in which you can become a real activist in the cause. You might not be out there protesting outside an abortion clinic, or going out on a mission trip, but you are sort of conducting a mission trip in your own genitals. Driving lust out from your body the way Christ drives the demons out. And it makes everyone feel like, wow, I’m a part of something big…And the reason that the gay man looms so large is because, in their imagination, he’s the one who gives into his temptations entirely…The gay man, he’s not even procreating, it’s just about him, it’s just about pleasure, it’s just selfishness.

And here’s Mel White saying what we all know to be true about gays in the church:

It’s the old Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. We are in every level of the church, and in every position. There are so many gay pastors and priests, gay congregants, gay deacons, gay elders. You know, we are everywhere in the church serving Christ well, and I think, wisely. But the only way we can do that is to build our service on a lie. And that’s really sad.

Monday, November 06, 2006

David Frum, Ted Haggard & The Gay Miasma

David Frum explains it all for you:

A sensational but to-date unsubstantiated allegation has been hurled at a major American religious figure. On much of the left, the reaction is gleeful delight: See! He is no better than anybody else!

In my mind, however, this story highlights a widespread moral assumption that I have never been able to understand.

Consider the hypothetical case of two men. Both are inclined toward homosexuality. Both from time to time hire the services of male prostitutes. Both have occasionally succumbed to drug abuse.

One of them marries, raises a family, preaches Christian principles, and tries generally to encourage people to lead stable lives.

The other publicly reveals his homosexuality, vilifies traditional moral principles, and urges the legalization of drugs and prostitution.

Which man is leading the more moral life? It seems to me that the answer is the first one. Instead of suggesting that his bad acts overwhelm his good ones, could it not be said that the good influence of his preaching at least mitigates the bad effect of his misconduct? Instead of regarding hypocrisy as the ultimate sin, could it not be regarded as a kind of virtue - or at least as a mitigation of his offense?

After all, the first man may well see his family and church life as his “real” life; and regard his other life as an occasional uncontrollable deviation, sin, and error, which he condemns in his judgment and for which he sincerely seeks to atone by his prayer, preaching, and Christian works.

There you have it, the rationale. Setting aside the notion that to reveal one’s orientation is to vilify traditional moral principles, the argument boils down to that Haggard is “more moral” for trying and lying than I am for honestly accepting who I am. But worse, Frum says clearly that the good of his preaching “mitigates” his “occasional uncontrollable deviation.”

Should we assume then that Frum means Foley’s good work as chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children mitigates his pursuit of teen-aged boys? Or the good work of all those parish priests mitigates their sins with altar boys?

There’s been a lot of “occasional uncontrollable deviation” going around lately. And I believe the opposite of what Frum says is true: that it is precisely the repression of the proclivity that causes the uncontrollable deviation. That an out proud gay man is more likely to be bound by social norms than one living the deep, dark shame of an illicit double life.

Last week The New Yorker had an essay on Steven Johnson’s book, The Ghost Map, about the mid-nineteenth-century English doctor named John Snow who discovered that drinking water was the cause of cholera:

At the time, the idea that cholera might be transmitted by a waterborne poison ran against the grain of medical opinion. Disease was not generally viewed as a “thing"-a specific pathological entity caused by a specific external agency. ... Moreover, epidemic disease-literally, disease coming “upon the people"-was then widely ascribed not to contagion but to atmospheric “miasmas.” ... The miasmal theory remained medical orthodoxy for about two centuries. (We owe to it the name of the disease malaria: literally, “bad air.") In mid-nineteenth-century usage, a disease was called “epidemic” if it was not thought to be “contagious.”

The fact that the poor suffered most in many epidemics was readily accommodated by the miasmal theory: certain people-those who lived in areas where the atmosphere was manifestly contaminated and who led a filthy and unwholesome way of life-were “predisposed” to be afflicted. The key indicator of miasma was stench. ... [The] belief in a subterranean origin of miasmas gradually gave way to the view that they were caused by the accumulation of putrefying organic materials-a matter of human responsibility...Rather like syphilis, it was taken as a sign that you had lived in a way you ought not to have lived. [...]

But some sanitary reformers, Florence Nightingale among them, opposed contagionism precisely because they believed that the poor were personally responsible for their filth: contagionism undermined your ability to hold people to account for their unwholesome way of life. Whereas, in a miasmal view of the world, the distribution of disease followed the contours of morality-your nose just knew it-infection by an external agent smacked of moral randomness.

In the letter to his congregation, Haggard said James Dobson “will guide me through a program with the goal of healing and restoration for my life, my marriage, and my family.”

As it happens, that program, Love Won Out, was in Atlanta this weekend. Even those who succeed in such programs, and there are few of them, tell of a process that is uncertain, fraught with relapses and some temporary successes.

Neither the medical community nor policymakers were convinced by John Snow’s discovery of a waterborne cholera pathogen; they stuck with the miasmal theory for nearly a decade after Snow’s death. The water got cleaned up, the right things were done, but not for the right scientific reasons.

Ted Haggard’s a pitiable hypocrite; Dr. Dobson a dinosaur. He’ll die and in the end we’ll see whose right. We may lose in seven more states again tomorrow, but I’m confident we’ll win in the end. I’m hoping that this time around it will be for the right reasons.