Same-sex couples in the United Kingdom are now entitled to full legal benefits under the Civil Partnership Act that went into effect in December. Evangelical Alliance UK warns that the new legal provisions will morph into a marriage law in the near future. And EAUK is outraged over the Government’s allowing a reference to God during these civil partnership ceremonies.
Some Church of England vicars have followed up by blessing same-sex couples holding civil partnerships. One such blessing – presided over by the former bishop of Durham – provoked this statement from the present bishop, N. T. Wright: “I shall be very sorry if members of the clergy, by holding services of blessing or near equivalent, force me to make disciplinary enquiries.” Wright’s ecclesiastical legalese continued: “My own integrity as diocesan bishop, and my collegial position within the House of Bishops, strongly suggest that I should follow the process thus recommended” to discipline the offending priests.
South Africa’s highest court has ruled in favor of same-sex marriage and gives the Parliament one year to enact legislation in keeping with the 1994 Constitution. The Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and Spain have already legalized same-sex marriage.
The Vatican has issued a new “Instruction” on homosexuality. “Deep-seated homosexual tendencies” are said to be contrary to God’s will and natural law and “often a trial” for those who experience these. The Vatican statement says that such persons “must be accepted with respect and sensitivity; [and] every sign of unjust discrimination in their regard should be avoided.” The statement goes on to say that it is “necessary to clearly affirm that the Church, even while deeply respecting the persons in question, cannot admit to the Seminary or Holy Orders those who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.” The term “homosexual tendencies” is not defined.
Thomas Reese, a Jesuit scholar at Santa Clara University asks: “Is ‘tendencies’ the equivalent of ‘orientation’ or does it mean something else? The document never uses the ‘O’-word, which has left many people scratching their heads.”
William F. Buckley Jr. asks how a seminarian is to “pass muster” when the Vatican letter calls for his homosexual leanings to “have been overcome for at least three years before ordination.” Buckley, a Roman Catholic, reasons that “someone who engages in homosexual acts at age 14 may, at age 24, still harbor gay proclivities. If this is the case for the aspirant priest, the practical question becomes simply: Is he willing to tell the truth?”
A cover letter issued with the Instruction “does not call into question the validity of the ordination [of those who are already priests] with homosexual tendencies.” According to a report in The Washington Times, “about 30 percent to 50 percent of the Catholic priesthood is estimated to be homosexual.” The president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, Bishop William S. Skylstad of Spokane, writes in his diocesan paper: “There are many wonderful and excellent priests in the church who have a gay orientation, are chaste and celibate, and are very effective ministers of the Gospel. Witch hunts and gay bashing have no place in the Church.”
“We are Catholic priests … with homosexual tendencies, and that fact has not stopped us from being good priests.” This was the testimony from dozens of gay Italian priests posted on the Web site of the Italian Catholic news agency Adista in December. Touching on some of the misunderstandings voiced by the Vatican, the priests said: “We don’t have more problems living chastely than heterosexuals do, because homosexuality is not a synonym of incontinence, nor of uncontrollable urges. We are not sick with sex and our homosexual tendency has not damaged our psychic health.” On the contrary, according to the priests: “We consider our homosexuality to be wealth, because it helps us to share the marginalization and suffering of many people.” The gay priests said they felt like the church’s “unloved and unwanted children.”
The chaplain of St. John’s University (Minnesota) and the nearby College of St. Benedict has resigned in protest of Vatican policies. Father Bob Pierson said he “can no longer honestly represent, explain and defend the church’s teaching on homosexuality.” He said he is gay and celibate.
The Boston Globe profiled students on America’s evangelical colleges (November 14). Political science professor Corwin Smidt of Calvin College compared evangelical student attitudes of the early 1980s with those of the late 1990s. He said: “In religious beliefs, there is no change.” He reported “minimal change” in areas such as smoking and R-rated movies and said students still see premarital sex as wrong. The students consider themselves conservatives but on issues such as allowing homosexuals to teach in public schools and military spending, he said, they’re more liberal. The Globe asked Wheaton College students about homosexuality and received “nuanced answers.” Wheaton students were divided on a federal constitutional amendment against marriage for same-sex couples. One Wheaton senior said matters such as homosexuality and abortion are complex and she objected to questions using “buzzwords.”
The Calvin College Chimes recently ran a feature on a discussion group sponsored by the campus counseling center “to provide a safe place where gay and lesbian students can ‘share each other’s burdens’ … (Gal 6:2).” Features Editor Allison Graff interviewed the students, giving them pseudonyms for the article, which appeared on November 11. She notes that there are gay and lesbian students who are too afraid even to show up at these meetings.
A senior told her he was frustrated at some of the response he’s experienced: “It’s not about historical or theological proofs; it’s about people.” He said: “It’s really easy to say it’s wrong when you don’t know anybody [who’s gay], but once you do, it changes your perspective.” Still, he said, rejection has pushed him to be “disenchanted with the church.” And yet several of the gay and lesbian students agreed with one who said he was “amazed at how open and accepting and caring” many in the Calvin community were. They also affirmed counselor Dan Vandersteen’s observation that “gay and lesbian students are at Calvin primarily because they’ve chosen a Christian education.” As one of the young women put it: “I value my education over my gayness.” Calvin College is an institution of the conservative Christian Reformed Church.
Graff concludes the article by stating: “Perhaps there will be a day when these students can have their real names back in the eyes of the Calvin community. Perhaps this will be a place where they can meet on the Commons lawn openly and other students can join them to learn from the wisdom they’ve gained on their journey. Perhaps.”
A Mercer University student group, The Triangle Symposium, started in 2002, participated in National Coming Out Day in October. The Georgia State Convention of [Southern] Baptists was so upset with this that it voted the following month to end it’s long association with the Macon school. Mercer University President Kirby Godsey tried a last ditch move to modify the Triangle group satisfy the Georgia Baptists and maintain the association. But it failed. Fred Evers, a Baptist preacher who heads the Executive Committee of the State Convention, barked back: “We are in a culture war!” He complained that Mercer has created a climate in which such things as the gay student group can “begin and flourish” and that Baptists should have no part in that.
Baylor University has dismissed an honestly gay member of its business school’s advisory board because of his “alternative lifestyle.” Tim Smith, a member of the gay Log Cabin Republicans and an alumnus and significant financial donor to Baylor reflects on his dismissal: “Baylor should be leading the way on issues of basic fairness, not lagging behind corporate America. [The school’s] decision to openly discriminate and to do it in the name of God, is shameful.”
Boston College’s GLBT group adopted a “less gay” theme for its AIDS benefit dance – complying with a request from the administration. College spokesman Jack Dunn said: “Gay students are accepted and welcomed at Boston College, but as a Catholic university, we cannot sanction an event that promotes a lifestyle that is in conflict with church teaching and the mission and heritage of Boston College.”
A minister in the Reformed Church in America preached encouragement to gay and lesbian students at a recent meeting of the United Methodists’ Wesley Foundation at the University of Iowa. Rich McCarty, who is also a doctoral candidate in the University’s Religious Studies department and teaches a course on Christianity and homosexuality, told the students: “God is using you to speak truth and declare God’s message of unconditional love and forgiveness and mercy.” McCarty said his views are not those of most in his denomination.
BJUandgayfriendly-subscribe@yahoogroups.com is the correct address for the Bob Jones University gay friendly alumni group. It was listed incorrectly in the Fall issue of RECORD.
Nazi camp survivor Pierre Seel has died in Paris at the age of 82. Seel was the author of Moi, Pierre Seel, Deporte Homosexuel, in which he told of his experience as a17-year-old victim of Nazi persecution of homosexuals. He was arrested for being a homosexual and forced to witness the execution of his 18-year-old boyfriend who, stripped naked and with a metal bucket jammed on his head, was subjected to the camp’s ferocious German Shepherds who, as Seel wrote: “began to rip at his flesh – first his genitals, and his thighs, and they devoured Jo before our eyes. … His screams of pain were amplified and distorted by the bucket over his head. Frozen in place and trembling, wide-eyed t seeing so much horror, I had tears running down my cheeks. I prayed that he would rapidly lose consciousness.”
Seel’s testimony was documented in the film, “Paragraph 175.” After the telecast, he was assaulted in the streets and called a “dirty faggot” by a mob of young men – not “skinheads,” he noted, but “well-dressed” young men.
Constantino Diaz-Duran, writing in the GLBT Southern Voice in December, decries all the Che Guevara tee-shirts he sees gay men wearing as “trendy” and “revolutionary” again these days. He writes: “Che was, indeed, a cold-blooded killing machine [who set up] the Guanahacabibes camp … populated by what they considered the scum of society: gays, and later people with AIDS, as well as Christians.” Diaz-Duran recalls the official stoning and beating of boys caught in acts of homosexuality and the suicide of gay Cuban poet Reynaldo Arenas who once wrote: “to be a ‘faggot’ in Cuba was one of the worse calamites that could ever happen to a human being.”
Twenty percent of Russians say homosexuals should be executed. That’s what a Leveda Poll found recently. But the same poll finds that 51 percent of Russians say there should be equal rights for homosexuals.
U2 lead singer Bono says: “I have a lot of gay friends, and I’ve seen them screwed up from unloving family situations, which are just completely anti-Christian.” He made this statement in Rolling Stone (Nov 3). Bono boldly tells of his personal faith in Jesus Christ in a new book: Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (Riverhead).
Former president Jimmy Carter is an evangelical Christian who once co-chaired a Human Rights Campaign fundraising dinner for gay and lesbian rights, even though he still believes that marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples only. But he recently told the general assembly of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship that homosexuality is one of those issues that “in God’s eyes, fade into relative insignificance, as did circumcision in the first days of the early church.” In his newest book, Our Endangered Values (Simon and Schuster), Carter criticizes Christians who have picked gay men and lesbians as their “foremost targets” in an “increasingly narrow and rigid definition of the Christian faith.”
The State [Southern] Baptist Convention of North Carolina has voted unanimously to have its board draw up a written policy to purge the organization of any member church that “knowingly affirms, approves or endorses homosexual behavior.” Such churches would not be considered “in friendly cooperation with the convention.” But one delegate who did stand up to voice objection to the proposal was Rob Helton of Cherry Point Baptist Church in Havelock. He asked perceptively: “Could it be that homosexuality gains our attention primarily because it’s not ‘our’ sin?” He went on to suggest: “If we write a policy [on homosexuality], it seems only fair and right that we write a policy on every sin in the Bible.” Helton added: “Eventually you would come to my sin and I would be excluded.”
Mark H. Creech of the fundamentalist Christian Action League of North Carolina attempts to rebut Helton’s objection by asserting: “Few sins in the Bible are described with the same harshness or urgency of language as homosexuality. … Few sins have done more of late to wreak havoc among God’s people as homosexuality. … Moreover, few sins today threaten religious freedom as does homosexuality.”
The Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire says that gay men (like himself) and lesbians will eventually be fully welcome in the church. Why? Because, he says, “it is the just thing, and God is always on the side of justice.” And explaining in the GLBT periodical, The Advocate, why he doesn’t think the gay issue will spell a disastrous split in the church, Bishop V. Gene Robinson observes: “We’re not arguing over the divinity or the humanity of Christ; we’re not arguing over the Trinity; we’re not arguing over the Resurrection. … You would find Anglicans all over the map with respect to abortion or stem cell research or Iraq, but we all go to the communion table together and receive the body and blood of Christ and find our unity there. And then we go back to the pews and argue about all these other things.”
South Presbyterian Church of Dobbs Ferry, New York has ordained a gay man to the ministry. The man, Ray Bagnuola, says he is not in a committed gay relationship at present but reserves the right to enter into such a relationship in the future, thus challenging the denomination’s requirement of “chastity” for homosexual ministers.
Novelist Anne Rice, best known for vampire stories, now writes about Jesus Christ. And she’s still standing up for gay people. Her newest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (Knopf), is the high-Christology story of Jesus’ childhood – the first volume of her intended series on Christ. In doing her biblical research, she found the “acid and vitriol” of skeptical scholars to be shockingly superficial but she found the arguments of more careful scholars such as Protestants N. T. Wright and Craig Blomberg, the Roman Catholic Luke Timothy Johnson and the Jewish Jacob Neusner, compelling and convincing. She tells the evangelical flagship journal, Christianity Today: “I’m not offering agnostic explanations about Jesus. He is real. He worked miracles. He is the Son of God.”
The Right-wing magazine, World, reports Rice is “an advocate for Christian and Jewish gays and their right to worship and to take the sacraments.” Presumably, World doesn’t mean the Jewish gays’ right to take the “sacraments.” Rice’s son, Christopher, is gay, a novelist and a frequent, good-sense columnist for the GLBT periodical, The Advocate.
A gay Mormon is too misfit for Misfit Mormons. That’s what a gay Mormon found out when he turned for understanding to a group of unconventional, “outsider” Mormons, only to be rejected even by those who had also experienced rejection. One-time Mormon missionary David Adler, who had earlier sought counseling through a Latter-day Saints Family Service only to be told: “Sounds like we need to get you laid,” moved on to seek help elsewhere. He finally found the group called Misfit Mormons and thought he’d be accepting there. He wasn’t. Some of the Misfits were verbally abusive. He passed through suicidal thoughts and finally concluded that he’d try to accept his homosexuality and make the best of it. Adler things that, since the LDS positions on birth control, polygamy and priesthood for African-Americans have been changed over the years, perhaps the LDS position on homosexuality will change. But he believes that the LDS leaders’ prayers about these other matters led to the changes and he doubts that they’re praying for guidance in their stand against homosexuality. The Salt Lake City Weekly featured Adler’s story on December 1.
“Gay Lord of the Rings fans … are legion.” This is what gay producer and co-writer Cliff Broadway says after traveling the world to interview fans of J. R. R. Tolkien’s epic tale for the documentary, Ringers: Lord of the Fans. He reports: “gay Lord of the Rings fans from the 1960s have taught me how to write in Elvish.” He found that many gay fans see a homosexual aspect to the friendship of Frodo and Sam. Yet as a writer for Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity has observed, such an interpretation is a “feast of clumsy Freudianism” that “cannot understand love without thinking it sexual.” Broadway is aware of a risk in reading homosexuality into the characters and says that, due to what he calls the Oxford don’s “severe” Roman Catholicism, he doubts that “the word ‘homosexual’ was even in Tolkien’s vocabulary.” The documentary has been released on DVD from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
AND FINALLY:
In the “Coming-up-to-Speed?” Department on the Religious Right – Focus on the Family movie reviewer Adam R. Holz writes on pluggedInOnline.com: “I should point out that Perry [Val Kilmer’s character in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang] is not a stereotypical gay character. He’s not portrayed as effeminate, but rather as a strong, capable man. He doesn’t lisp. He doesn’t have a limp wrist, etc. As homosexual characters show up with increasing frequency on the big screen (and the small one, too), expect to see more who defy the ‘gay shtick’ like Perry does. (In doing so, they will help further cement our cultural acceptance of homosexuality.)”