Denouncing the Religious Right’s demonizing of gay people, a National Association of Evangelicals executive suggests: “Let’s see what we have in common, … rather than stressing our differences.” Speaking to Reuters after Ted Haggard’s departure from the presidency of NAE, Richard Cizik, NAE’s vice president of governmental affairs said: “I think there could be some reconciliation between the evangelical community and gay people.” But, he added: “this doesn’t mean we are going to alter our position” on homosexuality. Cizik noted that “gay activists often say we are unwilling to admit that there are people among us in the closet who are tempted by a homosexual orientation and evangelicals will now have to admit this.” He enlarged on this: “Just listening to what others say would be an act of reconciliation, especially given America’s fractious culture wars.”
“If a man like Ted Haggard, a true believer with so much to lose, cannot turn away from his biological nature, how should any gay person be expected to?” That’s what a Colorado Springs woman wrote in a letter to Newsweek in response to the magazine’s story on the evangelical leader’s resigning from the NAE presidency and his church pastorate. Jill McCormick added: “It is time for Christians to take a closer look at their belief in the sin of homosexuality. … A more compassionate and truly moral theology could have saved Haggard years of self-hatred, embarrassment and suffering.”
“When a prostitute dominates the news in the days leading up to the election saying he supports domestic partnerships, do you expect rural and elderly voters – voters who don’t know many homosexuals – to support your cause?” This is Gay City News columnist Nathan Riley’s rhetorical question on all the “positive press” for Mike Jones’ outing Ted Haggard. That story, says Riley, “deserves a little cold water”. He points out that, earlier, “civil unions were winning by double digits in the polls” in Colorado. Then came all the media obsessed with Haggard and Rep. Mark Foley. Although the Colorado Initiative “was all about gay and lesbian couples who had been together for decades”, by Election Day, it was all about a gay prostitute, drugs and lusting after teenage boys.
The founding pastor of a 2,100-member Colorado congregation has resigned, acknowledging he’s struggled with same-sex attractions since he was 5 years old. Paul Barnes, a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, started Grace Chapel in Englewood 28 years ago. After the church received a phone call saying that someone was going to “blow the whistle” on homosexuals in evangelical pulpits, Barnes admitted his life-long struggle. Barnes, 52, and his wife, have two adult daughters.
Joel C. Hunter, president-elect of the Religious Right’s Christian Coalition, will not take office after all. In a meeting with the Coalition’s board it was found that he and the board were not in agreement on the direction the organization should take. He wanted to expand the Coalition’s antigay and antiabortion priorities to include concern for the poor, the environment, and justice issues. The board did not. Board chairwoman Roberta Combs, CC president before the selection of Hunter, will continue as both president and the chairwoman of the board. Christian Coalition, started by Pat Robertson in 1989, has struggled with finances and defections over the last few years.
Hunter is the senior pastor of Northland Church in suburban Orlando and author of the book, Right Wing, Wrong Bird: Why the Tactics of the Religious Right Won’t Fly with Most Conservative Christians.
“Those who don’t have homosexual inclinations can be judgmental towards those that do.” Leith Anderson, the pastor who replaced Ted Haggard as president of the National Association of Evangelicals made this observation in the wake of the “outing” of both Haggard and Paul Barnes. “When you discover people you know and respect are struggling with homosexuality, suddenly you’re more compassionate because they are real people who are around you, members of your church and community, and the compassion level rises. It should.”
Homeless and runaway youth number in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps over a million. The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services estimates that the number ranges from 575,000 to 1.6 million each year. The National Runaway Switchboard estimates that some 42 percent of these identify themselves as either gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender youth who, in many cases, have been rejected by their parents.
Church historian Randall Balmer writes: “The evangelical faith that nurtured me as a child and sustains me as an adult has been hijacked by right-wing zealots who have distorted the gospel of Jesus Christ.” In his new book, Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament, this Columbia University professor and advisory editor to Christianity Today notes, for example, that “After casting about, the Religious Right came up with a new foil, an enemy right here among us: homosexuals. … They were corrupting our children and infecting our military.” He suggests: “Anita Bryant is probably the person most responsible for advancing the notion of a gay agenda …in 1977 [when she warned:] ‘Homosexuals cannot reproduce – so they must recruit.’” Balmer observes that homosexuality has “proven to be such a durable issue for the Religious Right [because] it allows evangelicals to externalize the enemy, based on the supposition that no true believer could be gay or lesbian. It also works because it plays on popular anxieties about sexual identity and gender roles in the wake of the women’s movement of the 1960s.” He further points out: “Although most of the scientific and medical research does not support this position, the Religious Right persists in arguing that individuals choose to be homosexual and that, conversely, they can choose not to be homosexual.”
Another evangelical, Harry S. Stout (Jonathan Edwards Professor of American Religious History at Yale), endorses Balmer’s book: “Readers on the right and left cannot afford to ignore this richly provocative and brilliantly rendered argument against the Religious Right. … Balmer writes with the power and censure of a prophet – and no prophet is honored in his own country.”
“Implicit trust that the Bible was a plain book whose authoritative deliverances could be apprehended by anyone who simply opened the covers and read” – a very democratic view – was the naïve assumption of Civil War era Christians. Thus, they used the Bible to support very different stances on slavery. But, as the noted evangelical historian, Mark Noll, explains in his scholarly book, The Civil War as a Theological Crisis (University of North Carolina Press), “the natural, commonsensical, ordinary meaning of the words” seemed to support slavery rather than abolition, so abolitionists were reduced to more nuanced biblical interpretations. Reviewing Noll’s book, evangelical journalist Richard N. Ostling suggests that lessons from this historical example of the political uses of Scripture are pertinent today, “as the religious left and religious right dispute what the Bible says about, say, abortion and gay rights.”
Conservative religious believers give significantly more money and time to charities, and also donate more of their blood, than people who identify themselves as liberal or secular. Believers are 25% more likely to give away money and 23% more likely to give of their time than are non-believers and liberals – even though the latter groups average 6 percent higher incomes than conservatives. These are some of the findings of Arthur C. Brooks, Professor of Public Administration and Director of the Non-Profit Studies Program at Syracuse University. His new book, Who Really Cares, demolishes the commonly held assumption that liberals are more compassionate than conservatives.
Knowledgeable observers say it’s likely the House and Senate will pass The Employment Non-Discrimination Act and send it to President Bush in 2007. The bill, aimed at protecting gay people from employment discrimination, failed by a vote of 49-50 in the Senate in 1996 and it has never been brought to a vote in the House. Thomas McCloskey of the Religious Right’s Family Research Council admits its chance of passing is “much higher than it’s ever been in the past”, but he promises to try to stop it. What Joseph Solmonese of the pro-gay Human Rights Campaign calls “the $64,000 question” is whether or not President Bush will sign or veto. McCloskey agrees: “We don’t know where the president would come down on this.”
Senator Barack Obama says: “I was reminded that it is my obligation not only as an elected official in a pluralistic society, but also as a Christian, to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided.” The Illinois Democrat, increasingly mentioned as a presidential possibility, made this observation in his memoir, The Audacity of Hope.
The Georgia Baptist Convention has cut its ties to Mercer University after a 170-year association. “The straw that broke the camel’s back,” according to the Rev. Wayne Robertson, chair of the convention’s administrative committee, was a National Coming Out Day on campus, sponsored by a gay student group with the support of faculty members and staff. The school will no longer receive funding from the convention but is free to look for funding directly from affirming Southern Baptist churches.
The Religious Right in Canada is fighting that nation’s legalization of marriage for same-sex couples. Charles McVety, a leader of the opposition and president of the Canada Christian College in Toronto complains: “Faith has been violated.” He grants: “Traditionally people of faith in Canada have not been politically active. But now we’re finally seeing organizations that are professionalizing what was a very amateur political movement.” His red and white “Defend Marriage” bus is now touring the country.
The Parliament of the Canadian province of Alberta has voted not to allow its civil officials to refuse to marry same-sex couples. The decision came as something of a surprise in this traditionally conservative province.
The Supreme Court in Israel has ruled that same-sex marriages performed in Canada and other countries must be recognized in Israel. Even before this ruling, gay couples in Israel had many of the rights of heterosexual couples. They will now get the same tax breaks and will be allowed to adopt children. Orthodox Jews reacted to the ruling with anger, as expressed by Moshe Gafni: “We don’t have a Jewish state here. We have Sodom and Gomorrah here.” He deplored what he termed this “destruction of the family unit in Israel.”
Brooklyn Rabbi Yehuda Levin, representing the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada, said that this “homosexualization” of Israel is worse than giving land back to the Arabs and worse than the holocaust because, in that, Jews were killed in this life but in today’s “homosexualization” of Jews, they’re killed for the next life as well. Therefore, he argues, such “homosexualization” is “the ultimate holocaust.” Meanwhile, antigay, pro-Israel Americans of the Religious Right are also outraged with the Court’s ruling.
Conservative Judaism now permits openly gay rabbis – provided they don’t engage in anal sex – endorses synagogue blessing of same-sex unions, and recommends “reparative therapy” for any who wish it. Not all were happy with such mixed guidance for Conservative congregations and four rabbis on the Committee on Jewish Law have resigned in protest. Conservative Judaism accounts for a third of affiliated Jews in America. Reform and Reconstructionist branches of Judaism have accepted gay rabbis for the past decade.
After more than half the states have passed constitutional blocks to same-sex marriage, two Reagan and Bush (1) Justice Department lawyers say: “Conservatives need to reconsider whether that’s really what we want.” David B. Rivkin, Jr. and Lee A. Casey argue, in an Op-Ed piece in The New York Times (Nov 17), that: “Indeed, cluttering state constitutions with the disposition of many difficult social issues – and this process will probably go on, and even accelerate, especially if all of the states choose to define marriage in their constitutions – is likely to empower the judiciary more. This paradoxical and unwelcome result would arise because some of the newly enshrined constitutional definitions and guarantees are sure to conflict with one another, leaving the courts the only venue for resolving the tension.” They say: “Conservatives should find this outcome highly unpalatable” and suggest: “leaving the marriage issue to the state legislatures has many benefits.” Therefore, they assert: “The wave of marriage amendments – at least those that go beyond removing the issue from judicial resolution – should stop.”
Methodist churches may go on barring gay people from church membership. The highest court of the United Methodist Church has ruled that there is no basis for a bishop’s or local church’s evading a denominational rule that bars gay people being members.
Southern Baptist churches in North Carolina must keep homosexuals out of church membership or face expulsion. That’s the ruling of the state’s convention. President Stan Welch says this further clarification was needed to give the old rule “teeth.”
How it Feels to Have a Gay or Lesbian Parent is a book “by Kids for Kids of All Ages,” as the subtitle says. The book, from psychotherapist Judith E. Snow of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is a collection of first-person stories told by the sons and daughters of lesbian and gay parents, so that, as Snow puts it: “other kids could read them and hopefully identify with” them. She says that Middle school “bigotry, harassment, and homophobia …was identified as the hardest time.” On antigay rhetoric in religion, Snow says “it is an enormous issue if a religion views homosexuality as a sin and a gateway to hell. I think that most anyone in this position would feel quite conflicted with the idea that their good and loving parent … will go to hell. How do you reconcile that?”
Dallas has been dubbed the new center of cultural evangelicalism in the U.S. – home to mega-churches like Park Cities Presbyterian and The Potter’s House and schools like Dallas Theological Seminary and Dallas Baptist University. So it comes as a shock to many conservative Christians that Dallas tourism officials are reaching out in a big way to attract national conferences of gay and lesbian organizations to “Big D.” The Web site of the Dallas Convention and Visitors Bureau headlines “Our Secret is Out” and contains pictures of same-sex couples enjoying the local venues. After its recent meetings in the city, executive director Jennifer Chrisler of Family Pride Coalition, a national group committed to same-sex family equality, said: “I think it was an extraordinarily positive experience in that most of the participants found Dallas to be a warm, receptive, inviting place for them.”
“All alumnae are welcome at Trinity, always.” This is what the president of a Catholic and largely women’s college in Washington, D. C. wrote on her blog in the wake of the Catholic bishops’ reaffirming the intrinsically “disordered” nature of homosexual relationship. President Patricia A. McGuire stated that the official Catholic stance did not mean that the “alma mater must shun her own daughters.” McGuire is one of about a dozen college presidents with their own blogs.
Evangelical pastor and bestselling author, Rick Warren, asked Sen. Barack Obama (D-IL) and Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) to speak at the Saddleback Church’s second annual “Global Summit on AIDS and the Church”. Leaders of the Religious Right were outraged at the invitation to Obama – given his 100% rating by the liberal Americans for Democratic Action. But Warren defended the invitation: “Jesus loved and accepted others without approving of everything they did. That’s our position, too.” During the conference, Warren said: “I have to admit that the church was late in coming to the game and we have to repent over that. But we’re here to stay.” All three men took an HIV test as part of the conference. They tested negative.
Worldwide, AIDS kills 8,000 people every day. And everyday, 14,000 more people are infected with HIV.
In America, black gay men are most at risk for HIV/AIDS. While blacks make up only 13 percent of the U.S. population, they account for 51 percent of all new HIV/AIDS diagnoses and half of the black men who are HIV-positive engage in sex with men. According to Robert Fullilove, a dean for minority affairs at Columbia University’s School of Public Health: “A lot of what animates the sexual behavior [of black men who have sex with men] is a sense of shame – it’s subversive, it’s secretive, it’s hidden, it’s rushed, and in that sense it’s not safe.” The antigay black church is understood to contribute to this secretiveness and shame.
On the annual World AIDS Day, December 1, thousands of Roman Catholics from over a hundred countries petitioned Pope Benedict XIV to lift the ban on condoms in order to prevent the spread of HIV. The petition, along with statements from bishops who support condom use, can be read at Condoms4Life.org. But critics point out that condoms that men refuse to use can’t prevent HIV infection. Studies show that many men refuse to use condoms, complaining that they dull their sexual pleasure.
“It’s true, in my blood there is the AIDS virus, but there is also the blood of Jesus.” That’s the testimony Nsenglyumva Fidele of Rwanda shared with First Lady Laura Bush.
AND FINALLY:
At the Pentagon, homosexuality is now classified with motion sickness, fear of flying, obesity, bed-wetting, sleepwalking, stuttering, dyslexia, and allergies to insects. The Pentagon’s revision of its document on homosexuality – from homosexuality’s being a personality disorder or symptom of mental retardation to something like the conditions listed above – came in response to mental health advisories. But James H. Sculy, head of the American Psychiatric Association, has written to the Pentagon to say that it hasn’t yet quite understood: “We appreciate your good-faith effort to address our concern that the document was not medically accurate, but we remain concerned because we believe that the revised document lacks the clarity necessary to resolve the issue.”