From London Telegraph Online:
The Church of England is to grant partners of homosexual clergy who have registered under the Government’s new civil partnership scheme the same pension rights as clergy spouses.
The disclosure, made at the General Synod last night, could prove an embarrassment to the bishops because sexually active homosexuals are theoretically barred from the priesthood.
Only a few homosexual clergy have so far risked facing censure by publicly declaring that they are living in same-sex unions, but the prospect of gaining pension rights for their partners may prove an incentive for many more to “come out”.
The bishops plan to issue a letter for the guidance of clergy and others before the Act comes into force.
I’m glad, James, that you took the time to review We Are Family Foundation’s website. Did you give Dr. Dobson’s letter the same courtesy? It appears not. If you did you would have read the following:
“If you’re planning on visiting the We Are Family Foundation’s Web site [www.wearefamilyfoundation.org] to verify the accuracy of the above information [which details the foundation’s pro-homosexual agenda], don’t bother. In the days since this story broke, the majority of overtly pro-homosexual content has been removed. The founder of the organization, Nile Rodgers, appeared on the “Today Show” and said that we had the wrong site and that they had nothing to do with homosexuality. That was Jan. 21. Two days later, most of the homosexual content disappeared or became inaccessible. I will leave it for you to determine the motive behind the mysterious vanishing of such material by the We Are Family Foundation. Suffice to say that we have clear documentation that these materials were being promoted on the Web site as recently as late January, despite denials to the contrary.”
Here is a webpage, that provides information on We Are Family Foundation Allies in the “101 Ways to Combat Prejudice” and here is the Foundation’s webpage on the same program. You won’t find any “Allies” listed in the We Are Family Foundation’s webpage.
Note some of the groups listed (which can be found on Page 16 of the ADL booklet linked below) as Allies in this project: Parents, Family and Friends of Lesbians & Gays (PFLAG); National Gay and Lesbian Task Force; Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network (GLSEN); Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). Yes, there are plenty of other groups listed there as well, including the Boys and Girls Club of America, Children’s Defense Fund, a teacher’s union (the NEA), and the PTA. That these groups are also listed is irrelevent to my point, but it does tell us something about these groups, does it not? Why would Boys and Girls Club of America allie itself with GLAAD and GLSEN? What’s next? NAMBLA?
The ADL’s booklet on this program is kind enough to give us some readings that will teach us to “overcome prejudice” against, among others, homosexuals. Among the readings are “Daddy’s Roommate”, “Heather has Two Mommies”, “Growing Up Gay” and “Overcoming Heterosexism and Homophobia”; books which promote homosexual behavior as “just another lifestyle” and as normal as Ward and June Cleaver. (It looks like those of us who see the relational norm between the sexes as one man and one woman suffer from “heterosexism” and need to overcome our “homophobia”. Nothing like labeling and marginalizing those you disagree with before you’ve even talked them to promote tolerance and understanding, eh?)
Why would the We Are Family Foundation apparently remove this portion of that particular project but retain everything else? In fact why do they make it so hard to find information about the “101 Ways to Combat Prejudice” on their website? I had to go through Google to find it. It is not readily available from their own webpages.
This confirms that Dr. Dobson is telling the truth about the We Are Family Foundation. And those who don’t want to believe Dr. Dobson are simply closing their minds because they don’t like Dr. Dobson or what they think he represents.
If you support the We Are Family Foundation and want to join with groups that promote homosexual behavior, that is your choice. But don’t then tell me that your’s is the Orthodox Christian position. PFLAG, GLSEN and GLAAD all believe homosexual behavior is something to embrace and celebrate. Orthodox Christianity teaches it is a sin. These two views are not compatible. I’m sorry, but that is the truth.
Dr. Dobson is forthright and honest about what who his group is and what it believes. The We Are Family Foundation is hiding who they are and what they believe. I stand with Dr. Dobson.
James writes: “Moral absolutes are nice, but unfortunately there are times when actions are truly neither, as in the case with many wars which are filled with both good and evil intentions on both sides.”
Even beyond intentions or results, I think we have to look to the nature of the relationship between the individual and the state for a more complete understanding of the nature of warfare. In this regard Reinhold Niebuhr’s _Moral Man and Immoral Society_ is particularly helpful. Neibuhr writes that “The selfishness of nations is proverbial. It was a dictum of George Washington that nations were not to be trusted beyond their own interest.”
The paradox is that the selfishness of nations is made possible by the altruism of individuals:
“There is an ethical paradox in patriotism which defies every but the most astute and sophisticated analysis. The paradox is that patriotism transmutes individual unselfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to the nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervor that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation’s power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the un-selfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.”
Even when the individual wants to make his or her society less selfish, this is difficuilt to achieve, and the role of the critic is not appreciated: “While critical loyalty toward a community is not impossible, it is not easily achieved. It is therefore probably inevitable that every society should regard criticism as a proof of a want of loyalty. This lack of criticism, as Tyrrell the Catholic modernist observed, makes the social will more egotistic than the individual will.” (One thinks of “a prophet has no honor in his own country” here. It’s not just a clever observation, but one that accurately describes the inherent attitude of a nation toward it’s internal critics.)
But that’s not the worst of it:
“Perhaps the most significant moral characteristic of a nation is its hypocrisy. . . . The dishonesty of nations is a necessity of political policy if the nation is to gain the full benefit of its double claim upon the loyalty and devotion of the individual, as his own special and unique community and as a community which embodies universal values and ideals. The two claims, the one touching the individual’s emotions and the other appealing to his mind, are incompatible with each other, and can be resolved only through dishonesty. This is particularly evident in war-time.”
So the problem is not just whether war is evil and/or necessary. The problem is that nations inherently act out of selfish and self-interested motives in all that they do. Those motives permeate all that they do, even when they attempt to do good. At the national level good and evil always travel together.
We can use Neibuhr’s analysis to understand the danger of nationalism for Christians. As Neibuhr notes, the altruism of the individual is directed to the nation. Thus, the nation, in the minds and emotions of the citizens, becomes a repository of the ideals of self-sacrifice and altruism. Yet these are the very same ideals promulgated by Christianity. At some point the state can begin to displace the religion, or state and religion can become conflated together, as the goals and actions of the state are seen as part and parcel of the religion.
Without belaboring the issue, I think that a lot of what we see with the war in Iraq is consistent with this analysis: the “Christian” president, the support of Christians for the war, the denunciation and rejection of criticism, and even the perception of Iraq by some as a “holy war.”
Niebuhr’s warnings remin insightful and still deserve a hearing. It would be a mistake, however, to conclude that Niebuhr saw all war as wrong, or at least not necessary. Niebuhr broke from the religious anti-war wing in the early forties and supported the American war effort against Hitler.
Note 46:
Father,
You stated that the signers did not deliberate sufficiently and did not take proper note of the impact of the sloppiness of the document. I agree! My point exactly.
However, that was not what Schaeffer said when he stated that they had basically sold their souls for a moment of political relevance. What you said in your post is sound thinking. What Schaeffer said was invective, and that is the kind of invective that I have seen out of so many Orthodox. The OPF statement is not the only one. The Antiochian Bishops put out a strongly worded statement, as did the Patriarchate of Moscow. There has been a substantial amount of grumbling among both clergy and laity over this.
As for my providing a charicature of the motives of the signers of the OPF statement, I didn’t address their motives at all. I merely stated that I gave them the benefit of the doubt that they were acting honorably. I don’t know what motivated them, only that I am going to withold judgment that it was some kind of nefarious reason – like seeking ‘political relevence.’
Re Note #47:
From Stanley Harakas’ work entitled ‘No Just War in the Fathers’ (available online): “In that chapter, published in 1986, I focused on patristic sources, Byzantine military manuals, and contemporary Orthodox statements about war. I found an amazing consistency in the almost totally negative moral assessment of war coupled with an admission that war may be necessary under certain circumstances to protect the innocent and to limit even greater evils. In this framework, war may be an unavoidable alternative, but it nevertheless remains an evil. Virtually absent in the tradition is any mention of a “just” war, much less a “good” war. The tradition also precludes the possibility of a crusade. For the Eastern Orthodox tradition, I concluded, war can be seen only as a “necessary evil,” with all the difficulty and imprecision such a designation carries.”
Since the publication of this article, the Russian Orthodox Church has published a lengthy document assessing the relation of the Orthodox Church to the state in many ways. That document explicitly states that since Augustine was writing during the time of the unified church, that ‘Just War Theory’ could be ‘borrowed’ into the Eastern Tradition as a benchmark for determining whether or not a particular war is just or unjust.
Speaking as a Marine (1988-1992), I would sythesize these two streams in the following manner – war is a symptom of fallen nature. It is undertaken to prevent a greater evil than itself from emerging, but shouldn’t be seen as some kind of pathway to Universal Peace and Freedom (as Bush’s inaugural crusade sermon implied.) It should be fought in as limited a manner as possible, minimizing civilian deaths.
War is always justified, in my opinion, when conducted to repel foreign attack. War is usually just when defending an ally whose security is vital to one’s own. However, is it just to destroy cities in order to liberate a people from its own government?
That gets very, very dicey. I believe passionately in self-defense (large aresenal of guns and two German Shepherds). I believe in the efficacy of deadly force to stop a crime in progress. However, let’s take this scenario and play it out. A man is holding a hostage and is probably going to kill her. He will probably take and kill other hostages in the future. You have no idea how many, the timing of the abductions, the identities of the future victims, or even if he will be able to carry out his plans, as something may stop him.
To stop this man, the only path open to you is to blow up the building he is hiding in. Doing that will definitely kill 100 innocent men, women, and children.
Okay, what do you do?
This is how I see the situation is Iraq. Saddam was a brutal dictator who had lost control of the entire northern half of his country. Supposedly, Saddam gassed the Kurds to suppress their drive for independence. They were, by 2003, de facto independent and quite free of any fear of Saddam. Saddam was oppressing others, but we didn’t know how many, in what manner, and who they were. At the same time, launching a war was a guaranteed way to provoke mass casualties. The estimates vary, but I feel it is conservative to state that tens of thousands of Iraqis died to be rid of Saddam. At the same time, we have lost thousands of wounded and almost 1,500 KIA.
(Spare me the anecdotal evidence of rapes and other atrocities that were ongoing. We still have no way of doing the math and determing how many people would have died under a continued Saddam dictatorship versus the results of the war. At the very least, the 50,000 Christians hiding in Syria would still be at home in Iraq instead of in refugee status.)
Is this just? If Saddam had attacked us, then yes. If Saddam had threatened to attack or attacked one of our crucial allies, then yes. But is it just to kill people in the hopes that you can build a better political system on their graves?
That is the point that I press home time and again. We killed a lot of people to provide ourselves the chance to play ‘Founding Father.’
As for the OPF, I don’t like the group or its pacifistic overtones, so I will not defend them in any way. They speak for themselves. As for the Episcopate of the Orthodox Church, many synods have spoken concerning our war in Iraq. They have all condemned it. I am unaware of a single bishop that has been in favor of the Iraq War, though there might be one or two.
I am afraid that we have simply ignored their council and that of the fathers, and restricted our view of Christian morality to only what happens in bed.
Glen: You mention the “Fathers”, but what about the “father”? In his book “A World Transformed”. co-authored with Brent Scowcroft, George HW Bush, Sr. wrote preceiently of the unfortunate consequences we are seeing now resulting from any attempt to change the regime in Iraq through invasion and occupation. Stunningly his son chose to ignore all of his father’s advice. We did apprehend Saddam; otherwise everything else Bush Sr. predicted has come to pass.
“While we hoped that popular revolt or coup would topple Saddam, neither the U.S. nor the countries of the region wished to see the breakup of the Iraqi state. We were concerned about the long-term balance of power at the head of the Gulf. Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in “mission creep,” and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under those circumstances, furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-cold war world.
Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the U.N.’s mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different–and perhaps barren–outcome.”
http://www.thememoryhole.org/mil/bushsr-iraq.htm
Note 55. Die Welt, Germany’s left-leaning weekly, sees it differently.
Note 53. Schaeffer’s response was to the OPF piece, since it garnered most of the signatures. No other statement carried the same weight. But even so, I still don’t see why his criticism is invective. The piece called his son (a Marine) a murderer, and the response by Jim Forest smacked of even more high mindedness when Forest compared Schaeffer’s complaint to defending an abortion. The shoe is on the other foot, it seems to me.
My reference to charicature was not about the motives of the signers, but the motives of the critics.
Note 56: Leftists get all misty-eyed about elections and nation building. That is nothing new. Voting is the only sacrament that leftists hold dear, having dispensed with all others in building a secular religion based on the ‘will of the people.’ They are also amoral utilitarianists – a trait they share with the official ‘right.’ If something ‘works’ that proves it was the ‘right thing to do.’ The fact that something ‘works’ is highly subjective.
I have said it before, and I’ll say it again, the Iraq invasion under the pretense of nation-building would have been perfectly in character for a Wilson, or an LBJ, or a Clinton. The fact that Die Welt is going all squishy on this only acknowledges the degree to which Bush’s global crusade for Democracy is actually a leftist agenda. The left has no real intellectual way of opposing this, since Bush has, in effect, borrowed their hymnal.
The only legitimate opposition from the left can come from the ultra-left who eschew all foreign intervention. That point of view is not represented by Die Welt. Reagan opposed a Soviet Union that had enslaved half of Europe. Bush has beaten up a tinpot dictator in a sandbox. Comparing the two men in vision or ability is a great disservice to Ronald Reagan.
As for Bush Sr.’s warnings on the problems with Iraq, I think that he should have been taken very seriously. Iraq is still a mess, as the car bomb this morning clearly demonstrates. We are at 200 billion and counting on the cost, and the war seems to have no real end in sight, despite the elections. I think that had the original President Bush been in charge, rather than his son, things would have been handled much differently and much better.
Note 50: What, then, is the Orthodox perspective of how controversial subjects such as religion, sexuality and politics be handled in an elementary and junior high classroom, if at all? Certainly this time of life is difficult and awkward enough without having to endure teasing because one’s parents are gay or “worship elephants” as the Hindus do or if they attend class with a yarmulke.
Should students be exposed to many points of view as a college university does so that young kids can make up their own minds, or should only one point of view be given on these topics? For example, should Christianity be referred to as “one of many religions” or “THE” religion (and thus that all other religions are false)?
Moreover, should teachers be allowed to express their personal views on these subjects when asked by students, or must they remain completely mute about their personal beliefs? If the former, must they state some disclaimer that this is their opinion which may or may not be factually correct?
Personally, I tend to think that teachers in these lower levels of education should stick to presenting easily discernable facts (math, science, language, etc.), not opinion or matters of faith. The less is said of religion, sexuality and politics, the better as most students that age are generally not capable of determining bias as well as those in high school are. While this would mean that teachers should refrain from bringing up issues of sexuality, they will also need to check their faith at the door, whatever that may be.
Note 60: It was precisely because of the ambiguity of such questions that my wife and I decided to homeschool. We plan to teach our children comparative religion, the same as we plan to expose them to multiple languages. However, we feel that our children should have a solid grounding in their own faith, prior to being exposed to others. I am not sure how one is supposed to pursue true education in the current culturally anarchic environment in public schools.