We’ll be relatively quiet over the next few days until the start of 2009 – a wonderful Christmas to you and yours!
Merry Christmas, 2008
Reply
Monthly Archives: December 2008
Bush Administration regulation to challenge “Plan B”
The Bush Adminstration is still in power for a few more weeks, to the chagrin of Attorney-General Blumenthal. Federal regulations are being proposed that could supersede the plan under which Connecticut hospitals give contraception to rape victims. From the Courant:
The rule, issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, reinforces protections for health care workers and institutions who refuse to provide services they object to, including abortion.
When it takes effect Jan. 18, the regulation will override the 2007 Connecticut law that requires hospitals to provide emergency contraception, commonly known as Plan B, to rape victims, Blumenthal said.
“We went through a very lengthy, painstaking, contentious process to reach our statute in Connecticut, which has worked well for everyone,” Blumenthal said. “This administration’s new regulation threatens to blow apart that very significant balance of interests and compromise.”
At Mr. Blumenthal’s web site, his outrage was evident:
“I will fight this outrageous rule — the outgoing Bush Administration’s latest and last swipe at women’s health. This rule is an appalling insult and abuse — a midnight power grab to deny access to health care services and information, including even to victims of rape. Our strong coalition of states will fight fiercely to block this reprehensible threat to hard-fought patient and victim rights.
“This Provider Conscience Rule, thinly veiled as a promise of fairness to doctors, jeopardizes assurances that sexual assault victims are provided emergency contraception. This new rule puts personal agendas before patient care — protecting doctor objections, but entirely ignoring the rights of rape victims and others to access birth control and other vital services. This rule upsets the careful balance between physician beliefs and a patient’s right to affordable, accessible health care.
In September 2007 Connecticut Catholic Archbishop Mansell described the Connecticut bishops’ policy as follows:
Catholic hospitals will continue to administer a pregnancy test to determine if the woman has conceived.
If the pregnancy test is positive, contraceptive medication will not be administered.
This policy is consistent with the new law and with the Ethical and Religious Directives of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops.
Catholic teaching is adamantly opposed to abortion, but not opposed to emergency contraception for a woman who is a victim of rape.
This position has been criticized and even satirized by some other Catholics who feel it does not go far enough in upholding Catholic teaching. See discussion here at the FIC Blog.
You can be polled on gay marriage – but you can’t vote on it!
So says the Family Institute of Connecticut’s Executive Director, Peter Wolfgang, in a welcome return to blogging this week. Wolfgang assails the approach of our new media-political regime. Speaking about the Kerrigan case, Wolfgang says:
The court released its decision on the Friday before Columbus Day weekend. The following Tuesday a Courant/UConn poll was released purporting to show that most Connecticut residents approved of the judicial imposition of same-sex marriage.
This is how a “revolution from above” is conducted. Step 1: Have four judges undemocratically force same-sex “marriage” on Connecticut. Step 2: Have the media rush in to say to the public, “Move along, folks. Nothing to see here. Most of you are OK with this. Only a few rabble-rousers oppose it.”
But how accurate is a poll taken over a weekend — particularly a three-day holiday weekend — when many people are away? The Courant’s poll on the constitutional convention, for instance, begun on a Saturday, misjudged the “no” vote by 20 points.
Perhaps this is why those who cite polls to buttress their claim that Connecticut residents support same-sex marriage are unwilling to let those same residents vote on it.
Wow. There – he said it. The simple fact of the matter is that in States like ours, the public opinion is not listened to, much less adhered to. We cannot even say that it is influenced or shaped any more so much as it is managed. The results are challenging, both for a weary public who want to be “fair-minded” and for a weak Church.
Carl Trueman writes a sobering post in Reformation 21, the online magazine of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, called “Goodbye Larry King, Hello Jerry Springer.” Trueman’s word picture neatly captures the marginalization of evangelicals and anyone else who might dare to challenge the emerging homosexual orthodoxy:
You can have the hippest soul patch in town, and quote Coldplay lyrics till the cows come home; but oppose homosexuality and the only television program interested in having you appear will soon be The Jerry Springer Show when the audience has become bored of baiting the Klan crazies. Indeed, evangelicals will be the new freaks….
When church leaders, faculty, and the movers and shakers of the evangelical world find themselves excluded from the reputable avenues of power and cultural and professional influence and preferment, then we will see what their doctrine of scripture is really like, whether it really is solid, whether it really shapes their lives, their actions, and their priorities. The question is: will those in positions of authority in the schools, colleges, denomination and seminaries have the backbone to do what is necessary? Will they be willing to consider the reproach of Christ greater than the treasures of Egypt? When the invitations to the Larry King Show dry up, to be replaced by those from Jerry Springer, will they hold the line? I wish I had seen more evidence that that was the case and could be more confident about the future.
We need only look at how quickly Rick Warren fell from Media Darling status once he took a biblical and yet gracious stand against homosexual marriage in California. I think we shall all soon be required to give a reason for the hope that lies within us – and be able to articulate what the living out of that hope entails, and why.
Spirit Song at House of Grace Coffee House, January 10
The House of Grace Community Coffee House will be hosting Spirit Song for an uplifting program of Christian music with free admission, food & drink. This concert event will be held on January 10, 2009 at Grace Baptist Church, 400 Burnt Plains Road, Milford, CT.
Food and fellowship will start at 6:00 PM, with music following afterwards at 7:00 PM. For more information call (203) 874-8928 or visit the House of Grace website at www.houseofgracecc.com.
Glastonbury church moving
Pastor Eric Stillman
Notice to all our capital area friends: NewLife Christian Fellowship in Glastonbury has moved to 131 Griswold Street, Glastonbury.
The congregation’s first service in their new location will be tomorrow, December 21.
NewLife is pastored by Eric Stillman, who writes the insightful NewLife Blog. We wish the congregation well in their new church home!
Obama creates shock, fury by picking Rick Warren
President-elect Obama has angered many supporters – and probably many detractors – by asking California Pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation at the upcoming inaugural ceremonies. Politico.com reports:
“Your invitation to Reverend Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at your inauguration is a genuine blow to LGBT Americans,” the president of Human Rights Campaign, Joe Solomonese, wrote Obama Wednesday. “[W]e feel a deep level of disrespect when one of architects and promoters of an anti-gay agenda is given the prominence and the pulpit of your historic nomination.”
The rapid, angry reaction from a range of gay activists comes as the gay rights movement looks for an opportunity to flex its political muscle. Last summer gay groups complained, but were rebuffed by Obama, when an “ex-gay” singer led Obama’s rallies in South Carolina. And many were shocked last month when voters approved the California ban.
“There is a lot of energy and there’s a lot of anger and I think people are wanting to direct it somewhere,” Solomonese told Politico.
The selection of Warren to preside at the inauguration is not a surprise move, but it is a mirror image of President Bill Clinton’s early struggles with issues of gay rights. Obama has worked, and at times succeeded, to bridge the gap between Democrats and evangelical Christians, who form a solid section of the Republican base.
Warren has been more outspoken than usual lately about issues seen as purely moral, particularly gay marriage. This was unavoidable given the fur flying in California over Proposition 8. A CNN piece pointed out Warren’s objections, the kinds of objections that make sense but don’t get much airplay these days.
Warren’s support of California’s Proposition 8, a measure that outlaws same sex marriage in the state, sparked the ire of many gay rights proponents earlier this fall.
Warren, who has made it a practice not to endorse candidates or political parties, wrote in October that the issue of gay marriage is not a political issue, but instead “a moral issue that God has spoken clearly about.”
“For 5,000 years, every culture and every religion — not just Christianity — has defined marriage as a contract between men and women,” Warren wrote in a newsletter to his congregation. “There is no reason to change the universal, historical definition of marriage to appease 2 percent of our population.”
Warren also stirred controversy earlier this week when he told Beliefnet.com his grounds for opposing same-sex marriage laid primarily on his right of free speech.
“There were all kinds of threats that if [Proposition 8] did not pass, then any pastor could be considered doing hate speech if he shared his views that he didn’t think homosexuality was the most natural way for relationships, and that would be hate speech.”
Warren has also spoken out against abortion and defended Christians from the knocks they have taken (unwarranted in my view) for being “single-issue voters.” In a recent interview with Beliefnet, Warren outlines a fascinating discussion he had with Democratic senators:
And I went around the room and when I came to Chuck Schumer I said, “Chuck, how bad, if you had a candidate and he was right in EVERY SINGLE AREA that you agreed with but he’s a holocaust denier, there’s no way you’re gonna vote for a holocaust denier. That’s a single issue issue for you. And I said, “For these people who believe life begins at birth, alright–at conception–it’s an America holocaust. They believe that there’s 40 million people who should be here. And to them that’s an issue.”
These views may be starting to change some people’s views of Warren, sometimes seen as the poster child for a New Evangelicalism that isn’t as in-your-face about the contents of the Gospel and moral issues. But Warren has probably never been what the political Left would like people to believe he is.
Likewise, many Evangelicals have been uncomfortable with Warren because of this perceived overemphasis on social action at the expense of evangelism. Warren himself seems to be annoyed at this and takes pains to correct false impressions, as seen in a USA Today profile earlier this month:
He never stopped planting churches, he says, but as he spoke around the world, he realized government, business and non-profits could all share in efforts to reconcile global conflict.
“All of a sudden, I started having people of goodwill who were not Christian or not church members saying, ‘We’d like to do that. We’d like to partner with you on helping the poor. We’d like to help end AIDS. We’d like to help end corruption and injustice.’
“So,” he says, “I started making the appeal for people of goodwill, whether they happened to believe, as I do, that Jesus Christ is the son of God, or not, to work together on the areas where we can work together, and not worry about the areas where we can’t.”
Says Warren, “We’ll work with anybody who wants to stop AIDS.” And that, he says, “really makes the fundamentalists mad.”
“But when people say Saddleback is not a evangelistic church,” or that Warren is not standing for Christ all the time, “there’s a spiritual term for that,” he says.
“It’s when you cross an abalone with a crocodile. It’s a crock of baloney.”
If he can infuriate so many different kinds of people he must be doing something right.
Greenwich becoming Connecticut’s gay marriage capital
Proximity to New York may be making Greenwich the capital of gay marriage in the area, just as it made Greenwich the Powerball Mecca a few years back.
Since Nov. 12, when a state judge gave the final go-ahead for gay marriage, 26 same-sex couples have been married in Greenwich. That is more than the number married in any of the state’s four largest cities, according to data obtained from vital records officials. Seven gay marriages have taken place in Bridgeport; 16 in Hartford, 17 in Stamford and 20 in New Haven. Of the couples married in Greenwich, all but two were from out of state. Fifteen came from the New York City area; three from Long Island; two from Westchester County; one from New Jersey; and one each from Chicago, North Carolina and Kentucky.
Chicago, North Carolina and Kentucky?
I take it back. At this rate Greenwich may become the Las Vegas of gay marriage.
John Rowland and repentance
Former Connecticut governor John Rowland appears on Mike Huckabee’s show and talks about his fall “into grace.” If it is possible to watch Mr. Rowland objectively (which is certainly difficult for some) you will see he has some interesting things to say about lies, a moral compass and… he even uses the R word: repentance. This video comes in at just under 10 minutes and is worth watching or at least listening to in its entirety.
(Can’t wait to see reactions to this one.)
Newspapers are dying
The first song ever shown on MTV was a crazy thing by the Buggles, called “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Video actually did not kill the radio star, but radio stars had to adapt to the realities of the video age. Still, both survived, perhaps because they were based on a similar – passive – way of receiving entertainment and stimuli. There wasn’t much new thinking required on the part of those delivering the content to the consumers.
In the last few years, the rise of the Internet began to first wound (think: Craigslist) and now is truly killing the newspaper business. The print media have not adapted to the Net as well as the radio star did to the new realities of the video age. The passivity of the newspaper simply cannot compete with Web, with its greater user controls and niches. As early as 2004, Wired.com announced that newspapers had been admitted to the ICU:
Young people just aren’t interested in reading newspapers and print magazines. In fact, according to Washington City Paper, The Washington Post organized a series of six focus groups in September to determine why the paper was having so much trouble attracting younger readers. You see, daily circulation, which had been holding firm at 770,000 subscribers for the last few years, fell more than 6 percent to about 720,100 by June 2004, with the paper losing 4,000 paying subscribers every month.
Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses.
Don’t think for a minute that young people don’t read. On the contrary, they do, many of them voraciously. But having grown up under the credo that information should be free, they see no reason to pay for news. Instead they access The Washington Post website or surf Google News, where they select from literally thousands of information sources. They receive RSS feeds on their PDAs or visit bloggers whose views mesh with their own. In short, they customize their news-gathering experience in a way a single paper publication could never do. And their hands never get dirty from newsprint.
But if newspapers were in the ICU in 2004, the family has just been called to the bedside to say goodbye:
¶ Two well-known Connecticut papers, The New Britain Herald and The Bristol Press are dying and, because this is 2008, people are looking for a bailout. A former State rep says this is delusional.
¶ An upstart Greenwich blog is making waves, boasting about 2,000 visitors a day and apparently getting actual scoops as the disaffected local citizenry seems to be abandoning the local “real” newspaper. I have a feeling this is happening elsewhere.
¶ The Tribune Company, which publishes Connecticut’s most famous paper, The Courant, has filed for bankruptcy.
¶ The mighty New York Times itself is in big trouble and may be looking to borrow something approaching a quarter of a billion dollars against its real estate.
Where will this end? At present, I’m not sure there’s enough high-quality citizen journalism to fill the gap; not yet enough hyperlocal business portals, etc., to do what newspapers have been doing for 250 years – certainly not at the same level of credibility. Nevertheless, newspapers have precious little time to figure out that most people do not seem to have any problem jettisoning them altogether.
One man, one woman – unless that offends you, of course!
The Church’s failure to compete in the spheres of vocabulary and language has brought our society to the place where it is about to get hit by a train. It’s time for Christians to ask for, even insist upon, several things. The Church needs to: (1) reclaim the true biblical concept of tolerance; (2) reclaim the vocabulary of civil rights; (3) explain biblical teaching on family issues; and (4) refuse to be browbeaten by comical, trendoid explanations of biblical concepts – as if the Church and Israel before it have been wrong or confused about homosexuality for 4,000 years. American Christians must (preferably before tomorrow morning) cease to be intimidated by the possibility that someone may claim they are motivated by “hate.”
I was annoyed when I saw a clip of the pro-homosexual marriage video in which Jack Black appears as Jesus, castigating Christians by reminding them that shellfish, like gay sex, is an abomination in the Bible. Is this really the best that supporters of gay marriage can do? And have Christians become so utterly crippled in biblical knowledge and their ability to articulate it that hearing the phrase “God hates shrimp” paralyzes them?
Some time ago Christianity Today ran an excellent article by Edith Humphrey, a seminary professor, who explained for the confused what the Bible teaches: God is opposed to homosexuality. This shouldn’t come as a newsflash, but in our day we have many who are deceiving themselves or are being deceived. In her article, “What God Hath Not Joined,” Ms. Humphrey explains:
Leviticus 18:22 says bluntly: “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination.” Some within the church argue that such prohibitions concern only cultic practices in ancient Israel and so are no longer binding on Christians. But some Levitical proscriptions concern immoral behavior, not simply ritual uncleanness. We need to ask, How does the general pattern of the Scriptures direct us to understand this prohibition?
The answer is that homoerotic behavior contradicts God’s purpose for all his creatures. It is not in the same category as the cultic or cultural prohibitions regarding non-kosher foods and the twining together of two types of thread. Like the prohibition of incest (Lev. 18:6-18), the prohibition of homoerotic acts addresses every age.
As the New Testament epistles show, the early church did not discard what the Hebrew Bible said about sexual ethics. When Corinthian Christians thought that their spiritual sophistication gave them license to sin, Paul challenged them (1 Cor. 6:9ff.): “Do you not know that evildoers will not inherit God’s kingdom?” Then he offered as examples those who steal, get drunk, scorn what is holy, pursue sexual immorality, and practice two modes of male homoerotic behavior.
Some argue that we cannot understand Paul’s reference to these two behaviors (malakoi and arsenokoitai, as in and ) in terms of homoeroticism. But arsenokoitai is in fact a compound word derived from the Greek version of Leviticus 20:13 for those men “who lie with a male.” Malakoi means literally “soft ones” and in Greek writings frequently identified the passive homoerotic partner. It is a mistake to limit the term’s meaning, as do some, to masturbation, or as the NRSV does, to male prostitution.
The Genesis narratives, because they are stories, and the Levitical passages, because they are part of a code given to Israel in particular, must be considered in light of the whole biblical narrative. When we do this, the lists of immoral behavior in and show that the early Christian communities held firm to Old Testament views of sexual immorality…
Of course. But it’s worth thinking about these things in a little more depth than what we get in sound bites, which are more often than not pure sophistry. It’s important we do so because the press is not going to let up, and is forever seeking to teach people of good will that the Bible can be read to support gay marriage.
This week, Newsweek’s Lisa Miller sticks her finger in the eye of everyone who has read the Bible, saying:
Biblical literalists will disagree, but the Bible is a living document, powerful for more than 2,000 years because its truths speak to us even as we change through history. In that light, Scripture gives us no good reason why gays and lesbians should not be (civilly and religiously) married—and a number of excellent reasons why they should.
Is this for real? The Jesus who said “go and sin no more” now wants two girls to marry each other?
Christians need to respond to this drivel every time it appears in print, for when we let these things go unanswered, others over time may accept them by default.
Albert Mohler, never afraid of a fight, takes Newsweek to task:
Disappointingly, Newsweek editor Jon Meacham offers an editorial note that broadens Newsweek’s responsibility for this atrocity of an article and reveals even more of the agenda: “No matter what one thinks about gay rights –- for, against or somewhere in between –- this conservative resort to biblical authority is the worst kind of fundamentalism,” Meacham writes. “Given the history of the making of the Scriptures and the millennia of critical attention scholars and others have given to the stories and injunctions that come to us in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt –- it is unserious, and unworthy of the great Judeo-Christian tradition.”
Well, that statement sets the issue clearly before us. He insists that “to argue that something is so because it is in the Bible is more than intellectually bankrupt.” No serious student of the Bible can deny the challenge of responsible biblical interpretation, but the purpose of legitimate biblical interpretation is to determine, as faithfully as possible, what the Bible actually teaches — and then to accept, teach, apply and obey.
It’s time to focus on teaching and proclaiming the truths that virtually all societies have taken for granted across those millennia, whether they had a Bible or not, and without being ashamed to do so.