First Assembly of God in Brookfield will host a “Love and Respect Conference” with Dr. Emerson and Susan Eggerichs. This is a powerful conference that will help the married, single and divorced alike.
The conference will be held on Friday, May 20th, from 6:45 p.m. – 10:15 p.m., and Saturday, May 21st, from 8:45 a.m. – 1:45 p.m.
For full details and to register, visit Pastor Phil Morgan’s blog here.
Peter Wolfgang of Family Institute of Connecticut
On Thursday, July 22nd from 7 pm to 9 pm the Family Institute of Connecticut will be holding its third annual Open House at their offices, 77 Buckingham Street in Hartford. Refreshments will be served. To RSVP, see the FIC’s contact page here.
Biting like the winter chill that brought the mercury down to -7 F here in Western Connecticut the other morning, Demographic Winter – the coming population collapse – is hitting Connecticut. We’ve written about this before (see post here) and we agree with those who say that the entire developed world is headed for disruptive declines in population. Of course, this runs counter to the expectations of those who were schooled in the 60’s and 70’s, who were inculcated with a strong belief in the threat of world overpopulation. However, factors such as the legalization of abortion, the popularization of homosexuality, and the delay of marriage have created a disastrous decline in the fertility rate. In many nations, women are bearing children at a rate which isn’t even sufficient to maintain the existing population, much less to increase it or create a “population explosion.”
As a little thought will suggest, this wave will hit the so-called “blue states” and thoroughly secularized nations first and hardest. So I was interested to see a frank discussion of this (hat tip: WoodstockTruth.com) from none other than the Connecticut State Data Center. In a remarkable document, it seems that the State Data Center has even adopted the rhetoric of those concerned about Demographic Winter, issuing a press release entitled “Where Have All the Children Gone?“ This document should be read and clearly understood by all. If the State school enrollement peaked last year and is going to decline 17% by 2020 – not so far away – what does this say about the viability of our State economy and institutions? In other words, if you think taxes will go up and services be cut this year, just wait!
The press release says:
Orlando Rodriguez, Demographer and Manager of CtSDC, states:
“We have been expecting this downward enrollment trend to begin. The leading edge of Baby Boomers are approaching retirement and the trailing edge of their children have aged beyond K to 12 schooling.”
In Connecticut, the public school population, grades 1 to 12, peaked at approximately 523,100 in the 2003/4 and 2004/5 school years. This population dropped to approximately 516,400 in the just completed 2007/8 school year. CtSDC projects that this population will continue to decline, reaching a low of approximately 432,300 in 2020. This is a loss of approximately 90,800, or 17%, from the highs of 2003/4 and 2004/5.
Low fertility rates are the root cause of this decline. The Boomer generation, now approaching retirement, had fewer children than their parents. Thus the size of the “Echo Boom” generation, the children of Boomers, is smaller than that of the Boomers. In effect, Boomers did not replace their own generation. Looking forward, Echo Boomers are expected to have lower fertility rates than their parents thereby exacerbating the projected decline. Each progressive generation is failing to replace itself.
It is unlikely that the enrollment peaks of 2003/4 and 2004/5 will return. Connecticut has some of the lowest fertility rates, across all ethnic groups, in the country. Foreign in-migration is too low to offset a long-persistent pattern of domestic out-migration. Indeed, Connecticut’s population is skirting negative growth with only foreign in-migrants keeping the population numbers afloat. (Emphasis in the original.)
This is alarming. The anti-life, anti-marriage, anti-fertility doctrines of the secular left do have consequences, consequences which we are only beginning to see but which will undoubtedly cause great hardship and something else, too: a diminution of the joy within society as we become ever more childless.
See a fuller report on enrollment projections here.
Recommended to kick off your new year: some arguments for heterosexual marriage which are not religiously based. After all, some like to say that all truth is God’s truth; therefore, there must be some non-religious way to explain why marriage has always been heterosexual. Enter the Witherspoon Institute’s Patrick Lee:
In a well-ordered society, the state should give legal recognition to real marriage, promote it, protect it, and privilege it over other sexual arrangements—as a good for the spouses and the children their union may form. The state has an essential interest in the health of marriage. Generally speaking, children will receive the best and most loving care if they are raised by their biological parents, who have formed a community aimed at providing the most suitable environment for any children they may help bring into being. Almost always, children can count on their mothers to care for them when they are young; the institution of marriage is dedicated to ensuring, as much as possible, that fathers also will fulfill their responsibilities to the children they help procreate, and to the mothers of their children. Furthermore, where the institution of marriage is strong, people’s sexual passions and energies—frequently difficult to control, often leading to self-centeredness and exploitation—are channeled toward intelligible goods, namely, marriage and family.
Unfortunately, that’s seen as a little too quaint in many quarters – particularly the quarter we live in. Read the rest here at Public Discourse.
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.
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.
A great profile of Moms in Touch International from today’s Courant:
They pray for safe classrooms. They pray that bullies will be caught. They pray for an end to the illnesses that sweep through schools, and the homework tantrums their kids throw.
They even pray for Mastery Test scores.
“We pray for anything and everything that’s affecting our schools,” said Mary Beth Lawrence, a Marlborough resident with five children who has been the state coordinator of Moms In Touch International for the last three years.
The organization, which operates groups in every state and in 120 countries around the world, was founded by a Canadian mother in 1984. In Connecticut, Lawrence said, there are 107 weekly prayer groups covering about 10 percent of the state’s schools.
Read more here, and visit the Moms in Touch site here to find a Connecticut group.
A reader writes with some concern asking what options pro-family forces have in Connecticut in the wake of the Kerrigan decision legalizing same-sex marriage:
Is there going to be an amendment or a vote that the public can make like in California to ban the same sex marriage here in Connecticut? How do we ban it here as well? Is it too late?
This is an important question: is it possible to overturn the Kerrigan decision by electoral or some other means? There are indeed options, none of which, I hasten to say, has any chance of success absent divine intervention. However, before we even begin to explore political or legal options, we do well to take stock of the new realities. Do we really understand the place at which we have arrived?
In Connecticut, gay marriage will mean a mandatory and total acceptance of homosexuality in all spheres of life. Make no mistake: this represents the true end of the long and deliberate process of divorcing society from its Christian underpinnings. We must realize that there is no longer any sense at all in which we can say that Christianity is the animating principle of government or society in Connecticut, or any other place where there is homosexual marriage.
Think about it: in half a lifetime, homosexuality has gone from being an aberration and a psychiatric disorder not frequently discussed in polite society to being on a par with heterosexual marriage. Indeed, a new form of tolerance demands that we view it as such, but this new “tolerance” is not tolerance at all; it is intolerance of all who dare question the new orthodoxy. Thus the crafters of the new orthodoxy have become the intolerant bigots they accused Christians of being. If recent events are any guide, homosexual activists will not be willing to surrender what they have gained over the last 40 years. Indeed, the acceptance of homosexuality will now be enforced with all the machinery that the State has at its disposal. Religious conscience will be steamrolled in nearly all cases, as we are already seeing in the case of justices of the peace.
The full effects of this have not been seen yet in Connecticut, as they have in Massachusetts. The language of civil rights, now just as fully applicable to homosexuality as it is to matters of race, will mandate indoctrination of children and trump all rights of parents to guide their children’s education. Exaggeration? Not at all. In Massachusetts, the schools openly promote homosexuality and parents can neither opt out nor even be notified!
Christians are now a minority in matters of morality despite whatever numerical majority they may still enjoy. The court system, having severed itself from our Constitution, has become inimical to the faith. The sooner we will simply grow up and face this the better off we will be. Notice I did not say that there is no Christian influence, or remnant of Christians in the region. However, it is past time that we woke up. Just this month we have seen that even Californians, famously liberal, voted against homosexual marriage when they had a chance. Perhaps their familiarity with in-your-face homosexual activism pushed them over the edge. So is there hope? Yes. Will it require new approaches, new mindsets, and new tools? Absolutely.
Having said all of that, what options do we have?
Connecticut does not have any right of initiative such as Californians have to propose and create amendments to the Constitution or State laws. So scratch that option right at the outset.
One option would be for the Connecticut Supreme Court to overturn its own decision in Kerrigan. While anything is possible, this seems highly unlikely given the deference that judges give to their own precedents. The Court would have to adopt the reasoning of the dissenting justices over time and acknowledge some error, some change in society’s views, etc.
Could someone appeal from this decision to the Federal Courts? Extremely unlikely, as the Federal Courts do not like to interfere with decisions from the highest court of a State which interpret that State’s Constitution. They taught us in law school that States can always recognize more rights than the Federal government, and this is one of those cases. Incidentally, this means that even if a Federal Defense of Marriage Amendment were passed Connecticut might still have gay marriage, depending on how it was worded.
Another option is a convention which could amend the Constitution. There are two ways to call for a Constitutional Convention. First, as we saw this year, the voters must be presented every twenty years with the option to vote for a Constitutional Convention. Since we’ve just seen this question go down in flames, we will not get another chance at this one until 2028! A second way would be for the Legislature to vote for a Convention. This requires a 2/3 vote of each house of the Legislature and cannot take place less than ten years after a previous Convention. Again, this option is only to have a Convention, and does not guarantee what would take place at the Convention. See Article Thirteen of the State Constitution here.
Yet another option, by far the quickest and easiest in some ways, would be for the Legislature to simply pass a Constitutional Amendment. However, in our current political climate (and Connecticut being the State with the lowest percentage of Evangelicals), this would pose great difficulties. The Sixth Amendment to the State Constitution provides:
Amendments to this constitution may be proposed by any member of the senate or house of representatives. An amendment so proposed, approved upon roll call by a yea vote of at least a majority, but by less than three-fourths, of the total membership of each house, shall be published with the laws which may have been passed at the same session and be continued to the regular session of the general assembly elected at the next general election to be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November in an even-numbered year. An amendment so proposed, approved upon roll call by a yea vote of at least three-fourths of the total membership of each house, or any amendment which, having been continued from the previous general assembly, is again approved upon roll call by a yea vote of at least a majority of the total membership of each house, shall, by the secretary of the state, be transmitted to the town clerk in each town in the state, whose duty it shall be to present the same to the electors thereof for their consideration at the next general election to be held on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November in an even-numbered year. If it shall appear, in a manner to be provided by law, that a majority of the electors present and voting on such amendment at such election shall have approved such amendment, the same shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as a part of this constitution. Electors voting by absentee ballot under the provisions of the statutes shall be considered to be present and voting.
Let me put my lawyer glasses on. As I read it, this is potentially a multi-year process, approved by 3/4 of the Legislators (or at least 1/2 of them and then 1/2 of the Legislators from the next session) and then submitted to the voters afterwards.
Is it really possible that Connecticut voters can apply enough pressure on their State Legislators, some of whom are openly gay, to make this last possibility become a reality? There’s only one way to know, and that’s to try it. In California this squeaked by. What would happen here?
Today was the first day of homosexual marriage in Connecticut, in case you missed it… the press is having a field day and there are reactions aplenty. An AP report brought us down to New Haven City Hall:
Outside City Hall in New Haven, bubbles and white balloons bounced in the chilly autumn air as well-wishers cheered the marriage of Peg Oliveira and Jennifer Vickery .
Despite the roaring traffic and clicking cameras, “it was surprisingly quiet,” Oliveira said after the brief ceremony. “Everything else dissolved, and it was just the two of us. It was so much more personal and powerful in us committing to one another, and so much less about the people around us.”
According to the state public health department, 2,032 civil union licenses were issued in Connecticut between October 2005 and July 2008.
But there was no comparison between civil unions and marriage for Robin Levine-Ritterman and Barbara Levine-Ritterman, who obtained a civil union in 2005 and were among eight same-sex couples who sued for the right to marry.
“We didn’t do it with pride or joy,” Barbara Levine-Ritterman said of getting the civil-union license. “It felt gritty to be in a separate line.”
On Wednesday, however, she proudly held up the first same-sex marriage license issued in New Haven as about 100 people applauded outside City Hall. She and her betrothed, who held red roses, plan to marry in May.
“It’s thrilling today,” Barbara Levine-Ritterman said. “We are all in one line for one form. Love is love, and the state recognizes it.”
Manchester Town Clerk Joseph Camposeo, president of the Connecticut Town Clerks Association, said clerks in the state’s 169 communities were advised by e-mail shortly after 9:30 a.m. that they could start issuing marriage licenses to gay couples.
The health department had new marriage applications printed that reflect the change. Instead of putting one name under “bride” and the other under “groom,” couples will see two boxes marked “bride/groom/spouse.”
Love is love! I assume that by this Ms. Levine-Ritterman means that as long as two people “love each other” they should be permitted to marry. We have been brought to this point by the false equations and false dichotomies put forward by a movement which has taken every advantage of society’s lack of moral courage and inability to perform critical thinking.
The result will be mass confusion in our society, particularly among the young – a confusion fostered by their elders, as evidenced by the new boxes marked “bride/groom/spouse.”
As mentioned earlier, Connecticut voters refused to approve a Constitutional Convention which could have overturned gay marriage in our State. California voters, dare I say owing to their greater familiarity with both the style and the substance of the homosexual activist movement, appear to have handed a tremendous victory to pro-family forces across the nations. Today’s Wall Street Journal says:
Proposition 8, which would establish marriage as a union between a man and a woman, passed with 52.1% of the vote, against 47.9% opposed, with 94.6% of precincts reporting. The approval marks a stunning upset in a $70 million campaign that just weeks ago looked to be running in favor of preserving gay marriage rights.
The passage of Prop 8, as it is known, would be a major victory for religious conservatives seeking to ban gay marriage in other states, and a crippling setback for the gay rights movement nationwide.
Indeed. But what to do in States such as ours or Massachusetts, in which the right to gay marriage has been enshrined as a matter of State Constitutional law? When the highest judges in the land, elected by none and accountable to none, can create such a right as God made the world – out of nothing – and the people have no remedy available to them, what can pro-family forces do?
The fact that a “liberal” State like California, known for its large and very influential gay population, has spoken against gay marriage speaks volumes. As the FIC Blog points out today, some 30 states have already voted to protect marriage as it has been traditionally understood.
And what’s wrong with that?