Arguments Against Gay Marriage

I’m not sure how this first came to my attention (h/t to whoever shared this in Google Reader), but it’s a pretty grand summary of the arguments against full equality for gays and lesbians when it comes to marriage:

(by Patrick Farley)

Seven Reasons Barack Obama Is Not a Christian

That’s right, it’s all a diabolical plot.

Reason #1: Obama Believes There Are Many Paths to Heaven
Reason #2: Obama Denies the Authority of the Bible
Reason #3: Obama Supports Homosexuality (rather hilariously, the still shot excerpted from the video on this page, directly under this Reason, is a picture of Obama with his arm around Rev. Jeremiah Wright)
Reason #4: Obama Supports Abortion
Reason #5: Obama Affirms Muslim Prayer
Reason #6: Obama is Associated with Black Liberation Theology
Reason #7: Obama Has No Bona Fide Christian Testimony

Tolerance of other religions, skepticism about the Bible, outrage at injustice, support for equal rights and individual rights… good grief, Obama sounds like a Christian Humanist or something.

h/t Hemant

Two Approaches to Unity

The Christian Chronicle–long the flagship publication of Churches of Christ, the denomination of Christianity in which I grew up–has an interesting review up of a collection of essays on unity and the Stone-Campbell Movement.

Long story short, the Church of Christ grew out of the Restoration or Stone-Campbell movement, a movement early 19th century American Christianity to “restore the first century church”. One hallmark of the Church of Christ (that in some places has faded as parts of the CoC veer closer to ‘mainstream evangelicals’) has been that believers see their body as the Church. They don’t think there should be division in the church, so calling them a “denomination” is considered an insult. And they often self-identify only as “Christians” and would never start off by saying they’re members of the Church of Christ. Likewise, a publication like the Christian Chronicle is called just that, and not the Church of Christ Chronicle.

This theological identification has frequently been accompanied by a condemnation to hell of anyone outside this fairly narrow (a few million people worldwide) Church of Christ. That (blessedly) is one common tenet of belief that has faded somewhat for many members of the CoC, at least in the US.

Anyway, here’s an excerpt of the Christian Chronicle review of One Church: A Bicentennial Celebration of Thomas Campbell’s ‘Declaration and Address’:

The variety of the essays and meditations in the collection will attract some readers and trouble others. The contributors write out of their separate Stone-Campbell contexts, with the authors from each stream speaking in a way that suggests the concerns of their particular tradition. Readers among Churches of Christ — and in a similar way, Christian Churches — may bristle at how widely Session throws open the door to the kingdom.

There are basically two ways to achieve “unity” in an organization where people of differing consciences disagree. The first is to exclude all those with even moderately different views, condemning them as hell-bound outsiders. We could call this the judgmental approach. The other, tolerant approach, is to accept that, faced with imperfect information, people will disagree.

Death by Scientology?

Anon For Great Justice writes “What Scientology will probably do about the tragic death of Jett Travolta“:

We have as yet no firm information on Jett’s medical condition. John Travolta and Kelly Preston have only publicly spoken of their son’s having had Kawasaki Syndrome, an unlikely source of seizures, for which they treated him with Scientology’s vitamin, sauna, and running therapy known as the Purification Rundown. There has also been considerable speculation on whether Jett was autistic or had Asperberger’s Syndrome. While a confirmed diagnosis has not been made public, reports of Jett’s behavior make such a diagnosis more likely than not. At the very least, he suffered some sort of neurological impairment that contributed to his fatal seizure.

The death of a child, for whatever reason, is a pain that for most families lasts a life time. No other human loss is as devastating. What makes this loss even more tragic is that it may well have been preventable. His death is inextricably embedded in the beliefs, practices, and even more, importantly, the organizational practices of the Church of Scientology and it’s use of “deployable celebrity agents” as sociologist Roy Wallis calls them.

So, we don’t have enough information to really know what happened with Jett Travolta yet. But, it’s fair to say that the inanity of Scientology has claimed at least a few other lives. From Andrew Sullivan:

We rightly understand sexual abuse to be horrifying and a legitimate reason to intervene. But withholding vital medication from a child out of religious or ideological reasons strikes me as no less abuse. I’m reminded of this acutely by the case of Christine Maggiore, a woman I met and interacted with as another person with HIV. Christine adamantly denied that HIV was related to AIDS and refused anti-HIV medication on those grounds. She died last week. Of AIDS. That was her choice, it seems to me, however tragic it is.

What was also her choice, however, was to refuse anti-HIV meds when pregnant and then to refuse HIV meds for her daughter when she was born. Eliza Jane lived three years before succumbing to HIV-related pneumonia.

Saying “Push” in Mandarin

So now that I’ve got that whole college thing out of the way, I can finally start cleaning, sorting, and packing for the big road trip to the new home ahead, and doing more reading. Lord of the Flies (which I had never read) is first on the list. And a whole bunch of stuff from the New York Times. Like this one:

Over the following months, Dr. Gregorius learned many things, including how to deliver babies while saying “push!” in Cantonese, Mandarin, Russian and several languages he had never heard of. He learned that Chinese people brought babies into the pediatric E.R. between 11 p.m. and midnight, apparently after restaurants closed, that Pakistani babies showed up between 3 and 5 a.m., when cabdrivers changed shifts, and Hasidic babies seemed to arrive at 10 p.m., for reasons no one could explain. He knew it seemed like stereotyping, but that’s when a sudden rush of sick babies would arrive each night.

Case Studies in Ignorance

#2 article on the Chicago Tribune’s website:

Did you hear about the state legislator who last week blasted a Lutheran minister during a committee hearing for spewing dangerous religious superstitions, and then attempted to order the minister out of the witness chair on the grounds that his Christian beliefs are “destroying what this state was built upon”?

Of course you didn’t, because it didn’t happen and would never happen. Not to a Christian, not to a Jew, not to a Muslim or to anyone who subscribes to any faith.

OK, so that’s a bit of an overstatement. Something like that would happen, but it would definitely cause outrage from many, many areas.

Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony. . .and told him, “What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! . . This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God. Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.”

For the record, Rep. Davis attends Trinity United Church of Christ, the same place Obama attends. Someone please remind me why Obama (an otherwise an excellent candidate) should go to this church, or how he ever saw political benefit from being a member there?

A Straight-Shooting Questionnaire

This questionnaire is for “self-avowed heterosexuals” only.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
I’m pretty sure I was born this way, but how would I know?

2. When and how did you first decide you were a heterosexual?
Well, I guess I’ve just always been attracted to girls.

3. Is it possible your heterosexuality is just a phase you may grow out of?
Possible, but how can you ever know at the time? I’m just living my experience as I know it now.

4. Could it be that your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
Quite likely. Look at where I go to school!

5. If you’ve never slept with a person of the same sex, how can you be sure you wouldn’t prefer that?
Um.. body hair?

6. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did they react?
My friends and parents know, and they’re mostly understanding.

7. Why do heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into their lifestyle?
Why don’t you stop beating your wife?

8. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Can’t you just be what you are and keep it quiet?
I was thinking of starting an annual parade actually.

9. Would you want your children to be heterosexual, knowing the problems they’d face?
Probably not. The dilemmas of rejection from the gay community and ethical questions concerning having children are just too great a burden to bear.

10. A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual men. Do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual male teachers, pediatricians, priests, or scoutmasters?
Probably not. We really shouldn’t let children be around men at all given these stats. That’s why I advocate schools, hospitals, churches, and scout troops with all female leaders.

11. With all the societal support for marriage, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
It’s hard being an oppressed majority.

12. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
Because we can make babies. Deal with it.

13. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?
Birth control?

14. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don’t you fear s/he might be inclined to influence you in the direction of her/his own leanings?
I just don’t trust therapists in general.

15. Heterosexuals are notorious for assigning themselves and one another rigid, stereotyped sex roles. Why must you cling to such unhealthy role-playing?
Patriarchy.

16. With the sexually segregated living conditions of military life, isn’t heterosexuality incompatible with military service?
Probably so. I prefer the Sacred Band model.

17. How can you enjoy an emotionally fulfilling experience with a person of the other sex when there are such vast differences between you? How can a man know what pleases a woman sexually or vice-versa?
It’s probably not possible. We’re all doomed to live lives of disconnected, ambivalent oblivion.

18. Shouldn’t you ask your far-out straight cohorts, like skinheads and born-agains, to keep quiet? Wouldn’t that improve your image?
I ask them all the time, but I can’t control how they live their lives. If they want to get married to just one woman, and try and raise children who are only straight, who am I to stop them?

19. Why are heterosexuals so promiscuous?
See #12.

And then there are some more…

h/t Ian.

Quoting King

I’m currently reading Shane Claiborne’s Irresistible Revolution. I’m sure I’ll blog on it more fully once I’ve completed my leisurely perusal, but for now I’d like to highlight some quotes Shane brought to my attention. These are from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “A Time to Break Silence,” a speech given on the Vietnam war in 1967 at a meeting of “Clergy and Laity Concerned” at Riverside Church in New York City. MLK’s concerns went beyond his (incredible) devotion to civil rights in our country, to an even broader view of social justice. And it’s always good to reflect on values that should bring rich and poor, Christian and humanist, theist and athiest together.

[It became clear that the war in Vietnam] was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools.

Funny how these words still ring true today:

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government.

And here a call for a brotherhood of man, rooted in King’s own Christianity, though it could as easily be read as a call for a global humanism (in fact, King might have been closer to that than most of the Christians we know):

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls “enemy,” for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

King also has this quote from a Buddhist leader on the war in Vietnam:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

If you will, rephrase that quote for me with Iraq in mind instead of Vietnam (not the analogy is a perfect one, but analogies never are… this particular quote however makes a useful point):

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Iraqis and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.

And here he waxes prophetic. One could make the same claim today about US militarism:

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality…and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing “clergy and laymen concerned” committees for the next generation.

And another gem:

On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

And here’s another quote, though this time I’ve replaced “Communism” with “terrorism”:

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against terrorism. War is not the answer. Terrorism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative antiterrorism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against terrorism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of terrorism grows and develops.

Letter to a Christian Educator

Something special has come into my possession. A student who goes to a private, conservative, Christian school I’m familiar with got upset about some of his terrible liberal professors (all of whom are intelligent Christians who hold at least one position said student simply can’t fathom) and wrote a letter to the president of the university. For some unknown reason, the student then felt compelled to post the letter online for all to see (bragging about his conservative chutzpah, maybe?). Then he got cold feet and removed it… but Google cache is a cruel master and preserves such humorous nuggets in perpetuity. (Edited for brevity and anonymity, but the substance remains accurate.)

This is a copy of a letter I recently sent to [Christian U President] and some other [Christian U] big wigs…. I would encourage all of you to write a letter of your own on any of these issues that concern you. Feel free to copy and paste any of my letter to use in your personal grievance to the “powers that be.”

“Dr. [Christian U President]:
I am a current [Christian U] student and will be entering my junior year of college this fall. With that said, you should be aware that I have encouraged my classmates to also write with their similar concerns.

Oh, I’m sure the comments are a-flooding in.

Dr. [X]’s online journal is where most of his [Christian U]-hating is done… However, there several inappropriate displays outside of his office, in which he mocks [Christian U] and Conservatism. His comments in class have also been insubordinate and inappropriate.
This man is very clearly anti-[Christian U], anti-Conservative and, in my opinion, anti-American.
Regardless of your personal political views, regardless of the political values held by [Christian U]: this is an embarrassment to our school… What kind of message is being sent about [Christian U]?

Wait? A University can hold political values? It’s an embarrassment to have teachers who don’t all think and teach like zombies?

Many have yelled “freedom of speech” in defense of [X]’s comments, but I do not think his Constitutional rights can save him on this one. As you are aware, he is obligated to uphold the standards and principles held by [Christian U]: after having sat under his teaching, I am afraid he is failing miserably.

This student was probably either sleeping or fuming in anger that anyone could think differently, or think to judge America by the same standards as the rest of the world. In fact, I would say said professor’s views on politics flow more understandably from his faith than said student’s views. If I may speak for him, this professor sees himself as a Christian in an unjust world, and finds it as necessary to buck the trend of big “C” Conservatism when it doesn’t line up with his faith.

The day after learning of Dr. [X]’s outlandish comments…I was blown away by comments made in my Biology class. Dr. [Y], my teacher, told my class that there is overwhelming evidence that shows homosexuality is genetically inherited. After making this large, outlandish, sweeping statement, he proceeded to change subjects. I very politely raised my hand and asked if he would show us some of this “overwhelming evidence.” Dr. [Y] then responded, “If you want to add an extra week to this class, we might have time. Are you interested?” I politely responded, “No, I am not interested—I don’t believe it. I just think that’s a BIG statement to make and not show any evidence to back it up.” Dr. [Y]’s response was a simple “ok” and the discussion was over.

The unfortunate thing about general education science classes is that those who are incapable of understanding specific research (due to ignorance of science and unwillingness to consider arguments) are fed conclusions they will simply brush off as ideologically suspect, and the professors often do not have the time to discuss the evidence. This is sad because it misrepresents the process of science while maintaining its conclusions. That said, an extra week of class probably wouldn’t suffice to give this student the background needed to understand (and certainly not trust) such findings.

This is not my first conflict with the science department: in Spring 2006, Dr. [Z] presented the idea of the “Big Bang,” Evolution, and “Millions of years” to my Geology class. I should have written this letter then.

These concepts were likely introduced from the “here’s what most scientists think happened” perspective, not the “this is true” perspective. I should note that Dr. Z is what could be classified as an Old-Earth Creationist. I understand that he believes the Earth is billions of years old, that some species evolved and such, but that humans were a special creation. What’s the problem with that?

These occurrences, along with the showing of Al Gore’s propaganda film “An Inconvenient Truth” in the [auditorium] last semester, have led me to a place of discontent. While the spiritual mindset seems to grow more and more close-minded, the political tolerance on this campus is out of control! Why is it that the religion of environmentalism is promoted…?

Yes! Down with this Godless tolerance! Down with Godless environmentalism! Let us take the Creation and rape it to fulfill our own lust for wealth, oil, and dead Arabs! (Did I mention this student is pro-anything-military? Yeah).

I am not an administrator; I do not claim to know how to fix these problems. I only know that [Christian U] is not the same place it was 2 years ago when I stepped onto this campus. Attending this school has been a GREAT financial burden on me and my family, but it is a burden I have gladly carried—until this point. My parents have often encouraged me, saying, “We know [Christian U] is expensive, but it’s worth it. Public education is full of liberalism and corruption, but [Christian U] is an alternative.”

I wish I had a transcript of that conversation.

I’m not here to say that [Christian U] is corrupt; I simply feel shortchanged. I could receive a liberal, worldly education for one third of the cost at any public university. That is not, however, what I desire: I want to be educated by Christian brothers and sisters, in a Godly manner.

(I don’t see how any of the professors previously mentioned act in an ungodly manner, promoting things like free inquiry, science, evidence, etc.)

Please work to resolve these issues. Dr. [X] has gone unchecked for years—he needs to be controlled. As for Dr. [Y] and Dr. [Z], I’m sure they feel they can say anything “in the name of science,” but I think they are mistaken. There is a higher standard; there is a higher entity than science.

The last paragraph is really my favorite. It’s one thing to disagree with God’s politics (the Right-Wing side, not Jim Wallis’ book), but quite another to say things in the name of science. God forbid that we look at the evidence objectively and consider what it supports or does not support.

Welcome to conservatism.