Religion – Page 46

Finding My Religion

This makes me want to start going to church again.

Unity Fellowship Church, housed in a gray former warehouse in East New York, is the New York outpost of the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, the only Christian denomination explicitly set up to serve gay, bisexual and transgender members of minority groups. Unity, founded in Los Angeles in 1982, has 12 churches nationwide, including two in New Jersey – one in Newark and another in New Brunswick.

(…)

A gay church in a battered neighborhood led by a black minister with AIDS may sound like something dreamed up by a politically correct screenwriter. But Unity is the very real, raucous spiritual home for hundreds who feel cast out by traditional churches, which for many people serve as the heart of the community and an extension of the family.

“There are churches here and there” that welcome gay worshipers, said Gerard Williams, an assistant minister who teaches the Sunday school course on homosexuality and the Bible at Unity, “but ain’t nobody going to love you like we do.”

Too bad it’s in East New York. Luckily there are lots of progressive churches (and other houses of religion) all over NYC. If you know of any good places of worship (in NY or elsewhere), feel free to leave their info in the comments.

I heart Mass

Because they *heart* marriage equality.

The Catholic Church? Not so much. They’re preoccupied with their homo witch-hunt, apparently looking to oust anyone with deviant tendencies from the priesthood after the well-publicized child sex abuse scandal. Nevermind, of course, that attraction to children and homosexuality are two very different things, and the disproportionate number of boys being molested likely speaks more towards access than proclivity. The Church is potentially even getting rid of the gays who haven’t been sexually active for more than a decade (or ever). Which is interesting, given that the Church requires gays to live “chaste” lives. So what about the whole “love the sinner, hate the sin” thing? Not applicable anymore, I guess.

One Nation Under God, Revisited

A month ago I wrote on Ethan’s experience reciting the pledge in his kindergarten classroom.

Last week when Ethan started kindergarten, I was concerned about a great number of things, one of which was him knowing that no matter what any authority or law says, his rights do not stop at the school doors. When a friend reminded me that all Indiana children in public schools have to stand and recite the pledge every day at school to an American flag whose presence is mandated in every classroom, I made a point of discussing this with Ethan, simply to let him know that he had a choice of whether or not to stand with his classmates and make a pledge he certainly doesn’t understand.

I explained it as simply as possible without even touching on the religious complaints against the pledge. Our country is at war overseas, I told him, and some people with a lot of power believe that saying the pledge will make us love our country more and support the war. But, I told him, I think it’s silly to think that a pledge will make us love our country when there are plenty of other things to be grateful for, and just so you know, Mama doesn’t support the war. You can say the pledge if you want to, but it is your choice. No one can make you say it and no one can make you not say it.

I don’t care about “under God.” I care that my child is being asked to conform to an ideal he knows nothing about.

Since then I have spent several days in two local high schools, substitute teaching and gearing up for my student teaching. In both schools, the pledge is tacked on to the beginning of the daily announcements, with a short moment of silence that no one observes between the pledge and the call-out for the FFA. In the more urban school, half of the students participated, half did not. In the more rural school, everyone at the very least stood up and faced the flag.

As per usual, I didn’t say or do anything during the pledge. I got the feeling that both teachers and students found this time, as well as the endless string of announcements, an intrusion of sorts.

I had planned on blogging about this earlier in the week, but forgot until Alley Rat sent me this story (bugmenot: joe_user/123123):

A federal judge declared the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools unconstitutional Wednesday in a case brought by the same atheist whose previous battle against the words “under God” was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court on procedural grounds.

U.S. District Judge Lawrence Karlton ruled that the pledge’s reference to one nation “under God” violates school children’s right to be “free from a coercive requirement to affirm God.“

As I indicated in the original look at the pledge in Ethan’s school, it isn’t so much the phrase “under God” that gets me, it is the coersion of saluting a symbol the children don’t fully understand because of a jingoistic state mandate.

That said, I think the judge has a lucid point. The pledge is indeed an affirmation of God, one god, one kind of god. Not explicitly informing the children of their right to not affirm god and nation in the public schools is coersive, exactly why I told my boy he had a choice.

Why Buy the Cow?

Well, first of all, if I were to buy a cow, I’d want to make sure I got one whose milk I enjoyed. It would be pretty unfortunate to purchase a cow with no prior knowledge of said cow’s milk, and end up dehydrated and unhappy.

But my thoughts on this whole issue aren’t quite as eloquent as Hugo’s, so check out his post, which is sex-positive from the view of a married heterosexual progressive Christian male. He does a great job of pointing out the inherent sexism to the “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free” argument, and dismisses a lot of conservative claims (“Back in the day, people waited till they were married,” “Waitng until you’re married makes you less likely to divorce,” etc).

I have to say that as a Christian, a married person, and as a man, I find the notion that women ought to withhold sex in order to convince men to marry them to be profoundly objectionable. It certainly reflects a very limited view of men, women, and the nature of marriage! It also ignores what I think is the real reason for falling marriage rates: not sex, but economics. As more and more middle-class women become financially independent, more and more of us of both sexes can choose to be “picky” about whom we marry. We can make it on our own in a way that earlier generations could not; that means that marriages are more likely to be reflect our romantic and spiritual choices than our need and our dependence. On the whole, I tend to think that’s a good thing for both men and women.

and

I’d go so far as to suggest that for those of us raised in a more sexually tolerant and affluent culture, when we go to the altar with our college degrees and our IRAs and our own set of past physical experiences, we can offer our new spouse the radical assurance that we are truly marrying them for who they are, not for what we will finally be allowed to do!

Word.

If you want to get married, that is. Or as one commenter added, Why buy the pig when all you want is a little sausage? Ha.

Muslims are Nazis, kind of. Let’s declare war on them.

Total lack of historical knowledge, anyone?

Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.

Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.

Now, wait a minute — weren’t the Nazis appealing to a sense of supposed tradition and rightful ownership of Germany, that Jewish and other non-Aryans couldn’t possibly have had? As far as I know, Nazis weren’t an immigrant group, they were quite the opposite. So… wouldn’t it follow that an immigrant group couldn’t really pull that card outside of their own country?

Well, we’ll just ignore that little problem and move right along, because, Nazis or not, these Muslims are really becoming an issue. Luckily, Tony Blankley has a solution : That’s right, it’s another WWII!

World War II was good, despite the millions of deaths, the limitations on daily lives, the encroachment on peacetime liberties and the arduousness of wartime life. The war was good because the sacrifice was for a noble cause, for the perpetuation of America and the American way of life.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism is an equally good war — and for the same reasons. We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamist aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II.

Women: Ruining the World

Because Judeo-Christian values are apparently experiencing a major devaluation, women suddenly have power — and now they’ve gone off and ruined everything. Oh, and Christianity’s oppression of women is reason #22 why it’s really fantastic.

Who lets these nutjobs publish this shit?

Judeo-Christian values do not conflate equality with sameness. But the Left rejects any suggestion of innate sexual differences. That is why the president of Harvard University nearly lost his job for merely suggesting that one reason there are fewer women in engineering and science faculties is that the female and male brains differ in their capacities in these areas. A secular liberal who advocates affirmative action based on sex, Harvard’s president nevertheless also has — or had, until his humiliation at the hands of his faculty — a belief in seeking truth.

And the truth is that men and women are profoundly different.

One of these differences is that women generally have a more difficult time transcending their emotions than men. There are, of course, millions of individual women — such as Margaret Thatcher — who are far more rational than many men; but that only makes these women’s achievements all the more admirable. It hardly invalidates the proposition.

Women (except for Margaret Thatcher) are crying emotional wrecks who should not be allowed to handle anything that requires “rationality.”

To say that the human race needs masculine and feminine characteristics is to state the obvious. But each sex comes with prices. Men can too easily lack compassion, reduce sex to animal behavior and become violent. And women’s emotionality, when unchecked, can wreak havoc on those closest to these women and on society as a whole — when emotions and compassion dominate in making public policy.

Why do women’s emotionalities go unchecked? My best guess is because men aren’t doing their part (animal behavior, violence, etc). And as a sidenote, who would you rather have in charge: A crazed animalistic brute, or a compassionate but overly-sensitive person? Hmmm.

The latter is what is happening in America. The Left has been successful in supplanting masculine virtues with feminine ones. That is why “compassion” is probably the most frequently cited value. That is why the further left you go, the greater the antipathy to those who make war. Indeed, universities, the embodiment of feminist emotionality and anti-Judeo-Christian values, ban military recruiters and oppose war-themed names for their sports teams.

Here’s where I’m confused: Since when is “feminist” the same as “feminine”? I thought we feminists were all combat-boot-wearing baby-hating bull-dykes? We don’t have “compassion”! We just want to wage war on men!

In the micro realm, the feminine virtues are invaluable — for example, women hear infants’ cries far more readily than men do. But as a basis for governance of society, the feminization of public policy is suicidal.

Ah yes. That mystical feminine gift of being able to hear. I’m so glad that God made the sexes inherently equal by giving men all the power, and granting me the ability to know if a baby is screaming. This sure makes me proud to be a Christian.

Pandagon has more.

Quiet War On Abortion, Plus Dems

The Dems are signing on for their support of national Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers (TRAP laws). If the acronym is new to you, here is a background:

For years, the anti-abortion movement has pressed its case with noisy demonstrations that blocked clinics, with high-profile legislation that directly challenged the U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, and in some cases with violence, including the assassination of physicians. But 28 years after Roe, with public support of abortion rights running high, the movement has adopted what might be called a stealth strategy: to chip away at abortion rights, slowly and discreetly, with low-profile legislation and lawsuits that stop short of trying to outlaw the procedure.

The new tactic is to bombard providers with a barrage of costly rules. In addition to the civil-liability law, Louisiana has tried to slap abortion providers with extra-stringent building codes that regulate everything from the width of hallways in clinics to the angles and jet types for drinking fountains. Abortion opponents want to create small, expensive obstacles that cumulatively make it harder for clinics to offer services—or, in the words of one right-to-life leader, to create an environment “where abortion may indeed be perfectly legal, but no one can get one.” Not only does the tactic have the benefit of generating little public attention, but it also allows anti-abortion activists to couch the issue in terms of a woman’s welfare—for example, the right of a patient to sue her physician for unlimited sums.

“This is certainly one campaign that’s gaining increasing popularity as a way to hammer at abortion providers: to do it under the guise of caring about women’s health,” says Linda Rosenthal, a staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Law and Policy in New York. “That’s a pretty palatable starting point. Of course, everybody cares about women’s health. But the way these regulations translate is onerous.”

The stealth strategy is being deployed nationwide, from Utah to Connecticut. But it’s Louisiana that serves as the incubator for the rest of the nation, the state where anti-abortion activists develop innovative measures to test on a state legislature where Catholics and Southern Baptists predominate.

An attempted example includes a “civil-liability” law that would have allowed any woman who regretted her abortion to sue the providing doctors any time within the ten years afterward, not only for any emotional or physical damages she may have faced, but also for “damages occasioned by the unborn child.” With no limits to the amount doctors could be ordered to pay, one big judgment in favor of a woman who regretted her abortion could drive an entire clinic out of business. In some cases they exempt abortion providers who perform less than some specified number or percentage of abortions in their practices, thus exempting private practices and faulting free clinics.

Other examples that have passed include excluding midwives and nurse practitioners from those qualified to perform abortions, even though their training with abortion is that of a physician. In other cases, they require all private and free clinics that provide abortion to have facilities comparable to a hospital, which are unnecessary to the procedure and often too expensive for clinics to procure.

Plenty of Democrats are in support of these measures, in part because it doesn’t look outright anti-choice to voters undereducated on anti practices, and in part because it sends a coded message of “morality” to anti-choice voters who might vote Democratic. If you’ll notice, all of these Democrats pictured are men, perfectly willing to sacrifice women’s rights and autonomy for political gain.

All of this is so maddening — morality exists in the hearts and minds of people, it cannot be legislated. Keep this in mind as the John Roberts nomination moves toward confirmation. He is no friend of women, no friend of minorities.

via Media Girl

Note to World

The hurricane was not an act of God to punish us.

The Salvation Army conducted an outside religious service that included songs such as “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

“Natural disaster is caused by the sin in the world,” said Maj. John Jones, the group’s area commander. “The acts of God are what happens afterwards … all the good that happens.”

Note #2: Cold-hearted as this may be, this is why I don’t give to the Salvation Army.

In the face of a national disaster, it is difficult not to look for reasons why so many were abandoned or left for dead, but let’s not grow ever more flagrant in our rejection of reality.

C’mon, America. I don’t know why I believe in us much anymore, but let’s get a grip and chuck the fantasies. The god you love is not a god of retribution.

God, Save Us From Looting

The looting in New Orleans wouldn’t have happened if students were taught the 10 Commandments in schools. Cuz that’s the only way to learn that stealing is wrong. Plus, liberals steal, just like the commies. Although, as far as I can tell from the news coverage, looting would be avoided if only there weren’t any black people around. As Lauren pointed out earlier, black people loot. White people find stuff.

Peggy Noonan has a solution to stop looting: “Shoot ’em!” How very Republican and life-affirming of her. The (completely non-) Independent Women’s Forum agrees. (Disenfranchised? Rubbish!) And they pull the tsunami card.

What Really Caused Katrina?

Water vapor, warm air, condensation and wind, you say? Oh you sad, sad blue-stater, you just don’t get it, do you? Courtesty of that science-loving radical right, we now know that hurricanes are caused by evil feminists aborting their babies for fun. Except, well, sometimes they’re caused by the sodomites. And occassionally, it’s boobies and Girls Gone Wild. Many of these same sinners also caused 9/11.

via Ryan.

And in other ridiculous right-wing news, does anyone here read The New York Post? I don’t (I think my 50 cents is better spent elsewhere, like on 1/10th of my coffee), but I do read it over the shoulders of other passengers on the subway (thank goodness for huge headlines, small words, simple ideas and big print!). One thing I noticed yesterday was that all the stories covering Katrina were under the page label “Our Tsunami.” Now, Katrina is a horrific tragedy. But is it really “Our Tsunami”? For one thing, it’s not a tsunami by any stretch. And must the right always co-opt someone else’s tragedy for their own gain? I realize in this case they’re just trying to sell papers, but comparing this hurricane to the South Asian tsunami is entirely innaccurate, totally disprespectful and pretty darn stupid.