social justice — Page 12

Via Andrew Sullivan, who links to a New Zealand paper:

The Conservative Jewish movement, the faith’s American-based middle ground between liberalism and orthodoxy, is nearing a leadership decision that seems likely to permit openly gay rabbis and same-sex unions.

The Rabbinical Assembly Committee on Jewish Law and Standards which last tackled the issue in 1992 meets in New York next week, its 25 members reviewing an issue that has already rent many Christian churches and simmers across Judaism.

“The way it looks, it will be decided on a more liberal understanding of the law,” Rabbi Irwin Kula, president of the National Jewish Centre for Learning and Leadership, told Reuters. “It would be a very big, big surprise if that’s not the case.”
…
A gay pride rally in Jerusalem this month met with stormy protests and finally unfolded in a small stadium under heavy security. But Israel’s highest court also has ruled that homosexuals who marry abroad may be registered as married in the country.

There are perhaps 6 million Jews in the United States, only about a third of them affiliated with a congregation. Of those who do attend synagogue 38 per cent are Reform, 33 per cent Conservative and 22 per cent Orthodox, according to one survey.

Rabbi Kula, author of Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life, said the move toward liberalisation among Conservatives “is not something that came down from the top. It came from Jews in the pews … Jews who had homosexual children and wanted them to be rabbis.”

Rabbi Gerald Zelizer of Neve Shalom, a Conservative congregation in Metuchen, New Jersey, a former president of the Rabbinical Assembly who is a contributing columnist for USA Today, said in an essay in that newspaper this year that he backed the 1992 position but now had a different view.

“Conservative Judaism has always taught that we must upgrade our biblical understanding with new scientific knowledge. Contrary to the biblical assumption that gayness is a sinful choice, our best knowledge today indicates that it is as determined and irrevocable as blue or brown eyes …” he wrote.

Hermeneutics in action. I, for one, am glad to see this move. I’m looking forward to my PC(USA) getting it, someday, when we realize that, yes, God creates you with a sexual orientation (yes, sometimes on a sliding scale), and that God creates most of us to live out the fullness of our life in intimate relationship with another (though some of us, regardless of orientation, have no such desire and live celibate lives). When we as a church come to see that, then this matter about ordination will be simple. Then we can see how blessing same-sex couples to lasting, intimate, reciprocal relationships can be important, a responsibility, and a gift for the couple, for the culture, for the church. And how realizing this will not decimate our view of either God or the bible, any more than our rejection of slavery or the full inclusion of women in all teaching ministries of Christ’s church did. And how these, in fact, led to fruitful reappraisal and renewed appreciation for scripture, not less. So much so that almost all Presbyterians (of the PCUSA variety) now read the bible with new eyes and reject readings that support slavery or subjection of women. I’m still waiting on those PCA folk, but I’m not holding my breath…

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News this morning that prominent conservative “evangelical” (in scare quotes because of my earlier caveats with that word, since I’m using it here to denote a form of American right-wing Christianity) Ted Haggard has been caught in a sex scandal. This pastor of New Life Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and president of the National Association of Evangelicals ostensibly has been regularly soliciting sex from a male prostitute.

Its not looking very good for Haggard:

Haggard, 50, initially denied the allegations, telling 9News Wednesday night that “I’ve never had a gay relationship with anybody, and I’m steady with my wife. I’m faithful to my wife.”

But KKTV in Colorado Springs reported that New Life Associate Senior Pastor Ross Parsley told a meeting of church elders Thursday night that Haggard had met with the church’s overseers earlier in the day and “had admitted to some indiscretions.”

Parsley told the elders that Haggard had said some of the allegations were true, but not all of them.

This is a fast breaking story, and these are currently just allegations. But if true, Haggard will be the second high-profile “defender of traditional marriage” (read: against marriage and/or same sex union rights for gays and lesbians) to be exposed as homosexual in the past several months. Like Foley before him, this will stun the religious right. And maybe it should.

There’s something deeply troubling about people denying who they are and feeling forced to live a lie. Let me be clear, I’m not sure that’s the case here. And these people are all fully responsible for their behavior. I know that Foley was molested as a child, and that’s likely a catalyst for his behavior. But what the Haggard and Foley cases have signified for me, as well as the recent book tour by ex-Governor of New Jersey Jim McGreevey, is just how wrong it is for us to continue to suppress gays and lesbians and to try to make them into something they are not.

Andrew Sullivan has long been an advocate for these things. I think he’s right on in his assessment today:

I’m afraid I feel for Haggard. This is what happens to a man psychologically and spiritually destroyed by actually advancing a lie he knows to be a lie about homosexuality as a “chosen lifestyle” while being gay himself.

… Denial is a very powerful psychic force. When combined with addiction, it can fuel destructive behavior. In a human being, it can destroy a person, a family, a marriage, an entire life.

One more obvious lesson: The religious right’s lies about who gay people really are must end. Surely now. The victims are also Christians like Haggard. They are countless kids and teens in places where they are taught to hate themselves, and subsequently act out the psychic damage years later. I am not saying Haggard isn’t morally accountable for everything he has done, for the lies he has spread, for the hatred he has enabled. That hatred will now come back to him, like the sorcerer’s apprentice whose magic of electoral homophobia soon overwhelms him as well. It’s brutal pay-back, as it was for Foley, as it often is for every closeted gay man in the end. In the end, their lives lose integrity; and they know it; and then misery; and they feel it more than anyone. I’m praying for Haggard, as I hope he is praying for me and every sinner. But the lesson of this to the religious right surely is: go and sin no more. Stop the lies. Stop the bigotry. Deal with the reality of gay people, our souls, our wounded hearts, our humanity, our right to be treated equally by our own government. It’s what Jesus did. And it is your true calling now.

So there you have it. Oh, and also of somewhat tangentially related note, Bill Tammeus has an interesting comment on Pastoral Care to Homosexuals on his blog. For the record, Bill and I share a similar exegetical understanding of scripture with regard to homosexuality.