Federal lawsuit seeks to overturn Massachusetts homosexual marriage

Rev. John Rankin of the Theological Education Institute has filed a lawsuit in a Federal District Court seeking to overturn the regime of homosexual marriage that was imposed on Massachusetts by its Supreme Judicial Court.

As someone who practiced law for nearly 15 years, I can tell you that his argument is extremely interesting and very fine. In essence, Rankin says that the Massachusetts Judicial Court has destroyed our concept of unalienable rights and thus our system of Constitutional Law by declaring that classes of people possess rights, not individuals. In American law, individuals possess unalienable rights for they have derived them from the Creator.

Goodridge violates the nature of personhood as defined in the Fourteenth Amendment, where the unalienable rights of life, liberty and property are ascribed equally to all persons, as individual persons, and not due to membership in any given group, whether objectively or subjectively defined, whether fixed or malleable in declared nature.

The class of people who would engage in same-sex "marriage" is not even a true class of people, as it is "malleable" or changeable. The result has actually been to destroy the rights of others and create "super rights" before which all others must yield. Thus, while claiming it was upholding rights, it has actually destroyed all rights by making them alienable. The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court did this without even considering what it was doing with respect to Federal Law and our Federal Constitution. The result is that courts or legislatures can create new rights according to the whims of the season.

Under current federal law (e.g. Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act), civil rights, congruent with the Fourteenth Amendment, cannot, nor ever have otherwise been assigned to a malleable identity, to subjective choice. Goodridge thus rewrites federal law, and without examining the issue. If such malleability and subjectivity were consistently applied in this context, there would be no boundaries in place to restrict the possibility of consanguineous, polygamous or group marriage. And beyond this context, if applied consistently, malleability of individual and group identity for the sake of perceived government benefit opens up a Pandora’s Box which Balkanizes civil rights.

Notice what Rankin is saying: under the current regime, there is no brake or impediment to a government legalizing incest, polygamy or group marriage. I can't say what success Rev. Rankin will have - in this political climate, probably none apart from a Divine intervention - but I believe he has posed important questions, questions which no one seems to be articulating or which at any rate no one has dared to argue where it might count.

Do you have your "Jesus glasses" on?

If a public high school teacher were to say to his students, "When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can see the truth," you can bet the American Civil Liberties Union and others would say that the teacher was promoting Christianity, that it was a violation of the separation of church and state. And the school administration would probably agree.

But what if a public high school teacher tells his students that "When you put on your Jesus glasses, you can't see the truth"? Isn't that essentially the same thing? Isn't disparaging a certain religion in a public school classroom just as legally improper as promoting a certain religion?

Interesting stuff regarding a Federal lawsuit against a high school teacher.

Flickr photo by Ben Ostrowsky; some rights reserved.

How can you make sure people leave your church this Christmas?

Sadly, this is an all-too-common example of the rhetoric that drives people from churches. The Rev. Dr. Gary A. Wilburn of New Canaan, Connecticut says:

“When I hear language like, ‘You can’t be saved unless you accept Christ as your personal savior,’ I know that it is usually sincere and heart-felt. But what it most likely means is ‘We are on the inside and you are on the outside. Ours is the only true faith. If you do it our way, you’ll have better access to God than the followers of Buddha or Mohammed, or Mary Baker Eddy, or Charles Darwin, or the ‘inner light,’ or whatever, We welcome everyone into God’s family as long as you’re willing to become like us,” he said.

“That kind of insular theology makes Christianity a religion of exclusion, not inclusion,” Dr. Wilburn added. “A far cry from the universality of which the Bible speaks when it claims, ‘There is one God who is father of all, over all, through all and within all,” and “God is love, and anyone who lives in love, lives in God and God in him [or her].’ As a progressive Christian, I see in Jesus the true image and likeness of God. For me, Jesus is the face of God, the heart of God, the way of God. Jesus shows me what a life full of God looks like. For Christians, Jesus is our access into the realm of God. But at that same time I recognize the faithfulness of other people who have other names for their access into God’s realm. Because at the end of day, I believe that God is bigger than any of our ideas about God.”

But what if there actually was a revelation from God that told us what God thinks about things and, particularly, about Himself, who He is and what He is like?

At the risk of sounding rude: Attention! People go to Christian churches because they want to worship God through Jesus Christ. When liberal Christian theologians stop castigating people for - well, for believing what it is that Christians believe, they may be able to reverse the trends of departure and demographic winter in their denominations.

Can you shake the hand of a Jew?

I received this commentary from Glory of Zion:

"So they served him [Joseph] by himself, and them by themselves, and the Egyptians who ate with him by themselves, because the Egyptians could not eat bread with the Hebrews, for that is an abomination to the Egyptians" (Genesis 43:32; emphases ours).

The verse above was included in the Torah Reading for this week, and released in us a corresponding note to a bizarre happening at the recent "Annapolis" conference. Referring to her childhood as an African American girl in the segregated American South, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying, "I know what it is like to hear that you cannot go on a road or through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I understand the feeling of humiliation and powerlessness." Yet at the conference, bowing to Saudi demands, the Americans refused to allow the Israeli delegation to enter the hall through the same door as the Arabs. The Israeli Foreign Secretary Tzipi Livni was reportedly required by Rice to instead enter the conference hall through the service entrance. At a meeting of foreign ministers, Livni was driven to explain, "Why doesn't anyone want to shake my hand? Why doesn't anyone want to be seen speaking to me?" This at a conference to which Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries had been invited for "contributions" they might have towards furthering peace between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.

In fairness, I'm aware from other reports that Ms. Rice also drew parallels between her childhood sense of terror and the Israelis' fears of terrorism, but why should the U. S. government bend over backwards to legitimize the hatred of Jews?

Faith and Science at Yale

An interesting look from the Yale Daily News at creation, evolution and intelligent design. (Note the term "worship team" in quotes. A good reminder to Christians that people really don't know us.)

A “worship team” sang praises of the Lord, while professor Fred Sigworth prepared do his best to reconcile the demands of faith and the demands of science.

“God of wonders beyond our galaxy / You are holy, holy / The universe declares your majesty / You are holy, holy,” the crowd intoned.

After the introduction by the Yale Christian Fellowship’s worship team on Friday, Sigworth launched into a lecture that stressed the compatibility of science and faith by focusing on the idea of the “unexpected vista,” the discovery or witnessing of a unique occurrence, a phenomenon which he said was common to science and religion.

Sigworth’s talk spanned the foundations of modern science and the debate over evolution and intelligent design, with ample reference to philosophy and the Bible.

“Being a Christian is good preparation for work as a scientist, and science can help prepare you for being a Christian,” he said.

Click here to read the rest.

The best social program we ever had was the DAD

In the office of the DAD they had phones like this one

The DAD.

That's not an acronym. It's Dad. Your Pop. The Old Man. He was the best social program we ever had, back in the day when we had them - and only one, mind you, not two.

In an article entitled Urban Pathology And Distance, Don Pesci nails it:

If the root cause of urban pathologies is to be found, as some analysts have suggested, in partial family structures – single parent households abandoned by fathers, or those in which fathers never were present – then a solution to the pathologies must include a restoration of more adequate social structures.

What is the possibility that architects of social policy, including politicians and legislators, will in the future dedicate themselves to writing laws and policies that encourage the formation of traditional family structures, remembering that such legislation must include sanctions that discourage less successful forms?

To ask the question is to answer it. There are many powerful political interests arrayed against such a restoration, and politicians are not celebrated for an excess of courage in opposing powerful and politically well connected interests. Children in the cities are the victims of such timidity, not to say cowardice; and however much money is thrown their way, they will continue to be victimized by a system of sanctions and rewards that is blissfully unconcerned with families and convinced – despite clear evidence to the contrary – that it is possible for a village to raise a child in the absence of honorable, loving and working fathers.

Bingo. Read the whole thing here.

Photo by Bill Gantz. Some rights reserved.

Obama attacks the Religious Right

(Is there a Religious Left? Just wondering.)

FIC's Peter Wolfgang nails this one, which I'm sure wasn't difficult for him:

...Obama is peddling one of the cultural Left’s most deeply held lies here. Christian conservatives are not the aggressors in America’s culture wars, we’re the ones playing defense...

The cultural Left thinks the grassroots rebellion that has risen up against their assaults on faith and family is simply the result of “so-called leaders” cynically manipulating a malleable public. That says more about the Left’s own low regard for their fellow Americans than they realize.

Rearranging the furniture on the deck of the Titanic

Powerful commentary by Canon Gary L'Hommedieu on the Episcopal Church and the destruction of that church and society in general by guilt-driven leftists: I'm Guilty: You Repent - The Spiritual Impulse of Liberalism.

This is not fluff; it is real meat, and deserving of your time. Here's a statement of the problem:

If anyone thinks the present spiritual malaise is mainly about The Episcopal Church, or mainline Christianity in America, then I daresay they're naïve about spiritual warfare - not to mention reality outside their window. The demons that have ransacked TEC (to take a single example) are the same ones which have targeted the West as a whole. Indeed, the assault upon orthodox Christianity only makes strategic sense as part of a massive assault upon civilization as we know it.

The Episcopal Church makes an important study as a group that sold itself to play in a high stakes game before it was clear what the game was. Here we see the promiscuous quality of the affluent American Left that emerged from the Viet Nam era. The time was an eschaton of sorts. Here at last was a generation uniquely qualified to fix and save everything that was broken or oppressed, and it literally jumped into bed with any cause that promised a moment's notoriety.

Here at last was the generation qualified to overhaul a 450-year-old liturgy - one universally acknowledged as embodying the spirit of a global communion. That was just the beginning. From now on the visionaries would declare open season on any aspect of the church's tradition that could be tinkered with in such a way as to leave signs of their tinkering, all in the name of "liberation".

What's driving their tinkering?

Today's liberals live a pretty good life, and they feel bad about it. They have more of everything than any generation before them, and they sense this is unfair. But rather than repent and become Gandhians, they remove Christmas trees from the village green, or put bike lanes on four or five roads in their town. They might tighten up rules on what people can eat, drink, or smoke, and when. Are these the abuses that have been crying out for redress for the welfare of the community? Probably not. More likely they are the result of conscience-stricken busybodies scanning the horizon for opportunities to impose their heightened awareness on others.

Don't forget the name of the disease: I'm guilty; now you need to repent.