Baseball sports writer Dayn Perry over at a CBS sports blog commented on an article that dealt with the state of gay athletes in pro sports.
Like in the New England Patriots' locker room. Earlier this season linebacker Brandon Spikes sent out a tweet claiming to be homophobic "just like I'm arachnophobic. I have nothing against homosexuals or spiders but I'd still scream if I found one in my bathtub."
Spikes later said he was joking. But former Angels outfielder Torii Hunter, among baseball's most thoughtful and intelligent players, isn't kidding when he says an "out" teammate could divide a team.
"For me, as a Christian … I will be uncomfortable because in all my teachings and all my learning, biblically, it's not right," he says. "It will be difficult and uncomfortable."
Hunter is of course entitled to his personal beliefs (although one wonders whether he is similarly affronted by, say, shellfish and neatly maintained beards, which are also forbidden by the holiness code of Leviticus), and when he talks about potential problems within the clubhouse, he may well be correct .......
This is rather unfortunate and a person that writes for Washington Monthly, ESPN the Magazine, The Miami Herald, The Montreal Gazette, Reason, and The New York Sun, and many others should be held to a higher standard. The shellfish arguemnt is often presented as a grand gotcha .
However Christians of all Faith traditions have actually thought about those verses . For instance see here , here , and here all of which is easily available to find within minutes on the internet. It should be noted of course that the Angel baseball player did not even cite what portions of the Bible he was referencing by this seemed of little importance to Mr Perry.
Pro athletes of Faith I suspect in the future will note that Mr Perry might not exactly take the time to take their Faith seriously
That is the feeling I got just after the reading the title of his blog post Religious liberty for businesses: Protected freedom or excuse to discriminate? . I will return to that blog title later on.
Scott Alessi looks at the Hobby Lobby case ( where he thinks the CEO 's wealth is important for some reason to point out ) , and a group of people that are having religious libertyobjections to providing some type of services as to same sex marriage ceremonies. In particular he talks about a certain Trolley company woes.
Let me note before proceeding further that the New Mexico photographer case he cites in passing has other major First Amendment concerns that stand apart from the religious liberty claim, For that see
Amicus Brief in Elane Photography v. Willock (the New Mexico Wedding Photography Case) whose signers all support the right of same-sex marriage rights by the way.
It seems he is a tad more open to the Hobby Lobby problem though he states both " illustrate just how easily fighting for a company's "religious freedom" can cross the line".
In the article he puts "religious freedom" and "religious liberty" in scare quotes but note he does not put the word "rights" in scare quotes in that last paragraph. He also declares that these folks would not be " supporting or condoning same-sex marriage by extending the same service he already provides to same-sex couples ".
Well it appears they disagree. Let me add there is a also sort of odd belief in the Separation of Church / Faith and work that we see from time to timel urking around here.
He ends his piece :
Religious liberty is undoubtedly a valued freedom that should be protected. Just how far it extends into the business world is an issue best left for the courts to determine. But when it comes to denying rights to employees or customers, lets drop the "religious liberty" argument and call it what it really is: discrimination.
Well that is fair to a certain point. There is a facet of religious liberty that allows discrimination. There unprotected discrimination and protected discrimination. There is just discrimination and unjust discrimination.
However today the word discrimination is used sadly in a much one sided way. In fact at the recent controversy at Tufts University the fight against discrimination was being used to discriminate against other and to try impose a new required Orthodoxy. See Can Tufts Handle Religious Pluralism? from F.I.R.E. .
A good place to perhaps gets some need empathy or understanding is Prof Rick Garnett article Confusion About Discrimination at Public Discourse. I recommend that piece. In fact I recommend his full Law Review on the subject here .
After discussing just and unjust discrimination Prof Garnett states:
The near-universal, if sometimes unreflective, conviction that “discrimination” is wrong means that assertions of religious freedom are sometimes heard as requests that political authorities tolerate a wrong—i.e., “discrimination”—which they would otherwise prohibit, penalize, or discourage. Such requests then raise the question of whether it is “worth it” for the authorities to do so—that is, whether doing so would complicate too much the government’s own projects, or conflict too glaringly with its values. And so, when they are granted, accommodations are regarded all around as concessions. Sometimes, to be sure, we do and probably should think about honoring rights in terms of protecting, or simply tolerating, a liberty to do even the wrong thing (so long as the wrong thing is not too wrong). Our free-speech decisions and doctrines provide many examples, including the Supreme Court’s recent rulings protecting depictions of animal cruelty, hateful funeral protests, and over-the-top-violent video games.
We should not forget, though, that one dimension of the freedom of religion is, sometimes, precisely the freedom to “discriminate,” and that this freedom should be protected not simply because such discrimination is an all-things-considered tolerable wrong—sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t—but because it is inextricably tied to something good—a human right—and is, sometimes, beyond political authorities’ legitimate reach.
I noted at the beginning I was not thrilled with the blog title that the Editor at U.S. Catholic used.
I am not sure that most people that have religious liberty concerns are looking for an " excuse " to discriminate against gay people. They serve gay people all the time in the course of many parts of their normal operation of business.
However they still think there is a difference in serving a person of same sex attraction lunch versus participating and using their talents to enhance the celebration of a same sex union.
I do not suspect bakers are foregoing selling birthday cakes to people that have same sex attraction. Though some might again have problems participating in enhancing the rites of a same sex union with a wedding cake.
In other words I don't think the assumption should be from the start that people are looking for an "excuse" to pile on a certain group of people , but that they have a real life moral quandary in the VOCATION they are in.
I think a path toward respecting everyone rights and human dignity plus association rights is a distinction between belief versus status or immutable characteristics . As per previous example it would be indeed be unjust to discriminate against a person because they have same sex attraction. An example being again the restaurant refusing to serve people they think are gay would be unjust. The choice not to participate in a public rite of belief such as same sex marriage that also implies some sort of attempted sexual union one views as illicit would be a different matter.
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Coach Holtz from Catholics Come Home on Vimeo.
There is a big write up here and an interview video at CATHOLICS COME HOME AIRS SUPER BOWL-STYLE TV AD
While there are no doubt some low Church Protestants and Evangelicals in Syria most of the population is Orthodox or Catholic. This Get Religion author notes that the writer of this story might not get that. See A boring, non-sacramental Christmas in Syria
This is an interesting article about how there might be fewer young folks at Church those that go are very devoted to it. An observation I have been making in Catholic circles.
See from the Indy Star Millennials at worship services are few but passionate
It is a special day for Deacons I suppose. Vatican Radio has the full text at Pope: St. Stephen, model of New Evangelization
Two articles on the gun control caught my eye today. One is at the Corner Gun Rights, Gun Control, and Irreconcilable Cultural Differences a piece I somewhat agree with.
However related to that at The Volokh Conspiracy see Can We Talk (about Guns)? The whole thing is worth a read but this part really struck me as sound:
Hoffman also suggests the nature of internet discourse cuts against the tolerance of differing approaches to social problems.
My intervention here is to just to point out that the problem we actually have here is one of discourse – we are forced by the Internet to nationalize problems. This makes it much, much harder for local communities to experiment with localized solutions to threats to the moral order. If a community in, say, Connecticut wanted to ban assault weapon clips (because it made them feel safer – let’s put to one side data on efficacy!), Glenn Reynolds would lead a charge against the liberal fascists. Indeed. Heh. Yes. If a community in Tennessee wants to arm its teachers (because it makes them feel safer – let’s put to one side data on efficacy!) Josh Marshall and Andrew Sullivan would call them out as conservative fascists. Or loonies. Or winners of the Moore award. And we’d all get to pat ourselves on the back, but no one would actually get the benefit that law is supposed to provide, which is the helpful illusion that we’re more civilized than we actually are, and that we’re actually doing something to push back against the tide.
That is: a national conversation about guns and violence, facilitated and sped up by the internet, reduces our ability to try out different versions of the good life, and thus diminishes our capacity live together in peace.
I think he has a point. I also suspect this problem is magnified due to a decline in the understanding and appreciation of tolerance as a virtue. Not tolerance as acceptance or approval, but true tolerance. Tolerance as in there is something unpleasant, objectionable, or distasteful that one nonetheless tolerates. And this is brings us back to the problem of cocooning. If we have little interaction with those of truly different viewpoints — those whose entire worldview and starting premises are different than ours — we have a harder time recognizing the goodwill and fundamental humanity of those with whom we disagree. And that means we have a more difficult time discussing divisive political issues and trying to find common ground. So instead we demonize and attempt to marginalize our opponents — undertakings that may make us feel good, but do nothing to improve the situation.
Wriiten by the founder of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty that is a doing a lot of good work. See When Christmas Was Banned in Massachusetts -For the Pilgrims, Dec. 25 was not a day for 'gaming or reveling in the streets.'.
This past year we have seen the media put " religious liberty " in scare quotes and frame the HHS contraception mandate as fight over birth control or even a war on contraception. We saw how Andrea Mitchell of NBC took it upon herself to go after the Komen CHARITY because they would not fund her buddies in Planned Parenthood.
Now we have this from Howard Kurtz himself !! :
There was certainly a media agenda during the battle for civil rights in the late 1950s and 1960s. Television helped shine a spotlight on Alabama Gov. George Wallace and other Southern politicians who were fighting to preserve a segregationist society. News organizations were accused of being liberal, but they were on the right side of history in exposing practices that were fundamentally wrong. Rosa Parks’s refusal to move to the back of the bus would have been for naught had the media not made her a symbol of racial injustice.
In more subtle fashion, the media have led a national conversation about gay marriage, which as recently as 2004 was deemed politically unthinkable. Now it is legal in nine states, the last three of which adopted new laws in popular referenda last month. Again the press was accused of taking the liberal side, but sometimes that consisted of interviewing newly married gay and lesbian couples, who didn’t seem threatening to anyone. Whether the media changed the culture or lagged it, they were not missing in action.
Read the whole link.
No matter what your views are on gun control what Kurtz is saying should perhaps raise some alarm bells. It might be different if the United States had a real advocacy media like we see in Europe perhaps. That is various media outlets in the print world take and present the news through a certain viewpoint. However in the United States we don't have that. In fact there are few cities left that have more than one newspaper nowadays.
Events like this remind me more and more why I supported the Citizens United Supreme Court opinion. It's a necessary counterweight to the media folks that because of their First amendment rights are able to to basically lobby ( as Kurtz admits they are doing ) while other are handicapped.
I was doing Christmas shopping today and now just hearing the news that Robert Bork has passed on. Mirrors of Justice has a few links up as well one that is about his conversion to the Catholic Faith.
Update- Austin Ruse has a piece up too see Robert Bork: From Atheism to Christian Faith
I was twittering with Grant Gallicho who is an associate editor of Commonweal magazine, about the background that led the Louisiana voters to approve this rather significant gun rights amendment this past fall.
I have been thinking on this but the last few years has led to flurry of gun rights legislation in the State of Louisiana. They include being able to carry a gun Church and having a Louisiana lets celebrate the 2nd Amendment sales tax holiday each year . These laws and others led to the vote this past fall where Louisiana residents now has the strongest protection of gun rights in the nation perhaps enshrined in their governing document.
However the question is what started this train of pro gun rights bills ? I think most observers of the scene would reference perhaps a huge misstep by the Government. That was the seizure of guns from New Orleans residents during Katrina .
The reaction to many Louisiana citizens was just pure astonishment , and I am pretty convinced that event led to the laws and amendments I cite above.
It appears we are going to have another gun control conversation. ABC news was in full gun control mode tonight. The social media is all abuzz too.
Gun control proponents need to be wary. Many proposals that I am hearing don't seem to be that narrowly tailored to fight a specific problem. It's probably true that to some extent New Yorkers are from Mars and residents of some other States are from Venus. Seizing weapons might in lets say from a New Yorker point of view be very sensible in wake of a hurricane like New Orleans. However as we see others did hold that viewpoint .
If proposed gun control laws are not narrowly tailored I think you can expect a lot of communities to react by enacting very pro gun rights legislation.
The whole net result of this Congress must do something movement might be far less gun control in the end not more.
Justice Scalia recently walked into I what it hink is a very faux controversy at Princeton recently. Instapundit recently seemed to have the the same problem when he posted "What is the gun community going to do about this tragedy?"/"I dunno. What is the gay community going to do about Penn State?" .
Law Prof Ann Alhouse went into all this at Why are people having so much trouble understanding rhetorical devices?
I thought at Instapundit one remark that was posted as prety apt :
Wait, is garage mahal actually so stupid that he can fail to see a reductio ad absurdum right in front of his nose?
I’ll try once more to explain it.
InstaPundit thinks that it would be absurd and ridiculous to blame all gays for the minuscule percentage of gays who are serial rapists. His whole point depends on us seeing just how ridiculous that would be. He is trying to get morons like AF and garage mahal to understand that is equally ridiculous to blame all gun-owners for the minuscule percentage of gun-owners who commit mass murders. But some lefties are so in love with the idea of calling all gun-owners and NRA members and Republicans mass-murderers that they are unable to understand a simple analogical reductio ad absurdum.
I think Althouse does a pretty good job pointing out how Scalia was using a reductio ad abusrdum for legal purposes.
Its a siogn of the times that education has gone downhill so much people can't grasp a reductio ad absurdum when it happens. It more shocking that people that do then act like they don't get to the argument in order to frame the speakers points in a deceptive way
Catholic Vote has Think the HHS Mandate Won’t Hurt Non-Catholics? Think Again.
The politics of this are so infuriating. It really does not seem to be that much of deal to make the HHS Contraception mandate compliant with the "Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 and have real conscience protection safeguards.
In fact in the big scheme of things it is likely such acts would very little decrease in the availabity of contraception. Yet some folks are dug in and this is the result.
I think you can expect to see more and more of these lawsuits in the future especially from the Laity.Its actually my feeling that many Dioceses sort of maintain a sort of different reporting standard as to Laity and Clerics in this regard as to avoid perhaps lawsuits of this kind. I have no hard data on that but again just a feeling based on the number of LAY allegations we are seeing in the annual sex abuse audits.
As to how we balance all these interests and maintain child saftey while not lightly calling people's reputations out I am not sure. No easy answers from where I am standing
Religion Clause has Volunteer Barred From Working With Diocese Youth Sues For Defamation .
I followed the United Methodist 2012 General Conference this year pretty closely via the social media. That was pretty easy to do because it seems at both their gathering UMC delegate folks are very good with things like twitter and blogs to keep people aware of what is happening.
The UMC is part of the American Mainline that is trending in the opposite direction of many it's sister mainline congregations. That is as it's sister mainline bodies trend more "progressive" in theology the UMC is trending in the opposite direction.
The main reasons for this are :
- It is a truly a world wide faith community with a great number of members from Africa and Asia
- These non USA members actually to a certain degree have their demographic fairly represented in the UMC as to votes at the Convention.
- These non USA Methodist are now aligned with the more traditional American Orthodox faction of the UMC.
This last convention was hot. There were issues relating to gay marriage and blessings , to resolutions on Israel, to major reforms of the UMC structure itself among many other things..
My main interest was the pro life and religious liberty aspects of what would be voted on. In particular there was going to be a move to have the United Methodist Church sever ties with the very radical Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC) . That took on added importance this year to me as the RCRC was a huge advocate of the HHS Contraception mandate . In fact the RCRC was upset the mandate did not go far enough and go into the four walls of the Church itself !!
John Lomperis over at IRD has an excellent four part series on how the efforts to stop this were successful. See Why Was the 2012 General Conference So Unproductive and Dysfunctional?
To make a long story short advocates of the RCRC and pro choice movement were in full panic mode after the first week of voting on several matters. It was clear that the UMC relationship with the RCRC was going to be in deep trouble.
So what did they do. They made sure to delay and delay to to run out the clock so this important discussion would not happen.
From Part 2
I was an observer of the Church and Society #2 legislative committee, whose leadership was extremely liberal. The chair was the Rev. Molly Vetter, who appears to be active in the California-Pacific MFSA chapter. I observed the sub-committee chaired by Rev. Kennetha Bigham-Tsai, an outspoken supporter of the Common Witness Coalition, and a very passionate defender of abortion (the subject of many petitions in her sub-committee). In both the sub-committee and full committee, the respective chairs managed the discussion in such a way that they nearly ran out of time to address a petition to end our denomination’s formal affiliation with the militantly, uncompromisingly pro-abortion political group, the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC). Both Bigham-Tsai and another delegate at different points tried to have an RCRC-supportive church official come and lobby delegates under the pretense of “providing information.” In the sub-committee, when a delegate suggested that such testimony be balanced by hearing from the Rev. Paul Stallsworth, the head of Lifewatch (our denomination’s pro-life caucus) and an elected Jurisdictional alternate delegate, Bigham-Tsai falsely claimed that that was not allowed.
Having now been to the last three General Conferences, I can say that the Rev. Bigham-Tsai’s leadership was by far the most heavy-handed and blatantly manipulative that I have seen of any legislative committee or sub-committee chair. The majority of the sub-committee’s bioethics-related petitions would have at least nudged the UMC in a life-affirming direction. But this was contrary to the values of Bigham-Tsai, who successfully prevented most of these petitions from ever being discussed by insisting on devoting the first several meetings to very, very lengthy and needlessly repetitive personal sharing by delegates about “their hearts,” by calling needlessly frequent and early breaks, and after she did not like the way some votes were going, launching into an angry, self-righteous, and not completely coherent tirade about how she suspected that something nefarious was afoot. In the debate over revising the UMC Social Principles’ somewhat muddled statement on abortion, the Rev. Bigham-Tsai tried to strong-arm the sub-committee into hastily accepting, as a starting point, the language of the only one out of the seventeen relevant petitions that would have moved that statement in a more liberal rather than life-affirming direction, thus needlessly injecting a time-consuming fight over process. She used her power over the petitions’ order of consideration to crassly manipulate sub-committee delegates into ultimately giving up on even considering the majority of petitions that would have moved the UMC in a more pro-life direction, because of the hope she teasingly held out that they might get to consider RCRC if they had time.
This effort continued to the very last day as we see in this part :
DeLong and company also demanded that petitions to end our denomination’s scandalous affiliation with the strident Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (a move the relevant committee had supported in a decisive, historic vote) be labeled “sexuality-related” and moved to the back of the agenda with the other tabled petitions. Despite the strong objections of renewal leaders and even some relatively fair-minded liberal denominational officials, the Agenda Committee agreed to classify RCRC as “a sexuality issue.” The committee had also decided to overrule the anti-RCRC petitions’ original “global” classification in order to treat them as “U.S.-only” issues, even though: they dealt with a global denominational agency, UMC leaders from Africa, Europe, and the Philippines were outspokenly eager for the General Conference to pass them, and they involved a resolution that explicitly mentions “international” issues, the United Nations, and South Africa. Under the new rules, classifying RCRC as a “U.S.-only” issue provided a useful pretext for demoting these petitions’ priority. Moreover, the relevant legislative committee chair, Rev. Molly Vetter, used her position to have the anti-RCRC petitions deemed low priorities. Throughout the final day, DeLong and her allies sought to intimidate delegates and conference leaders by being very visibly primed and ready to fulfill their threat to forcibly shut the General Conference down in a THIRD illegal protest so that delegates would be unable to even discuss RCRC. But the anti-RCRC petitions were far enough down on the agenda list (albeit not at the very end as DeLong had demanded) that the Agenda Committee expected that there would not be time to get to them, EVEN IF it had not been for the eleventh-hour chaos caused by the Judicial Council’s striking down the compromise restructuring plan. And indeed, time ran out for plenary consideration of RCRC, which gave the bullying protesters what they wanted.
And thus the convention "ran out of time" to discuss the matter
The good news though is there are good signs now that their game plan has been exposed pro lifers might be much more successful the next time this issue comes up at their General Convention.
See Conversations: Stanford’s Religious Liberty Clinic .
Of Catholic interested it is noted his mentor was Professor Mary Ann Glendon at Harvard and he is a former Law Prof at Ave Maria School of Law.
This is a very good story about the family behind the Drury hotel chain and their Catholic Faith. See Drury Hotel founder says faith, family shape business decisions
At the very end of the article the HHS Contraception mandate :
Although he is pro-life and objects to the mandate, his company is subject to it because it is considered “secular” by the government, despite the fact that it is a private family company.
Drury said that he has sent out notices that the company – which is self-insured – will not comply with the mandate and is in the process of pursuing a legal challenge to it.
“We will not participate in payments of any kind” that oppose Church teaching, he said.
As you can see their hotel holdings and properties are pretty vast.
May I suggest people stay at Drury when traveling
Vatican Insider notes it seems the same ole policy is going to be still the policy still. This should not shock people since China's Western and very Christian trading partners will not object too loudly it appears.
See China: New government, same anti-religious hatred
They will be playing some 1700 times in English, Cantonese and Mandarin in the Archdiocese of Vancouver . The The B.C. Catholic has the story at Archbishop hails 'wonderful' ads slated to run on City TV, CTV, Global & Omni
Because as recent events at Vanderbilt University not only is our ox going to be likely gored it always HAS BEEN.
F.I.R.E , one of the leading advocates for rights of speech and association on colleges campuses ( both private and public ), has a great overview of the situation at Tufts University that has escalated somewhat the past few days. See Can Tufts Handle Religious Pluralism? .
It could be Tufts today and places like Tulane tomorrow and that is just the private University threats.
I have gone to great lengths to post on how I think many of these proposed anti sharia laws are a threat to religious liberties. The irony is of course it sets precedent that might affect Christians more.
See Michigan Catholic Bishops Oppose Anti-Sharia Bill .
This is a very interesting comment coming the United Kingdom's Womena and Equality Minister from remarks she said on the radio.
“I can be absolutely clear to you, when it comes to issues of adultery and consummation those are issues that relate to heterosexual marriages. What they won’t be doing is relating to same-sex marriages, but there will be clear protections in terms of grounds for divorce for individuals who are in a same sex marriage, that will be unreasonable behaviour, that’s exactly as it is under civil partnerships at the moment, so clear protections in there, but clearly there will be some differences.”
HMMMMM
The Ugly Vicar has more at "Thou cannot commit adultery" - the (theo)logical impossibility of 'equal marriage'
"unreasonable behavior" what is that ?
When the tragic death of Savita Halappananvar in Ireland came into the news I decided to take a stand back approach for a while.
The reasons for that are :
-I find some of Europeans press to be a tad sensational on their first reports of these matters
-There is also a brand of advocacy journalism in Europe with newspapers taking different positions in reporting that is not always apparent to Americans
-if it involves the Catholic Church it is even more sensational
-If it involves the Catholic Church in Ireland reported by Irish Press the current climate dictates caution
Also it did not take long get indications that not all was it as seemed perhaps.
One thing I found quite odd was how quick this was leading the American Network news as their lead story. It turns out there is a lot more to this story than we knew and now it involves some journalism ethics !!
Get Religion has a look at this abortion controversy and provides some good links at Savita’s tragic death and media ethics .
The question is now shall we see updates from all those American networks who seemed to be taking the pro abortion forces talking points as the facts.
