Archive for March, 2004

Mennonites on voting

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 22, 2004
in Christianity and Politics
. 0 Comments

One of the things that made me wary of the Mennonites was the traditional practice of obstaining from voting. Most Mennonites in this country now do vote, just as most drive cars and have abandoned all distinctive dress. But there are those who still believe that Anabaptists should stay out of civic affairs. Here’s an article in Mennonite Weekly Review about a recent forum on the subject.

Here’s a summary of the “no-vote” side:

John Roth, professor of history at Goshen College and author of Choosing Against War, presented a case for abstention from voting in the upcoming presidential election.

“Love of the enemy is at the heart of our faith,” Roth said. “We would do well to remember that when we vote for the president of the USA, we are voting for the commander-in-chief of the armed forces.”

Roth believes the differences among presidential candidates are illusory. Any candidate will have an America-first perspective, which is problematic for Anabaptists whose primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ.

“Not voting shows our children that we are citizens of an international kingdom, the kingdom of the body of Christ,” Roth said.

Roth said not voting does not mean retreating from civic life. He said political involvement means caring about the community. Relating to foreigners, welcoming the homeless and being advocates for victims of domestic violence are all political acts.

The argument for casting votes went thus:

Keith Graber Miller, professor of Bible, religion and philosophy at Goshen and author of Wise as Serpents, Innocent as Doves, said Mennonites moved toward political activism when they encountered “the least of these” as they served in America’s cities and in other parts of the world.

“We began to understand better what happened when our government had certain kinds of policies and practices,” Miller said. “We came home from that service and shared those stories. Mennonites were driven to speak to Washington.”

His faith prompts him to vote in local and national elections.

“I feel called to participate in the process of selecting leaders, all fallible to the core, who’ll have an impact on caring for the least of these in the U.S. and around the globe, all the while realizing that Washington is not the center of the universe,” he said.

I like that phrase, “all fallible to the core.”

The myth of evangelical unity on homosexuality

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2004
in Christianity and GLBTQ
. 8 Comments

Rudy Carrasco links today to this lengthy and thoughtful piece on homosexuality by well-known pastor Gordon Hugenberger. It’s a readable summary of contemporary conservative evangelical thought on the subject of homosexuality.

It includes tough stuff like this:

Despite the lack of explicit teaching from Jesus on the topic of homosexual practice, I think we can safely infer that Jesus condemned it in any form.

But it also includes this:

I do want to emphasize that I do NOT consider homosexuality to be worse than any of the zillion sins I commit every day. In fact, it is tribute to the infinite grace and mercy of God that the sanctuary roof stays up each day that I walk into the room. In any case, we are not on some kind of crusade to single out those who may be dealing with this issue. Although I want the liberty to be honest with the Bible and to address this topic from time to time, I have no intention of so stressing it that the many homosexual guests and visitors who are not interested in changing will feel put off or unwelcome (or at least no more put off or unwelcome than the many materialists who are not yet interested in changing).

Oh, I do like that last parenthetical aside. If all conservative evangelicals would see materialism as a sin worthy of being preached against, American Christianity would be a darn sight healthier. I disagree with Hugenberger, of course, but I like the way this particular pastor refuses to prioritize it as the “great social issue of our time.”

But at the start of his essay, Hugenberger does make the serious mistake of arguing that evangelicals in America are monolithic on this issue:

If we take the National Association of Evangelicals, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, Campus Crusade for Christ, Navigators, the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the Evangelical Theological Society, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Trinity Evangelical Seminary, Denver Theological Seminary, Phoenix Theological Seminary, Bethel College, Calvin College, Wheaton College, Gordon College, World Relief, World Vision, Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship, Christianity Today, Focus on the Family, etc., as well-known organizations which are representative of the convictions of the mainstream of Evangelicalism in America today - ALL of these groups in official documents or writings by their leaders of which I am aware universally reject homosexual practice (NOT homosexual orientation) as a departure from the will of God. The same is true, at least to my knowledge, for every single Evangelical denomination in America or elsewhere in the world…

(Gosh, you would think someone higher up at Campus Crusade for Christ would have asked me to step down as adviser to the Pasadena City College chapter by now, given my well-known stance on homosexuality. Funny, the kids in C3 on my campus seem quite unconcerned…)

Well, the good pastor isn’t entirely fair in the way he constructs his list of what constitutes American “mainstream evangelicalism”! I note the conspicuous absence of Fuller Seminary (probably deliberate, given the stance of some of the faculty there on homosexuality) and my own Mennonite Church USA (which certainly thinks of itself as evangelical), not to mention my dear friends at Christ Chapel of the Valley. Above all, I would refer pastor Hugenberger and his fans to the ministry of Evangelicals Concerned.

In the house of evangelicalism, there are many rooms. And in some of them, it is possible to be committed to Christ, to be committed to Scripture, and to be committed to affirming gay folk and gay relationships — all while retaining the same degree of intellectual consistency and theological fidelity exhibited by Hugenberger.

Busy, and the difference between being “looked at” and “being seen”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 19, 2004
in Feminism and Teaching
. 0 Comments

It’s an unusually busy Friday, and I have little time to blog. I came to campus for still another meeting on the consensual relationships policy I am helping to draft. Little progress was made.

I’ve got 13 journals from my women’s studies class to grade. I ask my students each semester, at the beginning of the course, if they consider themselves to be feminists. 2/3rds usually say “no”, they aren’t. Of course, we don’t define “feminist” until much later in the course! But something seems to be turning. This year, over half of my students said “yes”, they were — the first time in the nine years I’ve taught the course that I’ve gotten that high a number of positive responses. I’ll be interested to see how this semester plays out. Here’s one response I really liked, and which seems to sum up the theme of this year’s class:

…am I a feminist? To put it simply, yes I am. I am a strong believer in sisterhood. I want to be seen and not just looked at. I want people in general and men in particular to start looking past women’s exteriors and just glimpse for once what’s inside…

I always make that looked at/being seen distinction on the first day of class. I’m glad it seems to be resonating this semester more than usual.

Back to work.

More gems from Rate my Professors

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2004
in Ratemyprofessors
. 1 Comment

Here are two gems from my students at Rate my Professors:

First the laudatory: Very ethus. a/ history. His lectures stay w/ u. U’ll appreciation Hist. because of this class.

Thanks, I appreciation it.

And then the damning: B-o-o-o-o-ring and old-fashoned!!!

Well, any reader of this blog can tell you exactly how “old-fashoned” I am. Glad someone finally saw the light.

Mel sees the light?

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2004
in People, Politics and War
. 3 Comments

The Gutless Pacifist links this morning to this Sydney Morning Herald article in which Mel Gibson questions the war in Iraq:

Actor Mel Gibson has become the latest in a line of celebrities to question the war in Iraq.

The usually-conservative movie star-director said he had been having “doubts” about President George W Bush.

“It’s all to do with these weapons (of mass destruction) that we can’t seem to find, and why did we go over there?” he asked.

Usually a Bush supporter, Gibson said a lot of what the president had done during his term in office had been “good”.

But he said in the WABC radio interview that he had been “having my doubts of late”.

Gibson is riding a new wave of fame at the moment with the massive success of his film, The Passion of the Christ.

Well if a man so infrequently afflicted with doubt as Mel Gibson is starting to wonder about WMD, things really are looking up!

Christ Chapel and evangelical gay Christians

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ and Teaching
. 9 Comments

One of the assumptions folks like to make is that most openly gay Christians are in liberal, mainline denominations, such as the Methodists, the United Church of Christ, or the Episcopalians. When I was teaching gay and lesbian history a few years back, I got to know the good people at Christ Chapel of the Valley (North Hollywood), and their gay pastor, a former Foursquare minister from West Texas named Jerrell Walls. There are several other Christ Chapel congregations in Southern California, and one in Colorado. Their statement of faith is standard pentecostalism, including the belief in immersion baptism, the importance of spiritual gifts like tongues, and the existence of hell. But Christ Chapel is also a welcoming community for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBTQ) Christians — and without flinching, it affirms both the gay community and Christian orthodoxy.

Pastor Jerrell came and spoke in one of my classes in 2002, where he was a hit. What mystified the more liberal members of my class (both gay and straight) was his social and theological conservatism. Christ Chapel conducts same-sex blessings, and has for years; promiscuity is regarded as sin. Fidelity and monogamy within committed same-sex relationships is upheld as the norm and the standard within the community.

Jerrell and his flock are mostly from evangelical and pentecostal backgrounds, and most had tried more liberal Christian churches before discovering Christ Chapel. They don’t want Anglican liturgy or mainline reticence; they want healing services, tongues, folks gettin’ "slain in the spirit", and hands over the head with every praise song. And they want to know that they are okay just as they are, as gay men and lesbians, and that to build relationships of love based upon their identity is not an offense to their God.
I only worshipped with the folks at Christ Chapel once, but was moved by their charismatic, spirit-filled worship service. And because I know that even many people who are "in the know" about gay issues in the church aren’t aware of the growing number of GLBTQ evangelicals and pentecostals, I thought I should share…

It ain’t pretty, but…

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 18, 2004
in Athletics and Fitness, Photos and Vanity
. 0 Comments

catalina.jpg

Here I am at mile 23 of Catalina, embarrassingly pale. I’m smiling because it’s all downhill to the finish from here…

Maggi on being “biblical”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2004
in Christianity
. 9 Comments

A terrific post by Maggi today on those folks who insist that their reading of Scripture is “biblical”. Here’s an excerpt:

…some people use the term ‘biblical’ to indicate (or even authenticate) a specific theological interpretation - e.g. ‘biblical’ is often used to indicate ‘a conservative, evangelical interpretation of the Bible’. To use ‘biblical’ to describe a theological viewpoint, however, is a loaded way of referring to a theology - because it suggests that this theology is “the” theology of the BIble, and therefore the absolute truth, rather than a possible interpretation. But in point of fact, you can draw very different theologies from the same scriptures, all falling within the bounds of orthodoxy; most of the great controversies in Christian history have precisely concerned differing interpretations of scripture. So to use ‘biblical’ to mean ‘the right interpretation’ is actually a loaded, political abuse of the term.

And all God’s people said: “Amen!”

Hugo made dinner!

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 17, 2004
in Feminism, Food, Relationships, Teaching, Vanity and Youth ministry
. 1 Comment

Last night, once I was done working out, I had nothing pressing to do. No meeting of any kind to go to, no class to teach. Between my Monday night classes, regular Mennonite meetings on Tuesday nights, church youth group on Wednesdays, other meetings most Thursdays, small groups on Fridays, and date nights on the weekends, I almost never have a chance to stay home. No Mennonites last night; Hugo was free!

So my girlfriend suggested that I make dinner. Though I may pride myself on being enlightened in terms of my gender studies work, I am a neanderthal in the kitchen. When I lived alone years ago, I once went a whole week eating three meals a day from 7-11. (I even fueled my first marathon with goodness purchased only from that wonderfully convenient establishment). But women do seem — as a rule — to encourage a higher degree of attention to food preparation, and last night was my night.

I came up with the following BY MYSELF. (Well, almost). I sliced up some chicken breasts (which were defrosted in the fridge), threw ‘em in a pan, and sauteed them in olive oil. Added celery and onions (the only veggies in the house), and then every kind of salt and garlic powder I could find in the cupboard (we have lots and lots of strange little bottles of seasoning, I added a pinch of each). I then poured in half a jar of pasta sauce, and let the whole concoction simmer. I made some fettucine, and then poured the results from the pan on top of the pasta. It was a hit! I was proud! Matilde the chinchilla looked on in benevolent approval from inside of her mansion, and my girl was very pleased when she came home: “Honey”, she exclaimed, “this tastes good!” 36 years-old, and never before had I heard those words come from another’s lips in response to my efforts in the kitchen! (Well, I did bake chocolate chip cookies once, back in 1988, and those were a hit with my college roommates).

I also let myself watch television, something I so rarely have time to do anymore. One of my favorite movies of last year, A Mighty Wind, was on HBO, and I laughed and cried through the last half of it. I caught a bit of Larry King, and was reminded of why I don’t like him much.

Today, I’m back to the usual. I’m lecturing on Montesquieu, Voltaire, and Diderot at 10:25. I’m lecturing on Sappho of Lesbos at 12 noon. And at 1:35, I’ll be leading a discussion on 19th-century anorexia, and the similarities and differences between the disease then and now.

Church youth group is tonight, and hosannas shall be sung (or said)! W., the girl in my youth group whom we were sure had lymphoma, was sent home from the hospital after doctors discovered she did not have cancer after all, just an unusually aggressive infection of her glands. That after two major biopsys, a spinal tap, and a bone marrow test. Still, God is good.

Bethany Torode and another kind of teenage pregnancy

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2004
in Christianity, Family, Feminism, Having children, Marriage and Youth
. 3 Comments

Whenever I am feeling counter-cultural (in a rightish sort of way) I assign three essays by Bethany Torode to my students.

The Largest Career of All (2000)
Confessions of a Teenage Mom (2001)
Finding the Center (2002)

They trace three years in this young woman’s life, from marriage to motherhood. An astonishingly mature and articulate young Christian woman, Torode (nee Patchin) sketches a very different vision of feminism, sexuality, and happiness than what we normally read and hear.

In her first article, she wrote this as she contemplated getting married and becoming pregnant while still in her teens:

There will always be women who scoff at me, who are disappointed because they think I let down our sex. There will always be the professors who sigh because I am not living up to their idea of potential. But I know what makes me happy, and I’m slowly learning not to feel guilty about sharing it with people.
I look forward to giving up my independence. The word “dependence” has come to mean something negative: “an unhealthy need for a person or substance, an addiction.” But I see it as a positive reliance on others for companionship and love.
A friend of mine once said his greatest desire is to create something beautiful and lasting. That stuck with me. I want to create a beautiful and lasting marriage with a man, and with that man I want to bear and rear children, which are the most exquisite and eternal creations we humans can take part in fashioning. Architects design buildings that will someday fall down, programmers construct computer software that will eventually be obsolete—but fathers and mothers create and cultivate souls that will never die. How wonderful to experience just an inkling of what God feels as our Father.

Good stuff. In her second piece, written while pregnant, Bethany wrote:

Yes, I am among those contributing to the teen pregnancy rate. I would encourage other responsible young Christians in their late teens and early twenties to do the same. Women, these are the best years of your life to have a baby (ages 18-to-27 are when your body is at its peak for childbearing, and having your first child during these years significantly reduces your risk of breast cancer). Men, why not channel your youth and energy into something with profound eternal value?

Is it “fun” becoming a mom? So far, I wouldn’t describe it that way. Pregnancy is a challenge, and frankly, not very enjoyable (at least in the early weeks). It’s also terribly frightening, much more so than I imagined it would be. I am opening myself up to inevitable hurt — whether it comes at the miscarriage of this child in a week’s time, or whether it is stretched out into 60 years of having pieces of my soul pulling at me from the separate beings of my children.

And in her third, written as the mother of baby Gideon, Bethany says:

To me, there is nothing greater than curling up between my husband and baby and knowing that both of them depend on me for their very happiness (as I also depend on them). All three of us want to be around each other constantly. My 16-year-old sister, too, complains about wanting to get married and have her own baby every time she holds Gideon. But I think that’s because we grew up in a household with a vibrant center, which formed an inner compass in each of us to help set a true course in our own pursuit of happiness.

Just as every wheel needs a hub and every cell a nucleus in order to work, every household needs a strong marriage at its center — and, over the last 50 years, an increasing number of households have been floundering without a visibly united (and physically present) team of husband and wife…

Though in the grind of the ordinary we sometimes forget it, human beings are the highest gifts of God in our lives. Without them, there would be no need to make sacrifices — but there would be no happiness either. Our families are where we must relinquish ourselves the most, and in return experience communion second only to that with God. That’s why the family has been hit the hardest by the selfishness pervading our culture. Because the sacrifices have not taken place, we have had very little vision of what the rewards could have been. Young and even older people today have only a vague sense of how to make a family.

What we need are more people willing to trust God with their fears and become models of self-sacrifice. The water may look unfathomably deep, and the mist and the waves may often obscure Him — but Christ is waiting for us, as he was for Peter, with outstretched hand. He will help us to regain a vision of what a happy household looks like; He will provide us opportunities to take those small steps towards a more anchored family and community. And we will discover Him in the oddest, quietest moments — like when we’re planting a seed or patching clothes.

It is the dazzling nature of her prose which captivates me, and enthralls — and enrages — my students. I’m going to drop all three articles on them in the coming weeks. Yes, they are firmly Christian, but the values that Bethany Torode articulates so beautifully are not exclusive to those who share our faith. As a childless man in his middle thirties whose life and whose world are utterly different from Bethany’s, I am bewildered but also charmed by her world view. And I think, as a gender studies prof, she’s got some crucially important things to say.

I don’t teach her in a vacuum — other, radically different voices are incorporated into my women’s studies classes. I am not advocating early marriage and pregnancy for all. But I do think she is saying something important, and it is something utterly unheard in the secular academy.

Marriage, feminism, and the Pill

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 16, 2004
in Family, Feminism, GLBTQ, Having children, Marriage and Sexuality
. 10 Comments

My step-grandfather once shocked his relatively liberal new family by declaring (over a particularly fine rack of lamb, as I recall) that “the decline of civilization was because of the birth control Pill.” Many family members, led by my dear mother, took him on, but he refused to retreat. He was convinced that the coming of reliable contraception had doomed marriage and the culture itself, and nothing could convince him otherwise.

I thought of him as I read this Wall Street Journal opinion piece by Donald Sensing, whose fine (and thoughtfully conservative) blog I link to. His op-ed is entitled: Save Marriage? It’s too Late, and Sensing’s argument is remarkably similar to my late step-grandfather’s. Here’s an extended excerpt:

Since the invention of the Pill some 40 years ago, human beings have for the first time been able to control reproduction with a very high degree of assurance. That led to what our grandparents would have called rampant promiscuity. The causal relationships between sex, pregnancy and marriage were severed in a fundamental way. The impulse toward premarital chastity for women was always the fear of bearing a child alone. The Pill removed this fear. Along with it went the need of men to commit themselves exclusively to one woman in order to enjoy sexual relations at all. Over the past four decades, women have trained men that marriage is no longer necessary for sex. But women have also sadly discovered that they can’t reliably gain men’s sexual and emotional commitment to them by giving them sex before marriage.

Nationwide, the marriage rate has plunged 43% since 1960. Instead of getting married, men and women are just living together, cohabitation having increased tenfold in the same period. According to a University of Chicago study, cohabitation has become the norm. More than half the men and women who do get married have already lived together.

The widespread social acceptance of these changes is impelling the move toward homosexual marriage. Men and women living together and having sexual relations “without benefit of clergy,” as the old phrasing goes, became not merely an accepted lifestyle, but the dominant lifestyle in the under-30 demographic within the past few years. Because they are able to control their reproductive abilities–that is, have sex without sex’s results–the arguments against homosexual consanguinity began to wilt.

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?

There’s a lot there to unpack. (I like the fact that both “divorce” and “promiscuity” get modified with “rampant”, one of my favorite words. It calls to mind rampaging hordes of hormone-driven adolescents, a group with whom I am happily familiar!) But like my grandfather, Sensing makes a classic mistake about the Pill. The vast majority of women who have taken the Pill in the past forty years are not promiscuous. Most women who took the Pill in its early years were married women (see this short article in Salon on the subject). Sensing fails to see that most women who take the Pill do so not out of a desire to have multiple sexual partners, but out of a desire to regulate the number of children they have within their marriage. Married folks have more sex than single folks, and last time I checked, most married women weren’t interested in being baby machines. Even those women who find motherhood to be the transcendent experience of their lives seem to be highly uninterested in having a very great many children!

Historically speaking, the Pill has impacted the lives of married women more than of single women. Rather than encouraging the “rampant promiscuity” that Sensing bemoans, what the Pill did was allow women to experience intimacy and pleasure with the men whom they loved without fear of pregnancy. The ability to regulate reproduction gave women access to the marketplace, access to the ivory tower, and access to economic and political power that they would not otherwise have had. Sensing seems to wish for a world in which intercourse and reproduction were once again inextricably linked, a world in which there could be no pleasure without very serious consequences. In its own way, his is a compelling argument. But it isn’t grounded on the historical facts, and it fails utterly to acknowledge that the real legacy of the Pill was not promiscuity, but women’s ability to embrace what men have always been allowed to embrace: intimacy, pleasure, and simultaneous independence.

Gays, divorce, and consistency

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2004
in Christianity, Divorce, GLBTQ and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 1 Comment

Since I consider it great sport to read the “other side”, I often visit Touchstone Magazine online. A fine piece appears in the current issue, penned by the Rev. Robert Hart. He takes to task his fellow conservatives in the Anglican world for focusing on homosexuality as the chief dividing point between left and right. Rather, he argues, the real battle for marriage needs to be over divorce. Writing about the continued controversy over the gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson, Hart says:

The way home for the conservative Episcopalians is to place Robinson’s homosexuality in its proper context, as a part rather than the sum of his life of sin. If they wish to be credible in their opposition to homosexuality, they must reject all deviations from the path of sexual purity and teach chastity of life for all persons. They must affirm marriage as a covenant and as a sacrament in which the words “as long as you both shall live” retain their full meaning.

They must oppose Robinson’s “ministry” not only because he is a practicing homosexual, but also because he is unfaithful to his wife. They must oppose the continued public ministry of all clergy who are notorious for living immoral lives. They must demand the resignation of all divorced and remarried (read adulterous) bishops who have “put away the wife of their youth.”

After all, what the homosexualists have been able to do is to base their arguments upon a foundation already laid for them. That foundation has included relaxation of the moral laws about sexual behavior. It has also included the confusion of sex roles ever since women were first “ordained” in the Episcopal Church. The conservatives have accepted these things, but hope now to credibly and effectively oppose the homosexualist cause. This cannot be done.

Of course, what should have happened long ago is this: Mr. Robinson ought to have been defrocked, and if unrepentant still, excommunicated. Why? Because he is an openly “gay” man? No, because he is an unrepentant and notorious sinner. The discipline should have been the same had he left his family to live with another woman.

(All bold emphases are mine). Good on you, father! I don’t have much time for Hart’s theology, but I honor his consistency. I like his prophetic voice, too. To oppose gay unions while approving second (third, fourth, etc) marriages, and to oppose gay bishops while accepting divorced straight ones “cannot be done“, Hart says. And though I come to radically different conclusions about Christ, His church, and human sexuality, on that point I agree with him completely. (There are over a dozen divorced and re-married bishops in the Episcopal Church, including the bishop of Los Angeles, my friend Jon Bruno).

Will my conservative readers (perhaps even Kendall Harmon himself, should he be willing) tell me where Rev. Hart is wrong?

Mennonites on gay marriage

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2004
in Christianity, GLBTQ, Marriage and Politics
. 1 Comment

The March 9 issue of the Mennonite Weekly Review has this editorial on gay marriage; it takes the familiar Anabaptist middle-ground position:

Christians who disapprove of gay marriage have sound biblical reasons. Those who support a Constitutional amendment prohibiting it stand on less solid ground.

The current debate over gay marriage usually fails to distinguish between judgments about morality and legality. White House press secretary Scott McClellan unintentionally called attention to this fact when he said President Bush “has always strongly believed that marriage is a sacred institution between a man and a woman.”

The duty to uphold the sacredness of marriage belongs to churches and people of faith, not the government. Marriage has both sacred and secular dimensions. The government looks after the secular part, granting marriage licenses — essentially, documents conferring the status of “civil unions” — without regard for whether couples view marriage as sacred or not. It is hard to see why the government should be interested in whether or not gay unions are sacred.

The sacredness of marriage will be upheld in the teachings of Christian churches and in the lives of Christian couples. Whatever the future holds for the legal status of gay unions, heterosexuals need not feel threatened by it. Nor should Christians look to the government to define what is sacred, for it has no authority in such matters.

Bold emphasis is mine. In casual conversation with many of my fellow members at Pasadena Mennonite, I find that there are a wide range of opinions on homosexuality. (One of the nice things about being in the Mennonite church. When I hang out at my liberal Episcopal church, there is just one view. When I visit more conservative congregations, there is still just one view.) But even our most socially conservative members seem aghast at the idea of a constitutional amendment; this editorial does a nice job of explaining why.

Hymns, praise choruses, and cows

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2004
in Christianity, Fun and Links
. 0 Comments

Jay at Only Wonder Understands has a very fine joke this morning about the aforementioned; brought forth a belly laugh from me.

More on Spain

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on March 15, 2004
in Aggression and violence, Politics and War
. 3 Comments

Annika is morose this morning in the aftermath of the splendid Socialist triumph in Spain: she writes:

Too many innocent people died Thursday, but the most Spain will do to right that wrong is maybe throw a handful of conspirators in jail. And hope the terrorists don’t blow something else up in retaliation for their friends’ incarceration. Meanwhile, we have one less ally as we do the hard, hard work of bringing fundamental change to the region that produces such murderers, so things like this will stop happening.

Meanwhile, the National Review, whose editorial staff is no doubt filled with experts on war and suffering, goes further. David Frum fulminates:

Terrorism has won a mighty victory in Spain. The culprits who detonated those bombs of murder on 3/11 intended to use murder to alter the course of Spanish democracy – and they have succeeded.

In the months since the attacks on the World Trade Center, we have all heard – and ourselves often repeated – much brave talk about how terror cannot prevail, how justice must inevitably win through, etc. etc. etc.

The news from Spain suggests how very wrong those hopes were.

And I say, rejoice! Not because I am a socialist (though I am). I say “rejoice” because my reading of the Spanish election is of a people rejecting the politics of revenge. In their grief at last Thursday’s bombings, they chose not to lash out. They chose, it seems, to heal instead, and to allow others to heal as well. This was not, I think, a vote of cowardice. It was not a vote for isolation. (Spain spends more of its GNP on foreign aid than we do). It was a vote for peace. Not the fearful peace of appeasement but the peace of forgiveness. It’s a vote for the peace that comes in the aftermath of suffering (despite September 11, the last century has inflicted far more pain on the Spanish people than upon safe and placid America.)

Obviously, economic issues and concerns about corruption may also have played a part in the outcome of the Spanish election. But rather than being a victory for terrorism, it strikes me as victory for common sense. May it be repeated in this country just seven and a half months from now.