Since 1971, homosexual activists have worked hard in the courts trying to have marriage redefined. In our 2006 article Whose on First … First? we looked at the history of marriage and the law in the United States. Prior to 1971 thechallenge to traditional marriage was bigamy and polygamy. Could a man be married to 2 or more women at the same time? The court cases typically ended with the general affirmation of one man, one women constituting marriage but as far as the Constitution was concerned the courts held that:

“… every civil government had the right to determine whether monogamy or polygamy should be the law of social life under its jurisdiction.” 1

The Federal Courts left the final determination on monogamy vs polygamy to the states. It wasn’t a Federal issue. The question of sex and sexual partners and governmental restrictions is not limited to the United States. It surfaced overseas in 2006 when the Dutch Court OKs Pedophile Party Why did they do this? Their thinking is consistent with what we are finding in the U.S. Courts:

“It is not illegal to try democratically to change the system – which is what these people are trying to do,” said a Hague spokesperson, summarizing the ruling of Judge H. Hofius.

“They are exercising their freedoms of speech and association, and as such cannot be banned by the state.”

These stories are related. (more…)

“What you are doing speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you are saying.”

Beside privacy issues in arguing for abortion, one of the reasons cited was child abuse. An unwanted child, it was argued, increased the instance of child abuse. So, by giving women “choice” that supposedly translated to “every child a wanted child.” That this policy hasn’t dimished child abuse but perhaps has permitted its increase is a discussion for another day. In Do Humans Have Rights That Can Be Violated? I demonstrated that in American law and legislation, humanness and personhood have traditionally been two different things. Human is a statement of biology not personhood. Someone could be biologically human but not legally a person. Since they are not legally a person they have no rights or protections under the law. The one who owns them as property have rights and can pretty much do what they want with their property. According to the Prolife Action League there has been 1.3 million abortions annually since 1973 and as of May 17, 2005 that brought the number to 46 million. This becomes important for two reasons. Economic and end of life questions. A majority of the aborted would have been wage earners and tax payers. By killing off these humans there are less persons available to support the aging cry-baby boomers. As the current administration embarked on “health care reform” one of the questions was how that would impact healthcare for the elderly. Assurances were given that the healthcare would be as good as or better at a lower cost than is currently being charged. Conservatives were firm this was untrue. Now that it has passed, unread by most in the House and Senate who voted for it, we see that conservatives were right, Medicare Reform Means Some Seniors Face Benefit Cuts. (more…)

“The government of Vietnam’s desire to reap the benefits of the global economy must be matched by efforts to respect comprehensive human rights,” a bipartisan group of 19 members of Congress wrote to Clinton on July 15.

This was an interesting paragraph in the article Clinton pushes Vietnam on human rights progress. It also helped to begin crystallizing something I have been thinking about. Do humans have rights solely based on being human? Rather than simply making an assertion I decided to put the question to an organization that specializes in addressing human rights violations the Amnesty International. I emailed them and asked:

There seems to be some confusion when using the term phrase “human rights.”Do you mean by this that humans have rights based solely on being human? If a nation decides that a human is not legally a person and therefore has no rights, for only persons have rights, is that something you affirm?

The question is fairly simple and straightforward. Do humans have rights because they are human or are there some other criteria for protecting rights. Perhaps a human has no rights because they law makers used come arbitrary criteria to define personhood and then only protect the rights of those who are legally a person. In this scenario non-persons, human or not, do not have any legal rights nor are deserving of protection. I received a response back in less than 24 hours: (more…)

Although the Conservative Intellectual Movement had been working and gaining ground in the thinking of American culture, Evangelicals and Fundamentalist had remained steadfastly and intentionally removed from political involvement and policy making until the late 1970s. The reason might be best understood in the person of Jerry Falwell who publicly denounced political involvement on the part of church leaders in his sermon titled, “Ministers and Marchers”:

…March 1965 sermon, “Minister and Marchers,” in which he leveled a broadside at King, his black ministerial colleagues, and the Northern clergy whose liberal theology made them fully as suspect as their politics. Although he acknowledged that “many sincere persons are participating” in the movement, he questioned “the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left-wing associations. It is very obvious that the Communists, as they do in all parts of the world, are taking advantage of a tense situation in our land, and are exploiting every incident to bring about violence and bloodshed.” Speaking of the role ministers should properly play, he declared that “our only purpose on this earth is to know Christ and to make him known. Believing the Bible as I do, I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else – including the fighting of communism or participating in the civil rights reform…. Preachers are not called to be politicians, but to be soul winners.”(1)

As noted earlier, Falwell apologized for this talk. In part that was necessary as he was moving into the political (more…)

A few weeks ago, I participated in a debate on whether or not we should endorse gay marriage? That debate was an significant experience for me. My partner for that debate was one of my best friends, Ben Dyer. Ben graduated from Talbot School of Theology in 2003 with a degree in philosophy of religion and ethics. He’s a now graduate student at Bowling Green State. I asked him to give a sort of report from the front lines of that debate. The following is part 1 of that report.

The four of us share a car headed for a small community college extension campus in rural Ohio, and we don’t share much else. Mark and Jacob are going to defend their positive answer to the debate’s open question, “should we endorse gay marriage?” Jonathan and I will defend the view that we shouldn’t, and as we drive I’m wondering whether any of the great debaters (Fr. Copleston and Bertrand Russell, or G.K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, for instance) ever shared a cab on the way to their storied debates.

(more…)

 In our discussion about the Culture Driven Church, I keep coming back to one major question. You should know how questions affect me. Questions are the hobgoblins that niggle my brain. On more than one occasion my good friends have heard me begin a two hour conversation with the words, “There’s this question that’s been bugging me.” Questions are the launching pads for inspiration. And often I find if we let some questions simmer and bubble without rushing to a judgment, they tend to yield some useful insights. So here’s the question that been crawling up the side of my mind throughout the last year.

“What Christian critiques of the culture are truly scandalous?”

By “scandalous”, I don’t mean which ones fit the Pulitzer Prize nominated National Enquirer’s definition of scandal. I mean those aspects of our proclamation to the culture that are stumbling blocks that non-Christians (more…)

With the growth of liberaliism, socialism (also called “Progressive”) on both sides of the ocean, 1940 saw Europe in the midst of war as Germany, led by the Socialist Party (NAZI) moved toward world domination. It was hoped that war wouldn’t come to our shores but that all changed on December 7, 1941 when Japan launched a stealth attack on Pearl Harbor. America awoke to the news that either they would take a stand and enter the war or give up to be governed by another. Although there were signs and indicators of an impending attack, they didn’t seem to be picked up or if they were, they weren’t taken seriously. After all, America was a great nation and seemed invulnerable. As it turns out, that was its greatest vulnerability. The sleeping giant began to awaken and chose to enter the war.

The dawning of 1940 witnessed another arousing from slumber, the Conservative Intellectual. A number of individuals were concerned at what the universities had become and were producing in terms of worldviews and philosophies. Dewey’s plan to use the universities to administer social change was in full swing and working rather well in shifting the students into collectivism and socialism. (more…)