Gay marriage/divorce balance shifting legally, at church & in public opinion [Update]

Texans overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment in 2005 bolstering the state’s ban on same sex marriage and on Oct. 1 Dallas district Judge Tena Callahan ruled the ban unconstitutional.

Her ruling may be overturned, but remember that until 2003, Texas law forbade sex between consenting adults of the same gender. That law was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in Lawrence et al. v. Texas at a time when only a minority of the U.S. public supported such laws.

Same-sex marriage apparently does not yet have majority support in the U.S., but the ground is shifting.

That is in part because some of the arguments against it are strained. But it is also a generational shift. A majority of younger voters support it and their attitudes appear to be fixed.

The theological right rages, but in part because the young are the future, church policies have been evolving toward acceptance. Church by church and denomination by denomination by denomination … .

Update

Analyst Nate Silver wrote recently:

Public opinion is moving toward acceptance of gay marriage. But it is doing so very slowly, at a rate of perhaps a point or two per year, and has at least a few years to go before it is the majority opinion. In the near term, the more relevant dimension may be ‘passion’, or depth of feeling. It used to be that the conservatives were ahead on passion — they were strongly opposed to gay marriage, whereas liberals were, at best, lukewarmly in favor of it. Increasingly, that dynamic seems to be reversing.

Saturday he concluded:

… it would seem that the grassroots energy on this issue has reversed, with the pro-gay marriage side feeling more emboldened than the traditional marriage groups. This is true both outside the state of Maine and within it.

Quietly among the ‘Nones:’ Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski

Oregon Gov. Ted Kulongoski clearly didn’t just stumble into what Mark Silk termed “None Zone” during a recent NPR interview with Melissa Block.

Kulongoski was born in rural Missouri in 1940 and reared from age four (when his father died) in a St. Louis Catholic boys’ home, Kulongoski acknowledged last year that he hadn’t attended his apparent home church, Queen of Peace Catholic Church in Salem, since 2006. That was part of the uproar when Archbishop John Vlazny of Portland denounced Kulongoski for being among the honorary hosts at a National Abortion Rights Action Leagued fund raiser.

Kulongoski’s supporters probably didn’t pause last week when he told Block during the interview [transcript]:

Sometimes, you have to get out like this to really understand why you do what you do,” he says. “This is what Oregon’s all about. This is who we are as people — on the natural resource side of our lives. … I must admit, I may not be as religious but I’m very spiritual — and I believe if there is a God, this is where he lives. He’s on the river, he’s in the mountains — this is what it’s all about.”

In a different state this would likely be of more political import, but as Silk observers:

. . . not (as he implies) in Oregon. Its rate of religious identification is among the lowest in the country; and environmentalism is its civil religion. Kulongoski’s statement is more or less equivalent to the governor of Alabama talking about what a devoted Baptist he is.

Annual % change in SBC membership

Nor should it be startling at this juncture that a governor reared by Catholic nuns is a member of what demographic history suggests will become the largest U.S. religious denomination.

How Southern Baptists and others of evangelical bent will respond is an important issue hereabouts. For decades Southern Baptists have explored exclusionst rhetoric as a solution. Not effective, thus far. Membership numbers are in unarrested decline. And the increasing shrillness of rhetoric from Southern Baptist political spokesmen like Richard Land is whipsawing whatever civility was left in public discourse.

Whatever the political weather is like among the Oregon fly fishermen, the forecast down South is more thunderstorms.

Paul Haggis exits Scientology

Scientology isn’t our idea of a religion, but to ‘Crash’ Director Paul Haggis, it was. He resigned in a blistering four-part letter [1, 2, 3, 4] at the blog of Marty Rathbun, a former high-level Scientology official who left the church and is a critic of it.

New York Magazine’s Adam K. Raymond writes:

It all started when a San Diego church publicly supported Prop 8. Haggis asked [Scientology national spokesman Tommy] Davis to denounce its actions but Davis never went through with it. Then the already-pissed Haggis read an interview in which Davis denied Scientology’s practice of “disconnection” (forcing members to cut off communication with loved ones who oppose Scientology). But Haggis knew disconnection first-hand. His wife was forced to cut ties with her parents. The last straw came when Haggis read about the smear tactics Scientology used against its former members. That’s when he knew it was time to go.

Though it has lost the author of Million Dollar Baby and Flags of Our Fathers, it is still the church of Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Jenna Elfman.

For now. Even a cult has to adapt to shifting views of gay rights and repair key internal contradictions, or pay in lost members.

Addendum

Church of Scientology convicted of fraud in France/fined.

Texas Impact health-justice sermon award winner

The faith group Texas Impact gave United Methodist minister Kathryn Ransdell its health justice sermon award.

Preaching at First United Methodist Church of Dallas she said in part:

If we Christians are going to pray for people to have peace and healing while they are sick, we need to work so that all people have access to healthcare that is affordable so that they can have financial peace while they are physically healing.

We recommend her sermon to you:

Developing nation Anglicans to the pope: No thank you

Led by crusading Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria the bishops of the Global South Anglicans, “representing twenty of the thirty-eight Provinces of the Anglican Communion” and nearly half the world’s Anglicans, urged fellow believers on Sunday to reform the Anglican Communion rather than accept Pope Benedict XVI’s invitation to join the Roman Catholic Church.

In a statement on their Web site, they said:

. . . we believe that the proposed Anglican Covenant sets the necessary parameters in safeguarding the catholic and apostolic faith and order of the Communion. It gives Anglican churches worldwide a clear and principled way forward in pursuing God’s divine purposes together in the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church of Jesus Christ. We urge churches in the Communion to actively work together towards a speedy adoption of the Covenant.

Stories: Reuters; Associated Press.

Rumor of a ‘burnt Koran’ ignites Afghan protests

Afghans in Kabul carry effigy of President Obama in protests over allegations of desecration Of Koran by foreign troops (Photo by Majid/Getty Images) © 2009 Getty Images All rights reserved.

Despite investigation and denial by U.S.-led NATO forces of the mishandling of the Koran alleged to have occurred in Wardak province, hundreds of Kabul University students protested Sunday, burning an effigy of President Obama.

BBC’s Andrew North reminds us:

Four years ago, almost 20 people were killed after riots erupted in several Afghan cities following a US news magazine report that the Koran had been desecrated by American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

The magazine later withdrew its report, but by then the damage had been done.

The common good and health-insurance reform

Republicans, appealing to radical individualism at the expense of the the common good, asked in the weekend radio address on health reform, “Will this improve your life?”

Yet Western religious traditions have strong traditions of pursuing the common good – a moral dimension that is all but lost in the debate. Distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University David Gushee wrote for Associated Baptist Press:

The national debate over health-care reform has lost, or never developed, a truly moral focus. It has not been treated as the great moral crusade that it is. To find a way to extend quality health care to 50 million Americans who do not currently have it would be an extraordinary moral victory for this country. But except around the fearful edges of the debate — “pulling the plug on grandma,” “death panels,” abortion — the moral case has been muted, shouted down, abandoned or never made.

Paul Moses at DotCommonWeal reminds us that “for Catholics, this [the Republican] question on health care ought to be the wrong one, given our faith’s emphasis on the common good.” He refers us to Daniel Callahan, who wrote in the Oct. 9 issue of Commonweal:

Except for Catholics and a few others, however, the common good as a moral value has little purchase in American culture and politics. The closest some come is to speak of the “public interest,” but that notion seems more political than moral, useful perhaps but not quite the same. European health-care systems are based on the idea of solidarity, which is closely related to the common good, but the term “solidarity” has even less resonance here than the term “common good” does. For Europeans, it is a matter of solidarity that everyone have access to health care because it is a necessity for human welfare; and government, they believe, is the appropriate institution to guarantee this access. For Europeans, the 46 million uninsured Americans, together with the excessively high cost of care for those Americans who have insurance, is a source of astonishment. How can an affluent, civilized country tolerate treating millions of its citizens this way? Since every other developed nation provides universal care, it is worth exploring why we are different and whether anything can be done about it.

Moses persuasively argues that “the question ‘Will this improve your life?’ takes clever advantage of Americans’ lack of concern for the common good.” And we would add that faith leaders in general should not be shy of reframing the question.

Republican shot

Mark Silk has unearthed the template for a successful Republican candidate in 2010: One who makes hay by “minimizing the social conservatism of his past and reaching out to moderates” at election time.

Inspired by the Virginia gubernatorial face-off, successful application of that model also requires an incompetent Democratic opponent who can’t both build coalitions and successfully call fake.

Brazilian government/Catholic Church cooperate against AIDS

Brazilian adult AIDS prevalence (CIA World Factbook)

Longstanding public clashes over abortion and condoms are not preventing the Catholic Church and government in Brazil from cooperating in pursuit of the common public good.

In a joint AIDS-testing campaign, the Brazilian National Confederation of Bishops and Brazil’s Ministry of Health have launched Declare Your Love to Yourself.

While continuing to disagree with the Brazilian government’s model condom distribution program, the church has, according to The Catholic News Service, made an important commitment to encouraging Brazilians to visit clinics for HIV testing. Specifically:

AIDS ministry volunteers work in 142 of 272 dioceses in Brazil. Another 260,000 volunteers from the Catholic children’s ministry and 80,000 from the health ministry will work on the campaign. The church also will sponsor print, radio and TV ads in the campaign, which will begin in five state capitals before extending across Brazil.

. . .
According to Brazil’s Health Ministry, 60 percent of the Brazilian population has not been tested for HIV, although the tests are free and widely available. Health Minister Jose Gomes Temporao said this is why the partnership with the church is so important.

Brazil has since 1996 combined massive condom distribution with free anti-retroviral drugs to those diagnosed as HIV-positive and aggressive public awareness campaigns.

Amid and perhaps despite a culture which openly celebrates sex, it works, as NPR reported:

No one can argue that Brazil’s way of combating the spread of HIV/AIDS hasn’t worked. Back in 1991, Brazil and South Africa both had HIV prevalence rates of just over 1 percent of the population. A decade later, South Africa’s rate had skyrocketed to 25 percent. Brazil’s rate remained at 1 percent.

Brazil is still an overwhelmingly Catholic (> 70%) country. Thanks in part to the long neglect which preceded implementation of its effective policy, Brazil is also, says U.S. Agency for International Development, “the epicenter” of South America’s HIV/AIDS epidemic. Church and government agreeing to disagree while working together toward a more effective effort against HIV/AIDS is, especially there, a model to watch.

Abuse endured at the hands of nuns

Before release of the Ryan Commission Report on sexual abuse of children in Irish religious run institutions, telling about her experiences was difficult for Kathleen O’Malley:

Four years ago, when Kathleen first told her story in her memoir, Childhood Interrupted, there were plenty of cynics around who were prepared to cast doubt on the extraordinary tale of suffering inside a system that seemed akin to the worst excesses of a totalitarian regime.

Read the entire story here.