The Family Research Council declared this afternoon that religious and political critics of Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” all of Christianity by denying this one superficial, controversial, and sectarian pastor the privilege of serving the inaugural invocation for President Obama:
[The Human Rights Campaign's] desire to exclude Pastor Warren from the inaugural, based upon his religious convictions, proves the validity of the concerns over the homosexual desire to silence the Church.
According to that logic, FRC and Rick Warren are seeking to “silence” the entire Roman Catholic Church, all of Judaism, and all the world’s atheists, by denying them a spot in the invocation.
It’ interesting, the mainline [Christian churches] died. It’ an irrelevant word. The mainline is sidelined. There are more Muslims in America than there are Episcopalians. There’ less than two million of “em. We’ve had a 40 year decline in all the mainline denominations while the independent and charismatic and the evangelicals kept growing and growing.
Warren’s contempt for mainline Christianity may be, by itself, sufficient reason to oppose a role for him in inaugural prayer ceremonies that are intended to unite U.S. religious communities.
Addendum:
Pastor Dan observes:
Nobody likes Warren. The Religious Right think he’s a flake because he’s too liberal, and everybody else thinks he’s a flake because he’s a shallow idiot. From where I’m sitting, as the victim of an extremely expensive and extremely rigorous theological education, Obama could have gotten a better invocation from Stuart Smalley. It would have as much depth, and at least it would be doing a Democrat a favor. …
Mainline Protestant pastors are opinion leaders in their communities, and they tend to appreciate their GLBT friends and not appreciate slick weasels like Rick Warren.
Addendum II:
Focus on the Family avoids FRC’s foot-in-mouth disease.
This does not prove that homosexuals want to “silence” the church, as they say. We’re all for people believing what they want to believe. It’s when those beliefs become a thought of superiority to others, such as denying gays equal rights BECAUSE of religion.
Obama’s the guy in charge here and he made his commitment to meeting the needs of the LGBT community. I don’t think that he’s going to stray from that goal, he’s always been about equality.
I know Obama opposed Prop 8, but he opposes marriage equality under law too. Same with Biden. Without real equality, I don’t see how he intends us to be really equal. Personally, I think Obama is (and always was, as I said during the campaign) speaking from both sides of his mouth. He’s just another lib who claims to be progressive, but whose progressivism goes only so far — and not far enough to include my equality. Obama is useless, IMO.
BTW, FRC does the nation a service when it says such patently stupid things. The group has made it plain for all to see that they believe they are deserving of a privileged standing — IOW, “special rights” denied to others.
Is Obama in charge? Sounds like the former Clinton administration is in charge. Welcome back degenerate baby boomers and hippie love Christians.
Homosexuals do want to silence the church. The church is the last standing edifice calling out their behavior as sinful. Homosexuals want to live in society without any criticism and want to criminalize criticism to support their habit. And PC Christians bandwagon it up, as they succumb to the blurring of the Gospel to meet the deepening social crisis of political correctness and multiculturalism. Never has the word been so distorted as to be repackaged into a type of religion that appears wholly approving of the boomer generation degenerate lifestyle – for those BBs who still claim to believe in God.
We need a spiritual revival towards the truth of the gospel in this country, not a syrupy “I’m Ok your ok” pseudo christian philosophy borne of the selfish desire to anoint our selfish lifestyles as actually being okay.
That doesn’t mean hate the sinner. But love can be painful, and that’s NOT the message BBs want to hear. So they twist the gospel to approve of myriads of societal ills that of course reaffirm their own lives.
“I’m OK, you’re OK” is actually the message that Focus on the Family and P-FOX have been selling lately.
They oppose “viewpoint discrimination” — in other words, they say that all opinions are equal and must be taught to children, no matter how unethical some viewpoints may be. First, P-FOX used the argument repeatedly in its battle against science-only viewpoints in Montgomery County, Maryland, public schools. Then, P-FOX’s allies at Focus and FRC began using the argument themselves.
R. Gray, I appreciate your opposing views, but you must substantiate your accusations with links in order to survive here indefinitely. Blanket statements against all homosexuals (including ex-gays), without proof that all homosexuals fit your stereotype, won’t last long. Civility requires specifics and facts, along with restraint from undocumented overgeneralization.
Thanks.
Huh? By implication you are suggesting that I am referring to the same message as FOF. I am not. I was not aware.
>>Blanket statements against all homosexuals (including ex-gays), without proof that all homosexuals fit your stereotype, won’t last long. Civility requires specifics and facts, along with restraint from undocumented overgeneralization.
Here we go. You are using the classic gramsican tactic of calling me a bigot to deface my argument instead of debate it. When that has happened you have already lost your point, and you are engaging in uncivil civility. You obviously don’t appreciate the opposing views by calling me a bigot, and its the same tactic the homosexual agenda uses to try to silence its critics. This should be beneath you.
By the way your arguments seem derivative of evidence based discussion. However the Bible is not rationally arrived at always. Your objections remind me of atheistic blogging tactics in that the foundation of belief itself is not meritorious. Let me tell you that I believe rationalism to be a belief system. Therefore we will have to agree to disagree on what constitutes enough evidence to substantiate the point of view.
R. Gray,
Well if homosexuals do want to silence the church (I really do not believe they do), then I’m not one of them. Nearly every major mental and medical health organization says that homosexuality is natural for a minority of people, and the voices of the religious don’t have much power (especially when they disagree with facts established by science).
So I am in no way attempting to silence religion. They can scream as loud as they want and I will never have a problem with it because they will not succeed. They may be able to get other’s attention, but let’s not forget that everyone in the United States has a right to their religion and even no religion should they choose it, and putting religious values into law is against those people’s rights.
Say what you want. Homosexuals (more specifically, “GLBT People”) will be accepted someday and I know that because it’s already starting to happen. And there’s nothing that anyone can do about it. Because when truth and fact make its presence known, NO VOICE is louder than it. And that’s exactly what is happening here.
R Gray, no one has debased your argument. By declining to cite facts, you are declining to debate. Without facts — names, incidents, dates, documents — there is no substance to your accusations and generalizations.
And since many homosexuals (including ex-gays) are participants of one church/synagogue/temple or another, if homosexuals were attempting to silence “the church,” then they would be silencing themselves.
R. Gray said “That doesn’t mean hate the sinner. But love can be painful…”
Please keep your sick sadomasochistic fantasies to yourself. Thanks.
“The church is the last standing edifice calling out their behavior as sinful.”
**********
A church full of modern-day pharisees “calling out sinful behavior” of gay people, when many of those same people in the church are child molestors, alcoholics, drug dealers, meth heads, fornicators, cheaters, murderers, divorcees, slobs/gluttons, etc.
The correct message is “you sweep off your own porch, and I’ll tend to mine”.
A church full of modern-day pharisees “calling out sinful behavior” of gay people, when many of those same people in the church are child molestors, alcoholics, drug dealers, meth heads, fornicators, cheaters, murderers, divorcees, slobs/gluttons, etc
The church will always have its Pharisees . . God forbid that I be found among them. The heart of Jesus indictment of the Pharisees (which is after all the point for all of us – I claim by faith, not science) is that justice and mercy are greater still than any cold application of the laws. He assured the Pharisees that their actions and heart-condition aligned them with the Devil, not with the God of justice and mercy.
The point for this discussion is this: All men must face the judgment of God in the end, if not in this life. This again by faith in the Word of God, not by science. Science is materialistic authority. It will have no import when Gravity ends. Gravity will surely end for all of us soon or late.
Have your freedom (license) to operate in the entitlement domain of Homosexuality. But . . . realize that God created you in his image out of love; He also sent his Son, in our fleshly image, to feel the pull of temptations and sinful options. He died for Our sins (whoring, stealing, killing, or sodomizing); but he tells the woman caught in adultery what he tells every sinner: “Go, and sin no more.”
Three times, I recall, God destroys wholesale populations (because he is so distraught with the violence and immorality he finds): Noah’s flood, Sodom and Gommorah, Israelites during the exodus from Egypt. There is one more scheduled, according to the scriptures, yet to come.
The lesson is that all of us should commit our lives to serve Him through His Son Jesus Christ/Messiah, while we rejoice that Christ’s blood has caused God not to see our sin. God does, nevertheless, call upon us to “Go, and sin no more.” and to “turn from that sin which so easily entangles.” No real Christian can claim that he is without sin; yet, each of us is seeking to draw near to God in daily repentence, knowing that we fall short of the glory of God. Our dependency is upon Christ, not science in this quest. Science will tell us that we are electro-chemical, carbon-based creature, evolved from slime. In some world this may be partially true; but it is a knowledge inside a knowledge which is held in the hand of a fool, in the final analysis. God is the Creator, Savior, and His Holy Spirit dwells in the temple (each true Christian – He is the judge). Jesus is the first to rise from death to life and my name, and yours-if you are found in Him, is written in the Lamb’s Bood of Life.