Pope Francis calls for civil union laws for same-sex couples
The Pope is a heretic. Both the Old and New Testaments are clear that homosexuality is an abomination to the Lord. A Christian's duty is to condemn it, not support it:
Romans 1:27; Jude 1:7; 1 Timothy 1:8-11; Mark 10:6-9; Matthew 19: 4-16; 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11; 1 Corinthians 7:2; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Genesis 19:4-8
Catholics do claim authority for themselves that does not originate from the Bible but teachings which fly in the face of the Bible are clearly not Christian
Pope Francis has called in a new documentary for the creation of civil union laws, giving his clearest support to date for the rights of same-sex couples while breaking from the official teaching of the Roman Catholic Church.
“What we have to create is a civil union law,” the pope says in the film, released in Rome on Wednesday. “That way they are legally covered.”
Francis’s comment does nothing to alter Catholic doctrine, but it nonetheless represents a remarkable shift for a church that has fought against LGBT legal rights — with past popes calling same-sex unions inadmissible and deviant.
Francis’s statement is also notable within a papacy that on the whole hasn’t been as revolutionary as progressives had hoped and conservatives had feared.
He has long expressed an interest in outreach to the church’s LGBT followers, but his previous remarks as pope have stressed understanding and welcoming rather than substantive policies.
The public remarks that led up to Pope Francis’s call for same-sex civil union laws
“This is the first time as pope he’s making such a clear statement,” the Rev. James Martin, a prominent Jesuit who has advocated for the church to more openly welcome LGBT members, said in a phone interview Wednesday. “I think it’s a big step forward. In the past, even civil unions were frowned upon in many quarters of the church. He is putting his weight behind legal recognition of same-sex civil unions.”
The remarks from the leader of the Roman Catholic Church have the potential to shift the debate for some of its 1.3 billion followers. While Catholic priests in some parts of the world already bless same-sex marriage, others clerics operate in countries where homosexuality is illegal.
In “Francesco,” a documentary that touches on several of the pope’s trademark issues, from migration to the environment, Francis does not indicate any openness to extending marriage to same-sex couples, but says “homosexuals have a right to be a part of the family.”
“They’re children of God and have a right to a family,” the pope says in his interview with the filmmaker, Evgeny Afineevsky. “Nobody should be thrown out, or be made miserable because of it.”
“This is huge,” said David Gibson, director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture. “Looking behind all this, [Francis is] basically saying, again, ‘We’re not out here to be culture warriors. We’re not out here to pick fights. We are out here to build up the family.’ ”
Officially, the church teaches that homosexual sex acts are “disordered.” Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XVI, called homosexuality an “intrinsic moral evil.” In 2003, under John Paul II, the church issued a lengthy document laying out the “problem of homosexual unions.” The document, issued by the Vatican’s doctrinal office, said that “legal recognition of homosexual unions or placing them on the same level as marriage” would amount to “the approval of deviant behavior.”
Roberto de Mattei, president of the conservative Lepanto Foundation in Rome, said Wednesday that “this is perhaps the first time Pope Francis has publicly taken a stance on a specific point of morality against the church’s doctrine.”
“There’s no doubt this will add to the great confusion already existing in the Catholic world,” de Mattei said, “and will be fodder for those who maintain that, at least privately, the pope promotes or supports heresy.”
Conservatives often accuse Francis of muddling the church’s teaching on sexuality, saying he is allowing cultural changes to influence what should be immutable rules.
Famously, Francis in 2013 said about somebody who is gay: “Who am I to judge?” And he has spoken often about his ministry to gay and lesbian Catholics, saying they are loved by God and welcomed by the church.
His previous commentary about civil unions as pope has been difficult to decipher. In 2014, he said such unions should be evaluated “in their variety.” Though some took his words as an endorsement, the Vatican’s press office at the time downplayed the significance of any message.
Pope to parents of gay kids: ’Let them express themselves’
On a flight to Rome in 2018, Pope Francis said children who show “homosexual tendencies” should be treated with understanding and not be condemned or ignored. (Reuters)
Earlier, as a cardinal in Argentina, the pope reportedly supported civil unions as a pragmatic alternative to same-sex marriage. By all accounts, he remains staunchly opposed to same-sex marriage.
Pope Francis’s new encyclical is a papal warning about a world going backward
Reaction in the United States among bishops who have been previously critical of Francis’s papacy was relatively muted Wednesday. Support for civil unions and same-sex marriage among U.S. Catholics has steadily risen over the years: According to a Pew Research Center study from 2019, about 61 percent of Catholics support same-sex marriage, compared with 42 percent a decade earlier.
Thomas Tobin, the bishop of Providence, R.I., said in a statement that “the Holy Father’s apparent support for the recognition of civil unions for same-sex couples needs to be clarified.”
“The Pope’s statement clearly contradicts what has been the long-standing teaching of the Church about same-sex unions,” Tobin said. “The Church cannot support the acceptance of objectively immoral relationships. Individuals with same-sex attraction are beloved children of God and must have their personal human rights and civil rights recognized and protected by law. However, the legalization of their civil unions, which seek to simulate holy matrimony, is not admissible.”
Pompeo and Vatican officials face off over negotiations with China on bishops
For many LGBT members of the faith, Francis may not have gone far enough.
Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of DignityUSA, a national organization of Catholics dedicated to LGBT rights, was skeptical on Wednesday.
“Is this a confession that the world and legal communities are moving forward and the church is eons behind?” Duddy-Burke said. “Is it a step forward, or is it a way to avoid going all the way toward same-sex sacramental marriage? Because we’ve experienced a push-pull from the church on this, we’ll hold our breath.”
The pope’s statement may be seen by some as the next step toward marriage equality, but the Catholic Church is far from taking that step, said Patrick Hornbeck, professor of theology at Fordham University.
Hornbeck, who left the Catholic Church for the Episcopal Church before he married his same-sex partner in 2015, said Catholics who stay in the church have to do so with open eyes, because it is not likely to change for decades.
“As long as the Catholic Church continues to treat the lives and loves of LGBT people as short of the divine plan for humanity, people who are LGBT will always have second-class status,” Hornbeck said.
For Racial Healing, Reject Critical Race Theory
Imagine you own a small shop, perhaps something like a tailor shop where you have to assist each customer individually, and you find yourself in the situation where two people have entered at almost exactly the same time. One is white, and the other is black. You’re a sole proprietor, so you’re working alone. You are now faced with a decision: which of these two customers do you approach and help first?
Had you been confronted with this simple, everyday scenario a few months ago, you might not have thought much about it. You probably would have laughed and said it doesn’t matter; considering this a thought experiment would likely have seemed impertinent or even race-baiting. Maybe you still feel the same way now, but there’s also a good chance that you don’t. Though you may struggle to explain why, the thought of finding yourself in this perfectly ordinary situation may seem rather discomforting. There is a reason for this discomfort; you’re not just being paranoid.
The reason you’re uncomfortable is because a style of thought—indeed, an entire worldview—called Critical Race Theory has suddenly become mainstream. To be fair, this once-obscure way of thinking about the world has been in development for over 40 years, and has been seeping into our culture for the last decade in particular. In a sense, if you feel uncomfortable by the idea of being caught in the situation described here, it’s because you can feel the critical eye and fear its being turned on you. In a sense, you’re aware that the weight of your decision depends entirely on a factor completely outside of your control: whether or not one of the people who entered your shop, or someone who might end up a bystander to what happens next, has imbibed Critical Race Theory.
Critical Race Theory proceeds upon a number of core tenets, the first and most central of which is that racism is the ordinary state of affairs in our society. It is not aberrational, and therefore it is assumed to be present in all phenomena and interactions. The Critical Race Theorist’s job is to find it and “make its oppression visible” so that it might be “disrupted and dismantled.” This societal presupposition has been further distilled to a single operational question for those who accept the Critical Race Theory view of the world: “The question is not ‘did racism take place?’ but ‘how did racism manifest in this situation?’” as phrased by the now world-famous critical whiteness educator and bestselling author Robin DiAngelo.
That is, as you imagine yourself coming out from behind the counter to greet one or the other of these two customers—one white and one black—racism is present in your decision. If anyone involved accepts the tenets of Critical Race Theory, it will be that person’s job to identify your racism and make a stink of it (which might result, if you’re in certain American cities today, in your shop being vandalized, looted, and burned down in the coming nights). In some sense, everything in your life hinges upon you making the right decision in a situation that doesn’t allow for such a thing.
Why not? Consider your options.
If you choose the black person, say, racism is present in that situation. A Critical Race Theorist will ask how it manifested, try to find it, and will then call it out to disrupt and dismantle it. In this case, it is clear that you don’t trust the black person to be in your shop unattended while you help another customer, which is based in racist stereotypes and upholds racism. If you choose the black customer, you have chosen poorly.
If you choose the white person instead, though, racism is present in that situation. A Critical Race Theorist will ask how it manifested, try to find it, and will then call it out to disrupt and dismantle it. In this case, you clearly favor white people, who you view as first-class citizens over black people, who you see as second-class citizens, because you’re a racist. If you choose the white customer, you have chosen poorly.
Because Critical Race Theory begins with the assumption that racism is ordinary, present, and intolerable, there is no right choice in this plain, everyday circumstance. The only way to remedy this problem, to someone who accepts Critical Race Theory’s premises, is to find the racism embedded in the situation and then to call it out, so that it might be disrupted and dismantled. This is the world according to Critical Race Theory, and in such a world, you’re always wrong (and notice—your race never had to be assumed for these situations to play out to the inevitable conclusion of present racism: the conclusion was simply to be and was assumed from the outset).
A world that operates like this cannot be functional, and it certainly cannot achieve Critical Race Theory’s stated objective: to achieve “racial healing” by ending racism and making society more just and fair. If we want to achieve those goals, which I believe are possible, it begins by rejecting, not accepting and mainstreaming, Critical Race Theory.
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/10/racial-healing-reject-critical-race-theory/
Trump Makes History in the Middle East Yet Again With Another Israel Peace DealOn Friday, President Donald Trump announced that yet another Middle Eastern Muslim-majority country will formally recognize the Jewish State of Israel, in yet another massive foreign policy coup for the president’s diplomacy in the Middle East.
“President [Donald Trump] has announced that Sudan and Israel have agreed to the normalization of relations— another major step toward building peace in the Middle East with another nation joining the Abraham Accords,” Judd Deere, deputy assistant to the president and deputy White House press secretary, announced on Twitter.
The recognition of Israel appears to be part of a broader agreement by which Trump will formally rescind Sudan’s designation as a state sponsor of terrorism. Between 1989 and 2019, military dictator Omar al-Bashir controlled the North African country, allegedly engaging in human rights abuses and sponsoring terrorism. After protests in 2018, a coup d’etat ousted Bashir from power in April 2019.
“President Donald J. Trump has informed Congress of his intent to formally rescind Sudan’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism,” the White House announced on Friday. “This follows on Sudan’s recent agreement to resolve certain claims of United States victims of terror and their families. Yesterday, in fulfillment of that agreement, the transitional government of Sudan transferred $335 million into an escrow account for these victims and their families.”
According to the White House, Trump achieved “the resolution of longstanding claims of victims of the East Africa embassy bombings, the attack on the USS Cole, and the murder of USAID employee John Granville.”
“This is a significant achievement for the President and his Administration and brings a measure of closure to many to whom it has long been out of reach,” the announcement argued.
The White House hailed the agreement as “a pivotal turning point for Sudan, allowing for a new future of collaboration and support for its ongoing and historic democratic transition.” The statement also urged Congress to pass legislation to “ensure that the American people rapidly realize the full benefits of this policy breakthrough.”
The Sudan agreement represents another major foreign policy coup for Trump, following the Abraham Accords.
This summer, Trump announced historic peace deals between Arab states in the Persian Gulf and the State of Israel. In the Abraham Accords, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) normalized relations with Israel. Before the signing, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia announced they would open their skies to Israeli flights to the UAE. As part of its rapprochement with Israel, the UAE agreed to order hotels to serve Kosher foods in Abu Dhabi, delivering a powerful symbol of Jewish acceptance in a notoriously anti-Semitic part of the world.
Shortly before the Abraham Accords, Trump brought Muslim-majority Kosovo and Christian-majority Serbia together for a historic agreement that included promises to set up embassies in Jerusalem. This agreement brought reconciliation to two countries with centuries-long animosities that had sparked multiple wars, including World War I.
These historic diplomatic successes have brought Trump multiple Nobel Prize nominations.
The West’s booming new religion
This week, Britain’s Equalities Minister delivered a speech we probably wouldn’t hear in our federal parliament. That’s a shame because we could do with some home truths about a booming wokeness movement that is deeply flawed.
During a House of Commons debate on Black History Month, Tory minister Kemi Badenoch, an immigrant of Nigerian heritage, exposed the blind adherence of schools to simplistic slogans of the Black Lives Matters movement.
“I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations that has come far too close to home in my life and it is the promotion of critical race theory — an ideology that sees my blackness as victimhood and their whiteness as oppression,” she said. “What we are against is the teaching of contested political ideas as if they are accepted facts. We don’t do this with communism. We don’t do this with socialism. We don’t do it with capitalism.”
Badenoch said that some schools have decided to openly support the anti-capitalist Black Lives Matter group “often fully aware that they have the statutory duty to be politically impartial”.
“Black lives do matter. Of course they do,” said Badenoch. “But we know that the Black Lives Matter movement — capital B, L, M — is political. I know this, because at the height of the protest, I’ve been told of white Black Lives Matter protesters calling — and I apologise for saying this word — calling a black armed police officer guarding Downing Street a ‘pet n …’.”
When Badenoch entered the British parliament in mid-2017, she was hailed by sections of the media as the smartest of the crop of new MPs. And maybe only a woman of colour could rise in parliament and say we should stop pretending BLM “is a completely wholesome anti-racist organisation”. ‘There is a lot of pernicious stuff that is being pushed and we stand against that,” she said.
“We do not want to see teachers teaching their pupils about white privilege and their inherited racial guilt. And let me be clear, any school which teaches these elements of critical race theory as fact, or which promotes partisan political views such as defunding the police without offering a balanced treatment of opposing views, is breaking the law.”
Let’s not kid ourselves. There is a similar propensity in Australian schools to present BLM in simplistic, and misleading, terms as a wholesome anti-racist movement.
For example, at Ballarat Grammar, a weekly chapel service in week eight of term three, delivered as a video package to students, was devoted to the BLM movement. After an introduction where the school chaplain describes social movements as a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, a number of students read scripted statements extolling the virtues of the BLM movement. Students call for reparations for invasion. They talk about white privilege. They detail the terrible treatment of some Indigenous Australians within the justice system.
Students should bring complex and difficult issues to the attention of other students. Genuine learning will, at times, cause discomfort. But the video package for Ballarat Grammar students, and posted on the intra-school website, is a mickey mouse version of the BLM movement. It makes no attempt to recognise BLM as a political movement, which, like every political movement is complicated, sometimes inconsistent, and not figured out from a handful of scripted platitudes. Students are not stupid. Teachers, and preachers, respect them far more by allowing them to explore how political movements can be both significant and far from perfect.
Students have come of age in an online world. So there has never been a greater need to help them be discerning, curious, even sceptical of what they come across in their digital world. So why package up the BLM movement as a Hallmark card?
Defunding police, for example, has become a crude mantra of the BLM movement. It ought to be contested, even at schools, lest students imagine that mantras are a substitute for thinking about complex issues.
As Ballarat Grammar was compiling its BLM chapel video, the BLM website stated its aim to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family”. Though deleted from the website in mid-September, how does this anti-family view fit with the chaplain’s claim that the BLM movement is the manifestation of the Holy Spirit?
Parts of the BLM movement are radically political, vehemently anti-capitalist and aimed at dismantling the liberal order. It’s not hard to find video footage of black-clad BLM protesters standing over diners at restaurants, chanting “white silence is violence”, demanding that all people raise their fists to show solidarity with their chosen agenda.
If this was just a case of dumbing down education, that would be bad enough given the woeful results of Australian students in international educational rankings. But if educators are not giving students the warts-and-all truth about the BLM movement, how will kids learn to separate some very sound aims from some deeply authoritarian traits? Ballarat Grammar’s chapel service could have offered students the chance to consider a deeply ethical question: when, if ever, do the ends justify the means?
Imagine a school classroom where high school students are asked to consider whether Western lives matter? Where they are challenged to think whether we should kneel for French teacher Samuel Paty? Where they are asked to consider what Italian journalist Guilio Meotti said during the week after the civics teacher was beheaded for discussing the Mohammed cartoons in his classroom: “This French teacher was the victim of the most ferocious racism that circulates today in Western democracies, that of fundamentalist beliefs against ‘infidels’.”
Alas, not just schools offer unthinking support for the BLM movement. Corporations and all kinds of other groups salute it too as part of their commitment to “diversity and inclusivity”. This commitment, part and parcel of a wider wokeness agenda, is another quasi-political movement that, like the BLM movement, could do with a splash of scepticism and analysis.
Parading virtue is not the same as doing good. No organisation should need a highly paid team of D&I “experts” to prove it supports inclusivity and diversity. Nor should it need pages of turgid D&I policies to understand that no person should be discriminated against on the basis of sex, sexuality, creed, culture or race.
But the D&I industry has become the perfect Trojan horse for more opportunistic activists to demand special status and privileges for groups they deem special. And timid CEOs and boards are swallowing it, lock, stock and barrel. Most companies have D&I statements drafted by D&I “officers”, D&I KPIs drawn up and monitored by more D&I “professionals”, D&I workshops run by D&I “experts”. It is, as Time magazine reported late last year, a booming industry: a 2019 survey of 234 companies in the S&P 500 found that 63 per cent of diversity “experts” were appointed during the past three years.
What a terrific lurk. No skills or formal qualifications required. Learn the D&I lingo, master the art of bullshit, and you’re on your way to a lucrative career with guaranteed work from company executives and board members looking to mimic each other with expensively drafted drivel about diversity and inclusion.
Woke D&I flunkies are paid handsomely, for example, to advise companies to establish their diversity and inclusion credentials by encouraging employees to “bring their whole self to work”. Most of it is for show. And much of it is as deeply flawed as the BLM movement.
What if your whole self includes a Christian or Muslim view of traditional marriage or homosexuality? Rugby Australia famously told Israel Folau not to bring those bits of his whole self to work, nor to express them on his personal social media accounts. Then he was told not to come to work at all.
James Cook University is another organisation that, according to its website “encourages diversity.” “JCU has an extensive program in place to encourage diversity,” it says. JCU places “diversity messages” in its recruitment advertising — such as this: “We are enriched by and celebrate our workplace diversity and welcome applications from candidates of all backgrounds and abilities.”
But when it comes to the university’s core business, diversity and inclusion is a crock. Rather than defend the diversity of academic opinions, JCU sacked physic professor Peter Ridd, claiming he acted in an uncollegial manner when he challenged the quality of climate research by a JCU academic.
More and more, the D&I industry resembles a new religion for our secular age. Corporate executives throw shareholder money in the D&I collection plate to signal their virtue.
Even worse, whereas older, traditional religions are learning to become more tolerant of difference, the D&I industry is not there yet.
***************************************
My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com TONGUE-TIED)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://john-ray.blogspot.com (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
*****************************************
/>
Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See
No comments:
Post a Comment