Shock! Church of England refuses to back same-sex marriage
This latest decision is a typical Anglican compromise -- with "blessing" ceremonies over homosexual weddings still allowed.
It is less of a compromise theologically, though: it recognizes marriage as a sacrament and denies that sacrament to homosexuals. So 2,000 years of Christian teaching are still honoured.
Cantuar's celebration of "diversity" is however both mindless and a defiance of Christ. Christ said: "Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life" (Matthew 7:13-14). Not much diversity there.
"Diversity" came into vogue as part of a SCOTUS decision authorizing racial discrimination: The Bakke decision of June 1978. In current American usage, "diverse" mostly means "black"
London: The Church of England says it will allow blessings for same-sex, civil marriages for the first time but same-sex couples still will not be allowed to marry in its churches.
The decision follows five years of debate and consultation on the church’s position on sexuality. It is expected to be outlined in a report to the church’s national assembly, the General Synod, which meets in London next month.
The decision to not allow same-sex marriages follows five years of debate within the Church of England.
The decision to not allow same-sex marriages follows five years of debate within the Church of England.CREDIT:AP
Under the proposals, the Church of England’s stance that the sacrament of matrimony is restricted to unions between one man and one woman will not change.
However, same-sex couples would be able to have a church service with prayers of dedication, thanksgiving or for God’s blessing after they have a civil wedding or register a civil partnership.
Same-sex marriage has been legal in England and Wales since 2013, but the church did not change its teaching when the law changed.
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the spiritual leader of the Anglican Church, acknowledged that the proposals “will appear to go too far for some and not nearly far enough for others.”
“This response reflects the diversity of views in the Church of England on questions of sexuality, relationships and marriage. I rejoice in that diversity and I welcome this way of reflecting it in the life of our church,” Welby said.
“I hope it can offer a way for the Church of England, publicly and unequivocally, to say to all Christians and especially LGBTQI+ people, that you are welcome and a valued and precious part of the body of Christ,” he added.
The church said bishops plan to issue a formal apology to LGBTQ people on Friday for the “rejection, exclusion and hostility” they have felt from within the church.
It said it would issue pastoral guidance to its ministers and congregations and urge them to welcome same-sex couples “unreservedly and joyfully.”
Archbishop of York Stephen Cottrell apologised for “the way LGBTQI+ people and those they love have been treated by the church which, most of all, ought to recognise everyone as precious and created in the image of God.”
“We are deeply sorry and ashamed and want to take this opportunity to begin again in the spirit of repentance which our faith teaches us,” he said. “This is not the end of that journey, but we have reached a milestone, and I hope that these prayers of love and faith can provide a way for us all to celebrate and affirm same-sex relationships.”
Cottrell said the proposals will not be “what everyone wants,” but further changes will require a legislative overhaul and there was currently no majority supporting such change.
Jayne Ozanne, a prominent campaigner for LGBTQ people in the church, said the bishops’ decision was “utterly despicable.”
“I cannot believe that five years of pain and trauma has got us here. We have had countless apologies over the years but no action to stop the harmful discrimination,” she tweeted.
The General Synod is expected to discuss the proposals in detail during its February 6 to February 9 meeting.
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Chaplain Who Was Told to Remove Half-Inch Cross Pin or Face Consequences Remains Firm to His Faith
A Christian chaplain has received a formal apology from the nonprofit he worked for after being threatened with consequences for continuing to wear a tiny cross pin badge that they thought may “create a barrier” with patients. However, the chaplain defended his choice to the end and stood firm in his faith.
Former businessman Derek Timms, 73, of Solihull in England, has worked as a chaplain for the U.K.-based hospice charity Marie Curie for the past five years, providing care and support to patients of terminal illness and their families. He has worn a half-inch gold pin badge depicting the Christian cross for 14 years, including at work. But in September, his choice was challenged by the new management.
After the Solihull branch announced they would be changing the job titles of chaplains to “spiritual advisors” as part of an interfaith approach, Timms received a written instruction from a new Methodist minister: he should refrain from wearing his cross, in line with the ethos of hospice and healthcare chaplaincy.
“No religious symbols should be worn by those engaged in spiritual care,” read the minister’s letter, as detailed in a Christian Concern press release. “We need to be there for people of all faiths and none. Whilst I [recognized] you shared a story about one patient liking the cross you wore, it can create a barrier to others. The idea is that we should appear neutral, and that enables a spiritual encounter that is about what the person we are visiting needs.”
Timms, who lost his wife in early 2021 responded, asking whether the censoring of religious accessories also applied to people of other faith, adding, “My faith helps me to help the patients and staff, whether they have faith or not.”
The minister responded by suggesting Timms compromise by keeping his cross pin in his pocket unless he was sharing the room with another person of Christian faith.
Timms then searched but found no reference to the prohibition of wearing crosses in Marie Curie Solihull documentation, the code of conduct for healthcare chaplains, chaplaincy guidelines, or the chaplaincy code of conduct.
However, Timms reiterated in a face-to-face meeting with the minister on Sept. 20 that he believed he had done nothing wrong.
The minister said that based on the refusal to comply, Timms would need “re-training.” The back-and-forth eventually escalated to Timms being warned that unless he removed his cross pin, he could not work at Marie Curie as a chaplain.
Timms handed in his identification badge and left the premises.
With the support of the Christian Legal Centre, Timms wrote a letter to Marie Curie explaining how the controversy over his cross pin had led to “a crisis of conscience.”
“I have had a crisis of conscience since I received this request … I have serious and cogent reasons for wearing it and consider it a manifestation of my faith and a devotion to God,” Timms wrote. “The cross I wear around my neck is also highly meaningful to me as it represents a physical devotion to both my late wife, and to God, who brought us together and blessed our marriage.”
When the correspondence between the minister and the chaplain reached Marie Curie’s regional head office, a representative issued a formal apology in November 2022, to Timms, writing, “I can confirm that currently we have neither an organisational or uniform policy that would support our recent request to remove your cross while supporting patients and families in the Hospice. I apologise unreservedly for the distress that we have caused.”
Timms remains shocked and hurt by the ordeal.
“There was and is no need to suppress the symbol of the cross, and in so doing send a message that the Christian faith needs to be neutralised or removed entirely from a chaplaincy front line service,” he said. “When I became a Christian, I wanted to show people the faith that totally changed my life.”
Timms said no one was ever “offended” by his cross pin. He said that it has always been a privilege to support people of all and any faith through tough times. Timms appreciates the formal apology but now believes his service as a chaplain lies elsewhere.
“The easiest thing to do would have been to say, ‘I’ll take it off’, but I thought, ‘no’, I should be standing up for what I believe in,” he said.
Timms had the support of the Christian Legal Centre throughout his ordeal. Chief Executive Andrea Williams, said: “He showed great courage by refusing to cave in to the significant pressure to remove what mattered so much to him.”
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The emergence of an American NomenklaturaThe original Nomenklatura were the Soviet elite
Americans on the left, right, and center agree that America has too much inequality. They just can’t agree on what kind of inequality to complain about. Unable to agree on what the problem is, they cannot agree on the solution. Three different definitions of inequality are offered: economic inequality, cultural inequality, and inequality as demographic disparity.
Economic inequality is the focus of the remnants of the old socialist, social democratic, and labor left. Old-fashioned socialists propose to abolish the class system by abolishing class distinctions. Old-fashioned social democrats propose to ameliorate the class system by transforming basic needs—health care, education, housing, dependent care—from luxuries purchased out of after-tax wages into goods that are either publicly provided or subsidized by government. Old-fashioned labor liberals may support social democratic programs, but they are skeptical about the benign nature of government and would prefer to enhance the power of workers to use collective bargaining to raise their wages, minimizing their dependence on employers and government alike.
For their part, members of the new populist right tend to focus on inequality of cultural power in America. They correctly believe that every major institution in the United States, with the exception of directly elected officials—the judiciary, the civil service, the U.S. military, corporations, banks, corporate publishing, the corporate media, and the universities—has been captured by a semihereditary, college-educated overclass whose social views are well to the left of America’s working-class majority, white and nonwhite alike.
The managerial-professional overclass, a numerical minority, uses any institution under its control to impose its class culture and class values on the rest of American society, whether by purging conservative, libertarian, and leftist faculty and students from universities, canceling books and programs that dissent from overclass orthodoxy, or conditioning bank lending to firms and industries on promotion of overclass-approved social goals.
This brings us to the view of inequality promoted by the center. By “the center” I do not mean the actual center of opinion in the U.S. population as a whole. Such a national “center” would be slightly to the left on economics and slightly to the right on social values. What is called “the center” in American politics is the political center of gravity of the college-educated overclass minority: fairly libertarian in areas like trade, immigration, and deregulation, while supportive of radical liberal causes like “gender fluidity” and race and gender quotas for all institutions.
In the new orthodoxy of overclass centrism, inequality is identified with disparities in the representation of racial and gender groups (but not religious or class groups) in different occupations and income layers. The goal is not to eliminate class distinctions, or even to reduce the economic distance between classes. Rather, the goal of what is misleadingly called “equity” is to ensure that the share of the U.S. population of each race and gender identified by the most recent U.S. Census is replicated in all fields and all organizations. Hispanic Americans make up around 17% of the U.S. population; therefore, 17% of all sports teams and yoga schools must be Hispanic. Women are slightly more than half of the U.S. population; therefore, they must be slightly more than half of all engineers, construction workers, barbershop quartets, and special operations commandos. If any group is underrepresented in any class, category, or institution in American society, then it is “underserved.”
Women are slightly more than half of the U.S. population; therefore, they must be slightly more than half of all engineers, construction workers, barbershop quartets, and special operations commandos.
The mistake made by woke theorists of “structural racism” is to confuse two completely different things: the perpetuation of family privilege by inertia, generation after generation—which can occur in the absence of conscious or unconscious racism—and present-day racial discrimination. If today’s “anti-racists” were serious about reducing major disparities among white and Black Americans left over from slavery and segregation, they would not waste their efforts on “diversity training” designed to change the attitudes of contemporary white Americans, who are more liberal with respect to race than ever before. They would focus instead on broad, race-neutral economic reforms.
This was the view of the greatest civil rights leaders of the mid-20th century. In 1967, the A. Philip Randolph Institute published A “Freedom Budget” for All Americans. Note the phrase “All Americans.” Implicitly rejecting the idea of reparations for American descendants of slaves, the proponents of the Freedom Budget—including Martin Luther King Jr., who wrote the foreword—argued for race-neutral job creation and benefits policies that, although they would disproportionately help the Black poor, would also help whites, who then as now made up a numerical majority of the poor in the United States. In the introduction, Randolph wrote:
These forces have not come together to demand help for the Negro. Rather, we meet on a common ground of determination that in this, the richest and most productive society ever known to man, the scourge of poverty can and must be abolished … The tragedy is that the working of our economy so often pit the white poor and the black poor against each other at the bottom of society.
King, Randolph, and Bayard Rustin—among other civil rights leaders of the ’60s who favored race-neutral job creation programs—would have been appalled by a new program backed by the Oakland, California, city council. The Oakland program uses private funds to give $500 a month to “Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) families … with low incomes and at least 1 child under 18, regardless of documentation status,” according to the funder, Oakland Resilient Families. Poor residents of Oakland defined as “non-Hispanic whites” would not be eligible for the universal basic income, but foreign nationals who sneaked into the United States or overstayed their visa and remain in violation of federal law would be rewarded with monthly payments even if they do not work.
The price of the Freedom Budget doomed it at the time, and its details were designed for the midcentury manufacturing economy. While programs must change with the times, in principle the old-fashioned labor left that inspired the Freedom Budget has always been right about how to address the lingering aftermath of American apartheid. They were correct that reducing the legacy of historic discrimination by reducing class differences in life outcomes and opportunities requires a race-neutral approach.
For example, different minimum wages for Black, Hispanic, white, Asian American, and Native American workers would be an administrative impossibility, even if it were not also a moral monstrosity. So would collective bargaining on the basis of race or gender, rather than occupation or industry. The poor, hungry descendants of Confederate planters deserve access to food stamps as much as the poor, hungry descendants of those the planters tyrannized—today they are all poor and hungry, and while the Nazis revived the barbaric concept of hereditary guilt, it is alien and repugnant to all liberal societies.
The mainstream liberal coalition of the civil rights era was right that race-neutral economic reform, not race-and-gender quotas, was and is the necessary sequel to desegregation in America. For its part, the new populist right is correct that power exercised through private corporations, private nonprofits, and private media institutions is still power. If an oppressive national oligarchy uses nongovernmental bureaucracies to impose its moral and political agenda on society without the need to pass laws, then it is perfectly legitimate for America’s multiracial majority, through its elected representatives, to use the only institution in which ordinary people are at least partly represented—elective government.
Even if elected officials fail in their battles with the oligarchy, they can provide voices for the voiceless. Thanks to a kind of parliamentary immunity, elected politicians in the United States are still allowed to raise questions about the dogmas of overclass orthodoxy, from gender fluidity to open borders to police abolition to race and gender quotas, which might get ordinary Americans fired from their jobs in the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. The floors of Congress and the state legislatures may be the last zones of free speech and free thought in woke capitalism’s America.
It remains to be seen if the traditional labor left’s critique of economic inequality and the populist right’s critique of inequality of cultural power can be united in a new majoritarian alliance to defeat the divide-and-rule identity politics strategy of America’s pseudo-centrist oligarchy. Failure to do so means the entrenchment of both economic and cultural inequality under a national nomenklatura that is more profit-minded than its Soviet predecessor but no more tolerant of dissent or debate.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/inequality-michael-lind
****************************************************Black attorneys slam San Francisco's 'outrageous, unconstitutional and unlawful' reparations plan to hand longtime black residents $5m each -especially when California wasn't even a slave state
Black attorneys have slammed San Francisco's reparations committee for its proposal to give every longtime black resident a $5million payout in the summer.
Leo Terrell and former California gubernatorial candidate Larry Elder called the proposal 'outrageous, unconstitutional and unlawful' and even racist in an interview on Fox News' Hannity Monday night - and vowed to fight it.
They demanded to know who is going to fund the large payout — estimated to cost the city at least $50billion — noting that California was never a slave state.
But the woke city is already preparing to move forward with the proposal, with the reparations committee saying it will submit the plan to Mayor London Breed, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the San Francisco Human Rights Commission in June.
Under the proposal announced Monday, anyone who has identified as black on public records for at least 10 years and is at least 18 years old qualifies for the $5million payout.
They also must qualify for two of a number of requirements, including having been born in the city or migrated to it between 1940 and 1996 and then lived there for 13 years.
But the $5million payout is just the beginning of the draft's proposals.
It would also involve a lump sum payment to 'compensate the affected population for the decades of harms that they have experienced, and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and unintended harms perpetuated by City policy.'
The proposal also says qualifying low-income households should have their income supplemented to match the city's median income - $97,000 in 2022 - for the next 250 years.
And black residents who qualify for the program can get their debts forgiven, including their housing and student loans.
A number of other proposals include investment in San Francisco's black community, financial education, legal protections of people's reparations, tax credits, and black-owned banks being brought in to manage people's money.
The proposal says San Francisco must 'issue a formal apology for past harms, and commit to making substantial ongoing, systemic and programmatic investments in Black communities to address historical harms.'
Terrell and Elder, though, say the plan is racist — using taxpayer money to provide black people with funds unavailable to residents of other races.
As Elder described it: 'Reparations is the extraction of money from people who were never slave owners to people who were never slaves.'
Terrell, a Fox News contributor, is vowing to fight against the proposed measure.
'It's not ever going to get implemented,' he told guest host Pete Hegseth. 'I'll be the first lawyer to fight against this.' He continued: 'This is outrageous. It's unlawful. It's unconstitutional. It's racist. But it's not surprising it came from California on the day of MLK's birthday.
'We're talking about a racist program to benefit individuals who happen to be black — $5million,' Terrell said, noting, 'California was a free state.
'Who's going to pay for it?' he asked. 'Why should they get $5million? Because of skin color? It's insulting.'
Elder, who ran for governor in 2021, also noted that California was never a slave state and San Francisco was never a slave city.
'Furthermore, slavery was a Democratic institution. Why don't Democrats pay?' he asked, rhetorically. 'Jim Crow was a Democratic institution. Why don't Democrats pay?'
He went on to claim that 'very few Republicans owned slaves,' and asked why Republicans should 'pay a dime.
'The whole thing is absolutely insulting.'
Both attorneys accused the Democrats in charge in the woke city of 'playing the race card,' with Terrell saying: 'They need to keep blacks on the government payroll because, without the black population, there is no Democratic Party.
'They have a race card issue and they're never going to let that card go,' he said.
'This country has no systemic racism,' he claimed. 'That's something in 1955. In 2023, we have no institutional racism.
'But you can't tell that to a Democrat.'
Advocates of the proposal say it is necessary to right the wrongs of previous generations, that are still affecting black communities today.
In a draft report issued last month, the San Francisco Reparations Advisory Committee said the proposal will 'address the public policies explicitly created to subjugate black people in San Francisco by upholding and expanding the intent and legacy of chattel slavery.
'While neither San Francisco nor California adopted the institution of chattel slavery, the tenets of segregation, white supremacy and systemic repression and exclusion of black people were codified through legal and extralegal actions, social codes and judicial enforcement.
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My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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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 
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