Dr Kermit Gosnell's Chamber of Horrors

Dr Kermit Gosnell was until recently an abortion provider in Philadelphia.  When a raid was conducted against his facility, euphemistically referred to as the Family and Women's Medical Society, what FBI agents and state police discovered horrified them. 

Wikipedia gives a detailed overview of the case here. Among many other things, the Grand Jury investigation reported that:

“[F]etal remains [were] haphazardly stored throughout the clinic– in bags, milk jugs, orange juice cartons, and even in cat-food containers ... Gosnell admitted to Detective Wood that at least 10 to 20 percent ... were probably older than 24 weeks [the legal limit] ... In some instances, surgical incisions had been made at the base of the fetal skulls. The investigators found a row of jars containing just the severed feet of fetuses. In the basement, they discovered medical waste piled high. The intact 19-week fetus delivered by Mrs. Mongar three months earlier was in a freezer. In all, the remains of 45 fetuses were recovered ... at least two of them, and probably three, had been viable.”

Gosnell's cases are now before the courts. He is facing a long litany of charges, including 4 of first-degree murder for killing viable babies after they were delivered.  His method was to 'snip' the spinal cord.

Was it all about the money? Gosnell was taking in $10,000-$15,000 a night for abortions, as well as - according to the authorities - filling out thousands of prescriptions per month for controlled and much sought-after drugs, often allowing people to walk out of the Family and Women's Medical Society with multiple prescriptions under different names, for which Gosnell was receiving as much as $150 per visit.  The turnover from prescriptions alone could have amounted to more than a million dollars each year.

In this case the list of illegalities and inhumane abuses of just about every boundary of human decency goes on and on. I will not trouble the reader by going through them all, but they do deserve to be read carefully and understood for what they are.

What is striking about the case of the Family and Women's Medical Society is not that Gosnell and his staff team could have done what he did in today's America.  It does not surprise me that someone could be willing to kill babies for a living and call it kindness.  The pages of human history run red with the deeds of ordinary people.

Quite apart from Gosnell himself, there are two things about this case which really deserve comment. 

One is that the  authorities again and again  overlooked, ignored and turned a blind eye to what Gosnell was doing.  The Philadelphia Department of Health had plenty of warnings.  Ironically even the raid, when it finally came, was because of the illegal prescriptions.  Later it turned out that none of Philadelphia's 22 abortion clinics had been inspected for 15 years.  For political reasons, under a pro-choice Governor, health officials deliberately stopped inspecting abortion clinics.  The Grand Jury stated that "Even nail salons in Pennsylvania are monitored more closely for client safety." The reason given by health officials was that inspections might be "putting a barrier up to women" exercising their right to choose.  So the right to choose trumps all other considerations of morality and human decency.

The second thing which deserves comment is that the US media was slow to pick up the story.  Megan McArdell, writing for the Daily Beast, commented:

I'll tell you why I haven't covered it.
To start, it makes me ill.  I haven't been able to bring myself to read the grand jury inquiry. I am someone who cringes when I hear a description of a sprained ankle.
But I understand why my readers suspect me, and other pro-choice mainstream journalists, of being selective—of not wanting to cover the story because it showcased the ugliest possibilities of abortion rights. The truth is that most of us tend to be less interested in sick-making stories—if the sick-making was done by "our side." 

I had to smile grimly when I read that Marton Barron, the executive editor of the Washington Post, responded to criticism about the media silence by saying, with apparent pride, "we never decide what to cover for ideological reasons, no matter what critics might claim".  Of course the whole point about ideological bias is that those who exhibit it are not self-aware enough to recognize it.

Abortions after 24 weeks are intrinsically tragic and horrible.  They require the death of a viable child, whether outside the womb, as Gosnell is alleged to have done again and again to breathing, moving, crying infants, or inside the womb.  Either way the procedure results in a corpse, the dead body of the infant. I will never be able to understand why taking a viable baby's life inside the womb is more moral than killing it outside the womb, as Gosnell did.

I remember speaking once at length with a pastoral carer who had worked as a chaplain at a leading Australian women's hospital.  One of the functions this person had been asked to perform from time to time was funeral services for later-term infants aborted for psycho-social reasons.  These sad ceremonies, complete with tearful words of farewell, testify to the fact that the parents did not regard the fetus merely as a tissue to be discarded but as a lost child which needed to be grieved.  In recent decades it has been recognized that the loss of a child through miscarriage or some other misadventure can cause deep wounds of grief for the mother, so I do not find it at all surprising that some parents, having aborted a child, would also choose to grieve their loss.

I live in the state of Victoria, where it is legal to abort a baby up to 40 weeks.  It is legal to terminate a viable fetus inside the womb right up to birth.  Outside it would be murder.  This gruesome fact about the state where I live is deeply shameful and painful to contemplate.

Abortion is an unpleasant business, the later the more so.  Being an abortionist is not the most respected branch of the medical profession and only a  small proportion of the medial profession are willing to make this their living.    Here in Victoria there are abortion clinics unable to function because they cannot find doctors willing to perform procedures.  The Age newspaper reported that the Marie Stopes Clinic's Dr Mark Schulberg was the only medical practitioner in Australia willing to perform late-term surgical abortions.  However even Marie Stopes recently ceased doing abortions past 24 weeks gestation.  Their reputation had suffered after a high-profile case in which Dr James Peter, an anesthetist with a known drug habit, was accused of (and later pleaded guilty to) infecting 55 women with Hepatitis C (see here).  He used to inject himself before he injected the women who were undergoing abortions. 

Why would a medical clinic employ an anaesthetist who had been previously suspended for a drug habit?  The answer most likely is that he was the best they could get. The Age also reported that:

Marie Stopes Australian chief executive Maria Deveson Crabbe said the decision to discontinue late-term abortions was unconnected with any investigations into the clinic and was made purely for operational reasons. Ms Crabbe said Marie Stopes remained supportive of women's access to late-term abortion.

(It is an irony that Marie Stopes bears the name it does, as the real Marie Stopes, although pro-eugenics, considered abortion to be 'evil' and 'murder'.  She ensured that all nursing staff at her clinic swore not to "impart any information or lend any assistance whatsoever to any person calculated to lead to the destruction in utero of the products of conception."  See here.)

We were told that legalizing abortions would make them safer. This is the official narrative.  For the patients of Dr James Peter and Dr Kermit Gosnell this did not turn out to be true.

Here in Victoria our politicians pushed the boundaries to their limits in 2008 when they made abortion virtually freely available up to full term, subject to securing two doctors's assent.  The cynic might say that any two Gosnells would do.  The law also compels doctors with conscientious objections to abortion to refuse to treat their patients and to make an effective referral to a medical practitioner who does not object.  Even a doctor with a conscientious objection to sex-selective abortion is compelled to refer a patient seeking an abortion for this reason to another doctor without such scruples.

We live in a state of denial about the reality of late-term abortion. Gosnel was a wake-up call.  So too was the conviction of Dr James Peter, the drug-addicted anaesthetist. When will we, as a society, come to terms with what a late-term abortion really IS.


 

Looking for marriage in all the wrong places -- By Spengler

This article was originally published here with the Asia Times.

Two mutually incompatible arguments are advanced to defend gay marriage. The first states that marriage is a good thing provided by the state, such that gay people have the same right to it as anyone else. The second states that marriage is a bad thing, and that bringing gay people into the institution of marriage will destroy it from the inside.

Michelangelo Signorile, a prominent gay activist, urges people in same-sex relationships to "demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution". They should "fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, because the most subversive action lesbians and gay men can undertake ... is to transform the notion of 'family' entirely".

Signorile is quoted in a new book by the distinguished legal philosopher Robert P George and two of his students. They contend that marriage is an institution quite different from the domestic arrangement that advocates of gay marriage have in mind. Gay marriage as such isn't the issue, argue the authors: it an attempt to do away with the traditional view of marriage as a comprehensive union, and replace it with a view marriage as an especially intense sort of emotional bond.

Signorile might be tardy in his plan to "redefine the institution of marriage". Hedonistic heterosexuals have been hacking away at the traditional concept of marriage for years. Whether gay marriage becomes law or not, the institution of marriage in the United States may erode so quickly that it will cease to perform its social function, that is, rearing a new generation of Americans.

A Pew Research survey in 2010 found that almost 40% of Americans consider marriage "obsolete," versus 28% in 1978. They are acting on their convictions. Politicians of both parties are adjusting to the perceived shift in opinion. The Obama administration has petitioned the Supreme Court to overturn California's law against gay marriage, and 100 prominent Republicans last week signed a supporting legal brief to the Court.

Professor George and his colleagues defend traditional marriage from the vantage point of natural law, a minority viewpoint in an era where the capricious definition of one's identity is the focal point of culture. One may quibble with natural law as a concept or with the way that Professor George applies it, but there are some natural criteria which cannot be gainsaid. Here's one: will our actions make us extinct? The natural definition of marriage advanced by George, Girgis and Anderson is consistent with the continued existence of the United States; the "whatever" definition supported by their opponents manifestly is not.

America's fertility rate dipped to just 1.9 children per female in 2010 in the Census Bureau's estimate, well below the 2.1 level required to maintain the present population. Two-fifths of the fewer American children born in 2010, moreover, were born out of marriage.

Marriage rates have fallen in parallel to the decline in fertility. Only 51% of Americans 18 and over were married in 2010, compared to 72% in 1960. The numbers are much worse for minorities, with just 31% of adult African-Americans married in 2010, versus 72% in 1960. 40% of American women never have married, a proportion that is much higher among minorities (55% of black women and 49% of Hispanic women). Women who marry do so at a much later age (27 years in 2010 versus 21 years in 1950).

Sociologist Charles Murray argues that the great divide is less a matter of race than social status. "In 1960," he wrote last year, "just 2% of all white births were nonmarital. When we first started recording the education level of mothers in 1970, 6% of births to white women with no more than a high-school education … were out of wedlock. By 2008, 44% were nonmarital. Among college-educated … less than 6% of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1% in 1970."

In the short run, the decline of the traditional family causes an increase in dependency. 35% of American families now receive some form of welfare, that is, means-tested government aid. "In 2007, single-parent families were nearly six times more likely to be poor than married-parent families," notes Heather MacDonald.

In the long run, lower birth rates translate into an unsustainable proportion of elderly dependents. On the current trend, there will be only two workers to support every Social Security recipient, against five workers in 1960; if fertility continues to decline the situation will be much worse. And if more children are raised in single-parent households, fewer will be fit for employment.

Why should the state have an interest in intimate personal relationships? Nowhere do the authors suggest that consenting adults should be prevented from forming whatever intense emotional bonds they please. But it is a fallacy to conflate the issue of freedom of sexual expression with the institution of marriage. The state has an interest in children, first of all because it has a responsibility to promote their welfare, and secondly because the common institutions of society have an interest in our common future. Marriage, the authors write,
is a bond of a special kind. It unites spouses in body as well as mind and heart, and it is especially apt for, and enriched by, procreation and family life. In light of both these facts, it alone objectively calls for commitments of permanence and exclusivity. Spouses vow their whole selves for their whole lives. This comprehensiveness puts the value of marriage in a class apart from the value of other relationships.
That is the conjugal view of marriage, in the authors' definition. It is permanent and comprehensive, as opposed to an intense emotional bond, which may dissolve as quickly as it was formed. That may be convenient for lovers but catastrophic for their children.

Only the union of a man and woman can be comprehensive, the authors argue. The issue isn't dignity, which all human beings deserve. Instead, the issue is what a married man and woman can do that no other human arrangement can do: "Marriage is ordered to family life because the act by which spouses make love also makes new life; one and the same act both seals a marriage and brings forth children. That is why marriage alone is the loving union of mind and body fulfilled by the procreation - and rearing - of whole new human beings."

Across the ideological spectrum, researchers agree that "the family structure that helps children the most is a family headed by two biological parents in a low-conflict marriage. Children in single-parent families, children born to unmarried mothers, and children in stepfamilies or cohabiting relationships face higher risks of poorer outcomes," as the research institution Child Trends concluded. And as Professor Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia's National Marriage Project concluded, "The core message…is that the wealth of nations depends in no small part on the health of the family."

Adoption by gay parents does not do as well: The authors present a wide range of research showing that "compared to children of parents at least one of whom had a gay or lesbian relationship, those reared by their married biological parents were found to have fared better on dozens of indicators". Part of the reason that married biological parents do better may have to do with sexual exclusivity, which is virtually nonexistent in male homosexual relationships according to the standard research on the subject.

The state cannot help but take an interest, for it gets the bill for the damages when marriage breaks down. As George et al write, "Since a strong marriage culture is good for children, spouses, indeed our whole economy, and especially the poor, it also serves the cause of limited government. Most obviously, where marriages never form or easily break down, the state expands to fill the domestic vacuum by lawsuits to determine paternity, visitation rights, child support, and alimony."

That is the fallacy of the libertarian argument in favor of absenting the state from all questions involving personal intimacy. Society can get along with a small government if it has strong private institutions: families, churches, charities, schools and volunteer associations. Among these the family has more weight than all the rest put together. The state, and above all a state that seeks self-limitation, needs the family to flourish.

Professor George, like his co-author Ryan Anderson, is a religious Catholic (I do not know Gergis' beliefs). It is a particular strength of their book to propound a concept of marriage on the basis of nature and social benefit, with no recourse to the tenets of any religion. All of their well-reasoned arguments, nonetheless, will appeal almost exclusively to those who believe in traditional marriage for religious reasons. Why should this be the case?

Gergis, Anderson and George rightly argue that the two contending concepts of marriage stem from two quite different views of human nature. But it is just as possible to argue that two incompatible religious concepts are at issue. A useful formulation of the problem is found in the 1987 film Moonstruck:

Rose: Listen, Johnny, there's a question I want to ask you. And I want you to tell me the truth if you can. Why do men chase women?

Johnny: Well. There's the Bible story. God took a rib from Adam and made Eve. Maybe men chase women to get the rib back. When God took the rib, he left a hole there, place where there used to be something. And the women have that. Maybe a man isn't complete as a man without a woman.

Rose: But why would a man need more than one woman?

Johnny: I don't know. Maybe because he fears death.

[Rose leaps up, very excited.] Rose: That's it! That's the reason!

Note that Johnny begins with the argument from Natural Law, and then proceeds to the problem of mortality. Why do people fall in love in the first place? Because, as Johnny Cammareri suggests, we are everywhere and always haunted by the specter of mortality, and a certain kind of connection to another human being (or in this case beings) can intrude into our lives like a burst of eternity entering the temporal world. When we are in love, we are eternally in love; if we are separated by death, we know that we shall be reunited in heaven, or, alternately, we might wish to follow our dead beloved into the grave, like Richard Wagner's silly sopranos.

If we place our love in the context of raising children who will continue our lives, within a faith community that we believe to be called by God to his eternal service, we feel assured of immortality: not only does our flesh continue, but it will continue in the spirit of a community whose love-relationship with God mirrors our feelings for our beloved. Such folk as this will take Professor George's reasoning to heart.

It is not only conjugal love in the Judeo-Christian context that gives us the sense of immortality. Every kind of love does so, from the Temple prostitutes of ancient Mesopotamia to the heroines of Harlequin romances. That is what makes it love to begin with. It can be heterosexual, or not. Some of the best poetry of classical Greece and most of the love poetry of medieval Persia celebrated pederasty, in the narcissistic quest for eternal youth. Goethe's Mephistopheles is overcome by lust for the cherubs who come to claim the soul of Faust at the end of his drama. "Now I know how you feel, unhappy lovers, when you twist your necks to gawk at your beloved! This is much pricklier than hellfire!"

Left to its own devices, love tends toward idolatry. In the bestselling novel of the 16th century, Fernando de Rojas' La Celestina, the protagonist Calixto is so obsessed with the unattainable Melibea that, when asked his religion, he pronounces himself a "Melibeist." Adolescents should be made to readCelestina instead of Shakespeare's mawkish Romeo and Juliet. There would be fewer teen pregnancies.

Everyone who has loved anything more sentient than a cheeseburger is in some sense "spiritual". A decade ago a third of respondents described themselves as "spiritual not religious," which means that they explicitly rejected the tenets of any religion in favor of whatever they chose to invent for themselves. When Gallup in 1999 asked, "Do you think of spirituality more in a personal and individual sense or more in terms of organized religion and church doctrine?," almost three quarters chose the "personal and individual" option. Most Americans spend their loves looking for eternity in all the wrong places, seeking personal relationships that will lift them out of this mortal coil while preserving their prerogative for infantile self-aggrandizement.

The reason that it is impossible to carry on a rational conversation with gay marriage advocates is that they belong to an implacably hostile alternate religion. This new religion has armed itself with an Inquisition, ferocious as its predecessor. Say a word against gay marriage and you will be drummed out of polite society in most parts of the cultivated world. Fail to vituperate in favor gay marriage, and you will never get tenure at a major university.

Gergis, Anderson and George may not change many minds on the other side of the great divide, but their work is so well-crafted and well-reasoned that it will provoke apoplexy among their opponents. Defenders of gay marriage style themselves enlightened and reasonable; the present book proves they are nothing of the sort. If it will not convince the opposition, it exposes its irrationality. Perhaps that is as great a victory as the times afford.

Book Review: What is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, by Sherif Girgis, Ryan T Anderson, and Robert P George. Paperback; 133 pages, US$15.99.

Spengler is channeled by David P Goldman. His book How Civilizations Die (and why Islam is Dying, Too) was published by Regnery Press in September 2011. A volume of his essays on culture, religion and economics, It's Not the End of the World - It's Just the End of You, also appeared this fall, from Van Praag Press.

(Copyright 2013 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)

Here is Elizabeth's Christmas Prayer Bulletin.
Read about her new book here: http://www.turnbackthebattle.com/thebook.html


Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin | RLPB 190 | Wed 19 Dec 2012

------------------------------------                                     
CHRISTMAS HERALDS HOPE FOR THE WORLD                                     
------------------------------------                                     

by Elizabeth Kendal 

We are 12 years into the 21st Century; 64 years on from the signing of the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights; 23 years past the fall of Communism
in Europe and the end of the Cold War. Yet the world is not a safer place,
especially for Christians. For, while positives have progressed, so too
have negatives. And while proud, self-sufficient humanity likes to
congratulate itself on the positives, it is not very good at tackling the
negatives. For decades now, dangerous religious nationalism has been
building in post-colonial emerging democracies such as Sri Lanka, and
especially India. It is 33 years since the successful Shi'ite Revolution
in Iran and the failed Sunni Revolution in Saudi Arabia triggered the
Saudi-funded global expansion of Sunni Islamic fundamentalism, which is
pro-Sharia, pro-jihad, supremacist, imperialist and intolerant.

Yet these past decades have been decades of phenomenal Church growth,
specifically throughout the non-Western world. In 1960 the Church was
predominantly white, Western and middle-class. Today the Church is some 80
percent coloured, non-Western and poor. These Christians - who include
many converts - live as counter-cultural, vulnerable religious minorities
in increasingly hostile environments in states with poor human rights
records. Yet their numbers still increase as the Church continues to grow
despite  everything the devil throws at it. And that brings us to the key
issue: the escalating persecution we are witnessing is Satan's response to
Church growth. 'For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against
the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this
present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
places.' (Ephesians 6:12 ESV.) Satan is fighting back as should be
expected. So how should we respond to this? We are to respond with
endurance (Hebrews 10:35-39), prevailing prayer (Ephesians 6:18) and
steadfast faith (Isaiah 30:15) in the one who secured our victory by means
of the cross.

This year multitudes of Christians will be celebrating Christmas behind
barricades and with armed guards to prevent terror attacks and mob
violence. Those of us who are accustomed to worshipping in freedom can
hardly imagine such a scenario. This year the Indonesian government will
heighten security 'in seven areas believed to be prime targets for
terrorist attacks ahead of the Christmas and New Year celebrations'. The
areas which will receive special attention are East Java, Central Java,
Jakarta, North Sumatra, Central Sulawesi, Bali and Maluku. From 23
December 2012 to 1 January 2013 'police will heighten security at the
38,499 registered churches across Indonesia'. (Jakarta Globe). Instead of
celebrating Christmas outdoors as they like to do, most Christians across
northern Nigeria will remain inside their churches, behind the barricades
and armed guards. The general secretary of the Christian Association of
Nigeria, Rev. Musa Asake, expressed anxiety about the prospect of
Christmas bombings and appealed through CBS News for Christians to pray
that 'the Lord will intervene to protect churches'.

One of Iraq's leading Shi'ite clerics, Ayatollah Ahmad Al Hassani Al
Baghdadi is currently in Syria, supporting the jihad against Assad. He has
just issued a fatwa labelling Iraqi Christians as 'polytheists' [because
they worship a trinity] and 'friends of the Zionists'. He has decreed they
must choose 'Islam or death' and that 'their women and girls may
legitimately be regarded wives of Muslims'. This fatwa may well increase
the likelihood of a terror attack against Iraqi Christians this Christmas.
Also it is difficult to imagine that foreign jihadis in Syria will let
Christians gather and celebrate Christmas in peace and with security when
their intention is to eradicate Christianity from the whole Middle East.
In totalitarian states such as Eritrea, Algeria and all through Asia,
Christians worshipping in unregistered ('illegal') house fellowships will
worship, as usual, at risk of arrest. Christians in Pakistan, Egypt,
Sudan, Maldives and India will also worship at great risk, while
Christians in Somalia, Afghanistan and North Korea will worship in total
secret and near silence.

But worship and celebrate we all will, for we celebrate the coming of the
one who changes everything: Jesus Christ, son of David, Son of God. He
came to redeem his people and establish his Church. What started with a
band of disciples - most of whom were martyred - he has built into a
Church that is hundreds-of-millions-strong. What is more, he is building
still and Satan, though he fight with 'the energy of despair', cannot stop
him. Though this relentless battle leaves us weary, Christ is resilient.
Though we bruise like fragile reeds and fade like spent lanterns, the
promise is that Jesus Christ, the Lord of Hosts, will not grow faint or be
discouraged till he has established justice in the earth (from Isaiah
42:3,4). The one whose coming we celebrate at Christmas is the one who in
grace gives strength to those who will trust him, that the battle might be
turned back. He is the one in whom we hope. Yes, Christmas is worth
celebrating, for Christmas heralds hope for the world.

--------------------------------------------                             
A CHRISTMAS PRAYER FOR IMPERILLED CHRISTIANS                              
--------------------------------------------

As we lift our hearts and hands to the God of all Creation, we confess
that our hearts are heavy with anxiety for our persecuted fellow
believers; we confess that our hands are empty for there is nothing
material that we could offer that could stop the violence. But come we do,
because we know that while we are limited, you our God are not; for you
are the Almighty living God (Psalm 77:10-13) and nothing is impossible for
you (Luke 1:37). Indeed you are willing and able to do abundantly more
than we could ask or even imagine (Ephesians 3:20). We come because we
know that you love us with an everlasting love; that you speak, work and
rule in our interests; and that you are 'for us' (Psalm 56:9) and one with
us (Romans 6:5), having been given to us (the Church) as our head
(Ephesians 2:22). And so we cry to you: May the Lord of hosts himself
guard his churches and secret fellowships this Christmas. May the Holy
Spirit draw all imperilled believers into prayer, trusting that you will
answer as soon as you hear it (Isaiah 30:19). And may the name of Jesus
Christ be exalted throughout all the nations with songs of praise, of
glory to the Righteous One (Isaiah 24:16). AMEN  

--------------------------------------

RLPB 191 will be issued on 02 Jan 2013

--------------------------------------

To view this RLPB with hyperlinks, visit the Religious Liberty Prayer
Bulletin blog at http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com

For Critical Prayer Requests (CPR) for the nations, see
http://criticalprayerrequests.blogspot.com.au/

Previous RLPBs may be viewed at <http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com/>.

For more information, updates and helpful links see Elizabeth Kendal's
blog 'Religious Liberty Monitoring' <http://elizabethkendal.blogspot.com>.

This RLPB was written for the Australian Evangelical Alliance Religious
Liberty Commission (AEA RLC) by Elizabeth Kendal, an international
religious liberty analyst and advocate, and a member of the AEA RLC team.

Elizabeth is Adjunct Research Fellow in the Centre for the Study of Islam
and Other Faiths at the Melbourne School of Theology.

If this bulletin was forwarded to you, you may receive future weekly
issues direct by sending a blank email to <join-rlpb@hub.xc.org>.

The North American Episcopal Church Goes into Meltdown

The North American Episcopal Church is in deep trouble, hemorrhaging congregants, deep in denial, and wandering far from the teachings of the Bible.  What will remain? 

"Bishop Peter H. Beckwith, leader of the Springfield, Illinois, diocese, wrote in a pastoral letter that the Episcopal church was “in meltdown.”
Beckwith has joined bishops in the dioceses of Central Florida, Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, California, and South Carolina in asking their church’s top official, the Archbishop of Canterbury in England, for permission to pull out [of the Episcopal Church].
Beckwith says the failure of the resolution introduced by conservatives to declare the church’s “unchanging commitment to Jesus Christ as the son of God, the only name by which any person may be saved” was extremely disturbing."

Read more: http://www.beliefnet.com/Faiths/Home-Page-News-and-Views/Why-is-the-Episcopal-church-near-collapse.aspx?p=3#ixzz20SxyAm7p

All One in Christ

All One in Christ - a sermon on Galatians 3:19-29 delivered at St Catharine's South Caulfield on July 8, 2012.

I am a feminist, and have been almost as long as I can remember.   Late in my teens I came to this conclusion, and told my older sister.  I said “I am a feminist.”  She reminded me of this just recently.

I intensvely dislike the fact that the dominance of men over women has been and all to often continues to be one of the organising principles of human life. 

Thirty five years ago, in 1977, I attended a national Christian youth conference of the Uniting Church.   Thousands of young people were gathered in Canberra for the event.  In the afternoons we would split up into elective workshops.  I chose to attend a workshop on feminist theology.  There were a few dozen women - and two men.  The other man besides me was the conference plenary speaker, Dr Phillip Potter, a West Indian, who was general secretary of the World Council of Churches.  The  thing we had in common - apart from both choosing to attend a feminist theology workshop - was that we both wore size 15 shoes.

It was a fascinating and very helpful workshop.  The focus was on gender roles in the creation story of Genesis.  What I learned deeply impacted my thinking on the issue of men, women and Christian faith. 

One other thing I remember about that workshop was that when the speaker couldn’t get the cassette tape to work, she looked up and in a room full of people looked to me to fix it.  I was annoyed and made a rude remark.  In a room full of women, in a workshop on empowering and accepting women’s roles, she looked to a bloke to fix a gadget. It was one of those defining moments which stick in your memory.  I thought: how hard it is to free ourselves.

Today it is great to be preaching about Galatians, and specifically a very important passage in which Paul speaks about how distinctions of race, gender and social status are set aside in Christ.

Remember Paul’s argument, which we have been following for some weeks.  After Paul had planted a church in Galatia, new teachers had come, and they wanted the gentile Christians there to become Torah observant - to become in effect Jews.  They argued that if you follow Jesus, you had to be an observant Jew.  It is one of the  ironies of history that in the early church the big question for believers was whether it was obligatory for gentile Christians to become in effect practicing Jews.

But Paul countered: observing the Torah (the law) cannot make you right with God. Indeed no one can be justified by following the Torah.  Being part of God’s people,  he said, requires faith, not circumcision.  Faith in Christ.  And the Holy Spirit comes by faith in Christ, as the Galatians had personally experienced.  Life in Christ is not about following the Torah - it is about believing in Christ and experiencing his Spirit.

This argument of Paul’s raises the obvious question issue of why have the the law at all?  And this is where we come to in Paul’s argument at verse 19.

The answer Paul gives is that the law was a kind of ‘guardian’ or tutor.  People were held captive - not free, but under the oversight of the Torah - until they came of age.  Paul actually uses the language of imprisonment.  Then he refers to a cultural institution well-known to people of his day - the pedagogos, translated in the NRSV as ‘disciplinarian’.

The law, Paul says, was a pedagogos or disciplinarian, preparing the way for Christ.  The Greek term refers to a slave-tutor who takes over the supervision of a young person while they are being schooled.  The slave-tutor would take the child to school, wait for them to finish, bring them home, and check that they were learning their lessons and if necessary apply discipline.  This was a kind of a baby sitter until the child comes of age.  It was a role for a slave - a slave kid minder. 

Paul says that now that ‘faith has come’, we are no longer subject to the pedagogos of the Torah.  We are no longer to be baby-sat by the law.  This is what we call in English ‘coming of age’.  In Christ, Paul says, we have come into the full status of being children of God:  the expression he uses is ‘sons of God’.

Our identity is now ‘in Christ’, and Paul refers to baptism as the way into this new identity.  He compares this to putting on new clothes.  We are now clothed in the new identity Christ has given us.  We have been changed.

The law’s function is thus completed - job well done.  We are now ‘in Christ’.  We no longer need a babysitter to walk us to class, walk us home and carry our books.

Remember that Paul is making his point against the agitators who are pressing Torah observance upon the Galatians, who were already ‘in Christ’.   So Paul states:  “There is no longer Jew or Greek”.  That’s because, Paul is saying, the function of the Torah is no longer needed, so the distinction it creates, between Jew and non-Jew (‘Greek’) has been set aside ‘in Christ’:   we don’t need the Torah to babysit us anymore now that Christ has come.  Once you are an adult, why start wearing your old school uniform again?

Then, remarkably, Paul extends his point to also include gender and social status: in Christ, he says, there is also no longer slave or free, and no longer male and female.  All dividing distinctions have been set aside.

Today we would speak of racial equality, social equality and gender equality.

All are ONE in Christ!

In the daily prayers of orthodox Jewish men there is a traditional prayer which praises God that he has ‘not made me a woman, a gentile or a slave’.  It is an old prayer, which seems to go back to the traditions of the Pharisees.  Paul had been a Pharisee.

There was also a similar ancient Greek pagan tradition for a men to thank the gods for being made a human and not a beast, a man and not a woman, free and not a slave.

So Paul was challenging the current understandings of BOTH Jews and Gentiles about identity.

There is no one tradition which has a monopoly on disliking being born a woman.  Indeed in this day and age there is raging epidemic of dislike for women being born at all.

In some provinces in China the male-female ratio show that at least 25% of the girls are missing - with 5 boys born for every 4 girls.  The same applies in many parts of India. A 2005 study suggested that there were already around 90 million missing females in eight Asian states.   It is estimated that in China and India, by 2020 there will be 60 million surplus young adult males.   This same trend has been observed among some ethnic communities in Western nations.

This is a development which Christians should be speaking up about and opposing.  It is part of our heritage to do so.  In the early centuries of the Christian era one of the things Christians inherited from Judaism was an abhorrence for the wide-spread and entirely legal practice of infanticide, a practice which specifically targeted girls, causing as disastrous a gender imbalance in ancient Rome  as abortion is doing across Asia today.  In our modern era medial science just does it all more efficiently.

Rejection of women is an institutional problem of vast proportions all over the world.  The issue is found everywhere, from the traditional Aussie farming family who would pass on their land to sons but not to daughters, to the oppressive legal discrimination against women in Saudi Arabia.

Indeed as I mention Saudi Arabia, I cannot help but recall the uncanny contrast between Paul’s three-fold dimensions of equality and unity in Christ and Bernard’ Lewis’ observation that, under Islamic law women, slaves and non-Muslims all had an inferior status.  He wrote:

“ According to Islamic law and tradition, there were three groups of people who did not benefit from the general Muslim principle of legal and religious equality: unbelievers, slaves and women.”

• In Islam women are second class under the law - e.g. their testimony is only worth half that of a man’s. 
• Islamic law institutionalizes slavery - this was only abolished throughout the middle east under the compulsion of British guns in the 19th century - and in Saudi Arabia as late as the 1960’s -  but it is now returning with a vengeance in some Muslim societies. 
• And under Islamic law, non-Muslims, including Christians and Jews, are second class citizens.

Bernard Lewis observed (in What Went Wrong) that when Muslims visited Europe in past centuries they were amazed at how respected women were in Christian societies.  A visitor to Vienna was shocked that the Emperor himself would stop and take off his hat to a woman, giving way to her in the street.  He called this an ‘extraordinary spectacle.’  I’m not saying that the Christian West has not been patriarchal and oppressive towards women: of course it has!  But the Islamic sharia is many degrees worse, without the tempering influence of the gospel, and in past centuries Muslim visitors were astounded at the difference.

I have dwelt on the status of women, but slavery also is also a major issue in the world today. 

By the way, St Catharine’s church has an interesting connection with the movement for the abolition of slavery.  Christians in the 19th century fought to eradicate slave trade and slavery itself.  A leader in this movement was Sir George Stephen, William Wilberforce’s nephew.   Sir George was the first person knighted by the young Queen Victoria, for leading the political campaign against slavery.  Later, Sir George emigrated to Caulfield with his family, and donated the first piece of land and the church building to St Mary’s.  His residence, over the road, was Helenslea, where Shelford Girl's Grammar School is now housed.  And out of St Mary’s, St Catharine’s was planted.

Great battles against slavery were won in the past, at great cost of treasure and blood.  But despite the huge effort of 19th century Europeans to eradicate slavery - and later Americans through the agony of its civil war - the rattling din of slavery’s shackles is rising once again.

Millions of people are trafficked across the world and the numbers are growing all the time.  Right here in Melbourne people are trafficked for the sex industry.   This is OUR problem, right on OUR doorstep.

But back to Galatians.

What does it mean that these barriers have been removed, and we are all ONE in Christ?  How do we live as Christians as a result?

Paul’s statement meant first of all that in the church, in our spiritual identity, we are all one.  There is no hierarchy which makes some a better Christian than another by virtue of social position, gender, race or ethnicity.  In the early church a worshipping slave was not ‘below’ the free Christians.  They were all brothers and sisters.  The gospel was and should be a great leveler.  We are indeed all “One in Christ”.

But I think Paul means more than spiritual identity.  He meant there were implications for how we live in the world, just as the abolition of the difference between Jew and Gentile made a huge difference for how the earlier Christ-followers lived.

In this I agree with Catherine Booth, co-founder of the Salvation Army when she said:

“If this passage [Galatians 3:28] does not teach that in the privileges, duties, and responsibilities of Christ’s Kingdom, all differences of nation, caste, and sex are abolished, we should like to know what it does teach, and wherefore it was written.”

Galatians 3:28 is a statement about what the Kingdom of God looks like - and should look like.  It is about what the new creation, the new order of life which Christ has brought about really means. 

Recall that in Genesis, God made male and female in his image.  But after the fall various curses come in to play, including that man would rule over woman (Genesis 3:16).  As this dominance is one of the curses of the fall, this means that the dominance of men over women is a bad and evil thing - like death itself, which is another curse of the fall.  But in Christ, the curses of the fall are meant to be removed.  What Adam - and Eve - lost is being restored in Christ. Our shared identity in Christ must mean that in God’s new creation one gender should no longer dominate another.

Although the world will go it’s own way, in Christ everything is different.  Or it should be.  In our lives together in the community of Jesus, we should aspire to the life in Christ.  Nothing else will do.  We should set our heart and vision on the equal identity which Paul speaks about - that we are all one in Christ. 

There was obviously a gap between this teaching, and the standards of the surrounding society in Paul’s day.  Slave trading was carried on for centuries. Patiarchy endured the Christianization of Europe, dominating women and treating them as second class.  Christian people even quoted the Bible to justify it - and they did the same for slavery too. But this was the social order in the world, which sometimes has had far too great an influence on the church.  The church should aspire to be different from the world:  salt and light as Jesus said.  

In some respects the Christian community did live out its mandate. There were examples of slaves who became bishops in the early Church, and eventually due to Christian influence, some changes were made in society.  It became illegal to expose unwanted female infants.  But the world is resistant to change, and too often the church has failed its mission to witness to the values of the Kingdom of God in the world.  Too often its theologies

We can read that St Paul did not call for believers of his time to overthrow the institution of slavery.  His brief was not politics, or societal transformation, but life in Christ.  Instead, Paul counseled slaves on how to act in a good way within their social status.  But it seem clear that Paul rejected the slave trade as an unmitigated evil: in 1 Timothy 1:10 he states that  slave traders have by definition rejected sound Christian teaching. 

When he wrote to specific church contexts, Paul did give differentiated instructions to men and women.  But I regard these as concessions to the social order in which the church was constituted, even when formulated in spiritual terms. These regulations should be read in the light of Galatians 3:28, which lays out the basic principle of equality.  We find that in other places in hi letters Paul affirms the ministry of women: women are among those who laboured ‘side by side’ with him; there are women he calls ‘apostles’; and he recognizes the right of women to prophesy and pray in church meetings.

All this was remarkable for Paul,  who was trained as a religious, pious Jew of the school of the Pharisees.  To this day, if you worship in an orthodox synagogue you will find that men occupy the central area, while the women will sit separated off away from the centre of the action.  Men are at the centre, women around the periphery.

There is here a more general principle than gender, race, or social status - as profound as these are - and this is the honouring and respecting of others.  No one person is more important, greater or more deserving of honour and dignity that any other in Christ.  The dignity of being a son or daughter of God in Christ transcends disability, gender, ethnicity, wealth or status.  The Kingdom of God is greater than all such differences.  This is NOT just about rights - as important as they are.  It is about fundamental identity.  It is about belonging to God.  It is about being a member of the new community of grace being formed in Christ.

And this is what makes all the difference.

On Defining Marriage

I was interested to watch ACL's webcast of a panel on 'Defining Marriage' (view here).  The issue of same sex 'marriage' has been much on my mind in recent months.

What do most Australians think about redefining the definition of marriage in the Marriage Act?  At present the Marriage Act states:  "marriage" means the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others, voluntarily entered into for life.

What would the implication be of changing the definition to remove 'a man and a woman' and replace it with 'two persons'.

The Marriage Act definition has five key components:

• union - the two people become 'one'
• a man and a woman - a heterosexual relationship
• to the exclusion of all others - others beside the two should not be 'in' the marriage
• voluntarily entered into - not out of compulsion
• for life - the participants should be sincerely commit to a life-long union which will, be default, continue until one of them dies.

Before one changes this definition it is worth asking a question about ALL these components: why these particular definitional elements, put together?  Why 'for life'?  Why only two people?  Why a man and a woman?  Why voluntarily? Why are others to be excluded from this (apparently loving) relationship? 

Clearly the IDEA of marriage in this form has been around for a very long time.  It exists for a reason.   The reason is not what Germaine Greer saw in marriage in the Female Eunuch, namely that it is 'legalised slavery' for women.  If marriage was designed to be slavery, it would not be defined be a union but as a transfer of ownership, and use made by one of the other; it would also not be exclusive; nor voluntary; nor for life, because slaves are bought and sold as their master pleases, singly or in larger numbers.

The social reason for marriage, which is a public, not a private institution, is this:  it is to provide a stable public basis for the formation of families.  At its core the family is all about a man and a woman bringing up their own biological children as one of their main life tasks, and later in their turn being cared by by these children when they as aging parents are in need of protection and support.

The family, built upon the foundation of marriage, provides the most fundamental public institution for the flourishing of human society.  Countless studies show that children do best in families when they are brought up by their biological married parents.  This is not rocket science.  It is what marriage is for.

Marriage is a union, because a family is based on unity of purpose and identity, and shared ownership of core property assets (like the family home).  It is a desire for unity which causes most couples, even in post-feminist contemporary Australia, to adopt a shared family name after marriage.

It is about a man and a woman because this is what it takes to bring children into the world and to raise them in optimal conditions.

It is to the exclusion of all others because jealousy and relational insecurity damages parents and the children who are raised by them.

It is voluntary because only by choice can a person undertake such a difficult and sacrificial task as committing to another for life for the purpose of raising a family.

It is for life because that's how long the family project lasts, as generation passes to generation.  Raising a family requires a unique kind of stability which the Marriage Act's definition is designed to give.

This is the ideal, and the law enshrines it.  Marriage is honored and respected, held in high esteem - despite all the knocks it has taken - precisely because it embodies this ideal, precisely because people respect and honor what it means to be part of a healthy stable family.  Of course many families are broken, damaging and even toxic.  But that doesn't disprove the validity of the core ideal.  A race horse may break down, but that doesn't prove it wasn't bred for speed.

Many commentators, like Germaine Greer, have despised marriage.  The denigration of marriage is a common theme of the past 40 years in the West.  Yet the institution remains perennially popular; and prestigious, despite all the blemishes, and multiple forms of legal and socially undermining which Western nations have been foisting upon the institution.

I suspect it is this prestige that some same-sex attracted people are attracted to.  Some may ask: "Why should someone be excluded from this admired status, just because of their sexual preference?" Yet the institution is not a private one. It is a public construct.  Its purpose is not to promote the self-esteem or respect of married individuals.  Marriage is not a 'right' or a product to be consumed for the pleasure of the individual.

One of my concerns about those who are leveling their jousting lance at marriage by seeking to redefine its fundamentals is that their arguments offer no ideal which could possibly perpetuate the strengths of the institution they covet, in a way which will protect and preserve its benefits.  For example, if marriage is just about honoring people's love for each other, what possible objection can be made against multiple relationships voluntarily entered into?  I'm not using a slippery slope argument here, but seeking an explanation why arguments for same-sex marriage are not equally compelling in supports of polyamory.  If marriage laws should not 'discriminate' against gays, why should they 'discriminate' against polys, who by conscience and/or desire are committed to a multiplicity of relationships?  The traditional nexus between family well-being and heterosexual marriage provides a rationale against the poly agenda, but same-sex marriage rhetoric severs that nexus and will render marriage ideologically defenseless against polyamory. 

And why 'for life'.  If the justification for marriage is love and individual rights, then surely a shorter term relationship can be just as dignified and worthy of respect as a life-long one?

And why 'exclusive'?  Why should love be exclusive?  If, as many have argued, exclusive relationships are exceptional for homosexual men, why should their normative non-exclusivity be punished by retaining 'exclusively entered into' in the definition of marriage?

The thing is, once you abandon this core element of marriage as a union of a man and a woman — which is protected and privileged precisely because this is the foundation of biological families, with all their benefits for society — what principled basis can there be for not removing most of the other elements in the definition of marriage as well?  This is not about some kind of phobia about the 'slippery slope'. Nor is it a rhetorically lazy appeal to fear.  At issue is a fundamental lack of principle and confusion about purpose from the camp of those who desire to mutate the definition of 'marriage'.

The other thing that concerns me about same-sex 'marriage' is this.  Again and again we have been seeing around the world that where this public institution of marriage is restructured, the state inevitably intervenes into education, the workplace and right down into family life to persecute those who hold to a traditional understanding of marriage.  When the fairy tale about the prince and the princess must be transformed into a tale about the prince and the prince - because the law makes no distinction -  so many other things must change as well.  Sex education in schools will have to explicitly affirm the dignity of same sex genital practices.  Relationship counsellors shall be forced to honor same sex relationships.  Same sex couples will be given the same adoption 'rights' as heterosexual couples, trampling a child's right to having a father and a mother.  In some jurisdictions Christian agencies have been driven out of adoption services altogether for this very reason. 

There are a plethora of cases in overseas jurisdictions where people of conscience who uphold the traditional definition of marriage – which has applied for millennia – have lost jobs, careers, reputations,  livelihoods and even children because of states' intrusive insistence on compelling respect for same-sex relationships.  This is a case of the once-marginalized becoming the new persecutors, with a vengeance.  Melanie Phillips recently wrote of the outpouring of hatred she was subjected to when she dared to criticize the injection of homosexual materials into all subjects in the British school curriculum:  “... the total inability of those who subjected me to such abuse to realise that they are, in fact, spewing out the very hatred, intolerance and incitement to violence of which they are accusing others would be hilarious were it not so terrifying.”  Same-sex marriage laws empower collective societal acts of retribution against people who disagree with the redefinition agenda.

Redefining marriage can only give greater momentum to this totalitarian tendency, which I do not so much fear as acknowledge as a cold fact of life in the 21st century.

If Australians allow their marriage Act to mutate into something quite different, they will only have themselves to blame.  I do hope that the current discussion broadens and deepens, setting aside all forms of invective and fear-driven rhetoric.   I also hope that ordinary people, instead of just ticking the option marked 'tolerance' on their mental questionnaires about same-sex marriage, would do some deep thinking about what a marriage really is and whether it is worth fighting for.  As for me, I have decided it is.

Political Might is not (the same thing as being) Right

My mind has been turning in recent weeks to the situation in Europe, where democratically elected governments are being charged by their constituencies to spend more money, increasing the drain on the public purse in a climate of contraction and economic decline.  And to Egypt, where the people have been voting for more sharia, and more radical Islam.  There poverty and starvation will be the result; and in Europe there will be societal breakdown and growing civil conflict as people struggle to survive with inflated expectations in failing economies. 

Is democracy always a Good Thing?  Governments are as ‘good’ as the people who elect them. If a nation chooses to put their heads in the sand, they will elect politicians without vision.

I have also been reflecting that a generation raised with a belief in their entitlement to prosperity and progress —as is the case in much of the West—will not do failure, restraint, lack and poverty well.  Their demise could be ugly as they give way to those who are leaner, hungrier, and therefore more reality-based.

Also, if a nation has taught itself that the will of the people must always be right, both morally and prudentially, and that the ‘might’ of the ballot box provides a moral mandate, as well as a political one, then such a nation is at risk of losing their spiritual and moral compass: “We voted for it, so it must be good”.  Hitler’s democratic election to power and mass popular appeal did not make his vision righteous.  If it is true that thousands of individuals in western societies find cannibalism somehow appealing (see here), this does not make their preference a “minority right”.

The fact that freedom to choose things for oneself is a human right does not guarantee that when people make choices they will be morally “right”,  even when exercised in vast numbers through the ballot box. 

Political success is not a mark of being in the right.  Part of the Christian calling is to speak truth to power—including the power of the ballot box.   We must be courageous to speak out on the issues facing our nation, even if what we have to say runs against the tide of popular opinion.

There are dark and challenging days ahead for the nations, with storm clouds of rolling economic collapses and moral disorientation gathering overhead.  This is not an easy era to be born into.

All the more reason to be clear and bold about what we believe in, and what Christ has called us to stand for, lest by failng to stand, we fall.

Dr Richard Scott

I was interested to read of the case of UK GP Richard Scott,  from Margate, Kent, with 28 years experience as a doctor, who has been issued with an official warning and is currently under investigation by the General Medical Council following a complaint that he shared his faith with a patient during a consultation.

http://www.christianconcern.com/cases/dr-richard-scott