same-sex marriage

Fr. John Whiteford Asks: What is the Mainstream Orthodox View on Homosexuality?

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Fr. John Whiteford comments on his blog News, Comments, & Reflections about an assertion made by Rebecca Matovic that professors, hierarchs, priests, and “many, many laypeople” agree with Dunn and his support of homosexual marriage. Matovic couches her views in the usual “I am loving but my opponents are bullies and dangerous” verbiage of the left, but Fr. John takes care of that in short order as well.

If Matovic is correct, why are they hiding?

Were they born that way? Have a listen:

What is the Mainstream Orthodox View on Homosexuality?

Source: Fr. John Whiteford’s News, Comments, & Reflections | By Fr. John Whiteford

In the comments to a post by David J. Dunn on the flak he has been getting about his posts on Gay “Marriage” there was a comment that warrants some consideration:

Please hang around with people other than the Jacobse crowd! There are professors at our seminaries and hierarchs who agree with you; there are many, many lay people who are willing (indeed, anxious) to engage in meaningful dialogue around these issues; there are many, many priests who think about these issues in a loving, pastoral way and increasingly find themselves moving to the ‘left’ of Hopko. It says something rather sickening about the current state of affairs that I find myself hesitating to name names. But please don’t buy the PR of the AOI crowd that they represent the “true” Orthodox view, the universal Orthodox view, or even a particularly dominant Orthodox view. They are loud, and they are bullies, and the results are dangerous. But the only solution is for those of us who hold different views, while being fully and faithfully Orthodox (or endeavoring to be to the degree our brokenness and God’s Grace permits) to engage and to be heard. — Rebecca Matovic (signing my name because there’s too much silence and anonymity in the world these days)

There are several curious things about this comment. For one, if the views of those who stand against the acceptance of sodomy as compatible with the Christian life are really just a vocal minority, why are the priest and bishops that Rebecca refers to unwilling to come out of the closet and say what they really believe? In the history of the Church, I cannot think of a single example of a champion of Orthodoxy that hid his views until the situation was more favorable… though I can think of many heretics in the history of the Church who did so. If what they believe is true, they should be willing to stand up for it, and let the chips fall where they may. The fact is, however, that these clergy (whoever they may be) are clearly cowards, who will not say what they really believe, clearly and unambiguously, because they know their views are at odds with both the Tradition of the Church and the vast majority of the clergy and faithful of the Church. It is just a fact that every conciliar statement that has been made by the Orthodox Church on the question of homosexuality or gay “marriage” has taken a clearly Traditional view, and declared homosexuality to be a sin, condemned by both Scripture and Tradition, and gay “marriage” to be a distortion of the meaning of marriage and something that Orthodox Christians should oppose publicly — and that includes the OCA, the jurisdiction that Rebecca belongs to.

As for the charge of bullying, this is a typical liberal red herring when they find themselves without a substantive argument, and have nothing else to appeal to. If one takes a clear stand, and challenges their opponents to do the same, and refute their opponents, this is what is known as rational discourse. It is in fact those on the other side of this issue that prefer to engage in personal attacks rather than deal with the issues. All that they have are emotional Oprah-like arguments, and ad hominem. On the substance of the issues, they have nothing… and they generally don’t have the courage to come right out and say what they really believe.

And here are two lectures by Dr. Robert Gagnon that lay out how the other side has nothing, in great detail:

The Secular Argument Against Gay “Marriage”, and
St. Paul on Homosexuality.

Albert Mohler: Evangelicals and the Gay Moral Revolution

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R. Albert Mohler Jr.

In the essay below, Dr. Mohler is speaking to an Evangelical Christian readership but many of his observations apply to all Christians. The normalization of homosexual behavior is a moral revolution Mohler writes and not one that Christians can join and remain faithful to their Christian faith. He’s right about that.

There will be pressure to adopt to this new morality as well. We even see it on the edges of the Orthodox Church with the Facebook group Listening: Breaking the Silence on Sexuality within the Orthodox Church for example. Who ever thought that some Orthodox would drag this battle of the culture war into the Church?

Mohler takes the Evangelicals to task for their sloppy handing of the homosexual question. I’m not sure we Orthodox have been sloppy, but we have been complacent. The homosexual moral revolution is at bottom a question of anthropology, what it means to be a man or woman and thus a human being. We Orthodox know some things about human anthropology but we’ve been asleep at the switch.

My conviction is that we may be in a period of social unrest similar to what the Early Church experienced that caused the the forging of the great dogmatic truths like Nicea and others (I touch on this in my essay: Orthodox Leadership in a Brave New World). Great unrest imposes suffering, but it also can unleash creativity.

There’s a lot to be done. We have to resist the attempts to homosexualize the Church from within; teach that the object of one’s sexual desire is not a primary constituent of self-identity; develop our anthropology to answer the homosexual questions with better insight and compassion; learn how to help men and woman properly deal with same-sex desires, and more.

Mohler reproves his Evangelical followers for failing to meet the challenge of homosexuality face to face, and by this I presume he means that some Evangelicals prefer not to have dealings with homosexuals at all. That’s not an Orthodox problem I think because we have an easier time drawing the distinction between people and their behaviors, including their sins. We have a better practical sense that not much more than God’s mercy separates us from the next guy.

Unfortunately, the neo-Episcopalian wing like those on the Facebook group exhibit a deep immaturity about the the human person and same-sex desire. Their immaturity probably derives from moral confusion, particularly defining such concepts as tolerance and compassion in terms of the dominant culture rather than the moral tradition. They craft an apologetic that uses the language of the moral tradition to endorse behaviors that contradict its teaching, yet they refuse to admit that the contradiction even exists.

That’s why when they collapse the distinction between person and behavior they think they fulfill the law of love, and why they believe that insisting on moral parity between opposite-sex and same-sex marriage is pleasing to God.

If their confusion is allowed to prevail, then the dominant culture will trump the moral tradition and the deep anthropological understanding that shaped the language and makes the distinction comprehensible will be lost. So will the important pastoral work that depends on it. The Orthodox will become like the liberal Episcopalians except for our Eastern flair and better looking vestments.

Source: Albert Mohler.com

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

To many onlookers, this seems strange or even tragic. Why can’t Christians just join the revolution?

And make no mistake, it is a moral revolution. As philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of Princeton University demonstrated in his recent book, “The Honor Code,” moral revolutions generally happen over a long period of time. But this is hardly the case with the shift we’ve witnessed on the question of homosexuality.

In less than a single generation, homosexuality has gone from something almost universally understood to be sinful, to something now declared to be the moral equivalent of heterosexuality—and deserving of both legal protection and public encouragement. Theo Hobson, a British theologian, has argued that this is not just the waning of a taboo. Instead, it is a moral inversion that has left those holding the old morality now accused of nothing less than “moral deficiency.”

The liberal churches and denominations have an easy way out of this predicament. They simply accommodate themselves to the new moral reality. By now the pattern is clear: These churches debate the issue, with conservatives arguing to retain the older morality and liberals arguing that the church must adapt to the new one. Eventually, the liberals win and the conservatives lose. Next, the denomination ordains openly gay candidates or decides to bless same-sex unions.

This is a route that evangelical Christians committed to the full authority of the Bible cannot take. Since we believe that the Bible is God’s revealed word, we cannot accommodate ourselves to this new morality. We cannot pretend as if we do not know that the Bible clearly teaches that all homosexual acts are sinful, as is all human sexual behavior outside the covenant of marriage. We believe that God has revealed a pattern for human sexuality that not only points the way to holiness, but to true happiness.

Thus we cannot accept the seductive arguments that the liberal churches so readily adopt. The fact that same-sex marriage is a now a legal reality in several states means that we must further stipulate that we are bound by scripture to define marriage as the union of one man and one woman—and nothing else.

We do so knowing that most Americans once shared the same moral assumptions, but that a new world is coming fast. We do not have to read the polls and surveys; all we need to do is to talk to our neighbors or listen to the cultural chatter.

In this most awkward cultural predicament, evangelicals must be excruciatingly clear that we do not speak about the sinfulness of homosexuality as if we have no sin. As a matter of fact, it is precisely because we have come to know ourselves as sinners and of our need for a savior that we have come to faith in Jesus Christ. Our greatest fear is not that homosexuality will be normalized and accepted, but that homosexuals will not come to know of their own need for Christ and the forgiveness of their sins.

This is not a concern that is easily expressed in sound bites. But it is what we truly believe.

It is now abundantly clear that evangelicals have failed in so many ways to meet this challenge. We have often spoken about homosexuality in ways that are crude and simplistic. We have failed to take account of how tenaciously sexuality comes to define us as human beings. We have failed to see the challenge of homosexuality as a Gospel issue. We are the ones, after all, who are supposed to know that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is the only remedy for sin, starting with our own.

We have demonstrated our own form of homophobia—not in the way that activists have used that word, but in the sense that we have been afraid to face this issue where it is most difficult . . . face to face.

My hope is that evangelicals are ready now to take on this challenge in a new and more faithful way. We really have no choice, for we are talking about our own brothers and sisters, our own friends and neighbors, or maybe the young person in the next pew.

There is no escaping the fact that we are living in the midst of a moral revolution. And yet, it is not the world around us that is being tested, so much as the believing church. We are about to find out just how much we believe the Gospel we so eagerly preach.

How to Destroy a Culture in 5 Easy Steps

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Source: First Things On the Square | Joe Carter

In his book The Future of Marriage, David Blankenhorn, a liberal, gay-rights-supporting Democrat and self-professed “marriage nut,” offers this sociological principle: “People who professionally dislike marriage almost always favor gay marriage.” As a corollary, Blankenhorn adds: “Ideas that have long been used to attack marriage are now commonly used to support same-sex marriage.”

Blankenhorn provides almost irrefutable proof that this is the expressed agenda of many—if not most—professional advocates of same-sex marriage. Other scholars have noticed the same and have attempted to present the public with the facts about the less-than-hidden agenda to use homosexual rights to deinstitutionalize marriage and to separate sexual exclusivity from the concept of “monogamy.”

Since the agenda is an open secret, how has this anti-marriage program been able to advance to the level of public policy? And how did it happen so quickly?

To understand this seismic cultural shift we should turn to an obscure, decade-old political theory.

The Overton Window, developed in the mid-1990s by the late Joseph P. Overton, describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse. Overton believed that the spectrum included all possible options in a window of opportunity:

Imagine, if you will, a yardstick standing on end. On either end are the extreme policy actions for any political issue. Between the ends lie all gradations of policy from one extreme to the other. The yardstick represents the full political spectrum for a particular issue. The essence of the Overton window is that only a portion of this policy spectrum is within the realm of the politically possible at any time. Regardless of how vigorously a think tank or other group may campaign, only policy initiatives within this window of the politically possible will meet with success.

All issues fall somewhere along this policy continuum, which can be roughly outlined as: Unthinkable, Radical, Acceptable, Sensible, Popular, Policy. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable.

Overton’s model was developed to explain adjustments in the political climate. But I believe it can also illuminate how profound and deleterious changes are advanced in our culture. If the goal were to undermine cultural institutions, the process for getting from Unthinkable to Policy would follow these five easy steps:

Step #1: From Unthinkable to Radical — The first step is the easiest—provided the issue can become a fetish or the topic of an academic symposium. Since both the professoriate and the perverts have a fascination with the faux-transgressive (the truly transgressive [i.e., Christianity] tends to terrify them) all you need to do is get the attention of one of these groups. It doesn’t matter which you start with since the politics of the bedroom and the classroom inevitably overlap.

Step #2: From Radical to Acceptable — This shift requires the creation and employment of euphemism. Want to kill a child exiting the womb? Call it “dilation and extraction” and infanticide becomes a medical procedure. Want to include sodomitic unions under the banner of “marriage?” Redefine the term “marriage” to mean the state-endorsed copulation of any two(?) people who want to share a bed and a tax form. Be sure to say it is about “love”—in our culture, eros excuses everything.

There will naturally be a few holdouts, of course, but those who reject the shift from Radical to Acceptable can be shamed into approving. All that is required is to deploy a stingingly suitable insult. The word “bigot”, for instance, is more effective than a billy club at beating the young into submission. There are few core beliefs they won’t change to avoid being called a bigot. The disapproval of their Creator is unfortunate; enduring the disfavor of their peers is unimaginable.

Step #3: From Acceptable to Sensible — There is nothing more sensible than to submit to one’s god. And while Americans may profess to worship Allah, Jehovah, or Jesus, we mostly worship an American Idol—ourselves. That is why social libertarianism has become our country’s fastest-growing cult. It has tapped into this self-idolatry by preaching a gospel of the Individual. It’s a pragmatic and accepting message. You were, as its chief evangelist Lady Gaga says, “born this way”: “It doesn’t matter if you love him, or capital H-I-M / Just put your paws up /’Cause you were born this way, baby.”

Step #4: From Sensible to Popular — This step merely requires personalizing the issue. Do you know someone who is LGBT? Divorced? Had an abortion? Sure you do, they are in your family, in your school, at your church.

Do you hate them? If not, then how can you still disapprove of their actions? (Note: Be sure to talk fast so that no one follows the logic.) As it says in the Good Book (or maybe in a Lady Gaga song), judge not lest God judge you for judging. You want people to like you, don’t you? Then express popular approval for what your cultural betters (e.g., people on reality TV) believe should be popularly approved. Then you’ll be popular and it won’t be necessary to call you a bigot.

Step #5: From Popular to Policy — Commission a public opinion poll. Show it to a politician. They’ll do the rest.

Of course not everyone in society will agree with every step along the way, but that won’t stop an issue from sliding into policy. All it requires is for a majority of the people who find the issue unacceptable to do nothing at all.

Almost every culturally corrosive policy—from abortion to no-fault divorce to gay marriage—has come about in America this way: Christians who find such issues “unacceptable” tacitly accept this social-libertarian shift by their refusal to take action.

Taking action is perhaps the wrong word, though, since what is most often necessary is deliberate inaction. For example, if every Christian in America who claimed to be pro-life would simply refuse to vote for any candidate—regardless of party—who supports abortion, the abortion laws would change within two election cycles. Similarly, if every Christian in America who claimed to be pro-marriage had refused to support no-fault divorce, there would be less poverty and fewer broken families in our country today. And if every Christian in New York had made it clear that he would hold his representatives accountable for attempting to redefine marriage, then the recent expansion of homosexual-rights legislation would have never come to a vote.

Sadly, such inaction has never happened and is unlikely to occur in the near future. America has produced an overwhelming number of Christians who are adept at explaining why they can support issues that are antithetical to Christianity and depressingly few who can give reasons why we should adhere to the teachings of scripture and the wisdom of the church.

History has shown that dedicated Christians can close the Overton window and reverse the shift from “policy” to “unthinkable.” But it requires a people who have courage and conviction and a willingness to be despised for the truth. Do current generations have such virtues? Probably not. But I’m holding out hope that our grandkids will be born that way.

Papal Environmentalism: Pro-Life and Pro-Marriage

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Ethics and Public Policy Center | George Weigel

In his January 11 address to the diplomatic corps accredited to the Holy See, Pope Benedict XVI continued to carve out an interesting Catholic position on ecology. The Pope insists that care for creation is a moral obligation that falls on both individuals and governments. His very invocation of “creation,” however, challenges the secular shibboleths that underwrite a lot of contemporary environmental activism.

Here is the money paragraph in the papal address to the diplomats assembled in the Sala Regia of the Apostolic Palace:

“Twenty years ago, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the materialistic and atheistic regimes which had for several decades dominated a part of this continent, it was easy to assess the great harm which an economic system lacking any reference to the truth about man had done not only to the dignity and freedom of individuals and peoples, but to nature itself, by polluting soil, water, and air. The denial of God distorts the freedom of the human person, yet it also devastates creation. It follows that the protection of creation is not principally a response to an aesthetic need, but much more to a moral need, in as much as nature expresses a plan of love and truth which is prior to us and comes from God.”
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