(For more information on the Chicago consultation, please read this).
From email:
The following statement, in response to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Advent Letter, comes from the steering committee of the Chicago Consultation, an international Anglican group that favors the
full inclusion of gay and lesbian Christians in the Anglican Communion. The Consultation has more than 50 members, including two Primates of the Anglican Communion, 10 diocesan bishops in the
Episcopal Church, and representatives from Brazil, Canada, England, Ghana and New Zealand. It recently completed its initial meeting at Seabury-Western Seminary in Evanston, Ill. For more information see the attached release.
From the steering committee of the Chicago Consultation:
“The archbishop’s lengthy letter contains not a word of comfort to gay and lesbian Christians. In asserting the Communion’s opposition to homophobia, he gives political cover to Archbishop Peter Akinola
and other Primates whose anti-gay activities are a matter of public record. We are especially troubled by the absence of openly gay members on the bodies that may ultimately resolve the issues at hand.
The archbishop’s unwillingness to include gay and lesbian Christians in this process perpetuates the bigotry he purports to deplore.”
[blockquote]The archbishop’s lengthy letter contains not a word of comfort to gay and lesbian Christians.[/blockquote]
This is technically true, in the narrow sense. What should be supremely comforting to non-celibate gays and lesbians is what isn’t in the letter: i.e. that ++Rowan isn’t going to [i]do[/i] anything to slow, much less arrest what TEC is doing to advance their agenda.
And the number of those who support the biblical teaching of Lambeth 1.10 on the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council is?
[i] Comment deleted by elf. Does not add to the conversation. [/i]
See the word “bigotry” here. What does it mean? Does it in fact mean anything, has it a denotation, or is this merely a snarl word, telling us more about the speaker than his correspondent? Treating language like this – and the left has done this again and again – impoverishes language and makes genuine communication vastly more difficult than it need be. This word (like tolerant, inclusive, listening, gay, diversity and the rest of the long list) has been robbed of its meaning and has become useless for transferring ideas. Indeed, such words have become thought substitutes. Larry
[i] Please don’t take this tread off in another direction. [/i]
# 4 Larry Morse faults language and the terms bigotry, inclusive, listening…..
But, what of your words in the previous thread: The present crisis is in fact largely about sex, normal sexual behavior and standards, and deviant and abnormal standards.
Little is achieved by using the language of deviance, a psychological term; that went out some thirty years ago.
These people should take great comfort from Rowan’s Advent letter. They are being given a clear signal that they will need to re-think their strategy. It isn’t often that a group receives such a clear signal from the ABC.
#5: The words normal and deviant have statistical definitions and they can be measured if you want, for this is what the bell curve does, namely, determine the normative. Homosexuality is in fact, not as a mere rhetoric device, deviant, and heterosexuality is normative. Since when has this language gone out of use? Try taking an elementary course in statistics and the bell curve and what it signifies is where the course will start, in one way or another. In short, I have paid attention to denotations, and, e.g., Integrity has not, does not. Indeed, the very name Integrity is a bitter irony, an oxymoron, for they attack language’s integrity at many levels. And it is a limited portion of this subversion of language’s intergrit y that I sought to show.
Mind you, Intregrity and its kin are only doing what they have been taught. In the larger context, Americans trash language’s integrity on every level, e.g., so corrupt and corrupting has advertising become that no one notices any more just how bad it is.
A movie or book comes out. What do you read? “Awwesome!…” Los Angeles Zeitblatt. “Stupendous, beyond excellent !…” New York Babbler. Do you notice anymore? Do you care? And this overkill pf intensifiers is everywhere. But when even the most ordinary performances are given what we call a standing O, what in reality happens to (a) the standards of language and (b) our ability to make meaningful distinctions between good, better and best? When you call a homosexual “gay,” what can yo0u possibly mean? But when one calls homosexuality “sexual deviance” this means exactly what it denotes.
Elves, were you complaining that I was leaving the thread. I thought this was relevant, but maybe I should have put it uner the Integrity entry. Sorry. Larry
# 8 The concept of homosexuality as devianct went out when the APA changed its classification more than thirty years ago. Clinging to that expression is meant to attack. You’ve moved from denotation to connotation.
The APA re-classification was based on the flawed research of A. Kinsey, who was himself bi-sexual.
#10 The research by Evelyn Hooker dispelled the myths that gay and lesbian people were prone to pscyhological problems.
If this thread is going to turn on the concept of what is deviant or not, it ought to remove it’s context from the psychological realm to the theological. If sin is deviance from God’s Laws and plans for us, then talk towards that issue. Citing Kinsley or Hooker in support of or against a theological issue is pure puffery.
Faithful and Committed,
How difficult is this? Homosexual acts are deviant and non-normative because only a tiny minority engage in them, and any species where such acts became normative would die out. Theology or biology–take your pick–homosexual behavior is deviant and pathological by any measure. And when the homosexuals finally get their wish and their unions receive the official sanction of a much smaller TEC, they will still be deviant and pathological. And so the homosexuals will start casting about for other institutions to attack in their insatiable attempts to validate their deviancy.
#13 Reactionary:
One could say with equal validity, “Lifelong celibacy is deviant and non-normative because only a tiny minority engages in it, and any species where such acts became normative would die out.”
One could, but there is a sound social and theological basis for celibacy outside of marriage that is not present for homosexual behavior.
My point was, you appealed to biological arguments to demonstrate that homosexuality is “deviant,” but by that standard celibacy is just as deviant. When I pointed that out, you immediately shifted ground to “social and theological” arguments. If you’re going to bring in biology at all, you should at least be consistent about it.
Touche to Ross. I hear a bunch of poor arguments appealing to genetics or more appropriately eugenics that don’t hold up. If they did, I (and all other men) would be 6′ 4″ blond, blue-eyed hunky guy that women swooned over and whom I would impregnate liberally. Rather I am kind of a nerdy guy (but whom my wife loves a lot!).
You are correct that if all were celibate, the end result for the human species would be the same. But while a minority of people are celibate, only a tiny minority engage in homosexual behavior, and celibacy, unlike homosexuality, has the biological advantage of being hygienic.