Religious Left

Because I hold a tenured professorship in Christian ethics at Mercer University, I am one of those rare souls who can talk candidly about this hot-button issue. And these days I’m finding it hard to avoid the nagging and unsought conviction that this freedom now demands responsible exercise. Methodology is everything. Starting points are everything. Glen Stassen and I wrote a widely read book in which we argued that truly Christian ethics focuses relentlessly on Jesus Christ. It starts there, it dwells there, it ends there. All statements about Christian morality -- all statements about anything -- must fit with the Jesus we meet in the Gospels. Jesus is where God meets the world, and thus where any who bear his name must meet the world as well. Jesus taught us to love our neighbors as ourselves. He defined neighbors to include everyone. Absolutely everyone. He sharpened that definition by calling us to attend to those regarded as the last, the least and the lost. The most rejected, th...

(Frankfort, Kentucky) A judge ruled Thursday that Kentucky GOP lawmakers and former Gov. Ernie Fletcher violated the state constitution by appropriating $11 million in state funding to a Baptist university. Kentucky Fairness Alliance executive director Christina Gilgor called the ruling a victory against state-subsidized discrimination. The legality of the grant grew out of a 2006 incident in which the university expelled a student it found out is gay. Jason Johnson, 20, was expelled after posting his sexual orientation on a Web site. The dean's list student received all Fs on his transcript when he was expelled. ( story ) Following public outrage the university agreed to allow Johnson to send in work to finish his courses and receive final grades but he was barred from the campus. full article

I’m not a fan of sweeping generalizations so I’ll just say the clubhouse for honest politicians must be very small. Awhile back when I heard Barack Obama say he’d give us federal civil unions, with benefits equal to marriage, as soon as he was in the White House, I dismissed it as a “campaign promise”. A week or so ago we saw news regarding the significance of “the gay vote”. So it shouldn’t come as a complete surprise when we hear Barack say “We have scorned our gay brothers and sisters instead of embracing them”. It would be easy to dismiss this as well, were it not for the venue. Barack was at the Ebenezer Baptist Church which is the church Martin Luther King Jr. called home. They were having a special service celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. full story

The North Carolina Baptist Convention voted this morning to expel the Myers Park Baptist Church for welcoming and affirming gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) Baptists in their congregation. Last year, the North Carolina Baptists decided to expel any member church that openly accepts and affirms GLBT persons and same-sex relations from the Baptist community.

Now Craig has come under fire from an entirely new quarter: the church of right-fringe anti-gay Rev. Fred Phelps. In a press release dated Aug. 28, Westboro Baptist Church, located in Topeka, Kansas, exhorted followers to "Thank God for revealing a bit of truth about Sen. Larry Craig of Idaho; and, by a logical extension, about the United States Congress." Said the church’s press release, "Sen. Craig used his powerful office--(on loan from God, temporarily)--to oppose [Westboro Baptist Church], to speak against WBC, and to vote against WBC’s Constitutional rights of free religious exercise and freedom of speech." http://www.edgeboston.com/index.php?ch=news&sc=glbt&sc2=news&sc3=&id=22898 .