Associated Baptist Press - 3/28/2008

Associated Baptist Press
March 28, 2008 (8-33)

IN THIS ISSUE:
Watchdog groups use celebrity cast to turn focus on church-state issues
No cancer found during Mohler’s colon surgery
Opinion: On homosexuality, can we at least talk about it?

Watchdog groups use celebrity cast to turn focus on church-state issues
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) – Thomas Jefferson and James Madison are now only one degree of separation away from Kevin Bacon.

The fathers of the First Amendment’s religion clauses came together (in spirit, at least) with the contemporary actor at a celebrity-laden March 25 event in Washington, designed to kick off an election-year effort sponsored by two church-state separationist groups.

Bacon is the subject of the trivia game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, popular on college campuses in the 1990s, which tried to connect Bacon with any other actor by six or fewer levels of relationship.

Bacon was joined by other film and television notables to tape the talk-show-style presentation, dubbed “Everything You Wanted to Know About Separation of Church and State … but Were Afraid to Ask.” It was simulcast in movie theaters across the country the following evening.

The event was a splashy way to kick off a campaign, called First Freedom First, to get politicians and voters focused on maintaining strict church-state separation in the 2008 election cycle.

The purpose, said actor Peter Coyote, who emceed the show, was “to extend an invitation to all Americans -- atheists and believers alike -- to join us in gaining deeper appreciation for the history, the meaning and purpose of our sacred, protected right to worship or not.”

Coyote was joined by Welton Gaddy of the Interfaith Alliance and Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State as he interviewed several in-studio guests who had fought battles against government endorsements of religion or mistreatment of religious minorities.

They included Matthew LaClair, a student at a public high school in Kearney, N.J. He was ostracized and threatened after he attempted to get school authorities to rein in his American history teacher for his repeated endorsements of Christianity. LaClair made headlines when, in 2006, he released tape recordings to the press of the teacher, David Paskiewicz, using class time to say that those who don’t accept that Jesus died for their sins “belong in hell,” that there were dinosaurs aboard Noah’s Ark, and that evolution and the Big Bang Theory are scientifically unsupportable.

“I think the core of the problem was that this man had been teaching for 14 years by the time that I got there. Not one student has ever done anything,” LaClair said. “I think we have to start standing up for separation of church and state, because it’s so important.”

The guests also included Army widow Roberta Stewart. Her husband, Patrick, was killed in combat in Afghanistan in 2005. But the Department of Veterans Affairs initially refused to place the pentacle, symbol of the Stewarts’ Wiccan religion, on the soldier’s grave marker -- even though the military has Wiccan chaplains and even though it had several dozen other “recognized” religious symbols.

Roberta Stewart fought the government on the decision, ultimately winning the symbol and a personal apology from President Bush. “I decided to fight because if I didn’t I felt it made our love not as valid,” she said. “And I wasn’t willing to accept that, nor was I willing to accept discrimination.”

Veteran television and film actor Jack Klugman also appeared on the show, as well as in a made-for-television advertisement associated with the First Freedom First campaign. The ad urges candidates to clarify their views on end-of-life issues.

Klugman, who is 85, said he was motivated to do the spot because of the 2005 controversy over the fate of Terri Schiavo. The brain-damaged Florida woman had been in what doctors described as a persistent vegetative state for 15 years, and her husband had won several court battles in an effort to remove the feeding tube that kept her alive. But her parents and siblings objected, touching off a battle that many social conservatives cast as a pro-life issue.

Their allies in Congress passed an emergency law intervening in the case.

Klugman said the way conservative members of Congress handled the case disgusted him. “I did the spot mostly because I’m more at the end of my life than I am at the beginning, and I wanted to make a stand,” he said.

Bacon and his band provided entertainment during the show, which also featured comedy acts and a taped message from actor Michael J. Fox, who suffers from Parkinson’s disease. Fox appealed for science to take precedence over religiously motivated opposition to embryonic stem-cell research.

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No cancer found during Mohler’s colon surgery
By ABP staff

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (ABP) -- As expected, a tumor removed from the colon of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President Al Mohler proved not to be cancerous, according to a seminary news release.

A popular radio commentator and spokesman for conservative social causes, Mohler underwent surgery March 20 to remove the mass. Doctors discovered it during a routine colonoscopy in February. They said they thought the tumor was pre-cancerous, according to previous statements from the school. A pathological test confirmed their initial diagnosis.

Mohler earlier announced he would be a candidate for the presidency of the Southern Baptist Convention when it meets in June, but he bowed out of the race Feb. 14 when he announced his need for surgery. Three other conservative candidates had already declared their intentions to be nominated -- Georgia pastor Frank Cox and Californians Wiley Drake and Bill Wagner.

Mohler said he is “very thankful” for the outcome. “As it turns out, this is a tumor that turns malignant 100 percent of the time, but was found before it had turned,” he said in the statement.

Mohler went through similar surgery in December 2006. That surgery was complicated by blood clots that formed in his lungs.

Mohler said he is working his way back into his presidential duties.

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Opinion: On homosexuality,can we at least talk about it?
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- I’m one of the few leaders in Baptist life with the freedom to talk openly and honestly about the complex theological, moral, pastoral, and public policy issues raised by homosexuality without destroying myself professionally.

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, the most hated, the most abandoned, the most feared, the most loathed, the most despised, the most mocked -- these are the people to whom Jesus most directs us to offer our love.

I go to press conferences sometimes and talk about what Christians ought to stand for in society. Two times in recent months I have finished one of these press conferences and been approached quietly afterwards. Both times a young man has handed me a business card and gently said something like this to me: “Please do not forget about me and people like me.” They were homosexuals. They were seeking Christian love. They were asking for some help.

In my doctoral dissertation I studied Christians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. I discovered that in that horrible drama there were essentially four categories of behavior: victim, perpetrator, rescuer and bystander. Most instances of mass evil involve a small number of direct perpetrators killing a large number of hated victims in the presence of a much larger group of acquiescent bystanders, and resisted by a tiny number of rescuers. Scalded by that research, I have vowed with God’s help to be a rescuer kind of Christian.

In light of the hatred, mockery, loathing, fear and rejection directed at homosexuals in our society -- and in our churches -- I hope to God that I am not and never have been a perpetrator. But I fear I have indeed been a bystander. I am trying to figure out what it might mean to be a rescuer.

There are always very, very compelling reasons to be a bystander. Mainly these revolve around self-interest. You live longer when you are a bystander. People like you more. And even if you entertain nagging questions of conscience about your inaction, in the end it is easier to stay out of it. And so the hated group keeps getting thrown under the bus.

There are dozens of such particular flashpoints related to the issue of homosexuality. Christians, their churches, their denominations and their institutions are arguing about everything from homosexuality’s causes to whether active gays can be church members or leaders to even whether gay couples can appear alongside other families in church pictorial directories.

I want to begin a dialogue in this column by simply calling for the rudiments of Christian love of neighbor to extend to the homosexual. And the place to begin is in the church -- that community of faith in which we have (reportedly) affirmed that Jesus Christ is Lord. I call for the following Christian commitments:

-- The complete rejection of still-common forms of speech in which anti-homosexual slurs (“queer,” “fag”) are employed either in jest or in all seriousness

-- The complete rejection of a heart attitude of hatred, loathing, and fear toward homosexuals

-- The complete rejection of any form of bullying directed against homosexuals or those thought to be homosexuals

-- The complete rejection of political demagoguery in which homosexuals are scapegoated for our nation’s social ills and used as tools for partisan politics

-- The complete rejection of casual, imprecise and erroneous factual claims about homosexuality in preaching, teaching or private speech, such as, “All homosexuals choose to be that way.”

-- The complete recognition of the full dignity and humanity of the homosexual as a person made in God’s image and sacred in God’s sight

-- The complete recognition that in any faith community of any size one will find persons wrestling with homosexuality, either in their own lives or the lives of people that they love

-- The complete recognition that when Jesus calls us to love our neighbors, that includes especially our homosexual neighbors, because the more a group is hated, the more they need Christ’s love through us

There is more to be said. But this is at least a place to start.

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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. www.davidpgushee.com