The Manhattan Declaration facebook page promoted an article by Rod Dreher titled “Does Faith = Hate?” that contained the usual “winsome” anti-gay arguments. Here is the comment I left, if your interested.
The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops lobbied Congress to hold the continuing resolution and debt ceiling bill hostage to anti-birth control ideology. In a September 26 letter, they wrote:
We are writing once again, as Chairmen of the U.S. bishops’ Committee on Pro-Life Activities and Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty, on an increasingly grave concern to our Church and many others: Preserving religious freedom and the right of conscience for all who take part in our health care system.We have already urged you to enact the Health Care Conscience Rights Act (H.R. 940/S. 1204). As Congress considers a Continuing Resolution and debt ceiling bill in the days to come, we reaffirm the vital importance of incorporating the policy of this bill into such “must-pass” legislation.
…we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.…Chuck Colson Founder, the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview (Lansdowne, VA)
Have you ever heard of a Christian bakery?
I’ve been to many bakeries in my life. French bakeries, Italian bakeries, European bakeries, Mexican bakeries, but never a Christian bakery. The term just popped up because a so-called “Christian bakery,” Sweet Cakes by Melissa closed over a controversy. The owners refused to bake a cake for a client’s wedding because they thought the “act” of baking the cake violated their religious liberty. In Yiddish, we’d say the act was treif, but treif refers to products, not acts, and that’s where the people who orchestrated this controversy run into trouble.
The Oregon Family Policy Council, sister to our Virginia [some] Families Foundation placed a sign in the closed bakery reading:
RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IS UNDER ATTACK IN GRESHAM
The late Chuck Colson’s Prison Fellowship Ministries Manhattan Declaration posted an article on its Facebook page that lead to this exchange: Continue reading
Frank Wolf is stirring up the anti-gay base. On June 5, he and Democrat Tony Hall co-authored a letter to pastors that appeared on the Manhattan Declaration blog. The letter is a response to the President’s announcement that after listening to his children and consulting the Bible, he now supports marriage for all people. Wolf and Hall asked some pastors to construct a cultural anti-marriage narrative and to agitate their congregations to “act”. I’ve quoted portions of the letter, and added emphasis.
Talking heads and strategists in Washington are busy analyzing what constituencies have been mobilized, energized, secured or alienated by the timing of the president’s announcement. But the implications of this shift are more far-reaching than November’s electoral outcome. We believe that the president’s position, which he sought to justify by citing Scripture, necessitates a response. Not only a political response – but a reasoned, winsome, faithful interpretation of what Scripture actually has to say about God’s intent for the sacred institution of marriage. As is befitting those who identify themselves as followers of Jesus, this apologetic for marriage must be seasoned with grace, kindness and love while also being grounded in truth.
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where are the Christian apologists who will sound the clarion call for Biblical orthodoxy on the institution of marriage? Where are the William Wilberforce’s and the Mother Theresa’s and the C. S. Lewis’ for our day? Who will stand in the gap?
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The apostle Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “Again, if the trumpet does not sound a clear call. who will get ready for battle?” We fear that the trumpet’s call is muffled – that there is uncertainty and confusion among people of faith in part because many of our religious leaders have not yet stepped into the void.
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We write to you not as a Republican and a Democrat, which we are, but as men of faith who take seriously the teaching of Scripture – as do you. German Lutheran pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” In that spirit, we implore you, with an urgency that the situation demands, to boldly lend your voice to the public square on this defining issue – for such a time as this.
The underlying message to the pastors is “train the dog to bite when the master says ‘stay!’.” “Clarion call,” “stand in the gap,” “get ready for battle,” “Dietrich Bonhoeffer,” seriously, does Congressman Wolf not know Godwin’s law? Do historians need to remind him that Nazi Germany was a “Christian Nation”; 65% protestant, 30% Catholic, and that Pope Benedict was a member of the Hitler youth? Hitler quoted Martin Luther’s most anti-Semitic writings and he attended his Catholic church throughout the war. Hitler was a master propagandist who constructed a new racist Jew-hating narrative, but that narrative wouldn’t have taken root if it weren’t for Europe’s fertile soil of cultural, Christian, anti-semitism.
How can Wolf call for “grace, kindness and love” and then invoke Bonhoeffer to “stand in the gap” against “this defining issue – for such a time as this?” What time is it, a time when same-sex couples are living their marriages openly, and people honoring them in spite of 29 state constitutional amendments? That *is* what time it is, and our congressman, who supposedly represents all of us, equally, is comparing our marriages to cold, calculated mass-murder. Marriage and mass-murder, they are sooo-much-the-same-thing.
The letter is “monstrous“, and Frank Wolf is unhinged, and dangerous.