Mark Silk covers the Ugandan anti-homosexuality act.
We're still looking for Richard Land on Uganda. ERLC has a link to the Baptist Press Warren story, but thus far, that's all she wrote.
Dr. Rowan Williams
Buried in an interview with the London Telegraph is Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' first public declaration of opposition to the Ugandan gay genocide legislation. His wording implied that all members of the Anglican Communion, obviously including those in Uganda, should oppose the legislation. He stopped just short of calling out Ugandan Archbishop Henry Orombi.
The Telegraph's George Pitcher wrote [emphasis ours]:
"Overall, the proposed legislation is of shocking severity and I can’t see how it could be supported by any Anglican who is committed to what the Communion has said in recent decades,” says Dr Williams. “Apart from invoking the death penalty, it makes pastoral care impossible – it seeks to turn pastors into informers.” He adds that the Anglican Church in Uganda opposes the death penalty but, tellingly, he notes that its archbishop, Henry Orombi, who boycotted the Lambeth Conference last year, “has not taken a position on this bill”.
Williams' hand was apparently forced by the dramatically announced opposition of similarly reluctant Saddleback Community Church pastor Rick Warren (Williams interview is dated Dec. 11, shortly after Warren's statement), and a parade of other religious leader opposition, including the implicit opposition of the Vatican. Ekklesia reported that several British Christian organizations had also expressed opposition, "including Accepting Evangelicals, Changing Attitude, Courage, Ekklesia, Fulcrum and the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement."
Williams became a focus of criticism when he remained silent on Uganda yet issued a sharp, immediate rebuke to the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles for on Dec. 5 choosing as bishop the Rev. Canon Mary D. Glasspool, a lesbian who has been in a partnered relationship for two decades.
Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori took a stand against "the pending Ugandan legislation that would introduce the death penalty for people who violate portions of that country's anti-homosexuality laws," in effective contrast with Williams' silence.
The effect of growing international pressure on the legislation is still unclear. It is part of an Africa-wide slide toward repression of homosexuals, the Guardian reported today (12/13) [emphasis ours]:
There is wide support for [Ndorwa West, Uganda, MP David] Bahati's [anti-homosexuality] law which, while being an extreme piece of anti-gay legislation, is not unique. As far as gay rights are concerned, it would appear that much of Africa is going backwards. Nigeria has a similar bill waiting to reach its statute books and already allows the death penalty for homosexuality in northern states, as does Sudan. Burundi criminalised homosexuality in April this year, joining 37 other African nations where gay sex is already illegal. Egypt and Mali are creeping towards criminalization, using morality laws against same-sex couples.
. . .
He [Bahati] denied reports that international pressure might result in parts of the bill being toned down. "We are not going to yield to any international pressure – we cannot allow people to play with the future of our children and put aid into the game. We are not in the trade of values. We need mutual respect."
That is a contradiction of the earlier Bloomberg News (12/9) report that both the death penalty and life imprisonment would be dropped from the legislation.
Thursday without actually mentioning Uganda. the Vatican voiced to a United Nations panel on sexual orientation and gender identity its opposition to "all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment."
LBGT bloggers (1, 2) saw the statement as tacit opposition to Uganda's gay genocide legislation, although the statement was explicitly a reiteration of a Vatican position taken last year. It also echoed the Vatican's March position condemning violence against homosexuals without supporting the proposed U.N. Declaration on Human Rights, Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, recognizing "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" as new categories that need human rights protections.
Scott Long of Human Rights Watch reported that the statement Thursday "stunned" many in attendance and was in part the result of a lobbying effort:
Among the many people who contributed to this truly historic result, in which the Catholic Church affirmed a tradition of peace and charity, I particularly thank Boris Dittrich, who lobbied the Holy See for almost a year to declare this position.
Long also said in an email:
One of the panelists proposed that Rev. Rick Warren, instead of issuing statements from California that rights abuses are bad, needs to go to Uganda-he's preached there before-and tell Ugandans that he opposes jailing LGBT people.
The Reverend Philip J. Bené, J.C.D., legal attaché to the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the United Nations, said [emphasis mine]
Mr. Moderator,
Thank you for convening this panel discussion and for providing the opportunity to hear some very serious concerns raised this afternoon. My comments are more in the form of a statement rather than a question.
As stated during the debate of the General Assembly last year, the Holy See continues to oppose all grave violations of human rights against homosexual persons, such as the use of the death penalty, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. The Holy See also opposes all forms of violence and unjust discrimination against homosexual persons, including discriminatory penal legislation which undermines the inherent dignity of the human person.
As raised by some of the panelists today, the murder and abuse of homosexual persons are to be confronted on all levels, especially when such violence is perpetrated by the State. While the Holy See’s position on the concepts of sexual orientation and gender identity remains well known, we continue to call on all States and individuals to respect the rights of all persons and to work to promote their inherent dignity and worth.
Thank you, Mr. Moderator.
When Vatican in 2008 opposed the decriminalization of homosexuality, it was made clear that "no-one can or wants to defend the death penalty for homosexuals, as some people aim to insinuate."
Jennifer Harris explains that Christian ethicists view health care as basic right:
Other industrialized nations already provide basic health care, and consider it a human right rather than a commercial commodity, said Terry Rosell, professor of pastoral theology in ethics and ministry praxis at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan., and program associate for disparities in health and health care at the Center for Practical Bioethics in Kansas City, Mo. “They consider us to be barbarians for leaving out millions of our most vulnerable citizens—and non-citizens. They consider us immoral to allow some to grow rich off the sufferings of others.”
Read the entire piece here.
In the University of Chicago Divinity School column Sightings, Rick Elgendy argues that the wedge-politics of the culture wars have no support in Pope Benedict XVI's Caritas in Veritate:
Though frequently presumed to be the source of authority for those who would, say, deny communion to pro-choice politicians, Benedict here refuses to accept the ideological categories assumed in American politics: The same theological commitments that inform his convictions about the integrity of life demand a reimagining of prevailing social arrangements. Catholic and non-Catholic onlookers alike might hope that the encyclical will inspire political discourse that reexamines the standard binaries and turns to principled and civil conversation before partisan rancor (as Benedict himself did, by most reports, in his recent meeting with President Obama, in sharp contrast to how others dealt with the president’s Notre Dame commencement appearance).
Writing for Human Events, Ave Maria Law School's Rev. Michael P. Orsi says no, Catholics must still be anti-abortion/pro-life at the expense of any health care reform legislation. He does so in an argument that the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops violated fundamental principles by reasserting its longstanding position that “decent health care is not a privilege, but a basic human right and a requirement to protect the life and dignity of every person.”
Mark Silk responds, and quotes with telling effect from Caritas in Veritate:
Nowadays we are witnessing a grave inconsistency. On the one hand, appeals are made to alleged rights, arbitrary and non-essential in nature, accompanied by the demand that they be recognized and promoted by public structures, while, on the other hand, elementary and basic rights remain unacknowledged and are violated in much of the world[107]. A link has often been noted between claims to a "right to excess", and even to transgression and vice, within affluent societies, and the lack of food, drinkable water, basic instruction and elementary health care in areas of the underdeveloped world and on the outskirts of large metropolitan centres. The link consists in this: individual rights, when detached from a framework of duties which grants them their full meaning, can run wild, leading to an escalation of demands which is effectively unlimited and indiscriminate. An overemphasis on rights leads to a disregard for duties. Duties set a limit on rights because they point to the anthropological and ethical framework of which rights are a part, in this way ensuring that they do not become license. Duties thereby reinforce rights and call for their defence and promotion as a task to be undertaken in the service of the common good. Otherwise, if the only basis of human rights is to be found in the deliberations of an assembly of citizens, those rights can be changed at any time, and so the duty to respect and pursue them fades from the common consciousness. Governments and international bodies can then lose sight of the objectivity and "inviolability" of rights. When this happens, the authentic development of peoples is endangered[108]. Such a way of thinking and acting compromises the authority of international bodies, especially in the eyes of those countries most in need of development. Indeed, the latter demand that the international community take up the duty of helping them to be "artisans of their own destiny"[109], that is, to take up duties of their own. The sharing of reciprocal duties is a more powerful incentive to action than the mere assertion of rights.
Catholic neoconservative George Weigel attempts to escape that passage by arguing that it should be disregarded as a compromise by Pope Benedict XVI "to maintain the peace within his curial household.”
A strange argument to make about this pope who has backed up not a step in the face of one firestorm after another.
Agree or not, to understand the meaning of Pope Benedict XVI, do better to take Silk's approach:
Read that carefully. The pope is saying that an asserted (or legislated) "right to excess" is wrongly made equivalent to those things that are objectively and inviolably "elementary and basic rights"--such as "elementary health care." His point is that the affluent have to recognize that they have a duty to take steps to guarantee that the rights of the needy are not violated.
From Compass Direct News:
Five months after the daughter of a member of Saudi Arabia’s religious police [Fatima Al-Mutairi] was killed for writing online about her faith in Christ, Saudi authorities have reportedly arrested a 28-year-old Christian man for describing his conversion and criticizing the kingdom’s judiciary on his Web site.
. . .
On his web site, which Saudi authorities have blocked, [Hamoud] Bin Saleh wrote that his journey to Christ began after witnessing the public beheading of three Pakistanis convicted of drug charges. Shaken, he began an extensive study of Islamic history and law, as well as Saudi justice. He became disillusioned with sharia (Islamic law) and dismayed that kingdom authorities only prosecuted poor Saudis and foreigners.
Read the rest here.
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