Am I understanding this correctly?? 3 local churches are pulling out of a group of churches that come together to feed and minister to the poor/homeless because the other churches will not take a stand against homosexuality?
Oh lady you should come to Washington DC. The City Council--two of whose members are gay, in a city which has virtually no Republican Party--just voted to normalize gay marriage. The entire freakin' Catholic Church withdrew from its partnership with the city to run shelters and other services for the homeless.
What is it about homosexuality? This is just as stupid as the liberal groups that vilify the boyscouts for not allowing homosexual males to be scout leaders. You shouldn't have to agree on every issue to get together and do something you all agree is good.
Well, as a libertarian I'm familiar with the uncomfortable decision regarding just where you may ultimately have to put limits on people's freedoms. Clearly people must be free to form groups of people that have something in common, but size matters.
I rent out half of my house, and because my tenants basically become part of my family I am free to accept or reject their rental applications for any reason, including race, religion or anything else. But if I were running a 20-unit apartment house and I'm only going to run into my tenants in the laundry room, I have to conform to the minimal limits set by the law and not reject them based on age, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation. But I can still reject them if I don't like their politics, their level of education, their taste in music, or if they don't like dogs.
When a community reaches the size of a city, it has so much power over people's lives that restrictions that would be merely quaint and medieval in a village can become onerous. If a condominium passes a rule against having dark skin, the dark-skinned people can move to the condominium half a mile away. (And in America that's not a valid example.) But if a city does it, where are its half-million dark-skinned people supposed to go--to find new jobs for themselves and schools for their children?
And that's the problem with the Boy Scouts and any of the large fraternal organizations for adults. Their influence is too pervasive, the status of being a member is too powerful. By being prohibited from joining the Boy Scouts, your children are prevented from making contacts that will help them in school and later in life. There's a reason the word "marginalizing" was coined. Marginalizing people traps them in the margins of life.
Many they could have a national referendum on whether they want to see homosexuals in their community.
Beware the "tyranny of the majority." If we had a vote today in the USA on whether we should allow Muslims to live here, do you for one second doubt what the overwhelming majority of my people would say?
In theory, the advantage of representative democracy over direct democracy is that professional leaders are supposed to have cooler heads than the average citizen, and insulate us from our own meanness and short-sightedness. Of course I'm not saying it works that way in practice.
An excellent example of why religion that invokes fantasy-as-truth is harmful.
Is there any other kind of religion? By definition "religion" must include belief in one or more gods (or godlike forces), which is supernaturalism: fantasy. When a religion evolves to the point that its members recognize its mythology as a collection of extremely useful metaphors, it is arguably not a religion any more. Many Hindus tell me that Hinduism has reached this stage: nobody except the rubes honestly believe that blue elephant dude was real.
This isn't especially hard to figure out. Whatever happened to the "Christ" part of "Christian"?
I guess you didn't get the memo. "Christianity" was perverted into "Paulism" a very long time ago.
I don't know how it is in Aussieland, but the US Constitution makes it clear that the fed gov ensures the COMMON welfare ......not the welfare of only a select few. The US fed gov is NOT, and never was intended as, a charity!
Tell that to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. When he took over the White House in 1933 he immediately began adopting the entire 1929 American Communist Party platform, and every administration of both parties since then has continued the process. The first economic sector he nationalized was charity, even though before the income tax reached confiscatory levels Americans had historically been one of the most generous people on earth. Subsequently the education, communication, transportation, energy and health care sectors have been effectively nationalized, although in the unique American way that allows us to still own stock in the companies so we don't complain about it. Eisenhower, a Republican, completed the process by establishing the Department of Health, Education and Welfare--a name that could not possibly be more Orwellian.
So today we have federal, state and municipal government "charity" programs consisting primarily of thirteen layers of bureaucrats being paid to sit around and "administer" each other. If all of the money that is "spent" on welfare programs were simply collected in a big pile, divided up, and handed directly to the poor, the income of every family currently below the poverty line (somewhere around $18K annual income this year)
would suddenly rise to $40,000. You can bet the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, World Vision International, the larger churches, and even the bureaucratic charities that phone you during dinner,
do not spend more than half of their budget on overhead.
The Rooseveltian Era is about to enter its 78th year and shows no signs of slowing down. Now they're going to take our health care system, which barely works at all, and turn it into a government bureaucracy. How much more will it cost and how much less will it deliver?
