Posted on 10/19/2003 8:06:35 PM PDT by ahadams2
God urging me on, says gay bishop (Filed: 20/10/2003)
The Episcopal Church's first openly gay bishop-elect said yesterday that he is agonising over the turmoil his election is causing but believes God wants him to go forward.
"This is one of the hardest things I'll ever do," said the Rev Gene Robinson at Grace Church, Manchester, New Hampshire. "I do have this sense I'm supposed to go forward, and I do feel that's coming from God and not my own ego."
Rev Robinson was elected by clergy and parishioners in New Hampshire in June and confirmed by the national Episcopal Church in August. He is scheduled to be consecrated as bishop of New Hampshire in two weeks. His election and confirmation has outraged some conservatives and is threatening to divide the Episcopal Church in the United States and the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which it is part.
At an emergency meeting at Lambeth Palace, in London, last week Anglican leaders warned that if Rev Robinson was consecrated as planned on Nov 2, "the future of the communion itself will be put in jeopardy".
Rev Robinson, 56, who was accompanied by a police officer yesterday, remains optimistic about the Church's future, saying it has weathered similar crises in the past.
Anglican leaders, representing 77 million members worldwide, say homosexuality is "contrary to Scripture". Mr Robinson says that is outweighed by the Scripture's call for love and acceptance of all.
Great sort of fellow to be giving the bishop's hat to, eh?
Why, of course, egotism isn't involved in this. Wasn't it Griswold who opined that God's primitive writers didn't understand homosexuality as we do today, and anyway, they were talking about promiscuous homosexuals, not those in committed relationships?
IOW, God allowed His writers to make consistant terrible bloopers over a few thousand years, and now wants Robinson to go forward with what was really His true intent during all these millennia.
Indeed it is:
"The homosexual movement has a history of trying to claw its way into places its agenda doesn’t belong, not for the betterment of mankind, but simply to legitimize and normalize perverse behavior. This is apparent in the all-too-common need of homosexuals to declare their sexuality rather than simply do the job they sign on to do.
This is extremely detrimental - first, it creates conflict with others as most believe homosexuality to be wrong, and it shows that the full efforts of the employed homosexual are not going towards performing the task at hand but largely to declaring their lifestyle. When it comes to serious concerns such as the Church, schools, and the Boy Scouts that involve our children, we can’t take the risk of giving them this power to destroy the values we as parents try to instill, nor can we put our country’s welfare at stake by turning these pivotal foundational institutions and our military into homosexual social experiments.
The homosexual movement is marked by two major tendencies: the tendency to continually infiltrate all good aspects of society; and once they have achieved that, the tendency to destroy this good. Public education, the Boy Scouts, the military, and now the Catholic Church have been targeted, and all have been hurt by the effects of homosexuality. The media and the Church must break its silence towards this enemy. If they do not, the people themselves must rise up and expose it..."
-- Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, Homosexual Priests: A Time for Truth, The Washington Dispatch, May 6, 2002
What Homosexuals Say About Homosexuals - Is This Gay Behavior Sick?
""Let´s look at gay behavior as defined by two gays, Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen Ph.D., authors of After the Ball: How America will Conquer its Fear and Hatred of Gays in the 90´s (1989).
In Chapter Six, they outline “ten categories of misbehavior,” drawn from their own experiences, wide reading and thousands of hours of conversation with hundreds of other gays. Their contention is that the gay lifestyle, not gay sexuality mind you, “is the pits.” They want gays to improve their image by addressing “what is wrong with a lot of gays.” (276)
What follows are some highlights. As you read this, ask yourself if there is another human community, including the Mafia that could make these generalizations about itself. Ask yourself if we haven´t caught this disease, or at least the sniffles.
• The authors say “a surprisingly high percentage” of pathological liars and con men are gay. This results from a natural habit of self-concealment, and leads to a stubborn self-deception about one´s own gayness and its implications.
• They say gays tend to reject all forms of morality and value judgments. Gay morality boils down to “If it feels good, I´ll do it!” If a gay feels like seducing a trusted friend´s lover, he´ll do it, justifying it as an act of “sexual freedom” and the friend be damned.
• They say gays suffer from a “narcissistic” personality disorder and they give this clinical description: “pathological self absorption, a need for constant attention and admiration, lack of empathy or concern for others, quickly bored, shallow, interested in fads, seductive, overemphasis on appearance, superficially charming, promiscuous, exploitative, preoccupied with remaining youthful, relationships alternate between over idealization and devaluation.”
• As an example of this narcissism, the authors say “a very sizable proportion of gay men” who have been diagnosed HIV positive continue to have unprotected sex.
• They say the majority of gays are extremely promiscuous and self-indulgent. They must continuously up the ante to achieve arousal. This begins with alcohol and drugs and includes such “forbidden” aspects of sex as wallowing in filth (fetishism and coprophilia) and sadomasochism, which involves violence.
• They say many gays indulge in sex in public bathrooms and think it is antigay harassment when it is stopped. Many think they have a right to importune straight males, including children.
• Many gays are “single minded sexual predators” fixated on youth and physical beauty alone. When it comes to the old or ugly, gays are “the real queerbashers.” Disillusioned themselves, they are cynical about love.
• “Relationships between gay men don´t usually last very long.” They quickly tire of their partners and fall victim to temptation. The “cheating ratio of ‘married´ gay males, given enough time, approaches 100%.”
• Even friendships are based on the sexual test and hard to sustain. Unattractive gay men find it nearly impossible to find a friend, let alone a lover.
• The authors say gays tend to deny reality in various ways: wishful thinking, paranoia, illogic, emotionalism and embracing crackpot ideas.
This has nothing to do with discerning God's will. It is nothing more than an attack on the Church. The homosexual community's infiltration infestation of the church, in order to undermine and destroy its authority, has been part of a well planned and well funded campaign that has been going on for years.
An excerpt from: The Overhauling of Straight America:
"While public opinion is one primary source of mainstream values, religious authority is the other. When conservative churches condemn gays, there are only two things we can do to confound the homophobia of true believers. First, we can use talk to muddy the moral waters. This means publicizing support for gays by more moderate churches, raising theological objections of our own about conservative interpretations of biblical teachings, and exposing hatred and inconsistency. Second, we can undermine the moral authority of homophobic churches by portraying them as antiquated backwaters, badly out of step with the times and with the latest findings of psychology. Against the mighty pull of institutional Religion one must set the mightier draw of Science and Public Opinion (the shield and word of that accursed “secular humanism”). Such an unholy alliance has worked well against churches before, on such topics as divorce and abortion. With enough open talk about the prevalence and acceptability of homosexuality, that alliance can work again here..."
An excerpt from: In Their Own Words: The Homosexual Agenda:
"Homosexual activist Michelangelo Signorile, who writes periodically for The New York Times, summarizes the agenda in OUT magazine:
...to fight for same-sex marriage and its benefits and then, once granted, redefine the institution of marriage completely, to demand the right to marry not as a way of adhering to society's moral codes, but rather to debunk a myth and radically alter an archaic institution... The most subversive action lesbian and gay men can undertake --and one that would perhaps benefit all of society--is to transform the notion of family entirely." "Its the final tool with which to dismantle all sodomy statues, get education about homosexuality and AIDS into the public schools and in short to usher in a sea change in how society views and treats us."
My point exactly. He doesn't have the to capacity to discern. The rub is that he is claiming that he does, and some of the sheep are preparing to follow a false shepherd. Of course, this begs the question of whether or not the "sheep" are really "sheep," or are they, in the biblical sense, "goats"?
It has everything to do with his CLAIM to being able to discern God's will, and therefore to justify to the parishioners of NH that he is legitimate. I do not believe for "New York minute" that he believes it, but he is using the gullibility of those people to bamboozle them.
Indeed. The homosexual community's biggest victory was scored when when they infiltrated the APA and, through political pressure, got homosexuality removed from the DSM. It's been downhill from there. The continued assault on the Church is just part of the homosexual agenda.
The homosexual activists and organizations ( such as GLSEN ) are entrenched in the public schools and the situation will only get worse - e.g. see "Teaching Kindergarten Kids About 'Human Differences' and Homosexuality Isn't 'Easy' in Newton."
Consider the following excerpt from:
"The homosexual cause has moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. As Robert Reilly notes a society can withstand any number of person who try to advance their own moral disorders as public policy. But it cannot survive once it adopts the justifications for whose moral disorders as its own. This is what is at stake in the culture war...
For any individual, moral failure is hard to live with because of the rebuke of conscience. Habitual moral failure, what used to be called vice, can be lived with only by obliterating conscience through rationalization. When we rationalize, we convince ourselves that heretofore forbidden desires are permissible. We advance the reality of the desires over the reality of the moral order to which the desires should be subordinated. In our minds we replace the reality of moral order with something more congenial to the activity we are excusing. In short, we assert that bad is good...
It is often difficult to detect rationalizations when one is living directly under their influence, and so historical examples are useful. One of the clearest was offered at the Nuremberg trials by Dr. Karl Brandt, who had been in charge of the Nazi regime's Aktion T-4 euthanasia program. He said in his defense: “...when I said `yes' to euthanasia I did so with the deepest conviction, just as it is my conviction today, that it was right. Death can mean deliverance. Death is life.”
Unlike Dr. Brandt, most people recover from their rationalizations when remorse and reality set back in. But when morally disordered acts become the defining centerpiece of one's life, vice can permanently pervert reason. Entrenched moral aberrations then impel people to rationalize vice not only to themselves but to others as well. Thus rationalizations become an engine for revolutionary change that will affect society as a whole.
The power of rationalization drives the culture war, gives it its particular revolutionary character, and makes its advocates indefatigable. It may draw its energy from desperation, but it is all the more powerful for that. Since failed rationalization means self-recrimination, it must be avoided at all cost. For this reason, the differences over which the culture war is being fought are not subject to reasoned discourse. Persons protecting themselves by rationalizing are interested not in finding the truth, but in maintaining the illusion that allows them to continue their behavior. For them to succeed in this, everyone must accede to their rationalization. This is why revolutionary change is required. The necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture. Holdouts cannot be tolerated because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy), or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization.
The homosexual movement's rationalization is far more widely advanced in its claims. According to Jeffrey Levi, former executive director for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, “We (homosexuals)_ are no longer seeking just a right to privacy and a right to protection from wrong. We have a right - as heterosexuals have already - to see government and society affirm our lives.” Since only the act of sodomy differentiates an active homosexual from a heterosexual, homosexuals want “government and society” to affirm that sodomy is morally equivalent to the marital act. “Coming out of the closet” can only mean an assent on the level of moral principle to what would otherwise be considered morally disordered.
And so it must be. If you are going to center your public life on the private act of sodomy, you had better transform sodomy into a highly moral act. If sodomy is a moral disorder, it cannot be legitimately advanced on the legal or civil level. On the other hand, if it is a highly moral act, it should serve as the basis for marriage, family (adoption), and community. As a moral act, sodomy should be normative. If it is normative, it should be taught in our schools as a standard. In fact, homosexuality should be hieratic: active homosexuals should be ordained as priests. All of this is happening. It was predictable. The homosexual cause moved naturally from a plea for tolerance to cultural conquest. How successful that conquest has been can be seen in the poverty of the rhetoric of its opponents. In supporting the Defense of Marriage Act, the best one congressman could do was to say, “America is not yet ready for homosexual marriage,” as if we simply need a decent interval to adjust ourselves to its inevitable arrival.
The homosexual rationalization is so successful that even the campaign against AIDS is part of it, with its message that “everyone is at risk.” If everyone is at risk, the disease cannot be related to specific behavior. Yet homosexual acts are the single greatest risk factor in catching AIDS. This unpleasant fact invites unwelcome attention to the nature of homosexual acts, so it must be ignored..."
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