Jury Convicts Pa. Methodist Pastor for Gay Wedding

AP ^ | November 18, 2013 | MICHAEL RUBINKAM

[xzins]

A United Methodist pastor was convicted Monday of breaking church law by officiating his son's same-sex wedding and could be defrocked after a high-profile trial that has rekindled debate over the denomination's policy on gay marriage.

The Methodist church put the Rev. Frank Schaefer on trial in southeastern Pennsylvania, accusing him of breaking his pastoral vows by presiding over the 2007 ceremony in Massachusetts.

[onedoug]

Kick him out, with the boot-print on his posterior a permanent part of the fabric.

[xzins]

See #40

[aimhigh]

No law is going to do away with homosexuality -- it's part of being in the human race.

Laws never do away with any sin. Laws control sin to keep sin from overcoming civilization.

So, what other things are part of the human race? Murder, rape, adultery, stealing, arson, and the list goes on. Under your philosophy, we would eliminate laws against these also. Your philosophy is pure liberal philosophy.

[cloudmountain]

True enough.

[fwdude]

Anything less that defrocking him is unacceptable. He is defiant about the whole issue.

[Finny]

No, mine is pure limited government Christian philosophy.

I would say your philosophy is authoritarian tyrant, a far cry from limited government conservatism. Pass all the laws you want, just like with murder and stealing and arson and adultery and all the others, although the crimes of murder and violent aggression are in a different class than adultery and homosexuality, I do truly hope you agree.

I guarantee you that 5,000 years from now, all those vices will still be evident in any race of human beings. Laws don't prevent them -- behaviors do, values taught in religion, do. As for the effectivess of laws, they've been chopping off the hands of thieves in the Middle East for centuries. Yet thievery there still exists.

[GeronL]

Libertopian philosophy is nothing like Christian philosophy, it is more opposite than alike

[Finny]

Laws control sin to keep sin from overcoming civilization.

So you think that the Christian "conservative" approach is to advocate for law that aggressively pursues and hushes any outward evidence of homosexuality?

I'd rather STOP and RESTRAIN law that would, for example, punish a theme park for refusing to allow openly gay men in where children were present. It should be LEGAL, and protect right, that a theme park could do just that, and a school could absolutely rise up and slam the door in the faces of "gay pride" advocates without worry of the state or federal "moral" government punishing it for being homophobic.

Laws don't control sin -- they punish offenders. Laws are necessary, they are right, in that respect. Capital punishment I believe in fully because it isn't punishment, it's an example of a law keeping something bad from overcoming again.

The Founding Fathers didn't include laws against all kinds of things in the Constitution. They trusted it to their moral Christian compatriots to do it another way, and they did. Your "libertarian" template is badly flawed, I think, unless I read you wrong.

[aimhigh]

The Founding Fathers didn't include laws against all kinds of things in the Constitution.

False argument. The founding fathers left it up to the states to outlaw all kinds of things. And the states did.

[Mrs. Don-o]

A (fellow Catholic) friend was troubled that we were demanding from "gays" what we demand from no one else: that they live a life of loneliness and frustration. Thinking about it, I realized he was making the assumption that for the rest of us, heteros, life is just a sexual wonderland with no sacrifice, or not that much sacrifice.

I think the God-honest truth is that almost all of us, for part of our lives at least, have to live a level of sexual continence which is more difficult than we were bargaining for.

You are living a difficult sexual continence when you are young and full of fire, but unmarried;

or when, after years of careful discernment, you have taken a vow of celibacy and BAM! Mr. or Ms. Made-for-You glides smilingly into your life;

and again when you are married but because of geographic distance or chronic illness or disability, your spouse is long absent from your embrace;

and again if you have a wrecked marriage in your background, civilly divorced but canonically still valid;

or when your spouse emotionally "unfriends" but an old acquaintance is suddenly sending out vibes of friend-friend-friend and like-like-like.

What I'm saying is that everybody, no matter what their "orientation," has to learn to live chastity with an uneasy grace, not infrequently through long seasons of loneliness and struggle.

There's no room for "triumphalism" here by "straights"; neither is there room for "pride" by "gays". What Christ teaches us through His Law is right, because it is based on the truth about our human nature, and on our own real flourishing in this life and in the next.

But living it is not easy for anyone. Living it requires ardent prayers for each one of us, by the whole Communion of Saints .

[xzins]

I am convinced that the sex drive is very powerful still in the married. Therefore, they say no all the time to sex.

However, and this is a huge difference with the gays, Since natural sex is potentially procreative that means it is following the design made by God, The Great Designer.

Homosexual sex, on the other hand, is potentially deadly, and that means it is contrary to design and unnatural.

Homosexuals, both male and female, have much shorter lifespans than do heterosexuals, with males by a couple decades... living lives full of disease: biological and psychological.

So, we who care about them are the ones who tell them to change their behavior via grace & control.

[Mrs. Don-o]

"I am convinced that the sex drive is very powerful still in the married. Therefore, they say no all the time to sex."

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Could you expand on this thought a little?