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Archive for August, 2010

Judge keeps gay marriages in California on hold

Written by ECWR Web
Thursday, 12 August 2010 13:19
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By PAUL ELIAS (AP)
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge on Thursday put gay marriages on hold for at least another six days in California, raising hopes among same-sex couples that they soon will be able to tie the knot after years of agonizing delays.

Judge Vaughn Walker gave opponents of same-sex weddings until Aug. 18 at 5 p.m. to get a ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on whether gay marriage should resume. Gay marriages could happen at that point or be put off indefinitely depending on how the court rules.

Walker struck down the state’s voter-approved gay marriage ban last week in a case many believe is destined for the Supreme Court.

Dozens of gay marriage supporters who had gathered outside San Francisco’s City Hall, a block from the federal courthouse, erupted in cheers when the decision came out. The crowd included a handful of same-sex couples who had arrived early Thursday morning to fill out marriage license applications in hopes that the judge would allow nuptials to commence immediately.

Teresa Rowe, 31, and her partner, Kristin Orbin, 31, said they were still happy with the decision even though the ceremony didn’t happen.

“It’s sad that we have to wait a little longer, but it’s been six years,” Rowe said.

In his original ruling, Walker moved to suspend gay weddings until he could consider arguments from both sides on whether the marriages should be allowed during an appeal of his ruling. He now says gay marriage should resume, but he gave conservatives the extra time to get the appeals court to weigh in.

Charles J. Cooper, lead counsel for the Proposition 8 supporters, said his legal team intends to ask the appeals court to immediately impose a stay of Walker’s ruling, a move that would halt gay marriages while the case is pending before the 9th Circuit.

California voters passed Proposition 8 as a state constitutional amendment in November 2008, five months after the California Supreme Court legalized same-sex unions and an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples already had tied the knot.

Three people protested among the crowd to oppose Walker’s ruling Thursday.

“It’s a really sad day for Californians, for families, for our future and for voters that a federal judge has trampled on the civil rights of voters,” said Luke Otterstad, 24, of Sacramento.
Lawyers for gay couples, California Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Jerry Brown filed legal motions Friday asking that same-sex marriages be allowed to resume immediately.
Walker said on Thursday that ban proponents didn’t convince him that anyone would be harmed by allowing same-sex marriages to resume.

“The evidence at trial showed, however, that Proposition 8 harms the state of California,” Walker said.

Walker also turned aside arguments that marriages performed now could be thrown into legal chaos if Proposition 8 is later upheld by an appeals court.

But Walker said such weddings would appear to be legal even if the ban is later reinstated. He pointed to the 18,000 same-sex couples who married legally in the five months that gay marriage was legal in California as proof.

Walker also said that no one can claim harm by allowing same-sex weddings to go forward, but banning them harms gays.

Finally, Walker said it also appears doubtful that the opponents of the ban have any right to appeal his decision striking down a state law that he said should have been defended by either Gov. Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Brown.

Schwarzenegger and Brown each last week urged Walker to allow same-sex marriages to resume immediately and its unlikely they will join the appeal of Proposition 8.
“I am pleased to see Judge Walker lift his stay and provide all Californians the liberties I believe everyone deserves,” Schwarzenegger said after the ruling.

The case now goes before a special “motions panel” of three judges at the appeals court, the largest and busiest federal appeals court in the nation with jurisdiction over nine western states.

The panel consists of two judges appointed by Democrats and a third by a Republican.
President Ronald Reagan appointed Judge Edward Leavy to the appeals court in 1987. Leavy, who is semi-retired, has served as judge in the state and federal courts in Oregon since 1957.
President Bill Clinton nominated Judge Michael Daly Hawkins to the court in 1994 and Judge Sidney Thomas in 1995.

Hawkins, based in Phoenix, served as Arizona’s U.S. Attorney under President Jimmy Carter and also worked as a special prosecutor for the Navajo Nation from 1985 to 1989.

Thomas, who keeps his chambers in Bozeman, Mont., made President Obama’s short list to fill the U.S. Supreme Court vacancy that was filled last week by Elena Kagan.

A new three-judge panel will be chosen sometime next year to decide the appeal. Lawyers for both sides have been ordered to file their legal arguments by the end of the year.

 

Anne Rice Walks Away From Religion

Written by ECWR Web
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 03:25
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Author Anne Rice ‘quits’ organized religion because she refuses to be ‘anti-gay … anti-feminist … anti-Democrat.’

ByTim Rutten, LA Times
August 4, 2010

Only sleepwalkers and fanatics slide through life without reconsidering their values and philosophical outlook. Still, I never expected to be challenged quite so fundamentally by a writer of vampire stories and bisexual erotica.

Enter Anne Rice, the 68-year-old author of bestselling novels about the sexy undead and, pseudonymously, of various sadomasochistic-inflected tales. Since returning to her girlhood Catholicism more than a decade ago, she’s also written a string of devotional volumes and “a spiritual confession” that might best be characterized as rhapsodic. All that came to an abrupt end last week when Rice announced on Facebook that she had left both the church and organized Christianity.

“Today I quit being a Christian. I’m out,” she wrote. “I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious and deservedly infamous group. For 10 years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed. I’m an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else…. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen.”

Thousands responded to Rice’s declaration. Internet sites concerned with religious issues — from the conservative Catholic First Things to the liberal Jewish Tikkun — have hosted lively discussions of the issues she raised and their implications. As a Catholic happy to share Rice’s rejection of all the positions she enumerates, let me add a couple counts to the indictment:

Several commentators on her post have raised the jarring parallelism of recent cases involving two priests. One involves a leading American peace activist, Father Roy Bourgeois, who was excommunicated just four months after delivering a homily during a ceremony in which a woman was ordained a priest in defiance of canon law. The other touches on Steven Kiesle, an Oakland priest who was convicted of raping two young boys in 1978; he served three years’ probation. He asked Rome to be “laicized” — to voluntarily leave the priesthood. Years passed before then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger replied that, for the good of all concerned, the case required further consideration. In 1987, Kiesle finally was defrocked, though by then he had become the youth minister at another Catholic parish, where he also molested children.

Then there is this year’s ecclesiastical outrage involving Sister Margaret McBride, a veteran nurse and nun who worked at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center in Phoenix. A young woman was admitted to the hospital 11 weeks’ pregnant with her fifth child but suffering from pulmonary hypertension. Her physicians said she was too ill to move to another facility and almost surely would die before her unborn child became viable. The case was referred to the ethics committee, which approved terminating the pregnancy. When he heard of the case, Bishop Thomas J. Olmsted of the Diocese of Phoenix promptly excommunicated Sister Margaret.

Before he was forced to resign after being involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident, Olmsted’s predecessor avoided criminal prosecution by signing a legal stipulation that he knowingly moved child-abusing priests to other parishes, where they continued to commit crimes. Since Olmsted’s investiture, there have been a series of florid clerical sex abuse scandals, none of which has resulted in a single excommunication.

So why not join in the conclusion to Rice’s well-reasoned criticisms, particularly if — as I do — you also believe in marriage equality and abortion rights and think the church would be better off if it ordained women and its clergy could marry? Some of us are drawn to the late Pope John Paul II’s view that the only way to understand the institutional church is as “a sign of contradiction.” That’s a term in Catholic theology for a person or situation in which both goodness and its extreme opposition are manifest. Had humanity not been imperfect, there would have been no use for a young Galilean rabbi’s radically transformative teaching. If that teaching’s mere existence had perfected humanity, its adherents never would have required an institutional church, whose human composition makes it imperfect.

Some of our most profound challenges are resolved in the acceptance of contradiction — or so it seems to me.

 

Harry Knox on Christianity, the Church & Sexual Orientation

Written by ECWR Web
Tuesday, 10 August 2010 03:15
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Tony & Peggy Campolo and Harry Knox discuss issues of the church and sexual orientation at the 2010 Summer Conference of the Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America. Convened by Lucas Johnson. July 13, 2010, Keuka Park, NY (Part 8 of a multi-part series)