Name and Shame
May. 15th, 2009 11:22 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
davidnOver the past couple of weeks there's been a bit of (as we say) a kerfuffle in the Church of Scotland. I first heard about it through ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
diarytypething and can't really summarize it better than she did - basically the situation is that an openly gay minister was democratically elected to be the leader of a church in Aberdeen, causing an uprising among the few people who didn't agree, and the result of their complaint is that an online petition (because those always work) from the wider church has gone up in an effort to overturn the decision by getting signatures from people who have nothing to do with the congregation that elected him.
Unfortunately it seems that the list is, firstly, large, and second, really quite efficiently moderated, and my own entry, from a Jim McBastard from the Church of the Holy Bigots in Texas, 100 years ago, lasted all of four minutes before it disappeared. But simultaneously usefully and depressingly, it does mean that we can check ze list of the real entries to see who supports the cause. After some tentative poking at names that immediately came to mind, hoping at each keypress that Firefox's search bar would turn red and eventually being relieved, I thought I was safe, but was then extremely disappointed to find that Manson Merchant was in at number #998.If he'd just waited a couple of minutes he could have got the thousandth. I knew him as a young-at-heart minister who was very popular with the youth group (for an example of his mentality, his method of punishment for having caught a girl in the boys' dormitory during a trip away was, after a mock trial in which I not-at-all-deliberately failed as her defence lawyer, to take her outside and 'execute' her via the medium of a large barrage of shaving cream pies), so to see that he seems to subscribe to this rather backward view was surprising to say the least.
Now, I don't believe that everyone on the list is... wrong, automatically, because a development like this would be difficult as it's quite a large move for the church away from some rules and values that it's meant to have held for a couple of thousand years. But when I was younger, our church was always more about its own community and acceptance of people (and any wrongness in my head a few years ago was never taught to me and was purely my own fault), and at that time I was completely unaware of problems like this being caused by somebody writing down what might have been some reasonably good health ideas a few millenniums ago. I've heard many suggestions for possible mistakes in translation and misinterpretations or loopholes in Leviticus before, and some of them are plausible, but... I think for the most part it's a lot of work to try and dodge around it rather than just admitting that we're oppressing people for no reason other than it says it in this irrelevant and obsolete book of laws (though I admit I wouldn't exactly say that on top of a hill under a tree in a thunderstorm, or anything).
Still, later this month as the unfairness of being able to have a decision overturned like this becomes clear, maybe it'll cause a huge split in the church whichever way it turns out. That would be quite exciting.
And as this post only contains borrowed content anyway, here's the most brief yet accurate summary of Top Gear ever, fromstubbleupdate. Cheer up.
diarytypething and can't really summarize it better than she did - basically the situation is that an openly gay minister was democratically elected to be the leader of a church in Aberdeen, causing an uprising among the few people who didn't agree, and the result of their complaint is that an online petition (because those always work) from the wider church has gone up in an effort to overturn the decision by getting signatures from people who have nothing to do with the congregation that elected him.Unfortunately it seems that the list is, firstly, large, and second, really quite efficiently moderated, and my own entry, from a Jim McBastard from the Church of the Holy Bigots in Texas, 100 years ago, lasted all of four minutes before it disappeared. But simultaneously usefully and depressingly, it does mean that we can check ze list of the real entries to see who supports the cause. After some tentative poking at names that immediately came to mind, hoping at each keypress that Firefox's search bar would turn red and eventually being relieved, I thought I was safe, but was then extremely disappointed to find that Manson Merchant was in at number #998.
Now, I don't believe that everyone on the list is... wrong, automatically, because a development like this would be difficult as it's quite a large move for the church away from some rules and values that it's meant to have held for a couple of thousand years. But when I was younger, our church was always more about its own community and acceptance of people (and any wrongness in my head a few years ago was never taught to me and was purely my own fault), and at that time I was completely unaware of problems like this being caused by somebody writing down what might have been some reasonably good health ideas a few millenniums ago. I've heard many suggestions for possible mistakes in translation and misinterpretations or loopholes in Leviticus before, and some of them are plausible, but... I think for the most part it's a lot of work to try and dodge around it rather than just admitting that we're oppressing people for no reason other than it says it in this irrelevant and obsolete book of laws (though I admit I wouldn't exactly say that on top of a hill under a tree in a thunderstorm, or anything).
Still, later this month as the unfairness of being able to have a decision overturned like this becomes clear, maybe it'll cause a huge split in the church whichever way it turns out. That would be quite exciting.
And as this post only contains borrowed content anyway, here's the most brief yet accurate summary of Top Gear ever, from
stubbleupdate. Cheer up.
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Date: 2009-05-17 08:39 am (UTC)Unfortunately, the overture from Skye and Lochcarron has potentially more affect than the Scott Rennie Case:
Whereas:
1. the Church’s historic understanding of the Biblical teaching on homosexual practice has been questioned in recent years.
2. a lengthy period of reflection has elapsed without a resolution of the issue.
3. it is undesirable that the courts of the church should be asked to judge on individual cases in advance of any such resolution.
It is humbly overtured by the Reverend the Presbytery of Lochcarron-Skye to the Venerable the General Assembly to receive the Overture set out below,
“That this Church shall not accept for training, ordain, admit, re-admit, induct or introduce to any ministry of the Church anyone involved in a sexual relationship outside of faithful marriage between a man and a woman”.
at what level does it stop? does this mean that sunday school teachers/the organist/etc have to be vetted? The other problem is that its starting to encroaching on employment law, so my other half has been following this quite closely!
as an aside, here's a press release made my my church's minister-elect.
THE bitter row over the appointment of a gay Angus preacher to a north-east church deepened last night after the chaplain of Grampian Police branded critics “terrorists”. The Reverend Georgie Baxendale, one of Scotland’s first female preachers, said members of evangelical group Forward Together were “fundamentalists”, unwavering in their quest to block Scott Rennie’s move to Queen’s Cross Church in Aberdeen. The Inverbervie minister claimed the group was using the same “scaremongering” tactics which were employed in the late 60s to put the “fear of death” into Assembly delegates to try to prevent women becoming ministers. – Press and Journal
could be interesting, given a few members of my church have signed it!