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Showing posts from November, 2010

Should We Support Civil Unions?

As this is written, HB2234, a bill on civil unions for gay and lesbian couples in Illinois may be called up for a vote in the House in the fall veto session of the General Assembly. If it is, and if it passes, Gov. Patrick Quinn who supports it will presumably sign it. The Chicago Sun Times , the Chicago Tribune , and the Daily Herald have all editorialized in support of civil unions. The ACLU of Illinois supports it. Patriots United , the Illinois Family Institute , and Chicago Roman Catholic Archbishop Cardinal Francis George oppose it. Polling data both nationally and in Illinois make it evident that a clear majority support civil unions though less than half fully support same-sex marriage. The bill now before the General Assembly in Springfield is also supported by Protestants for the Common Good, an organization with which I am happily associated. At this moment, however, I am wondering if this is a bill we should support. If enacted, this bill would make

Hypocrites Among Us

One thing we can take from Jesus’ censure of the scribes and Pharisees as recorded in Mt 23:23 and Luke 11:42 is that they most certainly did not consider themselves hypocrites as Jesus said, or guilty of neglecting the “weightier matters” of justice and mercy, faith and love. Their problem with Jesus was that he simply would not accept that their totalizing institutions of religion and their leadership of them were virtuous, authentic, loyal, exemplary, sincere, authoritative, and most of all, lawful. What is interesting is that most Christians nowadays hold that, in this contestation, Jesus was correct in his assessment of his adversaries. But that means those who thought themselves right were in fact wrong, so these religious elite must have been functioning in some form of denial or false consciousness or just plain self-deception. Holding that Jesus was in the right is tantamount to acknowledging that those who regard themselves as the true custodians and protectors of a dom