Archbishop of Canterbury Promises LGBT Activists to ‘Root Out’ Certain People From the Church of England
Will he root out Leviticus 18:22 and Leviticus 20:13 as well?
Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, the head of the Church of England, promised LGBT activists that he would “take action” against clergy and lay members of the church’s General Synod who condemn homosexual activity.
The leader of Christian Concern, a group representing a General Synod member whom Welby has threatened to remove, condemned the remarks as “giving a green light for a witch hunt of any Church of England clergy who believe in the traditional view that marriage is between one man and one woman for life.”
Welby responded to an LGBT activist who mischaracterized a quote from an African Anglican bishop, pledging to launch a “disciplinary process” against clergy and lay leaders who utter similar words.
“Here’s a promise: you send me details of a church that is saying something like that and I will ensure that there is a disciplinary process against the clergy who said that,” the archbishop promised. “We’ll root ‘em out! We’ll root them out. Send me the details with that bit of paper and their names at the bottom of it, and I will take action.”
He promised to take action against members of the General Synod, as well as members of the clergy. (An elected body, the General Synod considers and approves legislation affecting the Church of England when it comes to worship and the annual budget.)
Welby was responding to Peter Tatchell, who protested at Lambeth Palace on Jan. 23, holding a sign reading “Church ban on LGBT marriage is homophobic discrimination. SHAME!” Tatchell and other protesters faulted Welby for refusing to personally bless same-sex couples. The Church of England does not endorse same-sex marriage, but it recently approved prayers of blessing for same-sex couples, a move that faced harsh criticism from other corners of the global Anglican Communion.
“I care equally for people round the world and not just for people in this country,” Welby said. Tatchell confronted him, asking, “Do you?” and challenging him to respond to the archbishop of Uganda, Stephen Kaziimba.
“Did you hear what the archbishop of Uganda said at Christmas?” Tatchell said. “He said it would be better for parents to drown their children than let them be gay.”
Yet Kaziimba made no such comment. In his Christmas message (full video here and at the bottom of this article), the archbishop condemned people “who are recruiting children into homosexuality,” quoting the words of Jesus in Luke 17:2.
“I want to alert all students, parents, and teachers that there are bad people trying to attract children into homosexuality by promising them money and sponsorship,” Kaziimba said. “I urge the government to set up a simple system whereby children can report these people to the relevant authorities who can investigate and take appropriate action.”
“To those who are recruiting children into homosexuality, I want to sound a very strong warning to you. These are not my words, but the words of Jesus: ‘If anyone causes one of these little ones…to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea,’” he added.
Welby did not contest Tatchell’s description of Kaziimba’s remarks, but rather said that he had publicly rebuked Kaziimba on exactly that quote. (Welby has condemned Kaziimba’s refusal to attend the Lambeth Conference last July, but there appears to be no record of him responding to the Christmas message.)
Welby did not respond to The Daily Signal‘s request for comment about what kind of comments would lead him to launch such a “disciplinary process” to “root” such people “out” of the Church of England. He did not respond to questions about his alleged condemnation of Kaziimba’s remarks.
Yet recent events may shine light on what Welby’s promise means. On Feb. 2, a week and a half after Welby’s promise on Jan. 23, the archbishop sent a letter to Sam Margrave, a member of the General Synod, demanding that Margrave apologize for Twitter comments and suggesting that Welby might expel him from the synod if he did not. Margrave had made comments opposing the sexualization of children and speaking out against what he described as queer theory
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The deeply flawed campaign for racial reparations
IN DECEMBER, Boston's City Council voted to craft a plan to pay reparations for slavery and its aftermath. The vote was unanimous, and the councilor who authored the resolution called it "the start of a long-awaited yet necessary conversation" about racial reparations.
The start? America's "conversation" about paying reparations for the harm caused by slavery has been underway for decades.
In 1969, the radical civil rights activist James Forman caused a stir when he issued a "Black Manifesto"— first at a prominent economic conference in Detroit, then from the pulpit of New York's Riverside Church — calling for $500 million in reparations. In 2000, Randall Robinson made an even bigger splash with "The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks," a bestselling book advocating financial compensation for the descendants of enslaved people. The New York Times reported the following year that "the call for reparations has taken on substantial force," with support from leading Black organizations and respected US newspapers. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates drew enormous attention with a 2014 article in The Atlantic headlined "The Case for Reparations." He was invited to expand on his ideas at a congressional hearing on reparations in 2019 — by which point the 2020 presidential primary season was underway and leading Democratic candidates, including Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren and then-Senator Kamala Harris of California, were telling voters of their support for reparations.
Present-day advocates of reparations cite redlining and other 20th-century harms. But the heart of the argument has always been that Black Americans should be repaid for the 240 years that their forebears were enslaved in this land. That's far from a new idea. But it is also far from a sound idea.
The problems with reparations are both practical and ethical.
To everything there is a season, as sages from Ecclesiastes to the Byrds have observed, and the time for slavery reparations was when those who suffered enslavement could still be compensated. It is tragic that Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman's 1865 order to distribute 40-acre plots of land to the formerly enslaved was never implemented across the South. The collapse of Reconstruction a decade later in the face of massive Southern resistance is one of the bitterest calamities of American history. But no white American living today bears any responsibility for the cruelties of that era. No Black American living today suffered those cruelties.
For exactly that reason, the great civil rights leader Bayard Rustin — the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington and a close adviser to Martin Luther King, Jr. — rejected calls for reparations as "ridiculous." He regarded Forman's demand for $500 million as demeaning. "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money," Rustin said, "but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."
Reparations are equitable only when they provide redress to victims who suffered unjustly. In 1988, for example, the US government paid reparations to more than 26,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated in internment camps during World War II. In the 1970s, the federal government agreed to pay $10 million to the surviving patients of the notorious Tuskegee Syphilis Study, who were deliberately denied proper medical treatment by doctors working for the US Public Health Service. But there is nothing equitable about paying reparations in the 21st century for wrongs committed in the 18th and 19th centuries.
"Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims," the contemporary Black writer and scholar Coleman Hughes told a congressional committee. "So the moment you give me reparations, you've made me into a victim without my consent."
Rarely do those who campaign for reparations acknowledge that for more than half a century, the country has made a concerted effort to provide Black Americans what amounts to reparations for historical mistreatment. Much of the War on Poverty was designed to improve the status of those who had been discriminated against for so long because of their race. President Lyndon Johnson didn't use the word "reparations," but in a major address at Howard University in 1965, he explicitly cast the government's vast new role in providing housing, health care, nutrition, and welfare benefits as a conscientious effort to address the heritage of African slavery and the century of widespread oppression and segregation that followed.
"You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race, and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair," declared Johnson. "It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates."
To date the War on Poverty has spent $25 trillion (not including Medicare), and whether those outlays ultimately helped or hurt Black Americans has been widely debated. But there is no disputing that they were intended, to a significant degree, to redress the harms caused by the racist policies of the past — to give Black people "the same chance as every other American," as LBJ put it. That's even truer of affirmative action in all its varieties — the decades of racial preferences by federal, state, and local governments, the minority set-asides, the de facto racial quotas in hiring and contracting.
In short, there has been for years in America a considerable, well-funded attempt to make amends for the legacy of slavery and segregation. Those today who wish to argue that an outstanding debt is owed to Black America have an obligation to account for all that has been done, in good faith and at great expense, to pay down that debt.
That isn't what they are doing. As the reparations bandwagon gathers speed, the demands being made are growing increasingly extreme. In San Francisco, a commission tasked with drafting a reparations plan came up with one that would obligate the city to make a $5 million lump-sum payment to every eligible Black resident. In addition, the 60-page plan calls for a cornucopia of other financial benefits, including a guaranteed annual income of $97,000 for life, plus a "comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears all educational, personal, credit card, [and] payday loans."
To implement such a scheme would obviously bankrupt San Francisco many times over. And yet there are city officials who insist it doesn't go far enough. All this in a city (and state) where slavery never existed.
As the clamor for racial reparations grows more aggressive, will it lead to healing and closure and reconciliation? Hardly. It will further inflame our already antagonistic public discourse and further widen our angry social divisions. Moreover, as John Murawski notes in a shrewd essay for RealClear Investigations, it will spur efforts to enact reparations for a host of other aggrieved claimants: "The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations — and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World." To Duke University economist William Darity, a reparations supporter who advises the California Reparations Task Force, such a development would be all to the good. "I would encourage the people who are concerned about these histories of injustice to do the work and make the case," he told Murawski. The scale of potential claims, he said, "could be immense."
As the clamor for racial reparations grows more aggressive, will it lead to healing and closure and reconciliation? Hardly. It will further inflame our already antagonistic public discourse and further widen our angry social divisions.
When all is said and done, the reparations movement is grounded in a belief in collective racial entitlement and collective racial guilt. No belief could be more repugnant to America's ideals — however imperfectly realized — of tolerance, individual equality, and the right of each of us to be judged on our own merits, not by our bloodline or skin color or ancestry. Perhaps reparations promoters mean no harm. What they are seeking would prove harmful indeed.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26733/the-deeply-flawed-campaign-for-racial-reparations
***************************************************British police Launched ‘Hate Crime’ Probe Into Anglican Leader for Tweets Opposing Sexualization of Kids
A Church of England bishop reported an elected church leader to the police over his tweets condemning so-called queer theory and the sexualization of children. Last week, the head of the entire church also sent a letter seemingly threatening to remove the man from leadership over his remarks.
“There’s a vocal minority that control the church and are using its resources to bully me into silence,” Sam Margrave, an elected member of the Church of England’s General Synod, told The Daily Signal in an interview last week.
Margrave provided The Daily Signal with letters from the offices of the bishop of Coventry, the Rev. Dr. Christopher Cocksworth, from Cocksworth’s lawyer, and from the leader of the church himself, Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby.
Margrave described a campaign of harassment and death threats from LGBT activists leading up to his appearance at the General Synod in July 2022. (An elected body, the General Synod considers and approves legislation affecting the Church of England, formulates new kinds of worship, debates national issues, and approves the church’s annual national budget.)
Margrave, a former community worker in the church, won his election on a platform pledging to “stand for Biblical Truth on life, death, sex, and Marriage” and to “campaign against sexualisation of Children.” [This article preserves English spellings in written material.]
He proposed a motion urging bishops to outline the church’s position on “pride”—as many in Great Britain refer to the LGBT movement—and to declare it incompatible with the Christian faith if it is. He noted that many churches raise rainbow flags outside, a violation of the Church of England’s official rules.
“I thought it would be a useful thing to raise,” Margrave told The Daily Signal. “I ended up getting death threats, threats from clergy, threats from LGBT groups. I had phone calls day and night.”
He attended the General Synod in July escorted by security. He installed CCTV cameras on his home and a panic button on his phone.
According to a letter Cocksworth’s office sent to Margrave on Nov. 11, the bishop of Coventry had contacted Margrave seven times between June 22 and Aug. 6, raising concerns about his posts on Twitter. In that letter, the bishop told Margrave that his office “had no option … [but] to report your offending tweets to the West Midlands Police.”
West Midlands Police confirmed to The Daily Signal that the office opened an investigation “into an alleged online hate crime” on June 24. The police spoke with Margrave last October.
“After reviewing the case and after speaking to all parties, the case has now been closed with no further action to be taken,” Mike Woods, the police news manager, wrote in an email statement.
Jenny Dymond, Cocksworth’s legal secretary, sent Margrave a letter on Jan. 30, alleging that Margrave’s tweets constitute defamation, harassment, and malicious communications. Among other claims, she highlighted Margrave’s tweets saying that “Queer theology builds on the work of paedophiles”; “Pride is the Nation’s next Jimmy Saville”; and “You don’t belong on General Synod. You belong on a register.”
Christian Concern, which represents Margrave, explained that Margrave traces queer theory back to the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s. The Gay Liberation Front pushed the sexualization of children as part of its case for banning therapy for homosexuality, and it targeted Christianity and Judaism with the idea of “smashing heteronormativity.”
Gayle Rubin, a founder of queer theory, defended pedophilia as a sexual orientation. Queer theory, like critical race theory, is a Marxist approach to challenge longstanding social norms regarding sexuality and normalize LGBT identities and lifestyles.
Margrave explained the Jimmy Saville reference to The Daily Signal. Police posthumously concluded that Saville, an English DJ, was a sex offender after hundreds of people came forward with sexual abuse allegations against him after his death. An April 2022 Netflix documentary on Saville explored why so many of his victims kept silent during his lifetime.
Margrave argued that both pride and Saville demonstrate “a culture where people are too scared to speak up. In order to protect people, you have to have a culture where you can debate issues.” He posted disturbing pictures of a sexual performer in front of children.
Margrave also admitted that he told Winnie Frigerio, another lay member of the General Synod who is a member of the pro-LGBT “Inclusive Church” movement, that she belongs “on a register.”
Frigerio had condemned Margrave for retweeting a message calling the rainbow flag “the preferred flag of nonces,” a slang term for sex offenders. She said she was “mortified” by Margrave’s retweet and said the Synod needs “an enforceable code” of conduct.
“You want to limit freedom of speech and protect those who sexualise and groom children,” Margrave responded. “You don’t belong on General Synod. You belong on a register.”
Margrave told The Daily Signal he did not mean a sex offenders register, but he said that “because some on her side of the argument were saying those of us who are Bible believing should be put on a naughty list.”
“By addressing the growing influence of queer theory in the church, Mr. Margrave has been accused of calling gay people paedophiles, which he categorically denies,” Christian Concern’s Tom Allen told The Daily Signal.
Welby, the head of the Church of England himself, joined the Archbishop of York, the Rt. Rev. Stephen Cottrell, in sending a letter to Margrave on Thursday. They wrote that Margrave’s tweets “failed to distinguish between serious allegations of criminal behaviour of specific individuals and the wider law-abiding LGBTQI+ community.”
Welby and Cottrell demanded that Margrave apologize publicly, “moderate your language in future on social media,” and “refrain from making generalised allegations of the behaviour of LGBTQI+ people.”
They ended the letter with a potential threat: “Membership of the General Synod is a privilege and a way in which we serve before our God.”
“I will not apologise for speaking the truth,” Margrave said in a public response to the Welby-Cottrell letter. “I do not believe I have done anything wrong. I have been honest, transparent and faithful.”
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The Battle Over Free Speech
In a free society, why should only one political side dominate the media? Yet social media, the networks, the cable channels, newspapers, and satellite programming are all completely dominated by the left.
Recently, we saw quite a kerfuffle when DirecTV, owned by giant AT&T, decided to ignominiously drop Newsmax-TV from their lineup.
AT&T did the same a year ago to a much smaller conservative outlet, One America News (OAN). Why does it seem that the corporate decisions of companies like AT&T always push in only one political direction?
Numerous leaders have spoken against this censorship by the left against Newsmax, including:
•Dennis Prager
•Mike Huckabee
•Florida Governor Ron DeSantis
•Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy
•Senator Ted Cruz
•Actors Jon Voight and Kevin Sorbo
Many are calling for a boycott of DirectTV. Others are calling for Congressional hearings because of the potential impact on our political debate.
My big question is: Why must the left strangle what few conservative voices are heard on the other side?
When the founders of America produced the Constitution, a frequent criticism was that it did not spell out specific rights. So the founders agreed that if the Constitution were to be ratified, they would attach a Bill of Rights. These were the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution.
The First Amendment deals, first and foremost, with freedom of religion. But other rights enumerated there include the freedom of the press and free speech.
AT&T is a corporation. It is not a part of the government. But these companies wield a great deal of political power. Why are they using it to essentially stifle free speech?
There is no question that the mainstream media, the legacy media, the major networks, and so on present news from a skewed and biased perspective. National Public Radio (NPR), which receives government funding, has a program called “All Things Considered.” I remember whenever I would hear that title, I would think to myself---“Yeah, All Things Considered, from a leftist perspective.”
The founders envisioned a free society with a robust and free press. But today’s mainstream media is dominated by the leftist perspective, with only Fox News offering a significant counterweight.
Thankfully, even under dire conditions, there is always an alternative media. In the days of the American War for Independence, there were Committees of Correspondence, disseminating information to the 13 colonies contrary to royal-controlled sources.
There are different skirmishes in the battle over free speech, and some speech of more eternal significance than others. But let me use an analogy from the history of Christianity.
When the Apostles of Jesus set out to proclaim His saving message in first century Rome, the overwhelming power of the state was dead set against them. But God used them to eventually win over many converts. One of the ways was through letters that were written largely in prison.
Ultimately, there is a battle between good and evil, and the proclamation of the truth is often at the heart of that battle.
As the hymn “Once to Every Man and Nation” puts it, “Though the cause of evil prosper, yet the truth alone is strong. Though [truth’s] portion be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future.” God is watching and making sure that truth will prevail, which it will---even if for a time, times, and a half a time, it suffers setbacks.
Of course, this is not to equate a commercial network like Newsmax with the Gospel. But it’s beyond question that elite interests often suppress truth wherever it comes from. I’m grateful to live at a time where there is readily available an alternative media. I’m sure if some elitists in our culture had their way, they would over-regulate the Internet, talk radio, satellite programming, Christian broadcasting, and so on, to make them essentially toothless---as sometimes happens in other countries.
When Elon Musk bought Twitter late last year, he suffered the ire of many on the left, as he opened up the Twitter files and exposed a great deal of censorship against conservative speech. Musk tweeted in late November: “This is a battle for the future of civilization. If free speech is lost even in America, tyranny is all that lies ahead.”
Dr. Richard Land, president emeritus of the Southern Evangelical Seminary, said of the left’s censorship of conservative speech in general: “They want to enforce conformity, they do not want to hear viewpoints, they want to stifle viewpoints that they disagree with. They’re acting like fascist Blackshirts….They can only get away with taking away our rights if we let them.”
Indeed, must the left strangle the flow of information? As the Bible notes: “The one who states his case first seems right, until the other comes and examines him.”
https://townhall.com/columnists/jerrynewcombe/2023/02/09/the-battle-over-free-speech-n2619350
****************************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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