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Posts tagged ‘Jim Antle’

What Will Happen To Churches That Don’t Believe In Gay Marriage?


Photo of W. James Antle IIIW. James Antle III, Managing Editor, 04/08/2015

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://dailycaller.com/2015/04/08/what-will-happen-to-churches-that-dont-believe-in-gay-marriage/

Pope Francis kisses a child as he leads a special audience for members of UCIIM, Italian catholic association of teachers, school managers, educators and trainers, in Paul VI’s hall at the Vatican March 14, 2015. REUTERS/Max Rossi

 

Will churches that do not recognize same-sex marriage eventually lose their tax-exempt status? The idea has been floated before. There are many reasons to suspect that this won’t happen. Fifty years of anti-discrimination laws on the basis of sex haven’t had much impact on the Catholic Church’s all-male priesthood.

In various countries and states where gay marriage exists, churches have generally not been forced to recognize them. Churches in the United States refuse to celebrate weddings for people whose marriages would be legal under civil law all the time. Plenty of heterosexuals who can legally marry cannot get married in the Catholic Church, or can only do so with special permission. The government has never treated this as discrimination.

But the two minutes of hate against Indiana revealed that a fairly narrow conception of religious freedom has gone mainstream, while some people seem to have a fairly narrow conception of freedom, period.

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat is likely correct when he says that if conservatives had offered legal same-sex marriage throughout the country in exchange for Christian wedding vendors being allowed to use the Religious Freedom Restoration Act process to possibly (not definitely) decline to participate, as late as Barack Obama’s first term, most liberals would have taken that deal. As what’s politically possible has changed, so has what liberals have demanded on this issue. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. No political movement is required to either accomplish all its long-term goals at once or accomplish none of them.squeeze into mold

On this issue, however, there has been a teensy bit of duplicity involved. In a relatively short period of time, the president went from saying;

  • No gay marriage, God is in the mix to

  • Gay marriage is something I’m in favor of personally, but the policy should be set at the state level and

  • The Supreme Court must discover a constitutional right to gay marriage in all 50 states.

When Republicans proposed a constitutional amendment on gay marriage, many Democratic senators, including Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, said they opposed gay marriage too but we didn’t need the amendment because the federal Defense of Marriage Act was so great. It took less than a decade for their position to morph from “the Defense of Marriage Act is great” to “the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional and unjust.” Again, there’s nothing wrong with changing one’s mind. But this looks a bit more calculated.Picture1

Prior to 2010, nobody thought the country was a theocracy because Little Sisters of the Poor didn’t have to pay for IUD coverage.

For the moment, taking away the tax-exempt status of most churches and other houses of worship in America would probably trigger a political backlash too large for any sane politician to contemplate. But if political conditions change? It’s easy for gay marriage and religious freedom to coexist if you believe gay marriage is simply a good and fair policy. But if you sincerely believe that traditional religious teachings on marriage and sex are totally indistinguishable from racism, it becomes untenable to treat those teachings differently than you would treat racism. At that point, it’s even possible houses of worship will run afoul of public accommodations laws. After all, religion was often invoked in defense of racism, right? (Religion was often invoked against racism too and the church was actually ahead of the curve on abolishing slavery.)

Politically, yanking the tax-exempt status of an outlier like Bob Jones University (the school didn’t admit blacks until the 1970s and prohibited interracial dating until 2000) is one thing. The largest denominations in America do not recognize same-sex marriage. The churches that do perform such marriages are much smaller than the ones that don’t. But while there is safety in numbers, the size of these denominations might also make challenging their practices more appealing. The Catholic Church and the United Methodist Church, for example, have both lay members and clergy who dissent from their teachings on marriage. Smaller, more marginal faiths might be easier to push around. They also are likely to have fewer members who will want to revise their denominations’ position on marriage.

Bottom line? Expect no change in how the government deals with churches that don’t do gay marriage for the foreseeable future. But should there be a change, what the journalist Rod Dreher calls the law of merited impossibility will apply: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.”Leftist determonation to destroy freedom of religion

W. James Antle III is managing editor of The Daily Caller and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter.

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Why The Democrats Are Drifting Away From Israel


Researched and Posted by W. James Antle III, Managing Editor, The Daily Caller

URL of the Original Posting Site: http://dailycaller.com/2015/02/15/why-the-democrats-are-drifting-away-from-israel/

vidisrael

muslim-obamaAt this writing, nearly two dozen Democrats are planning to boycott Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress in March. Vermont Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy called the speech “a tawdry and high-handed stunt.” Minnesota Democratic Rep. Betsy McCollum said, “In my view Mr. Netanyahu’s speech before Congress is nothing more than a campaign event hosted by Speaker Boehner and paid for by the American people.”

“I’m offended as an American,” said New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel, who appeared to challenge Netanyahu to a fight over Twitter.more evidence

This once would have been unthinkable. “You used to be able to find critics of Israel in the Republican Party,” John Judis wrote in The New Republic last year, rattling off names like Charles Matthias and Paul Findley. “But the Democrats, and particularly liberal Democrats, stood squarely behind whatever the Israeli government was doing.”Back-stabed1

“Our alliance with Israel is an alliance based on common democratic ideals and mutual benefit,” said a prominent Democratic senator in a 1980 speech. “We must never barter the freedom and future of Israel for a barrel of oil — or foolishly try to align the Arab world with us, no matter what cost.” The name of that senator? Ted Kennedy, who was then running for president to the left of Jimmy Carter.

Pro-Israel Democrats think the recent tempest merely reflects tension between Netanyahu and Barack Obama, the Democratic president of the United States. “It doesn’t matter that the president and the prime minister don’t like each other,” New York Democratic Rep. Elliot Engel, the ranking member on the House Foreign Relations Committee, told the Los Angeles Times. “The strength of the U.S.-Israel relationship has always been at its core a very bipartisan one. I think anything that threatens to jeopardize that is not good for the U.S. and is not good for Israel.”

Obama’s frosty relationship with Netanyahu has exacerbated the growing rift between liberal Democrats and Israel. Netanyahu clearly preferred his old friend Mitt Romney in 2012, while Obama has been similarly chummy with the Israeli opposition.  Secretary of State John Kerry linked Israel and apartheid, later apologizing but not particularly effusively. An unnamed Obama official told The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg that Netanyahu was a “chickenshit,” a remark they likely knew would be published.more evidence

But Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir didn’t get along famously with President George H.W. Bush or Secretary of State James Baker and that didn’t stop Republicans from moving in a more pro-Israel direction, including during the administration of George W. Bush.

The Obama-Netanyahu conflict reflects a real shift in Democratic sentiment that can’t be entirely attributed to the president. The Pew Research Center conducted a poll asking, “In the dispute between Israel and the Palestinians, who do you sympathize with more?” According to the poll;

  • 66 percent of Republicans picked Israel

  • while only 39 percent of Democrats did the same.

  • Conservative Republicans were more likely to support Israel than moderate Republicans,

  • moderate Democrats more pro-Israel than liberal ones.

  • Christians (55 percent) are now more likely than Jews (40 percent) to believe that God gave Israel to the Jewish people.

  • Only Orthodox Jews are more likely to believe this than white evangelicals.

  • White evangelicals are more likely than Jews to think the U.S. isn’t supportive enough of Israel,

  • and less likely to think the current level of American support for the Jewish state is “just right.”Islamapologist Obama Muslim collection

Democrats booed references to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital at the party’s 2012 convention. In this case, it was actually Obama’s forces who pushed to have the pro-Israel language restored to the Democratic platform over delegates’ objections.

“Basically, support for Israel gets stronger as you move right, and weaker as you move left,” Bill McGurn observed in the New York Post. Where liberals once saw Israel as a homeland for Jewish victims of discrimination and genocide, today’s liberals see the Palestinians as the victims and Israelis as the oppressors. Liberalism can more readily accept the nationalism of the former over the latter. Israel is too Western for the multicultural left and Zionism fits uneasily alongside the priorities of contemporary multiculturalism. The Jewish state has launched military offenses that Republicans were more likely to support than Democrats. Liberals are more secular than in the past, and less impressed by Judeo-Christian Holy Land claims.I am from the US Government

American supporters of Israel, on the other hand, have become more conservative and less secular, entangling this foreign policy question in the domestic culture wars. Israel itself has had center-right and right-of-center governments more frequently than the United States over the past 20 years. Netanyahu is close to the American right. It’s no accident House Speaker John Boehner invited him.

The disagreement between Obama and Netanyahu over Iran, colored by their barely concealed distaste for each other, may compound all of this. But the Democrats’ drift away from Israel is likely to continue after the president and prime minister are gone.

W. James Antle III is managing editor of The Daily Caller and author of the book Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Follow him on Twitter.

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