July 2, 2008

This spring, we saw a flashbang in Jewish-black relations with the saga of Daphna Ziman and the Rev. Eric Lee. Those waters have smoothed, and this week in New York, a former colleague of Martin Luther King Jr’s (no, not this one) said it is essential to both blacks and Jews that the communities identify their shared needs:

“As blacks and Jews, the wind may blow, the rain may beat down on an old house, be it a house in Brooklyn, Atlanta, America, Israel or Africa, but we all live in the same house,” Rep. John Lewis, a leader of the civil rights movement who stood behind Martin Luther King, Jr. on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, told a group of Jewish and black leaders in Brooklyn this week.

“We are one people, one family and we must stay together and build a society at peace with itself.”

Agreed. Interestingly, though, in an increasing number of cases, Lewis’ comment that “we all live in the same house” is especially true. What do I mean? Well, beside the reality that blacks and Jews have similar political sentiments, and the fact that Jews have historically felt the brunt of persecution whenever a society discriminated against anyone, there is a growing community of African American who are, in fact, Jewish.

Would you believe it numbers 150,000?

The Lord works in mysterious ways. Baron Davis, the best player to come out of UCLA since Reggie Miller, is set to make his return to Los Angeles. Suddenly, I think I’m a Clippers fan. The guy has more style than Jack Nicholson, who roots for that other L.A. team. Just watch Davis’ moves in the montage above from his Bruin days.

Two weeks ago, Julia Duin, the religion reporter for the Washington Times, dropped a bombshell: Commonwealth Catholic Charities of Richmond arranged for a 16-year-old immigrant girl in its care to receive an abortion. These action clearly violated Catholic doctrine and also possibly Virginia law. But the story didn’t end there.

Duin kept on it and Monday unloaded an even bigger shocker: Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo knew about the plans and “did not try to prevent the procedure.”

Both DiLorenzo and the head of Catholic Charities are now scrambling and hiding behind deflected responsibilities and feigned ignorance. “It is very awkward, it is very embarrassing. A human life was taken. He certainly has not taken it lightly in any way. He is clearly opposed to abortion,” the bishop’s flak told Duin.

The public isn’t really buying it, and rightfully so. Here’s what the Crunchy Con, Rod Dreher, had to say:

Bullsh*t. A bishop of the Church is told a day in advance that an abortion is going to take place under the Church’s auspices … and he doesn’t try his damnedest to stop it?! The director of Catholic Charities is supposedly distraught about the planned abortion because it “went against all she stood for” … and she didn’t try to stop it?! They’re covering their butts, and doing a poor job of it.

We may never know what really happened here. The U.S. Catholic Church has proven its skillfulness at covering up its mistakes—at least for a long time, until they fester and swell and burst in a public fiasco like the clergy sex abuse scandal. Easy lessons, it seems, are hard to learn for those afraid of owning up to their mistakes.

The new president of the University of California, Mark Yudof, and his wife are, to say the least, Super Jews. They keep a kosher house and received the Jewish National Fund Tree of Life Award; he served on the board of a handful of Jewish organizations; she is the past president of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism and sits the boards of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Hillel International.

In fact, Yudof, who will soon take the reins of a 10-campus system with 220,000 students, seems to know Torah so well that he speaks like its Central Character:

“I am what I am.”

Opening the gate to gay marriages in California was unavoidably as much a religious story as it was a legal one.

But just how religious folk feel about same-sex marriage, well, as this LA Times article demonstrates, that depends on who’s being asked:

Richard Mouw

“Homosexual intimacy is out of bounds. It’s not what God created us for,” said Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Mouw cites Romans 1 in the New Testament that decries men and women abandoning “natural relations” and men “inflamed with lust for one another” committing “indecent acts with other men”—behavior that carried death as punishment.

“Sexuality within the context of marriage is the order of creation,” he said.

Muow is a respected figure in the evangelical community, like a thinking-man’s Pat Robertson if Robertson really were relevant. But, clearly, his words mean little to the non-like-minded. Which prompted Mouw to muse on his blog about the role of Scripture in public policy.

The basic rule for understanding the present-day relevance of Old Testament prohibitions for the New Testament church is whether the New Testament reaffirms what we find in the Old. And I take it as obvious that the first chapter of Romans does reaffirm the prohibition against same-sex intimacy. This is turn reaffirms the more general teaching of the Old Testament about God’s creating purposes—what is “natural”—for human sexuality.

In the debates about public policy, however, I know that I cannot simply quote Scripture or cite ancient theologians in order to defend my position. I do not believe that everything that is declared sinful in the Bible ought to be decalred illegal in contemporary pluralistic societies. Here we enter a more pragmatic arena where we need to explore with our fellow citizens whether we have any common assumptions about what makes for a healthy society, and whether we can then figure out a workable arrangement that can accommodate our respective moral convictions.

Mouw goes on to say his “worries are variations on the old slippery-slope concern.”

Suppose, after five years of legal same sex unions three lesbians insist that their three-way relationship should be given the same legal status. (A case like this has actually come up in the Netherlands.) Or suppose the claim is made on behalf of, say, a forty year old man and a 13 year old boy …

Possibly to the dismay of my gay friends—actually, I doubt they care what I think God thinks—I agree with Mouw’s reading of the book of Romans. I understand homosexual behavior to be one looked down upon by God. So too is gossip and gluttony and arrogance and avarice. But there are very few sins for which God’s children are generally treated as others and outsiders.

What disappoints me about Mouw’s “slippery-slope” statement is that he essentially uses a weak premise to foretell tolerance of NAMBLA. Yes, the California Supreme Court has forever changed the definition of “marriage.” But the beginning of the end? I doubt it.

(Hat tip: My now-retired college pastor, Rhett Smith)