Posted on 05/07/2013 6:56:10 AM PDT by Morgana
New Zealand became the 13thcountry to legalise same sex marriage two weeks ago.
This week the Anglican Bishop of Auckland is being taken to the Human Rights Tribunal over allegations he is discriminating against a gay man who wants to become a priest.
Right Reverend Ross Bay (pictured) has been accused of preventing a gay man entering the Anglican Church's training or discernment programme for priests because he is unmarried and in a sexual relationship with his male partner.
Bay denies the allegation.
The complainant, who cannot be named for legal reasons, said he had been signalling his desire to train for the priesthood since 2006, but had never been accepted into the programme.
Bay, who approves entrants to the Anglican Church's clergy training programme, has been the Bishop of Auckland since 2010.
The Human Rights Act 1993 allows exceptions to some discrimination laws, including where organised religions are following their doctrine.
The Bishop said, ultimately, church rules determine who can be ordained, and he refused the man entry ‘by reason of the defendant not being chaste in terms of canons of the Anglican Church’.
He added that anyone in a sexual relationship outside of marriage would not be accepted to train as a priest.
The case is illustrative of the sort of litigation that will become commonplace once same sex marriage is legalised.
At the end of the day this is not about ‘legal equality’ – already granted by civil partnerships – or ‘love’ – nothing currently stands in the way of such relationships.
Click "like" if you support true marriage.
It is largely about the desire for affirmation and recognition.
What infuriates and drives some sections of the gay rights lobby is the fact that some other members of society - in this case leaders in the Anglican church - refuse to accept, affirm and celebrate their sexual relationships.
And so in complete disregard of the directive of Jesus and Paul not to take fellow Christians to court (Matthew 18:15-17; 1 Corinthians 6:5-7) they end up doing just that – thus underlining the key issue at stake in this debate – a disregard for biblical authority.
The Bible is very clear that the only context for sexual intercourse is within a lifelong heterosexual marriage relationship.
If this aspiring priest wishes to be ordained he needs to acknowledge and respect that by giving up his claim to ordination or by becoming celibate. He can't have it both ways.
Even if he is successful in challenging the rules in a human court he will not be successful when he attempts to justify himself before God who set the rules in the first place.
I guess the gay man is making an exception and not turning the other cheek in this case.
he can start his own «church«
A little bit of confusion in the article, some mentioned, some not.
To start with, the article even said that the Anglican church does not ordain those living in an unmarried sexual relationship of any kind. However, the Anglican church does not require celibacy (non-marriage), but only chastity (no sex) if unmarried.
Add to that the huge variations among the Anglican dioceses. The largest number of Anglicans are in Africa, and are very conservative and moral. The North American and English Anglicans are very liberal, to the point where the conservatives have often split off from them to form conservative “African missionary” churches, functioning in parallel with their former Anglican dioceses, but not under their liberal bishop.
Importantly, the New Zealand Anglican church is having a schism in the other direction, with the liberals trying to force their agenda on the church as a whole, such as in this case.
However, it is harder to force such things in Anglicanism, because each bishop is regarded as equal, the equivalent of “mini-Popes”, so if the bishop is liberal, the conservatives schism; but in this case, there is only one really liberal Anglican church in NZ, not enough to schism, so they are trying to use the government to force their bishop to do what they want.
Isn’t this a shocker? /s
MATTHEW 24:37
“As the days of Noah were, so will be the coming of the Son of Man.
He could be a Imam ,they have dancing boys
They are discriminating against someone who openly and unrepentantly sins? I’m shocked. That’s as bad as my local grocery store discriminating against expired milk from five years ago. While that expired milk is “Bush’s fault”, so it’s okay to make fun of it, discriminating is always bad, isn’t it? There’s nothing wrong with having a religious leader whose actions as a role model contradict the Bible, is there?
That is a Biblical statement that truly needed to be enlarged and elaborated on. The wickedness began with the righteous highlands (mountain) descendants of Seth intermarrying with the “daughters of men”, (valley or lowlands) descendants of Cain who had fallen away from God.
While the descendants of Seth thought they could reform the daughters of the descendants of Cain, the reverse happened, described as the wickedness of man in Noah’s time.
What the wickedness amounted to is indeterminate, other than in the Noahide laws, the first six of which were given to Adam in the Adamic covenant, reiterated by Noah, and only the seventh was added by Noah, importantly, *after* the flood.
1. Prohibition of Idolatry
2. Prohibition of Murder
3. Prohibition of Theft
4. Prohibition of Sexual Immorality
5. Prohibition of Blasphemy
6. Prohibition of eating flesh taken from an animal while it is still alive
7. Establishment of courts of law
These seem to be the only way of determining wickedness at the time prior to the flood. So the assumption is not that the wicked were such because they were gentiles, the descent of Cain; but because they violated the first six laws.
Noah’s big contribution seems to have been to determine that there must be Earthly judgement, in a court, of violations of these laws, because without courts, there was nobody to say “You shouldn’t do these things”, with any force.
Since the first five are regularly violated today, the big question must be “Who is violating the sixth Noahide law?”, because this seems to be the only way to replicate the wickedness that existed in Noah’s time, before the flood.
I'll take a stab at it. Could it have meant - since life is in the blood - an animal with blood in it (which they may mean by 'while alive') - as opposed to being cooked first - is prohibited and/or drain the blood before eating meat.
In a slaughterhouse, dismembering an animal for food while it is still alive might be such a violation.
While either argument is reasonable, my first inclination is to be literal, actually eating the flesh of an animal while it is alive, like a predatory animal might do.
What comes to mind is how, in parts of SE Asia, there are even special tables with holes in them to support the head of a living monkey whose skull has been cracked, and people eat its brain while it is still alive.
Technically, the Hebrew version of this referred to the limbs of animals at one point, and flesh at another. It also noted that people could not eat the flesh of an animal torn from it while still alive by *another* animal.
Off the top of my head I suspect that it was oriented to the use of hunting animals to hunt other animals. But this raises the question if you have a hunting dog that just kills an edible animal, can you still eat it, vs., if it killed then dismembered the other animal?
It has both general applications (prohibition of cruelty to animals) and very specific ones.
scroll down about 3/4 to Chapter 11 Limb of a Living Animal
or try ‘aiver min hachai’ in a search engine.
in parts of SE Asia, there are even special tables with holes in them to support the head of a living monkey whose skull has been cracked, and people eat its brain while it is still alive.
Ugh! I never heard of that. God Bless America!
We discovered this grotesquerie during the Vietnam War, when some of our Special Forces and CIA had to coordinate with what were essentially anti-communist indigenous war lords, who wanted to impress the Americans with Asiatic delicacies, like live monkey brains, as well as to determine their fortitude with contests of machismo, like eating the poison sacs of cobras.
Pretty soon we had to train our Special Forces with the idea that they had to be capable of eating anything that “walked, creeped, crawled, slithered, swam or flew.” In other words, just the opposite of Kosher and western.
I can see why, even in Asia, vegetarianism is popular. At least if you aren’t starving.
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