I wrote the essay below two nights ago as a follow-up on my task of commenting on recent Judicial Council decisions and to also follow up on why I had written several emails to the bishops.
As you will see, I have several strong opinions. For that reason, I am posting the whole essay in my personal blog and only the first two paragraphs and a few other sentences from this essay in the AIA blog.
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I have not regretted going over a year without commentaries on Judicial Council Decisions. Most of the issues before the Council were of how best to allow separation from the denomination by discontented pastors, bishops, churches, and conferences over gay rights. Those decisions regarding separation have been carefully and thoughtfully described by Heather Hahn of the United Methodist News Service in her respective articles at the time of their publication by the Council. I really had nothing to add regarding the meaning and legality of Paragraph 2553 and related paragraphs allowing withdrawal.
I have temporarily passed over the decisions on other subjects. I hope to address those in the near future.
Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two issues arose in our church. Those watching social concerns in the past began to focus on environmental matters, warning that air and water pollution were massive enough that work had to be done to reverse those trends or there could be terrible consequences.
Those watching for a chance to gain power in our denomination, as was happening at the time in all of the mainline churches, watched with gleeful dismay as a United Methodist pastor won a law suit against his conference for discrimination against him because he was gay. Those culture warriors had lost the battle over abortion at the time with the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision of the Supreme Court. But now those who claimed they took the Bible literally, as long as you took their word for what was to be taken literally, had a concrete issue over which to fight in order to gain political advantage. They wanted to reshape our denomination after generations of modernist (liberals and moderates) theology had dominated the leadership.
Sadly, we liberals took the bait and entered into conflict over gay rights and barely noticed the threat of global warming.
Prior to the gay pastor winning his lawsuit, no one particularly thought about sexual orientation. The estimated ten percent of men and women, not defining themselves sexually as the rest of us did, tended to be isolated and in the closet. Even our swear words were almost all theological or bodily function terms at the time. And "gay" was a happy word.
But as our population grew, so did the number and variety of people's sexuality to where they finally discovered each other on a political scale that disturbed everyone who had not noticed this natural phenomenon before.
My introduction to the reality of homosexuality occurred in an anthropology course where I discovered articles about "berdache" among Native Americans. Those braves who took a male homosexual partner brought into the women's areas of responsibility someone with masculine strength, a real plus for the tribe. My professor gave me a hard time because I did not mention it in the monograph about the tribe I chose to study but included reference to the articles in the bibliography. That was in 1958. -- The professor never did lecture on it or even bring it up in class. It was at most a niche issue that 90 percent of the population was not encountering it or its impact on their closeted alternately oriented neighbors. I also think it was too complicated to deal with. We as a culture had not been as wise as the Native American cultures and many other cultures were regarding it.
I think the conservatives used the era's sexual revolution at the time and for awhile hornswoggled liberals and moderates into looking upon the variations not as biological realities to be respected and integrated into our culture but instead to be seen as moral deviations. That was a whole lot more scintillating than discussing the rise of CO2 and plastics in our atmosphere.
And now we are paying for letting the conservatives distract us. We are now facing the greatest extinction Earth's long history with the demise of millions of species of flora and fauna and the prospect of the collapse of civilization hovering just over the horizon. (See note at the end of this essay.)
That is why I wrote a series of emails to the bishops during the last couple months. We have got to break the cycle of distraction brought by some power hungry politically oriented church leaders and focus on saving the planet. Part of saving the planet, besides facing up to global warming, is establishing a stronger church so that we can work together better and so that we can lean on each other through the tragedies of floods, fires, and storms that are upon us and yet to come.
That does not mean that what the Judicial Council does is irrelevant to the fate of the human race. They are stuck with the limitations of their role in our legal system. Our legal system as defined by the General Conference has not yet found a way to deal with climate issues that would allow the Council to have a direct impact.
Here too close to the end of my own life is my real regret that it took so long to speak up in support of the Dave Steffensons and Bishop Dycks of our denomination who have been warning us.
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Note: I know several, though not all, of the key "conservatives" who have led the fight for separation. They are good guys, "play well with others," and I would trust them "in the trenches" with me. If they ever seek my help, I will help them. They think they are right and acting with integrity. I used strong language about them above only because I truly believe that history will view them harshly.
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