Reports
the Boston Globe, in an article by Naomi Schaefer of the Ethics
and Public Policy Center:
If the Bush campaign is searching for the 4 million evangelical voters who stayed home during the 2000 election, they should know that the editorial board of the Baylor Lariat, which voted 5 to 2 to support gay marriage, is not unrepresentative of the views of younger evangelicals.
Baylor is a conservative Baptist university, and the Lariat is the student newspaper. The article continues:
the growing support for gay marriage among young evangelicals finds its roots in another trend as well. These students are more likely to place some distance between their religious beliefs and their political views than their parents and grandparents did. The editor of the Lariat explained that the board's decision was based on legal grounds not moral ones. Putting it more bluntly, one young man at the evangelical Wheaton College told me, "Christianity should never be reduced to politics."
So even among self-identified evangelicals, the next generation is far more accepting of gay equality than their elders. And that certainly bodes well for the future.
Not All of One Mind.
Here's more on divergent views among evangelicals. On the
conservative Wall Street Journal "opinionjournal.com" site, there's
an
interesting essay by the Rev. Donald Sensing, pastor of the
Trinity United Methodist Church in Franklin, Tenn. Though his view
of homosexuality clearly leans to the religious right, he scores
some original observations about the decline of marriage being
unrelated to gays desire to join the club. In "Save Marriage? It's
Too Late --
The Pill made same-sex nuptials inevitable," he writes:
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.
The tired cast of religious right televangelist "leaders" may be
anti-gay to their core, but Karl Rove's dream of using a
marriage-ban amendment to energize the base and add 4 million
evangelical votes to Bush's ledger may be headed for a hard crash
into a far more complicated evangelical reality.
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