{"id":7772,"date":"2004-03-07T12:59:29","date_gmt":"2004-03-07T12:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/if_you_say_so.html"},"modified":"2004-03-07T12:59:29","modified_gmt":"2004-03-07T12:59:29","slug":"if_you_say_so","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/if_you_say_so.html","title":{"rendered":"If you say so"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the National Post (Canada), Christians will win the culture wars<\/a>, says columnist Elizabeth Nickson.<\/p>\n

Is anyone else getting sick of gay marriage? Don’t haul me off to the gulag’s re-education room, and beat me with rubber hoses, for heaven’s sake. But honestly, I’m so over it. I’m tolerant, leave me alone, do what you want, I give up (not that I was ever fighting). Really. Caring less here.<\/p>\n

I guess the reason why gay marriage is so pervasive, on every screen, on every op-ed page, is that “rights” for gay men and women is the only idea the Left has left that actually rocks. It has traction, it is where, in that ghastly creaky phrase, the rubber hits the road. Why? I have no idea, so I went off to St. John’s Shaughnessy, the largest Anglican church in Canada to find out why. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Update<\/strong>Comments open. I didn’t know they’d been closed. Sorry.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The church, which is nestled in the most gorgeous city suburb in Vancouver, is a strange place to find a group of dissidents so radical that they are shaking the foundations of the International Synod. In fact, the morning I spoke with them my hostess was summoned via her cellphone to Lambeth Palace for a little consultation — with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Eerie stuff, when you consider that St. John’s is 2% of the Canadian Anglican church, which is 1% of the total Anglican worldwide church.<\/p>\n

St. John’s is orthodox and evangelical, which is rather not the Anglican church I was brought up in, it being so darn dull that my head nods forward and bangs an imaginary pew back at the faintest flag of memory. An orthodox church, for those who have managed to escape this debate (you must tell me your secret), believes in the inerrancy of Scripture, among other things. An evangelical church is one that preaches its gospel, like for instance the inerrancy of Scripture. And Scripture comes down quite hard on the union of man and woman being pretty much the only sexual union that God allows. Old and New Testament, rather strict. Mean, really. <\/p>\n

However, it seems that St. John’s is one of the only Anglican churches in Canada that is actually growing. One thousand people, four services on Sundays, busy all day, every day and every evening, running all kinds of widely attended programs. And, astonishingly, only 10% of parishioners are over 65. This church is actually worried that they are not reaching the elderly. Most churches only reach the elderly. In fact, the diocese of New Westminster is slowly dying off, since congregants skew so old. In fact, selling off church property is a major source of income for the current Bishop, the syncretic and bullying Michael Ingham, who believes that Christ is not the only way to God. Which is fine, he can believe that, but should he really be an Anglican Bishop? <\/p>\n

In any case, Bishop Ingham has decided that blessing same-sex unions must happen, and that those who refuse to are really out of step with his plans for the church. Therefore, flouting the worldwide Anglican church, the Lambeth Conference, and despite the announcement of the Primates of the Church in November, that his actions are causing “profound pain and uncertainty,” Ingham has systematically bullied clergy into approving of such blessings or encouraged the promotion of clergy who will perform such ceremonies. When he is flouted, for instance, at Holy Cross in Abbotsford, he changed the locks just before Christmas and fired the youth minister, trustees and all the people’s representatives. St. John’s congregation is praying for the only thing that will save them, alternative Episcopal oversight. Here you have the straightforward activism of the homosexual lobby in microcosm, with which I rush to add, I have no quarrel. The gay lobby can work as hard as it can to legitimate its unions, and then to enshrine those unions in rights law. Our courts are activist, undemocratic, they hate tradition and over-ride the will of the people all the time, so there is no question it will happen. And then, what then? Then, religious and cultural conservatives will have won. Their separate world, the one that hews to absolute values and Scripture, will be patently so much healthier, that within 10 years, and possibly five, they will have taken back the mainstream. <\/p>\n

How is that possible? Let me ask you a question or two in turn. How soon till we see the first marriage between a 16-year-old boy and a 50-year-old man? How soon till we see gay group marriages? Or group lesbian Wiccan coven marriages? How soon until we see what happens to the children of these marriages and inevitable catastrophic divorces? Once legal, these “rights” will be stitched into the fabric of society, and every institution that receives public money will be required to promote the ideas and practices of a multi-sexual society. Bisexuality, currently popular among teens, will skyrocket. According to U.S. researcher Linda Harvey, already both GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network) and PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) promote book selections for youth that include positive portrayals of homosexual sex between boys, pornography use, cheating on a spouse with a homosexual lover, homosexual sex between underage youth and adults, and straight and gay experimentation by “uncertain youth.” Once gay marriage is fully legal, these books will become required reading. <\/p>\n

Which is fine, I have no quarrel with that. But I’d be leaning on the last freedom available to me, and would be sending my kids to a school out of the reach of the gay lobby. Any other school. I would choose for them to keep their innocence as long as possible. I might even become a busy Christian, since it would be there only that I would find a culture not degraded by a persistent emphasis on sexuality, and the thorough destruction of tradition. St. John’s Shaughnessy will win their current battle for alternative episcopal oversight. And Christians will win the culture war. Because they must. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the National Post (Canada), Christians will win the culture wars, says columnist Elizabeth Nickson. Is anyone else getting sick of gay marriage? Don’t haul me off to the gulag’s re-education room, and beat me with rubber hoses, for heaven’s sake. But honestly, I’m so over it. I’m tolerant, leave me alone, do what you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nIf you say so - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/03\/if_you_say_so.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"If you say so - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From the National Post (Canada), Christians will win the culture wars, says columnist Elizabeth Nickson. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}