Daily Archives: September 9, 2004

Different study, different conclusions

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> from Philanthropy News Digest/Foundation Center newsletter
> August 27, 2004
> Civil Society
>
> University of Massachusetts economist Lee Badgett has studied marriage
> customs in the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, where same-sex
> marriage or same-sex partnership rights have existed for up to fifteen
> years. She found, and noted in a briefing paper prepared for the Council
> on Contemporary Families and the Institute for Gay and Lesbian Strategic
> Studies, that previously existing trends in marriage, divorce,
> cohabitation, and out-of-wedlock childbearing did not change. In fact, in
> Denmark, heterosexual marriage rates increased after the adoption of
> same-sex marriage and are now the highest they have been since the early
> 1970s. Divorce rates remained the same in the countries studied. The
> majority of families with children are headed by married couples. In
> Norway, 77 percent of couples with children are married and in the
> Netherlands, 75 percent, compared to 72 percent in the United States.
> According to Badgett, the Scandinavian and Dutch experience suggests
> there is little reason to think heterosexual couples would eschew
> marriage if gay and lesbian couples got the same rights.

Their end justifies their means

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Here is the latest proposal (blackmail attempt – did I type that?) presented to the Archbishop of Canterbury concerning ECUSA and the Communion.
http://www.virtuosityonline.org/portal/modules/news/article.php?storyid=1292 Or, click below for the full text of the letter.
When the “reactionary conservatives” say that the disputes currently taking place within ECUSA and the Communion revolves around power, I wonder how such statements by “conservatives” are any less of an attempt at power? Now that American reactionaries (note, not meaning historically practiced Anglican-Evangelicalism) are flush with “power” from support by overseas bishops, they are pushing for the whole enchilada while they can.
They will even attempt to forbid the U.S. Church from using the word “Anglican,” and force it to rewrite its constitution. If the reactionaries are successful in denying the ECUSA the role of Anglican presence in the U.S., then I believe they will push in the civil courts to take control of the structures of the Church, since the Constitution’s preamble says that the Church is that which is in communion with the Sea of Canterbury. After all, the proposal says the “faithful” diocese and parishes (read: Network of Anglican Communion Diocese and Parishes, also known as “The Anglican Communion Network”) will have the right to elect their own Presiding Bishop, etc., which gives them the structure which is then in fact in communion with the Sea of Canterbury, thus the legitimate “Episcopal Church USA.” These types of definitions have already been made. This is so very difficult to say, but they cannot be trusted. Their end justifies their means.

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