Some believe that perspective is everything. We don’t get much perspective in this country anymore. No one wants to be called a sexist, racist, homophobe, or any of the other myriad label’s that liberal theologians and politicians lay on us. To be called a member of the Taliban because we object to butchered baby parts being sold out of coolers doesn’t really contribute to a reasoned debate, but the fact that we have to approach baby parts being sold at all is pretty unreasonable so…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/people/anthony-faiola Writing about the Vatican City Synod on family issues held the other day Anthony Faiola gives us an interesting perspective. Sometimes it’s nice to hear other perspectives. The synod on family issues marked the Vatican’s second in two years, with a meeting last year touching off the debates on divorce and homosexuality. Unlike last year, when several controversial clauses failed to garner a required two-thirds majority, all the recommendations made this time reached that bar. But some said that was partly because of an attempt to make the language more palatable and ambiguous. Signaling the intensity of the debate, there were more than 1,300 amendments proposed by the more than 260 delegates.
This year, homosexuality became less a focus than divorce. But some conservative bishops argued that the synod was being hijacked by liberals overwhelmingly focused on “Western” or “Eurocentric” issues. Bishop Joseph Anthony Zziwa, a conservative Ugandan bishop, said there had been far too much talk about homosexuality, which is criminalized in his country, as well as divorce. Bishops even disagreed initially on the definition of a family — which in Africa, he said, often means extended families, compared with nuclear ones in Europe and the United States. Africans more generally, he said, had far bigger problems . “You keep asking someone from Nigeria to tell me about homosexuality, to tell me about divorce, when five of his children have been abducted by Boko Haram? You think that person has time to talk about that?” he said.”
