Report wants PCUSA to affirm ‘diverse families,’ gay couples
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 15, 2003
The 215th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), which will meet in Denver on May 24-30, will consider a document that could spawn sweeping changes in how the denomination views – and provides resources for – “diverse families.”
By diverse, the proposal by the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy would include single-parent families and homosexual couples and their adopted children as acceptable examples of God’s purpose for families.
“The policy, if adopted, will put the PCUSA on record officially sanctioning every deviant form of family, thus redefining family altogether,” says Terry Schlossberg, executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life. “It will erase the significance of marriage to healthy family life.”
In its report titled “Living Faithfully with Families in Transition,” the denomination’s Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy calls on the General Assembly to take a number of steps to recognize groups of all stripes as faithful components of the covenant community.
The steps would include educational and financial resources intended to change the orthodox and Biblical views that, in the words of John Calvin, have regarded the traditional family as a “little church.”
“Living Faithfully with Families in Transition” selectively quotes Scripture and the confessions in its rationale, but also makes some pointed comments that would suggest the panel considered much of Scripture to be untrustworthy.
“Biblical traditions present God as working through diverse family structures – structures that contemporary women and men would judge as no longer adequate for the values of equality and inclusiveness we now see as God’s intention for us,” the report says.
Further, the document discredits the writings of the Apostle Paul on the issues of marriage and sex.
“In considering Paul’s teachings on the family, it is essential to distinguish between those writings that scholars agree are authentically Pauline and other writings that were written at a later time and attributed to him,” the report says. “The two often reflect quite different outlooks on key questions. It is also necessary to understand Paul’s teachings in light of the prevailing social assumptions and moral traditions of the time. Paul, like many educated Jews of his day, was deeply influenced both by Jewish law and tradition and by prevalent Greek moral culture concerning family, marriage and especially sexuality.”
“There is no singular form of family, no ideal family form,” the report says. “Family forms, as creations of cultures, are multiple both in history, cross-culturally, and in contemporary U.S. society. The church must resist the temptation to raise up as ideal any one form of family and, thereby, to stigmatize other forms of families.”
While the report has numerous references to incest and rape, and views them as inappropriate, it includes none of the Scripture condemning homosexual practice. And, with its affirmation of a homosexual couple, with or without children, as an appropriate family, the report collides with what the General Assembly has already said on that subject – that homosexual practice is sinful.
The substance of the report is based more on sociological and cultural considerations than Biblical precepts. It only lightly suggests that sin may be a factor in divorce, cohabitation and teen-age pregnancy, and says the three major factors affecting American families are independence, materialism and consumerism.
“The stress on individualism has had a particularly devastating impact on racial ethnic communities that practice different, group-based values,” the report says, quoting a study by the National Indian Child Welfare Association that “finds that the White value system promoting nuclear families and individualism has fostered repression of native cultures.”
While saying individualism among heterosexuals who promote nuclear families is considered repressive and harmful to the church’s covenant community, the report does not mention another form of individualism that has disrupted the PCUSA – constitutional defiance by individuals of church laws on ordination, membership and marriage.
Consumerism and materialism are viewed as expressions of a society, as the report suggests, in which the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. The report calls on the General Assembly to support government policies that would promote the redistribution of wealth through “adequate, family-sustaining wages for all families” and “reduced economic and consumer pressure on all families.”
The contents of the report place a high priority on experience. For instance, it includes a number of paragraphs about families – using their first names – who are facing some kind of problem. One such family was headed by “Robert and Stephen … a gay couple in a long-term, committed relationship that was recognized in a service of commitment in the Presbyterian church where they have been members for over ten years.”
Without saying whether “Robert and Stephen” were real people, the report noted that “Robert … quit his job to become the stay-at-home parent of the children. Robert’s name is the official name on the adoption papers of the children since the state in which they live does not recognize same-gender adoptive parenting or marriage. On September 11, 2001, Robert was in the World Trade Center finishing his last week at work. He died in the collapse of the first tower. What should be the response of a just society? What should be the response of the Family of God?”
The clear message of the Robert and Stephen story is that a personal tragedy should mitigate against traditional values for families.
Of all the diverse models for families in the report, the report most repeatedly defends homosexual parents. “From the studies conducted over the past twenty years, no significant differences have been found between children reared by homosexual parents and children reared by a traditional set of heterosexual parents,” the report said.
It commended a study that concluded that “[C]hildren of same-sex families were less likely to hold to traditional gender stereotypes regarding behavior and roles. They were emotionally close to their parents, regardless of biological relationship, and also tended to be more expressive of their feelings … Due to this research, both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association support gay and lesbian parenting.”
William J. Maier, a child and family psychologist at Focus on the Family, said, “It seems clear that the American Academy of Pediatrics has submitted to the will of homosexual activists within its ranks – at the expense of scientific honesty and the very children it seeks to serve.”
Maier added, “Studies on this topic are fraught with methodological flaws, motivated by political agendas and ultimately offer no scientific justification for this hazardous recommendation.”
Schlossberg quotes “Marriage in America: A Report to the Nation” by the Council of Families that “summarizes the devastating effects of forms of the family that ACSWP seeks to have the church affirm. Plentiful research shows, for example:
- The rate of child poverty is five times higher for children living with single mothers than for children in intact families.
- Children of divorce, when they become teen-agers, have two to three times more behavioral and psychological problems than do children from intact homes.
- Seventy percent of juveniles and young adults serving in long-term correctional facilities did not live with both parents while growing up.
- Divorce in the background contributes to as many as three in four teen suicides and four in five psychiatric admissions.
- Family fragmentation is not limited by race, class, and ethnicity, but its most dramatic effects are within the African-American community. Today 68 percent of all black births are to unmarried mothers. Two-thirds of all black children are not living with two parents. Only 15 percent of black children living with their married parents are in poverty, compared to 57 percent of those living with their mother only.
Rather than affirming the nontraditional families, as does the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy, Schlossberg again quotes “Marriage in America:”
“As a foundation for family life and raising children, marriage is better than its fast-growing alternatives. It is our society’s most important institution for bringing up children, for fostering high parental investment in children, and for helping men and women find a common life of mutual affection, care, and sexual intimacy…. The challenge for your generation is to make marriage stronger.”
Among other proposals, the Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy wants the 215th General Assembly to approve its “theological affirmations and policy principles;” approve its report “as a whole for churchwide study and implementation;” and “commend enthusiastically the members of the Task Force on ‘Changing Families’ and express to them the church’s gratitude for their work and contribution to the whole church.”