Former moderator to renew attack on gay-ordination ban
The Layman Online, July 29, 2003
Jack B. Rogers, moderator of the 213th General Assembly (2001) of the Presbyterian Church (USA), has gained another platform to continue telling Presbyterians that they ought to ordain practicing homosexuals.
Backlash on gay issues
Americans have become significantly less accepting of homosexuality since a Supreme Court decision that was hailed as clearing the way for new gay civil rights, a USA TODAY/CNN/Gallup Poll has found.
“The shift in attitudes occurs as gay issues have been in the news. In recent weeks, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-sodomy law, a Canadian court decision allowed gay couples to marry in Ontario, and Wal-Mart expanded anti-discrimination protection to gay workers,” the report says. Rogers will deliver the keynote address – “Why I Changed My Mind on Homosexuality” – at the Covenant Network’s Northwest Regional Conference in Seattle on Oct. 11.
Rogers has long been affiliated with the Network, which was organized for the sole purpose of lobbying for the ordination of self-affirming, practicing homosexuals. Rogers would go even further. He wants the PCUSA to lift its prohibition against conducting marriage ceremonies for same-gender couples.
“To be perfectly honest, I don’t care what you call it – marriage, domestic partnership, holy union,” Rogers said in an article published in the November-December 2000 issue of More Light Update, a publication of More Light Presbyterians. “It is not the form I am interested in but the function. It seems to me that it is in the best interest of the state, and of the church, to recognize and encourage persons who are willing to make life-long commitments to each other and to children they raise.”
In June, a Cincinnati minister who performed “marriage” ceremonies for homosexual couples in defiance of church law lost his pulpit. The Presbytery of Cincinnati ruled that A. Stephen Van Kuiken of Mount Auburn Presbyterian Church had violated his ordination vows and, therefore, had renounced the jurisdiction of the Presbyterian Church (USA).
The Covenant Network bills its meeting in Seattle as a “dialogue,” but the agenda for the meeting suggests it is yet another attempt to convince Presbyterians that their opposition to ordaining practicing homosexuals and same-sex marriages is wrong.
Rogers himself has shown little inclination to “dialogue.” When he was a candidate for moderator, he denounced the Confessing Church Movement within the Presbyterian Church (USA). Upon election, he declared himself the “confessing moderator.” He later described some of the denomination’s evangelicals as “militant fundamentalists” and compared them with Osama Bin Laden.
For long, Rogers himself was considered an evangelical. He was on the faculty of Fuller Theological Seminary, where many evangelicals go to prepare for the ministry. He had written a book titled Presbyterian Creeds: A Guide to the Book of Confessions (1985) that was heralded by many evangelicals.
But he says he changed his mind about ordaining homosexuals. “I have been involved with the issue of the status of homosexual persons in the Presbyterian Church since it was introduced in 1976,” he once said. “For 17 years I maintained a traditional, conservative position. In 1993, I first began to study the matter in depth as a member of a task force in the local congregation where I worship. That led to a renewed study of Scripture and the Confessions, to contact with homosexual persons, and finally to a conviction that the traditional position denies fundamental tenets of the Protestant and Reformed faith.”