Committee to review social policy proposals
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, January 20, 2004
The Advisory Committee on Social Witness Policy will meet Wednesday through Friday at the headquarters of the Presbyterian Church (USA) in Louisville to wade through 235 pages of policy proposals and approve its recommendations to the 216th General Assembly.
The 12-member committee, which is elected by the General Assembly, will consider policy statements on 1) families, 2) immigration, 3) Iraq, 4) takings by government for public projects, 5) violence, religion and terrorism, and 6) human rights.
The early draft of the paper titled “Families in Transition” sparked controversy when it was presented to the 215th General Assembly in 2003. The General Assembly concluded that the paper lacked theological grounding and ordered that it be redrafted.
Since the meeting of the General Assembly, members of a writing team – including Dr. Charles Wiley of the denomination’s Office of Theological and Worship – have made wholesale changes in the document.
The first 22 pages of the 86-page draft report constitute a review of material that Wiley gleaned from Scripture and confessions. But it is silent on one of the thorniest issues discussed, sometimes heatedly, by members of the advisory committee and its writing team: Whether homosexual couples and their adopted children constitute a Biblical model for families.
The drafters shunned that topic in preparing their latest draft. The earliest version of the ACSWP report implied that homosexual couples, and other nontraditional families, such as unmarried mothers with children, were on par with a family consisting of a mother, father and their children.
Much of the draft that will be reviewed by the committee included social data and political strategies that also were strongly debated by the writing team.
The 19-page draft report on immigration policy calls for liberalization of immigration law. The proposals would go far beyond President George Bush’s proposed a new temporary worker program to match willing foreign workers with willing U.S. employers when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.
The 39-page draft report on takings addresses a Baltimore-area water project and calls for the Presbyterian Church (USA) to revise is environmental policy, Restoring Creation for Ecology and Justice (1990).
The 46-page draft report on violence, religion and terrorism raises questions about the legitimacy of “just war” to fight terrorism and calls on the church to focus on the causes of terrorism and violence rather than military responses. It would oppose the use of a “preemptive attack” against another nation as a deterrence to terrorism.
The 28-page draft on human rights addresses “hate” content on the Internet, “Islamophobia,” and human rights issues in numerous nations.
The 17-page statement on Iraq concludes that there are different opinions among Presbyterians, but, “From the beginning, it has been the judgment of many church leaders, both in the United States and elsewhere, that an essentially unilateral invasion of Iraq has been unwise, immoral, and illegal.”