(I) As reported in detail here by Scarecrow at Fire Dog Lake, Jim Wallis hosted a round-table with the three leading Democratic candidates on the issues of faith and public policy (should you go to Faith in Public Life.org, they have a video of it, plus follow-up articles). My shorter response is that I agree with Scarecrow on this one; this is a bad precedent, and adds little to the Presidential debate, and opens up the Democratic candidates to the charge of pandering.
The real culprit here, besides the candidates themselves who are willing to prostitute their faith, is Jim Wallis. Unlike Scarecrow, I do not nor have I ever like Wallis. He is a publicity whore, and has stated quite openly that he desires nothing less than to be for the left what Jerry Falwell was to the right. Rather than serve the Gospel, he wants to lead a movement. By hosting a forum such as this one, Wallis has shown that he has no desire to discuss issues of public policy on their merits, offering candidates a place instead where they can say all sorts of irrelevant things about their private lives rather than give serious responses to serious questions. This does not mean that issues of faith are irrelevant to matters of public policy; rather, it is a further erosion of the constitutional ban on religious tests for public office, with Wallis being the chief offender. I make no friends among religious progressives with my disdain for Wallis, but I just can't help myself - I think he's a fraud, and I think what he did in hosting this forum is a bad precedent.
(II) President Bush's nominee for Surgeon General, James Holsinger, is, like me, a United Methodist Lay person. In the late 1988, the General Conference of the United Methodist Church - our chief law-making body - created a study-group on the question of homosexuality and the church. Its mandate and task was broad, and its membership was diverse. My academic adviser in seminary was a member, although he left before the study was completed for health-related reasons. Holsinger was among a group that offered up a minority report, due to an ideological split within the study commission. As reported by Think Progress, part of Holsinger's initial contribution to the minority report was an oddly-homoerotic discussion of gay sex (and I say that as a straight man). Part of Holsinger's report, discussing the supposed history of disdain for male-male anal-genital copulation is so woefully ignorant, one wonders how stupid a man with the title "Dr." could be to have penned it. He insists that anal sex is "unnatural" because "everyone knows" the difference between the sex organs and the "alimentary canal" (some of these men were, apparently, quite well-endowed if he is worrying about the alimentary canal rather than just the rectum). Why, even children are aware of the difference!
Should Dr. Holsinger be interested, there are some pieces of Greek pottery he should peruse, in which Greek men are pictured fervently in flagrante. He should also read Plato's Symposium on the joys of man-boy and man-man love. Or perhaps he and other fans of the film 300 should remember that the the Spartans, in direct defiance of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell", encouraged sexual liaisons between and among their soldiers as a way of increasing their solidarity and willingness to sacrifice themselves for one another.
Just for the record, the whole "tearing" thing is true, of course, but such tearing also occurs in vaginal intercourse. It also occurs to men; no amount of lubrication, natural or artificial can prevent microscopic breaks in the skin. As a doctor, he should know this, probably does know this, but he would rather put the onus on same-sex copulation for all sorts of horrors rather than discuss the issue seriously.
I would apologize to the rest of the world for Holsinger as a member of the UMC, but, alas, he is just one of many quite silly and bigoted people in our church.
BTW, his rampant and public ignorance (not to mention bigotry) should automatically disqualify him from consideration as Surgeon General of the United States (unlike another UM layperson, the late C. Everett Koop, who was an early advocate of safer sex practices and didn't discriminate based upon sexual orientation). Of course, in a sane world, his name wouldn't even crop up, so my hope is slim . . .
