What It Is, Is Fornication

This is what I was thinking all along.  Now there’s no reason not to affirm or bless heterosexual living together without being married.  A real question them becomes, ” Where does it stop, or does it?”

“illumined by the Word of God” 

I guess they can say that, since they don’t seem to be aware that the Word of God has a lot, specifically, to say on the matter…

Greg when I first saw your headline I really thought you had adopted Andy Griffiths “What it is, is Football” to this mess.

Notice how the second vow avoids having to mention Christ.  I guess I should be glad His name isn’t being dragged through this filth.

Two questions
1 - Is the presider required to be clergy?
2 - Is it typical - at a wedding (male & female) for the couple to present the bread and wine?

A year ago, I attended a black baptist church with my black daughter-in-law, and the pastor preached an excellent sermon to the college students present, on the difference between companionship and commitment, and the fallacy and great danger of confusing the two. I think he hit the nail on the head. Throughout our society, we doing exactly what he cautioned about: we substitute companionship for commitment, and think we have found nirvana.

desert padre

Hey there ladies, will you be blessed unionized to me?  We’ve never met, I don’t even know if you’re single, but I’m a dude, and so far as I can tell this just commits me to tenderly respecting you in some undefined way exclusively, so I’m pretty sure we can marry or date other people so long as it’s in respectful tenderness.  Definitely no alimony or green card and probably no health care, but I am eligible for supermarket daily doubles.  Also, you can listen to my sister’s Moulin Rouge copy of “come what may.”

Oh yeah, I guess if we’ve promised to do this in the love of Christ that means no hanky panky.

Some English Bible translations use the word “fornication” to translate the Greek πορνεία, which encompasses various types of sexual immorality (inclusive of homosexual practice, of course).

Adultery (μοιχεύω) seems to be in a special category, separate from fornication. Matt 15:19 has a good example of use, in context.

#5, yes to the 2nd question. As for the first question, I’d opine that anyone can preside, since the “rite” means nothing, anyway. A chimpanzee, perhaps…

Jackie, the title on the document on page 1 is “The Witnessing and Blessing
of a Lifelong Covenant, Liturgical Resources for Blessing Same-Gender Relationships.”  Why did you say it doesn’t indicate that it’s intended for same-sex couples?

Re #5, yes.  See page 2 of the rite: “A bishop or priest normally presides.” “Normally” is the same used on page 422 of the BCP in the marriage rite (though I know this rite isn’t a marriage).

Sorry, should have addressed my question to Greg, not Jackie.

Hmmm….looks vague enough that I’m pretty confident I can finally marry my dog.  They could just do this during the annual animal blessings.  Or not…

Charles,

Point taken, but I meant that there’s nothing in the liturgy itself that specifies that.

Even given the title, though, the question remains: If this is all about equality, then how can the church discriminate against opposite-sex couples?

On what basis does it tell opposite-sex couples that they can’t have their “union” blessed? That gay couples can have this blessing but straight couples cannot?

According to a member of the SCLM Committee that was part of my deputation (Diocese of Kansas), that was actually discussed and rejected by the Committee (opening up this newrite to opposite-sex couples). 

Though we’re on opposite sides of the fence on this topic, we all know that the trajectory on this one is for this rite to eventually go bye bye and same-sex couples will eventually be able to be married in the Episcopal Church.  That’s my opinion on it, at least, and I would assume most conservatives see it that way too.

As to #11’s comments, your comment shows why I struggle “hanging out” at Stand Firm.  Mr. Hunter, that type of comment is not respectful to those who are happy about these rites (even though you strongly disagree with us).

If Communion is involved, it becomes a Black Mass, a profaning of the Eucharist.  Did anyone raise that at GC?

Greg, I followed a bit of the discussion in the HoB.  The bishops were clear that they did not intend it for opposite-sex couples.  The question in my mind is whether someone in the HoB will break collegiality and canon law and allow it to be used for opposite-sex couples or for polyamorous groupings.

It is a marriage rite. No bones about it.

Jill,

Seems to me that if the impetus behind a same-sex blessing is equality - to give same-sex couples the same kind of blessing that opposite-sex couples may obtain through marriage, only without the requirement that same-sex couples be married - then denying opposite-sex couples access to that same blessing is every bit as discriminatory as the practice that led to the creation of this liturgy.

If “fairness” - not God’s word about what constitutes an acceptable union - is now the sine qua non of union-blessing, then I don’t see how we get around the fact that either we have to open up this blessing to unmarried heterosexual couples, or continue to be guilty of exactly the kind of discrimination the remedy to which this liturgy was intended to be.

Charles,

I appreciate your willingness to hang out at SF, and I’ll let Mr. Hunter speak for himself, but being “respectful” of this idiotic and unholy “blessing” is not my goal. Quite the opposite, in fact. It deserves derision and mockery, not to insult the people who are happy with it, but because of what it is: As Jim the Puritan points out, a profaning of the Eucharist, and a perversion of what God has said marriage is.

Sorry to be indelicate, but if the only difference here is the various applications of sexual organs in ways I would deem unnatural in that things are being used for a purpose for which they are never intended, then the distinction the HoB makes is utter and complete nonsense.  Not that I expect a bishop in TEo to have any significant logical faculty at all.

Once again, this all about how it makes Episcopalians feel about themselves.  This makes them feel good.  Any high school philosophy class could take these tools to the shed for saying it isn’t “marriage” and it isn’t intended for hetero couples.  But then again, when have these sexually liberated bishops ever suggested sex outside of marriage is bad?  There are NO rules when it comes to sexual congress anymore.  That’s been obvious since they started ordaining non-celibate homosexuals.  Why is sex without marriage “holy” enough for them, but straights need to be married?  That horse left the barn decades ago.

Before this turns nasty I would hope all here would take the generous high ground and see the rite for what it is: a blessing of homosexual relationship outside the bounds of marriage as defined by Scripture and tradition.

Agreed, Greg. Blessing of fornication?.... IT IS INDEED!

To be clear, I wouldn’t care if a same-sex relationship were “blessed” provided there was no sexual component involved in the relationship. 

I think it’s dangerous and naive that a celibate relationship were envisioned here.  It’s seems that the acts of intimacy, as it is in marriage, are implicitly being blessed here as well.  If that weren’t the case, the Integrity crew would be frothing at the mouth.  They want it ALL.  Every part of their relationships need to be on parity and analogous to the married state.  Period.

Greg, I think Charles makes it clear that this rite is just the next step in boiling the frog. 

It doesn’t make sense because it’s not supposed to make sense, Piskie doublethink at its finest.  The typical pew potato will get mildly ruffled by the idea, then be assured that “this isn’t marriage,” never really thinking in any depth about what it is.  Then, once said PPs are once again properly anesthetized and innured to the current situation, full-blown SSM will be upon them and the Official Line will be “Oh, c’mon, what’s really changed?  They’ve been here under a blessing for three years!”

Charles, my initial inclination was to agree with you that comparing blessing gay marriage to blessing bestiality is insulting, but then I realized that both would or have driven me from the TEC.  Now, I’m wondering how you make a moral distinction between the two, and it occurs to me that since I don’t trust your reliance on or interpretation of the Bible, the only way that you can communicate with me is through a secular philosophical argument, but then I’m not much interested in secular philosophical arguments about morality because they tend to devolve so quickly into hard nihilism.  And honestly, the secular philosophers outside the Church are much higher-powered.  Furthermore since supporters of gay marriage within the Church tend to shatter the denotative reference of words, I don’t really know what you mean when you talk about morality.  For all I know, we could trade blog posts until we totally agree on the ethics of gay marriage and then Marcus Borg will come along and murder all the semantics to the point of rendering our discussion meaningless.

In other words if you support gay marriage in the TEC, then I don’t trust the way you think about theology or the way you use words.  I’ve seen too many linguistic shell games at the hands of KJS and Marcus Borg.  Honestly, I want to be able to talk to you; I wish your words weren’t static covered code on my computer screen, but when you use the word “normal” earlier in this thread, I feel like I need to hire a team of anthropologists to study your concept of normality in practice.  Even if you explicitly subscribe to some dictionary definition and attach a volume of Foucault lectures on normality, I’m still going to wonder if you mean what you say and say what you mean.

It seems rather heterosexist, this liturgy. It clearly insists that LGBT people *act* in their ummm…. union, as if they were a heterosexual religiously married couple. Obviously, that’s not going to be the case in most gay male unions, so why make them lie as well as sin in other ways?

A Senior Priest,

Check out page 377 of The Parallax View by Slavoj Zizek:

““True” identity itself, as a rule, form itself through the identification with a foreign gaze which plays the role of the culture’s Ego-Ideal.  Argentinian identity, for example, formed itself in the mid-nineteenth century, when its main mythical themes were established (gaucho melancholy, and so on); all these themes, however had already appeared in the the memoirs of European travelers a couple of decades earlier—the means that from the very beginning Argentinian ideological self-identity relied on an alienating identification with the Other’s gaze.”

Gay people of the TEC:  we’re really sorry your sexuality got drawn into a political war, and we admit it, we break the Biblical rules on sex and divorce all the time too.  But we’ve learned that they’re great standards.  We want to include you.  But we hate sin.  Come join us in repenting and turning to the God of the Bible.

Greg writes, “It deserves derision and mockery, not to insult the people who are happy with it, but because of what it is: As Jim the Puritan points out, a profaning of the Eucharist, and a perversion of what God has said marriage is.”

I can help with that.

1. Same-sex couples are not equal to opposite-sex couples, nor can they be equal. Same-sex couples cannot have real sex with each other. It’s just not possible. The closest you can get is when a Ladyboy (feminized XY male with intact male genitalia) marries an XX female, and they have sex. (I honestly have no idea what the spiritual outcome of that would be.)

2. Neither same-sex couples nor human-dog couples can receive a marital blessing. The blessing comes from God, not the priest. Although a priest can say the words over them, nothing positive would happen as a result. There is no Holy Sacrament. There is no mystical joining. God is not present in the blessing; only You-Know-Who is present. (And laughing.)

3. There is no generous high ground. Only generous amounts of eternally flaming pitch. One can indeed see the rite for what it is: a diabolical “blessing” of mutual defilement by homosexual practice, cloaked in the language of Christian Marriage. Nothing about this is bless-ed.

Before GC, I heard serious talk about the “rite” being used as a generous pastoral response for opposite-sex couples who want to co-habitate and fornicate, but who don’t want to get married for tax reasons, insurance, or whatever. So, don’t assume anything. YEECCCCH!

Oh yeah, I guess if we’ve promised to do this in the love of Christ that means no hanky panky.

I’m pretty sure the sex is mandated in all episcopal rights.

Ha, ha, Jackie!

Seriously, how does confirmation class work now?  It’s like, “well, teenagers, no sex outside of marriage for you unless it’s gay!”  Of course, I’m being naive.  I doubt teenagers get anything like the drugs and abstinence talks I got.  On one hand, it really angers and destabilizes me that some of the same priests telling me not to sleep with my beautiful high school girlfriend are now proclaiming “no boundaries.”  But looking back on it, I’m glad I didn’t get mixed up in some heavy teenage love situation and that the Church gave some support.  And even though I haven’t seen her in years, we and our families are still friends, and I can look her husband in the eye.

“I’m pretty sure the sex is mandated in all episcopal rights.”  - Jackie

Jackie, Jackie, Jackie.  I had high hopes there for a moment until you got all sexist and patriarchal.  “Man dated” indeed!  What about “Wymyn dated”?  Did you intentionally leave out half of personanity?  And what to do with the <1% of the population under discussion?  Same-gender?  Sounds awfully close to “men -der” to my ears!

In short, the Squishops hadn’t the gonads to say “equality” EXCEPT in denying heterosexuals access to the “blessing”.  Small loss, but symbolically HUGE. 
LOOK!  LOOK!  WE ARE DENYING HETEROSEXUALS BLESSED FORNICATION.

Maybe Brad can marry Angie now?

Folks, there already is an officially approved Episcopal rite to bless the union of heterosexual couples—it begins on page 433 of the BCP. (Of course, it’s referred to as a “civil marriage,” but it does not require a church marriage as a prerequisite, and so it would apply to couples in States that recognize common-law marriages, as well as to people who just get married by a civil clerk.)

It’s much shorter, too, and it’s just not dressed up with all the secular imagery and flowery language of the same-sex rite. I cannot conceive of a heterosexual couple wanting to use this one over the one in the BCP, but then I’m just an old curmudgeon, anyway.

@28

Ralph, so in other words, no rules just rite?

#28, Uhhhh…yeah.

I don’t know what to call the SSB thing that GC approved.

Words like “liturgy” and “rite” are churchy, and make me think of the BCP. So, they really don’t work for this.

Having encountered people infatuated with the life work of Aleister Crowley, I’m somewhat familiar with his writings. He called things like this a “ritual.”

I think “ritual” might be a good term for the SSB thing.

Here’s a tame example of a ritual:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liber_XV,_The_Gnostic_Mass

Then, there’s this - not for the faint of heart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroto-comatose_lucidity

Without offering other links, let’s just say that it gets much worse. This is not stuff written in fantasy novels - this is stuff that people are actually doing, right now. And, they believe in it.

Yes, I think “ritual” might be quite appropriate for a ceremony in which two people stand before the devil to make a mutual commitment to defilement, and to eternity in the outer darkness and/or a sea of burning pitch.

I suspect that the majority of HOB and HOD had no idea what they really voted for in approving the SSB ritual. However, I also suspect that a few of them were quite aware.

It’s interesting to note that, when Bishop Leo Frade authorised same-sex blessings in the Diocese of Southeast Florida back in 2009, he too excluded opposite-sex couples who wanted “commitment” w/o civil marriage:

Bishop Frade said he had asked a drafting committee of fellow bishops during General Convention whether such blessings might also be extended to civil unions. In his diocese, for instance, many elderly heterosexual couples are married in all but the legal sense because of dire tax consequences. The bishops at General Convention did not make provisions for such couples, he said, and he will respect those limits.

But such an inconsistent position is just that: inconsistent at the time, and inconsistent now.

The main reason for the inconsistency is that, if the Episcopal or any church starts to recognise marriage other than civil marriage, they’re undermining the whole value of civil marriage, which in turn undermines the whole value (?) of same sex civil marriage, which is the last thing the LGBT community wants.

Ah, the web we weave…

https://www.vulcanhammer.org/2009/09/16/theres-more-to-frades-allowance-of-same-sex-blessings-in-se-florida-than-meets-the-eye/

To comply with the laws of the civil jurisdiction which the rite is celebrated, the priest shall consult the bishop, who may authorize modifications of the Pronouncement.

Does this mean that in those states where same-sex couples can marry, the bishop can authorize a marriage pronouncement?