United We Stand: The Manhattan Declaration
(Update II: You may download the Manhattan Declaration)
(Update: The Manhattan Declaration’s website)
This, just over the AP wire:
Christian leaders issue ‘call of conscience’
WASHINGTON — More than 150 Christian leaders, most of them conservative evangelicals and traditionalist Roman Catholics, issued a joint declaration Friday reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage and pledging to protect religious freedoms.
The 4,700-word document, called “The Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” sounds familiar themes from political and social debates over the health care overhaul and gay marriage battles.
While acknowledging that “Christians and our institutions have too often scandalously failed to uphold the institution of marriage,” the group rejects same-sex marriage. The declaration states that opening a legal door for gay marriage would do the same for “polyamorous partnerships, polygamous households, even adult brothers, sisters, or brothers and sisters living in incestuous relationships.”
President Barack Obama’s desire to reduce the need for abortion is “a commendable goal,” but his proposals are likely to increase the number of elective abortions, the document contends.
“The present administration is led and staffed by those who want to make abortions legal at any stage of fetal development, and who want to provide abortions at taxpayer expense,” it says.
Obama has said he wants to strike a balance on abortion coverage in the health care overhaul. The declaration also cites threats to health care workers’ conscience clauses and anti-discrimination statutes it argues impinge on religious freedoms.
Signatories include 15 Roman Catholic bishops, including New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan and Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl; Focus on the Family founder James Dobson; National Association of Evangelicals president Leith Anderson; seminary leaders, professors and pastors.
Once the Manhattan Declaration is online, I will post a link to it.
(Originally posted on Return to Rome blog)
Very interesting.
But I didn’t know that there were as many as 15 Catholic bishops who could be described as “traditionalist Roman Catholics.”
Apparently the AP doesn’t use that term to mean the same thing that it means in the Catholic blogosphere (i.e., Catholics who prefer the older rite of the Mass, and who in some cases may even refuse to attend Mass celebrated in the Ordinary Form, a.k.a. Novus Ordo). I think what the AP really meant was orthodox Catholics, as opposed to cafeteria Catholics or cultural Catholics.
“[A] joint declaration Friday reaffirming their opposition to abortion and gay marriage and pledging to protect religious freedoms.”
Perhaps I am misunderstanding this statement (until the Declaration itself is posted, there is no way of knowing), but how does abortion and gay marriage impact religious freedoms? Unless religious institutions are forced/compelled to perform either, how are these freedoms in jeopardy? Or are these just two unrelated situations the Declaration is discussing?
I was glad to see Dr. Litfin from Wheaton signed on.
BSK – the work “and” is cleverly inserted between “abortion and gay marriage” AND “pledging to protect religious freedoms”. Nonetheless, religious freedoms and abortion and gay marriage are intertwined through the apportionment of tax money.
YN-
As I said, I could have been misreading it. It’s a bit ambiguous, especially given that position statements that involve multiple issues that are only somewhat related are generally less effective than ones that are more narrowly targeted. Having now read the test of the Declaration, it’s clear that they are broaching three distinct areas, while discussing the ways in which the former two impacts the latter.
I recognize that there are now practical ways in which policies (both actual and proposed) have potential impacts on religious groups. In the abstract, though, abortions and SSM do not inherently impact religious freedom; it is only in current practice that the potential for impact is there (perhaps not as much illegitimate impact as is purported, but impact nonetheless).
This was a very good article