Wow, thanks for this post. I guess that SSM has been around for a while now, and Satan or God has not cast affliction on the United States.
Actually they may have, but the evangelicals voted for him.
Not suprised at all that intentionally misleading information is posted.
The Mormon church as seen fit to only refuse to marry same-sex couples, but they are hunting them down and kicking them out.
Not only are they excommunicating gays, they are refusing to baptise their children. Children of same-sex couples are refused the saving ordinances until they are 18 and only if they renouce their parents’ marriage.
Serious question: What on earth compelled you to respond to the question?
mmm
Reasonable question except that he made that post almost five years ago and hasn’t logged in since June of 2014. 
I don’t think it really comes into play either way. You (any reader) can pick anything from the mobility of the population today (people not having physical 2nd and more generation congregations like they used to) to television and the internet providing an alternative form of worship and make a pretty good case for it. I don’t think I buy any of it. It just comes down to church attendance and participation has been in decline for almost as long as I’ve been alive and it looks like that is just the way it is.
In mine it isnt talked about but I’d guess it would be a no.
Interestingly our church bought its new building from a Unitarian congregation which had a “we accept everything” attitude yet strangely, wasnt attracting any people.
Now in my old church their was a situation where a lesbian couple wanted their baby blessed. The pastor talked to them and agreed to do the ceremony in a private setting but the couple bailed. From what I understood of the situation, one really was a Christian, the other wasnt and didnt want to become one so the couple basically just left the church.
We had the same, although with a baptism rather than a blessing. A lesbian couple wanted their child baptized. Our pastor, who is new, asked the church council what we thought. There was not even very much discussion - the idea of not baptizing a child because his parents were gay didn’t seem even to occur to anyone. Two weeks later, we had a baptism. They haven’t been back since, but that’s hardly unusual.
AFAIK no one has ever asked to have a gay marriage at our church.
Regards,
Shodan
In my congregation(I’m Episcopalian) there was a baptism a couple years ago. I noticed it because the surname of the kid’s father was a familiar one to me, he is a relative of an old acquaintance.
The family was new to the congregation, the three kids were from three years of age to eight. At the font there was no adult woman, so I assumed the dad was divorced or something. He was wearing a military uniform. Turns out the guy with him was not the godfather but the partner of the father. Oops on me an my assumptions. That couple is not the only gay couple in the congregation but is the only one with kids I know of. The three other couples I know of are all at least middle aged, this couple is in their thirties it looks like.
I go to a non-denominational church. They split from the United Church of Christ a couple years before we started going there, over the issue of same-sex marriage. Privately, the pastor has told me that he agrees with same-sex marriage, but he’d get fired from the church if he ever performed one.
On the Sunday after Obergefell v. Hodges, a retired police officer in my Sunday school class did the “slippery slope” argument about “what’s next, allowing three people to marry? Allowing people to marry animals?” I lost a lot of respect for him.
And one of my best friends in the choir stopped going when we started saying “No matter who you are, you are welcome here!” at the beginning of each service. His wife told us it was because he didn’t want us to be welcoming to gay people.
So much for eternal families.
Dang! Now I’ll never know.
mmm
Also did not include that another condition for the children to receive baptism is that they must not be living together with the parents.
I’m Catholic - just the size of the RCC means that there will be completely different levels of acceptance from parish to parish, but at the highest level we’ve still got a way to go before seeing SSWeddings. And yes, EscAlaMike, I do expect to see those some day; the Gloria will probably be in Latin.
Catholic Spain got SSM greatly on the back of grandmothers. Once you’ve got those, you’ve got the bloody country: get enough of them in enough locations, you’ve got the whole Church. I sear Abuelitas are the most underestimated marketing target in the world: only because they don’t happen to have a lot of pocket money that doesn’t mean they don’t have more influence than God Himself (I’d really like to see Him standing up to St. Anne* or whatever her real name was; knowing the reputation of Jewish grandmothers yeah right).
- Anne is the name tradition attributes to the mother of Our Lady, that is, to Jesus’ grandma.
And you may very well be right. In fact, I suspect you probably are…as I apparently pointed out five years ago, the attendance in mainstream denominations that hadn’t embraced SSM was declining just as it was in churches that had, and the trends predated the rise of SSM as an issue at all.
But it was interesting to see that one of the researchers cited in these articles said flatly that opposition to SSM was a significant reason why evangelical attendance was dropping in the last few years; and this researcher probably knows way more about the subject than me.
And I’ll also note that one poster, back when the thread began, was pretty smug in his/her assertion that support of SSM was the ruin of the Episcopal Church, while claiming that the anti-SSM churches were continuing to attract congregants due to their stance on this issue. As I said when I brought the thread back to life, the shoe seems to be on the other foot–if SSM support hurt the Episcopalians, SSM opposition is now hurting the evangelicals. Conversely, if it isn’t SSM that’s hurting the evangelicals today, it likely wasn’t SSM that hurt the Episcopalians earlier. I rarely engage in pitting, but I am not above a small twitting.
Maybe he found religion.
That was from a decade ago. Do we know how that turned out, and what their recent actions might be?
Post #62 gives some more up-to-date information about the LDS church and its attitude toward gay and lesbian families. From my perspective at least it ain’t pretty.
It ain’t pretty.
My cousin works with LGBT youth and their organization dreads the semiannual LDS General Conferences because of the spikes in LGBT suicides and homelessness. Apparently families feel that they need to kick out the kid to “protect” siblings from the sinful youth.
Is there any statistical basis for this dread, or just another anecdote?
Well, Prop 8 passed, and SSM was illegal in California. It was overturned by a federal court two years later, higher courts refused the appeal on the grounds of standing, and then Obergefell v. Hodges rendered the whole thing moot.
TokyoBayer is better placed to explain what the church has been up to lately.