[editor's note, by PoliSigh] for your reading pleasure.....
"Presbyterian High Court Bars Noncelibate Gay Clergy." From the Religion News Service (via EthicsDaily):
The high court of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has issued a landmark decision that unequivocally bars noncelibate gay and lesbian clergy and halts recent attempts to compromise on ordination standards.
Ministerial candidates in the PCUSA are required to be in faithful heterosexual marriages or remain celibate, though a compromise reached in 2006 was thought to potentially loosen those standards.
No such loosening is allowed, ruled the General Assembly Permanent Judicial Commission, the 16-member high court of the PCUSA, on Feb. 11. The "fidelity and chastity" requirement is "a mandatory standard that cannot be waived," the court ruled.
::
The Teamsters Union announced yesterday their endorsement of Barack Obama. Jesse Holland of the Associated Press reports (via The Washington Post) on the recent wave of union support for Obama:
The endorsement from the Teamsters is Obama's fourth from organized labor in a week. The 65,000-member International Brotherhood of Boilermakers endorsed Obama on Wednesday, the 1.9-million member Service Employees International Union backed the Illinois senator last Friday, and the smaller United Food and Commercial Workers endorsed him last Thursday.
As noted by Alex Carpenter at Faith in Public Life's Blogging Faith, the winners of this year's C-Span StudentCam documentary contest are 11th-graders Scott Mitchell and Nick Poss. Their documentary, "Leaving Religion at the Door" addresses the question of whether and how religion should influence American politics. At six minutes, "Leaving Religion at the Door" is beautifully woven piece that features interviews with representatives of a variety of faith traditions. Check it out!
Sarah Eekhoff Zylstra at Christianity Today writes a hopeful piece about the decline in evangelical support for the death penalty. She quotes Rutherford Institute president John Whitehead on the reasons that support for the death penalty is incompatible with evangelical Christianity:
"It's anti-evangelical to kill people," Whitehead said. "Christianity is redemptive. But you can't redeem people by extinguishing them." Whitehead believes opposition to the death penalty will gain momentum in the future. "Young Christians are seeing right away that, hey, the meek and mild Jesus—would he pull the lever? Would he put the hood on and pull the lever? I don't think so."
However, the news about evangelicals and death penalty opposition is not all rosy. The article includes this alarming statistic: "White evangelicals are still the death penalty's strongest supporters, with 74 percent approval, but that is down from 82 percent in 1996."
In "US Fed slashes growth forecasts," BBC News reports:
The Fed cut its growth forecast for this year by half a percent to a new range of between 1.3% and 2%.
The US central bank also said the jobless rate could be as high as 5.3% by the end of the year.
