CHILDREN, SCHOOLS & FAMILIES

It is now deeply unfashionable to say it, and the day is coming when some of us will get criminal records for saying it, but sex should only happen within marriage, and marriage can only be between a man and a woman.

Despite the risks, some of us need to keep on saying it, because we are getting drowned out by the relentless deluge poured on us by those who want to normalise homosexuality. A Government bill is passing though the House of Commons today which will make sex education in schools compulsory and remove the rights of parents to withdraw their children from it. At the last moment, the Government has added an amendment to the bill that will allow faith schools more freedom in how they teach sex education. This seems a very minimal amendment, but it has provoked fury.

The BBC website reports a debate on this mornings Radio 4 Today program:

Rabbi Dr Jonathan Romain, of the Accord Coalition which calls for an end to what it sees as religious discrimination in school staffing and admissions, told Today he was "astonished and saddened" that Mr Balls [the Children’s Secretary] had chosen to effectively give faith schools an opt-out.
"If a school doesn't approve of contraception or abortion or homosexuality, then it can give that message or it can omit certain facts.
"We know there are some faith schools which take a very negative view."

How shocking! Faith schools taking a negative view of homosexuality or abortion. Whatever next?

The report continues,

The bill states the subject is to be taught in a way that promotes equality, accepts diversity and emphasises both rights and responsibilities.

And,

Liberal Democrat Children's spokesman David Laws said the amendment was "a serious and undesirable U-turn".
He told Today: "This government hasn't had a bad record over the years in trying to challenge things like homophobia.
"Now, with this amendment it's undermined a lot potentially, that it's been achieving. I think it will upset many people who believe that in today's Britain we should have a society where the taxpayer should not be subsidising prejudice."

I am not the first to note that it appears that diversity and tolerance are to be encouraged only so far as they extend to unconventional sexual relationships, and not so far as to include principled faith positions.

The homosexual debate is often portrayed as one of neutrality (equality, diversity, rights and responsibilities) versus prejudice and intolerance and hatred of other people. But it is no such thing. Both sides of the debate are taking a moral position, one which advocates homosexuality as normal, and desirable, and the other which opposes this. On both sides of the argument there are those who display prejudice and intolerance, just as there are those who act and speak with grace. Ironically, it is deeply prejudicial and intolerant to accuse anyone and everyone who opposes your view of prejudice and intolerance!

So lets not just roll over and give up on this one. As a parent I should be able to remove my child from a lesson that is espousing a worldview I regard as morally wrong. That is not prejudice, but protection. And schools should not be compelled to teach all sexual relationships are of equal validity. They are not.

Lets keep saying it.

A THORN ON THE ROSE

Valentine’s Day drives me nuts. It seems to me to be a day driven almost entirely by greed, guilt and fear – and those three make very bad drivers.

Greed, because the price of flowers (especially roses) is hugely inflated for the day, and restaurants also cash in on the occasion by putting on ridiculous ‘romantic’ menus, again at inflated prices.

Guilt, because the only reason that men (and it is men – whatever happened to equality?!) feel browbeaten into paying said exorbitant prices for roses and dinners is guilt if they don’t, which means that greed is rewarded.

Fear, because it is fear that produces guilt. Fear that one’s partner will cut up in a seriously unpleasant manner should she not be rosed and dined sufficiently, or that one will not be regarded as sufficiently romantic or will be regarded as cheap (and quite possibly be denied sex as a result). And many men do feel guilty that really they do not love their partners as faithfully and fully as they should. So fear feeds guilt feeds greed and we get suckered by the whole nonsense.

It is nonsense you know.

Valentine’s Day is completely arbitrary, and any pressure to observe it is purely external. Real days of significance such as a birthday or wedding anniversary are one thing, but an externally imposed, arbitrary date is quite another.

Fortunately Mrs Hosier feels as strongly about this as I do, so we ignore Valentine’s Day for the commercial imposition that it is.

I would urge all other sane couples to do the same.

Men, rise up and claim your manhood! There is something rather pathetic about the sight of guilty, fearful men emptying their wallets at a florists to buy overpriced roses in order to appease their otherwise unappeasable better half. Men, if you are in Christ, you are free and don’t need to stoop to these pitiable depths! You will not love your wife more by bowing to the pressures of social convention.

Women, rise up and claim your femininity! You don’t need to exert control over your man by imposing guilt and fear on him. This only unmans him and makes him less of a man for you to respect. As a free daughter of Christ you don’t need to conform to societal pressures and pretend that there is something special about this date over any other.

Man, buy your woman flowers and take her for dinner because you love her, and as an imitator of Christ are to lay down your life for her. Do it for her birthday, do it for your anniversary, do it any day of the week you like, but don’t do it because commercial interests tell you you must.

Woman, make passionate love to your man, because you respect him and as an imitator of the Church you are to serve him and bring him pleasure. Don’t manipulate him or impose guilt on him over whether or not he buys that sadly wilting rose that the hustler in the restaurant tries to sell him.

The problem with Valentine’s Day is that it makes relationship all about the day, when really our focus should be about making all the days about relationship. For those of us who believe in God’s involvement in everything, and the supremacy of Christ in all things, our relationships should reflect this. This means that those who are married will seek to live out their married lives in reflection of the everything of Christ’s love for his church. Each and every day is an opportunity for husband to love his wife and wife to respect her husband. Every day is an opportunity for sacrifice, and purity. Every day is a day to celebrate.

This will mean that there will be moments of particular celebration. Just as the Church of Jesus Christ lives every moment in the grace of the cross but remembers this most particularly when we break bread and drink wine together, so the married couple should live each day in the grace of their wedding vows but remember these most particularly on their wedding anniversary. For the church everything is shaped by the cross, which is why we must proclaim His death at the communion table. For the married couple everything is shaped by their wedding vows, which is why they must celebrate their wedding anniversary.

When we see the all encompassing significance of our relationships, the greed and guilt and fear of Valentine’s Day is revealed as rather tawdry.

Of course, true love and real relationship only come at a cost, and this is seen most clearly at the cross. At the cross Jesus paid the ultimate cost for the bride he loves, in order to unite in relationship with her for ever.

It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed greed, because his was an entirely selfless act. It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed guilt by taking all the penalty for our sin and failure on to himself. It was at the cross that Jesus destroyed fear because by defeating our greatest enemy, the enemy of death, he has liberated us to walk in freedom before him.

And it is that which makes every day a day of love and relationship for the Christian, whether or not we are ‘in a relationship’. And it is why I feel absolutely no guilt or fear about failing to buy a Valentine’s Card for my wife – and the fact that she feels just the same makes me love her all the more!

METHOD OF ENGLAND

So, it looks as though, after years of discussion, the Methodist Church is finally resolved to throw in its lot with the CofE. I'm not sure this will necessarily mean a strengthening of either organization, but presumably it will mean even more vacant church buildings coming on to the market.

Should Westminster Central Hall come up for sale (and why would a combined church need it, when Westminster Abbey is right next door?) i would bet my bottom dollar that one of London's black majority churches would snap it up, even if it did cost £100 million. You heard it here first...

A DAY IN THE NEWS

Yesterdays paper (Daily Telegraph by force of habit, though I’ll read anything) contained a number of interesting, and vaguely linked cradle to the grave type stories that I thought I would make a few comments on.

There is a worrying increase in infertility in the west, for reasons that seem to be largely unclear (the kind of things I have seen suggested are women delaying conception in pursuit of career and leisure activities until the biological clock has ticked too far; oestrogen in the water; wearing tight underpants rather than boxers which leads to overheating of the gonads; sedentary jobs – again leading to heating problems; and so on). As infertility has increased, so has infertility treatment. Yesterdays news was that boys conceived by IVF treatment are more likely to have infertility problems themselves, thus compounding the problem of infertility. Which presents an interesting ethical dilemma. In evolutionary terms, we are obviously creating problems for ourselves if we buck nature – theoretically we could end up with an entirely sterile population, which can only reproduce via science rather than sex. Ethically, I am nervous about IVF because of the emotional trauma it causes to many people (as it still fails more than it succeeds and is highly invasive) and because of the high number of embryos it discards. So I think there are some cultural and medical assumptions here that would warrant further thought…

We tend to regard being able to have children as a right, something which the availability of IVF reinforces. I would rather see children as a gift from God than a right, but once we have them, we have to decide how to raise them. According to David Code, author of To Raise Happy Kids, Put Your Marriage First, parents should put children second to marriage. With this I concur utterly. Husband and wife should love one another more than they love their kids. One day your children will leave home, but the two of you will still be together, and you want a relationship that is worth sticking around for. Children are actually far more secure if they know mum and dad put mum and dad first. If a family becomes child-centric all is lost – it leads to unrealistic expectations on the part of the child; it leads to the parent trying to live their life through the child and piling unfair pressures on it; it leads to the parent never being able to say no to the demands of the child. It is bad news.

When your children go to school, they enter a world where there are likely to be people from many different backgrounds. It is often said that Britain is a multicultural society, and this is certainly confirmed by the report revealing that schoolchildren in Reading have been found to speak 150 different languages in their homes. On the one hand, this diversity is both fascinating and exciting, but on the other it is hugely complicated for service providers, especially schools – and thus hugely expensive. Personally, I’m all for open borders and as little control on immigration as possible, but this influx of the nations to the UK does present considerable challenges as well as opportunities.

As well as increasing racial and linguistic diversity there is increased diversity in the make-up of the British ‘family’. We are told by the powers that be that we now have to regard non-conventional family arrangements as equally valid as conventional ones, although plainly they are not. But the increasingly dotty (a kinder word than St Paul would use) Church of England is voting this week at its general synod to give gay clergy in civil partnerships the same pension rights as those who are married. We have come to a bizarre state of affairs indeed when the national church begins to lose the line that defines the differences between marriage and other relationships.

Another social shift is the increase in the number of women serving in frontline positions in the armed forces – something we are told we should regard as positively as we should gay vicars. However, a report by the Ministry of Defence shows that women who serve in the forces are twice as likely to suffer mental health issues as men. Makes you think…

And then there was the remarkable story of the concert given by the redoubtable Cleo Lane on Saturday night, at which she announced, just before the final number, that her husband of 52 years, jazz legend John Dankworth, had died a few hours earlier. Now I’m really not sure what to make of that. The show must go on, but to do the show at all so soon after your husband has died shows a fortitude and commitment that boggles the mind.

Of course, all of us must die, and we should prepare for that reality, but in the meantime we want to live as healthily as possible. So I was heartened by the news that drinking beer strengthens your bones and could stop them becoming brittle – in a crazy world I’ll raise a glass to that.

CRAZY WORLD

My friend Duncan Hanton writes:

You might be interested in this...

This Christmas we distributed 1500 Christmas Hampers to people on benefits on the 11 most deprived estates in Barnet - with Jesus House. They paid for the hampers (apx £37k!) and together we packed and distributed them.

Next day Rod Liddle slated Jesus House in his column in the Sunday Times as a homophobic church - few days later the BBC Politics show picked up the story as Boris Johnson had gone to their Carol Service. Politics Show interviewed a guy from Ekklesia and Brian Coleman the ex Mayor of Barnet - and now London Assembly member for Barnet and Camden. He has some notoriety for expenses and is openly gay.

Interesting thing is how Brian Coleman defends Jesus House - on the basis of their massive commitment to serving the community and the poor.
Have a look...

STILL STARRY EYED

Extraordinarily, I have had a number of people accuse me of being grumpy following my post about the irritations of too many people waving around too many torches. Clearly a lack of star-gazers who read this blog.

On Tuesday mornings at our staff prayer meeting we have been reading through a chapter of Andrew Wilson’s excellent book, Incomparable. This morning we were up to the chapter titled, “Yahweh is Majestic” and I felt fully vindicated by the opening paragraph:

If you want to understand God’s majesty, all you need is a Bible and a night sky. The Bible will give you the words: majesty, awe, splendour, wonder. But looking at the stars will give those words something of their real meaning. Vocabulary often loses its power through exaggeration, as football players become ‘awesome’, skyscrapers ‘majestic’, and so on. But the night sky gives a hint of what these words actually mean when they are used of God. The moon and the stars, set in place by God, loudly trumpet the utter majesty of Yahweh’s name and the utter irrelevance of mine.

Amen. Go look at the stars – so long as you can see them.