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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
It appears Christmas is back, or at least the “Christmas tree” is back. After several years of referring to the tree at the United States Capitol as the “Capitol Holiday Tree,” at the request of Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R,IL), the tree was renamed this month the “Capitol Christmas Tree.”
In another reprise of the Christmas wars, the noisiest Christmas backlash so far this year took place in Boston, where the Parks and Recreation Department set off a firestorm by calling the city’s annual gift from Nova Scotia a “Holiday Tree.” The logger who donated the spruce said he’d rather feed the tree to a wood chipper than call it a “Holiday Tree.” Christian groups like Liberty Counsel threatened legal action until Boston Mayor Thomas Menino said, “I consider this tree to be a Christmas tree.”
“Christmas” is also back in retail. The word has been curiously missing from the marketing campaigns of major retailers in recent years, even though they, like most retailers, depend upon the Christmas season for a bulk of their revenues. Kroger, Lowe’s, Dell, Target, OfficeMax, Walgreens, Sears, Staples, J.C. Penny, and Macy’s, to name a few, have re-introduced “Christmas” in their seasonal advertising.
The Christmas wars have become all too familiar: “Silent Night” or “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at the local middle school “Winter Concert” or “Holiday Concert,” nativity scenes banned from display on courthouse lawns, school teachers not permitted to read Christmas prayers or perhaps even to put the word “Christmas” on bulletin boards, refusing to allow retail clerks to say “Merry Christmas” for fear of being insensitive or disrespectful to those who do not celebrate Christmas, and so it goes.
So the “December Dilemma” of the place of religion in public life visits us once again.
Is it any wonder that Christians who are tired of this dilemma are now reacting, sometimes via legal redress? They feel pushed to the limit by what appears to be an organized attempt to secularize completely this most special of Christian holy days. Christians are tired of political correctness, feel like the recipients of reverse discrimination, and in general believe they must draw a line somewhere or there will be nothing left that looks or sounds like the culture of their youth. For some, this becomes a moral battleground, a place where one must take a stand if one has any convictions at all.
Of course its possible to over-react. If it is un-Christian to dismiss important Christian symbols it is equally un-Christian to act disrespectfully to those who do not share our values or belief systems. Refusing to acknowledge Hanukkah or Kwanzaa, for example, do not win Christians any points for love or compassion.
All this is rooted in the meaning of the First Amendment. Government is to protect the free exercise of religion even as it avoids establishing one religion over others. That’s the rub, and that’s why the Christmas wars are not going to go away anytime soon.
One thing would help, though—if people could learn to distinguish between government-supported activities and all other activities that take place in the public square. If you can make the case for a Menorrha alongside a crèche in the city park, you should also be able to acknowledge the individual right of businesses to use Christmas, Hanukkah, or Kwanzaa language in their advertising as they deem appropriate. One is publicly owned, the other is simply public. Christmas need not be empowered by government to continue its worldwide influence. It’s the Person and spirit of the season that yet makes the world pause and reflect about all that is good.
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
Las Vegas—Sin City—is now betting it can attract major league sports. While professional boxing has been virtually synonymous with Las Vegas for decades and other sports like NASCAR and arena football make their home in the desert gambling capital, until now, “Big Four” major league sports have kept their distance. And with good reason.
Sports wagering is a well over $200 billion per year business. The Super Bowl alone generates an estimated $2.5 billion in legal wagering in a single day. Illegal Super Bowl wagering more than doubles this total. Nevada operates 142 legal sports books, source of the famous “point spreads” or “Las Vegas line,” and now online opportunities are taking sports wagering to stratospheric level. Online sports books last year collected more money on the Super Bowl than all the Las Vegas sports books combined. Gross online sports wagering in 2003 was $63.5 billion and is growing rapidly.
Meanwhile, Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, and the NCAA have all testified before Congress in the past few years about the dangers inherent in allowing gambling and sports to mix. Only the National Basketball Association seems oblivious. NBA Commissioner David Stern recently selected Las Vegas to host the 2007 All-Star Game, making the city the first non-NBA city to be selected to host the game.
The NCAA’s Sports Wagering Task Force Report of January, 2005 concluded that gambling is a double threat to the integrity of sport and the well-being of student-athletes. Since 1993, gambling scandals have rocked the sports cultures of Arizona State University, Boston College, Bryant College, Columbia University, Northwestern University, and the University of Maryland. Both the NCAA and the NAIA are taking steps to distance gambling and intercollegiate athletics.
Gambling and sports are not a marriage made in heaven. Point shaving scandals, fixing games, Pete Rose, Art Schlicter, Jimmy “the Greek” Snyder, Chet Forte, “the Black Sox” scandal, Cecil Fielder—the list goes on.
Gambling undermines sports’ most beautiful attraction—the joy of fair competition. Allow gambling into the sports arena and the only thing you have left is faux sports. Not real sports, fake sports, big guys pushing each other around for the show and the dough, no physical and mental prowess, no supreme execution of athletic moves or plays, no photo finish, sudden death victories—just pay-per-view sweating.
The bottom line is this: if gambling makes inroads into sports activities real competition disappears. Gambling is a deadly parasite. Let it in, and sports will gradually die.
I know there is more going on in Las Vegas than gambling. I know people live in Las Vegas who don’t gamble. I know it’s theoretically possible to locate a major league sports franchise in Las Vegas and it not be infected by gambling. But come on? Does anyone really believe that this will happen?
If for no other reason than maintaining an important symbolic statement, major league sports should stay out of Las Vegas. Professional sports has enough problems these days with performance enhancing drugs, prima donna athletes, excessive salaries, and just plain mean, offensive players. Do professional sports really need another image-destroying, game-breaking problem?
If major league professional sports move to Las Vegas it will not be long before Pete Rose will be considered more of a prototype than a pariah. Other players, coaches, referees, umpires, and fans will follow him to the nearest bookie.
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.
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“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” is everything the critics are saying that it is—a first class work of cinematography. Even more, this film is a wonderfully presented fantasy adventure depicting the individual and world-changing truth of Christ and the Gospel. “Narnia” opens nationally today.
The film, produced by Walt Disney Company and Walden Media, brings to the big screen C. S. Lewis’ beloved “children’s” classic in all its beauty and complexity. Mixing live actors and computer-generated talking animals, dwarfs, witches, and other strange creatures, the film makes the story easy to understand, entertaining, and moving. It’s about children’s make-believe, and it’s about good triumphing over evil. In short, it’s “magical.”
My three grandchildren are under four years of age. If they were five years old and up, I’d take them to this film. I recommend this film to anyone, regardless of age or religious persuasion, and I suggest you see it more than once. You’ll grasp more of the nuances of the story the second time around.
Christians, conservatives, and conservative Christians have all verbally assaulted Hollywood for years, decrying gratuitous sex, language, and violence in films and lamenting movies and television that appeal to baser morality. Whether this “anti” strategy really accomplished much is subject to debate. How much better it would be to praise Hollywood for good productions, and how much better still it would be to place Christian professionals in the industry. Christians “separated” themselves from “Hollywood movies” as they used to be called, and we have paid too great a price.
This is one reason Cornerstone University initiated a new “Media Studies” program this year. This coursework will prepare students to work with emergent media in Hollywood, the theatre, video gaming, story-telling, radio and sound design, high definition video, and more. It’s a way of preparing students to pursue their interests and God’s calling so they can be “salt and light” influencers of the media productions of the future. Pollsters like George Barna say media are the predominant form of cultural influence, while the church is exercising virtually no influence at all. If Barna is even half right, the way to the hearts and minds of Twenty-First Century citizens is clearly through media—consequently, that’s exactly where Christians need to be.
If “Narnia” is successful, and by all accounts it appears it will be, plans are in the works for a sequel each year. C.S. Lewis wrote seven “Narnia” tales. Let’s hope that if the others make it to the big screen they will be as compelling as the first one.
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.
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- Written by Rex M. Rogers
My launch into the “Blogosphere” has been fun. To write an online web log or “blog” is to participate in what has been called “New Media.” It’s to experience the power of self-publishing.
Blogging by-passes publishers, editors, and editorial influences. It allows me to speak directly to anyone who cares to listen—at no additional cost to either of us.
For a writer, the blogosphere is the ultimate “free market,” a cyberspace version of the public square where we can share ideas, opinions, analysis…concerns, vulnerabilities, anxieties. We can be candid, straightforward, open. We can take the “risk” of speaking the truth as we understand it. We can be real.
The blogosphere is a great equalizer. Anyone who can write and has access to a computer and the internet can blog. And just like that one can be read by people around the world. Blogging is immediate. It’s a people’s tool, not just a tool for elites.
Blogging elicits response. In its best form it thrives on interaction. People reading this blog can email me at any time. They can share their comments, points of view, criticisms or kudos. The “I” becomes “We” as a new blogging community is formed around a common interest, idea, action, or attitude.
Bloggers are talking, influencing. It’s the newest and purist form of democracy. Blogging by conservatives helped bring the Harriet Miers Supreme Court Justice nomination to a screeching halt. Liberals have their own blogs. You can now find a blog on just about any topic representing just about any point of view.
About 1 in 6 or 32 million American adults are reading blogs, and the number is growing daily. According to Technorati, a search engine for blogs, some 18.6 million blog sites receive an average of 900,000 posts per day. Amazing.
Apparently not many college or university presidents are blogging. As far as I can tell, I am the only Michigan university president blogging, and I have so far found only two others nationally, one offering commentary and the other reading like a teenager’s diary—I assume a staff member in Admissions is writing this one, trying to reach prospective students.
Christians are also blogging—“God’s bloggers.” Earlier this fall, Biola University in California hosted the first ever Christian bloggers conference, drawing about 135 writers who try to analyze issues and events from a Christian perspective. The three-day conference attempted to understand the phenomenon, to analyze blogging itself from a Christian viewpoint. This is a promising development, because Christians have sometimes resisted new technologies as “tools of the Devil” (think T.V. or movies) while at other times have uncritically embraced new technologies as “gifts from God” (think T.V. or movies).
If you are over 30 and blogging, you’re ahead of the curve. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project most bloggers are 18 to 29 years of age. If you are a CEO and blogging, you’re also ahead of the curve. According to The NewPR/Wiki website, about 200 CEOs are currently blogging. Add mine and make that 201.
Blogging is a great new way to communicate or simply to test new thoughts, so when it comes to blogging, I’m a convert. And I say with Buzz Lightyear, “To infinity and beyond!”
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.
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On the day before the sixty-fourth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the United States military had to go to the United States Supreme Court to defend its ability to recruit on the campuses of the nation’s most prestigious law schools. Because of the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” policy toward gay and lesbian military personnel, a number of law schools have denied military recruiters access to their campuses.
While the schools do not want the United States military they do want millions of dollars in government largesse. But the government has threatened to withhold these funds if military recruiters are not allowed to recruit among the nation’s best and brightest students. The government’s response is based upon a 1994 law allowing the government to withhold funds when military recruiters are not given the same access to campuses as other groups.
A consortium of some 30 law schools claims the schools’ First Amendment rights have been violated by the government’s intention to withhold millions in aid. Schools like Yale Law School contend that they have every right to oppose what they term “discrimination against gays and lesbians,” so the government’s threat to withhold funds directly undermines the schools’ right to free speech.
This case will not likely be decided by the United States Supreme Court until June of next year. But it presents an interesting nexus of current hot potato issues: academic freedom, free speech, attitudes toward homosexuality, military recruiting, government and military action in wartime.
Who among us, say thirty or more years ago, would have ever believed that the United States military would be denied access to public “pro-gay” campuses while the military is cast as “anti-gay”? This debate is not about academic freedom—faculty members are still free to express their views in the classroom as pertains to their coursework. This debate is not about free speech—law schools are still free to assume whatever position on homosexuality that they deem appropriate. This debate is about money. The law schools want their cake and they want to eat it too.
The United States Supreme Court, as it appears disposed to do, should rule in favor of the government and the Pentagon in this case. No one is forcing the schools to accept government funds, nor is any agency forcing them to accept military recruiters. The government is simply saying that there are certain expectations associated with accepting those funds. If the schools want the funds, than they need to provide access to military recruiters. It’s a simple business transaction.
This case is also about the gay agenda. The unique requirements of the military service necessitate its current policy toward gay and lesbian military personnel. The Pentagon doesn’t condemn or discriminate against them. It does say their sexual predilections should remain private matters so that they in no way affect military unit cohesiveness and operations. It’s straight forward. It’s simple. But individuals embracing homosexuality do not interpret these standards this way. For them anything short of full acceptance is discrimination by definition. That’s where the law schools fit.
Many faculty and staff members in law schools have apparently embraced this new public morality. They don’t just provide open access to the schools to all students. The schools assume, as they do in this case, a proactive stance promoting gay agendas.
I’ve said before. I am not anti-gay person nor anti-gay person civil liberties or current civil rights. I am against special rights, and I am against normalizing gay behavior in American culture. If you believe, as I do, that homosexual expression is immoral, than you cannot embrace, much less promote, each new advance of the gay lifestyle. My position is not always pleasant or easy to maintain, but it is right and righteous.
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers, President or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.
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Great Britain is joining other European nations in another step toward the normalization of same-sex relationships. Dating to a law passed last November, beginning today, December 5, 2005, same-sex British couples older than 16 can declare their intent to form a legal partnership, commonly called a civil union. Ceremonies formalizing this union can be held after a fifteen day waiting period following the legal declaration. Among the couples planning a wedding as soon as possible are Elton John and his partner David Furnish.
France, Germany, the Netherlands, and now Great Britain legally recognize same-sex partnerships as domestic unions. Belgium, Spain, and add Canada, all legally recognize gay marriage. Either way, the legal benefits are virtually the same as those historically assigned to married heterosexual couples, including inheritance and pension rights, bereavement benefits, and next-of-kin standing. However in Britain there are some differences: pre-nuptials will be called pre-registration agreements, divorce will be called dissolution, and adultery cannot be asserted as justification for a break-up.
Meanwhile, the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act allows states in the United States to refuse recognition of the gay marriages or civil unions approved by other states or countries. To date, some 13 states, including Michigan, many of them in the 2004 election, have passed some version of a “no gay marriage or civil unions” law. Only Vermont and Massachusetts have so far joined the gay marriage band wagon.
The legal standing and “rights” of same-sex couples, along with abortion, occupy the front lines of the culture wars between a vigorously secularist humanism and a religious or specifically Christian worldview. Both issues, particularly same-sex marriage, strike at the very heart of Christian truth about the fundamental defining unit of society—the union of a man and a woman in the intended lifelong commitment of marriage. Proponents of the gay agenda know that if they can win the legal right to marriage they have won the battle for full normalization of homosexual and lesbian behavior.
Yet the legalization of gay marriage, domestic or same-sex partnerships, civil unions, or whatever they may be called does not a marriage make in the eyes of God. No one who assigns any validity to the Bible’s truth claims can read the Scripture plainly and miss the multiple references to homosexual behavior as a perversion of God’s mandate for human sexuality. If you accept the Bible as God’s Word and as a trustworthy source of truth in guiding your life of faith, you cannot at the same time assume the position that homosexuality should be regarded as a morally acceptable “orientation”—opening the door to legal affirmation. Consequently, promotion of same-sex marriage is an attack on the Bible itself.
Gay marriage loudly screams, “I want to do what I want to do with whomever I want to do it.” Proponents of gay marriage do not care what history, virtually every recognized culture, the evidence of biology, nature, logic, the great world religions, and in particular biblical Christianity, say about it. So they are strenuously lobbying the rest of us, not just for acceptance but for special recognition with all the rights and privileges thereto.
In an earlier “Making a Difference” column, I made these comments: “Standing morally against gay marriage does not deny gay people their civil liberties or many civil rights as Americans. Gay people may hold jobs, pursue careers, and own businesses. Gay people may vote, be considered innocent until found guilty in the eyes of the law, enjoy religious freedom, or earn a higher education. Gay people may own property, live freely in neighborhoods, care for their own children, and now may even adopt children.”
Opposition to gay marriage or civil unions does not equate with opposition to gay people, their personhood, their civil liberties as Americans, or any of their civil rights short of creating a new one guaranteeing their right to marry. Being against same-sex marriage is not the same as being against gays or lesbians as individuals. Being against same-sex marriage is about taking a stand for what one believes God says is right or wrong.
God’s definition of marriage is a unique covenant between a man and a woman that symbolizes the relationship of Jesus Christ with his Church. This sovereign gift cannot be replicated in same-sex relationships. So God does not limit our sexual expression because he wants to deny us love or pleasure. He declares homosexuality morally wrong because it does not fit reality as he created it. Homosexual practice twists the natural order in a way that will inevitably cause rejection, loss, and pain.
This theologically based moral perspective does not justify any disrespect of human beings who practice homosexual behavior. It does not affirm and should not tolerate any kind of threatening words or actions toward gays or lesbians, nor does it in any way celebrate what has been called “homophobia.” We are all sinners in need of grace, including those of us who do not practice or condone homosexual behaviors. We should respond to gays and lesbians with compassion, not anger or rejection.
Great Britain’s surrender doesn’t make the fight for moral truth in the culture wars any easier, but it doesn’t mean the war is over. Millions of Americans, and for that matter people in Canada and the European nations referenced earlier, still believe in something called “holy matrimony” for a man and a woman. Our task is to maintain fidelity to truth, to historic orthodox Christianity, even if our position attracts the ridicule or ire of some. And we must do this as winsomely yet clearly, as compassionately yet firmly, as Christ would do it if he walked among us. We are his ambassadors.
© Rex M. Rogers - All Rights Reserved, 2005
*This blog may be reproduced in whole or in part with a full attribution statement. Contact Dr. Rogers or read more commentary on current issues and events at www.rexmrogers.com or follow him at www.twitter.com/rexmrogers.