Ted Cruz is Attending David Barton’s Conference for State Legislators

Ted Cruz is Attending David Barton’s Conference for State Legislators

By: Hrafnkell Haraldsson

Saturday, November, 16th, 2013, 7:58 am
 

Readers often ask why people like David Barton are relevant, or even who David Barton is. Warren Throckmorton offered an answer yesterday. I am going to apologize to Mr. Throckmorton for stealing so much of his post but I hope turning folks here on to what a great and informative blog he has will go towards making up for “sampling” his:

This weekend David Barton is hosting state legislators from around the nation at in a conference headlined by Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Barton has come under fire in recent weeks due to endorsement of claims that climate change is related to legal abortion, that Christian professors are responsible for half of Christian students leaving their faith, that the U.S. military is God’s arm of judgment and that post-traumatic stress disorder can be discarded because of an Old Testament Bible verse.
The conference began last night and will run through Sunday and features Cruz, George Barna, John Fund, Glenn Beck, Terrance Moore and others. Given what he says when the camera and mic are on, I can only imagine what Barton will tell his audiences in private sessions.

(I just want to ask, parenthetically, why God needs an “arm of judgment.” Isn’t his own arm enough?)
I hope this helps explain why David Barton is relevant. Many times people will suggest that if we just ignore what many see as “fringe” players, they will just go away. But that will not happen. Sure, they are extremists but Barton, for example, influences the thinking of many. He is telling them that what they want to believe is true; he is validating their bigoted, twisted, preconceptions not only about history but about science and about religion. He threatens what our children our taught and he threatens what our leaders do.
David Barton is not a scientist. He is not a historian. He pretends to be a constitutional scholar but has no law degree. In fact, he has no relevant degrees. His academic credentials amount to a degree in Christian Education from Oral Roberts University. In the vernacular, he’s a bullshitter, making it up as he goes. But he found a niche for fake history and he filled it like gangbusters. The rest, as they say, is history.
It is just a shame that what Barton is selling is not history.
The good news is that not everyone – not even on the right – rolls over and plays dead for David Barton. Throckmorton also had some good news to dish out the other day. Communications Director of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and editor of the Gospel Coalition blog, Joe Carter, was not impressed by David Barton’s and Kenneth Copeland’s reading of Numbers 32 on Veteran’s Day:

How then should we answer the fools Copeland and Barton? While it is tempting to ignore them completely, I believe that would be a mistake. Had they merely proffered another laughably inept reading of the Bible, it would have hardly been worthy of notice. Throughout his career, Copeland has been accused of various heresies, most of which he created through his inept handling of Scripture. And though Barton is still, inexplicably, trusted by many conservative evangelicals, he has himself built his reputation on twisting and misrepresenting historical documents for ideological and propagandist purposes. They are, in other words, among the last people who could be relied on to intelligently interpret a text.
Yet many people will erroneously believe that Copeland and Barton speak as experts on the Bible and that their interpretation is the natural result of a literal or inerrant view of Scripture.
To those who are unclear on that point, let me express what I believe is the shared opinion of Biblical scholars, intelligent laymen, and just about anyone else who has ever bothered to read the Bible: Copeland and Barton’s application of Numbers 32:21-22 to modern veterans suffering from PTSD is one of the most profoundly stupid interpretations ever uttered.

And the best part? Savor it:

For Copeland and Barton to resurrect this “blame the victim” trope and coat it with the veneer of Biblical warrant is Satanic. Christians need to counter this demonic, gospel-destroying message by letting the men and women who are suffering from combat related PTSD know what the Bible really says about hope, healing, and deliverance through Christ Jesus.

Barton’s message is Satanic, demonic, gospel destroying. My God man, even the Southern Baptists aren’t fooled by David Barton! Why is Ted Cruz?
Ted Cruz has been called another Sarah Palin. Jonathan Capehart wrote last month at the Washington Post that Ted Cruz is Sarah Palin (2013 edition):

Both of them crave media attention. Both of them blame the media for their travails. And they wallow in a feeling of unfounded aggrievement. No wonder Palin endorsed Cruz during his 2012 Senate primary race. Thankfully, Palin has not been in a position to exercise hypocrisy on a grand scale like Cruz has.

I think Cruz is also a bit smarter – and therefore more dangerous – than Sarah Palin, but you have to wonder about his turn to David Barton. As Warren Throckmorton said, “At some point, I suspect reporters will start asking GOP presidential front-runner Cruz if he agrees with Barton about climate change, the U.S. military and PTSD, as well as many other of Barton’s claims.”
You have to wonder how big a seller “abortion causes climate change” will be to voters. Sure, there are a lot of anti-abortion conservatives out there, but not all of them are stupid enough to believe something so absurd. Certainly the all-important independents won’t buy it and even liberals stupid enough to oppose Obamacare aren’t going to accept that correlation. This decision of Ted Cruz may loom large as 2016 approaches. We liberals will make certain it is an issue when the time comes.
So you see, I hope, those of you who wondered, why David Barton matters. why I write about him so often. Because even if he doesn’t scare you he should make you wary. Ignorance is dangerous and that danger multiplies exponentially when it is embraced by people in power, as in representatives, senators, and most of all, presidents.
If we want to preserve our country and our constitutional rights, we need to be aware of who is crawling into bed with people like David Barton, and keep them away from the halls of power.

Ted Cruz is Attending David Barton’s Conference for State Legislators was written by Hrafnkell Haraldsson for PoliticusUSA.

© PoliticusUSA, Sat, Nov 16th, 2013 — All Rights Reserved

Obamacare Website Hit With At Least 16 Cyber Attacks

CONFIRMED: Obamacare Website Hit With At Least 16 Cyber Attacks (Video)

  posted by Randa Morris November 15, 2013

In spite of 16 attempts to hack the web-site, including a dangerous denial-of-service-attack (video below) and numerous attempts by republicans to sabotage the Affordable Care Act (ACA) itself, the program is already a success in some areas of the country. Not surprisingly, those areas are governed by legislatures who made a reasonable effort to work with the law.
Despite an early bad start, the Health and Human Services Department reports that 26,876,527 separate individuals have visited healthcare.gov, since the web-site opened on October 1, 2013. An additional 3,158,527 people have called the Affordable Care Act call center helpline, over the same period of time.
The good news is that on November 12, after weeks of delay, the Obama administration announced that it was able to put in place the technical fixes needed to get the web-site up and running smoothly. Beginning on the same day, the Center for Medicaid and Medicare began sending out letters to those individuals who had attempted to create accounts on the site early on, but were unable due to those technical issues. People who experienced difficulty creating an account shortly after the web-site opened on October 1, should be receiving a letter inviting them back, now that the problems have been resolved.
Even with the difficulty experienced on the national web-site, the Affordable Care Act has been a success in some states like California and New York. In fact, almost 70 percent of Californians who used the web-site to enroll in healthcare under the new law, reported that the site was easy to use and 88 percent said that they were able to find the information needed to help them choose a healthcare plan. Under the Affordable Care Act, California has enrolled more than 60,000 people under the ACA.
While the healthcare.gov web-site did receive at least 16 major threat level hacking attempts, it appears that no data was compromised. According to officials with the Department of Health and Human Services, attempts to sabotage the new healthcare web-site did not have any significant effect on the system.
Republican sabotage of the Affordable Care Act, on the other hand, has had some devastating effects. Those effects will be experienced by consumers living in states where republican governors refused to expand medicaid and rejected the provision to establish their own web-sites. In essence, when states refused to create their own web-sites, they placed a greater burden on the single healthcare.gov site. The National Memo explains it like this: “By opting out, states made the success of the president’s signature legislative accomplishment dependent on one single portal that needed to reach its tentacles into three dozen complex insurance markets at one time.”
In doing this, Republicans not only sabotaged the President, but they made it more difficult for people who need healthcare to be able to access it. The effects were not merely accidental. Instead, they were deliberate and well planned. The original plot was hatched inside the Libertarian Cato Institute, by a man named Michael Cannon. Cannon, an adversary of the Affordable Care Act from the beginning, convinced republican officials that by refusing to create their own web-sites, they could bring the Affordable Care Act to a halt. And for a while, they did.
Yet, as he has done many times in the past, the president has found ways to overcome his political enemies and to continue to work for the good of the American people. While it is clear that republicans did their best to prevent the residents of the United States from having affordable healthcare, their efforts toward that end will ultimately bring about their downfall, as more people begin to realize the benefits of the Affordable Care Act, in spite of their efforts to obstruct and sabotage.
Video: Denial of service attack (DDoS) on healthcare.gov confirmed. Representative Michael McCaul (R-Texas), Chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, questions witnesses at a hearing entitled “Cyber Side-Effects

 

Aging Liberals Have the Best Sex Life According to Harvard Study

Carl Pierre on November 11, 2013

For any conservatives out there curious as to what life is like for their political counterparts , there’s no need to postulate or wonder: a Harvard study on happiness shows that aging liberals in fact have more robust sex lives compared to conservatives.
I know, high-fives all around.
This study, which took 75 years to actually finish, was started back in 1938 at Harvard University and examined the lives of 268 different male undergraduate students as well as the multitude of facets that go into ‘happiness’. The research, which was to establish what factors contribute the most to human males flourishing, is considered to be the most comprehensive of any study done and has accrued a plethora of data with interesting conclusions. One of the more fascinating (and arguably most important) findings of the study is that aging liberal men have way more sex than their conservative counterparts. The study shows that most conservative men become sexually inactive around age 68 where as most liberal men have had robust and active sex lives well into their 80′s. George Vaillant, the director of the study who spent more than three decades conducting it, noted this phenomena and its inexplicable nature in his book, “I have consulted urologists about this, and they have no idea why it might be so.”
Even though it may stump urologists, here are a few plausible reasons why aging liberals have so much more sex than conservatives:

• Unlike conservatives, liberals show a modicum of respect towards the right a woman has to do whatever she wants with her body, which I imagine would make finding a willing sex partner a lot easier
• Liberals have a strong grasp of how basic biology functions, unlike conservatives (there are ways to not get pregnant from rape, right?)
• Conservatives believe in repressing sexual desires and practicing abstinence where as liberals believe in embracing their sexuality in a way that’s both safe and wildly more realistic (and fun too)
• Liberals believe that love has no boundaries and that marriage is a basic right every loving couple should be privy to, conservatives do not (ever notice it’s all the liberals making out at LGBT rallies and not the conservatives?)
• Liberals are really, really, ridiculously good looking.

For those interested in reading more about the study and what factors correlate to happiness in males, you can check out George Vaillant’s book called the Triumphs of Experience. As for the rest of you folk who likely have aging liberal parents, when their bedroom door is closed, it’s probably for a reason.

Michele Bachmann on CNN: ‘I Lost My Health Insurance Under Obamacare’

 Michele Bachmann on CNN: ‘I Lost My Health Insurance Under Obamacare’

by Josh Feldman | 6:30 pm, November 14th, 2013
During a lively debate with Paul Begala on CNN, Congresswoman Michele Bachmann told Begala and Wolf Blitzer that she lost her health insurance under Obamacare and is going to have to sign up for the D.C. exchanges, but wants to wait until the website, with the glitches and information errors, gets properly fixed.

When asked by Blitzer if she’s going to sign up for the exchanges, Bachmann first said, “Are you kidding? I’m not gonna waste an hour on that thing!” before telling him “I lost my health insurance under Obamacare.”
She said her husband has some personal health issues and they need insurance, at which point Begala jumped in to say, “And now you can’t be denied! Thanks, Barack Obama!” Bachmann shot back, “We were just fine before.”
She explained to Blitzer that “we are forced to go on the website and purchase the health insurance plan from the D.C. health exchange.” And while she’s going to do it eventually, Bachmann said she doesn’t want to waste her “time and frustration” on a website that doesn’t even work yet.
Watch the video below, via CNN:


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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

Inside the Fox News spin machine: I fact-checked Megyn Kelly on Obamacare

When a guest said Obamacare made him sell his business, I called him for his full story. It was more complicated

Eric Stern

Megyn Kelly (Credit: AP/Richard Drew)

Bill Lawrence of Texas recently posted on his Facebook page that he sold his business because of Obamacare.
Naturally, Mr. Lawrence was then invited on Fox News to be interviewed about his ordeal. He was on the Megyn Kelly show a week ago Friday.
Most of Kelly’s questions were fat softballs or in some cases just statements (“Employers like you might just have to say, ‘I’m gettin’ rid of my company!’”; “Your thoughts on having your livelihood directly affected based on what politicians in Washington felt was best for you?”).
I looked up Bill and decided to give him a buzz to learn more. He lives outside of Houston. We spoke for 45 minutes. He’s a guy who’s sort of hard not to like — funny, very sharp and obviously a very good businessman who built a large business from scratch.
Bill recently sold his company Bubbles Car Wash, with 13 locations and 290 employees, to a private equity fund for what he admitted was a tremendous price. “I’ve been very successful,” he acknowledged. (He boasted in a 2011 Houston Business Journal article that he owns two Mercedes and a Bentley convertible.)
With 290 employees, his business would be subject to the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate that kicks in in 2015 (assuming it isn’t delayed, as it has been once already), which will force companies to offer insurance to workers or else pay a penalty. Bill says it would have run him in the neighborhood of $400,000 annually.
My first question to him was: Would he show me some of his business’s financial records? Maybe an annual report, preferably something audited, so I could analyze his claim about the catastrophic effect Obamacare would have had on his business? He would not.
Did Megyn Kelly request such verification? No, he said, she did not.
I then pressed Bill on whether there were any other reasons he was selling his business. He admitted to me that there were plenty of others (“myriad reasons,” in his words). What were some of them?  “You ever run a business?” he asked with a chuckle. And then he began ticking off a bunch of problems in his life that he said he’d now be glad to be rid of.  The headache of managing workers. Taxes, fees and permits of every shape and size and color (dumpster permits, gate permits, this permit, that permit). He complained to me that he has to pay $300 for an “auto dealer’s” permit just to sell air fresheners at the checkout counter of his car wash centers.
 From the sound of it, Gov. Rick Perry is more to blame for Bill’s choice to retire than Obama. Perhaps Texas is not the pro-business eden that Perry portrays it to be.

Nonetheless, Bill insisted that the Affordable Care Act was the “primary” reason he chose to sell out and retire after 22 years. He told me he spent a year attending seminars and seeking advice from lawyers and insurance experts on the employer mandate, and it was universally made clear to him that the new federal law would make it too costly to stay in business.
There’s no questions that Bubbles Car Wash will have to absorb a new cost under the employer mandate. The question is how great it will be, and whether it will impact the business enough to have required Bill to unload it. Although Bill wouldn’t show me any hard financial data, I asked him if he could give me a brief sketch of his company’s revenue. He thought for a while, and then said he’d estimate that the company had around $13 million a year in revenues and about $900,000 in earnings — earnings, meaning post-salary (he wouldn’t tell me what his annual salary had been as an owner of the business).
Bill also told me most of his wage earners do not want health insurance. He’s offered a mini-med program in the past, a very cheap and bare-bones plan that employees could purchase, and they usually decline it. If that’s the case, Bill’s burden will be much smaller than what he told Megyn Kelly. Under the Affordable Care Act, Bill must simply offer his employees a chance to share in the cost of an insurance plan. The worker’s share can legally be as high as 9.5 percent of the worker’s household income. Once Bill has made this offer to an employee, if the employee declines the coverage then Bill is off the hook and doesn’t have to pay a penalty.
And sadly, Bill might be correct that his wage earners (who earn $8.50 to $10 an hour) can’t afford to spend as high as 9.5 percent of their salaries sharing the cost of an insurance plan.
I sent Bill an article from a recent Forbes magazine that shows how businesses of his size, and specifically Texas businesses, will have ample opportunity to keep Obamacare costs very low by strategically offering insurance plans that they know their employees will reject, forcing them onto the individual exchange in some cases. He did not respond.
Incidentally, Bill also told me that the private equity company that bought him out had approached him as early as “three or four years ago,” so he was at least speaking to the buyers before Obamacare ever existed. A spokesperson for the new owner refused to talk to me for this article. Suffice it to say, however, that a private equity firm sees enormous potential in Bubbles Car Wash with or without Obamacare.
In the final analysis, Bill is a strong conservative who believes government has no business saddling him with new costs. He said it would be nice if every citizen could be insured, but “even if the cost were only 10 percent of what I’ve estimated,” he said to me, “why should the federal government make it my responsibility to pay for it?”  (We decided to agree that there is no right or wrong answer to that question, only opinions.)
And as for Megyn Kelly, she asked very few probative questions before or during the interview, preferring instead to just take Bill’s claim about Obamacare at face value. But clearly there was another side of the story.
Special thanks to Bill Bertovich, one of my readers, who tipped me off to the above segment.

Eric Stern lives in Helena, Montana. He was senior counsel to Brian Schweitzer, former Governor. Follow him on Twitter at @_ericstern.

Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Wisconsin Republicans Roll Anti-Democratic Measures Through Assembly

Posted by Brendan Fischer on November 15, 2013

 

Wisconsin Republicans rolled a raft of anti-democrat measures through the legislature late Thursday night, ranging from additional restrictions on voting to new limits on the right to recall elected officials, following a recall effort against Governor Scott Walker last year.

Recall the Recalls

A proposed constitutional amendment passed by the Assembly on Thursday would limit the recall power that has been part of the state constitution for eighty years.
Currently, the state Constitution allows for recall of state elected officials for any reason. The amendment would only allow for recall if a state officeholder is charged with a felony or ethics violation. Wisconsin is one of 18 states that allows for recalls; of those, only seven limit recall to elected officials guilty of misconduct in office.
The constitutional right was exercised in recent years to trigger a recall election for Scott Walker after the newly-elected governor pushed a series of radical measures through the legislature, including restrictions on public sector collective bargaining, cuts in education funding, and voting restrictions; many of the measures were never discussed on the campaign trail and took the state by surprise, prompting massive protests in the capitol. State Senators from both parties were also targeted for recall. Those recall efforts could never have proceeded had the limits passed Thursday been in place.
The broad, unlimited right of recall was added to the state constitution in 1926 during the Progressive Era as a mechanism of accountability. ‘Fighting Bob’ LaFollette campaign literature from the early 20th Century says: “By the recall, a faithless public official may be retired without waiting for the evil to be fully consummated. Under such a law, the public official will no longer betray his constituency."
Rep. Fred Kessler (D-Milwaukee) echoed those sentiments on Thursday. "What are the authors [of the recall amendment] afraid of?" he asked. "Why in the world are they trying to set aside the ability of voters ... to recall someone who they think made a mistake? ... It's a democratic right of people to be heard and it's something that should not be suppressed."
The proposed amendment passed along party lines but is not a done deal. A constitutional amendment must pass the full Legislature two sessions in a row, and then be approved in a statewide vote; the earliest that could happen in 2015.
The legislature also passed similar limits on recall for municipal and school officials, which need only pass the Senate and be signed by Governor Walker. Ironically, had those restrictions been in place in 2002, they would have quashed the recall effort that led to Walker's rise to power. In 2002, Walker aligned himself with an attempted recall against then-Milwaukee County Executive Tom Ament, who hadn't been convicted of a felony or ethics violation; after Ament resigned, Walker was elected County Executive.

Voter ID, Back Again?

The legislature also voted along party lines to alter the state's voter ID law in the face of legal challenges.
After Governor Scott Walker and a GOP-dominated legislature took power in 2011, Wisconsin was one of several states to pass a law requiring an ID to vote. The law threatened to disenfranchise more than 300,000 voters who did not have the required forms of ID, primarily people of color, students, and the elderly -- voters who had turned out in record numbers just a few years earlier to elect President Obama. Wisconsin's law was subsequently struck down by two separate state courts on grounds that its burdens were too severe and it imposed eligibility requirements beyond those provided by the Wisconsin Constitution. One decision was reversed on appeal, but the other is still in effect and the law remains blocked. The law is also currently being challenged in federal court under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.
This latest bill is designed to overcome those legal challenges but would still make it harder to vote for low-income Wisconsinites.
Under the legislation, voters will still be asked to present an ID, and if they do not have one, they must sign an affidavit swearing not only that they do not have the forms of identification required under the law, but also declaring that they either are too poor to get an ID or cannot gather the necessary documentation.
"This bill says that poor people need to declare their indigency. It's a scarlet letter," said Rep. JoCasta Zamarripa (D-Milwaukee).
The bill passed the Assembly 54-38 along party lines and now goes to the Republican-dominated Senate. Its fate in the Senate is uncertain: Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald (R-Juneau) has said that he would rather wait for courts to rule on the original voter ID legislation before making changes to the law.

Early Voting Limits, Chief Justice Selection Alterations

Another bill will limit early voting to weekdays between 7:30 a.m. and 6 p.m., effectively ending weekend voter drives in Democratic strongholds such as Milwaukee and Madison. In 2008, President Obama won Wisconsin by 14 points, thanks in part to an aggressive "vote early" campaign where one in five voters cast absentee ballots in-person at their County Clerk's office. After Republicans took control of the state legislature in 2010, they cut the number of days and weekends for early voting in half, from one month before the election to just two weeks. Still, in the 2012 elections at least 392,000 people voted early at their clerk's offices, and Obama again won the state by a sizable margin.
The measure passed Thursday will limit the practice even further, eliminating early voting on the weekends, and during the weekdays, imposing a 6pm cutoff. This would have a significant impact on working people. Last November in Milwaukee County and other larger counties, voters could cast a ballot until 7pm on weekdays, and between 9am and 5pm on weekends. The measure now goes to the Senate.
The legislature also voted along party lines to amend the state constitution to alter the selection process for the state Supreme Court's Chief Justice, changing it from a seniority system to one based on peer selection. The measure appears aimed at ousting Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson, an independent judge on a court that in recent years has become dominated by corporate-backed jurists, many of whom have been elected with support from the state chapter of the Chamber of Commerce and shadowy out-of-state groups. Spending on Wisconsin's judicial elections have skyrocketed in recent years, shifting the court to the right and helping its reputation to plummet.
Like the recall measure, the amendment must pass two sessions of the legislature and be approved by voters.
Among other things, the Assembly also voted along party lines to approve new specialty license plates that read "In God We Trust" and "Choose Life," and to limit public access to a proposed iron ore mine site in Northern Wisconsin.

Council of Bishops requests complaint against Talbert

November 15, 2013

by United Methodist News Service

By Heather Hahn*

LAKE JUNALUSKA, N.C. (UMNS) — After hours of closed-door sessions throughout the week, the Council of Bishops has “respectfully” requested a formal complaint be filed against retired Bishop Melvin G. Talbert, who officiated at a same-sex union on Oct. 26 despite church law.

Retired Bishop Melvin G. Talbert. A UMNS photo by Mike DuBose.

The council specifically urged the complaint be submitted by Germany Area Bishop Rosemarie Wenner, the council’s president, and Birmingham Area Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett, who oversees the North Alabama Annual (regional) Conference where the wedding took place.
The complaint would go before the Western Jurisdiction, from which Bishop Talbert retired.
The council also recommended that its executive committee “initiate a task force to lead honest and respectful conversations regarding human sexuality, race and gender in a worldwide perspective in our shared commitment to clear theological understanding of the mission and polity of The United Methodist Church.”
The bishops in their statement acknowledged that neither they nor the other members of the church they lead are of one mind regarding ministering with gays and lesbians.
The statement said, “pain exists throughout the connection, including persons who support Bishop Talbert’s actions and persons who object to them. We express our pastoral concern and care for all people.”
Oklahoma Area Bishop Robert Hayes Jr., the Council of Bishops secretary, read the full statement at the start of the council’s session Friday, Nov. 15.
After the statement was read, Wenner told the council and observers that the bishops “commit ourselves as bishops in the church to be shepherds in our church, pastoral leaders for all people in our denomination.”
“We commit ourselves to invite and engage with our people in the areas to be in prayer so that God may through the Holy Spirit guide us to see Christ’s face in all God’s people and guide us to engage with all God’s people to whom we are sent,” she said.

Bishop Rosemarie Wenner. Photo courtesy of the Council of Bishops.

Wenner then reiterated the denomination’s mission to “make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world.”
Talbert and Wallace-Padget sat at neighboring tables while the statement was read. Talbert later told United Methodist News Service he did not feel he should speak publicly on the actions of the bishops.
“In our due process in the church, it is not appropriate for me to comment when a complaint is filed,” Talbert said. “So I will just simply wait to see the process unfold.”
Wallace-Padgett said she planned to speak later after Wenner speaks at a 12:30 p.m. ET news conference.
The Book of Discipline, the church’s law book, since 1972 has stated that all people are of sacred worth, but “the practice of homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” Church law bans United Methodist clergy from performing, and churches from hosting, “ceremonies that celebrate homosexual unions.”
The council directs that the complaint against the bishop be “under the provisions of Paragraph 413 (of the Book of Discipline) for undermining the ministry of a colleague (Paragraph 2702.1f) and conducting a ceremony to celebrate the marriage of a same gender couple (Paragraph 2702.1b) within the bounds of the North Alabama Conference.”
General Conference, the denomination’s top lawmaking body, approves the contents of the Discipline and is the only body that officially speaks for the church. Bishops do not have a vote at the assembly, which will next meet in May 2016.

Background of the tension

Talbert officiated at a ceremony at a United Church of Christ in Birmingham, Ala., that celebrated the marriage of Joe Openshaw and Bobby Prince.
Talbert, who has long advocated changing this part of the Discipline, said after last year’s General Conference he “felt compelled as a bishop to declare that the derogatory language and restrictive laws in our Book of Discipline are wrong, immoral and unjust, and no longer deserve our loyalty and support.”

Bishop Debra Wallace-Padgett. Photo courtesy of Debra Wallace-Padgett.

Before the ceremony, Talbert notified Wallace-Padgett of his plans, and she requested Talbert not to go to Birmingham for that purpose.
“For a bishop or any ordained or licensed minister to disregard a law of the church creates a breach of the covenant they made at their consecration, ordination or licensing,” she said in a statement.
She also expressed concern that Talbert’s actions “would encourage the public to only define The United Methodist Church in North Alabama by one matter and not by the rich range of ministries of North Alabama local churches.”
The Executive Committee of the Council of Bishops also urged Talbert not to officiate, reminding him that conducting same-sex wedding ceremonies is a chargeable offense under church law.

What happens now

“When there are violations of the Book of Discipline, a response is required,” the council’s statement said. “However, the General Conference has given the Council of Bishops limited authority for the task of holding one another accountable. Such authority and accountability resides in the College of Bishops and the Jurisdiction or Central Conference Committees on Episcopacy. (Paragraph 413.and Paragraph 403.1.f)”
That means it is up to the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops.
Mountain Sky Area Bishop Elaine Stanovsky is the president of the Western Jurisdiction College of Bishops.
“We keep faith with the guidance that we get from the Book of Discipline,” she told United Methodist News Service. She noted that church law gives bishops some leeway in addressing complaints.
“We seek a just resolution,” she said. She also noted that the Discipline calls church trials “an expedient of last resort.”
The 2012 Western Jurisdictional Conference adopted a petition stating that “the sense” of the jurisdiction — based on its welcoming attitude to people regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity — was to impose only a 24-hour suspension on any bishop convicted of ordaining or appointing a self-avowed practicing homosexual.
In October, the Judicial Council — the denomination’s top court — voided the resolution.  “The Discipline grants to the trial court the exclusive power to set a penalty in a church trial which results in a conviction and the full legislated range of options must be available to a trial court in its penalty phase,” the court states in Decision 1250.
“A jurisdictional or annual conference may express disagreement with other bodies of The United Methodist Church, but it is still subject to the Constitution, the Discipline and the decisions of the Judicial Council,” the ruling says.
“The current controlling principle is that a conference — jurisdictional, central or annual — resolution may express disagreement with the current language of the Discipline and may express aspirational hopes, but a conference may not legally negate, ignore or violate provisions of the Discipline, even when disagreements are based upon conscientious objection to those provisions.”
*Hahn is a multimedia news reporter for United Methodist News Service. Contact her at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org.