Mel Gibson Gets Tore Up Druuunk....

Check out this story on Mel Gibson's Anti-Semitic tirade....

Here's a snippet...

The deputy quickly subdued Gibson, cuffed him and put him inside the patrol car. Once inside the car, a source directly connected with the case says Gibson began banging himself against the seat. The report says Gibson told the deputy, "You mother f***r. I'm going to f* you." The report also says "Gibson almost continually [sic] threatened me saying he 'owns Malibu' and will spend all of his money to 'get even' with me." The report says Gibson then launched into a barrage of anti-Semitic statements: "F**g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." Gibson then asked the deputy, "Are you a Jew?"

Ouch. Never was a fan of Gibson's Passion of the Christ. Gibson's hateful tirade is both inexcusable and sad. But driving drunk? Sheesh.

In other news, I recently made a trip to South Georgia (Vidalia) where I was able to snag two 5x5 foot Ralph Reed for Lieutenant Governor signs. With the help of my former college roommate, we took the signs from the middle of downtown Vidalia just after sunset. Of course I put on my black war paint and used "guerilla warfare" tactics - Ralph Reed style.

Pictures to follow...

Frank Page - Come Out of the Closet!!!

Check out Bob Allen's bombshell piece on SBC President Frank Page.

According to Allen and EthicsDaily.com, newly elected SBC President Frank Page once endorsed women's ordination. Page's 1980 doctoral dissertation at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary was entitled "Toward a Biblical Ethic of Women in Ministry." Below are a few excerpts from Page's dissertation...

"There are solid biblical bases for a full recognition of the freedom and responsibility of woman in ministry and the freedom of God's spirit to bestow the gifts for ministry upon men and women alike...The time has come to declare that since the public activity of a woman is in most areas no longer considered as a breach of the marriage vow and since the law of the land no longer denies to them the right to act independently in mixed gatherings, qualified women are eligible candidates for any office in the church."

"If the church makes any claim in its ordination that it is merely recognizing the gifts of the Spirit, then it can hardly deny ordination to women,"

"One must search the Scripture and then perhaps, one may be more able to determine whether or not the limitations placed upon women are the will of God," he added still later.

"As a Christian, searching for a biblical ethic, one must remember that the 'oughtness' of the issue must be based on the revelation of God in the Bible and on the will of God as revealed in the life and teachings of Jesus."

"In a civilization in which woman was subordinate to her husband; where her place was in the home; where her freedom was restricted by society; Paul could not afford to proclaim a wholesale emancipation of Christian women from all the chains of custom. This was something which only time could bring about as a result of freedom found in Christianity," he wrote.

"To absolutize the biblical culture would mean to assume that all the standards of ancient Israel or first century rabbinic Judaism represent God's ultimate will for the human race. Instead of making such an assumption, one must make careful distinctions between what is 'for an age' and what is 'for all time.'"

"The very nature of the church and the nature of its ministry constitute the essential reason why barriers should not be interposed to the entrance of qualified women into ministry," he wrote. "To impose barriers to women in ministry would be disloyal to God's gift of grace. This also amounts to autocratically placing obstacles against the working of the Holy Spirit in the church. This, in essence, would mean pulling the Holy Spirit down to the level of limited human knowledge and understanding."

"Looking at the various viewpoints regarding women in ministry and having dealt with the related biblical passages, this writer agrees with the … reasons for the participation of women in ministry, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit," he wrote. "This writer, at least in part, agrees … that social distinctions are meant to be transcended, not perpetuated, within the body of Christ. They have been unfortunately perpetuated with a vengeance."

Unfortunately, the 2006 version of Frank Page has stated that his beliefs about women in ministry are consistent with Article VI of the Baptist Faith & Message 2000 which states "That while both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of Pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture." I truly like Frank Page circa 1980.

I do not understand. Why the change of heart? What event in Frank Page's life caused him to privately renounce his doctoral dissertation? Why Frank, Why? Did Frank Page jump on the Fundamentalist bandwagon? Opportunist? Is it possible that Frank Page is a Closet Moderate ??

What's the Story Big Frank?

In the spirit of my favorite episode of South Park, "Trapped in a Closet" during which Nicole Kidman begs Tom Cruise to Come Out of the Closet...

Frank, It's me, Big Daddy Weave - it's time for you to come out of the closet. Frank, don't you think this has gone on long enough. You need to end this and come out! I'm not going to think any differently of you. Your Baptist Bloggin buddies will not think any differently of you. You don't need to be in that closet anymore, Frank. You can't hide forever!!

Frank Page, come out of that Closet! You, Moderate, You!

The Right Hand of God Gets Slapped....

Newsflash. Ralph Reed has conceded defeat in his bid to become the next Lieutenant Governor of Georgia. Woo Hoo. Wonder what's next for Plagarizing Ralph?? Guess all that Guerilla Warfare and Face Paint didn't do much for Ralph tonight...

"I want to be invisible. I do guerilla warfare. I paint my face and travel at night. You don't know it's over until you're in a body bag. You don't know until election night." - Ralph Reed, The Hill, December 17, 1997.

In other news, Lt. Governor Mark Taylor, aka The Big Guy, will put a good 7-8 point spanking to Secretary of State Cathy Cox. I've always been a fan of The Big Guy. He's been an arden supporter of Georgia's lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship which paid ALL of my tuition for 4 years at the University of Georgia! With 70% of the precincts reporting, Cynthia McKinney has a slight edge (1.4%) over her opponent. Combined with Ralph's concession and The Big Guy's Win, a Cynthia loss would make the perfect TRIFECTA! If this happens, I'll be one happy South Georgian boy.....

Here is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution article on Ralph Reed

Ralph Reed concedes defeat By Jim Galloway | Tuesday, July 18, 2006, 10:02 PM The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Former Christian Coalition leader Ralph Reed conceded defeat about 9:50 p.m. in Georgia’s Republican primary for lieutenant governor.

“Tonight my candidacy for lieutenant governor comes to an end,” he said. He promised to work for the GOP ticket, including Sen. Casey Cagle (R-Gainesville), his rival in the lieutenant governor’s race. Reed conceded at 9:48 p.m., speaking to a crowd that cheered for the first time all night. With him was his wife, Jo Anne, and their four children.

“Today, Jo Anne and I celebrated our 19th wedding anniversary. It was an important reminder of what’s really important. “Stay in the fight, don’t retreat, and our values will win in November,” he said. Reed left quickly but stopped to say he was proud of the race he ran. “I’m not focused on being a candidate in the future, but I’m glad I ran,” he said. With 43 percent of precincts reporting, the Georgia Secretary of State’s office showed Cagle with 55.2 percent of the vote, compared with 44.8 percent for Reed.

Alliances WITH Baptists

Kirby Godsey's newly-elected successor, President Bill Underwood of Mercery University, has an insightful editorial in the latest edition of The Baptist Studies Bulletin published by Mercer University's Center for Baptist Studies. Check it out...

There are whispers of an exciting new movement emerging in Baptist life. Within the past several weeks, leaders of Baptist organizations representing more than 20 million Baptists have launched an unprecedented initiative to advance the Kingdom through the combined voice and work of Baptists throughout North America. Baptists from the North and from the South. Black and white Baptists. conservative, moderate and progressive Baptists joining together in a covenant–the North American Baptist Covenant–to affirm "their desire to speak and work together to create an authentic and genuine prophetic Baptist voice in these complex times."

Rather than focus on our disagreements over doctrine, there is much on which we all surely can agree. Jesus has commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves and to manifest this love by feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, caring for the sick. The Bible could not speak more clearly. And here there remains much work to be done. The average annual income per person in the world’s poorest nations is only $211. More than half the world’s people live on less than $2 a day. Over a billion people must survive on half that amount. Imagine what it must be like to have $1 a day for food, housing, clothing, health care, transportation and education. Millions of people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa. Every month, more than 100,000 people in the world die of malaria, diarrhea, and more than 200,000 die of AIDs. These are moral issues. They are issues of private morality–are each of us as individual Christians doing what we can to feed the hungry, cloth the naked, and care for the sick? They are issues of public morality–are we as a nation doing what we can?

There is power in unity. We Baptists can accomplish more together than any one of us can accomplish alone. This is the premise of the Baptist leaders who have signed the North American Baptist Covenant and who are moving forward aggressively in scheduling a national convocation of Baptists from throughout North America for 2007. Imagine the power of more than 20 million Baptist voices in North American joined together in a mighty chorus sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ and its implications for public and private morality. Imagine over 20 million Baptist voices urging the leaders of our nation to adopt policies that promote our moral values. Imagine over 20 million Baptists looking for ways to combine efforts to more effectively feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the sick.

We certainly would disagree if we chose to focus on some theological issues. Some Baptists believe the Bible is inerrant. Others believe it to be the authoritative record of God’s revelation. Some think that the creation accounts in the early chapters of Genesis convey a recitation of historical fact. Others have concluded that these creation accounts use metaphor to convey fundamental theological truths. Someday we will know the answers to these questions and other questions on which we disagree. But for now, we can only see through a glass darkly. Imagine, one day standing before God and trying to explain that we refused to combine our efforts with those of other followers of Christ to more effectively minister to the world because we disagreed over the meaning of the creation accounts in Genesis.

Though we Baptists are famously independent, we have also recognized that as Christians we owe important responsibilities to our communities. Indeed, we have an illustrious history of building up the Kingdom of God through cooperative endeavors with other Baptists in missions, health care, and education. We are at our best when we are working together. That is the vision of the North American Baptist Covenant.

Read more about The North American Baptist Covenant.

Adultery - Does Anyone Care???

Rudy Giuliani is a man of multiple women. 4 or more to be exact.

Rudy's first marriage was to his cousin and childhood sweetheart, Regina Peruggi. Rudy and Regine were married for 13 years. However, Rudy had this marriage annulled, supposedly after discovering that the sweethearts were second cousins instead of third cousins!

Giuliani left his cousin for another woman, Donna Hanover. Hanover is a D-list actress. She starred as Ruth Carter Stapleton in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Hanover has also appeared in episodes of Another World, Sex and the City, As the World Turns, Ally McBeal, The Practice, and my favorite - Law & Order!

Rudy married Hanover (who has recently found a new career as AOL's love-and-sex coach). She served as the First Lady of New York City from 1994-2002. After an affair with his press aide, Rudy met Judy Nathan. After his public and nasty divorce with Hanover was finalized, Rudy married Judy Nathan.

Like Rudy, two other divorced Republicans with a history of adultery have their eyes set on the White House. They are Senator John McCain and Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

In 2000, John McCain became the first confessed adulterer to run for the Presidency. According to Nicholas Kristof of the NY Times...

McCain was still married and living with his wife in 1979 while "aggressively courting a 25-year-old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich." McCain divorced his wife, who had raised their three children while he was imprisoned in Vietnam, then launched his political career with his new wife's family money.

Recently, Steve Benen published a piece in the Washington Monthly entitled "High Infidelity - What if three admitted adulterers run for President and no one cares?" On Gingrich, Benen writes...

But the most notorious of them all is undoubtedly Gingrich, who ran for Congress in 1978 on the slogan, "Let Our Family Represent Your Family." (He was reportedly cheating on his first wife at the time). In 1995, an alleged mistress from that period, Anne Manning, told Vanity Fair's Gail Sheehy: "We had oral sex. He prefers that modus operandi because then he can say, 'I never slept with her.'" Gingrich obtained his first divorce in 1981, after forcing his wife, who had helped put him through graduate school, to haggle over the terms while in the hospital, as she recovered from uterine cancer surgery. In 1999, he was disgraced again, having been caught in an affair with a 33-year-old congressional aide while spearheading the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.

After impeaching Bill Clinton - are the Republicans ready to nominate a confessed adulterer???? Will the Evangelical-wing of the GOP support the candidacy of a cheating man???

Kudos to the Calvinists...some of them...

At the annual assembly of the Christian Reformed Church held June 10-16 at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Synod released a statement calling for the Christian Reformed Church to "speak prophetically to the governments of the United States and Canada on moral issues related to preventive or preemptive military actions as well as weapons of mass destruction."

In a series of recommendations, synod set out steps by which Christians should approach the task. These include:

• * urging congregations and individual Christians to discuss and prayerfully reflect on their responsibility to be peacemakers;
  
• * making materials available to churches to assist them in ministering to members who are contemplating entering the military or who are veterans of military service;
  
• * encouraging congregations to urge members to inform themselves and to speak out on issues such as arms production and alternatives to war;
  
• * calling on agencies and members of the church “to promote and actively engage in international initiatives for building peace with justice.
  

It also called for the church to speak prophetically to the governments of the United States and Canada on moral issues related to preventive or preemptive military actions as well as weapons of mass destruction. And it instructed the executive director of the CRC to seek a means by which Christians serving in the U.S. military could lawfully be recognized as conscientious objectors to a particular conflict. Current U.S. laws on conscientious objection recognize only members of historically pacifist churches that object to participation in any conflict.

It's absolutely WONDERFUL to see this small denomination of Calvinists questioning the Bush Administration's policy on Pre-Emptive War. Hopefully more theological conservatives will begin to back-peddle from the Pro-War policies of George W. Bush and the Republican Party.

Kudos to the Calvinists of the Christian Reformed Church!

Time for Joe to Go!

Apparently, Senator Joe Lieberman is planning to run as an Independent in November if he LOSES Connecticut's DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY next month!

Why is Joe Lieberman taking out an "insurance policy against democracy"?!?!?! Hmm...

"While I believe that I will win the Aug. 8 primary, I know that there are no guarantees in elections," Mr. Lieberman said at a brief news conference at the State Capitol with his wife, Hadassah, beside him. The results, he said, could be skewed by a low turnout in a sultry August, or a last-minute media barrage by his opponent, who has already spent more than $1 million on his campaign. "My friends," the senator said, "after 18 years of working for, fighting for and delivering for all the people of Connecticut, I want the opportunity to put my case before all the people of Connecticut in November."

Thus far, Lieberman has been endorsed by folks like plagarist Ann Coulter, "Pretty Boy" Sean Vanity Hannity, and of course Michelle Malkin. In an attempt to pick up some Joementum, Senators Biden, Boxer, and Salazar are campaigning for Lieberman in CT.

According to the Washington Post...

Sens. Joe Biden of Delaware, Barbara Boxer of California and Ken Salazar of Colorado plan to campaign in Connecticut for Lieberman between now and the Aug. 8 primary. Their goal is to reassure the party faithful of the three-term senator's loyalty to Democratic causes, including women's issues, labor and the environment.

Reproductive Justice? Ha. Lieberman continues to oppose full access for rape victims to emergency contraception. His opponent, Ned Lamont, does not.

Tim Tagaris at Ned Lamont's Official Blog sums up the problems that Democrats (like myself) have with Joe...

Sure, Senator Lieberman is not living in reality when it comes to Iraq, but that’s not all. He was wrong on the Bush/Cheney/Lieberman energy policy. He was wrong on Alito. He was wrong on denying emergency contraception to victims of sexual assault. He is consistently wrong in trade deals. He was wrong on Terri Schiavo. He was wrong to flirt with privatization. He is wrong everytime he shows up on Fox News to trash Democrats as well.

Did I mention that Joe Lieberman supports school vouchers?? Indeed a true champion of the Separation of Church and State! AH!

I think it's time for Joe to Go..

Camden James

My sister had a baby on July 3 at 1-something-in-the-AM-Central Standard Time in Waco at Hillcrest Baptist Hospital. 23 years ago - I was born in a Baptist hospital as well - Baptist Hospital East in Louisville KY. Must be a Baptist thing...

baby pictures here...


http://camdenjames.blogspot.com

Note: I was about dead in the pictures as I had just arrived from my 13 hour drive from Atlanta.

The Reverend Angela Yarber on the CBF...

In Saturday's Faith & Values section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Reverend Angela Yarber recounts what the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship means to her life and ministry. Once my Youth Minister at First Baptist Church of Lyons, Georgia, Angela and I have been the best of friends for years. Angela recently graduated from Mercer's McAfee School of Theology. In the Fall, she will begin working on her Ph.d at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

I particularly like the first line of her article. But if you don't - feel free to join the growing list of angry SBCers and shoot her an email. Don't forget to tell her that Big Daddy Weave sent you...

Baptist organization moves beyond stereotypesAngela Yarber - For the Journal-ConstitutionSaturday, July 1, 2006

Open-minded. Affirming of women. Socially minded. Educationally oriented.

These are not typically qualities the average person would associate with Baptists. But June 21-24, I joined with more than 4,000 Baptists who care about these very issues --- defying the stereotypes about Baptists.

At the 16th annual Cooperative Baptist Fellowship General Assembly in Atlanta, defining ourselves for who we are rather than who we are not was a recurring theme.
We embraced the Baptist principles of freedom of conscience, the priesthood of every believer, soul competency and separation of church and state. We joined together to stand for justice, raise awareness of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and fight for religious liberty. While we hold many qualities in common, we also celebrated the diversity in each individual's heart regarding social, moral and political issues.

We affirmed that there can be unity of heart without uniformity in doctrinal theology. In worship services, workshops and panel discussions, participants could "be the presence of Christ" --- proclaiming liberation, freedom, peace, hope, and justice, in our world.
The assembly began with the HIV/AIDS Summit, where concerned and open-minded Baptists gathered to discuss how the church can minister to and support individuals and communities affected by HIV/AIDS. The fellowship has taken a stand on an issue that proves controversial in religious life.

Most people are shocked to discover that I am both a Baptist and ordained, because many Baptist groups do not support ordination for women. But the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship does. For me, the Baptist Women in Ministry service proved especially encouraging. To hear the sermons of women called of God, to sing and dance surrounded by voices united in calling and cause, and to worship with women and men who affirm that any person can receive a call from God makes the tough days in ministry worthwhile.

The misconception that all Baptists want to unify church and state also was addressed at a religious liberty luncheon. Because Baptists began in the midst of severe persecution from the state, they hold fast to the idea of religious liberty. We were reminded that faith, to be genuine, cannot be forced and that we should remain involved in maintaining the wall of separation between church and state.

Ultimately, though, the General Assembly wasn't simply a meeting or a worship service. It served as a call to action in an unjust world. Hearing voices in need of religious liberty reminds us that we have an obligation to provide liberty and justice for all. Joining with other Baptist women called to be agents of peace and reconciliation affirms that any person can be a minister.
The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship reminds us that not all Baptists are the same, but all have the same calling: to be the presence of Christ in our world.

The Rev. Angela Yarber is a graduate of Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology and minister of students at Parkway Baptist Church in Duluth. She grew up in Woodstock.

Email: ang0081@hotmail.com