Gender descrimination
A reader sent me the following story.
Refusal to work with a woman pastor at a church in Hyvinkää last March has brought charges of discrimination to three men.
Hyvinkää District Court Prosecutor Jari Auvinen has decided to press charges of criminal discrimination against two members of the Lutheran Evangelical Association in Finland (LEAF), and charges of discrimination in the workplace against the then substitute vicar of the particular parish in Hyvinkää.
This is the first time that the controversy in the Finnish Evangelical-Lutheran Church - over the resistance of some conservative male clergy to the ordination of women - has extended into the realm of worldly law enforcement.
The case goes back to March of this year , when a woman pastor had been scheduled for a shift at a Sunday morning Holy Communion service, where she would help distribute wine and wafer.
When the pastor showed up for the service, a visiting preacher of the LEAF said that he would be unable to take part in any service in which a woman pastor was serving.
...In the prosecutor's view, the visiting pastor and the chairman of the local LEAF association who helped arrange the visit were guilty of discrimination, as they prevented the female pastor from doing her work on the basis of her gender.
I wonder if this is a sign of things to come since women's ordination proponents always put this in the light of gender discrimination in the first place? Though of course Lutherans and other denominations where there are some that are against women serving as Protestant pastors will have a much harder time defending themselves considering that they have already largely gone down that road.
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Part of the problem here is the state having too much power. It's not simply that the prot churches in Scandinavia are part of the state apparatus; such things could happen here in the US as well if liberals got serious about applying anti-discrimination laws to bear on churches, private schools, etc., with regard to hiring practices and such. I work at a private Christian school and we have lawyers on retainer working on these issues all the time. The bigger and more aggressive government gets, the less room we will likely have to breathe.
It would be much easier to be able to point to one rule book (such as canon law) to defend oneself against allegations of discrimination. On the other hand, who (if not the faithful) will stop the gov. from eventually declaring canon law unconstitutional, considering that the ironclad separation of Church and State has been turned upside down to "protect" the state from freedoms granted by religion. Like the right to life, the right to pray, the right to respect one's own person and that of others, the right to refuse medication made from human embryos, etc.