And you'd have thought they also proclaimed they were going to sacrifice kittens to Satan in the company lounge every day and twice on Sundays. To say that the Religious Right had a conniption would be to understate the case. (I very nearly blogged about Bryan Fischer's hissy fit about World Vision's capitulation to sodomy.)
And, today, World Vision announced it was backing down.
'Today, the World Vision U.S. board publicly reversed its recent decision to change our employment conduct policy. The board acknowledged they made a mistake and chose to revert to our longstanding conduct policy requiring sexual abstinence for all single employees and faithfulness within the Biblical covenant of marriage between a man and a woman. In our board’s effort to unite around the church’s shared mission to serve the poor in the name of Christ, we failed to be consistent with World Vision U.S.’s commitment to the traditional understanding of Biblical marriage and our own Statement of Faith, which says, “We believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God.” And we also failed to seek enough counsel from our own Christian partners. As a result, we made a change to our conduct policy that was not consistent with our Statement of Faith and our commitment to the sanctity of marriage.'
Disappointing. Given their previous statement, I guess the message is that some Christian denominations (and "partners") are more equal than others.
Reshared post from +David Badash
Breaking: Major Christian Non-Profit Reverses Decision On Hiring Married Gays
World Vision, a billion-dollar Christian non-profit that made major headlines this week after announcing it would hire gay people in same-sex marriages, has just reversed its decision.
This is beyond unfortunate. I do not believe Jesus would have backed down from such a decision, or that in his eyes the decision would need to occur at all. How very sad.
It would have been nice if their back-down reasoning had addressed their initial reasoning.
Ironically, I've little doubt this will still impact donations to them. Yesterday, Fischer was saying that they'd taken the initial decision in order to continue to net federal funding. Others are now saying that they rolled back in order to continue to net evangelical donations. Tacking back and forth is likely to satisfy nobody.
It is my understanding, and I could be mistaken, that the donors are sponsoring individual children. If one feels strongly about this issue, I can see writing to World Vision telling them that this child will be the last I will sponsor and here are the reasons. I cannot comprehend saying, “I don’t give a rat’s behind about the child I’m already sponsoring. I quit.”
One wouldn’t think so. On the other hand, some folks are so into ritualistic ideological purity that they just might. There’s a reason why Jesus included the parable about searching for a lost sheep on the Sabbath (http://goo.gl/IxW7QO).