This morning we contrast. The Labour party (which is centre left for NZ or far left for the US) women’s group wanted to sent a remit that would stop men being candidates for certain electorates. This was immediately dubbed the man-ban by the VRWC (Whaleoil broke the story) and it took the leader of the party a week to get the proposal dumped. The Herald’s main political reporter put it this way.

The weekly stroll from the Labour leader’s office on the third floor of Parliament Buildings to Labour’s caucus room is always interrupted halfway down the corridor by a waiting pack of political media.

There is no escape from interrogation. The leader has to front – unless he or she brushes the questioning aside and makes an unseemly dash for the safety of the caucus room.

But that would look terrible. So after ducking questions on the “man ban” in past days, Shearer had to front prior to today’s caucus meeting.

In the end the choice was no choice. Either the “man ban” was dropped or Shearer was left in the impossible position of trying to explain why he was opposed to women-only candidate selections, but was doing nothing about getting the empowering remit withdrawn prior to it being debated at Labour’s annual conference in November.

The man ban would have continued to be a major distraction which would have frustrated Shearer’s efforts to get people focusing on Labour’s real priorities which this week are the just-tabled legislation covering the construction of an international-quality convention centre in Auckland, whether the Government is looking at money from asset sales to prop up Solid Energy, and kicking off a campaign promoting the party’s policy to cut power prices.

The inescapable logic of the leader’s predicament finally seems to have convinced the party’s ruling national council to agree to Shearer’s request for the man ban to be dropped. All very democratic. And if he said it once, he said half a dozen times that Labour was a “democratic” party and its members had the right to put up ideas for debate.

Being democratic is one thing. Coming up with an idea as potentially toxic to Labour’s election chances would have been hard to achieve.

The man ban has now been banned. But it leaves some serious questions about Labour in general and Shearer in particular in its wake

The lectionary has a passage today that contrasts with this. Completely. The Jews had lived by kosher rules since the law was founded. Peter, who considered himself to be a great sinner, had never broken kosher law. It was unthinkable. He was a Jew, he preached the gospel to Jews, and he would not associate outside the tribe with the unclean. This was how the Law of God had been taught to him and how it had been interpreted through generations.

Yet the passage is where Peter is taught by the spirit that God does not hav favourites, and that preaching the gospel to Gentiles is good, righteous and proper.

Acts 10:1-16

¹In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, a centurion of the Italian Cohort, as it was called. ²He as a devout man who feared God with all his household; he gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God. ³One afternoon at about three o’clock he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, “Cornelius.” ⁴He stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?” He answered, “Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. ⁵Now send men to Joppa for a certain Simon who is called Peter; ⁶he is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” ⁷When the angel who spoke to him had left, he called two of his slaves and a devout soldier from the ranks of those who served him, ⁸and after telling them everything, he sent them to Joppa.

⁹About noon the next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. ¹⁰He became hungry and wanted something to eat; and while it was being prepared, he fell into a trance. ¹¹He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. ¹²In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. ¹³Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.” ¹⁴But Peter said, “By no means, Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” ¹⁵The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” ¹⁶This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

The deep irony is that the church is more equal than those who preach liberty and freedom as their ideology, and then impose quotas on everything. The church is more allows more free speech than activists who make posters telling people not to use the word gay as a synonym for pathetic (after they had taken a word that meant happy when I was a child and made it mean homosexualist).

We are taught not to look at the words people use but what they do. The consequences to those around them. How people act when they are suffering and oppressed. For the liberals have forgotten that we are all equally damned and in darkness without the faith of Christ. A certain Bishop of Rome has released a letter he wrote with Ratzinger on this.

There is an urgent need, then, to see once again that faith is a light, for once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim. The light of faith is unique, since it is capable of illuminating every aspect of human existence. A light this powerful cannot come from ourselves but from a more primordial source: in a word, it must come from God.

In the light of God, we are all equally needy. There is no Jew or Greek. No one is not morally accountable, no one is without the need of the gospel of CHrist. And no one is banned from hearing it.

And woe betide any authority or ideology or bureaucrat that says that this person, or that person, cannot seek the truth or seek salvation because of what is between their legs, the colour of their skin, or where they were born.

In God there is no man ban. And if there are not men in the church, we have to consider if we have let too much liberal leaven into our assemblies, become too female friendly, and driven the men out. For a healthy church needs men. And a health church needs women. And (despite what the morons at women’s studies teach) we are mammals: men and women are different, (as is the case with most mammals) and this is good.

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A quick note to the lexically confused. The Australian Labor party is spelt US style, the New Zealand Labour party is spelt UK style. They have similar policies, and similar union influence.