For the second year running, the Maxim Institute has invited Summit Ministries worldview 'specialist' John Stonestreet over to indoctrinate fundamentalist youth at Compass 2007. What is Summit Ministries, and who is this guy? According to his Summit Ministries bio, Stonestreet is lecturer in worldview studies at Bryan College, Tennessee, a (fundamentalist) "Christian university," and is copresenter of worldview issues at the Colorado-run Summit Ministries, which took a high profile role in coordinating support for a Colorado citizens referendum that struck down state antidiscrimination law inclusion of lesbians and gays until the US Supreme Court revoked the referendum result in 1996. Stonestreet's boss, the rather odd David Noebel, has been a guest at previous Compass seminars, and this is Stonestreet's second year as an invited presenter. So, what antigay content might exist within Compass 2007? As I noted in my overview of Compass 2007, much of itsschedule is a reprise of Compass 2006, with repeated seminar content, the same workbook and the same obsessions- Darwin, Peter Singer and Paul Kurtz, compared to fundamentalist antiabortion ideologue Francis Schaeffer, with much attention paid to bioethics, abortion and euthanasia, and little to family policy or LGBT rights. There's no seperate workshop scheduled on LGBT issues or The Family, apart from one on fundamentalist rigidly polarised gender roles. So, I had a look at what US Summit/Stonestreet presentations consisted of, which appears to be a broadly generalist approach. I did find some mention of gay rights in an article by creationist activist Nancy Pearcey, in an excerpted article entitled "The Consequences of Bad Worldviews." This seven year old article reviews the lamentable record of the twentieth century as an era of genocide, global conflict and overall misery. In passing, it blames current developments in sex education, contraceptive access, abortion rights, stem cell research and LGBT issues on US birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger, who allegedly derived her concept of sexual liberation from Darwin's evolutionary theory. Sanger is blamed for turning sex into a cornerstone of human identity, and arguing that it should be seen as essential to the core of our being. Moreover, concepts of communal oppression are neo-marxist in hue. Moan. What's the fundamentalist answer to all this? Apparently, according to the latest fundamentalist Christian Research Journal, it is a 'biblical response to gay rights', leavened with selective biblical citation, distorted scientific references and US Christian Right junk science. Actually, that is no answer. Am I saying that this will inevitably arise at the Compass 2007 seminars? Not unless someone raises the issue of LGBT rights, and it seems that the Maxim Institute doesn't want to, unless absolutely neccessary. It all seems to be a Christian Right 101 presentation, and nothing we haven't really seen before. And as ever, it shows the near total pseudo-intellectual dependence of the New Zealand Christian Right on its philosophical forebears in the United States. Recommended: Summit Ministries: http://www.summit.org John Stonestreet: Worldview Seminar- incorporates Pearcy excerpt: http://www.northwestbsu.org/EvangRelatedTo/Worldview.pdf http://www.compass.org.nz Compass 2007 Craig Young - 12th January 2007