If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and heal their land.  2 Chronicles 7:14 (ESV)

It is no secret that our nation is more divided than ever.  This is an election year and November will either cement us onto the path we are currently traveling or will set the pendulum swinging in a new direction.  Whatever our fate, we as Christians have a duty to seek God’s will.  There is much we need to take before Him in prayer.  We all need to listen more than we talk.  The following list is only a beginning.  You are invited to add your own reminders of what we need to prayerfully consider and embrace as November approahces.

We pray that You teach us how to prepare our hearts in order that we may seek You and serve You.

We pray that you open our eyes to our own sins and so convict us that we turn and repent.

We pray that we seek truth and use that truth to wage our battles forsaking violence of any kind.

We pray for wisdom and discernment as we prepare to go to the polls.

We pray that You will raise up Godly leaders.

We pray that You give us the wisdom to discern these Godly leaders.

We pray, Dear Lord, that we become a nation of prayer warriors who seek Your face daily.

Julius Streicher would be proud

Al Mohler on the compromise that isn’t:

This means that certain employers who have “a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan” will not fund these services directly. Instead, the insurance plan will cover these services without charge to all women employees.

What does this resolve? Well, to state the matter bluntly, nothing. At the end of the day, this “compromise” will resolve the issue only for those whose conscience can be resolved by an accounting maneuver.

The qualified insurance plans do not print the monies required to cover the birth control services mandated by the Administration. They will obtain these funds through the premiums paid by employers — including those employers with “a religious objection to providing contraceptive services as part of their health plan.”...more

I mean, what topic could possibly cause an Anglican bishop in, say, Australia or England, to break collegiality with other bishops in order to promote an increasingly controversial and divisive agenda? Hold your thought and come with me.

First, to Gippsland Diocese in Victoria, Australia where the December issue [scribd] of the Gippsland Anglican has a report on page 8 of a new clerical appointment. All seemingly innocuous until you check out the caption under the picture, “Reverend David Head with his partner, Mark”.

And there you have it, open endorsement in the diocesan newspaper. What readers may not realise is that the liberal agenda is not as advanced here in Australia as in the US. So this is still a big deal. What may simmer under the surface is often allowed to simmer, as long as it doesn’t boil over. But Bishop John McIntyre has never been one for not kicking up a fuss. And it appears here that someone has approved the agenda of openly promoting a clergyman living in a homosexual partnership. If not the bishop then someone on his staff. Either way, the implication is obvious.

This was a deliberate decision. Rev. Head was previously at Holy Trinity Hampton where his relationship was (as someone recently described it to me) considered an “open scandal”. Perhaps it all got too much, we don’t know and Melbourne is a whole other question - a diocese where the fight really is on between the evangelicals and the liberals. But Bishop McIntyre over the border in Gippsland has decided to make it an issue by appointing and publicly affirming him.

The Australian House of Bishops is about to meet in conference. You can be sure there will be a number for whom this appointment is unacceptable. One commentator told me that when the doors close on the meeting room it can get a bit fierce inside. I’m sure we can expect some free and frank discussions there.

Over in England the same game is being played. The freshly-minted bishop of Salisbury, Nicholas Holtam, has come out in favour of gay marriage, contrary to the current position of the Church of England. And that right on the eve of General Synod - I mean, who would have thought? Of course, Changing Attitude are loving it, and who could blame them.

Well, surprise surprise, a man who we all knew what be controversial but nevertheless got appointed has now been controversial, to the extent of breaking ranks with his fellow bishops. Who could have predicted it?

Here’s what I’d like to know, what does his suffragen Graham Kings of Fulcrum fame think of it all? He was part of this response in 2005 which included a restatement of the traditional position and also critiqued exactly the sort of thing that Holtam has done,

One member of the House has already publicly broken with collegiality and distanced himself from the pastoral letter. Unless there remains a common commitment to church teaching and discipline within the House, there is a real risk that the levels of tension and disintegration witnessed in other provinces in relation to these issues could become a reality in the Church of England.

So I emailed his office and asked exactly that. I’ll let you know if we get a response.

Bishops breaking collegiality. You know what, Fulcrum are right - when they do it causes all sorts of problems if it’s not dealt with. It increases “levels of tension and disintegration”. Not convinced? Take a look at TEC. You won’t have to look very hard. And what ends up being compromised? Gospel witness and the proclamation of Christ. Go figure. Now that is worth kicking up a stink about. If everyone just stays in their dog collars and mitres as though nothing has changed then it would be a disaster - because it would mean that something has changed - this would now be acceptable.

Unlike Presiding Bishop Schori, I do not believe Catholics are less intelligent than the Episcopalians or any other denomination.  Unfortunately, President Obama’s thinking on this subject appears to be more in line with the presiding bishop.  Exactly how stupid does he think we are? 

In a statement released today, the White House said, “Under the new policy announced today, women will have free preventive care that includes contraceptive services no matter where she works.”

“If a woman works for religious employers with objections to providing contraceptive services as part of its health plan, the religious employer will not be required to provide contraception coverage but her insurance company will be required to offer contraceptive care free of charge.”

So what this means is that rather than have those who are unwilling to support contraception and/or abortifacient drugs pay for such things for their employees, they will now need to pay for EVERYONE’S employees to have these services done.  Exactly who does Mr. Obama think he is kidding here?  Where exactly do you think the money for the “insurance boogeyman” will come from to pay for these services?  Will the Easter Bunny drop off golden eggs that will cover the cost of the services?  This would be the equivalent of taking your employees to a restaurant and advising the waiter that everything is on you - except for the alcohol.  The waiter returns with the manager who says - no problem all alcohol will be provided free to all patrons and oh by the way, we’ve added a 30% service charge to everyone’s check.  Come on - did you really thing the restaraunt was paying for the booze?  The exact same principle applies to no-pays at the ER.  Paid a ticket lately?  Was there a line item for indigent defense fund?

Employers are still staggering under the enormous rate increases they had to absorb that came in anticipation of the changes Obamacare would force upon the insurers.  It doesn’t take a genius (and we obviously don’t have many of those in DC anyway) to figure out that the insurance companies will NOT absorb this cost.  They will parse it out among their client base regardless of any conscience objection. 

The only benefactor of this “accommodation” will be Planned Parenthood.  How long do you think it will be before we hear of a huge grant to Planned Parenthood to help them gear up in anticipation of the droves of women from those terrible orthodox who don’t believe in helping someone kill their child.  One has to wonder if this has been the plan all along. 

It is my sincere prayer that the American people will rise up with as much voice as they can muster so the tone deaf in DC will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that we see this accommodation exactly for what it is.  In short, we’re not buying it AND we’re not paying for it.

All this week I’ve steadily posted articles about the “Republican establishment” which can be roughly defined as those Republicans who are all for a corpulent State, with central planning galore, only for the projects that they like.  They’re fine with a big-government—as long as they are the ones getting to manage the big government.  To this end, they are waging a two-front battle.  One front is against the Mean Democrats who took their power back in 2008.  The other front is against the Mean Conservatives who will also take their power, since the Mean Conservatives want small government, little to no central planning, and a return to individual liberty.  You can tell an establishment Republican when he talks about “special incentives” and “tax breaks” [as opposed to holistic tax reform], usually for their favored sets of demographics [retirees, or married couples with children, for instance] or industries [manufacturing or transportation or logistics] or big businesses [Amazon and BMW and Cabelas, yes, the corner hardware store or outdoor shop, not so much].  In fact, switch the rhetoric to “the poor” or “the homeless” or “green energy” and you have your average Democrat.  Both Democrats and establishment Republicans have the same foundational worldview—they’re opposed to individual liberty, free enterprise, the Constitution, and private property rights when it comes to their pet projects]; they’re for a capacious, controlling Federal government.  If you want some names, try Brooks, Krauthammer, Boehner, DeLay, Armey, Lowry, McConnell, Dole . . . on a national level.  You can figure out which ones are establishment Republicans in your state—believe me they’re their.  The Club For Growth has helpfully listed the members of the House and Senate with handy little percentages—briefly anybody with an R by his name and a number somewhere in the 70s needs to be replaced.  And then, there is usually a state think tank for every state that details the state legislature’s voting records.  Mine is the South Carolina Policy Council.  Mississippi’s is the Mississippi Center for Public Policy.  The State Policy Network will help you find a think tank in your state focusing on individual liberty, free enterprise, the Constitution, and limited government.  Some of these feature scorecards on individual legislators.

The state-level Club For Growth also can help you with specific legislator scorecards.  You can see, for instance, when you gaze upon our state’s House and Senate scorecards, just why it is that we have fiscal policies high in collectivism and central planning when even the Republicans simply don’t value individual liberty, private property, or free enterprise.

All of the above is simply a precursor to this helpful article from Pajamas Media, where there is more:

Across America, state Republican parties and legislators are pursuing the opponents they most despise with renewed vigor.

You would think that the targets of these efforts are President Barack Obama and Democratic Party officeholders who are hell-bent on turning America into a financially broken, post-constitutional, Washington-controlled playground safe only for crony capitalists and regulators gone wild. You would be wrong.

In Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Utah, to name just four, state GOP establishments are laboring mightily to marginalize the millions of constitutional conservatives whose activist energy (but not their outlook) dates back to the beginnings of the Tea Party movement three years ago. By their behavior, it’s clear that those who run many state parties and quite a few incumbent moderate Republican lawmakers are more threatened than pleased at the results of the 2010 elections, when the GOP took back the U.S. House and significantly improved its representation in statehouses and state legislatures. Oh, they’re happy with the majorities they have, and want to pick up control of the U.S. Senate this time around. They just don’t like many of the people who won the races which gave them those majorities, would rather not see any more interlopers come in and try to upset the status quo, and are targeting several newbies for political extinction.

At the beginning of the week I kicked off a week of posts on the Establishment wing of the Republican Party—it’s definition, influence, strategy and tactics—with Red State’s article on What The Republican “Establishment” Really Means.  These are important issues, not merely for Americans, but for anyone at all [hint hint, fellow conservative Episcopalians and yes, even ACNA members] engaged in an organization in which, by necessity, there is internal political action.

That article developed into an exchange between the Red State writer and an NRO writer [which nicely encapsulates the divide].  Red State responded with this interesting article and then followed up with a further article, from which I’m excerpting the below:

My original essay on the current divide between the GOP “Establishment,” on the one hand, and the Tea Party and other anti-Establishment factions, on the other, sought to explain the leading issue (the growth of spending and the size of government relative to the private sector), the proximate cause (the loss of trust that the GOP Establishment would make a serious effort to stem this tide) and the underlying history that led to the wide fissure currently visible in the party and the movement on the Right. As I noted in my followup essay, the loss of trust in the Establishment over spending is by no means the only such divide, but it’s the one that has brought longstanding tensions out in the open and has overcome the natural tendencies of Republicans and conservatives to defer to authority, hierarchy and gradualism. The break is not a sudden onset of irrationality, as some would have us believe, but an entirely rational response to a long and depressing history of failure to check the growth of federal spending, the federal entitlement state, and federal regulation, leading us to the point where our private sector can no longer carry the burden of a perpetually growing public sector.

RoyThis observation has led me into an argument with Avik Roy, a senior healthcare fellow at the Manhattan Institute, professional healthcare analyst and healthcare writer at Forbes and National Review, who insists that conservative voters who have lost faith after some six decades of unkept promises by Republican candidates to stem the tide of growth in government spending and regulation should continue to trust that this time, the promises of such politicians will be different because they have white papers and proposals that would lead to “entitlement reform” (note that Roy nowhere promises that any such reforms would actually reduce the ratio of public expenditure to private production). Roy relies on a false comparison: the fact that not all anti-Establishment candidates for office have offered substantive solutions to the growth of entitlement reform, whereas an ideal Establishment candidate would do so.

This is a straw man argument, and one that continues to ignore history, Congressional dynamics, the basics of negotiation and the actual facts of the current Presidential race. In fact, Roy’s analysis is impractical and detached from reality. The practical reality is that, without pressure and leadership from the anti-Establishment wing of the party, nothing will get done. And the long and dolorous history of prior efforts to restrain spending, entitlement spending and regulation amply justifies the mistrust of Establishment figures who offer purely theoretical solutions and refuse to take political risks to make them a reality.

From LifesiteNews.com

Rick Warren, the pastor of Saddleback Church who delivered the invocation at Barack Obama’s inauguration, put his pro-life views against the mandate front and center.

“I’m not a Catholic but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure,” Warren said. “I’d go to jail rather than cave in to a govement mandate that violates what God commands us to do. Would you? Acts 5:29.”

Richard Land, a pro-life leader who is a top official with the South Baptist Church, said the same thing the day prior.

“When it comes to abortifacients, and many birth-control methods are abortifacients,” Land said, this mandate is “reprehensible in its demands for people to violate their conscience.” “We are not going to do this. We have a First Amendment right to freedom of conscience, and we’re going to defend it. If we have to defend it by going to jail, so be it.”

Rev. Matthew Harrison is another Protestant leader who is opposed to the mandate.

“We have a full-tilt assault on religion, especially full creedal Christians, right now,” he said. “This is a fundamental attack on the Roman Catholic Church’s ability to be in the public square, being in partnership with the government providing for the needy.”

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ:

As you probably know by now, Obama Administration has refused to grant religious organizations an exemption from purchasing health insurance that covers abortion-inducing drugs, surgical sterilization, and contraception.
The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration’s decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

Many bishops have already declared that they will not obey this unjust law. The penalty for such a move would be severe. Catholic hospitals, universities, and other organizations would be forced to pay punitive fines ($2,000 per employee) for refusing to purchase insurance that violates the teaching of their church.

For some institutions, it would spell the end of their existence—and their far-reaching service to the public and the needy.

But Catholic institutions aren’t the only ones affected by this mandate. Prison Fellowship, for example, which employs 180 people, could not purchase insurance for its employees that covers abortifacients. Nor could the world’s largest Christian outreach to prisoners and their families afford the fines we would incur.

Three years ago, when we co-authored the Manhattan Declaration, we predicted that the time would come when Christians would have to face the very real prospect of civil disobedience—that we would have to choose sides: God or Caesar.
Certainly for the Catholics and for many of us evangelicals, that time is already upon us.

We would urge you, therefore, to raise your voice against this unjust mandate that violates our first freedom as Americans. First, please sign the petition to President Obama prepared by the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which we have posted at the Manhattan Declaration site, demanding that the President extend exemptions from this onerous mandate to all religious employers.

Second, write to your representative and your senators in Congress.

Third, sign the Manhattan Declaration. Join with 500,000 people who have committed to “fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.”
Fourth, pray. Pray that God would soften the hearts and minds of the president and the leaders within his administration so that they would reverse course.

We do not exaggerate when we say that this is the greatest threat to religious freedom in our lifetime. We cannot help but think of the words attributed to German pastor Martin Niemoeller, reflecting on the Nazi terror:

First they came for the Socialists, and I
did not speak out —
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists,
and I did not speak out —
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did
not speak out — Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was
no one left to speak for me.

In Christ,
Chuck Colson
Timothy George

The Diocese of Georgia has been very busy lately.  How do they do it?  Do they have one of those daily reminders that stick to your refrigerator?  How must that read?  1.  Sue the orthodox.  2.  Violate commitment to be a Windsor Diocese. 3.  Organize retreat for spiritual renewal. If so, they must be proud as punch to be able to check off those first three items since they have a retreat planned for tomorrow.

SAINT HELENA SERIES FOR SPIRITUAL GROWTH
LIGHT UPON LIGHT
Introducing Rumi, Sufism and Islam

Are you sitting on the edge of your seat with anticipation wondering whatever such a retreat could be about? 

Islam is a sister faith, a younger member of the Abrahamic tradition to which Christians belong. At the moment there is tension between members of this larger family, much of it based on ignorance. The purpose of this seminar will be to explore the parameters of the Islamic tradition, but more importantly to explore its inner richness and mystical tradition called Sufism, and learn from some of its most magnificent and visionary mystics and poets such as Jalalludin Rumi.

No, the seminar is not being led by Ann Holmes Redding (but good guess!) that honor goes to Lynn C Bauman, PhD. who also claims to be a priest.  If the name rings a bell, there is a reason.

Starting next Friday, February 10 and continuing until Sunday, Feb 12, a convicted child predator and registered sex offender is scheduled to lead an Episcopal retreat in Georgia and clergy sex abuse victims are urging that it be cancelled.

Evidently Mr. Bauman was an episcopal priest prior to being defrocked after he was convicted of child molestation.  Of course, that was in 1999.  Had this happened today, one wonders if he would still have the title?

Call me crazy but I think even people who attend a retreat that promotes Islam as our sister faith deserve to know that the leader is a defrocked, convicted child molester.  How about you?

First Things has an excellent article on same sex science that uses a - well - scientific approach to looking at same sex attraction.  I am sure the usual suspects will be up in arms with accusations of homophobia and bigotry proceeding any actual reading of the article.  In any event, I highly recommend you hie thee hence. 

Is homosexuality biologically determined at birth? A pervasive understanding is settling into Western culture that homosexual orientation, indeed any and all sexual orientations, has been proven by science to be a given of the human person and rooted in biology. Why does this falsehood—that homosexuality has been proven to have an exclusively biological cause—matter? It is the basis for asserting that sexual orientation is the same sort of characteristic as race or skin color, which has become, for instance, the foundational metaphor in the push for the right to marry someone of the same sex.

One reason it is generally believed that homosexuality is conclusively caused by biological factors is the supposed lack of a credible alternative. Two astonishing examples: The 2009 APA task force report on Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE), Appropriate Therapeutic Responses to Sexual Orientation, presents over and over as established “scientific fact” that “no empirical studies or peer-reviewed research supports theories attributing same-sex sexual orientation to family dysfunction or trauma.” Neuroscientist Simon LeVay, author of a major book on the science of same-sex attraction, in considering environmental and psychological factors influencing sexual orientation concludes that “there is no actual evidence to support any of those ideas.”

There are, in fact, many such studies and a lot of actual evidence. Recent studies show that familial, cultural, and other environmental factors contribute to same-sex attraction. Broken families, absent fathers, older mothers, and being born and living in urban settings all are associated with homosexual experience or attraction. Even that most despised of hypothesized causal contributors, childhood sexual abuse, has recently received significant empirical validation as a partial contributor from a sophisticated thirty-year longitudinal study published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Of course, these variables at most partially determine later homosexual experience, and most children who experienced any or all of these still grow up heterosexual, but the effects are nonetheless real.

Hat tip: Rev’d Dr. Leander Harding

From BBC News:

Anglicans opposed to the ordination of women bishops have been refused concessions they say would secure their place in the Church of England.

The General Synod defeated a bid to increase the autonomy of male bishops looking after traditionalist parishes.

But the Synod did opt to back possible further amendments to legislation introducing women bishops in a bid to avoid a split over the issue.

A final vote on the creation of female bishops will be held in the summer.

Legislation as it stands would allow traditionalist parishes to have the right of access to an alternative male bishop - one who would intervene in the diocese of a woman bishop only at her discretion.

I’m trying to find some sympathy for these people, but oddly enough, all I can muster is bottomless contempt. Amy Sullivan in The Atlantic:

Let me explain. Abortion rights organizations, pro-choice Democrats, and the media have all characterized the debate over this contraception coverage rule as a struggle between the White House and the Catholic bishops. In its editorial supporting the decision, the New York Times praised the Obama administration for “with[standing] pressure from Roman Catholic bishops and social conservatives.” But that’s not accurate.

The list of Catholics who have lobbied the administration to consider a broader definition of “religious employer” than now exists—one that would cover institutions like Catholic universities and hospitals—includes politically progressive Catholics who have been close allies of the White House, like Father John Jenkins, the president of the University of Notre Dame who stood up to conservatives who wanted Obama disinvited from giving the school’s commencement address in 2009. It includes pro-life Catholic Democrats like Senator Bob Casey, who now faces an even tougher reelection campaign in Pennsylvania because of his vote in favor of Obama’s health reform plan. And it includes precisely those Catholic hospital officials and progressive nuns whose support of health reform provided reassurance and cover for the holdout Catholic Democrats who voted to make it law. In doing so, they made possible the largest expansion of contraception access in U.S. history.

Without the work of women like Sister Carol Keehan, president of the Catholic Health Association, and Sister Simone Campbell of the Catholic social justice group NETWORK, there would be no health reform and therefore no contraception coverage mandate to argue over—not just for the employees of Catholic hospitals and universities, but for the estimated 24 million other women who will benefit from this aspect of the law.

So, yes, a little gratitude from women’s health advocates and other liberals would be appropriate. Instead, when these Catholic sisters and others asked for some flexibility with regard to the mandate, the advocates pooh-poohed as irrelevant their concerns about religious liberty and insisted that “the bishops” were the only ones who had a problem with contraception coverage.

In a 49-page brief filed today with the Texas State Supreme Court, attorneys for the Diocese, Corporation, and congregations asked the Court to uphold several previous Appellate Court decisions and establish Neutral Principles as the method for resolving church property disputes in the state.

Neutral Principles, accepted in 36 states and approved by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1979, is a method of settling questions of church property ownership using the same rules that govern ownership of other types of private property, and it removes courts from wading into doctrinal disputes.

The brief also asked the Court to reverse the Fort Worth trial court’s February 2011 decision in favor of the Episcopal parties’ claims to diocesan property, and instead to uphold well-established state codes on trust instruments and non-profit corporations. The brief asks the Court to grant the Diocese’s summary judgment claims and prevent a hostile takeover of diocesan property by outside parties.

As you may know, the Department of Health and Human Services has issued a mandate, backed by the Obama administration, requiring all insurance plans to cover the cost of contraceptives, including contraceptives that act as abortificients (i.e. drugs that kill unborn babies). The mandate applies to non-profit religious organizations like Catholic Charities as well as secular ones.

Moreover, while the mandate does not apply to employers that meet the legal definition of religious organizations (churches for example), the HHS will require even exempt employers to provide information to employees about where they can obtain contraceptive (including abortificient) coverage.

Last week Catholic leaders denounced the mandate from pulpits across the United States.

But this is not a “Catholic” issue. As Archbishop Duncan writes:

“The Anglican Church in North America stands by our Catholic brothers and sisters as followers of Christ in a nation whose Constitution guarantees ‘the free exercise’ of religion.  As Christians, our faith and doctrine are at the very heart of our service to others in our community.  Therefore, it is extremely troubling to see our government mandate services contrary to Catholic Church teaching.  I call on all members of the Anglican Church to stand by our Catholic brothers and sisters, and pray for our elected officials to have the courage to stand up for religious freedom and overturn this mandate.”

If the mandate stands “free exercise” falls. The Archbishop is absolutely right. We must oppose this tyranny with every political fiber.

We must also flatly refuse to follow it.

The New Testament commands Christians to submit to and obey the authorities set over us.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.(Romans 13:1-3)

Paul wrote his letter to the Romans during Nero’s reign. God who inspired and superintended Romans 13 is blind neither to systemic injustice nor to the moral depravity of rulers. But government, even bad government, is a divine gift to fallen humanity, restraining the most vile and violent passions of human nature. To defy the laws of the state, then, is to defy the law of God.

There are only two exceptions to this rule of faith: 1. when a government commands Christians to do what God forbids (Daniel 3) or 2. when a government forbids Christians to do what God commands (Acts 4:18-20).

The HHS mandate requires Christian charities to directly contribute, not only to contraception, but to the killing of unborn babies. It also requires churches that employ staff to provide staff members with information about where to go to kill their babies cheaply.

Both requirements clearly fall within the first exception which means that there is only one faithful response: respectful but unyielding disobedience.

So long as I am rector of Good Shepherd we will never provide information about contraception or abortion to any employee. I pray that Anglican pastors, bishops, archbishops and Christian leaders across the country will make similar commitments.

Two articles today on the tactics—the “making the sausage”—of the Establishment segment of the Republican Party.  This is important stuff—it’s good to be very clear in our minds about how this works in various organizational entities so that we can recognize the “wheels within wheels” when they occur.

From the Washington Times, where there is more:

The 2012 Republican primary race has passed well beyond the rabbit hole into some extra-dimensional bizarro world where up is down, black is white and the allies of the candidate who disavowed Reaganism would have us believe that the leader of the “second stage of the Reagan Revolution” is somehow insufficiently Reaganesque.

It’s no secret that the GOP establishment backs Mitt Romney. The same folks who gave us John McCain and Bob Dole have picked their winner. When Mr. Romney is down, their panic shows. They start floating desperate ideas like late-entry candidates or a brokered convention. They also pull out the long knives for Newt Gingrich. After the former speaker’s decisive victory in South Carolina, insiders launched an all-out assault upon him. Unmasked and panicked, the GOP establishment unleashed the tactics of the left upon the right.

GOP insiders first dredged up 2-decade-old debunked partisan ethics charges that damaged Mr. Gingrich’s reputation until the Internal Revenue Service finally exonerated him. Mr. Romney couldn’t resist seeking cheap points by joining the discredited Democrats who started the whole sordid mess. Mr. Romney featured, of all people, Nancy Pelosi with her innuendo of Mr. Gingrich’s supposed wrongdoing, ironically blasting out an email slur just as Mrs. Pelosi was backing away from it. Then came something even worse: the salacious insinuation that Mr. Gingrich somehow betrayed former President Ronald Reagan.

The anti-Gingrich onslaught reached an apogee on the Drudge Report as Romney allies fed one negative story after another, amassing an impressive 10 pieces on the influential website at one point. A screaming headline claimed that Mr. Gingrich had repeatedly insulted Reagan. The unseemly issue of Mr. Gingrich’s second marriage managed to resurface. To cap it off, Ann Coulter, the surprising new head cheerleader for the moderate movement, enjoyed seeing her latest anti-Gingrich missive prominently featured.

I am continuing to steadfastly plod through posting some articles on the influence and tactics of a particular segment of the Republican Party—the Establishment.  These next two articles [posted in short succession] are more about tactics—“making the sausage” so to speak.  Since, again, these two articles mention specific candidates, let me say again that the important part of these articles are their broad over-arching themes on influence, definition, and tactics.  I personally think that all three of the candidates currently “in play” are appallingly non-conservative in key areas.  I would vote for two of them and not one of them—but honestly it doesn’t really matter anyway.  The key thing is the long-term effect of one segment of the Republican Party on the party’s decisions and strategies and tactics. 

I’ve jumped to more of the middle of this article, but do take the time to read it all, from the National Journal, where there is more:

Dole and Gingrich have a history, and it bears a quick summary. When Dole was a member of the Senate Finance Committee and urged then-President Reagan to raise taxes to cope with rising budget deficits, Gingrich memorably branded him a “tax collector for the welfare state.”

When Dole challenged President Clinton in 1996, Gingrich negotiated the deal with Clinton over welfare reform-–removing a potent issue of contrast from Dole’s campaign quiver. Dole told me later that when he heard welfare reform would be signed before his nominating convention, he knew his campaign had no chance.

It probably didn’t anyway, but Dole viewed Gingrich’s decision to get welfare reform signed into law–-allowing Clinton to campaign on it as he did in his convention renomination speech–-as a political and personal affront. Dole also knew he would face an onslaught of Clinton ads linking him to the unpopular Gingrich. He did. Vice President Al Gore put a cap on this at his convention speech, when he declared “Americans will reject this Dole-Gingrich approach and all this déjà voodoo.”

In that summer of 1996, Gingrich was terrified that Republicans would lose their majority-–in part because of two government shutdowns that Gingrich engineered in pursuit of a balanced budget (which was, it bears saying, eventually achieved). In that atmosphere of panic, Gingrich pointedly advised swing-district Republicans to leave conservatism aside and do whatever it took to hold their seats.

“For the marginal members, being speaker of the House, I’d say to them: Talk to your pollsters, do what gets you reelected, and call home afterward,” Gingrich told The New York Times editorial board.

Dole and other Republicans are now telling GOP primary voters to avoid what Gingrich was forced to advise when he led the party as speaker–-a mad race toward political expediency created by an agenda that had grown unpopular and threatening to the party’s long-term health.

This is not the only line of attack Gingrich has had to confront. Now brought into question is Gingrich’s fidelity to Reagan. There are several print and video examples of Gingrich trafficking in allegedly anti-Reagan apostasy. Some are contrived. For instance, a 1988 clip of Gingrich predicting that then-Vice President George H. W. Bush would lose if he ran like Reagan was actually advice for Bush to develop an authentic conservative platform of his own and distinguish himself as a new leader for a new time. In fact, Gingrich in that clip-–circulated by the Romney campaign to suggest Gingrich was abandoning Reaganism–-specifically praises Bush for his “no new taxes” pledge. He made that pledge while campaigning for the New Hampshire primary–-in which he defeated Dole.

From The Hollywood Reporter: 

Wanna make money in Hollywood? Release patriotic movies that promote conservative values and do not denigrate Christianity.

For two decades, that has been the message that Movieguide has been pushing, and on Friday when it celebrates its 20-year-anniversary with an awards show airing on The Hallmark Channel, the organization will present a 76-page report designed to back up its assertions.

This year’s annual report sells for $1,000 and the price includes tickets to the Annual Faith & Values Awards Gala at the Universal Hilton Hotel. The report praises such 2011 releases as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Battle Los Angeles, Moneyball, We Bought a Zoo and Hugo while heaping scorn on the likes of Super 8, Red State, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy, We Need to Talk About Kevin, Bad Teacher and Happy Feet Two.

  By Jove - that bears repeating.- Release patriotic movies that promote conservative values and do not denigrate Christianity.

From the Religious Herald

A counseling student who declined to advise a gay client might have been expelled from her university because of her faith, a federal appeals court ruled on Jan. 27.

Citing her evangelical Christian religion, Julea Ward disagreed with professors at Eastern Michigan University who told her she was required to support the sexual orientation of her clients. When the graduate student was assigned a client who sought counseling on a same-sex relationship, she asked to have the client referred to another counselor.

Ward was then expelled from the school.

If a student counsellor who happened to be a devoted, practicing Muslim was faced with counseling someone which went counter to Islam, would they be expelled? 

Hat tip:  Veritas2007

We continue this week’s series on the Establishment segment of the Republican Party with this excellent article from NRO’s McCarthy on what the Establishment Republicans are up to in the House:

Forget the fratricidal warfare between two establishment soldiers so harmonious on substance that their contest, inevitably, has descended into a poisonous, personal food-fight. The problem is not the GOP infighting. The problem is the GOP. Republicans are simply not interested in limiting government or addressing our death spiral of spending.

My weekend column was about the dog-and-pony show that congressional Republicans just put on to snow you into thinking they oppose the $2.4 trillion debt-ceiling increase they actually approved only six months ago. Now, get ready for House Republicans to unveil their $260 billion transportation bill.

The federal government should not be in the transportation business at all. A federal role was rationalized in the mid-Fifties to finance the construction of interstate highways. As National Review’s editors observed in 2005, that project was completed in the early Eighties, at which time the fuel tax that funded it should have been repealed and the upkeep of highways left to the states. “Instead,” they wrote, “Congress morphed the program into a slush fund for some of its most indefensible pork-barrel spending.”

The cover story for this permanent spendathon is that we now have a national highway “system” that ought to be financed by its main users. “Systems” is the abracadabra chanted by the progressives who run both parties when they’re about to pick your pocket. We don’t have a highway “system.” We have 50 states, whose widely varying transit needs are best known, and can be best addressed, by the affected local communities.

Plus, see how easily a “highway system” morphs into a “transportation system.” The taxes that Leviathan confiscates from drivers, purportedly for road construction and maintenance, are actually redistributed to subsidize other forms of transit preferred by progressives — including walking. For that, you can thank Republicans. With a compassionate wink from President Bush, the Republican Congress enacted an obscene $286.5 billion transportation bill in 2005, assigning the act one of those precious Washington acronyms — SAFETEA-LU (who cares what it stands for?). The editors accurately described it as a “monstrosity of wasteful spending.”

From His Grace’s blog: 

And not merely of ‘downgrading’, but actually ousting Him altogether from the Trinity: He is no longer the Son of the Father, because such terms are apparently offensive to Muslims, for whom Allah has no son and Mohammed is his messenger. Period. So, it appears that Wycliffe’s new Bibles are to be purged of all that which might cause offence to the heathen. God knows what John Wycliffe himself might have had to say about this: when words of truth become a stumbling block to mission, it must surely time to reassess one’s missiology, not adapt the truth.

Over on TitusOneNine, Kendall Harmon had linked to something with the headline “Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori invited to Anglican Provinces throughout Asia.”

I nearly passed it by, but I was struck by the, um . . . sweeping generalization of the headline.  See, when you’re trying to spin something as successful, but want to be vague on the details, you say stuff like [name of person you want to pump up] [verb indicating achievement] and “throughout [an entire continent].”

Here’s an example of how this would work if Matt Kennedy had a public relations flack who wasn’t very good [but was trying really hard.]

“Famed New York Preacher Matt Kennedy Launches North American Tour”

You could even say “Famed Acknowledged Well-Respected Preacher Matt Kennedy Launches Grand North American Tour.”  For the novice reader, this could be considered really neat, even if he doesn’t know Matt Kennedy.  After all, if he’s made it in New York, then he can make it anywhere, right?

But upon reading the article, one discovers that “New York” means “New York State” not “New York City.”  And the “North American tour” consists of preaching stints in Georgia and Texas.

Technically speaking, all of the things mentioned in the headline are correct.  Matt Kennedy is famed, acknowledged, and well-respected in his circles.  And Matt is in New York.  And were Matt to preach in Georgia and Texas, one could truthfully say that he is engaged in a “North American Tour.”

But . . . the sweeping vague grandiosity of the headline gives the game away.  And it does an actual disservice to who Matt Kennedy is because it attempts to inflate someone who needs no inflation.  The only thing such a headline would demonstrate is that either 1) Matt Kennedy seeks recognition beyond his current standing—he wants to leap a rung or two in public recognition and credibility before he is ready or 2) he hired a klutzy pr person.

That’s my general thesis.

But let’s dig a bit more into the details of this actual news release.

First off, this is announcing an “achievement” received from a particular set of people—leaders of Anglican Communion provinces who have, in theory, issued invitations [I have my own speculation even about the idea that they were “issued” but that’s for my own musing].  So immediately one recognizes—from the headline of the news release—the goal: to tout an achievement given by a certain niche segment of Anglitania.  You’ve got someone who is quite desperate to rid herself of the taint of “anathema”—which has apparently led to someone news releasing tea with Primates of Provinces!

Note how carefully the release is phrased too.  We are informed that KJS “has accepted the invitations of Primates of Anglican Communion provinces in Asia to visit, address diocesan gatherings, celebrate Eucharist and preach during February and early March.”

But . . . but . . . where precisely will she be addressing “diocesan gatherings,” and where precisely will she “celebrate Eucharist and preach”?

Ah . . . perhaps that is answered by the list of four Anglican Communion provinces in the third paragraph: the Philippines, Japan, Korea, and Hong Kong.

But no . . . because we are told that what she will be doing in those four provinces specifically is “visit and meet with the Anglican Primates” there.

Now—it may be that our Presiding Bishop will “address diocesan gatherings, celebrate Eucharist and preach” in all four of those Anglican Communion provinces and if so, that’s an achievement . . .  for her.

But we don’t know that from this news release.

So.

We know that she is having tea with the Primates of four Anglican Communion Provinces.  And we know that she will “address diocesan gatherings, celebrate Eucharist and preach” . . . somewhere or other . . .

But the most important thing we know is that Katharine Jefferts Schori needs to announce publicly that she is invited to go to some Anglican Communion provinces.

Matt Kennedy helpfully points us to another excellent model for this kind of news release:

Day of Shining Star to Be Commemorated in Foreign Countries

Pyongyang, February 6 (KCNA)—Events to mark the 70th birth anniversary of General Secretary Kim Jong Il (the Day of the Shining Star) were held in different countries.

They included a meeting and film show in Pakistan on Jan. 28 and a lecture in Benin on Jan. 30.

The chairman of the Pakistan Association for Self-Reliance Studies and other speakers highly praised the exploits performed by Kim Jong Il for the noble cause of ensuring the prosperity of the country and wellbeing of the people and peace and security of the world, adding that it is quite natural for progressive humankind and Juche idea followers to commemorate his birth anniversary.

He would be always alive in the hearts of the Korean people and global progressive humankind forever and his exploits in the international working class movement and global independence would shine forever, they noted, and continued:

The chairman and secretary general of the Benin National Committee for the Study of General Kim Jong Il’s Works said Kim Jong Il pursued original Songun politics, putting forward the Korean People’s Army as a mainstay of the defense capability for self-defence and a main force for building a thriving nation. He was, indeed, a peerlessly illustrious commander of Songun.

Socialism has won victory after victory in the DPRK and the invincibility of the Juche idea has been strikingly demonstrated worldwide despite the U.S.-led imperialist allied forces’ persistent moves to stifle the DPRK for several decades thanks to the treasured sword of Songun provided by him.

The revolutionary cause of Juche is sure to triumph as long as the dear respected Kim Jong Un follows the Songun politics, they concluded.

Upon our Presiding Bishop’s return we can sit back and wait for more news releases about all of her triumphs while taking the continent of Asia by storm. 

Despite the ruling, it could be a while before same-sex couples can resume marrying in the state. Prop 8 backers plan to appeal to a larger Ninth Circuit panel and then to the U.S. Supreme Court if they lose in the intermediate court. Marriages would likely stay on hold while that process plays out.

Slate’s legal affairs correspondent Dahlia Lithwick said many cases involving gay marriage have been burbling up.

“At this point, we’re almost in a foot race as to which one gets to the Supreme Court first,” she said on the Madeleine Brand Show. “It’s fair to say both sides do eventually want this to get [there].”

The Ninth Circuit ruling comes 18 months after federal judge Vaughn Walker struck down the ban. Walker found Prop 8 violated constitutional rights under two provisions: the equal protection clause and the due process clause of the constitution to marry.

In other words, gay marriage has actually been legal since we ratified the 14th Amendment in 1868, but we’re just now figuring that out.

It would also seem to imply that if gay marriage bans are unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment, then so are bans on possessing and carrying firearms, which California has in spades. Where am I wrong here?

This is a great example of how to leave an organization in the aftermath of a public relations blunder such as this one, in which (in my opinion) the Komen Foundation hung Karen Handel out to dry as some lone pro-life wacko: You make public the facts surrounding the decisions in question, you resign effective immediately, and you politely but tersely decline their offer of a severance package.

We can all agree that this is a challenging and deeply unsettling situation for all involved in the fight against breast cancer. However, Komen’s decision to change its granting strategy and exit the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood and its grants was fully vetted by every appropriate level within the organization. At the November Board meeting, the Board received a detailed review of the new model and related criteria. As you will recall, the Board specifically discussed various issues, including the need to protect our mission by ensuring we were not distracted or negatively affected by any other organization’s real or perceived challenges. No objections were made to moving forward.

I am deeply disappointed by the gross mischaracterizations of the strategy, its rationale, and my involvement in it. I openly acknowledge my role in the matter and continue to believe our decision was the best one for Komen’s future and the women we serve. However, the decision to update our granting model was made before I joined Komen, and the controversy related to Planned Parenthood has long been a concern to the organization. Neither the decision nor the changes themselves were based on anyone’s political beliefs or ideology. Rather, both were based on Komen’s mission and how to better serve women, as well as a realization of the need to distance Komen from controversy. I believe that Komen, like any other nonprofit organization, has the right and the responsibility to set criteria and highest standards for how and to whom it grants.

What was a thoughtful and thoroughly reviewed decision – one that would have indeed enabled Komen to deliver even greater community impact – has unfortunately been turned into something about politics. This is entirely untrue. This development should sadden us all greatly.

From The Guardian: 

The Church of England is failing gay Christian couples and must rethink the traditional, biblical portrayal of homosexuality as “idolatrous, promiscuous and exploitative”, according to one bishop.

In remarks that reveal deep divisions in the church hierarchy, the Right Rev Nicholas Holtam said there were gay couples who were living faithfully and lovingly for life and that the quality and nature of their relationships meant it was appropriate to use the language of marriage.

The theory holds that creation began some 14 billion years ago with a colossal explosion in which space, time, energy and matter were created, and galaxies, stars and planets – which are in continual expansion – came to be.

“We know that God is the creator,” he added, “that He is a good Father who has a providential plan for us, that we are his children, and that we everything we can learn by reason about the origin of the universe is not in contradiction with the religious message of the Bible.”

Fr. Funes said that as an astronomer and a Catholic, he is open to this explanation of the creation of the universe, despite “some yet unanswered questions.”

He noted, for example, that while there is no proof of other intelligent life in the universe, “we cannot rule it out,” since studies show that there are nearly 700 planets orbiting other stars.

“If in the future it was established that life, and intelligent life, exists, which I think would be very difficult, I don’t think this contradicts the religious message of creation because they would also be creatures of God,” he said.

The truck-stop hooker is no Julia Roberts, the trucker in the cab with her no Richard Gere, and this truck stop off the highway could not be any farther from Beverly Hills, the staging ground for “Pretty Woman.”

The woman sports baggy shorts, a white T-shirt and frizzy hair. Her fat middle-aged pimp sits in a beat up red Honda, watching as his “lot lizard” moves from truck to truck, in broad daylight.  If this pimp has a cane it is for substance, not style.

She moves through the parking lot, occasionally opening a cab’s passenger-side door and climbing in.

The trucker and hooker disappear in the back for 10 minutes.

Danielle Mitchell watches from the other end of the parking lot and shakes her head.

“We know from talking to other victims and other agencies that girls are taken to truck stops and they’re actually traded,” she says, sitting in her car, a shiny silver sport utility vehicle, keeping a healthy 50-yard distance from the pimp.

That’s not a question I’m asking, because fro all my gripes with CNN, I highly doubt they will. No, this is a question being asked by a rather hysterical Sarah Jones at a site called Politicususa.

What’s Ms. Jones’ beef with Erickson? Only that he told it as he saw it.

Oh - and that the subject is Christianity.

Commenting on President Obama’s comments on who Jesus would tax, in the context of his health care plan’s requirements regarding contraception and abortifacients, Erickson wrote:

The President this week chose to pervert God’s Word to make the case for a tax increase, but he also chose to ignore God’s word on life and is ordering Christians, while he claims to be one, to violate their Christian conscience on abortion — requiring Christian organizations to provide health insurance that will cover the cost of drugs that induce abortions.

He is trying to have it both ways. He is trying to use God’s Word to defend a tax policy that dissuades individuals from giving gladly and charitably to the poor as God instructs and is ignoring God’s Word in order to force fellow Christians into violating their Christian conscience — something about which God cares a great deal.

This cannot end well for him, particularly doing this claiming to be a Christian. And it might not end well for the rest of us either. Barack Obama has gone to war with Christians’ consciences and he is perverting God’s word in the process to get his way on public policy.

At this, Ms. Jones becomes unhinged:

...my concern today is the rhetoric of hate coming from someone who works for CNN. CNN hired Erickson in 2010 because he is allegedly in touch with small town America. Really? This is how small town America thinks? Sorry, but no. I will not stand for America to be tarnished thusly. I have friends who live in very small towns and they do not run around accusing people of perverting God’s word like a crazy carnival con artist.

The post is full of the usual liberal mischaracterizations of Christianity, logical failures, and hateful rhetoric that are on display whenever someone in a supposedly “friendly” news organization goes off the plantation - and especially when the topic is Christianity - but I recommend it to you for comic relief if nothing else.

Damian Thompson:

This might seem a strange thing for a Catholic to say, but I often think that the Queen is the most impressive religious leader in Britain. She says little in public about her Christianity, but what she does say – usually at the end of her Christmas Day broadcast – is powerful in its directness.

Having discussed the celebrations, tragedies and anxieties of the past year, the Queen affirms, naturally but unflinchingly and with no attempt at religious relativism, her faith in Jesus Christ.

A response to John Piper’s 8 Traits of a Masculine Ministry:

3. A masculine ministry brings out the more rugged aspects of the Christian life and presses them on the conscience of the church with a demeanor that accords with their proportion in Scripture.

This is strange language indeed: “the more rugged aspects of the Christian life”. What about the more tender aspects of the Christian life? What about the more refined aspects? Why are we putting a filter on the whole counsel of God? Do we want a masculine Christianity or do we want Christianity? Surely our aim should be to understand the scriptures as best we can in our cultural context. Is Piper asking me to filter out the parts of scripture which command us to be compassionate, tender, gracious because they might be deemed effeminate? I don’t want to deliberately cut the revelation of God in Christ down so that it echoes my cultural bias or my preference for a certain style of Christianity. Dr Piper is very vocal about his love for the scriptures so I struggle to understand why he would encourage this deliberate distortion of God’s word.

Piper concedes that women could do this, but he claims the theme of Christian warfare and other rugged aspects of biblical theology and life should draw the men of the church to take them up in the spirit of a protective warrior in his family and “tribe,” rather than expecting the women to take on the spirit of a combatant for the sake of the church. This language of protective warrior reminds me of John Eldridge’s book Wild at Heart rather than the scriptures which actually happen to have quite enough examples of rugged and fierce women. Perhaps Piper’s words would have more biblical tenacity if he had said “the spirit of a protective warrior like Deborah, or Jael or Queen Esther?”

Four lessons from Pajamas Media, where there is more.  These are applicable lessons for conservative Episcopalians as well.

Komen was unprepared for Planned Parenthood’s reaction. Go back and review Jill Stanek’s post on Komen’s initial decision. According to her, Komen wanted to make its grant criteria decision quietly and move on. Komen did not anticipate that Planned Parenthood would make sure the decision was not only not quiet, but that it would become a firestorm for an organization that, up to now, has enjoyed decade after decade of positive press. Komen might have been complacent, but more importantly, it was naive. Today’s statement, in which Komen reiterates its desire to move on, suggests that that naivete has not been punctured. Given Planned Parenthood’s history and leadership, there was no way it would take any adverse decision lying down. No one should have expected it to do anything but fight, so Komen should have gamed out Planned Parenthood’s likely reactions, and planned its own counter actions.

As I mentioned on Monday, this week I am posting a series of off-topic articles analyzing the influence of a certain segment of the Republican Party.  Since some of these articles mention political candidates, I should note that the larger, over-arching themes of the articles are what I’m interested in—and indeed what applies to conservative Episcopalians or conservatives in any known organizational entity.  This article from American Thinker takes note of what happens when the conservative segment figures out that there is such a thing as “an Establishment” segment and that this segment is pulling the strings to organizational decisions. It’s good stuff—make certain you read it all.

The Republican Party has a tenuous hold on the conservative movement in America.  At present the only home for the 40 per cent of the electorate that identify themselves as conservative is the Republican Party, but it appears that those who are nominally identified as the “Republican Establishment” are doing all they can to alienate the vast majority of the current base of the Party.

There is no office on Connecticut Avenue in Washington with a sign reading “The Republican Establishment” or the “The Democratic Establishment”; rather it is an amalgam of like-minded groups with one common interest: control of the government purse-strings.

The Republican Establishment is made up of the following:  1) many current and nearly all retired Republican national office holders whose livelihood and narcissistic demands depends upon fealty to Party and access to government largesse; 2) the majority of the conservative media, including pundits, editors, writers and television news personalities based in Washington and New York whose proximity to power and access is vital to their continued standard of living;  3) numerous think-tanks and members thereof who are waiting to latch on to the next Republican administration for employment and ego-gratification; and 4) the reliable deep pocket political contributors and political consultants whose future is irrevocably tied to the political machinery of the Party.

The overriding interest of this cabal has been and continues to be: the accumulation of power through the control of the income, borrowing and spending by the Federal Government.  Thus, with the exception of the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the Republican controlled House of Representatives from 1995 to 1999, the Republican members of the Ruling Class have been content since 1952 to merely slow down the big-government policies of the Democrats while publicly decrying their tax and spend policies.

This insider apparatus has been the primary determining factor in whom among those choosing to run for office will receive the financial, media and logistical support so vital for any political campaign, but particularly for national office be it the Presidency or either house of Congress.  It is this cabal that has given the nation Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain in the presidential sweepstakes and innumerable go-along to get-along members of Congress.

Most of you have probably heard by now of the new book out by Charles Murray—Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960–2010.  Here’s another summary article on it, this time over at The Wall Street Journal.  Take special note [not excerpted here] of his prescription for the problem:

It can be said without hyperbole that these divergences put Belmont and Fishtown into different cultures. But it’s not just the working class that’s moved; the upper middle class has pulled away in its own fashion, too.

If you were an executive living in Belmont in 1960, income inequality would have separated you from the construction worker in Fishtown, but remarkably little cultural inequality. You lived a more expensive life, but not a much different life. Your kitchen was bigger, but you didn’t use it to prepare yogurt and muesli for breakfast. Your television screen was bigger, but you and the construction worker watched a lot of the same shows (you didn’t have much choice). Your house might have had a den that the construction worker’s lacked, but it had no StairMaster or lap pool, nor any gadget to monitor your percentage of body fat. You both drank Bud, Miller, Schlitz or Pabst, and the phrase “boutique beer” never crossed your lips. You probably both smoked. If you didn’t, you did not glare contemptuously at people who did.

When you went on vacation, you both probably took the family to the seashore or on a fishing trip, and neither involved hotels with five stars. If you had ever vacationed outside the U.S. (and you probably hadn’t), it was a one-time trip to Europe, where you saw eight cities in 14 days—not one of the two or three trips abroad you now take every year for business, conferences or eco-vacations in the cloud forests of Costa Rica.

You both lived in neighborhoods where the majority of people had only high-school diplomas—and that might well have included you. The people around you who did have college degrees had almost invariably gotten them at state universities or small religious colleges mostly peopled by students who were the first generation of their families to attend college. Except in academia, investment banking, a few foundations, the CIA and the State Department, you were unlikely to run into a graduate of Harvard, Princeton or Yale.

Even the income inequality that separated you from the construction worker was likely to be new to your adulthood. The odds are good that your parents had been in the working class or middle class, that their income had not been much different from the construction worker’s, that they had lived in communities much like his, and that the texture of the construction worker’s life was recognizable to you from your own childhood.

Taken separately, the differences in lifestyle that now separate Belmont from Fishtown are not sinister, but those quirks of the upper-middle class that I mentioned—the yogurt and muesli and the rest—are part of a mosaic of distinctive practices that have developed in Belmont. These have to do with the food Belmonters eat, their drinking habits, the ages at which they marry and have children, the books they read (and their number), the television shows and movies they watch (and the hours spent on them), the humor they enjoy, the way they take care of their bodies, the way they decorate their homes, their leisure activities, their work environments and their child-raising practices. Together, they have engendered cultural separation.

It gets worse. A subset of Belmont consists of those who have risen to the top of American society. They run the country, meaning that they are responsible for the films and television shows you watch, the news you see and read, the fortunes of the nation’s corporations and financial institutions, and the jurisprudence, legislation and regulations produced by government. They are the new upper class, even more detached from the lives of the great majority of Americans than the people of Belmont—not just socially but spatially as well. The members of this elite have increasingly sorted themselves into hyper-wealthy and hyper-elite ZIP Codes that I call the SuperZIPs.

In 1960, America already had the equivalent of SuperZIPs in the form of famously elite neighborhoods—places like the Upper East Side of New York, Philadelphia’s Main Line, the North Shore of Chicago and Beverly Hills. But despite their prestige, the people in them weren’t uniformly wealthy or even affluent. Across 14 of the most elite places to live in 1960, the median family income wasn’t close to affluence. It was just $84,000 (in today’s purchasing power). Only one in four adults in those elite communities had a college degree.

By 2000, that diversity had dwindled. Median family income had doubled, to $163,000 in the same elite ZIP Codes. The percentage of adults with B.A.s rose to 67% from 26%. And it’s not just that elite neighborhoods became more homogeneously affluent and highly educated—they also formed larger and larger clusters.

If you are invited to a dinner party by one of Washington’s power elite, the odds are high that you will be going to a home in Georgetown, the rest of Northwest D.C., Chevy Chase, Bethesda, Potomac or McLean, comprising 13 adjacent ZIP Codes in all. If you rank all the ZIP Codes in the country on an index of education and income and group them by percentiles, you will find that 11 of these 13 D.C.-area ZIP Codes are in the 99th percentile and the other two in the 98th. Ten of them are in the top half of the 99th percentile.

Similarly large clusters of SuperZIPs can be found around New York City, Los Angeles, the San Francisco-San Jose corridor, Boston and a few of the nation’s other largest cities. Because running major institutions in this country usually means living near one of these cities, it works out that the nation’s power elite does in fact live in a world that is far more culturally rarefied and isolated than the world of the power elite in 1960.

And the isolation is only going to get worse. Increasingly, the people who run the country were born into that world. Unlike the typical member of the elite in 1960, they have never known anything but the new upper-class culture. We are now seeing more and more third-generation members of the elite. Not even their grandparents have been able to give them a window into life in the rest of America.
***

Why have these new lower and upper classes emerged? For explaining the formation of the new lower class, the easy explanations from the left don’t withstand scrutiny. It’s not that white working class males can no longer make a “family wage” that enables them to marry. The average male employed in a working-class occupation earned as much in 2010 as he did in 1960. It’s not that a bad job market led discouraged men to drop out of the labor force. Labor-force dropout increased just as fast during the boom years of the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s as it did during bad years.

As I’ve argued in much of my previous work, I think that the reforms of the 1960s jump-started the deterioration. Changes in social policy during the 1960s made it economically more feasible to have a child without having a husband if you were a woman or to get along without a job if you were a man; safer to commit crimes without suffering consequences; and easier to let the government deal with problems in your community that you and your neighbors formerly had to take care of.

A fascinating article from the New Criterion on the shattering differences between two groups of American citizens—make certain you read the entire piece:

The exceptionalism has not been a figment of anyone’s imagination, but nothing in the water made us that way. We have been the product of cultural capital of two kinds. The first is the system the Founders laid down that I shall refer to as the American Project: national life based on the Founders’ idea that the “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, is a state that “shall restrain men from injuring one another [and] shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.”

The second source of cultural capital has been a set of qualities about Americans that made the American Project feasible. Tocqueville’s disquisitions on these qualities are better known, but another early European observer of America, Francis Grund, summed it up nicely in his book The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (1837):
 

The American Constitution is remarkable for its simplicity; but it can only suffice a people habitually correct in their actions, and would be utterly inadequate to the wants of a different nation. Change the domestic habits of the Americans, their religious devotion, and their high respect for morality, and it will not be necessary to change a single letter of the Constitution in order to vary the whole form of their government.

What did Grund have in mind when he wrote of “habitually correct in their actions”? Different observers stressed different aspects of the topic, and they could be parsed in several ways. But if there is no canonical list, four aspects of American life were so completely accepted as essential that, for practical purposes, you would be hard put to find an eighteenth-century Founder or a nineteenth-century commentator who dissented from any of them. Two of them are virtues in themselves—industriousness and honesty—and two of them refer to institutions through which right behavior is nurtured—marriage and religion. For convenience, I will refer to all four as the Founding virtues.

As recently as half a century ago, Americans across all classes showed only minor differences on the Founding virtues. When Americans resisted the idea of being thought part of an upper class or lower class, they were responding to a reality: there really was such a thing as a civic culture that embraced all of them. Today, that is no longer true. Americans have formed a new lower class and a new upper class that have no precedent in our history. American exceptionalism is deteriorating in tandem with this development.

America has never been a classless society. From the beginning, rich and poor have usually lived in different parts of town, gone to different churches, and had somewhat different manners and mores. It is not the existence of classes that is new, but the emergence of classes that diverge on core behaviors and values—classes that barely recognize their underlying American kinship.

To make this case, I use data based exclusively on non-Latino whites (hereafter just “whites”) as a way of focusing attention on the nature of the problem. We are not dealing with problems caused by ethnic inequalities. I also focus on people ages 30–49, adults in the prime of life, to strip away complications associated with young adults who are delaying marriage and older adults who are retiring earlier than they used to.

To represent the classes at the two ends of the continuum, I give you two fictional neighborhoods that I hereby label Belmont (after an archetypal upper-middle-class suburb near Boston) and Fishtown (after a neighborhood in Philadelphia that has been white working class since the Revolution). To be assigned to Belmont, the people in my databases must have at least a bachelor’s degree and work as a manager, physician, attorney, engineer, architect, scientist, college professor, or in content-production jobs in the media. To be assigned to Fishtown, they must have no academic degree higher than a high school diploma. If they work, their job must be in a blue-collar, service, or low-level white-collar occupation.

Here’s what happened to the Founding virtues in Belmont and Fishtown from 1960 to 2010:

Marriage.

In 1960, extremely high proportions of whites ages 30–49 in both Belmont and Fishtown were married—94 percent in Belmont and 84 percent in Fishtown. The unquestioned norm in both neighborhoods was marriage. In the 1970s, those percentages declined about equally in Belmont and Fishtown. Then came the great divergence. In Belmont, marriage among prime-age adults stabilized during the mid-1980s and remained flat thereafter, standing at 83 percent in 2010. In Fishtown, marriage continued a slide that had not slackened as of 2010, when the percentage of married whites ages 30–49 had fallen to a minority of 48 percent. What had been a 10 percentage point difference between Belmont and Fishtown in the 1960s stood at 35 percentage points in 2010. The culprits—divorce and failure to marry in the first place—split responsibility for the divergence about equally.

Another aspect of marriage showed just as great a divergence: the percentage of children born to unmarried women. Frightened though politicians and media eminences are to say so, nonmarital births are problematic. Children who are born to unmarried women fare worse than the children of divorce and far worse than children raised in intact families even after controlling for the income and education of the parents. The technical literature on that topic is large and damning. The literature on what happens when large proportions of children within a neighborhood are born to unmarried women is less extensive, but the coincidence between that phenomenon and communities that have fallen apart, whether they be in the inner city or rural America, suggests that a large proportion of nonmarital births within a community constitutes a social catastrophe.

In 1960, just 2 percent of all white births were nonmarital. When the Vital Statistics first gave us the mother’s education in 1970, 6 percent of births to white women with no more than a high school education—women with a Fishtown education—were out of wedlock. Or to put it another way, 94 percent of such births were within marriage. By 2008, 44 percent were nonmarital. Among the college-educated women of Belmont, less than 6 percent of all births were out of wedlock as of 2008, up from 1 percent in 1970.

Industriousness.

The norms for work and women were revolutionized after 1960, but the norm for men putatively has remained the same: Healthy men in the prime of life are supposed to work. In practice, that norm has eroded everywhere. In Fishtown, the change has been drastic. To avoid conflating this phenomenon with the current recession, I use data collected in March 2008, before the onset of the recession, as the end point for the trends.

The primary indicator of the erosion of industriousness is the increase of prime-age males with no more than a high school education who say they are not available for work—they are “out of the labor force,” in the jargon. That percentage went from a low of 3 percent in 1968 to 12 percent in 2008, rising steadily during the boom years of the 1980s and 1990s when the labor market had plentiful blue-
collar jobs available for anyone who wanted to work. Even those who had jobs worked less—in 1960, only 10 percent of employed Fishtown males worked fewer than 40 hours per week. By 2008, that percentage had doubled. In Belmont, the percentage working fewer than 40 hours per week went from 9 to 12. Again it needs to emphasized: These reductions in work hours occurred in years when men could find work for as many hours as they wanted to work.

Honesty.

I focus on honesty as reflected in crime rates. Another aspect of honesty—integrity in matters not governed by criminal law—is just as important to America’s civic culture, but I could not find trends grounded in large-sample, interpretable data.

Ever since criminology became a discipline, scholars have found that criminals are overwhelmingly drawn from working-class and lower-class neighborhoods—Fishtown. But in 1960, crime was low and the existing differences between Belmont and Fishtown did not impinge on daily life. The real Fishtown in Philadelphia, for example, was an extremely safe place to live in the 1950s (as we know both from a contemporaneous sociological study of the real Fishtown and the living memory of those who grew up in Fishtown in those years). Doors were routinely left unlocked. Children were allowed to play unwatched by their own parents, who knew that neighbors were keeping an eye on them. In the rare instances when a crime did occur, the people of Fishtown knew where to look for the offenders, and often dealt with them without bothering to call the cops.

The surge in crime that began in the mid-1960s and continued through the 1980s left Belmont almost untouched and ravaged Fishtown. From 1960–95, the violent crime rate in Fishtown more than sextupled. When we can first break out imprisonment rates in 1974 (after crime had already been increasing for a decade), there were 215 imprisoned Fishtowners for every 100,000 persons ages 18–65. By the time of the most recent survey of prison inmates in 2004, that number had grown to 965. The comparable figures for Belmont were infinitesimal and flat (13 in 1974, 27 in 2004). Furthermore, the reductions in crime since the mid-1990s that have benefited the nation as a whole have been smaller in Fishtown, leaving Fishtown today with a violent crime rate that is still 4.7 times the 1960 rate.

This was an interesting take on the movie Groundhog Day—there’s more over at NRO:

THOROUGHLY POSTMODERN PHIL
A recap is in order. Bill Murray, the movie’s indispensible and perfect lead, plays Phil Connors, a Pittsburgh weatherman with delusions of grandeur (he unselfconsciously refers to himself as “the talent”). Accompanied by his producer and love interest, Rita (played by Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman (Chris Elliott), Connors goes on assignment to cover the Groundhog Day festival in Punxsutawney, Pa., at which “Punxsutawney Phil” — a real groundhog — comes out of his hole to reveal how much longer winter will last. Connors believes he’s too good for the assignment — and for Punxsutawney, Pittsburgh, and everything in between. He is a thoroughly postmodern man: arrogant, world-weary, and contemptuous without cause.

Rita tells Phil that people love the groundhog story, to which he responds, “People like blood sausage, too, people are morons.” Later, at the Groundhog Festival, she tells him: “You’re missing all the fun. These people are great! Some of them have been partying all night long. They sing songs ’til they get too cold and then they go sit by the fire and get warm and then they come back and sing some more.” Phil replies, “Yeah, they’re hicks, Rita.”

Phil does his reporting schtick when the groundhog emerges and plans to head home as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a blizzard stops him at the outskirts of town. A state trooper explains that the highway’s closed: “Don’t you watch the weather reports?” the cop asks. Connors replies (blasphemously, according to some), “I make the weather!” Moving on, the cop explains he can either turn around to Punxsutawney or freeze to death. “Which is it?” he asks. Connors answers, “I’m thinking, I’m thinking.” Reluctantly returning to Punxsutawney, Connors spends another night in a sweet little bed and breakfast run by the sort of un-ironic, un-hip, decent folks he considers hicks.

The next morning, the clock radio in his room goes off and he hears the same radio show he’d heard the day before, complete with a broadcast of “I Got You Babe” and the declaration, “It’s Groundhog Day!” At first, Connors believes it’s an amateurish gaffe by a second-rate radio station. But slowly he discovers it’s the same day all over again. “What if there is no tomorrow?” he asks. “There wasn’t one today!”

And this is the plot device for the whole film, which has seeped into the larger culture. Indeed, “Groundhog Day” has become shorthand for (translating nicely) “same stuff, different day.” Troops in Iraq regularly use it as a rough synonym for “snafu,” which (also translated nicely) means “situation normal: all fouled-up.” Connors spends an unknown number of days repeating the exact same day over and over again. Everyone else experiences that day for the “first” time, while Connors experiences it with Sisyphean repetition. Estimates vary on how many actual Groundhog Days Connors endures. We see him relive 34 of them. But many more are implied. According to Harold Ramis, the co-writer and director, the original script called for him to endure 10,000 years in Punxsutawney, but it was probably closer to ten.

But this is a small mystery. A far more important one is why the day repeats itself and why it stops repeating at the end. Because the viewer is left to draw his own conclusions, we have what many believe is the best cinematic moral allegory popular culture has produced in decades — perhaps ever.

Interpretations of this central mystery vary. But central to all is a morally complicated and powerful story arc to the main character. When Phil Connors arrives in Punxsutawney, he’s a perfect representative of the Seinfeld generation: been-there-done-that. When he first realizes he’s not crazy and that he can, in effect, live forever without consequences — if there’s no tomorrow, how can you be punished? — he indulges his adolescent self. He shoves cigarettes and pastries into his face with no fear of love-handles or lung cancer. “I am not going to play by their rules any longer,” he declares as he goes for a drunk-driving spree. He uses his ability to glean intelligence about the locals to bed women with lies. When that no longer gratifies, he steals money and gets kinky, dressing up and play-acting. When Andie MacDowell sees him like this she quotes a poem by Sir Walter Scott: “The wretch, concentrated all in self / Living, shall forfeit fair renown / And, doubly dying, shall go down / To the vile dust, from whence he sprung / Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.”

Connors cackles at her earnestness. “You don’t like poetry?” She asks. “I love poetry,” he replies, “I just thought that was Willard Scott.”

Still, Connors schemes to bed Rita with the same techniques he used on other women, and fails, time and again. When he realizes that his failures stem not from a lack of information about Rita’s desires but rather from his own basic hollowness, he grows suicidal. Or, some argue, he grows suicidal after learning that all of the material and sexual gratification in the world is not spiritually sustaining.

Stand Firm is about to undergo the biggest change of its nearly 8-year history.

Wednesday I’ll have a post that outlines all those changes and the reasons for them, but for now I need to make an appeal:

We need photos!

The new site design will make much more use of photographs than the current design, which is an evolution of the blog formats that were popular 10 years ago. The new design is more reflective of the site’s transition over the years from a blog to a web-magazine-slash-social-community, and will feature a lot more images.

Given the number of feature stories we post over the course of a year, we’re going to need a lot of photos. While we’ll no doubt have to rely from time to time on licensing them from news agencies or stock photo companies, we would love to start a cooperative relationship with all the shutterbugs out there who would like to contribute to the site, or who are looking to get more exposure for their photos.

So here’s what we’re looking for:

- Photos of Christian leaders and personalities. This means archbishops, cardinals, bishops, priests, preachers, writers, theologians, commentators… anyone who’s remotely anyone in Christianity. If you’ve taken photos at General Convention, Mere Anglicanism, ACNA Provincial Assembly, or similar gatherings, look through your photos for images of people.

- Photos of notable Christian places. This means cathedrals, parish churches, monasteries and convents, historical locations, Holy Land places, etc.

- Photos of Christian worship. This means high church and low church, indoors and outdoors, gothic cathedrals and revival tents.

- Photos of Christian “things.” This means Bibles and prayer books, opened and closed. Chalices and patens, wafers and wine. Crosses, crucifixes, and rosaries.

...and anything else you think is interesting or just plain beautiful.

Here’s how we need them:

- In as high a resolution as you have them.

- In JPEG format, at a compression of no less than 70%.

Here’s what you get:

1. If you send us 25 or more photos that we think we’ll be able to use, we will send you, on a first-come, first-served basis, this nifty Stand Firm lapel pin. I have about 30 of them left, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. They’re actually nicer than they appear in this pic - the red, blue and gold are rich and deep, and the finish is enameled.

2. No matter how many or how few photos you send us, you will receive credit near your photos wherever they apppear. If you have a web site you’d like to promote, provide that URL to us and the credit will link to it.

So if you’re interested, here’s what you need to do:

1. Collect the high-resolution versions of your photographs.
2. Compress them into one file using .ZIP, .SIT, or .TAR compression.
3. If the compressed file is under 10Mb, attach it to an email. If it is larger, upload it to DropBox or a similar file-sharing service.
4. If you want your credit to link to a web site, include the URL in your email.
5. Send us an email with the compressed attachment, or a link to the file-sharing utility where the file is stored.
6. COPY THE FOLLOWING LICENSING AGREEMENT AND INCLUDE IT IN YOUR EMAIL:

I hereby grant to Gri5th Media, LLC, the non-exclusive use of the attached images, in perpetuity, for use on the web site “Stand Firm,” located at standfirminfaith.com. This license does not include the commercial use of these images beyond the Stand Firm web site. Stand Firm and Gri5th Media, LLC are not authorized to resale these images, or to create derivative works from them, without a separate licensing agreement. I attest that I am the owner of these photographs, and am fully authorized to grant this license.

7. .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) to contact@standfirminfaith.com with the subject line “Photo Submission.”

This is a dated article in its initiating news report [Gingrich’s win in SC] but it is nevertheless a good analysis of how Parties choose nominees.  I think I can safely say that I’m in the “More of the Same” camp as to *how* things get done . . . which is why the only way the end result changes [that is, Republicans nominate a conservative for President] is if the establishment doing the “open negotiation” amongst themselves becomes a different establishment altogether.

From the FiveThirtyEight blog, where there is more:

The paradigms present profoundly different conclusions about the most likely outcome.

One might be called “More of the Same.” It asserts that the traditional rules of engagement in a nomination race still apply, and that the empirical evidence from past contests is reasonably powerful.

That evidence looks something like this: Although the nomination is technically decided by delegate counts, and somewhat less literally by the preferences of rank-and-file voters, ultimately the nominee is determined by a sort of open negotiation among the party elite, which includes elected officials, major donors and the partisan news media, among others.

Voter preferences can make some difference, but more as a lagging than a leading indicator. Being well-credentialed and building a traditional campaign matters, and candidates who do not do so may soar in polls but inevitably fall back to earth. Moreover, parties tend to come to fairly rational decisions about their nominee, placing heavy emphasis on electability. (This view is eloquently explained in the book “The Party Decides,” by the political scientists Marty Cohen and others.)

The competing paradigm might be called “This Time Is Different.” It asserts that a fundamental change has occurred in America’s political culture, or that a temporary shift is especially salient in this year’s Republican race.

Under this interpretation, elite support and the ground game do not matter as much as usual. Instead, success is more idiosyncratic: personalities matter a lot, and nominations are determined based primarily on momentum and news media coverage.

From NRO, where there is more:

In Greek mythology, the prophetess Cassandra was doomed both to tell the truth and to be ignored. Our modern version is a bankrupt Greece that we seem to discount.

News accounts abound now of impoverished Athens residents scrounging pharmacies for scarce aspirin — as Greece is squeezed to make interest payments to the supposedly euro-pinching German banks.

Such accounts may be exaggerations, but they should warn us that yearly progress is never assured. Instead, history offers plenty of examples of life becoming far worse than it had been centuries earlier. The biographer Plutarch, writing 500 years after the glories of classical Greece, lamented that in his time weeds grew amid the empty colonnades of the once-impressive Greek city-states. In America, most would prefer to live in the Detroit of 1941 than the Detroit of 2011. The quality of today’s air travel has regressed to the climate of yesterday’s bus service.

In 2000, Greeks apparently assumed that they had struck it rich with their newfound money-laden European Union lenders — even though they certainly had not earned their new riches through increased productivity, the discovery of more natural resources, or greater collective investment and savings.

The brief euro mirage has vanished. Life in Athens is zooming backward to the pre-EU days of the 1970s. Then, most imported goods were too expensive to buy, medical care was often premodern, and the city resembled more a Turkish Istanbul than a European Munich.

This week I’m going to be posting a series of political analysis articles about one thing: the Establishment segment of the Republican Party.

This magisterial article from Red State starts us off.  I’m posting the beginning preliminaries of it, but make certain to hie thee hence to Red State and read the entire piece.  It will be well worth your time.

There’s been a lot of talk, maybe too much talk, about the struggle between the GOP “Establishment” and “Outsiders,” sometimes – but sometimes not – meaning the Tea Party, however defined. There are many fault lines, wheels within wheels, that divide different groups on the Right, but it’s time to clarify the core issue that has people of perfectly conservative temperament and ideology scratching their heads at their own constituents. After all, we’re conservatives: establishments are a good idea, a necessary intersection of tradition and meritocracy, giving undue weight to neither and co-opting dangerous ideas about revolution and radical change. What’s so bad about that?

The answer is a simple one: it’s almost entirely about spending. The current trajectory of American government spending is one in which spending by government in general, and by the federal government in particular, just keeps on growing as a share of the economy, further and further crowding out the space occupied by free private citizens and businesses in the private sector. Worse, much of this happens automatically, without the consent of the governed in any but the most perfunctory way: discretionary spending is designed to grow because budgets are set by using the prior year’s spending as a baseline, and entitlement and public employee benefit spending – which consume a far larger share of spending – grows by itself in the absence of any affirmative legislation to stop it. The federal government has not passed a budget in nearly 1,000 days (President Obama’s State of the Union speech will mark the 1000th), yet spending has continued to grow, and will continue to grow as far as the eye can see – a dramatic change in our country taking place on auto-pilot – unless dramatic action is taken in response to stop it. Jack’s magic beans have nothing on public spending.

And the growth of spending bleeds over into every other issue. Federal spending comes with strings attached, and those strings reduce the independence of the states and burrow the arms of the federal octopus ever further into the area of social policy. Institutions like churches, schools, and hospitals become hooked on federal money, and have to dance the federal tune. Spending gets earmarked and targeted to favored people, businesses and groups, making society less equal and government less ethical. Spending distorts energy markets, housing markets, and markets for higher education, creating bubbles and inefficiency. And that’s before we even get to the metastatic growth of federal regulation. And eventually, runaway domestic spending saps our ability to adequately fund our national defense.

There is general philosophical agreement among both Republicans and conservatives about all of this. Where the fault line lies is in exactly how far we are willing to go to do something about it. Many people who got into politics as good conservatives, and still think themselves good conservatives constrained by the limits of practical possibility, are at a loss when it comes to meaningful ways to tame Leviathan. For reasons, some good (the need to use political power to protect national security, preserve control of the courts and restrain regulatory overreach), some less so, they have thrown in the towel on the central issue of the day. That is who we speak of as the “Establishment.” Others – not always with a sense of proportion or possibility, but driven by the urgency of the cause – seek dramatic confrontations to prevent the menace of excessive spending from passing the tipping point where we can no longer save room for the private sector. They are the Outsiders, the ones challenging the system and its fundamental assumptions. The analogy of a Tea Party is an apt one: the Founding Fathers had much in common with the Tories of their day, but disagreed on a fundamental question, not of principle, but of practical politics: whether revolution was needed to protect their traditional rights as Englishmen from being eradicated by the growing encroachments of the British Crown. As it was then, the gulf between the two is the defining issue of today’s Republican Party and conservative movement.

In short, the real “Establishment” and “Outsider,” “anti-Establishment” or “Tea Party” factions are not about who is conservative or moderate, or who is inside or outside the Beltway or public office, or who has fancy degrees or a large readership/listenership or attends the right cocktail parties or churches, or even necessarily who has or has not supported various candidates. The term “Establishment” is used and abused in those contexts, but invariably describes only a division of passing significance. The real battle between the Establishment and the Outsiders is between those who urge significant changes in our spending patterns as a necessity to preserve the America we have known, and those who are unwilling to take that step. It is, in short, between those who are, and those who are not, willing to take action in the belief that the currently established structure of how public money is spent is unsustainable and must be fixed while it still can if we are not to lose by encroachments the all the other things Republicans and conservatives stand for.

The Background

In a way, the division between confrontation and accommodation with the growth of the public sector is one that dates back to the 1950s, and the historical origins are useful in understanding why National Review, in particular, has found itself caught in the crossfire between its editors and its readership. The great GOP debate of 1933-1956 or so was how to react to the New Deal: try to moderate its excesses, or assault its premises. Dwight Eisenhower, in the long run, won the battle within the party in favor of the former; William F. Buckley, jr., in the long run, won the battle within the conservative movement in favor of the latter (hence the slogan “standing athwart history, yelling ‘stop!’”). Yet even Buckley and his magazine spent more effort combatting the status quo in national security policy than on the size of government.

From Goldwater’s failure in 1964 to Reagan’s victory in 1980 and Newt Gingrich’s victory in 1994 and failure in 1995-96, the common thread has been that conservatives win arguments about cutting taxes and restraining domestic discretionary spending, but lose arguments about dismantling the entitlement state created by FDR and LBJ and the auto-pilot budget-bloating processes of the 1970s. George W. Bush cemented this consensus in 2000-05: he could get the public behind cutting taxes and (sort of) restraining the growth of discretionary domestic spending but couldn’t get the public behind Social Security reform and was only able to get elected in 2000 by promising – then delivering in 2003 – a pricey new Medicare prescription drug entitlement. It seemed at the time that conservatives would have to content themselves with winning battles on taxes, national security, social issues/the courts and occasionally discretionary spending, but couldn’t challenge the status quo on the entitlement state and its compulsory collectivist impulses.

Then we got the multiple whammies of 2006-2011, which collectively pushed a lot of people on the Right from a position of accepting that they might be naive about how much change was possible, to being determined that the Establishment was naive about how long the old system could stand: . . .

Monday 6 February 2012 marks the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II’s accession to the throne.

The Church of England have prayers for the occasion.

God of time and eternity,
whose Son reigns as servant, not master;
we give you thanks and praise
that you have blessed this Nation, the Realms and Territories
with ELIZABETH,
our beloved and glorious Queen.
In this year of Jubilee,
grant her your gifts of love and joy and peace
as she continues in faithful obedience to you, her Lord and God
and in devoted service to her lands and peoples,
and those of the Commonwealth,
now and all the days of her life;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.

As good as that is, it’s still not a patch on this, is it?

O GOD, who providest for thy people by thy power, and rulest over them in love: Vouchsafe so to bless thy Servant our Queen, that under her this nation may be wisely governed, and thy Church may serve thee in all godly quietness; and grant that she being devoted to thee with her whole heart, and persevering in good works unto the end, may, by thy guidance, come to thine everlasting kingdom; through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

O LORD our God, who upholdest and governest all things by the word of thy power: Receive our humble prayers for our sovereign Lady ELIZABETH, as on this day, set over us by thy grace and providence to be our Queen; and, together with her, bless, we beseech thee, Philip Duke of Edinburgh, Charles Prince of Wales, and all the Royal Family; that they, ever trusting in thy goodness, protected by thy power, and crowned with thy gracious and endless favour, may long continue before thee in peace and safety, joy and honour, and after death may obtain everlasting life and glory, by the merits and mediation of Christ Jesus our Saviour, who with thee and the Holy Ghost liveth and reigneth ever one God, world without end. Amen.

AI.MIGHTY God, who rulest over all the kingdoms of the world, and dost order them according to thy good pleasure: We yield thee unfeigned thanks, for that thou wast pleased, as on this day, to set thy Servant our Sovereign Lady, Queen ELIZABETH, upon the Throne of this Realm. Let thy wisdom be her guide, and let thine arm strengthen her; let truth and justice, holiness and righteousness, peace and charity, abound in her days; direct all her counsels and endeavours to thy glory, and the welfare of her subjects; give us grace to obey her cheerfully for conscience sake, and let her always possess the hearts of her people; let her reign be long and prosperous, and crown her with everlasting life in the world to come; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

And never forget this:

1 Timothy 2:1 I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people— ² for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness.

From the bishop of Olympia’s blog where he calls this a Conservative Proposal:

It is expected that our Washington state legislators will very soon, perhaps even tomorrow begin floor deliberations on HB2516 & SB6239 with the Senate to begin.  Passage of these bills or a version of them would make same sex marriage law in our state.  Our Episcopal Church, after a long discussion about this over the years is poised to do roughly the same this summer at our General Convention.

Can’t say he didn’t warn them. 

While I am careful about wading into our legislator’s business, I would say this is the church’s business too.  I have been asked by many about my feelings on it, and I have decided to share them.  The ideas are not new,  I have shared them openly in the walk-abouts before becoming your bishop and in many venues before and since.

Of course, we all know these positions always flood the diocese with new members. 

As a reminder, Bishop Warner was the predecessor to Bishop Rickel.  Observant readers will recall it was Bishop Warner who thought having a Muslim-Episcopal priest was a swell idea.  Wonder if any of those less than 10,000 episcopalians left in Olympia are truly conservative?

The Rev. Jonathan Grieser, formerly one of the more vocal revisionist priests in the Diocese of Upper South Carolina, is now rector at Grace Episcopal Church in Madison, Wisconsin.

He also has a blog, and recently he wrote this:

In 2003, we were completely unprepared for the impact of General Convention, understandably so, because of the date of Bishop Robinson’s election. In 2012, we know what is coming. We know that there will be media scrutiny and intense discussion in the Anglican blogosphere,  From what I can tell of the materials produced by the SCLM, and from what I can tell of what I’ve read, they seem both somewhat superficial and often incomprehensible.

For me, the important question is this: How is General Convention preparing us in local parishes deal with the controversy? And I don’t primarily mean the conversations over the shape liturgies might take.  What materials are they providing local clergy to deal with the phone call from the local newspaper reporter who is writing an article on the topic and interviewing conservative Christian leaders as well?

Once again, my guess is that General Convention is going to leave us to our own devices, ill-prepared and ill-equipped to deal with the local consequences of its actions and increasingly curious why so many of us in the church want to have nothing to do with it.

That’s why I despair of the future of the Episcopal Church. I’ve been active in the Episcopal Church for two decades, I’ve been involved in parish leadership for a decade, and every General Convention in that time has contributed to conflict in the parish and led to diversion of precious resources of time, energy, and passion. I’m looking forward to GC 2012 with fear and trembling.

Now, this last part strikes me as a little humorous, because when I first read it, I thought, “You and me both, brother… you and—-”

... but then I realized: I’m not looking toward General Convention 2012 with fear and trembling at all. I looked toward GC06 that way, and GC09, but now I look toward General Convention 2012 only with a knowing smile, and an odd but strangely comfortable sense of satisfaction.

And here is why:

Because I know what will happen in Indianapolis. I know who will gather there… and who will not.

I know what they will do, and what they will not do.

I don’t look at GC12 and wonder, “What will become of my parish?”, or “What will become of my diocese?”, and certainly not “What will become of the Episcopal Church.”

I know what will happen: The Episcopal Church will continue its free-fall into irrelevancy and incoherency. Around my diocese and my parish, there will be a few families who leave, but most of them will shake their heads for a moment at the shame of it all, cluck their tongues, then say, “At least our bishop won’t be allowing any of that nonsense down here. Nosirree…”

All the while, blissfully ignorant that he has no choice in the matter. Oh, he won’t have to cave to the gay cabal any time soon, and perhaps won’t ever have to. If he doesn’t retire in a few years, he’ll be left alone by 815 to serve out his episcopacy in relative peace. But if he succeeds in holding the line, he will, without a doubt, be the last bishop of his diocese to do so. If he or any aspiring candidate thinks his successor will be able to keep from authorizing gay blessings in his churches, he is sadly mistaken. Compliance to the New Order will shortly be a requirement for all incoming bishops.

No, the Episcopal Church’s fate is sealed, and knowing that gives me a kind of solace and circumspection Fr. Geiser can only dream of. Some say its fate was sealed when Gene Robinson was consecrated as Bishop of New Hampshire. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Righter was acquitted of heresy charges. Some say it was sealed when the Philadelphia Eleven were illegally ordained. Some say it was sealed when John Spong was allowed, with impunity, to go on a gay-ordination spree. Some say it was sealed when Bishop Pike was allowed to keep his mitre after denying the Trinity.

It doesn’t matter, ultimately, exactly when the Episcopal Church’s fate was sealed, or even if it can be pinned down to one incident or period in its history. All that matters is that it’s done, and nothing that happens in Indianapolis this summer can change that.

Fr. Grieser is right to worry about what will happen to parishes like his following GC12. He is right to fret that he and rectors like him will be left to fend for themselves when the TV stations and newspapers come calling. He is right to be frustrated that the “resources” provided to him by the national church are laughably inadequate.

He is right, but he has no one to blame but himself, and those like him.

He and his compatriots threw in with this agenda, figuring they had found their generation’s civil rights movement, and that all the warm social-justice fuzzy which accrued to that movement 50 years ago would accrue to theirs as well. They figured they would be heroes. They figured far more people would applaud them for their courage, and reward with them their presence and contributions, than would ever be alienated and driven off by the depravity and hollowness of their cause.

They figured wrong.

The decline in membership, attendance, giving, and legitimacy in the Episcopal Church has coincided with many things, but make no mistake: There is one and only one thing that has caused it, and that’s an abandonment of the core doctrines of the faith in favor of new-age spiritualism, and a celebration of sexual deviancy practiced by perhaps two percent of the country’s population.

They ignored the warnings of the orthodox over the past several decades. They derided us as fundamentalists, Bible-thumpers, backwards, bigoted, ignorant… they poured all manner of bile on us as we told them: You will regret this. You will regret giving carte blanche to the likes of Katherine Schori, David Booth Beers, Stacy Sauls, Susan Russell, Louie Crew, and a thousand other charlatans and crackpots. You do not understand where this will lead.

They went starry-eyed as the church welcomed all sorts of strange doctrines, and winked at old heresies dressed up in new threads.

They cheered as 815 filed lawsuit after lawsuit against departing parishes and dioceses. They applauded as good people were run out of their houses of worship - houses they built with their own money and sweat, where they buried their parents and children.

And they applauded as godly men were charged with ecclesial transgressions, and run out of the church they had so faithfully served for years, often decades.

No doubt they pumped many a fist as those who dared not toe the revisionist line were shown the door, after a display of strong-armed tactics for which the current presiding bishop and her staff have become so famous.

What Fr. Grieser and his allies are seeing now, though, is that all the shows of force - little and big, hasty and well-planned - weren’t just for the orthodox. They were also - perhaps especially - for the liberals.

Because now, you have no levers to pull. You have no one to whom to appeal. The presiding bishop doesn’t care if you’re unhappy. The executive council doesn’t care if you’re afraid. And if you’ve ever been to General Convention, you’ll know that not a single one of the assembled kooks cares if you’re not down with The Plan.

You gave the powers that be a blank check, and you demanded of them no accountability. Just keep bringing back the scalps. Now you wring your hands that they have gone too far, too fast, that they aren’t listening to you, and that there’s no one looking out for you and your flock.

You are all alone, together.

One of my favorite hymns.  The sun does not set on the worship of Jesus Christ, who lives and reigns forever and ever.  No matter what happens in a Superbowl game, or to our country, or to me, the Church “rests not now by day or night” and “hour by hour fresh lips are making Thy wondrous doings heard on high.”

Praise Jesus!

The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended,
The darkness falls at Thy behest;
To Thee our morning hymns ascended,
Thy praise shall sanctify our rest.

We thank Thee that Thy church, unsleeping,
While earth rolls onward into light,
Through all the world her watch is keeping,
And rests not now by day or night.

As o’er each continent and island
The dawn leads on another day,
The voice of prayer is never silent,
Nor dies the strain of praise away.
The sun that bids us rest is waking
Our brethren ’neath the western sky,
And hour by hour fresh lips are making
Thy wondrous doings heard on high.

So be it, Lord; Thy throne shall never,
Like earth’s proud empires, pass away:
Thy kingdom stands, and grows forever,
Till all Thy creatures own Thy sway.

John Ellerton, 1826–1893

I think I would have liked to have met this guy—though maybe only from a distance.

From WISTV, where there is more:

Mark and Rose Watson live near the Loxahatchee, on the dirt road on which Trapper used to go for supplies. They claim to have seen him at least a half-dozen times. And Rose Watson speaks from first-hand knowledge… because she knew him.

When she was little, her older brother used to take her along when he rowed upriver to visit Trapper. 

“My brother Buddy was 20 years older than me,” Watson says. “And he and Trapper were good friends. After they put me to sleep, they would sit up most of the night talking by candlelight. I remember all the animals Trapper kept there. And I remember he was a huge man – especially to a little girl. I never saw him with a shirt on. And I don’t remember him wearing shoes.”

Archbishop Vigneron is currently in Rome with 16 other bishops from the Provinces of Detroit and Cincinnati to update the Vatican and Pope Benedict on the health of their dioceses. As part of their “ad limina” visit, the group has also made pilgrimages to the tombs of St. Peter and St. Paul.

“When I see those tombs,” said Archbishop Vigneron, “I immediately think of Our Lord’s big recruitment speech to the apostles when he said ‘I am sending you out like lambs in the midst of wolves’ and I imagine them looking around at one another and saying ‘Is he talking to us?’”

And yet, Christ’s prediction that “if they rejected me they’ll reject you,” is present for Catholics “in every age” even if “it differs in how it takes its shape,” he said.

He believes that one clear manifestation of this is the Obama administration’s decision to force all health insurance to cover sterilization and contraception services, including abortifacient drugs. The “price to be paid,” he said, could be in terms of religious freedom and also financially.

“If I think about these fines that it seems the government will impose upon us, well that is money I could use in my Catholics schools, it’s money I could use for feeding the hungry, providing services to people with addiction. I expect we’ll have to pay a price like that.”

The one price that Archbishop Vigneron said he will refuse to pay is any violation of Catholic moral teaching. As Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan of New York recently said, “they’ve given us a year to figure out how we can violate our principles – it’s not going to happen.”

When I was 19, I found out I was pregnant for the third time. A miscarriage, a two year old… and pregnant again.  I was homeless, living with friends, and - despite my “Christian” upbringing - convinced the only solution was abortion.  My boyfriend agreed to take me to the abortion clinic. On the appointed day, while I was waiting for him to pick me up, I got a call saying he could not take me after all because he had been picked up and formally charged with 2nd degree murder. At the time, that sort of ruined my day.

Then I started jumping through more hoops. My insurance wouldn’t pay for an abortion and nobody I knew had the money to loan me. Out of desperation I called a crisis pregnancy center. I told them my situation - that I was homeless, that I had a two year old I could barely take care of, and that I was feeling pretty desperate - but they had a solution. They knew a family who had built dorms on their little farm so they could offer a home to girls exactly like me. So I packed up my two-year-old and meager belongings and moved in with them.

That’s where my life truly began to change. This family had three young children of their own, one of them with Down syndrome and leukemia, yet it didn’t stop them from pouring their lives into a very nasty, uneducated, beastly, selfish, messed up, trashy teenager.

One of the dirty secrets of large sports events is that not only is prostitution common, but that tragically, many underage girls are also being prostituted, most of them against their will, as sex slaves.

...

Aware of this dreadful problem, Religious Sisters have come together, and trained to both identify and work with police to make arrests, and also to prevent human trafficking altogether at this week’s Super Bowl. They will also put pressure on local hotels to be serious in their awareness and noncooperation in this problem.

Generally speaking, I’m with the “non-extinct” group for various reasons, just as I believe the reported sightings of “black panthers” [black versions of big cats] in South Carolina.  From the Daily Mail, where there is more:

Endangered species specialist Mark McCollough, who works with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Maine, was the lead scientist in the agency’s study declaring the cougar extinct.

He told msnbc.com that there is no scientific evidence that Eastern cougars have survived 150 years after being driven from the region.

He added that the last known real eastern cougar was shot dead in 1938 in Maine.

This summary is from a priest in the Diocese of Southern Ohio.  Looks as if it was a rip-roaring event:

The speakers and preachers were wonderful and included the Principal of Wycliffe Hall Oxford, the Lord Bishop of London, the Vice-Chancellor of Sewanee (my alma mater),the Bishop of Rochester, the Bishop of South Carolina, The Dean of Trinity School for Ministry, and the Archbishop of Jos Nigeria. The worship was magnificent. Evensong featured the Choir of St. Philip’s Charleston singing George Dyson’s Mag and Nunc and Parry’s “ I Was Glad.” Bishop Chartres challenged us to open our lives and our institutions to the leadership and infilling of the Holy Ghost, who was without doubt present in the service. The festival Eucharist featured the choir of St. Helena’s Beaufort, accompanied by the Charleston Brass. Archbishop Kwashi brought tears to our eyes with his godly exhortations to evangelism and Bishop Lawrence shone like Moses as he consecrated and delivered to us the Body and Blood of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. By the time the third of five Communion Hymns rang out the words “Rise Up, O Saints of God,” we all were on our feet, rejoicing in the power of God and filled with what Son-in-Law Matthew calls “South Carolina Happy.” God was in our midst, and the entire conference was transformative. The message was unified and simple.

1. From the time of Augustine and Cuthbert to the great reformers of the 16th, 18th, and 19th centuries, to today, men and women who answer the call of Jesus to turn from their former ways and follow God have been used to transform not only lives, but societies.
2. As those same people forsook their sinful ways and conformed their lives to the clear teaching of Scripture, which is the example of our Lord, God used them, and he will use us, to bring the most obdurate sinners to personal confession, repentance, and moral transformation.
3. The cost of following Christ in this way is high, but the results are far-reaching, and ultimately eternal.
4. We who name Christ as Saviour are called to follow him in the knowledge that through us, through our hard work and sacrifice, God will transform the world and to bring all people to himself.
5. It is for this reason that he has called us and redeemed us by his blood.

Mollie Hemingway at Christianity today:

Now everyone knows that Komen funnels money to the abortion business. For years, pro-life activists had been attempting to alert Komen donors to its entanglement with Planned Parenthood. Progress had been made in recent years, with Komen acknowledging and attempting to downplay its association. But now, only those who don’t watch the nightly news, read a newspaper, or have a Facebook account are oblivious to Komen’s relationship with the abortion business. The media pushed the line that declining to fund Planned Parenthood is political, but they may be surprised to find out that funding Planned Parenthood is also viewed as political.
...
Planned Parenthood is damaged goods. The Daily Caller‘s Mary Katharine Ham joked that Planned Parenthood is “The Hotel California of charitable donations.” Abortion rights supporter Will Wilkinson said it appeared Planned Parenthood was “throwing its weight around, knocking a few pieces of china off the shelves, sending a message to its other donors: ‘Nice foundation you got there. Wouldn’t want anything to, you know, happen to it.’”

Liberals take the same view as the proprietors of the Dar al-Islam: Once they hold this land, they hold it forever. Notwithstanding that those who give to the foundation are specifically giving to support breast-cancer research, Komen could not be permitted to get away with disrespecting Big Abortion. We don’t want to return to the bad old days of the back alley, when a poor vulnerable person who made the mistake of stepping out of line had to be forced into the shadows and have the realities explained to them with a tire iron. Now Big Liberalism’s enforcers do it on the front pages with the panjandrums of tolerance and diversity cheering them all the way. In the wake of Komen’s decision, the Yale School of Public Health told the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff that its invitation to Nancy Brinker to be its commencement speaker was now “under careful review.” Because God forbid anybody doing a master’s program at an Ivy League institution should be exposed to anyone not in full 100 percent compliance with liberal orthodoxy. The American Association of University Women announced it would no longer sponsor teams for Komen’s “Race for the Cure.” Sure, Komen has raised $2 billion for the cure, but better we never cure breast cancer than let a single errant Injun wander off the abortion reservation.

The emerging conflict between the Catholic Church and the Obama administration may have a new front: in the U.S. military itself.

The Catholic Church is fighting mad about an HHS ruling that would have them buy insurance for things they consider sinful–contraception, sterilization and abortion.

All the bishops in the country sent out a letter to be read in their parishes promising that the Church “cannot-and will not-comply with this unjust law.”

Even Archbishop Timothy Broglio, who is in charge of Catholic military chaplains sent out the same letter. 

But after he did, the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains sent out another communication forbidding Catholic priests to read the letter, in part because it seemed to encourage civil disobedience, and could be read as seditious against the Commander-in-Chief.

More than one Catholic chaplain who spoke to us off the record confirmed that many chaplains disobeyed this instruction and read the letter anyway. Others sought further instructions from their Archbishop.

Be sure to read it all so you can learn that Big Brother has completed editing of the letter. 

Hat tip:  To All The World

UPDATE:  NRO has an update which reads in part:

So not only were chaplains told not to read the letter, but an Obama administration official edited a pastoral letter . . . with church buy-in?

Didn’t people flee across an ocean-sized pond to be free of this kind of thing?”

Evidently it is not just the government that is loco.

The drama over student rights and religious freedom continues to rage at Vanderbilt University, as the higher education facility doubled-down this week on enforcing strict rules that some say discriminate against campus religious groups.

At the center of debate is the university’s nondiscrimination policy, which bans student-led faith groups, among others, from requiring leaders to hold specific beliefs.

Hate to say I told you so, but I told you so:

We want to apologize to the American public for recent decisions that cast doubt upon our commitment to our mission of saving women’s lives.

The events of this week have been deeply unsettling for our supporters, partners and friends and all of us at Susan G. Komen. We have been distressed at the presumption that the changes made to our funding criteria were done for political reasons or to specifically penalize Planned Parenthood. They were not.

Our original desire was to fulfill our fiduciary duty to our donors by not funding grant applications made by organizations under investigation. We will amend the criteria to make clear that disqualifying investigations must be criminal and conclusive in nature and not political. That is what is right and fair.

Gareth Malone who has a British television series where he turns ordinary people into a wonderful choir, put together this group of military wives. 

I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live;

Some people take this admonition seriously, praise God!  Believe it or not, this speech was made by a politician - in public.

“At the end of the day our nation can never truly become what it fully was intended to be unless it deals with this issue squarely,” he said. “America cannot truly fulfill its destiny unless this issue is resolved. It’s that important.”

Rubio explained the importance of the task in religious terms, saying that he will one day need to answer to God for his actions and failing to fight against abortion — after all the gifts God has bestowed on him — is simply not an option.

“America is great because God has blessed America. And America has always honored that blessing by being an example to the world. … There is nothing that America can give this world right now more important than to show that all life — irrespective of the circumstances of its creation, irrespective of the circumstances of its birth, irrespective of the conditions of that they find themselves in — all life, in a planet where life is increasingly not valued, in a planet where people are summarily discarded, all life is worthy of protection. All life enjoys God’s love,” Rubio concluded to a standing ovation.

Casting a vote for this man would be a privilege. 

Hat tip:  Veritas2007

On a Thursday conference call Nancy Brinker, the founder and CEO of the Komen Foundation, told reporters that the organization is “singularly focused” on combating breast cancer, and that the politics of the decision to stop funding Planned Parenthood has been distracting from their mission.

Nevertheless, since cutting ties, Brinker announced that Komen’s donations have gone up in the last two days — by 100 percent.

“Our donations are up 100 percent in the past two days. With all of the emotion around these issues — which we understand, we get emotional too, we do this every single day of our lives,” Brinker said, explaining that they do not make decisions to be popular, they make them to fight cancer.

Could it be that Mollie Williams loves her some baby-killin’ more than trying to find a cure for breast cancer?

the organization’s top public health official, Mollie Williams, resigned in protest immediately following the Komen board’s decision to cut off Planned Parenthood. Williams, who served as the managing director of community health programs, was responsible for directing the distribution of $93 million in annual grants. Williams declined to comment when I reached her yesterday on whether she had resigned her position in protest, and she declined to speak about any other aspects of the controversy.

But John Hammarley, who until recently served as Komen’s senior communications adviser and who was charged with managing the public relations aspects of Komen’s Planned Parenthood grant, said that Williams believed she could not honorably serve in her position once Komen had caved to pressure from the anti-abortion right. “Mollie is one of the most highly respected and ethical people inside the organization, and she felt she couldn’t continue under these conditions,” Hammarley said. “The Komen board of directors are very politically savvy folks, and I think over time they thought if they gave in to the very aggressive propaganda machine of the anti-abortion groups, that the issue would go away. It seemed very short-sighted to me.”

The diocese has annouced the following nominees.

■The Very Rev. John Burwell, 60, rector, Church of the Holy Cross, Isle of Palms, South Carolina and rector, All Saints Episcopal Church, Florence, South Carolina (Diocese of South Carolina);
■The Rt. Rev. William Gregg, 61, assistant bishop in the Diocese of North Carolina;
■The Very Rev. Jacob Owensby, 54, dean, St. Mark’s Cathedral, Shreveport, Louisiana (Diocese of Western Louisiana);
■The Rev. Canon Gregg Riley, 63, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Western Louisiana;
■The Rev. Frederick Robinson, 60, rector, Church of the Redeemer, Sarasota, Florida (Diocese of Southwest Florida);
■The Rev. Canon Mark Stevenson, 47, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Louisiana; and
■The Rev. Canon Larry Wilkes, rector, Church of the Epiphany, New Iberia, Louisiana (Diocese of Western Louisiana).

I know (or know of) two of these gentlemen.  I can’t imagine the agony of having to select between the very excellent John Burwell+ or the very excellent Mark Stevenson+.  I know Mark+ personally and can tell you any diocese would be extremely fortunate to have him as a leader.  He excels in every category.  I have admired John Burwell’s+ various blog postings for years and friends in the Diocese of S.C. often sing his praises.

Prayers that the diocese is able to elect a man who loves and will continue to love the Lord more than any other person, place, thing or political agenda.

“Thief! Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!!”

Christ Church Episcopal may be back home in its Johnson Square building, but squabbling over church property continues.

The Episcopal Diocese of Georgia and Christ Church Episcopal on Monday asked Chatham County Superior Court Chief Judge Michael Karpf to hold the Rev. Marcus Robertson and Christ Church Savannah in contempt of court.

They argue Robertson and Christ Church Savannah have failed to comply with a court order to return a $2 million endowment fund and other property after the two congregations agreed to the return of the historic Johnson Square property in December.

The civil action alleges Christ Church Savannah, the Anglican congregation, has refused to relinquish control of such items as the endowment fund held by the Savannah Bank, corporate, business and other records, the domain name and website http://www.christchurchsavannah.org.

It also argues the Anglican congregation has failed to relinquish the names “Christ Church Savannah” and “The Mother Church of Georgia” despite three court rulings against them.

The motion filed by attorney James Elliott of Valdosta asks that Robertson and his group be cited for contempt of court and enjoined from continuing to hold the items cited from the diocese and Episcopal congregation.

The Diocese of Georgia is was a Windsor diocese.  Looks like a new broom does indeed sweep clean. Their convention starts today.

Commission on Clergy Ethical Standards
The Bishop’s office in late 2011 received from the Clergy Ethical Standards Commission, which we co-chaired, a recommendation of “no change at this time” to the Diocese of Georgia’s Title IV Ethical Standards Canon (“Marriage between a man and a woman or abstinence from sexual activity are the only acceptable forms of sexual behavior for a Deacon, Priest or Bishop in the Diocese of Georgia.”). This report provides some context for that recommendation.

After honest and principled discussion of the canon, its background, as well as its inadequacies from the bishop’s perspective, commission members remained divided about how to proceed: to let it stand, to rescind it, or to alter it. Nor were we of one mind about its compatibility with the Episcopal Church’s Canons.
At that point in our work together we acknowledged a second issue, which effectively shifted our focus. Most commission members and the clergy who attended the six Clericus meetings we held to receive input from throughout the Diocese of Georgia thought that the criteria offered by the bishop for an acceptable canon (“holy, reasonable and enforceable?”) could not be satisfied until the more fundamental issue of a blessing rite for gay unions was addressed. Most participants in our clericus meetings were favorably disposed toward some form of rite of blessing, a position shared by most commission members as well.
That issue will be addressed at the Episcopal Church’s General Convention this summer. Given the prospects for passage of a rite of blessing there, commission members began to consider the advisability of postponing action on the canon until after the Episcopal Church’s deliberative body comes to some decision. Adoption of such a trial rite by the Church might well remove the existing barrier to ordination of partnered gay persons, rendering our canon in its present form untenable. Assuming significant, near- term developments relevant to the situation at General Convention 2012, we recommended no present action regarding the canon, instead suggesting that it be presented for action – either deletion or significant alteration – at our 2013 Diocesan Convention.

The Commission also made a second recommendation to the bishop: that as a response to our report and a continuation of our work together, he initiate at Diocesan Convention 2012 a “disciplined and wide- ranging dialogue” in the diocese on issues related to the Church’s blessing of gay relationships. We have good reason to believe that the Bishop will embrace this initiative as a proactive way to prepare members of the diocese for thoughtful participation in and response to the expected deliberations and decisions of General Convention.

!Dr. Fred Richter & The Rev. Frederick A. Buechner, Co-Chairs

Another fascinating article, this time from instant fundas.

The pitch drop experiment began in 1927 when Professor Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, set out to demonstrate to his students that some substances that appear to be solid are in fact very high viscous fluids. He used tar pitch, a derivative of coal once used to waterproof boats, in an experiment to prove his point. At room temperature, pitch appears to be solid and can even shatter if hit with a hammer, but despite its look and feel, pitch can also flow at room temperature, albeit extremely slowly.

For his experiment, Parnell melted some pitch into a glass funnel with a sealed stem and allowed it to cool for three years. In 1930 he cut the sealed stem, hung the funnel over a beaker, and waited. It took eight year before the first drop fell into the beaker and another nine years before the second drop hit. Parnell didn’t live to see the third drop fall in 1954, as he passed away in September 1948. By then, the experiment was stored away in a cupboard of the physics department.

The Pitch Drop Experiment with its current custodian, John Mainstone in a picture taken in 1990.

The pitch-drop experiment might have fallen into obscurity had it not been for John Mainstone, who joined the University of Queensland physics department in 1961. One day a colleague said, “I’ve got something weird in this cupboard here” and presented Mainstone with the funnel, beaker and pitch, all housed under a bell jar. Mainstone asked the department head to display it for the school’s science and engineering students, but he was told that nobody wanted to see it. Finally, around 1975, Mainstone persuaded the department to publicly display the experiment in a cabinet in the foyer of the department building.

The experiment that carries on beyond death. Sometimes you just don’t have the time to see what something is really like. The current life expectancy of the Australian man is 79 years. They wouldn’t outlast the pitchdrop experiment. They might not even really get to see the effects. Life, and life that is short, is a lot like that - it obscures us from seeing the reality of things. And, of course, often death itself is the reality.

This week I’ve been working on Luke 12, the Parable of the Rich Fool. Jesus speaks of the idiocy of not realising there is more to this life than 79 short years. And in the middle he does so in a really clever way. The Rich Fool is speaking…

Luke 12:19 And I’ll say to myself, “You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”

It’s an obvious allusion to this…

Eccl. 8:14 There is something else meaningless that occurs on earth: the righteous who get what the wicked deserve, and the wicked who get what the righteous deserve. This too, I say, is meaningless. 15 So I commend the enjoyment of life, because there is nothing better for a person under the sun than to eat and drink and be glad. Then joy will accompany them in their toil all the days of the life God has given them under the sun.

Qoheleth, the speaker of Ecclesiastes, is working through the conundrum of life. It doesn’t seem to make sense - no one gets what they deserve. If that’s reality then the only sane option is to live it up now. Enjoy life - eat and drink and be glad. And, of course, store it up to stop if from going.

But as Ecclesiastes progresses we realise that there’s more to life. Or, more accurately, more to life than life.

11:9 You who are young, be happy while you are young, and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
Follow the ways of your heart and whatever your eyes see, but know that for all these things God will bring you into judgment.

The judgement of God puts everything into perspective. What seemed arbitrary and unfair will be measured and held to account. The 85 year experiment does have a demonstrable conclusion. You may die but you willsee the pitch drop, just not in the way that you thought. Which is, of course, Jesus’ point,

Luke 12:20 “But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?’

Assessing this life based on only this life is nuts. You simply can’t live long enough to see the pitch drop because death will get you first. And then it’s too late. Besides, the results of the experiment are already in - so why act like you don’t know what will happen?

From Powerline:

The Episcopal Church was known for decades as “the Republican Party at prayer,” but as the late Paul Seabury, a descendant of Bishop Seabury, the first Episcopal bishop in the U.S. after the Revolution, memorably put it in his famous 1978 Harper’s magazine article, “Trendier than Thou,” it would be better known today as the Marxist party at prayer—if there were any clerical Marxists left.  Instead today we get the relentless tide of multicultural political correctness from the Episcopal Church, exemplified by this poster making the rounds:

Hat tip:  Positive Phototaxis

Has anyone else noticed the total lack of class with most of the liberal protestors such as Occupy [fill in current occupation location here]? 

A pro-life event at the Rhode Island State House was disrupted by Occupy Wall Street protesters who heckled speakers and dumped condoms on Catholic girls in the crowd.

Last Friday, an estimated crowd of 150 pro-life supporters (including a reported two dozen legislators) had assembled in the rotunda of the State House for the 39th annual Pro-Life Rally, but they were prevented from speaking by members of Occupy Providence and other OWS sympathizers who shouted and chanted during speeches, held signs in front of the faces of speakers and prevented the delivery of the closing prayer by local Catholic leader Father Bernard Healey.

Rhode Island’s Right-To-Life Executive Director Barth Bracy was the scheduled keynote speaker, but the chanting and shouted made it impossible for him to deliver his speech. Bracy told Fox News radio that one Occupier climbed to the third floor balcony and dumped a box of condoms on a group of Catholic girls gathered below. Mr. Bracy wondered:  “What kind of individual throws condoms on Catholic school girls?”

On its face, this would appear to be a good thing, through and through:

In what looks to be a break between two organizations dedicated to women’s health, a national breast cancer awareness group said it would stop providing funds to Planned Parenthood centers for breast cancer examinations and other breast health services.

Susan G. Komen for the Cure, a leader in fundraising for breast cancer research and famous worldwide for its iconic pink ribbon, said Tuesday that it was halting all partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates because of recently adopted criteria that forbid it from funding any organization under government investigation.

I spoke with Georgette Forney, president of Anglicans for Life, who said: “I am pleased with their decision to de-fund PP, obviously. The best part, though, is that their actions have called attention to the fact that Planned Parenthood is under investigation.” In September 2011, Florida Republican Cliff Stearns launched a U.S. House inquiry into whether Planned Parenthood is violating the condition that it not use its donations to fund abortions.

No doubt it’s good that Planned Parenthood will have their funding reduced, but before anyone gets carried away heaping praise on SGK - let alone giving money to them - let’s recall that their stated reason for pulling their funding of Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with the moral repugnance of abortion; it’s that they have a rule in their by-laws stipulating they cannot donate to organizations under government investigation. Now it may, in fact, be the case that the unofficial position of SGK’s leadership find abortion morally repugnant (Karen Handel, who last year became SGK’s senior vice president for public policy, is strongly pro-life), but lacking a clear repudiation of Planned Parenthood’s mission, pro-lifers should assume that, absent such government investigation, SGK would happily resume its financial support of Planned Parenthood.

Another angle to this story that should not go unnoticed is that it’s served to illustrate, yet again, the moral depravity - and the intellectual emptiness - of the left. Over at the aptly-named Jezebel, the headline is “Susan G Komen Foundation Bows to Pro-Life Bullying.” Comments at the Huffington Post are running easily 5-1 against SGK.

The mood at both sites accurately reflects the left’s attitude as a whole: It’s deplorable - despicable - that SGK has chosen not to fund Planned Parenthood, and many are calling for a boycott of SGK.

From this, we have to conclude either that these people are unaware that they can donate to SKG… and Planned Parenthood, separately, and maintain their contributions both to an organization helping with the search for a breast cancer cure, and to an organization devoted to killing unborn innocents; or that their support of killing unborn innocents outweighs by so much their support of finding a cure for breast cancer, that they would rather deprive cancer research of ninety-five cents than know that a nickle of theirs won’t be going to fund abortion. The former conclusion is proof of sheer stupidity, the latter is proof of a depraved heart. But so it is on the pro-abortion left, and I suppose so shall it ever be.

From Yahoo News:

After the ceremony, a large banner reading, “I Do” was hung outside the building as the estimated 50 attendees sang, “Lean on Me.” Nonetheless, demolition on the building began ahead of schedule, starting last Friday.

Aivaz caused some unintended controversy with her ceremony. A pair of protestors showed up to the event, objecting to her use of the term “gay marriage” because it weakens the fight to legal same-sex marriage in the state.

“With the delicate nature of Washington state and the attempt to legalize gay marriage, I find her saying it’s a gay marriage disrespectful,” Phoenix Lopez told KOMO.

“Her saying it’s a gay marriage sets the community back with Christians and politicians and gives them a chance to say, ‘See, we told you, they’re going to want to marry everything if we give them the opportunity,’” added fellow protestor Johnny McCollum-Blair. “Having compassion against something you love, I understand, but to call it a gay union is irresponsible.”

Hat tip:  Underground Pewster

Tissue Alert!!

Sex-selective abortion is altering the ratio of boys-to-girls all over the world, with alarming consequences:

Over the past three decades the world has come to witness an ominous and entirely new form of gender discrimination: sex-selective feticide, implemented through the practice of surgical abortion with the assistance of information gained through prenatal gender determination technology. All around the world, the victims of this new practice are overwhelmingly female — in fact, almost universally female. The practice has become so ruthlessly routine in many contemporary societies that it has impacted their very population structures, warping the balance between male and female births and consequently skewing the sex ratios for the rising generation toward a biologically unnatural excess of males. This still-growing international predilection for sex-selective abortion is by now evident in the demographic contours of dozens of countries around the globe — and it is sufficiently severe that it has come to alter the overall sex ratio at birth of the entire planet, resulting in millions upon millions of new “missing baby girls” each year. In terms of its sheer toll in human numbers, sex-selective abortion has assumed a scale tantamount to a global war against baby girls.

From Icecap:

NASA announced this week that 2011 was the ninth warmest year since 1880 (132 years) despite a quiet sun (not really the case) and La Nina.

UAH had 2011 as the 18th warmest (thus 15th coldest) in their 33 years of record keeping. That alone should raise your eyebrows. Obviously the 15th coldest year in the last 33 years could not also be the ninth warmest in 132 years.

I think the only way we will settle the global warming debate is to make it illegal to profit in any way from it.  All grants for studying global warming sciences - both pro and con must go away.  Politicians will be banned for life from profits from global warming activities, studies, etc. for them, their families or any company in which they own stock.  I sure there are a ton of things I am overlooking but we must remove the profit to take away the incentive to falsify information.

This letter or one very similar to it was to be read at every Roman Catholic service yesterday.

LETTER FROM THE BISHOP (TO BE READ AT ALL MASSES}

My Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ in the Diocese of Trenton:

As your Bishop, I write to you concerning an alarming matter that negatively impacts the Catholic Church in the United States directly, and that strikes at the fundamental right to religious liberty for all citizens of any faith.  The federal government, which claims to be “of, by and for the people,” has just dealt a heavy blow to almost a quarter of those people - the Catholic population and to the millions more who are served by the Catholic faithful.

The U. S. Department of Health and Human Services announced last week that almost all employers, including Catholic employers, will be forced to offer their employees health coverage that includes sterilization, abortion-inducing drugs, and contraception. Almost all health insurers will be forced to include those “services in the health policies they write. And almost all individuals will be forced to buy that coverage as a part of their policies.

As a result, unless the rule is overturned, we Catholics will be compelled to violate our consciences or to drop health coverage for our employees (and suffer the penalties for doing so.)

We cannot - we will not - comply with this unjust law. People of faith cannot be made second class citizens. We are already joined by our brothers and sisters of all faiths and many others of good will in this important effort to regain our religious freedom. In generations past, the Church has always been able to count on the faithful to stand up and protect her sacred rights and duties. I hope and trust she can count on this generation of Catholics to do the same. Our children and grandchildren deserve nothing less.

This is not an attempt by the Church to interfere with anyone’s politics. It is, rather, an attempt to lift up and live our Catholic faith the way that our nation and our constitution have always guaranteed us the freedom and the right to do.  Please join me and all of those harmed by this legislation in prayer and in an all-out effort to have our freedom restored. History cautions us repeatedly that once we walk down such a dangerous path, we will get lost in the process.

Respectfully yours in Christ,
Most Reverend David M. O’Connell C.M.
Bishop of Trenton
DOC:blm

Surely, we can expect a similar such letter from the purple shirts in TEc. 

The following excerpt is from a paper where the authors are seeking to change the Dead Donor Rule.

“[I]f killing were wrong just because it is causing death or the loss of life, then the same principle would apply with the same strength to pulling weeds out of a garden. If it is not immoral to weed a garden, then life as such cannot really be sacred, and killing as such cannot be morally wrong.”

  The paper itself is behind a paywall but you can read more about this at The Blaze. 

From the Daily Mail:

Ministers should not overrule the Bible by allowing same-sex marriage, the Archbishop of York has said.
David Cameron would be acting like a ‘dictator’ and overruling the Bible if he legalises gay marriage, Dr John Sentamu has warned.
He told the prime minister that he will face a rebellion if he pushes ahead with plans to allow fully-fledged gay marriages.
  Archbishop of York John Sentamu says David Cameron would be like a ‘dictator’ if he legalises gay marriage

Marriage is set in history and the government cannot change it overnight, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England added.

The Archbishop believes marriage must remain a union between a man and a woman.

Dr Sentamu said: ‘I don’t think it is the role of the state to define what marriage is. It is set in tradition and history and you can’t just (change it) overnight, no matter how powerful you are.
‘We’ve seen dictators do it in different contexts and I don’t want to redefine very clear social structures that have been in existence for a long time and then overnight the state believes it could go in a particular way.

Hat tip:  Ralph

The Lead have what they claim to be (and I don’t doubt it’s true) a copy of an email sent by Bonnie Anderson (President of the GC House of Deputies) to all the members of the House. It speaks for itself:

January 29, 2012
Dear Deputies and First Alternates:
A confusing situation has arisen and I’d like to set the record straight:

On Thursday, the Presiding Bishop released a video directed to the House of Deputies expressing her opinion about legislative issues that will come before General Convention this summer. Yesterday, the Office of Communications sent an email to bishops that mischaracterized my response to the video’s release and asked the bishops to forward the video message to their diocese’s deputies.

On Thursday afternoon, I received word from the General Convention Office that the Presiding Bishop, via the Office of Communications, had directed that office to forward a video message from the Presiding Bishop to all deputies. I had neither seen the video nor been consulted about it and so I told the General Convention Office to hold it.

In my nearly 25 years as a deputy, I don’t ever recall the Presiding Bishop speaking directly to the House of Deputies outside of a joint session or without giving the House due notice, while at General Convention. I don’t ever recall a Presiding Bishop corresponding directly with deputies outside of the General Convention, without the knowledge of, or in collaboration with the President.

I was surprised because I thought that the Presiding Bishop, her staff, and I had worked through some important issues of internal communications last fall. I had talked with both Bishop Sauls and the Presiding Bishop and asked that we proceed in a more collegial and cooperative manner. I thought we had agreed to do so.

But while the General Convention Office was holding the video, it was released by the Office of Communications to the whole church just hours before the Presiding Bishop and I were scheduled to arrive in Baltimore where we could have resolved the situation in person.

I am glad to tell you that, while we have been in Baltimore, Bishop Katharine and I have shared a meal and talked in person. I told her that I’m disappointed about what’s happened in the last few days and asked that we proceed toward General Convention with collegiality and a cooperative spirit even—especially—when we disagree. I also told her that I am concerned about the use of churchwide resources to lobby General Convention on only one side of a legislative issue.

Despite this productive conversation, upon direction from the Presiding Bishop, the Office of Communications sent the second email, this time to bishops, that mischaracterized my request that the video be held, thus putting me in a difficult position and making it necessary to spell all of this out.

I am confident that we can get back on track and work productively and faithfully to prepare for General Convention. I will continue to urge that those of us who lead the church talk directly with one another to resolve differences. I will also continue to ask that the resources of the Church Center be deployed in ways that present the full range of opinions on legislation that will determine how the church meets the challenges before us.

Thank you for your commitment to our work. I am looking forward to being with all of you in Indianapolis and to the work that we will accomplish together.

Peace,
Bonnie Anderson, D. D.
President, The House of Deputies

The video is “the first of a series” of videos Schori wanted to make. In this first one she is trying to persuade the Deputies to endorse what are going to be radical changes in the budget. It seems Bonnie Anderson doesn’t want Jefferts-Schori interfering in that process within her own fiefdom.

But what were you expecting? You have a Presiding Bishop who has run roughshod over proper procedure for years now. Not so much fun when it comes back to bite you.

Liberty Counsel Press Release:

Shawano, WI – Liberty Counsel is representing the Wegner family after school officials at Shawano High School censored and punished Brandon Wegner, a 15-year-old, for writing an op-ed article explaining the Biblical view of homosexuality and supporting natural mother-father adoption. Liberty Counsel sent a letter to the school demanding it apologize for its unconstitutional and irrational censorship and humiliation of Brandon.

Brandon quoted several verses from the Bible regarding homosexuality. After Brandon wrote this article he was pulled into hours of meetings with school administrators and staff, without his parents’ knowledge. This caused him to miss exam preparation classes and at least one exam. Brandon was hauled before the superintendent on charges that he had violated the school’s bullying policy. Superintendent Todd Carlson told him that the column “went against the bullying policy,” and asked him if he “regretted” writing it. When Mr. Wegner stated that he did not regret writing it, and that he stood behind his beliefs, Superintendent Carlson told him that he “had got to be one of the most ignorant kids to try to argue with him about this topic,” that “we have the power to suspend you if we want to” and that the column had “personally offended me, so I know you offended other people!”

Brandon’s opinion was a part of an editorial page which presented viewpoints both for and against homosexual adoption, each articulated by students. After the school newspaper was published in the local town paper, a homosexual in the community complained to the school. School officials then censored Brandon’s article forcing him and his classmates to pull the page out of the newspaper before distribution at the school. In a statement, the school “sincerely apologized” – not for allowing the topic to begin with, but only for the Biblical viewpoint presented by Brandon. The First Amendment protects the opinions of all, including student journalists.

Mathew Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel, said “The bullying at Shawano High School is by Superintendent Todd Carlson and the school officials, not the student, Brandon Wegner. The school officials have displayed blatant intolerance of a view on homosexuality held by many people. The school’s actions are shocking and unjustified. The superintendent should immediately apologize and stop the bullying.”

January 19, 2012
Sometimes on vacation we will write to a friend from some temporary paradise, “I wish you were here”. I must say, if you are reading this article and could not make it to the Sacred Assembly called Moving Forward Together [MFT] I truly wish you were there. I say that because for me it was at certain points as if we were indeed in Paradise. I don’t believe I have ever been at such a large gathering where there was such intense seeking and subdued, worshipful,  spiritual energy. To see such large number of clergy and laity seeking the face of God together in an atmosphere of open prolonged, sincere, and dignified worship, humility, sorrow for sin, confession, and repentance was an awesome thing.
Those who have been following the story of the dust-up between AMiA and it’s provincial home in Rwanda would, like myself, headed toward Raleigh expecting a far different program and agenda than what actually materialized over the eighteen actual hours of meeting together at the Church of the Apostles.
Some would have expected the meeting to have the spirit of a business meeting. In other words, what do we do now? What are the structures, who are the leaders, what is our new name, where is the new headquarters going to be, and etcetera? Others would have expected a time of recriminations and accusations directed at some people and explanations and justifications on the part of others. Some would have expected a ‘show’ or a ‘pep rally atmosphere’ to get everyone excited and to draw everyone in and get ‘momentum’ for a new movement. Then experienced Anglicans may have expected papering over problems and endless dialogue and committee meetings.
Speaking for myself, but also according to others, what we saw and what actually transpired in Raleigh was an unexpected and ‘once in a lifetime’ experience for an assembly of ministers in a time of crisis, confusion, and pain.
I can only attribute this to the determination made by the Americans involved to let the Rwandan bishops set the spirit and tone of the meeting. As I mentioned in my first report the initial atmosphere of anxiety and apprehension was almost immediately dispelled when Archbishop Rwaje opened the assembly with gracious words assuring continued pastoral care, ecclesiastical covering, urging healing, reconciliation, and vision for mission.
As the assembly unfolded over Tuesday and Wednesday it was very apparent that these goals were more than words. The entire assembly took place in an atmosphere of worship. A complete Holy Communion service was celebrated Monday evening and Wednesday morning. The presence of God was palpable.

Tuesday morning the day’s activities began with a complete Morning Prayer service. The worship led the saints into true times of worship and praise.

On Monday evening, immediately after the Apostle’s Creed Bishop Terrell Glenn had the assembly form groups of four and enter into a time of intercession for reconciliation, then another time to pray for the Church, then another brief period to pray for the sick and suffering, and finally a time to pray for those in the USA and Rwanda. It was a great thing to hear the gentle but intense prayers of God’s people fill the large building.
On Tuesday morning Bishop Louis Muvunyi opened morning prayers sharing about the suffering of Rwandans, including his own family during the genocide. He made the point that the Devil is responsible for most of our ‘warfare’ and that our battle is not with ‘flesh and blood’ but with spirits that want to hinder God’s work and cause divisions among Christians.
Bishop Julian Dobbs, a New Zealander serving with CANA, shared the morning sermon. This was a passionate call to ‘Arise and Build’ from the ministry of Nehemiah. It was evident that he was casting the assembled Christians in the role of Nehemiah. He spoke of looking beyond the rubble to the City we are called to build; the Kingdom of God. He mentioned the various attacks and temptations that Nehemiah had to deal with, the mockery, the opposition and hindrances of various personalities with their own agenda, the temptation to negotiate where there was no reconciliation. He drew a laugh when he called ‘dialogue’ an Anglican disease. He did mention that Nehemiah had to deal with civil corruption and people dealing in trade and business instead of focusing on God’s will and power. These issues were dealt with in a scriptural and wise way. Most people read between the lines and understood that they must move beyond all the distractions and do God’s work.
During a question and answer session on Tuesday afternoon someone asked if any of the bishops, American or Rwandan, felt the need to ask forgiveness of anyone. Bishop Thad Barnum reflected the spirit of the assembly and touched our hearts as he brokenly confessed to several things. He spoke of not realizing the hurt he was causing to people by acquiescing to an agenda (AMiA leadership) that he knew was not right. He seemed to be apologizing also for allowing Bishop Terrell Glenn to resign at an AMiA Council of Bishops meeting without any support. He confessed his sorrow for helping to maintain the fiction that the AMiA was submitted to the new Archbishop while he, Barnham, did not object to AMiA disobeying His Grace by being involved in planning meetings for a new ‘mission society’ contrary to the Primates wishes. Finally, Bishop Barnum confessed his sorrow for the pain caused to Abp. Duncan and other in the ACNA when AMiA refused to honor their previous agreement to have full membership in the new Province in formation. Archbishop Duncan called out from the audience, “Apology received, forgiveness granted!” I tell you, it was heavenly, it was truly Christian. Bishop Thad’s heartbroken confession, sorrow, and repentance went a long way toward breaking any remaining hostility, resentment, or self-righteousness in the assembly.
Bishop Laurent Mbanda, former vice-president of Compassion International who now leads +John Rucyahana’s Shyira Diocese, gave us more words of wisdom and healing. He said that everyone seems to be looking for someone to blame. Some want to blame the Internet or various personalities. He told us that instead we should all examine our own hearts and find the blame in ourselves so we can confess, repent, and be healed. He said we need to be careful not to ‘write anyone off’, but instead to extend a hand of reconciliation to all.
At the risk of being redundant I must report that Tuesday Evening Prayer was again a powerful time of worship. If you don’t have a violin in your worship team, begin praying. Dr. Lyle Dorsett of Beeson Divinity School brought the message. At last years AMiA winter conference Dr. Dorsett gave us a sermon that was the ‘spiritual highlight’ of the meeting. We were not disappointed on Tuesday as he shared about the “George Gill Test”. George Gill, a layman, asked his pastor, “Pastor, do you love His appearing?” The pastor wasn’t sure what ol’ George meant. “Pastor, Paul told Timothy, ‘there is a crown of righteousness laid up for all who have loved His appearing.” Dr. Dorsett spent twenty minutes encouraging, challenging, and inspiring us to fight the good fight, finish the race, and do what God has called us to do because ‘we love His appearing’. He held before our eyes a litany of the suffering of Paul and the love he had for Jesus that enabled him finish his work. With hushed tones and a heavenly anointing our brother challenged us to have a vision of the Lord and a relationship with Jesus that will enable us to overcome and become better, not bitter. You could have heard a pin drop.
It was made very clear, over and over again at this assembly that the AMIA bishops who were not present were still considered part of the family. There was evidence that there was great grief and sorrow for the estrangement of those brethren and a great desire for reconciliation
Rev. Steve Breedlove (All Saints, Durham, NC) read out a brief statement from Abp. Rwaje about some decisions arrived at by the Leaders and Laity meeting together. Briefly, here are the high points. (I am sure a PDF will be available on the net soon.)

·    Overall Bishops Terrell Glenn and Thad Barnum will provide general oversight for all the clergy involved in “Moving Forward Together”. (This seems to be a description more than an actual name.)
·    A team of leaders rather than a hierarchy or a single personality will provide actual working leadership. This is much more in keeping with the Rwandan form of collegial leadership. These leaders will consult with and be under the authority and oversight of +Glenn and +Barnam. This leadership team will consist of Rev’s Dan Claire, Steve Breedlove, David Bryan, Chip Edgar, Clark Lowenfield, Ken Ross, and Alan Hawkins. Other leaders may be added as things develop.
·    The MFT Bishop and leaders will work collaboratively with churches and bishops in the ACNA where helpful.
·    A commitment was made to have total transparency on plans and financial accounting with regular monthly reports given to clergy and congregations. Feedback from clergy and laity will be encouraged.
·    The team received a charge from Abp. Rwaje to develop plans over the next 6 to 12 months for long-term structures. These structures will be designed to meet the needs of congregations and clergy rather than to force everyone to accept a ‘one-size fits all’ solution.
·    All churches and clergy who have been a part of the AMiA are invited to contact Bishop Terrell or Thad, or one of the aforementioned leaders to indicate interest in Moving forward together. Contact info for these men will be available by Jan. 23 at http://www.pearusa.com
Before the statement was read we again shared in a beautiful Communion service celebrated by Archbishop Rwaje. As the assembly drew to a close the Archbishop again addressed the assembly. He spoke briefly on how wonderfully his expectations for the meeting had been met. He said as Rwandan Christians they came expecting to have a time of prayer, confession, brokenness, and reconciliation. He said he was so grateful to the Lord that their expectations were exceeded not just met.
There was so much more, and it was so wonderful, worshipful, and encouraging.

Wishing you were there.

I’ve been engaged in a number of conversations lately with Christians—some of them well known orthodox Anglican thinkers and leaders—trying to justify their support for pro-abortion politicians and candidates. In almost every exchange I’ve run into slightly different forms of the same three arguments

The first goes something like this: “I agree that abortion is wrong but we cannot legislate moral choices. Instead, why don’t we simply focus on preaching the gospel. Only changed hearts will bring about a changed culture.”

The logic behind this rationalization is stunningly bad—so bad it’s hard to answer without a tinge of incredulity and exasperation. But here’s a paraphrased summary of my most common response: Right you are about changed hearts. But why the false dichotomy? One might as well say: “I agree that killing toddlers is wrong, but we cannot legislate moral choices.” Sure we can and we must. Not only do we proclaim the gospel and pray that God’s grace will change hearts and change the culture but we also put laws on the books that prevent people from killing their children.

Both/and not either/or.

The second rationalization employs logic every bit as bad if not worse than the first but a little more subtle. It goes something like this: “Yes, abortion is a great evil and yet it is merely one great evil alongside poverty, injustice, inadequate health-care and preemptive war. Why take this one great evil and elevate it above the others? I vote for the candidate who will, overall, do the most good. Every once in a while, that will mean voting for a pro-choice politician.”

The trick to this justification is to make abortion “just like” an ineffective economic policy or the failure of a particular party to resolve the health-care crisis or engaging in what some consider an unjust war. While all of these things do indeed result in destructive consequences for many people, the radical difference between abortion and any of them is that abortion is the purposeful killing of a human being. The others might result in death for many innocent people but such a result is accidental not purposeful. No free-world politician sets out purposefully to design an economic policy to kill people. Abortion has only that purpose and only that end. Comparing abortion to bad economic policy is like comparing the inept driver who accidentally swerves into oncoming traffic and kills another driver to the very good driver who purposefully drives into a crowd on the sidewalk at full speed.
In an article posted on the Christian Research Institute website Scott Klusendorf writes:

“Are pro-life advocates focused too narrowly on abortion? After all, informed voters consider many issues, not just one.

Of course abortion isn’t the only issue-any more than the treatment of slaves wasn’t the only issue in the 1860s or the treatment of Jews the only issue in the 1940s. But both were the dominant issues of their day. Thoughtful Christians attribute different importance to different issues, and give greater weight to fundamental moral questions. For example, if a man running for president told us that men had a right to beat their wives, most people would see that as reason enough to reject him, despite his expertise on foreign policy or economic reforms. The foundational principle of our republic is that all humans are equal in their fundamental dignity. What issue could be more important than that? You might as well blame politicians like Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt for focusing too narrowly on defeating the Nazis, to the neglect of other issues.”

The truth is that the ongoing , purposeful, legalized killing of innumerable unborn infants in the United States is a moral crime of such depravity that genocide, slavery, and mass murder provide the only the only legitimate comparisons.

The third rationalization involves a kind of paradigm shift. “The question is not,” some will say, “whether abortion is right or wrong. It is manifestly wrong. The question is who gets to decide? Is it right to give such power to the national government. Shouldn’t these kinds of decisions be left to the mother, the one who carries the greatest burden in caring for the unborn child? A one month old ‘fetus’ can’t survive after all unless the mother sacrifices her body to care for it? Shouldn’t she be the one who ultimately decides whether she can “

On the one hand the argument is an attempt to piggy-back on the increasingly prominent libertarian sentiment among conservatives. “Hey, if you really support less government why would you want the state getting involved in a woman’s womb?” On the other hand the argument suggests that the right to live ought to be determined by the measure of a human being’s independence.

The “libertarian” justification betrays an implicit denial of the unborn baby’s humanity. If, in fact, the unborn baby is “a baby”, then whether or not to kill it cannot be a decision left to the mother or father or both. Not even Ron Paul, I hope, would want to allow parents to kill toddlers or infants or retarded children. All these rightly enjoy the protection of the national government and the law. It should not be different for an unborn baby since “baby” it is. To argue otherwise is to implicitly accept the secularist position that a newly conceived human is somehow less human than than we are—a position both genetically and biblically repugnant.

Likewise, if we are going to define the right to live using independence or autonomy as the measure, then we will be opening a very dangerous door. There are many people who cannot survive apart from the care of another. Do they have less right to live than the more autonomous among us? Such reasoning is not very far from the “useless eater” ethics employed by health professionals in early mid-twentieth century central Europe. We are all, in fact, on some level “dependent.” Where do we draw the line?  A toddler is more autonomous than a one month old unborn baby but the toddler is far less autonomous than I am. So why draw the line at the unborn month old baby? Why not the toddler? Why not the homebound grandmother? Morally, it makes very little difference. Once you tie human life to autonomy, life becomes very cheap indeed.

This article is reprinted with permission from the Live Action Blog

I’ve been reading a fascinating book by economist, Stanford University professor, and Hoover Institute Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell called Black Rednecks & White Liberals. In an essay titled “The Real History of Slavery,” Sowell analyzes the complex reasons why most Americans who were morally opposed to slavery did not side with the radical abolitionists. A whole host of reasons stopped good men — including Washington and Jefferson — from supporting any endeavor to simply declare slaves free and release them into the wide world, and foremost among these concerns was the well-being of the slaves themselves.

Sowell quotes Edmund Burke, the 18th century British philosopher and opponent of the slave trade.

… Burke put the problem, as he put so many other problems, in the context of the inherent constraints of circumstances. While seeing slavery as “an incurable evil,” Burke was concerned with what would happen to the slaves themselves after they were freed, as well as the implications of their freedom for the society around them.

The “minds of men being crippled” by slavery, Burke said, “we must precede the donation of freedom” by developing in the enslaved people the capacity to function as responsible members of a free society…

[N]owhere did Burke view this is an abstract question without considering the social context and the consequences and dangers of that context.

Slavery is almost as old as humanity, and as widespread as the globe. The Islamic world was notorious for its slave trade. Slavs were notoriously slaves. In fact the word “slave” comes from slav. Arabs and North Africans enslaved Europeans, Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Africans enslaved other Africans. Everyone enslaved someone. It was all the rage. Sowell again:

While slavery was common to all civilizations, as well as to peoples considered uncivilized, only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history — Western civilization…

Slavery did not die out quietly of its own accord. It went down fighting to the bitter end — and it lost only because Europeans had gunpowder weapons first.

Why am I going on and on about slavery on a pro-life site?

In thinking about abortion — which I do rather often — I come back to the issue of slavery again and again. Both are grave moral evils, and both these evils — buying, selling and owning slaves, and procuring or committing abortions — have at some time been recognized as legal rights by our nation. Both involve the absolute, unquestioned power of one human being over another. Both are emotionally charged, divisive issues that split the nation practically in half — although, in this case, not geographically.

Here are two unsettling facts about abortion:

1. Abortion will not go down without a fight. Now, before you go screeching to your local news media that I’m about to bomb a clinic and inspire yet another “pro-lifers are violent” episode of “Law & Order,” let me make myself clear: I’m not talking about gunpowder. This movement has long since established itself as non-violent, and anyone who deviates from that is soundly condemned… far more loudly than, for example, butchers like Brigham and Gosnell are condemned by the pro-choice crowd, but I digress.

I am not predicting another Civil War. I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea, considering it cost the U.S. one life for every six slaves freed back in the day. I know many good people who would die to end abortion, but let’s put that on the back burner.

No, what I mean is, like the emancipation of slaves, the end to abortion will be something that law will have to force on the unwilling half of the country. It may not be physically bloody, but it will be uncomfortable.

I believe firmly, for many reasons both cerebral and spiritual, that Roe will be overturned in my lifetime. As we all know, this does not mean an absolute end to abortion in this country, but it is the essential first step, and goes a long way towards making it a punishable crime.

Changing hearts is all fine and good, but if we think that we are going to do that one at a time until everybody is pro-life and we all hug each other and gather on a hillside singing and no one has abortions anymore, we are all delusional. At some point, we’re going to have to make abortion illegal. We are going to have to make lots of people really, really mad.

About half the country will not take this sitting down. It will be an incredibly divisive, traumatic event.

2. Like Burke before me, I consider the practical, tangible results of an end to abortion, and I see that many problems will result. Unless changes are made in the way young people perceive and learn about sex, and unless a major shift occurs in the average American’s approach toward personal responsibility, we are going to be in trouble. If about one million more babies are born every year to mothers who are not prepared to take care of them, the strain on various government aid programs — WIC, Medicaid, etc. — will be disastrous to an already struggling federal system.

You probably hear anti-lifers throw out this rhetorical question all the time: “What are we supposed to do with all those new babies?” I usually reply with, “It’s a complicated problem, but I know what the answer isn’t: kill them in the womb.”

However, while we reject their evil Nazi idea that it’s better these children were never born, we’d better take the problem they bring up seriously if we want good lives for those children, and a solvent America for them to grow up in.

The solution to this problem is simple, but not easy, and I’ll tell you more about it in my next column.

______________________________________________

Kristen Walker makes people mad on the Internet and sometimes tweets.

From The Blaze:

Florida State Senator Gary Siplin, a Democrat representing Orlando, is on a mission to bring prayer back to public schools. The lawmaker has proposed a bill that would make it legal for students to lead prayer. Yes, in public schools.

The proposal would enable school districts to decide if they want to allow the religions practice at school events. Currently, students are permitted to pray on an individual basis, though the group-led prayer being proposed is obviously quite different. Siplin, likely realizing the controversial nature of the bill, has explained that no student would be mandated to participate.

From The Sacramento Bee:

Faith leaders regularly use iPads to research their sermons and smartphones to text church members. Tonight, many will put aside their high-tech tools to honor a book that was created the old-fashioned way – by hand.

The Saint John’s Bible is the first handwritten, hand-illuminated Bible commissioned since the advent of the printing press more than 500 years ago.
Fifteen years in the making, the Saint John’s Bible will be on display for the first time in Northern California at the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament.

From Associated Press:

An increased scrutiny of Illinois abortion clinics in the wake of revelations about a “house of horrors” in Philadelphia revealed that some facilities had gone up to 15 years without inspections, and two now have closed after regulators found health and safety violations.

The renewed oversight by state regulators led to the permanent closure of a clinic in Rockford earlier this month, following the closing of a clinic in suburban Chicago last October, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press through a Freedom of Information Act request.

One of those facilities — the Women’s Aid Clinic in Lincolnwood — closed when the owner decided to surrender its license rather than pay a $36,000 fine or endure an expensive legal fight with the state. The fine was for violations including the clinic’s failure to perform CPR on a patient who died after a procedure. Its owner told the AP her clinic was safe and she felt victimized by the surprise inspection after 15 years.

While Illinois is working on the backlog of neglected inspections, the documents reviewed by the AP show that a few abortion clinics in the state still haven’t been checked in more than a decade. One in Chicago hasn’t been inspected in 16 years. Another in the suburb of Wood Dale was last inspected nearly 15 years ago.

Praise God from whom ALL blessings flow!

Surprisingly, Gene Robinson, the reclusive publicity shunning Epsicopal Bishop of New Hampshire, is the subject of yet another full length documentary film. Somehow, the producers of “Love Free or Die” persuaded the embarrassed and reluctant country bishop to allow their cameras to follow him around England during the 2008 Lambeth Conference. The resulting documentary premiered at the Sundance Film Festival this month. And now, emerging from his quiet hermitage, Gene Robinson has relented to incessant public demand and has agreed to be interviewed:

When I spoke with openly gay bishop Gene Robinson about following him through a particularly harrowing period that he was about to enter, I told him that talking to him was like talking to Joan of Arc, in a time when a doc crew could capture the drama of the church/state firestorm he had found himself in. He laughed but said that it was true – he was caught in the crosshairs of cultural change and it was important to record it along the way, so he invited me to follow him for the next four years.

The experience has been packed with revelation, some lost on the camera but many captured…more

Horrific praise for a holocaust

“President Barack Obama says the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade is the chance to recognize the “fundamental constitutional right” to abortion and to “continue our efforts to ensure that our daughters have the same rights, freedoms, and opportunities as our sons to fulfill their dreams.”...more

Of course…he’s only talking about the sons and daughters we don’t kill first.

The present state of the Republican presidential nomination contest, on the other hand, is not entirely depressing from the pro-life perspective. I, personally, would love for Rick Santorum to win the nomination but I see little chance of that happening unless Newt self-destructs sometime in the next month or so. The one bright shiny unvarnished good is that somehow rank and file conservatives have made it impossible for anyone to run for the GOP nomination without being or becoming (ala Mitt Romney) pro-life. The same was not true in 2008 when a number of the candidates held, shall we say, “nuanced” views on abortion.

The party of death by contrast, as evidenced by the President’s words above, boasts the opposite litmus test—say you believe baby killing is a legal right on par with the right to eat or you’ll get nowhere.

Hat tip:  The Curmudgeon

When the Rev. Bob Brashear prepared for Sunday services at West Park Presbyterian Church on West 86th Street, he noticed parts of the bronze baptismal font were gone.

In a fire-and-brimstone message to occupiers later that day, he thundered, “It was like pissing on the 99 percent.”

In Brooklyn, at another church housing OWS protesters, an occupier urinated on a cross, according to Rabbi Chaim Gruber, who has angrily abandoned the OWS movement.

In a letter last week to OWS obtained by The Post, the rabbi fumed, “The Park Slope church housing occupiers was desecrated when an occupier peed inside the building and the pee came into contact with a cross.”

We disagree with Bishop Robinson on many issues but we ask that all put those differences aside and join with us in extending our deepest sympathies to Bishop Robinson at this time of great loss. 

Mary Imogene Bowman Robinson, 86, wife of Charles Victor Robinson of 65 years, died Thursday, January 19, 2012 after a lengthy illness. She was a Deacon of the Bethany Christian Church, a member of the Bethany Christian Women’s Fellowship and a member of the Disabled American Veterans Auxiliary. Additional survivors include two children, V. Gene Robinson and his partner, Mark-NH and Karen Robinson-Lexington, two granddaughters, Jamee Robinson-VT and Ella Robinson-NY, two great-grandchildren, daughters of Jamee, Morgan and Megan Muzzy-VT, a sister- and brother-in-law, Jan and Ray Wells-Nicholasville. Services will be 10:00am Monday at Betts & West Funeral Home with Rev. Barbara Schaars. Burial will follow in the Camp Nelson National Cemetery. Visitation will be from 3-8pm Sunday. Bearers will be Tommy, Craig and Aaron Cox, Jimmy Bowman, Scott Wells and John McIntosh. Honorary bearers will be members of the Bethany Christian Church Board. In lieu of flowers, donations are suggested to Bethany Christian Church or Hospice of the Bluegrass. Online guestbook here.

Dear Friends in Christ,
You will find below an urgent message from the Diocesan Council and the Finance and Budget Committee of the Diocese of New Jersey.
This appeal arose out of the very sobering results of the annual appeal to congregations for financial support of our diocesan mission. With gratitude for all of the pledges that have been received thus far, and with respect for the fact that many churches have fewer financial resources available, I am, nevertheless, asking you to do the following:
*Read the Council’s message and discuss it with congregational leaders in the coming week.
*Reconsider your congregation’s 2012 Fair Share Pledge and, where possible, increase your 2012 Pledge.
*Renew your commitment to work, pray and give for the mission of the wider Church.
Please note that the Council and I are committed to a review of the current Fair Share Pledge system in the coming year. We will see to it that a report with recommendations will be presented to the 2013 Diocesan Convention.  The financial health of our Diocese will be of interest as the Episcopal Election Committee prepares for the election of the 12th Bishop of New Jersey in 2013.
I write with gratitude for you and for all you do in the service of our blessed Lord and for the well-being of our beloved Episcopal Church. God is good; all the time. At all times and in all places, then, let us give thanks to the Lord our God.
Faithfully yours, in Christ,
+George
The Rt. Rev. George E. Councell
URGENT…Response Required

We need every congregation to reassess its financial commitment to the Diocese for 2012!

The Diocesan Finance and Budget Committee has been seriously deliberating the issues necessary to produce the annual, balanced Diocesan budget for 2012.  That budget, as always, is built primarily upon the pledges made by our individual congregations related to the Askings.  The preliminary budget for 2012, approved at the 2011 Convention, was predicated on receipt of pledges at 70% of the asking.  The actual commitments to date, when added to estimates for the forty congregations yet to make a pledge, accrue to only 60% of the asking.

When we combine the estimated income with an extremely tight expense budget projection, and as we search for a new bishop, we are almost $600,000 underfunded.  Even after planning, as a result, to reduce our budgeted pledge to The Episcopal Church to a tithe, we are still left with a lot of ground to make up.

To those 27 congregations who have already pledged the full asking, and to those of you who continue to move toward that goal by increasing your pledges, thank you.  Perhaps this communication will underscore to your congregations the true importance of your continued leadership and support, as well as our appreciation for it.  Unfortunately, numerous congregations have reduced their comparative commitment.  A dozen of the larger churches have reduced their pledges by a combined total of over $130,000.  Finally, many, many congregations have pledged less than 10% of their parochial income.

With this email we are asking every congregation to reassess its commitment for 2012 with the hope of achieving at least a tithe from everyone, and for those churches at or better than 10% but below last year’s pledge, to find the means to re-submit pledges at least equal to those of 2011.

We need your prompt response, directed as noted below and preferably by email, in order to have a balanced budget for Convention.  This means we need feedback from every congregation not later than January 25th.

Someone from Diocesan Council will be making a follow-up call to every church relevant to this appeal.

Finally, we recognize that the present Fair Share system needs an overhaul.  Our Bishop has agreed to appoint a new task force prior to the 2012 Convention to address the entire question of the asking process and its components; and, to have a new plan ready for approval by the 2013 Convention.  Until then, we urgently request and deeply appreciate your efforts to work with us for one more year under the current system.

In the event you want to see just where you stand with your fair share, you can follow this link - www.newjersey.anglican.org/fairshare - to the diocesan website, where a detailed spreadsheet can be found.
Please direct your email responses to Sarah Paige (spaige@newjersey.anglican.org).  If you choose to respond by phone, please call Connie White at 609-394-5281 x14.

Bishop George E. Councell and the Members of Diocesan Council and the Diocesan Finance & Budget Committee

Having been in this fight for so long, we sometimes forget - those of us who write about these things and those who read them - that our side of the debate is not obvious to everyone, and that from time to time we need to articulate our positions again, both because there are people who are open to considering them, and because we need to keep our skills sharp.

This interview with Winnie Varghese, a lesbian Episcopal priest at St. Mark’s in New York City’s Bowery district, reminded me of that. Two passages in particular, beginning with this one:

I was raised in the US in a very liberal Christian family, as my parents, who were young adults right after [Indian] Independence, grew up with an understanding of Christianity that was framed by the many Independence movements of the 20th century. The Bible is organised around the story of the Exodus, which is that God saves God’s people from slavery in Egypt, and we learn that God is on the side of the oppressed. In fact, the theme throughout the Bible, whether the Old Testament, or the New, is that of God redeeming people, not because they are good, or doing the right thing, but because they are marginalised.

It astonishes me that an ordained priest in a church that prides itself on rigorous religious education for its priests, actually has this understanding of the Bible; or if this is in fact not her understanding of it, that she would decide deliberately to push this nonsense as what the Bible is. Shorter version: This “priest” is either very ignorant about the Bible, or very duplicitous, although I suppose it could be both.

So off we go:

First, the Bible is not “organized around the story of the Exodus.” It is organized - as is, Christians believe, the whole of human history - around the birth of Jesus Christ, His revelation to us as God incarnate, and His role as our Savior and Redeemer.

Neither does Christianity teach that God redeems people “because they are marginalised.” What Christianity teaches is that God redeems people because they accept Jesus Christ as their savior. Why they should do so - because they are sinful and repentant - is almost secondary if one is looking for a single, simple lesson to take from the Bible. But it is most certainly not that redemption is offered because one is “marginalized.”

Here’s the second passage. In answer to the question, “What about the notion that homosexuality is a sin?” Varghese replies:

In the Levitical Code in the Bible, there are many acts that are prohibited, like wearing fabrics of two kinds in one garment or eating shellfish. These may seem absurd to modern people, but these were specific things that communities did to distinguish themselves from other communities, but which most Christians do not follow now. So it’s not difficult to take the Levitical Code—where a sexual moral code is discussed—and say that that’s from another time and another culture. The Code, for instance, says things like, if your child talks back at you, stone her. We don’t observe those practices now.

If we look at the Bible’s overarching themes, the most consistent one that runs through the text is a preferential option for the marginalised and the need to offer them justice, which is what people of a sexual minority need today, as they are marginalised and denied justice legally, and in terms of human rights.

This can be summarized as “the shellfish argument,” but the more complex issues of the Levitical codes aside, it never ceases to amaze me the simple failings of logic made by people who offer this “defense” of homosexual behavior.

The first failing is the notion that because items A, B, and C in a list are no longer applicable, then item D is therefore no longer applicable either.

To make my point, remove the list of prohibitions entirely from the context of Christianity, or even faith in general. Let’s say you’re writing a manual for automobile drivers, and the year is 1912. Your manual might very well include the following:

- Do not wear a veil to protect yourself against flying road debris; yea, verily I beseech thee, wear sturdy goggles.

- Do not attempt to start the motorcar with a crank made of wood; alas these will soon splinter, and cause you only grief.

- Do not honk your horn when approaching a horse-drawn buggy from behind; this may spook the horse and cause injury to the buggy’s riders.

- Do not operate your motorcar while intoxicated; it will impair your judgement and could result in serious injury or death to you and your passengers.

If I’m an advocate of the patently idiotic position that drinking and driving is a great idea, how seriously would I be taken if I insisted that, because cars now have windshields and thus no need for drivers to wear goggle; that cars are now started with keys and thus no need for cranks; and that horse-drawn buggies are virtually extinct, obviously the prohibition against drinking and driving is a quaint anachronism that can - and should - be reversed?

Why, then, does anyone take seriously people like Varghese, when their advocacy for homosexual behavior follows the same pattern?

The second failing is to offer the one example in Leviticus, make the case that it is “problematic,” and then proceed as if the case is closed - as if nowhere else in the Bible is homosexual behavior ever mentioned. Homosexual behavior is mentioned several other times in the Bible - Old Testament as well as New - and it is univocal in its prohibition of it as sinful.

The third failing is, again, a thoroughly incorrect characterization of the “overarching theme” of the Bible. It is most certainly not “a preferential option for the marginalised and the need to offer them justice.” Certainly the marginalized are lifted up, to the extent that by “marginalized” we mean the poor, the downtrodden, and the powerless; but the overarching theme of the Bible as regards the treatment of different kinds of people, is that no one of faith gets preferential treatment. The Gospel is the ultimate societal flattener: Repent of your sins and place your faith Jesus Christ, and you are saved, no matter your station in life or the magnitude of your sin.

So the “overarching theme” of the Bible is not “a preferential option for the marginalised and the need to offer them justice,” but “a preferential option for the repentant and the faithful, and the mercy to offer them salvation.” To focus more narrowly on sexuality, the overarching theme of the Bible, as Kendall Harmon has always reminded us, is one that repeatedly and pointedly prohibits sex outside of marriage, and one that very clearly defines and blesses marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Finally: As long as we’re brushing up on things like spotting flaws in the other side’s positions, it’s always a good practice to apply some simple math whenever you feel like you’re reading an explanation of the Bible and Christianity that just doesn’t seem to add up. For example, Varghese uses approximately 1,000 words to explain to a lay audience what the Bible and Christianity, at their core, are all about. So go to the linked article, open your browser’s “Find” tool, and count how many times the word “Jesus” appears.

Press Release 

WASHINGTON—The Catholic bishops of the United States called “literally unconscionable” a decision by the Obama Administration to continue to demand that sterilization, abortifacients and contraception be included in virtually all health plans. Today’s announcement means that this mandate and its very narrow exemption will not change at all; instead there will only be a delay in enforcement against some employers.

“In effect, the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences,” said Cardinal-designate Timothy M. Dolan, archbishop of New York and president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

The cardinal-designate continued, “To force American citizens to choose between violating their consciences and forgoing their healthcare is literally unconscionable.It is as much an attack on access to health care as on religious freedom. Historically this represents a challenge and a compromise of our religious liberty.”

The HHS rule requires that sterilization and contraception – including controversial abortifacients – be included among “preventive services” coverage in almost every healthcare plan available to Americans. “The government should not force Americans to act as if pregnancy is a disease to be prevented at all costs,” added Cardinal-designate Dolan.

At issue, the U.S. bishops and other religious leaders insist, is the survival of a cornerstone constitutionally protected freedom that ensures respect for the conscience of Catholics and all other Americans.

“This is nothing less than a direct attack on religion and First Amendment rights,” said Franciscan Sister Jane Marie Klein, chairperson of the board at Franciscan Alliance, Inc., a system of 13 Catholic hospitals. “I have hundreds of employees who will be upset and confused by this edict. I cannot understand it at all.”

Daughter of Charity Sister Carol Keehan, president and chief executive officer of the Catholic Health Association of the United States, voiced disappointment with the decision. Catholic hospitals serve one out of six people who seek hospital care annually.

“This was a missed opportunity to be clear on appropriate conscience protection,” Sister Keehan said.

Cardinal-designate Dolan urged that the HHS mandate be overturned.

“The Obama administration has now drawn an unprecedented line in the sand,” he said. “The Catholic bishops are committed to working with our fellow Americans to reform the law and change this unjust regulation. We will continue to study all the implications of this troubling decision.” 

Hat tip:  Prophet Micaiah

ENS

Archbishops Rowan Williams of Canterbury and John Sentamu of York have suggested that the Church of England and the Anglican Communion ought to be in “an open-ended engagement” with the Anglican Church in North America.

The organization is made up of individuals and groups that have left the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as those that have never been members of those two provinces. It includes entities such as the Reformed Episcopal Church, formed in 1873, and the Anglican Mission in the Americas, founded by Rwandan Archbishop Emmanuel Kolini and Moses Tay, the now-retired primate of the province of South East Asia, in 2000.

Williams and Sentamu made their remarks in a report to the Feb. 6-9 sessions of the Church of England’s General Synod.

An altar from the shuttered St. John’s Episcopal Church in Jersey City has turned up on eBay, for sale by a New York importer at a nearly $50,000 price tag.

The 137-year-old Summit Avenue church closed in 1991. Since then, it has been the focus of a battle between the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, which wants it demolished, and folks like Doran who want the historic structure preserved.

The eBay listing is here.

Quickly—three things stand out to me.

First—representatives attended from 109 churches.  Typically when touting their astounding growth AMiA leaders have claimed around 150 parishes and around 150 “in formation.”  That latter cluster has always been a suspect number since I’m rather familiar with AMiA congregations “in formation” judging by the recent history of the past seven years, here on the ground in the Upstate of South Carolina.  But I think the 150 or so claimed as actual congregations is a fairly “real” number.

Second, the three options being explored for congregations are interesting:

Those who desire full participation in an existing diocese of ACNA
Those who desire to remain affiliated with PEAR while also forming a subjurisdiction of ACNA
Those churches who desire to remain affiliated with PEAR by establishing a missionary jurisdiction in North America

And third, the clear invitation to “all churches and clergy that have been a part of the Anglican Mission in the Americas to be part of this process.”

Below is the statement as received via email:

Moving Forward Together Statement
Raleigh, NC
January 18, 2012

On January 16-18, 2012, over 300 laity and clergy, representing 109 churches that have been a part of the Anglican Mission in the Americas, gathered at the Church of the Apostles, Raleigh, NC, for a sacred assembly. The assembly was hosted by Archbishop Onesphore Rwaje and the House of Bishops of the Anglican Province of Rwanda (PEAR), who sent three other bishops (Alexis Bilindabagabo, Laurent Mbanda, Louis Muvunyi) as delegates, and were joined by US bishops Thad Barnum and Terrell Glenn. Archbishop Robert Duncan and Bishop Julian Dobbs of the Anglican Church of North America (ACNA) joined the assembly as honored guests.

The assembly was a rich time of worship, prayer, and communion with God. In the traditions of classical Anglicanism and the East African revival, the assembly featured both form and flexibility, which fostered dialogue, reconciliation, healing, and—most importantly—listening to the Lord. A way forward was unclear at the outset of the assembly, but by its conclusion the next steps for moving forward together were evident.

Emphasizing collaborative leadership as an Anglican distinctive, Archbishop Rwaje and the House of Bishops asked Bishops Terrell Glenn and Thad Barnum to create a short-term team to give oversight and care for all clergy and churches that have been a part of the AMiA’s and desire to remain resident in Rwanda. This team is to be characterized by a spirit of openness, collaborating freely with clergy and laity throughout its constituent churches. Its structures are to be temporary and easily dismantled once its task is completed. It will be a team actively connected to the House of Bishops of Rwanda.

This team is charged with:
Care, healing, encouragement and guidance for churches and clergy in all ongoing efforts of mission and ministry, in all things personal, corporate, ecclesial and structural;
Ongoing mobilization and distribution of financial support and guidance for church plants and church planting;
Continuing support for those in process of ordination and those whom God might raise up to join in the work of planting churches and carrying out the work of Christ’s church;
Developing temporary structures necessary to support and accomplish these tasks.

For this task, Bishop Glenn was asked and has agreed to serve as the team’s leader. He will recruit and recommend to Archbishop Rwaje temporary canons and regional leaders who will serve those churches and clergy moving forward together in regional groupings throughout North America. Additionally, as a result of the generous offer of Archbishop Bob Duncan, this team will work freely and collaboratively with partner churches and bishops in ACNA for the support and care of churches and clergy as needed.

Bishop Glenn has appointed the following clergy to serve in this temporary process: the Rev’s Steve Breedlove, David Bryan, Dan Claire, Chip Edgar, Alan Hawkins, Clark Lowenfield and Ken Ross. Others may be added in the weeks ahead as needed structures come into focus.

For the duration of its service, this team will communicate its progress and its finances on a monthly basis to constituent and interested congregations and clergy. Feedback will be welcomed.

Archbishop Rwaje charged the team to create a task force to work collaboratively with representatives of the ACNA and PEAR to explore and develop plans for long-term structures that will serve the following needs of our congregations:
Those who desire full participation in an existing diocese of ACNA
Those who desire to remain affiliated with PEAR while also forming a subjurisdiction of ACNA
Those churches who desire to remain affiliated with PEAR by establishing a missionary jurisdiction in North America

It is anticipated that these long-term, permanent structures will be established within the next 6-12 months. As congregations and clergy transition into them, the work of the interim team will be completed.

We invite all churches and clergy that have been a part of the Anglican Mission in the Americas to be part of this process: we need your voice so that we can move forward together.  Please contact Bishops Glenn or Barnum, or any member of the temporary team, to signify your interest in moving forward together. Starting on or before January 23, contact information can be found at http://www.pearusa.com.

We are deeply thankful for all those who joined together in Raleigh during this gracious time of fellowship and we are thankful for our bishops who have given us a way forward for these next days ahead. Please pray continually and fervently for all those who are seeking to serve the work of our Lord Jesus Christ and his Church in the days and months ahead, and please communicate freely and frequently your thoughts, ideas, questions and concerns with this team.

On behalf of all who attended the Sacred Assembly,

The Most Rev. Onesphore Rwaje, January 18, 2012

Just a reminder . . .

“I feel the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because it is a direct war, a direct killing — direct murder by the mother herself.”

Mother Teresa, in her 1979 Nobel lecture

From Anglican TV

A recently-released communique from the Church of Kenya recounting developments at the meeting in Nairobi to discuss the damaged relationship between the Church of Rwanda and the AMiA raises new questions about what, exactly, was agreed to by both parties.

A source close to the negotiations who wished to remain anonymous said, “This statement appears to contradict statements by the AMiA bishops about what happened in Nairobi. The Nairobi statement seems to be saying that the AMiA bishops agreed to all of Rwanda’s requests; the AMiA says something very different.”

Here is the text of the communique. The PDF is here.

COMMUNIQUE FROM ARCHBISHOP ELIUD REGARDING THE JANUARY 4TH RECONCILIATION MEETING BETWEEN THE ANGLICAN CHURCH OF RWANDA AND AMiA

On Wednesday January 4th, 2012 a reconciliation meeting was in Nairobi, Kenya, held between the leaders of the Anglican Mission in America (AMiA) and the Province of the Anglican Church of Rwanda [PEAR] at the invitation of the Most Rev’d Dr. Eliud Wabukala, Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Kenya [ACK] and Chairman of the Primates Council of the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans [GAFCON/FCA}

Present were the Most Rev’d Dr. Elîud Wabukala (ACK), the Most Rev’d Onesphore Rwage (PEAR), the Rt. Rev’d Lauren Mbanda (PEAR), Rt. Rev’d Chuck Murphy (AMiA) and the Rt. Rev’d John Miller (AMiA). Also present were the Most Rev’d Ikechi Nwosu (Church of Nigeria), the Rt. Rev’d Ioseph Kanuku (ACK), the Rt. Rev’d Timothy Ranji (ACK), the Rt. Kalu (ACK) and the Rt. Rev’d Dr. Gideon Githiga (ACK).

The Chairman made it clear that while there had been a painful and very public breakdown in the relationship between the leadership of the Anglican Mission in America and the Anglican Church of Rwanda he was confident that by God’s grace reconciliation could be achieved and harmony restored. He invited both sides to present their concerns openly and urged all present to listen prayerfully.

Bishop Chuck Murphy began by expressing his profound regret for the broken relationship and stressed his commitment to lead AMiA as a single-minded mission agency. He was deeply distressed by the public accusations made against him but remains determined to fulfill the mandate that had been given to him and Bishop John Rodgers when they were consecrated in Singapore in January 2000, by Archbishops Kolini and Tay.

Archbishop Onesphore Rwage also acknowledged his deep distress at the broken relationships since he counted Bishop Murphy to be a friend of many years. He also expressed his appreciation for the amazing work that has been accomplished by the AMiA. His concerns were focused on the confusion brought about by the continuing role of the former Archbishop, the lack of financial transparency and the recently announced plans to separate from the Church of Rwanda and function independently without adequate prayer or consultation.

After a lengthy discussion between all parties, including those present as observers, the following points were agreed to:

1. They were all resolved that forgiveness should come from both sides of the divide.

2. The founding Fathers {Archbishops Kolini, Young and Tay) should work together with the incumbent Archbishop of Rwanda with the former acknowledging the ecclesiastical authority ofthe latter.

3. The Church of Rwanda agreed to stop looking at AMiA’s mistakes and look forward and walk together for the sake of the Gospel.

4. AMiA agreed that they remain canonically under the Church of Rwanda and accept the doctrine of forgiveness.

5. The Archbishop of Rwanda and Bishop Murphy agreed to start the process of forgiveness with both acknowledging that things went wrong between them. They both agreed that when they start talking together the misunderstandings will be clarified and corrected.

6. AMiA agreed to continue to work with the Church of Rwanda and that other plans for restructuring will be put on hold for six [6] months to allow time for healing and for other fruitful discussions.

7. The next steps for the two leaders would be for the Archbishop of Rwanda to talk with his House of Bishops and for Bishop Chuck Murphy to meet with his Council of Bishops to begin the work of reconciliation between both groups.

Archbishop Eliud commended those gathered for their hard work and determination to allow the Holy Spirit to break down barriers of misunderstanding and begin the process of healing and restoration. He assured them of his prayers as they move forward together Walking in the light of God’s amazing grace.

On behalf of all those who gathered

The Most Rev’d Eliud Wabukala January 17, 2012

Cleveland.com

Essentially, breakaway groups see the church drifting from orthodox Christianity to a more liberal creed, including allowing openly gay, partnered clerics to serve as bishops.

Of course, many of our so called leaders say this is just plain hog-wash and that it is all about hate.  This is what the pastor of an Anglican “break-away” congregation had to say.

“When they talk about Jesus, it’s not the same Jesus I talk about,” said the Rev. Gene Sherman, pastor of the 250-member breakaway congregation from St. Barnabas.

“They say Jesus is a way to salvation. I say Jesus is the way to salvation.”

This statement was controversial enough that the bishop of Ohio felt the need to issue a clarifying response. 

In response, Ohio Episcopal Bishop Mark Hollingsworth said in a prepared statement that Episcopalians believe Jesus is the way to salvation, but he added that “there is a range of understanding as to whether Jesus is the only way to salvation.”

“In our belief that God is generous . . . many of us suspect that in striving for intimacy with all human beings, God can achieve it through varying faith experiences and traditions,” he said.

  It amazes me that ANYONE can question why the orthodox are seeking shelter.

Hat tip:  Underground Pewster

A report from the “Sacred Assembly” from “A Living Text”

Archbishop Rwaje spoke, telling the gathering: “You are part of us and we are part of you.” He said that those who have ‘deserted’ are welcome back at any time, but that any such move must be orderly – there can be no cheap reconciliation.

Archbishop Duncan then preached, saying that Jesus’ last words to Peter in John were ‘follow me’, just like at the first. The challenge to us is to follow him today, not worrying about where he will take us tomorrow. Archbishop Duncan then said that he wanted to share wisdom with the Moving Forward Together that was gained by the ACNA leadership over the years.

He mentioned that something began to change with AMiA about two years ago. The move from full jurisdictional partner to mission partner took place, and all communication was to take place between the Bishop Chairman (Bishop Murphy). This was a profound sadness. Why did it happen – we don’t know, but we are all sinners. Reconciliation requires all parties to “claim.”

Duncan continued, “In the Spring of 2004, I received a communication from Lambeth that said you in North America will never get it together.” ACNA was birthed out of a resolve to show this to be wrong. Bishop Murphy was a founding signer of ACNA. Duncan mentioned three “do you love me” relationships…more