The California Supreme Court will rule Thursday on the legality of the state's ban on gay marriage.

The justices today posted a notation on the court's Web site that the ruling in the civil rights challenge to the same-sex marriage ban will be posted at 10 a.m. Thursday. The Supreme Court heard arguments in five consolidated legal challenges in March, and had until early June to rule on the issue.

The Archbishop of Dublin has urged Church of Ireland members not to split over the issue of ordaining gay men as bishops, which has caused a crisis for the world-wide Anglican Communion.

Speaking last night at the Synod's annual service in Galway, Archbishop John Neill also suggested that a resolution of the church's "gay bishop" crisis could be found when the world's Anglican bishops meet in July for their 10-yearly Lambeth Conference.

The crisis erupted in 2003, when a gay priest, Gene Robinson, was elected as Bishop of New Hampshire.

Bishop Robinson, who has not been invited to attend the crucial Lambeth talks, is due in Dublin next week to promote his controversial book, which argues for inclusion of gays and lesbians at all levels of leadership in the church.

Bp. Lipscomb’s conversion to the RCC still puzzles me.

ECUSA is bad enough to leave. But if it’s bad enough to leave, then it’s also bad enough to make a ruckus about. That’s right, a RUCKUS!

A bishop takes vows to defend the faith and refute heresy. Bishops Duncan and Iker do it. Bp. Lipscomb certainly has the intellect to have done it magnificently. But if Bp. Lipscomb was so troubled about ECUSA, why wasn’t he out there with his stalwart colleagues day after day, week after week?

Why let a handful of orthodox bishops take all the bullets? And then turn around and wash your hands of the entire Anglican Communion?

Yes, Bp. Lipscomb should follow his conscience. So should we all. But what was his conscience saying over the past decade?

This story doesn’t add up.

The McGreevey divorce trial kicked off today with former New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey taking the stand to cry poverty.

Hoping to undermine wife Dina Matos McGreevey's demand for alimony and damages, he said he was never interested in making money.

"It was never my intention to become wealthy," he testified.

McGreevey said that as governor he took just part of his salary, and after he quit he turned down a $1 million offer to write a quickie tell-all.

He said his plans are to become an Episcopal priest and do youth ministries.

The United Nations this week said the refusal of Burma's government to allow workers into the country's devastated agricultural region was unprecedented in the history of humanitarian relief. The human catastrophe produced by Burma's refusal to permit aid in the wake of Cyclone Nargis has stunned the senses of a world that has watched this spectacle for a week.

There are uncounted numbers of persons dead, homeless and orphaned. Bodies still float in water. The World Health Organization has warned there could be outbreaks of cholera and especially malaria. U.N. member-state India warned the junta the deadly cyclone was headed toward Burma on May 1, two days before it hit. Yesterday, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said food relief hasn't yet reached the region because "regrettably" the junta won't talk to him.

It's time to kick Burma out of the United Nations.

With the financial world in turmoil, here’s a handy guide to the bursting of the housing market bubble.
Q. The term “bubble” is used frequently in discussing the housing market—did we have a bubble, and what does that really mean?
A. Yes, we did. A “bubble” is created when many people believe that an asset’s price, which has already greatly increased, must keep on rising, and that it therefore makes sense to borrow in order to buy it—for example, to buy a house with no down payment. Speculators acquire loans that can be repaid only if the asset is sold for a higher price, temporarily driving up prices and debt; lenders grow confident that it is attractive to make such loans. As long as the prices rise, borrowers, lenders, and investors all make money. But bubbles, by definition, come to a sad end, with defaults, failures, dispossessions, scandals, and late-cycle political and regulatory reactions and often overreactions.

Q. How big was the recent bubble in the U.S. housing market?
A. This time we had the greatest house price inflation in U.S. history. The value of U.S. residential real estate almost doubled between 1999 and 2006. The U.S. residential mortgage market was already the biggest credit market in the world, and it grew to have total loans of over $10 trillion. Securitized prime and subprime mortgages were purchased by investors around the world.

A financial crisis occurs about once a decade, with markets relearning the same lessons and then forgetting them.
Q. Are bubbles just caused by stupidity?
A. No. They look stupid in retrospect, but when a bubble collapses many intelligent people get caught. Brilliant model builders and articulate Wall Street bankers helped create the most recent bubble. Economist Walter Bagehot’s 1873 observation remains true: “The period of rising prices…naturally excites the sanguine and the ardent…and the ablest and the cleverest the most…. Every great crisis reveals the excessive speculations of many houses which no one before suspected.” Isaac Newton, possibly the greatest genius in history, invested in the bubble of the early 1700s, the South Sea Company, selling at a large profit. But when the price continued to rise, he bought back in—and then was stuck with a large loss when the bubble turned to panic. Disgusted, Newton wrote, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.”

Q. Why is a bubble so hard to control?
A. Bubbles are notoriously difficult to control because so many people are making money from them while they last. Also, this one made politicians of both parties happy because it was increasing home ownership.

Q. What does a “credit crunch” mean and how is it tied to falling house prices?
A. When lenders experience high delinquencies and defaults, they always become more conservative about extending new credit, as is happening now. They also are typically under regulatory pressure to keep up their ratio of capital to assets—and if the capital has been reduced by losses, their loans have to be constrained. In addition, lenders who have failed or gone out of business, such as about 200 former subprime mortgage lenders that have closed since early 2007, are obviously not making any loans. A credit contraction or “crunch” results. The reduction in available mortgage credit reduces the demand for houses, just when there is an excess supply of houses for sale. The combination of reduced demand and excess supply causes house prices to fall.

Societies that did not place boundaries around sexuality were stymied in their development. The subsequent dominance of the Western world can largely be attributed to the sexual revolution initiated by Judaism and later carried forward by Christianity.

This revolution consisted of forcing the sexual genie into the marital bottle. It ensured that sex no longer dominated society, heightened male-female love and sexuality (and thereby almost alone created the possibility of love and eroticism within marriage), and began the arduous task of elevating the status of women.

It is probably impossible for us, who live thousands of years after Judaism began this process, to perceive the extent to which undisciplined sex can dominate man's life and the life of society. Throughout the ancient world, and up to the recent past in many parts of the world, sexuality infused virtually all of society.

Human sexuality, especially male sexuality, is polymorphous, or utterly wild (far more so than animal sexuality). Men have had sex with women and with men; with little girls and young boys; with a single partner and in large groups; with total strangers and immediate family members; and with a variety of domesticated animals. They have achieved orgasm with inanimate objects such as leather, shoes, and other pieces of clothing, through urinating and defecating on each other (interested readers can see a photograph of the former at select art museums exhibiting the works of the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe); by dressing in women's garments; by watching other human beings being tortured; by fondling children of either sex; by listening to a woman's disembodied voice (e.g., “phone sex”); and, of course, by looking at pictures of bodies or parts of bodies. There is little, animate or inanimate, that has not excited some men to orgasm. Of course, not all of these practices have been condoned by societies — parent-child incest and seducing another's man's wife have rarely been countenanced — but many have, and all illustrate what the unchanneled, or in Freudian terms, the “un-sublimated,” sex drive can lead to.

De-sexualizing God and religion

Among the consequences of the unchanneled sex drive is the sexualization of everything — including religion. Unless the sex drive is appropriately harnessed (not squelched — which leads to its own destructive consequences), higher religion could not have developed. Thus, the first thing Judaism did was to de-sexualize God: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” by his will, not through any sexual behavior. This was an utterly radical break with all other religions, and it alone changed human history. The gods of virtually all civilizations engaged in sexual relations. In the Near East, the Babylonian god Ishtar seduced a man, Gilgamesh, the Babylonian hero. In Egyptian religion, the god Osiris had sexual relations with his sister, the goddess Isis, and she conceived the god Horus. In Canaan, El, the chief god, had sex with Asherah. In Hindu belief, the god Krishna was sexually active, having had many wives and pursuing Radha; the god Samba, son of Krishna, seduced mortal women and men. In Greek beliefs, Zeus married Hera, chased women, abducted the beautiful young male, Ganymede, and masturbated at other times; Poseidon married Amphitrite, pursued Demeter, and raped Tantalus. In Rome, the gods sexually pursued both men and women.

Given the sexual activity of the gods, it is not surprising that the religions themselves were replete with all forms of sexual activity. In the ancient Near Fast and elsewhere, virgins were deflowered by priests prior to engaging in relations with their husbands, and sacred or ritual prostitution was almost universal. Psychiatrist and sexual historian Norman Sussman describes the situation thus: “Male and female prostitutes, serving temporarily or permanently and performing heterosexual, homosexual oral-genital, bestial, and other forms of sexual activities, dispense their favors in behalf of the temple.” Throughout the ancient Near East, from very early times, anal intercourse formed a part of goddess worship. In ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Canaan, annual ceremonial intercourse took place between the king and a priestess. Women prostitutes had intercourse with male worshippers in the sanctuaries and temples of ancient Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Cyprus, Corinth, Carthage, Sicily, Egypt, Libya, West Africa, and ancient and modern India. In ancient Israel itself, there were repeated attempts to re-introduce temple prostitution, resulting in repeated Jewish wars against cultic sex. The Bible records that the Judean king Asa “put away the qdeshim [temple male prostitutes] out of the land”; that his successor, Jehosaphat put away out of the land ...the remnant of the qdeshim that remained in the days of his father Asa”; and that later, King Josiah, in his religious reforms, “broke down the houses of the qdeshim.” In India until this century, certain Hindu cults have required intercourse between monks and nuns, and wives would have intercourse with priests who represent the god. Until it was made illegal in 1948, when India gained independence, Hindu temples in many parts of India had both women and boy prostitutes. In the fourteenth century, the Chinese found homosexual Tibetan religious rites practiced at the court of a Mongol emperor. In Sri Lanka through this century, Buddhist worship of the goddess Pattini has involved priests dressed as women, and the consort of the goddess is symbolically castrated.

Judaism placed controls on sexual activity. It could no longer dominate religion and social life. It was to be sanctified — which in Hebrew means “separated” — from the world and placed in the home, in the bed of husband and wife. Judaism's restricting of sexual behavior was one of the essential elements that enabled society to progress. Along with ethical monotheism, the revolution begun by the Torah when it declared war on the sexual practices of the world wrought the most far-reaching changes in history.

Inventing homosexuality

The revolutionary nature of Judaism's prohibiting all forms of non-marital sex was nowhere more radical, more challenging to the prevailing assumptions of mankind, than with regard to homosexuality. Indeed, Judaism may be said to have invented the notion of homosexuality, for in the ancient world sexuality was not divided between heterosexuality and homosexuality. That division was the Bible's doing. Before the Bible, the world divided sexuality between penetrator (active partner) and penetrated (passive partner).

As Martha Nussbaum, professor of philosophy at Brown University, recently wrote, the ancients were no more concerned with people's gender preference than people today are with others' eating preferences:

Ancient categories of sexual experience differed considerably from our own... The central distinction in sexual morality was the distinction between active and passive roles. The gender of the object... is not in itself morally problematic. Boys and women are very often treated interchangeably as objects of [male] desire. What is socially important is to penetrate rather than to be penetrated. Sex is understood fundamentally not as interaction, but as a doing of some thing to someone...
Judaism changed all this. It rendered the “gender of the object” very “morally problematic”; it declared that no one is “interchangeable” sexually. And as a result, it ensured that sex would in fact be “fundamentally interaction” and not simply “a doing of something to someone”.

To appreciate the extent of the revolution wrought by Judaism's prohibiting homosexuality and demanding that all sexual interaction be male-female, it is first necessary to appreciate just how universally accepted, valued, and practiced homosexuality has been throughout the world.

The one continuous exception was Jewish civilization — and a thousand years later, Christian civilization. Other than the Jews, “none of the archaic civilizations prohibited homosexuality per se,” Dr. David E. Greenberg notes. It was Judaism alone that about 3,000 years ago declared homosexuality wrong.

And it said so in the most powerful and unambiguous language it could: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind; it is an abomination.” “And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed an abomination.” It is Judaism's sexual morality, not homosexuality, that historically has been deviant.

Greenberg, whose The Construction of Homosexuality is the most thorough historical study of homosexuality ever written, summarizes the ubiquitous nature of homosexuality in these words: “With only a few exceptions, male homosexuality was not stigmatized or repressed so long as it conformed to norms regarding gender and the relative ages and statuses of the partners... The major exceptions to this acceptance seem to have arisen in two circumstances.” Both of these circumstances were Jewish.

Bible truth

The Hebrew Bible, in particular the Torah (The Five Books of Moses), has done more to civilize the world than any other book or idea in history. It is the Hebrew Bible that gave humanity such ideas as a universal, moral, loving God; ethical obligations to this God; the need for history to move forward to moral and spiritual redemption; the belief that history has meaning; and the notion that human freedom and social justice are the divinely desired states for all people. It gave the world the Ten Commandments, ethical monotheism, and the concept of holiness (the goal of raising human beings from the animal-like to the God-like). Therefore, when this Bible makes strong moral proclamations, I listen with great respect. And regarding male homosexuality — female homosexuality is not mentioned — this Bible speaks in such clear and direct language that one does not have to be a religious fundamentalist in order to be influenced by its views. All that is necessary is to consider oneself a serious Jew or Christian.

Ms. Strand's populist defense of the glorious disorder of the private Niagara Falls Museum is of a piece with her appreciation of the falls as God and nature intended them to be. But just as the five-story museum was leveled by the New York State parks authority and replaced by a parking lot, so have the falls, in Ms. Strand's words, been "manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule." One can't help noticing that the "improvements" Ms. Strand deplores were almost entirely the work of government. Those overhangs were blown off by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has trimmed, blasted, dammed and fortified this natural wonder and its river. State, not commerce, was unable to leave well enough alone.

The sideshow crassness of visits to Niagara Falls has long offended sensitive natures. To Henry James, the "vendors of gimcracks" were "simply hideous and infamous," but while gaping at Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy may not have been as edifying as reading "The Golden Bowl," no wax-museum proprietor or cart-peddler of foot-long hot dogs ever greased the legislative works to win a water-diversion contract, as did the substantial men of the Niagara Falls Power Co.

In Ms. Strand's account, even the preservationist Free Niagara movement of the Gilded Age, which was dedicated to effacing "repulsive scenery" from the landscape, was tainted. Many of its partisans were intimately connected with the monopoly that received a state charter permitting it to harness Niagara's water for power generation. The mom-and-pop entrepreneurs whose tackiness had disgusted James and Free Niagara leader Frederick Law Olmsted were pushed aside as government-protected industries came to dominate Niagara Falls: The "small shop owners, cabdrivers and con men who had made money off the place were chased out of town and replaced by Morgans, Astors and Vanderbilts."

The usually cynical Ms. Strand goes weak in the knees at the thought of American Indians – she dismisses as "self-righteous" a French priest who was horrified when the Senecas tortured and ate a prisoner. But she is justly outraged by the plunder of the Tuscarora Indians by the reliably egregious Robert Moses.

This unelected czar of the New York Power Authority "drove a knife into the heart of the struggling downtown by ramming a parkway through it" in the early 1960s. He "tore down homes and relocated churches." And in a theft memorialized by Edmund Wilson in "Apologies to the Iroquois" (1960), Moses stole via eminent domain 600 acres for a power reservoir, over the eloquent objections – and fires of protest – of traditionalist Tuscaroras.

Just two years later, at its General Convention of 1976, TEC approved the ordination of women to the priesthood. As a consequence, two ministers declared themselves no longer subject to the authority of their diocesans who had voted for the change. Both were charged with "abandonment of communion" under Canon IV.10, both were inhibited and then deposed, and both left to form (with the help of the Rt. Rev. Albert Chambers, Retired) the Anglican Church in North America, which had a somewhat rocky beginning. Others joined them, parishes voted to leave their dioceses, the dioceses sued to retain what they claimed was their property under the Constitution and Canons, and the entire affair has much the same ring about it as do the disputes today---with this major difference: the dissident parishes and their priests today are leaving, not to form a new church that will not be in communion with TEC, but to join other provinces in the Anglican Communion. The Abandonment Canons were properly used in 1977 to depose the priests who joined the dissident church, since those priests no longer wished to function in TEC, and they had not formally joined any other province of the Anglican Communion. Their case, therefore, was closer to that of the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873 than it is to the cases presented today.

Two major differences mark today's situation as apart from those in 1873 or 1976: first, the Episcopal Church's doctrinal position was not out of step with that of the larger Anglican Communion in either 1873 or in 1976 (the Anglican Consultative Council had allowed provinces to proceed with the ordination of women in 1971); and second, the ordination vows in 1873 and 1976 had not yet been changed as described in the previous post---where the vow "to banish and drive away from the Church all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God's Word" was discarded in 1979 in favor of one to "conform to the doctrine, discipline and worship of The Episcopal Church". What has happened is that today's clergy find themselves ensnared between the Scylla of swearing allegiance to "the doctrine, discipline and worship of The Episcopal Church" and the Charybdis of swearing to uphold the "doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this Church has received them". No priest can be true to his ordination vows unless the "doctrine, discipline and worship" are the same in both cases, and the problem is that there are many today who hold sincerely that they are not the same.

It makes very poor sense, then, to exploit this gap by claiming a violation of "the doctrine, discipline or worship of this Church" when one is merely following one's conscience to try to make it possible to adhere to "the doctrine, discipline and worship of Christ as this Church has received them", if necessary under the authority of a different diocesan. There is only one remedy for cases of abandonment: deposition, and that is simply an inappropriate remedy when a member of the clergy wishes to remain within the churches of the Anglican Communion. Deposition revokes the authority of a priest, bishop or deacon to minister at services in The Episcopal Church. The Constitution and Canons of The Episcopal Church, however, contemplate that any clergy ordained within the Anglican Communion may be licensed by suitable local authority to minister within the Episcopal Church, and such license is not possible when one has been deposed from that very church. Thus by deposing its clergy who wish to stay within the Anglican Communion, TEC is doing permanent harm to its polity by creating a different class of Anglican clergy: those who may minister within any church in the Communion with the exception of within TEC itself.

Frankly, many of us don't know what we should think about homosexuality. We've heard all sides but no position has yet won our confidence so that we can say "it seems good to the Holy Spirit and us." That alienates us from both the liberals and conservatives who seem to know exactly what we should think. Even if we are convinced that all homosexual behavior is always sinful, we still want to treat gay and lesbian people with more dignity, gentleness, and respect than our colleagues do. If we think that there may actually be a legitimate context for some homosexual relationships, we know that the biblical arguments are nuanced and multilayered, and the pastoral ramifications are staggeringly complex. We aren't sure if or where lines are to be drawn, nor do we know how to enforce with fairness whatever lines are drawn.

Perhaps we need a five-year moratorium on making pronouncements. In the meantime, we'll practice prayerful Christian dialogue, listening respectfully, disagreeing agreeably. When decisions need to be made, they'll be admittedly provisional. We'll keep our ears attuned to scholars in biblical studies, theology, ethics, psychology, genetics, sociology, and related fields. Then in five years, if we have clarity, we'll speak; if not, we'll set another five years for ongoing reflection. After all, many important issues in church history took centuries to figure out. Maybe this moratorium would help us resist the "winds of doctrine" blowing furiously from the left and right, so we can patiently wait for the wind of the Spirit to set our course.

...on January 23rd McLaren wrote an article for Leadership that is posted on this blog. In it he argues that because the religious right is mean to gays we should not make any decision on the gay issue for 5-10 years.

As the pastor of a church of nearly 5000 in one of America’s least churched cities filled with young horny people this really bummed me out. Just this week a young man who claims to be a Christian and knows his Bible pretty well asked if he could have anal sex with lots of young men because he liked the orgasms. Had I known McLaren was issuing a Brokeback injunction I would have scheduled an appointment with him somewhere between 2011-2016.

Lastly, for the next 5-10 years you are hereby required to white out 1 Peter 3:15 which says “But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect” from your Bible until further notice from McLaren because the religious right forget the gentleness and respect part and the religious left forgot the answer the question part. Subsequently, a task force will be commissioned to have a conversation about all of this at a labyrinth to be named later. Once consensus is reached a finger painting will be commissioned on the Emergent web site as the official doctrinal position.

...more

At a Special Convention in the Diocese of California this weekend, Bishop Andrus introduced the new ethnic and multicultural missioner called to the diocese in fulfillment of a resolution passed by Diocesan Convention in 2007.

The Rt. Rev. Steven Charleston was selected to fill this position after a nationwide search ...

Charleston will also serve the diocese as assistant bishop. Charleston is the president and dean of Episcopal Divinity School, a post he will be leaving this summer before joining the Diocese of California.

A citizen of the Choctaw Nation in his home state of Oklahoma, Charleston has been national staff officer for Native American ministries in The Episcopal Church, director of the Dakota Leadership Program, diocesan bishop of Alaska, and assistant bishop of Connecticut. He is widely recognized as a leading advocate for justice issues and spiritual renewal in the church.

At the urging of student activists, more than 30 campuses across the country have adopted what colleges call gender-neutral rooming assignments, almost half of them within the past two years.

Once limited to such socially liberal bastions as Hampshire College, Wesleyan University, and Oberlin College, mixed-gender housing has edged into the mainstream, although only a small fraction of students have taken advantage of the new policies so far. Clark and Dartmouth universities introduced mixed-gender rooms last fall, and Brown and Brandeis announced plans last month to follow suit.

The University of Pennsylvania, Skidmore and Ithaca colleges, and Oregon State University also allow roommates of different genders. Students at New York, Harvard, and Stanford universities, among many others, are calling for gender-blind dormitory rooms.

"It's definitely a growing movement on campuses across the country," said Denise Darrigrand, dean of students at Clark, where about 30 students are living in mixed-gender rooms. "It's a new world, and gender has taken on all kinds of new definitions. It's about being more inclusive, and it's about keeping pace with the times."

While the trend predictably prompts prurient thoughts, most coed roommates are just friends, students and college officials say.

Most colleges discourage students who are romantically involved from living together, but a few schools freely admit that some roommates are in sexual relationships, which they say is none of their business.

Supporters hail the trend as a key advance for homosexual and transgender students that eliminates a gender divide they see as outdated, particularly for a generation that has grown up with many friends of the opposite sex. Traditional rooming policies, they say, infringe upon students' rights and perpetuate gender segregation.

"Among Millennial students, whether it's race, gender, or nationality, the borders are coming down," said James Baumann of the Association of College and University Housing Officers. "The lines just aren't there anymore."

But some observers say the policies promote promiscuity and represent political correctness run amok. And most colleges do not believe coed rooms are wise and see no reason for them.

Bruce Reitman, dean of student affairs at Tufts University, where students have unsuccessfully pushed for gender-neutral housing in the past, said the university is willing to allow coed suites, but believes coed bedrooms raise practical and moral concerns.

"We're not ready to provide coed bedrooms," he said. "That's a position we don't see changing in the near future."

Allowing coed living situations would create unnecessary distractions and problematic romantic entanglements, he added.

Jason Mattera, a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a conservative student group, said the policy is an outgrowth of "extreme political correctness that doesn't differentiate between men and women."

"This is the next logical step," he said. "It's a disturbing trend, and from a purely academic perspective, it seems bizarre. Colleges should have some sort of standards and guidelines in fostering the best possible learning environment."

Scores of colleges have established gender-neutral bathrooms and specific housing for gay, lesbian, and the small number of transgender students, and some already allow male and female undergraduates to live together in on-campus suites and apartments. Most maintain single-sex floors as an option for students, however, and for practical and moral reasons have been reluctant to allow male and female students to share a room.

But a range of students are pressing administrators to eliminate gender altogether as a factor in student housing. These include gay students who feel more comfortable living with the opposite sex and transgender students who don't identify as either sex.

Dartmouth's housing application form for gender-neutral housing states that the college "seeks to provide a living environment welcoming to all gender identities; one not limited by the traditional gender binary."

It asks students their personal gender identity and if students have a third-person pronoun they wish to be addressed by.

. . . what we don't hear much about is how personal income is also at historical highs. Per-capita personal income has almost doubled in the last 15 years, from about $20,000 in March of 1993 to almost $40,000 in March of 2008 (personal income data available here, and population data available here).

The chart above (click to enlarge) shows the cost of 1,000 gallons of gas at average retail prices (data from EIA available here) as a percent of per-capita personal income, on a monthly basis from January 1980 through March 2008. Measured this way, gas prices through March 2008 aren't even close yet to the historical highs of the early 1980s, when 1,000 gallons of gas cost between 10-13% of per-capita personal income for 36 consecutive months, much higher than the 8.2% of per-capita income in March 2008.