Tuesday, November 18, 2003
The Bay State once again shines forth as a beacon of all that is pure and good
Dr. Patrick always told us that the two most Calvinist places in the Western World, Boston and Amsterdam, are also the ones that have led the way into post-Christian moral collapse.
Well, my home state has again, reliably, helped lead the way into the Brave New World, zip code 02108.
Mass Supremes vote 4-3 that man/woman only marriages unconstitutional, but punt back to the legislature for a solution. Way to pass the buck, guys.
Does anyone in MA (Irish Elk) know if they will pass the marriage amendment before the 180 day court deadline? I doubt it, but you never know. The vote in MA is weird, and the pols may not want to tick off the blue collar vote. I have long since given up hope that they would legislate based on principle.
I love the quotes from the plaintiffs' briefs. I'll let Morrison or someone more qualified parse them for you. Suffice it to say that the complete abstraction of Western men/womyn/entities is entering its final stages. Pretty soon you'll be able to marry your ficas tree because, I mean, you love the geist of the thing, right? What does the body have to do with that?
I prefer the gay rights arguments that take a completely materialistic stance. I'll take "it feels good" materialism over my-spirit-makes-contact-with-his-spirit, sweet-mystery-of-life idealism any day. It seems more grounded, if nothing else.
P.S. - Over in The Corner, Robert Alt clarifies what the SCOMA did by defering to the legislature.
Dr. Patrick always told us that the two most Calvinist places in the Western World, Boston and Amsterdam, are also the ones that have led the way into post-Christian moral collapse.
Well, my home state has again, reliably, helped lead the way into the Brave New World, zip code 02108.
Mass Supremes vote 4-3 that man/woman only marriages unconstitutional, but punt back to the legislature for a solution. Way to pass the buck, guys.
Does anyone in MA (Irish Elk) know if they will pass the marriage amendment before the 180 day court deadline? I doubt it, but you never know. The vote in MA is weird, and the pols may not want to tick off the blue collar vote. I have long since given up hope that they would legislate based on principle.
I love the quotes from the plaintiffs' briefs. I'll let Morrison or someone more qualified parse them for you. Suffice it to say that the complete abstraction of Western men/womyn/entities is entering its final stages. Pretty soon you'll be able to marry your ficas tree because, I mean, you love the geist of the thing, right? What does the body have to do with that?
I prefer the gay rights arguments that take a completely materialistic stance. I'll take "it feels good" materialism over my-spirit-makes-contact-with-his-spirit, sweet-mystery-of-life idealism any day. It seems more grounded, if nothing else.
P.S. - Over in The Corner, Robert Alt clarifies what the SCOMA did by defering to the legislature.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Light Blogging
Blogging shall be light. Two reasons:
1. work - I'd talk about it, but it's so boring you'd fall asleep on your keyboard.
2. Xbox - Yes, we have obtained an Xbox. I am a first generation video game junky, and have been out of the game of late, as it were. So, I am unraveling the mysteries of a Galaxy far, far away and dominating the NFL via Microsoft's latest attempt to dominate every single market in the world. Facilitating world domination was never this fun!
I will probably need an intervention here soon to break the grip that this little black box is inevitably going to have over me. So stay tuned and watch for posts about how I've upgraded my lightsaber or finally gotten my blitz package where I want it. If you see these signs of obsession, please send help.
"You need to come with us, Mr. Scagel. We're here to help you."
"Wait, wait, let me save first . . . aw, now I'm gonna have to heal my Wookie. Thanks a lot!"
"This might take a while. Get the straight jacket . . . "
Blogging shall be light. Two reasons:
1. work - I'd talk about it, but it's so boring you'd fall asleep on your keyboard.
2. Xbox - Yes, we have obtained an Xbox. I am a first generation video game junky, and have been out of the game of late, as it were. So, I am unraveling the mysteries of a Galaxy far, far away and dominating the NFL via Microsoft's latest attempt to dominate every single market in the world. Facilitating world domination was never this fun!
I will probably need an intervention here soon to break the grip that this little black box is inevitably going to have over me. So stay tuned and watch for posts about how I've upgraded my lightsaber or finally gotten my blitz package where I want it. If you see these signs of obsession, please send help.
"You need to come with us, Mr. Scagel. We're here to help you."
"Wait, wait, let me save first . . . aw, now I'm gonna have to heal my Wookie. Thanks a lot!"
"This might take a while. Get the straight jacket . . . "
Friday, November 07, 2003
Confessions of a Southern Sympathizer
After reading some of the ruminations and biographical perambulations of Smockmomma, I have decided to share some of my thoughts on growing up in the North and then growing roots in the South.
I was born in a log cabin with a dirt floor in the majestic woods of Massachusetts . . . OK, so I was born into your typical middle class kind of family in a nice little town in eastern Massachusetts called Westford. Population @6000-7000 at the time (it's a suburb of 20 gazillion people now). At the age of 12 or 13 or so, we moved to another little New England Town: Epping, New Hampshire. I would say Epping was the more rural of the two. Lots of woods, trailer parks, farmers fighting with the town's selectmen because they ran illegal stump dumps, your usual rural-type stuff.
These towns were a far cry from what one usually associates with "Yankees" in the pejorative sense. They do, however, constitute what is best in the Yankee tradition. Farmers, both working and gentlemen, and trades people living in small, close knit communities. The town has selectmen who are elected to run the town, and a "Town Meeting" every year to discuss and vote on important town policy issues (side note: the Town Meeting is the epitome of the New England experience. It is a rollicking confab where issues such as whether or not to make the Old Dump Road a private lane or how much should be allocated for the town road agent are debated. It makes the intense debates of the Council of Ephesus look like a student council meeting).
These towns are not representative of the image of the North that is generally shown to Southerners: loud mouth cabbies, feminist shrews whacking the guy who opens the door for them, the goomba greaseball driving his IROC to cousin Vinnie's house, etc. If I were to use a reference to pop culture, it would be this: Generally the image most Southerners have of the North is a combination of Murphy Brown, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Friends. The towns I grew up in were more like the show Newhart (we loved that show in Epping, it could have been about our town, including Larry, Darryl and Darryl).
Now, as far as my relation to the South is concerned, I think the fact that I grew up in small towns is very important. Donald Davidson, one of the famed Fugitives, called them "small New England townships" (NB: I'm working from memory on this. I THINK it was Davidson who talked about "small New England Townships" as possible allies for the South in preserving the agrarian ethos, in the Fugitive Manifesto I'll Take My Stand. And Harry Lacy confirms that Davidson spent time in New England and wrote some lovely poems about the region. So I'm going with it.). They are the last repository of Yankee rural life. There is a timelessness to them, even in their current, diminished form. The traditional image of the old Yankee farmer, making a farm out of a wild forest and building his stone walls that make good neighbors, still penetrates the mind and imagination.
Anyway, I was effected by that image. I loved that our town had been chartered by the King in 1642. I grew up playing in woods that had been the tracks and routes of Minutemen on their way to ambush the Redcoats (in my imagination, anyway). The Old North Bridge was a favorite of mine, and only 10 or so minutes from my house by car. While the town of Westford still had the ghosts of the transcendentalists haunting its collective imagination from nearby Concord, in New Hampshire no such legacy held sway. It was straight up Yankee rural.
But, there was a problem. The North of the Yankee farmer was dying. Satellite dishes, MTV, liberals from urban Massachusetts moving in - the party line was being learned by the youth of these little towns. There was no great hope for the survival of traditional values in New England. So I had to find somewhere to put my hopes. I discovered the South.
Two of my sisters went to a little women's college in Virginia call Sweet Briar. It's in Virginia horse county. Very pretty. Very mint-juleps-on-the-veranda. My future brothers-in-law both went to Washington and Lee. That's when I started looking at the figure of Robert E Lee, and I developed an historical man-crush on Marsh Robert. And the Southern cause in general.
So, going to school and learning about American history in the middle of the 19th century, I was taught the basic line: North good and true, freeing slaves, drinking of the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored, etc.
But my upbringing in rural New England instinctively made me question some of this. Slavery was bad? You bet. No argument there.
But I thought, what if an army came to Epping to get the farmers to change something there? How would they react? 'Bout the same as the Southerners, ehyuh. I think it was Dan Harvey, the most inimitable old Yankee farmer ever conceived, who once told me that if a man comes and wants to tell you what to do with your land, he's got his pocketbook in mind. Growing up in a rural New England town taught me to be suspicious of the motives of reformers.
I spent a great deal of time as a young man in Lowell, MA, an industrial city whose textile mills were part of the industrial might of the Civil War North. I knew from hanging around those old mills and listening to my father talk about their history, that at the same time the industrialist of Massachusetts were attacking the South to free the slaves (and make a couple of bucks in the process), they were making wage-slaves of the Irish immigrants, holding them in virtual bondage in order to make a profit.
I was skeptical of the high-minded rhetoric of the consensus view of the Civil War. I just knew that there had to be more to the story. And my experiences growing up had made me very wary of the Northern ideal of progress and constant social betterment. The men of my little towns knew that the world was a certain way, and some things shouldn't be messed with. And if a city-type came and told you that you were doing something wrong, chances were he had no idea what he was talking about because everything had been working fine until now. Ehyuh.
It's always difficult to talk of the Civil War because of slavery. Hereditary slavery of the type practiced in the South was, without a doubt, a great evil. But, was that the entirety of what was being fought about? I didn't think so. And there were many noble and great things about the traditional society of the South. Not perfect, but great. I was drawn to the ideal of the South: centered on the family and its heritage and the emphasis on place and community. Very much like the traditional image of the rural North, if somewhat less taciturn and cold.
In high school we studied the whole antebellum-War-Reconstruction era. And I was siding with the South more often than not. I wrote a paper on why Douglas was more of a nationalist than Lincoln in their famous debates. I read about the attitude of many Northerners towards the slaves that was less than friendly. Side note: I was always happy that the movie "Glory" did a good job showing this. That General from Kentucky, and the private soldiers who get into it with Denzel Washington's character, was closer to the truth than most Northerners would like to think.
I made arguments against the horror that Sherman perpetrated in Georgia, and offered that if I was a Georgian, I wouldn't forget it either. I admired Lincoln for his Reconstruction plan, and was lampooned for thinking that the Republican Reconstruction plan was a great evil. I was more than empathetic to the plight of the South in the wake of the war.
My view was that slavery was the excuse, and that it was the industrial interests and the progressive intellectual elite lashing out at a region that wouldn't play ball that was the real cause of the war. I may have moved toward the center in my later years, but I still think that the slavery-only explanation of the war is faulty. And somewhat hypocritical as well, considering what was going on in the North at the time.
And I took it right in the tuckas from everybody except my professor (Eliot Trommald, one of the most fair-minded men I have ever known) and my closest friends, who always knew I was a little nutty about tradition and the like. I was a racist. I was a Copperhead. I was a "Southern Sympathizer".
So, when I moved to Texas, I figured I'd be right at home. I was a Southern Sympathizer from a little New England town, attuned to the guiding principles of the Southern tradition. I admired Robert E. Lee as a great American hero. I loved all things Southern. And I went gaga for chicken fried steak.
Then I got here, and found out I was just a Yankee.
Now, I admit that my personality didn't help the situation any. I am something of a talker, and can be less than reserved in my expression of opinion. OK, I'm a loud-mouth.
It was shocking to find out that all the intellectual stuff didn't make a difference. I was a Yankee, and that's all.
But, if I had thought about it, I shouldn't have been so surprised. One of the things I love about the South is that primacy is given to place, i.e. where you are from, who your people (i.e. family) are. "Becoming" a Southerner by intellectual gymnastics is a Northern way of looking at identity. So, I figured out that my identification with the South to such a degree that I thought of myself as a quasi-Southerner was just a vestigial piece of Yankee thinking.
So, I'm OWNING my Yankeeness these days, to paraphrase Oprah.
"Hi, my name is Kenny, and I'm a Yankee." "Hi, Kenny!"
I am not a quasi-Southerner. I am a Yankee who loves the South. There is a big difference.
I found out by moving to the South that I could be a better Southerner by being a Yankee.
After reading some of the ruminations and biographical perambulations of Smockmomma, I have decided to share some of my thoughts on growing up in the North and then growing roots in the South.
I was born in a log cabin with a dirt floor in the majestic woods of Massachusetts . . . OK, so I was born into your typical middle class kind of family in a nice little town in eastern Massachusetts called Westford. Population @6000-7000 at the time (it's a suburb of 20 gazillion people now). At the age of 12 or 13 or so, we moved to another little New England Town: Epping, New Hampshire. I would say Epping was the more rural of the two. Lots of woods, trailer parks, farmers fighting with the town's selectmen because they ran illegal stump dumps, your usual rural-type stuff.
These towns were a far cry from what one usually associates with "Yankees" in the pejorative sense. They do, however, constitute what is best in the Yankee tradition. Farmers, both working and gentlemen, and trades people living in small, close knit communities. The town has selectmen who are elected to run the town, and a "Town Meeting" every year to discuss and vote on important town policy issues (side note: the Town Meeting is the epitome of the New England experience. It is a rollicking confab where issues such as whether or not to make the Old Dump Road a private lane or how much should be allocated for the town road agent are debated. It makes the intense debates of the Council of Ephesus look like a student council meeting).
These towns are not representative of the image of the North that is generally shown to Southerners: loud mouth cabbies, feminist shrews whacking the guy who opens the door for them, the goomba greaseball driving his IROC to cousin Vinnie's house, etc. If I were to use a reference to pop culture, it would be this: Generally the image most Southerners have of the North is a combination of Murphy Brown, The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Friends. The towns I grew up in were more like the show Newhart (we loved that show in Epping, it could have been about our town, including Larry, Darryl and Darryl).
Now, as far as my relation to the South is concerned, I think the fact that I grew up in small towns is very important. Donald Davidson, one of the famed Fugitives, called them "small New England townships" (NB: I'm working from memory on this. I THINK it was Davidson who talked about "small New England Townships" as possible allies for the South in preserving the agrarian ethos, in the Fugitive Manifesto I'll Take My Stand. And Harry Lacy confirms that Davidson spent time in New England and wrote some lovely poems about the region. So I'm going with it.). They are the last repository of Yankee rural life. There is a timelessness to them, even in their current, diminished form. The traditional image of the old Yankee farmer, making a farm out of a wild forest and building his stone walls that make good neighbors, still penetrates the mind and imagination.
Anyway, I was effected by that image. I loved that our town had been chartered by the King in 1642. I grew up playing in woods that had been the tracks and routes of Minutemen on their way to ambush the Redcoats (in my imagination, anyway). The Old North Bridge was a favorite of mine, and only 10 or so minutes from my house by car. While the town of Westford still had the ghosts of the transcendentalists haunting its collective imagination from nearby Concord, in New Hampshire no such legacy held sway. It was straight up Yankee rural.
But, there was a problem. The North of the Yankee farmer was dying. Satellite dishes, MTV, liberals from urban Massachusetts moving in - the party line was being learned by the youth of these little towns. There was no great hope for the survival of traditional values in New England. So I had to find somewhere to put my hopes. I discovered the South.
Two of my sisters went to a little women's college in Virginia call Sweet Briar. It's in Virginia horse county. Very pretty. Very mint-juleps-on-the-veranda. My future brothers-in-law both went to Washington and Lee. That's when I started looking at the figure of Robert E Lee, and I developed an historical man-crush on Marsh Robert. And the Southern cause in general.
So, going to school and learning about American history in the middle of the 19th century, I was taught the basic line: North good and true, freeing slaves, drinking of the vintage where the grapes of wrath were stored, etc.
But my upbringing in rural New England instinctively made me question some of this. Slavery was bad? You bet. No argument there.
But I thought, what if an army came to Epping to get the farmers to change something there? How would they react? 'Bout the same as the Southerners, ehyuh. I think it was Dan Harvey, the most inimitable old Yankee farmer ever conceived, who once told me that if a man comes and wants to tell you what to do with your land, he's got his pocketbook in mind. Growing up in a rural New England town taught me to be suspicious of the motives of reformers.
I spent a great deal of time as a young man in Lowell, MA, an industrial city whose textile mills were part of the industrial might of the Civil War North. I knew from hanging around those old mills and listening to my father talk about their history, that at the same time the industrialist of Massachusetts were attacking the South to free the slaves (and make a couple of bucks in the process), they were making wage-slaves of the Irish immigrants, holding them in virtual bondage in order to make a profit.
I was skeptical of the high-minded rhetoric of the consensus view of the Civil War. I just knew that there had to be more to the story. And my experiences growing up had made me very wary of the Northern ideal of progress and constant social betterment. The men of my little towns knew that the world was a certain way, and some things shouldn't be messed with. And if a city-type came and told you that you were doing something wrong, chances were he had no idea what he was talking about because everything had been working fine until now. Ehyuh.
It's always difficult to talk of the Civil War because of slavery. Hereditary slavery of the type practiced in the South was, without a doubt, a great evil. But, was that the entirety of what was being fought about? I didn't think so. And there were many noble and great things about the traditional society of the South. Not perfect, but great. I was drawn to the ideal of the South: centered on the family and its heritage and the emphasis on place and community. Very much like the traditional image of the rural North, if somewhat less taciturn and cold.
In high school we studied the whole antebellum-War-Reconstruction era. And I was siding with the South more often than not. I wrote a paper on why Douglas was more of a nationalist than Lincoln in their famous debates. I read about the attitude of many Northerners towards the slaves that was less than friendly. Side note: I was always happy that the movie "Glory" did a good job showing this. That General from Kentucky, and the private soldiers who get into it with Denzel Washington's character, was closer to the truth than most Northerners would like to think.
I made arguments against the horror that Sherman perpetrated in Georgia, and offered that if I was a Georgian, I wouldn't forget it either. I admired Lincoln for his Reconstruction plan, and was lampooned for thinking that the Republican Reconstruction plan was a great evil. I was more than empathetic to the plight of the South in the wake of the war.
My view was that slavery was the excuse, and that it was the industrial interests and the progressive intellectual elite lashing out at a region that wouldn't play ball that was the real cause of the war. I may have moved toward the center in my later years, but I still think that the slavery-only explanation of the war is faulty. And somewhat hypocritical as well, considering what was going on in the North at the time.
And I took it right in the tuckas from everybody except my professor (Eliot Trommald, one of the most fair-minded men I have ever known) and my closest friends, who always knew I was a little nutty about tradition and the like. I was a racist. I was a Copperhead. I was a "Southern Sympathizer".
So, when I moved to Texas, I figured I'd be right at home. I was a Southern Sympathizer from a little New England town, attuned to the guiding principles of the Southern tradition. I admired Robert E. Lee as a great American hero. I loved all things Southern. And I went gaga for chicken fried steak.
Then I got here, and found out I was just a Yankee.
Now, I admit that my personality didn't help the situation any. I am something of a talker, and can be less than reserved in my expression of opinion. OK, I'm a loud-mouth.
It was shocking to find out that all the intellectual stuff didn't make a difference. I was a Yankee, and that's all.
But, if I had thought about it, I shouldn't have been so surprised. One of the things I love about the South is that primacy is given to place, i.e. where you are from, who your people (i.e. family) are. "Becoming" a Southerner by intellectual gymnastics is a Northern way of looking at identity. So, I figured out that my identification with the South to such a degree that I thought of myself as a quasi-Southerner was just a vestigial piece of Yankee thinking.
So, I'm OWNING my Yankeeness these days, to paraphrase Oprah.
"Hi, my name is Kenny, and I'm a Yankee." "Hi, Kenny!"
I am not a quasi-Southerner. I am a Yankee who loves the South. There is a big difference.
I found out by moving to the South that I could be a better Southerner by being a Yankee.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
See! I told you that guy was fishy!
Well, this will teach me to disregard traditionalist conspiracy theories
Damn. Somebody get CAI on the hotline, I need some in-depth intel on this situation. I think that may be a Masonic Thrice Puissant Grand-Mufti Architect (Third Degree) in the background! Or perhaps one of the Pope's crack Opus Dei Commando bodyguards!
Now, where did I put that schematic that overlays the map of the Middle East with that birth mark on Mikhail Gorbochov's head? There a connection here somewhere, I know it!
BTW, doesn't that picture in the article make Vlad look like he's saying, "Eeeeexcellent, Smithersky. The worm has turned. I have him right where I want him."
Well, this will teach me to disregard traditionalist conspiracy theories
Damn. Somebody get CAI on the hotline, I need some in-depth intel on this situation. I think that may be a Masonic Thrice Puissant Grand-Mufti Architect (Third Degree) in the background! Or perhaps one of the Pope's crack Opus Dei Commando bodyguards!
Now, where did I put that schematic that overlays the map of the Middle East with that birth mark on Mikhail Gorbochov's head? There a connection here somewhere, I know it!
BTW, doesn't that picture in the article make Vlad look like he's saying, "Eeeeexcellent, Smithersky. The worm has turned. I have him right where I want him."
Monday, November 03, 2003
RIP ECUSA
Very funny obit for the ECUSA
The funniest thing is actually the Mr. Taciturn bit. That is New Hampshire in spades.
Very funny obit for the ECUSA
The funniest thing is actually the Mr. Taciturn bit. That is New Hampshire in spades.
C. John McCloskey, Head Conspirator and All-Around Evil Conservative Svengali
Well, that's what this article from my home-town rag thinks, anyway
He's a little intemperate in his remarks sometimes, no doubt. He's in your face, in a very low-key kind of way. But isn't this a little over-the-top:
McCloskey is the cold stone at the heart of all the paradoxes about American Catholicism. His positions are the sharp, logical end of what Hudson believes about Voice of the Faithful and of all the philosophical filigree with which Robert George surrounds his opinions about Leon Panetta. McCloskey is the id of everything that was discussed at the Cosmos Club. He is the gleaming rock on which it's built.
I love liberal conspiracy theories like this one. There is always some evil mastermind trying to overthrow the progressive order. He always is a Mister Burns-type. Soft-spoken and devious. And of course a little nutty in his religious fanaticism. This article makes McCloskey sound like Rasputin on Zanex and with a better PR agency.
It's a good one as far as liberal conspiracy theories go. Though the great weakness of liberal theories is that they generally lack the flash/bang drama of Traditionalist Catholic conspiracy theories, which are my favorite. "Vatican II was run by six Masonic Jews in Geneva who took their orders from Vladimir Putin's mentor at KGB! John Paul II was raised to the pontificate by an unholy alliance of the KGB, the Sultan of Brunei, Zionist executives at the Wesson Corn Oil Home Office, and the Partridge Family!"
But then, liberals tend to have less historical imagination than Traditionalists.
Well, that's what this article from my home-town rag thinks, anyway
He's a little intemperate in his remarks sometimes, no doubt. He's in your face, in a very low-key kind of way. But isn't this a little over-the-top:
McCloskey is the cold stone at the heart of all the paradoxes about American Catholicism. His positions are the sharp, logical end of what Hudson believes about Voice of the Faithful and of all the philosophical filigree with which Robert George surrounds his opinions about Leon Panetta. McCloskey is the id of everything that was discussed at the Cosmos Club. He is the gleaming rock on which it's built.
I love liberal conspiracy theories like this one. There is always some evil mastermind trying to overthrow the progressive order. He always is a Mister Burns-type. Soft-spoken and devious. And of course a little nutty in his religious fanaticism. This article makes McCloskey sound like Rasputin on Zanex and with a better PR agency.
It's a good one as far as liberal conspiracy theories go. Though the great weakness of liberal theories is that they generally lack the flash/bang drama of Traditionalist Catholic conspiracy theories, which are my favorite. "Vatican II was run by six Masonic Jews in Geneva who took their orders from Vladimir Putin's mentor at KGB! John Paul II was raised to the pontificate by an unholy alliance of the KGB, the Sultan of Brunei, Zionist executives at the Wesson Corn Oil Home Office, and the Partridge Family!"
But then, liberals tend to have less historical imagination than Traditionalists.
The Anglican Two-Step
If anyone needed proof that the Northern Anglican church was going to stall and obfuscate on the gay bishop issue, here you go.
Money quote: Irish Anglican leader Robin Eames, appointed by Williams to head the commission tackling the thorny issue, pleaded for time. "We are moving into unknown territory," he said.
OK, so the guy running the commission says we're moving into "unknown territory"? No we're not. We know exactly where we are. They've consecrated a man who openly opposes traditional teaching on sexuality, and lives out that opposition. There's nothing unknown in that situation.
The only thing unknown is how people like Eames are going to spin it in an attempt to once again get the "conservatives" to call black, white.
They did it on contraception. They did it on women priestesses. They did it on women bishops. They did it on whether homosexuality is always a sin (good, if characteristically blunt, thoughts on this from Diogenes).
I think Eames and his cronies may have gone a bridge too far this time.
If anyone needed proof that the Northern Anglican church was going to stall and obfuscate on the gay bishop issue, here you go.
Money quote: Irish Anglican leader Robin Eames, appointed by Williams to head the commission tackling the thorny issue, pleaded for time. "We are moving into unknown territory," he said.
OK, so the guy running the commission says we're moving into "unknown territory"? No we're not. We know exactly where we are. They've consecrated a man who openly opposes traditional teaching on sexuality, and lives out that opposition. There's nothing unknown in that situation.
The only thing unknown is how people like Eames are going to spin it in an attempt to once again get the "conservatives" to call black, white.
They did it on contraception. They did it on women priestesses. They did it on women bishops. They did it on whether homosexuality is always a sin (good, if characteristically blunt, thoughts on this from Diogenes).
I think Eames and his cronies may have gone a bridge too far this time.
