A soldier was finally coming home from the war in Iraq. He called his parents from San Francisco.
"Mom and Dad, I'm coming home, but I've a favor to ask. I have a friend I'd like to bring home with me."
"Sure, they replied, we'd love to meet him."
"There's something you should know," the son continued, "he was hurt pretty badly in the fighting. He stepped on a land mind and lost an arm and a leg. He has nowhere else to go, and I want him to come live with us."
"I'm sorry to hear that, son. Maybe we can help him find somewhere to live?"
"No, Mom and Dad, I want him to live with us"
"Son," said the father, "you don't know what you're asking. Someone with such a handicap would be a terrible burden on us. We have our own lives to live, and we can't let something like this interfere with our lives. I think you should just come home and forget about this guy. He'll find a way to live on his own."
At that point, the son said 'thanks' and hung up the phone. The parents heard nothing more from him until a few days later, however, they received a call from the San Francisco police. Their son had died after falling from a building, they were told. The police believed it was suicide.
The grief-stricken parents flew to San Francisco and were taken to the city morgue to identify the body of their son. They recognized him, but to their horror they also discovered something they didn't know, their son had only one arm and one leg.
The parents in this story are like many of us. We find it easy to love those who are good looking or fun to have around, but we don't like people who inconvenience us or make us feel uncomfortable. We would rather stay away from people who aren't as healthy, beautiful, or smart as we are.
Caring unconditionally for all under the Sun and reminding you the most important spiritual message for us all is to follow God's example and love people unconditionally.
Sunday, April 30, 2006
Hypocritical Rush Limbaugh's Drug Abuse
Topic: Laws, the Courts and the Legal System, as they apply to hypocritical right wingers like Rush Limbaugh:
by Ellis Henican, Newsday
You can't accuse the prosecutor of rushing to judgment. This has to be the most carefully investigated criminal case in drug-war history.
And now we know what Rush Limbaugh stands accused of - violating the drug laws of the state of Florida. And we know the precise allegation that supports the conservative talk-show host's arrest.
It is "doctor shopping," fraudulently and illegally concealing information from multiple doctors to obtain massive doses of prescription painkilling drugs.
Prosecutors seized Limbaugh's records after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.
Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, says his client's arrest on Friday is all part of a plea deal in which the case will ultimately be dismissed if Limbaugh pays a fine and stays in drug treatment for 18 months.
Pretty sweet deal, huh?
But is this punishment enough for someone who violates the drug laws?
I certainly think so. If Rush hurt anyone with voracious OxyContin gobbling, it was mostly himself.
Is treatment more effective than prison time? Usually, yes, all the research says.
But what does Rush think? Is he a drug-war dove or hawk? Where does he stand on coddling drug users like himself?
Well, the usually talkable radio host wasn't talking at all when he walked out of the office of the state's attorney in West Palm Beach late Friday afternoon after posting $3,000 bail.
But thankfully, Rush has been quite chatty in the past on the issue of illegal drug use and its appropriate punishment. He's no druggie softie, that's for sure.
Actually, it turns out that Rush Limbaugh is quite a law-and-order guy when it comes to America's drug miscreants. So he must be steaming mad about the - let me use the word - liberal disposition of his own case.
"Let's all admit something," Limbaugh said on his short-lived syndicated television show almost 11 years ago.
"There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country."
So far, so good. And Rush was just warming up.
"And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs," he said. "And the laws are good."
That's right, he said "the laws are good."
Good why?
Rush Limbaugh explained. "Because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
Accused? Convicted? Sent to prison? People who disobey the drug laws?
Now those are words Rush Limbaugh must regret saying.
The date was Oct. 5, 1995. I quoted these words in a column when Rush was first being investigated. So much time has passed since then, I guess I have to quote them again.
Rush was on a tear that day about the threat of illegal drugs. And he put the issue in stark racial terms. Blacks and whites break the drug laws in roughly equal numbers, he said, adding that black drug users go to prison far more often than the white ones do.
But that doesn't mean police and prosecutors should ease up on the blacks, Limbaugh roared.
"What this says to me," he told his viewers that night, "is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too."
Funny, he didn't sing the praises of treatment.
He didn't come out in favor of 18-month dismissal deals.
He certainly didn't speak up for liberal drug policies.
And here we are, and there he is.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
Source: Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nyhen304722336apr30,0,5672935.column
by Ellis Henican, Newsday
You can't accuse the prosecutor of rushing to judgment. This has to be the most carefully investigated criminal case in drug-war history.
And now we know what Rush Limbaugh stands accused of - violating the drug laws of the state of Florida. And we know the precise allegation that supports the conservative talk-show host's arrest.
It is "doctor shopping," fraudulently and illegally concealing information from multiple doctors to obtain massive doses of prescription painkilling drugs.
Prosecutors seized Limbaugh's records after learning that he received about 2,000 painkillers, prescribed by four doctors in six months, at a pharmacy near his Palm Beach mansion.
Limbaugh's attorney, Roy Black, says his client's arrest on Friday is all part of a plea deal in which the case will ultimately be dismissed if Limbaugh pays a fine and stays in drug treatment for 18 months.
Pretty sweet deal, huh?
But is this punishment enough for someone who violates the drug laws?
I certainly think so. If Rush hurt anyone with voracious OxyContin gobbling, it was mostly himself.
Is treatment more effective than prison time? Usually, yes, all the research says.
But what does Rush think? Is he a drug-war dove or hawk? Where does he stand on coddling drug users like himself?
Well, the usually talkable radio host wasn't talking at all when he walked out of the office of the state's attorney in West Palm Beach late Friday afternoon after posting $3,000 bail.
But thankfully, Rush has been quite chatty in the past on the issue of illegal drug use and its appropriate punishment. He's no druggie softie, that's for sure.
Actually, it turns out that Rush Limbaugh is quite a law-and-order guy when it comes to America's drug miscreants. So he must be steaming mad about the - let me use the word - liberal disposition of his own case.
"Let's all admit something," Limbaugh said on his short-lived syndicated television show almost 11 years ago.
"There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country."
So far, so good. And Rush was just warming up.
"And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs," he said. "And the laws are good."
That's right, he said "the laws are good."
Good why?
Rush Limbaugh explained. "Because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."
Accused? Convicted? Sent to prison? People who disobey the drug laws?
Now those are words Rush Limbaugh must regret saying.
The date was Oct. 5, 1995. I quoted these words in a column when Rush was first being investigated. So much time has passed since then, I guess I have to quote them again.
Rush was on a tear that day about the threat of illegal drugs. And he put the issue in stark racial terms. Blacks and whites break the drug laws in roughly equal numbers, he said, adding that black drug users go to prison far more often than the white ones do.
But that doesn't mean police and prosecutors should ease up on the blacks, Limbaugh roared.
"What this says to me," he told his viewers that night, "is that too many whites are getting away with drug use. Too many whites are getting away with drug sales. Too many whites are getting away with trafficking in this stuff. The answer to this disparity is not to start letting people out of jail because we're not putting others in jail who are breaking the law. The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too."
Funny, he didn't sing the praises of treatment.
He didn't come out in favor of 18-month dismissal deals.
He certainly didn't speak up for liberal drug policies.
And here we are, and there he is.
Copyright 2006 Newsday Inc.
Source: Newsday
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-nyhen304722336apr30,0,5672935.column
Friday, April 28, 2006
The Star Spangled Banner Presented to Mexican Immigrants
[Blog Editor's Note: Some big news as we aim for May 1, the International Workers Day is the translation into Spanish of our National Anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. Written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key, this became our national anthem by a work of congress in 1931. Translations of existing works are sometimes difficult to do, so Gerald Erichsen will begin by presenting us with four translations, equally valid, then we will continue the discussion.]
'The Star-Spangled Banner' in Spanish
From Gerald Erichsen,Your Guide to Spanish Language.
El himno nacional de los Estados Unidos
Works of literature can be especially hard to translate well, as the majesty of the language and connotations of certain words can be lost. That is especially true of songs, where the rhythm and poetry of the original language can be lost as well. But that doesn't keep translators from trying. No fewer than four translators have made serious, recognized attempts to translate "The Star-Spangled Banner," although not all have tried to make the words singable.
How well did they do? Judge for yourself by selecting any of the next four versions.
First, note the tune we use for 'Star Spangled Banner' here in the USA when it is used with the lyrics we use when we sing it
Versión por Francis Haffkine Snow
Amanece: ¿no veis, a la luz de la aurora,
Lo que tanto aclamamos la noche al caer?
Sus estrellas, sus barras flotaban ayer
En el fiero combate en señal de victoria,
Fulgor de cohetes, de bombas estruendo,
Por la noche decían: "!Se va defendiendo!"
Coro:
!Oh, decid! ¿Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada,
Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada?
En la costa lejana que apenas blanquea,
Donde yace nublada la hueste feroz
Sobre aquel precipicio que elévase atroz
¡Oh, decidme! ¿Qué es eso que en la brisa ondea?
Se oculta y flamea, en el alba luciendo,
Reflejada en la mar, donde va resplandeciendo
Coro:
!Aún allí desplegó su hermosura estrellada,
Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada!
¡Oh así sea siempre, en lealtad defendamos
Nuestra tierra natal contra el torpe invasor!
A Dios quien nos dio paz, libertad y honor,
Nos mantuvo nación, con fervor bendigamos.
Nuestra causa es el bien, y por eso triunfamos.
Siempre fue nuestro lema "¡En Dios confiamos!"
Coro:
!Y desplegará su hermosura estrellada,
Sobre tierra de libres, la bandera sagrada!
=====================
(Traducido por Francis Haffkine Snow, 1919)
Versión anónima
Oh, decidme, ¿veis a la primera luz de la aurora
La que izamos con orgullo al último rayo del crepúsculo,
Cuyas anchas bandas y brillantes estrellas, en la fiera lucha
Contemplamos ondeando gallardas sobre las murallas? El resplandor rojizo de los cohetes y el fragor de las bombas
Probaban que por la noche nuestra bandera aún estaba allí.
Oh, decidme, ¿flota todavía la enseña estrellada y listada
Sobre la tierra de los libres y la patria de los valientes?
En la costa apenas perceptible entre las nieblas del mar
Donde la altiva hueste enemiga reposa en temeroso silencio,
¿Qué es lo que la brisa al soplar oculta en parte
Y en parte descubre su elevado pedestal? Ahora recibe el destello del primer rayo matutino
Reflejado en todo su esplendor, y ahora se destaca en el aire
¡Es la enseña estrellada y listada! Que ondee largos años
Sobre la tierra de los libres y la patria de los valientes.
¿Y dónde está aquella banda que engreída juraba
Que el torbellino de la guerra y la confusión del combate
Nos privaría para siempre de patria y hogar?
La sangre ha lavado la mancha de sus pasos desleales. Ningún refugio pudo salvar al mercenario y al esclavo
Del terror de la fuga o de la lobreguez del sepulcro.
Y la enseña estrellada y listada ondea triunfante
Sobre la tierra de los libres y la patria de los valientes.
Así sea siempre, cuando los hombres libres se interpongan
Entre sus amados hogares y la desolación de la guerra:
En la victoria y la paz, este país, socorrido por el cielo,
Alabe al Poder que nos creó y conservó como Nación. Hemos de triunfar, pues nuestra causa es tan justa,
Y sea nuestra divisa: "¡En Dios está nuestra confianza!"
Y la bandera estrellada y listada flotará triunfante
Sobre la tierra de los libres y la patria de los valientes.
(Traductor desconocido)
===========================
Versión por Manuel Fernández Juncos
El día renace y alegra la aurora
Transmite al oriente su vivo color,
¿No ves la bandera que ayer saludamos
Al último tenue reflejo del sol?
Ondeaba en el muro durante la lucha
De franjas y estrellas luciendo el matiz. Y al fuego rojizo de bombas marciales
La vimos de noche tremolando allí. ¿Qué es eso que al aire se agita y flamea,
Allí sobre el monte cercano al mar
Cual signo que anuncia cordial despedida
Al fuerte enemigo que triste se va?
¡Es nuestra bandera!
El sol de la gloria la envuelve y la baña en vívida luz. Mirad como ahora se extiende arrogante
Mostrando su blanco, su rojo y su azul. La turba enemiga que en local jactancia
Juró despojarnos de patria y hogar
¿A dónde se ha ido?
Ya cruza las olas;
Se siente pequeña donde hay libertad.
¡Que así siempre sea; cuando un pueblo digno
El yugo sacude de fiera opresión! ¡El cielo liberte los pueblos que luchan
Si es justa su causa y esperan en Dios! La paz y el trabajo propicios nos hagan
Llegar a la meta de nuestro deber..
Llevando por guías la ciencia y la gloria
Llevando por lema "virtud y poder."
De estrellas y franjas la noble bandera
Manténgase libre de mancha y baldón. Y alcemos al cielo, por nuestra victoria
De pueblos honrados la grata oración. (Traducido por Manuel Fernández Juncos)
========================
Versión por Guillermo F. Hall
Oh, decid: ¿podeis ver, al rayar de la aurora lo
Que vimos anoche orgullosos flotar?
La estrellada bandera, tremolando altanera, encumbrada en
La torre y excitando luchar!
Y a la luz de la roja, fulgurante centella, la
Bandera ondeaba, ondeaba más bella;
Y a través de la densa humareda inflamada,
Con qué orgullo miramos la bandera ondear! ¡El pendón de la Patria, la bandera estrellada,
Encumbrada en la almena convidando a luchar! Oh! decid, ¿todavía contemplais la bandera,
La estrellada bandera,
Sobre suelo de libres que defienden su hogar?
A través de la niebla, de la mar a la orilla
Iracundo enemigo nos atisba a marchar.
¿Qué es aquello que ondula, que flamea y simula
Un enjambre de estrellas refulgiendo en el mar?
Ya del alba recoge la primer llamarada;
Ya se oculta en la niebla, ya aparece inflamada;
Ya ostentando sus glorias se refleja en el río;
Ya sus franjas y estrellas nos deslumbran al par. ¡El pendón de la Patria, tremolando bravio
Y flamenado en la almena nos incita a luchar! ¡El pendón de la Patria, la estrellada bandera,
Tremolando altanera
Sobre suelo de libres que defienden su hogar!
¿Dónde está la falange enemiga y aleve
Que con vana porfía se atreviera a jurar
Que al fragor de la guerra, en la lucha que aterra,
Perderíamos patria y familia y hogar?
¡Con su sangre lavara la verguenza inferida
De su paso a la hulla por la tierra querida!
Encontrar no podría un refugio el taimado,
Que en su fuga oprobiosa la pudiera salvar
Del terror de esa fuga, del morir angustiado
Con el ansia del triunfo que no pudo alcanzar.
Mientras tanto tremola la estrellada bandera
Y triunfante, altanera,
Sobre suelo de libres nos custodia el hogar
Siempre así, cuando altivo se levante el patriota
Defendiendo su suelo, su familia y su hogar.
La radiante victoria lo circunde de gloria,
¡Y bendiga al Eterno que lo hiciera triunfar!
Y pues Dios nos asiste y la lucha es tan santa,
Y el pendón de la Patria nos alienta y levanta,
Conservemos la Patria, el hogar que adoramos,
Y adoptamos por lema, sacrosanto y sin par:
¡"Sea Dios nuestro guía; en su apoyo confiamos!" ¡Justiciera es la causa que nos manda a luchar,
Y el pendón de la Patria, la estrellada bandera,
Tremolando altanera,
Sobre suelo de libres nos conserve el hogar!
=======================
(Traducido por Guillermo F. Hall)
[Editor's Note: So, the way it winds up -- the 'official version' if you will of the Spanish/Mexican version of the Star Spangled Banner is the way it will be heard in the NPR news report from Friday morning, as shown and heard below. President Bush of course says he does not like it, and when President Bush does not like something, then of course the Fox Broadcasting Network does not like either. But I hope you will read the lyrics and listen to the music of our National Anthem (both in the version done on NPR as 'spanish' and also the 'American' original version. First, some comments from National Public Radio about it, then the Spanish/(modified as needed) English. PAT]
Day to Day, April 28, 2006 · A Spanish-language version of the U.S. National Anthem, "The Star-Spangled Banner," is getting huge airplay on Spanish-language radio stations across the nation ahead of pro-immigration rallies slated for Monday, May 1.
But the great-great grandson of the original songwriter, Francis Scott Key, is not pleased with the interpretation of the song, which features artists such as Wyclef Jean, hip-hop star Pitbull and Carlos Ponce and Olga Tanon from Puerto Rico.
==============================
Lyrics to 'Nuestro Himno' ('Our Hymn')
Amanece, lo veis?, a la luz de la aurora?
lo que tanto aclamamos la noche caer?
sus estrellas sus franjas
flotaban ayer
en el fiero combate
en señal de victoria,
fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertada.
Por la noche decían:
"Se va defendiendo!"
Oh decid! Despliega aún
Voz a su hermosura estrellada,
sobre tierra de libres,
la bandera sagrada?
Sus estrellas, sus franjas,
la libertad, somos iguales.
Somos hermanos, en nuestro himno.
En el fiero combate en señal de victoria,
Fulgor de lucha, al paso de la libertada.
Mi gente sigue luchando.
Ya es tiempo de romper las cadenas.
Por la noche decían: "!Se va defendiendo!"
Oh decid! Despliega aún su hermosura estrellada
sobre tierra de libres,
la bandera sagrada?
--------------------
English translation (of the Spanish lyrics):
By the light of the dawn, do you see arising,
what we proudly hailed at twilight's last fall?
Its stars, its stripes
yesterday streamed
above fierce combat
a gleaming emblem of victory
and the struggle toward liberty.
Throughout the night, they proclaimed:
"We will defend it!"
Tell me! Does its starry beauty still wave
above the land of the free,
the sacred flag?
Its stars, its stripes,
liberty, we are the same.
We are brothers in our anthem.
In fierce combat, a gleaming emblem of victory
and the struggle toward liberty.
My people fight on.
The time has come to break the chains.
Throughout the night they proclaimed, "We will defend it!"
Tell me! Does its starry beauty still wave
above the land of the free,
the sacred flag?
[Editor's Note continued): People who write words for music based on an already written text have to sometimes 'take liberties' with the original words of the author occassionally in order to get the words to fit into the 'meter' or cadence of the tune. You will see this frequently in hymns which were written in church music books (hymnals). Established tunes (or the tune decided upon as the best to use with the poem in question) do not always fit exactly with the words as they were written. Or maybe they do fit, but then a later translation of the words -- to a different language -- will not work to that tune's meter or cadence. With hymns, the hymn publishers get away with occassionally repeating a phrase, or repeating or changing a word, not the way the original poet did it, but 'close enough' and without changing the original meaning at all. That is what the translators above were trying to do: convey the MEANING of the Star Spangled Banner, and holding as close as possible to the original tune used. PAT]
Bush pans Spanish "Star-Spangled Banner"
By Matthew Robinson
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The "Star-Spangled Banner" debuted on Friday with new Latin beat and Spanish lyrics but it did not win a glowing review from President George W. Bush, who said the cherished national anthem should be sung in English.
Latin American artists recorded "Nuestro Himno" (Our Anthem) to stir immigrants to turn out for a national boycott and marches for rights across the country on May 1. Instead they stirred up the ire of those who see it as further polarizing Americans. One Internet columnist dubbed it "The Illegal Alien Anthem."
Bush told reporters at a White House Rose Garden news conference the anthem would not have the same value sung in Spanish.
"The national anthem ought to be sung in English. And I think people who want to be citizens of this country ought to learn it in English. They ought to learn to sing the national anthem in English."
The artists on the song include Gloria Trevi, Ivy Queen, Carlos Ponce as well as Haitian American singer Wyclef Jean. It was released through Urban Box Office.
The buildup to the May 1 immigrants' rights event has fuelled a debate that has divided Congress, the Republican Party, and public opinion.
Conservatives want the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants deported and a fence built along the border with Mexico. Bush has risked the ire of his own Republican party by supporting a guest-worker program and a path to citizenship.
SPANISH TRANSLATION
The idea of translating the U.S. national anthem into Spanish followed an April rally for immigrants in Washington when Spanish-speakers were handed cards printed with the words to the anthem printed in English and with a phonetic pronunciation guide underneath.
"We wanted to teach the anthem and the Pledge (of Allegiance), so we came up with the idea of the national anthem in Spanish," said Juan Carlos Ruiz, the general coordinator of the National Capital Immigration Coalition, which will receive a portion of the proceeds from the CD the song will appear on.
"There are people who are going to attack us no matter what we do. We want to be a part of this country," Ruiz said. "We want to improve America."
He said the Spanish version attempts to convey the meaning of the lyrics rather a direct translation.
"We tried to show the meaning of the song," he said. "It has a Latin beat and a Reggaeton beat which are basically our cultural music," Ruiz added.
Internet columnist Michelle Malkin, who has called it the "The Illegal Alien Anthem" in blogs this week, and others complain that that the lyrics are rewritten, adding phrases like "We are brothers, that's our anthem."
[Michelle Malkin has no idea what problems there are with attempting not only to translate one language into another -- that part is easy! -- but in translating it in such a way as to choose words to use with the proper meter (or syllables) to match with the accepted tune. For example, some tunes will meter out at 8.7.8.7 meaning 8 syllables followed by 7 syllables followed by 8 more then by 7 more. You have got to make the syllables (of the various words) work out that way or the whole thing comes out lopsided when you attempt to sing it. A good artist, which Michelle obviously is not, knows how to properly select words and phrases to use which flow 'smoothly' with a tune. To make matters worse, 'Anchreon in Heaven', the tune used for the poem 'Star Spangled Banner' was almost impossible to work with even for its original (our anthem) purpose. Many critics of (the original) Star Spangled Banner have said that poem is 'mostly unsingable' owing to the high notes in it and the belabored placement of some of the syllables, etc. Those same critics often times say 'America the Beautiful' (poem by Katherine Lee Bates) sung to the hymnn-tune 'Materna' or 'My Country Tis of Thee' (a poem which we sing to the ripped off British hymn tune 'God Save the King (Queen)' would be better choices for our anthem instead of 'Anchreon in Heaven' which melody of course we use with Francis Scott Key's 'Star Spangled Banner' poem. Oh well, maybe Michelle's main complaint are all those people sneaking in undocumented. And by the way, a good artist, in the process of changing a song in one language to another language while attempting to retain the original tune at least _attempts_ to convey the same thoughts and ideas of the original (poem's) author, which these people did. PAT]
The "Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key in 1814 during the War of 1812 with Britain and was sung to the tune of "To Anacreon in Heaven," a British drinking song. It became the national anthem in 1931.
(c) Reuters 2006. man.com
To hear an audio version of 'Star Spangled Banner' sung in Spanish as it is being presented to the men and women and children of Mexico who have immigrated to the United States, listen here
Now the version we use in the USA when singing the anthem in English here.
They are quite similar; I cannot see what Mr. Bush's beef is about, nor Michelle Malkin's either, for that matter. In her case at least, we know she has a grudge against people who have not filled out all the paperwork she feels is important.
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
A Church Asunder, Present Day Episcopalians
by PETER J. BOYER
For Episcopalians, faith in the power of compromise was almost doctrinal—until a diocese elected a gay bishop.
In the late summer of 1965, a high-school valedictorian named Gene Robinson anxiously set off from Lexington, Kentucky, for college. He was the first in his family to come so far, and the school he’d chosen, the University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, was not an obvious fit. Sewanee, as the school is known, was conceived, by an Episcopal bishop turned Confederate general, as an élite institution of learning for the sons of the landed class. A century later, when Gene Robinson arrived on campus, Sewanee remained an insular place, a mountaintop sanctuary known for its academic rigor, its cultivated airs, and a full measure of that particular Southern regard for tradition. A Sewanee man, dressed always in jacket and tie, was a gentleman of breeding, who had likely attended a preparatory school. Gene Robinson had grown up on a dirt farm, the son of tobacco sharecroppers, and had gone to Sewanee on a scholarship after graduating from public school.
Sewanee was owned and operated by the Southern dioceses of the Episcopal Church, and the school, which included a seminary, had a distinctly Anglican character. Every student was required to attend services at the university’s All Saints’ Chapel, as well as morning worship on most Sundays. Robinson, who had grown up in a conservative congregation of the Disciples of Christ, found himself immersed in the Episcopal practice of faith. It was a form of worship that, to an outsider, could seem so wholly foreign as to be impenetrable, with its candles and censers, the processions of robed priests and acolytes, and the recitations of ancient rites that the initiated followed in a Book of Common Prayer. The country church where Robinson’s family had worshipped for generations didn’t believe in creedal formulas of faith; the Holy Scriptures alone were enough. But Episcopalians ritually enunciated their beliefs at every service, through the utterance of one creed or another.
For Robinson, this saying of creeds intensified a spiritual crisis that had been gathering since high school. He had accepted Jesus Christ in his early teens, submitting, as was the custom in his church, to a full submerging in the baptismal pool following a public profession of faith. By high school, though, he had begun to harbor doubts about some of the particulars of the Christian faith—doubts, he felt, that would not be a welcome subject of inquiry either in his church or in his deeply religious home. At Sewanee, he found himself regularly obliged to proclaim some of the very assertions he questioned. The Nicene Creed, that fourth-century statement of Christian orthodoxy, particularly vexed him:
I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible:
And in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; Begotten, not made; Being of one substance with the Father; By whom all things were made: Who for us men and for our salvation came down from heaven, And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, And was made man: And was crucified also for us under Pontius Pilate; He suffered and was buried: And the third day he rose again according to the Scriptures: And ascended into heaven, And sitteth on the right hand of the Father: And he shall come again, with glory, to judge both the quick and the dead; Whose kingdom shall have no end.
And I believe in the Holy Ghost, The Lord, and Giver of Life, Who proceedeth from the Father and the Son; Who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and glorified; Who spake by the Prophets: And I believe in one Catholic and Apostolic Church: I acknowledge one Baptism for the remission of sins: And I look for the Resurrection of the dead: And the Life of the world to come. Amen.
To be expected to repeat these sentiments, Robinson decided, was an offense against conscience. He took his protest to one of the school’s chaplains, who listened to him and told him that he saw no problem at all. If joining in the Creed distressed him, why not just speak only those portions of it that didn’t offend? The chaplain’s counsel disarmed Robinson, but it also revealed to him that although the Anglican faith had cherished creeds, it had no absolute doctrine, a paradox rooted in its beginnings as the Church of England.
Anglicanism’s founding event was a sixteenth-century political fix, engineered by Elizabeth I as a means of avoiding the Reformation-era wars tearing at Europe. Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, for reasons of dynastic and connubial ambition, had broken with the Medici Pope Clement VII and declared himself the “Supreme Head in Earth of the Church of England.” Elizabeth’s half sister and predecessor, Bloody Mary, imposed a Roman Catholic restoration upon the kingdom, in the process dispatching some three hundred Protestants to the stake. When Elizabeth ascended to the throne as a Protestant, the realm faced a third religious about-face in a dozen years, and the prospect of civil war was real. Elizabeth’s elegant solution allowed her subjects to believe whatever they wished but insisted upon a uniform worship service.
The vehicle for this “middle way,” as Anglicanism came to be known, was the Book of Common Prayer, which gracefully blended Roman Catholic liturgy with Protestant principles. The prayer book allowed for the coexistence within one institution of distinctly different interpretations of Christianity, with the unofficial designations of High Church (those parishes inclined toward a more Roman Catholic orientation), Low Church (evangelicals), and Broad Church (those Anglicans tolerant of wide doctrinal interpretations). The Anglican way proved remarkably resilient, absorbing the shocks of the English civil war and the Enlightenment, and ultimately planting itself worldwide in the footsteps of the British Empire. In the United States, the Church of England became the Episcopal Church.
The big-tent tradition of Anglicanism—what its churchmen call “comprehensiveness”—made the faith especially hospitable to the theological innovations that moved through the Western Christian churches with particular force in the last half of the twentieth century. This new thinking tended to deëmphasize sin and salvation, favoring a progressive theology of social justice and the affirmation of the individual self. That an Episcopal university chaplain in the mid-nineteen-sixties would advise a conflicted student to disregard those parts of the liturgy that made him uncomfortable reflected not only the times but, in a way, the very nature of the Church.
For Robinson, as the weeks and months passed and the Anglican tradition washed over him, it all began to seem less alien, and even strangely captivating. The lyrical Tudor cadences of the liturgy, the majestic old Anglican hymns, sung by the school’s prized choir, filling the high spaces of the splendid chapel, all began to find a purchase, and Robinson came to see Episcopal worship as an irresistibly attractive presentation of the Christian faith.
By his senior year he had decided that he would make his life within the Episcopal Church as a priest. On Easter Sunday of that year, 1969, he was confirmed as an Episcopalian. It was a momentous day for Robinson, and for the Episcopal Church. Thirty-four years after leaving Sewanee, Gene Robinson assumed his duties as the Church’s first openly gay bishop. His elevation, cast alternately in terms of apostasy and divine revelation, posed the biggest crisis for Anglicanism since the Reformation, and brought the worldwide church to the edge of schism.
The General Convention of the Episcopal Church affirmed Robinson’s election as the Bishop of New Hampshire on the evening of August 5, 2003. Earlier, Robinson had addressed a church committee, offering a theological context for his sixteen-year relationship with his gay partner. Sexuality is a gift from God, he said, a means of experiencing, in physical, human terms, God’s own love. “What I can tell you is that in my relationship with my partner I am able to express the deep love that’s in my heart, and in his unfailing and unquestioning love of me I experience just a little bit of the kind of never-ending, never-failing love that God has for me. So it’s sacramental for me.”
To several of the bishops at the gathering, the Church’s endorsement of this logic, through Robinson’s elevation to the episcopacy, pushed the Anglican notion of comprehensiveness beyond its historically implied limits. What the Church had affirmed, in the view of these traditionalists, was not just a different expression of Christianity but a different religion altogether.
When Robinson’s affirmation was announced, twenty bishops, led by Robert Duncan, of Pittsburgh, rose in protest. “I will stand against the actions of this Convention with everything I have and everything I am,” Duncan said. “I have not left, and will not leave, the Episcopal Church or my apostolic role as Episcopal Bishop of Pittsburgh. It is this Seventy-fourth General Convention that has left us, betrayed us, undone us. May our merciful Lord Jesus have pity on us, His broken bride.” With that, Duncan and the others walked out.
They were incendiary words, and it was an insurrectionary gesture for a group of Episcopalians—not a denomination known for high-blooded passion (Bill Clinton recently kidded his Episcopal predecessor George H. W. Bush for being one of the “frozen chosen”). When the American Colonies became the United States, the Church of England in the new country became the Episcopal Church, and although it was no longer the established faith, it was, from the start, the church of the established order. Eight of the first fourteen Presidents were Episcopalians, as have been half of the Chief Justices. The Church was termed “the Republican Party at prayer,” meaning that in style and in fact it was the denomination of the moneyed class. Episcopalians, heirs to a historic church that was born in compromise, typically form a committee when conflict arises, and the issue vanishes into the fogs of “further study.” There have been schisms, but none amounting to much, with the splinter groups invariably fading to the margins of Anglicanism.
The traditionalist Episcopal rebellion over the elevation of Gene Robinson would not on its face seem likely to have much effect on the national church; Duncan and the bishops who joined him in protest represent only a small percentage of the episcopacy. Their purpose, however, is not to persuade the Episcopal Church but to replace it.
The conservative strategy turns on an audacious twist on the old concept of religious schism: forcing a divide within the Episcopal Church that would render the main church, rather than the dissidents, the schismatic party. This depends on convincing the worldwide Anglican Communion that the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States of America, or ECUSA, as the national body of the church is called, has already departed from the faith, and that an alternative body of orthodox Episcopalians should be recognized as the true church in America. The old Episcopal Church, it is envisioned, would drift away into irrelevance, a shrinking sect of aging white liberals.
The issue may be decided by global demographics. As Professor Philip Jenkins, of Penn State, noted, in “The Next Christendom,” even as Christianity is diminishing in the developed West the faith is experiencing an explosive growth worldwide. The center of gravity of the faith is now squarely in the Global South. If the new Christendom had a world capital based on the location of its believers, it would be somewhere south of the Sahara.
This trend is acutely felt in Anglicanism, one of the world’s largest Christian denominations, with seventy-three million members. More than half of all Anglicans live in Africa, South America, and Asia, where the faith continues to grow even as it recedes in Britain and the United States. There are more Anglicans in Kenya (roughly three million) than there are Episcopalians in the U.S. (2.2 million), and Kenya isn’t the largest Anglican church in Africa. Church membership in Uganda is nine million, and in Nigeria is nearing twenty million worshippers. While the Church of England remains the mother church, and the Archbishop of Canterbury is the spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, the balance of power in church politics has shifted dramatically.
That is why the future of the four-hundred-and-fifty-year-old Anglican project may turn upon the reaction of a few key Global South churchmen to the ordination of a gay bishop in the distant Diocese of New Hampshire. The theology of these men is a direct legacy of the Church Mission Society, a nineteenth-century undertaking by the evangelical wing of the Church of England to “promote the knowledge of the Gospel among the heathen.” The fervent men who carried the faith to the far corners of the empire left a lasting imprint on their mission territories, and the churches in those countries are today led mostly by men who are themselves assertively evangelical and orthodox. They regard with dismay the progressive turn of the Western church, its willingness to rethink the fundamentals of the faith, and its apparent doubt about the plain meaning of Scripture. “The Bible doesn’t make as much sense to them as it used to, to their ancestors,” Henry Luke Orombi, the Archbishop of Uganda, says. “The interpretation of the Bible is no longer what it was before. And that’s why the church life in America is so anemic and feeble.”
Orombi and other leaders of the church in the Global South believe that the current controversy over homosexuality directly reflects the divergence within the church over scriptural authority. The Bible, Old Testament and New, is unambiguous regarding homosexuality—it is a sin to be repented of, and to be condemned by the righteous. In the view of the orthodox, the acceptance of homosexuality in the American and English churches requires a reading of Scripture so innovative as to render its plain language meaningless. Peter Akinola, the Archbishop of Nigeria, has been outspoken on the issue, declaring that the Western church has so assiduously accommodated trends in the secular culture that it has betrayed the faith. “What is written of God is for all time, for all people,” he told me this winter. “But when you take what is convenient for you, and you hold on to that, and that which is not convenient for you, you throw it away—then there is a problem.”
Akinola is the acknowledged leader of the church in the Global South, and as such he is possibly the most powerful figure in Anglicanism. He is, of course, subject to the prejudices of his own culture, in which homosexuality is taboo. Akinola has been quoted as saying that he cannot fathom the sexual union of two men, and that “even in the world of animals, dogs, cows, lions, we don’t hear of such things.” There is also a practical aspect informing the views of churchmen like Orombi and Akinola, whose churches are in competition with Islam. In the Islamic areas of Nigeria, for example, homosexuality is punishable by death, and Anglicanism’s countenancing of gays complicates their evangelical mission. “Instead of proclaiming the grace of God, you have to justify that which God says should not be done,” Akinola says. “Instead of putting your energy into the work of mission, you’re spending your time defending the indefensible. It makes things much more difficult.”
To the Global South primates, such acts as the consecration of Gene Robinson without the broad assent of the whole church reflect an arrogant indifference to the consequences. “If you want to be very blunt about it,” Orombi says, “it’s a form of neocolonialism.” Bishops from the former British territories were routinely frustrated when they tried to be heard at the church’s once-a-decade Lambeth Conference. In 1978, Akinola’s predecessor Joseph Adetiloye stood at the microphone for twenty minutes, refusing to be seated until he was recognized by the chair. “In ten years, when African bishops come to the microphone at this conference, we will be so numerous and influential that you will have to recognize us,” he said. “In 1998, we will have grown so much that our voice will determine the outcome of the Lambeth Conference.” And, indeed, at the 1998 Conference conservatives, with the support of the Africans, pushed through a resolution declaring that homosexual practice is “incompatible with Scripture” and church teaching. The liberal American bishop John Shelby Spong, of Newark, disparaged the Africans’ form of Christianity—“They’ve yet to face the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we’ve had to face in the developing world”—and the American church continued along the course that led to the consecration of Gene Robinson. But the Africans had laid their marker.
The traditionalist Americans see men like Akinola and Orombi as their natural allies, and, of course, as invaluable leverage. Global South church leaders have been inclined to help the efforts to supplant the Episcopal Church as the official Anglican body in the U.S. They have opened mission churches in the United States, and have offered episcopal oversight to those dissident orthodox churches wishing to leave ECUSA while remaining within the Anglican Communion. They are, for the Americans, the key factor in the effort to pressure the world church into recognizing an alternative American church body or persuading ECUSA to repent.
It is one way, Henry Orombi says, of keeping faith with those long-ago Englishmen in muttonchop whiskers who brought the church to Africa. “A hundred or so years ago, the fire was in the Western world,” Orombi says. “And many of their great people went over to the countries in the Southern Hemisphere, and reached out there, and planted seeds there. And then things changed in the Northern Hemisphere. . . . It now looks like the Western world is tired and old. But, praise God, the Southern Hemisphere, which is a product of the missionary outreach, is young and vital and exuberant. So, in a way, I think that what God has done is he took seeds and he planted them in the Southern Hemisphere, and now they’re going to come back, right to the Northern Hemisphere. It is happening. It is happening.”
Gene Robinson watches these developments with a mixture of sadness and alarm. “The reason that I have trouble with Bob Duncan and that bunch is that they are seeking to align our church with Peter Akinola, who says that homosexuals are lower than the dogs,” he recently told me. “That is very close to saying ‘inhuman,’ which is very reminiscent of what Germans said about Jews and so allowed them to devalue Jews, that it was O.K. to exterminate them. Bob Duncan wants to ally our church with the church of Kenya, where the primate there said that, when I was consecrated, Satan entered the church. What most people don’t realize is that homosexuality is something that I am, it’s not something that I do. It’s at the very core of who I am. We’re not talking about taking a liberal or conservative stance on a particular issue; we’re talking about who I am.”
One winter when Robinson was in high school, he developed a fever and a sore throat so severe that it required several visits to the family doctor. On one of the visits, the teen-ager complained that he’d never felt so poorly in his life. The doctor looked at him and said, “Oh yes you have, and a lot worse than this. Sit down.”
In the spring of 1947, the doctor said, he was called in to consult on the case of a severely damaged newborn at the Good Samaritan Hospital in Lexington. There had been serious complications in the delivery. The child’s young mother was a small woman with an extremely narrow birth canal. After an agonizing night, with the baby in severe distress, the delivery team resorted to forceps. The child, a boy, was at last forcibly extracted—alive, but very badly mangled.
The baby’s parents, who were poor farmers, had little notion of what was happening, and they weren’t the sort to ask many questions. The baby had been placed in an incubator in an intensive-care unit, and for hours that was the only information they had. A nurse suggested the name of a pediatric specialist, who was called in for consultation. He examined the child and then told the young parents that the baby might not live, and if he did he might be severely handicapped. He was partially paralyzed, and there was no way yet of knowing whether he had suffered lasting brain damage or how severe it might be. The doctor did not mention that he had taken the child’s misshapen head in his hands, trying to massage it into something like a normal shape before the mother saw him.
Meanwhile, hospital officials said that a birth certificate must be filed: had a name been chosen for the baby? The young parents—his name was Charles Victor, and hers was Imogene—settled on the name Vicky Gene, suited for a girl. Under the circumstances—the child wasn’t expected to live—they decided that the name didn’t matter. So their boy grew up not knowing how or why he’d been given such a name until, in high school, a bad case of strep throat led him to the answer. It came just as the larger mystery of Vicky Gene’s life was presenting itself.
Imogene Robinson always regarded Vicky Gene as her miracle, and she came to believe that God had saved her boy for everything that was to come. For all the grim warnings she’d been given at the hospital, her baby’s paralysis soon resolved itself, and as time passed the child seemed in every discernible way to be quite normal.
Victor and Imogene had been high-school sweethearts in wartime Nicholasville, Kentucky, south of Lexington, and Victor had enlisted right after his eighteenth birthday. They were married soon after Victor’s return, and they did what his people had always done, trying to coax a living from the soil of Jessamine County. Victor sharecropped tobacco, a reliable cash crop, and in that first harvest season after Vicky Gene was born Imogene set the baby on the floor of the stripping room and helped pull the tobacco leaves from the stalks. They lived in a house without running water until 1955, after Victor took a second job as a fireman, and they moved up the road into the outskirts of Lexington. Even then, they made the short trip home to Nicholasville a couple of times a week to attend services at the Disciples of Christ Church, which Victor’s ancestors had helped to found.
It was not a home overly given to the airing of introspections, and certainly not those of the sort with which Gene struggled. “From the seventh grade on,” Robinson recalls now, “I was horrified at the possibility that I was attracted to men and not women. Some of my friends got ahold of a Playboy magazine and were showing it to a group of us, and I could tell that these pictures did something different for them than they did for me.” He desperately tried to banish his feelings. “When I was growing up in Kentucky, we didn’t have the word ‘gay,’ ’’ he says. “When we imagined what homosexual people were like, you know, the good ones were dead, because they had committed suicide. They’d realized how despicable they were, and did something about it. And the ones that weren’t courageous enough to do that, we figured they wound up as dope addicts and alcoholics. So, before I could ever talk to anyone else about what I feared might be true, I had to come to grips with that myself.”
Through his teen years, he had some same-sex experiences, but he told himself that it was just adolescent experimentation. At Lafayette High School, he played first clarinet in the band, and acted in some plays. He was the top graduate of all of Lexington’s high schools in the class of 1965. His academic prowess got him to Sewanee, but he wasn’t there long before he realized that being in an all-male college only heightened his conflict. “In order to deal with my feelings, I so totally shut down that—it’s sad to me now—I can hardly remember college,” he says. “It was like a lost four years, because you can’t just sort of selectively repress, you know? I just virtually shut down.”
When he was away at college, a letter addressed to Vicky Gene arrived at his parents’ home. They opened it, and discovered that their son had applied for conscientious-objector status. Victor Robinson travelled the three hundred miles to Sewanee, the only time he made that trip alone, and pleaded with his son to change his mind, to no avail. “It kind of hurt, because my husband had been in the service,” Imogene recalls today. “But, you know, he’s still our son, so we didn’t let that bother us too awfully much.” There was a gathering antiwar movement at Sewanee—the school’s R.O.T.C. building was burned during Robinson’s senior year—and the seminary offered the ancillary benefit of draft exemption. Robinson was accepted at the General Theological Seminary, in New York City.
He entered the seminary in the fall of 1969. The school is on Ninth Avenue in Chelsea, just a mile from the Stonewall Inn, in Sheridan Square, where earlier that summer the gay-rights movement came to life following days of confrontation with police. It was while Robinson was at the seminary in New York that he acknowledged that he was a homosexual. And it was there, too, that he met Bob Duncan.
“We were taught by the same people—isn’t that astounding?” Robinson says now. “It’s either bad scholarship on our part or bad teaching, I don’t know which.”
Like Gene Robinson’s, Robert Duncan’s bond with the church was made in crisis, but his was never a crisis of faith. He was a cradle Episcopalian, and grew up in Bordentown, New Jersey, in a household that was subject to the random terrors of an emotionally unbalanced mother. She sometimes beat her son, and he regarded his local church as a refuge. Christ Episcopal was in the High Church tradition, a full-bore “bells and smells” Anglo-Catholic experience, with Sanctus bells and incense, and the unchanging comfort of ritual solemnity. “It was wonderful,” Duncan recalls now. “I came from a really troubled family, and it was a place of security and predictability. You came into this place, and these people obviously believed in something; there was something a lot bigger here. And you sort of saw into Heaven on Sunday, and it was pretty wild—I mean, this was not like home.”
Duncan, too, was his high school’s valedictorian, but his spiritual rebellion, while he was at Trinity College, in Connecticut, was against the unorthodoxy that he encountered there. He recalls a discussion in his freshman religion class about the miracles reported in the New Testament, focussing on those accounts in Mark about Jesus’ casting out of demons. “Of course,” the professor said, “a lot of people just can’t take these stories at their face value.” Duncan later counted that moment as his evangelical awakening, when he decided that the claims of Christianity, as expressed in the Scriptures and in church teaching, are either absolutely true or the whole enterprise of the church is meaningless. “I remember sitting there in that class and saying, ‘Well, you know what? Jesus is the best friend I ever met. He was with me through all these teen-age years, and all this trouble at home, and I’ve come to rely on him. And the fact for me is, I’m actually going to believe his word until it’s proved false.’ ”
The consecration of Gene Robinson pains Duncan because of its implicit denial of the core elements of the Christian faith: sin and redemption. “If sin isn’t sin, you don’t need a Saviour,” he says. Like many conservative Episcopalians, Duncan says that his battle is not with Gene Robinson, or even over the issue of homosexuality, but with what he considers a radical reinterpretation of the faith by the liberal church. “I’m not in a fight over sexuality, gracious sakes,” he says. In his earlier career in campus ministries, he often ministered to young gay and lesbian people. “I loved them and cared for them,” he says. “We brought them in and helped them understand that God loved them. And actually not all of them came out of their same-sex affection, but they grew a lot toward God. We just made it clear we can’t bless the relationships. Everybody’s a sinner; you’ve got to break yourself.”
As it happened, Gene Robinson tried mightily to do just that. Robinson once believed as firmly as anyone that homosexuality was both a psychological disorder and a sin. “I think one of the things that people who are not gay sometimes fail to remember is that we learned all the same things that they did,” he says. “The hardest coming out is to oneself.” While in the seminary, he entered psychotherapy. “I got into therapy, to change this awful thing about myself,” he says. “It’s admitting to having this terrible sickness, and you want to get over it.”
A year later, Robinson was convinced that he was ready to undertake a heterosexual relationship. While interning as a chaplain at the University of Vermont, he met a young woman named Isabella Martin, whom everyone called Boo. Robinson warned her that he had been attracted to men, and that he’d undergone therapy to change that. “I thought I was capable of having a relationship with a woman,” he recalls. “We were totally open about that.”
They married in 1972, near Boo’s home in New Hampshire. After seminary, Gene got a job as parish curate in New Jersey, and Boo finished her undergraduate degree. Eventually, they moved to New Hampshire, acquired a piece of Boo’s family farm, and Gene ran various youth programs and spiritual retreats. They had two daughters, Jamee and Ella, but finally the fragile accord between them began to come apart. “Being in that relationship came at extraordinary personal cost, to me and to her,” he says. “In the last three or four years of our marriage, we together dealt with the fact that the price was too great for both of us.” In 1986, Robinson and Boo agreed to divorce.
It was an amicable parting. After the divorce was finalized, the couple went to a church and underwent a sort of reverse marriage ceremony—returning their wedding rings, vowing mutual support for each other and their children, and celebrating the Eucharist. It was more difficult to break the news to Robinson’s parents. “Let’s just say that, as a thirty-nine-year-old, to tell them that, A, I was getting divorced, and, B, it was because I was gay—that same father nearly didn’t let me stay in the house that night.”
“It hurt him pretty bad,” Imogene Robinson now says of her husband’s reaction to the news. “We were just so stunned, actually. We had never heard anything whatsoever toward that. It was a real shock to us. I think that was the worst part, the shock. And, of course, where we were from, that was just a bad word to say, about anybody.”
Robinson believed that his coming out was at God’s direction. “I have to tell you—I felt called by God to come out. It seems to me that if God stands for anything, God stands for integrity. And to be a priest, calling other people to integrity, when you’re not exercising it yourself—it’ll kill you.”
Boo soon began seeing another man, and in September, 1987, she remarried. Two months later, Gene was vacationing in St. Croix when he met a Peace Corps worker from Washington, D.C., named Mark Andrew, who had been raised a Roman Catholic. Mark eventually moved to New Hampshire, and the couple bought a house in Weare—substituting the Celebration for a Home, from the Church’s Book of Occasional Services, for a marriage ceremony. Imogene and Victor came to visit, and eventually accepted Mark and Gene’s new life—and even grew comfortable with the reflected celebrity that attended Gene’s election as bishop. “They’re out to all their friends now,” Robinson says. “Their friends will call them up and say, ‘Oh, I saw Vicky Gene on the “Today” show, and he was wonderful.’ ”
Mark attends the spouses’ functions and accompanies Gene on his rounds in the diocese. “My partner has made not only as much of a sacrifice in order to support me in this ministry as any wife of any male bishop ever has but even more so,” Robinson says. “He’s an incredibly private person, and for him to not only be willing but enthusiastic in his support of my doing this is just an astounding gift to me and to the Church. He is just simply beloved in this diocese.”
When Robinson was elected bishop, his seminary classmate Bob Duncan offered his prayers but not his congratulations. To Duncan, it was an occasion for grieving; his church had just taken a turn to heresy. “I was a seminary classmate of Gene Robinson’s,” he says. “I knew Gene. I knew his wife, his children. But that’s what’s so terrible, you know? What kind of a church is this?”
If there is someone who embodies the conservatives’ idea of the wayward church, it is Frank T. Griswold, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A. On a snowy morning last December, I visited Bishop Griswold at the church’s national headquarters, on Second Avenue in midtown. He is in the last months of a nine-year term as the head of the Episcopal Church, and it seems unlikely that the Church will easily find another leader who so wholly fits the Episcopal type. Lean and gray, conspicuously erudite, Griswold has an air that suggests good schooling (St. Paul’s, Harvard, Oxford) and old stock (while preaching at Canterbury Cathedral once, he mentioned that a direct ancestor had been one of Thomas à Becket’s assassins in that cathedral more than eight centuries before). On this particular morning, Griswold seemed a bit on edge, perhaps because of our subject—the discord his church has caused in the Anglican Communion. It will be, to Griswold’s obvious regret, the signature of his tenure as Presiding Bishop.
I’d been thinking that morning of something that Bishop Duncan had said: that the theology of the liberal church—Frank Griswold’s theology—was so distinct from classical Christianity that it amounted to a different religion. Duncan and his fellow-evangelicals see their Christianity as a religion of transformation, and liberal Christianity as a faith of affirmation. “One has sin and needs a Saviour, the other one simply tells you that you’re O.K. as you are,” Duncan said. The case of Gene Robinson brings that divergence into relief: is the gay bishop from New Hampshire in need of Christ’s redeeming grace or is he a living expression of it?
Griswold answered the question with a question. “Now, of course, what does transformation mean?” he asked. “If you’re talking about human sexuality—and all manifestations of sexuality have to be seen under the aegis of the Gospel—there’s no question of setting aside Gospel values.” By “Gospel values,” Griswold does not mean what Bishop Duncan might mean—that is, a plain understanding of Paul’s assertion to the Corinthians, for one example, that “neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites . . . will inherit the kingdom of God.” The values to which Griswold refers are those which order believers’ lives in a manner pleasing to God, and those apply as much to gays as to anyone.
“Having been a parish priest before I was a bishop, into the congregations I served came men and women whose affections were ordered to members of the same sex,” he says. “They shared some of their struggles with me, and, I must say, I came to respect, deeply, the integrity of their own faithfulness to a particular partner. And I think of one case in which one member of the relationship had multiple sclerosis, and his partner would bring him to church in a wheelchair, and the care, and the selflessness, was palpable. And members of the congregation, along with me, found ourselves saying, ‘So what’s wrong with this picture? Where is this in some way dishonoring of the Gospel?’ Don’t we see the fruit of the Spirit in patience and love and selfforgetfulness?”
It is true, Griswold says, that from “the classical point of view” sexuality “is to be exercised only within heterosexual, monogamous marriages.” But he notes that the church has, through time, come to an understanding of marriage and sexuality that is less rigid than that prescribed by the Bible and church tradition. “The Episcopal Church over the years has come to, let us say, an understanding of the human person that is more sophisticated, possibly, than the understanding on the part of the Biblical authors.”
Griswold suggests that it is problematic to try to understand the meaning of the Bible plainly, because the authors of Scripture were, as we are, captives of their time and place. “St. Paul very clearly assumed that everyone was, by nature, heterosexual,” he says. Therefore, in Paul’s time, homosexuality was a willing choice made by the wicked against God’s natural order. Our current understanding, he says, has been altered by God’s unfolding revelation of truth.
“Let’s talk about truth,” he says. “I’m struck by the fact that in the Gospel, in John, Jesus says, ‘I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. However, when the Spirit of truth comes, the Spirit will draw from what is mine, and reveal it to you.’ Now, when we look at how we have come to understand the cosmos over the centuries, how we’ve come to understand the complexities of our physicality, and have seen advances in surgery and medicine and all the rest of it, we can say to ourselves, ‘Why didn’t God simply plant the fullness of this knowledge in us at the beginning? Why has it taken us centuries to be able to cure fatal diseases that existed in the Middle Ages? How unkind and thoughtless of God not to give us all the information at the outset.’ And yet, we’ve been structured in a universe in such a way that truth is progressive.”
By this understanding, Gene Robinson presents to the church much the same question that the issue of gay marriage poses to the secular culture: is homosexuality what he chooses or what he is?
“I think, looking at what constitutes sin, in a relationship between two people,” Griswold says, “I think you have to ask, Is the relationship in some way abusive? Is it predatory? Is it non-mutual? Is someone being constricted or demeaned by virtue of this relationship? Are they being increased in some way? Are they undergoing a transformation? I mean, I’ve certainly had people in same-sex relationships say to me, ‘I know now what it means to love selflessly, in a way I didn’t before.’ So, clearly, grace can work in what many people perceive to be an anomalous or, even in some formal dogmatic sense, problematic relationship.”
In the current Anglican conflict, echoes can be heard of a larger struggle within Christianity that has been happening for more than a century. With the advance of science and the growing acceptance of Darwin’s theory of evolution, key theologians and churchmen concluded by the early twentieth century that the old faith had been essentially disproved. They began to imagine a more reasonable Christianity—one less insistent on miracles, resurrections, and a transcendent God who directed human history from a heavenly remove. Higher Criticism informed a new understanding of the historical Jesus; the Hegelian dialectic shaped a new image of an immanent and impersonal God, an unknowable force whose will was worked through human progress.
The new theology met stout resistance within the churches. The “modernist-fundamentalist controversy” of the nineteen-twenties split some of the mainline Protestant denominations, and eventually gave rise to the modern evangelical movement. The Episcopal Church, because of its liturgical unity and comprehensiveness—Elizabeth’s notion: Believe what you want, just use this book—was better able to absorb the new thinking, or, at least, to mask it. “Under the guise of Anglican comprehensiveness, and under the cover of Anglo-Catholic worship and liturgy, this alien religion took root in the Western Anglican world,” says Leslie Fairfield, a professor of church history at Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, a Pennsylvania seminary with an evangelical orientation. “The idea was ‘Keep all the same words, change all the meanings, but don’t tell the laypeople.’ ”
It was an Anglican scholar and bishop, John A. T. Robinson, who inspired the “God Is Dead” vogue of the nineteen-sixties, with the publication of his best-selling “Honest to God,” which posed the question: “Now that we have rejected the ancients’ view of God living in a material heaven above the actual sky, what does God’s existence mean?” His theological heir, Bishop Spong, of Newark, published a provocation that he called his “Twelve Theses”—a call to a new Christianity that rejected the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth and bodily resurrection, and most of the rest of traditional Christian doctrine. The central belief of Christian orthodoxy—the substitutionary atonement of Christ on the Cross—Spong, now retired, pronounced “a barbarian idea based on primitive concepts of God.”
Within the Episcopal Church, the innate tensions long cherished by Anglicans eventually sharpened into theological conflict, with human sexuality the battleground. After the Church’s General Convention resolved in 1979 that ordination of gays was “not appropriate,” Spong’s assistant bishop ordained an openly gay man into the diaconate. The assistant bishop, Walter Righter, was subsequently brought to church trial on heresy charges, accused of violating the Church’s core doctrine; the charges were dismissed on the ground that the Church had no core doctrine that applied. (“The Episcopal Church is committed to a Gospel so vague and spectral that false teaching is impossible,” one church critic complained. “The only heresy is to say that there is such a thing as heresy.”) Then the 1998 Lambeth Conference, the once-a-decade gathering of worldwide Anglicans, passed the resolution declaring homosexuality “incompatible with Scripture”; within five years, the American church had consecrated a gay bishop. Liberals claimed a prophetic witness to the world, saying that “God is doing a new thing” in the church; conservatives saw rank heresy.
Church leaders, meanwhile, declared themselves helpless to force any resolution. Frank Griswold said the election of Gene Robinson was a local diocesan matter, and expressed surprise that it caused such a stir. Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, reminded agitated traditionalists that he was no Pope; he couldn’t intervene in the affairs of the American church even if he wished to, which he plainly did not. This institutional incapacity left some conservatives pining for the authoritative teaching and discipline forsaken by their forebears nearly five centuries ago. When many of these issues surfaced in the Catholic Church during the long pontificate of Pope John Paul II, they aroused passionate dissent, and ringing defense, of Church teaching, but all sides were clear on what the Church teaching was. John Paul’s defender of the faith, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, made certain of that. “The problem is that in Anglicanism, as presently constituted, we have no means of officially disciplining people,” says Archbishop Drexel Gomez, the Primate of the West Indies. Some, such as Paul Zahl, Dean of Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry, began to despair that Anglicanism’s very DNA bore the seeds of its undoing. “This whole crisis has revealed a very serious deficiency in the character of Anglicanism,” Zahl told me. “It’s a severe deficiency in Anglicanism because there isn’t really a church teaching in the same way that there is in the Church of Rome. . . . I would say there is a constitutional weakness, which this crisis has revealed, which may in fact prove to be the death of the Anglican project—the death, at least in formal terms, of Anglican Christianity. We’ve always said that we’ve had this great insight, and I used to think that we did. But I’m not quite sure whether we’re not on very sandy ground. . . . It’s at the edge of the abyss. It’s about to be extinguished, and that’s not histrionic.”
It was in this light that some of the American conservatives began to look to the Global South. “It is simple,” Akinola told me. “We believe we know the mind of the Lord. We believe we know what he’s asking us to do in his holy word, and we simply respond to his command. . . . It is the power of the word, and the Lord has blessed our efforts.” In the marketplace of faith, it is hard not to notice the contrasting results. When Gene Robinson arrived at Sewanee in 1965, the Episcopal Church claimed three million six hundred thousand baptized members; church membership has fallen by more than a third in the forty years since. There are more worshippers in Akinola’s church of Nigeria on any given Sunday than there are filling the pews of all the Anglican churches of the West combined. Even Frank Griswold admires such fervor. “I do think there is always a need for what I call an evangelical vitality,” he says. “In terms of passion for the Gospel and, indeed, love for the risen Christ, these are gifts that the weary West can well learn from.”
Griswold observes, by way of a small caveat, that the churches of Akinola and Orombi are still relatively young in the faith, just a century or so removed from the missionary stage, their zeal uncomplicated by nuance. But the classical-Christianity-in-amber quality of the Global South is precisely what appeals to many American conservatives. “Because the world didn’t really care what Africans thought until about 2004, they were sort of in a hermetically sealed Christian terrarium for a hundred years,” Paul Zahl says. “Their Christianity didn’t get torpedoed by a lot of Western nihilism.”
But it is much more than a brotherly regard for Christian piety that draws the Americans to the churchmen of the Global South. Before taking his leave of the 2003 General Convention that affirmed Gene Robinson, Bob Duncan told the gathering that he and allied bishops would call on the Archbishop of Canterbury and the primates of the world church “to intervene in the pastoral emergency that has overtaken us.” The conservative dissidents already had the beginnings of a plan for what they called “realignment.” By December, 2003, the initial outlines of the plan were revealed in a letter to potential supporters. “Our ultimate goal is a realignment of Anglicanism on North American soil committed to biblical faith and values, and driven by Gospel mission,” the letter said. The aim was to create a “replacement jurisdiction” in the United States, supplanting ECUSA. The next month, in January, 2004, the Anglican Communion Network came into being, and Robert Duncan was elected moderator. This effort was receiving financial support from foundations associated with the family of Richard Mellon Scaife and other conservative donors.
Essential to the network’s plan was the support of, and official recognition by, the worldwide church. Anglican provinces representing most of the world’s Anglicans soon declared themselves in a state of “broken” or “impaired” communion with the Episcopal Church. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, responded. He called for a church inquiry into the crisis, and the resultant commission findings, called the Windsor Report, urged ECUSA to express regret over its action and to refrain from further consecration of gay bishops. ECUSA apologized for any unintended pain it had caused the Church, but not for the consecration of Robinson, and it declared a moratorium on the consecration of all bishops, gay or straight.
A meeting of the world’s primates was convened in Northern Ireland in early 2005, and some of them refused to share communion with Frank Griswold. At that meeting, the primates asked the churches of the U.S. and Canada (which had endorsed the blessing of gay civil unions) to abstain from the Anglican Consultative Council—the church’s most important deliberative body—until after the next Lambeth Conference, in 2008. Akinola and others called on Rowan Williams to withhold a Lambeth invitation from the American church “unless they truly repent.”
The Global South primates, in short, did all that the American conservatives could have asked, and more. When several of the primates appeared at a network convention in Pittsburgh last November, they were greeted like rock stars by the twenty-five hundred attendees. Akinola betrayed a hint of impatience with the American conservatives when he said, in his sharp, clipped tones, “Many of you have one leg in ECUSA and one leg in the network. With that, my friends, comes disaster. While that remains, you can’t have our support. Because, you see, as we speak here, we have all broken communion with ECUSA. If you want Global South to partner with you, you must let us know exactly where you stand. Are you ECUSA? Or are you network? Which one?”
Akinola later told me that he found it hypocritical for American dissidents to encourage action by the Global South so aggressively while remaining affiliated with the Episcopal Church. In defecting from the national church, however, a local parish risks losing its church building and property. In many places, the local Episcopal church resides in one of the oldest, finest buildings in a town’s best district. That first network letter outlining the plan for realignment plainly stated, “We seek to retain ownership of our property as we move into this realignment.”
Some churches, such as St. James in Newport Beach, California, took the risk in court when the Los Angeles Diocese filed suit to keep its church property. The lawsuit was dismissed, and the church declared victory. (The case is under appeal.) But laws in other states seem to favor the national church. In several instances, when a dissident parish has aligned itself with another province outside the U.S. and stopped sending annual contributions to the Episcopal Church, the church building has been seized by the local bishop bearing a court order. Akinola, whose own ministry started with the scarcest of resources, says the Americans have a clear choice. “I think it has to do with property, school buildings—those are very important things,” he says. “You have the right to decide what you want to do. You can keep on with your properties or say, ‘Well, it doesn’t matter—I can start all over again.’ So you have to interpret the faith in your own way. I can’t do that.”
The evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren also addressed the gathering in Pittsburgh, and put the property question to them bluntly. “What’s more important is your faith, not your facilities,” he said. “The church is people, not the steeple. They might get the building, but you get the blessing.” Bob Duncan says that the future looks like a series of unpleasant legal battles—“And the question that the state courts are going to have to figure out is, Who are the Episcopalians?”
That question must also be answered by the worldwide Anglican Communion. One possible outcome is that the Archbishop of Canterbury will effectively cast the Episcopal Church loose by withholding an invitation to the Lambeth Conference. That seems highly unlikely, but Canterbury also risks losing the Global South bloc in a massive realignment, which would effectively isolate a diminishing Western church.
All sides agree that much depends upon the coming General Convention of the Episcopal Church this June, the first national convention since Robinson’s affirmation. Anglicans instinctively seek the middle ground, and there are signs that compromise may yet be possible. About a dozen key bishops (at one time including both Bob Duncan and Gene Robinson) have conferred privately over the past year, partly in an effort to devise an alternative system of episcopal oversight for parishes that are irreconcilably at odds with their local bishop. This is a fundamental issue to both the dissident parishes and the national church, because property and money are at stake. When St. James Church, in California, withdrew from ECUSA, taking its property with it into a new alliance with the church of Uganda, the Diocese of Los Angeles lost not only the church and its buildings but also an annual contribution that amounted to millions of dollars over the years.
Potentially more significant, perhaps, is the work of a special commission established by the Episcopal Church to directly address the crisis posed by the affirmation of Gene Robinson at the last General Convention, in 2003. In a report scheduled for release this week, the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion was expected to recommend a course of action that amounts to a step-down on several contentious points. The report was expected to urge the national church to ask “repentance” for its actions in 2003, where hitherto ECUSA has expressed only “regret” for any pain it may have caused within the worldwide communion. Further, the report was expected to recommend a General Convention resolution mandating retreat on the question of same-sex blessings. In this compromise, the Church would not allow the performance of public rites joining homosexual couples, as in the blessing of a union; local priests would, however, be allowed to offer blessings to gay couples not based on the official church rites.
On the central point of contention, the consecration of gay bishops, the commission is expected to urge the Church to proceed down the path taken by Gene Robinson only with “extreme caution.” That is the sort of phrasing that might placate conservatives, and could provide convention delegates with the typically Episcopal opportunity to kick the problem down the road, getting them safely past the Lambeth Conference in 2008. In this case, however, evasion may not be possible. The Diocese of California is scheduled to elect a new bishop next month, and three of its seven candidates are openly gay. If California elects a gay bishop, and the General Convention withholds its consent, the Episcopal Church will face a new revolt, this time from the left. At least one church official has already begun to ask whether the Episcopal Church’s most prudent course might not be voluntary withdrawal from the worldwide Anglican Communion, thus taking a stand as a church pledged to human justice.
No one views such a possibility lightly, and for Gene Robinson the struggle has not been without personal cost. “Brothers and Sisters in Christ, I am writing to you from an alcohol-treatment center,” he e-mailed his New Hampshire colleagues in February. But he was not abandoning the struggle. “I eagerly look forward to continuing my recovery in your midst.” He returned home from rehab and resumed his ministry last month.
For Jim Naughton, the communications director for the liberal Diocese of Washington, D.C., any compromise with principle would have dire consequences for public relations. “What is the message we push to explain our desire to stay in the Anglican Communion?” he asks. “What is the slogan we put on our literature? Here is what I have come up with: ‘Join us in a diplomatically intricate, ethically ambiguous, and sometimes publicly humiliating tightrope walk toward Jesus.’ ”
Naughton said, “I think it needs work.”
Saturday, April 22, 2006
God Fearing Man Chooses to Kill Atheist In the Name of Jesus, But of Course!
The Murder of Larry Hooper
by Arlene Marie
On October 18, 2004, Arthur Shelton (age 50), a self-described Christian and Eagle Scout, murdered his friend and roommate, Larry Hooper (age 62), because Hooper did not believe in God.
On December 18, 2005, after many months of postponements, Shelton and his defense attorney Seymour Schwartz, appeared at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice in Detroit, Michigan. Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Christina Guiruis brought charges against Shelton for murder in the first degree. A trial by jury was waived. Judge Gregory D. Bill was assigned to the trial.
The trial began with the taped phone call Shelton placed to the Taylor police department in Taylor, Michigan, on October 18, 2004, at precisely 12:44 AM. Shelton sounded calm and prideful when he told the dispatcher he had just shot "the devil himself" with a revolver and a shotgun because "He [Hooper] didn't believe in God."
Shelton told the dispatcher he was "still armed and ready to shoot again in case he moves. I want to make sure he's gone."
When the dispatcher asked how many times he shot the victim, Shelton replied, "hopefully enough."
Throughout the 15-minute phone call, Shelton often repeated the words, "I'm a Christian and an Eagle Scout and I wouldn't lie."
Shelton also said, "Don't worry about me. I'm fine. But he's the devil."
The dispatcher struggled to convince Shelton to lay down his weapon and go outdoors with his arms raised. Shelton eventually complied. He initially resisted because he feared Hooper might not be "dead enough."
"Dead enough" was an understatement. When the police arrived, they were confronted with the grizzly scene of Hooper's body still sitting upright on the couch with his head blown away. Hooper's brain matter was lying in his hand. The autopsy report presented by the prosecutor was gruesome, to be sure. For the record, Hooper's tests were negative for narcotics and alcohol.
Testimony by the arresting office and those transporting Shelton to the police station revealed that, while the officers were interested in gathering details about the incident, Shelton was obsessed with talking about God and the Eagle Scouts. Shelton said that he "Would not talk to anyone who didn't believe in God."
Shelton eventually agreed to talk to the police because he felt they believed in God.
On the second day of the trial, the court played the videotape of Shelton's late-night interrogation. He appeared calm and cooperative as he enjoyed the cookies and milk that he was given. During the interrogation, Shelton was still obsessed with talking about God and the Eagle Scouts. He stated that he was "not sorry for a second that he killed Hooper."
He stated, "In the eyes of the law I was wrong and will probably spend the rest of my life in prison, but in the eyes of God I have killed an evil person—the devil himself."
When Arthur Shelton took the witness stand in his own defense, he reiterated much of the same rhetoric.
On day three of the trial, summary arguments were heard. The defense had little problem proving that Shelton is obsessed with religion, God and Eagle Scouts. Schwartz pleaded for a verdict of Not Guilty due to insanity.
The prosecution also had an easy time proving that Shelton was competent and knew the difference between right and wrong at the time he shot Hooper. Guiruis asked for a verdict of guilty of murder in the first degree. Judge Bill rendered his verdict quickly: Guilty of second-degree murder with mental illness.
On December 19, 2005, we returned to Judge Bill's court to witness Shelton's sentencing. The prosecution asked for the "high end" of punishment, which is 25 to 45 years. The defense pleaded Not Guilty due to insanity or, at the very most, a soft sentence at the "low end" of punishment, which is 15 to 22 years in prison.
Judge Bill invited Shelton to make a statement. After fumbling for words, Shelton stated that he was sorry Hooper was dead, but he "did a job that had to be done."
Shelton claimed he actually "saw fire and smoke" coming from Hooper's eyes, and that made him sure that Hooper was "the devil himself."
Judge Bill proceeded to tenderly read letters from Shelton's family members, all pleading for leniency. Shelton sat facing the audience and blew kisses to his tearful and sometimes sobbing family. In the end, the now stern-faced Judge Bill pronounced the sentence: 25 to 45 years.
Shelton was stunned, and tried to negotiate the sentence exclaiming, "I'm 50 years old and that is as good as a life sentence."
Judge Bill responded, "Mr. Shelton, you gave Larry Hooper a life sentence by committing one of the most heinous murders to come before my court."
Later, in a private conversation, Guirguis explained that Michigan law requires that Shelton must serve at least 25 years before being eligible for parole.
I will now describe a disgusting chain of events that took place in various locations: the courtroom, the hallways, the lobby of the court building, the staircase outside of the courthouse, and even the ladies' restroom.
George Shiffer and I attended the first day of the trial. Upon our arrival, court officials asked who we were. I gave the court official my American Atheist business card. Word that there were Atheists present traveled fast in the tiny courtroom, which offered very limited seating. The only other people in attendance were 11 members of Shelton's family, who immediately began taunting George and me with name-calling, such as "the people from hell," "evil," and "devils."
During the courtroom breaks, Shelton's family members waited for us in the hall. They continued the harassment, now adding the phrase "God loves you" to the mix. They started blowing us kisses and then began shoving their holy cross and/or crucifix necklaces in our faces. Several of the women even followed me into the restroom. They did their best to intimidate me with their crosses.
Through it all, Shiffer and I never flinched. At the end of the day, however, I reported this harassment and taunting to the Officer of the Court. The officer stated that they were aware of the problem. We were escorted to the elevator, passing by the disappointed group of "good Christians."
Joe Milon joined us on day two. When Shiffer, Milon and I entered the courtroom, the taunting and harassment immediately began. Within an hour, Judge Bill announced that anyone making gestures and faces had better cease or they would be removed from the courtroom.
For the rest of the day the Christians simply fondled their crosses and constantly flopped them about with their hands. When they weren't fondling their crosses, they wore their crosses on their backs. Why? Because Shiffer, Milon and I were seated in the back row.
As we returned from lunch, this time without court escort, the Christians were waiting for us on the seventh floor. They lunged at us with small signs they had painted and shouted, "Jesus lives!" Some shouted, "God loves you."
During one incident, the Christians thrust their crosses within two or three inches from our noses.Tempers flared and a brief shouting match began. It was only brief because the court officers were there in a flash.
My friend and fellow Atheist, Lee Helms, attended on day three. Even though his philosophical position was not known to the court, he was inconvenienced by the taunting Christians as well. At the conclusion of the day, an officer of the court detained Helms, explaining they were having trouble with "those [Christian] people." Helms had to be escorted to the elevators.
The day of sentencing was truly a horrific experience for Shiffer, Milon, Helms, Marty Maier, and me. When we were leaving the courtroom, the Christians (Shelton's family members) lay in wait for us in the hallway. With their tears dried and looks of hatred on their faces, they surrounded us, shouting, "The one good thing of all of this is that another Atheist is dead and the world is better off for it" and "The only good Atheist is a dead Atheist!
Shelton will be eligible for parole in 2030; he will be 76 years old.
[Editor's Note: This item comes from Scouting For All, an organization which attempts to force Boy Scouts of America to open its ranks to _all_ boys and young men of good character without regard to their sexuality or their beliefs about God. The behavior of the 'Christians' in the courtroom certainly make one to almost be ashamed to wear the label. Most Christians, of course, would not be quite that crass nor inconsiderate of the beliefs of another person. It is really sad that some people who consider themselves to be 'Christian' (and it is not _my_ place to judge on that topic, some people insist I am not a very good Christian myself) act out as they do, in the Savior's name. PAT]
Copyright © 2006
Scouting For All and its content providers.
Brokeback is In; Bible is Out
Bill Robinson: 9th Circuit Ruling: "Brokeback is In; Bible is Out"
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that a T-shirt that proclaimed "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned'' on the front and "Homosexuality Is Shameful'' on the back was "injurious to gay and lesbian students and interfered with their right to learn.'' The court said that the shirt can be barred on a public high school campus without violating the 1st Amendment. --Los Angeles Times
The two-judge majority criticized (dissenting Judge) Kozinski, suggesting that the majority could rely upon the motion pictures Brokeback Mountain or The Matthew Shepard Story as evidence of the harmful effects of anti-gay harassment.... The majority implied that Brokeback Mountain is in, and the Bible is out. What's really broken here is the majority's approach to the First Amendment. --Alliance Defense League Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot.
Tyler Harper is the name of the bigoted little bastard who actually wore the t-shirt and then sued the school district for trying to "change his religious views." But it's hard to get worked up about Tyler. He's just another piece of white trash, blowing along the gutters of route 15, on the outskirts of the crystal meth and crystal cathedral capital of San Diego. His parents, of course, are instigators and accessories in this little hate-fest, clogging our courtrooms, and possibly en route to the newly renovated Supreme Court. But are the backwards Harpers and their moronic t-shirt campaign really the brainchildren behind a legal strategy designed to strip gays of "special protections" under the law? Who's backing them? And why the 9th circuit as a testing ground?
Enter The Alliance Defense Fund, a tax-free "charity" legal organization founded by extreme members of the Christian right, including televangelists. The ADF describes itself as "a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation." On October 11, 2005, Bill O'Reilly spoke with a caller who asked "[h]ow do people like me ... fight people like" the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). O'Reilly replied: "Well, you fight them by giving money to the Alliance Defense Fund [ADF] out in Phoenix, Arizona. Allianc
In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals said that a T-shirt that proclaimed "Be Ashamed, Our School Embraced What God Has Condemned'' on the front and "Homosexuality Is Shameful'' on the back was "injurious to gay and lesbian students and interfered with their right to learn.'' The court said that the shirt can be barred on a public high school campus without violating the 1st Amendment. --Los Angeles Times
The two-judge majority criticized (dissenting Judge) Kozinski, suggesting that the majority could rely upon the motion pictures Brokeback Mountain or The Matthew Shepard Story as evidence of the harmful effects of anti-gay harassment.... The majority implied that Brokeback Mountain is in, and the Bible is out. What's really broken here is the majority's approach to the First Amendment. --Alliance Defense League Senior Legal Counsel Kevin Theriot.
Tyler Harper is the name of the bigoted little bastard who actually wore the t-shirt and then sued the school district for trying to "change his religious views." But it's hard to get worked up about Tyler. He's just another piece of white trash, blowing along the gutters of route 15, on the outskirts of the crystal meth and crystal cathedral capital of San Diego. His parents, of course, are instigators and accessories in this little hate-fest, clogging our courtrooms, and possibly en route to the newly renovated Supreme Court. But are the backwards Harpers and their moronic t-shirt campaign really the brainchildren behind a legal strategy designed to strip gays of "special protections" under the law? Who's backing them? And why the 9th circuit as a testing ground?
Enter The Alliance Defense Fund, a tax-free "charity" legal organization founded by extreme members of the Christian right, including televangelists. The ADF describes itself as "a legal alliance defending the right to hear and speak the Truth through strategy, training, funding, and litigation." On October 11, 2005, Bill O'Reilly spoke with a caller who asked "[h]ow do people like me ... fight people like" the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). O'Reilly replied: "Well, you fight them by giving money to the Alliance Defense Fund [ADF] out in Phoenix, Arizona. Allianc
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Just About the Time Some Thought it was Safe to go to Methodist Church Again
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Gay ministers come out, risk defrocking
PlanetOut Network
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
SUMMARY: Seventy-five LGBT United Methodist ministers nationwide come out in a letter to church leaders in hope of influencing next week's policy meeting.
Seventy-five LGBT United Methodist ministers from across the United States have signed a letter to their church leaders wading into the denomination's contentious debate about sexual orientation.
The letter released Tuesday was sent a week before the church's Judicial Council is scheduled to meet near Kansas City. Signatories hope to influence how the church interprets policy on sexual orientation.
Outing themselves with this letter, the ministers risk being defrocked, as happened to the Rev. Irene "Beth" Stroud less than a year ago. The United Methodist Church took away her right to be a minister when it ruled in October that she had violated the denomination's ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexual" clergy.
Stroud, as an associate pastor at a church in Philadelphia, came out in 2003 because, she said, the closet held her back from her faith and she didn't like telling partial truths about herself. Someone filed a complaint when she came out, and the church defrocked her. Last year, moreover, the church's Judicial Council reinstated a Virginia pastor who had been suspended for forbidding a gay man from joining his congregation.
The pastors' letter mentions Stroud's struggle. It suggests that the church's action against her makes their lives as gay clergy very difficult. And it reminds gay clergy who do serve in silence that they are not alone.
"We serve our beloved United Methodist Church at great cost. We have experienced personally the church's power to harm as it rejects an elemental part of who we are," the letter said. "The UMC's official policy has pushed us, as well as our families, into closets of fear and isolation. We are not deceitful people, but the church has given us no choice. To deny God's calling in our lives would leave a void in the Body of Christ."
The signatures were collected by the Reconciling Ministries Network, a grassroots organization that works to enable full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the life of the United Methodist Church.
The letter reminds the church that its current policy of homophobia hurts not just gay clergy; it is hurting the church itself.
"If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing."
The letter ends with a quote from church founder John Wesley and a call to action: "We call upon our UM sisters and brothers to break the silence and bear witness to these truths. We implore you to do all in your power to support LGBT people and their families so that we may live our lives as ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ with integrity and without fear."
Copyright © 1995-1999 PlanetOut Corporation.
Gay ministers come out, risk defrocking
PlanetOut Network
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
SUMMARY: Seventy-five LGBT United Methodist ministers nationwide come out in a letter to church leaders in hope of influencing next week's policy meeting.
Seventy-five LGBT United Methodist ministers from across the United States have signed a letter to their church leaders wading into the denomination's contentious debate about sexual orientation.
The letter released Tuesday was sent a week before the church's Judicial Council is scheduled to meet near Kansas City. Signatories hope to influence how the church interprets policy on sexual orientation.
Outing themselves with this letter, the ministers risk being defrocked, as happened to the Rev. Irene "Beth" Stroud less than a year ago. The United Methodist Church took away her right to be a minister when it ruled in October that she had violated the denomination's ban on "self-avowed, practicing homosexual" clergy.
Stroud, as an associate pastor at a church in Philadelphia, came out in 2003 because, she said, the closet held her back from her faith and she didn't like telling partial truths about herself. Someone filed a complaint when she came out, and the church defrocked her. Last year, moreover, the church's Judicial Council reinstated a Virginia pastor who had been suspended for forbidding a gay man from joining his congregation.
The pastors' letter mentions Stroud's struggle. It suggests that the church's action against her makes their lives as gay clergy very difficult. And it reminds gay clergy who do serve in silence that they are not alone.
"We serve our beloved United Methodist Church at great cost. We have experienced personally the church's power to harm as it rejects an elemental part of who we are," the letter said. "The UMC's official policy has pushed us, as well as our families, into closets of fear and isolation. We are not deceitful people, but the church has given us no choice. To deny God's calling in our lives would leave a void in the Body of Christ."
The signatures were collected by the Reconciling Ministries Network, a grassroots organization that works to enable full participation of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities in the life of the United Methodist Church.
The letter reminds the church that its current policy of homophobia hurts not just gay clergy; it is hurting the church itself.
"If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing."
The letter ends with a quote from church founder John Wesley and a call to action: "We call upon our UM sisters and brothers to break the silence and bear witness to these truths. We implore you to do all in your power to support LGBT people and their families so that we may live our lives as ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ with integrity and without fear."
Copyright © 1995-1999 PlanetOut Corporation.
The Enemy is _Really_ Us
Stephen Pizzo: 'The enemy really IS us'
Date: Wednesday, April 19 @ 10:11:56 EDT
Topic: Economic Policy
Stephen Pizzo, News For Real
Say hello to the America's account deficit. And it's gonna get you.
Not scared? Well, outta be. Because, under Bush, this little puppy has grown into a pit bull, and now it's right at our neck.
What is it?
The best way to understand it is to imagine that the nations of the world are companies that do business amongst themselves. They do so much business that rather than exchange cash with each transaction, they keep a record of credits and debits. Some companies sell more than they buy so they have a positive account balance. Others buy more than they sell, so they they have an account deficit. Ideally, over time, it should all balance out. Ideally.
But it doesn't. Countries with cockeyed fiscal policies almost always run account deficits. And, in order to keep doing business those countries run up a tab with the other countries. In other words, they borrow the money they need to remain in the game. That tab is secured with IOUs -- in the case of nations bonds.
How Bad is It?
Bad. Really bad. And, getting worse. The US is currently running an annual account deficit with the rest of the word of over $800 billion a year, and rising. Soon it will be a trillion dollars a year. The US has become the world's unrivaled debtor nation. No other nation on earth is as deeply in hock as we are.
So What?
America, once the richest nation on earth, has become Blanche DuBois – living off the kindness of strangers. And, as strangers go, they get no stranger than some of America's largest creditors: Saudi Arabia, China, UAE.
Pop quiz:
Question: What part of the world hates America the most right now?
Answer: The Arab world. Duh.
And guess which nations have the biggest account balances? Middle East, Arab, oil producers. In 2002 those oil exporting nations had $400 billion in loose change rattling around in their account balance, account. In 2005 that had grown to $700 billion... almost as much as we will have to borrow this year. And with $70 a barrel oil, you can bet that by the end of this year those little buggers will have shoved a trillion extra bucks into their account, much of it compliments of America's drivers.
(Factoid: Americans are spending $212 million a day more for gas than they did last year. A DAY!)
Up until this year those strange strangers have been kind, lending us all the money our government needed to stay in business, by investing in dollar assets, particularly bonds. But they really don't like us -- any more than we like them. And, while we have no other option but to do business with them, they have other options. And they are beginning to exercise those options when it comes to where they stash their cash.
Until recently the US could be smug about this precarious marriage of convenience. After all, the US was the only economy in the world that was growing and offered a secure investment environment.
Ah, but that's not so any longer. Japan is emerging from 15-year slump caused by their own fiscal and business bubble back in the 1980s. Unlike us, they've wised up, straightened out and are on the rebound. We, on the other hand, are about to reap the bitter harvest of America's second dalliance with supply-side VooDoo economics. Likewise, China has become the world's most attractive growth market ripe for foreign investment.
Which is why those strangers have suddenly become demonstrably less kind to us. According to a recent report by the US Treasury, in the 12 months ending this past January, oil-exporting nations invested less than $50 billion in US securities. During the same period last year they invested $100 billion.
How Serious is This?
Pretty damn serious.
“We (the US) need enormous amounts of capital inflows just to tread water.” (Lewis Alexander, economist, CitiGroup.)
What Can we Do Now? Once you get into as deep a hole as the Bushies have dug there's only one thing you can do – raise interest rates -- and keep raising them until US dollar investments become too attractive for foreigners to ignore.
This tactic, while postponing the inevitable, simply makes the inevitable more inevitable. By paying high interest to foreign investors even more dollars go “that-a-way,” further ballooning our account deficit. And, as America's credit rating continues to plummet we are forced to raise rates higher and higher to mitigate the higher risk we've become. It's the Debt Death Spiral.
What's it to You?
Where do I begin? Housing costs skyrocket, utility companies must pay more to finance capital improvements and that gets added to your bill, credit card companies, already loan sharks whose rates would have made John Gotti blush, will raise rates even further. Which will force more consumers into bankruptcy, which will force credit card companies to raise rates higher yet to cover those loses – the consumer version of the Debt Death Spiral.
But the biggest impact will be on the American government itself. Our military strength today is financed with borrowed money. Our domestic infrastructure, roads, bridges, airports, seaports, increasingly depend on borrowed money to finance repairs and improvements. Every time Congress passes a highway bill, they paying for it with borrowed money. Every time.
If the account deficit were an approaching hurricane we'd be evacuating right now. If it were an enemy preparing to launch an attack, the President would have sounded general quarters, jets would be scrambled, the fleet dispatched to meet the enemy.
But listen... what do you hear? Nothing. Silence. No preparations, no sense of alarm at all. Why? Could I be wrong about all that? Now that we're a free trading, open markets, cheap labor one-world economy, maybe the rules of business physics that have been repealed. (You know, like the dot-com boom in the 1990s repealed them.)
There's absolutely no sense of alarm at the Bush White House. They believe in miracles. They believe that, just as Christ divided the fish and loaves feeding hundreds from a single lunch bucket, that they can do the same. For unbelievers there's Keynesian economics. For the Bushites, it's faith-based economics. Real economic theory fills thousands of books, none with pictures. Faith-based economics is much simpler -- cut taxes on the rich and they will share. Simple indeed.
I can hear you now. “I've been reading this blog for almost two years now and you've been predicting that the end is near since the get-go. And the end has not materialized.”
The trouble with this kind of trouble is that it is never preceded by marching bands. There will be no warning from Homeland Security. And right up to the day the shit hits the fan, TV talk shows will be filled with the noise of economists debating how many trillions of dollars can dance on the head of a pin.
No, this kind of trouble creeps up on nations. The Roaring Twenties in the US. Everyone was having such a good time no one asked the key question: “Is the activity fueling all this sustainable? Is this the real deal, or are we just jerking off? The answer arrived unannounced on a very ordinary morning in October 1929. The gay and carefree "Life is a Caberet" society of 1920's Germany was reduced to ashes by the wild fire of run away inflation.
"The many parallels between 1924 Germany and present-day United States are cause for concern. We have not yet reached the depths to which Germany descended in that era, but few can look at the constant depreciation of the dollar since the early 1970's and fail to be alarmed. It seems we differ from 1924 Germany only in the duration between cause and effect. While the German experience was compressed over a few short years, ours has been more protracted. I think this has occurred for two good reasons: First, American central bankers have learned enough from the German experience to delay and extend the consequences of printing too much fiat money. Second, Germany was a small state isolated from the rest of the world --- a pariah nation of sorts --- and, as a result, it had a difficult time finding a market for its government bonds. German deficits had to be financed internally --- an impossibility which greatly accelerated the printing of fiat currency." (More)
We, unlike Germany of the 20's, have been able to borrow money rather than print. The day we can't borrow any more, we too will print.
So, the next time you are breezing through the business section and see the words, “US account deficit,” stop and read the damn story. Because the rules of business physics have not been repealed. They still apply, and breaking them still carries serious penalty.
Bush has broken them, and broken them and broken them. He figures the rules don't apply to him. That, by ignoring those rules he can get things done quicker and more efficiently. He is like a man who resents the limitations imposed on him gravity, so instead of taking the elevator down from the 30th floor, he can get down quicker by just stepping out a window.
Yes, he will get down faster than if he'd taken the elevator. That part of his theory, at least, was correct.
stephen(at)pizzo.com
Source: News For Real
http://newsforreal.com/
This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=25746
Date: Wednesday, April 19 @ 10:11:56 EDT
Topic: Economic Policy
Stephen Pizzo, News For Real
Say hello to the America's account deficit. And it's gonna get you.
Not scared? Well, outta be. Because, under Bush, this little puppy has grown into a pit bull, and now it's right at our neck.
What is it?
The best way to understand it is to imagine that the nations of the world are companies that do business amongst themselves. They do so much business that rather than exchange cash with each transaction, they keep a record of credits and debits. Some companies sell more than they buy so they have a positive account balance. Others buy more than they sell, so they they have an account deficit. Ideally, over time, it should all balance out. Ideally.
But it doesn't. Countries with cockeyed fiscal policies almost always run account deficits. And, in order to keep doing business those countries run up a tab with the other countries. In other words, they borrow the money they need to remain in the game. That tab is secured with IOUs -- in the case of nations bonds.
How Bad is It?
Bad. Really bad. And, getting worse. The US is currently running an annual account deficit with the rest of the word of over $800 billion a year, and rising. Soon it will be a trillion dollars a year. The US has become the world's unrivaled debtor nation. No other nation on earth is as deeply in hock as we are.
So What?
America, once the richest nation on earth, has become Blanche DuBois – living off the kindness of strangers. And, as strangers go, they get no stranger than some of America's largest creditors: Saudi Arabia, China, UAE.
Pop quiz:
Question: What part of the world hates America the most right now?
Answer: The Arab world. Duh.
And guess which nations have the biggest account balances? Middle East, Arab, oil producers. In 2002 those oil exporting nations had $400 billion in loose change rattling around in their account balance, account. In 2005 that had grown to $700 billion... almost as much as we will have to borrow this year. And with $70 a barrel oil, you can bet that by the end of this year those little buggers will have shoved a trillion extra bucks into their account, much of it compliments of America's drivers.
(Factoid: Americans are spending $212 million a day more for gas than they did last year. A DAY!)
Up until this year those strange strangers have been kind, lending us all the money our government needed to stay in business, by investing in dollar assets, particularly bonds. But they really don't like us -- any more than we like them. And, while we have no other option but to do business with them, they have other options. And they are beginning to exercise those options when it comes to where they stash their cash.
Until recently the US could be smug about this precarious marriage of convenience. After all, the US was the only economy in the world that was growing and offered a secure investment environment.
Ah, but that's not so any longer. Japan is emerging from 15-year slump caused by their own fiscal and business bubble back in the 1980s. Unlike us, they've wised up, straightened out and are on the rebound. We, on the other hand, are about to reap the bitter harvest of America's second dalliance with supply-side VooDoo economics. Likewise, China has become the world's most attractive growth market ripe for foreign investment.
Which is why those strangers have suddenly become demonstrably less kind to us. According to a recent report by the US Treasury, in the 12 months ending this past January, oil-exporting nations invested less than $50 billion in US securities. During the same period last year they invested $100 billion.
How Serious is This?
Pretty damn serious.
“We (the US) need enormous amounts of capital inflows just to tread water.” (Lewis Alexander, economist, CitiGroup.)
What Can we Do Now? Once you get into as deep a hole as the Bushies have dug there's only one thing you can do – raise interest rates -- and keep raising them until US dollar investments become too attractive for foreigners to ignore.
This tactic, while postponing the inevitable, simply makes the inevitable more inevitable. By paying high interest to foreign investors even more dollars go “that-a-way,” further ballooning our account deficit. And, as America's credit rating continues to plummet we are forced to raise rates higher and higher to mitigate the higher risk we've become. It's the Debt Death Spiral.
What's it to You?
Where do I begin? Housing costs skyrocket, utility companies must pay more to finance capital improvements and that gets added to your bill, credit card companies, already loan sharks whose rates would have made John Gotti blush, will raise rates even further. Which will force more consumers into bankruptcy, which will force credit card companies to raise rates higher yet to cover those loses – the consumer version of the Debt Death Spiral.
But the biggest impact will be on the American government itself. Our military strength today is financed with borrowed money. Our domestic infrastructure, roads, bridges, airports, seaports, increasingly depend on borrowed money to finance repairs and improvements. Every time Congress passes a highway bill, they paying for it with borrowed money. Every time.
If the account deficit were an approaching hurricane we'd be evacuating right now. If it were an enemy preparing to launch an attack, the President would have sounded general quarters, jets would be scrambled, the fleet dispatched to meet the enemy.
But listen... what do you hear? Nothing. Silence. No preparations, no sense of alarm at all. Why? Could I be wrong about all that? Now that we're a free trading, open markets, cheap labor one-world economy, maybe the rules of business physics that have been repealed. (You know, like the dot-com boom in the 1990s repealed them.)
There's absolutely no sense of alarm at the Bush White House. They believe in miracles. They believe that, just as Christ divided the fish and loaves feeding hundreds from a single lunch bucket, that they can do the same. For unbelievers there's Keynesian economics. For the Bushites, it's faith-based economics. Real economic theory fills thousands of books, none with pictures. Faith-based economics is much simpler -- cut taxes on the rich and they will share. Simple indeed.
I can hear you now. “I've been reading this blog for almost two years now and you've been predicting that the end is near since the get-go. And the end has not materialized.”
The trouble with this kind of trouble is that it is never preceded by marching bands. There will be no warning from Homeland Security. And right up to the day the shit hits the fan, TV talk shows will be filled with the noise of economists debating how many trillions of dollars can dance on the head of a pin.
No, this kind of trouble creeps up on nations. The Roaring Twenties in the US. Everyone was having such a good time no one asked the key question: “Is the activity fueling all this sustainable? Is this the real deal, or are we just jerking off? The answer arrived unannounced on a very ordinary morning in October 1929. The gay and carefree "Life is a Caberet" society of 1920's Germany was reduced to ashes by the wild fire of run away inflation.
"The many parallels between 1924 Germany and present-day United States are cause for concern. We have not yet reached the depths to which Germany descended in that era, but few can look at the constant depreciation of the dollar since the early 1970's and fail to be alarmed. It seems we differ from 1924 Germany only in the duration between cause and effect. While the German experience was compressed over a few short years, ours has been more protracted. I think this has occurred for two good reasons: First, American central bankers have learned enough from the German experience to delay and extend the consequences of printing too much fiat money. Second, Germany was a small state isolated from the rest of the world --- a pariah nation of sorts --- and, as a result, it had a difficult time finding a market for its government bonds. German deficits had to be financed internally --- an impossibility which greatly accelerated the printing of fiat currency." (More)
We, unlike Germany of the 20's, have been able to borrow money rather than print. The day we can't borrow any more, we too will print.
So, the next time you are breezing through the business section and see the words, “US account deficit,” stop and read the damn story. Because the rules of business physics have not been repealed. They still apply, and breaking them still carries serious penalty.
Bush has broken them, and broken them and broken them. He figures the rules don't apply to him. That, by ignoring those rules he can get things done quicker and more efficiently. He is like a man who resents the limitations imposed on him gravity, so instead of taking the elevator down from the 30th floor, he can get down quicker by just stepping out a window.
Yes, he will get down faster than if he'd taken the elevator. That part of his theory, at least, was correct.
stephen(at)pizzo.com
Source: News For Real
http://newsforreal.com/
This article comes from The Smirking Chimp
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com
The URL for this story is:
http://www.SmirkingChimp.com/article.php?sid=25746
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