Catholic Charities of Boston made the announcement on March 10: It was getting out of the adoption business. "We have encountered a dilemma we cannot resolve... The issue is adoption to same-sex couples."
It was shocking news. Catholic Charities of Boston, one of the nation's oldest adoption agencies, had long specialized in finding good homes for hard to place kids. "Catholic Charities was always at the top of the list," Paula Wisnewski, director of adoption for the Home for Little Wanderers, told the Boston Globe…
How did this tragedy happen?
It's a complicated story. Massachusetts law prohibited "orientation discrimination" over a decade ago. Then in November 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ordered gay marriage. The majority ruled that only animus against gay people could explain why anyone would want to treat opposite-sex and same-sex couples differently. That same year, partly in response to growing pressure for gay marriage and adoption both here and in Europe, a Vatican statement made clear that placing children with same-sex couples violates Catholic teaching.
Then in October 2005, the Boston Globe broke the news: Boston Catholic Charities had placed a small number of children with same-sex couples. Sean Cardinal O'Malley, who has authority over Catholic Charities of Boston responded by stating the agency would no longer do so…
But getting square with the church didn't end Catholic Charities' woes. To operate in Massachusetts, an adoption agency must be licensed by the state. And to get a license, an agency must pledge to obey state laws barring discrimination — including the decade-old ban on orientation discrimination. With the legalization of gay marriage in the state, discrimination against same-sex couples would be outlawed, too.
Cardinal O'Malley asked Governor Mitt Romney for a religious exemption from the ban on orientation discrimination. Governor Romney reluctantly responded that he lacked legal authority to grant one unilaterally, by executive order. So the governor and archbishop turned to the state legislature, requesting a conscience exemption that would allow Catholic Charities to continue to help kids in a manner consistent with Catholic teaching.
To date, not a single other Massachusetts political leader appears willing to consider even the narrowest religious exemption…
From there, it was only a short step to the headline "State Putting Church Out of Adoption Business," which ran over an opinion piece in the Boston Globe by John Garvey, dean of Boston College Law School.
It's worth underscoring that Catholic Charities' problem with the state didn't hinge on its receipt of public money. Ron Madnick, president of the Massachusetts chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, agreed with Garvey's assessment: "Even if Catholic Charities ceased receiving tax support and gave up its role as a state contractor, it still could not refuse to place children with same-sex couples."
This March, then, unexpectedly, a mere two years after the introduction of gay marriage in America, a number of latent concerns about the impact of this innovation on religious freedom ceased to be theoretical. How could Adam and Steve's marriage possibly hurt anyone else? When religious-right leaders prophesy negative consequences from gay marriage, they are often seen as overwrought. The First Amendment, we are told, will protect religious groups from persecution for their views about marriage.
So who is right? Is the fate of Catholic Charities of Boston an aberration or a sign of things to come?
I put the question to Anthony Picarello, president and general counsel of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty… Just how serious are the coming conflicts over religious liberty stemming from gay marriage?
"The impact will be severe and pervasive," Picarello says flatly. "This is going to affect every aspect of church-state relations." Recent years, he predicts, will be looked back on as a time of relative peace between church and state, one where people had the luxury of litigating cases about things like the Ten Commandments in courthouses. In times of relative peace, says Picarello, people don't even notice that "the church is surrounded on all sides by the state; that church and state butt up against each other. The boundaries are usually peaceful, so it's easy sometimes to forget they are there. But because marriage affects just about every area of the law, gay marriage is going to create a point of conflict at every point around the perimeter…"
Picarello is a Harvard-trained litigator experienced in religious liberty issues. But predicting the legal consequences of as big a change as gay marriage is a job for more than one mind. So last December, the Becket Fund brought together ten religious liberty scholars of right and left to look at the question of the impact of gay marriage on the freedom of religion. Picarello summarizes: "All the scholars we got together see a problem; they all see a conflict coming. They differ on how it should be resolved and who should win, but they all see a conflict coming."
These are not necessarily scholars who oppose gay marriage… Marc Stern is the general counsel for the center-left American Jewish Congress… Jonathan Turley of George Washington law school has supported legalizing not only gay marriage but also polygamy.
Reading through these and the other scholars' papers, I noticed an odd feature. Generally speaking the scholars most opposed to gay marriage were somewhat less likely than others to foresee large conflicts ahead — perhaps because they tended to find it "inconceivable," as Doug Kmiec of Pepperdine law school put it, that "a successful analogy will be drawn in the public mind between irrational, and morally repugnant, racial discrimination and the rational, and at least morally debatable, differentiation of traditional and same-sex marriage."
That's a key consideration. For if orientation is like race, then people who oppose gay marriage will be treated under law like bigots who opposed interracial marriage. Sure, we don't arrest people for being racists, but the law does intervene in powerful ways to punish and discourage racial discrimination, not only by government but also by private entities. Doug Laycock, a religious liberty expert at the University of Texas law school, similarly told me we are a "long way" from equating orientation with race in the law…
The Litigator
As general counsel for the American Jewish Congress, Marc Stern knows religious liberty law from the inside out. Like Anthony Picarello, he sees the coming conflicts as pervasive. The problem is not that clergy will be forced to perform gay marriages or prevented from preaching their beliefs. Look past those big red herrings: "No one seriously believes that clergy will be forced, or even asked, to perform marriages that are anathema to them. Same-sex marriage would, however, work a sea change in American law. That change will reverberate across the legal and religious landscape in some ways that are today unpredictable," he writes in his Becket Fund paper.
Consider education. Same-sex marriage will affect religious educational institutions, he argues, in at least four ways: admissions, employment, housing, and regulation of clubs. One of Stern's big worries right now is a case in California where a private Christian high school expelled two girls who (the school says) announced they were in a lesbian relationship. Stern is not optimistic. And if the high school loses, he tells me, "then religious schools are out of business." Or at least the government will force religious schools to tolerate both conduct and proclamations by students they believe to be sinful.
Stern agrees… that public accommodation laws can and should force truly commercial enterprises to serve all comers. But, he asks, what of other places, such as religious camps, retreats, and homeless shelters? Will they be considered by courts to be places of public accommodation, too? Could a religious summer camp operated in strict conformity with religious principles refuse to accept children coming from same-sex marriages? What of a church-affiliated community center, with a gym and a Little League, that offers family programs? Must a religious-affiliated family services provider offer marriage counseling to same-sex couples designed to facilitate or preserve their relationships?
"Future conflict with the law in regard to licensing is certain with regard to psychological clinics, social workers, marital counselors, and the like," Stern wrote last December — well before the Boston Catholic Charities story broke.
Think about that for a moment. Of all the experts gathered to forecast the impact of gay marriage on religious organizations, no one, not even Stern, brought up adoption licenses. "Government is so pervasive, it's hard to know where the next battle will be," he tells me. "I thought I had a comprehensive catalog, but the adoption license issue didn't occur to me."
Will speech against gay marriage be allowed to continue unfettered? "Under the American regime of freedom of speech, the answer ought to be easy," according to Stern. But it is not entirely certain, he writes, "because sexual-harassment-in-the-workplace principles will likely migrate to suppress any expression of anti-same-sex-marriage views." Stern suggests how that might work.
In the corporate world, the expression of opposition to gay marriage will be suppressed not by gay ideologues but by corporate lawyers, who will draw the lines least likely to entangle the company in litigation. Stern likens this to "a paroxysm of prophylaxis — banning 'Jesus saves' because someone might take offense."
Or consider a recent case at William Paterson University, a state school in New Jersey. A senior faculty member sent out a mass email inviting people to attend movies with a gay theme. A student employee, a 63-year-old Muslim named Jihad Daniel, replied to the professor in a private email asking not to receive messages "about 'Connie and Sally' and 'Adam and Steve.'" He went on, "These are perversions. The absence of God in higher education brings on confusion. That is why in these classes the Creator of the heavens and the earth is never mentioned." The result: Daniel received a letter of reprimand for using the "derogatory and demeaning" word "perversions" in violation of state discrimination and harassment regulations.
Interestingly, Stern points out, a single "derogatory or demeaning" remark not seeking sexual gratification or threatening a person's job security does not constitute harassment under ordinary federal and state sexual harassment law originally intended to protect women in the workplace. Moreover, Stern says, "our entire free speech regime depends on the principle that no adult has a right to expect the law will protect him from being exposed to disagreeable speech."
Except, apparently in New Jersey, where a state attorney general's opinion concluded, "[C]learly speech which violates a nondiscrimination policy is not protected." "This was so 'clear' to the writer," notes Stern, "that she cited not a single case or law review article in support." Ultimately, the school withdrew its reprimand from Daniel's employment file after receiving negative publicity and the threat of a lawsuit from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Sexual harassment law as an instrument for suppressing religious speech? A few days after I interviewed Stern, an Alliance Defense Fund press release dropped into my mail box: "OSU Librarian Slapped with 'Sexual Harassment' Charge for Recommending Conservative Books for Freshmen." One of the books the Ohio State librarian (a pacifist Quaker who drives a horse and buggy to work) recommended was It Takes a Family by Senator Rick Santorum. Three professors alleged that the mere appearance of such a book on a freshman reading list made them feel "unsafe." The faculty voted to pursue the sexual harassment allegation, and the process quickly resulted in the charge being dropped.
In the end the investigation of the librarian was more of a nuisance — you might call it harassment — than anything else. But the imbalance in terms of free speech remains clear: People who favor gay rights face no penalty for speaking their views, but can inflict a risk of litigation, investigation, and formal and informal career penalties on others whose views they dislike. Meanwhile, people who think gay marriage is wrong cannot know for sure where the line is now or where it will be redrawn in the near future. "Soft" coercion produces no martyrs to disturb anyone's conscience, yet it is highly effective in chilling the speech of ordinary people.
Finally, I ask Stern the big question on everyone's mind. Religious groups that take government funding will almost certainly be required to play by the nondiscrimination rules, but what about groups that, while receiving no government grants, are tax-exempt? Can a group — a church or religious charity, say — that opposes gay marriage keep its tax exemption if gay marriage becomes the law? "That," says Stern, "is the 18 trillion dollar question."
Twenty years ago it would have been inconceivable that a Christian or Jewish organization that opposed gay marriage might be treated as racist in the public square. Today? It's just not clear.
"In Massachusetts I'd be very worried," Stern says finally. The churches themselves might have a First Amendment defense if a state government or state courts tried to withdraw their exemption, he says, but "the parachurch institutions are very much at risk and may be put out of business because of the licensing issues, or for these other reasons — it's very unclear. None of us nonprofits can function without [state] tax exemption. As a practical matter, any large charity needs that real estate tax exemption."
He blames religious conservatives for adopting the wrong political strategy on gay issues. "Live and let live," he tells me, is the only thing around the world that works. But I ask him point blank what he would say to people who dismiss the threat to free exercise of religion as evangelical hysteria. "It's not hysteria, this is very real," he tells me, "Boston Catholic Charities shows that."
Fundamentally, Stern sees this as a "religious war" between people for whom an egalitarian secular ethic is the only rational option and people who can make room for an ethic based on faith in a God who commands. There are very few signs of a willingness to compromise on either side, he notes.
"You look around the world and even the right to preach is in doubt," he tells me. "In the United States we are not foreseeably in that position. Fundamentally speech is still safe in the United States. Beyond speech, nothing is safe…"
The Legal Eagle
Jonathan Turley, the George Washington professor who is a First Amendment specialist, also sees a serious risk ahead. Turley has no problem with gay marriage. But the gay marriage debate, he notes, exposes "long ignored weaknesses in doctrines relating to free speech, free exercise, and the right to association."
Before 1970 the law was "viewpoint neutral" with regard to the tax exempt status of all charitable, religious, and public interest organizations under section 501(c)(3), he says. The tax exemption was viewed not as a public subsidy, but as a means of encouraging private donations and charitable conduct in general. In 1971, the IRS issued a decision redefining the tax exemption as a public endorsement or subsidy. This meant that the IRS would strip an organization of its exempt status if its purposes, although legal, were "contrary to public policy." The goal at the time was to use legal pressure to end private racial discrimination. But why stop there?
Right now, Turley notes, there is no clear federal public policy against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. But such a policy is imminent, he believes, most likely within the decade…
It's not that hard to imagine: Pass an antidiscrimination law at the federal level, which polls suggest the majority of Americans already support; look for a 5-or 10-point swing in public opinion on gay marriage; then add a new IRS commissioner (not directly accountable to the voters) who wants to make his or her progressive mark, and religious groups would wake up to find themselves playing in a whole new ballgame.
Religious bodies may be as simple as the small, independent congregations that exist all over America, but often they are large and complex institutions with extensive property and multiple missions, notably saving souls. Even a slight risk of anything so damaging as the loss of tax-exempt status will persuade many such groups to at least mute their marriage theology in the interest of preserving the rest of their activities. Such a self-imposed muting on the part of faith communities would change our culture of marriage, and our understanding of the free exercise of religion, without necessarily creating visible martyrs.
The Marriage Line
How much of the coming threat to religious liberty actually stems from same-sex marriage? These experts' comments make clear that it is not only gay marriage, but also the set of ideas that leads to gay marriage — the insistence on one specific vision of gay rights — that has placed church and state on a collision course. Once sexual orientation is conceptualized as a protected status on a par with race, traditional religions that condemn homosexual conduct will face increasing legal pressures regardless of what courts and Congress do about marriage itself.
Nevertheless, marriage is a particularly potent legal "bright line." Support for marriage is firmly established in our legal tradition and in our public policy. After it became apparent that no religious exemption would be available for Catholic Charities in Massachusetts, the church looked hard for legal avenues to continue helping kids without violating Catholic principles. If the stumbling block had been Catholic Charities' unwillingness to place children with single people — or with gay singles — marriage might have provided a legal "safe harbor": Catholic Charities might have been able to specialize in placing children with married couples and thus avoid collision with state laws banning orientation discrimination. After Goodridge, however, "marriage" includes gay marriage, so no such haven would have been available in Massachusetts.
Precisely because support for marriage is public policy, once marriage includes gay couples, groups who oppose gay marriage are likely to be judged in violation of public policy, triggering a host of negative consequences, including the loss of tax-exempt status. Because marriage is not a private act, but a protected public status, the legalization of gay marriage sends a strong signal that orientation is now on a par with race in the nondiscrimination game. And when we get gay marriage because courts have declared it a constitutional right, the signal is stronger still…
On the cultural level, the declaration by a court that only animus explains why anyone would treat two men differently from a husband and wife represents an unfolding civil rights logic that has real consequences. As Boston Globe columnist Ellen Goodman put it, "But if you give one church permission to discriminate against gays, what's next? Permission to discriminate against blacks or Jews who want to adopt?"
End Game
On April 15, the Boston Globe ran a story about three other Catholic adoption agencies, in Worcester, Fall River, and Springfield, that do not do gay adoptions. The story noted that, for now, these agencies will not be punished for their refusal. Constantia Papanikolaou, general counsel for the state Department of Early Education and Care, said her agency is holding off taking any action because the governor has proposed legislation that would provide a religious exemption for adoption agencies. "We're going to wait and see how the legislation plays out," Papanikolaou said.
The reprieve is likely to be short-lived. Observers universally say the religious exemption has no chance of passage, and in a few months, Mitt Romney will no longer be governor. What then? The Boston Globe story provides a clue: "Gary Buseck, legal director of the Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders in Boston, said his group realizes that Massachusetts will have a new governor next year, and it expects that he or she will aggressively enforce the state's antidiscrimination laws."
Marc Stern is looking more and more like a reluctant prophet: "It's going to be a train wreck," he told me in the offices of the American Jewish Congress high above Manhattan. "A very dangerous train wreck. I don't see anyone trying to stem the train wreck, or slow down the trains. Both sides are really looking for Armageddon, and they frankly both want to win. I prefer to avoid Armageddon, if possible."
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
Sometimes Even Gay People Can Be Bigots
Liberals are among the most bigotted people I know ...
GAY MARRIAGE CREATES NEW CONFLICTS FOR NEIGHBORS
By Maggie Gallagher
The story circulating on the Internet was hard to believe at first: A North Truro, Mass., volunteer fireman lost his position because he signed a petition opposing gay marriage?
I was lucky enough to get Leo "Skip" Childs on the phone. Skip is the kind of guy who makes you ashamed of yourself, but very proud to be an American. He volunteers many hours in the tiny town of North Truro, repairing fire trucks, saving lives. "Last month I went on 22 rescue calls, plus 10 to 15 hours of administrative duties," he told me.
Why? "Because I think everyone that lives in a small community has got to pitch in," he says. "I'd love to go work on the finance committee, but I don't know much about that. I can help you when your fire truck is broken, and I can help you in the back of the ambulance. That's what I try to do."
His wife, Marjorie, also helps. "Her cooking is famous in three towns. A piece of cake and warm cup of coffee," he says proudly, "that's what my wife does to support the rescue squad."
After five years, Skip thought his reappointment to the Board of Fire Engineers would be routine. Then Selectman Paul Asher-Best spoke up: "Recent action you took, Mr. Childs, indicates to me that you think that gay people are less than fully human, and not entitled to all the civil rights that are afforded to them. The Supreme Judicial Court talks about marriage rights being a basic civil right. ... I need ... assurance from you that you would offer equal protection to everyone in Truro, including households headed by gay or lesbian people, because to me your action speaks otherwise."
Skip is scratching his head at this point. How could signing a marriage petition make you unfit to rescue people? He tried to be conciliatory: "I'm more concerned that a special interest group with a strong lobby would be able to influence a judge in our state. ... I wouldn't have a problem with it if it passed on the referendum."
But with that comment, Paul Asher-Best went ballistic. As Asher-Best later told me, "I consider myself one half of a loving couple who has been together 27 years. I don't consider myself a special interest.
"Mr. Childs' explanation, just like I said, amplifies his bias," he pronounced, "and I think for that reason I couldn't support him."
The town council voted for a new Board of Fire Engineers, minus Skip Childs. The Childses were humiliated. After nearly a decade of volunteering every spare hour to rescue your neighbors, this is your reward? Dressed down as a bigot in public for signing a marriage petition?
Paul Asher-Best is certainly not repentant. "To me, it reminds me of when back in the bad old days when a black man even looking a white man in the eye was an offense. I feel like this 'uppity f------' had the nerve to look a straight guy in the eye and ask him to explain himself. If the issue is interracial marriage, would questioning him on attitudes toward black people be so out of line?"
Paul Asher-Best is no villain. He's a good man with a bad idea: People who disagree with him on gay marriage demonstrate irrational hatred toward gay people. After all, that is what the Massachusetts high court actually ruled.
Skip is hopeful that when a new position opens up in June, he will be allowed again to serve. I hope so too.
But two ideas are clearly now on a collision course in America: 1) There's something special about unions of husbands and wives, and 2) there's no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, and only hate-filled bigots think otherwise. In Massachusetts, the second idea is now the official view of the law.
Skip Childs is one of the first casualties of this new conflict. But as our senators debate a Marriage Protection Amendment June 5, they should be forewarned: If they leave marriage to the courts, he won't be the last.
(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2006@yahoo.com.)
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.
GAY MARRIAGE CREATES NEW CONFLICTS FOR NEIGHBORS
By Maggie Gallagher
The story circulating on the Internet was hard to believe at first: A North Truro, Mass., volunteer fireman lost his position because he signed a petition opposing gay marriage?
I was lucky enough to get Leo "Skip" Childs on the phone. Skip is the kind of guy who makes you ashamed of yourself, but very proud to be an American. He volunteers many hours in the tiny town of North Truro, repairing fire trucks, saving lives. "Last month I went on 22 rescue calls, plus 10 to 15 hours of administrative duties," he told me.
Why? "Because I think everyone that lives in a small community has got to pitch in," he says. "I'd love to go work on the finance committee, but I don't know much about that. I can help you when your fire truck is broken, and I can help you in the back of the ambulance. That's what I try to do."
His wife, Marjorie, also helps. "Her cooking is famous in three towns. A piece of cake and warm cup of coffee," he says proudly, "that's what my wife does to support the rescue squad."
After five years, Skip thought his reappointment to the Board of Fire Engineers would be routine. Then Selectman Paul Asher-Best spoke up: "Recent action you took, Mr. Childs, indicates to me that you think that gay people are less than fully human, and not entitled to all the civil rights that are afforded to them. The Supreme Judicial Court talks about marriage rights being a basic civil right. ... I need ... assurance from you that you would offer equal protection to everyone in Truro, including households headed by gay or lesbian people, because to me your action speaks otherwise."
Skip is scratching his head at this point. How could signing a marriage petition make you unfit to rescue people? He tried to be conciliatory: "I'm more concerned that a special interest group with a strong lobby would be able to influence a judge in our state. ... I wouldn't have a problem with it if it passed on the referendum."
But with that comment, Paul Asher-Best went ballistic. As Asher-Best later told me, "I consider myself one half of a loving couple who has been together 27 years. I don't consider myself a special interest.
"Mr. Childs' explanation, just like I said, amplifies his bias," he pronounced, "and I think for that reason I couldn't support him."
The town council voted for a new Board of Fire Engineers, minus Skip Childs. The Childses were humiliated. After nearly a decade of volunteering every spare hour to rescue your neighbors, this is your reward? Dressed down as a bigot in public for signing a marriage petition?
Paul Asher-Best is certainly not repentant. "To me, it reminds me of when back in the bad old days when a black man even looking a white man in the eye was an offense. I feel like this 'uppity f------' had the nerve to look a straight guy in the eye and ask him to explain himself. If the issue is interracial marriage, would questioning him on attitudes toward black people be so out of line?"
Paul Asher-Best is no villain. He's a good man with a bad idea: People who disagree with him on gay marriage demonstrate irrational hatred toward gay people. After all, that is what the Massachusetts high court actually ruled.
Skip is hopeful that when a new position opens up in June, he will be allowed again to serve. I hope so too.
But two ideas are clearly now on a collision course in America: 1) There's something special about unions of husbands and wives, and 2) there's no difference between same-sex and opposite-sex couples, and only hate-filled bigots think otherwise. In Massachusetts, the second idea is now the official view of the law.
Skip Childs is one of the first casualties of this new conflict. But as our senators debate a Marriage Protection Amendment June 5, they should be forewarned: If they leave marriage to the courts, he won't be the last.
(Readers may reach Maggie Gallagher at MaggieBox2006@yahoo.com.)
Copyright © 2006 Yahoo! Inc.
Sunday, May 28, 2006
Horror of Horrors; Still More Grief for the Folks in Indonesia
After a devasting tsunami, now a major earthquake; what more are those poor folks in the south Pacific country of Indonesia going to have to endure? The hell seems to go on and on for them ... read this latest and weep.Indonesians plead for aid; toll over 4,300
By CHRIS BRUMMITT, Associated Press Writer
Tens of thousands camped out for a second night Sunday in streets, cassava fields and the paths between rice paddies as the death toll from Indonesia's earthquake topped 4,300.
Rattled by hundreds of aftershocks, exhausted and grieving survivors scavenged for food and clothes in the brick, wood and tile rubble of their flattened houses. They pleaded for aid, which — despite worldwide pledges of millions of dollars and planes carrying medicine and food — seemed to be coming too slow.
Torrential rain late Sunday added to the misery of some 200,000 people left homeless by Saturday's 6.3-magnitude quake, most of them living in makeshift shelters of plastic, canvas or cardboard. Thousands of wounded awaited treatment in hospitals overflowing with bloodied patients.
"So far no one from the government has shown any care for us," said villager Brojo Sukardi. "Please tell people to help us."
The quake on the island of Java was the fourth destructive temblor to hit Indonesia in the last 17 months, including the one that spawned the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami that killed 230,000 people across Asia, most of them on this Indian Ocean archipelago.
The country also is coping with the bird flu crisis, Islamic militant terror attacks, and the threat of eruption from Mount Merapi. The quake not only raised activity at the rumbling volcano but also damaged the 9th-century Prambanan temple, a U.N. world heritage site.
The disaster zone covered hundreds of square miles of mostly farming communities to the south of the ancient city of Yogyakarta. Power and telephone service was out Sunday across much of the region. As many as 450 aftershocks followed, the strongest a magnitude 5.2.
The worst devastation was in the Bantul district, which accounted for three-quarters of the deaths. One man dug his 5-year-old daughter out of the rubble of her bedroom only to have her die in a hospital awaiting treatment with hundreds of others.
"Her last words were 'Daddy, Daddy,'" said Poniran, who like many Indonesians uses only one name.
"I have to start my life from zero again."
In Peni, a hamlet on Bantul's southern outskirts, 20 residents searched for a neighbor after finding the bodies of his wife and three children. Villagers set up simple clinics despite shortages in medicine and equipment. Women cooked catfish from a nearby pond for dozens of people huddled under a large tent.
The U.N. World Food Program started distributing emergency food rations Sunday, with three trucks bringing high-energy biscuits to some of the worst-hit districts and two Singapore military cargo planes landing with doctors and medical supplies.
"I regret the slow distribution of aid," Idam Samawi, the Bantul district chief, told The Associated Press.
"Many government officials have no sensitivity to this. They work slowly under complicated bureaucracy, while survivors are racing against death and disease."
At least 4,332 people were killed, according to government figures, and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent said at least 200,000 people were left homeless. Most of the dead were buried within hours of the disaster, in line with Islamic tradition.
The earthquake hit at 5:54 a.m. as most people slept, caving in tile roofs and sending walls crashing down. Survivors screamed as they ran from their homes, some clutching bloodied children and the elderly.
The quake's epicenter was 50 miles south of the volcano, and activity increased soon after the temblor. A large burst spewed hot clouds and sent debris cascading some two miles down its western flank. No one was injured because nearby residents had been evacuated.
Officials said the famed 7th-century Borobudur Buddhist temple, one of Indonesia's famed tourist attractions, was not affected. But Prambanan, a spectacular Hindu temple to the southeast, suffered serious damage, with hundreds of stone carvings and blocks scattered around the ancient site.
It will be closed until archeologists can determine whether the foundation was damaged, Agus Waluyo, head of the Yogyakarta Archaeological Conservation Agency, said Sunday. Close to 1 million tourists visit the Borobudur and Prambanan temples every year.
International agencies and nations across Europe and Asia pledged millions of dollars in aid and prepared shipments of tents, blankets, generators, water purification equipment and other supplies. The United States promised $2.5 million in emergency aid; the European Union granted $3.8 million. Indonesia said late Sunday it would allocate $107 million to help rebuild over the next year.
Indonesia, the world's largest island chain, is prone to seismic upheaval due to its location on the so-called "Ring of Fire," an arc of volcanos and fault lines encircling the Pacific Basin. It has 76 volcanos, the largest number in the world.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Saturday, May 27, 2006
Bush Braces For Marine Scandal
[Editor's Note: Finally, it appears that Bush and other big shots in Washington are going to pay attention to the 'MaiLai scandal' of the Iraqi War. Old people like myself will recall when the MaiLai thing during the Viet Nam War of the 1970's helped to shake things up quite a lot. MaiLai was a village in VietNam which the military blew to bits during Vietnam. The Marines did the same thing several months ago to a small town in Iraq.
If you missed the report when it was first on the wires or discussed here in this blog, you can read it again here. So, here we go with MaiLai repeating itself all over again. First reported in this blog on March 21. 2005. ]
U.S. braces for Marine scandal
By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer
The U.S. military is bracing for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha — charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.
And while the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could enflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts by moderate Sunni Arab leaders to reach out to their community — the bedrock of the insurgency.
U.S. lawmakers have been told the criminal investigation will be finished in about 30 days. But a Pentagon official said investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.
With a political storm brewing, the top U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."
Haditha is not the only case pending: On Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement gave no further details except that "several service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending the results of the criminal investigation."
Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir al-Sumaidaie, accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin in cold blood during a search of his family's home in Haditha, a city of about 90,000 people along the Euphrates River 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The military ordered a criminal investigation but the results have not been announced.
Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which Bush cited Thursday as "the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq."
"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "It has the potential to blow up in the U.S. military's face."
He said that "the Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.
The Haditha case involves both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19.
That day, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a Sunni Arab city considered among the most hostile areas of Iraq.
After the blast, insurgents attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol with small-arms fire, triggering a gunbattle that left eight insurgents and 15 Iraqi civilians dead, the Marines said in a statement issued the following day.
That version stood for four months until a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student surfaced, obtained by Time magazine and then by Arab television stations. The tape showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.
Although the tape did not prove Marines were responsible, the military began an investigation. Residents came forward with claims that Marines entered two homes and killed 15 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man — more than four hours after the roadside bombing.
It isn't clear if questions have been raised about the eight slain people that the Marines described as insurgents.
In March, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said about a dozen Marines were under investigation for possible war crimes in the incident. Three officers from the unit involved have been relieved of their posts.
Such incidents have reinforced the perception among many Iraqis who believe American troops are trigger-happy — a characterization U.S. officers strongly dispute.
"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "U.S. troops are a very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."
Ayda Aasran, a deputy human rights minister, said Iraqis should be allowed to investigate such cases — something the U.S. command has refused to permit.
Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents.
Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.
Haditha, site of a major hydroelectric dam, has long been considered a tough case. It is among a string of Euphrates Valley towns used by insurgents and foreign fighters to infiltrate from Syria to reach Baghdad and the Sunni heartland.
Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the Americans leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight.
Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.
An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.
Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law — including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.
"This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy."
Some analysts, however, say the killings of civilians also reflect frustration among young troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight. They say these young fighters have been thrust into an alien culture for repeated tours in a war whose strategy many of them do not understand.
"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Robert H. Reid is correspondent at large for The Associated Press and has reported frequently from Iraq since 2003.
Associated Press writer Jacob Silberberg contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
If you missed the report when it was first on the wires or discussed here in this blog, you can read it again here. So, here we go with MaiLai repeating itself all over again. First reported in this blog on March 21. 2005. ]
U.S. braces for Marine scandal
By ROBERT H. REID, Associated Press Writer
The U.S. military is bracing for a major scandal over the alleged slaying of Iraqi civilians by Marines in Haditha — charges so serious they could threaten President Bush's effort to rally support at home for an increasingly unpopular war.
And while the case has attracted little attention so far in Iraq, it still could enflame hostility to the U.S. presence just as Iraq's new government is getting established, and complicate efforts by moderate Sunni Arab leaders to reach out to their community — the bedrock of the insurgency.
U.S. lawmakers have been told the criminal investigation will be finished in about 30 days. But a Pentagon official said investigators believe Marines committed unprovoked murder in the deaths of about two dozen people at Haditha in November.
With a political storm brewing, the top U.S. Marine, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, is headed to Iraq to personally deliver the message that troops should use deadly force "only when justified, proportional and, most importantly, lawful."
Haditha is not the only case pending: On Wednesday, the military announced an investigation into allegations that Marines killed a civilian April 26 near Fallujah. The statement gave no further details except that "several service members" had been sent back to the United States "pending the results of the criminal investigation."
Last July, Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Samir al-Sumaidaie, accused the Marines of killing his 21-year-old cousin in cold blood during a search of his family's home in Haditha, a city of about 90,000 people along the Euphrates River 140 miles northwest of Baghdad.
The military ordered a criminal investigation but the results have not been announced.
Together, the cases present the most serious challenge to U.S. handling of the Iraq war since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, which Bush cited Thursday as "the biggest mistake that's happened so far, at least from our country's involvement in Iraq."
"What happened at Haditha appears to be outright murder," said Marc Garlasco of Human Rights Watch. "It has the potential to blow up in the U.S. military's face."
He said that "the Haditha massacre will go down as Iraq's My Lai," a reference to the Vietnam War incident in which American soldiers slaughtered up to 500 civilians in 1968.
The Haditha case involves both the alleged killing of civilians and a purported cover-up of the events that unfolded Nov. 19.
That day, Lance Cpl. Miguel Terrazas, 20, of El Paso, Texas, was killed by a roadside bomb in Haditha, a Sunni Arab city considered among the most hostile areas of Iraq.
After the blast, insurgents attacked a joint U.S.-Iraqi patrol with small-arms fire, triggering a gunbattle that left eight insurgents and 15 Iraqi civilians dead, the Marines said in a statement issued the following day.
That version stood for four months until a videotape shot by an Iraqi journalism student surfaced, obtained by Time magazine and then by Arab television stations. The tape showed the bodies of women and children, some in their nightclothes.
Although the tape did not prove Marines were responsible, the military began an investigation. Residents came forward with claims that Marines entered two homes and killed 15 people, including a 3-year-old girl and a 76-year-old man — more than four hours after the roadside bombing.
It isn't clear if questions have been raised about the eight slain people that the Marines described as insurgents.
In March, Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, said about a dozen Marines were under investigation for possible war crimes in the incident. Three officers from the unit involved have been relieved of their posts.
Such incidents have reinforced the perception among many Iraqis who believe American troops are trigger-happy — a characterization U.S. officers strongly dispute.
"America in the view of many Iraqis has no credibility. We do not believe what they say is correct," said Sheik Sattar al-Aasaf, a tribal leader in Anbar province, which includes Haditha. "U.S. troops are a very well-trained and when they shoot, it isn't random but due to an order to kill Iraqis. People say they are the killers."
Ayda Aasran, a deputy human rights minister, said Iraqis should be allowed to investigate such cases — something the U.S. command has refused to permit.
Sunni political leaders will find it difficult to defend U.S. actions, even those aimed at establishing the truth, if they want to maintain their position as leaders of the Iraqi minority that provides most of the insurgents.
Even if criminal charges are brought in the Haditha incident, Sunni insurgents are likely to claim the case is simply a charade and argue that the Marines will escape serious punishment.
Haditha, site of a major hydroelectric dam, has long been considered a tough case. It is among a string of Euphrates Valley towns used by insurgents and foreign fighters to infiltrate from Syria to reach Baghdad and the Sunni heartland.
Many Marines have complained to journalists that they conduct repeated sweeps through villages to drive out the insurgents, who then reappear when the Americans leave. That has bred a sense of frustration among troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight.
Reporters who embedded in Haditha several months before the alleged massacre said Marines considered the town as enemy territory, with frequent roadside bombings. During patrols inside the city, Marines treated inhabitants like terrorists, raiding their homes.
An Associated Press journalist who traveled in Haditha last June with a Marine unit not involved in the November killings saw a Marine urinate on the kitchen floor of a home and on another occasion saw insults chalked in English on the gate of an Arab home. The reporter asked a Marine commander about the incident and was told it would be investigated.
Last August, the British newspaper The Guardian reported that Haditha was under the control of religious extremists who enforced their own strict interpretation of Islamic law — including decapitations of people suspected of collaborating with the Americans.
"This is a war in which the distinction between killing the enemy and massacring civilians is not always completely obvious," said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org. "Counterinsurgency operations are particularly prone to the killing of people who, in retrospect, are judged to have been innocent civilians, but who in the heat of battle seemed to be the enemy."
Some analysts, however, say the killings of civilians also reflect frustration among young troops fighting a difficult war with no end in sight. They say these young fighters have been thrust into an alien culture for repeated tours in a war whose strategy many of them do not understand.
"What we're seeing more of now, and these incidents will increase monthly, is the end result of fuzzy, imprecise national direction combined with situational ethics at the highest levels of this government," said retired Air Force Col. Mike Turner, a former planner at the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Robert H. Reid is correspondent at large for The Associated Press and has reported frequently from Iraq since 2003.
Associated Press writer Jacob Silberberg contributed to this report.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Gay Music Director Fired by Catholic Church in Kansas City
Gay music director let go by Kansas Catholic parish
GARANCE BURKE
Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Joseph Nadeau prayed for storms when he was an altar boy, hoping the lights would go out and he would be picked to play the church's creaking organ to celebrate Holy Mass. Now in his mid-30s, Nadeau's bold spiritual arrangements have brought dozens of parishioners to his suburban parish in Roeland Park, Kan.
But last Sunday, Nadeau ended his last Mass at St. Agnes Catholic Church with a wrenching solo on "God Help the Outcasts." It was his other life, as the artistic director of one of the nation's largest gay male choirs, that ultimately cost him his job.
"I've known I was gay since I was 15 or 16," said the soft-spoken Nadeau at his brick home in Kansas City. "My parish priest told me just follow your heart and you can't go wrong. I can't think of doing anything else."
The Roman Catholic Church views homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered" and in November held that priests who support "so-called gay culture" cannot be ordained. While Vatican teachings also instruct that gays and lesbians should be treated with compassion, church employees are expected to live in accordance with Catholic doctrine.
The church's decision to let Nadeau's contract lapse, however, comes at a time when the role of homosexuals is causing debates inside churches nationwide - though the bulk of those conversations never go public.
In January, the St. Agnes Catholic Church hierarchy summoned Nadeau into a closed-door meeting, he said. Monsignor Gary Applegate told Nadeau that to continue as music director, he needed to resign from Kansas City's Heartland Men's Chorus, take a vow of celibacy and acknowledge that homosexuality was a disorder, Nadeau said.
"Science and psychology have taught us that homosexuality isn't a disorder," said Nadeau. "If I had agreed to that, I would have felt like I was being very dishonest with myself. And I think there are a lot of parishioners who feel the same way."
Officials with St. Agnes refused interview requests, and the Archdiocese of Kansas City said it would not discuss personnel issues. But staff confirmed that after eight years of service, Nadeau's contract will officially expire in June.
Last month, a Las Vegas Catholic high school reportedly fired a veteran philosophy teacher after he placed an ad on Myspace.com detailing his taste in men. In 2003, a gay music director at a Catholic parish in Rockford, Ill., lost his job when he refused to take a vow of chastity.
"The most divisive issue in American religion today is homosexuality, and the Roman Catholic church is absolutely shut down on this," said Bernie Schlager, a gay former organist who now works for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. "I knew that as a gay person I had to leave the church because of the danger of being fired at any time with no recourse."
Nadeau began singing in a gay choir in Denver, where he united his love for multipart harmonies with his quest for social justice. In 1998, he was recruited to direct the Heartland Men's Chorus, whose 135 singers will celebrate the choir's 20th anniversary next month.
Nadeau heard of the opening at St. Agnes after moving to Kansas City and decided to apply. His father, now a Catholic priest, encouraged him.
"During the interview process, I wanted them to know what was going on with me. I told them I was the director of a gay mens' choir," said Nadeau. "I was greeted by a Catholic Church that I thought didn't exist: very kind, very loving, very compassionate."
Under his direction, the music program grew to include two children's choirs, youth and contemporary ensembles, and a Spanish-language musical liturgy. But in 2003, a group of conservative parishioners started campaigning against Nadeau, whom they saw as an emissary of a movement to "legitimize homosexuality at the parish level."
Members collected signatures on petitions to the papal nuncio, while an anonymous group stapled pictures of Nadeau to ads of underwear-clad men and slipped them under churchgoers' windshields, he said.
Later that year, former Kansas City Archbishop James Keleher told Nadeau that if he kept his two jobs separate, he did not see a problem with his other position.
The leadership at the archdiocese changed last year. In January, Nadeau said Applegate informed him that his membership in a "gay-affirming" group kept him from living out church doctrine.
Like priests, parish employees need to follow religious texts because "part of holding a church position is upholding the church's teaching," said the Rev. Thomas Tifft, rector of Saint Mary Seminary and Graduate School of Theology in Wickliffe, Ohio.
Often, gay and lesbian church workers will follow a "don't ask, don't tell" policy to avoid controversy and keep their jobs, said Debbie Weill, executive director for DignityUSA, a national lay movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics.
But for Nadeau, who has already started programming music for a different but "welcoming" Christian church in Kansas City, Kan., the option to stay quiet was not enough to keep him in the Catholic faith.
"You and I have discussed whether and under what circumstances you could remain as the parish Music Director," reads Applegate's May 15, 2006, letter to Nadeau. "We were not able to reach an understanding."
But after Nadeau performed his final solo, about 200 parishioners - many of them emotional and holding back tears - joined him for a send-off in the church's basement.
© 2006 AP Wire and wire service sources.
http://www.kansas.com
GARANCE BURKE
Associated Press
KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Joseph Nadeau prayed for storms when he was an altar boy, hoping the lights would go out and he would be picked to play the church's creaking organ to celebrate Holy Mass. Now in his mid-30s, Nadeau's bold spiritual arrangements have brought dozens of parishioners to his suburban parish in Roeland Park, Kan.
But last Sunday, Nadeau ended his last Mass at St. Agnes Catholic Church with a wrenching solo on "God Help the Outcasts." It was his other life, as the artistic director of one of the nation's largest gay male choirs, that ultimately cost him his job.
"I've known I was gay since I was 15 or 16," said the soft-spoken Nadeau at his brick home in Kansas City. "My parish priest told me just follow your heart and you can't go wrong. I can't think of doing anything else."
The Roman Catholic Church views homosexual acts as "intrinsically disordered" and in November held that priests who support "so-called gay culture" cannot be ordained. While Vatican teachings also instruct that gays and lesbians should be treated with compassion, church employees are expected to live in accordance with Catholic doctrine.
The church's decision to let Nadeau's contract lapse, however, comes at a time when the role of homosexuals is causing debates inside churches nationwide - though the bulk of those conversations never go public.
In January, the St. Agnes Catholic Church hierarchy summoned Nadeau into a closed-door meeting, he said. Monsignor Gary Applegate told Nadeau that to continue as music director, he needed to resign from Kansas City's Heartland Men's Chorus, take a vow of celibacy and acknowledge that homosexuality was a disorder, Nadeau said.
"Science and psychology have taught us that homosexuality isn't a disorder," said Nadeau. "If I had agreed to that, I would have felt like I was being very dishonest with myself. And I think there are a lot of parishioners who feel the same way."
Officials with St. Agnes refused interview requests, and the Archdiocese of Kansas City said it would not discuss personnel issues. But staff confirmed that after eight years of service, Nadeau's contract will officially expire in June.
Last month, a Las Vegas Catholic high school reportedly fired a veteran philosophy teacher after he placed an ad on Myspace.com detailing his taste in men. In 2003, a gay music director at a Catholic parish in Rockford, Ill., lost his job when he refused to take a vow of chastity.
"The most divisive issue in American religion today is homosexuality, and the Roman Catholic church is absolutely shut down on this," said Bernie Schlager, a gay former organist who now works for the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry in Berkeley, Calif. "I knew that as a gay person I had to leave the church because of the danger of being fired at any time with no recourse."
Nadeau began singing in a gay choir in Denver, where he united his love for multipart harmonies with his quest for social justice. In 1998, he was recruited to direct the Heartland Men's Chorus, whose 135 singers will celebrate the choir's 20th anniversary next month.
Nadeau heard of the opening at St. Agnes after moving to Kansas City and decided to apply. His father, now a Catholic priest, encouraged him.
"During the interview process, I wanted them to know what was going on with me. I told them I was the director of a gay mens' choir," said Nadeau. "I was greeted by a Catholic Church that I thought didn't exist: very kind, very loving, very compassionate."
Under his direction, the music program grew to include two children's choirs, youth and contemporary ensembles, and a Spanish-language musical liturgy. But in 2003, a group of conservative parishioners started campaigning against Nadeau, whom they saw as an emissary of a movement to "legitimize homosexuality at the parish level."
Members collected signatures on petitions to the papal nuncio, while an anonymous group stapled pictures of Nadeau to ads of underwear-clad men and slipped them under churchgoers' windshields, he said.
Later that year, former Kansas City Archbishop James Keleher told Nadeau that if he kept his two jobs separate, he did not see a problem with his other position.
The leadership at the archdiocese changed last year. In January, Nadeau said Applegate informed him that his membership in a "gay-affirming" group kept him from living out church doctrine.
Like priests, parish employees need to follow religious texts because "part of holding a church position is upholding the church's teaching," said the Rev. Thomas Tifft, rector of Saint Mary Seminary and Graduate School of Theology in Wickliffe, Ohio.
Often, gay and lesbian church workers will follow a "don't ask, don't tell" policy to avoid controversy and keep their jobs, said Debbie Weill, executive director for DignityUSA, a national lay movement of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Catholics.
But for Nadeau, who has already started programming music for a different but "welcoming" Christian church in Kansas City, Kan., the option to stay quiet was not enough to keep him in the Catholic faith.
"You and I have discussed whether and under what circumstances you could remain as the parish Music Director," reads Applegate's May 15, 2006, letter to Nadeau. "We were not able to reach an understanding."
But after Nadeau performed his final solo, about 200 parishioners - many of them emotional and holding back tears - joined him for a send-off in the church's basement.
© 2006 AP Wire and wire service sources.
http://www.kansas.com
Thursday, May 25, 2006
Schools Hold "Separate but Equal" Graduation Ceremonies for GLBT Students
Schools Blasted for Holding Separate Graduations for Homosexual Students
By Jim Brown
May 25, 2006
(AgapePress) - USA Today reports that a growing number of colleges and universities are holding so-called "lavender graduations" to honor their "gay," lesbian, and transgendered graduates; but one campus watchdog group spokesman says schools should not be making ideological statements by sponsoring these separate ceremonies.
At the lavender graduations, students are often given awards and typically receive rainbow-colored tassels to put on their mortarboards during their commencement activities. But while these ceremonies are often touted as celebrations of cultural diversity and equality, Jason Mattera with the Virginia-based Young America's Foundation (YAF) feels these exercises actually turn true equality on its head.
"I thought the homosexual agenda was just 'Leave us alone,' right?," Mattera observes. "That's what they're saying: 'Oh, we don't want the government involved in our lives. We just want to be treated normally.' Well, here is an obvious example where they're looking for special treatment."
But rarely, the YAF spokesman points out, does any group of students get its own graduation ceremonies as a separate class. "Imagine," he says, "if the Christian club at any of the schools mentioned -- let's take the University of North Carolina -- if the Christian club gathered together and said, 'We want a separate ceremony in which we were going to read passages from Leviticus and passages from Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family.'
"Not only would they have been probably flogged by the diversity deans and multicultural deans on the college campus," Mattera asserts, "but they would be [charged with] hate speech incidents. They would be reported to the human resource department."
In any case, the conservative campus watchdog adds, the idea of lavender graduations is not a very inclusive one, since the schools that hold these separate ceremonies are in effect promoting segregation. Nor, he asserts, do such ceremonies truly respect homosexual students by honoring their achievements.
"I would even think the homosexual students on these campuses should be offended," Mattera says. Homosexual students should consider these separate ceremonies to be a slap in the face, he contends, because the "honorees" are not being rewarded for their academic merits but for their sexual behavior.
Ultimately, the YAF spokesman believes the lavender graduations that are being held by schools like Duke University, UCLA, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington are rooted in anti-Christian hostility. But even if they are, as some homosexuals claim, simply celebrations of equality, he feels these ceremonies fail on that level as well.
If these and other colleges and universities are truly interested in equality, Mattera suggests, they could show it by doing away with race-based preferences and special rights for certain classes of students. And instead of trying to ring in a new, so-called "civil rights era" for homosexuals, he says, schools need to stop segregating people on the basis of sexual behavior.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
© 2006 AgapePress
By Jim Brown
May 25, 2006
(AgapePress) - USA Today reports that a growing number of colleges and universities are holding so-called "lavender graduations" to honor their "gay," lesbian, and transgendered graduates; but one campus watchdog group spokesman says schools should not be making ideological statements by sponsoring these separate ceremonies.
At the lavender graduations, students are often given awards and typically receive rainbow-colored tassels to put on their mortarboards during their commencement activities. But while these ceremonies are often touted as celebrations of cultural diversity and equality, Jason Mattera with the Virginia-based Young America's Foundation (YAF) feels these exercises actually turn true equality on its head.
"I thought the homosexual agenda was just 'Leave us alone,' right?," Mattera observes. "That's what they're saying: 'Oh, we don't want the government involved in our lives. We just want to be treated normally.' Well, here is an obvious example where they're looking for special treatment."
But rarely, the YAF spokesman points out, does any group of students get its own graduation ceremonies as a separate class. "Imagine," he says, "if the Christian club at any of the schools mentioned -- let's take the University of North Carolina -- if the Christian club gathered together and said, 'We want a separate ceremony in which we were going to read passages from Leviticus and passages from Rick Santorum's It Takes a Family.'
"Not only would they have been probably flogged by the diversity deans and multicultural deans on the college campus," Mattera asserts, "but they would be [charged with] hate speech incidents. They would be reported to the human resource department."
In any case, the conservative campus watchdog adds, the idea of lavender graduations is not a very inclusive one, since the schools that hold these separate ceremonies are in effect promoting segregation. Nor, he asserts, do such ceremonies truly respect homosexual students by honoring their achievements.
"I would even think the homosexual students on these campuses should be offended," Mattera says. Homosexual students should consider these separate ceremonies to be a slap in the face, he contends, because the "honorees" are not being rewarded for their academic merits but for their sexual behavior.
Ultimately, the YAF spokesman believes the lavender graduations that are being held by schools like Duke University, UCLA, the University of Georgia, and the University of Washington are rooted in anti-Christian hostility. But even if they are, as some homosexuals claim, simply celebrations of equality, he feels these ceremonies fail on that level as well.
If these and other colleges and universities are truly interested in equality, Mattera suggests, they could show it by doing away with race-based preferences and special rights for certain classes of students. And instead of trying to ring in a new, so-called "civil rights era" for homosexuals, he says, schools need to stop segregating people on the basis of sexual behavior.
Jim Brown, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
© 2006 AgapePress
Wednesday, May 24, 2006
Unspoken Love
Unspoken Love
By Emily King
When it comes to flowery speech or emotional expression, my husband, Dave, is a man of few words. That was one of the first things I learned about him when we married thirty-one years ago.
One of the next things I discovered is that Dave has little use for rosebushes. He had no second thoughts about yanking out mature plants to widen the driveway when we purchased our home. To him, roses represent hours of pruning and spraying, mulching and fertilizing. As far as he's concerned, a lawn mower and hedge trimmers are all you need for the perfect garden.
On the other hand, I treasure my roses. I consider every minute of their care well worth the beautiful, fragrant results.
One winter, I spent several evenings drooling over rose catalogs and planning a small garden. In the spring, I ordered several English varieties of self-rooted plants. I removed an area of sod, worked and reworked the ground, and planted the foot-long starts. During the heat of summer, I watered them daily. In my mind, I saw the fruits of my labor: masses of color and fragrance perfuming the air just outside my kitchen window.
But as it sometimes does, life spun us around and redirected our attention. In the fall, I began to have pain in my lower abdomen. At first I passed it off as nothing serious. But instead of getting better, the pain intensified. I went to see my doctor. He ordered tests; when the results came back, he asked to see me in his office right away. He also requested that Dave come with me.
Our worst fears became reality: colon cancer. I'd need surgery immediately. After a short recovery period, I'd undergo a six-month course of chemotherapy.
We cried . . . and prayed . . . and cried some more. We had one week to inform our family and friends. Then, trusting God and my doctors, I entered the hospital.
One month later, as I lay on the sofa still recuperating from surgery, Dave and I watched the TV weather forecast. It promised bitter cold temperatures and possible snow.
"Oh," I moaned to myself, "I never did get the roses mulched."
Dave just sat and watched the end of the forecast. Then, always the practical, on-top-of-things handyman, he said, "I'd better go winterize the outside faucets." He bundled up and headed toward the garage.
Fifteen minutes later, I hobbled to the kitchen for a glass of water. What I saw from the window brought tears to my eyes. There was Dave, bending over the roses, carefully heaping mulch around every plant.
I smiled and watched as my quiet husband "said" I love you. You know, sometimes words aren't needed at all.
By Emily King
When it comes to flowery speech or emotional expression, my husband, Dave, is a man of few words. That was one of the first things I learned about him when we married thirty-one years ago.
One of the next things I discovered is that Dave has little use for rosebushes. He had no second thoughts about yanking out mature plants to widen the driveway when we purchased our home. To him, roses represent hours of pruning and spraying, mulching and fertilizing. As far as he's concerned, a lawn mower and hedge trimmers are all you need for the perfect garden.
On the other hand, I treasure my roses. I consider every minute of their care well worth the beautiful, fragrant results.
One winter, I spent several evenings drooling over rose catalogs and planning a small garden. In the spring, I ordered several English varieties of self-rooted plants. I removed an area of sod, worked and reworked the ground, and planted the foot-long starts. During the heat of summer, I watered them daily. In my mind, I saw the fruits of my labor: masses of color and fragrance perfuming the air just outside my kitchen window.
But as it sometimes does, life spun us around and redirected our attention. In the fall, I began to have pain in my lower abdomen. At first I passed it off as nothing serious. But instead of getting better, the pain intensified. I went to see my doctor. He ordered tests; when the results came back, he asked to see me in his office right away. He also requested that Dave come with me.
Our worst fears became reality: colon cancer. I'd need surgery immediately. After a short recovery period, I'd undergo a six-month course of chemotherapy.
We cried . . . and prayed . . . and cried some more. We had one week to inform our family and friends. Then, trusting God and my doctors, I entered the hospital.
One month later, as I lay on the sofa still recuperating from surgery, Dave and I watched the TV weather forecast. It promised bitter cold temperatures and possible snow.
"Oh," I moaned to myself, "I never did get the roses mulched."
Dave just sat and watched the end of the forecast. Then, always the practical, on-top-of-things handyman, he said, "I'd better go winterize the outside faucets." He bundled up and headed toward the garage.
Fifteen minutes later, I hobbled to the kitchen for a glass of water. What I saw from the window brought tears to my eyes. There was Dave, bending over the roses, carefully heaping mulch around every plant.
I smiled and watched as my quiet husband "said" I love you. You know, sometimes words aren't needed at all.
Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Bible College Student Charged in Sex Phone Fraud Case
Bible Student Charged in Phone Sex Case
A student at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College was charged in the theft of his roommate's debit card, which was used to pay for more than $2,300 worth of calls to phone sex lines, prosecutors allege in court papers.
Shane Erin Mack, 20, of Belt, Mont., was charged with the gross misdemeanors of identity theft and theft by false representation. He made his first court appearance on Monday. Bail was set at $2,500. He remained in jail Tuesday afternoon.
Steele County prosecutor Scott Schrener said investigators only had documentation in hand for about $500 worth of calls, but the victim reported that $2,350 worth of calls had been made. Schrener said the criminal charges could be upgraded in the future.
The calls were made from March 23 to May 13, according to court papers.
Mack allegedly told investigators he admitted taking the debit card out of his roommate's wallet and using it to make up to 30 calls to adult phone lines from public phones on campus, the criminal complaint said.
College spokesman Tom Lawson said Mack would not be allowed to return to the school when classes resume in the fall. According to the college Web site, the college offers a Christian "education program which imparts a biblical worldview."
A call to the public defender who represented Mack in court on Monday was not immediately returned.
Mack's next court appearance was scheduled for June 1.
Information from: Owatonna People's Press, http://www.owatonna.com
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
A student at Pillsbury Baptist Bible College was charged in the theft of his roommate's debit card, which was used to pay for more than $2,300 worth of calls to phone sex lines, prosecutors allege in court papers.
Shane Erin Mack, 20, of Belt, Mont., was charged with the gross misdemeanors of identity theft and theft by false representation. He made his first court appearance on Monday. Bail was set at $2,500. He remained in jail Tuesday afternoon.
Steele County prosecutor Scott Schrener said investigators only had documentation in hand for about $500 worth of calls, but the victim reported that $2,350 worth of calls had been made. Schrener said the criminal charges could be upgraded in the future.
The calls were made from March 23 to May 13, according to court papers.
Mack allegedly told investigators he admitted taking the debit card out of his roommate's wallet and using it to make up to 30 calls to adult phone lines from public phones on campus, the criminal complaint said.
College spokesman Tom Lawson said Mack would not be allowed to return to the school when classes resume in the fall. According to the college Web site, the college offers a Christian "education program which imparts a biblical worldview."
A call to the public defender who represented Mack in court on Monday was not immediately returned.
Mack's next court appearance was scheduled for June 1.
Information from: Owatonna People's Press, http://www.owatonna.com
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Bin Laden Says the Only One Convicted Was Not Involved at All!
Bin Laden: Moussaoui Not Linked to 9/11
An Internet audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden said Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks — had nothing to do with the operation.
"He had no connection at all with Sept. 11," bin Laden said.
"I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission," he said, referring to the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bin Laden said Moussaoui's confession that he helped plan the attacks was "void," calling it the result of "pressures exercised against him during four and a half years" in U.S. prison.
Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman and admitted al-Qaida member, was sentenced to life in prison earlier this month after a jury ruled that he was responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11.
Two counterterrorism officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. intelligence is aware of the bin Laden message. One of the officials said there is no reason to doubt its authenticity.
That official said the message is part of bin Laden's continuing effort to demonstrate he is a relevant extremist leader, who is knowledgeable of current events. The official said the message was made for propaganda purposes, and it does not contain any threats.
The audio message, which is less than five minutes long, was transmitted with a still photo of bin Laden.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
[So what else is old business where our government is concerned? They spend months and years trying to convict this guy, and now Bin Laden -- the one guy who should know for sure -- tells them the one they convicted had nothing to do with it. PAT]
An Internet audio tape attributed to Osama bin Laden said Tuesday that Zacarias Moussaoui — the only person convicted in the U.S. for the Sept. 11 attacks — had nothing to do with the operation.
"He had no connection at all with Sept. 11," bin Laden said.
"I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission," he said, referring to the 19 hijackers on Sept. 11, 2001.
Bin Laden said Moussaoui's confession that he helped plan the attacks was "void," calling it the result of "pressures exercised against him during four and a half years" in U.S. prison.
Moussaoui, a 37-year-old Frenchman and admitted al-Qaida member, was sentenced to life in prison earlier this month after a jury ruled that he was responsible for at least one death on Sept. 11.
Two counterterrorism officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said U.S. intelligence is aware of the bin Laden message. One of the officials said there is no reason to doubt its authenticity.
That official said the message is part of bin Laden's continuing effort to demonstrate he is a relevant extremist leader, who is knowledgeable of current events. The official said the message was made for propaganda purposes, and it does not contain any threats.
The audio message, which is less than five minutes long, was transmitted with a still photo of bin Laden.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
[So what else is old business where our government is concerned? They spend months and years trying to convict this guy, and now Bin Laden -- the one guy who should know for sure -- tells them the one they convicted had nothing to do with it. PAT]
Sunday, May 21, 2006
1 in 136 U.S. Residents in Jail
ELIZABETH WHITE, Associated Press Writer
Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.
The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.
Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.
Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.
"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial."
The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.
Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.
Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report's other author.
The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, which supports alternatives to prison, said the incarceration rates for blacks were troubling.
"It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to use incarceration at such rates," he said.
Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole violations swell prisons.
"If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy," he said.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Prisons and jails added more than 1,000 inmates each week for a year, putting almost 2.2 million people, or one in every 136 U.S. residents, behind bars by last summer.
The total on June 30, 2005, was 56,428 more than at the same time in 2004, the government reported Sunday. That 2.6 percent increase from mid-2004 to mid-2005 translates into a weekly rise of 1,085 inmates.
Of particular note was the gain of 33,539 inmates in jails, the largest increase since 1997, researcher Allen J. Beck said. That was a 4.7 percent growth rate, compared with a 1.6 percent increase in people held in state and federal prisons.
Prisons accounted for about two-thirds of all inmates, or 1.4 million, while the other third, nearly 750,000, were in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Beck, the bureau's chief of corrections statistics, said the increase in the number of people in the 3,365 local jails is due partly to their changing role. Jails often hold inmates for state or federal systems, as well as people who have yet to begin serving a sentence.
"The jail population is increasingly unconvicted," Beck said. "Judges are perhaps more reluctant to release people pretrial."
The report by the Justice Department agency found that 62 percent of people in jails have not been convicted, meaning many of them are awaiting trial.
Overall, 738 people were locked up for every 100,000 residents, compared with a rate of 725 at mid-2004. The states with the highest rates were Louisiana and Georgia, with more than 1 percent of their populations in prison or jail. Rounding out the top five were Texas, Mississippi and Oklahoma.
The states with the lowest rates were Maine, Minnesota, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire.
Men were 10 times to 11 times more likely than women to be in prison or jail, but the number of women behind bars was growing at a faster rate, said Paige M. Harrison, the report's other author.
The racial makeup of inmates changed little in recent years, Beck said. In the 25-29 age group, an estimated 11.9 percent of black men were in prison or jails, compared with 3.9 percent of Hispanic males and 1.7 percent of white males.
Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, which supports alternatives to prison, said the incarceration rates for blacks were troubling.
"It's not a sign of a healthy community when we've come to use incarceration at such rates," he said.
Mauer also criticized sentencing guidelines, which he said remove judges' discretion, and said arrests for drug and parole violations swell prisons.
"If we want to see the prison population reduced, we need a much more comprehensive approach to sentencing and drug policy," he said.
Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press.
Saturday, May 20, 2006
Just What We Need! NOT! Now a "Pedophile Priest" Scandal in ECUSA
In a church already splintered on the 'gay bishop' matter, now comes another scandal certain to add to the controversy: 'pedophile priests' ala the Roman Catholic Church in recent years.
There is it seems, in California, a Reverend John Bennison who had such an event in his own life many years ago. Far too lengthy to reprint it all here, the original item from May 10 in Virtue Online discusses it. Apparently not content to deal with the fact that all of us -- even our priests -- are sinners, this group of congregants from the diocese there in California have also made a formal complaint in writing to our Presiding Bishop Frank Griswald and seem detirmined to make this a topic of discussion and controversy at General Convention during June.
You can read the report and the comments which follow it
Episcopal priest haunted by sexual indiscretion here.
Its not enough, I guess, that General Convention has to be spoiled by controversy over Bishop Robinson but now a priest who had an indiscretion involving a minor many years ago has to be part of the discussion. I wonder if they are going to talk about the priest who was convicted of murder a number of years ago (also from California) who later got things together and was ordained in the Diocese there. All the puritans should probably get after him also.
There is it seems, in California, a Reverend John Bennison who had such an event in his own life many years ago. Far too lengthy to reprint it all here, the original item from May 10 in Virtue Online discusses it. Apparently not content to deal with the fact that all of us -- even our priests -- are sinners, this group of congregants from the diocese there in California have also made a formal complaint in writing to our Presiding Bishop Frank Griswald and seem detirmined to make this a topic of discussion and controversy at General Convention during June.
You can read the report and the comments which follow it
Episcopal priest haunted by sexual indiscretion here.
Its not enough, I guess, that General Convention has to be spoiled by controversy over Bishop Robinson but now a priest who had an indiscretion involving a minor many years ago has to be part of the discussion. I wonder if they are going to talk about the priest who was convicted of murder a number of years ago (also from California) who later got things together and was ordained in the Diocese there. All the puritans should probably get after him also.
Episcopal Debate on Gays Heats Up
by Rachel Zoll, Associated Press
SUMMARY: Delegates must decide at June's convention whether to endorse Anglican leaders' gay rights detente or to risk a split in the global church.
Kendall Harmon has to monitor his blog these days, so he can delete insults and offensive language from the comments section.
His topic -- the Episcopal Church.
His blog -- Ken Harmon
As a critical church meeting on homosexuality nears, the debate online and in public comments has grown so intense that one publication has dubbed it "blood sport."
"I think people are dreading possible outcomes, and when you're dealing with the unknown, fear kicks in in a big way," said Harmon, a minister and conservative leader in the Diocese of South Carolina. "And I do think things are more polarized now."
The Episcopal General Convention, which begins June 13 in Columbus, Ohio, must respond to fellow Anglicans worldwide who were outraged by the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The votes will shape not only the church's future, but also its role as the U.S. representative in the Anglican Communion.
The emotion of the moment is visible in the explosion of blogs since the convention three years ago, when delegates voted to confirm Robinson's election. A quick Web search yields at least 20 dedicated to the plight of the 2.3 million-member denomination. The Living Church, an independent magazine, compared the tone of the discussion to "a wrestling cage match" in an editorial titled "Blood Sport."
Some bishops have complained of being flooded with hateful e-mails and of being personally attacked on the Web. Harmon, who runs the widely read titusonenine blog, has had to take down comments he said were "cynical, angry and alas, even petty." He now reviews all statements before they are posted. Some liberal-leaning blogs have had to do the same.
"The Internet and blogs do give megaphones to anonymous bigots, but they also allow you to organize more quickly and, in some instances, trade opinions across ideological lines," said Jim Naughton, a liberal who runs the blog for the Diocese of Washington and has had to warn people about the language they use there. "It intensifies the conversation for better and for worse."
The debate goes beyond the Internet. Episcopalians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality, a minority in the denomination, feel persecuted and silenced by the majority -- and their public statements reflect a deep anger over their circumstances.
A conservative group called Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion is pressing for a church trial of Robinson and the dozens of bishops who consecrated him. A spokesman for the advocates, James Ince, said the debate is becoming more direct and truthful, not harsh.
"You can expect the liberals not to appreciate the clear, straight language from lay organizations because they're used to this goody goody two-shoes pantywaist stuff," Ince said.
The Rev. Paul Zahl, dean of the conservative Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., said in a May 10 letter posted on the school's Web site that an "army of Brown shirts" was falsely interpreting scripture to fuel "the gay-agenda steamroller."
Some moderates and liberals have responded by accusing traditionalists of being more concerned with power than with faith. In a recent edition of the Washington Window, the newspaper of the Diocese of Washington, Naughton wrote a two-part report called "Following the Money," linking conservative Episcopal advocates to right-wing donors intent on fighting the political stands of liberal Protestants.
Perhaps the most inflammatory commentary can be found on the Web site virtueonline, where, for example, founder David Virtue refers to one of the church's first openly gay priests as the "First Sodomite." Virtue says anyone offended by his language should not read the site.
Delegates will be entering the convention in Columbus under a heavy burden. They will decide whether to fulfill a request from Anglican leaders for a moratorium on electing partnered gay Episcopal bishops and on creating blessing ceremonies for gay couples.
If Anglican leaders conclude that the General Convention has not moved far enough toward discouraging the practices, it could break apart the 77 million-member Communion.
"I definitely think the tenor of the conversation is a little stronger right now, primarily because both sides of the political issue think there's a lot to lose and there is," said Brother Karekin Yarian of Every Voice Network, which works with moderates and liberals in diocesan groups called Via Media. "Both sides are concerned about the church splitting, and no one wants to see that happen."
Copyright © 1995-2006 PlanetOut Corporation.
SUMMARY: Delegates must decide at June's convention whether to endorse Anglican leaders' gay rights detente or to risk a split in the global church.
Kendall Harmon has to monitor his blog these days, so he can delete insults and offensive language from the comments section.
His topic -- the Episcopal Church.
His blog -- Ken Harmon
As a critical church meeting on homosexuality nears, the debate online and in public comments has grown so intense that one publication has dubbed it "blood sport."
"I think people are dreading possible outcomes, and when you're dealing with the unknown, fear kicks in in a big way," said Harmon, a minister and conservative leader in the Diocese of South Carolina. "And I do think things are more polarized now."
The Episcopal General Convention, which begins June 13 in Columbus, Ohio, must respond to fellow Anglicans worldwide who were outraged by the 2003 consecration of the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The votes will shape not only the church's future, but also its role as the U.S. representative in the Anglican Communion.
The emotion of the moment is visible in the explosion of blogs since the convention three years ago, when delegates voted to confirm Robinson's election. A quick Web search yields at least 20 dedicated to the plight of the 2.3 million-member denomination. The Living Church, an independent magazine, compared the tone of the discussion to "a wrestling cage match" in an editorial titled "Blood Sport."
Some bishops have complained of being flooded with hateful e-mails and of being personally attacked on the Web. Harmon, who runs the widely read titusonenine blog, has had to take down comments he said were "cynical, angry and alas, even petty." He now reviews all statements before they are posted. Some liberal-leaning blogs have had to do the same.
"The Internet and blogs do give megaphones to anonymous bigots, but they also allow you to organize more quickly and, in some instances, trade opinions across ideological lines," said Jim Naughton, a liberal who runs the blog for the Diocese of Washington and has had to warn people about the language they use there. "It intensifies the conversation for better and for worse."
The debate goes beyond the Internet. Episcopalians with traditional beliefs on homosexuality, a minority in the denomination, feel persecuted and silenced by the majority -- and their public statements reflect a deep anger over their circumstances.
A conservative group called Lay Episcopalians for the Anglican Communion is pressing for a church trial of Robinson and the dozens of bishops who consecrated him. A spokesman for the advocates, James Ince, said the debate is becoming more direct and truthful, not harsh.
"You can expect the liberals not to appreciate the clear, straight language from lay organizations because they're used to this goody goody two-shoes pantywaist stuff," Ince said.
The Rev. Paul Zahl, dean of the conservative Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., said in a May 10 letter posted on the school's Web site that an "army of Brown shirts" was falsely interpreting scripture to fuel "the gay-agenda steamroller."
Some moderates and liberals have responded by accusing traditionalists of being more concerned with power than with faith. In a recent edition of the Washington Window, the newspaper of the Diocese of Washington, Naughton wrote a two-part report called "Following the Money," linking conservative Episcopal advocates to right-wing donors intent on fighting the political stands of liberal Protestants.
Perhaps the most inflammatory commentary can be found on the Web site virtueonline, where, for example, founder David Virtue refers to one of the church's first openly gay priests as the "First Sodomite." Virtue says anyone offended by his language should not read the site.
Delegates will be entering the convention in Columbus under a heavy burden. They will decide whether to fulfill a request from Anglican leaders for a moratorium on electing partnered gay Episcopal bishops and on creating blessing ceremonies for gay couples.
If Anglican leaders conclude that the General Convention has not moved far enough toward discouraging the practices, it could break apart the 77 million-member Communion.
"I definitely think the tenor of the conversation is a little stronger right now, primarily because both sides of the political issue think there's a lot to lose and there is," said Brother Karekin Yarian of Every Voice Network, which works with moderates and liberals in diocesan groups called Via Media. "Both sides are concerned about the church splitting, and no one wants to see that happen."
Copyright © 1995-2006 PlanetOut Corporation.
Friday, May 19, 2006
Australian Army Attempts to Stop Young Boys From Being Sodomized
Australian Aborigines reject calls for military to restore order
Australian Aborigines have rejected calls for military peacekeepers to protect indigenous women and children from violence, as a new report Saturday revealed high levels of sexual abuse of young indigenous males.
The Australian Medical Association on Friday urged the government to deploy military forces to some Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to protect women and children from murder, rape and assault.
It drew particular attention to one of the country's largest Aboriginal communities, Wadeye some 420 kilometres (260 miles) southwest of Darwin, where it believes some 1,300 children are at risk of abuse and neglect.
But the community council at Wadeye said bringing in the army would not fix problems brought about by chronic discrimination, substance abuse and poverty.
"That's rather ludicrous to suggest a peacekeeping role," Dale Seaniger from Wadeye's Thamarrurr Council told ABC radio.
"Just bringing in the army as a peacekeeping force is not going to resolve the issue, there needs to be quite a few sort of initiatives put in place."
But Seaniger said soldiers would be welcomed if they came to improve infrastructure such as roads and housing in Wadeye, where there is no high school and homes are dramatically overcrowded.
The government has dismissed the idea of sending the army to Wadeye despite calls from the Northern Territory branch of the Australian Medical Association that it do so.
"It seems to me that one of the only ways this community is going to get a chance to catch its breath... is for the forces to be there primarily as peacekeepers," Northern Territory branch president Paul Bauert said.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough this week called for a summit to discuss conditions in Aboriginal communities following reports of widespread sexual abuse and violence against women and children.
But a report published by The Weekend Australian on Saturday found that the problem of sexual abuse also extends to young men, with Aboriginal boys 10 times more likely to be raped than other Australian males.
The 18-month study by the Queensland University of Technology, in which 301 indigenous men in the Northern Territory and Queensland were interviewed, found that one in 10 had been raped before the age of 16 -- 10 times the rate in the rest of Australia.
Researchers said that the abuse had largely remained a secret because victims were too ashamed or scared to seek help.
"It becomes a mirrored thing: if you abuse people and get away it, then you continue with it and then others learn from you," head researcher Mick Adams told the paper.
"We are appalled by the abuse against women and girls but there is also men and boys being raped and sexually abused. It needs to be looked at."
Aboriginal Australians are the most disadvantaged group in the country and have life expectancy rates well below that of other Australians.
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.
Australian Aborigines have rejected calls for military peacekeepers to protect indigenous women and children from violence, as a new report Saturday revealed high levels of sexual abuse of young indigenous males.
The Australian Medical Association on Friday urged the government to deploy military forces to some Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory to protect women and children from murder, rape and assault.
It drew particular attention to one of the country's largest Aboriginal communities, Wadeye some 420 kilometres (260 miles) southwest of Darwin, where it believes some 1,300 children are at risk of abuse and neglect.
But the community council at Wadeye said bringing in the army would not fix problems brought about by chronic discrimination, substance abuse and poverty.
"That's rather ludicrous to suggest a peacekeeping role," Dale Seaniger from Wadeye's Thamarrurr Council told ABC radio.
"Just bringing in the army as a peacekeeping force is not going to resolve the issue, there needs to be quite a few sort of initiatives put in place."
But Seaniger said soldiers would be welcomed if they came to improve infrastructure such as roads and housing in Wadeye, where there is no high school and homes are dramatically overcrowded.
The government has dismissed the idea of sending the army to Wadeye despite calls from the Northern Territory branch of the Australian Medical Association that it do so.
"It seems to me that one of the only ways this community is going to get a chance to catch its breath... is for the forces to be there primarily as peacekeepers," Northern Territory branch president Paul Bauert said.
Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough this week called for a summit to discuss conditions in Aboriginal communities following reports of widespread sexual abuse and violence against women and children.
But a report published by The Weekend Australian on Saturday found that the problem of sexual abuse also extends to young men, with Aboriginal boys 10 times more likely to be raped than other Australian males.
The 18-month study by the Queensland University of Technology, in which 301 indigenous men in the Northern Territory and Queensland were interviewed, found that one in 10 had been raped before the age of 16 -- 10 times the rate in the rest of Australia.
Researchers said that the abuse had largely remained a secret because victims were too ashamed or scared to seek help.
"It becomes a mirrored thing: if you abuse people and get away it, then you continue with it and then others learn from you," head researcher Mick Adams told the paper.
"We are appalled by the abuse against women and girls but there is also men and boys being raped and sexually abused. It needs to be looked at."
Aboriginal Australians are the most disadvantaged group in the country and have life expectancy rates well below that of other Australians.
Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse.
Should DNA Be Collected From All Criminals?
from the May 19, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0519/p01s02-usju.html
Should DNA be collected from all criminals?
By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
ALBANY, N.Y. - In most cities and states, vandalism, shoplifting, and loitering are misdemeanors - possibly involving community service, not jail time. But those who commit such low-level crimes in New York State may soon be required to give DNA samples to authorities - just as convicted rapists or murderers do.
If the Legislature passes the proposal, which is currently being debated, New York would be the first state in the nation to require DNA samples for all convicted offenders.
Gov. George Pataki (R), who is asking the Legislature to expand DNA collection, argues that a larger database will help solve more crimes. Supporters add it will help solve future crimes because criminals who start off committing petty crimes sometimes graduate to more serious offenses.
The Empire State's move comes as DNA work in criminal investigations is under closer scrutiny. Complaints are rising about mistakes - some inadvertent, others fraudulent - at DNA labs around the country. Groups that have championed the use of DNA to verify the guilt or innocence of convicts are now campaigning against large-scale expansion of the practice, saying it would overwhelm labs. Others cite concerns about the increasing number of innocent people whose DNA is stored in a databank without their knowledge or approval.
"People have come to appreciate the power of DNA to solve crimes. They now need to respect the care that is required to maximize its potential and avoid its abuse," says Stephen Saloom, policy director for the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to free 176 prisoners wrongfully convicted.
Twenty-eight states now collect samples for some misdemeanors, according to DNAResource.com, a website that tracks DNA policies. A week ago, Kansas joined California and five other states in going one step further: taking the DNA samples of some people arrested, but not necessarily charged, with a crime.
"They all tend to be violent felony and burglary arrestees," says Lisa Hurst, a government-affairs consultant with Smith Alling Lane, which represents Applied Biosystems, a maker of DNA testing equipment. Smith Alling Lane also runs DNAResource.com.
New York's proposal, however, would go the furthest, requiring DNA collection for all convicted of misdemeanors. This would add about 80,000 additional DNA profiles per year to the DNA bank, say researchers at the state's Division of Criminal Justice.
It would be well worth the effort, says Chauncey Parker, director of criminal justice for the state. "Whenever we get DNA from a convicted offender, we run it against the 18,000 unsolved crimes, mostly rapes, and we have 2,400 hits so far. When we look at those hits, we find on average when [an arrestee] is convicted, it's [his or her] 12th conviction."
He cites the example of Raymon McGill arrested July 25 for attempted robbery. DNA testing linked Mr. McGill to two earlier murders and a rape, says Mr. Parker. He also notes that McGill had been arrested in 1999 for a misdemeanor.
"Had we required DNA fingerprinting back then, he would have been linked to the rape and the case solved," says Parker.
On Monday, critics of the New York proposal publicly complained that the backlog of cases is already large. Tom Duane (D), the only state senator to vote against the New York measure, worries about the cost of expansion, as well as how to ensure proper training of personnel and storage of the samples. "What good will it do if it's not done right?" he asked.
Such concerns go well beyond New York. In February, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in their magazine, published an article detailing mistakes that have cropped up at DNA labs around the country. "Many of the mistakes arise from cross-contamination or mislabeling of DNA samples," wrote William Thompson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Thompson's concerns arise just as states and cities are expanding their use of DNA testing. Los Angeles County is preparing to open a new crime lab in 2007. A proposed county budget included funding not only for the lab, but also for prosecutors and public defenders training in DNA technology. Nebraska recently passed a bill to include felony robbery and burglary convictions among those requiring DNA samples. Wisconsin is considering a bill to add some misdemeanor-related sex crimes to its DNA-collection requirements.
But with such expansions come concerns. Mr. Saloom of the Innocence Project objects to law-enforcement agencies holding the DNA of innocent people, especially those who merely cooperated with an investigation. These samples should be destroyed, he says. "The fundamental values of government accountability and personal privacy are at stake," he says.
Some of these arguments resonate with Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D), chairman of the Assembly Codes Committee, which deals with criminal sanctions. "We are asking [DNA labs] to destroy the DNA of an innocent party," says Mr. Lentol. "This is a privacy issue."
Parker, the director of criminal justice for the state, says cooperating individuals can ask a judge to order their samples to be returned. "The burden is on the police to always demonstrate to a judge that whatever evidence they are collecting, whether it's a DNA fingerprint or a photograph or a handwriting sample, that it has been collected lawfully and that it's being used for a lawful purpose," he says.
In addition, Assemblyman Lentol also worries that private labs will use DNA information for commercial gain. "There is an almost limitless possibility of ID theft," he worries.
That concern is addressed in the pending legislation, Parker says, by increasing the penalty for unlawful use of a DNA sample.
The governor and lawmakers have until the end of the legislative session, June 22, to come to terms on the proposal.
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor.
Should DNA be collected from all criminals?
By Ron Scherer | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
ALBANY, N.Y. - In most cities and states, vandalism, shoplifting, and loitering are misdemeanors - possibly involving community service, not jail time. But those who commit such low-level crimes in New York State may soon be required to give DNA samples to authorities - just as convicted rapists or murderers do.
If the Legislature passes the proposal, which is currently being debated, New York would be the first state in the nation to require DNA samples for all convicted offenders.
Gov. George Pataki (R), who is asking the Legislature to expand DNA collection, argues that a larger database will help solve more crimes. Supporters add it will help solve future crimes because criminals who start off committing petty crimes sometimes graduate to more serious offenses.
The Empire State's move comes as DNA work in criminal investigations is under closer scrutiny. Complaints are rising about mistakes - some inadvertent, others fraudulent - at DNA labs around the country. Groups that have championed the use of DNA to verify the guilt or innocence of convicts are now campaigning against large-scale expansion of the practice, saying it would overwhelm labs. Others cite concerns about the increasing number of innocent people whose DNA is stored in a databank without their knowledge or approval.
"People have come to appreciate the power of DNA to solve crimes. They now need to respect the care that is required to maximize its potential and avoid its abuse," says Stephen Saloom, policy director for the Innocence Project, which has used DNA testing to free 176 prisoners wrongfully convicted.
Twenty-eight states now collect samples for some misdemeanors, according to DNAResource.com, a website that tracks DNA policies. A week ago, Kansas joined California and five other states in going one step further: taking the DNA samples of some people arrested, but not necessarily charged, with a crime.
"They all tend to be violent felony and burglary arrestees," says Lisa Hurst, a government-affairs consultant with Smith Alling Lane, which represents Applied Biosystems, a maker of DNA testing equipment. Smith Alling Lane also runs DNAResource.com.
New York's proposal, however, would go the furthest, requiring DNA collection for all convicted of misdemeanors. This would add about 80,000 additional DNA profiles per year to the DNA bank, say researchers at the state's Division of Criminal Justice.
It would be well worth the effort, says Chauncey Parker, director of criminal justice for the state. "Whenever we get DNA from a convicted offender, we run it against the 18,000 unsolved crimes, mostly rapes, and we have 2,400 hits so far. When we look at those hits, we find on average when [an arrestee] is convicted, it's [his or her] 12th conviction."
He cites the example of Raymon McGill arrested July 25 for attempted robbery. DNA testing linked Mr. McGill to two earlier murders and a rape, says Mr. Parker. He also notes that McGill had been arrested in 1999 for a misdemeanor.
"Had we required DNA fingerprinting back then, he would have been linked to the rape and the case solved," says Parker.
On Monday, critics of the New York proposal publicly complained that the backlog of cases is already large. Tom Duane (D), the only state senator to vote against the New York measure, worries about the cost of expansion, as well as how to ensure proper training of personnel and storage of the samples. "What good will it do if it's not done right?" he asked.
Such concerns go well beyond New York. In February, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, in their magazine, published an article detailing mistakes that have cropped up at DNA labs around the country. "Many of the mistakes arise from cross-contamination or mislabeling of DNA samples," wrote William Thompson, a professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Thompson's concerns arise just as states and cities are expanding their use of DNA testing. Los Angeles County is preparing to open a new crime lab in 2007. A proposed county budget included funding not only for the lab, but also for prosecutors and public defenders training in DNA technology. Nebraska recently passed a bill to include felony robbery and burglary convictions among those requiring DNA samples. Wisconsin is considering a bill to add some misdemeanor-related sex crimes to its DNA-collection requirements.
But with such expansions come concerns. Mr. Saloom of the Innocence Project objects to law-enforcement agencies holding the DNA of innocent people, especially those who merely cooperated with an investigation. These samples should be destroyed, he says. "The fundamental values of government accountability and personal privacy are at stake," he says.
Some of these arguments resonate with Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D), chairman of the Assembly Codes Committee, which deals with criminal sanctions. "We are asking [DNA labs] to destroy the DNA of an innocent party," says Mr. Lentol. "This is a privacy issue."
Parker, the director of criminal justice for the state, says cooperating individuals can ask a judge to order their samples to be returned. "The burden is on the police to always demonstrate to a judge that whatever evidence they are collecting, whether it's a DNA fingerprint or a photograph or a handwriting sample, that it has been collected lawfully and that it's being used for a lawful purpose," he says.
In addition, Assemblyman Lentol also worries that private labs will use DNA information for commercial gain. "There is an almost limitless possibility of ID theft," he worries.
That concern is addressed in the pending legislation, Parker says, by increasing the penalty for unlawful use of a DNA sample.
The governor and lawmakers have until the end of the legislative session, June 22, to come to terms on the proposal.
www.csmonitor.com | Copyright © 2006 The Christian Science Monitor.
Wednesday, May 17, 2006
Soldier in Gay Porn Case Sentenced
May 17, 2006
Soldier in gay porn case sentenced
Associated Press
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — A soldier pleaded guilty Tuesday to having sex on a military-themed Web site for money and was sentenced to three months in prison.
Pfc. Wesley K. Mitten, 21, pleaded guilty to sodomy, conduct detrimental to the Army and cocaine use. He will be discharged from the service.
“I am sorry for disgracing my family name and my unit,” he said, according to The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer.
Mitten is one of seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division accused of appearing on the Web site. Two others, Pvt. Kagen B. Mullen and Pfc. Richard Ashley, have also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.
In court, Mitten said the Web site’s producer contacted him through the Internet in 2005 and offered him $2,000 to perform in a gay pornography video.
Mitten also made another film, posed for pictures and appeared before a camera for Internet broadcasts, he said. He earned $6,000 in three months.
Army prosecutors said Mitten helped recruit other men in his division.
Four other soldiers were punished outside of the military court system. All four were reduced in rank to private, forfeited half a month’s pay for two months, performed extra work and were restricted to Fort Bragg for 45 days. The Army has discharged one paratrooper and has recommended discharges for the other three, division officials said.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
Soldier in gay porn case sentenced
Associated Press
FORT BRAGG, N.C. — A soldier pleaded guilty Tuesday to having sex on a military-themed Web site for money and was sentenced to three months in prison.
Pfc. Wesley K. Mitten, 21, pleaded guilty to sodomy, conduct detrimental to the Army and cocaine use. He will be discharged from the service.
“I am sorry for disgracing my family name and my unit,” he said, according to The Fayetteville (N.C.) Observer.
Mitten is one of seven soldiers from the 82nd Airborne Division accused of appearing on the Web site. Two others, Pvt. Kagen B. Mullen and Pfc. Richard Ashley, have also pleaded guilty and were sentenced to prison.
In court, Mitten said the Web site’s producer contacted him through the Internet in 2005 and offered him $2,000 to perform in a gay pornography video.
Mitten also made another film, posed for pictures and appeared before a camera for Internet broadcasts, he said. He earned $6,000 in three months.
Army prosecutors said Mitten helped recruit other men in his division.
Four other soldiers were punished outside of the military court system. All four were reduced in rank to private, forfeited half a month’s pay for two months, performed extra work and were restricted to Fort Bragg for 45 days. The Army has discharged one paratrooper and has recommended discharges for the other three, division officials said.
Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.
Hold the Phone: Spying on Your Calls
MSNBC.com
Hold the Phone
Big Brother knows whom you call. Is that legal, and will it help catch the bad guys?
By Mark Hosenball and Evan Thomas
Newsweek
May 22, 2006 issue - In the difficult days after 9/11, White House officials quietly passed the word through Washington's alphabet soup of intelligence agencies: tell us which weapons you need to stop another attack. At the supersecretive NSA, the National Security Agency (also known as No Such Agency), the request came back: give us permission to collect information on people inside the United States. The NSA had been struggling, without much success, to listen in on terrorists who use cheap and easily available encrypted phones, and officials eagerly drew up a wish list, according to a participant in the discussions. This source, who declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters, said NSA officials did not really expect the White House to say yes to domestic spying. After scandals over wiretapping erupt-ed in the 1970s, the code breakers and electronic sleuths at the NSA had been essentially restricted to eavesdrop-ping on conversations between foreigners abroad. American residents and even most foreign visitors to the United States were off-limits to "Big Noddy," as NSA insiders call their giant "Ear in the Sky" surveillance capability.
But after 9/11, president George W. Bush wanted fast action. He believed that most Americans thought their government should do whatever was necessary to catch terrorists before they struck again. Though the details remain highly classified, the "National Security Presidential Directives" issued by Bush called for an all-out war on terrorism, including, it is generally believed, expanded electronic surveillance. Out went the old rules—a 1980 document called "U.S. Signals Intelligence Directive 18," which sharply limited domestic surveillance; in came a new, still dimly understood regimen of domestic spying.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. In times of war, open societies have been willing to accept the need for secret spy services. Americans now spend upwards of $40 billion a year on intelligence. Given a hard choice between security and privacy, most Americans would probably choose to sacrifice some of the latter to get more of the former. The harder question is whether the techno wizards at the NSA, overwhelmed by tidal waves of digital data, searching for tiny poisonous fish in a giant sea, can provide true security from another 9/11.
There can be no doubt that Bush correctly read the public mood in the days and weeks following the 2001 attacks. And had the president sent a bill up to Capitol Hill giving the NSA broad powers to wiretap and eavesdrop inside the United States, in all likelihood, the lawmakers would have shouted it through. But the president did not ask for public support. Instead, like most chief executives charged with running the modern national-security state, he chose the path of secrecy. True, the administration's spymasters confidentially briefed congressional leaders on the new eavesdropping program. But some of the lawmakers now claim they were confused, or misled, or somehow did not fully understand what the spooks were telling them. Perhaps the legislators weren't fully informed. Or perhaps they didn't really want to hear what they were told.
In any case, the story eventually, and inevitably, leaked. Last December, The New York Times revealed that the NSA had eavesdropped on thousands of phone calls between people in the United States and foreign countries without first obtaining warrants. Then, last week, USA Today reported that the NSA had amassed a vast database of billions of calls inside the United States—not the content of the calls themselves, but a record of when and to which phone numbers the calls were made and for how long. (The government did not ask the phone companies for names and addresses, but the simplest Internet search of a phone number can divulge that information.) The revelation was another blow to Bush, whose approval rating in the new NEWSWEEK Poll dipped to 35 percent, his record low in the survey, and it may slow the administration's plan to find a CIA director who can restore morale at the beleaguered intelligence agency. The brewing scandal is likely to entangle the government and the phone companies that helped in a legal morass.
Administration officials have always insisted that any eavesdropping or "data collection" had been narrowly focused on Al Qaeda terror suspects. It is hard to determine if the NSA goes on fishing expeditions. A senior administration of-ficial, who declined to be identified discussing classified matters, acknowledged to NEWSWEEK that the NSA had crunched through vast databases to help identify suspects who may have then been subjected to electronic eavesdropping, either without a warrant or under court order. This official claimed that the NSA program had helped gather evidence that had foiled terrorist operations, though the official would not be more specific. If the program "leads to one disruption of another 9/11, then it would be worth it," said the official. But other administration officials interviewed by NEWSWEEK questioned whether the fruits of the NSA program—which they doubted, though not publicly at the risk of losing their jobs—have been worth the cost to privacy. And many Americans naturally wondered whether Big Brother was watching or listening in ways that are still unknown. There are hints, for instance, that the government has been fishing the Internet as well as the phone lines.
In San Francisco, a privacy group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed a lawsuit based in part on the testimony of Mark Klein, an AT&T technician for 22 years who claims he witnessed the construction of a "secret room" for the NSA at AT&T's San Francisco headquarters in early 2003. Later that year, Klein says, he discovered that cables from the secret room were tapping into massive volumes of Internet communication. Klein says he discovered similar operations in other cities on the West Coast, and now concludes that the NSA had created the capability of "vacuum-cleaner surveillance" of all data crossing the Internet. AT&T says it has always obeyed the law and worked to safeguard the privacy of its customers. The federal government has mostly remained mum, though at a Dec. 19 White House briefing, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales somewhat cryptically referred to "many operational aspects" of the eavesdropping program "that have still not been disclosed." After the USA Today story, President Bush told reporters, "We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."
Whether that is strictly true will likely be on the agenda this week as lawmakers on the Senate intelligence committee grill Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, Bush's choice to take over the troubled CIA. Hayden ran the NSA before and after 9/11, when the agency was expanding its surveillance programs. "I have substantial questions about his credibility," Senate intelligence committee member Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, told NEWSWEEK. He points to Hayden's public statements that the NSA monitored only international calls. "There was never any mention of establishing a domestic database," says Wyden.
Republicans defending Hayden's nomination can counter with some early polls showing that most Americans support expanded electronic surveillance to catch terrorists, even if it intrudes on their privacy. (Much depends on the wording of a poll question, of course, and later polls showed more skepticism. The NEWSWEEK survey found 53 percent agreed with the statement that NSA data collection "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while only 41 percent agreed that the collection program is "a necessary tool to combat terrorism.") Most legal experts seemed to agree that the government could collect a huge database of phone records without violating the Constitution's ban on "unreasonable searches and seizures." Still, the phone companies that cooperated with the NSA—AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth—will be hauled into court, accused by their customers of violating the arcane and murky restrictions of various federal communications laws. All of them have protested that they were complying with the law, though it has been noted that they were paid for their cooperation, and lawyers suing the phone companies will undoubtedly want to know if they were pressured by threats to withhold valuable federal contracts. One much smaller phone company—Qwest, based in the Rocky Mountain states—refused to turn over its call records, arguing that the NSA never satisfied the company's legal doubts about the agency's request.
Americans are not naive about the need to snoop at home and overseas. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down a secret code-breaking operation called the Black Chamber by saying, "Gentlemen do not read each other's mail." But America's enemies are apt to play dirty, and during World War II and the cold war, the federal government decided, in effect, to play dirty, too—to steal secrets and eavesdrop, at home as well as abroad.
Washington spun a huge web of intelligence agencies with acronyms familiar (like CIA and FBI) and obscure (like NRO—for National Reconnaissance Office—to operate spy satellites). The attitude toward secret or "black" operations was, at first, rather "stiff upper lip" and British. Policymakers did not want to know too much about what the spooks were up to. Presidents were protected by the doctrine of plausible deniability. They were supposed to be able to say, plausibly, that they really didn't know how that secret was stolen—or that a journalist's phone was tapped or that a foreign government was overthrown. If caught, American spymasters were supposed to fall on their swords and take responsibility.
Of course, blametaking didn't quite work so stoically in practice. During the Watergate scandal, it emerged that the Feds had been carrying on a program of domestic spying, tapping phones and opening the mail of real and imagined enemies of the state. At the 1975 Church Committee hearings, intelligence officials squirmed and pointed fingers. New laws were enacted, including the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the Feds to get a warrant from a secret court before eavesdropping on foreign calls in and out of the United States.
The NSA was banned from any domestic espionage. At those 1975 hearings, Sen. Frank Church, the chairman of the committee appointed to investigate intelligence abuses, made a statement that today seems ominous and possibly prescient. The Idaho senator said he was most worried about the NSA. The secret agency's capabilities were so great they "could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything, telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
The NSA does have vast capabilities. One senior U.S. intelligence official, speaking anonymously because of the sensitivity of the subject, told NEWSWEEK that the heat generated by the NSA's secret supercomputers has been so great that officials have been talking about carting in snow and ice to mask the machines from the prying sensors of foreign spy satellites.
But increasingly, there has been talk of the agency's "going deaf." The NSA had its best luck monitoring Soviet lines of communication—for example, a microwave transmission from Moscow to a missile base in Siberia. But the new enemy is more shadowy and elusive. In 2002, General Hayden told NEWSWEEK, "We've gone from chasing the telecommunications structure of a slow-moving, technologically inferior, resource-poor nation-state—and we could do that pretty well—to chasing a communications structure in which an Al Qaeda member can go into a storefront in Istanbul and buy for $100 a communications device that is absolutely cutting edge, and for which he has had to make no investment for development."
According to most accounts, the NSA remains behind the telecommunications curve. A December 2002 report by the Senate intelligence committee noted that only a "tiny fraction" of the NSA's 650 million daily intercepts worldwide "are actually ever reviewed by humans, and much of what is collected gets lost in the deluge of data." Hayden told NEWSEEK that year that the NSA had been slow to catch up to new technology, and that he was obsessed with turning the enemy's "beeps and squeaks into something intelligible."
One of Hayden's most ambitious initiatives was called Trailblazer. It was a program aimed at helping the NSA make sense of its many databases—to put them to use. By more efficiently locating and retrieving messages, Trailblazer could help the NSA "data-mine," to find patterns in the huge volume of electronic traffic that might help lead sleuths to a terror suspect. Instead, the program has produced nearly a billion dollars' worth of junk hardware and software. "It's a complete and abject failure," says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program. Adds Ed Giorgio, who was the chief code breaker for the NSA for 30 years: "Everybody's eyes rolled when you mentioned Trailblazer."
What went wrong? The NSA apparently tried a clunky top-down approach, trying to satisfy too many requirements with one grand solution, rather than taking a more Silicon Valley-like tack of letting small entrepreneurs compete for ideas. John Arquilla of the Naval Postgraduate School at Monterey, Calif., a renowned "network" intelligence expert, says: "The real problem Big Brother is having is he's not making enough use of the Little Brothers"—the corporations that have become expert at manipulating databases for commercial use.
"Data mining" has been a boon to credit-card companies that can match customers and products. It has also helped the Feds track drug dealers who constantly buy and throw away cell phones (the technology can monitor frequent phone-number changes). Identifying and tracking terrorists may be a taller order. For one thing, terrorists have learned not to even use phones. A computer disk or message between, say, Osama bin Laden and Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi is hand-delivered. Some terrorists have learned to leave messages hidden in Web sites. Others are given passwords to go on the Web sites and find the messages. Since that process involves no electronic communication—no e-mail or phone call—the NSA is kept in the dark.
Effective data mining might have averted 9/11, notes Philip Bobbitt, who served as a National Security staffer in the Clinton administration. On Sept. 10, 2001, the NSA, monitoring pay phones in Qaeda-controlled Afghanistan, intercepted two messages, "The match begins tomorrow" and "Tomorrow is zero hour." No one knew what to make of these messages, which in any event weren't translated until Sept. 12. But the CIA and FBI had the identities of two of the hijackers, who had been linked to earlier Qaeda plotting, in the agencies' computers. "Had we at the time cross-referenced credit-card accounts, frequent-flier programs and a cell- phone number shared by those two men, data mining might easily have picked up on the 17 other men linked to them and flying on the same day and at the same time on four flights," Bobbitt recently wrote in The New York Times.
There are doubts within the upper levels of the U.S. government that the NSA, four-and-a-half years after 9/11, is any better equipped and run to piece together the next "Tomorrow is zero hour" intercept. NEWSWEEK has learned that some top government lawyers were troubled by the NSA data collection and search program—not on legal grounds so much, but because they doubted its efficacy. A senior administration official who was involved in legally vetting the NSA program but declined to be identified discussing sensitive matters says that a crude cost-benefit analysis left him uneasy. The NSA program ran a risk of intruding on the privacy of Americans. There are always "false positives." National Journal's Shane Harris conjured up the example of a book agent who represents a journalist who once interviewed Osama bin Laden. A faulty pattern analysis could make him a terror suspect. To justify the risk of dragging such innocents into government investigations, there needs to be evidence showing a high probability of return on the investment—the prospect of actually catching a terrorist.
So far, the best catch the Feds have offered up is a truckdriver named Iyman Faris, who conceived a rather farfetched plot to cut down the Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch. (Faris was apparently identified by a captured Qaeda leader; it's not clear the NSA played any role.) Of course, intelligence services do not always brag about their successes, and one U.S. official privy to the intelligence tells NEWSWEEK that another attack on an urban area in the United States was averted as well. The official would not discuss the plot for fear of revealing NSA listening methods.
There has been at least some debate inside the administration over how much license to give the NSA. In the spring of 2004, senior Justice Department lawyers objected to warrantless eavesdropping. For several months, until new rules to safeguard privacy were adopted, the program was suspended. It is not clear whether the NSA's data-collection program was also put on hold or altered in some way.
The administration is not eager to air its internal debates. At the Justice Department, an internal watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, began an investigation into whether DOJ lawyers had behaved unethically by interpreting the law too aggressively—by giving a legal green light to coercive interrogations and warrantless eavesdropping. But the OPR lawyers had to drop their investigation last week when the administration refused to give them the necessary security clearances.
Catching Al Qaeda or some shadowy terrorist offshoot before it strikes again will take all the tools of spy tradecraft—old-fashioned human intelligence (HUMINT) as well as signals intelligence (SIGINT) like electronic eavesdropping. It is frustrating to think how close the CIA and FBI came to stopping 9/11. After Al Qaeda bombed the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, local police managed to catch one of the would-be bombers who had decided not to commit suicide in the blast. The conspirator was turned over to American intelligence officials, who persuaded the man to give up the phone number of a Qaeda safe house in Yemen. The NSA began listening in on the phone line of the safe house. American agents were tipped to a Qaeda terror summit in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. Two of the 9/11 hijackers—Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar—were at that summit. Somehow, the CIA failed to hand over the identities of these two terrorists to the FBI in time for the slow-moving bureau to track them before they flew into buildings on 9/11.
That was a human error, but it was caused in part by the culture of secrecy that permeates the national-security state. The CIA and FBI are renowned for their turf wars and unwillingness to share secrets. It's hoped that intelligence reform and the shame of failure have prodded the intelligence agencies to share a little more. As the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed, during the cold war excessive secrecy did more to hurt national security than to help it. In an overly secretive world, assumptions go untested and rigorous thinking is stifled. The CIA, for instance, failed to predict the collapse of the Soviet Union, in part because agency analysts refused to reach out to outside economists and experts.
It is true, as the old World War II saying goes, that "loose lips sink ships." But by refusing to tolerate an open discussion of new rules post-9/11, the Bush team lost a chance to gain public support for the necessary trade-off between security and privacy. Figuring out how to track and find Internet-savvy terrorists is a daunting task. Government officials—even the superspooks of the NSA—need all the help they can get.
With Michael Hirsh, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey and John Barry
© 2006 MSNBC.com
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12779087/site/newsweek
Tuesday, May 16, 2006
General Convention 2006: Stepping Back Toward Revisionist Victory?
Report/Analysis
By Auburn Traycik, Editor
The Christian Challenge (Washington DC)
http://www.challengeonline.org
THE FUTURE of the U.S. Episcopal Church (ECUSA) and its standing within the Anglican Communion now appears set to be determined chiefly by the June General Convention's decisions on compliant-sounding resolutions that, as presently written, would nonetheless leave ECUSA "pointing in the same direction."
This, after the Diocese of California averted a second major convention struggle-and probable schism in the Communion-by passing up the chance to elect another actively gay bishop on May 6.
The election of a second such prelate would have presented an opportunity for considerable drama: Some claimed-and some did not believe-that the House of Bishops would this time narrowly refuse to back a non-celibate homosexual, and if so, that gay activists and their supporters would gather willing bishops to consecrate the candidate illegally.
The California diocese, however, chose a liberal, pro-gay, but married man with two grown children-Alabama Suffragan Bishop Mark Handley Andrus-to succeed Bishop William Swing. In so doing, delegates bypassed by a wide margin six other candidates, three of them partnered homosexuals, and one of those a lesbian. Placing second, and more favored among the laity, was the Rev. Canon Eugene Taylor Sutton, a black cleric serving at Washington National Cathedral, who also was not among the gay nominees.
The election of any one of the homosexuals would have forced the June 13-21 General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, to register a stark up or down vote on the consecration of the candidate, one that either failed the church's pro-gay stand or handed Anglican primates (provincial leaders) a clear-cut means of declaring that ECUSA is "walking apart" from the Communion.
That would have been a lose-lose situation for more moderate liberals, those deputies or bishops who likely want continue support for homosexuals, but also want to try to, or feign trying to, patch things up with the wider Communion for unity's or expediency's sake.
These include bishops-there are said to be some-who want to "maintain unity" because they are "genuinely sorry" that the Communion was so disrupted by General Convention 2003 decisions approving same-sex blessings and the church's first openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson (now a recovering alcoholic), even if they supported those decisions. But moderate liberals also appear to include those prelates prepared to slow their pro-gay agenda in a bid to retain Communion credentials and secure invitations to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, in anticipation of further revisionist gains in the decade between Lambeth '08 and '18.
ON THE SURFACE, the election of Andrus, 49, which aided the moderates, may seem to suggest that the diocese yielded to pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury and others not to widen the Communion's conflict, and thereby handed a defeat to radical liberals who want ECUSA to be honest about its stand and accept the consequences (as evidenced by their efforts to pack the California slate with homosexuals).
Remarkably, such pressure came even from Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold-the same man who agreed with fellow primates in 2003 that Gene Robinson's consecration would have devastating consequences for the Communion, and then acted as Robinson's chief consecrator, setting those consequences in train. In the run-up to California's election, however, he said the diocese "needs to respect the sensibilities of the larger Communion." When it makes its "wise" decision, it "will then be up to the House of Bishops to give or withhold their consent"-a thinly veiled warning that the House might this time nix another homosexual bishop.
However, such official "encouragement" looks unlikely to have been determinative in California, given the level of support Andrus received (on the third and final ballot, he garnered the backing of over 72 percent of the clergy and 54 percent of laity). None of the gay nominees received more than a handful of votes. Reportedly, some members of the diocese felt that Andrus significantly outshone homosexual nominees at the episcopal candidates' "walkabouts" before the election. As well, church gay activists know that there will be other opportunities to put forward their candidates for the episcopate: although it has not announced its nominees yet, the Diocese of Newark's episcopal election in September is one to watch.
NEVERTHELESS, the California election seems to have put more moderate liberals in the driver's seat for General Convention. Their "vehicle" for getting where they want to go looks to be the report and recommended resolutions of a special ECUSA commission which go a bit farther than some predicted-but not nearly far enough, conservatives say-in trying to meet the expectations of the 2004 Windsor Report and Anglican primates.
Recent press reports that ECUSA was preparing to step back from its pro-homosexual policies-a claim that dismayed some liberals and gay activists-were soon declared unfounded by conservative leaders, particularly as the resolutions do not urge the moratorium on non-celibate homosexual bishops sought by the Windsor Report, only the exercise of "very considerable caution" in putting them forward. (More on the resolutions in a bit.) The convention could act to strengthen the resolutions in Columbus, but that remains to be seen. As things stand, though, the "step back" seems a largely tactical and illusory one actually designed to enable liberals to go forward with their Communion status and their revisionist agenda.
As well, moderate liberals seeking to appear compliant with Communion expectations are still likely to get a hard run for their money in Columbus from homosexuals in the church. To be sure, the longstanding gay group Integrity welcomed the special commission report and proposed resolutions, saying that the panel had made a "strong statement that this church will not scapegoat its lesbian and gay members." But Integrity and other "lesbitransgay" advocacy groups also plan a big presence and ambitious legislative program at General Convention, under the umbrella of "Claiming the Blessing." Integrity says it wants to "keep the momentum it has gained through 30 years of respected, successful advocacy and witness." What perhaps said it all, though, was the title of an article by John Clinton Bradley in Integrity's spring magazine: "No Turning Back."
At this writing, too, the church's left wing had begun "massive media campaigns of disinformation, half-truths and spin" aimed at conservatives, painting them as schismatic, destabilizers of ECUSA, and bankrolled with millions of dollars from right wing foundations, reported Episcopal e-journalist David Virtue. A centerpiece of the initiative was a two-part series by Washington (D.C.) Window Editor, James Naughton, titled "Follow the Money." The accuracy of "bankrolling" claims aside, Virtue wondered why it would be "wrong for the orthodox to have serious financial backers when liberals have professional bagmen like George Soros who have poured billions of dollars into liberal organizations."
ALL THINGS (at the moment) considered, U.S. conservatives see little chance that the convention will adequately meet the minimal requests made of it, and-more importantly-no chance that it will answer the call underlying them, which is for real repentance and a broad return to scriptural fidelity and orthodoxy.
"Anybody with any sense knows that ECUSA is not going to repent," said Canon Bill Atwood of the Ekklesia Society. He recalled a survey in 2000 which showed that 42 (out of some 110) Episcopal dioceses had practicing homosexual clergy serving, 32 dioceses would ordain active homosexuals, and 22 dioceses were performing same-sex blessings. "They're not going to stop that," he maintained. "If Nineveh comes to us in Columbus, God will be glorified and we can rejoice and be reconciled. But I'm not holding my breath."
"Slowing down is not stopping," said Cynthia Brust, Communications Director for the American Anglican Council (AAC). She thought that the resolutions as proposed could create a perception that ECUSA is conforming, but said "the key...is, are there moratoria?" Clarity could be gleaned, she said, by examining whether the convention really agreed to the two types of restraint asked of it.
Still, some conservatives are worried that General Convention, bolstered by California's internationally-watched election, may do well in appearing accommodating and obscuring areas in which it falls short of expectations-thereby creating the kind of post-convention confusion and muddle in which liberals thrive, and conservatives flounder.
"The battle going into Columbus is obfuscation versus truth, and generalities versus specifics," said Canon Kendall Harmon of the Diocese of South Carolina.
Some sources said the impression of compliance could be augmented if the convention opts for a more conservative-leaning candidate for presiding bishop, though on the whole most do not expect the choice of successors to Bishop Griswold to make much difference for ECUSA.
Whatever happens, many will look to Communion leaders for clarity. But perhaps surprisingly, there are mixed opinions among those consulted by TCC on whether the conservative majority of Anglican primates and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams would be able or willing to identify the inadequacies of ECUSA's position and judge the U.S. Church's status in the Communion accordingly. Pressure One would not conclude this from recent developments, however. Indeed, as liberals and gay activists prepared to head determinedly into General Convention, international pressure on them was ratcheted up by Archbishop Williams.
Though he is known to have some liberal sympathies, Dr. Williams has lately issued some significant warnings and statements upholding Communion policy, and begun a series of private consultations with senior Church of England bishops and advisors to consider potential fallout from ECUSA's General Convention.
In his series of utterances, the Archbishop stated, for example, that the Communion is in danger of a "visible rupture" that could take decades to heal. Responding with "deep unease" to the list of nominees for Bishop of California, he also called on ECUSA to uphold a moratorium on the consecration of non-celibate homosexuals, reiterating that the mind of the Communion on sexuality matters cannot be changed by one province alone.
Williams' series of private consultations with senior English bishops and others, including representatives of the conservative Anglican Mainstream, began at Lambeth Palace on April 24, with discussions reportedly including how to deal with a range of possible outcomes of General Convention, how the international Anglican "instruments of unity" should respond, and what impact there would be on the C of E. One report said Williams was believed to be taking advice on whether he indeed has the power to "disinvite" bishops to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, though he has long been recognized as having authority to decide who to invite to Anglican meetings.
The issues at stake in these "next critical months" in the Communion's life are "too important...to allow events to overtake us," said a leaked letter of invitation to the April 24 consultation from Dr. Williams' head of staff, Chris Smith.
"The wording of the invitation makes it fairly clear that Lambeth [Palace] is expecting no backtrack from ECUSA and is therefore working out how to manage the oncoming schism," wrote The Times of London.
One source with a line into the consultations claimed, however, that participating bishops have agreed that whatever effort ECUSA makes to comply with the Windsor Report will be acceptable (a position that would seem to relieve Williams of having to "disinvite" Episcopal bishops to Lambeth).
But Dr. Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream said: "We are very concerned that a fudge isn't good enough. What we're looking for is repentance and the rescinding of decisions of the General Convention 2003."
And, it is Anglican primates who look to be the primary determinants of whether or not ECUSA has separated from the Communion. (There are, of course, disagreements over whether they have "authority" to do this, though it would seem that there is likewise no "authority" preventing them from declaring an opinion about ECUSA's Communion standing and governing their future actions accordingly.)
Bishop Griswold also revealed that he had a private meeting with Dr. Williams in Canterbury to discuss measures that ECUSA proposes to defuse the current crisis. Meanwhile, however, Williams has declined an invitation to make an appearance at the eight-day General Convention, citing pre-existing obligations. And in March, he sent the Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to deliver some sobering words to the Episcopal House of Bishops meeting (on which more in a minute).
And, in a signal move, Williams recently dashed hopes that liberals evidently had of overturning or undermining the 1998 Lambeth Conference's sexuality resolution (1.10) when the Conference meets again in 2008. He said in March that, while provinces will offer reflections at Lambeth '08 stemming from the process of listening to homosexuals called for in 1.10, he saw no "enthusiasm" or reason for reopening debate on the resoundingly-adopted resolution, which deems homosexual behavior "incompatible with Scripture." He stated that, despite "bitter controversy" over the issue, it remains clear that Lambeth 1.10 represents the mind of the Communion on sexuality.
The AAC said this left ECUSA with an "even more strongly defined choice." It must not only uphold Lambeth 1.10 but "abandon its agenda to revise Scripture and 2,000 years of teaching and practice on human sexuality, and...affirm the foundational tenets of Christian faith... Any other course represents a decision to walk apart." The Proposed Resolutions
It has been three tumultuous years since ECUSA's General Convention consented to the consecration of New Hampshire's gay bishop-elect and agreed that rites for the blessing of same-sex unions are within the bounds of church life. It was, said the AAC, the culmination of a "revolution in stages" against the apostolic faith; notably, the same convention defeated a resolution (B001) affirming the authority of Scripture and basic tenets of Christian faith. The convention actions and the subsequent consecration of Gene Robinson (along with the implementation of same-sex blessings in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster) plunged the Communion into turmoil.
And to the obvious surprise of ECUSA liberals-who were indulged by Communion leaders in pioneering earlier innovations that also lacked broad consensus, the ordination of women priests and bishops-the crisis has not blown over. Among other things, 22 of 38 Anglican provinces have reduced or broken communion with ECUSA. Additionally, the realignment of conservative North American Anglicans has quickened and become more organized, notably with the formation of the Canterbury-recognized Anglican Communion Network (ACN), consisting mostly of faithful still in ECUSA, and its links to various faithful associations and extramural Anglican bodies. The realignment also has taken some unprecedented turns, as more congregations have fled ECUSA and come under the oversight of foreign Communion bishops.
In 2004, the Lambeth Commission issued the Windsor Report, which-as Commission member, the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, put it-"was about how the...Communion can continue to operate when a province or diocese acts directly against the stated mind of the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury" (the Communion's four advisory "instruments of unity"). The Report called (among other things) for ECUSA to express its "regret that the proper constraints of the bonds of affection were breached in the events surrounding the election and consecration of [Gene Robinson] and for the consequences which followed"; it also called for a moratorium on the "election and consent to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same-gender union until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges"; and a moratorium on all public rites of blessing same-sex unions.
The 2005 the Primates' Meeting held at the Dromantine Center in Northern Ireland, and subsequently the ACC meeting in Nottingham, England-where U.S. and Canadian representatives defended their homosexuality policies-gave a general welcome to the Windsor Report and reaffirmed Lambeth Resolution 1.10. And both bodies asked ECUSA (and the Anglican Church of Canada) to withdraw its members from the ACC in the run-up to Lambeth '08, and respond through its legislative body to questions posed to it in the Windsor Report, while considering its "place within the Anglican Communion." In other words, ECUSA was effectively suspended from the global church, and asked to choose between its support for homosexual practice and its Communion membership.
ECUSA leaders have so far expressed regret only for causing pain to the wider Communion, not for the unbiblical action of consecrating Robinson. And, in a move widely seen as vindictive, Episcopal bishops agreed to a temporary halt on the consecration of any bishop, gay or straight, and to authorizing public same-sex union rites (though the ban is not binding on clergy in all cases, or on private ceremonies). A final answer, however, is still expected from ECUSA's General Convention.
NOW, IN A REPORT titled "One Baptism, One Hope In God's Call," released April 10, the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion proposes to make what initially looks like a conciliatory response to the wider Communion.
Appointed by Bishop Griswold and House of Deputies President, the Rev. George Werner, the mostly liberal special commission was charged with "[preparing] the way for a consideration by the 75th General Convention of recent developments" in ECUSA and the Communion "with a view to maintaining the highest degree of communion possible." Griswold and Werner said the commission's document is first and foremost "theological," and secondarily "a beginning" and not the end point for conversation and legislative decisions.
The report includes six sections covering topics arising out of the current feud, plus a brief conclusion, and offers 11 recommended resolutions. The resolutions could undergo revision as they are prepared for debate in Columbus by an 18-member special legislative committee.
But among the resolutions as they stand now are some deferential-sounding calls for the convention to: commit to "interdependence" in the Anglican Communion and to the "fellowship of churches that constitute" it; commit to the Windsor process as it relates to communion and discerning "the nature and unity of the Church," and to the (Lambeth 1.10) listening process; commit to the process of developing an Anglican "covenant," recommended by the Windsor Report as a way to help ensure unity among provinces that adopt it ; endorse "effective and appropriate pastoral care for all"; demonstrate support for Anglicans around the world by supporting the Millennium Development Goals, including regular giving to support international development work; and approve a curious canonical amendment that seems intended, in part, to ensure, after many long years, the end to discrimination against orthodox clergy and aspirants to ordination.
But while there are several significant caveats to be noted in those first motions, the rubber really meets the road in some of the few remaining ones.
Over the course of two proposed resolutions, ECUSA would express "regret" for pain caused by the actions of General Convention 2003, for contributing to the "strains on communion," and causing "deep offense" to many faithful Anglicans; it would also apologize and repent for breaching the "bonds of affection" in the Communion "by any failure to consult adequately with Anglican partners before taking these actions." But this appears to miss the mark again. According to Bishop Wright, the Windsor Report's reference to breaching the bonds of affection equates not with a failure to consult but with "going against the stated mind of the instruments of unity."
The commission's offerings include "no rejection of the decisions of the 2003 General Convention," the official Episcopal Life admitted.
More significantly, as earlier noted, one resolution urges merely that "very considerable caution" be exercised in "the nomination, election, consent to, and consecration of bishops whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church" and will further strain communion. (Reportedly, some commission members had wanted to use "refrain from" in the advice on future episcopal consents, but obviously they did not prevail.) The resolution also makes no promises about not ordaining gay deacons or priests-because the Windsor Report did not ask for any, and the primates did not expand on its requests.
Another resolution concurs with the Windsor Report request that the convention not authorize public rites of blessing for same-sex unions. But the same resolution allows "a breadth of private responses to situations of individual pastoral care for gay and lesbian" church members; in other words, private same-sex blessings could continue. But some say there is a loophole that would allow public rites to continue as well.
As proposed, the resolution on same-sex blessings appears to be in compliance with the Windsor Report, which sought only to proscribe public ceremonies. However, the commission's claim that General Convention has never yet authorized public gay blessing rites is disingenuous, as, in 2003, it gave a blanket okay to whatever liturgies that "local faith communities" wish to use for same-sex blessings: such communities "are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions," the convention said. AAC's Mrs. Brust maintained that these local rites are still being used publicly.
"It's happening all the time," she said, pointing, for example, to the recent lesbian union ceremony involving the head of Claiming the Blessing, the Rev. Susan Russell, and her partner.
Remaining resolutions would have the convention reassert positions the church has already taken in support of homosexuals, with which few would argue, e.g. that they are entitled to equal protection under the law, and "are by baptism full members of the Body of Christ" and ECUSA. But one clause would ask the church to commit to the communion of all the baptized "despite our diversity of opinion and, among dioceses, a diversity of pastoral practice with the gay men and lesbians among us." Brake, But Keep Going ECUSA "should slow but not halt its push for gay bishops and blessings," was one conservative writer's summation of the commission's recommendations.
Mr. Virtue called the 11 proposals "a carefully nuanced fudge that, when examined closely, offer nothing about returning to 'the faith once delivered to the saints' and therefore pose no threat to ongoing revisionism of the Episcopal Church. It also offers nothing to orthodox Episcopalians who had hoped [for] some relief or reprieve in...the church's 11th hour."
Writing on standfirminfaith.com, Fr. Matt Kennedy marveled that the "truly moderate" Windsor Report requests are still "far too stringent for the rebellious and schismatic Episcopal Church."
"What is being...proposed by ECUSA is not truly sufficient to show that [it] is intent on being a biblically-based, orthodox province," said the Rev. Dr. Peter Toon of the U.S. Prayer Book Society.
Even the moderate Living Church magazine was under-whelmed. "At first glance, the proposed resolutions included with the report seem to be in concert" with the Windsor recommendations, it said, "but instead it looks as though the commission was determined to change the words of these proposals to suit their own needs."
THAT WHAT U.S. CRITICS ARE SAYING is what Communion leaders might say as well was the clear message of the Church of England's Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to the March 17-22 House of Bishops (HOB) meeting at North Carolina's Kanuga Conference Center, where the prelates were given preliminary information on the commission's report and resolutions.
Langrish basically "told the U.S. bishops that the language of the special commission is not adequate," and "that if they consecrate another gay bishop or authorize same-sex relations, the Anglican Communion will break apart," and dialogue with Roman Catholics and Muslims will be finished, said The Times religion reporter Ruth Gledhill.
Significantly, Langrish spoke at the episcopal retreat as a representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which strongly suggests that the views he stated are those of Dr. Williams. As well, he was among bishops invited to the private Lambeth Palace consultations in April. And, he has, from past experience, some knowledge of the wider Communion, particularly the global South.
In his remarks to the HOB, Langrish noted the pivotal importance of the convention's response to the Communion. But he said that for starters, he had, and the wider Communion was likely to have, "real anxieties" about the call for "very considerable caution" in electing actively gay bishops. It is not clear what that means, "how it would be judged, and who would decide," he said. "Can you exercise extreme caution and still act in a way that injects further difficulty into the life of the Communion?"
Langrish also effectively said that regrets expressed for "pain" caused are insufficient. At issue, he said, was the creation of a bishop for the Church Catholic "who was in a relationship not liturgically sanctioned by the Church" and without seeking the assent of the wider Church.
He warned that, while "no one can force another province or diocese either to go or remain (in the Communion)... no diocese or province can enforce its own continued membership simply or largely on its own terms. There has to be engagement. There is no communion without a shared vision of life in communion."
Concluding with a flourish, Langrish said: "So it does seem to me, as I listen to those other parts of the Communion that I know best, that any further consecration of those in a same-sex relationship, any authorization of any person to undertake same-sex blessings, any stated intention not to seriously engage with the Windsor Report, will be read very widely as a declaration not to stay with the Communion."
How well did the U.S. prelates listen?
After the HOB meeting, Arizona Bishop Kirk Stevan Smith still seemed to think the proposed resolutions offered a way forward. That, because they signal ECUSA's pledge to "work to conform" to the Windsor expectations, "[w]ithout backing away from decisions we have made."
California's Bishop Swing said "we are fighting over freedom, among other issues," and that there is "a mad dash to create a worldwide final arbiter-a Windsor Report or an archbishop or instruments of unity-which would...put an end to all of the mischief caused by freedom."
Conservative Central Florida Bishop John Howe noted that some of his colleagues at the meeting immediately sought to clarify that the resolutions were not "forbidding" sexually active gay bishops. He added that, while "many...bishops would not vote to authorize same-sex blessings at this moment...they will not forbid them...And we all know they are being performed all over this country. Not to forbid is to authorize."
As shown by a recent survey of Episcopal bishops (see more in "Focus"), some bishops are prepared to say that they would vote differently than they did three years ago. "But (I believe) that is because of the consequences of that vote, not because they have actually changed their minds on the substance of the question," Howe said.
Most ECUSA bishops are "genuinely sorry" for having damaged the Communion and "do not want to see [it] destroyed," he said, but are "not repentant for the decision to confirm Gene Robinson's election...for they do not believe it was wrong."
And this, he predicted, will not be "enough to satisfy the primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury."
"If General Convention fails to adopt a stance of genuine compliance with the Windsor recommendations (which I am certain it will not do), I don't see how the Archbishop has any alternative but to declare that the majority of ECUSA has decided to 'walk apart' from the Anglican Communion." The Primates And U.S. Conservatives
But that, according to some sources, remains to be seen.
One well-placed conservative leader says there are varying views among the conservative majority of primates on the resolutions as they stand, and that some could by swayed by the perception of compliance that ECUSA wishes to give, or are looking for any excuse to get past the conflict. He thought that, while 12-15 primates will not be satisfied with anything but orthodoxy, others would be willing to accept something less.
His lack of confidence about solidarity among the primates extends to Archbishop Williams, whose actions he believes have had the net effect of supporting the liberals-as shown, for example, by the dilatory Panel of Reference charged with helping embattled faithful clergy and laity, which the Archbishop appointed and put under the leadership of a primate hostile to orthodox views. Williams has "killed" the Panel, and thereby encouraged liberal bishops to continue oppressing the faithful, by allowing his staff to filter information to it, the leader told TCC.
Further, he said there is a "big fight" underway over whether or not the primates should meet within a few months after General Convention, rather than wait until their scheduled meeting in February, as he claims Archbishop Williams wants the leaders to do.
The Archbishop of the Southern Cone (of South America), Gregory Venables, also contended that Dr. Williams and some other officials do not wish the primates to meet early, an idea he thought ridiculous. "If one of my children fell down a hole I wouldn't say I'll deal with it next Tuesday," he remarked.
Venables maintained, however, that if such a meeting can be managed (though it may require private funding) and there is opportunity for the primates to freely discuss the ECUSA response, they would likely reach "solid" consensus on U.S. Church's status in the Communion.
For his part, Venables sees ECUSA's resolutions as "a very elaborate U-turn which leaves ECUSA pointing in the same direction it was before. It doesn't change anything at all. It's an attempt at conciliatory language that doesn't change the underlying intention of ECUSA to keep on doing the same thing. It's just trying to gain time..."
Venables sees a post-convention muddle as likely. Everyone will want to "pretend that things will be all right...Nobody wants to face the truth, but we have to," he said. The only possible hope, the only means of "shining a light into the cellar," is for the primates to step in, he said.
HOW SOON THE PRIMATES can shine such a light will be critical to conservatives in ECUSA, and especially to the movement led by the Anglican Communion Network. It seeks a united, biblical, orthodox American Anglicanism, one that, ideally and ultimately, would be expressed in an institutionally-distinct, Communion-recognized body.
The Network's progress toward its objective will be especially hindered if the convention fails to produce clarity about ECUSA's position-perhaps because it has done a good job of selling the idea that it is conforming, or because legislative machinery or timing prevents a vote on a key matter by the whole convention.
But even in a clearer situation-wherein Anglican primates determine that ECUSA has quit the Communion, but continue recognition to its faithful remnant-Network-aligned bishops feel that they face heavy choices on how best to lead a mass of people to the promised land through uncharted ecclesiastical territory.
In a recent commentary, Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker contended that either leaving or staying in ECUSA could incur serious costs and consequences that should be considered. Indeed, at this writing, Network bishops were still not agreed on a unified, post-convention strategy, though there were plans for them to meet with the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, at Nashotah House Seminary on May 17, to try to decide among different proposals. Even so, it may be that Network affiliates in different situations may wish to or have to pursue their common objective by different routes.
Among apparent possibilities, though, is that, if ECUSA is deemed out of the Communion, the Network may not spearhead a separation from ECUSA as part of the push toward a separate province, as many expected. Rather, some or all of the ten ACN-aligned Episcopal dioceses could sit tight, taking the position that they have not gone anywhere, but ECUSA has.
Contacted by TCC, ACN Chancellor Wicks Stephens stressed that this approach would just be the start of response, but might be a "smart place to begin." He noted that, even as things stand now, if a diocese said it was leaving, ECUSA seems to lack "a good legal argument that the property of a diocese belongs" to the national church. But if that same diocese said ECUSA left it, "no one has ever litigated that question," Stephens told TCC. In such a case, he believes, a court considering the disposition of property would have to weigh the burden placed on a diocese that had not changed. Add to that the fact that ECUSA's separation from the Communion would be a violation of its constitution, and one may find significant changes in the legal perspective that has obtained in a number of past church property cases.
Some conservatives have already scored the "stay put" approach as a strategy for slow but sure death, a loss of credibility and integrity as orthodox Christians, and a plan that -though conservatives agree that ECUSA's injustice in this area should be redressed-is still entirely too wedded to property and money. One bishop among the ACN-linked Common Cause Partners told TCC he gets the impression that most Network bishops are "trying to hold on until retirement and protect their dioceses and then it will be up to somebody else. "
Several conservative leaders TCC consulted maintained that people are "fed up with waiting," and that if the Network does not move en masse soon, or has no plan for joint movement, such movement will happen in pieces.
The exact flow of people and parishes leaving ECUSA after June remains to be seen, though some predict "chaos and hemorrhaging." While most are likely to seek oversight from a foreign Communion bishop, some could opt for one of the leading orthodox Anglican bodies outside ECUSA: the Anglican Mission in America, Reformed Episcopal Church, Anglican Church in America, Anglican Province of America, Anglican Province of Christ the King, or the Anglican Catholic Church.
One can appreciate, then, the great weight that Network bishops feel. Whatever they decide will have a big impact on the future of the conservative movement.
Equally so, however, it is crunch time for ECUSA leaders, from whom many in the Communion are seeking signs of real transformation and reformation, both of which look to be in decidedly short supply in Columbus.
Sources: Global South Anglican website, The Guardian, The Living Church, VirtueOnline, The Church of England Newspaper, Christian Today, Episcopal News Service, Church Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Times.
http://www.challengeonline.org
By Auburn Traycik, Editor
The Christian Challenge (Washington DC)
http://www.challengeonline.org
THE FUTURE of the U.S. Episcopal Church (ECUSA) and its standing within the Anglican Communion now appears set to be determined chiefly by the June General Convention's decisions on compliant-sounding resolutions that, as presently written, would nonetheless leave ECUSA "pointing in the same direction."
This, after the Diocese of California averted a second major convention struggle-and probable schism in the Communion-by passing up the chance to elect another actively gay bishop on May 6.
The election of a second such prelate would have presented an opportunity for considerable drama: Some claimed-and some did not believe-that the House of Bishops would this time narrowly refuse to back a non-celibate homosexual, and if so, that gay activists and their supporters would gather willing bishops to consecrate the candidate illegally.
The California diocese, however, chose a liberal, pro-gay, but married man with two grown children-Alabama Suffragan Bishop Mark Handley Andrus-to succeed Bishop William Swing. In so doing, delegates bypassed by a wide margin six other candidates, three of them partnered homosexuals, and one of those a lesbian. Placing second, and more favored among the laity, was the Rev. Canon Eugene Taylor Sutton, a black cleric serving at Washington National Cathedral, who also was not among the gay nominees.
The election of any one of the homosexuals would have forced the June 13-21 General Convention in Columbus, Ohio, to register a stark up or down vote on the consecration of the candidate, one that either failed the church's pro-gay stand or handed Anglican primates (provincial leaders) a clear-cut means of declaring that ECUSA is "walking apart" from the Communion.
That would have been a lose-lose situation for more moderate liberals, those deputies or bishops who likely want continue support for homosexuals, but also want to try to, or feign trying to, patch things up with the wider Communion for unity's or expediency's sake.
These include bishops-there are said to be some-who want to "maintain unity" because they are "genuinely sorry" that the Communion was so disrupted by General Convention 2003 decisions approving same-sex blessings and the church's first openly gay bishop V. Gene Robinson (now a recovering alcoholic), even if they supported those decisions. But moderate liberals also appear to include those prelates prepared to slow their pro-gay agenda in a bid to retain Communion credentials and secure invitations to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Anglican bishops, in anticipation of further revisionist gains in the decade between Lambeth '08 and '18.
ON THE SURFACE, the election of Andrus, 49, which aided the moderates, may seem to suggest that the diocese yielded to pressure from the Archbishop of Canterbury and others not to widen the Communion's conflict, and thereby handed a defeat to radical liberals who want ECUSA to be honest about its stand and accept the consequences (as evidenced by their efforts to pack the California slate with homosexuals).
Remarkably, such pressure came even from Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold-the same man who agreed with fellow primates in 2003 that Gene Robinson's consecration would have devastating consequences for the Communion, and then acted as Robinson's chief consecrator, setting those consequences in train. In the run-up to California's election, however, he said the diocese "needs to respect the sensibilities of the larger Communion." When it makes its "wise" decision, it "will then be up to the House of Bishops to give or withhold their consent"-a thinly veiled warning that the House might this time nix another homosexual bishop.
However, such official "encouragement" looks unlikely to have been determinative in California, given the level of support Andrus received (on the third and final ballot, he garnered the backing of over 72 percent of the clergy and 54 percent of laity). None of the gay nominees received more than a handful of votes. Reportedly, some members of the diocese felt that Andrus significantly outshone homosexual nominees at the episcopal candidates' "walkabouts" before the election. As well, church gay activists know that there will be other opportunities to put forward their candidates for the episcopate: although it has not announced its nominees yet, the Diocese of Newark's episcopal election in September is one to watch.
NEVERTHELESS, the California election seems to have put more moderate liberals in the driver's seat for General Convention. Their "vehicle" for getting where they want to go looks to be the report and recommended resolutions of a special ECUSA commission which go a bit farther than some predicted-but not nearly far enough, conservatives say-in trying to meet the expectations of the 2004 Windsor Report and Anglican primates.
Recent press reports that ECUSA was preparing to step back from its pro-homosexual policies-a claim that dismayed some liberals and gay activists-were soon declared unfounded by conservative leaders, particularly as the resolutions do not urge the moratorium on non-celibate homosexual bishops sought by the Windsor Report, only the exercise of "very considerable caution" in putting them forward. (More on the resolutions in a bit.) The convention could act to strengthen the resolutions in Columbus, but that remains to be seen. As things stand, though, the "step back" seems a largely tactical and illusory one actually designed to enable liberals to go forward with their Communion status and their revisionist agenda.
As well, moderate liberals seeking to appear compliant with Communion expectations are still likely to get a hard run for their money in Columbus from homosexuals in the church. To be sure, the longstanding gay group Integrity welcomed the special commission report and proposed resolutions, saying that the panel had made a "strong statement that this church will not scapegoat its lesbian and gay members." But Integrity and other "lesbitransgay" advocacy groups also plan a big presence and ambitious legislative program at General Convention, under the umbrella of "Claiming the Blessing." Integrity says it wants to "keep the momentum it has gained through 30 years of respected, successful advocacy and witness." What perhaps said it all, though, was the title of an article by John Clinton Bradley in Integrity's spring magazine: "No Turning Back."
At this writing, too, the church's left wing had begun "massive media campaigns of disinformation, half-truths and spin" aimed at conservatives, painting them as schismatic, destabilizers of ECUSA, and bankrolled with millions of dollars from right wing foundations, reported Episcopal e-journalist David Virtue. A centerpiece of the initiative was a two-part series by Washington (D.C.) Window Editor, James Naughton, titled "Follow the Money." The accuracy of "bankrolling" claims aside, Virtue wondered why it would be "wrong for the orthodox to have serious financial backers when liberals have professional bagmen like George Soros who have poured billions of dollars into liberal organizations."
ALL THINGS (at the moment) considered, U.S. conservatives see little chance that the convention will adequately meet the minimal requests made of it, and-more importantly-no chance that it will answer the call underlying them, which is for real repentance and a broad return to scriptural fidelity and orthodoxy.
"Anybody with any sense knows that ECUSA is not going to repent," said Canon Bill Atwood of the Ekklesia Society. He recalled a survey in 2000 which showed that 42 (out of some 110) Episcopal dioceses had practicing homosexual clergy serving, 32 dioceses would ordain active homosexuals, and 22 dioceses were performing same-sex blessings. "They're not going to stop that," he maintained. "If Nineveh comes to us in Columbus, God will be glorified and we can rejoice and be reconciled. But I'm not holding my breath."
"Slowing down is not stopping," said Cynthia Brust, Communications Director for the American Anglican Council (AAC). She thought that the resolutions as proposed could create a perception that ECUSA is conforming, but said "the key...is, are there moratoria?" Clarity could be gleaned, she said, by examining whether the convention really agreed to the two types of restraint asked of it.
Still, some conservatives are worried that General Convention, bolstered by California's internationally-watched election, may do well in appearing accommodating and obscuring areas in which it falls short of expectations-thereby creating the kind of post-convention confusion and muddle in which liberals thrive, and conservatives flounder.
"The battle going into Columbus is obfuscation versus truth, and generalities versus specifics," said Canon Kendall Harmon of the Diocese of South Carolina.
Some sources said the impression of compliance could be augmented if the convention opts for a more conservative-leaning candidate for presiding bishop, though on the whole most do not expect the choice of successors to Bishop Griswold to make much difference for ECUSA.
Whatever happens, many will look to Communion leaders for clarity. But perhaps surprisingly, there are mixed opinions among those consulted by TCC on whether the conservative majority of Anglican primates and Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams would be able or willing to identify the inadequacies of ECUSA's position and judge the U.S. Church's status in the Communion accordingly. Pressure One would not conclude this from recent developments, however. Indeed, as liberals and gay activists prepared to head determinedly into General Convention, international pressure on them was ratcheted up by Archbishop Williams.
Though he is known to have some liberal sympathies, Dr. Williams has lately issued some significant warnings and statements upholding Communion policy, and begun a series of private consultations with senior Church of England bishops and advisors to consider potential fallout from ECUSA's General Convention.
In his series of utterances, the Archbishop stated, for example, that the Communion is in danger of a "visible rupture" that could take decades to heal. Responding with "deep unease" to the list of nominees for Bishop of California, he also called on ECUSA to uphold a moratorium on the consecration of non-celibate homosexuals, reiterating that the mind of the Communion on sexuality matters cannot be changed by one province alone.
Williams' series of private consultations with senior English bishops and others, including representatives of the conservative Anglican Mainstream, began at Lambeth Palace on April 24, with discussions reportedly including how to deal with a range of possible outcomes of General Convention, how the international Anglican "instruments of unity" should respond, and what impact there would be on the C of E. One report said Williams was believed to be taking advice on whether he indeed has the power to "disinvite" bishops to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, though he has long been recognized as having authority to decide who to invite to Anglican meetings.
The issues at stake in these "next critical months" in the Communion's life are "too important...to allow events to overtake us," said a leaked letter of invitation to the April 24 consultation from Dr. Williams' head of staff, Chris Smith.
"The wording of the invitation makes it fairly clear that Lambeth [Palace] is expecting no backtrack from ECUSA and is therefore working out how to manage the oncoming schism," wrote The Times of London.
One source with a line into the consultations claimed, however, that participating bishops have agreed that whatever effort ECUSA makes to comply with the Windsor Report will be acceptable (a position that would seem to relieve Williams of having to "disinvite" Episcopal bishops to Lambeth).
But Dr. Chris Sugden of Anglican Mainstream said: "We are very concerned that a fudge isn't good enough. What we're looking for is repentance and the rescinding of decisions of the General Convention 2003."
And, it is Anglican primates who look to be the primary determinants of whether or not ECUSA has separated from the Communion. (There are, of course, disagreements over whether they have "authority" to do this, though it would seem that there is likewise no "authority" preventing them from declaring an opinion about ECUSA's Communion standing and governing their future actions accordingly.)
Bishop Griswold also revealed that he had a private meeting with Dr. Williams in Canterbury to discuss measures that ECUSA proposes to defuse the current crisis. Meanwhile, however, Williams has declined an invitation to make an appearance at the eight-day General Convention, citing pre-existing obligations. And in March, he sent the Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to deliver some sobering words to the Episcopal House of Bishops meeting (on which more in a minute).
And, in a signal move, Williams recently dashed hopes that liberals evidently had of overturning or undermining the 1998 Lambeth Conference's sexuality resolution (1.10) when the Conference meets again in 2008. He said in March that, while provinces will offer reflections at Lambeth '08 stemming from the process of listening to homosexuals called for in 1.10, he saw no "enthusiasm" or reason for reopening debate on the resoundingly-adopted resolution, which deems homosexual behavior "incompatible with Scripture." He stated that, despite "bitter controversy" over the issue, it remains clear that Lambeth 1.10 represents the mind of the Communion on sexuality.
The AAC said this left ECUSA with an "even more strongly defined choice." It must not only uphold Lambeth 1.10 but "abandon its agenda to revise Scripture and 2,000 years of teaching and practice on human sexuality, and...affirm the foundational tenets of Christian faith... Any other course represents a decision to walk apart." The Proposed Resolutions
It has been three tumultuous years since ECUSA's General Convention consented to the consecration of New Hampshire's gay bishop-elect and agreed that rites for the blessing of same-sex unions are within the bounds of church life. It was, said the AAC, the culmination of a "revolution in stages" against the apostolic faith; notably, the same convention defeated a resolution (B001) affirming the authority of Scripture and basic tenets of Christian faith. The convention actions and the subsequent consecration of Gene Robinson (along with the implementation of same-sex blessings in the Canadian Diocese of New Westminster) plunged the Communion into turmoil.
And to the obvious surprise of ECUSA liberals-who were indulged by Communion leaders in pioneering earlier innovations that also lacked broad consensus, the ordination of women priests and bishops-the crisis has not blown over. Among other things, 22 of 38 Anglican provinces have reduced or broken communion with ECUSA. Additionally, the realignment of conservative North American Anglicans has quickened and become more organized, notably with the formation of the Canterbury-recognized Anglican Communion Network (ACN), consisting mostly of faithful still in ECUSA, and its links to various faithful associations and extramural Anglican bodies. The realignment also has taken some unprecedented turns, as more congregations have fled ECUSA and come under the oversight of foreign Communion bishops.
In 2004, the Lambeth Commission issued the Windsor Report, which-as Commission member, the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, put it-"was about how the...Communion can continue to operate when a province or diocese acts directly against the stated mind of the Lambeth Conference, Anglican Consultative Council (ACC), the Primates, and the Archbishop of Canterbury" (the Communion's four advisory "instruments of unity"). The Report called (among other things) for ECUSA to express its "regret that the proper constraints of the bonds of affection were breached in the events surrounding the election and consecration of [Gene Robinson] and for the consequences which followed"; it also called for a moratorium on the "election and consent to the consecration of any candidate to the episcopate who is living in a same-gender union until some new consensus in the Anglican Communion emerges"; and a moratorium on all public rites of blessing same-sex unions.
The 2005 the Primates' Meeting held at the Dromantine Center in Northern Ireland, and subsequently the ACC meeting in Nottingham, England-where U.S. and Canadian representatives defended their homosexuality policies-gave a general welcome to the Windsor Report and reaffirmed Lambeth Resolution 1.10. And both bodies asked ECUSA (and the Anglican Church of Canada) to withdraw its members from the ACC in the run-up to Lambeth '08, and respond through its legislative body to questions posed to it in the Windsor Report, while considering its "place within the Anglican Communion." In other words, ECUSA was effectively suspended from the global church, and asked to choose between its support for homosexual practice and its Communion membership.
ECUSA leaders have so far expressed regret only for causing pain to the wider Communion, not for the unbiblical action of consecrating Robinson. And, in a move widely seen as vindictive, Episcopal bishops agreed to a temporary halt on the consecration of any bishop, gay or straight, and to authorizing public same-sex union rites (though the ban is not binding on clergy in all cases, or on private ceremonies). A final answer, however, is still expected from ECUSA's General Convention.
NOW, IN A REPORT titled "One Baptism, One Hope In God's Call," released April 10, the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion proposes to make what initially looks like a conciliatory response to the wider Communion.
Appointed by Bishop Griswold and House of Deputies President, the Rev. George Werner, the mostly liberal special commission was charged with "[preparing] the way for a consideration by the 75th General Convention of recent developments" in ECUSA and the Communion "with a view to maintaining the highest degree of communion possible." Griswold and Werner said the commission's document is first and foremost "theological," and secondarily "a beginning" and not the end point for conversation and legislative decisions.
The report includes six sections covering topics arising out of the current feud, plus a brief conclusion, and offers 11 recommended resolutions. The resolutions could undergo revision as they are prepared for debate in Columbus by an 18-member special legislative committee.
But among the resolutions as they stand now are some deferential-sounding calls for the convention to: commit to "interdependence" in the Anglican Communion and to the "fellowship of churches that constitute" it; commit to the Windsor process as it relates to communion and discerning "the nature and unity of the Church," and to the (Lambeth 1.10) listening process; commit to the process of developing an Anglican "covenant," recommended by the Windsor Report as a way to help ensure unity among provinces that adopt it ; endorse "effective and appropriate pastoral care for all"; demonstrate support for Anglicans around the world by supporting the Millennium Development Goals, including regular giving to support international development work; and approve a curious canonical amendment that seems intended, in part, to ensure, after many long years, the end to discrimination against orthodox clergy and aspirants to ordination.
But while there are several significant caveats to be noted in those first motions, the rubber really meets the road in some of the few remaining ones.
Over the course of two proposed resolutions, ECUSA would express "regret" for pain caused by the actions of General Convention 2003, for contributing to the "strains on communion," and causing "deep offense" to many faithful Anglicans; it would also apologize and repent for breaching the "bonds of affection" in the Communion "by any failure to consult adequately with Anglican partners before taking these actions." But this appears to miss the mark again. According to Bishop Wright, the Windsor Report's reference to breaching the bonds of affection equates not with a failure to consult but with "going against the stated mind of the instruments of unity."
The commission's offerings include "no rejection of the decisions of the 2003 General Convention," the official Episcopal Life admitted.
More significantly, as earlier noted, one resolution urges merely that "very considerable caution" be exercised in "the nomination, election, consent to, and consecration of bishops whose manner of life presents a challenge to the wider church" and will further strain communion. (Reportedly, some commission members had wanted to use "refrain from" in the advice on future episcopal consents, but obviously they did not prevail.) The resolution also makes no promises about not ordaining gay deacons or priests-because the Windsor Report did not ask for any, and the primates did not expand on its requests.
Another resolution concurs with the Windsor Report request that the convention not authorize public rites of blessing for same-sex unions. But the same resolution allows "a breadth of private responses to situations of individual pastoral care for gay and lesbian" church members; in other words, private same-sex blessings could continue. But some say there is a loophole that would allow public rites to continue as well.
As proposed, the resolution on same-sex blessings appears to be in compliance with the Windsor Report, which sought only to proscribe public ceremonies. However, the commission's claim that General Convention has never yet authorized public gay blessing rites is disingenuous, as, in 2003, it gave a blanket okay to whatever liturgies that "local faith communities" wish to use for same-sex blessings: such communities "are operating within the bounds of our common life as they explore and experience liturgies celebrating and blessing same-sex unions," the convention said. AAC's Mrs. Brust maintained that these local rites are still being used publicly.
"It's happening all the time," she said, pointing, for example, to the recent lesbian union ceremony involving the head of Claiming the Blessing, the Rev. Susan Russell, and her partner.
Remaining resolutions would have the convention reassert positions the church has already taken in support of homosexuals, with which few would argue, e.g. that they are entitled to equal protection under the law, and "are by baptism full members of the Body of Christ" and ECUSA. But one clause would ask the church to commit to the communion of all the baptized "despite our diversity of opinion and, among dioceses, a diversity of pastoral practice with the gay men and lesbians among us." Brake, But Keep Going ECUSA "should slow but not halt its push for gay bishops and blessings," was one conservative writer's summation of the commission's recommendations.
Mr. Virtue called the 11 proposals "a carefully nuanced fudge that, when examined closely, offer nothing about returning to 'the faith once delivered to the saints' and therefore pose no threat to ongoing revisionism of the Episcopal Church. It also offers nothing to orthodox Episcopalians who had hoped [for] some relief or reprieve in...the church's 11th hour."
Writing on standfirminfaith.com, Fr. Matt Kennedy marveled that the "truly moderate" Windsor Report requests are still "far too stringent for the rebellious and schismatic Episcopal Church."
"What is being...proposed by ECUSA is not truly sufficient to show that [it] is intent on being a biblically-based, orthodox province," said the Rev. Dr. Peter Toon of the U.S. Prayer Book Society.
Even the moderate Living Church magazine was under-whelmed. "At first glance, the proposed resolutions included with the report seem to be in concert" with the Windsor recommendations, it said, "but instead it looks as though the commission was determined to change the words of these proposals to suit their own needs."
THAT WHAT U.S. CRITICS ARE SAYING is what Communion leaders might say as well was the clear message of the Church of England's Bishop of Exeter, Michael Langrish, to the March 17-22 House of Bishops (HOB) meeting at North Carolina's Kanuga Conference Center, where the prelates were given preliminary information on the commission's report and resolutions.
Langrish basically "told the U.S. bishops that the language of the special commission is not adequate," and "that if they consecrate another gay bishop or authorize same-sex relations, the Anglican Communion will break apart," and dialogue with Roman Catholics and Muslims will be finished, said The Times religion reporter Ruth Gledhill.
Significantly, Langrish spoke at the episcopal retreat as a representative of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which strongly suggests that the views he stated are those of Dr. Williams. As well, he was among bishops invited to the private Lambeth Palace consultations in April. And, he has, from past experience, some knowledge of the wider Communion, particularly the global South.
In his remarks to the HOB, Langrish noted the pivotal importance of the convention's response to the Communion. But he said that for starters, he had, and the wider Communion was likely to have, "real anxieties" about the call for "very considerable caution" in electing actively gay bishops. It is not clear what that means, "how it would be judged, and who would decide," he said. "Can you exercise extreme caution and still act in a way that injects further difficulty into the life of the Communion?"
Langrish also effectively said that regrets expressed for "pain" caused are insufficient. At issue, he said, was the creation of a bishop for the Church Catholic "who was in a relationship not liturgically sanctioned by the Church" and without seeking the assent of the wider Church.
He warned that, while "no one can force another province or diocese either to go or remain (in the Communion)... no diocese or province can enforce its own continued membership simply or largely on its own terms. There has to be engagement. There is no communion without a shared vision of life in communion."
Concluding with a flourish, Langrish said: "So it does seem to me, as I listen to those other parts of the Communion that I know best, that any further consecration of those in a same-sex relationship, any authorization of any person to undertake same-sex blessings, any stated intention not to seriously engage with the Windsor Report, will be read very widely as a declaration not to stay with the Communion."
How well did the U.S. prelates listen?
After the HOB meeting, Arizona Bishop Kirk Stevan Smith still seemed to think the proposed resolutions offered a way forward. That, because they signal ECUSA's pledge to "work to conform" to the Windsor expectations, "[w]ithout backing away from decisions we have made."
California's Bishop Swing said "we are fighting over freedom, among other issues," and that there is "a mad dash to create a worldwide final arbiter-a Windsor Report or an archbishop or instruments of unity-which would...put an end to all of the mischief caused by freedom."
Conservative Central Florida Bishop John Howe noted that some of his colleagues at the meeting immediately sought to clarify that the resolutions were not "forbidding" sexually active gay bishops. He added that, while "many...bishops would not vote to authorize same-sex blessings at this moment...they will not forbid them...And we all know they are being performed all over this country. Not to forbid is to authorize."
As shown by a recent survey of Episcopal bishops (see more in "Focus"), some bishops are prepared to say that they would vote differently than they did three years ago. "But (I believe) that is because of the consequences of that vote, not because they have actually changed their minds on the substance of the question," Howe said.
Most ECUSA bishops are "genuinely sorry" for having damaged the Communion and "do not want to see [it] destroyed," he said, but are "not repentant for the decision to confirm Gene Robinson's election...for they do not believe it was wrong."
And this, he predicted, will not be "enough to satisfy the primates and the Archbishop of Canterbury."
"If General Convention fails to adopt a stance of genuine compliance with the Windsor recommendations (which I am certain it will not do), I don't see how the Archbishop has any alternative but to declare that the majority of ECUSA has decided to 'walk apart' from the Anglican Communion." The Primates And U.S. Conservatives
But that, according to some sources, remains to be seen.
One well-placed conservative leader says there are varying views among the conservative majority of primates on the resolutions as they stand, and that some could by swayed by the perception of compliance that ECUSA wishes to give, or are looking for any excuse to get past the conflict. He thought that, while 12-15 primates will not be satisfied with anything but orthodoxy, others would be willing to accept something less.
His lack of confidence about solidarity among the primates extends to Archbishop Williams, whose actions he believes have had the net effect of supporting the liberals-as shown, for example, by the dilatory Panel of Reference charged with helping embattled faithful clergy and laity, which the Archbishop appointed and put under the leadership of a primate hostile to orthodox views. Williams has "killed" the Panel, and thereby encouraged liberal bishops to continue oppressing the faithful, by allowing his staff to filter information to it, the leader told TCC.
Further, he said there is a "big fight" underway over whether or not the primates should meet within a few months after General Convention, rather than wait until their scheduled meeting in February, as he claims Archbishop Williams wants the leaders to do.
The Archbishop of the Southern Cone (of South America), Gregory Venables, also contended that Dr. Williams and some other officials do not wish the primates to meet early, an idea he thought ridiculous. "If one of my children fell down a hole I wouldn't say I'll deal with it next Tuesday," he remarked.
Venables maintained, however, that if such a meeting can be managed (though it may require private funding) and there is opportunity for the primates to freely discuss the ECUSA response, they would likely reach "solid" consensus on U.S. Church's status in the Communion.
For his part, Venables sees ECUSA's resolutions as "a very elaborate U-turn which leaves ECUSA pointing in the same direction it was before. It doesn't change anything at all. It's an attempt at conciliatory language that doesn't change the underlying intention of ECUSA to keep on doing the same thing. It's just trying to gain time..."
Venables sees a post-convention muddle as likely. Everyone will want to "pretend that things will be all right...Nobody wants to face the truth, but we have to," he said. The only possible hope, the only means of "shining a light into the cellar," is for the primates to step in, he said.
HOW SOON THE PRIMATES can shine such a light will be critical to conservatives in ECUSA, and especially to the movement led by the Anglican Communion Network. It seeks a united, biblical, orthodox American Anglicanism, one that, ideally and ultimately, would be expressed in an institutionally-distinct, Communion-recognized body.
The Network's progress toward its objective will be especially hindered if the convention fails to produce clarity about ECUSA's position-perhaps because it has done a good job of selling the idea that it is conforming, or because legislative machinery or timing prevents a vote on a key matter by the whole convention.
But even in a clearer situation-wherein Anglican primates determine that ECUSA has quit the Communion, but continue recognition to its faithful remnant-Network-aligned bishops feel that they face heavy choices on how best to lead a mass of people to the promised land through uncharted ecclesiastical territory.
In a recent commentary, Fort Worth Bishop Jack Iker contended that either leaving or staying in ECUSA could incur serious costs and consequences that should be considered. Indeed, at this writing, Network bishops were still not agreed on a unified, post-convention strategy, though there were plans for them to meet with the Bishop of Durham, N.T. Wright, at Nashotah House Seminary on May 17, to try to decide among different proposals. Even so, it may be that Network affiliates in different situations may wish to or have to pursue their common objective by different routes.
Among apparent possibilities, though, is that, if ECUSA is deemed out of the Communion, the Network may not spearhead a separation from ECUSA as part of the push toward a separate province, as many expected. Rather, some or all of the ten ACN-aligned Episcopal dioceses could sit tight, taking the position that they have not gone anywhere, but ECUSA has.
Contacted by TCC, ACN Chancellor Wicks Stephens stressed that this approach would just be the start of response, but might be a "smart place to begin." He noted that, even as things stand now, if a diocese said it was leaving, ECUSA seems to lack "a good legal argument that the property of a diocese belongs" to the national church. But if that same diocese said ECUSA left it, "no one has ever litigated that question," Stephens told TCC. In such a case, he believes, a court considering the disposition of property would have to weigh the burden placed on a diocese that had not changed. Add to that the fact that ECUSA's separation from the Communion would be a violation of its constitution, and one may find significant changes in the legal perspective that has obtained in a number of past church property cases.
Some conservatives have already scored the "stay put" approach as a strategy for slow but sure death, a loss of credibility and integrity as orthodox Christians, and a plan that -though conservatives agree that ECUSA's injustice in this area should be redressed-is still entirely too wedded to property and money. One bishop among the ACN-linked Common Cause Partners told TCC he gets the impression that most Network bishops are "trying to hold on until retirement and protect their dioceses and then it will be up to somebody else. "
Several conservative leaders TCC consulted maintained that people are "fed up with waiting," and that if the Network does not move en masse soon, or has no plan for joint movement, such movement will happen in pieces.
The exact flow of people and parishes leaving ECUSA after June remains to be seen, though some predict "chaos and hemorrhaging." While most are likely to seek oversight from a foreign Communion bishop, some could opt for one of the leading orthodox Anglican bodies outside ECUSA: the Anglican Mission in America, Reformed Episcopal Church, Anglican Church in America, Anglican Province of America, Anglican Province of Christ the King, or the Anglican Catholic Church.
One can appreciate, then, the great weight that Network bishops feel. Whatever they decide will have a big impact on the future of the conservative movement.
Equally so, however, it is crunch time for ECUSA leaders, from whom many in the Communion are seeking signs of real transformation and reformation, both of which look to be in decidedly short supply in Columbus.
Sources: Global South Anglican website, The Guardian, The Living Church, VirtueOnline, The Church of England Newspaper, Christian Today, Episcopal News Service, Church Times, The Associated Press, The Washington Times.
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