The Covenant

Over a century into the marriage among the various Anglican churches, suddenly we need a legal contract.


Here is the Archbishop of Canterbury making the case for the Covenant:




And here is Louie Crew's reply to the Archbishop:




I personally think Crew is being generous here. I think the Archbishop's speech is filled with thinly veiled threats and his tone is supercilious.

I am furious that the Archbishop of Canterbury finds my kind to be so expendable. I am so very heartened that he meets such determined resistance in England and from around the world. If the Archbishop manages to pull off this bums' rush of the Episcopal Church out of the Communion, then so be it. Such a Communion held together by legal contract is not worth saving.

The consecration of Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire remains one of the supreme moments of my religious life. I never in all of my life expected to ever see an openly gay man with a partner elected and consecrated as a Christian bishop. The Episcopal Church consecrated him knowing that the whole church would suffer the same isolation and scorn that Robinson and all of us like him continue to suffer. And now the Episcopal Church finds itself scorned and mocked, and the object of a dubious piece of legislation intended to punish it for doing in good conscience what it thought best and right. That dubious legislation grandly calling itself a Covenant is the camel's nose in the tent of powerful and wealthy right wing interests mostly based in the USA who would gladly see the Episcopal Church and other Mainline Protestant churches destroyed (see the Institute for Religion and Democracy and The Chapman Memo). All of the supporters of the Covenant deny it, but we all know that this is about those nasty gay people. As long as churches continue to cling to false arbitrary ideas about gay people and to practices that are manifestly harmful and unjust, then the moral credibility of the churches will continue to erode until institutional Christianity perishes, and rightly so.

A church or a communion dedicated to playing the role of morals cop and enforcer of social conventions for the sake of established power is not worth preserving.

Christ in His Incarnation and Resurrection is the end of religion with all of the laws and burdens of ritual purity it lays upon our mortal shoulders, the overthrow of the whole grim equation of success versus failure, of ruler versus the ruled, of power versus powerlessness that is the world. He is the overthrow of the power of death whose terror drives so much of our enterprise. His proclamation of radical unconditional love is the end of borders, nations, tribes, of all the distinctions that we draw among ourselves, the end of the world as we've always known it. In that is our hope.

Christ's saving Grace is for EVERYONE just as we are without one plea, or it is for no one.

Tip of the fedora to Grandmere Mimi and to Simon Sarmiento.


EXTRA:

Diarmaid MacCullough, Oxford professor of Church History and self described "candid friend of Christianity" on the proposed Anglican Covenant:

Oh Boy! ...

My church is in the news! ...on Huffpost to be exact.



What's doubly satisfying about our care for homeless and runaway LGBT kids is that we do so in the teeth of the major property owners and developers in the neighborhood who would dearly love to be rid of them, and us.

Rush Limbaugh...

... a gift that keeps on giving.

Folks, we are truly blessed with enemies like these. They are so obligingly repulsive on so many different levels.

As I said on Facebook, I wonder if all of the 15 million who Rushbo claims listen to his show daily tune in because they really like what he says, or if a big portion of them are like the voyeurs who slow down to look at car crashes.

I don't really find him all that shocking folks. He doesn't say anything that you wouldn't hear from some bitter old fart sitting in a roadside Stuckeys on I-35. He just says it on the air, the angry frightened paranoid id of the Confederate white male. That id hasn't really changed since 1865.

"Rush is right, racism is over in this country. The n*****s are just going to have to find something else to complain about!" -- overheard by Molly Ivins in a diner in Weatherford, Texas. I think I ate at that diner a few times in my boyhood.

Maryland Gets Marriage Equality

And now there are 7 plus the District of Columbia.



We'll see what happens in November. I remain hopeful.

More Debussy

Someone Who I Really Will Miss

The things of childhood don't last forever, but that knowledge does nothing to make their loss any easier. I'm sorry to see this childhood crush of mine go.

No the Monkees aren't playing their own instruments and never could, but who cares.

Andrew Breitbart

Andrew Breitbart is dead.

I don't believe in Karma. I don't really believe in Original Sin (at least as Breitbart and his fans understood it). I do believe in Grace unearned and undeserved.

Forty three is awfully young, and his death (probably a heart attack) was sudden and unexpected. My sympathies to his family and close friends.

Then again, I can't help but think of this line from Bette Davis, "We should only say good things about the dead. Joan Crawford is dead. Good!"

I am not going to miss him. I shed no tears for him. He did a lot of harm to a lot of people. I would imagine their feelings are of relief. Like all people who fear and hate obsessively, he turned into the very things he feared and hated.

As far as I'm concerned, this will be his legacy:




May the spirits of Dr. King and Harvey Milk be with him as he begins that long long journey to The Place Where Lazarus is Poor No More.

EXTRA:

Ol' Rushbo is leading the right wing chorus of outrage over press coverage of Breitbart's death. Speaking of mendacity and character assassination, Breitbart was the master. As an old friend of mine used to say, "it doesn't matter if you believe in God or not, you don't want to lie on your deathbed knowing you're an asshole." According to the press reports slowly coming out, Breitbart never got to that point. It's looking more and more like a sudden and massive heart attack.