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Somehow we’re getting a bad case of “deja vu all over again” in the proposal to restrict Episcopal churches to simply bless people rather than actually marry them.

This, of coure, is the usual practice in Europe. We still think that the long-term objective of many gay rights activists–inside and outside of the Episcopal Church–is to end the church’s privilege of performing civilly valid marriages in the U.S. This is one way to get around having to have a religious exemption for those clergy who cannot, in good conscience, perform gay marriages. That is, of course, if they can get gay civil marriage to stick in the U.S…

Although the press covers it as if it’s a total shock, North Korea’s nuclear test is anticlimactic. Everybody–well, almost–knew they were working on nuclear weaponry. Now it’s official.

The main loser in this blast is South Korea, and not just for the obvious reason. They have been obsessed with reconciling themselves with their northern bretheren for a long time, not only for reasons of kinship but because they wanted to eliminate and dependency upon the U.S.–whose troops in the present they resent–and Japan, whose troops in the past they resent. Now their idea that this would be attainable in the forseeable future has gone up in radioactive smoke.

Cold wars with really intrasigent communists (the Chinese are too practical to fall into that category) are endurance matches, one the U.S. won in in the 1980’s. South Korea needs to understand that. They need to get away from doing what we almost did in the Cold War and realise that they need to stay the course until the North’s economy implodes.

Turning to another debacle, we know that Henry Kissinger has been telling President Bush that he needs to do the same in Iraq. But Bush is dealing with an entirely different dynamic in the Islamicists he faces in the Middle East. As we have pointed out time after time, the Arab world tends to be centrifugal, and Bush needs to exploit this and quit fighting the last war.  But for those who still are, the rules are still the same.

The Mark Foley thing–which, of course, does touch South Florida, as one would expect–seems to get deeper. Now we know that the Miami Herald of all papers sat on emails from Foley to the pages. Why? They weren’t explicit enough, and since he was a known homosexual…

Traditionally, the Herald isn’t known to duck a liberal cause when it sees one. Getting rid of Republican representatives is a liberal cause par excellence. It seems to me that their sitting on this is either poor journalism, esprit de corps with a man who is a member of a traditional liberal constituency, or just plain timing (wait until the election when your party is in striking distance, then hit them hard.) Or a combination of one or more of these.
As far as Foley being a homosexual is concerned, the Herald’s editor stated the following:

Given the potentially devastating impact that a false suggestion of pedophilia could have on anyone, not to mention a congressman known to be gay, and lacking any corroborating information, we chose not to do a story.

Homosexuals generally resent their way of life being linked to paedophilia, but that’s implicit in the editor’s statement.

Where the animals are tame and the people run wild…

The Republicans got another–and unneeded–setback in their quest to retain control of the House of Representatives with the resignation of Representative Mark Foley over his sexually charged emails to some of his pages.

The fact that these are disgusting and that he needs to go is not in question, at least not for us. The whole Foley fiasco, however, illustrates the central problem of the current status of sexual activity under law in most Western countries.

At the start for predominantly Christian cultures, sexual activity was restricted to conjugal relations between a man and wife. This automatically excluded homosexuality (since marriage was and generally is between a man and a woman) and sex with and amongst minors (since marriage was restricted to adults.)

Unfortunately a central tenet of all kinds of left-wing movements is that sexual activity is a necessary centrepiece of a fulfilled, actualised life. So they started by allowing straight up, heterosexual fornication. To facilitate this, they forced the legalisation of birth control and abortion, which is the real meaning of Griswold vs. Conneticut and Roe vs. Wade.

The problem of that is simple: where do you stop? Once this move is made, the goalposts of legal sexual activity acquire wheels, moved around by whoever has the most push. The most obvious result of this was the SCOTUS’ nullification of anti-sodomy laws in Lawrence vs. Texas.

But why here? Most Americans find the whole idea of sexual exploitation of children revolting, but then again they didn’t like the idea of abortion on demand either. And there are forces that would like to change that, too, ones which are well entrenched in our elites. This explains the diffident attitude of many on a lot of the anti-sexual predator laws which come before our state legislatures.

While we’re on the subject, we should not forget that, in the past, a few cultures–and one in particular–used the kinds of sexual contact between Rep. Foley and their young charges as a way for the latter to move up in the world. We explored this issue last year and it bears repeating again.

The central problem with our current situation is that it sends seriously mixed signals to everyone, especially the young. We cannot on the one hand allow (and in our culture encourage) people to have unrestricted sexual activity in some areas outside of marriage and, once these people are aroused, put draconian restrictions on others and result in anything but confusion. And that’s where we are today. If we allow this situation to continue, in a generation the behaviour that cost Rep. Foley his seat in the House will become the real reason that young people go to Washington to be pages: to move up…

Bill Clinton’s performance in his interview with Chris Wallace reminded me too much of some of the things I used to see during union meetings in my old family business. All too often, when the grievance filed didn’t have the merit they thought it had, at least one on the committee would blow up in front of us.

Clinton is a product of a "working man’s" background in Arkansas. I am too close to this for my own good; not too far north of where he grew up, my grandfather worked for the railroad for 44 years. I know a hothead when I see one, and watching him berate Chris Wallace I saw one who knew he was in trouble and whose only hope was to turn the tables by shoving emotion into Wallace’s face.

Back in the 1970’s my father attempted to fire one of his "hotheads" but lost in arbitration, in part because the aribtrator marked the grievant as a "sturdy yeoman." But when you’ve got a little of that Celtic "sturdy yeoman" in you, it’s hard to romanticise it. Moreover our "yeoman’s" basic problem was that he was running from God; if he had (and eventually did) put God first, many of the problems we had with him–and his own, really–would have been solved.

If we’ve advanced as far as we claim we have in this time of ours, we need to see Clinton for what he is and deal with him accordingly.

The call from the “Global South” Anglican primates for a separate chuch for conservatives in the Episcopal Church is not to everyone’s taste, but it is inevitable.

It’s taken a lot of “Anglican Fudge”–to say nothing about institutional loyalty–for conservatives to remain in the Episcopal Church as long as they have. But the time has come to face reality, as we noted last summer in our piece The Communion of One. The Global South primates have done just that. It is not as easy as it looks to an outsider–and will be even more complicated if it’s applied to a state church like the Church of England–but there’s no other way out.

And the liberals? Since they have made church pointless, perhaps they should go out and celebrate the Fall Equinox with their pagan friends.

Any American who has dealt with a British “cousin” (for some of us, at least) has sooner or later detected a note of condesension about those poor rude Americans in the “colonies.” Sometimes this condesension is justified, sometimes not.

It is with some amusement, then, that we discovered that the Church of St. Mary the Virgin in Stevington, Bedforshire (photo below), has a link to our popular 1662 Book of Common Prayer page. This is the first time, to our knowledge, that any entity in the Church of England has done this, although we have had links from American Anglican churches of various kinds for some time.

The reason for this is rather unique. We’re used the the idea that copyrights expire, although pressure from Disney keeps forcing Congress to move the goalposts. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer, however, is published by privilege of the Crown, which is the way books were legally published in European countries before the advent of copyright (and free speech, in many cases.) So the “copyright” of the book is in perpetuity within the United Kingdom. The Church of England is working on posting the 1662 book, but it’s in HTML, which isn’t very convenient for printing out.

So this Church of England parish is forced to rely on a site outside of the UK–in this case, in the “colonies” (literally in this case, it’s one of the original 13)–to enable their parishoners and others to obtain a free download of this magnificent work. (They probably liked the York Minster photo on the front, too.)

We want to extend our thanks to St. Mary the Virgin parish for linking to our site. In addition to helping make the 1662 prayer book more accessible, it constitutes an admission that we in the “colonies” are really useful to the “old country” after all.