Irresistible Logic

from Stand Firm by Matt Kennedy

In her letter to the Episcopal Church, the PB inadvertently provided the Anglican world with a rather fun glimpse behind the thin curtain of her differentiated "calm" revealing the seething pettiness she manages most days to suppress. After defending the consecration of Mary Glasspool and decrying the Archbishop's call for sanctions, she writes:

"We are further distressed that such sanctions do not, apparently, apply to those parts of the Communion that continue to hold one view in public and exhibit other behaviors in private. Why is there no sanction on those who continue with a double standard?"

We all know to what she is referring...the well worn accusation that there are high placed people in the Church of England who regularly engage in sex acts with people of the same sex. Let's take a look at the irresistible logic that lies behind the PB's "zinger": Churches in which individual leaders violate the official teachings of the church by engaging in sex acts with people of the same sex should be disciplined in the same way as those churches that have officially blessed sex acts between two members of the same sex. So there is really no moral difference between, say, the province that officially endorses "free liquor for alcoholics" and the province that discourages drunkenness and yet in which there happen to be a number of drunks. The parents who get stoned with their kids shouldn't be put in jail unless parents whose kids sneak out and smoke a joint are punished too. The shepherd who joins the wolf for the hunt shouldn't be held accountable until all those shepherds who have had sheep snatched from the fold are made to pay.

Makes perfect sense. This, amusingly, is the kind of thinking even grand poobah academic revisionistas think clever. Truly they have dizzying intellects...and they're just getting started (apologies to Vizzini).

No doubt the accusation that there are leaders in the Church of England who engage in sex acts with members of the same sex has at least some basis in fact. There have always been unrepentant sinners within the hierarchy of every church; secret adulterers, thieves, liars, apostates, abusers, philanderers, drunks and drug addicts...you name it. There has never been a time since Judas Iscariot when this has not been true.

But, really, does the Episcopal Church really want to do away with the age old and necessary distinction between what a church officially teaches and what individuals within a church do?

Does the Presiding Bishop, ringmaster of the oddest show on earth, boasting the wildest assortment of aging wiccan hipsters, Sufi dancers, clown celebrants, cosmic techno liturgists, John Spong, Muslim clerics, sage smudging ancestor worshipers really want the Anglican Communion to issue sanctions for unofficial acts and beliefs of member provinces?

My humble advice to the Circus Master is to back away from that suggestion as quickly as possible.