Anglican Samizdat

We all knew that the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell wasn’t the end of the military’s ever onward march towards sexual enlightenment: soon it will be legal for soldiers to have sex with animals. Consensual sex, of course.

Churches will be able to offer liturgical solemnisation of human-beast partnerships as a generous pastoral response for those who seek to live in mutual love and faithfulness in a stable, long-term committed relationship with their camels.

From here:

The Senate on Thursday evening voted 93-7 to approve a defense authorization bill that includes a provision which not only repeals the military law on sodomy, it also repeals the military ban on sex with animals–or bestiality.

On Nov. 15, the Senate Armed Services Committee had unanimously approved S. 1867, the National Defense Authorization Act, which includes a provision to repeal Article 125 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

Article 125 of the UCMJ makes it illegal to engage in both sodomy with humans and sex with animals.

[…]

Former Army Col. Bob Maginnis said some military lawyers have indicated that bestiality may be prosecutable under another section of the military code of justice – the “catch-all” Article 134 for offenses against “good military order and discipline.”

But don’t count on that, he said.

“If we have a soldier who engages in sodomy with an animal – whether a government animal or a non-government animal – is it, in fact, a chargeable offense under the Uniform Code? I think that’s in question,” Maginnis told CNSNews.com.

The question is, will non-government animals still receive survivor benefits?

From here:

A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

The survey of 1,500 Canadians, conducted over three days last week for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, showed 56% of respondents see Western and Muslim societies locked in an unending ideological struggle, while about 33% — just one-third of the population — held out hope that the conflict will eventually be overcome.

Obviously not many politicians or Anglican clergy were included in the poll.

From here:

An electrician faces the sack for displaying a small palm cross on the dashboard of his company van.

Former soldier Colin Atkinson has been summoned to a disciplinary hearing by the giant housing association where he has been employed for 15 years because he refuses to remove the symbol.

Mr Atkinson, a regular worshipper at church, said: ‘The treatment of Christians in this country is becoming diabolical…but I will stand up for my faith.’

Throughout his time at work, he has had an 8in-long cross made from woven palm leaves attached to the dashboard shelf below his windscreen without receiving a single complaint.

But his bosses at publicly funded Wakefield and District Housing (WDH) in West Yorkshire – the fifth-biggest housing organisation in England – have demanded he remove the cross on the grounds it may offend people or suggest the organisation is Christian. Mr Atkinson’s union representative said he faces a full disciplinary hearing next month for gross misconduct, which could result in dismissal.

As you can see, the cross is so conspicuous and, after all, there is nothing quite so damaging to an organisation’s reputation than the insidious allegation that it might be “Christian”; the mere act of writing that makes me want to disinfect my keyboard. I’m surprised that Atkinson wasn’t charge with sedition – or, at the very least, a public order offence.

As Western societies increasingly expunge Christianity from public life, so they increasingly foist compulsory aberrant sexuality on their children. It sounds like an application of Rom 1:24-25: God’s ultimate punishment is to give people what they think they want: in this case, unbridled deviant sexuality, ultimately causing them to bring about their own extinction through fruitless copulating with members of their own sex and – and if that is insufficient, rampant abortion.

The UK does not allow prisoners to vote, a tragedy that probably doesn’t bother most law abiding citizens since prisoners would undoubtedly vote for anyone who promises to go easy on criminals.

Most law abiding citizens other than Rowan Williams, that is, who, in his never ending exertions to distance himself from normal people, has put his foot – perhaps both feet – in his remarkably capacious mouth by supporting a prisoner’s “right” to vote.

From here:

Williams said that the civic status of a prisoner should not be “put in cold storage” while they are inside. “The notion that in some sense, not the civic liberties, but the civic status of a prisoner is in cold storage when custody takes over is one of the roots of a whole range of issues around the rights of prisoners,” he said in remarks published by the Prison Reform Trust.

“If we lose sight of the notion of the prisoner as citizen, any number of things follow from that, and indeed are following from that. The prisoner as citizen is somebody who can … expect that penal custody will be something that contributes to, rather than takes away, their capacity to act as a citizen in other circumstances,” said the archbishop.

“Thus issues around restoration, around responsibility, around developing concepts of empathy and mutuality are all part of what seems to me to be a reasonable working out of what it is to regard the prisoner as a citizen.”

John Hirst, who chopped up his landlady with an axe before managing to develop much of a concept of empathy, is, needless to say, most appreciative of Rowan’s support and is boasting about it:

The Archbishop of Canterbury today said prisoners should get the vote, backing an axe killer whose campaign has been endorsed by European courts.

John Hirst, who hacked his landlady to death, yesterday boasted that he was on the verge of forcing the Government to ‘wave the white flag of surrender’, as MPs prepare to vote on the move tomorrow.

As usual Rowan sacrifices common sense to tangled Rowanesque distinctions; in this case between civic liberties and civic status, both of which – even if there is a distinction – are forfeited the moment you start hacking your landlady to death with an axe.

Rowan Williams should re-read Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment: in it, Raskolnikov, an axe murderer, didn’t receive redemption through insisting on his right to vote, but by confessing his crime, repenting, accepting his punishment in Siberia and being spiritually reborn in Christ.

Last night I sank into a nostalgic haze while listening to some music that appealed to me when I was growing up:  These Were Our Songs: The Early 60′s.

The lyrics seem preposterously naive by today’s standards, of course. For example:

You come on like a dream, peaches and cream,
lips like strawberry wine:
you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine.

You’re all ribbons and curls, ooh what a girl,
eyes that sparkle and shine:
you’re sixteen, you’re beautiful and you’re mine.

But, as a callow youth, listening to this did manage to sum up what seemed at the time to be the profound attachment I felt towards my fifteen year-old girlfriend. Alas, it turned out not to be true love, so my romantic gushing was soon to be transferred to her replacement.

Unfortunately, for the last 20 years or so, popular music has laboured mightily to dispel the sentimentality of its progenitor: romantic pretension has been expunged by a crass unrelenting assault on the sensibilities:

Your bark was loud, but your bite wasn’t vicious,
And them rhymes you were kickin were quite bootylicious,
You get with Doggy Dogg oh is he crazy?
With ya mama and your daddy hollin’ Bay-Bee,
So won’t they let you know,
That is you fuck with dre nigga you’re fuckin wit Death Row,
And I ain’t even slangin them thangs,
I’m hollin one-eight-seven with my dick in yo mouth, beotch

Which, I have on good authority, could be roughly translated into the slightly less obtuse, but no less revolting:

You talk a lot but you can’t back it up,
You can’t rap well,
You must be crazy to try and mess with me,
I will kill you. Your mum and dad will be crying at your funeral,
If you mess with Dr. Dre you are messing with every rapper on our record label.
I don’t sell drugs, I will yell murder as you perform oral sex on me. Bitch.

If that wasn’t bad enough, here is Me So Horny from 2 Live Crew:

It’s true, you were a virgin until you met me
I was the first to make you hot and wetty­wetty
You tell your parents that we’re goin’ out
Never to the movies, just straight to my house
You said it yourself, you like it like I do
Put your lips on my dick, and suck my asshole too
I’m a freak in heat, a dog without warning
My appetite is sex, ’cause me so horny.

Romantic illusions have been replaced with pornographic illusions.
Take me back to the ’60s.

From here:

The Christian owners of a seaside guesthouse acted unlawfully by refusing to let a gay couple share a double bed, a judge has ruled in a landmark case.

Peter and Hazelmary Bull did not allow civil partners Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy to use a double room in their Cornwall B&B because it would be “an affront to their faith”.

However, a judge at Bristol County Court said the couple were breaking the law by denying the men a room.

Mr Hall and Mr Preddy were each awarded £1,800 in damages.

So how will this affect Christian B&B owners – before all Christians are driven out of the UK, of course?

Like this:

While rummaging around my dusty bookshelves over the holidays looking for something else, I came across a book by Alexander Solzhenitsyn that I read in the late 70s: “Warning to the West”, a collection of Solzhenitsyn’s speeches in one volume. It’s a shame his words have not been taken more seriously. This is some of what he had to say about socialism in a BBC radio talk:

The decline of contemporary thought has been hastened by the misty phantom of socialism. Socialism has created the illusion of quenching people’s thirst for justice: Socialism has lulled their conscience into thinking that the steamroller which is about to flatten them is a blessing in disguise, a salvation. And socialism, more than anything else, has caused public hypocrisy to thrive; it has enabled Europe to ignore the annihilation of 66 million people on its very borders.

There is not even a single precise definition of socialism that is generally recognized: all we have is a sort of hazy shimmering concept of something good, something noble, so that two socialists talking to each other about socialism might just as well be talking about completely different things. And, of course, any new-style African dictator can call himself a socialist without fear of contradiction.

But socialism defies logic. You see, it is an emotional impulse, a kind of worldly religion, and nobody has the slightest need to study or even to read the teachings of its early prophets. Their books are judged by hearsay; their conclusions are accepted ready-made. Socialism is defended with a passionate lack of reason; it is never analyzed; it’s proof against all criticism. Socialism, especially Marxist socialism, uses the neat device of declaring all serious criticism “outside the framework of possible discussion”; and one is required to accept 95 percent of socialist doctrine as a “basis for discussion”—all that is left to argue about is the remaining 5 percent.

There is another myth here too, namely that socialism represents a sort of ultra-modern structure, an alternative to dying capitalism. And yet it existed ages and ages before any sort of capitalism.

My friend Academician Igor Shafarevich has shown in his extensive study of socialism that socialist systems, which are being used today to lure us to some halcyon future, made up the greatest portion of the previous history of mankind in the ancient East, in China, and were repeated later in the bloody experiments of the Reformation. As for socialist doctrines, he has shown that they emerged far later but have still been with us for over two thousand years; and that they originated not in an eruption of progressive thought as people think nowadays but as a reaction—Plato’s reaction against Athenian democracy, the Gnostics’ reaction against Christianity—against the dynamic world of individualism and as a return to the impersonal, stagnant system of antiquity. And if we follow the explosive sequence of socialist doctrines and socialist utopias preached in Europe—by Thomas More, Campanella, Winstanley, Morelli, Deschamps, Babeuf, Fourier, Marx, and dozens of others—we cannot help but shudder as they openly proclaim certain features of that terrible form of society. It is about time we called upon right-minded socialists calmly and without prejudice to read, say, a dozen of the major works of the major prophets of European socialism and to ask themselves: Is this really that social ideal for which they would be prepared to sacrifice the lives of countless others and even to sacrifice their own?

According to the Duke of Kent’s son, Lord Nicholas Windsor.

From here:

Lord Nicholas, 40, who lost his place in the line of succession when he became a Roman Catholic, has written a controversial article in which he claims that abortion is a bigger threat to Europe than al-Qaeda and Islamic terrorism.

He describes abortion as “the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life” and calls for a “new abolitionism for Europe” in which abortion, like the slave trade, can be abolished.

While the threat of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda calls for “robust and, where necessary, lethal response”, he claims in the American religious journal First Things that “these are not threats that appear existential and have not as yet provoked a real sense of public crisis”.

He has a point. Why worry so much about the external threat from a ramshackle collection of death-worshipping antediluvian barbarians when we are so intent on defeating ourselves by wiping out our successors before they are born.

I know that isn’t news, but here are the latest examples of grotesqueness for its own sake masquerading as art:

The ant covered Jesus on display at the Smithsonian:

and the 7/7 London bombing with four angels, one for each of the bombers:

Both works are intended to shock. Sadly, that seems to be all Western art has left to offer: no meaning, no beauty no transcendence, just shock – each shock more shocking than the last.

Bankrupt art for a bankrupt civilisation