no Anglican covenant for this Episcopalian

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Simon Sarmiento is reporting that the bishops of the CofE have not only commended the Anglican Covenant for adoption by the Church of England, but have also taken steps to ease its adoption. Still, passage is by no means certain, judging from the comments at Thinking Anglicans.

Katie Sherrod and Fr. Mark Harris have written useful commentary on the covenant’s reception by The (American) Episcopal Church, especially in relation to the recent visit of Canon Kenneth Kearon to the TEC Executive Council. You can read Katie’s thoughts and observations here and here. Canon Kearon is Secretary General of the Anglican Communion. Fr. Harris’s relevant posts are here, here, here, and here. The background of Fr. Harris’s reference to “mitregate” is a recent appearance of American Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as preacher and celebrant at Southwark Cathedral, London, where she was granted permission to preach and celebrate by The Archbishop of Canterbury but told she must not wear her mitre or carry her crozier.

Bishop Schori received a veiled apology from the Dean of Southwark Cathedral, though not from the ABC, and has reacted to this latest attempt to shame her with the aplomb of a canny American feminist who understands that there is no such thing as bad publicity. The more her enemies and the enemies of the ecclesial openness she represents attempt to denigrate her (and the attempts are serious, misogynistic, and hateful), the more sympathy she garners for her cause and the stronger she becomes.

I am opposed to the The Anglican Covenant, to the whole of it and not merely to section four which permits the church to discipline and punish. Were my church to constitute itself as the confessional body envisioned in the covenant, I would have to part company with my church. I have enough trouble with the Nicene Creed as it is, and believe that orthodoxies generally are pernicious things that require coercion for their establishment. But I also think the ABC’s refusal to allow Bishop Schori to preside at Southwark wearing the symbols of her office was not merely the coercive act of a petty authoritarian, not only a slight and an offense to Bishop Schori, to Americans and to the American church, but something more as well. Fr. Jake is featuring a challenging post the last few days entitled, “The Dark Side of Canterbury…Perhaps,” whose thesis is that the ABC is projecting power towards TEC because he has realized that we may need him more than he needs us since some of our present property disputes may hang on our membership in the Communion. I am thinking Fr. Jake is right and that there may be an even darker dimension to the ABC’s political maneuvering.

It seems clear that Dr. Williams not only wants to hold the Anglican Communion together, but that he also wants to preserve the primacy of the established English church. He is, after all, a peer of the realm by virtue of his office, and he has as recently as last February argued in the House of Lords in opposition to the prohibitions against discrimination contained in Britain’s new equality legislation. It seems unlikely that such a peer would wish to be reduced in stature or to be the cause of his national church’s diminution in stature in relation to the various colonial primates and churches who are presently subjecting him to great pressure. By promulgating the covenant, and now by getting out in front of it politically and fostering (by whatever means) its quick adoption by the general synod, perhaps Dr. Williams preserves advantage over the colonials as well as gaining leverage with TEC.

In light of these thoughts it’s interesting to note the recent appearance of three new Facebook pages, here, here, and here.

One more thing. The Episcopal Church’s prophetic positions with regard to gender roles and sexual orientration inevitably proclaim the bigotry of patriarchy and homophobia. The contentions generated by these proclamations cannot merely be held in tension. As Terry Eagleton has put it, “there are a good many important contentions which someone is going to have to win and someone else to lose.” Reactionary Anglicans (who may now count Dr. Williams as one of their number) understand that they cannot win social justice arguments about gender and sexual orientation and have chosen to cast these contentions rather as arguments over tradition and the authority of scripture. For a good many years now, Dr Williams has been developing and expanding a theological understanding of Christian identity that puts him on the side of traditionalists. I’m presently reading his recent book on Dostoyevsky, which seems to be a major statement of that theological understanding, and intend to post an essay about it in the fairly near future.

oil spill demagoguery

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It now appears that Judge Martin Feldman, who issued a temporary injunction against the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling, has perhaps more than one conflict of interest. Other judges who, like Feldman, have money in oil and gas, recused themselves from lawsuits related to the Gulf Coast oil spill.

Republicans are engaging in follow-up demagoguery, or perhaps it isn’t follow-up. Judge Feldman’s arguments in this case could have been scripted by the oil and gas industry or by Louisiana Republicans, with press releases like this one flooding the Internet for weeks now.

I’m sure many of my persuasion will react with distress at the administration’s apparent lack of anger, especially in the face of demagoguery that blames the administration for the oil spill, itself. But I suspect pragmatism is better policy in the long run.

drill baby drill!

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4:00 pm: I’ve just learned that a New Orleans judge has granted an injunction lifting the administration’s moratorium on deep water drilling. If the matter goes to the supreme court, and the supreme court agrees to hear it, will that signal a constitutional crisis?

8:00 pm: Now the administration has served notice that it will issue a second order and is appealing the ruling in regard to the first.

Read about it here and here.

who cannot emote?

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Representative Joe Barton has now apologized for his apology, but his original charge of a shakedown of innocent BP management by a bullying Obama administration still stands as a marker of the hypocrisy of present-day conservatism. I’ve never bought the right’s claim to support limited government. Big government is fine with the right as long as it fights wars, restricts civil liberties, and skews the tax system to benefit entrenched privilege.

Actions, as my grandmother was fond of saying, speak louder than words. From health care legislation to recent supreme court decisions, right wing politicians in both parties have forced continuation of the dysfunctional marriage between the state and established wealth that has characterized US public policy throughout our history. This marriage, exemplified now for us in a series of public disasters wrought by corporate malfeasance, has currently produced greater inequality in this country than obtains anywhere in Europe; and it is this marriage, together with the various political and social inequalities it supports and maintains, that present-day conservatism seeks to preserve against the advance of cultural change exemplified by the election of Barack Obama.

In 2004 the American Political Science Association (APSA) issued a report entitled American Democracy in an Age of Rising Inequality that concluded in part:

Our country’s ideals of equal citizenship and responsive government may be under growing threat in an era of persistent and rising inequalities. Disparities of income, wealth, and access to opportunity are growing more sharply in the United States than in many other nations, and gaps between races and ethnic groups persist. Progress toward realizing American ideals of democracy may have stalled, and in some arenas reversed.

In this week’s issue of The Nation, a poignant letter to the editor underlines the point. Alice Skirtz, a casework supervisor at the Family Shelter Partnership in Cincinnati points to the growth of populations for whom “homeless shelters are lifesaving.”

If things proceed as they did in the 1980s, when the masses of Ronald Reagan’s “new poor” exploded, we can next expect the “basement dwellers,” followed by people from suburbia with foreclosures of their own. They will compete for precious shelter beds with the post-PRWORA [Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996] families stranded for lack of affordable housing.

The Moynihan Report, that influenced PRWORA, “the end of welfare as we know it” during the Clinton era, is now widely regarded as racist, its consequent greater isolation and enslavement of the poor yet another accomplishment of the US marriage between wealth and the state. But right-wing supporters of the document continue to condemn its feminist critics. Here’s the final paragraph of a recent diatribe by Rich Lowry in the National Review:

“There is one unmistakable lesson in American history,” Moynihan wrote, “a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.” It’s a statement just as true and nearly as unwelcome as it was four decades ago.

 

Voices on the left sometimes reflect a failure to understand the tensions and dilemmas of present-day political animus. Today, Richard Cohen added some words to the growing chorus of demands that President Obama get mad at something. Cohen will give the president his choice among several objects of anger, including China and Russia—Cohen is an old cold warrior and Israel hawk—but he mostly thinks the president’s putative coolness prevents the rest of us from knowing “who he is.” As far as I”m aware, this particular critique of the president was first offered by Shelby Steele back before the 2008 election. Steele’s little book about then candidate Obama was entitled in part, A Bound Man . . . . Though I didn’t accept its conclusion, I thought its title suggestive. It reminded me of a short story by Ilse Aichinger in which the protagonist learns to function within constraint and finds great freedom in his condition. I said of candidate Obama then, that I thought his individuality consisted “in a complex and dynamic adaptation to the constraints imposed by a particular situatedness.” As my friend Tim Burke put it in a paragraph I quoted:

This is what politics is, what politics has to be. This is what transformation needs. Otherwise, the best you can hope for are momentary, transient achievements that are destined to be reversed almost as soon as they are accomplished. There isn’t enough power in the greatest political mobilization imaginable to abolish significant groups of people who experience history and society differently than you and people like you experience it.

And even if there were that much power, as from time to time in modern history there has been, I wouldn’t want it to be exercised. Cohen gratuitously and condescendingly gives the president a pedigree right out of the Moynihan Report and suggests that both the president’s situatedness and his intellect are weaknesses. I profoundly disagree with this claim.

Actions speak louder than words. Richard Cohen and the perhaps liberal savoyards around him in the chorus implore the president to lose his cool and smite the wicked whilst conservatives sound another theme accusing him of shaking down BP. That the conservative accusation didn’t play very well tells me more than the accusation did. While others see a president who needs to “emote,” as Cohen puts it, I see a president battling entrenched privilege with a cool pragmatism that seeks to coopt its concerns and transform them.