Being Consistent

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The ratification of Canon V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire is old news now. There are some mighty irritated people and the American Anglican Council has put out a short guide for them so that nobody jumps the gun and there isn’t a mass exodus from the Church.

Those who know me know that I watched the General Convention with great interest. After all…

  • my background has a huge amount of the Episcopal Church in it

  • the One True Church is having Churchwide Assembly right now and we usually tend to follow the same path as the Episcopalians

  • the One True Church is currently engaged in a sexuality study right now

  • this issue is one of the few things keeping me from jumping back to the Episcopal Church (the others being the fact that the candidacy process in the ECUSA is worse than ours and my love of Luther’s writings)

    • In watching all this, I was kind of half incredibly sad that Robinson was ratified because I strongly disagree with his lifestyle and half relieved that the last minute efforts to derail him didn’t pan out. The current policy of the One True Church is that celibate GLBT persons can be ordained and that if you aren’t in the bonds of traditional matrimony, you have to remain celibate. Robinson’s ratification goes against all of this.

    My problems with his ratification:

  • He divorced his wife to pursue the gay lifestyle. That doesn’t really give him much credibility to talk about the sacrament of marriage. Yes… he and his partner have been monogamous; but he still broke his marriage vows.

  • I can’t get around the fact that the Bible very clearly states that homosexuality *IS* a sin. I seriously cannot in good conscience say that it’s a matter of opinion or that it’s just a cultural more. People argue that Jesus never specifically addressed it in His ministry and the reason He didn’t is… he was speaking to Jews who all would have known the Old Testament prohibitions against it.

    • **NOTA BENE: While I disagree with the homosexual lifestyle, I still do care about and love my GLBT friends. You don’t have to agree with someone to love them as a friend. Besides, I’m called to love all of God’s people, even those I disagree with strongly.**

    I guess the thing that pains me the most is that the Episcopal Church isn’t being consistent in its mission by failing to call a sin “a sin”. What makes homosexuality OK but adultery not? What makes it any different from pre-marital sex? It’s a very lukewarm attitude, which is *not* what we are called to have. We discussed the passage I have linked (Revelation 3:14-22) in Small Group last night, and we agreed that the message here is: whether you are hot for Christ or utterly frigid, at least BE CONSISTENT. What kind of message does it send when a Church claims that the definition of sin is left up to the individual?

    I’m really struggling with the consistency issue here in my own life. I am adamently opposed to Robinson’s ratification because of his choice of lifestyle but… he has gifts for ministry that would very much benefit the people of the diocese of New Hampshire. They elected him knowing fully well that he was openly gay and not celibate and this was OK for them; but not for me or others. Given that we probably will never have to interact with him and he isn’t our authority, should we really be complaining? Yet… this also impacts the witness of the Church and also its relations with others in the Anglican Communion and the Church pretty much thumbed its nose at the opinions expressed at the last Lambeth gathering by ratifying Robinson’s consecration.

    I am muchly conflicted inwardly…

    Finally… an accurate web survey!

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    You’re Ireland!

    Mystical and rain-soaked, you remain mysterious to many people, and this makes you intriguing.  You also like a good night at the pub, though many are just as worried that you will blow up the pub as drink your beverage of choice.  You’re good with words, remarkably lucky, and know and enjoy at least fifteen ways of eating a potato.  You really don’t like snakes.
    Country Quiz at
    the Blue Pyramid

    Friday Five: Travelling

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    1. What’s the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?
    State: Washington
    Country: Canada (Toronto, Montréal, and Ottawa)

    2. What’s the most bizarre/unusual thing that’s ever happened to you while traveling?
    Let’s see… I’ve had someone try to sit on my face. It was on the way back from Ireland in 1998 and we were on the leg of the flight from Chicago to San Francisco. I was *really* sick with what turned into walking pneumonia two weeks later and asked the stewardess politely to re-seat me so I’d be on an aisle. There were some rows in the middle of the plane that were empty, so I lay across one. I awakened three hours later to find a drunk guy about to sit down on my head. I screamed and the stewardess escorted him back to his seat. My mom came back and sat with me for the rest of the flight.

    3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?
    Seattle, my grandparents’ cabin in British Columbia, backpacking across Europe, studying Islam in Egypt, Israel, India, Korea,….

    4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?
    For the sake of quickness, I prefer plane. I’m also still working on getting my driver’s license.

    5. What’s the next place on your list to visit?
    Los Angeles next weekend. I get to see my mommy and my daddy and my twin brother and my sister-in-law and my parents-in-law and my friend Brian. (Yes… I do know that I could have eliminated all of those ands and just used commas. Deal with it.)

    Strange Politics Karma

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    Let’s see… I spent my first 21 years in a state where there is a recall movement going (that is an utter waste of time and money) and the candidates to replace Gray Davis include:

  • Gary Coleman

  • Arianna Huffington

  • **Arnold Schwarzenegger (he is a serious contender)

  • Larry Flynt (whose election would cause a mass exodus of people to the Midwest)

    • (The more mundane candidates: **Lt. Governor Cruz Bustamente, Rep. Darryl Issa, and **Dick Riordan [ex-mayor of L.A.]. The starred candidates are the ones I’d actually vote for.)

    Then… I move to Ohio where the possible senatorial candidate for the Democrats is Jerry Springer. (I’d love to see discussions on the floor of the Capitol if he had decided to run and was elected.)

    Our next state move is probably going to be Minnesota… where the ex-governor was Jess “The Body” Ventura.

    I think I definitely have strange politics karma.

    The Story of “Lepicat”

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    When I was doing my CIT training and during my first summer of counselling at a Girl Scout camp, my camp name was Leprechaun. I got it when I was 13 because I’m tiny, Irish, and a little on the feisty side. A lot of the international staff couldn’t pronounce it, so they called me “Lepi”.

    When I started college that fall, I needed an email ID and I didn’t want to use “jmccabe” because that would be boring. Most of the Jennifer derivatives had been taken and “leprechaun” was too long to use. The server at UCSC is “cats”, so a lot of people have cat-related email addresses. (The various servers are actually named for T.S. Eliot characters like “rumpleteazer” and “mungojerrie”.) I was going to do “lepi_jen” but that one was rejected, so I did “lepi_cat” instead.

    When I acquired my group of friends (many of whom I’d met the year before when I’d been visiting my friend Cougar at UCSC), there were about 8 Jen’s. So… they nicknamed us and my normal nickname was “Lepicat Jen”. Well… that soon evolved into just “Lepicat” (though Cougar still called me Leprechaun) and someone even created a special signature symbol for me. My other nickname was “Kitty Cat” because I can sleep almost anywhere and I had a habit of crashing on people’s beds in a ball while waiting for them to take me down to Long’s to get my antibiotics. (I had almost a constant case of bronchitis my first year of college.)

    So… that’s the story. My college friends still call me “Lepicat” and it’s happened where I answer the phone and the voice on the other line is screaming “Lepicat!!!!!!” (This would be my friend Brian Green, who I will be seeing for the first time in two years on the 18th while Jon is in his Approval interview.)

    Since I Am A Native Californian…

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    I thought I should put my $0.02 in on the recall:

    IT IS A COLOSSAL WASTE OF TIME AND MONEY FOR A STATE THAT IS ALREADY IN FINANCIAL PROBLEMS BECAUSE OF STUPID GOVERNORS FOR THE 30 YEARS BEFORE DAVIS WAS ELECTED.

    OK… let’s look at the situation: a disgruntled politician who lost his bid for Senate is funding the recall and is running himself. Yo! Issa wants to be king — like he’s going to settle for anyone else having the governorship? California had problems LOOOOOONG before Davis was elected. It’s a state of 32 million people speaking 200 different languages which really has two separate cultures (north and south) and grows most of the nation’s food even though it’s really just a well-irrigated desert. In other words, it’s a tough state to govern and believe me, the previous years of Republican tyranny before Davis were just as bad. I remember having a 5 period day in middle school with science alternating with PE so that my school could have its performing arts program. That was 1992-1994… BEFORE Davis.

    Oh yes… the economy is crappy everywhere and Silicon Valley is one of the worst places hit because there was an overexpansion in productive capacity known as the Dot.Gone bust. Yes… power bills are high — y’all are the ones who voted for deregulation in 1996. Don’t say that PG&E didn’t warn us — I remember the TV ads. You made your beds — now lie in them! Do you really want a schmuck like Bill Simon, Darryl Issa, or Larry Flint governing y’all? I mean.. Davis isn’t perfect, but at least he isn’t a smut peddler, someone who alienated himself from his own party, or a disgruntled person with weapons violations.