The following quip has popped up all over the Internet, with
various attributions, and has also been published in several
newspapers as a letter to the editor:
"The actions taken by the New Hampshire Episcopalians are an affront to Christians everywhere. I am just thankful that the church's founder, Henry VIII and his wife Catherine of Aragon, his wife Anne Boleyn, his wife Jane Seymour, his wife Anne of Cleves, his wife Katherine Howard, and his wife Catherine Parr are no longer here to suffer through this assault on traditional Christian marriage."
Quip Debate:A newly posted letter to the editor from Jeff McQuary takes exception. He writes, in part, "Henry is not the spiritual founder of Anglicanism. He was merely the political accident that made the (inevitable) spread of the Protestant Reformation to England happen at the particular moment it did."
A New Generation of Voices.
Eric Eagan, a young gay writer, explains his yearning for kids and normalcy in this Yale Daily News column. In the same paper, Jessamyn Blau explains why, in her view, being gay should not be equated with specific political views. Good to see that some Ivy Leaguers can think for themselves rather than just mouthing those same, old, tired PC platitudes!
Civil Rights, or Civil Liberties?
The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) has hired Massachusetts Democratic
State Senator Cheryl Jacques as its new executive director. It
would be good if she considers the advice provided by Andrew Rapp,
the editor-in-chief of Boston's Bay Windows gay newspaper, last
July 7 in an editorial headlined "How Now HRC" (no longer available
online). Rapp wrote that the group has ineffectively pursued a
traditional "civil rights" strategy focused primarily on passing a
federal nondiscrimination-in-the-workplace law. But:
The recent victories of our movement illustrate that a more fruitful approach is one that emphasizes civil liberties. In the Lawrence decision, we won a meaningful "equal protection" argument that recognizes gay people as a class, but the much more sweeping win was the finding that all people are entitled to the liberty to have consensual sex in the privacy of their home. The Canadian courts"found that we are entitled to the liberty to choose our partners, regardless of sex.
We are best described as a group of people with a particular stake in expanding civil liberties, rather than a class of people seeking protections under the law. Now we are seeing that civil liberties approach is also more fruitful.
But can an organization as beset with inertia as HRC recognize
its failures and retool its strategies?
"The Reagans" and
More Recent Postings