Anglican Mainstream

By John Smeaton, SPUC

In an interview on Zenit, Edmund Adamus, the pastoral affairs director of the Catholic archdiocese of Westminster, provides a compelling analysis of England in the context of Pope Benedict's visit next month. He says:

" … whether we like it or not as British citizens and residents of this country … the fact is that historically, and continuing right now, Britain … has been and is the geopolitical epicenter of the culture of death … Britain in particular, with its ever-increasing commercialization of sex, not to mention its permissive laws advancing the gay agenda*, is such a wasteland …

" … Our laws and lawmakers for over 50 years or more have been the most permissively anti-life and progressively anti-family and marriage, in essence one of the most anti-Catholic landscapes culturally speaking than even those places where Catholics suffer open persecution."

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By Julian Mann

The poster campaign on London buses by Catholic Women’s Ordination demanding that Pope Benedict ‘ordain women now’ can only serve to highlight one thing: the failure of feminism.

A number of realities need to be faced:

• Women are treated with significantly less respect in permissive Britain than they were in Christian Britain. Various feminist writers including Natasha Walter, Rosie Boycott and Joan Bakewell have highlighted the degrading impact of the permissive society on young women – their socialisation and their self-esteem.

• Women have been turned into wage slaves. Christian Britain regarded the nurture of children as a vitally important calling and Evangelical social reformers such as the Earl of Shaftesbury worked tirelessly to reform working practices so that women were liberated to pursue that God-given calling. But the inflation of house prices by double incomes is forcing young mothers back to work.

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By David W Virtue in Entebbe

[.....] Social issues are featured high on the agenda. The environment, poverty, HIV/ADIS and diseases of one sort or another are being addressed. However, one wonders if some of the speakers, many of whom are bureaucrats who struggle with resources, are adopting UN language to get UN dollars. Every Anglican province has an HIV office as well as development offices with huge staffs.

One of the criticisms of Episcopal Church bishops like John Chane of Washington and Tom Shaw of Massachusetts is that Africa is more concerned with homosexuality than the pressing issues of Africa. It is a lie, of course. It is the North American churches that are obsessed with homosexual behavior, not the Africans. Africans have no interest in the subject at all. They are being forced to address it precisely because it is being thrust upon them by the West's Culture Wars.

This conference is not shying away from addressing the subject, but this conference has dispelled forever the African church's alleged lack of interest on social issues that are tearing people apart including war and disease. Whole lectures have been devoted to HIV/AIDS, the environment, poverty, disease, war and the need for clean water and what local churches should be doing about it. One African bishop says he hopes to plant one million trees before he dies. (Has US Presiding Bishop Jefferts Schori planted a single tree?) The Africans have the resources. What they need is help to mobilize and strategize them.

The problems are immense and the need is great. Many African nations have had a series of corrupt political leaders, which has made change difficult. Uganda is a case in point. The country has gone from Idi Amin to a solid Christian Anglican president today. Things can change. The church even has a provident fund for retiring clergy. No, it is not in the same league as the Church Pension Fund, but the African Anglican world is growing and changing. Constant whining about Western pansexuality will not hold them back. The evidence is in. The total Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) for the whole of North America wouldn't be one decent sized Nigerian diocese. So the question is: who should be listening to whom?

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By Leon Podles

The Pope welcomed a gathering of altar servers in Rome. As John Allen notes:

First, for the first time this year, the female altar servers in attendance outnumbered the males. According to organizers, the balance was roughly 60-40 in favor of females. The official Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, pointed to the turnout as a symbol of “the massive entry in recent decades of girls and young women into a role once reserved exclusively to males.”

This predominance of girls was predictable (anyway I predicted it in my book The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity). Western Christianity has for a long time been regarded as unmasculine. It has been difficult to keep men, especially young men, connected to a church which seems to want to lessen their masculinity.

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By Christopher Brocklebank, Pink News

Figures released by the Health Protection Agency (HPA) this morning have shown that the state of sexual health among the UK population is poor, with STI rates reaching record levels. The figures have also revealed that gay men are of partcular concern.

Terrence Higgins Trust’s Chief Executive Sir Nick Partridge said: "It’s staggering that almost half a million people each year are affected by preventable sexually transmitted infections. Gay men continue to top the list, accounting for two thirds of syphilis and over a third of gonorrhoea diagnoses last year, while being only 6% of the population.

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By Rebecca Smith, Telegraph

Women aged 19 and men aged between 20 and 23 are at greatest risk of contracting an infection, according to the data from the Health Protection Agency.

Overall there were 482,696 new cases of sexually transmitted infections diagnosed in the UK in 2009. This was a rise of three per cent on the previous year.

Experts warned that greater efforts were needed to get the safer sex message across to the younger generation amid fears young people are increasingly engaging in risky sex.

The data showed that at least one in ten teenagers aged between 16 and 19 who are treated at a clinic for a sexually transmitted infection will return within a year with another infection.

The Health Protection Agency said the number of cases of sexually transmitted infections was still 'too high' but added that more testing and the use of more accurate tests will have contributed to the rise.

Dr Gwenda Hughes, head of the HPA's STI section, said: "These latest figures show that poor sexual health is a serious problem among the UK's young adults and men who have sex with men.

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By David Solway, FrontPage Magazine

By Catherine Snow, CitizenLink

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From Mailonline

Schoolchildren as young as six are subjecting teachers to a shocking level of sexual abuse – from leering and sexual comments to groping and threats of rape.

New figures reveal that hundreds of teachers have been touched inappropriately or propositioned by pupils, and other reports say that children have fondled themselves in class in a bid to embarrass or intimidate their teacher.

It comes as police reports reveal that children – also as young as six in some cases – are being arrested for serious crimes including assault and battery and robbery.

The increasing incidence of children sexual harassing their teachers has been highlighted in private logs kept by local councils, which have been made available through the Freedom Of Information Act.

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Lisa Severine Nolland

Though I hugely appreciate Peter Tatchell’s (PT) defence of human rights and religious liberty, I am appalled by some of his views because I believe they are toxic to human well-being.  In the past he contributed to a paedophile-advocacy volume. At present on his site[i], he asserts that ‘all sexualities are valid’.   PT also insists ‘porn can be good for you’ which I consider in the same vein as saying that nuclear waste can be good for you.  Moreover, PT  affirms that ‘equality is not enough’ and that ‘the lofty ideals of queer liberation and sexual freedom’ need to be recovered by gays in order to be able to liberate the rest of us from ‘the more general erotophobic and sex-negative nature of contemporary culture, which also harms heterosexuals'. As well as being vividly pornographic—erect penises all over the place— PT's book, Safer Sexy: The Guide to Gay Sex Safely (1994), provides eloquent testimony to his libertarian sexual views. I cannot do a visual ‘Show and Tell’ of it in this document (see below) but will use words to describe some of the graphic content

Like most of us, I imagine, PT is a mixed bag.  Of his commitment to his principles and willingness to sacrifice himself for them over the decades, there is no doubt!  There is also no doubt that Peter and I share certain values, like the importance of free speech, human rights and social justice. I deeply admire his courage and readiness to aid Christians like Dale McAlpine and many other oppressed folk around the globe.     

However,  Greenbelt [GB],  ‘the UK’s largest Christian festival’, is sending out a sub-text that is totally at odds with a Christian understanding of sexuality by including PT  on its programme, and I ask it to reconsider.  Read the rest of this entry »

From The Telegraph

Fewer than one in five people who voted in a survey asking people which songs they wanted player at their funeral chose hymns.

Timeless classic songs such as 'What a Wonderful World' by Louis Armstrong are increasingly popular choices for final farewells, according to the research for the website My Last Song.

The poll, which asked people to vote on the type of music they wanted played at their funeral, found that 39 per cent chose modern secular music while those who wanted a mixture of all categories accounted for 27 per cent.

Paul Hensby, founder of the website, said the poor showing of hymns confirms the trend towards funerals with a greater secular content …

The Modern British Funeral is more celebratory than grieving as family and friends give tributes to the loved one rather than listening to readings delivered by the minister, said Mr Hensby.

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From LifeSite News

According to Tom Jensen, director of the North-Carolina based Public Policy Polling (PPP), polls finding that a majority of Americans support homosexual "marriage" cannot be trusted because Americans are sometimes hesitant to state their position before a live interviewer who may judge them to be intolerant.

Earlier this month a CNN poll found that 52% of Americans thought that homosexuals should have the constitutional right to marry; 46% said the Constitution should not give that right.

Public Policy Polling's latest survey however, found that 57% of Americans think that same-sex "marriage" should be illegal, while only 33% think it should be legal and 11% have no opinion.

The difference between the two polls, according to Jensen, springs from the fact that CNN and other major polling organizations use live interviewers, while Public Policy Polling uses an automated system.

He said that people are "more likely to tell their true feelings on an automated poll, where there's no social anxiety concern, than to a live interviewer who they may be worried about the reaction of."

"It is frankly impossible," he continued, "based on the results of gay marriage referendums over the last decade, to believe that a majority of Americans support its legalization."

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Charlemagne: The Economist

Europeans thought they were progressing towards an ideal civilisation. Now time is up, and it hurts

VIEWED from afar, Europeans are a complacent, ungrateful lot. Nannied from cradle to grave by the world’s most generous welfare systems, they squeal like spoiled children when asked to give up just a few of their playthings. As governments in the euro zone trim benefits and raise the retirement age in the wake of the sovereign-debt crisis, a wail of indignation has rung out and a wave of protests set in. “Unfair!” thundered Antonis Samaras, the Greek conservative opposition leader, this week, at the government’s proposed pension-reform plans. “Totally unfair!” howled Martine Aubry, the French opposition Socialist leader, at her country’s attempt to do the same.

American commentators seem particularly amused to watch Europeans “dismantle” their welfare systems, just as America embraces European-style universal health care. Only a year ago Europe’s leaders were laying into American free-marketry and declaring unbridled capitalism finished. “After listening to two years of stern and self-righteous lectures about the ‘failure’ of the American capitalist model,” writes Walter Russell Mead, an academic, “many Americans…are quietly enjoying the spectacle of the smug Europeans writhing in helpless indecision and pain over the continent’s self-inflicted wounds.”

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By Linda Saad, Gallup

Partisan disagreement drives national controversy on gay relations, abortion

Americans generally agree about the morality of 12 out of 16 behaviors or social policies that sometimes spark public controversy, with sizable majorities saying each is either "morally acceptable" or "morally wrong." By contrast, views on doctor-assisted suicide, gay and lesbian relations, abortion, and having a baby outside of marriage are closely divided — the percentage supporting and the percentage opposing are within 15 points of each other.

The findings are from Gallup's annual Values and Beliefs survey, conducted May 3-6, 2010. While doctor-assisted suicide is the most controversial of the issues tested, with the public tied at 46% over its moral acceptability, Americans are fairly unified in their opposition to another life-ending choice — suicide — with 77% calling this morally wrong.

The morality of gay or lesbian relations is also relatively divisive in comparison with other issues Gallup tested; however, for the first time since this question was established in 2001, a slight majority, 52%, now finds them morally acceptable. Prior to a transition period from 2007 to 2009, when Americans were closely split on the issue, the majority had considered these relations morally wrong.

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From BBC News

A north London council is offering its primary schools the chance to serve only halal meat on its menus.

Nine Harrow secondary schools already provide pupils with meat prepared according to Islamic law in a scheme that has been running for two years.

Harrow Council said it had received "no complaints" about serving halal-only meat, with vegetarian and fish options.

Now 52 primary schools in the area will have the option of taking part in the same programme.

Harrow councillor Brian Gate said it would be the choice of individual schools as to whether or not they chose to use catering firm Harrison Catering Services, which serves halal-only meat.

"The decision about whether to use an individual provider is for schools to make, as the funding is delegated to them," Councillor Gate said.

Halal is meat from animals that have been slaughtered in accordance with Sharia law.

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By Tom Whitehead, Telegraph

A quarter of the population will be aged 65 or over within 25 years raising fresh fears of an ageing time bomb.

Those aged 85 or over are alone expected to double to 3.3 million by 2033 to make up one in 20 of the country.

At the same time the proportion of people of working age is expected to fall meaning an increasing individual financial burden to support the elderly.

The Government is already planning to raise the state pension age from 65 in steps to 68 in bid to ease a black hole that could run in to billions of pounds.

Projections by the Office for National Statistics warn the number of people aged 65 or over is expected to increase by 6.5 million to 16.4 million by 2033, at which point they would make up 23 per cent of the population.

The number of "very old people" of 85 or over has already doubled from 0.6 million in 1983 to 1.3 million by 2008 and is expected to double again over the next 25 years.

At the same time, the proportion of the population aged between 16 and 64 is expected to fall from 65 per cent to 59 per cent.

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From AFA

WHY WAS THE 20th CENTURY SO BLOODY?

There have always been mad-men, but the 20th century was the bloodiest century in human history. Why? What changed? Why did the world suddenly find itself murdering millions of innocent people?

Is it possible that one specific idea influenced or provided a justification for the atrocities we know as Nazi Germany, the eugenics movement and abortion?

Is it possible that idea was Darwinian evolution?

Charles Darwin loved his wife and children. He paid his taxes and he never kicked his dog. But Charles Darwin had a big idea, and ideas have consequences.

Can we thank the advocates of natural selection for the deaths of millions of people? Or were their ideas twisted and misapplied? Dr. John West, Dr. Richard Weikart and Dr. David Berlinski present the evidence that seeks to resolve the question,

“What hath Darwin wrought?”

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By Julian Mann

This first appeared on the US-based orthodox Anglican news service, VirtueOnline:

In 1971, the feminist campaigner Rosie Boycott co-founded Spare Rib, the first magazine in Britain devoted to women's liberation. Its name was a deliberate play on the account in Genesis 2 of Eve’s creation from the rib that the Lord God took out of Adam’s side. The message was clear: Christian Britain demeaned women.

This week Ms Boycott, who edited two national newspapers in the 1990s here in the UK, wrote a hard-hitting article in the Daily Mail denouncing the sexual revolution. In her how words, she had a 'ringside seat' at the start of it as a 17-year-old in 1968:

As a feminist, people are often surprised when I say that casual sex can be damaging, but as the years have gone by, I know that life is much more fulfilling when it is shared with someone, with respect and trust at its heart. Besides, as I have said, promiscuity certainly isn't what feminism set out to achieve.

Her conclusion is startling:

Now, nearly 40 years on, it would seem that although so much has changed, attitudes to sex are subjugating women every bit as much as the old-fashioned misogyny of the past.

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By Bruce Atkinson, Ph.D. 
Special to virtueonline

"Things are getting worse very quickly now. The list of what we are required to approve is growing ever longer. Consider just the domain of sexual practice. First we were to approve sex before marriage, then without marriage, now against marriage. First with one, then with a series, now with a crowd. First with the other sex, then with the same. First between adults, then between children, then between adults and children. The last item has not been added yet, but will be soon: you can tell from the change in language, just as you can tell the approach of winter from the change in the color of leaves.

As any sin passes through its stages from temptation, to toleration, to approval, its name is first euphemized, then avoided, then forgotten. A colleague tells me that some of his fellow legal scholars call child molestation "intergenerational intimacy": that's euphemism. A good-hearted editor tried to talk me out of using the term "sodomy": that's avoidance. My students don't know the word "fornication" at all: that's forgetfulness." — From J. Budziszewski, "The Revenge of Conscience," First Things, June/July, 1998

The above quote by Budziszewski focuses on moral regression in a culture, especially as we observe it in the media. In his letter to the Romans (1:18-2:16), the Apostle Paul deals with individual moral regression. As outlined here, the process of regression is pretty much the same in individuals and the culture, and as we all know, cultural moral regression requires the regression of individuals to make it happen.

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