Anglican Mainstream

By Melanie Phillips

By Ed West, Telegraph

by Zac Alstin, MercatorNet

by Hilary White, LifeSite News

When in August thousands of British youth started spontaneously rioting and looting shops in some of the country’s largest urban centres, a great deal of ink was spilled assessing the reasons for the riots. For those not watching out the window, videos were almost instantly available on YouTube of hoodie-clad children, teenagers and twenty-somethings kicking in shop windows, cheerily smiling and laughing while they helped themselves to an array of popular commercial goods.

By Timothy Dalrymple, Patheos

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in “The Closing of the American Mind”: “I am the Lord Your God: Relax!”

By Simon Caldwell, Mailonline

The Pope yesterday blamed the riots that swept Britain last month on a loss of awareness of what is right and wrong.

Benedict XVI said that ‘moral relativism’ had permeated British society to such a degree that many people no longer held shared values and were confused about what constituted wrongful actions.

And he urged the Government to remedy the crisis by spreading wealth – and ensuring its policies were underpinned by an objective belief in what is right.

The Pope told Nigel Baker, Britain’s ambassador to the Holy See, that it would be wise for the Government ‘to employ policies that are based on enduring values that cannot be simply expressed in legal terms’.

He went on: ‘This is especially important in the light of events in England this summer.

‘When policies do not presume or promote objective values, the resulting moral relativism tends instead to produce frustration, despair, selfishness and a disregard for the life and liberty of others.’

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By Albert Mohler

The Christian church has faced no shortage of challenges in its 2,000-year history. But now it’s facing a challenge that is shaking its foundations: homosexuality.

From National Review Online: Interview with Robert P George

Marriage was already in bad shape when New York’s governor rewrote its meaning in the state on Friday night with his signature on the “Marriage Equality Act.”

[...]  The vote in New York to redefine marriage advances the cause of loosening norms of sexual ethics, and promoting as innocent — and even “liberating” — forms of sexual conduct that were traditionally regarded in the West and many other places as beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures. Early advocates of this cause, such as Margaret Sanger, Alfred Kinsey, and Hugh Hefner, proposed to “liberate” people from “repressive” moral standards that pointlessly deprived individuals of what they insisted were harmless pleasures, and impeded the free development of their personalities. They attacked and ridiculed traditional norms of sexual conduct as mere “hangups” that it was long past time for sophisticated people to get over. By the early 1970s, their basic outlook had become the mainstream view among cultural elites in the U.S. and elsewhere in the West. Although Sanger was a racist and a eugenicist, though Kinsey was a liar and a fraud, though Hefner was a buffoon, the liberationist view they had championed eventually hardened into something very close to a matter of orthodoxy in elite circles, and liberalism as a political movement went for it hook, line, and sinker. Devotion to “sexual freedom” had been no part of the liberalism of FDR, George Meaney, Cesar Chavez, Hubert Humphrey, or the leaders and rank-and-file members of the civil-rights movement. Today, however, allegiance to the cause of sexual freedom is the nonnegotiable price of admission to the liberal (or “progressive”) club. It is worth noting that more than a few conservatives have bought into a (more limited) version of it as well, as we see in the debate over redefining marriage.

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By Chuck Colson, Breakpoint

New York has become the largest state to approve so-called same-sex “marriage.” Supporters, obviously, were delighted at the news: Parades, street parties and countless other demonstrations of their feelings of moral superiority.

One of the most outlandish such demonstrations was found at Slate.com. There, a headline spoke of the “dead hand” keeping other states from approving same-sex “marriage.”

Now, in normal usage, “dead hand” refers to events in the distant past that disproportionately affect the present. But in Slate’s usage, the term was referring to recent popular votes, many less than five years ago, to prohibit same-sex marriage. It’s difficult to imagine a better example of the failure of elite opinion to understand how most Americans think and even to understand how democracy really works.

What’s behind this failure? My friend Princeton professor Robbie George laid it out in National Review online. According to George, who is co-author of the Manhattan Declaration, the New York vote was about more than marriage; it advanced “the cause of loosening norms of sexual ethics.”

It was part of larger trend wherein “forms of sexual conduct” that were traditionally regarded as “beneath the dignity of human beings as free and rational creatures” are promoted as “innocent” and “even liberating.”

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By Brendan O'Neill, Telegraph

From Barna

A new national survey of registered voters conducted by the Barna Group reveals that the issues that will most affect the candidate people support for President in the 2012 election are most likely to be those affecting their personal security and comfort. The matters that are likely to have the least impact on their choice of candidate are moral issues.

The issues most likely to influence which candidate voters embrace in the 2012 presidential election are health care (which 64% said will have “a lot of influence” on the candidate they choose), tax policies (60%), terrorism (50%) and employment policies (50%).

A second level of influential issues included immigration policies (45%), education policy (44%), the wars in the Middle East (43%), and America’s dependence upon foreign oil (38%).

The issues noted as being least likely to influence how voters feel about potential candidates tended to be those with distinct moral underpinnings. Those matters include domestic poverty policies (37%), abortion (27%), environmental policy (26%), and gay marriage (24%).

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By Hilary White, LifeSite News

The Queen’s cousin speaks to LifeSite News

Lord Nicholas Windsor, the youngest child of the Duke and Duchess of Kent and first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, told LifeSiteNews.com earlier this month that patience is required from those waiting for true moral and spiritual leadership to turn the anti-human, anti-life tide in Britain.

Lord Windsor sat down with LSN at the annual plenary meeting of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy for Life on February 25th. He spoke at length of his conversion to Catholicism, through the influence of the late Pope John Paul II, and his dedication to the pro-life philosophy.

The hope of turning society away from the post-Christian amorality, he said, lies with the post-Baby Boom generation: “Our generation is the one after [the one] which made these, I think, calamitous decisions. To some extent, our generation looks upon all that with horror.”

He said that “undoubtedly” true leaders will emerge from the generation disillusioned with the social revolution. “There are inspiring people,” he added, but “perhaps not on the national stage … One has to be patient.”

Lord Windsor was received into the Catholic Church ten years ago and became the first ever member of the current English Royal Family to be married at the Vatican and the first since 1554 to be married according to the rites of the Catholic Church. His son Albert was the first member of the Royal Family to be baptized a Catholic since 1688.

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By Ross Douthat, New York Times

From AAC

[...]  The world of the church, the state, and morality in our society has certainly changed over my 40+ years in holy orders. The governments of several nations have seemingly turned against sound morality and embraced homosexuality as one of the "in" things to be protected, even promoted. At the same time, those who resist will be crushed legally, as we already see happening in the UK, where a Christian family who ran a bed and breakfast within their home wished to restrict couples sharing a room to those who were husband and wife. This obviously meant that they wouldn't rent to unmarried heterosexual couples, nor would they rent to homosexual couples. The hand of the court struck them down, giving a huge award to the gay couple who filed suit and threatening bankruptcy to the Christian couple. May the hand of God vindicate them and come against those who would punish the righteous.

Now the English Parliament is preparing to consider changing the marriage and Civil Partnership rules. It is sometimes difficult for those of us "across the pond" to understand what is happening and what all the collateral effects might be when the British propose such laws. We have an excellent piece from the UK written by the Rev'd Peter Ould about the proposed changes, and I recommend your reading it.

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Christianity Today Editorial

In December, Congress and President Obama ended the era of Don't Ask, Don't Tell (DADT) in the United States military. Today, American political culture is far more open to gay members of the armed forces than it was in 1993, when President Clinton created his famous compromise.

In civilian life, Don't Ask, Don't Tell attitudes are also fading. Once, this quiet accommodation to the presence of gays in our midst afforded the luxury of ambiguity, allowing heterosexuals to be friendly and supportive of gay coworkers, friends, and family without having to deal head-on with their sexuality. In order to be good neighbors, evangelical Christians have often chosen not to deal with the subject, making mental dis-tinctions between their personal beliefs and their family and community relationships.

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From Cranmer

[,,,]  If David Cameron wants a ‘Big Society’, he must bring ‘We the people’ into his thinking. And to do that, he must devolve and trust. But if he will not do that within his own party, he is not likely to achieve it in the country. The ‘Big Society’ is about personal and collective responsibility – the Church has been doing it for centuries. And that irrefutable fact calls for humility on the part of the Prime Minister: instead of criticising and lecturing church leaders, he might just sit at their feet and learn about the church’s centuries of experience in educating children, feeding the poor, housing the homeless and ensuring justice for the oppressed.

The ‘Big Society’ is a true Conservative vision: it respects the individual, embraces diversity and empowers community. It shows faith, deep faith, in mankind as the vehicle of compassion, of neighbourliness, of love. It demands the bottom-up participation of the traditional institutions – family, church, charities, community and country. So any attack on the family, any negation of religious freedom and any denigration of our instinctive patriotism is an offence against the ‘Big Society’: you cannot force families or coerce charities or the church into doing what’s right when you pursue policies and issue diktats which are wrong.

There is a balance to be struck between liberalism and conservatism. And that ought to be at the heart of every policy. If David Cameron really believes that strong families lead to strong societies, he must put his policies where his heart is. If he believes that the church is indispensible to social cohesion, he must harness its strengths and build on its conservative values and roll back the immoral cultural revolution.

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By Albert Mohler

The breathtaking pace of the moral revolution now transforming Western cultures staggers belief. In the course of a single generation, the sexual morality that has survived for thousands of years is giving way to a radically different moral understanding. Just consider the couple in the United Kingdom who were recently found guilty of discrimination because they allowed only married couples to share a bed at their small hotel.

Peter and Hazelmary Bull own a bed and breakfast hotel in Cornwall. In September of 2008, a homosexual couple requested a single bed and was denied that accommodation by the Bulls. The couple sued, and this week a judge found the Bulls guilty of discrimination under Britain’s Equality Act of 2007.

What makes this case particularly troubling is the nature of the judge’s decision.

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By Marcia Segelstein

If the government has its way, cigarette makers will soon be required to use graphic warnings on packages.  Among the labels being considered by the Food and Drug Administration are a picture of a corpse's feet accompanied by the words, "Cigarettes cause fatal lung disease," and a man blowing smoke out of a hole in his throat with the caption, "Cigarettes are addictive."

By Cal Thomas, World Magazine

People who take polls for a living will tell you that depending on the methodology, the sample, how a question is asked, and the understanding of the ones being polled, the outcome can pretty much be predetermined.

If you are dependent on a superior for your job and that superior tells you he wants a certain conclusion reached about a policy he wishes to implement, that, too, can affect the outcome.

Such is the case with President Obama, who has told gay rights groups he intends to end the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy and allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military. From the comments by Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Michael Mullen and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, it appears the president’s message has placed their job security above what is best for the military and the country. Many lower-ranking officers do not share their opinion about the effects openly homosexual service members would have on our military.

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