Category Archives: Signs of the Times

After Gay Marriage: No, The END Is NOT Near

Yes, the Same sex marriage forces in Massachusetts and elsewhere have deployed a secret weapon that is proving irresistible. And it does not involve locking opponents up, burning their churches, banning their books and movies — none of that paranoid silliness.

Even so, it’s real, and it works. I’ve seen it in operation close up, and am ready to to spill the beans:

It’s NORMALITY.

Legal same sex marriage expands the realm of day to day family life, with all its routines: juggling work & child care; homework, dentists, soccer, adolescence; fix the dinner and clean up that room. Plus the usual conflicts, which sometimes lead to divorce. Which is sad, but also NORMAL.

That’s what life is for legal same sex families. Flagrant, flamboyant, in-your-face NORMAL.

And over time, I haven’t seen anything that can beat it.

The “Hubris” of A “Judicial Putsch” — Dissents From The Same Sex Marriage Ruling

Together the four Supreme Court dissents make up a longer body of text than the decision. So for readability I am presenting them in three sizes:

First, the “Mini” or “Executive Summary” version, select quotes that add up to almost 4000 words.

Next, The Medium size, a fuller selection of the texts, which comes to almost 12,000 words.

And finally, at this link, one can read the dissents in their entirety, at about 19,000 words. (To find them, scroll down past the initial, “Opinion of the Court” section.)

Supreme-court-rainbow

Again, I have refrained from editorializing here, though as various commentators in the media have already said, that was not so easy. Many provocative statements and assertions are here, and they will rightly evoke extended discussion here and elsewhere.

The Dissents are presented in order of “rank”: Roberts, the Chief Justice, goes first, followed by Scalia, the longest-serving among the group; then Thomas, and finally the newbie Alito. That’s how they are presented here.

The Supreme Court Marriage Decision — Made Readable!

The Court, in this decision, holds same-sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all States. It follows that the Court also must hold—and it now does hold—that there is no lawful basis for a State to refuse to recognize a lawful same-sex marriage performed in another State on the ground of its same-sex character.

* * *

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

Richard Nixon’s First Cover-Up: His Quaker Religion

A former Nixon speechwriter-turned newspaper columnist compared Nixon’s personality to a many-layered birthday cake: cut into his persona and there was layer after layer, after layer.
It’s a striking image. But historian Larry Ingle’s new book about Nixon’s religion left me with a very different visual sense: that I had been peering down a deep, dark well, then shining a small but sharp penlight into the depths, hoping to glimpse the reflection of water, but finally seeing only a distant, dry emptiness, with an accumulation of trash, the deposit of endless lies.
And without Ingle’s saying so flatly, I also got nearly as strong a sense from the book that Richard Nixon, the second Quaker president, learned his lying ways first from, of all people, his supposedly “sainted” mother.
What’s the evidence for this?

Carolina Quakers: Saturday Showdown at Pine Hill?

What does “Integrity” mean in relation to North Carolina Yearly Meeting of Friends?

Does it mean taking seriously the four times that Faith & Practice says that it is NOT a CREED and thinking for oneself? Or is it picking out a few phrases from it and trying to make them the “absolute authority” for an organized purge of officers, committees, and meetings–something that same Faith & Practice does NOT authorize anywhere??

Is it attacking meetings which have honest issues about the fairness of their treatment in the yearly meeting, and reflect that in the partial payment of askings?

Or is there integrity in making widespread public threats about withholding ALL askings as of April 15, 2015 unless there was a purge by that date of disfavored meetings — and then abandoning the threat when the deadline passes and it doesn’t work?

Is it shown in getting creeds from other Quaker branches, purchasing most study resources and programs from Baptists, ignoring practically every Quaker in history and almost all the yearly meeting programs (except, of course, Quaker Lake) — and then demanding that other meetings be forbidden from freely associating with other kinds of Quakers, on their own time, and with their own funds?

And is there integrity in pursuing heresy inside this yearly meeting while making detailed plans to secede and form a separate body, one which will abandon just about every Quaker distinctive there is?