Thursday, August 11, 2022


Archbishop of Canterbury condemns gay marriage, but Anglican bishops remain divided

Welby is showing some spine in the matter. He might make a good Cantuar yet. He even seems to believe in God, not always guaranteed in the Anglican episcopate. Runcie clearly did not

The head of the Anglican Communion attempted to reinforce the church's stance against homosexual marriage this week, but the move was squashed by outcry from various bishops.

The controversy came to a head during the ongoing 2022 Lambeth Conference — a rare meeting of Anglican Communion bishops from around the world.

The Global South Fellowship of Anglican Churches (GSFA) — self-described as "a worldwide fellowship of orthodox Anglican Provinces and Dioceses within the Anglican Communion" — came to the conference with the gay marriage ban firmly on their agenda.

"We often feel that our voices are not listened to, or respected," South Sudanese Primate Rev. Justin Badi told The Church Times. "Today, in Canterbury, we may be ‘gathered together’, but we most certainly cannot ‘walk together’ until Provinces which have gone against scripture — and the will of the consensus of the bishops — repent and return to orthodoxy."

He continued, "The Communion is not in a healthy condition at present, and only major surgery will put that right."

They were bolstered in private, if not publicly, by Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby. The archbishop, by the nature of his office, is the most senior cleric in the Anglican Communion but holds limited powers of governance on his own.

Welby met with the GSFA in private on July 29 and offered to write a letter backing the traditional view of marriage, according to Anglican Church journalist George Conger. A call was scheduled for the conference — a sort of vote amongst the bishops to endorse or abandon proposed belief statements.

The next day — after word got out about the push for a formal rejection of homosexual marriage — the conference was threatened with chaos.

Many bishops reportedly stayed seated and did not receive the Eucharist during the mass. Protests against recording votes on church calls arose, and eventually, the conference ceased keeping track of individual bishops' decisions.

The call to reinforce Lambeth 1.10 was eventually dropped.

However, there was no demonstration against the archbishop nor the conference, and proceedings continued.

Despite the fervor, Welby made good on his promised letter, released to the faithful on Tuesday.

"I wanted to write this letter to you now so that I can clarify two matters for all of us. Given the deep differences that exist within the Communion over same-sex marriage and human sexuality, I thought it important to set down what is the case," Welby wrote in his letter.

He continued, "I write therefore to affirm that the validity of the resolution passed at the Lambeth Conference 1998, 1:10 is not in doubt and that whole resolution is still in existence. Indeed the Call on Human Dignity made clear this is the case, as the resolution is quoted from three times in the paragraph 2.3 of the Call on Human Dignity."

The archbishop went on to point out that the 1998 statues cited did not make mention of sanctions or exclusions based on obedience. Welby said that the "Pain, anxiety, and contention" caused by Lambeth 1.10 was "very clear."

He concluded, "To be reconciled to one another across such divides is not something we can achieve by ourselves. That is why, as we continue to reflect on 1 Peter, I pray that we turn our gaze towards Christ who alone has the power to reconcile us to God and to one another."

Anglicanism has been fracturing for decades over gay relationships, women's ordination and other issues. Those rifts blew wide open in 2003 when the New York-based Episcopal Church consecrated the first openly gay bishop, Gene Robinson, in New Hampshire.

The year prior, the top U.S. Episcopal legislative body, or General Convention, voted to authorize gay marriages in their churches.

In 2009, Anglican national leaders in Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda and other church provinces helped create the Anglican Church in North America, as a theologically conservative alternative to the U.S. Episcopal Church.

Anglicans, whose roots are in the missionary work of the Church of England, are the third-largest grouping of Christians in the world, behind Roman Catholics and the Orthodox.

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Hostile Environment: Tech’s DEI Disaster

An exploration of the unhinged workplace culture gripping the halls of our country’s most important companies

At this point, most people have internalized a sense the tech industry is run by crazy people. In fact, the industry is run by cowards terrified of a very small fraction of their employees — a legitimately crazy subset of political activists with many friends in the activist (establishment) press. For the last couple years, we’ve spent a great deal of time criticizing tech leadership for ceding authority to the deranged excesses of cultural authoritarians. But there’s a larger story we haven’t yet explored: what about the greater majority of tech workers, terrified of being targeted by their most unhinged colleagues, who just want to do their jobs?

Liz Wolfe is an associate editor at Reason and a weekly guest on The Hill’s YouTube show, Rising. She guests today for Pirate Wires with a wild exploration of the hostile workplace culture increasingly normalized in the halls of our country’s most important companies.

-Solana

At the Amazon fulfillment center where Leonard works, auditing how other employees on the floor pack boxes, everyone walks under a rainbow arch of balloons each day of Pride month, which is celebrated each June.

The rainbow balloon arch wasn’t a total shock to Leonard. Amazon has forced affinity groups on its employees, both those who work in warehouses and those who sit at desks all day. There’s PWD (people with disabilities), BEN (Black Employee Network), Indigenous@Amazon, and BPP (Body Positive Peers). There’s Glamazon, which Leonard says is for LGBT people.

Most of the warehouse’s Pride activities are relatively innocuous, but silly — dress-up contests, for example, and morning briefings reminding people how to be a good ally. Company-issued notices placed on bathroom stalls talk in glowing, over-the-top terms about Amazon’s commitment to queer employees and, just a column over, remind fulfillment center workers that their bags will be X-rayed when they leave the warehouse to go home. “I couldn’t care less who the folks over there loading trucks at the ship dock like to sleep with,” says Leonard. “Not my business.”

“Maybe if I was a two-spirit polyamorous noncomforming whatsit I could celebrate my sexuality on the company dime,” Leonard snarks, noting that he’s a heterosexual guy who’s put off by all this stuff. “Seems like a real double-standard.”

He’s far from alone in feeling this way. Few people dispute that it’s a good thing that more gay people than ever before can safely mention their spouse at work, without fear of being discriminated against or being cautioned to shut up. But there’s a big difference between rightful, overdue expansion of civil liberties, and where we’re at now.

Many employees of tech companies, both large and small, express frustration with work time being diverted to mandatory Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) sessions and Ibram X. Kendi talks; anger at being hassled to join affinity groups — employee groups for people to gather with others who share the same identity or characteristics — or waste meeting time declaring their pronouns; discomfort with managers sounding off about police brutality or the recent Dobbs abortion ruling. They point to a broad sense that work has become the land of extracurriculars, as if it’s freshman orientation on a college campus or a summer camp and you have to pick an activity schedule.

Harry, who works at a fully-remote expense management software company, says a whole DEI bureaucracy has sprung up in the last few years including “cultural events” around “ridiculous things like ‘the rich history of AAPI mixology.’” (Names have been changed throughout to protect people’s anonymity; company names have been noted where possible.)

With “explicit pressure from management to put your pronouns in your Slack profiles and your email signatures” and “company-organized ‘safe space’ and ‘coping workshops’” (featuring therapists!) in the wake of the Dobbs decision, Harry’s learned not to push back. When he lodged dissent a few years ago, it yielded nothing; he learned to lay low.

Sandy, who works for the email marketing company Mailchimp, says after the Dobbs ruling, which overturned Roe v. Wade, “everyone was posting about it in various slack channels, talking about it as if it was something that would cause you not to be able to function at work.” The company matches certain charitable donations, like those dealing with racial justice and LGBT issues — including the nonprofit Drag Queen Story Hour. “I don't feel comfortable saying I don't want to contribute to these things because I don't agree with them,” says Sandy.

The company has chosen to provide its services, free of charge, to certain organizations — like racial justice organizations, in the wake of a newly reinvigorated Black Lives Matter moment that started following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020. But such generous pro bono provisions only go one way.

Until recently, Kasey worked for a company based in Santa Barbara that makes doctor-patient portal software. If you make the foolish mistake of using the word guys in Slack, “a slackbot would pop up and tell you to use a more inclusive term,” she says. People on her team would get 45-minute lectures on Fridays by what’s termed “equity groups” on topics like proper pronoun usage.

The worst part, she adds, is that the software was actually really good. The company was “KILLING it.” She’d watched it progress from summer 2020 until recently, when “the woke [stuff] happened, then their competitors passed them and innovation fell behind.” She didn’t end up leaving because of wokeness, but because the product was suffering — which is a related issue, she notes, if company resources are being frequently diverted to glorified HR efforts in lieu of improving the product. “Far more effort was spent on pronouns than on what we were paid to do.”

“My big concern is that DEI is driving away employees who lean more conservative culturally and politically,” says Abby, who adds that she’s a leftie with some “libertarian sympathies.” “I might not agree with their world views, but we didn't hire them for those, we hired them for their skills.” At her 1,200-person company which does single sign-on authentication, “it’s not one individual or group of individuals doing anything extreme, rather it's the perception that there's some institutionally correct way of existing, even if that way runs contrary to your beliefs.”

Sam works for GitHub, an internet hosting/software developing provider with sub-5,000 employees. A three-hour meeting was held for employees on the anniversary of George Floyd’s death. Affinity groups are robust, holding biweekly hourlong meetings, for queer people, black people, and women. “Microsoft made all their subsidiaries’ employees watch a series of videos featuring legal scholar and author Kenji Yoshino about covering and allyship, and how we shouldn't make people feel like they need to hide their true selves because he used to feel like he had to hide the fact that he was a gay Asian,” says Sam. “Covering is always bad, [Yoshino] said, unless you hold certain types of views, then you may want to just accept the way things are and keep your head down.”

“I'm shocked they haven't ended up with an Antonio Garcia Martinez type situation where a small group of employees Slack-bully someone into getting fired,” Sam says. “I know it's coming.”

Two former tech employees’ names popped up as I chatted with today’s disillusioned workers, one fired from Apple, the other from Google, for being purported misogynists.

James Damore is widely regarded as the original workplace-wokeness whistleblower, though he landed in that spot accidentally. While lonely in China, he wrote a document that he circulated internally at Google, where he’d been an engineer for four years.

Calling Google’s culture an “ideological echo chamber,” Damore argued that disparities between men and women in tech roles could be partially explained by biology — something advanced by prominent clinical psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. He circulated his memo internally in July 2017; Gizmodo published a leaked copy of it on August 5; Damore was fired two days later.

He pursued a National Labor Relations Board complaint, then a class-action suit, then private arbitration. He now lives far away from Mountain View, and doesn’t do many speaking events or TV appearances.

More here:

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Biden’s 87,000 new IRS agents may be short-lived

By Rick Manning

President Joe Biden and ‘conservative’ Democrat Joe Manchin’s alleged inflation fighting legislation passed through the Senate this past weekend. It will be surprising to many Americans that the inflation fight includes hiring 87,000 new Internal Revenue Service agents, who are supposed to squeeze $200 billion out of their pockets over the next ten years.

Senate Republican Mike Crapo (R-ID) reports that the Biden inflation bill will make the IRS, “one of the largest federal agencies — larger than the Pentagon, State Department and Border Patrol combined.”

The magnitude of the expansion cannot be overemphasized. Currently, the IRS has just over 78,000 total full time employees doing all of the business of the Agency. This number will be dwarfed by the newly incoming 87,000 enforcement agents. Just the seating charts will be a logistical nightmare.

By comparison the entire Border Patrol only has 19,500 agents. With the immigration crisis at the border, perhaps Biden is planning on auditing the under the table earnings of the millions of newly arrived illegals to make them think twice about their choice to invade our country, but somehow I don’t think so.

But there is a snag in Biden’s plan to audit America into oblivion. Congress revisits the appropriations for the IRS at least once a year through the Financial Services and General Government appropriations bill. Due to Congress being completely broken procedurally, this appropriation bill is often passed as part of a Continuing Resolution (CR) or by an Omnibus bill each of which lumps multiple spending bills together.

To pass a CR or Omnibus bill doesn’t require 51 votes, but instead needs the magical 60 votes to overcome a filibuster in the Senate. Meaning that 41 GOP Senators can lay down a line in the sand and simply just say no to this dramatic expansion of the Internal Revenue Service by refusing to fund it.

Ending Biden’s weaponized IRS enforcement army before it ever gets hired should be a non-negotiable part of the upcoming government funding negotiations. After all, the best way to stop an infestation is to stop it before it spreads.

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Activist historians — a monumental waste of space

Our last visit to Hobart was a few years ago, but I remember it well. The waters were a bright blue, the views breathtaking, and the scenery spectacular. The locals were friendly, the beer taps were flowing, and the pubs abundant. The seafood was incredibly fresh, the restaurants diverse and plentiful, and the wines scintillating. But something was not right.

Even a delightful high summer day, the heat mitigated by a gentle sea breeze, was not enough to dispel the onset of melancholy. Morose and listless, I returned to the apartment.

By late afternoon, I had lost interest in our plans for the evening. A sleepless and restless night followed. By next morning, my despondency had given way to a burning anger at a monumental and longstanding injustice, the source of which I could not identify.

For several years I wondered what troubled me so. But thanks to the Hobart City Council, I now know the cause of my angst. It was the fact that the city’s named statues feature white men exclusively. Yes, all seven of them. As The Australian reported this week, the council will deliberate on a report which has found the city has too many monuments to “Caucasian males”.

The catalyst for this epiphany is a statue in Central Hobart of William Crowther, a nineteenth century naturalist, surgeon and premier. In 1869, he was accused of decapitating the corpse of an Indigenous man, William Lanne, for anatomical study. The council has all but decided the monument will be removed, which conveniently opens the way for a cultural purge of other colonial figures.

If it accepts the report’s recommendations, the council will decide on a policy for further statue “additions and removals”. Mind you, that’s not to say all seven statues will be toppled. For example, former premier Albert Ogilvie’s statue is likely to have the backing of the city’s Greens councillors. As the University of Tasmania website notes, the former Labor premier was “sympathetic” to the Soviet Union in the mid to late 1930s.

As for the remaining statues, well, decolonisation. No more being confronted with the monument to Abel Tasman, the first European to reach what was known as Van Diemen’s Land. No more steeling oneself when passing by King Edward VII’s likeness. Question the activists who parrot this nonsense, and you will be accused of waging a culture war. As for the council’s meek acceptance of this mantra, how does it sit with the organisation’s vision statement as outlined in its last annual report? You know, “We resist mediocrity and sameness”?

Citing numbers compiled by Monument Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald reported this week that 38 monuments across the country are dedicated to Captain James Cook. But if activists have their way, that number will fall. According to Nancy Cushing, an associate professor of history at the University of Newcastle, every statue should be assessed as to its relevance every 50 years or so.

“People say if you take down a statue you are changing history, but I don’t quite see it that way,” she told the SMH. “Statues manifest a set of beliefs held at least by some people at the time they were erected.”

The latter may be so, but nonetheless to remove statues, especially ones that date back to the colonial era, is to remove historical objects from the landscape. And increasingly the motivation for doing so is not to change history – that would be impossible – but to change our interpretation of history to suit a militant narrative.

In any event, you might assume the historian’s default position would be to preserve historical statues as opposed to assigning them a use by date. Maintaining their existence does not prevent academics from rigorously and objectively reassessing the legacy of the people they depict.

But apparently that is no longer the case. If you want to know where the discipline of history is heading, I suggest you read Cushing’s essay ‘#CoalMustFall: Revisiting Newcastle’s coal monument in the Anthropocene,’ which this year was awarded the Australian Historical Association’s Marian Quartly Prize.

The subject of her paper is self-evident, a monument that was erected in 1909. To my mind, the display is innocuous, but not to Cushing. Its presence, she writes, “silently contradicts the weight of scientific opinion which indicates that continued reliance on burning coal will lead not to wellbeing but to cataclysm”.

She imagines the monument being wrested from its base and thrown into the harbour by protesters. “Even without such a violent intervention, it is timely to consider what is to be done with a memorial to a substance which is now known to be an agent of irreparable harm to the planet.” The urgent situation justifies what Cushing calls “activist histories”.

You will be relieved to know she does not call for mob intervention. Instead Cushing wants the monument shifted to a museum. The original would be replaced with a “counter-monument” to “manage the grief associated with the exposure of coal’s role in the slow disaster of climate change”.

And her parallels aren’t exactly subtle. “As was the case with Jochen Gerz and Esther-Shalev Gerz’s 1986 counter-monument against fascism in Hamburg [Germany], the coal counter-monument would soon be covered with a ‘conglomerate of approval, hatred, anger and stupidity’”.

Cushing also envisages a counter-monument on the coastline where Newcastle’s former gaol was built in 1816. “From this position, a counter-monument would be visible to locals and visitors including the crews of the bulk coal carriers waiting to enter the port, and like the gaol in its time, offer up a warning to observers that behavioural change is necessary to avoid dire consequences.”

Excuse me, but is this a history lecture or did I walk into the drama class by mistake?

As for Hobart City Council, its ‘Community, Culture and Events Committee’ will today decide the fate of the Crowther statue. If it adopts the report’s recommendations, it will spend $20,000 on removing and storing the bronze component while retaining the plinth. Another $50,000 will be spent on “interpretive elements onsite”.

The result? Well, you could say these grand plans resemble the councillors who are in favour of them. A total waste of space.

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My other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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