Coty's Weblog

10 Years

I don't really do much posting of a terribly personal nature here. However, I thought I would mention that today marks 10 years of marriage for me and my lovely wife. Given the homosexual assault on marriage that we've endured during that time, I think that is something.

Sure, it was nip and tuck when an activist judge thwarted the will of the majority and struck down a state amendment banning same sex marriage. (I mean, seriously, this is Atlanta. There is a lot of temptation here if that option is open.) Just in time, though, our Supreme Court overruled that judge and upheld the amendment.

B. B. King at Chastain with The Neville Brothers and Dr. John

My wife got us tickets to see B. B. King along with The Neville Brothers and Dr. John at Chastain last night. It was part of the Classic Chastain series. It was kind of last minute, but the concierge in my wife's office building had tickets free up.

It was really a terrific show. Three things really made an impression on me.

First, B. B. King is 80 years old, and he is still working hard. This was my first time seeing B. B. live, but I have seen a number of other old bluesmen, and I have to say that you will not find a harder working group of entertainers. B. B. did play from a chair, but he was still working.

Second, having New Orleanians Dr. John and the Neville brothers there just reminded me of what a tragedy Katrina was. That anyone even talked about not rebuilding makes me furious. New Orleans is a national treasure. There is nothing else like it.

Finally, The Neville Brothers closed their session with Aaron singing Amazing Grace. I found it profoundly moving. It may have been because I was in an especially religious frame of mind as a result of following too much of the negative response to the election of Bishop Jefferts Schori. Aaron Neville's singing was just so unaffected, so beautiful, and so clearly in touch with his deep faith, that it really moved me.

Welcome Bishop Schori

This last Sunday, the Episcopal Church elected Katherine Jefferts Schori to be its presiding bishop. Bishop Schori will be the first female presiding bishop in church history.

Much is being written about how fractious this election will be. This CNN.com article quotes a number of conservative Anglicans who are troubled by Schori's election, including The Rev. Canon Chris Sugden, a leader of the Anglican Mainstream, who said Bishop Schori's election:

...shows that the Episcopal leadership is going to do what they want to do regardless of what it means to the rest of the communion.

I'm not sure I see what it should mean to the rest of the communion. At most it would seem that it will require the other primates in the communion to interact with a woman as an equal. Is that really asking too much?

FWIW, here are the details of the vote:

26th Presiding Bishop election results from the House of Bishops and House of Deputies

I regret that other members of the communion consider issues of gender and sexuality so critical when, as Bishop Schori noted in her first press conference, there are more pressing issues:

When a reporter asked how the "average Anglican who is a black woman under 30, earns two dollars a day and is evangelical," might react to news of her consecration and to her consent to Gene Robinson's consecration, she responded: "If the average Anglican is as you describe, she is dealing with hunger, inadequate housing, unclean water and unavailability of education. Those are the places I would start. The issue of sexuality comes along much higher on the hierarchy of needs."

[Episcopal News Service: Jefferts Schori's 'Reign of God']

Христос воскрес!

Christ has risen!

The title of this post is the Russian translation. I love the sound of it, and I can't get it out of my head on Easter.

Happy Easter!

Happy Mardi Gras!

Not much of Mardi Gras left, but we had a good one. Since we're pretty far from New Orleans and we're Episcopalians, it was really a Shrove Tuesday celebration at our church, but it was fun, nevertheless—particularly for the kids. Plus, I'm always up for pancakes for dinner.

We came home to find we had received a king cake from a good friend (and fellow Episcopalian) from Baton Rouge. We got home too late to eat any, so we'll have to extend Mardi Gras a bit into tomorrow.

Things I have a hard time imagining Jesus saying

The Atlanta Journal Constitution: Q&A / RICHARD LAND: Southern Baptists 'pro-human rights' too: He is an economic ignoramus who is wedded to socialist-mandated policies that have failed in every country they've been tried in. The old welfare system did perpetuate poverty. The new welfare reform is bringing people out of poverty. Federal, individual and corporate income tax receipts have exploded. There're more jobs and higher corporate profits. Jim Wallis just doesn't understand basic economics. What he calls social justice is what is running Western Europe into the ground.

Of course, Dr. Land is only a Baptist minister. He is not Jesus. However, I think it is worth considering whether someone who claims to represent Christians, Christian values—and, presumably, Christ to some extent—at least sounds a bit like you'd think Christ would.

Now, Dr. Land may well know better than I, but I don't think Jesus directly addressed the abject failure of socialism in Western Europe (Has Dr. Land been to Western Europe?), and he certainly didn't say anything about how he felt about corporate income tax receipts and how high he thought corporate profits should be. He did say something about "render[ing] unto Caesar...", and he talked quite a bit about the care of the poor. Given that, I just don't think he would have that big an issue with progressive taxation. (Particularly in the U.S., given that only a few developed countries have a lower tax burden.)

Of course, that doesn't really matter since Dr. Land doesn't "get [my] theology by adding up texts in the Bible." Apparently he is free to pick and choose what he believes to be the major themes of the Bible.

I suppose it isn't very Christian of me to pick on Dr. Land. I'm sure he has done much good work in his career. However, I just had such high hopes for this article when I saw the headline on Saturday, and it really let me down.

P.S. I know Dr. Land has been to Western Europe. He got his Ph.D. at Oxford. It was a rhetorical question. I just get tired of so many Americans talking about Western Europe as if they don't have running water and everyone is living in the streets. It really isn't that bad. It is largely just different. I'd even argue that they are pretty darn competitive given their penchant for long summer vacations, nationalized healthcare, etc.

In the Spirit of the Season

Robert Sanders was kind enough to pass along information regarding the threat to our moral fiber embodied by vegetarian gay sharks.

That set me to thinking about other stories with similar themes. It is the Christmas season, so my mind quickly turned to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Can this be anything but another thinly veiled allegory of a macho father learning to accept his gay son?

And don’t even get me started on the Island of Misfit Toys. That isn’t even thinly veiled.

Parents protect your children!

Textbook Disclaimers

I love these alternative textbook disclaimers:

If you didn’t know it already, good ol’ Cobb County Georgia Board of Education has been putting that first disclaimer about evolution in its biology textbooks.

Thanks to jwz for the pointer.

There Goes My High Horse

I was in the midst of a post in which I lamented the state of scientific understanding in our nation when this Gallup poll reports that “Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence” and more facts like it. In the wake of the election, I of course equated the bulk of the other two thirds with all the “values voters” who kept Bush in office.

Then I read this CBS News article that reports that more that half of Kerry voters would like both creationism and evolution taught in schools, and almost a quarter of Kerry voters would like creationism taught instead of evolution.

Granted, the numbers for Bush supporters are higher, but WTF? Almost one in four Kerry supporters thinks that creationism should be taught instead of evolution. This is really more dispiriting than the loss in the Presidential election.

Dan Gillmor posts on the same topic in Why the U.S. Will Become a Second-Rate Power. I think that title is a bit of hyperbole, but this probably is a cause for concern.

I’d love to see similar poll results from other industrialized countries.

Left Behind

While reviewing my site's statistics on SiteMeter, I noticed this banner add:

Being "left behind" shouldn't be that bad if it will mean being left in a world free of the small-minded, mean-spirited Christians who go for this.

I wish I could express how far I think this is from God's plan, but I am at a loss.