Till death do us part

There is yet another flutter of people talking about reintroduction of the death penalty. It always rather turns my gut as I fear that those opposed have rather dropped their guard. We tend to feel that that debate is long, long behind us. I am not so sure.
Those in favour of its reintroduction foten seem so strident. And it is, of course, such an emotional issue.
One seemingly rational correspondent to the local paper today critiques an observation earlier in the week that so-called 'right to lifers' (anti abortionists) often seem pro-death penalty. They note (The Advertiser February 26) that 'there is a vast difference between the killing of adults who have committed atrocious crimes and innocent babies'.
But I make the point in a letter to the Ed (yet to be published) "That is until, as has often been the case, the adult is found to be not guilty."
This is a real difficulty with the death penalty. It's a bit ghastly to discover after an execution that there may be doubt and/or even fresh evidence which calls a judgment into question.

It is not the only difficulty. Simply the most obvious.

To my mind the substantive problem is about a society that believes it has the right to take away life. There is an inherent contradiction in the idea, for example, that a society believes that no one has the right to kill another person. And yet punishes such a transgression by killing another person!

Religion and the polls (i)

I am personally pleased that the leaders of both major political parties in the Federal Parliament appear to be serious and practising Christians.
This is a change from the sort of wishy-washy tokenism that we appear to have had (which, by the way, Anglicans are used to) of leaders who say they are Christian but who are at pains to show that they do not have any meaningful attachment. Sadly they have most often called themselves "Anglican" as a sort of establishment stamp. But their analysis of matters religious and how this might affect day to day life is often simplistic and dismissive. John Howard was a classic example of this sort of Anglicanism.
So in comes Ruddy who not only seems to be an Anglican, but seems to know about it, and takes it seriously. He is often pictured going to Church and seemed to even smile when he came out as if he might have actually enjoyed it. Most un-Australian!
My impression of what really happens is that the Canberra gallery knowing where he would be at 10.30 on a Sunday morning habitually lined up for a door-stop outside St John's Church and Kev obliged.
Then the Opposition began to feed into our Australian wariness of anything pious and started suggesting that this was staged and, indeed, not what ordinary Australians do.

I am, of course, pleased that Kev has stuck to his guns. Which is what you would expect if he does indeed take his Christianity seriously.

Tony Abbott, too, has made no secret of the fact that he is a serious Catholic. Though he constantly equivocates (as in the Murdoch press today...."I do not regard myself as a Christian. I regard myself as a politician who just happens to think religion matters.") lest we think some how his Catholicism informs his conscience! I think this is bizarre.

He is, perhaps a little unfairly, constantly asked about the issue of abortion and whether he accepts contemporary social attitude or enforces catholic social teaching. There has of course been reason to explore this since he has made no secret of his anti-abortion stance and the fact that he is clearly at one with Roman Catholic teaching about matters such as the 'morning after pill'. This seems to me to be a much more potentially explosive matter than Rudd's attendance at the Eucharist Sunday by Sunday.

....more coming

Strange idea

A well meaning man rang yesterday to tell me about someone who was sick, but that was not really why he rang (so he said)...he was inviting me to go and pray silently on the steps of the SA Parliament this evening.
As he painstakingly explained the rationale he told me this was about praying for rain. This is not an easy idea at the best of times, but his rationale was that today was the 38th anniversary of liberalising abortion laws in South Australia, and such and such a person had developed a belief that the current drought might be connected with that.
This is a difficult view of God, don't you think? A God who visits drought upon a nation because of political policy...to be sure it has a certain Old Testament quality but it seems difficult to sustain.
I think the real problem with this sort of thing is not that God is not capable of this or that, but that we want extraordinarily simple solutions to what are obviously complex situations.
Drought is much more complex (it seems to me) than God just being a bit ticked off at how wayward this or that government is, and we are being invited to much more profound repentance than just turning round the abortion laws...as unsatisfactory as they might be.
To be fair to this humble sort of chap he was struggling about how to give this some sort of rationale, and he did touch me when he said that the problem with abortion was that "This was all we had to offer people in deep distress." which seems to me a fairly important reflection on a lot of social policy....."This was all we had to offer...."

On demand

The Victorian Parliament plans to put the question of decriminalising abortion to the Parliament in order to remove it from the area of Common Law to Statute Law. One of the interesting facts about the discussion is that the assertion is frequently made that there are no accurate statistics of how many abortions are performed in Australia.
This seems incredible in a country which works well bureaucratically and has a sophisticated health system.
Only in our own state of South Australia are providers required to report abortions, and by projecting these to a national level the extrapolation is that there are about 50 to 80 thousand each year. [Though some more conservative groups quote figures in excess of 100,000...]
What this exposes, I suspect, is that it serves the purposes of certain interests to not accurately report abortion.
One can speculate why this might be so; but given that these sort of approximations indicate that abortion is the most commonly performed medical procedure surely there needs to be some accurate information gathering . Then certain other questions might be more accurately answered like:

• is 'proper counselling' actually being offered to those who seek abortion? Given that this is a major premise on which abortion-on-demand is offered, surely we need to know whether it is taking place effectively
• is there good follow-up to those who have had to endure the trauma of abortion? There is a lot of evidence to suggest that abortion is simply not the sort of thing where you pop into the surgery one day in between the other events in your rather hectic life
• do we know how many people have multiple abortions? And what that means for an individual, but also for social health.

Hmmmmm! yes these questions (and others) are rather hard. One might begin to see why it is easier not to ask them!

Loose language

There's often not a great deal you can do about it but, I decry the imperialistic use of language which seems to be about capturing the "good words" and claiming them as one's own. In this the true meaning of words does not seem to have much bearing on their captured meaning.
To give an example (as I am some what confused myself by what I have written) a well-known coffee chain offers coffee in three different sizes (at least). The word Grande is used to describe what they call "medium", and the word "Alto" to descibe "large".
This is a marketing ploy of course, but I am always bemused...it's clear to me that their standard offering (which would seem to be small by their own description) is what I would call medium...their medium is a more than adequate large, and the "alto" is huge. Anmy way you learn eventually what size you want...thouygh I am always puzzled by what is medium outside the pictures and what is medium inside!!!
More serious and irksome are the following:
catholic: the word catholic has a life beyond the religious to mean all embracing, universaland broad. The qualified term therefore, eg. Roman or Anglo Catholic would seem to be an oxymoron (a contradiction within itself), and yet the former is the most common use.
A group I head wants to say that rather than being a narrow descriptor of who God is and what God wants (often the imperialism of the "Catholic" church insists that to be catholic is a descriptor of a narrow orthodoxy defined by an elite power structure) but we would suggest that it is better used to see God as "universal" affirming of all people irrespective of gender, nationality, sexuality and which is essentially affirming of equality rather than status and privilege.
liberal: Those of us who migrate to Australia take a while to understand that Liberal actually means Tory or conservative in English terms. Those of us who are really the old-fashioned liberals of the 60s and 70s stand back aghast at how the hard won liberalities are cast aside.
conservative: strangely the word 'conservative' has been captured to mean backward looking or recationary. I want it to mean genuinely conserving that which is important and not throwing out babies with bath water. But so often it means going back to the old tin bath.
evangelical: this word has been comandeered by a certain type of Christian, often fundamentalist, even though it clearly refers to what is a requirement for all christians to spread the gospel. So the word evangelical has been comandeered by some whose style of evangelism is often heavy handed and very manipulative; not values I would readily associate with the gospel
pro-life: sympathetic to a conservative (see above) view of abortion, which sees it not as a day to day strategy but a last port of call, the pro-life (anti abortion) movement is often anything but respectful of the life of those who are affected by the process of decision making about abortion. Women faced with this awful decision are often caricatured as demons incarnate,instead of being viewed compassionately and not merely as political footballs
pro-choice: much of what is said above could also be said about the misuse of the term pro-choice. What worries conservatives (see above) like me, is that pro-choice doesn't always engender careful choice, it may create an indifference and carelessness whioch has no true choice in it at all
traditional: I have within the bounds of my parish a church which styles itself a church of "The Traditional Anglican Communion". They are a breakaway church and by no stretch of the imagination part of the Anglican Communion. Though Archbishop Rowan is kind to these people they are not part of the Anglican Communion. If it wasn't for the fact that it would be a terrible waste of money, someone should take them to court for misleading advertising. Traditional, it would seem to me, has much the same sort of emphasis as the word "conservative" (see above), but is used to mean reactionary, and bizarrely conservative. It hails back to a time in Anglican life when some longed for the establishment of a fanciful type of pseudo Roman Catholicism.
Further it betrays the Anglican sense of "tradition", which has been a tradition of tolerance, openness and living with difference. The mis-named Traditional Anglican Communion, are against the ordination of women, they are authoritarian and regressive. Pity that their energy couldn't be better directed
anglican: we are involved in a struggle at the moment in who can be and who can't be Anglican. Where is the traditional tolerance of extremes? It disturbs some of us that conservative forces are so flexing their muscles that they want to to be intolerant rather intolerant. The justifications are curious..we are big and successful (questionable), we are conservative and traditional (questionable), therefore there is no place for those who are trying to actively dialogue with modern social questions in particular (and surprise surprise) the place of homosexuals in the life of the church.

There are many other words that have the same worry for me (christian, labour, democrat, gay, advanced)

Why can't we just say what we mean?

legalised murder---as predicted

I for one will not sleep better tonight knowing that once again the world has executed another human being.
No matter how "evil" we might assume or presume him to be there is a certain sense of irony that those who so loudly bey for the blood of such men as Saddam Hussein, so loudly decry the life taken through abortion or euthanasia.
I do not condone either of those courses of action, but find it rather disturbing that death penalty protagonists don't get this profound contradiction. see the ABC story here