A.S.Haley: In Lieu of an April 1st Post

Friday, April 1, 2016

I set out to write an April Fool's Day post, as I have done in the past, but my sense of humor is in short supply these days. Things are going from bad to worse so fast that there is little time to savor what human comedy remains.

Take the 2016 primary campaigns, where each party's candidates have made mincemeat out of Ronald Reagan's Eleventh Commandment. (I'm not sure if the Democrats ever acknowledged its wisdom to begin with, but no matter -- Sanders and Clinton are now going at it tooth and claw.) Just imagine the level of discourse to which the chosen nominees will descend in the general election contest this fall. And I'm not sure just how the media could egg things on more than they have already, but no doubt they will find a way. To paraphrase H.L. Mencken: "No one ever went broke  underestimating the nadir to which the media can sink."

Or take the craziness that infests college campuses across the land -- a mixed worship of victimhood and political correctness that has brought us such absurdities as "intersectional feminism", which is just another form of campus bullying that passes for a serious academic subject.

Or take the massive assaults on religious freedom, which have now become daily news events, but which are reported as though they are laudable signs of progress in the culture war against "bigotry" and "homophobia". Those terms are now even being used by erstwhile religious ones against their own; is it any wonder that the secular world considers Christians (but not, e.g., Muslims) fair game?

Even closer to home, we have the internecine wars among Episcopalians being fought out -- against the highly specific and contrary advice of St. Paul -- in the civil courts. Those once-revered institutions have proved largely incapable of dealing -- just as St. Paul warned! -- with religious disputes, especially today with something so preposterous as ECUSA's Dennis Canon. The Canon was adopted as a sinister measure to deter the departure of dissident congregations from the Episcopal Church, and it has succeeded in seizures of property far beyond anything the Borgias ever could have contemplated. Just imagine being able to create at one stroke a perpetual lien on all church property in all (well, almost all) fifty States -- with a self-executing forfeiture clause -- and all done, mirabile dictu, by a phantom "vote" of which no trace remains in the official archives!... the rest