An honest church?

Natalie's sick again. Why is there so much puking going around this year? Surely there's some sort of conspiracy theory and/or eschatological subtext here. There always is.

Anyway, if Graham just stops screaming for a little while I should have time to catch up on reading some of these magazines around the house. The Economist was just reporting on the deep and continuing schism in the Episcopalian Church, caused by the ordination of a gay bishop and the tentative endorsement of gay marriage. The grouse is already on the record about gay marriage: don't let em both wear white and make sure the appetizers are good, that's whay I say. But openly gay clergy? Hmm. I guess it probably is better to force them, as the Catholic Church does, to stay in the closet and abuse altar boys. As if you're ever going to be able to coop a bunch of guys up together for a long time and not let them have sex. I know I can go years without having sex, and it doesn't bug me at all.

It's ridiculous. Gay clergy have been a fact of life forever. What the conservative wing of the church is opposing is honesty, or, as the financial markets would have it, transparency. Suppressing gay clergy is like saying to Enron that it should keep all its off the book entities hidden because it's unseemly to have them. This is, in fact, much like what the Japanese banking system has been doing with its bad loan portfolios for well over a decade. That's worked great!