Earlier this month - in Norfolk, Va., - Nancy Reagan commissioned the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan (the ninth and penultimate of the Nimitz class carriers) with the traditional, "Man this ship and bring her to life!" In fitting tribute to all President Reagan did to reinvigorate the U.S. military and thereby defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War, the carrier is the only one ever to be commissioned with the name of a living former President.
On marriage between homosexuals, many are taking the cautious approach - surprisingly even Democratic presidential wannabes. At a recent forum held by a homosexual group, just three - Al Sharpton, Dennis Kucinich and Carol Moseley Braun - supported it forthrightly. The others tended to support homosexual civil unions, giving those thus united certain equivalents of spousal benefits. When John Kerry and the commendable Joseph Lieberman, in opposing homosexual marriage, said that in America marriage should be reserved for men and women, the audience hissed.
The homosexuality that has so crushed U.S. Roman Catholicism mainly via priestly predation on boys (the Massachusetts attorney general said Wednesday that in the Boston archdiocese alone the priestly sexual "mistreatment of children was so massive that it borders on the unbelievable"), may soon lead to schism in the U.S. Episcopal Church. At their Minneapolis convention beginning July 30, the Episcopalians will vote on - among other things - (a) whether to confirm a professed homosexual as bishop of New Hampshire and (b) whether to create a blessing for homosexual unions. Twenty-four bishops have announced that if the convention votes "yes" on either issue, they will break their ties with the church. Sounds like schism for the church. For parishioners already weary of church hierarchs' debilitation of morality and assaults on right reason, it sounds like more Sunday morning golf.
Significantly, the Anglicans' way-left Archbishop of Canterbury, perhaps sensing the damage it would do to the worldwide Anglican Communion, of which U.S. Episcopalians are a part, required a man selected to be the Church of England's first professedly homosexual bishop to disqualify himself for the post. Will U.S. Episcopalians meeting in Minneapolis prove themselves sufficiently prudent to demonstrate a similar degree of principle and foresight?