Big story, curious silence

Now here’s an odd thing.
Since December 1st I’ve been fielding queries from two ‘specialist’ areas of the press who know me of old. Both, from differing perspectives, are researching stories on an important development in their ‘specialisms’ in which a leading Manx resident will play a major part. Mainly, it must be said, because they’ve never heard of him. Yet the island media appear to know nothing about it.
Many current Manx journalists wouldn’t know a story if it crept up and hit them with a baseball bat, so nothing new or odd there.
What is odder is that powerful friends of the leading Manx resident haven’t spoonfed the story to a grateful hack either. Usually every vapid word he utters while going about his pointless and privileged job is not only relayed to the media, but followed by angry phonecalls and threats about the withdrawal of advertising if not immediately, and prominently, used.
So why not now?
Perhaps you can judge for yourselves.
The queries began when, on 1st December, the Church of England Media Centre issued a press release (see http://www.churchofengland.org/media-centre/news/2011/11/group-to-advise-house-of-bishops-on-2005-pastoral-statement-announced.aspx) in which it was announced that:
“The House of Bishops has announced the membership of a Group established to advise it on reviewing its Pastoral Statement issued prior to the introduction of civil partnerships in December 2005. The Group will be chaired by the Bishop of Sodor and Man, the Rt Rev Robert Paterson. The other two members of the Group are the Bishop of Portsmouth, the Rt Rev Christopher Foster, and the Bishop of Dorchester, the Rt Rev Colin Fletcher. The Group will start work in December and report to the House in time for the House to reach conclusions during 2012.”
The statement goes on to explain that:
“The preparation of the pastoral statement was the last occasion when the House of Bishops devoted substantial time to the issue of same sex relationships. The House undertook to keep that Pastoral Statement under review and announced in July, this year, http://www.churchofengland.org/media/1289380/gsmisc997.pdf , that the time had come for a review to take place.
The House of Bishops also announced in July further work on the Church of England's approach to human sexuality more generally. The expectation is that the membership of that Group, whose work will be considered by the House during 2013, will be announced in the next few weeks.”
Wow!
The C of E is looking to make their most important policy statement since Civil Partnerships became a reality, and Sentamu’s Apprentice is in charge of the process?
How big a Manx story is that?
What’s fast emerging is that even their fellow Anglicans hardly know these guys either, never mind the world at large. Which may be deliberate, or just because there are too many church factions with an interest (and form for sulking and taking their ball home) for any of the ‘regulars’ to get picked.
It’s known that Colin Fletcher is a former tutor at Wycliffe Hall and former chaplain to Archbishop George Carey. So he would have been picked by Anglican Mainstream. Don’t let the name fool you. They’re the ultra-orthodox freaks who keep threatening to break away and take some of the oldest, most valuable, church property with them. In reality, a tiny but powerful bunch of cranks, the C of E’s equivalent to a mad relative in the attic.
Less is known about Foster, other than that he studied economics at Durham, then lectured in it before being ordained, since when he’s worked his way up through the ranks in various roles, apparently with a particular interest in church mission, which I thought was just every vicar’s basic job.
But if Sentamu’s Apprentice was chosen because he was a dark horse and therefore gay and liberal Anglicans couldn’t object, it isn’t going to work.
True, the AM nutters don’t know or claim him, but they’ve approved him anyway because they see him as a fellow evangelical; if a bit of a wimp because any apparent antipathy for humanity doesn’t extend to lady vicars or women and everyone else in general except sad old white blokes in frocks.
But on websites such as the influential liberal Thinking Anglican (see http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/ ) comments like this are starting to appear:
“Robert Patterson (sic) was vicar of a parish adjoining mine and is wholly unsympathetic. He sacked a celibate gay curate, and most recently [...] he was one of only two C of E bishops in General Synod to vote AGAINST extending the pension rights of civilly partnered clerics.
I contacted some gay couples I know who live in Robert's former parishes - Robert would not be their choice for this post! I wonder if there is a single civilly partnered person in the whole of England who would support his appointment.”
Well, we’ve seen his grumpy, charmless comments after the Civil Partnership Bill passed, toeing an old Christian Institute line which portrays gays trying to put their relationships on an official basis and ensure pension and other basic rights as little more than economic opportunism, rather than ‘proper’ marriages like Christians pretend to have.
And I’ve noted here his successful attempt to make sure criminal civil servants won’t do time for leaking highly personal and confidential information about transgendered people to vicars, who also won’t do time for receiving it, or have to explain how they got it or why they won’t conduct a marriage ceremony.
So, we already know he has a bit of a problem with gays. In fact, his reported comments are alarmingly close to those swivel-eyed Manx political lunatics whose rabid views on the (then only proposed) partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1991 caused all decent people in Britain to write us off as a third world backwater. A view of us which meant most trade union and business groups took their conference business elsewhere for the next 20 years for fear of being branded homophobic knuckledraggers.
When Patterson and his chums eventually reveal their ‘new, improved’ Anglican policy towards gays we can have little doubt that, however sincerely meant, many will laugh and some will even feel sick. No point putting lipstick on a pitbull.
The problem is, if that view seems influenced by someone who is also an unelected politician in the Manx upper house, and could be portrayed as some sort of moral leader on the island, then we are right back to 1991 in the eyes of the rest of the world. And with a world recession on those are basics none of us want to go back to.

Game Over for Manx Christian homophobes

It’s been a funny old week in what passes itself off as the Manx press since it finally became legal to register a civil partnership.
To summarize briefly, we finally won the war for common decency over here, but in coming months there are a few religious snipers to be picked off. Which will happen, as they're not very clever, definitely not very popular and their old government friends are either retiring or popping their clogs.
So what we see now is a backlash by local faith leaders to the legalization of civil partnerships, now that they've totally lost the battle to stop them.
See, for example, http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34889 in which the Anglican area manager peddles a line last used by the Christian Institute as an either/or ultimatum to block the original Civil Partnership Bill in the UK.
It all sounds quite reasonable at first, but read closely and what he's doing is dissing gay marriage as a self-indulgent whim and trying to put some distance between the concept of Christian heterosexual marriage as 'proper' marriage and any form of 'partnership' as nothing more than a handy legal contract which might save you a few quid in tax benefits.
For the record, the current bishop wasn't here when the CP Bill Public Consultation took place back in around 2005, but his predecessor made no public comment on the subject and the Anglican submission was written by an Archdeacon who only retired last month. It did not take the Christian Institute line, did not oppose legal civil partnerships, and only wanted reassurances that clergy would not be under legal pressure to perform church ceremonies.
Those reassurances could not be gained through open discussion in Tynwald, because it would have shown up the churches as homophobic throwbacks who wanted the income from legal church weddings without the commitment of proper civil registrars to treat grown-ups decently. It was gained instead by their stooges in COMIN (Council of Ministers), whose meetings are not open to the public and whose minutes are not published until three months after the non-event, by which time the sleazy little deals have been nodded through Tynwald without risk that a member of the public could tip off their MHK.
Then there’s http://www.isleofman.com/News/article.aspx?article=34863 , which again looks very promising on the surface. But I think not if you know who is behind it, their history and their management structure.
Until a couple of years ago the Isle of Man Adoption Service, the charity paid by government to run our adoption services, was called Manx Churches Adoption and Welfare Society. All that changed was the name.
Employment, policy and committee membership are still under the control of the Anglican Church. The treasurer, for as long as I can remember, is a paid up member of Forward in Faith, one of the Anglican breakaway cults that can't deal with women priests, gays...or most other people!
It's one of about half a dozen such government-underwritten church charities in the social services sector who are dim enough to think that if they dropped the word 'church' or 'Christian' from their name, nobody would know how they're run.
Sorry, but some of us look at charity and company formation docs every day. We know the difference between registering a name change and registering an entire new constitution. We check, and we DO pass information on to people who can use it.
What's been happening is a desperate shortage of people adopting, and what MCAWS (as most people still know them) are really up to is relaxing, of necessity, an approval system that checks if potential parents run 'good Christian homes' (yes, they really used that phrase to someone I know) and allowing unmarried or divorced Christians, possibly even single parents, to adopt if enough fully lobotomized, church-spliced spouse-and-child-abusers don’t come forward.
They've been unsuccessfully trying to advertise this for the last year or two, but could not bring themselves to use 'the G word'. Annoyingly, they've been approached numerous times by gay and lesbian couples in recent years, without success, and in truth there never was a legal barrier anyway, just the personal prejudices of those vetting.
I suspect that MCAWS jumped on the first day when civil partnership ceremonies could be booked as a handy free advert, but that in practice gay couples will be the last resort once they've worked through any other applicants. For the sake of Manx kids who need good homes, I just hope the cultists don’t come forward, and government stops offering enough money to make child abuse a Christian business prospect.

The weak-minded are a long time in Manx politics

It must be lonely for Allan Bell in the Council of Ministers. In fact, he probably finds it difficult enough being a Manx politician who can count to ten and spell his own name.
Most Manx readers will immediately know what I mean, but for everyone else, this (http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=44001 ) is Allan Bell talking about the long overdue Civil Partnership Bill he pushed to a second reading last week.
And this (http://www.manxradio.com/newsread.aspx?id=44002 ) is some turnip-munching throwback who, after causing international embarrassment as Education Minister, then failed as the minister responsible for traffic jams and is now (for some reason nobody except another turnip-muncher squatting in the Chief Minister’s office can fathom) being allowed to run the Health Service.
Yes, world, we really do have it this tough. We really do have politicians in charge of an entire Ministry of Transport who, elsewhere, couldn’t even get a job filling in potholes. And you think Uganda has problems!
For the record, as for some reason an insightful piece on the second reading of the Civil Partnership Bill by Adrian Darbyshire in the local press hasn’t made it to the IOM Newspapers website (Update – there now at http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Are-dark-days-of-intolerance.6205221.jp ) , the voting was 19/3 in favour of the Bill. The three dullards who voted against were the aforementioned turnip-muncher plus John Houghton and Geoff Corkish, none of whom have a sparkling record on such matters.
It will be no surprise to anyone that they claimed to be protecting ‘family values’ and traditional Christianity. I think it might be nearer the truth to regard them as simple bigots who, unfortunately, got voted in because they stood in constituencies where literacy is so basic that many voters only communicate with the world verbally and probably don’t even know which name they put their X next to.
In passing, I also think it safe to say that even on the Isle of Man only two types of nominal Christian still oppose civil partnerships. One are outright bigots who hide behind faith. The other are sheep-like dullards who prefer to have mystical leaders tell them what to do rather than use faith as a means to think for themselves and explore the world.
Once you realise that the tactics used by seriously homophobic Christians (i.e. random Biblical quotes wrenched out of context instead of serious textual analysis followed by discussion with other serious, and fair minded, believers) are exactly those used a century ago to oppose mixed race marriage and half a century ago to oppose equality for women the rest is clear enough.
We should not waste further time on these chumps. But we should make sure they are no longer in any position to harm humanity.

Keeping nonsense offline

As locals know, the second reading of the Isle of Man's long needed Civil Partnership Bill has been suspended.
Officially this is because MHKs need to have a presentation on the proposals first (Are they really so dim or misinformed they don’t understand yet? That’s really terrifying!). Unofficially it will be to allow the zombie worshippers more time to delay the fair and necessary.
What’s more interesting is why otherwise balanced coverage doesn’t include putting online with the rest of the IOM Newspapers material (see http://www.iomtoday.co.im/news/Civil-Partnership-Bill-to-go.6111922.jp ) a highly publicised statement in the Isle of Man Examiner by Sentamu’s Apprentice (AKA ‘The Lord Bishop of Sodor and Mann’).
My guess is SA and his advisors demanded it be run separately to mark his ‘importance’, then couldn’t deliver it on time, then when the editor finally read it he was too embarrassed to run it anywhere except a newspaper now only read in print form by the elderly and other socially disconnected folk.
It was, frankly, confused and rambling tosh which avoided all the issues and bore marks of having been composed by a committee who couldn’t agree on anything (I suspect the executive committee of Churches Together in Mann as it has their usual lack of coherence).
Even so, not putting it online deprives us of the chance to snigger at just how out of touch the church is with 21st century reality.
What a shame.

Manx history is made tomorrow

Tomorrow one of the few decent men in Manx politics will make history. Allan Bell is (finally) due to move the Civil Partnership Bill that his knuckledragging colleagues have delayed for years.
Yes folks. Go to http://www.tynwald.org.im/papers/orders/2009-2010/ko23022010.pdf , read Item 3, and weep!
For the text of the Bill itself, go to http://www.tynwald.org.im/papers/bills/current/b048-1.pdf.
We can expect to see the House’s resident retard, John Houghton, trying to delay matters with more of his usual idiot questions earlier in the day. But the fun won’t really start until debate over the clauses begins later in the year, at which point just spot the liars and hypocrites in action.
For example, expect some porkies over the question of consultation with faith groups. There wasn’t any, whatever Sentamu’s Apprentice and his allies try to suggest. None of the island’s major churches debated the issue, the congregations were just told what they think. The government’s idea of ‘consultation’ was a nod from Churches Together in Mann’s executive, which is simply (in theory) the heads of the four major churches taking a decision without consulting their flocks.
I say in theory, because in fact the four never meet. Two of them hate each other so much they both ring ahead to check the other won’t be there, and later all four agree to put out a joint, pre-agreed, statement on the relevant ‘moral issue’ to continue the illusion of unity.
Other faiths weren’t consulted full stop, because at the point when they should have been some years back a senior Anglican told Government there weren’t any other faiths on the island, therefore it was a waste of time to seek their opinion about whether they might like to conduct religious civil partnership ceremonies.
As it happens, at least one group did say they would like to conduct them, and submitted detailed evidence on failures in UK government consultations and also amendments and missed opportunities when the Marriage Act was amended in Scotland. You won’t hear about that either, as you can tell immediately from the lack of any of the suggestions in either the present Civil Partnership Bill or last year’s amendments to the Marriage Act, which instead of changing anything significant merely increased the number of places where a superstitious halfwit can legalise your marriage if you’re still sad enough to get married on the Isle of Man instead of a civilised country – Scotland for example.
We can also expect either Sentamu’s Apprentice or another of the afflicted to raise the issue of ‘conscience clauses’ for the registrars. This was cooked up years ago on advice from CARE, the sicko Christian lobby group who so kindly gave a job to the daughter a Manx government minister, a notoriously unemployable wierdo who would only work for Jeebus.
‘Coincidentally’, whenever the first attempts at registering a partnership are made on the island, we can expect a local registrar to try and pull that clause, acting on advice contained in a letter originally written by CARE and mailed to all UK registrars, and which has since formed the basis of various attempts to derail civil partnerships in the UK.
But all that is a long away away. Tomorrow, just enjoy the rare sight of a Manx politician doing something decent for a change.

Quakers say 'Yes' to gay marriage while Manx can't even say 'When' for civil partnerships

One of the newer links on this page is to the Christian thinktank Ekklesia – a small oasis of good sense in the intellectual faith desert.
Symon Hill, associate director of Ekklesia and a Quaker, commented on 2nd August:
“I trust this decision will inspire people of all faiths and none who are working for the inclusion of gay, lesbian and bisexual people. As with other churches, this has not been an easy process for Quakers. I hope that others will have the courage to follow this lead and speak up for the radical inclusivity of Christ. As Christians, we are called to stand with those on the margins who are denied equality”.
Symon’s comment followed last week’s decision of the Quakers' Yearly Meeting in York to fully affirm the principle of same-sex marriages, not just give the nod to civil partnerships. For some two decades now Quakers have without fuss blessed same sex unions during their meetings, and remain the only Christian denomination to not only do so but to want to conduct legal Christian civil partnerships as well as heterosexual marriage ceremonies.
Meanwhile, here in Europe’s Third World, where we still await even a vague date for a basic Civil Partnership Bill, we can only marvel.
But then, Manx Christians still don’t recognise Quakers as ‘proper’ Christians anyway. The executive level of Churches Together in Mann remains an airtight ghetto where just four distant patriarchs decide and pronounce the ‘official’ beliefs of the many they claim to represent. While CTIM loves to take the credit for a Quaker-led Manx landmine clearance project, the woman who ran it had to be given a special associate status to a CTIM sub-committee in order to make things official.
In turn, we have no real idea how these grey and ghastly ‘church leaders’ come to agreement with equally grey, equally distant senior politicians over new laws and continued Christian privilege.
They just do, and we just suffer the consequences.

Third World status at last

Well, it’s official. The Isle of Man is now the most backward place in the British Isles.
Today the first civil partnership ceremony was held on the Isle of Lewis. Their local paper reported it here at http://www.stornowaygazette.co.uk/news/Western-Isles39-first-Civil-Partnership.5475743.jp.
Remember, this is the Scottish island where sour-faced calvinism is so prominent that until a week ago they wouldn't run a ferry on Sundays in case it got hit by a thunderbolt.
We are now the last place in the British Isles which doesn’t provide facilities for a legal civil partnership ceremony. Because our politicians are so spineless and our civil servants so incompetent that they will not upset a few vociferous but vacuous lay preachers and sort it out.
All together now (and with no apologies to the authors of the original piece of schmaltz…..)

We are the Third World
We are a Freakshow
We are……

Oh forget it!
Could the last person onto the ferry please turn out the lights?