The Most Cockamamie View of COVID Yet

 I interrupt my blog silence (waiting for the outcome of the South Carolina Supreme Court hearing next week) to bring you this report, from a reliable source, of the most cockamamie view I have yet to see anywhere in the world of the perils faced by the Obstinate Unvaccinated. After you absorb what appears below, please respond to this straightforward question: Does the Verein Sterbehilfe (the German Euthanasia Association) really think that its personnel can be safe only if they are killing those who have been first vaccinated against COVID-19? 

Or is it in fact saying: "If you want to kill yourself, that's fine with us. But don't expect us to help you if you don't care that we might die along with you. Unlike you, we are not yet ready to cash in our chips."

Here is the link to the article that announces the position of the (sogenannter) Verein Sterbehilfe.

Turnings (III)

This will be close to my last post as the "Anglican Curmudgeon". While I maintain my curmudgeonly skepticism toward today's idols (religious and otherwise), I can no longer claim the moniker "Anglican".  I do not presume to speak for others, but only for myself. And the objective truth is that I am no longer a member (or adherent) of the Anglican Communion, whatever grouping of denominations may lay claim to that name. 

Your Curmudgeon has followed the example of G.K. Chesterton, who came in time to realize that the grand Protestant experiment, without a magisterium, could do nothing but splinter into further denominational fragments, regardless of their claimed heritage. Like my model G. K., I have been received into the Roman Catholic Church. (See the first post in this series for more background.) 

It was one thing to criticize from the inside looking out, but it is not the same from the outside looking in. Removing myself from ECUSA made me indifferent to its fate.  Whether the Anglican Communion is on a different downward path may still be an open question, but the ECUSA-led schism in its ranks no longer attracts my attention -- so I am ceasing to write on that subject, as well. Quod scripsi, scripsi -- I will leave this blog up for the time being, so that the Guide can serve as a quick locator for specific topics.

The blog will therefore become a sculpture in amber of ECUSA's inexorable decline, chiefly the consequence of its flouting of its own and this country's laws for its leaders' short-term purposes.

The desultory legal contests ECUSA engaged in are now, thankfully, entirely resolved, with the exception of the final battle in the Supreme Court of South Carolina. For the sake of completeness, I will reserve my final post(s) on this blog to comment on how that battle turns out.  Until then, the reader can choose from among its more than 1,300 posts to date, indexed topically by the Guide. (There is, alas, no index to the almost 7,000 comments, but if you know the commenter's name, you can use the blog's search engine to find whatever that commenter wrote.)

I have no regrets either on leaving the Anglican Communion, which also (along with its parent, the Church of England) now shows signs of the further splintering envisioned in the links indexed in this post, and in this one. The "Communion" of its title is now honored more in the breach than in the observance, and I remain pessimistic about the capability of its current leadership to welcome back into the fold those it has effectively spurned by embracing the Zeitgeist in derogation of its scriptural heritage. 

In short, what previously made me an Anglican -- the belief that while rejecting the authority of the Magisterium we as Anglicans could yet remain true to Christ's teachings as handed down to us from the saints -- has become impossible to sustain, thanks to the vacillation and inconstancy of our overseers (Greek: episkopoi). Nothing "episcopal" remains of the Episcopal Church (USA), because its bishops have deserted their posts, while in the process expelling from their ranks all who rejected their ad hoc interpretations of Holy Scripture. 

This site was never limited just to Anglican / Episcopalian topics -- there was a lot of leavening thrown in, as its motto says, "for good measure." For leavening to be of any use, there has to be dough, and I have not decided yet how best to keep baking content. Fortunately (or unfortunately), the political scene in these so-called United States is so dispiriting that I have no desire to add to the general cacophony. The trend may self-correct before long, but if not, the priority should be protecting one's family from the disintegration taking place before our eyes. 

As Margaret Thatcher once observed: "The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money" -- and although closer to that point than ever before, we are not there yet.   

Dennis Canon Dead in Texas

 With its denial of certiorari (review) this morning to two of the Episcopal Church in the USA's ("ECUSA's") groups in Fort Worth, Texas, the United States Supreme Court has put to rest the multiple adverse claims made for the last twelve years against the Episcopal Diocese of Fort Worth.  All of those various claims, and the stages of their ups and downs, have been chronicled on this blog, which began just before the legal disputes emerged. It is gratifying, therefore, to report that this blog has managed to outlive, along with (retired) Bishop Jack Iker and his faithful flock, the Machiavellian intrigues of the schemers at 815 Second Avenue to hound and intimidate them into surrender of their properties.

Denial of review of the May 2020 decision by the Texas Supreme Court puts finally to rest ECUSA's dogged attempts to enforce its notorious and one-sided Dennis Canon in Texas. The brazenness of that Canon, which attempted unilaterally to impose (after the fact) an enforceable, perpetual trust everywhere on all the parish properties of its members in ECUSA's favor, ran directly into long-standing Texas trust law, which requires the consent of a property's owner to place it into a trust, and which also requires express language to make a trust irrevocable. The Dennis Canon failed the test on both of those grounds.

Nor could ECUSA succeed by giving its successor group the same name as Bishop Iker's Diocese, and then pretending to assume its identity. The Texas Supreme Court saw through those machinations, and held that the majority controlling the Diocesan corporation, and not ECUSA's minority faction, were the true successors under Texas corporate law to the group that founded the original Diocese in 1983. In that respect, the Texas courts were far more perspicacious than the feckless courts in California, New York, Pennsylvania and elsewhere who simply allowed ECUSA's attorneys to pull the wool over their eyes, and pretend that the newest kid on the block was actually the oldest, who (they claimed) had been there the whole time.

Those on the losing side reacted with predictable assurances that life will go on as before.

I am not certain about this, but the Supreme Court's denial of review may now make it finally possible for Bishop Ryan Reed (Bishop Iker's successor) and his Diocese to have a Texas court call a halt to the ECUSA group's impersonation of that Diocese's identity, by using the same words to describe itself (see the previous link).

The success in Texas leaves just one long-standing ECUSA dispute still festering: its pursuit of Bishop Mark Lawrence and his Diocese of South Carolina. For the reasons articulated in this post, your Curmudgeon has hopes that that litigation, too, will finally resolve itself before too much longer in favor of Bishop Lawrence and his withdrawing Diocese, notwithstanding ECUSA's machinations to the contrary (and that almost carried the day).