People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.
H L Mencken
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If there’s no struggle, there’s no progress. Those who profess to favour freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what a people will submit to, and you’ve found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get. If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labour, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.
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A friend of mine wrote me a few days ago:
We all need a break from the homosexual food fight in the Diocese of the Midwest (OCA).
There it is, in plain language. None dare speak this truth plainly… we hear screams of “disrespect”… “You’re not being ‘churchly’”, “The clergy have special rights”, etc, etc, etc, ad infinitum, from all the same interested parties (and their ignorant konvertsy cheering section). We’re supposed to “pay, pray, and obey”… and be silent in the face of clerical malfeasance. As for myself, I had to walk away from it all for a while and immerse myself in something else. The following are just my thoughts on the general situation facing us.
Let’s not be coy… Fathausen isn’t going to give up easily. Mel Pleska’s illness deprived us of the last credible hierarch in the OCA at a critical juncture. What’s amazing is how obtuse JP and his supporters are. There are three scandals in the air at present… involving Storheim in Canada, Dickie Wood in Moscow, and Mark Stokoe in the Midwest. There’s soon to be a fourth… Matt Moriak is going against the established institutional culture of the OCA DOM by appointing his son to a parish over the “expected” candidate and by suspending a deacon without any prior “by your leave” or hearing. If the rumours are true, if Moriak’s tastes are “interesting”… that’ll touch off an explosion that’ll dwarf anything else that’s happened so far. The Diocese of the Midwest isn’t only the largest diocese in the OCA; it’s also full of old-line po-nashemu sorts, who not only aren’t used to putting up with arrogant and high-handed smarkacz clergy, they’re used to having an honest stand-up guy like Vladyki Job as their bishop.
The most interesting thing in all of this is the konvertsy. They scream about purity, about morality, and about how they hate homosexuality, and how they’re going to run all the “queers” out of the Church… yet, they support the most blatant faygelers of them all. Did any konvertsy attack JP for serving openly with Hermie and Feodosy? NOPE. Did any konvertsy attack JP for serving openly with Izzy Brittain? NOPE. Did any konvertsy attack JP for schmoozing up to the arrested and questionable Benjamin Peterson? NOPE. I see a pattern here. The konvertsy don’t care about homosexuality in clerical circles… they never did, despite their rhetoric on the matter. Many came out of the so-called Anglo-Catholic movement, which had more closeted poofters per square inch than any other organisation that you could name. Friends of mine in the TEC assure me that some of the loudest “defenders of morality” were closeted gays. “Be gay, or, be straight… but be open about it”, as one of my friends put it. That’s my view, too… which leads one to question what Moriak’s doing to Mark, and to question his motivation.
Make no mistake on this… they have the internet in Moscow. The Centre KNOWS what’s going down in the OCA. What I’ve heard (from unofficial sources) is that the MP is setting up Territorial Metropolias outside the territory of the RF… they exist already in the Ukraine, Estonia, Latvia, and Central Asia. Reportedly, Western Europe is next… afterwards, what about the Americas? Then, shall the ROCOR go into the dustbin of history? If such is so, then, it stands to reason that the Centre’s going to do nothing until it’s ripe for action. That is, we must get up and do something ourselves, even if it’s as simple as not paying Syosset assessments. That could do the trick and trigger intervention. It won’t be easy in the short term; indeed, it may appear as if JP’s winning.
The problem is that you just don’t wave a magic wand and say, “It’s all over”… that’s demented childish thinking. Any “solution” that the Centre can bring shall only be partial, and it won’t encompass “everything”… that is, there’s going to be a rump OCA, a group that’ll be run by a clique of closeted poofters who’ll scream about moral purity and Biblical morality. I’ll say this… at least Feodosy, Pierre, and Hermie spared us sanctimonious lectures on morality and purity. As Frederick Douglass said:
Find out just what a people will submit to, and you’ve found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress. Men may not get all they pay for in this world; but they must pay for all they get.
Are we willing to bear the cost and pain that we’ll suffer if we remove Fathausen & Co? If not, then, Mencken will be right:
People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard.
It’s our choice… choose well.
Barbara-Marie Drezhlo
Sunday 14 August 2011
Albany NY
