After an incredibly long time, I'm very satisfied with the book manuscript! A couple of chapters will require minor revisions right up to publication because they have to do with the climate emergency and with "faith-based hate," each of which topics provides new headlines daily. Now the very big question looms: how to get it published. I can try more proposals to agents and publishers, but when you're not a celebrity or published author, it's likely to come down to self-publishing — for which there are several options. You can go through the steps of becoming a tiny publisher yourself, and handling all the very many details yourself, or you can turn to a self-publishing company. Some of the better ones still have a disadvantage the I found annoying: just look at the religion and spirituality titles! Totally vomitous.

There is still some possibility that a particularly sympathetic independent publisher might want it. One way or another, it's time to do this. And then it has to be promoted, which is a huge undertaking. If my "The Transcendentalist Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality" seminar/retreats get any traction, I'll have a venue. There are UU events and Evolutionary Enlightenment and Integral Spirituality events, and it ought to have some interest for queer folks on a spiritual quest.

It all looks very daunting now, and I'm aware that one on one's own cannot begin to do what a community of committed people can accomplish.

Meantime, shortly, I'll be sharing the fire with a terrific bunch of people who have asked me to serve half-time as their parish minister — in Manchester, New Hampshire. While I'm in Manchester I'll be lodging with the magnificent people at Sunpoint Sanctuary in nearby Derry. Paul and Patricia are Unitarian Universalist pillars whose vision and action reaches deeply into social justice and the wider possibilities of evolving consciousness. Funny how things work out.

While I enjoy the quiet of a perfect summer day at Westhampton, I'm reading the stunning disclosures obtained by Wikileak and published today in my two favorite newspapers, the Guardian (London) and the New York Times. I think the Guardian has done a particularly excellent job with this. It comes from 90,000 actual military logs of the war in Afghanistan and it contradicts what we've been told is going on. The logs all come from the Bush presidency, but don't therefore dismiss the implications for what is happening now. You can see the reports at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/jul/26/afghanistan-war-logs-wikileaks
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html

The President has just addressed the nation. Speaking from the Oval Office. Should have been standing in oily sands in Louisiana or Alabama, but that's a small matter of style. I was expecting something serious. That's a big matter.

Early on he assured us that in "the coming days and weeks" 90 percent of the surging oil will be captured. Oh? Did you get that from BP, too, sir?

There are a few things I expected to hear, and didn't:

1. Deployment of a take-charge goverment intervention: with a place for scientists, the military, and serious direct management of the situation. So the government knows how much oil is coming out down there and what the condition of the well actually is; knows what exists below the waves; gleans all the best available wisdom, science, and possible solutions. Lay out how this is being structured.

2. Announce those working near the oil and doing the clear-up operation will wear proper equipment like respirators, and announce that you are overriding BP's self-serving image-protecting orders that this equipment not be used (or employees using them will be fired). Announce access — overriding BP's ban on photography and journalists' access, and access for others who want to help or just to see for themselves.

3. Tell us what energy policy and environmental policy must now follow and that you are going to fight for. Be specific and unbending. Respond to the climate science as though you believe it. Demand that the Senate pass at least this wimpy piece of climate legislation — so that if the Congress resists, it will be their failure and disgrace. Tell us that from this moment on, you can't do offshore drilling or operate an offshore well without at least two additional relief wells, as some European countries and the UK require. We shouldn't be waiting for those wells to be drilled. We don't even know that the first or second attempt will hit the target.

4. Go easy on the platitudes. We don't want platitudes. Platitudes make us wretch just now.

5. Addressing the greatness of America isn't entirely appropriate when Europe has already done so many of the things you seem to be saying only the American spirit can do, which it hasn't done. This is a moment for a little preaching and a clarion call to repentance. Tell us how we have to change and how we might learn from others.

6. You seemed to be telling us about some restructuring of MMS. Weak stuff. Tell us what the Bush Administration did. Really — don't mince words. Tell us how you're going to dismantle that and put something specific and just and effective in its place.

I think this crisis has got the man down. One isn't getting that Harry Truman or FDR feeling from this. I note my own internal reaction and it isn't pretty. I think the speech was pretty much pious malarkey. Why did you approve offshore drilling, accepting the assurances and promises of the industry? Aren't you sorry? Tell us the mistake — don't have to dwell on that — and then do the Commander-In-Chief thing.

And then, tell us about the Manhattan-Project-style national energy retrofit you're undertaking.

For progressive people driven by an evolutionary vision of human possibility, this has to be a moment of painful disappointment. We believed him when he promised a new progressive government, and change we could believe in. Not so.

If you want a particularly revealing, particularly pertinent case in point, I refer you to Tim Dickinson's piece in the current Rolling Stone titled "The Spill, the Scandal, and the President." A couple of weeks ago I wrote the President (I do this a lot: you can do it too at http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/ ) urging him to replace the Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, whose career to date had demonstrated a significant fondness for offshore oil drilling and who not made good on the promise to reform the MMS — the Minerals Management Service — which was set up during the Bush administration to promote offshore drilling, and which is supposed to manage it, ensure compliance with environmental law and policy, grant (or withhold) permits to drill, and collect the "royalty" fees. At first, Salazar made some changes and announced "there's a new sheriff in town." But he proceeded to put 53 million new Gulf offshore acres up for lease, more than had ever been opened to drilling in a single year. The lawlessness in the agency continued. The 27 May post below tells the too-familiar story from there. There are employees at Salazar's Interior Department (of which MMS is a component) who describe their experience there as "the third Bush term."

Now, no one these days much likes BP. The behemouth company is a legitimate object of wrath. And no one bears more responsibility for the current catastrophe than the Bush-Cheney administration, which defined the terms and conditions under which the oil giants would operate and the values to be served by those terms and conditions. We knew that.

What we didn't want to know is that we had been lured into a regime of same ole' same ole' corporatism and get-alongism — by thrilling rhetoric that turns out to have been halfhearted window-dressing. If Mr Obama actually believes the scientists, what in hell is going on in the Gulf? Where is the Manhattan-Project-like national conversion to sustainable energy? Where are the new passenger rail lines? Why are solar and wind component companies like Evergreen sinking? Does he mean it?

Why is Larry Summers and fellow corporatists and banksters running the economy while progressive economists like Krugman and Reich and Stiglitz left out in the cold? Why is the Defense of Marriage Act still in place? Why are we left with a healthcare system that puts for-profit insurers between you and your health? Why is the United States still supporting the occupation of Palestian lands and, indeed, the blockade of Gaza?

There's something particularly dangerous about exciting people with empty promises. Hearing Barack Obama, throngs of young Americans and throngs more older ones who had been cynical about the political process allowed themselves to hope and believe. Can they hope and believe again? They don't now, and now, their renewed cynicism is deeper. It has to be described as a tragedy. In Mr Obama, there's evidence of many fine qualities and capacities. But he is in over his head, challenged with crises beyond his wisdom.

Indisputably, there have been policy shifts for the better. Manifestly, the cast of characters in this administration is to be preferred to the last. But what we've gotten are the kind of halfway measures the don't quite work. Now the looney right can make its case that the Gulf catastrophe and the economy (and on and on) are the fault of the left. It's hard to see how Mr Obama can be reëlected (remembering that his margin of victory over such low-quality, frequently off-the-wall opponents was appalingly small in 2008).

Which all begs the difficult question: does the progressive movement need to find a new leader?

On the night of April 20, an offshore oil rig called Deepwater Horizon — so named because it was drilling for oil under 5,000 feet, or nearly a mile, of seawater in the Gulf of Mexico — exploded. The rig had drilled a further 13,000 feet — altogether, three miles — pushing the limits of both technology and safety. Water at 5,000 feet is under tremendous pressure, something like 2,000 pounds per square inch. Oil and gas even deeper surges upward under more extreme pressure.

A month before the explosion, there’d been a series of accidents. One resulted in the destruction (undisclosed by BP) of the blowout preventer, or BOP, device near the seabed. It’s used to seal the well shut once it’s been drilled so as to test the well’s pressure and integrity. In the event of a blowout, a rubber gasket called the “annular” is supposed to close around the drill pipe. The BOP had other malfunctions, including dead batteries and a leaky seal. Now the well couldn’t actually be tested, and there was no working blowout prevention device.

Then it came time to seal the well. Deepwater Horizon would be removed and another rig would be moved into place to pump the oil. And BP, which leased the Horizon from Tranocean, had decided the procedure was taking too long, and cut some corners, despite Transocean ’s protests. The sealing with concrete plugs was fast-tracked, with catastrophic consequences. Two hours before the explosion a pressure test showed “a very large abnormality” and was ignored. I’ve mentioned the deposits of methane in the earth’s surface. A vast cloud of methane — natural gas — rippled up from the bottom and settled over the area around the rig. The methane made the rig’s diesel engines rev wildly. There was an almighty explosion and inferno that incinerated eleven men.

British Petroleum had once rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum. That was in the days when the company was run by John Browne, who from 1997 tried to rebrand BP as a “green” energy company. He may have been part visionary, but the company was already cutting corners, and Lord Browne lost his job after a 2005 Texas BP refinery fire that killed fifteen workers and for which BP was found willfully negligent.

But — that 2010 incident. For weeks the oil flowed into the Gulf. BP’s early public estimate was 1,000 barrels a day, but the number was revised upward: 5,000, 30,000, 80,000. How could anyone measure accurately at such great depth? As vast plumes of oil formed below the surface and oil began to flow into the critical Gulf Stream, the public got a revelation about what President Obama would call the “cozy relationship” between the oil companies and the government agencies that were meant to regulate them. The Bush-appointed head of the Minerals Management Service, Chris Oynes — an old friend of former Vice President Cheney — announced that he was going into “retirement.” Many might have wondered whether he should have beeing going into prison. BP, it turned out, had been given a waiver from having to conduct the required environmental assessments prior to undertaking the project. MMS is a division of the Interior Department. Sixteen months into the Obama Administration, Oynes was still there. The corruption-plagued Interior Department had changed too little. President Obama had just announced his support for offshore oil drilling, insisting that America needs the oil. The Republican Party, together with its “Tea Party Movement,” had already distinguished themselves with the phrase “Drill, Baby, Drill,” and now the GOP blocked efforts to raise limits on oil companies’ liabilities for oil spills, while mustering not a single sponsor for climate legislation (like the severely anemic Kerry-Lieberman bill, currently under debate).

Meanwhile, the world learned that BP had been operating another deepwater rig since 2007, The massive BP Atlantis platform, without proper up-to-date and engineer-approved documentation. Its location: 150 miles out of New Orleans, in an area known as “hurricane alley.” The water depth is 7,000 feet — 2,000 deeper than the Deepwater horizon. Most subsea piping and instrument diagrams, critical documents for operating the platform, were never approved by engineers.

It came out that an MMS scientist had complained to his bosses of catastrophic safety and environmental violations, but MMS had already granted at least five final approval permits for new Gulf drilling as recently as the time of the Deepwater explosion. Despite warnings from whistleblowers and members of Congress about BP Atlantis, MMS refused to act.

To mitigate the mess, both BP and the government are employing two types of a “dispersant” brand called Corexit, a chemical that was originally developed by Exxon and is now manufactured by Nalco Holding Company, a company in which BP has a financial interest. EPA data seems to say the dispersants are more toxic and less effective on South Louisiana crude than other available dispersants. More than a decade ago, both were removed from a list of dispersants approved for use in the United Kingdom, according to Rep. Ed Markey of Massachusetts, Chair of the House Subcommittee on Energy and Environment. The precise chemistry of the product is “proprietary,” but it’s known to contain 2-butoxyethanol, a harmful toxic. Corexit was used after the Exxon Valdez incident, resulting in public health problems including resperatory, nervous system, liver, kidney and blood disorders. But it comes with EPA approval. Many experts are concerned about this use, which adds additional toxins to the ocean and may lead to longer-term ecological problems. As of this writing about a 750,000 gallons of toxic dispersant have been pumped into the Gulf waters — on top of the millions of gallons of oil.

If dispersants protect the coastline and its ecosystems, the chemicals and the oil remnants will damage sea life, poisoning virtually everything that lives in the sea, and depriving it of oxygen. The combination of dispersed oil and chemicals is more toxic than the oil alone, and it can also spread out farther in the Gulf, according to Jacqueline Savitz, director of pollution campaigns at the oceans advocacy group Oceana. A 2005 National Academy of Sciences report on oil spills and dispersant chemicals found that the combination can kill fish eggs and impair development of surviving fish, and accumulate in shellfish like mussels.

Oh, and the Times, did I mention? Here it is, in the May 16, 2010 Auto section: a rave review of the Twin-Turbo Ford Flex SUV, “blissfully turbocharged, 355-horsepower EcoBoost V-6.” Reviewer Lawrence Ulrich gushes that the “federal mileage rating of the Flex with EcoBoost, 16 miles per gallon in town and 22 on the highway,” allows Ford to boast that “the power lunch is free, at least at the pump.” EcoBoost? The lunch is free?

If that is why the President thinks there must be offshore oil drilling, the soul of the nation is very, very sick indeed. It would be hard to say much more for the President’s moral clarity.

I used to regard BP as the most ecologically friendly oil company, as if any oil company can be seen that way. At the time of the Exxon Valdez outrage, I'd publicly destroyed by ExxonMobil credit card. Ever since I've bought not an ounce of Exxon or Mobil petrol. I will run out of gas before I'll do that. I'll now be driving past all BP stations, too. You and I get to decide whether or not to reward the parasites who run these corporations. Our money is an extension of ourselves.

So are our votes. In the United States, I've generally regarded third-party votes as wasted votes. I'm re-thinking that. Corporations driven by a culture of reckless greed don't have an awful lot to fear from our political leadership, who seem to be owned and operated by those corporations. And all of this is fed by the demands of a public that seems to have decided not to believe the science — science which is better reported, and more urgency, in the British and European press (I daily read The Guardian and The Independent) than in ours. Even the Times, which, most of the time, keeps the news about our climate emergency off the area above the fold on page one and hides it well inside. To a public that doesn't want to think this is real or important, such downplaying of "environmental" news is a comforting narcotic,

Tonight, the "top kill" procedure is underway. There's a fair chance it will stop the flow of oil that has gone on now for 38 days. The ruined marshes, the young salmon that will eat the globules created by the dispersant and oil and die, the Gulf coast seafood industry, — this list could go on, and on — we will need a way to mourn all these, intentionally and seriously. And when we have done that, to undertake a change of course. And that change will have to be one we, and those who come after us, can believe in.

A genuine apology for the long time lapse since February. To amplify the effect of my having disappeared, this website went down for a few days (oop, missed deadline to renew the domain name, an expensive mistake).

It's been a tough time, one of disappointed hopes. A month ago I learned from the search committee of a wonderful congregation I was quite excited about that I'm not their choice. Pre-candidating weekend went splendidly well, as it has for four years running. And for four years running, no cigar.

Some of you served as references, and some of your have done that repeatedly during these four frustrating years of the UUA's brutal search process -- and for this, I'm extremely grateful.

It doesn't seem to me that it makes sense to go through this again (or to keep asking you to serve as references!). And if I did, it would be as someone who, a year from now, will have been out of work for way too long. Interim ministry doesn't make a lot of sense, either, not for me. I've undergone the hair-raising, underfunded uprootings necessary to serve interims at North Easton and at Orlando — which I'm certainly capable of doing, but my best gifts aren't what's called for there, and "hit-n'-run" isn't how I want to work. The tasks now would seem to me to get that book published, and to take my workshop on the road — "The Transcendentalist Spirit and an Evolutionary Spirituality." Maybe I'll resume "Spirit," my radio show (though that doesn't pay anything!). And who knows — maybe form a new congregation somewhere. Maybe here. It's come increasingly to look like a good idea.

It's tempting to feel keen disappointment. But that's a construction of reality I don't have to choose. It's easy because what has been denied is something recognizable — I know what it is, I can imagine it. It's harder to recognize the patterns in the light radiating from between the familiar dark. But I remember what the great cultural philosopher Jean Gebser said of a very early experience in his life — a plunge into the unknown that took his fear away so that for the remainder of his life he faced the unknown with confidence. Then, years later, a profound experience of meditation and enlightenment filled him with a sense of "invulnerability, a primal trust." Which reminds me of Emerson, in the Divinity School Address, who spoke of the person who has awakened to their deepest, highest, most essential identity beyond ego. If you know, as the Chandogya Upanishad puts it, that "Thou Art That," that is, you are not other than or separate from the Divine, then it is that "the safety of God" enters into you. I'd always been struck by Emerson's statement but only in recent days has its significance become clear to me. Sometimes I feel awfully exposed. But I get to interpret the reality that is before me. Face it, avoid nothing, and choose not to see it darkly, see in it something foreboding. I can't promise I'll always succeed at that, but it's my intention.

It's been way too long since the last post — as illustrated by today's view of the same tree. Few dead limbs . . .

.

Apologies for neglecting the blog — lots going on!

Meanwhile it's been snowing again. You're looking west up Stage Road:

You have to agree that the Roman rendition of 2010 looks very cool. I believe I shall write it on all my checks this year. Wonder if anybody will know MMX is 2010?

Well, we've had another bomb attempt on an airliner. So, to prevent further attacks, we do what? Thom Hartmann suggests it will be just as effective to make everybody get naked at airport security, and hand them a towel to wear until the last your of the flight, when the towels would be collected. You get it back to walk through the airport.

And he points out that daily, somebody is taking substantial quantities of drugs through security, hidden somewhere in their body. They can do it with explosives, too, and even the expensive machines won't find it. Still, the machines are better than some of the silly procedures we're hearing about.

After 9/11, I said we must have the courage to ask why they hate us out there; what is behind the rage. This is not to dignify the violence, no, not at all. But desperate people do desperate things, most of them stupid.

And we have to ask why this rage. But we know the answer, don't we? It's time we stopped fueling the rage with our own stupidity. Get the American military out of Saudi Arabia, home of Mecca. Let Afghanistan be its miserable self because we cannot bring it into the 21st century, or even the 18th. And face our own addiction to consumerism and especially oil. We will have to change. Maybe we will have to lead the change in global perspective. That takes courage.

The ordinary people on the street holding signs about "No Blood for Oil" were right. Are right. If we have to will to change, we will find exhilarating things to do and to employ our people. High-speed trains. Hell, any trains. Massive conversion to sustainable energy. Adjusted expectations of what it is we have "every right" to do and have. I am not proposing reversion to an earlier, simpler world. I am proposing that we leave behind a world that could never work, and create the possible future. The brilliant possible future, because humanity possesses almost inconceivable powers to do this.

We could make of this MMX a marvel, a joy, and a triumph. But not by pursuing the same wretched means that have gotten us to this precipice. Let us not have another 2007, 2008, 2009. May we all have a blessed MMX.

Just heard, on BBC Radio 3, a climate-emergency drama worth listening to. "The Contingency Plan."

You can watch videos streaming from the Copenhagen conference at One Climate.net. You can follow the conference at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) website. The Conference section has a link to watch web streaming.

Also excellent:Yale's Environment360 site, There are dispatches from Copenhagen.

Astounding (or maybe not), but almost no daily newscast is originating there but Democracy Now is, and Amy Goodman is using her daily hour well to keep you informed.

As usual, the British newspapers are doing circles around American reporting. The Independent is always good on environmental reporting, but on Copenhagen, the Guardian has a clear edge. Here's a link to the Guardian's Environmental reporting.

A few others: Climate Progress, 350.org, the website of the Society of Environmental Journalists, the site of the Columbia University Earth Institute, and, of course, Friends of the Earth, which offers videos from Copenhagen.

Meanwhile, from the front window, while the snow falls again today, my old maple tree.

Snow! On the roofs (above) and the view from the dining room (below).

Meanwhile, in Copenhagen. The nations of the world (and many of its scientists) are gathered for what is probably the most important — the most urgent — gathering ever. Low-lying lands (far-flung places like the Nile Delta where most of Egypt's people live, Bangladesh, the East Coast of the United States among them) will be under water before the century is out — unless. What? Science says our carbon emissions have to drop something like 80 percent. The European Union is offering, for starts, a 30 percent cut by 2020, but they don't want to be alone in putting out. China, where they can't see much beyond their block because the air is so bad, is offering 45 percent and has opened a vast technological front on its carbon footprint. Every nation of the world is basing its figures on a comparison with 1990 levels. Except one.

President Obama has the unhappy disgrace of having to offer, on behalf of the U.S., a measly 17 percent reduction — based on a comparison with 2005. What that comes out to when figured back into the 1990 base of comparison is pathetic 4 percent. And that's before the inevitable fudging and finessing the numbers. I have to believe he must have yearned for something better to offer.

We will have to change. We will have to take this seriously, and right away. Of course, we know how. The technology is either already here or not too much for human brilliance to achieve. That's not the problem. It's a spiritual crisis, isn't it?

See how they lie. See how we, ourselves, hedge and pretend.

And today, more Americans believe they're protected by angels than believe we're causing global warming.

Meanwhile, observed changes are way outstripping the scientists' predictions. And we know this process isn't something slow & smooth & gradual. No, it hits tipping points and the situation plunges into something more dire and irreversible. Humans have an enormous capacity for changing the subject. Still you hear people talking about how "last summer was really chilly so obviously this isn't happening." Well, if you want to base your climate science on what happens in your own hometown, you might think so. The facts say there has been no cooling — speaking globally — over the past decade. Only warming. 2010 will probably set a new heat record. It's very cold and very windy out there tonight. But even tonight, inhabited lands are sinking under the waves, and the glaciers go on shrinking and the sea ice goes on thinning; and crop zones are moving north, leaving vast regions of scorched earth cannot produce crops.

So the United States has an announcement. It is prepared to contribute $1.4 billion to an international climate change fund! Even while we lavish $30-$40 billion on a very foolish war in Afghanistan. Did you get that? The bill for the Iraq war is probably going to come to $3 trillion. The Obama Defense budget request is $687 billion. This new Afghanistan surge comes to $30-$40 billion. A million bucks a year for each soldier. Is anybody figuring the ongoing costs of the horrible injuries and mutilations that will result?

Where are the high-speed trains? the massive national conversion to sustainable energy sources? Where are they? Does any of this disturb you? Ring a little phony? Have they no shame? Apparently not.

Deep in snow; wet, heavy snow that was a bit too much for my poor snow-blower. So I spent a lot of time shoveling today and will no doubt be quite sore tomorrow. Warmed up a bit later on today and the snow turned to rain. Tonight it all freezes very hard. Oh oh. But Scooby had such a good time tramping about in it today that it's all worth it.

But what's going on with healthcare "reform"? Does anybody know? It looks to me like this: despite tireless effort by progressives, the Democratic Party has failed the public badly. The Republican Party has cemented its new identity as a deeply poisonous factor in public life. We began with a huge compromise on progressives' part: the real solution to our healthcare scandal, single-payer, wasn't even on the table. Now, a meaningful, robust public option appears to have been defeated. Getting creative, Democrats have come up with something almost good: expanding Medicare to those 55 and up. Could be brilliant, since that would seem to be a return to the single-payer concept. But.

There's nothing for you if you're under 55, and, oop, nothing until sometime in 2011 for those over 55, and — don't fail to note this — there's no premium subidy until the "exchange" kicks in, when? 2013? 2014? Ever? Result: participation by those under 65 will, meantime, be very expensive, and certainly pose no competition to the greedy, abusive insurance industry. Instead we'll get a Christmas present for the industry that deserves no present. Of course, that's how it looks at the moment. And then the conservadems will join Maine's useless senators to kill it anyway, at least if there's anything like expanded Medicare in it.

I'm disgusted, as you might possibly have guessed. The United States Senate has distinguished itself as a pretty much useless institution that cannot bring itself to give up its precious filibuster. Couldn't even bring itself to bring the threshold down to 55. Many feel betrayed by this, by the continued reliance on militarism, by the Administration's failure to deliver on the President's profession to be a "fierce advocate" for gay people. By an economic policy that left the brains and vision the nation needed — Krugman, Stiglitz, Reich, Shiller — out in the cold and instead placed stewardship of the economy in the hands of some of the very fools who got us into this crisis. The ironic result? The latest poll shows Obama's popularity tied with Sarah Palin's.

Meanwhile, far more importantly, the nations have gathered at Copenhagen. And besides Saudi Arabia, there seems no greater obstacle to urgent action than — still — the U.S.A. This is depraved. And the Washington Post decides to run an op-ed piece on climate science by Sarah Palin. The press has, of course, contributed to our climate emergency. It is no coincidence that more Americans believe in angels than believe humans are responsible for global warming. Why is the American public so deluded? We all delude ourselves when we can, when the truth is inconvenient. And when the press buries the most important story of our time below the fold on page one (if it ever even makes page one), people can reassure themselves that it isn't really so important. Certainly not as important as the affairs of a popular athlete. So — the New York Times editorializes correctly, and you can find at least some of the reporting in its pages. But it doesn't turn up in the headlines — quite unlike what Brits see when they pick up, say, the Guardian or The Independent.

So far, this is going to have read rather depressingly. What's missing? Well, read the sermon (from the main jaydeacon.net page, click on Sermons), "Context: A Higher We — The Farthest Possibilities of Congregational Life." In times like these, the essential factor is going to be spiritual communities like that. The future depends on it. And our own meaningful, passionate, ecstatic, and joyous living depends on it.

Last night I was up very late following the numbers from Maine as they came in on the website of the Bangor Daily News. The issue, of course, was the new law extending the right to marry to same-sex couples — and the Roman Catholic Church's deceptive, bigoted campaign to defeat it by getting it on the ballot for public vote. Let the majority vote on the rights of a minority — yeh, right. Finally it was clear that 52.7 percent had voted to repeal the right to marry, to 47.2 percent to keep it. That, on top of the defeat of a wonderful (if not at all charismatic) governor in my state of origin, New Jersey by a fairly shady right-wing Republican — had me down.

I spent some time in Bangor in the mid-80s, serving the Unitarian Church in Bangor. They'd called me after one of their members was murdered in a queer-bating hate crime. His name was, of course, Charlie Howard. The anti-gay hate thundered from many quarters there, most especially the Bangor Baptist Church, founded by its pastor Buddy Frankland, who was later found to be having an affair with a married choir member whose wedding he'd once refused to perform inside the church because she'd once had a divorce. The story is far jucier than that, but that will have to do. When Charlie was murdered by three Bangor High School students, the Bangor Daily News ran a mind-numbing editorial titled "Not a Martyr." I remember writing a response, driving down to the newspaper, and marching in to the editor's office, pressing my piece into his hand and uttering something bitter.

So I looked again at the numbers. And I thought: yes, and the Bangor Daily News editorialized in favor of same-sex marriage and against Proposition 1. And the vote in Bangor went in favor of same-sex marriage. Meanwhile Portland affirmed same-sex marriage 20,085 to 7,242. And Belfast, and Camden, and Bar Harbor, and Saco, and many more communities. Yeh, the Catholic Church did what it does — it lent its spokesman to be the voice of the anti-gay campaign. (Why do any self-respecting gay people remain in that institution?) Yeh, the inland little towns aren't there yet. But great god — how far we've come since the mid-80s! And of that, I am very glad indeed.