How everything's stayed the same for fifty years or more ...

(Above: from The Guardian back in 2010, always a grand home for cartoons).

While junketing abroad, the pond was frequently trapped in transit lounges with English people and English newspapers, but thank the long absent lord, the suffering didn't extend to eating British Airways' food.

The heat's subsidised since, but at the time there was much talk of disestablishing the Church of England after its recent decision in relation to female bishops.

The most recent outing in relation to the scandal came in The Guardian with Church of England urged urgently to revive female bishops plan, but back in the pond's transit days, it was pieces like Suzanne Moore's The Church of England can no longer continue as an arm of the state that caught the eye in genuine hard copy newsprint:

Up until now I cannot say I have been overly concerned with female vicars. That one in Dibley seems fun but mostly I am with Bill Hicks: "Women priests. Great, great. Now there's priests of both sexes I don't listen to." I don't believe or even pretend to believe in order to get my kids into the right schools. 

Indeed. The pond doesn't even pretend to believe while shopping at opportunity shops.

At the heart of the church is a steely core of evangelicals who have far more say than they should. The provisional wing of the CofE is as fundamentalist as they come: the one thing that all fundamentalisms share is the need to keep women in their place.

She must have met a Sydney Anglican!

The nonsense of course in the UK, is that - having long ago accepted females into the church workplace as vicars, ministers, call them what you will - the notion of precluding them from higher positions such as a bishop is no longer a theological matter, it's merely a workplace dispute about senior management, discrimination, power-mongering, biblical glass ceilings and such like, as noted by Andrew Brown in Women bishops debate was a long and boring suicide note, The debate that ended with the church voting against women bishops was a ghastly mix of tedium and bad faith:

How did we get here? There have been women priests in the Church of England for nearly 20 years. The vast and settled majority of opinion among churchgoers is in their favour. And to have women priests barred from promotion to bishop is naked and indefensible discrimination.

The ruckus certainly got the joint jumping. There was Catherine Bennett scribbling furiously No to women bishops? It's high time the Church of England was taught a lesson. And The Guardian felt free to editorialise on Female bishops: embarrassing bodies.

Even The Times got caught up in the disestablishing mood - though there's no point trying to link to that invisible fortress - with a few of their scribes joining with Lizzy Davies in asking questions like  Female bishops and the Church of England: what happens next? Why doesn't equalities legislation cover the church, and could the vote lead to disestablishment?

For years disestablishmentarianism was the pond's favourite word, unless you count transubstantiation, or a chance to beat dissidents, fools and conservatives by deploying the even longer word Antidisestablishmentarianism to berate them for their "government-servile money lenders in the temples and bishops in the parliament" ways.

It was of course celebrated by Duke Ellington in his song:

You never want to be coddled, 
You never want to be kissed, 
You're just an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST! 
When I come close when we're dancing, 
I get a slap on the wrist, 
Don't be an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST! 
You've got no use for moonlight, 
You'd turn your back on a star! 
Your heart is bent and you're against 
The state of things as they are! 
When you're a hundred years older, maybe you'll want what you've missed, 
Don't be an old ANTIDISESTABLISHMENTARIANISMIST!

The Duke didn't put it high on his playlist (why not try Such Sweet Thunder instead?) but even Black Adder had a go at it (YouTube here), and frankly it still is dear to the heart, especially as long ago Australia disestablished the Sydney Anglicans, and now all they've got is a waning loyalty to a foreign Queen.

It was of course at one time hailed as the longest word in English, but these days you have to hedge your bets and describe it as the longest non-coined and non-technical word (and even then wiki is still demanding a citation here).

Whatever, you have to think it's an admirable way to avoid discussing the Sydney Anglicans, and when the moment arrives, what do we find?

(click to enlarge, no links, screen cap only).

Dear sweet absent lord, the online joint has had a complete makeover, a huge dose of digital plastic surgery, proving that fundies and conservatives understand that you need to put on your very best lipstick, eye-liner and slick shots of your fearless leaders, if you want to to put your best high-heeled foot forward with the public. 

A bit like any harlot or painted Jezebel. Truly, vanity, vanity, all is vanity saith the preachy pond.

But hark, what's that poignant, relevant, right here, right now touch up in the top right hand corner ...

A lot can change in 50 years. In 1962 ... Of the monarch, the Prime Minister, the Governor-General and the NSW Premiere, only the monarch was female.

Of course a lot can't change in 50 years when you take Adam and Eve as your guide to male and female relationships, and isn't it quaint, isn't it weird, to see the Anglicans getting nostalgic about how this fast-paced unsettling world has moved on and dared to put women in positions of power. Shocking!

Yep, the new lip glossed site is about as trendy as a mugwump in a swamp.

But what splendid news that Mark Thompson is to head Moore College, ensuring that the tradition of rabid fundamentalism is maintained. 

Keen followers of the Sydney Anglicans will recall Thompson asking a series of searching questions of the AOC in relation to the ongoing need for the repression of women in the church, since after all, everything is still Eve's fault (unless of course it's the fault of teh gayz). 

Here's a few of them, you can find the rest here:

• Will you have the courage to stand up to Ms Jefferts Schori and her companions in The Episcopal Church as they seek to impose their revisionist agenda on the rest of the Anglican Communion? 
• Will you have the courage to remove from office Canon Kenneth Kearon and the others in the Anglican Communion Office who have manipulated the ACC agenda over the past decade in extraordinarily unhelpful ways? 
• Will you have the courage to challenge the British government over its social engineering agenda, including the promotion of the legitimacy of homosexual behaviour? 
• Will you have the courage to stand with those faithful Christians and Christian congregations in other jurisdictions who are being persecuted because they want to stand with the teaching of Scripture against the revisionist proposals of denominational officials (The Tron, Glasgow in the Church of Scotland and St Johns Shaugnessy in the Church of Canada come to mind, but there are many others)? 
• Will you have the courage to reform the structures of the Church of England to enable it to focus on winning the nation for Christ? 
• Will you have the courage to break ranks with the other bishops of the Church of England if fidelity to the teaching of Scripture demands it? 
• Will you have the courage to insist upon genuine, effective and permanent protection for those faithful Christian men and women in the Church of England who in good conscience cannot accept the oversight of a woman bishop? 
• Will you have the courage to withhold an invitation to the next Lambeth Conference (2018) from those bishops who have denied the faith in word and action and persecuted the faithful who have opposed their agenda? 
• Will you have the courage to refuse ordination to those who by word or lifestyle deny the teaching of Scripture? 

And so on and so forth and etc. Thompson might look mild-mannered, but it's the usual rampantly punitive, fundamentalist, reactionary, exclusionary and savage stuff. There's not much love in those questions, but plenty of righteous hostility, anger, fear and disdain.

About the only question that went missing was this one:

• Will you maintain the proud Anglican tradition of misogyny and homophobia, and make sure that women and gays know their place in the world, underneath the iron heel of their menfolk?

Oops, that didn't come out right did it? Is the pond as fixated on stereotypical tops and bottoms as the average angry Anglican seems to be? 

And what about the men in the High Anglican Church who still love to dress in frocks?

• Will you maintain the right of high Anglicans to dress in frocks, and nice hats, while never questioning whether this is stretching gender boundaries?

Never mind, that barely leaves time to catch up on the doings of the Catholic Church, and as already noted, the Pellists have had a hard time of it recently, what with Cardinal Pell being accused of a "sociopathic lack of empathy" and a senior woman in the Catholic church telling the bishops it was Time for Bishops to step back, and Fairfax tracking down a dodgy priest who headed off to the foothills of the Owen Stanley Ranges to play a continuing role in the church. (Priest accused of sexual abuse has live-in boy helper, forced video at end of link).

It's taken the Pellists a long time to realise that Pell is an embarrassment, sideline him, and set up a ten member committee, including laypeople, to deal with the recently announced Royal Commission (Bishops strike conciliatory note on RC).

Meanwhile, what blather can you find scribbled by Pell for the Sunday Terror?

The Greek word for "gospel" means good news, an important announcement. It is God's word for us, which we share with other Christians.
This tradition develops over the centuries, but we find no doctrinal ruptures or somersaults. It works because it is true and this becomes more apparent as the wages of sin increase around us.
 Christianity brings every type of person a sense of purpose, peace and forgiveness. This is the same old message which has survived for 2000 years.

Yep, the same old same old.

Try telling that to the children who were wounded and maimed while within the maw, the clutching puncturing grasp of the Catholic church ...

All this is astonishing when it's not pitiful.

Sometimes the pond likes to imagine that it remains amongst the few genuine followers of Christ's humanist, socialist message. If only he'd return so we could embark on a righteous crusade, selling off the riches of Rome, forcing the Pope out of his frocks and into public service, and kicking the Anglican bishops out of their sinecures and their false pieties about the common lot of humanity, and made to acknowledge that women and gays are people too ...

What on earth would he make of the humbug of Xmas, and the humbuggery of church leaders?

The pond reckons Christ would be up for it, what with the view he took of the filthy rich and the arrogantly powerful and the exploitative money lenders, and with his yarns about nice hookers and good samaritans and his blessing of the meek and the poor and the cheese-makers. What a fine time it would be ...

Okay, okay, he and the other two in the trinity have gone missing for millennia despite the yearnings of the millenarians, so here's a few shekels for the "tell her she's dreaming and St. Paul and Adam and Eve rule the roost" jar ...

(Below: and a few more).