When comparing the findings from The Field Poll’s final pre-election survey of likely voters (n-966) to the Edison Media Research exit poll in California, the biggest differences relate to the turnout and preferences of frequent church-goers and Catholics. The Field Poll, completed one week before the election, had Catholics voting at about their registered voter population size (24% of the electorate) with voting preferences similar to those of the overall electorate, with 44% on the Yes side. However the network exit poll shows that they accounted for 30% of the CA electorate and had 64% of them voting Yes. Regular churchgoers showed a similar movement toward the Yes side. The pre-election Field Poll showed 72% of these voters voting Yes, while the exit poll showed that 84% of them voted Yes.

The same kind of phenomenon occurred when the first same-sex marriage ban was voted in California in the March 2000 election (Prop. 22), although because of the size of its victory( 61% Yes vs. 39% No) it didn’t matter much back then. In that year The Field Poll’s final pre-election poll, also completed about one week prior to the election, had 50% of Catholics on the Yes side, and accounting for 24% of the vote. Yet, the network exit poll conducted that year by Voter News Service showed them to account for 26% of the electorate with 62% voting Yes.

My take is that polling on issues like same-sex marriage that have a direct bearing on religious doctrine can be affected in a big way in the final weekend by last minute appeals by the clergy and religious organizations.

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Arizona State University, anticipating at least $25 million in budget cuts this fiscal year ”” on top of the $30 million already cut ”” is ending its contracts with as many as 200 adjunct instructors.

Boston University, Cornell and Brown have announced selective hiring freezes.

And Tufts University, which for the last two years has, proudly, been one of the few colleges in the nation that could afford to be need-blind ”” that is, to admit the best-qualified applicants and meet their full financial need ”” may not be able to maintain that generosity for next year’s incoming class. This fall, Tufts suspended new capital projects and budgeted more for financial aid. But with the market downturn, and the likelihood that more applicants will need bigger aid packages, need-blind admissions may go by the wayside.

“The target of being need-blind is our highest priority,” said Lawrence S. Bacow, president of Tufts. “But with what’s happening in the larger economy, we expect that the incoming class is going to be needier. That’s the real uncertainty.”

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The Anglican Bishop of Rochester has called on the British Government to agree that marriage between men and women is the basis of society.

Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali raised the issue during a discussion of same-sex relationships in the House of Lords.

Liberal Democrat Lord Lester of Herne Hill, a leading light in the campaign to introduce civil partnerships in the UK, had questioned the Government’s contention, in a case before the European Court of Human Rights, that same-sex relationships “fall outside the ambit of family life”.

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See what you make of it.

BARACK OBAMA’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election was in many ways a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s win 28 years ago.

His eventual success as president may depend on a willingness to do what Mr. Reagan did: be willing to combat long-term economic problems while accepting short-term pain and the risk of a prolonged slowdown that could damage his popularity….

In passing a tax bill, the Congress and Mr. Obama will have to balance the long-term deficit problem with the need for shorter-term stimulus.

Mr. Bush’s first tax bill presaged a leadership style that focused on partisanship and a determination to avoid compromise with his opponents. Mr. Obama’s first tax bill could show whether he will follow the bipartisan approach that he, like Mr. Bush before him, promised in the campaign.

The success or failure of his administration is likely to be determined by how well he deals with the long-term problems the nation confronts, not by how soon the current recession ends.

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Mr. Obama and his advisers acknowledge that their focus has to shift, but the change is still likely to be challenging, and a bit disappointing. “Unfortunately, the next president’s No. 1 priority is going to be preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the last century from turning into the next Great Depression,” says Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser. “That has to be No. 1. Nobody ever wanted that to be the priority. But that’s clearly where we are.”

Throughout the campaign, whenever Mr. Obama was asked about the financial crisis, he liked to turn the conversation back to his long-term plans, by saying that they were meant to solve the very problems that had caused the crisis in the first place. Back in January, he predicted to me that the financial troubles would probably get significantly worse in 2008. They had their roots in middle-class income stagnation, which helped cause an explosion in debt, and the mortgage meltdown was likely to be just the beginning, he said then.

His prognosis was right ”” and the pundits now demanding that he give up major parts of his economic agenda in response to the financial crisis are, for the most part, wrong. When you discover that a patient is in even worse shape than you thought, you don’t become less aggressive about treatment. But you do have to deal with the most acute problems first.

And Mr. Obama has a big incentive to do so. The hangover from a recession typically lasts more than a year, and this recession isn’t over yet. So he will be at risk of the same kind of midterm drubbing in 2010 that Ronald Reagan received in 1982 and Bill Clinton did in 1994. In the days leading up to this year’s election, as they confidently reviewed the polls, some Obama aides took to joking darkly that 2010 was already looking bad.

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South Carolina has announced it is ready to start making controversial “I Believe” license plates, a move that is already the subject of a lawsuit.

The South Carolina Department of Motor Vehicles posted an announcement on its Web site that it has received enough pre-applications to begin manufacturing the plates.

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Billy Graham’s work as a pastor to presidents is coming to an end, but he is praying for Barack Obama as the nation’s next leader begins his work, Graham’s son said Friday on the ailing evangelist’s 90th birthday.

Franklin Graham said in an interview that his father’s mind remains sharp even as his body continues to fail. But the preacher who has counseled every president beginning with Eisenhower is not in line to mentor Obama.

“My father feels like his time and day for that is over,” Franklin Graham said. “But he would certainly like to meet (Obama) and pray with him.”

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The Diocese of Quincy’s governing synod has voted resoundingly to leave the national Episcopal Church.

The announcement came Friday afternoon during the group’s meeting at Quincy Country Club. In the past five years the Peoria-based Diocese of Quincy and some of the other conservative-leaning dioceses around the nation have threatened to leave the Episcopal Church to join other Anglican bodies.

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Update: An ENS article is here.

Bishop Robert Duncan is once again the diocesan bishop of The Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Clergy and lay deputies to a special convention of the diocese on November 7 voted to invite Bishop Duncan back into leadership of the diocese 50 days after the House of Bishops of The Episcopal Church voted to remove (“depose”) him.

“It is good to be back. God has clearly watched over the diocese and watched over me and Nara as we have walked through these challenging days together. God willing, I look forward to many years together sharing the good news of Jesus Christ,” said Bishop Duncan.

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All year, General Motors CEO Rick Wagoner has been insisting his company will never declare bankruptcy. “We’re well positioned,” he said in August. Company spokespeople reiterated that in October, despite the big stock market plunge. Even the company website states that “bankruptcy protection is not an option GM is considering.”

Well, guess what. While announcing a $2.5 billion third-quarter loss, GM also said that its “estimated liquidity during the remainder of 2008 will approach the minimum amount necessary to operate its business.” That means the company is spending way more than it’s earning and, unless something changes, will run out of cash sometime early next year. The company itself hasn’t raised the possibility of a Chapter 11 filing. But at this dire juncture, Wagoner and his lieutenants ought to be fired if they’re not doing contingency planning for bankruptcy””since that’s where companies end up when they run out of money and can’t pay their bills.

There’s one alternative, of course. No, it’s not a desperate merger with Chrysler, which GM has now disavowed, since Chrysler is in even worse shape than GM. Salvation lies in””you guessed it””a government bailout.

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The Diocese of New Westminster on November 5 filed its Statement of Defence and Counterclaim in a second suit brought against it in BC Supreme Court.

The second suit was brought on October 15 by a former clergy, Stephen Leung, and some others at the parish of the Church of the Good Shepherd, Vancouver. Stephen Leung left the Priesthood in the Anglican Church of Canada in April of 2008.

Good Shepherd, primarily Chinese-speaking, was one of the four parishes in the diocese that last February voted to leave the Anglican Church of Canada and join a dissident group, the Anglican Network in Canada, affiliated with the Church of the Southern Cone of South America.

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I remain convinced that to understand the heart of our struggles we need to recognise that there are two distinct but related issues. One is the issue of sexuality and attitudes to Anglican teaching, discernment and practice on this subject as found in Resolution I.10 of Lambeth 1998. The other ”“ in some ways the more complicated one, especially for evangelicals ”“ is the issue of ecclesiology and what it means to be a global communion of Anglican churches….

In relation to North America, GAFCON is clearly seeking to be the means of constituting a new Anglican province. While I am among those who believe this is a sign of failure, it is now the inevitable consequence of developments over recent years and the key task is to ensure it is at least as good a “second best” as possible rather than something worse. The aim must be not only to build the church and spread the gospel in the US and Canada. The aim must also be to establish a structure which, even if initially only recognised by a few provinces, is able and willing, once the Anglican covenant is agreed, to make the necessary affirmations and commitments and so align itself with the newly configured covenantal Communion. The danger is that this development may become ”“ whether intentionally or not – the trigger for a fracturing of the wider Communion and the founding of a more narrowly defined purely confessional fellowship which is shaped less by the ecclesiological vision of Windsor and more by the forces of post-colonialism and hostility to the American church’s response to same-sex unions.

And what, finally, of our own Church [of England]? That is, I take it, where much of our discussion will focus today and I don’t want to pre-empt that but a few comments as I close. We would be foolish to deny that the fault-lines in North America and the wider Communion are not present here or to pretend that realignment in these other contexts can take place without effecting us. In particular, if the failings of Lambeth place more weight on the Archbishop of Canterbury, they also place more pressure on the province of which he is Primate. However, it would be both foolish and dangerous to pretend that our own situation is anywhere near as dire as that of either the American or Canadian churches or to claim that we are called to follow their path. The challenge especially for evangelical Anglicans in the CofE is therefore to find a way of maintaining their own unity and rejecting further fragmentation, standing in solidarity with others here in England and across the Communion who are committed to biblical teaching, and supporting the covenant process and all other means of reforming, healing and revitalising the Anglican Communion and serving God’s mission in the world.

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Squeezed by tight credit and plunging spending power, the American economy is losing jobs at the fastest pace since 2001, and the losses could accelerate to levels not seen since the deep recession of the early 1980s.

Employers shed 240,000 more jobs in October, the government reported Friday morning, the 10th consecutive monthly decline and a clear signal that the economic slowdown is troubling households and businesses.

Since August, the economy has lost 651,000 jobs ”” more than three times as many as were lost from May to July. So far, 1.2 million jobs have been lost this year.

“Clearly, these are very bad numbers,” said Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at IHS Global Insight. “Businesses had been paring back for most of the year, but I suspect that it had been more caution on hiring rather than firing,” Mr. Gault said. “In September, they decided, ”˜O.K., look, this isn’t just a mini-recession, this is a full-blown recession. We better take some action.’ And they did.”

Read the whole article.

The Bishop of Los Angeles has challenged California voters who backed the successful ballot initiative to ban gay marriage to examine their consciences and banish their ignorance on homosexuality.

In a statement released on Nov 5, the Rt Rev J Jon Bruno (pictured) called upon Californians who supported Proposition 8 “to make an honest and dedicated effort to learn more about the lives and experiences of lesbian and gay humanity whose constitutional rights are unfairly targeted by this measure. Look carefully at scriptural interpretations, and remember that the Bible was once used to justify slavery, among other forms of oppression.”

With 99 per cent of precincts reporting, voters backed Proposition 8 by 5,376,424 to 4,870,010 votes, or 52 per cent to 48 per cent. Proposition 8 amends the state constitution to specify that only marriages between one man and one woman would be recognized as valid in California — overturning a May 2008 state Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage.

Bishop Bruno and the bishops of San Diego, California, Northern California, El Camino Real, and the bishop of the provisional diocese of San Joaquin lent their support in September to the “no” campaign.

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He was an avid sportsman who loved soccer and the outdoors. But he also loved his country. On Wednesday, he died in Iraq.

Adam McKamey Wenger, 27, was the second Charleston-area soldier to have lost his life in the war on terror in about a month.

The circumstances are unclear and his family does not have many details. He had been in the Army for about eight years and leaves behind a wife and two young children.

His older brother spoke Thursday of someone who made sacrifices.

“He was a good kid,” said David Wenger, 31. “He loved his country. He wanted to serve his country. He wanted to do his duty.”

Please let us not forget those who serve. Read it all.

The Bishop of North Carolina, the Rt Revd Michael Curry, said on Wednesday: “This is a day that I honestly never dreamed I would see. I think about my grandmother, who was the daughter of a sharecropper here in North Carolina. My ancestors were slaves here. My daddy went to jail so folk could vote.

“My great-aunt Callie was a Sunday-school teacher at Sixteenth Street Baptist chapel where the little girls were killed in 1960. Somehow, all the things that people did without knowing how it was going to turn out helped to make this moment possible.

“But they never dreamed this. Americans have said what we want to be: a country for all. That was the American dream from the beginning. God blesses us sometimes, in spite of ourselves, and, every once in a while, something happens that says that dream is real, and don’t give up on it for America, and ultimately for the whole world.”

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Gertrude Baines’ 114-year-old fingers wrapped lightly over the ballpoint pen as she bubbled in No. 18 on her ballot Tuesday. Her mouth curled up in a smile. A laugh escaped. The deed was done.

A daughter of former slaves, Baines had just voted for a black man to be president of the United States. “What’s his name? I can’t say it,” she said shyly afterward. Those who helped her fill out the absentee ballot at a convalescent facility west of USC chimed in: “Barack Obama.”

Baines is the world’s oldest person of African descent, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates claims of extreme old age. She is the third-oldest person in the world, and the second-oldest in the United States after Edna Parker of Indiana, who is 115.

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Reporting from Washington — During the campaign, when Barack Obama needed an authoritative voice to defend his tax and spending proposals, he turned to Lawrence H. Summers — the Clinton administration Treasury secretary and former Harvard president who has one of the sharpest minds in modern economics.

Now, as President-elect Obama considers his choice for Treasury secretary, Summers’ name is again front and center. But this time, the decision is not so clear. Obama faces conflicting advice from his close advisors, from Capitol Hill and from important Democratic constituencies.

Some argue that, with the economy gripped by a deepening crisis, he needs the country’s best and brightest to help him deal with it, chief among them Summers.

Others warn that Summers’ sharp elbows and his penchant for controversy could make him a damaging distraction at a time when the nation and the new president can least afford it. And they worry that Summers’ wide-ranging knowledge, expansive personality and combative impulses could clash with the president’s desire to have the White House deeply involved in the biggest problems facing the new administration.

These voices argue that a more reassuring pick might be the venerable former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker, perhaps teamed with New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy F. Geithner.

I prefer the Volcker option. Read it all.

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So much for the “new evangelicals.”

For the past two years, hundreds of articles have appeared in newspapers across America making the claim that the old religious right was moving left and that Barack Obama, with his religiously infused rhetoric and various “outreach efforts,” was leading the charge. A year ago, David Kirkpatrick predicted the “evangelical crackup” on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. “Jesus Rode a Donkey: Why Republicans Don’t Have the Corner on Christ,” “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America” and “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right” are just three of the dozens of books released since 2004 that suggested that evangelicals were rethinking their loyalty to the Republican Party and conservatism in general. The new evangelicals, just in case anyone missed the storyline, were not so backward as to vote on issues like abortion and gay marriage. They were enlightened about the environment and favored government aid to the poor.

Well, whoever these new evangelicals were, they didn’t show up at the polls on Tuesday.

John McCain won 74% of white born-again Protestants’ votes. And while this was four percentage points lower than George Bush’s share in 2004, President Bush’s re-election was “the highpoint” for evangelical support of Republicans at least since 1980, according to John Green, a pollster at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It’s become something of a cliché that Mr. Bush has a “special relationship” with his fellow evangelicals — but it’s true. And it’s a little unrealistic to expect that Sen. McCain would enjoy the same relationship with them, given that he is not one of their own. But he did just as well as, if not better than, every other GOP candidate in the past 30 years. The large victory that Mr. Obama scored with most of the electorate makes it remarkable that his gains with white evangelicals were so small.

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A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago ”” or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.

The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.

“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.

Read it all and follow the link to the full report.

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The next meeting of the primates of the Anglican Communion will be Jan. 31 through Feb. 6, in Egypt, The Living Church has learned.

Among the topics expected to be discussed are the proposed Anglican Covenant and the three-fold moratoria proposed during the Lambeth Conference by the Windsor Continuation Group.

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Christian emergency response organizations have expressed alarm at a deteriorating situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province and about brutalities innocent civilians are facing in a potential humanitarian catastrophe.

The Geneva-based ACT International (Action by Churches Together) said in a statement on October 30 that it had accounts from aid workers of looted shops and dead bodies on the pavements in Goma, the capital of North Kivu province.

“It has been a night of horror, but Goma is quiet now,” ACT International quoted one of its aid workers as saying. Emergency work became paralysed after aid workers themselves were withdrawn from the field for security reasons, while thousands of people have sought refuge as rebel leader General Laurent Nkunda has moved towards the city.

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For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become — at least for a time — a national obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of his victory as we are about its political significance.

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long — that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America? And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black president? And yet an element of Barack Obama’s success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle. His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

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Reporting from London — If history records a sudden surge in carbon emissions on Wednesday, it may be due to the collective exhalation of relief and joy by the hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of people around the globe who watched, waited and prayed for Barack Obama to be elected president of the United States.

In country after country, elation over Obama’s victory was palpable, the hunger for a change of American leadership as strong outside the U.S. as in it. And there was wonderment that, in the world’s most powerful democracy, a man with African roots and the middle name Hussein, an upstart fighter who took on political heavyweights, could capture the highest office in the land.

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A poll commissioned by the Club for Growth in 12 swing congressional districts over the past weekend shows that the voters who made the difference in this election still prefer less government — lower taxes, less spending and less regulation — to Sen. Obama’s economic liberalism. Turns out, Americans didn’t vote for Mr. Obama and Democratic congressional candidates because they support their redistributionist agenda, but because they are fed up with the Republican politicians in office….

Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district will always support universal health care, and Jeff Flake’s Arizona district will always support less government. But the 12 districts we surveyed represent the political middle of the country, and in this cycle their partisan allegiances changed. The question is, have their opinions on the issues changed as well? The answer is emphatically no.

Consider the most salient aspects of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda: the redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on America’s top earners; the revival of the death tax; raising the tax on capital gains and dividend income; increased government spending; increased government involvement in the housing crisis; a restriction on offshore drilling and oil exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); and “card check” legislation stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot in union elections.

On each of these issues, swing voters stand starkly against Mr. Obama. According to the Club’s poll, 73% of voters prefer the federal government to focus on “creating economic conditions that give all people opportunities to create wealth through their own efforts” over “spreading wealth from higher income people to middle and lower income people.” Two-thirds of respondents prefer to see the permanent elimination of the death tax, and 65% prefer to keep capital gains and dividend tax rates at their current lows.

Read it all and take the time to look at the overall poll results also

The following two resolutions were unanimously passed by the Standing Committee of South Carolina at our November, 2008 meeting:

1. Be it resolved that the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina does hereby subscribe to as a standard of faith the Jerusalem Declaration as set forth at the GAFCON conference and affirmed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and further affirms the reforming voice of the GAFCON movement within the Anglican Communion.

2. Be it resolved that the Standing Committee of the Diocese of South Carolina does not recognize the non-canonical deposition of the Right Reverend Robert Duncan and continues to recognize him as a bishop in Christ’s one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church.

The Very Reverend John Burwell
President, Standing Committee of South Carolina