Yesterday afternoon I heard a radio journalist covering the continuing crack-up in the American Episcopal church. In particular, the journalist was reporting on the muddle of the denomination's approving a temporary "prudential moratorium" on the election of any more actively homosexual bishops.

Gay and Lesbian interest groups in the denomination are shocked by the "Columbus Compromise", the journalist reported. He paraphrased the words of one Rev. Susan Russell, leader of "Integrity", a GL activist group in the church:

"Not only has the Episcopal church failed the gospel, she said, but they have failed Gays and Lesbians too."


The reporter's words mean something: the sentence connotes that "failing Gays and Lesbians" is the more grievous of the two failures. Either that's exactly what Rev. Russell meant to say--in which case, we should be grateful for her honesty, and wish that other progressives would be so forthright; or that's the mind of the reporter expressing its inability to comprehend any possible meaning to the words "failing the gospel", and its assumption that such a phrase is meaningless to news listeners, for whom the second "failure" is the only real and newsworthy event here.