Bigotry in Australia

Politician Suffers Abuse From Homosexualists

Australian politician defending religious freedom says she faces bigotry worse than racism

The Barnabas Fund

An Australian politician who has raised concerns about the impact on freedom of religion of attempts to redefine marriage says she has been subjected to bigotry worse than racism.

Karina Okotel, a Vice President of the Federal Liberal Party and who is of Sri Lankan heritage, says she has occasionally been subjected to racism in Australia. However, the “bigotry”, “discrimination” and “hate” she has experienced recently, due to her having opposed attempts to redefine marriage, have been “far worse.” She says, “I have even been told to go back to my own country, which is difficult given that I was born in Australia.

The Apogee of Self-Deceit

Punched Drunk, and Slurred Speech

One of the moral depredations facing the West is self-deceit.  This perverse characteristic is manifest amongst elites, the Chattering Classes, the mass media, the Commentariat, universities and colleges, and so on.  The West is afflicted with a profound intellectual dishonesty.  

The pugilist ring in which this deceit is seen most clearly is the fight over the family.  In the left corner sits the protagonist for homosexual "marriage".  Lean, limbered up, at the peak of condition, and in the best fighting weight for decades, Mr or Mz Homosexual Marriage has defeated opponents in every pugilist ring in the country.  There is a spring of inevitable victory in the Champ's footsteps as s/he steps forth to engage in yet another triumphalist bout.  At last the great victory has been won.  Marriage, that holy institution ordained by Almighty God, is now extended to practitioners of homo-erotic sex.  Mighty Man has given God a lesson, an almighty thrashing, one may say.  

A thousand questions are suddenly begged--and not just begged.  They demand attention and answers.

Desperate Artifices

The Bible is Not a Wax Nose To Be Twisted At Will

When consciences become seared one of the outcomes is folk attempting to "explain away" the Bible's clear teaching.  When the Bible commands, "Thou shalt not . . . " the man with a seared conscience responds with a couple of common subterfuges.

The first (and probably the most intellectually honest, albeit erroneous) is to agree that, yes, the Bible does indeed condemn "x", but the Bible has no standing in human life and society.  The Bible is mistaken, irrelevant, tells lies, etc.  This response does not deny that the Messenger says that "x" is wrong, forbidden, and condemned.  Rather, it attacks the Messenger as having no relevance, authority, or standing in the matter.

The second subterfuge is to agree that yes, the Bible condemns "x" and forbids the practice of "x" but "x" has a narrow or technical meaning.  It does not apply to every instance of "x".  In this way, one can still maintain some vestiges of credibility as a believer, but only by perverting the teaching of the Bible, making it say what it does not.

Thus it has come to pass with respect to the Bible's teaching on homosexuality.  There are plenty of scholars in subterfuge number one.  Such folk are knowledgeable on the widespread practice of homosexuality amongst the Greeks and Romans (that is, in New Testament times).

The Winnowing Fork

"Choose You This Day Whom You Will Serve"

It is very sad to see some sections and traditions within the Church going all squishy over homosexuality.  But we must always bear in mind that when the Lord directs such things to confront His Church it is always to winnow and purify His body over the longer run.

The real issue is for us to return once more to the teaching of Scripture and stand upon the Word of God.  Regardless of the spurious doctrines and beliefs peddled by the world of Unbelief, we are called to be faithful to His Word.  By this we affirm our faith and our loyalty, and we confirm that we belong to Christ.  "If you love me, keep my commandments", says the King.

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. . . . Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.”  [John 14: 15,21]

In this light, we believe the following statement by a contemporary pastor, Kevin De Young on homosexuality and the Scriptures is right on the money:

The Homosexual Marriage Mirage

Flying Spaghetti Monsters

Homosexual "marriage" is being weaponised in New Zealand.  The bureaucrat in charge of the register of marriage celebrants, Registrar-General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, Jeff Montgomery claims that he is bound by the NZ Human Rights Act to prevent any discrimination against homosexuals.  Therefore, according to Mr Montgomery's peculiar perspective on things, if someone applies to be a marriage celebrant whose conscience will not permit them to "marry" homosexuals, they cannot be an official marriage celebrant.  

Bob McCoskrie of Family First writes:

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

On Kicking the Can’t Down the Road

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog

I was not surprised at the election of Donald Trump. I was actually expecting that. Neither was I surprised at the decisiveness of his win in Electoral College terms. I was expecting that also. And neither was I surprised that my preferences remained in place—I knew that I would much rather have Trump in the White House than Hillary there. All these things I have addressed in this space already in various ways. But I will tell you what did surprise me, something that I was not expecting at all. I was surprised at the depth of my joy over what happened to the Clinton hubris. I thought I was going to be pleased with the results in Clintonville, but my internal relief thus far has been positively undignified. I am not hugging strangers on the street yet though.

As I have been warning, the danger with backgrounding your principles for the sake of a particular election is that if you win (which the Trump evangelicals did), is that you then find yourself wanting to background them for a longer period, backgrounding them “until a more propitious time.” Your particular issues are not important to the people you helped elect, and so you start kicking the can’t down the road. You start thinking about getting this or that through, you start mulling on the possibility of a second term, and all that stuff, and so you put some important issues down at the bottom of the “old business” part your agenda. If enough time passes, this process is tantamount to forgetting your principles.

One of the places where Trump is positively bad is on the LGBTQ NATO foolishness.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

Natural Marriage and the Obergefall

Douglas Wilson
Blog&Mablog


INTRODUCTION

I confess myself a bit surprised at the reaction I have gotten from my recent interaction with Russell Moore’s apparent position on the aftermath of Obergefell. But what that reaction confirms to me is that the Christian opposition to secularism really needs to work through some of the foundational issues of political theology. Those foundational issues would have to include basic things like what is law? and what is marriage? And how do we know?

One person on The Twitters denounced me as one who is trying to recycle the discredited nostrums of 80’s Reconstructionism. On that charge I will only say that a central point of the recons—which was that we cannot settle these issues without an appeal to the expressed will of the living God—has hardly been discredited by subsequent events.

That point was made and reinforced when the same gent went on to say this:

“Repeal gay marriage? Might as well go for criminal penalties for adultery. Maybe Prohibition again. Nuts.”

Notice where we now are. The obvious folly of Prohibition, which was a stupid insult delivered at the will of God by the will of impudent man, is now being appealed to as the ground and basis for delivering another stupid insult to the will of God by the will of man. God gave wine to gladden the heart of man (Ps. 104:15). He did not give grape juice to gladden the heart of the wowsers. And the same God who gave us lively spirits to demonstrate His goodness also gave us the gift of being male and female so that we could manifest His image (Gen. 1:27). Setting aside the Word of God for the sake of your traditions is always a misguided attempt to make the pigs fly (Mark 7:8).

In God's World What Goes Around Comes Around

Hung Out to Dry

We have spoken from time to time of the persecution of Christians in the West.  Aaron and Melissa Klein of Oregon in the United States served as a notorious example.  Remember, this was the faithful Christian couple who refused to bake a celebratory cake for homosexual "nuptials".  One Brad Avakian, a petty potentate, lowered the boom upon the couple and forced them out of business.

Commissioner of the Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries Brad Avakian gained infamy when he fined a Christian bakery with $135,000 for refusing to bake a wedding cake for a lesbian couple. The owners of the bakery, Aaron and Melissa Klein, turned down baking a cake to a lesbian couple as it would violate their Christian beliefs. Avakian claimed that the Klein’s refusal to bake the cake were not protected under the 1st Amendment, and labeled it illegal discrimination.

The Klein’s were forced to shut down their bakery, and now operate solely online. Melissa Klein has stated that she would like to reopen an actual store one day, but that doing so in Oregon would be next to impossible.  [The Blaze]

Petty potentate Avakian is an ambitious chappie.

Where Orthodoxy is Optional . . .

The Winnowing Of Christianity

By Rod Dreher
The American Conservative
 




Last night I rode with a traditionalist Catholic friend down to New Orleans to attend a Requiem mass featuring the music of Gabriel Fauré. It was deeply moving, and ravishingly beautiful. I’ve loved Fauré’s Requiem for years, but I have never heard it performed as part of worship. On the drive back, we talked about the travails in the Catholic Church now, and what ordinary faithful Catholics should do when there is so much confusion coming from the church’s leadership.

We talked for a bit about why it is that Evangelicals, who lack the ecclesial structure of Catholicism and Orthodoxy, have an easier time than the rest of us do holding to the orthodox biblical position on contentious moral issues of our time. Nevertheless, Evangelicalism is undergoing a similar winnowing over the issue of how to respond to homosexuality. Denny Burk, a Southern Baptist pastor and seminary professor, writes about it on his blog. Excerpts:

A Latter Day Jeremiad is Called For

False Prophets of the Mid-West Put Themselves On Notice

We have just seen Jeremiah versus the False Prophets replayed before our eyes.  OK.  That's a bit of an exaggeration.  The person representing Jeremiah was a bit mealy mouthed as he went about his work.  But the false prophets of Yahweh were right on cue.

Jeremiah, of course, was the faithful, courageous prophet serving Yahweh in Judah right at the end of that kingdom, before the final exile in 586 BC.  He was bitterly opposed by the Establishment Prophets, who hated even the merest hint that the Lord was about to bring down the Babylonians to destroy the Temple and drive thousands upon thousands into exile.  This, said Jeremiah, was coming because of their sins.  "Traitorous snake", hissed the False Prophets, who were claiming to speak for God Himself.

History, naturally, vindicated Jeremiah as the Lord's true prophet.  At the same time it utterly damned the False Prophets as being, well, false.

In the United States recently the Midwest Society of Christian Philosophers (otherwise known as the Society of False Prophets) convened for a confabulation.

Sins of the High Hand

A Balrog Awakens

Western nations are in the middle of one of the most radical attempts to destroy the institution of marriage ever seen in human history.  It will not succeed.  But, the devastation resulting from the attempt will be the death of Western civilization as we have known it.  The fruits are already swelling, ripening, and falling rotten from the tree.  

The challenge to marriage and the attempts to undermine it will not be overcome by the passing of a few laws.  The worldview which enabled the sustained attack upon marriage in the first place must be repented of by a majority of citizens, and that will take a reformation more profound and widespread than the Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  It will require what the Puritans used to call "root and branch" repentance.

In the law of God and, therefore, in the Christian faith there are sins, and then there are Big Sins.  To be sure, all sins, no matter how small or inconsequential to our evil eyes, bring alienation from God and enmity between people.  When Adam and Eve engaged in a reinterpretation of the fruit of the one tree that was not to be touched or eaten, doubtless they thought it was a small matter.  What was the fruit of one tree amongst thousands and thousands?  We know how that turned out. But in human society, some sins are more destructive, more damaging to the human condition upon the earth than others.  The redefining of marriage is one of those sins.  It represents what the Bible calls a "sin of the high hand".  It is a sin which is contrary to Nature, contrary to sustained human experience over thousands of years, and a sin of supreme arrogance and wilful rebellion.  It is the sin for which there is no atonement, no repentance, no forbearance.

But the person who does anything with a high hand, whether he is native or a sojourner, reviles the Lord, and that person shall be cut off from among his people. Because he has despised the word of the Lord and has broken his commandment, that person shall be utterly cut off; his iniquity shall be on him.” [Numbers 15: 30,31]

One commentary describes the sin of a high hand as follows:

In the Ancient Near East one can find pictures of statues of a god or a warrior with his right fist raised up to the sky. This is the picture of a "high-hand." In the passage above (from Numbers 15) it is used of someone who is literally showing a defiant fist to God as if to say, "Try and strike me dead, I am doing my own thing."  This same sentiment is echoed in Hebrews 10:26 which reads, "If we sin deliberately after receiving the knowledge of the truth, there no longer remains a sacrifice for sins, but a fearful prospect of judgment…" What we can be sure of is that this sin is not accidental and is done in a flaunting, defiant and open-eyed, unremorseful manner which effectively tells Yahweh that He is irrelevant. 

When an entire culture embraces a sin of the high hand we can be certain that only suffering, death, and destruction will be the result, until the Lord grant a universal, culture transforming repentance.   But if the ordinary patterns of  redemptive history repeat, that will only come about after the lands have been ravaged, pillaged, and laid waste.

With a hand held high against heaven, with a fist pumping in a celebration of libertine "deliverance", the West has sealed its fate. Angelo Codevilla describes the leaven of mayhem now working its way through Western society:

The very notion of "redefining" families is a thinly disguised argument for the proposition that the natural family is no better than any other human arrangement and is probably the worst of the lot.  Thus, practitioners of what were once called "deviant" lifestyles want to pin the family label on relations between homosexuals less because they think there is little difference between homosexual and heterosexual relationships than because they want for homosexual couples whatever deference natural families normally receive.

Yet this desire cannot be fulfilled for logical as well as practical reasons.  If families are not natural and permanent unions of one man, one woman, and their children, in addition to others related by blood and marriage, they are the products of infinitely variable choices.  And if that were the case, how could one deny the label family to sometime unions of one man with man women, of one woman with many men, of many men with men?  Why deny it to any combination of bisexuals, pedophiles and necrophiliacs or to practitioners of sex with other species or with one's own offspring?  Ye to the extent that the label "family" is restricted to some living arrangements and not others, the criterion for restriction must be natural.  The acceptance of nature as the criterion, however, drives us back to one man and one woman united to reproduce and raise children.  [Angelo M. Codevilla, The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility (New York: Basic Books, 1997)  p.155f.]

The Balrog, a demon from the ancient world, has awakened.  He comes forth.  The secular West has not just torn down Christendom, it is now busy destroying itself.  Our Christian duty in such times is to continue to testify faithfully to our lost, unrecoverable generation, even after the example of our fathers, of Noah, Elijah, Isaiah, Jeremiah--and above all, of the Lord Himself.

 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not! See, your house is left to you desolate. [Matthew 23: 37, 38]

Thus end all cultures and peoples who, having heard the Word of God and once tasted the good fruits of His kingdom, yet lift up the high hand in stubborn, wilful rebellion.

A One-Eyed Man Amongst the Blind

The King is Dead

It is with great sadness that Contra Celsum notes the passing of US Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia.  We well remember his visits to Auckland, NZ in 1999 and 2004.  He has been lionised as the leader of the conservative justices on the US Supreme Court--their intellectual champion, their leader, and their mentor.  A giant, some have said.

We suspect that such praise is hyperbolic.  We suspect that Scalia himself would have thought so.  The fact remains that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.  Scalia was the one eyed man amongst a Court stacked with the blind.  We do not mean to imply that the "liberal lions" of the Court (Ginsburg, Kennedy, etc.) are dumb.  Rather that they cling to an epistemology that is so idiotic, so myopic that all it takes is for someone to state the obvious, like the boy who pointed out the sartorial inadequacies of the emperor, to be  seen as profound and far-seeing.

Scalia was the exponent of "originalism" when it came to interpreting and applying the Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights.  The original intent and meaning of the actual text, to be discovered by studying the text in its Sitz im Leben--its "Situation in Life"--once uncovered would help us in applying the text appropriately to the modern world.

Open War Is Upon Us Whether We Like It Or Not

Emptying The Caverns of Isengard

The prediction business is risky at any time.  Just ask your local weather man. However, we are going to go out on a limb in the case of Ireland.  We are going to predict  that within a few months we will witness Christians being fined, fired, and imprisoned for being faithful to our Lord in Ireland.

Donna Rachel Edmunds explains why:

Ireland has stripped away laws which protected the rights of people to freedom of religion when in conflict with gay rights. The move comes just weeks after the first Irish gay weddings went ahead, following a referendum to allow gay marriage earlier this year.

Following the landslide defeat for opponents of same sex marriage – the referendum was lost by 62 per cent in favour of gay marriage to 38 per cent against – Ireland’s Parliament has been busy with a slate of reforms designed to cement the rights of gay people within Irish law, Pink News has reported.

What the Irish Parliament has done is acknowledge its fealty to a higher law than the law of Jesus Christ.  In fact, the Irish Parliament believes itself higher than the Almighty.  The Irish justice system will now punish anyone and any church which declares--in the Name of Christ--that since homosexuality is a sin, homosexuals cannot serve in office.  For Christians, this is not a startling position: it is one the Church has held since the Apostles, in all places where the Bible is revered.

Ve Vill Make You Clap and Cheer

Baker Fights Back After Gov’t Punishes Him for Refusing to Make Gay Wedding Cake

Billy Hallowell

TheBlaze 

A Christian baker who was found guilty of discrimination after declining to make a cake for a gay wedding is appealing to the Colorado Supreme Court, arguing that the government should not force him to communicate messages with which he disagrees.

The move comes after the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled in August that Jack Phillips, owner of Masterpiece Cakeshop in Lakewood, Colorado, cannot cite his faith in his refusal to make a gay wedding cake, as such an act constitutes discrimination.

That ruling backed a decision that was previously made in May 2014 by the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, requiring Phillips to make cakes for same-sex celebrations, to engage in “re-educating his staff” and to file reports for two years that show that he is abiding by anti-discrimination laws.

The state Supreme Court appeal is an attempt to secure a religious-freedom exemption for Phillips and others like him, according to his attorneys with the Alliance defending Freedom, a conservative legal firm.

In this March 10, 2014 photo, Masterpiece Cakeshop owner Jack Phillips decorates a cake inside his store, in Lakewood, Colo. Phillips is appealing a ruling against him in a legal complaint filed with the Colorado Civil Rights Commission by a gay couple he refused to make a wedding cake for, based on his religious beliefs. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

“The freedom to live and work consistently with one’s faith is at the heart of what it means to be an American,” Jeremy Tedesco, a lawyer with the firm, said in a press release. “Jack simply exercised the long-cherished American freedom to decline to use his artistic talents to promote a message with which he disagrees.”

When Bobby Sang the Blues

And Nothin' Left Was All She Left To Me

Further to our piece on "Jolly Good Fellows" published yesterday,  Douglas Wilson has opined upon a  Professor of New Testament at Fuller Theological Seminary, who has decided that Bible needed revisin' and brought into twenty-first century.  The particular professor is not important: the decision of a professor in an evangelical theological seminary to affirm homosexuality and homosexual "marriage" as Christian is of some significance.  As is the reaction of Fuller, which, we understand will not be admitting said professor to a tenured position.  He will be departing Fuller shortly.  Good for Fuller.  Let's hope the particular professor will come to comprehend the viper he is clutching to his bosom, and repent. 

With that background, Wilson's piece, entitled "Our Decomposing Lusts" should be read in full.  But for our specific purposes, we want to quote his last two paragraphs, which echo the sentiments conveyed yesterday in "Jolly Good Fellows".

Not Part of the Hip Group

Unlikely Servants

Kim Davis, who has resisted the tyrant's attentions, is an unlikely servant of God.  But the Lord has both declared, and demonstrated, that it is always His pleasure to call as His servants those who are despised in the world.  In God's Kingdom, only repentant sinners may stand. 

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.”  [I Corinthians 1: 26-31]

In God's Kingdom, we don't spend our time judging those whom God has called to be His servants (not ours).  In God's Kingdom we have no interest in whether someone is hip or cool in the eyes of the world.

Kim Davis is an unlikely servant of the King.  That's why we find ourselves in merry mirth over the dyspepsia she has provoked in the bellies of many.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From Moscow

In Which I Paint With Some Bright Yellows

By Douglas Wilson

Blog&Mablog

A consensus appears to be developing among otherwise reasonable people that Kim Davis, of Rowan County fame, either needs to start issuing marriage licenses or quit her job.

For those just joining us, a county clerk in Kentucky is refusing to issue marriage licenses against her conscience and is also refusing to resign. Her name, which should be on a bronze plaque on the side of the courthouse, is Kim Davis. A federal judge has ordered her to appear in his courtroom Thursday to explain why Davis should not be held in contempt of court for refusing to issue marriage licenses.

File this under sentiments which seem extreme at the time, but heroic when the danger is over, and you are reading them inscribed on the base of a polished marble memorial.

But there is a difference between contempt of court and seeing that the courts have become contemptible.
Now while florists and bakers and photographers enjoy a great deal of active support from the broader Christian world, the most people like Davis will get is a sympathetic lack of sympathy. It falls out this way because Christians generally understand the private sector — that’s where they live, after all — but they don’t understand the nature of government. They don’t understand the public sector and the relationship of God’s  Word to it. Their theology develops a distinct limp as soon as they step into the public square, but it is not the kind of limp you might acquire by wrestling with God at Peniel. It is more like what might happen if you dropped the Collected Works of Immanuel Kant on your foot. That results in quite a distinctive limp, one  you see everywhere.

Here is a quick sampling of that sympathetic lack of sympathy:

Lawful Christian Resistance

Siding with the Pagan Satraps and Presidents

The wider issues cascading out of the Kim Davis event in the United States are probably going to occupy our attention for a stretch.  Whilst the particularities of this situation will fade, the fundamental principles at stake are, well, fundamental and so require Christians to think about them seriously.

OK, for those who have just joined us, the essential "facts of the matter" are these:

1. Kim Davis had been jailed for contempt of court for refusing to grant marriage licenses to homosexual "couples".  She had refused on the grounds of Christian law and doctrine.  In taking this action she has set herself and her office against the "command" of the US Supreme Court.

2. Davis has been "elected as Rowan County [Kentucky] clerk in November to replace her mother, who retired. As an elected official, Kim Davis cannot be fired, but the state Legislature can impeach her. That's unlikely in a state where many lawmakers agree with her position and won't meet in regular legislative session until January." [USA Today]

Some are asking, why does she just not resign?  Here is where the matter gets more complicated--and it is the complication which is the really important part.  All Christians should listen up and and take notice.

The Future of "Homosexual Marriage"

Arguments and Reasoning That Prove Far Too Much

When homosexual "marriage" became legally recognised there were tears of joy.  At last true love would be acknowledged and respected.  Christians and others were not amused.  They prophesied that before long the state would be recognising all sorts of relationships as marriage--thereby making the institution eventually empty of significance, meaning, and power.

Nah.  Don't be stupid, crowed the foolish and naive.  Slippery slope arguments lack logical force.

But there are a couple of little devils in this particular slippery slope that give it both logical force and societal potency.  In the case of homosexual "marriage" there have been been two suppressed premises driving the argument.  The first is that "true love" cannot be denied.  In the end, marriage in this view is the willful union of people.  Therefore, whatever may be the object of love, by virtue of its being loved, it justifies--nay demands--that society recognise the existence of a marriage, and provide legal sanction and recognition of it.  If it does not, it fails to recognise the human rights of the "true lover".

The second assumption is that marriage, like all existence, is evolving, developing and changing.  Therefore, we must expect, look for, and co-operate with the constant flux of existence in the way we recognise marriage (and all things for that matter.)

Yup.  The Christians were right.  Within just a few weeks of homosexual "marriage" being recognised by the Supreme Court of the United States, we read the following in Slate:

UK Soft-Despotism Hardens Its Cutting Edge

Christians Are the New Terrorist Threat

We have highlighted several times in recent months a very disturbing trajectory in Britain: the government appears bent on punishing Christians for being Christian.  It looks like we will be moving back to the days of Tudor and Stewart persecution--in principle, at least.  And once started, who knows where it will end?

It's all bound up in the Conservative government's woolly and incompetent approach to combating "extremism".  That mistaken--even idiotic--approach has led directly to this:

MP: use anti-terror powers on Christian teachers who say gay marriage is ‘wrong’

New Extremism Disruption Orders should be applied on those who “teach” traditionalist Christian views about marriage in the classroom

The headline is found in the Daily Telegraph.  The MP concerned is a Conservative MP.   It appears that in the lexicon of the governing Conservative party, when Christian teachers faithfully teach the Christian faith they are engaged in terrorism.  How has this come to pass?