The ASA sent him “all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline.” The correspondence was part of an investigation [...]]]> Last Friday, the blogger known as Archbishop Cranmer made a bold claim: “Advertising Standards Authority persecutes His Grace,” the headline announced.

The ASA sent him “all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline.” The correspondence was part of an investigation into an ad (which you can see here) that appeared on Cranmer’s blog, urging people to sign a petition on behalf of the Coalition 4 Marriage. Complainants said they found the ad “homophobic” and “offensive,” and although the investigation was not into Cranmer specifically, he was required to respond to that particular charge.

I was immediately quite irked by what seemed to me to be an attempt to silence an ad that, in the scheme of things, is no big deal. As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I want to see the debate won by reasoned argument, not by getting someone with a bit of clout to shut the other side up.

On Monday, “His Grace” responded publicly to the ASA. That someone trying to defend himself against charges of homophobia would make a clever pun on “smouldering faggots” was hardly the wisest step, but then the question wasn’t whether Cranmer was homophobic, but whether the ad was worthy of complaints to the ASA and a heavy-handed investigation.

On Wednesday, the ASA responded to the controversy, which by now had expanded beyond the blogosphere and into the mainstream media:

One of the bloggers on whose blog the ads appeared has raised concerns about us contacting him as part of our investigation.  We have long found it useful to ask, in confidence, publishers of ads subject to ‘offence’ complaints for their views, because they can give us a valuable insight into whether or not their readers are likely to be offended.  They are not the subject of our investigation, as we have made clear to them in this case, and they are not compelled to respond.

Valuable insight? Not compelled to respond? This did not sound like what Cranmer had claimed, or what I understood to be the situation, so I returned to read and reread everything Cranmer had written on the subject. I found it difficult to get a clear picture of what exactly the ASA said to Cranmer directly and in what context, however. He had received an email, accompanied by a bundle of 10 pages, all of which he had cited extensively, but there were obvious gaps where he had filled in with his own words. So, via Twitter, I made a very reasonable request: Could he please publish the entire correspondence online?

Can We See the Documents?

It was Cranmer himself who had said, when he first announced his persecution, that he had no intention of respecting the ASA’s request for confidentiality:

He is instructed by the ‘Investigations Executive’ of this inquisition to keep all this confidential.

However, Since His Grace does not dwell in Iran, North Korea, Soviet Russia, Communist China or Nazi Germany, but occupies a place in the cyber-ether suspended somewhere between purgatory and paradise, he is minded to ignore that request. Who do these people think they are?

So confidentiality was not a problem.

“That is the full email,” he replied, “minus the salutation and the sign-off.”

“In your original post? Looks like lots of little quotes, some paraphrasing, etc. Hard to gauge entire email.”

“No, the email is quoted in full. The ‘bundle’ is too big to publish in its entirety. The excerpts are not misrepresented.”

So the reason he won’t publish the attached bundle is because it’s too big. He says the excerpts aren’t misrepresented, but that’s not the point, is it? The whole point is we shouldn’t have to take his word, just as we shouldn’t have to take the ASA’s word. At this stage, I suspected if there were any big misrepresentation, it was from the ASA. But it was obvious the full documentation would confirm it.

“Surely very easy, and v helpful for onlookers, just to post original email in full? Not sure what ‘bundle’ is. … Still difficult to compare email with ASA response; not clear in your first post what’s verbatim & what’s your interpretation.”

“A bundle is ten pages of A4. It really is very simply: verbatim quotes are indented or in quotation marks.”

“So there are gaps, & it would very helpful, & make things very clear, if you filled in gaps by posting entire email verbatim.”

He didn’t seem to be getting it. I understood quite well that indentation and quotation marks indicated a verbatim quote. My problem was with the little gaps. Finally, to make things as easy as possible for the Archbishop, I posted all the quotes to a single document to demonstrate unequivocally that there were gaps.

“Bear with me. Here’s all the direct quotes you provided, minus your own paraphrases: http://t.co/cXy2kMGJ“

“For the third time, is not remotely practicable to post 10 PAGES on a blog. You are free to doubt and disbelieve.”

Here Cranmer really dropped the ball. Having gone to great lengths to argue his case on his blog, now he refuses to argue, and appears to say: Well, I’m not giving you that evidence; you’ll just have to believe me or disbelieve me. Note that again he offers the same reason: It’s impractical.

Then I was suspicious. I didn’t suspect some grand cover-up, but I was puzzled why Cranmer was so resistant. He was clearly making excuses; anyone with enough web savvy to run a blog knows that posting a few documents online is not impractical. Ten pages is not too big. If you can’t upload something directly to your blog, there are thousands of free services where you can easily host ten pages of documentation.

I emailed Archbishop Cranmer and asked once again, hoping I might get a more reasonable response in private. I even offered to host the documents myself if that was a problem. He replied to educate me on the difference between an email and a bundle and to give me another reason why he wouldn’t upload the documents, which he hadn’t even hinted at on Twitter:

You appear to be ignoring the fact (which has now been publicised numerous times) that this bundle contains numerous other pieces of information (recipients’ names, details) which it is simply not appropriate to put into the public domain. As His Grace has made clear, two of these letters are addressed to a third party. It is neither his right nor desire to drag them into his dispute.

It seemed the size of the bundle, twice offered as an excuse, wasn’t relevant at all. It was true that he had said on his blog that the bundle contained material addressed to third parties, but why didn’t simply point to that as the reason in the first place instead of making up unrelated excuses?

He ended his reply, “You are free to go on insinuating that he is concealing facts and misrepresenting the ASA.”

I replied, a bit irritatedly (but in no way impolitely — I’ll publish the emails I sent if anyone thinks that’s relevant), that I had stuck my neck out defending his freedom of speech, which to most of my fellow gays and liberals, or at least the most vocal ones, makes me look like a total sucker. I let him know I wasn’t suspicious at all until he started getting evasive over publishing everything he received from the ASA.

“Not remotely practicable” clearly falls down as a reason. While his second reason is better, it is still unconvincing. He could always simply black out identifying details. Remember, breaking ASA’s request for confidentiality is not in itself a concern for Cranmer at all. If it’s a simple matter of third parties’ sensitive information, he can publish and simply omit names and such where necessary.

What Did the ASA Tell Cranmer, and Is It Persecution?

The Archbishop’s unnecessary awkwardness over all this prompted me to go back and read and reread his claims. The main problem in piecing together exactly what the ASA told Cranmer directly is that all but the short email prefacing the bundle was addressed to other parties. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the following is the only part of the ASA’s communication addressed directly to Archbishop Cranmer:

The attached summarises a complaint we have received about the enclosed advertising, which appeared on the ‘Archbishop Cranmer’ blog. The complaint falls under the harm and offence section of the British Code of Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing. Please explain why you thought the advertising was suitable for your readers and whether readers have complained to you direct. Please respond by 21st May at the latest. Please keep this correspondence confidential. If you require a postal copy please let me know.

I’m assuming this is the email, as Cranmer told me by email that it was “quoted in full: it consisted of four or five lines of text.” His complaint is that the email is “terse,” that there’s a “tone of asserted authority” and, while they said, “please,” it “reads like a series of demands.” A deadline is “emphatically imposed,” and there’s no mention that he is “not being compelled to respond.”

Agreed. It is fairly terse, and it does present responding as the only option. There’s no suggestion that he’s allowed to ignore the request.

But the strongest and most oft-repeated quotes are from the bundle, none of which, it seems, were directly addressed to Cranmer, which he acknowledges. Yet they form the basis of his claim that he is being persecuted, intimidated, harrassed and threatened. For example:

What you need to do

We need you to respond to the complaint. The CAP Code requires marketers to avoid causing serious or widespread offence. We require you to explain your rationale for the ad and comment specifically on the points raised in the attached complaint notification. We will be happy to receive anything else you think is relevant.

It is for you to decide what to submit, but we will need to see robust documentary evidence to back the claims and a clear explanation from you of its relevance and why you think it substantiates the claims. It is not enough to send references to or abstracts of documents and papers without sending the reports in full and specifically highlighting the relevant parts explaining why they are relevant to the matter in hand.

Yet the way Cranmer represents this information is confusing:

Now, call His Grace obtuse or pedantic if you wish, but this plainly says: ‘We need you to respond to the complaint.’ This statement is not qualified. While these attached letters from the bundle were addressed to a third party, His Grace was manifestly expected to glean from them precisely what was being demanded of him. …  Since His Grace has had to assume that parts of this communication (the request to respond to Issue 2) apply to him (it is not specified in the covering email), it is not unreasonable to assume that these demands and deadlines also apply to him. There is manifestly an intimidating request for ‘robust documentary evidence’, followed by a threat that non-response is ‘considered a breach of The CAP Code’ and may itself be subject to investigation.

Without seeing the original documents, how can we say for sure these demands apply to him, especially when Cranmer tells us himself they were explicitly addressed to a third party?

He also takes exception to the following, which appears somewhere in the bundle:

Who we are

The ASA investigates complaints to ensure that non-broadcast marketing communications comply with The UK Code of Non-broadcast Advertising, Sales Promotion and Direct Marketing (The CAP Code), prepared by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP). We also investigate complaints to ensure that TV and radio advertising complies with The UK Code of Broadcast Advertising (The BCAP Code). The Government, the Office of Fair Trading and the Courts recognise the ASA as the “established means” of regulating non-broadcast advertising.

He finds mentions of “government,” “courts” and “established means” daunting, and so this paragraph, too, becomes part of the evidence that the ASA is persecuting, harrassing, intimidating him. Yet we have no context for these remarks, and we know most of the bundle was addressed to a third party anyway, so the idea these particular terms are being invoked as part of some unique targeting of Cranmer is at best unproven. It doesn’t show the ASA was trying to intimidate him so much as it shows he felt intimidated by them. There’s a big difference.

What Do We Know about Cranmer and the ASA?

We know several parties complained  about the Coalition 4 Marriage ad that appeared on Cranmer’s blog, among other websites. We know Cranmer received an email addressed directly to him and several documents addressed to third parties. We know he was asked to look at all these documents and comment specifically on the ad and why he thought it was “suitable for his readers.”

The more I look into what was said to Cranmer directly, the more I think there is some truth to this tweet by @EyeEdinburgh:

Think @His_Grace got frightened by an official-looking email, &now cannot bring himself to admit he was wrong

Archbishop Cranmer was spooked. He got a snotty email from an official body, the combination of terseness, legalese and demands panicked him, and he rallied his troops forthwith.

Is the ASA off the Hook?

While events don’t reflect brilliantly on Archbishop Cranmer, especially after his evasiveness yesterday, the ASA looks far from good. Putting aside hysterical claims of persecution and intimidation, if what I think I can glean for sure from the convoluted information Cranmer has made available is correct, the ASA looks ham-fisted and dishonest.

They sent a request to Cranmer with no indication that his compliance was voluntary. He was given a request and a deadline — how else to interpret that other than a demand? With the email were 10 pages of miscellany with no clear instructions how they related specifically to him.

Cranmer’s mistake was, in the absence of clear guidance, to assume it all applied to him, and to interpret the entire thing as a mean conspiracy against him. He went ballistic, and his champions joined him in denouncing it as persecution.

Somewhere in the crevices of the ASA office, someone just as easily spooked was terrified by this uproar. So the ASA responded immediately with what seems — again, I could say for sure if only a certain churchman would let us see everything in context — like a barefaced lie. They said it was a voluntary opportunity for Cranmer to provide valuable information, but this wasn’t made clear as they claimed. The opposite seemed true.

Nor do the complainants look very good — whoever they are — for reasons I explained when I first wrote about this story. (The Jewish Gay & Lesbian Group is not even among them, contrary to what the ASA claimed; a JGLG member simply complained independently, as the association now makes clear on its website.)

I see Archbishop Cranmer has asked the ASA, via his blog, to allow him to make the documents available. I’ve no idea why he thinks he needs to ask the ASA, since he’s made clear he doesn’t respect their request for confidentiality. I assume the ASA is not in the habit of responding directly to blogs anyway, and I doubt he’s contacted them directly to ask permission.

I suspect if and when we do get to see everything in context, we’ll see that the most intimidating stuff wasn’t addressed to Cranmer at all, and he may, not for the first time, be forced to recant.

It [...]]]> I signed up for Netflix in Canada last year, tempted by my American chums’ promises of the thousands of movies that awaited me. Having finally sussed that my bandwidth problems were due to the entire neighbourhood stealing my internet connection (I exaggerate; it was maybe half), I decided it was time to treat myself.

It was initially a disappointment. The Netflix range in Canada was a fraction of what users had in the US. Nevertheless, I found enough to entertain me, and I decided that rather than pay every month for a limited service, I would do a month off, a month on, a month off.

When I moved back to England, Netflix UK was just preparing to launch. I was unsure whether my Canadian account was transferable, so I tried logging in, and when that failed, I assumed they were being treated as two different services. After all, it was a different country, a different catalogue of titles and, presumably, an entirely different experience. I signed up for my free trial and it was granted — or so I thought until I read my bank statement and saw I’d been charged.

After seeing the dismal selection of titles on Netflix UK — some categories had less than a page — I was all the more glum to see I was being made to pay. I phoned Netflix to complain and get a refund. To his credit, the guy I spoke to immediately offered to reverse the charge or carry it over to my next month’s bill. I informed him what I thought of the service and that I didn’t want another month; so I got the refund with no problem. However, he said, there would be big changes ahead, and Netflix UK’s selection of titles would be improving in the near future.

Three months later, I figured my bank balance could stand me parting with six quid to experiment with Netflix again to see if the range really had improved. I authorized payment, logged in and, alas, saw very little difference. I still managed to find a few shows and films to justify a single month’s payment. Unfortunately, my main problem now is that the videos aren’t loading consistently. They’ll stop at 20%, pause for a couple of minutes, then either continue streaming or just go blank. It’s the same on every browser, and it’s not a bandwidth problem affecting any other site (such as LoveFilm, which, for all its faults, is glorious in comparison).

The Netflix UK support system isn’t particularly helpful to me. I can report a problem with a specific title, but not with streaming and downloading generally. Even then, I can’t submit a personal comment; I can only choose from a handful of possibilities, none of which fits. I’ll have to phone. Poor show, Netflix. There is a troubleshooting database, but there’s no index. You have to search it, which means guessing Netflix’s key words.

All-round, the service strikes me as backwards and decidedly user-unfriendly. How do I loathe thee, Netflix? Let  me count the ways:

• Extremely limited range of titles
• Much smaller library than Netflix Canada, but the same price (or more, depending on the day)
• Can’t bookmark or queue titles, so you have to remember or browse to find new titles every time you log on
• Rubbish online help/support system
• No way to see what’s available before you pay — is there any better way to say “We care about your money, but we don’t really care about you”?

If I overcome my streaming problems, I’ll continue to the end of this month, then cancel. After all, it was my gamble signing up to Netflix again, knowing the selection could be just as dire as it was when it launched. If I get no joy resolving the streaming issue, however, I think another refund is on its way.

Image: Netflix UK screenshot taken 14 May, 2012. Like classic dramas? Choose from seven titles, then arrange in sortable list or gallery view for added entertainment value.

– Not Voltaire

Friday afternoon saw a bit of muttering on Twitter over the plight of Archbishop Cranmer, the pseudonymous Christian blogger claiming persecution for carrying a Coalition 4 Marriage advertisement on his website.

I’m a Christian. I’ve been a confirmed Anglican since 2003. I’m a regular churchgoer and continue to be involved in all kinds of areas of parish life.

I am also an agnostic. I accept the intellectual arguments for atheism, and recognized about 18 months ago that I had long [...]]]> (This was first published in 2009.)

I’m a Christian. I’ve been a confirmed Anglican since 2003. I’m a regular churchgoer and continue to be involved in all kinds of areas of parish life.

I am also an agnostic. I accept the intellectual arguments for atheism, and recognized about 18 months ago that I had long since given up on theism. I believe God is a human construct.

Where the mainstream arguments of atheists fall down, I think, is in assuming that because there’s (probably) no God, there’s no place for religion. In my experience, this just doesn’t follow. I’ve had to radically reinterpret my faith recently, but its language, rituals, symbols and meanings have remained. To me it’s all about metaphor, and the outward practice of religious worship is about acknowledging the sacred dimension of life and taking time to remind oneself to live in it.

Everyone has some way of connecting with the sacred. It might be nature, music, a relationship, an intellectual pursuit. Mine just happens to be a religion, and it’s not inherently better or worse than anyone else’s means of engaging the sacred. I frequently hear from atheists that we “don’t need religion,” as if “not needing” were enough of a reason to abolish it. “Don’t need” is in itself ambiguous. What is need? Do you need a beautiful sunset? Do you need your wife? Do you need Beethoven’s symphonies? There’s a sense in which we don’t need these things at all. We could live without them; we don’t need art in the way we need oxygen, for example. Why must the next logical step be abolishment? There’s another sense in which we can’t live without these things.

I need religion only in the way other people need an art or a beautiful landscape or a loved one. An emotional crutch? Only if you can call Mozart or marriage or movies an emotional crutch. We don’t all need these things, but we all need something.

North Carolina’s Amendment One was a constitutional bill so anti-gay that even David Blankenhorn, the defence’s sole expert witness in the Proposition 8 trial, disavowed it. And yet, yesterday, voters in the state passed it by a majority of 60% to 40%, robbing gay families of all legal protections afforded to heterosexual married couples.

Unlike [...]]]>

North Carolina’s Amendment One was a constitutional bill so anti-gay that even David Blankenhorn, the defence’s sole expert witness in the Proposition 8 trial, disavowed it. And yet, yesterday, voters in the state passed it by a majority of 60% to 40%, robbing gay families of all legal protections afforded to heterosexual married couples.

Unlike California’s Prop 8, and contrary to most news headlines this morning, the amendment didn’t merely define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. It declared that the marriage of one man and one woman would be the only valid relationship. And the declaration wasn’t merely a law; it was enshrined in the state constitution of North Carolina. Three fifths of the electorate said to gay families, “Fuck your rights.”

The lost, drained expressions in the photo above (from The Guardian) tell all.

I’m left feeling incredibly sad for the gays and lesbians affected by this pernicious legislation. It means the love between two men or two women will never be recognized in law as anything more than the relationship between two people who just happen to occupy the same apartment. It means more stories like that of Shane and Tom. They shared their lives together for almost six years before Tom died, leaving Shane bereft and with no legal recognition of their mutual love and commitment. This video is hard to watch, but it illustrates compellingly the basic dignity and rights that straight, married couples take for granted, which vicious, homophobic legislation like Amendment One denies same-sex couples.

The fight to pass Amendment One, like similar legal efforts, was driven by those who claim to be “pro-family.” This is a misnomer. What pro-family really means in this context is “pro any family exactly like ours.” Such activists have no qualms about hounding, destroying and discriminating against families that do not conform to their so-called traditional values. They are anti-family, and they should be ashamed of their actions.

I just searched for a definition of “writerly” and found this:

1. of or characteristic of a writer

2. characterized by the qualities of a writer’s craft, esp. by those [...]]]> The term “writerly” fans a flame inside me. It’s a virtuous word that speaks of crafting words into sentences and paragraphs with passion, imagination and love.

I just searched for a definition of “writerly” and found this:

1. of or characteristic of a writer

2. characterized by the qualities of a writer’s craft, esp. by those that reflect a self-conscious display of literary techniques

But “self-conscious display” suggests pretension, and being pretentious is not what I think of when I hear “writerly.” Pretension is when someone tries far too hard to be writerly and ends up with a convoluted mess. When I write something I consider writerly, in a sense it’s because — albeit with mental effort — I stumbled on the turn of phrase that flowed most simply and effortlessly.

For example, when I typed that opening paragraph, my first attempt mixed two or three other metaphors along with that of fanning a flame. Just because I’d strained to sound literary, it didn’t sound good. It lacked simplicity and sounded forced. In the end, I whittled it down from three or four sentences into two, and what remained sounded both creative and effortless to me. Pretension would have been to throw as many adjectives, verbs, adverbs and metaphors in there as came to mind, without discrimination.

Not everything I write is writerly. This blog’s tagline reads, “Advice from a good writer who aspires to greatness.” I’m confident enough to say I’m good, but I don’t pretend to be great, and in the same way, I aspire to writerliness. I don’t always get there, but I try.

Here’s something I really enjoyed writing recently: the first in a regular online column, The Charm of Evil, in which I share my thoughts about the horror genre, mainly in film. I enjoyed the experience because I felt I was producing something writerly. When I read the final version, I felt proud. The end product went beyond perfunctory. This is good writing, I thought.

Do you want to make your writing more writerly? Here’s some advice: Cut out the crap. Simplicity is beautiful. Play around with words, experiment and shift things around with abandon in search of what works, but do settle with what works. Don’t throw impressive-sounding words out there like dung and hope some of it sticks, because even the bits that stick will still be dung. Instead, present the one idea in which you have total confidence. Edit your own work ruthlessly, because just getting words on the page is only part of the job. Shaping those words with care into their final form will make you a great and writerly writer.

_________

This was originally published on the Good Writing Blog
Image: Markus Rödder

I’ve documented Anglican [...]]]> The anti-gay movement is fighting back hard these days. And when I say anti-gay, I mean virulently. With Anglican Mainstream and Core Issues, two groups in the news at the moment for their now-cancelled “ex-gay” ad campaign on London buses, we’re not talking about mere “traditional Christians,” but egregiously homophobic organizations.

I’ve documented Anglican Mainstream’s history of hateful rhetoric and actions fairly extensively on Ex-Gay Watch. In 2006, for example, the group published the book God, Gays and the Church: Human Sexuality and Experience in Christian Thinking, in which they reprinted a viciously homophonic tirade that contained comments such as these:

And, gentle reader, [the porn section of a gay bookshop] is where most [gay men] will spend the rest of their lives, until God or AIDS, drugs or alcohol, suicide or a lonely old age, intervenes.

Gay churches survive as places where worshippers can go to sleep it off and cleanse their consciences after a Saturday night spent cruising for sex at the bars.

Here is the terrifying fact: If we as a nation and as a Church allow ourselves to be taken in by the scam of monogamous same-sex couples, we will be … legitimizing every kind of sexual taste, from old-fashioned masturbation and adultery to the most outlandish forms of sexual fetishism. We will, in other words, be giving our blessing to the suicide of Western civilization.

The homosexual rights movement is rotten to the core. It has no future. There is no life in it. Sooner or later, those who are caught up in it are going to wake up from the dream or else die. … How many more children are going to be sacrificed to this Molech?

Anticipating criticism, Anglican Mainstream’s Canon Dr Chris Sugden cited “equal opportunities” as a reason for publishing the essay. “We owe it to” the author, Ronald G Lee, to give his story a hearing, he wrote, adding that “we love those struggling with same sex attraction too much to do otherwise.”

In 2011, an Anglican Mainstream book review invoked the “precious blood” of WWII soldiers to portray gay rights as a threat to Western freedom. The article also contained a video, with the advice to fast-forward to 53 seconds for an anti-gay right-wing TV commercial in which a child reacts with disgust and terror to a nightmare about having gay parents.

In 2012, Anglican Mainstream threw its support behind Lesley Pilkington, a Christian psychotherapist barred from practice after telling a gay client — who turned out to be undercover Independent journalist Patrick Strudwick — that his homosexuality could be traced to low self-esteem, suppressed memories of sexual abuse and a family history of Freemasonry. (He denied any of the three even existed.)

Not long afterwards, Dr Lisa Severin Nolland told a Christian conference (charmingly entitled The Lepers Among Us) that gay rights would lead to the corruption of children in schools, where they would be encouraged at an early age to sexually experiment with “cock-and-ball torture” and “eating faeces.”

Northern Ireland-based ex-gay group Core Issues has joined Anglican Mainstream recently to pool resources, organize conferences and promote the scientifically dubious message that gay men and women can successfully change their sexual orientation — a cure for homosexuality. Their latest joint effort to sell their claims has met with unsurprising hostility, and London Mayor Boris Johnson yesterday put a halt to their plan to cover the city’s buses with the slogan “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it!”

As I noted on Ex-Gay Watch, to be taken seriously, they must also battle this week’s news that Robert Spitzer, the US psychiatrist behind a 2001 study supporting ex-gay therapy, has retracted his findings. A major plank in the ex-gay argument (although it had been routinely debunked for years by all except the ex-gays who relied on it for propaganda) has fallen through.

And the campaign is also faced with the embarrassing fact that the professional body the British Psychodrama Association has revoked the membership of Mike Davidson, Core Issues’ director. Nevertheless, Anglican Mainstream and Core Issues surely knew their announcement would be met with calls for a ban, and they are doubtless pleased with the publicity Boris Johnson’s actions have given them. If nothing else, they will enjoy their shining moment of martyrdom.

________________

The Ash Wednesday words “From dust you came and to dust you shall return” have particular resonance for this Anglican agnostic. [...]]]> I wrote these words just over a year ago, and I republish them to give friends and readers some idea why this non-theist continues to find meaning in the Christian Easter tradition.

________________

The Ash Wednesday words “From dust you came and to dust you shall return” have particular resonance for this Anglican agnostic. You only live once; you’re here and then you’re gone; therefore “turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.”

It’s a call to seize the moment, to begin a quest to make our own meaning out of life’s meaninglessness, turn away from the things that hinder us, do what we know we should do, live how we know we should live, and be as we know we should be. Why? Because we only live once. It’s our one and only shot.

I wish there were a literal resurrection and that life really were a journey towards an afterlife, but I don’t have any reason to think it is. The Lenten journey — from Ash Wednesday’s brutal confrontation with life’s fleeting nature, through the agony of Maundy Thursday and the death of Good Friday, to the resurrection of Easter Sunday — is a journey from meaninglessness to meaning, from the bare bones of existence to a life that matters.

That would certainly seem to be [...]]]> The silly but much-cherished rule of never using the grammatical passive in writing has bred some strange notions of what exactly the passive is. To some, “passive” apparently means “any construction that twists the grammar of a sentence so badly that it sounds instinctively wrong to just about everyone.”

That would certainly seem to be the understanding of Matt Cherette’s friend Frank, who claims to have rewritten a Wikipedia article “entirely in the passive voice.” The newly edited Wiki entry for Kim Richards, star of Bravo’s reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was made “nearly unreadable and, at the same time, infinitely better,” Cherette said.

Problem is, most of it is not passive at all — it’s just bad grammar. Says linguist Geoff Pullum, of Language Log:

The humorist’s view of what the term “passive clause” means is apparently something like: “badly written or ungrammatical clause with faults such as inept early positioning of things that should have come later, usually with an occurrence of the copula”. Or something along those lines. It’s closer to the notion of Yoda’s syntax than it is to a characterization of the English passive.

This misconception is borne of the vilification of the passive, which means that any number of tortuous grammatical constructions are met with horrified gasps of “Passive!” Pullum (I’m a bit of a fanboy, I admit) has addressed the “no passives” fallacy time and again, such as in the article “50 Years of Stupid Grammar“; in it, he takes to task EB White and William Strunk, whose book The Elements of Style has pushed the “no passives” rule on generation after generation.

The truth is that, while the passive is frequently a poor choice, it is often a fine or even the better choice. As I summarized recently:

A good writer uses her ear rather than relying on grammatical prescriptions often invented with little regard for context. If in doubt, write it both ways — active and passive — and read them aloud. Go with what sounds natural, succinct and clear. The best construction is usually obvious.