Of coffee and cultural change

George Hood, city editor of the Bohemian news, has an interesting article on the background not only to the story in San Joaquin and the larger discussion of mores.

Just a snippet from the article:

I realized that changes in the secular law that took place in the 1970’s, and later, bear on this present dispute in a way that I don’t think anyone could ever have imagined when those changes took place. I also suspect that many who now find themselves in this fight may not be aware of the path that led them to this point. Allow me to explain.

When I was a young man, the essentials of a good start for the day, that is, a good newspaper and a cup of drinkable coffee, both cost ten cents. The other day I dwelt a while on this bit of my personal history as I went past one of those chain stores where the coffee is just plain undrinkable and most of the patrons are looking for soy latte anyway.

It isn’t that I no longer like coffee. It’s just that what I call coffee is a whole lot different than what a lot of the people around here now call coffee. Things have changed.

[snip]

I grew up in a very different San Francisco, a place which had a substantial Roman Catholic population. For the many good Catholics here, life revolved around the Church: daily mass, daily reading of the Rosary, fish on Friday, the Men’s Social Club Annual Spaghetti Dinner, and the Easter Sunday Pilgrimage to the Cross on Mount Davidson – well, you get the idea. A great deal of activity found its origin in the Church and the faithful took their religion seriously even if they were sometimes light hearted in their expression of it.

This was the old time coffee. It was never bitter, never tasted burnt, and generally was pretty easy to drink. Whether you were Roman Catholic or Episcopalian, there never was any question of what you were going to get when you ordered it.

To carry this analogy out a bit further, from the perspective of the present Episcopal Church with its view toward “inclusivity”, this new chain store coffee, bitter as it may be, is a coffee equal to the older style of coffee. The Episcopal Church says, in effect, “coffee is coffee, let’s all sit down and discuss the many ways we can brew it.”

The orthodox, on the other hand, say, in effect “when we talk about conduct and pastoral responsibility, we are not talking about directions on a can, we are talking about the immutable laws of God and our directions come from scripture”. In other words, all coffee is not coffee in the sense of it all being drinkable. Likewise the many ways that human sexuality can be expressed do not all yield a spiritually acceptable result. The formula for the spiritually correct expression of sexuality is defined by the laws of God.