internet law

From the BBC, via slashdot

"Striptease via webcam is quite legal in Sweden"

I am sincerely hoping that there are no laws anywhere regarding that particular activity.
Indeed, hoping that the phrase "via webcam" stays absent from all laws everywhere.

But bless you, BBC, for the quote at the end:

"When we investigated the sites manually it worked better"

Houselist!

triad

I note the entry by ross_teneyck and proceed in a different direction. Last Sunday Bishop Mary came to oversee Vicar Mary. Yes, that means that in the hierarchy we have Vicar Mary under Bishop Mary under Presiding Bishop Katharine. (If Canterbury were to go the same way we'd have turtles all the way up, but I suspect that won't happen until after Doctor Who regenerates female.)

Bishop Mary came to us immediately after returning from Tanzania. She was still full of the experience and the story. Much of that is online with pictures in her sermons from Sunday, Thursday, and Friday. The purpose of the trip was to establish a diocesan triad with Gloucester in England and Western Tanganyika in Tanzania. But I suspect none of the sermons will contain her story of how that started.

Last year was the decennial Lambeth Conference where all the Anglican bishops gather. There were more than 600 bishops, 18 of them women. As Mary marched along the street toward the conference she saw protesters ahead. As she got closer one of the local bishops came alongside and shepherded her toward the middle of the street. Despite this one of the women protesters leaned over with her sign and repeated its message up close: "You are a whore of the church." Mary later learned those protesters had come from Germany in much the same way that the Phelps family comes from Kansas to protest.

The bishop who had shepherded Mary was from Gloucester. He said he would not be surprised if he were replaced by the first woman bishop in England when he retires. At the conference they both ran into the bishop from Western Tanganyika. Despite the many contentious issues of the conference which had kept away something like 100 bishops from other central African dioceses, they found common ground. Last month they formalized the relationship in Tanzania.

The bishop from Tanzania is aware of the seriousness of the local discussions about homosexual issues, but that is not his issue. In his diocese just staying alive, just having food, is a struggle for most everyone. Mary saw the daily struggle to boil water for drinking and washing, a kid along the road in the terminal stage of AIDS, kids attending the school who would not accept the token cross from the visiting bishop because their Muslim parents would beat them if they brought it home, a culture where women and men are segregated for most activities, a culture which believes that birth control causes cancer. Mary realized that issues of freedom to express oneself are a luxury in a place where survival depends on having kids and getting them educated as much as possible so they can take care of their parents. Those are the issues there, and they will be for yet a long time. Unlike the bishops of other nearby African dioceses, the bishop there is not going to avoid interaction with us despite our issues, for he is tending to his issues, and he sees that we can help.

Mary requested time with the women alone, probably the first woman bishop to do so in Africa, to speak with them about the many decades it took for our culture to admit women to where they are now.

The episcopal blogosphere is a mess of contention. Fortunately there is more to the world than that.