All Saints/Pasadena Rector Calls for Investigation into Impeachment of the Vice President

It is significant that a rector of one of the largest Episcopal parishes in the US - Ed Bacon at All Saints - has called for the Justice Department to investigate impeachment of the vice president in a sermon last Sunday.

I'm pleased to see that mainstream - even liberal/progressive - churches are waking up --



No siree, he doesn't soft-soap it at all. I'm no expert on Anglican homiletics, but the build up or lead up (what ever they'd call it at GTS) to the call for impeachment is a brill exposition by a person of deep faith - calling us to "look at what is at stake," to be "stewards of the fragile dream of democracy." Click here to read it or follow along as you watch the vid. Pretty damn good stuff, IMHO.

But here's Ed Bacon -

ON THE CALL FOR IMPEACHMENT

What I am about to say has been long in coming. But I want to invite you into a conversation about it. I have been deeply troubled by the state of our nation and its flaws. I have been deeply troubled by how the behavior of the current Vice-President of the United States has expressed the erosion of democracy and has exposed the flaws in our country’s life.

Vice-president Cheney publicly embraced the violation of the Geneva Conventions when, on a talk radio program, he said he was not troubled by our forces using “waterboarding” — the simulated drowning of detainees to force them to talk. He has ordered the destruction of the visitor logs to his residence. These are presidential records the law requires him to preserve and protect. He has held secret meetings with energy executives to craft an energy policy that does not alleviate oil dependence. I believe he has been the motor leading our country through fabricated intelligence into this disastrous, illegal, immoral, and unjust war based on lies. He has expanded Executive powers at the expense of our system of checks and balances under the “unitary executive theory”. And now he is using and abusing his power to make secret what is the rightful knowledge of U. S. taxpaying citizens. He has refused to provide his office’s documents to the National Archives and Records Administration as provided by law. He then made the insane claim that the Vice-President is not “an entity within the executive branch.”
So I have come to believe that for the sake of the soul of America and its addiction to the mentality of collateral damage – both of people who get in our way and the collateral damage of the Constitution when it gets in our way – that the United States Congress should authorize and direct the Judiciary Committee to investigate whether sufficient grounds exist for the impeachment of the Vice-President.

As a teenager I learned from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr that all human beings are interconnected, interwoven, and interdependent. We really are not free until all are free for that which unjustly incarcerates another incarcerates me. Whatever oppresses someone else oppresses me. When I do violence to another through perpetuating poverty, bigotry, occupation or war or genocide, that corrupts me and my soul. It corrupts the soul of a nation.

Thanks to Susan Russell and Bill Carroll for the heads-up.