From WTAE-TV:

A vote could possibly split the Episcopal Church of Pittsburgh: Some members want to break away from the national church while others want to stay. At the center of the decision: Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh.
The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church said there will be a vote this week at a meeting of the national House of Bishops on whether to remove Duncan from ministry.

The Episcopal Church notified Duncan that a vote to remove him from ministry will be taken on Thursday. The step comes as the Diocese of Pittsburgh nears an Oct. 4 vote on whether to secede from the Episcopal Church for a more conservative alignment.

A meeting Saturday at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Mount Lebanon drew a number of church members who believe remaining in the Episcopal Church is the right thing to do. Opponents would like to break away from the U.S. church and join the Anglican Church in South America.

“I think there’s some feeling that the Episcopal Church has drifted into areas that some groups consider to be not orthodox, and I think there’s some places where that is true but that’s not the character of the church in general,” said the Rev. James Simons, who opposes leaving the U.S. church.

A pastoral letter from Duncan indicated that he would abide by the Thursday vote of the House of Bishops, but that he doesn’t believe it can stop the diocesan effort to secede.

The Pittsburgh diocese voted in November to realign with the 77-million-member Anglican Communion, which believes the Bible forbids gay relationships, while a majority in the Episcopal Church does not.

Couldn’t have said this better than Democracy Lover in response to this by Barry:

I got out my super-secret Karl Rove decoder ring (which all wingnuts are issued) and learned that “community organizer” means “n**ger.” I’m not sure if Jesus was a “community organizer” or not.

Democracy Lover:

Jesus sure brought people together and taught them to help others, so Jesus was most definitely a community organizer. Of course, He and his community were non-White, so perhaps Barry has a point.

Using secret code words to pull in the racist vote has been a Republican strategy since the Nixon days. It’s the only kind of bigotry they bother to hide. Hating gays, liberated women and educated people are all out in the open – it’s only their hatred of black people that has to remain in the closet.

It’s so wonderful that the most avid followers of the Prince of Peace are supporters of warmongers.

Ambinder nails this. The joke about community organizers like Obama for elite Republicans is “Look at this Harvard-educated dilettante. He’s so stupid that he wastes all his youth, education and opportunities on the urban poor instead of using these to benefit himself and his family. After all, we all know they would never reciprocate and are in these situations because they didn’t work hard/smart enough or prepare for market realities.”

It’s a joke I’ve heard many times myself, and one that community organizers and others ministering to the poor put up with all of the time. It’s mocking what for elite Republicans is a moral disability, a refusal to be selfish. It’s also why they insist that there must be ulterior motives, like career advancement, underlying this work. I find the joke particularly appalling coming from the mouths of professed Christians. I hope that one benefit of this campaign, and Obama showed a willingness for this during his acceptance speech, would be a defense of the moral foundation of liberalism. This community organizer mocking joke provides us with an appropriate context for it.

From Marc Ambinder:

The four mocking mentions last night of Barack Obama’s service as a “community organizer” have ignited a metapshereic debate about whether the term has racial connotations.

The McCain campaign says no: they insist that no one knows what a community organizer is, and whatever they think it is, it doesn’t compare to being a mayor. They say that because Obama cites his organizing work as a key point on his resume, it’s fair for them to tickle it. Their point is: he’s a governing dilettante.

Indeed, the Obama campaign knows that many Americans don’t know what a community organizer does, and they’ve changed the way they refers to Obama’s experience too. When he talks about community organizing now, he references his organizing work for churches. That embeds the work in a more familiar context. Inner city Catholics know what community organizers do, certainly.

But community organizers tend to work with poorer folks, and there’s some chatter among Democrats that it’s a subtle way to highlight Obama’s urbanity. Some Obama aides see it as a knock against the poor and their material needs.

I think it’s a cultural trope, like when Rudy Giuliani (lacking, I might add, any sense of irony or awareness of his own life), referred last night to Obama’s “cosmopolitan” background.  It stirs up resentments. It makes elite Republicans feel comfortable with themselves. The audience repeatedly laughed; they got the joke. The question is: what was the joke?

Halperin piles on about this as the Republican’s tried-n-true “secret” plan:

Define Obama as so left he’s left America.
An out-of-touch, bead-and-sandal-wearing community organizer (whatever that is).

Mocking community organizers is not the way to reach places like western PA and the rust belt battleground states.

From the Catholic Democrats:

Catholic Democrats is expressing surprise and shock that Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech tonight mocked her opponent’s work in the 1980s for the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.  She belittled Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s experience as a community organizer in Catholic parishes on the South Side of Chicago, work he undertook instead of pursuing a lucrative career on Wall Street.  In her acceptance speech, Ms. Palin said, “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.”  Community organizing is at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching to end poverty and promote social justice.  

From Joe Klein:

So here is what Giuliani and Palin didn’t know: Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed–job training, help with housing and so forth–from the local government. It was, dare I say it, the Lord’s work–the sort of mission Jesus preached (as opposed to the war in Iraq, which Palin described as a “task from God.”)

This is what Palin and Giuliani were mocking. They were making fun of a young man’s decision “to serve a cause greater than himself,” in the words of John McCain. They were, therefore, mocking one of their candidate’s favorite messages. Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school. To describe this service–the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other–as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.

Perhaps La Pasionaria of the Northern Slope didn’t know this when she read the words they gave her. But Giuliani–a profoundly lapsed Catholic, who must have met more than a few religious folk toiling in the inner cities–should have known. (“I don’t even know what that is,” he sneered.”) What a shameful performance.