http://www.intrepidlutherans.com/2013/10/service-review.html#comment-form
Unbelievably immature. (Both the service and whoever flooded the voting overnight. Not even very subtle, but then the contempo advocates rarely are.)
A one-vote-per-IP policy wouldn't be a bad idea. It's still possible to beat that, but it takes a little more effort and is slower. A vote-with-your-name poll would be even better, but would of course get fewer responses.
It strikes me that the general trend in WELS these days seems to be geared towards the suppression of groups (even ephemeral groupings of folks on one issue) not created by the WELS itself, in response to the Time of Grace memorial last year, which of course acquired a long list of names and thus laid out in an un-ignorable way how big a problem that situation was. Now the policy is no more than three names on a memorial (unless, of course, it comes from a WELS committee like the TEC, and then the entire committee can be referenced), which has the effect of making "private" memorials appear to be the musings of a lone crank or a small minority, and I think also has the effect of reducing lay participation in the memorial process (if you can only put three names on your memorial, why "waste" one of them on a mere layman?)
Imagine how many signatures an anti-NIV2011 memorial would have gathered. I think it would have overwhelmed even the number that the Time of Grace memorial received, and it would have been an unmistakable signal to the convention delegates that they were not, in fact, required to choose from among only the options in the TEC's false dichotomy (i.e. would you like to approve NIV2011 only, or NIV2011 and some other stuff?) and that there was substantial support for that position. Instead we had a surfeit of anti-NIV2011 memorials, with only slight differences, each with just three signatures. Much less impactful and dilute--I have to hand it to whatever Machiavellian came up with the idea of limiting the signatures.
It is no coincidence that the powers-that-be eviscerated the grassroots memorial process in this way prior to pushing through the NIV2011 monstrosity.
A one-vote-per-IP policy wouldn't be a bad idea. It's still possible to beat that, but it takes a little more effort and is slower. A vote-with-your-name poll would be even better, but would of course get fewer responses.
It strikes me that the general trend in WELS these days seems to be geared towards the suppression of groups (even ephemeral groupings of folks on one issue) not created by the WELS itself, in response to the Time of Grace memorial last year, which of course acquired a long list of names and thus laid out in an un-ignorable way how big a problem that situation was. Now the policy is no more than three names on a memorial (unless, of course, it comes from a WELS committee like the TEC, and then the entire committee can be referenced), which has the effect of making "private" memorials appear to be the musings of a lone crank or a small minority, and I think also has the effect of reducing lay participation in the memorial process (if you can only put three names on your memorial, why "waste" one of them on a mere layman?)
Imagine how many signatures an anti-NIV2011 memorial would have gathered. I think it would have overwhelmed even the number that the Time of Grace memorial received, and it would have been an unmistakable signal to the convention delegates that they were not, in fact, required to choose from among only the options in the TEC's false dichotomy (i.e. would you like to approve NIV2011 only, or NIV2011 and some other stuff?) and that there was substantial support for that position. Instead we had a surfeit of anti-NIV2011 memorials, with only slight differences, each with just three signatures. Much less impactful and dilute--I have to hand it to whatever Machiavellian came up with the idea of limiting the signatures.
It is no coincidence that the powers-that-be eviscerated the grassroots memorial process in this way prior to pushing through the NIV2011 monstrosity.
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