—John Cleese, as Humphrey Williams in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

How do we arrive at this number? (By scribbling arithmetic all over the back of an interlibrary loan request form while I should have been filling out said form for research purposes, naturally.) Well, Frederic declares to Mabel that ‘In 1940 I of age shall be,’ referring to his 21st birthday, at which point he would have lived 88 years. But, you say, there are four years between leap years, and 21 times 4 is 84, so how do we get 88? Because 1900 was not a leap year. It is not clear whether Gilbert and Sullivan were under the misapprehension that it was. If they believed it was, then Frederic would have been born in 1856 and celebrated his eleventh birthday on the nonexistent day of 29 February 1900. But since 1900 did not contain an intercalary day, Frederic would of necessity have been born in 1852, thus making him 88 in 1940 and 156 today, his 38th birthday. (That 1900 did not contain a leap year is the reason the old Macintosh system epoch was chosen for 1 January 1904, to ’save a half dozen instructions in their leap-year checking code.’) On the other hand, if Frederic did somehow manage to celebrate a birthday in 1900, then he would have been born in 1856, and the multiplication would come out all nice and pretty to 84 years on his 21st birthday in 1940.

I find it hard to believe that G&S would have let poor Frederic live eight years between his eleventh and twelfth birthdays (1896 and 1904); therefore they must have erroneously believed that 1900 was a leap year and set his birthday in 1856. Then again, I also find it hard to believe that everybody would just take Ruth at her word when she reveals that the pirates are in fact simply fallen noblemen, so what do I know. However, the canon evidence, such as it is, is that Frederic celebrates his 21st birthday in 1940, making today his 38th birthday. He is therefore 156, or possibly 152, more or less (but rather less than more).

How quaint the ways of Paradox!

Pullum’s key opinion is that Dr. Williams is an unsuitable leader for the Anglican church because he cannot ‘do the demanding job of holding this figurehead position without causing his church to fall apart in social and political discord.’ He further points out that Dr. Williams also took a number of positions on homosexuality that caused dissension in various sizable wings of the church. ‘The people who say he lacks the leadership skills for his job are basically right,’ says Pullum:

Dr Williams is a gentle, learned, brilliant, scholarly man, and a bit of a public relations doofus. I hate to say it, but the calls for his resignation are not unjustified. He should be the holder of an endowed Professorship of Theology and Law at some top-ranking university. He should not be a prominent church administrator, and certainly not the Archbishop of Canterbury. Someone duller, more political, less original, and less intelligent must be found for that job.

Absolutely true, but I have a few caveats to add: First, would there really be no controversy if Dr. Williams were a professor somewhere, and not the Primate of all England? Just think of Ward Churchill and the media furor that surfaces whenever he opens his mouth. Furthermore, is it the case that religious leaders should not voice their political opinions? In other words, is it appropriate for a religious leader to use his religious pulpit as a political bully pulpit? (I have a very strong personal bias against this, but from a conceptual point of view I’m not sure what the answer is.)

But finally, this doesn’t address the underlying issue: to what extent should the secular state accommodate religious law? Back in 2004 there was a controversy in Ontario in which it was proposed to include shari’ah law in the Arbitration Act, which would make decisions rendered by shari’ah courts regarding private disputes legally binding. This had some Muslims, notably the Council on American-Islamic Relations Canada, worried that this would create a ’slippery slope’ and end up hurting Muslims more than it helped them. What do you do, for example, to prevent people—notably women—from being ‘coerced’ into using a system in which they might run the risk of unfair treatment? And what do you do when your religious law comes into conflict with established civil law? (And it is important to note that this is not just a Muslim concern; Jews, especially of the more Orthodox varieties, have many of the same problems with their own shadow court system, especially with the agunah problem).

Of course, there are no easy answers here: after all, this is one of the central post-Enlightenment questions in the Western world. But hopefully the current case of Dr. Williams can provide another data point and perspective in the current conversation, if we can get past the stupidity and sensationalism brought about by the media.