Following Fr Matt's and Rus' comments, I think what Rus is trying to say is that a major problem we have is we don't give simple answers to questions.
Ask the RCs and you get: "Fornication is wrong, homosexuality is wrong, cohabitation is wrong, birth control is wrong."
Ask Orthodox you get, "Ask your priest."
The problem is though we should always STILL ask our priests (and if you are a priest, your own spiritual father or the Bishop), that does not mean we must become either so open-minded that our brains fall out or so non-committal that the modernists can very easily (and understandably!) assume they are in the right to completely discard our traditions and the Scriptures.
People are morons, myself included. We
need simple answers to simple questions...not long theological textbooks and shades of gray. My wife, who doesn't read the fathers all day, needs to hear, "You should not commune if you are menstruating" or "birth control is wrong, the moral ideal is that sex is only for procreation." She should not only hear that "on the grape vine" just because these things are awkward. We all have sex and half of us menstruate. We need to talk about these things. We have been so silent on these things, that someone bringing up the historical, consensus view of the Church is viewed as wacky. This should not be, brothers.
A priest should be able to say, without wincing, just as he would have in 1930, "If you fornicate, cohabitate, or use birth control, you will not be communed."
Now, that does not mean that categorically, in every single circumstance for every single individual, this will occur. The Russian Church,
in their recent 2015 document on communion, for example allows for spiritual fathers to in peculiar circumstances to commune a cohabitating, unmarried people. Now, before we go all nuts, there are obvious situations (i.e. a woman who fornicated with a man, became pregnant, repents, and now seeks to keep the family together and serve God but her boyfriend refuses to marry her.) The spiritual father, in such circumstances, must help her navigate through these waters and gives her both penance, and the conditions, which he feels will allow her to be sanctified, instead of harmed, by communion.
So, even while the Russian church obviously allows for this, that does not mean a conservative Russian priest cannot still say, "If you fornicate, cohabitate, or use birth control, you will not be communed" and mean every word of it. We can make a clear statement, and
privately work out the exceptions when necessary.
And this is the key problem: we have taken
private, extra-ordinary exceptions, and turned them into publicly acknowledged norms, where the priest essentially accepts "I am trying to be a l'il better" but there is no real visible change. Let's be honest--we don't want to be rocking boats.
People I respect among the clergy (this includes a Bishop), that I know to be true conservatives, essentially have been too silent on these abuses out of fear of 1. offending people and 2. being too judgmental.
The fear is that all the cradles, who have suffered from three generations of almost no catechesis, won't get it and leave. A line is trying to be toed to slowly bring them the right way. But, the cradles are disappearing--and not by death, they are just not going to church. We all know this. The Orthodox churches that are growing are converts and reverts that want vision, not mush. The ones with the immigrants are full of the very old, baby boomers and very few gen Xers, and that's it. They will be gone soon because the millenial cradles are not showing up, period.
Being afraid to rock the boat is silly, as usually churches die when they lack vision and clear stances on these things (look what happened to every mainline church which ignored Prov 29:18). Further, we have become so non-judgmental, every one knows a priest that will commune a sodomite within driving distance. At least in the north east. In fact, it is open knowledge that there is at least one Bishop of a notable jurisdiction completely on board with this heresy. Yet, these priests, and Bishop, are not de-laicized and excommunicated. This is a travesty and an embarrassment, and we exist with this simply because we have been too loose ended and too open minded.
So, perhaps I am being too charitable with Rus' position here, but I think he is trying to vent a frustration with what has been, in all honesty, a misleading tact in modern Orthodoxy. Look to the Orthodox churches that are growing. Particularly Russia. They are going reactionary, not liberal, they are offering answers, not post-modernist muddle.
I am a recent convert, so I am speaking from the little I have seen. And, I am not the least bit worried, because God always has the Church's back. The Church always prevails and it has gone through centuries of captivity, persecution, and almost completely decimation and roars back from the ashes like a Phoenix. But, that Phoenix will rise when we wake up and realize we need to clearly and succinctly communicate what we have always communicated and not care who it offends. This is the best church growth strategy there is.