CourageMan

The Kardashian Marriage

2011-10-31T23:46:00.003-05:00

I know we shouldn't crow, but let's just say I'm very glad the Kim Kardashian / Kris Humphries marriage ended without issue. A marriage entered into so quickly and under such circumstances as negotiating TV and publicity rights to ... probably wasn't a marriage in the fullest sense, and the divorce merely makes formal what was already so.

But what it does not do -- as Mr. Sulu said in this tweet -- is prove one major claim of the gay "marriage" apologists. That, basically, gay "marriage" can't hurt the institution any more than THIS kinda farce does. Or as Takei put it.

Kim Kardashian files for divorce after 72 days. Another example of how same-sex marriage is destroying the sanctity of the very institution.

I take his point -- quick marriage and easy divorce DOES vindicate gay-marriage folks to this extent: Many (or is it "most"?) breeders HAVE utterly forgotten what marriage is. But he's actually more right than he realizes. Farces like the Kardashian marriage ARE, if not the result of gay "marriage" in the directly causal sense, the result of a society where gay "marriage" is even a question. Which is why so many non-gays support gay "marriage" (including, I am morally certain, Kim Kardashian). They can barely even remember why it is an impossible thing.

As I never tire of saying, gays are only 3% of the population. They (we?) can't screw up society without LOTS of help from others. Principally, a heterosexual society that perceives marriage, not as the permanent life-giving union unto death, but as the temporary alliance of autonomous selves seeking to have some fun or advance their interests for as long as the fun lasts or the interests get advanced. And heck ... two men CAN do those things as well as a man and a woman.

Women of Easter I

2011-04-24T19:52:00.000-05:00

OK, it's the evening, but this is too awesome an Easter song not to share (I already linked it on my Twitter feed earlier today). Dolly Parton sings "He's Alive" -- which was also a (small) hit on the secular country charts.

One of the two friends I identified in my most-recent post below as having fallen in love with was, like Dolly, an evangelical country kid from Tennessee. Sevierville-born Dolly had a grandfather who was a Pentecostal preacher, identifies as a born-again Christian, and plays spiritual songs at her concerts to this day. Jim (not his real name) absolutely loved Dolly Parton (and such other country divas as Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline) and one time, when we were going out somewhere, he insisted that we stay in his car until she was finished singing "He's Alive" on the cassette tape. Let's say Dolly sang "He's Alive" with as much conviction and joy as you'll ever hear on a song. Oh ... unless it's also Dolly singing "Coat of Many Colors."

We also talked a lot about Parton's TV and film work and the key to her star appeal, and it's not the two things you might be thinking of. She was *likeable* on stage and on screen, with a natural effervescence and good cheer. As she showed in "9 to 5" and "Best Little Whorehouse in Texas," she knew how to handle her obvious sex appeal without coming across as slutty or affected. She kidded it and didn't dress or act like she was trying to show it off (as in the attached photo ... typical of Classic-era Dolly). Her TV musical-variety show "Dolly" was a lot of fun and she was one of the few performers of her era who could make the comedy-music-sketch format work (though the format was obsolete, ratings-wise, and so "Dolly" only lasted a season). Thankfully, she turned down God-knows-how-much money to do what would unquestionably have been the best-selling Playboy centerfold ever.

In other words, she had the old-school class of a good Christian lady.

Farewell to a man I love

2011-04-04T01:21:00.003-05:00

It's finally HITTING me tonight that the man who has been my best work friend and drinking buddy for more than three years has left town. Off back home to Boston for law school, thanks in part to a recommendation I wrote. The move was hastened by wedding plans set for June and his fiancee getting a lucrative job offer that requires her to move from Washington to Boston right away.

I'm gonna miss our common interests, marinated in similar working-class backgrounds and comfort with ideas. We were also completely on the same wavelength, even though he was far to my left (as is 90% of the US populace, but whatevs). With both of us in a state of inebriation, I could say things (and remember this example specifically) like the self-coined-on-the-spot term "embourgeoisification" and he would get it as if he had heard it a hundred times. He and his fiancee are both lapsed Catholics ... collateral damage from the collapse of the Church's credibility in the city at the epicenter of The Situation. He's wandered from a vague interest in Unitarianism (the only kind imaginable) to attending an Episcopal church. When he said the liturgy made him nostalgic, I told him that if coming back to the Church isn't a short term option, that's better than nothing (something I did not say about the UUC). Hopefully, time healing wounds and ECUSA's silk-stocking style and PC earnestness (to which he's not blind and we both joked about) will nudge him back home. And he listened to my woes -- I probably imposed a bit much on him -- but was clear-eyed about it. At one point when I thought I may come down HIV-positive (I had had some inconsistent tests) he made me promise to fight it and not be ashamed to file a health-insurance claim (i.e., tell people at work) for anti-HIV drugs. "I think you might deliberately not take care of it and let yourself die," he said.

Though he is by far the bigger ice hockey fan (played in college and still does rec league games, in fact), every spring he and I would follow our teams through the Stanley Cup playoffs and watch some games together. The NHL regular season has one week to go, so I'm gonna miss the ritual of following my Capitals and his hometown Bruins. And frankly my taking advantage of his better hockey knowledge. But he knew not to rub in too hard the Capitals' first-round playoff collapse last year -- up 3-1 in the 1-8 matchup against Montreal, the Caps lost three games in a row, two at home despite getting a zillion shots on suddenly untouchable Canadiens goalie Jaroslav Halak. Like everyone else in Washington, I thought last year, when the Caps had the league's best record, would be The Year. But my heartbreak didn't stop him from IM'ing me after Game 7, "I guess the H in 'Jesus H. Christ' stands for Halak." We also would follow the simultaneous basketball playoffs, a sport in which the interest is a bit greater on my part (the NFL and baseball not so much).

We went out with his fiancee and a couple of his other local friends for a farewell evening last week, after his last day at work, and he left a couple days after that. We parted on a DC street with a hug. I hugged his fiancee as well and whispered in her ear "you have a good man there."

So I guess one could say I loved him. But I was never "in love with him." As the "fiancee" bit indicates, he could not be interested in me. And while I would probably be tempted if he had ever come onto me, I am absolutely certain I did not think of him in those terms in any but the most-theoretical of senses, like when typing this sentence. I told him directly once that there wasn't the least chance I'd proposition him ("you don't crap where you eat," I assured him).

Mind you, it has happened. Twice in my life, I've fallen in love with a male friend, sub rosa. Not only did neither ever become physical but I never so much as broached Topic H, except in the context of political discussion of related topics. In those cases, I probably was too terrified; now, I'm probably just past the point of caring who knows, at least in private and personal circles. I told him fairly early on and, having gotten over the surprise (I apparently don't register on men's gaydars at all), it was no big deal. Probably because it couldn't be, what with all the sports talk and beer and jokes about his shacking up with his old lady and whatnot. I realize how frivolous this may appear, but precisely because sex between us was not on the table, what it was in both our lives (good or ill) was aboveboard and freely discussable -- the subject had been neutered, as it were.

What I've been taught about condoms

2010-11-21T22:47:00.003-05:00

Well, I guess the cat is out of the bag. The Church doesn't teach that any and every use of condoms is itself a sin.

But I have to say I'm amused by the recent caterwauling over Pope Benedict stating what strikes me -- a same-sex-attracted man who has not lived a perfect life regarding chastity and has more than once reasonably feared coming down HIV-positive -- as fairly obvious, if obscure and of limited applicability.

As others, such as Jimmy Akin and Janet Smith, have pointed out, the whole context is essential, and Pope Benedict does not (CANNOT) alter the Church teaching on contraception. But here's the nub from his interview book "Light of the World" (emphasis is mine):

As a matter of fact, you know, people can get condoms when they want them anyway. But this just goes to show that condoms alone do not resolve the question itself. More needs to happen. Meanwhile, the secular realm itself has developed the so-called ABC Theory: Abstinence-Be Faithful-Condom, where the condom is understood only as a last resort, when the other two points fail to work. This means that the sheer fixation on the condom implies a banalization of sexuality, which, after all, is precisely the dangerous source of the attitude of no longer seeing sexuality as the expression of love, but only a sort of drug that people administer to themselves. This is why the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.
There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be a first step in the direction of a moralization, a first assumption of responsibility, on the way toward recovering an awareness that not everything is allowed and that one cannot do whatever one wants. But it is not really the way to deal with the evil of HIV infection. That can really lie only in a humanization of sexuality.
Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?
She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more human way, of living sexuality.

I have never sold sex, though I have purchased it. And I have talked about the issue of condom use with two different priests — neither of the dissident sort, and one is my confessor (the other priest spoke knowing of my SSA). The two men both said the use of a condom in a homosexual act is not a separate sin, over and above the sin of the homosexual act itself. And they both made, more or less, the same explanation.

In a very general non-technical way, if you say "the Church says condoms are always wrong," that's close enough for the proverbial government work and for almost all practical issues.But that common-sense understanding is not actually exactly true. The Church teaching is that **contraception** is immoral.

You might think that a distinction without a difference, and in most cases, you'd be correct. It is obviously the case that the usual and intended use for condoms either IS an act of contraception (in a male-female act) or presupposes an act that is already immoral (a male-male act) for reasons not unrelated to the Church teaching on contraception.

But the Church does not teach condoms are evil, and for the very simple reason that no "thing" can be a moral evil, only acts can be. A condom is not an act and so, like all the things men make, has no intrinsic moral qualities. If you wanted to, you could use it as a balloon. Even Zyklon-B was invented as a perfectly licit pesticide and is still made for that purpose.

So consider, in this light, the use of a condom in a homosexual act. Is it is an act of contraception? No ... the use of the condom itself is not. How can it be, since the underlying act is not fertile and there is therefore no "ception" for a condom to act "contrary" to?

Now, let me be as perfectly clear as President Obama, neither priest ever exhorted me, "[John], use a condom when you stumble" or "keep them around in that event." But my confessor did put it to me in the negative form that I shouldn't deliberately eschew a condom out of some misguided sense of residual fidelity, or from misunderstanding or misapplying what the Church teaches. Not-using a condom in a homosexual hookup, he said, is "stupid" and a risk to your own health and that of others. He has asked me, in the separate contexts of Confession, whether "you put at risk your own or others' health," which has several meanings other than condoms (recent VD diagnoses, say), but that too.

But context matters. These conversations with priests took place in circumstances where fidelity to the Church's teaching on sexuality can be presumed all around and such theological detail-sweating is appropriate. And the priests both know that I'm quite well educated, theologically literate and devout enough to care about i-dotting and t-crossing. But in at least one of the cases (I forget which), the priest said that public discussion along these lines carries too great a risk of scandal and misrepresentation ("Church teaches condoms are OK") to be worth the rare circumstances where they apply. Indeed, the only reason I'm writing about this subject at all and repeating what I've been told by priests is that, well, now that Pope Benedict has spoken, the cat's out of the bag and in public.

Which is where, I believe one can say that perhaps Pope Benedict erred.

As I say, not because of what he said, which is unremarkable, not contrary to Church teaching, and perfectly familiar at least to me. A male prostitute is not committing a sin in the per-se act of condom use and his doing so can reflect sound health concerns, which are not nothing, though they cannot make the evil act good. It's surely relevant and telling that Pope Benedict *specified* a male prostitute (and he is therefore talking about a gay act. Let's not kid ourselves -- we know that men are mostly the purchasers of immoral sex, whether prostitution or pornography).

No, Pope Benedict did not err, but Josef Ratzinger may have. He may have erred in judging the seriousness of the world and its openness to a full and serious discussion of sexuality. (He also certainly erred about the people in charge at L'Osservatore Romano, leaking an out-of-context, badly-translated account of the interview-book.) The reaction in the world press over the last two days confirm what that priest told me -- that attempts to introduce nuance are doomed to failure. The Church says "condoms" and the secular press (and therefore also those who listen to them) becomes ... ahem ... irrationally aroused and stops thinking with the organ intended for that purpose.

They ruined the word "gay"

2010-09-02T12:06:00.000-05:00

Now this story is just frickin' funny, but I think there is a serious point about the totalitarianism of the gay-lifestyle movement behind it. Apparently, an Australian music teacher changed the words of a popular children's song so the pupils wouldn't giggle over the word "gay."

Principal Garry Martin of Le Page Primary School in Melbourne said he instructed students to substitute the line "Fun your life must be" for the original "Gay your life must be" when singing "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree." ...

Martin said he was playing a recording of the song for the students about a month ago when the line "gay your life must be" produced a flurry of giggles throughout the classroom.
Some of the students use the word "gay" as a schoolyard taunt, he said, but don’t understand its true meaning.

I can actually think of a couple of other works I learned as a boy that used the word "gay," in the old sense of "happy" or "joyful." There was Mother Goose rhyme "Monday's Child":

But the child born on the Sabbath Day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay

Perhaps slightly less well-known is the folk song "Villikins and His Dinah," a remarkably grim song to teach a 10-year-old in elementary-school music class when you read the lyrics, including this now unintentionally hilarious couplet:

Go dress yourself Dinah in gorgeous array
For I've got you yon husband both gallant and gay

But of course, I was a boy in the Dark Ages of the 1970s, when you could use the word "gay" without giggles. But what's even funnier, and sickening upon reflection, in the Australian story is the reaction -- the principle. See if you can follow me. Apparently, even though the word "gay" was being used in the song in the sense of "happy" and was being misunderstood by the kids as a schoolyard taunt meaning "ridiculous and stupid" ("that's so GAY"), changing the word is still a hate crime against The LGBT Community. I am not kidding.

His decision erupted into a controversy, he said, after one of the students told his parents about Martin’s change to the song. Word then spread from the parents to friends to the local newspaper, which ran a story - and Martin found himself being bombarded with angry e-mails.
"Some think I’m the devil incarnate," he said.
Crusader Hillis, CEO of the gay and lesbian advocacy group The Also Foundation, didn’t go that far - but he did call the lyrical swap an overreaction.
"It sends a signal to people that just because a word has two meanings, that one of those meanings is unacceptable and that’s really putting us backwards," Hillis said. "Even if it’s done for good intentions because ’gay’ is being used in schoolyards as a slur, I think they need to use the word as a conversation rather than banning it."

This is, simply, gay-activist totalitarianism. Obviously, it is not totalitarianism in the "ship them off to the gulag" sense. But it is totalitarianism in the sense of "totalizing" -- that is, it shows there is literally nothing outside the gay agenda and no aspect of life it doesn't claim the right to adjudicate, even on the flimsiest (and here false) pretexts. Contra "Crusader" (what an unintentionally apropos name) Hillis, the one of those meanings of "gay" that was being declared unacceptable is "ridiculous and stupid." So it doesn't put your "gay" cause backwards. This. Isn't. About. You. And yet you, and apparently not a few Australian parents, still hear "homosexual" at every drop of the word "gay."

And another thing ...

Here is a quote from Principal Martin about why he decided to simply change the words rather than explain meanings.

"It wasn’t misplaced political correctness, it wasn’t homophobia, there was nothing really calculated in doing it. I could’ve stopped the whole class and gone into a very caring, supportive explanation of gay being quite a reasonable choice in lifestyle that some people make, but I was only talking with 7- and 8-year-olds and I think that sort of thing is better explained more fully with parents."

Plainly from this quote, the principal is an objectively pro-gay educator ("a very caring, supportive explanation") but someone who thinks that maybe, just maybe, introduction of the concept "gay" is something parents should do (or not do ... whatever) rather than teachers.* And still he gets roasted for this view and by the end of the story, he's agreed to do what he said he didn't want to do and what the gay-activist said he should. When the gay-activists, we don't want to indoctrinate and sexualize the children, they are lying. They want to shape their minds and their sense of the "normal" (and thus everything else about them) as early as possible, and use the public schools to that end, parents be damned.
-------------------------------
* How times have changed. When I was about 11, when the science/health unit got around to diet and vitamins, I asked about a vitamin ad at the time that had a female spokesman say, “being woman, we need twice the iron as men,” and I wanted to know why that was. I remember a couple of girls giggled and the teacher scolded the class for immaturity, and I protested that I was asking what seemed like a serious and legitimate question, and she replied, "I know YOU are being serious ... but you need to ask your parents about that" (the ad coyly referred to menstruation with "we lose some of it" though that meant nothing to me at 11).

Homo Castro

2010-09-02T01:51:00.000-05:00

The other day, Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro created a dilemma for the left, even while playing a sick game of Keeping Up With The Joneses. He gave an interview with the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, in which he said (too simply and/or absurdly) that, while it was ultimately his fault, he was too busy with other matters to stop putting gays and HIV-positive men in gulags. But he was somehow not too busy to actually, y'know, put them there, as if there was some deadly holdover from the Batista regime that just kept on keepin on.

[Castro] said he was not prejudiced against gays, but "if anyone is responsible (for the persecution), it's me."
"I'm not going to place the blame on others," he said.
Castro, 84, said he was busy in those days fending off threats from the United States, including attempts on his life, and trying to maintain the revolution that put him in power in 1959.
"We had so many and such terrible problems, problems of life or death," Castro said.
"In those moments I was not able to deal with that matter (of homosexuals). I found myself immersed, principally, in the Crisis of October (Cuban Missile Crisis), in the war, in policy questions," he said.

Frankly, Castro is trying to rewrite history, and based on pure contemporary expediency. Now being pro-gay is chic, and being anti-gay will cost you support from leftists -- a commodity Castro always has relied on. So he has to give an atonement interview. (See some of the reaction here at Gay Patriot, where some leftist trolls are comparing Castro favorably with Ken Mehlman, as if marriage amendments were remotely comparable to the Cuban Gulag.)

If it weren't too easily accessible to call a "secret," one of the Left's dirty little secrets is that it was as guilty of homophobia, if not more so, than the political right for most of the 20th century. Hard as it may be to believe now, Topic H really has only prompted live-wire public issues at all for the last 40 years or so and only been a litmus test for right-left sympathies for about the last 25.

Castro, very unremarkably for Marxists and leftists of his era, saw homosexuality as the behavior of decadent aristocrats and bourgeois dandies. And given the historical facts about homosexuality and the historical construction of gay identity, this was a reasonable claim -- at the time, homosexuality WAS largely (entirely, in terms of cultural impact) the province of the upper class, which had the leisure and freedom-from-want to agonize over their sexuality, their personality, their Romantic self-identity, and to use sex for purposes other than marriage and/or reproduction (indeed, a non-Communist Marxist claim can be made that the spread of homosexuality in the rich West is the result of the democratization of leisure and wealth). But Castro always persecuted homosexuality as anti-social, never as a sin against God ("what 'god'? ... we are Marxist-Leninists"). And this Wikipedia article (which also casts doubts on the narrative, swallowed whole in the Reuters article above, that it all ended around 1980) makes the rationale quite explicit (with citations of Castro's own words):

Castro's admiring description of rural life in Cuba ("in the country, there are no homosexuals") reflected the idea of homosexuality as bourgeois decadence, and he denounced "maricones" (faggots) as "agents of imperialism." Castro explained his reasoning in a 1965 interview:
"We would never come to believe that a homosexual could embody the conditions and requirements of conduct that would enable us to consider him a true Revolutionary, a true Communist militant. A deviation of that nature clashes with the concept we have of what a militant Communist must be."

None of this was atypical. Hard as it may seem to believe now, with Bohemia rather than class defining the right-left cleavage, Communists idealized the traditional family as the producer of new workers and were sternly moralistic. Homosexuality was a retreat from social responsibility and a wallow in non-productive selfishness. Indeed, many of the great homosexual artists of the 19th and early-20th centuries were forthright enemies of egalitarianism -- Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams, early Genet -- and hated as such by the Marxists and socialists of the period.

To speak just of movies, it was common well into the 1980s to see European directors such as Italy's Bernardo Bertolucci, Greece's Theo Angelopoulos or Italy's Luchino Visconti (all members of their respective national communist parties, and Visconti even gay himself) portray homosexuality as the harbingers and/or the symbols of sybaritic fascism and selfish vice. To cite just two examples: a dance scene in Angelopoulos's WW2-set "The Travelling Players" has the male communist guerrillas get all the woman in the town to dance with them, while the fascist male supporters of the collaborationist Greek regime dance with one another; and Visconti's "The Damned" basically portrays the Nazi Party prior to the Night of the Long Knives as a San Francisco bath-house group.

All this by way of saying ... if you have a memory or knowledge of politics that goes before about 1970, you know that, just as with the Democratic Party and blacks, the Left has been the enemy of homosexual persons as often as their friend. Castro will always remind us of that, regardless of his pathetic attempts at revisionism.

And now, on a lighter note ...

2010-07-05T23:38:00.002-05:00

Forget the effect on children, direct or indirect. Who cares about reinforcing the contraceptive mentality. To heck with the death of religious freedom. Here is the ultimate argument. If this is gay "marriage," all sane people should be against it.

The headline at the Daily Mirror says it all: "Gay couple banned from having giant models of The Simpsons as guests of honour at wedding." (Though you'd think the Sun wooda-dunn better, "I Do-hhhh" or something wittier.)

I guess it is appropriate though -- imaginary fictional witnesses for an imaginary fictional wedding.

I don't mean that as completely sarcastically as it might sound (obviously, breeders have been known to be tacky too). But it's pretty clear after years of practice (I am generalizing, I realize) that homosexuals don't want a marriage, they want a wedding; that they have no sense of solemnity and don't see monogamy as important. Heck, if a wedding is all about you and your fabulousness, why not have cartoon-character dummies as guests of honor?

And this couple seems ... well, how to put it delicately ... Psychological Case Study One supporting the "homosexuality as arrested development" theory.

Glyn and Roy will get over the snub to their cartoon heroes by not going on honeymoon ... and watching DVDs of the Simpsons instead.

I love "The Simpsons" as much as the next guy but ... does one laugh or cry? Shouldn't the honeymoon be about ... y'know ... lots of gettin nekkid and makin' out and sex'n'stuff. (I looked this up a few years ago ... I think it's supposed to involve that but I could be getting this part wrong.) You almost feel sorry for the Cardiff city council spokesflak stating the so-obvious-it's-passe in these Very Interesting Times:

A Cardiff city council spokeswoman said: “Guidance from the Registrar General states that the Registrar should always insist upon the seemly behaviour of the parties and their witnesses.
“All ceremonies – marriages and civil partnerships – should therefore be solemn and dignified.
“It is Cardiff Council’s view that this request was outside that definition and could not be permitted.”

New links

2010-07-05T23:04:00.001-05:00

Some people have said for years I dwell too much on Topic H, and, while that's the premise of the site, I can't deny that it makes me seem more of a gloomy killjoy than I am. I don't think I'm being immodest when I say that people who know me in the flesh know that I can be as funny and witty as ... ahem ... Oscar Wilde. And obviously I have secular interests -- I'm a huge fan of both sports and politics and beer (only "chicks" are left out -- durnit). And like most guys with my issues, I was a pop-culture junkie as a boy. As a result of all this, "blending in" among straight guys has never been hard for me.

So, partly to present a more-balanced view of who I am and maybe come across as a more attractive human being, and partly to make regular blogging psychologically easier -- I've decided to let myself write about other topics.

I've removed some dead or radically changed sites from my link list at the right. And I've also added a new category -- "homocons," a couple of whom I've come to enjoy reading and interacting some with on Twitter. It should go without saying that these are sites of people who practice the lifestyle and/or identify as gay (which is why they're in a different category than Catholic and Same-Sex-Attraction sites. They're not pornographic but the morality of the homosexual act and derivative conclusions are assumed and/or argued for. The over-scrupulous should consider that your warning).

Indeed it was while reading one of the "homocon" sites that I came across something profound about who I am, as a man, as a Catholic, a person with homosexual attractions, and my relationship to these sorts of "homocons" (though the realizations were kinda brewing within me during the disgraceful fight over GOProud at CPAC).

At the conservative blog Gay Patriot, there was an early June post about the Madrid Gay Pride parade, the organizers which had ignited a furor by disinviting an Israeli float because of the Gaza flotilla. The one nation in the Middle East where homosexuality is not punishable by imprisonment or death (this is a good thing) and that actually has a gay-pride parade (not-so-good but hardly objectionable to gay-pride parade organizers) is not kosher because of its fighting with neighbors who would only allow even a Courage conference so as to provide a target-rich environment. Even for a man like myself, no moral equivalence between Western civilization and its enemies -- Islam or pre-modern societies -- is even conceivable, and the people who prattle on to the contrary (of whom there are alarmingly many in "religious right" and Catholic traditionalist circles) are delusional fantasists.

B. Daniel Blatt, aka Gay Patriot West, began and ended it like this:

The more I learn about the antics of gay leaders (and other organizers of gay events) in this country and abroad, the more convinced I become that their primary concern is not promoting greater social acceptance of gay people, but in becoming the gay auxiliaries of various left-wing (and often anti-Western) movements. ...

Yet, to all too many gay organizations, that tolerance [for gays in Israel] matters less than belonging to the “Grand Coalition of those Oppressed by Western Civilization.”

Yep. Indeed to be honest, I have to acknowledge the following. I owe, at least historically, my aversion to the gay lifestyle as much to politics as to religion, to Western Civ and the great tradition as to the Church.

I am an adult revert who was only confirmed a few weeks short of his 26th birthday (though I had been attending Mass for a year and a bit before that). In my late-teens and early-20s, though obviously I told myself they were just a phase, the attractions and the male body's activity were undeniable. As was my falling in love with my best friend at 24. Since I wasn't any kind of churchgoer for much of these years, a man's sexual prime, I have to acknowledge that a huge reason I stayed chaste and didn't fall into the lifestyle, at a time when I would have been most vulnerable and also the most-dangerous time to be practicing the lifestyle, was my contempt for gay activists and the role models they put forth in college. They were everything I didn't want to be -- haters of Western civilization, haters of the Catholic Church (which I didn't despise even in lapsitude), haters of the US as it exists, whiners about their own bad choices in life, worshippers of whatever leftist fad came up next. And therefore, objectively-speaking, allies of those who want to destroy the space that even allows a closet and a space in the Church to a man like myself.

Attending college at the height of the PC-canon wars, I found inspiration in such "homocons" as Camille Paglia and Andrew Sullivan (the Sullivan of that period -- not the Trig-truther, pro-outing, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic bigot of today). Truth be told, they did more to protect my virginity (unintentionally I'm pretty sure) and keep me away from the gay lifestyle than could the Church I didn't quite embrace yet.

Easter rebirths

2010-07-05T21:06:00.000-05:00

I began a recent Easter Saturday in the depths. I was in a Washington DC hotel room late in the morning, wrestling a 240-pound bodybuilder -- voluntarily and knowing that beforehand of course. The results were predictable, and not undesired.

About a half-hour after it was over, I was sitting in the hotel's bar, sipping a soda, picking half-heartedly at the savory party-mix bowl the bartender had put out. I was sore all over, though not really hurt; and my face had some markings, though nothing major or permanent. And like St. Augustine under the fig tree, I was weeping bitterly (though silently, because I was in a public place).

I texted a buddy, to whom I've never come "out," that I was in a lot of pain, not specifying the kind. And telling him that I was "dead to the sin that has torn at me all my life" (as explicit as I wanted to be with him), and asked him point blank "tell me why I should go to the Easter Vigil."

He responded: "read St. Augustine's Confessions, book 8, chapter 12." I was pretty sure what passage that was -- I've read the whole of the book at least three times, including once as late-night bedside reading. But I was able, thanks to the miracle of smart phones and Internet access, to look it up and yeah ... it was St. Augustine recounting his conversion, weeping under the fig tree.

Here is St. Augustine, the whole chapter after the jump (this post does get back to me, but I want St. Augustine's whole chapter in front of everybody)

28. Now when deep reflection had drawn up out of the secret depths of my soul all my misery and had heaped it up before the sight of my heart, there arose a mighty storm, accompanied by a mighty rain of tears. That I might give way fully to my tears and lamentations, I stole away from Alypius, for it seemed to me that solitude was more appropriate for the business of weeping. I went far enough away that I could feel that even his presence was no restraint upon me. This was the way I felt at the time, and he realized it. I suppose I had said something before I started up and he noticed that the sound of my voice was choked with weeping. And so he stayed alone, where we had been sitting together, greatly astonished. I flung myself down under a fig tree -- how I know not -- and gave free course to my tears. The streams of my eyes gushed out an acceptable sacrifice to thee. And, not indeed in these words, but to this effect, I cried to thee: "And thou, O Lord, how long? How long, O Lord? Wilt thou be angry forever? Oh, remember not against us our former iniquities."[259] For I felt that I was still enthralled by them. I sent up these sorrowful cries: "How long, how long? Tomorrow and tomorrow? Why not now? Why not this very hour make an end to my uncleanness?"
29. I was saying these things and weeping in the most bitter contrition of my heart, when suddenly I heard the voice of a boy or a girl I know not which -- coming from the neighboring house, chanting over and over again, "Pick it up, read it; pick it up, read it."[260] Immediately I ceased weeping and began most earnestly to think whether it was usual for children in some kind of game to sing such a song, but I could not remember ever having heard the like. So, damming the torrent of my tears, I got to my feet, for I could not but think that this was a divine command to open the Bible and read the first passage I should light upon. For I had heard[261] how Anthony, accidentally coming into church while the gospel was being read, received the admonition as if what was read had been addressed to him: "Go and sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you shall have treasure in heaven; and come and follow me."[262] By such an oracle he was forthwith converted to thee.
So I quickly returned to the bench where Alypius was sitting, for there I had put down the apostle's book when I had left there. I snatched it up, opened it, and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes first fell: "Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof."[263] I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.[264]
30. Closing the book, then, and putting my finger or something else for a mark I began -- now with a tranquil countenance -- to tell it all to Alypius. And he in turn disclosed to me what had been going on in himself, of which I knew nothing. He asked to see what I had read. I showed him, and he looked on even further than I had read. I had not known what followed. But indeed it was this, "Him that is weak in the faith, receive."[265] This he applied to himself, and told me so. By these words of warning he was strengthened, and by exercising his good resolution and purpose -- all very much in keeping with his character, in which, in these respects, he was always far different from and better than I -- he joined me in full commitment without any restless hesitation.
Then we went in to my mother, and told her what happened, to her great joy. We explained to her how it had occurred -- and she leaped for joy triumphant; and she blessed thee, who art "able to do exceedingly abundantly above all that we ask or think."[266] For she saw that thou hadst granted her far more than she had ever asked for in all her pitiful and doleful lamentations. For thou didst so convert me to thee that I sought neither a wife nor any other of this world's hopes, but set my feet on that rule of faith which so many years before thou hadst showed her in her dream about me. And so thou didst turn her grief into gladness more plentiful than she had ventured to desire, and dearer and purer than the desire she used to cherish of having grandchildren of my flesh.

It was a perfect moment -- I even called my friend "Alypius" in my IM back, though on reflection that doesn't quite work. The great saint goes to Alypius later, after he's listened to the Lord's voice telling him to open and read ... but the alternative would be calling my buddy God or maybe St. Paul, which'd be way more absurd. The chapter that luckily moved St. Augustine and gave him a chastity he said never left him for life is Romans 13:13 (here's the NIV -- a little clearer to modern ears, avoiding the archaic King James terms "chambering" and "wantonness"). I've always wondered, in fact, whether my friend was recommending the Confessions as an account of conversion generally or of conversion from sexual misconduct.

It's very easy to associate with St. Augustine in that garden, even for those of us who have a formal affiliation with the Church, however weak or strong at a given moment, that the saint at that moment didn't have. To want God to lift our burdens is natural. To cite those unlightened burdens as reasons to reject Him or turn away from indifference or frustration is all-too-human. That's why St. Augustine and I were crying -- both torn between the soul and the flesh, doubting that we can live without sex. Or that if we can, that it'd only be temporary. But it's at those moments -- the previous chapters of the Confessions -- when outsiders can see things more clearly than we can, even if like Alypius and my friend, it's just to listen to our fretting until God can take command. And that's why isolation and self-isolation are bad. Chastity is not a fight that can be won alone (and I don't only mean that in the supernatural sense of "apart from God's grace").

I messaged my buddy:

Eyes dry now ... unfortunately too late to go to confession. But trail mix all scarfed, and fretting about [several sentences on our common sports-team rooting interest]. In other words, something resembling normal again.

He responded:

Good to hear. Keep your head up, and think how blessed we are to know God.

I went to the Easter Vigil that night. And contrary to what I said, I was able to find a priest to hear my Confession on the afternoon of Easter Saturday. I can't pretend things went as well for me after that as St. Augustine says they went for himself. I haven't lived a perfect life since then. Indeed, I had a fairly bad stumble less than a week ago, not the least of the reasons being the person with whom I did it. However again -- that's not the point. Alypius, children playing, an open Bible -- they can be anyone, anywhere, and they always are around if we have the eyes to see.

Indeed, this very blog post is one I started way back when, since that Easter Saturday, and has been sitting in my draft folder ever since. I went into my blog queue a little bit ago, just looking ... and saw this draft ...

All the boys love Alice*

2010-06-13T21:07:00.000-05:00

"Drinking beer is easy. Trashing your hotel room is easy. But being a Christian, that’s a tough call. That’s real rebellion!"

— Alice Cooper

I can't say I am a huge fan of Alice Cooper -- it's just not my style of music (and not because I'm a particularly prudish man about artistic subject matter; I just don't care especially for heavy metal). But nobody who has been in high school since 1972 hasn't rocked out and sung along to "School's Out."

But I saw this quote on my Twitter feed the other day (via Catholic Travel) and gave Cooper (nee Vince Furnier) another fist pump worthy of "schooooooooool's out ... for ever." Apparently it came from a 2001 interview with the Times of London. I had known in vague terms that Cooper was a born-again Christian after having hit rock bottom with alcohol and his wife threatening to leave him. But this was the first time I had ever seen this quote, and my reaction was "hell, yeah."

I did some sniffing around and saw that Cooper had given several interviews over the last few years on religion, a subject he apparently was reluctant to speak about for a long time, in part because he didn't want to be identified as a "celebrity Christian."

Here are some excerpts from the above-linked interviews:

That being said, I'm not a very good Christian. I mean, none of us are ever 'good' Christians. That's not the point. When you're a Christian, it doesn't mean you're gonna be good, it means you've got a harder road to pull. ...

I think Marilyn [Manson] had a really bad Christian experience when he was younger. My guess is he got involved with some less-than-Christian-Christians and that really, forgive the expression, nailed him. You know, he's one of the greatest button pushers I've ever met. And I know that game because I invented that game. ...

I've had a couple of people that were friends of mine that I've talked to that have vocally said they have [accepted Christ]. I have talked to some big stars about this, some really horrific characters ... and you'd be surprised. The ones that you would think are the furthest gone are the ones that are more apt to listen.

But to get back to the opening quote. What Cooper is saying is that hedonism and the life of the flesh is the easy path in life. To say "no" to a temptation that there is no earthly barrier to your indulging -- and there are effectively no more barriers to homosexuality in the rich West -- is the radical, countercultural act today. This is not the Gay 90s world of Oscar Wilde, when going to bed with another man could ruin your life. Even AIDS (syphillis in Wilde's time) isn't what it once was. When I was in college, at the height of the PC/canon wars in the years around 1990, a professor told me, "you wanna stand out, you wanna be different? Read Chaucer and Shakespeare." At the time, it was the height of conformity to read Rigoberta Menchu and other temporally-'relevant' junk.

The same holds with what it means to be exceptional in the field of sexuality. "We," meaning homosexual persons, are probably about 3% of the population. And when I mentioned that stat, one of the other chapter members replied, "and we," (meaning those who try to resist the temptation in God's name) "are at best 3% of that 3%." To resist the sexual revolution is what makes you your own man today. Like being one of the world's biggest rock stars and not getting drunk and trashing your hotel room.

I think some Christians may be reluctant to say this kind of thing, believing it smacks of spiritual grandiloquence. It has that danger, sure -- to count oneself as exceptional. But it's not a danger not always already inherent in the notion of salvation and calling: "many are called, few are chosen" and that stuff about the narrow and wide paths, etc. The goal has to be, as Cooper says elsewhere, "on Christ and not on Alice Cooper." But a kind of "calling to a higher, tougher goal in life" is a feeling that men, particularly, need to feel about their vocations -- whether it's the Marines or the Pope's Marines. That a vocation calls a man to be more than himself and to a thing (or Person) worth striving for.
--------------------------------
* Mad props to the first person who can identify that (slightly altered) reference.

"My film was the Queerest"

2010-05-06T03:19:00.005-05:00

In the category of "will any part of life ever be left untouched by the wonder that is the gay lifestyle" -- the Cannes Film Festival, which starts later this month, will have a "best gay film" award -- the Queer Palm.

"Cannes is getting its first (unofficial) GLBT award. Following on awards such as the Teddy at Berlin and the Queer Lion at Venice, an independent group is establishing the Queer Palm. The first Queer Palm, recognising a film for its contribution to lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender themes, will be handed out May 22. The films will be drawn from all Cannes sections: Official Selection, Un Certain Regard, Critics’ Week, and Director’s Fortnight. French directors Olivier Ducastel and Jacques Martineau are patrons of the award."

As the excerpt notes, it's an unofficial award. However, it's being done quite up front with an official jury and website, and so has to have some cooperation from the world's most famous and glamorous film festival. If the Powers That Be on the Cote d'Azur wanted to squelch this, they well could. Something also tells me the award will not go to any film that might suggest, or be construed as suggesting, anything less than the complete fabulosity of All Things Gay.

But most importantly -- Queer Palm is really uninventive and humorlessly straight ... ahem ... as a title. Couldn't they have called the award the Palme de Lavande or Golden Judy or Condom d'Or or Palme de [whatever is French for "gold lamé"]. Personally, my preference for gay films and criticism is ... Blaine and Antoine.

Free at last, free at last, thank Obama Almighty...

2010-04-19T22:11:00.002-05:00

This is a guest post from a former gay-activist friend who wishes to maintain some discretion for partner-related reasons.

My current topic is President Obama's recent order on same sex partners and hospitals, which the MSM and other media have seized upon as the equivalent of President Lincoln emancipating the slaves and American soldiers liberating Dachau all rolled into one. A Martian or even merely a bewildered Pole wandering into the media reports could be forgiven for assuming that all American hospitals demanded genetic proof or legal documents certifying blood relationships to screen their patient's visitors and make sure no same-sex loved ones snuck in. And of course there have been the isolated tragedies where, as in the case I most hear reported, the same-sex partner of a woman in Florida was barred from her bedside as she lay dying. There are no words to describe how awful that was and, seeing as the woman barred had the necessary legal documents (medical power of attorney etc.) to have brought her into the room, she has every right to sue and should sue.

But as in the old saying hard cases make bad law, such cases are hardly the norm and my partner's and my experience bears this out.

We live in a state which has hardly been considered a gay haven. It is not Massachusetts, California or even Vermont and has generally been among the most scarlet of the red states. Yet in our four or five visits to the hospital or emergency room over of our more-than-25-year friendship (all but the first seven of it chaste and accord to the teaching of the Church), we have never been accorded anything less than the most sincere respect, consideration and consultation. At those times when either one of us has had to be in hospital overnight, hospital staff have been solicitous about not kicking us out of the room when visiting hours finally ended and no one has murmured when the sick one of us has asked the other be present during consultation or even treatment. It has simply been a non-issue.

This, I believe, is how the topic has been going for some time, admittedly state to state and in an inefficient patchwork, but ultimately, I believe, in a healthier way as people gradually come to understand that love, not legality, is what makes up a person's most authentic family, the family one really wants and need to see when they heal from an accident or illness.

I view the President's move as essentially cynical politics. He has been under fire from an interest group which has been vocal in supporting him because he wisely discerned that caving in their demands would paralyze his administration and almost certainly limit him to one term. This move cost him little political capital and is almost attack-proof. Who after all, even among the most callous of gay-rights opponents, will stand up and argue that long-term same-sex partners not be allowed in to see their loved ones? Sure, there are undoubtedly some, but they are likely of the sort that Administration can only wish would rise up to decry the move.

But it was a move he didn't need to make and I fear it might, in the end, wind up actually hurting some of the very people it ostensibly seeks to protect by furthering and fostering the impression that the acceptance of same-sex relationships is not and cannot develop normally and naturally and instead can only be brought in on the wings of a federal mandate -- something which I do not believe to be the case.

Accidental outing

2010-03-15T23:12:00.002-05:00

Though I can console myself that it was a self-inflicted wound under the best of circumstances. What happened was the 2nd-biggest fear men like myself have -- outing himself via a slip of the tongue in an otherwise innocent situation.

I was having dinner with a fairly well-known conservative blogger (whom I'll call "K"). By the time the subject rolled around to Andrew Sullivan and his infinite wickedness, we were both on our third beer, and I mused aloud, "the guy makes me ashamed to be gay and Catholic."

Ooopsie ...

My face went red, though I will go to my grave uncertain whether K immediately caught it and registered it. Perhaps if I had not drawn attention by my reaction, it would have passed in one ear and out the other, like the lyrics to a pop song you've heard a thousand times.

All I said was "oh, man."

But K's reaction is what I want to share with others -- partly because it gives the lie to the "homophobe" narrative, both in the Christian religion and political conservatism. The fact is that very few conservatives, even those of a religious sort, really care what someone does in the bedroom as long as, as they say, we don't do anything to frighten the horses. (The public issues that surround homosexuality are ... well, public issues.) And I have never personally been treated badly by a religious or conservative person who knew about my homosexual attractions or behaviors (though I have seen the anti-gay hate in online or otherwise impersonal situations).

K was raised Southern Baptist and still hews to that ol' time religion (he's always been suspicious of my ties to the Beast of Rome). But his dominant reaction was to feel sorry for my embarrassment at that moment. He immediately referred to the lesbianism of one of his favorite link-buddies, whom I knew about, and said "we went back and forth on this and it never affected anything." He assured me it didn't matter and he didn't care, though he professed some surprise. When I asked K whether I tripped his gaydar, he said "no, but my wife did ask me" after one of the several occasions we met. "And I said, 'no, he's Catholic and just a celibate'," K told me.

However, in an unrelated context a long time ago, K had once told me that women had better gaydars than men. I asked him how he knew that, and he said that his 16-year-old daughter had surmised upon a single meeting that an adult friend of K's was gay (and not because the subject came up). K said his wife backed the daughter up, saying that the friend tipped them both off via his eyes. He was not scoping them out, not checking them out as eye candy. The wife said K's friend also apparently gave no detectable hint of interest in his interactions with other women to which she was witness. Women are so used to being visually assessed by men that they can spot it right away when it's not happening, K told me back then. It's much easier to fool a man, I guess, with overt behavior. I'm pretty masculine acting and have no difficulty "picking up" (if that's the right term) drinking buddies and single-serving friends.

So if we wanna stay closeted, guys, we gotta have to practice at scoping out the chicks. Otherwise we're only fooling half the human race. Here's a photo of Kim Kardashian for practice.

Things I don't understand

2010-03-15T02:46:00.005-05:00

A couple of nights ago, a bit after 11 pm, I was at a bar where I'm a regular and the bartender let out a couple of yawns a couple of minutes apart. I asked Todd when he'd been up since, and he said, a two-hour nap aside, since 4 am. He elaborated that "newborns will do that to you." I remembered that he had mentioned months ago that his girlfriend was expecting.

I "demanded" to see pictures of the baby, and he handed me his phone to show his daughter, and I handed him my iPhone to show the picture of Elizabeth (this being 2010 and not the "I Love Lucy" 1950s with the Ricardos and Applebys). He joked about having fallen asleep that afternoon with his four-day old daughter cradled in his arms and how he was glad he didn't have any weird or vivid dreams.

I then jokingly asked Todd, "so when are you gonna go legit?" And I got an answer that I still cannot comprehend. He told me, "We're not. We're gonna share custody."

Now, there are a lot of immoral or inadvisable things that I perfectly well "understand" or can "get." I can understand not waiting for the wedding night. I can understand shacking up if you plan to marry. I can even understand finding oneself in an unwanted pregnancy and, even if only for the fleeting instant Sarah Palin once mentioned, going to the clinic to have it "taken care of." And sometimes marriages don't work well or become impracticable and, in such a situation, it's easy to believe (and in some cases it is the case) that joint custody might be the least bad state of affairs.

But even after all that bending-over-backwards (my skull and heel are now neighbors) -- i still don't get this. What kind of person or couple will aspire merely to joint custody right at the start? Without even making a go at marriage or living together (and maybe marrying later)? How little love can there be between the two of them that even a child can't awaken any sense of duty or aspiration? And it's not as if Todd (at least in his public persona) is particularly a "playa" or "party animal." Indeed, he told me once in an unrelated conversation that he goes to Mass every week, taking along his grandmother.

I know Todd well enough to bust his chops bartender/customer-style about "going legit," but not so well that I could appropriately ask him "what the hell are you thinking?" But frankly -- that was my reaction. And I don't even want to think about what's gonna happen when the mother acquires some (but not too much) sense and realizes she needs a concrete guarantee, beyond his mere word, of support for their daughter. A co-worker to whom I told this said it sounded to her as if the two had broken up and had breakup sex, or maybe thought about reconciling and decided to celebrate right away, and ... ooops.

I remember seeing an episode of some shout-gab show about 20 years ago, on which some libertine, a woman, was defending shacking up and was asked by a religious-right woman "what happens when you have four kids and he walks out on you, legally untied to you?" And the libertine responded, "oh, I'd have a legal tie to him before I even had one child." Remember back in the 80s when sexual revolutionaries were smarter than now (thanks to 20 fewer years of the sexual revolution)?

I can only reflect on how screwed-up sex makes us, how irrationally we can behave under its spell. And pray that God can enlighten a better path for Todd and his girlfriend, toward a marital love that will bless the child with whom they've been gifted.

UPDATE, 6 MAY: Well, a couple of nights ago, it was almost 2am and I was at the same bar and had a conversation with Todd that was ... something less than encouraging. In fact, if it was serious, it was profoundly discouraging. He walked up to where I was, after he had served on another floor of the same bar. Here is the conversation, best I can recall (keep in mind, he doesn't know about Topic H, otherwise I would not have started this conversation as I did).

HIM: What are you doing up so late? Isn't it past your bedtime?
ME: Is that an invitation?
HIM: I don't think so.
ME: That wasn't what your wife said last night.
HIM: I don't have a wife.
(At this point, I'm mentally kicking myself for blowing the joke "I knew that.")
ME: OK, your girlfriend.
HIM: She's not my girlfriend.
ME: OK, your baby mamma, whatever you wanna call the chick.
HIM: Hey, fine with me. You wanna take her you're welcome to her and take the kid off my hands as well -- great.

I said nothing more after that and chuckled a bit. And obviously, "take my wife, please" jokes go back far before even Henny Youngman. And obviously this was ball-busting bar banter.

But ... nevertheless ... there was something about Todd's insistence that she wasn't even a girlfriend to him and the precise way he said the last line that told me "he's not really joking." Or if he is joking, he's doing so to ironize and minimize some ugly truth about himself in order to make it tolerable (like how WC Fields played a souse while being a bona-fide alcoholic). Easier to joke about something rather than stare into the reality that you have a child you don't want by a woman you don't love. (A temptation I'm prone to myself, I hasten to add.)

Christmas with the Prices

2010-01-06T12:31:00.002-05:00

Dale Price mentions my coming to the abode of himself and the fair Heather for Christmas this year, just a month after visiting Detroit for the baptism of my god-daughter Elizabeth.

One thing I learned with the Price kids this year is that presents matter, not so much for what they are as for their very existence (and by this I don't exactly mean "it's the thought that counts"). Dale mentions the Dec. 27 death of his cat Molly, including that the final collapse began Christmas morning. When I arrived at their home late Christmas morning, all three of the kids were wiping away tears and sobs. Heather told me that they had just been told that Molly, who is older than any of them and even than their parents' marriage, was dying and not likely to make it through the day.

I had left my presents under the tree the previous night (and this year managed to traipse from my car to the home without slipping, falling, and leaving bows all over the Price yard). But apparently Dale and Heather had told the kids not to open them until I got there. So when I arrived, that meant they had more presents to open, something good to think about and do other than the dying cat -- two presents each (one video and one nonvideo) and two more for all of them collectively (a candy box and a Wii game program). The tears were gone pretty quick, and stayed away for the rest of the day. Which matters more than whether D3 actually liked the Lone Ranger episode set or whatever else they got.

I also took all the kids, along with Heather, to see "The Princess and the Frog." Rachel is very *into* princesses, so I volunteered to take the girls and at least invite D3 (unsure whether he'd be interested). But Heather brought along the whole brood, including two-month-old Elizabeth. I liked the film, with its blend of New Orleans jazz and cajun music, magical voodoo, and old-school cel animation like "Beauty & the Beast" and "The Little Mermaid." Though the minute I saw that a major character was named Stella, my heart kinda sank at what a New Orleans-set work of art would HAVE to do. (Yes, I know ... Tennessee Williams and all ... but I'm still tired of other works stealing Marlon Brando's glory.) And when that inevitable moment came, Heather smiled and cheered at me from the other end of the row. Though the kids were overall well-behaved, Heather also told me later that, as she knew, the film's length proved too taxing for 2-year-old Louis. But she added that every time the movie would burst into music or song (some of the best sequences by the way, particularly the fantasy montage to "I'm Almost There"), Louis would get off his seat and start dancing, boogieing on down on the row's floor as only a 2-year-old white boy can. (Here's the film's soundtrack, where you can sample all the major cuts.)

Speaking of entertainment choices though, I think the Warren County Department of Family and Children's Services may need a call. Rachel was, as always, fascinated by my iPhone and the revelation that it could play music, using iTunes. I haven't loaded my purchases from my computer, but I told Rachel I could play at least 30 seconds from any song in the world (the browse and listen function at the iTunes store). And Rachel and/or Madeleine asked whether I could play Joan Jett. My ears popped out of their eye sockets ... appalled that these young impressionable girls are being schooled by their parents in the biker-slut-in-hot-leather-pants look. I asked the girls what Joan Jett songs they knew, and it was "I Love Rock N'Roll," ... it was ALL I could do not to show the girls this video of Joan Jett at her role-model-for-young-girls finest

... don't you just love Joan Jett as a flasher??

Anyhoo ... I regretted having to leave Detroit on early morning of Dec. 26, which made my visit a bit short, but work required it. Thanks to Dale and Heather for having me and Madeleine, Dale, Rachel, Louis and especially Elizabeth (whom I was able to get to go to sleep a couple of times) for making the holiday.

Bradley Effect on gay "marriage"?

2010-01-05T23:24:00.002-05:00

The public discourse surrounding gay "marriage" has been so dissatisfactory that it may have contributed to the surprise defeats in the last two big referendums. The gay groups' idea of an argument is "BIGOT!!!" (or more-nuanced claims such as "you hate me" or the supremely sophisticated "this argument is by definition bigoted").

Yet, the last two states to hold referendums on the issue were the solidly-blue states of California (in November 2008) and Maine (in November 2009). In both cases, polls were mixed or favored gay marriage slightly in the final days (here is a Maine preview; here is a California rundown) only for the poll that took place on Election Day to come out significantly different. In Maine, the repeal of state legislation won by 5 1/2 points; in California, a constitutional amendment to reverse a state high-court ruling won by 4 1/2 points.

The lead art on this item shows how stunned the pro-gay folks in Maine were by their defeat. Indeed, a report at Politico (where you can see the ghosts of earlier-filed stories) said everything went right for the pro-gay folks, and the various excuses they've given for their spectacular losing streak did not hold -- they were not outspent (can't blame that flood of Mormon and Vatican money); turnout was high (nor the few who are passionate about their bigotry); they were in a liberal state most of whose neighbors have gay marriage (nor their whole cultural narrative of opposing antedivulian knuckle-draggers ignorant of how awesome gay marriage is)

As voters went to the polls on Tuesday, gay marriage advocates were emboldened by what appeared to be higher than expected turnout in Maine. Even before polls opened on Tuesday roughly one-tenth of the state’s registered voters submitted mail-in ballots or voted early.
And in an interview late Tuesday night on MSNBC, Maine Democratic Gov. John Baldacci said that at polling places it looked like “the presidential election all over again.”
“A lot of young people were showing up, a lot of first-time voters were showing up,” Baldacci said. “I was encouraged by that.”
Supporters also hoped money would make a difference in the outcome. The main group working to keep the state’s marriage law on the books, Protect Maine Equality, outraised the leading opposition group, Stand for Marriage, by more than $1 million.

Which led me that very night to think that opposition to gay marriage must "underpoll," meaning "does less well in surveys than on Election Day," for some systemic reason. Pollster Nate Silver looked at the Maine results and also broached the possibility of a "Bradley effect," named after Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles who surprisingly lost a California governor's race he had been leading in the polls.¹

As for the polling, I think we have to seriously consider whether there is some sort of a Bradley Effect in the polling on gay rights issues

The "Bradley effect" posits that people will tell a pollster that they back the black guy while voting for the white one in a voting booth. I should add that even if black candidates suffer from some general "Bradley effect,"² that doesn't mean nefarious racism is the motive. Just as plausible, at face value anyway, as "phew ... I'm free to express my bigotry in the privacy of the voting booth" is that voters are unwilling to dismiss to a pollster (i.e., in a social situation) an underqualified minority or a minority whom they'd never support, for sound ideological reason, from fear of being thought racist.

This latter dynamic, I think, has more to do with gay issues. It is now a fact, that somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 percent of the US population has convinced itself that opposition to gay marriage is, in itself and necessarily, a mere expression of bigotry and prejudice. And that ~30 percent (or whatever exact number) dominate the instruments of culture and information and constitute nearly 100 percent of the experience of most open gays. Indeed, the 8 Maps and the enthusiasm that they and other forms of public menace generated among gays in California in the wake of their defeat indicate that many think "the time for reason is past." Folks are now fearing that a California judge may be preparing a show trial.

The one point gay-"marriage" folks have pounded on the table over and over is "BIGOT!!!" And a "Bradley effect" is the fruit this strategy has borne. Nobody wants to be thought of as a bigot, but yet you cannot persuade someone that he is one. The charge "BIGOT!!!" is not a bid to persuade but an attempt to anathematize. Thus, all it can do is intimidate, which can have an effect in a social situation like talking to a pollster but not a voting booth. This also might explain why legislators, at least in liberal states like Vermont and Maine, can be bent to oppose the popular will -- their votes aren't really secret. The more gay-"marriage" backers yell "BIGOT!!!" the more pronounced this Bradley effect is likely to become.
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¹ Yes, I know that politics scholars and pollsters debate whether there is indeed a "Bradley Effect," and some of the most skeptical are those who were involved the race itself. Whether there is, isn't or once was such an race-based effect doesn't change that the term is a good form of shorthand for a similar phenomenon re gay marriage.
² Though there's so many obvious exceptions that it's near impossible to believe in the Bradley effect as a general rule. It may be possible, nevertheless, to believe it holds in some cases or types of contests.
³ Nor should my willingness to use the term "Bradley effect" in re gay issues be taken to mean that I buy the "sexuality = race" narrative and all it implies.

Hate speech

2010-01-04T16:00:00.000-05:00

Read this self-identified "gaytheist" ... and keep in mind, this person is talking about Dignity.

Rarely will you see, without the use of profanity, such utterly unhinged ignorance and hate.All Christians see reason as the anti-Christ?' the very existence of any Catholics oppresses her; and ... well .... here are the choicest quotes.

"helping the church to oppress gay people simply through the idea that it’s okay to be Catholic."

"The Catholics, like all Christians, see rational thinking as the anti-Christ and work to vilify it as much as possible."

"The whole Catholic church is gayer than the Metropolitan Community Church. Come on, the men dress up in dresses and funny little hats and hang around altar boys all the time. The act of communion is essentially kneeling down with your mouth open in front of a man in a dress, how can you say that it is not gay?"

"The one thing about being Catholic in general (not just a gay or straight issue) is that to be a Catholic, you immediately have to hate everything that is essentially human about yourself."

"LGBT Christians are confusing but LGBT Catholics are just mentally ill."

Words fail. Remember this because the cultural narrative about us Catholics and the gays is ... we hate them, we hate them, we hate them ...

CPAC fight

2010-01-03T19:56:00.006-05:00

I don't have any particular stake in the Conservative Political Action Conference, an annual February event in Washington, this year running Feb. 18-20. I'm not much of a joiner and so have never gone, even as [my real name]. And for the same reason and others, I have never had any interest in the various gay-Republican groups, the latest of which is GOProud. They and other groups like Log Cabin Republicans and the Republican Unity Coalition have all generally supported the gay political agenda, which I emphatically do not, on public issues like marriage and military service (see 4 and 7 here for GOProud).

All this by way of saying "I ain't got no dog in this fight."

But although I'm a political conservative by any rational definition, nothing brings out my inner gay activist more than some of the pro-family groups on the right, as is now happening over this year's CPAC. One of the about 70 sponsoring groups this year is the newly-founded GOProud, and that has a lot of people unhappy. Americans for Truth, Liberty Counsel and Jerry Falwell Jr., Focus on the Family, the Alliance Defense Fund and the American Family Association all have denounced GOProud's involvement and/or threatened a boycott.

Rumblings got so bad that David Keene and Lisa DiPasquale both have issued public defenses of GOProud's involvement -- Keene to Texas radio host Adam McManus and DiPasquale to popular conservative blog Hot Air. Keene said GOProud's "interest is in demonstrating that not all gays are liberals rather than promoting their life style ... we find it difficult to exclude groups because of disagreements on one or two issues no matter how important many of us believe those issues to be," citing disagreements on the Bush administration's wars and immigration. DiPasquale told Hot Air's Ed Morrissey she was "satisfied that they do not represent a 'radical leftist agenda,' as some have stated, and should not be rejected as a CPAC cosponsor."

There's also more at conservative blog Gay Patriot on the issue of whether (as Keene can be read as having said in his e-mail) GOProud will be muzzled at CPAC, which the gay group denies, saying, among other things, that the speakers haven't been picked yet.

We'll see if this goes farther than this (it hasn't broken into the mainstream media, best I can tell). Of the 10 items on GOProud's Legislative Agenda, eight are solidly conservative, while the other two are not. And while I generally favor broad coalitions that include 80-percenters over narrow purist ones -- they're more likely to win, in a democracy -- the political question isn't exactly what makes me ashamed of many social conservatives. No ... it's because reading some of this stuff really makes it harder to believe that social conservative really believe in "love the sinner and reject the sin."

To start with, there's an unseemly interest in reductive and disgusting descriptions of gay sex from the likes of Matt Barber, the kind one expects from cranks like the Catholic Caveman, but not someone who leads a group that aims from respectability. Here is Americans for Truth's ~~rant~~ statement which approvingly quotes the "inimitable" Barber:

It boils down to this: there is nothing "conservative" about — as Barber inimitably puts it — "one man violently cramming his penis into another man’s lower intestine and calling it 'love'."

... which hardly merits a response (though here is one; starting with "His second point ...")

But more directly -- OK, so GOProud is wrong about marriage and military service. Why does that make *their* participation in CPAC so wrong? More wrong than any of the hundreds of pro-gay-marriage libertarians at CPAC? Or more wrong than the corporate involvement of such libertarian-leaning or -inclusive CPAC-sponsoring groups as the Competitive Enterprise Institute or the Manhattan Institute? And it is a moral certainty that CPAC-sponsoring groups with specific-issue focuses other than pro-family ones (like Americans for Tax Reform or the National Rifle Association, say) include gay-marriage supporters?

This kind of nonsense does nothing but make a prophet of the Andrew Sullivans of the world and gives credibility to their lies about the Church denying gay people's personhood per se. The issue isn't ... "are (misguided) supporters of gay-marriage et al gonna be at CPAC?" They will -- whether GOProud is there or not. Particularly given those previous comments, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that what these pro-family groups object to is the corporate personhood of GOProud. In other words, the objectionable point is a group of gay people. After all, social conservatives have no problem breaking bread with straight libertarians or bohemian neocons or others who back gay marriage. Social-conservative groups **who involve themselves in politics** have to ... well ... grow up. Get used to the presence of open gays in politics. We don't have gay coodies. Social conservatives might even find that some of "us" are also some of "them."

Backing down (?) ... or not (?)

2010-01-02T02:00:00.002-05:00

In a post last year, I made the simple point "if you make a threat, you MUST carry it out." The context there was the Church and Britain's adoption law, which requires private groups to let gays adopt. Now, it's coming up again in my back yard, over D.C.'s gay "marriage" law, and at least prominent gay site is already claiming the Church has pussed out.

In November, the Archdiocese of Washington issued a statement saying that a gay-marriage bill, which by that point looked inevitable, needed a religious-exemption. Otherwise the Church's social missions, which frequently involved partnership with the city, could be hampered. This was interpreted, thanks to ham-handed headline-writing at The Washington Post, into a threat to abandon city social services. (A couple of degrees of the Internet equivalent of the "Telephone" game made things even worse.)

Then the day D.C. created gay "marriage," the Archdiocese issued the following statement:

Today the District of Columbia joined a handful of states where legislatures or courts have redefined marriage to include persons of the same sex. Since this legislation was first introduced in October, the Archdiocese of Washington opposed the redefinition of marriage based on the core teaching of the Catholic Church that the complementarity of man and woman is intrinsic to the definition of marriage. However, understanding the City Council was committed to legalizing same sex marriages, the archdiocese advocated for a bill that would balance the Council’s interest in redefining marriage with the need to protect religious freedom. Regrettably, the bill did not strike that balance.

The Archdiocese of Washington and Catholic Charities are deeply committed to serving those in need, regardless of race, creed, gender, ethnic origin or sexual orientation. This commitment is integral to our Catholic faith and will remain unchanged into the future.

Religious organizations have long been eligible to provide social services in our nation’s capital and have not been excluded simply because of their religious character. This is because the choice of provider has focused on the ability to deliver services effectively and efficiently. We are committed to serving the needs of the poor and look forward to working in partnership with the District of Columbia consistent with the mission of the Catholic Church.

Now this contained no threat. And that had Jim Burroway at Box Office Turtle a-crowing:

Remember when the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington threatened to shut down its homeless shelters, food services and other community services if the D.C. city council approved same-sex marriage? Well now they’re saying “never mind.” ... This is the opposite of what they said before the same-sex marriage bill passed. At that time, they said they would be “unable” to continue those services if same-sex marriage became legal.

I know how this got jumbled. If you are looking for clear statements of principle, of whatever kind, Archbishop Donald Wuerl is not your man. The one thing he is, according to everybody I know who deals with him, is a smoothie. He is very reluctant to commit to anything concrete and pinning him down on something is the proverbial "Jell-O to the wall" experience.

Read the December statement carefully. Nowhere does it say the Church will abide by the D.C. law and treat same-sex "marriages" solemnized by the city as marriages. Nor does it say it won't. Keep in mind, the scenario the Church claimed (despite the Washington Post's dramatic headline and lead) was not "if there's gay marriage, we're pulling out of the city." Nor even "if a poor person is in a same-sex 'marriage,' we won't serve him." Rather it is "if the city requires us under non-discrimination law to recognize same-sex 'marriages' in our ordinary business (like providing spousal benefits for, say, a school librarian) as a condition of eligibility for city contracts, then we will not be eligible for them." Pro-gay-marriage blogger E.D. Kain explains here these distinctions, based on the November statement. At Box Turtle, a commenter noted that the Church had issued a clarification in the wake of the Post report.

And the D.C. city government hasn't issued any threats nor actually "married" anyone yet (the law can't take effect for a while because of the waiting period required to give Congress a chance to veto most DC laws; which won't happen here, but nevertheless ...). Nor has D.C. issued or not issued any social-service contracts. Nor has any gay person working in the Church has tried to claim spousal benefits. Until the rubber hits the road, there's nothing to do but wait.

In other words, both in November and December, the Archdiocese of Washington did not carve out a clear position. Even saying "we just won't be eligible for city contracts" isn't really a position. And here is the rubber-road meetings will take place:

(1) What will the Archdiocese do when Adam, husband of Steve, demands spousal benefits?

(2) What will the Archdiocese do when Adam and Steve, having been denied, take a discrimination claim to Caesar, in the form of a city panel or a federal court, and win?

(3) What will the Archdiocese do if, having said no to Adam and Steve, the city then pulls any or all contracts with it on the grounds that the Church is a discriminatory organization?

(4) What will the Archdiocese do if it sues the city for religious discrimination under scenario (3), but loses the case and Caesar orders the Church to choose between providing social services and maintaining its "discriminatory" policies?

Those are the real questions in this case ... and neither statement really addresses them, one way or the other.

Paging Dr. Freud

2010-01-01T23:07:00.003-05:00

I'm curious about, and would like to hear from others¹, whether sexuality or "issues" about sex have anything to do with how one learned about that subject.

I'm aware of course that boys and girls have always "played doctor" and picked up a certain amount of "knowledge" from the schoolyard rumor mill. And some of that will always be the case, I suspect. But I can't help but think that an ambivalence towards the sex act itself can't (ahem) bend a vulnerable branch away from normal sexuality.

To say that I'm ambivalent about sex is an understatement. My father never had a self-conscious The Talk. When I had my first emission, it was my mother who cleaned up the sheets I thought I had peed. My father said it was nothing to be ashamed of, just an accident that happens when you grow up. Which isn't exactly wrong, and I accepted that and moved on without giving it another thought. I knew babies had something to do with sex but never connected it to those weird muscle cramps between my legs until I learned the mechanics of the sex act when I was about 17, by looking it up in the encyclopedia. (In this case, it was the Teen Intellectuals equivalent of sneaking a peek at National Geographic.) My lack of interest in girls was chalked up by others to my being a bookworm. When a high-school friend asked me if I'd like to go on a double date (us and two girls, that is), I said "no" so vigorously that he told me later "you acted like you were offended by the very invite." Understand as well, that any identification as gay or pursuit of same-sex sex was even farther from my mind than dating girls. I simply was not interested in the genital areas at all. To this day, I cannot even imagine my mother and father in bed together, even though I am quite aware it happened (at least twice; probably more often)

Now don't get me wrong ... I am not now and never was a prude in any overt way. I can tell an off-color or even downright-filthy joke with the best of them. I watch R and NC-17 movies without a qualm, and am rarely offended, except by its use for titillation. And even blunt depiction and frank discussion of homosexuality do not per se offend me. (Pornography does make me wince, but only when I have my, so to speak, social clothes on.)

But what I'm suggesting, from my own experience, is that to speak of "sex as an act of love" is simply speaking a foreign language. Maybe that's not the right metaphor -- perhaps speaking a language one knows the grammar and syntax perfectly but not the meanings of the words. Oh, I've read Christopher West and all -- I know how the words fit together. I can even talk about it intellectually in a persuasive way -- I had a strange encounter with a waitress at a sports bar a couple of months ago I may describe soon. But at some level, it simply isn't something within my experience.² And perhaps that is why so many same-sex-attracted men, even those who identify as gay and maintain their satisfaction with that, have so little difficulty with overtly loveless promiscuity (I have had sex with more than 40 men -- only one under any impression that I loved him.)

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¹ If anyone is still reading...

² Which makes it a *good* thing that I've never believed that one's own experience creates either morality or truth.

Latest bit of smarm from St. Hope

2009-03-18T01:10:00.009-05:00

Now he wants homosexuality to be an international right. Could this be Obama's "gays in the military moment," an unwanted immediate plunge into the kulturkampf. From the Associated Press:

The Obama administration will endorse a U.N. declaration calling for the worldwide decriminalization of homosexuality that then-President George W. Bush had refused to sign, The Associated Press has learned. ...
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because Congress was still being notified of the decision. (CM: Will any member of Congress have the cojones to say nyet to this diktat or make a cause celebre out of it? ... Let's see Wednesday.)
They said the administration had decided to sign the declaration to demonstrate that the United States supports human rights for all. ...
"In the words of the United States Supreme Court, the right to be free from criminalization on the basis of sexual orientation 'has been accepted (CM: By whom, on what basis??) as an integral part of human freedom'," the official said.
According to negotiators, the Bush team had concerns that those parts could commit the federal government on matters that fall under state jurisdiction. In some states, landlords and private employers are allowed to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation; on the federal level, gays are not allowed to serve openly in the military. It was not immediately clear on Tuesday how the Obama administration had come to a different conclusion. (CM: See below; I'm not sure they did.)
When it was voted on in December, 66 of the U.N.'s 192 member countries signed the declaration — which backers called a historic step to push the General Assembly to deal more forthrightly with anti-gay discrimination.
But 70 U.N. members outlaw homosexuality — and in several, homosexual acts can be punished by execution. More than 50 nations, including members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, opposed the declaration.
Some Islamic countries said at the time that protecting sexual orientation could lead to "the social normalization and possibly the legalization of deplorable acts" such as pedophilia and incest. (CM: Now where O where might they have gotten such an idea.) The declaration was also opposed by the Vatican.

I'm frankly torn on this one. Obviously, I don't think sodomy, or any other immoral sexual conduct, should be a capital offense (I won't pretend to be a better man than I am, and I like my neck and spinal cord in one piece). Nor even be an actively prosecuted crime, either.¹

But at the same time, I'm pretty vigorously opposed to making anything a "right" or a "human right" under "international law" or treaties that could be enforceable by the U.N. or any now-realistically-conceivable judicial body. And not for reasons even remotely related to the specifics of homosexual conduct, but rather because I oppose giving the legal class any "words to work with" related to the current kulturkampf, any any words on any topic whatever to the international juridical class ("Davos Man," more or less). Rather, it's to the good of all nations that every nation have the sovereign right, under both the principles of (1) subsidiarity and (2) consent of the governed, to determine its own laws and policies on matters of morality, i.e., all laws and policies. Neither an unelected United Nations nor the international cosmopolitan class are a-priori morally superior to national governments in terms of their values (and more often than not, it's the reverse). And national governments, being closer to the actual people, will be better judges of what morals laws are fitting for a given people.

Further, I frankly doubt that the objective effect of this treaty will include preventing Iran or Afghanistan from hanging or stoning anybody. Iran will simply not sign the treaty, the Iranian Supreme Court will not do a Goodridge or Lawrence, and the Iranians will ignore any international tribunal on the matter. (Though hooray for all these things, in isolation.)

No ... what is much more likely is that some international tribunal or activist U.S. court will cite this treaty, despite its nonbinding nature, as representing some sort of international sensus fidelium and use it or cite it to strike down perceived anti-gay laws. After all, the Supreme Court already has used, as Ed Whelan describes here, a treaty the US did not even ratify as justification for striking down the death penalty for killers under 18. Who knows what can be done with a treaty one does ratify, even if it's nonbinding on its face?

The most cynical part of me, in fact, thinks that's exactly what the Obama administration wants, which is why I don't think the Obama administration necessarily came to a different conclusion from the Bush administration about the legal effects of the treaty. Team Obama just wouldn't mind if some international tribunal or an activist U.S. court were to cite this treaty as a basis for striking down, say, the ban on active homosexuality in the military or the federal or state legal definitions of marriage as a male-female union. Indeed, that'd be the best of both worlds, from their POV.² They and their gay-activist constituencies would get what they want substantively without having to risk political capital in a real political dispute for real stakes. "Hey, we have to do it, it's illegal under ... (bow our heads in reverence) international law."
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¹ I think anti-adultery and anti-sodomy laws are useful to have on the books for other purposes, but I don't wanna go down that rabbit hole right now.
² There'd be a striking parallel to Obama's pusillanimous stance on same-sex marriage, which is the most spectacularly incoherent drivel to come out of his mouth, a 200-proof stream of self-serving political cowardice ... regardless of the merits of the issue, even (especially?) if you back gay marriage. Obama says he's against gay marriage (so far, so good; or, in principle, "booooo!!!"). Yet he opposes codifying that belief into law, whether statutorily or constitutionally, whether at the state or federal level, calling every such law (DOMA, Federal Marriage Amendment, Prop 8, etc.) hateful, bigoted, mean-spirited and the restof the litany. But not doing so so loudly as to risk backlash. At the same time, he praises state-court decisions that strike down such state codifications of his supposed beliefs, and he promises, both affirmatively by whom he praises and negatively by whom he damns, more judges in that mould.

One of the happiest days of life

2009-03-17T19:16:00.003-05:00

A few weeks ago I got a call from Dale Price who, in a bout of temporary insanity (I swear I didn't threaten the guy) told me that he and Heather were expecting a fifth child to be born in October and "we need a Godfather." (Heather has already made an announcement, and Dale let it slip en passant in his combox, though I can't find it very quickly.)

I was frankly so nonplussed that I didn't handle it well. The very notion of me as a father of any description is not something that's been in my head for decades. But once I had accepted and talked with Dale for a bit, I was beaming with the same sort of humble pride (if that makes any sense) that I imagine affects men when they find out they'll be biological fathers, though they generally have a little more of an inkling that such news is potentially in the cards.

Goes without saying, of course, that the Prices will be the primary religious educators and parents and authority figures and whatnot. But in several months there will be a human being for whom I have some responsibility before God, a kind of parentage. I can't even type those words in without welling up. I even said to my confessor that "I now have a reason for living," though he (understandably) didn't care for those precise words and said, "you always did, this just makes it clearer to you."

And please forgive the joke pic ... too obvious too pass up.

CM at others' comboxes -- 7

2009-03-17T18:36:00.002-05:00

... though with considerable elaborations.

Despite the initial different-looking headline at Jay Anderson's (about Michael Steele) ... I posted the following in response to someone who flatly and dogmatically declared "being gay is not a choice." Something which is simply not true (elaborations here, but not at Jay's, are in italics)
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Goreds, anyone who says "being gay is not a choice" doesn't know what in the world he's thinking about. He doesn't know "being" "gay" and "choice" all mean.

To be a little less cryptic, saying "being gay is not a choice," notwithstanding the indubitable fact that our sexual desires feel as if they come from nowhere, presupposes"

sexual orientation as an ontological category ("being") which is, frankly, ass-hattery, as any competent historian of the history of sexuality from Freud to Foucault could tell you. In other words, the very fact that the construction of sexuality and its salient categories are in some sense historical (as the Biblical revisionists insist when they wish to argue that St. Paul and the Hellenistic world had no concept of what we would call "a homosexual orientation"¹) means that it cannot be a human "essence";
sexuality as a binary-exclusive category rather than a continuum (who are the Bs in LGBT, then?). In other words, the minute anyone is bisexual, the whole concept of a gay-straight dichotomy -- which is essential to the "nature" argument about its genesis, the notion that sexuality is a "being," and the rhetorical force of the "discrimination" complaints -- it all collapses. Bisexuals can only act like straights or like gays, which shows that the "essence" of sexuality is doing, not being (or they could act like either at different times, I suppose, but that's just as anti-essentialist);
choice as a self-conscious, pure creative act without condition or influence ("I *will* it thus). I mostly said my piece about this subject here. Homosexuality is a choice in the sense that all acquired personality traits are choices, i.e., they're affected by how we act, but they're not something for which we are conscious of having deliberately opted;
"gay" as a term having nothing to do with self-identification or self-consciousness. See discussion at the end. Though somewhat snarkily, I've actually been told this by the only actively-gay friend I've ever had who knew about my issues. I was a virgin at the time, and I used "we" or "us" in some reference having to do with some cultural aspect of homosexuality. He got offended and said "until you've [locker-room term for sex], you ain't one of us."

Sorry ... but you've just been propagandized all your life with ideas that don't make a lick of sense once you examine them (and not necessarily when you examine them from a specifically "conservative Catholic" POV). And particularly when you examine the general underpinnings outside the context of homosexuality. In a world where the with-it researchers don't even think sex (i.e., male-female) is biologically given, why on earth should this be the only thing in life that biologically given.²

Personality and identity formation are both fascinating subjects, except when the H word gets mentioned, in which case, PC orthodoxy toes the line. There's way more to be said about identity than petulant little "It is not a choice, everyone else is ignorant" squibs.

Just ask yourself this what does "being gay" mean if it does not refer to observable behavior (which is often both chosen and changeable)? If it neither refers to some eternal state separated from matters of behavior, nor primarily a matter of self-identification (either would be both chosen and changeable), then *what* *is* *it*? So is it a biological thing .... but if so, then why can't you give a blood/gene/semen/skin/breath/whatever test for it?
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¹ A statement that, as far as it goes, is true enough.
² Don't get me started on the absurd bad-faith of saying that "gender" is socially constructed, while somehow arguing that "who turns you on" is both innate and defined by "gender."

The "God hates shrimp" fallacy

2009-03-11T19:21:00.013-05:00

Robert Stacy McCain (HT again to Dad29) preaches that ol' time Bible-thumping religion on homosexuality and gay "marriage" at Cynthia Yockey, who responded at her site "A Newly Conservative Lesbian" by reprinting a letter to Dr. Laura that has been floating around since 2000. Here's an excerpt:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have learned a great deal from your show, and I try to share that knowledge with as many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind him that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it to be an abomination. End of debate.
I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some of the specific laws and how to best follow them. ...
b) I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her? ...
d) Lev. 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians. Can you clarify? Why can’t I own Canadians?
e) I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?
f) A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an Abomination (Lev 11:10), it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I don’t agree. Can you settle this?

McCain's rejoinder is here, but I've cut Miss Yockey off at (f) because the rest of the letter, which goes from (a) to (j) is essentially redundant ... all variations on the same point, what I call ... well the title of this post -- the "God hates shrimp" fallacy.

I don't particularly have any desire to specifically rebut Miss Yockey (who at least does come across on her site as a level-headed non-hateful person, i.e., not Amanda Marcotte, though they offer the identical argument), But the fallacy is so common that I guarantee you that there's not ten orthodox Catholic persons in the world who haven't heard it. There's even a would-be-parody-of-Fred-Phelps site called God Hates Shrimp, and some pro-gay types do parody protests like those pictured here at the right.

First of all ... in the discharge of my office as shepherd and teacher of all and by virtue of my supreme food authority, I declare, decree and define that the awesomeness of shrimp scampi as pictured atop and displayed throughout the ages must definitively be held by the whole Church. Hence if anyone, may God forbid, willfully deny or call into doubt that which I hath defined, let him be anathema.

But seriously, folks ...

It's hard to know the amount of seriousness with which "God hates shrimp" is offered. It is such a bad, BAD argument, that it is hard to believe that people knowledgeable about Christian belief (note: not at all the same thing as "devout Christians") could either be making it or be paying it any heed. Ignorant people rationalizing post hoc, prejudiced bigots arguing in bad faith, clowns incapable of turning off the snark ... those people I "get."

Yet this argument seems to be popular ... I've seen that "Note to Dr. Laura" at least twice in other forums, and I believe the "God Hates Shrimp" site people when they say at their photo captions that the two dominant reactions they get at Gay Pride parades are laughter (from those who "get it") and anger (from those who don't) -- both groups actually showing a different sort of ignorance, two riffs off the same chord of religious illiteracy. So at the risk of sounding like a square for taking too seriously something not meant seriously ...

It's often said, "scratch an atheist, find a fundamentalist." I'd go farther -- contemporary atheism and fundamentalism are really two sides of the same coin as far as reading and use of the Bible are concerned. They both see the Bible as a set of proof texts to be simply applied afresh and anew every day as if directly written by God Himself yesterday, i.e., completely independently of either Tradition or any notion of any binding authority. But of course, that atheist-fundamentalist hermeneutic coin has nothing to do with how the Bible has ever been understood (or the OT by Jews, for that matter). From the first century to possibly as late as the mid-19th century, no matter what Fred Phelps says today, nobody had ever conceived the Bible as a set of free-standing proof-texts waiting to be applied aphoristically to the controversies of every day.

Or in a single phrase: Christian teaching on homosexuality has never rested on proof-texting Leviticus 18:22.

Notably, every single example of other Biblical prohibitions mentioned in the note cited in the letter to Dr. Laura is from elsewhere in the early books of the Old Testament. Which hints right away at the problem -- "Old."¹ The ritual and dietary laws of the "Old" Covenant, and even the details of the Hebrew civic code, have never been considered binding by Christians. They have been superceded by the "New" Covenant in Jesus Christ, as explained in the "New" Testament repeatedly, most extensively in Hebrews. That the Old Testament and New Testament interrelate on some schema like this, however it may shake out in the details -- this isn't esoteric knowledge. It's so central to any understanding of Christianity that the person who doesn't know it (and somebody who makes the God Hates Shrimp argument seriously, by definition, doesn't) is incompetent to make any arguments about Christianity.² Indeed, practically the very first controversy in the Church was over this exact matter -- how binding is Jewish ritual law on matters like diet and circumcision. And the Apostles, led by St. Paul, quickly decided that they were not binding.

To some extent, I have done nothing more than state the obvious -- even the most cursory knowledge of Christian practice or, heck, even two good eyes on a Friday during Lent today, will tell you that Christianity has never proscribed eating shrimp. And to be fair, "God Hates Shrimp" isn't really intended to make Christians stop consuming scampi; it's more intended as the first horn of a (supposed) dilemma, the first move in an intellectual two-step ("suspend your morals / do-si-do").³ The real point is the second horn of the "dilemma," the "do-si-do" -- something like "well, if the Leviticus prohibition on eating shrimp has been superseded, why not 'lying with a man as one does with a woman'?"

Offered in the right spirit, it's a legitimate question, to which the answer is "some parts of the Mosaic law are still parts of the New Convenant, others are not." For example, Our Lord said He didn't come to erase the law, but to fulfill it, which, whatever it means in the details, obviously means that some of the specifics will remain and some will not. To which, the secular rebuttal is entirely obvious: "how does one determine which Specific Detailed Prohibition X remains valid (homosexual acts) and which Specific Detailed Prohibition Y (shrimp, mixing cotton and silk) does not?" And to have an intelligent rejoinder, one must abandon fundamentalism because literal proof-texting has no way, even in principle, to answer this question. If one DOES think of Leviticus 18:22 as an eternal proof text of its own per-se free-standing authority, then Leviticus 11:10 also must be, and the God Hates Shrimp argument is correct (or the Ten Commandments would dissolve also).

But back to the main point -- it is plain and manifest that Christians have always followed some parts of the Mosaic code but not others, the serious question always being "which parts and how do we know." And this is where the New Testament comes in, and Tradition and a binding Magisterium do too. Unlike shrimp, the binding quality of the parts of the Mosaic code related to homosexual acts has been held by Christians and the Church since the 1st century, including in the New Testament itself.

Now, to be sure, homosexual acts are only even arguably mentioned about four times in the New Testament, and a condemnation of them is never actually the point being made. Indeed, I could even subscribe to much of this interesting, if ultimately unpersuasive, piece by gay apologist James Allison, the thrust of which is the perfectly sane and well-developed point that the start of St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, the principal New Testament cite on the subject, isn't especially concerned with the morality of homosexuality as a topic. Rather, St. Paul uses it as an example of a wrong in the service of the broader point that's really what (that part of) the letter is about -- that there is neither Jew nor Greek in Christ, that sin has affected all equally. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger's 1986 letter on homosexuality uses similar lingo -- that Paul "is at a loss to find a clearer example" of sin.4 The other New Testament verses cited as proof texts (1 Corinthians 6:9-10; 1 Timothy 1:9-10; Jude 1:7) are the same, only "more" so -- homosexual acts and/or persons who commit them are merely mentioned en passant in a laundry list of condemnations.

But in some ways, that's exactly the way to discern Tradition -- the That Which Does Not Have To Be Argued For, the Premise So Obvious That It Can Remain Unstated. The very fact that St. Paul and St. Jude don't argue for the immorality of homosexual acts because they don't have to -- the "dropped in" quality of the references, without elaboration or argument or detail, proves they could assume automatic assent to the statement "homosexual acts are condemned" and "those who commit them are damned." And keep in mind, the Apostles weren't shy about changing the details of ritual and practice, if they thought the New Covenant reversed anything in the Old. After all, they even moved the day of Sabbath's observance (one of the Ten Commandments).

Going through Church history, the Fathers and the Tradition, we see something similar. Until historically speaking, five minutes ago, whenever homosexual acts are referred to, it has always been in an unfavorable light or in a context where its condemnation was assumed. Natural-law philosophy has always been invoked against homosexual acts and never until about five minutes ago did any orthodox Christian of prominence argue for the morality of homosexual acts. Whatever may be said about the meaning of those facts; that is itself a fact, which is relevant in understanding Tradition. And in response to the rise of the modern gay movement, the Church's Magisterium has produced a rich battery of response, none of which ever states that homosexual actions are acceptable. It's possible, of course, for new developments to overcome traditions, but not on a subject where there is Scripture (however vague) and a constant Apostolic Tradition, both of which are all on one side of the matter.

There is no doubt that sexual sins, of all kinds and all other sins too, may have had greater prominence and wider practice in some times and places than others. But silence does not equal assent; indeed, in the case a prophetic institution, quite the opposite. To get a sense of this apparent paradox, ask yourself: how often and how vigorously does the Church today condemn cannibalism? It wouldn't seem like much, on the proof-text method. If you go to the Vatican English Web site now and search for the word "cannibalism," you find three references. One is in a laundry list of brutalities. The other two (actually one in English and one in Italian) are attacks on scientific research that uses humans or their parts in a way incompatible with human dignity, and in both cases, the author uses "cannibalism" as a rhetorical weapon against using (or "consuming") human beings this way. In other words -- exactly the senses and contexts of the New Testament's references to homosexuality.

So step back -- would anybody care to defend the proposition that the Church does not now condemn cannibalism? Or be prepared to defend a 28th century revisionist citing the Church's few current words on the topic (along with the relevant news reports and works of art on the practice) as showing that the question was open in the 20th and early 21st century? Or argue in advance that the Church's 27th century flurry of condemnation against the then-rising tide of cannibalism will be ungrounded in Tradition (much less Scripture, which has even less to say about cannibalism than it does about homosexuality)?

To ask these questions this way is to answer them.

Now ... if the New Testament or Tradition/Magisterium had been silent or even sometimes been divided on the matter -- then I would be willing to say "maybe Leviticus 18:22 should be seen as a dead letter" and God no more hates lying with a man as one does with a woman any more than He does shrimp.

But of course, that's not the world we live in.
----------------------------------------------------------
¹ It should I hope go without saying, as the later paragraphs should show, that I'm not engaged in Marcionism, but rather merely saying that the Old Testament, while also divinely inspired, needs to be read in light of the New (and of Tradition) since it reflects various covenants that have been superceded.
² Indeed, when Christians say "atheists and 'brights' think we are all by definition completely stupid illiterates," it's situations like this that we have in mind: thinking that such an obvious "gotcha" hasn't been noticed for 2,000 years and that the Bright pointing this out in a combox in AD 2009 has some kosmos-shattering argument. One could never make the argument without always already having in the head "Christian = stupid" as a controlling mental template, an "of-course" meme. Or to put it another way, the secularist reaction to the manifest undeniable fact that Christians have never had a problem with eating shrimp or pork or with mixing fabrics, etc., isn't "hmmm ... they must not think these passages aren't binding. I wonder why?" but "bwahahaha ... they don't even KNOW these passages exist. Illiterates!!"
³ Exodus 20:12 to Exodus 20:17 would have to go out the window also on this argument. But again, that assumes "OT is not binding" is being argued in a more rigorous, rational spirit than it really is, rather than just being drafted into the theological equivalent of a lawyer's brief on the specific matter of homosexuality. The prophet Nietzsche famously laughed at "moralistic little English fatheads who think they could have Christian morality without the Christian god.
4 "In Romans 1:18-32, still building on the moral traditions of his forebears, but in the new context of the confrontation between Christianity and the pagan society of his day, Paul uses homosexual behaviour as an example of the blindness which has overcome humankind. Instead of the original harmony between Creator and creatures, the acute distortion of idolatry has led to all kinds of moral excess. Paul is at a loss to find a clearer example of this disharmony than homosexual relations." In other words, homosexuality serves as an example in a broader point about man's rebellion from God and the effects of sin; it isn't "the point" per se. What Cardinal Ratzinger wrote is completely compatible with Allison's reading (though the latter man's "read" does not, cannot, take him where he wants to go).

Answer to comboxer

2009-03-10T22:07:00.007-05:00

Someone named Konrad sent me three notes in the past few weeks, asking for the Bill Number for the Freedom of Choice Act, which I alluded to in making the point that politics requires that threats pretty much always must be followed through on.

To be honest, I initially dismissed Konrad as a troll, because his unused profile combined with the repetition of his first two notes set off an alarm bell and partially because of a meme making the rounds at the time -- most prominently in this Time magazine ~~(hit)~~ piece by liberal evangelical Amy Sullivan. She assured us that FOCA was a red-herring, a "mythical abortion bill" being railed against by a "well-oiled lobbying campaign" that "some American Catholics are finding ... both curious and troubling ... at a time when the United States is gripped by economic uncertainty and faces serious challenges in hot spots around the globe." Sullivan's piece being in the air meant that Konrad's notes read like the set-up for some liberal's "gotcha" trap ("A-HA ... there IS no such bill ... foiled YOU, Christianist godbagger!!!!").¹

But his latest note, in which he says he has "drafted letter to both the House and Senate and need to insert the bill number" tells me that he deserves an answer. The short answer is that FOCA has not been introduced in the current Congress, so it has no bill number. "Freedom of Choice Act" will suffice for any possible reference, though. Nobody will be confused.

But FOCA will be introduced. Rest assured, according to the sponsor of the legislation, and contrary to Sullivan's earlier report. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports:

A spokesman for Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the legislation "is among the congressman's priorities. We expect to reintroduce it sooner rather than later." ...
Ilan Kayatsky, Nadler's spokesman, said he anticipates that the bill's other original sponsor, Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., will introduce FOCA in the U.S. Senate. "We expect it to be more or less the same bill with some minor tweaks," Kayatsky said.

This does not mean FOCA will pass, of course; my bet is that it won't, for a variety of good reasons (the bill is so extreme that a majority of congresscritters probably do oppose it) and not-so-good reasons (kulturkampf liberals prefer stealthy administrative bodies and courts to democratic debate; the administration has tied itself to the mast on economic issues and has other domestic fish it'd rather fry).

But still ...
------------------------------------------

¹ Even though true, this view is ridiculously naive (rebuttals at the time were here from Ramesh Ponnuru at NR, here from John McCormack at TWS, and from Matthew Balin at Newsbusters). The indubitable fact that "no such bill has been introduced in the current Congress" does not make FOCA "a piece of legislation that doesn't exist." Or rather it does so only on the most formalist pecksniffery of the sort that would also believe that the U.S. armed forces are dissolved and raised anew with each Congress -- look it up, that's the actual "legal fiction." FOCA has been introduced in several recent Congresses, even though there was no chance of it reaching either chamber's floor and there was a hostile president at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. But the fact that a bill got little traction when it had no chance of passage and the party that would mostly favor it had little power -- in the world of Time Magazine senior editors, that actually argues AGAINST its relevance when that party has substantial majorities in both houses and a friendly president who was a former co-sponsor and vowed he would sign it during the campaign. Or at a minimum those new conditions don't change the equation in favor of the bill getting more traction now than in the past.

CM at others' combox -- 6

2009-03-10T21:44:00.003-05:00

From a discussion at The Other McCain (HT re site, to Dad29), the first graf, in bold is what I'm responding to (some elaboration by me, now, in italics:
--------------------------------------
Robert, I'm speechless. Well, not really. Here's my entire problem with Christianity: Christians sin in any manner they want, profess a belief that Christ has paid for their sins, then continue with their sinful ways. THEN ... condemn others for sins, because those sinners haven't said the magic words "I believe and accept Christ".

Sure ... the way many Christians act is objective counter-witness. But you're conflating three different issues as though they were the same thing:

(1) The failure of Christians to meet Moral Standard X. Note that the actual content or subject matter of the Moral Standard is of no consequence.
(2) The rightness of Moral Standard X.
(3) The role of Moral Standard X in public policy.

That (1) has nothing to do with (2) is, I hope, self-evident without explanation. I suppose if a person believes all moral standards to be self-rationalization for what one does or personalist wish-fulfillment toward some arbitrary ego-ideal, one can deny there is is no link. But those are pretty extreme positions that few people self-consciously hold.

And when you think about it, it's hard to see why (1) should have anything more to do with (3) than with (2). After all, if all men are sinners, then who could ever uphold any Moral Standard? Nobody in good-faith and upon reflection can seriously maintain that only the sinless have the moral space to preach virtue (though many people do say it in bad faith, though charity requires the latter guess upon dealing with a stranger). Now it may well be the case that, to take a pertinent example, that it would be impolitic or embarrassing for a tax cheat to oversee the IRS as its Treasury Secretary, say. But nobody would take Tim Geithner's woes to either (a) argue for the moral goodness of tax-cheating, or (b) argue that the IRS has no right to pursue tax cheats according to law.

(That (2) is a separate question from (3) primarily becomes relevant when we discuss the practical wisdom of the extent of morals legislation, i.e., all legislation, in a given time and place. To take a concrete example, abortion, contraception and masturbation are all intrinsically immoral, but I think the law and society ought to take very different stances on all three -- respectively: illegal, legal but legally-discouraged, legal but socially-discouraged.)

Lord, forgive me

2009-03-10T20:35:00.004-05:00

I've even managed to ADD a timesuck during Lent -- now Twittering under this persona (been doing it in my own name for a while). ~~Dunno how to set up an RSS feed that Blogger will accept, but for now, just click on the link to the right.~~ It wasn't an RSS feed I'd seen on other sites ... just a Blogspot widget that I've now added, at the right.

UPDATE: Awesome ... got two followers within an hour, the first historic step coming from Don Schloeder ("just this guy, you know" ... wait wasn't that already taken??), and the second being apologist-extraordinaire Patrick Madrid.

Staying classy

2009-01-15T14:51:00.010-05:00

Upon the death of Father Richard John Neuhaus, the always charitable Andrew Sullivan wrote, now that the man cannot provide us with his version of this encounter:

I met Richard John Neuhaus only a couple of times, but he took the second occasion to tell me to my face, with his clerical collar on, that I was "objectively disordered." I remember this rather well because we were in an elevator at the time and I didn't quite know where to look.

I'll go out on a limb though and say, whatever Sullivan says now he remembers rather well, that this is not accurate. I posted Father Scalia's talk below and he goes to excruciating length to tease out what "intrinsically disordered" or "objectively disordered" do in fact mean, and what they refer to. They can never refer to a person. Ever. No Church document has ever said either of those things about persons, and I have read all of those that touch on this topic.

There are four explanations (just speaking the logical possibilities)

Sullivan is flat-out lying and made the story up from whole cloth
Sullivan misheard or misunderstood an actual conversation
Father Neuhaus doesn't understand Church teaching as well as I and/or Father Scalia do
Father Neuhaus spoke imprecisely in an impromptu oral conversation

Simple charity requires me to exclude (1) and simple humility requires me to exclude (3).

Now (4) is a possibility -- even the best of us slip into imprecision or speak casually or forget certain philosophical distinctions that we acknowledge. But it strikes me as unlikely in this case. I've heard Father Neuhaus speak and give interviews, and he's not orally inarticulate or imprecise. And generally, homosexuality has become in recent years such a hot-button issue for the Church and its teaching so often distorted, willfully or otherwise, that any decently-formed priest or Catholic with intellectual pretensions will have the philosophical p's and q's in the front of his head, not the back, when speaking with a homosexual person. (I know I do.)

And it's not as though there isn't a public record of Sullivan doing (2). Read practically anything he's ever written on homosexuality and the Church, and you'll see the same basic misunderstanding -- the identification of the person with the act and/or the feeling. And from the very beginning: I'll post an extensive discussion of his mistake in "Virtually Normal" when I can get done with it.

So, I would bet New York to a donut that Neuhaus said something like the following, all of which are perfectly congruent with Church teaching, and none of which mean what Sullivan hears:

"Your orientation or feelings are objectively disordered"
"Homosexuality is objectively disordered"
"It is unfortunate that you identify with an objective disorder"

Obviously, those choices aren't exhaustive of all the things that could have been said that use the term "objective disorder." But as I said ... it sure was classy for Sully to repeat this anecdote now that Father Neuhaus is in no position to dispute it to the world.

Offer it up

2009-01-15T14:23:00.004-05:00

A priest mentioned to me recently a couple of important things about the theology of "offering it up," something that many people in my situation do.

"Offering it up" doesn't make "it" go away.
"Offering it up" doesn't make "it" not painful.

It is the most natural thing in the world to think these things, but they are incompatible with why one "offers it up." The point of offering it up is to transvalue or sanctify suffering by joining our sufferings to the Cross. Our Lord accepted the Cross, not chucked it aside, i.e., made it go away. And He didn't accept the pain because it was something he was impervious to, like a deaf man standing in front of a bullhorn.

The point of offering up suffering is to transcend it, not end it.

Father Scalia does ToT

2009-01-15T13:07:00.006-05:00

Last week, our Courage chaplain spoke at the Arlington Diocese's Theology on Tap program, on "The True Catholic Teaching on Homosexuality."

The Podcast of Father Scalia's talk is here. It's an MP3 file, but it doesn't automatically download the file, just opens a browser window and plays the file, so it's quite safe. And here's the page that links to Podcasts of all the ToT speakers, plus the schedule for Monday nights at Pat Troy's Ireland's Own in Old Town Alexandria.

I believe I was the only person from our chapter; I certainly saw no others and neither did Father, though I can't exclude the possibility that some in the audience were struggling with this issue but have not come forward. Father begins with the overall Church teaching on sex as having meaning, and goes from there. Here's several of the key points.

"The Church does not have two different standards for chastity -- one for homosexuals and one for heterosexuals."
"Notice that both these groups (gay activists and Fred Phelps) make the same error. They collapse the person into the sexual attractions. They believe that sexual attractions define the person. The Church's view of the person is much deeper and broader than that. That sexual attractions are an aspect of the human person, an aspect of human sexuality, but they do not define the person."
"First [the Catechism talks about] homosexual acts, which the church teaches are 'intrinsically disordered' ... The church does not teach that persons are intrinsically disordered, it has never taught that. Second, the Catechism talks about homosexual attractions. Homosexual attractions the Catechism describes as 'objectively disordered.' They are not immoral in themselves ... feelings in and of themselves cannot be morally good or morally bad; they're simply feelings. They become morally charged when we act on them. But there are certain feelings lead us to the wrong things and certain feelings lead us to the right things."
"This is one of the boldest paragraphs in the Catechism. It calls those with same-sex attractions to holiness, not just to physical continence -- it's not just saying, 'OK, you've just gotta control yourself and that's it.' No, 'you have a particular weakness, an attraction that is not right, but you're called to holiness.' And as is true for everyone, it is the struggle against our sinful inclinations that makes us holy. We don't become holy despite the struggle -- 'gosh, if I just got over my human weakness, then I could be holy.' No, it is by struggling with our human weakness and availing ourselves of every opportunity for God's grace that we become holy. And that's the Church's message to those with same-sex attractions." And then a joke about the nature of Confession; I admit tearing up a bit at this point.

And he goes on to make a point I never tire of making, immediately and in the Q-and-A -- that the homosexual movement is simply applying the morality of the sexual revolution, which was mostly the fruit of heterosexual sins, most prominently contraception and divorce. (Stonewall came after the Summer of Love, not before. Or in Father's words "given that's the way [most heterosexual couple today] live marriage -- we can do that.")

The questions afterwards were sometimes pointed but always respectful. No ranting "WHY DO YOU HATE ME!!!!" types. My favorite Q-and-A moment was when one person asked something about "how does one rebut 'Gay Argument X'," and Father called that "playing defense" and said he was more interested in playing offense (I winced at where this metaphor could go) and explain the Church's teaching on sexuality, and the beauty of it and what's good about it. The Church is not the Ravens, who can win by relying on a great defense.¹

After the speech, owner Pat Troy said that night's audience was the most people ever to attend a ToT, even outdrawing one by Bishop Loverde (don't get a big head, Padre. I'm thinking that the fact the word "sex" was in the title may have had something to do with it).

But it'd be hard to imagine anyone ever topping it, at least in that venue. The bar was completely packed, and I would be stunned if there was no fire-code violations -- people were standing the aisles two-deep and the waiters and waitresses had to struggle to walk around.
---------------------------------------
¹ The fact Father said the Ravens, not the Redskins is proof of bona fides -- only a football fan could have said that. Though this Steelers fan hopes the Ravens defense, great though it is, comes up short this weekend against another team that plays great defense.

Rule #1 -- If you make a threat, carry it out

2009-01-02T19:26:00.005-05:00

You must carry out threats, if for no better reason than to preserve your ability to threaten something the next time. This basic rule applies to much more than, say, Israel and Hamas. Like to Britain and Catholic adoption agencies.

The BBC is reporting that half of the Catholic adoption agencies are wussing out on threats to shut down rather than comply with a British law requiring all groups providing public services, even religious groups effective Jan. 1, to accede to state morality on homosexuality.

Actually, if you read through to the end of the story, it's worse than 5 of 11 agencies complying with Caesar's unjust law. It's actually 5 of the 8 that the BBC could determine; in three of the 11 cases, it wasn't known what the agency was doing. Even among the three agencies that are not complying with the law, only one has actually closed down; the other two are seeking reclassification as agencies whose mission caters specifically to married couples and singles (I am not holding my breath that Caesar will buy this legerdemain in my opinion).

Now please tell me ... why should the British government, in its threat to force approval of the gay lifestyle on everybody in the Scepter'd Isle, believe Church warnings in the future?

There's a lesson in this case for American bishops in the Age of Obama. Though actual, formal, gauntlet-throwing threats have been rare so far, the Freedom of Choice Act, which Obama has promised to sign, is causing some rumblings among our bishops.

Some bishops have hinted that if FOCA passes, they will close Catholic hospitals (i.e., about 15 percent of the national total, depending on how you measure) rather than perform abortions or dispense contraceptives and abortifacient drugs. Others (e.g., my bishop, Bishop Paul Loverde of Arlington, at right) have said they would keep the hospitals open, ignore the law and let Caesar arrest the bishop if he dare.

Either option would be fine. But anybody who's ever been in a bar, a playground or any athletic contest knows this much: "never let your mouth write a check your ass can't cash"

CM at others' comboxes -- 5

2009-01-01T13:55:00.002-05:00

I spent much of New Year's Eve -- when I was supposed to be working, natch -- arguing over gay "marriage" at the Culture11 blog Confabulum, answering a Twitter call from C11's Joe Carter for more SoCon support (kinda like Commissioner Gordon shining the Bat-Signal).

The thread is here -- as I type, there's 107 comments, a healthy share from Yours Truly. I cannot reach Culture11 from my home computer (stupid porn filter), though I can read but not post from my iPhone.

Anyhow, only two minor things since my last comment from my work computer last night seem worthy of comment, and they're more in the "throw up my hands" genre. Frankly, every day the arguments and conduct of gay, pro-homosex and pro-SSM activists, particularly since the passage of Proposition 8 in California, provide more evidence for the libel that homosexuality is a form of arrested development.

First, I love [sic] how one can be accused of saying something (post 94 ... that I was "comparing my friends' happy relationships to 'bestiality or whatever' ") that one has quite specifically said he doesn't believe (post 68 ... that there is no necessary link between a person's homosexual desire and behavior and that person's wanting the other forms of unions -- polygamy, bestiality, etc. -- that the arguments for gay marriage will legitimate). Particularly when someone else had noted earlier that much I was about the arguments for SSM than SSM itself.

Second and relatedly in Post 94, there's another example of the same tiresome trope -- bigot ("ignorant prejudice"). Laughably, the person even defends his own rationality with "others of us -- certainly myself -- do see opposition to SSM as rooted in bigotry but are still willing to discuss and explain why." Does one laugh or cry? "Bigot" is not an argument or even an objective description -- it's an attempt to delegitimize the person and end the discussion. You do not, in fact cannot, disuss matters with a bigot, because a bigot by definition does not hold a position for rational reasons. The only thing a pro-SSM person need do in such a "discussion" [sic] is make pronunciamentos that arguments X, Y, Z are "bigotry" and issue the appropriate "anathema sit"s of the bigot.

In fact, a certain gay activist once wrote the following warning, regarding what he called the "Prohibitionist" view of homosexuality that is very relevant to this, even though he himself has not only fallen off this-here wagon, but isn't even interested in getting back on.

Perhaps the most depressing and fruitless feature of the current debate about homosexuality is to treat all version of this argument as the equivalent of bigotry. They are not. In an appeal to "nature," the most persuasive form of this argument is rooted in one of the oldest traditions of thought in the West, a tradition that still carries a great deal of intuitive sense. ... And at its most serious, it is not a phobia; it is an argument. And as arguments go, it has a rich literature, an extensive history, a complex philosophical core, and a view of humanity that tells a coherent and at times beautiful story of the meaning of our natural selves.
Andrew Sullivan,
Virtually Normal, pp 21-23

Remember when Sullivan pretended to take arguments seriously. That was awesome.

Friend sent me this

2008-12-02T03:47:00.001-05:00

Good in discouraging times.

From "The Prophet" by David Torkington, pp. 165-66
----------------------------
"Peter, I've failed so often since we last met," I blurted out, "but I'm going to start again with your help."

"Well," said Peter, with a reassuring smile. "If you say you've failed so many times it must mean that you have continually started trying again, and in the Trying is the Dying; the dying to the 'Old Man,' the egoist within you, so that the 'New Man' can be born. You can do no more than try, inside or outside of prayer. Every moment is a moment for Trying, for Dying, and for Rising till Christ be perfectly formed within you. Simone Weil once said a person is no more than the quality of their endeavor. This is how God will judge us all. Not by what we have achieved; not by some man-made measure of success, but how best we have tried."

"When the final trumpet sounds, God won't say, 'What interior mansion were you in or what rung of the ladder of perfection were you on,' but 'How best did you try?' Believe me, the whole of the spiritual life, the very essence of mystical prayer is about Dying through Trying. It is not the cowards, it is the saints who die a thousand times before their death, and it is in this Dying, through this Trying that they reach the height of the spiritual life: total identity, complete at-one-ment with the Christ of Easter Day."

CM at others' comboxes -- 4

2008-07-30T22:18:00.005-05:00

I wrote the following at Disputed Mutability, a blog by a lesbian-turned-new-mom who calls herself "ex-gay until some better term comes along" but can be rather skeptical of parts of the Ex-Gay Movement (as am I). The context was the dispute over the genesis of homosexuality, whether it's a developmental condition or an inborn trait (or to be more precise, how sure we can be of either alternative, either generally or in given cases; my answer: "not one bit at all").

But my words there were on a different point, a side issue. They were as follows:
--------------------------------------------
Why do at least two people think that the developmental theory should lead to greater optimism re change?

After all, if a condition be decisively inborn and/or biological (I am obviously speaking generally and hypothetically) … that tells us exactly what the “cure” is. Reverse the effects, change the gene, alter the hormones in utero, etc.

But if a condition be the result of a set of historic circumstances and one’s interactions thereto, neither the circumstances nor the adolescent soul doing the shaping can ever be recreated or “relived.” To put it simply and crudely (and I put it to my shrink this way) … you can only grow up once.

“Bios” is dumb and so is easier to change than the self-conscious “psyche.”

Carried out

2008-07-29T14:48:00.007-05:00

This photo only makes sense if this post from about this time last year rings any bells (ha ha). But a couple of people have expressed concern for me publicly or privately, given the long gap since my last post.

The fact is, I've plainly been "on the stretcher" for a while now -- early spring at least. I have on a couple of occasions mentally "resigned" from the Church and not gone to Mass or Adoration for weeks at a time -- and no ... not for reasons narrowly or especially related to Topic H or because of having fallen head over heels for the man of my dreams or somesuch. It's stuff much, MUCH more fundamental.

It happens often, but always the thinnest twitches upon the thread¹ remind me that resignation simply is not an option. Ever. I wait for the intellect to reassert itself over my depression and remind myself that regardless of my worst fears, I've never not been able to say the Creed. I may be a bad Catholic, but I am still a Catholic.

In the meantime, deadlines have to be met and rules followed, and so nobody should look for me at this year's Courage Conference in Boston. I was "in the dressing room" when the time for registration passed.

But while I am being cuffed about in the ring, it's very hard to blog in this persona I've created because I am acutely aware that he often doesn't come across as a particularly happy or admirable man or much of an advertisement for Our Lord. Second, I have a very difficult time with the "confessional" mode of discourse (it's a hard enough thing in a private sacramental context; publicly, I detest it). Third, I have an overriding desire not to scandalize people, and it remains strong even in the "in the dressing room" periods.²

So my tendency is to resist making a public point of these things (even writing this post is something I've been off and on about for a month). And remind myself of Mother Teresa, the patron saint of the spiritual darkness, who hardly spoke of her feelings of abandonment for decades. And just try to forget.

I hope those of you who link or come here regularly understand.
-------------------------------------------------------
¹ That post from last year on one occasion; a visit from a friend who regards me as a "spiritual hero" on another; finding myself bowing my head and making the Sign of the Cross before dinner on another.
² That is, it's not that I'm thinking "the Church is stupid/evil/wrong, etc.," (if such were the case, one should "scandalize" others). But "the Church is who She claims to be but I am not called to follow Her."

I can still run for president

2008-03-31T00:18:00.002-05:00

I asked our Courage chaplain last week whether there were any videos of his preaching floating around the Internet that could become an embarrassment for me when I run for higher office. Fortunately, he told me, there's only this:

My favorite lesbian atheist

2008-03-15T02:39:00.006-05:00

I only read the leftist cyber-rag Salon once a month ... on the Wednesday that Camille Paglia's column runs. In fact (stopped clock alert!!!) Andrew Sullivan said the following last year:

Sorry, I can't help it. Like many non-lefty homos, I just can't get enough Camille (as enraged former New Republic readers in the 1990s will recall).

I've never met a man like myself (regardless of how we react to our same-sex attraction) who doesn't absolutely love her combination of erudition and bitchiness. Here she is this week on the Hillary "it's 3am ... do you trust" ad:

Would I want Hillary answering the red phone in the middle of the night? No, bloody not. The White House first responder should be a person of steady, consistent character and mood -- which describes Obama more than Hillary. And that scare ad was produced with amazing ineptitude. If it's 3 a.m., why is the male-seeming mother fully dressed as she comes in to check on her sleeping children? Is she a bar crawler or insomniac? An obsessive-compulsive housecleaner, like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest"? And why is Hillary sitting at her desk in full drag and jewelry at that ungodly hour?

If you're familiar with her talk-show performances, you can just *hear* her say this. This is what makes Paglia such a singular writer: she writes as she speaks. But to why I post about her here now, I was recently rereading her book "Sex, Art and American Culture," which includes her brilliant essay "The Joy of Presbyterian Sex." But the thing I found inspiring this time was from a speech she gave at MIT, in which she crystallizes, from the other end of the sexual-morality spectrum, how uncritical the acceptance of a link between same-sex attraction and "gay identity" has been:

Now, you know what I hate? This thing of, say you have a man who's married, he has children, and maybe every month or every few weeks he goes out and picks up a guy. Today, in this fascist environment it's "you're gay! You're gay and you're secretly homophobic! You are self-loathing! You are hiding behind the mask of respectability!" What if he's just married and likes to sleep with men now and then? ...
I don't like the situation because right now it's bad for gay people! Right now, people are afraid. Often, a woman is afraid to go to bed with another woman because she's afraid that if she does that, even though she's attracted to her, she'll be "gay"; she'll have to have an identity crisis, be gay and all that other stuff. Why? I'm influenced by the great foreign films of the Late Fifties and Sixties where you had Catherine Deneuve and Jeanne Moreau and Dominique Sanda floating from bed to bed with a man, then with a woman, then with a man, then with a woman. ...
In terms of my history, you know, for a long while in my life I felt that, well, I have to be gay, because I'm so attracted to women, but then in a way it's living a lie, because then I have to repress my attactions to men. So after a while I thought, well, why do I have to give myself any label? Why can't I just respond from day to day and just go with the flow in the Sixties way? ...
It reminds me a little bit of Holly Woodlawn, the great Warhol drag queen, who was on an early Geraldo show. And Geraldo said to Holly Woodlawn: "are you like, a man who should be a woman, or are you a woman who was a man, or are you a man/woman?" And Holly Woodlawn said, "Oh — who care? As long as you look fabulous!"

Obviously, Paglia is not a champion of Catholic sexual morality (though her relationship to it is mature and ambivalent, not hate-filled and infantile like so many of today's gays). But she's making an important point about sexual identity, how it's actually repressive and constricting, even to someone like her who thinks homosexual acts are not immoral. She refuses to be boxed in and sees her true liberation as moving beyond gay identity. She had feelings, but asserted her freedom not to be defined by them (though she's certainly acted on them).

Honestly, and counterintuitive though it may seem ... Camille Paglia, "a bisexual radical libertarian and fulltime scold of the feminist establishment" (to quote Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes, from memory) and Andrew Sullivan helped me get through American universities in the early 90s, at the height of political correctness and about the time I was starting to become fully conscious of "That." Though neither could be called an orthodox Catholic, they both kept me away from the gay establishment of a time when I might have been quite vulnerable to it.

The Spitzer scandal

2008-03-14T19:21:00.007-05:00

This conversation took place after a Confession in which I had acknowledged abusing myself three times in the previous 24 hours (reconstructed from the best of my recollection). Father's penance involved a devotion to Mother Teresa, the saint of the darkness and spiritual dryness.

FATHER: A treadmill can be gotten off.
(long pause)
ME: You heard about the New York governor today?
HIM: Yes.
(long pause)
HIM: And you're afraid of the same thing.¹
ME: Yes. I didn't want to say it during Confession so as not to come across as making excuses.
HIM: It puts it in context.
(long pause)
ME: I got a call on my cell today from a prostitute I hired a year ago -- unsolicited, not a call-back.
(long pause)
ME: Big etiquette violation on his part.
(Father nods)
HIM: Might be a setup; delete the number from your phone.
ME: Oh, I've already done so, believe me! I've not even close to being tempted. No way, not now.
(CM lets out some mordant, sarcastic laughter)
ME: Wonderful. That's how perverse I am. I'll resist sin if I fear getting caught.
HIM: That's not the best reason, but it'll do.²

Now to repeat, I am not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not not (is that enough "not"s) "blaming" Elliot Spitzer for such a hard fall. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

As Father said, I had been gutted by fear and not for the first time, and I responded in one of the ways people do -- seeking to medicate and forget through escapist private vice (drunkenness and drugs are other examples). I confess that I don't see exactly how, or even whether, this situation would be covered in any of the classic Nine Ways of Being an Accessory.³ And obviously "hey, the New York governor bought a prostitute, so I will too"⁴ is not a self-conscious thought process many people go through.

But the effect of Spitzer's whoremongering on me is, I think, illustrative of how all sin is social and how there is no such thing, ultimately, as a "completely private act." Your acts, everything that you do, becomes a part of the world that everyone else lives in and thus influences everybody else and in ways over which you have no control. Admittedly this next is a greater concern for public figures than other person, but at the end of the day, you can't even really have any knowledge of that influence, only the knowledge that it's there somehow.

I don't expect Elliot Spitzer to care whether he raised anxiety levels in others who have purchased prostitutes or encouraged the masturbatory response -- he has many more-pressing and important-to-him concerns. To make an obviously imperfect bawdy analogy, it's like pissing in the pool. Everybody knows and understands that you can't just pee in your own end. Obviously, one person's discreet whizz is hardly noticeable in any discrete way. But we still know that it circulates, and, if diseased, can infect anyone anywhere in the pool.

The meaning of the term "scandal" has changed. Now it just means "the public fracas over a celebrated person's wrongdoing, often in the personal or private (certainly non-official) sphere." But in the past, as in the phrase "giving scandal," "scandal" meant "the encouragement of bad acts/thoughts in others." And in that sense, Spitzer's purchasing prostitutes, though it may be a "victimless crime" in the sense that bourgeois libertarians imagine -- it is, truly, scandalous. And thus not victimless.
------------------------------------
¹ I'm not even close to being a public figure, so fears at the level of "front page of the New York Times" are completely irrational. Lesser forms of outing ... not so.
² Father has told me in more than one other context that I shouldn't worry so much over doing things for not-the-noblest of motivations.
³ "By counsel. By concealment. By command. By partaking. By consent. By silence. By provocation. By defense of the ill done. By praise or flattery." As I say ... not clear if this fits any example.
⁴ Or as Chris Rock put it apropos of Marion Barry: "How you gonna tell little kids to not get high, when the mayor's on crack. 'Don't get high, you won't be nothing.' / 'I can be mayor'."

And a moment of amusement ...

2008-02-29T23:06:00.003-05:00

To Mick Blattberg, who sent me a bulk email from the address Mick-onologic@BAYLEYS.CO.NZ ...

You might do better in soliciting your pills to men like myself with a Subject Line other than "Click here for chicks!"

Friendly advice.

"Queering" the church registry

2008-02-29T20:34:00.010-05:00

One of Fort Worth's most prominent Baptist churches engaged in an anti-Solomon decision last week, deciding to cut the baby in half by not printing any family photos in its directory rather than printing those of homosexual couples. From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (HT to Mark):

FORT WORTH -- Broadway Baptist Church voted Sunday to publish a 125th anniversary directory without individual or family portraits after some members of the congregation opposed allowing gay couples' portraits to appear in the publication.
In a compromise recommended by the church's board of deacons, the directory will show members in candid snapshots of small and large groups. The group pictures will identify people by name, and every effort will be made to include all of the church's members.
Church leaders said this approach provides the photographs needed by members to identify each other and follows church bylaws to treat all members equally. It also avoids making any statement regarding Scriptural interpretations regarding homosexuality.

The headline writer said "Neither side wins on gay couples in directory." Which rather presupposes a lot, in my opinion -- namely that there are in fact "two sides." And I wonder (actually, I don't wonder) why the Star-Telegram writer laid the blame for the decision on the theological conservatives, saying the decision was made "after some members of the congregation opposed allowing gay couples' portraits to appear in the publication" rather than "after some gay couples demanded to have their portraits appear in the publication."

There's a couple of other things I'm curious about.

First of all, what has these gay couples' self-presentation been? The Star-Telegram report reads as if the three pairs in question already had been attending the church openly and "as a couple." On the assumption that this is correct (I grant a secular media outlet is unreliable on the point), then I think the gay couples have a legitimate request. And Broadway Baptist made its own bed long ago.

If one has been attending a church under a certain public persona and holding yourself out in a certain way, I find it hard to see why this public persona doesn't belong in the yearbook. You can't really object to a photo, as one person in this Star-Telegram story does, on "having to explain it to the kids" grounds. Not if those children are already seeing a same-sex couple at Sunday services, presumably holding hands or other PDAs of the kind considered acceptable for married-or-dating couples. And how would the so-called compromise -- candid snapshots that attempt to cover everyone -- fix that. Are the children not supposed to realize that Adam and Steve were together at all the church picnic photos too? And even if the two are in a portrait-type situation, as the gays wanted, couldn't a parent just as convincingly say to a curious girl [boy] "it's like when you and your sister [brother] had your photo taken together."

As it happens, I know two same-sex-attracted men who live together and go to the same parish. They are ex-lovers but are now Catholics, sleeping in separate bedrooms and committed to chastity, which they have broken once in more than a decade. Never would they either commit a PDA that might scandalize others nor (and here's where I'm guessing) would they insist on being a couple in the parish directory. They are both in it as individuals.

But second, in what meaningful sense is this decision, whatever one thinks of it in the sense of "agree-disagree" or "good-bad," not a "statement about Scriptural interpretations regarding homosexuality," which the Star-Telegram report says it was crafted not to be. Even a decision not to say something says something -- namely that this congregation can't say anything about the morality of homosexuality and therefore this very public matter is one of religious liberty. Or, to use the formulation of St. Augustine, who knew a thing or two about sexual immorality, that homosexuality is one of those "dubiis" in which there should be "libertas." Which is of course a substantive teaching -- that homosexuality is one of those "doubtful things" and is not one of those "necessariis" that call for "unitas." Which does, of course, marginalize and exclude those who believe sexual conduct is a "necessary thing" that requires "unity."

Thus this quarrel underlines something I'm confident I've said more than once. "What a group of people are disputing and why" is a far more telling fact about the world than "how that dispute is decided substantively."

The fact that any Baptist church is even debating whether to put pictures of openly-gay couples in its yearbook tells us how far the gay agenda has wormed its way into the body of Christ. That they decided not to may be a good or bad thing. But more revealing than even the fact of a debate is that the only way the church could "refuse" was not "just say no" but a "compromise" on having no family photos at all. And more revealing still is the fact that the church called in "New Testament experts."

"The New Testament experts [sic] made it clear that thoughtful, intelligent Christians disagree on what the Bible says about homosexuality," [Senior Pastor Brett Younger] said. "Many realized that Christians can hold different opinions on this without letting it divide the church."

Not really. Or rather, there is no disagreement among thoughtful intelligent Christians who hold that the Bible is normative and inspired about what it says on homosexuality. The only way a thoughtful, intelligent person can hold that the Bible does not condemn homosexual acts is by starting from the presupposed worldview (i.e., before any actual engagement with the text) that the Bible is not normative and is not inspired — that it is merely the product of men and thus can be superceded absolutely ("there is no binding magisterium" also has to be smuggled in somewhere or thus inferred).

Lest I come across as an anti-intellectual, let me say that there is nothing wrong with these two (or three) worldview premises for certain purposes, primarily scholarly ones. That the Bible is a historical text written by men is, in a certain sense, undeniable and for some historical, sociological or philological work, whether it's the inspired word of God binding for all time and what that means¹ is a question that can be set aside. But ... that does not in any way shape or form make such scholars "experts" in any normative sense or especially competent to testify on doctrine, either on faith or morals. Their expertise explicitly excludes them from such a self-presentation.

So the question becomes, can there be a religion that includes people who do believe the Bible inspired and binding and those who do not. One guess what I think, but the fact is that this Fort Worth congregation has no way to answer that question definitively, in no small part because of the congregationalist structure that is a Baptist pillar. Instead, they worship the One True god ... Diversity:

"This has been a difficult decision for our congregation," said Kathy Madeja, chairman of the deacon board. "Our members continue to have diverse opinions, but we are still a church family and we will continue to struggle with how to honor our diversity," she said. ... (CM: how about honoring God??)
"Broadway will continue as a congregation in which diversity is embraced," [Senior Pastor Brett Younger] said. (CM: how about embracing the Cross??)

And ultimately this is why Episcopalians are in a necessary internal schism over Bishop Gene Robinson. It's not the sin of sodomy per se, but the questions of biblical authority. Robinson's consecration and the defenses of it proved to conservatives that liberal "wetness" went all the way down, with no limits. The two groups do not worship the same god and thus do not belong in the same church, as St. Paul taught. Schism simply objectively was and the so-called acts of schism in the last few years by individual parishes and dioceses in the US and by the African and South American bishops are mere recognitions of that fact.

The Episcopalians may be in the infirmary right now (actually hospice care, I'd say), but this Fort Worth church shows that the rest of mainline Protestantism is starting to call in sick as well.
--------------------------------------
¹ However that formulation shakes out in the details, about which there are legitimately held differences among Christians and Christian bodies.

CM at others' comboxes -- 3

2008-02-29T20:06:00.003-05:00

Jay Anderson recently fisked Barack Obama's pledging his soul to Planned Barrenhood, which, combined with his saying during Tuesday's debate that his vote to save Terri Schiavo was his greatest mistake, makes him the Official Candidate of the Culture of Death™.

Anyhoo, Jay left out one point in Obama's speech as reported. My rebuttal to that point (which Jay later highlighted ... thanks) follows, with only minor edits for clarity. The first paragraph is Obama, criticizing the Supreme Court's decision upholding the ban on partial-birth abortion:

"For the first time, the Court’s endorsed an abortion restriction without an exception for women’s health. The decision presumed that the health of women is best protected by the Court—not by doctors and not by the woman herself. That presumption is wrong."

Since when, exactly, has a core principle of the Democratic Party been Ayn-Rand-ism in matters of regulating health care?

Every drug has to win state approval to be sold; every person needs some sort of state license to practice medicine at any level (doctor, nurse, aide, pharmacist); every medical procedure needs to have approval of the state or some quasi-state board to be performed; the state holds liable all practice of medicine of which it doesn't approve.

All these decisions -- all of them made a part of the medical landscape by the Democratic Party -- presume EXACTLY that the health of persons of both sexes is best protected by the state, and not by doctors and not by patients themselves. Saying "that presumption is wrong" is deeply dishonest for all non-Libertarians.

If abortion were treated by the state as merely one more medical procedure among others, Planned Parenthood, Obama, et al would be having fits. Parental consent? Clinic rules? Pre- and post-care standards? The train left long ago on the matter of whether the state should regulate medicine or interfere in the doctor-patient relationship, and none of us this side of Ayn Rand want that Express back.

CM at others' comboxes -- 2

2008-02-29T19:15:00.003-05:00

At Rich Leonardi's site, he blogged about a recent survey of American religiosity that his city's paper (the Cincinnati Enquirer) had localized, with comment from people there who had left the Catholic Church. Here is one excerpt:

Reasons for leaving vary. Janet Steele of Springfield Township cites the priest sex abuse scandal and the [C]hurch's teachings on birth control among the reasons she's no longer Catholic. Her family joined Forest Chapel United Methodist Church in Forest Park, where she is now lay leader.

My response follows:

I maybe shouldn't say this given some of my own struggles, but ...

I will never understand leaving the Catholic Church for some other Christian body over the teaching on contraception. Not because the teaching is objectively correct and you'd have to be ill-willed or stupid to think otherwise; I can well imagine being unpersuaded by the church's teaching on any particular matter.

It's that, if you have any faith to begin with, it just seems so petulant ... jeopardizing your soul over a matter that, while not trivial, is not life-or-death either. And it occurs in that field of human activity where ... to put it delicately ... the human capacity for self-delusion, selfishness, rationalization and being-guided-by-passion are at their greatest.

I mean ... what's the worst thing that can happen if you obey the teaching: (1) you might not have as much sex as you'd like; or (2) you might have more children than you thought ideal when you first married.

(1) can be a painful PAINFUL sacrifice but, at the end of the day, hardly seems worth damnation. As for (2), ditto the first part, but, at the end of the day, I don't know too many parents who seriously, existentially regretted having a particular child, once born.

Response to Michael Bayly

2008-02-20T00:04:00.015-05:00

My last post on an 8-year-old "transgendered" boy in Colorado excited responses from a frequent visitor to my site Michael Bayly (StatCounter doesn't lie, dude), who is executive coordinator of the Catholic Pastoral Committee on Sexual Minorities.

His latest response was initially posted here and I'm bringing it out and up, because I want to respond in detail, an exercise I think worthy because so much of the basis for his scandalous counterwitness is so common. His words are in italics and block quotes, with my responses on each point following.

You seem to be conflating issues of gender and sexuality. Just because a child (or anyone, for that matter) identifies with the opposite gender doesn't mean they want to be sexually active.

It may not. My point is not about the particulars of what this child wants but his general competence to speak on sexual matters. I repeat my unanswered question ... if an 8-year-old is competent to decide “gender identification” (which, while not the same thing as sexual behavior, is inextricable from it) as you seem to think, Mr. Bayly, why is he not competent to decide whether to be sexually active. It doesn’t matter what said decision of this 8-year-old or any particular one may be. “Age of consent” laws rest on the assumption of incompetence and inagency, not an empirical matter of whether a competent agent actually wants to.

Further, what harm is done, exactly, by parents and schools here doing what they traditionally would have done, which is to chalk this boy's feelings up to a phase and wait till he grows out of it. If it is just a phase or an excessive imagination or curiosity, you've spared him years of humiliation and steered him away from a self-fulfilling prophecy (i.e., he would **come** to see himself that way by everybody else indulging himself). And if it isn't a phase, if there really is such a thing as a "transgendered person" (which I doubt, but I'll stipulate for the moment) and he is an example of that ... he'll still be a "transgendered person" when he turns 18 or 21 or some such age when he can then act accordingly -- snip it off, cram hormones, wear dresses, change his name, etc. The only possible harm I can see is "repression" as an adolescent, though in this day and age I see that as a positive good.

I mean ... I hope you DO realize that (1) kids have phases that are mostly meaningless and (2) that a child should not get everything he wants and/or his wanting something is not a moral warrant. (Actually, I'm pretty confident you realize (1); not so much (2).)

So your mentioning of NAMBLA is misleading and, quite frankly, rather bizarre. Then again, perhaps it's an attempt to demonize and silence any opposing viewpoints. "Oh, you watched that film ["Ma Vie en Rose"] so you must be supportive or aligned in some way with NAMBLA!"

Given that I said I saw the film myself, I rather doubt that’s a reasonable reading.

What I do think does associate you with NAMBLA is your apparent assumption, correct me if you don’t hold it (though it certainly seemed to be your point in citing it) that “Ma Vie en Rose” tells us some great truth about the human person that our Courage group meetings could profit from. One might enjoy (parts of) "Ma Vie en Rose" as a kind of fairy-tale movie, but you brought it up in the context of this real-life Colorado case, which rather suggests you think it insightful. And yes, if a boy of 7 or 8 is a sexual agent competent to decide his/her/its/their “gender identity,” then NAMBLA is correct and our current taboo on "intergenerational love" (that's what it will be called, BTW ... and what DO you have against love, Mr. Bayly) is every bit as irrational as you think past taboos against "same-sex love" were.

Sorry, but that's a ridiculous and false assertion, and I for one won't be cowered by it.

Just to avoid a potential misunderstanding (and one that I'm sensitive to regarding men like us) I’m not saying that you diddle 7-year-old boys or have any desire to, or that your homosexual attractions per se either incline you that way or are evidence that you secretly may be doing so.

Nor am I saying that "diddling 7-year-old boys is good" is a thought you hold self-consciously. But I am saying, and I will stand by this, that "diddling 7-year-old boys is good" is the endgame logic of ideas that you DO consciously hold and practices like the Colorado parents and school-district's that you DO consciously defend (that's how cultural degradation advances ... like warming up the water in a lobster-pot).

And what am I closed-minded about exactly?

Three things I can think of quickly, that I'll phrase in the form of things you closed-mindedly deny ... that same-sex sex and all other sex outside marriage is wrong; that sexual desires do not definitively type the human person; that the Church has a real teaching office.

I fully support you in living a life of celibacy if that's how you feel called. Yet you can't say to me that you support me in building and sustaining a loving and committed relationship with another man. Why is that?

I rather doubt your "support" given some of the picketing you've done.

But to avoid the personal stuff ... the problem is in your usage “feel called.” No ... it’s what I **am** called to. I can pretty much assure you that I often DON’T “feel” called. And if I were married and Sophia Loren¹ were to come and whisper sweet nothings in my ear, at that moment, I wouldn't "feel called" to marital fidelity either. Feelings simply do not create moral warrants or obligations (this is another thing on which I don't know whether you are closed-minded or simply haven't thought it through).

Anyway, I don’t have any problem with anybody having a “loving, committed relationship,” properly understood. But if same-sex sex is always immoral (it all does eventually come back to that), then engaging in it is not “loving.” I well understand that same-sex sex feels good (there’s that verb again) and can be enjoyable. But “feels good” and “enjoy” are not the same things as “loving” though; and attempts to derive “loving” from those unquestionable facts are ... well, it’s "Katie, bar the door" time on just about anything (NAMBLA actually would be a minor issue).

I’ll even say the following. Any sin can be aggravated, and therefore “not aggravated” and thus (speaking strictly relatively) less bad. So, there are aggravated and not-so-aggravated ways of living the gay lifestyle. And perhaps over time, a legitimate friendship can grow and fucking can leave the picture. Suffice to say though that this is extremely rare and certainly not the desired eschaton of Dignity, et al.

Similarly, I'm fine for Courage to exist and help people. Yet you can't seem to say the same thing about Dignity. So who's really being closed-minded here?

I freely admit to being closed-minded about certain matters, including matters that the Church has definitively taught. Anyway, open-mindedness is not a virtue that anyone seriously holds; it's merely a holding strategy for debunking morals one thinks wrong.

As to my "questions and issues" not being compatible with scripture, tradition, and right reason, that's very much open to discussion and debate. Do we really know exactly what scripture is condemning with regard same-sex relations?

Yes.

In part because Tradition always read it that way, including in times when they were far closer to the social context than we could ever be. I must say I find it darkly humorous that people dismiss the Greek-speaking Church Fathers of the 2nd-4th centuries as having a poor or at best irrelevant understanding of the subtleties and cultural shadings of the text (which pro-gay apologists must say, if they are to dismiss their unanimous teaching on sodomy), but think Mel White or John Spong have a good one.

In part because Scripture has a broader, normative vision of what sexuality in general is, one that is not reducible to issues of Koine translation on the two or three New Testament proof texts on homosexuality². For example, and Pope John Paul begins "Theology of the Body" with these passages, the Church teaching reflects Our Lord's words on divorce and His citing of Genesis 2-3, and what it says about embodied sexual complementarity as part of our nature, created as good in the beginning. Homosexual acts do not, by their nature, meet that broad normative understanding.

Most reputable biblical scholars would say that its exploitive sex that, more often than not, is being condemned. And rightly so.

Dale somewhat beat me to the punch ... and given what counts as reputation-enhancing in the American academy, the more “reputed” a Biblical scholar is, the less likely I am to believe him. (Puts on Joe Piscopo-in-"Johnny Dangerously" voice) I read Bart Ehrman once. Once.

But what about loving and committed [homosexual] relationships? Where are they condemned?

Scripture also doesn’t mention 4-sided triangles or male pregnancy or nonviolent boxing because everyone simply understood that these things were as oxymoronic as gay “marriage.”

As for tradition, that's a living thing

No, not Tradition with a capital-T in the Catholic sense of that word, which always has to take account what went before and whether any new statements are compatible with what went before. What you’re describing is democracy, or, at best, a radically congregationalist, and thus un-Catholic, understanding of sensus fidelium.

I also should add that I find it darkly humorous that everyone who says "tradition is a living thing" becomes a fire-breathing proof-texting fundamentalist when one of their pet teachings is trampled on -- "you know, my conscience tells me that homosexual persons should be the object of violent malice in speech and action" (which actually is a proposition that would find more proof-text support in the writings of more Church authorities than "same-sex sex is good" would).

and accordingly should be informed and shaped by new insights and knowledge - including insights and knowledge related to human sexuality.

What “new insights and knowledge” might you be referring to? It cannot be the fact of homosexual acts, which were quite well known in the Hellenized Mediterranean world. Nor the fact that certain people may develop habits, which was just as well understood. Nor psychology, which is largely self-fulfilling prophecy about how people feel, not knowledge of how things are. And certainly not genetics, which has definitively refuted radical-biologism as the genesis of homosexuality (a deterministic cause might, strictly in principle, have provided the kind of serious “new knowledge” that would require doctrine to develop; but it isn’t true, as experience long ago told us and modern science merely confirms on a new basis).

No ... the only “new insights and knowledge” here is that a small group of people have chosen to define themselves according to a sinful act and accordingly warped their souls into moral blindness.

That's not happening in the Roman Catholic Church.

Actually, that’s not true. The Church’s pastoral understanding has developed a great deal on this subject, and for the better, in the last 40 years ... and that’s OK because pastoral practice has much more to do with the social particulars than moral truth does. A non-condemnatory support group like Courage (or Project Rachel to give an example of a pastoral response to a degraded cultural fact other than homosexuality) would have been unthinkable 50 or 100 years ago. Then, a man like myself probably would have been encouraged to “deal with it” by marrying. And more likely than not, damaged some woman and probably some children in the process. Now, the Church discourages marriage as cure-seeking.

Accordingly, to suggest that the Church's sexual theology is supported by "right reason" is a joke, and the vast majority of Catholics - gay or straight - know it.

I repeat what I said about “democracy.” The Church is not, and cannot be, a democracy (nor can even a secularized understanding of "reason" be either). So the fact you cite, true enough though it probably is, is of no moral weight whatever.

And frankly, in the current social environment of ill-formation, secularization, poor catechesis, dissent-worship, faithlessness, authority-phobia, a pornified public space and self-worshiping individualism -- it would be more surprising if most Catholics did think reason supports Church teaching. That doesn't make the teaching untrue. Or optional. Or not binding.
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¹ The photo is because I have to give the heterosexuals some reason to come here and there was too much text with no art otherwise.
² None of which BTW feature much "discussion" of the subject per se but usually only mention a condemnation en passant in service of some other point. Which indicates (1) that St. Paul can assume the reader's assent as one of his minor premises, and relatedly (2) that there was no issue of overturning the unanimous inherited Jewish tradition on the matter, as Scripture records that there was on diet and circumcision.

At 8, I couldn't even spell "transgendered"

2008-02-18T22:04:00.005-05:00

On the "WTF Is The World Coming To" front ... an elementary school in Colorado is planning on accommodating an 8-year-old boy who says he's "transgendered."

He's an 8-year-old boy who wants to attend second grade here in the Douglas County Public Schools, but with an unusual stipulation: He wants to go to class as a girl.
That means wearing girls' clothing if he likes, being addressed by his teacher with a girl's name, and using the school's two unisex, family bathrooms instead of the boys' room.
School district officials are preparing to accommodate the transgender child and his family, but not without public fuss.
Other parents at the school have gone public with their objections, citing concerns about exposing their own children to the sensitive subjects of sex and gender identification, and questioning the wisdom of the school's accommodation of the boy.
"I don't think a [second-grader] does have the rationale to decide this life-altering choice," said Dave M., who told Denver's KUSA-TV that his daughter will be in the same class as the transgendered boy.

I distinctly remember being 8 years old and ... the very concepts "transgendered" and "transsexual" would have been absolutely beyond me. And not because they would have been beyond my comprehension (I was pretty smart as a boy ... and I probably could have spelled them, the 5-time School Spelling Bee champ says). And not because I didn't know, at some pre-sexual level, that I didn't "fit in" amongst the other boys. But who knows what I might have thought at that time had I had "Comprehensive Sex Education" or otherwise had my mind fucked with by the sexual revolution and the sensitivity police.

This is a large part of what we opponents of sexual revolution mean when we say it is corrupting. Where, in the name of Whatever, could an 8-year-old even get the notion that he's "really" a girl or should be called by a girl's name? What competence does he have to even decide on the matter? I should note that I'm really not commenting exactly on moral matters per se. I could very well believe ... this is experience talking ... that an 8-year-old boy might have some latent issues and they might later morph into full-blown same-sex-attraction ... and, if so, his post-pubescent body will tell him that in about 5 or 6 years. And when he's an adult, he might be competent to decide what to make of such a fact. It is actually possible (gay men assure us repeatedly) to believe that homosexuality be moral and that there's no need to prematurely sexualize children.

And why the hell are his parents accommodating what would once have been understood as simple malingering, childishness (in an 8-year-old ... imagine that) or an excessive fantasy life? An 8-year-old might not even have made his first confession yet and certainly doesn't even have his adult voice yet, and his parents are going along with some declaration on a lifelong matter like "gender identity"? Children have no attention span and no concept of time or lifespan. I remember wanting to change my name when I was 10 ... it lasted a day. The fewer adult concepts you introduce into a child's head, the less chance he has to screw up.

As our Courage chaplain once wrote (keep in mind that he's writing explicitly about high-schoolers, but that was back in the Dark Ages, the Unenlightened Era of 2005. We've made so much progress among the youth since.):

Rather than struggle through the difficulties of adolescence, a high-school freshman or sophomore can now, with official support, profess to be gay—and he instantly has an identity and a group. Now he belongs. He knows who he is. Gone is the possibility that adolescents might be confused, perhaps even wrong. Adults typically display a wise reserve about the self-discoveries of high-school students: they know adolescents are still figuring things out, and they recognize their responsibility to help sort through the confusion. So why is all this natural wisdom somehow abandoned these days—in the most confused and confusing area of adolescent sexuality?
Of course, the phrases are tempting because of their convenience and efficiency. They are common, close at hand, and make quick work of a difficult issue. But they also identify an individual person with his homosexual inclinations. They presume that a person is his inclinations or attractions; he is a “gay” or is a “homosexual.” At some point adults have to admit that a fifteen-year-old who claims to be “a questioning transgendered bisexual” is really just confused.

In fact, it used to be the case that we believed an 8-year-old was not competent to make decisions on sexuality, whatever they may be -- that's the presupposition of all age of consent laws. And that analogy goes to the heart of what is evil, not just laughable, about this Colorado case. By giving an 8-year-old his way on this matter, and trying to make others accommodate him using the power of the state, this boy's parents and the school district are treating him as a sexual agent. This undermines the "age of consent" presupposition and thus does something as violating, as evil as anything NAMBLA does, even though nobody is being touched or fondled or "messed with." We used to understand the difference between adults and children. I don't think we do any more. In this case, both because a child is trying to be too adult and adults are succeeding in acting like children.

Pretty soon, this won't be satire ...

Retreat this weekend

2008-01-18T05:41:00.000-05:00

I'll be seeing some of my readers and co-bloggers this weekend (at least these two here) at the Courage men's retreat (I depart in a few hours). And probably not a moment too soon, to be honest, given where I am.

Why "outing" matters

2008-01-07T22:14:00.000-05:00

Wow ... maybe I should write more about the Piskies in the future.

My post about the despicable behavior of the High Priestess of the ECUSA was noted this morning at Stand Firm in Faith, a site for "traditional Anglicanism in America" (original notice to a smaller site run by Peter Ould) and this was probably responsible for a few other site links.

Anyway, today I got about 20 times my usual traffic, though probably most are Episcopalians. The rot in the ECUSA and some similar Anglican churches is no time for triumphalism, since the disease that has the Communion in the infirmary at least is not one unfamiliar to us Catholics. In the tradition of then-Cardinal Ratzinger ... I hasten to assure you of my heartfelt prayers for all those [in traditional Anglicanism] ... there is a unity in truth and a communion of grace ... With this in mind, I pray in particular that God's will may be done by all those who seek that unity in the truth, the gift of Christ himself.

Anyhoo ... one gift I received from visiting the Anglicans (which I confess I don't do regularly) is that I read this piece at Stand Firm and this piece at Mr. Ould's.

The ugly, but necessary background for those pieces to make sense: A gay blogger, whom I will neither name nor link, responded to the call by Bishop [sic] Katharine Jefferts Schori by saying late last week he had a short-lived sexual relationship (weeklong, consummated twice) with a particular Church of England priest who later became a bishop. Bishop X (the only way I will refer to him, though the gay blogger names him) has committed the cardinal sin since those acts of associating with and backing the homophobes in global Anglicanism and believing the Christian teaching on sexuality. This has been the subject of much talk in the Anglican blogosphere the past several days.

Anyway, this is the key part of the spiritual reflection by Jackie Bruchi (in both cases, RTWT):

There is no mention in the article if the bishop in question continues unrepentant in the alleged acts; only an implication that having participated in homosexual acts, it is now hypocritical to take an Orthodox view or support others in their stand for Biblical Authority. If one follows this logic, it means once you have sinned, you may never condemn that particular activity as a sin. Every bank robber must condone theft, every unfaithful spouse must embrace adultery. Repentance is never even considered. Since we are all sinners in desperate need of the redeeming grace and salvation of Our Lord and Savior, this would be bad news indeed.

Of course, this is really not news, is it? The revisionist are simply taking a page out of the LGBT playbook which says you are welcome to your sins provided they do not interfere with their agenda regardless of how morally depraved those sins may be. From a secular point of view that is bad enough but when you seek to apply that same standard from a Christian standpoint, the clarity becomes overwhelming. The message has become a threat, spiritual blackmail, if you will – the only way to escape seeing your sins in neon lights is to uphold the liberal agenda or don’t sin. (this latter not really being an option, CM) It’s a little fuzzy as to whether it is the liberal view that gives you a pass or whether embracing your proclivities keeps them from being sins. ...

We would all do well to remember that it is not the sin that makes the man. It is our willingness to repent of our sins and submit our lives to the Kingship of Christ that determines who we are. We should also ask if it is a matter of hypocrisy or the beginning of wisdom when one recognizes a sin in one's life and refuses to call it holy?

And here is Peter Ould:

The comment thread and other posts from other bloggers began to fill with a number of people echoing the original cry of hypocrisy. The one theme that comes through these commenters and the original post is that the Bishop in question is repressed, in denial and undertaking "fear driven decisions".

Curiously though, one word was missing from all the comments and articles.

Grace.

The reason why the blogger outed the Bishop and why the liberal feeding frenzy commenced wasn’t because of the Bishop’s hypocrisy. In fact, the Bishop in question has been commitedly single and celibate for many years. There is nothing hypocritical about someone who rejects a sinful past, embraces the orthodox position and lifestyle and then supports others who do the same (trust me on this one). There is nothing self-repressive about someone who realises that they have sinned in the past and now lives a life centred on holiness, not sexual gratification. There is however one expression that can describe the activity of God in transforming someone’s life and leading them on the path of righteousness.

Grace.

There it is again, that wonderful word. It is, as John Newton would say, "Amazing". It’s a sweet sound that saves wretched sinners, that makes us found when we were lost, that lets the blind see. Grace forgives and grace leads on. It points to a sinless heaven not a fallen earth. It breaks down stereotypes rather than reinforcing prejudices.

Grace transforms.

And that, my friends, is the real reason the liberal bloggers have it in for the Bishop in question. They don’t like grace because it requires an acknowledgement of sin, and they particularly don’t like the grace that God has exhibited in this specific Bishop’s life.

How so? Very simple:
The choices made by the Bishop in the past decade reveals the lie that one’s sexual attraction dictates one’s whole life
The Bishop’s consequent rejection of prior sexual activity challenges the liberal notion that gay sex is holy
This is why the liberals have to attack this Bishop, because his current lifestyle and his rejection of not only his past sexual activity but also the contemporary pro-gay agenda is a denial of everything they stand for. How dare he? How could he?

The personal risk or social consequences of "outing" really are not why I have such contempt for people who engage in it, frankly bordering on hatred, I admit.¹ The bastards could, in principle, humiliate me or Bishop X or others -- but sub specie aeternitatis, that doesn't matter all that much.

My contempt is because, as Bruchi and Ould explain, the logic of "outing" is necessarily a denial of grace, of the possibility of repentance, of the grounding of forgiveness ... in other words, pretty much a denial of Christianity itself.

This would be bad enough from the Signoriles of the world, but we're now seeing this despicable Gospel-pissing from the presiding bishop of the ECUSA. That's the head of one of America's most-prominent churches and necessarily one of its leading Christian figures.² Anyone of such faithlessness in her (pseudo-)position causes enormous damage, both from present scandal and from the precedents she enables/solidifies. She, her predecessors and her current courtiers have morally certainly cost many souls in their prowling about the earth and turning the ECUSA into an effectively non-Christian body. I am sure her skull will make excellent paving.

St. Michael the Archangel ... pray for us.
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¹ I have no plans to ever again refer to Bishop Smarmi by anything other than some form of insult.
² Yes, I know what Dominus Iesus says. But the objective nature of the Episcopal Church does not speaks to the effects it has on souls. I do not subscribe, either in politics or religion, to the "the worse it gets, the better" school. The Body of Christ is stronger when our separated brethren are strong.

Bishop Signorile

2008-01-07T02:04:00.000-05:00

I would normally try not to say anything about the Anglican Communion-rending dispute over Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, on account of manners in speaking about the internal affairs of one of the Protestant churches, or to put it more snarkily: "Robinson is just as much a bishop as the rest of them." But the Big Cheese of the Episcopal Church has engaged in the ultimate in pro-gay smarm -- outing, which is one theme of this blog.

No, actually Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori doesn't even rise to the level of an "outer" (and no gay man would ever tolerate her taste in robes either, as this Jackson-Pollock-worthy ensemble proves). But at least Signorile, Rogers, Ehrenstein and the rest of that despicable gossiping lot would have the stones to say "Bishop So-and-So is a homo." They might use anonymous or unreliable sources, but they at least say who they're talking about.

Bishop Schori? No such honor. Why out "Bishop X" and risk being rebutted or having to offer proof. She simply does a Clintonian drive-by smear-by-implication, with the slushy slide already set up, the escape hatch already well-greased. She tells the BBC:

"[Bishop Robinson] is certainly not alone in being a gay bishop, he's certainly not alone in being a gay partnered bishop," she said.
"He is alone in being the only gay partnered bishop who's open about that status."
She said other Anglican churches also have gay bishops in committed partnerships and should be open about it.
"There's certainly a double standard," she told BBC Radio 4's PM programme.

This self-righteous pro-gay ideologue, working in the guise of a shepherd of Christ, has sinned through her own fault, in her thoughts and in (especially) in her words, in what she did and what she failed to do.

(1) She has made an impossible-to-rebut implication against every unmarried bishop in the rest of the Anglican Communion. And put them all on the spot without their having done anything to warrant or deserve it. I realize the good bishopess does not herself think sodomy is wrong, but this is an act of pure contempt against those who do, some of whom she is still supposed to in communion (as in Anglican ------) with.

(2) She has put without reason journalists in an awkward quandary -- how does one report "an outing" without giving it credit (like with the false "Obama is a Muslim" smears, which caused much more consternation). Her statement is, as made, uncheckable, and she offered no proof of it. But it is made by a prominent-enough person that it has to get reported. She thus gets journalists to make the charge for her if they dig for details. Orwell talked about the morality of those who always managed to be elsewhere when the trigger was pulled.

(3) Does Bishopess OutersRUs really think that she will change the mind on this issue of any closeted-gay bishop by threatening, however sotto voce, his public humiliation? Does she think they're either so spineless (exposure to the bishops in her own ECUSA may have encouraged this perception) or so ruled by their dicks (exposure to gay groups in her own ECUSA may have encouraged this perception) that they will not take such a threat as an affront worthy of digging in their heels (even if those heels be Prada-clad). But regardless of anything, on absolute principle, it's a call she has no right to make (see Gay Patriot and Andrew Sullivan on that principle, called "playing God").

Blame Canada

2008-01-07T01:25:00.000-05:00

Maybe the Canadian Human Rights Blackshorts have overreached in the Mark Steyn case, trying to punish an internationally-famous columnist over straight factual statements about Islam. Though, as was predicted almost 20 years ago in the Salman Rushdie case (and seen in the cases involving the Danish cartoons, Theo van Gogh and Oriana Fallaci), free-speech is rapidly becoming an internationally indivisible right.

But, as Lifesite notes here (and the Steyn link above makes the same point), these panels have consistently been solicited, successfully or otherwise, by homosexuals and their enablers to silence Christians, starting almost 10 years ago with a Christian printer who didn't want to do business with a gay group. The bullet list will only expand as homosexuals' definition of what constitutes "hate" expands.

I vacation every year in Canada, where I have extended family, and I'm tempted to take along with me next time something by Father Harvey or Father Groeschel and see if Customs does anything.

I ♥ Bishop Nienstedt

2008-01-06T20:28:00.000-05:00

The coadjutor-archbishop of Minneapolis-St. Paul has been trying to rein in much of the homosexuality-based dissent in his diocese, home of the famous St. Joan of Arc Parish and much more mirth (to the consternation of those who should be consternated). One of his acts was repealing an invitation to an open lesbian to speak at a church. A decent, if biased (and in one place nonsensical), roundup of what has happened is here.

What I liked was Archbishop Nienstedt's response to Ann Marie de Groot, who thought to write "what's this new sin called complicity?" (Aside: does Miss De Groot really think "complicity" is a new concept ... it's just a more-contemporary sounding word for the Thomistic lingo "formal cooperation"). Here is the whole letter, with the part worth highlighting in italics.

In her Dec. 19 commentary, "What's this new sin called complicity?" Ann Marie DeGroot presents an argument against the Catholic Church's teaching on homosexual activity that is representative of many such proposals I have recently received -- with one exception: She does claim that this archbishop is "good"!

The caricature that she makes of my argument is that "parents of an actively homosexual child cannot invite that person home for Christmas dinner" without committing a sin. I never said or implied that, and I never would.

After being born, raised and educated in a Catholic home and Catholic schools, my brother decided to join an evangelical church. My parents were heartbroken but continued to keep in touch with him. He knew that my parents never accepted his action, but he also knew they would not reject his person.

The same is even more true for any child involved in an immoral activity. You don't have to sanction the behavior in order to eat Christmas dinner with that son or daughter. At the same time, you do not have to condone that activity. You urge the offspring to reconsider his/her activity and you pray for his/her conversion. In other words, you let it be known you do not approve. Parents, family members, friends are called to radical honesty and moral integrity. There is nothing "new" about that.

"Loving the sinner while hating the sin" is not a snap-fingers-easy thing to balance. Indeed, one of many detestable things about gay identity (quite apart from the sin of sodomy) is that by identifying the person with the sin, it makes that very balance impossible in principle (and for any sin).

But this analogy about conversion away from the Church is about as good a pastoral analogy as possible since it presupposes a situation that all people have experience of (religious difference within the family) and also doesn't require that the listener already agree with the Church on the morality of homosexual acts -- changing churches is widely considered in this society to be a morally neutral and sometimes-good act. Thus religious difference is an analogy that explains how and why you can have somebody in your house who practices the gay lifestyle / evangelicalism without approving of it, and thus has the potential to better penetrate a "skull full of mush" than analogies of homosexuality to alcoholism, kleptomania or bestiality.¹
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¹ Yes, I am aware that schism is an objective wrong. But, because my point is about pastoral response and effectiveness, the wide perception that it is not one is far more salient to the point I am making.

You don't often hear it stated this baldly

2008-01-04T05:48:00.000-05:00

Conservatives often accuse liberals and leftists of being closet (or not-so-closet) secular bigots who only find religion tolerable if isn't taken seriously.

Most opponents' descriptions of the other side should be taken with a grain of salt, of course. But this one might not ... from the "Catholic Church in Britain" files:

'A group of bishops appear to be taking a much firmer line and I think it would be useful to call representatives of the Catholic church in front of the committee to find out what is going on,' [Barry Sheerman, chairman of the parliamentary cross-party committee on children, schools and families] said. 'It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith. But as soon as there is a more doctrinaire attitude questions have to be asked. It does become worrying when you get a new push from more fundamentalist bishops. This is taxpayers' money after all.'

Now of course, it's bad enough that Britain is apparently considering making Catholic bishops explain themselves before an official tribunal (regardless of its consequences) for the sin of actually believing Catholicism is true and that schools that are supposed to be Catholic should act as if it were. These schools are supposed to be Catholic even though they are state-funded; the notion of "church-state separation," whatever its merits, is an American one that has never been the practice in Europe. And Sheerman repeats one of my pet peeves of liberal-secularist insularity -- common vulgar misuse of the worst f-word in the language (that would be "fundamentalist"¹)

But did you catch that part ... "It seems to me that faith education works all right as long as people are not that serious about their faith." How does one parody such unthinking ... unthinkingness.

I will acknowledge that this was a sinus-clearing quote. You could cut this MP's contempt with a knife (and if he were to speak that way about Islam, some people would be cutting more than that). But, to quote myself, "you don't often hear it stated this baldly." British blogger Cranmer, who calls the whole shameful thing an "inquisition" put it best:

Well, Mr Sheerman, Cranmer has news for you. People who are 'not serious about their faith' do not possess a faith. And faith schools which are 'not serious about their faith' are not faith schools. Does Parliament 'work all right' if politicians are not that serious about politics?

Hey, it's not as if religion or one's eternal fate² is something worth being serious about? What's eternity sub specie aeternitatis? What doth it profit a man if he take his soul seriously but lose the world?
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¹ Any use of that word to refer to anything other than a strain of mostly Anglo-American Protestantism since the early 20th century either proves the user's ignorance or mendacity.
² Or the lack thereof. If there is no God or next life, that'd be just as much a fact and just as serious a matter as their existence.

My Christmas

2007-12-31T21:36:00.000-05:00

Earlier this year, in response to my saying last year how much the Christmas Holidays and I don't agree, Dale Price invited me to his humble abode for Easter and I'm afraid I didn't take him seriously. So he reupped the invite for Christmas, and I made the flight to Detroit.

I had a great time with the Prices, and apparently I was a hit with their children (3-year-old Rachel reportedly asked "is the funny man coming back?"). But I also learned a few salutory lessons and had a few highlights along the way:

-- Within just one day of frequently holding their newborn (Dec. 19) son Louis, I had learned to tell the difference through the diaper between the feel of a fart and the feel of a crap. But the Prices trusted me with Louis after I assured that I did know how to hold a baby, having seen it often on television.

-- Children determined to run around a church will not be dissuaded, even if their brother is being initiated into the Kingdom. I warded off a threat to the dignity of Louis's Baptism on Christmas morning by dealing with a restless D3 while the Parental Units were otherwise occupied. (Here's a picture from another Price Baptism.)

-- I showed The Boy 1.0 how to grip a football to throw a perfect spiral (the football was made of cushion material but it worked well enough) so I could catch his throws every time. He said he and his Dad like the Lions and hate "the Green Packers." But note to self: Never de-facto dare a 4-year-old boy to hit you as hard as he can by saying "you hit like a girl." Eye tissue is delicate and those buggers are stronger than they look.

-- Shopping for children for the first time in your life can be both utterly mystifying and nostalgia-inducing. For example, I had never heard of "the Littlest Pet Shop" and had to call to ask what the reading levels of the Pricelets were before deciding to get the "Cat in the Hat Dictionary." That book was one my aunt bought for me when I was 6 and thumbing through the book, I realized how much of it was still stuck in my memory (the four J-boys named Jack, James, Jerry and Joe, e.g.)

-- Hockey tickets will make you very popular in Detroit, even to the point of The Wife overlooking the perfect male-to-male Christmas gifts: 100 episodes of The Man Show one way, and a Borat book the other way.

-- Dale hates the song "Brother Louie" by Stories. Or at least got sick of it after hearing me sing the chorus to Louis. I switched to the Kingsmen's "Louie, Louie," but couldn't remember the lyrics.

-- Letting me loose in a multi-storey bookstore, such as Detroit's John King Used & Rare Books, and expecting restraint is like ... well ... Paris Hilton at a nightclub, Marion Barry at a crackhouse, Rosie O'Donnell at Krispy Kreme. I bought so much that I had them ship most of my purchase UPS Ground to Washington, to arrive in three weeks. Northwest Airlines was no doubt grateful to avoid the fuel costs.

-- Although I'm nobody's idea of a trained athlete, there is nothing like suddenly remembering that you've left your cell phone at the cash register in an airport store while descending an escalator that will take you from the secured area of an airport to the unsecured. You will turn suddenly into Steve Austin running up the down stairs (and rip your ~~best~~ jeans in a stumble) to the amusement of a passle of DTW passengers. Trust me.

-- Heather and I bonded over our shared hatred of "Catcher in the Rye." I denounced this paean to EMO teen self-indulgence, to contempt for adulthood as hypocrisy, this orgy of self-righteous whining about phonies, as the most vile novel ever written, at least for us in our current context. I said that given the choice between giving a 15-year-old a copy of that book or a subscription to Playboy ... "my money's going to Hef. Playboy merely encourages an existing vice that can hardly profit from encouragement in a teen boy; Salinger creates new vices in the guise of virtues." At those words (close as I can recall), a grateful smile came over Heather's face. "I thought I was the only one," she said, coming close to tears as she hugged a fellow comrade in Salinger-hate. While in her arms, I said to her, "let's you dump him and run off together." She said ... "you know ... there's at least one major issue with that." And Dale chimed in: "I really can't work up much jealousy right now."

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Seriously, thanks Dale and Heather for your hospitality and making 2007 a Christmas to remember rather than forget.

Under the Tuscan Sun

2007-10-30T00:21:00.000-05:00

An Italian regional government will be starting a campaign to put the weight of the government behind one of the key Dogmas of The Church of Gayness: that babies are born gay.

Talk about sexualizing the youth.

Personally, I would have put on the tag "escaped the abortionist." But maybe that's just me.

The Vatican, of course, tut-tuts, and so that makes that the lead on the ANSA report, while the openly gay philosopher's skepticism is at the bottom of the story. (There's more details of what Gianni Vattimo said here, but I can't find the original article in Corriere Della Sera, in Italian or English).

Gianni Vattimo described the campaign as “excessive” and said the slogan included “is too biology-centric. Of course for a homosexual it is natural to be gay, but I'm not too sure it is determined by genetics.”

The text on the poster -- "sexual orientation is not a choice" -- actually would be defensible if not for that ridiculous image, which pushes you to take a radical (and absurd) reading of the various ways that sentence can be parsed.

As I never tire of pointing out, there is in fact not a single shred of evidence -- yes, not a one -- that says homosexuality, even as a disposition, in determinedly inborn, which is the only way it can be meaningful to label newborn babies "homosexual" (and why not bisexual or transgendered).

Still, there is some suggestive evidence for much-more-modest claims -- that genes or hormone levels in pregnancy dispose toward homosexuality; that psychological events prior to puberty and/or conscious sexual agency affect one's sexuality; that an adult "sexual orientation" can be very difficult (in some cases impossible) to alter. While, on a moment's reflection, all serious people know that there is *an* element of choice involved in sexuality (not the same thing as saying it's fully and consciously chosen) and that change is *possible* (not the same thing as saying it's likely) ... certainly these facts do not make homosexual attractions a full-blown choice comparable to, say, what career to have.

Where there is not willful lying, obscurantism, ignorance, unwillingness to listen ... I think part of the reason so many people believe the "born gay" or "sexual orientation is not a choice (in any sense)" falsehood is the tendency to view one's own life and others' lives in narrative terms, i.e., in teleological terms. In other words, people reason from "how I am" or "I have XYZ features" (you'll notice I'm not talking specifically about "sexual orientation" yet) to "I am supposed to be this way." And then, since all forms of personality formation are two-sided processes, the "present" becomes retroactive justification, baptizing the "past," while the "past" ("present") continues to create the "present" ("future") that does the baptizing. You justify what you become and you become what you justify.

I am 40 years old and never had a sexual thought for a woman in my life and have had some thoughts about men for more than 30 of those years. It would therefore be very easy for me (and I doubt I'm alone in this respect) to assume that this was how it was meant to be. As the Italian gay MEP notes above, it even becomes, in a certain sense, "natural" for you or for that class of person. It's a thought that even comes in religious flavors, gussying up everything in your life with providential labels like "God's will" and "this is how God intended it." And it's no leap at all then back to "God made Mary Cheney gay."

Theodicy is a thorny question obviously, particularly if "God doesn't make mistakes." But keeping their eyes too focused on the present, the "gay-friendly" Christian says "and since God made me gay, being gay cannot be a mistake, ergo homosexual acts are good." And if all Scripture and 2,000 years of tradition say otherwise ... well ... hmmm ... "God is still speaking." Because to justify how far along the "gay-friendly Christian" already is, and cannot go back on, He has to be.

Signs O the Times

2007-10-29T22:26:00.000-05:00

● In the People's Republic of Ontario, the Toronto Catholic School Board (i.e., not the Toronto Public School Board) has adopted rules that bar all teachers and staff from objecting to "same-sex partner status," "marital status" and "sexual orientation."

● In Mexico, left-wing activists send death threats to Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City over his opposition to abortion and gay "marriage." Apparently he's recieved them daily over the past year, to the point that he wants federal-government protection. (The city government is in the hands of the leftists.)

● California's governor signs into law an effective ban on the use of terms like "mom and dad" and "husband and wife" in California textbooks (we can't engage in heteronormativity). This governor is a Republican -- you know them. The party of homophobic bigots.

● Britain threatens to take away a family's foster children -- not on grounds of substantive neglect, but because they will not agree to teach the children that the gay lifestyle is equal to marriage and that homosexual acts are morally peachy.

● The Archbishop of San Francisco gives the body, blood, soul and divinity of Our Lord to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. He apologizes, but his spokesmen don't understand the fuss.

● A California Catholic Church promotes Bondage/S&M outreach for gay teens. Not exactly -- it has a Gay Lesbian Outreach program whose newsletter thanks all who participated in the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade. With. All. That. Involves. (Nope ... no pix or links. The pervs know where to find them.)

It's a further Sign O The Times (and I'm not doing horse, nor is it June) that I really can't think of anything worthwhile to say. This is what passes for a normal couple of days in this day and age.

Black vs. pink

2007-10-29T19:32:00.000-05:00

Oh ... me love me the cases of "let's you and him fight."

Sen. Barack Obama committed the capital offense at the weekend of associating with bigots, homophobes and other leper types. Well, not really. He had a gospel-music fund-raiser in South Carolina and one of the performers was Donnie McClurkin, an ex-gay who says God saved him from the gay lifestyle that grew out of a case of homosexual-seduction/statutory-rape as a boy.

There was a pathetically small picket. But the news/blog reaction was amazing. Obama associates with such vile sinners -- crucify him!!! The pharisaic gay left went ballistic for a week and beyond. The intellectual value of those links is essentially nil, but their entertainment value is enormous. It's been like a contest to see who could say the most inane thing.

(You wanna know how bad it was: Andrew Sullivan was an island of sanity, calling himself "a little taken aback" by the reaction.)

Earl Ofari Hutchison calling McClurkin a "gay basher" (really? has the definition of "gay bash" stretched to the point where no "bash" actually has to occur)
The Washington Blade calling him a "vote whore" (maybe he can took out a listing in the Blade's classifieds. There's a whole section.)
Mother Jones stating that the "black masses" are ignorant enough to fall for anything set to music (whoa ... aren't liberals supposed to be the ones *against* racial stereotyping)
James Hannaham at Salon compared the McClurkin invite to a situation involving "a Holocaust denier" (I call a "Godwin")
The very excitable John Aravosis compared it to "if Hillary invited David Duke" (ditto)
The arrogant Wayne Besen, calls it "most offensive" to call Obama's disagreement "a mere 'disagreement.' It’s not just a disagreement. It’s repugnant." (so he gets to decide what issues there are legitimately two sides on; this is not the first time he has said this)
The MyDD commentator who compared it to "OJ Simpson ... sing[ing] the national anthem at their event" (take it away Chris Rock at Track 9)
Gay_Blog makes the ultimate low blow -- "taking plays from the campaign [of] Karl Rove" (is there no limit?!?!? Nazis I can take ... but Karl Rove?!?!?!)

Obama himself gave an interview to the Advocate, and was admirably forthright in defending his invite to McClurken without trimming his sails on gay issues (as the Advocate likes them). The best part:

One of the things that always comes up in presidential campaigns is, if you’ve got multiple supporters all over the place, should the candidate then be held responsible for the every single view of every one of his supporters? And obviously that’s not possible. And if I start playing that game, then it will be very difficult for me to do what I think I can do best, which is bring the country together.

Look, when I went to Rick Warren’s church at Saddleback, he was under enormous heat because, among his constituency, my position on LGBT issues and my position on abortion is anathema. So his position could have been, we will not have Obama speak because he does not subscribe to our views on these two issues. To his credit, he allowed me to speak, in his church, from his pulpit, to 2,000 evangelicals. And I didn’t trim my remarks, I specifically told them, “I think you guys are wrong when it comes to issues like condom distribution.” And by the way, I got a standing ovation.

My views on gay issues and on choice issues are well-known. I did not trim my sails in the conversation I had with them. And I think as a consequence of appearances like that, I am helping to encourage understanding that will ultimately strengthen the cause of LGBT rights.

The. Guy. Is. Good. Regardless of the merits of his stance, Obama was actually willing to go to the Advocate and defend it to an audience not primed to hear it. One struggles to think of the gaseous shroud of verbiage Hillary Clinton would have covered, assuming that she'd have stood up to the Gay Establishment as Obama did (which I doubt).

Probably the best comment was this pro-Obama blog that tracked down the reactions from the same leftists yelling "anathema sit" when Warren was taking heat for inviting Obama. The comparisons are ugly. The blogger concludes:

There is no way to unify this country if people on both sides refuse to be in the same space as those with whom they disagree.

Bingo.

But at concert night itself, guess who was the biggest hit of the night? McClurkin. So says the Washington Post:

In Columbia last night, a crowd of more than 3,000 in a packed auditorium cheered and clapped during speeches from Obama aides and taped videos of the Senator and his wife, neither of whom attended, but leaped up for applause and cell phone pictures when McClurkin was introduced.

And he even addressed the issue of homosexuality directly:

After another song, he specially addressed the issue of homosexuality, saying he had been "touched by the same feelings."
"Don't call me a bigot or anti-gay,' he said. "Don't call me a homophobe, because I love everybody. . . Let me tell you something, the grace of God is given to all men," he said to loud applause.

Preach it, brother. Anybody who calls me or McClurkin homophobes is an idiot. We know of which we speak. If we "feared" homosexual persons, why would we be around them. We have the same feelings in our genitals as gay people do. If we've acted on it, we've probably enjoyed it as much as they do -- at least in the moment. The Fred Phelpses and Cavemen of the world detest as much as they do you (probably more; we're pretend-Christians, false prophets, etc.) We are part of the same culture, the one that tells us homosexuality is just fine, and might even make us more special or chic.

But we also know that it's possible not to give in to it, if we put God first in our lives and seek out his grace, however intermittently or stumblingly. And with whatever result, whether legitimate marriage or chaste celibacy.

He then went ahead and touched the third rail (video available at the link)

Don't tell me that I stand up and I say vile words against the gay community because I don't. I don't speak against the homosexual. I tell you that God delivered me from homosexuality.

There's just something aesthetically pleasing about people not backing down from political pressure from the Gay Mafia, be it Obama or McClurkin. Perhaps it takes being black and so getting a lot of "must not be a racist" eggshells surrounding you to be able to preach it.

More on the Mad Scientist

2007-10-18T22:50:00.001-05:00

Well, like John Cleese hanging upside down from a building in "A Fish Called Wanda," Jim Watson has "apologized unreservedly" for ~~calling Kevin Kline stupid~~ blaspheming The Equality Establishment.

To all those who have drawn the inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is somehow genetically inferior, I can only apologize unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly from my point of view, there is no scientific basis for such a belief.

It's hard to see what else he *could* have meant by his remarks, and he doesn't exactly say he was misquoted. I guess he realized he bumped up against the limits of religiously-permitted thought for the freethinking secular scientist.

I also found the original remarks he made about aborting homosexuals, and they're even more interesting than I could glean from the indirect quote in the newspaper account from earlier today and from the CNN account of his recantation above.¹ Anyway here's the original direct quote:

"If you could find the gene which determines sexuality and a woman decides she doesn't want a homosexual child, well, let her" abort.

Which he elaborates on here (HT: Dale)

I remember him turning to me the day the headline “Abort babies with gay genes, says Nobel winner” appeared in a British broadsheet 10 years ago. Eyes wild and voice uncharacteristically strained, he asked: “What should I do about the press?” He refers to the incident again at lunch. “It was a hypothetical thing,” he explains. “If you could detect it pre-natally, could a woman abort a child who was homosexual? I said they should have the right to, because most women want to have grandchildren, period. We can’t do it, but it’s common sense. Anyways,” he says, shaking his head wearily, “it was a bad day when that headline hit. I was just arguing for the freedom of women to try and have the children they want, not what is right or wrong.”

I'm curious about what he meant by "we can't do it" presumably meaning "we can't stop women" from aborting pre-gay children -- which is on the face of it, nonsense. (It may be unwise to do it, or some people may get around such a law, but we certainly *can* ban abortion for gay selection. Society uncontroversially bans certain medical procedures for certain purposes.)

After libel-suit threats, he "clarified" his remarks, but leaped even deeper into worship of The God Choice.

But when asked where society should draw the line over abortion, he replied:
"Society shouldn't. I think women should have the right to an abortion if they want one, irrespective of whether there is a disease. I am pro-choice and I believe men and committees should play no part in women's decisions.
"I don't see where you can draw the line. Some people might not want a child who is dyslexic. A woman could say that some day, if a gene were discovered for musical ability, and her child didn't have it, she might want to abort.
"Someone else might say, I do not want my child to be short because I love basketball and he'll be too short to play. There could be 1,000 different reasons and many of them we would consider absurd. But I believe a woman should be able to walk into a clinic for an abortion and not have the state interfere."

This 1997 article in the Independent shows that this distinction apparently didn't mollify gay groups, for no rational reason I can discern that is compatible with the pro-choice attitudes commonly held among homosexuals, too many of whom see opposing abortion as one of those evil things that horrible religious fundamentalists do.

Watson is simply correct: if you are pro-choice, you can have no moral qualm about aborting babies that test positively for a predisposition to homosexuality. None. And if the specific, repeated disclaimer that one is pro-choice himself doesn't prevent one from being tarred over it, then what the Cultural Elites are indicating by their reaction is that -- well, they're just gonna plug their ears and say "tralalala, lalala. I'm not listening. You're evil. I'm not listening."

When a reasonably reliable pre-natal test of that sort becomes available (that's "when" not "if," assuming that "nature" plays any role in same-sex attractions in the first place, and it's an Article of Faith among gay groups that they do), I want to be around to see whether the gay-rights establishment is really about protecting homosexual persons or just a tool of the Democratic Party and the kulturkampf left. If past is prologue -- the latter.

UPDATE Friday: The excommunication continues. Watson is suspended from his lab.

LONDON - A prominent American scientist who set off an international furor with remarks about intelligence levels among blacks canceled a book tour of Britain and returned home Friday, after his employer suspended his administrative duties.
James Watson, 79, is chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York. Late Thursday, the lab's board said it had suspended Watson's administrative responsibilities pending further deliberation.

UPDATE 2: The Bigot Is Dead. Long Live ... The Other Bigots (I guess). Watson is forced to resign from his lab outright.

Nobel laureate James D. Watson, the renowned co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, resigned Thursday as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in the aftermath of an uproar over racial comments he made recently. ...
Watson, 79, said in an e-mail statement that the change in leadership was "overdue."
"The circumstances in which this transfer is occurring, however, are not those which I could ever have anticipated or desired," he continued.

Further proof that no scientist will ever find any differences in group intelligence. Any who say there are any will be defrocked and turned into "nonscientist." The progress of reason is a thing of beauty.
---------------------------------
¹ "In 1997, Britain's Sunday Telegraph quoted Watson as saying that if a gene for homosexuality were isolated, women who find that their unborn child has the gene should be allowed to have an abortion." It's feminism-blasphemy to say "be allowed to"???

Poor scientist

2007-10-18T14:09:00.000-05:00

Apparently James Watson, the discoverer of DNA has put his foot in it again, suggesting that Africans may be less intelligent than whites (HT: Mark Shea). And in the great tradition of open-minded discussion that science provides and of which secular scientists are the living repository, a planned speech at the London Science Museum has been canceled, for thinking Badthought about The God Equality.

In the guts of the AP story, there's one bit that caught my eye.

The Independent catalogued a series of controversial statements from Watson, including one in which he reportedly suggested women should have the right to have abortions if tests could determine their children would be homosexual.

Why is that statement controversial?

If a woman has the right to an abortion for any reason or no reason, or because child-bearing is such a personal matter that no Other (whether person or state) may pronounce on her motives -- then why doesn't she have the right to abort if tests determine a predisposition to homosexuality (or any other predisposition, in principle)? Any reason is as good as any other reason, and who are YOU to judge ME, right?

And frankly, if the Darwinian muthos is true, that man is merely a pretty smart and/or uniquely rapacious animal with no divine purpose, then our "purpose" defaults into what is that of the other animals, i.e. to reproduce. And if one were a mad scientist (let's follow precedent and name him Yakub) asked to invent a dysgenic feature to introduce into the human race, it'd be hard to come up with a better one than homosexuality. So in that way, it makes entirely good sense that a leading Darwinist would support aborting the homos, or even, stepping back in the manner of Robert Wright, construct "homophobia" as an adaptive psychological emotion that evolved through natural selection to favor reproduction. My only question is "why aren't the others?"
-----------------------
Icon credit: PLAGAL is the Pro-Life Alliance of Gays and Lesbians, a group that does good and necessary work.

The sniping

2007-10-11T04:57:00.000-05:00

Despite my general skepticism of "ex-gay" therapies, the one reason I will always defend them qualifiedly is that the attacks on them from the pro-gay people are so devoid of merit, so self-serving, so hypocritical, so self-righteous that ... one shudders.

For example, here is an execrable rant by Truth Wins Out and its leader Wayne Besen, released the same day as the study was, i.e., before it could have possible to digest it if one's motives were truly scholarly or scientific. Here are the problems:

there is no "Pat Robertson University," a phrase used repeatedly, indicating that Besen's is really motivated by prejudice and a desire to demonize. Plus "pray away the gay" is sound-bite lingo that has nothing to do with anything. (Aren't liberals supposed to be the intelligent discerning ones, with conservatives the knee-jerk simplifiers?);
the researchers did in fact do a bit more than "telephone professional ex-gay lobbyists and ministers from Exodus International and ask them if they had 'changed'." And not a few told them they had not;
A series of quotes attempting to show that Yarhouse and Jones have beliefs pertaining to homosexuality is nothing but a vulgar attempt at anathematization, at declaring Christians ritually impure, as if Besen or Truth Wins Out don't have beliefs;
"Any 'ex-gay' study that does not include physical components that measure truth are essentially meaningless ... It is folly to suggest that telephone interviews can be considered genuine research." Really?

Warren Trockmorton quickly pointed out that the very most-prominent study used to "prove" that "anti-gay therapy" has harmed people had exactly the same (if not worse) methodological shortcomings as Jones and Yarhouse did -- personally interested parties; an explicitly stated desire to prove a thesis at the start; sponsorship by an agenda-driven lobby group; soliciting participants through non-random organizations where members self-select according to one side of the issue being studied.

In an article for Planet Out from the Advocate (in which the story was folded into a sex-abuse charge against an ex-gay former leader), Besen continued his attack, with this claim:

"Exodus should be embarrassed that even their hand-picked participants in this hoax of a study showed such a meager success rate."

One suspects that if Jones and Yarhouse had claimed a higher success rate, this would have been chalked up to their "hand-picked sample." A serious person with scholarly motives can attack a study for having a hand-picked sample, or for showing little success, but hardly both (the teeth of the former charge presupposes a high success rate). There is no doubt that samples for this sort of study are not random, but they cannot be because no therapy in principle can ever work if the subject resists the therapy or thinks his condition is a good thing to have. You will always need a motivated and "primed" population.

Further, what would Besen consider an acceptable success rate. Keep in mind that psychiatry is largely unsuccessful when it cannot chemically mess with the brain. The standard has to be compatible with the success rate for similar non-drug therapies, otherwise the carping sniping is merely equivalent to noting that Ted Williams didn't get a hit about 2/3 of the time. Jones and Yarhouse anticipated this objection, by showing that the success rate was comparable to "results shown in a recent, reputable study of drug therapy for depression."

Then Besen continued:

"It was created to suit their political agenda, which is spreading myth that if one person can change, anyone can change."

Is there no lie to which gay propagandists will not stoop? This is simply a lie. L-I-E. The studiers quite specifically say the very opposite, as I cited in the post below, in the quote about the four-minute mile. And this was supported by their acknowledged figures -- some people even embraced the gay lifestyle. If anything Jones and Yarhouse's "point" is the mirror image -- debunking the myth, spread by gay propagandists, that absolutely nobody can ever change (which is nonsense that nobody who gives the matter a second thought can believe).

In other words, Besen is just drooling.

The Washington Blade had an article that was somewhat more reasonable, though it "led with the reaction" rather than the facts (and wasted column inches on Besen). But most of the criticisms were from someone sober, if biased, and the researchers were even quoted rebutting some of them.

Sociologist Christine Robinson, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on social control of deviance and sociology of sexualities, said she has two major concerns about the study, which she has not yet read. The first is that some will abuse its findings and the second is the methodology.
“The authors are right to say that one limitation … is the lack of independent/objective measures of sexual attraction beyond self-reports,” Robinson wrote in an e-mail. “This is a major weakness of the study. In addition, and even more problematic to me, is that the study is being touted as evidence to counteract the claim that reorientation therapies are not inherently harmful, but the study doesn’t examine reorientation therapies of Exodus ministries.”

At the Throckmorton link I give above, Robinson expands on what she means by it, and she apparently told the Blade that what concerns her is "how this study, like Robert Spitzer’s study a few years ago, will be used in the culture wars over homosexuality. I’m concerned that ... this study will be misused to shame people into seeking out ex-gay therapy."

I'm glad she's acknowledging what really counts. Not what a study actually says, but its use in the culture war. One rather suspects that if it showed no change was ever possible, then its use in the culture war would perturb Robinson rather less. And Throckmorton quickly points out the double standards regnant in pro-gay discourse.

The Blade continues:

Critics note that anything that relies on an individual’s perception is not scientifically sound. Some “ex-gay survivors,” say they convinced themselves, at times, they were straight but later acknowledged those feelings as wishful thinking.

The double standard noted above about anti-ex-gay studies is not only here presented again, but done so even more baldly in consecutive sentences. If relying on an individual's perception is not scientifically sound, then not only does practically every study on sexuality fail, but so does the testimony of "ex-gay survivors" because that is merely their perception and self-presentation (albeit their current, and thus privileged, one).

This points to why, at the end of the day, I doubt that the scientific study of "sexual orientation" is even possible in principle. The very category "sexual orientation" is suspect, as something the slips away from objective measurement or scientific definition. Even if one weren't to go as far as I do and dismiss sexual orientation as mere reified discourse, there can be doubt that it is not separable from self-understanding and self-consciousness. As such, an innocent subject-object relationship -- no observer bias, no confirmation bias, no expectancy effects, no observer effect -- is simply not an option in principle. Add in such other problems as deformation professionnelle (accepting the conventions of a profession), the impossibility of random sampling, and the impossibility of objectively measuring sexual response in a moral way, and it's simply hard to take the "unscientific" charge seriously, even if it's true.

In fact, the level of scrutiny given to the ex-gay studies is itself a perfect example of one such particular example of confirmation bias -- the Tolstoy Syndrome.

Therapy shown somewhat effective

2007-10-11T03:30:00.000-05:00

The most encouraging news last month from the study by Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse of ex-gays was how realistically it was reported, in some quarters at least. In the words of Christianity Today, it's "an older, wiser, ex-gay movement" that

... is certainly clearer about what it has to offer. Early hopes for instant healing have given way to belief that transformation occurs through a lifetime of discipleship.
...
Alan Chambers, the low-key opening-night speaker, emphasizes that there is no step-by-step formula for overcoming homosexuality. "Hear me loud and clear: You're not going to get cured this week. … We don't choose our feelings, but we do choose how we are going to live. I choose every day to deny what comes naturally to me. … I have to rely on Jesus Christ every day."

The companion article at CT makes it clear that this research cannot be dismissed as simple advocacy research, precisely because the results were relatively modest and in some ways cut against whatever biased interests the researchers may have.

Jones and Yarhouse emphasize the imperfections of their research, carefully noting points at which their method could be criticized. For example, they had hoped for 300 or more participants, but found many Exodus ministries mysteriously uncooperative. In the end, they settled for 98 people in their initial sample.
...
As Jones and Yarhouse themselves note, both skeptics and true believers will find evidence for their arguments.
...
They found that 38 percent could be described as "Success: Conversion" or "Success: Chastity," with another 29 percent continuing hopefully, even though they could not yet demonstrate convincing change. They compare this "success rate" to results shown in a recent, reputable study of drug therapy for depression.
...
Jones and Yarhouse found, contrary to professional consensus, that change is possible. But they did not find that change is possible for everyone. They write, "The fact that some human beings can break the four-minute-mile barrier establishes that running a four-minute mile is not impossible, but that same fact does not establish that anyone (every human being) can break the four-minute-mile barrier."

Here's the relevant breakdown, in my opinion, from a more-laudatory Baptist Press article (the source of the pie chart up top):

At the end of the study, the subjects were placed in six categories, in order from success to failure:
-- 15 percent reported their conversion was successful and that they had had "substantial reduction" in homosexual attraction and "substantial conversion" to heterosexual attraction. They were categorized as "success: conversion."
-- 23 percent said their conversion was successful and that homosexual attraction was either missing or "present only incidentally or in a way that does not seem to bring about distress." They were labeled "success: chastity."
-- 29 percent had experienced "modest decreases" in homosexual attraction and were not satisfied with their change, but pledged to continue trying. This category was labeled "continuing."
-- 15 percent had not changed and were conflicted about what to do next.
-- 4 percent had not changed and had quit the change process, but had not embraced the "gay identity."
-- 8 percent had not changed, had quit the process and had embraced the "gay identity."

Understand that these are the success rates that *already presuppose* the strongest factor disposing toward success -- a religiously-motivated desire to be rid of same-sex attractions. That applied to everybody in this study. And still, the chances of little or no change were acknowledged to be greater than the chances of satisfactory change (29+15>23+15). Also, the chances were only 1 in 6 of "substantial" conversion. And note the word is "substantial," i.e., not "total."

To be sure, these subjects were not broken down by age and (the Baptist Press notes) they tended to be well-experienced sexually. It simply makes sense that the more ingrained a habit or pattern of behavior is, the harder it will be to unlearn.

I've generally been critical of ex-gay therapy, largely because I think it gets oversold and misses the ultimate point, which is not becoming "straight" but living chastely (whatever that means according to our state of life). But this is a well-designed study within the limits the subject matter inherently imposes, if not a very large one. And its modest conclusions give it credibility and show what scheisse the sniping against it really is.

Rule, Brittania

2007-10-10T21:30:00.000-05:00

Not content with squashing the right of the church to teach in its schools that its doctrines on sex are true, Britain is moving toward Thoughtcrime territory on homosexuality. The Times of London reports that "inciting hatred" against homosexuals will be punishable by up to seven years in jail.

Leading gay rights campaigners insisted that the proposed offence would not lead to the prosecution of people expressing religious views. “It will not apply to those who temperately express religious views,” a leading campaigner said.

Well, that's reassuring, isn't it? An anonymous gay-rights advocate's assurances? Even Molotov got better assurances from Ribbentrop than that. And even that was tempered by the word "temperately."

I was quite surprised to see in Mark Shea's comboxes, a "don't worry about it too much" comment from my friend Ron Belgau.

I agree with your worries about excess state power being turned against Christians. I also am not naive enough to think that "inciting hatred" will always be interpreted rationally by judges.
However, this law does not criminalize saying homosexual acts are sinful. It criminalizes inciting hatred on the basis of sexual orientation, which is not quite the same thing.
In societies that respect the freedom of religion, I can write a book that explains my convictions or critiques others' convictions. I can't try to whip up a mob to go burn down the local synaogue or lynch the Mormon bishop.
As I read it, this rule is the equivalent of telling me not to incite others to burn the synagogue or lynch the Mormon bishop, not a restraint on theological debate. We shall have to see how it is applied, of course. But the problem, if any, is not in this law.
If this law gets interpreted to prosecute my writings, for example, then we are dealing with a corrupt judiciary, and a corrupt judiciary can find an excuse to prosecute whether they have this law or not.

Ron has two points:

(1) The law doesn't criminalize Church teaching;
(2) If the law will be stretched to cover that, the judiciary or executive is so corrupt that they don't need this law.

Obviously (1) is literally true as stated, but I just think Ron is being impossibly sanguine given the context. There *already is* (as I noted above) precedent for the British state (i.e., not some rogue judge) to refuse religious freedom in the name of gay liberation. There *already is* precedent from other countries of ministers being prosecuted or brought before tribunals under similar laws for preaching as the Church does on this topic.

And, as Ron surely knows, many if not most practicing homosexuals, and an increasing number of sympathetic liberals and leftists think the Church stance is, by definition, inciting hatred. I honestly don't believe that the homosexualists think it is possible to oppose their cause temperately. Some have even gone so far as to say a devout Catholic woman stabbed to death by a gay man brought it on herself, and the lawyer made the claim in open court that "it happened because she wouldn't leave him alone." I know I have been accused frequently of inciting hate, and I would be *stunned* if Ron has not. To cite one of numerous personal experiences, in one private forum, not devoted to politics or religion, I used the phrase "I believe it to be wrong." This was compared (and seconded thus) to the medieval blood libel with the specific qualifier "no matter how delicately said."

Which bring us to (2) ... and here again, I think Ron is thinking too rationally. Of course, it is the case that a thoroughly corrupted institution doesn't need legal niceties. But there's corrupt and there's corrupt. Ron's point would be correct if we were fearing literal "Gay Blackshorts." But the post-Christian West is not vulnerable to hard totalitarianism of the Hitler-Stalin kind, or to the "l'etat c'est moi" (or "la loi c'est moi") principle of arbitrary rule by an all-wise Ruler (think Kim Jong-il for a modern example). In those cases, yes, what the law says on paper is of little consequence.

But that's not what's happening. Instead, Christians in the post-Christian West face a kind of soft-tyranny -- marginalization under the law, underscored by and justified by cultural contempt. What these laws do, what they're designed to do, is give lawyers "words to work with," i.e., provide a legal basis for acting on conclusions already drawn morally (in this case "to silence the hatred coming from the christofascist godbaggers that is killing us oppressed LGBTs"). Yes, it can only be for what people may want to do in the darkest recesses of their hearts anyway. But soft-tyranny is still soft, and jurists and the legal class are not willing to act without the backing of the law. After all, "we're a society of laws," right? But if the law provides a legal basis, words to work with, to lock up those who incite hate, and in that society, Christianity is commonly constructed as "hatred" ... well, the conclusion hardly needs stating.

Further, these laws incentivize accusations of hatred, by rewarding them in the currency of silencing one's opponents. Economics teaches us that everything a society rewards, it will get more of. And as night follows day, rewarding accusations of "inciting hatred" (especially if there's no cost for unvindicated complaints, as there won't be) will result in a lot more complaints of "inciting hatred."

The British gay group Stonewall (see point 10 here) already has stated that Christians protesting gay-rights laws are "inciting hatred" and it called on those grounds for denying a permit to march on Parliament. The Stonewall Web site defines a "homophobic incident" as "any incident which is perceived to be homophobic by the victim or any other person." This is rather broad and open to easy abuse, no? Not to mention completely incompatible with the classic mens rea standard for intent-to-commit-a-crime. But it's what these people say when they're free to speak among themselves. This will become a self-reinforcing loop with, in principle, no end point, because people (homosexuals and their advocates in this case, though the point is generalizable) will become thinner- and thinner-skinned as disapproval in any form becomes a rarer and rarer experience, like groups that had no exposure to viruses or pathogens have no immunity to them and become sicker quicker. The principle of passive immunity applies to more than the body.

Larry Craig, please go

2007-10-10T18:47:00.000-05:00

I took your side last year, in the initial "outing" fight with a despicable gay blogger and the leftist moonbats that hate men like us. And I avoided comment on your legal troubles when they were reported, partly because I wasn't blogging at the time, but also because you quickly fell on your sword and because the sin of anonymous sex is not something on which I have a clean rap sheet.

But last week, you went back on your word to resign if a judge didn't let you withdraw your guilty plea, to disorderly conduct in a bathroom-sex sting. You say you can effectively represent Idaho (after being stripped of your committee leadership assignments?) and because staying in the Senate will give you an opportunity to "prove my innocence" or "clear my name."

The problem is that you don't have evidence that proves your innocence beyond reasonable doubt. If you did, we'd have heard about it long ago. I can only imagine two kinds of things that would suffice at this point, with a guilty plea entered and so the de-facto burden becoming "prove your innocence": (1) a videotape from that Minneapolis airport bathroom that shows the officer accosting you, and you saying "no, I'm not interested in your homosexual come-on, sir. I am not gay"; or (2) proof that your guilty plea was forged -- handwriting samples, letters between the judge and the cops saying "let's frame Larry Craig," proof you were in Australia on the day of the Idaho-postmarked personal note through which you pleaded guilty in Minnesota.

Quite apart from their inherent unlikeliness, we know from the absence of their mention during the hearing where you tried to withdraw your guilty plea that such evidence does not exist. So in the presumed absence of dramatic new evidence, we know that all we'll hear in any attempt to "prove your innocence" is "I was misinterpreted"; "I'm not gay / I love my wife"; "my plea was just a hush bid"; "this was not a crime," etc.

Any Senate ethics commission hearings, which you say you hope to use as a forum to clear your name, will not clear you. (1) There's the inherent evidentiary problems already mentioned; (2) you lack Republican-colleague support or supportive local clamor; (3) three Democratic enemies will be judging you; (4) these panels aren't really investigatory panels in themselves¹; and (5) what they have a tendency to become is a political circus, grist for sordid tabloid headlines about games of hide the cigar or kick the toilet paper.

Your only hope was a plain factual injustice, firmed up by overwhelming support in your own party and doubts in the other. You have neither. In short, if this was false, you had your chance to deny it before the Minnesota court and you chose not to. Bathroom-cruising is now a fact about you, true or not.

As the Los Angeles Times article I linked to above indicates, you have little support in the Senate. And you have become a national punchline even outside the context of political junkies, like Howard Dean's AGHGHGHGH moment made him "that weirdo that growled a lot" and sank his 2004 campaign. You're now, as this ABC News icon indicates, "the gay bathroom senator." Just today, at my job, a coworker said to me, completely outside any homosexual-related matter², that "you look as happy as Larry Craig in a bathroom."

If you have any loyalty to the Republican Party or to conservative principles, you'll simply get off the national stage now, and give your state party and the Republican successor whom the governor will appoint a year to let your 15 minutes of fame fade away, live you down, and keep your seat that you're already planning on giving up. (You are gonna follow through on THAT promise, right?) Republicans should not have a tough fight to keep Idaho Senate seat. Your continued presence assures that we will.
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¹ They are more expert at judging and weighing facts given to them by outside investigators, whether the FBI, the Capitol Police or special prosecutors like Ken Starr or Patrick Fitzgerald. Or in legalese, they are like an appeals court in that they defer to other fact-finders, where they exist.
² Well, not exactly. I was expressing my delight at Camille Paglia's latest Salon column being up.

Capping the 'T'

2007-10-09T03:10:00.000-05:00

John Aravosis has a piece up on Salon detailing some good news, though not from his perspective. He says that the insistence of some gay groups of including Transsexuals¹ in the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA)

[T]his year is also the first time that ENDA actually has a real chance of passing both the House and Senate -- but only if gender identity isn't in the bill. So the bill's author, openly gay Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., dropped the transgendered from the bill, and all hell broke loose. Gay activists and 220 national and local gay rights groups angrily demanded that gender identity be put back in the bill, guaranteeing its defeat for years to come. Many of them, suddenly and conveniently, found all sorts of "flaws" with legislation that they had embraced the previous 29 years. They convinced House Democratic leaders to delay action on ENDA till later in October. They'd rather have no bill at all than pass one that didn't include the transgendered.

Aravosis makes all kinds of arguments in favor of a bill that doesn't makes transsexuals a protected class, but they all boil down to pragmatism and they are entirely persuasive, stipulating the good of his ends -- "we can pass this now and cover most sexually-discriminated against persons; half a loaf is better than none, etc."

But, as he later realized, that didn't matter. The transsexuals were hearing none of it. One hardly thinks that Barney Frank can be denounced as a wet who "doesn't get it" -- but there it is. Or rather, the transexuals said they would win the persuasion battle. Here's the amusing quote.

If Barney can't get the bill passed, then he should leave it to Tammy to get the job done. I can speak to the wavering Congresspersons in half an hour and give them enough of an understanding to respond effectively to any hate speech from the Republicans. Instead we show our cowardice again and run.

To which my reaction is "hehehehe." Trans-sexual rights means this sort of thing.

The dispute centers on transgender patrons and the use of the club's restroom facilities.
Last year, [club owner Tom] Anderson asked Michele deLaFreniere and some other patrons to leave the nightclub because they "freaked out" female customers by using the women's restrooms.
When the transgender patrons tried to use the men's room, they complained that male patrons harassed them.
"It was determined that the safest course for the protection of all was to exclude these particular individuals because their conduct was creating tension at the nightclub," Anderson said.
DeLaFreniere said it was a matter of discrimination and filed the complaint.
DeLaFreniere, 52, has lived as a woman since 2004.

(There's more of the same here.) It was "bathrooms" (along with "women soldiers") that sunk the ERA 30 years ago, and "bathrooms" is just as potent a weapon as ever. Oh ... I'd kill for the right to be the ad-copy writer for the RNC.

But who cares, right? We're right and better to stand on our rightness and get nothing rather than compromise on a compromise a principle, move the ball downfield and fight for the rest later. (But then "maybe some folks in our community are afraid that trans people will highlight the gender nonconformity in the gay community and drag straight-acting gays into the sunlight.")

This sort of politics, expressive rather than instrumental, is what the inherent fractiousness of identity politics and what the inclusivity-uber-alles left produces. The transsexual's comments about discomfort are also an example of what happens when a group of people take anathematizing psychology as a norm of public argument ("you're self-loathing," "gay panic," "why are you so obsessed" ... the whole panoply). The weapon will be deployed in civil wars too.

I remember seeing years ago on CSPAN some gay-rights umbrella forum, and the members of a Hispanic group Llego² seized the microphone and staged an ostentatious walkout over their not being included in the ethnic ragout of the panel. Other people started yelling at them ("you have been invited!!") A yelling match live on CSPAN??? Yep. But when politics is presumed to be based on identity and demonstrative expressions therein, this is the logical result.

Later at the same panel, a Filipina dressed down the representative from the Log Cabin Republicans, who was trying to make a point about gay groups respecting intellectual diversity (the only kind worth anything, BTW) among homosexual persons. Close as I can recall, she said: "for me, the struggle for gays is inseparable from struggling against the attacks on my community" (she was referring to the immigration debates of the 90s). "I don't know, maybe you agree with those attacks and want to degrade my people as long as others don't degrade you white gays," etc. On another CSPAN show, a Booknotes interview, bell hooks criticized the Million-Man March (and Cornell West's participation in it), on the grounds that it was a march for patriarchy and against women. So it didn't matter what it did for blacks. Quoting from memory: "if we learned anything [from the past], it is that the struggle for liberation, and against white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, is indivisible. The parts are inseparable."

The best thing about being a conservative is that liberals are so marinated in their own self-righteousness that they do half your work of demonizing them for you.
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¹ I do not use the word "gender" in the context, where it is a biased, prudish codeword for social-constructionism. French nouns have a gender; human beings have a sex.
² As an aside, while searching for some art for this piece, I learned that Llego had since gone defunct and a group called Unid@s was trying to become the Hispanic gay group of choice. But what I couldn't stop laughing at was the rationale in the Blade article for the "@" character. It's a combination of "o" and "a," the respective typical markers for the masculine and feminine cases in most Spanish nouns, adjectives and pronouns.

“Unid@s means ‘everybody together,’” Serrano said. “We use the ‘at’ symbol because when you want it to refer to females you use ‘unidas’ and males, ‘unidos.’ We use ‘unid@s’ to show our diversity, unity and inclusivity.”

But ... but ... it makes the group's name unpronounceable in English, Spanish or any other language, kinda like Prince's. You still have to make a vowel sound, a single sound, between the "d" and the "s." There's no way around that fact, so you'll either say "unidos" or "unidas." And be exclusive and sexist. Sigh.

Christ on Bourbon Street

2007-10-09T01:09:00.000-05:00

[Judy Tenuta voice]
Yeah, it could happen
[/Judy Tenuta voice]

I went down to Louisiana a few weeks ago to see a friend take his first vows with the New Orleans Province Jesuits. And I did what every devout Christian would do on the subsequent Friday night before my plane left for Washington on Saturday -- spent it in the French Quarter, specifically one street. (Hey ... I did spend the early part of the day doing the respectable tourist stuff like the D-Day Museum.)

Over the space of about five hours -- well, I drank and ate and drank and drank some more as I walked down America's most famous 24-hour orgy for the second time in my life (the other was a New Year's Eve when I was there for the Sugar Bowl). Hand Grenades, Hurricanes, Jell-O shots, a seafood dinner (it being Friday and all), $1 beer, $3 shooters from street vendors. But even there, God was watching.

Practically the very first thing that happened to me in the Quarter, before I was even on Bourbon Street proper, was that a strip-club owner invited me ("sir," he called me) to come in for a free drink with a lap dance, while an exaggeratedly sexy young thang was spilling out of her T-shirt next to him. I politely said "not interested" as I walked past him. It was all I could do to avoid saying "are you ever barking up the wrong tree."

After dinner, I headed northeast along Bourbon Street, away from Canal Street, when I reached the end of the carnival-light section of Bourbon and, having just finished my drink, I went into a bar for another. And for the second time in my life, I unwittingly went into a gay bar -- Cafe Lafitte. I didn't see the rainbow flag walking in (this end of Bourbon Street was quite dark) and the clues didn't register with me until after I had ordered and started drinking a bottle of beer and so couldn't leave easily. Needless to say, I was still pretty uneasy just sitting there, trying to maintain my usual unflappability and sangfroid.

It wasn't the objective behavior of the clientele, at that time anyway (though to judge from the pix on their site, I must have caught them on Chaste Night). There were lots of queeny mannerisms on display, of course, plus diva dance remixes (Bananarama, Gwen Stefani, etc.) on the video screen and sound system. But as randy as it got that I saw was having a condom stretched over the lips of a cup of carbonated soda. Nobody was shirtless; I saw no PDAs stronger than a peck on the cheek; nobody propositioned me; nobody was garlanding beads as rewards for gawdknowswhat. I saw much more (and much-more) wanton sexuality elsewhere on that street. But, at least personally, I can consume as campy comedy, e.g., a woman sashaying her hips as she stands on top of a bar while her husband/boyfriend takes her picture. Precisely because it doesn't threaten me because she doesn't interest me. I slinked away as soon as I finished my one beer. I wonder if the bartender or the two guys sitting on either side of me noticed how queasy I was.

Going back the other way down Bourbon Street, I happened to look down a side street to my left and I saw an obvious shadow -- a Jesus statue on the wall. Probably looked very like this image (photo taken by a St. Louis architecture buff from his trip to New Orleans from about the vantage point I would have had). I was near the Cathedral of St. Louis.

I can't not go there, so I do ... grenade in hand (no, not THAT kind ... this kind), but with no particular plan. The Cathedral is locked up, so I can't go in. Which I understand somewhat -- the adjoining well-lit square had an interesting cast of midnight characters. I had been to confession a couple of days previous and, for complicated but good reasons, had yet to actually say my penitential Rosary. This seemed a perfect time and place, and so I go to one of the park benches before the main door (at the back edge of Jackson Square; this poster here shows where I was) and say it under my breath and keeping track on my fingers. I'm only interrupted once that I recall, by a street person sitting next to me on the bench who asked if she could have a swig of my grenade ("sure").

Then, walking back toward Bourbon Street, with more drinking on my mind, I'm convinced God sent me an angel. A man stopped me as we passed each other while walking in opposite directions on one of the side-street sidewalks. He stopped me and said, "excuse me, sir, but can you spare me some money?" At that moment, I really couldn't say no. I had just come from church (sort of) and was heading for a site of orgiastic consumption. I did ask him if he needed me to buy him some food, and he said he wasn't really hungry but might be tomorrow: "I live day to day," he said (and his appearance let me believe him very easily). I reached into my pocket, and as it happened, the outer bill on my fold was a ten. Which I gave him automatically. He thanked me, and I said, looking him in the eyes, "God bless you." He returned those words and then said something I've never heard in such situations.

HIM: Would you pray for me?
ME: Sure.
HIM: I mean right now.
ME: Yes.
HIM: I'm from Arkansas and having a run of bad luck.
ME: Sorry.

I put my arms around his shoulders, and he puts his around mine. If he had harbored ill intentions (a thought which did occur to me), I'd have been completely at his mercy. But I trusted. I said a simple "Our Father." He didn't say the words, but at every one of the natural pauses in the prayer as I went through it, very slowly per my custom, he let out a soft ejaculation, in the Charismatic style -- "praise the Lord!" "hallelujah!" or the like. Our faces were touching, we were locked in an embrace, a block off Bourbon Street. In prayer. And at that moment, nothing else mattered to me. Or to him, I suspect.

When I finished, he asked me, "are you a preacher?" It was all I could do not to laugh as I said "no." I repeated my offer of food. He said he was fine, and nodded his assent when I said "well, just use well the money I gave you." We hugged again before parting.

Somehow, after this encounter, another few hours of drinking no longer seemed so attractive. My confessor, who has warned me about my drinking in the past, was a bit disappointed (I am inferring) that I didn't get this man's name when I told him what had happened.

I met him by pure coincidence and the confluence of a hundred accidental factors of timing, but the most immediate of which, though, was my side journey to the Church upon seeing Christ's shadow. To send me in the direction of His shadow again. My night began by being accosted by a strip-club owner after my money and ended by being accosted by someone else after my money some, sure, but after something more also.

I walked backed to the edge of Bourbon Street to Canal, stopping only to browse and buy a couple of gifts for friends. Driking some soda. And going home for the night, praying for this down-on-his-luck man, and making a mental note to do it often. Whatever his name.

Wishful thinking about the past

2007-10-08T00:44:00.000-05:00

If I were limited to one reason why "I detest the gay-lib movement," I wouldn't refer to the sinfulness of homosexual conduct (sodomy has been around forever and didn't particularly need Stonewall to justify it). But I would instead choose the way that it has poisoned same-sex love, which takes many forms including loyalty and friendship, by injecting the aura of sex into them.

Consider the execrable articles from last month on a paper in the Journal of Modern History that was widely reported (and positively so, on that grounds) as providing a model for homosexual relationships. Predictably the usual suspects got aroused by it: Andrew Sullivan's Daily Dish (though not Sully himself); National Public Radio; Live Science; and very silly student journalists.

Here is Gay.com (customary warning here; article is fine, whatever the dangers the broader site may hold)

Same-sex civil unions, while seemingly new and radical, appear to have existed 600 years ago in late medieval France, a professor writes in the September issue of the Journal of Modern History.
The term affrerement, or "brotherment," referred to a certain type of legal contract that provided a marriage-like foundation for non-nuclear households of many types, according to Allan Tulchin, an assistant professor of history at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

What utter balderdash ... (CM rolls up sleeves and readies fisking muscles) ...

The model for the arrangement was that of biological brothers who inherited the family home on an equal basis from their parents and continued to live together, Tulchin wrote.
But in cases where the affreres were single, unrelated men, the contracts provide "considerable evidence that the affreres were using affrerements to formalize same-sex loving relationships," he wrote.

The $64,000 question here is the phrase "same-sex loving relationships." What does that mean? And what does it communicate?

To answer the latter first, it communicates to a modern audience homosexual "marriage" (see the very silly student journalist). But literally, of course, it doesn't "mean" very much at all. Or rather it means nothing at all new or controversial or anything having to do with marriage law. I have a "same-sex loving relationship" with my father. I have one with my confessor. I have ones with my best drinking buddies, Courage brothers and other friends. We are all of the same sex. We do love one another. And we have relationships.

Well, let's all toodle off to Massachusetts then. (At least, once the consanguinity taboo has been suitably demystified as the irrational prejudice future generations will see it as, so my father can join the fun.)

What never ceases to raise my wrath with these sorts of scholarly articles is precisely that the writers will never say "gay marriage," because they know their scholarly credibility will be shot to hell if they do. Instead they use "same-sex loving relationships," which doesn't exactly "say" gay "marriage," but will be heard as saying it. And also cooperate with news articles that puts that spin on their work sotto voce. Even to me, who cannot be called someone who speaks French, "affrerement" is an easy word to translate -- "brothering" ("frere" is the uncontroversial translation of "brother"). Obviously "brother" has to be somewhat metaphorical in this sort of case, but prima facie, "brothering" someone is not evidence of sexual interest.

Nor is there no precedented for this very problem with this very term. There was the 1990s flap over John Boswell and adelphopoiesin (the Greek term for "making brothers"), which has been roundly dismissed, me saying that "his books' account of social approval and gay marriage are incompetent fantasies based on tendentious eisegesis."

"I suspect that some of these relationships were sexual, while others may not have been. It is impossible to prove either way and probably also somewhat irrelevant to understanding their way of thinking," Tulchin wrote. "They loved each other, and the community accepted that."

In other words, there is NO evidence at all, merely Tulchin's supposition ("I suspect"). This is rather less than persuasive.

There is a difference between primary evidence and corroborating evidence, and "affrerement" and "adelphopoiesin" rites can only be corroborating evidence of social tolerance of same-sex sex. I agree that Tulchin is making a reasonable surmise if we were dealing with a society in which there were good pre-existing reason to think homosexuality was widely tolerated. But as evidence for such toleration in the first place? Not even close ... that's the classic case of Nietzsche's critique of scholars "who dig up what they themselves buried."

Yes, of course "the community accepted that." But if "the community" were a bunch of homophobic Catholics who understood same-sex love as perverted if it involved sex (while having no difficulty with ritualized friendship, fraternity, paternal love, etc.), then said tolerance would be evidence of nothing whatever.

American academicians comes across as simply incapable, for reasons I dare not speculate, of imagining any form of love that is not sexual or a sublimated pale-substitute for sex. Inevitably, they read sex where it isn't (or rather there is no evidence that it is). To quote from Shaw's review of Boswell:

Such agreements and rituals are "same-sex" in the sense that it is two men who are involved; and they are "unions" in the sense that the two men involved are co-joined as "brothers." But that is it. There is no indication in the texts themselves that these are marriages in any sense that the word would mean to readers now, nor in any sense that the word would have meant to persons then: the formation of a common household, the sharing of everything in a permanent co-residential unit, the formation of a family unit wherein the two partners were committed, ideally, to each other, with the intent to raise children, and so on.
Although it is difficult to state precisely what these ritualized relationships were, most historians who have studied them are fairly certain that they deal with a species of "ritualized kinship" that is covered by the term "brotherhood." (This type of "brotherhood" is similar to the ritualized agreements struck between members of the Mafia or other "men of honor" in our own society.) That explains why the texts on adelphopoiesis in the prayerbooks are embedded within sections dealing with other kinship-forming rituals, such as marriage and adoption. Giovanni Tomassia in the 1880s and Paul Koschaker in the 1930s, whose works Boswell knows and cites, had already reached this conclusion.

That point stands essentially unchanged against Tulchin's work. Back to the Gay.com article:

Before a notary and witnesses, the "brothers" pledged to live together sharing "un pain, un vin, et une bourse" -- one bread, one wine and one purse.
The "brothers'" goods usually became the joint property of both parties, and each commonly became the other's legal heir.

Evidence of a formalized union, even especially one involving property, is not, never was, and never will be evidence that said union included affective ties.

Otherwise what would some Tulchin or Boswell of the 30th century be able to make of documents showing the widespread practice of "fraternities." Such scholars could even find, in addition to proof of collective living, deeds showing that it was a common practice for two or three "special brothers" (wink, wink, nudge, nudge, saynomore) to live together, by themselves, away from the community? Add a few "original documents" of fraternity rites and oaths, including all these Greek letters (more winking and nudging).

There will also be all the references to "loyalty" and "bonding in brotherhood" and the like (it'll help if these Tulchins and Boswells do not speak English and so will need to translate "loyalty" and "brotherhood"). And if there are references to "fellowship" and "camaraderie" (all these four words are species of the genus "love") ... do I need to say more?

"Western family structures have been much more varied than many people today seem to realize, and Western legal systems have in the past made provisions for a variety of household structures," wrote Tulchin, who studied documents and gravestones of the affreres to arrive at his conclusions.

And now we get to the other thing that pisses me off when I read these sorts of articles. Those of us who oppose gay "marriage" really are quite aware that a range of family structures is possible, and that all societies acknowledged plurality, within the limits that define the society's understanding of family. We don't need to be talked down to and told this. We really don't. But the mere fact of diversity on points A, B, and C is not a reason for accepting structures that differ on points X, Y, Z. Not in itself. Indeed, social norms operate precisely on the how difference is constructed between ABC on the one hand and XYZ on the other.

CM at others' comboxes -- 1

2007-08-10T15:20:00.000-05:00

I have decided that I post so much at other people's comboxes that I should start putting up here the more substantial posts, those that in my judgment make broader points that can stand up on their own, outside the particular context (none of my debate polemics or smart-aleck comments, IOW).

I will post them unedited except for the grammar, clarity or spelling burps we all occasionally make. I posted at Closed Cafeteria earlier today in response to this comment:

why the claim that temptation toward homosexual activity is greater than [it is for] heterosexual persons? I often hear comments like those offered by John Hetman, that homosexual persons grapple with a "struggle with oftentimes overwhelming temptations."

Comparing the weight of crosses is in some sense a futile endeavour, I agree. But I don't think there can be any comparison at all between homosexuality and heterosexuality in this respect (in other words, we are talking about a difference in kind, not of degree). So I responded:

Strictly biological-drive speaking, it probably isn't. But there are still some quite fundamental differences:
(1) Marriage and children are vocations and are always a possibility for the straight person; chastity is both carrot and stick, in other words. For the homosexual person, it can be easily seen (and almost all do see it at times) as all stick and without real vocational value.
(2) No straight person really sees his heterosexuality per se (as opposed to particular features of it) as a curse, a cross.
(3) Straight people really don't have anything comparable to the contemporary "gay rights" movement, which sets up both an alternate temptation and a group of people who despise you. (Nor are there Caveman types among Catholics ready to assume the disgusting worst of one at the drop of a hat.)

Check here for any continuation.

More about the conference

2007-08-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

Smile ... you're on Closed Cafeteria. (That should be a line in my opinion.) Thanks for linking, Gerald, and sending my hit count through the roof.

Thanks to everyone else who linked to my post on the Chicago Courage Conference -- the British Catholic Mom of 10 (watch your Americanised spelling there, Mum); Tony at Catholic Pillow Fight; Terry Nelson at Abbey-Roads2; and TJIC and Father Tim Finigan really liked Father Groeschel's comment on the recent atheist books.

Also, Terry posted correspondence he got from Jeron (a frequent commenter here too) about his recollections of the conference. Jeron's memories and Terry's comments are way way WAY more spiritual than mine. There is a reason some people discern monasteries while others play Clown Prince.

Also, the ex-Protestant hypersectarian and reader CW ("who-can-quote-the-croaking-chorus-from-The-Frogs-of-Aristophanes") has apparently decided to start blogging about certain topics (presumably including Topic H) anonymously. Oh ... what hath CM wrought.

This year, in Chicago ...

2007-08-08T16:58:00.000-05:00

I just got back yesterday from last week's Courage Conference, which was held in Chicago at Mundelein Seminary. And as I've said about previous conferences, it was like an oasis in the midst of the desert:

To put it in the most crass way possible (moi?), I enjoyed 10 days of chastity -- before during and after. It was the anticipation and later fact of a holy environment, with daily Mass and availability of confession, *despite* the temptations of the people surrounding me. The whole weekend was just ... hopeful. It was more than fellowship, more than the holy environment and daily sacraments, but my just being able to *be* for four days without any fear or shame or worry or Angst. To breathe easily with everybody always already knowing the thing I hate most about myself and most fear others knowing/guessing/finding out. I hate the word "liberating" (it carries the aura of Che Guevara posters), but that's what it was. I was not sunk in my customary gloom, trapped in the whirlpool of frustration, anger, acting out, despair and depression.

Damascene episodes are not my experience here, but the simple ease of a life of submissive grace is. It happens the same way every year for me, with the worst thoughts coming upon leaving, to the effect of "why can't the other 361 days of the year be like this?" Even before going, I was touched by grace.

The previous week, as I finished my assigned hours at my parish's Perpetual Adoration, I told the man who shares my second hour that I would be gone the next week "for a church conference in Chicago." So he needed to make sure he was either there or lined up a substitute. Nodding his understanding, he then innocently asked me "what's the conference about?" I thought about it for a half-second and decided that, though I hardly know the man at all, there need be no fudging in the Presence of Our Lord. I told him it was a Courage conference and he said "oh ... do you know Father Harvey." Turns out the man's wife is a former student of his, and he asked me to say hello to Father Harvey for her. I was relieved at being able to handle The Awkward Question truthfully and without a hitch.

So I go up to Father Harvey during the conference and said "do you know a Mary Constantine?" He responds, without further prompting, "yes. I taught her at Dunbarton College 30 years ago. She was in my moral philosophy class" (exactly what the woman's husband told me). I told Father that her husband and I share an hour at my parish's Adoration Chapel, and he told me to send the former Miss Constantine his blessings and prayers. Here's a man nearly 90 years old (born 1919) and showing it in some ways -- but still having the presence of mind to remember a student from decades ago.

At the end of the conference, I've checked out of my room and am returning the keys, packed baggage in hand. Father Harvey is doing the same at the same time. I grab his hand and thank him for the conference, for Courage, for everything. He responds in the socially normal way but then, he puts his hand on my head and says a blessing on me and my trip home. Without my even asking him.

There was some broader good news in Father Harvey's keynote address, in which he said there were about a half-dozen new chapters, including one astonishing example (albeit quasi-underground) of official approval from one of the most-liberal and least-St.-Blogs-loved of U.S. prelates. He also mentioned that Courage had started the process of incorporation. I don't pretend to understand the subtleties of what this means under either secular law or canon law, but Father said it would make the group's mission more secure and its means broader and deeper. He said Courage International Inc. would be sending out solicitations to us and to others in the Catholic community to raise its projected budget.

Father Benedict Groeschel gave the main address on Friday night. The man is simply amazing, able to hold an audience in the palm of his hand despite having very little physical strength and not too much voice (he had to sit to give his speech and needed assistance from one of his brother friars just to walk from place to place).

But he has so much wisdom and self-assurance that he gave his whole speech, a critique of conventional psychiatry and the turn to virtue, without notes and overflowing with epigrammatic and surprisingly scalding wit:

"Freud's mother would repress anybody."
"That's like the Communist secret police publishing the diary of St. Faustina."
"Why would Mother Teresa want an honorary degree from Harvard? That's like making Jesus a monsignor."
In reference to some of the recent atheist tomes: "I am deeply insulted that atheism can be so badly represented. I am tempted to write a book defending atheism in response."

But even when tossing off bon-mots, Father Groeschel understood what is relevant to the audience in front of him. In reference to the celibacy vow and the sexless life, he said, "whatever we missed, it's not the secret to happiness; 98 percent of the world's great literature and drama are about problems brought about by sex," presumably referring to works like "Madame Bovary," "The Red and the Black," "Oedipus Rex" and "Don Giovanni." Men like myself tend to think play "if only" ... thinking that all would be well if we were straight or married or whatever. But Father reminded all of us Courage members that "God is not a psychiatrist" and "calls both the healthy and the ill," citing his own namesake, St. Benedict Joseph, as an example of the latter, as someone who exemplified being "poor in spirit."

Amazingly, he ended his talk with the line "my apologies for taking so much of your time." Yeah, you're forgiven for such an affront all right, Ben. Father Groeschel will also be in the Arlington Diocese this weekend for two talks — one at St. Mary's in Old Town Alexandria on Friday night; the other at Blessed Sacrament on Saturday (can't find a mention of it on that parish's site).

We also saw a nearly-finished version of a one-hour profile documentary on Father Harvey, called "Profiles in Courage." I was surprised how much I enjoyed it, particularly the early parts about Father Harvey's boyhood (he was a Phillies fan ... apparently into long-shots at an early age) and the early years of his work with Catholic priests struggling with homosexuality, which dated back to 1953, a decade-and-a-half before Stonewall. The latter parts, particularly after the founding of Courage, is a bit heavier on testimonial and a bit lighter on history and narrative (including the difficulties the apostolate has faced) than I would have liked. There's one really sweet moment, which brought down the house, involving Father Harvey, his sister and a Miraculous Medal. To say more would spoil a moment that really relies on unexpected spontaneity. Besides Father Groeschel, the film also had an appearance by Archbishop Edwin O'Brien (now in charge in the Baltimore Archdiocese; hopefully to effect some changes there).

Some highlights I remembered from other talks, in addition to two strong testimonials, including one from a married couple whose daughter is practicing the lifestyle but who themselves had the Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara bit down pat:

The ebb and flow of spiritual tides is like the ebb and flow of oceanic tides in that low tide is God enabling us to see the muck that high tide covers up. (from one of my Courage brothers and a reader of this site, on "The Meaning of Companionship")

The Lord, upon His Resurrection, calls Mary Magdelene by name. Not my a slur or a descriptor, but by name because He knows her most fully for who she is. As He does all of us, whom He calls by name.
The woman caught in adultery is not named. Which means it's the reader (or listener). You. And that moment -- Jesus bending down, writing something and then rising up -- is the whole sacramental economy in miniature. God descending to the earth, revealing Himself and then arising from the earth. As is the woman's arising from the dirt.
"The only failure is to see yourself as nothing but a sinner with no hope. Not to say 'I did something wrong,' but 'There is something wrong with me'." (all from Father Richard McAlear on "The Healing Presence of God")

"Hell is not going to let go of you easily."
Even if you've stumbled a thousand times, that means that 1,000 times in Confession, "you've committed yourself to Christ. Whether it lastest 3 hours, 3 days or 3 months is of little consequence."
" 'Firm purpose of amendment' doesn't mean 'I'll never do it again,' but 'I'll get up again next time'."
"Why does suffering happen? So love can reveal itself."
"You cannot live in this society without an adult understanding of the faith." (all from Father Donald Timone on "The Critical Problem of Pornography")

Other things overheard:

"If you're not doing it for Christ, you're a fool."
"My SSA is a permanent inoculation against the sin of Pride."
"Know what OSFS stands for? Old Shoes For Sale."
"If anyone finds a missing Roman collar, it's mine."
"Homosexuals did not start the sexual revolution. They were simply too few ... But then they asked 'if it's OK for everyone else, why not us?' " Why not indeed?
"I have made all things new -- including you."
"Father Timone's presentation on porn would have been better with visual aids."
"His penis is fine; he's just too fat."

As for myself, I met three readers of this site who didn't know me by name, including one who's discerning the religious life and another who left not merely Protestantism, but a very specific type that he could rattle off like the Very Model of a Modern Major-General. (I think his leaving reduced their ~~remnant~~ rolls by 20 percent.)

As I noted above, one of the best things about these conferences is simply the easy fellowship. And sometimes, some of it is not edifying in the purest sense -- like my teasing Ryan about his mere-wannabe status as an opera queen (the boy didn't even know the ending of "Aida" fer pity's sake); or my doing my world-famous Eric Cartman** imitation one lunch and leaving my whole table in stitches; or my noting that it was OK for me to by wearing white sneakers since it wasn't yet Labor Day, only to have one of the other guys look at the well-worn pair and contemptuously and say "those haven't been white for a LONG time." Holiness is obviously first and last, but fellowship also means the ability to not be serious and have some fun. To let oneself breathe easily, in other words. That ability enabled me to hug the guys in parting or at Mass unselfconsciously and freely, even if they were men to whom I might be attracted under other circumstances.

Next year in Jerusalem. Or if that isn't an option, Boston will do.
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** Image of Father Cartman swiped from Father Erik Richtsteig.

More Democrat debate suckitude

2007-07-25T20:38:00.000-05:00

Here is a put-up job from Planned Parenthood -- the winner of apparently some kind of standardized contest (Astroturf, I think the pros call it) in which PP conventioneers seem to compete to produce the most obsequious reverse-'have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet' question. The text of the question and answers is here from the CNN transcript.

Unlike with the homosexual "marriage" matter, the question is actually more revealing than the answers (plus I've already picked on Edwards and Obama¹).

My question is, we here at Planned Parenthood support comprehensive sex education, and I'd like to know if any of you as candidates have talked to your children about sex, and used medically accurate and age-appropriate information?

Whether it's "immigration reform" or "sex education," the minute you stick the word "comprehensive" in there, I start looking askance, as if someone is trying to throw a fast one on me or steal some intellectual bases. This particular question also is loaded with rehearsed buzzwords.

But more directly, the question is utterly and totally ridiculous on every front imaginable.

● The president (which I think is the office to which the persons being asked all aspire) has nothing to do with sex education. Governors, state lawmakers, school districts, etc. ... sure. Not the president. He is not sex-educator-in-chief.

● The way the question is specifically put does a slushy slide over from "as candidates" to "talked to your children about sex." But nobody talks to his child about sex "as a candidate." One teaches his children about sex as a parent (or parent-surrogate, like grandparent or even, in principle, teacher). And what one does and says at home in matters relevant to religious values -- as Jonathan Edwards insists -- need not necessarily have anything to do with what one thinks "as a candidate" or "as an officeholder."

Further, nobody denies the need to educate children about sex. The public issue only even comes up when schools that all must attend (in a era when all do not worship the same god) try to address the subject. How do we (or can we) handle moral plurality on this matter? It's not that "as a parent" isn't the same thing as "in public policy," but that the public-policy issue (and the contention therein) comes up only in the context of children who are NOT one's children. All sane people agree that parents have certain prerogatives in raising their own children on which outsiders may not intrude, even for the somewhat better. So asking about "your own children" is exactly the 180-degrees-wrong question.

● The term "medically-accurate" is a shibboleth and actually contradicts the other adjective -- "age-appropriate." Medically-accurate terms generally are not appropriate for children; little boys don't have "penises" or "testicles"; they have "wee-wees" (or whatever was the term in your neck of the woods).

Whatever such lingo lacks in medical precision (and I agree that to an adult in a doctor's office, the talk should be about "your penis" not "your wee-wee" or "your manhood"), it gains in respecting children's innocence. Nor do children really have any need for "medically-accurate" information about reproduction, birth control or abortion. But then Planned Parenthood's idea of age-appropriate includes telling 7-year-olds about masturbation, so apparently people have quite different (and irreconcilable -- reason one why all school-sex-ed should be banned IMHO) understandings of "appropriate."

● Further the very insistence that "medical accuracy" is a relevant criterion hints at reason two why all school-sex-ed should be banned IMHO. Medical accuracy says that sex is a medical (and/or biological) matter. And while it obviously is that in certain contexts, school sex ed that it is not at the same time religious or moralistic (and I think all agree that it should not be that) thereby constructs sexuality as solely a medical/biological matter, without a religious or moral dimension. Regardless of the details of what you say, when you bring up a topic and discuss A, B and C in that context, but not X, Y and Z, you are necessarily marginalizing X, Y and Z in the context of that topic. And in that construction of sexuality, medically-accurate sex ed reduces man to a rutting animal, which is far worse than teaching nothing at all or some ignorance of this or that detail of.
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¹ Still, I did find it interesting that both of the candidates talked more about preventing sexual abuse and predators than sex-education in the more customary, and controversial, sense.

The awful Democratic debate

2007-07-23T22:30:00.000-05:00

The exchange on homosexual "marriage" Monday night was about the most incoherent discussion of the issue imaginable -- and not even necessarily from the POV whence I come -- that 'tain't no such thing as "gay marriage." If I were a pro-gay Democrat, I would find it every bit as annoying. It came in response to this question:

And then this amplification from a North Carolina minister, aimed specifically at Jonathan Edwards:

Before I begin, I'd like to note that the first clip illustrates pitch-perfectly one of the trends of political discourse I like least, namely the personalization of every matter and attempts to "put a face" on social policies. "Would you allow US" is not an attempt to get an answer about a matter of the common good. It invites knee-jerking in the answerer, attempts to narrow thought beyond one's own horizon (and thus feeds this generation's narcissism), and is mostly just cheap self-righteous grandstanding by the questioner.

The responses I posted in their entirety here, from the CNN transcript.

This is not difficult. If a person has a right to marry someone of the same sex, then the lack of same-sex "marriage" under the law is government-sanctioned discrimination, truly akin to the miscegenation laws. You cannot be against homosexual "marriage," while considering that any disparate treatment of any definable group is discrimination. This discrimination narrative, "rights talk" as Christopher Lasch and Mary Ann Glendon called it, is something that all the Democrats who answered the question (plus both the questioners and Anderson Cooper) apparently accept. They believe that this is an issue about anti-gay discrimination and not about the definition and purposes of marriage.

One either believes that a person has a right to marry, in principle, anybody he wants to based upon his wanting to do so, and thus the case for gay "marriage" is airtight (as is the case for polygamy and who-knows-what-else-is-waiting-in-the-wings). Or one accepts that marriage has an inherent structure, namely the male-female procreative bond, that contrary unions violate and so are not "marriages." Therefore, privileging the male-female union does not "discriminate." Which is why it is truly incoherent to say, as all the Democrats except Mike Gravel and Dennis Kucinich apparently believe, that such privileging is "discrimination," but the solution is civil unions. Civil unions are simply another form of discrimination and one made even more incoherent and irrational if such unions have all the privileges and burdens of marriage, but not the name.

Every response was weak at least intellectually and only Kucinich even achieves surface coherence. But the spectacularly incoherent ones were from Edwards and Obama. Here are the highlights of Edwards:

whether it's right for any of our faith beliefs to be imposed on the American people when we're president of the United States. I do not believe that's right. ...
I feel enormous personal conflict about this issue. I want to end discrimination. I want to do some of the things that I just heard Bill Richardson talking about -- standing up for equal rights, substantive rights, civil unions, the thing that Chris Dodd just talked about. ...
But I personally have been on a journey on this issue. I feel enormous conflict about it. ... my wife Elizabeth ... actually supports gay marriage. I do not.

Keep in mind he's answering a question partly and undisputedly framed in the lingo: "Senator Edwards said his opposition to gay marriage is influenced by his Southern Baptist background."

Where to begin? How about with Edwards insisting that he doesn't believe in imposing religion-based morality while supporting his stance against homosexual "marriage" in terms of his religion ... excuse me ... his faith community. He reads like somebody saying something he doesn't believe -- in both directions. There is certainly no other reason -- good, bad or indifferent -- for why he does not support gay marriage.

And how disgraceful is it to hide behind your wife's skirt on such a matter? What ... is Edwards afraid that Elizabeth will keep all the hair mousse if he doesn't make some bow toward her stance. This is a classic case of someone trying to straddle the fence -- wanting to say one thing to ~~the brights~~ the party base, while keeping his option open with regard to the ~~yahoos~~ general electorate come November. He even repeated it later:

I mean, I've been asked a personal question which is, I think, what Reverend Longcrier is raising, and that personal question is, do I believe and do I personally support gay marriage?
The honest answer to that is I don't. But I think it is absolutely wrong, as president of the United States, for me to have used that faith basis as a basis for denying anybody their rights, and I will not do that when I'm president of the United States.

Does Edwards even realize that the entire claim to homosexual "marriage" made by gay activists is precisely THAT the inability of a man to marry a man is a denial of their rights? Even Uber-Homophobe Moi at least acknowledges their arguments as being what they are. You would have to have spent the last 10 years on Pago Pago not to realize that saying "I do not support gay marriage" and "I don't want to deny gays their rights" is an answer that, in the current intellectual climate, does not answer anything without you having a lotta 'splainin to do.

Which gives us a nice segue to the incoherence of Barack Obama. Here's the highlights:

COOPER: Senator Obama, the laws banning interracial marriage in the United States were ruled unconstitutional in 1967. What is the difference between a ban on interracial marriage and a ban on gay marriage?
OBAMA: Well, I think that it is important to pick up on something that was said earlier by both Dennis and by Bill, and that is that we've got to make sure that everybody is equal under the law. And the civil unions that I proposed would be equivalent in terms of making sure that all the rights that are conferred by the state are equal for same-sex couples as well as for heterosexual couples.
Now, with respect to marriage, it's my belief that it's up to the individual denominations to make a decision as to whether they want to recognize marriage or not. But in terms of, you know, the rights of people to transfer property, to have hospital visitation, all those critical civil rights that are conferred by our government, those should be equal.

Not only does he repeat the same Edwards nonanswer about equality, apparently not realizing that the argument for gay "marriage" is precisely that denying it is a denial of equal rights, Obama even managed to commit two further intellectual crimes.

First of all, he didn't actually answer Anderson Cooper's question, which was that he distinguish the current "ban on gay marriage" from the ban on interracial marriage. The analogy between them was also the unstated starting premise of the North Carolina minister's YouTube question. It's surely worth noting in this context that the analogy between homosexuals right and black civil rights is one that much of the black community, particularly in the black church that finds misguided or offensive. Obama's silence shows exactly how the tension on this issue between the black church and the Democrat netroots is treated -- by not acknowledged as even existing. It may be slipperiness but there is method to it.

Second, the second part of Obama's answer manages to introduce a new nonsequitur. Obama says that the churches should have the right to define what marriage is for their own sacramental purposes. One would have thought that the First Amendment's Free Exercise clause would have made that a rather noncontroversial point, but ... whatever (for now)¹. But the issue of what is a marriage for the church has nothing to do with the matter of what is a marriage for the state, which also both acknowledges and performs them. Most of the time, Caesar does simply rubber-stamp what God has put together. But not always -- the county JP will suffice. To tick "married" on your 1040 forms, or any other government document (state or federal), you need a license from Caesar. Thus the definition of marriage is something on which Caesar must decide -- for his own purposes at least. That's what the whole current dispute is about: who can be considered "married" by the state.² And that's a matter that a political office-holder like Obama cannot punt to the church.
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¹ Once gay marriage becomes state policy, we'll see how long it takes before gay activists try to force churches to conform. The over-under is a week, I'd guess.
² Anyone who wants to has long been able to go to the Unitarians, Metropolitans or similar sects, and have a ceremony in (what they imagine to be) the eyes of God, cut a cake, wear rings and have a hot time in bed that night. The free exercise clause does cut both ways.

"My life is in your hands"

2007-07-22T00:11:00.000-05:00

Now more than ever.

I got the news while in a movie theater last night, about 1020pm from one of my Courage brothers, the here-mentioned Tar Heel who loved Tammy Faye as much as I did. He sent this simple three-word text message to me:

Rip tammy faye

As a writer, one never knows what will resonate with people. Whenever I check my traffic since May, without fail, I learn that some people have been directed from a word search for "Tammy Faye" to this post "As She Lay Dying," which has gotten prominently listed on major search engines. The editor of one of Washington's two principal gay weeklies, Sean Bugg of Metro Weekly, wrote about my post about her. Just earlier this week, I got the following e-mail from a stranger:

Subject: Thank you for your blog on Tammy Faye
Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 10:25:36 -0700
I caught your blog today and cried. I saw tammy faye on larry king live last night which
devastated me. I will pray for her soul. She is a christian who loves all people (black, white, gay, square).etc.

thank you

Tammy Faye's death was, of course, not unexpected. As the writer noted, she appeared again on "Larry King Live" earlier this week (video excerpts here; transcript here). To say that she didn't look good would be an understatement. That was my dominant initial reaction, though one I quickly took back mentally when I mulled it over.

It was the latest and final proof that superficial appearance didn't matter to Tammy Faye. It's too bad that in English the word "shameless" has come to have a negative connotation, because it describes her appearing on TV to encourage people and talk about the Lord and His presence in her life while she was on death's doorstep. Shame didn't matter to her. Or maybe "prideless" is the word I'm looking for (except that I don't think it's an "official" Webster-approved word). The kind of pride that would keep most of us off TV in her state and which caused her son Jay to have her exit his reality-TV show "One Punk Under God" when she was in obviously better condition than she was this week -- that just didn't matter to her. Only evangelizing did. And if that meant appearing on TV in this way, so be it. Roger Ebert made a similar point about refusing to hide his own illness. One of John Paul the Great's last great witnesses was refusing to give in to his manifest infirmities, to be an icon of Christ in his illness.

Ironically, one part of the King interview, that Yahoo excerpted above or a clip, was providential for me:

I talk to God every single day. And I say, "God, my life is in your hands and I trust you with me."

Earlier on Saturday, a few hours before I learned Tammy Faye had died and while (I'm guessing) her ashes were being scattered, I was in confession, tears again (though no mascara -- I'm a butch, manly-type homo). My parish pastor listened to another bout of despairing doubt and said that better cultivation of Hope was needed. His penance was to repeat several times a short prayer "Jesus, I trust in you."

(Aside: I swear to God, as I write at 2am Sunday morning, my iTunes just rotated randomly to Depeche Mode's "Personal Jesus," a song that was almost certainly consumed upon release as an 80s slam on televangelism a la Jim and Tammy. But which has lyrics too elemental and too resonant to be contained by this superficial topicality and avoid contrarian appropriation -- having been covered by the devout Christian Johnny Cash near the end of his life. Also, like Tammy Faye. I'll keep iTunes on DM until I'm done.)

But those words "Jesus, I trust in you" were essentially Tammy Faye's last words to the world. She was totally in His hands. And her final days were an act of witness to Father's short prayer, in the face of, in her case, the ultimate earthly darkness.

Thanks to all

2007-07-04T14:45:00.000-05:00

Since most of the time, the personal news I do share tends to be "bad" and my last post pretty much made it clear that I was "on the canvas" recently, let me reproduce here a draft from a lengthier note to a priest that I was working on, but decided against finishing and sending.

Hiccups aside, which I do allude to, these past couple of months have been some of the happiest, Godliest I've experienced. For the first time in my life, I think God has been able against my will to turn a corner with me on Topic H, and I'm much more closely attuned to His voice and the angels he sends. "Le bon temps" began approximately with this public prayer request, so thanks to everybody who responded -- publicly, privately or spiritually. Anyhoo, here it is:
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First of all and for the first time ever, I’ve really measurably felt my homosexual attractions diminishing. I would be lying to say that I’ve lived perfectly continently in that period, but (and I will spare you the details) I can definitely say that (1) I can innocently come across a male body without triggering further action, (2) when I do same guiltily, I much more easily and quickly turn away or click off, (3) it takes more “time” to give Satan the definitive upper hand. While I’m aware that libido will naturally diminish over time, I’m still only 41 and not too far removed from my biological prime.

As for sex with other men, I am pretty much uninterested any more, knock wood. The pickup attempts I’ve made have been progressively fewer (function of choking off the routes or having them choked off for me), more half-hearted, and almost always the eventual victim of my cold-footed conscience. And none of the three completed occasions within the past year did I even enjoy much at the time, much less did I leave the bedroom thinking “I have found my true nature and identity.”

To use a disease metaphor, although I still catch colds my immune system is measurably strengthening -- actually “coming into existence” would be more like it. I can’t tell you how joyous and thankful I am over this, Father. To switch metaphors, I’ve served close to 20 years of what I’ve always expected to be a life sentence without the chance of parole. And it’s like finding out that you misheard the judge saying “with” as “without.”