Wow

A former victim of Bush Derangement Syndrome, gay & Clinton-loving, is healed.

HT to LK.

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Hidden In Plain Sight

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Sprung

Last year, when I was mentioning to my ex the fella who is now my boyfriend, the ex said to me, "You are so sprung." I did not know the term. My ex, African American and way more cool and into pop culture than the Caucasian Curmudgeon, was using a term which, I discovered, is the equivalent of "smitten."

Guilty. The man is not perfect (my heart has the scars to prove it) but I am, like, so sprung on him. He'll back back from his European jaunt in a few days and I am looking forward to it.

Exhibit A.

Working out at the gym yesterday, I was stopped by one of the guys who was last year's coverman and Mr. December on the South of Market Bare Chest Calendar. We normally just nod hello, but he broke off from his workout with his trainer to talk to me. The jist of his comment was that I was looking very good. I thanked him and made some remark about how five or six days a week at the gym is bound to give you some results. He interrupted me, "No false modesty. Let's take a look at those guns." At which point he was feeling my upper arm. "Nice. Very nice." Again, I smiled and thanked him. And he returned to working out, as did I.

What entered my mind next was not Mr December, although he is a man both impressive and attractive. What entered my mind was My Guy. The rest I leave to a discreet silence.

Mr. Coverman flirts and makes a move and this leads me to miss The Boyo.

Yeah, I'm sprung.

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Externalized homophobia

I stumbled onto a film on the LOGO channel, Mr. Right. Against my better judgment, I watched it, even though it was described as "a vibrant romantic comedy charting the lives and loves of gay Londoners: a TV producer, an aspiring actor, an artist, a model, a rugby player and a soap star."

Narcissistic hunks, histrionic bitchy queens --galore--, fag hags. Haven't I seen this before...and before? If you want a reason to be homophobic, a film like this will give it to you.

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Anglicans in Groups

Pope Benedict has put together an offer for groups of Anglicans who wish to become Catholics and maintain an Anglican liturgy, spirituality and communal structure. The document is called Anglicanorum Coetibus, Groups of Anglicans. It's an interesting set-up and creates something like an Anglican Rite.

It maintains the strong position of Rome that sacramental priesthood was lost at the English Reformation and so will require that all clergy wishing to transfer into Catholicism be ordained again. Currently married Anglican priests will largely be accepted for ordination, but those who wish to ordained bishops must be celibate, as must, in general, future candidates for priesthood.

The basic structure for these Anglicans in Groups is called an ordinariate. In Catholicism, an ordinary is a person with juridical and pastoral authority over a diocesan or diocesan-like group.
Bishops are ordinaries if they are in charge of a diocese, but you can be a bishop without being an ordinary: an auxiliary bishop, or a bishop who works for the Roman curia. And you can be an ordinary without being a bishop: abbots and provincial superiors of religious orders have juridical and pastoral authority over certain groups, but are not ordained bishops.

To allow a former Anglican bishop to stay in his marriage AND to be the ordinary of a group of Anglicans, the document would allow him to be ordained as a priest but to wear episcopal insignia and participate in larger Bishops' Conferences with retired status. Abbots are examples of this: they are only priests, but are ordinaries and wear the mitre and carry the crosier.

As far as doctrine is concerned, unsurprisingly, there is no concession at all. The Catechism of the Catholic Church is the norm. And although there is talk of maintaining Anglican liturgical forms, what that would look like is not clear. JPII created a smaller version of this with his Pastoral Provision.

Significantly, other Catholics may not join these Anglican groups unless married to an Anglican who is making the move, and former Catholic priests who became Anglican cannot return to Rome and still exercise their ministry.

Rome, it seems, has made an offer but has stood very firm on principles. Seems to be Benedict's style. Kinda what you'd expect from a...pope.

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Berlin

My Guy is in Berlin and sent this shot of the Brandenberg Gate. Twenty years ago there would have been a wall there, that symbol of the split between the Communist World and the Free World, aka The West. It marked the divide between West Berlin and the world of the German Democratic Republic, where hundreds of thousands of informants helped the Secret Police, the Stasi, keep tabs, and worse, on fully one-third of the population. All in the name of the greater good.

No human arrangement is without flaw. My Irish grandmother put it this way, "All human things, given time, go badly." Hibernian optimism at its best! Certainly no political or economic system lacks problems. But some, for all their flaws, allow for kinds of human flourishing that others do not.

The West, restless child of Athens and Jerusalem, of Christendom and Enlightenment, has dominated the planet for the last five centuries. Much of the result has been extraordinary improvement in life for many. Have there been costs? Of course. But this is unavoidable on Planet Earth. We are not an episode of Star Trek.

One of the most unfortunate, lamentable and frankly evil developments within the West --one which is both utterly Western and implacably anti-Western-- is Marxism. I have opined elsewhere that Marxism is a far greater evil than Nazism, the convenient whipping boy of so many of our highminded betters. Marx and his children and nephews and nieces continue, despite the failure of the Communist project, to bedevil the West. His ghost is active and the backwash of the dismantled Second World still infects the air.

I have mentioned my idea of the Seven Pillars of "progressive" or "liberal" ideology: multiculturalism, feminism, redistributionism, environmentalism, pacifism, secularism and transnationalism. They all stink of the Gramscian mode of Marx's vile enterprise: for the sake of ideal human equality, to make all humans equally miserable in practice.

The obsession with equality, to the exclusion of almost every other value, marks the political and social landscape of the West two decades after that Wall in Berlin came down. Masquerading as a grand vision of hope and change, justice and peace, it is an ideology born of envy and hatred and leads eventually, as Communism always did and does, to Orwellian tyranny, poverty and soulessness.

PS. Synchronicity? Just arrived home about an hour after posting and turned on the TV to find a story originating from...the Brandenburg Gate, about a Volkswagen called the Phaeton.

PPS. An email from Himself later in the day. Attending the celebration at the Gate, found himself moved by the place, symbolizing, as he sorta put it, the loss of possibility and the refinding of it. I like him.

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Aside

I don't post much about politics these days because it is so unremittingly depressing and my irritation is major. The feelings about B. Hussein Obama that I expressed during the campaign have remained intact, although I did not expect the serial outbreaks of rookie incompetence, thin-skinned pettiness and --with his responses or lack thereof to the Fort Hood massacre-- shockingly disconnected arrogance. I thought he would at least be able to make believe he gave a shit about the country's military. Like he does about gays.

So posting about that, or the biblically-sized unread healthcare bill on top of the apparently ineffectual hyper-massive bailouts that will make us a debtor nation for generations...what could I rant about that you could not read elsewhere and better expressed?

Hence, I think about sex.

Saw two guys on line recently who fit into my "impressive but not attractive" category. (Pic above is someone else. Both impressive AND attractive. Nice, no?) Some local guy called Rascally Randy, and a gay Italian model and actor named Alessandro. RR is a big, built, furry, handsome bearded Daddy with a killer smile. Very nice to look at. But unfortunately he thinks he's amusing, so he uploads humoresque videos to YouTube. Stick to silent stills, RR. Alessandro is a younger fella, darkly handsome, beautiful build and not, like RR, stuck on himself. But he is almost unreally beautiful and despite evidence of a lot of testosterone, muscle and fur, almost pretty.

Impressive guys, but not material I would fantasize over. I guess there is something about the unique, slightly flawed, lived-in guy that appeals to me. Good thing, because even though I have become handsome recently (!) Randy and Alessandro are way out of my league. Unique, slightly flawed and lived-in guys are not only appealing to me, but available to me.

Take The Boyo --I call him that because of his zest for life; he is a well-seasoned 55 years old.
You'd never find him on the cover of a magazine, and you could easily pass him on the street without turning your head. But if he walks into a store, or sits down at a table in a restaurant,
the clerk and the waiter are his new best friends...instantly. It is really amazing to watch. Something in the way he shouts --and he does shout-- "Hi", with a big grin, makes most people like him in a nanosecond. (Even my ex, who had a hard time getting used to him, told me that he was almost irresistibly likeable). They start smiling and talking and laughing before they know it. I love it. When he leaves, he turn to me with a grin and says, "My new best friend!"

This is an element in sexiness, a joy in life and a pleasure in experience, a magical power of opening other people up, an energetic playfulness centered on the other. Which he brings to almost everything he does. Wink wink. Part of sexiness is a gift for making the other person feel sexy. Damn, does he.

I'd take him over big handsome ain't-I-witty RRandy any day. And Alessandro..well, to be honest...ninety nine days out of a hundred. The Boyo's off in Europe still, so if Sandro were available this afternoon, I'd probably go for it. I'm pretty horny.

My ex and I were discussing our sexual histories recently and both agreed that the best sex we'd had in our lives was not with the best-looking and best-built men we'd slept with. Chemistry rules. Thank God.

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