Sunday, March 04, 2012

Balls and chains

(No, this is not a posting on gay S&M.)




Sometimes the traditional folks lack a sense of proportion*.

Just saw a video of a rally against samesex marriage outside the Maryland statehouse.  The crowd and the speakers were mostly Black. Black ministers going on about God and the sanctity of traditional marriage. With a 70% out-of-wedlock Black birthrate. C'mon. Really. That's embarrassing.

And a usually kinda hip and funny but very orthodox Catholic apologist decided to play off Brokeback Mountain against the marriage of Pocahantas and John Smith in The New World...And you think I come up with odd thoughts.

He decided to title his article Brokeback Evil. His point was that the sexual revolution was a revolt against the constraints of nature, both human nature and the larger system we are embedded in. There is certainly a lot of truth in that. Refusing to accept the constraints of nature is a problem for humans in most areas of life, of course, not just sex. A major division between utopians and realists is where that boundary lies.

And the burden of his piece was about how marriage was portrayed in both those films. In Brokeback, of course, because the focus is on the thwarted and tragic love affair between the two men, marriage is their prison, wives and children a burden. In New World, it is a place of connection, bravery and nobility. I get his point. But I gotta say, the title was egregiously nasty-by-association.

And then there is the oddity of placing these two stories side by side. Whatever their motivations, it seems the Brokeback boys now are wanting to get in on that Pocahantas/John Smith prison ball-and-chain thingy.

I've often thought that when Aristotle described us as rational animals he must have been having an unusually good day.



*Liberals, of course, despite their self-concept as empathetic and kind and caring and open and blahblahblah, can very easily be and often are as disproportionate as they come. They enjoy thinking of Limbaugh and Co. as "hatemongers" while utterly ignoring the oceans of bile that flow out of their own compatriots' mouths, pens and keyboards. One liberal Tweeter just announced that he was much happier about the death of Andrew Breitbart than of Osama bin Laden. But Ex Cathedra's readers know this.

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