Wow. Shocking.

Obama to delay DADT til "further down the road". Heh.

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Randoms

Being opposed to changing the definition of marriage so that it makes gender irrelevant does not mean that you hate homosexuals. Some gays, including most who have a public voice, equate opposition to gay marriage and hatred of homosexuals, aka homophobia.

I am opposed to affirmative action on the basis of race (or anything else) and to slavery reparations for blacks. You can say that makes me a racist. Go ahead. As I have said, neither that word nor the preceding one (homophobia) has much meaning to me.

A lot of this comes down to "If you don't agree with me and give me what I want, you are evil."

Adolescent.

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Been wandering through some Vatican II-loving Catholic blogs. God, do these folks never catch on? Same old same old routines and demands and dusty ideas of "renewal", wanting to turn Roman Catholicism into the Episcopal Church and stamping their feet because it doesn't seem to want to. Dudes. 1968 was a long time ago. Give it up. You can't make Catholicism be whatever you want it to be. You lost.

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Found an old article by a Catholic theologian, taking on another Catholic theologian about homosexuality. Pretty bright, pretty civil. The writer is traditional and after doing an assessment of the various arguments pro and con, asks a interesting question: how can specifically homosexual sex acts be said to support the goals of the Catholic tradition?

Leads me to wonder about how any sexual act except penile-vaginal intercourse with ejaculation, performed by a married man and woman, could support those goals? Which raises the question of what constitutes a sexual, as opposed to a non-sexual, act? The Bill Clinton problem: when is sex sex?

So, if a married couple starts in, kissing and stroking and rubbing. And then it moves to lots of skin-on-skin contact. And then genital contact. Oral sex, say, the woman on the man. Is the oral sex wrong? What if it's stimulation without ejaculation? Does it then become foreplay, like kissing and ok? Or is it a sin? What if the man ejaculates and then after his recovery, has penile-vaginal intercourse?

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The traditional theologian notes the current Catholic morality rejects homosexual sex because it is forbidden by positive divine law, does not fulfill the requirements of natural law, breaks the gender complementarity of the act of sexual love and is not a genuine communion of self-giving persons.

We all know, I think, that marital intercourse can be an act of communion, giving and generativity. And it can be an act of disconnected duty, selfishness and manipulation. Its "saving grace" is that even in the second case, a human being can be conceived. (Hence the medieval opinion that rape -praeter naturam- is less evil than masturbation -contra naturam-, because it least in rape the aim of nature is achieved, despite the illict mode.)

The traditional theologian, even if he grants that in a particular instance sex between two men can be subjectively experienced by them as intimate communion, self-giving, even a moment divine grace --and it can, I'm here to tell you-- he does not see how the acts themselves can be read in this way. I guess we are talking here not of the kissing, the caressing, etc. as much as of those activities where there is penetration and/or ejaculation.

That's where the primary problem lies, I suspect. Where it's always been.

Even if a lot of people have found sexual intercourse between man and woman vulgar or dangerous or impure or animalistic, no one seems to find it unnatural. No one says that it is degrading to the man as a man, or denaturing to the woman.

Especially in male-male sex, the very acts place at least one of the males' nature in question.
Male sex with a woman can be situationally turned into an act of humiliation, but it is not thought to be so in itself...except insofar as women, being thought very widely to be inferior to men, are naturally secondary to him.

But for a man to be on the receiving end of anal sex or on the oral end of oral sex has been very widely thought to be a kind of humiliation specifically of his maleness. After all, who is in that position by nature? Women.

Even in societies where male-male sex is condoned, it is almost universally the case that it is arranged on an age-grade or another hierachical gradation.

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Bumper sticker mind

On my way to the Comcast store for the third time in four days to get my TV reception fixed, I drove behind a socially conscious local whose bumpers proclaimed his and/or her values.

KPFA 94.1 Berkeley

Pretty well tells you what to expect. I was not disappointed.

It will be a great day when schools have all the money they need
and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.

Some people really are too stupid to live.

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Speaking of MSM

CNN finds it necessary to debrief and explain because a reporter asked The One a question He didn't like. Oh, the humanity!

After the years of self-righteous shark-pit feeding-frenzy behavior in the White House press room during the terms of W, stuff like this makes the top of my head crack with accumulated steam.

My opinion of journalists in general continues to plummet, though how much lower it can go I can't imagine. I hope to God none of my nieces or nephew ever decide they want to earn a living whoring like this. Such crap.

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And this will help us because?

The Washington Post, a longtime Obama friend, like most of the MSM, put this graph up, based on the independent assessment of the federal budget office. It compares the Bush deficits...remember him, the drunken sailor and his treasury-draining exsanguinary Iraq adventure (which seems to have worked, btw)...to the Obama deficits.

Do you have to be an economist to have the blood run out of your head on seeing this?

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Mush

A friend of a friend is off to a seminar north of SF, put on by a group which is also advertizing the following conference:

Toward a Global Shift: Seeding the Field of Collective Change

The time is now, to join together in community, to share our dreams, celebrate and take action -- co-creating a new vision for our shared future.

• Explore the forefront of positive transformation
• Learn to co-create a sustainable future
• Gain penetrating insights from pioneers
• Engage in creative dialogue with people from all over the globe

This stuff sounds like it was put together out of a New Age text generator program.
Zzzzzzz.

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Me not alone

Writer Charles Winecoff opines on gayness, leftism and marriage.

Canada vs America

The fate of the hot dog in Toronto. An instructive tale. Not only is the hot dog unhealthy, it is "un-diverse". (God, how I hate that word in all its forms.) If it has not yet suffered so in America, it is probably just a matter of time. Nanny rules. I loathe Nanny.

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Well put

Liberals are relativists, except where white male Christian American capitalist consumer gun-owners are concerned. Good and evil (with the above exception) are social constructs and culturally-determined.

Evan Sayet, former liberal, makes a nice connection between relativism and the liberal narrative:

"if nothing is better than anything else,
then that which failed must have been victimized."

He opines that the basic conservative/liberal difference is that conservatives accept the difference between good and evil. Liberals only consider evil those who accept the difference between good and evil. And racists. White racists.

I had a friend who was a passionate uber-liberal. He was in seminary with me. He became obsessed with discovering the theoretical foundations of Church authority, the power to determine what the Church believed and who belonged to the Church. Being Catholic, all that seemed pretty obvious to me, but not to him.

Of course, he decided that no one had that power, especially the people who said they did. And as for criteria of Church membership, he came to hold quite vehemently that the Church was meant to be an inclusive community and that the only ground for exclusion was that you excluded someone else. As you can see, his relativism was driven by his moralism, a hatred of authority (although he later became a devoted supporter of his liberal bishop) and rage over the fate of the excluded.

As theology, Catholic theology, it is, well, kinda silly. But very popular among the Vatican II types (of which I used to be one, full disclosure and all), especially "feminist theologians".

Anyway, I digress. But once you become a relativist, you are a liberal.

"if nothing is better than anything else,
then that which failed must have been victimized."

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Cocolitzli

Cortez conquered the Aztecs starting in 1519. Two huge epidemics in the 1540's wiped out 80% of the native population. Eighty percent, over sixteen million people, died, leaving only two million. Demography is destiny.

It had been commonly assumed that one of the European illnesses, such as smallpox or typhus, was the killer, partly because most Spanish, priests excepted, were little affected by it. But it seems now that it was a hemorrhagic fever, like hanta, native to the New World. The outbreaks followed the same pattern as the 1993 hanta: several years of drought followed by wet weather.

The disease is called Cocolitzli.