Since it's pride month, here's something to reconsider.

According to the recent documentary "What is a Woman?" the average person undergoing transsexual medical treatments represents a $1.3 million payday to pharmaceutical companies.

Those of you who have rattled the bars of socmed griping about the evils of so-called capitalism and market forces and the bourgeoise and whatnot, keep that in mind.

At the grocery store I frequent, in between the Muzak they have ads for special sales they have, convenient but obscure services they provide, and other trendy things.

"Trendy things" might just be about holidays.  Like, leading up to Memorial Day, they talked about grilling hot dogs and how you'll need buns for them and beer to wash it all down, but they also praised our soldiers for their sacrifices.

In that same vein, one of the ads is about their cooperation with some outfit called something like the Fluid Foundation.  It's apparently about providing gender-neutral clothing so people can express themselves through fashion in a non-binary way.

Meanwhile most people can describe their casual outfits as something like "jeans and a t-shirt," and the uniform for that grocery store's employees, whether male or female, masculine or feminine, is a blue polo shirt and black or tan pants.

Sure, there are variations available for civilians as well as employees, but it's all down to personal preferences, see?

Like it always was.

This foundation or whatever the clothing company is calling itself isn't doing something innovative or groundbreaking.  It's repackaging what you were already getting into something trendy.

Why?  So you'll spend more money on the fad in your rush to get on the bandwagon.

They were only half right when they said "No service is free; if you're not paying for it, you're the product."  There are also movements you're encouraged to buy into but it's like brand loyalty with a moral dimension--or rather, a facade, something just painted on top.  The movement itself is the product, but if it reaches its destination, its goal, it will no longer need to exist, and the "movers" will be out of a job.  They might say they look forward to that day, but for most humans, big money that easy is too great a temptation.

So those movements "move," all right; but they don't go anywhere.

Another case of dishonest eisegesis

Saw a video on YouTube recently about pirate trivia. A lot of it was interesting, including an item about how pirates practiced gay marriage. This surprised me a little bit because I didn't think "practicing marriage" was on the list of typical pirate activities at all. So they went on for a minute about how two pirates might decide to throw in together: they might pool their share of the spoils, if one died the other would get something for it and was responsible for making final arrangements...and they, I kid you not, would occasionally share a prostitute when they were in port. They'd share a prostitute? Kinks aside, that doesn't sound like anything that should be described as a marriage, gay or otherwise. What it sounds like is a mutual power of attorney compact between two close friends. It wasn't long ago that two men could be friends without being presumed to be lovers, and even something as seedy as splitting a prostitute wouldn't have cast doubt on that. But, anything to muddy the waters, eh? Keep this in mind next time someone makes a similar claim.

So my employer recently got bought by a much larger company, one with deep enough pockets and enough stability that it recognizes the value in employee engagement even when we don't hit our revenue targets.

One of the manifestations is a monthly newsletter.  It's just a four-page glossy little thing written by the employees; articles range from good business and manufacturing principles to informative and acculturative stuff about the new parent company to important things about what we do at our facility.  All well and good, if often predictable enough to warrant just a quick skim.

Then there was a cover page article by our new plant manager, imported from the parent company.

Wouldn't you know it, it's about how they value Inclusiveness and Diversity.  In the opening paragraphs there even was the line"Diversity and inclusiveness is at the forefront of everything we do."

Really?  We're a manufacturing facility.  Diversity and inclusiveness may inform everything we do, but to put it ahead of production of quality product is to place the cart in front of the horse.  Are there hourly employees not getting scheduled to work because we shun them?  No.  Do employees of different races work well together?  Actually yes, because they are united in their outrage at the former, draconian owners and the hostile, dysfunctional legacy they left; although I think the new owners hoped for something a little higher minded.

Driving these things for their own sake?  You won't want to do it the way it's been done before now.  First pass yield is bad, customer satisfaction is worse.  We can pat ourselves on the back for our acceptance of each other while we wait in line at the unemployment office, if we have any more never-hit-our-revenue-target quarters like all the ones we've had since we got acquired.

The article went on with a paragraph that went something along the lines of "Diversity of talent...and apropos of nothing, we're pretty smug about our transgender employee group."

With what, two members, at different sites?  It's a big company but it's not that big.  Diversity of talent, if it means "broad base of expertise," I get; but putting this stuff together?  Props to them for coming up with a name that is a pronounceable acronym, but how does having your genitals surgically mutilated and making a wardrobe shift afford you fresh insights into our engineering problems?  And why is it anybody's business?  I'm not an especially private person, but I don't make a point of dragging my social proclivities into work discussions; apparently I act straight enough that people who would be inclined to make an assumption are comfortable doing so, but then again, I do happen to be middle aged and single, and even in this day and age you can interpret that differently.

See what they did?  It's a bait and switch, or in the political arena it would be a caption bill.  They start talking about one thing, and then take a half step to the side and make it about something related but distinct, all the while pretending they're still talking about the first thing.

This is a feature, not a bug.

Like when they say "Why don't you want gay people to get married?  They should be allowed to love whomever they want."

You can have a reason for refraining from extending legal coupling benefits to pairs who are not in a position to bring the next generation of citizens into society, and hence do not have heroic need for such benefits.  But permitting or banning how people feel about each other?  No way to control that, and in fact there have never been laws against  people's feelings, so now it seems like you're the one trying to change society for the worse, and you might as well give up trying.

I just hope our company is inclusive and tolerant enough not to fire me if I can keep my mouth shut about not changing my performance expectations of the woman from the lab who recently started growing a beard and insisting everyone call her Bill.

Although I will be interested in watching people grapple with the issue of male athletes who want to "identify" as female so they can compete in women's leagues and divisions.

One of these things is not like the other...

So I'm in a colleague's office Saturday (yes, Saturday...yes, I'm looking for a new job) and he pulls his web browser up to show me some pictures of a dog breed he's interested in.  His home page is some news headline site.  I didn't catch which one it was.

What I saw from the headlines really made me wonder about our priorities--or at least the priorities of who passes for journalists these days.

Most of the top stories were about the Olympics:  who took gold, what America got, and so on.  Another one or two were about all the violence in Syria.  I was pleasantly surprised to see that because especially with the Olympics on, news about the Levantine powder keg has been perhaps not where it should be.

Okay, so maybe old news is no news, "dolphins still missing" and all that.  But still, if nothing else, the Christian genocide in the Middle East gets almost as much attention as the back-alley-type abortion mills that we were warned would crop up if abortion were never legalized (but, it turns out, cropped up anyway).  But I digress.

So there are all these articles about the Olympics, and a few about violence in Syria, and one other one. What was that one about?

Some actress turns out to be a lesbian.

Wow.  That's really on par with a major, peaceful, international event; and with violence in the Middle East?  Color me dissenting.

Okay, I know that in this day and age it's still sometimes to explain why, for example, your parents may never have grandchildren.  I don't mean to trivialize that or any other particular reason.  In fact, just the opposite.

Part of the reason it's still sometimes tough to talk about your sexuality in public?  It's because sexuality is not a public matter.  It's normally addressed discreetly because it's such an important and often delicate topic.  Everybody poops, too, but that's not an excuse for you to do it in public.  And I don't want to see any pedantic criticisms about me comparing sexuality to defecation; you'll notice first that I didn't specify any kind or sort of sexuality, and you'll notice also that I'm only pointing out that they are both discreet topics, which any lucid adult will acknowledge without getting hung up on any differences or similarities that I am not bringing up at all.

I realize a lot of this is part of a concerted effort to normalize homosexuality, to get people used to the idea that it's out there, it's everywhere, it's natural and normal and no big deal.  Granted, that's going to be tough when it makes the headlines every time someone well-known or a close relative of someone well-known comes out; and when people introduce themselves in irrelevant situations by "Hi, I'm So-and-so, and I'm gay."  I don't care.  It doesn't matter.  Are you interviewing housemates and are worried about the drama of renting a room to a bigot?  Okay, that's worth considering.  Did your pushy mother and father compel you to go on a blind date with someone they think will be compatible enough with you to get them the aforementioned grandchildren?  Okay, good to get that out in the open right up front so you're not wasting each other's time.

Otherwise?  It's not news, pal.  It just isn't.  Word's going to get out enough when the gossip rags start mentioning actress A being more than a little chummy with actress B.

You know who else introduces themselves by "Hi, I'm So-and-so, and I'm X?"  Alcoholics.  But they don't do it for the acceptance of everyone else.  They do it to admit it to themselves.  And they don't have the media embedded in their AA meetings.

Even the famous ones.

As a nation, we turned a corner yesterday.

I'm not sure which bothers me more, the fact that SCOTUS decided that no one has any business opposing gay marriage in California when Californian legislators can't be bothered to defend traditional marriage, or the fact that POTUS has merely promised that he would refrain from trying to bring to heel any dissenting groups.

I concede to painting with an overly broad brush.  I just had to read the verbiage about California residents not having standing to oppose the overturn of Proposition 8 several times before I gave up trying to see how the logic was not actually applied in reverse.  Would people with same-sex attraction be permitted to participate in the debate if they opposed gay marriage, or would they also be told that they don't have a right to promote their opinions or reasoned arguments because they're on the wrong side of history?  How tidy:  you're on the winning team or you're not allowed to play.

As for the president, well, I've seen him promise not to abuse his power in the past.  One time, he even said he wasn't going to get into the whole gay marriage thing.  Now he's reassuring Christians that they will be able to indulge their own bigotry undisturbed in private.  Of course, he won't be able to stamp out every last vestige of orthodox morality, that's too vast and tedious a task to bother with, but there are terms for an announcement like this.  In sparring, it's called a telegraph.  In literature, it's foreshadowing.  In naval warfare, it's a shot across the bow.  

I do think it's true that there's a supernatural conspiracy here, and possibly not a human one on top of it; and thus I agree that ultimately gay marriage is a vehicle to persecute the Church.  What scares me on this matter is I cannot imagine the circumstances in which homosexuals will be thrown under the bus when (that is, how) they cease to be useful to that end.

I wish people had some perspective.  Gay people have never been banned from marriage; they just don't have the right to marry absolutely anyone they wish.  This prohibition is in place for all of us.  Romance literature is chockablock with stories about unrequited or thwarted love.

"Why, Ed, don't you want people to marry whomever they love?"

Setting aside the question of whether the person they love loves them back and wants to be married, the government has no truck with whom someone does or does not love.  Marriage is to provide a stable environment for raising children, and well-raised children make for a healthy nation, so the government is wise to promote that.

Stray into emotional territory, and you open the door wide to abuse.  I promise you, there is nothing the government can do in applying itself to the emotional domain that is not going to be abusive.

Finally, an anecdote illustrating the "ruthless narcissism" Mark Shea describes comprising this whole movement.

I have a coworker who is terribly fond of using politically incorrect humor. He loves talking about cooking meat and killing animals in front of one of our technicians who is an on-again, off-again vegan; he talks in front of his female coworkers about how he orders his wife to do this and orders her not to do that, and how women shouldn't be allowed to do various things; when talking to one of our black technicians, he often refers to "your kind." He doesn't mean a word of it and he doesn't offend any of the people he teases (trust me, they dish it right back). But this morning, he was asked if he had talked to the sole admitted lesbian in the office. She's a sweetheart, but he said "What, are you crazy?  I'm not stupid!"

Some people just want to mind their own lives, and when they do it really is nobody's business, but it

Take a lesson from Evangelicals, abortion clinic bombers, and Phil Plait:  you're not going to prick consciences and win hearts and minds by being a jerk.  For every George Takei there are ten Andrew Sullivans, and the Sullivans are undoing whatever progress was being made by the no-big-deal desensitization plan.  Granted, a lot of progress has been made on that front, judging from prime time TV and the nigh-complete failure of everyone to articulate the fact that the Boy Scout thing from a few weeks ago now means that sexuality has to be discussed openly with ten year old boys instead of leaving the sensitive topic to be broached at a discreet time.

This ain't exactly Gandhi's M.O.  Don't pretend it's even close.

Post hoc procrastination roundup

I haven't had much time to write lately, as you might surmise. I'd try to jot down a few thoughts at work while on break, to e-mail myself later, but I never seemed to get around to checking my e-mail for this account and cleaning the prose up.  I'm taking some time now, though, and what with it being so far after the fact on some of these issues, I'm just going to take some pot shots at several of them at once.

Pope Francis: I like his style.  I think Benedict was more my speed, I think we would have benefited from having someone in charge who made a point of focusing on things like orthodoxy and liturgy, but God knows better than I do and it's not like I really have a problem with the preferential option for the poor. My only worry would have been if people would see Francis give an inch on social justice and then take a mile in the direction we're already headed.  But, maybe someone who doesn't give the first impression of "Oh, he's that kind of Catholic because he's politically conservative," which tended to be the [mis]understanding by modern pundits of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, would seem less threatening to people who....aren't politically conservative.  Apparently it's the right time to show that you can help the needy and still stand for something more foundational than the endless advance of novel civil rights.  Plus, it gives the old Jesuit conspiracy theorists lots of fodder to play with it, and we're one step closer to being done with the silliness of the alleged prophecy of Malachy.  Also, it was interesting to see early and frequent criticism from people who are ignorant of the College of Cardinals or at least ignorant of the limits of their understanding of the Church; after hearing and reading comments from both Catholics and non-Catholics like “There was no one of intellectual stature after Ratzinger,” “John Paul packed the College full of yes-men,” "The only thing we have to look forward to is a papacy of mediocrity, because there is no one to choose from other than lousy bureaucrats” and “I don’t like him; it was a political move, he’s just the first pope from Latin America,” I know I can sleep easily knowing he's already made all the right enemies.

The IRS scandal: Sure, maybe Republicans did much the same under Dubya. I don't know why it wouldn't have gotten more press; I'm still inclined to believe that reporting is more honest during Republican administrations because reporters are happier to air the GOP's dirty laundry, but whether it was just covered up better or they just focused more on warrentless wiretaps, it's happening now; as Mark Shea says, Obama voters, own this.

The Boy Scout decision to accept openly gay boys:  I don't think it was a mistake to be accepting, but I think getting drawn into the debate to where they felt they had to say something one way or the other was a mistake.  I don't know how much has changed since I was active in Scouts, but no, we didn't really talk about girls or sex much at all, what with busy doing boy stuff and camping and learning about good citizenship and character.  There was one boy I know of who came out of the closet in college, and I don't know if he was hiding it the whole time or hadn't quite figured it out for himself yet (my tangential knowledge suggests this was common, especially so before homosexuality got normalized), but it just didn't matter, and while most of the guys in my patrol probably would have been more scandalized if he'd said something to us when he was SPL, we still would have been a bit off-put if other guys just started talking about what he liked about girls.  It's just not the place for it, and that is the whole pitfall. If there's someone who can help a confused kid, great; I think that's why the national council ruled the way it did. But it introduces sexuality explicitly where it should never have been in the first place. On top of that, how are they going to handle all the gay Eagle Scouts when they hit their 18th birthday? It's one thing when all the concerned parties in a scandal are minors, but how long is the fear of gay ephebophilia going to withstand the pressure of youths who want to have their sexuality approved--and behind them, the pressure of real gay predators who have just been waiting for this target-rich environment to expose itself?  And I'm kind of surprised the LDS Church didn't kick up more of a fuss, what with Scouting being a huge component in its youth program for boys; for years, the Mormons provided the backbone in resisting encroachment by the gay agenda.  Again, just to summarize, I don't think gay boys should be kicked out of Scouting--a concrete, masculine but otherwise asexual environment is probably the most healthful place for a confused youth; but Scouting should never have gone down this road.  There's no way to answer "Have you stopped beating your wife?" without sounding guilty, and there's no way to address the issue without introducing it into Scouting culture.

Meh, I thought this was going to be brief, but it's late and I'm tired and I have to work today, so if I think of anything else worth going over old ground for, you'll be the first to know.

Need proof that the MSM has a liberal bias?

I submit that the following evidence is representative, if perhaps a bit inflammatory; abortion is the example I give, and I recognize that the lines between Life and Choice are not drawn perfectly down the middle aisle.

The Bad Catholic has two posts with videos from the March for Life.

Mark Shea has more posts than I could hope to write, but in his defense, it's kind of his job.

Shameless Popery...well, you get the idea.


If you don't care to follow the links, each shows how the March for Life, attended by hundreds of thousands of pro-life demonstrators, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade was anything but news, but the relatively scant counter-protesters got disproportionate coverage, with interviews focusing on asking Planned Parenthood executives questions that suggest the underrealized utopia that consequence-free sex was supposed to usher in was mainly due to logistical difficulties.

And yes, I realize that I'm just rolling a few Catholic blogs.  But hey, the hard work's already been done, and sometimes being fair and balanced, so to speak, means presenting something with bias opposite to the usual so a lucid mind can consider the merits of both sides; and like I said, I consider this to be a representative, if dramatic, example.

You know, just to mix it up a bit, I'm going to link a couple gems from the Zombietime blog (which may not be suitable for those with delicate sensibilities):

• Taxonomy of a Fraud
• The Red Cross Ambulance Incident

There are some other articles there that go into more detail.  For those not in the know, Zombie is a photographer in the San Francisco area who, despite not being particularly conservative, finds much blog fodder in the incoherence of the fringe Left and the intellectual bankruptcy of its alleged elites.

Recent disinformation about so-called gay marriage in the early Church

Recently, some hokum has been making the rounds of the Intertubes suggesting that, in the early days of the Church, gay marriage was not just recognized, but sanctioned and blessed.

The evidence ranges from circumstantial to falsified.

I won't add too much to the discussion here; the heavy lifting has already been done by Jimmy Akin and Mark Shea, who in turn cite more detailed articles that debunked the source of the "ancient gay marriage" myth when it came out almost twenty years ago:  a book written by John Boswell, late professor of history at Yale, which (except in that it claimed to be honest history instead of claiming to be a novel full of historical facts) is The DaVinci Code of gay marriage--something appealing only to those whose itching ears can only be satisfied by the hope that such scandalous ideas are true.

One of the articles--I won't link it, but you can get there from Mark's and Jimmy's sites if you really want--that has resurrected this notion attempts to describe the ritual as a wedding mass:  hands joined, vows and blessings made, followed by the Eucharist and a celebratory feast.

Um, hello?  It's a religious ceremony; of course there will be blessings.  Vows?  Could be marriage, could be joining a religious order or the priesthood, could even be one of the other sacraments, or something else completely.  They're Catholics/Orthodox; of course there will be the Eucharist during and a celebratory feast after.  If it were a wedding in an eastern church, there also would have been a crowning, but instead of that we only have this reference to holding hands.  

Well, that and bald assertions, like "While homosexuality was technically illegal from late Roman times, homophobic writings didn’t appear in Western Europe until the late 14th century. Even then, church-consecrated same sex unions continued to take place."  I guess Paul's allusions to Sodom don't count, since he technically wrote in Judea for the most part rather than Western Europe, but "gay marriage kept going on under the radar" is assuming the conclusion.

Maybe Boswell would have done well to consider the "current events" side of history before finding a publisher, see what modern trends and activities linger that are descended from practices of the time period of interest.  Maybe he would have been surprised to learn that this adelphopoiesis still goes on, or maybe he only would have been disappointed, instead, to learn that it is a blessing of friendships, not of romantic relationships.

It's sad in many ways.  The word used to describe a fraternal relationship between men is adelphopoiesis, which anyone familiar with the largest city in Pennsylvania would be literate enough to recognize as something other than eros, despite Boswell's insistence on translating it as "Office of the Same Sex Union."  Ah, but is it maybe a euphemism, or a misunderstanding arising from blind homophobia?  Okay, then where's the talk about gay sons pooling their inheritances?  Where's the talk of them adopting successors to continue the family name or business?  Where are the references to mundane relationships based on brotherly love?  How are we to know the difference?  Surely not so much time has passed that I am the last person to remember friendships between members of the same sex being understandably described without the use of terms like "man-crush" and "bromance," without even needing to be qualified with the word "platonic"--after all, I'm only middle aged.

But maybe, if a "bromance" is just "the kind of gay relationship that nominally straight men are comfortable having," then there is no meaningful difference between a friendship and a "relationship," and if these two things are distinguished despite having no differences, then one might argue that gay marriage is also distinct from traditional marriage for no good contemporary reason, for no real difference.

Maybe that's just what they want.

Two stupid things I've heard, relating to politics/democracy:

Abortion: "Needs to be made affordable/less restricted because it's the law of the land, and if it's not universally available, it's being discriminated against."
 BS. It's a medical practice, not a citizen, and therefore has no rights and is not subject to discrimination laws, but rather to the same regulation as any other operation.

Gay marriage: Voters in MA or PA or somewhere, so it goes, have the same right to vote on the matter as those in CA.
We live in a hybridized democratic republic, but that doesn't mean you're entitled to vote on any issue you want at any point. No. Voting is only one part of the process and only comes at certain times. At other times and places, go campaigning. Don't complain that the movement in different states is in different stages, except to call attention to more or less progress is being made in one state than another. That can motivate people to be more active. It's as fitting (which is to say, not at all) to demand to vote on the east coast because people on the west coast are, as it was to ask Bush to step down early so Obama could get a head start on saving the country.  Keep talking that way, though, and you'll give the impression that you or your cause or people on your team are entitled to special civic and legal privileges, which is distasteful to people who are aware that you haven't earned the right.

"Why doesn't the law allow someone have a spouse of the same sex?"
"What would be the point?"
"I love him; it should be me who gets to make life decisions with him; or for him, and him for me, if we can't make decisions for ourselves."
"The state is not interested in how you feel about someone.  It rightly sees that it has no business butting into things based on sentimental motivations."
"You love your wife."
"Yes, and we are also trying to create the next generation of citizens. "
"We can--"
"Yes, you can adopt in some jurisdictions, but you don't need to be married to do that.  That justification has already been taken off the table."
"Who is the state to stop two consenting adults making a private decision to share their lives--"
"Hold the boat here, your complaint was about the law, originally.  The state hasn't tried to stop you from living together so far, you or any other couple, gay and straight.  What you want is public approval, or else you wouldn't be insisting on getting the laws changed and sending out invitations to attend your 'private decision to share' ceremony at a public venue."

Some time ago I was following a discussion about gay marriage over at ISCA. There's a lot of material ripe for dissection that I read, but instead of attacking the whole issue, I want to relay a few comments that were made along the way in order to capture the state of the debate.  Quotes are from the pro-gay-marriage side; my comments follow.


"Gay people need marriage because their power of attorney for their partners can be challenged by blood relatives."
It  can anyway.

"The child argument has nothing to do with the issue of marriage."
It has everything to do with marriage, as anyone with a lick of historical sense can tell you.

"A marriage is a committment of two people to each other. Why does it matter what their relative genders are?"
Because there are other kinds of commitments between people where their gender has nothing to do with what the commitment is about.  If two men or two women--or a woman and a man--open a business, it's irrelevant.  If two people want to get married, if it's a man and a woman they can have kids, and that's an important difference.

"I haven't seen any logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments against homosexual marriage."
You're defining anything relying on natural law or absolute truth and morals as religious, which is a cop-out.  John C. Wright used to get that kind of criticism even when he was an atheist arguing for traditional marriage, which says to me that critics who make such arguments rather won't see logical, non-moral, non-religious arguments...although I'm not sure why I should be persuaded by someone who would be willing to say "Okay, so maybe X is immoral, but I want to do it anyway."  If your argument for sodomy isn't inapplicable to murder, then maybe you'd best go back to the drawing board.

"Repealing sodomy laws hasn't led to gay marriage..."
 It's leading there now; hence this debate.

"How does letting two faggots marry infringe on your right to bang your wife at night? Does it suddenly invalidate your marriage? Of course not."
Watch the language, pal.  I know it's kind of personal, but if you're the only one throwing around inflammatory language, it's not everyone except you who is going to look like a bigot.  That aside, it's not just about who gets to have sex with whom; that's not all there is to a marriage, and if two gay men wanted to get married, I would have thought they would be interested in the other aspects of being wedded as well.  If not, why are we having this conversation?

"Folks who oppose gay marriage just say 'it goes against tradition' or 'it goes against nature' when really government should not be involved in it to begin with."
Then we have nothing to talk about.  Just throw that baseball over the fence so no one can play with it, and stop wasting our time.

"You are aware that there has been absolutely no interest expressed in inter-species marriage anywhere in Massachusetts, right?"
Keep in mind that one woman had "married" a dolphin in 2006, before this debate took place, so I wonder about the incredulity of the person who made this criticism.  Then again, the dolphin wasn't from Massachusetts.

"Actually, we're not talking about changing the basic foundation of marriage.  We're talking about dumping marriage as something that the state can regulate, and going only with civil unions for all."
So will civil unions be regulated by the state?   If so, that would be a distinction without a difference.  If not, it's still defining away the problem--something is being created that is supposed to be just the same as marriage, with all the benefits, but lacking the thing for which the privileges of marriage were afforded to couples in the first place.

"I do not believe that government should legislate morality beyond any which deprives others of their basic civil rights. E.g., if what I choose to do does not harm you, deprive you of your property, or kill
you, then what I choose to do should not be regulated by law."
Your only standards are theft and assault?  Bravo!  Still, it won't hold up if abortion is going to get a pass--anyone you don't like will just get recategorized as an entity that lacks the right not to be harmed or deprived of anything.
But don't get snared by this argument.  The deprivation or providence of civil rights is the matter at hand itself.  This critic is assuming the conclusion in establishing the jurisdiction of government.  Marriage isn't a basic civil right, anyway, or else we could rightfully sue anyone or anything that kept us from marrying whom or what we wanted--not just a minister or justice of the peace that didn't want to play house with us, but the would-be paramour who turned us down, a jealous spouse, a parent, a coroner.

"Pedophilia and bestiality are a straw man. They're illegal."
No, they're warnings against the slippery slope.  I refer skeptics to NAMBLA and the woman who "married" the aforementioned dolphin.  Polygamists are also waiting in the wings.  Oh, didn't you notice that "Big Love" show?  Don't you think it's an attempt to desensitize us to that kind of thing?    If you're still skeptical, I refer you to the Internet.  Start by looking up Rule 34; if it's out there, there are people who would rather not risk going to jail for what they're viewing or doing.

"The religious types should start with atheist-atheist marriage."
Why?  Atheists are capable of conceiving children, provided one is a man and the other is a woman.  This has been the whole point of the argument.  Stay on topic.

"It's taken decades for the establishment to get as far as it has in accepting homosexuality as just the fairly minor natural variation that it is, and to get beyond the moral stigma of it."
Predispositions to sociopathy and diabetes are also "minor natural variations," but they have far-reaching consequences.   Further, I submit that much of the "acceptance" you claim is actually mere tolerance (remember when that word meant something?), heavily seasoned with fatigue and then subsumed by the fear of being branded a cross-burning-caliber bigot.
Honestly, the normal reaction to a campaign that consists of things like the Folsom Street Fair (beware:  a even a Google image search with the Strict setting isn't work-safe), punctuated by rhetoric about wanting to be treated normally, is not "Huh, I guess it was silly of me to entertain any anxiety about their lifestyle--I mean, orientation."

"If we want gays to be less promiscuous, then legalizing their relationships would seem like a logical way of doing that."
That would be a thoughtless and insane kind of logic.  "Open" heterosexual marriages and adultery already exist and the trend in the past century has been to destigmatize promiscuity.  I take it back--it wouldn't be thoughtless and insane logic, it would just be logic unburdened by the evidence.

"Damn right straights are not more promiscuous. In fact that is why heterosexuals never get AIDS, there is no teen pregnancy problem, and there is a 0% divorce rate for adultery."
Straw man.  Okay, hyperbole, but AIDS is still more common in the gay community--when was the last time you heard of an "AIDS roulette" frat party?  More or less often than a gay AIDS roulette party?  More or less often than a swingers party?

"What this all boils down to, and forgive me for the crassness of the whole thing, is that when these people think of gays marrying, they are thinking of two sweaty gay men pounding the hell out of each other, and they can't get the thought out of their minds. (not to mention that some of them have gay tendencies themselves, or watching lesbian porn gets them off, or whatever.)"
Wishful thinking--the most vocal opponents must be those closest to conversion.  That's a real enough phenomenon, but it just smacks of "You're going to be so humiliated when you discover the depths of your own hypocrisy, and I'm going to get a big laugh at your grief."  Classic example of assuming everything is about sex and power.  Do we need to get out of people's bedrooms, or do you need to get out of people's heads?

"Gay couples want to and do raise children, just like you."
Maybe so, but they never tell me that, only their concerned friends do, and then only rarely. All they tell me is they want power of attorney and less harrassment. Even obnoxious activists deserve less harassment than they get, but that ain't the same thing.  But even if two men have a kid, who and where is the mother?  If two women have a kid, who and where is the father?  Did you have a kid so you could bring some joy into the world, or to satisfy your own desires?  Not that that's a problem exclusive to gay parents--who hasn't seen Hollywood celebrities with trophy children?--but we may not be able to convey the meaning of marriage until we can remind people that children are not pets.

"I didn't choose to marry because of the exclusivity of the marriage institution, and I don't know anyone else who did either."
A straight answer from a married straight man.  That's the danger of playing the victim card:  it's not always All About You.

"Gay marriage won't lead to dolphin marriage. One woman does not a slippery slope make. There are no human-dolphin families or human-dog families in need of legal protection. It's a red herring."
What led us to dolphin marriage is what's leading us to gay marriage, is what led us to the guy who "married" the Eiffel Tower. It would be more of a red herring if the dolphin so-called marriage hadn't actually, you know, happened; or if there were actual human-dolphin or human-dog "families."

"Clearly, many heterosexual people engage in unsavory activities as well. And yet, because they already 'have' marriage, it is acceptable to dismiss those activities among heterosexuals, while using them as a reason for denying marriage to homosexuals."
Unsavory behavior is no more support for gay marriage than it is evidence against straight marriage.  What are they trying to make us think happens?  A guy gets caught by the police in the act of statutory rape, and he says "Hey, I'm a married man; my wife lives next door."  "Oh, all right," says the cop, "off ya go?"

"'Unequal treatment is a red herring' is a red herring. No gay person would want to marry someone of the opposite sex, just as a straight person wouldn't want to marry one of the same sex."
I'm a straight man, but there are plenty of women I wouldn't want to marry, not even counting girls and wives of other men.  Even if I did, there are reasons for the rules against it.  Same as there are reasons for keeping me from marrying some dude.
Regardless, historically, and still in many places, weddings are arranged with little concern for the druthers of the husband and wife. Was it ideal? No. Was it legitimate? Yes.

"And when did society have to "approve" on my ability to have sex with wife or anyone else for that matter? I didn't realize that the rest of the world had to say yes or no to my actions or my marriage."
Marriage is a social institution, not a private one.  Don't confuse it with sex, which is supposed to be a private act (cf. Folsom Street Fair).  Don't you remember having a public ceremony followed by signing a contract with witnesses?  Don't you remember demanding approval?  Don't you remember demanding rights, not just privacy? It used to be about privacy, though--that's why we're still making slippery slope arguments.

"We just want to be able to protect our families, relationships and property - y'know: the original basis for the social construct of marriage."
Wow, great--'cept that relationships and property can exist outside of marriage, and property can be regulated independently, but families come from marriage, which some want, but from who's occupying all the bandwidth, it doesn't seem like a lot.

"I say do away with marriage as a civil/legal construct."
So you are against marriage, after all.

"You say marriage is about procreation and an adequate nurturing environment. I say it's a ritual contract declared in a public space; it's like a notary in that it gives more value to your commitment because it had been witnessed by a third party."
What does it accomplish that cohabitation and power of attorney don't get you, if you're not interested in kids?  If you want it notarized, get a notary for yourself.  Plenty of other public rituals, some that can even get you tax breaks if you want to make a job of it.

"Being gay is not wrong, and since its not wrong, gay couples should have the option to marry if they want. It's not something that heterosexual individuals have a right to deny them."
Being diabetic is not wrong, so people with diabetes should have the option to eat all the sugar they want, and non-diabetics shouldn't be party poopers about it.
Do I need to point out the difference between doing and being, here?

It's this kind of stuff that makes me roll my eyes when secprogs talk about conservatives being the ones living in a fantasy land and reality having a liberal bias. Secular progressives--post-moderns, anyway--don't even have as strong a concept of reality or truth as conservatives (although there is some doubt about the relationship Science has with Truth--but that's a separate matter). Concrete evidence for historical understandings of marriage?  Religious claptrap.  Statistical evidence that it's more expedient to raise children with a father and a mother than with some other combination?  Words that shouldn't be spoken because they have power to hurt their cause, not because they have the power of fact behind them.  Sure, invent your own explanation, and of course someone who disagrees will seem hallucinatory.

Social studies curricula soon to attempt explaining the relevance of alternative sexual preferences to the development of California and America

Mark Shea and others can be visited for a more substantial discussion of the subject itself.  Personally, moral objections aside, it seems an exceptionally trivial matter and a case of misprioritized attention, like Jefferson and Franklin arguing about the font in which the Declaration of Independence would be printed but not getting around to nailing down how King George's abuses justified secession.  Maybe supporters of the movement look at it as an issue whose time has come, that we've finally progressed enough to seriously entertain notions in the classroom of tying sexual preference to political accomplishments.  Maybe somebody from an alphabet-soup orientation didn't feel that having whole programs of study at various universities was enough to make them feel like and to show everyone else they were a part of something bigger and unignorable, and that classroom time should be taken away from geology or fractions to satisfy this need.

Whatever.  The one thing I can focus on in this debacle right now is how a whole slew of bored, ADHD, and nonconformist students are now going to get nailed for not being politically correct in the classroom, instead of merely being bored, having trouble focusing, or being nonconformist.

Sure as kindergartners get charged with sexual harassment, this is the direction classroom discipline is going to take.  I never thought a one-size-fits-all approach to discipline was appropriate once I was old enough to know the difference between a student who just needed structure in his life and a student with a neurological problem, but neither do I think it is appropriate to treat children like well-informed (or ignorant but responsible for being well-informed--they're students, by definition they're uninformed) free moral agents.  Really, save the "scared straight" routine for the kids who are too hard to reach by normal pedagogical means.

Has it been in the headlines yet?  Not to my knowledge; but it will be.

Celibacy is not the problem

I read an online article several days ago, written by one of our archbishops whose name escapes me now, that argued that the Scandal in the Church was not caused and is not propagated by the rules of celibacy in the western Church.  I thought I'd already read it some time before, as many of you probably have actually done so, but it only seemed familiar in the broadest strokes, in the terms of things I would have known anyway.

The usual points were made:  celibacy's a choice willingly made in pursuit of a vocation, it's been practiced for far longer than the problems associated with the Scandal have been going on (not denying that "protect the reputation of the Church at all costs" hasn't happened at other times and for other reasons), and the rate of sexual abuse is about half what it is in the general population (according to his numbers--I'd heard they were about the same, but the point holds), so it doesn't make sense to cast sole or primary blame on something that doesn't make a net difference in the outcome.

Two responses, conveniently located on the first page of comments (actually, probably on every page), caught my attention this time.

One was the bizarre accusation that pedophiles gravitate towards the priesthood in particular (along with other child-centered professions like teaching) because of the "absolute power" priests have over children.  I won't argue the "access to children" point, but power?  No priest alive knows the power that was held, or at least imagined today to be held, by priests of the late Middle Ages, whenever clericalism was at its peak. Were they sometimes protected, given the benefit of the doubt, by laity as well as by their respective ordinaries?  Perhaps so; but that's a far cry from the pastor of every parish in Europe or the New World being a little ceasaro-pope.

The more tired comment was something like this:  "Humans are sexual animals.  Repression of the sexual instinct is only going to lead to these kinds of problems."  First, humans are sexual creatures, but we are not animals; healthy human adults have it within their power to restrain their appetites and to turn a rational eye to bodily urges and emotional states instead of unwillfully submitting to them.  Second, even animals do not exhibit psychotic behavior just for being denied the opportunity to mate frequently.  Competition for mates happens all the time and all over the place, and by and large, the Darwinian losers don't take it personally.  Third, choosing of one's own accord or willingly submitting to a lifestyle of abstinence is not "repression"--at least, not any more than my fear of getting charged with assault and battery if I didn't indulge my so called instinct of rage on the face of a hostile supervisor is "repression" of my anger.

This sophistry, to put it generously, has been overused and abused to justify a lifestyle that conveniently claims to distill meaning from it's-your-fault-if-I-feel-oppressed-by-imagining-you-mentally-judge-me pleasure seeking, that I no longer think that intellectually serious hedonists would even bother making such arguments--at least, not honestly; perhaps only to provide more chaff for casual leave-me-alone-with-my-endorphins hedonists to throw in the air and slow everybody else down.
Please, people:  find a new argument.

"Is it fair..."

...one of the California supreme court justices asked Kenneth Starr, to nullify the 18,000 gay "marriages" that had taken place between the court's ruling that gay marriage could exist and be practiced in California, and the passage of Proposition 8. Is it fair that all these couples, having moved in together, now lack the legal status they thought they were getting?

Fair?

Fair is a question you ask after you answer "Is it right?" Slaveowners 200 years ago demanded of abolitionists a justification that taking away their free labor was fair to them. The obvious answer was "No, but it's the right thing to do."

Do I sympathize with the people who had a public ceremony and pooled their resources? Sure. I hate moving to a new home; doing so with someone else, becoming a single legal entity, and then having it undone has got to be an order of magnitude worse than what I experience every few years, not even broaching the subject of it being a civil rights issue.

Am I going to say "Aww, you've put so much time and effort into it; we'll ignore valid legislation that you find inconvenient because we'd feel bad," though? No. Again, I'm not broaching the subject of civil rights, because "is it fair?" is not that kind of question in this context.

Life's not fair. Unfair things happen all the time, and we have to learn to adapt. Social security runs dry and Generation X has to work longer to get full benefits, if they end up getting them at all; retirees lose their pensions, sometimes after years of retirement, sometimes days before retiring. People wait in lines at stores for hours only to find that whatever they wanted to buy is sold out. Rapists walk free because their victims' testimony does not provide sufficient doubt against his alibi. A man's friends plan a surprise party and don't find out until the big day that he's gone out of town for the weekend. What are you supposed to do, get a court order to declare your former employer solvent, or to get an electronic tether on your friend? Become a vigilante or a thief to mete out your own brand of justice and get what you worked as hard (should I say "no harder?") as anyone else to get a chance for?

You want to know what's not fair? Telling a bunch of people that marriage is something it isn't, and assuming that the opinions or powers available to other people who disagree are simply not worth considering, so when things get rough--poof!

Kinda like promising easy mortgages to people who can't, really, afford to buy a big new home. Evicting them would be awful, but what's unfair is making a promise you can't keep.

There are arguments that can be, and are, made in favor of gay "marriage," although I don't buy them. If you have to suggest that it would be too difficult to do the right thing, though, then maybe you don't believe those arguments, either.

CPCSM to Nienstedt: "Condone us or we'll scream loudly and stamp our feet!"

I think the folks who promote "gay pride" still have a lot of work to do. When I hear people talking about events like what was going to be held at St. Joan of Arc in Minneapolis, I don't hear about great accomplishments or historical figures like George Washington Carver's many inventions or MLK's principled opposition to segregation and discrimination. Pretty much all I hear is rhetoric about being proud rather than ashamed of their sexuality, and pretty much all I see is public spectacles designed to desensitize us--and maybe them--to acts of perversion (and I'm including the publicity of acts which by themselves, in private, might not be particularly bad things).

I don't think that kind of behavior is is a result of healthy pride. There are plenty of things I'm not this-is-bad ashamed of about myself that have no need to be advertised, and publicizing them would have nothing to do with throwing off the societal yoke of bigotry. If I wanted to shock people I disagreed with into complacency, though, I might go out in public and show people how odd I could be, until everyone got used to it; maybe it's not positive approval, but it would be the tolerance of resignation, and maybe that's a good enough first step.

What would happen to gay pride parades when people reach that point? Would they still go on to spite the memory of traditional values, or just to accommodate people with exhibitionist fetishes?

I know the goal of these kinds of events is to wear down opposition, to get people to give up on opposing publicity and public approval of anything sexual. They might do a lot better if they also provided reasons for their virtue other than sentiments like "You're just like racists opposing the Civil Rights Movement from forty years ago," which is only true superficially and incidentally. As I've lamented before, we don't see gay evangelists going door to door in suits politely making their cases.

There is such a thing as self-esteem. You should value the good that is in you, regardless of whatever troubles or flaws you bear. It is also healthy to recognize the good things that you have accomplished. What do gay pride events usually celebrate? libertinism? Nothing special there; I can see that coming from people of all orientations on any college campus. Is it an inoculation against the disapproving words of people who believe that there is such a thing as sins of lust? Maybe, but homosexuals don't have the corner on that market, either.

They complain that their behavior isn't lauded by the Church and by much of society. Well, too damn bad. My bad behavior isn't lauded either. It just seems like they're picking on homosexuals because the question of homosexuality takes up so much bandwidth in our culture today.