Catholicism Comes to a Crossroads

Many of the bitter old men in dresses in bishoprics across the western world refuse to admit that times and people have changed and that the Roman Catholic Church is at a likely crossroads that requires that the Church come out of 13th century beliefs or face growing irrelevance.  It is a reality that man of these less than decent men don't want to accept, the arch-reactionary bishop of Richmond, Virginia (who was installed in office by the less than saintly John Paul II, a protector of child rapists) being a prime example.  Not only is he viciously anti-gay, but he still treats divorced and remarried Catholics as lepers and bars them from positions in Catholic schools.  A piece in the Richmond Times Dispatch looks at the crossroads before the Church:

Today’s rapidly changing social views are demanding some uncharacteristically hasty action from the Vatican. The issues of same-sex marriage and the role of homosexuals in the Catholic Church threaten to create seismic divisions within the church or perhaps even leave it in a position of irrelevance.

Currently, 22 nations have legalized same-sex marriage. Many of those are traditionally Catholic-majority countries. In May, Ireland became the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by popular vote. The predominantly Roman Catholic nation stood tall in its opposition to the church’s position, with 62 percent voting in favor of same-sex marriage.

And what was the Vatican’s response? Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Holy See’s secretary of state, called the vote “a defeat for humanity.” But the Archbishop of Dublin, Diarmuid Martin, had a different take. He bluntly admitted that it was time for the Church to do a reality check and ask itself if it has drifted away from young people.

A little more than one month later, the United States Supreme Court ruled that same-sex marriage was a constitutional right. That same day, June 26, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops issued this statement: “Today is a tragic day for marriage and our nation. The Supreme Court has dealt a profound injustice to the American people by striking down in part the federal Defense of Marriage Act. The Court got it wrong. The federal government ought to respect the truth that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, even where states fail to do so.”

So, what happens to the Catholic Church? How can the Roman pontiff continue to exercise supreme and full power within the universal church if its flock in the Western nations deliberately flouts Catholic teachings? Does the church remain rigid and unbending even if many of the faithful leave for other churches more welcoming to gay and lesbian family members and friends? How does the Church remain relevant to young men and women who are far, far more accepting of same-sex marriage then their parents?

Catholics in Western nations represent only a small portion of the church and the religion is not growing in Ireland or anywhere else in Europe. (Nor is it growing particularly fast in the U.S.)

Thanks to social media, we have seen the grim images of violence toward gays and lesbians in nations where homosexuality is considered a crime. Compare those to the joyful celebrations that took place across Ireland and the U.S. when gay marriage was legalized.

I wonder: Which of these attitudes has His fingerprints all over it?

Return to Brantingham - Continued Part 2

Click image to enlarge

Today was another amazing day at the lake and I am so very happy that we made the arduous drive - although, I think next time we will try to fly and rent a car - which has allowed me to reconnect with much of my family history on my mother's side.  We took the "Class of 1941" (pictured above) out again today, lazed on the beach and on the dock in the sun and visited some with cousins who now co-own the camp next door.  My brother arrives shortly and the three of of us and four cousins will have dinner once my brother gets here - the husband, a/k/a Martha Stewart is doing the cooking. 

The views below are scenes of the ever change lake today.  It is truly heaven here.

Early morning

Mid morning view

Afternoon view

To give a sense of the length of time my family has been coming to Brantingham Lake, below is a photo from 1919 of my great grandparents, grandfather, and an uncle and aunts from my grandfather's generation.  Consensus is that the photo was taken at a no longer existing inn just up the road from our camp.

I plan on trying to take photos of other even older photos here at the camp.  One more photo: me feeding the ducks who decided to join us as we had drinks on the beach last evening.  

Trump is Driving Voters Away from GOP

In the wake of Donald Trump's outrageous attacks on Megan Kelly, some in the GOP are belatedly voicing attacks on Trump.  The main point to remember is that while the Donald says outrageous and hatefully things, what he is saying is generally in line with GOP policies and continues to excite the GOP base because Trump isn't afraid to openly voice the hate and bigotry that are typical of today's GOP voter.  Thus, when Jeb "Jebbie" Bush accuses Trump of driving voters away from the GOP, Trumps big sin is openly saying what Jebbie and others prefer to state in dog whistler messages.  The Hill looks at Jebbie's disingenuous criticism of Trump.  Here are excerpts:

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush on Saturday said Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is repelling voters by attacking Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly.

 

Bush said Trump will not attract female voters in 2016 by speaking crudely about Kelly and other women.

 

"What Donald Trump said is wrong,” he told listeners at the RedState Gathering in Atlanta. “Mr. Trump should apologize.”

 

“What he said does not win elections,” said Bush, who is also a White House hopeful next year. “Worse yet, it is not something that brings people together.”

 

Bush’s rebuke of Trump comes as the two men wrestle for the GOP’s presidential nomination next election cycle.

 

The former Florida governor is running in second behind the anti-establishment Trump in multiple national polls among potential voters.

 

Bush charged Saturday that Republicans will only reach the Oval Office next year by building a path that includes as many Americans as possible.

 

Bush on Saturday fiercely rejected the idea that Kelly unfairly targeted anyone from the GOP’s 2016 field during last week’s contest.

 

“We have candidates complaining that the questions were too tough,” he said. “That’s nothing.”

 

“Dealing with Putin is tough,” Bush quipped. “The big personalities on that stage matter nothing for people in poverty.”

 

“We need leaders to fix these big things,” he added. “We have had great presidents in the past who lifted our spirits with concrete solutions who did just that.”

 

The Donald shoots off his mouth.  Bush's past policies and the ones he supports now continue to attack women and harm the poor.  At least Trump says what his outrageous views are in fact.  Jebbie lies about his real agenda. Actions speak louder than words, and Jebbies past actions speak volumes.

 

 

 

 

Sunday Morning Male Beauty

Religious Extremism - Words Can Be Just As Dangerous As Knives

Annette in action

One of the principal forces opposing the civil rights of LGBT citizens are the "godly folk" and the professional Christian set who live off of the ignorance and bigotry of their parishioners and, of course, the GOP base, like leeches and other parasites.  To keep the money flowing it, it is crucial that the sheeple be convinced that they are under attack and that their "rights" are threatened.  As the prior post notes, one favored target is the black community (and by extension all other non-whites).  Another favored target is the LGBT community.   And in order to fan the requisite paranoia and fear, all kinds of hate words are the principal currency.   Facebook friend and fellow activist Annette Gross looks at how dangerous such hate words can be in a piece in Huffington Post.  Here are highlights:

For the past week, the City of Goshen, Indiana has been a hot-bed of debate about whether the City Council should grant civil protections to its LGBT citizens. Goshen mayor Allan Kauffman brought up the conversation at the end of the city council meeting on Tuesday, May 19, handing out copies of the city's 2009 failed amendment.

Mayor Kauffman also said that he does not want anyone who lives outside of the city to provide input at the meeting. That can be a problem for Eric Miller, executive director of Advance America, a right-wing organization that claims it is devoted to protecting the constitution and the family.

On Tuesday, July 14, Miller spoke to a crowd of about 100 people at Calvary Assembly church. He stated that, "The homosexual agenda has now come to Elkhart County. These two ordinances (Goshen and Elkhart) are wrong. These two ordinances need to be defeated."

Eric Miller has long been a foe of LGBT Hoosiers. He was one of the proponents to have same-sex marriage banned in Indiana by way of a state constitutional amendment. He testified at every hearing at the Statehouse in order to push his agenda. He also was present in 2005 when the Marion County City Council debated inserting sexual orientation and gender identity into their Human Rights Ordinance. He was one of the people seen with Governor Pence when Pence signed RFRA behind closed doors.

Eric Miller claims that he is trying to protect families. He falsely claims that churches and businesses could face punishment or legal problems if they refused to take part in a gay marriage ceremony. We know these are scare tactics. Miller warns repeatedly of the "homosexual agenda."
He [Miller] uses religion to push his agenda. He has been known to bus people from all over the state to hearings on same-sex marriage and LGBT equality.  Miller uses words to make his points. But words hurt -- just as much as violence can hurt. So my question is -- where does this go? Last week we saw an Orthodox Jewish man stab six people at the Jerusalem Pride Parade.

There is no excuse for killing anyone in the name of religion. And there is no excuse for telling lies and mistruths in the name of religion. When I look at people like Eric Miller, I get scared. He may not be wielding a knife or a gun, but his words can have an impact on those who believe them. Words have been known to lead people to do dangerous things. How far will people go? I cannot imagine going to any house of worship to listen to words of hatred and discrimination.  

What will they say to stop LGBT Hoosiers from gaining these rights? What ideas will they put in peoples' heads?

We have to be vigilant. Not only do we have to write letters and speak with our legislators -- we have to call out the religious zealots who will deny our friends and loved ones the rights they deserve. We need to talk to our religious leaders -- those clergy who support equality and fairness. We need to urge them to call out people who hurt others in the name of religion.

I have watched Eric Miller and his friends Curt Smith (from the Indiana Family Institute) and Micah Clark (from the American Family Association of Indiana) for the past ten years as they push their messages of discrimination. It is about time we call them out and not allow them to hijack the good that religion really is. Religious extremism is dangerous -- whether by using knives and guns -- or by using words. 

People like Miller are dangerous.  And Annette is right - we need to call on the "good Christians" and other gay friendly faith leaders to get off their butts and end their silence.  Bad things happen when good people remain silent. 

Cuckservative - Right Wingers Who Claim Their Country is Being Stolen

Haven't heard the term "Cuckservative" until now?  Candidly, neither did I since I don't frequent white nationalist circles.  But as a piece in Salon discusses, the term is becoming increasingly popular among the GOP base and it use to describe conservative who are allowing "their country" to be stolen from them by the usual targets of Christofascists and the white supremacy crowd but are too cowardly to do anything about it.  Sadly, it is part and parcel with the Republican Party's slide to insanity and open racism.  Here are excerpts from the piece:

In a recent article at Salon, Joan Walsh did an excellent job in navigating the political effluence that is the American right’s newborn obsession with “cuckservatives.”  There, she noted how:

“Cuckservative” started showing up in my Twitter mentions last week, after I suggested Donald Trump supporters might not be the brightest bulbs. As I clicked around, I came to a shocking conclusion: I’ve been uncharacteristically downplaying the amount of racism and misogyny powering the right today. The spread of the epithet “cuckservative” is a sign that the crudest psycho-sexual insecurity animates the far right.

“Cuckservative,” you see, is short for a cuckolded conservative. It’s not about a Republican whose wife is cheating on him, but one whose country is being taken away from him, and who’s too cowardly to do anything about it.

OK, that’s gross and sexist enough already, but there’s more. It apparently comes from a kind of pornography known as “cuck,” in which a white husband, either in shame or lust, watches his wife be taken by a black man. Lewis explains it this way: “A cuckservative is, therefore, a race traitor.”

White supremacists have reinforced the racial intent of the “cuckservative” narrative.   . . .  But, as Walsh explains, usage the word hasn’t been limited to white nationalist circles:

Rush Limbaugh helped spread the term to the mainstream when he praised Trump like this: “If Trump were your average, ordinary, cuckolded Republican, he would have apologized by now, and he would have begged for forgiveness, and he would have gone away.”

At present, “cuckservative” is just one more signal of how the contemporary Republican Party and movement conservatism have become a carnival-like human zoo fueled by the talk-radio echo chamber, one where extremism is now mainstream, and the politically adolescent and immature obsessions of “men’s rights” victimologists — with their “alpha males” and “cuckolding” anxieties — are considered reasonable and respectable points of view.

The convergence of white supremacy and conservatism in the modern Republican Party — spurred in part by a renaissance of toxic white masculinity — has produced what, in the moment, appears to be a series of never-ending climaxes and crescendos wherein new levels of absurdity and paranoia replace previous peaks once thought unattainable. The extreme has become the new normal for mainstream American conservatism.

 

[T]his camp of aggrieved and imperiled white men, drunk on toxic white masculinity, are terrified of their supposed status as “victims” in a more inclusive and cosmopolitan 21st century America. Whereas cuckolding has its foundations in eroticism, the term “cuckservative” has evolved from a related, but ultimately very different, psychosexual fixation: racialized castration anxieties.

 

White men saw themselves as the naturally dominant group in the United States from its founding to the present. The idea of white male privilege as “normal” and a given remains inexorably compelling — especially to the “angry” and aggrieved white men who are the base of the Republican Party in the post-civil rights era.

 

The Republican Party’s fetish for guns, its knee-jerk defense of white-on-black-and-brown police violence and abuse, and its theocratic Christian politics also have many wellsprings in the American South. The right’s desperate efforts to control women’s bodies and reproductive freedoms are likewise a legacy and reminder of how white men’s power has historically extended to their (supposed) ownership over women’s sexuality and health.

Thus, white male anxieties spoken to by those who authored and circulated the “cuckservative” meme are really just evoking a misdirected feeling by some white men that they have lost political power and potency — that they have been, so to speak, castrated.

More Saturday Male Beauty

When Will the GOP Face Reality About Donald Trump?

Having been in the car for 12 hours yesterday and then a bit out of the loop today I am a little bit behind the curve on the latest news.  However, that said, one thing is clear: Donald Trump is a train wreck for the GOP.  The number one question, therefore, becomes one when the party as a whole not to mention opposing candidates will face reality and stop treating Trump as a viable candidate.  Between his newly launched war against Megan Kelly and Fox News in general, Trump continues to prove that he is a loose canon and that his candidacy is nothing more than a circus act with a loud mouthed, egotistical buffoon at its center.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the GOP dilemma.  Here are highlights:

Donald Trump’s attacks on Fox News’s Megyn Kelly have brought his Republican presidential rivals to another moment of truth. How long can they try to treat him as a sideshow before they and the party they seek to lead suffer the political effects of his excesses?

For Trump’s rivals, the political calculus this summer has seemed relatively straightforward. At this still-early stage in the nomination contest, they prefer to pursue their own campaign strategies, not react to his. As Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) told NBC’s Chuck Todd in a “Meet the Press” interview that will air Sunday: “If I comment on everything he said, my whole campaign will be consumed by it.”

Because his rivals assume that Trump will either implode or eventually walk away in a fit of anger, they have generally tried to ignore him rather than seek a confrontation. Sometimes they’ve been forced to voice their displeasure, as has been the case in the past 48 hours.

They responded after Trump, in a CNN interview Friday evening, escalated his criticism of Kelly, calling her a “lightweight” and accusing her of coming after him in last week’s debate in Cleveland with “blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”

Saturday’s flurry of statements criticizing Trump had a sense of déjà vu. Just three weeks ago, the same almost-ritualized performance played out after Trump had dissed Sen. John McCain of Arizona as not being a hero, despite McCain’s having endured torture and permanent disability as a POW during the Vietnam War.

Tentativeness has marked the candidates’ strategy in dealing with the Trump phenomenon. You could see their hesitation during the debate Thursday. No one really came to Cleveland with the goal of taking on Trump. Not one of the other nine candidates on stage came to Kelly’s defense when Trump went after her for asking him about derogatory comments he has made about women in the past.

There is another reason beyond the other candidates’ wanting to run their own races or wishing not to be the object of Trump’s considerable ire.

They all think that Trump’s support reflects more than fascination with celebrity, that he has tapped into something visceral in the electorate: anger and insecurity, revulsion with Washington, disgust with political-speak and political elites. Because they hope Trump will sink of his own weight, they wish to avoid offending Trump for fear of offending his voters. The candidates want those voters to turn to them if they abandon the reality TV star.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.),  . . . warned that Republicans risk blowing a chance to win the White House if they fail to take on Trump. “There comes a point when it becomes about you and Mr. Trump,” he said.

Right now, Trump’s megaphone is louder than the collective voice of the others in the GOP race. The nomination contest for now is Trump vs. the rest of them. As long as he stands tallest in the polls and loudest on the cable stations, his message will outweigh theirs. It’s clear now what kind of campaign Trump will run and what kind of candidate he is. That’s the reality that now confronts the rest of the Republican Party. 

Return to Brantingham - Continued

The husband and I had a wonderful day today as we revisited my family's past and he got to meet some of my more distant cousins.  First we went in to Lowville - about 17 miles away from the lake house - where my maternal grandparents lived after moving from Central America. The husband  got to see my grandparent's former home pictured below (which my grandfather had bought for his parents around 1920), the family cemetery plot with my grand parents and great grand parents graves, and a farmer's market at the county fair grounds where we bought luscious looking preserves from a delightful Mennonite woman.  

Once we got back to the camp, we took out the "Class of 41" - my brother's 1941 Chris Craft (pictured above) which is the main photo on this blog - and we circled the lake a number of times stopping to wave and talk to friends from long ago.     We finished the afternoon with wine and munchies sitting in Adirondack chairs looking across the ever changing scenery of the lake.  Tonight I am taking him to dinner to a restaurant that has been here for at least 50 years.

The husband at the wheel

A windblown me in the rear seat

My brother joins us tomorrow and the fun and making of new memories will continue.  More posts tonight if we don't treat ourselves to too many cocktails. :)

Saturday Morning Male Beauty