Category: Sexualia
Wednesday 10/26/16
Sunday 10/23/16
3-2-1
I’m going to take a blogging Sabbatical very soon. Didn’t want to wait until my return for these.
I’m old enough to remember when “That one will screw anything that moves” was an insult to either the man or the woman to whom it was applied. Today, that quality is a virtue, and its gets you fawning notice in USA Today …
I am not interested in hearing cultural liberals get high and mighty about how vile Donald Trump is (and he is!) for his gross sexual behavior, but then have them turn around and cheer for every new manifestation of polymorphous perversity that flops across the transom. I know, I know: consent. Legally it’s an important concept, but it’s not a moral disinfectant. I find it impossible to believe that most liberal parents would be fine with their sons or daughters coming out a “pansexual,” which is a five-dollar word for something infinitely cheaper.
(Rod Dreher, on Miley Cyrus coming out as “pansexual.”)
I was prevented from “sharing” this, but there are work-arounds:
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“In learning as in traveling and, of course, in lovemaking, all the charm lies in not coming too quickly to the point, but in meandering around for a while.” (Eva Brann)
Wednesday 10/12/16
Monday 10/10/16
Quislings gotta quisle (and a more charitable explanation)
InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, an Evangelical organization that played important roles in the college and young adult lives of both me and Mrs. Tipsy (this book, for one major instance, packed one of the pivotal epiphanies of my life as a Christian), has taken a stand against the sexual zeitgeist and in favor of an essentially orthodox Christian view of human sexuality.
It predictably is being vilified for it.
What I find depressing in the vilification is the predominant theme, by professing Christians, that a Christian organization must not declare Christian teaching if enough members of a sexual minority aver that they are hurt or made to feel unsafe by it. Since the tone is not heckling, I’ll call this a Sniveler’s Veto.
Of course, there always is a fall-back position, which is implicit in the notion that we mustn’t declare Christian teaching if it’s hurtful or makes someone feel unsafe. The opening gambit of the Father of Lies has ever been “hath God truly said?” Friends and Snivelers United assure us that they’ve been listening to their holy spirit and what God hath truly said really isn’t all that clear.
In other words, we mustn’t declare Christian teaching because it’s false. This is more heckle-like.
IVCF apparently anticipated the vilification but thinks it’s possible to tell the truth without attacking anyone’s dignity:
We do continue to hold to an orthodox view of human sexuality and Christian marriage, as you can read in our Theology of Human Sexuality Document at the bottom of the article.
That said, we believe Christlikeness, for our part, includes both embracing Scripture’s teachings on human sexuality—uncomfortable and difficult as they may be—as well as upholding the dignity of all people, because we are all made in God’s image.
Some will argue this cannot be done. We believe that we must if we want to be faithful followers of Jesus.
I regret that Protestants are compelled to revisit, revisit and revisit aspects of Christian tradition that are out of favor currently. They do so because, in Protestant theory, tradition is virtually weightless. Spiritual ancestors don’t get a vote — not even 3/5.
When I was an Elder in a Calvinistic Church, we were revisiting what church offices women may hold. I ended up on the “liberal” side, frustrated that the “conservative” side seemingly argued thus:
- Our doctrine affirms, and our entire Protestant tradition depends upon, the perspicacity of Scripture.
- Our tradition is that only men may be Deacons, Elders and Pastors.
- Therefore, Scripture clearly teaches that only men may be Deacons, Elders and Pastors.
I had not yet experienced my last major epiphany — the one about the incoherence of Christianity without frank reckoning with tradition.
If you asked me today whether Calvinist Churches should have women pastors, my answers would be “How should I know whether you should; your conception of pastors is not the historic conception of Priests” and “Right or wrong, you will have them because Protestants can’t say ‘no’ to the spirit of the age indefinitely.” (That Church now has Husband-Wife Co-Pastors — nice kids, by the way — so it’s hardly adventurous of me to predict it.)
And, be it noted, she that weds the spirit of the age is soon made a widow:
[W]hoever advocates the conciliatory strategy today fails or refuses to see the conditions in which Christians have been living. It is utterly mistaken to take the position that many do: namely that the Church should take over some liberal-democratic ingredients, open up to modern ideas and preferences, and then, after having modernized herself, manage to overcome hostility and reach people with Christian teachings …
An aversion to Christianity runs so deep in the culture of modernity that no blandishment or fawning on the part of the Church can change it. Going too far along this road actually threatens the very essence of Christianity.
(Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies)
Legutko’s book sheds some more sympathetic light on the IVCF progressives: giving them every benefit of every doubt, they’re just ahead of the curve on ingratiating themselves to the emergent Liberal-Democratic Totalitarianism, much as clergy in communist lands tried to do what must be done to preserve a remnant for a more propitious day.
Quislings gotta quisle, yeah, but conscientious leaders in bad times sometimes make choice that in hindsight are bad or at least embarrassing.
The more I think about it, the more consternation I feel at the state of Evangelicalism and the happier I am that I got out of this debating society and into the Church, which admits that Scripture and Tradition belong together.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Saturday, 10/1/16
What is a man?
20+ year ago, some Religious Right ideologues in town weren’t getting enough limelight, I guess, so they started calling for a boycott of the local Gannett paper over the Canadian-based comic “For Better or Worse.” Before our nest went empty, my wife and I thought that was one of their very best comics.
So why should it be dropped? As best I can recall, it was because a middle-school boy character, a friend of the main family in the strip, concluded that he was gay. The problem with that, again as I recall, was that the comic’s author was accepting of the fact that gay people exist and are not (disproportionately) monsters.
The character didn’t contemptibly become the Good Time That Was Had By All the other characters. He didn’t become a stereotypical sissy. He didn’t get struck by lightning during Outfest or or get arrested for molesting younger children or get AIDS and die.
He just lived, while gay.
Apart from “features a gay character,” which was about all you could really say, the campaign against the Gannett paper was mounted with half-truths, which was par for the course for one particular Religious Right leader. In war, all’s fair, and nothing is more important than war against … a comic strip! A freakin’ comic strip!?
Editorial cartoons get the same treatment routinely, as does Doonesbury. People come totally unhinged.
Comic strips act like Kryptonite on the humorless Right. A comic is never just a comic if it gets under their skin.(“St. Thomas More writes, ‘The devil…that proud spirit…cannot endure to be mocked.‘” Now why did that pop into my head?)
The Left usually blows other things out of proportion.
“A poem should not mean, but be,” he quoted, pivoting. That is, a poem is just a poem.
Except when it’s not. Clara: In the Post Office, not only is, but to me means something about the unreliability of my sex that have long been painfully obvious to me. (It clearly meant something to the poet, too.)
When I know nothing more than that a couple has divorced, I reflexively blame the man. If I know the couple, I still blame the husband unless he was uncommonly sober and his wife obviously a shrew or a flirt.
Nothing upsets me so much as a Christian man, baptized and church-going, leaving wife and children because he’s unhappy. (Oh! You poor dear!)
“O holy martyrs, who fought the good fight and have received your crowns, entreat the Lord, that He will have mercy on our souls.” (Hymn of the Byzantine Rite of Crowning, or Holy Matrimony)
This hymn is sung during a triple procession, around a table in the center of the church, at the “Crowning” or Marriage-Rite of my church. It is also sung at the Rite of Ordination (to ecclesiastical orders). It is sung in anticipation of the “martyrdom” or “witness” of self-offering and self-sacrifice inherent to the life of ministers of my church – including married people, who are called to minister to each other and to others in their “domestic church.”
Why am I reflecting on this today? Because one of my relatives, a banker, wrote me an email last night, in which he mentioned that he’s currently on “the night-shift” at his bank, because his bank “has to do some trades during Asian hours.” So – he now works nights, a married man and father of three, coming home “for a nap” during the day, and then working through the night. “It’s been tough,” he says humbly, “but it should only last two weeks.”
Let me take note today of the “unsung heroes” and martyrs of my church, the married ones. How many of these men and women labor today, sitting in front of computer-screens or elsewhere, to support their families, often at unfulfilling jobs in various businesses or odd enterprises, just to support others – their families. May they all be blessed on their cross-carrying journey, however little it is recognized, because they will, indeed, “receive their crowns.”
(Sister Vassa Lerin, who providentially had this meditation waiting for me to read as I was mulling over the unreliability of my sex.)
My son’s historically Protestant all-male college spent a fair amount of time reflecting on what it means to be a man and a gentleman. I forget the details of the discussions we had about it lo those many years ago, but it seems to have molded him into an admirable man, a man of areté, of which we have far too few.
They sang that martyrdom hymn at his wedding, too.
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“The remarks made in this essay do not represent scholarly research. They are intended as topical stimulations for conversation among intelligent and informed people.” (Gerhart Niemeyer)
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 