FACES: A PET PEEVE. See also the comment of a friend of mine, after seeing the cover of a new book on Gay Catholic Whatnot, "Oh no--not the bandaged heart!"

NEW YORK TIMES STORY BINGO 2011. Not always quite on-target (the aura-cleansing one) and it's not like Fashion Week clothes are supposed to be off-the-rack wearable, but enough of this works that I will allow it. Via IP, but I'm adding this lady to the blogroll because she is funny and interesting and so are her commenters.

YOU STAY CLASSY, CALIFORNIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY. Pictures of dead children sell candidates.

SOME SAY THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES. I SAY BARACK OBAMA IS HOT! This may, of course, be merely a selection effect (as opposed to a selection effect which nonetheless says something important), but it seems to me that I'm much more likely to run across liberals who really like Democratic politicians and feel proud of them or protective of them, and conservatives who really dislike Republican politicians and hold their noses in the voting booth.

If I'm right about this, what should I make of it? A lot of op-ed types seem to take any expressed conservative disillusionment with the overall GOP field as a sign of weakness or bad conscience--even the right-wingers know they're wrong! I tend to view it in the exact opposite light. I generally take this divergence as an indictment of liberals (detainees? what detainees?) but I do realize that my tendency toward political despair is at least partly the result of my own incompetence in forming political judgments. If I talk about explicitly political issues on the blog you can be sure I really, really mean what I say (e.g. on marriage, or torture) because most of what I've learned since I started the blog in 2002 is how often I have nothing of value to contribute.

In turn, this has made me really viscerally aware of how much our political judgments rely on personal trust (since the amount of knowledge we would need to amass to be respectable wonks, combined with the amount of political philosophy we'd need to do to sort through and assess that knowledge, is simply astounding), which I think has made me more personally negative toward both politicians and people who "like" politicians or have favorite politicians. You can like things about people who are politicians (I like Michelle Bachmann's commitment to foster parenting) without feeling any warm fuzziness about their public service or business acumen or whatever Little Father mishegoss we're supposed to accept.

ONLINE YA FICTION DYSTOPIA GENERATOR. To create your own one-trick-pony novel where an all-powerful government has the same idee fixe that you do!

PASOLINI IS ME: What's the difference between a stereotype and an archetype?

Since his humor never overturned his preconceptions it didn't take him or his listeners by surprise; no, it was a local affair, just a snarl in his mental traffic, not an accident.
--The Farewell Symphony

Although its roots are traced back to the ancient world of mythology, the real birth of figure skating occurred in Stuart England.
--James R. Hines, Figure Skating: A History

Oh LOL, of course I would fall for the Restoration-era sport! ...And the one whose motto seems to be, "Girls, Lisa. Boys kiss girls."

(edited to fix quote and tags)

ORDER FROM CONFUSION SPRUNG: As promised, some thoughts on the problems with the "intrinsically disordered" jargon the Church currently uses to describe homosexuality.

I want to open by saying that the Catholic Church speaks a lot of languages. I have a really hard time with natural-law talk, for example, and also with Carmelite spirituality, even though both of those are really different! Whereas I respond really strongly to "theology of the body" and, to a certain extent, Christian neo-Platonism. But the great thing about the Church is that you do not have to buy in to any one particular vocabulary.

The fact that the Church currently uses a certain way of talking about gay people (and, for that matter, the fact that "gay identity" as such is just over a century old--that doesn't make it fake, it just makes it one way among many of talking about same-sex desire) doesn't mean that you need to buy the vocabulary in order to live out the teaching. If the way the Church talks gets in the way of your chastity, ignore it. (Or I guess I should say, try to find and develop other ways of talking about gay life; but reworking the Church's language might not be part of your vocation, in which case I think ignoring the language while living by the teaching is the best way to operate.) Your chastity and your unstinting fidelity to Christ are so much bigger and more beautiful than any one theological framework. So yeah, don't have gay sex; but you can think about that sacrifice and challenge in a whole lot of different ways, including ways which might shock your local priest.

Having said that, here's my problem with the "intrinsically disordered" language: I think it relies on a mechanistic understanding of eros. If sexual desire can be easily tweezed away from nonsexual longing and love and adoration then yeah, sure, I guess I can see the point of calling homosexual desire "disordered." But that's not how eros actually works! My lesbianism is part of why I form the friendships I form. It's part of why I volunteer at a pregnancy center. Not because I'm attracted to the women I counsel, but because my connection to other women does have an adoring and erotic component, and I wanted to find a way to express that connection through works of mercy. My lesbianism is part of why I love the authors I love. It's inextricable from who I am and how I live in the world. Therefore I can't help but think it's inextricable from my vocation.

And what's funny is that even the defenders of the "intrinsically disordered" language are defending so little. Basically all of them say one of two things: either "everything you do which is influenced by your lesbianism is tainted," which is bleakly hilarious if you've ever nursed a sick woman through her illness in part because you loved and were attracted to her; or "it just means that your eros can never be acted on, whereas even wrongly-directed heterosexual eros might be in some hypothetical made-up world." Which is like... do we really want to be encouraging unhappily-married heteros to think, "I could totally act on this desire and it would be ordered!... you know, if the old ball-and-chain died, or we got an annulment"? I mean, at that point literally nothing is added by the "explanatory" language of disorder which wasn't already stated by the bare moral teaching: You don't get to have sex with ladies, case closed. I knew that already! What extra work is this jargon doing? It doesn't even make straight people feel superior, since none of them know or think about it unless their kids are gay.

I am a lot more tentative about proposing alternate ways of understanding Catholic moral teaching on sexuality, alternate vocabularies. I think this post, where I describe what lesbianism feels like to me, might be a starting point.

I genuinely believe that eros requires that the focus of our desire be Other in some important way. And so the process by which homosexual desire transforms members of one's own sex into Other--the process by which pretty girls become iconic women, and therefore available for me as focus points of my eros--is fascinating to me, and I think it's genuinely sublime. That said, I don't think it's too hard to do the math on "eros is directed toward the Other + sex difference, la difference, is the fundamental difference in human nature = homosexuality requires an alienation from self, from eros, or from the beloved, so that likeness can begin to seem Other when in fact it is not."

I'm not sure yet if that's how I want to talk about Catholic theology of sex. But I do think we can all try to work through what being gay feels like, and thereby come up with a vastly broader and better set of vocabularies than the ridiculously, painfully limited set the Church is working with right now.

One final note, which is maybe bitchy but I don't know a better way to do this: Please don't use the Church's current failures and lacunae and flinching uncourtesy as an excuse to wallow in self-pity. Yes, the "intrinsically disordered" language sucks and is a mark of privilege, the kind of thing you only say if you don't feel it yourself or don't care about the other people who feel it. But if you focus on the failures of the Church's language, not only do you lose the opportunity (which, again, may not be your vocation) to improve that language, but you also lose out on everything else the Church offers. Self-pity is I think the least Christian emotion in the history of ever, and it's worth thinking hard about whether and to what extent and where your problems with the Church are really problems with the way the Church hierarchs express themselves right now. In which case, prayers to Joan of Arc would seem to be in order.

And in general, if you have to entertain negative emotions toward the Church (and God knows I do), I highly recommend bitchy and bitter over self-pitying comfort. That's my considered aesthetic judgment and I'll stick to it until you pry my rosary out of my cold, dead hands.

DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN THE MAGAZINES? Here, have a list of things which are not true of me!

1. I am "asexual."
2. I have a "low sex drive."
3. I'm a virgin.
4. I was sexually abused, ever.
5. I was raised "without a moral compass."
6. I only like synth pop/disco/the Smiths, and have no time for hard rock or punk.

There. Does that help?

MADAM CHAIRMAN, I AM CONFUSED. Why do people think official recognition and funding is a good thing for their organization? Surely we all know that having a bad reputation is the best way to attract the kinds of people a Christian would prefer!

THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI: There is a fun meme called "red families vs. blue families." This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven't read and which I therefore don't want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.

The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."

These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.

You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?

You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.

These are all things you could do.

The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.

You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.

Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.

STILL PREFERRING THE TINSEL: I recently finished Melinda Selmys's Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism. (Insert "sounds like a Heideggerian lingerie ad" joke here....) I wish I could recommend the book, because it does grapple with some concepts close to my heart--I was really excited to see that later chapter headings included "Beauty" and "Vocation." But this book did not work for me, at all. I'm not going to do a real review, but I do want to highlight five problems I had, because I think these problems are endemic to orthodox Catholic writing on Gay Whatnot.

So here are five things I wish Sexual Authenticity had done.

1. Remember the miniskirt rule! Discussions of sub-topics should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. Selmys covers sodomy in Christian history in two pages, ex-gay therapies in maybe five and a half. Better to skip these topics entirely than to skimp.

Selmys, for example, describes some of the more shocking 20th-century "cures" for homosexuality, like electroshock and hormone replacement, and then tells us that contemporary ex-gay therapy shouldn't be similarly reviled. That's groovy and all, but Selmys doesn't actually describe even one contemporary ex-gay program. So is she saying we should give this a chance, or the programs described by Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll in my NRO piece here, or this, or something else? I don't have to think Carroll is today's Alan Turing to think Love in Action is cruel, ugly, and silly. (I'd really recommend the posts here for in-depth, specific looks at various different approaches to ex-gay identity, practice, and culture.)

2. Avoid monocausal explanations. There are a lot of reasons people drink milk in the morning! Surely there are even more reasons someone might be promiscuous, or unhappy, or defensive. And yet Selmys frequently falls back on rhetorical forms like, "Promiscuous sexuality is, at its heart, an attempt to access something like the Communion of the Saints--to be able to enter into the intimate life of a much larger range of humanity than you would ordinarily be able to access."

This is intriguing and in a way quite charitable. It's in line with Augustine's stance that sins are virtues misapplied. But it's also, I would wager, unrecognizable to most people who have actually been promiscuous. (Not speaking from experience, MOM.) If you only offer one explanation or reason for an action, you lose the chance for your words to resonate with people who did the action for entirely different reasons. This isn't such a big deal if a) you're just talking about your own experience, or giving other specific examples of actual people, or b) you don't rely on monocausal explanation very often. Selmys went to that well way too often for me.

Oh, here's another example, and a worse one I think. While arguing that ex-gay therapies fail, when they fail, because they don't promote friendship and spiritual succour, she says: "The 'cure' consists not in the healing of father-wounds, nor even in the assumption of heterosexual relationships, but in humbling yourself enough to admit that a struggle is taking place and that you can't do it by yourself. This is why frequent confession and compassionate spiritual direction is effective, while testosterone-replacement therapies are not. ...This is also why there are some people who will never be 'cured.' Because for someone whose primary struggle is the struggle with same-sex attractions, being cured is tantamount to being saved. Regardless of what certain Protestant theologians would like us to believe, that is something not completed until, finally, you stand before the judgment throne of God...."

It's really just not true--and it's damaging--to say that people whose same-sex attractions persist throughout their lives are insufficiently humble or are assuming that they'd be saved if only they went straight. I mean, I know people who do frequent confession and have compassionate spiritual directors, and who seek to live entirely in accordance with God's will as expressed in the teaching of the Catholic Church... and they're still pretty gay.

3. Don't say you have special insight into experiences you almost had. This one is tricky. Almost having an experience can give you relevant insight into that experience, depending on the reasons you stopped short. But if you deploy your empathy too readily, you may come across as if you're attempting to colonize other people's experiences for your own worldview.

For example, Selmys writes, "I am going to stand up and confess, here, that I understand exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling when they give up on the quest for chastity, leave the Church, and try to find hope and happiness in the gay lifestyle. I have felt it myself: there are times when I look up at my ceiling at night, and I don't see the face of God--I haven't seen Him, or felt Him, in months, and I can't understand the burdens that are piling up on me--and I want to say, 'To hell with it.' Literally. Let this entire project of the moral life collapse under its own weight; just let me get out of the building first."

Which... I'm pretty sure I don't understand "exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling," but obviously a lot of people view leaving the Church as taking on a new moral project, a better and truer one, not giving up on the moral life. I think they're wrong (though they're quite sincere!), but it's just not true to diagnose their problem, universally, as despair or willful immoralism.

She concludes that section by writing that if she did not believe in God, "I would run away from my family, or commit suicide, or become a raging alcoholic and curse everyone who came my way. I would be worse--a hundred times worse--than any of the people hanging around the bars down in the Village." But really, if you'd be a hundred times worse than them, doesn't that mean you don't share their experience or know what makes them tick? Or to put it another way, if the problem of the guys at JR's is atheism, and Selmys understands their temptations and experiences as intimately as she claims, why aren't they acting as badly as she says she would?

4. Try to have something to say to people who are happy being gay. This is not so relevant if you're basically writing autobiography. But Selmys is attempting a more theoretical work, aimed at a broad audience. And I think one of the reasons it really didn't speak to me is that it assumes that lesbian experience will be kind of fakey-fantasy, inherently unsatisfying, and gay life is depressing. This... has not been my experience.

I like being gay! I love being Catholic. (Love is obviously a more fraught emotion than liking.) The intersection of the two can be humiliating, lonely, irritating (it's very tiresome being constantly told by strangers that you hate yourself), frightening, philosophically challenging, and generally difficult. But it's also immensely fruitful and, in its own way, fun. Certainly we've got a lot of historical precedent to play with! Pasolini is me... and all that....

5. Acknowledge the diversity of vocations. This point is obviously related to the previous one. Selmys, now married with children, often writes as if marriage is the summit of vocation, the only opportunity for real love. She writes that gay relationships are more like friendships than like marriages, which isn't true on its face (I think gay relationships are different from both, but similar to both--they're the middle circle in the Venn diagram, overlapping the two outer circles while retaining its own boundaries) and, in context, treats friendship as a cute accessory to the real business of life.

For example, elsewhere: "Friends may hope to stick together 'through thick and thin,' but in reality, friendships tend to dissolve quickly when bonds of mutual interest cease to hold them together--they may linger on in name, and occasion the odd greeting card at special holidays, but they cease to involve a genuine knowledge of and involvement with the other." (I don't know whether that sentence is more ahistoric, tragic, false, trivializing, or self-fulfilling.) And elsewhere again: "Love involves the whole person. Romantic or erotic love involves the whole person most of all--there are plenty of other kinds of love in which you make a sincere gift that comes out of yourself, but do not actually give yourself entirely."

You all know by now that I can't be havin' with that sort of thing. Friendship is real love. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.

I'm not sure how Selmys's latria toward married love can allow for priestly vocations, let alone devoted friendship.

I couldn't, of course, be the athletic or heterosexual man he wanted. He knew I was homosexual, although we never discussed it. I'd told him in a letter in order to get the money I needed to see the shrink, Dr. O'Reilly.
--The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The guy who created the sublime Daily Mail-o-Matic also made a widget to generate policy proposals from Labour politician David Blunkett. I have no comment on the accuracy of this or any other furrin satire of a furrin pol; but the thing I always remember about the widget is the tag, at the end of each cartoonish abuse of power, "...and charge them for it." Like so: "Pre-emptively convict children, and then lock them up. And charge them for it." "Put Muslims under a curfew order, and then put their children into care. And charge them for it."

And what's so striking to me is how easy it is to convince us to do it: to pay for our own shaming and dismissal, to pay someone else to be the Good Person to our Uniquely Bad. (For example.)

THE WRONG END OF THE TELESCOPE: I've added what I hope is a clarifying paragraph to my bitchy post about reviews of Andrew Sullivan's books. I think the para. is really about whose eye we're supposed to take as our lens.

Oh, Allison Gross, that lives in yon tower
The ugliest witch in the north country
Has trysted me one day up in her bower
And many fair speech she made to me

She stroked my head and she combed my hair
And she set me down softly on her knee
Says, "Gin ye will be my leman so true
Sae many braw things as I would ye gi'"
--"Allison Gross"; Steeleye Span here, and something in another language here. I always sang it as "leman," not "lover," and to the same tune as Boiled in Lead's "As I Was Roving Out."

IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!: 1. Conservative, moralizing politician gets caught [EDITED to remove unnecessarily crass description; "gets caught" pretty much covers it...].

2. Conservative Christian commentator wails about how could he? with much throwing of the fiftieth stone. I would never!

3. Liberal commentator (Christian or not--all look same!) inveighs against the obvious Schadenfreude and piling-on of aforementioned conservative Christian types. Drink if they cite "Judge not, lest ye be judged"; drain your drink if they bother looking up the chapter and verse. Drain somebody else's drink if they specify that they're atheist and they really, really think adultery is bad, and they'd totally shame the initial bad guy as much as you would, but they just can't help themselves in pointing out the hypocrisy!

4. Bitchy blogger notes that patting yourself on the back for your rejection of pride might actually be... prideful. Thus, she judges your judgeyness of others' judging of sexual sin! It would be so awesome if this action were virtuous!

5. Lather, rinse, repent.

I know so many good people, I mean, where do I start?

UPDATE: [edited: ehhh, changed my mind about this.]

FURTHER UPDATED: Doesn't change what I say in this post, but this does offer context and assorted whatnot.

SERIOUSLY!

WHY do people who say that respect has to be earned never withhold respect from themselves?

LET'S YOU AND HIM FIGHT. So apparently there's this kerfuffle in the American Philosophical Association about whether schools which require their faculty to abstain from gay sex should be allowed to advertise in the APA's job listings.

There's a petition, and a counterpetition, and my name came up in comments on the latter, because apparently I've been weaponized now? I tried to post this at Brian Leiter's site, but the comment wasn't accepted--not sure if it's in moderation, or if it's too long (for which I apologize!), or if this is just some computery glitch, but just in case, I'm reposting it here.

It's nothing new if you read this site regularly, but I figured I'd post it in case people are still finding me by Googling for stuff about this issue--if that's how you got here, I suggest checking out my sidebar under "Sicut cervus: Resources on God and homosexuality," and/or the "Gay Catholic Whatnot" and "romoeroticism" tags.... I promise to have some more interesting stuff up Saturday, inc. possibly some Gay-Catholic-Whatnot for those who can't get enough of that wonderful Duff. Plus reviews of movies about rats.
-----------

Well, now I know why so many people have been coming to my site by Googling "Eve Tushnet and John Heard"....

I feel as though I have been pushed into the middle of someone else's fight--I don't think the best model of a Catholic university is one in which all faculty must pledge to profess and follow the Catholic faith--but... fine. My take on some of the issues involved in this question.

1. Some of the arguments in the counterpetition are quite silly. ("Many of the greatest..." etc.)

2. But y'all are really arguing that "You cannot make sense of someone's sexual orientation apart from the acts that embody and constitute that identity"? Really? (This from the movement that claims Cardinal Newman was gay?--sorry, cheap shot.)

Many, many "gay people"/"people with same-sex desires"/(your term here) have chosen celibacy, for a variety of reasons, not all of which have anything to do with religion. Gay people choose celibacy as a form of fidelity to a deceased beloved. They choose celibacy because they're bitter about their experiences in a gay community (my guess is that Djuna Barnes, for example, might fit this one). And of course they (we) choose it as a form of fidelity to Christ. You can judge some of these reasons as much better than others--bitterness is something I'd try to alleviate, not recommend--but they don't make the people involved any less gay. "Between the emotion/and the act/falls the shadow," as TS Eliot didn't say....

(You're really telling me I'm... what? Straight? Nothing neither way? Romoerotic?)

I don't think this analogy works:

Though if the counter-petition's argument is that one is capable of discriminating only against those that act upon their orientation while not against the broader category of those that have that particular orientation, then it seems to me that it is legitimate to hire a person who have an orientation towards a particular religious faith on the proviso they don't act on that faith (e.g. attending services, partaking in Communion etc.)

If you're Catholic, for example, there are lots of things you're supposed to do. (Those things really are intrinsic to being Catholic.) Are gay people supposed to have sex? Is sex the vocation of the lesbian, as witness is the vocation of the Christian?

Now, you could argue that the vocation of the lesbian can be expressed in lots of different ways, including some forms of celibacy, but religiously-motivated celibacy cannot be among them. I am not sure why the APA should endorse this viewpoint.

Anyway, at least the religion analogy is much better than the race analogy; I'm not sure what I could possibly say to someone who thinks I'm analogous to a black girl bleaching her skin in an attempt to become white.

4. Finally, I understand why people want to marginalize and stigmatize religions which bar homosexual acts. But do acknowledge that that's what you're asking the APA to do.

Ahhhh, this is too long. I'm sorry.

Yeah well, happy Lent to me, I guess. I had to cut a lot of stuff from that, including my defense of Catholic universities hiring all manner of religious flotsam and moral jetsam--God and Man at Yale is wrong, y'all, and The Closing of the American Mind is right--but rest assured I know that sots and lechers and even Presbyterians can be good teachers....