Today's Quote: Faith and Love

Life is both faith and love. Without faith, love is only one dimensional and incomplete. Faith helps you to overlook other people's shortcomings, and love them as they are. If you ask too much of any relationship, you can't help but be disappointed. But if you ask nothing, you can't be hurt or disappointed.

--Debbie Reynolds, 1964

What I Say:  There is much wisdom in what Debbie says here.  She ought to know:  she was married three times, and all of her marriages ended disastrously.  When asked about her husbands in later years, she would smile charmingly and say, "I have no taste in men."  Pretty much the same thing happened to Doris Day.  You'd think these two women, both beautiful, talented, and vivacious, admired by millions, would have easily found adoring husbands to love, honor, and cherish them.  But no -- Love can make fools of us all, whether pretty and popular, or not.

It's only the last sentence in Debbie's statement that I take issue with.  In the broadest sense, she is right, I have come to find out:  real love is about what you give to the other, not what you get.  But of course romantic love is only worth having if it is a two-way street.  There has to be a fundamental compatibility of wants and wishes, and a congruence of values, of how you live your lives together.  There must be give and take on both sides, so both parties get their needs met most of the time and both are happy with the relationship.  Get it all figured out before you commit yourselves, not after.

If  you can't work it out, compromise, adjust -- then let it go and just move on.  I learned this lesson at great cost.  Holding on will only make you crazy, and maybe kill you.  It's not worth it, no matter how great the romance.  Something better will come along in time, but first you have to get out of the hole of despair and pull yourself back together.  Trust me, brother -- when the ship of love sinks, save yourself.  There's a time to love, and a time to just let go. 

Real love doesn't hurt you, it helps you.

-----

Today's Quote

From Mere Christianity (1952), Chapter 9, by C. S. Lewis, emphasis mine:

Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way, Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We 'like' or are 'fond of' some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural 'liking' is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous. . . .

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you 'love' your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.

 There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine forgiving chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his 'gratitude', you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) 

But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

-------

Note:  C. S. Lewis was, in a way, my spiritual mentor.  I came to the Episcopal Church as an adult, and was confirmed after a short, perfunctory course in the fundamentals; but I wanted more guidance.  I had already come across some of Lewis’s writings, so I bought up most of his non-fiction books, perhaps a dozen, and read and re-read them for years.  His keen insight and intellectual perspective, along with good humor and humility, gave me the spiritual roots I needed in that seedling period.

Sadly, I have not been to church for the better part of two decades now, for very good reasons.  But my faith goes on.

-----

Happy Pride 2020

Imagine if there was a President who celebrated Gay Pride . . .




A few dates to remember in the progress of gay rights over the last half-century:

June 28 - July 3, 1969: Stonewall Riots, New York City

June 28, 1970: First Gay Pride marches, NYC and other cities

May 20, 1996:  Romer v. Evans

June 26, 2003: Lawrence v. Texas

December 22, 2010: Don't Ask, Don't Tell repealed

September 20, 2011: DADT repeal implemented

June 26, 2013: United States v. Windsor and Hollingsworth v. Perry

June 26, 2015: Obergefell v. Hodges

June 15, 2020: Bostock v. Clayton County


Today's quote:

I do have things I would like to see adopted on behalf of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people:  they include the right to marry the individual of our choice; the right to serve in the military to defend our country; and the right to a job based solely on our own qualifications.

I acknowledge that this is an agenda, but I do not think any self-respecting radical in history would have considered advocating people’s rights to get married, join the army, and earn a living as a terribly inspiring revolutionary platform.

--Congressman Barney Frank (D-Mass.), 2008

Bonus: The Night Michelle Escaped from the White House

New Year's Eve 2019

It occurred to me yesterday with a shock that after midnight tonight, my life will have spanned eight calendar decades, or parts thereof - though I am only a youngster in my sixties.  How extraordinary.

The years pass by quickly now, as my grandmother warned me they would.  Sometimes one might wish to say, O beautiful time, stop and linger - but like birds on a fence, the moments of life flicker and are gone before one can speak a word.

I had intended to close the year with some philosophical ruminations - but the clock is running out on me, and really, I have nothing new to offer beyond what many other older and wiser men have already said about time and life and love here on this small and fractious planet.

On the whole, it has been a happy year for M.P. and me, despite assorted health problems and financial difficulties at various times - but for the moment all those worries have subsided, and we are spending the holidays in quiet comfort and good cheer, thanks be to God.

So among the anxious changes and chances of this transitory world, I will end by simply wishing all my truckbuddies health, wealth, and happiness in the new year--and I leave you with this timely quotation from the fourth inaugural address of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945:

I remember that my old schoolmaster, Dr. Peabody, said, in days that seemed to us then to be secure and untroubled: "Things in life will not always run smoothly. Sometimes we will be rising toward the heights--then all will seem to reverse itself and start downward. The great fact to remember is that the trend of civilization itself is forever upward; that a line drawn through the middle of the peaks and the valleys of the centuries always has an upward trend."

Today's Quote: Lord Kenneth Clark

Lord Kenneth Clark (1903-1983) was a renowned British art historian, perhaps best remembered for his 1969 BBC series Civilisation, at the conclusion of which he made this statement:

At this point, I reveal myself in my true colors as a stick-in-the-mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time. I believe that order is better than chaos, creation better than destruction. I prefer gentleness to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole I think that knowledge is preferable to ignorance, and I am sure that human sympathy is more valuable than ideology.

I believe that, in spite of recent triumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last two thousand years. And in consequence, we must still try to learn from history: history is ourselves.

Today's Quote: Time Outlived

via GIPHY


Meghan Daum, a youngster still in her 40s, writing in The Guardian about the difference between her generation of feminists and those who are now in their 20s, makes a point that relates to everyone old enough to be not-young today:

The world has changed so much between my time and theirs that someone just 10 years younger might as well belong to a different geological epoch. To a young person, someone like me is not so much an elder as an extinction. Is it any wonder, then, that older generations’ contributions to the conversation are, at best, a kind of verbal meteor shower, the flickering, nattering remains of planets that haven’t existed for eons?

So this is where I find myself. Amid my exasperation and confusion, I have wandered into a devastating but oddly beautiful revelation: my generation will be the last to have known the world in its analog form. As a result, we’ve grown old before actually getting old. We’ve become dinosaurs before we’re even 50.

And I'm a generation older than she is, so how do you think I feel?

I remember how my grandparents, born well before 1900, were completely unimpressed, and often disgusted, by the reckless speed and dangerous follies of the go-go Sixties.

I feel the same way about the world we live in now - this hellscape, as it is aptly termed - only much more so.

So much so, in fact, that nowadays I more often than not decide, with a sigh of resignation, not to blog about things I deplore - because, well, why waste my meteors on an indifferent planet?

Today's Quote

Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis, who resigned at the end of last year:

Nations with allies thrive, and those without them wither. Alone, America cannot protect our people and our economy. At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering. A polemicist’s role is not sufficient for a leader. . . .

What concerns me most as a military man is not our external adversaries; it is our internal divisiveness. We are dividing into hostile tribes cheering against each other, fueled by emotion and a mutual disdain that jeopardizes our future. . . .

All Americans need to recognize that our democracy is an experiment—and one that can be reversed. We all know that we’re better than our current politics. Tribalism must not be allowed to destroy our experiment.

According to Wikipedia,

Mattis was raised in a bookish household that did not own a television. . . . During his service years, Mattis was considered an "intellectual" among the upper ranks. . . . He is noted for his interest in the study of military history and world history, with a personal library that once included over 7,000 volumes, and a penchant for publishing required reading lists for Marines under his command. He required his Marines to be well-read in the culture and history of regions where they were deployed, and had his Marines deploying to Iraq undergo "cultural sensitivity training."

A devout Catholic, Mattis has never been married.

Today's Quote: What Kind of Country Are We?

Time cover, issue of July 2, 2018. Click to enlarge.

Karl Vick of Time magazine poses the question:

Presidents have many jobs, and one is telling us who we are.

For the first 240 years of U.S. history, at least, our most revered chief executives reliably articulated a set of high-minded, humanist values that bound together a diverse nation by naming what we aspired to: democracy, humanity, equality. The Enlightenment ideals Thomas Jefferson etched onto the Declaration of Independence were given voice by Presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama.

Donald Trump doesn’t talk like that. In the 18 months since his Inauguration, Trump has mentioned “democracy” fewer than 100 times, “equality” only 12 times and “human rights” just 10 times. . . .

A week after his return from the June 12 summit with North Korea’s dictator, family separation dominated the national conversation like no other political story since former FBI chief James Comey was shown the door. A steadily building wave of revulsion washed over the political spectrum, from MSNBC to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal to Franklin Graham and into the White House living quarters, when a spokeswoman for the First Lady said she called for “a country that governs with heart.”

Which leaves us facing a question: What kind of country are we? The world has been nervously asking that since November 2016. And while Trump ultimately capitulated on the forced separation of children, his new order suggested that families would be detained not only together, but perhaps indefinitely. For many Americans, the forced separation of immigrant families left them looking into the void from which the brutal policy emerged: the dark space left by the words Trump does say. . . .

What values does America’s billionaire President embrace in place of the Founders’? A kind of gimlet-eyed competition. Trump purports to run the country as a business, the most meaningful metric being exports vs. imports: if you have more than your counterpart, you’re a winner, and the other guy a loser. But even in the bloodless world of accounting, “goodwill” has a place on the ledger (the left side; it’s an asset) and the U.S. may be writing down a loss. Its economy is strong. The people pitching up at its borders surely count as proof of that.

It was Alexis de Tocqueville, the French observer of the early American character, who recognized the danger of placing too much value on business, law and order at the expense of the higher values. Warning of the country’s obsession with material gain and the enforcement of order necessary to pursue it, he wrote, “A nation that asks nothing of its government but the maintenance of order is already a slave at heart.”

Which is why the test posed with Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy is as much about our future as it is about the tragedy of the families separated by its implementation. Trump may have backed down on the specific practice of family separation, but the larger question remains. In the balance between the integrity of the U.S. border with Mexico and a parent’s love for a child, where will we come down?

“Without a Border, you don’t have a Country,” the President wrote on June 19. Everyone knows that. The question is, what kind of country?

The photographer who took the photograph of the child explains the background of her story:




What I say: If this misled, misguided country does not repent and shed the cruel, uncaring, unjust evil twining about its heart, and quickly, it may be in store for a terrible retribution at the hands of Fate. For as everyone knows: What goes around, comes around.


Those who yearn for a truly "Christian nation" had best examine their own hearts and heed these words of warning:

Matthew 25:31-46 King James Version (KJV):

31 When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:

32 And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:

33 And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

34 Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:

35 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:

36 Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.

37 Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?

38 When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?

39 Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?

40 And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

41 Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:

42 For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:

43 I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.

44 Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?

45 Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.

46 And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Today's Quote: Laura Bush

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Former First Lady Laura Bush, in an op-ed for the Washington Post, emphasis mine:

I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart. Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the Japanese American internment camps of World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history.

Americans pride ourselves on being a moral nation, on being the nation that sends humanitarian relief to places devastated by natural disasters or famine or war. We pride ourselves on believing that people should be seen for the content of their character, not the color of their skin. We pride ourselves on acceptance. If we are truly that country, then it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.

Today's Quote: Cleverness

Click to enlarge.

From Literary Visions of Homosexuality, edited by Stuart Kellogg, 1983.

Today's Quotes

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David Chappelle on Saturday Night Live, November 12, 2016:

We’ve elected an internet troll as our president.

Joyce Carol Oates in The Guardian, November 12, 2016:

Yes, it is likely that misogyny played a negative role, to a degree – but if Clinton had been strongly in favour of guns and closed borders, these voters would have voted for her regardless of gender, as many of them would probably have voted for Sarah Palin, a rightwing favourite whose gender has never disadvantaged her.

From The Atlantic, November 11, 2016, a white, well-educated veteran on why he voted for Trump:

Maybe Trump won’t do a thing to change or fix any of it. Hillary definitely would not have changed any of it. So I voted for the monkey wrench—the middle finger—the wrecking ball.

I do not have the time, energy, or opportunity to march through downtown and chant vulgarities or spray paint buildings or set cop cars on fire. So I protest—and use my voice—with a ballot.

Go ahead: Label me a racist, a bigot, a hate-filled misogynistic, an uneducated redneck. But I turned down Yale, motherfuckers; I ain’t who you think I am. And while I love grits and pulled pork barbecue and collard greens and cold beer in a bottle, I also love my neighbors of all colors, especially if they can cook. I want a synagogue, a church, and a mosque on Main St. all in a row, getting along and following the golden rule. And we mostly do.

But I have grown tired. I admit, I am tired of arguing with crazy. . . .

Crazy is treating the same symptoms and never the disease.

Here’s the recipe for success and comfort in modern America: Stay in school, do your best, stay away from drugs, don’t have kids until you are no longer a kid, don’t break the law. You might be a pipe-fitter or a welder, a truck driver or a rapper. You might sell insurance, teach school, sell homes, or pave roads. You might become a chef or a mechanic, work with computers or take care of people in a nursing home. You will be able to afford Netflix, have food on the table, pay the rent or own a home, buy a car that runs, not get shot by the police, and probably find some happiness. Nobody will hate you because you’re a girl, or a person of color, or gay or straight, or speak with an accent. We just won’t.

Masha Gessen, “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” in the New York Review of Books, November 10, 2016:

But Trump is anything but a regular politician and this has been anything but a regular election. Trump will be only the fourth candidate in history and the second in more than a century to win the presidency after losing the popular vote. He is also probably the first candidate in history to win the presidency despite having been shown repeatedly by the national media to be a chronic liar, sexual predator, serial tax-avoider, and race-baiter who has attracted the likes of the Ku Klux Klan. Most important, Trump is the first candidate in memory who ran not for president but for autocrat—and won.

I have lived in autocracies most of my life, and have spent much of my career writing about Vladimir Putin’s Russia. I have learned a few rules for surviving in an autocracy and salvaging your sanity and self-respect. It might be worth considering them now: . . .

Andrew Sullivan, “America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny,” New York Magazine, May 1, 2016:

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome. This is just one aspect of what Trump has masterfully signaled as “political correctness” run amok, or what might be better described as the newly rigid progressive passion for racial and sexual equality of outcome, rather than the liberal aspiration to mere equality of opportunity.

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well. A struggling white man in the heartland is now told to “check his privilege” by students at Ivy League colleges. Even if you agree that the privilege exists, it’s hard not to empathize with the object of this disdain. These working-class communities, already alienated, hear — how can they not? — the glib and easy dismissals of “white straight men” as the ultimate source of all our woes. They smell the condescension and the broad generalizations about them — all of which would be repellent if directed at racial minorities — and see themselves, in Hoffer’s words, “disinherited and injured by an unjust order of things.”

And so they wait, and they steam, and they lash out. This was part of the emotional force of the tea party: not just the advancement of racial minorities, gays, and women but the simultaneous demonization of the white working-class world, its culture and way of life. Obama never intended this, but he became a symbol to many of this cultural marginalization. The Black Lives Matter left stoked the fires still further; so did the gay left, for whom the word magnanimity seems unknown, even in the wake of stunning successes. . . .

And what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans. At rallies, whenever a protester is hauled out, you can almost sense the rising rage of the collective identity venting itself against a lone dissenter and finding a catharsis of sorts in the brute force a mob can inflict on an individual. Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper¬democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

And while a critical element of 20th-century fascism — its organized street violence — is missing, you can begin to see it in embryonic form. The phalanx of bodyguards around Trump grows daily; plainclothes bouncers in the crowds have emerged as pseudo-cops to contain the incipient unrest his candidacy will only continue to provoke; supporters have attacked hecklers with sometimes stunning ferocity. Every time Trump legitimizes potential violence by his supporters by saying it comes from a love of country, he sows the seeds for serious civil unrest.

Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect. At his rallies he has recounted the mythical acts of one General John J. Pershing when confronted with an alleged outbreak of Islamist terrorism in the Philippines. Pershing, in Trump’s telling, lines up 50 Muslim prisoners, swishes a series of bullets in the corpses of freshly slaughtered pigs, and orders his men to put those bullets in their rifles and kill 49 of the captured Muslim men. He spares one captive solely so he can go back and tell his friends. End of the terrorism problem. 

In some ways, this story contains all the elements of Trump’s core appeal. The vexing problem of tackling jihadist terror? Torture and murder enough terrorists and they will simply go away. The complicated issue of undocumented workers, drawn by jobs many Americans won’t take? Deport every single one of them and build a wall to stop the rest. Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

For, like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape. Once again, Plato had his temperament down: A tyrant is a man “not having control of himself [who] attempts to rule others”; a man flooded with fear and love and passion, while having little or no ability to restrain or moderate them; a “real slave to the greatest fawning,” a man who “throughout his entire life ... is full of fear, overflowing with convulsions and pains.” Sound familiar? Trump is as mercurial and as unpredictable and as emotional as the daily Twitter stream. And we are contemplating giving him access to the nuclear codes.

House Speaker Paul Ryan on CNN, Sunday morning, November 13, 2016:

We are not planning on erecting a deportation force. Donald Trump's not planning on that.

Donald J. Trump, 60 Minutes interview with Leslie Stahl, Sunday evening, November 13, 2016:

What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally. After the border is secured and after everything gets normalized, we’re going to make a determination on the people that you’re talking about who are terrific people, they’re terrific people but we are gonna make a determination at that . . . .

Don’t be afraid. We are going to bring our country back. But certainly, don’t be afraid.

Today's Quote

From a "subway therapy" DIY art installation in New York City;
see a gallery of other Post-it notes at The Guardian.

Today's Quotes

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I. Editorial in the Guardian, speaking of Pope Francis:

When he went to Auschwitz, he showed what he believes religions are really about. He had no words. What was done there went beyond politics: it was an attempt to annihilate all meaning from humanity. In the face of that horror, he prayed in silence, and he asked “for the gift of tears” for himself. That is sometimes the greatest eloquence.

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II.  Ghazala Khan, writing in the Washington Post:

Donald Trump has asked why I did not speak at the Democratic convention. He said he would like to hear from me. Here is my answer to Donald Trump: Because without saying a thing, all the world, all America, felt my pain. I am a Gold Star mother. Whoever saw me felt me in their heart. . . .

Donald Trump said he has made a lot of sacrifices. He doesn’t know what the word sacrifice means.

Today's Quote

 

Left by a commenter on this Washington Post story:

Not a republican, but I thought that Paul Ryan was at least a decent, principled human being. And today he sold his soul to support someone who's an utter buffoon.

Yup, that nails it.

Today's Quote

Via Joe.My.God.:

Today's Quote: Mark Twain

From The Autobiography of Mark Twain, a section of it written in 1877, published in 1958:

Click to enlarge.

For those of you who don't know, Mark Twain loved fried chicken, Scotch whisky, and cigars - and enjoyed them frequently and fully.  And died happily at 75, loaded with honors and the memory of a life well lived.

See this PBS Newshour video for more on Twain's remarkable autobiography, parts of which are yet to be printed.

Today's Quote

It’s great we live in a democratic society, but we’ve lost all sense of decorum and occasion. To be on Fifth Avenue is now about the same as being on the Coney Island boardwalk.

--"Shirtless Goes the City," The New York Times

 

 

Your Head Trucker has been saying the same thing for the last forty years, but nobody has paid me the slightest bit of attention. 

Today's Quote: "Don't Give a Fuck"

Drag artist Cyon Flare

I love the gays. Always have. I respect the hell out of them. Because at some point in his or her life, every gay person has to look society straight in the eye and say: “I’m gay, and I really don’t give a fuck what you think.” And that isn’t an easy thing to do. If everyone had that kind of courage, there’d be a lot less frowning faces on the subway. There’d probably be more people dancing on floats, half-naked, covered in metallic body paint, and waving peacock feathers in the air. Because you can’t really be free until you don’t give a fuck. And not giving a fuck is just about the hardest thing there is to do. And every gay person has to do it. And I respect the hell out of that. Always have.

--Photographer Brandon Stanton via Americablog Gay.

Today's Quotes

Norwegian flags and flowers left in mourning for the slain at Oslo Cathedral

1.  From Truth Wins Out, about suspected Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik:

This passage from the suspect’s postings to an anti-Muslim website struck me though . . .

I dare not even think of how many Norwegian children who have been suicide because of these experiences (assault, robbery, rape, psychological terror committed by Muslim youths). There are probably several hundred in the last 15 years. . . .

Non-Muslim youth in Oslo aged 12-18 are in a particularly vulnerable situation in terms of harassment [from] Muslim youth.

This from a man who (it is said) methodically killed 80 kids at a youth camp, some while they were swimming away for their lives. Always, the monster the bigot sees in others is themselves. And they are right to fear that monster.

2. From Box Turtle Bulletin, about New York state clerks refusing on religious grounds to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

It goes without saying that many churches, the Catholic Church in particular, oppose the very existence of medical clinics which offer abortion services. Yet they do not suggest that the County Building Inspector refuse to issue a building license or that the city Clerk refuse to process a Business License. None of this administrative process is considered to be a part of, or the administrators culpable for, the abortions that will be conducted at the site.

There simply are no religious beliefs held by any of these public employees, sincerely or otherwise, which forbid them to administer the paperwork involved with any other businesses, marriages, divorces, or other vital statistics which they find morally objectionable. And if there were, their argument is a bit specious considering that they’ve been violating those beliefs with regularity for years.

3. From AmericablogGay, on the Vermont resort that turned down a gay couple who wanted to hold their wedding there:

Catholic beliefs strictly prohibit them from having a gay wedding on the premises. But they're okay with gay couples staying the night in their rooms, they say, and presumably having gay sex. . . .

In addition to married couples who refuse to sign a document promising they won't use contraception and won't have sex unless it's for the express goal of having a child, and single people would need to promise that they won't masturbate.

I'm tired of bigots trotting out the religion card when they actually couldn't care less about enforcing the actual tenets of their religion when it affects anything other than the gay.

4. From Andrew Sullivan, on "America's Cold Civil War":

The Republican refusal to countenance any way to raise revenues to tackle the massive debt incurred largely on their watch and from a recession which started under Obama's predecessor makes one thing clear. They are not a political party in government; they are a radical faction that refuses to participate meaningfully in the give and take the Founders firmly believed should be at the center of American government. They are not conservatives in this sense. They are anarchists. . . .

They are clearly calculating that the economic devastation their vandalism could create will so hurt the economy that it could bring them back to power through the wreckage. And they will use every smear, every lie, every canard possible to advance this goal. The propaganda channel dreamt of by Roger Ailes in the Nixon era will continue to pump poison into the body politic, until they defeat the man whose legitimacy as president they have never truly accepted.

Coming from abroad, this country seems as if it is beyond dysfunctional. It looks like a banana republic on the verge of economic collapse. Now that Nixon's dream has come true and the GOP is fundamentally the party of the Confederacy, it was perhaps naive to think they could ever accept the legitimacy of this president, or treat him with respect or act as adults in the governing process.

But this is who they are.

5. The President in yesterday's press conference:

Today's Quote: C. S. Lewis

From Mere Christianity, Book 3, Chapter 4:

One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at.  But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both.  Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it.  Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again:  each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not.  The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.