Pope Francis Nixes Gay Unions

 

Last fall, as I reported on this blog, for a moment it seemed that Pope Francis was smiling on same-sex unions; but I was mistaken.  Today the Pope signed off on a Vatican declaration that even in a committed union, homosex is a SIN, and since "God cannot bless sin," neither can the Church.  Excerpt:

It is not licit to impart a blessing on relationships, or partnerships, even stable, that involve sexual activity outside of marriage (i.e., outside the indissoluble union of a man and a woman open in itself to the transmission of life), as is the case of the unions between persons of the same sex. . . . [Blessing such unions] would constitute a certain imitation or analogue of the nuptial blessing invoked on the man and woman united in the sacrament of Matrimony, while in fact “there are absolutely no grounds for considering homosexual unions to be in any way similar or even remotely analogous to God’s plan for marriage and family”.

[This teaching] declares illicit any form of blessing that tends to acknowledge their unions as such. In this case, in fact, the blessing would manifest not the intention to entrust such individual persons to the protection and help of God, in the sense mentioned above, but to approve and encourage a choice and a way of life that cannot be recognized as objectively ordered to the revealed plans of God.

What pompous bullshit.  Since I'm an Episcopalian (lapsed), not a Catholic, this slanderous ruling has no direct relevance to me - but of course it reflects and encourages the same thinking in all other churches that hold to this antediluvian view of life and love.  When it comes to the gays, that is.  When it's about the straight boys and their spermatic proclivities, oh well, there's all kinds of loopholes, winks, and nudges, aren't there?

The truth is, there is nothing glorious, notorious, or ridiculous about homosexuality, which has occurred naturally and spontaneously throughout human and animal populations since the dawn of recorded history.  I have no desire to change anybody's church; I just want to be left alone, neither glorified nor vilified nor ridiculed.  And I insist upon the right to the equal protection of the laws, with the same human rights and dignity as anyone else.  

This is not too much to ask; nor will it cause the world or the universe to collapse, despite hysterical religious claims to the contrary.  You straight people have already done more than enough, collectively, down through the centuries to merit the wrath of God, if it comes to that, so quit trying to shift your guilt onto the gay scapegoats.

[A lot of boring pontification omitted here.]

As for Pope Francis, I still respect him as a kindly, magnanimous leader who is doing what good he can for the world in other ways - but I now unsay my remark in that earlier post about considering him a gay ally.  

The Supreme Court of the United States ruling on marriage equality, June 26, 2015

God bless America!

-----

Who Says It's Not Natural?

Birds do it, bees do it - even beetles do it. And here's the proof.

Enuff said.

Sex, Lies, and Catholicism

Excerpt from a Sunday essay on the Pope's sexuality by the devoutly Catholic Andrew Sullivan, under the ironic title "The Pope Is Not Gay":

The choice between this kind of affirmation of spirituality and love and a politics of control and fear was what the church faced under John Paul II, as modernity pressed. . . . The pursuit of control is really a fear of scrutiny and transparency which, when added to the unspeakable crimes of the past, ineluctably led to the current meltdown in the West. The homosexual question is not in any way marginal to this; in fact, you could see it as a central challenge for a church caught between truth and power. . . .

It seems pretty obvious to me - as it does to Angelo Quattrochi, whose book is reviewed by Toibin - that the current Pope is a gay man (just as it was blindingly clear that John Paul II was straight). I am not claiming that Benedict is someone who has explored his sexuality, or has violated his own strictures on the matter. There is absolutely no evidence of that, or of hypocrisy of any sort. But that does not mean that he isn't gay. In fact, Ratzinger's command that gay priests should actively lie about their orientation makes any public statement about this on its face lacking in credibility. But when you look at the Pope's mental architecture (I've read a great deal of his writing over the last two decades) you do see that strong internal repression does make sense of his life and beliefs. At times, it seems to me, his gayness is almost wince-inducing. The prissy fastidiousness, the effeminate voice, the fixation on liturgy and ritual, and the over-the-top clothing accessories are one thing. But what resonates with me the most is a theology that seems crafted from solitary introspection into a perfect, abstract unity of belief. It is so perfect it reflects a life of withdrawal from the world of human relationship, rather than an interaction with it. Of course, this kind of work is not inherently homosexual; but I have known so many repressed gay men who can only live without severe pain in the world if they create a perfect abstraction of what it is, and what their role is in it. Toibin brilliantly explains this syndrome, why the church of old was so often such a siren call for gay men who could not handle their own nature. In Benedict, one sees a near-apotheosis of this type, what Quattrocchi describes as "simply the most repressed, imploded gay in the world." . . .

I would like to return to the world where this kind of speculation was disgraceful, unnecessary and blasphemous. But when this Pope has already enabled the rape of children, has covered up the crimes of many priests, when he has responded by blaming gay men for the moral failings of his own church, when he has publicly demanded that gay Catholics remain in the closet, i.e. lie about themselves as a sacred duty ... then such deference becomes much more difficult.

What I Say:  As a gay man, and an Episcopalian-on-hold, I understand the point Sullivan is making about being attracted to a spirituality supported by liturgy, ritual, and finery; in fact, as I've blogged in the past, I do think that the love of beauty - creating, revealing, sharing it in any of a myriad possible ways - is a defining element of the gay personality, which of course also comes in many shapes and sizes from silly twink to gruff leatherman.  But when you get past whatever the exterior may be, I think you find the same motive animating all of us at heart.

In contrast to our straight brothers, some of whom are very creative indeed and might take great delight in crafting pastries or growing roses - as did one very butch and very straight retired Marine captain I once knew.  Yet my hunch is that for them the beauty motive is a sideline, not the animating principle; seems to me that the heart of an unambiguously straight man is driven to build a metaphorical fort, not a house or a garden, as well as finding the means to knock down the other guy's fort.  In other words, aggression and domination, or to put it differently, the defender and the warrior, two sides of the same coin:  that's what makes them tick and sets their life agenda.

Continued after the jump . . .

Past Times: The Warren Cup

First, a little background:  In 1900, Edward Perry Warren - a wealthy gay "American collector who lived in Lewes in Sussex, England, with his collection of Greek antiquities and his lover John Marshall," according to Wikipedia - gave a commission to the sculptor Rodin for a marble copy of his exquisite statue The Kiss, the contract specifying that "the genitals of the man must be complete."  Figures.

Having obtained the statue, in 1914 Warren lent it to the Lewes town council, to be put on public display at the town hall.  It is a lovely thing, isn't it?

Oh but - Horrors!  The local prudes were all up in arms, and managed to get the statue hidden away from public view.  Musn't encourage that sort of thing, you know.

This much of the story I already knew most of.  Tonight I was cheered to discover that Warren was also the owner of another work of fine art that bodes well to become even more famous than Rodin's - it is certainly more explicit, which you might expect from the collection of an artsy old queen, right?

In 1998, the British Museum paid £1.8 million for this other highlight from Warren's collection:  a silver Roman drinking cup dating from about the year ten, supposedly found near Jerusalem and bought by Warren in 1911.  Of course, for most of the twentieth century, such a frankly homoerotic piece of work could not be openly displayed or discussed at all; but now it is on permanent display at the British Museum.

Do click here for an even better, zoomable photograph to explore the fine details of this piece; and while you're there, listen to the very insightful BBC Radio 4 commentary on the cup.

Paul Roberts, curator of the British Museum:

To the Romans it was a drinking cup to be used not just admired. Picture a dinner party, course after course of exotic food and lots of fine wine. The guests talk about politics and love as they pass round the table this luxurious, tactile silver cup. Their host is delighted that they admire its decoration (and its value).

As a work of art it’s a masterpiece – its fine decoration achieved by beating the silver into shape from the inside using fine hammers and chisels. Luxuriant fabrics and musical instruments indicate a world heavily influenced by Greek culture, which the Romans admired and adopted.

So what is so special about the decoration that made it one of the British Museum’s highest-profile and most controversial acquisitions? What kept the piece out of permanent museum collections until 1999, and ensured that its purchase by the British Museum earned it a place in all the British media?

Continued after the jump . . .

Keeping Up with the Bonobos

And the albatresbians.  The New York Times Magazine features a thoughtful, well-written piece on "Can Animals Be Gay?" that you should read.  Excerpt:

Various forms of same-sex sexual activity have been recorded in more than 450 different species of animals by now, from flamingos to bison to beetles to guppies to warthogs. A female koala might force another female against a tree and mount her, while throwing back her head and releasing what one scientist described as “exhalated belchlike sounds.” Male Amazon River dolphins have been known to penetrate each other in the blowhole. Within most species, homosexual sex has been documented only sporadically, and there appear to be few cases of individual animals who engage in it exclusively. For more than a century, this kind of observation was usually tacked onto scientific papers as a curiosity, if it was reported at all, and not pursued as a legitimate research subject. Biologists tried to explain away what they’d seen, or dismissed it as theoretically meaningless — an isolated glitch in an otherwise elegant Darwinian universe where every facet of an animal’s behavior is geared toward reproducing. One primatologist speculated that the real reason two male orangutans were fellating each other was nutritional. . . .

These ideas generally aim to explain only particular behaviors in a particular species. So far, the only real conclusion this relatively small body of literature seems to point to, collectively, is a kind of deflating, meta-conclusion: a single explanation of homosexual behavior in animals may not be possible, because thinking of “homosexual behavior in animals” as a single scientific subject might not make much sense. “Biologists want to build these unified theories to explain everything they see,” Vasey told me. So do journalists, he added — all people, really. “But none of this lends itself to a linear story. My take on it is that homosexual behavior is not a uniform phenomenon. Having one unifying body of theory that explains why it’s happening in all these different species might be a chimera.”

The point of heterosexual sex, Vasey said, no matter what kind of animal is doing it, is primarily reproduction. But that shouldn’t trick us into thinking that homosexual behavior has some equivalent, organizing purpose — that the two are tidy opposites. “All this homosexual behavior isn’t tied together by that sort of primary function,” Vasey said. Even what the same-sex animals are doing varies tremendously from species to species. But we’re quick to conceive of that great range of activities in the way it most handily tracks to our anthropomorphic point of view: put crassly, all those different animals just seem to be doing gay sex stuff with one another. As the biologist Marlene Zuk explains, we are hard-wired to read all animal behavior as “some version of the way people do things” and animals as “blurred, imperfect copies of humans.”

What I Say:  Your Head Trucker is mildly amused by the convoluted attempts of scientists and philosophers to fit homosex into some rigid, all-encompassing Grand Theory of Life; which to me seems just as silly and irrelevant as the fundamentalists trying to fit all the messy, multiform variety of the cosmos into the straitjacket of Biblical literalism.

Both attempts are very short-sighted and missing the point:  namely, that there is a divine and jovial mystery at the heart of things whose depths no one can plumb. 

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

--Hamlet, Act I.

As I see it, one might as well try to explain why Australia is where it is and not, say, in the Gulf of Mexico.  Or why the sky is blue, or why stars twinkle but planets don't, or why we say the sun rises in the east when we could if we wanted to just as easily say it rises in the west.  Or why in certain cases the precise compound curve of a lip, a shoulder, a hip, or a buttock makes another person weak at the knees.

Very clever fellows have, indeed, long since come up with explanations for some of these things; but I submit that these delightful events would still be occurring and giving daily joy had no explanation ever been devised.  Explanation is not the same as justification; and some things need no justification at all.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty:  that is all ye know, and all ye need to know.

--Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn.

Thirty Years Later: Desire and Regret

Your Head Trucker about 1983, in the one short beardless period of my adult life.

I've been meaning to write a note about a significant milestone in my life.  I don't remember the exact day, but I know it was a Saturday night in February, 1980 - that's when I first had sex, at the very late age, so it seemed then, of 24.   (That fooling around I did with some other boys when I was 11 or 12 doesn't really count.)  I had missed out entirely on the Seventies, I am very sorry to say, all except for some Playgirl magazines and a lot of furtive whacking off - but that doesn't count either.

The previous fall I had finally worked up the courage to go to the gay rap group on campus and ease into the water, so to speak.  It's difficult, and amusing, to remember now how terrified I was of coming out, even just to other gay men.  But after a year on a large university campus I had taken those baby steps of connecting socially; and then after a few months of paddling around in the shallow end of the pool, it was time to try the diving board.

It was probably in January that I first went to the local gay bar, along with some friends from the campus group.  I would never have had the balls to walk in there all alone, I don't think.  Hell, I didn't even have a clue that there was a gay bar in town - that's how deep in the closet I was.  But as soon as we arrived, I was thrilled at the sight of all these guys - and some gals too, of course - dancing with each other.  Hot looking guys, like something out of my dreams; but who were also very ordinary, everyday guys in jeans and college T-shirts and ball caps:  not scary at all.  I don't know what I expected, but it was all very reassuring, and fun.

I don't remember if I even danced with anyone that first time; mainly I was just scoping out the scenery.  A few weekends later I went out with the guys again, still a bit shy and not expecting anything in particular to happen.  And that's when somebody introduced me to Greg, and suddenly - kersplash!

Continued after the jump . . .