New links

Some people have said for years I dwell too much on Topic H, and, while that's the premise of the site, I can't deny that it makes me seem more of a gloomy killjoy than I am. I don't think I'm being immodest when I say that people who know me in the flesh know that I can be as funny and witty as ... ahem ... Oscar Wilde. And obviously I have secular interests -- I'm a huge fan of both sports and politics and beer (only "chicks" are left out -- durnit). And like most guys with my issues, I was a pop-culture junkie as a boy. As a result of all this, "blending in" among straight guys has never been hard for me.

So, partly to present a more-balanced view of who I am and maybe come across as a more attractive human being, and partly to make regular blogging psychologically easier -- I've decided to let myself write about other topics.

I've removed some dead or radically changed sites from my link list at the right. And I've also added a new category -- "homocons," a couple of whom I've come to enjoy reading and interacting some with on Twitter. It should go without saying that these are sites of people who practice the lifestyle and/or identify as gay (which is why they're in a different category than Catholic and Same-Sex-Attraction sites. They're not pornographic but the morality of the homosexual act and derivative conclusions are assumed and/or argued for. The over-scrupulous should consider that your warning).

Indeed it was while reading one of the "homocon" sites that I came across something profound about who I am, as a man, as a Catholic, a person with homosexual attractions, and my relationship to these sorts of "homocons" (though the realizations were kinda brewing within me during the disgraceful fight over GOProud at CPAC).

At the conservative blog Gay Patriot, there was an early June post about the Madrid Gay Pride parade, the organizers which had ignited a furor by disinviting an Israeli float because of the Gaza flotilla. The one nation in the Middle East where homosexuality is not punishable by imprisonment or death (this is a good thing) and that actually has a gay-pride parade (not-so-good but hardly objectionable to gay-pride parade organizers) is not kosher because of its fighting with neighbors who would only allow even a Courage conference so as to provide a target-rich environment. Even for a man like myself, no moral equivalence between Western civilization and its enemies -- Islam or pre-modern societies -- is even conceivable, and the people who prattle on to the contrary (of whom there are alarmingly many in "religious right" and Catholic traditionalist circles) are delusional fantasists.

B. Daniel Blatt, aka Gay Patriot West, began and ended it like this:

The more I learn about the antics of gay leaders (and other organizers of gay events) in this country and abroad, the more convinced I become that their primary concern is not promoting greater social acceptance of gay people, but in becoming the gay auxiliaries of various left-wing (and often anti-Western) movements. ...

Yet, to all too many gay organizations, that tolerance [for gays in Israel] matters less than belonging to the “Grand Coalition of those Oppressed by Western Civilization.”

Yep. Indeed to be honest, I have to acknowledge the following. I owe, at least historically, my aversion to the gay lifestyle as much to politics as to religion, to Western Civ and the great tradition as to the Church.

I am an adult revert who was only confirmed a few weeks short of his 26th birthday (though I had been attending Mass for a year and a bit before that). In my late-teens and early-20s, though obviously I told myself they were just a phase, the attractions and the male body's activity were undeniable. As was my falling in love with my best friend at 24. Since I wasn't any kind of churchgoer for much of these years, a man's sexual prime, I have to acknowledge that a huge reason I stayed chaste and didn't fall into the lifestyle, at a time when I would have been most vulnerable and also the most-dangerous time to be practicing the lifestyle, was my contempt for gay activists and the role models they put forth in college. They were everything I didn't want to be -- haters of Western civilization, haters of the Catholic Church (which I didn't despise even in lapsitude), haters of the US as it exists, whiners about their own bad choices in life, worshippers of whatever leftist fad came up next. And therefore, objectively-speaking, allies of those who want to destroy the space that even allows a closet and a space in the Church to a man like myself.

Attending college at the height of the PC-canon wars, I found inspiration in such "homocons" as Camille Paglia and Andrew Sullivan (the Sullivan of that period -- not the Trig-truther, pro-outing, anti-Semitic, anti-Catholic bigot of today). Truth be told, they did more to protect my virginity (unintentionally I'm pretty sure) and keep me away from the gay lifestyle than could the Church I didn't quite embrace yet.