They ruined the word "gay"

Now this story is just frickin' funny, but I think there is a serious point about the totalitarianism of the gay-lifestyle movement behind it. Apparently, an Australian music teacher changed the words of a popular children's song so the pupils wouldn't giggle over the word "gay."

Principal Garry Martin of Le Page Primary School in Melbourne said he instructed students to substitute the line "Fun your life must be" for the original "Gay your life must be" when singing "Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree." ...

Martin said he was playing a recording of the song for the students about a month ago when the line "gay your life must be" produced a flurry of giggles throughout the classroom.
Some of the students use the word "gay" as a schoolyard taunt, he said, but don’t understand its true meaning.

And now, on a lighter note ...

Forget the effect on children, direct or indirect. Who cares about reinforcing the contraceptive mentality. To heck with the death of religious freedom. Here is the ultimate argument. If this is gay "marriage," all sane people should be against it.

The headline at the Daily Mirror says it all: "Gay couple banned from having giant models of The Simpsons as guests of honour at wedding." (Though you'd think the Sun wooda-dunn better, "I Do-hhhh" or something wittier.)

I guess it is appropriate though -- imaginary fictional witnesses for an imaginary fictional wedding.

I don't mean that as completely sarcastically as it might sound (obviously, breeders have been known to be tacky too). But it's pretty clear after years of practice (I am generalizing, I realize) that homosexuals don't want a marriage, they want a wedding; that they have no sense of solemnity and don't see monogamy as important. Heck, if a wedding is all about you and your fabulousness, why not have cartoon-character dummies as guests of honor?

And this couple seems ... well, how to put it delicately ... Psychological Case Study One supporting the "homosexuality as arrested development" theory.

Glyn and Roy will get over the snub to their cartoon heroes by not going on honeymoon ... and watching DVDs of the Simpsons instead.

I love "The Simpsons" as much as the next guy but ... does one laugh or cry? Shouldn't the honeymoon be about ... y'know ... lots of gettin nekkid and makin' out and sex'n'stuff. (I looked this up a few years ago ... I think it's supposed to involve that but I could be getting this part wrong.) You almost feel sorry for the Cardiff city council spokesflak stating the so-obvious-it's-passe in these Very Interesting Times:

A Cardiff city council spokeswoman said: “Guidance from the Registrar General states that the Registrar should always insist upon the seemly behaviour of the parties and their witnesses.
“All ceremonies – marriages and civil partnerships – should therefore be solemn and dignified.
“It is Cardiff Council’s view that this request was outside that definition and could not be permitted.”

Hate speech

Read this self-identified "gaytheist" ... and keep in mind, this person is talking about Dignity.

Rarely will you see, without the use of profanity, such utterly unhinged ignorance and hate.All Christians see reason as the anti-Christ?' the very existence of any Catholics oppresses her; and ... well .... here are the choicest quotes.

"helping the church to oppress gay people simply through the idea that it’s okay to be Catholic."

"The Catholics, like all Christians, see rational thinking as the anti-Christ and work to vilify it as much as possible."

"The whole Catholic church is gayer than the Metropolitan Community Church. Come on, the men dress up in dresses and funny little hats and hang around altar boys all the time. The act of communion is essentially kneeling down with your mouth open in front of a man in a dress, how can you say that it is not gay?"

"The one thing about being Catholic in general (not just a gay or straight issue) is that to be a Catholic, you immediately have to hate everything that is essentially human about yourself."

"LGBT Christians are confusing but LGBT Catholics are just mentally ill."

Words fail. Remember this because the cultural narrative about us Catholics and the gays is ... we hate them, we hate them, we hate them ...

"Queering" the church registry

One of Fort Worth's most prominent Baptist churches engaged in an anti-Solomon decision last week, deciding to cut the baby in half by not printing any family photos in its directory rather than printing those of homosexual couples. From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (HT to Mark):

FORT WORTH -- Broadway Baptist Church voted Sunday to publish a 125th anniversary directory without individual or family portraits after some members of the congregation opposed allowing gay couples' portraits to appear in the publication.
In a compromise recommended by the church's board of deacons, the directory will show members in candid snapshots of small and large groups. The group pictures will identify people by name, and every effort will be made to include all of the church's members.
Church leaders said this approach provides the photographs needed by members to identify each other and follows church bylaws to treat all members equally. It also avoids making any statement regarding Scriptural interpretations regarding homosexuality.

The headline writer said "Neither side wins on gay couples in directory." Which rather presupposes a lot, in my opinion -- namely that there are in fact "two sides." And I wonder (actually, I don't wonder) why the Star-Telegram writer laid the blame for the decision on the theological conservatives, saying the decision was made "after some members of the congregation opposed allowing gay couples' portraits to appear in the publication" rather than "after some gay couples demanded to have their portraits appear in the publication."

There's a couple of other things I'm curious about.

First of all, what has these gay couples' self-presentation been? The Star-Telegram report reads as if the three pairs in question already had been attending the church openly and "as a couple." On the assumption that this is correct (I grant a secular media outlet is unreliable on the point), then I think the gay couples have a legitimate request. And Broadway Baptist made its own bed long ago.

If one has been attending a church under a certain public persona and holding yourself out in a certain way, I find it hard to see why this public persona doesn't belong in the yearbook. You can't really object to a photo, as one person in this Star-Telegram story does, on "having to explain it to the kids" grounds. Not if those children are already seeing a same-sex couple at Sunday services, presumably holding hands or other PDAs of the kind considered acceptable for married-or-dating couples. And how would the so-called compromise -- candid snapshots that attempt to cover everyone -- fix that. Are the children not supposed to realize that Adam and Steve were together at all the church picnic photos too? And even if the two are in a portrait-type situation, as the gays wanted, couldn't a parent just as convincingly say to a curious girl [boy] "it's like when you and your sister [brother] had your photo taken together."

As it happens, I know two same-sex-attracted men who live together and go to the same parish. They are ex-lovers but are now Catholics, sleeping in separate bedrooms and committed to chastity, which they have broken once in more than a decade. Never would they either commit a PDA that might scandalize others nor (and here's where I'm guessing) would they insist on being a couple in the parish directory. They are both in it as individuals.

But second, in what meaningful sense is this decision, whatever one thinks of it in the sense of "agree-disagree" or "good-bad," not a "statement about Scriptural interpretations regarding homosexuality," which the Star-Telegram report says it was crafted not to be. Even a decision not to say something says something -- namely that this congregation can't say anything about the morality of homosexuality and therefore this very public matter is one of religious liberty. Or, to use the formulation of St. Augustine, who knew a thing or two about sexual immorality, that homosexuality is one of those "dubiis" in which there should be "libertas." Which is of course a substantive teaching -- that homosexuality is one of those "doubtful things" and is not one of those "necessariis" that call for "unitas." Which does, of course, marginalize and exclude those who believe sexual conduct is a "necessary thing" that requires "unity."

Thus this quarrel underlines something I'm confident I've said more than once. "What a group of people are disputing and why" is a far more telling fact about the world than "how that dispute is decided substantively."

The fact that any Baptist church is even debating whether to put pictures of openly-gay couples in its yearbook tells us how far the gay agenda has wormed its way into the body of Christ. That they decided not to may be a good or bad thing. But more revealing than even the fact of a debate is that the only way the church could "refuse" was not "just say no" but a "compromise" on having no family photos at all. And more revealing still is the fact that the church called in "New Testament experts."

"The New Testament experts [sic] made it clear that thoughtful, intelligent Christians disagree on what the Bible says about homosexuality," [Senior Pastor Brett Younger] said. "Many realized that Christians can hold different opinions on this without letting it divide the church."

Not really. Or rather, there is no disagreement among thoughtful intelligent Christians who hold that the Bible is normative and inspired about what it says on homosexuality. The only way a thoughtful, intelligent person can hold that the Bible does not condemn homosexual acts is by starting from the presupposed worldview (i.e., before any actual engagement with the text) that the Bible is not normative and is not inspired — that it is merely the product of men and thus can be superceded absolutely ("there is no binding magisterium" also has to be smuggled in somewhere or thus inferred).

Lest I come across as an anti-intellectual, let me say that there is nothing wrong with these two (or three) worldview premises for certain purposes, primarily scholarly ones. That the Bible is a historical text written by men is, in a certain sense, undeniable and for some historical, sociological or philological work, whether it's the inspired word of God binding for all time and what that means¹ is a question that can be set aside. But ... that does not in any way shape or form make such scholars "experts" in any normative sense or especially competent to testify on doctrine, either on faith or morals. Their expertise explicitly excludes them from such a self-presentation.

So the question becomes, can there be a religion that includes people who do believe the Bible inspired and binding and those who do not. One guess what I think, but the fact is that this Fort Worth congregation has no way to answer that question definitively, in no small part because of the congregationalist structure that is a Baptist pillar. Instead, they worship the One True god ... Diversity:

"This has been a difficult decision for our congregation," said Kathy Madeja, chairman of the deacon board. "Our members continue to have diverse opinions, but we are still a church family and we will continue to struggle with how to honor our diversity," she said. ... (CM: how about honoring God??)
"Broadway will continue as a congregation in which diversity is embraced," [Senior Pastor Brett Younger] said. (CM: how about embracing the Cross??)

And ultimately this is why Episcopalians are in a necessary internal schism over Bishop Gene Robinson. It's not the sin of sodomy per se, but the questions of biblical authority. Robinson's consecration and the defenses of it proved to conservatives that liberal "wetness" went all the way down, with no limits. The two groups do not worship the same god and thus do not belong in the same church, as St. Paul taught. Schism simply objectively was and the so-called acts of schism in the last few years by individual parishes and dioceses in the US and by the African and South American bishops are mere recognitions of that fact.

The Episcopalians may be in the infirmary right now (actually hospice care, I'd say), but this Fort Worth church shows that the rest of mainline Protestantism is starting to call in sick as well.
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¹ However that formulation shakes out in the details, about which there are legitimately held differences among Christians and Christian bodies.

At 8, I couldn't even spell "transgendered"

On the "WTF Is The World Coming To" front ... an elementary school in Colorado is planning on accommodating an 8-year-old boy who says he's "transgendered."

He's an 8-year-old boy who wants to attend second grade here in the Douglas County Public Schools, but with an unusual stipulation: He wants to go to class as a girl.
That means wearing girls' clothing if he likes, being addressed by his teacher with a girl's name, and using the school's two unisex, family bathrooms instead of the boys' room.
School district officials are preparing to accommodate the transgender child and his family, but not without public fuss.
Other parents at the school have gone public with their objections, citing concerns about exposing their own children to the sensitive subjects of sex and gender identification, and questioning the wisdom of the school's accommodation of the boy.
"I don't think a [second-grader] does have the rationale to decide this life-altering choice," said Dave M., who told Denver's KUSA-TV that his daughter will be in the same class as the transgendered boy.

I distinctly remember being 8 years old and ... the very concepts "transgendered" and "transsexual" would have been absolutely beyond me. And not because they would have been beyond my comprehension (I was pretty smart as a boy ... and I probably could have spelled them, the 5-time School Spelling Bee champ says). And not because I didn't know, at some pre-sexual level, that I didn't "fit in" amongst the other boys. But who knows what I might have thought at that time had I had "Comprehensive Sex Education" or otherwise had my mind fucked with by the sexual revolution and the sensitivity police.

This is a large part of what we opponents of sexual revolution mean when we say it is corrupting. Where, in the name of Whatever, could an 8-year-old even get the notion that he's "really" a girl or should be called by a girl's name? What competence does he have to even decide on the matter? I should note that I'm really not commenting exactly on moral matters per se. I could very well believe ... this is experience talking ... that an 8-year-old boy might have some latent issues and they might later morph into full-blown same-sex-attraction ... and, if so, his post-pubescent body will tell him that in about 5 or 6 years. And when he's an adult, he might be competent to decide what to make of such a fact. It is actually possible (gay men assure us repeatedly) to believe that homosexuality be moral and that there's no need to prematurely sexualize children.

And why the hell are his parents accommodating what would once have been understood as simple malingering, childishness (in an 8-year-old ... imagine that) or an excessive fantasy life? An 8-year-old might not even have made his first confession yet and certainly doesn't even have his adult voice yet, and his parents are going along with some declaration on a lifelong matter like "gender identity"? Children have no attention span and no concept of time or lifespan. I remember wanting to change my name when I was 10 ... it lasted a day. The fewer adult concepts you introduce into a child's head, the less chance he has to screw up.

As our Courage chaplain once wrote (keep in mind that he's writing explicitly about high-schoolers, but that was back in the Dark Ages, the Unenlightened Era of 2005. We've made so much progress among the youth since.):

Rather than struggle through the difficulties of adolescence, a high-school freshman or sophomore can now, with official support, profess to be gay—and he instantly has an identity and a group. Now he belongs. He knows who he is. Gone is the possibility that adolescents might be confused, perhaps even wrong. Adults typically display a wise reserve about the self-discoveries of high-school students: they know adolescents are still figuring things out, and they recognize their responsibility to help sort through the confusion. So why is all this natural wisdom somehow abandoned these days—in the most confused and confusing area of adolescent sexuality?
Of course, the phrases are tempting because of their convenience and efficiency. They are common, close at hand, and make quick work of a difficult issue. But they also identify an individual person with his homosexual inclinations. They presume that a person is his inclinations or attractions; he is a “gay” or is a “homosexual.” At some point adults have to admit that a fifteen-year-old who claims to be “a questioning transgendered bisexual” is really just confused.

In fact, it used to be the case that we believed an 8-year-old was not competent to make decisions on sexuality, whatever they may be -- that's the presupposition of all age of consent laws. And that analogy goes to the heart of what is evil, not just laughable, about this Colorado case. By giving an 8-year-old his way on this matter, and trying to make others accommodate him using the power of the state, this boy's parents and the school district are treating him as a sexual agent. This undermines the "age of consent" presupposition and thus does something as violating, as evil as anything NAMBLA does, even though nobody is being touched or fondled or "messed with." We used to understand the difference between adults and children. I don't think we do any more. In this case, both because a child is trying to be too adult and adults are succeeding in acting like children.

Pretty soon, this won't be satire ...