How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways...

I love thee like a drop of dew loves the light of dawn.  I love thee as stars love night's deep embrace.  I love thee as the storm loves the sea; as the tree loves the land; as the clouds love the sky and as the snow loves the mountain's peak.  I love you in your absence; indeed I love your absence as much as I love you.  I love the pining needfulness that follows your departure like a gently settling mist, the stillness of your heart elsewhere beating, the infinite tenderness of my lips unkissed by yours. 

I love our love for the countless sweet illusions which rise up from it when I am isolated.  The ethereal beings of my lonliness are my most favored companions; they come to me when you do not, they come from me which you can not, they hold me like a cold mist embraces a homeless cat.  They hold me.

I love thee wherever else you are.  Do not hurry back.

It's up.  Go there, quick; my experience with keeping things up is not so good. 

Terreus has a compelling posting regarding deeplinking, and the beancounters' and lawyers' progress toward preventing it. 

I say if a site does not want deeplinking, then they should write a script to prevent unauthorized access to their sites.  Otherwise everything on the web is (and should be) fair game.

It's coming.

The [Durham Catholic District School Board] has said it supports Hall's right to be a homosexual but that it does not support "a homosexual lifestyle."

-from CP article today by Amy Carmichael

photo, (CP/Fred Chartrand)

Of all the hypocrisies of the religio-sexual Catholic church, this one is made of the flimsiest tissue of illogic and rationalization.  I am not sure if I am more insulted by the seething hatred which this line of bigotry pretends to cloak, or by the bigots' patently disengenous effort at concealing their contempt.  "We love you, we just hate what you do."  I guess they think that immunizes them against the hatred which they hold so dear.  Go on, keep hating me, I want you to.  Because I know your hate will kill you.  And if I loved justice like I say I do, I should feel bad about that. 

You would think that the Catholic church would have a little discretion in the tame matter of allowing a high school boy to take his boyfriend to the prom—I mean, it's not like they're going to be having sex in the rectory, they're just going to be dancing at a prom.  I can't resist:  It would appear that the Church will overlook a priest fucking him, but won't allow his boyfriend to hold his hand.  There, I said it.

However, these sex-abusing priest scandals rocking the Catholic church right now are just a flash in the pan.  Anyone who has close friends who attended seminary has heard about how handy it can be for a young man to be sexually versatile.  It can help a great deal in gaining good grades and promotion.  I don't know why we pretend to be surprized about that, it is a not uncommon theme in our culture; Madonna once said that losing her virginity was a career move.  Why should we think this would be any different among the men and boys of the altar? 

Probably because it is worse among them.  Men are pigs, according to a current maxim, and absent a woman's longer view of sex—which tends to include consequences, emotional and otherwise—men-on-men sex can quickly become a runaway chain reaction.  And the conditions, which arguably have helped promote the recently revealed abuses, such as exist with an all-male clergy, all-male religious orders, and an all-male Magisterium, have all been in place for hundreds of years.  This crisis has been in the making for a long time.  Recent headlines and lawsuits represent a very superficial flash restricted so far to the extreme fringes of promiscuity and abuse among priests.

This does not mean the blaze will get worse and consume the Church; the Catholic church has a thousand years' experience in controlling public opinion and squelching scandal.  What this does mean is that religious ministry will lose a sizeable chunk of its already narrow philosophical base under the guise of hunting monsters. 

Most of the priests I have known are gay, and many were sexually active (with peers, not children).  In my experience these men undeniably gave more compassion and humanity to their ministries than did any of their scared-straight counterparts.  They gave me faith.  Once upon a time, I believed that real genuine love (not sex) and complete acceptance were a part of religion.  I believe this no more.  But these men also gave me a faith—and this faith I keep—that genuine love and complete acceptance are a part of me.  Sadly I cannot thank you all by name here, and sad is it too that we cannot relive those days of high holy hell-raising together, in the 80s, when our church felt so joyful and wholly alive... 

Fanaticsm will rise and fall, bigots will ascend and be cast down, boys will go to proms with boys (or not), and what we call love will continue to be spoken in either froth-mouthed rages, or gentle sincere whispers—but the choice will always be ours. 

We can learn a great deal from a fresh-faced seventeen year-old in love, but will we?  The choice will always be ours. 

A Massachusetts State Trooper shot and killed a man who was threatening suicide.  Of course, I wasn't there, and it does seem too easy to take pot-shots at the cop after the fact, so until today I didn't.  But today I read of a riot in which police officers suffered terribly—huge lacerations, concussions, and broken limbs—yet none of the rioters was killed. 

No jokes about showing up to a gunfight with a knife.  No jokes at all; this isn't funny though it is grotesquely absurd.  Did Trooper Wildgrube sustain any injuries?  Did he tear or soil his uniform in this conflict that left a man dead?  I could see the use of a semi-automatic .357 with hollow-point bullets if they were in hand-to-hand combat, and the trooper was within range of the knife's lethal potential.  I could even almost understand a cop in body armor firing a gun at a crazed man charging homicidally at him with a knife.  But Mr Twedt was, by all accounts, a remarkably harmless fellow who was distraught, depressed, most likely angry, and at the moment he was shot, he was coated like a ghost in white fire-extinguisher powder.  I wonder, did those two hollow-points raise a puff of dust when they hit the pathetically powdered suicidal man?

Forgive my brutality, but the use of lethal force opens you up to that.  And that is as it should be when police officers start using overwhelmingly lethal force as if it were a television remote control, when they do not like what they see and can't deal with it in any way other than to just shut it off. 

This is what we want; rape in the embrace of a self-seeking capitalism, in exchange for the promise that it will not kill us—not right away.  The myth of medication makes no one well, least of all those whom it makes rich.  Restoring humanity to the societies of the world will take a long time, but restoring humanity to ourselves can be accomplished immediately.  You just have to really want it, so much that you are willing to turn your back on the homicidal rapist who wants to keep you right where you are.

I think I am an anarchist.  Oh, my. 

I guess I have always accepted the recieved notion that anarchy and peace were mutually exclusive.  I am now beginning to develop the opinion that peace without anarchy merely represents order within the prison yard.  True peace is, I think, serenity within the natural freedom which exists prior to 'administered freedom,' which is what we define as freedom today.