Dear Fred,
I don't quite get Laura's post -
It is noteworthy (and
overlooked) that for Christianity's first 1950 years, it was the Church -
almost exclusively - which made women into professionals. In the process, the church specifically prevented professed religious women from having husbands and children.
I would venture that "a
third" of these women were lesbian by inclination, in keeping with current
estimates that about a third of Catholic priests are homosexually disposed.
Thanks be to God the Church accommodated
the sexual preference of lesbian religious, providing them a "living" rather than relegating them to bleak, life-long submission to a
heterosexual husband.
I speculate that Laura herself would be repelled
by a socio-economic obligation to marry a spouse on the "wrong" side
of "the gender divide."
Or, perhaps Laura would welcome a late-life surprise that her husband is gay.
Laura thinks that "Modern, Liberal Women" are opposed to stay-at-home Moms. Similarly, she muses that "MLBs" view humankind's gender-marriage history as "a horrible
and frightful thing, almost too disgusting to contemplate." (Say what?!?)
Elsewhere, Laura
attempts to satirize perceived "feminist opposition" by again conjuring this "awful,
bleak period."
Not one of my liberal or radical friends (nor any of my conservative friends) sees the past as garishly as Laura does. (Anais Nin observed: "We do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are.")
You and I -- and "everyone" we
grew up with -- had Moms deeply acculturated to stay-at-home family life and
not one of us withholds love and affection.
Conservative Catholicism exhibits an enduring proclivity for paranoia. Perhaps this skew arises from the belief that Catholic doctrine
and tradition are "Absolutely Right" and therefore any one who does
not categorically approve "the one, true, holy, Catholic and apostolic
church" is, on some level, an existential threat to the survival of Truth.
Hey...
If any woman's heart-choice is to be a stay-at-home wife and mother, I applaud her decision.
I would not want it any other way.
Pax on both houses,
Alan
PS As sequel to Laura's recent laceration
of Islam, please see "Weaponized
Theology" - http://paxonbothhouses.
Only recently did I come across this
bit of scriptural weaponization:
Exodus 32:21-29
New Living Translation (NLT)
21 Finally, he turned to Aaron
and demanded, “What did these people do to you to make you bring such terrible
sin upon them?”
22 “Don’t get so upset, my
lord,” Aaron replied. “You yourself know how evil these people are. 23 They
said to me, ‘Make us gods who will lead us. We don’t know what happened to this
fellow Moses, who brought us here from the land of Egypt.’ 24 So
I told them, ‘Whoever has gold jewelry, take it off.’ When they brought it to
me, I simply threw it into the fire—and out came this calf!”
25 Moses saw that Aaron had
let the people get completely out of control, much to the amusement of their
enemies.[a]26 So
he stood at the entrance to the camp and shouted, “All of you who are on
the Lord’s side, come here
and join me.” And all the Levites gathered around him.
27 Moses told them, “This is
what the Lord, the God of
Israel, says: Each of you, take your swords and go back and forth from one end
of the camp to the other. Kill everyone—even your brothers, friends, and
neighbors.” 28 The Levites obeyed Moses’ command,
and about 3,000 people died that day.
29 Then Moses told the
Levites, “Today you have ordained yourselves[b] for
the service of the Lord, for
you obeyed him even though it meant killing your own sons and brothers. Today
you have earned a blessing.”
Note that Aaron was not among those killed.
The "guys in power" know how to insulate themselves
from the judgment they invoke on the poor slobs at the bottom Yertle's turtle
pile. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yertle_the_Turtle_and_Other_Stories
Nor did it impede Aaron's survival that Moses -- champing at the
bit to "kill everyone - even your brothers, friends, and neighbors" -
refrains from killing his brother, despite Aaron's role as creator of The
Golden Calf. (Note well: American "conservatives" are this
generation's curators of The Calf. They polish it punctiliously
well.)
I have long been astonished by the Deuteronomic command to kill
one's adolescent children for the capital offense of "being adolescent children." http://www.
That said, Moses "takes the cake" in Exodus 32.
Nothing in the Quran quite "matches" the
"divine" command that Jews slaughter their own kin. http://en.wikipedia.
***
Please see: "Is The Bible More Violent Than The
Quran?" http://www.npr.org/
Excerpt: "By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane," Jenkins says. "Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide."
Excerpt: "By the standards of the time, which is the 7th century A.D., the laws of war that are laid down by the Quran are actually reasonably humane," Jenkins says. "Then we turn to the Bible, and we actually find something that is for many people a real surprise. There is a specific kind of warfare laid down in the Bible which we can only call genocide."
***
"One of
the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolf] Eichmann trial was that
a psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. I do not doubt
it at all, and that is precisely why I find it disturbing. . . The sanity
of Eichmann is disturbing. We equate sanity with a sense of justice, with
humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and understand other
people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from barbarism,
madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that it is precisely the
sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane ones, the well-adapted
ones, who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the
buttons that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the
sane ones, have prepared. What makes us so sure, after all, that the danger
comes from a psychotic getting into a position to fire the first shot in a
nuclear war? Psychotics will be suspect. The sane ones will keep them far from
the button. No one suspects the sane, and the sane ones will have perfectly
good reasons, logical, well-adjusted reasons, for firing the shot. They will be
obeying sane orders that have come sanely down the chain of command. And
because of their sanity they will have no qualms at all. When the missiles take
off, then, it will be no mistake." "A Devout Meditation in
Memory of Adolf Eichmann" in Raids on the Unspeakable." Trappist
monk, Father Thomas Merton - 1964 http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/12/thomas-merton-quotations.html
Perhaps Laura is too sane for her own
good, not to mention The
Common Good.
The profoundest truths are paradoxical.
On Thu, May 2, 2013 at 11:50 AM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:
Laura got a in a good one today.The Disney letter head warms my heart, regardless of the issue.
--
Fred Owens
cell: 360-739-0214
My blog is Fred Owens
send mail to:
Fred Owens
35 West Main St Suite B #391
Ventura CA 93001
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