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Well! Happy Birthday, Jesus!
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I’m in Living Faith today.
Remember: if you would like more of the same – every day of 2019! – check out:
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Thanks to Steve McEvoy for including my short story “The Absence of War” and two of my son’s short story collections in his best reads of the last quarter of 2018.
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Everyone has their favorite Christmas music, and in These Times, even their curated Christmas lists on Spotify and such – hey, I do! – and here are three of my favorites.
It’s still Christmas, people!
Celebremos el Nino – Christmas Delights from the Mexican Baroque. I love the music of the Latin American Baroque, and this is a wonderful introduction.
A Renaissance Christmas from the Boston Camereta. This gets the heaviest rotation, hands down.
Carols from the Old and New Worlds.
And of course, the best Christmas song of all time: Merry Christmas from the Family by the master, Robert Earl Keen.
Little sister brought her new boyfriend/He was a Mexican/We didn’t know what to think about him til he sang Feliz Navidad..Feliz Navidad
Of course he brought his new wife Kay/who talks all about AA/chain smoking while the stereo plays Noel, Noel….the First Noel.
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The only John Waters I knew of was the filmmaker, so I was confused to run across this article about the current state of Irish society and culture by one John Waters – who, I discovered is quite a different person. Judging from this article, I’ll be searching out more by him: Ireland, keep your opinions to yourself.
What he says here is not just about Ireland, though:
Most people out there nowadays tend to speak in code, to avoid pursuit by the guardians of the new orthodoxies. Others just play along, reserving their energy for battles about immediate things.
There is this odd situation whereby a majority, or at least a sizeable minority, of the population is appalled and scundered at the way things seem to be going, but dare not give any indication that they are dismayed. This generalised sense of confusion and disgust is a great secret, even between people who hold to the same view. At the level of the central conversation, the facts are denied or distorted to uphold the official line that only a tiny minority of recalcitrant throwbacks have any difficulty with anything that is happening.
Most people daren’t even enumerate these current absurdities, but are dimly aware of the patterns: in the obsession with personal freedom expressed sexually, and the unrelenting emphasis on the ‘rights’ of nominated categories of person in the matter of doing whatever they please.
They observe these agendas being driven in the media by what are termed ‘human stories’ – carefully selected sociological narratives, chosen and tweaked to indict the past and the way things used to be seen and done. There are the women who have been denied abortions and the women who have had abortions and seem to be proud of this. Both are deemed heroines, or is that heroes?
There are the men who are really women and the women who are really men, and the men or women who are men one day and women the next. What was a short time ago unheard of is now, it seems, ubiquitous.
At the core of all this is what appears to be an attempt to insinuate sex and sexuality as the centre of human existence, human happiness, human being. It is not possible to dissent from it, even to ask that you be spared the details. In the alleged new era of truth-letting, no one is entitled to claim an amnesty or immunity.
Because the lie has been sold that everyone was involved in suppressing and oppressing those who have now ‘bravely risen up’, everyone must show up to salute their bravery and applaud their freedom. ‘No thanks’ is not an acceptable response, being likely to qualify as hostility, which invariably qualifies for a designation with an ‘ism’ or an ‘obia’ at the end of it.
This new culture has crept up on us, so that for a long time many people thought it was just a few isolated groups of soreheads demanding this and that entitlement they say had been denied them. Now, people are beginning to twig that there is a pattern here and that it is growing more insistent and pronounced.
The escalation of this new culture has taken on an exponential character, to the extent that it often seems to be dictating the nature and significance of everything the media suggests as important. Chat shows are dominated with the stories of people who would once have been considered to have a bit of a want on them.
These individual stories seem, moreover, to be connected, and plugged into the central grid of agenda-setting, which in turn appears to emanate from a lobby sector that commands the ear of government and instant access to the media. One story is crazier than the last, and tame compared to the next. But the weird thing is that nobody ever says – or at least not publicly – that the stories are crazy; instead, the subjects of them are congratulated for their ‘courage’ in speaking so personally about things that most people think should remain private.
Anyone who dissents from this analysis is likely to be eviscerated – first on social media, and then in the mainstream, which is essentially the same people acting in, respectively, their anonymous and bylined manifestations.
Most people are simply perplexed by all this and confounded as to where it is coming from and going to. The idea that it is simply a series of isolated stories is starting to wear thin, and people are becoming more open to the idea that something fundamental has shifted in our culture, though they cannot even begin to say what.
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Two more links, related – really. Can you catch the connection?
A thread in Waters’ piece is trans-authoritarianism, which Twitter watchers saw on display this past week as tennis great Martina Navratliova committed wrongthink and heresy by opining that maybe it’s not right for men to compete in women’s sports. Geez.
Many of us have been waiting a very long time for ‘peak trans’ to be reached, and for liberals, faint-hearted feminists, journalists and politicians to break out of their cowardly complacency and face the reality – that extreme trans activism is misogyny. Perhaps peak trans may well have arrived, thanks to the latest valiant efforts of the transbullies.
The latest target in the vicious and often violent war being raged by extreme trans activists is one of my all-time heroes – the world tennis champion and LGBT rights campaigner, Martina Navratilova.
Navratilova has been accused of being ‘transphobic’ as a result of a tweet responding to a question from a follower about transgender women in sport.
From another angle, Julian Vigo in Forbes on an issue centered in a particular British context with British organizations, but her point is applicable in a wider context:
The reality is that there is a burgeoning medical industry and social apparatus which seek to label gender non-conforming children as “transgender” and which then undertakes to medicalize these children. And this trend is hardly limited to the United Kingdom. In the US, Diane Ehrensaft, Director of Mental Health at San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Center, gives the some rather unscientific examples of transgender identification in small children—from a toddler ripping out her barrettes, a one-year-old girl enunciating “I boy,” and a one-year-old unsnapping his onesies. One need not read beyond these examples to see some very dangerous reductions made between what is a child’s natural behavior in experimenting with the world around and adults ready to fixate on every action to lend a reading of gender. Rather than focus on “gender” as the “problem,” it is far more likely that toddlers find barrettes and onesies uncomfortable, just for starters.
With organizations like Mermaids attempting to “educate” those within the public health services, teachers, and parents, we must be wary of the hokum being pawned off as “science.” It’s no more scientific than talking clownfish. And the downside of this story is that such balderdash is affecting our culture and ability to speak frankly with each other about the reality of sex and social expectations placed upon each sex. The true revolution around gender will come when we stop attempting to match or alter sexed bodies to a presumed “correct gender.”
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All right, let’s get back to good news:
Our parish has been all in for Christmas, celebrating and praising through liturgy and sacred music and seeking to bring grace into ordinary life through the means that the Church has developed over time – no need for a committee to dream up a paraliturgy and make slides.
The music for Christmastide at the Cathedral of St. Paul.
The blessing of wine on the feast of St. John. (I missed it because I was on the road, doing the Birmingham-Gainesville-Birmingham journey.)
The blessing and distribution of Epiphany chalk.
(Add that to the Rorate Mass earlier in Advent.)
And nearby, the Fraternity Poor of Jesus Christ, invited to take up residence in the city by the Cathedral and diocese, were present:
For more Quick Takes, visit This Ain’t the Lyceum!
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Charlotte was Both 