Rounding up the chicks

Well, not ours, who are safely in a crib in the bathroom. “A bathroom full of meat; life is good!” my wife said this morning.
And life is apparently good for Dan Cathy. Quoth Allahpundit, “Somewhere, a Burger King ad man’s toying with the idea of having “The King”declare himself “100% pro-life.””  Apparently, a Wendy’s franchise owner in North Carolina decided to stand with Chick-fil-A (for principle or for money, I don’t know and it doesn’t much matter) , and got his butt kicked by corporate,

On Catholic Answers last night, the host (a sub I think, not Patrick Coffin) was joking with Fr. Serpa about “picking chicken out of our teeth” and commenting on how well-mannered and pleasant the folks in line were.

Well, not everyone. This douchebag seems to have earned himself his 15 minutes of Internet fame. And this lady (his victim) deserves a promotion. Heck, if I were single and 30 years younger, I’d interview her for a position as “wife”.

For those wondering: no, I didn’t participate. I hate lines, and the local stores aren’t particularly convenient to me. But we’ll be going out of our way soon.

UPDATE: the douche has a name (Adam Smith!), and is the CFO of a catheter company (no I’m not making either fact up!)

UPDATE 2: Make that WAS the CFO of a catheter company.

Barnhardt, Dolan, schism

Ann Barnhardt had another conniption fit, this time over Timothy Dolan. Now, I agree with Ann about the general emasculation of the Church. I don’t get as dramatic about it as she does…sometimes she gives the impression that if she actually met the priest of her dreams, built like Carpenter Jesus driving teh gayz and heretics out with a whip, she’d spread ‘em like a randy Randian heroine…which would be embarrassing for both parties I’m sure, not to mention a mortal sin. I figure that in this culture, even to become a priest requires quite a bit of fortitude, so I will give them the benefit of the doubt when possible. Here’s one doing it right. And here are some folks who aren’t.

Likewise, “barefooted lesbian wannabe-witch-priestess does a pagan dance on the altar with a bowl of incense” makes a lot of assumptions about intent. Yes, that’s what it looks like, and yes, that’s not a woman’s job or physical place, but you don’t know. [UPDATE: more info submitted...and "4 directions" and "Zen meditation" = not Catholic, period. If it looks like a priestess, and calls quarters like a priestess... but if they just spent umpteen dollars to create sacred space, why is somebody doing it the low-rent way?]. Likewise, I have no trouble with the notion of a GLBT ministry; they’ve got a problem, and they should be ministered to. Realistically, I know it’s quite likely that said ministry isn’t offering aids on how to be celibate or deal with same-sex attraction. In that case, the problem is heresy. But that’s always the problem. There they are singing the hideous “All are welcome” (instead of the Introit, no doubt…what IS the Introit for the re-dedication of a church?). The liturgy is weak, and the rest follows from that, particularly the emasculation. In the two Extraordinary Form parishes I’ve sung in, men outnumber women in the Schola, while in Ordinary Form parishes, you practically have to bribe men to sing (as I’m being bribed.). Now, the problem with heresy is that it needs to be fought with catechesis and liturgy. You can’t just assume that people are heretics by looking at them, and you can’t throw them out for being heretics; if we did that, any more, there’d be no Church. You have to keep the poison from spreading, and correct the problem (something that the bishops have been most lame about in re Pelosi, Sebelius, et al). But unlike a blogger, a bishop can’t go off half-cocked and make assumptions about where people are at. That’s not kissing the world’s heinie; that’s making the most charitable assumption about a soul in need.

Then there’s her schism prophecy. Here’s the old part:

There will be, at some point, an informal schism. The Catholic Church in America will quietly acquiesce to the Obama regime in order to keep the money flowing and the 501(c)(3) slavery provision intact, and will thus cease to be Catholic. The TRUE Church will then be cut off from the mainstream and go underground. This cleavage will almost perfectly align with the Order of the Mass. The Novus Ordo “new Mass” parishes will surrender to the Obama regime because the Novus Ordo Mass was an invention and a tactical maneuver by the Marxist-homosexualist infiltrators in the 1960s. The Traditional Latin Mass parishes, and those priests, religious and laity who pray the Latin Mass will remain faithful to Our Lord, will go underground, and will eventually be hunted, imprisoned and killed.

This is the latest iteration:

This is why I fear that there will be a quiet schism in the Church, and that it will happen soon. Dolan and his politicking bovine excrement is going to lead the Church in the United States off the edge of the cliff in the name of “compromise” and “tolerant dialog”, and in doing so will render the Church no longer in union with the Chair of Peter, and thus no longer Catholic. Once that apostolic break is made, the churches that go with Dolan will no longer have valid Masses and the Eucharist will not be present in those churches. At that point, there will literally only be a few hundred valid Masses celebrated in the entire United States per week. Many people will be many, many hours drive away from the closest Mass. Satan will run wild in the land.

Now, what’s odd about this is that a while back Ann was warning her readers about Donatism. But here she is making a Donatist argument: that churches that roll over and pay for Obamacare will not confect a valid Eucharist. WTF? (“What’s that, Father?”) As long as there’s a valid apostolic succession, the proper words and the proper material, it’s good. Now, I partially buy her argument about informal schism. It takes a certain seriousness about the faith to do Latin Mass, and in my experience, the EF community is more serious about doctrine…which is not necessarily to say that the OF community are bad Catholics, but if push comes to shove, more are likely to roll over. What makes this less likely, and what I think will be the salvation of the faith, is the new Catholic media, which is by and large doctrinally conservative, and which has take on the job that priests don’t want to do: catechesis. You’ve got folks watching EWTN and listening to Catholic radio, and reading the Catholic blogosphere (and it might just be my sources, but I seldom come across a liberal Catholic blog) … and what they’re seeing is that their priests need some encouragement, so they’re doing the encouraging (even when it means dropping a dime to the Bishop).

There have been times in the Church’s history where survival of the Magisterium was very tenuous. In the early days, being elected Pope was equivalent to a death sentence. Then you had the Babylonian Captivity of the late-14th century, where at one point there were THREE rival Popes. Now, are you sure that all the Ts were crossed in your priest’s line of apostolic succession?  Or do you assume that whatever needed fixed got fixed? For that matter, if Europe turned on Christianity, it could well be that the Bishop of Rome was no longer the Pope (because a bishop would no longer be allowed to LIVE in Rome). The Church and its Magisterium will continue, somewhere, in the jungles of Africa if need be. It’s altogether possible that someday we’ll look at slacker priests and choirs singing David Haas, and think of “the good old days” when there actually were priests and music. And with that bit of conjecture, I’d like to steal Ann’s prayer:

Dear God,
Please, please, please let Jeffrey Quick be totally and completely wrong and make him eat crow by the bucketful every day for the rest of his life.
Amen.

UPDATE 2/22. Looking at her latest, I’ve decided that Barnhardt’s intellectual blind spot is her absolutism. She posts a homily by Fr. Sammie L Maletta Jr. about the HHS mandate, and then says, “He starts out pretty well, gets his hellfire and brimstone on a little – which is good. But then at the very, very end, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he JUST. DOESN’T. GET. IT. The man is totally, completely and thoroughly whipped.” What constitutes “whipped”? Saying, “Obama, let us be Catholics!” She’s right, of course, that there’s no “let” about it; her point about always being free to do God’s will is solid. But…this guy did a whole homily! Most of us just got the reading of the bishop’s letter. He faced the strong possibility of being kicked around by his congregants. Do the times demand more? Surely. Is this guy actually ahead of the curve? From what I’ve heard and seen, I suspect so. But Ann is very “He who is not for me is against me,” (MAtt. 12:30) and I don’t think she has the rank to make such a statement.

The obligations of business

I got into way too much trouble on Facebook just before Christmas. But the one bit I’m going to discuss here concerns a friend who was highly offended at Hallmark because she was looking for a Christmas card for her son and his partner, and the only gay Christmas card they had was lame. I expressed the opinion that “[identity group] Christmas cards” were a silly idea, and she got offended, and all of her girlfriends with her, and I decided it was best to bow out. But I really need to finish the issue somewhere where I don’t feel I’m trampling somebody’s feelings.

First: she found one gay Christmas card. Would we have seen such a thing in the small town we grew up in, in the ’70s? You’ve come a long way, baby.

Second: what constitutes a gay Christmas card?  A card with a picture of two guys on it, or two women? Do the cards that say “To the both of you” have specifically heterosexual imagery? Most of the ones I’ve seen are pretty lame. Do they say “Horny holidays to you and your partner?” For that matter, where are the heterosexual Christmas cards, and what do they say? Yeah, they’re out there, where they keep all the edgy cards. And they’re generally borderline offensive. And I suspect I’ve seen gay cards with them…but not by Hallmark. Indeed, a Web search confirms that there are a bunch of people doing gay cards.

She was looking for something special, and they had cards for all these other relationships, so why not this one? Well, everyone has parents, and more often than not alive. Most people have children, grandchildren, inlaws and bosses (though fewer of all of them, these days). Indeed, this was for an adult child and his mate. But only about 3% of the population is gay. And how many people would get a member of that 3% a card that celebrates or even acknowledges their gayness?  While yes, families are important at Christmas, what we’re celebrating is the birth of Jesus, not somebody’s sexual orientation.

Let’s look at this from the point of view of Hallmark. The gay market is a niche market. Now, yes, there’s money there. But the bigger the company, the more conservatively they’d have to play. What they could make from the gay market could be dwarfed by a concerted protest against gay cards. And a lot of stores wouldn’t stock them. I’m cool with the idea of buyers having cards that look like them, or the people they’re sending to. Hallmark has the Mahogany collection, but that’s a much bigger market. A search at the Hallmark site under “homosexual, Christmas” got 859 hits, but I wouldn’t call any of them “a gay Christmas card”. (I did several similar searches, with “gay” and “holiday”, with similar results).

What bothers me about this discussion was the implication that a company was somehow obligated to serve a particular market, because members of that market thought it was the right thing to do.  Hallmark is obligated to do nothing except make its stockholders happy, no more than I am obligated to send my gay friends gay Christmas cards…because, you know, they are so much more to me than a positive-ground DNA interface.

Copland and Perry

The day began with one of my lefty Facebook friends raving about Rick Perry’s TV ad using Aaron Copland’s music. I hadn’t heard the ad, so I played it there as it was set out. Now I read Tom Jackson, linking the ad and noting that the music is NOT Copland. And indeed, it isn’t. Not only is it not any Copland piece that I know, but the woodwind writing doesn’t ring true; it’s too dense and solid. It’s certainly Copland-LIKE. But so is most of John Williams, just to mention the most famous miner of that lode. When you’re the Iconic American Composer, you set the style for icons. And that style has become the musical shorthand for “wide open spaces good old-time America”.

It was apparently an Alex Ross tweet that got the whole Perry/Copland meme going. Now, there’s less than no love lost between Ross and Perry; I’m a Ron Paul guy myself so I really don’t give a shit one way or another (especially as I’m not much motivated by gay issues). So yea, it was a deliberate attempt to make Perry look bad (as opposed to a passing cultural observation.) But then, the standard musical formula for love scenes in an earlier movie era was to use fake Tchaikovsky…who was of course queerer than a $3 bill. Yes, passion is passion (like “a mouth is a mouth”), but if we’re going to read things into films, based on the back story of composers who inspired film music composers, just what does that signify? If one is responsible for taking into account the sexual preferences of the inspirations on one’s media employees, then what was Perry’s team to do? I suppose that they could use fake Charles Ives, who had pretty impeccable gay-averse credentials (I don’t use the term “homophobic” because such people generally do not fear gays…though considering how many gays are  into physical culture, perhaps they should .),  but polytonality doesn’t suggest “E pluribus unum” and conservative politics to the average listener…. not to mention that Ives’ source material was diversity-deprived, being very Christian, and very WASP, and hasn’t been on the hit charts since 1898 at the latest. Which may, now that I think of it, might be an advantage to Perry.

The irony is probably lost on Perry’s target audience, who, if they noticed the music at all, probably thought it sounded like “movie music…John Williams… the score from The Patriot“, in order of specificity. I’ve never seen Brokeback Mountain, but I have to wonder now if there are Coplandisms there, and what they mean.  This friend-on-a-friend stuff is weak tea… which may be why the Internet insisted on amping it up to real Copland.

Santorum

Mike Soja doesn’t believe in comboxes, so I have to comment here. He writes about a weird mislinkage to a story about Rick Santorum’s “Google problem”, and accuses Dan Savage or his followers of Google-bombing Santorum. I don’t think it quite happened that way. Savage appended Santorum’s surname to a byproduct of anal sex that nobody had ever bothered naming (probably because it’s pretty disgusting), and the term took off, leading to Google use to search the word.  A lot of people read the bourgeois Marxist tabloids that Savage’s column appears in…not just liberals. Indeed, I can’t think of Santorum without thinking of santorum…which I would really rather not think about.  It’s a brilliant piece of Alinskyism. Nobody deserves to have his name dragged through shit like that. But Rick Santorum probably comes as close as anyone can. And there really isn’t jack he can do about it either, as anything he could say would just weld the concepts closer together.

The love that dares not wear its ring

McPhillips accuses some libertarians of being butt-boys for cultural Marxists re DADT repeal. It’s not quite that; it’s more like commies and libertarians came out of the same 1790′s Parisian bath-house, and they just had a rapturous reunion.

Well, ya know, Martin, I’m all into that All-American Equality thing. So why didn’t we instead expand DADT to heterosexuals? How is your sexuality anyone else’s business? What if you faced a court-martial every time you gassed about your exploits to your buddies? What would that do to the military, besides make it much smaller?

A modest proposal for the neighborhood of the Ground Zero mosque.

I’m announcing tonight, that I am planning to build and open the first gay bar that caters not only to the west, but also Islamic gay men. To best express my sincere desire for dialogue, the bar will be situated next to the mosque Park51, in an available commercial space.

This is not a joke. I’ve already spoken to a number of investors, who have pledged their support in this bipartisan bid for understanding and tolerance.

I don’t see why anyone would object. Justin Raimondo tells us that the new building will actually be the Islamic equivalent of a YMCA, and he would surely know about those. So possibly there will be a divided market. But Raimondo claims there actually is a mosque already within 4 blocks of Ground Zero, so apparently there’s a large underserved community, one which also needs dog boarding kennels and sausage shops.

At Hot Air, they’re trying to find a name for the place.

Part of DOMA declared unconstitutional via 10th Amendment

The Feds can’t withhold swag from fags who are married, on the basis of considering them not-married, because marriage is a state responsibility. I hate that we’re talking about a right to a ladleful from the cannibal pot, here, but the part of the decision based on the 10th Amendment is spot-on, and a breath of fresh air. I’d feel better about it if I were convinced that Judge Joseph actually believes in the 10th, as opposed to finding it a convenient excuse. But I’ll take my victories where I can. Decision is here. (pdf)

The stuff I find helping patrons with research

Some of my stories about [Julius Eastman] I can’t use in my liner notes, like the time at New Music America 1980 when I unwittingly let him lead me into a gay bar in Minneapolis – it took me a moment to figure out why all these burly men were wearing midriff shirts, but I kept calm, stayed 15 minutes before excusing myself politely on account of other commitments, and thought I handled it pretty coolly for being only 24 and very inexperienced. He used to try to talk me and Peter into trying out gayness in that mellifluous deep bass of his. He griped at us for using deoderant, saying, “Only straights use deoderant these days,” to which Peter would yell, “Julius, whaddaya think we are?!” —Kyle Gann

God, I love my job!

ATF agent arrested for putting glory hole in hotel room

I guess that would be “Alcohol, Tobacco and Fellatio.” Didn’t John Ross write a book about capers like this? I mean, was Vanderwerf really that stupid, or was he set up? Or was he bucking for a promotion to Safe Schools Czar?

Always nice to see the BATFEces in trouble.

H/T Riehl, via Vanderboegh