Prevailing Winds "For the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is there is freedom . . ." 2 Cor. 3:17, TNIV

March 2, 2015

Saturday Night Live

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:15 am

I’m not sure anyone who didn’t come of age in the 1970s can understand how important Saturday Night Live was for those of us on the tail end of the Baby Boom. I escaped my life for 90 minutes every Saturday night, and I honed my sense of humor by watching not just Gilda, Jane, and Lorraine, but Belushi, Aykroyd, and Murray. Humor was the lifeline I grabbed onto in high school, even if I used it as both narcotic and anesthetic, and Saturday Night Live provided me with images of where a lonely, funny girl could end up … and although I didn’t end up there, I got to where I am largely because I knew from SNL that girls could be funny. Funny worked. Funny gave me hope. And pretty much everything I know about Funny, I learned from Saturday Night Live.

And yeah, I cried when Gilda died. Stacy Kern, you did, too … so I’m thinking of you tonight.

A Note From The “50 Shades” Picket

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:12 am

Civil disobedience, like picketing at a movie theater against police orders, is not something to undertake lightly. However, the greater danger is to dismiss it lightly as something that “isn’t appropriate” or “doesn’t work.” This world is not suffering as it is because of the reckless courage of the civilly disobedient, but because of the blithe cowardice of the civilly obedient.

That cowardice, that sense that social change will just somehow work itself out for good without any direct efforts to secure it, makes the civilly obedient not just cautious to the point of indifference. It makes them co-authors of the very conditions they insist will get better, and must get better, without any effort expended on their part.

I find that unacceptable. I always have, and age hasn’t mellowed me.

When Young Christian Classicists Offend …

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:10 am

Here’s an example for your Monday morning of what constitutes thoughtful social and religious commentary from the uber-patriarchal, neo-Reformed boys in Moscow. The context is whether or not a florist’s refusal to provide flowers for a gay wedding is, indeed, a bold stand for the faith. Here’s the comment that has me already fired up at before 7:30 a.m. It was made half an hour ago by an erstwhile acolyte of the Bloviating One, Douglas Wilson.

“Why is there any difference between two consenting homosexuals and a consenting pimp and cash cow hooker?”

My response:

G, your breathtakingly ugly reference to prostituted women is astonishing in its callousness and hate, even for you, someone whose disdain of women is generally as profound as his disdain for logic and reasoning. This is bad; you managed to set even lower a moral and rhetorical bar that already had been, in my mind, set almost impossibly low.

In an argument that began with your gratitude for what you call the florist’s courage, which you offensively referred to as “balls,” in refusing to sell wedding flowers to a same-sex couple, you blithely ignore one commenter’s respectful and intelligent argument against your conclusion and arrive, with false triumph, at an insult to prostituted women first, and then to same-sex couples.

The phrase “cash cow hookers,” whose literal meaning is muddled at best but whose true meaning reveals you to be a misogynist of the highest, or lowest, order, is your way of describing real women, including women I know and love, who have been forced into a life whose horrors you cannot begin to understand and whose nourishment is found in the robust heterosexually perverse desires you refuse to question.

You know nothing of the reality of a prostituted woman. You manage to describe the male who abuses her, the pimp, with nothing other than the word “consenting,” ignoring the irony of the woman’s servitude to him, and then describe the woman with language that, in three words, reveals you to be an ignorant and crude, misogynistic and homophobic buffoon. I’ve known you to be an immature lickspittle evidently incapable of generating independent argument, and I’m well aware that you doggedly, irrationally, persist in equating homosexuality with pedophilia. I’m well accustomed to the moral and logical paucity of your arguments; indeed, I’ve prayed that you receive pastoral counsel from someone other than the lockstep sycophants surrounding Doug Wilson.

Still, nothing I know about my having interacted with you prepared me for the revelation that you, a former seminarian and a deacon in your church, hold poor, marginalized, and exploited women in such hideous contempt. I rebuke you as harshly as I do because you are a Christian, or claim to be, whereas your ugliness here is specifically directed to people, already harmed, already hurting, you declare cannot be. You owe every prostituted and exited woman an apology, and you owe gay couples an apology as well — not because you support the florist, but because you echo the argument, blistering in its offensiveness, that same-sex intimacy is analogous to pedophilia.

Your heart is hard and your words, vile. You will equivocate and prevaricate and try to explain what “cash cow hooker” REALLY means. Spare yourself the effort, son. Your words harm not only the people to whom you direct them. They harm YOU, confirming the smug toxicity of your religious culture and distancing you from the work of the Holy Spirit.

Repent. You are way too far on a very wrong track. And do not make the mistake that you are merely dismissing me when you dismiss this. You have the Lover of the marginalized, the ones in whom we see and know Christ, to answer to. I pray for you as you do. Your “balls” have distanced you from your soul.

Stats and Transpeople

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:06 am

The killing, harassing, and violence against even ONE trans person is wrong, without equivocation.

However, the statistics given don’t appear to mean what people insist they do. Further, here’s one truth that is undeniable:

Virtually every trans person harmed or killed is harmed or killed by a man. That goes for male victims and female victims. Men are the perpetrators, and that’s telling. It also means that radical feminists are not. Check out this blog, which admirably illustrates the problems with the often-proclaimed “1 in 12 transpeople are killed” meme:

culturallyboundgender.wordpress.com

My Crush, Joe Friday

Filed under: Uncategorized — keelyem @ 4:02 am

It’s true that I’m enjoying The Slap on NBC, but what you don’t know about me is that I would have unnecessary surgery only for the opportunity to lie in bed for two months watching … Dragnet.

Yeah, as in Joe Friday.

I am utterly enamored of the 1957-1961 Dragnets, and I love just a little less the 1970-72 shows. I don’t know what it is, honestly. I guess maybe I like just having a neat and tidy, 26-minute-long, moral world. In Dragnet, bad men get taken down, worn to a nub either by prison or by Joe Friday’s endless spitfire patter. I like it.

Please don’t think less of me.

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