‘Tis the season for Faux News to crank up its annual “Secularists War Against Christmas.”

Since Republicons are usually hysterians rather than historians, this page from our Puritan founder William Bradford (1590-1657) might be instructive:

“On the day called Christmas-day, the Governor called them out to work, (as was used) but the most of this new company excused themselves, and said it went against their …consciences to work on that day. So the Governor told them that if they made it matter of conscience, he would spare them, till they were better informed; so he led away the rest and left them; but when they came home at noon, from their work, he found them in the street at play openly; some pitching the bar, and some at stool-ball, and such like sports. So he went to them, and took away their implements, and told them, that was against his conscience, that they should play, and others work; if they made the keeping of it matter of devotion, let them keep their houses, but there should be no gaming, or revelling in the streets. Since which time nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.” (Bradford, Of Plimmouth Plantation, chapter 12, Anno 1621)

If you missed the point: Our “Christian founders” forbade Christmas, which they thought to be a Popish festival, filled with pagan symbolism and having no scriptural basis.

The Vatican claims that this ad is “damaging not only to the dignity of the pope and the Catholic Church but also to the feelings of believers.” I can think of some things that the Vatican and its minions have done that have already done this damage. The Vatican is threatening suit to prevent the image’s circulation.

Circulate.

Republicon governor Rick Perry has declared a public day of prayer and is organizing a major national public prayer event, using the typical language of the 17th-century jeremiad: America in crisis . . . facing doom . . . must act now . . .

But what would Jesus do? Fortunately, we know without any biblical ambiguity, the ipsissima vox of the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, the Messiah, whose Second Coming in glory Christians eagerly await:

5And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. (Matthew 6: 5-6 [KJV])

According to Dallas News reporter Wayne Slater:

Video clips of the event’s sponsors and official endorsers cover the waterfront — claims that the Statue of Liberty is a “demonic idol,” that Oprah is the precursor of the Antichrist, that Hitler was God’s plan to get the Jews to go to Israel and that the decline in the Japanese stock market was the result of the Emperor having sex with the sun goddess. Perry has dismissed questions about the religious views of his prayer partners, saying the focus ought to be on the day of prayer and fasting, not the sponsors.

This stuff makes Glen Beck look like an Enlightenment philosophe.

This is my first and last comment on The Wedding. Like any queen, I am Anglophile. And I wish anyone well who makes public promises, especially given the recent connubial track record of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (as they were known before tidily Anglicizing the name of “the firm” to “Windsor” during World War I), but please spare me the trite farrago of heterosexual privilege, which as frequently as not ends up at the doorstep of a divorce attorney. 

Not that I don’t envy fidelity or even some measure of romance. Twenty-five years ago, accompanied by The Man (for me, he will always be The Man, to paraphrase Sherlock Holmes, or Watson on Holmes) I saw Les Misérables on Broadway. All the rage at the time. But it left me cold. The image that came to my mind was someone’s singing on tip-toes at the loudest top of one’s voice as substitute for depth and nuance. Trite. Even “Bring Him Home.” Especially “Bring Him Home.”

When Bill Pfeiffer, RN, laid to rest his partner of many years, Mike Peppler, MD, “Bring Him Home” was played at the funeral. Then Bill died a year or so later. I had attended their simulacrum of a wedding (all that is allowed queers in most of the Lower Forty-Eight); the ritual was sham, only the sentiments were real.

In the current issue of the London Times Literary Supplement, Judith Flanders observes of Les Misérables:

. . . the complexities of a narrative were no longer necessary for success, a realization that leads to Cameron Mackintosh’s Les Misérables, which substitutes music-cued generic emotions for the (complicated) original story of Javert and Jean Valjean. . . . Here, via their circular return to melodrama, language was no longer a barrier to understanding . . . relying on musical cues rather than narrative to produce their emotional effects: spectacle replaces narrative and character.

Manufactured, pre-package emotion. So, too, The Wedding: Two photogenic inconsequentialities plight their troth, spectacularly. Cue anthems. Cue tears. Cue change ringing.

Weddings should be private affairs, with public celebrations for the 25th and 50th anniversaries (if at all). I prefer love’s alchemy, especially now, having misplaced my Philosopher’s Stone. So my romantic hero is John Donne: marrying a woman against her father’s and his patron’s wishes, landing him in jail, and costing him a diplomatic career. Reluctantly he became a priest. After the death of his wife, Anne More, he did not remarry. Surviving is the celebration of that most frail of loves, the marital, in the poem “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning”:

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

Those things which elemented it.

But we by’a love so much refined

That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assuréd of the mind,

Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’ other do.

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must

Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

I wish the young Windsor couple banked fires.

What do Minister George Rekers; Pastor Ted Haggard, WA Legislator Richard Curtis, former congressman, Mark Foley, and Alabama Attorney General Troy King, and most recently Rev. Eddie Long (no relation to me!)  have in common? Each one of them took rabid anti-gay positions in their public lives. Each one of them has been accused of ‘less than above-board’ same-sex sexual behaviors in private.

 What do Seth Walsh, 13 years old, of Tehachapi, CA, Billy Lucas, 15, of Greensburg, Indiana, Asher Brown, 13, of Houston and Tyler Clementi, a college freshman in New Jersey have in common? Each one of them was tormented on the basis of their actual or perceived sexual orientation. Each one of them died at their own hands in the last three weeks.

Is it a stretch to connect the self-hating, anti-gay rhetoric of those men with the suicides of the presumedly gay boys? “I don’t think so,” Says True Colors Executive Director, Robin McHaelen. “The same culture of hatred that tortures some children into killing themselves leads some grown men to unsafe, secretive, and illicit acts. Die or lie — its homophobia either way. And either way, the effects are devastating.”

 ”At the same time, ‘ notes True Colors’ Mentoring Director, Kamora Herrington, “we know that mentoring makes a difference. I have LGBT kids in my program who would have hurt themselves, if it weren’t for their mentor, or the support that True Colors provides. Don’t you wonder how the lives of Minister Rekers or Mark Foley might have been different if they had been free to be themselves as young people?”

 True Colors offers Connecticut’s only LGBT youth mentoring program; social and recreational groups for LGBT youth, foster parent recruitment for LGBT youth rejected or abused by their families the largest annual conference on LGBT issues as well as training for educators, youth, social workers and clinicians. “True Colors exists to create a world in which youth of all orientations and genders are affirmed” said Board President, Marlo McGriff. “We do a lot, and there is so much more to do. True Colors has accomplished a lot, but there is so much more to be done. I encourage everyone in CT to use these tragedies as an opportunity to make a difference for the LGBT youth in their own communities.”

 True Colors works to create a world where youth, adults and families of all sexual orientations and gender identities are valued and affirmed. We challenge all forms of oppression through education, training, advocacy, youth leadership development, mentoring and direct services to youth and those responsible for their well-being. For more information, call (860) 232-0050 or on the web at Our True Colors

Widely reported recently, including this excerpt from the New York Times:

Since October 2008, the percentage of Americans who say the president is a Muslim has risen from 12 percent to 18 percent. The percentage of people who think he is a Christian has fallen from 51 percent to 34 percent. The polling data indicated that those who identified themselves as conservative Republicans were most likely to say that he is a Muslim.

Of course that is the same tea-and-nut bag crowd that thinks he was born outside the US (which, as Ahnold Schwarzenegger can tell you, prevents you from becoming president of the US).

The previous presidential incumbent took every opportunity to remind us that Jesus was his BFF and that God was on his (and therefore our, if you were for him not against him) side. Obama does not wear his religion on his sleeve.

So what would Jesus say? (WWJS). Let’s see:

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. 6But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. 7But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking. 8Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him. (KJV, Matthew 6: 5-8)

Looks like Obama’s a Christian. Really Christian.

Widely reported today, Good Friday among Christians, is the sermon delivered before Pope Benedict XVI (formerly known as Joseph Ratzinger) by Rev. Raniero Cantalamessa, who holds the office of preacher of the papal household. Friar Cantalamessa likened recent criticism of the Pope’s inaction in a priest-pedophile abuse case (when Ratzinger was Archbishop of Munich, Germany) to the invective heaped upon Jews during two-millennia of anti-Semitism (some of it fomented by the Church).

The timing of this sermon was unusual in that for centuries the Catholic Good Friday liturgy blamed the “perfidious Jews” for the death of Christ.

Medical observers, however, expressed alarm, noting that the friar’s sermon and recent Vatican pronouncements indicate a serious, even life threatening pathophysiology requiring a surgical procedure.

The surgical procedure is a cranial-rectalectomy, the surgical removal of one’s head from one’s own or another’s rectum. Delay, according to medical authorities, only worsens the condition, which can become permanent, dimming the prognosis.

In 2008 I left the Commonwealth of Virginia (my ancestral home, where I had lived and worked for most of my adult life) to move to Connecticut. News from the Old Dominion (reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education) confirms my decision to leave:

Virginia’s attorney general says public colleges and universities in the state with policies that ban discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation should revoke such policies because they lack the legal authority to name gay state employees as a protected class, The Washington Post reported. The attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli II, a Republican who took office in January, wrote in a letter to the colleges that only the state’s General Assembly can give legal protections to gay state employees. The legislature has repeatedly declined to take that step.

Connecticut, in contrast, recognizes same-sex marriage, adoption by same-sex parents, prevents discrimination because of sexual orientation, and provides benefits for same-sex spouses. Since Griswold v Connecticut in 1965 (the Supreme Court decision, ruling on a law restricting access to birth control, that established a right to privacy), the “Land of Steady Habits” has moved steadily into modernity.

The Virginia AG office has historically been the springboard for those with gubernatorial ambitions, like Bob McDonnell, the recently elected governor whose campaign was successful in part because he was a Right Wing transvestite performing in Centrist drag, and whose 1989 Public Polic master’s degree and Law JD thesis from Pat Robertson’s Regent University (entitled “The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family”) includes this gem: “. . . every level of government should statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators. The cost of sin should fall on the sinner not the taxpayer”  (p. 65).

I am the product of 20 years of Catholic education (grade school, prep school, college, seminary), of which I am proud and for which I am grateful. During the 1980s I was a Roman Catholic priest. Over 20 years ago, I left the priesthood and the Church. In the words of the Jewish Passover Seder hymn, Dayenu . . . “it would have been enough.”

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ collusion in shielding sexual abuser priests and preventing the victims from receiving their rightful pastoral care.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the bishops’ intractable denial of a rightful place for women in ministry and in positions of leadership, more recently evidenced in the Vatican’s New Inquisition of orders of women religious.

It would have been enough . . . to leave because of the Church’s single-minded campaign against the social equality of gay and lesbian people.

Today’s news includes salt on that wound. After the Washington, DC, government decided to recognize same-sex unions as marriages (with all the rights, privileges and duties pertaining thereunto), which included the provision of health benefits for spouses, the Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, led by Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl (”Oh, her!” I could tell you stories that I’d heard about that girlfriend years ago), has decided that henceforth they will not offer spousal benefits to any new heterosexual employees or to any new spouses of current heterosexual employees, in order not to give even the appearance of condoning same-sex marriages.

The former chief operating officer of the archiocesan Catholic Charities, Tim Sawina, has called upon the archdiocese to change its position. According to a report in the Washington Post:

“Some, including the archbishop, have argued that by providing health care to a gay or lesbian spouse we are somehow legitimizing gay marriage,” said Sawina, a former priest. “Providing health care to a gay or lesbian partner — a basic human right, according to Church teaching — is an end in itself and no more legitimizes that marriage than giving communion to a divorced person legitimizes divorce, or giving food or shelter to an alcoholic legitimizes alcoholism.”

The sound you hear is my shaking the dust off my sandals . . . again.

Telehypocrite Pat Robertson has announced today that the Haitian earthquake was God’s punishment for Haitians’ making a pact with Satan 200 years ago when they struggled for liberation from the French. (I’m not making this up.) The following prayer is offered for the relief of Haitians and all humanity from this pestilent beast.

(To be prayed for nine days in a row)

Almighty and All Just God, who smites the proud and who protects the weak, hear us as we beseech Thee to deliver us from the pestilence of Pat Robertson. Raise Thy mighty arm and remove this affliction from our midst. May Thou bring him swiftly into Eternity where Thou shalt mete out justice and mercy. We ask this in the name of Jesus Christ, the soon-coming Just Judge of the quick and the dead. Amen.

(Disclosure: I conducted some research for my book AIDS and American Apocalypticism in the library of Robertson’s Regent University in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and was once threatened with arrest on the campus during direct action civil disobedience there to protest Robertson’s anti-gay on-air slanders.)