And then there's this, the latest comment (8/25, 12:09 P.M. CST U.S.) to judder into the Commonweal thread in response to Joseph Bottum's essay about gay marriage: I cite it without comment, since it seems to speak for itself, doesn't it?:
There are no homosexuals, there are only individuals pursuing mutual sexual gratification; sexual gratification greatly enhanced by religious/cultural taboo. Promiscuity is the norm among sodomites not marriage. They essentially destroy culture and societies, not because of their behavior, but because while strong morally centered culture/societies repress such behavior thoroughly debased corrupt society/culture will readily accept it. This is not new... it's always been that way!
Our current religious/cultural/societal breakdown, world wide, I attribute to the common mans acceptance of "contraception" as virtuous, when it is, in-fact, intrinsically EVIL! The genesis of every evil and fundamental corruption we are presently experiencing can be traced to the corruption cause by routine application and acceptance of contraception... that includes the accelerated prevalence of sodomite behavior.
By the way... Spitfire1938 was my alias. Thomas R Peasley is my real name! The time for alias' is over! We are about to enter a real war the nature of which we cannot foresee. An alias allows anyone to adopt your 'handle' and pass themselves off as you or someone else and there is NO WAY to confirm they are who they claim to be. A real name is instantly confirmable! Besides NSA already has recorded EVERYTHING you've done electronically!
Don't be afraid, stand up and spit in their face!
God love and protect you!
As Terry Weldon notes at his Queering the Church site this morning, there's been no little uproar in conservative Catholic circles over Bottum's essay. On Twitter, Bottum himself had noted Terry's own response to his essay, and then a blog called Big Pulpit ("The Best Punditry and Analysis on the Catholic Church in the World") had provided a link to Terry's essay about Bottum in an article called "Joseph Bottum on Marriage," only to yank that link to Queering the Church later, mysteriously and with no explanation.
The Catholic right is, well, exercised about Bottum and his defection on the issue of marriage: Don't be afraid, stand up and spit in their [i.e., sodomites'] face! But, God love and protect you!
Who's the "you" here, to whom Mr. Peasley addresses his assurance that God loves "you"? Somehow, I gather it's not me.
The best (and safest) way the rest of us might deal with this show is to break out the popcorn and watch the drama unfold, since it's going to get . . . interesting . . . if the Commonweal commentary of Mr. Peasley et al. is any indicator of where it's headed.
And as we munch our popcorn, we may want to think about the recent suggestion of Mexican bishop Jose Raul Vera Lopez that, in dealing with some of these spit-in-their-face!-God-love-and-protect-you! Catholics, we're dealing with serious mental illness.
P.S. "Sodomite" as shorthand for "gay male" continues to be de rigueur, by the way, at the National Catholic Reporter threads, where one Purgatrix Ineptiae recently slipped the term "sodomy" into a discussion of homosexuality, adding her usual toxic suggestions that gay men are diseased child molesters. I continue to maintain that if someone made similar outrageous statements about any other targeted minority group at NCR, statements designed to keep alive ugly old stereotypes that are all about eliciting prejudice and fomenting violence, NCR would yank such statements immediately from its threads and would warn the contributor making them to cease and desist.
The image is from a Salon article by Stephanie Zacharek.
