matching tracksuits

New instructions from Bennie XVI about gay priests.

bq. “The criteria of the Instruction are also entirely consistent with the teaching of the church for the past 2,000 years. To portray the Instruction as ‘gay bashing’ or ‘gay banning’ is to misrepresent it,” [Cardinal Francis George] said at the conclusion of his statement. (“Chicago Tribune”:http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-gaycath30.html)

Read: the Church has been homophobic for 2,000 years, so this is nothing new.

Is the Catholic Church _trying_ to make itself a sociological relic, or does it come naturally?

And what about claims that the Church is doing this to try to head off the kind of bad publicity it suffered from the sexual abuse scandals or recent years?

bq. “At best, it’s a distraction; at worst, it’s damaging,” said David Clohessy, national director of the advocacy and support group Survivors Network for those Abused by Priests. “It will feed the mistaken notion that [the abuse scandal] is about the behavior of priests and not the behavior of bishops. Gay seminarians didn’t hire and transfer and cover for child-molesting priests. It was bishops who did that.” (ibid)

Cardinals’ archbishops’ blindness to this simple fact is a sure guarantee that this “solution” will not work.

I wonder if left-handed seminarians are beginning to feel the heat…

Headline at “The Daily Mail”:http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/health/healthmain.html?in_article_id=370045&in_page_id=177

via Google News.

Wonder what would happen if the NYT ran such a story…

The recent brouhaha over the war in Iraq has drawn Bush and his gang out of its shell of silence. Cheney has recently stepped into the fight:

bq. Vice President Dick Cheney on Wednesday lashed out at Democrats who accused the Bush administration of manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, saying such critics were spreading “one of the most dishonest and reprehensible charges ever aired” in Washington.

bq. Cheney also suggested that the Democratic attacks could undermine troop morale.

bq. “The saddest part is that our people in uniform have been subjected to these cynical and pernicious falsehoods day in and day out,” Cheney said in a speech in Washington to a conservative think tank.

bq. “American soldiers and Marines are out there every day in dangerous conditions and desert temperatures . . . and back home a few opportunists are suggesting they were sent into battle for a lie,” Cheney said. (“L.A. Times”:http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-cheney17nov17,0,4502547.story?coll=la-home-politics)

In a sense, he has a point. If the administration did indeed admit to “selectively choosing” intelligence so as to make the war a little more attractive, would the average soldier be inclined to go back out, day after day risking his/her life? Probably not. In other words, troop morale would be affected were the charges admitted (and I’m not even saying here they’re true).

But Cheney’s claim that merely _suggesting_ it, his claim that asking tough questions about the origins of the war affects troop morale, is absurd. It amounts to using the soldiers’ daily risks for political gain — a way of stifling the critics. Not the race card, but
the soldier card.

And then he calls Democrats “opportunists.”

But what choice do they have?

After all, a little honesty can go a long way. So it’s better, in the end, I suppose, to shut up and die for a lie, knowing that its for the greater good, because now that we’re involved we can’t withdraw, even though our involvement was finagled by intelligence massaging…

It’s all more convoluted than that attempt at a grammatically based illustration.

If the Bush administration has nothing to hide in this matter, why is it historically tight-lipped about _everything_? Why is it swinging away with such panic blows?

!/images/60.jpg (License)!

Recently, “I went through old things my parents had been storing for ages”:/?id=260, and threw out most of what I found. Last night, it was time to tackle the big sorting/trashing issue: pictures.

Nine and a half years ago (almost) when I heading off to Poland for the very first time, I knew I’d be seeing things so novel that a strange urge to photograph said things would arise in my otherwise photographically indifferent soul. “I’ll buy a decent camera before I go,” I reasoned, plunking down probably about $200 for a point and shoot. I’ve since lost that camera, but my interest in photography has only grown.

As has my collection of pictures. Until last night, it took up a significant portion 15x21x15 tub. Stack upon stack of pictures: Lipnica, Gdansk, Prague, Vienna, Strasbourg, Boston, and points in between.

I went through them with a merciless eye, and ended up throwing out at least half of them — probably more. A twelve-inch stack of pictures, all told.

It wasn’t gut-wrenchingly hard, but there was a moment, just before tossing it all in the trash, than I thought, “Maybe I should go through these one more time.” After all, what if I’d thrown away the only pictures I’d had of some part of my life?

Some insignificant part of my life, for I realized that in ten short years I’d gone from photographic indifference to photographic hoarding.

Why would throwing away. Several times I thought I had at least two dozen of the same picture, taken at different times during my initial three years in Poland. I took pictures of _everything_ and then did it again. In the tub I found pictures so almost-ineffably useless (badly conceptualized, badly printed) that it was depressing.

On the other hand, I found it reassuring. At least now these images are clearly bad. There’s no debating it. Which means, in theory, my eye has sharpened and perhaps I’ve become a better photographer.