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Having grown up back west I could identify with a TV episode of Reba, the country singer, who has a daughter in school. The school principal —a woman, since this is the 21st century— tells Reba something like, “In this school we don’t believe sex exists.”
Reba replies, “How’s that working out for you?”
In Europe they say, “God lives in the American midwest.” You know, like in the movie Footloose. (Quotes from the film) (the reverend stops a public book burning)
In nonPuritan Europe they say, “Oo la la.” Still, I never expected, one morning, to be reading the news over breakfast, and read where a man old enough to be a grandfather, his holiness The Pope himself no less, says, “(Pornography is) a vice that so many people have… even priests and nuns.” I spit out my coffee.
The pope believes sex exists? For nuns?
You might ask me, with some outrage, “Are you some kind of male chauvinist with a double standard, easier on nuns than priests?”
I raise my hands, fingers outspread, to say, “Hey, I’m only going by society.” At a day program I worked at, for the mentally handicapped, when two ladies took smiling delight in each other’s presence, our agency director told us we would let it go, and certainly not separate them, “…because society is easier on gay women than gay men.” This was back when the harsh terms lesbian and homosexual were replaced by the softer unisex term gay. Not that any bigots, back then, would ever refer to a man or woman as being gay.
An old man who was prominent in the Vietnam War protests, who as a child had met Queen Victoria, Lord Bertrand Russell, (1872-1970) once wrote with righteous rage, furious at the leaders of his society believing that normal boys and girls only got sexual ideas from paintings and statues. They insisted such art should be censored. Put a blanket over the statue. And when youth still got ideas, they said the answer was “More censorship.” When I read Russell’s words it was the late 60’s, America was still losing in Vietnam, and social leaders were saying, “Just send more troops.”
I regret to say that at the turn of the century, when I did a speech in class for gay rights, I had forgotten reading Russell.
Too bad, because at that time religious leaders were still “going at it,” this time saying our youth only turned gay because of paintings, statues, and something newer, called “the media.” And some leaders—or were they leaders only in their own mind?—espoused a stupid conspiracy theory of a “gay agenda” to convert our youth. This stupidity was satirized in our student newspaper with a cartoon of a teacher hypnotizing her class. No wonder not a single school teacher in our city was gay. Officially. Call it a form of madness, which repeats like history, if we fail to remember what we have read.
Like the Kremlin forgetting the horror of WWII and then shelling Ukrainian towns into rubble.
Right now I have grandfatherly white hair, I’m almost a senior citizen, but still, I am begging you: Please don’t think you have to censor yourself around me, protecting me from the horrors of war and sex. After all, the pope is a senior too, and he’s not innocent.
… …
… …
Sean Crawford
In God’s own country
October
2022
Footnote: My problem with being a senior is watching as each new new generations might as well be illiterate when it comes to some new intolerant madness. In my mid-October post about cancel culture I mention a few historic lunacies.
Also in that post I put a link to an essay by an alleged hater of transexuals, R.K. Rowling, of Harry Potter fame. Since her essay is not private, in fact it’s on her author’s web site, (with a meant-for-adults warning) I won’t hesitate to link to it again. You know, so folks can read, and judge her alleged “homophobia” for themselves. Because some of the biggest lies start with “they say.”
