Boobs & Ninnies

Today's Washington Post has two offerings that caught my eye. One is an op/ed piece by a United Methodist pastor whose first husband was a "closet gay" who fathered three children with her before opening the exit door and leaving them in emotional tatters. (Thus she shows that she has victim status and is credentialed to speak with authority on these matters.) She goes on to say that the "root of the problem (in light of the Ted Haggard, Mark Foley incidents) is in our denial that gays and lesbians are as worthy and unworthy, flawed and gifted, as heterosexuals."

She notes that our condemnatory attitudes arose with such benighted thinkers as Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages who "labeled not only homosexual acts but all non-procreative sexual behavior 'unnatural'. The Roman Catholic Church continues to promote this idea, even though most critical thinkers (as opposed, presumably, to the slouch thinkers in the Church) appreciate the relational bonding, tension release and joyous pleasure that sexuality affords along with the possibility of procreation." Not wanting to single out the Catholic Church (she says), she proceeds to spend two paragraphs denegrating the Catholic Church.

Finally, she concludes, with the results of Election Day in -- one wonders if it is akin in her mind to the Second Coming or merely cloaked in an aura of apocalyptic liberal triumph -- now is the time to throw off the shackles of medieval attitudes about our sexuality.

The second piece is an amusing story by a young, articulate lady who writes about her being blessed with -- how to say it appropriately and with decorum? -- excessively large mammary glands. In her words:

"Stare all you want; you'll have no idea what's going on in my head. Because if you're staring, I am probably thinking that I could smother you and make it look like an accident.

"Harsh? I know. But with a rack like this, you can't be a doormat."

Now, how in the world does one relate these disparate offerings from a well respected and outlet for progressive news and information like The Washington Post? Why, one at a time, of course.

The Rev. Ermalou Roller apparently subscribes to that optimism about breaking down social and psychological barriers that sees anything that impinges upon one's sexual freedom of expression as passe, "medieval" and worthy of scornful dismissal. Jeffrey Satinover, respected lecturer at both Yale and Harvard in Psychiatry, showed courageously and conclusively that the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV) was carried out by a determined lobby by political means, and not according to scientific evidence in his book, Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth.

Too, mimetic theory casts a cool and discerning eye on what Rene Girard calls "the crisis of distinctions." The bold and reckless knocking out of the road little distinctions like "natural" and "unnatural", especially in the area of human sexuality, may seem the very vanguard of social justice and indeed mercy. What practitioners of this kind of erasure of demarcations do not see is their culpability in bringing about a sacrificial denouement. In short, the imploding of a culture which has lost its cultic and organizing principle.

The Rev. Roller isn't interested in whether or not her promoting gay rights looks for all the world like a sacrificial preparation. The Rev. Roller is too much on a roller coaster of naive progressive optimism and Pelagianism. And what of the benighted Thomism that sees certain sexual practices as "unnatural"? Fortunately, the Church teaches that Natural Law is not only universal but immutable. The knowledge of it cannot be destroyed; it can only be obscured for a time. Times when the frenzy of a sacrificial preparation dims the eye and rationality to its truth.

And what of the young lady who writes of her well endowed set of mammilian opulence?

In his hugely prescient epic tale, J. R. R. Tolkien has the walking, talking tree-herders, the Ents, bemoan the fact that the Ent-wives abandoned them so long ago that they cannot even quite recall what they looked like. And, thus, their numbers dwindled to only a few (demographics of Europe one generation out, by conservative estimates). Where did the Ent-wives go? What were their concerns instead of having and raising little entlings?

I waited as I read the funny story in the Post Magazine for her to mention something about the purpose of her breasts. Weren't they designed for something, anything, other than attracting glances of males and potential lovers or murder-victims (see her quote above)?

Have we so forgotten the design and purpose of sexuality that we are enduring what Mark Gordon calls at his website, the suicide of the west? Will we draw back from the brink and return to the Greatest Adventure known to human beings: falling in love, marrying for a lifetime, raising children in our domestic church and being a "sign and image of the communion of the Father and the Son in the Holy Spirit" (CCC #2205).

Otherwise, we will prove what boobs and ninnies we magnificent moderns have become to our doom.