Remonstrans
What We Can Learn From Perverts
12/05/08
What We Can Learn From Perverts
One of the blogs I visit regularly is the work of a morbidly obese lesbian pastorette. The blog is a record of the complaints and resentments of a wretched soul who wants everyone to internalize her misery and outrage. All who go there can read of her physical ailments, her fear of being outed, her fear of disappointing those in her congregation with whom she is dealing treacherously, her fears of a career cut short by anti-sodomite bigots, her exercise routine at the swimming pool, and occasionally her surreptitious trysts with "Beloved".
One gets the impression of an immature seven year-old writing in a diary which she keeps in the living room so everyone can read it and extend emotional support and affirmation.
Her love is a very sad thing. It is not the love of Romeo & Juliet or Anthony & Cleopatra or Abelard & Heloise or Paolo & Francesca or Bonnie & Clyde or even Pepe LePew & The Odor-able Kitty. It is an unhealthy, sweaty thing done in a corner and then foisted for validation on an indifferent public under the pretense of a demand for social justice.
This she cannot see.
But on her blog she has a well-known logo of two wedding bands on a backdrop of a rainbow which says "This blog supports gay marriage". Underneath is written what I take to be the blogger's words: "Don't be scared... it's just love".
Frankly, I don't think a case can be made that it is love, and if it is love, it is a very different love from the sort mankind has honored since Eden.
But let's call it love just to be sarcastic.
It is a frightening thing to observe someone who thinks herself a competent shepherd of souls talking like this.
Love is good.
I love X.
Therefore X is good.
It's an interesting conclusion to be drawn by one who is fighting morbid obesity.
People "love" many things. They love many destructive things like drugs, sex, food, pornography, power, attention, adulation....
The message of the Incarnation is not that we are victimized by those who hate us, it is about how we are savaged by our own inordinate loves. Perhaps we can find some example of this during the Advent Season?
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1 Comment from: the divine passive [Visitor] 
Shepherding souls is the only gig she could get? I wonder if that is some sorta government equal opportunity employment thing.
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12/05/08 @ 13:03 2 Comment from: dissidens [Member]
It, along with the other two non-holiday posts, is intended to show the demise of Christianity. This is what we have fallen to. (I say “we”, but of course I don’t mean me.)
This is what is left of the religion of the Apostles and the Martyrs.
We should think about how we got here.
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12/05/08 @ 16:12 3 Comment from: lilrabbi [Visitor]
Is the blog too indecent for a link to it?
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12/07/08 @ 18:40 4 Comment from: dissidens [Member]
Actually, no. At least not that in the sense you mean.
I just didn’t want to influence her blog’s trajectory with too close a fly-by, if you catch my meaning. She wants to stay under the radar while she communes with her demons. There is nothing of particular interest (and nothing salacious, certainly) that we can’t find in the advocate press; it’s just the quotidian, tiresome sentiments observed over time but perhaps magnified by the incessant, feminine self-centeredness of it all.
A self-congratulatory smugness interleaved with guilt as she anticipates the betrayal her flock will feel once she screws up the courage to “come out”; her pathetic cowering at the prospect of discovery upon chance meetings; her cryptic ways of provoking change in her “diocese”. That sort of thing. She has persuaded herself that she is better than “us” and “we” are insufficiently Christ-like in our failure to embrace her superior understanding of “acceptance” and “community” and “love”. These are now the virtues of the vandals.
This is why I’m interested in people like Arpin-Ricci and Pagitt and Corcoran and Shroyer and Jones…. It’s not enough to read their propaganda and watch their YouTube ads. As I learned again at Journey Church: they don’t want us just to reject their heresies, they want us to know how they feel about their heresies.
I recommend it. They say way more than they know.
The thoughtful person will observe similarities between different things and the differences among similar things.
I just didn’t want to influence her blog’s trajectory with too close a fly-by, if you catch my meaning. She wants to stay under the radar while she communes with her demons. There is nothing of particular interest (and nothing salacious, certainly) that we can’t find in the advocate press; it’s just the quotidian, tiresome sentiments observed over time but perhaps magnified by the incessant, feminine self-centeredness of it all.
A self-congratulatory smugness interleaved with guilt as she anticipates the betrayal her flock will feel once she screws up the courage to “come out”; her pathetic cowering at the prospect of discovery upon chance meetings; her cryptic ways of provoking change in her “diocese”. That sort of thing. She has persuaded herself that she is better than “us” and “we” are insufficiently Christ-like in our failure to embrace her superior understanding of “acceptance” and “community” and “love”. These are now the virtues of the vandals.
This is why I’m interested in people like Arpin-Ricci and Pagitt and Corcoran and Shroyer and Jones…. It’s not enough to read their propaganda and watch their YouTube ads. As I learned again at Journey Church: they don’t want us just to reject their heresies, they want us to know how they feel about their heresies.
I recommend it. They say way more than they know.
The thoughtful person will observe similarities between different things and the differences among similar things.
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12/07/08 @ 19:43 5 Comment from: x [Visitor]
What is your interest is Arpin-Ricci? Compared to the other names listed, he seems like... well, an obscure nobody. Why does he rank in your list so often?
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12/09/08 @ 21:30 6 Comment from: dissidens [Member]
That’s a strange question, x.
I listed five names above: Arpin-Ricci, Pagitt, Corcoran, Shroyer and Jones. Jones and Pagitt are, or were, formally identified with the leadership of the movement. Arpin-Ricci is a rather widely recognized name in the emergent blogging community and was at one time a part of its leadership. Of the five names I listed, Corcoran and Shroyer are the real “obscure nobodies”. Shroyer has an organic connection but is not very prominent, and Corcoran is a nobody.
I am a nobody. Nobodies are people too.
And of the nearly five years this blog has been around, Arpin-Ricci has piqued our interest only twice.
So I don’t accept your premise.
What interests me is what he says. It’s not about people who are prominent, it’s about ideas that are characteristic. Read our banner: we are interesting in big spirits and small goblins.
I’ll tell you this in private if you promise to keep it a secret: I am interested in the Western Church which, across the board, has a religious devotion to the trivial, the malformed and the capricious. I think examples of triviality, malformation and capriciousness help our readers understand our times.
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12/10/08 @ 06:54 7 Comment from: x [Visitor]
Understood. Thanks.
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12/10/08 @ 15:43 Leave a comment:
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