Derb on f*cked-up people, and more

• Gay marriage in America: what should the church do? Just like it should with heresy and abortion, excommunicate leaders, in this case, Catholic politicians and judges, who push this. Anything more extreme would backfire. Putting America under interdict, for example. Just like in Elizabethan England, it would make every Catholic in the country a target, by the government; a death warrant, maybe even literally. Still a question: pushed against the wall, will accommodationist churchmen such as, maybe, Archbishop Cupich actually leave the church? Maybe subtly go into schism ("redefine/clarify our relationship" with Rome) to form a puppet American Catholic Church as some said they would in the '70s.
• Integralism visits First Things? One good thing about this whole mess is it seems to have woken up such polite conservatives to the fact that trying to meet the liberals on the liberals' terms, the idea behind Vatican II, doesn't work. They're starting to say things only "Lefebvrists" used to.
• Episcopalians now allow actual homosexual weddings. Not news. Aren't they supposed to be somewhat conservative compared with other pseudo-Christian Protestant sects? "Talk to John; he was an Episcopalian at one time." Born Episcopal because my dad married an Episcopalian and joined, but he came back to the Catholic Church providentially two years before he passed away. First, to be fair, unlike Unitarians, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and arguably Oneness Pentecostals, offshoots of Protestantism that are no longer Christian, Protestant sects are still Christian. Gay marriage doesn't change that; denying the content of the creeds does. (Some Protestant denominations are non-credal but still Christian; it's implied.) Second, growing up in the culturally pre-Sixties Episcopal Church, "that's what I used to think." We thought we were Catholic too, partly because we had bishops (hence the name Episcopal). The Anglo-Catholic parishes (a movement going back to the 1800s; either "we want to be Roman but recognize our orders" or "we're just as good as Rome and don't need it") existed because Episcopalianism is semi-congregational; parishes, but not missions, had much autonomy, so the rector (parish priest) and the vestry (parish council), which chooses the rector, were essentially their own Pope. That's how/why some Episcopal churches were a hedge against liberalism when I was a kid; why I'm pre-Vatican II. Now of course it's among the most liberal denominations in a liberal field, mainline Protestantism. I think only the United Church of Christ, what the Congregational Church of the Pilgrims has become, is more liberal, almost caught up with its Unitarian splinter. (The "Enlightenment" hit English Calvinists, including the partly Calvinist Anglicans, hard. America's founding fathers were basically unbelievers.)
• Derb: Avoid f*cked-up people. Taking the lefties' "Mean People Suck" from around 20 years ago and turning it on its head.
• Female lefty illogic that would make Mr. Spock famously raise an eyebrow: damned if you do, damned if you don't. Based on things I really hear. "What do you mean 'Star Trek' is a hokey lefty fable? Bigot." If, as I try to be, you're open-minded so you watch things you don't agree with, enjoy them on your terms, and even learn a thing or two: "He's a hardcore Catholic! I can't BELIEVE he says he's a 'Star Trek' fan. How dare he? Gene Roddenberry was an atheist." (Heretic!) So now we're not allowed to watch THEIR show but are supposed to desperately want to, I guess. It's true that Roddenberry and thus the show were anti-religious, actually slightly more mainstream in pre-Sixties America (which the original show mirrored; the Great Society "in space") than imagined (Protestant America, "the American Religion": create your own faith including no faith). Frank Sinatra in 1963 told Playboy he didn't believe in God as we understand that. (Mugged by the Sixties, he made his peace with the church and became a Republican.) One of my lines: "Gilligan's Island" and "Star Trek" are actually the same show (fable), the only real difference being the tone, "Star Trek" seeming grown-up/serious like "The Twilight Zone" most of the time; equally unrealistic (not really about surviving on an island or space travel and meeting aliens, who if they exist probably don't speak English).
• Arnie speaks. An interview with Christine's Keith Gordon.