I love it when MetaFilter goes zone. Wish it happened more often.

Catholic sexual teaching is like a rambling, cracking old building, and its foundations lie in a quagmire of ancient fear, misogyny, rejection of the body and denial of pleasure. The structure is so unsound that a threat to any part of it is perceived as a threat to the whole. Therefore contraception must be repeatedly denounced, women kept away from the altar, remarried people excluded and gay people silenced or sacked. The shakier things get, and the more absurd and unjust they become, the more fiercely the bishops stamp their crosiers. They, too, are trapped in the deceptions and contradictions. Yet change lies ahead, and it will not be denied. […]

I can’t wait.
[ via wrongwaygoback ]

I liked Andre’s love poem for geeks a great deal. I also (again) got a kick out of the fact that my relationship with The Boy defies one of the usual gender stereotypes: I’m the one who laughs at that joke, the one he runs to frantically whenever things go wrong with either of his computers (Mac and PC — I don’t even have a Mac yet but I’m pretty good at troubleshooting regardless), and the one who is heavily into gadgets.

David Brooks’ “‘The Fascist’ and ‘The Activist'” is a really interesting take on the politics of the late Pim Fortuyn and explains why, in the author’s view, the Western media has chosen to write about him simplistically.

In the parlors of polite society, social tolerance sits side by side with multiculturalism. They are two pastries on the platter of polite opinion. But Fortuyn was socially tolerant, even libertine, and it was for that reason he felt he could not be a multiculturalist.

The Victorian gent does have a strategy when confronted with this clash of Good Opinions. Insulation. Retreat to the high-minded tolerance of your suburb and social circle, and leave it to other poor buggers to actually live with the intolerant extremists. That is to say, champion multiculturalism from the enlightened venue of leafy London or Cambridge, and force the bastards in Israel or the neighborhoods to actually confront the practical consequences of your ideas.

But Fortuyn was a nationalist. The Victorian gent disapproves of nationalism, since it is a primitive passion, like excessive religious belief. But nationalism is actually a form of unselfishness, which takes one out of one’s immediate circle and induces one to love and care about one’s countrymen. In America, a nation of immigrants, nationalism takes one form. In France, the land of the blood and soil patrie, nationalism takes another form. In Holland, the land of pot bars, nationalism takes another form yet, Mr. Fortuyn’s.

Fortuyn forcefully confronted the great contradiction in enlightened opinion. He argued that given the realities of the situation, one had to build a wall around one’s tolerance, and restrict the flow of people who refused to join the culture of openness. He proposed reducing immigration flows and stepping up assimilation programs.

One can argue about the merits of his platform. One can argue whether Islam is really as intolerant as Fortuyn made it out to be or even whether this intolerance toward homosexuality and euthanasia is a good thing. But what is interesting from our point of view is that the Victorian gent that is the Western press corps could not even allow Pim Fortuyn to exist.

I have to admit I never thought of what Brooks posits until reading this and now that I have it does make some sense, and so putting him in the company of France’s Le Pen or Austria’s Haider seems inaccurate, not to mention somewhat unfair. I can’t say I agree with Fortuyn’s politics still but it’s good to have an idea of the thought behind them.
[ via Gulfstream ]

(May 5) From Shattered vows: Musings of a married priest by Rev. Tax B. Rosaldo:

In my 12 years as a clergyman, the Church’s power structure, “honeycombed with sexual secrecy,” gradually shaped me to fit into it.

The bishop’s advice to me is still very vivid: “You can take a woman, but no civil marriage, live in another place where no one knows your identity, but on Fridays or Saturdays, return to your parish for Sunday Masses.”

Another bishop whose clergyman fell in love with and impregnated a woman advised her parents to take her to the a convent in Baguio until she delivered the baby, and then to leave the baby in the convent after delivery.

Many bishops have become very shrewd in maintaining this culture of secrecy and hypocrisy. These institutional virtues are to be kept intact at all costs.

In his “Shattered Vows,” David Rice wrote that “by a conservative estimate, 50 percent of the clergy in the Archdiocese of Manila have relations with women, and Jaime Cardinal Sin is silent about it.”

Some bishops who discover that their clergymen have had carnal relationships with women or with men, whether with or without consent, send them to other dioceses or abroad to escape suspicion and hide the scandal.

(May 7) How Filipino priests are shielded from scandal:

A charity institution in Malabon is known to take in women impregnated by Catholic priests to prevent them from aborting the child in their wombs and provide them with natal care, spiritual healing and counseling.

It also shields priests, who have broken their vows of celibacy, from scandal. This was disclosed to the Inquirer by a priest who did not want to be named.

He said that the children born of these women at the Heart of Mary Villa are jokingly branded as “Church property” or “Pamangkin ni sister (the sister’s niece/nephew),” as nuns and priests consider one another brothers and sisters.

After giving birth, the women at the Heart of Mary Villa are given the choice to either leave the baby behind or to keep the child. […]

(May 8) Church apologizes for priests’ sins, says errant priests minority:

The Catholic Bishops Conference of the Philippines Wednesday expressed remorse for the sins committed by priests, including those who had violated their vow of celibacy.

Speaking for the CBCP in a rare press briefing, Msgr. Hernando Coronel, secretary general of the influential organization, also said the sex scandals currently rocking the Church worldwide would result in a “period of purification” for the local Catholic hierarchy.

“We apologize to the victims. We are sorry for the victims. We are sorry for the sins of the priests. We hope this will not happen again,” Coronel said.

Apologies and hope sound nice but note that when Coronel discusses how the Church will be handling cases of sexual misconduct by clergy, the law never figures in. Sorry, but if you’ve used your position to force anyone into having sex with you, defrocked or not you should face the legal consequences of your actions like any other rapist.
(Rape is a heinous crime in the Philippines; offenders are sentenced to reclusion perpetua and under special circumstances, they receive the death penalty. So especially if you’re a European or North American pedophile thinking of coming here on a sex tour: don’t.)

“The Phone Guy” is an article by Michael Specter on how Nokia came to revolutionize and conquer the world market for cell phones. Good reading.

[Erik] Anderson reached for his briefcase and turned it upside down; at least a dozen telephones came tumbling out. He grabbed the oldest among them, the nine-year-old 101. “See the space here?” He pointed to a gap between the numeric keypad and the scrolling keys above it. “Frank [Nuovo] did it with his own hand,” he said. “Look at the racetrack, a curved oval shape. It was subtle. You wouldn’t notice it consciously.” He rubbed his thumb slowly across every line and contour. “Look at the earpiece. It has three holes. But what shape are the holes? Three ovals. Look at the microphone. It’s a little oval. It cost money to make those holes into oval shapes. A circle would have been cheaper. You don’t notice it—but you see it, you feel it. The phone creates a feeling of coherence, of understanding, which is both intellectual and emotional. It is a sense of organic rightness.” He glanced over at me. “You think this is a bunch of crap, don’t you?” he asked, amused as my eyes moved from the cell phone to Alberti’s essay, passages of which Anderson had underlined. “What could making a goddam cell phone have to do with the Renaissance?”

[ via gulfstream ]

I received a large thick envelope in the mail today.
I got into NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program! I’m going to NYU in August!
*faints*

Speaking of Bea Arthur, my current wallpaper is an oil painting of Bea Arthur wrestling with dinosaurs. I may never change it.

If you remember Mil Millington’s name from his hilarious Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About page, you’ll probably be pleased to know that his first novel is one of the UK’s five best debut novels of the year.
Millington now also writes a weekly column for a newspaper; his column and book deal both came about because the right people found and read his site, which is really neat.
[ via Gulfstream, now with permalinks! ]
Update, January 2012: there’s a new link for Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About (mil-millington.com), but I’m leaving the old one above intact for posterity’s sake.

Lots of information on how Holy Week is celebrated in the Philippines in this LiveJournal post:

In Spanish times, as part of the process for coopting the leading native families, among the distinctions the Spanish clergy would hand out to the local oligarchy would be the custodianship over certain religious images. Spanish style Catholicism is particularly obsessed with images and this obsession has merged quite well with prehispanic idolatry on the part of the people the Spanish happened to subjugate -in Mexico and the Philippines, for example, the images that have the greatest following, or devotions, are often dark-skinned, because the faithful could identify with them more; which is why, for example, when the Philippine Revolution against Spain took place, images with fair skin (say, painted to look white, or made of ivory) often had their noses cut off out of racial spite, but black madonnas and images of Christ were spared.

The images Filipinos are particularly devoted to are of Mary, so the country is replete with madonnas that are patronesses of everything from safe journeys (Nuestra Senora de Buen Viaje, in Antipolo), the rosary (Nuestra Senora dela Paz y la Santissimo Rosario originally in Manila and now in Quezon City -commonly known as Nuestra Senora de la Naval, as the defeat of many Dutch and British naval attacks against Spanish galleons traveling between Acapulco and Manila were attributed to her intercession), Our Lady of Perpetual Help (a more modern devotion introduced shortly before WW2, she is the patroness of the poor, of the scorned and those with hopeless causes -the devotion to her by the working classes and prostitutes is particularly intense), and so on. There is a national devotion to the Infant Jesus, called the Santo Nino (The Infant Jesus of Prague), dating back to Magellan leaving an image of the Sto. Nino in the Visayas which was “miraculously” rediscovered when the Spaniards returned; the Sto. Nino is the particular devotion of businessmen and merchants and anyone wanting prosperity and good luck, so it is rare not to find an office or a factory or any business establishment without a little Santo Nino image on display.