Christianity, like Marriage, is only as Strong as its Weakest Link
There is that scene in the recent movie “Selma” with LBJ meeting with Governor George Wallace in the Oval Office in 1965 and two Southern politicians are trying to haggle their way out of an uncomfortable situation whereby one hundred years of Jim Crow and racial suppression was bubbling up all over the South but in this particular place of Alabama with protesters wanting to march across the state to petition their state government for a redress of their grievance of wanting to exercise their full constitutional right to vote without hindrance in that state.
The white men in Alabama sounding like the Roman Catholic Church on Sacred Tradition were saying this is how it has always been and we are satisfied with it.
The black men in Alabama no longer wanted to be on the short end of the stick, an expression, and no longer on the end of stick being beaten or killed for asking for their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
At one point Governor Wallace wants the federal government to go along with Southern Sacred Tradition and Lyndon Johnson, wanting to establish some sort of legislative legacy, throws the problem back at Wallace and tells him that as Governor he can force adherence to national law at the local level at the county level where all government is local and the local voting registrar is the real place where the Negro was being denied his local rights.
It occurred to me upon recent viewing of that movie for the first time, how the definition of man and the definition of the rights of man are in essence defined and or redefined according to the local prejudice and flavors of the month, years and century.
Which also brings this slightly aged person, with memories of the sixties, to look at County Clerk Kim Davis of Rowan County Kentucky and her singular obsession with the biblical definition of “marriage” and her hearing and obeying her “god” and his direct command to her to enforce “his” definition of whatever marriage is.
Before marriage, I told a friend that I thought of marriage as a merger and or alliance between two people. He having been married more than once listened to my definition and or preconceived idea of marriage and laughed. He told me that at best marriage is a truce between two people on the front line of the war between the sexes and the unique qualities, attributes and assets of those eternally warring factions, and their ongoing hit or miss contributions in the way of offspring to the common good and millennial old haphazard survival of the species.
Some weird Baptist cult, famous for their hatred of gays, has set up protesting with signs shop within hearing distance of three times divorced County Clerk, living in a glass house Kim Davis, and throwing stones at da gays who wish to be in legal union and or marriage with each other.
The traditional definition of marriage via filtering of the RC sacred traditions that make up their ritual plagued religion, and the basis of most modern Christianity, had Jesus, a single man going to a wedding with his mom, and getting drunk. No engagement to a female, no bridal registries, no speaking of vows.
Of course that is not the way they tell the stained glass story on the wall of the cathedral but that is the bottom line – the stained glass sacred tradition story. Marriage in the RC tradition / “Christian” POV would appear to be whatever sacred tradition says “it” is - just like - the way “it” has always been for the white man in the South - the majority opinion in the church so to speak is the definition of what sexual union and or sexual truce is within the confines of a legal union and or marriage – and must be between a legal aged male and female of the species.
Minority opinions do not count.
Kim Davis with her three divorces is technically according to the sparse and or spaced all over the place in the Greek Testament phrasings – she is an adulterer and her many other marriages are not the one true union of marriage that Jesus supposedly defined once upon a time in a distant galaxy in a time far, far away from the real here and now.
Kim is a “whore” living in sin and the good people of the Westboro Baptist “Christian” cult don’t think that Kim is the right spokesperson to diss and deny gay people their civil rights. (Strange turn of events and or rhetoric?)
Christianity and its thousands of sects and cults is after all only as strong and its weakest link and or links as in the Kim Davis variety or the Westboro inbred Christer crazies.
The Pedophile Union Lobby that runs the Vatican has after fifty years post-Vatican had a Synod recently and after fifty years since Vatican II of shitting on the divorced of their church, they are reaching out for contributions or contributions disguised as an invitation to return to the Church and get a mean spirited right to their sacraments - take or leave it losers - or btw go to hell.
This as the pews remain empty and perhaps a few divorced catholics who have not already joined the Lutherans or the Anglicans or other main stream Protestant churches that accept in a complex world, the complex reasons why marriages fail, why there is divorce and why everybody deserves a second chance to make a more perfect union with a spouse and of course with or without children involved.
I am reminded of the author Anne Rice who went back briefly to the RC church and left after a few months later pulling her hair and screaming something to the effect that the nostalgic home of the church she remembered from childhood was replaced by the biased boilerplate preaching of the meal tickets clerics defending celibacy in all its toxic forms including the Sacred Tradition of Omerta surrounding regarding pedophilia, of that particular business, sect, cult.
Good luck to any divorced people lucky enough to find a comfortable roost in the same old medieval RC church thing btw.
The Vatican Synod on the “Family” btw forgot about all the gays. Divorced Catholics first on the tour. Maybe in another hundred years, the gays?
Pope Francis, who is a great PR guy, having not only survived some of the darkest fascist days of Argentina history but prospered as well despite that history, is trying to I think to highlight a lot of piles, mountains of sacred tradition in the RC church (with a possible need to change, tweek things a bit here and there?) before he goes to his eternal reward and is no doubt happier stirring up the pot in Rome rather than in Buenos Aires. Wink, nod.
Which brings us to the people of this world, the Kim Davis county clerks, or the cookie cutter RC priests, or the perfect cult people of the Westboro Baptist Congregation publicity seeking church playing with themselves and defining marriage any which way but loose.
Marriage is in the words of the definer?
Which goes back to my tongue in cheek but probably no so far from the truth article about a stoned Jesus as a gay wedding. A long standing 2,000 year old coded message from da bible? Again – Wink, Nod.
Good thing I am mostly cultured and not christianed these days?
Whatever.
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