Christianity, like Marriage, is only as Strong as its Weakest Link

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.

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2010/08/anne-rice-continued.html

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2010/07/anne-rice-heretic-or-areligionist.html

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. 

http://thisculturalchristian.blogspot.com/2012/07/jesus-stoned-at-gay-wedding-paolo.html

Good thing I am mostly cultured and not christianed these days?

Whatever. 

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Kim Davis - Cafeteria Christian Continues to Draw $6.66K/Mo. Salary Telling the Public to Pound Sand

Kim Davis continues to eat chocolates and seat on her fat ass public taxpayer subsidizzed job practicing her own form of designer Duggar Christianity. Whatever. Who died and make her  god Queen for life. 

Kim Davis continues to draw her $6.66K/Mo. salary telling the taxpayer to pound sand as she chooses to practice her brand of cafeteria Christianity hating da gays and loving the sanctity of all her four marriages as holy in her belief system. A welfare queen Kentucky style I would think or more likely delusional. Get a straight jacket folks. Great show BTW Rowan County.

But like Pope Francis has said "who am I to judge" her. LOL


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Kim Davis Morehead Town Clerk on Fourth Marriage Thinks Gay Marriage is Evil

People who live in glass houses should not throw rocks at people wanting to get married for the first time. Turns out Divorce Queen Kim Davis, Town Clerk Rowan County, lives in a glass house and is throwing boulders at her neighbors.

Typical Cafeteria Hypocrite Christian. With Christians like Kim, no wander that religion has become a dead religion in America.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/07/06/1399415/-A-view-from-Rowan-County-KY#

Chat outside the courthouse among the protesters says that Ms. Davis, the County Clerk, is on her fourth marriage, though nobody thinks that diminishes her faith. Her mother held the post for some years; her son serves as her assistant. That's not mean, angry conversation. It's a headshake from people who know her and are sorry it has come to this. (The same chat says at least one employee is gay, and so the county may be looking at a hostile work environment.)

Our regional hospital (which, along with the university, attracts a number of professionals to the community) was brought here largely through the intercession of a lesbian physician, who convinced the Sisters of Notre Dame to plant their mission here. Even today few would be comfortable to see it said to plainly and there is not a large Catholic community here.

Best guess, the county is evenly split on gay marriage. And that's optimistic counting.

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Upper Class Gossip of Old New York – 1886-1891 – The Mrs. James G. Blaine Jr. Scandal

(original copyright expired)

This n'ar Romeo and Juliet tale of young love played out in the streets of old New York from about the middle of 1886 through the middle of 1891.

The aspects of many dysfunctional families usually and eventually ends up spilling out onto the street and or public thoroughfare for all to see and dissect. 

While researching a news clipping of a wedding at old St. Leo’s RC church at 11 E. 28^th Street, I ran into the character of the bon vivant pastor in the name of Father Thomas Ducey. His main claim to fame in his Obits, among a few others perhaps not published, was his so-called secret marriage of Marie Nevins originally of Ohio but recently of New York City, married to the son of the former Republican candidate on the 1884 ticket James G Blaine Sr. who lost to Grover Cleveland by a razor thin vote majority but not on Electoral College count.

Secret is a strong word but the bottom line is that the groom presented himself as of age, 18, and able to freely marry his sweetheart.

James G Blaine Jr. - "Gilded Youth" of the "Plumed Knight"

The father of the groom overall treated his son as some sort of property in the little rhetoric bled into the press regarding this embarrassment to him as a very ambitious national political figure - a property rights and or parental rights thing in words of a private letter to Father Ducey not published until after the priest's death. 

James G Blaine Sr. - Mister Republican
The "Plumed Knight"

James G. Blaine Senior was in the political wilderness and no doubt considering his 1888 political options. He even took this wife and daughters on a grand European Tour starting in 1887 which ended with an extended stay at Andrew Carnegie’s castle in Scotland – just to drop a name or two among the lowly.

Blaine Senior was a self-made man. Started a successful newspaper in Maine, backed Lincoln in 1860 and channeled his publishing fortune into Coal Mines in western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Not to mention a big bribe or two from Railroads while serving as Senator from Maine before his days as Presidential contender which in the 1876 bid he was dubbed something like not as a dark horse but a “Plumed Knight” (white knight?) to lead the Grand Old Party to new heights of glory etc.

James G. Blaine Junior born 1868, was among his younger children and he, the son, would appear to have met Marie Nevins while her family was vacationing in Maine one summer. One thing led to another no doubt and by the beginning of September 1886 Blaine Junior is presenting himself as a “gentleman” registered at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the best in the city with few rivals, and telling the priest at St. Leo’s that he wants to marry Marie Nevins, no doubt in a mixed religious ceremony, one Catholic Marie and one Protestant Jamie (and or "Jimmie" by some newspaper accounts) Blaine Junior.

The priest marries them in the standard Rectory Marriage for quick and or mixed marriages, no doubt assuming pregnancy as a factor, along the usual verbal contract that the children of such a union be raised Catholic etc.

I suppose all this happened without the Blaines being aware of it for a while or at least until Jamie’s hotel bill at the Fifth Avenue Hotel came due and became overdue etc. I am not too certain if the Nevins knew too much at first. But the witnesses to Marie’s wedding would appear to have been Nevins servants. The Nevins were in quiet repose I would speculate in the fading grand eloquence of the old New York Hotel 721 Broadway, in retirement or semi-retirement, clipping coupons so to speak. 

[Old New York Hotel.] – 1875 (photographer unknown) From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWNKHAD7&SMLS=1&RW=1067&RH=528

(Old New York Hotel was the first major hotel in New York City to have indoor plumbing when it was built in 1844. It was a preferred stop over for Southerners visiting the city. Jefferson Davis stayed there in 1858. Some of his children and his mother in law stopped over there on their way to Canada in 1865. An early long term manager had cultivated this Southern connection to a genteel aristocracy sort of clientele. It was the ideal quiet place to stay for people of means on a budget to stay the season with its table d'hote in house restaurant prices and menu. Torn down in 1894.)

Marie’s father had been a successful printer/publisher in Ohio and a one-time owner of the Ohio Statesman, a Democratic leaning newspaper. Richard Nevins had also married Florida “Flora” Madery, daughter of the original long term owner and founder of the Ohio Statesman. The Statesman by the way changed owners and politics a few times in the late 1860s after I believe Richard Nevins moved on to New York City.

Richard Nevins was born in New York City in 1831 with his father, being a partner with his brother in the Wall Street brokerage firm of Nevins and Townsend before dying in Richard’s infancy.  Nevins moved to Philadelphia to be raised by his mother’s relatives and legal guardians before striking out in his youth to seek his own fortune in Ohio.

Marie (born Mary in 1866 according to the family Genealogy page) was educated in a convent school away from the world until her encounter with the Blaines.

Whatever the families knew, the couple ran off for a short period and set up housekeeping in Marie’s uncle’s house in Pittsburgh while tempers on both sides no doubt flared and James Junior got himself a job as a newspaper reporter, the first of many jobs he got but never showed interest in or held onto for very long. They went back to New York to rent an apartment “uptown”. He of course was cut off from his parents money and allowance in the short term. Finally with the arrival of James G Blaine III in January 1888, some communication with the Blaines and Junior’s $1800 a year normal allowance was temporarily restored.

I don’t know if Richard Nevins was happy about his convent educated daughter being secreted off in the night to marry what was proving to be a n’ar do well son in law and the son of one of the most powerful figures in Republican politics of the day. I believe that Marie is often quoted in the papers as going to see her mother as opposed to her father etc. as intermediary etc.

Blaine Family Mansion - Augusta Maine

Along with the restored allowance to James Jr., the young Blaines made an attempt to live with the Blaine in-laws in Augusta Maine in the summer of 1888 which only lasted a few weeks and until a big blow-up blow-out cat fight between newlywed Marie and her mother in law.

After that, what the press and the public did not know about all this probably came pouring out in sordid details and even in the New York Times – the New York Times – but then again this was a tragedy, a future styled “soap opera” unfolding with each new detail printed in the press. A lot of “He Said…She Said” stuff getting quoted on both sides and printed in the newspapers of the day and not just in New York City.

What I would imagine is that Blaine Senior did not want was any negative publicity to interfere with his future political gamesmanship for the White House that would have gotten lost in the yellow street journalism of the day.

Marie came back to New York and stayed at the old apartment but without James Junior who stayed with mommy, daddy and his allowance in Maine. No letters were answered from Marie to the various Blaines in their Augusta mansion and sent by Marie.

No doubt as a desperate or perhaps clever ploy to gain public attention to her private woes, Marie Nevins Blaine – or Mrs. James G. Blaine Jr. (her stage name) – signed a theatrical contract to go onto the stage and perform in legitimate theatre.

The proverbial muck hit the fan and the press had their field days.

As a side note, this was not something original on Marie Nevins part to try and cash in on her name, a now famous national married name.

There was another well to do Married Lady – Mrs. James Brown-Potter who as a beautiful young American got dumped in England by her rich hubby, one of the Browns of Brown Bros. Wall Street fame, but who managed to turn misfortune into fortune as a bright new young sensation on the London Stage – cashing in on the poor dear, little woman, jilted wife of a cad, taking on an underdog stance to make it against all odds as a woman that is in late Victorian England. 

Mrs. James Brown-Potter - The American Actress
photo source - http://vintage-ephemera.blogspot.com/2012/12/cora-urquhart-brown-potter.html

With all the stress of trying to maintain a household and not live with her parents who may or may not been giving her support and or cash up to this point and trying to shame the Blaines into taking responsibility for their worthless son, Marie got really sick with an inflammatory attack of Rheumatoid Arthritis that left her bedridden for months and being treated by all the best doctors and treatments, including opiates, in New York at the time. 

Weeks drifted into months and she had yet to make her announced appearance on the stage.  She for a time is noted as with her mother at the New York Hotel before establishing another residence closer to her new show business career, should it ever get off the ground.

Some back and forth on the negotiations and or communications with the Blaines of Maine and with publicity in the press, and with a new circle of theatrical and powerful Democratic leaning friends, Marie moved out of the original apartment and into the Percival Apartments at 230 West 42^nd street to be near those new friends in her attempt at recovery. Her child it would seem was in temporary care of her mother in her residence at the New York Hotel.

Remains of the Percival Apartments in 1924

234 West 42^nd Street – 1924 – Photograph by Wurts Bros. (New York, N.Y.) - From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York http://collections.mcny.org/C.aspx?VP3=SearchResult_VPage&VBID=24UAYWNQXI28&SMLS=1&RW=1600&RH=783

(The above mis-labled I think as 234 W 42nd Street unless new street numbers assigned over time for the Percival Apartments, scraped in this 1924 photo of the previous McKim, Mead & Whites designed exterior decorative work.)

(http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/16/realestate/streetscapes-230-west-42d-street-school-residences-flea-circus-brothel.html …but 230 West 42d Street was built in 1872 as a Roman Catholic school for "boys of refined families," according to the 1893 King's Handbook of New York City.
 In 1882 Percival Wood Clement, a Vermont publisher, banker and railroad investor, hired McKim, Mead & White to completely rebuild the school as a bachelor apartment house. They gave the Percival touches that elevated it above the usual apartment house of the period: multipaned windows, balconies with intricate ironwork designs and a paneled main doorway, all in the character of the Esthetic Movement, then at the forefront of educated taste...)

Marie found a cure in the person of Doctor William T. Bull, a young eligible bachelor, well connected socially, of the Rhode Island founding Bulls, and an innovative successful doctor in his own right. No doubt, his attachment in the press to the cure of Marie Nevins Blaine made him more a famous figure, more famous locally than he was before.

Meanwhile at the ranch, James G. Blaine Sr. has become Secretary of State under President Benjamin Harrison and James Junior had found a job as clerk on a House committee in Washington DC. He continues to live as bachelor and party goer and general playboy through all this without according to the other side even shelling out a dime of support for his son.

Which finds us in April 1891, with no doubt Marie Nevins Blaine wanting a divorce, to get rid of dead weight and free herself up for a presumed marriage with Doctor “Right”.

Here is where more gossip in the press speculates about the future coupling of Marie Nevins Blaine and William T. Bull in the bonds of matrimony. Marie assembles a dream team of lawyers that I would presume her father has partly assembled. 

George Hoadley

One is former Governor George Hoadley of Ohio now living and practicing law in New York City.  

Robert G Ingersoll

The other is Robert G.Ingersoll, successful lawyer, famous political orator and free thinker aka “The Great Agnostic” willing to debate against religion anywhere, anytime and with anyone. 

                        

And the darling of the recently lost Anti-Tammany Reform ticket 1887 for District Attorney De Lancey Nicoll.

Governor Hoadley had only handled two divorce cases in his mostly business legal career, one of those cases being for fellow Ohioan Kate Chase Sprague, Civil War Washington DC hostess under her father Secretary of Treasury Salmon P. Chase. Kate had also once had Richard Nevins on her short list of suitors rich enough to marry in antebellum Ohio when her daddy was governor.

Robert G. Ingersoll was above all a free thinker and something of a nationally known Clarence Darrow type before there was a Clarence Darrow type per say.

De Lancey Nicolls’ family descended from the original English that took New Amsterdam away from the Dutch and made it New York City.

Nicoll was an anti-Tammany democrat that lost for D.A. in 1887 but decided to run and win with Tammany in 1890. So a little publicity, helping a beautiful and wronged Marie Nevins Blaine, could not hurt and only help his public image.

One of Marie’s lawyers had Jamie Blaine Junior followed by detectives in Washington DC. Rather than embarrass herself further in the press and have a record of her husband’s misconducts in DC documented and to haunt her young child in the future, the legal dream team decided that Marie could not divorce under the “moral misconduct” necessary of one or both parties to get a New York State divorce. Instead Marie Blaine was to hop a train to South Dakota, become a resident of a few weeks and get a "quickie" divorce granted solely for “lack of support”.

In the meantime and with the dream team talking to the press officially and unofficially, the other camp in DC decided to send House clerk James G. Blaine Jr. on a an urgent secret diplomatic mission to Spain in the middle of the night in order to avoid being served with divorce papers.

Marie gets her divorce. She does not go on the stage. She marries Doctor William Tillinghast Bull and lives happily ever after etc. etc. 

Doctor William T. Bull (later in life)

End of the story of dirt and gossip on the rich and famous in late nineteenth century New York.


(All images and photos above would seem to fall within the Public Domain or Original Copyright Expired category except for those otherwise noted.)
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Ossian Euclid Dodge – Divorce Clipping – New York Daily Tribune 28 January 1873 – and other bits…

Ossian Euclid Dodge 1820-1876
(public domain)

Clipping - New York Daily Tribune 28 January 1873
(original copyright expired)

Comic Song Writer and Performer Ossian Euclid Dodge 1820-1876 whose most noteworthy accomplishment in life according to his NYTimes Obit would seem to have been to pay $500 for a ticket to Jenny Lind’s first night performance in Boston. (Shades of blatant future Diamond Jim Brady self-promotion and free more than $500’s worth of publicity.)

1850 Lithograph - Ossian E Dodge (left) being Introduced to Jenny Lind by P.T.Barnum
(public domain)

http://www.daytonsbluff.org/DBDF/May2007/DBDF_May2007Txt.html

Euclid Street (St. Paul, MN): Ossian Euclid Dodge, “an eccentric troubadour,” was a nationally-known  journalist, writer and song writer who once had a traveling concert troupe. He was a strict teetotaler who hoped that the public “could learn that a comic song is not necessarily a vulgar one; and that wit which has no fellowship with profanity or coarseness, will be keenly relished by the best and most refined portions of society.”    

Dodge came to St. Paul in 1862 and had a downtown house called “Alpine Cottage.” He sold music and pianos and got into real estate.  In 1873 he named the street after himself.  He was secretary of the St. Paul Chamber of Commerce from 1869 until 1873. What the local papers called a “scandalous divorce” forced Dodge to flee to England in 1874, where he died two years later.

  

More on Ossian Euclid Dodge:

http://kihm6.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/the-chaste-entertainments-of-ossian-euclid-dodge/

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Janna Ryan’s Black Sheep Uncle by Marriage – Governor David L. Boren of Oklahoma

Janna Ryan’s press releases mention her red neck granddaddy Reuel W. Little who ran unsuccessfully for Governor.  Grandad Little supported George Wallace by forming his own John Bircher type third party in Oklahoma, the American Party, so that Wallace could be on the ballot in OK in 1968.

Her uncle by marriage to her aunt Janna Lou Little is David L. Boren, who did successfully run for Governor of Oklahoma 1975-1979.  And was Democratic Senator from Oklahoma 1979-1994.

Governor Boren is not mentioned directly in the Janna Ryan press releases.  Was it because he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and is not likely to endorse him a second time around, family connections as all that? Or that her aunt divorced Boren and divorce is a sin in the Ryan Catholic household?

The Democrats are strangely silent too on this Black Sheep of the Little/Ryan family/dynasty. Perhaps it was because Senator Boren defied the Teddy Kennedy wing of the Dem party by voting for Robert Bork on the Supreme Court?

In any case, it sure helps for a struggling young Wellesley graduate with a law degree in tax avoidance to set up shop in digs like Washington DC where her uncle, black sheep or not, knew a few important people.  (Wink, nod)

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Bibi and Poldi call Quits to Marriage after 115 years

Breaking up is not hard to do.

Important news from Europe.  Bibi and Poldi, giant turtles, together for 115 years have suddenly decided to separate and no longer want to live together as man and wife.  No doubt marriage gets worn out a bit after a century or more.

http://austriantimes.at/image/30308/news/General_News/2012-06-08/42193/Shelling_Out_for_a_Divorce

Zoo management have called in animal experts to try and give the pair counselling - feeding them romantic good mood food and trying to get them to join in joint games - but so far without effect. Zoo boss Helga Happ said: "We get the feeling they can't stand the sight of each other anymore." 

Bibi and Poldi have been a pair since before anyone alive today can remember - they have been together at the Austrian zoo in Klagenfurt for 36 years and before that they lived at Basel zoo in Switzerland. 

Zoo boss Helga added: "They are both 115 years old - they have been together since they were young and grew up together, eventually becoming a pair.

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No Dolan-style Charity from the Vatican to Nuns who Talk about Shhh! (sex) – Sister Margaret Farley

The Vatican is attacking a retired theologian nun, Sister Margaret Farley, for her book on human sexuality published in 2006.

At Amazon.Com: 

Just Love: a Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics," by Sister Margaret Farley

http://www.amazon.com/Just-Love-Framework-Christian-Sexual/dp/0826429246

Can’t have women let alone nuns define what the Vatican Penis Cult is only allowed to define in what to do with your naughty parts etc. 

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http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentaries/157502835.html?page=all&prepage=2&c=y#continue

Taking on the Council of Trent and a church that has taken a stand against pleasure, Farley asserts that procreation is not the only reason couples should have sex. 

Fruitfulness need not "refer only to the conceiving of children," she writes. "It can refer to multiple forms of fruitfulness in love of others, care for others, making the world a better place for others" rather than just succumbing to "an egoisme a deux." (“Love is a selfishness of two.”) 

The Vatican showed no mercy to the Sister of Mercy, proclaiming that "the deliberate use of the sexual faculty" outside of marriage or procreation, or on one's own, is wrong; that homosexual sex acts are "deviant," and that marriages are by and large indissoluble. Farley issued a statement that she did not intend for the book to be an expression or criticism of current official Catholic teaching, and academics and the head of her order rushed to her defense. 

This latest ignoble fight with a noble nun adds to the picture of a Catholic Church in a permanent defensive crouch, steeped in Borgia-like corruption and sexual scandals, lashing out at anyone who notes the obvious: They have lost track of right and wrong. 

Cardinal Timothy Dolan of the Archdiocese of New York blasted The New York Times after Laurie Goodstein wrote that, as the archbishop of Milwaukee in 2003, he authorized payments of up to $20,000 to sexually abusive priests "as an incentive for them to agree to dismissal from the priesthood." 

Dolan insisted through a spokesman that it was "charity," not "payoffs." But if you were the parent of a boy abused by a priest who went away with 20,000 bucks, maybe "charity" is not the word that would come to mind.Its crisis has made the church cruel. The hierarchy should read Farley's opprobrium against adults harming vulnerable children and adolescents by sexually exploiting them; respect for the individual and requirement of free consent, she says, mean that rape, violence and pedophilia against unwilling victims are never justified. 

"Seduction and manipulation of persons who have limited capacity for choice because of immaturity, special dependency, or loss of ordinary power, are ruled out," she writes. 

If only the church could muster that kind of clarity, rather than Dolan-style "charity." 

Facebook – Pornography – Divorce?

It is not illegal to post pictures of your erect penis or your wide open twat in self-made porn on Facebook with your cell phone camera. 

Of course restricted access in most cases separates Grandma’s pictures of baby from the steamy underside of the new age of “social interface”.  

The giggly teenage girls will still gossip and 20% of America divorces now citing Facebook in divorce cases will move on in time to the next flavor of the month “social network” thing.  But think about it.  

American are so much more gung ho. And Facebook was originally designed exclusively for college kids, drugs, sex, alcohol, Spring Break. Bring on the self-produced porn in the bathroom mirror and dirty steamy messages.

“Leisure time” activity, the pursuit of happiness?

Now we know why the Facebook stock scam  is worth 104 billion dollars in capital  on the stock market and why every pension fund and 401k in America must have it in their stock portfolio even at a loss with fees, fees, fees included.  

Wall Street certainly knows how to judge the moral compass or non-moral compass of America and currently it is Facebook.

The marriage killer: One in five American divorces now involve Facebook 

Facebook was by far the biggest offender, with 66 per cent of lawyers citing it as the primary source of evidence in a divorce case. MySpace followed with 15 per cent, Twitter at 5 per cent and other choices lumped together at 14 per cent. 

The survey reflects the findings of a UK law firm last year showing that 20 per cent of its divorce petitions blamed Facebook flings…. 

The most common reason seemed to be people having inappropriate sexual chats with people they were not supposed to,’ said Mark Keenan, managing director of Divorce-Online. 

Friends Reunited faced similar claims when it was launched to help people reconnect with old classmates, but the 23 million plus people now using Facebook in Britain means it is having a much bigger effect on rising divorce rates….  

An American minister also made the headlines recently when he called Facebook a ‘portal to infidelity’ and insisted that his congregation delete their accounts after revealing that 20 couples attending his New Jersey church had been led astray through the site. 

Rev. Cedric Millier, who runs the Living World Christian Fellowship Church in Neptune, New Jersey, said Facebook enabled spouses to reconnect with former lovers, leading to rows and bitterness. 

But Rev. Miller was forced to take a leave of absence after his own non-Facebook transgressions were revealed in an admission that he took part in three-way sexual trysts in the past. 

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Why Catholics Are Leaving the Church – Seven Top Reasons

The sex abuse crisis

The church’s stance on homosexuality

Dissatisfaction with the priest

Uninspiring homilies on Sundays

Perception that church hierarchy is too closely tied to conservative politics

Church’s stance toward divorced and remarried Catholics

The status of women

Read more:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/03/30/7-reasons-catholics-leave-church-in-trenton-1-is-sex-abuse-crisis/?hpt=hp_c2

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