Mainline Florida: Link to Mainline Florida
My final version of The Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, CO. 10 X 8“ oil on canvas board from a photo I took last year.
64 ‘Vette
Caught a Motown special on PBS las week. Stylistics here Betcha By Golly, Wow. Chi-Lites later with one of my all time favorites Oh Girl. Wonderful evening. I got to thinking, however, about my teen and early 20’s in a systemic racist country and cultural appropriation that went on during this time. Barry Gordy and Holland Dozier Holland, Smokey Robinson, Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, The Temptations, The Four Tops, Sam and Dave...and all of the White groups and individuals who picked up on the genre, all of the fun and sharing, and enjoyable times listening, playing, watching a fabulous musical movement. All of the Black and White studio musicians, sound engineers, marketing staff, stage presenters, union support in the venues, cosmetics, costumes, stage musicians, venue ushers (like Don and me at the old Kiel Auditorium and Opera house), the bus driver on the route I took to get to work, food supplies, all types of insurance agents/coverage, travel vendors...How many billions of $ did Motown create for how many people? How much fun and enjoyment? Whew, I think too much, just enjoy, and ignore all the BS going on now, right?
from Babylon Bee
HEAVEN—The CDC now recommends that everyone stay home and avoid going out as much as possible. Despite this, reports are that God is breaking quarantine and going absolutely everywhere.
Hospitals, nursing homes, prisons -- wherever He is needed, God is going. He is reportedly visiting everyone and checking on everyone in this time of need and not using any amount of social distancing. God is said to be following the absolute best practices, though, and is at no risk of making people sick but only making people better.
“We have absolutely no control over the guy,” said CDC spokesman Jim Wells, “which is extremely frustrating. We want to remind you, though, that you’re not God, so please stay put in small groups.”
God is also reportedly trying to get people to stop hoarding toilet paper and instead put their treasures in Heaven. Treasures that don't include toilet paper.
Photo of Biden wandering around White House looking For Obama...compliments of Babylon Bee
Watching Dateline 20/20 on the murder of Phil Hartman caused me to cruise YouTube and I found this hilarious segment on Letterman...PH, the funniest comedian in Germany!
Limo ride to restaurant in NaplesAn often elusive love the Dostoyevsky had envisioned more than a century before: “If it is for love that a man and a woman who married each other,”the Russian wrote in Notes From The Underground, “why should that love ever pass? Can it not be fostered? Why should love ever pass if the husband be kind and honorable? Of course, the fervid passion of the first few weeks can not last eternally; but to that love there sometimes succeeds another and a better love. When that has come about, husband and wife are twin souls who have everything in common.”
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Transgenderism Has No Clothes
Transgenderism, especially the push to enshrine in civil law a protected status for people who consider themselves not to be a male or a female in the customary sense of those designations, has increasingly been filling our news these days. The topic is long, complex, and loaded with sensitivities.
It is indeed important to speak with sensitivity about sensitive topics in the hope of fostering greater understanding in the hearts and minds of people who are wounded over these matters. However, in recent years the cultural departure from objective reality itself, and from a healthy view of human nature, has become dramatic when it comes to the topic of transgenderism. It has reached the point where even the slightest departure from its ideology is viewed as hateful. In such a climate, one loses hope that speaking with tip-toed sensitivity on the subject is going to make any difference at all.
Therefore, fruitless sensitivity aside, the current cultural moment would greatly benefit from some clearly articulated counter-points offered from what has now become the “classical” perspective on human nature. It is the Church’s role as the guardian of the authentic understanding of human nature to speak clearly for the sake of the present generation and for the generations to come.
“Male” or “Female” is How God Wants Us to View Ourselves
The Scriptures and the Catechism of the Catholic Church are essential voices of divinely revealed truth about how we understand reality. They are very clear that humans are created male and female, and that maleness and femaleness are willed by God as good things. For us as Catholics those are binding statements of faith and truth. Unfortunately, the same statements are increasingly viewed as un-scientific in the light of all the subtle variations of biological markers that are evident when one looks hyper-closely at male and female physiology across an entire population. This leads many to conclude that doctrinal statements about “male” and “female” will, before long, be viewed as something the Church was forced to retreat from in the same way we had to let go of the Medieval idea that the earth was the center of the universe.
The subtle variations mentioned above are in the vast majority of cases just that: subtle. Which means that any claims to the effect that modern science has shown there really are not two sexes is more ideological than it is scientific. Far more iron-clad across the whole population is the simple truth that, subtle variations aside, a woman is able to be a mother and carry life inside of her, and a man is able to be a father and conceive a child inside of a woman.
If one understands that maleness and femaleness are most fundamentally about the creation of new life, then all of the subtle variations in biological markers are quickly reduced to something of minimal importance. We quickly arrive back at what the Bible has said all along: God made us male and female, and that we cannot switch our gender identities. With science being lost in an ideological fog on this point right now, it is the gift of Divine Revelation to put everything back in perspective for the good of the human race that would otherwise destroy itself in gender theory.
Men Are Men and Women Are Women.
It is true that there is a very small segment of the human population that experiences genuine sexual identity discordance that originates in biology and psychology. This is a mental condition in which a person deeply questions his or her given sexual identity. For those people, the remedies require care and compassion, rooted in a proper understanding of the situation. A proper understanding holds to the normative character of the categories of male and female that all of us do fit in to, even if imperfectly at times. For the ways in which we sometimes feel conflicted in our sexual identity, these are best explained through the ancient lenses of fallen man, sin, grace, the cross, and the resurrection with some good counseling thrown in to help. Remedies that suggest we should attempt to change our biological sex are never, ever, compatible with God’s plan for us as people and will not leave us satisfied.
Much of our world today lives totally cut off from the land, from agriculture, and from the raw forces of nature. In such a world, it is easy to begin to think that gender is fluid and that we can manipulate it, or even that we can be overly conflicted about how we understand ourselves as a man or a woman. Unfortunately, it can even become trendy or an attention seeking behavior to try and “go against the norm” by ruminating too deeply on the idea that we are really not what our bodily sexual identity shows that we are. When that happens to us, the answer is not to suddenly decide we are a different gender and seek legal protection from any attempts to be told otherwise. Instead, the answer is to take it as it is: part of the mental roller coaster of adolescent and adult life that we just weather as best we can without re-inventing reality, or worse without mutilating otherwise healthy bodily reproductive systems.
Legalized Violence Against Human Dignity
To enshrine “transgender” as a distinct biological and legal category, on the same plane with “male” and “female,” actively erases the unique roles and gifts of men and women in the world. A man with inner conflicts about his sexual identity who decides he is female, and who attempts to bend his biology around his mental self-image even to great lengths, can never truly be thought of as a woman. Insisting that family, friends, neighbors, legislators, and employers label him as a woman is a flight from his true identity and a degradation of true femininity. Viewing a man as a woman denies women their right to authentic self-expression, and their right to the safety and security of settings and circumstances that uniquely belong to women. All the converse is equally true of a woman seeking to convince herself she is a man. Rather than being left with a social situation in which we all acknowledge a “range” of gender possibilities, as the transgender movement would have everyone believe, what is actually left is generic humanity bereft of any deep and lasting identity or community.
For the vast majority of the human population that intuitively grasps the objective fact of biological, God-willed masculinity and femininity, it does violence to us to force us to construct an alternative version of reality of sexual identity. A woman who forces me to claim that she is a man attacks my dignity because she denies me my fundamental right to acknowledge what is objectively true. It also denies anyone else the ability to offer meaningful help and assistance through expert counseling and therapy, thereby thwarting the God-given desire in all of us to offer authentic, compassionate healing to those in pain. Embracing God’s plan of masculinity and femininity leads to true human communion in the bonds of objective truth. Denying God’s plan in the manner that transgender ideology does only leads to isolation in the shadow world of make-believe, and to the fracturing of the human family.
Now Is the Time to Speak Clearly
The Church needs to speak boldly right now about this before it is too late, recognizing that we are never going to win a popularity contest on this issue. We must understand the transgender movement for the grave misunderstanding of human nature that it is, and we must fight for our legal rights to point out reality to those who would deny it. We must do so as part of our God-given mission to protect people from ideas, forces, and practices that spell disaster for the human family. This is a duty that all of us should take seriously and we should make our voices known to those who hold public office. Any society that intentionally and legally denies the truth that we are created male and female has no future.
Curiously, Bishops Less Outspoken as Border Crisis Worsens
CV NEWS FEED // Catholics are wondering why bishops who heatedly criticized President Donald Trump’s handling of migrants are now silent as the humanitarian crisis at the border becomes even greater under the Biden administration.
In recent years, many Catholic bishops decried the Trump administration for its attempts to respond to unprecedented influxes of illegal border crossers, including children.
But since President Biden was sworn in on January 20, a spike in illegal crossings has led to a renewed crisis as vulnerable migrants in need of shelter and other basic necessities overwhelm detention facilities and other venues near the border.
Unlike previously, bishops have largely been reticent to speak out about the moral implications of the border crisis.
“This is the trouble when bishops decide to engage in partisan politics,” said CatholicVote President Brian Burch. “They went on the attack against the Trump administration, repeatedly condemning his attempts to contain the surge of 2017-2018, including the use of ‘cages’ that we later learned were built by then-Vice President Biden.”
“Yet the only public statements on immigration since President Biden took office have been to praise his policies,” Burch continued, “despite a similar crisis now building on our border, including the use of holding facilities, inhumane conditions and the prospect of an even larger surge in the coming months. Catholics rightly wonder why they were so vocal against Trump, but silent today.”
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