Too Much To Dream

The Gay Divorcé, continued

Well, what can I say, Mike at Begging to Differ is obviously a much nicer, more understanding, and tolerant human being than either I or James Lileks. His post has everything except Childe Robinson being chased across the ice by an evil gaybasher. As for the struggle with the sex thing and the marriage and the breakup and the apparent abundance of wonderfulness that oozed out of the pores of everyone concerned (except for the unnamed meanies who made Robinson feel bad about his urges when he was a sharecropper lad), there's a movie script in there just waiting for that rumored new gay cable channel, though if they can get Susan Blakely or Rebecca Arquette to play the suffering wife they can put it on Lifetime.

Oh, go ahead, call me cruel. Look, I don't care what Gene Robinson does with his peepee. I don't care about the Anglican church; if they want to become the Church of All-Inclusive Kewlness in order to fill up the pews ("Announcement: the ritual human sacrifice to Baal has been postponed until Thursday; the Orgiastic Rite of Ishtar will go ahead as scheduled Sunday at 10pm") that is their problem. Isn't the thing about Episcopalians supposed to be that they are "Catholic but without the guilt"? I always thought that just meant you could have married priests, like the father of my fifth-grade best friend, but that was a long time ago and I see things have changed... I don't even care, much, about the offended sensibilities of other people concerning this man. But I do object to this ongoing softening of standards everywhere in favor of sanctimonious posturing about how "fair," "open," and "honest" we all are. I've always thought that people who paraded their "honesty" and "openness" and "refusal to live lies" to be hiding a basic self-centeredness and a tendency to look upon the world as owing them a favor. Who is Lileks or anyone else to judge, Mike asks back to the James in that annoying ooh-look-I'm-so-clever-I'll-toss-his-statement-right-back-at-him! way these moral levellers have. Okay, Mike, since Lileks doesn't blog on weekends, I'll tell you who he thinks he is: a father of a kid who is appalled that other fathers of kids could voluntarily leave their children and the mothers of their children for a reason he finds frivolous, and I do believe that he finds Robinson's desire to, well, fulfill his desires (if he didn't leave his family for another man right away, don't you bother to tell me he didn't plan to find a man eventually -- and he did, wow, a whole eighteen months later) to be frivolous. You don't like it? Welcome to the world.

(Via an email sent, perhaps unwisely, to me from Mike himself.)

Update: here are some other links to people on this and related subjects. Steve H. thinks this whole thing is crazy, and he would really like an explanation, because as far as he was always told, the Bible didn't have much nice to say concerning homosexuality ([TROLL WARD-OFF] I'm not saying this is right or wrong, but that book is still the owner's manual for the Christian vehicle, right? [/TROLL WARD-OFF]); here's more sensible stuff about marriage and love from Moira Breen; Jeff Jarvis is all into the tolerance and the exclusiveness and the so on and so forth; Donald Sensing isn't all too thrilled (no permalinks, just scroll and look for "gay bishop" and so on). And in reply to some people who commented in my previous post on the subject: no, I am not advocating that divorce be banned, or that all marriages be kept together "for the Children™ no matter what the circumstances. I just think that our society on the whole would be better served by whatever authority figures we put over aspects of our lives if said authority figures would take life and their actions in it a little more seriously.

Oh -- one last thing, for David Strain: yes, I also agree with Lileks that "life-intentioned" is a horrid phrase. Here are my reasons: it sounds godawful -- clunky, gallumphing, clumsily "sincere" like something a high-school guidance counselor would come up with to replace gender-specific references in the departmental newsletter. Just more debasing of the language. Here are a couple of words that already exist, and suit the situation quite well enough: lover -- as in "I am Father Gene Robinson, and this is my lover of n years, blah blah": or, if they are really now celibate, "friend," or "roommate." Sure, they aren't very specific, or descriptive terms, at least not in the personal-detail-parsing way we've come to demand from everyone who opens their yap about their S.O., but I think they are fine. I can also see an objection to "life-intentioned" from the viewpoint of the man's own church: just what is "life" supposed to be intentioning here? I thought that Christians believed that "life" didn't "intend" things, God "intended" things -- he intended life to exist, for one thing. It sounds like Robinson didn't trust in his relationship all that much; wouldn't he have said it was "god-intended?" (That's the correct form of the word, buy the way -- you don't "intention" things, you "intend" them. The grammar is incorrect too -- the final blow, so far as I am concerned, but the man's awkwardness with his own mother tongue may simply endear him to his motley congregation and reassure them further that those stuffy robe-wearing fellows are really no better than us folk down here in the mud.)

Update 2: Justin Katz has a gone further in depth with the story, and has unearthed some interesting quotes. My favorite (that's a sarcastic "favorite") is the line from one of Robinson's daughters.

Posted by Andrea Harris at August 8, 2003 11:31 PM