language

Minton in drag

Biden’s new appointment to the Department of Energy is a strutting, non-binary drag queen. He is also a packmate in the leather subset of “pup handlers.” You can bone up on the culture of puppy love later. For now, pay attention to Sam Brinton holding forth on the ethical necessity of role-playing of another kind: genderqueer pronouns for the newly discovered constellation of gender identities. A link to his three and a half minute video is in the previous post. Still, it is better to have the libretto in front of you. Continue Reading
Transgenderism & Politically Correct Psychosis

It did not take long for California gubernatorial candidate Caitlyn Jenner to evolve in a politically correct way about transgenderism on the playing field. And he is not even in office yet. The Federalist reports his recent evolution on the “non-issue” of biological males competing against biological women in sports:
I’m not running as a trans activist, I’m running as a California citizen that has lived there for 48 years,” said Jenner. “What I would do as governor is I would put together a commission.
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grieving woman

This post will keep its titular promise. But first, a personal note. My blog has been silent for a while. Crisis in a family shutters engagement with the world outside. It blocks the view of everything foreign to the suffering of our beloveds. The news cycle evaporates; external claims on our attention shrivel. Neither national politics, cultural disintegration, nor Vatican intrigues count a whit. No matter whether the ones we love are endangered by illness, accident, or the incoherences of their own souls, nothing counts except their well-being. Continue Reading
Confusion of Tongues: Language of Sin vs Bureaucracy

To religious minds, the language of sin, its vocabulary and syntax, cuts closer to the heart of things than its secular replacement: the language of bureaucracy. In a religious lexicon, the word sin describes violation of the inalienable rights of the God Who commands. Bureauspeak, by contrast, is a secular rhetorical practice adept at describing violations of standard procedure. Or, if you prefer, offenses against decorum. The sinner says, “Cleanse Thou me from secret faults.” The bureau-rhetor says whatever is needed to minimize negative reaction to slippage among personnel or, perhaps, one’s own. Continue Reading
Alfie Evans & the Lethal Sympathy of Bioethics

Alfie Evans is dead. Deemed unfit, the child was sentenced to death by dehydration and suffocation. We shun the term life unworthy of life but embrace its content. We mask the odor of it with smiling phrases like “end of life care,” cruel details dismissed in the “best interest” of the patient sacrificed to force of law. The act of killing is rephrased in the argot of compassion. Language loosens constraint from the annihilation of life judged undeserving of the means to sustain it. Continue Reading