I want to add to yesterday’s post that this is not a phenomenon specific to the urban gay subculture. Our entire culture is susceptible to it and many quarters actually feed the mania for profit and who knows what other reasons. All one has to do is spend some time on a college campus to recognize that we have some significant and profound problems in our culture with personal responsibility, destructive behavior, and accepting the consequences for our decisions, choices, and behavior. We are reaping the whirlwind.

I’m at a complete loss as I try to fathom why people do this. From this week’s issue of Newsweek:
“It’s Saturday evening in Manhattan, and three dozen men are crammed into a one-bedroom suite in an upscale hotel across from Ground Zero. After shelling out $20.00 apiece to the man who organized tonight’s event over the Internet, the guests place their clothes in Hefty bags for safekeeping and get down to business and pleasure. A muscular man in his mid-30’s sits naked on the sofa and inhales a ‘bump’ of crystal methamphetamine. Within minutes, he’s lying on the floor having unprotected sex with the host of tonight’s sex party, whose sunken cheeks, swollen neck glands, and distended belly betray the HIV infection he’s been battling for years. In the bedroom, a dozen men, several of them sweaty, dehydrated and wired on meth, are having sex on the king-size bed. There’s not a condom in sight. ‘It’s completely suicidal, the crystal and the barebacking,’ says one of the two attendees who describe the scene. ‘But there’s something liberating and hot about it, too.’” (emphasis mine)
It is suicidal. They know it. They know it before they engage in this kind of behavior. They know it before they take a “bump” of crystal, Tina, snow, whatever you want to call it. “It’s completely suicidal…”
I see these men in Chelsea all the time. Not the exact men mentioned in the article (although, maybe). I see men like them in Big Cup. I see them walking in and out of Rawhide on 8th Ave., a block from the seminary. I see them in the grocery store. There are all kinds of psycho-social explanations of why people, and in this case particularly gay men, do self-destructive things, but most of those explanations just don’t fit here in New York or in places like San Francisco. “It’s completely suicidal… But there’s something liberating and hot about it, too.”
Liberating? I don’t understand. Otherwise sane men playing Russian-roulette, and we all have to pay the price this time. I heard a story out of Trinity Wall St. of a very successful straight, married man who worked in the Financial District. He had all the money he could ever need, status, even a church-goer. He started taking meth, and within a year had lost everything and was living on the streets. He lost everything. The crystal-meth, self-inflicted epidemic is not just a gay phenomena, but coupling the use of the drug with willful unprotected sex because it seems “liberating” and “hot” is just unbelievable to me.
Look in the list sections of HX and NEXT magazines in Manhattan and anyone will see that the whole urban gay subculture, or at least that which is being portrayed and marketed, is nothing but a juvenile, irresponsible, hedonist rampage of sex and drugs. THAT is what being GAY is all about as portrayed in much of the gay mass-media, and we wonder why America is so anti-homosexual.
There is a point where the gay community must take responsibility for its own dysfunction, its extreme dysfunction, and those who aid and abed this dysfunction need to be held accountable. No more caving into the yells and screams of sexual-Nazism, no more letting people off the hook because of some form of rationalization for the suicidal behavior all in the name of liberation and some sort of bizarre notion of pleasure uber-alas. The behavior of those who fuel the sex-crazed and irresponsible sub-culture need to be held accountable, to hell with their cries of censorship, of internalized-homophobia, of puritanicalism, and all that crap. People are encouraging death! no matter how they want to pretty-it-up.
Our culture of no-accountability-despite-reckless-behavior needs to end. Our culture that feeds the idea that we can do whatever we want without being held responsible for our own decisions and actions needs to end. I’m not advocating that we let people die because they chose to act “suicidal,” but no one should be allowed to not take responsibility for their own decisions – no one else is to blame but me!, but the individual!, but the sub-culture!, but society! No excuses, else we really will eventually have a completely drug-resistant form of the retro-virus knows as HIV.
You tell me what is more loving and kind – demanding an end to the cultural that encourages and allows this “suicidal” behavior because it is perceived as “liberating” or “hot,” or telling people to STOP! Demanding that they/we take responsibility for their/our own lives and STOP! The final result of sin (yes, sin) is death. That which is contrary to our own health and survival as people period, contrary to God’s will for our lives, is sin – whether individual, cultural, or institutional.

Here is more on SpongeBob Squarepants and the UCC.

From In the Name of Jesus by Henri Nouwen. The noted professor who taught at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard moved to be the priest of a mentally and physically handicapped residential ministry.

“These broken, wounded, and completely unpretentious people forced me to let go of my relevant self – the self that can do things, show things, prove things, build things – and forced me to reclaim that unadorned self in which I am completely vulnerable, open to receive and give love regardless of any accomplishments.
I am telling you all this because I am deeply convinced that the Christian leader of the future is called to be completely irrelevant and to stand in this world with nothing to offer but his or her own vulnerable self. That is the way Jesus came to reveal God’s love…
Jesus’ first temptation was to be relevant: to turn stones into bread… (p.30)
Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, isolation, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.
And the cry that arises from behind all of this decadence is clearly: ‘Is there anybody who really cares? Is there anybody who wants to stay home for me? Is there anybody who wants to be with me when I am not in control, when I feel like crying? Is there anybody who can hold me and give me a sense of belonging? Feeling irrelevant is a much more general experience than we might think when we look at our seemingly self-confident society.
It is here that the need for a new Christian leadership becomes clear. The leaders of the future will be those who dare to claim their irrelevance in the contemporary world as a divine vocation that allows them to enter into a deep solidarity with the anguish underlying all the glitter of success, and to bring the light of Jesus there. (p.33-35)
Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus: Reflections on Christian Leadership, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 1989).

I’m sure many have heard of this recent incident. James Dobson and Focus on the Family are claiming that SpongeBob Squarepants and other cartoon characters are being used to promote the gay-agenda. Now, the United Church of Christ has issued a press release unequivocally stating that SpongBob is absolutely welcome in their churches. Check out the press release and picture!
I have watched a whole lot of SpongeBob Squarepants episodes with my nephew. I love ’em!

Growing up in Pentecostalism, I remember talk of the “faithful remnant” God always preserved even during the most apostate times. Of course, we liked to think we were part of the faithful remnant that God was preserving. Why? Because we loved God and desired to do His will, which meant that of course we were right and part of the remnant. Looking back, I see how the criteria for judgment were our earnestness and desire – very subjective indeed. I thought I got past all that when I came to Anglicanism. I thought wrong.
Some on the more conservative Episcopalians keep proclaiming evidence of the Episcopal Church’s error by posting drops in attendence or membership. Since when does size make right or good? Growth is certainly desirable and CAN be an indication of right and good. If we use this criteria, however, we have to admit that the Mormons, the Pentecostals, and the like are the MORE right and good than we are, conservative or liberal. Therefore, if numbers as indicators of who is doing the right thing and whose theology is more correct are this important, we need to become Mormons or Pentecostals.

Just for the heck of it, I decided to find out more about Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher who lived from 1788-1860.
“He is known for having espoused a sort of philosophical pessimism that saw life as being essentially evil and futile, but saw hope in aesthetics, sympathy for others and ascetic living.” (wikipedia.org)
Here is another quote:
We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.
Arthur Schopenhauer
Well, what about Michael Polanyi and his theories of tacit knowledge?

From a Netscape Channels article:

Why Men Don’t Want to Talk at Night
What IS he thinking? After a hard day, he’s thinking he’d rather surf with the TV remote than talk to his lady love. And don’t nag him about the shoes he dropped on the family room floor or the clothes he left on the bedroom floor. He doesn’t even notice them.
That’s the word from social philosopher and author Michael Gurian, who claims that men are not lazy, sexist, or pigheaded. Instead, the male psyche is radically different than the female psyche due to distinct and profound biological differences in their brains.

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I have said repeatedly of late that I do not know what has happened to the Republican party. Well, I do know, it has been taken over, but I am perplexed that so many in the party have allowed it to be taken over.
More Republicans are asking the same question, and are determining to do something about it, if it isn’t too late already. The party is no longer “conservative,” unless one wants to define “conservative” to mean only that which deals with morals and family values as defined by a small group of men and women who lead American para-church organizations.
The following essay was written by Garrison Keillor. If sums up some of what I feel, although I do not necessarily agree with everything he writes. Here it is…
We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore
by Garrison Keillor
“Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The
genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned–and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

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I find the Emergent Church movement very interesting. From what I observe, it seems to be an organic merging of many aspects of Evangelicalism (from the children who are tired and skeptical of the Baby-Boomer Evangelicals that have created the Religious Right) and aspects of the ancient sacramental and liturgical Church. Not really like true Anglican-Evangelicalism, but not far off. Not at all like the “Anglican-Evangelicals” that have become so reactionary and appear more like the worst of “American Evangelicalism” than honestly Anglican.
There are many aspects of this nascent movement that are very appealing to me, especially as an Anglican who thinks about evangelism, and especially considering unchurched young people.
There is a sea-change afoot in the Christian religious landscape in the West and a little further out in time in the world. If we are not careful, the worse of us will be triumphant in this country. I want to help keep that from happening.
What is authentic in a personal experience of the Divine – a relationship with God (“Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” as a name for God) through Jesus Christ? A different question: How do we authentically experience God and community as we worship God together – experience God in the community of faith?
“Christianity has not been tried and found wanting;
it has been found difficult and left untried.”
G. K. Chesterton