Thursday, October 16, 2003

A thought experiment.

If Terri Schiavo were sitting on death row for killing three people while knocking over a liquor store, the Bishops of Florida would be fervently pleading for her life now.

They certainly wouldn't be employing namby-pamby language like Bishop Lynch's in his latest statement of "concern."

Sick-making.

Sorry for the "negativity" and "detraction." I keep forgetting: all is well in our church.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?


[Update: I hate being right. Here are Exhibits A and B: the Florida bishops in opposition to legislation changing capital punishment procedures, and in opposition to the execution of a man on death row.

Please understand: when there's the possibility of killing an innocent by lethal injection following a trial, they invoke Zechariah. When an absolutely innocent member of their flock is being starved to death under their very noses for two weeks, they invoke Frank Griswold.]

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Be reasonably civil. Ire alloyed with reason is fine. But slagging the host gets you the banhammer.

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