In which a complimentary woman speaks or at least scribbles and so sets off a Sunday mediation ...

The pond is inordinately proud and pleased that the only winter sporting event it's seen in recent weeks is the movie I, Tonya ...which is much better than the overly solemn Battle of the Sexes, though Jessica McNamee captures the vacant glare of the incipient religious fundamentalist well ... and as for that fish film, The Shape of Water, sorry, the pond's heart was given long ago to Cocteau and La Belle et la Bête and damned if some overlong, slowly paced bout of faux whimsy is going to come along and snatch it away ...

Yes, it's all part of the pond's attempts to find life beyond Barners, though the Barners struggle goes on, and the pond will be forced to confront the new reality some time soon ...

In the meantime, why not - for a Sunday meditation - return to that perennial favourite of the whining, moaning religious fundamentalist - the right to be an offensive judgemental righteous and pious bigot ... and lo, see how the lizard Oz scores the top three mentions when the subject is raised with google ...

They never give up, do they?

Of course freedom comes in many forms, including the right of Mike Pence to be deeply weird, as outlined at Rolling Stone in The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence - about the only moment the pond paid attention to the current Olympics came with Adam Rippon's takedown of the weirdo ...

“I don’t think he has a real concept of reality,” Rippon told USA Today. “To stand by some of the things that [President] Trump has said and for Mike Pence to say he’s a devout Christian man is completely contradictory. If he’s okay with what’s being said about people and Americans and foreigners and about different countries that are being called ‘s—holes,’ I think he should really go to church.”...

...Rippon’s mother, Kelly, who will be in PyeongChang for her son’s Olympic debut, said people still tell her they are praying for her and her gay son. “Or I’m praying against you,” she told the Orange County Register. “One person came up to me and said ‘I’m still praying he just meets the right girl.’ And I’m thinking, What? Aren’t there other things you should be praying for. World famine? Shouldn’t you use your prayers for something that might happen?”

But enough of the pleasantries and banter, it's time for the lizard Oz's patented form of whining, disagreeable petulance ... and please note, this is the sort of guff the reptiles are pleased to say is part of their Inquirer, apparently because a closed mind with medievalist tendencies is a necessary precondition for inquiring ...

Was it so long ago that the church stomped around like a schoolyard bully?

But in truth, the numbing effects of the bigotry can be much more insidious, as noted in that notorious leftie Jesuit rag Eureka Street ...

Now don't ask the pond why anyone would be gay and want to remain a Catholic, and work in a Catholic school, playground for deep conditioning and induction into a life of bigotry and prejudice - it's a deep mystery up there with transubstantiation and the desire to eat human flesh and drink a little human blood each Sunday, but if someone wanted to go that way, you'd think that the least that a bunch of Xians could do is be a bit Xian about it ...

But that's never the way it works with your average Xian.

Instead the Shanners of the world want the right to go on cluck-clucking and tut-tutting in a way they've managed for many thousands of years ...

And as this is a Sunday meditation, please allow the pond to take a detour to a review by Emily Wilson in the New Statesman, a little aged, but isn't the Qantas lounge a handy source of reading material?

The title and splash gives it away, Killing the old gods Christians employed brutal methods to win the culture war against Rome ... currently outside the paywall for the full dose ...

The language of “persecution” and “martyrdom” has been claimed by only one side. Yet there were at least a handful of non-Christians who were persecuted and martyred for their refusal to adopt the new religion. Unlike Trajan and other polytheist authorities, the Christians did not offer their opponents an opportunity to escape punishment with a quick prayer to the correct God. Instead, they probed their homes and even their minds in search of secret sins against the one true deity. Nixey tells the story of the sainted Egyptian monk Shenoute, who led a group of his fellow Christians to batter down the door of a citizen’s house and barge in to discover his forbidden statues of the old pagan gods. Breaking and entering was, Shenoute insisted, entirely justifiable, since: “There is no crime for those who have Christ.”

Violations of what we would now call human rights and civil liberties were allowed for the sake of religious conformity. In Alexandria in 415 CE, the philosopher and teacher Hypatia was mobbed, stoned, flayed, ripped to pieces and burned by a gang of Christians, who accused her of witchcraft. Classical learning, literature and philosophy were now all suspect. Being pious in the new faith meant not only participating in public religious practice but also a moulding of hearts, minds, art, architecture and reading matter to fit the new “reality”. Nixey emphasises above all the aesthetic and cultural violence of the shift from Roman paganism to Christianity. She writes somewhat predictably of the turn away from the relatively “body positive” world of antiquity, in which privileged elite men could wine and dine on imported luxury goods and enjoy a wide range of sexual activities with objectified women and boys, to the asceticism of late antiquity, in which the most pious monks and hermits deprived themselves of food, sex and washing, and often became obsessed with all three...

... Nixey’s story is more shocking when she describes the widespread destruction of antiquities. The vandalism evoked in this book – such as the demolition of the temple of Athena at Palmyra, one of the most impressive buildings in the world – is disturbingly reminiscent of the destruction of cultural heritage sites by Islamic State, although Nixey does not make the comparison. Radical Christian terrorism has a long history. As the Roman Epicurean poet Lucretius wrote in the first century BCE, “Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum.” (“Religion has persuaded people to so much evil.”)

Indeed, indeed, and how they yearn to keep on doing the weevil ...

Your average Islamic and Catholic fundamentalist has much in common when it comes to the persecution of teh gaze, but now duty calls, and the final gobbet of the complimentary Shanners must be endured (well, she's Catholic, but when was the last time the world saw a complimentary female Pope?)

The church is not arguing for the right to discriminate? But that's what the blather about living according to conscience means ... that's how the Sydney Anglicans dress up their wilful, shameful complementarianism ...

Thank the long absent lord the times are changing, as even the Perth Anglicans and the Nationals discovered ...

The Nationals part of the LNP performed poorly, and the so-called “deal” with One Nation failed as some One Nation preferences actually supported ALP candidates. Similarly, the Nationals were “surprised” as 15 of their 16 lower house seats voted “yes” in the same-sex postal survey.

Barners, bloody Barners.

He sticks his nose into everything on the pond these days ... you'd think as a fellow sometime Tamworthian he'd just bugger off and take his licks from John Hewson in Joyce doesn't deserve to be deputy PM ...

While Joyce is often hailed as “the best retail politician in Australia”, he is just as spectacularly accident prone – recall the Gina Rinehart cheque; recall also that he was actually ineligible to serve in Parliament, having not renounced his New Zealand citizenship, and then compounded the “farce” by remaining in cabinet, having forced Matt Canavan to stand aside from his portfolio, while under consideration by the High Court. 

There was also Barnaby’s “train wreck interview” about the government’s release of private information; the “forced” resignation of Paul Grimes as secretary of his department; his failure to release the cost/benefit analysis of moving the Australian Pests and Veterinary Medicines Authority to his electorate; his inconsistency on the value of wind farms, praised in his electorate, but attacked in South Australia; his support for a banking royal commission against government policy; and a host of others.

And then, his most significant and revealing “accident” of all, the moral issue aside, his total mismanagement of his marriage breakdown, and the subsequent questioning of him as to whether he had breached the Ministerial Code of Conduct, and parliamentary disclosure requirements. This revealed an appalling series of poor judgments.

Barners, Barners, preaching traditional marriage and doing the other, while the churchies blather about living according to conscience, which turns out to mean fiddling with the children in their trust ...

Oh enough already, it's time to wrap things up, perhaps with a few old vaguely related TT cartoons, with fresher TT here ...

Oh heck, the pond can't resist the latest one ...