Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll has SOME THOUGHTS ON PERPETUAL INDULGENCE: She writes:

Let me state for the record that I am NOT A FAN of making fun of anybody else’s religion. But I am even less of a fan of our culture’s obsession with “PERPETUAL INDULGENCE.” Which thread I will get to in a minute.

But The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence! What a great and accurate name for these obnoxious haters pretending to be both women and nuns. We lived in San Francisco from 1971 to 1975 and, especially in parades, men dressing like nuns was already a thing. It doesn’t get any funnier than unattractive men in nun drag, does it?

The Gay Pride Parade in 1972, you may recall, coincided with Richard M. Nixon’s re-election campaign. It featured one of the most popular floats in that walking Bacchanalia — a 12 foot missile representing a very realistic male member which was festooned with the family-friendly slogan: LICK DICK IN ’72! Haha. Get it? A real knee-slapper.

Oh, it doesn’t compare with going topless on the White House lawn, but how was that poor Attention-Dependent idiot to know the degenerates in charge would belatedly pretend it was unwelcome? When the President himself gropes everything that moves including, most recently, Eva Longoria, who noticed. Thank God it was during Pride Month, because I am so dang proud that the Leader of the Free World tried to cop a feel like a horny eighth-grader and I am from his same country and possibly even the same species.

So, okay, I am pretty close to a Free Speech absolutist. Why should I be bothered with obscene mockery of the Catholic Church and its sacred traditions? Well, to borrow the get-out-of-jail-free card covering everything for the Left: IT MAKES ME FEEL UNSAFE.

The Twentieth Century provided plenty of examples of what happens when one group which is read outside the protective canopy of Humanity gets attacked. “Never Again” is real to me. So though I am Jewish, I am appalled by nasty attacks on anybody else’s “faith tradition” as the media would usually have it.

Though I never saw the play, I hated the very idea of mocking The Book of Mormon and Hillary laughing her fat behind off at it. Hey, kids, guess what you will never see in a theater anywhere in the world? The premier of the brand new musical Muhammad Does Fire Island.

I hate the fact that in every who-dun-it (CSI and the like), any time you see a woman with a cross necklace, COUNT ON IT that her husband will be the guilty guy, as well as a wife-beater and incestuous pedophile. I HATED every comic who sneeringly referred to “Bible-thumpers” as though that were a bad thing.

Though the Catholic Church definitely should have taken charge of its pedophile priest problem decades ago, I even hated the media obsessing with those priests like a broken record while totally ignoring pedophile teachers who, I was told by a veteran teacher, outnumber priests by several orders of magnitude.

I think I have “made myself perfectly clear” in the words of the Richard who not only was not licked but won in a landslide, that I do not countenance anti-religious bigotry. So let us move on to what is the far more serious civilizational problem: Indulgence – perpetual or otherwise.

We have had just about all the Indulgence that a civil society can stand. I have lived long and prospered, but I never could have imagined hearing an elected official say that we needed to allow “Room to riot.” I never believed that I would see an incurious news-head standing in front of a conflagration and calling it a “mostly peaceful protest.”

In the service of the flawed concept of “Equity,” racial hucksters noted that ONE group was scoring very high in the commission of crimes. Way back in the early ’80s in Oakland, the news-dispensers decreed that they would no longer print or say the race of the perpetrator of crimes. EVEN when they were looking for a perp on the loose! Why? Well, because it might give a “wrong” racist impression. Evidently they couldn’t get enough white people to step up to even the stats. And so began the Indulgent Insanity. But even that was not enough to keep folks from getting that “impression.”

And it came to pass that if black criminals turn out to be way out of proportion to their numbers in the general population, then the obvious answer is simply to declare that MANY categories of crimes will no longer be crimes! Drugs? Legalize ‘em! Shoplifting? Help yourself! Carjacking? You better not even THINK of trying to defend against it. YOU will be the one whose life is ruined. Looting? Bring the kiddies! Don’t worry that you are ON CAMERA! Hey, what’s a few Huggies and an Air Fryer to The Man? He’s got insurance.

Did Society think that turning a blind eye to crime was going to work out well – and especially well for black people? Did people not realize that once you slide down that “Equity” slope, you find yourself on a luge headed for Hell?

What about the abysmal gap in high school graduation rates? Let’s just graduate EVERYBODY. Studying is for suckers. Let everybody take exams as many times as it takes – until they “pass.” Turning homework in on time, even DOING homework, is so “white” it is in and of itself racist. To get into college, why, we won’t have any racist testing at all!

It’s such an insult to the brightest and best. One of my heroines is a woman named Dr. Reatha Clark King, the President of my Minnesota state college at the time I graduated. Dr. King was born in 1938 into a family of sharecroppers in Georgia, in the era of “separate but equal” and Colored Only bathrooms and restaurants. She went to a one-room schoolhouse and then the High School for Negro Youth, valedictorian of her graduating class. She was accepted at Clark College and originally majored in Home Economics.

The Head of the Chemistry Department himself convinced her to switch to Chemistry and she graduated with a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics, going on to accumulate Fellowships, various Master’s Degrees, and a Ph.D. in Thermochemistry from the University of Chicago. The title of her Ph.D. thesis was, “Contributions to the thermochemistry of the Laves phases.” My understanding is that was GOING to be Dr. Jill’s Doctoral thesis, but it was already taken.

Dr. King also is one of the most gracious, warm, and beautiful women it has ever been my privilege to know. I served for years on a committee awarding scholarships in her name.

My heart weeps for the Dr. Kings, the Thomas Sowells of this country, and non-genius “regular folks” who just try to raise decent kids, send them to decent schools, enforce a few rules and turn them into men instead of incarcerated or dead losers.

As a Jew, I cannot imagine turning on the television every day and seeing one Jewish gang (The Blood Libels?) vs. another gang (The Crypts?) of promising Jewish young men routinely shooting up weddings, funerals, baby showers, holiday celebrations and each other in truly horrific numbers. Plus a few stray shots into baby carriages, houses with little girls doing homework at a kitchen table, and the like.

At the same time as deviancy is defined downward, and we have decriminalized all but the most egregious crimes for black people — blowing through a stop sign, going 100 mph, and vaporizing five young ladies is spun by a prominent black woman spokes-disgrace as “a tragic accident” — we have CRIMINALIZED the most innocent of male sexual advances necessary for the continuation of the species. Lookin’ at YOU, #MeToo grifters.

You better not look for over 5 seconds at a female co-worker in some companies. You better not ask for a date more than once if the woman says she “has other plans” the first time. That is STALKING, you toxic male. There are no Statutes of Limitation, no “innocent until proven guilty” on anything a woman accuses you of, unless you are a Hollywood mogul or Democrat. (But I repeat myself.)

Perpetual Indulgence. It doesn’t work with raising kids and it doesn’t work with preserving any semblance of freedom and justice in a country that has lost its way. It’s way past time for a course correction. May the time not be distant.