Brief Retrench

The web rushes me too, and I am not trying to be overly critical of what it does to other online journalists, but I think we all lose, regardless of where we fall on the ideological spectrum, when an agenda like homosexual partners and resources is driven by this lie of equal treatment. On the percentage, homo sapiens is still by and large an omnivorous primate with alpha males and females. Michael Nutter shut the entire city down for Pope Francis, once a seminarian bouncer in Argentina, now cordoned off from people like me for whom his church is so vocal. On the day of his visit I folded after perhaps a 30 second effort to hear the man give mass, and though I made an enormous effort to be unobtrusive, the police yelled at me and a security officer eyeballed me while I zig-zagged to do a little grocery; hairs stood on the back of my neck while SWAT followed a black man to the parking lot adjacent to River's Edge, a condo right next to my public housing unit. Only in America, as the cliche goes.

Now, I am not complaining. If I really wanted access to the Pontiff, I had advance notice and could have engaged in extraordinary rendition, and am fully cognizant of the fact that the poor fellow is trapezing on one lung, but his status is extraordinary, if now as decorative as any type of fame.

I haven't seen Freeheld; do not find in particularly fortuitous that Angela Watercutter's editor ran her article in Wired as is, but I'll assert this: Stacie Andree is ambulatory, correct? Lesbian or not, able to work? What about police officers disabled on the job, or a cop's widowed family strained for resources themselves? I can hear LBGT activists for the wolverines they are, but your disadvantages due to stigma over your sexual preferences is and remains largely cosmetic, and there are larger problems in the world than the lie of equal treatment regardless of sexual orientation.

THE STATE, and let's pause in a moment of respect for my libertarian sympathizers' groan of dismay, still enforces codes of conduct in relation to high risk sexual practices. Ask Fauci if sodomy isn't designated as a high risk sexual practice detrimental to the public health at large. Detective Hester's advocates might say it is just a pension rightfully earned under the terms of her contract with the FOP, and she wanted to provide Andree with a modicum of a security guarantee, but there are more invisible voices on the food chain in the garden state, and if Andree could walk, she could work, and what limited resources Hester did not absorb through hospice, these should have gone elsewhere.

Tunnel vision has its blinders even in the righteousness of progressive empathy.