Why I Unsubscribed from Andrew Sullivan’s *The Weekly Dish*

AI generated image based on the writing below. Another case (see here and here) of the young Andrew Sullivan lying about Trans* desire.

Today, I ended my paid subscription to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish. I did so because his anti-Trans* click- and rage-baiting is evil.

Politically, I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. By pragmatic, I generally mean that I think our politics should be attuned to what we human beings can and want to do to make our lives better. When politics refers more narrowly to a campaign to win electoral votes, I think pragmatism means championing progressive values that most Americans support.

For example, a recent poll by The Argument, led by Jerusalem Demsas, shows that the vast majority of Americans support legislation making it illegal to discriminate against Trans* people in employment and housing.

There is less fortunate news in this same poll.

In a recent clump of words about Trans* desire, Sullivan rightly points out that support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. According to Demsas’s poll, most Americans now support legislation to make use of public restrooms and participation in sports dependent on one’s birth sex and banning safe and reasonable healthcare that supports a minor’s desire to transition from one sex and/or gender to the other.

What this means pragmatically is that the next Democratic nominee for President should focus their campaign on ending discrimination against Trans* people in employment and housing.

Focus is not the same thing as “selling out.”

If Trans* rights and freedoms are important to you, then yes — winning elections is everything. That requires focusing on what the American public is willing to support.

Can a Democrat veto legislation limiting the rights of supportive parents of Trans* children if she doesn’t win enough electoral votes to become President? Obviously, no.

Pragmatism, however, is not always about what is “true.” It is almost always about what works for a person or group of people. And this is where the liberal in my self-description as a pragmatic liberal comes in.

By liberal, I mean, to echo John Rawls, a form of political power based on reason and reasons that may, at least in principle, be accepted by all citizens as justification for a particular action. By reason, Rawls means “public reason” or “political reason,” and such reason excludes metaphysics.

Religious reason, for example, is, in its own way, reasonable, but it is not a form of public reason. It is not public or political reason, reason all citizens are, in principle, capable of exercising because all the information we need to assess to make the case for some kind of action is not commonly available.

So, a Democratic candidate can make a pragmatic and reasonable case for making it illegal to discriminate agianst Trans* people in the workplace and in housing.

Sullivan also makes a few pragmatic and reasonable points in his post.

As I noted above, support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. Sullivan is absolutely right about that. Sullivan is right about a second thing, too: “the real world keeps intervening.”

“Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic,” Sullivan writes. “I’ve lost some good friends. . . . [M]y social life has shrunk.” The real world is rejecting Sullivan’s unreasonable, unconscious fantasy of Trans* desire as justification for political action.

The real world is telling Sullivan it is unpersuaded by his fantasy of gay kids being forced to transition by evil, greedy doctors. Furthermore, it rejects the idea that because a majority of Americans support legislation banning Trans* discrimination in the workplace and in housing, Trans* people “already have [those protections].”

The real world, moreover, thinks it is unreasonable to ignore Trans* people. Pace Sullivan: “And so what sacred trans people say they want [Sullivan is opposed to sacralizing minorities, by which he seems to mean taking what minorities want for their own lives seriously] . . . is all that matters” (emphasis original).

What Trans* people are asking their fellow citizens to do is to listen honestly and openly to their testimonies. And it is in this context that Sullivan makes a third good point: some Trans* stories are not pretty.

In his recent post, Sullivan describes a tragic figure named “Mike.” “Mike” represents Sullivan’s most potent fantasy: that of Trans* terrorists — doctors, parents, therapists — destroying (“castrating”) the lives of genuinely gay male kids.

My contention is not that “Mike” doesn’t regret transitioning, but rather that his regret does not establish that he was forced into transitioning. Frankly, Sullivan is, on this point, lying to us. There is simply no reasonable evidence that “Mike” was forced into or thoughtlessly and recklessly offered Trans* healthcare.

Surely, some people regret transitioning. I feel for them. I am interested in hearing the facts of their cases.

Yet their stories do not amount to a reasonable basis for public policy decisions, because they are not representative cases. In fact, it is Sullivan who does “Mike” a great disservice by misleading the public about the facts of his specific case.

Of course, Sullivan is free to fob off to his own fantasy. But his picture of Trans* desire is simply not politically reasonable. It betrays the evidence any of us can assess with our eyes and ears, provided that we have eyes to see and ears to hear as citizens.

Unfortunately, Sullivan is committed to the same mind-snapped-shut-mentality that he attributes to his opponents (Sullivan’s reference to “a bunch of synapses” may be his way of calling his opponents “bird-brained.” The epithet is rooted in ignorance, as bird brains are bunches, if you will, of synapses–and birds are extremely intelligent. Close-mindedness, however, is something found in both stupid and smart people).

I think the only thing that will open Sullivan’s mind is another real-world intervention: a significant drop in his paid subscribers.

If you have a paid subscription to The Weekly Dish, I humbly ask you to consider unsubscribing. Unsubscribing is even easier than subscribing.

Unsubscribe from Sullivan. And consider other opportunities to unsubscribe, too.

Bubbles, a Reading

– AI-generated art based on Bubbles by Sir John Everett Millais (1886) –

A reading of the first few pages (17-19) of Peter Sloterdijk’s Bubbles:

The child stands enraptured on the balcony, holding its new present and watching the soap bubbles float into the sky as it blows them out of the little loop in front of his mouth.

Now a swarm of bubbles erupts upwards, as chaotically vivacious as a throw of shimmering blue marbles. Then at a subsequent attempt, a large oval balloon filled with timid life quivers off the loop and floats down to the street, carried along by the breeze.

It is followed by the hopes of the delighted child floating out into the space in its own magic bubble, as if for a few seconds its fate depended on that of the nervous entity. When the bubble finally bursts after a trembling, drawn out flight, the soap bubble artist on the balcony emits a sound that is at once a sigh and a cheer.

For the duration of the bubble’s life, the blower was outside himself, as if the little orb survival depended on remaining encased in an attention that floated out with it. Any lack of accompaniment, any waning of that solidarity, hope, and anxiety would have damned the iridescent object to premature failure.

But even when, immersed in the eager supervision of its creator, it was allowed to drift off through space for a wonderful while, it still had to vanish into nothingness in the end. In the place where the orb burst, the blower’s excorporated soul was left alone for a moment, as if it had embarked on a shared expedition, only to lose its partner halfway.

But the melancholy lasts no more than a second before the joy of playing returns with its time-honored cruel momentum. What are broken hopes, but opportunities for new attempts?

The game continues tirelessly. Once again, the orbs float from on high. And once again, the blower assists his works of art with attentive joy in their flight through the delicate space.

There is a solidarity between the soap bubble and its blower that excludes the rest of the world. And each time the shimmering entity drifts into the distance, the little artist exits his body on the balcony to be entirely with the objects he has called into existence.

In the ecstasy of attentiveness, the child’s consciousness has virtually left its corporal source. In the orbs, his exhaled air has separated from him and is now preserved and carried further.

At the same time, the child is transported away from itself by losing itself in the breathless co-flight of its attention through the animated space. For its creator, the soap bubble thus becomes the medium of a surprising soul expansion. The bubble and its blower coexist in a field spread out through attentive involvement.

The child that follows its soap bubbles into the open is no Cartesian subject remaining planted on its extensionless thought point while observing an extended thing on its course through space. In enthusiastic solidarity with his iridescent globes, the experimenting player plunges into the open space and transforms his own between the eye and the object into an animated sphere.

All eyes and attention, the child’s face opens itself up to the space in front of it. Now the plain child imperceptibly gains an insight in the midst of its joyful entertainment that it will later forget under the strain of school: that the spirit in its own way is in space.

Placental Relations: Theology, Viability, and Roe v. Wade

– Author’s sketch and revision of an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul,” from the Rupertsberg Codex –

In Receptive Bodies, the late literary and queer scholar Leo Bersani takes up the work of Peter Sloterdijk, especially the first volume of his three-volume Microsphereology, Bubbles. Sloterdijk persuasively argues that our first relationship is not with our mother, exactly, but with a “non-object” he calls our With — that is, the placenta:

[I]n truth, obstetricians know that there are always two units which reach the outside in successful births. The child . . . never emerges from the cave alone. . . . In terms of its psychodynamic source, the individualism of the Modern Age is a placental nihilism (387).

A serious analysis of Sloterdijk’s Microsphereology, especially as it relates to psychoanalysis (e.g., 349ff), must wait for another time. What interests me here is his engagement with an artistic rendering of Hildegard of Bingen’s vision recorded in Scivias, entitled “The Creation of the Soul.” My amateur sketch of it appears above — and I genuinely cannot explain what possessed me to draw my own version.

Here is the original, from the Rupertsberg Codex:

According to Sloterdijk, pregnancy for Hildegard

repeats the creation of Adam: physically as the function of a solid from a liquid [cheese or dough are in the figures’ baskets] through concrescence, psycho-pneumatically as the inspiration of the soul through the descent of the spirit orb from the angelic space into the fetal body. According to the traditional view, the latter takes place around the middle of pregnancy — that is, at a point equated in earlier doctrines of female wisdom with the beginning of palpable movement in the womb (367).

This “middle of pregnancy” — roughly 20 to 24 weeks, give or take — is also the point at which modern medicine teaches us that fetal lung development has progressed far enough that survival outside the womb becomes possible, with significant NICU support. The fetus, in the middle of pregnancy, receives lungs/breath/soul. That is, by the way, an idea that stretches back at least to Aristotle.

This brings me to Roe v. Wade (1973) and its companion case Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), which together regulated abortion access in America for five decades before being overturned — wrongly and foolishly, in my opinion — by the Court in Dobbs v. Jackson (2022).

Here is the argument I want to make: Roe was indeed an instance of judicial overreach. The irony is that its overreach favored the so-called “pro-life” position.

The Roe Court honestly confronted the originalist reading of the Constitution and concluded, in the words of legal scholar Katie Watson, “that fetuses don’t fit within the Constitution’s use of the word ‘person,’ and the opinion doesn’t paint the fetus as a character or personify it as an active agent” (Scarlet A, 42). As Watson observes on page 82, according to the Roe Court, “Constitutional personhood only begins at birth.”

The 14th Amendment says “born.” It means born. A strict originalist has no textual basis for fetal constitutional personhood — none.

And yet the Roe Court ruled that the Constitution allows states to ban abortions. The Court made up “viability” as a legal threshold — the point at which states may restrict or even ban abortion in order to protect what it called “potential life.” That threshold is similar to the one Hildegard (and Aristotle) identified as the moment of ensoulment: roughly the middle of pregnancy, when breath and life become possible outside the womb.

Roe is judicial overreach — but it was overreach grounded in “pro-life” logic. While Roe protects a woman’s right to abortion because she is an unambiguous constitutional person (conservatives clutch your pearls!) and the fetus is not — it doesn’t go so far as to assert that the fetus is pure “bare life,” or life outside the protection of the law.

Roe is a compromise — a significant one — and one that, as Watson argues, tracks with what women actually do. The vast majority of abortions occur in the first trimester, long before viability. Later abortions are almost always the result of medical necessity or devastating fetal diagnosis. Roe and Casey reflect reality.

Now consider Dobbs. Its reasoning is, if anything, more extra-legal than Roe‘s. The Dobbs Court rejected a constitutional right to abortion on the grounds that the word “abortion” does not appear in the Constitution, but then justified state bans on abortion in order to protect “potential life,” an extra-legal concept they didn’t even try to define in the spirit of the actual text of the Constitution, but left it to the states to define.

Frankly, the Dobbs Court was not being more faithful to the Constitution. It was simply being faithful to a different set of extra-legal values, without acknowledging it.

If you are a genuine originalist, the honest conclusion is fucking shocking: the Constitution, as written and as historically understood, offers the fetus no protection whatsoever.

Not at viability.

Not at any point before birth.

The “born” language of the 14th Amendment is unambiguous.

I think Roe‘s extra-legal reasoning is preferable to that of Dobbs because it is manifestly less cruel.

Roe, like Dobbs, went beyond the strict text of the Constitution. But Roe at least tethered its extra-legal reasoning to something real, both constitutionally and historically. Almost all abortions occur well before viability. However, once the fetus reaches the threshold of ensoulment or viability, it becomes a potential person, a potential citizen that our society has an obvious interest in reasonably protecting.

Dobbs replaced the Roe Court’s wisdom with conservative Christian metaphysics. And we are all, especially girls and women, living with the consequences. The only thing worse may be a radical leftist vision of absolutely no legal constraints on abortion, damning the mother to the hell of individualism 

It’s Giving (Momma) Bear: On the Way Out of Goals, Passion, and Misery

We seem to know that goals make us miserable. But we keep setting them anyway, like clockwork—because we don’t know how to live without them. Jenny Craig is counting on that.

FX’s hit series The Bear helpfully illustrates why we are not wrong to think that goals are the literalization of our passions, and that our passions are the sources of our misery. Passion makes us miserable because it immunizes us against receiving (the touch of) O/others. 

But The Bear also reveals something else: maternal love—unexpected, unconditional—can free us from passion’s grip.

In season 3, episode 9 of The Bear, Uncle Jimmy (Oliver Platt) makes a distinction between passions and goals (You can watch the entire scene here):

Well, dreams are a son of a bitch, aren’t they? I went to this lecture series, U of Chicago. . . . Anyway, dreams, they always. . . start from a place of passion, right?

And, by the way, when I say dreams, I mean goals, not like when you’re, you know, asleep and you’re stuck at the bottom of a swimming pool, and your fucking teeth keep floating up out of your head. And you look down, and you have a fucking tattoo of a bulldog on your cock.

Anyway, so I’m at this lecture, and it’s called The Day Tomorrow Began, right? It’s all about these breakthroughs in, like, science and fucking culture and whatever . . . . Crazy fucking shit, let me tell you. Like carbon dating . . . .  It’s inspiring, really.

Because it’s kind of like, if you really nurture these dreams, these goals, no matter how batshit crazy they sound—and trust me. There are, like, 15 more of these breakthroughs—positively fucking idiotic, right?

But you can make an impact, right? You can actually change the fucking world, as long as you have a place like the university to, you know, take care of you, to let you do your thing, let you drive, right?

And, uh, keep you financed. I just remember the whole time thinking, “Whew, not everything can be that. . . .”

Jimmy’s lecture mirrors a dream of floating teeth and bulldog-tatted cocks, but its warning about passion is clear enough.

Dreams, “like when you’re, you know, asleep,” are “a place of passion.” Goals “start from a place of passion,” from your dreams. Your dreams (re)surface your passions. In your dreams, your “teeth” come out of your head to speak your mind, and your “dog” is free to sniff out a place to piss on the world. 

Goals (i.e., teeth and bulldogs) are forms of passion. And they ain’t pleasant. They’re “a son of a bitch,” “crazy fucking shit,” and “positively fucking idiotic.”

The idiotic—or passionate—person hasn’t lost their mind. Their teeth are speaking it. What they’ve lost is their head—their, I say, pleasure.

Passion sacrifices pleasure. As the late Leo Bersani writes, “Passion is an obstacle to pleasure” (Receptive Bodies, vii). 

Passion blocks your pleasure by immunizing you against the reception of O/others—for example, the university you need to “take care of you,” the investors you need to “keep you financed,” the business partner, family members, and/or girlfriend you need to run a successful restaurant and experience something like a good life. 

Your goals get realized—if they do—in spite of you. More importantly, goals immunize you against yourself. 

Season 4 Spoiler Alert! “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

In season 4 of The Bear, we learn that being a world-class chef is more than Carm (Jeremy Allen White) can bear (You can watch the final scene of season 4 here and here):

I—I think I have put a lot of stuff in the way, of not dealing with other stuff. . . . And I think I’m trying to run into that. All right. So, I’m not blocked by it anymore. I’m not scared of it anymore. I’m not sprinting from it anymore.

. . . . 

I don’t know what I’m like, Richie. . . . Like, outside of the kitchen.

We know what Carm is like inside the kitchen. He is like his mother inside the kitchen (I only recently completed watching season 2 of The Bear because episode 6, “Ma Does Seven Fishes,” caused me so much anxiety that I could not bear to finish watching it). 

Carm’s curiosity about what he’s like outside the kitchen is also inspired by his mother, who is now in a similar position. Donna (Jamie Lee Curtis) offers her apology for years of parental neglect just outside of their family home’s kitchen (You can watch the scene here):

I’m trying to make things better. And I am–I’m here asking if I can be part of your life again because I miss you. And I– I know I never said it enough–I know I didn’t–but I love you, Carmen.

You’re my baby bear. I know. And I love you. And I’m so sorry. I just didn’t say it enough. I just didn’t.

Donna’s unexpected apology—her unexpected expression of sincere maternal love—somehow moves Carm to think about his pleasure, about who he may be outside of the kitchen.

Maternal love redeems us from our passions, and it opens us to ourselves. Lots of love to you, dear reader, in 2026. 

Animal Changes

Animal Changes is the topic of the final episode of Season One of the N*EW* Thoughts podcast! 

I open with a viral Donald Trump claim about immigrants eating pets and use it to explore how we dehumanize people by turning them into “animals.”

I then trace my own journey from a hunting childhood to a Christian conversion and tentative vegetarianism, share stories of my companion pets, and criticize careless hunting and factory farming.

The episode brings in thinkers—Derrida, Ken Stone, Carol J. Adams, Val Plumwood, and Martha Nussbaum—to discuss animal sentience, the predator–prey dynamic in the Bible, and the ethical implications of edibility and sacrifice.

I encourage us to treat sentient animals as beings with species-specific lives, call for more compassionate practices, and close the season by asking listeners to “rest from cruel dominion” and rethink our relationship to animals.

EXPLORE:

Read a preview of Tony’s essay, *The Bible Isn’t Edible.* 

Read Tony’s sermon, *Rest From Cruel Dominion.*

Read *Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy* by Matthew Scully.

Read *The Animal That Therefore I Am* by Jacques Derrida.

Read *Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies* by Ken Stone.

Read *The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory* by Carol J. Adams.

Read *The Eye of the Crocodile* by Val Plumwood (edited by Lorraine Shannon).

Read *Justice for Animals: Our Collective Responsibility* by Martha C. Nussbaum. 

Read “Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern” in *Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections*, by Stephen D. Moore:

Read *Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel* by Theodore Jennings, Jr.

On the Urgent Matter of the Bible; Or, On How Vegetarians Should Use The Bible

AI-generated image depicting Genesis 27, emphasizing vv 16-17, inscribed on the skin of a goat.

“Vegetarianism is an act of the imagination. It reflects an ability to imagine alternatives to the texts of meat.” (Adams 2024 [1990], 180).

  1. How Should Vegetarians Use the Bible?

New Testament scholar Stephen Moore draws our attention to a “notable interfacing” of postcolonial, poststructuralist, and biblical readings in Homi Bhabha’s essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders” (2005, 81). This “is one essay in which Bhabha is more than usually emphatic,” Moore observes, “that the colonized are engaged in active subversion of the colonizer’s discourse, in this case, the colonizer’s Scripture” (2005, 90).

Moore explains that in “Signs Taken for Wonders,” Bhabha describes a gathering in May 1817 of “some 500 souls, men, women, and children, seated in the shade of trees [outside Delhi] and engaged in scripture reading and debate” (2005, 86). The souls gathered in the shade are taught by an Indian missionary, who tells them, “These books . . . teach the religion of the European Sahibs. It is THEIR book; and they have printed it in our language, for our use.” Hearing this, someone replies, “Ah! no, that cannot be, for they eat flesh” (2005, 91, italics added).

The 500 agree to be baptized, but they refuse to receive the Eucharist “because the Europeans eat cow’s flesh, and this will never do for us” (Moore 2005, 91). They decline to complete the Catholic initiation process by receiving the vegetarian Meal of meals, the Eucharist, because Europeans eat meat, especially cow’s flesh.

But what do the Indian people, who believe cows are sacred, do with the Bible of the European meat-eaters? A second missionary observes that “[every Indian] would gladly receive a Bible. Why? That he may store it up with curiosity; sell it for a few pice, or use it for waste paper” (Moore 2005, 92)

For “every Indian,” the Bible of the Western meat-eaters is a collector’s item, a cheap commodity, or toilet paper. Moore describes such uses of biblical literature as forms of “resistant reading of the colonial Bible” (Moore 2005, 92, emphasis original)

Such resistant reading practices, “ones that resist by refusing to read,” hover over the surfaces of the Bible. They enable resistance “by remaining at the level of the material signifier, the papery substance itself—wondrously thin, almost transparent, yet wholly tangible . . .” (Moore 2005, 92).

The nearly 175-year-old example of 500 Indian Christian vegetarians, including children, might shock modern Western vegetarian readers of biblical literature into the realization that the Bible can be used in surprising ways, but it isn’t edible. While the contemporary Bible is plant-based, at least in its printed forms, papyrus is not the material condition of the Bible. The Bible is meatier than it first appears, at least to its modern readers.

As we will soon discover, the intuition of the 500 Indian Christian souls—that the Bible’s meatiness is inside-out—is more than confirmed by the texts that make up biblical literature. In fact, biblical literature is structurally wedded to a predator-prey dynamic. This presents a serious problem for the Bible’s Western vegetarian and vegan readers.

In what follows, I attend to the Bible’s material condition, to the reason for its textual survival—namely, dead animals. I then make the predator-prey logic that runs through biblical literature visible. Finally, through a (re)reading of Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Crisis of Verse” and 2 Samuel 6, I propose a queer vegetarian hermeneutics that refuses the “common sense” of (divine) predation and intervenes in it, letting fall through the meaty “sheet” of the Western Book of books queer possibilities for anti-predatory (non)human animal relations.

This essay is seeking a home in an academic journal; so, the rest of it has been omitted while the essay is under consideration for publication elsewhere. I hope you enjoyed this small preview of its theme and argument!

WORKS CITED

Adams, Carol. J. 2024. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Original work published in 1990.

Bhabha, Homi. 2004. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge.

Mallarmé, Stéphane. 2007. “Crisis in Verse.” In Divagations. Translated by Barbara Johnson, 201-211. Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press. Original work published in 1897.

Moore, Stephen. D. 2005. Questions of Biblical Ambivalence and Authority Under A Tree Outside Delhi; Or, The Postcolonial And The Postmodern. In Postcolonial Biblical Criticism: Interdisciplinary Intersections. Edited by Stephen D. Moore and Fernando F. Segovia, 79-96. London and New York: T & T Clark International.

The Anti-Homoness of Straight Hipster Politics: On Homo Family Values and the Question of Political Change

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet), 1990

1.

Hipster irony appeals to overly earnest straight people, especially straight men (and their sometimes adoring queer fans).

Here’s one version of straight hipsterism: Acceptance of homosexuality and homo marriage occurred relatively quickly in the U.S. because homosexuality and homo marriage aren’t really hip.

The homo who desires to marry and build a family wants nothing more, according to the hipster, than to be “one of the boys.” In other words, the legal/political recognition of homos and their family values is not real political change.

2.

Hipsters aren’t wrong, to be fair, for having some fun at the expense of homos who, like hipsters, want to keep their position high up the ladder of respectability and be cool.

Some homos want nothing more than to be straight (but not that straight).

The problem is that hipster self-righteousness requires a sacrifice: homo difference and dignity.

3.

To the hipster, homoness is the enemy of coolness. Homoness is the recapitulation of normie-cis-white-male-straightness. 

That’s why I think hipster irony is just really fucking dull. It’s more of the same: straight (male) resentment and self-righteousness masquerading as progressive politics.

Nothing irritates hipsters more than homo joy and affluence.

4.

That’s why, to riff on David Halperin’s description of straight hipster irony in How To Be Gay (2012), straight hipsters just love to turn homos and their family values into the new normie straight dude. Homos become “fodder for [hispter] irony”: 

By acknowledging straight hipsters’ affection for such quaint cultural forms and practices [like marriage], while refusing to express that affection except in a grotesque, exaggerated fashion, in case someone should get the wrong idea, straight hipster irony maintains and consolidates (though it’s much too cool to flaunt it) a distant and disengaged position for hipsters—that is, a position of relative social privilege (395-96).

Straight hipster irony enables you to distance yourself from your straightness while castigating the desires of homos who want to marry and build families of their own.

5.

Here’s an example of hipster homo (but not that homo) love: “It is weirdly possible to imagine a scenario,” writes one Substack hipster, “where the United States becomes a violently misogynistic white ethnostate, but gay marriage still remains the law of the land.”

Is our hipster arguing that the reason homos and homo marriage gained relatively quick cultural acceptance is that they fit, hand in glove, within the normie logic of “a violently misogynistic white ethnostate”?

Is our hipster asserting that homos and their family values enjoy popular support in the U.S. because they are entirely compatible with normie-cis-white supremacy-straight-guyness (pronouns: he/bruh)? 

Who needs enemies when you have allies like the hipster! 

6.

In his view, homos and their family values have achieved quick legal/political victories because they have chosen to suck the cock of cis-white-straight-dudeness.

“Pointing out that context,” our hipster claims, “is not a critique of the movements that succeeded as being ‘secretly’ conservative or oppressive, but instead a critique of the society that only lets itself do good things for bad reasons” (emphasis added). 

Who needs enemies when you have neighbors like that! 

7.

Anyway, according to the hipster view, Pete Buttegig won the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa in 2019 because he just loves sucking white dick.

Any evidence to the contrary is evidence of a cover-up. 

Yasmin Nair, for example, asserts that even the Buttigieg kids are part of a secret, oppressive conservative plot to win white-normie-straight-bruh political power: 

Given their talent for curation, it’s hard not to wonder if the Buttigieges didn’t also choose their [biracial] children as carefully as Melania Trump chose her outfits. This doesn’t mean that the pair don’t love their incredibly adorable children, but given that even Chasten looks like he was chosen from a catalog of ‘Good Gay Men,’ it’s safe to say that even the most seemingly personal details of Pete’s life are carefully chosen.

8.

Hipster paranoia (i.e., nothing good can happen in people’s hearts or society) may also explain why our hipster fails to mention the HIV/AIDS crisis in his essay.

While the hipster does recognize that straight opposition to homo love was (remains?) violent and horrific, extending well into the 1990s before giving way to growing support for homos and their family values starting in the early 2000s, he does not seem to know that the 1990s were also the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in, for example, Chicago.

The hipster can’t even entertain the idea that witnessing homos suffering and dying in large numbers because of a demonic virus, which our government was too slow to address, might have been a bridge to compassion that led to a genuine change of heart among our fellow citizens. 

9.

And because any legal/political recognition is necessarily a form of assimilation, the hipster can’t risk acknowledging (or take seriously) the substantial legal/political recognitions won by Black and Trans* people over the past few decades.

So, he doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Americans support some form of police reform. Likewise, the hipster doesn’t seem to realize that most Americans do support Trans* people. Our hipster, however, dismisses the very real gender dysphoria experienced by Trans* youth, categorizing it as a common experience for all youth going through puberty.

Also, our hipster doesn’t mention that it was a conservative Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, which declared it unconstitutional to discriminate against Trans* people in the workplace. 

Finally, the hipster’s faith in the straight coddling of homo desire likely blinds him to the fact that the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to relitigate the constitutionality of same-sex marriage on Friday, November 7th, 2025 (Thankfully, the Court chose [for now] not to relitigate homo marriage. It sure must be nice not to have one’s dignity up for routine legal review.)

10. 

Homos and their family values gained quick acceptance, according to sophisticated hipsters, because they offered a lifeline to normie-cis-white-straight-maleness.

In reality, it was the other way around. 

Homosexual activists made surprising use of a straight male invention: the concept of homosexuality.

Homo identity politics was so successful (like all forms of Black, Trans,* and Women’s respectability/identity politics before and after it) precisely because it compromised with the protocols of the dominant masculinist culture, the culture—then, now, and for the foreseeable future—in power.

Specifically, homo identity politics accepted the conservative logic that sex(uality) is gender and gender is sex(uality). 

The idea that homoness is anything more than a sexuality, anything other than a sexual orientation/identity—like a culture, a specific lifestyle, or a uniquely “feminine” way of relating to women, men, and the world—remains a controversial subject in homo circles. 

Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal (1996) and Horace Griffin’s Their Own Receive Them Not (2010)–very different versions of homo identity politics.

In How To Be Gay (2012), Halperin cogently analyzes the history of homo identity politics—the history, that is, of what Judith Butler calls a “necessary error” (Bodies That Matter [1993], 175).  

11.

Homo political gains have, indeed, come at the expense of a different history: the history of (homo)sexuality.

The concept of homosexuality was created in the late 1800s (and with the publication of the RSV, incorporated into various biblical texts in the 1940s), but I am more interested in the history of what terms like “homosexuality” are meant to describe—namely, desire. 

We are, in a sense, “born that way.” We are born as wild and wildly desiring animals, entirely dependent on the care of our parents and society—the very “institutions” that frustrate our desires.

Although no one knows what causes one’s sexual orientation, David Halperin offers a promising idea. He claims that “[l]ong before they ever have sex . . . young people have genre” (343).

Briefly, genres are formal rules that govern specific social interactions. Halperin explains that what a server might say to a complete stranger in Ann Arbor differs from what a server in Paris might say in a similar situation without causing a scandal (131). 

Genres are also pragmatic. “[T]hey provide people, in their daily practices, with concrete means of interacting with one another and negotiating specific social situations—and they instruct them in the right ways to do so (132).

Halperin suggests that genre might be all that’s necessary to create consistent, persistent, and insistent non-standard or queer relationships with mainstream cultural forms, including marriage, masculinity, authenticity, abjection, and so on. Halperin writes,

[Genre] may be all [children] need in order to forge certain non-standard relations to normative sexual and gender identities. For by making non-standard emotional connections to cultural forms, they effectively refuse the pressing social invitation to assume a conventional, heteronormative positioning and they effectively acquire non-standard sexual and gender identities, identifications, and orientations (343).

Once acquired, a non-standard relationship to cultural forms becomes, like everything experienced in our youth, difficult to change in adulthood. There are no “fresh starts.”

The second chance that is your adult life is an opportunity to change, to the extent possible, your biological and cultural heritage. If you’re lucky, your adult life is a question: What am I interested in?

12.

Our hipster believes homos have failed to launch. For him, homos and their family values easily fit into the standard mold of normie-cis-white-straight-family values. Acceptance of homo family values is not, according to hipsters, a genuine legal/political change.

Queer theoretical differences, like those between Leo Bersani and Judith Butler (1995), David Halperin and Leo Bersani (1996), Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and How To Be Gay (2012), are all about the character of and possibilities for real political change.

In a forthcoming essay, I argue that Martha Nussbaum misjudges Judith Butler’s politics as “hip quietism.” Instead, I argue, Butler’s politics is a subtle form of compromised resistance to the norms of straightness.

To be clear, Nussbaum is not opposed to resistance as a political strategy. She is not a radical political figure. For example, Nussbaum does not believe, as Michal Warner does, that “marriage is unethical” (The Trouble With Normal [1999], vii). 

In her review of Warner’s book, Nussbaum highlights the importance of cultural forms and routines for most people (232). Still, I believe she is too optimistic about the kind of change humans can achieve to appreciate the subtlety of Butler’s queer politics. 

13.

It is manifestly true that Butler’s theory is highly pessimistic about the potential for legal/political change. Our being here is premised on being subject to the desires, norms, and influences of the dominant culture. 

Even so, Butler clearly has faith in the possibility of change. Performativity is their term for a limited but creatively resistant form of freedom. 

“The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality,” Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990), “does not mean that those constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality nor that gay and lesbian sexuality are derivable or reducible to those constructs. . . . The presence of these norms not only constitute a site of power that cannot be refused, but they can and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality” (158, emphasis original). 

The Butlerian subject is us. It is normal and queer. 

14.

In the essay on Butler I hope to finish soon, I also argue that How To Be Gay may be read as a redescription of Butler’s political ambition, as initially described in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.

Halperin’s understanding of the politics of homo subculture perfectly captures the character of Butler’s queer politics.

Their queer politics “reckons with the world as it is, with the way we lived and still live now, and [seek] less to change the world than to resist its inflictions (even at the cost of appearing reactionary, rather than progressive)—[thereby offering] an important emotional and political resource . . . to many different kinds of socially disqualified people, at least to those whose sense of irredeemable wrongness makes them willing to pay the achingly high price for it” (219-220). 

15.

In summary, participation in what’s normal is not a matter of personal choice.

You can’t choose your sex(uality) or gender (realities created and enforced by the dominant culture before we come into the world and learn to speak its language).

That comforts some homos. And why should homos be different from nearly everyone else? 

In any case, it is also true that the dominant regime can’t completely control what you do with its normative categories. 

As Fester from the Addams Family reminds us, “Normal is difficult to achieve.”

That’s why queer politics also appeals to many homos. Failing to take “normal” too seriously is the point of queer politics.

16.

But our hipster advises us to embrace a politics of fluidity. We are advised not to stress about sex(uality) and gender norms.

I guess we are to entirely forget our hipster’s essay, wherein he ranks similarly situated minority groups on a ladder of value. If homos are even on his ladder, we are farthest away from the heavenly clouds of political coolness.

17.

The hipster seems to believe that recognizing the legitimate suffering of the hip and queer, Black communities, and Trans* people requires a sacrifice: the difference and dignity of homos. 

If that’s right, the hipster’s argument collaborates with HIV/AIDS. It collaborates with evil. 

Meanwhile, the option of carefully attending to admittedly uncool forms of queer desire remains available, if seldom considered and even less often taken—at least by straight (male) hipsters and their adoring queer fans.  

Tearing down the East Wing, Trump 💩 on us.

– AI generated art based on the piece below –

In tearing down the East Wing—something Trump seems to have known he could not announce in advance—the President dramatically, unabashedly took a 💩 on us. 

I know it seems silly. Of all things that could make me aghast in this moment, the destruction of the East Wing should be last on the list. It isn’t. 

I am very attuned to space. In therapy, I spend weeks talking about my therapist’s office. I am curious about where s/he is sitting, what is hanging on the wall and why, and even what is under their chairs. 

In one case, while picking up keys that I had dropped on the floor, I noticed that my therapist had a dozen or so colorful crystals under their chair. The discovery made me laugh. Now, I have crystals all over my study. 

Buildings are important to me as a pastor. Even in my teenage years, I would preach to my elders: the outside says a lot about what’s on the inside (btw: regarding churches, that is almost always true).

I once served a church that was obsessed with the historical status of its main building. In truth, the building was somewhat ugly and, in many ways, entirely impractical—but it did have some charming, standout features. 

I am not contemptuous of any one church’s history—but I do insist that those histories come into the present. Translation is, in my view, the job of the church (to say nothing about outright change, or creating a future). 

But the insistence on preserving the historical structure blocked any consideration of what the building is for now—and even what such a building, what the property, might be for in the future. 

I wanted rocking chairs on the church porticos. I held new member classes outside, in those same spaces. I even wanted to commission a mural that would connect the church’s mission to the city in which it was a central feature. No and no. 

As I think about the now-demolished East Wing of the White House, I am not immune to the pull of translation, of making changes, and so on. Resisting the temptation to worship historical buildings is a good thing. 

Yet, in tearing down the East Wing, Trump tapped into a deeply human connection to historical places, and he 💩 on it. By destroying the East Wing, the President made it very clear how he feels about us—and at a time we are facing runaway inflation, a government shutdown (i.e., layoffs, unpaid time), rising healthcare costs, and increasing social animus. 

Trump also told us how he feels about U.S. democracy. The fall of the East Wing put the 💩 character of his policies on full display: destruction for the sake of the gratuitous, the ugly, and the people willing to pay for it (or, if we end up paying for it, the people who stand to gain—at our expense—by purchasing admission to it). 

First YouTube Short on Sucking at Popularity

My first YouTube short!

I talk about an idea I shared on the recent episode of the New Thoughts Podcast: it’s ok to suck at popularity.

I put some of the ideas/tips I learned from reading Adam Aleksic’s book, Algospeak, into practice.

I am looking forward to creating more shorts for the New Thoughts Podcast, and some others based on the writing I do here.

Enjoy!

Speaking of Unity

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Blessed Damozel (1878).

The following is a sermon based on Ephesians 4:15, entitled Speaking of Unity. I offered it at an annual gathering of pastors and other church leaders.

Ephesians 4:14-15:

We must no longer be children, tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine, by people’s trickery, by their craftiness in deceitful scheming. But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Messiah.

Organizing Idea: Forsaking anger, we speak the truth in love, and so draw closer together, preserving God’s will: the unity of the body of Messiah Jesus. 

I.

Picture this scene: We fall in love. 

I’m a bit proper, and intimate chat—you know, what the young folks these days call “spicy” talk—that makes me uncomfortable. 

I don’t know how to handle love-talk, so as we walk through your garden, you whisper “sweet nothings” to the roses. 

I laugh as you tell the roses how much you love them.

But there’s one problem: We fall in love during a war. 

You leave to fight in the war, leaving me with instructions on how to care for the roses.

I do my best to keep the roses alive until you return. 

There’s one more problem: one thing you told me to do I won’t do—and that is talk to the roses. 

Why not? Well, that’s ridiculous! 

Honestly, I won’t talk to the roses because I miss you. 

In the letter I send to you, I share that the roses are surviving—but they are not thriving. The roses are alive, but they are not living because they are not getting the conversation they need. 

Why did we fall in love in the middle of a war? What a silly thing for anyone to do. 

II.

What you just pictured is a scene from the new, fabulous Broadway musical Operation Mincemeat.

Jak Malone won the Tony Award for his performance as Hester Leggatt, who sings about falling in love during World War II and caring for the roses while her lover, Tom, is away fighting the war.

For reasons you’ll need to figure out yourself, the song is called “Dear Bill.” 

III.

Roses are, of course, a cliché for love.

Teenagers at prom.
Honeymoon suites.
Romance novels.

But in Hester’s song, the roses are more than cliché.

They’re a revelation.

The roses in Hester’s song reveal what it means to speak of unity. 

Ephesians repeatedly emphasizes that God’s will is to unite everything and everyone (1:10). In fact, God, through the cross of Jesus the Messiah and the ongoing advocacy of the Spirit, has completed that goal. 

Unity is not something we create. 

Our pastors, leaders, youth, members, or visitors can’t command or create unity.

God gives unity to the body of Messiah, to the church. Unity is grace.

That’s why Ephesians urges us to “accept each other with love, and make an effort to preserve the unity of the Spirit with the peace that ties you together” (4:2-3). 

Preserving unity, the unity that God gives us through the weakness of the Messiah, in the Spirit—that is our work. 

Planting, growing, and watering the roses–that’s God’s work. 

Our task is tending to them, giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive. 

But there’s one issue: we are living in wartime. 

IV.

We are in the middle of a serious culture war. One that too often successfully pulls us out of the garden, almost guaranteeing that the roses won’t get the conversation they need to thrive.

Military helicopters are descending on Chicago, targeting communities of color—and ICE, armed like Roman soldiers, are kicking in the doors of citizens and their children, hauling them into the streets.

Rome’s agents ruthlessly round up our fellow human beings without papers—the vast majority of whom are, like all of us, trying to build a good and decent life.

Across this divided land, killers strike our fellow citizens in their homes, on campuses, and as they walk to lunch—and yet we only recognize some victims as saints.

Today, our government is shut down because we refuse to agree that our neighbors deserve affordable healthcare.

V.

We are in the middle of a war, so all the chatter I am hearing in my circles, from both sides of the partisan divide—and everything in between—about buying guns is not so surprising. 

Even Ephesians encourages believers in the Messiah to arm themselves. We are to put on the belt of truth, take up the shield of faith, wear the helmet of salvation, and wield the sword of the Spirit (6:13-17).

The author of Ephesians encourages us to dress up like Roman soldiers.

That’s no small thing. Fashion moves us. 

Remember that time you finally fit into those tight jeans or that expensive dress you never thought you would fit into… and then immediately booked a flight to New York to walk the runway during Fashion Week? Or, remember the time that you got a great haircut, and you seriously thought, “I could be a rockstar with this hair.”

Playing dress up as a Roman soldier is not as innocent as it seems. 

And before you think I am overthinking this, consider that the author of Ephesians, just a few verses earlier, explicitly commands us to adopt a Roman lifestyle. 

Just before asking us to dress up like Roman soldiers, he commands wives to submit to their husbands, and slaves to obey their masters.

If it’s any consolation, he does request that husbands and masters, masters and husbands, treat their property with kindness (5:21-6:9).

That’s so cringe. I know. 

It’s also very, very Roman lifestyle advice. 

But like every text written in wartime—Ephesians is all about a clash of cultures—it resists simplicity.

VI.

Earlier in the letter, the author of Ephesians declares, “I’m telling you this, and I insist on it in the Lord: you shouldn’t live your life like the [the Romans] anymore. . .” (4:17).  [unstated exegetical note: It is because the author moves in this direction that I emphasize the Roman cultural connections rather than the Jewish ones. The author of Ephesians was likely Jewish. See Daniel Boyarin’s excellent study, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism (1999), for an analysis of the overlap between Jewish and Roman cultures, along with its main theme: how Judaism and Christianity eventually became distinguishable religions].

But in the middle of his musical, let’s call it, The Roman Family Musical, the author offers some Roman advice that is actually sound: he tells us to avoid anger. [Underlying source: see Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness: Resentment, Generosity, Justice (2016) for a sophisticated and careful analysis of the character of anger.]

The Romans, and the Greeks before them, believed that anger was a female thing. They thought males were rational and disciplined, and females were childish and prone to excess.

One thing is certain: when you lack control over your own body, anger does feel empowering.

Even so, avoiding anger is good Roman advice because human anger is always an injustice. 

Anger always works against God’s will to bring everything and everyone together.

Please don’t take my word for it, the truth is as close to you as your own family.

The author of Ephesians commands children to obey their parents (6:1-4). But this time, there is good reason to comply with his command: 

The commandment to love your parents is the only one that comes with a promise: We should listen to our parents so that everything may go well for us and that we may live a long life.

That’s promising! 

And parents, if you want to command your children’s respect and ensure everything goes well for them, avoid provoking them to anger.

That sounds promising, too! 

I confess, I am surprised; I never took Ephesians for a letter with much promise.

In fact, I typically feel like this dude is a prude.

No drinking. No cussing. No joking. No rock, pop, or blues music. No good sex (it’s all missionary style for him).

But this time, I thought: maybe the perils of anger explain his social conservatism. 

VII.

Nowadays, anger is a respectable thing to feel, especially if you are a male. 

The fruits of male anger are predictable—a terrible tale as old as time: males drink, males boast, males covet the spouses of other males.

Outrage follows. Men die. And women and children are the collateral damage of male anger.

Here is a new thing about anger: it’s especially powerful on social media. 

Rage-baiting is all the rage. Why? We love it. We like it. We comment on it. 

The algorithm gives us more and more of it. Influencers and social media platforms profit from it. 

There is a reason we describe getting angry as “going nuclear.” It is the most potent weapon in our culture war arsenal.

Anger always goes viral. 

Here’s why: Anger is a feeling that is always—and I say again—always related to the pleasures of retribution, of punishment, of revenge, of domination—of really sticking it to someone who stuck it to you. 

The logic of anger is devilishly simple: if I can wound the one who wounded me, I will be made whole again.

Anger is always a form of magical thinking: the thought that revenge will right a wrong. 

It won’t.

Anger is always a verb. It is always about getting even. 

That’s why we should avoid provoking our children to anger and getting angry ourselves. 

“Get angry,” we are told, “but don’t sin” (4:26-27).

In other words, don’t get angry, because anger is always related to sin; it is always opposed to God’s will, to unity and its preservation in the church.

Speaking of unity, I remember visiting family in northern Idaho. 

I was in my mid-twenties, sitting with my brother and uncle in a bar called the Six Devils.

After I enjoyed about six devils, I decided it was time to share some angry thoughts. The result was predictable: more anger.

My brother, a huge, muscular guy (the opposite of me), stormed out of the bar—and my uncle did too, after he started to cry. 

What I said damaged our relationship; it certainly did not bring us closer together.

That’s why the author of Ephesians urges us to forsake anger and begs us to adopt a different lifestyle, one characterized by speaking the truth.  

That’s one word in Greek—it means to speak the truth continuously.

Like anger, speaking the truth is a verb. But it’s not angry speech. It is not permission to say the nastiest things imaginable about people while smiling. 

Well, bless your hearts. 

Speaking the truth–quite unlike anger–is always a matter of love-talk, and love-talk is always talk that inspires–indeed is–the preservation of unity in the body of Messiah Jesus. 

VIII. 

Now, with that in mind, let’s re-imagine what speaking of unity—what giving the roses the conversation they need–looks like. 

Picture this scene: We are back in the garden; the roses are there between us. I start talking to them because I know you don’t like it when I talk too directly about love. Here’s what I say to the roses:

I was asked to preach at the Church of Christ, but I was told there was one topic I could not mention in my sermon. 

So, I angrily left the garden to fight on the Western front of the culture war.

Walking to the battlefield, I was reminded of a time I asked a layperson to avoid a topic. I asked them not to disparage members of the church I was serving from the pulpit.

One member was barely back on his feet after being disowned by his entire family. Another member was coming back to church after she had stayed away for years, fearing abuse from the pulpit. Yet another member had just lost his husband.

Please, I asked, preserve the unity of the Spirit in peace.

This layperson had somehow learned to say yes when he meant no, and he offered a condescending and damaging message that drove people–including me–away from one another and that congregation. His comments severed our unity.

As I marched to war, I considered what it meant to be prohibited, in the name of unity, from preaching a message of extravagant welcome. 

I also started to feel sad. I learned, again, that Rev. Kay Ray was right when he observed that I was excited about ministry because I hadn’t been doing it.

I thought despairingly: If being the United Church of Christ means that one church can degrade and exclude people like me, my family, and our friends, while another church can boldly fight racism, preserving the grace of unity is surely impossible.

The feeling only worsened when I remembered the times that even our leadership expressed the view that folks like me in the church are a “controversial” issue. 

They think it is a sign of faithfulness not to take a position on such a “controversial” issue. 

Here is what should be controversial: 

Rome’s Supreme Court empowers conservative parents to pull their kids out of public-school lessons that entail “controversial” themes and even to send their “controversial” children to conversion therapy. Yet, it denies caring parents of those same children the power to make their healthcare decisions.

“Controversial” adults in North Carolina now have to hand over their false birth certificates, the ones they received at birth, along with their real ones, whenever they require a passport, other necessary documentation, or for identity verification purposes.

What should be controversial is our historical ignorance. 

Did you know that the Greeks thought that males and females were different species? A similar idea, Ibraham Kendi reminds us, enabled some white folks to justify the institution of slavery. 

The Romans got rid of the idea of the sexes. Male and females represented points on a sliding scale—the only difference being that some genitals stuck out while others turned inward . . . . 

What sticks out asserts reproductive power; what turns inward submits to reproductive power. Rome privileged and empowered what asserted itself on women and on both male and female slaves and other non-citizens. 

What we now think of as sex and sexuality are the creations—very real and very unnatural social creations—of the 1700s and 1800s. [Underlying source: see David M. Halperin, “Sex/Sexuality/Sexual Classification,” in Critical Terms for the Study of Gender (2014), 449-486, for this history and a spirited and clear analysis of it].

There is no such thing as “biological truth.” But too many Christians seem to be sticking with Rome. Some of y’all are too Roman for my liking.

My anger was further enflamed when I remembered times that our leadership couldn’t even celebrate the good that the Southern Conference had done, like our fight in 2015, because they couldn’t bring themselves to name it, to mention it explicitly. 

Rome’s Court is—once again—looking for an opportunity to make some of us sit at the back of the bus.

And some of our leaders are uncomfortable even discussing their own desires, fearing they may cause controversy.

Family, unity should not come at the expense of diversity in the church.

We should not be cutting off toes to fit into a Roman sandal.

If unity comes at the cost of the dignity of other parts of the body, it’s just not worth it. 

In fact, it just not unity.

It’s not a just unity.

It’s hostility. 

And it is contrary to God’s will. 

Yes, I was feeling some kind of way when I received your letter. Something about it made me drop my weapons and walk away from war.

Honestly, I missed being together with our roses.

As I walked back to our garden, I did feel like a motherless child. 

I felt like a kid who had grown up without a good enough mother, tossed to and fro because his caregiver was not reliable—except in their efforts to provoke him to anger.

But something about your letter also made me feel like I no longer had to be an angry soldier out fighting the culture war of rage.

Your letter, your hymn, inspired me to think that speaking of unity—giving the roses the conversation they need to thrive, to really live—is an infinitely more pleasurable use of our time.

Your Psalm reminded me: 

It’s good and pleasant when we live together in unity!

Unity feels like precious oil on the head, running down over the collars of robes. 

It’s like the smell of morning dew.

It’s like the simple beauty of water droplets gliding across rose petals. 

It’s life forevermore (Psalm 133, redacted). 

May it be so.

Amen.