Civil Commotion

It probably wouldn’t be smart to make too much of it, but it seems somehow fitting, maybe even predictable, that FOX NEWS had the lowest viewership during Michael Cohen’s testimony before the House.

CNN finished first in the key demographic ratings during Michael Cohen’s testimony before Congress on Wednesday, while Fox News—which more typically wins in the metric—finished last among the big three cable networks. According to Nielsen, CNN averaged 588,000 viewers aged 25-54 (a key demographic for advertisers) during the Cohen hearings, which lasted from 10 a.m. until 5:15 p.m. ET. MSNBC came in second in the 25-54 demographic, pulling an average of 452,000 viewers, while Fox News finished last with an average of 388,000.

Of course Trump cultists wouldn’t be interested in real Reality TV.

Moving in a milieu that considered homosexuality to be intrinsically bad, and reading theology books that defined it as a sin, for a long time I experienced it as guilt. The path that I chose to leave that guilt was to deny that sexual attraction by transferring it to religious attraction: I made the choice of chastity and the seminary. For me, becoming a priest was a kind of solution to expiate an error that I had not committed.

In the Closet of the Vatican

This quote is from a just-published work of journalism taking-up the gay culture in the Vatican.

I imagine most people have forgotten about it by now, but a bit more than a decade ago there was a Colorado pastor named Ted Haggard whose career spectacularly incinerated when a male prostitute stepped forward to say that he and his buddy Ted regularly did drugs together, and … business. The self-immolation followed the usual course: stout-hearted denials, then acknowledgement that there might have been some kind of misunderstanding, and then Haggard was caught in his driveway by a camera crew and looked straight into the camera and said (I approximate, it’s been a long time), “I’ve struggled against this all my life.”

I was watching and said aloud, “So why did you become a preacher?”

It was, literally, one of those smack-your-forehead moments for me. I knew the answer immediately: Because he had struggled against it all his life.

For almost 2-millennia, for an extraordinary number of men, a career in the clergy has been a form of self-therapy: the unauthorized desire might be made to go away or, if not, he would at least be surrounded by good people and unable to indulge his wickedness. Whew! Hell avoided!

Vocations are down because the public acceptance of homosexuality is steadily trending up. What a grand irony it is that the church’s condemnation of being gay was its best recruitment tool.

The Oxford comma is the one that follows the next-to-last item in a list, e.g., “I went to the bookstore, the deli, and the doctor.” The comma following “deli” is the Oxford comma, and most of us are taught in grade school that we shouldn’t use it, that we should write “I went to the bookstore, the deli and the doctor.”

What do you know? An American court has held in favor of the comma.

That’s because an appellate court recently ruled in favor of Maine dairy drivers in a labor dispute that hinged on the oft-debated piece of punctuation.

For anyone who’s ever wondered what all the fuss is about over Oxford commas, the circuit judge’s opinion says it all: “For want of a comma, we have this case.”

I almost always use an Oxford comma. My rule is simple, and is unlikely to ever steer you wrong or land you in court: Read the sentence back to yourself, and put a comma in if you would briefly pause if you were speaking the sentence aloud to another person. Write as you speak.

This is more disappointing than actually surprising, I suppose. The entire notion of rapprochement between the United States and North Korea is a marketing fiction promoted by Donald Trump to enhance his vanity; it was bound to go POOF! once matters got down to serious decision-making.

As a young engineer, w-a-a-a-y back in the Pleistocene, I worked on the design of a dike made of flyash along the edge of Lake Erie. It was a slick and intricate project, technically, and I learned a lot, contributed a lot, and have never regretted my part in the work. That project kept industrial waste out of the lake, and helped to protect it.

That experience has made me alert through the years to reports of the decline in the health of Lake Erie thanks to agricultural pollution and algae blooms. Now, the citizens of Toledo have decided it is time to do something about it.

Toledo voters have reached a consensus: Lake Erie — the world’s 11th largest lake and one that provides drinking water to 12 million U.S. and Canadian citizens — deserves to have its own bill of rights.

In a special election that drew only about 9 percent of Toledo’s registered voters to the polls, the citizen-led Lake Erie Bill of Rights referendum passed by a 61-39 margin on Tuesday night, according to unofficial election results.

Now, it’s up to lawyers to sort out what the citizenry’s impassioned plea for the lake really means in practice …

As sympathetic as I am to the residents’ frustrations, it’s difficult to know what the voters have said. A lake is a non-sentient ever-evolving ecosystem and has no rights to assert; almost certainly, this legislation will become a vehicle for perverse litigation by half-baked busybodies.

As a political gesture, though, which serves notice to the hired-help in the adjoining state and provincial capitals that We, the People, have had ENOUGH!, it’s genius.

Dawn and I made our annual colors trip last fall, this time visiting the northern Lower Peninsula of Michigan (we timed it exactly right, and the colors were terrific, btw). We went along the western edge of the Lower Peninsula, across the top of the mitten, and then south along Lake Huron. I was frankly shocked by how inaccessible Lake Michigan is. The northern end of Lake Huron has frequent roadside parks that provide access, but it, too, is unavailable over much of its length.

Erie, famously, is a dumping ground for agricultural runoff that nourishes algae blooms that stink.

And then there is Lake Superior, highly accessible because it is protected by miserable winters and a National Lakeshore designation along its southern edge.

The moral is clear: Without an activist citizenry that take steps to protect resources, they will be exploited, soiled, and wasted by cynics indifferent to their beauty and incapable of seeing anything but dollar signs. Good for You!, then, to the people of Toledo for putting their foot down and taking a first step toward making one of the Great Lakes great again.