Goodness and mercy

My late life partner and I used to love to watch the British comedies broadcast by the Baltimore and Washington, D.C., PBS stations — Are You Being Served?, Keeping Up Appearances, As Time Goes By, Chef, Last of the Summer Wine, Waiting for God, Blackadder, The Thin Blue Line and The Vicar of Dibley were among our favorites. I stopped watching most of them after Margaret died because their association with memories of her made me sad.

But late on Christmas Day, after my brother and his son, Awesome Nephew, had gone home and I had gotten Dad tucked into bed, I sat in the living room with my kitties idly browsing through the onscreen TV guide and noticed The Vicar of Dibley was about to come on. I love the arrangement of the 23rd Psalm that is sung over the opening and closing credits, so I tuned in and was delighted to see it was an episode I’d never seen. In fact — spoiler alert — it was intended as the last episode, in which the eponymous vicar, gets married and her side of the church is packed with other female vicars. Did I forget to mention the vicar was a woman, one of the first ordained by the Church of England?

The Church of England first permitted female vicars in 1992 and Richard Curtis created The Vicar of Dibley in 1994. Dawn French played the vicar, Geraldine Granger. Although only 20-ish episodes were created over the next 13 years, I suspect the show’s warmth and humor went a long way toward tipping the battle for acceptance of female vicars greatly in favor of, “This could work out better than we think.” And the fleeting image that captures the transformation wrought over the 13-year course of the show is when the camera pans over Geraldine’s side of the church before her wedding and all the pews are filled with female vicars:

Female vicars fill the bride's side of the church at the wedding of the vicar of Dibley, Geraldine Granger.
Female vicars fill the bride's side of the church at the wedding of the vicar of Dibley, Geraldine Granger.

As a woman I was glad to see how shows like The Vicar of Dibley can dispel fears whipped up by people whose real concern is losing power. As a lesbian, I wonder when liberal Hollywood will ever create comedies and dramas that will do the same for gays — illegal aliens and Muslims have rather jumped the line, in that regard. And as a conservative blogger, flabbergasted as I am that Obama kept a promise and signed the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” on Dec. 22, the photo above is a symbol of where I believe gays and lesbians serving openly in the military will be a few years from now — making a valued contribution, equal and all the predictions of doom laid to rest.

If The Vicar of Dibley piques your interest, you can search on YouTube and find the first episode and the wedding episode. I learned this by searching YouTube to see if anyone had uploaded a video of the arrangement of the 23rd Psalm behind the credits — and lo!, someone has! I am joyful about this because the last time I searched for it on iTunes it was nowhere to be found, although that could have been because I searched for “Vicar of Dibley Lord’s Prayer” even though, dagnabbit, I know the words to both the prayer and the psalm. I hope you will find this arrangement as haunting and comforting as I do, and my new year’s wish for all my dear gentle readers is that goodness and mercy will follow you all the days of your life and that you will dwell in the house of the Lord forever:

Back soon

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting. In the afternoons, when I would usually write, for the last several days I’ve been making the house more energy efficient so we can be warm and reduce our heating bills. My other usual writing time is right after seeing my father to bed, but I’ve been going to bed instead for the crazy reason that I feel much better the next day when I go to sleep before midnight instead of 2 am or later, as I do when I’m writing and get carried away. I’ve also been reluctant to write because I’ve realized that my weight loss program has taken off more than extra pounds — I also have lost a good deal of my patience, compassion and sense of humor, especially if I write late at night when my blood sugar is low. This is sobering to contemplate because I need to be on this program for several more months to achieve my weight objective. For now it looks like the solution is to schedule my writing after lunch, which is my main meal of the day, and avoid writing in the evening.

However, there are plenty of things I have in mind that I want to write about, so I’m looking forward to getting back to posting in a day or two. Thank you, dear gentle readers, for your patience.

Phyllis Chesler on the contributions of Second Wave Feminism

A few days ago psychologist and pioneer feminist Phyllis Chesler posed the question, “Is the Conservative Media Really Anti-feminist?,” at her own website and Newsreal. Short version: no, but the Left is, because the Left stopped publishing Dr. Chesler’s work the instant she began to treat feminism like values that were to be upheld by all, everywhere — which, obviously, is crazy talk — while the Right immediately started to publish her work:

It did not help matters that, in the past, I also opposed pornography, prostitution, and the selective feminist prosecution of only certain men for sexual harassment (white men, conservative men of any color) and rape, but not other men (men of color, men of color in positions of power, Democratic presidents). These tensions were ongoing among feminist leaders from the mid to late 1970s on, and they constituted a serious private controversy between Steinem and myself.

And then I committed an ultimate series of unforgivable Thought Crimes. I publicly stood up for America, for Israel, and for the West—and I began exposing Islamic gender and religious apartheid and Islamic jihad. This included exposing the Muslim hatred, not only of Israel, but of Jews and of other “infidels.”

This piece seems to have inspired a post by Megan Fox at Newsreal — who is linked in Dr. Chesler’s post below — which is a name-calling rant against the feminist pioneers who viciously created the state of liberty and equality American women now enjoy. I am 57 and I remember what it was like to be constantly invalidated, thwarted and denigrated for being female well into the 1980’s. Now is better. I am very grateful to Dr. Chesler for her life’s work. Here is part of her reply to Ms. Fox:

More important: Does Fox realize that good fathers and good husbands lose their jobs, become ill, even die, and that a second income is often essential? Perhaps for most people that second income has always been essential—but if women are uneducated or unskilled, (even when they are highly skilled) women still cannot earn a “male” income? And that children go hungry and become homeless for this reason?

It is telling that in her open letter to Second Wave feminists, Fox seems to blame all social evils only on women and on feminists in particular. She allows men an absolutely free pass in terms of their entrapping girls and women into unmarried sex and into unwed motherhood. Men both produce and purchase pornography; men are the pimps and the Johns who buy women’s bodies. Men traffic girls and women into sexual slavery. Why are these purveyors of filth and these whore-mongers absent from her commentary? Does she understand that it is men who have infected women with AIDS, not the other way around?

(snip)

Before the Second Wave began making waves, women were silent in church, synagogue, mosque, and temple. We created the consciousness that led people to envision women as religious authorities, counselors—not only as followers and volunteers but as leaders. Since then, women have been ordained as ministers and as rabbis and, in a real sense, God has been further liberated from human misogyny.

Thank you, Dr. Chesler — thank you, thank you, thank you!

Jon Stewart pwns John McCain on DADT

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Jon Stewart provides current and past clips of Sen. McCain to show that McCain will say anything to prevent the repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the vain belief that it would be too much hassle to find video clips throughout his career where he contradicts his current argument against DADT that “subordinates have to be consulted.” Lo! It was not!

H/T: Matt Hadro at Newsbusters, who provides a convenient transcript of the video clip above.

UPDATED: Social conservatives battle fiscal conservatives for the soul of the Tea Party

Newsweek interviews dear Andrew Ian Dodge on the battle between social conservatives and fiscal conservatives to set the message of the Tea Party and control its message, money and power. The Republicans who just swept into state and federal offices ran on fiscal conservatism and the economy. I am shocked that social conservatives now are trying to force them to make social issues their priority instead of doing the work they promised to do to create jobs and improve the economy.

However, I suspect if I were a better student of American elections, I would find that this isn’t the first time social conservatives have gotten elected by posing as fiscal conservatives and then indefinitely postponed doing anything remotely connected to fiscal conservatism while putting their social agenda first and foremost at every opportunity. I intend to raise my voice along with Andrew’s to ensure that this time they will keep the promises that got them elected and that the fiscal conservative agenda will be the one that that has the priority.

H/T Hot Air Headlines.

Update, 12/3/2010, Fri.: Dan Riehl takes Karl Rove to the woodshed on compassionate conservatism — which I gather is the preferred term for social conservatism when it is combined with fiscal liberalism — and the battle for the soul of conservatism. Read the whole thing because I left out some good parts:

Bush’s so-called compassionate conservatism was pure GOP establishment political bullshit. America is and will continue to be paying the price for it in increased debt, taxes and regulation for years.

To the extent a genuine sense of individual American independence and liberty is allowed to continue to be compromised by a GOP establishment more interested in political power and control, as opposed to a serious appreciation for individual liberty, American conservatism will continue to suffer, if not one day disappear.

We are facing some hard truths in America’s ongoing history. I get that. The genuine American truth that needs to be conveyed, in fact, trumpeted, in this difficult time, is that, government can not do everything for you. In fact, there is very little that it has proved itself capable of doing efficiently, let alone well.

(snip)

The more I hear from Karl Rove, the more I think about the potential, if not genuine need, for a disastrous split on the Right, leading to a third party move in 2012. If the GOP wants to go down the road to hell and statism with the Democrats, fine, let them. But they have no right to expect principled conservatives to follow them to their own end. I’d rather conservatism wither and die on the vine alone while standing for something more than the latest gee whiz slogan from just another GOP political hack like Karl Rove.

I think we have the potential for a split on the Right if social conservative leaders persist in trying to hijack the energy, money, power, and enthusiasm that fiscal conservatism has won for the conservative movement since 2008, when Obama began minting brand new fiscal conservatives in round-the-clock shifts. I don’t think it is inevitable, but when the Right is dominated by people who are offering a supremely intrusive churchism as the alternative to statism, and if they can only be satisfied by gaining supreme government power rather than the achievement of the stable and prosperous social order they profess to want, then, yes, it is time for conservatism to re-define and re-create itself.

So you want to write a novel

Xtranormal is the new Downfall/Hitler clip.

I first saw this at The Rejecter, where the author of the video comments. She is an assistant to a literary agent and a published novelist. She is a witty and a helpful mentor to writers looking for an agent and their first big break.

Actually, I always thought writing screenplays would be more appealing than writing novels, which is one reason I majored in both English and theatre. However, this year Roger Simon told me that it’s better to write novels and then see about turning them into screenplays. That’s because fans of your novel won’t put up with the free association total transformations of your story into formulaic twaddle by the powers-that-be, which is a phenomenon that plagues the process of bringing original screenplays to the screen. So the six-foot tall brassy black MTF trannie wedding planner in her 40’s doesn’t get turned into a shy young white woman in her 20’s who is a barista at Starbucks by day and vampire slayer by night.