Tag: mary valle

Whole Lotta Testosterone

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by Mary Valle

I don’t think that men and women are the same. I think we have a lot in common, being humans. However, if you look around, you’ll agree that there’s a big difference between us and that difference is testosterone. Skyscapers. The space program, with its great missiles impregnating the silvery, virginal moon. Football. War. The Washington Monument, for Pete’s sake. Guns, archery, race-car driving. Fireworks. Abrahamaic religion, with its cold, lordly sky-gods and “pure” “untainted” virgins. Agriculture. Mono-anything. New cars, and that “new car smell.” Breaking seals on bottles of shampoo and ketchup. Beer caps popping off, and the foamy explosion running over the lip of the bottle. Synthetic pressurized whipped cream products, and anything having to do with them. Onward, into infinity. These are all the byproducts of testosterone, which can really change a person, since we all do start out female. Continue Reading →

Catholic Workers Take a Stand Against Anti-Terrorism

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Mary Valle: Way to go, Baltimore City Paper, for covering Viva House’s rejection of the loyalty oath now demanded of United Way fundees, as directed by the USA PATRIOT act. Edward Ericson Jr. reports that a soup kitchen, which has been run since 1968 by Catholic Workers Brendan Walsh and Willa Bickham, will no longer receive the small “write-in candidate” checks it received from the United Way as a result of not signing an “Anti-Terrorism Compliance Measures” form.  Walsh and Bickham drafted a letter in reply saying that “We continue to ‘do the works of mercy and resist the works of war,” and “Loyalty oaths don’t bring about unity or good health. Instead, they break us apart as a people.”  They then urged United Way to “abandon its USA PATRIOT Act compliance effort.” Check out the letters to the editor and comments on this one! Continue Reading →

Ross Wants Your Snowflakes

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Mary Valle: My favorite cheek-shaved, neck-bearded Catholic convert, Ross Douthat, weighs in today (sort of? His columns seem to consistently defy “logic” and “making a point”) on abortion and infertility. Citing a recent MTV broadcast of a show in which a teen mother has an abortion, an article about how years of Pill usage makes women forget about their fertility, and last Sunday’s spectacular about the making of very special “twiblings” in his own paper, he ends with a little sniffy blort about America’s unborn — “No life is so desperately sought after, so hungrily desired, so carefully nurtured.  And yet no life is so legally unprotected, and so frequently destroyed.” Continue Reading →

The Melancholy Rite

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Mary Valle: I recently voted in my state’s primary election, because I like voting. Where I vote is in the gym of my local Catholic school, which, since the last election, has closed. Been consolidated. I noticed the cornerstone as I walked in: 1957. Boom times in America; boom times for Catholics. It seems that most of your less-endowed (public and parish schools) date from this era, unreconstructed: chipped linoleum floors, scuffed stairwells, the walls themselves weary with decades of cleaning and children. Usually I’d see colorful bulletin boards and statues and crucifixes and maybe even some students, in uniform, selling baked goods to voters, but this time the walls were bare, the icons removed. I felt a twinge of sadness. Continue Reading →

Stuff to Do, Updated

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Mary Valle: We here at The Revealer were wondering just who was the “American who taught that Catholics could dissent from church teachings about abortion, birth control and homosexuality” in the Goodstein/Halbfinger article? Who was cited as a special target of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith? Laurie Goodstein edified us: good ol’ Charles Curran, who was booted from his tenured post at Catholic University by the micro-managing (when they saw fit) CDF.

Read more about Curran here, here and here. Continue Reading →

They Had Stuff to Do, Give Them a Break!

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Mary Valle: A huge New York Times piece on the Ratzinger-led Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith’s role in the “sexual abuse scandal” (or, as I like to call it, Pontifigate) by Laurie Goodstein and David M. Halbfinger draws the trail of crumbs ever closer to the Vatican. Indeed, they say “it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.” Hmm. Cancer metaphors? Where have we heard this before? John Dean in the Oval Office, uttering the infamous “cancer on the Presidency” line. We all know how that ended. Continue Reading →

Pontifigate: The Flaccid Sword of Priestly Justice

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Mary Valle: Rapist priests! Good news! You can rape, abuse and lie all you want in the great lag time when your case is sent for review, investigation, further inquiry, empanelation and cooling on a desk in Rome somewhere. You may even be shuttled from parish to parish, which is convenient if you are a predator. New victims come to you! However: If you’re a nun and you authorize an abortion of an 11-week-old fetus to save a woman’s life, when the stated outcome of not performing the abortion would be death for all? Automatic excommunication for you, little missy. Maybe we should just start calling children “ambulatory fetuses?” Continue Reading →

Insidious and Dangerous

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Mary Valle: There’s a battle of miter-wearers today in the HuffPost. In one corner, we have Mary Glasspool, the first openly lesbian bishop ordained in the Episcopal Church of America. In the other, Pope Benedict, calling gay marriage “insidious and dangerous.” The American Episcopal church (most of it) is stepping up its support of gay rights, causing tension within the worldwide Communion, with warnings coming from Canterbury regarding American ordinations of gays. Papa Benedict, meanwhile, is trying in vain to deflect attention from Pontifigate (as the NYT calls for revocation of the NY state child-abuse statute of limitations), using some ill-chosen words to describe the activities of consenting adults who actually want to play by society’s rules. Point: America. Continue Reading →