Really?

[laceblade]

I just....cannot even believe the comments I'm interacting with in this thread any more. For example!

If you don't understand the logic behind the man being (at least titular) head of the household, you don't understand men. A man has to be responsible for something or he will not be responsible at all.

Well shit, I guess I'll have to turn in my Understands Men card! My poor boyfriend! I must be stunting his growth as a man by being in a relationship in which I fully expect to have input, and my thoughts respected, and to NOT BE CONTROLLED, or to not expect him to be "responsible for me," lest I punch him in the neck and say, "Fuck you, bye!"

Also, WTF is up with people posting things ON THE INTERNET, and then getting upset when people respond to their thoughts. I think that I stopped expecting choruses of, "Oh, mystickeeper, you're so right!" when I turned 14. It's The Internet, buddy. You should be so lucky that the meanest person you have to deal with is ME.


Commiseration is cool, but if you'd like to respond to the thoughts of Father Benjamin, please post the thoughts in his blog.

Comments

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

This is what I meant when I said at WisCon that you're a better person than I am for being able to continue fighting. I gave up that battle long ago. It started when while in Texas in high school I was so busy being a good Catholic that I made my very Protestant friend's parents take me to mass in the local parish only to find that that parish had altar girls, and it continued right down that path while the church seemed to swing radically right from the church I grew up in. (The archdiocese I grew up in was pretty liberal, complete with a married priest who ran my confirmation retreat. Since he was originally an Episcopalian priest who was married while he was in that church, when he later converted to Catholicism, the church didn't make him ditch is wife.)

I started to respond over there on one minor point--that clearly that priest holds a common but incorrect understanding of social constructionist theory, but then I realized that my anger at about a million other things he said wouldn't let me do that without that anger leaking out all over the place.

The people who hold those very, very small minded views that women should submit to their husbands, that folks like myself are clearly deeply willful, selfish, and hurtful to myself and others are not going to hear anything I have to say, no matter how carefully I phrase it since their mode of engaging with a world that threatens their worldview is to retreat into a mythical imaginary image of a past that never existed.

Good on you for fighting the good fight. I just can't bring myself to fight it today. You're being awfully patient and rational in the face of an awful lot of denial and delusion on their parts.

[mystickeeper.livejournal.com]

Re-reading my post now, or at least that last part, it sounds like I was being all, "You guys go do this for me!" and I want to make it clear that isn't what I meant.

I understand, though, why this is so exhausting for people - because it happened to me, just like to you. If I start to respond about just one point, it snowballs, and I can't leave until I've de-constructed everything he said, and then two hours have gone by.

For now, I'll take solace in the socially-progressive Catholic church that I found last week, and I'll see how things go from there. I thank you for your compliments, too

I think that the main reason I'm so pissed at him is that I expected him to be smarter. sasha_feather and I were talking last night about how people on LJ are so much better at arguing than other people, and it makes us want to not engage with others!

[hederahelix.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, I didn't take it that way at all. I was actually curious. Because, as you know, you can stop being a practicing Catholic, but esp. if like me you come from two ethnically Catholic traditions, you don't stop being Catholic even once you've given up on the church.

I went. I read. I rolled my eyes the way I don't get to do when students display woefully inadequate understandings of social constructionist theory, and I started composing a response in my head.

And then I remember that I don't actually always have to respond when someone's wrong on the internet, you know?

So please don't worry about the original post sounding that way. It didn't sound that way to me at all.

[sophy.livejournal.com]

If you don't understand the logic behind a woman being equal in her relationship with her husband, you don't understand women. Or, you know, common fucking human decency. I'd go say that, but not sure it'd be appropriate. :)