Last night I was talking a lot of shit to myself, silently, in the privacy of my living room while everyone else in my house was totally in the bone zone. I had been reading too much theory all day (research) and started sliding into one of my misogynist moods where I check out the mundane answers to banal questions on a ‘woman’s forum’ and start getting like, “this? This is who you want to write for? Worthless. Hope they spend their lives smelling like cat piss and scanning bridal magazines for clippings to gluestick into their scrapbooks.”
(It actually got much worse than that. The shadow of one’s psyche is really a mean, shameless motherfucker.)
When I start talking like the little broad from the Exorcist, I know that it’s time to go to bed. Then I can wake up and the pall lifts and the sky gets all sunny blue again, and my will to live is renewed by stories like Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Catholic priest originally from Louisiana, and his response to the threat of excommunication courtesy of the Vatican. Father Bourgeois ordained a woman to the priesthood.
“Who are we as men to say that we are called by God to the ministry of priesthood, but women are not? That our call is valid, but theirs is not?” he said in an interview. “We profess as Catholics that the invitation to the priesthood comes from God, and it seems to me that we are tampering with the sacred.”
He is devastated by the action, but says he is unwilling to recant his position. It’s what he feels in his heart. Regardless of what you’re all about personally, it’s sort of the most awesome thing ever to know that there are still people who hold themselves accountable for their own beliefs and actions in this world. There are still people who, after much reflection and study, will not submit to an external authority the most deeply felt beliefs they know. That’s amazing. We should all understand such strength exists inside of us.
Johanna said, “that name sounds really familiar!” We realized that Father Frank Bourgeois is the founder of SOA Watch, which is the first issue I ever felt moved to political action by, back in the pre-historic days of high school. The School of the Americas, now renamed (due to too many people understanding what it was) Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, is essentially the terrorist training camp we run down in Virginia. Their most successful graduates go on to violently overthrow, rhetorically pacify, and piss all over the human rights of all the South American countries we’d like to extort material and abstract resources/political agency from.
It is probably the most explicitly and recognizably shameful representation of the evils done in our name, but hey, there it is. Hanging out down in Virginia, drinking sweet tea and flipping us the bird.
