Bob Schwartz

Category: Sex

April 14, 2014

Mad Men and Kabbalah

Don Draper - Broken Vessel

“I keep wondering, have I broken the vessel?”
Don Draper, Mad Men, Season 7, Episode 1, Time Zones

Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men show is not about Kabbalah, or so it would seem. It has, though, frequently touched on religious and spiritual matters. In the first episode of the new Season 7, for example, Roger Sterling’s daughter appears to have had some sort of enlightenment experience that allows her to accept her father as he is and to forgive him unconditionally. And at the end of last season, Don Draper’s hitting bottom included his punching out a Christian preacher in a bar. There have been Catholics, Jews, Hindus, and all manner of beliefs in the mix.

And then, in the latest episode, Don grows introspective and candid with a beautiful stranger on a plane. He admits to being a terrible husband, and then assesses his own responsibility: “I keep wondering, have I broken the vessel?”

For some, the image of the broken vessel instantly brings Kabbalah to mind. According to some traditions, God created the world by sending emanations—holy sparks—encased in ten vessels. Had all the vessels arrived intact, this would be a perfect world. But the force was so powerful and the vessels so delicate that a number of them shattered. In an imperfect world, it is our mission to gather up the holy sparks that have scattered, and thus to make the world better.

One of the first people to make Kabbalah popular and accessible in recent times was Rabbi Herbert Weiner. His book 9-1/2 Mystics: The Kabbala Today (1969)  was the introduction for many to the subject. By coincidence, Rabbi Weiner died almost exactly a year ago at the age of 93.

None of that is much to go on. There is no known connection between Matthew Weiner and Herbert Weiner. And as strange as Don’s dialogue sounds, he has said plenty of strange things before, he is an unlikely Kabbalist, and sometimes a broken vessel is just a broken vessel. Still, Mad Men has taken us places we never thought we’d go, so why not? After musing about the broken vessel, and after refusing the advances of his new friend, Don turns to the plane window and opens the shade. Bright morning sunshine washes his face. Not much to go on. But if there is some message there about Don’s awareness of a duty to gather the broken bits of light and heal his world, Kabbalah or not, that would certainly make Mad Men fans happy.

Leave a comment
March 28, 2014

The Torah and the Supreme Court: Tazria and Scalia

Women of the Supreme Court

This week the portion of the Torah read in Jewish communities is Tazria (Leviticus 12:1–13:59). This week the Supreme Court heard arguments in the widely reported Hobby Lobby case. There is a significant but not obvious connection between the two.

Leviticus is the one of the Five Books of Moses that has the least action and the most rules. Lots of rules about the behavior of the Jewish people. In the thousands of years since those rules flowed into the processes of cultural and social oral tradition, and in the thousands of years since those traditions were set down in writing, different Jewish people and communities have determined which to honor and which to ignore. Those decisions are based on what exactly one thinks these rules are: God-given and inviolable, or ancient and subject to temporizing to suit modern philosophy and life. We should not wear clothing made from two different fabrics, Leviticus says. Non-literal interpretations of this have been conceived for centuries, but it says what it says, or rather, God says what God says. But what’s so wrong about a wrinkle-free, 60/40 cotton-poly blend shirt?

The Tazria portion begins:

The Lord spoke to Moses, saying: Speak to the Israelite people thus: When a woman at childbirth bears a male, she shall be unclean seven days; she shall be unclean as at the time of her menstrual infirmity. On the eighth day the flesh of his foreskin shall be circumcised. She shall remain in a state of blood purification for thirty-three days: she shall not touch any consecrated thing, nor enter the sanctuary until her period of purification is completed. If she bears a female, she shall be unclean two weeks as during her menstruation, and she shall remain in a state of blood purification for sixty-six days.

On the completion of her period of purification, for either son or daughter, she shall bring to the priest, at the entrance of the Tent of Meeting, a lamb in its first year for a burnt offering, and a pigeon or a turtledove for a sin offering. He shall offer it before the Lord and make expiation on her behalf; she shall then be clean from her flow of blood. Such are the rituals concerning her who bears a child, male or female. If, however, her means do not suffice for a sheep, she shall take two turtledoves or two pigeons, one for a burnt offering and the other for a sin offering. The priest shall make expiation on her behalf, and she shall be clean.

 The attitude toward and treatment of this passage in a modern context ranges widely, depending on belief sets. Some express wholesale acceptance and obedience (except for the sheep and bird sacrifice). Some faithfully regard it as God’s word, but pass it through interpretive filters suitable for the times. Some see it as a reflection of ancient people making sense of the mysteries of God and life.

One of those mysteries, of course, is women. Especially for men. Especially for the strange and foreign ways that women “work”. No matter your ideology, no matter how much the passage is accepted or spun, it is not hard to read meaning. Women are different. Some of that difference renders them unclean, even if that part is functionally essential (e.g., sex, birth). That uncleanness can be fixed, but it will cost you (e.g., lambs, pigeons).

The Hobby Lobby cases (Kathleen Sibelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services v. Hobby Lobby; Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius) concern the interaction of two federal laws: The Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), which aims to protect Americans from intrusion on their religious lives, and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) which, among other things, requires employers to offer health insurance that includes coverage for contraception. The Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals found that the religious right of companies such as Hobby Lobby, which has Christian objections to providing that coverage, overcomes the particular requirement of the ACA.

The big legal issues are complex and significant. One arises every time religion is in the mix: we protect religion in this country, both in its expression and establishment, but in a nominally secular country, that is bound to clash with civil rights that may contravene religious belief. This isn’t easy to resolve, but resolve it we do. If, for example, your religion happens to believe that people of color are lesser human beings, and you are “commanded” to treat them accordingly, you still cannot follow that faith in the public square or the marketplace.

The other big legal issue is whether a company such as Hobby Lobby is a “person” able to enjoy religious liberties in the first place. We’ve seen this come up before and will again. Citizens United is the most recent and famous case deciding that enterprises may enjoy free speech, First Amendment rights, just as you do. Then there is Mitt Romney, former presidential candidate, who will forever be identified with his own legal interpretation of the issue: “Corporations are people, my friend.”

Besides these, the Hobby Lobby case is widely viewed as being about women, because practically it is. The ACA requirement that health insurance include contraceptives for women is a practically and realistically sound policy. A large majority of women use contraceptives, either for health reasons or, more frequently, to prevent conceiving as a result of sex. Preventing conception has a number of advantages, including avoiding unwanted or unplanned pregnancies. An advantage of this is that women do have sex, and do want to avoid pregnancy. It’s that basic. And then there’s this: many of those women who want to prevent conception are having sex with men.

The transcript of oral arguments in the Hobby Lobby case shows, as usual, a deeply divided court. Beyond the interesting central arguments concerning religious freedom and the personhood of corporations, there is a subtle subtext (some might say not so subtle). To a certain extent, the law, and arguments about it, are clinical. To the greatest extent possible, questions about impact are subservient to questions about the law itself: what it says, what was intended, how it works with other laws and with the Constitution. The rule of law prevails over the rule of people, and if the impact is unfair or disproportionate but still constitutional and legal, well, change the law.

But that has never been, will never be, and can never be how it works. Everyone—judges, lawyers, litigants, citizens—comes to the table with histories, psyches, lives, all the riches and trash we can carry. That’s how a case that seems about one thing can be, at least in small part, about another. That’s how the Hobby Lobby case is about women, something the three women on the Supreme Court without question get, something the six men may or may not.

Do read the transcript of the argument and maybe a few of the almost one hundred appellate briefs filed in the cases. In the arguments, you won’t find any express misunderstanding of the lives and impact of the case on women, though you may if you read between the lines. The briefs, which come from just about every corner of American society and politics, are a little clearer on how this is about women in ways that are not just incidental.

This brings us back to Tazria. It is easy to dismiss the passage as archaic, particularly for those who have found ways to work through or around it. Similarly, you may consider the Hobby Lobby case one about important and respectable religious and legal doctrines, and it is.

It can’t be said often enough: Men don’t get it and they can’t. They don’t know what it’s like to menstruate or be capable of bearing children or of having children. They don’t know what’s it like to be treated as unclean because of all of that, and then to be hypocritically treated as enjoyable and useful for those very same reasons. They don’t know how it feels to have some very simple means of adjusting all that, and then to have those means treated as something both profound and trivial, but not important.

Men don’t know, even if they are at the pinnacle, writing scripture or dispensing justice. So pleading ignorance, a little humility, a little learning, and a little compassion might be in order.

1 Comment
March 11, 2014

Teach-in and Dope in the Senate

Teach-in
Yesterday some Senators, mostly Democrats, held an all-night “talkathon” on the Senate floor about climate change. It wasn’t any kind of filibuster, because there wasn’t any particular piece of legislation involved.

Back in the 1960s, this might have been called a teach-in, which was just this sort of session during which change-minded people would learn about the radical issues of the day. Except those people were more likely to be professors and students (or “outside agitators”), and it was more likely to take place in a college administration building than the U.S. Senate.

Two occasional hallmarks of extended teach-ins were sex and drugs. We don’t dare speculate whether any U.S. Senators were having sex during this “talkathon,” but we might just wonder if anybody snuck out to the cloakroom for a quick hit.

In the delightful and trenchant Amazon political comedy Alpha House, one of the four Republican U.S. Senators living in the eponymous D.C. house is seen relieving the tension of running for reelection by bonging it in the bathroom. (The much more serious and dangerous Netflix political series House of Cards also shows the ambitious Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey, sharing joints with his Lady Macbeth of a wife. Sex of all varieties too.)

Back to the climate change teach-in. Even if no substances were involved in the event, what are the odds that any of those participants occasionally indulge, or that any of the rest of the Senate does? As a variant on the old speaker’s trick of imagining your audience without clothes, maybe it would be easier to watch the U.S. Senate if we as citizens just imagined our favorite or least favorite Senators sitting in those iconic smoke-filled rooms passing the pipe. Dope in the Senate. That would explain so much.

Leave a comment
October 28, 2013

The Book of Matt: Hidden Truths About the Murder of Matthew Shepard

Kennedy Monore Kennedy
When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Director John Ford in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence

The Book of Matt by Stephen Jimenez is about the heinous and now-legendary murder of Matthew Shepard. It obliquely brings three people to mind: John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe.

All three are legends apart, so maybe it is not surprising that legends have grown up about all three in various pairings, and even all together on at least one purported occasion. Whether or not Monroe had an affair with either or both of the Kennedys, whether Bobby was with her on the night of her death, whether evidence of those affairs was covered up or destroyed, is almost certainly never going to be incontrovertibly established. Some will say that some of it appears near certain while other of it is sordid and unsubstantiated conjecture. For the most part, we’ve reached a general consensus that none were saints, none were complete role models, but that we liked some of what they did, and we liked them for what they did, including inspiring us, and the rest is just shades of humanity. JFK helped prevent a nuclear war, Bobby Kennedy helped end the Vietnam War, and Marilyn was just Marilyn. If they didn’t live like saints, they died as complex and heartbreaking lessons.

Jimenez has investigated the Matthew Shepard murder for more than a decade. He concludes that this was not a vicious hate crime against a young gay man. Instead, it is a cautionary tale about the epidemic of methamphetamine. According to this report, Shepard was troubled, and was involved in the Laramie meth scene. The killer, who knew Shepard, was a meth head who had been up for a week, and was trying to get information from Shepard about a meth deal. He intended to coerce the information from Shepard, but out of his mind, simply beat Shepard mercilessly and insanely. The killer and his accomplice pled guilty, which kept details of the local meth market and the killer’s gay dealings with Shepard—trading meth for sex—secret.

The police investigation never involved a hate crime. The now-infamous imagining of Shepard being trussed up on a fence in a crucifix position never happened; he was found on the ground, hands tied behind his back. The anti-gay angle for the horrific event was soon added.

This might present a problem.

Jiminez has found himself in an odd position. He is accused of being anti-gay, though he is gay himself, in which case he is accused of being a “traitor” to a cause. He is accused of being a tool of the reactionary right wing, though he himself is far from being a right winger. What he is, he repeats, is a journalist who wants to do what he is supposed to do: find and tell the truth, as best as it ever can be found and told.

Matthew Shepard has become very important to the movement for gay rights. It is a powerful story: the young man who did nothing wrong, who only wanted to live a free and openly gay life, who had the misfortune of running into a black-hearted, hate-filled, intolerant stranger—the sort that fifteen years ago, and today, you can meet anywhere.

If it turns out that some or more than some of what Jimenez concludes is true, what happens to Matthew Shepard, the young man and the legend? In essence, Jimenez says that nothing happens. The issues remain the same, the good fight remains the good fight, but we will be fighting it armed with a little more truth about the story, convenient or not.

That sort of complication should be welcome, but it may not be, at least not everywhere. We like our stories simple, because so much of life is convoluted and mysterious. There are lines that are clear, but simple stories are mostly for children. Grownups have to work and stretch. This is a warts-and-all age, so we take our big characters as they come: flawed but still valuable. People work every day, their entire lives, on establishing equality—some of those people under the Matthew Shepard banner. That cause isn’t going away, and if we have to accept a little bit of historical adjustment, that’s the price we pay for having our eyes open.

1 Comment
October 23, 2013

The Marijuana Dilemma: It’s About Age

Marijuana
This was going to be a note about the Gallup poll showing that 58% of Americans think that the use of marijuana should be legal, and that 38% have tried it. It would include arguments about how pot stands in relation to other legal intoxicants—alcohol, tobacco, firearms (sorry, that’s the federal law enforcement agency)—and about how our justice system is distorted and how lives are ruined by reflexive, thoughtless, moralistic public policy.

But no. This is about a simple solution. It won’t make everybody happy, particularly those hypocritical it’s-all-bad-for-you-and-society Puritans who apparently missed the Sunday School class where Jesus mentioned getting the log out of your own eye before criticizing someone else’s splinter. But this might work.

Add marijuana to the list of acceptable American intoxicants. Then take the three biggies—alcohol, tobacco and marijuana—and make their distribution to children, particularly younger children, an even bigger deal than it is, so that the jail cells currently filled with marijuana-guilty adults could then be filled by real bad guys. Draconian punishment. Because while adult use of these intoxicants may be equivocal, childhood use of them is not.

We did not need American alcohol prohibition to learn that nothing will stop people using intoxicants. (Another hint: sex, at least if you’re doing it right, is also an intoxicant, the world’s most popular and, yes, one that the Puritans have also tried to circumscribe.) In another missed Sunday School lesson, Jesus did not smash the jars at the wedding at Cana, as he did the moneylender tables at the Temple; he actually made more wine for the celebrants. The poor we have with us always; so too the wine drinkers.

It is widely agreed that none of the three intoxicants are perfect: all of them are abused, all of them have real potential for ruining life and health. (America’s other big intoxicant, coffee, is excepted from this discussion, in part because any regulation of coffee would start a national revolt that really would prompt a new party, the Coffee Party, and in part because it is coffee that makes posts like this possible.) But as much as adolescents want to indulge, and as much as they already find a way to do it, if there’s a beneficial bargain to be made, this may be it. Let the grownups smoke/drink/smoke, let them explain to their kids why it isn’t a good idea for the younger set.

If you are currently a pre-teen or teenager yourself, or you once were, and you indulge in weed or once did, this may seem silly, arbitrary and unworkable. Here’s the news: all social policy is ultimately unworkable, or at least challenging and perplexing. The truth is that marijuana abuse by adolescents, just like alcohol and tobacco abuse by them, really is a bad thing, and really can cause irreversible damage. Adults should be free to get blissed out or ruin their lives (with minimal harm to others); kids shouldn’t be. If we are going to have some sort of marijuana policy, it ought to be a lot more sensible than the one we have now, even if the solution isn’t perfect.
10:39 AM 10/23/2013

10 Comments
October 21, 2013

Miley Ray Cyrus for Halloween

Miley Ray Cyrus
Millions of children and adults will spend Halloween dressed as some version of Miley Cyrus, which is a scary thought in so many ways.

The first suggestion to counteract this is that people dress as her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, as seen during the heyday of his popularity. But just wearing a mullet and spending the entire halloday singing Achy Breaky Heart seems cruel, with lots of pain and not much payoff.

Then an epiphany. Why not mash up father and daughter, Billy Ray and Miley. Dress as Miley Ray Cyrus. The most outrageous near-nude mullet-headed sex-crazed country dance pop tart in the history of music. Anyway, it’s all in the DNA.

For those who still don’t get it, and still need convincing, here are just some of the lyrics from the remix that you’ve all been asking for, know it or not:

Achy Breaky Wrecky Ball

You can tell my arms to go back onto the phone
You can tell my feet to hit the floor
Or you can tell my lips to tell my fingertips
They won’t be reaching out for you no more

We clawed, we chained our hearts in vain
We jumped never asking why
We kissed, I fell under your spell.
A love no one could deny

But don’t tell my heart, my achy breaky heart
I just don’t think it’d understand
And if you tell my heart, my achy breaky heart
He might blow up and kill this man

Don’t you ever say I just walked away
I will always want you
I can’t live a lie, running for my life
I will always want you

You can tell your ma I moved to Arkansas
Or you can tell your dog to bite my leg
Or tell your brother Cliff who’s fist can tell my lips
He never really liked me anyway

I came in like a wrecking ball
I never hit so hard in love
All I wanted was to break your walls
All you ever did was wreck me
Yeah, you, you wreck me

Leave a comment
October 4, 2013

Joke Break: Duck Walks into a Drugstore…

Duck Drug Store
We need a break. So here’s one in a continuing series of jokes from the joke file, a well-traveled manila folder containing about three pounds of clippings and copies from all kinds of sources.

This doesn’t mean that there aren’t stupid, tragic and completely unnecessary things going on in this country and the world. That’s exactly what’s going on—but we still have to live. And laugh.

Great jokes don’t have to offend sensibilities, but they sometimes do. So a blanket apology in advance if you are put off or offended—or if you don’t find a particular joke very funny.

 

Duck walks into a drugstore, asks for some Chap Stick. Guy behind the counter says, “That’ll be fifty-nine cents.” Duck says, “Put it on my bill.”

Next day, the duck walks into the drugstore, asks for a package of condoms. Guy behind the counter says, “Would you like me to put that on your bill?” Duck says, “Hey, what kind of a duck do you think I am!”

Leave a comment
August 29, 2013

Steve Lonegan: I Personally Like Being a Guy

Steve Lonegan
I’m strictly a male male
And my future I hope will be
In the home of a lovely female
Who’ll enjoy being a girl having a guy like me.
Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein, I Enjoy Being a Girl

Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.
Abraham Lincoln

Newark mayor Cory Booker is running for the U.S. Senate seat from New Jersey, left empty by the death of Sen. Frank Lautenberg in June. Booker’s Republican opponent in the October16 election is Steve Lonegan.

Booker is unmarried, does not talk about his sexuality, though he has made reference to girlfriends past. He is, along with many politicians and Americans, a supporter of marriage equality. There has been discussion and innuendo that Booker may be gay, something he has not directly addressed.

Enter candidate Lonegan, who is twenty points down in the polls, and very unlikely to win, whatever he throws at Booker. Without comment, here are some of the remarks made by Lonegan in an interview with Newsmax.

Maybe one comment: Lonegan’s “I personally like being a guy” is one of the stranger things said in the midst of political discourse. And that is saying something.

“It’s kind of weird. As a guy, I personally like being a guy. I don’t know if you saw the stories last year. They’ve been out for quite a bit about how he likes to go out at 3 o’clock in the morning for a manicure and a pedicure…Maybe that helps to get him the gay vote, by acting ambiguous. That I can’t address. All I know is I don’t like going out in the middle of the night, or any time of the day, for a manicure and pedicure. It was described as his peculiar fetish, is how it was described. I have a more peculiar fetish. I like a good Scotch and a cigar. That’s my fetish, but we’ll just compare the two.”

A final comment: Steve Lonegan, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And then again…

Leave a comment
April 4, 2013

Clinton, DOMA and GLAAD

Bill Clinton
People—including some politicians—hate politics, for a thousand reasons. Every one of those reasons is valid.

The answer to these reasons is the often cited quote from Otto von Bismarck: “Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable – the art of the next best.”

Oh principles, oh pragmatism. We honor and admire the idealists, but in the end we support those who get things done—especially the things that we want done.

This is a timeline. The common thread is one of America’s current political dynasties.

  • 1996 – President Bill Clinton signs the Defense of Marriage Act.
  • 2003 – Hillary Clinton votes for the Iraq War Resolution.
  • 2008 – Hillary Clinton runs for President.
  • 2011 – Bill Clinton comes out in favor of marriage equality.
  • 2013 – The Iraq War ends.
  • 2013 – Bill Clinton calls DOMA unconstitutional.
  • 2013 – DOMA is argued before the United States Supreme Court.
  • 2013 – Hillary Clinton comes out in favor of marriage equality.
  • 2013 – Bill Clinton to receive the Advocate for Change Award from the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD)
  • 2016 – Hillary Clinton runs for President?

People who do things for political reasons, or support those who do, should never be ashamed of that. Otto von Bismarck, unifier of the German Empire in the nineteenth century, certainly wasn’t.

But the “art of the possible” does create some tight and twisted places that Houdini might have trouble escaping from. Unless, of course, he had help.

Bill Clinton’s statement before signing DOMA includes this: “I also want to make clear to all that the enactment of this legislation should not, despite the fierce and at times divisive rhetoric surrounding it, be understood to provide an excuse for discrimination.”

Here is DOMA, which has been the law of the United States for the last seventeen years, and may or may not still be the law after the Supreme Court decision.

The statute reads:

No State, territory, or possession of the United States, or Indian tribe, shall be required to give effect to any public act, record, or judicial proceeding of any other State, territory, possession, or tribe respecting a relationship between persons of the same sex that is treated as a marriage under the laws of such other State, territory, possession, or tribe, or a right or claim arising from such relationship.

It also changed the definition of marriage in U.S. law:

In determining the meaning of any Act of Congress, or of any ruling, regulation, or interpretation of the various administrative bureaus and agencies of the United States, the word `marriage’ means only a legal union between one man and one woman as husband and wife, and the word `spouse’ refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife.

Evolution—political, philosophical, or most other kinds—can be a wonderful thing, particularly if it leads to freedom and fairness. But evolution presupposes a prior state, which might be called “less evolved” or “unevolved.”

Some people approach this by pretending that the pre-evolutionary state didn’t exist. They may also be unwilling to acknowledge that the pre-evolutionary state was politically motivated, or that the evolution itself may be. Remember, the art of the possible is only possible by paying no attention to the man, or woman, behind the curtain. Once in a while, they even apologize for it, or contort themselves as John Kerry did, well-meaningly, about his prior support for the Iraq War: “I was for it before I was against it.”

Still, this is America. We love second chances and second acts. Consider the late Senator Robert Byrd, who emerged from the depths of racism to become a champion of Constitutional rights. But while it may not be fitting to punish people for having once upon a time acted in a powerfully less enlightened way, this doesn’t always mean they have to be rewarded. Or awarded.

Leave a comment
February 26, 2013

The Pope and the H-Bomb

Richard Chaberlain in The Thorn Birds
From The Guardian

The Vatican has attacked reports in the Italian media linking Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation to the alleged discovery of a network of gay prelates as attempts to influence the cardinals in their choice of a new pontiff.

The Vatican secretariat of state said in a statement: “It is deplorable that as we draw closer to the time of the beginning of the conclave … that there be a widespread distribution of often unverified, unverifiable or completely false news stories that cause serious damage to persons and institutions.”

Whether or not that statement was written by Church lawyers (and even for lawyers, they serve the cause of language and reasoning with uncommon precision and conscientiousness), the denial is carefully constructed. The stories are described as one of three things: unverified, unverifiable or completely false. Note bene that two of these categories do not necessarily include or even imply falsity. Just verification. The reason for this care is that there is a top ten directive about false witness—which includes labeling as false that which is not.

Almost everyone willing to talk openly about the workings of the Church, and particularly its seminaries, will admit that there is a homosexual element of the enterprise. To say “everybody knows” is a ridiculous overstatement. But to say “nobody knows” or “not true” are equally ridiculous. Many know, some talk, most don’t.

The speculation that Pope Benedict resigned because the H-Bomb was about to drop will remain unverified and unverifiable, if the Vatican firewall holds, and it may. But whether you call it a code or a conspiracy of silence, speculation calls for and ultimately begs for verification.

Both law enforcement and the Church depend on the urge to confess. That urge is rooted in the complex and inchoate thing called conscience. In the case of the police, suspects are torn between punishment and a clean(er) heart. This is exactly the same tension for Catholics in the booth. But at this much higher level, the stakes and the choice to tell are much more momentous.

Leave a comment