Those who oppose gay marriage say that legal and sacerdotal recognition of the abiding love between a man and a man or a woman and a woman somehow degrades marriage between a man and a woman, and even threatens the social order.

I think love is outside and above the social order. If there is a higher law, love is that law.

I think denying gay people the sacrament of marriage degrades heterosexual marriage. I think that the refusal and the legal legitimization of the refusal to recognize the union between two people of the same sex degrades any claim we have to being a free society, and threatens the institutions that protect all our freedoms. There’s nothing "civil" about it.

I am married and my wife and I enjoy all the rights and benefits of any married couple. I have never thought that my marriage would be in any way diminished by the legal recognition of the union of two people who happen to be the same sex. In fact, I think all citizens having the right to legally consumate their intimate partnerships without regard to sex enhances the institution of marriage, strengthens the commonweal of our society, and promotes and protects families.

Believers who work to ban gay marriage makes a mock of God’s love, and a mockery of the idea that we are all God’s children. It is an attempt to outlaw love. It is an attack on families that protect and nuture love in a dangerous world. Abraham Lincoln said, "Those who would deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves." I say those who would deny family to others don't deserve it for themselves. Denying marriage and family rights to some is no defense of the freedoms we so proudly, and loudly, proclaim. People who propose, and vote to enact, such a ban should be ashamed.

You cannot outlaw love. As St. Paul says in 1 Corinthians 13, love never fails. Love is greater than faith and outlasts hope. Love abides, as Paul says, when tongues and prophesies fail. Love will prevail.

In fact, in my mind it is already August. I wrote and posted a little poem on Facebook, and the first line is “August’s full moon rises…” I don’t think anyone noticed, even though Deb, Jason, and James gave it the Facebook thumbs-up and “liked” it. Perhaps it is already August for them, too.

I revised the poemlet, the faceboku, the squiblet, slightly:

The full moon of July lifts

above the hash of ghosts.

In the dark of kitchen

Coltrane pours out of the radio

like water overflowing the sink.

August soon.

This is the first summer I’ve spent outside of Oklahoma for more than a decade, and I’ve been trying on the weather in the Land of Fred (Frederick, Maryland) like a new shirt, feeling it on my skin, admiring myself in it in the mirror of what is. The subtle differences are hard to describe. The air is softer here than in Oklahoma. The humidity is higher. Now that the trees and what all have leafed out, there’s an incredible lushness to the landscape of central Maryland. In the farmers’ fields, the standing corn is truly “as high as an elephant’s eye.” When I wandered down to the Monocacy River near Buckeystown, to wet my fishing line and catch my wits, I passed by a farm where a harvester was already cutting that high corn.

We’ve had some truly blazing hot days when all I wanted to do was pitch a tent of bedsheets over the air conditioning vent and camp, but I like to walk; not in the mall or on a treadmill, thank you, but out of doors. I am obliged to go walkies with Annie Beagle–daily, if possible, to exercise whatever devils that may infest both our spirits, not having a herd of swine to cast them into, nor cliff to run them off. Walkies in the evening, walkies in the morning, but we do not go out in the noonday sun, because I may be crazy, but I am not an Englishman.

It is reported by those pesky scientists that this is the hottest summer on record, but most of the weatherman and talking heads never mention global warming. I’ve read that most TV weatherman (in America, at least) do not believe that global warming and anthropotentiated climate change. The link to that article is lost somewhere in my Facebook profile. In Crazytown just south of here, the parliament of whores can’t even put together a bill that addresses the matter, much less pass one.  It’s not the heat, it’s the stupidity. It’s not the heat, it’s thecupidity. Also. Too.

It’s a melancholy heat.

I can't not keep going. It is not given me to stop the going. We just keep going and going, like the Energizer Bunny. In a scene in Goethe's play Faust, Mephistopheles puts on Faust's robe and pretends to be Faust when a fawning student comes in. The student begs "Faust" to enscribe his book for him. Mephistopheles writes "Eritis sicut deus, scientes bonum et malum." This is a quote from the Book of Genesis in the Latin Vulgate Bible, the wise old serpent saying, "You shall be as God, knowing good and evil." After the student leaves, Mephistopheles says (Approximately, the play is in German, OK?), "Follow that old proverb and listen to my cousin the snake, and someday you'll terrify yourself with your likeness to God. Goethe had it right--We have faithfully followed that verse from Genesis and now terrify ourselves with Our Own Likeness. 

Keep going.

When Michel Nostradamus came to Paris in the summer of 1556 to advise Catherine Di Medici on cosmetics and the future of France, as well as cast diplomatically hopeful horoscopes for her children, some court wit (either the poet Etienne Jodelle or Jean Calvin's right hand man Theodore de Beze) penned the following Latin couplet: 

Nostra damus com falsa damas, nam fallere nostrum est; 
Et cum falsa damas, nil nisi nostra damas.

In English it runs thusly: "We give that which is our own when we give false things: for it is in our nature to deceive, and when we give false things, we give but our own things."

Nostradamus stared into the "thin flame," and gave the world...doggerel. A doggerel full of flickers.

Keep going.

There is an equivalent of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem in the arithmetic of dreams and the calculus of prophecy. You cannot choose a future, no future is or can be chosen for you, you cannot mean it into existence, it is not meant for you, it has no meaning. There is no correction because there is nothing to correct: There is not that kind of action.

Keep going.

The trouble with doom is that it follows its own schedule and posts no timetables. The worldline is implicit, not explicit. It doesn't happen fast enough for those impatient for the latest version of doom to release, ready for download; the four horsemen are always late; yet it blindsides the willfully oblivious when the thief in the night stages a home invasion at dawn. The Cassandras sing their arias and the rest whistle in the growing dark, in vain.

Speaking collectively, we feel doom impending, yet we feel it's taking too damn long. We dread it, but we can't wait, like kids on Christmas Eve, kids who still believe in Santa but who secretly fear Santa's not going to deliver the doom we're dying for. 

Pour me another metaphor, barkeep... There is no light at the end of this tunnel, not even that of an oncoming train. We're groping in black void, hoping to find a wall, and to feel our way to the opening of a tunnel. The tunnel has already left the station. Doom is not a train, and no political, scientific, or religious Mussolini can make it run on time, much less prevent a wreck. Neither Paul Ehrlich nor Hal Lindsay can map it out for us, because we each have our own doom. Doom happens. Doom is an everyday occurrence, yet nobody could have predicted it, and even if someone did, we weren't listening. We were watching Lost. Or Survivor. Or American Idol. The black tide of doom is sweeping in on collective us, and we're surprised.

Trying to predict or plan for our murderous future is, as Billy Collins said about writing poetry, like playing Pin-the-Tail-on-the-Donkey with no tail, no pin, and no donkey. But the blindfold is still on; many blindfolds, woven on cognitive frames in the meme-driven looms of our mortal minds.

Doom is random but inevitable, and the random is harder to face than the inevitable. Randomness is inherent in nature, yet the human mind abhors it. The randomness of doom is a hard truth, and we instinctively reject it. There has to be a reason. This all means something... Look in the mirror, summon your best Jack Nicholson growl, and say, "Truth? You can't handle the truth!" Yet you can't escape it. You can't save yourself or anyone else. Prepare to meet your doom. I dare you.

Note: All metaphors spilled in the gulf of meaning are BYOB (Bring your own boom).

after Andreas Libanius