…ink as a lens it says something. If I were to say what I think “Catholicism” represents, trend-wise, it would be something like this: the desire to see something ascendent that is aesthetically lush, intellectually rigorous, ambiguously reactionary, and which, above all, people can’t get mad at you for. Because getting mad at people for their religion is an asshole move, and nobody wants to be an asshole, and the people who do mark themselves out as people with whom it’s not really possible to have a conversation. You can also treat religion like…

via Bunny

Man, this is very interesting, because it does not match my experience of non-Catholics’ perception of Catholicism at all. How Can You Associate Yourself With An Institution Seeped In Homophobia, Transphobia, The Oppression Of Women, And The Protection Of Pedophile Priests is, like, a valid conversation to have, but also not deployed in a conversational kind of way so much as an invisible fence kind of way.

However, I run with the kind of people who see “ambiguously reactionary” and have sirens go off in our heads, so1.

Who are the people who are pulled toward the reactionary these days? There are demographic arguments, obviously – the mainstream doctrines of social justice feel more dispensable to the safety of some than to that of others – but I am realizing I don’t have a good sense of the psychology of the type. If anyone’s written anything along these lines that isn’t, you know, NYT-fawning-over-fascists-because-look-they-have-nice-haircuts and that doesn’t endlessly ruminate on the importance of the tiny slice of society that reactionaries make up, send it my way.

  1. As always, this post is made from a position of woundedness by the aesthetic appropriation of my heritage to ill effect. Where is the Latin Novus Ordo Mass for queerdos? Where is it?? ↩