Morford Today

How can you not love Mark Mor­ford’s columns? And why isn’t there an RSS feed on LJ so I can read them here?

It is, quite sim­ply, a stun­ning and rather unex­pect­ed vic­to­ry for the spir­it, for the heart, for the body, for the very notion that we as a hum­ble and chaot­ic and dis­tressed species can actu­al­ly progress almost despite our­selves, despite a famous­ly oppres­sive and uptight lead­er­ship, despite reams of deceit and war and John Ashcroft’s sad nip­ple fetish. 

This is a crazed wild­flower burst­ing through a con­crete side­walk. This is a breath of fresh air after smok­ing four packs of tox­ic dis­in­for­ma­tion a day for the past three years. This is the unex­pect­ed roy­al flush when all you’ve been dealt to date are jok­ers and sui­cide kings.

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And this is how you know. When those whose sole agen­da is to pro­mote the tyran­ny of fear and vio­lent­ly mis­in­ter­pret the Bible for their own acidic agen­da are them­selves hor­ri­fied and run­ning scared, there has been a gor­geous breakthrough. 

Maybe it’s this. Maybe this case sig­ni­fies the deep­er acknowl­edg­ment of our pur­pose on the plan­et, the sub­tle real­iza­tion that God, that the divine, is not, in fact, sep­a­rate from the flesh, is not some­thing to be dread­ed and guilt­ed by and wield­ed like a bloody sanc­ti­mo­nious sword by born-again pres­i­dents and sex­less attor­ney gen­er­als and snick­er­ing for­eign despots. 

In oth­er words, maybe this is not, as the GOP so des­per­ate­ly wants every­one to believe, about icky “deviant” sex and unholy gay mar­riage and blas­phe­mous anal-sex toys at all. Maybe the change is about the poten­cy of love. About the nat­ur­al explo­rations of love in nature, of human rela­tion­ships and the free­dom to explore and let love pen­e­trate our lives and make the divine into some­thing we can touch, taste, slide into and, ulti­mate­ly, incarnate. 

Oh my heav­ens. No won­der the con­ser­v­a­tive Right is aghast and atwit­ter. No won­der the Death Star is pan­icky and sweaty and fla­gel­lat­ing itself. Because the divine is wink­ing in our gen­er­al direc­tion. And, this time, it looks like we just might wink back.