#i know he dress very conservative like the good Christian mother he is but baby its hot outside lemme see just a teent of calf

[nashvillethotchicken]

If we all band together and get him therapy, we may be able to see a lil peak of louis’s ankle or maybe even elbow, inshallah

[dwellordream]

“Members of respectable Victorian society were also able to perceive women as married to one another, and they rarely confounded female marriages between white, middle-class women with the polygamous or incestuous arrangements they attributed to the peoples they sought to subjugate, using Christian ideals of marriage to justify the imperial mission. The life of Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), documented in letters and memoirs, shows that even a woman who did have an illicit affair with her daughter-in-law differentiated between that illicit, quasi-incestuous affair and a more marital relationship, conducted in full view of her friends and the public, with a woman she called her wife. Charlotte Cushman was one of the most acclaimed and financially successful American actresses of the nineteenth century, best known for playing Romeo in the 1840s.

Born in the United States, she lived outside it for most of her life, first in England and then in Italy, but returned often to play sold-out national tours. As Lisa Merrill has shown in a brilliant biography, Cushman used the language of marriage to conceptualize many of her sexual relationships with women, which after her rise to stardom usually consisted of a primary relationship with a peer and a secondary, clandestine relationship with a much younger woman, often a fan. Cushman described her primary relationships as marriages that created a spousal bond and kinship network. In 1844, she noted in her diary, “Slept with Rose,” and the following day wrote “‘R.’ Saturday, July 6th ‘married.’”. As in heterosexual marriage, sex made marriage and marriage created kinship: Cushman called Rose’s father “Father,” as though he were her father-in-law, or as though in marrying Rose she had become her sister.

Cushman was involved in two long-term relationships with women: one with Matilda Hays, an author, translator, and feminist activist, and another with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, whom she met in 1857. Steb- bins is best known today for her sculpture Angel of the Waters, which stands in Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace and features prominently in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. Until her death in 1876, Cushman cultivated a public persona as a respectable artist and lived openly with Emma Stebbins in an elegant apartment brimming with friends and pets. After Cushman’s death, Emma Stebbins wrote a biography of her former spouse that, with the reticence and impersonality typical of the lifewriting discussed in chapter 1, made only one direct statement about their relationship: “It was in the winter of 1856–57 that the compiler of these memoirs first made Miss Cushman’s acquaintance, and from that time the current of their two lives ran, with rare exceptions, side by side.” But Stebbins attested to her marital connection with Cushman through the very act of writing the biography as a memoir, in her pointed exclusion of Cushman’s other lovers from her account, in her detailed description of their shared apartment in Rome, and in a ten-page inventory of their pets, including dogs named Teddy and Bushie.

…Cushman herself described her relationship to Stebbins as a marriage when she warned her young lover Emma Crow that she was not a free woman; as she put it, “Do you not know that I am already married and wear the badge upon the third finger of my left hand?” (211). Cushman began a clandestine relationship with the much younger Crow in 1858, soon after she exchanged rings with Emma Stebbins and began living with her. Cushman met Crow while touring the United States; their affair lasted years, spanned continents, and is documented in Cushman’s many letters to Crow, which Crow preserved and bequeathed to the Library of Con- gress, despite her lover’s many anxious requests that she burn them. In that correspondence, Cushman frequently tried to naturalize her adulterous betrayal of Emma Stebbins by calling the younger Emma Crow her daughter, niece, and baby, as if to suggest that Crow was not Stebbins’s rival but simply an addition to the family. “Never did a mother love her child so dearly. Never did Auntie think so sweetly so yearningly of her Niece. Never did Ladie love her lover so intensely,” Cushman wrote.

Cushman took the incestuous fantasy of sex as kinship to its literal limits when she encouraged Crow to marry Cushman’s nephew and adopted son, Ned Cushman. Cushman’s plan was to have Crow live near her as her daughter-in-law, a situation to which Cushman’s wife, Emma Stebbins, could not object. Crow was so in love with Cushman that she agreed to the arrangement, and she and Cushman continued their affair well after Crow’s marriage to Ned made Charlotte Cushman young Emma’s mother-in-law and aunt to the children Emma had with Ned. After Crow married Ned Cushman, Charlotte continued to address Emma as her lover, but also as a “dear new daughter” who had, in taking the Cushman name, also become in some sense Cushman’s wife. Cushman called Emma’s marriage with Ned her own ��ultimate entire union” with Emma, and her letters to a pregnant Emma convey a sense, as biographer Lisa Merrill puts it, “that she and her ‘little lover’ were having this baby together.” With a grandiosity that came easily to a rich and famous actress, Cushman arrogated to herself the roles of husband, wife, father, mother, aunt, and lover, saluting Emma as “Dearest and Sweetest daughter[,] niece, friend and lover” and referring to herself in other letters as “Big Mamma.”

Cushman’s matrilineal, incestuous, adulterous, polygamous, homosexual household seems to realize the conservative fantasy of the primitive family in which no distinctions are made, no restrictions imposed, and patriarchal monogamy does not contain the promiscuity that results when women reign unfettered. For that very reason, Cushman provides an excellent point of departure for interrogating the equation of homosexuality with primitive sexual anarchy. Her affair with Emma Crow does not in fact show that those who disregard the taboo on homosexuality will also flout the prohibitions on incest and polygamy. Instead it demonstrates that, like most Victorians, Cushman’s desires were shaped by taboos that incited the very desires they prohibited. Vows of monogamy, even when not legally binding, made adultery all the more alluring, and as Foucault shows in the first volume of the The History of Sexuality, nothing in the Victorian family was more normative than its obsession with incest.

In societies that make “the family . . . the most active site of sexuality . . . incest occupies a central place; it is constantly being solicited and refused; it is an object of obsession and attraction, a dreadful secret and an indispensable pivot. It is manifested as a thing that is strictly forbidden . . . but it is also a thing that is continuously demanded in order for the family to be a hotbed of constant sexual incitement.” The mother-daughter axis was as subject to eroticization as any other aspect of family life, and incest fantasies, veiled and overt, were a prominent feature of Victorian culture (see chapters 3 and 4). Cushman’s letters to Emma Crow blurred the lines between lover and family member in the same way as Dinah Mulock Craik’s 1850 novel Olive did when describing a wife’s love for her hus- band: “She loved him at once with the love of mother, sister, friend, and wife.” Pornographic novels obsessively depicted incest of every variety and in every possible gender configuration (see chapter 3), and Henry James easily translated his acquaintance with Charlotte Cushman’s history into the heterosexual plot of The Golden Bowl, in which a father marries his daughter’s husband’s lover, also named Charlotte.

The normative cast of even Cushman’s most hidden desires helps to explain why she was not branded as deviant in her lifetime and why the relationships with women that she did make public were accepted by those surrounding her. Cushman was a recognized and often admired type: a nineteenth-century woman whose financial independence made it relatively easy for her to form a couple with another woman. Cushman enjoyed playing male roles on stage, and like many middle-class and aristocratic women in female marriages, she adopted masculine dress and nicknames. But she lived openly with other women as a woman, and identified with both feminine and masculine roles. Cushman called Emma Stebbins her better half and described herself as married to her first lover, Rose, but she did not consistently or exclusively see herself as a husband.

The language of marriage described the quality of her commitment to a sexual partner rather than a gendered division of roles. In this respect female marriage appears, on the basis of current historical evidence, to have been a primarily middle- and upper-class phenomenon. Working- class women who earned their own money also formed couples with other women, but it was more common for one member of the couple to live as a man. Such alliances were therefore not perceived as female marriages. Although in some technical sense they could be called marriages between women, in the eyes of the law, the couple’s community, and even the couple themselves, they were marriages between a woman and a man. If caught or exposed as women, some female husbands were legally cen- sured and mocked in ballads and broadsides for seizing male privileges, but others were not. An 1869 article on “Modern Amazons,” for example, wrote approvingly of two women who assumed the roles of “man and wife” and “lived together in good repute with their neighbours for eighteen years.”

…The idea of female marriage was not simply a private metaphor used by women in same-sex relationships; it was also a term used by the legally married to describe relationships that were conducted openly and discussed neutrally in respectable society. Even among middle-class Victori- ans, marriages were not defined by law alone, and for couples with no legal status, social acceptance provided legitimation and established rules for beginning and ending relationships. Charlotte Cushman assumed that many in her circle were aware of sexual romance between women, since she warned Emma Crow in an 1860 letter that “there are people in this world who could understand our love for each other, therefore it is necessary that we should keep our expression of it to ourselves.”

The historical context leaves it surprisingly unclear whether Cushman demanded secrecy because Crow was a woman, or because Cushman was afraid of being exposed as adulterous. There are no similar records of Cushman attempting to conceal her relationships with Eliza Cook, Matilda Hays, or Emma Stebbins, which far from being open secrets were explicitly acknowledged by her social circle and in newspapers. Cushman and her lovers displayed their intimacy for all to see. In the 1840s Cook published a fervent poem, “To Charlotte Cushman,” which described the two women as “captive in Affection’s thrall,” and when Hays published her translation of George Sand’s La Petite Fadette in 1851, she dedicated it to Charlotte Cushman. On a tour of United States theaters in 1849, Cushman traveled with Hays, and a newspaper article praising Cushman as a “woman . . . worthy of homage and esteem” added, “Miss Cushman will be accompanied by her friend, novelist and translator, Matilda M. Hays.”

…To understand the social position of women in female marriages, it is helpful to distinguish between a subculture and a network. Charlotte Cushman did not belong to a subculture, a type of social group that tends to be organized around a limited number of shared traits and that coheres through its separation from the mainstream. She did, however, belong to a network, a form of social alliance whose strength derives from its relative openness and internal variety and from its links to other networks. Overlapping sets of acquaintances as well as shared identities define networks; the stronger the network, the greater the number and type of groups to which it is linked. Cushman’s network thus included women in or interested in relationships with other women and had many links to people who were not in same-sex couples.

Her circle overlapped considerably, for example, with the Browning circle, which consisted of highly respected artists who lived in Italy to get distance from their immediate families, access to a warmer climate, and exposure to Italy’s historic culture. Charlotte Cushman’s integration into multiple networks shows how easily same-sex relationships between women were assimilated to the model of marriage. Indeed, as Merrill notes, Cushman’s relationships with Matilda Hays and Emma Stebbins helped incorporate the actress into many networks by giving her an aura of propriety and respectability. Women in female marriages or interested in sexual liaisons with women banded together but also entered social circles organized around legally married couples. Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning spent time not only with Cushman and Hays but with several other women whose charged same-sex relationships included giddy flirtations, tempestuous infatuations, short-term love affairs, and long-term partnerships.

…In the 1860s and 1870s, a period when few knew of the sexological idea of inversion and many still associated sodomy with sexual acts absolutely opposed to nature and virtue, the female couple was accepted as a variation on legal marriage, not treated as a separate species. This suggests that Lillian Faderman and Carroll Smith-Rosenberg were absolutely right that Victorians considered love between women to be perfectly normal, whether that love involved intense, sensual friendships that existed alongside marriage to men (Smith-Rosenberg) or lifelong partnerships that replaced marriage to men (Faderman). It also shows how they were wrong. Smith-Rosenberg erred in defining intimacy between women as a supplement to male-female marriage, for women in female marriages did not supplement marriage, they appropriated it.

Faderman was wrong to argue that acceptance of female couples depended on the perceived asexuality of their relationships; the use of marriage as a term to describe female couples suggests that people believed sex was involved, for marriage, unlike friendship, was never an asexual term. For Victorians, marriage meant the union of sexual and spiritual impulses, the reconciliation of sexuality with propriety. Marriage was a socially acceptable exhibition of sexual intimacy because it was predicated on fidelity and thus advertised not only the sexuality of spouses but also their acceptance of restraints and limits. For this reason, female marriage was not associated with a savage state of sexual license but instead was readily integrated into even the most restrictive ideas of social order. As we will see, however, female marriage also differed from legal marriage between men and women in significant ways, and those differences made it a model for reformers seeking to modernize legal marriage.”

- Sharon Marcus, “The Genealogy of Marriage.” in Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England

[nicnacsnonsense]

A few days ago @whiteleyfoster did some lovely The Birdcage AU art and @poetic----nonsense decided we needed a full AU figured out, so they tagged me. Because I am now the person who figures out fusion AUs., Which honestly, that’s fantastic; I love it. Unfortunately I hadn’t seen The Birdcage before, but it’s available to watch on Prime, so I just took care of that. The bad news is I didn’t actually like the movie all that much. The good news is my problem was in the execution rather than the premise, so I do think there’s a good Good Omens AU to be had with two adjustments. One, lean into the wacky hijinks more -- this is definitely a wacky hijinks comedy kind of plot, but the tone of the movie was oddly serious a lot of the time. And two, I want to really feel the love between all the members of our little queer family. The movie tells us they’re a happy and healthy family, but what I was seeing was a lot of Val being mean to his parents, a lot of Armand being mean to and dismissive of Albert and a lot of Albert being overly dramatic and sensitive to everything.

Moving on to our characters. In Whiteley’s drawing they had Aziraphale as Albert and Crowley as Armand, which I get that, but I want to switch it. Aziraphale as the small business owner cismale who is obviously gay (I didn’t get any obviously gay vibes from Armand, but the movie told us a couple of times he was giving them off, so *shrugs*). Meanwhile Crowley is amab and typically presents male day-to-day, but also presents female at time and is slightly ambiguous in terms of gender. I also feel Crowley’s dramatic bitch energy is a better match for Albert’s than Aziraphale’s is. 

For Val and Barbara, Whiteley suggested Adam and Warlock respectively, and while I like each of those choices a lot individually, it doesn’t work for me once you put them together. Partially that’s a personal thing -- I know Adam/Warlock is somewhat popular but it squicks me out -- but also unless you want to genderbend one of them female, you have a gay relationship which kind of undermines the whole “gay couple has to pretend to be hetero to fool the super conservative in-laws.” I still think there’s a way you could do it, but it would take a lot of work. So instead I propose Newt as Val and Anathema as Barbara. (which weirdly makes the second time I’ve had Aziraphale as Newt’s dad. I swear I’m not trying to make it a thing).

I realize the immediate impulse there is if you’re going to use those two you should flip them: Newt as Barbara and Anathema as Val. But first of all I think if Anathema was Val she wouldn’t stand for lying about who her parents are; sucks for you Newt, but you’re just going to have to come clean. And if you put aside political views, these are actually really good matches for each of their families in canon. Anathema was a “professional descendant,” her entire life was mapped out for her by her many times great-grandmother, which is something of the ultimate extreme Barbara’s controlling family. Meanwhile’s Newt’s mother seemed very loving and she supported and encouraged his enthusiasm for computers no matter how many power outages he caused. Plus I do think there’s a great parallel in Crowley and Aziraphale having to hide their homosexuality from Anathema’s parents and the idea of Anathema being a liberal, occultist, environmentalist, feminist, general social activist, probably met Newt at an LGBT+ support rally, who goes home to her family and has to hide all of that and pretend to be a good little conservative Christian girl.

For the other major characters Anathema’s parents would be Anathema’s mom (obviously) and Gabriel I think. The idea of him as Anathema’s dad is a little weird, but you can’t deny Gabriel fits the super conservative senator mold really well. You could also use the Dowlings instead if you wanted, but c’mon, Gabriel fawning over femme!Crowley? That’s too funny, guys. For Newt’s biological mother I think Michael. She could definitely pull off high-powered exec who isn’t the least bit maternal, but is willing to show up for her son in this because of a sense of duty. In this version Aziraphale and Michael would have actually been dating because Aziraphale was still in the closet and in deep denial at that point, but they broke up when she got pregnant and Aziraphale wanted to keep the baby and Michael wanted to put it up for adoption the instant that baby slid out of her. (I also totally picture that after they agreed to break up Michael said it was probably for the best, seeing as Aziraphale was just super gay.) And finally for Agador I think Madame Tracy. Admittedly as a character she’s not much like him, but looking at it in terms of the function of the character as a comic relief zany housekeeper type, I think she could do a really good job as her own version of that.

A few other changes. The whole argument about “who’s the white whine for?” still happens, but it’s playful banter, rather than any sort of serious accusation of cheating. Then after the show Crowley and Aziraphale go upstairs together and surprise! Newt’s here for a visit. He tells both of his parents about his engagement at the same time. Then again when the issue of Anathema lying to her parents comes up, Newt approaches both Crowley and Aziraphale together and presents it not as something he’s demanding they do for him, but a problem to be solved together. Then Crowley and Aziraphale are totally extra enough to be like, zany hijinks, we’ll just fake like we’re the very straight cultural attache to Greece and his woman female wife. 

Except after a bit of prep work Crowley suddenly backs out as the wife, claiming he can pull of woman sure, but he can’t pull off housewife. That’s where Michael comes in. Crowley is the one who chooses not to go into her office -- he resents her for what he considers to be her abandonment of Newt -- but when he gets impatient waiting he coincidentally barges in at just the wrong moment to what looks like flirting/cheating (but we the audience know was actually something completely innocent) and storms off. 

Aziraphale goes to talk to Crowley once they both get home and his shocked and even a little hurt that Crowley would ever think Aziraphale would cheat on him. Crowley says, no he knows that’s not what was going on and he knows Aziraphale wouldn’t, especially not with a woman. So Aziraphale is like what’s up then, you’ve been acting weird ever since Newt got home. And Crowley admits that he is jealous, but not over any sort of fictitious other lover, but of Newt. Because Newt is getting married and Crowley and Aziraphale can’t (cause 90′s). And that’s why Crowley backed out of the wife role, because tt was too close to what he wants and can’t have. The two of them have a heart-to-heart about how much they love each other and how committed they are. This also means when Crowley does show up to the dinner dressed up as Newt’s mom, it’s a heart-warming moment where Crowley is silently communicating that Aziraphale is right, that it’s real in their hearts, and that’s what matters. 

[berniesrevolution]

In Dilley, Texas, there is only one grocery store, and that grocery store is Lowes. (It is not a Lowes, like the home improvement center. It is a totally different and legally distinct store that also happens to be called Lowes.) Lowes is a place of many mysteries. I once went there to buy vegetable broth for a sick coworker, and combed the soup aisle for nearly 20 minutes before being forced to admit that no, Lowes does not carry vegetable broth. The closest thing they had was a can of something called “vegetable beef.” Lowes does, however, carry bacon-flavored pancake syrup, quite a lot of animal pheromones in spray cans (including such choice selections as “raccoon urine” and “sow in heat,” which I assume are for agricultural rather than cosmetic purposes), and a large selection of devotional candles in glass cylinders.

I had never paid much attention to the candles, but a friend of mine was in town, volunteering at the child internment camp where I work as an immigration lawyer, and he wanted to bring back a candle for some eclectic ofrenda-type situation he had set up in his D.C. apartment. He is a meticulous and thoughtful sort of person, and took a long time debating between various candidates. I had come to Lowes primarily to buy Cheez-Its, and was getting impatient. I picked up a candle at random. “How about this one?” I said.

The candle had a picture of a Little Lord Fauntleroy-type in a plumed hat and a white ruff, with a pink seashell pinned to his cloak. I glanced at the label on the back. Glorioso Santo Niño de Atocha, it said, patrón de las que est��n injustamente en prisión, protector de viajeros y que das la mano al que se encuentra en peligro…

I didn’t know anything about this saint at all, despite having grown up Catholic, so I looked him up on my phone. I soon discovered that he was not really a saint, per se, but a special Limited Edition version of baby Jesus. Wikpedia offered up the following backstory:

In the 13th century, Spain was under Muslim rule. The town of Atocha, now part of Madrid’s Arganzuela district, was lost to the Muslims, and many Christians there were taken prisoners as spoils of war. The Christian prisoners were not fed by the jailers, but by family members who brought them food. According to pious legend, the caliph ordered that only children under the age of 12 were permitted to bring food. Conditions became increasingly difficult for those men without small children. … Reports soon began among the people of Atocha that an unknown child under the age of twelve and dressed in pilgrim’s clothing, had begun to bring food to childless prisoners at night. The women of the town returned to Our Lady of Atocha to thank the Virgin for her intercession, and noticed that the shoes worn by the Infant Jesus were tattered and dusty. They replaced the shoes of the Infant Jesus, but these became worn again. The people of Atocha took this as a sign that it was the Infant Jesus who went out every night to help those in need.

This all got me rather excited, because I am very fond of medieval history, and regularly drive around rural Texas blasting 13th-century Spanish pilgrimage music. Who would’ve thought that a little vestige of the medieval world would turn up in my local grocery store? Secondly, what better patron for someone who works at a jail for child refugees than a child-saint who defends both travelers in peril and the unjustly imprisoned?

And that was how I first ended up buying a Holy Infant of Atocha candle for my kitchen table.

Later, when I researched the matter further, I found out that the Wikipedian history of the Holy Infant was—shockingly—likely incorrect. The medieval origin story was a post hoc invention, an attempt to give an older European pedigree to a wholly Mexican tradition. The Holy Infant’s mother, as it turns out, was an authentically medieval character: Holy Mary of Atocha appears in several of the 13th century Cantigas de Santa Maria (a.k.a. the sick beats currently blaring from my Kia Forte), mostly as a patroness of field workers. When her shrine at Atocha was selected for special favor by the Spanish monarchy in the 17th century, she was transformed from a saint of the people into an emblem of Spanish governance. It was in this capacity—as a defender of Spanish colonial might—that Mary of Atocha found her way to Mexico. Sanctuaries in her name were built in the state of Zacatecas, in Fresnillo and Plateros.

But through some obscure evolution of local devotion, it was the image of her child, the Holy Infant, that became the primary locus of worship. The Holy Infant of Atocha eventually came to be revered as a protector of ordinary people, especially of miners, travelers, and prisoners. An 1848 novena written by one Calixto Aguirre was instrumental in popularizing the cult of the Holy Infant, and the cover illustration of the printed pamphlet version was the first to show him as a pilgrim rather than a prince. Instead of a crown, a globe, and a scepter—the traditional iconography of power—he had a big hat, a food basket, and a traveler’s staff with a gourd hanging from it. The first episode of the novena tells of a legal miracle.  It begins with the tale of a poor woman by the name of Maximiana Esparza, who wanders to four different cities, seeking succor. In each city, she is imprisoned for her malas costumbres—some unspecified bad manners—and, having no family or other advocate to speak on her behalf, she languishes for years in prison in each place. At last, after being in prison a year in Durango, she prays to the Holy Infant of Atocha:

…who listened to her kindly and took her out of her captivity; for in all the time that she had lived there, there was nobody who would defend her, until the Holy Child of Atocha, dressed as a handsome youth, visited her in that prison and gave her some bread in the name of his mother, saying to her that same afternoon she would see the judge and he would take up her case, which caused no little amazement among the rector and the other inmates; and when the time arrived that the Child had named, she was set free.

Mary of Atocha, the former people’s saint, may regrettably have become more conservative in her waning years, but she nonetheless succeeded in giving the world an even more radical son. We should all be so lucky!

It’s actually pretty absurd that I knew nothing about the Holy Infant of Atocha until a few months ago. Once he was on my radar, I soon realized that he’s a pretty standard figure in Mexican and Chicanx Catholicism. But I stumbled into immigration advocacy three years ago knowing next to nothing about Latin American cultures, and even now there are huge gaps in my understanding. My Spanish, too, is still pretty atrocious. I have been working at it for three years, but it’s like speaking through a mouthful of broken glass. I muster my words with pain, and my meaning comes out all mangled. I now feel a strong affinity for all those immigrant grandparents who understand English perfectly and never learn to speak it; I am sure I would be just the same if I were ever to immigrate to a non-English-speaking country. I often feel that any bilingual person, with or without a law degree, could do most of my work a lot better than me. But I am here, so I do my best.

Sometimes I wake up in the mornings very anxious, usually when I have to draft a big court filing or an important request to the asylum office, to try and stop a detained family’s deportation. I come up with soothing little rituals to ease my transition from fretful sleep to focused work. I put on some music. I make a big pot of coffee. I light my Holy Infant of Atocha candle. It’s really because I like the way the candlelight makes me feel, not for superstitious reasons. I’m really not one for good luck charms, astrology, or premonitions. I remember that shortly after Trump first announced the family separation policy this summer—this was when I was still in Massachusetts, getting ready for my move to Texas—I was walking down a familiar street near my home, feeling very disturbed and heartsick. All of a sudden I saw a rabbit on the sidewalk a few feet ahead. It was standing quite still, and it let me walk up close. For a moment the encounter felt almost magical. Then the rabbit loped off, and where it had been, I saw two small baby bunnies lying dead on the pavement. When I bent to look, a little cloud of flies dispersed, then settled again. As omens go, that was some Roman-level bullshit. But I don’t think it was anything but coincidence.

The area of south Texas where I live now is teeming with strange sights, and sometimes everything I see feels pregnant with meaning. The drive from my apartment to the internment camp is only four minutes, but the road is always strewn with strange corpses. A dead dog or house cat is an everyday casualty; but I have also seen bodies of armadillos, bobcats, and javelinas, all mowed down by a speeding truck, or a passenger-bus of incoming detainees, or one of the heavy tankers that barrel continually to and from the nearby oilfields. No waste collection service ever disposes of the animals, so I watch their corpses bloat and distend and then disintegrate over a period of weeks. I have heard a rumor too that there are zebra on one of the ranches around here, flown in and kept in captivity so that deer-weary hunters can have something exotic to shoot. I’ve yet to see an escaped zebra lying dead by the side of the road, but give it time.

Also on the same road as the child internment camp, if you can believe it, there is a Texas state prison. It lies alongside a large ranch, and in front of the jail there’s a field of watermelons. Sometimes in the early morning, on my way into work, I see a group of prisoners in white jumpsuits and white caps, working the watermelon field. Ringed around them are three or four heavily-armed officers on horseback, in case anyone tries anything. The thing is so ludicrous it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. It’s as if this tiny town has been selected as a kind of roadside showcase of human cruelty.

(Continue Reading)

[dfnews]

Episode Recap of "The Vuolos Take LA" Season 10, Episode 2 October 22, 2019 "Jinger and Jeremy explore L.A. with new friends. While hiking, Jinger discusses her decision to wear pants, which is unusual for Duggar women. The Duggar boys' road trip could be the last time they're all together before one of them starts a new courtship." TV Guide Online This will be a review in three parts; 1. The Gospel of Jinger: Thou Shalt Not Follow Your Parents' Pants Shunning Legalistic Ways 2. The Gospel of John and Abbie: Conservatives Visit Reindeer and Socialism and Survive 3. The Gospel of The J Boys: Thou Shalt Not Buy Lemons & Try To Pass It Off As Lemonade 1. JinJer and Lissy are visiting LA and decide to take a hike up to the Hollywood sign. Why two conservative evangelicals want to see the sign is beyond me. My suspicion is that they plan to stake out the location with the hope of one day altering the sign. If the HOLLYWOOD sign changes to JESUSWOOD overnight we'll know who is responsible. They somehow got special permission to actually walk down to the big letters. I guess the city saw this opportunity as good advertising. If they didn't get permission JinJer may want to lay low for awhile. If the city doesn't bust them child welfare might after watching Jeremy stumbling down the mountain with a baby strapped to his chest. Jinger explains she decided to wear pants for the hike due to the steep terrain. What? That didn't stop her before when hiking mountains in a skirt and flip flops. One of the Duggars most often used phrases is a Duggar girl can do anything in a skirt. Jinger explains about her pants wearing that her parents taught her "To honor Christ in everything that we do and that is where the Lord has led me, as of now." Sooooo, the Lord told her she could wear pants? I'm confused. She also says, with Michelle sitting by her side, that her parents instilled in them the importance of modesty and she appreciates that training…yet Lissy wears pants. She doesn't find that foundation important for her own daughter? Michelle is asked by the producer why she decided to wear only skirts and dresses. She goes right to blaming herself which isn't the true reason. The real reason is that she fell in with hardcore legalistic church people who put false biblical beliefs into her head. Beliefs that blame women for the actions of others. She said she had a lot of baggage in her life like wearing a bikini while mowing the lawn as a teen which she feels may have caused some men to have bad thoughts. Michelle, you aren't responsible for others thoughts. Wearing a bikini while mowing the lawn is bad for so many reasons but not because your body is shameful or hurting others. It's bad because rocks and sticks and dog poop may fly into places you wouldn't want them flying. Oh, and she also claims the Bible says for women to not wear what men wear. As I've said before, why would God give a darn what people are wearing? That passage seems more men sponsored than spiritually inspired. You really need to learn to read between the lines to find true inspiration in the Bible. You'd think they would have figured that out by now. Jinger says she discussed with her parents about wearing pants before she decided to rebel against her mother's convictions. Michelle says she's okay with it as long as they walk with God and continue to be modest. So I guess short shorts might be a cause for shunning? Anyway, as they talk about walking with God, scenes of Jeremy with baby and jeans wearing Jinger are being shown as they walk/fall with God down the side of a mountain to the Hollywood sign. Michelle seems a little resigned that she can't keep dressing Jinger in prairie dresses anymore and is just glad that her kids will at least walk in truth which does her mama's heart good. In other words, "Wear your stinkin' jeans! Just don't become an atheist or a Catholic!!!" Later, JinJer meet up with that Cade hair guy and his future wife to see the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I discover from Jeremy that Alice Cooper is now a Christian and Jeremy fan boys all over the Backstreet Boys. The producers ask various Duggars on the couch who their favorite Backstreet Boy is and most of them don't know and just laugh about it. They've learned to take these questions that exploit their ignorance lightly. But I can't blame them for being ignorant on this one. I couldn't name a Backstreet Boy or any of their songs either. Boy bands were never my thing. After a hedonistic walk through Venice Beach, (They walked passed a tattoo parlor. Gasp!) Lissy gets to see the ocean for the first time and then is proselytized to by the hair guy who sings Amazing Grace. Why the heck didn't he sing a Backstreet Boys song? 2. John and Abbie decide to flee the winter in Arkansas and fly to the even more winter of Finland for their honeymoon. John says the typical Duggar line of saying that marriage is great because there are no more chaperones watching your every move. Ummm, I recall that they didn't use chaperones during their courtship. They said they were too mature for that hence the photo of them alone in Walmart where John allegedly smacked unmarried Abbie in the arse. These people are raised on so many family talking points that they can't remember what their reality is. John and Abbie play with reindeer in the snow. Smart Abbie decided to wear snow pants instead of following Michelle's lead of snow skirts. Abbie is a walk in truth pants wearer and thankfully John is okay with that. Later they visit a Greek Orthodox church where they take selfies on the steps but don't go inside. They were there either to try to show the world that they don't hate other types of Christians or they passed out tracts on the steps that announced Greek Orthodox believers were hellbound. Probably a bit of both, I guess. 3. Jed, Jeer, James, Justin and Jason are in Philly to pick up three used limo lemons to sell at their car lot. Jed is wearing a dress shirt with large pictures of cars all over it. They seriously make those in men's sizes? They need to drive the cars 20 hours back home and they leave without test driving the vehicles. Smrt! These five goofy guys with walkie talkies drive out onto the highway announcing, "Jed is president, Jeer is vice and I'm (Jason) is speaker of the house." That must be a little peek into the conversations being held around the Duggar dining room table these days about their future. (giggle) Of course the five daddy owned stooges run into car problems pretty quickly. As they stand along the side of the highway with a camera crew the boys discuss their car problems and their decision to wear skirts. As long as you walk in truth, boys. After driving way too long they decided to stop in an RV park without an RV. They plan on sleeping in the limos though they don't show that and I bet they actually found a nice motel nearby. The boys talk about someday settling down and for some reason they think if they get married they won't be able to hang out and go on road trips anymore. It's all just blah, blah, blah talk just so they can bring up personal beliefs again as is their mission for the show of which none of them are paid. They need to spread the word of DugGod in each episode because saying it once isn't enough. All the family on the holy couch chime in with their views, I mean, Duggar views, on courtship and marriage in this very long boring segment that we've seen way too often. Why is TLC allowing them to proselytize without giving equal time to other beliefs? Jana is again put in that uncomfortable hot seat of having to defend her singleness. She says at least she can still go on family trips which her married siblings can't…except Josh. Josh and his clan go on most of those family trips for some reason. Jana claims to never have been in a courtship before despite reports of her mentioning relationships. I guess technically she can call her one relationship that I know about a "promise". She was promised to a guy named Andrew but he broke off that relationship because he just wasn't ready to settle down. Since her family is probably looking for someone within their cult to marry Jana, somebody her age and financially stable, Jana may be waiting for a very long time. That is a very limited pool of guys unless they want to take a chance and go outside the cult again and then all of a sudden BOOM! Jana is sporting jeans and is living in a city. How much more can Michelle's mama's heart take. Next week, John and Abbie head to Lapland in an attempt to use natural birth control to freeze their reproductive systems limiting the size of their family. Science, you know.

[sofreakinmanyfandoms]

November 14 - We’re Gonna Go Flirt with Superheroes

Some important notes:

1. Thank you to my amazing friend Dean for letting me use their delightful self as a character in this fic. You may all be jealous that I actually know this person.

2. Because Dean does not have the cleanest of language, this fic has significantly more swearing than anything else I've posted here. I still only put half as much language as normally spews from their mouth. Love you, babe.

3. I've never actually been to a hipster bar and it's been years since I've been to Portland. Please forgive me for any obvious errors.

4. I normally shy away from describing the reader too much, but honestly? I needed this. I needed to explore a bit what it's like being straight but looking gay, because while it's nothing compared to what the LGBT+ community goes through, it's something I get a lot of grief for from my conservative Christian extended family. I needed a fic where the main girl has short hair, okay? Okay.

Thanks for letting me vent myself in this fic.

Word count: 2416

Warnings: Language, mentions of cheating, if you’re homophobic you’ll hate this one so go suck an egg

Pairing: Bucky Barnes X short haired!hipster!Reader

“Ah, Portland,” Sam said with a sigh, looking around at the bar that was definitely owned by someone very hipster. “Remind me again why we’re here?”

“It was the closest city with the material Stark needs to fix the jet,” Steve reminded him. “He’ll have it ready by morning and we’ll be on our way back to the compound.”

“Friends,” Thor declared cheerily, throwing his arms around their shoulders, “despite our transport’s destruction, we have won a great victory this day! Let us celebrate, even if your Midgardian drinks are weaker than mother’s milk.”

Bucky followed behind them, feeling out of place as he took in the décor. The floor and ceiling were concrete, but the walls had been coated in what looked like disassembled pallets with wooden booths build out of the walls. The free-standing tables were giant spools and he was pretty sure no two chairs in the whole building matched. Whoever had been in charge of decorating had even taken the chalkboard menu trope to the extreme, making the whole wall behind the bar a blackboard instead of just hanging one up. Everything was decked out in old – sorry, “recycled” – netting and buoys, presumably ones that had seen actual use based on their condition. Also, Bucky had never seen so much flannel in his life.

He settled into a booth with Sam as Steve and Thor went to get their drinks. The other man was looking around, a determined expression on his face.

“Here’s where we get to the hard part,” Sam whispered to him. “Now we’ve gotta figure out which women are gay and which are just fashionable.

Bucky furrowed his eyebrows at his friend. “I don’t understand.”

Sam leaned back and nodded to the bar. “Well, normally you see a woman in skinny jeans, a plaid flannel, and a beanie? She’s a lesbian. But we’re in Portland, where that’s everyone’s style, so it gets harder. Like the chick on the end of the bar? Pixie cut, slouchy beanie, band tee that’s probably for some local group her friend is in under her open flannel, black jeans that look painted on, and totally ignoring the prime male specimens currently ordering our drinks in favor of her cell phone? Definitely gay. But that chick over there,” he subtly pointed to a nearly identically-dressed girl, shorter and with longer hair, who had definitely noticed Steve and Thor’s presence, “is either straight or bi. I can work with either of those.”

Snorting at his friend’s explanation, Bucky flashed a quick look back at the woman at the end of the bar. Sam was probably right. Too bad; she was beautiful, and he wouldn’t have minded getting to know her better.

----------

You sighed at your phone and shifted on your seat at the end of the bar. Your friend was late again; they were always late. According to the text chain you were receiving nearly non-stop, they were also probably already drunk, not that that was surprising anymore.

“Come on, Dean,” you muttered under your breath. “I need you here before he shows up.”

Five minutes later, your friend stumbled through the door, giggling madly at, well, you didn’t want to know what. They stumbled their way over to you and collapsed onto a stool.

“Why are we here?” Dean immediately began complaining. “I stick out like a sore thumb. I’m more goth than hipster, you know that.”

“We’re here because I nanny for the owner part-time so the drinks are free,” you pointed out, rolling your eyes. “You know fully well that any place becomes your scene when you don’t have to pay for alcohol.”

“True,” Dean replied with another giggle. “I didn’t have to pay at the last place either, because I’m fucking hot. Three guys and two girls bought me drinks.”

“Aaand, that’s it, you’re cut off for the night,” you sighed, asking the bartender for a coffee for your definitely drunk friend. “You did kill your makeup tonight, though. It looks great.”

“Damn right it does,” they slurred. “Hey, how come you didn’t tell me? I’d have gotten here a hell of a lot sooner if you’d told me there were Avengers in the building.”

You followed your friend’s line of sight to where there were in fact four members of the Avengers seated in a booth.

“Oh… I didn’t notice them.”

Dean scoffed and gave you that knowing look that you really hated. “You got lost in your phone again, didn’t you? Just in case he showed up.” The blush on your face was enough of an answer. “Damn it, woman, he’s a fucking asshole who never deserved you and I’d have killed him already if you weren’t so fucking concerned with whether or not things are legal.” They downed the rest of their coffee with a grimace and pushed themselves off the bar, grabbing for your hand. “Come on. We’re gonna go flirt with superheroes.”

Your eyes widened in horror. “Oh no. I am not going to talk to the Avengers with you while you’re drunk.”

Dean’s eyes narrowed as they looked at you. “Then you have to promise me you’ll sing karaoke tonight. You haven’t done it since that bastard criticized your voice, and I miss hearing it. You’re fucking good, and you let that fucking moron rob us all of your beautiful songbird-ness.”

“I hope you realize how drunk you sound.”

“Do we have a deal or not? Because if I’m going to give up a shot at fucking Thor, it had better be for a good reason.”

You sighed. Your friend was always stubborn like this. “Fine, we have a deal.”

“Awesome! I get to pick your song.”

“Aw, hell, no…”

----------

Your ex showed up right before karaoke started as he always did.

“Look at the smug asshole,” Dean muttered into the drink they’d somehow managed to get despite your best efforts. They put on a comically feminine voice and mimicked, “I must sing every chance I get, for my voice is God’s gift to mankind and to deprive people of the joy of listening to it would be blasphemy of the highest fucking order!”

“Dean,” you sighed, “please behave. You’ve already gotten me to agree to singing again. You don’t need to start a scene with him, too.”

“I should cut off his fucking dick for cheating on you.”

Because you knew Dean, you were concerned they meant it. “Don’t. He did me a favor, helping me realize he wasn’t worth it. Now, did you sign me up for karaoke already, or do I need to do it?”

The grin they flashed you was even more concerning when paired with how much they’d had to drink. “I signed us both up. After you sing your mystery song – yes, you’ll have enough of an intro to figure out what it is and come in on time, they put the lyrics up anyway, you’ll be fine – I’ll blow your performance out of the water with a spectacular rendition of ‘Bang, Bang.’ Your ex won’t know what hit him.”

“I’m sure he won’t,” you said dryly, only to be horrified when your name was called first as karaoke started.

Dean laughed at the glare you threw them. “Go blow them all away with your magical voice, darling!”

“Y/N,” the bar’s owner said into his mic when you stepped up on stage. “It’s been far too long, m’lady! Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time in a few months, it’s the lovely Y/N singing ‘Shake It Off’!”

“Really, Dean?” you asked, picking up your mic. “All the songs in the world to choose from and that’s the one you picked for me?” The regulars laughed at your teasing as Dean raised their beer in salute. Almost before you had a moment to collect yourself, the music was off and you could feel your ex studying you from his seat near the back with his new woman draped across him. You shut him out of your mind and focus and launched yourself into the song, determined to have fun even if you weren’t really drunk enough to do a Taylor Swift song for karaoke.

----------

Bucky hadn’t been paying attention to much other than his beer until the karaoke started. Their booth was set up at the perfect spot for watching the stage, and he chided himself for the way his heart jumped when you stepped on stage.

“Really, Dean?” you joked, shooting a look at your friend who did not look like – he? She? Bucky couldn’t tell which – would be interested in hanging out in a bar like this. Then you took a deep breath and wow, your whole demeanor changed as you started singing. It was like the song took over you and you had an entirely different energy about you.

“I go on too many dates, but I can’t make ‘em stay,” you sang, and Bucky watched you work the stage, using the mic stand to your theatrical advantage even as you held the mic in your hand. He’d say you were hamming it up for the crowd, but there was something about your performance that said maybe some of the words were hitting a little too close to home for you to be too flippant with them.

“My ex man brought his new girlfriend,” and he didn’t miss the way your eyes flickered to a couple in the back. “And to the fella over there with the hella good hair, why don’t you come on over baby? We can shake, shake, shake.”

He almost choked on his beer, because he could swear that during that last line you had looked over and winked at him in a very “I’m not a lesbian and I want to climb you like a tree” type way. Bucky’s eyes quickly flickered to Sam to see if the other man caught it, but if he had, he wasn’t giving any indication of it.

It had to have been the performance, right? You were just working the audience. When the song ended, he made sure to applaud, and soon your friend (Dean, the announcer called them) was on stage singing like they were, well, as hammered as they looked.

----------

“Come ooooonnnn,” Dean whined, tugging on your sleeve. “Y/N, they’re in town and they’re in this bar and Thor’s so hot I’m surprised I don’t have a sunburn yet. I can’t talk to them alone. Come flirt with me.”

Your friend wasn’t going to give up anytime soon, so you slammed back the rest of your drink and stood.

“Fine,” you said, “but if you look like you’re going to puke on an Avenger at any point I’m dragging you home.”

“Yay!” they cheered, immediately pulling you over to their table and sliding into the booth next to Thor. “Hello, gentlemen of the Avengers. My name is Dean, I’m genderfluid and pansexual and would gladly climb any of you. This is Y/N and she’s a straight prude but if you give her enough alcohol you might be able to get a nice make-out session with her.”

You groaned and rubbed your face with your hand. “Sorry for my friend here. They passed merely being drunk an hour before karaoke started.”

“Pleasure to meet you both,” Captain America (YOU WERE TALKING TO CAPTAIN AMERICA?!?) said. “I’m Steve, and this is Bucky, Sam, and Thor.”

“Hi, Thor.” Dean batted their eyelashes and you choked back a snerk.

Bucky pushed at Sam and the two slid a little further back in the booth, making space for you to sit next to the soldier. He motioned to the seat and you slid next to him hesitantly.

“Sorry for interrupting your evening,” you apologized quietly, although Dean had long since tuned you out in favor of attempting to seduce the god of thunder. “Dean gets an idea their head and I’m basically stuck along for the ride.”

“It’s no problem,” Sam said smoothly. “I do have one question, though. Are you really straight?”

You couldn’t help but laugh, and Bucky thought that might be the nicest sound he’d ever heard. “Yes, I’m really straight. Most people are surprised, but my sense of style wasn’t enough to keep jerks from hitting on me so I got a haircut and fell in love with the style. It’s let me fly under the radar a lot more frequently, which is nice.”

“I can’t imagine how,” Bucky said, a blush creeping up his cheeks. “You’re beautiful.”

Before you could thank him, a voice to your left made you freeze.

“Y/N.”

Dean’s attention was snapped away from Thor and they stared down your ex. “Listen, asshole –”

“Dean.” You held up a finger to stop your friend before they made too much of a scene before entirely turning to your ex. “What do you want, Daniel?”

“It’s free karaoke time,” he crooned, ignoring how unwanted he obviously was. “I thought maybe we could do a duet together, for old time’s sake?”

You affixed him with a glare that would whither a plant. “Why on earth would I want to be reminded of our time together?”

That seemed to shake his confidence a bit. “I’m just being friendly,” he snapped.

“You don’t know how to just be friendly. We’re over, Daniel, so get over it already. If you really wanted me, you wouldn’t have cheated.”

“I believe you heard the lady,” Thor cut in before Daniel could reply. “She wishes for you to leave her alone, and I suggest you abide by her wishes.

For the first time he seemed to notice who you were sitting with, and he sulked off back to his date.

“Well,” Sam broke the silence that had fallen over the table, “I’m guessing that relationship being over is a good thing?”

You nodded. “Thank you,” you told Thor. “I appreciate the support.”

“Anytime, m’lady.”

----------

“Do you want to talk about it?” Bucky asked you softly a few minutes later when you had yet to join the table’s renewed conversation.

You shook your head. “He was a jerk who cheated on me so I got out. It was a long time ago.”

“How could anyone throw away someone like you?”

The earnest way he said it made you blush.

“His loss,” you whispered shyly.

Bucky only paused a moment before asking, “Could I make his loss my gain?”

“I’d like that,” you said with a smile. “I’d like that very much.”

[stevedonnellyfaith-blog]

The Value of Keepsakes (Post 103) 8-26-15

                        I spent a good part of the last 48 hours in an angry stew. My progress on writing was ground to a screeching halt by a virus on the new laptop I bought for my job search. I think I vaguely remember purchasing an Anti-virus disc as part of the package, but I don't believe I ever installed the software and I expect that it has now been lost in the move. Usually, Nicholas, my IT guy handles problems like this for me but he began the first five classes of his college career yesterday, so I haven't asked for his help out of respect for what he is trying to accomplish. Usually I would switch to Pam's old laptop as a back-up, but Natalie informed me that it no longer recharges so that plan was out. It is quite a frustrating situation, especially, as I only use the laptop at home for the newsletter so there is no real reason for me to expect to get infected. Natalie and Stephen both use the laptop as well so I should have made the effort to protect my device; there is nothing so frustrating as to look over both shoulders in search of a culprit to blame while only discovering your own visage in a mirror staring back from every possible vantage.

Of most concern to me was the idea that I might have let Natalie down with respect to the pictures that I have been saving for her. Usually Pam was the picture taker in our family, but I have made more of a point of collecting family images since Pam became ill. Because Pam was adopted as a child, she had very few baby pictures and she was sensitive about it. My mom had given us albums of pictures from my childhood and a good sized box of my "better" efforts from grade school. I don't go through my albums or keepsake box very often, maybe once every several years, but when I do, I usually find certain pictures or items that remind me of happy times long ago. The memory thread to other items and pictures is lost to me, though. If it is a piece of homework completed for a teacher long forgotten, I usually discard the paper and whittle down my collection still further. Someday, after I am gone, the box will probably go straight into a rubbish bin, although Natalie may go through it piece by piece. I leave that choice to her. An old puck from an Ohio State hockey tournament long since played might become a paperweight on her desk or it might roll right into the trash truck however she so chooses. The thought of losing a cache of pictures of her that I had saved in no other place just bothered me. Finally, I successfully transferred them to a back-up drive today during my lunch hour and felt much better.

Natalie shares my broad but not limitless sentimentality while Stephen would horde everything he has ever touched. By contrast Nicholas and Abby are both more sensible than the other three of us. Because they packed up the family house in Brentwood, it will be interesting to see what made the cut. I had set aside boxes for them that included too much of their school work and other stuff, not knowing what memories were tied up in which pieces of paper and which toys, clothing items and curios from their childhood. Nicholas admitted that he tried to sift through some of the boxes in Pam's and my closet unsuccessfully. He said that he associated too many of the items in some of the boxes with happier times so opening the memories randomly was like occasionally being punched in the face. They were on a tight deadline and just couldn't afford the distraction. I was pleased, in a way, by his reaction; in at least some cases I must have saved the right stuff.

Abby is a tougher nut to crack with regard to sentimentality. I got her a couple of music boxes for her birthday the other day that turned out to be dud gifts. I had always remembered the music boxes that my grandfather had given my mother for Christmas and birthdays. They were in no ways useful to her, but they fascinated us as children. I remember pulling out her dresser drawers in increments to form a staircase so that I could reach the fragile ones that were stored beyond my grasp - they made furniture quite a bit sturdier in those days. I guess my burglary was a comical mix of Mission Impossible and the Nutcracker Suite. That kind of exploit must happen a lot with kids as my antics could have been from any number of the plots from the television show Rugrats. Of course, we surely broke a few of Mom's keepsakes, but she does still have quite a few things still that I remember being stored up high back in the days of my indoor clandestine Lara Croft-like archaeological expeditions.

Natalie told me that she wants music boxes for her next birthday so I may have gifted my wrong daughter. She is attracted to the same items that I also appreciate, so my cache of keepsakes may not all end up decorating a landfill or thrift shop. In the end, I expect, all my stuff will all eventually be discarded down to the last puck as mementos are sifted by successive generations of varying tastes. I have not collected Bugatti's.

 Words can sift down as well. What my grandfather wrote in his newspaper evokes emotion in me because I knew the man. What I write might interest some of my grandchildren, but others will collect stamps, baseball cards or whatever innovative pastime replaces those tried and true favorites. Whatever they consider my legacy to be, their interest in me will be voluntary. My goal remains to pray for my children and grandchildren beside my wife in heaven. The keepsakes serve as reminders only of where I have been, without real intrinsic value in themselves. I chuckle to myself at the dreams of wealth that I once entertained. Stephen told me the other day that he hopes to buy a Tesla and a motorcycle one day. I now have an understanding that the riches that await even the person in the very last seat at the Wedding Feast of the Lamb are well beyond the imaginings of Bill Gates or the richest Saudi oil Sheikh.

 The Wedding Feast makes me think of the subject about which I originally intended to write. Because I have come to discern some of the value of the Eucharist, I now possess only the greatest pity for the many modern people who are leaving the Church about hard sayings that they refuse to understand. John 6:66 describes for us that even in the presence of Jesus himself, many 1st century Christians chose to abandon the Bread of Life. No one knows whether any of them would likely have stood with The modern Church in the face of the debates over abortion, same sex marriage or contraception, but they couldn't abide by the idea of the Real Presence even as the Living Word declaimed the doctrine to their very ears. Others have left the fold over the centuries chasing various other fads, trinkets and heresies. Many continue to leave over a selection of worldly issues that misunderstand the very essence of Christianity . We are not of this world, but were made for the next.

Not all those leaving The Church are leaving because Catholicism is too conservative. Unfortunately, for instance, one of Pam's relatives is an active dissenter against Pope Francis because the man who sits in Peter's chair is not a fan of unbridled capitalism. I pray for Pam's relative and don't really I understand or share that point of view. Certainly, like Francis I prefer capitalism to socialism which is always atheistic, corrupt and exploitative. With regard to Francis' statements about capitalism tending towards enslaving and exploiting people, I wholly agree. Once Americans became capitalist only and ceased being Christians except on dress-up days, then pornography, prostitution and abortion slipped the leash and greater proportions of men and women began to generate wealth without regard to how many souls are being eviscerated for the sake of healthy balance sheets. 

Pornography is now a multi-billion dollar industry, drug cartels dominate whole Latin American countries, and baby parts are bought and sold as a commodity, but profits are good. I plan to continue to listen to what Pope Francis says as well as the Bishops who most clearly articulate opposition to the most spiritually corrosive aspects of our society. Bishop Barber is a good one, but I will be especially pleased to see Pope Francis shaking the hand of Archbishop Chaput in Philadelphia. Also please encourage your Protestant friends to support Rev Franklin Graham's efforts to facilitate a Christian renewal in America.   We need it.

[theconservativebrief]

Warning: Major spoilers for the film Hereditary follow. I’m going to talk extensively about the film’s third act, so turn back if you don’t want to know!

As it cruises into its final moments, director Ari Aster’s blistering new horror movie Hereditary seems to settle any “Is it real, or is it metaphorical?” questions about what’s really going on in the movie with, “Oh, you better believe it’s real!”

Where the first two-thirds of the film live in an uncanny space that could best be described as “In the Bedroom set in a haunted house,” the last third goes full-tilt into supernatural horror, with cultists, strange beams of energy, and Ann Dowd shouting, “I EXPEL YOU!” across a crowded highway at a boy she hopes to possess with a demon.

When the movie finally ends with Dowd’s character calmly and pleasantly explaining to the now-probably-possessed boy that he is “Paimon, one of the eight kings of Hell,” then a whole bunch of naked people calling, “Hail, Paimon!” you’d be forgiven for thinking the movie had completely shredded whatever slow-building tension it had mounted throughout its first two acts. (I would violently disagree with you, but I would forgive you.)

Now, I would maintain you could still read this final act as metaphor, as one final snap from reality occurring in the head of the film’s protagonist, Annie (Toni Collette), who has clearly been on the very edge of mental stability all movie long. There’s a rich, metaphorical reading of Hereditary that treats everything that happens as a kind of empathetic tale of a mother who finally has enough and takes her own life and that of her husband (possibly sparing her son — but to a life in which he’s accidentally killed his sister and seen both of his parents die).

But let’s not treat this movie as metaphor. Let’s talk about those final scenes as if they really happen. And let’s talk about why the movie’s devil cult has less to do with our reality and more to do with the way horror movies briefly influenced our reality in the 1980s and ’90s.

Let’s talk, in other words, about the Satanic Panic.

2016’s The Witch also has elements of satanic panic. A24

One complaint about Hereditary that I have some sympathy for (expressed best in what I saw as a subtweet of the film by Vanity Fair’s K. Austin Collins, one of my favorite film writers) is that the devil-worshipping cult pulling strings is very much a cult straight out of a movie, not the more mundane horror of a real cult, which strips people of their connections, their means, and often their lives. Movie cults are bogeymen that leap out of the shadows in the third act and reveal their dark intentions for the protagonist.

Yet I can’t entirely shake the cult in Hereditary — or the very similar cults in other indie horror movies of the 21st century, like Ti West’s 2009 House of the Devil or Robert Eggers’s 2016 release The Witch — because it feels, to me, like a throwback to the Satanic Panic, a very real, completely unfounded fear that gripped America in the 1980s and ’90s, leading to very real unjust convictions and the infamous McMartin preschool trial.

In brief, the Satanic Panic was a belief, driven by a wide variety of not particularly scrupulous sources, that the United States had become infiltrated by a large number of Satanists and other practitioners of the dark arts who were conspiring to abuse and assault the nation’s children, commit human sacrifices, and turn the country over to the Dark Lord.

The idea was ridiculous on its face, but it had deep, deep roots in the US, stretching all the way back to the Salem witch trials, and we’ve never quite been able to shake variations on it. What is the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, if not the satanic panic dressed up in 2010s clothing?

What was vaguely remarkable about the satanic panic was how it felt as if it had arrived in our reality straight from a horror movie. When you look at some of the “true accounts” of devil cults on the evangelical Christian circuit in the ’80s, many of them sound less like anything that could really happen and much more like the third acts of movies like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen.

Much like the way reports of alien sightings in the wake of Close Encounters of the Third Kind became more likely to depict grey-skinned beings with big black eyes, the devil worshipper movies of the ’60s and ’70s solidified within the American subconscious a very specific idea of what was going on behind closed doors in seemingly harmless suburbia. (Surprise: It involved bathing in goat’s blood and trying to get demons to possess children.)

This is, of course, how horror often works — in a feedback loop with reality. Our real-life horrors (in this case, a millennia-old belief in a dark being constantly trying to turn humanity against its better natures) get translated into horror tales, which get translated into real-life scares, which later become other horror tales.

My colleague Aja Romano, for instance, showed just how The Exorcist drove real-life scares around Ouija boards, which were later translated into horror movies about Ouija boards. Fear begets fear begets fear. It’s one of the things human beings are good at.

And so it is with the Satanic Panic. The directors of these recent indie horror movies are of the perfect age to have been cognizant of either the initial wave of Satanic Panic reports or a smaller wave of them in the ’90s, to say nothing of a small wave of dark horror tales of Satan’s misdeeds that arrived in the ’80s and ’90s (such as the 1987 horror film The Gate or the 1995 X-Files episode “Die Hand Die Verletzt”). And when you hear these dark and gruesome stories, it’s only natural to wonder, hey, what if they really happened.

House of the Devil does the best job of zeroing in on a fairly straightforward depiction of the Satanic Panic, while The Witch turns the idea of rejecting God in favor of Satan into a weirdly twisted act of feminism. But Hereditary goes one better than both of them by simultaneously making this cult of devil worshippers incredibly terrifying and also strangely hilarious.

The entire third act of the film walks a razor’s edge between terror and ridiculousness. Perhaps I like it so much because it reminds me of all those years I spent reading “true” stories of Satanists in my evangelical Christian childhood home. You laugh, if only because you want so desperately for none of what you’re seeing to be happening.

But it is happening, right? Hereditary and its indie horror cousins capture brilliantly the way that Americans have always found ways to fill our dark corridors with satanic beings and low-level demons. “Paimon” is a real thing from the odder corners of Christian mythology, and if we take the Satanic Panic at face value, then somebody out there is trying to resurrect him right now.

They aren’t, of course. Or at least I hope they aren’t. I’m sympathetic to the idea that a movie like this devalues the very real horrors of cults. But a movie like this can also help us stare at a particular strain of American darkness and find a way to laugh at it, before running away, screaming.

Original Source -> The real-life horrors behind the ending of Hereditary

via The Conservative Brief

[yourdigitalmarketingguru-blog]

Public Schools in Need of Prayer and Missionaries

"I am much afraid that schools will prove to be the great gates of hell unless they diligently labor in explaining the Holy Scriptures, engraving them in the hearts of youth. I advise no one to place his child where the scriptures do not reign paramount. Every institution in which men are not increasingly occupied with the Word of God must become corrupt." - Martin Luther

1. In Need of Prayer

Since 1962 the Supreme Court is heading down this culturally corrosive anti-prayer path. Among others, the High School sports events have been on target. Those events usually start with the national anthem and then a prayer that goes over the loudspeakers. These invocations to Almighty God often include a supplication for fair sportsmanship. This truly is needed in today's corrupt, money-mad world of sports.

The author gladly remembers a High School football game in Westmoreland, TN. It was the first football game I ever attended. It was a wonderful thing and, most of all, I appreciate that they still kept praying. My spirit was moved when I heard people pray and saw the football players bow their head. This is the way it ought to be. NO PRAY, NO PLAY!

The hypocrisy of the Supreme Court's anti-prayer obsession becomes apparent when it is compared to the court's approval of many anti-biblical and morally depraved school policies. That point was underscored on September 1st when, prior to the school's first home football game of the season, Principal Jody McLoud of ROANE COUNTY PRIMARY AND HIGH SCHOOL in KINGSTON, TENNESSEE, read a brief statement over the public address system. Here is what he had to say:

"It has always been the custom at Roane County High School football games to say a prayer and play the National Anthem to honor God and Country. Due to a recent ruling by the Supreme Court, I am told that saying a prayer is a violation of Federal Case Law. As I understand the law at this time, I can use this public facility to approve of sexual perversion and call it an alternate lifestyle and if someone is offended, that's okay. I can use it to condone sexual promiscuity by dispensing condoms and call it safe sex. If someone is offended, that's okay. I can even use this public facility to present the merits of killing an unborn baby as a viable means of birth control. If someone is offended, no problem. I can designate a school day as earth day and involve students in activities to religiously worship and praise the goddess, Mother Earth, and call it ecology. I can use literature, videos and presentations in the classrooms that depict people with strong, traditional, Christian convictions as simple-minded and ignorant and call it enlightenment. However, if anyone uses this facility to honor God and ask Him to bless this event with safety and good sportsmanship, Federal Case Law is violated/ This appears to be at best, inconsistent and at worst, hypocritical. Apparently, we are to be tolerant of everything and everyone except God and His Commandments. Nevertheless, as a school principal, I frequently ask staff and students to abide by rules with which they do not necessarily agree. For me to do otherwise would be, at best, inconsistent and at worst, hypocritical. I suffer from that affliction enough unintentionally. I certainly do not need to add an intentional transgression. For this reason, I shall, "render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's," and refrain from praying at this time. However, if you feel inspired to honor, praise and thank God, and ask Him in the name of Jesus to bless this event, please feel free to do so. As far as I know, that's not against the law yet."

Principal McLoud aptly summarized the dilemma that he and other educators face as they strive to cope with the increasingly anti-Christian tropism of our government schools. Asked about the response to his comments, he said that most of those in attendance, including members of both teams, "were appreciative, and... responded with applause." Asked if there were any boos, he recalled, "No. None whatsoever," adding that the "responses that I've gotten from all over the country... have been overwhelmingly positive." Indeed, of the 300-500 communications he had received, only four or five were negative in tone..

The New School Prayer

Now I sit me down in school where praying is against the rule. For this great nation under God finds mention of Him very odd. If Scripture now the class recites, it violates the Bill of Rights. And anytime my head I bow becomes a Federal matter now. Our hair can be purple, orange or green, that's no offense; it's a freedom scene. The law is specific, the law is precise. Prayers spoken aloud are a serious vice. For praying in a public hall, might offend someone with no faith at all. In silence alone we must meditate, God's name is prohibited by the state. We're allowed to cuss and dress like freaks, and pierce our noses, tongues and cheeks. They've outlawed guns, but FIRST the Bible. To quote the Good Book makes me liable. We can elect a pregnant Senior Queen, and the 'unwed daddy' our Senior King. It's "inappropriate" to teach right from wrong. We're taught that such "judgments" do not belong. We can get our condoms and birth control, study witchcraft, vampires and totem poles. But the Ten Commandments are not allowed, it's scary here I must confess, when chaos reigns the school's a mess. So, Lord, this silent plea I make: Should I be shot; My soul please take! Amen!

Author Unknown

2. In Need of Missionaries

If God calls missionaries to far away countries, do you think He is unable to send a missionary to a public school in the US? I would like to ask every Christian school student: Have you been born again? If you have been born again, has the Lord ever put on your heart to take a stand for Him at school? Is the Lord calling you to be an ambassador for Christ at your school?

While many Christian families homeschool their children, there are still many Christian students in public school. Those should think of themselves as "Missionaries to the Public School Systems". They can use class discussions to proclaim Biblical views. They can use debate classes to speak up for Christ, for the word of God, etc. That what Apollos did in Acts 18:24-28. They can use writing assignments to research subjects according to the Bible and back it up with data from Christian publications, organizations, etc. If you are a student at a public school, have you ever prayed and asked the Lord for wisdom how to turn a situation in school into a witnessing opportunity? You can witness in so many ways! Here are some suggestions:

Modest apparel.

You can already witness for Christ with the way you dress. In schools many teenagers dress in very worldly and lust-provoking ways. They are addicted to brand-name clothes. Their hair looks untidy and weird. If you, as a child of God, come to school in a clean and modest appearance, they will know the difference. Click here to read up on modest apparel. It doesn't matter whether your school has a dress code or not. The Bible has a dress code. As a guideline I give you the dress code of a church camp. "No shorts anytime. Boys must wear decent pants and shirts. Girls must wear modest dresses or skirts (below the knee). No sleeveless tops, no jeans, no inappropriate slits, no tight fits. For appropriate activities, boys may wear sweatpants and girls may wear below the knee culottes, capris, or wind pants."

Teach your teacher!

Public schools are full of wrong or antichristian teachings. As a Christian you know that you don't really have to pay attention to evolution, sex education or attempts to rewrite America's history and strip it from Christian heritage. First of all, when it comes to sex education, try to leave the class. Walk out. It is offensive, wicked, opposed to your belief in chastity, temperance and marriage. Provide other students with tracts or information material that gives the Biblical perspective on that issue. Be prepared to stand up and tell your teacher that you disagree with him. Be ready to give him an answer. Read 1 Peter 3:15! Yes, you can teach your teacher. The teacher is not an all-wise god. He is only human. Modern public school teachers are often leaning toward the left, toward liberalism and through the NEA they are indoctrinated in radical antichristian thought.

Assignment: Read Psalm 119:97-104. Question: What does it say about your teacher when it comes to Bible issues?

Your answer: ________________________________

Here is a situation I faced in my school. The teacher gave us a text with a news report. The news report was about a conservative politician who compared the number of abortions with the Holocaust. As a politically correct teacher he was outraged by the article and our homework was to write a comment about the politician's "inappropriate" statement. So when I was home I grabbed some pro-life literature I got earlier from a Christian ministry and wrote an essay that gives the exact numbers of aborted babies in the US since 1973. I described the brutal procedure of abortions in detail. I added pictures of aborted babies. I closed with the statement that I fully support the politician's statement because of the evidence I provided. I gave a short statement about legislative work to put an end to legalized abortion on demand. The number of US abortions outreach the number of Holocaust victims by far. I got to read my homework in school. The teacher was outraged and flabbergasted because I presented the Christian pro-life perspective. I backed it up with scripture, evidence and photos! That was powerful! I hope you get many opportunities like that!

Exposing Evolution

You can really start teaching your teacher and classmates when it comes to evolution. If you are saved and live a Christian life, you have come to believe in the Biblical account of creation. No amount of public school teaching can change you, influence you or get you to change your mind. Your primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ. Not to public school. You have come to put more confidence in your pastor than in your teacher. I was really blessed by a gospel tract that tells about a professor who thought we came from monkeys, until a student proved evolution was a lie. That student can be YOU. That tract is available here: Big Daddy, Jack Chick.

Here are some other suggestions for student missionaries to public schools:

Invite students to meetings at your church.

Give students and teachers gospel tracts.

Stay away from bad people. Turn away. Don't listen to them.

Don't be forced into a clique. Resist group or peer pressure. Be independent. Dare to be different. As Christians we are separated.

Stay away from the drug, rock and rap subculture. Iwould rather listen to the roar of a jet engine than worldly music. If someone were to offer me drugs, I'd turn the person immediately over to the police. I never had one desirem craving or not the least thought of getting into that. I just said NO just like former President Reagan suggested.

Refuse to participate in occult activities such as meditation, yoga, etc.

Make your local church a priority. Not school clubs, associations, etc. All this is for selfish vainglory anyway.

Christians do not participate nor endorse such foolish school activities such as dance, cheerleading, dating, making an idol out of sports, etc. That's not what it's about. You live for Jesus and all you do at school is learn. The rest is a waste of time.

When students can suggest what kind of books can be read during lessons, suggest Christian books. Same goes for music!

If you can, eat breakfast & lunch at home. We don't need to be locked up in a school compound all day like a bunker.

When you can choose a destination for a field trip, suggest a Christian monument or historic site.

Tell other students or teachers about this website.

Remember the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22,23. Let the other students pick some fruit off you. The fruit of the Spirit are not only for you to enjoy, but mainly for the Lord and for others around you.

If you are not busy (maybe because a class was cancelled) use the time to study your Bible.

Use writing assignments to refine your Christian writing skills. Use your pen as a sharp sword of truth. Eph. 6:18. If you have to make a speech, speak up for Jesus.

In history classes, try to point to quotes from America's founders that profess faith in God.

Join the work of Child Evangelism Fellowship or Good News Club and other school based discipleship groups.

Create a demand for righteousness. Bringing prayer and Bible reading is not a demand of right-wing politicians. You the student must demand it urgently and persistenly and consistently. You want to see fellow students saved and get out of the worldliness. You demand school prayer. You demand creation. You demand intelligent design. You demand abstinence education. It's a marketplace of ideas controlled by supply and demand. Are you demanding the things of God?

And if you ever need to use a Webster's dictionary at school, I suggest you use the original Noah Webster's 1828 Dictionary which has its definitions taken from a Biblical worldview. Today's dictionaries are from a humanistic standpoint. It really helps define words for their real meaning. That might be crucial in school. Try to get this dictionary: Webster's 1828 dictionary.

These are just a few suggestions of what a missionary to the public schools can do. If you are prayerful, you might find many, many more suggestions. Parents, churches and Christian organizations and ministries try to change schools, but as of now there is an antichristian onslaught in America's public schools. The examples are too numerous to mention. The free expression of faith is being suppressed. But the real key to impacting the schools for Christ is the student. The Christian student who will no longer compromise. The Christian student who will take a stand. The Christian student who wants to be a warrior for Christ rather than a wimp. The Christian student who will say goodbye to dead Sunday-morning churchianity, but will rather live for the Lord seriously 24/7 with the word of God as his final authority. The Christian student who will not allow himself to be brought under the power of liberal lies, secularism, humanistic deception and wicked peer pressure. It's all about putting Christ first!

Dear Christian student,

is the Lord calling you to the mission field of America's public school system? If Christ really lives within you, then He goes with you when you go to school every morning. Go into all the world and preach the gospel unto every creature. Have you ever prayed for the mission field of the public schools? You don't have to go to China, India or Malawi. You might have to go to your school and introduce Christ to the multitudes of the lost students and teachers. Rescue the perishing! How will you answer the call?

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/5786013

[fluffywarrior]

Women's March Reflections

Y'all have to understand something... My mother is a very conservative woman. She doesn't agree with liberal leftist feminism. I asked her the other night about what she thought about the Women's March the other night and she said, "it's bull shit. They didn't represent all women. A real woman works and has a career but always puts her family first. Abortions are selfish. Just because a woman wants to go to college and be free of responsibility is no reason to kill a baby. Abortions are murder and real strong women are the ones that keep the baby, still go to school, still have a career and put their kids and family over everything." There you have it folks. Strait from the strongest woman I know. My mom skipped college and made a bunch of sacrifices for me and my siblings through out our lives. Some of which she carries a lot of regret and burden for. I guess mostly because all that sacrifice didn't produce three thriving successful young adults. So in no way am I going to disagree with my mother. After she has been through in her life the biggest lesson I learned was that my opinion doesn't matter. I neither agree nor disagree with what any woman says or believes because I'm not a woman. I can't even begin to understand your struggles. All in all my mother still holds those old Reagan era moral values. She tries to be a good Christian woman. She busts her ass and even when we were poor as fuck as little kids never took a single dime from welfare. So when it comes down to me having to pay taxes that fund certain women's health issues or what ever I'm against it because I don't want to pay any taxes. It's a combination of how I was raised on top of knowing that even tho I could really use the governments help right now, I couldn't as a guy get any welfare. No food stamps, no unemployment. It just doesn't seem very equal to me. I understand the anger towards Donald Trump and how all his comments and actions were just swept under the rug. I understand that it's unjust that a bunch of white men get to decide what you can and can't do with your body. So I guess where I stand on abortions is that it's a personal matter. I can't say that I wouldn't want a girl I got pregnant to have or not have one unless I was in that situation. I'm not a big fan of kids at the moment so I'd probably lean more towards yes. Watch my mother disown me for being a murder because I'm selfish. I think the father should have an opinion on the matter unless he isn't around. But then again you're the oven for nine months. The rest I suppose I just don't know enough about. Sometimes to me it always seems like women are always shouting that they don't have enough and I'm like well shit, get in line, I've been killing the internet for a few years now I've barely managed to get famous people to subtweet me. Now if you want to talk about animal rights well I agree in a way. Dolphins and Killer Whales aren't going extinct so to keep them captive for human entertainment seems a bit cruel. But I support zoos that do keep animals in captivity that our going extinct or are marked for sport. My dad and I really don't get along but he did teach me one thing as a kid I agree now... "don't kill anything you're not going to eat." So with that said I don't support hunting for sport just to have something over a fire place. But I do enjoy turkey, duck, elk, deer and other wild game. What's more cruel? Ordering duck at a Chinese restaurant raised in a slaughter house or going out on a lake and giving it a fair chance at flying past your bird shot? I honestly support the dismantling of Super markets and Super centers like Walmart sams club and cosco and a return to home town local markets. Farmers raise animals free range and grow crops they can grow with free market trade across states to ensure you can still get all that's available. But if you still want the convenience that mass production provides then just stay oblivious to the treatment of animals in slaughter houses or quit eating meat. To you hard core vegans out there I'm sorry, but I'll take the blue pill and look the other way on meat and answer to God among all my other sins. I despise people who get pets and then can't even give them a good home. I'm not saying buy them presents or dress them up for every holiday but at least make sure they are fed, loved and have adequate shelter. I probably would never wear a fur coat because I'm not a 70s NYC pimp. I'm not a Yankee Doodle with a feather in his cap. When it comes to testing cosmetics on animals I really don't have an opinion. I don't wear make up, nail polish, exfoliate and I barely even moisturize. That's one for the women to solve. What are you willing to sacrifice for flawless skin and perfect palettes that. Lend with your skin tone perfectly while decreasing wrinkles and what not? So there. That's it. I'm sorry if you still can't unblock me because the mother y'all so desperately want me to fuck is a conservative Christian.

[dfnews]

Episode Recap of "The Jinger Gown" Season 3, Episode 1 -  First Aired: January 16, 2017

From TV Guide: "In the season premiere, the Duggars go to Washington, D.C., to look for Jinger's wedding dress when her nuptials are just three months away." I'm already puking from joy.

1. For some reason TLC feels we need to see the prep for Jinger's wedding even though they already aired the wedding episode. I think the ratings for this season will prove that wasn't a great idea. The show opens with Jinger packing to go to Virginia to find her, free in exchange for advertising, wedding gown. TLC pays for the trip, the bridal shop pays for the gown and Jinger an Jeremy fast track their way to selfish financial freedom. Aren't these people supposed to be setting a good example for other young Evangelical couples? Accepting handouts or welfare from businesses is against what conservatives are supposed to believe, right? Handouts are only for the less fortunate.  Jinger could have paid for her own gown and given the free gown to someone who couldn't afford one. That would have been the Christian thing to do.

2. The girls discuss the trip in their dorm bedroom and I notice Jill is wearing a t-shirt with the word "Wifey" on it. See photo below for my physical reaction to Jill's lack of self-pride and identity. She's just a wifey owned by a man.

3. For some strange reason Jinger can't go to Virginia with one or two family members but has to drag an entire entourage along with her. She's taking Jana, Jill, Jessa, Joy, Michelle, Jeremy's parents, and Ben and Derick to take care of Spud and Izzy. Ben and Derick could easily have stayed home with the babies because the kids aren't nursing anymore and they don't exactly have jobs. I'm guessing Ben and Derick didn't want full-time responsibility over their own kids. If they had stepped up to being full-time parents, that would have been the Christian thing to do. Actually, it could have been really entertaining for TLC to leave Derick and Ben at home alone with their sons and gotten a lot of fumbling dad footage. But knowing the Counting On editors, they would have cut out all the good stuff and left us with Derick and Ben yammering about nothing in talking heads. See photo below. :p

4. After spending all that TLC money to fly two husbands and two babies to DC, the guys are quickly sent away to have ice cream. At the bridal shop in Virginia, Jinger is forced to deal with baby talking Michelle and like-minded baby talking shop owners and dress designers. The dress designer is already thinking ahead at profiting off of the Duggars for years to come by telling Jinger her gown will come with a title. It will forevermore be called "The Jinger".  Cha ching! Jeremy's too tight wedding suit will from now on be called, "The Jeremy Junk". Jessa has to remind Michelle to go with Jinger as she tries on dresses. Michelle looks embarrassed as she quickly gets up and says, "Yes, that's my job. Mother of the bride." She had to verbally remind herself that she's Jinger's mother. It's easy to forget when you give all your kids to other kids to raise. A second later, she's back in her seat again as Jinger comes out in the first gown. Michelle was not going to miss any camera time if she could help it.

5. Derick is asked about what he thought when he first saw Jill in her wedding gown. It's only been two and half years but Derick says that was so long ago and he can't remember. He says he remembers it was white. Don't they have any wedding photos up in their mansion? The flashback is funny because when Jill says, "Are you ready to get married?" Derick doesn't respond to that. He just say, "I've never seen you look so gorgeous." I wonder if he wanted to change his mind at the last minute. Derick says, "It will be a special moment for Jeremy to see Jinger in her wedding dress." Since Derick is suffering from amnesia about his own wedding this statement falls flat. Later Derick, Ben, Charles Vuolo and two passed out in the heat babies, sit for ice cream. Ben asks Mr. Vuolo about how to deal with two children and Mr. Vuolo explains in football terminology which gets Ben all excited in the pants. I hope he doesn't take that advice too literally and end up punting those babies around. After talking they leave without the babies getting any ice cream. I hope the kids paid them back with some diaper blow-outs after their nap.

6. Jinger decides on dress number three just as I woke up from dozing through one and two.  Jessa says since Jinger found her dress that, "The wedding now seems very real. Like the wedding is approaching. Like it's really happening." IT ALREADY HAPPENED!  It's over! Maybe it never happened. Maybe I just dreamed it all. Run Jinger, run! You still have time to escape! I wish.

7. Next the entourage head to a painting class place. They pair up and paint as the babies begin to fuss. They want their ice cream now! The pairs show off their end results with Ben painting a coffee cup, Jana and Joy painting a sad girl in the rain, which Joy says reminded her of Jinger, and Derick and Jill painting a creepy faceless portrait of Jinger and Jeremy. Derick explains the faceless portrait in this way, "As you age the painting goes with you." WTF? Jinger raves over the odd painting as only a good Christian could. One who thinks if she's truly honest about how she feels about the painting that she'll go to hell. See photo below. :p