Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Gandalf the Gay

A brief thought: I have the mixed pleasure of receiving the magazine Columbia as a benefit of my membership in the Knights of Columbus. The veil over the leadership's fealty to the G.O.P. gets rather threadbare around election seasons, but other than that it's a welcome arrival every month. The hard-copy edition of the December issue's wearily predictable but actually perfectly solid pre-Hobbit "Betcha Didn't Know Tolkien was Catholic!" article, "The Knights of Middle Earth," was illustrated with a picture of Sir Ian McKellan's Gandalf doing some manly sword-wielding well-suited to the article's message of neo-chivalric moral uplift.

Of course, when not playing Gandalf, Sir Ian spends much of his time engaged in political activism on behalf of his fellow gay people; not unrelatedly, he participated in the unfortunate protest against the Pope's recent visit to Britain. Unsurprisingly (and understandably, I admit), this went unmentioned in the Columbia article.

My passing (minor) observation is merely this: Those of us, like me, on the conservative side of the present stage of the kulturkampf might do well to strive to remind ourselves periodically that even some of our most cherished conservative cultural treasures are often in part gifts to us from our gay neighbors.

2 comments:

  1. "The veil over the leadership's fealty to the G.O.P. gets rather threadbare around election seasons" Yes it does. I wish they'd rather focus on local activism than the national stage. I think that their efforts to get out the Catholic vote (for the GOP) cause many to focus on and drain themselves emotionally during national elections, which retards the local activism that actually affects their community. The KofC as a national organization is not unique in this; thankfully, the local councils are firmly focused on local charity and service.

    "some of our most cherished conservative cultural treasures are often in part gifts to us from our gay neighbors" Hear, hear, and let me state the obvious continuation: All of our most cherished conservative cultural treasures are gifts to us from our fellow sinners.

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  2. "I think that their efforts to get out the Catholic vote (for the GOP) cause many to focus on and drain themselves emotionally during national elections, which retards the local activism that actually affects their community."
    *
    Absolutely. Ironically, that tendency to ignore the effective local for the affective national is, when not done out of a laudable abhorrence for abortion, as often as not done out of a misguided sense that ignoring the local this way somehow serves "subsidiarity"!

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