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qman said:
The new Pope just said it's OK to be gay, things are changing.

http://wtvr.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis/

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terric said:
It was a guy. The church is an average size community church; I've never attended. I just hope the preacher realizes the effect his words have on his congregation. Im not religious by the way, just found this interesting since it was close to where I live. The guy did have depression issues.

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Synthe said:

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qman said:
The new Pope just said it's OK to be gay, things are changing.

http://wtvr.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis/

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No, he doesn't think it's okay to be gay. Give me a fucking break. He still maintains his backwards stance that "homosexuality is a sin".

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qman said:

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Synthe said:

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qman said:
The new Pope just said it's OK to be gay, things are changing.

http://wtvr.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis/

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No, he doesn't think it's okay to be gay. Give me a fucking break. He still maintains his backwards stance that "homosexuality is a sin".

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"Who am I to judge them.. They shouldn't be marginalized... they're our brothers."

It's a huge change on homosexuality for the Catholic Church, while they might still consider it a sin, they now want gays in the church.

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qman said:

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Synthe said:

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qman said:
The new Pope just said it's OK to be gay, things are changing.

http://wtvr.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis/

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No, he doesn't think it's okay to be gay. Give me a fucking break. He still maintains his backwards stance that "homosexuality is a sin".

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"Who am I to judge them.. They shouldn't be marginalized... they're our brothers."

It's a huge change on homosexuality for the Catholic Church, while they might still consider it a sin, they now want gays in the church.

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Magicman69 said:
Nothing real new here, we all know Christians frown upon homosexuality.

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That is changing, and I'm sure the conservatives are going to step up their rhetoric as the mainstream shifts toward more tolerant doctrine. I don't think a story like this can be dismissed as "nothing new"

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psi said:

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qman said:

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Synthe said:

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qman said:
The new Pope just said it's OK to be gay, things are changing.

http://wtvr.com/2013/07/29/pope-francis/

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No, he doesn't think it's okay to be gay. Give me a fucking break. He still maintains his backwards stance that "homosexuality is a sin".

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"Who am I to judge them.. They shouldn't be marginalized... they're our brothers."

It's a huge change on homosexuality for the Catholic Church, while they might still consider it a sin, they now want gays in the church.

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Basically they say that gay sex is a sin, but being gay (as in having gay tendencies) in itself is not.

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Synthe said:

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psi said:
Basically they say that gay sex is a sin, but being gay (as in having gay tendencies) in itself is not.

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Yeah but it's absurd to say that as a gay person, you must be abstinent for life to get past the pearly gates.

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Just throwing this out there for people who may be struggling with their sexuality due to social stigmas and repression.

The piece written below is in regard to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality, Vol 1. People who are struggling with their sexuality may benefit from these notes and I know homophobes might see things differently if they give it a read. The entire book is worth reading as well, so is Vol 2.

Sorry to hear bout this person's suicide.

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Dystopia said:

Introductory Notes, Hist of Sexuality Vol 1
This is a discourse of repression that is being repressed!

•Power operates in innumerable places, taking many different forms that may or may not work in tandem.
•There is no single privileged place for the political activist to go to work, no locus of power whose removal will bring the whole system tumbling down.
•The “universal” intellectual has given way to that of the “specific” intellectual, “situated” (as all are subjects) in social networks.
•Though no struggle is more crucial or effective than any other, the agent must start with the local and the specific: not only because of his or her own location but also because “universalist” claims arrogantly (and mistakenly) assume the right to speak and act for others.

Power is productive. Power is traditionally seen as repressing behaviors that it finds unproductive, threatening, or otherwise undesirable.
•People have various sexual desires that are deemed “unacceptable”, and social power is exerted to repress those desires and the behaviors that follow them.
•The enunciation of the category and the law both creates (identifies, designates) certain actions as crimes and affords them a heightened presence.

Power is an exercise in relation to something else. It is multiplicitous, redistributive, homogenous, relations throughout via networking, relational and non-subjective; there is no resistance and it is not outside of any realm of society.

Modern Power produces the very categories, desires, and actions it strives to regulate.
•Before an act is prohibited, it is not singled out as something separate and identifiable or perhaps even desirable.
•Modern Power produces sexual categories that structure the world in certain ways.
•Modern Power penetrates everywhere, giving a specific name to every possible variant of human action so as to master the world and leave nothing unexamined, unknown, uncatalogued.
•Modern power is a POLYMORPHOUS TECHNIQUE with many manifestations and forms.

Modern Power operates through continual classification, surveillance, and intervention, proposing that such power names actions as crimes and perversions precisely to increase its opportunities for intervention.  This is why he says modern society “is in actual fact, and directly, perverse.”
•Produces desires and behaviors it claims to abhor, relying largely on discourse.

•Power can operate physically on bodies, but discursively it carves up the world. People are assigned to various categories (race, gender, IQ, etc.), and various actions are designated in relation to norms as praiseworthy, deviant, punishable or criminal.
•A new array of identifiable “perverse” sexualities were named in the 19th century.

•19th century produced extensive new vocabs and categories for desires and actions that could then be subject to medical, legal, and other institutional and state interventions.

•“Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy to a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.”

•Power acts discursively to produce homosexuality when it separates out and labels homosexual certain actions that had been previously referred to as sodomy (which also included bestiality and nonreproductive heterosexual acts).

•The new attempt to be more precise, more “scientific”, in categorizing human sexual behavior itself requires that behavior be scrutinized more carefully than ever before.

•In modern society, actions begin to be taken as evidence of a deep-rooted and persistent identity. In the premodern world, in contrast, sodomy and other crimes were seen as temporary aberrations, single acts that carried no particular relation to the self who committed them; they certainly were not seen as demonstrating a sexual identity or a criminal nature.

•The homosexual carries his homosexuality within himself at every moment; the act comes to determine identity. Modern power therefore produces identities within its subjects, thereby enabling its grip on us.

•Subjects whose identities must be figured out through an interpretation of their actions become “both an object of analysis and a target of intervention”.

Exposes and questions the era’s most fundamental assumptions about who and what individuals are. The assumptions have been produced by and are the foundational principles of the “social sciences” – what the French call the “human sciences.”

During the same period, academic disciplines arise and shift towards producing knowledge in psychology, sociology, anthropology, criminology, and medicine as an integral part of the discursive ordering and physical management wielded by modern power.

POWER/KNOWLEDGE – modern power requires narrow categories through which it analyzes, differentiates, identifies, and administers individuals.

The human sciences provide tools and legitimate the actions.
Psych exam – criminal to a prison, criminal to a hospital?
Undercuts “the life of the mind” or “the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.”
The intellectual starts to look like a privileged outsider to power’s activities.

NOTION OF POWER (p. 86):

“In a society such as ours, where the devices of power are so numerous, its rituals so visible and its instruments ultimately so reliable, in this society that has been more imaginative, probably, than any other in creating devious and supple mechanisms of power, what explains this tendency not to recognize the latter except in the negative and emaciated form of prohibition? Why are the deployments of power reduced simply to the procedure of law and interdiction?”



BIO-POWER: Institutions that prompt, store, distribute things said about sex. Churches, schools,
military, etc. 143, 144-145

DISCOURSE:It is not just language. It’s a whole paradigm of methods of thinking, operation of power throughout discourse and its exercise of power. (17)

CAPITALISM:Policing sex as a regulation not prohibition (taboo) – a necessity for wealth, production, labor capacity, balance of resources, specific phenomena of government. (24-25).

NEXUS:Other centres for proliferation via multiplicities – juridical, medical, psychiatric – they all create, participate, and work with each other. (33)

PASTORAL:Christian pastoral tradition and its loosening grasp on regulating sexuality as “dispersion of centers … regulated, polymorphous incitement to discourse.”
-Dispersal, multiplication, polymorphous, broad range of networking. (34)

SECRET:Sex as a “secret” outside of Discourse that you must get at. Just by saying you must disclose sexual information means there’s a discourse. By saying you shouldn’t, you really should, thereby creating/reflecting/examining Discourse.

The Perverse Implantation: The permanent reality (visibility) of the four parts of the machinal apparatus.

History of Sexuality, an Introduction
•The rise of the bourgeois class held work ethic higher than pleasure (wasteful, unproductive).
•Sex outside of the institution of marriage became a confessional situation.
•“The marriage relation was the most intense focus of constraints; it was spoken of more than anything else; more than any other relation, it was required to give a detailed accounting of itself.”
Limits even on such things as LANGUAGE – moved to the private sphere of marriage.
•Church tempered its language to sexuality, but the confessional demanded specifics.
•In order to confess everything, people MANDATED to speak of it.

“THE FALL” During the Victorian Era
•We gave it a sentence to silence and an affirmation to not see/hear/speak/know and focused on the illicit – nonreproductive and extramarital.
•He also asks how we have (or if we) freed ourselves from this repression. Everything from late 19th to early 20th centuries to liberate ourselves after “what they did to us”.

Scientia Sexualis
Our problem applying science to sex; knowledge-power. The secrets of sex and understanding how we talk and that we talk.

•Bio-Politics: Medical discourses on sex which have broader powers over controlling populations.
•Laws and Taboo’s: Pleasures/taboos vs. Truth, as in what’s “right”
•Discourses arose to think or to know (page 57 for falsehoods).
•The immediacy of ars erotica – truth from pleasure itself. (57)
•Main purpose at the confession is to produce THE TRUTH – other systems then adapted this notion, such as law, medicine, and thought. (59)
•This is the true question of who we are (Truth) and is very much related to sex.
Sex as rationality in “The Deployment of Sexuality”.

Analytics of Power (85)

Juridico-Discursive.
The negative relation.
Insistence of the rule.
The cycle of prohibition.
The logic of censorship.
Uniformity of the apparatus.

Multiplicity within these. Not simply by operating only through censorship – rather, by negating/prohibiting, the counter-intuitive manner may actually be productive. We have our typical power.

Power is an exercise in relation to something else. It is multiplicitous, redistributive, homogenous, relations throughout via networking, relational and non-subjective; there is no resistance and it is not outside of any realm of society.

Right of Death and Power Over Life

Reductive, subtractive exercise of power (seizure) over Life & Death. (136)
Prominent mode but also a generative mode of growing and creating it. (137)
Power began as a way to help for its usefulness and efficiency. (138)
Bio-Politics: Power that is made to proliferate life by disciplining the body and regulating the population.

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