BAPist 47 Respecter

Columbus Circle at Union Station has been fully restored thanks to President Trump.

Latest pics of the new tabernacle at St Ann’s, Texas that was just installed this week The addition of this tabernacle is part of a larger project to renovate and bring back tradition in the parish. The tabernacle will sit in the center of the brand new sanctuary that was added last year.

I AM A TALAFREAKO

I’m a straight white dude, a veteran who grew up in a military family on farms in the Midwest. Moved to Texas on a scholarship from the Army. I drive a truck, listen to country music, and love football. I dare anybody to call me UnAmerican, and I’m fully behind Talarico.

The ancient Greeks invented democracy, theater, the Olympics, and apparently the world’s first “labels are for soup cans” discourse. Ancient Greece did not have a word for “homosexuality” the way we understand it today. They did not sort people into neat little boxes marked gay, straight, or bisexual. What mattered to them was status, power, age, and who held control in a relationship. The entire framework was different. A powerful adult man could sleep with women, male lovers, sex workers, or basically whoever fit into his social world without anyone deciding that was his entire identity. The scandal was not same-sex desire itself. The scandal came if a freeborn man was seen as passive, submissive, or giving up social dominance. Masculinity was treated like a rank you had to defend at all times. Which, honestly, too many men still take to heart. Greek art and literature are packed with desire between men. Plato wrote about love between men as a path to beauty and wisdom. The Sacred Band of Thebes was an elite military unit made up of male couples who were said to fight harder because their lovers stood beside them in battle. Alexander the Great openly grieved Hephaestion like a spouse when he died. None of this was hidden in whispers or coded glances. It was woven into public life. Women, meanwhile, got shoved to the margins of most Greek records because ancient misogyny was working overtime. That is part of why figures like Sappho stand out so sharply. Her poetry about love and longing between women survived thousands of years because it was too powerful to erase completely. The Greeks were not “progressive” in the modern sense. Their world was deeply unequal and brutally hierarchical. But they also remind us that sexuality has never been as fixed, tidy, or binary as modern culture pretends. © Bil Browning