Tag Archives: wynn wagner

Dec 31 2011

Civil Unions is a half-measure

Photo is from Diane’s Muse

By Wynn Wag­ner

Sev­eral states now allow what they call civil unions.

I’m happy that my gay broth­ers and les­bian sis­ters can approach equal­ity with those born het­ero­sex­ual. It’s a step, but it isn’t equality.

This isn’t a gay issue. It is a mat­ter of religion.

My church — the Old Catholic Church — teaches that sex­ual ori­en­ta­tion is not a bar­rier to mar­riage. Gay men and les­bian women can marry in the Old Catholic Church. Most priests don’t blink an eye or hyper­ven­ti­late when they’re asked to per­form a gay wed­ding. In fact, one of the old­est mar­riage rites we have is for two men from what we call the Ortho­dox Church.

The Roman Catholic Church thinks it dif­fer­ently. Rome’s church was estab­lished in the year 1054, regard­less of their mar­ket­ing attempts to claim it is the “orig­i­nal” Chris­t­ian sect. Rome says that so-called tra­di­tional mar­riage is always between one man and one woman. Balderdash.

The Roman emperor Charle­magne (742–814) is con­sid­ered one of the great Chris­t­ian emper­ors. He led the Rome back when there was one Chris­t­ian denom­i­na­tion. He was the leader of Rome when the Old Catholic Church was formed in Hol­land, by the way.

But here’s the thing: Charlemagne had eigh­teen chil­dren over the course of his life with eight of his ten known wives or con­cu­bines. He had mul­ti­ple wives at the same time, and he never apol­o­gized for that. He was a Chris­t­ian with a stronger claim to “tra­di­tional mar­riage” than any­thing Rome can put forward.

It’s find for a reli­gion to define mar­riage how­ever they like. If the Romists and Bap­tists want one-man-one-woman as their pro­to­type, they’ll never get an argu­ment from me. The argu­ment comes when they try to inflict their dogma onto my real­ity map.

I’m not Roman Catholic. I’m not Bap­tist. Yet, they try to con­trol my church.

The Bill of Rights in Amer­ica says that gov­ern­ment isn’t sup­posed to pass laws that restrict the free exer­cise of reli­gion, but they do pass those laws. They have judges who claim to be rea­son­able but restrict my reli­gion every day.

What needs to hap­pen is this: the US gov­ern­ment needs to get out of the reli­gion busi­ness. My church her­alds love in a diverse array. Mar­riage is a glo­ri­ous gift.

I shouldn’t have a law that pro­motes rules of some johnny-come-lately churches like the Roman Catholics and the Baptists.

Bravo for civil unions! Now, can y’all stay the heck out of dogma?

Photo is from Diane’s Muse.

Nov 30 2011

Mixed up Christmas

Reli­gion Professor: We need to get back to the orig­i­nal mean­ing of Christmas.
Me: Mithras?
Reli­gion Professor: (hits me)

The airplane wins this contest 87% of the time.There was a lit­tle con­fu­sion reported in the whole con­cept behind a store win­dow dis­play in China a few years ago. I’m sure they meant well. The store cel­e­brated Christ­mas by putting Santa Claus on a cross.

It was sooooo close, but really missed the point.

On the other hand, a lit­tle chaos can bring a spirit of fun to the hol­i­days. One of my favorite hol­i­day songs is “Christ­mas in the Ashram.” It was writ­ten and per­formed by Chris Rosser. Tom Prasada-Rao recorded an excel­lent cover. It’s a won­der­ful mish­mash of ideas, like putting Santa onto a cross.

From the west to the east
They left their homes in search of peace
A tran­scen­den­tal mys­tic yogi
Took them in, he was kind and holy
Cal­i­for­nia to Bombay

They trav­elled far to sing and pray
But on the last week of the year
Their songs became a lit­tle weird

Cho­rus:
Singing Om Alleluia — Hare Hare Krishna
In Excel­sis Deo — Rama Bolo Rama Bolo
Glo­ria Glo­ria — Govinda Gopala
Om Noël — Jay Siya Ram
Christ­mas in the Ashram

The guru must be out of town
There’s tin­sel in Vishnu’s crown
Some­one hung a Christ­mas star
From one of Shiva’s extra arms.

There’s egg nog in the black spice tea
Lotus petals on ever­green
Incense burn­ers green and red
Santa hats on shaven heads

(Repeat Cho­rus)

They sang Gospels and Upan­ishads
Psalms and Vedas prais­ing God
Maybe Christ and Krishna are amused
When humans get a lit­tle bit confused

(Repeat Cho­rus)

Nov 29 2011

Wynn at The Authors Guild

Wynn at The Authors GuildI am very pleased to let you know that most of my books are now listed at The Authors Guild.

The Authors Guild has been the nation’s lead­ing advo­cate for writ­ers’ inter­ests in effec­tive copy­right pro­tec­tion, fair con­tracts and free expres­sion since it was founded as the Authors League of Amer­ica in 1912. It pro­vides legal assis­tance and a broad range of web ser­vices to its members.

This is the orga­ni­za­tion that fights for fair con­tracts for writ­ers. It takes on large cor­po­ra­tions, such as Ama­zon and Google, to make sure an author’s copy­right is honored.

Nov 26 2011

10 Steps to Writing a Novel

  1. Plot bun­nies become too treach­er­ous to ignore.
  2. Bun­nies are off’d with great alacrity (stir in fresh bun­nies to make the plot thicken).
  3. Plot is almost fin­ished (except for the most impor­tant parts).
  4. Cheeky muse van­ishes (aban­doned, time of peril and need).
  5. Rewrite (hate plot/publisher/agent).
  6. Rewrite (hate miss­ing scenes).
  7. Revisit ill-fated deci­sion not to study pre-law.
  8. Rewrite (put out hit on muse).
  9. Plot fairies visit and mirac­u­lously fin­ish miss­ing scenes.
  10. Soli­tary plot bunny spot­ted in yard.

Oct 26 2011

Laurels and Tardies

Wynn WagnerThis is kind of a big deal for me per­son­ally. This web­site. It is because the engine that does the squishy tech­ni­cal stuff is Word­Press, one of the amaz­ing soft­ware sys­tems that is avail­able on the inter­net. The con­tent is stored in a MySQL data­base. Here’s the amaz­ing part: Word­Press and MySQL are absolutely free. Word­Press is wran­gled by a bunch of scripts that will make the best com­puter pro­gram­mer go glassy eyed just before falling over in con­vul­sions. MySQ, but the scripts usu­ally get the job done. MySQL used to be some­thing of a joke around com­put­eroids, but the data­base devel­op­ers got them­selves a seri­ous case of whoop-ass which they pro­ceeded to pour all over Ora­cle and Sybase. The point is this: free soft­ware rocks. It is almost like they took a cue from… I don’t know… who? Fidonet? Opus?

It still gnaws at me. Because I spent years pro­gram­ming these sill silicon-based whooz­its, I have a deeply held belief that I could prob­a­bly do a bet­ter job. Belief? No: absolute knowl­edge that I could do a bet­ter job. It is the kind of cor­ro­sive knowl­edge that is bub­bles around every time I launch some­body else’s program.

That’s one side of it. The other side is that run­ning some­body else’s code is lazy. It is like the gar­den cen­ter at one local Home Depot. They actu­ally have a tree stak­ing kit. A what? No, really. It is a sharply pack­aged bag of wire and short wooden stakes, and there’s some kind of wrap to keep the wire away from the tree trunk. What’s more, they actu­ally printed instruc­tions for the kit. I’m sur­prised they didn’t include a ham­mer… unless the instruc­tions tell the pur­chaser to go to the tool sec­tion to buy the ham­mer of their choice. I mean, give me a plank and some wire. I’ll break off some wood strips to use as stakes, and I’ll have the tree aligned and fas­tened in less time than a Gen-X Green-jeans can read the damned instruc­tion booklet.

On the other hand, I’m retired from pro­gram­ming com­put­ers. I can rest on my … no, I don’t have any lau­rels. Where are my god­dam lau­rels? WAIT, do lau­rels have thorns? I’m not putting my tush on top of any thorns for any­body. I’m retired, for Pete’s sake.