By David Futrelle
There are a lot of guys out there who not-so-secretly resent women for having bodies that get them all hot and bothered.
Warren Farrell, the intellectual grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement, famously warned men to beware of the “cleavage power” and the “miniskirt power” of young women. Incels and MGTOWs today rail against women “torturing” them by wearing skin-tight yoga pants. Hell, last week I wrote about one horny Redditor who blamed women for tempting men by showing their arms in public.
So what about in insidious threat of shoulders, which in addition to being “the laterally projecting part of the human body formed of the bones and joints with their covering tissue by which the arm is connected with the trunk” are also sometimes nice to look at?
Enter Father Kevin M. Cusick. On Sunday, the priest and former military chaplain caused a bit of a stir on Twitter after he suggested that women shouldn’t show their bare shoulders in church lest the sight of such a tempting bit of skin cause the men and boys to suddenly start feeling a bit funny in their pants.
Naturally, more than a few Twitterers took issue with Cusik’s stance. And so he doubled down, and doubled down again, launching into a full-on meltdown that lasted until this morning.
But he topped even those tweets with his final comment on the subject, in which he compared himself, and the treatment he’d gotten from critics on Twitter, to Jesus getting nailed to the cross. No, really.
As it turns out, Cusick’s not just worried about sexy lady shoulders; he’s also worried that women’s bare feet could give priests boners. Several years ago, you see, the Pope said it was ok to include women and girls in Holy Thursday foot-washing rituals. But Cusick worried that foot-washing priests might get turned on by “cute” lady feet.
That last tweet about washing men’s feet seems just a little bit ironic when one starts poking around a little more in Cusick’s Twitter history.
Because, as it turns out, shoulders and feet aren’t his main obsessions. For every tweet he’s written about the dangers of improperly exposed female flesh, there are dozens (hundreds?) of tweet about the evils of gay men and their dirty doings — both in the Catholic Church and in the world at large. (He has much less to say about lesbians.)
In Cusick’s mind, the Church doesn’t have a pedophile problem; it’s got a “homosexual problem.”
Not only is this “homosexual network” intent on sexually abusing boys; it’s also, in Cusick’s mind, “perverting” the Church’s teachings in order to promote the mortal sin of sodomy.
Apparently the only way to ward off this “homosexualist” menace is with the magic of Latin.
He’s a bit obsessed with the whole sodomy thing.
He also has some, well, interesting views on “so-called ‘trans'” folks. Here’s his reaction to a news story about a trans woman teacher.
And here’s his, well, novel theory about the nature of transness.
Needless to say, he won’t be celebrating Pride month.
But Cusick isn’t just obsessed with sex. His Twitter history is a virtual smorgasbord of unhinged takes on almost every hotbutton social issue. He thinks abortion leads to “bloodthirsty mobs on the streets.”
He regularly links to alarming “news” articles on the alleged evils of migrant Muslim “invaders,” including at least one article from rabid far-right Islamaphobe Pam Geller. His own opinions on the subject are only slightly less rabid than hers:
Needless to say, Cusick also hates feminism, especially when it involves young boys being taught that women’s suffrage was a good thing.
But the strangest thing I found in Cusick’s Twitter history? He’s apparently afraid of being enslaved — by Beto O’Rourke.
It’s a weird and more than slightly unhinged reaction to a young man standing on a car spouting vaguely lefty political platitudes. But, hey, anything to get Cusick’s mind off of sodomy, I guess.
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Fast forward: because of what God did to save humanity (sacrificed his Son) this was why he liked Lot so much, and only because he didn’t choose the easiest option he was rescued from Sodom?
Nooo, he was a shitty coward, because @Makroth says so.
How about you find many answers that christian philosophers and theologists gave already. Maybe you dont’t understand them. Maybe you understand them and still reject anyway. But I cannot imagine knowing it and still claiming “you’re shitty people who worship cruel God”.
PS. Isn’t it a kind of “I’m a man, tell me what this whole feminism is about?”
That’s not what I’m saying at all.
YOU SAID that we were engaging in “Presentism in all its glory.”
YOU are the one who insists that morality was different back then, and we can’t judge people who aren’t in our culture by the moral standards of our culture because what is evil and good changes between the past and the present, and between Sodom and the rest of the world.
Remember:
That’s the priest you came here to defend, and yet look at you: you’re defending Lot’s criminal facilitation of rape. And now you’ve lost all credibility or authority to condemn child or youth sexual abuse.
And, worse, you’ve decided that your god thinks Lot’s actions were okay, which means your god has lost such credibility and authority.
What the fuck do you do now?
YOU have announced to everyone that you engage in relative morality, and YOU roped your god into it, not least because your god’s holy book calls “righteous” a man who offered up his daughters to be raped instead of resisting the idea of any rape, all rape.
I’m not talking about just any god, in the manner of Euthyphro. I’m talking about your god. You’ve made your god bad by assigning to your god an inability to morally condemn rape when it’s arranged by one of god’s favorite people.
You’ve made your god bad by refusing to condemn the incest in the bible – and by the way, I wasn’t talking about Lot’s daughters, but rather about the recurring incidents of incest throughout the catholic bible, from Cain and Abel marrying sisters to Abraham marrying his half-sister and right on down the line. You don’t get to dismiss the incest in the bible as two rapes that happen briefly in Genesis 19. It’s all through your holy book.
YOU decided morality was relative and that a book full of incest is your (relative) guiding light.
I’m not criticizing your god for being pathetic. I’m criticizing you for worshipping a pathetic god.
Pick a god that doesn’t endorse rape, pick a god whose actions you don’t have to justify through relative morality and I won’t make these criticisms.
@yzek
That’s kind of you to validate the accuracy of Crip Dyke’s description of her own thoughts.
@yzek
How about no? How about you tell me what you think?
It wasn’t so much cowardice as it was treating his daughter like they were cattle.
Like i said: He’s a piece of shit.
How about no? This is Catholicism 301 and we haven’t really started 101 course yet.
That’s only your projection of Lot’s thoughts again :/
A piece of 101 course: the trouble with interpreting Biblie is not only taking out of internal and external context, presentism and all other approaches you represent (and which would be enough to dismiss such analysys of any other classic literature like Homer or Shakespeare). Moreover: Bible is not literature and Christianity is not its fandom.
Let’s take Harry Potter series and Dumbledore. You may read them all the way, pick up proper quotes, and write two essays. In one of them Dumbledore will be a noble mentor and bravest man, in the other one: manipulative coward exploiting other wizards like Harry or prof. Snape. And both essays could score A+, whatever J.K. Rowling thought of Dumbledore.
Now: if Harry Potter was you Bible and instead of studying it as literature you would do proper exegesis, your goal would be different: to find a description of Dumbledore and other characters MOST CLOSE to what JKR intended.
So far what you’re doing to Bible stories is more close to: “Harry Potter is a dark magic ritual handbook intended to make children worship Satan!!!!” than any of the two different approaches.
@yzek
You still haven’t actually proven that what Lot did there was a good thing. You can start whenever you’re ready.
Just nothing, of course, because whatever you want to force-feed with me is not my food. I see Lot as a tragedy of decent men (It’s your idea to make him absolutely “holy” like he was Jesus or something) of HIS TIME (this is the whole “presentism” you accuse me of) forced to choose between evil and evil, where doing nothing is also evil. “Trolley problem” before no one ever thought about trolleys.
In this situation it’s more important to recognize not WHAT he did, but WHY.
What Lot choose and why doesn’t mean “rape is OK” in any means (E- in both classes I wrote above).
@yzek
Why he did it is irrelevant.
He gave his daughters away like they were things to be traded. “Why” and “where” doesn’t change the fact that it was an exceptionally horrid thing to do. Which makes him an exceptionally horrid individual.
Now you’re the one assuming that there’s only two options available.
Why is Lot required to choose between “all right, go ahead and rape my guests” or “hey, don’t rape my guests, please rape my daughters instead”? Why couldn’t he stand against the rape of anyone? Because he was afraid that the men might turn on him and he wanted to save his own skin? I mean, that’s an understandable reason, but hardly a decent one.
And when you read history of Sodom as a whole you see that it’s like allegory of place or situation so evil, that it forces even decent people to participate — or perish. In such situation God doesn’t allow evil to overcome, but those decent people rather be willing rather to take harm to protect others against evil rather than protect themselves by any cost.
This, or “daughters are a cattle and rape is actually good”. Your choice.
@yzek
Bad analogy, my friend.
1) Harry Potter is a work of fiction. It doesn’t claim to be anything more than that. People don’t cite Harry Potter as an infallible guide to morality and try to base laws on it, so it’s irrelevant whether the reader thinks Dumbledore is a mentor or manipulator.
2) J.K. Rowling is a real person, alive today. She is able to comment on how closely a given interpretation matches her intent.
3) Harry Potter was written by a single author, during a small time frame of a decade or so, in one language. It has a consistency of voice and viewpoint that the Bible doesn’t share.
4) You sure are condescending for someone whose idea of a counterargument is a link to Wikipedia and vague statements like “I’m not going to get into it with you, you’re at the 101 level and don’t understand” and “you missed some points”. If you’re too lazy to back up your opinions with supporting evidence, you can hardly expect the rest of us to grant you credentials as an expert on Church doctrine.
@Everyone else
Can we get back to Father Cusick? He’s a lot more interesting than this troll.
Or cat pictures. Cat pictures are always good.
Oh, reckless bravery (stand back! you get no one!) which would make the mob even more angry and take guests, dauthers? No, this is not decency. This is putting everyone in more danger because you value your own self-image more. The only salvation Lot saw was: give them what they desire to calm the situation and save the outsiders.
Also If I remember correctly: the reason why cityfolk hated Lot was because he and his family did not engage in their “parties” before. In this context it’s more like “Is this what you always wanted me to do? To let my daughters on your bunga-bunga? OK then, only leave those people alone!”
@yzek
Now that you’ve put the situation in a modern context, I completely understand why Lot had no choice but to give his daughters to the mob.
There’s a philosophy where this would be an arguable position, but it seems odd that it would be found in a religion centred around a man who sacrificed himself to save others. A religion where Christians were thrown to lions, etc. and it was considered to be a noble thing for them to do, to die rather than renounce their faith. Compromise is not typically considered to be a Christian virtue, as far as I’m aware.
That’s why its only analogy with purpose of giving some idea how exegesy differs from literature interpretation. Sorry, I cannot see any second Bible around to protect me against quite plain “analogy is not equality” charge :>
… and that’s how you should treat Bible different than Harry Potter? That’s what I said, innit? Because when you do not step carefully and follow strict rules, you might get some crazy ideas like “incest is OK” or “you should cut off your dick in order to sin” (there were such sects for real)?
That’s not my intention; especially towards you. Please take it as my uncertainity that I’m able to pass Church teaching correctly, especially to such hostile audience — I’d rather come up as coward or lazy than accidentally write something that some people here would misuse and twist their idea of Catholic doctrine even more (if it’s even possible).
The Quran? The Torah?
You won’t do the work because then we’d misuse your words, even more than we already have. Got it.
@yzek
Oh, i see! Lot did not want to engage in “virtue-signaling”. Surprised it took you this long to bring in that old chestnut.
He could have stood against those people because it would have been the right thing to do.
But not Lot. He was too afraid of being seen as a virtue-signalling beta soyboy cuck or something.
It’s cute how the troll thinks we haven’t already read the common answers to the problem of evil before.
Personally, I find them wanting. But there are approaches that make sense at least. Christian Bible literalism is however, irreconcilable with the problem of evil. You can’t defend rape and slavery because the Bible is okay with them and then turn around and scold a woman for wearing a sleeveless blouse in church. I mean, you can, but nobody reasonable is going to take you seriously as someone who is actually moral. Especially since right wing religious people mostly only embrace Bible literalism when it’s convenient for them. Where are all the conservative Christians calling for a debt jubilee or actually observing Sabbath? Where are the Vatican higher ups and megachurch pastors that take vows of poverty instead of living cushy lifestyles on the tithes of much poorer people?
I sense irony here… but anyway: I came back to refresh my memory of the story — Lot’s offer was rejected and Lot was forced to defend both his guests and his house and would be beaten to death without divine help.
So ultimately he was forced to do the “right” thing anyway, because evil knows no compromise. That’s another moral of the story more sane than “it’s morally acceptable to let ones daughters be raped”, I hope you’d agree.
Really, the simpler explanation for the story of Lot was that it was written by men in a very patriarchal culture who saw women as property of their fathers and husbands. What Lot did wasn’t evil because he was sacrificing his property, not harming loved ones who are real human beings.
That troll has no problem with it is unsurprising. This is someone who defends incels after all. I’m not sure how defending incels and their desire to be able to fuck Staceys squares with the pious Catholic shtick he’s doing in this thread though. Typical right winger. Demand purity and perfection from women, but men get to make all sorts of mistakes and sin all over the place and still be considered the superior gender.
There’s always a justification for bad male behavior.
And eating shripms and other unclean food (yum!).
And yet I seem condescending when I say “you don’t know 101”?
Whatever you want to see, I know.
I don’t see how a sarcastic remark about yummy shrimp demonstrates that I don’t know 101.
It does kind of demonstrate that you can’t refute common and basic arguments though.
Of course, my point actually is that we don’t need to go beyond 101 level. I’m not interested in any attempts, sophisticated or not to defend clearly immoral male behavior while holding women to unmeetably high standards. Because it’s all spin.