OMG! 'I'm A Conservative' - Given Enough Time And A Little Push, All Progressives End Up Right

The political aphorist Lowell Frampton once famously said, 'Give a liberal long enough, and he will become a conservative', and while of course this is not completely true - there are those for whom liberalism has so defined their character, their persona, and their very being, that no dose of reality will cure them of the hopeless idealism which has been their calling card for decades - it is generally true. 

Even the most hardened liberal will take a deep breath, open a history book, look around him, and say, 'Phooey'. 

Addison Taylor was one of these committed progressives who never thought that he would ever change from a profound commitment to social justice, the environment, and the black man.  That would simply be unthinkable.  After all, he reasoned, there are such a thing as absolute truth.  The black man, descendant of the forest and legatee of tribal wisdom, sentience, and native intelligence would always be fit for the top of the human pyramid.  Heterosexuality would always be a bad choice, an outdated, crippling imposition of white straight males.  The climate was warming due to man's obtuse ignorance, etc. etc. 

The life he lived was an immersion into liberal values, liberal thought, and liberal friends.  He had no patience nor time for anyone who did not espouse the canon - those political troglodytes who refused to see the truth or even having seen it, retreat into a defensive ignorance. 

Addison was the Chairman and CEO of Scientists For Humanity, a small liberal advocacy group which had been on the front lines of every liberal cause since the first notice of melting Antarctic ice.  He had marched on the National Mall, delivered fiery speeches on college campuses, written op-ed pieces for The Nation, was a member of every women's organization in Washington, and a fierce champion of black rights. 

'Not this year, Addie', said Artemis Phipps, new President of the Radical Women's Caucus. 'Maybe another time', referring to his taken-for-granted speaking engagements before this group of radical feminists.  His presence had been considered important, for his view - the accommodating, respectful, understanding liberal male view - was needed to complete the inner circle, and show the nation that the fight for women's equality was also a men's affairs. 

Phipps, an imposing woman from Bernal Heights, chosen to lead the Caucus because of her dyke righteousness, high-toned bitchiness, and relentless, virulent, outspoken hatred of white straight men who, she said, were responsible for forcing women to spread their legs while they went off philandering, raping, and sucking the lifeblood out of them. 

 

Understandable, thought Addison, an expected evolution, a necessary radical turn; but at the same time he felt, for the first time in his life, left out.  He was in perfect solidarity with lesbian women, with women in general, and in consonance with their suspicions of men like him; but he had shown them that he was as much of a woman as they, as militant, and as committed. 

He was allowed to attend the annual Caucus conference in Washington, but during Phipps' tenure, the whole atmosphere had changed.  Not that he wanted protest to return to the days of Martin and Ralph, black-and-white, ebony-and-ivory solidarity, but this was a slugfest.  It had turned from a reasonable colloquy of thinking women to a riot.  'Cunts For Castration'...'Twats Forever'...'Bull Dagger Power' were just a few of the signs he saw. 

Now, the women's movement had always been palatable - girls he knew at Yale from Smith, Vassar, and Holyoke refusing patriarchy while marrying well; girls from fine families endorsing the harshest penalties for discrimination in the workplace while remaining caring, thoughtful, and loving wives and mothers. 'Our kind', Addie often said, proud of his and their ancestral tradition of reason and leadership. 

This...this mosh pit, this offensive freak show, was beyond the pale; and it had happened without him realizing the change.  Overnight, it seemed, feminism had gone from propriety and discipline to gang warfare.  

It was that scene that first disturbed Addie's convictions, and when the image of Heather Morgan, blonde, demure, and loving came back to him after many years.  She was a perfect, charming, quiet, intelligent Smith girl who adored him.  Their future - a home on the North Shore, children, an extended family, wealth and privilege within a solidly liberal worldview - was real, possible, and only awaiting graduation. 

 

'You women don't want pricks up inside you, do you?', shouted Artemis Phipps from the podium.  'You want cunts, pussies, hot, slathering FEMALE juices!!!' 

The crowd roared. Women ripped off their shirts, fondled each other, kissed, and shouted, 'No pricks...No pricks....No pricks!!!' until the rafters shook. 

Addie, nonplussed, taken aback, revolted and disgusted, left by the fire door, sat on a bench in Lafayette Park and wondered what the political world was coming to. 

The final loose hinge on what had been a solidly constructed and maintained political framework, came off when his political aide and advisor suggested a trip to Anacostia, the heart of the Washington inner city where he would see first hand the vibrant street life of the black man so limned and championed in Addie's speeches.  In Anacostia he would see first hand the virility, the community, the vital street life that was so absent in white, uptight, hidebound, racist neighborhoods of the city.  He would hear a carnival of music, dance, and effusion. 

Addie readily agreed but rolled the windows up as they crossed the Anacostia River into a potholed, rutted, trash-strewn neighborhood.  The outskirts of any community are always sketchy, he knew, whether tacky strip malls or yet-to-be-developed modern neighborhoods; but as he drove further south, down MLK Avenue to Fernwood Circle, there was nothing vibrant, soulful, or uplifting.  There were only derelicts, Fentanyl addicts, shirtless men with Uzis, and stoops where men smoking dope and drinking Colt45s sat and shouted at his car. 

This was he famous inner city?  This was the community of the prized, cherished, New Man? Where had he been all his life?

If all this wasn't bad enough, Washington had its coldest winter in fifty years - feet of snow, pummeling north winds, and brutal below-zero temperatures...and worst of all the polar ice caps were gaining ice.  For the first time in decades, the Ross Ice Shelf was increasing by a kilometer per year.  

Why was this such a surprise? If he had listened to anyone but the Armageddon cabal of the progressive Left, he would have heard compelling arguments about the cyclical warming and cooling of the planet, the modest if not indifferent effect of human activity on environmental temperatures, and he would have at least been apprised of another view. 

With that the ball of yarn began to unravel quickly.  Suddenly, everything became clear - the militant COVID response was nothing but government presumption and political chicanery; the open door immigrant policy was tantamount to the rapid dissolution of polity and ethos; the gender spectrum was an illogical, twisted, distorted fantasy; capitalism was the engine of remarkable growth everywhere and had raised hundreds of millions out of poverty in China and India.  Africa was nothing but a continental shithole run by corrupt big men, dominated by Paleolithic tribalism, and mired in abject  underdevelopment. 

He was much happier now that he had jettisoned all that worthless progressive baggage, stopped listening to the portentous claptrap mouthed by his former colleagues, and for once in his life said a great big 'Fuck you!' to anyone within earshot. 

Ol' Lowell Frampton, the political aphorist was right as rain when he said that all progressives become conservatives if given enough time.  Some take longer than others to see the light; but they all eventually come around.

A Life Of Social Justice - A Long Haul With Frightful Women

Robert Finley had given his all to social justice. There were the Freedom Rides, marching with Martin and Ralph across the Pettis Bridge, Bull Connor and his dogs, sit ins, protests on the National Mall, and Negro friends. 

Later there was the glass ceiling, the environment, climate change, the gender spectrum and capitalism itself.  There had never been a moment of doubt or hesitation.  He and thousands of others were joined in a political consensus - progress was real, Utopia was not only possible but around the corner, and if there was meaning to life, it was giving to others. 

Now in his later years, Bob sat disconsolate and wondering as he watched the parade of beautiful, blonde, young women step brightly down Pennsylvania Avenue to and from the White House - a White House that should have been his and the legions of those who had fought so long and so hard for graciousness, compassion, and harmony. 

He shook his head as he nibbled at his sandwich, shaking the crumbs for the pigeons who clucked and cooed at his feet.  How could this have happened, he wondered?  How could this moral reprobate, this arrogant, divisive, unprincipled man have made it to the Oval Office?  What tear in time-space had let this braggart come to earth?  

Decades of discipline, hard work, patience, and love were gone.  The black man was relegated to the ghetto, the lesbian consigned to Bernal Heights, the farm worker sent back across the border, and every last brake, bit, rein, halter, and trace with which he had harnessed Wall Street gone in a flash, setting free once again the monopolistic, predatory, arrogant robber barons of America. 

'Need a friend?', said a well-dressed man in blue suit to Bob. 'You look like you could use one'. 

Bob looked up from his sandwich and smiled at the man, one of the genteel male escorts who routinely cruised Lafayette Park.  By rights - after all he had fought long and hard for the gay man - he should have offered him a seat; but he was in no mood for the kind of casual intimacy that the man was offering. 

No matter how militantly he had taken up the cudgel of gay rights, he was privately disgusted by what fagg...Here he stopped himself, about to think an unutterable slur.  He revised his thought, composed himself and tried to right his ship, yet the thought completed itself...I'm disgusted at what these (blanks) do with each other. Reaming, water sports, buggery, cornholing, bathhouse sex. 

'You've got the wrong man', Bob said to the young man in  the blue suit, tossed the end of his sandwich to the pigeons and walked quickly away. 

This was the whole problem with social justice, he thought as he walked towards his office - espousing, endorsing, committing to political causes that offended him. Lesbians, dildoes, and scissoring was just as repulsive as the gay thing.  The black man had, despite decades of generosity and support remained in the same stinking, pestilential, drug addled, dysfunctional shithole ghetto he started in. 

Worst of all, he had for all these years been surrounded by nothing but frightful women - short, unwashed, ugly, frizzy haired, Jewish women he had seen before only on Brooklyn subways.  These were his cohorts, his colleagues, his sisters in arms.  Meanwhile all the bright young things he had had squired at Yale before his political days, were things of the past. 

 

Ahh, Heather Morgan, he remembered. Soft, pliant, wealthy, and with a fresh Midwestern blush and in love with him.  Where was she now? Who did she marry? Why wasn't she, still in the full blush of the bloom of the rose not here with him now?

Instead there was Esther Pilchman, finishing a rancid sardine sandwich, smears of mustard and horseradish still on her lips.  'Bob, we've got to talk', she said as he walked through the door. 

This time it was about immigrants, ICE pogroms, and Trump's planned genocide. She howled about Auschwitz, Soviet ethnic cleansing, the barbarity of Union soldiers as they exterminated Native Americans.  'You see?', she shouted, holding last of her sardine sandwich.  'You see??', she said. 'It's Kristallnacht all over again'. 

No, it was Esther's putrid, ugly ranting all over again, overblowing, inflating, inventing, and doing a St. Vitus' dance, wailing and twitching, turning blotchy, smelling badly and as ugly a woman as Bob had ever seen. 'Stop it!' he shouted silently, unwilling to challenge the clearly unhinged creature bouncing around the airless, cramped office. 

'Sorry to run', she said.  'I'm off to protest' and with that grabbed her stained and saggy Hopi cloth bag, and walked out the door leaving Bob alone, disquieted, and unhappily looking at his inbox, an old fashioned relic of the halcyon days, filled with flyers, announcements, screeds, and torn copies of The Nation. 

Bob sat heavily in his chair and stared at the portrait of MLK, the poster of Che Guevara, the stale bagels, dust devils, and bookends holding Marx's Communist Manifesto, Engel's The Coming of the Proletariat, and Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung. 

A Presbyterian born and raised, Bob still wished that he could go to Confession.  He was having bad thoughts, traitorous, devilish thoughts, and he could live with them no longer.  He hated black people, gay men, lesbians, freeloaders, and especially the unholy ugly women who harped on about them.  

Right now, his Yale classmate Hetherington Adams (Addy) was sitting on a St. Bart's verandah overlooking the harbor, lovely young mistress at his side, not a care in the world, a satisfied life of investment banker behind him, scion of one of Boston's most well-known families, father, grandfather, emeritus and model. 

Had it all happened the way Bob had planned - a progressive revolution which would have turned America into a socialist union of shared values, equal benefit, and harmonious inclusivity- he might be enjoying his later years.  Instead he was still at his cheap steel desk in a third-rate office, pursuing a stale, outdated, hapless agenda. 

'Yes, but it had to be done, and someone had to do it', he shouted, but it was empty valor, a last hurrah, a desperately off tune swan song. 

No one can ever admit that they have wasted their life - that would leave them horrifically empty before death - but Bob came close.  'There's still time', he thought; but of course there wasn't.  He had played his cards, no more were to be dealt, and he was left only with a few scattered dollar chips. 

'Goddamn it!', he shouted.  'Goddamn it to hell'. 

Diary Of A Madwoman - Taken For A Visionary, She Matched Her Madness With The Liberal Agenda And Succeeded Brilliantly

As a toddler Phoebe Nelson had shown signs of the mental ferocity that was to be her calling card in later life, but her parents simply took her seemingly irrational behavior as 'the terrible twos'.  She would wail and flail, tear up her books, spit on the Audubon print in the hallway, throw her food, and smear her face with gravy. 

'Wow, she's really something', said her father, admiring God's creation - such a volcanic temperament in a two year old was remarkable, for it showed the limitless power of the human will. 

Frank Nelson was a Nietzschean who had read all of the philosopher's works, and was convinced that his daughter was an Übermensch, a being destined to ride above the herd. 'The only validation of the individual in a meaningless world is the expression of pure will', Nietzsche wrote in Thus Spake Zarathustra, and Phoebe Nelson was showing the first signs of such willfulness at a very early age.

'Frank, be serious for a change', said his wife, a practical woman who saw Phoebe as a spiteful, intolerable girl who needed a good thrashing. She might have will, but there was nothing philosophical about it. She was obdurate and antisocial. 

As she grew older, she lost that infantile, inchoate rage, but never lost the intent behind it.  For there was, despite the seeming unbridled anger, a purpose - a defiance of the world around her; and she was never at a loss to show it.

'Bobby Nevins is a fat, ignorant, bullying imbecile', she shouted at the principal of her school as she stood before him accused of 'antisocial behavior'.  The school was in the throes of diversity, inclusivity, and equity, and the principal went to great pains to harness youthful energy to communitarian well-being. 

'We do not say such things about anyone', the principal admonished her.  'Ever'. 

'But he is an obese moron', Phoebe went on, 'and an ignorant bullying retard to boot.  Like it or not, you can't deny it.'

The principal thought for a moment about how to be principal-like, temperate, understanding, and helpful; but he couldn't avoid the truth spoken out of the mouths of babes.  Bobby Nevins was indeed a doltish clot, a stupid, vain, and imbecilic piece of work, the offspring of equally backward, moronic parents. 

'Perhaps we might be a bit more tolerant', the principal managed, 'and a bit more kind'. 

'Give that halfwit an inch, and he'll take a mile', she replied. 'Nip him in the bud'. 

As much as he hated the idea of having been intimidated by a student, he knew she was right.  Bobby Nevins was a disruptive, interfering, empty-headed twit; and the school would be better off without him.

And so it was that before long, Bobby tripped himself up, crossed the line, passed the limits of tolerance and inclusivity, and was sent packing. 

This was to be the first step of Phoebe's political activism, and the principal, long retired and reading about Phoebe Nelson's rise to power, said to his wife, 'I knew it'. 

There were many intermediate steps between middle school and Washington, defining moments in Phoebe's career, moments when her voice became more forceful, mature, and resonant.  

Her classmates at the Brown University Young Progressives Association were in awe at the young woman.  They had many firebrands in their midst.  LaShonda Evans, an uppity, loud, borderline hysterical black woman from Washington's worst slum and admitted to Brown on affirmative action, couldn't hold a candle to Phoebe who combined eloquence, intellect, reference, and determination with brutal, savage ad hominem attacks. 

President Phillips is a cowardly, buggering, idiotic lowlife - a drunk pedophiliac moron in power only because of a craven board of directors on the take.  His administration of university policy has been nothing but a drooling, lobotomized joke. The man is mentally flatulent, a farting, disgusting prick, a gutter-dwelling piece of shit...

She took on every campus cause - gays, black people, the climate, immigration, the gender spectrum, Wall Street - with the same venomous passion. She went from revival tent to revival tent, podium to podium, lectern to lectern without missing a beat. She was the Miss Universe of campus progressivism. 

When she was at her best, she was poetic. 

The black man, descendant of the rainforest, the savannah, and the veldt, home to the wild things and God's first human creation, is the legatee of that native sentience, that natural intimacy, that primordial understanding, that universal brilliance. He belongs on the very top of the pyramid of human society, not on the lowest rung where he has been relegated by generations of white slavers. We who understand his greatness, his superiority, his genius will fight to the last to see him become the model for civilization, the brightest shining star in the human firmament...

She was able to dismiss conservative cavils - the persistent, perennial pestilential slums of the inner city, consistently bottom of the barrel test scores, academic performance, intellectual ability, and lack of socialization, abandoned children, dereliction, addiction, and violence. 

'How dare you?', she shouted at her critics, launching into another fiery, intimidating, brutal reprisal.  She was unbeatable, unstoppable; and best of all she could make the most untenable, historically inaccurate, wild, febrile, nonsensical claims sound reasonable!  She was brilliant, a master, a genius at winning the public.

She believed nothing of what she said.  Everything was a product of her madness - for now even she admitted that madness was the engine that propelled her - and she found the progressive agenda perfectly suited to her rage. 

Liberals hated things, found everything wanting, found despicable, nasty bits everywhere.  They were already a hysterical lot, so stepping in and adding nuclear fuel to the fire was easy. 

Politicos in Washington took note and visited her before her graduation from Brown.  Mightn't she be interested in an internship, or even an associate aide to an influential Democratic Congressman?

And so it was that this Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa graduate from a premier Ivy League school became one of the House's youngest aides, in the office of the representative from her home district in Ohio. 

She, despite the age-old rules of decorum in the Capitol, became a whirling dervish of passionate conviction for all the Congressman's liberal policies.  He was the most radical of the white members of Congress, never as bulldozing and scuttling as the Squad, that cabal of assaulting women of color, but far left nonetheless. 

'I can help you, Congressman', Phoebe told him. 'I'm the white bitch who'll put you on the map', and so it was that she went after AOC, the Somali, and the Affirmative Action Queen with a vengeance. She was merciless in her demeaning, insulting, scurrilous attacks on these cunts'.  She staked out territory to the left of all of them, uncharted political land no one even knew existed; and before long the Congressman had become the Great White Hope of radical liberalism. 

She felt good at night, emptied of her bile, her virulence, her anger, and her madness.  It was a time for recuperation, regeneration, and rebirth. Tomorrow was another day, a better day, a more bitterly angry one.  The demon inside her must be fed. 

She made the news.  The liberal media gushed with praise.  A woman was not just making waves.  It was a tsunami!  She was written about, featured, and interviewed; so when the suddenly quit, everyone was caught unawares.  There had even  been talk of her running for office. 

'I don't give a shit'', she openly and characteristically commented to a friendly reporter. 'Don't you get it?' 

Of course the reporter had no idea what she was talking about and was unwilling to surmise the worst, the truth - that the whole Phoebe Nelson thing had been a show, a vaudeville act, the Madwoman of Chaillot come to Washington to fret on the stage and then disappear. 

But it was just that - a marvelous circus act, a high wire performance, a stunning trapeze act of glitz and glamour but without any substance whatsoever. 

Observers on the Right saw her act as a metaphor - the whole progressive movement was nothing but a vaudevillian act, a rabbit out of a hat, smoke and mirrors, Sturm und Drang, signifying nothing; and they were sorry to see her go. 

'Wasn't she wonderful?', said the editor of The Federalist, a conservative journal; and so she was indeed. 

After she left Washington, she disappeared. Some reports had her in Tallahassee, others on St. Bart's; but not even the most sensitive surveillance instruments could pick up even a trace of that magnificent, mad voice. 

A Woman's Ivy League College Goes Gay- From Nantucket To Bernal Heights In The Blink Of An Eye

The Seven Sisters - Barnard, Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Pembroke, Radcliffe, and Wellesley - were in the days of separate but equal men's and women's colleges, the academic equivalent of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. There were differences among them.  Vassar took Jews, Smith catered to the Nantucket crowd, Wellesley the up-and-coming social register daughters, Radcliffe, the binary, algorithmic ladies who gave up pinafores and Arpege for serious thought, and Holyoke took the rest. 

Yet all marched to the same drummer; all were conformingly upper class, feminist women who wanted it all, wealthy husbands from Yale, boardroom appointments, and Jascha Heifetz and Artur Rubenstein for sons. 

And they realized their dreams.  Abigail Simmons, scion and legatee of the Newport Simmons family, merchants, traders, shipbuilders, and investors in the Three Corner Trade, went to Wellesley.  Patience Morrow, descendant of John Taylor Morrow of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and John Davenport's aide de camp in his expedition to found a new, uber-Puritan colony in New Haven went to Vassar; and Felicity Potter, great great granddaughter of Audubon Potter, Chief Justice at the Salem Inquisition went to Pembroke. 

These and other well-fashioned, properly educated, and socially statuesque women excelled at college, married well, had equally bright and well-behaved children, and reacted well to the new dynamics of the Sixties.  While holding their own as members of the Old Guard, they were quick to adopt the new, progressive ethos of the times.  

'The Other' - the black, the Latino, and the gay - were welcomed members of the new American society.  While the Old Guard still returned to Beacon Hill, the Main Line, and Shawnee Mission for holidays, they were the first advocates for the trifecta of inclusion, diversity, and equity. 

Now, same sex institutions being what they are - closed, intimate, shared showers and bedroom havens - it is not surprising that some gender infidelity occurred; but women who were of that particular sexuality were tired of sexual adventure behind closed doors.  Instead, they became members of activist groups, political cabals, and well-funded interest groups to put pressure on the administration to both admit more gay women and to welcome a cultural move away from a traditional, formal, and increasingly outdated social milieu, 

Amanda Parsons, graduate of Smith College, on her way to an advanced degree in bio-physics, and a well-known Bernal Heights lesbian, was particularly outspoken about the need to change direction and for Smith to become not only welcoming to lesbian women but to transform itself into 'Lesbian Central'.  This was the niche that would separate Smith from the rest of the Seven Sisters, all foundering after the Ivy League became co-d. 

 

Making Smith a gay Mecca would place it at the forefront of modern progressivism, and would give it a cachet and recognition that the other Sisters could not match. Amanda wrote this to the President of the college:

Dyke Heaven, Queersville, Bernal Heights East, Wet Pussydom....This is the new Smith, the forerunner, the avant-garde, the first in line.  A new redoubt for brilliant non-binary women in solidarity and with political purpose.  A primus inter pares women's institution which would combine academic excellence with sexual license, the New Wave of higher learning, the model for the New American woman. 

At first the President, a straight woman, PhD from Harvard, noted economist, and advocate for 'accommodating feminism' was taken aback by the letter,  Yes, same sex partnerships were not uncommon at Smith or any of the other Seven Sisters, but to make it into the go-to place for lesbian women was another thing altogether.  Her passionate commitment to diversity was antithetical to the idea of sexual monopoly.  Gay women were welcome at Smith, but to make it a dildo, pussy eating haven was another thing altogether. 

'Wait a sec, Madame President', advised one of Smith's board members. 'Distinction and cachet are the sine qua non of financial solvency.  Market placement, a unique selling principle, and cash flow dominance are what college development is all about.'

The President grimaced at the thought of the Development Office's promotional materials. 

'Smith is an all-embracing, all-encompassing place of sexual diversity.  Within the highest standards of academic excellence, the student body is free to enjoy the company of likeminded, seriously intended sexual others; and in fact the college endorses and promotes such alternate lifestyle preferences'

 

This of course accompanied by photos of undergraduate women doing things together, sharing intimacies and belonging. 

When asked to approve the new promotional campaign, the President demurred.  Her past - a wild heterosexual bacchanal interrupted by periods of scholarship, her serial partnerships with Princeton quarterbacks and Yale rowers - could not be either forgotten or denied.  Turning Smith into a cunt fest?  Never on her watch. 

But once the genie is out of the bottle, there is no putting him back; and the cry for a more sexually unique institution continued to gain currency. 'Who cares who does what to whom if their grades are kept up?', said the most positive activists, indifferent to the likely job interview where, 'Ah, you went to Smith, I see', unmistakable reference to sexual oddity, would be the defining moment in the hiring process. 

Of course in these days of inclusivity, no recruitment officer was supposed to think querulously about sexual orientation, but such an item could not be dismissed. In the case of McLarty Enterprises, LLD, a Washington think tank, there were far too many sexual hijinks during working hours, added to which was the increasing discomfort of the binary employees under whose notice these alternate affairs were happening. 

Nevertheless Smith went whole hog on the lesbian thing, and much to their surprise, the applications far exceeded supply.  It was a gold rush, and many thanks were given to the foresightful administrator who thought up the change of direction, 

An example of the applicant enthusiasm was evident in this essay:

I am queer, I am lesbian, I am a pussy hound, I am incontinent, indissolubly gay, and look forward to passing four years with my sexually alternate sisters.  Together we will form a cabal of queerness, a redoubt of same sex intimacy, a sexual unit of personal satisfaction and political weight...

'Smith is the New Shining City On A Hill', said one Admissions officer proud of his and the college's efforts to relegate heterosexuality to the dustbin of history, to create a brave new world of gender-affirming, inclusive sexuality.  He couldn't keep his delight quiet nor keep his own counsel and in an impromptu meeting with the President said, 'We've done it! Eighty percent gay and counting.'

The President, still despite herself with disgusting images of buggery and sexual excess on her mind, and longing for the days of cotillions, masked balls, Nantucket weddings, and grandchildren, smiled and thanked her colleague for her work and enthusiastic commitment. 

Privately she thought that Smith was going down the shithole.  Imagine! she thought, how perverse, how untoward, and how perfectly...unacceptable the whole idea was, 

'I quit', she told the Board of Directors and went her way to her retirement condo in Tampa, Trump country.  Better bass boats and gunracks than vaginal insertions and lower lip sucking. 'There, I've said it', the President mentioned to her husband, quite glad indeed to be out of that hell hole that miasma, and back on God's green earth 

The Tart, The Altar Boy, And The Defrocked Priest- Small Town Values Gone Very Much Awry

Father James J. Brophy was the pastor of St. Maurice Church, and had been seen as the likely replacement for the Archbishop who was now in his early nineties.  

 

Father Brophy was one of the few hardline Catholic prelates in the archdiocese and had taken a very critical stance on ecumenism, homosexuality, graft, and moral corruption.  He was an old time fire and brimstone preacher, more Protestant evangelist than Catholic priest. 

 In fact he and Pastor Ebenezer Johnson of the Third Baptist Church of Ames City challenged each other very Sunday to see who could raise more Hell and shake the faithful to their roots for their sinfulness and godless indifference to the Lord. 

They had each peeked in on each other, marveled at each other's eloquence and ability to corral even the most faithless into the embrace of Jesus Christ.  They tried to one-up each other, calling upon  more and more fearsome Biblical references, causing sinners to weep with repentance, and raising the newly resurrected from their pews and shout 'Amen'. 

Of course this last was not done in the Catholic Church. Such born-again tomfoolery was verboten, especially after Pope John Paul II condemned Protestant fundamentalism as a sect, promising as it did salvation with a few shouts and hymns.  Only faith and reason, said the Pope, the vision of both Aquinas and Athanasius, could lead to heavenly bliss. 

So no one in Father Brophy's congregation stood up and said, 'Praise the Lord', or 'Praise be to Jesus', but kept their seats in quiet contrition.  Father Brophy had reached them, touched their grief and their sorrow, and they did not have to proclaim their submissiveness to anyone.  

Father Brophy was at his very best when he railed against the gender spectrum, that godless and Satanic revulsion, that twisting of God's creation, that blatant pie in the face of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that abhorrence. 

'Go forth and multiply', shouted Father Brophy from the pulpit, 'and as for the rest of you, be gone!'

Now, hypocrisy is the stock-in-trade of the clergy and the politician, especially when it comes to sex.  Not a few politicians who ran for office on moral rectitude, sexual propriety, fidelity, and traditional Christian values, were found in bed with some tart, admitted their sin, vowed never again to stray from the path of righteousness, and were re-elected. 

Perhaps the most famous was Congressman ____from a district in Father Brophy's home state of Ohio, who was caught in flagrante delicto with a harem of hookers procured by Washington's most reliable Madame, Mrs. Esther Kleinberg. When questioned by the press, the politician channeled Dominique Strauss-Kahn, former candidate for the French Presidency, a known Lothario and obsessive 'sexualist' who when accused of a similar sexual jamboree, said, ‘How was I to know they were prostitutes?  All women look the same with their clothes off'. 

 

The press and the American politician's constituents did not find this funny at all, and he had one hell of a time extricating himself from the mess, but he did, bawling and beating his press in a nationally televised press conference, and claiming to be born again.  His district forgave him, and he was again reelected. 

Father Brophy, despite his fulminations from the pulpit about the gender spectrum, was fascinated by it, especially the idea that one could pick and choose and move easily between and among the offerings.  No one had to be sexually hidebound, progressives said.  Heterosexuality was only a choice and a bad one at that, and the gender spectrum was the sexual offering long awaited. 

Father Brophy studied the daunting array of options on the spectrum and was drawn to the bi-sexual.  Of course, there were more divisions and subdivisions of this category that one could possibly imagine, and together they formed their own mini-spectrum, but the priest quietly and quickly concluded that he belonged to all of them.  

His sexual desires were eclectic to say the least.  He was attracted by Billy Baxter, angelic altar boy who served at High Mass, gracefully moving across the altar to serve both priest and God.  Billy was a charming, delightful boy - blonde, blue-eyed, lithe-limbed, and profoundly faithful.

But he was also attracted to one of his parishioners, Mrs. Althea Albertson, reputed to be of illicit sexual bearing - a tart, to be quite honest, and just the thought of thrashing around with her, doing unspeakable things, sent him to the confessional. 

 

Now, Ames City, like most small towns in America, had its share of sexual deviancy.  Mrs. Hermione Phillips, President of the Women's Auxiliary, charming hostess, and country club golf champion, routinely entertained men in her home while her husband was away. The butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker didn't begin to describe the eclectic mix that came to 145 Harper Road every afternoon. 

There was Hennessey Phelps, a City Hall administrator, lawyer, accountant, and upstanding citizen who spent his lunch hour in his basement pleasuring himself with the raunchiest, most twisted, and vulgar pornography ever assembled.  When finally arrested for mail fraud - Phelps had naively used the USPS for his obsession - the FBI admitted they had never seen such an assemblage of filth. 

And Blanchard Tompkins, Fitzsimmons Archer, Gladstone Pinkus, and Dido Marks and a hundred others doing unspeakable things. 

So in some ways Father Brophy should not be faulted for his own eclectic mix of sexual partners.  It was par for the course in Ames City.  Of course the priesthood was sacramental - being ordained meant that he was in a line to Jesus Christ himself - and so such sexual deviance should be looked at differently 

 

Yet, in the light of God's merciful forgiveness, and his warm embrace of all sinners, he knew he was doing no wrong. 

Not so, concluded the Archbishop who investigated the rumors that were circulating in Brophy's parish.  In the old days he would simply have transferred the priest to another domain with a lecture and a warning; but in the new days of transparency, he would have to take more decisive action. Brophy was brought before the archbishopric magistrate in Cleveland, investigated, and found guilty of apostasy.  After a rather lengthy appeal, Brophy was defrocked and sent packing. 

Now Brophy was just an ordinary john, but one who had been most generous and kind in his ecclesiastical days, so when he decided to say a fond goodbye to Mrs. Albertson, she felt sorry for him, offered him a temporary place to stay, and a few hours of her earthly delights, gratis. 

Brophy was pleased and touched by the woman's kindness, accepted her offer but did not overstay his welcome, and eventually made his way to Portland, where, he had heard, anything goes.