whatever

For my own reasons, which like mañana is good enough for me, I moved this segment out of my June 26, 2026 blogpost to stand separate. If I publish it, it won't be linked on my Facebook page. It's - - 

- - an observation, to comment on something. Two somethings really.

Announcement yesterday that the Italian-themed chain restaurant Olive Garden will be adopting a dress code for clients. For folks who want to dine there, no armless shirts. Shirts should have a collar. No shorts as I recall. No flip-flops. Women should wear dresses, skirts. No slacks for women? I don't think they really want "a higher class of clients," I think they just want to make dining there a bit less sloppy.

I've eaten at both: 

There's an Olive Garden on MLK across from Target in the NW block of Highway 77 and 23rd Street, here in town where life is pretty informal; when we've eaten there it was more a casual drop in, not a planned and scheduled family outing for which we'd dress special.

There's an Olive Garden at Panama City Beach, where beach wear is the standard year round, and certainly this Time of year. You'd expect to go there as a casual summer tourist, not more formally dressed.

Can you imagine Olive Garden turning you away at the door because you don't meet their dress code? Maybe it'll be optional for each restaurant to management as best suits their business, IDK. 

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My other tentative gripe is about something I read yesterday in ENS, the Episcopal News Service online. In an Ohio diocese, and being reviewed by higher church authority, a priest is being laicized (that's not quite the term the Episcopal Church uses, I forget the term, but he's having his ordination revoked) for conduct unbecoming a clergy person: adultery. 

As ENS presented the story, defense says the priest's wife left him (the story did not say why, which may be relevant but was not elaborated as such), and a year or so later while the divorce was in process but before it was finalized, the priest began seeing another woman, whom he eventually married. The adultery charge is for what went on privately between them before the divorce was final. I guess someone was looking in the window.

There were other objections to the priest, but the ENS article said the adultery charge is what his dismissal sentence is about. 

IDK, maybe he's so bad a priest that they felt forced to find some way, any way they could, to get rid of him, I've known several priests in that category. Otherwise, the adultery charge for the man's being a male human whose female partner has departed seems a borderline outrageous arrogant sort of cherry-picking literalism as in the Bible story of adultery that Jesus ends with the words, "Let he who has not sinned cast the first stone." 

The church itself casts the first stone? Really?  

Yes, there are rules, generally bishops require that any marriage after divorce be delayed at least twelve months after the divorce is final before we are allowed to officiate the marriage ceremony. Nobody certifies to the bishop that we checked and made sure they didn't sleep together though. On the face of it, this case is ridiculous. Surely I'm missing something?

The church is obsessed with sexual sins. I knew a priest who robbed his parish of tens of thousands of dollars for personal use, who was not prosecuted in civil courts or church courts or subjected to the disciplinary canon, but sent from the diocese to a distant diocese to continue work as a parish priest. Not sure, but I think he may have since been suspended or expelled for a sexual sin of viewing porn on his church computer. 

Discussing Jesus' word that blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is an unforgivable sin, a priest once declared In my hearing that the unforgivable sin is adultery. Jumping Jiminy Jeepers. What about child abuse? Wife beating? Cruelty? Bullying? Drunk driving and hurting or killing an innocent person? Rape? Murder? But adultery is the one unforgivable sin? 

The church's obsession with sexual sins above all others is birthed in an institution, from which ours comes, of mandatorily celibate old men who are nevertheless human males, dogmatizing BMEV and idolizing virginity as the ideal for sinless human purity.

There is evil beyond evil. Carelessly bombing a girls' school and killing a hundred children is at the top of the list. As is My Lai. The Holocaust. The Nakba. Official clearly racially-profiled anti-immigration brutality. Ethnic cleansing. Mistreatment of people. Greed. Adultery is way down the list - - or the church cleansing itself of impurity?

My bit of cynicism.

T90  

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