Thanksgiving and remembrance

This week Argentina became the first Latin American country, and the second country in the Americas (O Canada!), to legalize same-sex marriage nationwide. ("Viva!" to Mexico's Distrito Federal for legalizing it locally.) The LDS Church made what strikes me as a token effort to stir up opposition among its members in the vicinity of Buenos Aires. I'm not sure, actually, how to explain why they refrained from organizing a more assertive opposition, something more on the scale of Prop 8. Scared cautious by the Prop 8 backlash? Worried about a backlash from the Argentine government? A largely American leadership just not so invested in what goes on outside the United States? Who knows. Anyway, justice won, though I'd be more encouraged if it had won by a larger margin.

The morning breaks, the shadows flee;
lo, Zion's standard is unfurled!
The dawning of a brighter day,
majestic rises on the world.

The clouds of error disappear
before the rays of truth divine;
the glory bursing from afar,
wide o'er the nations soon will shine.

"Zion's standard" because one of the defining values of Zion is social equality and an end to discrimination (D&C 38:26-27).

Hope flickers on.

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It appears—fingers tightly crossed—that the oil well in the Gulf of Mexico has been successfully capped. My feeling about that actually isn't so much gratitude, to be honest, as it is: About frickin' time. I still want to see heads on stakes. Well, no, I don't believe in capital punishment as a matter of principle. So let me revise my vindictive fantasy: I want every BP executive, and anyone else in that company whose job responsibilities make them accountable for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, along with every person at the MMS ever guilty of taking gifts or allowing oil companies to bend the rules, to be compelled to work in oil cleanup for however many years it takes until the job is done.

One can only dream.

The angel brought me again to the door of the temple;
and look! water flowed out from under the threshhold toward the east. . . .

He said to me:
These waters flow down into the desert and into the sea,
and when they come into the sea, the waters will be healed.
Then every living thing that moves will live,
and there will be great schools of fish,
because of these waters.
They will be healed, and everything will live.

(from Ezekiel 47: 1, 8-9)

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Yesterday was the three-year anniversary of my excommunication. I'm sitting here looking at the screen, with absolutely no idea what more to say about it than that. I'm not even sure what kind of scriptural passage to quote at this point. Well, no, this feels right:

I will ask my Father to send you another Advocate,
who will remain with you forever . . .
I will not leave you orphaned:
I will come to you . . .
Then you will know that I am in my Father,
and you are in me, and I in you.

(John 14: 16, 18, 20)