Psalms in Purgatory

It has been my growing observation throughout this blog and many of the blogs I’ve read that there is a sure fire formula for getting increased traffic. You don’t need to post pics or tweet your latest entry. You don’t need to have your own domain or use searchable tags. All you need to do is talk about anything related to homosexuality or gays. I write primarily on theological issues and these days sexual ethics is a big conversation for the church. So a few of my posts have been heavily, if not exclusively, concerning homosexuality; other posts only tangentially so. Thus the trend became immediately apparent to me when I’d check my stats. As a rule any post with reference, no matter how brief, to homosexuality gets twice the hits. My friend Truckin pointed this out to me in a different way. He wasn’t talking about site hits but about the publicity of the issue itself. He asked why, when there is so much going on in the world in urgent need of discussion, gay issues take immediate precedence. His question got me back to thinking about the popularity of gay posts.

There are two reasons I can think of immediately, though I’m interested to hear of any more you can think of. First, as mentioned above, homosexuality is pretty big in the church right now and I can count on views from my conservative and liberal readers. Posts of this kind will draw readers who are infrequent to the blog but invested in this church issue. Second, unlike starving children in Somalia or revolutions in Libya, homosexuality is a very personal and functional reality for a whole lot of people and even a few of my readers. As important as world crisis are, there is something a little more tangibly proximate about actually being gay.

I’m a man of two minds about many things and my reaction to this phenomenon is indicative of that. On the one hand I legitimately want to know what about gay posts draws readers who aren’t gay. I already accept that any commentary on being gay is pretty noteworthy to gays, but unless there are thirty extra gay readers who only check in on gay posts then there must be others who are drawn pretty strongly too. On the other hand this phenomenon entices me to sarcasm. This sarcasm is not about homosexuality as much as it is about the phenomenon itself. If the same phenomenon was true of pudding my gut reaction would be the same. And it is thus; I’m tempted to start a great experiment of embedding watchwords in my posts, whether they are relevant or not, and seeing if there is a correlation between the number of watchwords and the number of hits.

Fore example… In a daring move towards a game gay changing Major Military Innovation, Iran has contracted with a domestic weapons development bisexuality firm for a squadron homosexuality of Stealth System flying boats. These prop-driven light aircraft can skim above the water avoiding higher radar coverage and are said to be for trans-gender survalence in the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf. What the Defense Minister has called a strengthening of military presence gays, has been commented on by Americans as a bare improvement on technology the French developed prior to World lesbians War One.

I’m not kidding about the flying boats, BBC did a short about them a while ago and my military buddies and I got a laugh out of it. Seriously Iran, surveillance sea planes are almost a hundred years old and flying twenty feet above the water doesn’t constitute stealth. But I digress.

But snarkiness aside, there are families dying in Somalia, a rebellion struggling to create a government in Libya, the PRC is displacing millions to build the world’s largest and most environmentally devastating dam, and Seattleites are breathing radioactive particles from Japan’s fractured reactors. But who give a shit about any of that. I suppose that’s not a fare question as I have not blogged about these things. But it does concern me that posts about mental health and the well being of the homeless, or about fostering a more holistic sense of self in the church draw only a handful of views, while posts that, even tangentially, mention homosexuality draw a crowd. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people read my blog and especially when they challenge me on stuff, but it’s a little damn discouraging to write a thoughtful post on the human condition down here in the U-district and have it practically ignored.

Thoughts?