Love is all around.

Yesterday, I said "Love was all around, and I was able to choke back tears until I got back in the car." In the comments, Unknown said:

How can the increase of the rate of love in the world be a bad thing? I don't comment often, anywhere, but this moved me. Thank you.

And Pat said:

Long time conservative republican here, glad to see people who love each other and are willing to commit to each other, able to be married. We r's need to let this issue go and fight other fights.

But eric said:

I submit that the word love is being used in a fallacious way. Love does not mean something you feel. It means the way you behave. What we are seeing is a perversion of love. One that says, if you feel good, its love. Which is apropos of this situation. As we see both love and sex being perverter and enablers helping these people destroy their lives.

Love is not something you feel? "I feel it in my fingers/I feel it in my toes," sang The Troggs in a song, titled with the words I used, "Love Is All Around." And here's Joan Jett and The Blackhearts singing the theme from "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" ("Love is all around/No need to waste it..."):



And — to embrace tradition — here's the original show opening with Mary emoting and a gentle-voiced man singing about turning the world on with a smile. Perhaps eric will stop in to submit that the human smile cannot in fact turn on the world and, indeed, the world is not a unified, embodied entity with genitals capable of arousal, and even given the vast appeal of Mary Tyler Moore, it is fallacious to contend that the entire world possesses a sexual orientation toward a woman smiling.

The gentle-voiced man — if you're inclined to riff on what your body's ears hear as effeminacy or metrosexuality or whatever — is Sonny Curtis, who played with Buddy Holly before there were Crickets and who wrote — in addition to Mary's "Love Is All Around" — the lawyer's favorite "I Fought the Law" and the Everly Brother's "Walk Right Back." Or does Anne Murray turn you on with her smile?

Did you know Mary Tyler Moore is now 77 years old and nearly blind?

Have you heard there are none so blind as those that will not see? 

And:

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the expiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No man has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.