Democrap
Boi from Troy asks, “Why does Obama oppose gay marriage?” Ostensibly Obama's reason is because his religious views dictate that marriage should be between a man and a woman. He might as well have finished his statement with, “Polly want a cracker!”
Obama doesn't support gay marriage because it is not politically expedient to do so. Period. Religion. has. nothing. to. do. with. it. Maybe he figures, “Hey, it worked for Edwards.” Except that Edwards actually does come from a conservative religious background. Obama claims membership in the United Church of Christ which is actually quite gay friendly, and...wait for it...supports gay marriage. It's hard to imagine a religious body more gay friendly than the United Church of Christ, except maybe the Metropolitan Community Church.
Wanna try again Obama? Oh, and while you're at it, want to explain how talking out of both sides of your mouth is a “change” from past and current political bullshit?
Religion continues to serve one of its vital functions for society: to provide a screen for individual and institutional bigotry. God said Europeans should “colonize” the rest of the world and convert the colored heathen to the true faith, and if the point of the sword happens to be involved, well, they're better off dead than living in darkness anyway. God said the institutional, systematic and organized attempts to destroy the culture of native peoples in the western hemisphere, including the forced removal of native children from their homes to be placed in “proper” Christian homes, was necessary for their ultimate salvation. God said black people are cursed and naughty and deserve to be treated like animals and beasts of burden.
This is really the god you believe in and worship and I'm supposed to be impressed?
And just so there is no confusion, Hillary doesn't get a pass either. It was her darling husband that gave us DOMA and DADT. She's already on record as having no intention of trying to undo DOMA, and I suspect she has no intention of trying to undo DADT either.
Really!?! With Seth and Amy
A pretty good roast of Senator Craig.
Compared to some of the other shenanigans going on in Congress of late, Craig is, as my dad put it, "small potatoes." No pun intended. (Actually, he probably did. Dad's wit is dryer than the Sahara.)
Nevertheless, the man is an idiot. His closet is damn near pathological. There's a reason that gay men have the signals they do. It's because the average man taking a pee in a public bathroom doesn't do those things! Can you imagine the catastrophic consequences if gay men had chosen shaking of the unit as their signal?
Remember these signals were developed in a time when a mistake would likely have proven painful if not fatal. Depending on where you are, that probably hasn't changed much.
Pass it on.
Still another story to add to the growing list. My friends Jim and Fernando were returning from a vacation in Puerto Rico when Fernando was detained in customs because his visa has expired. Jim has returned to Utah, but Fernando is stuck in Puerto Rico seeking legal representation to set up a bond that will allow him to return to the U.S. If that fails, Fernando could have to return to Brazil and it will be 10 years before he can return to the U.S.
We are trying to raise money to help pay for Fernando's legal fees. Any amount you feel you can spare is greatly appreciated.
Satan Disavows Gay Marriage
I know there is are a lot of people who might think I'm in favor of this," he said, "but you couldn't be more wrong. My perfect world involves the fevered debasement of flesh and the absolute corruption of the spirit, not two happy people living out in the suburbs building a life together. Frankly, just the thought of these "families" hosting barbecues and going to baseball games makes me sick." 1
To Infinity and Beyond!
There has been some general grousing about the gay rights movement's seemingly myopic focus on marriage. You can count me among those who question the apparent strategy of straining at gnats and crying wolf. "We must defeat the Federal Marriage Amendment!!" Defeat it? It was DOA.
Some have taken their grousing one step further. The folk at BeyondMarriage.org have released a public statement more or less stating that marriage is too narrowly defined and GLBT folk should be pressing for broader definitions to allow for a wider variety of living circumstances including, but not limited to, "Committed, loving households in which there is more than one conjugal partner."1
Oh, yeah. That will mollify the religious right. You thought they were hysterical before, they'll be positively apoplectic now.
Just from the first few paragraphs—I'll admit I haven't read the entire statement—it sounds like a revival of the 60s free love movement, a movement which, in case no one has been paying attention, fell flat on its face. Maybe it will succeed this time, because, you know, the current socio-political atmosphere is so conducive to such an idea right now.
I guess this could be some sort of subtle reverse psychology strategy. BeyondMarriage.org actually makes gay marriage look good.
Predictable
Jeffery Nielsen, a professor at BYU, recently pended an honest, heartfelt appraisal of the Federal Marriage Amendment. Recently a letter from the First Presidency, the presiding body of the LDS church, was read from every pulpit in the U.S. urging the members to contact their congressmen and voice their support for the measure. Nielsen felt that was inappropriate for the the church to do and said so.
When the church hierarchy speaks on a public issue and requests that members follow, it is difficult indeed if an individual feels the content of their message would make bad law and is unethical as well. I believe opposing gay marriage and seeking a constitutional amendment against it is immoral.
Currently the preponderance of scientific research strongly suggests that same-sex attraction is biologically based. Therefore, it is as natural as a heterosexual orientation, even if rare. It seems it might be caused by environmental conditions in the mother's womb, before birth, triggering the DNA to give the fetus a homosexual orientation. Neither the mother nor the child has any choice in the matter; it is a completely natural process.
Truly, God would be unjust if He were the creator of a biological process that produced such uncommon, yet perfectly natural results, and then condemned the innocent person to a life of guilt, while denying him or her the ordinary privileges and fulfillment of the deep longing in all of us for family and a committed, loving relationship.
Even if the scientific evidence does not yet establish this beyond reasonable doubt, it seems that virtuous moderation and loving kindness require us to exercise caution before making constitutionally binding discrimination against a whole class of people based only on fear and superstition.1
A fine statement in and of itself, but he doesn't stop there.
God is not the author of incoherence or injustice, but we humans often are. We in the LDS Church must be more honest about our history, including the past and future practice of polygamy in our official doctrine. This will be difficult, for it will reveal that we have been less than truthful in our public relations, and it will show our inconsistency with current statements opposing gay marriage.
We can no longer afford to teach only what is useful and hope people won't discover what is true. In this day of easy Internet access, a person can find more real history of the LDS Church in 30 minutes online than the same person would in a lifetime studying approved church materials.
This is not right. Too many individuals have suffered a loss of faith when they were forced to choose between the truth or their family after innocently discovering the discrepancy between genuine history and the official story of the church.1
It's certainly nothing that has not been said before. It's certainly nothing that some church members haven't thought and felt for some time. The sin, however, is giving voice to those opinions. My first thought when I read he was a professor at BYU was, "Wow. I hope he's tenured." Turns out he's only an adjunct professor, and, predictably, has been fired.2
Surely he saw that coming. I'm not sure how he could not have been aware of the risk to his job. Maybe he believed that critical thinking is encouraged in an university environment when the reality is "intellectual" is a pejorative on BYU campus. (I graduated from BYU, trust me.) At BYU thinking critically is encouraged only so long as your conclusions are in line with official church positions. Public statements of conclusions derived from such thinking in opposition to official statements of the church will get you, as a church employee, fired. The church is well within its rights, as an employer, to fire an employee who is in violation of policy. It's just supremely unfortunate that in a university context, speaking your mind is contrary to policy.
The Tribune article mentions possible action against his membership. Frankly, I see that as unlikely, though I'm sure one member of the church leadership—at whom "We can no longer afford to teach only what is useful" was a deliberate jab—would love to haul him before a church court, restraint not among his better known qualities. One statement of belief in opposition to official church policy is not enough to get you ex-communicated. If Nielsen continues to make such public statements, and makes efforts to sway other members of the church to his way of thinking, on the other hand... You can bet he'll think twice before making his beliefs public again.
2Hollingstead, Todd, "BYU fires teacher over op-ed stance," The Salt Lake Tribune, June 14, 2005, sltrib.com.
(Tribune articles are only freely available for seven days. After that a subscription is required to search the archives.)
Here we go again.
Howard Dean is coming under fire from GLBT groups for recent sucking up to Evangelicals.
Gay rights groups reacted angrily Wednesday to Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean's televised comments to an audience of evangelicals that his party's platform defines marriage as between one man and one woman.1
Whence the shock? I just don't get it. He didn't say anything that hasn't already been said by Democratic politicians—over and over and over. I don't understand the faith that GLBT groups seem to place in Democratic politicians. Kerry never took a stand on gay marriage when it really counted. He pandered to whatever group he happened to be addressing. If he was addressing a conservative crowd he touted marriage between on man and one woman. If he was talking to a gay crowd he touted his opposition to a Constitutional amendment.
The Democratic Party remains committed to equal protection under the law for all Americans," [Dean] said in a written statement.
"How we achieve that goal continues to be the subject of a contentious debate, but our party continues to oppose constitutional amendments that seek to short-circuit the debate on how to achieve equality for all Americans."1
Do you see "We unequivocally support gay marriage" in there? I don't. I don't see that anything has changed. I don't understand why GLBT groups think Democrats are going to champion their causes which remain unpopular. Gays and lesbians are a political liability and will be sacrificed in the name of political expediency every time.
Nor do I understand why Democrats are trying to mollify self-righteous busybodies instead of pressing the point that you don't have to be a self-righteous busybody, constantly meddling in the lives of others, to be a person of faith and conscience. But then no one has ever accused the Democrats of being great strategists.
Mostly useless bits of information
Beer may increase your risk of lung cancer but wine may lower it. In one study, "after smoking was discounted, drinking up to six beers per week increased the risk of lung cancer by 20 percent, and by 50 percent for seven or more beers consumed in the same period." In another study, "beer appeared harmful to men who did not eat fruit and vegetables regularly while men who drank wine saw their lung cancer risk drop by 40 percent, and women by 70 percent." Interpretations: 1) Beer causes cancer; wine prevents cancer. 2) Beer drinkers eat fried food, which causes cancer; wine drinkers eat vegetables, which prevent cancer. 3) Wine drinkers, being richer and better educated than beer drinkers, take better care of their bodies in lots of ways.1
This is what is called useless information, also known as getting bit in the ass by extraneous variables. It seems highly unlikely that beer causes lung cancer. It seems much more likely that the lifestyle of someone who is consuming at least a beer a day includes other activities which increase the risk, for example how about where the beer is consumed? I don't have any hard figures to back it up, but it seems to me more beer by far is consumed in smoke filled bars than wine. Gee, might second hand smoke have something to do with it? Is there a difference between men who have a single beer every night after work and those who down a six pack on a Friday night? This is mildly interesting correlational information, but in the end not terribly useful.
Here's more even more useless information: The United States has a 50% divorce rate. This number is derived thusly: There were x number of marriages last year. There were y number of divorces last year. x = 2y, therefore we have a 50% divorce rate! Question: what do the people getting married last year have to do with the people getting divorced last year? Not a damn thing, save for those who got married and divorced last year. A more accurate measure of the divorce rate is to compare the number of existing marriages (60,000,000) with how many end in divorce in a given year(1,250,000). That number is about 2%. In other words you have a 98% chance of still being married at the end of any given year.2 So much for marriage being a dying institution.
Interpretations: 1) Don't believe everything you read. 2) Unscrupulous people will crunch numbers and invent flimsy statistics that favor their arguments. 3)The conservative wingnut doomsdayers either have no idea what they are talking about, or are deliberately misleading the American public. You decide which is worse.
2Henslin, James M., Essentials of Sociology: A Down-to-Earth Approach, sixth edition (Boston: Pearson A&B, 2006) 331.
Gay marriage <> Polygamy
The religious right loves talking about slippery slopes. "If we let a man marry a man what's to prevent a man from marrying his dog?" Only slightly more credible is the "slippery slope to legalized polygamy." I've never bought it, thought I couldn't tell you exactly why beyond the obvious that homosexuals are talking about marriage in the "traditional" sense. Oooo. Did I just say that?
The fact is polygamy, specifically polygany, has quite a long history. Perhaps it made sense in agrarian societies when cheap farm labor was desirable. Perhaps it made sense when young men had high mortality rates thanks to tribal warfare. Perhaps it made sense when women were considered commodities and thus amassing women sated the apparent human tendency to amass power or wealth. None of those really apply anymore, so any benefits derived by society from this arrangement have evaporated as well.
I recently read two good articles about the consequences of polygamy: one about the personal implications of polygamy and one about the social implications. Here are a few excerpts.
If, as advocates of gay marriage insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices," then "on what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?"
Here's the answer. The number isn't two. It's one. You commit to one person, and that person commits wholly to you. Second, the number isn't arbitrary. It's based on human nature. Specifically, on jealousy.
The average guy would love to bang his neighbor's wife. He just doesn't want his wife banging his neighbor. Fidelity isn't natural, but jealousy is. Hence the one-spouse rule. One isn't the number of people you want to sleep with. It's the number of people you want your spouse to sleep with.
Women shared husbands because they had to. The alternative was poverty. As women gained power, they began to choose what they really wanted. And what they really wanted was the same fidelity that men expected from them.
Gays who seek to marry want the same thing. They're not looking for the right to sleep around. They already have that. It's called dating. A friend once explained to me why gay men have sex on the first date: Nobody says no. Your partner, being of the same sex, is as eager as you are to get it on. But he's also as eager as you are to get it on with somebody else. And if you really like him, you don't want that. You want him all to yourself. That's why marriage, not polygamy, is in your nature, and in our future.1
So far, libertarians and lifestyle liberals approach polygamy as an individual-choice issue, while cultural conservatives use it as a bloody shirt to wave in the gay-marriage debate. The broad public opposes polygamy but is unsure why. What hardly anyone is doing is thinking about polygamy as social policy.
Other things being equal (and, to a good first approximation, they are), when one man marries two women, some other man marries no woman. When one man marries three women, two other men don't marry. When one man marries four women, three other men don't marry. Monogamy gives everyone a shot at marriage. Polygyny, by contrast, is a zero-sum game that skews the marriage market so that some men marry at the expense of others.
"Scarcity of women leads to a situation in which men with advantages -- money, skills, education -- will marry, but men without such advantages -- poor, unskilled, illiterate -- will not. A permanent subclass of bare branches [unmarriageable men] from the lowest socioeconomic classes is created. In China and India, for example, by the year 2020 bare branches will make up 12 to 15 percent of the young adult male population."
Crime rates tend to be higher in polygynous societies. Worse, "high-sex-ratio societies are governable only by authoritarian regimes capable of suppressing violence at home and exporting it abroad through colonization or war." In medieval Portugal, "the regime would send bare branches on foreign adventures of conquest and colonization." (An equivalent today may be jihad.)
Such problems are not merely theoretical. In northern Arizona, a polygamous Mormon sect has managed its surplus males by dumping them on the street -- literally. The sect, reports The Arizona Republic, "has orphaned more than 400 teenagers ... in order to leave young women for marriage to the older men." The paper goes on to say that the boys "are dropped off in neighboring towns, facing hunger, homelessness, and homesickness, and most cripplingly, a belief in a future of suffering and darkness."
The social dynamics of zero-sum marriage are ugly. In a polygamous world, boys could no longer grow up taking marriage for granted. Many would instead see marriage as a trophy in a sometimes brutal competition for wives. Losers would understandably burn with resentment, and most young men, even those who eventually won, would fear losing. Although much has been said about polygamy's inegalitarian implications for women who share a husband, the greater victims of inequality would be men who never become husbands.
By this point it should be obvious that polygamy is, structurally and socially, the opposite of same-sex marriage, not its equivalent. Same-sex marriage stabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by extending marriage to many who now lack it. Polygamy destabilizes individuals, couples, communities, and society by withdrawing marriage from many who now have it. 2
2Rauch, Jonathan, "One Man, Many Wives, Big Problems," National Journal, March 31, 2006, nationaljournal.com (This link doesn't look all that permanent)
Piety: Reality or Facade?
I have just been swamped lately and haven't had time to post much of anything, but I just couldn't let this pass. Today I stumbled on to this bit from The Nation, originally published May of 2005.
Back at Asbury, Hager cast himself as a victim of religious persecution in his sermon. "You see...there is a war going on in this country," he said gravely. "And I'm not speaking about the war in Iraq. It's a war being waged against Christians, particularly evangelical Christians. It wasn't my scientific record that came under scrutiny [at the FDA]. It was my faith.... By making myself available, God has used me to stand in the breach.... Just as he has used me, he can use you."
Up on the dais, several men seated behind Hager nodded solemnly in agreement. But out in the audience, Linda Carruth Davis--co-author with Hager of Stress and the Woman's Body, and, more saliently, his former wife of thirty-two years--was enraged. "It was the most disgusting thing I've ever heard," she recalled months later, through clenched teeth.
Davis, a former beauty queen, was a disengaged student eager to get married and start a family. A Hager-Carruth marriage promised prestige and wealth for the couple; her father was a famous Methodist evangelist, and his father was then president of Asbury. "On the surface, it just looked so good," she remembers. The couple married in 1970, while Hager completed medical school at the University of Kentucky.
"I don't think I was married even a full year before I realized that I had made a horrible mistake," Davis says. By her account, Hager was demanding and controlling, and the couple shared little emotional intimacy. "But," she says, "the people around me said, 'Well, you've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it.'" So Davis commenced with family making and bore three sons: Philip, in 1973; Neal, in 1977; and Jonathan, in 1979.
Sometime between the births of Neal and Jonathan, Hager embarked on an affair with a Bible-study classmate who was a friend of Davis's. A close friend of Davis's remembers her calling long distance when she found out: "She was angry and distraught, like any woman with two children would be. But she was committed to working it out."
Sex was always a source of conflict in the marriage. Though it wasn't emotionally satisfying for her, Davis says she soon learned that sex could "buy" peace with Hager after a long day of arguing, or insure his forgiveness after she spent too much money. "Sex was coinage; it was a commodity," she said. Sometimes Hager would blithely shift from vaginal to anal sex. Davis protested. "He would say, 'Oh, I didn't mean to have anal sex with you; I can't feel the difference,'" Davis recalls incredulously. "And I would say, 'Well then, you're in the wrong business.'"
By the 1980s, according to Davis, Hager was pressuring her to let him videotape and photograph them having sex. She consented, and eventually she even let Hager pay her for sex that she wouldn't have otherwise engaged in--for example, $2,000 for oral sex, "though that didn't happen very often because I hated doing it so much. So though it was more painful, I would let him sodomize me, and he would leave a check on the dresser," Davis admitted to me with some embarrassment. This exchange took place almost weekly for several years.
Money was an explosive issue in their household. Hager kept an iron grip on the family purse strings. Initially the couple's single checking account was in Hager's name only, which meant that Davis had to appeal to her husband for cash, she says. Eventually he relented and opened a dual account. Davis recalls that Hager would return home every evening and make a beeline for his office to balance the checkbook, often angrily summoning her to account for the money she'd spent that day. Brenda Bartella Peterson, Davis's friend of twenty-five years and her neighbor at the time, witnessed Hager berate his wife in their kitchen after one such episode. For her part, Davis set out to subvert Hager's financial dominance with profligate spending on credit cards opened in her own name. "I was not willing to face reality about money," she admits. "I thought, 'Well, money can't buy happiness, but it buys the kind of misery you can learn to live with.'" 1
I'm not sure who I'm more enraged with the asshole of a husband or her stupid, idiotic "support network" who told her "you've made your bed, and now you have to lie in it." The thought of one of my daughters in a relationship like this makes me damn near homicidal, and you can bet good money if my daughter came to me with a story like this she would be out of that house so fast the bastard's head would spin. That her bastard husband publicly pretends to piety and a Christ-like love for women is just salt on the wound.
While it seems common to at this point launch into a diatribe about the personal hypocrisy of "religious types," I really don't want to go there. I am suspicious of anyone publicly flaunting their "righteousness," and I do believe religion encourages silence and pretense. Still, I hardly believe every religious person is a fraud. What really bothers me is how the religious right holds up marriage as some holy sacrament, while turning a blind eye to travesties such as this. While they'll publicly claim to "obviously" be against such behavior, they don't do much to stop it either. When was the last time you heard Pat Robertson or James Dobson talking about spousal or child abuse? The advice of "the people around" Mrs. Davis (interesting she doesn't call them her friends) doesn't speak well of "compassionate conservatism" either. It seems to me if they want to improve the stability of marriage as a social institution, they could make a good start by teaching men what it means to be a husband. (Not that there aren't women who need to be taught what it means to be a wife, but the story is about a bastard of a husband, not a bitch of a wife.)
If the government wants to be in the business of licensing marriage, then maybe they should start doing a better job of vetting candidates. "I'm sorry, sir. Your application for a marriage license has been declined because you're a self-centered, controlling bastard."