206. caveat

Yesterday I received an email inviting me to sign a petition. I get these fairly often, usually from Change.org or the Democrats, alerting me to some grave issue that requires my clicktivist engagement right away. Sometimes I join if it seems a worthwhile cause, but usually it gets deleted.

The petition I received yesterday was from All Out, an organization whose mission is to build “a global movement for love and equality.” A worthy goal, if a tad… shall we say… lofty.

All Out is mobilizing millions of people to build a world where no person will have to sacrifice their family or freedom, safety or dignity, because of who they are or who they love.

If anything, they’re doing a fairly good job of alerting people to issues around the world, such as human rights abuses and instances of LGBT discrimination and persecution. And they are bringing together LGBT advocacy organizations to combat institutionalized prejudice and hate.

The petition yesterday was intended to put pressure on Orange, “one of the world’s leading telecommunications operators, present in 32 countries,” to remove its advertisements from a Ugandan tabloid that recently published the names of “Uganda’s Top 200 Homos.” This just a day after its president, Yoweri Museveni, signed the “Kill The Gays” bill into law.

Getting Orange to pull the adverts wouldn’t just send a message to the editor of the Ugandan tabloid — it would show the Ugandan government that a major investor doesn’t approve of the anti-gay law. If more companies join in, the Ugandan government won’t be able to ignore the potential damage to their economy of their attacks on human rights.

While this is a good sentiment and a good start, having grown up in Evangelical culture I know that this approach won’t ultimately do much good. The authors of this petition are assuming that Ugandans (and Evangelicals) care what the international community thinks. They think that sanctions and cuts to aid from other nations will convince Uganda’s leaders that the bill was a bad idea, and that human rights is the best way to go.

In short, they’re assuming that they’re reasonable people.

What they don’t understand is that Evangelicals believe that our world is a spiritual battle ground, divided between God and Satan.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:12)

Furthermore…

“Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery trial when it comes upon you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you… If you are insulted for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you.” (1 Peter 4:12-14)

They’re not being criticized and their aid is not being cut because they’re bigots. They are experiencing backlash because they believe they’re doing “God’s work.”

I grew up being told that if we lived true to the Bible and God’s commandments, non-Christians (i.e., “the world”) would turn on us. When someone made fun of us for not using profanity or “saving ourselves for marriage,” we weren’t the real target — Jesus was the target.

If you listen to any ultra conservative bent on outlawing marriage equality or screaming about “religious liberty,” these are the Bible verses you’ll hear. They believe that a time is coming when Christians will be thrown in jail and possibly even executed for their beliefs.

No, really. Seriously.

I’m currently watching the fourth season of the Star Trek series Deep Space 9. The other night I saw the episode “Accession,” in which a Bajoran poet who disappeared two hundred years earlier mysteriously reappears through the wormhole. He claim to be the Emissary and to speak for the “prophets,” demanding that Bajorans return to “d’jarra,” an ancient caste system. This doesn’t go over well with everyone. The decree also puts Bajor’s application to Federation in jeopardy. But the religious leaders in favor of the “d’jarra” believe that following the “prophets” is worth any consequence that may result.

In the same way, the Ugandan government doesn’t care if it loses standing in the international community, if Western nations cut off funding and aid, if advertisers pull spots from newspapers, or international businesses pull out of the country.

I’m not sure how many Evangelicals really believe they’re following the commandments of their “God” by attempting to deny LGBT people equal human rights. Frankly, I think it’s part of the song and dance they perform to help themselves sleep at night.

I believe it is the responsibility of the ninety-four nations that signed the UN Declaration on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity to offer asylum to LGBT Africans affected by these bills. Yesterday, I sent a letter to the director of U.S. Immigration and Citizenship Services, asking him to do that. I’m also writing to activists to ask if there are any organizations working to help relocate LGBT Africans to safer areas.

What we need is for Western nations that claim to welcome LGBT people to offer asylum to displaced Ugandans and Nigerians (and Russians). Like the Underground Railroad of the 19th Century, we could build a “Rainbow Road” for people currently living without hope. Many of these people are living in poverty, with little to no means of immigrating, now in fear of being exposed, punished, and even killed.

Secretary of State John Kerry recently said: “People everywhere deserve to live in freedom and equality. No one should face violence or discrimination for who they are or who they love.”

I believe we’ve a responsibility to try to and make that a reality.

UPDATE: This site was recommended as a potential resource for helping LGBT Ugandans: ugandans4rights.org.

159. disbosom

First of all, the eight-year-old in me finds the word “disbosom” so snortingly hilarious, but it’s precisely the reason why I love the Dictionary.com Word of the Day. It’s an eighteenth century word meaning to reveal, to confess, as in “baring your soul” or “the naked truth.” Words are a window into the sensibilities of another age, when they actually meant something to the people who used them. Today words seem little more than candy bar wrapping paper — disposable, cheap, trivial. I find particular awe in the opening words of the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word.” While I no longer believe in the literal factualness of this idea, that God created everything, it’s still a beautiful image of creating through speech. It’s the dream of every writer to give his or her words life so that they may convey everything that can’t be expressed on paper.

Today I received a response to a comment I left on a blog several weeks ago during the national gay marriage debate that sprang up over the recent (and it turns out, successful) marriage equality initiatives. It was clear that this woman meant well and wanted me to know that God loves me, even though I don’t believe in him and am living a lifestyle that this God apparently thinks is an abomination.

She also pointed me to a blog entry written by a young man named Matt Moore who has been sharing his story of apparently finding Jesus on the floor of a gay club. (Or so she says. I’m skeptical about that claim.) One of his recent blog entries is entitled HIV/AIDS & The Hope Of The Gospel, in which he recounts a close call he had with contracting the virus. This apparently led him to conclude that being gay is a sin, and he claims to have “left the homosexual lifestyle,” which as we all know is code for going “ex-gay.” Whether that means attempting to change his orientation through therapy or “praying away” the gay, or turning to a celibate lifestyle is uncertain.

What I am certain of is that my heart is absolutely breaking for this young (and, if I may say so, very attractive) man. He’s had a hell of a time, and his story is rife with abuse and sadness. And this is precisely the kind of person that the Church preys on, exploiting the feelings of self-loathing programmed into them by society and promising deliverance, if not here then in the hereafter.

As an atheist, I don’t believe that there is anybody minding the store with a broom and dustpan at the ready to sweep up the mess and set everything right at the end of the day. I believe that, if we’re lucky, we have 70-80 years of existence on this planet, and then that’s it. There is no great reckoning. No big reward. No eternal punishment. We have one go at this life, so why waste it strapping yourself into a straight jacket to please the jackals who preach their toxic hatred from the pulpit?

I can understand how someone who fell into a lifestyle of promiscuous sex and drugs for a while would want to run from all of that. Many alcoholics pick up their entire lives to start over, leaving behind the environment and the people who enabled their addiction. But homosexuality is not an addiction. It’s an orientation, something deep in the wiring of the brain that leads some of us to seek out members of the same sex as mates. Unlike most animals, we’re capable of much more than just breeding. As primates, we’re highly complex social animals. We can form pair bonds, and build emotional and romantic connections with our partners. What conservatives like to describe as “homosexual behavior” is behavior we find among heterosexuals as well. But just because many homosexuals have engaged in that kind of party lifestyle doesn’t mean that all homosexuals do.

Most of the gay men I know are in committed relationships of some kind. The single gays I know are looking for committed relationships. With the introduction of more LGBT characters in movies and television, our community is moving from the fringes of an underground lifestyle to the mainstream. We don’t want a sling in the bedroom, or a dungeon in the basement. We want the house in the suburbs with the dog, the neighbors, the couch and the mortgage. That is to say, everything we associate with heterosexual marriage. Is this the gays trying to emulate the “straights”? I don’t think so.

Those things don’t just symbolize heterosexual marriage. They symbolize adult commitment, setting down roots with the person you love and care deeply for. Of course, those symbols are going to be different for each person. For example, I could never see myself as a suburban couple, with the Subaru jeep, picket fence and 2.8 kids. Maybe a dog. Jason and I don’t really see ourselves as a “planted” couple. We want to travel, live in foreign countries, study abroad, and see and learn as much as we can. But we want to do it together.

A few weeks ago I attended a wedding of a friend of mine. I know for a fact her now-husband has struggled with same-sex attraction. Another friend of mine there confirmed that many of the other guys there also struggle. It breaks my heart because I know what they believe their God is demanding of them, and I also know they have been conditioned to not see it as a burden. The author of the first epistle of Peter writes:

“But rejoice insofar as you share Christ’s sufferings, that you may also rejoice and be glad when his glory is revealed.” (1 Peter 4:13)

They honestly believe overcoming their homosexual feelings is suffering for Christ. This is the evil humans do with religion.

As the character of Auntie Mame says in the stage play, “Life’s a banquet, and most poor bastards are starving to death.”

158. climacteric

Most people will make a few bad decisions in their lives. Drink too much, get arrested, shave your head, get a tongue piercing or a dumb tattoo. I like to think that my poor decision was voting for George W. Bush in 2004. To be fair, the alternative was John Kerry. Now, if I’d been voting in the 2000 election, which I missed participating in by just a few months (why couldn’t my parents have had sex a few months earlier?), I’d’ve voted for Al Gore hands down. Or at least I like to think that I would’ve. Vote for the nerd over the nincompoop? Is that even a choice?

My political affiliations have changed radically in the last ten years or so. Most of it has reflected my steady shift towards atheism and abandoning the fundamentalist beliefs of my childhood. My parents, who will be voting for Romney (because at least he believes in God) and “Yes” on the Minnesota Marriage Amendment, are staunch Republicans, and believe that how elections go will determine how God will judge America. They also believe that Jesus is coming back to swoop all the Christians up into heaven one of these days. Personally, I hope they’re right about that part.

But my other poor decision was to attend Northwestern College in Saint Paul, MN. It’s a small conservative Christian liberal arts college. It had a good music composition program, which was my focus then. (Another poor decision — not majoring in something practical).

The past few weeks I’ve had some interactions with students there via my writing on several online journals and newspapers about the marriage amendment. The Huffington Post ran a story today about Northwestern students “proudly” voicing their support for “traditional” marriage. Here are a few of the students’ reasons:

I’m voting Yes because…

This is actually a great cross-section of why Christians support this amendment. Moreover, these responses highlight the intellectual poverty of these young people, and of the pro-amendment folks, and of the community that celebrates willful ignorance.

This also highlights how much the Minnesota for Marriage people have distorted the reality that this amendment isn’t about voting to legalize same-sex marriage, as they’re doing in Washington, Maryland and Maine. This is about voting whether or not to permanently ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota — or at least put it off for another two years.

To the “Our future depends on it” girl: You think your petty, misogynistic God is going to destroy America because gays decide to, oh, make life-long commitments to each other? — which a lot fucking more than most Christians can claim these days. (Especially Christians from Northwestern. Hm.) Or perhaps you think that, as Chris Kluwe suggested, once gays are allowed to marry that your super-duper Christian youth pastor boyfriend will decide to leave the closet he’s been hiding in and become a “lustful cockmonster.” If that’s the case, then he was never yours to begin with.

To the “arrow pointing to girlfriend” guy: You’re going to vote to deny gay people their constitutional rights because you have a girlfriend?

To the “Marriage is a spiritual covenant, not a secular issue” guy: You have drunk the Kool-Aid, buddy. You’re taking a bloody bath in it. Religious marriage may be a spiritual three-way covenant between your dear wifey and your imaginary sky friend, but marriage is a legal, secular institution. The officiant doesn’t say “By the power invested in me by God” or “by the Church.” Marriage is regulated by the state you live in.

To the “I believe Jesus died for me, now it’s my turn to live for Him” guy: That’s so great that you have a boner for Jesus. But your silly religious beliefs have nothing to do with why we should ignore both the First Amendment and the Fourteenth Amendment to discriminate against gay people because you don’t like them.

To the “Christ calls us to take a stand on marriage” girl: Where exactly does Christ say “Marriage is between one man and one woman [and not two fucking queers]”? (Emphasis mine.) That’s right. HE DIDN’T. Christ did say something about judging your neighbor and treating people the way you want to be treated. Would you like someone voting on whether you should have the right to marry the person you love?

To the “It’s the way GOD designed life to be, and a child needs a mom and a father” girl: You want to talk about the way your God apparently designed life to be? Read the Bible like a guidebook. You should be a sex slave to your husband, your daughters sold into slavery if he desires it. You should be forced to have an abortion (trial by ordeal) if your master merely suspects you of infidelity. Sound good?

To the “I believe the WORD of GOD” girl: Which has what, exactly, to do with public policy? If you’d care to go live in a theocracy, be my guest. But America is not a fucking Christian nation. We are a nation founded on secular values. The people who fled here did so to escape ignorant, hateful people like you, and you want to make this country into a religiofascist dictatorship.

I don’t begrudge you your religious beliefs. Just don’t hide behind them to mask your being a prejudiced bigot.

153. velleity

“Immediately after the [9/11] attack, seeing the [American] flag all over the place was moving, endearing. So when the newspaper I subscribe to published a full-page, full-color flag to clip out and hang in the window, how come I couldn’t? It took me a while to figure out why I guiltily slid the flag into the recycling bin instead of taping it up. The meaning had changed; or let’s say it changed back. In the first day or two the flags were plastered everywhere, seeing them was heartening because they indicated that we’re all in this sorrow together. The flags were purely emotional. Once we went to war, once the president announced that we were going to retaliate against the “evildoers,” then the flag again represented what it usually represents, the government. I think that’s when the flags started making me nervous.”
— Sarah Vowell, The Partly Cloudy Patriot, p.158

A few days ago I finished listening to Sarah Vowell’s Unfamiliar Fishes, an account of the American annexation of Hawaii in 1898. As a public radio listening, I’ve had the biggest crush on her voice since being introduced to This American Life and hearing her work on that show.

In case you’re not familiar with the story, the annexation of Hawaii came about through the deliberate intervention of the grandsons of American Christian missionaries. The Kingdom of Hawaii occurred five years previously in 1893, led mainly by anti-imperialist American citizens. Basically, it’s another chapter in the all-too-real horror story of imperialist manifest destiny and American exceptionalism; this notion that America has been called by God to “Christianize” other countries and bring their peoples under the authority of Christ—i.e., rich white men armed with the certainty that their theology is the right one, and that their cause is the only just one.

In other words, “Might makes right” (i.e., the Bush doctrine).

The same belief that led the United States to invade and occupy Iraq for 8 years, 8 months and 3 weeks, and Afghanistan since 7 October 2001, is the same one that led nineteenth century American columnist John L. O’Sullivan to remark of Oregon: “That claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.”

Stand there with a straight face and tell me that the current American foreign wars (i.e., occupations) aren’t experiments in American democracy.

A nineteenth century cartoon of a schoolhouse overseen by a glowering Uncle Sam scowling at childlike representations of rebellious Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico and Cuba has this written on the chalkboard:

The consent of the governed is a good thing in theory, but very rare in fact.

England has governed her colonies whether they consented or not. By not waiting for their consent she has greatly advanced the world’s civilization.

The U.S. must govern its new territories with or without their consent until they can govern themselves.

And when I hear Mitt Romney saying things like, “God did not create this country to be a nation of followers. America is not destined to be one of several equally balanced global powers,” I hear the boats being readied again, as they were in 1820 when the first Protestant Christian missionaries arrived in Hawaii, to dispatch his manifest destiny theology like a virus to foreign shores.

I am becoming increasingly ashamed to be an American. Not only are our students some of the least educated in the Western world, but we’re also the most strongly religious Western country. Every time a Republican opens their mouth to say that women can’t get pregnant from rape, or that homosexuals are the cause of hurricanes, I feel as though the country I was born and raised in is being pulled from my hands just a little bit more.

In 2006, Grace Church Roseville, the church I grew up in got a new pastor. He was young, with fresh, new ideas about how to engage the community and “grow the flock.” At first things were okay. Like any new relationship, we knew it would take time to get to know him and adjust to the change in leadership. But then things started to change in a not-so-exciting direction. Sermons were watered down to appeal to a wider demographic. (The senior pastor now apparently delivers talks from an iPad.) Thousands of dollars were spent refurbishing the sanctuary, with special attention paid to lights in order to “enhance the worship experience” (i.e., put on a flashier show). The point at which I checked out was when they wanted to buy a professional barista machine. I remember sitting in church one Sunday, and as though I’d just woken up, I thought: “This isn’t my home anymore.” The physical room was the same, but it had changed to the point where it was unrecognizable as the place I’d known.

So now conservative Christians are trying to force their anti-gay agenda on this country, attempting to overturn the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and derail efforts to repeal the Defense of Marriage Act. They claim to not hate gays, and perhaps they truly don’t—which makes their work all the more hideous for throwing LGBT Americans under the bus in order to further their political agenda and pander to an ultra-conservative voter base. Because the truth is that there’s a lot of money to be had from evangelical Christians—money that isn’t going to feed the hungry, help the poor and sick, or relieve global suffering.

Apparently stopping those godless faggots from not hurting anyone is more important than being like their Christ.

Regardless 0f what happens in this election, this country is less of a home to me now thanks to conservative bastards like Rick Santorum, Michele Bachmann, Tony Perkins and Maggie Gallagher. The fact that they’re still being taken seriously makes me wonder if there’s anything left to fight for here.

Sic transit gloria mundi.

152. concatenate

Last week I watched my news feed with excitement for the much-anticipated landing of the Mars rover Curiosity. Since I don’t watch television, radio and online news are my primary sources of information, and I was admittedly somewhat embarrassingly anxious to hear how the $2.5 billion Mars Science Laboratory would fare on its “seven minutes of terror” landing. Seeing those first few pictures of the Martian landscape is still breathtaking—images of literally another world that isn’t earth.

This mission has revived a public conversation that’s been raging in the scientific community for decades. What is life? How do we define it? How do we recognize it when we see it? Since the dawn of the science-fiction genre with the second-century Roman satirist Lucien’s True History,we’ve been imagining other forms of life in our own image, which really isn’t all that different from how we’ve crafted our gods. Until recently, sci-fi shows and movies almost always portray aliens as humanoid, partly due to budget or material constraints.

In an article on NPR today, Marcelo Gleiser ponders the implications of finding (or not finding) evidence of life on Mars. “The expectations are high that Curiosity will find a trace of life, even if long extinct,” he writes. “However, if results turn out negative, we will still learn a lot. After all, the question we are asking is whether life on Earth is the exception or the rule. If life is not found on Mars, it will be harder to justify that life is abundant in the universe.”

The human race is currently emerging from its infancy. Until a certain age, young children are egocentric, incapable of empathy and recognizing that other people are separate individuals. Their brains haven’t developed that ability yet. (Some people never grow past that stage.) Similarly, the human race is finally learning that there might be other ways to be alive. We’re now conjecturing what silicon-based life form might look like, how it could evolve, how it could evolve intelligence, and how we might recognize any of those things. Depending on planetary conditions and the elements its parent star are rich in, a life form might find chlorine, arsenic or methane nourishing, and water a lethal poison.

Analogously, the human race is also discovering that there’s more than one way to be human. (Yes, I just managed to link the Mars mission to gay rights. Bite me.)

Earlier this week I was having several discussions over this infographic that’s been floating around cyberspace:

In case you haven’t seen it, the gist of it is that we dismiss much of the Bible now as being either culturally contextual and therefore irrelevant to modern-day society (such as wearing clothes woven from different fabrics, or any of the Old Testament laws and regulations), or flat out wrong (such as forcing rape victims to marry their rapists).

Naturally, it’s caused a firestorm of controversy and disagreement.

The two central questions this debate has raised seem to concern the definition of marriage and the definition of sexuality. What does it mean to be married today? What has it meant historically? Is heterosexuality the only way to be sexual, or are there alternatives? That was the central issue in the California Proposition 8 case—whether homosexuality is a learned “behavior” or it’s a natural variant of human sexuality. The answer to that question determined whether the GLBT community could be considered a legal protected class and therefore entitled to protection under the Due Process Clause. In his ruling decision, Judge Walker overturned Proposition 8 as unconstitutional, saying that “no compelling state interest justifies denying same-sex couples the fundamental right to marry.”

Walker’s decision harkens, of course, to Chief Justice Earl Warren’s landmark 1967 ruling decision in Loving v. Virginia, when he wrote that “marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.”

I’ve encountered a number of people of the anti-gay persuasion this week, most of whom continue to insist that being homosexual is a choice. They’ve also claimed that gay men have hundreds of partners, are riddled with STDs, rape and molest children, and bring down God’s wrath and judgment on any society that doesn’t persecute us. But I haven’t heard one argument that has cited a scientific study proving categorically that homosexuality is indeed a perversion of human sexuality, that anyone is harmed by homosexuality (including homosexuals), that children are placed at risk of harm or indoctrination by an insidious “gay agenda,” or that the institution of marriage itself is endangered by including same-sex relationships under the umbrella.

And that is the central issue at stake here. You can argue that “God says it’s wrong” until you’re blue in the face. That argument doesn’t hold any water in a secular society and government—which America is. And the second president of the United States would agree with me.

The question we should be asking is not whether homosexuality is wrong. The reparative therapy crowd has admitted that the homosexual orientation is 99.99% fixed; the scientific community has a plausible explanation for how homosexuality could indeed be genetic; conservatives have yet to produce one marriage destroyed by homosexuals (though the Miller family of Pittsboro, NC might disagree after their harrowing ordeal); and children of same-sex parents seem to grow up perfectly normal—perhaps even more well-adjusted.

In the absence of any compelling reasons, the Constitution of the United States of America weighs in via the Fourteenth Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Bottom line: Either all citizens deserve equal protection, or no citizens deserve protection.

115. doyenne

My plan for February is to write a post each day, the topic taken from/inspired by Dictionary.com’s Word of the Day. I’m trying to venture outside of the usual subjects I write about (i.e., religion), and this seems like a good exercise to get new ideas going.

Doyenne. noun, a woman who is the senior member, as in age or rank, of a group, class, profession, etc.

It’s always interesting to see which Facebook posts of mine go relatively unnoticed, and which ones cause an uproar. The other day I posted this YouTube video from Second City:

In case you hadn’t heard, last month Rick Santorum gave an interview with Piers Morgan where he attempted to “clarify” his position on abortion (especially in the case of rape and incest) in which he said the following:

As horrible as the way that that son or daughter was created, it still is her child. And whether she has that child or doesn’t, it will always be her child. . . And so to embrace her and to love her and to support her and get her through this very difficult time I think [is] the right approach [;] to accept this horribly created — in the sense of rape — but nevertheless a gift in a very broken way, the gift of human life, and accept what God has given to you. . . I can’t think of anything more horrible. But, nevertheless, we have to make the best out of a bad situation.

In short: Rape sucks. Give her a hug and tell her to buck up and push. Then ask what she’s planning to name the baby. Does it have its father’s eyes/nose/chin?

The gist of the flurry of comments that followed was that while the sentiment may sound harsh, it’s a complex issue, but abortion is never right, and children are a gift from god. If there’s one topic Evangelicals will never fail to speak up about, it’s abortion.

Even a year ago my own position on this was evolving. Up until last year, or maybe a bit before, I’ve always been solidly pro-life. Life was a gift from god and humans have no right to make those kinds of decisions concerning it. This is ironic, considering how many Christians are pro-death penalty and how many people their god has commanded other people to kill in horrific ways over the centuries.

It’s one of the many areas of ethics that has undergone significant revision since my coming out as an atheist. And right now, it’s this: while life is a rare thing in the universe, we seem to be the only species on earth that is able to manage its own sexual reproduction. Unlike animals, we can choose how, when and if to reproduce. We are under no divine mandate to bring each and every fertilized ovum to full-term.

Now let me stop a moment and point out that I currently have a four-year old roommate (the son of my two married, adult roommates). My younger sister has a one-and-a-half year-old son. Most of my friends have multiple kids. Hell, I have friends who have kids going into kindergarten and first grade. This isn’t a neutral, academic issue for me. My views have palpable, real-life ramifications.

Basically, I don’t believe human life has any purpose other than that which we as humans define it with. A shorthand way of saying this might be: Humans are made, not born.

What I think is happening here is that we’ve confused ‘potential’ for life with the ‘right’ to life. By the Christian definition, every miscarriage should be prosecuted as manslaughter, but functionally, a fetus is neither innocent or guilty. At the moment of conception it’s a conglomeration of mutating cells, and by the time that a pregnancy is detectable, it’s still largely animal—pre-human, void of consciousness. We anthropomorphise that grouping of cells and project intentions and feelings on to it that likely aren’t there. It’s all Instinct.

This may sound like rationalization for abortion, and perhaps it is. But from a logical standpoint, the simplest solution is to terminate a “rape/incest pregnancy” before the situation becomes more complicated than it already is. By any definition, the fetus is not yet “human.” There is no god to bestow automatic personhood, and no one’s rights are being violated. The zygote does not have opinions, and the fact is that we can’t ask it if it would like to live or not. We are under no divine obligation to protect it, especially in cases where the pregnancy was induced by force rather than by the woman’s choice.

The only person whose rights are being violated is the woman who is being forced to carry the fetus (a parasite by any definition) that she never asked for to full term. And, to be sure, this is a huge decision for the woman. Santorum claims that a rape victim just needs the support and care of her community. But no one can take on the radical physiological changes that take place during pregnancy—not to speak of the wild hormonal changes—or the agonies of labor and childbirth for her. She must face these alone. To be realistic, women have faced this reality since the beginning of time, when there was no rape. Males “took” women without impunity, and getting pregnant was just a hazard of being female.

And we know better now.

However sympathetically they couch it, Santorum and those who share his views on this issue fundamentally view women in this barbaric way. Ironically, it’s godless atheists and humanists who have women’s best interests in mind—not theists. The only person who should have a say over what happens to a woman’s body is the woman herself.

It’s funny how different this issue looks outside of the Christian bubble. It’s much more nuanced and shaded out here.

And that’s the point. We can’t just decide these issues for each other. Each case is unequivocally unique. We have to decide together.

114. ignorance

‘They are Man’s,’ said the Spirit, looking down upon them. ‘And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.’ cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. ‘Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.’
— Dickens, A Christmas Carol, Stave 3: The Second of the Three Spirits

Full disclosure: I am angry right now.

If you follow GLBT news at all, one of the big items in Minnesota is the announcement on Tuesday^[1] that the Anoka-Hennepin school board is considering an alternative to the Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy^[2] that’s in place right now. This is the home district of Michele Bachmann, the anti-gay congresswoman whose husband Marcus(ss) runs the [Pray-Away-the-Gay] counselling clinic^[3].

In case you aren’t familiar, the current policy prohibits teachers and administrators from talking about or interfering in matters concerning a student’s sexual orientation—including a student being bullied—the purpose being (and I’m speculating here) to protect school officials from being sued over insinuating that a teen is gay. What it’s created, however, is a culture in which GLBT teens have little recourse from bullies, and a culture in which nine students have committed suicide in the past two years, some of whom were gay or merely perceived to be gay.

Again, this is the home district of Michele Bachmann. And, not surprisingly, the Parent’s Action League, an ultra-conservative group, is protesting the new policy^[4], stating that it is “being used as a pretext to advance a much broader agenda: the legitimization of homosexuality and related conduct to impressionable schoolchildren [and] will undermine the academic focus of this district and open the door to pro-homosexual and related conduct materials in the school curriculum thereby exposing students to concepts hostile to their religious faith and or moral convictions.”

So, “school safety” = “pro-homosexual.” Simply astounding.

MinnPost reported in an article on Thursday^[5] that these parents also requested that, should this new policy be instituted, students also have access to information about conversion (i.e., “ex-gay”) therapy, a form of psychological terrorism that has been denounced and derided by every reputable therapist. They also demand that (and I’m not making this up) officials “provide the history of gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), AIDS, and the medical consequences of homosexual acts” and “provide pro-family, ex-homosexual and ex-transgender videos to secondary media centers.”

GRID, in case you don’t know, was the name initially proposed for the disease that became AIDS. In 1982.^[6] It was promptly discarded for its inaccuracy^[7]. Yet here it is again, in 2012, being referred to in a proposal by a bunch of right-wing, religious, anti-gay parents.

In Michele Bachmann territory.

This comes in the same month that the Tennessee General Assembly is meeting about the HB229 (a.k.a., “Don’t Say Gay”) bill^[8] that’d make it illegal to even mention homosexuality in a public school, even though another 14-year-old committed suicide^[9] this past week after he was relentlessly bullied at his school for being openly gay.

And we need to prohibit teachers from talking about homosexuality, as if that will stop kids from turning queer.

Just like we need to keep telling teens not to have sex before marriage, which is obviously going to stop teen girls from getting pregnant—just like it’s stopping them in Texas, which has the third highest teen birth rate^[10], and the highest repeat teen birth rate^[11], in the country. That’s one race you don’t want to come first in.

I am angry that there are still anti-sodomy laws^[12] in Kansas, Texas, Oklahoma and Montana, which means the police can technically arrest you in your own home for having “gay sex.”

I am angry that Oklahoma State Rep. Mike Reynolds is attempting to push new DADT legislation^[13] that would ban GLBT citizens from openly serving in the National Guard (even though a similar measure was attempted in Virginia last year, and the federal government responded by threatening to cut their entire budget)^[14], a measure that Rick Perry lent his support to by encouraging Christian Oklahomans to mobilize.

I am angry that a 16-year-old atheist student ^[15] in Rhode Island received violence and death threats after she sued her school to have an overtly Christian banner taken down. (This is supremely ironic, considering that Rhode Island was founded by Roger Williams in 1636 as a haven for religious freedom.)^[16]

I am angry that an Oklahoma Republican, State Sen. Ralph Shortey, is actually pushing a bill that would (according to the website Talking Points Memo):

outlaw the use of human fetuses in food, because, as he says, “there is a potential that there are companies that are using aborted human babies in their research and development of basically enhancing flavor for artificial flavors.”^[17]

Yes. Soylent Green is a tasty food additive made from dead babies.

I am angry that Rick Santorum (among other things) is publicly saying that he thinks that women who become pregnant after being raped should “make the best of a bad situation” and carry the fetus to term as a “broken gift from god.”^[18] (This coming from a privileged white guy who will never have to face that scenario himself.)

I am furious that Tennessee Sen. Stacey Campfield (R) said that it’s “virtually impossible to contract AIDS through heterosexual sex.”^[19] Tell that to the 12 million women living with AIDS in 2009 in Sub-Saharan Africa, compared with 8.2 million men. (More on women living with AIDS globally at http://www.avert.org/women-hiv-aids.htm.) Tell that to the children—born of heterosexual parents, mind you—who were infected at birth.

I am furious that the Catholic Church still advises against condom use^[20], in places like Sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas where it could save millions of lives, under the notion that condom use will encourage fornication and prevent procreation.

I’m fucking angry.

That is all.

References:

Baca, Maria. “4 of 6 on Anoka school board back new policy on sexual orientation.” StarTribune. 24 Jan 2012.
Anoka-Hennepin School District. “Sexual Orientation Curriculum Policy.” 9 Feb 2009.
Benjamin, Mark. “The Truth Behind Marcus Bachmann’s Controversial Christian Therapy Clinic.” Time Magazine, 15 Jul 2011.
Lindquist, Bryan, and Michael Skaalerud. “Concerns & Demands.” Parents Action League, 09 Jan 2012.
Hawkins, Beth. “Learning Curve.” MinnPost, 26 Jan 2012.
Altman, Lawrence. “New Homosexual Disorder Worries Health Officials.” The New York Times, 11 May 1982.
Altman, Lawrence. “Outlook on AIDS is Termed Bleak.” The New York Times, 13 Jun 1988.
Towle, Andy. “Tennessee’s ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Bill is Back for Another Try.” http://www.towleroad.com, 17 Jan 2012.
Huffington Gay Voices. “Phillip Parker, Gay Tennessee Teen, Commits Suicide After Enduring Bullying.” Huffington Post, 23 Jan 2012.
“50-State and National Comparisons.” The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, Nov 2011.
“Lowering the Teen Birth Rate in Texas.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 30 Jun 2011.
Murphy, Kevin. “Gay groups angry Kansas anti-sodomy law remains on books.” Reuters, 24 Jan 2012.
Wright, John. “Oklahoma lawmaker seeks to ban gays from serving openly in state’s National Guard.” DallasVoice, 10 Jan 2012.
Nolan, Jim. “Cuccinelli: Va. could exclude gays from National Guard.” Inside NoVa, 31 Jan 2011.
Goodnough, Abby. “Student Faces Town’s Wrath in Protest Against a Prayer.” The New York Times, 26 Jan 2012.
“Rhode Island.” Worldmark Encyclopedia of the States. 2007. Encyclopedia.com. 27 Jan 2012.
Rayfield, Jillian. “Oklahoma GOPer Proposes Bill To Outlaw ‘Aborted Human Fetuses’ In Food.” TPM. TPM Media LLC, 25 Jan 2012.
Graff, Amy. “Rick Santorum: Rape babies are gifts from God.” San Francisco Chronicle. Hearst Communications Inc., 24 Jan 2012.
Gittleson, Wendy. “Tennessee Rep. Says It’s ‘Virtually Impossible’ To Contract AIDS Through Heterosexual Sex.” Addicting Info. 26 Jan 2012.
Bowcott, Owen. “Catholic church tries to clear confusion over condom use.” The Guardian. 23 Nov 2010.