If you tried to read the blog this morning you may have noticed a somewhat cryptic message that read, Sorry, but you are looking for something that isn’t here…  That started appearing after I upgraded my copy of WordPress, and the upgrade process assured me that it all went swimmingly.

I won’t geek out on you with the details…just this moment.  It’s nice outside here in Baltimore today and I want to go out and enjoy some of it.  But the problem was apparently that one of the WordPress plug-ins I was using was incompatable with the new database structure.  Everything’s fine now and I rather like the look and feel of the new Admin screens.  But I’m not going to fool with it anymore today.  I have some posts I want to put up, but I’ll do that later.

If Have Posts?  Yes dammit, you have posts…

What She Said…

When the kids were killed in the Columbine High School shooting, no one asked what they did to get themselves killed. Every moment of the press coverage was dedicated to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.

What they wore, who they hung out with, how their parents were raising them – even the spots they parked their car in when they arrived at the school that horrible day.

Do we know what Brandon McInerney wore that day? Do we know how he got the gun into school? Do we know what created such rage in this boy of 14 to have him take a gun at point blank range and shoot? Do we know who his friends were, what pushed his buttons, what kind of movies he watched or internet sites he visited?

No. We know what that Larry King favored a pair of brown stilettos.

-Sarah Whitman, The Killer, Not The Killed

After all the stink the news media has been raising about the clothes Lawrence wore in school, you’d think he was dressed to go see Rocky Horror when McInerney walked up behind him and shot him in the head.  In fact, the day he was killed he was wearing tennis shoes, baggy pants and a loose sweater over a collared shirt. 

As a parent, I cannot understand the King’s lawsuit. They are blaming lipstick and glitter instead of the gun and the hand that held it. The message, loud and clear, is the dominant culture can wield a gun and shoot at will at anyone who doesn’t conform. And our Schools should enforce that conformity.

In doing so, they put my son, and anyone like him, at risk. And that really makes me want to scream: How can you miss the point?

It’s the killer, not the killed.

Emphasis mine.  And it’s not just King’s parents who are content to put other people’s kids at risk.  It’s McInerney’s lawyer, William Quest, who promised out of one side of his mouth, shortly after the first tendrils of his gay panic defense began to appear in the newspapers, that he wouldn’t put Lawrence on trial.  Hahahahahaha.  It’s a safe bet he’s been behind the media rush to portray 14 year old Lawrence King as a transvestite sexual predator, and taint the jury pool in McInerney’s favor.  Even if he doesn’t succeed, without a doubt there will be other dead gay kids because of it. 

And perhaps more dead gay adults too.  The bedrock of the gay panic defense is that homosexuality is so revulsive that acting violently toward homosexuals is a normal and reasonable reflex.  From there it is a simple step to conclude that homosexuals must assume responsibility for violence against them to the degree they are openly homosexual.  The gay panic defense is another way of saying Their blood is upon them…

Some weeks ago my bathroom shower faucet froze.  It’s a single knob type…you it pull outward to adjust the flow, and turn it clockwise or counter-clockwise to adjust the temperature.  One morning as I was getting ready to take a shower I pulled the knob outward and it simply stopped moving.  Luckily it froze in the off position and there was no pouring water emergency to deal with.  So for the past several weeks I’ve been using the shower in the basement, while I hemmed and hawed over whether to fix the upstairs one myself, or call a plumber.

My upstairs shower adjoins a closet which hides a trap door, which gives me access to the pipes that service the shower and the bathtub.  Normally there are shutoff valves located there, but my shower had none.  So one motive for calling in a plumber would be to have shutoff valves installed.  Even that would be something I could theoretically do myself.  It’s not like soldering copper pipes is any magic art…in the past I’ve helped friends do that in their own houses.  But the space behind my bathtub is tight, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to fuss with it.

So I thought about it and thought about it, and shopped for propane soldering tools and read various manuals on how to fix shower faucets.  And then it occurred to me that there might be shutoff valves down in the basement somewhere, before the pipes took a turn to the upper floors.  You’d think after owning the house for seven years I’d have had all the plumbing here mapped out by now, and I did have a general sense of how it was all laid out.  But I hadn’t actually taken an inventory of all the shutoff valves, just an ad hock survey.  I knew where the shutoff valves were to the kitchen sink and the ice maker in the refrigerator.  I knew where the shutoff valves were to the basement shower, the washer, the hot water heater and the central air humidifier.  I know where the shutoffs are to the outside faucets and I know where the main shutoff valve is to the service to the house.  So I went down into the basement and looked again at the place where the pipes split off to the second floor and sure enough, there was a set of shutoff valves there too.  But they were frozen tight.  I reckoned they’d likely never been turned since they were first installed.

So that wasn’t helping.  I dosed them with WD40, figuring I’d work on unfreezing them a little bit at a time.  Then I went back to my shower repair manuals.  I found  a schematic of my Moen shower faucet and tried to figure out how to disassemble it.  Turns out the knob had a cap I could pry off.  I’d checked it for that when it first froze up but didn’t see any obvious one.  But seeing it there in the schematic it was obvious how to get the knob off and I grabbed a couple of small screw drivers and went to work.  With the cap popped off, I saw the phillips head screw attaching the knob to the mechanism and quickly unscrewed the knob and removed it.

The plastic knob was broken.  That was the problem.  The faucet mechanism it was attached to was fine.  I couldn’t turn it because a piece of plastic inside the knob had broken off, essentally disconnecting it from the mechanism.  Sweet.  I took the knob down to Home Depot and found a replacement for a few bucks.  With the new knob on the faucet worked again and the shower was back in service.  So in the end, all I had to do was replace the damn plastic knob. 

Moral of the story…don’t call the plumber until you’ve made sure it’s not a simple fix. I could have ended up paying for a whole new faucet I didn’t need.

I still need to get those shut off valves to the upstairs bathroom unfrozen though…

Looks like the parents of Lawrence King have bought into the defense strategy of their son’s killer.  News reports I’m seeing this morning are that King’s parents have filed a claim against the school where he was shot to death, asserting that it was their failure to enforce the dress code on their son that led to his death (so far all I see is the AP report, which I’m not linking to because of the blogger AP boycott).  In other words, because Lawrence felt himself more feminine then the other boys, and the school allowed him to dress more femininely, the school made him a target.

This is so unbearably sad.  The poor kid’s parents seem deathly ashamed of their own son, even in death. He had to know how they felt about him before he died.  And maybe that was why some of the teachers at his school took him under their wing as they did.  Lawrence’s parents aren’t arguing here that the school failed to protect their son, but that they failed to keep him in the closet.  They are granting the premise of their son’s killer and his lawyer, that hate has more right to walk in the hallways of the public schools then gay kids do. 

It’s one thing to argue that the school let the bullying that Lawrence endured escalate dangerously.  It is another thing entirely to argue that letting Lawrence be openly gay led to his murder.  Waving the dress code around is a calculated and disgustingly cynical ploy.  It sidesteps the question of whether the code itself embodies discriminatory gender norms.  Gay and transgendered children should feel welcome and safe and secure in school too, or they cannot assert their right to an education.  Shoving them into the closet, for the sake of the delicate sensibilities of bigots, punishes them simply for existing, forces them to try and learn, somehow, in an environment where they are made to feel deviant, outcast and ashamed.

I read elsewhere that Lawrence’ father has complained bitterly that the gays have turned his son’s death into a cause.  As though the safety and welfare of all the other gay and transgendered kids in the public schools isn’t something worth fighting for.  It’s one thing to forgive his son’s killer.  The boy is only 14 after all.  But it’s another thing to excuse him.  Many gay and transgendered children know with horrible sickening clarity, some living on the streets because they were thrown out of their homes, that their parents would excuse their killer too.  Some would excuse them with great sadness.  Some would applaud.

I’m still running a very old version of the WordPress blog software here at The Story So Far so an upgrade is long overdue.  I’m going to work on that this weekend, as weekends seem to be when my traffic here is at its lowest ebb.  Presumably that’s because most of you have work to do around the house on the weekend like I do, and not because blog prime time happens to be during normal work hours when the boss isn’t looking. 

I’ll start the process sometime this weekend.  Saturday or Sunday morning depending on how my other household chores go.  Hopefully the upgrade will be reasonably painless.  There’s a WordPress upgrade plugin I’m going to try first.  If that doesn’t work then I’ll have to to it manually.  Obviously I’m backing everything up first, so unless the backups fail nothing here should be lost.  But the blog may be unavailable for a time.  Please Stand By…

Ecuador is debating a new draft constitution and Pope Ratzinger doesn’t much like it.  The new constitution, which goes to the voters on September 28, among other things guarantees the rights of same sex couples.  Consider that here in the land of the free and the home of the brave we’re busy taking those rights away one state at a time.  Some say the new Ecuadorian constitution also concentrates too much power in the office of the current President, who is a socialist.  But that’s not what Ratzinger’s men are busy complaning about…

Archbishop Antonio Arregui Yarza of Guayaquil criticized the draft charter for including what he called ambiguous abortion laws and granting the same benefits to same-sex couples and married heterosexual couples.

"A union between homosexuals is not a family," Arregui said in a news conference Monday.  "We’re going to request that the entire Christian conscience takes note of the nonnegotiable incompatibilities of this constitution with our faith." He also said the proposed document is "leaving the door open to the deletion of a new baby."

Just ignore that little bit of translation awkwardness…the new constitution doesn’t explicitly ban abortion outright and that’s a problem for the Archbishop.  But what’s unacceptable to him, is that it gives same sex couples the same rights as opposite sex couples.  To him that is a nonnegotiable incompatibility with his faith. 

Luckly for Ecuadorian gays, their president isn’t afraid to throw the religious argument right back at the haters…

President Defends Gay Rights in Draft Ecuadorean Constitution

President Rafael Correa has defended a new draft Ecuadorean constitution that grants same-sex couples the rights of marriage, El Telégrafo reported Aug. 1. The document faces a popular vote Sept. 28.

Speaking in the city of Monteverde, Correa said: “Jesus of Nazareth never preached hatred, homophobia or segregation; instead he knew to say, ‘Love one another.’

“It is false that (the draft) is recognizing as family the union of homosexuals. What we are doing is recognizing the dignity of all people without discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, etc.”

“Let’s hope, now that there’s been so much talk about moral incompatibilities between the new constitution and the Gospel, sometimes utilizing falsehoods, that we also can talk with equal force about the profound incompatibility of the social situation — of that inequality, of that existing social injustice — with the Gospels,” Correa said.

Emphasis mine.  This is why John-Paul furiously tried to stamp out liberation theology in South America.  It’s one thing to preach to the poor and the outcast.  It’s another thing entirely when they start preaching back at you.

Lifted from Fred Clark’s blog, Slacktivist, which you should read more often…

"You’ve got that eternal idiotic idea that if anarchy came it would come from the poor. Why should it? The poor have been rebels, but they have never been anarchists; they have more interest than anyone else in there being some decent government. The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht. The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all. Aristocrats were always anarchists."

-G.K. Chesterton – The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare.

Via Pam’s House Blend…

Lavonia, Ga., man imprisoned family for years, police say

Police say for the past three years, the wife and children of Raymond Daniel Thurmond lived in fear and squalor; held captive in a singlewide trailer where they were literally not allowed to see the light of day.

According to the news article, nobody in the neighborhood even knew there was a family in that trailer.  Trailers in that park sit within feet of one another…

Only one of the children, who are ages 14, 13, 12, and 9, had been to school.

“The 14-year old had been allowed to go school until second grade,” Chief Carlisle said.

… 

The only food found in the house was rotted, leftover fast food, said Roger Dutton, who has been responsible for cleaning out the structure, and investigators said all four children were undernourished and underweight. “Their weight is not consistent with their height and age. They were deprived of food and had also gone without medical attention for a long period of time. In fact, one of the children has a serious medical condition that has gone untreated,” Carlisle said.

Photos taken at the scene by investigators and shown to this reporter revealed the family was living in unimaginable filth.

The photos showed thousands of roaches and roach dirt covered every part of every room. They crawled in and out of drawers, cupboards, and furniture.

Old pizza boxes were stacked in one corner of the living room with dozens of empty plastic soda bottles strewn about on the floor.

In the kitchen, counters were covered in stacks of dirty dishes and old empty cans of food. Bags of garbage were strewn about the house, mixed in with dirty clothes and other trash.

Workers have hauled away two Dumpsters full of trash so far, and the work still is not done, Dutton said.

The prisoners family were discovered when Thurmond decided to take himself a mistress on the side and his wife bolted…

All are now in protective custody at an undisclosed location. The children are being evaluated and their medical needs treated.

Thurmond was arrested when he showed up at the Fieldale chicken processing plant where he worked.

But at least those kids weren’t growing up in a same sex household, so they still had a good roll model of what family life is supposed to be like.

It’s a hopeful sign to see more mainstream liberal pundits finally waking up to the fact that the moral argument is actually their friend.  This from Slate, in an article on Reclaiming The Morality Of Abortion…

Liberals have never won anything by reframing moral questions as pragmatic ones; they end up looking shifty and evasive. 

And…cowardly.  Here’s why the moral argument matters…

The gay-rights movement best illuminates the need to emphasize the role of morality in politics. In 1986, the Supreme Court decided Bowers v. Hardwick, upholding the constitutionality of criminal penalties for gay sodomy. Choice, said the five-justice majority, although available for a wide range of decisions (including abortion), was not available for conduct we consider really, really icky. (They didn’t say that explicitly; they put the words in the mouth of the "Judeo-Christian" tradition and let the priests say it for them.) Just as Bowers was decided, however, the AIDS epidemic motivated and enabled gay people to tell the world why their behavior was moral. As gay men began to die, they and their loved ones began to write about their relationships, their shared homes, and their desire—going back to Homer—to bury those they loved. At the same time, lesbians, who had been fighting for their children after divorces and for the families they were creating with donor insemination—publicly told the story of their own moral commitments.

By the time the Supreme Court faced the previously sinful gay litigants again in Lawrence v. Texas, 17 years later, the decision went the other way. It is impossible to read the two opinions and ignore the change in moral climate that produced the legal shift. And although recent polling fails to reveal a majority supporting gay marriage, the numbers have been steadily improving.

To fight for your own part in the American Dream, you must first fight for the American Dream.  That, Liberty And Justice For All thing.  Eight years of George Bush, and the collapse of America’s moral stature among the nations of the world, right as one of the world’s great tyrannies rousts itself from a short slumber to start eating its neighbors again, is the price we are paying now for ceding the moral ground to the human hating Right.  There is a pragmatic human potential and productivity side to the fight for democracy and freedom.  But it should never replace the moral struggle for liberty and justice, for the human status.  The struggle for freedom has always been a profoundly moral struggle.

So I’m scanning my Google News headlines this morning, and I come across a tantalizing fragment of what looks like a letter to the editor of the Associated Baptist Press…

Associated Baptist Press, FL – 1 hour ago
(ABP) — Thanks to Dr. David Gushee for his engaging article on Christian ethics as they relate to gay and lesbian Christians.

However, when I click on the link the Associated Baptist Press website tells me…

You are not authorised to view this resource.
You need to login.

I double check to see if it’s a subscription only site and it appears not to be.  So perhaps they’re just blocking incoming links.  A lot of head up their butt websites do that these days.  So I go to the home page of the Associated Baptist Press website and look for a handy search box.  There’s one at the top and I enter what I assume is the name of the columnist the person in the Google link is responding to, "David Gushee".  I get a handy list of entries, including this…

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. 

I’ll just bet it did.  After all, we homosexuals are one of the seven seals of the tribulation aren’t we?  I blogged some time ago about how, according to the Left Behind books, the Antichrist will be the son of a gay male couple…

This came to mind last night, as I read (via Andrew Sullivan) the following Wikipedia entry on Nicolae Carpathia, the Antichrist in Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins Left Behind stories…

Born in the county of Cluj in Romania, Carpathia’s birth is the product of genetic engineering. His mother Marilena Carpathia, is convinced by parties who are followers of Satan, although she is kept unaware of this, to become the mother of a child who they assure her would change the face of the world. Marilena’s husband, Sorin, and his gay lover, Baduna Marius, provide genetic material to facilitate Nicolae’s conception.

Dig it.  LaHaye and Jenkins are telling their readers that the Antichrist is, literally, the spawn of a gay male couple.

And some days I sit here at my computer and wonder if this is what it was like to be a Jew in 1920s Germany, watching the horror coming on the horizon.  This is the kind of stuff that gets people killed.  Someday, it might well get me killed.  Someone with a baseball bat or a gun comes along and takes my head off, because he thinks that gay people are going to deliver the world to the Antichrist.

And LaHaye and Jenkins are hardly alone in this.  Variations on this theme are popping up all across the kook pews.  The Gays are in league with Satan…  Just last week James Dobson was telling his listeners on the Focus on the Family radio broadcast, that same sex marriage was an attack on the family by the very forces of hell itself (via Ex-Gay Watch):

…as you all very well know marriage is under vicious attack, now I think from the forces of hell itself. Now it’s either going to continue to decline, and as I told you in my office a few minutes ago, I believe with that destruction of marriage will come the decline of western civilization itself.

So…yeah…I’ll fucking bet David Gushee’s recent series of articles on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response.  On the other hand, I have to wonder what the Associated Baptist Press expected.  Baptists haven’t exactly been in the forefront of calling out all the anti-gay hatemongering that’s been going on for the past few decades.  There’s a reason I keep the Baptist part of my own life history at arm’s length.

Anyway, I found the article Google News had linked to, clicked on it, and found I was actually allowed to read it from one of their own internal links…

Gay Christians can’t wait any longer
By Peggy Campolo
Wednesday, 13 August 2008

Editor’s note: The recent series of articles by David Gushee on homosexuality generated an unusual amount of response. ABP solicited these two representative responses — from Peggy Campolo, an advocate for gay Christians, and George Guthrie, a professor at Union University.

Both articles are worth the read, if you can actually get to them.  Maybe the links I’ve posted here will work.  If not, you’ll probably have to do what I did.  (Update: I’ve just tested them and they seem to be working for now…)  Gushee writes…

It is clear that insofar as "Christianity" or "the church" is primarily associated in people’s minds with rejection of homosexuals, as poll data shows, our mission as witnesses to the love of God in Jesus Christ has been badly damaged. There are very good missional reasons for Christian leaders to back off of public crusades against gay rights, whatever one may think about the merits of the particular issues under discussion. We must be known for what (who) we are for, not what (who) we are against.

The crux of his article is this, basically…

A church that is in the process of abandoning basic tenets of Christian sexual morality has no credibility as a moral voice in culture. And, ironically, it has no credibility if it decides to abandon the church’s traditional stance on homosexuality.

It’s almost an Only Nixon Can Go To China kind of argument.  The problem with it is that at it’s core it’s still pretty damn arrogant.  I don’t know of any church that’s saying Hey gang…let’s just throw sexual morality out the window so we can all just have some fun!  What’s happening is that some congregations and some church leaders are seeing the old moral codes being challenged by the reality of gay people’s lives and they are finding them wanting.  That is leaving many of them to ask questions they’d never thought in their wildest dreams they’d ever find themselves asking, because the Bible was supposedly plain as day about all that homosexuality stuff.  If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death. Their blood shall be upon them… 

Simple, no?  God says, kill the homosexuals, and you get a free pass on that thou shalt not kill thing.  But it’s not so simple if you have a conscience.  You don’t see an abomination when you look at that kid who just came out to you.  You don’t see an abomination in the love and devotion of that same sex couple next door.  If anything, you see the same joy and peace and contentment you see in your own marriage.  And so the questions start tap tap tapping you on the shoulder.  Not all who wander are lost.  These people haven’t abandoned sexual morality.  It is in fact because they are moral people, that they are questioning what they’ve been taught all their lives about homosexuals and homosexuality.

Folks like Gushee, who I have no doubt is trying hard, and in good faith, to figure all this out, need to listen to themselves.  Because you are willing to willy-nilly toss out thousands of years of Christian sexual morality simply because you see in the love of same sex couples a reflection of God’s love too, you have no creditability as a moral voice.  I’m sorry?  It’s the folks who cling to ideology and dogma in the face of what their own two eyes can plainly see who have no moral conscience, let alone credibility as a moral voice.

And tucked into Peggy Campolo’s response is the moral truth in a nutshell…

A pastor friend of mine, who has conducted too many funerals for gay children of God who ended their lives because they could no longer live the lie that their churches and families demanded of them, tells of a suicide note left by a young Christian. He dearly loved the godly parents who had accepted him but could not bear the anguish felt when their church excluded them along with him. His final letter to his mother and father read simply, "I didn’t know how else to fix it."

Their blood shall be upon them…  No it won’t.

Via Box Turtle Bulletin…  Karen Klien of the L.A. Times editorial board writes of meeting with the Proposition Eight supporters…

Behind the gay-marriage talk

The Times editorial board formulates its positions on ballot measures not only by research, but by inviting representatives of both sides to (separate) meetings with the board. It’s a good forum for probing an issue, and the results sometimes are surprising.

Here is where we win.  When the only people who were engaging the gay haters directly were us, they were able to hide the depth of their hate from the rest of straight America.  They could claim they were only motivated by a desire to protect children.  They could claim that they were only out to protect the institute of marriage in a time of every increasing divorce rates.  They could claim they were only motivated by their sincerely held religious beliefs, and not merely animus.  That love the sinner hate the sin was always just a thin coat of paint over God Hates Fags was something the rest of America never really got much of a chance to see, as long as most heterosexuals kept their distance from the fight.  Now, as more sons and daughters, more friends and co-workers come out to them, they are taking a closer look…

So it went with the supporters of Proposition 8, which would amend the state constitution so that gay and lesbian couples no longer could marry. The board already has published its stand on the measure, but the editorial left out some interesting turns in the conversation.

The measure’s supporters are generally careful to avoid appearing anti-gay, probably because they realize that, for all the voter split on same-sex marriage, Californians generally support gay rights. They professed in our meeting to have no ill will toward gay people…until the talk went deeper.

And I expect it didn’t have to go very much deeper… 

At one point, the conversation turned to the "activist judges" whose May ruling opened the door to same-sex marriage, and how similar this case was to the 1948 case that declared bans on interracial marriage unconstitutional. According to one of the Prop. 8 reps, that 1948 ruling was OK because people are born to their race and thus are in need of constitutional protection, while gays and lesbians choose their homosexuality. So much for the expert opinions of the American Psychological Assn. and the American Academy of Pediatrics that people cannot choose their sexuality. Oh, those activist doctor types.

In any case, one Prop. 8 supporter said, gay rights are not as important as children’s rights, and it’s obvious that same-sex couples who married would "recruit" their children toward homosexuality because otherwise, unable to procreate themselves, they would have no way to replenish their numbers. Even editorial writers can be left momentarily speechless, and this was one of those moments.

Emphasis mine.  As Molly Ivins would have called it, a "whoa moment".  It isn’t so much the myth that children can catch homosexuality like a goddamned cold.  It’s the image of gay people as almost a separate parasitic species that shocks the conscience.  But for these people, it’s just common knowledge.  Homosexuals aren’t human. 

Aside from this notion of a homosexual recruitment plot — making it understandable where the word "homophobia" came from — this made no logical sense at all. Same-sex couples. whether married or not, already have children. Marriage wouldn’t change a thing about this picture except, perhaps, to model for children that parents tend to be married.

Exactly.  But it’s not about insuring that children have stable family lives.  It’s not about imparting the virtues of marriage to them.  It’s about cutting gay people out of the human family tree.  That’s it.  There is nothing more noble about their cause then that.  If you don’t believe that, spend some time talking to them.  Enough time for them to get all their spiels about loving the sinner out of the way, so they can get down to brass tacks.

So the Washington Post has an article up today about phobias.  Given they put a photo of a honking big spider on the article, you have to wonder if they’re trying to scare off their target audience before they have a chance to read it.  But never mind. 

I am not in favor of spiders.  But I have a much bigger phobia then those little eight legged dickens.  My phobia involves high bridges over water.  No kidding, I am scared to death when driving over those things, let alone trying to walk across them.  I was in Portland Oregon a few weeks ago and tried to walk across the Steel Bridge there and I could not do it for the life of me.  There is a really nice pedestrian-bicycle lane going across that bridge and I tried to do it and I could only get about a fifth of the way across before my legs simply would not take me any further.

So when these discussions of phobias come up every now and then they pique my interest.  Especially because, as it so happens, we have a really good fear inspiring bridge right here in Maryland.  It’s called The Chesapeake Bay Bridge.  Almost four and a half miles of white knuckle cold pit in the stomach heart pounding trembling breath goodness.  I will drive up to Delaware and back down the Delmarva to avoid having to cross that damn bridge…

Fear Factors
Understand Your Phobias (Rational or Otherwise).

There are plenty of people who coast across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge without even a flicker of anxiety, never giving a thought to any greater calamity than whether they forgot the sunscreen or made an error in judgment in packing the Speedo.

You don’t say… 

But for some people, the 4.3-mile span sparks feelings from mild consternation to outright panic. What if the bridge sways or collapses? What if an erratic driver forces them out of their lane and into the drink? Or worse still, what if they completely freak out and in a state of panic accidentally drive themselves into the bay?

Uh, hummm… 

Some can’t even express exactly what it is that terrifies them; they just know how they feel: heart racing, back of the neck on fire, irresistible urge to flee at the mere mention of the b-r-i-d-g-e.

You don’t say…

Generally speaking, people with intense fears or phobias know their reactions aren’t rational. They’re well aware that the plane probably won’t crash, the dog won’t bite, the elevator won’t get stuck. But throwing statistics at them won’t help. "They say, ‘I don’t understand why, but I feel like if I do it, I’ll die,’ " Ross says.

You don’t say…

Just what’s behind those feelings isn’t always clear, either, but phobias often are not rooted in reality, says Bethany Teachman, assistant professor of clinical psychology at the University of Virginia…

You don’t say…  Oh…look what’s in the Metro section today…

Truck Driver Dies In Bay Bridge Crash

Beachgoers and other motorists spent several frustrating hours stuck in traffic backups of more than 10 miles on both sides of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge yesterday in the aftermath of a deadly crash that sent a tractor-trailer hurtling through a concrete Jersey wall and into the water below, killing the truck driver.

I’m Never crossing that bridge again.  Ever.

I’m copying the following from Brad DeLong’s blog comments in their entirety.  Some days you read the news and you just want to write off the human race altogether.  When those moments hit you, it’s good to be able to keep things in perspective…

Hoisted from Comments: The Dawn of Humanity

Grasping Reality with Both Hands: Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal: The Dawn of Humanity: What astonishes me is the speed. They’ve got the origin date at -56,000, and the oldest modern human remains in Australia are -40,000. The route from East Africa across Asia to Northern Australia is 10K+ miles, which means humans were expanding at close to a mile a year. That’s just unbelievably fast.

We have all sorts of branches of homo surviving stably for a million plus years all over africa, asia, and europe, and this new branch comes out of Africa and by the end of the Great Migration, only a little over ten thousand years later, they are building boats to sail to Australia. And wiping out or out-competing every one of our homo sibling species on the way.

The Singularity is truly in our past.

Posted by: tavella | January 23, 2007 at 05:15 PM

From Forbes Magazine comes this account of Jerry Falwell’s money machine…

Biblical Bling

Hundreds of millions of dollars poured into the ministries of Bible Belt televangelists in the 1970s-80s. But these fortunes would never have materialized without a secular weapon from the North–a Massachusetts marketing outfit begun by a group of twenty-something Harvard business school grads called Epsilon Data Management. Falwell began using the company in 1976; he was the first televangelist to sign up. When his contributions exploded, other preachers like Pat Robertson, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts and Rex Humbard contracted with Epsilon and made a pile, too.

Before Epsilon, Oral Roberts used punch tape-driven Friden Flexo-writers. Billy Graham handwrote every homespun fundraising appeal himself. "You could see the buckwheat flying off the paper," recalls Gaylord Briley, one of the top religious fundraisers of the era. In a few years Epsilon was doing work for 7 of the top 10 televangelists in America. 

Two threads joined together in the 1970s to produce the political machine we now know as the religious right.  In the early 1970s, the feds began challenging the tax exemption of many fundamentalist schools over their race segregation policies.  I’ve blogged about that previously Here…

But the spark that lit the roaring fire that eventually consumed the republican party wasn’t integration specifically…

In a recent interview broadcast on CNN the day of his death, Falwell offered his version of the Christian right’s genesis: "We were simply driven into the process by Roe v. Wade and earlier than that, the expulsion of God from the public square." But his account was fuzzy revisionism at best. By 1973, when the Supreme Court ruled on Roe, the antiabortion movement was almost exclusively Catholic. While various Catholic cardinals condemned the Court’s ruling, W.A. Criswell, the fundamentalist former president of America’s largest Protestant denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, casually endorsed it. (Falwell, an independent Baptist for forty years, joined the SBC in 1996.) "I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person," Criswell exclaimed, "and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed." A year before Roe, the SBC had resolved to press for legislation allowing for abortion in limited cases.

While abortion clinics sprung up across the United States during the early 1970s, evangelicals did little. No pastors invoked the Dred Scott decision to undermine the legal justification for abortion. There were no clinic blockades, no passionate cries to liberate the "pre-born." For Falwell and his allies, the true impetus for political action came when the Supreme Court ruled in Green v. Connally to revoke the tax-exempt status of racially discriminatory private schools in 1971. Their resentment was compounded in 1971 when the Internal Revenue Service attempted to revoke the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating. (Blacks were denied entry until that year.) Falwell was furious, complaining, "In some states it’s easier to open a massage parlor than to open a Christian school."

Seeking to capitalize on mounting evangelical discontent, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic named Paul Weyrich took a series of trips down South to meet with Falwell and other evangelical leaders. Weyrich hoped to produce a well-funded evangelical lobbying outfit that could lend grassroots muscle to the top-heavy Republican Party and effectively mobilize the vanquished forces of massive resistance into a new political bloc. In discussions with Falwell, Weyrich cited various social ills that necessitated evangelical involvement in politics, particularly abortion, school prayer and the rise of feminism. His implorations initially fell on deaf ears.

"I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed," Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. "What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation."

Dig it.  It wasn’t abortion.  It wasn’t militant homosexuality.  It wasn’t rampant sexual hedonism.  It wasn’t the secularization of America’s schools.  It wasn’t even racism, that lit the fire the brought the fundamentalist leadership charging into our political system in a blind destructive frenzy.  It was their tax exemption.  It was money.

The second thread is the advent of computerized direct marketing.  Richard Viguerie was a pioneer in its use for the republican party.  Viguerie had more then a mailing list.  His genius was in applying computerized database analysis techniques to it, tracking the giving patterns of the names in his database.  He paired that with a ruthless analysis of which marketing campaigns worked, and which did not.  Viguerie, a right wing extremist, wasn’t interested in informing the republican base so much as in pushing their buttons so they would open their wallets and go to the polls.  And he got results.  With his database and direct mailing technique, Viguerie almost single-handedly turned around the fortunes of the Republicans after Watergate. 

Remember, this was a time before the Internet, before the widespread use of cable TV and the appearance of 24 hour cable news, before even talk radio as we know it today, with its national audiences and personalities.  Viguerie showed the republicans how they could bypass the news media of that day, and not only get their their message out on their own terms, but do it below the radar of the popular culture.  His mail appeals were Targeted.  The message was tailored and precise, and didn’t have to appear in any newspaper or television ad where the rest of the country could see it too. 

Falwell saw the success of Viguerie’s technique, and revamped his own direct mailing effort…

Computerized database marketing turned the late 1970s into an era known as the golden age of direct mail prospecting. Direct mail was still an almost clandestine medium. The content of such correspondence was rarely exposed to media scrutiny. Falwell crafted his letters with theological abandon, hitting his mortal enemies with blunt force. Epsilon led Falwell to discover that the secret to steady income is consistency; getting lots of donors to give a little, but regularly. Epsilon also taught Falwell that most donor lists contain "compulsive contributors"–usually amounting to four percent of the list, says Briley. 

These twin threads of course, have a common root.  Money.  It was all about the money.  That is why there is a religious right today.  And that is why they’ve made common cause with the corporate world, the world of Caesar, the world of mammon, that they once disdained.  When Carter went after their tax exemptions, they found had a lot in common with those kings of business after all.

And how do you push the rube’s buttons enough so they’ll give you money, over and over and over again?   Well…here’s one way…

Besides Epsilon, Falwell had the formidable talent of Jerry Huntsinger. Then 45, he was a former minister who lived on a farm near Richmond who had been taking advertising concepts from the for-profit world and applying them to nonprofit religious ventures. Huntsinger brought a novelist’s touch to direct mail. He considered every fundraising letter a first cousin to the short story. "A short story has a problem that seems insurmountable, a sympathetic character that is a victim of the problem, complications and obstacles, but finally, a resolution." He advised his clients that emergency appeals work best because they give donors a feeling of "excitement at coming to the rescue."

Huntsinger was also a master at fine tuning the mechanics: the color of the envelope, the position of the address window, which paragraphs to indent, which sentences to underline. He knew how to lure a reader’s eye just to where he wanted.

Huntsinger encouraged Falwell to focus on wedge issues in his mailings, excoriating the feminist movement and attacking homosexual rights, often equating both with the dangers of communism. As one letter stated: "Dear Friend: Homosexuals are on the march in this country. Homosexuals do not reproduce, they recruit, and many of them are after my children and your children….This is one major reason why we must keep "The Old Time Gospel Hour" alive…So don’t delay. Let me hear from you immediately. I will be anxiously awaiting your reply."

The sense of impending doom the letter conveyed fit perfectly with Huntsinger’s operating credo. It turned a pitch into a storyline (gays on the the march) with sympathetic characters (children) under threat from sex offenders (gay pedophiles). It was an emergency appeal that sought to panic his audience into coming to the rescue.

The Forbes excerpt ends on the note that the gay bashing appeals actually raised very little money.  Given the history of the religious right’s move into politics, I don’t believe it.  Before Anita Bryant showed them that waving the gay menace at people could practically stampede them to the polls, the Falwells and the Robertsons actually did very little gay bashing.  But on the day Falwell stood by her side in front of reporters and declared that "a homosexual will kill you, soon as look at you", he knew she was on to something.

Falwell and his kind didn’t create the climate of fear and contempt toward gay people.  But in the 1970s they began to whip it into a frenzy.  For money.  Never mind all that love your neighbor as yourself crap.  The harder you push their buttons, the more they open their wallets.  And the best button of all was the Homosexuals Are On The March And They Want Your Children button.  It worked.  The money came rolling in.  For Falwell.  For Robertson.  For Dobson.  And for all the other crusaders for Christ.  The money came rolling in.

And here’s the color of money…