Today, Amazon removed George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from its Kindle e-book store. The company also went ahead and removed any digital trace of the books, too-striking them from both users’ digital lockers and from Kindle devices.
…
This unusual maneuver, which Amazon says occurred because Orwell’s publisher changed its mind about offering the electronic version of these titles, is all the more unsettling simply because readers already purchased the books and had their ownership of the item revoked. In the Orwell book case, the item was simply no longer there-it was as if those Kindle users never owned it.
What book citizen? That book does not exist. That book never existed…
I have this quirky sense of humor that (I think) alternately charms and appalls my friends. The problem with being a nerd is you never quite know for sure when you’ve taken it too far until your friends are giving you that Oh Do Grow Up look again. There is some subtle social sensibility you are missing, which prevents you from stumbling across the line from smart and funny into dumb and annoying.
I have to admit…I was tempted when I saw This. Oh…very tempted…
Novelty Bavarian Lederhosen With Yodeling Frankfurter Controls: Hurry!
Each 6-inch tall plastic pair of Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen is activated by an infrared remote control knockwurst. Press the button and the self propelled Lederhosen hops around and sings a merry yodel.
You can have your very own Bavarian Remote Control Lederhosen for $19.49. Requires two AAA batteries. Knockwurst remote control operates your Lederhosen to within 10 feet.
Matt Aune, 28, and his partner, Derek Jones, 25, crossed the plaza holding hands, according to Aune. About 20 feet from the edge of the plaza, Aune said he stopped, put his arm on Jones’ back and kissed him on the cheek. Several security guards then arrived and asked the pair to leave, saying that public displays of affection are not allowed on the church property, Aune and Jones said. They protested, saying they often see other couples holding hands and kissing there. "We were kind of standing up for ourselves. It was obviously because we were gay."
Jones said that the guards put Jones on the ground and handcuffed him. Aune said he was also cuffed roughly, suffering bruises and a swollen wrist.
LDC Church spokesperson Kim Farah said the two men "became argumentative," refused to leave, and used profanity.
And goodness knows no heterosexual would swear at a couple of rent-a-cops for arresting them for kissing their date. Oh…and this all happened in a public place too…right?
The path where they walked is officially church property, but is used as a pedestrian avenue open to the public. That’s because it was a public walkway until 2003, when, reports the Salt Lake Tribune, "in a controversial land-swap deal … the easement became private property, allowing the church to ban protesting, smoking, sunbathing and other ‘offensive, indecent, obscene, lewd or disorderly speech, dress or conduct,’ church officials said at the time. In exchange, the city got church property for a west-side community center."
Dig it. That space was public property. And then one day the church that teaches its flock that they too will become Gods, decided it needed more control over that public space. So they asked the city council nicely if they could have it in exchange for some pretty worthless property somewhere else. And all the Mormons on the city council gave it to them.
This is what people are missing in this story. That city space was a popular tourist zone…particularly for couples…
An LDS Church spokesperson, in a written statement, denied that the two were singled out for being gay. "Two individuals came on church property and were politely asked to stop engaging in inappropriate behavior — just as any other couple would have been."
The spokesperson declined to comment on what is considered inappropriate behavior, and on the rules governing the plaza.
Salt Lake City sold the property to the LDS Church in the late 1990s. It is a popular pedestrian thoroughfare, and reportedly a site where couples often pose affectionately for photos.
This isn’t about this oddball God Is A Being From Another Planet religion’s bedrock of anti-gay animus. It’s about its need to control…well…everyone. Mormon or not. It wasn’t a swarm of same-sex couples all necking in that plaza that made the church decide it needed to grab ownership of it away from the public. And this isn’t Las Vegas we’re talking about here…it’s Salt Lake City…where until just this month, by law you had to fill out an application, pay a fee and become a member of a private club before setting foot in a bar…
The Mormon church has always helped shape alcohol policy here, and the change to the law this year was no different. Only after consultation with church leaders and an agreement that DUI penalties would be stiffened, did lawmakers make progress on the changes.
The Mormon church "helps" shape all public policy in Utah. Never mind the bible belt, which may consider itself Christian America, but isn’t under the thumb of any one particular church…it is Utah that is as close to a theocracy as can be managed under the U.S. constitution. In Utah, the Mormon church wants, the Mormon church gets. Whatever was going on in that plaza before the Mormon church ate it, it couldn’t have been much. This is Salt Lake City not Key West. But for theocrats there is never enough control, especially over lovers.
The Salt Lake Police Department on Friday denied a request by the Salt Lake Tribune for a full police report on the incident, citing Utah laws giving them five business days to respond to records requests.
Sgt. Robin Snyder of the SLC PD refused to name the reason security guards gave for alerting police, saying it is "irrelevant."
They’re getting their stories straight. I would bet money that every single person who had a hand in writing that police report, when it finally comes out, is a Mormon.
What you need to understand about the leaders of religions like this, is that it isn’t sin they’re waging war against. Their sworn enemy isn’t the devil. Theocracy hates the human heart. And fears it. Because the heart acknowledges no master other then Love…
And when two lovers woo
They still say, "I love you."
On that you can rely
No matter what the future brings
As time goes by…
Brüno is, in more than one sense, beyond gay. Is any viewer really going to think that this hyperbolically crass and ridiculous narcissist—who wears mesh tops and eye-searing lederhosen, refers to his adopted African baby as a "dick magnet," and drops faux-Teutonic vulgarities about his waxed arschenhaller—represents "the mainstream of the gay community," as one troubled Hollywood "gay insider" put it?
Okay…I have a question for you. How many top grossing box office movies can you name that honestly represented that mainstream of gay people you speak of? How many? No…not just a walk-on token gay character, but a movie About gay people that wasn’t full of the same stupid ignorant stereotypes that are propelling Sacha Baron Cohen’s gayface act to number one? How many?
That one about the gay cowboys? The one that couldn’t win an academy award because John Wayne was rolling in his grave? The one academy members openly said they’d never vote for. The one they made Bruno-esq jokes about at the award ceremony? The one that got practically no cable channel airplay after it left the theaters, even though it was nominated for best picture? That one?
Editing As I Read…How To Cope With Living In A Heterosexual World…
Once upon a time my diet of fiction was huge. In grade school I was a voracious reader of it, much to the annoyance of my teachers who often caught me at it in class when I should have been paying attention to them. Once a dour old history teacher of mine, a man who could make World War II seem boring, caught me reading a western behind my text book and berated me for a good ten minutes in front of the whole class. He demanded to know if my copy of Louis L’amour’s Flint was more important then history class. It was all I could do to keep from telling him no, just his history class.
But as I have grown older my diet of fiction has dropped severely off. Where I used to go through one or two fiction books a week, now I’m doing good if I read one or two a year. It isn’t that I’ve stopped reading altogether. Far from it. I read constantly. Between the web and the few magazines I still subscribe to, my eyes are constantly scanning words. And I always have a book I am digesting, sometimes several, on the side table in my office with bookmarks carefully inserted. But these are non-fiction titles. A history of German-English relations, Death of the German Cousin, by Peter Edgerly Firchow. A history of Walt Disney Word, Since The World Began, by Jeff Kurtti. A history of the anti-gay witch hunts of the 1950s, The Lavender Scare, by David K. Johnson. These are the sorts of books I read now.
I think I know why, and it’s why I don’t like watching movies all that much anymore, or TV shows that, once again, aren’t non-fictional. I can watch The Science Channel and The Discovery Channel and The History Channel for hours. But very little else. Fiction mostly bores me anymore.
At work, there is a little bookshelf in one corner of the cafeteria where staff can leave books they are finished with, for others to pick up and take home and read. It’s a kind of informal book exchange. When I first joined the Institute ten years ago (has it been that long?), it was just a small stack of books on a window ledge. One day someone had left a few there with a note saying anyone who wanted one could have it. Over the next few months some books disappeared and others were deposited to take their place. Eventually the stack outgrew its window ledge and a small bookshelf was installed.
I check it daily, and have even fed from it a time or two. But as I hardly read any fiction anymore my interest was mostly curiosity as to what my co-workers were reading. As you might expect, the mix is largely science-fiction and computer technology. There is an old Word Perfect manual there, and a Turbo-C manual, that have been waiting for a hand to lift them off the shelf and take them home now for almost as long as the exchange has been going. About half of it cycles quickly and the rest just sits and waits for the recycling bin to come along. But they’re like me there…loath to toss out a book that might possibly still be useful.
The other day someone left a small collection of science-fiction hardbacks, their dust covers looking almost like new. But it was older stuff…stuff from my kidhood, when I read it voraciously. I sorted through them and saw an interesting cover. It was of an older man sitting in a rocking chair his front porch, reading a book to a companion who stood nearby with a coffee cup in one hand. The man in the rocking chair seemed to be a farmer of some sort…you could see fields of wheat going off into the distance just off the porch. His companion was a grey skinned, pointy eared bug-eyed alien. The two of them were enjoying a restful moment looking over the book the farmer was reading.
I picked it up…it was by Clifford D. Simak titled, Way Station…I’ve never read him…and on a lark brought it home thinking I could always take it back if I got a few pages in and lost interest.
That’s been my pattern lately with fiction and I know why. Even back in my kidhood, most of what I read was very light on the romantic interest. My favorite authors, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Hal Clement, and others, seldom spoke of that baffling dating and mating game, which suited me fine then, and ironically enough still would, although for a very different reason. Action writer Alistair MacLean (of Ice Station Zebra and Guns of Navarone fame), whose books I devoured, once averred that the love interest just slowed down the action. I wondered since if he wasn’t simply, as Clarke was, a gay man who couldn’t bring himself to write about love as he knew it, and simply left it out of his writing altogether, but I read now that he was married twice and had three kids.
Clarke, let it be said, wrote one of the most touching same-sex love stories in science-fiction in Imperial Earth. But even then he had to make his main character bisexual, not gay and there is a female love interest too. I pretty much just glossed over those scenes, which were gratefully few. The scenes between the two male characters had real emotion to them. Or at least, they did for me.
That’s been my pattern. I pick up a book that looks interesting and as soon as it gets to the love interest I put it down. Okay…I get that I’m living in a heterosexual world. But it is the rare straight writer who can hold my interest while I’m reading about it. And come to think of it, those writers have all been women. And as more and more science-fiction writers became comfortable, insisting even, with writing about sex too, I just lost interest. I suppose I can appreciate that heterosexuals probably don’t want to read about gay sex either. But it would be nice if their gay neighbors had the same kind of depth to their fiction shelves. Mary Renault is dead. Mercedes Lackey only wrote one set of stories featuring a gay male lead. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. But then there was no more. The various gay authors I’ve read have been mostly one hit wonders, and there is no good gay science fiction to speak of. None. Most of what I read these days that is fiction, are yaoi manga from Japan. I have a bookshelf practically filled with those damn things.
So I picked up this Clifford D. Simak novel hoping that at least it was representative enough of its time that its love interest was minimal. I got about thirty pages into it when I stumbled upon The Mute Free Spirit Girl In The Woods and thought…yeah…here it comes. But then I did something, probably out of shear frustration, that I’ve always done when listening to pop music. I mentally switched around a few pronouns and read it as The Mute Free Spirit Guy In The Woods and kept on reading. What I found was I could empathize with the main character’s feelings once more, and my interest in the story perked up considerably. And thus the pages kept turning.
I do this all the time with pop music. It’s not always easy, particularly with rock songs that are über masculine male meets über feminine female. But it is do-able. Sometimes I need to substitute genderless pronouns to make the song make sense. But in years of doing this, it comes to me almost as second-nature now…
You are all the woman I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…runs through my mind as…
You are all the lover I need
And baby you know it
You can make this beggar a king
A clown or a poet
…so easily now I hardly think about it. This is how I cope with living in a world where 99 44/100 percent of the songs about love are songs about heterosexuals in love. Sometimes I wonder if this is why my imagination is so potent. I’m constantly re-imagining my pop culture environment to suit myself. But no…I’ve been a day dreamer since well before puberty. The imagination has kept me sane all these years. Or at least, pleasant company.
So I try this out on Way Station and find myself not putting the book down after all. It’s more difficult then with rock songs, as I have to buffer the images in my mind as the words create them, then re-build them with the new pronouns, before actually looking at them. I’m editing it on the fly and taking it in as I’m editing it.
It’s…do-able, but hard. With music it’s more the direct emotional content and the words are poetry and their images are meant to free-associate in your mind anyway. You’re not building any specific image in your mind. With a novel you are and re-casting an opposite sex love interest as a same-sex one is more mental gymnastics. And I don’t have the genderless pronoun out I do with rock songs, when explicitly switching gender won’t make any sense. On the other hand I don’t have to worry about how the words scan to a beat either.
It is not that much harder, really, then what I do for a living when I’m trying to visualize program flow from computer code. And I don’t have to do it everywhere in the novel, just when the love interest shows its face. It’s work…I think it’s cutting my reading speed in half…but as time goes on I’ll probably get mentally faster at it. As long as it doesn’t involve any actual sex scenes.
I have a confession to make. I do this all the time with favorite movies. Not in real time though…that’s more then even my hyperactive imagination can handle. But there are titles I could tell you about, some blockbusters, some just little niche films I happen to have liked a lot, that I have recast in my mind, mentally changing a pronoun as it were when the love interest appears, sometimes mentally re-writing huge sections of the plot, to satisfy my need for some reflection of my life and my own romantic desires in the pop culture. I daydream these rewrites constantly, refining them a little every time I replay them in my head. With the iPod, I can even daydream them to their actual background scores too. These are favorite movies, but if you look on my video shelves you won’t see any of them there because I have them all stored inside my head, just the way I want them.
They say gay folk are more creative. I think that’s more myth then fact, but if there is some truth to it, it’s because we need to be to survive. We live in a world that is hostile at worst, and uncaring at best. I wish there was more gay fiction out there. There are probably tons of good gay writers out there…but it isn’t gay folk who run most of the publishing houses, let alone the Hollywood film studios.
Kilmeade and two colleagues were discussing a study that, based on research done in Finland and Sweden, showed people who stay married are less likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s. Kilmeade questioned the results, though, saying, "We are — we keep marrying other species and other ethnics and other …"
At this point, his co-host tried to — in that jokey morning show way — tell Kilmeade he needed to shut up, and quick, for his own sake. But he didn’t get the message, adding, "See, the problem is the Swedes have pure genes. Because they marry other Swedes …. Finns marry other Finns, so they have a pure society."
You can see the video of it on Salon. I suppose they’ll be touting the benefits of incest on FOX News next. It doesn’t get much purer then that…
Michael Moore, a former resident of Martinsville, VA said he was forced to resign from the Virginia Museum of Natural History because he is gay. The state has no anti-discrimination law, just Governor Tim Kaine’s (who is also the DNC chair) 2006 executive order. The courts have ruled that without legislation on the books, Moore has no recourse there.
Well of course the Governor’s executive order wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. It dared to suggest that gay people are something other then human garbage. You can bet your ass that if Kaine had ordered an anti-gay witch hunt the Virigina courts would have backed him a thousand percent, legislation or not. People think Texas is the most anti-gay state in the union, but it just gets noticed more when it does dumbshit things like raid a gay bar and crack some gay heads on the anniversary of Stonewall.
Tell me please, what this man did to deserve loosing his job. Oh…right…he was gay and it was Virginia. By all appearances it was an act of pure anti-gay animus on the part of the executive director of the museum, Tim Gette, who probably thinks Moore should be grateful he didn’t call the police and have him arrested for being a sodomite. Moore had been given an employee evaluation at the time of his getting the boot, that had entitled him to a pay raise. And then Tim was told the horrible news by someone. Hey Tim…you have a gay guy working for you. Imagine that…a gay guy working in a museum…
According to Moore, during his evaluation in October 2006, the museum’s executive director, Tim Gette said, “Michael, there are board members that are aware you are gay, and I do not appreciate you hiding that from me.”
I can’t imagine why he’d have wanted to hide that fact from you Tim, considering you gave him the boot the moment you found out. Homophobe much? You find yourself wondering if the board members who didn’t alert Tim to the presence of a homosexual on the staff are going to get the axe next. I do not appreciate your failure to inform me there was a homosexual on our staff… Hey Tim…are you sure you’re the executive director and not an exhibit somewhere over in the Neanderthal section?
Meanwhile, the Roanoke Times is wagging its finger at a statehouse that wishes its sodomy law was still enforceable…
The decision by the Martinsville court should be a convincing sign to the General Assembly that protection against such discrimination must be written into Virginia’s code. Only a law will offer genuine confidence to Virginia’s gay employees that they won’t face irrational threats to their employment based on their sexual orientation.
It would be better if such protection were guaranteed to all workers in Virginia, not just state employees, but a law making it official state policy not to discriminate against public employees because of their sexual orientation would at least be a start.
Editorial – The Roanoke Times, July 7, 2009.
I’d like to know what planet the editorial board of the Roanoke Times is living on. An anti-discrimination law? They expect the Virginia statehouse, which passed an anti same-sex marriage amendment so draconian, so breathtaking in its sweep that some legal experts say it could even be used to break a same-sex couple’s joint checking account…they expect That legislature to pass an anti-discrimination law? Earlier this year the statehouse gutted an anti-bullying bill of its LGBT protections practically the instant that bill hit the floor. You expect a state that thinks there is nothing wrong with beating up gay kids to pass an anti-discrimination law? There something funny in the tobacco down there lately?
Two options I made sure to get when I bought Traveler were the fold down rear seats and the trunk liner. I did this because the car, lovely though it is, needed to be a working member of the family too. It’s been a welcome feature this past couple weeks as I’ve been trying hard to rid Casa del Garrett of all the excess…stuff.
I took a load to the city recycling drop-off yesterday. It’s an uneasy feeling driving a Mercedes-Benz carefully among the dumpster rows. You just get the feeling the car doesn’t belong here, even though you’re just taking care of the same everyday household business your neighbors are. But among the banged up pickup trucks loaded down with junk, the car sticks out. What yuppy scum is this bringing his luxury car here? What’s he throwing out…his old expresso machine?
One of the trash guys started backing up a drumpster next to where I was busy unloading Traveler. He gets out of his truck and walks over to my car and looks carefully at the tires. Then he asks me if they’re 19" or 17". I’m embarrassed to admit I hadn’t a clue, but he looks more carefully at them, declares them to be 19" and says his own Mercedes has 19s too but he wasn’t sure they were right for that car. Turned out he had a CLK he’d bought second-hand from Carmax. If I’d had half a brain I’d have bought a used Mercedes ages ago and I’d have had one to drive then for more of my life. The two of us chatted easily for a while about our favorite car maker before getting back to work. We were both fans.
Well. If the trashman owns a Mercedes, I don’t have to feel so self conscious about driving mine with a load to the dump from time to time. That’s the thing about these cars…they’re not just empty status symbols. People in all walks of life appreciate them for their engineering. The car gave me a reminder of that as I pulled away from the dumpster.
I’d emptied the trunk and the back seat, and flipped back up the rear seatbacks. Then I got behind the wheel and started the engine and immediately got an alert in the speedometer display that the right rear seatback wasn’t fully latched. So I got back out and checked it and sure enough. Just a little nudge and it locked into place. I’d been too offhanded about flipping the seats back up. But it was another discovery about my car. I’ve had it for three months shy of two years and I’m still discovering things about it. Whatever senses the seatbacks aren’t latched has to know, somehow, the difference between all the way down and not fully up. It isn’t like the doors where you can just throw an alert if they’re ajar when the driver starts down the road. Sometimes the driver will drive off with the rear seat backs down because they’re taking a load somewhere. So the car had to know I meant to latch them back up again, and hadn’t.
And I’m sure the Daimler engineers considered it a safety issue. Logically it isn’t a hard issue: you just test for the seat being in the upright position but not latched. But that’s more complex then simply testing for not latched, which is all you need to do for the doors. And I didn’t just get a generic One Of The Seatbacks isn’t latched messages, it told me which one it was. Just like it has whenever I’ve tried to drive off with a door ajar. I love this car. Geeze…why haven’t I owned one of these before now…?
Just So We Don’t Have To Talk About What Louts We Allowed Ourselves To Become
Once upon a time, it may surprise you to learn, the American Puritan set wasn’t so afraid of the natural world. In fact, they embraced it with a passion very much akin to the environmentalists of today. My favorite American landscape painter, Fredric Church, embodied the thinking in those days. His absolutely stunning landscapes were representations not merely of nature’s awesome beauty, but also of the eternal spiritual truths one may behold within. They were revelations on canvas for "…those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand".
In his essay, Church and Luminism: Light for America’s Elect, David C. Huntington says of Church’s painting, The Andes of Ecuador, that it is…
…a joyous paean to a divine universe. The very composition appears to soar in exaltation. All, as it were, becomes a resurrection. The light of the sun expands without effort to touch and bless the whole earth. The atmosphere itself bears the higher message of the painting. In Cotopaxi, however, the sun must suffer for the evils of this world.
Church painted Cotopaxi in 1863 and many understood it to be a parable for the nation in the midst of a bloody civil war. Understand, these were not your trite modern bible story paintings. They were realistic, almost hyper realistic, awesomely beautiful landscapes. Church twice visited South America, drew many sketches in oil on paper of the natural wonders there. As well as any modern day naturalist, Church took pains to make sure that every detail of his landscapes were true to nature. And yet they were created by an artist for a viewing public that took for granted that the natural world and the revelations of the Bible not only did not contradict one another, but did in fact emphasize one another.
Cotopaxi is a geological parable, a proverb drawn from the sacred "volume in stone". The canvas is as charged with the spirit of prophesy as is Bushnell’s discourse. "The word, the meaning and the expression" of the great Andean volcano becomes a "revelation" to "those who have eyes to see and a mind to understand". Cotopaxi is nature’s type for the regeneration of America.
Once upon a time in America, religion was not at war with the natural world. In fact it was the pride of many biblical literalists that Americans held a special regard for the natural sciences. Some even believed that it was here in North America (some said it was Yosemite Valley) that the Garden of Eden had once been located. Much of the 19th century efforts to protect and preserve the natural wonders of America were based in no small measure on these deeply religious people’s intent to venerate that "sacred volume in stone"…
For those who will have remarked the visible absence of an explicitly Christian context in The Personal Narratives and Cosmos of Alexander von Humboldt, works which twice inspired Church to visit South America, McCosh’s treaties would seem to provide a missing link between Church’s religious and Humboldt’s secular approach to natural history. Typical Forms and Special Ends in Creation is a dedicated Calvinist’s guide to the "Science of Design". Geology is viewed as a Bible in stone, infallibly inscribed with the story of creation. Like the verbal Bible, known to the generations who lived without the benefit of the new dispensation of science, the physical world is as much, so McCosh tells us, the word of God as is the word recorded by the prophets and the apostles.
And then Darwin came along and scared the steaming shit out of all of them, and they never forgave science for it. It takes courage, and a little humility, to look God in the face and ask a question, because you might just get an answer. Why yes Pope Urban, Gallilao and Copurnicus were right…the earth isn’t at the center of the universe after all. And oh…by the way…neither are you…
After Darwin, America’s religious purists retreated back into a padded room prison of Bible idolatry which has corrupted them ever since. It is not a matter simply, of science verses the Bible. Religion that teaches its faithful to deny any fact that contradicts its dogmas makes liars out of them. First to themselves, then to their neighbors. When lying to yourself becomes a daily necessity, to lie to your neighbors becomes simply a fact of life.
Witness the routine, almost offhanded lying by the modern religious right in their war against their gay and lesbian neighbors. A good recent example is provided by Timothy Kincaid over at Box Turtle Bulletin…
Reports are coming in that some people collecting signatures in opposition to the new marriage law in Maine are doing so under false pretenses (Sun Journal):
Gerard Caron walked into the Auburn Post Office and was met by a woman with a pair of clipboards.
“This petition is against gay marriage and this other petition is to support gay marriage,” she said, according to Caron.
The Poland man said he asked her why there would be a petition to support something that already happened, referring to the petition “in support of” gay marriage.
“She just kinda gave me a little grin and didn’t say anything,” he said.
Then he looked at the two petitions and discovered they were identical, both were supporting the repeal of the same-sex marriage law, Caron said.
There is no way this person honestly made that mistake. It was a lie. A simple, easy, toss-off lie for Jesus. We are doing God’s work and that means we have to lie. Eventually the lying becomes so ingrained in one’s day to day life that it goes unnoticed. What was a pious duty becomes a habit of two-facedness. Thus, during the Dover Pennsylvania Intelligent Design trial, Alan Bonsell, then on the Dover Pennsylvainia school board, may have actually believed it when he told Judge John Jones that he didn’t know who the money came from to purchase copies of Of Pandas and People, a creationist textbook, even though he himself had handed his father the check for $850 to buy them…a check that a former board member had given him, from the proceedings of his church’s fund raiser for the books…
The judge also wanted to know why the money needed to be forwarded to his father, why Buckingham couldn’t have purchased the books himself.
Bonsell stammered.
"I still haven’t heard an answer from you," Jones said.
"He said he’d take it off the table," Bonsell said.
"You knew you were under oath?" Jones asked at one point.
Yeah he knew he was under oath. This is what fundamentalism brings people to. More specifically, it’s what idolatry brings people to. They are not worshiping God the creator. They are worshiping a book. After Ben Stein’s film Expelled came out, National Review columnist John Derbyshire smacked out into the open what his fellow movement conservatives are loath to speak of publicly…
When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?
My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.
The shifty… That’s it exactly. It’s the shifty. But Derbyshire doesn’t dig deeply enough into the cause. It isn’t simply creationists are pretending not to be a religious pressure group. Morality in the fundamentalist world is a constant struggle to have it both ways.
All this was churning in my thoughts the other day when I came across this post by Marv Knox, Editor of the Baptist Standard. Marv thinks it’s time for Baptists to talk about homosexuality. Here’s what talking looks like to Marv…
I’m not a geneticist or a biologist, so I don’t know if someone is “born homosexual.” I do know many homosexuals who swear they did not choose their orientation and never would choose to feel this way. Still, a direct reading of Scripture says sexual relations are designed by God to be enjoyed between one woman and one man exclusively within the bonds of marriage. While I empathize with the pain and grief of homosexual friends, I believe the Bible says their option is to remain celibate. I do not belittle their suffering, because the sex drive is one of the most powerful forces on Earth, but I also cannot ignore what seems to me the plain teaching of Scripture. Likewise, I do not feel their same-sex yearnings alone comprise sin. Humans are responsible for actions, not feelings. So, we must differentiate between homosexuality and homosexual activity.
There’s lots here to unpack, but if the first thing that strikes you is how shallow this man’s empathy is for his gay "friends" you don’t grasp what it means to talk about…well…anything, in fundamentalist circles. It all comes back to the bible, and ultimately there is no talk because there are no questions. Questions aren’t permitted. Only answers. Does your job bite? Well, Ephesians 6:5-8! Are credit card companies ripping off the public? Well, Psalm 37:21! Origin of the species? Well, Genesis 1:20! Homosexuality? Well, Leviticus 20:13!
Talk about homosexuality? Sure…as long as we already know what the answers will be. Talk to homosexuals? By all means…to save them. You can talk all you want as long as you don’t listen.
Marv empathizes with the pain and grief of his homosexual friends. Some of my best friends are… But he is also perfectly willing to join in the pummeling of them because that’s what the bible tells him he must do. This he regards as friendship. Look at that, if you have the nerve. His "friends" are in pain and grief. Marv is not looking the other way while they suffer. He’s looking right at it, adding his own righteous measure to it, and calling that empathy. He must. The bible calls us to love our neighbor, and to kill the homosexual…
Mark 12:31 And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.
Leviticus 20:13 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.
"A direct reading of scripture" says both these things. We must love. We must kill. Therefore, to love the homosexual, is to kill them. Or at least, to make sure they understand that God condemns them.
And let it be said that gay people are killed every year in this country by murderers who claim some measure of justification in the bible’s condemnation of homosexuality. But while actually killing his homosexual neighbor may be more then Marv’s conscience will endure, twisting the knife in their hearts can be seen as a kind of tough love, the moral qualms at seeing yourself doing it washed, washed, washed away in the knowledge that you are simply obeying God’s will. That isn’t you bringing pain and grief into the lives of your homosexual neighbors, it’s the fallen state of humanity…it’s Satan…it’s God’s will…not mine… I am twisting this knife into your heart because God wants me to love you…
Once upon a time the righteous believed that God’s will could be seen in nature’s design. Then one day nature informed them they weren’t the center of the universe and they turned away in anger. But as Jacob Bronowski once said, when you discard the test of fact in what a star is, you discard in it what a human is. The commandments were not written on the stone, but in the stone, and in the light of the sun and stars, and in the songs of birds, and the color of the tiger’s eyes and the fish’s scales, and in our flesh and blood and bones, and in our hearts. To turn away from the natural world is to turn away from your human identity, and everything fine and noble a human being can become. Then you enter the wasteland, where inflicting pain and grief upon your neighbor is regarded as loving them…where the death of love is embraced as the purest essence of it. No Marv, let’s not talk about homosexuality. Let’s talk about how you became so callow. You need to understand why that happened.
Road kill reported by a driver in the German state of Lower Saxony turned out to be a drunk badger taking a nap, police in Goslar reported on Wednesday morning.
Late on Monday night, a driver reported what he thought was a dead animal on county road 32 near Groß Döhren to police.
But when officers arrived on the scene to remove the traffic obstruction, they were stunned to find that the animal was not dead or injured.
“Right in the middle of the street there was a badger sitting and staring at the officers incredulously,” a police statement said.
The officers quickly discovered that the animal – which was not frightened by their presence – had been snacking on the overripe cherries on a nearby tree.
“The animal’s belly digested the fruit to alcohol and the badger was, as the saying goes, ‘drunk as a blackbird’,” the statement said, adding that the little mammal was also suffering from “diarrhoea containing cherry pits.”
Officers directed the badger off of the road, where he could “sleep off his intoxication in a meadow.”
–The Local, Germany
Well of course they let it go on its way. Who wants to arrest a badger for public drunkenness? You’d get your hands chewed off.
Good thing it was the happy peaceful kind of drunk and not the loud belligerent kind. Just imagine walking home from a night out at the bars and suddenly encountering a drunken pissed off badger…
Really? Staffers that would otherwise have contributed to police work, road repair, education, and sea research were pulled in to help the governor’s office deal with the legal ins and outs of ethics complaints? That’s the official explanation for Palin’s claim now?
Well, it will be for the next five minutes. Then another lie will come along. Note in particular that ABC News’ Kate Moss did not even question her bizarre claim that she was resigning to save the state "millions" in frivolous lawsuits, a claim that was suspicious on its face, debunked on the blogs and now a proven lie. But on ABC News, stenographers to the powerful, Kate Snow just sat there and let Palin state…
This would be the same ABC News that claimed that Matthew Shepard knew his killers, that he was a druggie, and that his murder was a meth fueled robbery gone bad, not a sickeningly typical-in-its-brutality gay bashing? That ABC News?
If You Understand Nothing Else Understand This: Those Days Are Over
Dan Savage puts his finger on what’s so utterly dumbfounding about the Rainbow Lounge raid…
…The police burst into that bar as if it were still 1968, the year before the NYPD’s raid on the Stonewall Inn, as if the old rules were still in force. They assumed that the other men at Rainbow Lounge that night—the men who witnessed four officers assaulting Chad Gibson—would disappear into the night, grateful that they got out of the Rainbow Lounge without getting assaulted and arrested too. The police didn’t expect the other gay men men at the Rainbow Lounge to talk to the media—or to organize a protest outside Fort Worth’s city hall. The police didn’t even seem to realize that there were men taking pictures with their cell phones during the raid. It’s as if the police in Fort Worth didn’t know what decade this is.
In June 2008, Washington D.C. Council member and former mayor Marion Barry declared his support for same-sex marriage in the District. Three weeks ago Barry co-sponsored the District law that recognizes legal same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. The former mayor now breaks his promise and appears at an anti-gay rally organized by the publicity-hungry gay-bashing Bishop Harry Jackson of the Hope Christian Church in nearby Beltsville. Barry and Jackson call marriage equality "immoral."
D.C. Council member Marion Barry (D-Ward 8), the only council member to vote against the bill today to legalize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere, predicted today there could be a "civil war" in the District if the Council decides to take up a broader gay marriage bill later this year.
"All hell is going to break lose," Barry said while speaking to reporters. "We may have a civil war. The black community is just adamant against this."
Barry made his remarks a few hours after a group of same-sex marriage opponents, led by black ministers, caused uproar in the Wilson Building after the Council voted 12 to 1 to recognize same-sex marriages performed elsewhere. They caused such a ruckus that security guards and police had to clear the hallway. The protesters shouted that council members who voted for the bill will face retribution at the polls.
U.S. Park Service Police arrested Barry (D-Ward 8) about 8:45 p.m. in Anacostia Park after a woman flagged down an officer to report that a man in a nearby vehicle was "bothering her," police said.
After interviewing Barry and Watts-Brighthaupt, Barry, 73, was charged with one count of "misdemeanor stalking," said Sgt. David Schlosser, a Park Police spokesman. Barry, on probation for failing to pay his federal taxes, was released hours later and ordered to appear in court Thursday.
It’s a girlfriend who broke up with him and says he won’t leave her alone. Except they had lunch together that same day and she’s saying now she didn’t ask for him to be arrested. This is the same girlfriend he bought a eight-hundred dollar coat for at auction while he was struggling to repay the back taxes he’s on probation now for not paying. Moral Leadership.
Tune in again next week when our topic will be: Moral Leaders And Their Soulmates…featuring Marion Barry and Mark Sanford.
I saw the other day that Sirius/XM has an iPhone app. Neat, I thought. Until naturally I saw the details. It’s extra, on top of a subscription fee that I have been wondering for months now why I keep paying.
Oh I know…mostly. It’s for OutQ…the only gay radio station on the planet. Well…there’s a German one I found using Wunder Radio. But it only plays dance music. At least it doesn’t have the inane chit-chat programs that OutQ does. The only thing I ever listen do on OutQ these days is Signorile. And he’s the only reason I’d want Sirius on my iPhone. I have tons of other music and talk options on the iPhone. I don’t need Sirius for either one.
So to ask me to pay extra above and beyond the normal subscription price is more then too much to ask. When I first signed up Sirius had a lot of content I liked. They’ve systematically removed or destroyed most of it. Swing Street is gone. It became…somehow…the All Frank Sinatra All The Time station. When they bought XM they brought over its 40s station…but that seems to always play the very worst most saccharine stuff my parent’s generation ever listened to. I don’t think they’d even bother with it were they still alive. The Trance channel is only trance part-time these days. The "New Age" channel became the International Music channel and it really eats toxic waste. The classical stations never play anything worth listening to. The sixties channel seems to just play the same set of songs over and over. I scan the dial and I hear nothing, Nothing, that is worth my time. In the car these days, I mostly listen to my iPod/iPhone, or the CD player.
Why am I paying money for this? Well…because it’s still handy to have when I travel cross-country. But only barely. I can plug my iPhone into the car stereo and hit "shuffle" and hear more songs I like then I can on Sirius. For hours at a time now I am listening to the iPod while driving.
Hey Sirius…bring back Sunset Cruise and I might reconsider. I’d take that to mean you are taking your gay listeners seriously again. Sunset Cruise was this sweet little call-in show where gay folk would call and dedicate a song to the one they love. They ran it Sunday evenings and it was a perfect way to end the week. I used to listen to it while I was drawing the weekly political cartoon for my web site. It was just the thing I needed to remember why the struggle was worthwhile, and life was good after all. It’s DJ, Pat Marino, has set up his own Internet broadcast Here, called The Heartbeat Cafe’. If he was still doing Sunset Cruise on Sirius I wouldn’t hesitate to add that iPhone app to my subscription. But you seem to think the kind of raunchy talk you hear constantly on Derek and Romaine is all gay people want to listen to.
If there were no OutQ I wouldn’t even bother subscribing. But its programming is way too narrowly focused on an urban gay stereotype that isn’t most gay people. It had more bandwidth a few years ago. But then, your entire channel line-up had more variety then it does now. You are not competing with broadcast radio anymore. You are competing with the iPhone and iTunes and the Internet. And just like the newspapers, you are loosing because you are stuck in an old business model and you keep thinking you can drag your customers back into it somehow and you can’t.
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