So I have friends down in Florida (and readers according to my server logs…) and places I’ve visited that I’ve become fond of. So I’m checking the news headlines for the latest on Fay. Last night I heard that the storm might wander offshore, strengthen again and take another swing at Florida.
Do you have a composer who speak to you? Not some trendy pop band…but a pure music classical composer, whose music seems to define you in a way none other does?
I have two. When I was a teen, I discovered Shostakovitch. Mom and I were driving alone to California, defying her family to visit dad’s side. I remember it clearly…we were driving through Pennsylvania west on I-70 after having dropped grandma at her brother’s house. It caused a family uproar, but we were both determined. That night, I was driving and she was nodding off in the passenger’s side. We were going to California. I had the radio on to some random classical station, and driving down that empty highway I heard music that just said it all to me at that point in my life. I was alienated, confused and utterly alone it seemed. And here was this amazing symphony that just said it all.
I later learned that it was Shostakovitch’s first symphony, composed when he was just sixteen. It was amazing how well it said it all. All though the rest of my adolescence I devoured his music. His symphonic music. It touched me in a place no others did.
Later, as I grew older, I discovered the music of Ralph Vaughan-Williams. His music touched another side of me…a side that was tender and wounded, and struggling to assert itself in my consciousness. The side that believed in the beautify of life. The side that believes that’s all that really matters.
We probably all have that struggle in ourselves. One side dark, lonely and alienated…the other hopeful and believing. Sometimes we find music that speaks to them. Shostakovitch speaks to that dark lonely alienated side of me…the side that knows that Sturgeon was right…that ninety percent of everything is bullshit. The side that knows that the bullshit often wins. Vaughan-Williams speaks to my other side. The side that knows that doesn’t matter.
These are me. The Shostakovitch piece is only good for the first three movements. That last movement is silly…giddy…a bit hysterical if you ask me. It’s too giddy…like he’s faking himself out. But the first three movements are pure gold. The Vaughan-Williams piece is pure gold all the way though…especially the last movement. The obo concerto on that album is beautiful too. But the symphony is gold. Pure gold. These are me. These links are to the performances of each that are, in my opinion, correct. They’re Amazon MP3s if you care to download them and listen. They’re not expensive and I think worth every penny. Beautiful music, each in its own way. These are me.
Oh…and here’s Shostakovitch 1, in case you’re interested. This one’s pretty close to what I heard that night long ago, which was performed by the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra. I don’t recall who was conducting…but the Russians seem to get this one better then anyone else does…
So it looks like tropical storm Fay might become a roaring hurricane before it makes landfall. The Florida Keys and Orlando, both of which occupy fond places in my heart for various reasons, are in its path. So I’m keeping an eye on it. Her. It. Whatever.
You know…they need to stop giving these dangerous things cutesy names. Instead of Fay, how about Insane Clown, or Babbling Homeless Man With An Axe, or Drunken Train Engineer or Laughing Pit Bull or Flying Anvil Swarm…
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.
Brandon McInerney Shot Larry King. The News Media Will Now Bury Him.
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.
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?
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.
Crossing My Fingers, And Upgrading My Blog Software
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 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.
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 Lawrencev.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…
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."
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