A thought struck me the other day as I was re-reading it: I’m the only one I know from my high school/college days, who’s ever actually been to a street protest. At least…that I know. It flabbergasted me for a moment to think that, because my circle of friends back then was very politically aware. Remember, those were the Nixon/Viet Nam years. My friends and I were angry, livid even, about what was happening. Everyone could cite you chapter and verse the Nixon gang’s various crimes against America and democracy. We talked about it a lot. We ranted and raved and bitched royal. But I was the only one I could recall, who ever marched or became politically active, even just a little.
Never mind the national gay rights marches. Never mind all the Pride day marches I’ve been too, let alone the ones I’ve actually marched in and not watched from the sidelines. In the 70s I went to an assortment of anti-war protests too, and various women’s rights and civil rights marches, merrily taking photos along the way. I lived in the suburbs of Washington D.C., and it was easy to get downtown to the Mall whenever something was happening. Sometimes I went purely as a photographer. But more often I went as I often do, as both participant and observer, camera in hand, marching along with the others, chanting the chants, helping out here and there when I could, and with my camera documenting the times I lived in.
And I’ve never, never considered myself all that much of a radical or an activist. Never. I’m not an organizer. Shy as I am, it took every shred of nerve I could muster to go out when I had to and get petitions signed, because I just hate walking up to total strangers and starting up a conversation. It’s nerve wracking. And I’m not preoccupied with politics all day long, not even gay politics. I’ve always considered it to be a part of my life, a part of the times we all live in, but not all there is to life. And sometimes I feel guilty that I’m not doing more politically, especially now.
And yet…I marched. Nobody else did. Not even on their issues. That…really surprises me to recall. I have no idea why I never noticed it before.
I always tried to get a button from the marches I went to, for some small token that says that, yes, I was there. I suppose you can pick them up at flea markets and hip retro ’70s boutique shops now too, along with lava lamps, peace necklaces and tie-dyed t-shirts. Alas my hair there is covering one of my favorite march buttons, the one from the first gay rights march on Washington in 1979. The others are from the rest of the national gay rights marches to date. The little Capital dome with the rainbow below it is from the HRC Millennium March in 2000, which got the biggest crowds ever, but was dismissed as being more of a big block party then a political protest march. The little green square next to it is my GLIB button…the Gay and Lesbian Information Bureau BBS which I did volunteer work for many years on, and which gave me my first real access to the larger gay community beyond the confines of the D.C. suburbs.
Homosexuality has been like a ghost, hiding in the shadows of my shame, telling me I can never reach my full potential as a Christian. As strange and contradictory as it may sound, seeing Brokeback Mountain helped me bury that ghost and begin moving forward.
What I saw in Brokeback Mountain tore my heart apart. I cried with Alma when she discovered the truth about Ennis and Jack. I also cried for the countless wives in real life who know that their husbands are leading a secret existence. I cried even harder for the men, more in number than we realize, who are trapped in sexual sin and don’t know how to escape it. And as I wept, I wondered if God could use me to help reach some of them with his grace and delivering power.
No scene touched me more than the one in which Ennis’s daughter pays him a visit after Jack dies, and tells him he needs to buy some furniture to liven up his cold and barren trailer. Ennis responds, "If you ain’t got nothin, you don’t need nothin." I made up my mind then and there that I would not let homosexuality rob me like it had robbed Ennis.
No you drooling moron…homosexuality didn’t rob Ennis, a goddamn tire iron swung by all the force hate could give it robbed him. Twice…
"You won’t catch me again," said Jack. "Listen. I’m thinkin, tell you what, if you and me had a little ranch together, little cow and calf operation, your horses, it’d be some sweet life. Like I said, I’m gettin out a rodeo. I ain’t no broke-dick rider but I don’t got the bucks a ride out this slump I’m in and I don’t got the bones a keep gettin wrecked. I got it figured, got this plan, Ennis, how we can do it, you and me. Lureen’s old man, you bet he’d give me a bunch if I’d get lost. Already more or less said it — "
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. It ain’t goin a be that way. We can’t. I’m stuck with what I got, caught in my own loop. Can’t get out of it. Jack, I don’t want a be like them guys you see around sometimes. And I don’t want a be dead. There was these two old guys ranched together down home, Earl and Rich — Dad would pass a remark when he seen them. They was a joke even though they was pretty tough old birds. I was what, nine years old and they found Earl dead in a irrigation ditch. They’d took a tire iron to him, spurred him up, drug him around by his dick until it pulled off, just bloody pulp. What the tire iron done looked like pieces a burned tomatoes all over him, nose tore down from skiddin on gravel."
"You seen that?"
"Dad made sure I seen it. Took me to see it…"
Annie Proulx, "Brokeback Mountain"
That’s what robbed Ennis. That’s what stole from him his capacity to love and accept love from another man. Nearly every review of the film I’ve seen has commented on how perfectly the actor who played him, Heath Ledger, captured the sense of a man completely uncomfortable inside his own skin, so completely inhibited he can barely talk. Shame. Guilt. Self loathing. It’s not enough for the hatemongers to make other people hate us. We have to hate ourselves too. We have to hate ourselves even more then they hate us. Because only by hating ourselves that much, will we keep punishing ourselves for simply existing, for just being alive and walking this good earth along with them and breathing their air, when they’re not able to punish us for it with their own two hands. And those of us who never fell into or who manage to escape that bottomless pit of shame and self loathing, still have to deal with the hate and all the myriad ways, large and small, that it cheats us out of one of this life’s most perfect joys.
That’s what robbed Ennis. And it robs all of us. Some of us more then others…horribly more. I’ve never hated myself and never tried to obliterate myself in reckless squalor, or an all controlling self-annihilating religious cult. I’ve never lost a lover to the tire iron. I’ve never been forced against my will into ex-gay therapy. But I can count in months the time in my life I’ve had someone to love, and that’s partly because I’ve fallen in love so many times with other guys, who could not love and desire whole heartedly, because they were so ashamed to love and desire at all.
Hate, and the tire iron. One way or another it robs us all. It robbed me…and it robbed you too. Mr. Belkofer.
(Washington) Private Christian colleges would be excepted from local and state non-discrimination laws under a proposed amendment to the Higher Education Act – a move that would allow the schools to legally reject LGBT students.
The amendment, proposed by Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah), would prevent accrediting boards from making adherence to non-discrimination laws a requirement.
Now…you’d think nullifying local discrimination laws for private christian schools would mean congress was givng them the green light to discriminate on the basis of race, religion and a host of other things too. But…well…not. This isn’t about opposition to anti discrimination laws. This bill’s target is a tad more specific then that. It’s a bullet aimed at one particular group of students…
The committee also inserted language in the bill stating that it is not meant to allow an institution to discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age or disability. The provision does not include sexuality.
Between now and the November elections, Republicans are penciling in plans to take action on social issues important to religious conservatives, the foundation of the GOP base, as they defend their congressional majority.
In a year where an unpopular war in Iraq has helped drive President Bush’s approval ratings below 40%, core conservatives whose turnout in November is vital to the party want assurances that they are not being taken for granted.
So what’s a good way to get votes in this country? Well…crap like this for instance:
(Vatican City) In marking the Stations of the Cross during Good Friday observances in Rome Pope Benedict XVI called for the "filth" that surrounds society to be cleansed and said the world is in the grip of "a diabolical pride aimed at eliminating the family".
Diabolical pride. Diabolical pride. Diabolical pride. Aimed at eliminating the family. Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!
(Atlanta, Georgia) A conservative law practice has filed a federal lawsuit accusing Georgia Tech of violating the constitutional rights of religious students over the school’s non-discrimination policy that protects gays and lesbians on campus.
The suit, filed by the Alliance Defense Fund on behalf of two students, names President Wayne Clough and other administrators. ADF is involved in fighting LGBT issues across the country.
The lawsuit alleges that the school policy discriminates against Christian and Jewish students by barring them from speaking out against homosexuality and other issues.
Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!
(Burlington, Vermont) Several parents are blasting the Burlington, Vermont school board for inviting a state-wide LGBT advocacy group to make a presentation on gay bullying at a local middle school this week.
A teenage member of Outright Vermont told the sixth graders about the bullying he faced and the difficulty he had in coping. The presentation at Lyman Hunt Middle School was part of Wellness Week". Other presentations covered topics such as tobacco, alcohol and drugs abuse, eating disorders, suicide prevention and violence against women and girls.
Parent Kristy DeGuise said parents should have been notified in advance that a gay person would be speaking.
"School is a place to learn. I don’t personally believe that learning about not bashing gays is going to get them a better job in life," she told the Burlington Free Press.
Mary Rouille, a parent who said she is Catholic but enrolls her children in the public system said the speech should never have been allowed.
"If we can’t bring our religion into the school, they shouldn’t bring their beliefs in," she said.
Next week is kill a fag week…bring your own gun!!!
Welcome to my world. Maybe you can understand why gay politics preoccupies my time and my throughts a lot these days. Maybe you can understand why I seem so goddamn angry and pissed off sometimes. Maybe you can understand why I take a little…erm…Pride…in my activism, artistic and otherwise…pissing in the wind though it all sometimes seems to me. It takes a certain amount of courage to stand up to this kind of vitriolic hate, look it in the face and tell it ‘No’. Do you understand that? I’m Proud of what I’ve done to fight this cancer on our lives, this profound insult to the human identity, this all out war on that deepest most intmate part of ourSelves where we can love and trust and hope and dream. Maybe you can understand why I think it’s so important to be out, and to push back against prejudice and hate. Or…not. Maybe I’m just irritating you more by waving all this in your face again.
Here…let me show you what gets waved in mine, on a regular basis:
It’s not just that I’m single…it’s not just that at 52 I see one of life’s great dreams receding into the distance…vanishing over the horizon…it’s not the triumphalism of all the gutter crawling bigots of this poor world whenever they get another chance to twist that knife in our hearts, and murder that dream in yet another gay soul, and then dance in its ashes. Oh it’s all that…but I could endure it all, and maybe be a little less angry, and a little more balanced and secure, but for the indifference, the motherfucking indifference, of a few people in my life, a few people I once held dear.
You should have cared. You should have given a good goddamn. Never mind my desolate love life, you should have cared about my physical safety, about my status as a free and equal citizen, it should have bothered you, just a tad, how bad the threat to your friend was getting. But it never did. Here…look at it again…
See a connection there yet? And you’re pissed off at me because I’m fighting back…because I’m standing up to it, because I’m proud of what I’ve done in the fight? So where the hell were you during the great great American Kultar Kampf? One of this life’s most magical, most wonderful moments, that time when you discover love, and sex, and falling in love for the first time, and being loved in return, is systematically turned into a desolate nightmare for some of us and I’ve asked myself why so many nights until my head is going in circles that I can’t count them anymore. But I’ll tell you what: I’ve stopped asking why some of the people in my life never really seemed to care. After the last election, when the republican national committee proudly took credit for that Bible Ban ad, I reckoned there was just no fucking point in it any more. Someone who has gay friends and isn’t completely pissed off at how their friend’s lives are under constant, relentless attack these days, is simply faking it.
I am not the some in some of my best friends are. In a better time, I could treat my sexual orientation like it’s just another part of me…like my blue eyes and brown hair, and the fact that I’m right handed and like to paint and draw and take pictures and go on long road trips. In a better time we all could. You have no fucking idea how much I’ve wanted to just live my goddamned life as if my sexual orientation was no big deal.
But when I have to read about one attack on my person after another nearly every fucking day in the newspapers, when they’re calling for an amendment to our constitution declaring me in essence a second class citizen, and religious passions toward people like me are being thumped on pulpits from one end of the country to the other, then I can’t afford to ignore it any more then I could afford to sit on my porch and sip ice tea while a tornado is bearing down on me. As William Lloyd Garrison once said, Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm.
I stood on a protest line last summer while a sixteen year old gay kid was involuntarily put through an ex-gay therapy program. I have to tell you it crossed my mind more then once during that protest, to wonder what my own friends would have done for me had I been placed into that kind of nightmare when I was that age. Picture me standing in a protest line, staring at this run down church they’d converted into an ex-gay ministry, not knowing the answer to that.
Hate cannot take our lives away from us, it cannot devastate our hopes and dreams, without the help of indifference.
The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.
The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference.
The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference.
And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.
–Elie Wiesel
Yeah. I’m angry. So fucking what? Where the hell were you while I was in Memphis? I know…I know…the same place you were while I was marching in Washington for equal rights…in 1979…in 1987…in 1993…in 2000. You were somewhere else. You were always somewhere else.
On the way home yesterday I saw my first barn swallow darting around the Institute parking deck. So never mind the spring equinox…spring arrived in Baltimore sometime yesterday afternoon, while I was busy in my ground floor office trying to figure out why my XML parser was validating a document that it should have failed.
When the swallows leave for the winter, their nesting spots are taken over by the local sparrows and house finches. The house finches aren’t much of a problem, but sparrows are mean and aggressive as all hell. They only seem like small birds. Side by side you notice that they’re actually bigger then most of the the native songbirds. My worry has been that if we get enough sparrows in the parking deck they’ll drive out the swallows. But not to fear…it seems the first order of swallow business upon returning to their nesting grounds from South America is clearing out the sparrows. When I saw my first swallow of the year it was chasing a sparrow for its dear life away from their nests.
Swallows are tiny little things, but they’re fast and can turn on a dime in mid air and what I saw the other day is that sparrows are just no match for them in air combat. I watched while that swallow fairly terrorized that sparrow in a high speed wheeling and hair pin turning chase up and down half the parking deck. They zipped and turned and darted between parked cars and around the concrete columns like a couple bats out of hell, with the swallow loudly cussing and the sparrow completely terrorized until it finally, I’m not kidding, ducked under a parked car. Then the swallow perched on one of the overhead fire sprinkler lines nearby and sassed it for a few minutes before flying off. So I guess the swallows aren’t afraid of the sparrows. If this year is anything like all the others, what will happen is the sparrows will move to a few isolated locations around the deck, perch on the deck railings during the day and sass the swallows as they fly in and out of their nests, and the swallows will just ignore them as long as they keep their distance.
Everything is green again. The neighborhood trees are almost fully leafed now, and my bird feeders are suddenly getting a lot less traffic then they did in the winter. My Spanish moss offering was picked over a little, but not much, so I guess the city birds aren’t really impressed with it as nest material, but I’ll leave it out for a couple months more. I can walk to work in shirtsleeves most days now. The swallows are back. It’s spring now.
Sorry… This one’s taken a little longer then I thought. And I’m still too tired during the day for some reason. I’m still napping a lot when I really need to be working around the house and in my art room. I’d hoped to be getting more past all that now then I am.
Via Peterson Toscano, a powerful reminder that James Dobson’s greatest crimes against humanity aren’t the ones he’s committed against gay and lesbian people, but his methodical and systematic breaking of the bond of love between parent and child. Ex-ex-gay blogger Christine writes about what it was like growing up in a fundamentalist household, where Dobson’s pathological hatred of children had found its soil, and taken root…
I was disciplined and guilted and shamed into submission for many years. It somehow seems appropriate to me that Focus on the Family is such a partner with Exodus. My parent’s treatment of me as a child (using Dobson as their guide) no doubt made me all the more vulnerable to the ex-gay message. I was ready and willing to believe myself a damaged and broken person that needed to be fixed, with my sin nature needing to be beaten down and submerged, subdued, and dominated. I was willing to believe that my homosexuality was a part of my own strong-willed defiance gone horribly wrong and satanically out of control.
I can’t even look at Dr. Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline without wanting to weep…
Well somebody needs to look at it. Because this man has single handedly shattered the lives of countless thousands of helpless children. And he did it by manipulating their parent’s fundamentalist religiosity, their fear of Satan, and that secret empty place inside of them, where other people have a conscience and a capacity for basic human sympathy…
For parents like mine, who got almost all of their parenting advice from Dr. Dobson, is it any wonder that everything turned into a battle of wills and they saw their child as a "strong-willed tyrant" that needed to be battled into submission? Dr. Dobson is a man who says that "If discipline begins on the second day of life, you’re one day too late." What kind of discipline could a one-day old infant possibly need?!?
I have heard of Dobson-style parents commenting on how "manipulative" a four-month old baby is, because the baby will smile when an adult is playing with them, but cry when it is left alone.
This is sickening. Of course an infant will cry when its left alone. Look at that, because the temptation is to think that Dobson desensitizes parents and he doesn’t. Infants are helpless and vulnerable and need to be cared for. For Christ sake they’ll cry when they’re hungry too, when they’re sick, when they’re in some kind of pain. The first reaction of any normal human being to the sound of an infant crying is that anxious sensation that something’s wrong. But the problem Dobson’s parents face isn’t that they don’t know what to do with a crying infant, it’s that they don’t know what they’re supposed to feel.
And Dobson supplies them with an explanation of child parent interaction that fits their sensibilities perfectly: there are no genuine human emotions…everything is manipulation. Love… affection… tenderness… anxiety… grief… sorrow… Dobson tells them that all of that is really just different ways humans manipulate one another. Ask yourself what kind of person this makes sense to, and the horrors inflicted on so many children in this world by their own parents stop being so surprising.
There’s also the story of how Dobson treated his own dog, Siggie (yes, after Freud) in a battle of wills between man and beast. Dobson relates this story in The Strong-Willed Child:
"I had seen this defiant mood before [defiant mood being indicated by Siggie not wanting to leave a warm spot in the house and go to his kennel, and subsequently growling at Daddy Dobson], and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me ‘reason’ with Mr. Freud."
If you decide to click on that link, brace yourself. They say that the abuse of animals is a prime indicator of deeper sociopathologies. Its something they watch for in young children as a warning sign of potential for serious pathological violence later in life. Dobson however, is in the enviable position of being able to exercise his pathologies by proxy. Why abuse children yourself, and risk a very long prison term, when you can get their parents to do it for you? But not just any parents mind you. You need the ones who are missing that extra something most humans have…a capacity to feel sympathy. A heart, capable of whole hearted love for another. You find yourself enough of these, and then the rest is just a matter of invoking the name of Jesus, and telling those parents that their children are Satan incarnate.
No…I’m not exaggerating…
This brings me to another thing I’ve wondered of late. In talking with other ex-ex-gays or those who have survived fundamentalist upbringings, many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally. These parents do things and say things that most parents would not utter to their children no matter how upset they were with them. Is it the idea of sin or satan somehow controlling our lives that gives them license to think of us this way, or talk to us this way? Is it a lifetime of thinking of us as "defiant tyrants" that gives parents the idea that their child is in league with the devil himself?
My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!" because she was convinced that he’d looked at her in a defiant manner that gave her chills and that she could only attribute to Satan. She told our family about this later, with an air of pride that she’d had the guts to speak out against Satan in this manner (nevermind the poor child who probably still remembers that church lady calling him "satan"). For those of us whose parents see us in this light…could this be an explanation for why they are so willing to throw us away, to denounce us and reject us? Do they truly still see brazen and defiant tyrants controlled by satan when they look at us?
(emphasis mine) I’ve seen that with my own two eyes. Guy I dated once had a father like that. Couldn’t love unconditionally if Jesus Christ gave him his heart to do it with. And there’s the problem, in all its horrible stomach churning glory. There’s the Pit you don’t want to stare into for too long, because it also stares back into you. The fundamentalist demands structure, tight all controlling structure to their world, because the world of intimate human interaction is utterly incomprehensible to them. If they have to manage their way in the human community the way the rest of us do, by building bonds of trust and Empathy and love, they’re completely lost at sea and cannot cope. Without that all controlling structure to tell them how to conduct their lives at the interpersonal level, they simply can not fathom right from wrong. They just can’t figure it out. Telling a five year old boy that he’s the devil no more disturbs their conscience then telling him the time of day would. The boy does not exist in their conscience as a boy, but as an incomprehensible…thing. It might be human…it might be a child…on the other hand it might be the devil himself. They’ve just no way of knowing, apart from some structure, some tradition, some religious dogma, telling them what the boy is.
And into this soil fertile for every human horror you can imagine, because none of them have any brakes beyond the traditions and social structures they live inside of, comes Dobson – telling these parents that their children are, in fact, the very images of satan himself. The growing child who expresses the slightest shred of their own human individuality is, in fact, channeling the serpent in the Garden of Eden…
Perhaps this tendency toward self-will is the essence of ‘original sin’ which has infiltrated the human family. It certainly explains why I place such stress on the proper response to willful defiance during childhood, for that rebellion can plant the seeds of personal disaster.
To suck the human identity out of a child, leaving their soul an empty blackboard that any authority figure can scribble their will upon, is Exactly Dobson’s purpose here. But I don’t think Dobson means to be that authority. I think he just takes pleasure in the emptying of a human soul, and leaving it with nothing left to Be. A vampire gains some nourishment from the people whose blood they take. Dobson is one of those toxic human voids that just suck the life out of everything they touch, for the pleasure of watching something they could never themselves become die. Oscar Wilde once said that we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Dobson is the man handing out hot pokers to parents, determined that every child will grow up blind, so they will never know that the stars above his gutter and beyond his reach, even exist.
…many of us have in common parents who are absolutely unable to love unconditionally… My own mother once looked at a 5-year old boy and said out-loud to him "get thee behind me, Satan!"… Never mind the stacking of the Federal Courts…here’s the legacy of the ascendancy of the religious right that America will be suffering under for generations to come. Tens of thousands of soul wounded children, walking into adulthood with their only understanding of what it is to trust and love coming from parents who were taught to regard them as satanic beings.
You may have already heard the story of Jason Johnson, a gay student who was expelled from the fundamentalist University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky. You may have heard this university claims the right to treat any of its students like less then dog shit because…hey…they’re a private institution and they don’t have to answer to any of those damn secular civil rights and equal opportunity laws. You may have heard further that the University of the Cumberlands is slated to get a sweetheart 11 million dollars of Kentucky tax payer money from the state assembly this year…it’s status as a private institution willing to discriminate against any citizen of Kentucky it damn well pleases to notwithstanding. God says it’s okay to steal money from the heathens.
What you may not have also heard, and which attracted my attention just a few moments ago while reading this article about the incident, is that the University of the Cumberlands is apparently also quite willing to lie through their teeth about Jason’s school record…
The summer after his freshman year, he came out to his parents and returned to campus as an openly gay man.
"I just knew that I couldn’t go back to hiding again. I wanted to be out," said Johnson, adding that he never experienced harassment or conflict because of his sexual orientation. "Being gay is part of who I am, but not the totality of who I am."
Johnson posted messages about his boyfriend and being gay on his profile at MySpace. com, and school administrators eventually saw the Web site; Johnson doesn’t know how they found it. They confronted him last week with a printout of the site, an order to leave the school and failing grades for a semester that probably would have ended with honors.
The university did not return calls seeking comment yesterday.
(Emphasis mine) Okay…it’s one thing to say that an openly gay student doesn’t conform to your school’s religious teachings. It’s one thing to expel that student. But it’s quite another to claim in his transcripts to any other school he might want to attend, that he failed classes which in fact he was doing quite well in, but which in fact you did not permit him to finish. No…you mark the semester as incomplete, and if you’re ashamed to go into detail about why this particular student didn’t complete the semester you let it go at that. But you don’t say he failed, because he didn’t. He wasn’t allowed to finish.
The word for what University of the Cumberlands is doing here….is lie. The word for people who do that sort of thing…is liars. But the word from the pulpits in America now, is that it’s okay to lie through your teeth about homosexuals, and god won’t mind.
Via Pam’s House Blend… The Stranger is reporting that a pharmacy in Seatle refused to fill a woman’s perscription on moral grounds. The morning after Pill? Contraceptives? Oh mes non: Antibiotics…
The complaint includes one incident at the Swedish Medical Center outpatient pharmacy in Seattle. According to the complaint, someone at the Swedish pharmacy said she was "morally unable" to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for abortion-related antibiotics. Cedar River’s complaint quotes its Renton clinic manager’s May 17, 2005, e-mail account: "Today, one of our clients asked us to call in her prescription… to Swedish outpatient pharmacy. [We] called the prescription in… and spoke with an efficient staff person who took down the prescription. A few minutes later, this pharmacy person called us back and told us she had found out who we were and she morally was unable to fill the prescription." (Cedar River thinks their client eventually got her prescription filled.)
Cedar River Clinics, is a women’s health and abortion provider. What you need to pay attention to here is that the pharmacy in question has at this point, no idea whether or not the woman who needed the antibiotics has even had an abortion. They only know the doctors calling the prescription in work for a clinic that provides abortions. But…never mind. The moral position now seems to be to let woman who do have abortions die from post surgery infections. And it gets better…
The complaint also includes an incident from November 2005 in Yakima, in which a pharmacist at a Safeway reportedly refused to fill a Cedar River patient’s prescription for pregnancy-related vitamins. The pharmacist reportedly asked the customer why she had gone to Cedar River Clinics and then told the patient she "didn’t need them if she wasn’t pregnant."
Perhaps the day is coming in which grocery store owners can legally deny food to certain people on moral grounds too. Who would Jesus starve to death?
"I’m a uniter, not a divider." Remember that? Anyone remember that?
I noticed a difference the very first morning after using the CPAP machine. I noticed it the moment I opened my eyes with my head on the pillow. My head was clearer. Visually, everything in my bedroom seemed suddenly sharper and clearer to my eyes. The morning light coming in my windows streamed over walls and bookcases and bedroom furniture and dozens of little objects scattered throughout the room that looked richer in detail then before. The wood grain in my beach dresser stood out in the morning light in a way I hadn’t noticed in years. There was a world out there.
It’s hard to explain the sensation. It isn’t like my eyes became suddenly sharper. It’s that the visual detail in my environment was suddenly more there then before. I was still tired. My body was still not nearly as energetic as it used to be. But my head was noticeably clearer, and it was taking everything around me in.
I’d known at some rational level that my sleep problem had been dragging me down, not only physically but mentally as well. I had to work to keep things in focus. For years now I’ve been having to force myself to concentrate in a way I’d never had to before (unless I was seriously high). I’d known at some rational level the state I was in was bad. But I hadn’t realized how down, how out of it I’d been for years, until that instant of waking up, and looking around my bedroom.
You know how it is with cars…they get worn and cranky and you have to work to get the engine up to speed, and before long you have a dozen little work-arounds you just do automatically to compensate while you’re driving. Imagine one day you get into that car and turn the key and the engine just starts purring and when you get it out onto the road the car just leaps forward. Yeah…it was like that. But only mentally.
My body is still tired. I have years of living a sedentary life I have to work now to overcome. And I expect that at 52 that’s not going to be a piece of cake. But if I don’t want my body to spiral down into complete helplessness when I’m aged then I need to get it back into some kind of shape now. If I inherited the trend of males on mom’s side of the family to die of stroke in their 60s or before I’m fucked anyway. But if my circulatory system has more of dad’s side in it I might live a reasonably healthy old age. I need to start getting myself back in shape now though…
But…the difference in how I feel mentally now is just…amazing…
For example…
Dream…
I’m walking through the halls of my old High School. Usually in these dreams I’m a teenager again, but this time I’m the grown adult I am now, and I’m walking alone in empty halls, while paradoxically all the kids I grew up with are outside, still teenagers, talking noisily to each other as they begin their walk home from school.
Instead of following them I walk into the big central gym and in my dream it morphs into the arcade of some big shopping mall, the same one I’ve visited hundreds of times in my dreams. I think this dream Mall is some mental aggregate of all the Malls I’ve ever lived near. I don’t know how other people’s dreams are, but in mine things can just change instantly from one setting to something else entirely and it never seems to faze me. One minute I’m walking into the school gym, but I go through the doors and then I’m strolling around in a Mall, and I never seem to notice the oddness of that while I’m dreaming it.
In my dream I recall that there is a subway station down one level, down at the end of this particular arcade, and wanting now to go home, I walk toward it. For some reason though, instead of going down the escalators to the subway I stop and sit on a stone bench nearby, and just relax for a while watching the people in the Mall walking by.
Then I notice a beautiful guy sitting on a similar bench on the other side of the arcade. He’s just breathtakingly beautiful. He notices me looking at him…and he smiles back at me.
I work up some sort of nerve I don’t normally have and smile, quickly, back at him and then look away. I’m such a damn wuss. You want to know why I’m still single? That’s why. I can never, never work up the nerve to make the first move. Been like that my entire life. And I’m not nearly good looking enough to be waiting around for a beautiful someone to make a move on me.
So I sit there, like I always do, stealing glances at this beautiful guy sitting across the arcade from me. From time to time he smiles at me. Then he reaches over to his backpack, pulls out a notebook and starts writing. He strolls over to my bench, sits down, and passes me a note…
Hi…what’s your name?
Like a couple of damn teenage school kids we pass this note back and forth for a while. Swear to god it was even ruled loose leaf notebook paper we were writing on…
I’m Bruce. What’s your name? Do you live around here?
Eventually we dispense with the note passing and start chatting. I forget now what we chat about, but I’m enjoying the conversation immensely.
The foot traffic in the arcade suddenly starts to get heavy. We’re suddenly surrounded by crowds. I check the time. Of course, it’s rush hour, and people are starting to head to the subway. The beautiful guy I’m sitting next to looks annoyed at the crowd around us, and for an instant I think he’s just going to get up and leave. That’s almost always how these sorts of dreams end for me. But no…instead he gives me a serious look and asks me if I know of someplace where we can have a little more privacy.
And…amazingly…I do. I’ve walked this particular dream Mall many times. There’s a spot just down the arcade full of tiny little boutique shops that seldom get any foot traffic. And there are little nooks here and there along it, where you can sit and not be seen.
We start walking that way, still chatting easily. We leave the crowds behind, and enter this very odd little corner of the Mall I’ve never figured out. It’s full of these tiny little stores that never seem to get any customers, but they’re always open all the same. There are no boarded up shops here, no look of economic despair, but just the opposite. Brightly lit stores everywhere, that just never seem to do any business.
I point out a nice quiet spot along the arcade where we can be alone for a while…
…and I wake up. Crap. The damn CPAP mask is crowding my face again. About four or five times a night now it does that and I wake up having to get it all adjusted again. I need a better mask.
But…damn! In my dreams the beautiful stranger never approaches me. Never.
When The Bird And The Bird Book Disagree, Believe The Bird
Okay…it’s getting just plain medieval deep in the heart of Texas. Bill Nye, The Science Guy, was giving a presentation at McLennan Community College in Waco, and some people walked out after he told them that a literal interpretation of Genesis 1:16 just doesn’t square with the facts…
And God made two great lights: A greater light to rule the day, and a less light to rule the night, and he made the stars also. -Tyndale’s Old Testament
Well…okay… As poetry it kinda works, but it isn’t right. The sun is a star, and a fairly common type of star at that. And the moon shines in the sun’s light (and also a bit of reflected earth light too from time to time, so we get light from it that’s been doubly reflected), not its own. The moon is not a light, anymore then the mountaintops that reflect the last light of the day as the sun goes down are lights. It’s the moon…a pretty amazing object in its own right, but it is not a light. And the sun is a star too…little different from most of the other stars whose light we see at night. But the person who wrote those lines could not have known any of that and you can see their intent well enough. God made all the things which shine down upon us from the heavens above…the sun which gives us the day, and the moon which shines brightly in the night and also all the stars that shine in the night…
Fine. I can dig it. I’ve spent many a night gazing up in rapture at the creator’s work. This is a beautiful amazing universe we live in. Depending on how expansive your view of God is (or how willing you are to admit you really don’t know crap about what God is, other then it’s that which created the cosmos), science and religion don’t really have much to argue about in Genesis 1:16. But some people just don’t want to hear it…
The Emmy-winning scientist angered a few audience members when he criticized literal interpretation of the biblical verse Genesis 1:16, which reads: “God made two great lights — the greater light to govern the day and the lesser light to govern the night. He also made the stars.”
He pointed out that the sun, the “greater light,” is but one of countless stars and that the “lesser light” is the moon, which really is not a light at all, rather a reflector of light.
A number of audience members left the room at that point, visibly angered by what some perceived as irreverence.
“We believe in a God!” exclaimed one woman as she left the room with three young children.
Fine, but you don’t seem very willing to embrace that which God hath wrought are you? What the hell were you doing in a science lecture lady? See…this is what’s a tad scary about this story. This fundamentalist woman took her children to a science lecture expecting to hear nothing that contradicted her religious conceits. So what have they been teaching in science classes in Texas for the past generation or two?
Did you remember to count all the hungry mouths you feed…?
More Mark and Josh tax time fun, here and here. I missed getting one in for 2005. The 2003 cartoon is obviously an early effort at drawing the two…I’d only just discovered them recurring in my political cartoons. They’ve managed since then to get themselves a better kitchen table set, and a slightly better artist.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
