The thing that began nudging me away from Rand was seeing how people who embraced her values system actually behaved. Years later and well after she had passed away, some biographies began to appear and I got a glimpse into the behavior of the person herself.   Unsurprisingly these random sickening glimpses of the person within are to be found everywhere she went.   In her novel The Charioteer, Mary Renault wrote that “some events are crucial from their very slightness; because circumstances have used no force on them, they are unequivocally what they are, test-tube reactions of personality.”   We leave our mark sometimes where we are least aware of it.   But these light little footsteps on our world are the most authentically us.

For an eyewitness portrait of Ayn Rand in the flesh, in the prime of her celebrity, you can’t improve on the “Ubermensch” chapter in Tobias Wolff’s autobiographical novel Old School.

Invited to meet with the faculty and student writers at the narrator’s boarding school, Rand arrives with an entourage of chain-smoking idolaters in black and behaves so repellently that her audience of innocents gets a life lesson in what kind of adult to avoid, and to avoid becoming. Rude, dismissive, vain and self-infatuated to the point of obtuseness — she names Atlas Shrugged as the only great American novel — Rand and her hissing chorus in black manage to alienate the entire school, even the rich board member who had admired and invited her.

What strikes Wolff’s narrator most forcefully is her utter lack of charity or empathy, her transparent disgust with everything she views as disfiguring or disabling: a huge wen on the headmaster’s forehead, the narrator’s running head cold, the war injury that emasculated Hemingway’s Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises.

To the boy, she appears to be exactly the sort of merciless egotist who might have designed a fascist philosophy that exalts power and disparages altruism. Rand is wearing a gold pin in the shape of a dollar sign. After meeting her, he can no longer read a word of The Fountainhead, which as an adolescent romantic he had enjoyed.

The thing that still distresses me most to this day is how she treated her husband, Frank O’Connor, who became a painter after his acting career declined. He did the dust jacket illustration for the first hardbound editions of Atlas Shrugged…the one with the train tracks leading into the tunnel with the huge red stop light above the entrance (if you’ve read the novel you know what it refers to).   Rand’s affair with the younger Nathanial Brandon destroyed both their marriages (never of course, causing her to check her premises about the nature of human emotions), and O’Connor became a recluse in his own little apartment studio.   After he died some friends of Rand entered his studio and found it littered with empty bottles of booze scattered everywhere, and a lot of unfinished paintings.

Radley Balco tweets: “Surprised the Cato crowd is so big on Ryan. Votes don’t match rhetoric on fiscal policy, and he’s awful on social, civil liberties issues.”

Uh-huh.   I see you’re still taking their libertarianism seriously.   Something I discovered back in my libertarian days was you scratched the surface of a lot of them and you found a John Bircher who figured pot decriminalization would appeal to younger voters.

Charles Mudede writes:

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which has done yeoman’s work on tracking violent groups, notes that “Currently, there are 1,018 known hate groups operating across the country, including neo-Nazis, Klansmen, white nationalists, neo-Confederates, racist skinheads, black separatists, border vigilantes and others. And their numbers are growing.” The Center’s data show that hate groups have increased by 69 percent in the last decade. And the so-called “Patriot” groups have increased nearly 800 percent since Obama became president.

If the news media and political leaders were told there were a thousand violence-prone Muslim groups operating in the United States, can you imagine the reaction? Yet, apart from the glancing attention given incidents like the Sikh temple massacre, the national discourse about terrorism focuses almost exclusively on Muslims.

The same goes if they were white and on the radical left.

I remember immediately after the Oklahoma City bombing, nearly everyone figured Arab terrorists were responsible. Then it turned out a right wing lunatic did it.   Right wing lunatics have continued to kill people in this country ever since and yet when the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI issued a report on anti-government right wing violence it was denounced by the republicans as a political attack.   As if the republican strategy of tearing the country apart for political advantage hasn’t itself been a political attack on the country they keep claiming to patriotically love.

The United States of America is fantastically more violent then any other industrialized nation and the tragedy is every time a domestic terrorist attack happens any hope of talking about why that is so quickly devolves into an argument about guns.   Guns don’t matter.   What matters is how much hatred there is now between Americans.   What matters is one of the two major American political parties has for decades actively sought to incite that hatred for political gain.   They have courted the racist vote.   They have courted the misogynist vote.   They have courted the votes of religious bigots, xenophobes and homophobes.   And that has had consequences.

But we can’t talk about them.   We can talk about how our enemies hate us, but we can’t talk about how we hate each other.   Because that would be a politically motivated attack on the people who have made tearing the country apart in order to get the bigger half their election strategy for decades.   For some reason that is a wrong thing.

“The reason I got into public service, by and large, if I had to credit on thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.” -Paul Ryan

“Our rights come from nature and God, not government.” – Paul Ryan.

Let others bust on Romney’s VB choice for his let the rich eat the middle class and have the poor for dessert politics. I want to point out something that’s irritated me about him and all the Who Is John Galt tea-ed off jackasses that want government out of their Medicare.   Seriously…Rand would chew all of you to shreds and spit you out in disgust.

I will admit to being a Randoid back in my twenties. In my defense it was something Ronald Reagan cured me of, which means I can look back on it with some relief and a little pride that, whatever ideology I would have become hooked on at that age I was never the sort to let a belief stop me from seeing what is right in front of my eyes. But before Reagan managed to convincingly show me how people who equate money with morality actually behave in real life, and what a government comprised of such people really looked like, I delved into Rand’s books and her writings hungrily.   Some say Randism is a kind of petulant ego trip, but for me it was my inner teenage geek thinking she had the simple elegant answer to all the problems of society and government.   Simple is better…right?   H.L. Mencken once said that for every complex problem there is an answer that is simple, neat and wrong.

I still have all those books of her’s I bought way back when, and even some of the newsletters. Give me a sentence or two of dialogue from Atlas Shrugged and well worn hardbound copy in hand I’ll put my fingers on the pages it came from in under a minute. I’m not exactly proud of this…but it’s come in handy from time to time whenever I get into an argument with someone who is still eating at Hugh Akston’s rancid diner.

So let me take this opportunity to say, as someone who has been there and can claim some experience with the territory, its culture, and its charming little village church…Ryan is shitting you. Twice. He’s shitting you when he says he admires Ayn Rand, and shitting you when he says he believes rights come from God, both. The magnitude of the mendacity here is you can’t even believe he’s at least being honest about one of those statements. To say both of these things is to basically say you believe neither one.

Anyone who so much as skims the John Galt speech knows what Rand thought of Christianity and God worship. Her take is so absolutely venomous it is just not possible to reconcile any form of Christianity, even the ersatz republican christianity of war, wealth, power and contempt for the poor and outcast, with Rand. Rand and Christianity do not fit together in any possible way.   Not even in The Twilight Zone do they fit together. Here…just take a wee taste…

What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge – he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil – he became a moral being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor – he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire – he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness, joy – all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man’s fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was – that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love – he was not man.

Man’s fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he’s man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

And so on… But take note: Ryan’s mendacity is eminently typical of modern republicans. They pick ideas from Rand and from her hated bastard offspring, libertarianism, the way they pick from the bible, like they’re populating the window display of an antique shop with any pretty junk that might get the passers-by to stop and look. Their admiration of Rand is intellectual the way a bank robber admires a well made shotgun and getaway car is intellectual, and to the same exact kind and degree that their religiosity is deeply spiritual.   It isn’t just about waging culture war.   When you’re busy plundering one of history’s great democracies, it’s good to be able to look in a mirror and convince yourself it isn’t a thief looking back.   The bible merely gives them a few handy clobber verses.   They have to skim over all the parts about loving your neighbor and getting camels through the eyes of needles.   Rand told them outright that theirs is the power and the glory and that even a little mustard seed of compassion toward your neighbors is anti-life.   She set them free, free at last from the loathsome work of forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty to anyone but themselves.

Paul Constant over at SLOG reminds us…

Paul Ryan has a highly consistent legislative record. He has voted against regulations of all kinds—environmental protections, work safety laws, controls on the banking, credit card, and health care industries—and against spending on things like food stamps, arts funding, Medicare, and infrastructure. He wants to decimate Pell Grants and he votes against education funding almost every time. He’s strongly anti-abortion. He votes against protecting minorities and women—against The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, for example—but he votes for religion, arguing against the separation of church and state whenever possible. He claims to be for small government, but he votes for military spending a whole lot. He was against drawing down in Afghanistan, and he’s for government wiretapping and the PATRIOT Act. The only real divergence from that record comes from his votes to bail out GM and his support for TARP, when the entire country was teetering on the edge of a Bush-inspired collapse.

Something that worries me, though, is Ryan has a disconcerting habit of completely denying the reality of his record, in a very convincing way. If a senior citizen asks Ryan about privatizing Medicare, he will toss a word salad that leaves the senior disoriented and convinced that he’s actually for a stronger Medicare. He will force his interns to read Ayn Rand novels, tell everyone we’re “living in an Ayn Rand novel,” and even credit his entire life of public service to Ayn Rand, and then he will tell a crowded room with a straight face that his love for Ayn Rand is an “urban legend.” Both of these contradictory truths are on the record.

I think Rand would have understood at some level, even as she would have despised his bows to right wing fundamentalists.   She yapped a lot about the rights of the individual but for her it was all about the will to power. Her beef with religion, Christianity specifically, was almost certainly in all that stuff about being a neighbor and doing unto others.   I think she saw religion as a cousin to communism, and so even a religion that exalted the rich and powerful would have drawn her contempt, because to some degree all religion involves fellowship of some kind and Rand acknowledged no interhuman connections of any sort beyond transactions that are engaged in purely for self benefit.   She despised the idea that love could be unconditional and selfless.

It’s a view of human society citizens of the nation of Wall Street can see the rapture in.   A morality in which all that matters is acquiring and holding onto power makes the concept of neighbor pointless. Everyone is responsible only to themselves and harm is something you do only to yourself. There is no neighbor.   And without neighbor there is no shame. The people you meet are nothing more than potential sources of profit or loss. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan are not contradicting themselves and they don’t view what they are doing as lying per se, let alone immoral.   Business after all, is business. They are selling you a product under the rules of a marketplace where the only thing that matters is did they get your money.   And that is exactly how they will govern.   Because theirs is the power and the glory, and Atlas don’t feel shame.

So it’s Really Swell how Chick Fil A has brought people together to discuss what rights, if any, they’re willing to grant their gay neighbors. Behold the Wonder of Food. In Ancient times we would break bread together and discuss matters close to the heart. Now we eat junk food and get our arteries hardened. Some gay friends of mine on Facebook tell me lately that I’m not the only gay American in my friends list having this conversation with their heterosexual friends. But this is good. If nothing else there is value here, great value, in remembering that most folks outside the gay community are in the dark about the details of our struggle and its history.

That isn’t because they’re ignorant (at least My friends aren’t!), it’s because their news streams generally don’t give much focus to our lives and our issues. This fact really hits home day after day lately, as I engage other friends, heterosexuals, and see them getting genuinely surprised to hear details about Chick Fil A’s corporate giving to hate groups…even more surprised at the magnitude of venom those hate groups have been injecting into the political discourse for years. On the one hand, it can get frustrating to be constantly reminded in these conversations that we are mostly a side show to the other pressing issues most heterosexuals face. Like oh…the crappy economy…their job situations…their health care. On the other hand, the “teachable moment” here runs both ways.

Just because you can recite off the top of your head what states have same-sex marriage and what states have it on the ballot this year and who the major players are in the fight against it and where they get their money from, that doesn’t mean everyone else can, and just because they can’t that doesn’t mean they don’t care. Harder, but just as important to learn is this: just because you hear some boilerplate crap about same-sex marriage and gay rights in general coming out of their mouths that doesn’t mean anything, other then the hate mongers are much better at getting these little poisonous memes out there then our crappy corporate news media is at informing people.

So…keep calm, and carry on a discussion with whoever is willing to listen. Remember…they don’t always know the subject the way we do.

Below is something I just posted elsewhere, in the hope that clues are digested here and there. It began with an old high school classmate, also an atheist but let it be said with a much Much bigger chip on his shoulder toward religion then I’ve got, who surprised me by dispensing some standard antigay boilerplate crap to the effect that:

• Heterosexual relationships are of a different kind because they have the potential to procreate. (He actually said he was surprised the “religionists” didn’t make more of an issue about biology! (foolish religionists…always waving your bibles when there is Biology to discuss!))
• Government needs to put same-sex couples into a different category to distinguish between families that procreate for the purposes of education, housing, transportation, etc…

And oh by the way he’s fine with a Constitutional Amendment granting all the same rights heterosexual couples have to same-sex couples.   Just not apparently, the term “marriage”

Here’s my reply…

So you’re fine with government denying the status of marriage to opposite sex couples who are infertile for one reason or another (old age or medical condition) but allowing them some sort of separate but equal status? Even if they’ve adopted children anyway? Somehow I am doubting that.

I can see you don’t follow the struggle between gay Americans and the religionists much (and as I said before I don’t expect everyone to) because the fact is that’s actually something they bellyache about a Lot. Along with something they keep calling the “complementary nature of man and woman.”

I can appreciate how, being sexually drawn to the opposite sex, and finding a wholeness of body and soul, a perfect romantic complement in a person of the opposite sex, heterosexuals can mistake that complementary nature of their relationships for gender. Listen to your gay neighbors: it isn’t gender. The complement is the person. If you look at human relationships you see it all the time; lovers filling in each other’s blank spaces. The religionists are always claiming that homosexual relationships don’t really involve love as deeply or as meaningfully as heterosexual relationships, but all that is telling is that they can’t see the people for the homosexuals. But also that they aren’t looking too carefully at themselves. If making babies makes a marriage then why do so many children live apart from one or both parents? How often do you hear the story of a guy getting his girlfriend pregnant and then leaving her. Some relationship that, eh?

Children do not make a marriage work. They will not turn a sexual relationship into a whole hearted romantic one capable of sustaining a marriage. That I even have to say this given the barrage of evidence all around us is just…amazing. But that is what the national conversation about the rights of gay people reliably devolves into. If having sex does not make a marriage, as the religionists keep yapping at gay people, then sex that results in children clearly does not either. The evidence is all around us. That takes something more. And if you would bother to look you might see that your gay neighbors are as capable of that something more as anyone else is.

I would put it to you that this something more is something that any civilized society should want to nurture in its people. Or at minimum, not try to suffocate.

Our relationships are not of a different kind. They are just a small variation on a theme. And that holds true for same sex marrieds, same sex dating but not sure want to marry and one night stands. Try your local straight singles bar sometime to see a lot of that. Or here in Baltimore, where we have a charming little neighborhood called The Block. Browse around it sometime and then tell me that heterosexual relationships are so much more innately noble. Cheap? Empty? Oh boy! It isn’t just chicken that’s on the junk food menu. There’s a lot of sex on that menu too it would seem.

And don’t gay people make really swell scapegoats for all the problems heterosexuals are having with their lives these days? Oh gosh…if we can only reserve the word “marriage” for ourselves, keep it out of the hands of Teh Gay, then we won’t have such high rates of divorce, or so many lost children wondering where mom or dad or both went. No…I don’t think kicking your gay neighbors into a separate but equal status is going to help with any of that.

Our relationships are not in any substantive way any different from that of heterosexuals. And the reason government needs to stop denying same sex couples access to marriage is that equal justice thing. Government does not need to keep tabs on whether a couple is gay or straight for education, housing healthcare or any of that, just do they have kids. I believe the census already asks about that. No. The only reason to place a different label on our relationships would be to enforce some sort of cultural norm that has no bearing at all on anything real, other then a deeply rooted need to see our relationships as somehow different. Separate. Apart.

Why would anyone want to do that?

So you know…I use the term “religionist” in the above because that was how my classmate from way back when referred to them. That is not how I would normally put it, nor do I believe that religion is necessarily a problem for gay people. Or anyone for that matter. You hear a lot of bible waving from homophobes, but that doesn’t mean they’re very religious…only that they’ve discovered their bibles have another handy use besides door stop and beer coaster.

When it comes to matters of religion and faith I keep coming back to something the author Mary Renault once said, that politics, like sex, is a reflection of the person within, and that if a person is mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their politics and it will come out in their sex lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that. I would only add religion to that statement. If they are mean and selfish and cruel it will come out in their spiritual lives when what really matters is they aren’t the sort of person who behaves like that.

I know a lot of religious people will profoundly disagree with that because what I’m saying there basically is religion does not matter, what matters is the person within, but it’s been my experience in life. If you are an angry person, you probably worship an angry god (or I suppose, just angry at existence if a non-believer). I have never seen a religious epiphany make a cold heart warm, but I have seen it bring to life a tiny little spark of humanity that was always there, but buried under a lot of hurt. There are people who hurt and who lash out in pain. And there are cold hearts out there that will never know a touch of human warmth. That is not the fault of their religion.

Bryan Fischer does a pivot from supporting a christian (in his opinion) parent who defies a judgment giving her lesbian co-parent custody, to supporting the wholesale kidnapping of children from gay parents…

This tweet followed one about Mennonite minister Kenneth Miller, charged with aiding and abetting the kidnapping of the child Isabella Miller-Jenkins in a custody battle between a lesbian and her now ex-gay partner who fled to Nicaragua with the girl rather then obey a court order giving custody of the girl to her former partner.   But the link below the tweet, to a story posted on the blog of The Witherspoon Institute…one of Mark Regnerus’ big money teats, by a man who blames his difficulties growing up on the fact that he was raised by a lesbian couple. (Naturally he ends his story with a big round of applause for Regnerus’ work and you can be sure that has no bearing at all on why the people who dropped a giant wad of cash on Regnerus saw fit to publish his story…)   So Fischer here isn’t tweeting that an underground railroad is needed to support good christian parents when they decide to flee their homosexual past and take the kids with them.   He’s saying that any kid being raised by homosexuals is in danger, and needs a few good christian child snatchers to get them out of it.

This is where the culture war can take a turn for the very worst, and if you think these people are not capable of wholesale child snatching you need to refresh your memory as to what they’ve been capable of in the fight over abortion.

[Update…] As expected, Fischer is slyly sticking to his guns on the Miller case as though that was what he meant all along….

No kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case. She left the US to keep her natural, biological daughter FROM BEING KIDNAPPPED. In Lisa Miller case, I’m advocating AGAINST JUDICIAL KIDNAPPING, in favor of keeping daughter with her own mother. In Lisa Miller case, lesbian who wanted sole custody of the daughter had NO legal or biological relationship to the girl. If any kidnapping involved in Lisa Miller case, it’s judges stealing a child from her mother and giving her to a stranger.

This is a standard technique of the kook pews, when cornered to pick a distraction and try to drag the conversation down and away from whatever was getting them mainstream static. But Fischer’s tweet about “Why we need an Underground Railroad to deliver innocent children from same-sex households” didn’t link to a story about the Miller case, but to the story of a man raised in a same-sex household which he blames for his life problems, published by The Witherspoon Institute which funded the Regnerus “study”. Never mind for a moment that even in the Miller case Fischer is claiming a right to ignore the rule of law wherever it gets in the way of his holy war on Teh Gay, there was no custody battle issue in the story he linked to, no issue of gay verses christian parent. Fischer was saying that Every household headed by same-sex parents is a danger to the children in them.

At minimum, it was a dog whistle endorsement of snatching these kids from their homes and Fischer isn’t walking back any of that, he’s merely waving the Miller case around as if that was all he was talking about. It wasn’t. Be assured that the right ears will have heard Fischer’s dog whistle, and nodded their heads approvingly.

And…If you thought the work of Mark Regnerus would only be used by the culture warriors to deny gay people the right to marry, you have been painfully naive.

This is making the rounds on Facebook and over at Truth Wins Out…

My own Dad ended his life badly, by way of robbing banks.   I’ve said before that if I had to choose between being raised by him and being raised by any of these self styled godly men, I would unhesitatingly choose to be raised by the honest crook.

Strangers can gay bash you, they can take your life from you, but only family can chew your heart up and spit it out. But consider not only the man who wrote this. Take a moment to wonder about the person, most likely but not necessarily someone who gets up behind a pulpit every Sunday, who taught this man to hate his own son so terribly much.

Put aside for a moment if you can, your feelings toward this man. Think about the kind of person who teaches parents to hate their children and considers it righteous. Think about the kind of person who does it as a campaign strategy and considers it patriotic. What do you say to someone like that when they tell you about their deeply held moral values?

[Update…] Via Towleroad, the son who got this letter says…

It’s important to know just what this zealotry from Bryan Fisher, Maggie Gallagher, Dan Cathy, et al., does to everyday people. I’ve never done drugs, was an excellent student, an obedient child (far less trouble than many of my classmates), didn’t drink until I was 22 because it terrified me, and have had just 1 speeding ticket in my life. Yet I am still seemingly deserving of this terrible act of hate and cowardice that one person can place on another. 5 years on and I am still doing fine, though this letter saunters into my mind every once in a while. When it does, I say without hesitation: F**k you, Dad.

There was a poem I read many years ago…I just tried to Google it and couldn’t…I think it was about a PFLAG mother attending a gay pride march with her son, seeing all the other lost children standing on the sidelines, watching the march go past, and upon seeing her their faces light up with a painful joy at the sight of a parent proud enough of their gay child to walk with them publicly. But behind that joy she saw also a hopeless longing. Would you be my mother…? So many lost children she sees as she walks with her own son, and she could not take them all in. It isn’t just the children who have to be carefully taught to hate, it’s the parents too. When the likes of Bryan Fischer, Maggie Gallaher, Dan Cathy, et al., speak of family values, laugh in their face.

[Update…] Fixed the Towleroad link.

[Update…] In the comments, Alsafi found the poem I was referring to, Here. Amazing how it stuck with me so long, even after I’d forgotten nearly all of its words. Which I guess just goes to show that words are just the stepping stones a poem takes you somewhere on. It’s the somewhere that’s the thing, the imagery it conjures up, not the words.

[Update…] The link the reader sent me is broken now. Luckily the Wayback Machine is there to help. Whoever it was that wrote this…thank you…it is pure gold

San Diego Pride Parade – July 18, 1992 – author unknown

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
and only a handful of us.
The screamed and they shrieked and they cheered as we passed
yelling, “Thank you. It’s great that you care!”

Loudest of all and clearest of all
were the screams that emerged from the eyes
of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
who watched as we marched down the street.

I carried a sign that stated most clear
my love for my son who is gay.

She stared at my sign
piercing my heart
with her pain.
I left the parade and moved to her side.
I held her in both of my arms.
Her sobs were intense and I tightened my grip
as she whispered her secret to me.

“My mom has disowned me since she found out.
She says I’m not right in the head.
She says that I’m weird
that I’m one to be feared
that I’ve caused her to suffer such pain.
Do you think that you could
Do you think that you might
Just be my mom for today?”

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them
looking for parents they’d lost.

There were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
But only a handful of us.

Every election cycle the republicans run on deregulation, lower taxes and more jobs. And when they get power then it’s all about the culture war and everything they do seems to cost people jobs and depress the economy more and more. You wonder if they even care about the economy.

Get a clue: a productive economy, technological progress, and general prosperity, are the most destabilizing things for authoritarian cultural norms and religious fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism and right wing authoritarianism flourish in stagnant or declining economies.

I’m not saying it’s a plan, I’m saying it’s a reflex. They act like they don’t want Americans to prosper because they have an allergic reaction to prosperity anywhere below the top 1 percent. Prosperous happy people don’t obey orders and generally don’t take a lot of crap from authoritarian louts.

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by Carmen Rasmusen Herbert, of the Deseret News…

Un…

I have several friends and family members who support gay marriage.

Deux…

We’ve had lively discussions about our differing beliefs.

Trois…

But nothing they say would make me love them less…

Quatre…

…or stop supporting them as people I care about.

Cinq…

I strongly believe in supporting the traditional family unit.

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

Note: Deseret News is the news organ of the Mormon Church. If you think they’d let anyone take a genuinely friendly attitude toward gay people in its pages I have some real estate on the planet Kolob to sell you.

Jim Burroway over at Box Turtle Bulletin writes a daily Today In History post, and yesterday’s gives me pause.   Here in 2012, even those of us who lived through this tend to forget it…

Illinois Rescinds Sodomy Law: 1961. On this date in history, the state of Illinois led the nation in becoming the first state in the land to enact a repeal of it’s law criminalizing homosexuality. The repeal was part of a very large omnibus legal overhaul of the state’s criminal code, and much of that overhaul was based on the  American Law Institute’s Model Penal Code, which in 1956 recommended the elimination of anti-sodomy laws and other prohibitions against consensual sexual activity between consenting adults. Because the Model Penal Code also touched on a plethora of other criminal statues, it’s likely that most Illinois lawmakers didn’t realize that they were repealing their anti-sodomy law by adopting the Code. Nevertheless, the code was adopted, and the anti-sodimy law’s repeal became effective on January 1, 1962.

For the next decade, Illinois would remain the only state in the union to legalize consensual adult same-sex relationships. In 1971, Connecticut finally rescinded its sodomy law, followed by Colorado and Oregon (1972)…

1972 was when I graduated from High School.   So bear in mind the story I’m telling in A Coming Out Story was happening in an America where sex between same-sex consenting adults was a criminal act in 48 out of fifty states that could get you jailed.

If it seems like little teenage me is trying awfully hard not to notice he’s falling head over heels in love with a guy, this has some bearing on why.   The next three episodes form another small story arc, that centers on the horrible Sex Ed class I had in Jr. High, and how damaging it was particularly to a gay teenager.   There are other negative images of gay people I planned on including into it as background.   I may just rewrite some of the text of story arc to include this fact about the state of the sodomy laws back then, just as I was on the cusp of adulthood.

Episode 15…in which our young hero discovers the power of names…

And Episode 16…   In which a boy and his libido continue their mutual failure to communicate…

Note: these two are part of a small three episode story arc that began with Episode 14, so if you haven’t been reading these for a while (because I haven’t posted any new episodes for a while) you might want to start over with that one.

And if you’re new to these you might just want to start at the beginning with the main page. The guy who looks like me walking around naked save for a little fig leaf in Episode 16 might not make a lot of sense otherwise…

Le Dance Pathetique…as choreographed by pastor Ben Reoach of the Pittsburgh, PA Three Rivers Grace Church…

Un…

I want to say something about how I hope that we, as a church, can address this whole topic…

Deux…

I want to begin by saying that men and women who are living a gay or lesbian lifestyle are welcome here…

Trois…

…and I hope we will all demonstrate a loving compassion toward the homosexual community.

Quatre…

Those who are living a homosexual lifestyle are welcome here…

Cinq…

…just like those who gossip are welcome here, and those who are lustful or proud or selfish or greedy.

Le Curtian…Applaus a vous…

Danger…deep thinking ahead.   Sorry…but I’ve been chewing on this since my last post about “Why is there something rather than nothing”. Probably it’s all the Science Channel stuff I’ve been watching lately.

Run it backwards. The question I mean. Or…forwards let’s say.   Instead of why is there something rather than nothing, ask how do you get nothing out of something. I’m serious here. Supposedly matter is never destroyed, it’s simply converted into the energies it sprang from, and energy is never lost, it simply goes to entropy…a state where you can’t do anything with it. That, as I understand it, is the rule by which our physical universe works.   The following is from Wikipedia…

The four laws of thermodynamics are:

• Zeroth law of thermodynamics: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law helps define the notion of temperature.

• First law of thermodynamics: Heat and work are forms of energy transfer. Energy is invariably conserved but the internal energy of a closed system changes as heat and work are transferred in or out of it. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.

• Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium — the state of maximum entropy of the system — in a process known as “thermalization”. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.

• Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero. The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has. Specifically, the entropy of a pure crystalline substance at absolute zero temperature is zero.

Okay…so as I read this, and as I have always understood it, you can’t destroy energy.   Energy is invariably conserved… You just move it from one place or form to another.   You need energy that hasn’t degraded into entropy to do work, but when you do the work, transfer energy, entropy increases.   No transfer of energy is ever 100 percent efficient.   Some is always lost to entropy.   Eventually entropy is all there is.   But as I understand it, the energy is still there.

So…the thinking these days as I understand it, is given that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing as the universe gets bigger, the end game of our universe is The Big Chill.   That is, it spreads itself so thin the energy in it approaches absolute zero and it’s all entropy nearly all the matter in it has decayed and maybe there are a few protons left but even those will eventually decay and then time simply stops.   (the best definition I ever heard of time was when a physicist on a science program I was watching ages ago said that “time is one damn thing after another”.)   Fine.   I’m told physicists working in the standard model will basically dismiss questions about “what happened before the “Big Bang” as meaningless since time did not exist before there was a universe.   There was no “before”.   Okay.   Fine.   So no time before there was time, and time will stop eventually.   But at the end of time and beyond if energy isn’t gone (let alone the space) then you don’t have a state of absolute nothing.   You still have a “something”.   And from all I can grok here you can’t make it go gone.

So once you have something you can’t make it nothing again.   You can move the something around but you can’t make it simply disappear.   Energy is invariably conserved.   If that’s true, then you can’t ever reach a state of absolute nothing.   Not in this universe, not in any universe.   If you could find a way to drain all the leftover energy out of this universe, all you’re doing then is just putting it somewhere else.   If it cannot be destroyed then how do we say it nonetheless had to have been created at some point?   If the question is where did the something in the Big Bang come from, then it’s looking to me like the answer is, it was always there.

So maybe we’re back to the concept of forces that are simply eternal.   Which is as hard to wrap your head around as absolute nothing, but then you pretty much had to figure whatever the ultimate answer is it would be.

I hear some thunder, check the weather radar and step out onto the front porch to watch a passing thunderstorm. I’m no sooner out the door when suddenly this little chickadee starts sassing me. I mean it’s cursing up a storm, calling me every name in the book. Fine, thinks I, I’m interrupting dinner at the suet feeder. I’ve noticed the chickadees and tufted titmice have been at it at the suet feeder lately. So I go back inside. Doesn’t shut the little dickens up. DeeDeeDeeDeeDeeDee!!! So I go back outside thinking there might be a cat lurking. No cat, and chickadee turns up the volume. DEEDEEDEEDEEDEEDEE!!! Sass Sass Sass Sass Sass!!!

What the hell? Then I notice the sunflower feeder is empty. So I take it downstairs and refill it, and I swear I can still hear that little thing cursing me all the way down in the basement. I put the sunflower feeder back up, full now, and go back inside and it’s all peace and quiet in the neighborhood.

Geeze…   If you thought cats were demanding…   How does something that small get that loud?   If you’re all lungs in that little featherball then your stomach is too small to be eating all that.

Sullivan posts thusly…

Ask Jim Holt Anything: Why Is There Something Rather Than Nothing?

…he has a new book out, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story. How Jim described the question in an interview with John Williams:

Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing? Why is there something rather than nothing? William James called this “the darkest question in all philosophy.” For Wittgenstein, the world’s existence was cause for wonder. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical,” he declared, “but that it exists.”

… I was brought up in a religious family, so the stock answer was that God made the world, and God himself existed eternally by his own nature. As a teenager I started to doubt this theological story. I became interested in existentialism and got my hands on a book by Heidegger called “An Introduction to Metaphysics.” The very first sentence was, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can still remember how the sheer poetry of it bowled me over.

Well…this is a question I think we all ponder early on in our lives.   And for most of us, raised in religious households of one sect or another, the answer is given simply: God created everything.   And for those of us smart asses who asked the obvious follow up, what created God then? The answer was God always existed.   He got lonely so he created us!

Which…eventually stopped being a satisfying answer to the question.   Eventually I came to understand that unless you postulate eternity everyone believes something was created from nothing.   We just disagree on the number and order of the steps.

Fine.   We are not Gods ourselves that we can really expect to grok the answer to that question completely.   The details may simply be beyond the grasp of the human brain.   One of my favorite passages from the Bible is still where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? We were not there to witness it.   All we have is the result of whatever processes took place.   If space is the final frontier then the birth of the cosmos is the first mystery from which all other mysteries, all other questions arise.   But we can try to figure it out and we are a curious kind.   We want to know the story of our birth, why we came to be, what does our future hold.   And I still believe that if we are brave and honest we can get close to those answers.

Perhaps the problem is that creatures with finite lifespans such as ours just can’t get the concept of eternity.   Why not simply state that the cosmos always existed?   It seems after all the simplest answer.   To me it’s simpler to assume a small set of eternal forces of nature then such a highly complex thing as an eternal supreme intelligence always existed…and I accept that your mileage may vary.   Fine.   But maybe we’re all missing something.   Or rather, assuming it.

There is a warning given to young programmers: while designing a system, beware the hidden assumptions.     I think it’s a good rule in general, to ask from time to time, what do we know, and how do we know it? We tend to assume that nothing is a the most stable of states which if left alone, if untouched by some outside force,   will simply always exist.   How could it not be so? Then some months back I was watching Dr. Michio Kaku discussing physics and the origins of the universe and he suggested something very provocative, at least to me: Perhaps nothing is the unstable state.

And if you were to dismiss that speculation as simply nuts I’d have to shrug and reply that thinking the entire universe could have sprung from a singularity probably looked like pretty nutty thinking back in the day.   But then people began hypothesizing what you might find if it were so, and evidence was gathered.   The first step in gathering evidence can sometimes seem nutty.   It’s because the mindset is failing you, your tests based on it keep failing, and you’re just going in circles.   The first person to challenge a very entrenched mindset is going to sound nutty.   That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right…usually they aren’t…but if you keep running into brick walls it might mean your frame of reference just isn’t working and you need to consider others that might look and sound nutty.   Just keep in mind that what matters ultimately is the evidence.   Lots of paths science takes turn out to be dead ends.   The point is to keep looking and respect the evidence.   Let nature speak for itself.

But to find the evidence, you need to figure out where to go looking for it.   If the question, “why is there something rather then nothing”, is a challenge to prove that something can be created from nothing, then perhaps the universe has already proven it.   We are here after all, and if you believe in God, fine, then God is here too.   But if nothing existed before either God or the cosmos then the cosmos has already pretty decisively proven that something can in fact, be created from nothing.   Quite a lot of something actually.

So then the question becomes not so much a why, as a how.   Maybe rethinking the assumed absolute stability of nothing might be a start at it.   Maybe the answer turns out to be something like that it is impossible for a state of absolute nothing to even exist because that state is simply too unstable.

What do we know, and how do we know it?

[Edited a tad upon further pondering…]