The Thing About Running Up To The Edge And Barking Is Sometimes The Edge Collapses Underneath You
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.
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.
No…Not “Goodbye Dad.” A Dad Loves His Son. You Are Not A Dad.
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?
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.
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.
One Reason Coming Out To Yourself Was Very Difficult
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…
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.
Dogs Have Owners, Cats Have Staff, And Birds Have Waiters…
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.
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.
Reasons Not To Procrastinate #22…Collect The Entire Series!
Five years ago I noticed the bottom step on my backyard deck was getting loose. The builder whoever they were, really didn’t use the best wood screws on it and they started getting loose. I saw the problem the moment I noticed it, and understood the fix. Just tightening down the screws wouldn’t do it. It needed the right wood screws installed. But it was a minor thing and I always have things to do around the house, so for five years that step just kept getting looser and looser, and I adjusted to it by stepping carefully down on that one step.
Last week it finally came off. Annoyed with myself for putting such a simple fix off, I got out my tools and the right wood screws and did the job. Five minute fix. It’s very solidly on there now, but after five years my reflex going up and down those steps while doing yard work is to keep stepping carefully on that one step. That step is going to keep reminding me not to procrastinate on the simple stuff for years now, I just know it.
On July 20, 1969 I was 15 years old and sitting in front of the family TV with my little Kodak Brownie Fiesta, and I snapped this shot off the screen…
The TV was a monochrome unit powered by vacuum tubes and had a tuner that picked up VHF channels 2 through 13 and maybe also UHF channels too, although there wasn’t much to see on UHF and on VHF you just had the three major networks and maybe one or two local independent stations. It got its signal with rabbit ear antennas. Cable TV was for the rural folks who lived too far away from the city transmitters to get a good signal. The household telephone (there was only one) was hard wired into the wall and had a rotary dial. The household music player was a German made console unit, also powered by vacuum tubes, that had an AM/FM radio that also picked up four shortwave bands, plus an automatic turntable you could stack up to five records on. It would play record speeds of 16, 33 1/3, 45 and 78 rpm. It was however, not a stereo unit. We wouldn’t get a stereo record player in the house until I was 17 and mom bought me a small portable unit for Christmas. Cameras used photographic film, you wanted to read the news you bought a newspaper, school teachers handed out assignments and tests printed on mimeographs, and if you wanted to listen to music on the go, something small enough to fit in your pocket say, you bought a small transistor radio. These typically only picked up AM radio signals and had a jack for a single earphone to plug into one ear. The Sony Walkman would not appear for another decade. Computers took up entire floors and were programmed with punch cards and paper tape, and the “user” was considered to be the programmer who submitted the job, not the poor schlep who needed the output. I was sitting in front of the TV with a camera on that day because the first mass market home video recorders would not appear until 1975. And we were putting human footsteps on the moon. It was 1969.
Citing their Christian faith, Mike and Mari Fuller, owners of the Waha Bar & Grill in Idaho, say they will no longer sell Pepsi or MillerCoors beer because of those companies’ ties to the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce.
Others have pointed out the list of products they still sell that also support gay equality. But the first thing that struck my inner Baptist boy about this story was…er…wait…this is a bar for goodness sakes.
The home I grew up in had no car, and when I was very young we took the bus downtown to go shopping and then walked my little legs off. I remember, and I am not kidding and not exaggerating, how my Baptist grandmother would point to the bars along our way and say “The devil lives there!”
Eventually I became a teenager and the instant some high school friends of mine gave me my first taste of illegal (for my age) rum and Coke I decided the devil might not be so bad after all. I’m a middle-aged gay man now with a taste for sugary cordials and fine tequilas. But I still count that distrust of the pleasures of drink as one of the pluses of the religious training I got way back when. It’s that little bird perched on my shoulder whenever I am miserable and depressed, telling me that there is no path to happiness in a bottle. I’d Like A Drink is fine. I Need A Drink is…ooooohhh…then you don’t get one Bruce Albert Garrett…
Unlike a reflexive distrust of sex and sexuality, a reflexive distrust of alcohol actually does have something to be said for it. Alcoholism, unlike homosexuality, really does cause health and social problems. And there is a pretty well known period in the history of this country of massive Christian opposition to the making and selling of alcohol on those grounds. So…listen…Mike, Mari…I appreciate your right to carry whatever products you choose, for whatever reason you want. But…seriously…I don’t think the Christian Women’s Temperance Union would approve of your line of work. Don’t you know how destructive alcohol is to the family and society?
Writing fiction is hard. Writing good believable human dialog is very hard. You have to have an ear for listening. I sat in a jury box once, on a case where the accused was charged with a very horrible series of crimes against an individual. One of the places where the prosecution lost me was when the alleged victim testified their attacker said something to them and it sounded more like bad dialog from a low budget crime movie then anything anyone would actually say in the middle of a violent kidnapping and robbery. I’m not saying I’m the world’s greatest listener, and you can’t always tell when somebody is making things up, but I suspect that for most of us it’s pretty obvious when someone is trying to invent dialog, write a scene as it were, and they’re no damn good at it.
You will die tonight. You will die tonight. You will die tonight. Yeah. Right George. Maybe it’s God’s will that you can’t shut the fuck up like your lawyer probably wants you to if he’s any damn good.
Ladies and gentlemen, who was it that abolished the institution of slavery? It was the Republican Party, it was a Republican President, it was a conservative who abolished the institution of slavery.
Who was it that filibustered the Civil Rights Acts in the Sixties? It was liberals, it was progressives. It was conservative Republicans that voted in greater percentages that voted for the Civil Rights Act then Democrats did.
Who where the ones that were standing hosing people off with fire hoses? Those were Democrats, those were liberals that were doing that.
But Fischer is no ignoramus. He knows his history, he knows the subtle as a serpent lie he’s telling his listeners. The slight of hand here is when he says, correctly, that it was democrats who manned the fire hoses against civil rights protestors back in the 1950s and 60s. What he conveniently fails to mention is how they switched parties in droves after LBJ signed the civil rights act. Yes, they were democrats. No, they weren’t liberals.
And the Nixon republicans welcomed them in, seeing a path to breaking up the New Deal coalition and winning elections finally. When LBJ said after signing the civil rights act into law that democrats had lost the south for a generation he was only foretelling part of the tragedy. The democratic party lost the south, and the republican party lost its soul.
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