I get into a fair number of … heated discussions … with religious people. Like caffeine addiction, this is probably something I should be concerned about and address, but which I prefer to nurse. Today something popped up in the ol’ Google Reader that brought me back to three specific old fights.
The spark is this Politico piece about how, “The National Organization for Marriage, a prominent backer of the successful campaign against same-sex marriage in California, is launching a $1.5 million ad campaign this morning aimed at forestalling same-sex marriage support in other key states.”
Before I get started, let’s go to the tape:
Now dig this:
“The biggest argument — and the biggest lie — put forward by those who want to redefine marriage is that it’s not going to have any affect on you. ‘Why should you care? It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” said NOM executive director Brian Brown. “In state after state we’ve seen same-sex marriage directly conflict with people’s religious beliefs.”
What a fun bait and switch. He sets you up by claiming that he’s going to show that it’s a lie that, “It’s not going to have any effect on your marriage,” but then actually argues that it, “conflict[s] with people’s religious beliefs.”
So this is for the friend whose retort, when I said that religion is the problem at the root of this issue, was “Some of the most famous homophobes were godless and closeted: Roy Cohn, J Edgar Hoover.” Seriously, that’s great and all, but J Edgar Hoover didn’t put up $1.5m to manipulate public opinion.
Last November I had a long argument with a colleague who listed as one reason to support Proposition 8 the fact that she didn’t want her preacher sued for refusing to marry some gay dudes. At the time, I thought that made sense, and I was happy to tell her that exceptions exist for that kind of thing. I thought this made so much sense that I later defended the right of the Catholic church to excommunicate bishops who ordained women, saying:
[I]t may be somewhat important to protect these stupid rules. For instance, one of the things the pro-Prop-8 crowd says is, “What if some gay couple sues my priest to make him marry them, which is against his religion?” It’s important for them, and it’s important for us to be able to say, “Look, your [...] religion is safe, there’s an explicit judicial precedent which says those types of lawsuits are not valid.”
But then I read something like:
Brown cited the decision of Catholic Charities in Massachusetts to stop handling adoptions in response to a law banning discriminating against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt children.[...]
Proponents of same-sex marriage argue that the legal changes will, if anything, strengthen marriage. There have also been moves to protect groups like Catholic Charities from conflicts, and the Vermont same-sex marriage bill that became law yesterday, for instance, contains religious exemptions.
And the kowtowing drives me crazy. There is absolutely no reason to allow anyone to discriminate against gays and lesbians hoping to adopt, so that sort of “exemption” should be out of the question. But it’s clearly something they would want. So now I don’t know how I feel about this.
Anyway, I’ll give the last word to Tony, because he’s smarter than I am:
So, the evidence of the real impact it will have on your lives is, religious bigots will stop doing charitable work if they can’t discriminate? I really fail to see how this is something for which gay marriage is responsible. It’s a but-for cause, to be sure, but we don’t get to blame everything on but-for causes: If a guy kills someone who mouths off at him in a bar, he doesn’t get to say “What? I wouldn’t have done it but for his crack about my mom.”
Sometime in January I found this website called Sex in Christ, which describes how to get freaky without making Jesus sad. It’s full of great advice, such as
Are you saving yourself for your wedding night? The Devil wants you to fail, that’s why he puts stumbling blocks in your way. But God wants you to succeed, and that’s why he has given us an alternative to intercourse before marriage: anal sex. Through anal sex, you can satisfy your body’s needs, while you avoid the risk of unwanted pregnancy and still keep yourself pure for marriage.
and
His sin was pulling out (coitus interruptus) and ejaculating on the ground rather than into the woman. He did so in order to avoid impregnating her. However, he could have easily avoided God’s wrath (and the penalty of death), by simply having the woman fellate him and then swallow his semen.
I never posted this because I couldn’t decide whether or not it was a parody. How could anyone seriously say, “Given the powerful symbolism of the fist, it is no surprise that couples who have partaken in the practice of fisting have described it as being a profoundly spiritual experience.” Surely they’re just making fun of the saddlebackers, right?
But then I got an email from the American Family Association trying to sell me a DVD, and I lost all faith in my ability to decide questions like “How could anyone seriously say X?” So I figured I may as well bring it to you, and let you decide what’s serious and what isn’t.
The DVD is called It’s Not Gay, and it is described thusly (emphasis added):
It’s Not Gay presents a story that few have heard, allowing former homosexuals the opportunity to tell their own story in their own words. Along with medical and mental health experts, these individuals express a clear warning that the sanitized version of homosexuality being presented to students is not the whole truth.
Uncompromising, yet compassionate, It’s Not Gay is a fair and balanced approach to this challenging subject.
This video has been shown in thousands of churches. Only 28 minutes in length, it makes a perfect fit to use in a Sunday School class, women’s or men’s group or youth group, etc.
Really? Fair and balanced? That’s what you’re going to go with? And you’re not, like, trying to win a contest for least-self-aware advertisement ever? My mind is blown.
My Google Reader has been overflowing with stories and opinions about Sarah Palin, and I’ve been sharing a lot of it. But I thought it would be useful to do a quick round-up here.
To start with, if you haven’t read anything at all and are just wondering, “What are people saying,” Andy Tanenbaum at Electoral Vote has a decent summary, along with a hypothetical dialog explaining the choice.
PZ Myers has a post that, at first, seems to be about the completely unrelated subject of a militaristic evangelical sect. There are quotes like:
“An end-time army has one common purpose — to aggressively take ground for the kingdom of God under the authority of Jesus Christ, the Dread Champion,” Bentley declares on the website for his ministry school in British Columbia, Canada.
But then PZ ends with this:
Let’s hope this is a fringe cult that will fade away, rather than rising to greater power. Let’s hope. But … Sarah Palin’s home church is dominionist, with connections to Joel’s Army.
Afraid yet?
So, uh, that’s awesome. Anyway, back to Palin. Two good posts by Alaskans about the way she is perceived in her home state at Statistical Modeling and Lawyers, Guns and Money. But by far the best coverage so far as been by Edge of the American West. There’s this excellent post about the right and the wrong way to go about attacking the choice. Hint: leave the beauty queeen bit out. There are two great illustrations of how Palin represents four more years of embarassing political cronyism. The posts respectively compare Palin to a “Mayberry Machiavelli” and to Alberto Gonzales. So, you know, that’s pretty flattering. And then there’s this, which begins with a most important question:
“Why is Sarah Palin running with John McCain if she hates old people so much?”
To wrap up on a more serious note, I have Henry Abbott making an important point. With Barack Obama and Sarah Palin on the Democratic and Republican tickets, America is guaranteed something significant: a serious basketball player in the White House.
Why hasn’t anyone shown me this clip of Mos Def on Bill Maher’s show last year? Mighty Mos clearly has some strange ideas (Bin Laden wasn’t behind the September 11 attacks? No one walked on the moon? OJ was innocent? Hard to tell if he’s joking anymore), but his take is interesting, and it’s definitely fun to watch him blowing Maher’s mind. Meanwhile, when did Bill Maher become one of those “Oh noes, the Islamofascists are coming for us” dudes?
The clip also includes a performance from Dr. Cornel West which constitutes a watershed moment in the history of YouTube*.
My post from May about PZ Myers’ over-reaction to a car dealership’s radio ad has found a long comment, and since it’s my blog I decided to reply with a new post. Commenter Lilia has clearly never seen me get tipsy and start offending not only religious people, but less-strident nonbelievers as well:
And I assume you know what it’s like to be an atheist in the United States, which is why you can make this claim? For your information, it’s not at all like being a Yankees fan.
This past week I’ve been picking through A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich. It’s a big, thick book detailing the history of the Venetian Republic, from its beginning as a refuge in “these marshy, malarial wastes” until their surrender to Napoleon. Some guy on Goodreads didn’t like the book, saying, “[V]ery little thought was given to try and make the history pop. [...] Maybe I expect more from my histories, but this was written so dryly it could have come from the Gobi.” Which is exactly the opposite of what I would say. Reading the book is like sitting down for a story with your historian friend the Viscount Norwich, maybe with some good Scotch.
A dry history might just tell you that in 565 the Byzantine general Narses was relieved of his duty, and that as a way of taking revenge on the Emperor he encouraged the Lombard king to invade Italy. But your friend the Viscount takes a sip of his Scotch and tells you why the general should never have been dismissed: “Eunuchs, as everybody knows, are dangerous people to cross.”
Further, a dry history would probably not call the 864 Patriarch of Aquileia a “rascally primate,” or describe the tenure of Pope John XII as “the nadir of the papal pornocracy.”
Probably the most famous tourist attraction in Venice is St. Mark’s Basilica. Wikipedia provides a dry history of this building’s importance: “In 828, the new city’s prestige was raised by the liberation of the relics of St. Mark the Evangelist from Alexandria, which were placed in the new basilica.” After the jump I’ll transcribe Norwich’s livelier version of the “liberation.”
Not that these are mutually exclusive, necessarily, but via my Google News AP feed I found this article about the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Forum. It provides some interesting food for thought, although it’s hard to know what to make of it.
One highlight is the finding that Americans of various faiths seem more accepting of other viewpoints than their religious doctrine of choice would suggest. For example, according to the Survey, “57 percent of evangelical church attenders said they believe many religions can lead to eternal life, in conflict with traditional evangelical teaching.” As the AP article points out, this “can either be taken as a positive sign of growing religious tolerance, or disturbing evidence that Americans dismiss or don’t know fundamental teachings of their own faiths.” I would argue that the one needn’t exclude the other. More specifically, even if the reason for this tolerance partly ignorance of religious doctrines to the contrary, this may still be a sign that people are disinclined to accept tenets that require them to write the rest of the country off as sinners condemned to eternal damnation.
It would be interesting to see further studies where people were asked a follow-up question about whether they would continue to hold this belief if their religion told them otherwise. I would also think that respondents first given a statement by a religious figure saying that people of other faiths would not enjoy eternal life would then be less likely to express this tolerance, but that may be too obvious to be of interest.
While I’m relieved (and even slightly amused) by the findings among the religious, this figure is somewhat more troubling: “21 percent of self-identified atheists said they believe in God or a universal spirit, with 8 percent “absolutely certain” of it.” It’s that these people have misunderstood the dogma of atheism (there isn’t one, so far as I know), but that they seem to simply misunderstand the word “atheism”. If you go look at the Pew Forum results, the atheists are a subgroup of the “unaffiliated,” which also includes the agnostics and those of no particular faith, but the above statistics are just for the atheists.
If people were given an open prompt to identify their religion, I would guess that this was mostly people applying “atheism” (and perhaps “agnosticism”) indiscriminately to any rejection of an Abrahamic god, but the phrasing of the question tends to suggest otherwise:
What is your present religion, if any? Are you Protestant, Roman Catholic, Mormon, Orthodox such as Greek or Russian Orthodox, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, atheist, agnostic, something else, or nothing in particular?
There’s clearly still some confusion about the use of these words (and not just atheism; how could 18% of the people who claim agnosticism also claim to be “absolutely certain” of a belief in god?), since these people selected that identification out of a list of equally plausible alternatives (e.g., why was “nothing in particular” an unappealing choice?). It’s also disappointing that the unaffiliated come a poor fourth for believing that evolution is the best explanation for life on earth, although understandable given the other statistics (plus I couldn’t find a detailed breakdown of this belief between atheists and agnostics in the full report). Any guesses what religions were higher? (Two were tied for first place, if it helps.)
UPDATE: At Pharyngula, PZ notes that the LA Times oddly chose to include their own poll in an article on the Survey (which also finds it more newsworthy that 92% of respondents expressed a belief in god). So feel free to go crash the poll, if that’s your thing.
Scanning my list of unread posts in Google Reader this morning, I saw this, from PZ Myers: “What if they wouldn’t sell cars to uppity blacks, Jews, and women?”
PZ has been one of my favorite people on the Internet for years now, in part because of his habit of pointing out disgusting behavior and unleashing a healthy ire on the perpetrators. So, reading that post title, I ran through the short list of social groups who I consider fair game for such a comparisson, trying to guess who had been discriminated against at a car dealership. Honestly, it’s a short list. Maybe a gay couple got mistreated at a Chevy dealership? Maybe someone wouldn’t sell a van to a guy with a Middle Eastern accent?
Yeah, the story turns out to be way less interesting.
A Ford dealership is taking a novel approach to advertising: by telling a small subset of their potential customer base to shut up.
But did you know that 86% of Americans say they believe in God? Since we all know that 86 out of every 100 of us are Christians, who believe in God, we at Keiffe & Sons Ford wonder why we don’t tell the other 14% to sit down and shut up. I guess maybe I just offended 14% of the people who are listening to this message. Well, if that is the case then I say that’s tough, this is America folks, it’s called free speech. None of us at Keiffe & Sons Ford are afraid to speak out. Keiffe & Sons Ford on Sierra Highway in Mojave and Rosamond, if we don’t see you today, by the grace of God, we’ll be here tomorrow.
PZ calls for a boycott of both the dealership and Ford (though see here for more on that), which is fine. It’s a stupid ad, and I guess if I heard it on the radio my reaction would be “Yeah, well, fuck you, too.”
But what interests me is the absurdity of the title of PZ’s post. For one, there simply isn’t any sense in which the lives of atheists today are like the lives of women, black people, or Jews at any point in history. Some people may not like atheists, but they aren’t regularly beating us to death or burning crosses on our lawns.
And I know you could say, “Well, look, all he means is, try substituting in ‘Jews’ for ‘atheists’ in the above, and see how offensive it is.” Yeah, fine. But all that means is that there’s some formulation of the ad that’s really terrible. But what if you replace the atheists in the ad with Yankees fans, or emo kids? No one likes either of those guys, either. But then the ad is just goofy and misguided. And, in my experience, being an atheist is more like being a Yankee fan than a black guy. (Not that I have any idea what it’s like to be a black guy. Or, Ceiling Cat forbid, a Yankee fan.)
For another thing, it isn’t even like anyone was denied a sale. For all of the talk in this is one ignorant radio ad, I wouldn’t be surprised if PZ Myers, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris could all walk into this dealership and drive out in brand new Explorers today. It just sounds like bluster from some yokels, and it seems to me that the price PZ pays in dignity when he makes it out to be some kind of segregated lunch counter is much worse than the ad itself.
That’s right, it’s this year’s edition of everyone’s favorite tradition: Todd is an atheist, loves Christmas, thinks thoughts. This time we’ve got a link to Dinosaur Comics, though, so there’s something to anticipate.
Did you know that the Wikipedia page for Santa Claus has an entire section entitled Santa as a lie told to children. It’s true! Also true is that the footnotes for that section are just a link or two away from an About.com review of a book called The Trouble with Christmas. The first paragraph of this review is as follows: