May 25, 2008

A Quick Memorial Day Weekend Special Edition: Santorum’s Creepy Bestiality Fantasies Overshadow Court Victory

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Again, I’m breaking the no-politics rule… but I was just reading the blogs and I stumbled across this pearl by Rick “I Can’t Tie My Own Shoes” Santorum, who waited a bit but finally had to find a venting outlet for his gay marriage induced man-on-dog fantasies.

So on my birthday (woohoo!) the CA District Court overthrew a ban on gay marriage because, duh, it’s blatantly unconstitutional. And, according to Little Ricky, that was the same day that men in California started having sex with their dogs. (And, possibly, photographing the whole thing and emailing it to Santorum’s office).

I don’t want to rehash the whole anti-gay marriage screed because, embellished man-on-dog details aside, it’s basically the same everywhere. And it’s always completely based on strawmen and reverse logic, is never statistically backed up (oh right, there are no statistics that really back it up…) and is, in general, stupid and backwards.

BUT - he brought up some silly points I just want to poke at. First - the whole idea that anti-discrimination laws are somehow discriminatory to bigots… a common Fundie argument since they don’t have anything else. Let’s get clear about the law here (I have to forgive these guys though, there’s really only one law school that’ll accept them and it happens to be Bob Jones University…) - it’s not illegal to be a bigot. You can hate anyone you want without getting in legal trouble - unfortunately for the rest of us, stupidity and ugliness are not generally illegal in this country. You only get in trouble when you actually try to use that bigotry to harm someone else.

He makes the argument that THE GAY MARRIAGE VOTE WILL SHUT DOWN CHURCHES AND KILL GOD BY REMOVING TAX EXEMPT STATUS OMG OMG OMG. Because, as he says, churches that preach anti-*anything* screed will lose their federal tax protection and that somehow is the same as being illegal. I realize this may be a complex train of thought for most of these folks, but let me try to be clear: It’s not illegal to preach in your church (nor, unfortunately, will it ever be); however, (as one Pandagon commenter put it) tell the congregation they’ll be excommunicated for voting for a gay candidate, and BAM you lose your funding and federal protection.

And anyway - churches already discriminate based on religion, a protected class. A Catholic church is not obligated to marry two Jews, a synagogue not obligated to marry two Protestants, etc… and they’re not facing legal trouble for it. Exclusion and discrimination are the nature of religion, they have to show us what not to be like in order to teach us what to be like. So I don’t understand why they get their panties in such a knot over adding gays to the list of protected classes that their federally tax-exempt church can officially discriminate against.

WHICH leads me to my second point. In his article he goes into uncontrollable spasm over churches and religious organizations losing their tax protections. I have to admit, I read that and had to re-read it several times to figure out that he was casting it as a bad thing - at first I thought he was providing one good possibility of an outcome from the crazy string of logic he laid out.

Let me go out on another limb here and make another crazy prediction. Within 10 years, clergy will be sued or indicted for preaching on certain Bible passages dealing with homosexuality and churches, and church-related organizations will lose government contracts and even their tax-exempt status.

Quick! Somebody call the WAAAAmbulance!

Hmm… let’s see. Cancellation of federal protection for churches… church-affiliated organizations losing government contracts and other boons just for preaching… that sounds like further separation of church and state to me! What business does the government have supporting churches anyway?! “Church-related organizations” getting government contracts - that sounds like it should be illegal in this country. If you can prove non-profit legal status based on reasons OUTSIDE of simply being a church (genuine charity, community development, etc), fine. Otherwise (Tammy Faye Baker?), why exactly do you deserve tax exemption?

I’d be happy as shit if my tax dollars were no longer going to support religious organizations against my choice. It’s borderline money laundering that my federal taxes are currently going to these groups to protect them from paying federal taxes, and to allow them to send missionaries overseas and within the US to harvest souls.

Because these groups aren’t about community development anymore, they’ve been hijacked by Right Wingers using them to snuggle up to the US Government, who after 8 years of the current regime will gladly push their interests forward, while continuing to evangelize… on my dime.

So cry me a river about religious tax exemption and man-on-dog action - I haven’t heard one single, legitimate, well reasoned argument as to why the decision was anything other than a genuine triumph of an independent judiciary, and a needed recheck to the Bush-era legal machine.

Could that be because there simply isn’t a good argument to be made? Hmm.

 

April 25, 2008

and i guessed that the world was full of wonder

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This is a very strange time for me, I have so much on my mind and yet I’m feeling totally blocked - I haven’t been able to write any of it down anywhere; I’ve barely been able to talk to Liz about it (though I have, in bits).

This blog was started as part of an ongoing journey in self-discovery (and an exercise in much-needed self-censorship), but I have to say I think I’ve let myself down in that respect.  I’ve kept part of my bargain - there are some meaningful entries here, but in the long term I think I could have done more.  And I intend to, I certainly read blogs constantly, every day, from the personal to the political to  everything inbetween.

I think my problem is, I don’t know how to start this one.

Here’s the thing - this might be one of the hardest journeys/admissions/confessions I’ve ever made in my life, it’s not something that happened overnight (see this post I wrote three years ago which I have unlocked over at my livejournal), but it’s something that cuts right into the heart of who I am - what I believe, how I view the world, how I interact with it, how I process it - and, I fear, how others will interact with me.

As I was trying to explain it to Liz a couple of nights ago, she came up with a (somewhat) apt metaphor: faith is, essentially, making a bet - having faith in something doesn’t mean you know there’s a God or that your church is correct, but you’re betting it is, and that’s the nature of faith - you’ve basically got your money on the idea that this path will lead you where you want to go.

And I guess, to make a long story short, after years and years of repeating the same questions to myself over and over and over again - I can’t honestly do anything else but withdraw my bet, and choose to bet on myself instead.

If you read that post from three years ago, you can see that already, I believed more strongly in human power than in any form of divine power - it seems to me that God is only some being onto whom we have projected the parts of ourselves of which we are most afraid, so as to withdraw our own responsibility and accountability: the powers of creation and destruction - ultimately, those most hallowed powers of heavenly beings - are deeply human acts at their core.  What we fear in ourselves, we give to an uncontrollable, unfathomable entity and in doing so absolve ourselves of any responsibility for our lives, our environment, our world, our universe.

I was raised Jewish - in varying degrees - and this has been a difficult road for me, asking myself again and again, whether or not I can honestly say I believe in God.

So finally, when the answer came back, a quiet but firm ‘no,’ - I realized that my own ‘religion’ had been taking shape for years behind me in place of what I had been calling a faith.  I don’t know if there is or is not a God - in this sense, semantically, I suppose you could call me agnostic (because, literally, I do not know) - but I do not ascribe to any religion or any faith, I do not believe in the colonization of the mind by another, without the free choice (which I did not have) of the individual.

In the overarching sense, I believe that we have sold our souls to the wrong magicians - that the man behind the curtain, so to speak, is nobody but our own tremendous power as human individuals, with free thought and free will. And despite what some in the religious community might have us believe, I do believe in moral absolutes - my morality is codified in legal norms which I do not believe came from God but like so many other things came from us, and when, confronted by the profound accomplishments we had made, we cowered and ascribed them to a higher being.

If you have to ask me what I believe in, I finally am ready to admit, that the answer is: myself.

 

November 7, 2007

and this is how he appears to me, i suppose

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Do you believe in the prophet Elijah? We call him Eliyahu. I heard stories about him when I was little. He’s a great character, he always appears at strange moments, just when you’re giving up hope, just when your life is about to change, and gives you a choice, maybe a push in the right direction, maybe a twist of fate. He appears as different things, an indigent man, a donkey, whatever.

I’m reading Paolo Coelho’s The Alchemist to Liz at the moment, and we just passed the part of the story with Melchizedek, the King of Salem, who sets Santiago, the main character, on his way to his fortune. Melchizedek, means loosely in Hebrew, the King of Fortune, and his character is a pretty obvious interpretation of the mythical archetype of Eliyahu. He describes a story where he appears to a miner who, having given up everything in his life to mine for emeralds had found nothing for five years and was about to abandon the entire dream; Melchizedek appeared as a rock, which the miner, so angry at having found nothing, threw with such force against another stone that the stone it hit broke open to reveal the most beautiful emerald in the world.

I think this character, rather, I believe that this character, appears to everyone at some point(s) in their lives. People can always choose to ignore him, to walk past the indigent man on the street or not throw the stone or whatever. But I heard enough stories when I was little to always have my eyes open for him. I believe in the winds of change as well.

I had a conversation today that suddenly illuminated the ways in which I think this character has always appeared to me. I met with my program director, she just needed to sign a form for me, but she ended up being extremely rude and telling me that I had no chance of getting into the law school I wanted to because of my LSAT score and I shouldn’t even bother applying, that they wouldn’t even look at my application, she knew how it worked, and I should take her advice and not even try.

Now. My response was as follows. First I was hurt. I have a pretty good poker face as far as adults giving (bad) free advice are concerned, but it stung. Then I thought about it.  And I walked out of her office, really with a fire lit under my ass to go learn anything and everything about the fucking LSAT there is out there to learn, take it again in December, and fucking ace it so hard she’ll think I had someone take it for me.

Then I was sitting at home, thinking about how my life has gone, and why it was that I was so upset by what she said. When I was in high school, my number one choice of college was Mount Holyoke… ever since sophomore year, but I wasn’t a stellar student and I refused to take the SAT on principle… my college counselor said it was a lost cause and I didn’t stand a chance, I should apply to my state school and not waste my money on the application fee. I got pissed off, applied early decision I, and got in before anyone else in my class had gotten into college. He was so shocked when I told him he had to call the admissions director at MHC before he believed me enough to congratulate me. In college, senior year, my ex told me I didn’t have what it took to be a graduate student in the top program in the country, she said I didn’t have the strength of character to make it alone in the big city, that I wouldn’t survive a month, let alone 2 years. And here I am, a year and a half later, doing a damn fine job.

It struck me then. This is how he appears to me. Eliyahu, Melchizedek, the Lord of Fortune, appears to me not as the stone I throw in anger but as the person who tells me what I cannot do. Because it is that person who makes me go and do that thing, it’s that person who makes me want that thing even more.

And it’s true, after talking to my director today, if I didn’t want to go to law school before, damned if it’s not the only thing I want to do now.

 


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