Pernicious Nonsense In The Very Air We Breathe...

One of the interesting things about Kouryou-chan's ballet class is the sheer number of extremely Christianized people who participate in it. It's not just the way the head of the school always leads every performance in a prayer "in Jesus's name, Amen," (which always reminds me of the Porcupine Tree song, "Intermediate Jesus," which has snippets from some evangelical sermon that ends with the minister laughing in a dark and frightful way, shouting, "That's the only way you're gonna survive, is on your knees! Muahahahahah!"), or how so many people there know each other from the local churches.

No, what particularly caught my attention was that there are whole classes for homeschool students only, and even more particular is that one of the students left her textbooks on the floor during the performance. The book was Understanding The Times, part of a multimedia "educational" series in social studies from Summit Ministries. The series promises:

This curriculum outlines the differences betweet Christianity and other prominent worldviews vying for allegiance in Western culture: Islam, Postmodernism, Secular Humanism, Marxism, and the New Age. In a time when more than half of all Christians lose their faith in college, no other curriculum so effectively prepares its students to defend the Christian worldview against all its competitors.

Even more disheartening is the list of contributors, including:

• Ken Ham, a chronic liar for Jesus who repeatedly pretends to understand the science of biology in order to misrepresent the state of the art in evolution,
• David Barton, a man who repeatedly cherry-picks the writings of the Founding Fathers in order to prove America is founded as a "Christian Nations", and make it seem like the lack of mention of Christianity or Jesus in the Constitution was not because the Founders believed in freedom of religion, but because they assumed it so overwhelmingly that it didn't need repeating,
• Ray Comfort, the bizarre little man who so homoerotically caressed a banana to "prove" it was intelligently designed for the human hand, and who regularly asserts that Hitler was "inspired" by Darwin,
• Josh McDowell, the "Campus Crusader For Christ" and another anti-evolution nitwit,
• Kerby Anderson, another "All the Founding Fathers of America were Christians as only evangelicals understand Christianity today!" maroon,
• Along with many others.

There's an entire population in my comfortable Seattle suburb that reads, believes, and even pays for their children to absorb this pernicious and mendacious nonsense. These are people who are training their children to be unaccustomed to being confronted with dissonance-causing information. At best, another entire generation of children will not grow up to cure cancer^[1] or feed the planet^[2]. At worst, well, I'm reminded of this t-shirt: Science flies you to the moon. Religion flies you into buildings.

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^[1]A model of the evolution of cancer implies novel treatment strategies.

^[2]Many comments in the NYT obituary for Norman Borlaug suggest that he should not have saved the billions of lives he did, because his actions led to an industrialized agricultural system, and enriched the petrochemical industry. None of those commentors are from the Indian subcontinent.

Watching your past fade, one batch of laundry at a time

Queer \kwi(ə)r\: different in some way that is unique.

Every morning during the winter, I confront a difficult question: what t-shirt should I wear? I confront this question because almost all of my t-shirts are favorites, carefully and thoughtfully collected over the years, and I know that every time I wear them, they wear down more, they fade, and ultimately they die.

I made a photographic collection of some of them on Flickr, ones that are already well on their way towards their inevitable disintegration, and looking over them I feel oddly nostalgic. They fall into one of three categories: sex and S&M, furry, or geek. Most of the geek shirts are from various places I've worked: Spry, CompuServe, F5, and Isilon.

The sex ones are a little understated. Okay, the Queer Nation shirt isn't, but unless you're in the know about "C-Space" or "Beyond the Edge," you have no idea what those shirts are for. Still, they were as useful for signalling back when signalling was necessary^[1].

The Magician

The furry ones are the most diverse, although oddly given the whole anti-fur attitude on the Internet I worry most about wearing them. Since I seem to have a mostly normal life, and so do most of the furries I know, I've never understood why the stereotype outlasted its original casting. I suppose I fit many of the stereotypes, as I'm attracted to both men and women (although not in equal volume, I've long known).

We like to hold onto the things of the past. I'm a very utilitarian person in some ways, and the things that fill my life are things I can use. I do collect things to look at and listen to, but often the soundworthiness of a piece I measure by how much it charges me while I work, and the utility of a piece of art I measure by how many ideas it sparks in my head. I collect these T-shirts because they say something about me, and I fear for their demise because I fear that when they go I'll no longer have a grip on the subcultures they represent.

It's also true that the subcultures they represent no longer exist: I can go to a Furry convention and nobody will know who the Hell I am. A new generation has come into being that seems embarassed by what its progenitors were up to. The S&M subculture is so completely smeared into the mainstream that people no longer flinch that much when they learn there's a club for that in their city. Oh, that's just what people do these days. I go to Furry conventions and people aren't even selling t-shirts, nor for that matter are the nightclubs and S&M dungeons that used to put out wink-and-nod articles of clothing that let us wink and nod at one another.

Maybe I'm just complaining about getting old. Or being a parent and incapable of getting out more often and buying more t-shirts. Or being jaded and not wanting these symbols of belonging anymore. Whatever it is, it's annoying, and for me, profoundly sad.

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^[1]Pascal Bruckner opines in his article The Love of Lust that the current zeitgeist is one in which we're afraid to admit that we're not getting laid. I suppose there's something to that.

Matt Barber is not a Conservative, and deserves no voice to criticize

You have to feel the love from former Concerned "Woman" for America and modern-day Christian Culture Warrior Matt Barber, who objects to the group GOProud (a more activist flavor of the Log Cabin Republicans) being invited to the 2010 Conservative Political Action Conferencence:

It boils down to this: there is nothing "conservative" about one man violently cramming his penis into another man's lower intestine and calling it 'love.' Or two women awkwardly mimicking natural procreative relations or raising a child together in an intentionally fatherless home. This does not mean that people practicing those and other immoral (and changeable) behaviors cannot think and act conservatively on other issues like lowering taxes, cutting government spending, ending abortion, etc. But let's be honest: the "proud" in GOProud is not about pride in opposing the death tax, or defending the right to bear arms; it's about proudly embracing sinful homosexual behavior – and that is hardly a conservative value.

He then goes on to quote Russel Kirk's famous (if you're a conservative) quote that society must be governed by men and women with a strong sense of right and wrong, by personal convictions of justice an honor.

Kirk seems to be his bludgeon, so let's look closely. Kirk was a conservative intellectual, and a brilliant one, and one of his best works, and one of his last, was The Politics of Prudence, published in 1993. (Note, it's the Politics of Prudence, not Prudery.)

Kirk's "Ten Principles of Conservatism" are worth reading, especially if you're a liberal, because they are supposedly the principles upon which modern conservatism is based. If they are, then Barber and his ilk are no conservatives.

Barber would dearly love to use the government to allow his passions to run freely: the passion to punish others for their private activities. Kirk says, "The conservative perceives the need for prudent restraints upon power and upon human passions." Kirk fears human passions when coupled with power; Barber embraces his passions backed by power.

Barber would love to stamp out one kind of diversity. Kirk says, "Conservatives pay attention to the principle of variety. They feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems." When Barber and his ilk write that homosexuals have the same rights as heterosexuals, to marry someone of the opposite six, they are engaging in a narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism.

Barber appeals to Kirk's call for "an enduring moral order," and "adherence to custom, convention, and continuity." You know, I can understand that appeal. What I can't understand is how homosexuality per se, which has always existed, threatens these things. A moral order is not one which denigrates and abuses our fellow man for their private activities, nor confuses a personal distaste for custom and continuity.

Barber would be well to recall Kirk's final say:

There exists no Model Conservative, and conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order. The attitude we call conservatism is sustained by a body of sentiments, rather than by a system of ideological dogmata. The conservative person is simply one who finds the permanent things more pleasing than Chaos and Old Night. (Yet conservatives know, with Burke, that healthy "change is the means of our preservation.")

...

The thinking conservative understands that permanence and change must be recognized and reconciled in a vigorous society. The conservative is not opposed to social improvement, although he doubts whether there is any such force as a mystical Progress, with a Roman P, at work in the world. When a society is progressing in some respects, usually it is declining in other respects.

Kirk understood that communities, like individuals, like organisms, must adapt or die to the ever-changing landscape around it. Our fundamental humanity demands that we recognize that homosexuals exist, and there isn't much we can do about that that wouldn't be henious and self-defeating. It is a conservative value to find ways to live together, respectful of our private needs and public faces. Barber, by putting forth only a violent description of what can be and often is a loving act, betrays his conservative values in favor of older and darker impulses.

Because I must: Michael Caine and Christopher Reeves's kiss

Giggity!