Archives 2012

Good On Ya for Standing Up for Your Principles. Now Go Away.

A business owner in Annapolis has found that his deeply-held convictions are about to come into conflict with the law, and rather than give up his principles, he’s going to, if not close up shop, then at least scale back shop:

An Annapolis company whose old-fashioned trolleys are iconic in the city’s wedding scene has abandoned the nuptial industry rather than serve same-sex couples.

The owner of Discover Annapolis Tours said he decided to walk away from $50,000 in annual revenue instead of compromising his Christian convictions when same-sex marriages become legal in Maryland in less than a week. And he has urged prospective clients to lobby state lawmakers for a religious exemption for wedding vendors.

(Source: Washington Post.)

This seems as clear a case I can imagine of a business owner having to choose between money and bigotry. He chose bigotry. I wish him the best of luck in not getting hit in the ass by the door on the way out.

As far as can make out, he’s not actually shutting down his business. He’s just pulling his business out (heh-heh) of the wedding business.

In case anyone’s wondering why he can’t just pick and choose his customers:

“If they’re providing services to the public, they can’t discriminate who they provide their services to,” said Glendora Hughes, general counsel for the Maryland Commission on Civil Rights. The commission enforces public accommodation laws that prohibit businesses from discriminating on the basis of race, sexual orientation and other characteristics.

If your business is open to the public, it’s open to the public, not just to those parts of the public that you approve of. If a state passes a law saying “Jews and black people can shop anywhere that gentiles and white people can”, that’s great, but if you then add “unless the shop owner doesn’t feel like it”, that makes the law meaningless.

Predictably, the owner of Discover Annapolis Tours, Matt Grubbs, has his defenders:

Frank Schubert, the political strategist who ran campaigns against same-sex marriage in Maryland and three other states this year, said opponents predicted collateral damage from legalizing same-sex unions.

“This is exactly what happens,” Schubert said, adding that religious liberty is “right in the crosshairs of this debate. . . . The law doesn’t protect people of faith. It simply doesn’t.”

The first thing I note is that “religious liberty” here is used the same way as “states’ rights” in discussing the US Civil War: then, the states’ right in question was the right to own slaves. Here, the religious liberty at issue is the right to discriminate against gay people.

The second thing I note is the phrase “people of faith”. There’s just so much unthinking privilege packed into those three words. There’s the assumption that faith is a Good Thing; that believing things just ‘cos is something worth defending. And then there’s the assumption that all “people of faith” must agree with his views. I can name any number of self-professed “people of faith” who’d disagree with him.

Still, I suppose it could’ve been worse. At least Grubbs is complying with the law, rather than, say, suing for the right to discriminate. All the same: buh-bye.

Religious Righties Have Trouble With the Irony. And the Facebook. And the Truth.

(Via Right Wing Watch.)

This post at pro-life site lifenews.com highlights this video:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/d-XHPHRlWZk

The video shows a woman with bruises and cuts on her face. She shows how to use makeup and accessories to cover up the fact that she was beaten. The video ends by saying “65% of women who suffer domestic violence keep it hidden. Don’t cover it up.”

The video, which uses the irony that kids today seem to appreciate, is by the British anti-domestic-violence organization Refuge. Planned Parenthood has nothing to do with it, as far as I know. They just chose to link to it on their Planned Parenthood for Teens Facebook page.

So far, so good. lifenews.com even says as much. Where Life News’s article goes off the rails, is

The video is from a legitimate organization in the UK that fights domestic violence. But the way Planned Parenthood headlines it—with “How to look your best the morning after,” teens are mislead by Planned Parenthood into the cover up mentality. On the anti-domestic violence site, the video is introduced with the headline: “Don’t cover it up.” That headline makes a world of difference to young teens who run across the video.

(emphasis added.)

Ah, so maybe Planned Parenthood didn’t watch the video to the end, didn’t realize that it was ironic, and thought that their readers would really and sincerely appreciate some advice on how to cover up their beatings, rather than doing something to stop them. So what did Planned Parenthood for Teens write about the video?

A recent study showed that almost 1 in 10 high school students has been hit, slapped or physically hurt on purpose by a boyfriend or girlfriend in the last 12 months. Watch this video and tell us in the comments what you would do if Lauren was your best friend.

Below that are the things you normally get when you link to a YouTube video from Facebook: the title and description as they appear on YouTube. The title “How to look your best the morning after” was chosen by the uploader, not by Planned Parenthood.

But I guess it’s too much to expect Life News to understand that, or to accuse Planned Parenthood of a position that no one in the history of compassion has ever adopted. It would apparently also be too much to expect Life News to link to the actual post so that people could see for themselves (perhaps they realize that doing so would undermine their point).

And given how Life News didn’t exactly go out of its way—or even get up off the metaphorical sofa—to make this easy to find, perhaps its readers can be forgiven for just believing the article and launching accusations against Planned Parenthood without checking them out:

Perhaps. But perhaps not.

See also Twitchy’s article. I don’t know enough about Twitchy to know whether this is serious, sarcastic, or merely unfiltered, but they do have links to lots of tweets by people who didn’t stop to get basic facts first. Actually, I’m leaning toward right-wing nutbaggery, because the Sarcasm-O-Meter isn’t twitching, and because of passages like:

But the way Planned Parenthood framed it, the message is just the opposite: “You probably had it coming, girls. May as well try to doll yourselves up afterward.” Appalling.

At the bottom of the page, the author of the piece is outraged—outraged, I tell you!—that PP would dare to tell teenaged girls that yes, their labia are normal.

It’s too bad that whichever edition of the Bible these people are using doesn’t seem to have anything about “do not bear false witness against your neighbor”.

Election Night Woot!

As I write this — and maybe I shouldn’t be writing this while I’m in no state to operate Internet machinery — a number of things have happened in the 2012 US election.

Obama has won reelection. Mittens is about to concede. Looks like Obama has won not only the Electoral Vote, but also the popular vote. So I guess the moral of the story is that you can’t buy an election without showing your tax returns or adopting a consistent policy on something.

Elizabeth Warren has won. Richard Mourdock has lost. Todd Akin has lost. According to various sources, Democrats have picked up a Senate seat or two.

Recreational marijuana will now be legal in Washington state.

Oh, and gay marriage will be legal in Maryland, Washington, and Maine. And Minnesota has rejected a constitutional amendment to ban it. So the homophobes can suck it. For years they’ve been using “every time gay marriage has been put to a vote, it has lost”, and now they won’t have that anymore. I’m not sure what they’re going to do now. I suspect they’ll blame electoral activism by unelected voters.

From what I’ve seen, Fox News’s spin is that most counties voted for Romney, so shenanigans. Or something. Also, Republicans might’ve done better if they’d deigned to adopt a platform reflecting 21st-century values. Like maybe that women and black people are humans too.

Anyway, thank you, America, and thank you Maryland. You done good tonight.

Hookers and Blow and Trimmed Sideburns

Somehow, by pinballing over the Internet, I ran across a post entitled Sexual Immorality and Five Other Reasons People Reject Christianity. It’s a rather odd list; if I were to make a Top Six list of why people turn away from Christianity and become atheists, it’d look very different from this.

At any rate, the last reason he cites is:

Now for the big one. Of all the motivations and reasons for skepticism that I encounter, immorality is easily the most common. In particular, sexual sin seems to be the largest single factor driving disbelief in our culture. Brant Hanson calls sex “The Big But” because he so often hears this from unbelievers: “’I like Jesus, BUT…’ and the ‘but’ is usually followed, one way or the other, with an objection about the Bible and… sex. People think something’s deeply messed-up with a belief system that says two consenting, unmarried adults should refrain from sex.” In other words, people simply do not want to follow the Christian teaching that sexual intercourse should take place only between and man and woman who are married, so they throw the whole religion out.

The easiest way to justify sin is to deny that there is a creator to provide reality with a nature, thereby denying that there is any inherent order and purpose in the universe.

Yes, I admit it: the real reason I’m not a Christian is that I want to have endless sex with depraved floozies while bathing in a swimming pool full of cocaine, and not trim my sideburns. What can I say? I have a weakness for cotton-polyester shirts.

I’ll add that I love to eat bacon, which is why I’m not Jewish. And I like to wash it down with hot tea with a splash of wine, which is why I’m neither Muslim nor Mormon. And having thetans turns mere masturbation into an orgy, which is why I’m not a Scientologist.

Hopefully these examples illustrate what’s wrong with Johnson’s argument: he’s arguing from the assumption that behavior X — in this case, various unspecified sexual practices — is bad because someone in authority arbitrarily decided that it was bad, and that the reason I reject that authority is that I like doing X too much.

Which is, of course, nonsense: if you’re like most people, you enjoy a cup of coffee or tea, or drink more caffeinated soda than your dentist would like, and this has nothing to do with your opinion of Joseph Smith, or any rejection of Elohim. Rather, it’s simply that drinking caffeinated beverages doesn’t do any real harm, and the benefits (including simple enjoyment of the taste) outweigh the downsides.

If you have, say, a shellfish allergy, then it certainly makes sense for you to stop eating shellfish, and maybe even to ask the people around you not to eat shellfish in your presence, depending how severe your allergy is. But saying that nobody should ever eat shellfish because my friend Lucille says not to is an unjustified imposition on people’s freedom. A moral rule should be based on the welfare of humans and other sentient beings — e.g., the enjoyment derived from eating a plate of scampi, the possible health benefits or drawbacks of eating shrimp, the pain of the farmed shrimp, and so on — and not simply “because Someone In Charge said so”. Accepting moral fiats from above is just lazy thinking.

(For more about Lucille, see the extended clip.)

If Johnson wants to argue that certain sexual behaviors cause harm to the well-being of humans or animals, and can back those arguments up with solid facts, I’m willing to listen. Heck, I can name a bunch of behaviors pleasing to the id that I don’t engage in, and I don’t think other people should, either. Rape is a no-brainer: no one wants to be violated, to be forced to do things against their will, and whatever pleasure the rapist might get is vastly outweighed by the victim’s desire not to be coerced. Cheating on one’s SO involves lying, which erodes the trust between people.

But a lot of Biblical moral rules are just given by fiat: why shouldn’t you eat clams? No reason. God just said so, that’s all.

Even when it gives a reason, as in Exodus 20:9-11, that reason is bogus: you should rest one day in seven because that’s how God did it. But hey, humans aren’t God. Maybe one in four, or one in eight would work better for humans. Too bad; that’s irrelevant.

I’ve run into the “you just want to sin” argument — or, more broadly, the “you reject my religion because you want to break its rules” argument — pretty often. Whenever I see it, I think: here is a person who hasn’t figured out a better basis for morality than “do what you’re told by the person in charge”.

No, Mr. Johnson. The reason some of us commit what you consider sins is not that we’re id-driven hedonists. It’s that we’ve looked at your system of morality and found it lacking. We can do better. Someday, I hope you’ll see that for yourself.

Woman Killed for Not Prostituting Herself

What is this I don’t even

Mah Gul, 20, was beheaded after her mother-in-law attempted to make her sleep with a man in her house in Herat province last week, provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Sayedzada told AFP.
[…]

Gul was married to her husband four months ago and her mother-in-law had tried to force her into prostitution several times in the past, Sayedzada said.

The suspect, Najibullah, was paraded by police at a press conference where he said the mother-in-law lured him into killing Gul by telling him that she was a prostitute.

This story is so far outside my most cynical ideas about how the world works that all I can do is gape in idiotic incomprehension. What the fucking fuck?!

For one thing, you don’t force people to have sex with strangers for money. If Gul had chosen that path, that’d be one thing; but it’s not a choice you can make for someone else. Secondly, you don’t kill people for not prostituting themselves. That one seems kind of obvious, but apparently not obvious enough for some people. Thirdly, don’t behead people. Because fuck you with a meat cleaver, that’s why. Fourthly, if you’re pushing someone to become a prostitute, you don’t then get to tell people that she’s a prostitute and that that’s a bad thing. Again, apparently not obvious to Gul’s mother-in-law. Or else she took advantage of the two-for-one special on standards at the local bazaar.

This story is so horrific, I can’t imagine how any human being can think the way these people must have done. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

In Defense of Gussie Fink-Nottle

For those who may have forgotten, Gussie Fink-Nottle is a character in the Jeeves stories by P.G. Wodehouse. He is the series’s stereotypical nerd: socially inept, a teetotaler, and physically unimpressive. His most memorable trait, however, is his fascination with newts.

Clearly Wodehouse tried to find the least interesting subject he could think of, to allow his character to easily bore all the other characters to tears by going on at length about his pathetic pet subject.

I don’t remember his early life ever being discussed in any detail, but I imagine that, as a weakling, he was never any good at sports and thus never developed an interest in them. Unable to hold his liquor, he never got into the habit of meeting with the chaps over drinks and experiencing the sorts of things that only seem to happen during alcohol-fueled debaucheries. His social ineptitude meant that he never became a lothario. Eventually, he was forced to become interested in that most uninteresting of subjects, newts.

But I would look at it from another angle: there is an infinite number of subjects in the world. What is it about newts that’s so interesting that Gussie would choose to devote his life to them?

Stephen Jay Gould, as I recall, did his graduate research on snails. Carl Sagan was interested in points of light in the sky. Bertrand Russell worked on breaking down existing mathematical proofs into longer chains of simpler steps. In each case, they found something interesting in what might appear to be an unintersting subject.

Likewise, I sometimes wonder what makes people want to go into professions like accounting or proctology. It can’t just be the money, can it? Presumably there’s something there that I don’t see, some hidden bit of beauty that I haven’t seen or had explained to me.

I don’t want to think, “Wow, what a loser, for being interested in something as boring as newts.” Rather, I want to ask, “What is it about newts that’s so interesting?”

XKCD: Beauty

The Rise of the Nones

Due to a combination of laziness and everything blowing up at once at work, I wasn’t able to post about this earlier, so by now you’ve no doubt read all about the Pew forum’s poll report about the recent increase in the number of Americans with no religious affiliation, or “nones”.

You’ve seen this graph:

Growth of the Religiously Unaffiliated, from the Pew Research Center.

You’ve heard that for the first time, Protestants make up less than half of the US population. That there are more atheists, agnostics, and none-of-the-aboves than before, and that organized religions are losing members. That the nones lean toward the political left. That according to Bill Donohue we’re all a bunch of selfish, self-absorbed brats. So let me mention something else.

According to Pew’s chart, 2.4% of Americans adults call themselves atheists, 3.3% call themselves agnostics, and 13.9% are nothing in particular, neither atheist/agnostic, nor members of an organized religion, for a total of 19.6%. But the report also notes that

many of the country’s 46 million unaffiliated adults are religious or spiritual in some way. Two-thirds of them say they believe in God (68%).

which means that 32% of the unaffiliated don’t claim to believe in God. If my math is correct, the atheists comprise 12.2% of the unaffiliated, and agnostics are a further 16.8%; so atheists and agnostics together make up 29.1% of the unaffiliated. So even if we assume that none of the atheists or agnostics believe in God (probably a good assumption for atheists, perhaps not so good for agnostics), that still leaves us with 32% – 29.1% = 2.9% of “Nothing in particular”s who don’t believe in God, which presumably makes them atheists, even if they don’t call themselves that.

The last time I wrote about the American Religious Identification Survey, I noted a similar phenomenon. Except that then, the discrepancy between “people who don’t believe in God” and “people who call themselves atheists” was significantly larger.

Two obvious possibilities present themselves. It’s possible that ARIS and Pew are measuring different things, and that the numbers they report are only loosely related. But it’s also possible that people who don’t believe in God are more comfortable calling themselves atheists or agnostics; that the stigma attached to those words is disappearing. The difference between the ARIS and Pew surveys is the sort of thing I’d expect to see if that were the case.

Vatican Announces Forgiveness Sale

Medieval indulgence

Say, do you have an imaginary friend? Do you feel guilty because a guy in a funny hat told you that you broke some rules laid down by your imaginary friend, like not hating gays enough, or not showing enough deference to men in funny hats? If so, you’re in luck, because the Vatican has announced that

Benedict XVI will grant faithful Plenary Indulgence for the occasion of the Year of Faith. The indulgence will be valid from the opening of the Year on 11 October 2012 until its end on 24 November 2013.

“The day of the fiftieth anniversary of the solemn opening of Vatican Council II”, the text reads, “the Supreme Pontiff Benedict XVI has decreed the beginning of a Year especially dedicated to the profession of the true faith and its correct interpretation, through the reading of – or better still the pious meditation upon – the Acts of the Council and the articles of the Catechism of the Catholic Church”.

“Since the primary objective is to develop sanctity of life to the highest degree possible on this earth, and thus to attain the most sublime level of pureness of soul, immense benefit may be derived from the great gift of Indulgences which, by virtue of the power conferred upon her by Christ, the Church offers to everyone who, following the due norms, undertakes the special prescripts to obtain them”.

First of all, I like how the release doesn’t mention the Bible in its list of resources on how to properly interpret “true faith”. This is in accordance with longstanding Catholic tradition, that if you let the hoi polloi read the Word of God, they might come away with a false understanding of what God wants. So best if the parishioners don’t worry their pretty little heads about it.

So what, pray tell (see what I did there?), must one do to erase real and imaginary transgressions from one’s soul, or that of one’s deceased relatives? Glad you asked:

  1. Attend three sermons or three catechism lessons.
  2. Visit a basilica, a Christian catacomb, a cathedral, or other specially-designated holy site.
  3. Take communion or celebrate Liturgy, on any specially-designated day.
  4. Visit the place where you were baptized and renew your baptismal promises. [I’m confused by this one. I thought Catholics baptized newborns, who aren’t capable of making any promises. Maybe this only applies to those who were baptized as adults?]

I can only imagine that they give out cards, like coffee shops and burrito restaurants, except with lots more Latin and curlicues, and once it’s been punched or stamped ten times, you get your indulgence.

Oh, and at the end, there’s a sort of nod to the Vatican equivalent of the Americans With Disabilities act:

The document concludes by recalling how faithful who, due to illness or other legitimate cause, are unable to leave their place of adobe

So what’s the deal with adobe? Does this apply only to Catholics in New Mexico and Arizona?

Bill Donohue Bathing in Privilege

The latest twist in Bill Donohue’s Gordian panties is the fact that he was barred from a gallery in New York City that was exhibiting Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ:

I then asked them if I could enter, and they said no, without explanation. At that point I turned to the crowd behind me explaining that my First Amendment rights were being censored by the same people who were proudly displaying Serrano’s crucifix in a jar of urine.

Now he’s posted a video of the incident:
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/Cd7h80UUNHg

At around 1:10, he says,

I was just officially denied the opportunity by these people— Censoring my freedom of speech, my First Amendment right. They took this art and they’re going to show it here. […] My problem is with the phonies who run the Edward Tyler Nahem art museum by trying to censor us.

Oh, Jesus tapdancing Christ in a jar of urine. I’ve seen BillDo throw some riduculous tantrums, but this is a contender for Privileged Whine of the Year.

The very fact that he’s airing his beefs on the Internet to anyone who gives a crap is proof that he’s not being censored. But that’s not good enough for him. He imagines that he has not only a right to speak, but a right to be listened to. He’s upset not because he can’t say what he wants, but because he can’t say it where and how he wants it. Apparently in BillDo’s head, it is the gallery’s responsibility to provide him with a platform to air his grievances. Because he’s getting offended on God’s behalf, apparently.

If there’s a more perfect examplar of religious privilege, I have yet to see it.

Atheist Contributions


James Osborne (1834-1881) was an early settler of Seattle, who opened the Gem Saloon (seen in the illustration to the left). His obituary said that “He maintained a reputable saloon patronized by the best citizens of the type that patronized saloons.”[1]

In addition, in his will, he left money to the city to build a civic building, provided that the city contributed matching funds. Unfortunately, he was so filthy rich (like much of the American west, Seattle was founded by a bunch of people trying to make a quick buck) that the city couldn’t afford to match the funds until 1927, when they built the Seattle Opera House (see also Speidel).

Speidel also tells us:

The will specified, for one thing, that his brother-in-law—who had thrown him out of the house once—was not to get “one thin dime.” It also stated flatly that he forbade anyone to take his body into—or even near—any church and there were to be no religious ceremonies conducted at the funeral.

Instead he asked that the funeral be held at Yesler’s Pavilion, that a competent brass band be employed to liven up the occasion, and that a good free-thinker like Judge I. R. W. Hall be paid one hundred dollars for the oration … and failing Judge Hall, that “either Thomas Burke or W. H. White will do.” The services were to end with burial in Lakeview Cemetery by the Ancient Order of United Workmen.
…

So that we can truthfully tell you that the “father” of our Opera House was an atheistic saloon keeper from the Skid Road.

[1]: William C. Speidel, Sons of the Profits, Nettle Creek Press, pp. 72-73.