Category Religion

Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal

Passing on a meme from Le Café Witteveen and Rabid Atheist, by way of Attempts at Rational Behavior:

12 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Should Be Illegal

  1. Homosexuality is not natural, much like eyeglasses, polyester, and birth control.
  2. Heterosexual marriages are valid because they produce children. Infertile couples and old people can’t legally get married because the world needs more children.
  3. Obviously, gay parents will raise gay children, since straight parents only raise straight children.
  4. Straight marriage will be less meaningful if gay marriage is allowed, since Britney Spears’s 55-hour just-for-fun marriage was meaningful.
  5. Heterosexual marriage has been around a long time and hasn’t changed at all; women are property, blacks can’t marry whites, and divorce is illegal.
  6. Gay marriage should be decided by people, not the courts, because the majority-elected legislatures, not courts, have historically protected the rights of the minorities.
  7. Gay marriage is not supported by religion. In a theocracy like ours, the values of one religion are imposed on the entire country. That’s why we have only one religion in America.
  8. Gay marriage will encourage people to be gay, in the same way that hanging around tall people will make you tall.
  9. Legalizing gay marriage will open the door to all kinds of crazy behavior. People may even wish to marry their pets because a dog has legal standing and can sign a marriage contract.
  10. Children can never succeed without a male and a female role model at home. That’s why single parents are forbidden to raise children.
  11. Gay marriage will change the foundation of society. Heterosexual marriage has been around for a long time, and we could never adapt to new social norms because we haven’t adapted to things like cars or longer life-spans.
  12. Civil unions, providing most of the same benefits as marriage with a different name are better, because a “separate but equal” institution is always constitutional. Separate schools for African-Americans worked just as well as separate marriages for gays and lesbians will.

One quibble I have is with item #1, which lists birth control as something unnatural, but desirable. This Daily Kos poll shows that at least 10% of self-identified Republicans believe both that abortion is murder, and that the pill is abortion (76% who think abortion is murder, minus the 48% who don’t think the pill is abortion and 18% not sure). Then again, people who still identify themselves as Republicans and aren’t using it to make money or get elected don’t seem to be bothered by little things like facts, consistency, or the whole brainy-thinky thing. So this list will probably sail over most of their heads in any case.

(Yes, I’m being condescending. If you don’t like it, you can eat a gay family-sized bag of cocks.)

A Scientific* Experiment

* Not scientific.

I normally don’t read Denyse O’Leary, because I like Canada too much to taint my mental image of it with her ignorant hackery. But for the past few days, she’s had a series of posts at Happy Dembski’s House of ID Circle-Jerk called about “Access Research Network’s top ten media-related intelligent design stories for 2009”.

But since it says “intelligent design stories” in the series title, I thought I’d conduct an experiment:

Hypothesis:

Half or more of the “intelligent design” stories are really just evolution-bashing.

Experimental procedure:

I will read the “Top Ten Media-Related Intelligent Design Stories for 2009”, as chosen by ARN and/or O’Leary. Or at least skim them until I get bored or distracted by shiny things. Or at least read the headline.

I will then evaluate whether they present evidence for ID, or merely constitute science-bashing, using the Behe-cross technique[1], and tally[2] my results.

Methodology:

This will be an open trial, unless the articles are so stupid that I poke my eye out, in which case the experiment will be blind. In case of extreme stupidity, it may even turn out to be double-blind.

Control:

If necessary, I will read Pharyngula, Hemant Mehta, Wonkette and the label of that bottle of Médoc I’ve been saving, until I regain my self-control.

[1] This experimental technique, which consists of dismissing evidence without reading it, has a long informal history, but it was formalized and made famous Michael Behe at the Kitzmiller v. Dover trial.

[2] Tally Tal”ly, adv. [See Tall, a.]
Stoutly; with spirit. [Obs.] –Beau. & Fl.
Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1913).

That is, I plan on having a glass of porter stout or other spirits while writing up the results.

Results:

Summary of ARN’s Top 10 Science News Stories:

Rank Title #Evo #ID
1 Texas Requires Critical Analysis of Evolution 5 0
2 Louisiana Implements Academic Freedom Act 4 0
3 Polls Show that Americans Overwhelmingly Support Academic Freedom in Evolution Education 7 0
4 The Darwin Bicentennial Bust 6 0
5 Discover Magazine Names Forrest Mims to Top 50 Brains in Science List 2 3
6 California Science Center Sued over Cancellation of Darwin’s Dilemma Film Showing 3 4
7 Michael Behe Expelled from Bloggingheads 1 1
8 Federal Court Dismisses Evolutionist Lawsuit in Texas 4 0
9 Ben Stein Expelled from the University of Vermont 2 1
10 Evolutionary Psychology Finally Comes Under Media Attack 2 0
Rank: the story’s rank in ARN’s list. Title: the story’s title. #Evo: the number of times the words “evolution” or “Darwin” are mentioned in ARN’s summary. #ID: the number of times the words “ID” or “intelligent design” are mentioned in ARN’s summary.

Several broad themes emerged, the most popular being “Teach the controversy!” (stories 1, 2, 3, and 6). It was followed closely by “Help! Help! We’re being repressed!” (stories 5, 7, and 9). Stories 4 and 10 represented the “Evolution is doomed! DOOOOOOMED!” category. Story 8 arguably falls into the “Fluff” category. Or perhaps the “It’s Okay When We Do It” category.

Conclusion:

Creationists are still a bunch of WATBs. Not a single piece of evidence for ID made their top 10 list. And since any such evidence, had it existed, would undoubtedly have made the top 10 list, it’s safe to conclude that there isn’t any.

Under hypothesis, above, I said I expected over half of the stories to fail to purport to provide any support for ID, but I’m surprised that they didn’t stick a single “Complexity complexity complexity” story in there.

I Fail to See BillDo’s Problem

In a characteristically spittle-flecked post, BillDo rails against the people suing to repeal Proposition 8. For those who’ve forgotten, that’s when a group of Californians turned to another group of Californians and said, “The right to get married is so precious and fundamental that we’re going to take it away from you.”

BillDo writes:

Their goal is not to contest the First Amendment rights of Catholics and others—their goal is to put religion on trial. What they are saying is that religious-based reasons for rejecting gay marriage are irrational, and thus do not meet the test of promoting a legitimate state interest.

So what are the rational reasons for taking away gays’ right to get married?

Society cannot exist without families;

This isn’t obvious to me, but I won’t argue the point.

families cannot exist without reproduction;

Agreed.

reproduction cannot exist without a sexual union between a man and a woman;

Well, duh.

and every society in the history of the world has created an institution called marriage to provide for this end.

Again, this might not be 100% true, but it’s close enough for jazz.

In short, it is nothing but irrational to challenge such a timeless verity.

Who’s challenging any of this? How will allowing gays to marry affect straight couples who want to get married and/or have children?

Unless he’s arguing that the institution of marriage will become so polluted by Teh Gay that people like him won’t want anything to do with it. Kind of like saying “I won’t go into that store; they allow homos to shop there.”

In short, BillDo’s problem seems to be with his head. Fortunately, it’s nothing a good laxative can’t fix.

PS: I just realized that I managed to write an entire post about BillDo without using the words “fucknugget” or “twatwaffle”. I take this as a sign that I’ve grown as a writer.

Analogy O’ the Week

Daniel Dennett, about why God allows innocents to suffer:

The Problem of Evil, capital letters and all, is the central enigma confronting theists. There is no solution. Isn’t that obvious? All the holy texts and interpretations that contrive ways of getting around the problem read like the fine print in a fraudulent contract–and for the same reason: they are desperate attempts to conceal the implications of the double standard they have invented.

(emphasis added.)

As usual, Dennett manages to clear away the rhetorical brush that hides the central problem, and gets to the point. I’ll have to remember this analogy.

Margaret Downey Can Go to Hell

About a year ago, a group of us was* at happy hour downtown. There was a Secular Coalition for America meeting nearby, so I got to meet a few famous atheists (or at least famous in certain atheist circles), including Dan Barker and Brother Richard.

The bit that sticks in my mind, though, is when Margaret Downey told some of us that as atheists, we should purge our speech of religious expressions.

“Oh, lord”, I thought. I made a herculean effort to remain jovial, but the reaction she got was close to pandemonium.

Even setting aside the fact that policing the language for morally inappropriate words and phrases strikes me as being too close to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four for comfort, there’s also the fact that human language is a product of its culture.

Whether we like it or not, religion and other mythological ideas have left their mark on the language. They’re common tropes that we can all refer to in speech. In December, I might joke that such-and-such annoying customer will be getting coal in his stocking. And after Christmas I sometimes ask my friends whether Santa was good to them. Not because any of us believe in Santa Claus, but just as a roundabout way of asking whether they got everything they wanted. If we remove religious references from speech, shouldn’t we do the same with Santa Claus?

What about Internet trolls? Or gremlins in malfunctioning machinery? Should we stop referring to Wall Street prognosticators as oracles who read tea leaves? And where would games and online fora be without avatars?

For that matter, should we stop using atlases, named after the titan holding up the world, depicted on the frontispiece of early books of maps? While we’re at it, we’d have to rename most of the planets, moons, constellations, and the continent of Europe. We’d also have to eliminate Thursday and Friday.

It’s not just ancient myths, either: discussions about the limits of knowledge invariable eventually include the phrase “living in the Matrix“. And a delusional kook who refuses to see reason can be described as having taken the blue pill. Heck, even Non Sequitur recently referenced the Kobayashi Maru.

The Bible gives us a plethora of myths and expressions to draw upon: David and Goliath, the good Samaritan, the kiss of death, 30 pieces of silver, “am I my brother’s keeper?”, the word “antediluvian”, and much more. The Greeks gave us Achilles heels, Procrustean beds, Pandora’s box, odysseys, and mentoring.

Obviously, the difference between Christian myths and ancient Greek ones is that the Christian ones are still widely believed. Ideally, we should be moving to where we can put the Bible next to the Kalevala and the Iliad on our bookshelves, something that influenced society in the past, but that no one takes seriously anymore.

But there’s a difference between post-theism and anti-theism. If you stay away from a thing, you’re being influenced, perhaps controlled by that thing. I used to avoid Top 40 music until I realized that I was cutting myself off from some music that was quite good despite being popular. I don’t want to be controlled by religion, and so I plan to continue using whatever terms come naturally, whether they’re religious or not. When I have to catch a dawn flight, I’ll complain about having to get up at an ungodly hour. I’ll complain about the unholy mess of cables in the machine room. I won’t stop using expressions like “Christ on a cracker” and “Jesus titty-fucking Christ”. Hell, no.

I’m sure Ms. Downey’s heart is in the right place, and hope she doesn’t feel crucified or martyred if she runs across this rant. I just don’t want to be limited by someone else’s superstition.

References

Update, 22:21: Alert reader Fez took issue with the phrase “a group of us was”, saying it should be “a group of us were”. As of this writing, we’ve failed to reach consensus on which one it should be. They both sound right to me. My go-to reference in matters grammatical, Grammar Girl (or, in this case, her guest writer), says that there aren’t any hard and fast rules, but that “was” is more common American usage. Feel free to discuss in the comments.

Answering Silly Questions

One thing I’ve always liked about science is that it allows you to answer a lot of silly questions, as well as lofty ones.

I don’t remember where, but I recently ran across the question of what would happen if you put a kitten in the Large Hadron Collider and accelerated it to some fraction of the speed of light. While that’s a very silly question, it’s easily answerable: the LHC uses magnets to accelerate charged particles; but since you can’t ionize a kitten, there’s no way to accelerate it using magnets. (Also, I haven’t checked, but I think the inner ring where the particles actually spin and do their thing is too small for a kitten to fit.) If you came up with some other way of accelerating a kitten to .5c, you could also pick up any textbook on relativity to find out how it would be flattened, how time would slow down for it, and all that other fun stuff.

(For other answerable questions, see this list of Questions you hope students don’t ask. In fact, I remember asking my High School chemistry teacher how they get teflon to stick to the pan in the first place. It led to an interesting discussion.)

(Update, Jan. 25: For a perfect example of what I’m talking about, see this video of the Mythbusters exploring whether it’s true that you can’t polish a turd. I’m guessing that the measuring device seen at the end is used to tell shit from Shinola.)

Compare that to how religion deals with similar questions. Everyone’s heard stories of the “troublemakers” who ask questions in Sunday school, like “If I get eaten by a cannibal who then converts to Christianity, and the second coming comes and the dead get their bodies back, will the various atoms become part of my body, or the cannibal’s?” Or “Assuming everyone in my family goes to heaven, which is perfect, will my grandmother be the baby girl that her parents first loved, the young woman who my grandfather fell in love with, the middle-aged mother that my father remembers, or the old woman whom I loved?”

Too often, kids are told not to ask such questions, or are given entirely unsatisfactory answers (“It just is, okay?”). But if a belief is so weak that it can’t withstand honest questioning by children, is it worth holding on to?

ID ≠ YEC?

If you’ve been following the ID movement for any time, you know that the group they try to publicly distance themselves from the most, after Darwiniacs, are other creationists, especially young-earthers.

So you’ll understand my surprise when I saw this come in on the ID the Future podcast feed:

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin examines a new peer-reviewed paper that demolishes a very common and very fallacious objection to intelligent design. That objection? “Aren’t there vast eons of time for evolution?”

I haven’t listened to it, so it’s possible that the blurb is misleading (it wouldn’t be the first time a creationist wrote something misleading). But are they so starved for peer-reviewed papers that they’ll even take something that seems to support YECism?

High-Tech Schlock

Less than a year ago, I mentioned Guitar Praise, a Guitar Hero knock-off that only plays Christian rock.

Now they’re making the same cheese available to today’s hip devil-hater on the go, with Guitar Praise for the iPhone.

Never before will you think to yourself, “what should I do while my hellbound teacher is trying to brainwash me with Darwinism, Copernicanism, and other satanic dogmas?” Just pop in your earbuds to block the blasphemous blather and pray for your teacher’s salvation — with rock!

Oy.

Followup on Luke 6:30

As I mentioned earlier, I asked commenter Flabberghasted for money, and he came through. Which left me with a not-terribly-fungible Amazon gift card, and the question of what to do with it.

I wound up taking Shelley’s advice: used the card to knock $50 off my Christmas shopping, and then made a $50 donation to the Secular Student Alliance. Because today’s students are tomorrow’s future that the Terminators will come back in time to try to undo. Or something like that.

Oral Roberts Dead

The AP is reporting that Oral Roberts is dead at 91. I guess he failed to raise the $8 million ransom to keep the Lord from calling him home.

The obit also mentions Oral Roberts University’s financial problems. Maybe they could join with Bob Jones University to form Oral BJ U. (Might not want to invite Brigham Young U. into the coalition, though. That might turn out to be… barely legal.)