Marriage Is a Punishment, Imply Defenders of Marriage

Marriage should be limited to unions of a man and a woman because they alone can “produce unplanned and unintended offspring,” opponents of gay marriage have told the Supreme Court.

By contrast, when same-sex couples decide to have children, “substantial advance planning is required,” said Paul D. Clement, a lawyer for House Republicans.

The LA Times calls this an “unusual defense” of marriage, which is a bit like calling the Pacific “moist”.

So the California Prop 8 trial has reached the Supreme Court, and apparently the anti-gay side’s lawyers have figured out that the “buttsecks is icky” and “Baby Jesus told me to hate you” lines of argument aren’t going to fly in a venue that has cross-examination (a legal term for “calling you on your bullshit”).

“It is plainly reasonable for California to maintain a unique institution [referring to marriage] to address the unique challenges posed by the unique procreative potential of sexual relationships between men and women,” argued Washington attorney Charles J. Cooper, representing the defenders of Proposition 8. Same-sex couples need not be included in the definition of marriage, he said, because they “don’t present a threat of irresponsible procreation.“

So what they’re saying is that the only reason the state has to have marriage in the first place is to provide unwanted and unplanned children with a stable environment. That if it weren’t for drunk guys shooting their cum up equally-drunk vaginas all over the place, no one would have to get married, shotgun or otherwise. So really, they’re doing the homos a favor by not imposing marriage on them, and all the nasty icky visitation rights and tax-filing status that come with it.

The first thing that jumped out at me was that this line of reasoning sophistry is so underpants-on-head retarded that it shows that the anti-gay-righs folks are running so low on arguments that they’ve scraped through the bottom of the barrel and are now serving up whatever they’ve found under the rocks below the barrel.

But the second thing was the stereotyping. They’re lumping me along with the irresponsible guys who get women pregnant and then refuse to take responsibility for their children. Me, and every guy who always carries a condom, just in case; every woman who makes sure she doesn’t get pregnant until she’s ready. Every mutually-infertile straight couple who use IVF or adopt children.

But even though I’m being insulted, I can’t even get that worked up about it. Because as Greta Christina points out, if they’re using this sort of argument, it’s because nothing else has worked, so they’re desperate. They’ve lost. But some of them haven’t realized that yet.

Who Needs an Ultimate Source of Authority?

Over at Creation Today, Paul Hovind (son of Kent “Dr. Dino” Hovind) and Eric Taylor have a video entitled What Is Your Ultimate Source of Authority?. The blurb says,

Paul and Eric welcome guest Jay Seegert of the Creation Education Center to discuss the importance of world-views, historical science versus observational science, and the importance of the authority of Scripture.

As much as I love each and every one of you, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video to critique its specific points for you, so what I say below may not have any bearing on their actual positions. If it helps, imagine I’m having a conversation with a fundie sockpuppet that bears only the most fleeting resemblance to any person or event, living or dead.

But presumably the point is that people are unreliable, observations are unreliable, historical records are unreliable, chains of reasoning are unreliable, and so you need some kind of pole star to guide you. And, of course, the only reliable guide is the word of God because we’ve made up our minds that God never lies; and that the Bible is the word of God because we’ve made up our minds that it is. QED.

But what if the Bible isn’t reliable? What if there aren’t any reliable pole stars by which we can unambiguously guide the truth or falseness of a proposition? Would that mean that we can’t know anything? Do we, in short, need an ultimate source of authority?

Actually, murder mysteries are an entire literary genre where stories often take place in a context where there are no 100% reliable witnesses. Any of the suspects might or might not be lying; any given clue may or may not have been planted; anyone might be concealing information or covering for someone or lying for some other reason. And yet, the detective usually manages to figure out whodunit.

The thing is that just because something isn’t 100% reliable doesn’t make it absolutely unreliable. The GPS unit in your car is only reliable to something like 7 feet (and it was worse back when they had Selective Availability turned on), so it may not be able to tell you whether you’re in the northbound or southbound lane, but it can tell you whether you’re in Washington or Baltimore. Weather forecasts are often wrong, but if you consistently bet even money on tomorrow’s forecast being wrong, you’re going to lose money.

You could, of course, ask how we can know that the weather report was wrong. For all we know, meteorologists are always right and it’s only our lying eyes that tell us it’s raining on a day that was supposed to be sunny. Except that when we see rain, we usually have multiple lines of evidence: we can hear the rain, feel it on our skin, hear from friends who also think it’s raining, etc. So you have a cluster of information sources (sight, hearing, touch, friends) that confirm each other, and one outlier (the weather report).

As we grow up and observe the world around us through our senses and other sources of information, we can figure out how reliable those sources are, and under which conditions. For instance, if it’s broad daylight and I don’t see a cat in front of me, it’s a safe bet that there’s no cat in front of me; if it’s dark, then the fact that I don’t see a cat is a far less reliable indicator of the absence of cat (sorry about your tail, kitty!).

In fact, we can look at the scientific method as an ongoing search to figure out which observations are reliable and which ones aren’t, one that has so far come up with hundreds or thousands of Ways of Being Wrong. All the business with lab coats and double-blind studies and such is secondary, in service of the primary goal of avoiding Ways of Being Wrong.

Everything I’ve said above also applies if one of our sources of information is 100% reliable. If, say, the Bible as interpreted by Eric Hovind were absolutely correct in all cases, we should be able to figure it out by comparing it to other sources of information that we’re pretty sure are pretty reliable, like scientific observation. But unfortunately for him, we have far too many cases where multiple independent lines of evidence (such as radiometric dating, dendochronology, and historical records) agree with each other, and disagree with the Bible. That’s not what we’d expect to see if the Bible is 100% reliable and scientific investigation is 95% reliable.

But my broader point is that we don’t need to assume that there are any 100%-reliable sources of information or authority, so Hovind’s and Taylor’s question is premature; first we need to establish that there is an ultimate source of knowledge. It’s also malformed: the word “your” implies (with the caveats noted above) that he uses the Bible, and if I don’t, then I’m wrong. But if the Bible is the reliable source of information that he thinks it is, then he should be able to demonstrate that it is. But the fact that Hovind isn’t taken seriously even by a majority of other Christians tells me that he still has a lot of work to do in that regard.

Is Christianity Against Das Kapital?

Oh, BillDo! Will your histrionic antics never cease to amuse me? (Spoiler alert: no.)

Last week, Lawrence O’Donnell opined on Louie Giglio withdrawing from participating in Obama’s inauguration because of an outcry over a homophobic sermon he delivered in the 90s (and, to my knowledge, has so far failed to apologize for). That, and the irony of Barack Obama being sworn in on a book that contains so many horrific passages that he and every decent person on the planet disagree with. Watch it, because it’s quite good:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/gJgNQsQDkqk

At 2:51, Giglio is quoted as saying,

if you look at the counsel of the word of God, Old Testament, New Testament, you come quickly to the conclusion that homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle. Homosexuality is not gay, but homosexuality is a sin. It is sin in the eyes of God, and it is a sin according to the word of God.

Predictably, Bill Donohue thought O’Donnell’s editorial wasn’t quite cricket (emphasis added):

Pastor Giglio’s crime? He’s a Christian. Practicing Christians, along with observant Jews, Mormons, Muslims and millions of others, accept the biblical teachings on the sinfulness of homosexuality. In the 1990s, Giglio addressed this subject, citing Christian teachings, and that was enough to set off the alarms in gay quarters.

Over the past few decades, many homosexuals and theologians have tried to argue that the Bible’s passages condemning homosexuality should not be read as condemning homosexuality. In their postmodern mind, they say that interpretation is wrong. O’Donnell, to his credit, knows these savants are delusional. While he readily admits that the Bible condemns homosexuality, his level of cognitive development does not allow him to discern the difference between behavior and status, which is why he falsely claims the Bible condemns “gay people.”

Now, given that he’s just spent two spittle-flecked paragraphs explaining how Christianity is anti-gay, I wasn’t expecting his very next post to be entitled Is Christianity anti-gay?. I guess he enjoys making me do spit-takes.

To say that Giglio backed out because of his “previous anti-gay comments” is tantamount to saying Christianity is anti-gay because it sees homosexual behavior as sinful. It also sees adultery as sinful. Does that mean Christianity is bigoted against heterosexuals?

Right. BillDo’s flavor of Christianity places some restrictions on heterosexual behavior, like mandating marital fidelity; and it also places some restrictions on homosexual behavior, like not being allowed to have the kind of sex you enjoy, or being allowed to marry the person you love, or have your union recognized as legally equivalent to Kim Kardashian’s umpteenth marriage, or being portrayed in a favorable light in sitcoms, and if gays have to have the unmitigated gall to exist in the first place, could they at least have the decency to emigrate to a leper colony somewhere? Because the children or something.

With regard to homosexuality, the teachings found in Christianity were taken from Judaism. Moreover, Islam also sees homosexuality as sinful. Are we to believe that the adherents of all these world religions are “anti-gay”?

Why, yes. To the extent that they agree with BillDo’s anti-gay interpretation of their holy scripture of choice, yes, they are. That was easy.

What, am I supposed to believe that if a bigoted belief stops being bigoted if enough people accept it?

(Update: Oh, poo. I just realized I posted this without explaining the title: it’s a mashup of the titles of BillDo’s two posts: “Should Obama swear on Das Kapital?” and “Is Christianity anti-gay?”. I could fix the title, but that would break the permalink. So oh well.)

Congratulations, Matt and Tracie

Matt Dillahunty and Tracie Harris hosted the last episode of The Atheist Experience. Most of the show was taken up by a caller named Shane, arguing about morality.

Shane claimed that since he’s a human sinner, his moral sense is unreliable, which is why he follows God and God’s perfect morality. Tracie asked how Shane came to the conclusion that God is good, if Shane’s moral sense is unreliable. This led to the following exchange:

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/WrfWs52Kjk0

As Tracie correctly points out, if there is an omniscient, omnipotent, omni(or even just reasonably-)benevolent god out there, then every time there’s a rape, that god either causes that to happen, or stands by and allows it to happen. Shane starts saying that the victim in this case is as evil as the rapist (I’m pretty sure this is an instance of the “all have fallen short of the glory of God” doctrine, by which it doesn’t matter whether you’re Albert Schweitzer or Adolf Hitler: both are scum in God’s eyes), and Matt hangs up on him, calling him a “piece of shit”.

Anyway, congratulations to Matt, Tracie, and the whole Atheist Experience team, since this got picked up by Raw Story, AlterNet, and even Glenn Beck’s The Blaze.

I thought the exchange was pretty much par for the course: they’ve had lots of theist callers who make despicable claims like this. So I’m not sure what happend this time, but hey, the show deserves all this attention and more.

At any rate, I went looking through the comments to see what the Beck fans (is there a name for people who read The Blaze? Surely not Blazemongers) had to say.

Witness1974
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 2:55am

The first thing a Christian has to come to terms with is the fact that he or she needs to be saved from the wrath of a Holy God. People who merit God’s mercy, of which there are none, do not need to be saved.

tonykeywest17
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 2:28am

No son of adam is innocent . ALL deserve death and HELL. If God in his justice leaves men to what the deserve – who are you to question him.

sisserydoo
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 7:45am

Human beings make distinctions between sin, God does not. In God’s eyes, all sin is sin.

This seems to repeat Shane’s point: that the rape victim is evil, and deserve’s God’s wrath. I rebut it thus:
Flipping the bird

john vincent
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 12:26am

God did not direct a plane into the twin towers; He did not light the match which caused a house to burn down, killing all inside; He did not order young Adam to kill children in a Conn. school; […] He certainly did not order a raping.

Commander8080
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 11:24am

The caller got it wrong. God does not interfere with mans free will. Therefore, if a person rape or does evil to another, God will not stop the act because he loves us so much not to interfere with our free will.

God may not have directed the 9/11 attacks, or the rape in question here. But if he exists, he did sit by and allow them to happen. This is Tracie’s point.

DogTags
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 8:22am

The hosts presented a false choice: God either sends rapist or stands back and does nothing. Implying that God is not good who would do either. What they ignore is that God didn’t create robots but moral agents who he gave the choice to obey or to do evil.

This is the old “God won’t interfere with free will” apologetic. The problem is, if you see a rape being committed, the rapist wants to exercise his free will to rape the victim, while the victim wants to exercise her free will to just go about her day. Whether you interfere or not, someone’s free will is being violated.

Big_John
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 9:54am

all the evil actions of men, as well as every good action, was foreordained by God so that everything that happens on this earth has a good purpose behind it.

So child rape serves a greater good, so God sitting back and watching it happen is somehow the right thing to do. But neither God, nor this commenter, can be bothered to explain what this greater good is.

AntBrain
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 1:09am

I think it’s laughable that an atheist promotes the idea of child rape as being evil. It just so happens that social evolution has engineered a construct that pretends child rape is immoral … but if child rape could be shown to improve human survival, the atheist is stuck.

azitdad
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 10:42am

Whoever ‘Shane’ was, he was no Christian. Christians don’t think like that.

Ah, good old No True Scotsman. I’ve missed him.

sdd757
Posted on January 10, 2013 at 7:53am

I’m really getting sick of this whole argument. God does not just break in and stop crime and evil. If miracles happened everyday then they would not be miracles.

I wonder if we should apply the same principle to the police: “You can’t expect the cops to try to solve every crime they hear about, because then law enforcement wouldn’t be, you know, special.”

I’m not saying that all of these comments are representatives of all theists. But Tracie is right: either God causes bad things to happen, or stands by and allows bad things to happen, despite both knowing about them and being able to prevent them. If anyone else did that, they’d be acting immorally. But the running theme in these comments is that God has to be good, so they come up with excuses for why our usual moral reasoning or standards of civilized behavior don’t apply in this case.

And once again, congratulations to The Atheist Experience. I have no idea why this particular segment was picked up by so many sources all of a sudden, but I hope it helps spread the word about a good show.

I’d Rather Have a Long List of Scary Warnings than Nothing at All

I recently participated in a coversation—or maybe I’m conflating two or more conversations, but no matter—in which my interlocutor said that she prefers alt-med natural remedies because mainstream drugs all have a long list of scary potential side effects.

But when I asked whether alt-med drugs actually lower cholesterol or help prevent heart attacks or whatever they claim to do, she said that people who sell alternative medicines tend to avoid making medical claims. They’ll say the product “enhances well-being” or some such, but not “this product helps regulate LDL”.

Because what happens is this: if you make a specific claim about physiological effects or the like, that’s a medical claim, and the FDA expects you to back it up. So Pfizer comes along and says, “this new drug, XYZ, improves blood-clotting.” The FDA says, “Oh, yeah? Show me.” And so Pfizer performs studies, or cites independent studies, that show that yes, as a matter of fact, patients who receive XYZ tend to clot better than patients who don’t, even after taking into account other possible explanations, like luck or the placebo effect. And the FDA says “All right, you’ve made your case. You can claim that XYZ improves blood-clotting in your advertisements.” At least, that’s how we want it to go; how we hope that it goes.

Unfortunately, the world is complicated, and it’s never as simple as “take this drug and you’ll get better.” Different people have different bodies and react to things differently—for instance, I have a friend who doesn’t drink caffeine because it puts him to sleep. So at best you’ll have “take this drug, and it’ll most likely help, but it might not do anything.” More often, you get a drug that does what it’s intended to do in the majority of cases, but also has a list of possible, hopefully rare, side effects. But the more participants in the study (which is good), the greater the chance that one of them will have a heart attack or something that can be plausibly be attributed to the drug being studied. So the Scary List O’ Adverse Effects grows.

So yeah, traditional herbal remedies that don’t have words like “vomiting” or “stroke” on the label look appealing by comparison. But that’s only because the people selling the herbs aren’t required to test them, or to publish the negative results. If someone out there did make a specific claim, like “echinacea helps relieve flu symptoms”, and the FDA said “Oh, yeah? Show me”, and they showed ’em, and ran tests and studies and such, there would almost certainly be some adverse side effects to report. If you’re not seeing any, then either someone’s hiding them, or else no one’s looked for them.

In the real world, everything has problems. Saying you prefer alternative remedies to conventional medicine because it doesn’t have a scary list of adverse effects is like getting your financial advice from a psychic instead of an investment banker because instead of scary disclaimers about lawsuits and patents and the possibility of losing all your money, she just has the friendly statement “For entertainment purposes only.”

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?