Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is

As you probably know, the House of Representatives last week passed their version of the health reform bill. It's been knocked on liberal blogs, for good reason: the public option is weak, it mandates that people who can't afford insurance buy it anyway, basic women's health care is not on the list of things that companies are required to cover, and it prohibits companies that have any federal subsidies from covering abortion.

(It does prohibit denial of coverage based on pre-existing conditions, which is good.)

Some of these things are steps forward, however small. Some of them are steps backward. Which is why I ask conservatives who are bemoaning the bill's passage:

How many "babies" are you willing to let die in order to kill a Democratic President's health care plan?

How many "babies" are you willing to let die in order to prevent the spread of "socialism!!1!"?

How many "babies" are you willing to let die in order to protect insurance companies' right to profit from the most basic needs of others?

Put your money where your mouth is and try to get the bill passed. Read More......

Election 2009; Glenn Beck's Race Baiting

Assorted thoughts:

Some gains and some losses. Gains are summarized here; most notably, Referendum 71 in Washington, which establishes domestic partnerships as equal to marriage in all but name, appears to have passed by two points. The most notable loss is, of course, Maine, where the pro-marriage side lost by almost six points.

What we learned from Maine. Main(e)ly, that even a good grassroots campaign that's willing to show the real people that the issue affects and to combat the other side's lies won't always win. Or perhaps that it takes a campaign almost entirely funded by the religious establishment, which breaks financial disclosure laws and lies in all its ads, in order to beat that campaign.



I admit that the standard comfort of "the voters who supported it are old and time will bring equality" isn't too helpful on a day like this.

(Commenter Alex at the BTB link does make the ironic point that the right-wingers' push to strip a minority of their civil rights "because otherwise the children would have to hear about it in school" will be the subject of every social studies class discussion today.)

Not election-related, and I don't like to talk about Glenn Beck, but I was linked this so I might as well: Much has been made of Beck's ranting yesterday that black Obama supporters were "taught to be slaves," and its obvious offensiveness to descendants of slaves who still feel the effects of slavery. While his subsequent comment that progressives like Andy Stern (of the SEIU) were "taking 'you' to a place to be slaughtered" has likewise been called out for being an obvious lie, I haven't seen the same criticism made about its race-baiting - Andy Stern is Jewish, and that absolutely reads as a Holocaust reference. As if those weren't prevalent enough already with right-wingers crying that the President will put them in concentration camps and that health care reform is like a Nazi plan. Read More......

Interesting

The European Court of Human Rights has just ruled that Italy cannot display crucifixes in public schools. It's an interesting case because the arguments run so close to those for and against religion in schools in the United States - only they don't split along the same lines.

Here's a little quiz - which side used these arguments?

1. Values of a democratic society
2. Restricts rights of parents to educate their children
3. Discrimination
4. Promotes pluralism
5. Not a sign of belief
6. Religious rights of children
7. European values
8. Europe is trying to crush our values
9. Opponent is ideological
10. Schools must observe religious neutrality

Answers: 2, 6 and 10 are the secular side. 5, 8 and 9 are the religious. 1, 3, 4, and 7 are both.

The most interesting crossovers are, of course, 2 and 6. Here in the United States, it's more common to see religious supremacists saying that prohibiting prayer in schools restricts them from raising their child the way they see fit. It's one of the eternal paradoxes of the "parental rights" school of thought (another one is that it mostly consists of attempts to legalize child abuse): the same people campaigning for more freedom to educate their children without the structural support of the public school system (when it's about sex ed or evolution) are the ones who don't seem to think they're up to the task of teaching the kids about God or, you know, sending them to religious school.

Except of course it's not a paradox at all, because it's never about educating their own children. If it were, they would be content with no religious opinions being forced on their children (no school prayer, comp sex ed), leaving a space for those to be taught outside the public classroom. It's always about using their power to make sure others conform. Same reason you see 6 crop up among this lot when the students are Christian and want to make public display of their faith. (4, 5 and 7, from the religious side, are the same thing we see here when crosses are used as memorials to non-Christian soldiers - because if they obscure the fact that non-Christians serve their country, that's just an unfortunate side effect.)

Echoes of Engel v. Vitale and Lynch v. Donnelly - the former banning school prayer, the latter okaying religious decorations on public property. In the latter we get the same argument that a government-sponsored representation of Jesus has a secular purpose and doesn't advance a religion, while in the former we have a decision that even a non-denominational prayer offends atheists. In the interim (1962-1984) we of course had almost a complete turnaround on the court, which has got only more conservative in the twenty-five years since Lynch. I'm actually afraid for what could happen if school prayer comes up again.

(The state of Italy was fined, but as of yet has not been ordered to remove the crucifixes.) Read More......

Values Voters Minues the Values

One characteristic that makes funadamentalists unique is their willingness to stick to their religious dogma regardless of how illogical it seems. Even when confronted by tons of reasoning and new ideas, they refuse to change their perspective, or are at least hesistant to do so. While I'm not a big fan of this sort of philosophy, I do have to give them credit for sticking to their values when it's hardest to do so. After all, what good are values if you abandon them the second doing so becomes tough?

This idea of sticking to one's views at all costs does, however, come with a huge sense of arrogance and an attitude that essentially says, "I'm right, you're wrong, and everything I do is the work of God himself." Obviously, this sort of attitude is consistent with a feeling of religious self-righteousness. But in order to feel self-righteous in a religious sense, one must act in a manner consistent with religious teachings. So how would a fundamentalist Christian go about achieving this high sense of self-worth? Just live a life consistent with the teachings of the bible.

That's easy, right? Good Christians should be following the bible anyway, so an even better Christian should be at least that christlike. But what happens if some of your views don't match up with those taught in the bible? If that's the case, you have a few options:

1. Don't pretend to be God's gift to the world. This is the most sensible option. If your views don't agree with those of the bible, it's perfectly fine to admit that there's a discrepancy, and that there's some value in thinking for oneself.

2. Pick and choose. The bible contains tons of wisdom, but it also has tons of stuff that aren't as admirable. (God is egotistical and even genocidal on more than a few occasions.) So, how do you resolve this? Just ignore the parts you don't like. Sure the bible encourages things like polygamy, animal sacrifice, and executing rape victims, but the bible's a lot easier to follow when you just ignore those parts.

3. Twist the verses around. Have a belief, but can't find a biblical passage to prove that every thought that pops into your head is inspired by God himself? Fix this problem by taking a random biblical passage (either in or out of context) and twist around its meaning until it justifies your belief system. This technique is particularly fun if you can arrange it so that it's interpreted to mean something with absolutely no relation to its original meaning. For example, you could interpret a passage about incestuous, same-sex rape as justification for centuries of race-based slavery and persecution. (I wouldn't recommend using that suggestion exactly as stated, seeing as it's already been done.)

4. Rewrite the bible. Not everyone has the same viewpoint... unless you edit everyone else's viewpoint. At first glance, this may appear to be a ridiculous idea, but there is some logic to it. After all, the bible was originally in languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic. Surely some errors must be present in it after centuries of translation and having scribes rewrite it by hand. Good faith efforts to correct these mistakes are reasonable, but surely nobody would even think about changing the bible to suit his or her own personal political beliefs. This idea is so sacrilegious that nobody in his or her right mind would actually do it. That being said, there are a lot of people who are out of their minds.

Enter Conservapedia, one of the internet's more organized collections of nutcases. For those of you who don't know, Conservapedia is a website created by Andy Schlafly as a response to what he viewed as liberal bias on Wikipedia. (Schlafly's mother is the infamous Phyllis Schlafly.) Conservapedia itself is basically an encyclopedia of conservative opinions, rather than of facts and verifiable information. (There are also many objectively accurate articles, but they tend to be about a sentence or two long.) And the opinions expressed on this website are rather extreme. In fact, sometimes it's hard to tell if their views are serious, or if they're just satires poking fun at conservatives.

Back to the subject of screwing with the bible, Conservapedia has found a new way to put the "fun" in "fundamentalism". Simply put, through what's known as the Conservative Bible Project , Conservapedia is attempting to translate a conservative edition of the bible. Evidently, the book most used to arbitrarily justify conservative positions was too liberal for them, so they felt the need to rewrite it with the following guidelines:

1. Framework against Liberal Bias - Liberal bias, of course just means anything Schlafly doesn't want to follow.
2. Not Emasculated - Why use gender-neutral language? Godforbid any theological issue should be made as relevant as possible to more than half of the world's Christians.
3. Not dumbed down - Even the newest parts of the bible are centuries old, and there have been many generations of people who've devoted their lives to trying to better understand them. Still today, we've got plenty of unanswered biblical questions. If that's the result of a dumbed down text, I can't imagine what a more complex version would look like, and I'd have to question how deeply the bible could be understood as part of a project led by a man who isn't sufficiently formally educated in the field of ancient languages.
4. Utlize Powerful Conservative Terms - Isn't that just another way of saying to add more conservative bias? So much for focusing on biblical accuracy. Then again, given Conservapedia's track record with defining the ideology of words, this may not change the ideology of the bible at all.
5. Combat Harmful Addictions - Changing terms like "cast lots" to "gamble" might be well-intentioned (and ineffective), but modern bibles already have this kind of stuff written as footnotes.
6. Accept the Logic of Hell - Because we all know that if any book argues against the existence of Hell, it's the bible.
7. Express Free Market Parables - This is necessary because Jesus healing the sick could otherwise be viewed as socialized healthcare.
8. Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages - The provided example is of the story with the line "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." If that's liberally biased, then I'm even prouder to be a liberal.
9. Credit Open-Mindedness of Disciples - There are books of the bible credited to the disciples themselves. Their own words are probably good enough for forming opinions about them.
10. Prefer Conciseness over Liberal Wordiness - I wasn't aware that conciseness was a conservative trait. But if wordiness is suggestive of liberalism, wouldn't it be more concise to take the word "liberal" out of "liberal wordiness"?

This is why you've got to love the far right. They think anything and everything is biased against them if it contains even the slightest bit of ideology that does not match their own. Read More......

Tosca and Torture

(apologies, this is so not the current story at the moment. but if I tried to keep up, I would never post anything.)

Some of you may know that I'm a major opera lover. I was thinking today, for whatever reason, about Tosca. Tosca has a scene in which one of the characters is tortured (offstage) for information about a terrorist he's suspected of harboring, while his partner Tosca, who also has the information, is onstage having the torture described to her by Scarpia the police chief and listening to his screams. He doesn't break. She does.



Now, someone in favor of torture might come out of there thinking, "Torture works. She had the information, she was psychologically tortured, and she gave it up."

Here's the thing, though. It so happens that the person by whose physical torture Tosca is mentally tortured is also an accomplice to terrorism. But if he weren't? Nothing about the situation dictates that the person being tortured offstage have anything to do with the crime - all that is necessary is that he or she be someone dear to Tosca. If Cavaradossi weren't guilty? If it were her brother, or her mother?

This is the fundamental problem with torture apologism. This is what happens when you follow the utilitarian aspect of it to its logical conclusion. The argument that one hears is that the human rights of the torture victim are secondary to the lives of the people that could be saved if "we" had that information. Doesn't even matter if each individual detainee is guilty or even knows anything. The overall set of people who would suffer is much smaller than the set of people who would not (so the argument goes) and thus torture is acceptable.

But wait. We've already seen CIA operatives threaten to kill detainees' children and rape their female relatives in order to get information out of them. What's stopping them from actually doing it, from torturing a child in the next room while one of the detainees is forced to listen until he cracks? It's only one child - hundreds or thousands of children could be saved if the supposed terrorist gives us the plans for that bombing or plane hijacking.

The situation presents two problems. One: why is it all right to torture innocent men, but not innocent children? Remember that we don't know that the people we're torturing are guilty; in fact, we know that a good number of detainees are not only innocent, but of no intelligence value. And two: why are apologists trying to deny that the detainees are human, with human feelings, while advocating the extraction of information by threats against people close to them?

It's obvious enough, but it's worth stating again: torture is not practiced to extract information. It is practiced to punish people, not for crimes, but because we don't like them.

(The other famous operatic torture scene is the one from Turandot, where, after giving her captors false information, Liù refuses to reveal what she knows and then kills herself. Oh right, but torture works.) Read More......

How To Save Yourself From Teh Gay

There is an unbelievable amount of content that can be viewed on the internet. Using this resource, you can do anything from sending electronic letters to friends, to purchasing items from sellers halfway across the world, to looking up articles for academic information, to playing video games, and anything in between. But did you know that the internet also has pornography? As hard as it is to believe, it's true. There really are such things online. They can range from oral sex between a man and a woman, to harcore sex between a man and a woman and another man and 3 more women plus a goat and a boxturtle (not that I'd know anything about that). This phenomenon of pornographic diversity is so prominent that it's been given it's own name: Rule 34. This acknowledgement of the vast variety of porn available on the internet may seem logical to the untrained eye, but in reality, all porn is the same. So, why is all porn the same? It's so simple: All pornography is part of a vast conspiracy to turn people gay, particularly the type that features sex acts between heterosexual men and women.

Some people reading this blog may be thinking something like, "Wait a second. How does watching straight porn make people gay?" The answer was explained by Michael Schwartz, the Chief of Staff for Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn and author of Gays, AIDS, and You:



Schwartz's logical skills are shown to be equally impressive throughout the speech, but unfortunately, the complete video of this speech was removed from Youtube before I finished this post. That being said, this video seems to serve as a "highlight reel" for the speech as a whole. So, without further ado, I'd like to break down Schwartz's ideas and put more thought into this he he evidently did:

But it is my observation that boys at that age have less tolerance for homosexuality than just about any other class of people. They speak badly about homosexuality. And that’s because they don’t want to be that way. They don’t want to fall into it. And that’s a good instinct.

Disregarding the fact that this is only anecdotal evidence, and that it's very plausible that attitudes regarding homosexuality are socialized, rather than instinctual, this is a pretty unconvincing statement. For argument's sake, let's assume that children do, for some reason or another, have a propensity toward homophobia. (Interestingly, in doing research for this post, I found a journal article suggesting that homophobia could be a genetically determined trait.) Even if this were the case, Schwartz's statement essentially boils down to a the following premise and conclusion: Children dislike homosexuality. Therefore, homosexuality is unhealthy.

The problem with this argument is that it's based on the implied premise that children know what's healthy for them. As we discussed previously, just because a child doesn't understand something accurately doesn't mean that it's a bad idea. Perhaps the best way to demonstrate this idea would be to look at Schwartz's argument, except replacing "homosexuality" with "eating vegetables". Children have little tolerance for eating vegetables, and they talk badly of doing so. That being said, I don't think any legitimate dietition would support the idea that avoiding the consumption of vegetables is a good idea. In short, just because kids seem to believe something doesn't necessarily mean that it's a reasonable idea.

...studies have been done by the National Institute of Health to try to prove that its genetic and all those studies have proved its not genetic. Homosexuality is inflicted on people.

If you think this is true, I dare you to go to nih.gov and prove its veracity. I did a quick search through the website and it doesn't have a well-organized listing of studies on the basis of homosexuality. What it does do, though, is provide links to other organizations' studies. The scientific perspective on homosexuality, as explained by the APA can be viewed here. Simply put, Schwartz's assertion was a flat-out lie. (On a sidenote, I looked up articles about this topic using research tools unaffiliated with the NIH, and the most commonly accepted explanation is that homosexuality is caused by interactions with the immune system of one's mother during pregnancy. There are also tons of studies analyzing potential connections between homosexuality and traits like birth order and handedness.)

And one of the things that [an ex-gay leader of a sexual orientation conversion organization] said to me, that I think is an astonishingly insightful remark. He said, 'All pornography is homosexual pornography because all pornography turns your sexual drive inwards.' Now think about that. And if you, if you tell an 11-year-old boy about that, do you think he’s going to want to go out and get a copy of Playboy? I’m pretty sure he’ll lose interest. That’s the last thing he wants.

First of all, it's the 21st century. No 11-year-old is going to go through all the trouble of illegally purchasing a pornographic magazine. As I explained earlier, the internet is for porn. Furthermore, no threat of the alleged dangers of pornography are going to deter people effectively. Similar types of fear-mongering allegations made about masturbation (i.e. it causes blindness and hairiness) have been around for a long time and masturbation is still common. Why Schwartz thinks pornography is any different is beyond my understanding.

But in all seriousness, Schwartz's friend's quote is untrue. Pornography is used to get one excited by viewing other people engaging in sexy behavior. The whole point of it is not to focus on one's own body, but instead to focus on the people depicted in the pornographic material. This is as much an example of turning one's "sexual drive inward" as getting aroused by looking at another naked individual in person. If seeing sexy scenes turned people gay, then people would become homosexual by having sex with a member of the opposite sex with their eyes open.

I know that for all these points, I am, for the most part, preaching to the choir. I seriously doubt that the idea that not all pornography is gay does not qualify as a revolutionary concept. That being said, it is important to realize that the speaker was the chief of staff for a senator. This would suggest that his perspective is influential when Senator Coburn is forming his opinions, and that his views are similar to those of Coburn to begin with. It's not as if I'm talking about some random American. Rather, I'm talking about someone with a lot of power. While Schwartz's perspective isn't exactly mainstream, it's definitely not reassuring to realize that there's a large fringe in this country that actually does agree with him. Read More......

Another Democrat pwns

Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-MI: ...And I don't think you can go forward and allow 60 percent of the insurance companies not to provide basic maternity care, in a new system we're setting up that's hopefully gonna be better than the old one. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Sen. John Kyl, R-AZ: Mr. Chairman, well, first of all, I don't need maternity care, and so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something that I don't need, and will make the policy more expensive.

Sen. Stabenow: If I could just object once with my colleague, I think your mom probably did. Read More......