The Pagans Are Coming! The Pagans Are Coming!

I like to imagine the preshow meeting going something like this:

Ed:  Our anti-gay routine has been feeling pretty stale lately.  I mean, Bryan's compared them to Nazis like a million times, and we've worked the pedophilia, bestiality, and fecal matter angles half to death.  NOM's got the "they're coming for your children" angle covered.  What can we do to keep this fresh and interesting?  What possible tone can we take that will be something new, something they haven't heard before?
Buster:  Hmm.  You're right.  Let's see...we could try to work patriotism in there?  Paint gays as anti-American.
Ed:  But we've done that before, too.
Buster:  Oh!  I know!  We'll use the patriotism angle, but we'll make it about the Founding Fathers, specifically.  Nobody can argue about the Founding Fathers, criticizing them is totally off-limits and everyone knows it, right?
Ed:  I just don't know if that's enough, though.  It's not scary enough.
Buster:  Scary?  What could be scarier than un-American Americans everywhere?  It worked for McCarthy, didn't it?
Ed:  Yeah, but...oh!  Oh, I got it.  We're talking to a really fundamentalist Christian audience here, right?
Buster:  Of course.  We've alienated pretty much everyone else who ever existed.
Ed:  Well, what is this kind of Christian scared of?
Buster:  ...non-Christians?
Ed:  Bingo, buddy.  Bingo.  So we'll make it about being unChristian!  Not just generically anti-Christian, cause that's been overplayed too, we will make it about...PAGANS.
Buster:  Ooh, I like that!  Paganism.  It calls up mental images of the decadence of Rome...
Ed: ...and specifically, the fall of Rome.  So we associate the gays with paganism, everyone thinks of Rome and falling empires, and bam!  Scared shitless and ready to do what we tell 'em.
Buster:  Falling empires...that's deep, man.
Ed:  Thanks.  So, that's our thing, then?  Founding Fathers and paganism?
Buster:  Yep.  Let's do it.

Two middle-aged white men sit behind microphones and self-righteously mansplain at each other and the viewer.  Relevant quote from 2:03:
Buster:  Dr. Gary Gates at the Williams Institute, an arm of the UCLA School of Law, [says] an estimated 3.5% of all adults in the United States identify themselves as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, and an estimated 0.3% of adults recognize themselves as transgender.  Ed, your thoughts on those figures first?
Ed:  Well, 3.5%, of course, includes bisexuals in that estimate. [Yes, because they were measuring lesbian, gay, AND BISEXUAL, it was right there in the quote.  I'm not sure I see the problem here.]  Um, most of the recent surveys in this country show that those who self-identify as homosexual men or women is lower than that [with Very Serious Concern Troll Face].  It's actually closer to 2.5%.  But some people say, well, you're just arguing over a few percentage points.  [Because you are.  Actually you're not; you're arguing over a single percentage point, and it looks very much like you're doing so just to make the queer community seem as small and easy to dismiss as possible, as if bisexual people somehow don't count as part of that community.  Which makes you even more of an inane jackass.  But do go on.]  But the point of, the point we take issue with, is not the percentage, it is the ideology behind the normalization of sexuality.  It wouldn't matter if it was 20% - if it was 20% we'd be in big trouble [yes, you would be; bigger communities have more voting clout, usually, and you'd have a lot harder time trying to stuff that many people back in the closet] - but um.  We're talking about a return to pagan sexuality, a pagan view of sexuality, that says that it doesn't matter with whom you have sex, and uh, that God's laws do not apply to us and there are no absolutes when it comes to sex.  And, frankly, even if you are not a Christian, you do not believe the Bible, or you have no real Christian viewpoint in this - we are talking about a departure from the view of our Founding Fathers, who held to the "Laws of Nature and Nature's God," as it says in the Declaration of Independence! 

You know, the Founding Fathers (and can I just say, I'm ridiculously over that phrase and the patriocentrism it's got going on?  Ugh ugh ugh.  There were women involved in the founding of this nation, asshats) used the phrase "the Laws of Nature's God" to refer to freedom and self-determination as an independent nation.  IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH TEH GAYS OR TEH BUTTSECKS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT.  It wasn't about sexuality at all.  Y'all have seized on this one tiny phrase, taken it out of context, twisted it, and are milking the everloving fuck out of it to try to promote your Dominionist aims.  For the record, it's part of a much longer sentence, called the preamble to the Declaration of Independence - you may have heard of it? - which goes like this:

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

In this context, they're talking about more of a philosophical question of rights and freedoms and such, in contradiction to such philosophies of governance as the whole divine right of kings thing.  It's not about Christianity.  It's not about the Bible.  It's about countering the idea that the Creator (science hadn't really gotten to the point of explaining how we could come into existence without a creator being, therefore it was assumed almost universally that there was *some* kind of Creator.  This does not mean they all believed in the Bible or Christianity; most of the FFs were actually Deists.) had endowed certain special people with the divine right to rule, and replacing it with the idea that the Creator had endowed all people* with the divine right of self-determination and self-rule.

Which, y'know.  HAS SHIT ALL TO DO WITH THE BIBLE AND DOMINIONISM AND AMERICA-AS-A-CHRISTIAN-NATION AND ALL THE BULLSHIT YOU KEEP TRYING TO MAKE IT MEAN!  It's a POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.

Ahem.  That aside (she says, three paragraphs and much swearing later), I am cracking the fuck up at the whole "zomg pagan sexuality" thing.  This is...meant to be a problem of some kind?  In case ye olde mansplainers were unaware, there are actual, real, live Pagans in this country.  PRACTICING A PAGAN SEXUALITY ALREADY.  So.  Shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted, and has already jumped the fence and is in its partner's paddock and they're getting it on, to stretch a metaphor uncomfortably far, is not particularly effective here.

I'm also not getting why the idea that "God's laws don't apply to us" is such a thing to be afraid of.  Shouldn't a particular deity's laws only apply to those who have chosen to follow that deity in some way?  One of my favorite fantasy novels** takes place in a culture in which there are four main sub-deities, and when a person comes of age, they choose which one of them to be a devotee of, and there are different codes of law that apply to followers of each.  Like, one character is struggling at one point with whether she should marry a guy from a different sect, because he wants her to marry him under the laws of his deity, which removes her right to divorce and makes her property his after they marry, while she wants to marry under the laws of her deity, which allow for free divorce and equitable division of property.  This makes sense to me.  I have never, and probably will never, understood why the laws of one religious tradition should apply to those not of that tradition.

Lastly, let me correct a misconception here.  Saying that pagan sexuality has no absolutes when it comes to sex is deeply incorrect.  This pagan, at least, has precisely one absolute when it comes to sex: consent.  Affirmative, explicit, overt consent (in whatever form that takes for a given partnering) must exist prior to and during all sexual activity.  That's it.  That's all.  And I even like to think this is an absolute we could agree on (although sadly I'm probably wrong)!  So I propose an experiment:  Let's try out this "pagan sexuality/pagan view of sexuality" that you're so afraid of.  Based on the single absolute I've put forth here.  Give it, say, ten years?  Of this as the sexual norm.  See if the Universe disintegrates or the Earth spins from its axis or anything catastrophic.  If so, I will personally buy billboards all over the nation proclaiming how right you were.  If not, you have to STFU and quit using my religion as a scare tactic to make people hate my sexuality.  Okay?  Okay.

Edited to add: Now that you've read the post, look at the title again.  Am I the only one who giggles and goes "Damn right, we are" at that? ^_^
*In the sense that "all people" meant at the time, which is to say, all white landowning males, more or less.
**Talyn, by Holly Lisle.  Trigger warnings for rape, sexual abuse, and torture.  It does, however, pass the Bechdel test, multiple times over, and while the main love pairing is hetero, it involves them as equals sharing their different skills to defeat the Big Bad, so.  Pretty awesome.  Magic and war and infiltration. 

Feed the Witch!

So, those who actually pay attention to blog sidebars (a minority, I know ;-) may have noticed that I've added a donate button to this little blog of mine.

Let me first say, I do not ever want to push, pressure, or guilt anyone into donating.  It's completely voluntary.  I understand how it is when money's tight (or just not there at all), trust me - that would be why I have a donate button up, in fact - and I don't ever want anyone to feel like they *have* to give when it wouldn't work out for them. 

That said, let me explain a little.  I spend a fair amount of time - averaging about an hour per post, more for ones that require a lot of sourcing or are longer/more in-depth - writing here.  I average between 3-5 posts per week depending on the week, and I'm working on upping my post frequency even further, because I love what I do here and I think it's important.  I don't want to go to an ad-supported model because ads annoy the fuck out of me, and they only work insofar as you have lots of pageviews, which is what often prompts bloggers to set their RSS feeds to snippet-only to force people to click through, and I fucking *hate* that.  So I won't ever do it.  But, as I'm trying to transition from unemployed to self-employed, I could use some support of the financial variety.

Understand this blog will always remain ad-free and free to access.  All I ask is, if you value what I'm doing here and your financial situation allows you to comfortably do so, toss a few bucks my way once in awhile. 

The donate button takes you to Paypal, where you can type in your donation amount, then use your paypal account or a credit card to send it along to me.  If anyone's interested in a subscription-type recurring donation, let me know and I can create a button for that, too. 

Whether you can donate or not, whether you choose to or not even if you can, thank you for being here, for your support in reading, pageviews, and comments.  I appreciate you, my readers.  From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

More Race-Based Antichoice Propaganda

Remember these?  And these, and these?  Playing on the statistical discrepancy between rates of abortion for white and black women, they set out to demonize black women for making reproductive choices other than giving birth to EVERY PREGNANCY NO MATTER WHAT.  Conveniently, they ignored the part about structural inequality and poverty and other issues which might explain why abortion is much more prevalent among black women than white women.

Welp, they're at it again.  Only now it's Latinas under fire.  Using the same phrase, "The most dangerous place for a Latino is in the womb," in both Spanish and English, with a silhouette of a child and smaller polaroid-style pictures of babies' faces and a pregnant woman's belly (curiously, the woman is headless/faceless; it's almost like they don't want people thinking about the woman, only her body and specifically her uterus), the campaign is unveiling this weekend in Los Angeles, CA. 

The group behind it, as usual, cites statistics, showing that Latinas are 2.7 times more likely to get an abortion than non-Hispanic whites.  And as usual, that's thrown out there without any discussion of racism, systemic inequality, poverty, employment problems, access to contraception, etc which might, just a tiny bit, maybe in some way contribute to a woman's decision to abort rather than carry a pregnancy to term. 

As I said before, if you really want to address this discrepancy, work on the CAUSES of the disproportionate rate of unwanted pregnancy/inability to carry wanted pregnancies to term.  Demonizing Latinas who choose to abort like this is just fucked-up, and it's not going to help*.


*You know who is helping?  Planned Parenthood and all their low-cost/free/sliding-scale contraception and other sexual health services.  Suck on that, anti-choice assholes.

Rick Perry: Still Not Getting the Difference Between Politicians and Priests

Holding one's very own explicitly Christian prayer rally - even when one is an elected official - is one thing.  Holding a prayer rally to which one invites the leaders of every state in one's purportedly-secular nation is kind of another thing entirely.

Not that that matters to Rick Perry, the Governor of Texas. 

I have sort of the impression that Perry's mental representation of governing a state looks like this:

1. Pray really hard
2. ????
3. Profit!  All the state's problems will be solved!

It's also the height of disingenuous to claim that it's an "apolitical Christian prayer meeting," when, as I said, Perry specifically invited all 49 other governors, "as well as many other national and Christian political leaders."  Does that sound apolitical to anyone else?  Bueller?  Bueller?  Protip: If you want to call your event apolitical, maybe you shouldn't feature dozens of political leaders as specially-invited guests.  That tends to blur the line a bit.

But you know what really gets me?

That fucker put his rally on my birthday.  >:-(

Rick Perry can go un-fuck himself.  Anyone know if there are term limits in Texas? 

At least we know he's gotten three no's from his fellow governors so far.  Here's hoping the event falls flat on its church-state-conflating face.

Bleh.

Sorry, all.  Meant to be back posting on Tuesday, but it's been a shitty week.  It seems I take longer to recuperate after a socially-intense four-day trip than I thought?  Yeah anyway.  Giving myself through the weekend for genuine mental health time (as opposed to flogging myself for not posting OMG WHAT ARE YOU DOING CHECKING TUMBLR FOR THE MILLIONTH TIME TODAY YOU HAVE POSTS TO WRITE - strangely enough, that doesn't actually help me recover faster) and will hopefully be back in full form come Monday. 

(Of course, now that I've said this, tomorrow will be awesome and I'll be posting left right and center and be able to queue posts for all through next week by Sunday night.  Because that's just how my life is right now.  >.< /self-pity)

Love and light, hope everyone has an awesome weekend.  See you Monday.

Don't burn the place down while I'm gone!

I'm headed down to SoCal this weekend for my cousin's wedding.  Sadly, there will be no open bar.  (It's a Mormon wedding.)  But it means I'll be gone from Thursday morning through to Monday night.  No new posts while I'm away, and apologies if I'm slow responding to comments, since I'm not taking my laptop, just my phone.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, darlings!  I'll see y'all next week.  Try not to burn the place down while I'm gone, ok kids? ;-)

San Francisco's Circumcision Ban

The City of San Francisco will have on its next ballot a measure that would ban circumcisions performed on minors in that jurisdiction.  There is nothing in the proposed language that would allow for religious exemptions for Jewish or Muslim families wishing to circumcise their sons for religious reasons. 

The legal blogs are all over this, discussing it in terms of both parental rights and religious rights.  (It's honestly pretty dense reading, I didn't get through all of it, and they reference quite a number of other cases.  But here's a good roundup for the curious.)  I had declared myself cautiously in favor of the ban in conversations with friends/family, but in the ensuing discussions, I discovered I actually felt far stronger about it than I'd thought.

It still bothers me a little that there's no religious exemption.  Being of a minority faith which is still struggling in many ways to be treated fairly under the law, I find the idea of laws that ban a practice originating in a particular religion to be troubling. 

On the other hand, the vast majority of circumcisions in the U.S. are not done for religious reasons, but for reasons like "not looking different," or "so he looks like his father," or "just because that's what's done."  Given that circumcision offers only minimal, mostly potential health benefits (the US Academy of Pediatrics does not recommend routine circumcision) and is generally a cosmetic procedure, why is it acceptable for parents to choose such an intimate bodily modification for an infant incapable of consent?  When a mother was featured on TV last week for having had her 8-year-old daughter given Botox injections, there was a righteously outraged wave of condemnation.  How can we logically condemn one parent for having a minimally-invasive, semi-permanent (Botox injections fade after about six months, IIRC) cosmetic procedure done on a child, while accepting a much more intimate and absolutely permanent *surgical* cosmetic procedure performed on days-old infants without comment?

And I even find it harder and harder to advocate for a religious exemption, the more I consider it.  Those who would have female "circumcision" - more accurately described as female genital mutilation - performed on their children are not permitted to do so (it's legally banned in California, at least), deep-held cultural values notwithstanding.  Which makes it logically inconsistent to advocate upholding the ban on FGM without exception, while wanting a religious exemption for a circumcision ban.

So I suppose in the end, it comes to this:  I don't believe parents should be making permanently-body-altering decisions for their children, period.  I don't care what religion the parents hew to, or what their cultural beliefs dictate they do to their kids.  It's unethical, to perform such procedures on those too young to independently decide for themselves.  If people choose to have body modifications made as adults, that's their prerogative.  If you want to get circumcised, go for it.  Have fun.  But something like that should require active, informed consent, and an infant is absolutely incapable of giving such.

What do you think?  I'd like to hear other perspectives on this.

Your Rights End Where Mine Begin

How is this a difficult concept to grasp?  I would think it would be pretty simple.  Your right to do something ends where my right not to have my life interfered with in some way begins.

But apparently this guy doesn't get the idea.  This preacher went to a local DMV in a town in Southern California one morning before it opened, and began reading the Bible and preaching to the people standing in line waiting for the office to open.  After being asked to stop by a security guard and refusing, he, and the two elders of his church who had come with him, were arrested for trespassing and interfering with a public business.  (Personally, I think he should have been cited for public nuisance, but that's just me.)

Cue, of course, the whining of the Poor! Persecuted! Christians! about how the ebil gub'mint is coming for their Bibles and soon it will be illegal to be Christian in this country.  One of the linked articles is headlined, not kidding, "Christians Arrested for Reading the Bible in Public".  Which, while technically factually correct, conveys rather a different message than what actually happened, which was that they were arrested for proselytizing, at a captive audience, on government property.

It gets better, of course.  In the end, the three jackasses weren't actually charged, and now they're suing the state for infringement on their religious freedom and free speech rights!

What is this I don't even.  Look, dudes, your right to free speech and freedom of religion does not include the right to harass people waiting in line at the goddamn DMV.  That's just not how it fucking works.  And no, as one of the linked bloggers claimed, the people in line couldn't "just" go away and come back when it opened.  Have you been to a California DMV lately?  If you don't have an appointment and you arrive after it opens, expect to wait at least an hour before you even TALK to anyone, and gods help you if there are more forms to fill out, because yes, they will make you wait through the line AGAIN to bring the forms back up (unless you get a really nice DMV person; they're out there, they really are.  Sometimes.).  So the only way to get in and out quickly, if you wanted to do anything else with your day or if you have an appointment or have to work later, is to get there at least half an hour before they open and wait in the pre-opening line.  It's completely unfair to force people to choose between coming back later and thus spending twice as long at the DMV, and listening to you force your religion on them. 

Your right to share your religion ends where their right to do business with the DMV without suffering religious harassment begins.  Because that's what public preaching to a captive audience is: religious harassment.  You give them no choice in whether to listen to you or not - that being the definition of a captive audience - and force them to listen to your religious dogma, which they may or may not share.  That is not what is meant by either "freedom of religion" or "freedom of speech".  You are absolutely, completely and totally making up out of whole cloth this imagined "right" to proselytize in this manner.  It does not exist.  Period the end.

(I can't decide if my lolsob is more lol or more sob at this; referring to captive audiences as "organic congregations" is just...just...words fail me.  Fuck, I hope that was supposed to be a joke...)

Brown v Plata: The Humanity Of Prisoners

To put it bluntly, California's justice/prison system is utterly, completely broken.  Thanks to what is widely acknowledged as the most draconian three-strikes law (on your third conviction of a felony, the sentence is life imprisonment, period, no exceptions) in the nation, our prisons are overloaded with mostly-nonviolent offenders, most of them convicted of various drug possession or sale offenses.  The state prison system was built to house around 80,000 prisoners; it currently houses nearly 150,000.  Overcrowding of such epic proportions, combined with constant budget cuts, has led to a situation in which "on average, an inmate in one of California's prisons needlessly dies every six to seven days due to constitutional deficiencies in the medical delivery system."

SCOTUS has now stepped in with a ruling yesterday, Brown v Plata, which holds that the level of overcrowding and resulting deficiencies in care violate the 8th Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.  That's how bad it is.   The document describes unthinkable, mass-storage conditions, like cramming 200 prisoners into a gymnasium supervised by only two or three officers.  It's just horrifying.

It made me remember a project I did, years ago in college, about health-care delivery systems in the prison system.  (I took a course on "structures in clinical health care" or something like that as an "Oh, shit, I need credits." sort of elective thing.)  The rates of Hep C were unthinkable, treatment was scarce, prisoners who were entering more or less healthy were leaving with lifelong diseases that the system had neither bothered to prevent nor treat.  I was horrified to read about the complete disregard with which prisoners in my state were being treated - or rather, not treated.

And yet I remember a conversation with a coworker and a customer and I on a slow day last year, still fresh in my mind, where the customer was griping about how "those damn prisoners get organ transplants paid for by my tax dollars," and "they get better medical care than I do."  And I said, first of all, that's not true, at least in this state; the medical care in our prison system is awful-to-nonexistent.  But that aside, why shouldn't prisoners receive necessary medical care?  We're not talking about cosmetic boob jobs here, we're talking about necessary-to-survive medications and operations and other forms of care.  At which point my coworker jumped in and sided with the customer, saying that it's just not fair and they fucked up so they don't deserve anything (heavily paraphrasing, but that was the gist of it). 

And I think of the criminal-in-chief of Maricopa County, Arizona, Joe Arpaio, too.  His tent cities in the desert and his chain gangs, and how strangely, and horrifyingly, he has remained in power for nearly twenty years now.  That people defend him, and reelect him, over and over, because his awful human rights abuses are "only" against prisoners (and immigrants, and anybody non-white, really) and they "deserve" it. 

Why is this okay?  Why is it commonly accepted that being convicted of a crime - without knowing what the crime was, mind you.  People end up in prison for rape and murder, yes, but also for drug possession or other nonviolent offenses, and I hope people aren't trying to make those out to be equally bad - means you deserve whatever kind of treatment those in power dish out?  Do we really want a culture where one bad decision is enough to completely strip a person of hir humanity, hir rights to decency and a certain minimum standard of treatment?  I'm sure it's only a coincidence that these views coincide with a "justice" system that is heavily racist, so most of the time when one talks about "prisoners" it's also a sort of code for "lower-class PoC", right? /sarcasm 

I can understand being angry at the fact that, for many people, prison healthcare *is* actually better than what we can access on the outside.  It's galling to know that while I, having never committed a crime, struggle along without access to any healthcare at all, people who have committed crimes are having their health care paid for on the state's dime.  So I get that envy and anger, I really do.  But I don't think the solution is to heap further abuse on the prison population.  It's not their fault our government has shitty priorities.  When there is an inequality between haves and have-nots, the solution is not to tear down those who have, it's to raise up those who have not.  And you know, maybe if we provided universal healthcare and a living wage and decent educational opportunities, not only would the people on the outside not have to be jealous of medical care afforded to prisoners, a lot of people in prison, who turned to the least-worst path available to them despite the illegality of that path, might not *be* in prison in the first place. 

Scott Walker: Privatize ALL The Things!

(For those not familiar with the "___ ALL the things!" joke, I direct your attention here.)

Scott Walker, Wisconsin's asshole-in-chief, best known for his lying scumbag tactics* during the union-busting fight a couple months ago, is back hard at work on his job of undercutting the government's ability to provide services.  This time, it's through an expansion of the proven-to-be-a-failure school vouchers program in the state, while simultaneously cutting funding for public schools.  No, seriously.  Studies and testing have shown that the students in the voucher program actually did *worse* than their counterparts in public school.  And yet Walker wants to cut funding to the better-performing program and pump public funds into the worse-performing program.

But it gets better!  Not only does he want to cut funding and expand the failed voucher program, he wants to exempt voucher students from the testing and studies that revealed the program's failure!

Dear Republicans:  You are entitled to your own opinion.  You are not entitled to your own facts.  The proper response to a study showing that your pet project isn't working like you insisted it would, is not to say "Well FINE then, we just WON'T STUDY IT ANYMORE, OKAY?  (But let's give more money to it anyway.)"

*Sealing protesters inside the Capitol building, calling in the police, sheriff dept, and even the National fucking Guard to try to intimidate protesters, insisting the union-busting bill (I typed that "union-busting bull" the first time. Ahem, paging Freud.) was absolutely! necessary! for the budget! during this time of fiscal! crisis! and then, when it became clear that wasn't going to fly, blatantly violating procedural rules and forcing through a vote on the union-busting as a separate bill in less than 5 minutes in a secret meeting, among other abuses of power.