Northern Ireland culture is apparently cuckoo

The Culture Minister for Northern Ireland is a born-again Christian kook who has decided that the Ulster Museum is insufficiently respectful of the notion that a magic man in the sky poofed the universe into existence in 4004 BC — the farmers on the plains of Mehrgarh and the potters of Mesopotamia were probably greatly surprised to be conjured out of chaos so abruptly, their shock only exceeded by the later confused state of Egypt’s Sixth Dynasty, which was simultaneously exterminated by a great flood from that psychopath, Jehovah, and also continued unbroken with no notice of their extinction for another 150 years. Resilient folk, those Egyptians.

Anyway, the nutcase in question, Nelson McCausland, has demanded more attention be paid to his clueless creation myth. No, not the interesting myth with Fomorians and Fir Bolg and the Tuatha de Danaan, not even the one with frost giants and cows licking people into being, but some weird Hebrew fairy tale.

Nelson McCausland, who believes that Ulster Protestants are one of the lost tribes of Israel, has written to the museum’s board of trustees urging them to reflect creationist and intelligent design theories of the universe’s origins.

The Democratic Unionist minister said the inclusion of anti-Darwinian theories in the museum was “a human rights issue”.

McCausland defended a letter he wrote to the trustees calling for anti-evolution exhibitions at the museum. He claimed that around one third of Northern Ireland’s population believed either in intelligent design or the creationist view that the universe was created about 6,000 years ago.

Weird. I had no idea the Protestants of Northern Ireland and our Native Americans all belonged to the same peripatetic tribe. Or that preaching ignorance and lies was a human right that must be supported by the government.

At least the appeal to a majority ruling on science was familiar creationist nonsense. When will these loons learn that museums and schools should only teach the stories that are sensible, rational, and right and not simply every random every eruption of lunacy that some deluded clique finds compatible with their dogma?

You will not be surprised to learn that McCausland is a member of DUP, and is a Paisleyite, another crazy creationist Bible-walloper. He also uses the same justification of appeal to the mob to defend his views on homosexuality.

I would not be a supporter of Gay Pride, and I think that in spite of attempts to portray it as an event that’s going to boost the country and increase the number of major events in the city, I think the majority of people in Northern Ireland would have great reservations and in many cases strong opposition to it.

I believe it is the will of God that relationships should be heterosexual. I believe that’s what God intended and planned. But I would not treat anyone unfairly.

It’s fascinating how often bigotry and ignorance go together. One might almost speculate that there’s a causal relationship there.

(via Pagan Prattle)

You can tell where this is going, but you can hardly believe it when it gets there

Some men have a particularly oblivious sense of privilege — these are the kinds of evil freaks who murder their children at the prospect that their ex-wife might get custody. The fact that they are men is used to blind them to the fact that there are these other human beings called women out there who have just as much right to their lives as they do.

Here’s the opening paragraph of a blog post by a self-proclaimed anti-feminist.

When men have something women have less of, such as money or power, women simply take it by force. It’s called affirmative action and feminists believe it’s right. I am not going to argue against that. I accept that as a lost cause. So instead I am going to embrace forced equality and demand it for men as well.

What do women have that men don’t? Vaginas. So poor pathetic Eivend Berge is asserting his right to rape. He’s quite open about it: “it is about time men in feminist countries such as Norway stop thinking of rape as wrong” and “Rape is equality.” You’ll find his type is fairly common among a group who call themselves “Men’s Rights” proponents, where Men’s Right seems to be to maintain economic and social inequities that benefit them.

I’m afraid he needs to learn that legal corrections to a long and ongoing history of economic oppression of women are fair and just, and not comparable to using violence to abuse and degrade and physically and emotionally harm women. I should also point out that women have lived with this fear of rape for essentially the entire history of the human race, so his self-serving manifesto isn’t exactly novel.

Just to warp your perception of rotten males a little more, some of the comments there are all about giving him tips on improving his appearance to be a better pick up artist (PUA). Sometimes I’m really embarrassed by my gender. I’m also wondering now if the fact that we’ve got our oh-so-sensitive testicles dangling gently in a place just ripe for a savage kick isn’t an example of cosmic justice, after all.

I’m ashamed of our governor

It’s not all good news: Jonathan Katz may have lost a position, but someone who had much more power to do good keeps his. Our Minnesota governor, Tim Pawlenty, is also a homophobic jerk—he just vetoed a bill that promoted some common decency, giving gay partners a few end-of-life rights and responsibilities, so gay people could make decisions about disposition of the body at the death of a partner, for instance. It was a bill that did not go so far as to legalize gay marriage, but simply acknowledged that grieving gay people ought not to be barred from making decisions about the people they love.

And Governor Pawlenty shot down basic human decency, making noises about defining marriage as “between a man and a woman” and how he opposes efforts to “treat domestic relationships as the equivalent of traditional marriage”. He’s a rotten excuse for a human being.

But then, he is a Republican.

The pandering slimeball is angling for a presidential nomination in the next election, and he knows the only way the Republicans will pay attention to him is if he plays up more bigotry and hatred. He’s going to be sidling farther and farther rightward in the next few years, and it’s not going to be good for Minnesota.

Proud Homophobe gets just deserts

I remember Joycelyn Elders. The woman was appointed to the position of surgeon general, and when asked about masturbation at a conference on AIDS, she replied, “I think that it is part of human sexuality, and perhaps it should be taught.” It was a perfectly ordinary comment about something nearly everyone does or has done, and she got fired for it, by Bill Clinton. It was part of my disillusionment and disappointment with the Democrats.

Now look who Obama has appointed to a team to assist with the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico: Jonathan I. Katz. He’s not quite a climate change denialist, but the next best thing: he agrees that the climate is warming, that it’s anthropogenic, but tells us that it’s good for us, and we ought to stop research on it. At the same time, he’s doing research on geoengineering to counteract global warming. I’m confused. I think he’s confused.

But here’s what made me think of Joycelyn Elders. Katz is a self-admitted, flaming homophobe, and he’s proud of it. Literally. He comes right out and says it while blaming gays for killing innocent people (the deaths of gays, of course, were there own damn fault).

Unfortunately, the victims are not only those whose reckless behavior brought death on themselves. There are many completely innocent victims, too: hemophiliacs (a substantial fraction died as a result of contaminated clotting factor), recipients of contaminated transfusions, and their spouses and children, for AIDS can be transmitted heterosexually (in America, only infrequently) and congenitally. The icy road was lined with unsuspecting innocents, who never chose to ride a motorcycle. Guilt for their deaths is on the hands of the homosexuals and intravenous drug abusers who poisoned the blood supply. These people died so the sodomites could feel good about themselves.

What of those cursed with unnatural sexual desires? Must they forever suppress these desires? Yes, but this is hardly a unique fate. Almost everyone has desires which must be suppressed. Most men and women think adulterous thoughts fairly often, and find themselves attracted to members of the opposite sex to whom they are not married. Morality requires them to suppress these desires, and most do not commit adultery, though they feel lust in their hearts. Almost everyone, at one time or another, covets another’s property. They do not steal. Many people feel great anger or intense hatred at some time in their lives. They do not kill.

I am a homophobe, and proud.

This is what I don’t get. Joycelyn Elders could make an accurate, honest, and relevant comment about the fact that masturbation is a part of human sexuality, and that if we’re concerned about sexually transmitted diseases, it is a reasonable alternative outlet for sexual urges…and she got fired for it.

Jonathan Katz writes stupid and wrong comments about how gay people are killers, and says that they should completely suppress their sexual urges…and he gets a distinguished appointment from the Obama administration.

However, there is some good news here. People complained, and the administration listened: Katz has been dismissed from the position. Maybe there is some hope after all.

Now we just get to sit back and wait for the wingnuts to start complaining about the exclusion of bigotry.

One thing worse than a bigot is a sneaky, devious, lying bigot

Roger Ebert has roused the ire of the teabaggers, which is actually pretty easy to do. The occasion was a news story about a group of five privileged white kids who decided to flaunt American flags on their apparel on Cinco de Mayo, and who were sent home from school. Ebert made this comment:

Kids who wear American Flag t-shirts on 5 May should have to share a lunchroom table with those who wear a hammer and sickle on 4 July.

This prompted a series of comments from right-wingers, gloating over his disfigurement and prospects of his death. They are such a classy bunch.

In contrast, Ebert did post a classy response, explaining that the students were being deliberately provocative and offensive, and deserve the kind of rebuke he suggested.

I agree. As a certifiable expert in being provocative and offensive, I think my reaction has a special authority to it, too. I differ with how the school authorities handled it, though, and in particular, we’re chastising the students for the wrong thing. They were offensive, all right, but there are good reasons to be offensive; what seems to be ignored by everyone is that those all-American boys were also craven little cowards.

For instance, I own this nice t-shirt.

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Now, if I put my “Arrest the Pope” shirt on and walked down the street to the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary and attended Sunday Mass, I would be acting like a jerk, attempting to irritate the church attendees just because I felt like being jerkish. I might have a serious message — the Catholic hierarchy has become an immoral defender of child rape — but that doesn’t mean I should hammer every Catholic in my town with that message all the time, especially not when they are engaging in activities that have nothing to do with pedophilia, no matter how silly they are.

Provocateur that I am, I wouldn’t do that. It makes the message simply random and made with the sole intent of being rude.

On the other hand, if there were a public rally in town to proclaim the innocence of the church in all these scandals, well, then I would intentionally put the shirt on and wear it…I might even make a big sign. I’m still being rude, but it’s rudeness with a purpose, to make an issue of a problem that this rally intends to cover up. That’s fair; that’s free speech. And this is where I differ with the American flag boys.

I presume that this group of friends organized with the intent to protest the celebration of Cinco de Mayo in the public schools — that’s the only plausible explanation for their coordination. As long as they were peaceful about it and doing nothing but wearing a flag shirt, they should have been allowed to do so, and the school was in the wrong to send them home (I think they were also awfully condescending when they said they did it because they thought Mexican-American students would riot over it.) They should have been allowed to non-violently express their opinions.

But here’s the funny thing: what were they protesting? The fact that Mexican-American students are proud of their heritage? That’s where the cowardice of these students shows up — that is a ridiculous and petty thing to complain about. Do they also show up on St Patrick’s Day in orange, flogging leprechaun dolls? Are they resentful of the fact that some Minnesotans celebrate their ancestry on Syttende Mai? When you actually confront these teabaggers with the absurdity of complaining about fellow Americans taking pride in their families, they wilt and collapse and start making pathetic excuses.

There’s the “they wear those shirts all the time” excuse. So it was just an accident that they all happened to wear their jingo on that particular day.

Dariano said her son has at least four T-shirts with American flags that he wears often and did not try to cause any conflict at school.

Well, gosh, Wally. When they discovered their entirely unintentional faux pas, then the boys should have been quick to affirm their sensitivity and do something about it, don’t you think? That’s not the case, though; it’s a lie. Rather, they were quick to assert their indignation.

Then there’s the “it’s unfair to the boys” excuse.

“I’m more hurt than anything,” she said. “It is so hurtful and disrespectful the way this has turned. These are American kids.”

Note the oblivious attitude: this mother is talking about her son when she says “American kids”. Guess what? The Mexican-American students at the school are also American kids!

Note also the “give me respect” excuse, which is carried to a ludicrous extreme.

The boys told Rodriguez and Principal Nick Boden that turning their shirts inside-out was disrespectful, so their parents decided to take them home.

Man, these teabaggers are so focused on respect: it has to be given to their kids when they’re being pointlessly provocative, and it even has to be given to their shirts. (And that is also weird: once upon a time, the act of chopping up the symbol of the flag and using it as clothing was regarded as disrespectful. Is turning it inside out more disrespectful than cutting, folding, sewing, and putting a row of buttons up the middle of the flag?) The only objects that don’t deserve any respect are the Mexican-American students. The Fox News report is entirely about the white boys and how their rights were trampled upon, but the browner part of the student body seems to be ignored.

I concede that it was wrong of the school to silence their valiant message of silent protest. The sad thing now, though, is that the boys and their families are suddenly silencing themselves, realizing that their message might have been a little, errm, misplaced, and when exposed to the bright light of day, looks an awful lot like racism. Instead of hiding behind weak excuses, they ought to be proudly declaring the object of their protest: the existence of brown-skinned students of Mexican descent, and the celebration of a culture different than their own. Own your bigotry, boys! Don’t run away when you’re asked to articulate it! Unless, that is, you realize that you are bigots, and are a little ashamed of it all now.

Say…one of those boys is named “Dariano”. That sounds suspiciously Italian, like maybe some of his ancestors were…immigrants, and not just any immigrants, but ones with darker complexions who spoke English poorly or with funny accents. I sure hope he doesn’t celebrate Columbus Day.

I’m glad I’m not at risk of ever getting a job offer from a Catholic university

Not that I’d ever apply; I wouldn’t ever want to work in an instition with an irrational commitment to a weird medieval superstition. It leads them to make all kinds of strange decisions.

Marquette University has just done that. They’ve been searching for a new dean for the college of arts and sciences, and had made an offer to a Dr Jodi O’Brien, a professor of sociology at Seattle University. They have now abruptly yanked the offer off the table and announced that the search has failed.

The reason? Partly, it’s because she’s a lesbian. Marquette does have other gay faculty, though, so that’s not the whole story — the other part of the story is that she actively studies the sociology of homosexuality, and has written papers that favor gay marriage.

“I guess if she was a lesbian abut her research was on microorganisms, she might have been acceptable,” Franzoi said. But he said scholars study issues that are important to them and O’Brien’s sexual orientation makes her scholarship related to gays and lesbians important to her.

“This issue has always been a problem with Marquette officials. This is just the latest and probably most publicly embarrassing of its kind.”

Apparently, you can be a lesbian at Marquette as long as you aren’t too lesbian. People outside the university seem to have applied pressure — donors, possibly, who don’t want to hire administrators who are insufficiently conservative.

And that’s why I’m happy to stay clear of private universities with peculiar affiliations. They have a rather limited definition of academic freedom.

Et tu, Canada? It must be dangerous to teach while lesbian.

Whatever happened to “first, do no harm”?

The American Academy of Pediatrics has come up with a compromise on female genital mutilation.

International human rights organization Equality Now is stunned by a new policy statement issued by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), which essentially promotes female genital mutilation (FGM) and advocates for “federal and state laws [to] enable pediatricians to reach out to families by offering a ‘ritual nick’,” such as pricking or minor incisions of girls’ clitorises. The Policy Statement “Ritual Genital Cutting of Female Minors”, issued by the AAP on April 26, 2010, is a significant set-back to the Academy’s own prior statements on the issue of FGM and is antithetical to decades of noteworthy advancement across Africa and around the world in combating this human rights violation against women and girls. It is ironic that the AAP issued its statement the very same day that Congressman Joseph Crowley (D-NY) and Congresswoman Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) announced the introduction of new bipartisan legislation, The Girls Protection Act (H.R. 5137), to close the loophole in the federal law prohibiting FGM by making it illegal to transport a minor girl living in the U.S. out of the country for the purpose of FGM.

Nice bit of accommodationism there. “We’ll just mutilate baby girls a little bit, to make the misogynist patriarchal assholes happy.” Well, we have no obligation to make misogynist patriarchal assholes happy at all, especially not when it involves waving scalpels about in the genitals of children.

Check out Equality Now, if you’re unfamiliar with the organization. It’s got the most depressing mission ever, but one of the most important, too. Also go to their urgent alert page, where they have names, addresses and phone numbers of AAP board members who should be flooded with messages (they also provide a sample letter) telling them what an awful, horrible, evil decision they have made.

By the way, the director of AAP and both board members you should write to…all male. Somehow, I’m not surprised.

By the way, also read the official AAP policy statement. It’s got another bizarre bit of pandering:

In addition, “mutilation” is an inflammatory term that tends to foreclose communication and that fails to respect the experience of the many women who have had their genitals altered and who do not perceive themselves as “mutilated.” It is paradoxical to recommend “culturally sensitive counseling” while using culturally insensitive language. “Female genital cutting” is a neutral, descriptive term.

It also has several diagrams of the results of the procedure, appropriately labeled “Female genital mutilation.”

They do say that they offer “nicking” as a compromise to avoid greater harm, so that the parents are satisfied and do not go looking for more severe forms of mutilation to perpetrate on their children. It is not enough. Their whole policy is designed to avoid confronting misogynistic bigots with the horrendous consequences of their traditions.

Catholic priorities

John C. Nienstedt is the Archbishop of the Diocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, which makes him the ranking Catholic god-botherer in the region, I guess. We’re supposed to call him “Most Reverend” — priests are really good at attaching laudatory titles to themselves — but I won’t be doing that, ever. “Most Intolerant,” maybe, or “Most Boneheaded”.

Anyway, he has an op-ed in the Star Tribune. The Catholic Church is facing some rough times right now, with declining attendance, a dearth of priests, and a scary percentage of the people willing to become priests being clearly socially and sexually dysfunctional, so you’d expect him to write something about the real problems the Catholics are grappling with right now, doing something to bolster the flagging reputation of the priesthood. And I guess he thought he did: he wrote about gay marriage.

Those gays, getting married—it just wrecks my thrillingly heterosexual marriage to think that two men or two women might be having fun out there, together. And now it’s wrecking the church, too!

Actually, Nienstedt just makes the same boring and false arguments against gay marriage that they always do. This is probably more a matter of distraction.

Citizen: “Hey, there’s a priest raping a child, stop him!”

Priest: “No, look over there: there are two adults trying to engage in consensual sexual activities in the context of shared legal and social obligations! Stop them, quick, before they get insurance! It’s an EMERGENCY!!!“

And really, Nienstedt makes some pathetic arguments. He’s promoting a Minnesota marriage amendment that would dictate that the only true and valid long-term relationships to be recognized by the state involve strictly one (1) man and one (1) woman. Look at what he claims:

We might learn caution from experience. Back in the early 1970s, the experts told us that no-fault divorce would liberate women from bad marriages without affecting anyone else. We now know that as many as one-third of women fall into poverty with their children as a result of divorce. Social science caught up late with the common-sense wisdom that children need a mom and a dad working together to protect them.

…says Father Nienstedt, high-ranking member of a blatantly patriarchal hierarchy. Why do women fall into poverty after a divorce? Because they are discriminated against in the workplace, because they get the bulk of the financial obligation in caring for any children, and because many men (and, I suspect, especially the men women want to divorce) fail to meet their responsibilities in contributing to child care. The problem isn’t divorce, the problem is a patriarchal culture, which the church does nothing to reverse and actually promotes, and the male privilege that allows fathers to escape with diminished responsibility.

Divorce is a good and reasonable solution to marital unhappiness, unless, of course, you’re part of a culture that wants to keep women dependent on a mate.

Hey, maybe one tack we should take in promoting gay marriage is to instead play up gay divorce: we have to give gay men and lesbians the ability to break their bonds with their partners. Oh, and by the way, we’ll have to let them get married first before they can divorce.

Throughout history, human beings in virtually every society have recognized that, to make a marriage, one needs a man and a woman. What is more, it has long been acknowledged that marriage is not just about the happiness of adults but concerns the well-being of society — that is, the common good. Marriage exists in civil law primarily in order to provide communal support for bringing mothers and fathers together to care for their children. Same-sex unions cannot serve this public purpose.

Forget the ignorant ahistorical argument in the first part — gay marriage hasn’t been that unusual, and it’s particularly surprising that a Christian priest would fail to have noticed the frequency of polygamy in the Old Testament — and let’s consider his “common good” argument. I would actually concede that one essential function of a stable human society is that it provide a mechanism to care for our offspring, with their ridiculously long period of dependency. Marriage is one method for accomplishing that, by pairing two people together to share the burden of child-rearing. One method…so does this priest support the idea of communes? That’s even more efficient, and I can tell you that just two people, separated from other family support by the demands of their jobs, really have to struggle to keep their sanity. This is hard work, not that a celibate bureaucrat would know.

And I think that if you look back over history, most cultures have seen it as the responsibility of a whole tribe to help raise children, not just two people. This convention of assigning all responsibility to just two and only two, who are necessarily in a heterosexual relationship, is new and weird.

I think also that if you actually look at civil law, most of the reasons for getting married are economic. Children are just one aspect of that law. If marriage just exists in the law to promote children, then what about all those marriages that are childless? Are they invalid? Maybe it’s not obvious to a priest, but people do like to be together for reasons other than procreation. I’m done with having children, my youngest daughter graduates from college in two weeks, and no, my marriage will not be dissolving at that moment. Or ten years from that moment. It won’t be over until I drop dead. And you know what? I like it!

As for the claim that “same-sex unions cannot serve this public purpose”: why not? Lesbians have it easy, artificial insemination can get them pregnant; gay men don’t have that option yet (give the biologists a few more years, though…), but even so, adoption is possible, and sometimes, gay men even have children by previous relationships. Two men, two women, a man and a woman, a cooperative commune of many men and women…they can all serve that public purpose. Oh, and in all those cases, who is having sex with whom is pretty much irrelevant to the children, since these typically are not Catholic Sunday schools, so the children won’t be participating in the sex. This argument is a complete non-starter.

Would you believe Nienstedt’s argument gets even worse?

What will happen to children growing up in a world where the law teaches them that moms and dads are interchangeable and therefore unnecessary, and that marriage has nothing intrinsically to do with the bearing and raising of children? Do we really want first-graders to be taught that gay marriage is OK, or that the influence of a mother and a father on the development of a child somehow doesn’t matter?

I think a world where moms and dads are interchangeable in their roles and responsibilities in child-raising would be a fine place to live. Aside from nursing (and again, biologists will fix that someday, too), men and women can change diapers, attend PTA meetings, play ball, give hugs, cook, and read bedtime stories equally well, with individual variation. Interchangeability does not imply that they are unnecessary. I grew up with a mom and dad who could both read to me; that did not imply to my mind that they were therefore both superfluous.

We already know that marriage is not intrinsically about having kids. People have them without getting married, married people stay married without having them. Children grow up just fine with that simple fact; I know I did.

And dear sweet jebus yes, I want first-graders to be taught that gay marriage is OK! Teach them that gay people are fine and normal and ordinary, that old limiting stereotypes are hateful and foolish, and that only beastly decrepit bigots sit around whining that someone else might be finding happiness in life. Let’s steer young kids away from the hypocritical joylessness so well represented in Catholicism at an early age!

And finally, that last line…it’s a lie. No one is planning to teach that parents don’t matter, since they do — parents matter profoundly. I do think, though, that we can’t let repressed celibate jerks dictate who can be parents, and deprive people who might want to be parents of the privilege simply because a priest does not approve of their love.

Mississippi Misery

There are good people living in Mississippi, I just don’t know how they can bear it.

At least this first story can’t be blamed on Mississippi. Fred Phelps is planning to picket Constance McMillen’s graduation. This will be very interesting … how will the town and her fellow students respond? Will they be cheering the Phelpsians on, or will they finally get a good look in the mirror?

Residents of the state can be blamed for this one: another lesbian student, Ceara Sturgis, had her photo expunged from her high school yearbook. Her crime was dressing up in a formal tuxedo while being female.

These are just the travails of the lesbian women of Mississippi. Somehow, I expect the life of a heterosexual woman probably isn’t much better.