Gay Activism and the Christian Persecution Complex: The Kirk Cameron/ Anita Bryant Delusion

August 27, 2012

At about the same time the hysterical jeremiads began circulating about the supposed discrimination against Christians by the gay-coddling American legal system, another earth-shattering story also exploded into the news: the outrage toward actor Kirk Cameron for standing by his “Biblical principles” on same-sex relationships. It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that the punditocracy brandished this backlash as a prime specimen of “liberal” intolerance, “liberal” hypocrisy, “liberal” bias in the media, and above all an anti-Christian vendetta of holocaust proportions.

Now you might figure that all show biz celebrities squander their free time in such frivolous pursuits as combating AIDS, world hunger, child abuse and neglect, homelessness, rape of the environment or rape of other human beings. But rest assured, some of them are perfectly willing to devote some precious time and energy to things that really matter, such as keeping those accursed Sodomites in their place.

If you’re old enough to remember the late Seventies  (in which case you have my sympathies, you disco duck), you may recall that “Christian” pop singer Anita Bryant waged a more-sexually-pure-than-thou rampage to overturn anti-discriminatory legislation in Florida, establish further discriminatory measures in that state and elsewhere, and in general denounce the “deviant lifestyle”  of queerness like a Good Christian.  After successfully leading a campaign in Florida to repeal a law affording protection to gays, she crowed:

Tonight the laws of God, and the cultural values of man have been vindicated. The people of Dade County, the Normal majority, have said ‘Enough, enough, enough.’

She didn’t specify whose god, which divine laws or which man, but it’s clear enough that in her worldview, gays, by existing in her direction, were blatantly assaulting her and other “normal” folks. (Bear in mind, this was not about gay marriage or any other particular right or benefit; it was just a law to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation.) In fact, she and her cohorts portrayed homosexuality as an evil cult that tried to recruit children into its Satanic rituals. (Actually, gay pedophiles are rather likely to be members of the priesthood. And anyone remember what religion they represent?)

Her triumph was short-lived, because laws recognizing gays as human were reestablished in Florida and elsewhere and in fact her activities galvanized a network of gay activists nationwide to fight harder than ever for equality. During one appearance on a TV station in Des Moines, one such activist smacked her in the face with a strawberry rhubarb pie. Whereupon she quipped, “At least it’s a fruit pie.” Nyuk nyuk nyuk.  Afterward, I heard it said that her getting her just desserts constituted the kind of persecution that Christians typically have to face in our society, and the fellow who did the serving proved that them librulz are hateful and intolerant. Seriously.

Kirk Cameron hasn’t gone on nearly such a holy tear as Bryant,  at least not yet. In fact, all the hubbub was really about a single comment, a tempest in a fruit punch bowl, if you will. Speaking to CNN’s Piers Morgan, he declared that he considered homosexuality not only “sinful” but “unnatural” and “ultimately destructive to so many of the foundations of civilization.” What foundations? Destructive how? He didn’t elaborate. He didn’t need to. He has a direct line to Yahweh Himself.

It’s become trendy among fundamentalist gay-bashers to weasel out of the guilt of being hatemongers by insisting that they “hate the sin and not the sinner”, and that’s essentially how he tried to validate his position. Sorry, won’t work. To label anyone a “sinner” is arrogant, presumptuous and judgmental (Aren’t Christians supposed to believe that only God can determine who’s a sinner?); to do so on the basis of factors beyond their control is, in addition to the above, bigoted if not downright hateful.

But chances are there wouldn’t have been such an outcry over this one ill-advised utterance had not Mr. Cameron done an encore during another TV appearance. A couple of weeks later, NBC’s Ann Curry pressed him to explain himself a little further, pointing out that many people (she didn’t say including herself) might consider his words “hate speech”.  It was a golden opportunity for him to redeem himself, to justify his beliefs or else apologize for his thoughtless words. Instead, he did more or less what simpleminded ideologues so often do when challenged: he did a Sarah — i.e., he shifted the blame to those doing the questioning:

I love all people. I hate no one. And, you know, when you take a subject and you reduce it to something like a four-second sound bite, and a check mark on a ballot, I think that that’s inappropriate and insensitive.

Pretty speech. But somehow I suspect that if I said Mr. Cameron was an unnatural critter who was destructive to civilization, he wouldn’t deem it particularly loving. Furthermore, he still tap-danced around the question he was asked, as well as the larger question of just what he’d intended to say in the first place. Why exactly does he consider gays such a threat to his particular civilization? And what exactly did he mean by “unnatural”?

The latter is no trivial pursuit; “natural” (and hence unnatural) is one of those words that mean whatever people want it to. At one extreme, nothing is unnatural, because we human beings are a part of nature, and therefore one might argue that everything we create or produce is also a part of nature — even including nuclear reactors and sneakers with lights. But when people invoke these two words for ideological purposes, they’re most often focused on the other extreme: that “natural” includes only those things that might have been around in the day of the Neanderthals — or in the Garden of Eden, if you will.

By this line of reasoning, the “unnatural” would include clothing, penicillin, razors, bicycles, spectacles, toilet tissue, the computers with which Christians disseminate their beliefs, and the Bible from which they profess to obtain them. But it would not include homosexuality. It’s common among animals of many kinds, not just humans, and most of these species have never even been exposed to the supposedly corrupting influences of pop culture or those legendary gay recruiters.

Homosexuality has always been around, and is an integral component of the foundations of civilization; yet Mr. Cameron believes that its continued existence, by some process or other, threatens the survival of civilization.  He expressed, in other words, a strong opinion on a matter about which he is, in fact, quite ignorant. There’s a word for that: bigotry, the evil stepmother of hatred.

To condemn gayness in the name of the deity that  invented it is misguided at best, and potentially far worse.  Even when camouflaged by angelic robes, the rhetoric of the Cameron-Bryant Follies is a fuse attached to the powder keg of hate crime.  Words like “unnatural” “destructive”, “abnormal” and “deviant” suggest “perverted”, “malicious”, “evil” and “dangerous”.  And it’s not at all hard to conclude that repeatedly characterizing any segment of the population in such terms — particularly when coupled with the type of blatantly slanderous allegations advanced by Bryant and certain “Christian” “Family” organizations — breeds a festering animosity toward such a segment that could escalate into physical violence, perhaps of the type directed against Matthew Shepard.

(Food for thought: Since the official spin is that “liberals” are more hateful and intolerant than “conservatives”, and that criticizing a “Christian” is more hateful and intolerant that just about any type of attack against a gay, what would happen if “liberals” committed a Matthew Shepard type of torture-murder? Would that be considered as hateful and intolerant as, say, pieing Anita? A very interesting “lady or tiger” type of conundrum.)

Just as Bryant’s pie in the face was a badge of her putative persecution for her “principles”,  Cameron — whose career hadn’t been exactly  Disneyland lately — has used the notoriety from his TV appearances to make further TV appearances to say the same things and protest about being misunderstood again. He has become a poster boy for the National Organization for Marriage, one of those cherubic sounding groups that strive to “protect” marriage by prohibiting the wrong people from getting married.  NOM, by the way, is also mulling the enlistment of other “glamorous, non-cognitive elites” — i.e., attractive but stupid celebrities — to champion its cause. You think I’m joshing?

He’s also launched a speaking tour to share his expertise with the rest of the world, and has even taken advantage of his newly acquired limelight to defend Congressman Todd Akin, who’s come under fire for displaying a level of scientific knowledge comparable to Cameron’s own.  Yet for all his embracing of opportunities for exposure, he’s rejected a friendly invitation from a group of gay teens to conduct a constructive dialogue about his views on homosexuality.

In short, Ann Curry’s line of inquiry was entirely relevant; she was doing the job for which she gets paid. But that, of course, was not how it was spun. The media, taking its cue as usual from the most extreme of rightwingnutball diatribes, began to suggest that she was “attacking” him for his “Christianity” (always including, of course, the obligatory projection that “If he’d been Muslim instead”, yada yada yada). The most monumentally silly of these diatribes, the absolute Mount Rushmore of silliness was surely the one at Breitbart.com. (The man is gone, but his brilliant legacy lives on.) Accompanied by an audio clip of her questions on the topic with his responses edited out — giving the impression that she’d hammered away at him without giving him an opportunity to answer — the blog entry included these scintillating observations:

Make no mistake about it, this is all about going after the Christian Church. Same-sex marriage, GLAAD’s fascist rampages, and all of this Orwellian political correctness is part of long-term goal — and that’s to make Christian beliefs a form of bigotry and to force a left-wing agenda on the church all under a Trojan horse labelled “discrimination.”…

We all know what the next step is, and that’s the outlawing of these opinions under the principle that the speaking of such things will cause harm to others.

This, of course, would mean the end to the church — which is the whole idea.

No, stop laughing. These folks are serious. I think. Never mind that the great majority of “liberals” are Christians, and the great majority of gays are Christian, and that by no means do all Christians condemn gays as “sinners”. Facts? We don’t need no stinkin’ facts. We got an ideology.

Make no mistake (to coin a phrase), this has far less to do with any imagined persecution of Christians and far more to do with promoting the notion that them librulz are even more evil than them fairies. The good folks at Brietbart and elsewhere know that Bible thumping is a very reliable technique for getting people to fall in line with an extremist ideology.

Fortunately for them, there are plenty of Christians who are willing to swallow it hook, line and crucifix.

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Gay Activism and the Christian Persecution Complex: A Tale of Two Legal Judgments

August 15, 2012

“Courts rule it’s okay to ridicule Christians, but not homosexuals”. Thus breathlessly proclaimed the chain email that landed in my inbox, complete with links about a couple of cases that allegedly substantiated this claim. To which I responded with a big yawn, having heard this kind of tactic many times before. But let’s take a look at these epsiodes anyway, shall we? Their juxtaposition reveals one of the major caveats of comparing two events – namely, that no two things are exactly alike, and sometimes the differences are more illuminating than –and actually undercut — the similarities. It also speaks gigabytes about the Supposed Persecution Of Christians That’s Really Persecution By Christians Syndrome.

One case involves a former high school student in California named Chad Farnan, who sued his former science teacher, James Corbett, for violating his First Amendment rights in the classroom. And just how exactly did Corbett do this? By making derogatory statements about religion. No, seriously — by exercising his own First Amendment rights, Corbett supposedly was depriving Farnan of his. But wait, it gets even better.

Farnan recorded Corbett’s comments, and presented them to the court as evidence of his teacher’s malice. Here, presumably, is one of the worst:

“Aristotle was a physicist. He said, ‘no movement without movers.’  And he argued that, you know there sort of has to be a God. Of course that’s nonsense. I mean, that’s what you call deductive reasoning, you know. And you hear it all the time with people who say, ‘Well, if all of this stuff that makes up the universe is here, something must have created it.’ Faulty logic.  Very faulty logic.”

Faulty logic??? Quick, call me an attorney. And here’s another one:

“Those are the two possibilities: [the universe] was created out of nothing or it’s always been here. Your call as to which one of those notions is scientific and which one is magic. . . I mean, all I’m saying is that, you know, the people who want to make the argument that God did it, there is as much evidence that God did it as there is that there is a gigantic spaghetti monster living behind the moon who did it.”

Spaghetti monster??? That’s a comic analogy. I smell a settlement for millions. And try this one:

“What was it that Mark Twain said? ‘Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool”

Okay, that does it. It’s no longer a mere civil case. Quoting Twain is a display of capital literacy, and this guy needs to be tried as a criminal.

There was in fact,  a total of one instance cited in which Corbett may have crossed the line:

“When you put your Jesus glasses on, you can’t see the truth.”

But while this observation certainly could have been made with more finesse, it was essentially quite true; religionists often allow their dogma to blind them to scientific fact. And note that while the lawsuit evidently implied that “you” was meant to address Farnan directly — indeed he claims that Corbett frequently ridiculed him specifically — he has produced as evidence only comments that Corbett (who, incidentally, describes himself as a “smorgasbord Catholic”)  made about religion and/or religious people in general. But nobody else in the classroom seems to have been offended enough to file a lawsuit.

The real question is whether it was appropriate for Corbett to riff about science so much at all in a course on history. But that’s a matter for the school administrators to determine, not a court of law. This lawsuit sets a precedent whereby any student who doesn’t like what he’s being taught can just sue to stop it if his parents have enough dough. And the purpose of education is not just to tell kids what they’ve already been conditioned to hear.

Nonetheless, the courts originally ruled in favor of the plaintiff; it was the overturning of this decision by an appeals court that supposedly constitutes declaring that it’s “okay to ridicule Christians”. Note also that one claim made by Farnan’s lawyers was that Corbett was violating the First Amendment by advocating the “religion” of atheism. As we mentioned in the previous post about the Christian Persecution Complex in regard to Chick-Fil-A, all it takes to make your case is to redefine your terms.

And presto, Chad Farnan became a hero and appeared on Fox as a guest of Bill O’Reilly (who, coincidentally, Corbett mentioned is a liar) who commended his courage and lamented that he is only one of many because this kind of thing supposedly is happening in schools all across America. (Was he trying to validate the “liar” label?) Not bad for a kid who, according to Corbett, was a slacker in class.

The other ruling, or settlement,  in question involved two lawsuits filed by 6 — not one, but six — current and former students in Minnesota in challenge to school district policy that did not afford adequate protection to students against bullying for being gay or being suspected of being gay. The lawsuits were prompted because of six other students who had been driven to suicide by harassment from other students.

Okay, come on now. Do we really need to go any farther with this? Six gay students committed suicide. How many Christians committed suicide among the lawyer-retaining students at Chad Farnan’s high school? These gay (or presumed gay, or suspected gay, or falsely accused of being gay for liking ballet) youngsters were teased, taunted and attacked repeatedly — as individuals, not generically. They were shoved against lockers, they had their genitals grabbed, they were pissed on. Know any student who’s endured things like this just for being a Christian?

Nor is Minnesota unique in that regard. All over the country, so many gay teens have been driven to suicide that it’s practically an epidemic. And among Christians who are not gay? Well, we’ll get back to you on that one.

Nor is it just a matter of suicide. Sometimes gays (students and otherwise) are brutally attacked and even killed for being gay. Remember Matthew Shepard? The Good Christians from Westboro Baptist Church did, picketing his memorial service with signs reading “No tears for queers” and “Fag Matt in Hell”. Know of any Christians who met his fate because of their beliefs?

Yet now my Christian friends evidently want me to believe that a court’s refusal to participate in a kid’s scheme to settle a score with a former teacher is on a par with efforts to prevent that kind of violence against gays in the future. Which prompts me to ask, as I often do, just what planet they’ve been living on.

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Gay Activism and the Christian Persecution Complex: Playing Chikin

August 8, 2012

Unless you’ve spent the last couple of weeks orbiting Jupiter and have had problems with satellite transmission, you’ve surely heard all about the Chick-Fil-A flap. And you’ve no doubt been bombarded with the official spin that it’s another case of librul intolerance and librul hypocrisy, and above all raging anti-religion, or at least anti-Christianity. Never mind that most American “liberals” and most American gays are themselves Christians. The facts don’t make nearly as marketable a story, nor nearly as passionate fundraising fodder, as the hypocrisy/ intolerance/ Christian persecution narrative.

To hear the outraged Jeremiahs tell it, one would get the impression that it’s progressives and gays who have been busily passing laws to prevent fundamentalist fanatics from marrying each other (please, no jokes about how it might be a good idea at least to prohibit them from breeding). Although marriage equality isn’t really the half of it, as this, the most perceptive of commentaries on the subject, so deftly lays out. But come to think of it, it isn’t just Christians, or even just fundamentalist fanatics, who are manipulating public opinion. It’s the pundits, the ones who get paid for it — though they have plenty of followers willing to parrot whatever they churn out. My hat is really off to them this time; they’ve really outdone themselves. I kneel in awe at their self-righteous feet.

They love to say that “it’s not about gays, it’s about religion”. They’re almost half right. It’s really not about religion either, for the most part. It’s about politics.  This is part of a very focused campaign by right-wing extremists to attack “liberals” (although some of them have wised up to the fact that the public has wised up to the fact that “liberal” is a nebulous, heavily abused word, and have started saying “progressives” instead) by portraying them as guilty of the very intolerance and persecution they decry.

They apparently figure if they can pick out enough incidents in which people who may or may not be classifiable as liberal/ progressive may or may not be guilty of what may or may not be intolerance, these all will stack up to some sort of blanket generalization. It’s a tall order, but they are ardently devoting every waking minute to it.

Don’t believe it? Just look at the media articles and blog posts about the incident, and see how many of them connect it to liberals/ progressives and use the word intolerance.  It’s as if they believe that all  progressives think alike on everything. They seem oblivious to the fact that many progressives, while they may disapprove of Chick-Fil-A’s stance, think the reactions of the Muppets, of Mayor Menino of Boston, and of Mayor Emmanuel of Chicago, went too far. Even Mayor Menino acknowledged that he’d been wrong to suggest that he could prevent the franchise from setting up shop in Beantown (it would be beyond his authority to do so). Such things tend to get ignored because they don’t  fit the narrative.

Who’s on The First?

One prong of the attack is the First Amendment angle. Chick-Fil-A president Dan Cathy, the spin goes, is being crucified for exercising his freedom of speech, and he was just making a personal declaration that had nothing to do with his business practices. Beep, beep! Double bullshit alert! If Cathy indeed had done nothing more than make bigoted and boneheaded pronouncements, chances are there would have been no problem. It’s not just a matter of his right to sanctimoniously condemn someone else’s “lifestyle”. The problem is that he also puts his money where his mouth is. Lots and lots and lots of money.

During the past few years, Chick-Fil-A has donated millions to organizations (often with beatific names featuring the words “Christian” and/or “family”) that blatantly promote disinformation about and discrimination against gays. One of them is Exodus International, which long claimed to be able to “cure” homosexuality. Two of its (male) founders renounced the organization and became lovers. Other former leaders of the group have apologized for its activities, and admitted that Exodus “cured” no one (no shit, Sherlock), and even did great harm to much of its clientele. With an intensive campaign to scurrilously portray homosexuals as deviants with sinister purposes — even as predators upon children — Exodus International actually may have contributed to  violent attacks, even the killing of gays. But Dan Cathy still has no problem supporting it in the name of “Biblical principles” — which evidently include lying to his loyal customers.

Well hey, he’s got a point. Condemnation of gays really is in accordance with Biblical principle. So is anything else you can dream up — you can dig up something in the Bible to support absolutely anything you choose to believe. But it’s hardly a Christian principle, since there is no record of Jesus ever saying anything on the topic of homosexuality. (And the big irony here is that while all the Biblical imprecations against gays come from the Old Testament, Christians are far more likely to be homophobic than Jews.) It says right there in the Book of Leviticus:

And if a man lie with mankind, as with womankind, both of them have committed abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

Wait a minute.  Put to death???  Has Cathy ever stoned a gay person? If not, then he isn’t really and truly following Biblical principle, and so perhaps he should go stone himself. He may have to wait in line; he also has a stoning due because his restaurants serve pork in violation of God’s instructions. And another because they stay open on Saturday (the Sabbath). They also, by the way, traffic in extreme animal cruelty, but it might be harder to ferret out a Biblical principle against that, given how many ritual sacrifices the scriptures demand.

Free But Not For Thee

The “free speech” meme took a truly bizarre turn when a fellow named Adam Smith decided it would be, somehow, an effective statement of protest if he made a video of himself voicing his disapproval to a low-level Chick-Fil-A chickadee and posted it online. It made a statement, all right, but not the kind he intended. When the video went viral, someone dug into his background and publicized his place of employment. Whereupon Smith, who really and truly was just speaking his own mind and not representing an organization, was fired from his job. So of course the right-wing Guardians of Free Speech rose up en masse and rallied to his defense, right. Er… right??

Well, um, not exactly. What they did was gloat and guffaw and smirk and call him a jerk and an intolerant librul who got just what he deserved. You’d be hard pressed to find any reference to the incident on the web that doesn’t brand him a “bully”. And even though he’s apologized (for what, exactly?) he’s been deluged with threats and hostile messages — presumably from Good Christians exercising their Biblical principles. Not only did he lose his job, but he and his family have had to leave their home because his address has been publicized.

Okay, time out. Here’s the video. Watch it for yourself. Watch carefully.

Now then: did you see any bullying or “harassment” or “berating” in that video? Any at all?? If so, then someone must have planted subliminal content in it that’s below my radar. All I see is the utmost courtesy by both individuals. The worst thing Smith says is “I don’t know how you live with yourself and work here.”, followed by  “You deserve better, Rachel”. Is that what people find so objectionable? No, wait. It must be “Have a great day.” Surely only an intolerant librul bully would say something that obnoxious. But the manipulators have branded him a bully, and bully he must be. So declares even the rather progressive Huffington Post. It’s downright creepy. But there’s a valuable lesson to be learned here.

Valuable Lesson: To portray someone as intolerant (or whatever) and yourself as less so, simply redefine the terms at your leisure.

It’s all part of a cute cyber-parlor game that has become quite trendy in the past few years. The object is to brand the rejection of intolerance as being more intolerant than intolerance itself. Ready to give it a try? Very well, I’ll name an event and you decide how to categorize it.

A fast food corporation declares that it will continue supporting shady campaigns to defame a segment of the population that has never done it any harm? Right, that’s religious principle. Refusing to support businesses that subsidize such campaigns? Bingo, that’s intolerance and hypocrisy and suppressing free speech. Expressing disapproval of such a business’ practices to one of its employees? Hey, you’re doing great — it is indeed bullying.  Harassing and threatening an individual who expresses such disapproval? Righteous indignation, absolutely. You’re smokin’. Of course, we also need to emphasize that the second and third actions constitute a blatant assault on Christianity.

Oh and we mustn’t forget the liberal hypocrisy angle. I mean if those libruls/ progressives really were so outraged by hate groups, why is it they don’t condemn President Obama for giving 1.5 billion to the Muslim Brotherhood? Lots of right-wing blogs say he did. But oops, turns out it’s not true. Shh!! Don’t tell anyone.

But surely we can prove that there is a vast left-wing conspiracy afoot to squelch Christianity, by  pointing out that Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel (who is not a Christian, but practices the same religion as the founder of Christianity) didn’t voice similar objections to Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who’s also made some unenlightened anti-gay utterances. And hey, Mayor Emmanuel welcomed him to The Windy City with open arms.

Oops, there are some problems here too. First of all, while it’s true that Farrakhan has said he thinks gay marriage should be prohibited (though his views seem to be evolving, unlike Cathy’s), he hasn’t systematically engaged in defamation of gays to the point of inspiring genocide. In fact, he’s working to prevent killings. It isn’t so much that Mayor Emmanuel has welcomed him; he’s welcomed some followers of Farrakhan — young black men who volunteered to inject themselves into the city’s most violent neighborhoods in an effort to stem violent crime.  Given that the homicide rate has soared by 40 percent, it’s understandable that any mayor would be desperate enough to accept the help of people he’d prefer to distance himself from. Hell, it’s a good bet that if Dan Cathy had agreed to put on a bowtie and stroll through Chicago’s worst neighborhoods acting as a human shield, Emmanuel would have welcomed him with open arms.

Hmmm… There seems to be a bit of a hitch in this little game of ours, but surely it’s nothing we can’t ignore to keep the narrative going. It’s just that….well, whenever you hear about a case of supposed persecution of Christians, there are almost always missing facts that totally change the picture.

I just wish I could say the same about the Christian persecution of gays.

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Appreciating Hitch; the Won’t of God

January 5, 2012

It’s rather tardy of course, but I’d like to take this opportunity to express my appreciation for the late British-born essayist Christopher Hitchens, who left us entirely too soon last month at the age of 62.  I didn’t always see eye-to-eye with him, but he was always engaging and stimulating, and quite skilled at ripping away the veil of delusion. He was a bright beacon of reason and sanity in a vast sea of media vacuity.

As it happens, I’d only recently read his 2007 bestseller God Is Not Great; How Religion Poisons Everything. It was an eye-opener even to me, after having spent most of my life studying the outrages committed in the name of religion.

It details how one country had all but eliminated polio when its religious leaders became convinced that the vaccine was somehow unpleasing to God, and so the disease made a tragic comeback. It chronicles how, when Salman Rushdie was living under the threat of death for being “blasphemous” (i.e., too candid) by extremists of one religion, the clerics of other religions (notably Western Christians), rather than condemn the fundamentalist fanatics, criticized Rushdie for bringing it on himself. It even makes the case that such supposed paragons of progressivism as Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. were in fact fundamentalists who fought progress almost as much as they promoted it. And it offers a rebuttal to the trendy claim that atheism has inspired more bloodshed than religion (a myth we’ll be examining in more detail in the future).

Hitch also mentions an interesting epiphany he had about religious dogma as a parochial student when one of his teachers commented that it was so wonderful of God to put so much green in nature, so that it would be pleasing to human eyes. Even at that age, he was perceptive enough to realize that she was thinking ass-backward: nature isn’t green because we like it; rather, we like green because it is so abundant in nature. It is we who have made the concession, not our creator. But by assuming that God sometimes caters to our wishes as long as we constantly cater to His, people use “it’s God’s will” not only to rationalize evil that already exists, but to excuse the evil they commit. Or, as another wise soul put it:

“I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.”      — Susan B Anthony

With his biting criticism of organized religion (as well as such diverse public figures as Bill Clinton, Henry Kissinger and Mother Teresa), Hitchens heard from Christians a great deal – usually excoriating him and promising him the penalty of eternal hellfire for the sin of thinking too much.  And when it was revealed that he had a terminal case of esophageal cancer (for all his brilliance, he nonetheless indulged in the indefensible stupidity of slow suicide by tobacco), many of them contacted him to gloat over God’s “punishment” of his impiety. (Have you ever known an atheist to talk to people like this?) He responded to this tackiness as he always had, noting that God also doles out such afflictions, and far worse, to the devout – as well as to children too young to understand faith – while many noted skeptics have lived to a ripe old age.

A staunch atheist to the end, he nonetheless made it clear that atheism was not necessarily a prerequisite for rationalism. “Believe in God if you must”, he said, but religion is another matter. Religion is not only believing in God, but believing you understand God’s will, which is something nobody could possibly do. (And I might add, Hitch, that it isn’t religion itself that’s the problem, but religiosity – i.e., the compulsion to impose one’s own beliefs on the world at large.)

Yet many people claim they can do just that. And the results are often profoundly disturbing.  (Anyone remember 9-11?) I solemnly swear to you that I once overheard the following conversation between parent and child:

SON: Dad, was David right-right, or was he right-wrong?

FATHER: He was right-wrong. He did the right thing, it just wasn’t what God wanted him to do.

Here was a parent giving his child guidance about how to behave in the world by totally reframing morality to conform to his own religious beliefs. But as grotesque as it sounded coming from him, the thing is it happens all the time. He was merely expressing in balder terms the kind of attitude that religionists exhibit as a matter of course.

That’s why it was so refreshing to hear a man like Christoper Hitchens challenge common perceptions about the will of God, focusing instead on what might be called the “won’t of God”. The irony is that if there is a God, and if He is as benevolent as folks suppose, then Hitch probably was following His will as few others ever do.

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The Myth of Christmas Candy Canes

December 20, 2011

A certain laundromat that I’ve frequented recently seems to be a popular hangout for Jehovah’s Witnesses. Every time I go there, they’ve left some of their pamphlets behind, featuring people on the cover who display what perfect skin and hair God will grant you if only you submit to His will, as relayed by them. I’ve learned to take this all in stride; maybe this literature actually is of benefit to some people. But on my last visit I discovered they’d really crossed the line by leaving behind those candy canes.

 

Yes, candy canes. About a dozen of them, each conveniently attached to a little tract explaining the TRUE meaning of Christmas. Like pedophiles, religious propagandists know that candy is an effective way to attract and manipulate children into something they’re not old enough to process. (Come to think of it, few adults are old enough to process religion. But that’s another story.) Accordingly, I threw them all into the trash where they belong. Sorry kiddies, you’ll have to get your sugar high elsewhere.

 

This was, alas, not the first time candy canes have been used as church bait. It’s been going on for centuries. Lately, there’s been a popular rumor circulating that these confections were created expressly for that purpose, and are infused with religious symbolism. Here’s how one website, often quoted in emails, states the case:

 

“A candy maker in Indiana wanted to make a candy that would be a witness, so he made the Christmas Candy Cane…He began with a stick of pure white, hard candy. White to symbolize the virgin birth and the sinless nature of Jesus, and hard to symbolize the Solid Rock, the foundation of the Church, and firmness of the promises of God… The candymaker made the candy in the form of a “J” to represent the precious name of Jesus… Thinking that the candy was somewhat plain, the candymaker stained it with red stripes. He used three small stripes to show the stripes of the scourging Jesus received by which we are healed. The large red stripe was for the blood shed by Christ on the cross so that we could have the promise of eternal life.”

 

Lovely story. There’s just one problem with it: it’s utter horseshit. Inspired, perhaps, by the pretzel, which has a much older, and possibly religious, origin – with the folded shape representing either hands in prayer or a disguised cross.  The use of bread also probably stems from Christianity’s roots in harvest celebrations, and even possible connections to ancient cannibalistic cults . (“Eat this bread, it’s my body.”)

 

Candy canes themselves have existed, and have been used for Christmas decoration, for centuries. And they were plain white until about a hundred years ago, when somebody decided that they looked more festive with red stripes, and the innovation caught on. Originally, the canes were straight, but the crook was added later for reasons unknown, but there is no reason to believe it was intended to represent the letter “J”. Another legend (also unproven, but somewhat more plausible) relates that this alteration did indeed have a sort of religious significance: it supposedly was concocted by an official at Cologne Cathedral in the Seventeenth Century as a novelty to pique the interest of restless children in attendance. According to this legend, the shape represents a shepherd’s staff – not a letter of the alphabet.

 

But that’s quite likely a fabrication as well. It reeks of the same kind of symbolic retrofitting that Christianity has always been guilty of. Now, as always, Christians are trying to take credit for something they didn’t originate – including the United States of America. And, lest we forget, this holiday now commonly known as Christmas.

 

 

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Devil’s Knot Untied: The WM3 Are Free!

August 21, 2011

There’s some very good news this week on the legal front, and it comes from, of all places, Arkansas. The West Memphis Three, after spending 18 years in prison (one of them on death row) were finally freed, putting an end to one of the most shameful witchhunts of the Twentieth Century.

In 1993, the bodies of three 8-year-old West Memphis boys were found in a ditch in a wooded area; they’d been brutally murdered and their bodies mutilated. The local police department, which had been plagued with corruption, ignored the trail of evidence pointing toward the stepfather of one of the victims (with whom they had some ties), and instead focused on three teen misfits: Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley, Jr.

This troubled trio had been known to dress in black, listen to heavy metal and engage in other activity that was considered oddball in their conservative community. But what really sealed the deal was that Echols had been known to experiment with different religious practices, such as Catholicism, Buddhism, and even (shudder) Wicca.

In their community, there were plenty of people who were living in the Fourteenth Century rather than the Twentieth. They believed that the earth was created 6000 years ago, that science is evil, that God punishes nonbelievers, and that neopaganism equals “devil worship”, complete with human sacrifice.

Police badgered Misskelly, who was mentally handicapped, into confessing to the crime and implicating Echols and Baldwin – he apparently was under the impression that if he just told them what they wanted to hear, they’d let him go. Accordingly, he changed his story several times under their prompting, and got significant details of the crime wrong. Nonetheless, his “confession” was good enough to establish their guilt unless they could prove themselves innocent.

The “trial” was held in the nearby city of Jonesboro (which later would gain further notoriety as the site of a deadly school shooting) but that didn’t really improve the odds of the accused. With proceedings that  trumped the best efforts of Saturday Night Live, the prosecution introduced an “expert” in the occult whose credential turned out to be a certificate obtained by mail order. There was speculation that the victims were chosen in part because of their age: 8 is supposedly a number with mystical significance. (Anyone who follows occultism will tell you that ANY number is a number with mystical significance.) They even introduced a stick found in the woods because it looked like something that MAY have been used as a murder weapon. Seriously.

And so, in a nation where those accused are supposedly presumed innocent unless guilt can be shown beyond a reasonable shadow of a doubt, these three boys were convicted of a capital crime without a single shred of credible evidence. They’ve now spent half their lives behind bars, without ever having used such commonplace conveniences as the Internet or a cell phone. Their eighteen most vital years, gone forever.  While the Bible Belt certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on judicial rape, it’s hard to imagine that this kind of outrage could have occurred anywhere else. Let’s hope not.

And this week, suddenly, there was a surprise hearing. And after agreeing to a rotten deal that basically says that even though they’re not guilty they still have to be branded as guilty because otherwise they might sue the ass off the state, they’ve been released. Progress is two steps forward and one step back. Or maybe sometimes it’s the opposite. In any case, these three victims of mass hysteria and southern fundamentalist bigotry are, at long last, free men.

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Propaganda Prop #3: Bible-Thumping

July 30, 2011

“Prayer is a different thing for Republicans than it is for the rest of us; you don’t actually ask God for things, you sort of ask God to make clear to other people what he’s already shown to you.” — Garrison Keillor

Not long ago, a certain right-wing politician that you’ve probably heard too much about already published a book attacking President Obama. (Say it ain’t so!). The book was titled To Save America, and that’s certainly an interesting instance of the propaganda technique we call flag-waving. But it’s the subtitle that we’re concerned with here: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine. Not just because of the obligatory right-wing characterization of the president as a “socialist” (which is certainly dopey enough) but because of the use of “secular” as a pejorative. It’s an excellent illustration of the third propaganda technique we’d like to examine, a technique we call Bible-thumping.

Usually, Bible-thumping means brandishing specific scriptural passages in an effort to defend specific extremist views. But we’re using it in a broader sense, to include using religion in general to defend extremist views in general. In your Professor Of Propaganda’s lexicon, Bible-thumping is the conviction that not only does God take sides in every petty human squabble, but he invariably sides with arrogance, ignorance or bigotry – and ideally with all three at once.

Our illustrious politician-author, and others of his bent, proceed from three assumptions: (a) America was intended to be a Christian nation; (b) religionists are more moral and more patriotic than secularists; and (c) “conservatives” are religious and “liberals” are not.  All of these assumptions are premium grade horseshit. Granted, “liberals” are somewhat less likely to be religious than “conservatives”, but what’s far more significant is that “conservatives” are far more likely to be fundamentalists, and therefore far more likely to indulge in Bible-thumping – which is certainly no guarantee of moral soundness or patriotic fervor. (If you’re curious about how this secularist-basher applies Christian moral principles to his own life, have a look.)

We should note that Bible-thumping is an equal opportunity activity, not limited to followers of the Bible. You just as easily could quote the Koran, or the Upanishads or the Avesta or Peanuts. But it is the Bible, by far, that people are more likely to be pointing at your head when they say things like these:

  • “I want you to just let a wave of intolerance wash over you. I want you to let a wave of hatred wash over you. Yes, hate is good… Our goal is  a Christian nation. We have a biblical duty, we are called on by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time. We don’t want pluralism.”  (Randall Terry, founder of Operation Rescue)
  • “We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will be (sic) get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God.”  (Gary North, Christian Reconstructionist)
  • “We thank God that it (the atomic bomb) has come to us, instead of to our enemies; and we pray that He may guide us to use it in His ways and for His purposes.”  (President Harry Truman, after dropping the first of two holy offerings on Japan)
  • “God told me to run.” (paraphrased from several right-wing politicians. Considering that they often run against each other, it’s clear that the Almighty either is a fickle patron, or wants most if not all of them to lose.)
  • “America today begins to turn back to God.”  (a certain Bad Actor, explaining why a crowd had mindlessly assembled at his blatantly self-promotional rally.)

There is never a good reason to mix religion and government. NEVER. No matter what religion, no matter what government. And whenver anyone tries to do so, you should be suspicious of their motives. And you should REALLY batten down the hatches when you hear a politician, especially if he happens to be the leader of the nation, say something like this:

“God the Almighty has made our nation. By defending its existence we are defending His work.”

I really hate to do this, but the nation this leader was referring to wasn’t the U.S. It was The Third Reich.

 

 

 

 

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Fourth-Right-Ness: Independence Day as a Tool for Partisan Sniping

July 14, 2011

The U.S. just celebrated its “birthday”, which it always does on the wrong day (July 4 instead of July 2, the date the Declaration of Independence was adopted, or August 2, the date most delegates signed it) and you might think that such an occasion would be one of national unity. But for many ideological extremists, it’s an opportunity to double down on their attacks against those who do not wholeheartedly concur with their extreme beliefs and values.

At a Republican Party barbecue in Georgia, Representative Paul Broun was offering up a prayer to the (presumably right-wing) God he claims to follow when he said :

“Father, there are many who want to destroy us from outside this nation. Folks like al-Qaeda and the radical Islamists. But there are folks that want to destroy us from inside, the progressives and the socialists, who want to make this nation a nation that’s no longer under you, under God, but a nation that’s ruled by man.”

It’s no secret that these people seem to think the most patriotic thing they can do is express their irrational, all-consuming hatred for half the citizens of the United States; and judging by Broun’s “prayer” it appears they also think it’s the most pious thing they can do. Surely God must hate all the same people they do, or what use is He?

There was an even cuter trick on a right-wing website called BigJournalism.com (in keeping with the prevailing concept that “journalism” entails misinformation and ideological indoctrination). This site is under the stewardship of Andrew Breitbart, whose truth allergies we’ve previously noted.

Here’s the deal: Big Journalism published the text of the Declaration of Independence, accompanied by an illustration of George Washington; and various words and phrases throughout the text are linked to other web pages that evidently are intended to suggest that President Obama is as tyrannical and oppressive as King George – though quite often, the links just give the impression of having been chosen at random. If you’re really bored and crave some cheap laughs, you might try looking at this post and clicking on some of these links.

If you click on the phrase “invasions on the rights of the people”, you’ll get a news story about how the House of Representatives passed the Health Care Reform Bill. Yes, you read that right. An action by the HOUSE to help extend the right of medical care to all citizens is deemed an INVASION OF RIGHTS by the PRESIDENT.

Click on the passage about how the king has “incited domestic insurrections”, and what do you get? A Wikipedia article about ACORN. Yep, the (former) existence of an organization devoted to improving the lives of disadvantaged citizens is proof positive that Barack Obama encourages people to form angry mobs bearing … well, guns and racist signs or something.

Oh, and try clicking on “harass our people”. Please, please do. You’ll connect with the blatant lie (now an official GOP talking point parroted by Newt Gingrich and John Boehner) that “Obamacare” will call for 16,000 new IRS agents to “track everyone’s bank accounts”.

And try the one about how he’s “ravaged our coasts”. That will take you to an op-ed at The National Review (another impeccable source of Big “Journalism”) about the administration’s moratorium on drilling. Yep, trying to stop oil companies from ravaging our coasts constitutes ravaging our coasts. If you’re a black Democrat and it’s a second Tuesday in March under a blue moon.

Propaganda like this even manages to take (relatively) legitimate concerns about some of Obama’s actions (e.g., Libya) and convert them into grossly inaccurate smears. What a breathtaking achievement.

Although this post is, unlike the “prayer”, ostensibly aimed at denouncing an individual rather than a large segment of the population, it’s hard not to connect the “patriotic” agenda of Breitbart and company with the Tea Party rhetoric, often incendiary and sometimes violent, of “taking back” THEIR country from the 53% of American voters who elected Barack Obama.

It’s hard to believe this is what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Or, for that matter, the putative Founding Father.

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San Francisco, Circumcision, and the Endless Quest for “Liberal Intolerance”

June 19, 2011

To some people, it’s of the utmost importance to engage in a tireless quixotic quest to locate “liberal intolerance”. These people generally style themselves as “conservatives”, though in fact they’re generally right-wing radicals. And there’s nothing more important to a right-wing radical than attacking “liberals”, however that term is – or much more commonly, is not – defined. (One of these days, I promise, we’ll take a good look at those much-abused terms “liberal” and conservative”, which are almost never used properly anymore, and which I almost always bracket in quotation marks, and for very good reason.) Many of them literally live for it. Since “liberal”, in the true sense of the word, is more or less synonymous with tolerant, “liberal intolerance” is a self-canceling phrase, rather like “conservative movement”. Therefore, it has become a chimera of choice among such“conservatives”.

Recently the Mercatus Center, a very influential right-wing think tank (founded and funded by the billionaire Koch Bros., who have been quietly but steadily buying out democracy for several years) released a laughable “study” showing that “liberal” states (California, New York, New Jersey) enjoy less freedom than “conservative” states. Essentially, the rule of thumb they followed is the fewer laws, the more freedom. They don’t seem to consider the possibility that the Big Apple, with some 8,000,000 inhabitants crammed onto a compact sliver of soil, might actually need more laws than Lamont, Wyoming with its population of 3. Furthermore, if you take a glance at the graph of the factors they considered and how they were weighted (yes, they were actually so inept as to publicize this information), you’ll note that financial matters constitute TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of what they regard as crucial. Guns, of course figure significantly into the mix, but nowhere is there a mention of reproductive regulation, which almost all right-wingers are very gung ho about. Just goes to show that you really can prove black is white, provided you have no scruples about cooking the books.

It’s only natural, then, that such “conservatives” should salivatingly turn their gaze toward the librul Gomorrah called San Francisco, which has always been a supreme melting pot of all kinds of lifestyles, and therefore has always had a reputation for tolerance. (I speak with some authority on this topic, having lived more than 15 years of my own life as a San Franciscan.) And oh yeah, San Francisco sometimes passes certain laws, you see; and according to right-wing logic, a law aimed at curbing intolerance is the ultimate act of intolerance.

Recently, rumor has it that the City By The Bay played into their hands by banning circumcision. How dare those effete elites decree that we can’t carve up the wee-wees of our own babies? It’s been called a blatant infringement of “freedom of expression”, as if infant genitalia were artistic materials to be molded into expressive shapes to our liking.

Actually, San Francisco has not banned circumcision, at least not yet. What happened was that after a requisite number of signatures were collected, the proposed law was placed on the ballot, so in November, the electorate will decide whether or not to approve it. It’s the democratic process (also known as “liberal intolerance”) the way it was meant to work.

Fox Noise couldn’t wait for November, but promptly declared the measure to be a hitleresque attack on Jews. Never mind that the ban applies to all circumcisions, the great majority of which are performed by goyim. Never mind that a quarter of the city’s residents are Jewish, including no doubt a good many who signed the petition. Yes, it’s true that many Jews have decried the measure, but many others support it; just don’t expect to hear much about them, because they don’t fit the media narrative of librul intolerance so neatly. Incidentally, Fox’s righteous indignation doesn’t appear to extend so much to concern for Muslims, who are also habitual pecker-choppers.

You expect this kind of crap from Pox News, but they weren’t alone. This was a golden opportunity for the powerful right-wing propaganda engine to do what it does best: manufacture outrage out of misinformation. It’s probably safe to say that there has been far more outrage expressed in the last few weeks over this one little law (which isn’t even a law, and probably never will be) than there has ever been expressed over circumcision itself, even though it’s been around for ages, and many have always found it objectionable.

Even more interesting, there has been far more outrage over female circumcision, which is already illegal not only in librul San Francisco, but everywhere else in The United States, as well as many other countries. And I’ve never heard of anyone complain of those laws infringing on freedom of expression.

This discrepancy is surprising for two reasons: there are far fewer female circumcisions than male, and females are usually considered of lesser worth than male, particularly in societies heavily dominated by religion. But that’s the rub: religion. Although female circumcision is often inspired by religious beliefs, it is typically not a religious rite per se. Its purpose is to permanently impair the ability of women to experience sexual pleasure, and to help keep the female head securely under the male boot.

Similarly, male circumcision has been the rage in America since Puritan times, when it caught on not for religious reasons (Jews were really a small minority then) but because it was believed to discourage boys from choking the chicken. (The Puritans were on the right track, but you’d really have to cut off the whole thing.) Still, while religion didn’t provide the inspiration, it provided the defense: anything good enough for Jesus is good enough for our children, so shuddup and pass the nails .

Religion and tradition are the twin pillars that have supported all kinds of practices including slavery and human sacrifice. These activities have been largely eliminated after many bold strokes of librul intolerance, in defiance of “conservatives” who demanded “I don’t need no stinkin’ guvmint limiting my freedom to do whatever I want to other people.”

No, no, I am not suggesting that circumcision is in a class with those things. The point is that while “conservatives” often seem to invoke religion and tradition to justify anything and everything, the truth is that absolutely NOTHING can be logically justified on such grounds alone; there are always other factors that need to be considered. Circumcision, for example, has long been believed to be hygienically beneficial, though the evidence is by no means conclusive. The people of San Francisco, or at least some of them, have considered certain other factors.

There is, for one thing, the inescapable fact that circumcision is quite painful. This can be mitigated somewhat, and many try to convince themselves that babies don’t feel the pain at all. But that’s royal technicolor bullshit. At any age, it hurts like hell to have something amputated from your body – whether it be a finger, an ear, or part of Mr. Winkie.

For some slice-ees, the experience is also highly traumatic. There is even evidence that circumcised males may be more prone to low self-esteem and depression. It clearly doesn’t have that kind of effect on everyone, but there are support groups with plenty of members (no pun intended) for circumcised adults, some of whom even undergo procedures to restore the loss.

So the issue is not tolerance vs. intolerance. It’s extreme tolerance vs. extreme tolerance. On the one hand, you have the tolerance for religious tradition, to the point of allowing parents to make religious decisions for their children, even to the point of inflicting pain and possible lifelong trauma, and permanently deciding the appearance of Tiny Tim. On the other hand, you have the tolerance for individualism, to the point of sparing children the pain and trauma, and allowing them to decide for themselves whether their package will remain intact.

You may not approve of what decision the San Francisco voters ultimately make. You have the right not to approve. But to brand the initiative itself as intolerance is truly the pinnacle of reactionary spin.

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The God Bias, and Other Observations from Joplin

June 5, 2011

This past weekend, I’ve been fortunate to have the opportunity to visit Joplin, MO and volunteer with the recovery efforts in the aftermath of the recent tornado. It’s a daunting, sobering task that can’t help but make you pause to reflect on a number of things. Here are just a few thoughts that paraded through my mind while picking up debris in the June swelter.

Sometimes media gets it right.

It’s no secret that we live in an age of media exaggeration and sensationalism. (That’s one of the reasons for the existence of this blog.) As I came into Joplin, it appeared they’d done it again. Seeing initially the part of town that was little affected, I noted only a few trees down and some spotty structural damage to houses, and I figured the TV cameras had just zoomed in on a few buildings that got hit exceptionally hard. And then came the reality: miles and miles of total jaw-dropping, gut-wrenching, mind-numbing devastation. The media actually may have understated the case this time.

People want to help.

Despite what you hear about people being greedy, selfish and cutthroat, most of us jump at the opportunity to help out someone in need. Sometimes it takes a disaster to jolt people out of their ruts and make them realize that their help is needed. But we have an innate drive to be of service – ALL of us, regardless of age, race or creed.

The God Bias

Disaster relief is a conspicuous manifestation of the bias toward religion that permeates our society. Most of the people you see – no, strike that – most of the people that you NOTICE  reporting to volunteer are affiliated with a church group. They arrive in vans, wearing custom made T-shirts advertising their congregations from all over the country. Hey, it’s great to see them, from southern fundamentalists to Middle Eastern Muslims.  Joplin needs all the help it can get; even the Scientologists are a welcome sight.

What’s annoying is that it’s often difficult to find an outlet for volunteering without going through a religious group. The official spin is that churches have cornered the market when it comes to charity. And this perception has contributed to the belief that one must be religious in order to be moral, in order to be a good person. The truth is that secularists are just as caring and helpful as anyone else (see above); they are just not as massively organized nor as publicly visible as the religionists.

Religion is, for better and for worse, a highly conspicuous thread running through American society, especially in this part of the country – they don’t call it The Bible Belt for nothing. Just try having a ten-minute conversation with someone about their social life without having them mention their church. The work these folks do for charity is an extension of everything else they do; but contrary to what many believe, it is religious people doing the good deeds, not religion itself.

God does not play favorites.

One aspect of the God Bias is the strange but persistent belief that faith will protect you in the face of such calamity – while simultaneously blaming God for the very disasters he is expected to shield you from. (“Act of God” is even a legal term is this strange world.)

Sorry, but the reality is that such tragedies often strike (think Joplin and Katrina, for instance) in areas having a high concentration of believers. Just around the corner from the houses where I was picking up the sad traces of some family’s home and life were the sparse ruins of a church building, with only a couple of pews remaining, and its hymnals scattered to the winds.

It’s a trend.

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been an increase in storms of this type in recent years. And it’s likely to get worse. Because it’s quite probable that global warming is contributing to it. Of course, the Cult of Denialism will poo-poo this, and find some other explanation. (See above.) They believe that global  warming would be linear and consistent, and therefore having a cold day now and then totally discredits the exhaustive research of climate scientists. What they don’t realize is that global warming produces extremes of many kinds, including cold weather and winds. But don’t worry, the extreme heat is still there too: while I was cleaning up debris, the thermometer reportedly hit a new record for the date.

Finally, note that Joplin still needs a lot of help, and will continue to need a lot of help for a long time. You can contribute hours, money or goods – even if you’re not religious. Honestly.

4 Comments | Culture, Myths, Religion | Tagged: , , | Permalink
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