Pansynthesis

[In case it needs to be said: I don't agree with every word of everything I link to. --L.]

Ted Haggard Opens New Church, Welcomes Gays

[Shakesville]Ted Haggard, one-time leader of the Colorado Springs Evangelical megachurch New Life Church, since deposed following a buggery and methamphetamine scandal, has annouced the formation of a new church.

During a press conference today, Haggard announced “Everybody is welcome: Democrats, Republican, Independents, gays, straights, tall, short, addicts and recovering addicts.” [...]

That’s nice. Nonetheless, The Advocate is reporting Haggard “will not perform same-sex marriages.”

[Self-Hating Hypocrite Reinvents Progressive Christianity, Same As Fundie Christianity. Film at eleven. -L]

No, really, the word “no” isn’t that confusing

[Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte][Trigger warning, of course. -L]

…let’s be clear: being resigned after someone overrules your refusal to perform a specific sex act isn’t consent. If someone mugs you on the street, and you pull out your wallet and hand it over with resignation instead of fury, you’re just as mugged.

[...]

It is true that young women are more vulnerable to coercion, sexual assault, and rape because assailants exploit a common fear young women have about standing up for themselves. And that’s all very interesting, but it’s secondary to my main concern.

What’s wrong with a man that, when faced with the words “stop”, “don’t”, “no”, “quit it”, or any variation of the above doesn’t immediately turn off the camera and stop the sexual activity? What is wrong with him that he gets off bullying his supposed girlfriend into performing for him…

Let’s face it. We all know the answer to why some men get off on this. They feel powerful. They like the control over women. In this case, I’m sure her Playboy-style looks were part of it—controlling a woman that other men gawk at is a way to feel like a big, powerful man. We all know why men like to impress themselves and other men with their control and mastery over women, their willingness to hurt women.

And if you still have questions about why feminists call ours a “rape culture”, I suggest letting the issues raised by this tape and the release of it percolate in your mind for awhile.

And there it is, the “tree hugger” crapbasket

[Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]Rep. Don Young (R-AK) declared that the oil pumping into the Gulf is “not an environmental disaster”…

…this is one of Rush Limbaugh’s favorite truisms, that environmentalists are full of shit because they know that, given enough time, the planet will right itself. It’ll outlive us, even! It’s one of the right wing’s all-time favorite ways to co-opt progressive language—accusations that we’re victimizing and condescending by suggesting that policies aimed at preserving or encouraging good things are a good idea. In this case, the “victim” of liberal condescension is the planet itself. By not wanting people to spew pollution all over it, destroy ecosystems, or heat it up to the point where large parts of it become unlivable, we’re apparently condescending to the planet, insulting its ability to recover from the injuries conservatives gallantly want to give it.

…Don’t think about the surface argument—think about the assumption bundled inside it. Think about whose interests are quietly left out when a conservative argues with a liberal about the planet as a living entity that will recover after we’re all gone. Oh yeah, the people who rely on the ecosystem…

This is what’s also underlying their arguments about how volcanoes emit CO2 and oil leaks all on its own. They’re trying to get their audience to believe that environmentalists aren’t concerned about practical issues, but that we just have an irrational hatred of any human activity that influences the planet. So if volcanoes—part of our worship object—do it, it can’t be wrong, right?

But while there may be a few goober heads that fit the stereotype they’re trotting out, the reality is that environmentalists aren’t actually working from an arbitrary moral system, where everything our god the planet does is right and everything humans do is wrong.

Actually, cooking is hard (and I smell sexism in claiming otherwise)

[Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte quotes Jamelle Bouie thusly...]“It’s not that healthier ingredients are absent or too expensive — even lower-priced supermarkets have plenty of fresh produce available — it’s that preparing those meals requires more time and energy than is available to most lower-income people.”

[...and adds some important insights. -L]

…Forcing myself to buy unusual produce and learn to cook with it is intimidating, because you fall into “failure is not an option” mode, because you don’t want to waste food. I imagine that if you have a family to feed on a small income, that pressure is even more intimidating. With cooking, you learn by doing, and that means a lot of time and energy put in to practicing and refining. Even for people who are really dedicated to it, it’s often tempting to say, “Fuck it all” and eat out, or grab some prepared food. I do it all the time.

[Go and read this; there's the feminist angle, and also Marcotte touches on how economic pressures affect the culture of eating, which I think is an under-acknowleged problem. -L]

Are some anti-choicers losing their stomach for opposing contraception?

[Pandagon - Amanda Marcotte]The more I think about this story, the more I think it may end up being a really big deal.   As has been extensively covered here, opposition to abortion with the Christian right has been grounded since basically forever in an authoritarian desire to impose the patriarchal family by force, and punish anything that could lead to dissent. And therefore, opposition to abortion tends to come with a whole host of beliefs about sexual and reproductive rights—disapproval of cohabitation and premarital sex, hostility to contraception (especially for unmarried people), disapproval of homosexuality, anxiety about divorce. But of course, there’s a game that the Christian right has to play with its people, who are naturally going to struggle between their desire to live by the rules and their desires to be healthy human beings who actually derive enjoyment from life and sexuality. So they do things like look the other way on divorce while doubling down on gay marriage, knowing that gay people are a small minority and feeling like they’re easier to pick on than straight married people. Abortion, while common, is also hidden and therefore super easy to grandstand about. But contraception is a little more trouble. On the whole, the anti-choice movement has been opposed to contraception—especially for young women or unmarried women—but mostly they try to keep quiet about it, knowing how popular it is.

And now the National Association of Evangelicals has come out in support of contraception, which is a huge step in terms of giving in and choosing reality instead of continuing to grand stand about the evils of sex no matter what the pragmatic consequences, including a high abortion rate. For those of us who were skeptical that the “common ground” strategy could get anti-choice activists to relent on the subject of contraception, this could be evidence that we were overly cynical. Let’s hope. [...]

“Folks that think that people are awful and can’t ever be reliably good don’t believe in making rules that people can actually follow. That would be a waste of time. Instead, they make rules that are merely aspirational. They don’t see these rules as being unrealistic, or at least not any more unrealistic than any other set of rules. It’s the symbolic setting of the bar that matters, not whether people achieve it.”

[The last-quoted paragraph in particular catches my eye because, when criticizing others, I always try to remember to ask myself if I or those whom I consider my political allies / philosophical teachers are prone to the same mistake.

Are my morals more aspirational than achievable? Yes.

In what way?

Example 1: I'm not a hard-line pacifist even though I know that war tends to lead to lots of moral abhorrent acts such as rape, torture, and extra-judicial homicide. I'd like to claim that the United States is too good to torture, but as we all know, that's an aspirational goal, not a reality, and it may or may not be an achievable one for the U.S. in my lifetime. In fact, these and other war crimes are so commonly linked, one suspects they are part of human nature.

Example 2: I'm a feminist. I believe that injustice will always arise from the subservience of women as a class and the political dominance of one gender. Sometimes I despair that certain aspects of male versus female physiology tend to push human societies toward patriarchal development. Nevertheless, I believe it will always be worthwhile to resist patriarchy.

Why, then, is my kneejerk reaction to say that the fundie worldview is de-legitimized by the aspirational nature of their moral guidelines, and yet the progressive worldview is not?

I'll be asking myself this for a while. I have a tentative answer, but I'm still proofing it to prevent myself from question-begging.

--L.]

The Link(s): Thu, Jun 3rd, 11am by Lee Salazar, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License. Terms and conditions beyond the scope of this license may be available at leesalazar.com.