gaudior

John Shore has started a petition asking his fellow Christians to "affirm that same-sex relationships are not inherently immoral." He's aiming for a million signatures; has about 2,000 so far. I know a lot of you aren't Christian, but it's still worth a read-- there's a list of reasons why people signed the petition, which range from the simple ("Jesus told us to love one another,") to the pointed ("There was a time not long ago when people used the Bible to justify slavery, discrimination against women, racial segregation, etc. The incorrect belief that being gay is a sin is the final frontier, and now is the time for Christians to step up on behalf of LGBTQ people,") to the poignant ("Because you can't pray away the gay. Believe me, I tried for 33 years.") And they're worth a read.

I love seeing Christians act so... so Christian.

Grin.

--R

Hi, all! So, I have found an office (!) for my psychotherapy practice, and I have a license, and I am applying for insurances, and I am so ready to go!

So one of my next steps is to establish a web presence. That's where you guys come in. Would you mind looking at the things I'll be putting online, and telling me whether they would sound appealing to you if you were looking for a therapist? Or, conversely, if there's anything there that would turn you off and make you decide absolutely not this one?

Thank you!

( Kink-Aware-Professionals Weblisting )


( Psychology Today Listing )

WHAT WILL GO ON THE WEBSITE
( Front Page )

And then there will be pages you can click to, which are:
( What to Expect )

( My Approach )

( Background )

So... you probably won't have time to read all of it, but any feedback would be really helpful. Also, is there anything you'd want to know that isn't on the website, or in either of the shorter listings?

Thank you so, SO much!
--R

I've been spending a lot of time* lately reading news articles on same-sex marriage, and their comments sections. One thing I've noticed is how very upset opponents of same-sex marriage get at being called "bigots." "We're not bigots for trying to hold the line on our religious beliefs," they say. Or "The definition of bigotry is not ‘fear and intolerance.’ It’s making a judgment without knowing the facts."

Now, this is not true-- according to the OED, the definition of bigotry is: "intolerance towards those who hold different opinions from oneself." Merriam-Webster agrees, defining "bigot" as "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance." Even dictionary.com goes with "stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one's own."

Those definitions don't specifically mention fear, but they're very clear about the intolerance. They don't say bigotry is ignorant; they say it's stubborn and refuses to change its mind.

Similarly, opponents of same-sex marriage will sometimes say that they aren't practicing discrimination. "Upholding Traditional Marriage is Not 'Discrimination,'"they say, because "when gay activists and their supporters cry 'discrimination' they conveniently avoid the question of whether homosexual relationships merit being granted equality with marriage." The basic argument there is that all laws make choices which discriminate between two things (no murders is inherently better than murders), so doing that about gay marriage doesn't count as discrimination against gay people.

This particular piece of double-think comes directly from three beliefs about bigotry and discrimination. The first is that they are bad. The second is that they are historical, not current. And the third is that they are always based on nothing.

This is where I wish to hell more people read more intellectual history, and had at least a primer on race theory. Sure, I'm glad that people agree that being hateful is a bad thing. But do they honestly believe that this is a new concept? The idea "you should be nice to people different from you" isn't new, nor did the modern use of the word "bigot" spring into existence in 1965. George Washington, slave-owner, praised the United States Government as one which "gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." (Letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island (1790)) Voltaire wrote the Treatise on Tolerance in 1763, decrying prejudice against Protestants and others.** I'm sure if I looked harder I could find plenty of older sources; suffice it to say that it's not like everyone used to be unquestioningly bigoted Back in the Bad Old Days. Nor is bigotry over-- there are plenty of people who hold negative views of people of different races, and like to explain that they're not racist-- they just call it like they see it/think affirmative action is unfair/have a sense of humor, what?

But the most important thing is that opponents of same-sex marriage can't imagine that historical bigots had reasons for their beliefs. Ta-Nehisi Coates explains this really well with the concept of "a muscular empathy." "It's easy," he says, "to say you would have acted better than a slave master if you had lived in the antebellum South... But it's much more interesting to assume that you wouldn't have, and then ask 'Why?'" You have to realize that most people believed the things we now think are wrong, not because they were all stupid and hateful, but because these things were, at the time, self-evident. Historical bigots knew that what we now call racism was proper, the way things should be. Because it was obviously right and natural, because the Bible said so, because Black men with White women made them feel uncomfortable and icky-- they didn't think they were "making a judgment without knowing the facts." They had the facts. They were quite sure of it. The facts they had are different from our facts, but that doesn't mean they didn't have them. They had scientific papers, they had the words of religious leaders they trusted-- they had thought this through. There were reasoned debates about slavery, about denying women the right to vote-- and the people we would now see on the wrong side of history often had excellent logic and rhetoric to back them up. They were not unthinking. They simply had beliefs we now see as wrong.

The difficulty that same-sex marriage opponents have is that they cannot bring themselves to question what they believe. Which is fair. Most of us, even the most liberal, have a deep level where we simply believe what we believe because we believe it's true. We can play all the questioning games we like, but: I believe that you shouldn't torture kittens. I just believe that. It just seems innately true to me, and understanding that some people have reasons to torture kittens takes a huge leap of understanding. Even if I get to where I truly understand the theoretical framework wherein torturing kittens is a fine use of an afternoon, I will still have a little voice, deep inside me, saying, "but that's still wrong!"

But the thing is: believing something deeply, having all sorts of evidence to back it up, doesn't make it not bigotry. Treating one group of people differently from another is discrimination.*** Refusing to accept other ways of life is bigotry. That's just how it is. Having reasons and (in your opinion) the will of God behind you doesn't make you not a bigot. It may mean that you're right. But you cannot both hold that view and claim not to be a bigot. That just makes you a bigot in the 16th century meaning: "sanctimonious person, religious hypocrite."

--R



*Some might argue a terrifyingly obsessively lot.
**"It does not require great art, or magnificently trained eloquence, to prove that Christians should tolerate each other. I, however, am going further: I say that we should regard all men as our brothers. What? The Turk my brother? The Chinaman my brother? The Jew? The Siam? Yes, without doubt; are we not all children of the same father and creatures of the same God?"
***And, yes, the argument, "Gays aren't discriminated against! They have just as much right to marry someone of the opposite sex as straight people do!" is very cute. It even holds some water if you believe that "the union of husband and wife" is innately the definition of marriage, and it's as impossible for a wife and wife to "marry" as it would be to "drive" without a vehicle, or make an "omelette" without eggs. But as the Iowa Supreme Court pointed out, this argument says "gay people can have this right if and only if they give up the thing that distinguishes them as a group." It's like saying "Jews have a perfect right to freely practice their religion, if by 'practice a religion' you understand it to mean 'go to a church and worship Jesus Christ.'"

I've been reading arguments about same-sex marriage, and one thing I keep running into is that opponents seem to see themselves as having Values and Restraint about sex, and the other side as having none at all. It's a zillion kinds of untrue, but those of us on the other side don't exactly have a Bible* or other handy reference guide that we can point to as our canon of what is right and wrong about sex.

So I thought I'd write one. This is my personal set of rules, I'm not sure how well they match other people's.

1. Do not have sex with someone who doesn't want to have sex with you.**
2. Do not have sex with someone who's too young or asleep*** or intoxicated*** or crazy or insufficiently-sentient to be able to make the same kinds of decisions about sex that you can make.
3. Do not have sex you don't want to have.
4. Take precautions not to get anyone sick.
5. Take precautions not to get anyone pregnant unless both partners want them to be.
6. Make sex as enjoyable and satisfying as possible for you and your partner(s).
7. Keep whatever promises you make to your partner(s) about sex with other people.
8. Never lie to your partner(s) about sex, with other people or otherwise.
9. Don't take part in other people's breaking of promises to their partners about sex.
10. Don't use sex to manipulate people.
11. Tell your partner(s) what you want and what you feel, and ask about what they want and feel, enough to make all the above happen.****
12. Don't shame anyone, including yourself, for their sex- or love-lives.
13. Learn about sex enough to know what you want and don't want, how to do it well, and how to talk about it.
14. Teach people anything they want to know about sex.*****

Am I missing any?

--R


*Entertainingly, the Bible turns out not to have very much to say at all about sex before marriage. It's also wildly unclear about same-sex sex, but that's more widely known.
**And just because someone had sex with you once, or a certain type of sex, doesn't mean you can assume they will always want to have sex with you, or that all types of sex are okay by them.
***Unless they gave their consent beforehand.
****Perhaps the most important example: make sure that you have explicit consent to have sex with someone, and keep alert to their responses throughout, don't assume you know what they want. If you're playing with consent as part of a fantasy, have a clear safe-word which you follow absolutely, and immediately end the scene if your partner uses it.
*****I would say "age-appropriately," but that's implied in the "what they want to know"-- kids usually aren't that interested in things they're actually too young to process. You just have to answer the question they're actually asking, not leap ahead.

So, I am making a principled call to action that everyone buy more Girl Scout cookies.

No, seriously--

Some transphobic fuckwits are calling for a boycott. Because when a little transgirl asked to join the Girl Scouts, the Girl Scouts of Colorado thought it over and released an official statement that "if a child identifies as a girl and the child's family presents her as a girl, Girl Scouts of Colorado welcomes her as a Girl Scout."

Now, you can argue that just by being the Girl Scouts, the organization is gender-essentialist, and worry about what happens to transboys who come out after years of being Girl Scouts, etc. But I think that's less important than the fact that the Girl Scouts are a huge international organization which affects the lives of thousands of kids, and they're doing the right thing, and they're going to be taking some heat for it. So, y'know, buy cookies! If you're vegan, buy cookies and give them to your friends! Email the Girl Scouts and tell them standing up for the rights of transgender girls is a good thing to do! And so forth!

--R

So, Fred Clark at Slacktivist wrote rather a good piece on the important work the EPA does, and why we want it to keep doing it.

--R

JOSS WHEDON: Oh, hey, you know what's interesting? Feminism!
HUGE CANON OF FEMINIST THEORY: *looks at Joss Whedon*
JOSS WHEDON: *leaps into it, jumps around wildly waving his arms* WAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!
THE INTERNET: ...
ELIZA DUSHKU: So, wait, is this supposed to be sexy sex or disturbing sex I'm having? A lot of? Because it's kind of hard to tell from the script.
THE INTERNET: *facepalm*

Just got back from the Pride Community Center's march in the Bryan/College Station Christmas Parade.



It's a pretty diverse parade of different community groups, from the Girl Scouts (they were dressed as cookies) to the Blinn College Dentistry School to the Ron Paul supporters. Plus various churches, the fire-fighters, the A&M Army Corps... 112 groups altogether, going down Texas Ave (the biggest street that goes through Bryan and College Station).

And we were there, the first time there's been any sort of GLBTQ group in the parade. I think everyone was a little nervous going in. It's one thing to go to a Pride CC event where it's just you and queer people and allies in a room, eating a feast or watching a movie or whatever. This, though... this was walking down the main street, and being on TV. This was "you are now out to everyone in town, bam, that's it, out."

But there were eleven of us-- seven board members and four people (mostly students) from the community. We wore tinsel garlands, and we marched down the street and handed out candy (we had about 200 or 300 pieces, with our logo and Facebook page on them, and it was so not enough-- we ran out within the first block or so), and waved and smiled, and people waved and smiled back.

And nothing went wrong at all. I mean, not every single person smiled at us... but it was kind of cold out. (After threatening rain all day, and storming for most of the morning, the rain let up for the entire time we marched. Then it started again, shortly after we got into our cars to go home. Nicely timed.) No-one hassled us, no-one bothered us. Our members and allies and people we knew cheered wildly for us.

And... there was this one kid, maybe ten or twelve, who just stared at us with this wide-eyed amazement. I don't know what was going on with him. But I have this story in my head that he saw us, and recognized what we were, and was amazed because he had not realized that queer people could just march down the street (in Bryan, Texas) with a banner, smiling and laughing and happy. That maybe he could do that one day.

I don't know if that happened for that kid in particular, but I bet it happened for somebody today.

This will probably be the last Pride CC event I take part in before I leave... there'll be some meetings, and maybe a karaoke night, but that was the big thing planned for December. But that... damn. That was worth doing.

I'm glad we did that.

--R

My apologies-- my old hotmail address seems to be spamming people. If you get email from me at hotmail, please just delete it-- I never send email from that address, so it's not me.

Feh.

From the Treaty of Tripoli, signed in 1796/1797 by President John Adams and unanimously ratified by the Senate.

As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen,—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

In your face, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association. Who is an enormous asshole.

--R