GAY = SIN from Matthew Brown on Vimeo.
Matthew Brown has made a video which he shares on Vimeo, looking at how some people are so thoroughly opposed to the ‘gay lifestyle’ – which I interpret simply as opposition to the fact that gay people exist – that they feel compelled to share their distain for others in a as public a forum as is possible. He overlays critical audio over images captured of friends sharing special times together. The sounds so awfully contrast with the clement, benign and thoroughly gregarious nature of the images portrayed – pictures that could not be further from the audio that accompanies them. The result is artistic and thought provoking, as well as not just a little bit beautiful.
Check out the video link for an High Definition version which, through its clarity, renders the images yet more poignant and meaningfull.
Why greater censure; because Israel has higher relative wealth than Russia and in other contexts acts in an intelligent and rational way. How can we explain away Israel’s bad behaviour as though it doesn’t have other options? Melanie Phillips in The Spectator writes today of the west’s ‘pathological obsession’ with Israel, ‘Selective Moral Outrage‘. The thing is, when we discussing a state that is financially propped up by the US, one should hold them to a higher standard. It’s delusional and insulting to claim that all opposition to the actions Israel takes militarily is anti-semitic, as Bret Stephens implies: ‘As for the Chechens, too bad for their cause that no Jew will ever likely become president of Russia’. Russia is no Israel and visa versa. This but what about argument just doesn’t hold water. As Johann Hari recently wrote in his article in The Independent – ‘How to spot a lame, lame argument‘: There is one particular type of bad argument that has always existed, but it has now spread like tar over the world-wide web, and is seeping into the pubs, coffee shops and opinion columns everywhere. It is known as ‘what-aboutery’ – and there was a particularly ripe example of it in response to one of my articles last week.
As a rhetorical trick, it is simple. Anyone can do it, and we are all tempted sometimes. When you have lost an argument – when you can’t justify your case, and it is crumbling in your hands – you snap back: “But what about x?” You then raise a totally different subject, and try to get everybody to focus on it – hoping it will distract attention from your own deflated case.
Can we back away from the distraction of comparing Israel/Palestine to everywhere else in the world and concentrate on fixing what is clearly going wrong with that conflict itself. Middle-Eastern peace won’t come because one day everyone realises what Russia does in Chechnya is worse, but rather when all sides are honest about they can, could and should do to end conflict and bring about a harmonious life for all. I still think this is possible, though the mindset and honesty from all parties required is some ways off.
Plus, basing an article on numbers of hits from a Google search is elementary-school level journalism.
Jonathan Miller, who’s now kind of the new chairman of the International Secular Society or the British Humanist Association, one of the two, in England. He said to me the other day, he doesn’t like the word atheist because he doesn’t think there should be a special word for it, if you don’t have a word for saying you don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy.
Wayne Besen, on his blog, discusses the the idea of a Southern Baptist leader Rev Albert Mohler Jr that one day, were a genetic propensity to homosexuality ever discovered, he would condone the use of anti-gay treatments to correct these traits. The idea is interesting because it comes from a man who is clearly in a position of power in his community. He’s riding high and there are few natural predators. There’s no need to watch your back, right? But what if he did have to? What if he were to consider his stated view but from the position of a Christian who is unpopular. You go to Turkey, go to China, go to Indonesia and perhaps the idea that eradicating gays might not be quite as powerful. Why? Not that these men and women who criticise everyone else’s lifestyles would have had a change of had, not that their hatred would have diminished, but in the light of threats to their own eradication and extermination perhaps they would have less haste in persecuting others. Besen says:
Before you dismiss this question as hypothetical or academic, consider that research into the origins of spirituality is a robust field of inquiry. There are currently about a dozen studies that show shared personality traits among religious people, suggesting a genetic or biological basis. …In Mohler’s world, conservative Christians are a majority and considered a paragon of virtue. However, the late singer John Lennon is not the only person who has “imagined” a world without religion and its Inquisitions and suicide bombers. Indeed, there are prominent scholars and writers who consider religion to be little more than a psychological defect – much like the Southern Baptists now consider homosexuality.
While the right in America is strong they think of their worldview as omnipotent and supreme. But their lack of humility and their absolute faith, which often equals a disregard of and lack of respect for the views of others could be a threat to themselves. Who is to say that in some future time, our increasingly laïque and secular societies will not view religion as a greater threat to humanity than ‘alternative’ sexualities? Gays don’t start wars because other people aren’t gay, we just want to be left alone. But those crazy christians are just bringing fire onto themselves. By pushing to continually persecute gays, legislating against us, protesting against us, hating against us, praying against us, shooting, stabbing and killing us, they will eventually undermine their own position of what is for now strength. Love thy neighbor flys out the window when those neighbors are both guys. Maybe they should rethink that?
I thought this article on the Guardian’s blog site ‘comment is free’ was fascinating. The article may well have come from the Observer (Sunday version of the Guardian) newspaper, so it’s not really a blog post. Henry Porter discusses Jack Straw’s recent comments about he would prefer Muslim women not to wear full, covering, headdress, and how ‘our’ Western secular societies are largely capitulating to pressures from some religious groups not to conform and adapt to living within these communities:
He didn’t quite say that the veil has no place in a liberal secular society, but if that was his intention I agree with it. This is not to persecute Muslims for their beliefs or deny them rights: it is simply to say that the veil, like it or not, has become increasingly regarded as a symbol of separatist aspiration and of female subservience. Many wear it voluntarily, but it does not stop this being a symbol of women’s oppression which stretches back to the times of classical Greece. Several official, as well as the self-appointed, spokesmen who have entered the fray since publication of the Lancashire Telegraph last week have suggested that Muslims are being discriminated against. ‘Would he say to the Jewish people living in Stamford Hill that they shouldn’t dress like Orthodox Jews?’ asked Reefat Bravu, chair of Muslim Council’s social and family affairs unit.
The answer is that wearing a veil in a largely secular society says something about the woman’s position in her marriage and probably prevents her from engaging with that society properly and so enjoying the rights of other women. It is fundamentally different from wearing, say, a sari or any of the traditional clothes of the Hassidim because it erects a barrier between her and the people around her.
I couldn’t agree more with the assessment. I find it doubly troubling, the wearing of the burkas themselves but also the reaction to the comments because there is an implied separation between societies. When so many communities can successfully cooperate and celebrate that melange of cultures, having certain groups intentionally remove themselves from the conversation, establishing and enforcing restrictive, divisive practices is disappointing. And prolonging the ‘outrage’ seems, honestly, petty. Women should not be treated, whether voluntarily or not, in the manner a burka or such garments implies. Not anywhere, but certainly not in societies that espouse individual rights and freedoms. These may clash with religious practices but eventually, one must take the upper hand and in the UK, we haven’t apported religion that dominant standing for decades.
I only really put this link up on here because I was intrigued by the story carried by the Boston Globe which looks at the differences between two identical twins aged just 7 years old, one of whom is almost certainly going to identify himself as gay, the other straight. This is interesting because it implies a non-genetic pressure on the boys, though they had very clearly different personalities and interests from the very beginning, despite being raised about as similarly as possible.
When the twins were 2, Patrick found his mother’s shoes. He liked wearing them. Thomas tried on his father’s once but didn’t see the point.
When they were 3, Thomas blurted out that toy guns were his favorite things. Patrick piped up that his were the Barbie dolls he discovered at day care.
When the twins were 5, Thomas announced he was going to be a monster for Halloween. Patrick said he was going to be a princess. Thomas said he couldn’t do that, because other kids would laugh at him. Patrick seemed puzzled. “Then I’ll be Batman,” he said.
Their mother – intelligent, warm, and open-minded – found herself conflicted. She wanted Patrick – whose playmates have always been girls, never boys – to be himself, but she worried his feminine behavior would expose him to ridicule and pain. She decided to allow him free expression at home while setting some limits in public. That worked until last year, when a school official called to say Patrick was making his classmates uncomfortable. He kept insisting that he was a girl.
Patrick exhibits behavior called childhood gender nonconformity, or CGN. This doesn’t describe a boy who has a doll somewhere in his toy collection or tried on his sister’s Snow White outfit once, but rather one who consistently exhibits a host of strongly feminine traits and interests while avoiding boy-typical behavior like rough-and-tumble play. There’s been considerable research into this phenomenon, particularly in males, including a study that followed boys from an early age into early adulthood. The data suggest there is a very good chance Patrick will grow up to be homosexual. Not all homosexual men show this extremely feminine behavior as young boys. But the research indicates that, of the boys who do exhibit CGN, about 75 percent of them – perhaps more – turn out to be gay or bisexual.
Patrick’s mother says, ”I can now imagine him being completely straight, which I couldn’t a year ago,” she says. “I can imagine him being gay, which seems to be statistically most likely.”
She says she’s fine with either outcome, just as long as he’s happy and free from harm. She takes heart in how much more accepting today’s society is. “By the time my boys are 20, the world will have changed even more.”
The nondenominational Lakewood Church in Texas, the nation’s largest congregation, moved into the Compaq Center, once the home of the Houston Rockets, over the weekend. After $95 million in renovations, including two waterfalls and enough carpeting to cover nine football fields, the arena now belongs to a charismatic church with a congregation of 30,000, revenues of $55 million last year and a television audience in the millions. Like many new evangelical churches, the building has no cross, no stained glass, no other religious iconography. Instead, it has a cafe with wireless Internet access, 32 video game kiosks and a vault to store the offering.
On Saturday evening, at the first service in the arena, Joel Osteen, the pastor, exhorted a packed house of black, white and Latino worshipers, some of whom arrived three hours early. “What a sight this is. You guys look like victors, not victims,” he said, to a round of applause. “We’re just going to have a great time and celebrate the goodness of God tonight.”
Last month [October 2004] in New York City, Osteen sold out Madison Square Garden two nights in a row — something New Yorkers say the NBA’s Knicks can’t even do. One woman from Florida asked him if he’s the next Billy Graham.
“I don’t know. I don’t think of it like that because I think Billy Graham served his purpose. I don’t think anybody is ever going to take over for Billy Graham. He was so great,” Osteen said.”That little man is so powerful. He’s just a mighty man of God,” said Nell Kendrick, who drives from Austin to see Osteen preach.
The Compaq Center, the former home of the Houson Rockets, is transforming from a sports and entertainment complex to the new Lakewood International Church. The same designers who work the Grammy Awards are building a stage with a huge jumbotron and waterfalls on each side of the choir. The renovation will cost $85 million.
We asked why the money isn’t being used to help people. “What I would say is, when we have this facility, we’ll have a bigger base, so we can help more people,” Osteen said.
…Even as it has ceased to be a crime or necessarily a political career-breaker to be gay, unprincipled gay-baiting has mushroomed into a full-fledged political movement. It’s a virulent animosity toward gay people that really unites the leaders of the anti-”activist” judiciary crusade, not any intellectually coherent legal theory (they’re for judicial activism when it might benefit them in Florida). Their campaign menaces the country on a grander scale than Drury and Preminger ever could have imagined: it uses gay people as cannon fodder on the way to its greater goal of taking down a branch of government that is crucial to the constitutional checks and balances that “Advise and Consent” so powerfully extols.
Today’s judge-bashing firebrands often say that it isn’t homosexuality per se that riles them, only the potential legalization of same-sex marriage by the courts. That’s a sham. These people have been attacking gay people since well before Massachusetts judges took up the issue of marriage, Vermont legalized civil unions or Gavin Newsom was in grade school.
UPDATE:: In other news, the NYTimes is going to start charging $50 a year for access to comment articles just like this one. Starting in September, subscribers will have ‘early access’ to content and comment that was previously free. This is most interesting because just a couple days ago the LA Times stopped charging for its premium content, having found that it severely impacted readership. This is, I think, a bold and yet foolish move on the part of the times. The success of about.com, about which they gloat so openly on their website, was due to its openness. Now the Times wants to restrict access to only those with the money to pay for added bits and pieces, a strategy which they hope will bring in more cash but could well just push people away from the site. Perhaps they know something that we don’t know, but a lot of UK newspapers have been scaling back their premium content sections, keeping only ‘digital editions’ and so forth as the Guardian does. By making themselves less open to the market, I think the NYTimes risks going the way of the Wall Street Journal, where no one pays attention to it because it simply isn’t a factor in everyday life. It’s not part of the equation. Editor and Publisher boingboing links NYTimes Co Press Release
This offering marks an important step forward in the Company’s overall digital strategy. Since the Times Company launched its digital operations in the mid 90s, it has had three business objectives for them – profitability, scale and revenue diversification. In 2001 the Company’s digital properties achieved profitability and earlier this year, the acquisition of About, Inc. increased their scale. The launch of TimesSelect further diversifies their revenue base.
“If you have weaklings around you who do not share your biblical values, shed yourself of them,” wrote Bob Jones III, president of the eponymous South Carolina university, to President Bush after the election. “Put your agenda on the front burner and let it boil.”"
My University really has a knack at choosing wholly inappropriate colleges for students to exchange with in the US. Coming from one of the most liberal places in the UK, going to the University of South Carolina, or the Catholic University of America (as Pol Sci students do in DC) is not perhaps the most obvious placing. I can’t believe just how out of left-field these choices are; there seems to be no basis for why we’d choose them other than a singular lack of research. I just hope I can pick somewhere for myself – if even the Times doesn’t like your college, there’s something going wrong.
