275. NOW THAT'S A REAL HATE CRIME!

From the Archives (5 May 2007) I subscribe to the American Family Association's (AFA) action alert service so that I can alert my progressive friends to the need to counter fundie protests. Hence I know that the Christianists really have their panties in a wad this week.

The fundies are worried SICK about the possibility of the Hate Crimes Act actually passing, so yesterday they urged folks to ask PrezBush to veto the act should it reach his desk.

The AFA also warned religious brethren that they will no longer be able to spew their hatred in church or on the Web or in a public setting without being arrested unless if they fail to successfully defeat this act.

Reasonable people would say that folks who target victims because of their sexual orientation should be charged with a hate crime, since these people are committing an act of hatred—remind me to tell you all about the joys of having queer spray-painted onto your car when you’re sixteen years old and living in a small southern town if you doubt that—but the AFA insists that "liberal leaders" just want to extend special rights to us queer folks.

(No. No. You're confused. Special rights are those things that you and your ilk extend only to heterosexuals who fall in love.)

So. Today the AFA has taken a particularly dishonorable stand and resorted to equating pedophilia with queer love.

(Yes, yes, I suppose you could get the two confused, since the government insists on placing the names of queers who engage in consensual sex on the same sex0offender lists as the men who kidnap and molest your toddlers.)

Yep. Today's Action Alert warns that, since the definition of sexual orientation is not spelled out in the act, Christians will be forced to stop discriminating against ANY form of sexual orientation.

Then (because they're nothing if not thorough), the AFA includes the following list of sexual orientations (er sex crimes)—a list that the logic-challenged will no doubt assume lists acts that will be protected under the Hate Crimes Act.

(Note how many times queer people crop up, when most sex crimes are committed by heterosexual men.)

Interesting that lewdness is defined as a sexual orientation too.

SEXUAL ORIENTATIONS
Coprophilia—sexual arousal associated with feces

Exhibitionism—the act of exposing one's genitals to an unwilling observer to obtain sexual gratification

Fetishism/Sexual Fetishism—obtaining sexual excitement primarily or exclusively from an inanimate object or a particular part of the body

Frotteurism—approaching an unknown woman from the rear and pressing or rubbing the penis against her buttocks

Gay/Homosexual—people who form sexual relationships primarily or exclusively with members of their own gender

Gerontosexuality—distinct preference for sexual relationships primarily or exclusively with an elderly partner

Incest—sex with a sibling or parent

Kleptophilia—obtaining sexual excitement from stealing

Klismaphilia—erotic pleasure derived from enemas

Lesbian—a homosexual female

Lewdness—sexually unchaste; inciting to lust or debauchery

Masturbation—erotic stimulation of one's own genitals

Necrophilia—sexual arousal and/or activity with a corpse

Paraphilia—a condition in which a person's sexual arousal and gratification depend on fantasizing about and engaging in sexual behavior that is atypical and extreme

Partialism—A fetish in which a person is sexually attracted to a specific body part exclusive of the person

Pederasty—Sex between an adult and a child, usually an adult male and a male child

Pedophilia—Sexual contact between an adult and a child—Bisexual Pedophilia—term used for an adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child without regard to the sex of the child

Heterosexual Pedophilia—term used for an adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the opposite sex

Gay Pedophilia—term used for a male adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the same sex

Lesbian Pedophilia—term used for a female adult who derives sexual gratification from sexual contact with a child of the same sex

Prostitution—the act or practice of offering sexual stimulation or intercourse for money

Sexual Masochism—obtaining sexual gratification by being subjected to pain or humiliation

Sexual Sadism—the intentional infliction of pain or humiliation on another person in order to achieve sexual excitement

Telephone Scatalogia—sexual arousal associated with making or receiving obscene phone calls

Toucherism—characterized by a strong desire to touch the breast or genitals of an unknown woman without her consent; often occurs in conjunction with other paraphilia

Transsexual—a person whose gender identity is different from his or her anatomical gender

Transvestite—a person who is sexually stimulated or gratified by wearing the clothes of the other gender

Urophilia—sexual arousal associated with urine

Voyeurism—obtaining sexual arousal by observing people without their consent when they are undressed or engaged in sexual activity

Zoophilia/Bestiality—engaging in sexual activity with animals

The um good folks at Don Wildmon's wet-n-wild ranch would have you believe that this is really a 'Thought Control Bill," but no one is saying that people can be charged with a hate crime for what they think.

So listen up, Bubba: we're talking actions here.

It's your ACTIONS, how you express your bigotry, that are being put on notice. Spewing hatred has real consequences and your campaign against queers causes real crimes.

And you don't get to violate other people's rights just because you don't approve of their choices.

Capiche?

Okay. Life will be saner after this weekend, when my chorus's concert and my (gulp) duet are behind me.

(The first performance went fine, despite my stage fright, and a woman in the audience even told me that my cello-rich voice brought tears to her eyes.)

Sweet, huh?

239. NOTHING BUT A BUNCH OF AMISH BUGGIES HERE, FOLKS

We are nothing but a bunch of Amish buggies and tractors out here. No one would care. (Brian Lehman, whose business, Amish City Popcorn, is on a government list of potential terror targets, as quoted in the New York Times)

From the Archives. (31 July 2006) Hmm. Wonder if his business is located beside a secret missile silo?

It’s Monday, 24 July 2006, and I am in the oh so progressive state of South Carolina, home of confederate flags and mustard-based barbecue and “100% Redneck” T-shirts and “Save the Males” bumperstickers and fundamentalist Baptist schools that place razor-wire atop their fences in an effort to keep the wicked out.

Or maybe it’s there to keep the Baptists’ rebellious children in; otherwise they might be smart like me and make a fast escape from this hell hole.

The place feels so hopeless and Faulknerian and sad to me but, at the same time, I’m hyperaware of how many of “God’s good people” here are eager to pass Bible-based laws that would see me stoned.

(Monday) And now I’m in the small Missouri town of St. Robert with my niece, hanging out in a nearly empty cinderblock Budget Inn behind a Waffle House and gas station where my sister reserved a room. We are currently the only occupied room on the back wing and our door faces an abandoned carwash and Electra’s, a seedy topless bar that is frequented by soldiers.

Great.

I’ll write more later but, right now we have to go pick my little sister up at her Army base.

(Tuesday night) Spent last night at Ft. Leonard Wood, where my niece was reunited with her soldier mother, who let her eat four helpings of frosted yellow cake as she listened to her mother explain that she joined the Army because she couldn’t find another way for the two of them to have a better future.

Hope it’s not at too high a price ...

... and yes I did manage to hold my tongue during the prayer invoking God’s favoritism of US troops because, frankly, if there is a god, then I hope she is powerful enough to keep my little sister out of harm’s way (this harm including the all-American soldiers who are raping their female peers with alarming regularity over in Iraq).

My biggest impression of the graduation banquet was that these rows and rows of newly minted soldiers are far too young to be heading off to war. And no big surprise that they are mostly from the poorest states in our union (and mostly from the deep south).

We watched jingoistic slide shows in which the soldiers demonstrated how to use an overstuffed Q-Tip-looking thing to fight another soldier; how to throw a rope over a wall and climb up the knots; how to slide on your stomach through a mud puddle; how to shout “Yes drill sergeant!” on queue and do whatever your drill sergeant tells you to do just because he says to do it.

Hard to see how this prepares anyone for real-time battle, much less for the sight of the dismembered arms and legs that are supposed to prove our country’s superpower status.

I managed to hold my tongue during these slide shows, even though they might as well have been campaign footage for the president.

I didn’t barf when they played a country song about the Statue of Liberty turning her welcoming hand into a fist after 9/11 so she could kick some Iraqi ass either.

Nor did I point out that the suicide bombers were not even Iraqi and that those weapons of mass destruction are still missing.

Then, finally, all the flag-waving was over and my sister was officially on leave for 10 days, so we piled her duffel bags into the rental car and went swimming at the seedy cinderblock hotel.

Tomorrow we rise at 5 AM and drive 3 hours to St. Louis—a city that is experiencing power outages—on our trek back to South Carolina.

And then I high-tail it out of there as fast as my lesbian “life style” legs will carry me.

BEST-OF SPAM: We never repent of having eaten too little.

224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS

“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times

From the Archives

(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.

And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.

(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.

(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)

Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”

He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.

(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)

Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.

Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)

Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.

Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.

Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?

Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.

SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”

READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend

LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.

223. ADVOCATING A GAY “LIFESTYLE”

From the Archives

(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.

The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.

Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)

And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.

And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?

He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.

(Go team)

No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.

Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).

Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.

193. WANT SOME TORTURE WITH THOSE CHEERIOS?, OR, THE GEOMETRY OF ATROCITY

From the Archives

(February 2006) I’ve been staring at the newest Abu Ghraib photographs.

(Yes, the ones that Bush & Co. tried so hard to keep under lock and key.)

The first batch was bad enough, but these are definitely worse. They also confirm that American soldiers beat at least one prisoner to death ... and for what? Loyalty to an administration that’s eager to eliminate anyone who challenges it?
Because they were just following orders, sir?

(But no John Wayne noble soldier bullshit can justify this one, fellas, so don’t even start in on It’s a Grand Ol’ Flag or that old following orders routine.)

What we have is lies on top of manufactured weapons on top of human blood smeared from one end of a holding cell to the other on top of white Muslim asses with bright red cigarette holes burned into them.

(Nothing to wave your stupid yellow ribbons about either, folks.)

So how many Americans do you figure are following what’s really going on at Abu Ghraib, at Gitmo?

It’s time we recognize the necessity of bearing witness to the atrocities that are happening in our time. With our tax dollars. In our name.

You know, I’m a writer and I value words, but I also know that reading a hundred descriptions of abuse did not have the same impact of my seeing one photograph of a real human being reduced to a battered collection of chipped teeth and vomit and feces stains and hematomas all wrapped up in swaths of plastic wrap (to better what? Stew him in his own blood?).

So let that image sink in while you eat your Cheerios, dear readers.

•

I downloaded some of the images and have been studying them the way I study Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians—in an effort to understand this geometry of atrocity.

I suppose these images are the twenty-first-century version of those black-and-white photos of cops and their dogs attacking nonviolent black protestors or that Vietnamese man who is one second away from getting his brains blown out by a soldier.

... So, yeah, back to my recovering-Seventh-Day-Adventist pal’s question regarding why anyone would voluntarily watch violence.

Here’s what I believe: Artists must walk into the fire with our souls bared and our eyes wide open and feed on the nightmares that are happening in our midst. And we must find a way to use these images—especially the horrific ones—in a manner that makes it impossible for people to hide inside their iPods and ignore what’s being done in their names.

•

Meanwhile, did anyone else note that this Outsource Everything administration contracted control of our ports to the Arabs?

•

And did you know that this past Sunday was EVOLUTION SUNDAY?

This little soire didn’t receive the publicity that Frist’s Creationist Sunday event garnered, but Evolution Sunday is part of the Clergy Letter Project—a religious response to fundamentalists’ insistence that real Christians must choose between modern science and their religion.

Turns out over 10,000 ministers disagree with Frist’s fundamentalism. They signed a letter stating that evolution is “a foundational scientific truth” and say that rejecting it “is to deliberately embrace scientific ignorance and transmit such ignorance to our children.”

They also said

We believe that among God’s good gifts are human minds capable of critical thought and that the failure to fully employ this gift is a rejection of the will of our Creator.

The bad news is that most of the signatories are from mainline Protestant denominations, which are shrinking nearly as fast as evangelical fundie churches grow.

And here’s an interesting spin on a vote that actually endorses incorporating intelligent design into South Carolina classroom materials.

John Drake opened his AP article thusly:

COLUMBIA—The Education oversight Committee voted Monday to reject standards for high school biology that deal with teaching evolution and insisted the curriculum incorporate critical analysis.

Now I know you’re probably thinking his “critical analysis” involves evidence-based methodologies, but he’s actually referring to creationism.

And now I’ll end on a personal note.

My triathlete ex Tree just found out that she has a 69 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has only radiation treatment and an 81 percent chance of surviving for 5 years if she has chemo and radiation. (She elected for chemo, naturally.)

So please give yourself a breast exam. Today.
TAGS >

173. CHRISTMAS UNDER SIEGE

From the Archives

(December 2005) Someone’s stealing 110-foot light poles right out from under the noses of the Baltimore police and this one-line description appeared in today’s online New York Times:

The Bush administration seems to be losing sight of the fact that the majority party may not use its powers to strip citizens of their rights, politicize the judicial system or rig the election process.

And we wonder why so many North American youth have lost faith in the (sometimes still) democratic process and don’t even bother to vote.

I cruised through the mountains this morning in a heavy downpour. Usually the temperature rises as I drive down the mountain and the sun comes up in my eyes but, this morning, the sun stuck its head under the covers instead of rising and the temperature fell steadily.

I encountered some sleet and slushy snow too, so I guess I’ll be placing my snow boots in the trunk a little early this year.

•

This past weekend, a friend told me about a letter she wrote to her fundamentalist church informing then that she was withdrawing her membership because there is nothing in the Bible that says women cannot hold positions of power but they refuse to let women take an active role in the power structure and insist that women behave submissively.

For these reasons, she informed them, she was using the only power that she had—the power of her feet—to walk away from this organization that she now refers to as “the cult.”

Since my mother just pointed out that I am still a member of the southern (twitch) Baptist church of my childhood until I officially withdraw, I need to write a similar letter.

This is way down on my list of priorities right now, but I plan to reference my aunt Becky’s homophobic correspondence plus Sue Monk Kidd’s Dance of the Dissident Daughter (an excellent book for survivors of religious fundamentalism). I also want to state my belief that members of the convention practice hatred and bigotry, which violates Jesus's message of love and inclusion.

I know this probably won’t matter a hill of beans to anyone and will probably just succeed in making my mother uncomfortable in one of the few places to which she still ventures, but it’s important to me to say why I am withdrawing.

Maybe I’ll CC my mother and aunt too ... and hmm, maybe I should write this letter before Christmas, since I’ll no doubt receive another God-can-cure-you epistle when I show up down south.

My aunt, like so many Christianists, insists that our nation’s founders intended for our country to be a theocracy. I have concluded that she has never read a single unbiased biography of our founders and that the leaders of her cult assume that their followers are stupid, since they write such nonsense and encourage them to pass it off as fact.

Contrary to popular superstition, Thomas Jefferson understood very well that the only religious freedom the Puritans were interested in (besides their own) was the freedom to label people who disagreed with them as witches. He knew their biases resulted in witchhunts back then just as they do today, and that these extremists were more than willing to supplant Jezus’s message of inclusion with the Nicene Creed and to create scapegoats for their own benefit.

And THAT reality—along with the long, long history of religious persecution in Europe and elsewhere—is why the US Constitution spells out the separation of church and state so strongly, Aunt Becky.

Once our country had Thomas Jefferson—a possible slave rapist ( I hope it was mutual lust) but a damn insightful one who at least believed in democracy. Now we have an Constitution-shredding president who has forced Grand Canyon National Park to sell scientifically inaccurate creationist books in their bookstore.

(!)

Yes indeedy, Christianists and their children (who no longer even have to attend a public school where they would receive evidence-based information about their world) can now purchase these inaccurate tomes and take their own creationist rafting trip down the canyon (during which they will learn about humans coexisting with the dinosaurs and how there is no such thing as carbon evidence or evolution and how everyone knows that Eve was the original sinner who corrupted good men and removed us all from paradise).

What’s that Muhammed Ali line:

I ain't no Christian. I can't be when I see all the colored people fighting for forced integration get blown up. They get hit by the stones and chewed by dogs and then these crackers blow up a Negro church... People are always telling me what a good example I would be if I just wasn't Muslim. I've heard over and over why couldn't I just be more like Joe Louis and Sugar Ray [Robinson]. Well, they are gone and the black man's condition is just the same, ain't it? We're still catching hell.

So here’s my version: I ain’t no Christian. Hell no, I can’t be when I see good homosexuals assaulted by fundamentalists. We’re strapped to a fence and bludgeoned to death or left to die on the street by homophobic cops, sent into exile for being atypical, rate.

People are always telling me what a good person I’d be if I’d just take one of those cure-yer-homosexuality classes and forget how incredibly alluring women are.

(Yes. I love women. And I love that I do.)

But why should I be a fundie talking head instead of who I am? Those other women are the female impersonators, if you ask me, and my very existence is threatened by this bigotry.

We queers are denied basic civil rights that are extended to every other citizen of this country merely because of whom we love, so get out of my face with your religious mythologies and your just-as-I-am bullshit and quit trying to kidnap democracy.

In fact, why don’t you climb back into Plato’s cave where you can stare at the wall and insist that you see only darkness.

So. Yeah. I also just read that Christians are now boycotting businesses that don’t use holiday greetings that they deem appropriate. Christmas is “under siege” by “professional atheists” and “Christian haters,” see, and there is a “liberal plot against the holiday,” according to Fox commentators.

So the American Family Association is leading a boycott against Target because the phrase Merry Christmas is not in the chain’s marketing material.

And the Catholic League is leading a boycott against Wal-Mart because they don’t like the way the chain’s website searches for the word Christmas.

(But, hey, if liberals AND conservatives boycott the place, then maybe they’ll actually give their employees a living wage in an effort to improve their image.)

Now, dear readers, please do make a note of the fact that Christianists do not like terms such as “Happy Holidays” and “Seasons Greetings” and, if they hear such phrases, may very well decide that you too are a professional liberal atheist Christ hater.

Should this happen to you, I suggest that you pick up the nearest brass sleigh bell and, in the midst of your jingalingalinging, bop him or her over the head.

You can follow this action up with a hearty “Happy New Year.”

Or, better yet, point out to your dazed admirer that there is absolutely no biblical evidence whatsoever that the so-called virgin birth happened on or around 25 December. Instead the Christians replaced the Roman Saturnalia celebration with this holiday in an effort to convert celebrants.

SANG IN SHOWER: Carry me back to Memphis. Gotta find my Daisy Jane... (an old America song)

BEST OF SPAM: Subject: Wrist.Factors (well that IS quite the subject now isn’t it? And also the reason some of us have metal bedframes.)

172. THE CHURCH OF THE BIG DILDO

From the Archives (December 2005)

You have navigated with raging soul far from the paternal home, passing beyond the seas’ double rocks and now you inhabit a foreign land.—Medea

Yes that would be me living here in this foreign land where my orchids are sprouting brand new stalks and the clementines I purchased just a few days ago are already beginning to mold.

(What is UP with that? I mean jezzzzuslawd I’m eating three a day!!)

Whole Foods’ produce department has gone way downhill recently (and I still don’t understand why they can’t be bothered to buy locally grown produce when it’s so readily available). I mean, throw some (finely sifted sea) salt over your shoulder in these parts and you’re bound to hit some hippie who went back to the land and has been selling organic rosemary or pig-sniffed truffles or free-range something at the local farmers’ market.

Anyway, so here I am with my short attention span changing topics again when what I wanted to say is that yes, indeedy, this here dykestergrrrl has navigated myself relatively far away from my paternal homeland and you better believe that I only looked back long enough to find those barbecue and cornbread and coconut cream pie recipes.

I was fortunate enough to not desire the tiny strictured life that my family designed for me but, wow, do they keep trying to cram me back into their mold.

In fact, it’s beginning to feel as if they’re stalking me—which, no doubt, means that the church had another save-the-queers-from-themselves drive.

My mother asked what church I attend. (The church of the big dildo, Mom.)

My homophobic Aunt Becky informed me in highlighted all caps that I am going to spend eternity in Hell because I don’t believe every rabidly hateful thing that her minister insists is Jezus’s word and because I “live in unnatural sin.”

Oh. Wait. No. The Baptists don’t concern themselves with Jezus anymore. (He was just too liberal.) It’s all about their so-called literal interpretation of the worduvgawwd now.

(Don’t you wonder in what dank cellar they’ve locked Jezus away? It’s apparently the same cellar where they’ve locked the Christians who took “feed the poor and care for the sick” to heart, since the new Falwell/Dobson/Robertson Jezus impersonator promotes giving huge tax cuts to the rich at the expense of the poor and fails to provide healthcare for the indigent.)

(And yes I know that there are plenty of good liberal Christians out there who are mighty embarrassed that Pat Robertson and his cronies are managing to speak for them all, but I am talking about the organized Christianists with an obvious GOP agenda here.)

And don’t get me started on my little sister, who converted to Catholicism and believes their spiel about separate and unequal gender roles being part of God’s master plan and who knows just knows that I can be cured of my lust for gorgeous women—one of whom, by the way li’l sister, brings me to ecstatic screaming climaxes on a very regular basis.

(Think about THAT the next time you’re mumbling some prescribed phrase out of your lectionary.)

Meanwhile our local dyke chorus has, for the first time in its 22-year history, elected to perform a traditional holiday concert that includes Jezus songs.

See, many of us are classically trained musicians who really enjoy challenging carols such as Rutter’s “Mary’s Lullaby” and “Lo How A Rose E’er Blooming” or the lovely “Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day,” and it is exceedingly difficult to find any classical carols that don't reference the J-Man.

So we bit the bullet and introduced Jezus into our estrogen mix for just this one concert—only we unknowingly did this the same semester that HRC invited us to perform at their Gospel and Unity event (which they, incidentally, presented to us as inclusive of all organized religions).

Turns out their event was actually an attempt to bring African-Americans into their fold ... and I guess they could only envision African-Americans, even queer ones, as gospel-belting churchgoers.

(Hey, ever heard of Audre Lorde or Essex Hemphill or Pomo Afro Homo?)

The HRC event overflowed with evangelical Jezus-farting, but there was neither hide nor hare of Buddha or Pan or Muhammed or Spiderwoman weaving the world or the magnificent golden carp.

So, understandably, my dyke sister-singers are up in arms now about our apparent conversion.

What was I thinking when I voted to perform this Jezus music in the first place? And is it enough that I opted not to participate in the HRC event (because my Jezus allergy can detect allergens from miles away and I was sneezing the second HRC said the word "gospel"). I also declined to design their publicity material for the same reason, but did perform in our holiday concert because, well, I love Rutter and have not yet convinced the chorus to purchase an SSAA arrangement of “Ave Pudendum.”

But anyway, to make matters worse, the local (queer) MCC church asked our chorus and the local gay men’s chorus to perform at their holiday fund-raiser too and, well, we assumed we'd sing “Deck The Halls” and “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” etc, but, well, they just delivered a song list to us and it couldn’t be more Christian!

(Whee our next board meeting is sure going to be fun!)

Meanwhile, I miss the days when the Christians that our chorus sang about were the blood-thirsty extremists who murdered 9 million European women during the witch hunts, and so plan to propose that we sing Holly Near’s “I Ain’t Afraid” (of your Yahweh. I ain’t afraid of your Jesus. I ain’t afraid of your Allah. I’m afraid of what you do in the name of your god) and “Did Jezus Have a Baby Sister?” and “Ave Pudendum” at our next holiday concert, as penance.

LISTENING TO: Maggie Sansone’s Ancient Noels

BEST OF SPAM: last longer John (oh baby I do)

161. SINGING ... ABOUT THE DARK TIMES

From the Archives

(October 2005) So. Scientists have determined that the 1918 flu pandemic was a bird flu that jumped directly to humans. Scientists also speculate that AIDS is a monkey virus that jumped directly to humans.

Now bear with me ‘cause I’ll come back to that. But, in the meantime, anthropologists argue that humans have survived as a species, in part, because our ability to communicate allows us to weed out, through ostracism or physical elimination, the bloodthirsty bullies who would destroy our communities.

Unlike chimpanzees, we homo sapiens manage to silence our bullies in an effort to sustain our species.

Yet homo sapiens engineered the Holocaust. The Crusades. Destroyed priceless cultural artifacts—destroyed thought—during the Dark Ages and beyond. Introduced untold atrocities in the twentieth century. Engineered the disasppeared. And Rwanda. And Darfur.

Now we have reached another juncture when the Christianists have become the arrogant, aggressive iron-fisted bullies who are attempting to silence alternative viewpoints, to silence diversity.

In our time, it is the Donald Trumps of the world—the people who say, with glee, You’re fired! as we sit on our couches eating popcorn and celebrating such meanness—not the Gandhis or Martin Luther Kings Jrs or Bobby Kennedys of the world—who are revered, some photogenic asshole on Survivor who flexes his abs for the camera while stabbing a teammate in the back who is lauded as the new American hero.

Meanwhile, we have elected a president who used his Daddy’s connections to weasel his way out of serving in the armed services but now dons war gear in an effort to pass himself off as a hero. And a mean-spirited, heartless preacher who shows up at gay children’s funerals waving a “God Hates Fags” placards and shouting to the boy’s mourning parents that their child is in Hell where s/he belongs is celebrated as a moral hero by people who consider themselves moral.

We worship the biz school detritis of suburban America—the glamorous, consumer-branded offspring of corporate CEOs and the idle rich who will do anything in the name of bidness and retaining their status among the economic elite.

So I guess it makes sense that the Christianists have followed suit and realized that American citizens want a mean Jerry Falwell-type and not some kind-hearted country bumpkin Will Campbell-type who admonishes us to fulfill Christ’s directive to love one another, damn it!

Evangelists who once proclaimed Jesus’s message of love and inclusiveness now strut their power on stage and their hatred over the radio waves, garner control from their tax-protected pulpits and rake in millions spreading hatred as God’s unerring truth.

Modernity, twentieth-century German Jewish philosophers Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno argue, is marked by a superstitious worship of oppressive force (and by a concomitant reliance on oblivion, poet Carolyn Forché would add).

I fear people who are convinced that they hold the only version of truth, perhaps because I grew up surrounded by too damn many fundamentalists who wanted to control my and everyone else’s mind, body, and soul. I fear people like Eric Rudolph who are so convinced that their god gives them the right to silence all other interpretations of truth that they believe they are justified in walking into a bar and spraying nails into fellow human beings.

And I fear the neighborhood Eric Rudolphs who spread homohate and misogyny across their kitchen tables and backyard fences.

Today, American universities, like universities in Tehran and other theocracies, are teeming with students who “have an unwavering moral compass that is not swayed by public opinion” (as several grad. students informed me before refusing to complete a writing assignment that required them to argue both sides of an issue).

It’s no longer paranoid to imagine American students reporting professors who don’t espouse the presidential administration’s iron-fisted policies to some thought Gestapo that will monitor library books and e-mail and telephone calls, hold us without cause for indeterminate periods of time without ever pressing charges because we spoke out in the name of justice, democracy.

Professors who dare discuss a controversial topic (or who insist that students stick to the topic instead of monopolizing discussion time with their repeated bigotry) are dragged through the mud in newspapers and punished for preaching reason.

Meanwhile, a university degree is something to be purchased, just a piece of paper that suburban parents buy for their children like designer clothes.

But what about knowledge for the sake of knowledge, enlightenment? That’s what kept me working to pay my tuition even when I was exhausted, what keeps my artist friends and me up nights reveling in new ideas and exploring new ways of thinking and seeing and interpreting and moving in the world, our place in it.

My mother used to threaten to send me to Bob Jones University when I mocked Baptist doctrines and I count my blessings every day that religious school vouchers were not available back when I was a kid. I try to remember to recognize how fortunate I am that I was able to attend public schools where—at least in some cases—such narrow doctrines were challenged.

But today Christianists are in a position to hold their children prisoner to these ignorant views, to define the conversation within the parameters of their own narrow world view. And, since Reagan did away with balanced reporting, Christianists can purchase television shows (on, say, the National Geographic channel) that assert their so-called Intelligent Design or whatever philosophy they’re currently espousing as scientific truth without justifying it.

Did you know that there are two different rafting tours down the Grand Canyon: one for scientists and one for people who espouse the theory of intelligent design? Ponder that. And even the once-credible New York Times spends far too much time furthering the president’s agenda instead of presenting objective news (but that’s a topic for another day).

What comes to us via our TV screens and the radio and in our newspapers today may not be factual, may instead be whatever message a sponsor paid for us to hear.

Or shall I just state the obvious: Our reality is determined by the market.

Christianists would argue that science is but an advertisement as well, but some of them have never even taken a legitimate science course from a legitimate scientist. Why then should they be allowed to lecture about this field of expertise?

So many Americans—like Bush’s current Supreme Court nominee—base their world view solely on what they define as the perfect word of God and insist that patterns found in our natural world are immaterial.

Carolyn Forché notes, in her introduction to Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, that

the gap between self and other opens up the problem of relativism that has bedeviled modern philosophy, politics, and poetry. Respect for otherness seems always to release the specter of an infinite regress. The language of religion therefore becomes quite important in this supposedly secular century, for religion traditionally makes claims for universality and unimpeachable truth.

And some of the most flagrant forms of institutionalized violence in our era, she notes, have been directed toward specific religions (during the Holocaust) or against religion in general (as in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe).

Religion in our age of atrocity bears substantial responsibility for human suffering.

I try to believe that most of us are reasonable people who are likewise appalled by the fact that we seem to be worshipping Donald Trump.

(Surely that must appall people at some level.)

I try to believe these people are grasping for morals in a world that feels increasingly out of control and meaningless.

The Christian church is an easy answer in such a world. It provides a social outlet for our children, still teaches the Golden Rule, offers up a (patriotic) version of the Ten Commandments, the promise of salvation, clear boundaries.

The problem is, the modern evangelical movement, the fundamentalists, are also attempting to introduce a new dark ages.

WHAT HAPPENS IF THE RELIGIOUS FUNDAMENTALISTS SUCCEED?

A lawyer friend and I have long philosophical conversations as often as we can manage. Her lawyer husband was on Clinton’s shortlist to be the next Supreme Court justice and said, after the Meiers nomination, We’ve gotten it all wrong. We thought it was abortion, but it’s religion. The ultimate goal is not to overturn Roe v. Wade, but to force their religious beliefs onto the rest of us.

That writing’s been on the wall for some time now.

My friend is re-reading Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale now and it’s scaring the living shit out of her. She says she still can’t believe that we’re actually in a place where the possibility of waking up to discover that her bank account has been closed and her money placed in her husband’s account does not seem so far outside the realm of possibility anymore.

I think of the homeschooled Christianist children, the ones who never even get a chance to experience Enlightenment thought, in terms of Plato’s Parable of the Cave. They’re indoctrinated now, afraid, unable to turn their heads and acknowledge the light at the opening of the cave, and thus continue to insist that the world is black and white, without nuance, without subtlety. They’re rigid with fear and ignorant, yet insist that everyone else see the world through their narrow black and white lens.

There’s a reason Hitler went after the artists, the free-thinkers, first. A reason the Hungarian poet Miklós Radnóti was sent to forced-labor camp where his words were silenced.

Carolyn Forché notes that,

as North Americans, we have been fortunate: wars for us [provided we are not combatants] are fought elsewhere, in other countries. The cities bombed are other people’s cities. The houses destroyed are other people’s houses. We are also fortunate in that we do not live under martial law [yet]. There are nominal restrictions on state censorship; our citizens are not sent into exile. We are legally and juridicially free to choose our associates, and to determine our communal lives. But perhaps we should not consider our social lives as merely products of our choice: the social is a place of resistance and struggle, where books are published, poems read, and protests disseminated. It is the sphere in which claims against the political order are made in the name of justice.

Still, I stand by Bertolt Brecht’s belief: In the dark times ... there will be singing. About the dark times.

Yet (Medea says, finally getting back to those scientists and the bird flu that jumped to the human species and making a huge specious leap), sometimes I wonder if we should compare this cowboy Christianist mindset that now dominates our land to rogue chimpanzee behavior that threatens whole species.

147. CHRISTIAN EXODUS

From the Archives

(September 2005) Christianexodus.org wants to “reestablish a constitutionally limited government founded upon Christian values” by relocating 2,500 families to two SC counties—I guess because SC is not filled with ENOUGH Christianist wackos already!!. Their stealth objective is to gain the electoral majority needed to put their officials in every public office so that they can then dictate how every other citizen can live her/his life.

Here’s their spiel:

ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the US Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.

Notice their past three decades. Many religious extremists seek to overturn spousal and child abuse laws that were put into place in these last 3 decades (God, you see, granted men absolute dominion over their families and women, so they have the God-given right to do with us as they will. See?).

Check out the Family Protection Act from the 1980s for a real sobering overview of these principles.

Randall Terry also props up specious reasoning as fact with lines such as Look what we’ve seen since the second wave of feminism. More violent crime, more child abuse, more divorces, rampant sexual immorality concerning the past 3 decades. What he fails to mention is that the feminist movement pushed to criminalize spousal and child abuse and introduced domestic-violence shelters into our landscape. The movement also encouraged women to leave violent relationships even as it pushed to punish abusive parents.

Protections such as these just irritate the crap out of those "women must submit graciously to men" folks—I mean, how dare we tell them whether or not they can backslap their wives!

There’s more violent crime today because men who beat their wives and children are more likely to be charged with a crime. But, when you factor in these new laws, violent crime is actually LOWER than it was in the oh-so-chaste 1950s.

Sensationalistic reports of violent crime, on the other hand, are all too comonplace.

My pals who grew up in SC speak of the state as rabidly fundamentalist and oppressive, so I worry that this exodus group will encounter minimal resistance there. Still, occasionally visit queers who have stubbornly decided to stay in Greenville (which abuts the area Exodus wants to resettle).

Greenville is also home to the infamous Bob Jones University. Remember the flap that ensued when Bush visited Bob Jones University, with its strict no interracial dating policy?

This university has separate pink and blue sidewalks where males and females walk and a chain-link fence with razor-wire keeps students locked inside/interlopers out. Girls are required to wear knee-length or longer dresses—no pants—and boys' hair must not touch their collars. No facial hair or long sideburns either. And visitors must agree to these policies as well in order to step foot on the grounds.

I can’t help but think about the two gay men in Greensville who have a huge Christmas in July party every year—we're talking hundreds of queers decorating Christmas trees in the tropical heat of summer. A huge event. Will they be forced out? Ostracized? Outlawed? Lynched?

This will surprise people, but this squatting approach strikes me as democracy in action in some ways. Sure, I don’t want to abide by laws I don’t believe in and have done my time at protests and civil disobediences to make my voice heard. And I will continue to fight for equal rights for ALL citizens, not just the mainstream ones.

I am more than a little suspicious of people who rely on stealth invasion to try to force their bias onto others though.

Still, maybe concentrating superstition in a few pockets of the country could free the rest of us up to just move on with our lives though.

Saw this commetary on the Web: “These groups are clever. They are going beyond the ‘intentional community’ model that we’ve seen to date. It is difficult to create an intentional community trying to live with a common set of moral values if your values are not reflected in the laws you must abide by” though.

And lets don't forget that the Bill of Rights is under threat because these groups are so well organized and willing to pretend to be something they’re not in order to achieve their goals.

So much for honesty. The Golden Rule.

Christianexodus got it’s idea from the Free State Project, which started in 2001. This project currently has 6,600 committed participants who are ready to move or have already moved to NH. (Their goal is 20,000 people.) It’s a simple concept: Find a like-minded state, move there, and set up a government that’s run the way you believe it should be run, passing laws that explicitly reflect your own values.

They’ll gain the electoral majority they need to put dozens of officials into every local office from the city council to the school board and then (if they have their way) expand from there.

Also from the Web:

Christian Exodus believes the federal government has extended its reach way too far into the lives of Americans, and has far exceeded the powers reserved for it by the Constitution. They also share many of the Christian right’s viewpoints on hot-button issues (they’re against gay marriage and legalized abortion, they think kids should be able to say Christian prayers in school, and that the Ten Commandments should be displayed prominently in courthouses). But they don’t consider themselves part of the Christian right. They’re anti-war and anti-Bush, and founder Cory Burnell went so far as to describe President Bush as “that big-government liberal.”

Here’s their splash page:

WELCOME TO THE CHRISTIAN EXODUS
ChristianExodus.org is coordinating the move of thousands of Christians to South Carolina for the express purpose of re-establishing Godly, constitutional government. It is evident that the U.S. Constitution has been abandoned under our current federal system, and the efforts of Christian activism to restore our Godly republic have proven futile over the past three decades. The time has come for Christians to withdraw our consent from the current federal government and re-introduce the Christian principles once so predominant in America to a sovereign State like South Carolina.

THE PROBLEM
Christians have actively tried to return the United States to their moral foundations for more than 30 years. We now have a "Christian" president, a "Christian" attorney general, and a Republican Congress and Supreme Court. Yet consider this:
• Abortion continues against the wishes of many States
• Sodomite marriage is now legal in Massachusetts (and coming soon to a neighborhood near you)
• Children who pray in public schools are subject to prosecution
• Our schools continue to teach the discredited theory of Darwinian evolution
• The Bible is still not welcome in schools except under unconstitutional FEDERAL guidelines
• The 10 Commandments remain banned from public display
• Sodomy is now legal AND celebrated as "diversity" rather than condemned as perversion
• Preaching Christianity will soon be outlawed as "hate speech"
Attempts at reform have proven futile. Future elections will not stop the above atrocities, but rather will exacerbate them and lead us down an even more deadly path.

THE SOLUTION
So what can be done? ChristianExodus.org offers the opportunity to try a strategy not yet employed by Bible-believing Christians. Rather than spend resources in continued efforts to redirect the entire nation, we will redeem States one at a time. Millions of Christian conservatives are geographically spread out and diluted at the national level. Therefore, we must concentrate our numbers in a geographical region with a sovereign government we can control through the electoral process.

ChristianExodus.org is orchestrating the move of thousands of Christians to reacquire our Constitutional rights and, if necessary to attain these rights, dissolve our State's bond with the union. Click on our Plan of Action page to find out how we can experience God-honoring governance once again.

If you are tired of government-endorsed sin, then stand up and be counted! Register a user account to join the discussion forum, and submit a membership form to join the movement.

That about sums it up.

BEST-OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: “Why let people know about your intimate life?”

Well, that IS the question, now isn’t it?

145. WE ARE ONLY COMING THROUGH IN WAVES

From the Archives

(September 2005) My family is an old Mississippi family. I had antiques, 150 years old or more. They’re all gone. We have just basically a slab, Anne Anderson of Gulfport told NBC. Behind us we have a beautiful sunrise and sunset, and that is going to be what I’m going to miss the most, sitting on the porch watching those.

Rebuild. With a porch, Anne. Rebuild!

My house is flooded, said Rhonda Green, 44, who had reached the highway safe, but damp. I’m talking about deep-freezer-floating-in-the-water flooded.”

Spoken like a true southerner!

These little tidbits are reaching us, but where’s the rest of the news? This is fucking eerie.

Meanwhile, here's a choice piece off the web:

Letter to Pres. Bush:

What? You want me to donate?

Gee, I dunno. Sending money to the Red Cross to help a red state is a real problem for me. Would the "Christians" down there take money from a card-carrying Liberal from hoity-toity Connecticut? What if they knew I were Gay; would they take my money then? Anyway, I thought I heard some preacher somewhere saying that Hurricane Katrina was God's wrathful punishment against the Bible Belt for turning away from evolution, for their homophobia, for their anti-environmentalism, for opposing universal health-care, for supporting the Invasion of Iraq, for interpreting the Bible literally, for a history of racism, and, especially, for the Catholic diocese down there in New Orleans throwing another Christian church (UFMCC) out of a building they own because of theological disagreements. Maybe it was Jerry Falwell or "ole squint-eye" Pat Robertson. Didn't Falwell blame 9/11 on us? And didn't Robertson agree with him? Will they take my money now? I really need to know.

Since Bush, Cheney, et. al. are making billions from gasoline prices and war profiteering, I'd like to know how much they are contributing first, before I donate. Is anybody asking these questions? Is anybody asking the president of "Personal Responsibility" why he insists that the globe is not warming even though the gulf waters are hotter than ever and are directly linked to Katrina's force? How much are these fat cats donating?

Hey, what about the tax cuts for the rich? Shouldn't the rich be the ones to kick in? I haven't heard about a covey of rich white folks getting it together, giving up their tax cuts, to provide millions in aid to Hurricane Katrina victims. Maybe they're all down in the superdome with Falwell, Dobson and Robertson - hot, smelly, filthy, crowded superdome - handing out food to the poor??? Guess not. Say, why can't the Corporations that have bought what used to be a Democracy for and by the people globalize the relief effort? Are the holders of outsourced jobs donating?

Maybe after Bush privatizes my Social Security I'll feel more disposed to act like a good Christian and send money. Oh, if I'm not by chance a Christian at all, would my money be accepted? It's a real quandary.

Frank Chisholm
East Lyme, CT 06333

144. BIBLICAL LAW

From the Archives (August 2005)

If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us—1920s Texas governor Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, barring the teaching of foreign languages in public schools

What the Bible purportedly says is often the grounds upon which political battles are decided in our country and, these days, some Bible factoid that a slick preacher can encapsulate in a rhyming soundbite often passes as knowledge and is used to try to sledgehammer bias and superstition into policy.

The New York Times reports that an overwhelming majority of US citizens want both creationism and evolution to be taught in public schools. And many are under the erroneous assumption that none of the tenets of evolution are proveable. The fact that we are carbon life-forms, that our ancestors were carbon life-forms that can be traced to a certain era is not theory, but that's missing from this debate.

Meanwhile, the science backing creationism or so-called Intelligent Design remains nonexistent.

The bigger question, of course, is WHY is manipulated public opinion dictating what people are taught in science classes?

When I was a child, a primary tenet of Southern Baptist faith was the absolute separation of church and state. Baptists perceive of themselves as hard-working, good-hearted minorities who would be protected by the rule of law, but they eschewed politics (and carved furniture and fancy make-up, and...) as worldly and unclean.

That’s all changed now, almost as radically as the Baptist version of Jesus has changed.

Jesus, back when I was creating tinfoil lakes and burning bushes in my Vacation Bible School diorama projects, was the supreme authority—the all-knowing, all-loving savior who made everyone equal before the eyes of God. Fundamentalists have replaced this authority with Old Testament fire and brimstone now and assert that the Bible is not open to interpretation.

Nosireebobtail, it’s not a human translation of original Hebrew or Greek written by a host of fallible people, but is instead the literal word of God. And this Old Testament God's wrath, not Jesus’s inclusion, is the authority now.

As the bumpersticker I see too often says God said it. I believe it. That settles it.

Interesting how the Baptists exclude some chapters of the Bible found in the same caves as chapters that are included too. Are these texts somehow less the word of God? Or are they less easily manipulated for social control or insufficiently patriarchal or a little too sexy? (Or too Catholic, as a Sundahy School teacher once told me.)

Baptist ministers are also “called,” which means that some never attend seminaries or receive formal education. Do these religious um leaders even know that these other chapters exist? Or that they were written in the original Greek and Hebrew?

•

You and I can bring the rule and reign of the cross to America. That’s what Bishop Harry Jackson, pastor of the 2,000-member Hope Christian Church in Bowie MD said on so-called Justice Sunday II (8.14.2005). And that’s what the fundamentalists want to do: enforce their brand of faith onto this nation.

I guess they’ve overlooked the fact that our Constitution calls for three co-equal branches of government, since they are determined to undermine the independent judiciary and thus undermine the separation of powers.

One of their strategies is court-stripping, but “despite the Christian Coalition’s best efforts, those pesky federal courts keep upholding the Bill of Rights and the separation of church and state. But not to worry, the group has a plan to fix that: take away the right of the courts to hear those cases in the first place. This bold gambit, called ‘court stripping,’ is all the rage among the Religious Right these days.” (Rob Boston, AUSCS’s Church and State, Nov. 2004)

Jesse Helms worked hard to deny the courts the right to hear school prayer cases too. In fact, for years now, the Christianists have insisted that Congress has the power to remove some “issues” from the purview of the federal court system.

Our separation of powers was designed to maintain balance while keeping the will of the majority from trampling on the rights of the minority. If lawmakers infringe on constitutional rights, then the courts pull them back from the fringe and protect citizens from cultural whims and biases and the sometimes boneheaded will of the majority.

You don’t have to go very far back in history to realize why we need this division of power either. Remember when the federal courts stepped in after local and state governments ruled by bias and failed to protect African Americans? They overturned the oppressive Jim Crow statutes that denied a portion of our citizenry the right to vote and imposed segregation(...and many a white southerner has stoked a simmering rage against the federal court system ever since).

Court-stripping was not a strategy back then, but think about it in the context of the present, with the Christianists who are now in Congress running things. With our theocractic-leaning president running things. If a federal court overturned the Jim Crow laws today, a court-stripping amendment could be pushed through to uphold them before lunch.

Now let’s step back to the days of ducktails again. In 1964, George Wallace attacked the passage of civil-rights legislation this way: “Today, this tyranny is imposed by the central government which claims the right to rule over our lives under sanction of the omnipotent black-robed despots who sit on the bench of the US Supreme Court.” Not surprisingly, Wallace insisted that legislation be passed to “curb the powers of this body of judicial tyrants.”

Judicial tyrants.

(Hey. Here’s an idea: if someone enforces a law that you don’t believe in, then don't step back to question your own biases. Instead, insist that you’re being vicitimized by tyrants. They don’t like me becawz I’m a Chwistian! Waaa!)

(Aww. Would you cry me a fucking river?)

James Dobson sounds like George Wallace these days. “Stop Judicial Tyranny,” he says on his Focus on The Family website, as he promotes court-stripping bills and attacks the federal judiciary for any ruling that displeases his quest for power.

And he gets tax breaks for doing this. Amazing!

•

Meanwhile, I’m reading What The Bible Says—and Doesn’t Say—About Homosexuality and A Response to Southern Baptists: A Gay Christian Answers to Fundamentalist Southern Baptists right now in an attempt to decide how to respond to my rabid aunt. This is from the latter title:

The conservative political takeover of Southern Baptist seminaries and other institutions has undermined the objective academic credibility of once great schools and boards and has made Baptists the object of scorn and ridicule in the scholastic world.... Baptists deny the Bible in their attacks on homosexuals. Baptist Greek scholars know, like all others do, that the Bible has no word for ‘homosexual’ in the Old Testament Hebrew or the New Testament Greek. Yet the same incorrect translations and out-of-context use of only six verses to attack and condemn gay people continues in this so-called ‘Bible believing’ denomination.”

Katherine Yurica transcribed Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club in the early 1980s and points out that he was outlining his strategy to strip the federal judiciary of its constitutional powers 25 years ago:

Robertson wanted to reduce or eliminate the power of the judiciary. He denied that the Constitution provides a system of checks and balances between three separate and equal branches of government...

In fact, Robertson went further: he denied that the judiciary is a co-equal branch of the government. Instead, he saw the judiciary as a department of the legislative branch, which he believed was the dominant center of power in the nation. His reasoning went like this: Since Congress has complete authority to establish the lower federal courts and to establish "the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court," the court system is necessarily subordinate to the legislative. Robertson's idea was that congress could control the court by using its power to intimidate. For example, he said, ‘Congress could say “There's a whole class of cases you can't hear” and there's nobody can do anything about it!’

Now let’s shift our gaze to Rep. John Hostetler (R-IN). He said, at a recent Christian Coalition gathering, "When the courts make unconstitutional decisions, we should not enforce them. Federal courts have no army or navy. The court can opine, decide, talk about, sing, whatever it wants to do. We're not saying they can't do that. At the end of the day, we're saying the court can't enforce its opinions."

Yes, he’s THAT Hostettler, the author of two recent court-stripping bills. (One was an amendment barring the use of federal funds to enforce the 11th US Circuit Court of Appeals decision to remove the 10 Commandments from a Montgomery courthouse; it also restricts the court’s ability to hear cases involving other religious symbols. Hostettler drafted the so-called Marriage Protection Act too. This bill strips federal courts of jurisdiction over legal challenges to the DOMA.

Then there’s the so-called Constitution Restoration Act of 2004, which bans challenges to state-sponsored acknowledgments of “God as the sovereign source of law, liberty, or government” and retroactively overturns all existing rulings even as it sets up a mechanism for impeaching federal judges who uphold church-state separation. And this was written by a judge!

Maybe he never had to take Civics. Or maybe most current Congresspeople these days didn’t. Or maybe the Christianists went to Christian schools and were only taught what would make them complacent believers. Or maybe the Christianists haven’t yet realized that they can’t buy courts the way they can buy elections.

Whatever the case, our nation’s separation of powers means that Congress does not have the power to decimate the authority of the courts through legislation that deals with issues surrounding our Bill of Rights, even if some citizens would like to turn the courts into rubberstamps for Congress and the Christianists.

There’s much more to rant about in this arena and researching the Bible in my efforts to draft an overdue letter to my Aunt Becky is pushing me up onto my soapbox, but I gotta go for now so ciao bella.

140. AMERICAN FATWAH, CONTINUED

From the Archives

(August 2005) So I received an e-mail message from Democracy for America this morning. Instead of calling for an FCC investigation or the filing of criminal charges against Pat Robertson, Democracy for America wants to place a “Thou Shalt Not Kill” ad in Pat’s local newspaper. How effective of them.

I signed their petition, but wrote this:

The FCC fined CBS $550,000 for accidentally airing Janet Jackson's silicone breast during the Superbowl. Call for the FCC to fine Robertson’s so-called Christian Broadcasting Network for using federally licensed airwaves to call for terrorist homicide.

Call for criminal charges to be filed against him for his fatwah.

Insist that he be prosecuted for calling for the murder of a democratically elected head of state.

See US Code, Title 18, Sec 1116: “whoever kills or attempts to kill a foreign official, official guest, or internationally protected person shall be punished” and Sec 878, which makes it a crime to “knowingly and willingly threaten” to commit this crime.

Our government is obligated under international law to prevent and punish acts of terrorism against foreign heads of state when they are conceived of or planned on our soil. See the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, which makes it a crime to commit a “murder, kidnapping, or other attack upon on the liberty of an internationally protected person” [including] a “threat to commit any such attack.”

See also The OAS Convention to Prevent and Punish Acts of Terrorism Taking the Form of Crimes against Persons and Related Extortion That Are of International Significance, of which the US is a signatory. Art 8a obliges “the contracting states undertake to cooperate among themselves by taking all the measures that they may consider effective, under their own laws, and especially those established in this convention, to prevent and punish acts of terrorism, especially kidnaping [sic], murder, and other assaults against the life or physical integrity of those persons to whom the state has the duty according to international law to give special protection, as well as extortion in connection with those crimes.” This convention includes foreign heads of state as internationally protected persons.

Obviously, I didn’t do all that research myself but got most of it from Deborah James’s article on ALTERNET.

Democracy for America did make a good point though when they wrote in their plea for funds that

Robertson's fatwah, calling for the assassination of the president of Venezuela—in the name of keeping access to a "huge pool of oil," among other excuses—exposed the warped values of many religious radicals with the ear of the president of the United States. From efforts to squelch the teaching of sound science in our schools, to the "Justice Sunday" rallies trying to impose religion on the courts, to the quixotic jihad against SpongeBob SquarePants, fundamentalist power grabs make the news and have a huge impact. But they don't have the teachings of any religion we know of—and they don't have us.

Infuckingdeed y’all.

135. CRICKET AND BULLFROG LULLABIES

From the Archives

(August 2005) I’m reading My South: A People, A Place, A World of Its Own and trying to convince myself to go to sleep, but thunder is rolling across the sky and lightning is flashing in jagged electric spasms and, just as when I was a kid, here I sit mesmerized by it all and I just don’t want to go to sleep and miss anything.

From the book:

My South is a tree comforting me. Its ivory velvet blooms emitting fragrances of exotic places. Lemon verbena fondly familiar from sea islands to grand plantations. Standing through centuries of hurricanes and sultry evenings silhouetted by the Carolina moon.—Carol Furtwangler

and

In my south, crickets and bullfrogs are my lullaby.—Edward Jack Smith

and

In my South, secrets are heirlooms and politeness is a way of life.—Carol Furtwangler

So one of my rabidly Southern Baptist aunts is determined to cure me of my uh choice to be a dyke and is offended now because I took a lesbian to my uncle’s funeral.

(Yeah and we touched your Baptist doorknobs too so WATCH OUT or we just might rub off on you.)

She is now advising me to

please read the enclosed Scripture. You are a great influence to your family. They love you very much and so do I. We can all repent and see our loved ones again for eternity.

She also sent the program from their church service held the Sunday after my uncle’s funeral with its so-called Message from God’s Word entitled “What The Bible Says About Homosexuality: Isaiah 5:20.”

(Was it our nose rings that gave it away? Glad we made such an impression!)

So here are some extra Bible verses that my auntscribbled onto her envelope: 1 Tim 1:9 • Leveticus [sic] 20:13 • Deuteronomy 23:17 • Romans 1:26 • 1 Cor 6:9 • Jude 1:7 • Matthew 7:1-6 (because you can never say that Medea fails to keep you informed).

I’m toying with the idea of donating Stranger at the Gate to their church library, but suspect they’d never actually place it on the shelves. Maybe I’ll donate a book in honor of my aunt too!

BEST OF SPAM SUBJECT LINES: burden creole

(Hmmm. I might have to write a poem about Burden Creole. Maybe one similar to that Wander, Indiana, poem ... and THAT’s an obscure poetry reference that only a few people will get. Sorry.)

97. WILD IDEA

From the Archives

(May 2005) I had this wild dream last night, probably because I reread my entry BIG ENGINE, LITTLE RADIATOR and so was thinking about the theory of evolution and subspecies that survive and subspecies that become extinct and those idiots in Kansas with their insistence on so-called intelligent design and that little mustard plant that fixed its own defective gene etc. etc. etc. instead of falling asleep.

Anyway, in my dream I was a scientist sitting at a wrought-iron table outside a little café—the sort of place Ernest Hemingway describes in “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”—smoking a cigarette and drinking a java and doodling on a newspaper while pondering the world.

And I said to myself, Self, we classify groups in a long historical glance but what if humans are really divided into two or more groups? If, like Cain and Abel, we are subspecies competing for the same land, the same products, our own laws.

Maybe mutations in our genes, these massive evolutionary changes that differentiate us, account for our superstitions, our insistence on religion, the differences between the reptilian brains of, say, a Kansas City flat-earther and an wiccan dude working in the creative force in Seattle.

My dream question was a radical one: Is there only one form of human walking around or could we be a collection of subspecies competing for survival in a common environment?

Odd dream. Had to write it down as soon as I woke up because I knew THAT wouldn’t stay with me for long!

•

In other news, today I overheard a woman describe herself as having “free-hanging labia.” What a description! She also said, while describing a career change, “I feel like I’ve got my fanny hanging out there and everyone’s looking at my butt crack.”

The woman's got a way with descriptions.

LISTENING TO: That sexy Lucinda Williams song about masturbating: I take off my watch and my earrings, my bracelets and everything. Lie on my back and I moan at the ceiling Ohhhh my baby...

90. WILLFUL IGNORANCE

From the Archives

(May 2005) The climate on campus has changed considerably in the Bush years as conservative Christians have become defiantly vocal and increasingly proud of their ignorance. This anti-intellectual climate is sobering, especially to someone who was raised Southern Baptist and encouraged to embrace science-defying explanations of natural processes (coz those dinosaurs were, of course, right there on Noah’s ark y'all and those scientists who insist otherwise are just Devil worshippers who spend their careers thinking up new ways to make the, um, enlightened miserable for all eternity).

The freshman reading assignment at a university where some friends teach recently caused a flap because conservative donors and students accused the text of marginalizing Christianity. They also objected to the fact that budding adults were being exposed to Islamic culture at a time when so-called American patriots are killing Islamic um infidels.

A male student at this same state university enrolled in a seminar course that explored feminist issues in popular culture, then complained that his tax dollars were being used to support offensive texts that encouraged students to empathize with ho-ho-homosexuals.

(Let me guess: women were not instructed to submit graciously to men either.)

This student complained to legislators that his professor prohibited his right to free speech because she would not let him monopolize daily discussion time with his endless tirade against queers (which, when you think about it, provided a handy example of the patriarchal assumption of male privilege to his class. But I’m sure that never occurred to McBoy!)

The university reprimanded the professor but did not fire her, so McBoy's actions effectively contributed to a climate in which professors are now afraid to introduce new and controversial ideas in class or to give assignments that encourage students to expand their limited worldviews because we know we might be next.

(Perhaps Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale should be required freshman reading there this fall?)

For several years now, a co-instructor and I have opened our graduate-level seminars with an In Search of America episode about Christian conservatism and racial injustice in a small South Carolina town. We then incorporate this video into a series of persuasive-writing and intentional communication exercises.

Listening to non-Southerners depict the locals as stupid hicks (as the southerners among us bristle) proves to be instructive fodder, and course exercises have prompted much good discussion about the limits of tolerance and the need to at least attempt to understand how bias and religious intolerance affects others in a pluralistic civil society.

The town in this video has the distinction of having more churches per person than any other place in the country, and its mayor posts “character banners" on the lamp posts—you know, because public material about Christians' version of character (à la the gambler William Bennett) is the substitute of choice for Christians in places where religious material has been prohibited.

Town water bills include "character quotes." City officials attend weekly prayer sessions and character-building workshops as part of their professional training. And the mayor himself wants creationism to be taught in the public schools.

Meanwhile, professors at the state university's branch do “missionary work” to try to counter the lessions these children of creationists learned in the public schools. And at least one of the profs Peter Jennings interviews was queer in this place.

This kind of sanctioned ignorance is what happens when the government endorses Christian home-schooling and Moral Majority founder Jerry (cough) Falwell raises millions of dollars by declaring war on difference ... or should I say on us queer “brute beasts” who are “part of a vile and satanic system [that] will be utterly annihilated”?

Lou Sheldon, Falwell’s partner in bias and the founder of the Traditional Values Coalition, asserts that queers target children for recruitment. He also says that, given the chance, gay men will kidnap boys and convert them to queer sex ... and says this with an, um, straight face in a world where girls are raped by men, and especially male relatives, on an alarmingly regular basis.

Christian Coalition founder and resident wingnut Pat Robertson warned us that tornadoes and earthquakes would descend on Orlando unless Disney World canceled Gay Day (which queers, not Disney, organize). Robertson also insists that allowing queers to serve in the military gives “preferred status to evil.”

(Just an aside but, if you look at a map of where Florida was hit by those back-to-back hurricanes, almost all of the Republican counties were damaged but almost none of the Democratic ones were. Wonder if Robertson reported this on his Christian so-called news shows?)

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s most recent Intelligence Report includes a map designating the 762 active hate groups in our nation, by state. The tiny state of South Carolina comes in first in this category with a whopping total of 47 organized hate groups. (Does anyone see a correlation here?) Florida is second with 43 and California is third with 42. (And, interestingly, only 2 active hate groups have been organized in the entire tax-free state of Montana.)

The editor of the Intelligence Report points out that it is hard not to equate Sheldon’s statements with “blood libel” against Jews, or the accusation that Jews kidnap Gentile children and kill them so they can drain their blood to use in making matzohs.

Yeah. It’s hard to listen to evangelicals describe queers as voracious sexual beasts who recruit innocent kids—especially on this day when a father has just been jailed for stabbing his second-grade daughter and her best friend to death in a particularly gruesome fashion—without recalling the nineteenth-century racists who insisted that “lust-crazed, demonic nigra men” were intent on raping innocent white women.

I grew up a free thinker in the religious (tic) south and have had a fascination with and severe allergic reaction to organized religion ever since. I keep my Jesus allergy to myself in the classroom, but have had many lively one-on-one conversations with like-minded students over the years when they asked outside of the classroom what it was like to grow up here.

(More on that later, I'm sure, but let’s return to the classroom fo now because I'm in the midst of a story.)

So, last semester, my co-instructor and I noted that more students than normal bristled at the predictable stereotyping of my so-homeys but, for the first time in my teaching career, this did not result in healthy dialogue. Instead, several conservative students in these small classes used the exact same phrase to describe why they objected to completing assignments that require them to take opposing viewpoints on public-policy issues such as teaching creationism in the schools, same-sex/spousal-equivalent benefits, and other ripped-from-the-headlines topics.

They said "I have an internal moral compass that does not waver” and said that this means that they do not need to explore both sides of an issue or even entertain an opinion that is not supported by scripture.

I guess, to their way of thinking, such close-mindedness shows character.

I say that with a smart-ass tone, but this very different way of moving in the world is all too familiar to me (as are the collective chips on their shoulders). And it is not lost on me that someone trained them to respond in the exact same manner, like lemmings.

Most of the disenfranchised people in my southern town of origin and many people in my extended family move through the world in this same manner.

For example, when my younger (and evangelical) sister, who never left home, is threatened by new ideas (such as the assertion of her equal status with a man), she becomes agitated. And, if she’s threatened enough, she goes into a sort of trancelike state that involves her stringing together random Bible verses and prayers that she repeats aloud in what I can only describe as stream-of-consciousness Jezuschanneling.

I guess imagining herself as Other, as powerful, is so threatening that she must instead disassociate from the world and its opposing views.

When I think about the limits of what she has seen (or is likely to ever see) of this big wide world of possibility, I feel very sad for her and for women who are continuously told that they are second-class citizens who must be isolated, veiled, protectd.

I also recognize that the easy route for intellectuals is to make fun of such people—especially if they're southern and uneducated and trying hard to find some way to make sense of a world that is so threatening to them (even though I am guilty of making fun of them myself too, on occassion, and am more than a little impatient with such responses).

I place a high value on logic, am turned off by closed-mindedness and bigotry, and am INTP enough to be vocal when someone hits the right chord—and this reality can sometimes get me kicked out of extended-holiday gatherings and religious gatherings.

(For example, when my uncle asserted that God Hates Queers—that’s why he gave us AIDS, natch—I countered that God must prefer lesbians then, since we’re the least likely group to acquire this disease. This didn't go over so well.)

My mother’s religious sledgehammer frustrates the hell out of me and the fact that so many evangelicals attempt to dictate my life with their narrow worldviews does too.

Yet flinging around easy stereotypes shuts down dialogue and fails to acknowledge everyone’s experience in the world. I also know how easy it is for educated liberals to belittle the prescribed existences over people whose lives leave them with relatively little control over their destinies.

Some of my students were just not reachable last semester and this troubles me greatly. I think of them in terms of Plato’s Parable of the Cave.

There they stood, staring intently at the back of the cave and insisting that their world is comprised of undifferentiated darkness. Their moral compasses and those prescriptive character lessons and holy bible held them in vise-like grips that insisted that they not turn their heads and not see the light shining in through the cave’s opening.

And, for the first time in my teaching experience, some of my students still stared at that dark wall at the end of the semester.

I know, at some level, that willful ignorance is willful ignorance—that a dogged insistence on one particular mythology as truth is often based in deep-rooted fear of the randomness of the universe, of the unknown. And I know that pat black-and-white homilies, if you don't think about them too much, can allow you to maintain the illusion of safety.

But philosopher David Hume’s birthday was this week, so let's look at his experience.

In early 1700s Edinburgh, religious groups known as the Seizers grabbed people who skipped out on church and forcibly dragged them to mass right there in front of young David.

Perhaps then it's no big surprise that Hume lost his faith as a teenager. He lived near a university student who was found guilty of blasphemy and hanged for denouncing Christianity too though. Yet, despite the threat he felt around him, Hume wrote, "I found a certain boldness of temper growing in me, which was not inclined to submit to any authority. I was forced to seek out some new medium by which truth might be established."

In his Treatise of Human Nature, Hume argues that it may be impossible for any of us to know the truth about anything, that we humans can only experience the world but never fully understand it.

The Church of England tried, but failed, to prosecute Hume for this belief, and he continued to openly question the existence of a god ... and, thankfully, students in Philosophy 101 still hear this tale.

I worry that our country could become a Nazi theocracy like Hume knew, that the jihadists who are currently defining the conversation and attempting to dismantle our legal system and demonizing difference could create a landscape in which modern-day Seizers can, with Borg-like moral compasses, bully the rest of us until the ones who are left are all (publicly) assimilated.

Did anyone else notice that, when legal decision after legal decision in the Schiavo case failed to align with the so-called religious faithful’s insisted outcomes, that the conservative leaders merely announced that there was something wrong with the legal system (as opposed to their way of thinking)?

The speaker of the house and Tom DeLay are waging war on our legal system at a time when Falwell’s Heritage University is offering legal degrees to Christian activist judges to counter what they see as liberal activist judges.

This scares the living shit out of me.

SINGING IN THE SHOWER: I’m having an eclectic sort of day musically. Sang "I’m gonna tell you how it’s gonna be [insert happy thrashing about in a mosh-pit–like fashion to the guitar’s driving “duh-duh-DUH-duh-duh” beat here], soon you’re gonna be fucking me. I’m gonna tell you what your mama won’t say. She’s ashamed her daughter is gay .... [skipping to chorus now] "I’m gonna take you to queer bars [more mosh-pit–like thrashing to duh-duh-DUHs] I’m gonna drive you in queer cars...You’re gonna meet all my queer friends. Our queer, queer fun it never ends...." I believe Two Nice Girls sang this back in the early nineties, but can’t remember for sure. It certainly sounds like something Gretchen would write though. [OKAY, OKAY. WE DO RECRUIT!]

LISTENING TO: C Major Prelude from the Well Tempered Clavier, performed by Darron Flagg. God I love this piece! Was listening to Siouxie and the Banshees singing “Peekaboo” before that. Go figure.

READING: Switch by Carol Guess

SELECTED SPAM (Subject Lines): cheep erecction mads. you won't stop screewing thanks to it jest

JUSTICE SUNDAY?

From the Archives

(April 2005) I'm pasting this entire article because the news is so obscene. We’re already a plutocracy masquerading as a democracy; will we be a theocracy by the time Bush finally leaves office?

FRIST SET TO USE RELIGIOUS STAGE ON JUDICIAL ISSUE
by DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, New York Times
Published: April 15, 2005

WASHINGTON, April 14—As the Senate heads toward a showdown over the rules governing judicial confirmations, Senator Bill Frist, the majority leader, has agreed to join a handful of prominent Christian conservatives in a telecast portraying Democrats as "against people of faith" for blocking President Bush's nominees.

Fliers for the telecast, organized by the Family Research Council and scheduled to originate at a Kentucky megachurch the evening of April 24, call the day "Justice Sunday" and depict a young man holding a Bible in one hand and a gavel in the other. The flier does not name participants, but under the heading "the filibuster against people of faith," it reads: "The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias [by SC Dixicrat Strom Thurmond-MEDEA], and it is now being used against people of faith."

Organizers say they hope to reach more than a million people by distributing the telecast to churches around the country, over the Internet and over Christian television and radio networks and stations.

Dr. Frist's spokesman said the senator's speech in the telecast would reflect his previous remarks on judicial appointments. In the past he has consistently balanced a determination "not to yield" on the president's nominees with appeals to the Democrats for compromise. He has distanced himself from the statements of others like the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, who have attacked the courts, saying they are too liberal, "run amok" or are hostile to Christianity.

The telecast, however, will put Dr. Frist in a very different context. Asked about Dr. Frist's participation in an event describing the filibuster "as against people of faith," his spokesman, Bob Stevenson, did not answer the question directly.

"Senator Frist is doing everything he can to ensure judicial nominees are treated fairly and that every senator has the opportunity to give the president their advice and consent through an up or down vote," Mr. Stevenson said, adding, "He has spoken to groups all across the nation to press that point, and as long as a minority of Democrats continue to block a vote, he will continue to do so."

Some of the nation's most influential evangelical Protestants are participating in the teleconference in Louisville, including Dr. James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; Chuck Colson, the born-again Watergate figure and founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; and Dr. Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

The event is taking place as Democrats and Republicans alike are escalating their public relations campaigns in anticipation of an imminent confrontation. The Democratic minority has blocked confirmation of 10 of President Bush's judicial nominees by preventing Republicans from gaining the 60 votes needed to close debate, using the filibuster tactic often used by political minorities and most notoriously employed by opponents of civil rights.

Dr. Frist has threatened that the Republican majority might change the rules to require only a majority vote on nominees, and Democrats have vowed to bring Senate business to a standstill if he does.

On Thursday, one wavering Republican, Senator John McCain of Arizona, told a television interviewer, Chris Matthews, that he would vote against the change.

"By the way, when Bill Clinton was president, we, effectively, in the Judiciary Committee blocked a number of his nominees," Mr. McCain said.

On Thursday the Judiciary Committee sent the nomination of Thomas B. Griffith for an appellate court post to the Senate floor. Democrats say they do not intend to block Mr. Griffith's nomination.

That cleared the way for the committee to approve several previously blocked judicial appointees in the next two weeks.
The telecast also signals an escalation of the campaign for the rule change by Christian conservatives who see the current court battle as the climax of a 30-year culture war, a chance to reverse decades of legal decisions about abortion, religion in public life, gay rights and marriage.

"As the liberal, anti-Christian dogma of the left has been repudiated in almost every recent election, the courts have become the last great bastion for liberalism," Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and organizer of the telecast, wrote in a message on the group's Web site. "For years activist courts, aided by liberal interest groups like the A.C.L.U., have been quietly working under the veil of the judiciary, like thieves in the night, to rob us of our Christian heritage and our religious freedoms."

Democrats accused Dr. Frist of exploiting religious faith for political ends by joining the telecast. "No party has a monopoly on faith, and for Senator Frist to participate in this kind of telecast just throws more oil on the partisan flames," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York.

But Mr. Perkins stood by the characterization of Democrats as hostile to faith. "What they have done is, they have targeted people for reasons of their faith or moral position," he said, referring to Democratic criticisms of nominees over their views of cases about abortion rights or public religious expressions.

"The issue of the judiciary is really something that has been veiled by this 'judicial mystique' so our folks don't really understand it, but they are beginning to connect the dots," Mr. Perkins said in an interview, reciting a string of court decisions about prayer or displays of religion.

"They were all brought about by the courts," he said.

Democrats, for their part, are already stepping up their efforts to link Dr. Frist and the rule change with conservatives statements about unaccountable judges hostile to faith.

On Thursday, Mr. Schumer released an open letter calling on Dr. Frist to denounce such attacks. "The last thing we need is inflammatory rhetoric which on its face encourages violence against judges," he wrote.

57. EDUTAINMENT

From the Archives

(March 2005) Woke up groggy so am writing instead of doing catas. Sat on my wet deck for 30 minutes drinking my first cup of java and watching the sun come up. Now I’m stretched across my sofa and coffee table, drinking a second cup with sugar-free butter-pecan ice cream (ran out of cream), which is, well, an interesting taste.

Am checking out Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes magazine, which someone left in our employee lounge, and remembering a resurrection song that my church youth choir sang

Life was filled with guns and wars and everyone got trampled on the floor—I wish we’d all been ready. Two men coming up the hill; one disappears and one’s left standing still—I wish we’d all been ready. Man and wife asleep in bed; he hears a noise and turns his head; she’s gone [a line that always made me snicker uncontrollably, which pissed off my mother]—I wish we’d all been ready. There’s no time to change your mind. The son has come and you’ve been left behind. You’ve been left behind. . . . .

It’s better than some of the make-’em-afraid-make-’em-very-afraid songs that they taught us at Baptist camp but I still wish my brain didn’t remember some of the appalling stuff that it remembers.

According to this magazine, world events make it clear that the end is near. We’re living out the prophecies of Revelations, folks, so save yourself while you can!

Haven’t read Revelations in a while, so am making my own assumptions about what it must say. I assume it describes dark days of exploitation, a time when society dismantles the safeguards that provide at least basic economic security to its neediest members. The endtimes must occur in a so-called ownership society (which, near as I can tell, means that, if you’re not one of the beast’s, er, the Shrub’s wealthy pals then you’re on your own, buddy). The beast must cut funding for food stamps, education, Medicaid, health care, safety inspections for food and drugs, and food for poor children, while forcing the poor and working people to make sacrifices for the benefit of the rich. Then I assume the FDR angel gets so pissed that he gives God a good ol’ smackdown, which must trigger the second coming.

Can’t help but think about Ayn Rand’s ironic definition of laissez-faire capitalism, which she defines as “a system where men deal with one another, not as victims or executioners, not as masters or slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit.”Yeah. And now I can’t help but think about Herbert Hoover saying “The trouble with capitalism is capitalists. They’re too damn greedy.”

We all have our own interpretations, right?

I saw a KRS-1 performance at Howard University at the height of the Afrocentric education movement. His songs were (by his own definition) edutainment, and one of my favorites explains why the twelve tribes of Israel had to be black.

The words, from memory, are something along these lines:

Genesis, chapter 11, verse 10, explains the genealogy of Shem. Shem was a black man in Africa. If you repeat this fact they can’t laugh at ya. Genesis 14, verse 13, Abraham steps on the scene. Being a descendent of Shem, which is a fact, means Abraham too was black. Abraham, born in the city of a black man called Nimrod, grandson of Ham. Ham had 4 sons—one was named Canaan. Here, let me do some explaining. Abraham was the father of Isaac. Isaac was the father of Jacob. Jacob had twelve sons, for real, and THESE were the children of Israel. According to Genesis, chapter 10, Egyptians descended from Ham. Six hundred years later my brother, re-up, Moses was born in Egypt. In this era, black Egyptians weren’t right. They enslaved black Israelites. Moses had to be of the black race because he spent forty years in Pharoah’s place. He passed as the Pharoah’s grandson, so he HAD to look just like him. Yes my brothers and sisters take this here song. Yo! Correct the wrong. The information we get today is just daft but ask yourself, why is that? . . .The government you have elected is inoperative. . . .

All-righty. It’s 7:30 AM. Time for me to take a shower and get ready for my day.

LISTENING TO: “Damn Crazy,” as performed by disappear fear (I know I’m lazy, but I’m so damn crazy for you...)

READING: Midnight Call: The Prophetic Voice for the Endtimes. Whee!

SINGING IN SHOWER: haven’t had one yet, so I’ll have to include in a later entry.