Bits

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Brokeback:

Interesting comment by Andrew Sullivan on Brokeback Mountain, slightly elaborating on a point I touched in one of my posts: the damage to families that the Christianists like to point to as the result of the men's love for each other is really the result of their homophobia (and I use that term advisedly: it's a clinical condition, and I begin to think that's what we're dealing with here).

[Y]ou can see the damage done to so many lives by the powerful, suffocating evil of homophobia. So many lives. Sometimes I start to imagine how much accumulated human pain has been inflicted for so many centuries on so many gay hearts and souls, . . .

If nothing else, the film really brings home the point that, because Ennis and Jack are not free to be together, where they want to be and should be, because they are forced to live in the closet, the harvest is pain across the board. I recently met a woman who had gone to my high school (a year behind my sister) who married a man who turned out to be gay. She still has some bitterness about it. We talked abouit the fact that her ex-husband was running scared and didn't have an out. I think she feels a little better -- what was most hurtful was that he lied to her, and even realizing that he didn't know an alternative didn't serve to make her feel better.

And we can thank the likes of Donald Wildmon for this.

(I'm not even going to be snarky about Sullivan's reaction to the film as a whole. I won't. Honest.)

ID, Down for the Count:

My regular correspondent JP at Aces Full of Links noted a very interesting thing about the decision in Kitzmiller (the Pennsylvania ID case). There's a thing called the "Wedge Document" developed by the Discovery Institute's Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (and I just love the way the Christianists twist the language; Goebbels would be proud). Science certainly isn't going to be renewed by these jerks. From the opinion:

"the IDM’s "Governing Goals" are to "defeat scientific materialism and its destructive moral, cultural, and political legacies" and "to replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God."

The point being, of course, that without scientific materialism, you have no science. But then, I guess if you already know everything about the universe, you don't need it.

The idea that science can somehow destroy morality still comes up a blank. Granted, many scientists are atheists, but anyone who's been reading my posts (in their various guises) knows that I don't think religious motivation is a necessity for moral behavior. Science itself is value-neutral in that regard. It has no morality of its own. Morality is what human beings bring to their endeavors, not something that is intrinsic to the endeavors themselves. And, last time I checked, being godless in this country was still legal. Perhaps the fundie wackos should spend some time thinking about what their morals are based on and how they can become better people (which in my universe means being willing to live and let live).

Group Sex is OK:

Interesting story from Canada: sex clubs are not illegal. In other words, if they're doing it in private, butt out.

Bath houses and swingers clubs which feature consenting adults cavorting in twosomes, threesomes and moresomes, are legal, the Supreme Court of Canada said Wednesday.

In a major decision, the court re-wrote the definition of indecency to use harm, rather than community standards, as the key yardstick.

The 7-2 majority ruling, written by Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, said indecent acts must be shown to be harmful to the point where they ``interfere with the proper functioning of society.''

Public sex would meet the test of indecency, but orgies and partner swapping among like-minded adults in private don't, McLachlin wrote.

. . .

Bastarache and LeBel wrote that harm should not be the main ingredient in determining indecency.

``We are convinced that this new approach strips of all relevance the social values that the Canadian community as a whole believes should be protected.''

The problem with this approach arises when you have mutually exclusive "social values." If they are anything like their American counterparts, I'm sure the dissenting justices are referring to those things that fall under the rubric of that "public morality" that they can't seem to define. Ironically, they fall back on a standard that the right holds in contempt when the PC left cites it: offense. I guess it must depend wholly on who is being offended. The more substantive issue is what social values are to take precedence? It seems to me that the overriding social value, both in Canada and the U.S., is personal autonomy within the framework of the common good. I find in the quote from the dissenting opinion a distressing hint that that particular ideal should give way, on a case-by-case basis, to upholding imposed sectarian moral dicta, which are by no means universal, particularly within societies as diverse as those in North America.

I get so tired of dealing with these effing dinosaurs who can't deal with reality. Not that I have to deal with them personally -- if that were the case, I'd just ignore them, which is what I do anyway. It's when they insert themselves and their "beliefs" into positions in which they can screw up the rest of us that I start to get irritated. About all I can think of at that point is to fire off a letter to the effect "Hey shit-for-brains -- why don't you go over to WalMart and get a life?"