Culture Break: Monkeys Get It, Republicans Don't

A little trip to another area of culture. Interesting little experiment on unequal pay for equal work, and how monkeys react.

It's an excerpt from a TED talk by Frans de Waal on "Moral Behavior in Animals." And let's face it, without morality, we wouldn't have much of a culture. (And I'm not talking about the "Christian morality" that is so completely focused on other people's sex lives. I'm talking about the real morality that informs our daily social interactions and relationships.)

You can catch de Waal's full talk here. It's encouraging to see how well his conclusions fit in with my own ideas about the origins of morality, particularly in social animals: we take care of each other.

Oops!

That's not what they were supposed to say:

"Fox & Friends” on Monday had a panel of independent voters to discuss the caravan of Central American immigrants heading through Mexico toward the United States — but it backfired hilariously after the guests expressed empathy for migrants.

Even though the show had spent the entire morning running scare-mongering segments about the caravan, the independent voters on the show said they were nonetheless supportive of helping the migrants.

“There’s a humanitarian crisis taking place in Central America,” said one independent voter interviewed by Fox News’ Steve Doocy. “And yet, this issue gets turned into a complete political football. There’s very little about what’s actually happening.”

A second guest quickly piped up to agree, while subtly knocking Fox for its efforts to frighten viewers about the migrants.

“Treating this as an ‘invasion’ is a bad idea and it’s going to end horribly,” he said. “People have to realize, yeah, these are human beings coming here, and there needs to be a real solution offered in dealing with it.”

American are better than what Trump wants us to believe. It occurs to me that the erosion of our standing in the world is not simply that our president is a joke. It wasn't based on money or military power (for those nations not led by people like Trump), but much more on our willingness to help. We took the lead in the fight against AIDS in Africa and Asia, we've always been there with relief for natural disasters, both at home and abroad, and -- well, remember the Peace Corps?

And, as it turns out, most Americans still believe in that. Which makes me wonder all the more how we put a bunch of sociopaths like Trump and the Republicans in charge.

Today's Must-Read: Pushing the Conversation: A Twofer

Two pieces from Hullabaloo this morning, back to back. First, via Digby, this piece by Adam Gopnik from NYT:

The point is not that what Obama did was necessarily always admirable, but that amnesia about even the very recent past has become essential to the most decent conservative politics; only by making the national emergency general and cross-party can it be fully shared rather than, as it should be, localized to the crisis of one party and its ideology. In plain English, it becomes necessary to spread the smell around so that everyone gets some of the stink on them.

Fottnote: The press has been more than complicit in this, and it hasn't been just Fox.

This piece by Tom Sullivan follows immediately:

Writing for the Irish Times, Fintan O'Toole agrees. He believes the sitting president's caging of toddlers is no mistake, but test marketing:

Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.

One conclusion from both articles: this is not something that's newly emerged with Trump: he's the prototype; it's what the right has been working toward since the days of the John Birch Society, the Moral Majority, and Ronald Reagan. Actually, come to think of it, there's always been an element in American society that doesn't love our foundational values. And now they've learned new techniques to control the discourse.

Today's Must-Read: "You Watch My Back, I Watch Yours"

Tom Sullivan has a piece at Hullabaloo this morning that echoes something I've been saying for a long time: Our morality, in spite of what you hear from the money-grubbing Bible-thumpers, is based on one simple tenet: we take care of each other.

Sullivan starts off with a longish Twitter thread, but here's the gist:

Markos wrote this in 2006:

There's a reason most vets running for office this year are running as Democrats. The military is perhaps the ideal society -- we worked hard but the Army took care of us in return. All our basic needs were met -- housing, food, and medical care. It was as close to a color-blind society as I have ever seen. We looked out for one another. The Army invested in us. I took heavily subsidized college courses and learned to speak German on the Army's dime. I served with people from every corner of the country. I got to party at the Berlin Wall after it fell and explored Prague in those heady post-communism days. I wasn't just a tourist; I was a witness to history.

The Army taught me the very values that make us progressives -- community, opportunity, and investment in people and the future.

His basic examples are drawn from the military, but his thrust is to translate those values -- more than "American" values, they are human values -- into civilian life -- life as most of us know it.

Read it.

Today's Must-Read: Told Ya So

More and more people are now subscribing to the idea that belief in God is not necessary to be a moral person, according to Pew Research:

Most U.S. adults now say it is not necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values (56%), up from about half (49%) who expressed this view in 2011. This increase reflects the continued growth in the share of the population that has no religious affiliation, but it also is the result of changing attitudes among those who do identify with a religion, including white evangelical Protestants.

Surveys have long shown that religious “nones” – those who describe themselves religiously as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – are more likely than those who identify with a religion to say that belief in God is not a prerequisite for good values and morality. So the public’s increased rejection of the idea that belief in God is necessary for morality is due, in large part, to the spike in the share of Americans who are religious “nones.”

There's more, including all sorts of neat visuals.

This just points up what I've been saying for a long time: morality is hard-wired, a function of our existence as social animals: we take care of each other. That's not that same as obeying a set of arbitrary rules cherry-picked from the tribal taboos of Bronze Age Middle Eastern nomads.

Via Joe.My.God., who includes a reaction from the Catholic League (a/k/a Bill Donohue and a fax machine). (Warning: Donohue's diatribe comes close to word salad.)

Today's Must-Read: "Onward Christians Soldiers" Edition

The influence of evangelical/fundamentalist "Christians" on the U.S. military has been a problem for a long time. Remember the problems with overt proselytizing a number of years back at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs? (Also home to a major anti-gay hate group, the American Family Association.) Since the election of The Hairpiece, it's apparently reached epidemic proportions:

Donald Trump’s election has led to such a steep rise in fundamentalist Christian evangelizing and religious bigotry in the U.S. armed forces that the matter is reaching the level of a “national security threat,” according to information shared exclusively with Newsweek by an organization that represents and advocates for secular and minority religious views in the military.

The number of complaints from servicemen and -women in the Army, Air Force, Marines and other service branches to the Military Religious Freedom Foundation has doubled in number since November 2016, according to lawyer Michael “Mikey” Weinstein, a former Air Force officer who founded the organization.

Many of the recent charges are coming from members of minority religions, including Roman Catholics, Jews and Muslims, and from atheists. Among the complaints: military family and marital therapy programs are being infused with Protestant Christianity, which would go against the U.S. Constitution; open anti-Semitism; anti-LGBT statements, posters, symbols and bullying; openly anti-Muslim teachers and Islamophobic attacks; a rise in on-base evangelizing; and increased pressure on recruits or lower-level personnel and service members to convert to fundamentalist Christianity.

We're talking about the likes of Gordon Klingenschmitt being in the ascendant. Why they're picking Trump as their messiah is anyone's guess:

The Christian right’s willingness to see Trump as a savior for their cause—if not a messianic figure, despite his living as an urban libertine who has had three wives and a history of lewd acts and statements—continues to grow. His selection of an evangelical as vice president, plus the appointment of at least nine evangelicals to his Cabinet, have apparently soothed any concerns the religious right had with his personal life.

My guess is that they'll grab onto anything as a rationale for pushing their agenda: note that the "Christian" right has a history of blowing any little "victory" out of proportion, and claiming influence where they have none. (Just read any of Brian Brown's money begs, or Tony Perkins' press releases.)

And I think it's no surprise that this is happening along with the rise in hate crimes and the resurgence of the neo-Nazi and proto-fascist "alt right" groups: they share a mindset, and I'd bet that there's a lot of overlap in their membership.

Fasten your seatbelts -- it's going to be a bumpy ride.

Another Must-Read: Compassion (Update)

From Tom Sullivan at Hullabaloo. It's largely a scathing indictment of right-wing "morality" and how we lost our bearings, but this summation strikes me as apt:

What strikes me is how this research echoes something paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey said about Turkana Boy in speculating about the development of compassion in early Man:

Bipedalism carried an enormous price, where compassion was what you paid your ticket with. You simply can't abandon somebody who's incapacitated because the rest will abandon you next time it comes to be your turn.

There but for the grace of God. Compassion has an evolutionary advantage, Leakey suggests. Perhaps it is what helped us rise above the law of the jungle.

This goes back to my conviction that our morality -- the real thing, not the Bronze Age tribal taboos -- is hard-wired, or close to it: we're social animals, which implies that our primary moral imperative is to work for the benefit of the group, which necessarily (in most cases) works to our own good.

The American right seems to have dispensed with that idea.

Update: In support of that last statement, read this and this.

The Moral Vacuum That Is Donald Trump

Digby has a post at Hullabaloo that presents a very clear picture of just what Donald Trump is. This is only the most recent example:




Here's some background on that tweet.

Digby has further examples, which aren't amenable to excerpting here. Click through and read her post.

It's no wonder the "Christian" right is supporting him -- he, too, detests our foundational principles.

Y'know what? We're better than that.

Today's Must Read -- A Twofer

Two articles -- they're really too substantial to be designated as "posts" -- from Mahablog.

The first, published on the anniversary of Hiroshima, is a good look at the moral questions of the decision to drop The Bomb.

In Rethinking Religion I have a section on “moral clarity,” defined as “a state of mind achieved by staking a fixed position on a presumed moral high ground and then ignoring the details of human life that fog the view.” My primary example of “moral clarifying” are the anti-abortion activists who argue incessantly for the sacredness and rights of the fetus while barely mentioning the woman carrying the fetus in her body.

Appy, and many other liberals, try to pull something like that with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They stake the moral high ground that dropping the bomb was absolutely evil, and then revise history six ways from Sunday to “prove” that the men who chose to drop it were just evil and callous and had some nefarious end other than the stated one, which was to end the war quickly and avoid a ground invasion of Japan.

And it goes on from there.

The second -- well, the title says it all: Will Evangelicals Rediscover Religion?

A big part of the problem with our definitions of religion stems from the fact that most of us have had a very narrow exposure to religion. This is doubly true in the U.S., in spite of the fact that we may be living in the most religiously diverse nation in human history. Somehow, in mass media and in the public hive mind, the default definition of “religion” is “conservative evangelical Christianity.”

I am reminded of the state legislator in Louisiana who was a big supporter of Bobby Jindal's school voucher program, which allowed "religious schools" to apply -- until two Muslim schools applied to the program, at which point she did a 180. Her reason for the switch? "I thought 'religious' meant 'Christian'."

This is, as far as I'm concerned, the key observation:

In other words, religion is something you do, not something you are, or believe, or something to adopt as part of your tribal identity. And as something you do, it should not necessarily be easy, or be a socially enforced norm. And it’s that last part that’s hard for conservatives to accept.

She does make one comment that stopped me for a moment:

The worst thing that can happen to religion, IMO, is to become entangled with ethnic and national identities, and thereby with politics. That’s where religious violence comes from; it’s the confluence of ethnic and racial bigotries and political power with conservative religion that drives the worst of what is called “religious” violence.

This is certainly true in contemporary terms, but if you look at history, religion is tribal: Vine Deloria pointed out, in God is Red, that religion is a key factor in group identity -- they all started off as tribal, as a way of differentiating "us" from "other". My own conclusion is that attitude -- the cultural take on "other" -- is a key factor in whether the tribalism of religion leads to the kind of aggression that she notes: in pre-Christian Europe, for example, religion tended to be syncretistic. The Romans are perhaps the best example: one of the major cultural thrusts of ancient Rome was expansion and assimilation, one result of which was that the gods of neighboring peoples were taken as counterparts of the Roman gods. The Greek pantheon was almost identical to the Roman, save for the names (and if you think about the plethora of epithets attached to the Greek gods, take it as evidence that the Greeks had been doing their own assimilation of deities), but we find that the Romans were also eager to fit the ancient Irish and British gods into their existing roster. The ancient Israelites, on the other hand, weren't interested in including anyone else in their club. Given their history, that's not such a surprise, but it's indicative of a cultural mindset that seems to have carried over -- or been revived -- in modern evangelical Christianity, which doesn't even consider the Pope to be Christian (although they don't tend to say that out loud these days -- the enemy of my enemy, etc.) and seems to focus more on the Old Testament than on the Gospels.

At any rate, both are worth reading -- just pour yourself another cup of coffee and hunker down. And if Mahablog is not on your bookmarks, I suggest you rectify that asap.

Reinforcements

Via Box Turtle Bulletin, a very interesting report published in 1963 from the Literature Committee of the Friends Home Service Committee on sexual morality:

“Surely it is the nature and quality of a relationship that matters,” the authors wrote. “One must not judge by its outward appearance but by its inner worth … We see no reason why the physical nature of a sexual act should be the criterion by which the question whether or not it is moral should be decided. An act which expresses true affection between two individuals and gives pleasure to them both, does not seem to us to be sinful by reason alone of the fact that it is homosexual.”

The report asserted that “sexuality, looked at dispassionately, is neither good nor evil — it is a fact of nature.” it also explored the meaning of morality itself. “It seems to us,” the report continued,” that morals, like the Sabbath, were made for man, not man for morals, and that as society changes and modes of conduct with it, we must always be searching below the surface of human behavior, to discover what is in fact happening to people, what they are seeking to express, what motives and intentions they are satisfying, what fruits good or bad, they are harvesting.”

That's essentially what I've been saying for a while: sexual morality is not about who sticks what into whom under what circumstances. It's about how we treat those we are involved with -- the quality of the relationship. (Well, morality in general is about how we treat each other.)

Selections from the full report are here.

Divine Retribution

Jim Burroway, in today's "Daily Agenda" at Box Turtle Bulletin, has a couple of interesting items that fall under the heading "Moralistic Reactions to Disease." I'm going to mix them up a bit -- he's following the "Daily Agenda" format, which doesn't necessarily lead to a clear narrative.

First, some fairly recent history, in the form of this quote from the ever benign Pat Buchanan, from a New York Post column in 1983, when AIDS was rearing its ugly head:

Through much of the first decades of the AIDS crisis, moralistic preachers, pundits and politicians described the fatal disease as divine punishment for what they saw as illicit behavior. In 1983, for example, New York Post Columnist Pat Buchanan wrote, “The poor homosexuals… they have declared war upon nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.”

That's not a new attitude. Burroway outlines some of the history in both entries, which are concerned with the reaction to venereal disease, as they used to call it, from scientists. Yes, scientists.

In 1916, Dr. Winfield Scott Hall, professor of physiology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, published a book, Sexual Knowledge, “for the instruction of young people, young wives and young husbands… on the best way and the best time to impart sexual knowledge to boys and girls.”

It contained gems of scientific thought like this:

Nature has devised a retribution for illicit intercourse in the form of venereal disease. If the parties observe fidelity to their marriage vows, venereal disease is experienced in wedlock only on very rare occasions, and then through some accidental infection, as from contact with some public utensil, as a public water closet, a public towel, or a drinking cup. So rare is this unfortunate accident, however, that we may say that intercourse in undefiled wedlock results normally in pleasure and gratification to both parties; while intercourse out of wedlock, or illicit intercourse, is destined, as a rule, to be visited with retribution.

There was pushback, of course -- not everyone was a moralistic asshole, not even in 1916. The immediate response to Hall's book came from Dr. William J. Robinson, who, unfortunately for Hall, was editor of the American Journal of Urology and Sexology. My favorite bit from his review (which Burroway quotes at length):

Venereal disease is Nature’s retribution for illicit intercourse. And what is measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria a retribution for? What is consumption, cancer, heart disease, Bright’s disease, a retribution for?

Some years before, biologist Ilya Mechnikov addressed the same issue, in rather more moderate tones:

In the question of the prevention of syphilis, the moral problem is still more easy to settle. … The certainty of safety from this disease might render extra-conjugal relations more frequent, but if we compare the evil which might come from that with the immense benefit gained in preventing so many innocent persons from becoming diseased, it is easy to see which side the scale dips.

Now, lest you think that this is all a nice little historical quirk, think about the current outcry in some quarters against PReP and the use of a potential HIV vaccine. The surface reason is that these measures will encourage people to be careless. I suspect you don't have to dig very far to uncover an underlying assumption: promiscuity is bad. (Even in Mechnikov's comment, there is the underlying assumption that "illicit" sex is wrong, but we must protect the "innocents.")

This is not an attitude that has left us. Do I need to draw the obvious comparison to the "right to life" anti-abortion activists -- who are now revealing themselves as not just opposed to abortion, but to any form of birth control? Yes, it's heavily involved with misogyny, and it comes from the "Christian" right -- the same group that is so obsessed with gay sex, which is, by definition, "illicit." The assumption is that any sex outside of what they deem appropriate is due for punishment, whether it be some horrible disease or merely an unwanted baby that you can't care for. (I'm not going to go into what sorts of sexual behavior are "natural" for human beings -- going back into history and looking at the behaviors of our closest relatives, there are all sorts of things going on, from monogamy to alpha males keeping harems to free love. I'll let the anthropologists sort it out.)

But it's not only about sex -- it's about the whole idea of disease as a "punishment," which on its face is ridiculous -- unless, of course, you subscribe to the belief that we are all born bad. Needless to say, I don't subscribe to the idea of "original sin." My sins, such as they are, are my own, thank you very much, and I'm not about to ask forgiveness for being born.

And I'm afraid that, try as I might, I can't ascribe this idea to anything other than a world view that tries to dictate to nature how it's supposed to behave. (One of my favorite quotes from former Senator Frothy Mix runs to the effect that birth control, etc., are bad because they lead to sexual behavior that isn't the way it's "supposed to be.")

The problem is, nature isn't listening.

Do read Burroway's entire post -- it's quite illuminating.

Today's Must Read

Very interesting post at Mahablog, focused ostensibly on race and identity, but touching as well -- well, actually, based on human beings as social animals and how that context shapes who we are and who we think we are.

We are not only physically dependent on each other but psychologically dependent as well. There is all kinds of data and real-world experience showing that actual isolation is devastating to a human. Prolonged isolation from other humans literally drives us mad. Indeed, our personalities — the traits we think make us uniquely “me” — are (to the psychologist and sociologists who study these things) entirely about how we relate to other humans. If there are no other humans to relate to, personalities cannot be expressed and arguably don’t even exist.

One of my favorite exercises — describe who you are as an individual without reference to a position within some kind of social or economic network. In other words, describe who you are as an individual without reference to family, nation, profession, interests (sports? stamp collecting? messing around on the Web?) or anything that doesn’t require other people. I say it can’t be done.

This ties in to my thinking on the social contract and the bases of morality, which I've explicated ad nauseam, but to summarize: the social contract is our morality, which in turn is all about how we relate to other people, which is something those who rail on about the evils of birth control and homosexuality and the like are never going to understand, since they think of morality as a set of rules derived from the tribal taboos of a group of ancient Middle Eastern nomads that can't be broken for fear of eternal damnation, to which I can only respond, Well, you get what you pay for.

Saturday Science: The Evolution of Morality

I go on quite a bit about how human beings, as social animals, are more or less hard-wired toward what we call "moral behavior." As I usually phrase it, "Why do people form societies?" The answer, of course, is "For mutual benefit." (Actually, my usual answer is "I don't think it's so that the greediest and most dishonest can take everything," but that's usually when I'm debating "libertarians.")

Well, this morning I ran across this post from Undercover Blue at Hullabaloo, referencing this article by Indre Viskontas on the work of psychologist Paul Bloom. The article is not easy to excerpt, but click through -- it's short, and it has videos and stuff. Essentially, it summarizes Bloom's work with infants and toddlers on how compassion and a sense of fairness seem to be on display early on, based on babies' choices of the good guys (those who help or share) over the bad guys (those who do neither) as preferences -- they opt for the good guys.

This echoes the behavior of other primates exhibited both in research settings and in the wild: most of our relatives travel in groups, and they help each other out. Primate societies are marked by cooperation among the members, which from an evolutionary standpoint (you knew this was coming) has proven to be an adaptive trait: cooperation among members of the group enhances the survival of the group and, by extension, that of the individuals who make up the group.

There's always self-interest, though. In the realm of small children, Bloom discovered that, while perfectly happy to distribute someone else's treats in equal shares, when it comes to the child's own treats, it's a very different story. As they grow, however, that changes, as witness Viskontas' first anecdote in the article on Bloom's work:

At the playground, I watch my 10-month-old son beeline to the center of the sandbox where there is a bright pink shovel. But before he gets there, a rambunctious 2-year-old snatches up the coveted toy first. As my son watches the shovel slip away, a wobbly 14-month-old comes over and offers him a half-chewed cookie.

There's an element of tribalism in this. As Bloom notes, as quoted by Undercover Blue:

"But this compassion and this helping, it all pertains to the baby's own group," says Bloom. They are less naturally generous with out-group members.

By our natures, we strongly value those around us over strangers. And to the extent that you and I don't, to the extent that you and I might recognize that somebody suffering, I don't know, from the Ebola virus in Africa, is a life just as valuable as those of our closest friends and family, that's an extraordinary cultural accomplishment. And it's something that's not in the genes. It's not what we're born with.

And there we have an added wrinkle: culture building on inheritance.

(I don't think I need to emphasize how this applies to, say, contemporary American politics: it's a matter of expanding your perception of "Us" as opposed to "Them," and the trend in American history has always been toward a larger "Us." There's always been an element in American society, and others as well, that fails to make the leap. These days, we call them "Republicans.")

National Graphic did a special with Richard Leakey on his discoveries at Turkana in Africa, of which this clip addresses the issue under discussion here:

Self-interest? Yes, but also, as Leakey puts it, "bonding, care, love, affection, protection" -- which all boils down to "compassion."

If you look at any religion -- and most people, for some reason, consider the teachings of their religion as the basis of morality, rather than its codification -- you'll find that underlying all the codes of behavior, tribal taboos, and "history" is one basic precept: we take care of each other. (Some evoutionary theorists have hypothesized that we're also hard-wired for belief. Be interesting to see how they test that one.)

And I can already hear the objections: how can genetics determine something as complex as our understanding of morality? Well, in addition to instilling a tendency toward cooperation and compassion, evolution also gave us brains. You do the math.

(I'm going to refrain from commenting on the somewhat rudimentary sense of morality evidenced by the spokespersons of the "religious" right, except to note that their concern is with tribal taboos, not any real values. Although I will admit that imagining their reaction to the idea that morality is hard-wired gives me a great sense of satisfaction.)

This one has a lot of ramifications. Use your imagination.

The Culture of Suffering

Interesting post by David Atkins at Hullabaloo on what I can only call the culture of suffering in America:

Why do so many Americans feel so strongly that pain is morally good?

Assisted suicide is in the news again after Stephen Hawking came out in support of it. For some reason it remains a controversial question whether people wracked with terminal illnesses should be able to bring an end to their own suffering. Apparently many Americans feel it's the the greater moral good for dying people to spend an extra few months excruciatingly experiencing every organ failure until a painful, convulsing release finally sets them free. Why is that?

That's just the beginning -- he hits the war on the poor, police terrorism, torture as a legitimate tool of war, and ends up with this:

What is it in the American psyche that seems to be in love with the idea of forced pain as an instrument of terrestrial and divine justice?

I have an easy, one-word answer: Our so-called Judaeo-Christian culture. (Well, OK, it's not exactly one word. Say "Christianity" then.) We tend not to realize the way the basic thought patterns of that religious tradition have infused our entire world view. We see things in terms of absolute dichotomies: good/evil, either/or, black/white. The universe doesn't work that way.

And it's a tradition built on the idea of suffering as a moral good. Christianity itself is centered on the Passion: the pain and suffering of the Christ.* The goal of the good Christian is to be as much like Christ as possible. And not incidentally, there is a strand of Christian thought that holds that the purpose of life on earth is to endure suffering in the hope of eternal reward. (Lest you think Judaism is exempt from this idea, think of Job.) Both Judaism and Christianity rest on the idea of punishment: we are all born sinners, and therefore deserve to be punished. (Needless to say, that's not an idea that appeals to me -- my own take is that new lives are born pure, and I'm not too keen on the idea of being punished for something that a theoretical ancestor did way back when, especially when it was more breaking the rules than being absolutely evil.)

Of course, people being what they are, all this pain and suffering are even more enjoyable when they're happening to other people. That ties into the whole tribal nature of the Judaic base of Christianity: it's Us against Them, and they deserve whatever we can dish out. (Interestingly enough, Christianity dropped the exclusivity of Judaism early on, and wound up being fairly syncretistic in many respects -- the timing and trappings of Christmas and Easter, the appropriation of Pagan holy sites, the tendency to co-opt the gods of other religions by canonizing them -- St. Brigid comes to mind, not to mention St. Nicholas. But some sects, at least, seem to have backtracked to that insular mentality.)

It seems fairly obvious to me that the "punishment and suffering" culture that Atkins decries can be considered a feature, not a bug. It's just part of our cultural foundation out in the open.


* I take Christ as an avatar of the Sacrificed God, who shows up in just about every religious tradition I can think of. The difference is that Christianity denies the existence of any of the other gods, and it's their stories that tend to bring the whole thing back into some sort of perspective.

Small People, Part I

I wonder, sometimes, about the need some people seem to have to denigrate others -- not based on anything they've said or done, mind you, but simply because of who they are, who their parents are, the way they look, things like that. There's a couple of recent stories that kicked that one up to the front of my brain this morning.

First off, the "Mrs. Nice" of the anti-gay movement, Maggie Gallagher. She started off with this, in, of course The National Review, bemoaning the upswing in acceptance for things that she (read "the Catholic Church") finds immoral. Given her history, it's not so surprising that the nut is same-sex marriage:

I personally still cherish the hope that we can as a society eliminate cruel homophobia without jettisoning heteronormativity — which is the need for social norms and institutions to be oriented strongly around the problem and the blessing that sex between men and women makes babies.

This is a statement worthy of her mentor, Robert George. (I dissected one of his essays here.)

Perhaps she just doesn't get it, but the idea that we can eliminate homophobia without "jettisoning" heteronormativity is ludicrous on its face: until you accept that same-sex attraction is part of the normal range of human sexuality, you're keeping gay people in the category of "other."

She apparently got wind of the criticism, because, in true conservative fashion, when you say something ridiculous and offensive, double down.

Marriage equality is going to be used primarily to enforce the moral norm: no differences between straight and gay can matter. Or as Think Progress put it recently “At a basic level, it’s logically impossible to say that heterosexuality is better — or should be the norm — compared to homosexuality without simultaneously stating that homosexuality is worse — or abnormal. Either all people are equal in society or they are not; she cannot have her straights-only wedding cake and eat it stigma-free.”

It is possible to affirm an ideal without stigmatizing the alternatives–to affirm in the positive without pushing the negative. But gay marriage advocates insist that any affirmation of the ideal represents a denigration of them, no matter how expressed.

Let's see -- there are no significant differences between gay and straight, unless, like most of the anti-gay right, you are obsessed with the mechanics of sex. And tying the "moral norm" to heterosexuality is loaded, at the very least, echoing the Catholic propaganda (not that Gallagher does anything else) that gays are "intrinsically morally disordered." Unlike an institution that shields pedophile priests.

As for "affirming the ideal without stigmatizing the alternatives" -- how, exactly, does one do this? Anything that falls short of the ideal is, by definition, not good enough. (Oh, and just in terms of formal argument, an assertion to the contrary does not counter a conclusion by your opponent. And that's all Gallagher can come up: argument by assertion.)

By way of background, Gallagher has her own page at GLAAD's Commentator Accountability Project's website. Gallagher taking the pose that she cherishes the hope that we can do away with "cruel homophobia" (is there another kind?) is so much bullshit.

Back to my original question: why does she feel a need to cast a group of people, in this case gays and lesbians, as less deserving? Given her history and public statements, there are some obvious answers, but I'm not going to assume motivations. I'll just let that history and those statements speak for themselves. It's also worth noting that she shares this characteristic with the right in general -- the need to cast those who are different as "other." Partly this is a basic human characteristic -- we're tribal creatures, when all is said and done. And the influence of Christianity of a certain, Old Testament cast on conservatives in this country only reinforces that tendency: it's founded on a religion that itself was founded on group identity: anyone not of the tribes of Israel was lesser.

Given that America's real ideals are based on inclusion and equality, you have to wonder what country Gallagher is living in.

I'll probably come back to this topic -- there are a lot of small people out there.

"Morally Straight"

For some reason, that phrase jumped out at me while reading this post at Towleroad. It is, of course, one of the catch phrases and guiding principles of the Boy Scouts of America. It's taken to automatically exclude gay scouts and leaders, as though morality is somehow intimately tied to who you have relationships with rather than how you treat people.

That strikes me as pretty shallow. To my mind, morality is much more complex. But then, I was taught actual values (another word that's been sadly warped in our public discourse) rather than just rules. Perhaps that's why I found Paganism such a good fit -- every day, one is confronted with a series of moral decisions that don't lend themselves to cut-and-dried solutions, and if you follow Paganism's one rule -- "Do no harm" -- it can get pretty knotty.

As for the video (which I'm not going to post), the sentiments expressed are repellent, as much for their ignorance as for their bigotry. And have you noticed that these people are obsessed with sex?

Helping a Child Come Out

Can you imagine an article like this being published ten years ago, or even five?

The most important thing, Ms. Kahn said, is that parents need to find ways to let their children know that their love is unconditional, and that their home is a safe place where anything can be discussed. Adolescence can be a secretive time, but “it’s the role of the parents to try to create the open path,” she said. “The adults have to do a little work here.”

In other words, Ms. Kahn said, the job of the grown-ups is to help guide their children through adolescence. The terrain may be unfamiliar, but the role is not. It’s called parenting.

I find it impossible to understand those who subscribe to the importance of family and then turn around and reject their children who are gay. (Thanks to people like Tony Perkins.) Maybe they need to learn what parenting is -- it's not creating little clones of yourself. It's preparing your children to lead an independent life.

There are good people in this world

Today's feel-good story:

It's more than feel-good, though: most of the people in this country are decent people who want to do good. (Don't miss the part about ten other companies chipping in to help cover the cost of the repairs.) It's the assholes like Paul Ryan and Todd Akin and Brian Brown and the teabaggers who get the news coverage.

You see why I still have faith in humanity.

(Via)

Another Campaign, Another Pledge

The Republicans are real big on pledges, it seems. This one actually happened last October, but now it's suddenly in the news, and it's a real hoot:

Last October, Morality In Media (MIM), the “leading national organization opposing pornography and indecency through public education and the application of the law,” launched an effort to get presidential candidates in both major parties to commit to strict enforcement of obscenity laws. In both face-to-face meetings and written statements, three candidates made this pledge: Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney, and Rick Santorum.

Why am I not surprised? Romney, of course, will sign anything, as will Gingrich, and Santorum lives to interfere in other people's private lives. They all made statements, but Newt's is my favorite:

When MIM’s Executive Director Dawn Hawkins asked former Speaker Gingrich if he will enforce existing laws that make distribution of hard-core adult pornography illegal, he responded: “Yes, I will appoint an Attorney General who will enforce these laws.”

If he's not too busy arresting activist judges.

I have a novel suggestion -- let's try treating adults as adults. Just to see what happens.

And a word to the candidates: If you're trying to appeal to your base, you may have just blown it:

Those states that do consume the most porn tend to be more conservative and religious than states with lower levels of consumption, the study finds. . . .

Church-goers bought less online porn on Sundays – a 1% increase in a postal code's religious attendance was associated with a 0.1% drop in subscriptions that day. However, expenditures on other days of the week brought them in line with the rest of the country, Edelman finds.

Residents of 27 states that passed laws banning gay marriages boasted 11% more porn subscribers than states that don't explicitly restrict gay marriage.

To get a better handle on other associations between social attitudes and pornography consumption, Edelman melded his data with a previous study on public attitudes toward religion.

States where a majority of residents agreed with the statement "I have old-fashioned values about family and marriage," bought 3.6 more subscriptions per thousand people than states where a majority disagreed. A similar difference emerged for the statement "AIDS might be God's punishment for immoral sexual behaviour."

I don't think I need to add anything to that.

This Is Just Sick

I don't think I need to comment at all, except to note that, if you go to the comments at this post (which is where I first found the video), pay particular attention to commenter "timjoebillybob" -- he never seems to have heard the phrase "the common good," and doesn't seem to understand that others are paying taxes for his benefit as well as their own. Big effin infant, all caught up in the idea that his taxes might actually pay for something that benefits someone else, too.

Here's a more complete version of that video -- Bernie Sanders calls it what it is.



See also this take-down of the "conservative" position on Medicare by Maha.

And as a footnote, and an indicator (if you needed another one) of the basic philosophy of the "fiscally responsible" right, here's Gov. Haley Barbour's reaction to the potential devastation in Mississippi from flooding:

As the water rose, Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour moved furniture out of his lake house outside Vicksburg on family land that was inundated during the 1927 flood. A week ago, he urged residents to flee low-lying areas, saying that the state wouldn't assist the evacuations and that people should help one another secure their property and get out.

Mm -- that's "fiscally responsible, small-government conservatives." (But he did ask the feds for disaster assistance -- ya don't want government to get too small, now.)