Perversions

Perversions

Atheists and homosexuals were called perverts once. Why do we still see perversion where no harm is done?

by  Jesse Bering

Reclining Boy (1913) by Egon Schiele. Leopold Foundation, Vienna. Photo by Corbis

Jesse Bering is a former academic in psychology whose writing has appeared in Scientific American, Slate and The Guardian, among others. His latest book is Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us (2013).

Perverts weren’t always the libidinous bogeymen we imagine when we think of the term today. Sexual mores have certainly shifted dramatically over the course of history and across societies, but the very word ‘pervert’ once literally meant something else entirely to what it does now. For example, the peculiar discovery that some peasant during the reign of Charles II used conch shells for anal gratification or inhaled a stolen batch of ladies’ corsets while touching himself in the town square would have been merely coincidental to any accusations of his being perverted (though it wouldn’t have helped his case). Seventeenth-century terms such as ‘skellum’ (scoundrel) or reference to his ‘mundungus’ (smelly entrails) might have applied, but calling this man a ‘pervert’ for his peccadilloes would have made little sense at the time.

Linguistically, the sexual connotation feels natural. The ring of it — purrrvert — is at once melodious and cloying, producing a noticeable snarl on the speaker’s face, while the image of a lecherous child molester, a trench-coated flasher in a park, a drooling pornographer, or perhaps a serial rapist pops into one’s head. Yet as Shakespeare might remind us, a pervert by any other name would smell as foul. For the longest time, in fact, to be a pervert wasn’t to be a sexual deviant; it was to be an atheist.

In 1656, the British lexicographer Thomas Blount included the following entry for the verb ‘pervert’ in his Glossographia (a book also known by the more cumbersome title A Dictionary Interpreting the Hard Words of Whatsoever Language Now Used in Our Refined English Tongue): ‘to turn upside down, to debauch, or seduce’. No doubt all of these activities occur in your typical suburban bedroom today. But it’s only by dint of our post-Victorian minds that we perceive these types of naughty winks in the definition of a term that was floating around the old English countryside. In Blount’s time, and for several hundred years after he was dead and buried, a pervert was simply a headstrong apostate who had turned his or her back on the draconian morality of the medieval Church, thereby ‘seducing’ others into a godless lifestyle.

If we applied this original definition to the present iconoclastic world of science, one of the most recognisable perverts in the world today would be the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins. As the author of The God Delusion (2006) and an active proselytiser of atheism, Dawkins encourages his fellow rationalists to ‘turn away from’ canonical religious teachings. As I’ve written my own scientific atheistic screed, I’m not casting stones. I’m proudly in possession of a perverted nature that fits both the archaic use of the term, due to my atheism, and its more recent pejorative use, due to my homosexuality.

Only at the tail end of the 19th century did the word ‘pervert’ first leap from the histrionic sermons of fiery preachers into the heady, clinical discourses of stuffy European sexologists. Today, the term is more likely to be used less as a diagnosis and more as an insult, hurled at the likes of sex offenders. This gradual semantic migration of perverts, from the church pews to the psychiatric clinic to the online comments section of salacious news stories, hasn’t occurred without the clattering bones of medieval religious morality dragging behind. Notice that the suffix –vert means, generally, ‘to turn’: hence ‘to convert’ (to turn to another), ‘to revert’ (to return to a previous state), ‘to invert’ (to turn inside out), ‘to pervert’ (to turn away from the right course), and so on. Of those, ‘pervert’ alone has that devilishly malicious core ­— ‘a distinctive quality of obstinacy’, as the Australian psychoanalyst Jon Jureidini has called it in the paper ‘Perversion: An Erotic Form of Hatred or Exciting Avoidance of Reality?’(2001). He goes on: ‘petulance, peevishness … self-willed in a way that distinguishes it from more “innocent” deviations’.

A judge accusing someone of ‘perverting the course of justice’ is referring to a deliberate effort to thwart moral fairness. Similarly, since the modern noun form of ‘pervert’ is synonymous with ‘sex deviant’, the presumption is that the person thus described is a deviant by his (or her) own malicious design. In other words, he is presumed to have wilfully chosen to be sexually aberrant — that’s to say, to go against what is right.

It’s striking how such an emotionally loaded word, one that undergoes almost no change at all for the first 1,000 years of its use, can almost overnight come to mean something so very different, entirely eclipsing its original intent. Exactly how did this word ‘pervert’ go from being a perennial term for the ‘immoral religious heretic’ to referring to the ‘immoral sexual deviant’?

One key reason for this shift can be found in the work of the British scholar Havelock Ellis, who back in 1897 popularised the term ‘pervert’ in his descriptions of patients with atypical sexual desires. Earlier scholars, among them Richard von Krafft-Ebing, the Austro-German psychiatrist regarded by many as the father of studies in deviant sexuality, had already sexualised the term, but Ellis’s accessible writing found a wider general audience and ultimately led to this meaning of ‘pervert’ becoming solidified in the common vernacular.

The provenance of the term in Ellis’s work is still a little hard to follow, because he initially uses ‘perverts’ and ‘perversions’ in the sense of sexual deviancy in a book confusingly titled Sexual Inversion (1897). Co-authored with the gay literary critic John Addington Symonds and published after Symonds’s death, the book was a landmark treatise on the psychological basis of homosexuality. In the authors’ view, ‘sexual inversion’ reflected homosexuality as an inside-out form of the standard erotic pattern. That part is easy enough to understand. Where the language of Ellis and Symonds gets tricky, however, is in their broader use of ‘sexual perversions’ to refer to socially prohibited sexual behaviours, of which ‘sexual inversion’ (or homosexuality) was just one. Other classic types of perversions included polygamy, bestiality, and prostitution. The authors adopted this religious language not because they personally believed homosexuality to be abnormal and therefore wrong (quite the opposite, since their naturalistic approach was among the first to identify such behaviours in other animals) but only to note that it was salient among the categories of sexuality frequently depicted as ‘against what is right’ or sinful. Theirs was merely an observation about how gays and lesbians (‘inverts’) were seen by most of society.

Curiously enough, Ellis, the scientist of the pair, and the one usually credited with christening homosexuals as sex ‘perverts’, had his own unique predilection. Ellis’s urophilia — a strong sexual attraction to urine, or to people who are in the process of urinating — is documented in his various notes and letters. In correspondence with a close female acquaintance, Ellis chided the woman for forgetting her purse at his house, adding saucily: ‘I’ve no objection to your leaving liquid gold behind.’ He gave in to these desires openly and even fancied himself a connoisseur of pisseuses, writing in his autobiography: ‘I may be regarded as a pioneer in the recognition of the beauty of the natural act in women when carried out in the erect attitude.’ In his later years, this ‘divine stream’, as he called it, proved the cure for Ellis’s impotence: the image of an upright, urinating woman was the only thing that could turn him on. And he was entirely unashamed of this sexual quirk: ‘It was never to me vulgar, but, rather, an ideal interest, a part of the yet unrecognised loveliness of the world.’ On attempting to analyse his own case (he was a sexologist, after all), Ellis concluded: ‘[It’s] not extremely uncommon … it has been noted of men of high intellectual distinction.’ He was also convinced that men with high-pitched voices were generally more intelligent than baritones. That Ellis himself was a rare high tenor might have had something to do with that curious hypothesis as well.

Ellis was among a handful of pioneering sexologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who had set out to tease apart the complicated strands of human sexuality. Other scholars, among them Krafft-Ebing and Sigmund Freud, as well as Freud’s early follower, the Austrian psychologist Wilhelm Stekel, were similarly committed to this newly objective, amoral empirical approach to sexual deviance. Their writings might seem tainted with bias to us today (and in fact they are) but they also display a genuine concern for those who found themselves, through no doing or choice of their own, feeling aroused in ways that posed major problems in the social conditions under which they lived.

With their inverted pattern of attraction, homosexuals became perverts in essence, not just louses dabbling in transgressive sex

The early sexologists found themselves confronted by angry purists who believed that their novel scientific endeavours would bring about the collapse of cherished institutions such as marriage, religion, and ‘the family’. Anxieties over such a ‘slippery slope effect’ have been around for a very long time and, in the eyes of these moralists, an objective approach to sexuality threatened all that was good and holy. Conservative scholars saw any neutral evaluation of sex deviants as dangerous, for it legitimised wicked things as ‘natural’ variants of behaviour and lead ‘normal’ people to embrace the unethical lifestyles of the degenerate. Merely giving ‘horrific’ tendencies such as same-sex desires their own proper scientific names made them that much more real to these moralists, and therefore much more threatening. To them, this was the reification of sexual evil. For instance, in 1897 William Noyes, a psychiatrist at the Boston Lunatic Hospital, wrote a scathing review of Ellis and Symonds’s Sexual Inversion in which he chastised the authors for ‘adding 300 more pages to a literature already too flourishing … Apart from its influence on the perverts [homosexuals] themselves no healthy person can read this literature without a lower opinion of human nature, and this result in itself should bid any writer pause.’

Looking back, it’s evident that Ellis and Symonds’s careful distinction between homosexual behaviour and homosexual orientation was an important step in the history of gay rights. It might seem like commonsense today, but these authors disentangled the two elements, which in turn informed our modern understanding of homosexuality as a psychosexual trait (or orientation), not just something that one ‘did’ with the same sex. Their contribution to the way psychiatrists’ think about homosexuality had long-lasting implications for gays and lesbians. On the positive side, homosexuals were no longer perceived (at least by experts) as fallen people who were simply so immoral and licentious that they’d even resort to doing that; instead, they were seen as having a psychological ‘nature’ that made them ‘naturally’ attracted to the same sex rather than to the opposite sex.

On the negative side, this newly recognised nature was also regarded as inherently abnormal or flawed. With their inverted pattern of attraction, homosexuals became perverts in essence, not just louses dabbling in transgressive sex. Whether or not they ever had homosexual sex, such individuals were now one of ‘those people’. Also, once homosexuality was understood to be an orientation and not just a criminal behaviour, it could be medicalised as a psychiatric condition. For almost a century afterwards, physicians saw gays and lesbians as quite obviously mentally ill. And just as one would treat the pathological symptoms of patients suffering from any mental illness, most clinicians believed that homosexuals should be treated for their unfortunate disorder. Needless to say, such ‘conversion’ treatments, in all their shameful forms, didn’t involve encouraging gays and lesbians to be themselves.

The die had also been cast for the disparaging term pervert and its enduring association with homosexuality. Not so long ago, some Neo-Freudian scholars were still interpreting anal sex among gay men as an unconscious desire in the recipient (or the ‘bottom’) to nip off the other’s penis with his tightened sphincter. ‘In this way, which is so characteristic of the pervert,’ mused the influential South African-born psychoanalyst Mervin Glasser in the paper ‘Identification and its Vicissitudes as Observed in the Perversions’ (1986), ‘he [is] trying to establish his father as an internal object with whom to identify, as an inner ally and bulwark against his powerful mother’. That might sound as scientific to us today as astrology or tarot cards, but considering that Glasser wrote this 13 years after the American Psychiatric Association formally removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders, it shows how long the religious moral connotations stuck around, even in clinical circles. Glasser’s bizarre analysis of ‘perverts’ was the type of thing a gay man could expect to hear if he ever sought counselling for his inevitable woes from living in a world that couldn’t decide if he was sick or immoral, so simply saw him as both.

Today, the word pervert just sounds silly, or at least provincial, when used to refer to gays and lesbians. In a growing number of societies, homosexuals are slowly, begrudgingly, being allowed entry into the ranks of the culturally tolerated. But plenty of other sexual minorities remain firmly entrenched in the orientation blacklist. Although, happily, we’re increasingly using science to defend gays and lesbians, deep down most of us (religious or not) still appear to be suffering from the illusion of a creator who set moral limits on the acceptable sexual orientations. Our knee-jerk perception of individuals who similarly have no choice whatsoever over what arouses them sexually (be they paedophiles, exhibitionists, transvestites, or fetishists, to name but a few) is that they’ve wilfully, deliberately, and arrogantly strayed from the right course. In other words, we see them as ‘true perverts’. Whereas gays and lesbians are perceived by more and more people as ‘like normal heterosexuals’ because they didn’t choose to be the way they are, we assume that these others somehow did.

As a society we’ve become so focused on the question of whether a given sexual behaviour is ‘natural’ or ‘unnatural’ that we’ve lost sight of the more important question: Is it harmful? In many ways, it’s an even more challenging question, because although naturalness can be assessed by relatively straightforward queries about statistical averages — for example, ‘How frequently does it appear in other species?’ and ‘In what percentage of the human population does it occur?’ — the experience of harm is largely subjective. As such, it defies direct analyses and requires definitions that resonate with people in vastly different ways.

When it comes to sexual harm in particular, what’s harmful to one person could be not only completely harmless to another but might even, believe it or not, be helpful or positive. A gay Muslim who dies only to find himself in an afterlife thronged with 72 beautiful female virgins, as the Koran promises its faithful, will be in hell, not in heaven. One man’s angels are another’s demons.

Morally, all that matters is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful

And it’s not just overtly physical sexual acts that can be experienced differently in terms of harm but also entirely ethereal sexual desires. For the religiously devout, this whole conversation is a lost cause. Yet once one abandons the notion that one can ‘commit’ a sin by thinking a thought, it becomes quite clear that sexual desires — no matter how deviant — are intrinsically harmless to the subject of a person’s lust, at least in the physical sense. Mental states are ‘a mere breath on the air’ as the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote. Sexual desires can, of course, be thought bubbles with thorns and wreak havoc on a person’s own well-being (especially when they occur in the heads of those convinced such thoughts come from the devil and yet they just can’t stop having them).

Still, it’s only when this ‘mere breath on the air’ is manifested in behaviour that harm to another person might or might not occur. Treating an individual as a pervert in essence, and hence with a purposefully immoral mind, because his or her brain conjures up atypical erotic ideas, or responds sexually to stimuli that others have deemed inappropriate objects of desire, then becomes medieval in both its stupidity and its cruelty. It’s also entirely counterproductive. For example, research in the 1980s on the ‘white bear effect’ by the social psychologist Daniel Wegner and colleagues at Trinity University in Texas has shown that forcing a person to suppress specific thoughts leads to those very thoughts invading the subject’s consciousness even more than they otherwise would. (Whatever you do, don’t — I repeat, do not — think about a white bear during the next 30 seconds.)

Our critical evaluations should fall upon harmful sexual actions with the heaviest of thuds, but not upon a pituitary excretion that happens to morph into an ethereal image in the private movie theatre of someone’s mind. Morally, all that matters is whether a person’s sexual deviancy is demonstrably harmful. If it’s not, and we reject the person anyway, then we’re not the good guys in this scenario: we’re the bad guys.

Excerpted from PERV: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us by Jesse Bering, to be published  October 8th by Scientific American / Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright © 2013 by Jesse Bering. All rights reserved.

Related articles

• From Immoral to Illegal: how religion perverts laws (gloriabrame.typepad.com)
• Of Cultures Destroyed by Western Sexual Exploitation and Violent Religious Prudery (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
• The Opposite of “Protection”: A Fetish for Used Condoms (livescience.com)
• Bite Those Nails, Baby: A “Quick” Tale of Fingernail Fetishism (blogs.scientificamerican.com)
• Beware the Ultimate Orgasm: Autoerotic Fatalities (blogs.scientificamerican.com)

Religion Should Be Criticized

Sometimes religion should be criticized

Posted by: American Humanist Association

Most people, understanding good manners, have distaste for those who are vocally critical of the religious beliefs of others. Theological decisions are recognized as deeply personal, and common decency dictates that we respect the rights of others to believe what they wish, assuming those beliefs cause no harm to others.

The vast majority of humanists, even those actively engaged in the secular movement, share the general public’s sentiments on this issue. Live and let live, right?

We should realize, however, that the social norm that discourages the criticism of religion can work to the great advantage of religious political activists. Social conservatives, for example, righteously claiming the highest moral authority grounded in religion, knowing that criticism of religion is considered off-limits, can demand that their policy positions be given legitimacy even when those positions lack any rational basis.

To read the rest of this Psychology Today article by AHA President Emeritus David Niose clickhere.

Relate

Related articles

• Why Sometimes Religion Should Be Criticized (americanhumanist.org)
• Sometimes religion should be criticized (secularnewsdaily.com)
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Nazi Pope Resigns | The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women

The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women

by Soraya Chemaly

Pope Benedict XVI. (Vibe)

I find it strange that Pope Benedict XVI chose a week that will culminate in a global strike to protest violence against women toretire. And for health reasons no less. Orange smoke and irony and all that. On Thursday of this week, all over the globe, people will gather and dance for One Billion Rising, a day dedicated to striking against violence against women. As Eve Ensler, the founder of  V-Day which has organized the strike knows better than most, “violence against women is a global, patriarchal epidemic.“

Part of that epidemic is compulsory pregnancy. The Pope’s rationale is that his “age means he lacks strength to do job.” You could use the exact words to describe the nine-year old girl  whose family the Pope excommunicated for having a life-saving abortion after being raped and impregnated, with twins. It seems to me that her age meant she lacked strength to do the job, too. Actually, the job would have killed her.  These things happen. She and 16 million other pregnant adolescent girls a year, two million of whom are under age 15, strike me as 16 million good reasons to rise.

As does this girl: last Thursday a friend posted a story on Facebook, ”Dafne, 9-Year-Old Girl, Gives Birth To Baby Girl In Mexico.” Millions read and shared it over the weekend.  The link appeared with this caption: “The girl reportedly delivered a 5.7 pound baby by Caesarian section on January 27. She was 8-years old when she became pregnant.” Picky, picky feminist wordsmithy me thinks the caption should read, “The girl underwent a dangerous Caesarian surgery to delivery a 5.7 pound baby on January 27. She was 8-years old when a 17-year old boy forcibly inseminated her.”  Eight-year olds cannot consent to sex. They also cannot consent to having contraceptives implanted in their arms, but that’s now happened too. Just in case she gets ideas. On the same day, by coincidence, a 12-year old in Argentina gave birth to twins after she “fell pregnant.” Like she tripped by accident.

While nine is very young, girls this age having babies is not as rare as we’d like to think. The United States has more “teen” births than any industrialized nation, including girls as young as 10,  and our rates have been climbing.  However, 95 percent of teen births take place in poorer countries. According to W.H.O., “Half of all adolescent births occur in just seven countries: Bangladesh, Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria and the United States.” Many girls die because they do not have control over their bodies and their own reproduction.

Last year, after a 10-year old in Columbia gave birth, experts blithely explained that “a C-section delivery for such a young mother is not unusual.” Given global trends (researchers, armed with competing theories, have noted that the average age of the onset of menstruation for girls has been steadily declining for decades) we can reasonably expect to see instances involving younger and younger girls. Little girls, and women who find themselves raped and pregnant often “want to die.” It’s only one reason why raped people shouldn’t be forced to carry pregnancies to term. Guess what else, besides the Papacy, of course, is a “job or life with no retirement age?” Whereas the Pope is retiring to “go back to his priesthood,” girls who are raped, pregnant and give birth or die cannot go back to their childhoods.

This was the conclusion reached by a doctor last year in the case a mentally-disabled girl, 10-years old, in Kansas, who had to have an abortion after becoming pregnant as a result of rape.  The Kansas medical review board that revoked the girl’s doctor’s license.

In Mexico, authorities “don’t know if [the girl] is being entirely truthful.” Mainly because of her age, but interesting choice of words. Is she saying she was raped? Or is she saying she wasn’t? The article linked to doesn’t say which. Turns out she’s saying that the boy was her “boyfriend.” As one commenter speculated, the child “may have even had feelings for” her rapist.  Authorities, in a perverse game of “he said/she said,” acknowledge that they are looking for the missing father, a 17-year old boy, “to acquire his own account of what occurred between the two.” In case he reveals that she was wrong in her assessment and wants to make it clear that he raped her?

Besides, it’s probably her parents fault, not his. “The new mother is one of 11 children… and her parents were unable to watch her while they worked.”  It wouldn’t have mattered, as her mother explained that her daughter had sex willingly and she “didn’t report it because she was not aware” it was a crime.

“Who has 11 children, anyway?” many people wondered. This is perhaps the most important question because another way of asking it is, “Who insists on compulsory pregnancy that impoverishes millions?” Globally, historically, that has been been the Catholic Church, which continues to put girls and women at risk worldwide through bullying policies that ensure that they will be poor and unhealthy as the result of unregulated childbearing and rearing.  This is the same Church that excommunicated a mother and doctors for saving a 9-year old victim’s life by when they ended her pregnancy with twins. Guess who the Church didn’t excommunicate? That’s right,her rapist stepfather.

Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger, the retiring Pope of the Catholic Church, should be tried in the International Criminal Court of law for human rights abuses, not only for being head of an organization that has shielded and enabled child rapists, but for the deadly and systematic global obstruction of girls’ and women’s rights to life and health.

In the hospital where Dafne gave birth, 25 percent of the births are to teenage girls.  She lived, but pregnancy is THE leading cause of death for girls ages 15 to 19 worldwide.  A thoroughlyunholy international alliance between American evangelicals and the Vatican has resulted in the death of millions. While President Obama quickly repealed the “global gag rule” put into place by George Bush, which prohibited even the mention of abortion where US funds were being used for women’s health care abroad, the Helms Amendment, which restricts the use of US aid for the purposes of providing abortions, even in conflict zones where rape is endemic, still stands. It is in no small measure the result of this policy and the influence of the Catholic church that 150 million women cannot get the birth control they need or safe abortions that would save their lives.  We know how to stem these deaths— family planning, including both.

Meanwhile, here in the US, where Catholic Bishops and friends refuse to comply with the law and religiously-inspired Republican legislators spew venomous mythologies about rape, race, poverty, and women, the rate of maternal mortality has DOUBLED in 25 years. We now rank 50^thin the world for pregnancy related morbidity.  In New York City, black girls and women, are eight times more likely than white ones to die from pregnancy related causes. The girls and women dying globally often our poorest, darkest, young girls, regardless of what country they live in.

“Someone’s 10 years old, and they were raped by their uncle and they understand that they’ve got a baby growing in their stomach and they don’t want that,” explains the doctor in the Kansas case, Dr. Ann Neuhaus. Here, we don’t excommunicate people, we harass them and terrorize them, in some cases, we kill them. Have you seen The Assassination of Dr. Tiller?  Abortion clinic violence wrought by anti-abortion groups is constant and debilitating to those who do this work. In what can only be described as an archaic witch hunt, Kansas revoked Neuhaus’ medical license last year.  They had to take a break from praying that the Violence Against Women Act won’t pass to do it.

When these religious beliefs conspire with political ambition, it’s girls and women who pay the highest price.  Consider the eight men who all voted to block passage of the Violence Against Women Act on Monday. Every woman in the Senate with the exception of Sen. Deb Fisher (R-NE) co-sponsored the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which is now being held up byconcerns  that largely hinge on the color of the people involved in cases of abuse and the color of the authorities with jurisdiction over them.  Which is interesting, because in the case of the young girl who gave birth last week, many people think it’s a “Mexican” problem. Hmm.

“What kind of person would sleep with an 8-year old?” (No one was sleeping.)  The kind that has created what Mia Fontaine recently called, “America’s Incest Problem.”  Fontaine rightfully and cogently suggests how it is possible that our institutional rape tolerances have their roots in family and household rape tolerances.  No one wants to model our government more on an abusive, father-knows-best, privacy of the family, patriarchal unit than conservative Republicans using proxies like “states rights” and “lying bitches.” It’s not a random coincidence that people who obstruct the reauthorization of VAWA are those who object to family planning and women’s abilities to control their own bodies and fates.

Just a little more than a month after Governor Rick Scott of Florida held a lovely party at the Governor’s Mansion celebrating the passage of four new abortion restriction laws in that state (a state dedicated to faith-based abstinence programs), a 14-year old girl stuffed a towel into her own mouth, gave birth in her bathroom, feared her parent’s reaction, strangled her newborn, hid it in a shoe box, was discovered and charged with murder as an adult. She faces life imprisonment. She apparently didn’t know she was pregnant when she went into labor.  Before you laugh and think that’s impossible, one study found that in one out of every 7,225 pregnanciesa woman is in this situation until the moment of birth.  There are many reasons a woman might be in “pregnancy denial.”

As in Mexico, no one knows where the boy or man involved is either. He does not face murder, nor do the parents, teachers, state legislators or others who failed her.  The girl may, like many kids in abstinence-only situations, not even have known how she got pregnant.  Even if she did she may have taken this to heart:  As one abstinence teacher put it in a Texas classroom, “Go ahead and use a condom. You’ll still be known as a slut.”  If her tragic case isn’t a clear enough example of girl hatred, degradation and misogynistic abuse wrought by a system of oppression, I don’t know what is. And she’s white. And in a wealthy country.

For girls and women, the Pope represents an inconvenient morality.

Related articles

• Holy smokes! Goodbye Pope Benedict, but hello to plenty of movie pontiffs (timesunion.com)
• The Pope, Pregnant Children, and Violence Against Girls and Women (my.firedoglake.com)
• What is One Billion Rising? Founder Eve Ensler explains (guardian.co.uk)

Urban Legends vs. The Pill: How the Christian Right Uses Propaganda Against Reproductive Rights

Urban Legends vs. The Pill: How the Christian Right Uses Propaganda Against Reproductive Rights

by Amanda Marcotte

Conservative fundamentalist Christian culture has always had a tradition of showing one face to the outside world and one face to each other, and negotiating how much of the latter can inform the former has always been a complex task. It’s only grown more confusing in the age of the internet. On one hand, the internet makes it very easy for people to create their own media bubble, which means conservative Christians can and often do only consume media made with them specifically in mind. On the other hand, the internet means that it’s easier than ever for outsiders to have access to media materials that are intended for Christian right insiders only, which is the bread and butter for websites such as Right Wing Watch.

The result is becoming a problem for the Christian right. Their insular culture encourages ever more bizarre flights of fancy, competitive demonstrations of misogyny, and making up of their own facts—and then all that is transmitted in a way where outsiders can tune in and expose the inner workings of the Christian right to the outside world. Kevin Swanson of Generations Radio is simply the latest person to fall into the trap of speaking to insiders where outsiders can hear. And outsiders are astounded at what Christian right culture looks like on the inside.

Right Wing Watch has started monitoring Swanson, who used to broadcast in multiple radio stations in Colorado but now prefers to reach out over the internet. They claim to have over a million downloads of their program. And while the official outward face of the Christian right claims to oppose reproductive rights because of “life,” the glimpse that Swanson gives of the internal Christian right culture makes it extremely clear that the objection has much more to do with the belief that women should be uneducated, dependent on men, and servile.

Now Swanson’s show got another round of media coverage for his claim that the birth control pill turns a woman’s uterus into a “graveyard” full of “dead babies”.

I’m beginning to get some evidence from certain doctors and certain scientists that have done research on women’s wombs after they’ve gone through the surgery, and they’ve compared the wombs of women who were on the birth control pill to those who were not on the birth control pill. And they have found that with women who are on the birth control pill, there are these little tiny fetuses, these little babies, that are embedded into the womb. They’re just like dead babies. They’re on the inside of the womb. And these wombs of women who have been on the birth control pill effectively have become graveyards for lots and lots of little babies.

As our own Robin Marty noted, this is the sort of thing that doesn’t really need comment to refute. Still, as she points out, this is ignorance of biology on the level of believing women don’t poop or something: “[E]ven if somehow there were tiny mini babies stuck in your uterus, they would come out when you menstruate since THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT OF MENSTRUATION.” Swanson is married to a bona fide uterus-haver, who, having only had five children, clearly did not spend her entire reproductive life pregnant. Which, in turn, means some kind of menstrual product probably came into his home at some point. So I’m going to go out on a limb and say that I think Swanson isn’t actually ignorant of menstruation and probably not ignorant of the fact that zygotes aren’t actually miniature babies.

That’s because what Swanson is doing here is something that’s very typical to intra-Christian right culture, which using a lurid urban legend as the basis of a political argument. All cultures have urban legends, butthe Christian right does tend to traffic in more lurid and more political ones. (Think: Satanic messages in rock songs.) Fred Clark claims, in fact, that Christian right culture is rife with propagandistic urban legends.

These other kinds of urban legends can’t really be considered fiction — they’re more like simple lies. Such stories are not told in the hopes of eliciting delight, but usually in order to create or to foster a sense of aggrieved victimhood and resentment.

Such stories, in other words, are propaganda. They are about sowing division, heightening the antipathy between groups or factions. They are about creating and enforcing and sustaining tribal conflict.

Swanson is clearly doing this: Telling an urban legend of vague “doctors” and “scientists” finding teeny-weeny “dead babies” in the uteruses of women that they’re opening up for some unknown reason. The anti-choice movement basically lives off these urban legends, telling themselves lurid, propagandistic stories about everything from what’s supposedly going on in abortion clinics to a laundry list of claims of all the ills that will befall you if you defy the patriarchal God’s orders and use contraception. This “dead babies” thing is a classic example of this.

Of course, nowadays a lot of these urban legends are being passed off in the mainstream as if they were the same thing as arguments, instead of weird stories that Christian conservatives tell to titillate each other. The “dead babies” weirdness stems from an equally absurd anti-choice urban legend that claims that the birth control pill and emergency contraception work by “killing” fertilized eggs; in reality, they work by suppressing ovulation. This propagandistic urban legend—or what Fred Clark would call a “simple lie”—is used to make their opposition to female-controlled birth control sound less misogynist than it is. This bit of nonsense has, sadly, become part of the basis for attacks on insurance coverage of contraception, even though it makes about as much sense as arguing that there are teeny-weeny baby skeletons lurking in the uteruses of women who’ve used the birth control pill.

Related articles

• WTF Wednesday: Birth control pills embed dead babies in women’s wombs? (velociriot.org)
• Oh, the things you’ll learn about “Science” from the interwebs! (freethoughtblogs.com)
• Swanson: Wombs Of Women On Birth Control ‘Embedded’ With ‘Tiny Fetuses’ (crooksandliars.com)
• Christian Science: Right-Wing Christian Host Claims “Tiny Dead Babies” Embedded in Women’s Wombs (alternet.org)
• On the Pill? Religious Right Nut-Job Claims Tiny Dead Fetuses Litter Graveyard Wombs! (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
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Why I Raise My Children Without God

Why I Raise My Children Without God

By TXBlue08

 CNN PRODUCER NOTE     TXBlue08, a mother of two teenagers in Texas, blogs about raising her children without religion. She said she shared this essay on CNN iReport because ‘I just felt there is not a voice out there for women/moms like me. I think people misunderstand or are fearful of people who don’t believe in God.’ – dsashin, CNN iReport producer

     When my son was around 3 years old, he used to ask me a lot of questions about heaven. Where is it? How do people walk without a body? How will I find you? You know the questions that kids ask.

For over a year, I lied to him and made up stories that I didn’t believe about heaven. Like most parents, I love my child so much that I didn’t want him to be scared. I wanted him to feel safe and loved and full of hope. But the trade-off was that I would have to make stuff up, and I would have to brainwash him into believing stories that didn’t make sense, stories that I didn’t believe either.

One day he would know this, and he would not trust my judgment. He would know that I built an elaborate tale—not unlike the one we tell children about Santa—to explain the inconsistent and illogical legend of God.

And so I thought it was only right to be honest with my children. I am a non-believer, and for years I’ve been on the fringe in my community. As a blogger, though, I’ve found that there are many other parents out there like me. We are creating the next generation of kids, and there is a wave of young agnostics, atheists, free thinkers and humanists rising up through the ranks who will, hopefully, lower our nation’s religious fever.

Here are a few of the reasons why I am raising my children without God.

God is a bad parent and role model.

If God is our father, then he is not a good parent. Good parents don’t allow their children to inflict harm on others. Good people don’t stand by and watch horrible acts committed against innocent men, women and children. They don’t condone violence and abuse. “He has given us free will,” you say? Our children have free will, but we still step in and guide them.

God is not logical.

How many times have you heard, “Why did God allow this to happen?” And this: “It’s not for us to understand.” Translate: We don’t understand, so we will not think about it or deal with the issue. Take for example the senseless tragedy in Newtown. Rather than address the problem of guns in America, we defer responsibility to God. He had a reason. He wanted more angels. Only he knows why. We write poems saying that we told God to leave our schools. Now he’s making us pay the price. If there is a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who loves his children, does it make sense that he would allow murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind? Doesn’t this go against everything Christ taught us in the New Testament?

The question we should be asking is this: “Why did we allow this to happen?” How can we fix this? No imaginary person is going to give us the answers or tell us why. Only we have the ability to be logical and to problem solve, and we should not abdicate these responsibilities to “God” just because a topic is tough or uncomfortable to address.

God is not fair.

If God is fair, then why does he answer the silly prayers of some while allowing other, serious requests, to go unanswered? I have known people who pray that they can find money to buy new furniture. (Answered.) I have known people who pray to God to help them win a soccer match. (Answered.) Why are the prayers of parents with dying children not answered?

If God is fair, then why are some babies born with heart defects, autism, missing limbs or conjoined to another baby? Clearly, all men are not created equally. Why is a good man beaten senseless on the street while an evil man finds great wealth taking advantage of others? This is not fair. A game maker who allows luck to rule mankind’s existence has not created a fair game.

God does not protect the innocent.

He does not keep our children safe. As a society, we stand up and speak for those who cannot. We protect our little ones as much as possible. When a child is kidnapped, we work together to find the child. We do not tolerate abuse and neglect. Why can’t God, with all his powers of omnipotence, protect the innocent?

God is not present.

He is not here. Telling our children to love a person they cannot see, smell, touch or hear does not make sense. It means that we teach children to love an image, an image that lives only in their imaginations. What we teach them, in effect, is to love an idea that we have created, one that is based in our fears and our hopes.

God Does Not Teach Children to Be Good

A child should make moral choices for the right reasons. Telling him that he must behave because God is watching means that his morality will be externally focused rather than internally structured. It’s like telling a child to behave or Santa won’t bring presents. When we take God out of the picture, we place responsibility of doing the right thing onto the shoulders of our children. No, they won’t go to heaven or rule their own planets when they die, but they can sleep better at night. They will make their family proud. They will feel better about who they are. They will be decent people.

God Teaches Narcissism

“God has a plan for you.” Telling kids there is a big guy in the sky who has a special path for them makes children narcissistic; it makes them think the world is at their disposal and that, no matter what happens, it doesn’t really matter because God is in control. That gives kids a sense of false security and creates selfishness. “No matter what I do, God loves me and forgives me. He knows my purpose. I am special.” The irony is that, while we tell this story to our kids, other children are abused and murdered, starved and neglected. All part of God’s plan, right?

When we raise kids without God, we tell them the truth—we are no more special than the next creature. We are just a very, very small part of a big, big machine–whether that machine is nature or society–the influence we have is minuscule. The realization of our insignificance gives us a true sense of humbleness.

I understand why people need God. I understand why people need heaven. It is terrifying to think that we are all alone in this universe, that one day we—along with the children we love so much—will cease to exist. The idea of God and an afterlife gives many of us structure, community and hope.

I do not want religion to go away. I only want religion to be kept at home or in church where it belongs. It’s a personal effect, like a toothbrush or a pair of shoes. It’s not something to be used or worn by strangers. I want my children to be free not to believe and to know that our schools and our government will make decisions based on what is logical, just and fair—not on what they believe an imaginary God wants.

Related articles

• Why I Raise My Kids Without God (kidswithoutreligion.wordpress.com)
• iReport: Why I Raise My Children Without God (religion.blogs.cnn.com)
• Why I Raise My Children Without God (richarddawkins.net)
• Why I Raise My Children Without God (ireport.cnn.com)
• Gods Swallow Our Humanity (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)

It’s Irrational To Be Religious

Jared Diamond: It’s irrational to be religious

Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they’re so emotionally satisfying

BY JARED DIAMOND

(Credit: Reuters/Enny Nuraheni)

Excerpted from “The World Until Yesterday”

Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.

No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?

One suggested answer is that supernatural religious beliefs are just ignorant superstitions similar to supernatural non-religious beliefs, illustrating only that the human brain is capable of deceiving itself into believing anything. We can all think of supernatural non-religious beliefs whose implausibility should be obvious. Many Europeans believe that the sight of a black cat heralds misfortune, but black cats are actually rather common. By repeatedly tallying whether or not a one-hour period following or not following your observation of a black cat in an area with high cat density did or did not bring you some specified level of misfortune, and by applying the statistician’s chi-square test, you can quickly convince yourself that the black-cat hypothesis has a probability of less than 1 out of 1,000 of being true. Some groups of New Guinea lowlanders believe that hearing the beautiful whistled song of the little bird known as the Lowland Mouse-Babbler warns us that someone has recently died, but this bird is among the most common species and most frequent singers in New Guinea lowland forests. If the belief about it were true, the local human population would be dead within a few days, yet my New Guinea friends are as convinced of the babbler’s ill omens as Europeans are afraid of black cats.

A more striking non-religious superstition, because people today still invest money in their mistaken belief, is water-witching, also variously known as dowsing, divining, or rhabdomancy. Already established in Europe over 400 years ago and possibly also reported before the time of Christ, this belief maintains that rotation of a forked twig carried by a practitioner called a dowser, walking over terrain whose owner wants to know where to dig a well, indicates the location and sometimes the depth of an invisible underground water supply. Control tests show that dowsers’ success at locating underground water is no better than random, but many land-owners in areas where geologists also have difficulty at predicting the location of underground water nevertheless pay dowsers for their search, then spend even more money to dig a well unlikely to yield water. The psychology behind such beliefs is that we remember the hits and forget the misses, so that whatever superstitious beliefs we hold become confirmed by even the flimsiest of evidence through the remembered hits. Such anecdotal thinking comes naturally; controlled experiments and scientific methods to distinguish between random and non-random phenomena are counterintuitive and unnatural, and thus not found in traditional societies.

Perhaps, then, religious superstitions are just further evidence of human fallibility, like belief in black cats and other non-religious superstitions. But it’s suspicious that costly commitments to belief in implausible-to-others religious superstitions are such a consistent feature of religions. The investments that many religious adherents make to their beliefs are far more burdensome, time-consuming, and heavy in consequences to them than are the actions of black-cat-phobics in occasionally avoiding black cats. This suggests that religious superstitions aren’t just an accidental by-product of human reasoning powers but possess some deeper meaning. What might that be?

A recent interpretation among some scholars of religion is that belief in religious superstitions serves to display one’s commitment to one’s religion. All long-lasting human groups — Boston Red Sox fans (like me), devoted Catholics, patriotic Japanese, and others — face the same basic problem of identifying who can be trusted to remain as a group member. The more of one’s life is wrapped up with one’s group, the more crucial it is to be able to identify group members correctly and not to be deceived by someone who seeks temporary advantage by claiming to share your ideals but who really doesn’t. If that man carrying a Boston Red Sox banner, whom you had accepted as a fellow Red Sox fan, suddenly cheers when the New York Yankees hit a home run, you’ll find it humiliating but not life-threatening. But if he’s a soldier next to you in the front line and he drops his gun (or turns it on you) when the enemy attacks, your misreading of him may cost you your life.

That’s why religious affiliation involves so many overt displays to demonstrate the sincerity of your commitment: sacrifices of time and resources, enduring of hardships, and other costly displays that I’ll discuss later. One such display might be to espouse some irrational belief that contradicts the evidence of our senses, and that people outside our religion would never believe. If you claim that the founder of your church had been conceived by normal sexual intercourse between his mother and father, anyone else would believe that too, and you’ve done nothing to demonstrate your commitment to your church. But if you insist, despite all evidence to the contrary, that he was born of a virgin birth, and nobody has been able to shake you of that irrational belief after many decades of your life, then your fellow believers will feel much more confident that you’ll persist in your belief and can be trusted not to abandon your group.

Nevertheless, it’s not the case that there are no limits to what can be accepted as a religious supernatural belief. Scott Atran and Pascal Boyer have independently pointed out that actual religious superstitions over the whole world constitute a narrow subset of all the arbitrary random superstitions that one could theoretically invent. To quote Pascal Boyer, there is no religion proclaiming anything like the following tenet: “There is only one God! He is omnipotent. But he exists only on Wednesdays.” Instead, the religious supernatural beings in which we believe are surprisingly similar to humans, animals, or other natural objects, except for having superior powers. They are more far-sighted, longer-lived, and stronger, travel faster, can predict the future, can change shape, can pass through walls, and so on. In other respects, gods and ghosts behave like people. The god of the Old Testament got angry, while Greek gods and goddesses became jealous, ate, drank, and had sex. Their powers surpassing human powers are projections of our own personal power fantasies; they can do what we wish we could do ourselves. I do have fantasies of hurling thunderbolts that destroy evil people, and probably many other people share those fantasies of mine, but I have never fantasized about existing only on Wednesdays. Hence it doesn’t surprise me that gods in many religions are pictured as smiting evil-doers, but that no religion holds out the dream of existing just on Wednesdays. Thus, religious supernatural beliefs are irrational, but emotionally plausible and satisfying. That’s why they’re so believable, despite at the same time being rationally implausible.

Printed by arrangement with Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. from “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies?”by Jared Diamond. Copyright © Jared Diamond, 2012.

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• 20 Percent of Americans Don’t Believe in God – So Why is Our Congress So Religious? (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
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Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious

Why Atheists Are More Intelligent Than the Religious

Humans are designed by evolution to believe in God

Published by Satoshi Kanazawa

It is natural to believe in God, so more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheists.

Religion is a cultural universal, and its practice is observed in every known human society.  However, as I explain in earlier posts (Why do we believe in God?  Part I, Part II), recent evolutionary psychological theories suggest that religiosity may not be an adaptation in itself but may be a byproduct of other evolved psychological mechanisms variously called the “animistic bias” or the “agency-detector mechanisms.”

These theories contend that the human brain has been selected to overinfer agency – personal, animate, and intentional forces – behind otherwise natural phenomena whose exact causes cannot be known.  This is because overinferring agency – and making a Type I error of false positive – makes you a bit paranoid, but being paranoid is often conducive to survival.  In contrast, underinferring agency – and making a Type II error of false negative – can result in being killed and maimed by predators and enemies that were incorrectly assumed not to exist.  So, evolutionarily speaking, it’s good to be a bit paranoid, because being paranoid can often save your life.  Religiosity – belief in higher powers – may be a byproduct of such overinference of agency and intentional forces behind natural phenomena.

If these theories are correct, then it means that religiosity – belief in higher powers – may have an evolutionary origin.  It is evolutionarily familiar and natural to believe in God, and evolutionarily novel not to be religious.  Consistent with this reasoning, out of more than 1,500 distinct cultures throughout the world documented in The Encyclopedia of World Cultures, only 19 contain any reference to atheism.  Not only do these 19 cultures exist far outside of our ancestral home in the African savanna, but all 19 of them without an exception are former Communist societies.  There are no non-former-Communist cultures described in The Encyclopedia as containing any significant segment of atheists.  Nor is there any reference to any individuals who do not subscribe to the local religion in any of the ethnographies of traditional societies.

It may therefore be reasonable to conclude that atheism may not be part of the universal human nature, and widespread practice of atheism may have been a recent product of Communism in the 20th century.  So belief in higher powers is evolutionarily familiar and natural, and atheism is evolutionarily novel.  The Hypothesis would therefore predict that more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheist than less intelligent individuals.

Once again, analyses of large representative samples from both the United States and the United Kingdom support this prediction of the Hypothesis.  Net of a large number of social and demographic factors, including education, more intelligent individuals are more likely to be atheistic than less intelligent individuals.  For example, among the American sample, those who identify themselves as “not at all religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 103.09, whereas those who identify themselves as “very religious” in early adulthood have a mean childhood IQ of 97.14.

Even though past studies have shown that women are more religious than men, the analyses show that the effect of childhood intelligence on adult religiosity is twice as large as that of sex.  Remarkably, childhood intelligence has a significant and large effect on adult religiosity even when religion itself is statistically controlled for.  So it appears that more intelligent children are more likely to grow up to be atheists than less intelligent individuals, and the Hypothesis provides one explanation as to why.

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• Jimmy Kimmel Doesn’t Get Atheism (patheos.com)
• Calm Atheist Versus Crazy, Shrieking Catholic Theist Harpy (theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com)
• Susan Jacoby on the ‘Blessings of Atheism’ (patheos.com)
• My take: ‘Atheist’ isn’t a dirty word, congresswoman (religion.blogs.cnn.com)

We Are All Killers

We Are All Killers

Posted by thephotosophy

So desperately is modern, civilized man trying to conceal the fact that killing is an everyday occurrence. Without intentional, purpose-driven and rationalized everyday killing of living beings, there would be no life as we know it – at least in some domains. We kill for food, but we also kill for fun. What is hunting than killing for fun? Some may call it a sport, or justify it by other means (animal control), but it essentially is nothing more than organized and intentional killing.

Killing for food is not much different. Here the western culture vigorously tries to escape from the awareness that food processing in most cases involves a systematic slaughter of fellow creatures. Food commercials and related depictions of food processing may try to embellish the reality by diverting the perception toward end products devoid of their bloody past, but preparation of meat for consumption is in reality a ruthless bloodbath where compassion retreats in the face of mechanized rationality.

Why is the modern western human so afraid of coming to terms with the (presumably) justified killing that engulfs its culture? Why does he refrain to look in the mirror while slaughtering a pig to make sausages? What is so disturbing in a bloody image of a butcher, with an axe dripping blood from a recently slaughtered creature?

Might he be not simply disgusted of blood – which he enjoys as food – as much as afraid of compassion that could spring from realizing that so many creatures are being sacrificed for his pleasure and comfort? Might he simply be frightened by the possibility of frailty – because compassion is frailty, unlike cold, rationalized and purposeful homo faber that screams confidence, control and productivity?

Not all modern human is like that. Walk into a Chinese fish store and they will let you pick a lobster (or a trout) to smash with a hammer and wrap up for your pleasure. Walk into a Balkan meat store and you will see skinned young lambs hanging on the walls, blood dripping from their mouths, awaiting your pick of their most delicious body part. These guys don’t seem afraid to accept the reality of death, inflicted by their bloody hands on creatures of the world – sacrificial victims of our habits and tastes. But, where is the compassion? Does the fearless butcher who slaughters while winking to his image in the mirror have compassion for the victim?

Enchanted with the exoticism of non-rationalized human, many would think so. But, compassion for the killing we do for food or animal control is not to be looked for in the non- or pre-rationalized cultures, where mass production has not yet replaced the living experience of ending a creature’s life. It can only come from the future, from the enlightened understanding that rationality is just another step in the perfection of human conduct, on the everlasting path of our coming to terms with meaningless and arbitrary existence

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Gay Scientists Isolate Christian Gene!

Gay scientists isolate gene for Christianity

We may soon have the tools to treat this condition that seems to inexplicably make some people Christians!

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Christian Horse-Fondling School “Cures” Your Gayness

You Are Not Gay Anymore, Thanks To Horse-Fondling  School

Posted by Evan  Hurst

When  you were born, there was always something different about you. When you were  little, you were interested in “girl things” like Barbie Dolls and learning.  When you were in high school and all the other boys were doing splashy-splashy in the pool with the girls, you were staying  in the water getting a boner of anticipation every time one of the guys hopped  out, just praying they’d forget to un-cling their swim trunks from their  glistening wet bodies for just a minute longer, because you were A Budding Gay.  You were upset about this because Religious Indoctrination, but that’s okay  because something came along and changed your life forever!

Yes, one day, after finding evidence of your secret gayness, your mom took  you to the Cowboy Church Of Virginia, where they taught you to relieve  yourself of wretched, wretched homosexuality by just straight up fondling some  horses:

An American church is promising gay men they will be cured of their  homosexuality if they stroke horses.

The Cowboy Church of Virginia, led by chief pastor Raymond Bell, believes  homosexuality and other ‘addictions’ can be cured by Equine Assisted  Psychotherapy.

Horse therapy, in the right hands, can be used to help overcome fears,  develop communication skills, and is generally beneficial to mental health.

But Bell says the horses in his church, a cowboy ranch in the  south,

As opposed to the horses in LIBERAL CHURCHES…

are part of teaching men to stop being gay and encourage them to be more  masculine.

[…]

Bell said he uses EAP to identify how a person got ‘involved’ in  homosexuality to begin with. For example, because of rape, abandonment, lacking  a male role model, abuse, and having low self-esteem.

Show me on the horse where you’d like Jesus to touch you.

Wayne Besen of the good old Truth Wins Out (where your Wonkette used to work  for, like, actual employment!) coined the phrase “pray away the gay” back in the  day, and is now having to add “neigh away the gay” to his toolbox of  phrases, which reminds us of a story we told a few weeks back about a Floridian man and his  love relationship with a mini-donkey named “Doodle.”

Unfortunately, the proper methods for using horse-fondling to relieve  yourself of gayness are not provided, so please don’t try this with your own  personal horse. You can’t just walk out in the pasture and pocket-rocket to  third base with the first whinnying love machine you see. For one thing, you  will get bitten or stomped on. No, this requires the work of licensed  professional heterosexual romance therapy horses, and the men of God who offer  them up for gay men to jerk them off or whatever, I don’t understand how Jesus  therapy works.

But anyway, that is the story of why you are not gay anymore, and also why  you spend so much time in your barn  after midnight, softly moaning to the sounds of pitter-pattering horseshoes and  Isaac Hayes on vinyl sexing your wife, in the vagina. [Gay Star News/Truth Wins Out]

Sandy Hook Shootings: Who Are We Supposed to Be Mad At?

Sandy Hook Shootings: Who Are We Supposed to Be Mad At?

Posted by Tracy Moore

Reading the responses across the Internet to the horrific Connecticut elementary school massacre, which as of this writing, has led to the deaths of 27 people, 18 of whom are children, and it’s clear that we, as a nation, are not exactly sure who we should be mad at. Hollywood? Washington? Fox News? The NRA? The schools? Angry white men? The lack of mental healthcare access? All of the above? Because just being mad at the disturbed man who did it doesn’t feel like enough. That leaves us as powerless bystanders in an increasingly familiar nightmare.

As the details pour out, it feels like déjà vu: The young, angry white man, the innocent children, the terror, the powerlessness and frenzy the parents feel, the mental block and deep, deep sadness of all the rest of us trying to process unimaginable horror. And then, the desperate pleas from average citizens to stop making this such a terribly easy crime to commit.

A few randomly plucked comments from this New York Times initial report on the massacre give you an idea of the general feeling:

Suspend the constitution, conduct door-to-door searches of EVERY private residence in the United States and confiscate ALL guns – YES, rifles too!

And then melt them ALL down.

We need to restrict movies, TV, and video games that glorify violence.

Do any of you honestly believe that there could have been anything done by this sleepy, little Connecticut town to prevent something like this from ever happening? 

Connecticut is already among the top five states with the most strict gun control laws, among the lowest for gun crime, and yet something like this still happened. The fact is that the man was a killer and if someone ever crosses a threshold to kill on a scale as this man had, then they would find a way to do it.

First the horror, then the compassion for the victims, the families.
Then the rage against a people for whom having and using guns is a national pastime.
How many senseless killings will it takes for the nation to awaken and revolt against the barbaric NRA type neanderthals running amok in the streets of America.

Every incidence of a shooting in a public place makes me more and more frustrated that we can’t have a serious political discussion about guns.

I feel such sadness for the children and their families, yet this is overridden by my anger at the NRA.

It’s really sad that it’s easier for a crazy person to buy a gun than it is to get proper mental healthcare.

What is the tipping point? When will Americans love their children more than they love their guns? How much more? How many more?

Everyone is right to one degree or another. But the answers to those questions, are, of course by now, 31 school shootings later, quite familiar: We are not supposed to talk about policies, but people, pundits and politicians remind us. We are not supposed to blame access to guns, but rather, the unstable individuals who purchase them for harm. We are not supposed to be mad at Hollywood, but rather, the people who cannot tell the difference between real life and the glamorized fantasy portrayed on screen. And we are not supposed to blame those angry, unstable young men, but rather, a mental healthcare system that failed them.

The problem is, none of that gets us any closer to an action to take, a plan to implement. Doing nothing is no longer an option, a frustration now part and parcel of the coverage of these events.

If we simply accept this kind of violence as the new normal, then what? Schools are more than just a vulnerable population of innocents — they are, for some people, symbols of their earliest exposure to the cruelty of fellow humans, badges for their failures, some of their first experiences with alienation, marginalization and the judgment of others.

For the mentally unstable, that symbol has proven to be a particularly irresistible outlet for revenge fantasies. Isn’t it time we regarded schools as the same vulnerable target as airplanes? Why are they not among our nation’s top-guarded entities? Because we simply cannot accept that they are no longer innocent places?

If we will not implement gun control, and will not make mental health a universal, destigmatized resource, then the least we can do is protect the most obvious targets of the mentally unstable people who commit these crimes. Because otherwise, our only choice is to become as jaded to this terrorism as we have to every other “unsolvable” issue in this country, i.e., issue at which we have reached another political, partisan impasse: homelessness, poverty, immigration, sexism, racism. Remember? There was a time all those things floored us too, when all those things seemed like unspeakable horrors. And their continued presence in our every day lives is the price we pay for our complacency.

Related articles

• For Sandy Hook’s sake: learning from the tragedy of Newtown | Michael Williams (guardian.co.uk)
• How Will NRA Explain Away Gun Shooting At Elementary School In Newtown, Connecticut? (dekerivers.wordpress.com)
• In the Shadow of Sandy Hook, a Pro-Gun Organization Keeps Silent (nation.time.com)
• NRA Under Twitter, Facebook Attack After Newtown Shootings (huffingtonpost.com)
• In the Shadow of Sandy Hook, a Powerful Pro-Gun Organization Keeps Silent (nation.time.com)
• Regarding Sandy Hook… (therealkenjones.wordpress.com)
• Is a Crisis in White Masculinity Leading to Horrific Gun Crimes Like the Sandy Hook Shootings? (alternet.org)
• Mike Huckabee Blames Sandy Hook Shooting On Absence of God in Schools (atlantablackstar.com)
• School killer’s mom made irresponsible, and fatal, mistake (star-telegram.com)

Gun Control: Don’t Fall for the ‘Mental Health’ Diversion

Gun Control: Don’t Fall for the ‘Mental Health’ Diversion

Mental illness is not a significant factor in gun crime

Posted by Charles Johnson

Take a look around the right wing blogs and news sites, and watch Fox News, and you may notice that there are suddenly a lot of conservatives arguing that the real problem that leads to gun violence is mental illness — and that the solution is “better mental health care.”

While it’s true that the US does need better mental health care, your first clue that this is a dishonest diversionary tactic instead of a real argument is that the right wingers parroting it are the very same people normally vehemently opposed to any and all government involvement in health care.

There’s a reason why so many right wingers are using the “mental health” excuse – to distract attention away from the real problem: there are more than 290 MILLION guns in America, almost one for every single man, woman, and child. The right is so in love with gun culture that they’ll even make dishonest arguments that contradict their own values, to pull attention away from this issue.

There is no real evidence that mentally ill people are more likely to commit gun crimes. Columbia University psychiatrist Paul Appelbaum has found that less than 3-5% of American crimes are perpetrated by mentally ill people, and for crimes involving guns the percentages are even lower.

In fact, the mentally ill are far more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators: Focus on Mental Illness in Gun Debate Is Misleading.

Research by John Brekke and Cathy Prindle at the University of Southern California shows that individuals with schizophrenia are more likely to be assaulted by others than to commit violent crimes themselves, Metzl said.

By blaming people who have mental disorders for violent crime, the threats posed to society by a much larger population – the sane – are overlooked.”The focus on so-called mentally ill crime obfuscates awareness of a far more important set of risk predictors of gun violence: substance abuse and past history of violence,” said Metzl, a professor of psychiatry and sociology. “By blaming people who have mental disorders for violent crime, the threats posed to society by a much larger population – the sane – are overlooked.”

One possible explanation for the tendency to blame mental illness for violent crimes is the fact that the debate around gun control has become so politicized that bringing up mental illness is one of the few ways to even talk about the issue, Metzl said.

For the right, this has become a way to confuse and obfuscate the issue, in order to hang on to their precious, precious guns.

Related articles

• Redefining Mental Illness (time.com)
• “Curiously, during the period before deinstitutionalization, the mentally ill seem to have been less likely to be arrested for serious crimes than the general population.” (althouse.blogspot.com)

Schizophrenia | The Disease of the Christian Mind

Schizophrenia: The Disease of the Christian Mind?

Posted by Fed Up American

People diagnosed with schizophrenia suffer from problems with their thought processes. These lead to hallucinations, delusions, disordered thinking, and unusual speech or behavior. Symptoms affect the ability to interact with others, and often people with schizophrenia withdraw from the outside world.

Q. What’s the difference between a Christian and a schizophrenic?

A. One person hears voices and is convinced their thoughts and actions are known to some outside power.

They think the world was designed and created for them and that they are central to everything that goes on and they are sure they are part of a special divine mission.

They believe that ordinary everyday events have some special transcendent meaning visible only to them, sometimes speaking in babbling incoherent voices, and they believe supernatural forces are at work to influence their actions.

And the other one, of course, is a schizophrenic.

The Bible is filled with reports of people hearing voices and seeing visions. In the pre-psychiatric world that Jesus allegedly walked upon, these “miracles” were attributed to their God. Combine a superstitious person, which most of the day were, with a psychiatric disorder as serious as schizophrenia and you have a very volatile and dangerous situation.

A dangerous situation that has morphed itself into a monster centuries later. The Christian of the modern day, especially the devout Christian that believes that the voices and visions mentioned in the Bible are real, have accepted the schizophrenia and superstitions of the people of Jesus era.

They even go as far as to sing praises to this fairy tale God of theirs, with arms raised and vacant, glassy stares to the heavens, believing that there is a magical, mystical being that is looking down, approvingly at them.

There is a very big problem with Christian delusions accompanied by auditory and visual hallucinations. They live in a world of make believe that is responsible for centuries of fear, guilt, death and destruction of families. Christian atrocities throughout history include the crusades, the Salem witch trials and various episodes of torture all in the name of the Christian God and mass hallucinations and religious belief.

Politicians have been heavily influenced in basing their legislative decisions, ignoring the separation of church and state, on their religious beliefs and insurance companies have been using the “act of God” clause to get out of paying claims. People have been accepting these things for centuries and need to finally wake up and face reality.

Schizophrenia is a lifelong illness and will require medication for the rest of the patient’s life. They find comfort in church services and fellow Christians that share their same hallucinations and delusions, by their beliefs in things that can never be proven as real. This is a problem because they will revolve their entire lives around a make believe story. They will even go as far as believing that they are superior compared to a non-believer because they feel as though they are chosen or more enlightened.

Schizophrenia is a treatable mental illness and will undoubtedly get worse the longer it goes untreated. Trying to convince a Christian that they are suffering the symptoms is the problem. They don’t believe that they are sick and need medical treatment.

Look at it this way. Let’s suppose that I came to you one day and said that I was enlightened last night by an angel that told me that I will have “life everlasting” by simply believing so. The only condition is that I must always believe, even when evidence points to the contrary, or I will lose my life everlasting “gift.” The belief would be that I discovered that a story of Humpty Dumpty, complete with all the kings’ horses and all the kings’ men, was based on real accounts of a story by Mother Goose. I found these stories to be as real as the story Mother Mary and will not be told anything to the contrary.

Would you not find me as being a mental case?

Related articles

• Seeing Things? Hearing Things? Many of Us Do (nytimes.com)
• Work and the Mentally Ill : An All Too Common Problem (bipolarlessons.com)
• Coping With Schizophrenic Hallucinations and Delusions (everydayhealth.com)
• Could poor sleep contribute to symptoms of schizophrenia? (scienceblog.com)
• Cannabis Use May Lead To Schizophrenia (medicalnewstoday.com)

Everything You Wanted to Know About Male Supremacy and Were Too Oppressed to Ask

Everything you wanted to know about male supremacy and were too oppressed to ask

Why did ancient cultures only ban homosexuality among men and see abortion as a crime against males? Dr. Zvi Triger examines how ancient laws and social norms have promoted patriarchy.

By Avner Shapira

Illustation by Yael Bogen

Zvi Triger, whose lectures are aired on Army Radio. Photo by Tali Meyer

The terms “gender” and “homosexuality” had not been invented in the 11th century, but even back then the Persian ruler and poet Keikavus already knew what “real men” needed. In his book “Qabus nama,” he recommended that his fellow men not restrict themselves to sexual intercourse with only one of the sexes. Instead, he maintained that they should feel free to conduct relations with women or adolescent boys, according to the seasons. Keikavus explained that because women’s bodies are cool it was better to sleep with them in the summertime, as that would help cool the man’s body. On the other hand, sleeping with boys was recommended in wintertime because their warm bodies would also warm the man making love to them.

Literary scholar Dr. Zvi Triger recounts these pseudo-medical recommendations in the course “Crimes against patriarchy: adultery, abortions and homosexuality from antiquity to today,” which he is currently teaching on Army Radio’s “University on the Air” show on Mondays at 8:30 P.M. The lectures will also come out in book form next year, in the “University on the Air” series published (in Hebrew ) by Modan.

Triger sees expression of a phenomenon that recurs in quite a few ancient cultures in Keikavus’ text: Just as in ancient Greece, there is no sweeping prohibition of sexual relations between men in the “Qabus nama.” Still, the apparently accepted norm is that an adult male is entitled to sleep with women and adolescent boys, but not with other adult males.

“On the face of it, Keikavus’ words express sexual fluidity and a great deal of openness,” Triger says, during a conversation in Tel Aviv. “But, in actuality, we see that patriarchal values are reflected in them, in the manner of representation of the woman’s body and of the adolescent boy’s. The advice is being given to an adult male … It is a wholly masculine point of view, and there are no parallel recommendations for a woman about when and with whom she ought to sleep.”

In his talks, the scholar presents the diverse ways in which laws and social norms have served the male heterosexual position throughout history. He examines the attitude toward sex and sexuality in antiquity, and explains why certain actions – such as adultery and abortion – were primarily forbidden, whereas others – such as homosexual relations – were banned only for men.

The birth of the horns

According to Triger, for the purpose of preserving its existence, the patriarchal social order, under which certain men dominate women and other men, had to define “gendered crimes.” In other words, crimes that apply only to one sex, and as such should be viewed as crimes against the patriarchy. The lecturer provides plenty of examples from ancient Greece, Rome and other countries and eras, and also underscores the way adultery, abortion and homosexuality are treated in Hebrew law, as well as in contemporary Israeli law. Additionally, Triger analyzes the punitive measures against those who committed these offenses in the light of feminist and queer theory.

Triger, 40, is vice dean of the Haim Striks School of Law at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon Letzion, and also teaches law at Tel Aviv University; his specialties are family law, contract law and the interface between law and culture. Along with his work as a jurist, he has published a novel, “In Case of Emergency” (Hargol Publishing, 2005 ). He also cowrote (with Haaretz writer Amalia Rosenblum ) the book “Speechless – How Contemporary Israeli Culture is Reflected in Language” (Dvir, 2007 ).

In one of the first lectures in his radio course (which Dr. Hagai Boas edits ), Triger relates that in 711 C.E., a new legal procedure was enacted vis-a-vis incidents of adultery in the Byzantine Empire. Until then, it had been permissible for a man to kill his wife in the event that she had cheated on him, as well as the man with whom she had committed adultery. However, Emperor Justinian II then enacted new laws: From now on, a husband who killed a man for engaging in intercourse with his wife on a single occasion would be put on trial for murder and did not have immunity from prosecution, as had been the custom.

“Under the new laws of Justinian,” Triger explains, “the cuckolded husband had to send his wife’s lover three warning letters demanding that he stop seeing her. Only afterward, if the lover had not obeyed the letters, could he kill him and enjoy immunity from prosecution. This dictate aroused the scorn of the legal sages, who composed a parody of a letter in which a husband with the generic name Martinus Cornelius (playing on the Latin word cornutus – having horns ) urges his wife’s lover to stop seeing her. This humorous letter is the source of the expression ‘made him grow horns,’ which refers to an adulterous wife who has publicly humiliated her husband.”

Throughout history, social attitudes toward adultery reflected fear of female sexuality, Triger continues: “Originally [adultery] was an offense within the family unit, in which the father asserted his authority over his daughters and wives in an attempt to supervise their sexuality. In the ancient world, women were always perceived as suspects; as naive and therefore vulnerable to seduction; and mainly as irrational creatures who could not be relied upon. When adultery became a crime, this apparently expressed an attempt by the governing regime to weaken the family institution [because it took the supervision out of the father’s hands].”

The unyielding attitude toward both the adulterous wife and the man with whom she cheated did not disappear. Indeed, it still resonates in the Israeli criminal justice system. Triger points out that the current penal code contains the “provocation defense,” which allows a murderer’s guilt to be diminished, and his crime commuted from murder to manslaughter if there was some provocation that led him to act as he did.

“Actually, the origin of this offense is in Roman law, which was understanding in cases when a husband catches his wife ‘red-handed’ in the arms of another man and kills them both on the spot,” the scholar explains.

“In Israel, a well-known Supreme Court verdict from the 1990s – the [Maurice] Azuelos case – was lenient on a man who had murdered his wife and a neighbor, whom he suspected of being his wife’s lover. Justice Aharon Barak ruled at the time that, ‘the blood of the average Israeli [male] and average Israeli [female] might boil, when they see the female spouse or male spouse cheating.’ Even though Barak’s wording is gender-neutral, historically the ‘provocation defense’ was tailor-made for men, and experience shows that women generally do not murder husbands who have cheated in similar cases.”

Moreover, because of the Orthodox monopoly on domestic relations in Israeli law, a woman cannot marry a man with whom she had committed adultery prior to her divorce. Adultery can also lead to loss of child-support payments to the ex-wife and of the sum the husband undertook to pay her in the ketubah. And if a married woman becomes pregnant from a man who is not her husband, her children will be designated bastards.

“All these restrictions are imposed only on women,” Triger emphasizes. “A married man who has cheated on his wife and ‘made her grow horns’ will not suffer from them.”

A national womb

As with adultery, abortion was always historically deemed an offense, the punishment for which reflected man’s control over a woman’s body. In contrast to Christian thinking – which completely banned abortion and viewed it as killing the living being developing in a woman’s womb – in ancient Greece and Rome, abortion itself was not considered an offense: The rights of the fetus were not an issue there, rather the rights of the father. If the husband of the woman seeking to abort her fetus agreed to it, the abortion was legal.

Triger: “The most important thing was the consent of the man from whose seed the child was conceived, since the wife was perceived as someone who merely warmed the seed in her womb and enabled it to develop. She had no rights over the fetus, no right to decide about an abortion.

“If she had the abortion done on her own, she violated the husband’s ownership. The wife and her womb were his property. Even when a forbidden abortion was performed, the punishment was imposed on the person who carried it out (for example, whoever gave the wife a drug or potion meant to cause a miscarriage ) and not on the woman in whose body it was performed.”

He adds that in view of the birthrate crisis in ancient Rome, the campaign against abortion was designed, among other things, to compel men to get married. The laws banning abortion were also related to a demographic issue: the state’s interest in the birth of boys, who would become soldiers and fight in its service. This phenomenon, which viewed a woman’s womb as a “national womb,” recurred in modern regimes as well: In fascist Italy, abortion was deemed a “crime against the race.”

There are still people today who wish to deprive a woman of the right to decide about her own body, as evident in the widespread debate over abortion in the United States, where the issue is a highly sensitive political matter. In October the issue also made headlines in Israel, in the wake of the tragic death of teenager Raz Atias. He was shot dead by police after he threatened to kill his pregnant girlfriend and then commit suicide. The boy’s family claims the girl decided not to get an abortion after activists for the Efrat organization allegedly pressured her against it. The group, which works to encourage the Jewish birthrate, offers aid to women who are contemplating having an abortion, and tries to persuade them to change their minds.

Triger believes that, “similarly to the activity of the evangelical right in the United States, the activity of Efrat and other entities in Israel is sustained by the presumption that a woman is not mistress of her own body and that she absolutely must not have an abortion. In the case of Israel, there is the added demographic aspect – in other words, the perception that women must be encouraged to use their wombs to give birth to Jewish children as part of the demographic battle against the Arabs.”

In his lectures, Triger also discusses a so-called offense that relates only to men: homosexuality, and describes the incarnations of “the love that dare not speak its name,” as it was expressed in Greece and Rome, and Hebrew law. He also explains why homosexual relations were in some societies severely looked down upon, whereas lesbian relations were not generally perceived to be a serious threat per se.

Triger contends that the historic reason why sexual relations between members of the same sex were perceived as an offense that only men can commit stems from the patriarchal concept, according to which it is appropriate to punish a man who allows another man to treat him as one treats a woman – i.e., a man who waives the privileges granted to him by the power of his being a man and thus “degrades” himself.

“Inherent in this is potential that threatens the patriarchal order, which is based on a strict division between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ roles, and on the supremacy of the ‘masculine’ roles,” Triger says.

In his opinion, one of the aspects that the three phenomena he discusses have in common is the violation of male honor: “A married woman who sleeps with a man who is not her husband, and also that same man with whom she sleeps – both violate the husband’s honor, because they disrupt his dominion over his family; a married woman who has an abortion likewise violates her husband’s honor, because she aborts a fetus that does not belong to her but rather was merely placed in her care by the husband; and a man who has sex with another man violates male honor in general, by his sheer waiving of ‘manly’ conduct.”

Alongside this, Triger stresses that the attitude toward the three offenses entails a silencing of the female voice and a near-sweeping neglect of women’s needs and wishes, which are viewed as inferior in the social hierarchy.

American claims

In his final lecture, Triger discusses the influence of patriarchal perceptions in our own day. He shows that the gendered offenses have not disappeared from the world, despite the great advances made in the 20th century in the status of women and gays. He bases his argument on the claims of the American theoreticians Carol Gilligan and David A.J. Richards, who have drawn a connection between the progress in women’s status and the rise of religious fundamentalism – Christian, Islamic and Jewish.

“The growing power of religion in the public domain over the last two decades is seen by Gilligan and Richards as a counterreaction to the retreat that occurred in patriarchal power in certain areas,” Triger says. “They hold that the religious radicalization – which is reflected, among other things, in the strengthening of the anti-abortion campaign in the United States, or the lengthening of head and body coverings for women in Islamic nations – is a sort of ‘corrective’ that patriarchal systems are applying in response to the spread of the human-rights culture in general and women’s rights in particular.

“What all types of religious fundamentalism have in common is the attempt to regain control over a woman’s sexuality,” he continues. “The crimes the patriarchal order created in an effort to protect its basic principles exist and are enforced to this day, despite all the improvements that have been achieved. Not only women but men too are suffering from them, because the patriarchal world forces both sexes to obey norms of conduct that are dictated in advance, and to live according to norms of ‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ they have no say in, and which they are able to rebel against only if they are willing to pay a high personal price.

“To do away with the crimes against patriarchy,” he concludes, “we must do away with patriarchy itself. We must exchange it for a genuinely democratic social order, free of hierarchy, in which both men and women have an equal voice and an equal right to shape their personal version of masculinity, femininity – or any combination of these they can think of – without being perceived as criminals.”

 

Kellogg’s Politely Tells Catholic Fascist Bill Donohue To Go Fuck Himself

TOUCAN SAM SAYS GO FUCK YOURSELF

Tony The Tiger On Jon Stewart’s Vagina Manger: Tastes Grrrreat!

Thanks to Rebecca Schoenkopf

The Catholic League’s Bill Donohue is none-too-pleased with the Kellogg’s family of cereals, as it unaccountably refused to yield to his demands that it immediately stop advertising on the Jonathan Stewartsky Half-Hour Jew Hour That Hates Goys Full-Time. Oooooh, what’d Kellogg’s say to Bill Donohue? Did they tell him to get fucked? Yes. Yes they did.

“We understand that our customers come from a variety of backgrounds, experiences, lifestyles, and cultures and we respect their individual decisions to choose the television programs that they deem acceptable for themselves and their families. Consumers speak most loudly when they vote with their remote control and change the channel or turn off the TV if a program does not fit their personal criteria.”

Hahahahaha, that is corporate-speak for “well bless your heart,” which is southern lady for “fuck you in the ass face down on a gravel road,” which is southern man for “Well, fine fellow, I must civilly disagree!”

And don’t think Bill Donohue doesn’t know exactly what he just heard! He’s so mad he’s about to go full-Nuge!

THIS SHALL NOT STAND!

In other words, Kellogg’s is telling Christians to shove it. But they made a mistake. We will now send the indefensible picture to their senior management and board, as well as to community leaders, religious and secular, throughout Battle Creek, Michigan. We are also calling for a national boycott of all Kellogg’s cereals. Moreover, I will notify the public via TV, radio and our website about their collapse of decency. This is just for starters. We have the time, money, and the determination to give Kellogg’s some free advertisement.

Oh. No. Stop. Don’t.

It is weird, it almost seems as if big corporations are no longer running scared from and doing the bidding of folks like Bill Donohue and the One Million Moms! (Forty-seven. They are 47 moms, with a really intense interest in lesbianism.)

Anyway, looks like Kellogg’s will have Bill Donohue to thank when all the hippies decide to finally let their uncombed spawn eat Frosted Flakes and Honey Smacks instead of puffed rice and tofu cereal. Or maybe they’ll be inspired by Kellogg’s next variety: Fruit of the Womb.

Related articles

• Bill Donohue on Jon Stewart boycott: I’m not asking for him to be fired (rawstory.com)
• Bill Donohue reveals himself to be one of the Three Stooges, the dumb one (skepacabra.wordpress.com)
• Bill Donohue: It’s ‘a Lot Less Expensive’ To Fight Victims Of Pedophile Priests (thinkprogress.org)
• Catholic League Furious About Manger Joke On The Daily Show (lezgetreal.com)
• Bill Donohue Threatens Street Protests Over Contraception Rule (lezgetreal.com)
• https://theageofblasphemy.wordpress.com

Is Some Homophobia Self-Phobia?

Over at Science Daily, a report on a study that suggests that the answer is yes:

Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex and who grew up with authoritarian parents who forbade such desires, a series of psychology studies demonstrates.

The study is the first to document the role that both parenting and sexual orientation play in the formation of intense and visceral fear of homosexuals, including self-reported homophobic attitudes, discriminatory bias, implicit hostility towards gays, and endorsement of anti-gay policies. Conducted by a team from the University of Rochester, the University of Essex, England, and the University of California in Santa Barbara, the research will be published the April issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar tendencies within themselves,” explains Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author.

Related articles

• Some Homophobia Is Self-phobia (talkingmonkeynews.wordpress.com)
• Homophobes: Externalizing an Internal Conflict (slog.thestranger.com)
• Finally! Study Confirms Homophobes Are Actually Damaged, Closeted Homosexuals (practikel.com)
• Homophobia Is Probably Caused by Supressed Homosexuality, Study Says (blogs.sfweekly.com)
• Survey Says: Homophobic? Hate Gays? Here’s Your Closet (uncommontary.com)
• Homophobia linked to lack of awareness of one’s sexual orientation and authoritarian parenting, study shows (medicalxpress.com)
• Self-Loathing Closet Cases Often Virulent Homophobes (lezgetreal.com)
• Homophobia is more pronounced in individuals with an unacknowledged attraction to the same sex (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Homophobia = Self-phobia? (thesituationist.wordpress.com)
• Is some homophobia self-phobia? (eurekalert.org)

Zombie libertarianism

Jacob Weisberg surveys our financial collapse and declares libertarianism dead.  (Hat tip.)  Alas, I wish I could feel as secure as he does on this front, but I’m afraid I don’t, because while it’s true that we can blame deregulation frenzy for our current economic situation—-and that people trying to say otherwise sound like the ripe fools they are—-I fear that the premise of his article is a bit off.  Libertarianism may be extremely unpopular right now, but it’s always been unpopular and that hasn’t stopped it.  In fact, your average pedantic libertarian gets off on the fact that most people wisely hate libertarians, because it confirms to the libertarian that he is a unique snowflake that the rest of the world is too stupid to get.*  Libertarianism isn’t popular, but it will always be well-funded because the class warfare at the heart of it appeals to embittered, willfully ignorant rich people who give money to think tanks.

The problem with libertarianism is similar to the problem with social conservatism, which is that it’s largely based on fantasies that appeal to people who feel thwarted entitlement.  Economic crisis will put most Americans into a reality-based way of thinking, and Obama’s surge in the polls reflects this.  But the more that reality-based liberalism gains ground, the angrier and more bitter you’ll see conservatives of both stripes get, and the more they’ll retreat into their fantasy lives.  Weisberg praises libertarians for having ideological consistency, but I see that rigidity being based in a fundamentally immature, inflexible worldview that Weisberg describes:

The worst thing you can say about libertarians is that they are intellectually immature, frozen in the worldview many of them absorbed from reading Ayn Rand novels in high school. Like other ideologues, libertarians react to the world’s failing to conform to their model by asking where the world went wrong. Their heroic view of capitalism makes it difficult for them to accept that markets can be irrational, misunderstand risk, and misallocate resources or that financial systems without vigorous government oversight and the capacity for pragmatic intervention constitute a recipe for disaster.

Anti-troll disclaimer: I’m not saying that liberals can’t be equally rigid.  Believe you and me, I deal with them all the time, and it’s exhausting.  But rigidity is built into the principles of libertarianism in a way that’s not true of liberalism or even into most forms of conservatism.

The appeal of libertarianism is the same hidden appeal of the call for “states rights”, which is that it’s a way for conservative types to be both pro-freedom and pro-oppression by redefining federal protection of its citizens as somehow anti-freedom, even though most federal protections are established with the belief that all people deserve freedom and equal access to opportunity.  When you get away from the class warriors in high places like the ones that Weisberg excoriates and look at the workaday support for libertarianism, you’re looking at a bizarre phenomenon that doesn’t initially seem that political, in all honesty.  I was reminded (by reader Anne) of one of the touchstone moments of online libertarianism recently, which is the famous hoax where a libertarian blogger pretended to be a woman to see if he’d gain readers and did.  His conclusion was the exact same one that an immature man reaches after being sexually rejected, which is that a) women suck, especially pretty young women (others don’t exactly exist) and b) they have it so easy because they get to reject people all the time.

As a hoax, it was interesting, because the hoaxer didn’t seem aware of why his hoax was so interesting.  His hoax did not in fact reveal anything about the relative ease at which pretty women get through life.  What it did reveal was that a whole lot of online libertarians who have very weird fantasies about women.  After all, the hoaxer didn’t make his female character a middle-aged female libertarian, nor did he try to emulate the writing style and quirks of real female libertarians.  His concoction was Buffy the Libertarian, a pure sexual fantasy of a young woman who spends her time flitting about being a shallow, pointless female who just happened to write about libertarianism.  It said nothing about women as they are in real life, but did inadvertently expose a lot of men who were just a tad too hungry to believe their fantasies were real.

To make this all the worst, the reason it came up was Michael Duff at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal wrote a piece about the hoax where he continued to stroke the egos of libertarians in lieu of making political observations.  Note the blatant sexism:

I believe libertarianism appeals to men, particularly to male geeks, because it rewards quirkiness, independence and an obsession with economics.

I was unaware that quirkiness, independence, and an “obsession” with economics (that doesn’t translate, in libertarians, to an understanding of economics) were masculine traits.

I propose an alternative explanation for why men dominate the ranks of self-declared libertarians.  The fantasy of libertarianism is a masculine fantasy of a return to a prior time when it was easier to dominate women because the veneer of civilization that makes us equal despite the difference in physical power is stripped away.  The mixed economies and regulated markets that define modern civilization give women a great deal of access to the world, creating many opportunities for embittered men to deal with women who aren’t immediately compliant or subservient, which in turn creates many opportunities for such men to retreat to a libertarian fantasy where it’s every man for himself, and women have to accept a lesser station in life in exchange for male protection.  Of course, in any chaotic situation, a handful of women are able to find their own ways to equal the playing field, and female libertarians like to imagine they’d be those exceptional women.  (I’m skeptical myself that either gender of libertarians are generally as tough on the inside as they think they are.)

At the end of the day, libertarian ideology is about making sure that huge parts of our society are put out of the reach of the democratic system, meaning that oppressed people can’t use their power to vote to relieve their oppression.  It’s about declaring that the only legitimate powers are the ones that can be used to keep wealth in the hands of white people and power in the hands of men.  It tends to function that way over and over, and that’s why I don’t think it’s ever going to go away.  Because there’s always going to be people who would rather flush our entire society down the drain than accept equality in it.

*All libertarians are fun to watch when they get into a pity party about how no one likes them, but Megan McArdle whining about the meanie feminists trying to kick her out of feminism is definitely the most fun.  I guess she’s just too smart/beautiful/good-souled/practically perfect in every way for the likes of us.

Related articles

• Van Jones: Libertarianism An ‘Extreme Ideology That Would Spit In The Face Of Dr. King’ (mediaite.com)
• Libertarianism Shouldn’t Be An Appendage Of Either Party (andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com)

Why The Right-Wing Brain Is Dysfunctional

How the Right-Wing Brain Works and What That Means for Progressives

            There really is a science of conservative morality, and it really is vastly different from liberal morality. And there are key lessons to be drawn from this research.

March 20, 2012  |

Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com

Editor’s Note: This essay draws upon Chris Mooney’s forthcoming book, The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality (due out in April from Wiley), as well as his interviews with George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and Dan Kahan on the Point of Inquiry podcast.

If you’re a liberal or a progressive these days, you could be forgiven for being baffled and frustrated by conservatives. Their views and actions seem completely alien to us—or worse. From cheering at executions, to wanting to “throw up” over church-state separation, to seeking to “drown” government “in the bathtub” (except when it is cracking down on porn, apparently) conservatives not only seem very different, but also very inconsistent.

Even the most well-read liberals and progressives can be forgiven for being confused, because the experts themselves—George Lakoff, Jonathan Haidt and others–have different ways of explaining what they call conservatives’ “morality” or “moral systems.” Are we dealing with a bunch of die-hard anti-government types in their bunkers, or the strict father family? Are our intellectual adversaries free-market libertarians, or right-wing authoritarians—and do they even know the difference?

But to all you liberals I say, have hope: It’s not nearly so baffling as it may at first appear. Having interviewed many of these experts over the course of the last year, my sense is that despite coming from different fields and using different terminologies, they are saying many of the same things. Most important, their work suggests that there really is a science of conservative morality, and it really is very different from liberal morality. And there are key lessons to be drawn from this research about how to interact (and not interact) with our intellectual opponents.

That’s what I’m going to show—but first, let me first emphasize that morality isn’t the only way in which liberals and conservatives differ. They differ on a wide variety of traits–and it is not necessarily clear, as Jonathan Haidt recently put it to me, what’s the root of the flower, what’s the stem and what’s the leaves.

But set that aside for now. Moral differences between left and right tend to draw the greatest amount of attention, and for good reason: They seem most directly implicated in policy disputes and the culture wars alike.

Another thing that you need to know at the outset about conservative “morality” is that it’s not at all the sort of thing that moral philosophers debate endlessly about. We’re not talking about a highly developed intellectual system for determining the way one ought to act, like deontology or utilitarianism. We’re not paging Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham.

Rather, we’re talking about the deep-seated impulses that push conservatives (or liberals) to act in a certain way. These needn’t be “moral” or “ethical” at all, in the sense of maximizing human happiness, ensuring the greatest good for the greatest number, adhering to a consistent set of rules and principles, and so on. Indeed, they may even be highly immoral by such standards—but there’s no denying that they are very real, and must be contended with.

The Science of Left-Right Morality

So how do conservatives think—and more important still, what do we know scientifically about how they think?

Perhaps the earliest and most influential thinker into this fray was the Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, with his classic book Moral Politics and many subsequent works (most recently, this item at Huffington Post). Lakoff’s opening premise is that we all think in metaphors. These are not the kind of thing that English majors study, but rather real, physical circuits in the brain that structure our cognition, and that are strengthened the more they are used. For instance, we learn at a very early age how things go up and things go down, and then we talk about the stock market and individual fortunes “rising” and “falling”—a metaphor.

For Lakoff, one metaphor in particular is of overriding importance in our politics: The metaphor that uses the family as a model for broader groups in society—from athletic teams to companies to governments. The problem, Lakoff says, is that we have different conceptions of the family, with conservatives embracing a “strict father” model and liberals embracing a caring, empathetic and “nurturing” version of a parent.

The strict father family is like a free-market system, and yet also very hierarchical and authoritarian. It’s a harsh world out there and the father (the supreme and always male authority) is tough and will teach the kids to be tough, because there will be no one to protect them once the father is gone. The political implications are obvious. In contrast, the nurturing parent family emphasizes love, care and growth—and, so the argument goes, compassionate government control.

Lakoff has been extremely influential, but it’s important to also consider other scientific analyses of the moral systems of left and right. Enter the University of Virginia moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt, whose new book The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion has just come out. In his own research, Haidt initially identified five (and more recently, six) separate moral intuitions that appear to make us feel strongly about situations before we’re even consciously aware of thinking about them; that powerfully guide our reasoning; and that differ strikingly from left and right.

Haidt’s first five intuitions, or “moral foundations,” are 1) the sense of needing to provide care and protect from harm; 2) the sense of what is just and fair; 3) the sense of loyalty and willingness to sacrifice for a group; 4) the sense of obedience or respect for authority; and 5) the sense of needing to preserve purity or sanctity. And politically, Haidt finds that liberals tend to strongly emphasize the first two moral intuitions (harm and fairness) in their responses to situations and events, but are much weaker on emphasizing the other three (group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity). By contrast, Haidt finds that conservatives more than liberals respond to all five moral intuitions.

Indeed, multiple studies associate conservatism with a greater disgust reflex or sensitivity. In one telling experiment, subjects who were asked to use a hand wipe before answering questions, or to answer them near a hand sanitizer, gave more politically conservative answers. Haidt even told me in our interview that when someone like Rick Santorum talks about wanting to “throw up,” that may indeed signal a strong disgust sensitivity.

More recently, Haidt and his colleagues added a sixth moral foundation: “Liberty/oppression.” Liberals and conservatives alike care about being free from tyranny, from unjust exertions of power, but they seem to apply this impulse differently. Liberals use it (once again) to stand up for the poor, the weak; conservatives use it to support the “don’t tread on me” fulminating against big government (and global government) of the Tea Party. This, incidentally, creates a key emotional bond between libertarians on the one hand, and religious conservatives on the other.

Haidt strives to understand the conservative perspective, and to walk a middle path between left and right—but he fully admits in his book that conservative morality is more “parochial.” Conservatives, writes Haidt, are more “concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.” And Haidt further suggests that this is not his own view of what is ethical, writing that “when we talk about making laws and implementing public policies in Western democracies that contain some degree of ethnic and moral diversity, then I think there is no compelling alternative to utilitarianism.” It’s hard to see how thinking about the good of the in-group (rather than the good of everyone) could be considered very utilitarian.

But to my mind, here’s the really telling thing about all of this. When you get right down to it, Lakoff and Haidt seem to be singing harmony with each other. It’s not just that they could both be right—it’s that the large overlap between them strengthens both accounts, especially since the two researchers are coming from different fields and using very different methodologies and terminologies.

Lakoff’s system overlaps with Haidt’s in multiple places—most obviously when it comes to liberals showing broader empathy and wanting to care for those who are harmed (nurturing parent) and conservatives respecting authority (strict father). But the overlaps are larger still, for the strict father family is also an in-group and quite individualistic—in other words, prizing the conservative version of freedom or liberty.

What’s more, both of these systems are also consistent with a third approach that is growing in influence: The cultural cognition theory being advanced by Yale’s Dan Kahan and his colleagues, which divides us morally into “hierarchs” and “egalitarians” along one axis, and “individualists” and “communitarians” along another (helpful image here). Conservatives, in this scheme, tend towards the hierarchical and the individualistic; liberals tend toward the egalitarian and the communitarian.

Throwing Kahan into the mix—and yes, he uses yet another methodology–we once again find great consistency with Lakoff and Haidt. Egalitarians worry about fairness; communitarians about protecting the innocent from harm; hierarchs about authority and the group (and probably sanctity or purity—hierarchs tend toward the religious). Individualists are, basically, exercisers of the conservative version of freedom and liberty.

Terminology aside, then, Lakoff, Haidt and Kahan seem to have considerably more grounds for agreement with each other than for disagreement, at least when it comes to describing what actually motivates political conservatives and political liberals.

And in fact, that’s just the beginning of the expert agreement. In all of these schemes, what’s being called “morality” is emotional and, in significant part, automatic. It’s not about the conscious decisions you make about situations or policies—or at least, not primarily. Rather, the focus is on the unconscious impulses that shape how you think about situations before you’re even aware you’re doing so, and then guide (and bias) your reasoning.

This leads Lakoff and Haidt to strongly reject what you might call the “Enlightenment model” for thinking about reasoning and persuasion, and leads Kahan to talk about motivated reasoning, rather than rational or objective reasoning. Once again, these thinkers are essentially agreeing that because morality biases us long before consciousness and reasoning set in, factual and logical argument are not at all a good way to get us to change our behavior and how we respond.

This is also a point I made recently, noting how Republicans become more factually wrong with higher levels of education. Facts clearly don’t change their minds—if anything, they make matters worse! Lakoff, too, emphasizes how refuting a false conservative claim can actually reinforce it. And he doesn’t merely show why the Enlightenment mode of thinking is outdated; he also stresses that liberals are more wedded to it than conservatives, and this irrational rationalism lies at the root of many political failures on the left.

Getting Through

On the one hand, the apparent consensus among these experts is surely something to rejoice about. Progress is finally being made at understanding the emotional and cognitive roots of the culture war and our political dysfunction alike. But if all of this is really true—if conservatives and liberals have deep seated and automatic moral and emotional differences—then what should we do about it?

Here, finally, we do find real disagreement among the pros. Lakoff would have liberals combat conservative morality by shouting their own values from the rooftops, and never falling for conservative words and frames. Haidt would increase political civility by remaking our institutions of government to literally make liberals and conservatives feel empathetic bonds and the power of teamwork. And Kahan has done experiments showing that talking about the same issue in different value laden “frames” leads to different outcomes. For instance, if you discuss dealing with global warming in an individualistic frame—by emphasizing the importance of free market approaches like nuclear power—then you open conservative minds, at least to an extent. We’ve got data on that.

It shouldn’t be surprising that the experts become dissonant as they move from merely describing conservative morality to outlining strategy. After all, there’s a heck of a lot more uncertainty involved when you start to prescribe courses of action aimed at achieving particular outcomes. Understanding conservatives in controlled experiments is one thing; trying to outline a communications strategy with Fox News around, ready to pounce, is another matter.

Nevertheless, here’s what I’ve been able to extract.

Clearly, you shouldn’t try to persuade your ideological opponents by citing threatening facts. Rather, if your goal is an honest give-and-take, you should demonstrate the existence of common ground and shared values before broaching anything controversial, and you should interact calmly and interpersonally. To throw emotion into the mix is to stoke automatic, moralistic, indignant responses.

Such are some scientific tips about trying to communicate and persuade–but liberals should not get overoptimistic about the idea of convincing conservatives to change their beliefs, much less their moral responses. There are far too many factors arrayed against this possibility at present—not just the deeply rooted and instinctive nature of moral intuitions, but our current political polarization, by parties and also by information channels.

You can’t have a calm, unemotional conversation when everything is framed as a battle, as it currently is. Our warfare over reality, and for control of the country, is just too intense. And in a “wartime” situation, conservative have their in-group preferences to naturally fall back on.

But if we merge together Lakoff and Haidt, then I think we do end up with some good advice for liberals who want to advance their own view of what is moral. On the one hand, they should righteously advance their own values, not conservative ones. But they should remain fully aware that these values are somewhat limited since, as Haidt shows, conservatives seem to have a broader moral palette.

To reach the political middle, then, it certainly wouldn’t hurt to demonstrate much more loyalty than liberals are used to emphasizing, and to show respect for authority as well—which doesn’t come so naturally to us. What authority should we respect? I suggest either the authority of president, or perhaps better yet, the authority of the Founding Fathers. Let’s face it: Conservatives have insulted, defiled, and disobeyed the secular, rational, and Enlightenment legacy of the people who founded this country (if you want to get moralistic about it).

When it comes to loyalty and unity in particular, liberals could stand to look in the mirror and try to be more…conservative. Not in their substantive policy views, but in their ability to act as a team with one purpose and one goal that cannot be compromised or weakened. Diversity is great for our society—but not for our objectives. And that means we have something to learn from conservatives: They may not know how to make America better, but they certainly know how to take a strong, united and moralistic stand in order to get what they want.

That’s an example that liberals could do worse than to follow.

Chris Mooney is the author of four books, including “The Republican War on Science” (2005). His next book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science—and Reality,” is due out in April.

Related articles

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• Jonathan Haidt: Religion, evolution, and the ecstasy of self-transcendence – – – TED (richarddawkins.net)
• Speaking of conservatives (snohomishobserver.com)
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