Category: Religion

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Chief Justice James Dobson

I know most Americans will sleep well tonight because they can rest assured that Dr. James Dobson is watching over their Supreme Court, making sure that only right-thinking people get to serve on it.

I have a suggestion for George Bush. The nomination of Mrs. Maier is absolutely silly. Drop it. And nominate Dr. James Dobson instead.

Why not? If Dr. Dobson gets to check out the nominees before anyone else does, why waste time on middle men. (Check the news — Dobson brags that Bush called him before making his nominee public.) Make Dobson Chief Justice.

Alleluia, praise the lord, God’s will will finally be done in America.

But wait.

Then he would have to go through an investigation by the FBI. And further investigation and questioning by the Senate Justice Committee. He would have to answer questions. He would have to answer questions asked by real people who don’t owe him anything. He would have to disclose information about how he runs his organization, who is on his board, who manages his money, and where it is invested, and if there are any legal actions against him.

It gets worse. During the confirmation proceedings, he would have to make public his views on social and political issues. He would have to explain his positions on abortion, birth control, sex education, parental discipline, prayer in the classroom, and all kinds of hokey stuff. He might have to express some knowledge and his views about Miranda, and due process, and habeas corpus, and privacy, and the Uniform Commercial Code, and interstate commerce, and the environment. He might actually have to demonstrate some knowledge and understanding of the basics of our system of justice.

And some Senators might be worried about going into the next re-election campaign (Senators are never “elected” in the U.S.– they just collect the cash for passing the right legislation and then get themselves “re-elected”) having to defend the choice of a totally unaccountable dingbat for the Supreme Court.

All it would take is one question: when deciding a case, do you consult the law, or your bible?

No, that won’t do at all. Let’s just let him have a veto over the actual nominees.

Dobson’s “family values”… doesn’t include any values that actually make family life better. If they did, you might hear him urge his buddies in the Senate to raise the minimum wage, which has been stalled at $5.15 an hour since 1997! I am not making that up. How much of an increase, do you suppose, top executives have received since 1997? How much of an increase do you suppose James Dobson has received since then?

Republican lawmakers, according to the NY Times, voted against the bill because they say they believe that higher wages can prevent new businesses from being viable, thereby reducing the number of jobs available to the poor. They failed to point out that they might also have more children, thereby impoverishing themselves even more.

This would be more entertaining if you ever heard these same people complain that giving too many tax breaks to the rich would end up causing them to do drugs or something.

Dobson doesn’t advocate health insurance for the poor.  He doesn’t advocate for safer working conditions or racial equality or maternal or any kind of parental leave for families with newborns.

Because Dobson’s real interest is in protecting the propertied classes, and programs that actually benefit families who are not rich would cost money and require that the rich pay their fair share of taxes.

Dobson Advocates the Execution of Child Criminals

I am not making this up.

Dobson however is exuberant in supporting executions for children who commit capital crimes: “So the unchecked judiciary plows ahead. In March of this year, the Supreme Court struck down laws duly passed in 18 states permitting the execution of minors.” Dobson adds that these perpetrators, who were minors when they committed their crimes, do not “deserve” to live. In a moment of astonishing lucidity, Dobson admonished: “Justice Kennedy should be impeached for taking such a position, along with O’Connor, Ginsberg, Souter, Breyer, and Stevens, who have recently made similar statements.” The truth is, it would be fabulously helpful for everyone if Bush did in fact impeach those justices. Let’s have it out and let, as Dobson claims to believe, the American people decide who they want to be running this country.

Dobson’s main page.

Watch your wallet!

What’s wrong with putting Mrs.Harriet Maier on the Supreme Court?

Naw. I can’t even take the question seriously enough to begin.

By the way, if you found Margaret Atwood’s novel, “A Handmaid’s Tale”, a portrait of an America run by people like James Dobson, a little over the top, you haven’t read James Dobson.

The most charming aspect of Dobson’s vitriolic harangues on the subject is the way he carefully sneaks a fund-raising appeal into the last paragraph: send me money or America will slide into a moral abyss. Sometimes we should thank these puppet-masters for their own transparency.

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Sinful Pat Robertson

You may have noticed that little storm God sent to Louisiana and Mississippi. The message is clear. God is angry. He wants to punish someone for the grievous sin of blaspheming his holy name. That someone is Pat Robertson.

Just a few weeks ago, Pat Robertson called for the assassination of Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela. Then he lied about calling for the assassination of Hugo Chavez and accused the mainstream media of taking him out of context and misquoting him.

But now it’s clear that Pat Robertson was the one who sinned. He advocated murder, which, according to the bible, is the same as actually committing the murder himself. Then he accused others of sin to cover up his own sin. So God sent Katrina to teach him a lesson.

Now, you may have noticed that Katrina didn’t actually do any harm to Pat Robertson but it did do a great deal of harm to a lot of innocent people in New Orleans and Biloxi and Mobile, and so on.

But that’s the way it is with God’s wrath. As Jerry Falwell pointed out, 9/11 was punishment for America’s acceptance and tolerance of homosexuals. It didn’t matter if none of the people in those buildings were actual homosexuals, just as it didn’t matter that none of the people in New Orleans waiting in their attics in water up to their collar-bones was actually Pat Robertson.

If you believe that sort of thing.

You are not sure if God really sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson? How would you know if I was wrong? You would pray about it, right, and God would tell you?

What if God told you that Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ tradition of drunkenness and debauchery? What if God told me that it was punishment for Pat Robertson’s militancy? How do we know which is the real message from the real God?

Actually, maybe it’s not as hard as it looks. Just read the bible, especially the gospels. Then try to imagine that God would get more angry at a lot of poor black people who have been beat up and abused most of their lives than he would at a rich and powerful white preacher who, confronted with the problem of dwindling supplies of oil for America’s lavish lifestyle, advocates political assassination over conservation.  And confronted with the problems of racism and poverty and inequality, he would advocate reduced taxes for the rich?

Try to imagine Christ saying, “blessed are those who give tax deductions to investors and shareholders, and who reduce the liability of manufacturers for defects in their products, and whosoever provideth grants and incentives to profitable companies that they might exploit disasters for their own gain…”

You see?  God sent Katrina to punish Pat Robertson.  I prayed about it and it’s true.

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Our Moral Decline

Would you be surprised to find that, in the view of this website, public morality is in decline? What? Again? It is? Oh my goodness! Whatever will we do?!

www.holybible.com is a fairly representative Christian commentary on our day and age, our times, our era, our epoch, our cultural milieu. (It even, of course, like almost every other “Christian” website in the world, has a pitch for your money on the main page, for a CD or worship of songs, though I should acknowledge that it’s a relatively low-key pitch for the genre).

Or, like me, would you be more inclined to think about just how shocked you would really be if you ever happened to stumble into a website somewhere, by a Christian journalist or pundit, that expressed the thought that public morality was improving?

Seriously. I thought about that a lot. Why would it seem totally weird to read a comment like, “it is clear that our society is less sinful now than it was 50 years ago”? But you know that you are never going to hear that from a Christian journalist or pundit. Not in your life.

If virtually every single Christian commentator thinks the world is getting worse, not better, they must be right– right? They can’t all be wrong.

But if society is in decline, when, according to these punsters, was it ever in incline? It must be declining from somewhere. It must have improved, from the barbaric ages, at some point. Say, the 1950’s. The America of Ozzie and Harriet and the Beaver.

Do they have a picture in their minds of rural villages dotted with white churches, milk-maids tending the cows and baking apple pies, young boys fishing at the creek, fathers mowing the hay?

That’s nostalgia. That’s sentimentality masquerading as social conviction. Even a cursory survey of the real historical record reveals that the 1950’s was actually an age of profound immorality. Racism was not only tolerated, it was accepted. Sexism was embedded in the infrastructure of the workplace. Materialism and conformity were promoted as “healthy” social values. Sexual abuse was ignored, if even reported. And it was the official policy of the U.S. government that, if necessary, 100s of millions of people would be killed to stop the Soviets.

You would think that Christians would be among the first celebrate the achievements of the civil rights era, or the accomplishments of U.N. peace-keepers, or the land-mine treaty, or democracy in the Soviet Union, the disarmament movement, equality for women, peace. Nyet. Doesn’t matter. Has no importance. The important thing is that 13-year-old girls use the f-word in movies. That’s it! It’s the end of times!

This is all a bit like the “values” argument conservatives love to wave around. We poor liberals believe in diversity, tolerance, progress, human rights, community, the environment, and equality. It’s such a shame we don’t have any values. Hey bubba– lets get a six-pack and some buckshot and drive your Hummer down the back roads of Idaho so we can shoot some helpless furry creatures and talk about values. Right, Bobby-Bob– like the sanctity of the right to own guns, and the sanctity of the right to pay our employees a low minimum wage? And the sanctity of the right to send people to jail for 99 years for stealing a cell phone? Damn right we have values…

I frankly believe that even if 90% of the population stopped fornicating and drinking beer and thinking kind thoughts about minorities and the poor and suddenly decided to go to church on Sunday instead… even if all of that happened, the Christian commentators would continue to tell you that the world is in moral decline…. because that’s what they do. That’s their bread and butter. That’s their mental frame-work, their cache, their frame of reference. They could not do without it, and they would not feel powerful and mighty without that cudgel with which to whack you in the face: listen to me, or you will burn in hell.

Why is it so illogical to constantly, consistently, always proclaim that public morality is declining? If it doesn’t already seem absurd to you, here’s why. Suppose that your salary were declining every year, year after year, without fail? How much salary, exactly, would you now have?

If you started at, say, $30,000 in 1970, and your salary declined continuously since then, you would have almost none of it left. But that’s silly. Nobody’s salary declines like that.

In the same way, public morality cannot be in constant decline. But have you ever heard any of these pundits that morality ever improved in any particular year? No, and you never will: where’s the money in that?

 

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Billy Graham’s Heart

The Billy Graham Organization just won a Minnesota Appeals court decision which allows it to fire a 30-year employee who was spied kissing a woman in the parking lot.

Sara Thorson started working for the Billy Graham Associates in 1971. She was the bulk-mail services coordinator.

In February 2002, two employees spotted her kissing another woman in the parking lot. Her supervisors were alerted. She was confronted and admitted that she was gay. They suspended her immediately and asked her to renounce her sinful lifestyle, repent, and come back to work.

They were prepared to forgive her for the sins she had committed, but she had to demonstrate a sincere desire to repent. I guess that’s a way to put it.

Sara Thorson decided that since her work had nothing to do with the direct ministry of the organization– only with the technical task of sending out bulk mail– she should be allowed to keep her job and her lover. A Minnesota appeals court denied her request.

It was reasonably clear, I think, from comments made by the original sponsors of Minnesota’s ban on discrimination based on sexual orientation, that their intent was to give religious organizations an exemption.

We presume that no other employee of this particular office was engaged in any apparent sinful activity at the time, or she or he would also have been fired, of course. But there’s no sin like sexual sin, so it’s conceivable that eagle-eyed employees were not on the lookout for hard-heartedness, for example, or materialism. Imagine, for example, if they had reported spying an employee climbing into a Hummer, or wearing a Rolex, or buying a gun, or eating too much too often.

Suppose Thorson’s supervisors had decided to be compassionate. They were not– no mistake about it. You have to be fairly brutal, in my opinion, to fire someone who has worked for you for more than 30 years because she kissed someone in a parking lot. You have to possess a remarkable mindset to be able to point at someone else and say, “you are the sinner.” You must be purged from our midst. You are not worthy of our company. You are going to hell and we’re not.

I’ll bet the two employees that spotted her were happy. I’ll bet it was the happiest day of their lives. Well, maybe not. Maybe they were a little sad. Maybe they even said, “we’re really sad about this. It’s heart-breaking to have to fire someone who has worked faithfully and diligently for you for 30 years.”

Okay, so let’s say they were sad. But I’ll bet they at least felt important.

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“Strong Religious Beliefs”

“One of the things we’re playing with is having characters with strong religious beliefs included in some of our new shows,” Mr. Reilly added. “This would not be the premise of the show, but we could have a character who simply has this strong point of view.” NY Times, November 20, 2004

One of the most infuriating things about the political and cultural debate of the past few years is precisely this piece of bs elicited from the network executives on the subject of values on television, from an article that largely observes that even in the bible belt, people are watching dirty tv shows. Do as I say, not as I do.

All right. So, since Bush was elected with the support of the Christian Right, and they are getting all the media attention lately, and because they are a bunch of medieval cry-babies whose idea of pluralism is allowing Hindu and Moslem students to leave the classroom while the 10 Commandments are recited, let’s think about having a character on a tv show espouse “strong religious beliefs”. As if.

And if you think I’m picking on the Christians– I am a Christian.

Sounds to me that someone is buying into the preposterous evangelical myth that the media is controlled by radical liberal feminists, homosexuals, atheists, and socialists and, therefore, the Christians are entitled to some space for their views. If only!

If only there was a single character on any tv show that ever actually said anything like:

“Those fundamentalists like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell give me the creeps. How long before they start burning witches?” Or, “Why does the government allow advertising directed at children?” Or, “We’ve looked at all the evidence and questioned all the suspects, and we still have no clue as to who committed this murder. Should I beat someone up until he confesses?” Or, “He was a great soldier. He killed many people for his country.” Or, “Our kids are getting fat from eating at McDonald’s too often.”

The day we hear characters speak like that is the day I’d be delighted to hear a character say, “I think it would be wrong for you to have sex before you are legally married.”

I don’t object to values being discussed on tv. But I do object when narrow-minded right-wing bigots insist that they are the only people with “values”, as if people who voted Bush, and for his tax-cuts for the rich, have values, while those who voted for Kerry because he might actually do something to preserve the environment and protect endangered species, don’t have values.

The word “values” is being used, by conservative Christians, the way “quality” is now used by a lot of people. We want “quality television”. Which is, television with “values”. Right.

 

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Spinning Mother Theresa

Can you count the number of times you have heard the name of Mother Theresa given in conversation as a veritable paragon of virtue and holiness and kindness? Stuff it.

I was fooled. I remember the first articles I read about this devout, holy, self-sacrificing woman living in the worst slums of the poorest city (Calcutta) in the world offering only kindness and care and love to the lowliest outcasts, the vulnerable, the helpless. Malcolm Muggeridge, Christendom’s most pompous twit before he passed on, groveled before her with all the enthusiasm those who think their groveling will be taken for virtue can muster.

I even remember a SCTV skit in which a loud, bombastic “Lola Heatherton” (Catherine O’Hara) interviewed Mother Theresa and sang her Broadway Tunes. SCTV confined the parody to Heatherton– Mother Theresa was depicted (by Andrea Martin) with reverence. The point was that Mother Theresa was so holy that not even SCTV dared impugn her sanctified honor.

And then I stumbled into a crazy article somewhere– I can’t remember what magazine it was — that described how Mother Theresa inspected a home that had been donated to her order, for her novitiates, and I remember how she sternly ordered the hot water tank removed, and the mattresses and beds (they can sleep on the floor), and anything else that might make it a pleasant place to live.

I think the article was generally favorable to her and meant to celebrate her purity and austerity. I remember thinking a lot about it. What’s wrong with making a sacrifice, if it helps the poor? But getting rid of the hot water and the mattresses didn’t help the poor. It simply spread the suffering around. It was as if the point was not to alleviate suffering, but to increase it, out of some twisted sense of masochistic self-sanctification. A few years later, she was quoted as saying that the suffering the poor was “beautiful”. Not beautiful enough for herself, however. When she became ill, she checked into a nice, western hospital and received the best care available.

That bears repeating. While raising millions of dollars to preach to people who are dying and while making no effort to provide them with any kind of medical care, because, she says, their suffering is “beautiful”– she herself has accepted some of the finest medical care available from clinics in California.

Later on, I read more about Mother Theresa, and grew more and more disturbed by what I read. While she was receiving tens of millions of dollars in donations from thousands of benefactors around the world– and the Nobel Peace Prize– she was also appearing in public with Haitian dictator Papa Doc Duvalier, to defend his regime against charges of corruption, and with Albanian dictator Enver Hoxha. And of course, as an unrepentant traditionalist, Mother Theresa fought fanatically against the very idea of any form of birth control.

Ironically, she was embraced by some in the Christian right in America, including Ralph Reed, as representative of “family values”– as if she had never taken a vow of chastity. And as if Ralph Reed, and Pat Robertson, and Jerry Falwell, had anything but contempt for Catholicism. She was politically useful to them.

According to Hitchens, after intervening in the referendum in Ireland to allow divorce, (she was opposed), she told the Ladies Home Journal that she was glad her friend, Princess Diana, was getting a divorce because she will be happier. Clearly, there is one set of rules for the poor….

What kicked it for me, though, was when I realized that what she was actually doing in the slums of Calcutta was not “helping”. She provided some comfort, yes, to the dying, but she did almost nothing to alleviate suffering or to make people’s lives better when she clearly could have. In fact, she actively opposed efforts to provide the poor with medical care and food, because, she said, it did not further the advancement of Catholicism. It merely distracted people from the real issue, which was, saving souls.

That’s not the gospel.

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The Lonely Sinner

There is a church in my denomination which has decided to try to be welcoming to gay members of the body of Christ. The rest of the denomination goes, “Amen, brother– what an opportunity to bring the ministry of the Lord Jesus to those depraved souls! May they all, the lord willing, repent and be welcomed into the body of Christ as former sinners.”

That isn’t exactly what they had in mind. What this church had in mind was to welcome practicing gay Christians to their fellowship, to accept them as fellow sinners, and to share communion with them.

So, in other words, these particular sinners are still sinning. Unlike the rest of us sinners who sin no more. But we wouldn’t say that, would we? Would you say that you don’t sin anymore, now that you are a Christian? I wouldn’t.

We don’t commonly tell people that we don’t sin. If we did, and if people believed us, then we would be comfortable reaching for the stones if we met someone who said, “I still sin.” No, no– we smile indulgently. We are all sinners.

If we all take a deep breath and count to three and speak the holy words, “I am a sinner”, we can all smile knowingly to each other…

…and then, when we spot a homosexual, shriek, “now there is a sinner.”

And then welcome him or her into full communion.

Of course, we do not.

So what on earth do we mean when we acknowledge that we are all “sinners”? I’ve been a member of a church for almost 50 years and I couldn’t tell you. I don’t think it means anything. I don’t think we honestly believe that we are sinners. We believe that we are righteous and virtuous and morally pure. We’re reaching for stones. We do it all the time. Nothing makes us feel more righteous and pure and holy than reaching for a stone.

If it doesn’t mean anything, what do we think it means when we say it? Do we think about that time we looked at someone we were not married to and wished for a forceful embrace? That time we were rude or mean to a colleague? Maybe our fantasies about owning a Hummer and crushing a few Corollas underneath those massive wheels? Or the fact that we didn’t give very much, last year, to help people less fortunate than ourselves?

The key difference between the sinner we acknowledge within our selves and the sinner we see in the homosexual is that we really seem to believe that our sins are over. Whatever it is we acknowledge having done wrongly, we seem to believe that we don’t do it anymore.

That’s also the peculiarity of sexual sins. When the preacher stands in front of a congregation and rails about the evil fornicators and homosexuals and adulterers out there– we can safely assume that he doesn’t mean me. We might be doing it, but it’s something we keep secret anyway and can safely assume no one else knows about it.

That’s why preachers would rather preach about those sins than about indifference or materialism or hard-heartedness or hypocrisy.

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Same Sex Marriage

I don’t believe that even George Bush really supports a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage. Believe it or not– in spite of what I have said about George W. previously– he isn’t that stupid. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that his top advisor, Karl Rove, isn’t really that stupid.

Why? Good question.

It’s not hard to figure out why trying to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage is a stupid idea, even if you do believe in the bible. The definition of marriage as a life-long union between one man and one woman is so clearly bound up with a religious doctrine and is so culturally and historically specific that large numbers of lawyers, judges, editorialists, and even some law-makers will eventually come to realize that it simply isn’t viable to enshrine the idea in the constitution. You have to start discussing the origins of that definition of marriage, it’s foundation in religious law (or do you want to try to argue that it is the product of “natural” law?), it’s claims of normativity (when more than 50% of heterosexual marriages fail in the U.S.) and what, exactly, it is that is so valuable about it. Is the purpose of marriage to have children? Explain that to childless couples.

You have to explain why divorce is permitted for trivial reasons, and why couples are allowed to live together common-law, if marriage is so sacred.

You have to explain the difference between common-law marriage and legal marriage. You have to start thinking about how the state tries to treat children from single-parent homes, and why.

I’m not saying that there isn’t anything valuable about the old fashioned heterosexual definition of marriage. Just that it would be very hard to prove that keeping marriage exclusively hetero-sexual would provide something to our society that is indispensable or irreplaceable. Unless you are James Dobson.

But James Dobson might have to come clean in a campaign like this. No, he won’t. You see, if Dobson ran for office, he would actually have to try to persuade a majority of voters that his politics are reasonable and wise. He would actually be accountable for his views. But in his best-selling books and tapes, Dobson can pontificate about all of society’s ills without ever being challenged or disputed.

Will John Kerry ever have an opportunity to ask George Bush if, since he feels that marriage should be the union of one man and one woman for life, he approves of divorce? Get him on the record. Let him explain why being in favor of a constitutional amendment defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman doesn’t mean you don’t recognize that there are situations in which a divorce is desirable or allowable. See if his right-wing evangelical minions agree.

Still, you never know. It wouldn’t surprise me if the Texas legislature came out and declared that the earth was flat one of these days.

The problem is that the constitution is about the set of rules and principles that govern the way we, as individuals, associate with each other. It doesn’t tell you that the purpose of such associations is to seek salvation, or to experience sensual gratification, or some kind of higher consciousness. It leaves that to religion. The constitution wisely leaves to each of us the right to decide what the ultimate purpose of life is.

It is not for the state to define what the pursuit of happiness means. It is not for the state to define love or marriage or family or happiness. The purpose of the constitution is to keep you from being able to prevent me from seeking my own happiness according to my own beliefs, in so far as my pursuit of happiness does not impinge upon your pursuit of happiness.

We aren’t very big on the idea that the state should consciously promote moral virtue in it’s citizens. In other words, we want to promote orderliness and prosperity and justice, and any law that clearly advances those ideals will resonate with our existing laws and institutions. But any law that tries to tell us what happiness is, or should be, goes too far.

There is no constitutional logic that provides a rationale for banning gay marriage. It clearly is no skin off James Dobson’s, or anyone else’s, nose if a couple of guys or girls in New York want to share an apartment and sleep together and make each other beneficiaries of their life insurance policies. It really isn’t, no matter how many stupid things Dobson may say and how often he may say it.

I may not believe that people should be driving around in Hummers, but I can’t stop them. If they can pay for the gas, and if they abide by the rules of the road, they have the right to drive a Hummer. Some guy driving a Hummer does not infringe upon my right to drive a Toyota. (Let’s leave alone, for a moment, the argument that a Hummer uses up more resources belonging to everyone– like air– than most other vehicles.)

George Bush is going to have to try to argue that gay marriage somehow prevents me from driving my Toyota, in a manner of speaking. He’s going to have to argue that gay marriage somehow is going to prevent you from…. well, I can’t even imagine what they will argue gay marriage prevents you from do it. The truth is, he might as well blurt it out– he just doesn’t like it.

The truth is– and I think any in depth discussion of the issue will eventually elucidate it– that gay marriage doesn’t hurt anyone.

Unless. Unless you are going to argue that homosexuality is an unhealthy, abnormal lifestyle. But then, you don’t just need to ban gay marriage. You need to ban homosexuals.

And James Dobson and his cohorts might well say, well, what’s wrong with that idea? “When I grew up, we didn’t have homosexuals. Homosexual acts are still illegal in some states. It ought to stay that way.”

So, why not a constitutional amendment making it illegal to engage in homosexual acts?

Because then you would see how silly and unworkable it is.

Bush may be clueless about the implications of this issue, just as he seems clueless about the implications of just about every policy of this administration. (After Texas implemented an abstinence-only high school sex education system under then governor Bush, it’s rate of teen pregnancy slipped to the highest in the nation). But Karl Rove isn’t. He probably doesn’t care one whit whether the proposed amendment gets passed or not.

The truth is, that he is hoping to make use of some bigotry. He knows the Democrats would prefer not to oppose the amendment, because they know that Americans, by a ratio of 2 – 1 disapprove of gay marriage. And he knows that many Democrats are as ahead of the Republicans on this issue as Johnson, Kennedy, and the Supreme Court were ahead of the country on the issue of race in 1963.

How feeble does it sound, intellectually?  Try this:

“It should be an inalienable right, guaranteed by our Constitution, to live in a marriage-based society,” said Robert Knight, director of the Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute. “When you create counterfeit marriages and put them into the law, you’re undermining society’s most important safeguard against tyranny.

Actually, that doesn’t just sound feeble.  It sounds downright stupid.   A “marriage-based” society?  Sounds almost like “creationism”.  But you can see how the right is groping for some rationale for why they think their rights are infringed by the idea of same-sex unions, when clearly they are not.

Quote from Salon

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Spanking

I had not, until now, formed a strong opinion on the issue of spanking, though I had decided for myself, for quite some time, that if I had to raise my children over again, I wouldn’t do it.

I did think that parents could make a reasonable case for a legal right to spank their own children. Who is the government to interfere in family life to the extent of telling parents how to discipline? As long as the parents aren’t too rough, and as long as they really do love their children, I figured, why shouldn’t they have the right?

But it has always seemed odd to me that you can’t hit a 250 lb. adult male with any force whatsoever without risking the possibility of being charged with assault, but you can hit an 11-year-old girl, or a four-year-old, or a seven-year-old, with impunity. The courts have spoken. Linebackers need the protection of legislation. Children– well, we better let people hit them occasionally because it might be good for them.

Those children will now never threaten to sick their lawyers on you.

It does seem odd. And never odder than when I gazed upon the photo of Victoria Whaley, standing in front of Canada’s Supreme Court building with her mother and father. Victoria is now 13. She was there with her parents to support the existing legislation, which gives parents and teachers the right to use “reasonable” force when disciplining children. This cute blonde was saying, I want you to have the right to spank me. And Focus on the Family and other “Christian” organizations were there to say the same thing: spanking is good.

spanking_cu.jpg (176691 bytes)

spanking_cu.jpg (176691 bytes)

Now, something is wrong here. Focus on the Family likes to sell themselves– which, in my view, is pretty well what they do–sell– as an organization that promotes wholesome, traditional, family values.

Like spanking.

I have often wanted to ask Focus on the Family some specific questions about spanking. How hard is “reasonable”? Bare bum or no bare bum? Should fathers be allowed to spank girls, and mothers to spank boys? Wouldn’t that lead to temptations? Over knees, or standing, or laying down? Should step-fathers and step-mothers be allowed to spank? How about uncles? Is there a reasonable level of frequency? Once a day? Ten times a day? At which point should parents stop spanking and reach for the Ritalin?

I mean, for heaven’s sake, if you are going to endorse spanking but you want to reduce the risk of child abuse, you will have to be specific for most people and give some directions, including diagrams.

The trouble is, there isn’t a single child-abuser in the world who could be trusted to know what is “reasonable”. But they all know, now, that the government approves of some form of physical punishment of children. The government says you can do to children what you are never, ever permitted to do to an un-consenting adult.

That’s strange. It’s disturbing.

I would bet that many politicians know that there is something wrong with this law but can’t do anything about it because they have to get re-elected.

Copyright © 2004 Bill Van Dyk All rights reserved.

Doesn’t the girl in the picture look a little like Marcia Brady from The Brady Bunch?  Did Robert Reed, Dad Brady on the most traditional TV show of it’s era, spank?

Slate Article on Canadian Spankers

Is Sweden a hotbed of lawlessness?  They must be.  Spanking is illegal in Sweden.  If you believe Focus on the Family and other conservative Christian organizations and churches, the only way to teach children that there are consequences for bad behavior is to beat their little behinds.  Obviously, a country that bans spanking must, therefore, be full of criminals.

Focus on the Family provides a tantalizing “how-to” on spanking.
Added 2006-07   [Awwww.  They took it down.  Why, I wonder.  Why?]

spanking_lrg.jpg (29681 bytes)

I couldn’t find the answer to my question about bare bum or not anywhere on that page. If you have better luck than me, let me know. It is rather striking that the subject is not even addressed, even though, obviously, it is a central issue in terms of technique.

Equally obvious is the fact that it could create some serious problems for Dobson if he thought it was okay to spank bare bums. Why not, then, just say no?

You tell me.

Posted on

Abstinence Delusions

The Guttmacher Institute says that two-thirds of public school districts have policies to teach sex education, and that 35 percent of those require that abstinence be promoted as the sole option for unmarried people. Birth control and condoms can be mentioned just in terms of failure rates. NY Times, December 22, 2003

That’s interesting. I thought that the public school system, and the government in general, was not supposed to be promoting any particular religious beliefs. I suppose that some would argue that the idea that unmarried people should not have sexual intercourse is not a religious idea. It’s grounded in natural law, or the social contract, or something else.