Well, this is my first year keeping a blog, and it's been a big one. My book came out in February, and now it's in paperback. I've traveled around the country and met so many people who have appreciated my point of view. Perhaps my favorite comment after one of my talks came last spring from a marriage equality activist in California who told me that my book articulated for her the things she had felt uneasy about in her work -- but that she had never had the words to explain why. So many gay rights advocates fall into marriage equality work without questioning it, without realizing there are other ways to think about families and relationships.
When people ask me why I wrote the book I tell them about my law students. For all of their politically aware lives, same-sex marriage has been in the news. The Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) passed Congress in 1996. States passed "mini-DOMAs." Vermont enacted civil unions in 2000. Marriage in Massachusetts in 2003; introduction of a Federal Marriage Amendment; passage of state constitutional amendments banning same-sex marriage in the majority of states; blaming (wrongly) the turnout for the ballot initiatives on those amendments for Bush's victory in 2004; marriage in California; Prop 8; and so much more. That's what they've heard.
So my students come to law school thinking that the only thing wrong with family law and marriage is that gay couples can't marry, and that the problems gay people face will be solved by marriage. Since they (overwhelmingly) support gay rights, they of course support marriage for same-sex couples.
I wrote the book to give them another lens. The early gay rights movement contributed to a critique of marriage and was part of a set of forces that changed the significance of marriage. Those forces included feminism and the sexual revolution that destigmatized nonmarital sex and brought increasing acceptance of women without husbands bearing children. The legal changes that accompanied those social forces made marriage matter less: the end of sex discrimination in marriage, the right to abortion, legal equality for children born to married and unmarried women, no fault divorce.
Today, it is the right-wing "marriage movement," of which I've written much this past year, and the gay rights marriage equality movement that make the most noise about how much marriage matters. Sure, they have different visions, but marriage is at the center of both of those visions. Forced to choose between the two, I will always pick marriage equality. But my vision is really altogether different. It is of a world where our laws support economic security and emotional peace of mind for the wide range of families and relationships that exist among LGBT -- and straight -- people; one where, as I often put it, marriage is not the dividing line between the relationships that count and those that don't.
When I get a chance to relate my vision -- to my students and to the audiences who come to hear me speak -- I get so much positive feedback. And if I can help move public policy in the direction of that vision, I will feel that I have really been of use.
Happy new year to all.
Paper claims on real assets
The United States, although a very wealthy country, has a finite amount of wealth in terms of the resources of its government, its land/natural resources and its citizens. When every tree, building, mine, deposit, bank account and company is valued and added together, there is an actual value that could be "assigned" to the country.
Every time we issue a new bond (also known as an "I.O.U."), this is essentially a claim against a portion of the assets the United States "owns." Alternatively, you could consider each U.S. dollar as a share of stock in the USA company. While these are wild oversimplifications, you get the idea.
If the USA company starts issuing bonds and stocks without increasing the value of its underlying assets and/or revenue streams, the company is diluting the value of the stocks and bonds held by existing investors. Investors know that when a company issues new stock, the stock price is usually punished because of the anticipation of the future dilution.
Currently, the USA company is issuing stocks and bonds at a record pace to stave off short-term pain caused by a recession. This weakens the future prospects of the USA company and also ensures that its stock price (i.e. the value of its currency) will be punished and will decline significantly.
Where this analogy fails is the fact that American citizens are essentially forced to own stock in the USA company, as this stock is the only legal currency in our country. When people begin to learn that every time they get a piece of paper with a number printed on it that the real value of the number on that paper bill is declining every year consistently, moral values change and begin to decay.
As inflation proceeds down the path of least resistance that has plagued every fiat currency in the history of the planet, hard work and savings begin to be replaced with speculation and borrowing. Since you cannot save money and maintain purchasing power without taking significant risks, why save at all? If you're going to embrace risk, why not go for a bigger risk and bigger reward? If it doesn't work, just borrow more money and try again!
Persistent, continuous inflation leads to moral and social decay. It has led to the bling bling, big screen TV, Hummer, McMansion culture that we find ourselves in today. Think end of Roman empire decay. Why save for tomorrow when you can borrow and have it today? The overwhelming majority of people don't realize that monetary decay leads to moral and social decay. As the government prints more and more money and gets itself further and further into debt in a fiat money system, it essentially encourages its citizens to do the same by both the example it sets and the debasement of our currency that it sets into motion.
The U.S. government is a subprime borrower looking to max out another credit card after it spent all its family's money and then hocked all their possessions and spent that money, too. Instead of correcting its ridiculous fiscal habits, it makes new promises to new naive family members (e.g., China) to draw them into yet another round of the ultimate Ponzi scheme. The current power brokers in Washington no longer care about debt reduction and are scrambling to increase the debt load of our country at an ever-increasing pace. In addition, the government wants banks to resume lending despite the fact that most people have already borrowed too much from banks as it is.
The government cannot save you. It hardly knows how to save itself and no longer even pretends to think beyond the next election. Common sense is ridiculed and bread and circuses are favored over serious intellectual or political debate. This is a direct end-stage effect of the cancer introduced into our society when we gave control of our money to a private, secret cartel of bankers and then severed all links between our currency and gold in 1971.
The early highs of an inflation cycle are positive and pleasant as they affect asset classes like stocks and real estate and make most feel prosperous and bold. Now, in the later stages of inflation, we have a rabid and unsustainable addiction to cheap money that reveals us for what we are: junkies needing a fix as bad as a heroin addict does. Though the printing presses will run full steam, the highs produced by this easy money are no longer pleasant and simply keep us from going into withdrawal. We spend more and more and accumulate more and more and feel hollower than ever.
The debt created by all this inflationary borrowing and spending in both the public and private sectors has painted our government into a corner. The only realistic options are extremely aggressive further attempts at inflation (which will either fail or lurch us into a hyperinflationary currency crisis) or a deflationary collapse where all domestic money moves from the stock market into government bonds. There is no turning back from this debacle and there is no "goldilocks" scenario. The world is not ending but your 401k might if you don't move to protect yourself.
Gold is a protector of savings in times of uncertainty. It holds its value in a deflationary debt collapse as well as a runaway inflation. In short, gold becomes strong when the currency it is denominated in becomes unstable. As we all know, promises made by an addict are not particularly reliable. If the government gets desperate, they will confiscate assets and will declare anyone making over $20,000per year a rich swine that deserves to be taxed at a 90% rate. Gold is no ones liability and asks for nothing. It can be buried in the backyard quietly until our government dries out, wises up and kicks its addiction so that a new cycle of prosperity can begin.
Got out of DIG with my 10% profit today. Got out of RGLD and looking to re-enter in the next several weeks on a decent correction. Looking to get back into SRS as a short-term trade if the price dips a little further into the 50-55 range.
Virtually Freaky; or, The Slithery Slope
I was going to say something like "While I'm talking about religion...", but I'm not sure how much this is about religion. Ostensibly it's not, but religion's probably lurking beneath the surface.
IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.
IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.
Steven Waldman: Now you, one controversial moment for you in the last election was your support for proposition 8 in California. A couple of questions about that. First, to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?
Rick Warren: I don’t know if I use the term there, but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don’t believe that we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights.Steven Waldman: But what about, like, partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?
Rick Warren: You know, to me, not a problem with me. But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.
It looks to me as though Warren is dodging the question about civil unions and domestic partnerships, though he does seem to say that insurance and hospital visitation are "no problem" with him. On the other hand, he also says, "I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," which means that he is opposed to guaranteeing insurance and hospital visitation for same-sex couples, but not as much as he is to letting them marry. I think he should be pressed closer on civil unions and domestic partnerships (which are not, be it noted, limited to same-sex couples). Don't let him blather about equal rights regardless of "particular lifestyles": does he or does he not approve of same-sex civil unions?
Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?
Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.
Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.
Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).
As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.
The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.
Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?
Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.
Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.
Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?I think that it's misleading to speak of "the major Western religions" as though there was a slew of them; granting Judaism "major" status because of its influence on Christianity, there seem to be two major Western religions. But as a Jew, Charen must know as well as Warren that "traditional marriage" is compatible with polygamy. In Judaism, plural marriage was only banned about a thousand years ago. Who's Mona Charen, to go against zillions of years of polygamous tradition?
Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).
As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.
The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.
Please understand: my point here is not that I endorse polygamy, or the marriage of children to adults, or of siblings. My point is that Charen and Warren, and the gay and pro-gay Christians they oppose, have no real arguments against such practices either. Or against same-sex marriage, come to that. All they can do, apparently, is point to Tradition, as if it were monolithic and unanimous in its judgments. But it doesn't really support them. Despite all their babble about "redefining" marriage, marriage has been redefined in many ways over the past several millennia, let alone in the past half-century. (In 1967 the US Supreme Court redefined marriage in America to include mixed-race couples, for example; the early Christians redefined marriage to forbid divorce, which was permitted in Judaism, but since the political rise of Ronald Reagan at least, conservative evangelicals have decided that divorce is tolerable, and their own divorce rate is higher than that of the general population.)
On top of everything else, it would be interesting to know why both Warren and Charen present themselves as willing to accept homosexual relationships short of marriage. I mean, if the government gives special rights to sodomitical couples instead of putting them in jail or executing them (as the 5,000-year definition of sodomy would require!), letting them have insurance, and visit each other in the hospital, isn't that approving homosexuality? Won't we have to let polygamists visit their wives, or incestuous couples have insurance? What are we going to tell the children?
Charen says,
Gays and lesbians argue that their same-sex unions are loving, committed relationships. Fine. But there are, or could be, other loving, committed relationships involving more than two people. Supporters of gay marriage say this is a ridiculous slippery slope argument.I'll pass on whether it's ridiculous, but it is a slippery slope argument, and as I've already suggested, it's a bit late to invoke it now that American traditionalists have already caved in on miscegenation, divorce, letting wives own property (or vote, or serve on juries, or keep their wages when they work outside the home), and so on -- they even seem to have given up on sodomy laws! To say nothing of Warren's claim that he supports equality for sodomites and sapphists. I don't believe he really means it, he's too cagey in his phrasing, but it's still a retreat from the grand Judeo-Christian tradition of stigmatizing queers.
My ambivalent Obama-supporting friend, by the way, referred me to Change.gov, the Obama Transition Team's site. It says there, inter alia, that "Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples." That's pretty clear, but 1) most state constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage also "affect unmarried relationships of same-sex and different-sex couples," according to Nancy Polikoff in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008, page 95), which means Obama has his work cut out for him; and 2) what's to stop same-sex couples in civil unions from considering and calling themselves married, especially if they decide to have a religious wedding of their own, which the law doesn't and can't forbid?
Virtually Freaky; or, The Slithery Slope
I was going to say something like "While I'm talking about religion...", but I'm not sure how much this is about religion. Ostensibly it's not, but religion's probably lurking beneath the surface.
IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.
IOZ linked to this article at National Review Online by Mona Charen, the author of a couple of attack books on anyone to the left of Ronald Reagan. It's an oddly half-hearted defense of Rick Warren, in particular of his comparison of homosexuality to polygamy, pedophilia, and incest. "Those were not the most felicitous comparisons and probably unnecessarily hurt the feelings of gays and lesbians," Charen allows. I hadn't looked at Warren's actual remarks before, and they're interesting if you look at them with any care.
Steven Waldman: Now you, one controversial moment for you in the last election was your support for proposition 8 in California. A couple of questions about that. First, to clarify, do you support civil unions or domestic partnerships?
Rick Warren: I don’t know if I use the term there, but I support full equal rights for everybody in America. I don’t believe that we should have unequal rights depending on particular lifestyles or whatever stuff like that. So I fully support equal rights.Steven Waldman: But what about, like, partnership benefits in terms of insurance or hospital visitation?
Rick Warren: You know, to me, not a problem with me. But the issue to me is, I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage. I’m opposed to having a brother and sister be together and call that marriage. I’m opposed to an older guy marrying a child and calling that a marriage. I’m opposed to one guy having multiple wives and calling that marriage.
It looks to me as though Warren is dodging the question about civil unions and domestic partnerships, though he does seem to say that insurance and hospital visitation are "no problem" with him. On the other hand, he also says, "I’m not opposed to that as much as I’m opposed to the redefinition of a 5,000-year definition of marriage," which means that he is opposed to guaranteeing insurance and hospital visitation for same-sex couples, but not as much as he is to letting them marry. I think he should be pressed closer on civil unions and domestic partnerships (which are not, be it noted, limited to same-sex couples). Don't let him blather about equal rights regardless of "particular lifestyles": does he or does he not approve of same-sex civil unions?
Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?
Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.
Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.
Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).
As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.
The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.
Look at what Warren says about "a 5,000-year definition of marriage." Even if I agree to let him focus solely on Judaism and Christianity here, he's being absurd. Brother and sister marriage? Abraham and Sarah, according to Genesis, were half-siblings -- same father, different mothers. Most people would call that incest, yet according to Genesis they were husband and wife. Who's Rick Warren, to go against Scripture?
Maybe Abraham and Sarah are an isolated case, but "one guy having multiple wives and calling it marriage"? That is virtually the norm in the Old Testament, as a Bible-believing pastor like Rick Warren must know, and when the Christian father St. Augustine wrote about marriage he conceded that biblically speaking, polygamy is lawful, but "Now indeed in our time, and in keeping with Roman custom, it is no longer allowed to take another wife, so as to have more than one wife living." It appears, then, that the ban on polygamy derives from Roman paganism, not Christianity. From Jacob, who married two sisters (and his first cousins), to Solomon with his seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, there is no suggestion that plural marriage is anything but marriage. Who's Rick Warren, to go against scripture? I'm not sure why people like him should be allowed to redefine marriage, etc., etc.
Mona Charen takes basically the same line in trying to defend Warren.
Once traditional marriage — supported by centuries of civilization and the major Western religions — is undermined in the name of love, there is no logical or principled reason to forbid polygamy, polyandry, or even incest. Gay activists recoil from incest. But on what grounds exactly? Suppose, after we formalize gay marriage, two 25-year-old sterile (to remove the health of offspring argument) twins wish to marry? Let’s suppose they are loving and committed. What is the objection? That it offends custom and tradition? That it offends God? Isn’t that just bigotry?I think that it's misleading to speak of "the major Western religions" as though there was a slew of them; granting Judaism "major" status because of its influence on Christianity, there seem to be two major Western religions. But as a Jew, Charen must know as well as Warren that "traditional marriage" is compatible with polygamy. In Judaism, plural marriage was only banned about a thousand years ago. Who's Mona Charen, to go against zillions of years of polygamous tradition?
Even more, she offers no "logical or principled reason" for opposing same-sex marriage, plural marriage, incest, or marriage between adults and children; all she does is appeal to "tradition." Tradition in the West has permitted slavery, anti-Semitism and other forms of racism, child labor, and many other practices that I doubt Charen would want to endorse now. (If Tradition still ruled, she'd be running a grocery stand in a ghetto while her husband did the studying and writing, but they'd both be worrying about pogroms and the Inquisition.) Adultery, traditionally, means having sexual relations with a married woman: a married man is allowed to stray with impunity, and as late as the end of the 1800s the English parliament refused to make a husband's adultery grounds for divorce, as a wife's adultery was already (see pages 38 and 39 at that link).
As for marriage between a child and an adult, the definition of a child has been in flux for some time. When Victoria became Queen of England in 1838, the age of consent was 10 (though a girl couldn't marry until she was 12), and it stayed there for most if not all of her reign. What most Americans and Britons nowadays would consider the marriage of a child to an adult was legal in an officially Christian nation in those days. (How old was Juliet again?) I'm not sure what the age of consent ought to be; logical and principled reasons for raising it above 10, as it was traditionally, seem to be in short supply, but I'm open to discussion.
The same goes for "incest." Leaving Abraham and Sarah aside, what about marriage between first cousins? Thirty-one states in the US forbid marriage between first cousins, though Canada and most European countries do not. As I mentioned before, the Bible seems to have no objection either. To be honest, I am not sure I see any logical or principled reasons to forbid even brothers and sisters from marrying; certainly Charen doesn't offer any. If there are no such reasons, maybe it should be permitted. Again, I'm open to discussion.
Please understand: my point here is not that I endorse polygamy, or the marriage of children to adults, or of siblings. My point is that Charen and Warren, and the gay and pro-gay Christians they oppose, have no real arguments against such practices either. Or against same-sex marriage, come to that. All they can do, apparently, is point to Tradition, as if it were monolithic and unanimous in its judgments. But it doesn't really support them. Despite all their babble about "redefining" marriage, marriage has been redefined in many ways over the past several millennia, let alone in the past half-century. (In 1967 the US Supreme Court redefined marriage in America to include mixed-race couples, for example; the early Christians redefined marriage to forbid divorce, which was permitted in Judaism, but since the political rise of Ronald Reagan at least, conservative evangelicals have decided that divorce is tolerable, and their own divorce rate is higher than that of the general population.)
On top of everything else, it would be interesting to know why both Warren and Charen present themselves as willing to accept homosexual relationships short of marriage. I mean, if the government gives special rights to sodomitical couples instead of putting them in jail or executing them (as the 5,000-year definition of sodomy would require!), letting them have insurance, and visit each other in the hospital, isn't that approving homosexuality? Won't we have to let polygamists visit their wives, or incestuous couples have insurance? What are we going to tell the children?
Charen says,
Gays and lesbians argue that their same-sex unions are loving, committed relationships. Fine. But there are, or could be, other loving, committed relationships involving more than two people. Supporters of gay marriage say this is a ridiculous slippery slope argument.I'll pass on whether it's ridiculous, but it is a slippery slope argument, and as I've already suggested, it's a bit late to invoke it now that American traditionalists have already caved in on miscegenation, divorce, letting wives own property (or vote, or serve on juries, or keep their wages when they work outside the home), and so on -- they even seem to have given up on sodomy laws! To say nothing of Warren's claim that he supports equality for sodomites and sapphists. I don't believe he really means it, he's too cagey in his phrasing, but it's still a retreat from the grand Judeo-Christian tradition of stigmatizing queers.
My ambivalent Obama-supporting friend, by the way, referred me to Change.gov, the Obama Transition Team's site. It says there, inter alia, that "Barack Obama supports full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples." That's pretty clear, but 1) most state constitutional amendments that ban same-sex marriage also "affect unmarried relationships of same-sex and different-sex couples," according to Nancy Polikoff in Beyond (Straight and Gay) Marriage (Beacon, 2008, page 95), which means Obama has his work cut out for him; and 2) what's to stop same-sex couples in civil unions from considering and calling themselves married, especially if they decide to have a religious wedding of their own, which the law doesn't and can't forbid?
Virtually Satirical
Just to return his courtesy, I should mention that Jon Swift has posted "Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen By The Bloggers Themselves)." Though Jon is a reasonable conservative, he allows even crazed radicals like your Promiscuous Reader to participate. It's worth browsing through his compilation; I found several interesting posts in it, and I daresay you will too.
Virtually Satirical
Just to return his courtesy, I should mention that Jon Swift has posted "Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen By The Bloggers Themselves)." Though Jon is a reasonable conservative, he allows even crazed radicals like your Promiscuous Reader to participate. It's worth browsing through his compilation; I found several interesting posts in it, and I daresay you will too.
Virtually Catholic
Homo Superior features several quotations that come from Andrew Sullivan's blog, either directly or filtered through him. I've never liked Sullivan, but there's some interesting stuff here that I wanted to comment on. This, for example:
No reason is given for the prohibition of sex between males in Leviticus, except that such behavior is hateful ("an abomination") to Yahweh, so in that sense it's true that Leviticus doesn't develop a "concept of homosexuality as such." That hasn't kept either anti-gay or pro-gay Christians from reading their own obsessions into it. Pro-gay Christians try to explain the Levitical prohibition as being actually a prohibition of male-to-male rape, though there's nothing in the text to support this; or based on a belief that sex between males confuses gender, though again there's nothing in the text to support that theory; or that the prohibition refers to same-sex 'cult prostitution' in ancient pagan fertility cults, though there's nothing in the text to support that either, and how would two men bonin' symbolize fertility anyway? Sullivan's notion that Leviticus forbids sex between "two heterosexuals of the same gender" also has no basis in the biblical text. It's true that you can't just yank verses out of context without a "larger theological argument", but your theological argument has to make sense of the text.
What is probably the only New Testament reference to homosexuality, in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, arguably does have a conception of homosexuality as such. It occurs in a diatribe against paganism which declares that even though human beings had good reason to see one creator God behind the world they lived in, they deliberately refused to worship Yahweh and chose instead to worship idols.
Modern pro-gay Christian interpreters have read some odd theories into Romans 1:26-28. Some, again, think it refers to 'cult prostitution'; others that it it refers to people who were constituted heterosexual by nature, but wickedly chose to engage in homosexual sex anyway. (This is probably what Sullivan means by "sex by heterosexuals of the same gender", drawing on the theories of D. S. Bailey as modified by John Boswell.) Some think that the payment in their own persons refers to venereal disease, as though STDs were unknown among heterosexuals. (See my comments on James Nelson's discussion of Romans here; he tries to save Paul's polemic against the gentiles while being pro-gay.)
It's odd to see Sullivan denouncing "fundamentalists" for their inadequate approach to scripture here, just as Pope Rat was getting ready to attack homosexuality in basically the same terms as Pat Robertson or Rick Warren. Back in the days when he was just plain old Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul's hammer of heretics, in Sullivan's 1995 opus Virtually Normal he fawned on Ratzinger as a fount of compassion and opposition to bigotry:
Besides, Andrew Sullivan is a layman, so why should I take his analysis of the Bible or of Church teaching on sexuality to be authoritative? Better thinkers than he, including the gay Catholic theologian, Mark Jordan, have shown the flaws in his, um, reasoning. (See Jordan's The Silence of Sodom [Chicago, 2000], especially page 29ff.)
For me the most memorable Christian response to homosexuality has always been a 1973 article by a Methodist clergyman named Robert L. Treese and published in Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (Glide Publications, 1974), an influential collection edited by Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson. The article, "Homosexuality: a Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective", begins with these words:
I'm far from the first person to notice that Yahweh tells his different human intermediaries diametrically different things. First they need to sort out how I'm supposed to tell which one of them is telling the truth about their hotline to heaven. As for Yahweh himself, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax said, even if the gods exist that's no reason to believe in them -- it only encourages them.
The essence of fundamentalism is not, it seems to me, the assertion that Christ is the same “yesterday, today and forever” (I believe the same and my faith is anti-fundamentalist); it is the assertion that every single aspect in the bewilderingly expansive and contradictory and over-determined texts we call the Bible are literally true in every particular and every injunction should be applied today as literally as possible.Why are so many critics of fundamentalism obsessed with "literalism"? (Especially since so few people seem to know what "literal" means.) Conservative evangelical Christianity (which is what is generally meant by "fundamentalism" in a Christian context) shares with Sullivan's Roman Catholicism the postulate that the Bible is inerrant, which is not at all the same thing as taking it literally. Far from it, in fact -- to interpret the Bible so as to preserve it from error requires very non-literal interpretation. But I've written about this before. Now we get to watch Sullivan applying his own fundamentalism to the Bible.
So a vast document that has only a handful of opaque references to sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender and no concept of homosexuality as such requires interpretation. We cannot resolve this issue by the plain meaning of the text alone. The minute we do this reduction - with, say, the Leviticus proscriptions - we are required to explain further why the prohibition of eating shell-fish is no longer operable. And an attempt to insist on the eternal, literal authority of Scripture with respect to marriage in churches that accept divorce - plainly and clearly ruled illicit by Jesus himself - reveals the deep intellectual confusion among the fundamentalists.First, of course, the Bible is not a document but a collection of documents; it reveals Sullivan's own theological preconceptions that he refers to it as if it were a single, unified text. The references the Bible contains to sex between males, though it's true there aren't many of them, are not really "opaque" -- they're clear enough -- nor are they about "sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender". (More on that in a moment.) Sullivan's claim that the Bible has "no concept of homosexuality as such" is false; what he really means is that its concept of homosexuality doesn't agree with his. The Biblical writers arguably didn't consider homosexuality to be an expression of an internal biological condition that shuts off heterosexual function and imposes same-sex expression instead, which is Sullivan's concept, but that doesn't mean they didn't have one, or several, of their own.
No reason is given for the prohibition of sex between males in Leviticus, except that such behavior is hateful ("an abomination") to Yahweh, so in that sense it's true that Leviticus doesn't develop a "concept of homosexuality as such." That hasn't kept either anti-gay or pro-gay Christians from reading their own obsessions into it. Pro-gay Christians try to explain the Levitical prohibition as being actually a prohibition of male-to-male rape, though there's nothing in the text to support this; or based on a belief that sex between males confuses gender, though again there's nothing in the text to support that theory; or that the prohibition refers to same-sex 'cult prostitution' in ancient pagan fertility cults, though there's nothing in the text to support that either, and how would two men bonin' symbolize fertility anyway? Sullivan's notion that Leviticus forbids sex between "two heterosexuals of the same gender" also has no basis in the biblical text. It's true that you can't just yank verses out of context without a "larger theological argument", but your theological argument has to make sense of the text.
What is probably the only New Testament reference to homosexuality, in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, arguably does have a conception of homosexuality as such. It occurs in a diatribe against paganism which declares that even though human beings had good reason to see one creator God behind the world they lived in, they deliberately refused to worship Yahweh and chose instead to worship idols.
[24] Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,This passage treats homosexuality not just as isolated acts, but as the expression of desire, and indeed as desires inflicted by Yahweh as a punishment for idolatry. It's not what I'd consider a workable explanation of why some men desire others erotically, but it's a theory in its own right, and one which numerous modern Christian writers have not cared to abandon entirely. It doesn't explain why all pagan men didn't burn with lust for each other, or for that matter why some Jewish men did. But modern scientific theories are pretty inadequate too, which doesn't keep Sullivan from waving them around as if they were solidly proved. (For that matter, I've argued that contemporary science doesn't have a concept of homosexuality as such, only of tops and bottoms, penetrators and penetrated. Science may turn out to be correct -- time will tell -- but it doesn't support Sullivan's position.)
[25] because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
[26] For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural,
[27] and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
[28] And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct.
[29] They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips,
[30] slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
[31] foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
[32] Though they know God's decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.
Modern pro-gay Christian interpreters have read some odd theories into Romans 1:26-28. Some, again, think it refers to 'cult prostitution'; others that it it refers to people who were constituted heterosexual by nature, but wickedly chose to engage in homosexual sex anyway. (This is probably what Sullivan means by "sex by heterosexuals of the same gender", drawing on the theories of D. S. Bailey as modified by John Boswell.) Some think that the payment in their own persons refers to venereal disease, as though STDs were unknown among heterosexuals. (See my comments on James Nelson's discussion of Romans here; he tries to save Paul's polemic against the gentiles while being pro-gay.)
It's odd to see Sullivan denouncing "fundamentalists" for their inadequate approach to scripture here, just as Pope Rat was getting ready to attack homosexuality in basically the same terms as Pat Robertson or Rick Warren. Back in the days when he was just plain old Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul's hammer of heretics, in Sullivan's 1995 opus Virtually Normal he fawned on Ratzinger as a fount of compassion and opposition to bigotry:
And the Catholic Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of homosexuals, or its compassion for their plight.Doesn't that just make you feel loved? Sullivan is describing here Church documents which warned that the gay movement would, regrettably, cause decent people to lose control and attack us; which insisted that homosexuals were "objectively disordered"; and which opposed "unjust discrimination" against us, but considered most forms of discrimination against us to be just. The guys in funny hats who wrote these documents had both a concept of homosexuality as such and a larger theological argument; Sullivan wrote in Virtually Normal that what he called "prohibitionism" has "a rich literature, an extensive history, a complex philosophical core, and a view of humanity that tells a coherent and sometimes beautiful story of the meaning of our natural selves" (23) -- yet despite all these qualifications, the Vatican's position on homosexuality is hardly distinguishable from that of Sullivan's "fundamentalists."
... the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by antigay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their sexuality ... [while] simultaneously, it deepened and strengthened its condemnation of any homosexual sexual activity [page 36].
Besides, Andrew Sullivan is a layman, so why should I take his analysis of the Bible or of Church teaching on sexuality to be authoritative? Better thinkers than he, including the gay Catholic theologian, Mark Jordan, have shown the flaws in his, um, reasoning. (See Jordan's The Silence of Sodom [Chicago, 2000], especially page 29ff.)
For me the most memorable Christian response to homosexuality has always been a 1973 article by a Methodist clergyman named Robert L. Treese and published in Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (Glide Publications, 1974), an influential collection edited by Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson. The article, "Homosexuality: a Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective", begins with these words:
What is God trying to tell us about homosexuality? About sexuality? About creativity and the redemptive community today? These are the questions this paper attempts to face.I've never been able to read or think of this opening without thinking of theology as a game of Charades, with Yahweh jumping about in his white robe and long beard, gesturing theatrically: First word -- sounds like -- abomination! The situation hasn't improved in the past 35 years. On one hand we have those who advise us to turn up our hearing aids so that we can hear what Yahweh is 'trying to tell us'; I have little doubt that an omnipotent deity with firm ideas about human conduct could find a way to make himself heard if he wanted to. On the other hand, we have the fundamentalists of various positions, antigay or pro-gay, who have Yahweh on the cell phone and know exactly what he wants of us.
I'm far from the first person to notice that Yahweh tells his different human intermediaries diametrically different things. First they need to sort out how I'm supposed to tell which one of them is telling the truth about their hotline to heaven. As for Yahweh himself, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax said, even if the gods exist that's no reason to believe in them -- it only encourages them.
Virtually Catholic
Homo Superior features several quotations that come from Andrew Sullivan's blog, either directly or filtered through him. I've never liked Sullivan, but there's some interesting stuff here that I wanted to comment on. This, for example:
No reason is given for the prohibition of sex between males in Leviticus, except that such behavior is hateful ("an abomination") to Yahweh, so in that sense it's true that Leviticus doesn't develop a "concept of homosexuality as such." That hasn't kept either anti-gay or pro-gay Christians from reading their own obsessions into it. Pro-gay Christians try to explain the Levitical prohibition as being actually a prohibition of male-to-male rape, though there's nothing in the text to support this; or based on a belief that sex between males confuses gender, though again there's nothing in the text to support that theory; or that the prohibition refers to same-sex 'cult prostitution' in ancient pagan fertility cults, though there's nothing in the text to support that either, and how would two men bonin' symbolize fertility anyway? Sullivan's notion that Leviticus forbids sex between "two heterosexuals of the same gender" also has no basis in the biblical text. It's true that you can't just yank verses out of context without a "larger theological argument", but your theological argument has to make sense of the text.
What is probably the only New Testament reference to homosexuality, in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, arguably does have a conception of homosexuality as such. It occurs in a diatribe against paganism which declares that even though human beings had good reason to see one creator God behind the world they lived in, they deliberately refused to worship Yahweh and chose instead to worship idols.
Modern pro-gay Christian interpreters have read some odd theories into Romans 1:26-28. Some, again, think it refers to 'cult prostitution'; others that it it refers to people who were constituted heterosexual by nature, but wickedly chose to engage in homosexual sex anyway. (This is probably what Sullivan means by "sex by heterosexuals of the same gender", drawing on the theories of D. S. Bailey as modified by John Boswell.) Some think that the payment in their own persons refers to venereal disease, as though STDs were unknown among heterosexuals. (See my comments on James Nelson's discussion of Romans here; he tries to save Paul's polemic against the gentiles while being pro-gay.)
It's odd to see Sullivan denouncing "fundamentalists" for their inadequate approach to scripture here, just as Pope Rat was getting ready to attack homosexuality in basically the same terms as Pat Robertson or Rick Warren. Back in the days when he was just plain old Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul's hammer of heretics, in Sullivan's 1995 opus Virtually Normal he fawned on Ratzinger as a fount of compassion and opposition to bigotry:
Besides, Andrew Sullivan is a layman, so why should I take his analysis of the Bible or of Church teaching on sexuality to be authoritative? Better thinkers than he, including the gay Catholic theologian, Mark Jordan, have shown the flaws in his, um, reasoning. (See Jordan's The Silence of Sodom [Chicago, 2000], especially page 29ff.)
For me the most memorable Christian response to homosexuality has always been a 1973 article by a Methodist clergyman named Robert L. Treese and published in Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (Glide Publications, 1974), an influential collection edited by Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson. The article, "Homosexuality: a Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective", begins with these words:
I'm far from the first person to notice that Yahweh tells his different human intermediaries diametrically different things. First they need to sort out how I'm supposed to tell which one of them is telling the truth about their hotline to heaven. As for Yahweh himself, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax said, even if the gods exist that's no reason to believe in them -- it only encourages them.
The essence of fundamentalism is not, it seems to me, the assertion that Christ is the same “yesterday, today and forever” (I believe the same and my faith is anti-fundamentalist); it is the assertion that every single aspect in the bewilderingly expansive and contradictory and over-determined texts we call the Bible are literally true in every particular and every injunction should be applied today as literally as possible.Why are so many critics of fundamentalism obsessed with "literalism"? (Especially since so few people seem to know what "literal" means.) Conservative evangelical Christianity (which is what is generally meant by "fundamentalism" in a Christian context) shares with Sullivan's Roman Catholicism the postulate that the Bible is inerrant, which is not at all the same thing as taking it literally. Far from it, in fact -- to interpret the Bible so as to preserve it from error requires very non-literal interpretation. But I've written about this before. Now we get to watch Sullivan applying his own fundamentalism to the Bible.
So a vast document that has only a handful of opaque references to sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender and no concept of homosexuality as such requires interpretation. We cannot resolve this issue by the plain meaning of the text alone. The minute we do this reduction - with, say, the Leviticus proscriptions - we are required to explain further why the prohibition of eating shell-fish is no longer operable. And an attempt to insist on the eternal, literal authority of Scripture with respect to marriage in churches that accept divorce - plainly and clearly ruled illicit by Jesus himself - reveals the deep intellectual confusion among the fundamentalists.First, of course, the Bible is not a document but a collection of documents; it reveals Sullivan's own theological preconceptions that he refers to it as if it were a single, unified text. The references the Bible contains to sex between males, though it's true there aren't many of them, are not really "opaque" -- they're clear enough -- nor are they about "sex between two heterosexuals of the same gender". (More on that in a moment.) Sullivan's claim that the Bible has "no concept of homosexuality as such" is false; what he really means is that its concept of homosexuality doesn't agree with his. The Biblical writers arguably didn't consider homosexuality to be an expression of an internal biological condition that shuts off heterosexual function and imposes same-sex expression instead, which is Sullivan's concept, but that doesn't mean they didn't have one, or several, of their own.
No reason is given for the prohibition of sex between males in Leviticus, except that such behavior is hateful ("an abomination") to Yahweh, so in that sense it's true that Leviticus doesn't develop a "concept of homosexuality as such." That hasn't kept either anti-gay or pro-gay Christians from reading their own obsessions into it. Pro-gay Christians try to explain the Levitical prohibition as being actually a prohibition of male-to-male rape, though there's nothing in the text to support this; or based on a belief that sex between males confuses gender, though again there's nothing in the text to support that theory; or that the prohibition refers to same-sex 'cult prostitution' in ancient pagan fertility cults, though there's nothing in the text to support that either, and how would two men bonin' symbolize fertility anyway? Sullivan's notion that Leviticus forbids sex between "two heterosexuals of the same gender" also has no basis in the biblical text. It's true that you can't just yank verses out of context without a "larger theological argument", but your theological argument has to make sense of the text.
What is probably the only New Testament reference to homosexuality, in the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, arguably does have a conception of homosexuality as such. It occurs in a diatribe against paganism which declares that even though human beings had good reason to see one creator God behind the world they lived in, they deliberately refused to worship Yahweh and chose instead to worship idols.
[24] Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves,This passage treats homosexuality not just as isolated acts, but as the expression of desire, and indeed as desires inflicted by Yahweh as a punishment for idolatry. It's not what I'd consider a workable explanation of why some men desire others erotically, but it's a theory in its own right, and one which numerous modern Christian writers have not cared to abandon entirely. It doesn't explain why all pagan men didn't burn with lust for each other, or for that matter why some Jewish men did. But modern scientific theories are pretty inadequate too, which doesn't keep Sullivan from waving them around as if they were solidly proved. (For that matter, I've argued that contemporary science doesn't have a concept of homosexuality as such, only of tops and bottoms, penetrators and penetrated. Science may turn out to be correct -- time will tell -- but it doesn't support Sullivan's position.)
[25] because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.
[26] For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. Their women exchanged natural relations for unnatural,
[27] and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in their own persons the due penalty for their error.
[28] And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct.
[29] They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips,
[30] slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents,
[31] foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.
[32] Though they know God's decree that those who do such things deserve to die, they not only do them but approve those who practice them.
Modern pro-gay Christian interpreters have read some odd theories into Romans 1:26-28. Some, again, think it refers to 'cult prostitution'; others that it it refers to people who were constituted heterosexual by nature, but wickedly chose to engage in homosexual sex anyway. (This is probably what Sullivan means by "sex by heterosexuals of the same gender", drawing on the theories of D. S. Bailey as modified by John Boswell.) Some think that the payment in their own persons refers to venereal disease, as though STDs were unknown among heterosexuals. (See my comments on James Nelson's discussion of Romans here; he tries to save Paul's polemic against the gentiles while being pro-gay.)
It's odd to see Sullivan denouncing "fundamentalists" for their inadequate approach to scripture here, just as Pope Rat was getting ready to attack homosexuality in basically the same terms as Pat Robertson or Rick Warren. Back in the days when he was just plain old Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope John Paul's hammer of heretics, in Sullivan's 1995 opus Virtually Normal he fawned on Ratzinger as a fount of compassion and opposition to bigotry:
And the Catholic Church doggedly refused to budge from its assertion of the natural occurrence of homosexuals, or its compassion for their plight.Doesn't that just make you feel loved? Sullivan is describing here Church documents which warned that the gay movement would, regrettably, cause decent people to lose control and attack us; which insisted that homosexuals were "objectively disordered"; and which opposed "unjust discrimination" against us, but considered most forms of discrimination against us to be just. The guys in funny hats who wrote these documents had both a concept of homosexuality as such and a larger theological argument; Sullivan wrote in Virtually Normal that what he called "prohibitionism" has "a rich literature, an extensive history, a complex philosophical core, and a view of humanity that tells a coherent and sometimes beautiful story of the meaning of our natural selves" (23) -- yet despite all these qualifications, the Vatican's position on homosexuality is hardly distinguishable from that of Sullivan's "fundamentalists."
... the Church stood foursquare against bigotry, against demeaning homosexuals either by antigay slander or violence or by pro-gay attempts to reduce human beings to one aspect of their sexuality ... [while] simultaneously, it deepened and strengthened its condemnation of any homosexual sexual activity [page 36].
Besides, Andrew Sullivan is a layman, so why should I take his analysis of the Bible or of Church teaching on sexuality to be authoritative? Better thinkers than he, including the gay Catholic theologian, Mark Jordan, have shown the flaws in his, um, reasoning. (See Jordan's The Silence of Sodom [Chicago, 2000], especially page 29ff.)
For me the most memorable Christian response to homosexuality has always been a 1973 article by a Methodist clergyman named Robert L. Treese and published in Loving Women / Loving Men: Gay Liberation and the Church (Glide Publications, 1974), an influential collection edited by Sally Gearhart and William R. Johnson. The article, "Homosexuality: a Contemporary View of the Biblical Perspective", begins with these words:
What is God trying to tell us about homosexuality? About sexuality? About creativity and the redemptive community today? These are the questions this paper attempts to face.I've never been able to read or think of this opening without thinking of theology as a game of Charades, with Yahweh jumping about in his white robe and long beard, gesturing theatrically: First word -- sounds like -- abomination! The situation hasn't improved in the past 35 years. On one hand we have those who advise us to turn up our hearing aids so that we can hear what Yahweh is 'trying to tell us'; I have little doubt that an omnipotent deity with firm ideas about human conduct could find a way to make himself heard if he wanted to. On the other hand, we have the fundamentalists of various positions, antigay or pro-gay, who have Yahweh on the cell phone and know exactly what he wants of us.
I'm far from the first person to notice that Yahweh tells his different human intermediaries diametrically different things. First they need to sort out how I'm supposed to tell which one of them is telling the truth about their hotline to heaven. As for Yahweh himself, as Terry Pratchett's Granny Weatherwax said, even if the gods exist that's no reason to believe in them -- it only encourages them.
Park Hyo Shin
I haven't done a video introduction to a Korean pop musician in a while, and I still have a few who deserve your attention. This time it is Park Hyo Shin, whom a friend recommended to me a few years ago. I bought his fourth CD, Soul Tree, which at the time was his newest work. Much of it was pretty standard K-pop ballads, but a couple of tracks caught my attention, especially "Hey U Come On":
The distracting sax squeal (probably sampled) is mixed too prominently in this clip, but it's the best version I could find on YouTube; and aside from that cavil, it's a good performance. Park's voice reminds me of various American R&B singers I liked in the 80s, like Jeffrey Osborne or James Ingram.
Park has also performed with other singers, often from outside Korea:
And with other Korean singers. I'm trying to remember where I first heard this song, if it was on a compilation or on one of Park's albums:
The second, of course, is from Disney's Aladdin. (There seem to be a number of versions of this song by K-pop singers on YouTube.)
Park has also been doing some slightly different things, possibly trying to leave his teenybopper idol image behind. (He was only about 20 when he put out his first album, and I was surprised, when I first heard his singing, to learn how young he was.) This clip, for example, shows him improvising and scatting in a radio studio with a keyboard player and drummer, and then singing a trote, an older Korean pop form.
His voice is so distinctive that I doubt he will ever be able to broaden his range very far -- I suppose that's one reason, aside from Show Biz reasons, that he's doing all those duets and collaborations, to participate in some different sounds. I enjoy him enough, though, to want to keep track of his work. There's a lot of clips featuring him on YouTube (including a creepy news item from the time in 2007 he checked into a hospital suffering from stress), so look him up if you find these samples interesting.
The distracting sax squeal (probably sampled) is mixed too prominently in this clip, but it's the best version I could find on YouTube; and aside from that cavil, it's a good performance. Park's voice reminds me of various American R&B singers I liked in the 80s, like Jeffrey Osborne or James Ingram.
Park has also performed with other singers, often from outside Korea:
And with other Korean singers. I'm trying to remember where I first heard this song, if it was on a compilation or on one of Park's albums:
The second, of course, is from Disney's Aladdin. (There seem to be a number of versions of this song by K-pop singers on YouTube.)
Park has also been doing some slightly different things, possibly trying to leave his teenybopper idol image behind. (He was only about 20 when he put out his first album, and I was surprised, when I first heard his singing, to learn how young he was.) This clip, for example, shows him improvising and scatting in a radio studio with a keyboard player and drummer, and then singing a trote, an older Korean pop form.
His voice is so distinctive that I doubt he will ever be able to broaden his range very far -- I suppose that's one reason, aside from Show Biz reasons, that he's doing all those duets and collaborations, to participate in some different sounds. I enjoy him enough, though, to want to keep track of his work. There's a lot of clips featuring him on YouTube (including a creepy news item from the time in 2007 he checked into a hospital suffering from stress), so look him up if you find these samples interesting.
Park Hyo Shin
I haven't done a video introduction to a Korean pop musician in a while, and I still have a few who deserve your attention. This time it is Park Hyo Shin, whom a friend recommended to me a few years ago. I bought his fourth CD, Soul Tree, which at the time was his newest work. Much of it was pretty standard K-pop ballads, but a couple of tracks caught my attention, especially "Hey U Come On":
The distracting sax squeal (probably sampled) is mixed too prominently in this clip, but it's the best version I could find on YouTube; and aside from that cavil, it's a good performance. Park's voice reminds me of various American R&B singers I liked in the 80s, like Jeffrey Osborne or James Ingram.
Park has also performed with other singers, often from outside Korea:
And with other Korean singers. I'm trying to remember where I first heard this song, if it was on a compilation or on one of Park's albums:
The second, of course, is from Disney's Aladdin. (There seem to be a number of versions of this song by K-pop singers on YouTube.)
Park has also been doing some slightly different things, possibly trying to leave his teenybopper idol image behind. (He was only about 20 when he put out his first album, and I was surprised, when I first heard his singing, to learn how young he was.) This clip, for example, shows him improvising and scatting in a radio studio with a keyboard player and drummer, and then singing a trote, an older Korean pop form.
His voice is so distinctive that I doubt he will ever be able to broaden his range very far -- I suppose that's one reason, aside from Show Biz reasons, that he's doing all those duets and collaborations, to participate in some different sounds. I enjoy him enough, though, to want to keep track of his work. There's a lot of clips featuring him on YouTube (including a creepy news item from the time in 2007 he checked into a hospital suffering from stress), so look him up if you find these samples interesting.
The distracting sax squeal (probably sampled) is mixed too prominently in this clip, but it's the best version I could find on YouTube; and aside from that cavil, it's a good performance. Park's voice reminds me of various American R&B singers I liked in the 80s, like Jeffrey Osborne or James Ingram.
Park has also performed with other singers, often from outside Korea:
And with other Korean singers. I'm trying to remember where I first heard this song, if it was on a compilation or on one of Park's albums:
The second, of course, is from Disney's Aladdin. (There seem to be a number of versions of this song by K-pop singers on YouTube.)
Park has also been doing some slightly different things, possibly trying to leave his teenybopper idol image behind. (He was only about 20 when he put out his first album, and I was surprised, when I first heard his singing, to learn how young he was.) This clip, for example, shows him improvising and scatting in a radio studio with a keyboard player and drummer, and then singing a trote, an older Korean pop form.
His voice is so distinctive that I doubt he will ever be able to broaden his range very far -- I suppose that's one reason, aside from Show Biz reasons, that he's doing all those duets and collaborations, to participate in some different sounds. I enjoy him enough, though, to want to keep track of his work. There's a lot of clips featuring him on YouTube (including a creepy news item from the time in 2007 he checked into a hospital suffering from stress), so look him up if you find these samples interesting.
If Helen Keller Could Get Through Life, We Certainly Can
I got my old copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975) off the shelf last night and looked through it; I'm thinking of trying to read at least some of it while I'm still on vacation. I bought it soon after its original publication, partly because I always liked Black Sparrow's book design and partly because Spicer was said to be gay. Back then it seemed possible to keep up with all the gay poets, and it even seemed important to do so, whether I liked their work or not. I kept meaning to read Spicer. His poetry looked interesting, if not exactly welcoming, but what with several thousand other books to read I never got around to it.What led me to dig out that particular book was the news of the recent publication of My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. The new volume contains a lot more material than the earlier one, and maybe I'll look for it at the library after I read the Collected Books. I learned about My Vocabulary Did This to Me (the title is reportedly Spicer's last words; actually it was booze that did him in, at the age of 40) from a post at Christopher Hennessey's blog Outside the Lines. Hennessey quotes the New York Times review of My Vocabulary, which says that its editors "speak touchingly of his 'status as an unattractive gay man.'" So does the Time Out review. Rub it in, why don't you?
Y'know, I'm a well-known pervert, but from the photos I've found online I wouldn't say that Spicer was unattractive. (I found both here; the one on the left is credited to the collection of Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, the one on the right to the photographer, Robert Berg.) I guess what these people mean that he wasn't a gym-toned Adonis. If so, who among Spicer's contemporaries, gay or straight, was? Allen Ginsberg? Robert Duncan? Chester Kallmann? Frank O'Hara? John Ashbery? James Merrill had a sort of elfin cuteness about him, I suppose, but no one was going to put him in an Abercrombie ad. From these photos it looks to me as if Spicer had a sweetness and vulnerability that I find kinda sexy. No doubt the drinking didn't do his looks any good as he got older. And of course he's dead now, which I find a bit of a turnoff.
From the other stuff that Christopher Hennessey linked to, it seems that Spicer wouldn't have been the easiest person to love. (Not that I'm casting the first stone, mind you!) And like many people, he no doubt fell in love with people who didn't reciprocate, maybe even people whose value in the sexual marketplace was higher than his. Maybe, like many people, he went around complaining that he was unattractive and no one loved him, perhaps in hopes that this would make them feel sorry for him and see his inner beauty. I don't know much about Spicer's life, let alone his love life, so I can't say: I'm mainly generalizing from my own experience and that of other men I've known. But worse-looking men have found love, sometimes even with much better-looking men than they were. And I have to wonder why these reviewers, or Spicer's editors for that matter, felt it relevant to dwell on Spicer's looks. (He may have been a great poet but nyeah nyeah, Jack Spicer couldn't get laid!)
Somewhere Edmund White wrote, or said, that back in his most promiscuous days he still felt that he was getting hardly any sex, and that lots of other guys must be getting more. At some point he recognized that in fact he was getting a lot of sex, with hundreds or even thousands of partners, but he still felt deprived. I hope that Jack Spicer got his share of nooky and love; he seems, however, to have known with some confidence that he was writing good poetry. (At the site where I found those pictures you can find him speaking with assurance, in a public lecture, about his art and that of others.) If I had a time machine, I'd go back to 1955 and hit on him, but how much do you want to bet he'd turn me down?
If Helen Keller Could Get Through Life, We Certainly Can
I got my old copy of The Collected Books of Jack Spicer (Black Sparrow Press, 1975) off the shelf last night and looked through it; I'm thinking of trying to read at least some of it while I'm still on vacation. I bought it soon after its original publication, partly because I always liked Black Sparrow's book design and partly because Spicer was said to be gay. Back then it seemed possible to keep up with all the gay poets, and it even seemed important to do so, whether I liked their work or not. I kept meaning to read Spicer. His poetry looked interesting, if not exactly welcoming, but what with several thousand other books to read I never got around to it.What led me to dig out that particular book was the news of the recent publication of My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan University Press), edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. The new volume contains a lot more material than the earlier one, and maybe I'll look for it at the library after I read the Collected Books. I learned about My Vocabulary Did This to Me (the title is reportedly Spicer's last words; actually it was booze that did him in, at the age of 40) from a post at Christopher Hennessey's blog Outside the Lines. Hennessey quotes the New York Times review of My Vocabulary, which says that its editors "speak touchingly of his 'status as an unattractive gay man.'" So does the Time Out review. Rub it in, why don't you?
Y'know, I'm a well-known pervert, but from the photos I've found online I wouldn't say that Spicer was unattractive. (I found both here; the one on the left is credited to the collection of Lewis Ellingham and Kevin Killian, the one on the right to the photographer, Robert Berg.) I guess what these people mean that he wasn't a gym-toned Adonis. If so, who among Spicer's contemporaries, gay or straight, was? Allen Ginsberg? Robert Duncan? Chester Kallmann? Frank O'Hara? John Ashbery? James Merrill had a sort of elfin cuteness about him, I suppose, but no one was going to put him in an Abercrombie ad. From these photos it looks to me as if Spicer had a sweetness and vulnerability that I find kinda sexy. No doubt the drinking didn't do his looks any good as he got older. And of course he's dead now, which I find a bit of a turnoff.
From the other stuff that Christopher Hennessey linked to, it seems that Spicer wouldn't have been the easiest person to love. (Not that I'm casting the first stone, mind you!) And like many people, he no doubt fell in love with people who didn't reciprocate, maybe even people whose value in the sexual marketplace was higher than his. Maybe, like many people, he went around complaining that he was unattractive and no one loved him, perhaps in hopes that this would make them feel sorry for him and see his inner beauty. I don't know much about Spicer's life, let alone his love life, so I can't say: I'm mainly generalizing from my own experience and that of other men I've known. But worse-looking men have found love, sometimes even with much better-looking men than they were. And I have to wonder why these reviewers, or Spicer's editors for that matter, felt it relevant to dwell on Spicer's looks. (He may have been a great poet but nyeah nyeah, Jack Spicer couldn't get laid!)
Somewhere Edmund White wrote, or said, that back in his most promiscuous days he still felt that he was getting hardly any sex, and that lots of other guys must be getting more. At some point he recognized that in fact he was getting a lot of sex, with hundreds or even thousands of partners, but he still felt deprived. I hope that Jack Spicer got his share of nooky and love; he seems, however, to have known with some confidence that he was writing good poetry. (At the site where I found those pictures you can find him speaking with assurance, in a public lecture, about his art and that of others.) If I had a time machine, I'd go back to 1955 and hit on him, but how much do you want to bet he'd turn me down?
Sanctified
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in comments on another blog that many gay people, including advocates of same-sex marriage, confuse civil marriage with religious marriage. Another commenter said that she had participated in some big anti-Proposition 8 protests, and she'd never seen anyone making that mistake. I haven't replied yet, but when (or if) I do, I'll say something to the effect that she probably just hadn't noticed the confusion. (Perhaps because she's not completely free of it herself, as shown by some things she said.) Once you start noticing something, it turns up everywhere.For example, at the Nation website, Richard Kim (who's often written for them on GLBT issues, and so is probably gay himself) has a sensible article on GLBT liberals' feeling of betrayal because their Messiah-elect invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. I thank Kim for the information that Warren's ballyhooed global AIDS programs, "some funded by Bush's global AIDS plan, advocated abstinence-only education and Christian conversion." Just as I thought.
Kim notes Obama's oft-quoted remark that "my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman." And then he writes:
But here's the bright spot for gays and lesbians: there's actually common ground that they might find with Obama and Pastor Rick--it's just not on religious terms. Both say they support full equal rights for gays and lesbians. Let's test this premise by pushing forward a federal civil union bill that guarantees all the rights of marriage for same-sex couples, as Obama has suggested in his platform. Perhaps over time, some straights will want in on this God-free institution too, and we'll have civil unions for everyone. Then Warren will be free to sanctify as marriages only the unions he likes. And I'll be free to sanctify mine by whatever idol I choose, or to choose not to at all.Um, Richard, we already have a "God-free institution" that "guarantees all the rights of marriage", if only for mixed-sex couples at the moment. It's called civil marriage, and it's available in every state of the union. It's not sanctified unless the couple involved chooses to take it to church. Warren is already "free to sanctify as marriages only the unions he likes", as is every other minister or priest. Civil marriage is not religious marriage, okay? I swear, you children are just saying these things to drive me crazy!
(Image above from here.)
Sanctified
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned in comments on another blog that many gay people, including advocates of same-sex marriage, confuse civil marriage with religious marriage. Another commenter said that she had participated in some big anti-Proposition 8 protests, and she'd never seen anyone making that mistake. I haven't replied yet, but when (or if) I do, I'll say something to the effect that she probably just hadn't noticed the confusion. (Perhaps because she's not completely free of it herself, as shown by some things she said.) Once you start noticing something, it turns up everywhere.For example, at the Nation website, Richard Kim (who's often written for them on GLBT issues, and so is probably gay himself) has a sensible article on GLBT liberals' feeling of betrayal because their Messiah-elect invited Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. I thank Kim for the information that Warren's ballyhooed global AIDS programs, "some funded by Bush's global AIDS plan, advocated abstinence-only education and Christian conversion." Just as I thought.
Kim notes Obama's oft-quoted remark that "my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman." And then he writes:
But here's the bright spot for gays and lesbians: there's actually common ground that they might find with Obama and Pastor Rick--it's just not on religious terms. Both say they support full equal rights for gays and lesbians. Let's test this premise by pushing forward a federal civil union bill that guarantees all the rights of marriage for same-sex couples, as Obama has suggested in his platform. Perhaps over time, some straights will want in on this God-free institution too, and we'll have civil unions for everyone. Then Warren will be free to sanctify as marriages only the unions he likes. And I'll be free to sanctify mine by whatever idol I choose, or to choose not to at all.Um, Richard, we already have a "God-free institution" that "guarantees all the rights of marriage", if only for mixed-sex couples at the moment. It's called civil marriage, and it's available in every state of the union. It's not sanctified unless the couple involved chooses to take it to church. Warren is already "free to sanctify as marriages only the unions he likes", as is every other minister or priest. Civil marriage is not religious marriage, okay? I swear, you children are just saying these things to drive me crazy!
(Image above from here.)
Dow to gold ratio - how long will it take?
If a continuation of the current deflationary bust is the way we are going to get to a 1:1 ratio between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the price of one ounce of gold, it won’t take very long if the last time it happened is a guide. The peak of the Dow:Gold ratio in early fall 1929 was slightly less than 19 when the Dow was at 386 and ratcheted down to a 2:1 Dow:Gold ratio nadir by 1933. The gold price didn’t change a bit during this period, as it was pegged to the dollar at fixed price of $20.67/ounce. The Dow, on the other hand, fell by 90% to reach 40 in the summer of 1932 – less than 3 years!
If you think a similar Dow:Gold ratio can’t happen again today, ask yourself why. Is it because we are smarter today than we were then? Gimme a break. Is it because we are more sophisticated today and have learned from our mistakes? The only thing we have learned is how to increase financial leverage to an even greater extent so that the subsequent bust promises to be even worse! Is it because you don’t want to believe it can happen? This is a plausible explanation for most, because who wants to believe everything we have been taught is wrong?
Buying and holding general stocks for the long haul was built into the psyche of the current generation of investors because it worked so well from 1982-2000. Everyone is now starting to realize that maybe it doesn’t work. We’ll have a nice stock bounce into the spring to keep a few holdouts in the bull camp, but then a tsunami of reality will destroy the portfolio of every Pollyanna praying for profits. Then you’ll really see the market crash as people stumble all over each other to get out of the market at any price.
For those who doubt this bear market can get any worse, do you honestly believe that our stock market can escape with a one year bear market when:
• The United States’ (and the world’s for that matter) banking system is insolvent
• Nearly half of the large Wall Street firms no longer exist due to recent bankruptcy
• A housing crash that is already giving the Great Depression a run for its money is just starting to pick up serious steam
• Our government has added nearly a trillion dollars of debt to its balance sheet in the last year despite already being bloated with debt
• Unemployment is still surging in earnest at the exact same time consumer debt loads are higher (in both relative and nominal terms) than ever
• Commercial real estate has begun to implode at an astonishing rate and retailers are about to start going out of business in droves
• The big 3 auto firms need government handouts just to stay alive until spring
This is not a gloom and doom scenario for the prepared, it is an opportunity. What a relief that all you have to do is buy some pieces of metal and hold onto them to come out of this mess with your retirement money unscathed! What could be easier and less scary? No need to worry about fraud, recession, counterparty risk, currency crisis, industry nationalization or corporate bankruptcy! Gold is the easy, low risk way to achieve a reasonable rate of return and maintain your savings. Buy physical gold and forget P/E ratios, growth estimates, and hot stock tips and just relax!
I have had people ask me how to reconcile this advice with the fact that their 401k/403b only offers limited investment choices. Let me give you a scenario to clarify your thinking: let’s say you know your stock investments in the 401k/403b are going to lose at least 40% more of their value over the next few years. OK, well that scenario is reality. What should you do? If your retirement option is to get a 30% tax break up front so that you can lose 40% of your money, I would say you should avoid that option!
If you have the energy, you can petition your employer to expand choice or allow you to set up a self-directed account. You can also sell everything in the account this March or April after the current bear market rally is near its end and move to cash. In the mean time, don’t throw more good money after bad just because you pray and hope things will get better! This means you have to seriously consider whether or not you should continue to put your hard-earned money into a retirement plan with shitty investment options.
General stocks will lose money/value relative to gold over the next few years and should be avoided except by short-term traders. For the more adventurous, a higher risk, higher reward play over the next few years would be to buy a basket of blue chip gold mining stocks. Government bonds have made the bulk of their bull move already and offer low returns and high risk and are no longer a good way to protect savings – cash under the mattress at this point has a similar return with less risk (and I would recommend gold as more reliable cash option).
Bottom line: I think the Dow to gold ratio reaches one in less than 5 years, which means stocks have a long way to tumble in the near future and gold will rise up to meet them. I also wouldn't be surprised if the ratio falls below 1 and one ounce of gold becomes worth more than the once mighty Dow Jones.
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