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I would laugh, but...
It's really just too sad.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
I think that it [the evil secular gay fascists] is a very dangerous threat to anybody who believes in traditional religion. And I think if you believe in historic Christianity, you have to confront the fact.
Gingrich pretty much sums up why I believe most social conservatives--at least, the ones I hear and the ones I'm unfortunate enough to deal with-- are people who embrace not history, but a dangerously misguided nostalgia for "traditional religion." Historic Christianity had a great time burning Jews and heretics, traveling to the Holy Land to kill Muslims, and once the Reformation came around, killing other Christians. The vast majority of Christianity's history has been concerned with its overwhelming fear not of secularists (or gays, which was not even a term recognized until the twentieth century), but of other religions, its own inability to develop and sustain a cohesive and contiguous theology, and its power struggles with political institutions it wanted to control.
I hate it when people treat history like this. I really, sincerely hate it, and I hate it almost as much as the fact that people like Gingrich consistently get away it.
A couple of quotations to sum up my thoughts, because I'm too tired to do it properly:
The misuse of language induces evil in the soul. Socrates
To be innocent of the variety of ways in which humans have mythologized or proscribed what they do with their genitals is to be unfit for being a moralist, much less a scholar of morals. Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy (which book I very highly recommend)
Many Christians have come to believe that the official teachings on same-sex pleasure are inadequate both to their own experience and to the Gospel... This is not the first time that the body of believers has reached an impasse in moral reflection. Something very similar happened with the question of chattel slavery just over a century ago--as it happened with the doctrine of justifiable war in the 1960s. In every case the question has been the same: How does one honor the tradition while being faithful to the Gospel and to the impulses of God in the present? In ever case, the beginning of an answer was the same. Believers had to free themselves from fundamental misunderstandings about the character of Christian moral tradition. Part of freedom is to remember how fragile our relation to that tradition is, so far as it is a relation dependent on the reading of inherited texts. (Jordan, Invention 170)
*hits Gingrich over the head with this*
(It's also worth noting Mark Jordan is a gay man of faith (Catholic) and taught at the University of Notre Dame. The conclusion to his book, from which this excerpt is taken, is a plea to other Christians to reconsider tradition and history, and the relationships they hold.)
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Those old time Christians though, they sure knew how to party.
But as for Grinch, wow, I had no idea that bands of roving facist gays were in fact imposing their will on straight people to marry people of the same gender. How awful! If only Grinch can save us from this
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For myself, I fully anticipate that very soon, the bands of lesbians who are no doubt roaming Indiana even as we speak, will force me and my roommate to marry. Now, I don't want to get married to my roommate, mostly because I can't contemplate spending the rest of my life with her (because I have a feeling divorce will be outlawed under Teh Gay Regime), so really, that's all I'm afraid of right now.
Those old time Christians though, they sure knew how to party.
Auto-da-fes: not only do burning bodies keep the mosquitoes away.... it's BBQ!
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They've forgotten the whole message - "This is the great and first commandment; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and mind. And the second is like it - you shall love your neighbor as yourself; on these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets."
But I am a considered a very bad Christian.
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The trouble is with the Conservative Christians is the horrible fact they are encouraged to be ignorant of the Bible and Biblical scholorly commentary.
Yes. Yes. YES. And yes again, I say.
Last year it fell to me to teach a few days of Uncle Tom's Cabin to a collection of sophomores, and I had a very hard time containing my overwhelming antipathy for the sort of ignorance that Stowe and mid-century evangelicals promoted. I had to tell them I didn't like the book much (which understated my position considerably), and then try to explain the theology without going off into virulent tangents.
It's just... Yeah, it may be holy, but it's socially irresponsible. That's why, in the middle ages when people felt they really needed to adhere closely to the tenets of their faith, they joined monasteries.
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I've always been supportive of the idea of a separation between church and state, simply because a) it's the right thing and b) as a religious minority I don't particularly feel like being forced into a baptism, thank you very much.
But when faced with stuff like this...I'm almost at a loss at how to start talking to people about something that seems so blatantly sensible to me. Even if you fully believed that homosexuality was a sin, you DO NOT have the right to force that belief upon me or anyone else. How is this so hard to understand?
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How is this so hard to understand?
I seriously don't know. It's like... No, I really don't have the words for it, Mar. Like, it is an issue that can be explained logically, in small and easily understandable words, and they don't get it. In more cynical moments, I think that the sort of attitudes inherent in religious conservatism like the kind that howls against gay marriage is incompatible with the idea of a democratic society in which individuals are free to make their own moral/ethical choices and the people who want to ban gay marriage and have a wonderful aren't-we-all-happy-and-free democracy do not see that there is a problem with this.
Grah.
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And that's what I'm talking about. Like, if you want to be convinced that being gay is sinful, then fine, I can't stop you. It's when you start trying to put your beliefs into the FREAKIN' CONSTITUTION that I want to slap you silly.
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What a great tenet, regardless of religion (although I agree, your instructor probably had your safety in mind when he offered it). I remember, when I went to this awful Baptist private school, we were advised--very strongly--to go out and witness to friends who were members of non-Baptist denominations, as well as to friends who weren't Christian at all. Like, for example, my best friend who was Jewish.
Looking back on it, I'm horrified and revolted by what I was asked to do. I mean, I was thirteen years old, what the hell business do I have advising anyone on their salvation, and what the hell business did my teachers have suggesting I save my best friend from her own heritage and faith? Thinking about it makes me so angry, I wish I could find my old teachers and somehow make them understand how wrong this was.
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I mean, I was thirteen years old, what the hell business do I have advising anyone on their salvation, and what the hell business did my teachers have suggesting I save my best friend from her own heritage and faith?
Exactly.
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My only comfort? Hannity and Gingrich will probably die the day equal marriage rights for all consenting adults are granted. They'll just fall over, and the dark creatures of the earth--the worms and insects and burrowing things, the corpse beetle and inchworm and serpent--will devour their remains.
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I prefer to think of it as Dantean :D :D
I feel that to move forward in the eyes of the world we have to let go of Winthrop's ridiculous "city upon a hill" to the point where it is not longer a staple of political speeches.
Grah, I had to re-read Winthrop last year for a class, and it was very hard not to throw the otherwise mostly-innocent Norton Anthology of American Literature, vol. 1 across the room. It was also hard to hide the full extent of my loathing from the class I was teaching... I tried, but I think they sensed it anyway, seeing as the hatred was pouring off me.
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Dear me. Quite apart from my own reading, life with "my daughter the theologian" leads inexorably to the questions "Which ones? When are you talking about?" Currently we both have a liking for the situation in Gaul in Late Antiquity - Christians attending the synagogues as well as the churches (because they liked the sermons)*; drop-outs living in communes (nuns). And we're both fascinated by the cyclical nature of religion in England: the recurring pattern of claims that organised religion has lost the place and there should be a return to the message of the Gospel against a background of continuity. So which is "traditional" for England? York Minster, Westminster Abbey and Canterbury, or the Lollards and their heirs?
*This included the Bishop of Lyons
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For most Americans, "traditional" really means "Great Awakening evangelical Protestantism," which basically equates with license for willful ignorance when it comes to doctrine. (Since, you know, it is the only religion that has EVER EXISTED EVER.) It also means they can ignore their history; many evangelicals were at the forefront of both emancipation and women's suffrage in the early/mid-1800s, and it was mostly Northern Methodist and Baptist churches that sponsored education and housing programs for blacks after the Civil War. While I hate the sort of condescending "teach the simple black folk who don't know no better" attitude in church-sponsored education pamphlets, at least these people were aware of intrinsic human rights and the hypocrisy of people who insisted on robbing a whole group of individuals of their rights in the name of economic expedience.
Try to tell someone that now, in an argument as to why gay marriage is not the great evil conservatives make it out to be, and they'll calmly tell you it isn't a moral crime to be black, but it is to be gay. Try to tell someone that gay marriage (or for that matter homosexuality) isn't actually 1.) in the Ten Commandments, or 2.) in the Gospels as spoken by Christ--and, to my knowledge, isn't even in the Pauline letters because Paul is too busy being a misogynist and they look at you and say even the Devil can quote scripture.
Oh, for a lightning bolt.
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Ok, so, a translation of that would read: "a gay and not overtly or specifically religious totalitarian nationalist ideology."
The utter hatefulness is more than bad enough. Does a misuse of words really have to be added to the mix?
I use boys!kissing icon in protest.
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I approve of your protest!