Prometheus Unbound

I’m confused. I thought that followers of Christ are supposed to pray for the interests of the sick and the poor, not pray against them. But here’s a group of Republican lawmakers and right-wing activists, led by Lou Engle and Michelle Bachmann, earnestly gathering in opposition to the Senate’s tepid health care reform bill, treating it like it would be some horrible sin against God were it to pass:

As I watched the above video, I said to myself, “Where have I seen the host of this event—Lou Engle—before? He looks familiar.”

Then it registered with me. I live in California, and back in November of 2008, Lou Engle organized a giant (30,000 people strong) anti-gay prayer rally in San Diego. The prayer rally was in the run-up to the state’s vote on Proposition 8 (marriage equality for gay people), so apparently organizing earnest prayer events (to urge God to literally intervene and thwart liberal electoral or legislative victories) is Engle’s religious—political?—”calling.” Here’s some video from that time:

Obviously, in contemporary American culture, there are an awful lot of people walking around who, though not gods themselves, and thus having no experience at being gods, nevertheless know exactly what the God of all heaven and Earth wants to happen in human politics. The God above all gods doesn’t want civic equality for homosexuals, and he (for God is always addressed as male at these curious events) doesn’t want health care reform for the working poor in America.

And how do so many people know these extraordinary things concerning the divine mind? They just do.

Look, I’m not against prayer, or praying in public (though Jesus was). I’m also not against public displays of art. Nor am I against people getting together to dance, sing, or eat. Prayer, like these other collective activities, will probably—in some form—always go on among human beings, and I wish the practice well. But I get suspicious when I see religious or aesthetic ecstasy bleed, without any governing inhibition or proportion, into politics. It is not a characteristic of rationality or wisdom. And I’m also nerved out by it when it happens from the left as well:

History suggests that the introduction of religious or aesthetic ecstasy into politics can corrode rational democratic dialogue, and even be a prelude to an emerging authoritarianism. And as the above political videos are illustrative of, contemporary Americans tend to be far more religiously emotive and charismatic in their political behavior than people living in other industrialized nations. It’s hard to imagine many contemporary Brits, for example, getting equivalently wound-up about, say, Tony Blair or Gordon Brown. 

But what moves the above videos from the merely curious to actually troubling is when our nation’s second largest political party (the Republican Party) starts to morph, before your very eyes, into an overtly sectarian fundamentalist party. Fundamentalist religious parties are characteristic of economically developing countries (India, for example, has one), but what happens when a mature Western democracy starts to spawn one? Can you imagine, for example, Senator Barry Goldwater, the Republican Party’s 1964 presidential nominee, being comfortable in such a party?

And how is it any longer a political party when sectarian fundamentalist dogmas are being pressed into the public square, not for purposes of rational debate, but for ecstatic reification—and for elevating in-group solidarity—beyond the realms of dialogue? Once you’re pressing God as being, in some ultimate or Manichean sense, on one—and only one—side of a political debate, then, with regard to your fellow citizens, you’re no longer really listening or talking to them, are you?

The far right’s effort to stall, in Congress, the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), is getting desperate, warning that, should the legislation pass, heterosexuals might be forced, at their workplace, to share restrooms with people who are transgendered. This today from Mother Jones Online:

After many years, Congress may finally have the votes to pass the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). The measure, which the Obama administration views as key to advancing gay rights, would ban workplace discrimination against gays, lesbians, and transgendered people. But Christian right groups are fighting the legislation — on the grounds that it would force businesses to allow transgendered and “transitioning” men and women to use opposite-sex restrooms or face lawsuits from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. . . . Peter LaBarbera, president of the anti-gay group Americans for Truth, has called ENDA the “Transgendered Bathrooms for Business” bill. He frets on his Web site that women will be forced to share facilities with “a big-boned man claiming to be ‘transitioning’ to ‘womanhood.’” He writes, “Biologically-born ladies, beware!”

Is Peter LaBarbera right? Is our culture, in making both male and female restrooms accessible to transgendered people, taking a terrifying jump to the left?

The vote for marriage equality in the New York legislature lost last week, but Diane Savino’s speech was a moving moment prior to the vote:

I think.

This today at Alternet:

The Ugandan parliament is currently considering an “Anti-Homosexuality Bill,” under which any person “convicted of gay sex is liable to life imprisonment.”

I took this picture at the Getty Museum in Westwood on Saturday. It is a photo of a painting (from the first decade of the 1700s) by Sebastiano Rici, and depicts Perseus holding the head of Medusa in combat against Phineus and his not-so-merry band of men. Phineus, a failed suitor to Perseus’s bride-to-be, Andromeda, crashes their wedding, Dustin Hoffman style, but unlike Hoffman, doesn’t end up with the girl, but is turned to stone by Perseus holding before him and his men Medusa’s creep face. The ending of The Graduate  seems to be echoing the disrupted and chaotic wedding of Perseus and Andromeda, but with Phineus victorious:

All that cross swinging in the film above recalls the waving around of the Medusa’s head by Perseus, doesn’t it? I suppose that the moral of the story is this: Don’t let anybody get between you and the one you love. And if they do, consider wildly swinging before them a Freudian energized taboo symbol that frightens all opposition into stony silence. And if that doesn’t completely ward them off, go to Plan B: run like hell, hand in hand. Everybody has a right to their own choice of who to marry, right? (Opponents of gay marriage, are you listening?) Anyway, here’s a scene from Clash of the Titans, showing how Perseus got Medusa’s head in the first place:

Dan Savage is absolutely brilliant here. It’s straight people, not gay people, who have progressively redefined marriage, liberalizing it through history, and now gay people are saying: Hey! What straight people have turned marriage into, we want too. Clear and simple:

A man asks another man to marry him during a city council hearing!:

My response:

For gay equality in Maine, a good focusing question:

George Takei (Lt. Sulu of Star Trek fame) and his partner went on the Newlywed Game this week!

Come out, stay out, speak out.

You know that there’s an atheist community, and a gay community, and a lesbian community, and an Italian-American community. But did you also know that there is a Bigfoot community? Look and listen:

Spock and Captain Kirk? Really?

An amusing mash-up here.

Last week Keith Olbermann went after the anonymous atheist who donated $10,000 to the atheist bus ad campaign in New York, giving the anonymous donor the bronze for June 29th’s “Worst Persons in the World” segment:

Tonight’s worst persons in the world. The bronze: To the person who donated the scratch for ten thousand dollars worth of ads on the sides of buses in New York City, promoting atheism. They read, “You don’t have to believe in God to be a moral or ethical person.” The hope, from president Ken Bronstein of the group NYC Atheists, is to get people to stop hiding their non-belief — to stop hiding it. No complaint about the message — however, while Bronstein says, “We want to get atheists to come join us, to get out of the closet,” unfortunately the donor who made the ads possible is keeping his identity anonymous!

Notice that Olbermann did not attack atheism as such, but the idea that a person might hypocritically invite people into a movement for which he (or she) is obviously ashamed to have his (or her) name associated with. I think that is a fair critique. If you want others to get on the atheist bus, the least that you can do is not wear a paper bag over your head as you wave and shout atheist slogans from your atheist bus window. It’s hardly a profile in courage.

The same goes for those wealthy individuals who were outraged that their bigoted large-sum financial donations for Proposition 8 (the anti-gay rights bill in California) were made public. If you want to enter the political or religious arena of discourse, you should go in unmasked.

Pinch me.

We are living in the 21st century, right?

1. They’re everywhere. Andrew Sullivan and his husband find themselves walking in the background of a famous heterosexual couple’s photograph . . . more
2. Slate deconstructs the conservative Republican War on Empathy . . . more
3. Camille Paglia worries about the obsessive and inflamatory Obama rhetoric daily consuming conservative Shout Radio . . . more

This today in Time magazine:

[A] new Gallup poll finds that most conservatives — 58% — now support openly gay people serving in uniform (nationally, 69% support the change; when Clinton assumed office, a Gallup poll found 53% of those polled opposed lifting the ban). Perhaps even more surprising, 58% of self-described Republicans, and 60% of weekly churchgoers, also support gay men and women serving openly in uniform. “While the Administration to date has not taken action on the issue,” the polling firm reported last Friday, “the Gallup Poll data indicate that the public-opinion environment favors such a move.”

Barack Obama simply doesn’t pray or torture enough for the folks at FOX News. If Obama would just pray and torture more, we would have back the America we all know and love!

On FOX News today is a truly noxious discussion of “prayer” that seeks to make public displays of religiosity a test of a politician’s moral bearings. Not ending torture, mind you, but praying in public:

Not that I’m all that keen on quoting Jesus, but here’s something that he supposedly said when he was alive (from the sixth chapter of Matthew, verses 5-8):

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

I don’t like Jesus’s sexist designation of God as a “father,” nor his creepy blanket dismissiveness of Jews and pagans as the evil “others” who don’t do religious things “right,” but his point would seem to contra-indicate the practice of public prayer for those who call themselves “Christian.” Of course, under cover of defaming Obama, and not from any real concern for prayer or moral behavior (such as not torturing people), the FOX News crew is simply scoring points for their right-wing “team,” and framing it in faux pious terms. And it is truly nauseating to watch the Barbie-girl—who obviously spent more time on her hair and make-up this morning than on her knees—feign earnestly about Obama’s blasphemous and anti-American presidency.

When will Jesus come again and clear the FOX News temple with a whip?

Or would that be torture?

So according to Access Hollywood:

David Ogden Stiers, the actor who is best known for playing Major Charles Winchester on TV’s “M*A*S*H,” has come out.

“I am [gay],” the 66-year-old actor said in an interview with the blog Gossip-Boy.com. “Very proud to be so.”

And he says that he stayed closeted for a long time because he does voices for Disney—and Disney, of course, didn’t want to deal with the public relations fallout and fundamentalist sniping.

But he’s out now.

Should gay people do Disney voices—or is there something wrong with that?

Where is President Obama on this?

According to Rachel Maddow today, Lt. Dan Choi recently received a dismissal letter from the military for coming out as gay. Here’s a segment from Maddow’s show in which Choi publicly declared his sexual orientation:

Kicking people out of the military because they are gay is so 1990s. It’s now 2009, and this simply has to stop. President Obama can stop it. Let’s see if he does.

1. Commentary claims journalist I.F. Stone was a spy for Stalin from 1936-1938 . . . more
2. The New York Times says big screen e-readers, such as the new larger version of the Kindle, might save the publishing industry, and transform the college textbook industry . . . more
3. In an interview with Christianity Today, Joe the Plumber talks some bigoted shit about gays, calling them queers, and saying that he, of course, would never let them around his children . . . more
4. Tattoo artist Scott Campbell turns stacks of dollar bills into art by laser cutting. The Virgin Mary dollar image is especially beguiling . . . more
5. In 1831, French poet Alphonse Marie Louis de Prat de Lamartine dreamed of blogging . . . more  

Andrew Sullivan has been talking about this. Iraqi Shiite’s have been targeting gays. And it’s almost too apalling to report, but this today in Gay City News:

As the murder campaign targeting Iraqi gays intensifies, a leading Arabic television network last week revealed the use of a horrifying new form of lethal torture against Iraqi gay men – anti-gay Shiite death squads are sealing their anuses with a powerful glue, then inducing diarrhea, which leads to a painful and agonizing death. The use of this stomach-turning new torture was first reported by the Al Arabiya network, which is headquartered in the United Arab Emirates and was alerted to the story by a leading Iraqi feminist and human rights activist.

Yanar Mohammed, president of the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), told Al Arabiya that the torture substance “is an Iranian-manufactured glue that, if applied to the skin, sticks to it and can only be removed by surgery. After they glue the anuses of homosexuals, they give them a drink that causes diarrhea. Since the anus is closed, the diarrhea causes death. Videos of this form of torture are being distributed on mobile telephones in Iraq.”