Literate Perversions

Gloating Like a Motherfucker

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There isn’t much to feel happy about these days if you’re an unemployed, chronically-depressed, leftist atheist pervert. But in between the stories of the mounting body count in Iraq and the hateful madness that stands in for conservative political thought these days, you get something like this. Maybe I’ll have to reconsider the atheism thing.

<pondering> Well. Not quite. But it’s pretty fucking sweet, especially coming on the heels of Mark Foley and Ted Haggard.

MIAMI BEACH, Fla. Truth Wins Out expressed satisfaction today in learning that Dr. Joseph Nicolosi, President of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), has stepped down amid a cloud of controversy stemming from a polemic justifying slavery found on the group’s website, according to a statement released by Truth Wins Out. NARTH had also taken heat in recent months for advocating child abuse against gender variant children.

“NARTH was a sinking ship and they had no choice but to throw their captain overboard,” said Truth Wins Out’s Executive Director Wayne Besen. “The group was quickly becoming the Mel Gibson of the ‘ex-gay’ world and this move was NARTH’s desperate way of saying, ‘timeout, we are going to rehab.’ However, it may be too late, as no spin can erase their racist and anti-gay sin.”

Trouble began mounting for Nicolosi after Canadian doctor Joseph Berger, who serves on NARTH’s “Scientific Advisory Board” wrote on the organization’s website that gender variant children should be sent to school in opposite-sex clothing so they can be “ridiculed” into conforming.

But criticism of NARTH reached a crescendo after “Scientific Advisory Board” member, Dr. Gerald Schoenewolf, penned a polemic on the group’s website that seemed to justify slavery and said that African-Americans taken away in chains on slave ships “were in many ways better off than they had been in Africa.”

Jesus loves you…

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but He absolutely adores atheists. Why? Because they're the only people who don't ask Him to take sides in a war, particularly a war based on religious beliefs. Do you want to know who is His favorite atheist? Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason. Too tired at the end of your 12-hour day as a corporate lackey to read anything more than a catalog? Then go to the website of The Sun Magazine to read an excerpt from Bethany Saltman's interview with Harris. If you're too tired to click on the link, allow me to give you an example of why you should read this interview. In answer to Saltman's question, Isn't religion a natural outgrowth of human nature? Harris gives this reply:

It almost certainly is. But everything we do is a natural outgrowth of human nature. Genocide is. Rape is. No one would ever think that this makes genocide or rape a necessary feature of a civilized society. Even if you had a detailed story about the essential purpose religion has served for the past fifty thousand years, even if you could prove that humanity would not have survived without believing in a creator God, that would not mean that it's a good idea to believe in a creator God now, in the twenty-first-century world that has been shattered into separate moral communities on the basis of religious ideas.

Sy Safransky, editor of The Sun Magazine will even allow you to get a free trial copy of the magazine, just in case you feel as though you cannot give up those Grande Mocha Frappucino's to pay for the subscription. (Maybe next week?) Or, while getting that daily dose of caffeine and sugar, you can visit Sam Harris at his website www.samharris.org.

Onion V. Reality

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If we ever run out of reasons to keep the Religious Right out of power (yeah, right!), then this ought to provide some motivation: it really is only a short step from reading the Bible literally to reading The Onion like it's The Washington Post.  If you can believe in a creation that took seven days, you can easily believe that there's a woman  on the editorial staff of The Onion named Caroline Weber who wrote an article called I'm So Psyched About This Abortion! Here's a few lines of the article:

As I pushed my way through the crowd, one of the picketers yelled, "How could you do this? How could you kill a child?" What? It's more like, "How could I wait this long?" It wasn't until now that I was lucky enough to be pregnant with a child I had no means to support. I tell you, for a long time, I thought it would never happen to me!

So, to all of you pro-lifers who are trying to rain on my parade, keep it to yourself, because I don't have the time for that kind of negativity. I've got an abortion to plan, and I just know it's going to be the best non-anesthetized invasive uterine surgery ever!

The funny thing is, I actually have the pro-life movement to thank for this opportunity. If my HMO wouldn't have bowed to their pressure not to cover oral contraceptives, I never would've gotten pregnant in the first place. Then what would I be doing a week from Thursday? I'll tell you what I wouldn't be doing: going to an awesome abortion clinic where I'll be the center of attention from the minute I put my feet up in those stirrups. I wouldn't be looking forward to induced dilation of my cervical opening and suctioning of my uterus, either. And I sure as heck wouldn't get the chance to have a doctor insert a metal instrument into my womb to dislodge tissue from my uterine wall!

Well. As soon as Pete, a pro-life blogger at March Together For Life, read those words, his first thought was that it was high time to use the power of Blogspot to give Ms. Weber a good talking to, so that she might understand the error of her whorish, baby-killin' ways:

Sorry ma'am, if you hadn't had sex you wouldn't have gotten pregnant, it's not the HMO's fault for not supporting your promiscuity while not married….

Miss Weber, you have killed your child, which you admit is a baby/human being, intentionally. That does make you an admitted murderer. I'm not going to "condemn you to hell", I'm going to pray for your forgiveness and for the suffering which you will endure when you realize what you have done. Every baby you see from that moment on is going to wake you up to the realization that you killed your child.

I can't think of what to type here that will sound pithy and intelligent, so I'm going to say the only thing that comes to mind: HUH?!? 

True, I don't give the Fundies much credit for intelligence, or even familiarity with the basic precepts of reality. But no matter how cynical I get, I just can't fucking keep up.  I would at least expect them to know that The Onion is a FUCKING JOKE PAPER.

Of course, Pete doesn't need me to tell him this; as of this writing, 649 people had commented on his post to tell him what an unbelievable jackass he is. His reply is actually the most revealing part of the whole thing, because he remains utterly clueless, even when it's pointed out to him. First, he keeps referring to Caroline Weber as if she's a real writer — all the personas in The Onion are as invented as the articles — and second, the pearl-clutching horror with which he tells us that, parody or not, she is a sterling example of the lib'rul baby-killing mindset, and then proceeds to prove it by creating a simpleminded parody of a liberal pro-choicer. He, however, really does expect us to believe that he met this woman.

I've considered deleting this entry, because frankly, I think this pompous little prick has gotten enough attention; he's turned into an Internet phenomenon overnight, and has even gotten a Wikipedia page out of it (although the page is currently being considered for deletion). In my ideal universe, I want to see him rot in obscurity.

But Pete really shows what I loathe and fear about the fundies: their literalism. People who can't think in metaphor or parody are the ones to keep your eye on because they've already decided what the answers are going to be far in advance of getting the facts. The inability to consider the world in abstract, mutable terms is what breeds fanatics and tyrants; the world consists of only binaries, and the opposing binaries can't be tolerated. In short, what might be the biggest warning sign about the aspirations of the Fundies is their utter lack of a sense of humor.