House of Eratosthenes

One of my Facebook friends is a political “moderate,” although I notice his rapier-like wit lances is one direction only. He straddles an awkward divide. I think a fair statistical sampling of his values would find him to be mostly conservative, but an equally fair statistical sampling of his humor would it to be mostly left-wing, and often lacking in jocularity. You know the kind. “Wouldn’t it be fun to imagine so-and-so said such-and-such, let’s laugh anyway because you just know she would even if she hasn’t.”

I think he’s making some poor decisions about what friends he wants to keep, and doing what it takes to keep them. That is often the first step over the cliff. Now & then, against my better judgment, I extend a helpful hand to keep him from sliding further.

Today’s controversy is the implied maxim that people who aspire to chase the gay away, are full of hate. I really have a tough time with this. I know what hate is; when it meets up with action, it is abandonment. If the option of abandonment is somehow closed off, then it hate becomes an effort to out-and-out destroy. Either way, it is rejection. It isn’t an attempt to convert. It certainly cannot be an abundant expenditure of energy, toward a conversion. Why work that hard for something you hate?

Bachmann Cures Gay So when I saw this…

…and those of you with a Facebook account will see, it’s one of those make-believe indictments — “got tired of waiting for her to say something dumb, so I’m gonna go ahead and invent it” — but hey, it’s humor, and it’s something believable right?…

…I just had to respond with:

I’d much rather have my house watched over a long weekend by someone who thinks he can make gay kids straight, than by someone who thinks he can tax & spend the nation into solvency.

My former work colleague had by this time surrounded himself with lots of open-minded, left-of-center twenty-somethings, so my comment was greeted with lots of tolerance.

Well, I suppose I shouldn’t go there. A dialogue ensued between myself and a nice young lady named Nichol, who with great and obvious difficulty managed to remain civil. Which must have meant she “got” it — had she gone all angry-Alan-Alda, she’d have been unable to accuse the other side of going negative first. I think she knew I was right. But she showed no more conscious sign than that, and wasn’t ready to concede the point. An attempt to convert is hate, you can’t claim to have expunged hate from your heart until you join the latest civil rights struggle. Simple as that.

But there was one other criticism thrown at me for which I had a great deal more sympathy: Threadjacking. What does taxing and spending have to do with hating these — er, I mean, disapproving of these people who want to convert homosexuals? Why is this Freeberg character throwing in this topic drift?

I could, with a little effort, be persuaded to plead guilty, Your Honor.

At least, until I saw what Kate put up at Small Dead Animals:

Now is the time at SDA when we juxtapose!

Obama Administration, July 18, 2011 – Neither setting arbitrary spending levels nor amending the Constitution is necessary to restore fiscal responsibility.

Fox News, July 18, 2011 – The federal government helped fund a study that examined what effect a gay man’s penis size has on his sex life and general well-being.

Perhaps, in our new Grecian economy, the Year of the Queer has become a luxury we can no longer financially afford. Not that I expect the “tolerant” spendthrifts to get it.

Is our popular modern fad of phony tolerance linked to matters regarding our national solvency? Perhaps the most accurate answer to that one is “Yes, but it shouldn’t be.” I cannot prove it, but I believe if we had it all to do over again, and nobody needed to do anything to outwardly display their compassion, open-mindedness, their tolerance — we would, today, be in much better financial shape.

There’d probably be a lot more tolerance, too.

I was recently un-friended *again* by somebody for having different political views. This time because I dared say that Michele Bachmann would be a good candidate for President.

I no longer care about tolerance or the perception of tolerance. This is what happens when one side shuts down the dialog. There’s no incentive for me to see your point of view.
- Jason | 07/19/2011 @ 07:14
A more accurate sign would read, “Guest Speaker Michele Bachmann – Come Let Us Help You Try to Pray the Gay Away”. Though “Pray the Gay Away”, if I had to guess, is also a construct of the Left as well meant to ridicule the belief that homosexuality is unnatural and wrong.

The way the “sign” reads intentionally implies a sense of power and self-importance that anyone who is or knows anyone like Michele knows isn’t there. From what I can gather, the idea is that homosexuality is a result of psychological imbalance and can be addressed by restoring or bringing about a sense of self-worth and psychological balance. Through religion. I don’t have a problem with this. Psychology is religion as well. At least as far as “therapy” goes, there’s no more real evidence to show that one is in fact superior to the other in matters of attaining balance.

Even if homosexuality is innate, and I have some sympathy for that point of view based on what I’ve seen in my life – the idea that it isn’t — is a valid belief. There are even people who claim to have been “cured” and I have no reason to doubt them. And if we’re serious about respecting each others’ religious beliefs, well you know that knife theoretically cuts both ways … or better yet … “any way you slice it”.

I find Christians in general to be the most tolerant people in the world. I think most on the Left, at least when they start out, know this and it drives them crazy. It’s a mantle they are trying to claim — because leftism is ultimately about ego. The left can’t stand the idea that people who disagree with them are more loving and tolerant than they are, and yet don’t go around bragging about it for their religion also teaches them that they are imperfect and weak.

Thus Christianity’s image must be destroyed at every turn so that people will eventually never know it, and it will from that point forward be synonymous with “hate” to all. That’s the plan.

What did I read somewhere today … “the notorious extreme right-wing, anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-woman fundamentalist Christian group Focus on the Family.” Do a google search on anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-woman … it is revealing. This is apparently a widely distributed catch-phrase.

Of course, it is lost on folks who buy in to this that being against the promotion of homosexuality and believing it is wrong and “having it in” for gay people are not the same thing. These people want to help, not to harm. As for the reflexive “anti-choice = anti-woman” … this is of course, bunk. I know far too many women who are pro-life. This is the real reason they hate Bachmann and Palin. They don’t fit the stereotype of the woman who is only pro-life because her husband has beat her into saying it. So they go with the “extreme fundamentalist Christian” tag — you know, because anyone who disagrees with them over matters of right and wrong and stick to their beliefs is “extreme”. But sticking to their own beliefs in the face of disagreement is not extreme. Christians are just “notorious” [hey, I thought you guys weren’t into value judgements. “Notorious” is, like, so judgemental.]

Nobody’s using the power of the government to round up gays and force them into places like the Bachmann clinic where they are chained to chairs and forced to pray. Oh, some parents do force their kids to go, but some parents send their kids to psychologists, too. It is their duty as parents to prepare them to be functioning, happy, moral adults, and it is their right as parents to do it according to what they believe (excessive physical coersion excepted).
- philmon | 07/19/2011 @ 08:19
(cleaned up and edited for “betterness” at my place)
- philmon | 07/19/2011 @ 08:44
I still find it funny that people insist on equating “religious” with “right” (as in, “the Religious Right”). True, lots of the most vocal Christians vote Republican, but as the left is so fond of pointing out when we note the extremely close associations between Democrats and socialists, correlation is not causation. Were the “Religious Right” ever seriously in a position to impose a “theocracy” — and I guess that slack-ass George W. Bush just never got around to it — you’d see the right deserting the “religious” in droves, because ….. drumroll please…. the right is about less government intrusion in citizens’ lives. And isn’t it the Left, after all, who keeps telling us that Jesus would’ve supported 95% marginal tax rates on “the rich”?

It’s the left, by contrast, who have the consistency problem. I can easily imagine a small-L libertarian state — cf. any American history textbook for the years 1782-1900. There’s some bad stuff in there to be sure, but give us five minutes and we’ll figure out a way to end things like Jim Crow without a massive, quasi-police state bureaucracy. But what would the ideal leftist state look like? How do you get an all-knowing, supremely virtuous government? You’d either have to compel certain groups to not hate each other — and the most rabid “extreme right-wing, anti-gay, anti-choice, anti-woman fundamentalist Christian group” like Focus on the Family ain’t got nothin’ on your average imam — or you’d have to compel us all to pretend they don’t hate each other…. while meanwhile the populace seethes with all the old hatreds and one new one, the hatred of not being able to acknowledge the obvious.

This is virtue? This is progress? Say what you will about Bachmann and Focus on the Family — and I find the idea of “converting” gays more than a little creepy and fascistic — but they at least acknowledge some of the obvious consequences of their positions. The left thinks it can just mandate niceness with the Lions and Lambs Bedtime Arrangement Act of 2012. Who are the open-minded ones again?
- Severian | 07/19/2011 @ 09:35
Only in the progressive mind is the freely arrived at choice of attempting to change one’s sexual preference through prayer or therapy defined as hate, while the attempt to change one’s very biology in the case of the transgendered through surgery and hormone therapy, considered the height of compassion. These two positions can be held at the same time only through dismissing logic and replacing it with emotionally driven politically correct thinking. Progressivism is faith based group think as strident and as intolerant of differing views as the most fundamentalist of religions. Which is fine, what ever floats their boat. But please, refrain from pushing your faith on myself or others and labeling us as “hateful” or worse “unreasoning” if we don’t follow along like good sheep.
- westsoundmodern | 07/19/2011 @ 09:38

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“Not Brokeback Enough”Tuesday, July 19th, 2011

“Not Brokeback Enough”
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011