You know, I can honestly say that it’s not every day I come home to find, in the daily post, a lovely little book of 17th and 18th century erotic paintings waiting for me.
Thanks, browngirl!!
Day: March 12, 2004
rmjwell points to this wonderful article by Avadon Carol.
Consider the teachings of Jesus: He preached against public piety, against putting material wealth above the spiritual, against casting the first stone, against bigotry. He spoke up for the poor and told us to love our neighbors. He blessed the peacemakers and the merciful, and taught his followers to share. He preached love, hope, and charity. He was about forgiveness and redemption.
And so, as someone who, “was raised on the Good Book Jesus ’til I read between the lines,” it’s pretty much impossible for me to look at the modern GOP and the Christian right – and particularly at the Bush administration – and see any of Jesus’ teachings there. I don’t claim to know the mind of any god (which, after all, would be blasphemy), but it seems to me that Bush represents the kind of self-righteous, publicly pious, war-mongering rich men who Jesus warned us not to become.
Unlike Avedon, I wasn’t even raised in a religious tradition, and have always considered myself far more spiritual than religious. But even so, I read this and said “yes, this, this exactly, this is what I’ve been saying all along.”
Go read. it’s good stuff.
Some of you may already be familiar with mollyringwraith‘s hysterical condensations of the LOTR movies. Now, someone with a lot of time on their hands has done some photo magic to present her scripts in comic form.
So far they’ve only done The Two Towers, But it looks like they plan on setting up all three movies. Check it out, and I’ll make a note here if the following parts show up later.
Listening to NPR’s Morning Edition this morning, I heard a report on the President’s video address to the National Association of Evangelicals in Colorado, which predictably focused on efforts to make gay marriage illegal.
Now, there are certainly some legitimate arguments against gay marriage. By legitimate, I don’t mean that I agree with them (as I don’t), but in the sense that they are founded on an actual thought process that one can use to support a rational argument.
Then there are people like Pam Flannery, interviewed in the segment, who said
There will be problems in, you know, in the western world, because then we’ve broken down the family, we’re no longer producing children, and yet in other countries, where there’s an agenda to affect America, they are going to be producing children with a agenda to hurt the United States, and so there’s a concern, there’s a fear there.
To which I went….”Whaaaa—?”
What barren intellectual wasteland produces people like this? What sort of low grade paranoia allows people to think that if we allow same-sex couples to get married, that we as a society will stop producing children, allowing our enemies to outbreed us? I admit that as arguments go, it’s hard to refute, if only because the sheer ludicrousness of the approach tends to leave anyone with an above-room-temperature IQ speechless and unable to defend themselves.
Someone isn’t making a lot of sense here. And I don’t think it’s me.