The Invisible library

Guardian UK:

In a scene which appears to have been lifted straight out of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, a group of Christians in Wisconsin has launched a legal claim demanding the right to publicly burn a copy of a book for teenagers which they deem to be “explicitly vulgar, racial [sic], and anti-Christian”.

The offending book is Francesca Lia Block’s Baby Be-Bop, a young adult novel in which a boy, struggling with his homosexuality, is beaten up by a homophobic gang. The complaint, which according to the American Library Association also demands $120,000 (£72,000) in compensatory damages for being exposed to the book in a display at West Bend Community Memorial Library, was lodged by four men from the Christian Civil Liberties Union.

Because if history has taught us anything, it’s that burning books works, suing for the right, doubly so. Also, it never, ever makes them more popular.

I haven’t read Baby Be-Bop, but I did recently read Weetzie Bat, the first book in the same series. It’s a beautiful story, about people (some of them gay!) looking for love and acceptance, a topic I know really rankles Christians. I think it was in the Gospel of John where Jesus said, “Fuck all those pansy-ass fagots, they’ll burn for wanting to be loved like a real person.”

Link via @neilhimself

And for real, not like California’s implicit, we’ll-have-to-go-the-whole-way-eventually-but-not-today kinda way. New Hampshire did it right and just laid it all out there, joining such bastions of saniy and modern living as Ohio Iowa* and the Sims 3 game. That’s right, an RPG has better civil rights than 9/10 of the the USA. Welcome to the 21st century. It’s a lot stranger than we were promised.

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*As Noz pointed out in coments, I had the wrong agrarian state in the middle of nowhere. But I’m sure Ohio will come to their senses soon, too.

As John Scalzi points out, the California Supreme court’s decision today, recognizing Prop 8 as legit, effectively legalized gay marriage. All Prop 8 does now is put a (temporary) cap on the number of gay marriages that the state can preform (18,000 as of last November). The wording of the ruling explicitly states that those married couples are recognized under the law. This means all Californians have to do is repeal prop 8’s discriminatory language and California joins other sane, civilized places like Canada and Ohio.

Last night, we went 4/5 of the way to getting back on track as a country. We elected a Democratic President (who has received more votes than any president before him) and several Democratic congress folk and governors.

But we lost on Prop 8. The Homobigot amendment to the California constitution passed by a slim margin. So, yeah. We got 4/5 of what we wanted. Not bad. But it could have been better.

What happens next is not going to be easy or fun but it might just turn out better. The thing is, there already are thousands of married same-sex couples in California. California now has 2 choices: 1) recognize them, thus undermining the new law  or 2) annul all those marriages.

The first option will effectively create a loophole for gay marriage, and the fundies and homobigots won’t let that stand. They’re already scared that they are loosing the culture war, which is why they came up with Prop 8 in the first place. Society is already starting to accept same sex couples as equals. Prop 8 and other attempts are the Hail Mary pass and the suicide charge. They are doomed to fail, eventually. We were hoping to shoot down prop 8 last night and force the homobigits to slouch home, whimpering in defeat. Now they have a slight glimmer of false hope.[1]

The second option will bring discrimination law suits. Big ones. Degeneres vs. California. The fundies don’t want this matter to go tot he Supreme Court, since there are already decisions on the books that will undermine their cause and show them for the hateful troglodytes they are. Loving vs. Virginia is a clear cut example. Just replace the parts about miscegenation with homosexuality. And since Lawrence vs. Texas decriminalized sodomy, nothing a same-sex couple does is illegal.

Now of course, if the matte goes to the Supreme Court, there’s the matter of the conservative judges. But these same conservative judges were the ones who stuck their fingers in fundie’s eyes over Lawrence, which is one of the many reasons they don’t like “Activist Judges.”[2] The fundies know they will loose if this fight gets to the Court. And that’s even without factoring in the minimum of two new Justices Obama will have appointed by then.

So, loosing on Prop 8 is not the end of the world or the fight for same-sex rights. Just a minor set back.

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1. but that’s OK, too. When some fundie, homobigot or Mormon starts gloating about winning Prop 8, just remind them that we elected a scary black Muslim socialist Antichrist for President.

2. You know, judges who follow the constitution, rather then the fundie interpreted Bible. Liberals! Liberal here meaning “sane,” as it usually does in wackaloon speak.

Daniel over at Crooked Timber has a nice little post on the financial crisis and how, contrary to popular opinion, it wasn’t the result of stupid bankers banking stupidly, but from far more complex issues, as financial problems tend to be. As an aside, he linked to this article in the Spectator by Melanie Phillips, who blames the bankers (of course) but also casts the whole predicament in the frame of the culture war, so that it isn’t just the fault of an army of incompetent professionals infiltrating the highest echelons of the financial industry, but also the fault of all us atheists. Again. Our moral perfidity is so far reaching as to have touched even the sacred halls of the banking industry, which, until Richard Dawkins came along, was lily white and motivated purely by Christ’s injunction to take what thou hast and give it to the poor at an adjustable, 30 year rate with high yield dividends.[1]

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Christopher Buckley, son of William F., founder of the Neocon Rag, the National Review, has “resigned” over the snarling rancour caused by his Obama endorsement:

As for the mail flooding into National Review Online—that’s been running about, oh, 700-to-1 against. In fact, the only thing the Right can’t quite decide is whether I should be boiled in oil or just put up against the wall and shot. Lethal injection would be too painless.

I had gone out of my way in my Beast endorsement to say that I was not doing it in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column, because of the experience of my colleague, the lovely Kathleen Parker. Kathleen had written in NRO that she felt Sarah Palin was an embarrassment. (Hardly an alarmist view.) This brought 12,000 livid emails, among them a real charmer suggesting that Kathleen’s mother ought to have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a dumpster. I didn’t want to put NR in an awkward position.

Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.

Welcome to the world you and your dad created, Mr. Buckley. You and he spent 30 years riling up these dingbats, force feeding them Free Market Fundamentalism, racism, anti-liberal nincompoopery and general selfishness and now are surprised that they’ve turned on you for endorsing the embodiment of all they fear: a moderate black man with an ethnic-sounding name.

I’d cry for you, but thanks to the economic meltdown you helped champion, I can’t afford a hanky.

But. Look on the bright side: you’ve learned a lesson. Conservativism has failed. And there is a viable alternative. A few more decades, we’ll make a socialist of you yet.

Douglas Rushkoff on the economic fuffallah and why it might not be as bad as all that:

All this means is that you can’t count on capitalism anymore. Your wealth is not how many paper assets you have. It’s not even how much land you have (or think you have). It’s what you can do. It’s your value to other people.

The real economy need not suffer in the downfall of the speculative economy. If anything, the real economy has been repressed by the speculative economy. Real farmers have been crushed by Big Agra, real druggists have been crushed by Wal-Mart and real transportation alternatives have been crushed by Big Oil and Big Auto.

The opportunity here, while the big boys are down, is to rebuild the genuine, local commercial infrastructure. To make shoes, clothes, food, education, healthcare and everything else we can in a bottom-up fashion. While speculators enjoy the economy of scale, we inhabit an ecology scaled to the human being that was lost in the corporatist equation.

So, chill out people. We can still build and create and think and innovate. We just have to remember that our wealth lies not in what commodities can be bought and sold but what we can do that improves the human condition. Even if you loose your home and can’t fill the gas tank in your car, you still have something of worth to contribute to society. All you have to do is figure out what that is and how to make it available. Preferably without getting a corporation between you and the human market.

Rushkoff also has a manifesto of sorts up at Boingboing.

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
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On this day, 199 years ago, one of the most important humans ever to crawl from the primordial slime was born: Charles Darwin.

149 years ago, the culture wars began, with the publication of one of the greatest books ever written, On the Origin of Species. It was published on his 50th birthday. Ever since, a small cult of dingbats have been fighting a loosing battle agaisnt the forces of progress, knowledge and truth. It may take another 200 years but we’ll win, eventually. Time and Evolution our on our side.

Razib at Gene Expression has a great post on Christmas and what it means, if anything:

Ed, Greg & PZ have commented on the strange reaction of the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary toward Richard Dawkins’ enthusiasm for Christmas traditions. So “why would an atheist want to sing Christmas carols?”

The same reason that the study and reading of literature has not been reduced to physics. We humans appreciate great stories, and we can conceive in our mind’s eye ideas which may not be true, but we enjoy the play of those ideas nonetheless. One does not have to be a Greek pagan to appreciate the beauty and power of the Iliad, and in fact for centuries pious Christians have been moved by the poems of Homer without acceding to the reality of its relgious vision. For them Homer was not about the Truth of the gods, but the Truth of human experience. We don’t need to appeal to a classical education though, anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.

Today many Christians complain about a “War against Christmas,” but they might be surprised to know that until recently the soldiers in that war were avowed Christians! During the 1650s the ascendant Puritans in England waged a war against Christmas because of its associations with “Popery” and paganism. The reasoned argument was that Christmas had no Biblical foundation, that was not grounded in Truth, and that a host of practices were obviously extra-Biblical interpolations from the pagan milieu of their ancestors, residue from the age of darkness before the Savior. Politically, the practice of Christmas traditions was a sign that perhaps one was for the Cavalier cause or a recusant Catholic. In the the name of utilitarian economic efficiency these early fundamentalists also abolished most holidays and religious festivals because they had no Biblical grounding, and so were not rooted in Truth, and were a waste of time and without any utility. In may ways I think these early Protestant fundamentalists had much in common with latter day social engineers, such as the Khmer Rouge, who seemed driven by an unnatural and distorted Benthanmite conception of what drives human nature and what gives joy and fullness to our lives.

I believe in human nature. We are not a blank slate into which one can pour in prior values and assume that our lives will be shaped by these exogenous inputs through a chain of necessary propositions. We enjoy good food, music, the company of family, gossip, socialization and the broader succor of our community. These are not social constructions, they are are the core of our humanity, and any belief system or model of human action which neglects these natural impulses will lead us astray. I am not denying flexibility of the parameters, but that flexibility exhibits constraints and stress when deviated from the central tendency.

The whole post is great and hits on several ideas that have been whirring about in my brain for some time. One idea in particular that jumped out at me was his statement that, “anyone who reads a piece of moving fiction can be emotionally impacted, without entertaining that the narrative is real in a positivistic sense.“ This cuts to the heart of the Fundamentalist problem with other narratives, not just the Christmas Story.

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