Freedom of Religion? Did Someone Say Something About Freedom of Religion?

As you are doubtless aware, last week, a group of House Republicans, led by Darrell Issa (R-Cal), brutally gang-raped the First Amendment. With “yeehaw’s” and everything. And in the time-honored tradition of ideological rapists, they motivated their heinous conduct by their supposed love of liberty. Not everyone’s liberty, of course (don’t be silly) — just the liberty of authoritarian men to control and punish sexually active women, and the liberty of fundamentalist religious officials (similarly authoritarian men, all) to be above the law. I make no apologies for my choice of strong language, for what happened last week was the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare come to life: a bunch of clergy explicitly dictating policy in Washington. And by “dictating”, I mean “bodily present in Congress and telling said Congress what laws it may or may not pass, in a hearing whose whole premise was the idea that public policy must comply with clerical law in order to pass Constitutional muster”.

“Objectification”: You Keep Saying That Word …

When I started my blog, I made a pact with myself that I would not use it to attack other people’s blogs. I therefore will not include a link in this post to some of the things that have riled me up in this latest contraception controversy. Instead, I will observe generally that religious conservatives are copiously misusing the term “objectification” in an attempt to mask their fear of and contempt for female sexuality and sex in general. Specifically, a spurious charge is made that the ability to have sex “without consequences” leads to women being objectified.

I should note that objectification, in general, is one of the most misunderstood concepts in modern political and social discourse. Through basic intellectual laziness, people — especially people hostile to women’s equality — have come to equate objectification with lust. This is the infuriating “logic” behind the claim that the birth control pill leads to objectification: that men will get to have sex with women purely for pleasure. This highly traditionalist view presumes that male desire in and of itself is degrading to a woman, and that any sexual expression is by its very nature a painful sacrifice. Marriage and motherhood, therefore, are the only things that allow a woman to save face, as it were, against the humiliation of a man’s lust for her body. Religious conservatives ominously warn that the availability of birth control leads to men having sex for pleasure, and they fully expect women to be scared by this. And when women don’t get scared, they, of course, bemoan the sorry state of morals in our society.

Fun With The Magna Carta: A Letter to Three Musketeers From New Hampshire

“All members of the general court proposing bills and resolutions addressing individual rights or liberties shall include a direct quote from the Magna Carta which sets forth the article from which the individual right or liberty is derived.”

— NH House of Representatives Bill 1850
(Bob Kingsbury – R, Tim Twombley — R, Lucien Vita — R)

Dear Messrs Kingsbury, Twombley and Vita:

I would like to begin by thanking you, Gentlemen, along with many of your colleagues in the conservative movement, for providing countless hours of quality entertainment, so badly needed in these difficult times. You’ve been working overtime since at least 2008, and I think America doesn’t give you quite enough appreciation for all the good times had by water-coolers all over the country.

The Other Birther Movement

Oh, shut up, birthers. There was only one man who wrote the works of William Shakespeare. His name was William Shakespeare.

One of the most puzzling and maddening non-controversies in literature is the spurious question of the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. Since Shakespeare’s life is pretty well-documented for a 16th-century commoner, and since there is not a shred of evidence (not a single inscription, not one letter) suggesting that anyone else wrote any of the works attributed to him, the anti-Stratfordian movement (as the birthers are formally called) revolves entirely around Shakespeare’s background and personality, his supposed personal lack of fitness to wear the laurels as the immense colossus of English-language poetry and theater, the inventor of modern English in all its glory and one of the greatest artists in all of history.

Religious Freedom: Does the Constitution Really Favor Religious People Over Others?

No, it doesn’t. Still, this hasn’t stopped the outcry over the recently enacted Federal regulation that requires religious employers — such as parochial schools, church-run hospitals and “faith-based” social service organizations — to cover the cost of birth control for their employees. The complaint is that this act by the current Administration is an assault on religious freedom. The legal question is, how much religious freedom does the US Constitution guarantee, exactly?

In an effort to be a nicer person, I’ve decided to scrap my original plan to begin this post with a crude hypothetical. I’ll just point out the obvious.

Friday Ramblings: Fun With History

Some curious and very nerdy historical anecdotes for this Friday:

VIOLENCE

* In 1914, Grigori Rasputin, the legendary Russian mystic and favorite of the last Empress, was stabbed in the abdomen by a former prostitute turned religious zealot. He survived the stabbing. Two years later, he was poisoned, shot, shot three more times, clubbed and finally drowned. And only just barely: after being thrown into the icy waters of the Moika River, wrapped in a carpet and bound with rope, the poisoned, four-times-shot and badly battered Rasputin managed to break free of his bonds and almost swam to safety. The story plays out like a straight-to-video martial arts thriller on drugs: one of the murderers, Prince Yusupov, would later testify that he had the phonograph on, playing Yankee Doodle in a loop whilst three of history’s most inept assassins tried their damnedest to bring down the Indestructible Monk.

We Are What We Eat, In More Ways Than One

Last week’s news: Paula Deen, a popular cook and author of cookbooks with an emphasis on traditional (read: breaded and greasy) Southern cuisine, revealed that she had been suffering from diabetes for the last three years. She has come out about it now in order to shill for a pharmaceutical company. There is no denying that the there is irony in the situation, an obese adherent of riotously unhealthy cooking developing diabetes. Quelle surprise. And there is something unsavory in that, having made money for herself by selling such unhealthy recipes, she is now going to make some more by selling medication for a disease that’s caused, to a large extent, by bad diet.

Still, I wish people would stop ripping into her already. The reason for that is, I am just not sure that publishing a cookbook is tantamount to promoting a lifestyle. Were it so, vegan and low-fat cookbooks would certainly have fixed our nation’s eating habits by now. Fact is, however, people buy cookbooks that appeal to their tastes. A health-conscious person may buy a Paula Deen cookbook, but certainly will not use it with any frequency significant enough to impact his or his family’s health. By contrast, people who buy her cookbooks because they like to have that kind of food on a daily basis, would eat junk just as well without her input.

It does make one think, though: why DO people indulge in diets known to lead to serious illness?

Let’s Beat Up On the Young. Again. And Again. And Again.

O tempora o mores! What’s wrong with teenagers these days? Having dreams and desires? Doing things for fun? Having sex? And don’t even get me started on their iphones, ipads, ishmads and all that other touch-screen, sexy-picture-taking rubbish. Why, only a generation ago, teenagers were completely different. They hunted the woolly mammoth and mined salt for their own meals. They made all their own clothes and bought their own cars with the money they earned making cheeseburgers after school. Alas, it’s all in the past. Gone are the days when thirteen-year-old girls married sixteen-year-old boys and had ten babies in quick succession. Now, that was some maturity, some responsibility! Today, young people live through their teens and twenties enjoying themselves and not saving money for an obscenely overpriced home somewhere by the side of a coal plant. What’s wrong with teenagers today, and how can we help them live harder, less enjoyable lives as surly little adults?

You might think that the habits and mores of teenagers and young people today have something to do with demographic changes in the last several decades and centuries, and the current state of the economy, but you would be wrong. No, Alison Gopnik, writing for the blessed Wall Street Journal — I swear, lately, this gift just keeps on giving — is here to tell you that really, there is just something wrong with young people’s brains. It’s not the high rate of unemployment. It’s not the screwed-up economy, where an Ivy League degree gets you a job as a secretary (assuming you speak three languages and have a nice ass). It’s not the crushing cost of education these days. It’s not that it makes sense to spend some time living a little and getting a solid financial ground under your feet before you start having kids and taking out astronomical mortgages. It’s not that people who claim they lived like Trappist monks when they were young are lying. Oh no. Everything bad that happens to teenagers and young people these days is because they are lazy, irresponsible, unrealistic and shallow. In other words, “the kids these days”. Cue in hundreds of comments about “the way it was in MY day”.

Friday Ramblings: Shorts

This just in: history is polluted by facts!!

Actually, this isn’t just in. In fact, this juicy tidbit is about a year old, but it’s just too good to pass up: The Tennessee Tea Party has demanded that school history textbooks do not mention any TRUE FACTS that reflect negatively on the Founding Fathers, including “intrusions” on the Native Americans and ownership of slaves. (Sorry for being redundant.) Lest anyone think that the TTP has taken a page out of the Holocaust Denier’s Handbook, it must be emphasized that they went beyond classic historical revisionism, by implicitly acknowledging that bad things have happened to certain groups of people in the course of the American history. The draft reads:

Dabbling in Religion (Or How I Became an Atheist)

Back when my family was still living in Moscow, in the last waning days of the Soviet regime, my mother would take a tram car to work every morning. From the Three Stations, it rolled through Basmanny, past the magnificent Yelokhovskaya Church, where sometimes, my mother would get off to light a candle or to … just hang out, I guess. My mother was not by any means devout, but she was a romantic, and I think she had a touch of bovarism: Yelokhovskaya was the most opulent church in the city, certainly the most opulent functioning church (St. Basil’s Cathedral was a mere shell then), and it was rumored that the last remnants of the Old Regime aristocracy came here to worship, bloody but unbowed, and still conversing in French. On the few occasions that I happened to accompany her, the church awed me with its cascades of goldleaf and beeswax candles, its vast, dark expanse that made the lightest whisper ring and soar, its endless icons with saints, regarding me sternly and its otherworldly frankincense-scented mist. My mother would squeeze my hand and whisper in my ear: “Can’t you just feel that the Lord dwells in this place?”

I knew — because she told me many times — that the year before my birth, my parents lived on the shores of one of the numerous man-made reservoirs in Russia’s heartland, where you could still see the crosses of submerged churches and an occasional ruined belfry peeking out of the water. To us, living under the Soviet rule, when it was still dangerous to go to church or admit to being a believer, these small reminders of a submerged world were symbols of some spiritual loss, of the rootlessness, ugliness and the soul-crushing grind of Russian life.