maybe if we keep them separate but equal...

My recent post responding to the comment about Debbie Maken brought me on a brief internet safari (I looked at what else came up in the technorati search that lead to my site). I found a blog post on a site that is labeled "A Website of Focus on the Family." The post is one of the more blatant examples of heterosexism I have seen in a while. The post remarks on the story of a landscaping business that chose not to work with a gay couple and sent them an email explaining why with this email text:

I am appreciative of your time on the phone today and glad you contacted us. I need to tell you that we cannot meet with you because we choose not to work with homosexuals.

Best of luck in finding someone else to fill your landscaping needs.

All my best,

Sabrina.

And it gets worse. The post then suggest that "However you feel about the decision they made, it's hard to criticize the way they handled it." I disagree. It is easy to criticize the way they handled it. What is wrong with this country when someone can express blatant discrimination without any reason besides "we choose not to work with homosexuals" and then be commended for their bravery? We used to do this to black people, but last I heard anyone who still behaves that way knows better than to do it so publicly for fear of backlash. I would be (slightly) more forgiving if the landscapers had expressed concern for their young sheltered laborers, or if the couple had been presenting their sexuality in a way that was offensive, but even then, there is no excuse for treating a person as inhuman. And encouragement of this behavior from organizations that claim to be christian makes me sick to my stomach.

more ranty on singleness

I wanted to draw attention to a comment I just received from the proprietor of a blog against singleness about my review of a Debbie Maken article a few months ago.

Here's the text of the comment, for context:

"Actually, the problem is not so much "singleness" per se, as protracted singleness.
If we continue down the road we are going, with so much faulty teaching about the ridiculous contemporary idea of a "gift" of singleness, then you may feel differently in - what? - 10 years time? 20 years time? Maybe if you end up facing the future as a single woman who has passed her child-bearing years, you may wish you hadn't disrespected Maken, but actually took her common sense, Biblical approach far more seriously.
God's will is not just a rubber stamp on our collective actions, meaning that all who experience lifelong singleness have been "gifted" for it, when quite plainly our faulty teaching is causing it."

Now, maybe this whole discourse is railing against another small discourse that says it is best for christians to all be unmarried, but I still find it intensely problematic. As though being 43 and childless would make me so miserable I would change my mind about the problems with gender essentialism and valorizing marriage to young people who then enter unwise marriages in their rush to couple-up and procreate because they so fear spinsterhood.

Why can't the church be the one place you don't feel bad about being single?

On a related but tangential note, I've been considering this hypothesis lately: all of Focus on the Family's cultural and political positions are based in gender essentialism.

delurk!

Other blogs have posted this graphic and suggested that it is delurking week. Presumably as Turkey and Lurkey rhyme. As we all know, I really am a slave to trends, and I am often curious when I compulsively check my sitemeter and see unfamiliar locales pop up.

So I figure now is as good a time as any. I've been posting here for just over 2 years now. There are probably some people who read me from time to time that I don't know about. So, if you read my blog (even only occasionally), make yourself known! Who are you? where are you? don't you have anything better to do with your time? It will be fun!

letters to the president

my friend Claire teaches middle school in Roma TX, and writes fantastic blog posts all the time. Recently, she posted some letters her students wrote about Bush's plan to build a big fence. They are adorable and interesting, and I think you should read them too.

This might lead us to some interesting discussions about civic participation and voicelessness or, uh, immigration issues.

writing and waiting

As I was surfing the internet today (to stave off writing, ironically) I encountered this lovely blog post by my acquaintance Jessie on writing. Jessie is working on her dissertation right now, so writing is more central to her academic life than mine, but some of her thoughts resonated with me. At first I was thinking about writing and future in the sense that writing now guides my future – gets me into PhD programs, gets me jobs, gets me recognition. Also, especially if I publish the things I write now, I am committing to defend those ideas in the future, or at least continue to speak knowledgeably in that subject area.

Jessie’s reference to Habakkuk is really nice, though, and not just because it’s my favorite minor prophet. I was thinking about her suggestion that “writing and waiting have so much in common.” Jessie talks about active waiting, but I was thinking too about hope and trust. The upcoming season of Advent reminds us that we are in a constant state of waiting and hoping for the second coming and the new Jerusalem, but smaller bits of waiting also include hope and trust. Writing, for me, is often an exercise in hope and trust. I write in the hope that things I write will be useful and enlightening to me and others in the future. That my articulation of ideas will provide insight and possibility to others. Perhaps high hopes for an academic essay or a Friday afternoon blog post, and of course I don’t expect every word that crosses my keyboard to be brilliance for the future. I do, however, write in the hope that what I am writing is good and useful and will be good and useful in the future.

And I trust that God’s revelation will work through my academic muddling and make its way to me and others through me and my work. That is, I suppose, an outcome worth waiting for.

"popular" online slang

I was pleased to see that Nathan did some work looking into the real popularity of those internet abbreviations often listed in publications on the subject. It has often been my experience that half of the slang terms, abbreviations, and emoticons listed in glossaries of the same have been terms I had never seen before reading the glossary and never saw after. I imagine some poor hapless reader of a feature on internet slang going into a chat room and looking foolish rather than savvy by reading terms from a list. I think many of these list-makers miss the important fact that internet culture is not monolithic - different slang, abbreviations and inside jokes exist in different communities. groups based on being fans of certain bands or tv-shows have slang or abbreviations for pertinent characters or albums. some straightforward symbols are common - :), lol, brb, ttyl. But most slang terms are so community-specific any purported guide to all the internets will be, well, misguiding.

They'll Know We Are Christians By Our Teetotaling

This recent NYtimes article is troubling for many reasons besides those which appear to trouble Evangelical leaders. Evidently a poll suggests that only 4 percent of current young people will grow up to be “bible-believing christians” given a very restrictive definition. And even those Christian groups who suggest their numbers are larger present strange definitions of Christianity. (also interesting how they compare their audience to Paul McCartney’s – you know, he’s so popular with the kiddies these days…)

Apparently, these Christian teens feel the things that are keeping them from a godly life include Gilmore Girls, Ryan Seacrest, and Harry Potter. Although I understand that these things are not inherent goods, I suspect the one thing that needs to be excised from the lives of American teenagers to make them more godly is not Rory Gilmore. They express the belief that the markers of Christian living are “avoiding casual sex, risqué music and videos, Internet pornography, alcohol and drugs.”

Of course, I don’t believe that any of these ideas are bad, I’m obviously not going to encourage my 15-year-old sister (or anyone for that matter) to start doing any of those things. But is it a surprise that few people want to be part of this club? Their Christianity isn’t about love, grace, forgiveness or service. Their biblical values appear in the bible only by abstraction and certainly less than calls for social justice. If evangelical Christianity is about conservative social values, of COURSE it’s not popular among teenagers and of course they don’t want to talk about it. There’s no way to spin Puritanism as cool, no matter how much you brand it. But what really bothers me is the way they diminish the radical nature of Christianity to a set of conservative cultural values. How can “bible-believing” Christians fixate on such a small percentage of the actual biblical text?

quirk meme

I gave up my moratorium on memes to do the book one, and now I've been tagged by Shelly to talk about my quirks. Since Shelly constitutes a fair percentage of my small audience and I like talking about how quirky I am, here I go with 5 quirks:

1) I finally gave up on trying to learn to flip my pen like a debater this year after 7 years of trying intermittently.

2) I like to buy my stamps at the post office counter so that I can get the limited edition designs. Right now I have superheroes. I hope the recipients of my bills and letters notice.

3) Half of the time I'm looking at Facebook and Myspace I'm trying to figure out what other people do for hours on there.

4) I wanted to be a writer since I was 4 or 5 years old and started working on my first novel by typing on my parents' apple II. I never finished it.

5) When I was in High School my friends and I played a game called "word of the week" which was a contest to see who could use the designated word the most during the week. Some of those words showed up on the GRE, and I felt smug.

I'm sure my friends could think of quirkier things that I forgot are quirky, but there's some.

Capitalism's War?

Daniel linked to this propaganda video from world war II. I was floored by how much our wartime messages have changed in 60 years. Why are we being told the opposite now? What if we had war propaganda that said "every dollar you spend on something you don't need is a dollar helping the taliban"? What if more of us thought of the soldiers in Iraq as "our boys"?

for more on interesting wartime propoganda check out Dr Stahl's documentary.

new word

inheranoid: the condition of being worried about extra about something because that person's parent does. (dirivitive: inheranoia)

examples: did we lock that? are you sure? can we just go back and check? Sorry, I'm inheranoid.
let's just throw it out, I have some inheranoia about food poisoning.

** Jim made up this word by accident, we worked together on the definition **