Pharyngula

Posted by: 2-D Man | May 19, 2009 10:35 AM

I'm not sure it's the "new" part they have problems with.

Posted by: Michael | May 19, 2009 10:39 AM

Really, very interesting topic. If possible, please more information. This is one of the better blogs that I read.

Posted by: Roger | May 19, 2009 10:42 AM

Have any of you ever been over to the NOM blog? The comments section is a hoot, particularly this one imbecile named "Chairm" who keeps harping about the "core meaning" of marriage. He keeps trying to get dissenters to explain the "core meaning" of gay marriage, as though the concept is soooooo totally foreign and alien to heterosexual marriage that the two are incommensurate. Dumbasses.

Posted by: Wildflower | May 19, 2009 10:43 AM

Curious. Until the last sentence I thought this was an advertisement for same sex marriage.

Posted by: Epinephrine | May 19, 2009 10:51 AM

Such a weird obsession with same sex marriage. I'm glad we legalised it a while back, my children's generation won't even blink. Heck, there are kids in my eldest's grade with two dads or two moms, and it'll do no end of good for making people realise that anatomy doesn't really matter.

Posted by: nails | May 19, 2009 10:56 AM

hahaha. "BUT WHO WOULD BE MY MOM????" clearly most of you men folk are incapable of parenting.

Posted by: Mike K | May 19, 2009 11:02 AM

The one thing I simply do not get:
Why, for the love of dog, do these people care how other people want to live?

Gay marriage is all pros for society:
Two people vow to love each other and care for each other, and accept responsiblity for each other - responsibilty the rest of society does not have to take in case of sickness, unemployment etc...

And just because you call yourself something (married) does not change the meaning it has for me and my wife.

So seriously: What is it?

Posted by: Ploon | May 19, 2009 11:07 AM

And most kids have more than one (step)dad and (step)mom nowadays, right? Welcome to the 21st century, people. I don't know many same-sex couples with children, but those I do know are completely committed to each other and loving and devoted to their children. These NOM clowns are suffering from a complete lack of imagination. Any form of family other than ours working just as well? INCONCEIVABLE!

Posted by: Reginald Selkirk | May 19, 2009 11:07 AM

My family includes Ida

Posted by: Parsnip | May 19, 2009 11:08 AM

I wish my own President could muster as much passion in defending my rights and my human dignity as my secular friends. The atheists are the "fiercest advocates" I've got in this country.

On NOM, they're just this side of a hate group, and their irrelevance is self-evident. The organized anti-gay right is crumbling before our eyes.

Posted by: chancelikely | May 19, 2009 11:11 AM

This is the child equivalent of that old question of gay couples, "Which one of you is the husband and which one is the wife?" And it's not any smarter or better thought out here, either.

I understand that they're trying to play on common fears, but honestly, it just comes off as if what they're really scared of is teaching their children anything.

Posted by: truthspeaker | May 19, 2009 11:11 AM

Our kids will be taught a new way of thinking.

Oh noes!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 19, 2009 11:13 AM

Being raised Christian, I was all confused that so many people around the world might be good and yet still go to hell because they didn't believe in Jesus.

Should we make Christianity illegal too, NOM?

Posted by: Beth B. | May 19, 2009 11:17 AM

One thing that always confuses (ha!) me is the tacit assumption that the worst thing you can do to your child is allow them to become confused on any given important issue. Let the little buggers puzzle over it, I say. It's good training for later in life.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 19, 2009 11:20 AM

I'm not interested in pro-homo right rants and other strictly political issues - i'm interested in phylogeny trees, evo-devo, genetic evidences and not this crap.

Don't they have science textbooks in Middle Europe, dipshit? Go buy some.

After all it is a scienceblog, isn't it?

Go read some of the other blogs hosted by ScienceBlogs and see how often they get political, you literalist idiot.

Posted by: Watchman | May 19, 2009 11:21 AM

It's all so ludicrous. The ones who are "acting all confused" are the adults who fear social change. Children are far more adaptable. One of my son's best friends has two moms. None of the kids in their class find it particularly odd, in fact they find it to be less odd than a family situation where the two parents live apart.

Yeah, I know... anecdote. But what is NOM peddling, if not fictional anecdotes that attempt to contradict reality?

Posted by: catgirl | May 19, 2009 11:21 AM

This is the child equivalent of that old question of gay couples, "Which one of you is the husband and which one is the wife?"

They could ask this of straight couples and still not get the answer they are expecting. I think this is actually where the fear comes from.

Posted by: ArchangelChuck | May 19, 2009 11:24 AM

Looks like we'll be watching Colbert tonight. ;p

#35: Yes!! I was thinking something along those lines myself.

Posted by: Watchman | May 19, 2009 11:27 AM

Honestly, that's what's at the core of it. They think it's yucky.

*shudder*

Yeah.

Also, you know, if we let homosexuals live together and stuff, soon everyone will be homosexual, and the human race will die out.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 19, 2009 11:29 AM

Another fail for Maggie Gallagher. Poor little loser.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 19, 2009 11:31 AM

Mike @ 14

Why, for the love of dog, do these people care how other people want to live?

Near as I can figure it, they believe same-sex marriage will make the baby jebus cry. Other than that, they got nothin'.

Posted by: Molly, NYC | May 19, 2009 11:32 AM

Right. Because the current arrangement (for many) of some combination of mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, ex-stepparents, step-siblings, half-sibs, ex-step-siblings, step-parents' exes, (etc.) is so simple and straightforward.

Posted by: James | May 19, 2009 11:35 AM

I have thus far experienced having three fathers and two mothers, all of them heterosexual. The not-so-unusual failure of good Christian marriages leads to plenty of interesting questions as it is. Kids already deal with a 50/50 chance of living with one of their biological parents at a time; I'm sure they can deal with two moms or dads under one roof.

Posted by: bunnycatch3r | May 19, 2009 11:36 AM

@12 I'm sure Hypatia heard similar arguments in her day.

Posted by: James | May 19, 2009 11:37 AM

I have thus far experienced having three fathers and two mothers, all of them heterosexual. The not-so-unusual failure of good Christian marriages leads to plenty of interesting questions as it is. Kids already deal with a 50/50 chance of living with one of their biological parents at a time; I'm sure they can deal with two moms or dads under one roof.

Posted by: catgirl | May 19, 2009 11:41 AM

It's so silly when people complain about the content on any website, especially a blog. Seriously, there's a wonderful bar at the right side of your screen that allows you to just scroll past the parts you don't like. If you don't like a post but decide to comment anyway, then you're a troll. Seriously, it's like if I go to a website and see a recipe that has peppers in (which I hate), and then I whine about it and say, "how dare you make me look at a recipe that I don't personally like?" Seriously Alexander, get over it. Move on down the page and move on with your life. When you start accusing people of pedophilia, then you're no longer a whiny baby; you're officially a troll.

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 19, 2009 11:47 AM

And thanks for the nice words, my tolerant sympathetic fellow human being.

Be less stupid, then. I wear no tagline saying "I coddle morons."

Posted by: Ploon | May 19, 2009 11:48 AM

Alexander @ 45:

Oh SNAP! Yes, there was talk in the Netherlands of a pedophilia interest group (on a par with NAMBLA, I guess) starting a party and running for elections (hell, we have a Party for the Animals in parliament). They soon withdrew though.

But this leaves me even more confused. What does that have to do with anything? People who associate homosexuality and pedophilia are usually bible-thumpers (maybe because of the preferences of their clergy). You're not secretly a Christian troll, are you? Is that why religious topics on this blog bother you?

Posted by: Mike K | May 19, 2009 11:52 AM

@51 Michael: Nice!

Does anyone remember the standup bit Lewis Black did on the topic? The one where he explains the bible to non-jews? There was something in there with a camel, and I can't find that performance anymore.
It is so hilarious, I almost fell off my chair laughing...

Posted by: gaypaganunitarianagnostic | May 19, 2009 11:55 AM

If everyone became a nun, monk, or priest the human race would die out too.

Posted by: GregB | May 19, 2009 11:59 AM

Child: The idea of gay marriage confuses me. My church says that it's moral to deny gay people the right to share insurance benefits and to have community property rights. But in school we read that the Constitution says no state shall deny to any of it's citizens equal protection of the law.

Then we started learning about bigotry at home school. You know, like with the slaves and stuff and how Jesus said that not treating people the same is a bad thing. But then Jesus said that we should treat our slaves well. But isn't just having slaves wrong? Why would Jesus say both of those things?

It kind of seems like if you let most mom and dads get married but you don't let some people get married that it would be like that bigotry stuff we learned about.

I wanted to ask my dad about it but he and mommy are divorced and I only get to see him twice a month. Mom says it's all about the importance of "Family" but I don't get it how two people who want to be together is bad but mom and dad getting divorced and not living together is OK.

Gay marriage confuses me.

Posted by: James F | May 19, 2009 12:04 PM

Mike K #58

I think you're thinking of Red, White, & Screwed. Check this clip starting around 4:00. As a bonus, that clip starts out with his classic bit on creationism.

Posted by: Marcus | May 19, 2009 12:12 PM

Anna and Eve. Huh. Could have sworn that was from Vivid entertainment not NOM. The things they did with that poor snake.

Posted by: Richard | May 19, 2009 12:15 PM

Mike #14:

So seriously: What is it?

To expand on the answer to this question: there are laws on the books that require elementary schools to "teach respect for the institution of marriage."

Now, if "the institution of marriage" includes homosexuals, then children will legally have to be taught to respect homosexuals. That's the problem.

Why is that a problem?

Because, as Nathaniel #29 said, homosexuals are yucky and not deserving of respect.

Posted by: Mike K | May 19, 2009 12:19 PM

@ 63 Zar: That is very funny, thanks!
@ 64 James F: Thank you, that was what I was looking for!

Posted by: Awesome Robot | May 19, 2009 12:32 PM

Traditional marriage is a property arrangement where a man owns one or more wives. These modern interpretations of marriage are against the Bible! If we say a man can only have one wife, what's next? Will marriage be between one man and no women? It's a slippery slope indeed!

Posted by: Mena | May 19, 2009 12:35 PM

But if they create cheap ads, doesn't that mean more profit for them and more take home pay for Maggie Gallagher? Her earnings (42% of their take last year, IIRC) are what this is all about, isn't it?

Posted by: Konsole | May 19, 2009 12:44 PM

Welcome. I think that yes it is. This blog is so interesting that you spend most of his reading of his time. Waiting for the next entries. Yours.

Posted by: Alexander | May 19, 2009 12:46 PM

pleeease...
"dumbfuck"
"fuckwit"
and finally:
"jobless neo-Nazi" "we're keeping him spraying swastikas in the bathroom of the nearest McDonald's"
that's all, or is something else that I don't know about myself?

Can't You please use a bit less subhuman language?
The intention why I made my first post is simply this: If PZ looks trough the comments than in the flood of Yippeee-Hurray there will be ONE post which sais that I prefer the "Evolution, development," parts from the header instead of the "random". Period.

If you don't like my comment than there is a "wonderful bar at the right side of your screen that allows you to just scroll past the parts you don't like" as catgirl wrote.

And please, Brownian, stop this. It's not funny to accuse unknown people with being Nazis. Fucking not funny. Frightening thing is that you (and Ploon, who is confused that he can't put me in a neat box according his prejudices) can not handle an opinion which is not resembling yours. Someone who does not agree with you is not automatically an ... well, you listed everything.

Posted by: Rob | May 19, 2009 12:57 PM

Are we absolutely sure that NOM isn't a parody? I haven't seen anything except on the internet. Is it a real organization, you know with tax exempt status and all that?

I mean, the name is funny, as in LOLcats NomNomNom! Their commercials are so serious and silly at the same time, and their arguments sound real but are truly vapid. I have a really hard time believing that an organization that was seemingly so seriously anti-gay marriage would put out such silly commercials. Are they actually aired on TV?

Posted by: Brownian, OM | May 19, 2009 12:59 PM

Frightening thing is that you (and Ploon, who is confused that he can't put me in a neat box according his prejudices) can not handle an opinion which is not resembling yours.

Alexander, you haven't offered an opinion other than that you're not interested in "pro-homo" or political rants.

We get a lot of trolls here, and so far you've fit the category perfectly.

Posted by: catgirl | May 19, 2009 1:09 PM

Ironically, I have actually seen NOM ads on icanhascheezburger.com recently. It's not even those Google-generated ads based on text, but actual banner ads. It's hilarious because they are so oblivious to it. I wonder how many NOMers are also tea-baggers. It really does seem almost like a parody, but I think these people are really truly oblivious to reality.

Posted by: Stogoe | May 19, 2009 1:19 PM

You're not dumber than a bag of rocks, Alexander, are you?

Are You?

Posted by: Pablo | May 19, 2009 1:30 PM

Right. Because the current arrangement (for many) of some combination of mom, dad, stepmom, stepdad, ex-stepparents, step-siblings, half-sibs, ex-step-siblings, step-parents' exes, (etc.) is so simple and straightforward.

Let's step back even further: single parents. Some children live with only one parent, and have little-to-no contact with the other. Yet, for some reason, this is actually preferable to having two loving parents in the same house, if those two happen to be the same sex? That is effectively what they are saying: married same sex parents are SO bad for kids that unmarried, single parents are preferable. That just doesn't make any sense.

We sort of went through this when we baptized our son in the catholic church. Catholic guidelines give strong advice for chosing godparents, talking about how it is important decision, and you want to chose godparents carefully and thoughtfully, don't chose aunts or uncles just because they are aunts and uncles, but chose people who are going to be committed to the spiritual well-being and religious development of your child. Oh, and, if you chose two, one has to have a penis and the other cannot.

Apparently, it is better to only have one person committed to the spiritual well-being and religious development of your child than to have two, if they are the same sex.

This is church canon, so is non-negotiable. In the end, we just had one godmother sign the baptism certificate, but our son has two godmothers and no godfathers.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 19, 2009 1:35 PM

The intention why I made my first post is simply this: If PZ looks trough the comments than in the flood of Yippeee-Hurray there will be ONE post which sais that I prefer the "Evolution, development," parts from the header instead of the "random". Period.

If you noticed, there is less comments in the science postings. And I will give a reason why that is. I am assuming that many of the regulars and lurkers are like me, we have a general interest in the various sciences but our knowledge is not really very deep. We read most of the columns that PZ post and even follow to the papers that he links to. That is because PZ has the great and apparently rare ability to spell out the information in a readable way. But we have nothing to add in the comments.

But when it comes to the intersection of science, politics and life, we feel more free to let loose.

If you do not like it, find an other place. Right now, you are an energy sucker.

Posted by: catgirl | May 19, 2009 1:38 PM

Alexander, if you don't like the content, then send PZ a private e-mail. Otherwise, scroll down the page and move on with your life.

Posted by: ice9 | May 19, 2009 1:39 PM

Gay couples would likely be attractive to insurance companies. They beat the actuarial tables in a variety of ways.

Aside from the stupidity of the message, I was struck by how in the commercial all the kids are leaning forward in a parody of adult intensity. Kids just don't do that.

As someone said above, this is choir-preaching, and we should rejoice at it. The ads do more harm than good if you consider the whole electorate; as long as the culture-war branch of the right wing continues to play to the gay-fear angle, their market share will continue to dwindle. Even among the most far-right christian gay-haters, the weak arguments are starting to sound hollow. There never has been a real argument. These ads dramatize just how trivial the problem is, and in that respect accomplish two important things: first they satisfy the arm of the Republican party that their "message" is getting out, thereby making them confident and brave so they can continue to participate in the cycle of hatred, all the while bleeding real political support and making themselves more irrelevant every day; and second, they reiterate to the moderates the patently foolish postures the Republican Party has taken, further alienating them and reinforcing the sense that the GOP's loyalty is self-destructive--that is, painting themselves into a smaller and smaller corner. I for one love it.

ice

Posted by: mandrake | May 19, 2009 1:43 PM

Alexander, maybe you didn't consider what the phrase "pro-homo rants" sounds like to an American audience. I think that's garnering a lot of the hostility here.

Posted by: nate | May 19, 2009 1:46 PM

To Alexander at 22: I'm always surprised that commenters who don't care about a topic choose to post a comment in the comment section atached to a post about that topic (I live in Middle America). The post is clearly about homosexuals being denied the right to marry by the religous fucks in the U.S., but I see a comment from Alexander merely stating that he doesn't want to read such a post. This comment section is about the post discussing how insane it is to oppose homosexual marriage--in principle, okay and about religous fucks sometimes because those are the people most adamantly opposed to homosexual marriage. I'm not interested in commenters like Alexander about this post, specifically, and equality for homosexuals, generally--I'm interested in commenters who do. After all it is a post about homosexual marriage and equality for homosexuals, isn't it?

Posted by: Drockatctown | May 19, 2009 1:49 PM

Alright #100 now can we all just stop this for the sake of upsetting of Lord.

Posted by: Rick R | May 19, 2009 1:49 PM

"Ignoring the fact that some gay men don't, and some heterosexuals do."

Very true, but that kind of subtle complexity (reality) is not really what the anti-gay crowd wants or understands. The idea has been around for a long time that homosexuality and sodomy are synonymous, not just in the public square, but in law as well.

To these idiots, homosexuality = teh buttsecks. Lesbians, apparently, get a pass, although they're still hated and feared because (gasp!) they demonstrate you don't need a man for sexual contentment. Although if they're doing it where white heterosexual christian men can watch, it's OK then.

So, really, the whole opposition boils to down to pointing to "facts not in evidence" to support their bigotry.

But for conservative christians, that's a feature, not a bug.

Posted by: ArchangelChuck | May 19, 2009 2:20 PM

Aww, come on guys. You're hurting Alexander's little feelings. If you keep it up, chances are that he'll go home and cry into his cardigan because all the mean old atheists yelled at him. He might even cut himself. *gasp*

Posted by: Bill Dauphin | May 19, 2009 2:33 PM

Although if [lesbians are] doing it where white heterosexual christian men can watch, it's OK then.

Not just OK; it's porn efficient!

Also... bacon! ;^)

Posted by: Cade R. | May 19, 2009 2:43 PM

You can't spell ignominy without NOM!

ig⋅no⋅min⋅y
  [ig-nuh-min-ee, ig-NOM-uh-nee]
–noun, plural -min⋅ies for 2.
1. disgrace; dishonor; public contempt.
2. shameful or dishonorable quality or conduct or an instance of this.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 19, 2009 3:10 PM

If our goverment continues to allow this our country is going to be full of AIDS

too bad for you and your propaganda that the facts don't support your BS

Posted by: shamar | May 19, 2009 3:25 PM

Mommy, why are that boy's mommy and daddy different colors ??

Because they are trying to destroy the sanctity of marriage for real white americans?

ha ha ha

my little work in progress

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 19, 2009 4:11 PM

I'm not sure that the bill the video refers to (HB 436) has much of a chance of passing.

From
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090519/NEWS02/305199966/-1/OPINION02

Last Thursday, Lynch said he would veto the legislation (HB 436) unless lawmakers adopted the "strongest and clearest" protections for objecting religious groups

Looking over the bill, it seems like sec. 457:37 was added:

Members of the clergy...shall not be obligated or otherwise required by law to officiate at any particular civil marriage or religious rite of marriage in violation of their right to free exercise of religion

...but if this was in the approved draft on 04/29, and the gov's statement was on 05/14, it might not be enough.

Thing is, what stronger wording could there be that respects both parties?

Posted by: Cactus Wren | May 19, 2009 4:17 PM

Nathaniel@ #29: that’s my response when I hear people protesting, “But I don’t want to have to explain to my four-year-old about gay marriage and homosexuality and gay sex!”

Okay, sooo, if a four-year-old said “Mommy, why is that man kissing that lady,” the answer would be, “Because he loves her” – but if the same four-year-old said, “Mommy, why is that man kissing that other man,” the answer would have to be, “Because he wants to put his pee-pee in the other man’s butthole.”

And they say gays are corrupting their children?

Reginald@ #37: Olbermann did a great rant on his “WTF moment” segment last night (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30815557) about how legalizing same-sex marriage would affect the economy. $4.7 billion in catering and wedding planning alone. Total: "Sixteen billion eight hundred million dollars. Sixteen billion eight hundred million dollars! My God, Steele, it's a stimulus package!"

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 19, 2009 4:27 PM

Ryan @114 -- If I understood it right, Lynch wants clauses modeled on those contained in Vermont's and Connecticut's laws, which are more wordy (even though they do nothing the 1st Amendment didn't already do.)

Yup. And it passed a Senate committee today. Legislative leaders (and marriage equality organizations) have basically said, "Sure, no problem" to the language providing redundant religious privileges. It'll probably be passed and signed within a week to ten days. And then the number of states allowing same-sex couples to marry will have jumped from two to six in the past two months.

New York is going to be much tougher. Doesn't sound likely to emerge from the state Senate there.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 19, 2009 4:31 PM

#37: Olbermann did a great rant on his “WTF moment” segment last night (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/#30815557) about how legalizing same-sex marriage would affect the economy. $4.7 billion in catering and wedding planning alone. Total: "Sixteen billion eight hundred million dollars. Sixteen billion eight hundred million dollars! My God, Steele, it's a stimulus package!"

HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE, HATE THIS!

First of all, the marketization of gay and lesbian communities, and the worthiness of recognizing these relationships because it will provide an economic boon just drives me crazy. But, in addition, the continued discourse surrounding this tends to reinforce stereotypes of gay wealth (I wrote about news coverage and the overrepresentation of wealthy gays and lesbians in one chapter of my dissertation). Beyond that, though, it just feeds the wedding-industrial complex and the ridiculous wedding planning industry that gives the fucking ceremony more importance than the actual relationship. I hate that we're giving the same party planning gay boys that have ruined straight people's lives more power over our own.

Posted by: Tulse | May 19, 2009 4:40 PM

can we all just stop this for the sake of upsetting of Lord

Yeah, for fuck's sake don't get that touchy bastard riled up, as he's really into the whole smiting thing....

Posted by: stogoe | May 19, 2009 4:45 PM

Smallexander, you're not actually going to leave. But next time you waltz in, you might try not to say stupid bigoted shit right in your first post. That bit about "pro-homo right rants" really labeled you as a fucknut right off the bat. I don't think even Walton made his "short skirts made of human skin" comments right off the bat.

Posted by: Bren | May 19, 2009 4:51 PM

Did anyone else notice how much the music in that ad sounded like the music in the Brokeback Mountain trailer?

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 19, 2009 5:04 PM

Well, lawdy lawdy lawdy Ms Clawdy -- you sure (don't) look good to me... I just popped in from Leiter Reports to take a look around. Perhaps PZ has much to offer, but if this NOM thread is representative of his and his readers' persona(e), then how sad. So arrogantly certain. So readily abusive of others. So proud of your terrible swift ironic swords. In short, a nasty bunch. I say sad, because a mind is a terrible thing to waste in seething hatred of our benighted bros. Love thy neighbor -- you may really really need her or him some day.

Posted by: CJO | May 19, 2009 5:09 PM

I don't think even Walton made his "short skirts made of human skin" comments right off the bat.

Uh, that was Pete Rooke (Survivor loser and dungeon denizen).

I'm not what you'd call Walton's biggest fan, but compared to Pete Rooke, he's Sastra.

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 19, 2009 5:21 PM

Not code, Ryan. Simple English, in the clear. However, I see that you accord "respect" by some special calculus, rather than as a matter of generous assumption, so -- I understand your confusion. I doubt we need bother with further discussion.

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 19, 2009 5:39 PM

you accord "respect" by some special calculus, rather than as a matter of generous assumption

Respect calculation is actually pretty easy to understand for a given topic:
((Level of expertise in general) + (Level of expertise in a given topic * accuracy in given topic)) * (1 - (% of how much of an asshole they are by demanding respect))

So for you, I've calculated my respect for you on the subject of English at:
(x + y * 0) * (1 - .95) or .05x

Why? Because 'benighted' means the exact opposite of how you used it, which is why I asked.
You took it as meaning a group that should garner respect by generosity.
Why on Earth should someone automatically respect an "Unenlightened" group?

Nyuck.
Of course, you knew all that, right?

Posted by: MTB | May 19, 2009 5:46 PM

The ad "Original topic" assumes that without gay people, Every Child would live with parents named Ward and June Clever, a Brady Bunch Family Christmas each year. Ooops, instead foster care systems throughout the country are collapsing under the strain from the sheer number of children in need of help. (Did I miss that part of her video?)

As a nurse I can tell you stories of child abuse cases from One Man and One Woman Families that would make your stomach turn. Yet my life time of accomplishments with my partner, our home, the business we have together in addition to my job in healthcare, the two cars, dogs, respect of neighbors, clients, friends and family are going to confuse a child in need?

Maggie Gallaghers Yale Education is being put to good use in generating fear, praying on prejudice and generating donations to an agency that according to her last filed 990 tax return she was able to take 42% of all donataions as salary.

Her motive is greed, and as long as she uses the historical data she learned from Yale and how religion can and is big business, she can maintain the office across from Princeton, the home in Westchester County, and a 6 digit income.

Statistically children raised by gay parents fair as well as children raised by two different gender parents. Her entire platform on marriage as a means for procreation is laugable as well. Her first child was born out of wedlock, and Maggie has only 2 children.

The truly sad realization is that the millions of dollars spent on advertisements, video's, television time, etc., could have gone to save a child's life, helped a foster child out of the system, kept a family facing foreclosure from loosing their home. Instead, the Yale Educated Woman with a Religous Background and the office across the street from Princeton decided to attack my marriage, instead of using the money to save a child.

She speaks like there is some "HH" Homo-headquaters where Agendas are passed out to each homosexual with some kind of membership card, and sworn legal document that commits us to the destruction of the human race. Yet as she flies from city to city she pass by the homeless children and their families and uses the money she collects for her own pockets and to fight the life I have built for myself. Some Christain crusade right? Wasn't it the Crusades that ended thousands of childrens lives?

Shame with that education a realization of what she could do for children is a priority, but instead a vendetta to stop gay men and women from helping their children.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 19, 2009 6:06 PM

However, I see that you accord "respect" by some special calculus, rather than as a matter of generous assumption

Says the person who insulted everyone here in the very first post. What a hypocrite.

Posted by: Watchman | May 19, 2009 6:23 PM

I say sad, because a mind is a terrible thing to waste in seething hatred of our benighted bros. Love thy neighbor -- you may really really need her or him some day.

You're addressing the wrong crowd, Kolonel. I suggest you take your message of peace, love and acceptance where it's needed most: to NOM, and to other organizations like it.

You haven't seen "seething hatred" until you've met the opposition at a gay pride parade.

Now go do some good in the world. You'll come back a better man.

To MBT @ #136: Well spoken.

Posted by: Kate | May 19, 2009 6:47 PM

MTB, you tell 'em.

There *will* come a day when this type of stupid, ridiculous, hypocritical bigotry will be seen as nothing more than an embarrassing period in human history.

That day can not come soon enough. I sincerely hope it arrives in my lifetime and I'm going to do everything I can to see that it does.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 19, 2009 7:21 PM

Posted by: JJ | May 19, 2009 10:36 AM

I actually think that NOM is an undercover pro-gay marriage group. I sent this to friends in NH, and it outraged them so much that they called the number to tell Gov. Lynch to SUPPORT gay marriage. They never would have done this on their own. GO NOM!

Hmm, this might be one of the hardest Poes to figure out. Remember also how after the first ad all those hilarious audition tapes leaked out mysteriously.

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 19, 2009 7:51 PM

PZ Myers:

Oh, and for any kids who are actually confused, here's how to tell who your parents are. They're the people who love you

Sometimes love hurts.

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 19, 2009 7:58 PM

Pilty again I ask, do you have a point?

Posted by: John Morales | May 19, 2009 8:11 PM

Piltdown @146, I take it that those aren't your parents.

Are you attempting to imply that gay couples make bad parents? To show us you troll the web for images that titillate you? Or what?

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 19, 2009 8:12 PM

Rev. BigDumbChimp:

Pilty again I ask, do you have a point?

Well that was a snapshot of the Folsom Street Fair. Here's another good one.

The point?

Matthew 18:6.

And we wonder why the Muslims despise us.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 19, 2009 8:19 PM

No Pilty, ever wonder why you are despised? That is the proper analysis. Leave the poor Muslims out of it.

Posted by: Priya Lynn | May 19, 2009 8:23 PM

Piltdown man, you think people should be murdered for taking their children to the Folsom fair - no wonder we despise people like you.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 19, 2009 8:28 PM

Love Hurts

Here is a remedy for the Hoax.

Posted by: The MadPanda | May 19, 2009 8:37 PM

Given Pilty the Pointless Wonder's clear masochistic tendencies, why offer him a cure? He'd first have to admit he has a problem, and De Nial is strong with this one.

Off the table and into somebody's pint of lager, that boy.

The MadPanda, FCD

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 19, 2009 9:00 PM

And we wonder why the Muslims despise us.

I don't see anything in Matthew 18:6 about Christian imperialists stealing Muslim land and dropping bombs on their heads, but you say that it's relevant, so it must be in there somewhere.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 19, 2009 9:04 PM

Aquaria, excellent post #161.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 19, 2009 9:06 PM

Hey, guys. We should lay off Pilty. He's got a point. Good Christians would never make a public spectacle of some weird bondage fetish.

Posted by: Carlie | May 19, 2009 9:21 PM

Love also stinks.

Posted by: Josh | May 19, 2009 9:26 PM

I LOVE Joan Jett!

In a weird serious of events, I ended up at a Joan Jett concert a few years ago. It was an outdoor show. She's still got the voice.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 19, 2009 9:40 PM

Josh! You got a bad case of Chimpy's Cooties! I have to find a way to use weird serious in a sentence!

Posted by: Josh | May 19, 2009 9:45 PM

Josh! You got a bad case of Chimpy's Cooties! I have to find a way to use weird serious in a sentence!

Goddammit.

RREEEEEEEEEEVVV!

That's not funny.

Uh...typos usually aren't?

*looks confused*

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 19, 2009 9:52 PM

Hoax! Don't you wish you could place them all in the flames!

I certainly hope so.
All the filthy sinners have the best parties!

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 19, 2009 9:57 PM

Well that was a snapshot of the Folsom Street Fair.

Pilty you fucking idiot. S and M is not a gay thing, its a sex thing that both homosexuals and heterosexuals engage in. You keep posting these things as if you are making some clever statement and you are not. You are only showing that you are a myopic moron who wouldn't know the real world if it kicked you in the nuts.

The point?

Matthew 18:6.

How about Matthew 7:1-5?

But really, who GIVES A SHIT about your fucking bible verse. If you believe it, then follow it. If you think that applies to others and you should force it on them,

GO FUCK YOURSELF

Sick of you and your continual pushing of the idea that your religion is some moral thing to be a part of.

It is not.

It's about intolerance, ignorance and control.. and you are a great ambassador of that.

Fuck you very much you insignificant little ignorant spec on the ass of a rat.

May the fleas of a thousand camels infest your crotch and may your arms be too short to scratch.

Posted by: SC, OM | May 19, 2009 10:00 PM

Posted by: Rev. BigDumbChimp | May 19, 2009 9:57 PM

What he said.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 19, 2009 10:03 PM

Brava! Rev. Brava!

Posted by: Josh | May 19, 2009 10:06 PM

'Night. :)

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 19, 2009 10:14 PM

Night Josh. I'm heading toward wind down time toward bed shortly myself. The Redhead did laundry, so I have to make the bed first.

Rev., I don't think Pilty heard you. He seems to have a noseeum, nohearum, lightsonnobodyhome problem. But I like your point.

Posted by: Mike in Ontario, NY | May 19, 2009 10:26 PM

I thought the photo Pilty posted was taken at the latest stormfront rally. No?

Posted by: David Dyer-Bennet | May 19, 2009 10:37 PM

There's a great photo of a rather smug-looking (and quite rightly so) young woman holding up a sign reading "Jesus had two dads, why can't I?" (in rainbow lettering). I think it's a great response to the idiots!

I saw the photo at http://img179.imageshack.us/img179/3674/256007rallying.jpg

Posted by: Susan Stanko | May 19, 2009 10:46 PM

Isn't that what religion is about? Control?

Posted by: Kseniya | May 19, 2009 11:00 PM

At the risk of seeming pedantic... Brava is for females, Bravo for males, Bravi for two or more persons. So we ought to say "Bravo!" to cheer Rev, unless we're ... making a statement. ;-)

Say... where the heck is Etha? I miss her.

Unleash the bloodhounds.

Posted by: Sastra | May 19, 2009 11:18 PM

kolonelpanik #193 wrote:

But let's also say that as deeply wrong as I think NOM is, despicable as is their use of children for their probably harmful propaganda, I find the certainty and nastiness on this forum even more despicable -- because there's no excuse for it. At least the NOMs can plead ignorance.

I think you're drawing a very strange equivalence here, between "nastiness" (?) expressed in the comments section of a blog, and a concerted effort to deny a large group of individuals basic human rights. What is the "certainty" which you find so appalling? Being sure that 'gay marriage' is marriage? You yourself say that the NOM campaign is "deeply wrong," and are presumably sure enough about that.

I don't understand your specific complaint.

Posted by: Kseniya | May 19, 2009 11:45 PM

(My use of the umlat was unironic - I copy/pasted from your own post. Only now, in reviewing the thread, do I see that it was imposed upon you. Yet you have chosen to keep it, at least temporarily. In any event, no snark intended.)

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 20, 2009 12:09 AM

Koloncancer (#193) observed,

you quite likely are an insufferable asshole, suffering from the same dangerous predilection to judge what you know nothing of.

It seems you are not so clueless after all.
I am an insufferable asshole, but mostly to whiny theistic-types not unlike yourself (and yes, your predelication with matters spiritual gives you away, so there's no use continuing to lie)

The thing of it is, though, I judge based on what I do know.
I judged your incompetence because of your ramblings.
I judge NOM because of their propaganda.

It is true that not much more from there can be made, but it's also philosophically bankrupt to not be able to make any determination on any matter at all, or to be so generous as to not take any criteria into account.

As someone who clearly has not read much modernist philosophy, you presume to know the correct means to making judgments, but lack the ability necessary to describe what they are.

This may all be moot, because you are a liar: you don't believe in generous respect as you have not shown respect to anyone here. You do not believe in not making determinations or judgments as you've judged others.

Lying is part of your essential nature.

Posted by: Ken Cope | May 20, 2009 12:35 AM

Owlmirror @199,

"Aw shucks, I love you."

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 1:04 AM

Ken,

My friends call me Keith. You can call me John.

BOOM!

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 1:11 AM

Ken,

Sorry, I cannot resist this. An absolutely smoking cover of a Hendrix song.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 1:21 AM

I am so in the mood for some Blacked Hearted Love.

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 20, 2009 1:32 AM

I am so in the mood for some Blacked Hearted Love.

Bring It On

On a side note, I didn't know there was a new Harvey album.
* Adds it to my already long list of new music to get *

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 1:42 AM

So Ryan F Stello, you just gave me some Chris Bailey. You should really try to Know Your Product.

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 20, 2009 1:47 AM

Funny you should mention that.
My product is a House of Fun!

Posted by: Ryan F Stello | May 20, 2009 1:55 AM

I did not intend to conflate the two of you, but rather only to show an inconsistency in the Kolonel's approach.

True that, Cap'n Danger can't seem to make even one internally consistent comment (as noted way back in #138).

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 2:20 AM

Ken,

Yet more action from Monterey Pop.

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 20, 2009 4:52 AM

Mike in Ontario @ 188:

I thought the photo Pilty posted was taken at the latest stormfront rally. No?

You might be right ...

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 20, 2009 5:38 AM

From Gay Community News, 1987 --

Homosexual Manifesto
AN ESSAY ON THE HOMOSEXUAL REVOLUTION
by Michael Swift

THIS ESSAY is outre, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage, on how the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor.
We shall sodomize your sons, emblems of your feeble masculinity, of your shallow dreams and vulgar lies. We shall seduce them in your schools, in your dormitories, in your gymnasiums, in your locker rooms, in your sports arenas, in your seminaries, in your youth groups, in your movie theater bathrooms, in your army bunkhouses, in your truck stops, in your all-male clubs, in your houses of Congress, wherever men are with men together. Your sons shall become our minions and do our bidding. They will be recast in our image. They will come to crave and adore us. Women, you cry for freedom. You say you are no longer satisfied with men; they make you unhappy. We, connoisseurs of the masculine face, the masculine physique, shall take your men from you then. We will amuse them; we will instruct them; we will embrace them when they weep.
Women, you say you wish to live with each other instead of with men. Then go and be with each other. We shall give your men pleasures they have never known because we are foremost men too and only man knows how to truly please another man; only one man can understand with depth and feeling the mind and body of another man.
All laws banning homosexual activity will be revoked. Instead, legislation shall be passed which engenders love between men.
All homosexuals must stand together as brothers; we must be united artistically, philosophically, socially, politically, and financially. We will triumph only when we present a common face to the vicious heterosexual enemy.
If you dare to cry faggot, fairy, queer, at us, we will stab you in your cowardly hearts and defile your dead, puny bodies.
We shall write poems of the love between men; we shall stage plays in which man openly caresses man; we shall make films about the love between heroic men which will replace the cheap, superficial, sentimental, insipid, juvenile, heterosexual infatuations presently dominating your cinema screens.
We shall sculpt statues of beautiful young men, of bold athletes which will be placed in your parks, your squares, your plazas. The museums of the world will be filled only with paintings of graceful, naked lads.
Our writers and artists will make love between men fashionable and de rigueur, and we will succeed because we are adept at setting styles. We will eliminate heterosexual liaisons through the devices of wit and ridicule, devices which we are skilled in employing.
We will unmask the powerful homosexuals who masquerade as heterosexuals. You will be shocked and frightened when you find that your presidents and their sons, your industrialists, your senators, your mayors, your generals, your athletes, your film stars, your television personalities, your civic leaders, your priests are not the safe, familiar, bourgeois, heterosexual figures you assumed them to be. We are everywhere; we have infiltrated your ranks. Be careful when you speak of homosexuals because we are always among you; we may be sleeping in the same bed with you.
There will be no compromises. We are not middle-class weaklings. Highly intelligent, we are the natural aristocrats of the human race, and steely-minded aristocrats never settle for less. Those who oppose us will be exiled. We shall raise vast, private armies, as Mishima did, to defeat you.
We shall conquer the world because warriors inspired by and banded together by homosexual love and honor are as invincible as were the ancient Greek soldiers. The family unit, spawning ground of lies, betrayals, mediocrity, hypocrisy, and violence will be abolished. The family unit, which only dampens imagination and curbs free will, must be eliminated. Perfect boys will be conceived and grown in the genetic laboratory. They will be bonded together in a communal setting, under the control and instruction of homosexual savants.
All churches who condemn us will be closed. Our only gods are handsome young men. We adhere to a cult of beauty, moral and aesthetic. All that is ugly and vulgar and banal will be annihilated. Since we are alienated from middle-class heterosexual conventions, we are free to live our lives according to the dictates of the pure imagination. For us too much is not enough.
The exquisite society to emerge will be governed by an elite comprised of gay poets. One of the major requirements for a position of power in the new society of homoeroticism will be indulgence in the Greek passion. Any man contaminated with heterosexual lust will be automatically barred from a position of influence. All males who insist on remaining stupidly heterosexual will be tried in homosexual courts of justice and will become invisible men. We shall rewrite history, history filled and debased with your heterosexual lies and distortions.
We shall portray the homosexuality of the great leaders and thinkers who have shaped the world. We will demonstrate that homosexuality and intelligence and imagination are inextricably linked, and that homosexuality is a requirement for true nobility, true beauty in a man.
We shall be victorious because we are fueled with the ferocious bitterness of the oppressed who have been forced to play seemingly bit parts in your dumb, heterosexual shows throughout the ages. We too are capable of firing guns and manning the barricades of the ultimate revolution. Tremble, hetero swine, when we appear before you without our masks!

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 20, 2009 6:25 AM

Jadehawk:

Although the author of the piece I quoted describes it as a "fantasy", I see nothing in it to suggest irony or satire. That might make for good plausible deniability, but the essay strikes me more as wishful thinking.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 20, 2009 6:42 AM

Am I the only one who sees unintended irony and hypocrisy in these statements?

No, not at all. Kölonelpanik has posted nothing but hypocritical rants here.

Posted by: Smidgy | May 20, 2009 7:01 AM

Hmm. Pilty, I love how you quote that whole essay, but miss the very first sentence, the part that says how, 'the oppressed desperately dream of being the oppressor'. That's a very natural, if not exactly pleasant, human reaction, called revenge. Does the author advocate this REALLY happening? Nope. In fact, again, in the very first sentence, he calls it 'outre, madness, a tragic, cruel fantasy, an eruption of inner rage'. It's not irony or satire, or, as you claim, 'wishful thinking' - it's the author letting his anger and rage vent by merely writing an essay. He says as much in the first sentence. What is this anger and rage at? The discrimination faced by gay people, such as the discrimination given when it is decided that gay people don't have the right to marry.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 20, 2009 7:01 AM

Pilty posts an essay containing some violent imagery, presumably because he thinks it gives him some moral high ground. He ignores the fact that everything mentioned in that essay has been done for real to real homosexuals by real heterosexuals.

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised anymore that a religionist would be more concerned with fantasies and with what happens in people's minds than with cold, hard, physical reality.

Posted by: Citizen of the Cosmos | May 20, 2009 7:14 AM

Also, it's incredibly embarrassing that there are people in Europe who are so hysterical about homosexuality. I honestly thought we had outgrown that garbage long ago. But maybe I just happen to move in the right circles, and so I think everyone are like those people...

Posted by: SquidBrandon | May 20, 2009 7:17 AM

Janine, Delightful Bitch, OM spoke:

I am so in the mood for some Blacked Hearted Love.

My partner bought me tickets to see her next month. I am so excited I am very fearful my head may asplode before I get see her. PJ Harvey is my Cher.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 20, 2009 7:40 AM

Pilty, you have said nothing cogent here for months. It is time for you to move to find a more hospitable blog for your super-religious-medieval rantings. In other words:

Pilty, time to fuck off

Posted by: Tassie Devil | May 20, 2009 8:11 AM

Actually, Pilty, if you're saying (as you seem to be) that the muslims despise us because we want a society that includes homosexual men and women and treats them as equals, then I'm proud to be despised and will carry it as a badge of honour.

Posted by: Emmet, OM | May 20, 2009 8:35 AM

Thus spake Knockgoats:

Michael Nugent@51 wins the thread!

Aye, but he has an unfair advantage ;o)

Posted by: Jim in Buffalo | May 20, 2009 8:49 AM

Every time we think about same-sex marriage
It makes us sick to our guts
I mean, two people who want to commit to a stable monogamous life-long relationship...
What are they, nuts?

--Roy Zimmerman, Defenders of Marriage

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 20, 2009 10:41 AM

Cerberus, you have just delivered the second great rant in this thread. Brava! And very well said.

Posted by: Pablo | May 20, 2009 11:55 AM

Posted by: Skemono | May 19, 2009 8:10 PM

NOM pretends that kids are confused by gay marriage (I can't wait to see if their audition videos get leaked, too).

Meanwhile, here's a sample of what real kids think.

The interesting thing about this article (about an 8 year old who organized a gay-support event) is that it shows that even the kids who were making anti-gay comments (that set this all in motion) aren't "confused" by the gay. They are equally able to be bigoted against it as adults are (I'm just guessing they are parroting their parents).

Has anyone mentioned in this thread that the whole "gay marriage and kids" thing is a red-herring? There is nothing inherent in marriage that requires kids. In fact, there are states that have laws AGAINST married couple having kids if they are too closely related. While I'm not in favor of it in any way, would these anti-gay marriage people who are trotting out the kids support gay marriage if married gay couples were not allowed to adopt?

of course, they wouldn't, which just goes to show that this whole "think of the children" thing is a red-herring.

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 20, 2009 1:52 PM

Kseniya, @#197:
What could *unintended irony* be? You're funny. Unintentionally. You suggest I keep a log of offense. That's even funnier. I'm not impossible to offend, but there's nothing here worth noting.
About the ignorance of NOMS, you "suspect they know full well what they are doing, and why they are doing it." And ask "Is that ignorance, or informed evil?"
That's a strange choice, but I'll go with ignorance, beause I don't believe in superstitious notions like "evil."
I do not believe in any sort of god.

To the rest of the lead pipe welcoming committee, a couple of further clarifications:
Whatever "spirituality" may be, if anything other than neuro-activity, for me it manifests only as aesthetic wonder; empathic experience of observed suffering; and disappointment with self in my limited contribution to the increase of one and the alleviation of the other.

On the matter of radical individualism, I say good fuckin' luck. No one on this NOM thread has any doubt that those who fear a sudden abandonment of thousands of years of basic reproductive arrangements, including societal norms meant to assure at least a reproductively successful succession of generations, deserve any sympathy or understanding. The sort of attitudes expressed on this forum, this hate wallow, will further convince them of the need to circle the wagons, and will lead to more disinformation, continued successful attempts to seize political control at all levels, and their particular sort of abuse of children. To misunderstand the enemy, especially one who has survived for thousands of years, does not bode well for success.

On the matter of "gay" parentage, this cannot be counted other than as a social experiment. It's certainly not a matter of "natural" or "human" "rights." There is no such thing. Rather, given the state of society (USA) today, and that there is every reason to think that motivated, committed long term nurturers are a precious asset, perhaps this society will prove to be just flexible enough to look to a wider pool of candidates in the face of the shrinking supply of female hets willing to make the sacrifice. Hope it works out. Not all experiments do. In any case, the only rights grantor, i.e., any particular sovereign society, is moving toward granting those *civil* rights. Would that the same society, and others, institute greater control over the *right* of willy-nilly, as it were, reproduction in general.

Ever yours, in rambling unintended irony, hypocrisy and essentially lying rants.

Posted by: Stu | May 20, 2009 2:17 PM

Ever yours, in rambling unintended irony, hypocrisy and essentially lying rants.

I think this sentence does not mean what you intended.

It's very true though -- although you forgot to throw in "stupifyingly boring", you incompetent concern troll.

Posted by: Watchman | May 20, 2009 2:58 PM

Kolonel:

I'm not impossible to offend, but there's nothing here worth noting.

Oh? And yet, you go on and on about it. How interesting.

The "sudden abandonment" argument is nonsense, and I think you know it. Heterosexual couples (and their increasingly popular spin-off, the single-parent household) will continue to make up the vast majority of parenting entities in this country. Governmental sanction of gay marriage merely formalizes the recognition of a class of relationships have already existed for quite some time.

Given that I believe you agree with me on this, I'd like to ask how you suggest we refute that specious argument?

Goats, you seem to have misunderstood the good Kolonel on one point: He's not "inveighing" against marriage equality. Quite the opposite, I think. His complaint is that the commenters here aren't compassionately sympathetic towards the manipulative, homophobic propagandists of NOM. His own apparent lack of patience with, and compassion for, the concerns of members of the gay community who happen to post here is something he'll have to answer for on his own.

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 20, 2009 3:15 PM

BTW, isn't it interesting that Piltdown Man has vanished now the Report on systematic child abuse, and cover-up of the same by the Catholic Church in Ireland, has been published. What a contemptible piece of shit he is.

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 20, 2009 3:36 PM

WatchThis: I knew there must be someone who can read here. But by "nothing worth noting" I only meant specifically nothing that offends me. And I'm not concerned about compassion for the sake of compassion. I'm concerned with utility. Just as in my early, ironic love-thy-neighbor (you might need them one day, I said. Compassionate?). I'm a fan of enlightened altruism. I mean, it's usually worth trying.
Your assumption about me and the gay community (Son? Come check these guys out!) is hilarious. Based on nothing at all!
Although I do believe in polymorphus perversity and that we do indeed make situational sexual behavioral choices along the way, I also believe that I'm sick to death of speech police. Offense is as much inference as commission -- and too frequently all.

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 20, 2009 3:45 PM

"However, we are discussing radical change WITHIN a society." - Kolonelpompous

And I gave examples of changes of broader effect in the past, within societies, that you conveniently ignore.

"How one could trust any evidence on any matter in the public arena these days is beyond me, especially evidence developed by "social science."" - Kolonelpompous

I think there's a great deal that is beyond you, Kolonelpompous - rationality, for example. Would you care to attempt a justification of the arrogant and paranoid nonsense I have quoted?

Posted by: Watchman | May 20, 2009 4:11 PM

Kolonel:

But by "nothing worth noting" I only meant specifically nothing that offends me.

Understood, but wasn't it obvious, by way of context, that Kseniya meant that you might consider tallying comments that offended your sensibilities with regard to how we as a group should be responding to the likes of NOM, if only as an exercise that might reveal something to all of us? Surely you are astute enough to pick up on her intention, even if she didn't express it with exceptional lucidity.

But no, you chose (?) to be obtuse about her suggestion, and to resort to sarcasm and condescension, as you apparently always do. Forgive me if I'm mistaken about that. Either way, can we move beyond that now, please?

I'm concerned with utility. Just as in my early, ironic love-thy-neighbor (you might need them one day, I said. Compassionate?). I'm a fan of enlightened altruism. I mean, it's usually worth trying.

Ah. Ok. Understood.

Your assumption about me and the gay community (Son? Come check these guys out!) is hilarious. Based on nothing at all!

And your assessment of me as an insufferable asshole was based on ... what, exactly? A single casual utterance?

Anyway, you're wrong. It was not an assumption, it was a conclusion, based on your own casual (or not) utterances. Why have you not deigned to respond to, or even to acknowledge, either Cerberus or Sastra? Why do you respond only to the most contentious replies? What are you really after, here? My conclusion may be completely wrong, but it wasn't an assumption. Reread what you were responding to, and get back to me.

I also believe that I'm sick to death of speech police.

Oh?

Offense is as much inference as commission -- and too frequently all.

Agreed.

Posted by: Cerberus | May 20, 2009 4:49 PM

@261

You do realize that there isn't inherent morality to a neutral position, right?

In fact, those who claim to be "above" an issue or hew to the morality of the "smart compromise" often bring about some of the most heinous decisions and radically hurt long-term goals for the betterment of the oppressed.

While you are posturing, members of our good order are dying. THe pushback is always strong, because those with unearned privilege, with a position of unearned strength do not yield easily. But if you give them an inch, a compromise, they become emboldened and seek to undo all the hard-won protections of days gone by. For a great example, see the abortion debate and women's rights. When women stopped pushing as hard, the pushback tried to undo past protections and abortion access has been stealthily chipped at to the point where the enemy felt confident attacking ALL contraception.

But I forget, civility and the ability to be above it (while basking in the natural supremacy of your birth) is the most important qualities. Noting how these all to unfortunate concepts interact with real, formerly living people like Angie Zapata...that's just for lesser uncouth type people.

Posted by: Raiko | May 20, 2009 5:19 PM

Alexander (#22)

I'm always suprised that this issue is so important on this blog (I live in Middle Europe, so the whole topic is odd for me). This blog is about biology and evolution - in principle, okay and about religion sometimes because of the Evo vs. ID controversy, but I see more and more political articles. I'm not interested in pro-homo right rants and other strictly political issues - i'm interested in phylogeny trees, evo-devo, genetic evidences and not this crap. After all it is a scienceblog, isn't it?

So, to sum up your post:
* You don't understand what scienceblogs are for and you're unable to read a header (instead, you actually try to tell the blogger what his blog is about!)
* You seem to think that a professor will honor your complaint and cater to your "Middle European" ideas of what should be on a scienceblog and what shouldn't
* ...whereas, as a fellow Middle European, I assure you that your disinterest in equal rights all over the world has nothing to do with the place you're born in but is only your personal problem.
* You appear to have a problem with a USA professor blogging about things that concern the USA (you actually claim surprise that this is important).

Now, seriously - you end up wondering why people react to your comment by indicating they think you're a moron?

Hint: They have a point.

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 20, 2009 5:43 PM

Cerberus@262, morality, neutrality, here we go. Is it immoral to be mistaken? Is it immoral to believe what you've been taught and to be too stupid to see beyond your constricted life? Is it immoral to try to protect your children from what you believe to be immoral? I don't know, but I doubt it. What it is is, tragic. Try that on. It's the human condition. (We'll be very very lucky if we can maintain at tragic without progressing quite so fast to catastrophic.)

Is it moral to claim to be moral and that others are immoral?
I don't know, but I know it's dangerous. And stupid.

Am I to assume that you believe that I take a "neutral" position on any of these NOM matters, or that I have said anything about compromise, smart or otherwise?
On the contrary, I have stated my positions, my concerns, and hinted at my life experience, to no avail.
Your friend WatchingOut4U wonders why I don't engage you. This is why. Take care of yourself.

Posted by: Cerberus | May 20, 2009 7:21 PM

@266

First paragraph:
It can be. It can be deeply immoral. My best friend grew up in an oppressive fundamentalist home. This occurred ostensibly because the world was filled with demons looking to corrupt the children. His mom didn't know it, but she didn't believe my mom to be human, she didn't believe her son to be human, she didn't believe her daughter of being human. My mom was the first to recognize the toxicity, my best friend is a non-person (his crime, wicca), and his sister clings to the closet doors for life. The intense shame and fear of being disposed like her brother making her too scared to admit the truths about her own sexuality. I have raised my partner through the wrought-iron gates of the closet, helping her unwind the chains of her past, given to her out of "love". She still cannot be fully open about her inherent sexuality because of those chains.

And those are just the mental wounds, a paltry smattering. There are the ones so afraid of change that they beat a friend of mine, barely bi, for counter-protesting a Prop 8 demonstration, splitting her skull with a sign. And then there are the raped and murdered, taken because the world frightening and not hewn to the lies of their own parents challenged their assumptions. Angie Zapata was murdered because transpeople are not human in our society. But furthermore she was likely killed because she challenged one man's understanding of masculinity, fostered in turn by parents trying to protect him in a masculinity obsessed world.

The point being that these products can indeed be immoral.

And that's even before we discuss the toxicity of the closet. The silent killer. The closet is the worst enemy, the thing that reinforces the narrative that we are less than, unworthy, that we have something to hide, that we should be ashamed for being born different. So many closet doors were built by those actions in your questions. Are these immoral actions? Yes, in many ways, they are. They are actions that are immoral.

Now, since you seem to require the high field of thought, let us depart momentarily into that world where the nasty physicality of dead bodies no longer taunts one's standards and protocols. A simple non-biased measure of morality was coined by a famous hedonist: "If it harm none, do as thou will". But the closet harms, attitudes that reinforce the lesser value of queer lives harms, eliminationist language (which you seem to oddly regard as not hateful) gets as close to physical harm as you can get with just language.

I don't think anyone is denying these people are human beings, deluded, deeply unhappy, chained to ideologies they are doomed to fail to live up to, damned to forever alienate their children, and soon to be relegated to the same subcommunity as the Aryan Nation assholes. They are still yet human beings. But to give their statements more credit than they are worth and to ask people to dull the pain of the sword in their gut in order to not be mean is blaming the victim for their own oppression and that is cruel.

Second paragraph:
I wasn't entirely aware I was arguing from a place of moral perfection that would warrant such a warning. I can definitely appreciate the poetry and philosophic intent of Jesus's "pick not at the splinter in your neighbor's eye and ignore the plank in your own", but it shouldn't be a cudgel to prevent criticism of those who would seek to prolong or increase your oppression. There is in this world, a differential in power dynamics for a whole slew of interactions. There is a reason that gay people have to defend their right to be human in courts of law for basic protections, pointing to the biological basis of their condition, whereas religious people, a condition of choice, are constantly accommodated for with genuinely special rights.

It is not arrogant for the oppressed to note the harm the oppressor causes nor to mock them pulling on the cowl of feigned outrage when stung by this notation. I am not denying it might feel terrible for the oppressor to be called out by his slaves, but that is rather the definition of privilege (well a type of it at least). That they can be blind to the very real harm there is.

Third paragraph-
You have indeed hinted at a life experience. You or a loved one is queer. Your positions and concerns have also been...stated. But most are an incoherent mess, a plaintive cry for us to cry for the oppressor in the dynamic and understand his pain against those he would deny rights and dignity to.

Oddly enough, I can indeed understand and empathize with such devils, even those with the hardest of hearts. It's a funny thing, but the oppressor always assumes that the oppressed have the same blindness that they do. Rather, the oppressed have to grow up in the oppressor's world, survive the oppressor's rules, and walk every day in the assumptions of primacy of the oppressor's culture. I knew about the worldview of those who despise queers long before I knew one, long before it applied to me and I have loving supportive parents. It's in the very air of the culture.

But furthermore, I also seek to understand these people. Where you seem to be making an error is that one cannot understand nor empathize with one's enemies while also growing to despise them or at least lose sympathy for their situation.

One can understand why the rapist has no regard for the consent or well-being of their victim, the stresses of masculinity as it's depicted in our culture, the conflation of predation and being a sexually excited male, a culture that assumes no means maybe, while still despising all rapists. Similarly, one can understand the Rapture Ready types and their firm belief that people who don't agree with them are demons trying to corrupt their rightful property before the big mass suicide without suicide that is the rapture, while still hating their ill effect on their children and society at large.

In short, one can understand, one can even empathize with the actions that lead them down that road while also coming to find that in the sum told of history there are some inherent rights and wrongs. Consent, harm, basic human rights, these are not negotiable and most every time those aspects have been negotiated, there has been a swath of mental and physical destruction that in the grim glow of time seems silly and paltry to have cared about. It was madness at one time to view blacks as anything other than slightly more ambidextrous oxen. A few daring people got pissed, got up in the faces of the oppressor, brought that pain into the lives of those carefully secluded with as deep and pressing need to be right as the NOMers today.

And that brings up a crucial addendum.

In every struggle of the oppressed versus the oppressor, the oppressed has been cast as angry. Their statements of pain, truth, or simple response to oppression blasted in every oppressor-dominated society as the vile rantings of the deranged. Each oppressed group had factions wherein a group of accomodating oppressed tried to bargain with the oppressors and sell themselves on civility while those seen as angry made the real change. And this is true in nearly every revolt or movement.

A history example, Martin Luther King was seen as impolitic. A madman, deranged with hate for America and a love of this country's enemies. He was constantly raked over the coals for his perceived incivility and attacks against the family and culture. Many a white person rung their hands and stated how supportive they were of the concept of desegregation, but how they wished black folk wouldn't be so violent and hostile about it. Many a feigned ally stated that the movement couldn't progress without respecting the Southern white man's beliefs and worries about the dangers to their families that would be caused by racial mixing.

The same fight has gone against women for over a century at least. The shrill shrewish creature filled with hatred for all men, the charicature of the feminist that endures today was wielded since the beginning towards any women who noticed the inequalities that existed. Women who fought for the right to vote were seen as clinically mad and angry and many were seen as uncivil and attacked brutally whenever they dared taunt back the men who threatened them with death.

To get to a crucial point, what I'm stating is that the tactic of lamenting incivility and privileging the hurt feelings of the oppressor against the oppression of the oppressed is one of the oldest and most crucial tools of said oppression. It is a means of shutting down the debate in order to prolong an unfair status quo by hinting at a social taboo (being rude or unfeeling towards another's person) in order to essentially try and force the oppressed citizen to "know their place".

It is also a cudgel against the groups. It demands that to be taken seriously, they can not react with the exact amount of anger and hurt as their oppression warrants, nor even the base amount that any human exhibits, but rather a perfectly sanitized parody of a human. A flawless super-person, ever rational, ever-forgiving of the oppressor, and literally impossible to anger.

And even then, when an oppressed fits into that mold, they are still seen as hateful. Ask any black person whenever they try and carefully and delicately explain why some book or movie had troubling racist narratives or any woman explaining why a rape joke in a movie isn't universally funny and the fact that some people find it funny at all can be deeply troubling. They can be calm, they can be accommodating, they can even excise every single curse word from their vocabulary and they are still accused of being hateful.

Moving back to your last paragraph, I wanted to briefly address one last thing:
On why you don't want to engage me, it's your baggage to sort. I think you are falling into obtuse patterns in thinking, a narrowness of scope that prevents you from considering the hard reality that the concepts flow through and also that these concepts often have human faces, human lives. Your position as stated as best I can parse is that on this narrow issue, you support full equal rights and you have some level of personal connection. But the neutrality isn't your position. The neutrality is your sympathies (not empathies) and your personal fears that recognizing that in this fight there are in fact good guys and bad guys and good positions and bad positions, because you fear such taking of sides will close off possibilities of empathy.

It will not.

Nor is empathy, the blind acceptance of bullshit as equal to truth. Such false equivalencies are the neutrality of our media and our politicians and leads to the compromises I stated. You may personally have a position, but your language and targets are the neutrality I am pointing out and also are what is privy to this snark-inducing statements. You will likely write this off, I have no suspicions otherwise. You seem to already view my statements as hostile likely for false social constructions that I have narrated above.

But nonetheless, I have written a novel of a post and I'd hate to see it go to waste. Maybe it'll help a lurker or something or just cause irreparable scrolling injuries.

Posted by: Naked Bunny with a Whip | May 20, 2009 7:50 PM

I also believe that I'm sick to death of speech police.

I have to admit, I can't tell if this is more hypocrisy or simple, raw cluelessness.

Posted by: kölonelpanik | May 20, 2009 10:38 PM

MoreMoralMorales & Cerberus @267,8, 9, 271: Asked and answered. So be it. So for Morales and Cerberus, the Mutual Admiration and Protection Society, or Mutt (Long) & Jeff (Short -- and punchy), and for my surprisingly many other admirers, I have the Tina Turner follow up question: what's Morality got to do with it? Got to do with it? (Oh boy, I even think it's just a second hand emotion!) Look, even in our notoriously corrupt criminal law system, we inquire into circumstance, intentionality, competence and so on. We don't ask about the morality of some act or another. Although not a meaningless concept, it is essentially useless in deciding what is right and what is wrong. The concept appeals to black and white thinkers, and appears to be a source of great comfort to them to know, and to know with certainty, what is moral, what is not. If I ask you what is right, what is wrong, you can tell me and can tell me why, or at least how you came to the answer. But if I ask you what is moral, what is not, and WHY... to whom or what do you appeal? I would imagine there are interesting cases where the right thing to do is also inconveniently self-defined as immoral. Think Catholics who choose abortion, or divorce, or closer to home, fundamentalist Protestant fathers who find that they love their gay son AND his partner, no matter what preacher says. A teachable moment, perhaps. So I’m at a loss to know what Mutt the Many Headed brought to the table in asking about “inherent morality.”
The two of you think you’re on to something important about abstraction versus blood and guts, and one of you is theorizing about something dark, and both of you prefer to believe that I am concerned about the feelings of NOMers aand that my preferred stance is safely within an hot air balloon. Baloney. Mutt has put a great deal of work into this, and as Jeff says, passion. I’m going to sleep on it, because I’m old and I’m tired, and pussy whipped too — my wife hates it when I don’t come to bed.

Posted by: John Morales | May 21, 2009 12:46 AM

kölonelpanik:

We don't ask about the morality of some act or another. Although not a meaningless concept, it is essentially useless in deciding what is right and what is wrong.

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 21, 2009 6:41 AM

Knockgoats @ 254:

BTW, isn't it interesting that Piltdown Man has vanished now the Report on systematic child abuse, and cover-up of the same by the Catholic Church in Ireland, has been published. What a contemptible piece of shit he is.

I've not "vanished" anywhere, you drooling cretin, I've been at work. Not perhaps as vital as your research into systematic approaches to comparing, validating and combining agent-based models using formal ontologies and related formalisms, but sufficient to feed myself and my family. Unfortunately, unsocial hours mean my posts are sporadic.

As yet I've only seen the sketchy online BBC, Reuters and Irish Times reports on the situation in Ireland, so my remarks are necessarily provisional.

Regarding the scale of the problem:

About 35,000 children were placed in a network of reformatories, industrial schools and workhouses up to the 1980s.
More than 2,000 told the Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse they suffered physical and sexual abuse while there.

So we're talking about less than 6% of children at these institutions. Maybe the real figure is much higher. Maybe it isn't. Maybe there are many thousands of happy, well-adjusted individuals who have fond memories of their time in such schools - but if there are, no-one's going to run a news story about them.

Regarding the cases of physical and psychological abuse ( - or perhaps that should be "alleged cases" - "we have, after all, only the "victims" word for it", to quote a certain regular poster on this blog), we read the following:

Schools were run "in a severe, regimented manner that imposed unreasonable and oppressive discipline on children and even on staff".

the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

"The reformatory and industrial schools depended on rigid control by means of severe corporal punishment and the fear of such punishment,"

"Excesses of punishment generated the fear that the school authorities believed to be essential for the maintenance of order."

Children were frequently hungry and food was inadequate, inedible and badly prepared in many schools.

Many witnesses spoke of being constantly fearful or terrified, which impeded their emotional development

There was constant criticism and verbal abuse and children were told they were worthless.

Prolonged, excessive beatings with implements intended to cause maximum pain occurred with the knowledge of senior staff.

Absconders were severely beaten, at times publicly. Some had their heads shaved and were humiliated.

I'm tempted to dismiss much of this as the usual flatulent liberal emoting over perfectly reasonable disciplinary regimes and corrective chastisement. Phrases like "severe, regimented manner", "rigid control" and "constant criticism" are telltale liberal whines. The talk of beatings sounds more serious, but the language is unhelpfully vague and many would regard a simple caning by a schoolmaster as a "severe, excessive beating". (It's notable that since our modern schools abandoned "unreasonable and oppressive discipline", metal detectors and a permanent police presence have become necessary to maintain a semblance of order in said halls of learning.)

My scepticism increased when I read some of the specific examples of this supposedly Spartan regime:

she worked long hours washing and ironing customers laundry

children often worked for long hours outdoors on farms

Accommodation in the institutions was "cold, spartan and bleak" with sanitary provision "primitive" in most boys' schools particularly.

Academic education "was not seen as a priority for industrials school children"

LMAO!

Much more serious are the cases of sexual abuse ( - or should that be "alleged cases" - "we have, after all, only the "victims" word for it", right Goaty?).

We read:

BBC:

sexual abuse was "endemic" in boys' institutions.

More allegations were made against the Christian Brothers than the other male orders combined.

The report said that girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse

Sexual abuse occurred in many of them, particularly boys' institutions.

He said he too was sexually abused, not by the Christian Brothers but by the older boys who supervised or monitored the dormitories at night

Reuters:

a string of scandals involving priests molesting young boys, have eroded the Catholic Church's moral authority in Ireland

In the United States, a sexual abuse scandal was uncovered in 2002 and involved mostly abuse of teenage boys by priests.

Irish Times:

Sexual abuse was "endemic" in State-run institutions for boys

Sexual abuse was "endemic in boys institutions", involving such abuse by some staff members and some older boys. Sexual abuse "was not systematic in girls' schools"

A definite pattern appears to be emerging here.

Suffice to say, I have no hesitation in condemning the guilty parties (if guilty they be) as evil bastards, wicked sinners, disgusting perverts and perhaps not entirely irrelevant to the original subject of this thread.

Also from the Irish Times:

The system of institutionalisation in Ireland at the time was "a response to a 19th century social problem, which was outdated and incapable of meeting the needs of individual children." ... By contrast it found that in England , from the mid-1920s on, "smaller, or family-like settings" were set up and were seen to provide better care for children in need. The Commission noted how, despite these advances in England , "in Ireland , however, the industrial school system thrived."

Presumably these "smaller, or family-like settings" which provided "better care for children in need" were and are wholly secular affairs run according to the best enlightened principles. It's a relief to know that nothing like the appalling abuse in Church-run institutions could ever happen under the modern system of social services.

Or could it?

Social workers put the rights of a teenage sex offender over those of the foster family whose children he went on to abuse, a report has found.

The married couple who welcomed the 19-year-old into their home were not told of his sexual interest in minors.

They only discovered the truth after he raped their two-year-old son and molested their nine-year-old daughter.

Yesterday, social services admitted they had withheld the information because they considered the paedophile to be 'the one in need of protection'.

Their shocking error emerged earlier this year after the disturbed teenager was given an indeterminate prison sentence for his crimes.

A court heard the couple had agreed to look after the then 18-year-old for a scheme known as Adult Placement Service, hoping he could be a 'big brother' to their two young children.

But they were not told that the boy had sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl, had exposed himself and touched a young boy sexually at a care hostel and had faced allegations five years earlier of 'sexually inappropriate behaviour' with a young boy.

The Vale of Glamorgan Council in South Wales vigorously denied that human rights legislation was behind the decision not to disclose the teenager's history.

After apologising to the devastated family, director of social services Philip Evans refused to resign, insisting he should stay on to bring in improvements.

. . .

A homosexual foster couple were left free to sexually abuse vulnerable boys in their care because social workers feared being accused of discrimination if they investigated complaints, an inquiry concluded yesterday.

Craig Faunch and Ian Wathey were one of the first homosexual couples in the country to be officially approved as foster parents.

They looked after 18 children in only 15 months.

With no previous convictions, they came across as respectable men who simply wanted to help boys with a variety of problems.

In reality, they were paedophiles, who repeatedly abused the children in their care.

Even when the mother of two of the children reported her suspicions to the council, officials accepted the men's explanations and did nothing.

Instead of banning children from staying with Faunch and Wathey, they sent youngsters with more serious problems to them. Between them, the couple abused four boys aged between eight and 14.

The report, following an independent review of the case, said: "One manager described the couple as 'trophy carers' which led to 'slack arrangements' over placement.

"Another said that by virtue of their sexuality they had a 'badge' which made things less questionable.

"The sexual orientation of the men was a significant cause of people not 'thinking the unthinkable'.

"It was clear that a number of staff were afraid of being thought homophobic.

"The fear of being discriminatory led them to fail to discriminate between the appropriate and the abusive."

The report also accused the council of failing to carry out proper assessments before and after the children were placed with Faunch and Wathey.

"Issues arose in the first longer-term placement of two children, including potential indicators of child sexual abuse, which were inadequately investigated, understood or acted upon," it said.

"More children were then placed with Faunch and Wathey, some successfully, some with concerns which were again inadequately investigated, understood or acted upon.

"The practice of some social workers in this case was deficient."

Wathey, 42, was jailed for five years in June last year after being convicted of four counts of sexual activity with a child and one offence of causing a child to watch sexual activity.

Faunch, 33, received a six-year jail sentence after he was found guilty of five charges of engaging in sexual activity with a child and two of taking indecent photographs of a child.

The couple, who lived together in Pontefract, West Yorkshire, were approved as foster carers by the council in August 2003.

Their victims included a 14-year-old boy with Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism,who had a mental age of seven and was forced by Wathey to watch gay pornography.

But social workers had been aware of "inappropriate" behaviour long before then.

Just eight months after they started as professional foster carers a mother of eight-year-old twins, who couldn't cope with raising them on her own, voiced concerns about them with social services.

While visiting the twins, the 34-yearold single mother was shown a picture taken by Faunch showing one of the boys going to the lavatory during a visit to Butlin's holiday camp in Skegness and discovered a similar snap had been taken of the other twin.

A social worker took the photograph and promised a full investigation.

But the court heard that not only did social services staff lose the photo, they decided against contacting police after accepting Faunch's explanation that he was trying to embarrass the boys into shutting the lavatory door.

Judge Sally Cahill, QC, said neither had shown "empathy, remorse or any responsibility for their actions".

Yesterday's report said that the fostering panel which approved Faunch and Wathey accepted without hesitation their request to look after only boys on the basis that they didn't feel equipped to look after girls.

So, Goaty, given that this is just the tip of the iceberg, are we to conclude that the whole extensive and elaborate apparatus of the modern secular social services should be torn up at the roots? I know what I think.

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 21, 2009 7:35 AM

(It's notable that since our modern schools abandoned "unreasonable and oppressive discipline", metal detectors and a permanent police presence have become necessary to maintain a semblance of order in said halls of learning.)

Evidence that this is cause and effect? None. In fact as far as I can discover, metal detectors so far been instituted in exactly 22 schools in the UK, and a permanent police presence - as opposed to a police officer assigned to the school - in none.

LMAO!

You think it funny that children were deprived of proper education and used as slave labour instead. Yes, I suppose you would.

I'm tempted to dismiss much of this as the usual flatulent liberal emoting over perfectly reasonable disciplinary regimes and corrective chastisement. - Pilty

Yes, we're all aware here that you are a psychopathically sadistic scumbag. No need to remind us.

"we have, after all, only the "victims" word for it" - Pilty

No, you lying piece of stinking filth, we have an extensive and thorough investigation, of which the outcome is not denied or contested even by the Catholic Church. And for you to implicitly equate systemic sexual abuse of children and the cover-up of the same with your trivial example of minor harassment is beyond even your usual standards of shamelessness.

So, Goaty, given that this is just the tip of the iceberg, are we to conclude that the whole extensive and elaborate apparatus of the modern secular social services should be torn up at the roots? I know what I think.

What do you mean "given"? Any evidence for that claim? The appalling errors by social services you cite, and the crimes they failed to prevent are certainly bad enough - but do they really compare with decades of systematic abuse and brutality, condoned and concealed - and in the case of the sadistic thrashings and humiliations, actively promoted, by the Church? I notice that those disgusting filth the Christian Brothers have managed to ensure that no names will be named, no-one will be prosecuted. I notice also that that piece of shit Vincent Nichols couldn't bring himself to give a straightforward apology, instead babbling about the "courage" of abusers who admitted their crimes and "all of the good they [the child-abusing orders] did".

How the fuck do you live with yourself, you turd?

Posted by: phantomreader42 | May 21, 2009 10:14 AM

Anonymous @ #279:

Ad hominem attacks in this forum (see the Goat on Pilty the “turd”) are just as despicable and counter productive as they are wherever they occur.

This needs to be explained FAR too often, but here it is again "AD HOMINEM" IS NOT A FANCY LATIN WORD FOR "INSULT"! The word actually has a meaning, a meaning you clearly don't know a damn thing about, and aren't interested in learning.

An ad hominem involves attacking the person making an argument instead of refuting their argument. Refuting the argument AND calling the arguer a lying sack of shit is NOT an ad hominem. It is an insult. In Pilty's case, a much milder insult than he deserves.

The brain-dead theocratic troll known as "Piltdown man" repeated known falsehoods while laughing at the plight of slaves and defending the sexual abuse of children by his cult. He is not only a lying sack of shit but totally morally bankrupt. He was called on this, his idiotic and false arguments were torn to bloody shreds, and on top of that he was called a turd, among other things. This was NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT, NOT an ad hominem. No one is saying pilty the turd is wrong BECAUSE he's a turd, they're pointing out that he's wrong AND that he's a turd. He's been caught lying countless times, and as an obvious result of this he's lost all credibility. A liar does not deserve credibility.

And, "anonymous", if you are, in fact, "kolonelpanik", I'd advise you to look at the derision in your own post #193, as well as EVERY POST YOU'VE MADE SINCE. Then go fuck yourself, because you're clearly a worthless hypocrite.

Posted by: kolonelpanik | May 21, 2009 11:22 AM

@280, ThePhantom Knows, and blows my inadvertent cover. What a lot of work to make a distinction with so little difference -- a very large component of many of the most impassioned responses here are ad hominem. Just because they may be combined with other kinds of refutation does not negate the "latin" label. Example: "Yes, we're all aware here that you are a psychopathically sadistic scumbag. No need to remind us." This is a classic example. To translate: The reason you say what you do is not because it is true or false, but because you have a clinically diagnosed (presumably) mental illness plus character faults. That, sweetheart, is an ad hominem attack. You don't need to go any further than Wikifuckin'pedia to reeducate yourself on this.

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 21, 2009 12:16 PM

among other hostilities I see here, is clear prejudice against and hostility to intellectualization - Kolonelpompous

No, it's pompous, pretentious pseudo-intellectualism of the kind you display we're not keen on. As for my describing "Piltdown Man" as a turd yes, that was wrong. I do most sincerely apologise to turds everywhere. You know practically nothing about him, his disgusting views, and his history here - in particular his proudly expressed bigotry, and the obvious relish with which he advocates beating children and defends the crimes of the Inquisition. I call him names; but he would like to see me and most of us here tortured and burnt. Meanwhile, if you don't like the atmosphere here, no-one is forcing you or begging you to stick around.

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 21, 2009 12:29 PM

Kolonelpanik gets upset because Knockgoats calls the Piltdown Hoax a turd. Kolonelpanik, did you know that for years, the Hoax has expressed his admiration for Catholic figures who tortured and murdered "infidels"? I am sorry, which is worse, calling an asshole by an accurate name or expressing approval of the maiming and killing of people who do not belief as you do?

Also, Kolonelpanik, you have made it a habit of altering people's monikers when you address them. You have no fucking room to complain about name calling.

Posted by: Anonymous | May 21, 2009 2:45 PM

C, @ 268&281 I have now read your recent long contributions. You apparently think almost entirely within a particular paradigm that really got rolling with Frantz Fanon and has been over the decades expanded and commingled with therapeutics and generally resorted into what we may, with your permission, refer to as Victimology, Colonial Imperialist Paternalist Model. It's a model that I agree with, in the sense that, as far as I can see, it accounts for, or accurately describes, or convincingly models, or however you want to put it, the reality of social structures across and within culture after culture.

Sometimes though, an organizing principle takes over the rest of our perceptual and interpretative apparatus, and when I read you, I see some of that -- a lot of that. Many of the points you make are perfectly valid, historically true and interpreted the same way I do. Some, not so much, i.e., "A history example, Martin Luther King was seen as impolitic. A madman, deranged with hate for America and a love of this country's enemies. He was constantly raked over the coals for his perceived incivility and attacks against the family and culture. Many a white person rung their hands and stated how supportive they were of the concept of desegregation, but how they wished black folk wouldn't be so violent and hostile about it." Outside of J Edgar Hoover and a small handful of whackos, this was not the way MLK Jr was perceived, and this was one of his crucial strengths! I grew up, was educated, and initially worked in the south. Incivility was virtually never a charge leveled against that man, even by those who hated him. But that's a detail, I guess. Your larger point is correctly analogous to King's critical point in Letter from a Birmingham Jail (I was working at just that time in a prison outside Montgomery) -- that the biggest obstacle to progress contemporaneously was the "white moderate."

I do not know, and do not care to know, why you have precisely targeted me as your student most in need of improvement. Your obsession with accident-of-birth privilege, and your need to make me a bogeyman oppressor is wasted effort. I am what I am. I've spent 3 decades (of 6+) of my education and working life working in maximum security prisons, psychiatric hospitals, and child protection systems, in a southern state, a western state, and a province of Canada. What I haven't seen, I don't want to see, unless it's further progress, and we have progressed, quite remarkably in the long perspective. I have, within my quite selfish limits, worked against what hurts and for what helps. What I haven't experienced as a direct victim, (other than being spat on, punched, kicked, called names and had feces hurled at me) is just my loss.

I haven't read one of Piltdown's contributions -- I was going to, but because it began with "...you drooling cretin..." I didn't bother. Why the fuck you people bother to read and respond, wasting precious emotional energy on a demon who feeds on it, I can only speculate. My theory has to do with masochistic victimhood, wherein many find satisfaction. I think Piltdown plays you like a violin. It's OK to live that way, everyone plays his part, but I wonder if that is really where you wish to be. I wish you the best. I'm outta here. Really. Discuss among yourselves. I won't be back.

Posted by: Watchman | May 21, 2009 3:03 PM

Outside of J Edgar Hoover and a small handful of whackos, this was not the way MLK Jr was perceived, and this was one of his crucial strengths!

I agree. Ok, I was only 10 years old when MLK was assassinated, but that's how I remember it, too.

Perhaps C. was thinking of Malcolm X, who was widely considered quite dangerous.

Posted by: SquidBrandon | May 21, 2009 4:09 PM

Cerberus @268

A wonderful and well-articulated contribution to this thread. You expressed some of the points I wanted to chime in with much more eloquently that I would have and frightened this subpar concern troll away. Everyone wins.

Posted by: Cerberus | May 21, 2009 6:27 PM

A clarification on my last post:

I doubt a majority viewed MLK as evil and mean and certainly there were some detractors who had to admit that he was likable though of course part of the radical blah-de-blah, but a vocal minority did indeed buy the whole farm.

A modern example of a person with even less against them owing to their total lack of activism: Ellen DeGeneres. Universally seen as the nicest most friendly gay person on the planet pretty much. Yet still, on a recent Family Feud where the family had to name 5 things about Ellen DeGeneres, the father believed that "she is known to hate America" would be on there. Similarly, there is the President, almost impossible to rile. My best friend's mother believes he's a crazed socialist whose wild temper will destroy America in the War on Terror. It's a small group of crazies, but not negligible.

Posted by: Kseniya | May 21, 2009 9:47 PM

Catamites? Self-pitying rants?

Pilty, you betray yourself once again.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 21, 2009 9:57 PM

catamite, huh? and what about those "sodomites" who are into older partners? or into female partners? or into female, older partners?

anal sex != homosexuality != pederasty

get that into your calcified pea brain already

Posted by: Kseniya | May 21, 2009 9:59 PM

By the way, Pilty, "the liberal elite" is itself a "ridiculously hyperbolic" term.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 21, 2009 10:04 PM

Eye-rollingly clueless Word of the Day: catamite

Posted by: Anonymous | May 21, 2009 10:09 PM

Anonymous (presumably kolonelpanik) @ 288:

Why the fuck you people bother to read and respond, wasting precious emotional energy on a demon who feeds on it, I can only speculate.

Sometimes, the reading and response aren't so much for the benefit of the objectionable poster, but for the benefit of the unseen audience of lurkers. And sometimes, if an objectionable post is just ignored, there are those that construe it as tacit agreement.

Of course, it's also true that feeding trolls makes them fat and even more objectionable. Finding a balance between starving them and encouraging them by responding to their points (usually the same ones, over and over and over again) for the common good, is tricky.

Plus, of course, troll-baiting and troll-stomping are also popular individual and team sports.

Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM | May 21, 2009 10:13 PM

Darn, I missed Kolonel Koncern's grand exit. However, he'll be back, misusing big words that he doesn't quite understand the meaning of, whining about the tone here while telling people to fuck off, and otherwise showing himself to be a pompous priggish pseudo-intellectual.

Posted by: cicely | May 21, 2009 10:15 PM

Well, bother.

Anonymous @ 304 was me. *grumblegrumblegrumbleTypeKeygrumblegrumble*

Posted by: Rev. Bigdumbchimp | May 21, 2009 10:20 PM

Touché

FYI posting on pharyngula from an iPhone is tough. I predict an increase in typos if that is even possible.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 21, 2009 10:25 PM

I have to admit that, even though I've had the Old Fake Fossil killfiled longtime, I sometimes peek. It's a rubbernecky kind of peeking. I feel dirty just admitting it. And even when I don't peek, some people find him irresistibly quotable in retort. Seldom fails to amaze. What sort of enjoyment keeps him coming back here, is what I wonder.

Posted by: Rev. Bigdumbchimp | May 21, 2009 10:37 PM

Have not but I'll look it up

Posted by: Ken Cope | May 21, 2009 10:50 PM

"Who is Number One?"

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 21, 2009 11:00 PM

August is going to be HOT!!!!!

Oh, and who's number one? (jumping the gun just slightly...)

Posted by: Anonymous | May 21, 2009 11:18 PM

Grumble. I'm hoping my pressence at the game including loud obnoxious screaming fueled by beer and good old southern redneckitude on Saturday will stir the vanes to victory.

Win or loss either way there is a slight possibilty you'll see this chimp on tv making an ass out of himself as our seats are center ice near the glass.

Oh and we're going with some of the owners of Adam and Eve (nsfw).

Should be, um, interesting.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 21, 2009 11:29 PM

As you can see, only your nym & initial grumble got hirblegurbled.

Have fun at the game. My father sez those tix ain't cheap.

Posted by: strange gods before me | May 21, 2009 11:38 PM

This dismissal is dehumanizing, but at least you weren't brusque to the men in power. That would have been unforgivable.

Cerberus kicks ass.

Posted by: Rev. Bigdumbchimp | May 21, 2009 11:57 PM

well yeah, that works ok on an actual computer

Posted by: Knockgoats | May 22, 2009 6:23 AM

Pilty,
You are so fucking stupid it's a wonder you can find your mouth when you want to eat. Nichols did indeed say "Homosexuality is not a sin". That is and always has been the official church line, because "homosexuality" refers to a sexual orientation, not a sexual practice. Here's the context:

"Homosexuality - is it a sin? Homosexuality is not a sin.

A person who is of a homosexual orientation is as worthy and as dignified as anybody else and one of the things I regret about our society is that it tends to identify people by their sexual orientation and that is a diminishing of a person." - Vincent Nichols

Nichols very pointedly did not say that homosexual acts are not sins.

What I actually said was that perpetrators of sexual abuse against children were: "evil bastards, wicked sinners, disgusting perverts". - Pilty

And what you evaded, as you always do, you dishonest little shit, is the systematic cover-up orchestrated by the RCC hierarchy, including the current Pope. The Roman Catholic Church is the world's largest and most powerful pedophile ring. The Irish Church has successfully ensured that no prosecutions will result from this report, no names will be named, and most of the compensation to victims will come from the Irish taxpayers. The Mafia look like a benevolent society by comparison with your scumbag church, Pilty.

By the way, among the other disgusting practices exposed by the recent report - and this was nuns as well as monks -was that of falsely telling children their parents were dead. Can't really get much lower than that in the way of lying, can you?

"I call him names; but he would like to see me and most of us here tortured and burnt." - Me

Whatever gave you that idea? You're no threat to society, jut a useful idiot for those who are. - Pilty

So you admit that there are people you would like to see tortured and burnt. You're a psychopathic sadist, as I've recognised from early in our acquaintance. Incidentally, being called an idiot by you is like being called smarmy by Tony Blair.

I don't hate anyone. - Pilty

And you're a shameless liar.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 22, 2009 7:29 AM

Pilty, still showing why you are on a lot of peoples hit list. Get a clue. You are just being an ignorant homophobic nuisance, so it is time for you and your paranoia to move on. Do so.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 22, 2009 7:38 AM

It is almost refreshing, however, to see one of the hate-mongers acknowledge what they desire. A return to the 50s, to the closet at its most intense, bans on employment, police harrassment, electroconvulsive "therapy" to "fix" homosexuals," witch hunts and purges... Basically, a return to gay folks as enemies of the state and a living death for gay folks.

Posted by: John Morales | May 22, 2009 8:09 AM

It's all bad, but homosexual sodomy is higher up the sin scale than anal sex between a man and woman. [...] My use of the term "sodomy" is not intended to cause offence. The reason I prefer to use that word -- and why I think it is humane to do so -- is because it emphasizes the fact that the sin resides in a particular act, not in some ill-defined essentialist psychological disposition.

PS "homosexual sodomy", gotta love it. Hey, if it's the act and not the disposition, does a female doctor administering a suppository to a female count as an act of sodomy? If not, how do female homosexuals indulge, or is it only the preserve of males?

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 22, 2009 8:19 AM

THEY ARE STEALING OUR LITARTURE!!!
THE GAYZ!!!!
IT IS THERE AGENDA!!!

'If you removed all of the homosexuals and homosexual influence from what is generally regarded as American culture, you would pretty much be left with "Let's Make a Deal."'-~Fran Lebowitz

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 22, 2009 8:53 AM

So the Hoax prefers the use of the word sodomy. Just remember the violence implied by the use of the word. The residents of Sodom and Gomorrah were murdered when a groups of men wanted to rape the angels visiting Lot. The cities would have been spared if only they followed Lot's reasonable request and instead, raped his daughters.

Hoax, take your sin scale and shove it up your ass.

Posted by: GMacs | May 22, 2009 9:02 AM

I actually had a conversation about this last night with a friend who is a conservative and a Catholic.

He is totally fine with SSM. Why? Because of the Constitution.

See, here's how he puts it:
He's against Affirmative Action because it goes against the 14th Amendment, which guarantees equal protection and opportunity. He can't stand other conservatives who hypocritically turn around and don't allow same-sex marriage.

Funny, that my conservative friend was the one who pointed out to me (a raging, bleeding-heart liberal) that disallowing same-sex marriage is against the Constitution.

So, redefining marriage is not nearly as damaging to society as, say, going against the foundation of our federal law.

Posted by: Sven DiMilo | May 22, 2009 9:07 AM

Just a song of Gomorrah
Wonder what they did there
Must have been a ba-ad thing
To get shot down for...

Posted by: Walton | May 22, 2009 9:19 AM

Piltdown, you're a bizarre contradiction. You're clearly intelligent, articulate, and aware of history. Yet you hold the most frustratingly indefensible views.

There is - as I'm sure you know, whether you admit it to yourself or not - no solid empirical evidence backing the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a divine being who was resurrected from the dead. There is even less evidence that the magisterium of the Catholic Church speaks and acts with any special divine authority. These claims have no more empirical support than the claim that Mohammed was a prophet, or the claim that Joseph Smith transcribed the golden plates given to him by the Angel Moroni, or the claim that the world is run by a huge alien reptilian conspiracy.

Examine yourself: the reason you believe in Catholic doctrine is not because it is demonstrably right, but rather because it is traditional and a part of your identity. I know. I was raised a Christian. A majority of my family and friends are Christians. I know how the human mind can twist itself into believing lies, because you want them to be true.

And you do not simply seek to delude yourself quietly. You want to impose your "values" on everyone else. You are not satisfied with causing suffering to those who choose to follow your cult, Piltdown. You want to torture everyone.

There is no inherent moral rightness or justice to our universe. Often, the good suffer and the bad prevail. Life for the vast majority of people throughout human history has been nasty, brutish and short - and you and your kind have so often made it more so. Because of your arbitrary beliefs, you seek to impose senseless "moral" standards - relegating women to a second-class position; brutally persecuting gay people for expressing their sexuality; imposing your archaic values on children through coercion, both that of the State and that of the traditional family and social structure.

Let go of your delusions, Piltdown. There is no loving God - for if there were, there would not be a million children born with disabilities and congenital diseases every year. There would not be periodic epidemics and natural disasters which cause untold human suffering, striking down bad and good alike, young and old, Christian and pagan, indiscriminately. People who devote their entire lives to selflessly caring for others, wearing themselves out, would not die long, slow, painful lonely deaths of cancer. And I would not be sitting here, as I have so often lately, alone and depressed, debating whether the universe would be better off without me. There is no God. Or, if there is, He is a cruel and malevolent being who is unworthy of my worship.

And you, Piltdown, your beliefs make it worse. You would have millions more children born into destitution, poverty and broken homes, because you would deny people the chance to use contraception. You would have more children born into short, painful lives with horrific diseases, because you would deny abortion. You would make more good people die long, painful, humiliating deaths, because you would deny them the right to end their lives in a dignified painless way. You would let young and old die of degenerative diseases rather than conduct stem-cell research which could save their lives. You would make gay, lesbian and transgender people loathe and deny themselves, depriving them of the chance to enter into the loving, fulfilling relationships which we all, in our hearts, desire - and making many of themselves commit suicide, depriving the world of their talents, as Alan Turing and Tchaikovsky did because of the condemnation of people like you. You would make mentally ill people - like me - hate ourselves even more, because, in your view, we must have done something to deserve what we are. And you would do all this because, for you, empirical reality and common decency are trumped by adherence to a few ancient and corrupted texts, and to the words of elderly, celibate, self-loathing, sad men in dresses.

All we can do is accept that there is no God, no devils, no angels, no voice from the sky that will make things better, and no better life to come. This life and this world, horrific as they are, is all we have. And all we can do is give people a fair chance to relieve the worst of their suffering. We can give science a chance to build a better world. We can give gay and lesbian people the same chances as everyone else to find love. We can encourage people to use contraception, so that fewer unwanted children are born into conditions of suffering. Your beliefs deny these things, and so, Piltdown, I deny that your beliefs deserve any respect.

I'm sorry for the rant. I'm in a dark place right now.

Posted by: cicely | May 22, 2009 10:34 AM

Walton @ 344:

And I would not be sitting here, as I have so often lately, alone and depressed, debating whether the universe would be better off without me.

Been there, dude, and very nearly done that. Hang tough; there's always the chance for better days ahead, and you can affect the odds. It's worth the gamble. After all, if I had given up, I would have missed out on my son (who is, in my completely unbiased and totally objective opinion, wonderful in every way :) ), and so would everyone he has interacted with. Inconceivable! And don't dismiss the effect that your continued existence can have on others. I like to think that my input has been positive for a good many people. It's hard to bootstrap yourself out of the Black Pit of Dispair, it may seem to require more energy than you think you have while you are in it, and it may try to suck you back in, but it can be done.

(I hope it goes without saying that I don't invest the Black Pit with any physical or metaphysical existence, but just in case.....)

Posted by: Watchman | May 22, 2009 10:55 AM

I'm sorry for the rant. I'm in a dark place right now.

Good post, Walton. The spin was pretty dark, but I think your points are valid and well-spoken.

Nice tunes, Pilty. Impressive work by the mandolin girl. I love to hear Alison play the fiddle, too. I suspect that many people who are aware of her as a singer don't even know she can play.

As video response to Walton's criticism, however, it's a bit weak.

Posted by: Jadehawk, OM | May 22, 2009 12:14 PM

True, but while pederasty (as in "pederast priests") may not be homosexuality, it is homosexual.

except that it's not. just because you're trying to brush sexual abuse of girls under the table to make the false connection, doesn't mean it's actually true. homosexuality is the attraction to your own biological sex; to normal adults, children are sexless, i.e. they lack the things that make our brains react with sexual attraction. to pedophiles/pederasts, it's the pre-pubescent part that's attractive... and that's identical in both girls and boys; most pederasts abuse girls, some prefer boys, and some prefer a mixed bag; you have to completely ignore the vast majority of pederasts, and vast tracts of knowledge of human psychology and human sexuality, to make any sort of attempt at a claim that pederasty is homosexual.

Posted by: Walton | May 22, 2009 1:26 PM

Piltdown: Thanks, and I apologise for the hostile tone of my earlier post. You're not, as far as I can tell, a bad person; you just have some views which I believe to be both thoroughly wrong and extremely dangerous. Since I was in a particularly bad mood, I lashed out at you - unfairly, perhaps.

Posted by: Jam Packed | May 22, 2009 4:43 PM

"debating whether the universe would be better off without me"

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 23, 2009 4:27 PM

Watchman @ 353:

So your intention was not to equate Walton's post to the clucking of a hen?

Absolutely not.

+++

Knockgoats @ 328:

Nichols very pointedly did not say that homosexual acts are not sins.

More to the point, he didn't say they were.

... the systematic cover-up orchestrated by the RCC hierarchy, including the current Pope. The Roman Catholic Church is the world's largest and most powerful pedophile ring. ... The Mafia look like a benevolent society by comparison with your scumbag church, Pilty.

In spite of all the hypocrisy and distortions of the media, I think there is a great deal of truth in what you say. The present hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is a sewer of corruption, heresy, criminality and downright evil. But I also believe an institution and the doctrines it embodies stand or fall independently of the character and behaviour of its members.

As you know, the 'Mother of Parliaments' is currently mired in scandal, with many if not most MPs exposed as venal rascals, up to and including the PM himself. Do you conclude from this sorry state of affairs that the ideal of parliamentary democracy has been discredited? (And no, I'm not "equating" sexual abuse of children with mere political corruption.)

So you admit that there are people you would like to see tortured and burnt.

It's not a question of "like". I believe that a polity has the right and duty to defend itself from external aggression and internal subversion. Sometimes that calls for the exercise of fatal violence, be it warfare or the death penalty. How the latter might be best administered is a secondary issue. As for torture, I can conceive of extreme cases where it might be justified ... Atheist poster boy Sam Harris apparently thinks so too! (BTW, following Fray Torquemada's humane reforms, the much-maligned Spanish Inquisition restricted itself to a mild form of waterboarding, whose use was very strictly circumscribed.)

+++

MAJeff @ 332:

It is almost refreshing, however, to see one of the hate-mongers acknowledge what they desire. A return to the 50s ...

I thought != meant ≠ ...? That's what I meant anyway.

+++

Kseniya @ 343:

[Your posts] have focused almost exclusively on allegations of perversion and pederasty, with the transparent goal of equating homosexuality with pedophilia.

No, I'm not equating homosexuality with paedophilia; I'm saying pederasty is a type of homosexuality. Which it is.

... some ill-defined essentialist psychological disposition.

Nice try.

What causes a person to have a particular sexual orientation? There is no consensus among scientists about the exact reasons that an individual develops a heterosexual, bisexual, gay, or lesbian orientation. Although much research has examined the possible genetic, hormonal, developmental, social, and cultural influences on sexual orientation, no findings have emerged that permit scientists to conclude that sexual orientation is determined by any particular factor or factors. Many think that nature and nurture both play complex roles; most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.

According to Wiki, the APA was persuaded to drop homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders thanks to lobbying by gay rights activist Frank Kameny. This creep has also declared:

Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better sexual perversions, by whatever definition, by more and more consenting adults. We will all be the better off thereby. ... Bestiality is not “my thing.” I have never participated in it and have no expectation that I ever will. But it seems to be a harmless foible or idiosyncrasy of some people. So, as long as the animal doesn’t mind (and the animal rarely does) I don’t mind, and I don’t see why anyone else should. If bestiality with consenting animals provides happiness to some people, let them pursue their happiness. ... Let us have more and better enjoyment of more and better and harder-core pornography by those to whom such viewing provides happiness. The pursuit of such happiness is Americanism in action.

Frankly, I have no more regard for the anthropological assumptions of the American Psychological Association than you have for the doctrines of the Catholic Church. "Little or no sense of choice" indeed!

+++

phantomreader42 @ 349:

You whine at the top of your lungs that you aren't an apologist for child rape, but you support your sick death cult and it's official policy of protecting rapists

Where have I said I support a policy of protecting rapists?

And on what basis do you say that protecting rapists is an "official policy" of the Catholic Church?

+++

Jadehawk @ 350:

True, but while pederasty (as in "pederast priests") may not be homosexuality, it is homosexual.

except that it's not. just because you're trying to brush sexual abuse of girls under the table to make the false connection, doesn't mean it's actually true. homosexuality is the attraction to your own biological sex; to normal adults, children are sexless, i.e. they lack the things that make our brains react with sexual attraction. to pedophiles/pederasts, it's the pre-pubescent part that's attractive... and that's identical in both girls and boys; most pederasts abuse girls, some prefer boys, and some prefer a mixed bag; you have to completely ignore the vast majority of pederasts, and vast tracts of knowledge of human psychology and human sexuality, to make any sort of attempt at a claim that pederasty is homosexual.

You appear to be confusing paedophilia ("a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children"*) with pederasty ("an erotic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside his immediate family"*). Most of the priestly abuse cases appear to be the latter.

(*Wiki definitions)

Posted by: Thrifty | May 23, 2009 7:21 PM

@Piltdown Man, #356

Absolutely not.

A most infelicitous reference, then. Perhaps adopting a more considerate approach in your communication would behoove you.

The present hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is a sewer of corruption, heresy, criminality and downright evil.

This is a very interesting statement about which I would like to know more. I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of Catholic doctrine, but I'm pretty sure that a core tenet of that faith is the infallibility of parts of its hierarchy acting in certain capacities. Has the hierarchy, while acting in any infallible capacity, proclaimed any teaching that demonstrates "corruption, heresy, criminality and downright evil"? If not, do you think it likely - or even remotely possible - that, if pushed, the current hierarchy would proclaim a teaching that you consider to be corrupt, heretical, criminal or downright evil?

with many if not most MPs exposed as venal rascals, up to and including the PM himself

[citation needed]

Do you conclude from this sorry state of affairs that the ideal of parliamentary democracy has been discredited?

Your analogy is specious. The misconduct of the MPs that comprise the UK parliament reflects on that institution, not on the ideals of parliamentary democracy in general. And in fact, the revelations of abuse of the expenses system has triggered what the more dramatically inclined might call a constitutional crisis, which will lead to unprecedented and radical reforms of the way in which Parliament conducts its business, but with absolutely no implications for the principles of parliamentary democracy beyond the governance of that one institution.

In a similar way, the misconduct of the guilty parties in the RCC - both the offenders and those who sought to protect them - reflects on the RCC, not the broader ideals of, well, I'm not really sure what you're getting at here since it's pretty difficult to pin down what the broader ideals of Christian institutions are due to their widely divergent characteristics. But whatever, UK MPs behaving badly means that the UK Parliament needs to be changed, not the idea of parliamentary democracy. Bad Catholic priests means that the RCC needs to be changed, not every Christian organisation. Or probably every Christian organisation should be changed, but not necessarily for the same reasons.

As for torture, I can conceive of extreme cases where it might be justified

I would very much like to hear the basis for this. I am doing you the charity of assuming that your conceptions do not include wild and hypothetical 24-esque scenarios.

the APA was persuaded to drop homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders thanks to lobbying by gay rights activist Frank Kameny.

The current position of the APA with respect to the disordered nature of homosexuality is conveniently provided at the link in your post, and I'll reproduce it here for your convenience:

Is homosexuality a mental disorder?

Irrespective of Frank Kameny's activism at the time of the APA's declassification of homosexuality as a disorder, that organisation based its decision on research and clinical experience that has been confirmed since that time.

You say that you have no regard for the anthropological "assumptions" of the APA. Does the Catholic Church base its doctrine on similarly demonstrable grounds?

You appear to be confusing paedophilia ("a psychological disorder in which an adult experiences a sexual preference for prepubescent children"*) with pederasty ("an erotic relationship between an adolescent boy and an adult man outside his immediate family"*). Most of the priestly abuse cases appear to be the latter.

If you seriously believe that to be the case, I shudder to think just how far you can stretch the term "erotic relationship" before it snaps under the strain of incredulity.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 23, 2009 8:05 PM

*headdesk* Sentence 2 in #359 should start with "You all are all..."
*shakes fist at the typo cooties*

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 26, 2009 5:37 AM

Walton @ 344:

There is - as I'm sure you know, whether you admit it to yourself or not - no solid empirical evidence backing the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was a divine being who was resurrected from the dead. There is even less evidence that the magisterium of the Catholic Church speaks and acts with any special divine authority. These claims have no more empirical support than the claim that Mohammed was a prophet, or the claim that Joseph Smith transcribed the golden plates given to him by the Angel Moroni, or the claim that the world is run by a huge alien reptilian conspiracy.

I'm not an apologist or even a controversialist, just a gadfly. I don't really think it's possible to produce a single knock-down argument for religious belief, whether in the form of "solid empirical evidence" (whatever that might be) or philosophical proof for God's existence (which, as Wowbagger has rightly pointed out, can at best only demonstrate a vague, undenominational theism).

Rather than a single knock-down argument or piece of evidence, the nature of 'proof' for a believer is more likely to be a number of discrete factors (historical, philosophical, experiential) whose cumulative effect is to put the matter beyond reasonable doubt. The process is more akin to a jury considering a case in a court of law than a scientific experiment in controlled laboratory conditions. (And remember, if the God of the theists does exist, He is an active sovereign being Who reveals Himself at His discretion, not a passive object of inquiry.)

Speaking for myself, I would agree with Pascal that the ongoing vicissitudes of the Jewish people make a compelling case for divine action in human affairs. I would also say that the course of historical events since the formerly Christian nations formally rejected the reign of Christ the King conforms to what one would expect to happen if the Christian religion were true.

Examine yourself: the reason you believe in Catholic doctrine is not because it is demonstrably right, but rather because it is traditional and a part of your identity. I know. I was raised a Christian. A majority of my family and friends are Christians. I know how the human mind can twist itself into believing lies, because you want them to be true.

I can only say that I was not raised in the practice of any religion. I was brought up as a woolly liberal agnostic whose parents had an instinctive distaste for institutional Catholicism. I became a theist at the age of 20 after a brief mystical experience which had nothing in common with the kind of "ecstatic", "transcendent" or "numinous" experiences one associates with art, nature, sex or psychedelics. I can only describe it as the presence of a personal God. Some years later I became a Roman Catholic after a series of unsettling 'paranormal' phenomena (also experienced by a second and third party), which only ceased when I began saying Catholic prayers and displaying Catholic images in my house.

And you do not simply seek to delude yourself quietly. You want to impose your "values" on everyone else. You are not satisfied with causing suffering to those who choose to follow your cult, Piltdown. You want to torture everyone.

I don't want to torture or cause suffering to anyone. I would like to see my "values" prevail in society because I believe they are based on truth and, in consequence, will increase the happiness of individual and communal happiness of individuals.

There is no inherent moral rightness or justice to our universe. Often, the good suffer and the bad prevail. Life for the vast majority of people throughout human history has been nasty, brutish and short - and you and your kind have so often made it more so. Because of your arbitrary beliefs, you seek to impose senseless "moral" standards - relegating women to a second-class position; brutally persecuting gay people for expressing their sexuality; imposing your archaic values on children through coercion, both that of the State and that of the traditional family and social structure.

If you really believe that there is "no inherent moral rightness or justice to our universe", on what grounds do you condemn the alleged wrongs and injustices committed in the name of traditional values?

(BTW, where have I advocated "brutally persecuting gay people"? Refusing to accept the normalization and promotion of a particular sexual practice is not the same thing as the "brutal persecution" of its practitioners -- any more than Pharynguloids advocate the "brutal persecution" of Christians by urging Christianity's exclusion from the public square.)

There is no loving God - for if there were, there would not be a million children born with disabilities and congenital diseases every year. There would not be periodic epidemics and natural disasters which cause untold human suffering, striking down bad and good alike, young and old, Christian and pagan, indiscriminately. People who devote their entire lives to selflessly caring for others, wearing themselves out, would not die long, slow, painful lonely deaths of cancer. And I would not be sitting here, as I have so often lately, alone and depressed, debating whether the universe would be better off without me. There is no God. Or, if there is, He is a cruel and malevolent being who is unworthy of my worship.

I don't think you have the right to say that. The fact that the human race hasn't committed suicide en masse in despair at the horror of existence, suggests that something is stronger than the experience of suffering.

And of course, many who "devote their entire lives to selflessly caring for others" are motivated by religious belief and many who suffer in the ways you describe are able to endure only through their religious faith. If religion is the opiate of the masses, don't opiates play an important role in palliative medicine?

You would have millions more children born into destitution, poverty and broken homes, because you would deny people the chance to use contraception. You would have more children born into short, painful lives with horrific diseases, because you would deny abortion. You would make more good people die long, painful, humiliating deaths, because you would deny them the right to end their lives in a dignified painless way. You would let young and old die of degenerative diseases rather than conduct stem-cell research which could save their lives. You would make gay, lesbian and transgender people loathe and deny themselves, depriving them of the chance to enter into the loving, fulfilling relationships which we all, in our hearts, desire - and making many of themselves commit suicide, depriving the world of their talents, as Alan Turing and Tchaikovsky did because of the condemnation of people like you. You would make mentally ill people - like me - hate ourselves even more, because, in your view, we must have done something to deserve what we are.

With regard to contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, I believe their acceptance by society will led to the disintegration of society - with all the untold suffering that entails. With regard to mental illness, I can assure you that my worldview doesn't require me to believe that you or anyone else have "done something to deserve" it!

All we can do is accept that there is no God, no devils, no angels, no voice from the sky that will make things better, and no better life to come. This life and this world, horrific as they are, is all we have. And all we can do is give people a fair chance to relieve the worst of their suffering. We can give science a chance to build a better world. We can give gay and lesbian people the same chances as everyone else to find love. We can encourage people to use contraception, so that fewer unwanted children are born into conditions of suffering.

We have done and are doing all those things and from where I'm standing misery, ruin, anguish and evil are triumphing as never before. Give it a few years and see where we are.

Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | May 26, 2009 6:37 AM

Piltdown wrote:

The fact that the human race hasn't committed suicide en masse in despair at the horror of existence, suggests that something is stronger than the experience of suffering.

There is 'something stronger' - but it's not your god, or anyone else's god for that matter; it's simply a survival instinct.

But that existence can be, and often is, a horror, demonstrates the impossibility of your god (as defined by your belief system as being omniscient, benevolent and all-powerful) existing.

An evil or uncaring god, sure. But that's not what you admit to believing.

Posted by: Watchman | May 26, 2009 9:43 AM

Wowbagger: But our suffering is a sign of God's love. He wants us to learn from it. And eventual alleviation of that suffering is proof of God's benevolence. Uh... right?

Posted by: Walton | May 26, 2009 10:09 AM

Piltdown,

I don't think you have the right to say that. The fact that the human race hasn't committed suicide en masse in despair at the horror of existence, suggests that something is stronger than the experience of suffering.

You've missed my point slightly, I think. I wasn't denying that there is good as well as bad in the world; my worldview isn't quite that resolutely negative (though I can see how you got that impression, as I was particularly depressed when I wrote my original post). Rather, what I was pointing out is that bad things happen, on an apparently random and unguided basis, to good people. All too often, the evil succeed and the good fail; and catastrophe afflicts the good as much as the bad.

And of course, many who "devote their entire lives to selflessly caring for others" are motivated by religious belief and many who suffer in the ways you describe are able to endure only through their religious faith. If religion is the opiate of the masses, don't opiates play an important role in palliative medicine?

True, having a religious belief can certainly enhance some people's lives and their ability to endure suffering. But that doesn't make the belief true. Having an imaginary girlfriend might enhance someone's life, too; but that doesn't make the imaginary girlfriend real. (I realise that's a facetious example, and I'm not comparing religion to imaginary girlfriends, but it gets the general point across.)

If you really believe that there is "no inherent moral rightness or justice to our universe", on what grounds do you condemn the alleged wrongs and injustices committed in the name of traditional values?

This is an is-ought confusion, though I appreciate that my wording was ambiguous. I am not a moral relativist, in the sense that the term is usually understood; I believe that human reason can produce objective moral principles, and that some standards are objectively right while others are objectively wrong. This doesn't mean that moral rules have to be dictated by some sort of divine command or supernatural force. Rather, all it means is that we, human beings, develop, through our own rational capabilities, certain general principles which allow us to live together and share limited resources with a minimum of suffering and violence. We can legitimately disagree among ourselves about what these principles are - but that doesn't mean they don't have objective force.

That is to say, we need to avoid confusing the two senses of "natural", where we talk about "natural law" or "natural morality" or "natural justice". We don't mean "natural" in the sense of an observable scientific phenomenon, external to the human mind, in the way that laws of physics are "natural". Rather, we mean it in a normative sense; we mean that common human reason, empathy and practical reasonableness* sometimes militate in favour of, or against, a particular course of action. So when the religious accuse atheists and agnostics of being necessarily morally relativist, they tend to overlook this fine distinction.

However, what I was observing - based on a considerable amount of empirical evidence - is that the universe doesn't have any natural, innate moral order; that is to say (as I noted earlier), bad things happen to good people, and vice versa, all the time. Natural disasters, epidemics, and so on do not discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving. This doesn't mean that the concepts of "deserving" and "undeserving" are objectively meaningless; morality is a product of human reason, and it can and should play an important part in our lives and in the way we interact with one another. Our moral principles need to be objectively, rationally justified; a moral principle which is so justified is superior to one which is not. We can see, then, that we derive true objective morality not from divine commands or supernatural forces, but from our own rational abilities.

With regard to mental illness, I can assure you that my worldview doesn't require me to believe that you or anyone else have "done something to deserve" it!

True, and I apologise. That was an unfair accusation.

-----

*(To borrow a term from John Finnis, who is, incidentally, a social conservative and a man after your own heart. But I digress.)

Posted by: Janine, OMnivore | May 26, 2009 10:14 AM

I don't want to torture or cause suffering to anyone.

Why do you show so much admiration for those who have caused suffering and used torture?

With regard to contraception, abortion, euthanasia and homosexuality, I believe their acceptance by society will led to the disintegration of society - with all the untold suffering that entails.

And yet all of human civilizations through out all of history have had this. And humanity survives.

With regard to mental illness, I can assure you that my worldview doesn't require me to believe that you or anyone else have "done something to deserve" it!

'cough' Original Sin 'cough'

Posted by: Watchman | May 26, 2009 11:16 AM

Walton:

I believe that human reason can produce objective moral principles, and that some standards are objectively right while others are objectively wrong. This doesn't mean that moral rules have to be dictated by some sort of divine command or supernatural force. Rather, all it means is that we, human beings, develop, through our own rational capabilities, certain general principles which allow us to live together and share limited resources with a minimum of suffering and violence. We can legitimately disagree among ourselves about what these principles are - but that doesn't mean they don't have objective force.

Hear, hear.

Posted by: Watchman | May 26, 2009 11:37 AM

Has Pilty conceded the point APA/DSM/Kemany point? His avoidance of the subject suggests that he has.

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 26, 2009 8:57 PM

Kseniya @ 357:

I'm saying pederasty is a type of homosexuality. Which it is.

On a gross level, yes, but you conveniently ignore the finer distinctions between sexual orientations which apply to this discussion. You're smart enough to already know this, but your aim is to conflate pederasty with homosexuality between consenting adults. Go ahead - deny it.

"Finer distinctions"? I grant, of course, that not all homosexuals are pederasts. And it might indeed seem unfair to specifically classify pederasts as homosexuals, given that one doesn't ordinarily refer to men who sexually abuse underage girls as 'heterosexuals'. On the other hand, given that the overwhelming majority of the clerical sex abuse cases do seem - correct me if I'm wrong - to involve men abusing boys, it doesn't seem unreasonable to point out this homosexual 'over-representation'.

Frankly, I have no more regard for the anthropological assumptions of the American Psychological Association than you have for the doctrines of the Catholic Church. "Little or no sense of choice" indeed!

Feh. Argument from personal incredulity.

Incredulity at the expression "little or no sense of choice". Does "sense of choice" mean something different from "choice"? And what exactly does it mean to quantify it as "little"?

When did you decide to be heterosexual, Pilty? I think you should go out and score with some hot young stud just to prove to yourself that sexual orientation is largely a matter of choice. Let us know how it goes.

I will cheerfully concede that sexual orientation may not be a matter of choice. Will you concede that homosexual acts are a matter of choice?

According to Wiki, the APA was persuaded to drop homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders thanks to lobbying by gay rights activist Frank Kameny.

Ah, the Wiki, font of all that is completely true.

Touché.

Without Kameny, the DSM never would have been changed, huh? What a nice bogeyman Kameny is for you! Oooh, evil homo, single-handedly twisting the APA around his fat little finger. LOL. I should think you'd prefer to name Fryer as the key player in all that, but I guess there's no bestial quote you can mine that has Fryer's name on it.

It's difficult to comment on the part played by Fryer as his 'Anonymous' speech no longer appears to be available online.

Not that it matters. What IS your point? That's Kemeny's laissez-faire attitude towards bestiality makes the APA wrong about sexual orientation as it manifests between consenting adults? All you've offered is an indirect ad hom: Kemeny is a "creep", therefore the APA is wrong. Your personal evaluation of Kemany's character has no bearing on the issue.

You are right and I apologize for the sloppy ad hom. I would, however, be interested to know more about the APA's own avowed rationale for their change of classification -- and how Fryer's speech influenced their decision.

The APA's decision has proven to be correct.

Has it been proven? How?

And on what basis do you say that protecting rapists is an "official policy" of the Catholic Church?

Perhaps not literally "official".

Your link includes the following definition of "de facto" : "actually existing, esp. when without lawful authority".

Quite.

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 26, 2009 9:01 PM

Thrifty @ 358:

Absolutely not.

A most infelicitous reference, then. Perhaps adopting a more considerate approach in your communication would behoove you.

If I unwittingly offended Walton, I beg his pardon. Kseniya is doubtless right @ 361. In my defence, it never occurred to me that anyone would think me such a monster as to post a sarcastic jibe at someone who was in a state of serious melancholy.

The present hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church is a sewer of corruption, heresy, criminality and downright evil.

This is a very interesting statement about which I would like to know more. I won't pretend to understand the intricacies of Catholic doctrine, but I'm pretty sure that a core tenet of that faith is the infallibility of parts of its hierarchy acting in certain capacities.

That is correct. Specifically:

- A pope speaking ex cathedra, that is "when in discharge of the office of pastor and doctor of all Christians, by virtue of his supreme Apostolic authority, he defines a doctrine regarding faith or morals to be held by the universal Church" (Vatican I)

- The papally-approved decrees of an Ecumenical Council.

Has the hierarchy, while acting in any infallible capacity, proclaimed any teaching that demonstrates "corruption, heresy, criminality and downright evil"?

Not that I'm aware of.

If not, do you think it likely - or even remotely possible - that, if pushed, the current hierarchy would proclaim a teaching that you consider to be corrupt, heretical, criminal or downright evil?

In an infallible capacity you mean? As a Catholic I cannot believe such a thing is possible. Hypothetically, if a pope were to declare ex cathedra a teaching that was manifestly heretical, one would be forced to conclude one of two things:

1.) that the Church was not the divinely guided institution it claimed to be -- the whole edifice would come crashing down and one's religion would be exposed as a pack of lies.

2.) that the individual promulgating this heretical doctrine was not in fact the pope but an antipope who possessed no legitimate authority. Welcome to sedevacantism.

with many if not most MPs exposed as venal rascals, up to and including the PM himself
[citation needed]
Do you conclude from this sorry state of affairs that the ideal of parliamentary democracy has been discredited?

Your analogy is specious. The misconduct of the MPs that comprise the UK parliament reflects on that institution, not on the ideals of parliamentary democracy in general. And in fact, the revelations of abuse of the expenses system has triggered what the more dramatically inclined might call a constitutional crisis, which will lead to unprecedented and radical reforms of the way in which Parliament conducts its business, but with absolutely no implications for the principles of parliamentary democracy beyond the governance of that one institution.
In a similar way, the misconduct of the guilty parties in the RCC - both the offenders and those who sought to protect them - reflects on the RCC, not the broader ideals of, well, I'm not really sure what you're getting at here since it's pretty difficult to pin down what the broader ideals of Christian institutions are due to their widely divergent characteristics.

Perhaps it was a specious analogy. I would, however, maintain a distinction between the Roman Catholic Church and current personnel of the various diocesan chanceries or even the Vatican - ie between the Church and churchmen.

As for torture, I can conceive of extreme cases where it might be justified
I would very much like to hear the basis for this. I am doing you the charity of assuming that your conceptions do not include wild and hypothetical 24-esque scenarios.

Well, that was good enough for Sam Harris!

The current position of the APA with respect to the disordered nature of homosexuality is conveniently provided at the link in your post, and I'll reproduce it here for your convenience:
Is homosexuality a mental disorder?

No, lesbian, gay, and bisexual orientations are not disorders. Research has found no inherent association between any of these sexual orientations and psychopathology. Both heterosexual behavior and homosexual behavior are normal aspects of human sexuality. Both have been documented in many different cultures and historical eras. Despite the persistence of stereotypes that portray lesbian, gay, and bisexual people as disturbed, several decades of research and clinical experience have led all mainstream medical and mental health organizations in this country to conclude that these orientations represent normal forms of human experience. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual relationships are normal forms of human bonding. Therefore, these mainstream organizations long ago abandoned classifications of homosexuality as a mental disorder.

Irrespective of Frank Kameny's activism at the time of the APA's declassification of homosexuality as a disorder, that organisation based its decision on research and clinical experience that has been confirmed since that time.

The passage you kindly transcribed is just a series of repeated assertions that homosexuality is not a disorder ("psychopathology"). How does the APA define "disordered" and "normal"? On what does it base those definitions? What was the "research and clinical experience" that led to its conclusions? What role did Mr Kameny and Mr Fryer's activism play in its deliberations? And what is the relevance of the fact that homosexuality has been "documented in many different cultures and historical eras"? Could not the same be said about many "psychopathologies"?

Posted by: Wowbagger, OM | May 26, 2009 10:29 PM

I will cheerfully concede that sexual orientation may not be a matter of choice. Will you concede that homosexual acts are a matter of choice?

So, you're saying that your god creates homosexuals for the specific purpose of making them suffer by having them desire something they can only obtain via sin that will lead to their eternal damnation? You're suggesting that he wants them to live a miserable, tortured existence of denial - denial that most other people (i.e. heterosexuals) aren't required to practice?

God of love indeed.

Posted by: MAJeff, OM | May 27, 2009 6:16 AM

Pilty, given your irrational ravings against homosexuals, one is very inclined to think you might have latent tendencies in that direction

Oh, bullshit.

He's nothing more than a religiously orthodox bigot working to make life worse for gay folks.

Posted by: Rorschach | May 27, 2009 6:31 AM

Pilty the freak:

Join us, Nerd. Join us and learn the true meaning of pain.

Freak freaks me out.

Posted by: Watchman | May 27, 2009 1:18 PM

Piltdown Man:

Kseniya is doubtless right @ 361. In my defence, it never occurred to me that anyone would think me such a monster as to post a sarcastic jibe at someone who was in a state of serious melancholy.

Yes, Kseniya was right. FWIW, I wasn't coming from a "Pilty is a monster" place, I was coming from a "Pilty is snarking on Walton's points, not his bleak state of mind." So I wasn't pointing a particularly crooked finger your way. I was curious about you intent, given the title of the bluegrass tune.

I might file that link away for some future opportunity to snark on some of the genuine hennish clucking and pearl-clutching we get here sometimes. Heh.

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 30, 2009 7:38 PM

Pilty, who gives a shit what you think? You have continuously proven yourself to be a religious bigot and non-thinker. What makes you think whatever you have to say is important to us? Until you can answer that question, your only reason to post here is your ego and your delusions of grandeur. Meanwhile, your opinion falls into the stupid ignoramus category. Get it?

Posted by: Nerd of Redhead, OM | May 30, 2009 9:52 PM

Yawn, an other post of idiocy from Pilty. Move along folks. Nothing to see or respond to here. He will just think he has something cogent to say if you respond...

Posted by: Owlmirror | May 30, 2009 10:12 PM

But, then again, any conspiracy so long as it involves homos or Freemasons, or Jews, or Muslims, or heretics, or other thoughtcriminals is apparently believable.

Fixed.

(Pilt's paranoia casts a wide net indeed.)

Posted by: Piltdown Man | May 30, 2009 10:23 PM

John Morales:

More accurately, in real life. What else is there, unreal life? :)

Life that is more real, as you are more real than a photograph of you. Reality is not undifferentiated it's hierarchical.

You might as well have said "But it does at least suggest the possibility that one's own feelings in this matter -- the feeling that evil in the world is compatible with God's love -- may not be a universally reliable guide."
A conclusion that applies both to a contention and its opposite is clearly otiose.

It has the virtue of encouraging one to disregard feelings of any sort as an infallible guide to truth.

... and I tire of this, already.

"and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’

I conclude now I have no
inner resources ..."

Posted by: Owlmirror | May 30, 2009 10:41 PM

They are prominent examples of wider destructive cultural trends. One is the obsessive wish to indulge one's lusts without consequences.

Such as, for example, the bloodlust of conservative Catholics?

I assume you mean the Inquisition? In the same way I can admire a soldier while thinking war a terrible thing. Civilization is a war.

Case. In. Point.

"Oh, how wonderfully Torquemada and Arnaud Amalric torture and kill! Look at their body counts! Smell the stink of burnt hair and human flesh! Pity it's so necessary, though. If only those Jews and Muslims and heretics would not force their tortures and killings by defiantly thinking thoughts condemned by the Catholic Church!"

Feh.

Original Sin is not a personal fault. We don't commit it, we inherit it.

So it's something God does to us, in other words, not something we choose. Are you sure you're not secretly a Calvinist?

Posted by: Owlmirror | May 30, 2009 10:55 PM

It has the virtue of encouraging one to disregard feelings of any sort as an infallible guide to truth.

Posted by: Watchman | June 4, 2009 3:29 PM

Piltdown, my good man, if you think the use of contraception is a "destructive cultural trend," I have to wonder why I pay you any mind at all. The RCC's stance on contraception is, at best, reckless and irresponsible. Surely you understand the concept of environmental sustainability? Surely you appreciate the danger of unchecked spread of STDs?

Now this:

The other is a desire to sink into oblivion, born of a despairing hatred of life... [snip]... Poor bastard.

I cannot agree with many of the opinions expressed in the comment you quoted, but those opinions do not add up to "a despairing hatred of life." I may as well argue that anyone who recites the usual funereal cliché that the deceased "has gone to a better place" exhibits a greater sense of despair about the value of life. Death is better than life? Uh... ok. Whatever.

Now this:

‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no Inner Resources.’

I agree with the sentiment, but as a comeback to John, it's lame. When one tires of a thing and moves on to another, does he lack inner resources? No.

Posted by: Watchman | June 5, 2009 10:39 AM

Owlmirror: I'm going to give Pilty the benefit of the doubt on "environmental sustainability." However, I think you're right on the money about the other thing, and I expect Pilty's response to more or less verify that.

The great irony is that the goal of unchecked procreation as advocated (commanded?) by the Bible, and the negative consequences thereof, are inextricably connected. Why did God [m/a/k/a descent with modification, filtered by natural selection] give us such powerful procreative instincts, knowing that those instincts, once unleashed, would eventually destroy us? Why did He [it] give us minds capable of conceiving (heh) and devising a variety of solutions to this conundrum, and then forbid us to implement those solutions? It defies logic.

"It is to teach us self-restraint," our honorable opponents will counter.

Just. So.