Happy birthday, America!
So much anger about love
A post about gay marriage, after the break….
So we’re over a week since the Supreme Court weighed in and made it legal nationwide for gays to marry, and the repercussions are still…repercussing. Some on the right are calling for the people in favor to be magnanimous in victory and nice to those poor folks who lost the case, which strikes me as a bit twee. This isn’t the end of a playoff series in the NHL, where the two teams line up for a series of handshakes before one team gets ready for its next round in the playoffs and the other just goes home for the summer. This was a deeply serious struggle that took many, many, many years to come to this point, and it was a struggle that has seen gays literally demonized, literally killed and jailed for their beliefs and desires to live their lives. Hearing people on the right crying out “Please be nice to us now that you’ve won” don’t do much for me when I remember what happened to Matthew Shepard and Alan Turing.
And those cries of “Be nice to us, now” sure as hell don’t do much for me when I go on Facebook and see this:
The spilling of blood.
The person who posted this seems to be literally calling for some kind of civil and religious war to get things back to the “way they should be”, with gays firmly shoved back in the closet so we don’t have to know about them at all while they live their disgusting, immoral, hedonistic lives.
The spilling of blood.
This makes me want to ask a bunch of questions.
We’ve already spilled blood on this. Shepard, for instance. Turing. Every gay person who died of AIDS while Ronald Reagan ignored the problem. (And let’s not pretend those aren’t the same thing. It all comes together. It’s all about treating gays as what they are: people.)
Whose blood needs to be spilled?
Will there be Christian fundamentalist suicide bombers, detonating themselves in the middle of gay weddings?
Will there be states attempting secession again, this time over their “right” to subjugate and dehumanize another group of people?
Will some town or county or state become so defiant that the President is forced to deploy the National Guard to escort gays to their own weddings? Will those National Guardsmen be fired upon?
Are we calling for the assassination of the five Supreme Court justices who voted this way? If so, why stop there? Before the ruling, gay marriage was legal in many states because of decisions in lower courts. Are those judges to be placed against the execution wall? What about the states where marriage was legalized through legislative action? Should every person who ever cast a vote in favor of gay marriage in any state legislature be placed against the same wall?
Whose blood will be spilled? Where, and why? And will you be willing to spill your blood for this noble cause?
And if so, will you for the love of God think about what that says?
Then there are my other questions, which mainly revolve around this one: WHY IS THIS SO BIG A DEAL TO YOU???
Does the Bible say negative things about homosexuality? It does seem to…but there’s something about the way it says it, isn’t there? It’s not entirely clear that the writers of those ancient texts are referring to quite the same thing that we are, in our day. If God feels so strongly about homosexuality and “marriage equals one man and one woman”, you’d think he would have managed to get that into that list of Commandments. Instead, it gets relegated to other parts of the Bible, along with all manner of other stuff that we willingly ignore.
So why is homosexuality in general, and gay marriage in particular, so important? What makes this prohibition from Leviticus the one that must be obeyed unto death, up to and including the spilling of blood? Why this, and not the eating of shellfish or getting tattoos or Wal-Mart being open on Sunday or the bit about how if your teenager is rebellious the proper thing to do is drag her outside so your neighbors can stone her?
What is so awful about this law in a book full of laws you completely ignore that it must be obeyed to the point of overruling those Ten Commandments that seem to be the things God really really really wants us to not be doing?
“We must be ready to spill blood in order to prevent people from loving in a way that stands in opposition to my selective reading of a text written thousands of years ago by an agrarian people in a desert country on the other side of the world, all because of my personal belief that said text was inspired by God.”
That may be the single craziest sentence I have ever written. And that’s saying something.
(Comments are off for this post.)
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America got a little bit better today.
Who cares, they all look alike anyway.
Syracuse had an Ironman triathlon thing the other day, and participants who completed the course were awarded this medal:
Yup, they got that beautiful medal for completing a triathlon. In Syracuse.
Because completing a triathlon is an accomplishment. In Syracuse.
One wonders, then, why the medal features the skyline of…Rochester.
Oops.
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Dispatches
Some stuff from recent days!
:: A kinetic sculpture featuring eleven thousand marbles. This kind of thing delights me to ridiculous degrees.
:: This blog is most certainly NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but it’s kind of interesting, if you’ve ever wondered what life is like for a working stripper.
:: JAWS is 40 years old!
What a great movie. I need to watch it again soon…but meantime, here’s a neat interview with the guy who, as a kid, got to be the killer shark’s second victim in the movie. Poor Alex Kintner!
:: Speaking of Speilberg blockbusters, I saw this on the road the other day. I assume it’s a promotional thing. Note the license plate.
:: Speaking of movies, some nifty news from the week past: the rest of Battle of the Century has been found. This silent Laurel&Hardy movie features one of the finest of the old-style pie fights in movie history, but the film itself has been mostly lost to time, until now, when the entire missing reel turned up. Details here and here.
As for the deeply sad story that’s been dominating the news this week…I’m not addressing it here. I’m simply worn out by such things. My thoughts tend to mirror Jason Bennion‘s, though, for what it’s worth.
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The last, full measure of devotion
Know, all who see these lines,
That this man, by his appetite for honor,
By his steadfastness,
By his love for his country,
By his courage,
Was one of the miracles of the God.— Guy Gavriel Kay
Well, how do you do, young Willie McBride,
Do you mind if I sit down here by your graveside?
And rest for awhile ‘neath the warm summer sun,
I’ve been walking all day, and I’m nearly done.
I see by your gravestone you were only 19
When you joined the great fallen in 1916,
I hope you died quick and I hope you died clean
Or, Willie McBride, was it slow and obscene?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
Did you leave a wife or a sweetheart behind
In some faithful heart is your memory enshrined?
And, though you died back in 1916,
To that faithful heart are you forever 19?
Or are you a stranger without even a name,
Enshrined then, forever, behind a glass pane,
In an old photograph, torn and tattered and stained,
And faded to yellow in a brown leather frame?
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
The sun’s shining down on these green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard that’s still No Man’s Land
The countless white crosses in stand mute in the sand
To man’s blind indifference to his fellow man,
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
And I can’t help but wonder, no Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did they really believe when they answered the call,
Did they really believe that this war would end wars?
Well the sorrow, the suffering, the glory, the pain
The killing and dying, was all done in vain,
For young Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Did they Beat the drum slowly, did they play the fife lowly?
Did they sound the death-march as they lowered you down?
Did the band play The Last Post in chorus?
Did the pipes play the Flowers of the Forest?
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Something for Thursday: In remembrance of the Shoah
Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The Daughter has, this past week, watched Schindler’s List in school. I don’t know if this is because of Holocaust Remembrance Day, or if it’s a coincidence that their study of the WWII and the Holocaust period happened to line up with today. Schindler’s List is a favorite film of mine, a deeply human testament to the evil that can arise out of simple human nature and the good that can also arise out of the same thing. What begins for Schindler as an easy way to make money over time becomes a mission to save as many lives as he can, and he’s never even aware of the shift; there’s no moment when he sits down and says, “I am going to save them.” He just…does. By the time his mission has become humanitarian, all the Nazis around him are so utterly convinced of his skill as a businessman that it never even occurs to them that he’s not making money and that he is literally buying their lives.
Likewise, the film’s flip side is the staggering banality of its evil. Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), kills sometimes because he is enraged and sometimes because he clearly loathes the Jews, but other times, he is shown killing because he has nothing else to do. He’s up one morning and shooting Jews with his rifle and then he leans back to pop his spine a few times and then he shoots a few more and then he goes to the bathroom and so on. Much has been written over the years of how the Nazis managed to elevate their evil to industrial levels, and no scene establishes that in this movie quite so well as the scene when Goeth is ordered by Berlin to have his men dig up the mass graves and cremate the bodies instead. The shots here are jaw-dropping in their horrific nature: giant piles of bodies being set aflame, and a conveyor belt thing being used to drag them from the carts and dump them on the pyre. A horrified Oskar Schindler arrives on the scene, and Goeth turns to him and says in the tone of an annoyed and overworked office worker, “Can you believe this? As if I don’t have enough to do, they come up with this?” That’s when it hits me, in this movie: the Nazis didn’t just make one of the most egregious evils of all time into an industry. They made it people’s jobs. People showed up to work, punching a clock and bitching about their workloads at lunchtime, to kill six million Jews.
Here is the scene where the war has ended and Schindler, technically a fugitive, must go on the run. It’s my understanding that this did not happen in history. I don’t care.
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Pi Day Followup
It turns out that I’m far from the only person to use Pi Day as an impetus for a pie in the face, which is actually kind of nice to learn. I mean, I want to be weird, but not ridiculously out there, if you know what I mean. Anyway, here are a few examples of folks who put their faces on the line for mathematically-initiated silliness!
A reporter makes a bet with the quarterback of the Tennessee football team as to how many digits of Pi he can rattle off. He wins.
Two guys offer a demonstration. This is amusing because they start off with that slightly-macho, jaded humor thing common nowadays…and then they start giggling when the pies come into play.
This woman coupled Pi Day with an pieing challenge for ALS, like last year’s Ice Bucket craze. (By the way, ignore her advice on goggles and shower caps. Go big or go home! Don’t be a muggle! You’re not going to look any more dignified if you try dressing up like a deep-sea diver for your pieing. In fact, the Pie Gods will mock you forevermore if you do such a thing!)
Another challenge-type video here. This woman actually made this video last year, but she retweeted it yesterday for Pi Day, which is how I saw it. She is raising awareness for Huntington’s Disease, and what I like about this (besides the pie) is that she uses clips from an episode of the best medical teevee show ever, Scrubs, to describe the disease and its effects.
This fellow invented a mechanical device for pie-throwing. Some logistics need to be worked out, obviously, but the idea is intriguing.
Actually, I’m not sure this has anything to do with Pi Day or not, but it got posted yesterday, so here’s Suzanne Somers getting pied by her Dancing with the Stars dance partner.
Long live Pi, and pie!
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Happy Pi Day!
Yes, today is Pi Day! I don’t usually do much to observe Pi Day, but this year’s is a special edition, since this is the only year in this century when the digits will line up so perfectly.
And how would a goof like me mark the occasion? Well, it would start with this:
And end like this:
Long live Pi, and pie!