Family knows best?

Sitting in Logan airport using Google's free holiday wi-fi (thanks, Google!), I came across the following:

With their reported $13 billion tax-exempt financial empire, the Mormons may be the wealthiest cult in America — and Scientology may be the big thing among the rich and powerful in Hollywood — but when it comes to political power neither of those sects holds a candle to the Family, the Christian extremist political group that operates the now infamous C Street house on Capitol Hill in Washington.

[...]

But what many people may find surprising is that the Family has branches around the world. In fact, yesterday, Jeff Sharlet, author of “The Family: Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power,” reported on NPR’s “Fresh Air” that it was a Family member in the Ugandan parliament who introduced a bill that would increase the punishment for homosexuality from life imprisonment, which is the maximum sentence today, to death:

SHARLET: [The] new legislation adds to this something called aggravated homosexuality. And this can include, for instance, if a gay man has sex with another man who is disabled, that’s aggravated homosexuality, and that man can be – I suppose both, actually, could be put to death for this. The use of any drugs or any intoxicants in seeking gay sex – in other words, you go to a bar and you buy a guy a drink, you’re subject to the death penalty if you go home and sleep together after that. What it also does is it extends this outward, so that if you know a gay person and you don’t report it, that could mean – you don’t report your son or daughter, you can go to prison.

And it goes further, to say that any kind of promotion of these ideas of homosexuality, including by foreigners, can result in prison terms. Talking about same sex-marriage positively can lead you to imprisonment for life. And it’s really kind of a perfect case study and the export of a lot of American largely evangelical ideas about homosexuality exported to Uganda, which then takes them to their logical end.

[...]

[The] legislator that introduces the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of the Family. He appears to be a core member of the Family. He works, he organizes their Uganda National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which the Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda…

So who are the members of Congress who belong to the Family and tolerate, if not encourage, this sort of extremism overseas? According to Jeff Sharlet, while most cult members are Republicans, members of both parties are welcomed. “Jesus didn’t come to take sides,” the members are fond of saying. “He came to take over.”

Now check this:

The mainstream media avoids referring to the Family as a cult, but check out this description of the group’s belief system from Jeff Sharlet and decide for yourself:

They have a very unusual theology in the sense that they think that Christ had one message for an inner circle and then a kind of different message for a sort of slightly more outer circle. And then the rest of us, Christ told us little stories because, frankly, we couldn’t handle the truth. And the core members are those they think are getting the real deal.

He didn't come to take sides, he came to take over. It makes me shiver.

But what makes me shiver more than the Family/cult/power network stuff is the overarching dynamic. A lot of gay people in Uganda are going to die, or live in misery. A lot of their friends and family will, too. And they will go through this directly because of globalized Evangelical Christianity.

I was just reading about a much different, milder, nicer version of this in a book about the Full Gospel community in Trinidad. Protestantism plus colonialism in Trinidad, at least, has rendered the local and the native identical to the carnal and the primitive, while the nonlocal (North America in particular) is identified with the spiritual and pure. This gets played out in choices of music appropriate for worship services, but that's not the point here. In Trinidad, at least, sects are concerned with the "global church" (largely Pentecostalist and Evangelical) as a way of defining for themselves what is proper religious practice and what is appropriate for someone living a religious life.

I admit that I don't know much about Uganda, and I am very ready to be wrong. But as we know, a little information is a dangerous thing, and so armed with my one book about Trinidad I see a bit of a parallel here of a global (read: American) church having a strong influence on congregations far from the global center--peripheral nations like Trinidad and Uganda. And especially in the case of particular issues, like abortion and birth control, this flow of influence has been strengthened and backed by explicit U.S. policies.

That makes me shiver, too. In a much less titillating fashion.

Relationship advice FAIL

Dennis "Completely Fuckwitted" Prager is at it again with the long-awaited followup to his last tour de force ("When A Woman Isn't In The Mood: Part I"), "When A Woman Isn't In the Mood: Part II".

Well, my hopes have not been dashed. After Prager's artful plumbing of the male and female natures to explain why women totally need to give their husbands sex whenever they want it because otherwise the poor men will shrivel up and die, I just couldn't WAIT to see how he would explain why it also followed that women need to do so even when they don't feel like having sexytimes. (NB: I will not spend time addressing the stupid and false division of libidinous labor between the genders, because Prager sort of maybe addressed it in Part I and has made quite clear that he will ignore the cases when the roles are reversed. Great, fine, fuck you too, moving on.)

I was rewarded. Money quote:

Why would a loving, wise woman allow mood to determine whether or not she will give her husband one of the most important expressions of love she can show him? What else in life, of such significance, do we allow to be governed by mood?

What if your husband woke up one day and announced that he was not in the mood to go to work? If this happened a few times a year, any wife would have sympathy for her hardworking husband. But what if this happened as often as many wives announce that they are not in the mood to have sex? Most women would gradually stop respecting and therefore eventually stop loving such a man.

What woman would love a man who was so governed by feelings and moods that he allowed them to determine whether he would do something as important as go to work? Why do we assume that it is terribly irresponsible for a man to refuse to go to work because he is not in the mood, but a woman can -- indeed, ought to -- refuse sex because she is not in the mood? Why?

Well, let's see. Unless your wife is a hooker, I have a hard time seeing how on earth these two examples are IN ANY WAY COMPARABLE. If your husband refuses to go to work day after day, your family will eventually not be able to eat. I'm sure Prager can come up with an argument as to how female frigidity will destroy the family relationship, fucking up the kids so badly that they eventually find themselves homeless on the street at the age of 35, but I'm also sure that that argument is really fucking stupid.

Oh, boy, here comes the sidelong swipe at those Humorless Feminists!

Thus, in the past generation we have witnessed the demise of the concept of obligation in personal relations. We have been nurtured in a culture of rights, not a culture of obligations. To many women, especially among the best educated, the notion that a woman owes her husband sex seems absurd, if not actually immoral. They have been taught that such a sense of obligation renders her “property.” Of course, the very fact that she can always say “no” -- and that this “no” must be honored -- renders the “property” argument absurd. A woman is not “property” when she feels she owes her husband conjugal relations. She is simply wise enough to recognize that marriages based on mutual obligations -- as opposed to rights alone and certainly as opposed to moods -- are likely to be the best marriages.

What's at least rhetorically clever about this part is that he manages to couch what he's saying, toward the end, in what sounds like fairly reasonable and realistic statements--that marriages require compromise, that there are obligations involved, and that they should be navigated steadily and without being too subject to caprice.

This is a good point. But note the logic.
A: Women are convinced that being obligated to have sex whenever hubby wants (only married women have this issue of refusing sex, I guess, because if they're unmarried and sexually active they're obviously MASSIVE SLUTS who want it ALL THE TIME) is an invasion of their rights.
B: Women aren't having their rights invaded because they can say no and have that wish respected.
C: BUT they are obligated not to say no by codes of behavior and the paramount importance of keeping hubby happy.

Explain to me how A is different from C again? Is it the assertion that if she does say no her husband shouldn't rape her anyway?

Finally, though, this is the passage that shows that Dennis Prager is living in some kind of crazed fantasy world, possibly with the aid of huge amounts of medication, and he and his conclusions will always be irredeemable:

In the rest of life, not just in marital sex, it is almost always a poor idea to allow feelings or mood to determine one’s behavior. Far wiser is to use behavior to shape one’s feelings. Act happy no matter what your mood and you will feel happier. Act loving and you will feel more loving. Act religious, no matter how deep your religious doubts, and you will feel more religious. Act generous even if you have a selfish nature, and you will end with a more a generous nature. With regard to virtually anything in life that is good for us, if we wait until we are in the mood to do it, we will wait too long. [...]

That solution is for a wife who loves her husband -- if she doesn’t love him, mood is not the problem -- to be guided by her mind, not her mood, in deciding whether to deny her husband sex.

A gramme is better than a damn! Now you go out there and fake it, ladies! Fake it good! And then maybe someday we'll all manage to return to the halcyon days of universal emotional, sexual, and social repression commonly known as the 1950s. Bonus: Art Deco homewares!

Homophobia motivating acceptance of transgendered children?

he Atlantic has an interesting article about transgender children which I've been switching off with my homework for reading material. I was struck by these paragraphs:

Catherine Tuerk, who runs the support group for parents in Washington, D.C., started out as an advocate for gay rights after her son came out, in his 20s. She has a theory about why some parents have become so comfortable with the transgender label: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.”

Tuerk believes lingering homophobia is partly responsible for this, and in some cases, she may be right. When Bill [the father of a transgendered child] saw two men kissing at the conference, he said, “That just don’t sit right with me.” In one of Zucker’s case studies, a 17-year-old girl requesting cross-sex hormones tells him, “Doc, to be honest, lesbians make me sick … I want to be normal.” In Iran, homosexuality is punishable by death, but sex-change operations are legal—a way of normalizing aberrant attractions.

Overall, though, Tuerk’s explanation touches on something deeper than latent homophobia: a subconscious strain in American conceptions of childhood. You see it in the hyper-­vigilance about “good touch” and “bad touch.” Or in the banishing of Freud to the realm of the perverse. The culture seems invested in an almost Victorian notion of childhood innocence, leaving no room for sexual volition, even in the far future.

I don't have anything to add, really--I had just never thought of transgender as a comforting (for some) "escape condition" for homosexuality. It dovetails nicely with how focused parents of transgendered children seem to be on the biological rather than environmental explanations. Not saying yes or no particularly--just musing.

Go. Read. NOW.

It's sort of nominally about John Edwards but it's much more so about Washington, D.C.

"in d.c., women are famous for being fucked.
the government is famous for fucking.

and there’s really something fucked up wrong about that."

This is a fascinating and saddening study.

It demonstrates a shockingly strong link between teen pregnancy and sexual violence--that is, that girls who have been sexually abused or raped are likely to have sex earlier and engage in more dangerous behaviors, and, not surprisingly, get pregnant.

What's so incredible about this isn't the link--the link really isn't that surprising--but rather the sheer numbers. The disparity between groups of abused girls and not in terms of behaviors (age of first intercourse, use of protection) is incredible, and what gets even worse is when you look at the statistics by ethnic group. Teen pregnancy rates among Latina and black girls are much higher, as is the incidence of sexual violence. Native American girls experience sexual assault at TWICE the rate of other groups, mostly by people outside of their ethnic groups. (How much you wanna bet these guys are white? The more things change, the more they stay the same.) This has a lot to do with the way our culture positions these girls and their bodies (sexy, exotic, "spicy"; girls of color are seen as "bad" or not as buttoned up as white girls and so are sexually available; old colonial narratives about conquest and sex with conquered women).

A big part of why this is important is that teen pregnancy is largely seen as an issue of promiscuity--"Those durn teenagers just keep having sex! Weird!"--and morals ("OH MY GOD THEY'RE HAVING SEX AND SATAN WILL TAKE THEM FOREVERRRRRR! THEY MUST NOT HAVE CONTRACEPTION OR ABORTIONS SO THEY CAN BE PUNISHED FOR THE ERROR OF THEIR WAYS WITH BAYBEEEEZ!"). This study makes it clear that in large part, the public debate on this issue is missing the point.

I highly recommend that everyone click through. And remember that a teen mother or young mother is not necessarily an irresponsible slut (and even if she is, it's none of your business); she's a person struggling, that's all. Or hell, maybe she decided she wanted a baby. Like I say, none of my business.

Sigh. Rush Limbaugh sez:

"I've got a theory about the motivations. Well, I don't know that I could -- I don't know that I can put this one on the air." Discussing his "theory," Limbaugh said, "We know -- we've been told that Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards. That's part of the puff pieces on them that we've seen. Ergo, if Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards, is it likely that she thinks she knows better than he does what his speeches ought to contain and what kind of things he ought to be doing strategy-wise in the campaign? If she is smarter than he is, could it have been her decision to keep going with the campaign? In other words, could it be that she doesn't shut up? Now, that's as far as I'm going to go." Limbaugh later added, "It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk." Limbaugh went on to say in a subsequent segment: "my theory that I just explained to you about why -- you know, what could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."

Via Media Matters.


Bah freakin humbug, you asshole. It's totally brilliant, talented, passionate Elizabeth's fault her husband cheated on her because she wouldn't suck cock.

This is an absolutely fabulous and beautiful post on bodies and the ownership thereof that I found through the 61st Carnival of Feminists. (It's likely I'll end up passing on more posts as I work my way through.) A sample:

It also reminds me of a dance competition at my school. One of the female dancers did a not-quite-appropriate-for-school kind of dance, and some boys in the audience jeered, called out "slut" and the like. The boys were dealt with, but likely not enough for them to understand their error. I'm guessing they reacted to her power. Desire can be scarey business. And they couldn't have her themselves, so they tried to wreck her for everyone else by disparaging her. Standard. But they also misunderstood her performance as an offering to anyone watching. What they were being offered was the opportunity to see her dance, nothing more.

But I'm ignoring the sense of the line that suggests that if I'm showing off my body, then you have a right to stare or touch or whatever. So, it follows that if I don't want your specific attention, I must choose a tent dress, perhaps a bag on my head. That's just silly. Do we really want people to hide their beauty to keep a few lug-nuts from finding them too irresistible to look away? Beauty is to be enjoyed, not possessed.

[...]

I am in awe of the human body. I know that barely repressible urge to touch a stranger's body. It's exactly like the urge to touch the glasswork in a gallery. Because I really want to, because the stunning beauty is drawing me in, capturing my full attention, doesn't give me the right to without explicit permission. Art is on display for our admiration, not ownership.

You can't own me, but I'm sometimes willing to share myself, let you touch and taste. You can look but only respectfully, with appreciation, not appropriation. If you're standing too close, or reaching out to touch, I'll kindly ask you to step back.

In addition, because I've given up on self-restraint, you will find below a bunch of posts I liked from the Carnival. As always, go ahead and ignore if you like.

Bloke Coke -- the relationship between sex and food, and how it's gendered.
How it ought to be -- experiences of a former stripper and her boyfriend of five years.