morality legislation agenda pbs special

[iftsiga]

I expect this to depress me this evening, even if it doesn't cover anything I don't already know.

+It's on PBS stations anywhere, you can look up showtimes in your area. Should be repeated tomorrow many places. It's short, mostly about South Dakota. Apparently there are some web only bits at http://www.pbs.org/now/ ...The interviewer seems to be restraining herself mightily from giving the smug sanctimonious head of the abstinence education movement a slap with a shoe. ++Alas, there are no "desirious of shoe-slapping" confessions at the website, but there are broader things covered than the televised bit was able to do.

Comments

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

"When is it appropriate for personal morality to become government policy?"

If by "personal morality", we mean "unsubstantiated primitive religious superstition", I would say...
Never. Ever. No government anywhere should endorse any religion or religious worldview at all.

Speaking of primitive superstition, I saw the last bit of the Passion of the Christ on TV last night. Wow. Gotta hate those sneering murdurous Jews.
I cant believe how many people were taken in by that giant mess of pious flummery.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

I agree. Specifically, sexual morality being dictated by anyone who tries to use the bible as a model is a huge laugh (as well as frightening). So where do the patriarchs with the big harems fit in? are we stoning prostitutes or just flimsily denying that one was an apostle in those chapters they neatly excised?

I haven't seen TP. So, it's not JUST a nasty bit of sadomasochistic gratuitousness, it's got ugly anti-Semitism too? splendid.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

not to mention all the dashing out of brains of little ones against rocks.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

Satan is a clever fellow. You think you are using your god given reason and common sense, but really, you have been deceived by the ultimate enemy. It is his words you speak now, the god of this world!

The Passion is everything you could expect and more (at least from the little I saw). The bad guys (the Jews, and to a lesser extent, the Romans) are dipicted in the most cartoonish manner imaginable. Have you seen Commando, with big Arnie? Or the Russians in Rambo 2 and 3? We are talking that kind of careful characterisation, and sophisticated explication of their motives. Oh, and the Devil is transgendered, it seems. It contains all the usual Christian ahistorical horseshit about the ancient world. There were a couple of sops to modern scholarship, like having Jesus both tied and nailed onto his cross (so as not to abandon the wounds of the stigmata and Turin shroud, but also being able to say "well, thats why he didnt fall off, since we accept that nails in your hands cant hold the bodies weight alone") However, since the bible only mentions the nails, that seems to me to be somewhat of an... editorial decision? Something I was assured by the faithful in Ohio was completely impossible in such a "straight from the book" adaptation.
Quick review, based on much careful thought, reading, and having seen 30 minutes of the film: Complete Bollocks.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

Was trying to look up an article on the BMJ that my Dad sent me, but aparently you need to be a subscriber to view it. The address is
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/332/7536/294
If you want to spend $4 reading it. It is about conscientious objection in medicine, namely all the god bothering phramacists and doctors who refuse to prescribe things/ do medical practices that are contrary to their superstitions. The general gist of the article is that it is fine to object to doing something, as long as the person who wants the drug/proceedure/whatever is not inconvenienced at all, and the service/product is freely available elsewhere. If it is not, or if it would seriously unfairly inconvenience them, then yu have no right to object. If your conscience will absolutely not allow you to prescribe drugs/perform medical proceedures that the law says are fine, then you should find another line of work, because your refusal constitutes gross medical negligence.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

I would be interested in seeing an article about the topic in another country, so I might fork over the four dollars. Here, the strange thing is that pharmacy chains are the ones who've been saying to pharmacists that they can't do that. (There is also apparently a *walkin clinic with a nurse practitioner* for the uninsured at a Rite Aid in Portland now, one of many....they do let you fill any prescriptions at ANY pharmacy, and it's some kind of partnership, not medical people Rite Aid hires. But how bizarre is taht?)

Anyway.... it's not just inconvenienced, although we're talking about towns with only one pharmacy sometimes....I've heard of birth control prescriptions being torn up.

I have had it pointed out to me that there are very few religions which do not consider birth control either positive or at least allowable. From the little research I could do on the intarwub, that seems to be borne out.

The last abortion clinic in South Dakota - in Sioux Falls - will be shut down when their law goes into effect. Meanwhile no doctors in SD will perform abortions, the doctor who does them at the clinic (ONE) is from Minnesota. I'm fairly sure she commutes. South Dakotan women who've had abortions are afraid to have their faces shown (well, duh) for fear of harassment and possibly violent retribution. The same people who got abortion bans are pushing abstinence-only education (and promoting it nationally.... abstinence.net I believe).

I think the most vomit-inducing part of the short tv special was the coverage of the PURITY BALL where teenage girls were taken by their fathers to this formal dance and took a vow to "remain sexually pure" until they "give themselves as a gift to their husbands on their wedding night" - there was a ring placed on each girl's finger, I didn't catch by whom but imagine it was by her father, and it looked like it was on the wedding finger. (Google "purity prom" - which I first misremembered this as - and find ads for roses for purity ball OR weddings.)

Nothing quite as heartwarming as a daddy's love for his precious little HYMEN.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

The only major world religion I can think of that absolutely does not allow birth control is the Catholic Church. Plenty others have restrictions, however, and Im sure a lot of Muslim women in the middle east would rather be in the position of the Catholics, where at least they can go outside without a hat without fear of being beaten to death by an angry mob.
The pharmacidt thing is covered in the article- it does not affirm any right to refuse to do something that is legal. It really seems as if the main problem in the states is not that there are millions of angry, militant christians around, the way it is (equivalent religion) in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, but rather that there is a very vocal minority who have managed to take advantage of christianities "good name" and no public figure wants to be seen to be the heathen who tells them to butt out of everyone elses affairs. What I try to tell everyone who questions why my tracts- so few people point out the inconsistencies, the stupidity, the blind fucking ignorance of the dominant religious culture, so why try to get me to stop aswell?
Abstinence culture is currently being prmoted worldwide by these freaks, as Im sure you know. Thats part of the problem with fundamentalist faith- it has to be applicable to all, or it means nothing. If only they actually had some decent standards that they felt the urge to push globally, like abstinence from torture, or a global minimum wage, or smething equally as impossible/unworkable.
That ball sounds utterly repellent, in the way that only undisguised pious mysogeny can be. Of curse, Daddys little Hymen is, or was, a real money spinner. If one cant sell/marry off ones virgin daughters to the highest bidder, then you might as well drown them in a bucket at birth, no?

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

Well, of course, you don't need TOO many Virgin Princesses. Some cultures you gotta come up with a dowry (...pay the groom). In this country it is "traditional" that the bride's family pays for the wedding.

A whole lot of our anti-abortion, pro-ignorance and abstinence, adultress-stonage & fag-burnage favoring activists are some form of fundamentalist or evangelical Christian. There is a peculiar alliance with the loonier sort of Catholics. So many a la carte Catholics in this country, also.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

I would imagine that most, if not all, of the "set the clock back to 1800" campaigners in America are fundamentalist believers of one kind or another. Why else would you think like that? How else could you justify it? I just meant that they are a minority, but most people who dont think about things, or dont have time to, acquiesce to their insanity because they have never been told that it is OK not to. The fundies have monopolised the debate about 'morality' so effectively that if you dont start with "Im a Christian..." then everyone thinks you have nothing to say on the subject.
To my mind, the whole virginity thing in America is just the last pathetic, shrivelled vestigal remains of the same anti-female culture that results in horrific torture and death in less developed countries. And not the only one.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. The whole virginity thing anywhere is dehumanizing. The massive emphasis on teenage GIRLS' purity is pretty telling. The nonsense about predatory deceitful males being after the innocent female's body while she is gullibly seeking love and security....because women have no sex drive, of course... and have to carefully guard their one most precious commodity so that someone will value her enough to take her on as a dependent when they reach adulthood...

The born-again virgin movement is only mildly less revolting.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

Add the words "born-again" to any description, and it becomes revolting. Try it...
Born- Again Vegans;
Born- Again PETA campaigner;
Born- Again Anarchists.
All wankers.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

oh, googling around 'purity ball' sponsors, holy shit some of the attendees are just babies they're like 18" shorter than their dads...anyway... the founder of 'braveheart', another 'purity' group, works here:

http://www.cpccoastalga.org/services.php

These are extremely common everywhere: groups calling themselves clinics which imply that they offer abortion but only counsel girls NOT to get them, or counsel them afterwards (that they can attribute any emotional difficulties in their life to the abortion. Or, y'know, satanic ritual abuse. No, I'm joking, that's another scam.) "Arrange housing in Christian homes"? what's that about? I assume it's for the mother. Try to change your mind and go get an abortion when you're being "housed" by any arrangement made with that group.... I see our phone book at least has come up with the heading "abortion alternatives" so groups like that are merely alphabetically before "abortion services" now instead of deceptively interlisted.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

"pregnancy services," sorry, no actual use of the word "clinic."

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

There was one of those clinics in BG. They used to have signs up on the highway saying "Scared? Confused? Think you might be pregnant? We can help!" I always thought there should be a subtitle, "Make it worse!"
And it had an allied student group, "Falcons for Life". Listened to a freind of mine rip them a new one once while they had a table up. That was the day the abortion trucks with the fetus snuff came by.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

Those signs should have been relentlessly amended and/or defaced.

Falcons for Life? FALCONS? What a peculiar choice of name. Law clerk where I used to work saw a falcon take a pigeon apart in midair. The bird of prey and pigeon body went one way, the pigeon's head went t'other.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

Those signs were twenty feet up in the air, next to a highway surrounded by cornfields. Hard to reach, and highy visible.
The BGSU football team is called the Falcons, and as such, every BGSU'er is sort of referred to as a Falcon, because why else would one go to school than to watch/support fucking football? Dont even get me started...

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

Paint balloons and a slingshot. Potato guns full of elderly beets. Bigger budget: Hire a crop-duster to hit it with something indelible. Hire a cherrypicker to stop quick and slap up a big sticky label....oh well, I'm full of ideas, but not ways to get a tidy caption added.

I'm glad UB's football team was universally considered a joke.

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

My personal favorite would be to be able to afford my own billboard and put up atheist posters on the other side of the highway.

Sadly, the BG Falcons were not considered a joke. I do recall the Bulls being derided as shit, however.

[xauenmurph.livejournal.com]

Here is a copy freely available:
http://press.psprings.co.uk/bmj/february/ac294.pdf

[simmeringhatred.livejournal.com]

I have a computer printout of it here, was just looking for the link so you could see it. Well done the Murph!