The Republic of T.

I posted earlier about the political influence of the “Rapture Ready” crowd, and prior to that about their specific influence on foreign policy based on their particular interpretation of the book of Revelations. But, CUFI and the Apostolic Congress notwithstanding, some people think that the current talk of theocracy potentially looming on the horizon amounts to paranoia. But, when I look at some recent news items and developments, I think some level of paranoia is justified. I’m talking about:

• Stuff like what happened to the Smalkowski and Dobrich families.
• The conservative legal organization that’s endorsed mandatory school prayer.
• The Missouri legislators who sought to establish christianity as the state’s official religion.
• The Georgia mom who wants to ban Harry Potter from the school library, because the series offends her religious beliefs.
• The conservative blog that published the Dobrich family’s address and phone number.
• The Wiccan soldier killed in Afghanistan, whose family can’t get the army to put the symbol of his religion on his headstone.
• The conservative outrage that the a U.S. Marine base might provide Muslim U.S. service members with a place to worship on base.
• The evangelicals who’ve taken over the Air Force Academy and made it hell for anyone who isn’t an evangelical christian.
• The Bush administration joining forces with Iran’s fundamentalist government, to block U.N. access for GLBT human rights activists.
• The lack of oversight in Bush’s faith-based initiative, that’s basically spawned a taxpayer-supported evangelical christian proselytizing cottage industry, supporting groups like the Silver Ring Thing and Prison Fellowship.
• The same faith-based initiative supplying the Salvation Army with 95% of its budget, thus supporting religious discrimination with tax dollars.
• The Indiana Republican legislator who wanted to marriage a legal requirement for motherhood and enforce criminal penalties for out-of-wedlock pregnancies.
• The Republican Senate Candidate who can declare separation of church and state “a lie” and still be the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
• The Left Behind video game, in which kids go on “convert or kill” missions against unbelievers, homosexuals, etc.
• Some of the same loonies mentioned above want to hold a constitutional convention.
• And, yes, the people who want to hasten Armageddon with bombs.

I could go on, believe me, but I’ll stop lest I come off as paranoid. I’ll just add that it was items like the laundry list above that inspired me to add Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism, The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us, and American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century to my reading list earlier this year, with the thought that I’d read them as a means of gaining some insight into the people, policies, and propaganda behind all of the above.

After reaching a critical mass (really, after the Dobrich and Smalkowski stories) I decided not to wait for the paperback editions, bought the books one by one, and read them to see what they could tell me that I didn’t already know. The answer? Plenty. Afterwards thought that I might eventually post a review of all three. So, here goes.

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Too busy at work to do much posting today, but I was inspired to post an update about my adventures with BookMooch after getting into the office this morning to find three mooched books waiting for me. It works! It really works!

Two of the titles are fiction that I became interested in after reading a lot of Derrick Jensen's work — Ecotopia and Into the Forest — neither of which I had much luck finding in bookstores. Now I basically have them for free, or at no cost beyond the minimal postage spent on books mooched from me. (Media rate postage isn't terribly expensive.

But the title I'm probably most excited about is one I got for Parker, I Once Was a Monkey: Stories Buddha Told. I posted a while back about pondering how to raise a kid with a particular set of values in a non-religious family. To that end I've been searching for children's books related to Buddhism, that I can start sharing with Parker. Most of them are hard to find in bookstores, so rather than ordering one from Amazon I decided to give BookMooch a try first, and found one of the titles I was looking for. Yay BookMooch!

I've thumbed through it, and I'll have to give it a closer reading, but my first impression is that it's probably a little to advanced for Parker right now. (He has a tendency to get impatient if there are "too many words" and wants to turn the page before we're finished reading it, which I take as an indication that the particular book is one he's not ready for yet.) Still, I may try reading one story to him this evening, just to see how it goes. If he's likes it, great. If it's too much for him right now, at least I have it and it'll be on the shelf when he's ready to give it another try.

Parker’s daycare is closed today, and I’m at home with him. So sporadic posting is the most that you’ll see here today. (I’m taking out for pizza and ice cream for lunch, and the rest of the day will probably be spent reading books and playing with his trains.) But I didn’t want to let the 1 year anniversary of Katrina go unnoticed, since I blogged about it quite a bit when it was happening. So much, in fact, that I’m not sure what more there is to say about it except this.

What happened in the aftermath of Katrina is exactly what you can expect to happen when the people running the government are wedded to an ideology that says the government shouldn’t be in the business of helping people who can’t help themselves. Barrack Obama pointed it out after the disaster, and it’s pretty much what I said peviously.

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A couple of weeks ago, there was some concern that I might have gone a bit too far in characterizing the “AIDS is not the enemy” rap of a prominent “abstinence-only” advocate. Like, maybe I read her wrong in flipping it to reveal an “AIDS is a victory” subtext. And I kinda hafta admit I was a little concerned that I’d done just that, and that maybe the statements of this activist merely sounded more extreme than they were. Maybe I was guilty of what so many people accuse progressives of doing: painting political “people of faith” as much more extremem than they actually are.

Then along comes someone like Judie Brown, who — as piny points out — isn’t bothered much by rising abortion rates so long as people don’t have access to contraception.

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More YouTube diving, After finishing Kingdom Coming, The Baptizing of America, American Theocracy, and walking through some of the more troubling passages of the bible with Bishop Shelby Spong’s The Sins of Scripture I’ve been getting curious about some of the people I’ve been writing about lately. Namely, the “Rapture-enthusiasts” that are — some might say — influencing U.S. foreign policy, both at the ballot box and in the oval office. (In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips lays out a pretty good case for these people — various segments of evangelical christians who share a belief in a particular interpretation of the biblical book of Revelations — making up at least a 30%-40% block of the Republican party’s voter base.)

Back in May 2004, I posted about a meeting one such organization had with a Bush administration foreign policy advisor. More recently I posted about the people who are cheering on war in the Middle East because they believe it means they’ll be having pie in the sky with Jesus soon. At the beginning of the month I posted about a minister whose rapture-related preaching built an organization that gets even people like RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, Rick Santorum and San Brownback to speak at its meetings. (And the president sends “words of support,” from a safe distance I guess.)

After reading those last three books, I’ve decided to pick up Pocket Guide To The Apocalypse: The Official Field Manual For The End Of The World and Skipping Towards Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire just to get a handle on just what these people think. Towards those same ends, earlier this year I got my hands on the Left Behind Trilogy of movies. (It was easier and faster than reading the books, I figured.) So while I was YouTube-diving, I entered a few relative search terms to see what I’d come up with, and the result was another playlist (or two, or three).

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I decided to take a break from reading and writing blogs this weekend, and devoted my time and attention to my family instead, so there having been any new posts. But I also found time to spend exploring YouTube. Boy, once you get going on that site, you can spend a great deal of time clicking on related videos. That’s what happened to me, and resulted in this post and more to follow.

Saturday night, the hubby and I happened to catch Logo’s special Out in Nature, on same-sex activity in the animal kingdom. I’d seen it before, and much of it jibed with two books on my shelf: Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity and Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People. Sunday morning the comments on this post reminded me of the show and the books. Later on Sunday I was randomly searching YouTube for interesting stuff, and came across several clips from the program, which I added to a playlist, and decided to share here.

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It’s the end of the week again, and I have to admit I’m not sorry to see this one pass. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller coaster for me, for reasons I won’t go into here. It’s been a weird week, with more than its share of ups and downs, and unexpected twists and turns when it comes to lgbt-related news.

It started off quietly enough, as I tried to continue an earlier conversation by asking “What rights should same-sex couples not have?” And the discussion continued with more than a few new twists of its own. I’m still not sure where that discussion’s going, or whether it’s headed downhill or up. In the meantime, before we can finish that discussion we actually have to turn around and have another discussion about straight civil rights, for non-married heterosexual couples. If we get domestic partnerships or civil unions, do they get them too? Even though they can marry each other and we can’t? You may begin to see what I mean about the twists and turns, and the strange territory these questions lead to. So, with that, let’s plunge into this week, shall we?

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Had a busy day yesterday, and probably will today too. So posting may be pretty sporadic, or nonexistent until later this afternoon. In the meantime, here’s another random 10.

This is how we do it:

1. Fire up the MP3 player or iTunes.
2. Shuffle everything.
3. Play & post the first 10.

Here’s mine.

1. One from the album “American III” by Johnny Cash
2. I´ll Be Around by Randy Crawford / Tiefschwarz
3. Unconditional Love from the album “The Donna Summer Anthology (disc 2)” by Donna Summer
4. Macho Man from the album “Casablanca Records Greatest Hits” by Village People
5. Girls Just Wanna Have Fun from the album “Twelve Deadly Cyns…And Then Some” by Cyndi Lauper
6. Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me from the album “Singles” by The Smiths
7. Jump (Album Version) from the album “Confessions On a Dance Floor” by Madonna
8. Get It Together from the album “Seal: Best, 1991-2004″ by Seal
9. Little By Little from the album “Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub)” by Groove Armada
10. I Started Something I Couldn’t Finish from the album “Singles” by The Smiths

So, what’d you get?

I can’t help but find a little bit of irony in the news that South Africa — a country that, in my lifetime, had bigotry and discrimination literally as the foundation of its laws — is taking a step on road to allowing same-sex marriage.

South Africa’s Cabinet has given the green light for a bill allowing gay marriage, which would make it the first country in Africa to accord homosexual couples the same rights as their straight counterparts.

Government spokesman Themba Maseko said the Cabinet had approved the bill — which must still be adopted by Parliament — after the country’s highest court ruled it was unconstitutional to deny gay people the right to marry.

“Basically (the bill) will legalize same-sex marriage in compliance with the constitutional court ruling,” said Maseko, who could not say when Parliament would discuss the bill.

It remains to be seen whether the bill will pass in Parliament, but if nothing else South Africa joins Canada, the Netherlands, Spain, and Great Britain in taking a giant step ahead of the U.S. when it comes to equal protection under the law for all of its citizens. Whether the U.S. is ready to take a tiny step forward, as opposed to the usual giant steps backwards, remains to be seen. But we can hope, I guess.

One of the things that’s interesting in the whole discussion about the various legal statuses that may or may not be applied to same-sex couples is the question of just who else they may or may not apply to. For example, if you establish a reciprocal beneficiaries status that’s available to same-sex couples, and other eligible adults who are interdependent relationships but for some reason can not marry, should unmarried heterosexual couples be eligible as well? If they’re not, is that discrimination?

One woman in Washington state thinks so, and she’s filing a civil rights suit.

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The Republic of T Podcasts #1 – Randy Boyd Podcast

Check out my latest podcast, in which I talk with author Randy Boyd about his creative process, his lastest book, and his thought on interracial relationships and the black gay community.

(Here’s a direct link if the flash player doesn’t work.)

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I’ve been getting the Victory Fund’s Gay & Lesbian Leadership SmartBrief via email for a while now, but this is the first time I think my blog has been featured in it.

Nice. The discussion of which rights same-sex couples should or shouldn’t have has spread out beyond this blog as I hoped it would. It’s been picked up by the Washington Blade’s blogwatch and most of the rest of the Window Media gay papers, and gotten some discussion on Daily Kos as well.

For the record, I’m not sure I’m advocating reciprocal beneficiaries so much as exploring how they might be a means to an and in terms of winning rights and protections for our families, and how they might dovetail with increased support for marriage equality in the future. It remains to be seen, as far as I’m concerned, how broadly or narrowly that kind of legal status will be constructed and how secure it is from attack and attempts to scale it back when and where it is established.

That said, I hope I contributed to the discussion if nothing else. It’ll be interesting to watch how it unfolds.

I’m not sure where “The Book Meme” started, but after seeing it at A Stitch in Haste I thought it might be a good idea. Unlike Kip, I’m a big fan of blog memes, if only because I usually pick up something interesting from other people’s responses. And since I’m an even bigger fan of books, who’s always on the lookout for reading suggestions to add to my ever-growing “to read” list, this one was a natural fit. If you want to jump in, feel free to post your own picks in the comments, or link back here if you post it on your own blog (I’d just like to see other people’s answers).

Here goes:

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