The Republic of T.

Jon Swift has posted the best blog posts of 2007, from his blogroll. There are enough fantastic posts there to keep you reading until next year, including “The Queer Thing About School Shooters, Pt. 2″ from this blog. Check them out!

Before I got Jon’s invite to send in what I thought was my best blog post, I hadn’t really given the question much thought. After I picked one to send Jon for his post, I starting going through my 2007 archives. It was a little strange to step back and take a look at what I was writing about at the beginning of the year. I’d no idea I’d written so much, and pleased to find some of it I actually liked.

So, these are my favorites from the past year. I don’t know if they’re my “best of 2007″ or not, but at least some of them are my “personal best,” and represent the kind of writing I most enjoy doing. If you’ve been reading the blog this year, I invite you to share in the comments your favorite posts from this blog (or another, since I’m always looking for interesting reading) in the comments.
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I’ve been meaning to post some kind of follow-up after my last three posts on mental illness and mental health care (or the lack thereof). After going off about the lack of mental health services, or lack of access to treatment, can lead to problems for the mentally ill, their families, and the rest of society, it was encouraging to read about states increasing funding for mental health services. But it raises some interesting questions about how to achieve a balance that also protects the rights of the mentally ill.

I thought about it a couple of weeks ago, when I read about Kaine’s plan to boost mental health funding, in the wake of the VA Tech shootings. But that funding comes with a reform that—though apparently intended to address situations in which people, like VA Tech shooter Seung Hui Cho, don’t get court ordered treatment—raises questions about the effectiveness of basically coercing the mentally ill into getting treatment.
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The Daily Mail says that the Pope will wage war on Satan in 2008, with an army of exorcists.

The Pope has ordered his bishops to set up exorcism squads to tackle the rise of Satanism.

Vatican chiefs are concerned at what they see as an increased interest in the occult.

They have introduced courses for priests to combat what they call the most extreme form of “Godlessness.”

Each bishop is to be told to have in his diocese a number of priests trained to fight demonic possession.

The initiative was revealed by 82-year-old Father Gabriele Amorth, the Vatican “exorcistinchief,” to the online Catholic news service Petrus.

“Thanks be to God, we have a Pope who has decided to fight the Devil head-on,” he said.

Or maybe not.
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Michael in Norfolk points out an article about Obama’s latest statement on DOMA.

In an interview with the Bay Area Reporter Monday, December 17, Tobias Wolff, a gay man who’s chair of the national LGBT policy committee for the Obama campaign, called the Illinois senator a “fighter” who will stand by his principles.

…Wolff, 37, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, also noted that while he disagrees with Obama on the issue of same-sex marriage, he nonetheless believes that Obama is the better candidate. Obama, as well as the other leading Democratic candidates, support civil unions. Wolff supports marriage equality. But Wolff drew a distinction with Obama’s and Clinton’s position on the federal Defense of Marriage Act. Obama supports repeal of all DOMA, while Clinton is on record supporting repeal of only part of the legislation. President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law, as well as the anti-gay “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” military policy that prohibits gays and lesbians from serving openly in the armed forces.

At the Logo presidential forum in August, Clinton said that she would repeal Section 3 of DOMA, which states that, for federal purposes, “marriage” can mean only marriage between a man and a woman, thus it essentially denies same-sex couples more than 1,100 federal benefits enjoyed by married heterosexual couples. Section 2, however, says that states do not have to recognize same-sex relationships, and Clinton has not gone so far as to support repeal of that provision.

What that part of DOMA means, Wolff said, is that gay couples could have problems should they move to a state that doesn’t recognize their relationship. That section of DOMA could also come into play regarding custody or wrongful death issues.

“States can disregard judgments,” Wolff said, referring to the problems that could arise. “Senator Obama from the start said this is wrong and we shouldn’t be making excuses.”

I’ve already made it clear who I’m supporting during the primaries. I’m voting my hopes until I have to settle for what I can get. And while I’ve been critical of all the rest of the Democratic field, Obama’s statement on DOMA does underscore a distinction that should become more important as the field narrows.
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The holiday wouldn’t be complete without the obligatory “Jesus is the reason for the season” commentary, and this year Roland S. Martin provides it.

This whole push to remove Christ from the Christmas season has gotten so ridiculous that it’s pathetic.

Because of all the politically correct idiots, we are being encouraged to stop saying “Merry Christmas” for the more palatable “Happy Holidays.” What the heck are “Seasons Greetings”? Can someone tell me what season we are greeting folks about? A Christmas tree? Oh, no! It’s now a holiday tree. Any Christmas song that even remotely mentions Christ or has a religious undertone is being axed for being overtly religious. And I’m sorry, forget X-M-A-S. Malcolm X? Yes. X replacing Christ? No.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m very respectful of other religions. I don’t want anyone to be afraid of discussing the Jewish faith when we address Hanukkah. And we shouldn’t dismiss Muslims when the annual pilgrimage to Mecca is held during December. In fact, Americans are so ignorant of other faiths that we can all learn from one another.

But this seeming backlash against Christianity is bordering on the absurd, and we should continue to remember that Jesus is the reason for the season.

I don’t disagree with Martin on some points, but the overall tone of his column is basically the same old “Christian appropriation of everything” theme. Much as the “Christian nation” rhetoric serves to remind us that the country does not really belong to the rest of us, the “Christian holiday” rhetoric serves to chide us that if the rest of us non-believers celebrate the holiday we are by default celebrating Christianity, its tenets, and mythology.

But it’s not true. Jesus hasn’t been “removed from Christmas,” so much as he was grafted onto it in the first place. And he wasn’t the “reason for the season” until the season was appropriated by the Christian church. So, it’s appropriate that we’re reminded that “the season” predates Martin’s “reason.”

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As much as I’ve taken Democratic presidential candidates to task on marriage, I feel like I have to give credit where credit is due. Especially after having said the following.

Gravel’s presence at the forum isn’t going to make supporting equality seem goofy and thus dissuade Democratic candidates from supporting equality, because the “serious” candidates are all afraid to publicly support equality even if they support it privately. The only person even connected with a major Democratic candidate who has the courage of her convictions is Elizabeth Edwards, and that’s a damn shame because she’s not running for anything. Her husband is, and while I don’t doubt Elizabeth’s sincerity, her stance accomplishes little more than making some gay voters feel better about her husband while also giving him enough cover to basically have it both ways by “tolerating” his wife’s stance and saying that he opposes discrimination while basically supporting discrimination and inequality.

…I refuse to cheer any candidates support of civil unions or “leaving it to the states” unless they either explain why the federal government is even in the business of offering benefits and protections to heterosexual families but not ours, or make a case for the federal government getting out of the business of awarding benefits and protections on the basis of marital status. And I don’t want to hear about any candidate’s support for civil unions unless it’s followed by their vision for some national policy measure that establishes civil unions in a way that protects our families across state lines.

So, when some Democrats take even a tiny step towards support for marriage equality, as with the Domestic Partner Benefits and Obligations Act, it’s at least worth recognizing.

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Just before the Holiday, Mike Huckabee’s thoughts on homosexuality inspired me to explicate what some of us call the procreative imperative, which seems to be inherent in some brands of conservative political Christianity.

The most astounding assumption is that everyone should have children. This despite the abundant evidence that there an untold numbers of people who’ve already had children probably shouldn’t be parents, if the results of their parenting thus far is any indication. There are undoubtedly more who realize they may not be parent material and thus avoid becoming parents. Would the author have them become parents too, and subject children yet unborn to living with parents who may not want the, or who may even be neglectful or abusive?

That’s the unspoken but fundamental point in his argument, as well as many on the same side. The assumption is that people who marry and have children should do so within the context of the faith that he practices. Because, if they do so and do it right, there won’t be any abuse or neglect. Just like if all women surrendered to their husbands, there wouldn’t be any domestic abuse so long as they’ve married “godly men.”

It’s an ideal that has nothing to do with reality, because there will never be a time when everyone practices the author’s idealized brand of Christianity. But it seems so obvious to him how wonderful it would be if everyone would, that he can remain oblivious to the unhappiness that is bound to result from attempting to force everyone into a one-size-fits-all family unit.

After all happiness, the human variety at least, isn’t the point.

One after the other conservatives from Huckabee right down to the Maryland Court of Appeals will apply the procreative imperative as a supremely logical (in their eyes) reason to deny marriage equality to same-sex couples: if gays are accepted and not discriminated against, and same-sex couples allowed to marry and be treated like any other family, human beings will stop having babies altogether, and civilization will crumble.

Problem is, it’s just not so.

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I’m taking a blog break until sometime after the holiday, and just spending that focusing on my family. I’ll be back here sometime between Dec. 26th and New Year’s Day.

In the meantime, I don’t have any eloquent holiday/year-end message. So I’ll leave you with my favorite song this time of year, which pretty much says it all.

May you and yours have a happy and safe holiday, and enter the new year with renewed hope. And so may we all.

It’s been a long time since I blogged about Katrina or it’s aftermath. But I was reminded of it by the steady stream of Katrina-related headlines I’ve been reading lately. You know, the steady drumbeat of actual news that barely breaks through the din surrounding stories of missing white women, or pregnant one’s for that matter.

They may get drowned out, or passed over as news readers turn the page or click the next, more interesting link, but if you put them together, stand back and take a good look, you can’t help but get the big picture. It’s not pretty, but I think the picture is one of conservatism’s finest hour, depending on how you look at it.

When Bush described Iraq as a “catastrophic success,” William Saletan defined the term; “If it gets worse, we must be winning.” When you apply the same notion to domestic disasters like Katrina, the definition might be more like, “If things get worse, the policies are working.” The worse it gets, the bigger a success it is for conservative philosophy. It’s just that the rest of us don’t, and can’t, see it that way.
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As I was catching up on my blog reading, I came across Timothy’s response, over at Box Turtle Bulletin, to something Mike Huckabee said about homosexuality.

“Let’s understand what sin means — sin means missing the mark,” he responded. “Missing the mark can mean missing the mark in any area. We’ve all missed the mark. … How we miss the mark is less important than we all miss the mark. The mark is that we have marriage — men and women, they marry, they create children, and they train their replacements and you have a future generation then that creates their replacements and trains them. That’s the mark. If we didn’t have that as the ideal, we wouldn’t have a civilization that was able to perpetuate.”

Timothy’s response was basically, “He can’t really mean that.”

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I meant to post a response to Arianna Huffington’s post, titled “Fear of Faith”, when it was originally posted, but an already busy life suddenly got busier, and now two weeks later I find myself sitting in New Jersey—sleep deprived, and so busy making bottles and changing diapers that I still haven’t posted a response.

Not that I need to. Arianna’s readers’ have taken her to task for having posted stuff like this.

So for many the price of escaping from the prison of damnation-drenched religious conventions has been to lose touch with the spiritual truths from which they originally sprang. When that happens, our new reality is the fear-filled and barren terrain of sterile secular humanism. It’s a false world in which the spiritual either gets taken over by fanatical fundamentalism or explained away by psychoanalysis as the residue of a damaged childhood. Indeed, one of Freud’s most famous books about religion is entitled The Future of an Illusion.

Without faith in a higher order and the existence of something outside ourselves and our everyday lives, life can become emotionally unbearable and filled with fear. And this anxiety, even if we’re not aware of it, will surface in other parts of our lives. Bernard Levin described it as “the gnawing feeling that ultimate reality lies elsewhere, glimpsed out of the corner of the eye, sensed just beyond the light cast by the campfire, heard in the slow movement of a Mozart quartet, seen in the eyes of Rembrandt’s last self-portraits, felt in the sudden stab of discovery in reading or seeing a Shakespeare play thought familiar in every line.”

Leaving aside trotting out the rather tired right wing harping about “sterile secular humanism,” I think Arianna misses the point. It is not faith that some of us are afraid of. Nor does a lack of faith cause most of much in the way of fear. (After all, hell does not yawn before us, and paranoia over being left behind in the Rapture isn’t a problem.)

What we fear is not faith, but—and with good reason—the faithful. One look at the presidential race, and the field of leading candidates, bears that out.

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I’ve been meaning to post about Mitt Romney’s speech, but I’ve had other matters to deal with—like trying to get enough sleep to at least give the appearance of something close to human when we venture out as a family. And I still may comment on it, but something else occurred to me as I read about the little fight Romney and Huckabee seem to have picked with one another, over questions about Romney’s faith.

Oddly enough, David Kuo’s post was what got me thinking about it.

I’m sorry but I am really confused about all of this. Since when is asking a question about someone’s religion attacking it?? This is bizarre.

There are a thousand ways to attack someone’s religion – but asking questions about it is not one of them. If it were then every single person who asks questions about Christianity would be a religious bigot.

Kou didn’t mean for that to be funny, I’m sure, but I laughed when I read it. Then it took me a few minutes to figure out why it was so funny to me.

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Mental illness isn’t a crime, but the way we treat — or don’t treat — the mentally ill is. Or should be. I wrote earlier that the Hillary’s hostage taker was ordered to undergo evaluation, which led me to make the following joke.

In fact, if you need — really need — inpatient mental health care, you’re unlikely to be able to get it, or at least get enough of it, because whatever can’t be treated in 10 days or so, isn’t going to be treated period. Not unless you kill someone, or at least take a few hostages.

But it turns out that committing a crime isn’t necessarily a ticket to getting mental health care. In fact, if you’re incarcerated — probably as a result of untreated mental illness — it can be a virtual guarantee that you won’t get the mental health care that you desperately need. In some cases, it can even be a death sentence.

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So is my outer adult. And that, according to Desmond Morris, is because part of me never really grew up.

DESMOND MORRIS, who became a bestselling author by applying zoology to explain human behaviour, has now utilised the techniques to put forward an explanation for homosexuality.

In his latest book, The Naked Man, he concludes that men are “made gay” because they retain infantile or juvenile characteristics into adulthood – a phenomenon known as neoteny.

According to this theory, gay men also tend to be more inventive and creative than heterosexuals because they are more likely to retain the mental agility and playfulness of childhood.

“Gays have in general made a disproportionately greater contribution to life than nongays,” said Morris, who is also a noted artist. “The creative gay has very much advanced Planet Earth.”

“The playfulness of childhood is continued with certain people into adulthood. This is very much a positive. Adult playfulness means that certain people, often a fairly large proportion of them gay, are more inventive and curious than heterosexuals.”

Desmond, with all due respect, grow up.

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No sooner did I post about the Clinton hostage crisis than the Omaha mall shooting happened, and right away there were questions about the mental health of the gunman.

“As the twig is bent, so grows the tree.” A sign bearing these severe but hopeful words marks the entrance to Cooper Village, a residential treatment facility for teenagers along the rural northern edge of Omaha.

…Robert A. Hawkins, as a ward of the State of Nebraska, received extensive care at Cooper — private psychotherapy, family therapy, drug counseling — from 2003 to 2005.

It was his longest stop in a five-year journey through a maze of juvenile-services programs that began when he was 13 and was charged with making homicidal threats toward his stepmother.

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Apparently the comments function in WordPress is corrupted somehow. I just got an email from my host saying there’s a script that allowing malicious users to run sever commands: in other words, send spam. So, my host has disabled comments until I figure out what the problem is. Until then, comments are disabled. But you can reach me through the contact page. That, as far as I know, is still safe.

I actually went all day without hearing about the hostage situation at Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters. By the time I got the full story, it was all over but the post-hostage-crisis analysis, which basically boiled down to this: the guy was crazy. His lawyer said he heard voices telling him to “sacrifice himself” to bring awareness to mental health issues. Maybe the voices were on to something, because he appears to have done just what they said.

As I listened to the reports, I couldn’t help shaking my head and asking “What was a guy with obvious problems like this just roaming around? Why wasn’t he somewhere getting help?” Of course I knew the answer. In a way, the hostage situation in Hillary’s office is just like any number of other events, like the disastrous non-response to Katrina, or the tidal wave of toxic toys and poisonous food that’s washed up on U.S. shores. It’s the result of a very simple political philosophy, one that’s often mistakenly paraphrased as “government doesn’t work, when a more accurate description would be “government shouldn’t work, mustn’t work, and if it is working it must be stopped.”

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This weekend, the hubby and I took advantage of the baby-sitting co-op we joined when we moved into our, got a babysitter and went out to a friend’s birthday party; something we haven’t done in about a year. It was a chance to catch up with friends we hadn’t seen in a while, all of whom asked us how Parker is doing and how old he is now. When we said that Parker is five years old one friend of ours noted how happy and “unstressed” the hubby and I appeared to be the parents of a five year old boy, and implied that means we must be doing something right.

I like to think so. In the five years that have passed since I walked out of the hospital into a cold November night with our son, I’ve discovered that now I never stop being a parent. From the first step I worried that he might get too cold going the short distance between the hospital and the car. Anyone who meets Parker immediately notes what a healthy, energetic, smart kid he is. I like to think we had something to do with that, and that it means we’re doing our jobs as fathers well.

But every so often I run in to someone who questions whether we are “real” parents, or just two people taking care of somebody else’s kid; in other words, glorified babysitters. People like the on who left the following comment in a previous post in this growing series.

child abuse, courts, crime, current events, family, gay rights, homophobia, marriage, parenting, politics, same-sex marriage

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You Are Vixen

Sexy and sultry, you’re the one all the other reindeer dream about. Why You’re Naughty: That fur pulling spat you got into with Dancer over Santa. Why You’re Nice: Because even when you’re nice, you’re still delightfully naughty!

I guess today is Lazy Blogging Day for me. This and the previous quiz come via Living the Scientific Life.

Your Holiday Personality is Social

For you, the holidays are all about spending time with people you love – and even those you kind of like. Host your own party – maybe even a few. Get people together for baking cookies, watching movies, and playing holiday charades.

Sounds about right. I’m busy making baked good and other stuff to give as gifts. This year it’s either White Chocolate Hazelnut and Cranberry Fudge or Milk Chocolate and Peppermint Fudge Topped with Candy Cane Pieces. In a pinch, I might whip up some Semi-Sweet Chocolate Orange and Hazelnut Fudge. If necessary.