Ruby the Church Lady

Sometimes I can't resist the urge. It isn't nice, it isn't pretty, and it usually strikes me at the worst of wrong moments.

But I'm like Pavlov's dog whenever I run across someone using religion as a blanket excuse for Being an Asshole Whilst Assuming the Mantle of Righteousness.

I'm not big on religion in general, as you know. But when I run across someone using it to justify assholery, whether it's being mean to a gay couple or engineering a sectarian massacre, it makes me all kinds of stabby.

Yesterday it was that idiotic Indiana "Jesus Sez It's Okay to be Hatin' on Homos" law, and a friend's Facebook feed.

Another FB pal posted this link to some sort of anti-anti-gay-law protest and it drew the ire of someone I'll call Ruby the Church Lady.

This is a summary of what Ruby the Church Lady had to say:

"This is not an anti- gay law but a freedom of religion law. Why do people insist others go against their religious beliefs just because they don't agree? What about the rights of the ones on the religious side. I suppose they don't count, they're not important, because there are those who think they're wrong. They are protected by the Bill of Rights. This law is redundant. Are they suppose to go against their beliefs because someone doesn't like what they are doing?...I'm not saying they are right or wrong. However, what good is freedom of religion if the gov't makes you go against your beliefs? You can't have it both ways. You are either free to follow your convictions or you're not. I doubt very seriously that these people, (bakers, photogs, florists) ever refused an African American. Because of all the uproar about this these people are losing their businesses. Is that right? It's not as tho they are the only ones in town who do these services. Instead of raising a stink about it, go to a different business. That's what I would do... If I had to choose who I would answer to it would be God, hands down...I am NOT openly against the rights of the LGBT community. I have a gay granddaughter and I support her completely and love her partner."

Of course you do, Ruby! Of course you do!

Anyway, let's see what else you have to say on the subject...

"...This is not a matter of discrimination against them. It is a matter of the free exercise of religious beliefs. Either you have that freedom or you don''t. If you are made to go against your beliefs you do not have free exercise of that belief. You and the Supreme Court can spin it anyway you want but that is a fact. Like I said., it is not as tho they have no where else to go, they do. The only reason you or anyone else would insist that they do not have the right to refuse service is because you want everyone to think as you do. and will cause trouble for anyone who doesn't. They do NOT have to do that. That is what FREEDOM is. They have as much right to their beliefs as you do and the free exercise thereof..."

Of course you see the problem here.

Ruby is, not to mince words, being a pig-ignorant, hypocritical, theocratic Bible-banger on this issue.

She completely misses the point where her Crusade - or jihad - stops at the end of my nose. And, of course, part of that is the part where if she opens a shoe shop and sells shoes to the public then she's gotta sell shoes to, you know, the Public. Every spotty ill-washed rube, every drooling gomer with money in his, her, or its wallet.

Every homo.

Doesn't mean she can't enforce some rules. No shirt, no service (can't really go with the "no shoes" in this case since, gudDAMN, she's sellin' shoes and if they had shoes they wouldn't be coming to ol' Honest Ruby's Shoe Emporium, right?).

No profanity. No show tunes.

But she can't hang up a sign that says "no blacks" or "no queers". Why not? Because let's say she's the ONLY shoe store in town. And she doesn't want to serve me because I'm black. Or queer. Or, hell, a left-handed atheist pan-flute-playing goatherd. So no Ruby shoes for me and how the hell do I get anything on my damn feet, then?

So. Bottom line - in this country, anyway, where Equal Justice Under Law is written on the fucking front door of the Supreme Court - is that I'm the Public, and you're serving the Public, you gotta serve me the same as anyone else providing I'm within the law.

Then you can then go pester Jesus, or Allah, or Buddha, on your own dime and on your own time...AND you don't get to be the "good guy" here. You may claim dot you vere chust vollowing Gott's orders but someone, either you or your God, is being an asshole. The hypocrisy of pretending to be the Noble and Upright Christian pisses me off far beyond the mere assholery of being cruel and unreasonable to other people for who they are and not for what they're doing.

In other words, Ruby the Church Lady pushed nearly every one of my buttons and I drooled on cue. To wit:

"Actually, no, it's not that simple.

I may worship Moloch, but the damn state law prevents me from sacrificing babies. I may worship Tir, but intrusive and unreasonable state law prevents me from strangling my king and throwing his body in a peat bog (actually, I suspect that state law has something to say about the whole "king" thing, but, whatev...). I may follow Jainism but the rigid and oppressive state law forbids me from walking into my kids' daycare sky-clad.

Sucks to be me, but, there it is. There's all kinds of things that your religion says you have to do - or can't do - that the law forces you to refrain from, or to perform. So this isn't a "controversy, got it? The people who want to run a public business have to leave their racial, sexual, religious, etc. exclusionary beliefs at home and serve the public. If you insist that your religion should let you discriminate based on things that people are and not things that people do then either you or your religion are effed up and wrong."

Now Ruby didn't like this at all. She replied:

"You are really comparing not wanting to provide your services on religious grounds to sacrificing babies or strangling a king etc? That doesn't even deserve a response!"

Yep, I said, and is the comparison so inapt?

Tir, Moloch, Satan, Ayn Rand, Communism...all have their "religions". Human and animal sacrifice were a respected part of most religions for millenia. The reasons for sacrificing kings, babies, and goats seemed perfectly good at the time. So did the reasons for stoning adulterers. So, frankly, do these contemporary "reasons" refusing to admit homosexuals to the common lot of humanity.

It's just a whole lot of lovin' or hatin' on things for no real "reasons" at all; just what your or their or his or her invisible sky-wizard or Earth spirit or inner voice tells you is good or bad. Or that YOU tink is bad and icky and wriggle around trying to find something in your religion to justify, so you won't feel like a self-righteous asshole.

And in a nation like ours, where citizenship is a matter of believing not in a God, or a flag, or a race, or a language, but in a couple of pieces of paper that boil down to "Equal Justice Under Law" that law must, must, require you to park your prejudice at the door of your public accommodation.

You don't have to love me.

You just have to work for me if I hire you, same as you do for Pastor Jenkins.

It seems to me - and pisses me off no end - that instead of admitting that they're being assholes, that they're indulging themselves and cherry-picking their beliefs that people like Ruby the Church Lady and her pals just want to have it all. They want to be "cafeteria Christian" - pick the parts of their religion they want - like not baking a cake for a couple of gay guys - but still want to wear mixed fabrics, eat shellfish, and go golfing on Sunday...and be considered sweet, wholesome, corn-fed, upstanding pillars of the community and all around Good People of the Earth.

Instead of a mob of selfish, hypocritical, bilious old bitches and bastards with a hate-on for stuff they find icky.

I'd respect them more if they just came out and said honestly that they hate what they hate and stood up honestly as the hate-filled skinsacks they are instead of hiding behind "God".

It's not the hate.

It's the hypocrisy that really gets my goat.

Skeptical Inquirer

For some reason my Facebook page has been overrun lately with people posting me things about how eeeeevil Monsanto is.

Now let me say for the record; I'll be the first to suspect Monsanto of any and all of the sorts of corporate malfeasance that corporations have got up to since the first couple of Sumerians got together to lowball the other guys in the Tigris Co-op.

But a lot of this stuff just seems...insensate.

For example, one person posted a link to some beekeeper who had his colonies confiscated by the Illinois Agriculture people. The article stated that this was connected in some nefarious way with corporate Big Ag; Monsanto was mentioned because of a connection between the Roundup pesticide and colony collapse.

"The Illinois Ag Dept. illegally seized privately owned bees from renowned naturalist, Terrence Ingram, without providing him with a search warrant and before the court hearing on the matter, reports Prairie Advocate News. Behind the obvious violations of his Constitutional rights is Monsanto. Ingram was researching Roundup’s effects on bees, which he’s raised for 58 years. “They ruined 15 years of my research,” he told Prairie Advocate, by stealing most of his stock."

Which makes absofuckinglutely no sense at all.

Look, I'll happily convict Monsanto of poisoning wells and sacrificing babies to Moloch. But pollinator and especially honeybee deaths are terrible publicity for the company; every time someone brings up honeybee problems pesticides are one of the major villains.

Why the hell would a company making pesticides want to stop someone from researching how to develop pesticide-resistance in honeybees?

I'm not saying that they didn't. I'm not saying that couldn't.

I'm saying that on its face the charge makes no sense. The saying in geology is "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence". If you were trying to prove that Monsanto's Roundup was killing honeybees then it'd make sense for Monsanto to want to shut you down. But the article is quite specific; "...they (the bees) could have been turned over to Monsanto to ascertain why some of his bees are resistant to Roundup." Roundup resistant bees? Whoa! Monsanto for the win!

Why the hell would Monsanto want to stop that kind of research?

I'll buy that they could - but you're going to have to produce a hell of a lot of proof before I do.

Along with this anti-Monsanto agitation there was a general irruption of anti-GMO posts, almost all of them talking about the horror of GM organisms. There was little if any actual biology involved. Here's a typical one: GMO Wheat Found In Oregon Field..How Did It Get There?

Well, duh.

A sensible person would answer "It got there the way any other volunteer plant gets anywhere, probably; bird or animal ate a seed, pooped it out in a corner of the field. Somebody dumped a pocketful of GM seed out on the ground. Wind. Act of God..."

The "why" - which is the breathless center of the whole fevered article - doesn't seem to be the real big issue here.

The bigger question that this article doesn't address is "Is there any evidence - hard, scientific evidence - that this GM wheat is a "problem"; that it endangers the mainstream wheat genome, that it produces harmful effects when ingested, that it has problematic genotypic characteristics that, if allowed to diffuse into the wheat genome, might cause trouble down the road"?

And why?

Well, because that's a goddamn hard question. And it probably doesn't have a quick or easy answer. Or one that lends itself to scary headlines about spooky GM wheat suddenly appearing like Freddy Kruger in a slasher movie.

There's a much, much better article tucked away in Scientific American that asks "What DO we know about GM organisms, what don't we know, and why don't we know it?"

"For a decade their user agreements have explicitly forbidden the use of the seeds for any independent research. Under the threat of litigation, scientists cannot test a seed to explore the different conditions under which it thrives or fails. They cannot compare seeds from one company against those from another company. And perhaps most important, they cannot examine whether the genetically modified crops lead to unintended environmental side effects."

Humans have been modifying organisms for millennia. We can now do it in a single generation unlike the previous breeders that had to work in lifetimes. And those changes are and should be daunting; who knows what genetic twist will torque a simple organism into the next Spanish Influenza, a new Potato Blight?

But how is the best way to deal with this to simply fear and forbid them? To demonize and scare-tactic about them, to set up a counter-anti-science in opposition to the GM organizations' anti-science? Is a blanket condemnation any better than the GM companies blanket denial of independent research?

Anyway.

About the same time there was also a flurry of "March Against Monsanto" posts in my in-box, and apparently this past Sunday about one-fourth as many people wandered around downtown Portland marching against Monsanto as turned out to see the Portland Thorns FC play the Washington Spirit a couple of weeks ago.

I didn't go. Neither did this guy, and he has a terrific post explaining why:

"Monsanto isn’t out to poison us or the environment. They are just one part of a system that is meeting demand for plentiful, cheap food. If Monsanto went away tomorrow, our food system would look almost the same, including all the problems. I believe that most people who went to marches today are actually concerned about the same thing I am: how do we produce enough food, fairly, for all with minimal impact on the environment? How do we achieve that? Setting up cartoon villains isn’t the way to do it."

That's kind of the crux of the biscuit, isn't it?

My Facebook friend(s) that post this stuff, and my bride's dear friend who shared her "MILFs Gone Wild" weekend, seem to have the same sort of thing going on. They are concerned. They protest, they agitate about certain causes, they march, the write letters. They do change their own lives; Geochick is a strict vegan and her family is, too.

But for all that they don't seem to be able to go further than "setting up cartoon villains". Wall Street. Monsanto. Obama. FOX News. GM wheat.

But they never seem to be able to actually change the things that power up those villains and their villainy.

A lot of these "villains" are villainous because the world and our society makes their villainy profitable. If it wasn't them it would be someone like them. To change the villain isn't enough. There must be a change in the world that profits the villainy.

But that sort of change?

It won't happen because three thousand of you march around Lloyd Center.

It can happen when tens of thousands of you storm prisons, and palaces. It can happen when you destroy those prisons, those palaces, your life and the lives of those around you. But that sort of change is fearful; it often replaces the bad with the worse, and the Tsar is overthrown only to set Stalin in his place.

The great promise of the U.S. is that it offers the public some of that change without the need to destroy. You can vote. You can woo and threaten and try and influence legislators. Hell, you can even buy one or two; ain't tradition wonderful?

I don't know what the hell to do about GM crops. But I do know that running and hiding in pure fear of them isn't a good option.

And using laws and patents to stifle research on them and prevent skeptical inquiry about them isn't one, either.

And most of all I wish to hell I thought that the U.S. circa 2013 was in any condition to make an intelligent and reasoned decision one way or the other.

I have an attitude problem

And every so often it shows.

A "Facebook friend" (who is a very smart and passionate woman, BTW, who I would be happy to befriend more traditionally if she lived closer than 200 miles to Portland) posted a link to something called "Free Love Day".

This hootchie is described in the link as

"...a day to promote awareness of suicide and depression, as well as to advocate a LIFESTYLE of unconditional love. On April 25th, put a heart on your wrist to signify that you will wear your heart on your sleeve and observe a LIFESTYLE of love. ASK SOMEONE HOW THEY'RE DOING. TELL PEOPLE YOU LOVE THEM AND DO IT. Nobody should have to feel so bad about themselves that they take their own life, so let's give them a reason not to! Let's change the world on April 25th!"

Well, okay then.

Anyway, the conversation from there went like this:ME: I'd prefer to draw crosshairs over the foreheads of the Koch brothers. 7.62mm national match corrected-for-drop-and-windage attitude adjustment, gentlemen. I'm here for your tax breaks.

I like to think I change the world in my own special way...
7 hours ago · LikeHER: You do John.
7 hours ago · LikeME: THEN I'd draw a heart on my wrist.
7 hours ago · Like · 1 person

I can't believe that some people think I'm not a sensitive guy just because when someone asks me what I would feel taking the life of another human being and I reply "Recoil".

Dictatus Papae

I hate to say this, but one thing that Facebook often lends itself to is a nattering lack of reflection.

I say this in a tone of rueful acceptance, mind you, not surprise or anguish.

It's a fucking "social network", after all.Generally I like to think that my selection of "friends" helps me avoid the "I'm picking out my toe jam! :-b" sorts of status updates; luckily I'm not bombarded with much of that sort of brain-destroying crap.Mostly the site does what it is supposed to do and provides me a sort of party line to check in with friends and chat about this and that. For all the handwringing about how the Evil Twitter, Facebook, and whatever other electronic media bete noir de jour are destroying civil society by substituting for "real human interaction", when you think about it these things are just replicating the slower means of distant communication humans have used since the beginning of literacy.

What is a "tweet" but a little postcard? What is a Facebook post but a short letter, a digital telegram, a typed-out phone call? "Having wonderful time, caught fish, weather fine. Come soon, Woosie."

I don't see how this happening in realtime, over a fiber cable, somehow makes the process dangerously antisocial. We've always enjoyed our long-distance relationships. Entire books have been published containing the epistolary friendships of pre-electronic times, when living a couple of tens of miles apart meant seeing each other once a year or so. People have always had ways of staying in touch with distant friends and lovers; these electronic means are just an adaptation of a very old gimmick, a quicker version of sending a house slave with a clay tablet to your brother and sister-in-law in Sumer.

But (and you knew there would be a but, didn't you?) to go with the advantages in celerity there is the disadvantage of brevity. If brevity is the soul of wit, it is the mother of inattention. A discussion limited to 420 characters isn't really much of a "discussion", and the one thing I find unlikeable about Facebook - I am not "on" Twitter and have no interest in doing so, since a tweet is even briefer than a Facebook post less informative, and thus more conducive to the ignorant-shouting sort of "communication" than Facebook - is that much conversation is necessarily brief and one-sided. A letter allows time and space for thought, and if two paragraphs are needed instead of one to dissect the issue they are there for the taking. The only limit is the paper and the patience of the writer, and reader.

Which may be the very heart of the matter. We as a culture are increasingly impatient; the notion of simply sitting and reading a letter - or a novel, or a long blog post - is becoming both difficult and challenging. Difficult because many of us are so busy, our days full of cascades of essential ephemera demanding our attention; challenging because our preferred style of prose is often simple and poorly suited to complex thought. While the text we read on paper or off the screen may be prolix the arguments are often crude, the exposition simplistic, and the argumentation circular or absent. So the quick declaratory statements of Facebook make us easier. We needn't marshal our overtasked intellectual reserve; the thinking is done for us.This has become a very roundabout introduction to a topic that emerged on Facebook the past week. Specifically, a friend of mine linked to this article in the New York Times discussing the falling out between the Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix, Arizona, and a local formerly Catholic hospital.

It seems that the hospital in question performed an abortion on a woman who was in danger of injury or death if her pregnancy had progressed. The bishop, who had apparently warned the hospital that this sort of thing would put them outside Church law, used this surgery to sever the ties between the diocese and the hospital.

My friend was incensed. "Time to move into the 17th century, boys." is the way she put it. Another of her friends replied that the bishop had the right of it; that a "Catholic" hospital had the obligation to abide by church doctrine. Several more of us piled on and we had - especially for Facebook - quite a rousing little discussion. I don't think anyone's opinions were changed, but we at least got to hear a good bit from several sides on the matter.And the more I got to thinking about it, the more I found that I tend to believe in what I first said; that the bishop's job, if he were to be any sort of bishop and not a windsock for popular opinion, was to insist that the mother, as a Catholic or at least as the patient of a Catholic hospital, give her life for the life of her child in the same sense that a bishop would expect his priests to give their lives, if they had to, to ensure the lives, or the spiritual salvation, of those who depend on them.

His understanding of God's Will as expressed by his Holy Father should admit no less, and the tenets of his Church - an authoritarian organization whose fundamental nature is spelled out by the "Dictus Papae" (which includes such statements as "That of the pope alone all princes shall kiss the feet." and "That this (the Pope's) is the only name in the world.") - demand that those beneath him in the hierarchy submit to his interpretation of that Will.

That's cruelly hard. But religions in general ask us to put God first and ourselves afterwards; that's the nature of a religion, most religions. It's a feature, not a bug. Because of that demand religious faith can accomplish great things. Because of it faith can be the spark for horrible atrocities. The direction depends greatly on the nature of the person who "speaks" for the religion and the nature of those listening. But there is no promise that either the speaking or the reception will be beneficial and kind.

All we can only hope then is that our religions don't demand us to make choices that lead to suffering. But by their nature they can, and often do, and we can't really get one without the other, eh?

My bride, lovely woman that she is, is (if she only knew it) a classic American cafeteria Catholic. She has said that if she agrees with a doctrine, she would hew to it. If not, she would ignore it.

I can't do that or believe that.

To me the entire point of a religion - as opposed to a personal faith - is either accepting the doctrines of the religion or working to change them. But until they change, I don't thing that the adherent has an option to just ignore them.

Since I have yet to encounter a religion whose tenets I can accept without demur or disputation, I have no religion. Since I have yet to encounter a moment where my need to have an all-powerful Sky Daddy overpowers my skepticism of the entire notion, I have no personal faith, either. For good or ill, I am alone within my head when the moment for spiritual succor arrives.

And as ruthless as it is I wish that what happened to the hospital would happen more often. I wish that the Catholic Church, for example, would excommunicate people who use birth control, would stop granting annulments and force divorcees out of the laity. American Catholics haven't been forced to actually do what their church demands them to do for a long time. If they were, well, either the laity might change or the church might. Some people might find themselves alone as I do. Some may find that they can abandon themselves in order to have that Sky Daddy within them.

Either way, at least both sides would be consistent.

Because for me so long as a religion does not force itself into the public square and demand that people not its adherents adhere to its beliefs it should be true to itself. For some religions this is not a pretty or humane thing because by their nature they are not about the pretty and the humane but about the demands of a supernatural belief on a merely human soul.

This often makes them magnificent, grand, and terrible.

And it is perhaps the failure of my own soul that I would take the smallest common moment of human life; the sound of a sigh, the heat of a quarrel, the softness of a kiss, the breathless of lovemaking, the peace of a nap, the placid twilight of age, over all the magnificence and grandeur ever conceived.