Surfacing for Breath

After a mind-boggling ten days without Intarwebz access, I am safely ensconced in my uncle's house in far west suburban Chicago. The last week was spent in the haven of McCormick's Creek State Park in southwestern Indiana, a place my family has been retreating to in one form or another for the better part of eighty years.

I have pictures out the ass, but my laptop isn't cooperating at the moment, so I'm borrowing my aunt's computer.

Anyway.

Following the road from the park gatehouse as it curves past the tennis courts and runs through the woods, you don't notice at first that the cabins are perched somewhat precariously on a thin thumb of level ground surrounded on three sides by massive sinkholes. The sinkholes are a quirky byproduct of the limestone foundation underlying much of Owen, Monroe, and Lawrence counties south of Indianapolis. As water courses between the underground layers of stone, caves are hollowed out. When the ceilings collapse, voila. Sinkholes the size of Assembly Hall.

The trail to the creek starts at the rear circle of cabins and follows a narrow ridge as it slopes steeply down, a merely large sinkhole on the right, a huge one on the left. They don't photograph well. Beech, tulip, and maple trees march resolutely down the sides of the holes, the giants growing up from the bottoms matching the crowns of their higher cousins despite being rooted some fifty feet lower. One hundred, one hundred and fifty feet they tower, the canopy blocking all but a few thin beams of sun. Maple branches break the middle layer into horizontal planes; young hickories and muscle elms elbow each other for the dregs of the sunlight nearest the forest floor.

On the floor itself, a profusion of plants covers the humus formed by fallen leaves. A grove of mayapples here, a riot of wild ginger there, nightshade and dotting everywhere. Occasionally a low moss- and fern-covered hummock of earth stands sentinel over a bleak oval depression, an open grave the sole monument to the giant tree whose falling and uprooting dug it. Eager saplings crowd the sun-soaked forest gap; only the fastest growing will eventually supplant the giant trees to either side.

Closer to the creek, the forest changes, a profusion of ferns and a parade of sycamores signalling greater proximity to the water table. Where the creekbend has washed away the soil beneath the sycamores, limestone cobbles are suspended in air by interwoven roots. Where the trees are long gone, the roots remain, a cephalopod of wood squirming in the mud, clinging to the rocks in futility. Dragonflies flit from weed to weed, water striders skim the surface of still pools, crawdads skulk beneath the rocks, and tiny bass and sunfish flee from your shadow.

The massive floods of early June have scoured the creekbed clean, leaving clear water mostly free of sediment, running cold and gurgling over the newly-dumped cobble bars. In the lower reaches of the creek you can stand on the bank eight feet above the water and look up to see muddy leaves and tree trunks above your eye level, a stark testimony to the volume of water that moved through here. The two-foot-diameter tree trunks piled like Lincoln logs speak to its violence.

On this day, though, the current burbles cheerfully along to the soundtrack provided by wood thrushes and the wood peewee. Notoriously difficult to spot, they are rendered even more invisible by a canopy that is twenty feet higher than the last time you were here. No matter. Simply hearing them is enough.

That's McCormick's Creek. For six blessed days, my heart was home.

Off to the Floody Midwest Edition

The annual escape from Tucson in June commences tomorrow; we hop the train in Flagstaff and head east and hope the railroad bridges in southwestern Iowa are still intact. The family is converging on a small state park in southern Indiana that has been our hearts' home for the past eighty years or so. Unfortunately, it's also located smack dab in the middle of the worst flooding Indiana has seen, ever. The park itself is up on a hill above the White River, but we buy our beer in the little town of Spencer, which is at the bottom of the hill and now under the White River. Hundreds of people have been evacuated so far. The river was expected to crest last night and recede through this week, but more storms are rolling in on Friday, right before we turn up.

McCormick's Creek usually looks like this:

A mellow little waterfall.

This is what it looked like last week:


Less so.

Anyway. Should we come through the floodwaters unscathed, I have an additional week and a half in the Chicago area, most of which is likely to be spent playing cards and drinking wine on my aunt and uncle's back porch. Intermittent nature, culture, and drunken birdwatching posting from Chicago is possible in a couple of weeks, but given the current sorry state of our laptop's modem, it may be a check-back-in-July kind of deal.

Headline of the Day

From the Chicago Tribune: Operation lets Muslim women reclaim virginity and lives.

To the Chicago Tribune (for that headline), the idiot men who view a rupturable hymen as a use-by date that supersedes every other attribute their brides have, and the doctors who perform the surgeries: fuck you.

Gynecologists report that in the past few years, more Muslim women are asking for certificates of virginity to provide proof to others. That in turn has created a demand among cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacements, which, if done properly, they say, will not be detected and will produce tell-tale vaginal bleeding on the wedding night. The service is widely advertised on the Internet; medical tourism packages are available to countries like Tunisia where it is less expensive.

Let's clarify a few very simple things. First, the presence or absence of a hymen is roughly as relevant to virginal status as the presence or absence of a hat is relevant to status as a Steelers fan. If you spend much time on a bike, or a horse, or a seesaw when you're little, chances are good your hymen is going to unzip itself without the help of a penis. Men who believe that blood on the sheets is the only guarantee they've married a virgin are ignorant; men who decide to punish their wives for not screaming and bleeding on initial wedding-night penetration are ignorant assholes.

Second, shelling out thousands of dollars to get a flap of skin sliced from your vaginal wall and sewn to the other side solely in order to enable your new husband to rip the surgical scar open and then thrust against the torn tissues repeatedly isn't reclaiming your virginity. It's just elective mutilation undergone to assure that your ignorant asshole of a husband will get enough of an ego boost from his bloody dick that he won't divorce you on your wedding night, beat you, or give you back to your father so he can beat you.

The furor followed the revelation two weeks ago that a court in Lille, in northern France, had annulled the 2006 marriage of two French Muslims because the groom discovered his bride was not the virgin she had claimed to be.

Some feminists, lawyers and doctors warned that the court's acceptance of the centrality of virginity in marriage would encourage more Frenchwomen from Arab and African Muslim backgrounds to have their hymens restored. But there is much debate about whether the procedure is an act of liberation or repression.

Wow, let me think about that for all of two seconds. Liberation or oppression, liberation or oppression... surgical mutilation designed to enable coital mutilation, the reduction of women's lives not to only to their sexual status, but to a small flap of tissue that may be absent even if the sacred virginal status is present, the complete focus on the woman's virginity and complete indifference to the man's, ownership of a woman's sexuality by her father... liberation or oppression? Do they seriously even need to ask?

I'm not even going to waste my time on the American women who apparently think this is the best Valentine's present ever for their husbands, independent of any medieval religious and cultural mores that threaten to destroy them if they don't comply. Because nothing says I love you like giving your guy the chance to rip you open all over again.

Vote McCain. Because He Understands Foreign Relations Like Nobody's Business.

It's so refreshing to learn that it isn't just Iran and al Qaeda that John McCain has ass-backwards.



So apparently the next time George Bush is in the mood for some German neck rubs, he'll be doing it with a guy whose eyes he's already looked into to see his soul. This is going to be AWESOME.

Summer Sporadicity

The combination of ungodly Tucson summer heat (it's been a cool spring by Sonoran standards, but once it gets about 85 I am effectively done until fall), gasoline price angst, and hopefully baseless terror over what my prospects would be should the contract archaeology market go belly-up are conspiring to severely limit my ability to churn out regular posts that are worth reading.

Do stop by regularly anyway; I'm sure I'll get over it in a couple of weeks.

John McCain is a huge douche. I'm just sayin'.

Well, This is Distressing

Not that I'm overly familiar with Bolthouse Farms, but the name is awesome enough. But no. They ponied up 100K for California's anti-marriage-equality amendment, so please eschew their products in favor of the far less awesomely named but more progressive Naked or Odwalla. Even though Odwalla kinda sucks, to be honest.

Other regrettably delicious foods to be avoided include Focus on the Family donors Chik-Fil-A and, if you're in the Chicago area, Oberweis Dairy. Both of these break my heart. Damn these fundamentalists and their delicious chicken and waffle fries! And their amazing chocolate milk sold in funky sub-rectangular glass bottles that clank together before pouring out sublime creamy chocolately goodness!

Who else has waffle fries? Do we know? Buffalo Joe's in Evanston has killer waffle fries, but that's a bit of a drive from Tucson. Mmmm... waffle fries.

After These Lovely Fermented Possum Brain Hors d'Oeuvres, the Main Course is Sure to be Lovely

So it's Obama, apparently and finally, please-Jesus-hopefully bringing the Democratic nominating process to a close, letting us snort awake from a restless series of disturbing images just long enough to roll over and fall into the nice deep nightmare of the next five months. The primaries were soaked in a distressing amount of sexism and racism, exposing America yet again as a place where racism is not Tony Snow's distant memory but an active enough force for one in five Kentucky voters to tell pollsters that they're voting against Obama solely because he's black, a place where young women claim they're not feminists because feminism is no longer either required or useful while another woman stands up in public to ask John McCain how he's going to "beat the bitch" and the only response is raucous laughter.

Now we get to see a bunch of collective head explosions as Clinton supporters who swore they'd either vote for McCain or stay home should Obama get the nomination begin to weigh the relative merits of clinging to principle and choosing political expediency. I understand the frustration at feeling undercut, of having been undercut by the patriarchy one more damn time, but at the same time I would hope that the specter of a John McCain presidency would be enough to outweigh any compulsion to cast a fuck-you vote for the opposition. Just as I would expect Obama supporters to vote for Clinton were the situation reversed. Hey, I was an Edwards girl, so I'm equally disillusioned by certain things that have emanated from both the Obama and Clinton camps, was equally optimistic about others, and have always been firmly committed to keeping McCain out of the White House. There may be a time to take your ball and go home, but this ain't it.

Here we go, then, with the general election. You think the primaries were ugly? The Repubs have been biding their time, sharpening two sets of knives. The dick-handled sexism knives are going back into the box under the bed, for now; you can be certain the hood-handled racism knives are getting an extra kiss from the stone, the dog whistles getting a final tuning. How far have we come as a nation since July 9, 1868? We get to find out this summer. I'm not optimistic.

Product Review Monday

The former part-time housemate bought a Wii over the weekend and decided it should be our current and perpetual housemate. I thought I might be okay with that until I woke up this morning with a sore shoulder from two consecutive nights of 5+ hour Wii sessions. Forthwith, the verdicts on the Wii Sports pack that was bundled with the console:

Bowling: I am just as crappy at Wii bowling as in real life. It's a frighteningly accurate virtual recreation of my annoying hook that is juuuuuuust predictable enough to rely on for a decent first ball and juuuuuust inconsistent enough to bollocks up 4-9-10 splits every time. Major plus: no grimy hands and questionable rental shoe sanitizing. Major minus: no bowling alley fries and draft beer.

Baseball: Pitching is fun, since my real-life curveball doesn't break nearly as hard and my fastball tops out at about 50. Timing the batting is a bit tricky, but you're helped by realistic ball rotation that allows you to pick up on whether it's going to break outside or have the bottom drop out. Major plus: satisfying crack when you make good contact, no sunburn. Major minus: elementary schoolyard kickball baserunning where no one tags up or takes a lead, inexplicable fielding lapses.

Golf: As long as you don't overswing, you're not going to slice the shit out of your drive or skull your approach over the green, making this game the grand champion best escape into fantasyland offered by Wii Sports. Putting is every bit as dodgy as in real life, but since you're making it on in two, who cares? The nine hole course will probably become overly familiar after a few weeks, but changing wind conditions keep it interesting, and the wicked four-island par five is a heartstopper no matter how many times you play. Sure, you can just hit the shit out of it and bypass one of the fairways and just drive the green. It will work this time, honest. Major plus: ease of lining up shots and guaranteed good form means you don't even miss the absent curse like a sailor and wrap wedge around nearest tree functions. Major minus: can't think of one right now. No carts, maybe.

Tennis: Again, a frighteningly accurate recreation of my crappy real world tennis game, despite lessons as a kid and my parents' best efforts, although the game doesn't allow me to sky the ball over the back fence but instead funnels all that failure into simply missing the ball with great frequency and looking bad while doing it. Do be sure to move all the furniture up against the walls and leave yourselves plenty of space, especially when playing doubles. Major plus: working up a sweat while standing in the living room, killer slo-mo replays showing exactly how high you jumped and how many times you flailed your racquet before face-planting back into the court, puffs of dust. Major minus: the tendency to stand to close to your playing partners and maybe inadvertently whack them in the back of the head.

Boxing: Oh Christ. Does a major fucking gasping for air workout tickle your fancy? Then try boxing. Just make sure you're well-hydrated beforehand. I suppose it could be a handy election catharsis tool as well, especially if you just play against the other controller without an actual person holding it. Major plus: no actual blood or concussions. Major minus: you feel run over by a truck anyway.

So yeah, Wii. The games are wicked expensive, so if you're not a traditional console gamer or haven't been since the days of the Atari 2600, don't let Wii Sports fool you into thinking that fifty-dollar FIFA 2008 game will be a piece of cake.

Shades of Truth

In the end, even Scott McClellan couldn't quite grasp the transitive property within his message that Bush lied his way to assuming the wartime president mantle.

"Rather than open this Pandora's Box, the administration chose a different path — not employing out-and-out deception, but shading the truth," he wrote of the effort to convince the world that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, an effort he said used "innuendo and implication" and "intentional ignoring of intelligence to the contrary."

Intentionally ignoring intelligence to the contrary of what he trotted out as truth to the public on a daily basis is the very definition of out-and-out deception. That's not shading the truth. That's sealing the truth up in a lead-lined cement vault. The count as of this morning, if you're keeping track, is 4,084 US dead and over 33,000 wounded, over 42,000 officially reported iraqi deaths since 2005, and a new treaty between the Pakistani government and its pro-Taliban, Afghanistan-bordering Waziristan province.

Why this sideways sandpaper fuck and his cronies are still in power in Washington will be the sad mystery schoolkids are forced to write essays on fifty years from now.

Wednesday Roundup

Two oh wow moments upon opening the Trib this morning. First, former administration spokesmodel Scott McClellan has written a book saying yeah, we sort of misled the country into that whole Iraq war thing.

"History appears poised to confirm what most Americans today have decided—that the decision to invade Iraq was a serious strategic blunder," McClellan wrote in "What Happened."

He added that "war should only be waged when necessary, and the Iraq war was not necessary."

The president's real motivation for the war, he said, was to transform the Middle East to ensure an enduring peace in the region. But the White House effort to sell the war as necessary due to the stated threat posed by Saddam Hussein was needed because "Bush and his advisers knew that the American people would almost certainly not support a war launched primarily for the . . . purpose of transforming the Middle East," McClellan wrote.

The White House has no comment. Will George Bush continue to link Iraq to September 11 with varying directions of causality, as he did in his speech to the 82d Airborne during last week's All American Week festivities? And I almost kept a straight face while asking that rhetorical question.

If that news item left me a bit surprised and shaking my head, even though Scottie's exit interviews suggested he was leaning toward eventually disavowing most of the stuff he'd spewed in his job as the president's mouthpiece, the next one had me hopping up and down for a couple of giddy moments.

Poll: Majority of Californians back gay marriage.

The results mark the first time in over three decades of polling that more California voters have approved of extending marriage to gay couples than have disapproved, said Field Poll director Mark DiCamillo. The survey of 1,052 registered voters was conducted over the phone.

The poll was conducted from May 17 to May 26 in the days after the California Supreme Court handed down its historic ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in the nation's most populous state. A smaller percentage of respondents--48 percent -- said they agreed with the court's decision and 46 percent disagreed.

Maybe the pollster inadvertently dialed up more Ellen fans and Star Trek groupies than he thought he would, or maybe--despite the bleatings of religious conservatives that the sky will fall and the cows will be frightened--Californians have noticed that life has carried on as usual in Massachusetts four years into their foray into marriage equality, with no hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, or plagues of frogs. Maybe Ellen's artfully simple dismantling of John McCain last week nudged a few fence-sitters into comprehending that our live really is equal to theirs. Ah, or maybe they're finally just sick of it all. Doesn't matter. It's about damn time.

Photos Guaranteed to Put You off Your Feed for a Week

Going back to the Texas FLDS child-rape cult for a moment, if I may. I caught the ooo-weeeee exclusive closeup with an FLDS family report on the execrable Situation Room on CNN a few weeks back (available here) and was struck at the time by Wolf Blitzer's reaction of "Wow, great reporting," which I suppose was accurate if what he meant by that was wow, great reporting of exactly what the family in question told you, with no probing followup questions or, apparently, any critical thought at all.

The reporter, Gary Tuchman, marveled at the "children who seem very happy, even joyous... they were polite, smiling..." over footage of a half-dozen blond kidlets bouncing on the trampoline and eating dinner. The father, Chris Wyler (who was 16 when he married; the mother was 17), scoffs wonderingly at allegations of abuse.

"People here are taught that we're never ever supposed to yell at our children. When the children do something wrong, we're supposed to not, you know, even raise our voice any more than this... and there's no way anybody I know would ever abuse their wife."

Well, then, glad that's settled. That's the convenient thing about defining your own terms, I suppose; if abuse only equals spanking and yelling, then heaven no, there's no abuse here. At least not in this family, and at least not while the camera is rolling. The reporter might have inquired whether Mr. Wyler considers forcing an underage girl into sex toy/brood mare status constitutes abuse. Amazingly, he didn't take that opportunity.

Tuchman: If he married another woman, and she was right for the family, would that be okay with you?
Lydia: [silent]
Chris, jumping in: Well, it's part of our culture.
Lydia, snapping back to awareness and shrugging: Well, it's what we believe.

No word on what Chris and Lydia's reaction would be if their eldest daughter, who appears to be in the prime 12-to-14-year-old marrying range, were given to some older guy on orders of the prophet. And with that we're back to scenes of the happy family intercut with shots of Warren Jeffs, who Lydia is certain has been unjustly convicted. Asked what she thinks of him, she smiles her vague smile and says, "I know he's our prophet."

Something else she should know is that he, and all the people who follow him unquestioningly, are pedophile fucktards. Click over to The Smoking Gun for some of Warren Jeffs' myriad wedding photos, if you have the stomach, and then try to tell me with a straight face that this group's religious beliefs really ought to be respected and accommodated.

I would really have loved for CNN to have included even one of those snapshots in its breathtaking coverage of the Wyler family. Had one of the details been flipped, say making FLDS a cult centered on the rape of young boys by creepy older guys, would the network have gone to such pains to portray the "normalcy" of the family and marvel about the kids' good dispositions and flawless manners? I rather think not.

Who Benefits?

I was wrapping up my last trip up to Mesa to visit the grandparents before they chug back to Colorado for the summer, the mental Offensive Comment Bingo card refreshingly under-blotted, when my grandmother said, "You know, I really don't have any idea what you do in your job." That's fine, not many people do. So I launched into my well-practiced spiel about the cultural resource management field, touching on Arizona's historic preservation laws, the rich history and prehistory of life in the Tucson Basin over the past four thousand years, outlining the process we go through in order to get artifacts out of the ground and onto my desk, describing briefly how I look at them and the kinds of behavioral inferences I can squeeze out of them, tooting ever so softly the little horn that plays the song about me managing to have achieved a decent reputation in the field and respect as an expert. It took a few minutes. She absorbed it and paused for all of two seconds before asking the ultimate question.

"But who does it benefit?"

That one stumped me. It's been stumping me for years, as I watch my relatives build meaningful careers in education and health care, as I have watched those same grandparents kick back and enjoy the very comfortable retirement my grandfather accrued through a lifetime of working his ass off. "Uh... I guess it mostly benefits people who are curious about how people lived in the past," I finally managed to sputter out. "So, nosy people, then." Yeah, something like that.

Does that do anything to better the world? I kinda have my doubts. My officemates agree that archaeology mainly functions to keep marginally socially incompetent riffraff like us off the streets. If we occasionally satisfy someone's curiosity about what might have been going on in their back yard in 1800 B.C., I suppose that's nice. But earth-shaking revelations about human behavior that actually benefit modern people are pretty few and far between. Ancient people used tools and generated mounds and mounds of trash. They remodeled their houses and ate dinner. They wore jewelry. They cared enough to bury their dead relatives and even, sometimes, their dogs too. They did things one way until someone came up with a better idea, and then they did them the new way until the next innovation came along.

In short, ain't a whole lot changed in four millennia. Does knowing that benefit your life? I hope so. Otherwise I'm squandering a lot more here than just time.

In Which We Are Just Too Tired

Too tired and cranky and hot, Jesus god, so hot, to string together the kind of insightful, astute analysis you've come to expect. Not today.

Life in Tucson tip: if you need plumbing supplies and advice in a hurry, say on a Sunday afternoon, Naughton's is your place. Just make sure you get there before three. Sunday was the first really hot day to hit so far this sun season, so I wasn't too surprised when I walked in through their wide open doors and saw half the lights were off. All the lights at Home Depot had crashed briefly not an hour earlier, what with all the air conditioners in the city suddenly being turned up to eleven at the same time, so yeah, just another cramp in the grid. The Naughton's lights sprang back to life as I puzzled over J-traps, and then all went dead. Ah, no worries, no need to panic. I dallied another minute or so before deciding to break down and ask for some guidance.

Boy, was the last guy in the store with the front door keys in his hand surprised to see me come around the corner. Oh, I didn't know you were here. Uh... we're closed.

At three in the afternoon? Seriously, who the fuck closes at three in the afternoon? When all my pipes are disassembled and strewn across the kitchen floor? Naughton's, apparently. Moral of the story? If it's Sunday, Ace is open until the scandalous hour of five.

Boltgirl v. US Soccer, Part Three

The good news: they finally cranked out a new National Team commercial. Unfortunately, since they only put the games on TV once in three or four blue moons, you're not likely to see it. The oh-Christ-here-we-go-again-news: well, just watch for yourself and see if you can find the innocuous two-second sequence that had me throwing stuff at the monitor.

Hint: it just might be the portion of the video accompanying the intonation of "real values..." which just might show a wedding set on a hand manicured with red, white, and blue fingernail polish, which maybe kinda sorta hints that US Soccer believes (or at least thinks their target fanbase believes) that Real Values(TM) for women mean the holy trinity of femininity, patriotism, and heterosexuality.

Commenters on BigSoccer are pretty sure it wasn't intended to mean anything, really, that they used the wedding ring to symbolize loyalty in contrast to that skanky ho Paris Hilton (who gets mentioned over and over and over and...). Uh huh. The Fed haven't evidenced the brightest minds in the business, but do you honestly think they "didn't mean anything" by sticking the ring footage in there? Like, now, in the age of consumer and media research databases that rival anything held by the NIH? I think they knew exactly what message that would send, as surely as they've breathlessly hyped every engagement and wedding among the players, as they still desperately cast about for the next fresh face to sell the team to the country.

Here We Go

The fallout from yesterday's California Supreme Court decision invalidating the state's ban on same-sex marriage started pretty much immediately, with half the country flinging confetti and the other half howling that the world is about to end.

Slate has some interesting commentary (passed along by Top!Secret G-woman) here and here and here. And also here. This last one, by Doug Kmiec, particularly intrigued me with its unusually non-inflammatory and almost plaintive presentation of probably the most common religious objection to marriage equality. That said, it still sent my blood pressure through the roof. The recurrent theme is the necessity of accommodating religious belief in public policy. To a certain degree, I won't argue against it. But when the argument is presented in the contexts of these three statements:

it would be prudent for Senator Obama and supporters of same-sex marriage to note that, for the most part, those who opposed that affirmation did so not out of acrimony or dislike, but out of a like appreciation for the family as an irreplaceable cultural building block and often sincere religious belief that deserves respect and accommodation.

and

It is often asked... how the acknowledgment of same-sex marriage harms marriage between a man and a woman. The inability to give a simple, secular answer to this explains the California victory in favor of same-sex marriage more than the reasoning of the opinion. That doesn't mean there is not an answer. There is a religious answer and it is anchored in the creation story recorded in the book of Genesis.

and

The end of sexual orientation discrimination has much to commend it, as again Marty nicely illustrates in his quotation from the opinion, but again, there are interwoven religious beliefs that are not based on stereotype and that do deserve accommodation.

it falls apart for me. The first point, that it's not personal when people vote to deny you the right to marry who you choose, it's just that, well, your marriage doesn't look like what they're used to and doesn't match one of the several models for marriage presented in their holy book, in which they profess a sincere belief? Too fucking bad. The FLDS church has a sincere religious belief that serial child rape is a prerequisite for entry into heaven, but no one outside Colorado City thinks that belief should be respected and accommodated in civil law. Do I need to bring up the sincere religious belief that was used to justify miscegenation laws prior to 1967?

Point two, that the Genesis creation story somehow provides the answer to how same-sex marriages harm straight ones, turns out to be woefully unsupported--unless simply stating that the answer is religious and comes from Genesis, QED, is all that needs to be said. Well, okay. If you find a religious proof in there, that's between you and your bible, but it is precisely the lack of a compelling secular explanation that makes this one a non-starter. Secular laws require secular foundations. QE fucking D.

And then we come to the last bit. Let's look at it just one more time.

The end of sexual orientation discrimination has much to commend it, as again Marty nicely illustrates in his quotation from the opinion, but again, there are interwoven religious beliefs that are not based on stereotype and that do deserve accommodation.

The end of discrimination has much to commend it, as if it were even a question that's still up for debate. Nondiscrimination? Pretty good, has a lot going for it, but... But there are some religious beliefs that aren't stereotypes, really, they aren't, and since they are religious beliefs and not, like, bald-faced bigotry or anything, well, they deserve accommodation. Sorry about your civil rights and all, but by "accommodation" I mean that if I don't get to exercise just a little bit of discrimination against you--say, maybe getting to determine who you can marry, since they already took away my ability to kick you out of your apartment or fire you from your job, although in most places I can still beat you bloody for asking me for a smoke--I just don't get to fully express my solidarity with Jesus, who loves you.

I was going to say I try to be empathetic to the mindset that considers that a legitimate foundation for argument, but I really don't any more. I will agree that religious beliefs may be accommodated by public policy so long as that accommodation does not abrogate the civil rights of, cause harm to, or, at this point, even fucking inconvenience anyone who does not share those beliefs. And accommodating your beliefs on marriage only means that the state cannot compel you to enter into a marriage contract against your will. It does not mean the state has to guarantee that all marriages conform to the religious model you have adopted for your own.

My life is not beholden to someone else's fairy tales. No one's life should be.

Happy Dance

California. 'Nuff said.

The language of section 300 limiting the designation of marriage to a union "between a man and a woman" is unconstitutional and must be stricken from the statute, and that the remaining statutory language must be understood as making the designation of marriage available both to opposite-sex and same-sex couples.

Backlash in 3, 2, 1...

Science Thursday

Today, a nifty tidbit about the mantis shrimp. 400 or so species within the order Stomatopoda are known, but researchers working on specimens from the Great Barrier Reef have discovered that one variety, the technocolored Gonodactylus smithii, have the ability to see a complete range of polarized light no other creature on the planet can, effectively opening up an entire world to them that is invisible to the rest of us.


Is that four linear and two circular polarizations,
or are you just happy to see me?

Sharp-eyed, gutter-minded readers will likely notice that the order name "Stomatopoda" means "mouth-footed" and genus "Gonodactylus" means "genital-fingered." I can't be the only one here having visions of thumb-wrestling with that special someone whilst strolling barefoot across a field blooming with chocolate chips and Twinkies. And the occasional stretch of neatly manicured pad thai lawn.

Remorse Is Great and All, But a Little Ineffectual at This Point

Marian McClure is having a crisis of conscience. My e-mail to her this morning, and her response, below:

Dear Rep. McClure,

You're certainly being deluged with e-mails at the moment, but I hope you find the time to read this one. I do not live in your district (I'm in Tucson 28) but I feel compelled to register my extreme disappointment with your decision to vote for a redundant, intentionally punitive and discriminatory constitutional amendment, one that you freely acknowledge is unneccesary, solely on the basis of your personal religious beliefs.

I do not discount the tension between those beliefs and the reality of operating within a pluralistic, nominally secular society, but being a legislator requires you to consider the needs of all of your constituents and make decisions that do not cause unneccesary harm to even the least-regarded among them. Those decisions have to be made on the basis of good law, not on the teachings of one particular congregation within one particular sect of one particular religion. To do otherwise, as you did with your vote on SCR1042, is to compel all Arizonans to abide by the rules of your personal religion, whether they share it or not.

As for how you could possibly face your pastor and fellow congregants on Sunday, here are a few suggestions. You might start by asking how many of them have had their marriages destroyed by the committed gay couples living around them every day. How many have decided to get a divorce because gay couples are allowed to marry in Massachusetts. How many have decided to have affairs since their vows don't mean anything if a couple of women can make the same vows in Canada. Then you might ask how many feel their Judeo-Christian God-ordained marriages are diminished because non-Abrahamic religions conduct weddings. Or because atheists can get married too. Or because the straight couple in the pew behind them might have five previous marriages racked up between them.

The answer, if they are honest, will be "none." Marriage is not a zero-sum game where the status of an existing relationship is determined by that of the other relationships, where adding additional relationships to the pool damages all the others. And the state sanctioning of all committed couples under the umbrella of marriage does not force anyone to "accept" homosexuality any more than the current sanctioning of all straight adult couples forces you and your brethren to "accept" atheism, or paganism, or sexual practices that make you uncomfortable. Many, many marriages in Arizona do not conform to the traditional Christian model of man+woman+Jesus+lifetime. Same-sex couples are singled out for discrimination on religious grounds simply because they are the most visible examples of nonconformity. Specifically barring gay couples from marrying because they do not conform to God's ordained plan is an immoral stance when every nonconforming straight couple is given a pass simply because they are straight, simply because their public appearance meshes with your own.

You are free to believe as you wish and follow the tenets of your faith in your personal life. Enshrining your religious beliefs in civil law, however, encroaches on the ability of other people to live their lives as they see fit. I would not seek legislation that regulates the teachings and practices of your church (provided they do not harm unconsenting people). I do not wish to force your church to conduct same-sex weddings or to force straight people into same-sex unions. I firmly support your pastor's right to rail against gay people every Sunday from the pulpit if he wishes. I will, however, never support an attempt to change the constitution of the state of Arizona to reflect religious objections to full civil rights for all Arizonans.

I do not wish to diminish any spiritual struggle this issue has raised for you. I simply implore you to consider the issue as a legislator for all of your constituents and all the people of Arizona, and to think about the real reasons behind your religious objection to same-sex marriage and whether they truly pass logical and ethical muster.

~~~~~~~~~~~

Dear [Boltgirl],

I have had a few emails. I must admit I feel a great sadness in my heart. I did not and do not believe this measure belonged in the Legislature. I have always worked very hard to do everything you state in your email. In one fell swoop, I forgot everything.

Such crises hurt, particularly when they're incurred by very public fuckups. I'm sorry for that, really, I am. Her brain cramp at voting time didn't make or break the amendment, although it helped the 8-vote margin by which it passed, but her failure to stand up and fight against a ballot measure she admits the Legislature had no business considering has the potential to come back and bite a hell of a lot of gay Arizonans in the ass. I'm sorry you're sad, Marian. But I have a great sadness in my heart today too. You get to go on and live your life as you please. The amendment you voted for will impact the rest of my life so long as I stay in Arizona, and every one of these goddamned things that passes makes it easier for other states to write discrimination into their own constitutions.

Please Help

Found this awesome trippy little game from the BBC via Chaotic Utopia. Very basic third-grader level questions, but the graphics are delightful and the music works just fine after a couple of glasses of wine. Ahem. Please, please, WTF are you supposed to do on level 3? I've clicked the owl and bird until my finger's gone numb.

A level I am sure would be wonderful if I could get off the goddamn
animal planet.

Well, Thank Goodness for This

Vatican: It's OK to believe in aliens

We are relieved to know that our infatuation with a certain Corellian freighter captain may proceed without peril to our mortal soul.

The only thing that
might make us entertain
notions of going back
to teh menz.