If 'God' had a Facebook page:

Well, what do you know, College Humor actually comes up with something not involved half naked chicks or booze. Kind of.

Behold, the 'God' Facebook page!

Here's a little taste of what it's like (but I highly recommend going to the page and reading it all):

Sweet Map Action

So, I was listening to NPR the other day I learned about World Mapper. This guy, Mark Neuman, and his team of super nerds have come up with an alternative mapping method which re-sizes areas on a map according to a certain subject of interest.

For example, here is the normal election map that is sectioned out by state:



This map can seem somewhat skewed because it seems like, due to visibility alone, that Montana would have more influence over New York because it appears larger on the map. However, New York has more electoral votes because of the larger population, which this map doesn't show.

Check out Mark's alternate version:



Freakin' cool! The areas are skewed to properly show how much influence each red or blue state has.

More maps can be found on World Mapper and they are all pretty awesome.

They are Coming to Your Town...

I hate to pull down the level of the posts lately. JT has been doing a great job keeping the posts up to a high intellectual standard.

But this is just so funny...



You can buy the FIVE PACK TODAY!!!

Note: I just read a beautiful little piece over on the Friendly Atheist's blog on this video. Very well done. =)

Chuck Norris should shampoo my crotch

I've seen this letter from Chuck Norris circulating around the intertewbz, including the blogs of two good friends of mine.  So I figure I need to say something about it.

The first seven paragraphs are the Association Fallacy, trying to insinuate that a few isolated incidences are indicative or approved of by the whole of those supporting equal rights. 

No, almost all of us condemn violence.  If this logic works, then all Christians pray their children to death, hate science, and are members of the Ku Klux Klan.  If that sounds absurd to you, then Chuck is not off to a very good start.  Chuck's whole letter depends on asserting that something is the case when it's not the case.  The instances of violence are rare and are an exception to the rule - yet Chuck, for his spiel to work, has to invert reality and convince us that most protesters are shoving old ladies.  This is dishonest and wrong.  Rather, throughout the protesting we are seeing stuff like this:

"Throughout the entire event demonstrators were thanking the police," said Long Beach Police Sgt. David Marander. "It wasn't an adversarial event, except for the few who were there to cause trouble."

"Other than a smashed police car window, there were no reports of property damage nor injuries."

Or this:

"A similar protest took place in San Diego, where around 11,000 people demonstrated peacefully despite an attempt by anti-gay marriage activists to disrupt the march, police said. One man was arrested for attempting to incite violence before being released."

Afterward, he admonishes us to accept the will of the majority.  This is a means of circumventing the discussion about whether or not what the majority wants is moral.  Consider the following paragraph:

"The truth is that the great majority of those opposed to blacks marrying whites are not bigots or hatemongers. They are American citizens who are following 5,000 years of human history and the belief of every major people and religion: Marriage is a sacred union between a man and a woman of the same ethnicity. Their opposition to Loving vs. Virginia wasn't intended to deprive any group of its rights; they were safeguarding their honest convictions regarding the boundaries of marriage."

Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?  "We weren't trying to be bigoted, we just think you should have to abide by our tradition when choosing who you should marry."  That would be downright hilarious if people weren't serious when they used that argument leading up to 1967, when people of different races were finally allowed to marry.

First, it doesn't matter if it's your tradition - if your tradition is exclusionary, if it insists that others abide by your tradition while forsaking their own, it's bigoted and hate-mongering. 

Second, Chuck doesn't seem to know much about the history of marriage, even within his own faith.  It has not always been between one man and one woman.  Hell, if the tradition had never changed, marriage in the Christian faith would not even be about love. 

Third, Christian marriage is not the only marriage.  Many religions recognized by our government will, and always have, married people of the same gender.  To insist that people abide only by your ideal of marriage is, wait for it, ignoring and suppressing the traditions of other religions.  All the same, why does years of tradition matter?  I just fasted for 20 minutes and had a revelation that Zothar the Lizard King is the one true god (tm), and I am now forming a religion and starting my own traditions which include marrying people of the same gender and forbidding marriage to somebody of the opposite gender.  If my faith gets the nod governmentally, I'm not being a hatemonger - I'm just adhering to my own tradition.

Wait, my tradition is needlessly discriminatory?  Shit...

Or, try this paragraph:

"Nevertheless, bitter African-American activists simply cannot accept the outcome as being truly reflective of the general public. So they have placed the brainwashing blame upon the crusading and misleading zealotry of those white-skinned and religious villains: the Catholics, evangelical Protestants, and especially Mormons, who allegedly are robbing the rights of American citizens by merely executing their right to vote and standing upon their moral convictions and traditional views on slavery."

The fact that slavery was once the overwhelming will of the American public, endorsed by their moral and traditional views, never made it moral.  The majority was wrong then, and you can bet they used arguments like this to circumvent the argument of whether or not what they wanted was right or fair, even as they asserted that they were being moral, just like Chuck is doing.

Other people who have been unable to accept the majority's traditional views on morality have been Susan B. Anthony and Dr. Martin Luther King.  Yes, the majority had spoken, but as Dr. King once said (from a jail cell, no less), "It is the duty of every decent man to disobey unjust laws."

On protesting black churches, it's hard to protest a race.  A race is not a belief-set.  Even if 70% of voters with brown eyes had supported prop 8, protesting people with brown eyes would just be silly.  However, those people who attend churches (and voted for it by a clip of 86%) which donated tens of millions of dollars to the campaign to get prop 8 passed, they are clearly culpable and should be protested.  That being said, gay rights people should be protesting "black" churches - but because they are churches that contributed, not because they are "black."

The rest is more conflating those upset about losing their rights with "violent thugs," including Chuck's quote of Colson.  Yes, we are begging Americans, particularly those on the religious right, for tolerance.  You can't really be surprised when we don't buy your insistence that those of us being intolerant of the discrimination you voted for are themselves the intolerant ones.  Tolerance of intolerance is not tolerance.

The rest of it is Chuck pissing and moaning about violent protesters that make up a few isolated incidences and have been condemned by virtually every gay rights organization both in CA and nation-wide.  If you buy this, you are neither reading nor watching the news.

So, here's a brief recap of Chuck's arguments:

1.  Majority rules.

Yes, it does, and now we are bound by the law.  That doesn't make it right, and to invoke this is to avoid the argument about whether or not it was right.

2.  All/most of the protesters are violent.

Anybody who glances at the news in the morning will know this is bullshit.  Yet, people believe it when Chuck says it without doing any fact-checking.  These people vote.  Ug.

3.  We're not bigots, our faith is just different than yours and so you have to abide by ours.

...really?

The most overt Chuck Norris joke seems to be Chuck Norris himself.

On the notion of tolerating intolerance, as Chuck is asking us to do, Mark Morford once said it better than I ever could.

Space - we're tackling it a little bit at a time.

It's been such an exciting time for Astronomy lately. We've discovered water on Mars, which means that microbial life is probably there. The next rover we send over there should be able to determine this for sure. The Garden of Eden had quite the extended reach, it seems...

Also, we have our first images of exoplanets orbiting other stars. We have discovered over 300 planets now that orbit stars outside our solar system, and that number is perpetually growing. So far, we've found no Earth-size terrestrial planets, although there's the possibility of one around Gliese 876.

These images are huge news! And, if it's huge news in Astronomy, you know Phil Plait will have to have to weigh in.

You'll notice that not once did we ever have to pray our way to these results - nor is this information found anywhere in the bible between instructions on how to keep slaves and sacrifice animals. This is the accomplishment of mortals, period. Let this be a lesson to all of us: we can pray for things to change, or we can use that time changing them by taking in reality for what it truly, and beautifully, is.

Gay Marriage: the Arguments

This is a collection of all the arguments I have heard against gay marriage, and the reason why they are factually errant, logically vacuous, cruel and without empathy, or a combination of the three.

In order to get into some of these arguments, we all need to be on the same page about marriage's development. Historically speaking, the notion of marriage is a nebulous concept that changes constantly. While marriage traditions differ greatly from culture to culture, marriage within Jewish culture and subsequently Christian culture was seldom an issue of love, but rather a means of producing children, securing bloodlines, and managing property rights. This is why a widow was made to marry her husband's brother. Also, throughout much of it, women were considered chattel, which was a different way of saying "property" (the word itself being derived from "cattle").

The History

Polygamy.

"Although [polygamy] was lawful among the ancient fathers: whether it be lawful now also, I would not hastily pronounce." ~ St. Augustine, The Good of Marriage

Indeed, even Martin Luther, the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation from which we derive what would become our Christianity, wrote "I cannot forbid a person to marry several wives, for it does not contradict Scripture."

In 1650, the parliament of Nürnberg decreed that men could take up to ten wives for a brief period, and the Catholic Church adopted it.

Religious philosophers, starting with Augustine in the 5th century, debated the issue of polygamy for centuries. However, it was the Roman Catholic Church that put an official end to the practice in the 12th century.

Endogamy.

Marrying only within a particular social group (the opposite of exogamy, which is marrying outside your particular social group). Many Muslim groups still engage in this, as do some Christian groups. Until 1967, Christian groups opposed exogamy in the form of marrying somebody of a different race (thus supporting endogamy). Names for these types of laws were often similar to Virginia's "Racial Integrity Act," and they werejustified as defending the traditional meaning of marriage. They did this citing passages from the bible, the most frequent of which was Phinehas and the curse of Ham. It should be noted that these laws would have prevented the marriage of Barrack Obama's parents.

Arranged Marriages.

These have been prevalent throughout history. We owe arranged marriages to the Hebrew edicts that marriage preserve property rights, as well as the tradition of marriage to tackle primarily financial issues. Often these marriages were conducted by proxy, in which somebody stood in for the groom. It is this tradition of marriage as a financial matter that gave us the idea of a dowry.

It was the troubadors of the 12th century that introduced the concept of romantic love to the notion of marriage, and begun to emancipate us from marriage, both in the religious and political sense, as an economic institution.

The list of assundry changes to the idea of marriage could quite literally go on forever, but this should be sufficient for arguments I'm about to make.

The Arguments

It is plain to see that any argument against gay marriage is merely bigotry dressed up as an argument, and if we are to be moral, good human beings with sensible moral imperatives, we must oppose bigotry wherever it rears its devout, ugly head.

We cannot "redefine marriage."

We cannot redefine marriage for whom? Marriage exists in many cultures and many faiths differently than it exists in yours. There is not a single definition of marriage, and the United States government recognizes several faiths as legitimate religions that have a different definition than yours. Many of these faiths will marry people of the same gender. To recognize one religion over another legally is an abrogation of the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights.

By saying that we cannot redefine marriage, you are simply saying that the country must recognize your idea of marriage and grant you the monopoly on the concept. This is flagrantly discriminatory and for no good reason.

We must keep the traditional value of marriage.

Again, you do not seem to grasp the notion that there is no "traditional" value for marriage. The term is broad, and even marriage in your faith changes constantly (historically speaking). You really just want to force others, with their own notion of marriage (which is just as legitimate as yours) from keeping with their tradition. So in reality, it is you who is ignoring other cultures by demanding that they adhere to yours.

Also, as we've seen, tradition is a very poor measuring stick for what is fair. Traditionally, the United States allowed you to keep slaves (until we broke from that wicked tradition). Traditionally, blacks were not able to marry a majority of the citizens in the United States who didn't share their ethnic minority. We rightly eliminated those laws - far later that we should have. Tradition should be eliminated if it conflicts with compassion. There is no need to maintain a practice from a dated society with different needs than our current one, that conflicts with modernity. To do so could only be called regressive and stupid.

My brother put it very well once:

"I hear there are some voodoo hoodoo tribes in Africa where it’s a passage to manhood to rip some poor sap’s still-beating heart out of his chest and eat it raw while prancing about on a bed of hot coals and whacking off with their free hand. I hope they get rid of that tradition – that one sucks.

Some traditions should be flushed down the proverbial toilet, or at least be given a few rigorous wipes to make them applicable to modern society."

Homosexuality is a life-style choice.

Even if it is...who cares? Your traditional marriage once forbid marriage to a non-believer, which is certainly a choice. Why should whether or not loving somebody of the same gender is a choice even matter?

The following is a non-sequitor, since whether or not it's a choice is irrelevant.

Our most prestigious batteries of medical minds say it's not a choice. This is from the American Psychological Association in response to the question of whether or not homosexuality is optional:

No, human beings cannot choose to be either gay or straight. For most people, sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence without any prior sexual experience. Although we can choose whether to act on our feelings, psychologists do not consider sexual orientation to be a conscious choice that can be voluntarily changed.

All credible medical bodies are in concert with the APA on this subject. In order to part ways from them, you must have a good reason to deny the consensus of the experts. What is it?

Marriage is for the production of children.

Your idea of marriage may be. But, once more, you do not hold all the rights to the notion of marriage. Nobody is insisting that you must alter your particular set of tribalistic rules to accommodate groups you want to exclude, so nobody wishes to alter your concept of marriage. It is you who wants to forcibly exclude other ideas of marriage from their protection under the first amendment because those ideas do not mesh with yours. If you can do that, what prevents others from doing the same to you?

If marriage were for the production of children, we would have laws against impotent couples (which make up about 15% of marriages), we would take away children from single-parent homes, and we would make procreation requisite for marriage. We do none of the above. We tried to do so in 2007 with Washington Initiative 957. Initiative 957 or the "Defense of Marriage Act" would have required a couple to prove they were capable of having children in order to be married, and it would have annulled their marriage if they did not produce offspring within three years. The measure failed and rightly so - because marriage is not exclusively about producing children in the eyes of our country.

If you want your definition of marriage to be about producing and rearing kids, great. Nobody is saying you cannot do this. But to insist that others forsake their traditions, religious or otherwise, and abide by yours is tyrannical and wrong.

Even if it were about raising children, adoptions happen (many of the orphans coming from straight-marriage homes), and gay people are certainly capable of handling that responsibility. The American Medical Association, perhaps the most austere medical organization on Earth, supports gay people raising children:

Our AMA will support legislative and other efforts to allow the adoption of a child by the same-sex partner, or opposite sex non-married partner, who functions as a second parent or co-parent to that child.

The American Psychological Association follows suit:

Studies comparing groups of children raised by homosexual and by heterosexual parents find no developmental differences between the two groups of children in four critical areas: their intelligence, psychological adjustment, social adjustment, and popularity with friends. It is also important to realize that a parent's sexual orientation does not indicate their children's.

According to the Department of Human Services in my home state of Arkansas, on any given day there are about 3,700 children are in foster care with only about 1,100 foster homes ready to take them. So even if gay people cannot produce children (a fact that is irrelevant for the purpose of denying them marriage), they can still adopt and provide a child with a loving family they wouldn't have had otherwise.

If you are denying gay people familial rights that currently, in states like Arkansas, prevent them from adopting children, your policies are hurting children even as you pose as defenders of our progeny. If you are doing this, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The slippery slope argument.

The idea is that if we let gays get married we must also let polygamists get married. I have also heard other wretched comparisons used with this argument, like if we let consenting adult gays get married we must also let pedophiles marry their prey or let people marry animals.

This argument was also invoked by pious Christians leading up to the landmark 1967 decision to allow interracial marriage. If we let blacks marry whites, what next? The correct answer is, nothing. Each issue must be weighed on its individual merits and for fairness of its own account. If the slippery slope argument is to hold, what keeps us from slippery sloping in the other direction? What keeps the government from saying that you can't marry whomever you choose based on your income, or some other arbitrary measure?

In the case of gay marriage, you are not protecting anybody. These are consenting adults, who have found happiness in each other's arms. There is no harm. There is no danger. Why do we need to have laws against this? Who are we protecting by doing so?

The one-size fits all approach to marriage.

The idea here is that gay people have the same rights as straight people: they can marry somebody of the opposite gender. This is really just another way of saying that your particular idea of marriage (out of tens of thousands on Earth) should be the only one, and that people somehow have full rights because they can adhere to your sense of marital propriety.

That's just stupid.

Outro

This is a growing document, so I will be perpetually adding facts to it and addressing new arguments as they arise. If you have anything to contribute, please e-mail it to me at jteberhard@gmail.com or leave a comment.

All of us know what it is like to be discriminated against for one reason or another. If you would prevent that unpleasantness from being visited on perfectly normal and perfectly good people for no good reason whatsoever, speak out.

While life may not be fair, the unfairness does not have to come from us, as compassionate human beings. If you have a sense of justice, and want to wash your hands of unethical treatment of others, speak out.

If you want to be somebody who views us as a single race trying to share happiness on this rock we call Earth, rather than an agent of a balkanizing tribe, speak out.

In short, if you have empathy, and truly want to transcend the vagaries of our different cultures. to share yours and acknowledge others', you cannot sit silently on this issue - and you must not let any of the terrible arguments that allow people to ignore the well-being of others to advance.

I Am A Figher of H8

This Saturday, at 12:30pm Central time, people are rallying across the nation in protest to California's passage of Proposition 8. Proposition 8 banned same-sex marriage in the state that only month's before had begun to allow same-sex marriages. 18,000 same-sex couples had been married in the state when the Supreme Court's decision was overruled by that Prop 8.

So, we're speaking out. There are rallies all over the country. Specifically in Missouri, there are rallies in St. Louis, Kansas City, Cape Girardeau and here in Springfield. I urge you to attend one of these rallies.

I, along with others of the Juggernauts, are helping with the Springfield rally. We need all the support we can get. It is a peaceful protest, so leave your angry words and Fuck You signs at home. Please come and support equal rights for everyone.

I Am A Fighter of H8
Nationwide Rally Against Proposition 8
Saturday, Nov. 15
12:30pm
Park Central Square in downtown Springfield

For other rallies in other cities or states, visit this website.