sundries

[rm]

Wait, isn't this the plot of one of the Twilight books, but like, with sharks or something? via enegim.

I try, I really really try not to be anti-faith in general or specific around here. I'm not an atheist and I grew up with a lot of different faith traditions because of family wackiness. I have a huge variety of believers and non-believers of many different faiths on this friendslist and so-forth and so-on. Among other things, I have close LGBTQ friends who are also members of the Catholic Chruch and try to exist within and with their church is a way that reduces the harm some of the church's current doctrine causes. All of which means I generally don't post about anti-gay stuff from religious quarters -- it's not a surprise, and I don't really view it as my problem, until it injects itself into politics.

The D.C. Catholic Archdiocese has threatened to stop helping thousands of the needy in the nation's capital if the District's City Council approves a pending bill which states that marriage between 2 people in the District of Columbia shall not be denied or limited on the basis of gender, and which also ensure[s] that no minister of any religious society who is authorized to celebrate marriages shall be required to celebrate any marriage...or solemnization of a same-sex marriage.

This is not how we show compassion, ease suffering or let God do the judging.

Can I make a request? When we talk about models being too thin, or being photoshopped to look too thin (things we should be genuinely outraged/concerned about, I agree), can we stop saying they look like "concentration camp victims?" It makes me uncomfortable both as a Jewish and a queer person and as a person with a genetic disease that makes me very, very thin. If you think I look sickly, it's because I am sick.

So-and-so "needs a sandwich" talk sucks too. It's also worth remembering that eating disorders are illnesses, not personal moral failings (cultural culpability is another matter entirely); people with anorexia aren't bad people, they are people with anorexia.

So confronting skinny privilege/expectation? Good! Saying that a given level of skinniness looks sickly to you? Fine! Blithely making the Holocaust comparison or judging people who have various nutrient absorbtion diseases or eating disorders? Not cool.

Apparently there's going to be some weird Miracle Whip vs. Mayo thing on Stephen Colbert tonight? There were weird angry Miracle Whip ads about in the paper this morning. Patty hates mayo (and Miracle Whip) more than anything, but we'll be watching anyway.

Women with brain tumors more likely to wind up divorced. The numbers could mean a lot of different things, but few of them are good.

Malcolm X was bisexual? Seriously, I just got linked to this, I have no idea, I must sit and read. via i_amthecosmos. (Actually, the article is a bit crap in several ways, delineated in comments below).

Megan Fox and the construction of celebrity. I don't think she's that sly, but the topic is always of interest (celebrity construction, not Megan Fox).

In New York, we all look in each other's windows.

“He would sew in the dark every night, except for a small desk light. His hands would flutter up like a moth to the light,” she said. “I found the image so lonely and sad, but somehow soothing. Maybe because I was lonely, too. It gave me comfort.”

Look, I just pass this shit along. ALSO, WHO IN INDIA TOLD TONY HELLO FROM THE TORCHWOOD LESBIANS? FESS UP!

There's a word for one of the strange things ConSweet is playing with via Io Station! Defictionalization! I probably should have already known this. via tod_hollykim.

OMG, I just had this conversation with Sprint. I feel sorta bad about it:
Me: "I'm going abroad in a couple of days and want to know if my phone will work."
Them: "Will you be leaving the country?"
Me: "That's what abroad means."

Zurich progress:
- I've called my bank
- I've rented a mobile for there
- I'll do all cat-related errands tonight
- this just leaves currency exchange and packing tomorrow
- I also, unrelatedly, but hey important phone calls, played more phone tag with the headshot guy.

Comments

[eumelia.livejournal.com]

can we stop saying they look like "concentration camp victims?" It makes me uncomfortable both as a Jewish and queer person
Word.

This is the first article about Malcom X's bisexuality (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2005/may/19/gayrights.usa).

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Kewl! (re: Malcolm X, that is. And agreed re: "concentration camp victims". Besides, some of the 'shopped thinness on fashion photos just results in their looking like dolls, or aliens: another piece of evidence of humanity being conditioned to value the 'inhuman'.)

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

Also, can we stop calling every conflict where people of different backgrounds are involved a Holocaust. And people we don't agree with are not automatically Nazis.

I've been very underweight (also due to a medical condition) as well as somewhat overweight and found the comments about weight were much worse when I was heavy. Just my experience.

[toujours-nigel.livejournal.com]

re: Tony Lee, omg, did someone? he was at my uni today, and i might have asked someone to pass it along, but i didn't know she would. O_o

ETA: yes, she did. it was fireshowers

[rm.livejournal.com]

AHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHHAAHA.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

zomg, I was right, our spies truly are everywhere!

[silmaril.livejournal.com]

The D.C. Catholic Archdiocese has threatened to stop helping thousands of the needy in the nation's capital if the District's City Council approves a pending bill...

Wow, that is... wow. Like, seriously, wow. I can't even begin to comprehend the dimensions of the "Wow."

In what bizarro-world is blackmail and holding the needy as hostages even remotely ethical, moral, or all of them things that are supposed to spring from God?

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't describe it quite as you did. Traditionally, religious organizations get a pass on anti-discrimination legislation because a law saying that a Catholic school has to hire teh gay would infringe on the separation of church and state. It would seem that this time either there isn't an exemption or they are deliberately misreading the bill. (Sadly, I've lost the ability to assume that the opponents of progress are arguing in good faith.) So it's not that Catholic Charities would take their ball and go home so much as they would be given a mandate that they could not conscientiously accept and would therefore be unable to operate in D.C.

The whole threat is sort of a crock anyway, IMHO, since the church would get an injunction and spend ten years dragging the law through the courts before they would voluntarily shutting down. And maybe it is about time that we started experimenting with whether we can dispense charity as a society without so much of the reactionary morality.

[5251962.livejournal.com]

Ya know..I heard some crazy guy on the radio last road trip I was on- I don't ordinarily listen to conservative radio, but I was flipping through channels trying to find good driving music when I heard, And Malcom X, how can they say he was a hero? He was a gay prostitute!
And I went, "WHAT?!" Apparently, this guy Jonathan Leaf was on a Christian talk show, discussing his new book or something. I listened for a minute until they had a caller call in who screeched about how Martin Luther King Jr. held "wild, perverse sexy orgies!" and then I had to switch. But yeah, I've heard the Malcom X thing before, I just heard it in a really shitty way. XP

Also, if you are interested- Ed Reggi is organizing a protest of the Saint Louis Archdiocesan, which I know- not in your area, but, this is because of this:
http://www.stltoday.com/blogzone/civil-religion/catholic/2009/11/carlson-gave-cash-from-archdioceses-special-needs-fund-to-fight-gay-marriage-in-maine/

One wonders how they still keep their tax exempt status.

[fruitsgrow.livejournal.com]

re: models

Ugh, thank you. You can say "she looks too thin," and it be enough; you really don't have to be insensitive on top of it.

[tod-hollykim.livejournal.com]

LOL! Oh, so you read that already? Yeah, it's weird when stuff from fiction of one form or another makes it into the real world.

[annlarimer.livejournal.com]

I don't think that objecting to the DC Archdiocese's statement is anti-faith. It's anti-evil. Which, normally, should be the Archdiocese's job.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

Saying that a given level of skinniness looks sickly to you? Fine!

I am inclined to disagree, as that sounds like ableist language. I don't so much mind someone having aesthetic standards based around body shape, but there is an important distinction between speaking actively about _your_ standards and speaking passively about _her_ shape. Saying that someone looks sickly is as misguided as saying that they sound insane; if you're not qualified to make a medical diagnosis then choose your words with more care.

[rm.livejournal.com]

That's fair. I'm mostly trying to say "I get that I have skinny privilege, so complaining about people being mean to me about it isn't really that important, but...." and I'm still working out how to phrase that.

[kindkit.livejournal.com]

I'd love to believe that Malcolm X was bisexual, but I find Peter Tatchell's evidence, derived from a single 1991 biography, wildly unconvincing. Sex work says nothing about a person's orientation, and "there were other ways he could have earned money" is just as creepy applied to a male prostitute as when applied (generally in a victim-blaming way) to a female one.

It's also deeply weird to see a gay rights campaigner like Tatchell cheerfully reproducing old Freudian chestnuts about how men become gay:

After the death of his father, when Malcolm was six, he lacked male role models and was dominated by strong women - in particular, his tyrannical mother. He feared women and his early sexual experiences with girls were mostly unsatisfactory.

The last time I saw that kind of argument, it was coming from Christian "therapists" who claimed they could cure homosexuality. Surely Tatchell knows better.

While I'm absolutely in sympathy with what I gather is his political purpose--correcting the invisibility of black lesbian, gay, and bisexual people--he's going about it in a problematic and not very helpful way.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Ditto. This comment covers everything I was gonna say.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Me: "I'm going abroad in a couple of days and want to know if my phone will work."
Them: "Will you be leaving the country?"
Me: "That's what abroad means."

I love this. I think we should redefine Abroad to mean ADVENTURING INTO THE COUNTRYSIDE. It conjures images of people striding along the highways and byways of the country, clad in sturdy boots and corduroy trousers, carrying a dollar in their pocket and a knapsack on their back, a song in their hears and a smile on their face.

"Where are you going?" "I don't know! ABROAD."

[coraa.livejournal.com]

So confronting skinny privilege/expectation? Good! Saying that a given level of skinniness looks sickly to you? Fine! Blithely making the Holocaust comparison or judging people who have various nutrient absorbtion diseases or eating disorders? Not cool.

Word.

I'd also like to do away with 'she looks prepubescent'/'she looks like a twelve-year-old boy'/'real women are curvy.' Not so much because they're unfair to think people -- I do realize that it's thin people that are privileged in our society -- but because policing what a 'real' adult woman is or is not like strikes me as pretty awful. There's enough awful policing of gender normativity standards as it is.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I complain about the "real woman/man thing A LOT.

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

Seems to me that the Catholic Church would be better served by cleaning up their own act in regards to child rape than by denying rights to loving adults who want to be together.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

This.

[tsarina.livejournal.com]

The Church really breaks my heart some days. I keep wanting to go to Mass for my own reasons but then I don't because I read stuff like that and wonder what the hell for. That's such a nasty disappointing reaction and so utterly anti-Catholic, that sometimes I wonder if everyone has been replaced by pod people from outer space.

[fireshowers.livejournal.com]

*takes a bow* thank you, good ladies. always glad to pass on a word.

[laughingacademy.livejournal.com]

Re: the D.C. archdiocese, so much for "love the sinner, hate the sin."

Thanks so much for linking to the defictionalization article. My favorite part:

...Murray Leinster's prescient short story A Logic Named Joe...describes a networked computer system in homes across the country that allows people to learn how to cheat on taxes, find hangover cures, kill their spouse using hard to trace household chemicals, and most of all allows young children to discover porn. He not only predicted the internet, but he predicted internet porn and the sinister uses people have for Google. In March of 1946. [emphasis mine]

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

...zomg. I wonder if said short story is in print somewhere?

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

The D.C. Catholic Archdiocese has threatened to stop helping thousands of the needy in the nation's capital if the District's City Council approves a pending bill which states that marriage between 2 people in the District of Columbia shall not be denied or limited on the basis of gender, and which also ensure[s] that no minister of any religious society who is authorized to celebrate marriages shall be required to celebrate any marriage...or solemnization of a same-sex marriage.

That's not only counter to absolutely anything I was ever taught back in the day when I was Catholic (and in a really conservative, Opus Dei-run school), it begs the question wtf they think the problem is specific to DC. Because Catholic Charities is still alive and well here in CT, and we've been doing same-sex marriage here for a year as of today. I've yet to hear of them having any issues around benefits for same-sex spouses, though I don't know whether that's because it just hasn't come up yet or whether it's because they have some sort of exemption or what. There certainly haven't been any noises about them pulling up stakes to RI or something. So yeah, not only bigotted and unethical but also bizarre.

[sociallyawkrd.livejournal.com]

I had the exact same conversation with Verizon when I went to China this summer.

When did people stop understanding what abroad means?

[aviv-b.livejournal.com]

I had to let you know that something interesting happened concerning gay rights in Utah yesterday:

http://www.detnews.com/article/20091112/NATION/911120406/1020/rss09

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

My own informal data and some studies I've seen both agree that people who become seriously ill or disabled are also likely to start losing their support network; partners, family, friends. The number of folks I know who lost a husband or boyfriend because he "couldn't cope" with their illness is pretty horrifying. Not least because this leaves most of these sick women with nobody to care for them. Others are stuck in semi-abusive conditions with caretakers who belittle their illness or don't really take care of them at all, but have no way of escaping the situation.

And the suicide rate among the disabled is much higher than it is among the healthy.

So with you on the skinnybashing. I had crappy self-confidence for years because of being teased about my boniness. Skinny people are just as victimized by messed-up societal ideals, but some fat activists think it's okay to hate on them. Not okay.

[delchi.livejournal.com]

I think the crux of this is that people who have been hated on, for whatever reason ( skinny, fat, tall, short etc ), tend to hate back rather than finding a way to deal with it. It's just easier. I know that's the first thing I did before getting told where I was going wrong. I still find myself sliding down that path sometimes.

[i-amthecosmos.livejournal.com]

Sorry that original source turned out to be so bad! I think that guy's general editorial about the straightwashing of Black History was really interesting, but everyone here is right. The source material is dubious at best. Hustling doesn't make one gay or bi after all. So I put that in the "maybe" box.

[jackolantern.livejournal.com]

When I was in the choir of the cathedral for the diocese where I used to live, there were 2-3 gay or lesbian couples in the choir at any given time. I also suspect that the nun who ran the choir was partners with another nun, and there was also a very popular priest who was suddenly "encouraged" to join a monastic order away from the parish, for reasons that even his friends were reluctant to talk about. Wonder what they think of this.