Then the first alarm goes off. Continue reading I’m not a morning person
Monthly Archives: March 2014
A den of thieves
The church emphatically denied everything, calling the allegations ridiculous. Doing such a thing was antithetical to their mission.
The original accusation was soon corroborated when someone got hold of the contract (which outlined the procedure) from a particular marketing firm that does this on a regular basis for religious books. And more evidence began piling up, including allegations of crates of the book gathering dust in church storage rooms, and so forth.
And then, suddenly, the church admitted it:
While not uncommon or illegal, this unwise strategy is not one we had used before or since, and not one we will use again. The true cost of this endeavor was much less than what has been reported, and to be clear, all of the books purchased through this campaign have been given away or sold through normal channels. All monies from the sale of Pastor Mark’s books at Mars Hill bookstores have always gone to the church and Pastor Mark did not profit from the Real Marriage books sold either at the church or through the Result Source marketing campaign.
In other words, having insisting that they would never do such a dishonest and immoral thing, when they admit they did do it their excuses are that everyone else does it, it isn’t technically illegal, they are never going to do it again, the “true cost” isn’t as much as people say, and they gave the books away, so no harm. Oh, and the pastor didn’t profit from this unwise thing they did which they had swore up and down they had never done.
At a later point the statement commends the pastor for enduring these false accusations with grace. Except, of course, that they are totally not false.
This pastor has demonstrated, again and again, that he is one of the world’s biggest attention whores. So whether he actually made any money from it was never the point. The point was to be able to brag that he was a New York Times Bestseller writer… which (until now) had been plastered all over the church web pages, his personal web page, his twitter profile, on every single press release the church had issued since it happened, on posters for their various conferences and seminars, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Over the weekend a non-apology letter has surfaced, where he spends a lot of time explaining how the pressures of trying to fulfill the mission that god has repeatedly called him to do forced him to do things he’s not proud of. He never says what any of those things are, though he did say things like, “my angry prophet days are over” and “I must learn to be humble.”
It’s hard to take the humble comment, or the apology, seriously when every other sentence is some kind of bragging about his calling from god, what a humble man he is, how he doesn’t deserve all the talent that god has given him, and so on.
Besides the blatant contradiction between first claiming that they never paid to manipulate a bestseller listing, then admitting they did it, they’ve lied many times before. I wrote before about their press release that (while equating all gay people with people living with AIDS) lied about working with the Lifelong AIDS Alliance. They issued several clarifications that just compounded the lie as the Alliance denied any relationship. No one from the church even called the Alliance to get basic volunteering information until after about the third clarification statement.
Pastor Mark has made too many misogynist and anti-gay sermons over the years to list, though I am particularly fond of both his sermon that compared wives to waterboarding, as well as the times he explained that his wife has to ask his permission if she wants to get her hair cut. Besides the dozens of times he’s made fun of, mocked, and otherwise denigrated effeminate men, there’s also his famous assertion that masturbation is clearly an act of homosexual sin.
And let’s not forget that several Christian news sites and scholars have been slowly demonstrating that large proportions of all of the pastor’s books are plagiarized from other, more obscure, Christian authors.
Driscoll commands a megachurch, which is a bunch of large congregations that meet in several locations around the region. His congregation tends to be younger and more well educated than the typical evangelical crowd. I’ve never really understood the appeal, particularly since he is so transparently egotistic. I understand why he, and the other leaders keep doing what they’re doing. Jesus himself had something to say about people like them:
“And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the money changers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said to them, ‘It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but you have made it a den of thieves.'” — Matthew 21:12-13
As ye sow…
All of the reports point back to the same announcement on Facebook from one of Phelps’ sons, Nate (who fled the cult at 18 years old back in 1976, has since come out as atheist, and has spent many of the last decades working in favor of LGBT rights). A few people have called Nate and other excommunicated family members to confirm a few facts: the senior Phelps was excommunicated from his own cult last August, and he’s currently a patient at the Midland Hospice Center in Topeka.
Continue reading As ye sow…
You wanna talk about blarney?
The troublesome question has been ever since then, why do non-irish and non-catholic elected officials march in a religious processional? And more importantly, why are police and firefighters allowed to march in uniform?
The last point is particularly important. It has long been the consensus opinion (and has even been accepted as a statement of fact at the federal appeals court level), that allowing the police to participate in uniform in a discriminatory rally or parade gives ordinary citizens the impression that the police department (and the entire justice system) endorses the bigoted message of said event. When police participated in Anti-segregationist Marches in the past, it had a chilling effect on the minority communities. People in those communities became even more reluctant to call the police to report crimes, afraid to cooperate with police in the investigation of crimes, et cetera. All one has to do is to watch the video of nearly an entire contingent of cops in uniform marching in the St. Patrick’s day parade a few years ago all flipping off a small group of gay protestors standing along the parade route to understand what kind of message that conveys.
The new mayor of NYC decided not to march in this year’s parade (as did the mayor of Boston). The NYC mayor instead participated in the St Pat’s For All parade earlier in the month. Note, that article mentions a deal that was being worked out for one gay group to march in the Boston parade, but that deal has since been rescinded.
The mayor has declined to try to forbid NYPD officers from marching in uniform in the bigots’ parade, claiming it is a free speech issue. Except, the courts ruled long ago that because marching in uniform creates the impression that the city endorses a discriminatory message, that the city’s responsibility to serve all citizens equally trumps the rights of the cops. They can’t forbid the cops to march, they can’t forbid the cops to march with banners and signs that say they are cops, but they can forbid them to march in uniform.
The sad thing is that, since gay rights groups have been lobbying these city governments to ban the uniforms from the parade, parade organizers and their apologists have squawked loudly, claiming that doing so would be discrimination!
This coming from the people who created new religious non-profit corporations to sponsor the parade for the explicitly stated purpose to discriminate. It’s all well and good to discriminate against gay citizens, but Saints Preserve us if you suggest that maybe the police department shouldn’t endorse such a thing…
Fears of a white homo devil
Continue reading Fears of a white homo devil
Friday Links with the Best Gay Possible
All 7 of Texas’ openly LGBT congressional, state legislative candidates win primaries.
Scientist Scan Brain of Woman Who Claims Out of Body Experiences While She Has It. And prove why the delusion feels so real.
Hal Douglas, 89, Superstar of Movie Trailer Narrators, Dies. In a world without Hal Douglas… how do they make movie trailers?
White Man March Coming To NYC To Fight “Anti-White Agenda”. One newsblogger from New York says that last time this group tried this, it wound up being two guys with badly made signs.
The 17 Equations That Changed the Course of History. Somewhat misleading title. Yes, they show an important logarithmic equation, but then what they talk about changing the world is the entire concept logarithms. Similarly with Calculus…
Clues to Genghis Khan’s rise, written in the rings of ancient trees.
I didn’t come from no monkey, updated.
Diamond Traps Rare Mineral, Brings to the Surface Tantalizing Clues from the Deep.
Dozens of Insect Species Living Only On Two Types of Flower.
Darren Hayes: ‘Come out. In your own time.’.
In One Sentence, Michele Bachmann Proves How Ignorant Republicans are about the Constitution.
Study: Police see black children as less innocent and less young than white children.
CALIFORNIA PUSHES TO FINISH DRIVERLESS CAR RULES.
VLT Spots Largest Yellow Hypergiant Star.
Tea Party Activists Aren’t Gearing Up For 2016 — They Want To Refight 1964.
Twins tell story of coming out to each other (yes, a repost from yesterday):
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
The dance of the strategically placed towels:
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
Bright Light Bright Light & Elton John – “I Wish We Were Leaving” :
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here.)
The ever fabulous Pet Shop Boys have created a lovely dance track from the “Noble Call” speech by Irish drag performer, Panti Bliss. It’s a lovely song, includes the whole speech, and yes, you can dance to it:
(If embedding doesn’t work, click here — And it’s available on iTunes here!)
Confessions of a re-blogger
Occasionally the place I got the image from is a tweet or other re-blog that doesn’t have the original source. When that happens, I try to track down the source with Google Image Search, but some images have been re-blogged so many times, the original source doesn’t come up in the search. Then I try to the read the EXIF data from the image, but often there’s nothing useful there, either because it’s been stripped out along the way, or in the case of web comic images and the like, it was never there.
But, often I go ahead and use the image. I rationalize that I’m not profiting from it and that I’ve done due diligence trying to locate the source to give credit. But it’s a rationalization. Should I feel guilty about that?
Probably. And maybe I should start going the ultra-scrupulous route: don’t post it if I can’t find the source and link back to it. I’ve certainly ranted enough about people using the excuse the “everyone else is doing it” in the past. There’s such a rant about a recent news story sitting in my draft queue right now. I had been looking for a good “hypocrite” image, and had found a great one (much more interesting that the Shutterstock image above), but couldn’t find the original source to give credit.
Then I got an email from someone wanting permission to use an image I’d used in a post months ago. I had to explain that I’d found the image on iLounge, and so didn’t have the right to give permission, because it wasn’t my image.
Even though that image did have the URL for the source of the image, the URL is in the ALT tag, and most people don’t even know how to view that. So, even when I am pointing to the source, most people don’t realize it.
What to do… what to do?
Confessions of a white homo devil, part 2
It would be easy to just dismiss this as more crazy talk, or a sad cry for attention, but I have to agree with radio host, Elon James White, that dismissing this delusional and divisive rhetoric as “crazy” makes us forget that it’s also dangerous… Continue reading Confessions of a white homo devil, part 2
Lost in time
Telling…
It was a struggle writing those scenes. I was literally crying while writing one. I’ve opined many times before that in order to write a character convincingly, there’s a part of you that has to believe the character is real. There’s some neuroscience to indicate that the part of our brain from which emotions and gut reactions originate literally cannot tell the difference between real people we know, and ficticious characters we become attached to. So it made sense, when (for plot purposes) some of my non-villain characters needed to die, that it would be upsetting.
In wrapping up the plot, some of the bad guys need to make a similar exit, and I find myself just as conflicted about writing those scenes. Again, it makes sense in that, in order to make them interesting characters, I have to see them as well-rounded people. They aren’t just bad for badness sake—they have reasons they believe that what they’re doing is justified.
But I can also see that it’s not just that I empathize with them. There is more than one kind of finality, here. Once I finish them off, once I complete this conflict and move to the denouement, there’s no turning back. Oh, yes, as the author, so long as the book hasn’t been published, I can go back and change things to go a completely different way. If I really want to, I can comepletely rewrite the entire book.
But… Once I actually write the scene, it’s harder. If the scene works, if it feels real as I write it, I’ve committed to this sequence of events as a viable way for the story to unfold. I can revise it, yes, but there will always be part of me that knows it could have gone this way. And unless an alternate scene that I think of gets written, and unless it feels as solid when I write it, the first version way will seem like the more likely option, the more real option.
At least as real as a fictional narrative can get.
So, as much as part of me is reluctant to kill off these next five characters slated for a big defeat, there is another part of me that’s just as reluctant to commit. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” a voice whispers from my subconscious. “There’s still time to go another way.”
The problem is, if I give in to this impulse for too long, it will become even more tempting to go back and undo a few things. “Why does that innocent character have to die?” The voice will ask. “Why does any of this have to happen?”
On one level, it’s my story and I can change anything I want.
On a completely different level, I’m its author, and it deserves to be told the best it can be. It’s fiction, but all fiction is about making sense of the world, of finding meaning in events big or small, profound or mundane, pleasant or unpleasant.
Contrary to what some will tell you, a fiction writer’s job is not to lie. A writer’s job is to tell the truth. And to tell it the best we can at the time.
So, I have to stop equivocating, stop spinning excuses for avoiding the tough part, and I need to tell this story, this discovery, this truth.
Font Folly 