Minton

Jean-Francois Millet, French

The Sesame Street Strangler Hiding Snuffalupagus' Body, 1852

Oil on canvas

Laurent de La Hyre, French

Spotters Helping Jesus With His Double Front Handspring Into a Roundoff, 1629

Oil on canvas

Some weekend inspiration for you.

View

Because when everyone hangs out somewhere, those awkward conversations—just like the ones you end up having in the middle of Walmart when you bump into someone you barely know—are inevitable.

Read more...

Some people gobble up algebra and calculus like their life depended on it; others would rather poke pins into their eyes than solve a simultaneous equation. But why is that?

Read more...

Jarad Dewing comments on the whiskey (and whiskey cocktail) suggestions of a well-known Las Vegas casino.

This infographic comes courtesy of Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas, sent specially to me to share with all of you because I suppose they wanted free publicity. Nonetheless – it’s pretty and it’s interesting.

Two out of the three drinks they list as for The Manly Man contain maraschino cherries. I’m sure this is just a matter of personal taste, but I never want fruit in my drink unless it’s muddled to an unrecognizable state of pulp. Like I said, that’s just me. Ten dollars (because that’s just how much I happen to have on me, and probably how much this drink would cost in a large city) says that the “Old-Fashioned” was included simply because of Mad Men recognition.

Kudos for recognizing that women like whiskey. The women I knew who drank straight Scotch tended to scream “Take off your pants!” at whatever band was playing, but then again they were mostly crazy to begin with and perhaps the whiskey had nothing to do with it. That “Kiss On The Lips” looks pretty damn good to me (minus the cherry, obviously) because I love apricots and whiskey and kissing.

Apparently there is such a thing as “sausage-infused whiskey.” I… I don’t even know how that would work. Throw some raw pork and fennel in the still and hope for the best? If by “adventurous,” you mean “you could end up in the ER pooping yourself to death,” then I guess that’s a marketing strategy? I do, however, love that there’s absolutely no reference to the skewer in that “Forty Creek Caesar,” clearly impaled with shrimp and steak and what could possibly be a dried apricot. That’s a meal in a glass, folks.

I’m going to skip the Youngster section because I am old and also those are terrible drinks. There is no good reason to do an “Irish Car Bomb,” not even on Saint Patrick’s Day, which every true drinker knows is Amateur Hour. You will end up breaking your foot on a swingset in a total stranger’s yard, three miles from home, and hobbling back to your dingy apartment because you shouldn’t drive and you can’t walk on the sidewalks either because you might sway into cars and errgghhhh this ditch is wet and cold and cattails keep swiping you in the face. Lesson learned, kiddos.

Palm’s Signature Drinks are a bit beyond my ken, except to say that Jim Beam’s “Devil’s Cut Bourbon” is exactly what it claims to be – a hellishly delightful shot of Americana that oddly makes me want to play the fiddle. Looking at the ingredients, I’d personally replace the mint with fried rosemary. Again, just me.

Luckily for the Palms, their seasonal drinks are a helluva lot more spot-on than their gender-binary concoctions. Juleps and mulled cocktails are essentially foolproof. Eggnog’s a no-brainer. But this raises the question – why is it so easy to formulate delicious libations based on seasons, but not on gender? Could it be that seasons, quarters of the year in which we expect to find particular climates but often are surprised by the variations, are more reliable than gender?

What are your favorite whiskeys or whiskey drinks? How do you feel about classifying cocktails as Manly or Girly? Drinks for thought, my luscious lushes. Leave ‘em in the comments.

Photo via libraryrachel/flickr

Determining who is and is not a Real Man can be confusing. Thankfully, Erin Judge has a handy chart.

-

Once again, the question of what real men should do and how it’s up to men to redefine manhood is all over the media. It seems odd to me that every side of every issue attempts to claim “real men” as devotees. You know what I mean. “Real men love guns” vs. “real men don’t need guns to prove they’re real men.” And so on.

Just to clear up the confusion, I’ve made this handy flow chart to help you figure out if a person is a real man.

And that’s pretty much the long and short of it.

Now, whether or not you are a real man, if the question you have is about how you should behave, try going with this: be a good person and respect your fellow humans.

It’s basic golden rule stuff, ladies and gentlemen and the rest of us.

Now let’s all human up and be folks.

 

-

Originally appeared at so make it up

Lead photo:  Darin House

Just before Christmas, Ross Douthat wrote a column (NYT) wondering how scientific materialism and its account of “a purely physical and purposeless universe” could provide the basis for liberal egalitarianism. Jerry Coyne took the bait:

I’m not sure what Douthat means when he says “cosmology does not harmonize at all” with the moral picture of secularism. Cosmology doesn’t give one iota of evidence for a purpose (it could!) or for God. Most of the universe is cold, bleak, airless, and uninhabitable. In fact, such a cosmology harmonizes far better with a secular moral picture than a religious one. Secularists see a universe without apparent purpose and realize that we must forge our own purposes and ethics, not derive them from a God for which there’s no evidence.

Yes, secularism does propose a physical and purposeless universe, and many (but not all) of us accept the notion that our sense of self is a neuronal illusion. But although the universe is purposeless, our lives aren’t. This conflation of a purposeless universe (i.e., one not created by a transcendent being for a specific reason) with purposeless human lives is a trick that the faithful use to make atheism seem dark and nihilistic. But we make our own purposes, and they’re real.

Douthat counters by noting that “if the only real thing is matter in motion, and the only legitimate method of discernment the scientific method, you’ll never get to an absolute ‘thou shalt not murder’  (or “thou shalt risk your life on behalf of your Jewish neighbor”)”:

I don’t think those of us who still embrace the traditional Western idea of God are crazy to suggest that our cosmology has at least a surface compatibility with moral realism that the materialist conception of the universe’s (nonexistent) purposes seems to lack.

So if you’re going to defend both materialism and modern rights-based liberalism, you have to actually address this point head-on. Make a case for a more limited, non-metaphysical form of moral realism, make a more thoroughgoing attempt to discern some sort of moral teleology in the Darwinian story (though of course Coyne has denounced efforts along these lines as “creationism for liberals”), go full relativist and make a purely aesthetic case for cosmopolitanism, I don’t care what — but give me something that doesn’t either beg the question (“we should help people because it helps people!”) or pretend that there are actually solid selfish reasons for the most costly, heroic, and plainly self-sacrificial forms of non-self-interested behavior.

Coyne goes another round:

I’ve often said that I don’t know how much of human morality comes from natural selection’s instilling in us certain behaviors and feelings, and how much is due to reason. But I am virtually certain that none of it is due to God.

I want to live in a world where people are treated fairly and in which, were I  disadvantaged, people would try to help me. For it is only an accident of biology and history that has made me better off than others. I want to live in a world where people promote the well-being of our fellows. That is what I see as “moral” behavior. This kind of morality is justified by its results, but one thing it is not is circular. (Indeed, it is Douthat’s morality that is circular, for it ultimately rests on what he thinks God wants, and unless Douthat can further justify why God wants such behavior, that’s the end of the road.) Like all nonreligious brands of morality, mine comes down to a justified preference: a judgment call.

But it’s better to make a judgment call based on science, observation, and reason than on the dictates of an imaginary being.

Millman steps in and examines Douthat’s original question:

[W]hy be moral? If the universe has no point, and human beings are not here for a reason, why not be a hedonist? Or worse – a sociopath?

I’m always mystified by this question from theists. Douthat complains that Coyne’s argument is circular: “If my question is ‘what’s the justification for your rights-based egalitarianism?’ saying, ‘because it’s egalitarian!’ is not much of an answer.” But his own argument is equally circular: secular liberalism is “unjustified” because it lacks a foundation in belief in God, but a belief in God is “justified” because without it you don’t have a foundation for morality! I don’t know about Douthat, but I suspect that, at least some of the time, what I’m really hearing with this kind of argument is a species of Straussianism. To whit: yes, I know, and you know, that there isn’t really any arguing with a cold and empty cosmos. But most people can’t handle that kind of truth; they need to believe that there’s an objective meaning to their lives. So, for the sake of the greater good, we have to affirm publicly that there is such a thing, that God is the foundation of morality. I’ve always suspected that Strauss would have got on just fine with the Grand Inquisitor; in any event I’ve never liked this line of argument.

Damon Linker praises David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God for dismantling the New Atheist view of God as merely “the biggest, most powerful object or thing in, or perhaps alongside, the universe”:

Scientists are heroically proficient at detecting the laws that govern the natural world. They interrogate phenomena, trace effects back to their contingent causes, and then those causes back to even prior causes, developing and testing theories that seek to explain the temporal sequence. In the case of cosmology, that sequence extends all the way back to origins of the universe — to the first contingent cause of every subsequent cause over the past 13.82 billion years or so.

God concerns something else entirely. He is certainly not one of the many contingent causes within the natural world. But neither is he the first contingent cause, setting off the Big Bang from some blast-resistant fallout shelter lodged, somehow, outside of and prior to the universe as we know it.

On the contrary, according to the classical metaphysical traditions of both the East and West, God is the unconditioned cause of reality — of absolutely everything that is — from the beginning to the end of time. Understood in this way, one can’t even say that God “exists” in the sense that my car or Mount Everest or electrons exist. God is what grounds the existence of every contingent thing, making it possible, sustaining it through time, unifying it, giving it actuality. God is the condition of the possibility of anything existing at all.

He goes on to note Hart’s provocative argument “that faith in this classical notion of God can never be ‘wholly and coherently rejected’”:

The deeper reason why theism can’t be rejected, according to Hart, is that every pursuit of truth, every attempt to be good, every longing for beauty presupposes the existence of some idea of truth, goodness, and beauty from which these particular instances are derived. And these transcendental ideas unite in the classical concept of God, who simply is truth, goodness, and beauty. That’s why, although it isn’t necessary to believe in God in some explicit way in order to be good, it certainly is the case (in Hart’s words) “that to seek the good is already to believe in God, whether one wishes to do so or not.”

In a recent interview, Hart also expressed his scorn for the way Intelligent Design enthusiasts understand God:

My real problem with the movement is the disastrously silly picture of the universe and God that one finds lurking between the lines or in the last chapters of their books.  ID theorists merely repeat the mechanistic narrative about physical reality and then reinsert an intelligent designer—a deist God—into the picture, one whose role is little more than that of a discrete causal agency among others, making periodic interventions in a reality outside himself.  But such a God could be removed from the picture again just as easily, by the rise of another scientific paradigm, and (more to the point) such a God is not the fullness of being that classical theism sees as the logically necessary source and ground and end of all finite things.

Previous Dish on Hart’s work here.

When I was 8 or 9, I was very briefly kidnapped by well-meaning lunatics. My younger sister and I were exploring the FIBArk (First in Boating the Arkansas) Festival in Salida, Colo., when we were lured by the promise of candy into a small trailer with a number of other children. It turned out that in order to get the candy we had to suffer through a short film on Jesus, which, as I recall, depicted with graphic horror the torments that await the unsaved in the next world. After the film, a clean-cut young pastor and four or five of his flock delivered some bromides. Finally the pastor said, “Before you leave, let me ask you a question. Is there anyone here who has not accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior? Raise your hand if you haven’t been saved.”

I have to say I’m befuddled by the firing of Phil Robertson, he of the amazing paterfamilias beard on Duck Dynasty (which I mainly see via The Soup). A&E has a reality show that depends on the hoariest stereotypes – and yet features hilariously captivating human beings – located in the deep South. It’s a show riddled with humor and charm and redneck silliness. The point of it, so far as I can tell, is a kind of celebration of a culture where duck hunting is the primary religion, but where fundamentalist Christianity is also completely pervasive. (Too pervasive for the producers, apparently, because they edited out the saying of grace to make it non-denominational and actually edited in fake beeps to make it seem like the bearded clan swore a lot, even though they don’t.)

Now I seriously don’t know what A&E were expecting when the patriarch Phil Robertson was interviewed by GQ. But surely the same set of expectations that one might have of an ostensibly liberal host of a political show would not be extended to someone whose political incorrectness was the whole point of his stardom. He’s a reality show character, for Pete’s sake. Not an A&E spokesman. So here’s what he said – which has now led to his indefinite suspension (but he’ll be in the fourth season, apparently, which has already wrapped):

“Everything is blurred on what’s right and what’s wrong … Sin becomes fine. Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men … “Don’t be deceived. Neither the adulterers, the idolaters, the male prostitutes, the homosexual offenders, the greedy, the drunkards, the slanderers, the swindlers—they won’t inherit the kingdom of God. Don’t deceive yourself. It’s not right … “

This is a fascinating glimpse into the fundamentalist mind. You’ll notice that, for the fundamentalist, all sin – when it comes down to it -  starts with sex. This sexual obsession, as the Pope has rightly diagnosed it, is a mark of neurotic fundamentalism in Islam and Judaism as well as Christianity. And if all sin is rooted in sex, then the homosexual becomes the most depraved and evil individual in the cosmos. So you get this classic statement about sin: “Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there.”

This emphasis is absolutely not orthodox Christianity. There is nothing primary about sexual sin as such in Christian doctrine. It sure can be powerfully sinful – but it’s not where sin starts. And to posit gay people as the true source of all moral corruption is to use eliminationist rhetoric and demonizing logic to soften up a small minority of people for exclusion, marginalization and, at some point, violence.

If you think I’m hyperventilating, ask yourself what the response would be if in talking about sin, Phil Robertson had said, “Start with Jewish behavior …” The argument would be totally recognizable, once very widespread, and deeply disturbing. What we’re seeing here – and it’s very much worth debating – is how fundamentalist religion seizes on recognizable, immoral minorities to shore up its own sense of righteousness. You can gussy it up – but it’s right there in front of our nose.

Then Robertson says something that tells us nothing except he has never had an honest conversation with a gay person about what it is to be gay.

He simply assumes that all men must be heterosexual, and that making themselves have sex with another man must be so horrifying it mystifies him:

“It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.”

No, it isn’t logical if it were a choice for a straight guy. But it isn’t. All we’re seeing here is the effect of cultural isolation. The only thing I find objectionable about it – and it is objectionable – is the reduction of gay people and our relationships to sex acts. Mr Robertson would not be happy – indeed, rightly be extremely offended – if I reduced his entire family life and marriage to sex with a vagina.

But look: I come back to what I said at the beginning. Robertson is a character in a reality show. He’s not a spokesman for A&E any more than some soul-sucking social x-ray from the Real Housewives series is a spokeswoman for Bravo. Is he being fired for being out of character? Nah. He’s being fired for staying in character – a character A&E have nurtured and promoted and benefited from. Turning around and demanding a Duck Dynasty star suddenly become the equivalent of a Rachel Maddow guest is preposterous and unfair.

What Phil Robertson has given A&E is a dose of redneck reality. Why on earth would they fire him for giving some more?

(Photo: Phil Robertson of ‘Duck Dynasty’ as a guest on ‘Good Morning America,’ 5/7/13, airing on the ABC Television Network. By Fred Lee/ABC via Getty Images.)

Theodore Dalrymple argues that addiction isn’t a disease:

To take only one point among many: most addicts who give up do so without any medical assistance—and most addicts do give up. Moreover, they do so at an early age. The proximate cause of their abstinence is their decision to be abstinent. No one can decide not to have rheumatoid arthritis, say, or colon cancer. Sufferers from those diseases can decide to cooperate or not with treatment, but that is another matter entirely. Therefore, there is a category difference between addiction and real disease.

The pretense that a non-disease is a disease may actually hinder people from deciding to behave better: they will instead wait for their medical savior, as Estragon waits for Godot. Whether this hope is justified or not, the pretense will certainly involve much public expense, just as would fitting out an expedition to discover unicorns somewhere in the world.

To treat addicts as people to whom something has happened rather than as people who have decided to do something is to infantilize them. It is another small step in the transformation of the population into wards of government.

A doctor in the comments section pushes back:

I understand the frustration with categorizing a choice-based malady with other conditions that seem to occur for now reason. But as a doctor, I see lots of people with diabetes, hypertension, or cancer that was caused by their choices.

Drug abuse and addiction are simply on the continuum of diseases, whether self-induced or otherwise. True, rheumatoid arthritis is good old-fashioned all-American disease, but drug abuse, while less pure, still encompasses all the standard attributes of disease. The issue is that due to neurochemical changes caused by the initial exposure to, say, methamphetamine, the victim may lose the ability for further decision making. Thus they induced an essentially incurable disease state in themselves. Calling it a disease helps when it comes to the science of studying it and trying to provide the afflicted with better tools to fight it.

Another commenter:

Dr. Dalrymple. I”ve read most of your books and many of you articles, and I agree with all of them except this one. When you see the destructive power of addiction among both rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and the powerlessness of otherwise intelligent people, it’s hard for me to understand how you view this as essentially a “will power” issue. You’re wildly off base. I’m very disappointed. This is a wholly unsupported thesis. No facts or numbers to justify your rash claim. Highly unusual for you.

But an addiction counselor agrees with Dalrymple:

I retired after spending 25 years counseling alcoholics and drug addicts. IMHO, advances in neuroscience show that there is definitely a physiological component to substance abuse. There are some people who just like doing drugs and alcohol and have no desire to quit, but they are a definite minority. There is a another definite minority who do quit and make it stick, they do not relapse. Then there is the large majority who want to quit but keep relapsing. Some of that may be that they are too lazy to follow a treatment regimen, but for most of these people the problem is that they come from family and social backgrounds that are not supportive of their efforts to stay clean and sober. And no medical intervention can cure laziness or a dysfunctional family/social environment. So government efforts to treat addiction like a physical disease are doomed to failure. But this will only be apparent much useless expenditure of the taxpayers’ hard earned money.

Previous Dish on addiction here and here.

One brief remark on the Phil Robertson fiasco.

I understand and share all the concerns about religious liberty, which Rod Dreher, Russell Moore, and Mollie Hemingway have done a good job (as usual) of articulating.

But just because someone quotes 1 Corinthians 6:9-11 and is opposed to same-sex marriage doesn’t mean that they’re speaking up for a theologically informed, humane, pastorally sensitive view of what it means to be gay. Not by a long shot. And social conservatives should think twice before linking the concern for religious liberty to a vindication of Robertson.

I won’t quote Robertson’s remarks in full here—they’re easy to look up—but suffice it to say that he implies that if gay men could only open their eyes, it would dawn on them how myopic they’ve been. “I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.” The conclusion to draw from this comment, as Katelyn Beaty noted earlier today on Twitter, is “that gay men should just wake up to how awesome women’s body parts are.”

But, of course, that’s just not how sexuality works.

When I was in my early twenties and just beginning to allow myself to face up to my sexuality, I remember a wise pastor friend telling me that anyone with an Augustinian anthropology—for those playing at home, that’s a dim view of natural human ability to be virtuous and an uber-high view of God’s slow-moving, unpredictable grace—should have no time for the notion that gay people (or anyone else!) “choose” whom they’ll be attracted to. That seems obvious to me now, after years of thinking about these things, but at the time, hearing him say that felt like a revelation. A weight was lifted. Someone understood!

No one who takes seriously the mysteries of human nature and all the ways our hearts are opaque, even to ourselves, would say that embracing a Christian view of marriage and sexuality could ever be a matter of saying, “Gee, Phil, I’d never thought of it that way before, thanks!”

And making that point is also a matter of speaking up for Christian orthodoxy in the public square.

(Cross-posted at Spiritual Friendship)

I’ll join Wes Hill in making a brief comment on the Phil Robertson fiasco.

First: I agree with Rod Dreher that Robertson’s suspension shows a double standard on the part of A&E, a standard that is much more hostile to criticism of homosexuality than it is to other offensive content.

However, this reminds me of Rod’s gushingly positive response to Joshua Gonnerman’s first post on First Things just 18 months ago. The title of Rod’s post was “One Crazy — Or Very Brave — Gay Catholic,” and he began by saying, “Joshua Gonnerman, a gay, chaste Catholic who is a theology doctoral student at Catholic University, may have blown up his academic career with his short, courageous piece in First Things today.”

Why would it take courage for Joshua to write that post, and why would it potentially “blow up” his academic career?

Because A&E is not the only operation out there that has double standards when it comes to homosexuality.

Rod recognized that a chaste gay graduate student would not just be at a disadvantage when it came to looking for jobs in conservative Christian circles: He could be at such a serious disadvantage that disclosing his sexuality could amount to “blowing up” his academic career.

This is not just an abstract worry. More than one of the bloggers at Spiritual Friendship has lost a job in a Christian institution, solely because he disclosed his sexual orientation. In each case, the Christian bosses agreed that the person they were terminating was not guilty of any sin, nor did he hold any belief about sexuality at odds with Christian orthodoxy. It was simply that they were unwilling to have an employee with same-sex attraction, even if he was completely committed to orthodox belief and obedient to orthodox teaching.

This is not to say that this prejudice is everywhere: Most of us, including those who have at one point lost a job over our sexuality, have also been welcomed in other Christian circles. But the fact that discrimination is not ubiquitous does not mean it is not still a real problem in Christian institutions.

I think social conservatives are right to be upset at the double standard which A&E has applied to Phil Robertson. But we can’t do much but complain about the prejudice at A&E. On the other hand, we actually can do something about the prejudice and double standards in the Christian world.

In other words, now might be a good time to remove the log from our own eye.

[Cross-posted from Spiritual Friendship]

We post tons of great images on Gizmodo, from space to science to art to design. Here's a treasure trove of our very favorites that proves that 2013 was, if nothing else, eye-catching.

Read more...

You don't have to watch "Duck Dynasty" to have an attitude, but in the next 48 hours or so, it will probably help. Once again a conservative voice was publicly chided for supporting views critical of homosexuals.Today's supposed victim is Phil Robertson, star of the A&E reality TV series "Duck

Ah, here’s a tricky one.

According to a report by Daniella Silva of NBC News:

A federal judge has found key parts of Utah’s anti-polygamy law to be unconstitutional, ruling in favor of a polygamous family known for their reality television show.

While all 50 states across the nation have laws against bigamy, prohibiting people from having multiple marriage licenses, the law went further in Utah, finding a person guilty of bigamy when a married person “purports to marry another or cohabits with another person.”

But Judge Clark Waddoups of the U.S. District Court in Utah ruled late Friday that the “cohabitation” provision of the law was unconstitutional because it violated the First and Fourteenth Amendments to the Constitution, which guarantee freedom of religion and the right to due process. His 91-page ruling now criminalizes plural marriages only in the literal sense, through acquisition of multiple marriage licenses.

The decision follows years of litigation in a case brought forth by Kody Brown, a star of the TLC reality television show “The Sister Wives,” which chronicles the lives of Brown, his four wives and their 17 children. The Browns are members of the Apostolic United Brethren Church, a fundamentalist church that shares historical roots with Mormonism and believes that polygamy is a core religious practice.

Kody Brown made a statement, saying, “While we know that many people do not approve of plural families, it is our family and based on our beliefs. Just as we respect the personal and religious choices of other families, we hope that in time all of our neighbors and fellow citizens will come to respect our own choices as part of this wonderful country of different faiths and beliefs.”

The Principle Rights Coalition, a group with members from many of Utah’s polygamous churches and families, issued a statement praising the ruling:

For over 130 years, various state and federal statutes have targeted our deeply-held religious beliefs and family arrangements.  These statutes were enforced arbitrarily and, by their vague and overbroad definitions, they brought fear into the lives of many families, prompting thousands to seek isolation rather than face selective prosecution.  As Judge Waddoups observed in this case, convictions for unlawful cohabitation appear to have focused solely on Fundamentalist Mormons who were legally married to just one spouse.

…The impact of this decision is both immediate and yet to be realized.  As a coalition, we will continue to seek broader acceptance through education and service, building bridges between a maligned culture and the rest of society.  We remain committed to the right of all families to exist.

As might be expected, social conservatives lamented that this ruling indicates another slide down the “slippery slope” toward redefining marriage to mean anything people want it to mean. For example, CNN ran this quote:

This is what happens when marriage becomes about the emotional and sexual wants of adults, divorced from the needs of children for a mother and a father committed to each other for life,” said Russell Moore, of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Polygamy was outlawed in this country because it was demonstrated, again and again, to hurt women and children. Sadly, when marriage is elastic enough to mean anything, in due time it comes to mean nothing.

However, one commentator is of the opinion that his fellow conservatives are missing the point and missing an opportunity in this case. Napp Nazworth thinks that this ruling actually supports conservative values because it is, in reality, more about religious freedom than it is about the redefinition of marriage.

He notes that the judge did not strike down the right of the state to define marriage as it pertains to the issuance of marriage licenses. The judge also said there is no inherent right to polygamy. What he ruled unconstitutional was the part of the law that forbids cohabitation and “marriages” such as those that might be blessed in private religious ceremonies. The plaintiffs did not ask the state to endorse polygamy by issuing multiple marriage licenses; they only asked that they be free to live together according to the dictates of their religious beliefs. As Nazworth summarizes:

In other words, the judge makes clear that the state is not obligated to legally recognize a polygamist marriage, but if the fundamentalist Mormon Church, to which the defendants belong, want to recognize a polygamist marriage, which their beliefs encourage, they are free to do so.

Mr. Nazworth asserts that, by considering this decision a ruling about marriage, conservatives are contradicting their own arguments in other cases, such as the fight against the “birth control mandate” in the Affordable Care Act, where they insist upon the right not only to hold certain beliefs but also to practice them according to their religious convictions and traditions. This is inconsistent logic.

It appears that the issue of marriage is so important to its defenders that they are incorrectly viewing the Utah decision through that lens when they should be looking at it from the perspective of religious freedom, according to Nazworth’s reasoning. This case is not, in reality, about defining or redefining marriage but about having the liberty to practice one’s faith.

So, which will it be — guarding the traditional view of marriage? Or siding with the polygamists for religious freedom?

Isn’t that a fine pickle?

They say politics makes strange bedfellows.

Wouldn’t it be something if standing for religious freedom should lead the defenders of traditional marriage to crawl into the sack with Kody Brown and his sister wives?

So GQ sent me down to Monroe, La. (GUMBO GUMBO GUMBO), to hang out with the Duck Dynasty family. You can read the story right here, and whenever I go deep into the heart of 'MERICA—be it for this assignment or the Kid Rock cruise or the Values Voters Summit—I'm always careful not to be the sneering LIBRUL who ventures into red-state territory just to rip on all the people there. That would be unfair, predictable, and dickish. I try my best to keep that shit balanced, and I know that sounds hypocritical given all the stones I throw here at Deadspin like the NERDY KEYBOARD COWBOY NERD that I am. Whenever you meet face-to-face with people you don't necessarily see eye-to-eye with and talk to them and drink lots of beer with them, you're almost always more likely to understand them and like them. That's how it works.

Read more...

1. Very old books
2. The calendar
3. Getting buried when I die instead of burned or mutilated or set adrift or abandoned or eaten by birds
4. Luke chapter 1
5. The abolition of slavery
6. Always believing (and occasionally even feeling) that I am forgiven and ultimately ok
7. Going to church
8. Staying home from church
9. Christmas carols
10. Europe
11. C. S. Lewis
12. Believing that my dog was created by God and hoping that he will go to heaven too
13. Clerical vestments
14. Novels
15. Evensong, and the ability to see morning and evening as holy
16. Cappadocian beards (like the one growing on Oliver Crisp)
17. Russian icons
18. Very old churches with old bones lovingly planted underneath
19. Babette's Feast
20. Gargoyles
21. America
22. The love of names, and the belief that names are holy
23. The sign of the cross
24. All the women's names, hundreds of them, derived from the Virgin Mary (Mara, Marie, Mariella, Marietta, Marilyn, Marita, Maryanne, Maura, Maurine, May, Mayra, Minnie, Moira, Morag, Muriel…)
25. Civil law
26. Italian cooking
27. Having a lot of other people (billions of them) who will always think of me, no matter what, as a brother
28. Hospitals
29. The resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come
30. Codex Sanaiticus
31. Being able to read Milton and T. S. Eliot and understand what they are talking about
32. Old people
33. People who speak in tongues
34. The nomina sacra (see #22)
35. Holy communion (even when I don't deserve it)
36. Kim Fabricius
37. People who argue about very old books (see #1)
38. The habit of seeing normal things, bread and wine and water, as the best and holiest things
39. Learning how to pray
40. The meaning of words like grace and love and steadfast love and lovingkindness and mercy and the multitude of thy tender mercies.

by Kim Fabricius (a sequel to Ben's forty things)

1. Theism
2. Chicago – famous for its wind and a Statement. But I repeat myself.
3. ID (e.g., Marmite, the designated hitter, Michele Bachmann, The X Factor)
4. Predestination – Double-or-Nothing (Calvin’s Wager)
5. Penileal substitution
6. Cumulonimbus eschatology
7. Crusades, especially those without fatalities
8. A “spiritual” resurrection (cf. Flannery O’Connor on the eucharist: “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it”)
9. The exception to “neither bond nor free” (Galatians 3:28): chattel slavery
10. (Pace Nietzsche) Pig theology (aka complementarianism)
11. Supercessionism (Scylla) and CUFI (Charybdis)
12. God hates fags – or rather God loves fags but hates fags who love fags
13. God loves flags (well, Old Glory – the flag, not the God)
14. The Health and Wealth Stealth Gospel
15. The undeserving poor (fuck ’em)
16. Just-wanna prayers, the Sinner’s Prayer, prayer breakfasts, prayer chains
17. “Christian” used as an adjective (as in Christian music, counselling, dating, etc.)
18. Mission statements, purpose-driven drivel, and other managerial bullshit
19. Church billboards with corny or – even worse – “inspirational” messages
20. Fish symbols on cars (all “Christian merchandise”, for that matter)
21. Confession before absolution
22. WowerPoint in worship
23. Fenced Tables
24. Communion grape juice, chalicules, wafers, a thousand pieces of bread for a congregation of twenty (cf. “Feed the Birds (Tuppence a Bag)”)
25. Family values (in distinction from Modern Family values)
26. Whinging about “persecution” in the US and UK (“The Empire Strikes Back”)
27. The Alpha Course (spag bol evangelism)
28. God TV (unless it’s the only comedy on at the time)
29. Tradition fundamentalism – “the dead faith of the living” (Jaroslav Pelikan)
30. Pro-Life support for the death penalty
31. Sports chaplains
32. Purity (cf. Mark Twain: “To the pure, all things are impure”)
33. Papal bull
34. Protestant bulls (see #35)
35. Mars Hell
36. (Contra Ben’s #36) Kim Fabricius
37. Worldviews
38. Christian Realism (“That’s all very well, but what about Hitler?”)
39. Theidiocies
40. The logos asarkos (aka “The Myth of God Disincarnate”)

DUBLIN, OH—After accounting for the cost of tuition, four years of lost earning potential, and the minimal increase in salary an undergraduate degree provides, 30-year-old local man Patrick Moorhouse has, at this point in his life, earned $11 more t...

As Scott Brown prepares to ditch Massachusetts and challenge Jeanne Shaheen for her New Hampshire Senate seat, Kevin Mahnken defends the practice of carpetbagging:

There is a great deal that is silly about the politics in the United States, but nothing more fatuous and bizarre than the widely-held belief that an elected representative must somehow form a lasting relationship with a place, or embody its character and traditions, to ably work on behalf of its people. This expectation forced ex-senator Richard Lugar to go to extreme lengths to prove his residency in Indiana—a state that, in normal circumstances, no sane person would willingly claim as their home—and allowed his primary opponent to successfully paint him as absent and out of touch, costing him reelection and millions of Hoosiers a skilled and popular lawmaker. Even now, Mary [Liz] Cheney must dodge accusations of carpetbagging in her own Wyoming Senate race. But that (truthful) designation couldn’t possibly be more important than her manifest insanity. A candidate’s policy preferences matter infinitely more than which college football team he roots for. If Brown, like Robert Kennedy and Hillary Clinton before him, were to run and win in a state he hadn’t lived in, it would go a long way toward proving that point.

The UK student section's been having a bit of trouble filling up this season. And Chester, one of Kentucky Sports Radio's favorite callers, has himself a theory.

Read more...

Matthew Remski believes that we have to let our children be bored, so they can explore safely the endless horizons of time, and if we take their lead, we can also let ourselves be bored, but not with resignation or apathy.

—

I have an ambivalence crush on Louis CK. He plays the brave and humiliating role of exposing the swinging sweaty balls of the cultural id. But this doesn’t make him the spiritual teacher so many want him to be, especially when we forget that he’s playing a caricature.

Case in point: his now-famous admonishment, now scoring big hits through the new-age blogosphere, that his fictional daughter (played by the brilliant Ursala Parker) shouldn’t be allowed to be bored, is not a borderline-spiritual encouragement for her to seize the day. It’s a transference of anxiety. If we’re laughing, it’s to protect ourselves from the most difficult question a child will ask: “What should we do now?” The truth is that nobody knows. If we wanted we could let that soften us, but that softness won’t make anyone laugh.

The dialogue goes like this:

I am bored. I am bored! I’m boooored. (etc., etc.) Why don’t you answer me?

Because I’m bored is a useless thing to say. I mean, you live in a great, big, vast world that you’ve seen none percent of. Even the inside of your own mind is endless; it goes on forever, inwardly, do you understand? The fact that you’re alive is amazing. So you don’t get to be bored.

The gag is that this is a hostile response to a four-year-old, whose “Why don’t you answer me?” carries all human pathos. Even to a peer, the answer would be heavy-handed. Not that Louis’ character would care, which is at the heart of the joke: here’s a guy who speaks to children as if they were his competitors for resources and emotional attention.

Joking aside, the answer is both untrue and ineffectual. On the untrue side, every four year-old knows that the world is great, big, and vast. And no four year-old has seen none of it. In fact, her entire being is trembling at the threshold of the all of it. The four year-old has had plenty of time to navigate her internal worlds. She knows that stories, dreams and fantasies go on forever. So yes. She understands these things, and feels much more than she understands. “I’m bored” doesn’t mean “I’m uninterested”. It means “I don’t know who I should be. I feel empty and full. I feel confused and sad. What should I bother doing?”

On the ineffectual side, the answer pretends to kindle the girl’s wonderment, but it actually burns the tenderness of her question. She’s asking a question about how to manage emptiness, and the answer overwhelms her with stuff. Instead of letting it be an open moment in which the parent can share in the revelation of uncertainty that the child makes new for him, Louis crams irritated gumption and panicked work-ethic down her throat, guilting her with what she already knows but was too innocent to accept, guilting her for naming a condition to which we dare not confess, guilting her for being so rude as to ask for help. We laugh because he releases the valve on our own guilt over doing the same thing.

♦◊♦

In his essay “On Being Bored”, British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips delivers an understated bitch-slap in answer:

Is it not indeed revealing what the child’s boredom evokes in the adults? Heard as a demand, sometimes as an accusation of failure or disappointment, it is rarely agreed to, simply acknowledged. How often, in fact, the child’s boredom is met by that most perplexing form of disapproval, the adult’s wish to distract him – as though the adults have decided that the child’s life must be, or be seen to be, endlessly interesting. It is one of the most oppressive demands of adults that the child should be interested, rather than take time to find what interests him. Boredom is integral to the process of taking one’s time.

But you can’t take time if you’re terrified by your own boredom. You have to move things along. Be rushed, maybe, in the way that you were rushed as a child. You can’t tolerate your children taking time or else they will expose how your own forward movement is in a state of perpetual derailment. So there’s no surprise when a father overpowers his daughter with an answer several cynical clicks north of her intellectual paradigm.

The anger in the transference is clear. He’s not saying “You don’t get to be bored” to his daughter, but to himself. Not getting, of course, that her boredom and his boredom belong to different categories. Her yearning boredom is about paralysis of limitless possibility, and the paradoxical wish, as Phillips puts it, to have a sensible desire. Louis’ boredom is the anxious boredom of the adult: he doesn’t know what to do with himself, and time is wasting away, and he fears he’s forgotten how to feel wonderment, so he demands his daughter feel it for him.

But like the best of comedians of history, Louis confesses to a hypocrisy when he flutters into autobiographical mode, and turns it into shtick. In “Live From the Beacon Theatre”, he belts out a delightful seven minutes on the boredom of parenting—how he has to read all fifty books of Clifford the Big Red Dog, and watches his daughter count the spaces on their board game with excruciating slowness. He forces her token forward as she complains “But I’m counting and learning!” He replies straight from the darkest shadow of fatherhood, where anxiety expresses its disdain for innocence: “I don’t care honey. You’re going to grow up stupid because I’m too bored to wait. I’m more bored than I love you.” The audience roars with laughter, relieved that someone has finally said it.

From Freud’s essay “Humour” (1927):

The grandeur in [comedy] clearly lies in the triumph of narcissism, the victorious assertion of the ego’s invulnerability. The ego refuses to be distressed by the provocations of reality, to let itself be compelled to suffer. It insists that it cannot be affected by the traumas of the external world; it shows, in fact, that such traumas are no more than occasions for it to gain pleasure.

I’m more bored than I love you. What can this mean? I think it means that the fear of death is indistinguishable from our present responsibilities to each other. We laugh at the line so that we can outsource the stress. The giddiness of that laughter comes from the fact that boredom shows us the inevitable challenge of loving.

Here’s the punch line that Louis, fictional or not (and we can never know the difference), speaking for the cultural unconscious, can’t afford. We have to let our children be bored, so they can explore safely the endless horizons of time, and softly confront the abyss. If we take their lead, we can also let ourselves be bored, but not with resignation or apathy. We can be comfortably bored with the endless Big Red Dog, the counting of spaces on board-games. We can know that time is passing at different rates for different ages. We could soak up a little of the sadness and openness we’ve closed off over time.

Perhaps if we get it, we can avoid the default to cruelty towards children who are reminding us of what we fear. Perhaps parent and child can share boredom as one of the more curious and restless forms of love.

—

Photo: John-Morgan/Flickr

Shopping malls are teeming with Santas this time of year. Have you ever wondered how they got their jobs? Explainer provided career advice to would-be Santas in 2006. The original article is below.

“It’s tempting to think that the church needs to decide quickly which of these [original sin] scenarios is right, and which ones must be wrong. I believe the church is better served by taking its time, holding several different scenarios in tension for a while as we think through the implications of each.”

Abstruse Goose

19-year-old Korean-American Kiyun worked with friends at college to create a series of photos titled “Racial Microaggressions.” For the portraits, each person posed with a sign sharing some seemingly small thing that they’ve been told before that has made them feel stereotyped or marginalized for their race.

Here is a selection…

(via Bored Panda)

Readers offer their best tips for accessing your history in Mobile Firefox for Android, creating spoiler tags on Facebook, and changing habits with a simple trick.

Read more...

Sarah Palin disembarked from a plane in Seoul, South Korea today expecting to attend the memorial service for Nelson Mandela. According to local reports the former Alaskan governor and Republican vice presidential candidate arrived on Asiana flight 459 from Anchorage at 6:30 a.m. local time and took nearly a half hour to realize that she