Psalm 33:4-5

“For the word of the LORD is right and true; he is faithful in all he does. The LORD loves righteousness and justice; the earth is full of his unfailing love.” – Psalm 33:4-5

God loves righteousness and justice. I don’t think that this means that God loves judgement. Too often we judge one another and in doing so stir up hate and grief.

Out of curiosity I just did a  search on Biblegateway for the words Hate and Jesus together in the New International Version of the Bible.  There were zero results. I’m comforted by that fact.

Westboro Church Protest (Godhatesfags.com)

The word “Hate” does of course appear in the  Bible — 127 times in the NIV. Skimming over these I start to wonder what Hate really means. There is obviously the sinful malice demonstrated by individuals in the Bible. Then there are the ideas, practices, and concepts that God Hates or that we are commanded/advised to hate.  I think of the extremist Christians out there protesting Gay Pride Festivals, Schools, Funerals… all saying God Hates You! Hate seems so absolute, unforgiving, and very… icky. I hate hating if that makes any sense. I get this weird dread in my stomach over just the thought of hate. How could we be commanded to Hate others? How could God be a hateful God?

I keep coming back to an idea I learned from 2008 Queer Spirit Retreat. What is my God Concept?  How, in my own head, do I define and characterize God and are there any conflicts with how I believe he acts or with scripture etc?  I can not fit such a horrid thing as my own concept of Hate into my concept of God.

Westboro church Protest (Godhatesfags.com)

I also believe in scripture and there are instances of connecting Hate with God. So how do I reconcile these conflicts of concepts? My concept of God can be wrong and say that God does indeed Hate.  My concept of Hate could be wrong and say that it is in line with a loving God. My belief in the scripture could be wrong and say that God does not Hate.

I am aware that there are multiple words for Love used in the Bible. I have never heard of multiple words for Hate and perhaps there should be. I believe boundaries are good and there are things that God likes and dislikes, encourages and discourages. If hating is to put things beyond the boundaries or what is good, liked, and encouraged then I can accept that God hates. There is the other kind of hate, however, that I can not apply to God. While I could imagine Jesus being in a protest and standing up for what is good I could never imagine him doing so spouting insults and wishing others harm. Just the idea sends chills down my back.

I’ve posted pictures of the Westboro Church (GodHatesFags.com) but I must mention that they are less of a hateful group than they appear.  After hearing an interview with Shirley Phelps on Feast of Fun I came to realize that they believe in total depravity of man and they deserve as many insults as they dish out and have a hate concept of simply God has judged against (insert topic here). Their methods, however, are inflammatory and stir up hate.

Monday Meme: !@#$ the !@#$%^&*!@#$

Only watch the video below if you don’t mind lots of swearing, cartoon nudity, and anti-pedophilia via anti-catholicism. The first 25 seconds or so is solid swearing and then the witty lyrics come in which continue to swear almost every other word.

I used to agree with the sentiment that there are always better words to use than curse words. Sometimes, however, there is good reason to use the word, fuck, or any other “profanity”.  The above video uses it very effectively to express outrage at an infuriating situation. It gives the message bite. Its shocking nature delivers his idea with lasting power. I had never heard of Tim Minchin before but I am now excited to check out more of his work.

As for my personal thoughts on the controversy surrounding the catholic church and pedophilia I give you this rant:

I say that while the idea of redemption even for the pedophile is nice I still consider it wrong to neglect accountability, consequences, and to ignore the needs of the victims. There are many examples of righteous men in the Bible who commit sins but they humble themselves asking for forgiveness for sinning against both their victim and God. The actions of the Catholic church seem to ignore the victim, remove accountability, and encourage the unrepentant.   Be like Saul/Paul, or David, or Peter, or Abraham, or like so many other examples from the Bible and own up to your mistakes and then deal with it.

To the Gay priests:  Come out!  Even if you believe sex with other men is a sin come out! Fine, be celibate. I’m okay with someone doing  just about anything as a ritualistic way to honor God.  Some fast from certain types of food; you can go ahead and fast from sex.  Just don’t pretend you’re straight and then go sneaking off to have sex with anonymous men.

New pages

Way up at the top should be a new tab leading to a new page currently entitled Homosexuality Research. I might rename it to something like pro-gay discourse. Anyway, the point was to collect the information I’ve gathered over the years about homosexuality especially the pro-gay theological arguments.  It’s still heavily under construction but hopefully it’ll become a good resource over time.

-PenguinJim

What Defines a Christian?

Hackman’s Musings Article

I have been giving thought to whether I want to consider myself a “Christian” as of late. I feel that the article linked above  pretty well sums up why. On the one hand there is the religious right-wing that in my opinion has put a taint on the word. On the other hand there is Jesus. It’s for the latter that I would feel guilty giving up the label, but is that good enough? As Andrew points out in the link above there are other labels available. I could say that I am a follower of The Way as it is used in the Bible or I could say I am a Christ follower or any other of a myriad of labels. But what does that matter? If these labels were more widely used they might carry more meaning, but then would they have their own dogmas attached that are equally or more repulsive than what I am considering running from? Do they already? Is it enough to abandon a label altogether and state simply that I follow Jesus? But then I would probably be lumped into the Christian label by default.

Penguin Jim reminded me that with the Christian label I would be accepting the community that also uses that label which is much larger that the religious right. This would include those that I worship and fellowship with. But if I abandon the label does that mean I lose my fellowship with them? I believe I could still choose to associate myself with certain Christians and I absolutely would choose to do so. But if I so choose would that defeat my purpose in abandoning the label?

Ultimately I believe I will accept the label even though I feel it to be inaccurate. Perhaps it is enough that I consider myself separate even though others do not. And there is precedence in my life for this. For example: I consider myself bisexual even though the term queer is probably more accurate since I find myself attracted to those who consider themselves to be genders other than male and female, I usually give my name as Michael but I accept it when others call me Mike, and there are other labels I won’t go into.

So, in conclusion; my name is Michael. I am a follower of The Way and I am queer. But it is acceptable if you see me as Mike, a bisexual Christian (or a gay Christian for that matter). My only requirement is that you respect me as a person.

Conservative Gays are Hilarious! (Republican Condoms)

These condoms were distributed at the Twin Cities Pride Festival by the Log Cabin Republicans promoting off-shore drilling and safe-sex at the same time.  Click here for the Advocate’s behind-the-scenes story.

Genital Cutting at Cornell University

I came accross this article from “The Nation” Leading Cornell Doctor Performing Genital Cutting | The Nation

The gist of the article:

Dix Poppas, Chief of Pediatric Urology at the Weil Medical College of Cornell University, has been performing a “nerve sparing” version of ventral clitoralplasties.  This is the surgical reconstruction of a clitoris — in this case he’s taking over-sized Clitorises (Clitori?) and cutting them down to a ‘normal’ length. Some also call this Female Genital Cutting or Female Genital Mutilation (FGM).

To test that there is little to no nerve damage the doctor calls for annual visits:

At annual visits after the surgery, while a parent watches, Poppas touches the daughter’s surgically shortened clitoris with a cotton-tip applicator and/or with a “vibratory device,” and the girl is asked to report to Poppas how strongly she feels him touching her clitoris. Using the vibrator, he also touches her on her inner thigh, her labia minora, and the introitus of her vagina, asking her to report, on a scale of 0 (no sensation) to 5 (maximum), how strongly she feels the touch. Yang, Felsen, and Poppas also report a “capillary perfusion testing,” which means a physician or nurse pushes a finger nail on the girl’s clitoris to see if the blood goes away and comes back, a sign of healthy tissue. Poppas has indicated in this article and elsewhere that ideally he seeks to conduct annual exams with these girls. He intends to chart the development of their sexual sensation over time. — Alice Dreger and Ellen K. Feder

Wait wha-?!?   So the doctor is using a vibrator on infants and toddlers? After reading that paragraph I knew I had to look into this subject with greater depth.

I started researching this thinking it was about FGM. My prior knowledge on the subject was vague, having listened to a guest speaker in my high school’s Gay Straight Alliance come in talking about how it was used ceremonially in many countries to control women or even to punish them in a very dangerous and torturous way. I came across what the World Health Organization says about FGM and also a Video News Report by Russia Today that does a good job at characterizing the controversy over the practice. The more I looked, however, the more I realized that it isn’t really about the FGM controversy. He’s specifically working at retaining the nerves and does so with surgical precision and in a sterile environment. I started thinking about the research some of my transgendered friends have done and thought that maybe this was really a trans issue. Femininsting.com and Bird of Pardox’s articles on Poppas’ work shows that I’m not the only one who’s making the connection.

Having a large clitoris at birth is commonly caused by congenital adrenal hyperplasia.  To put it very basically (and most likely inaccurate somewhere as a layman) the child during early development had a different mix of hormones than usual and may have caused a mixture of typical male and feminine traits to develop which may include ambiguous genitalia.  Often parents are told this is abnormal and to give the child a ‘normal’ life they perform surgery to reconstruct the genitals and assign a gender (usually female).  This can present problems later when the child, growing up one sex, hits puberty and the new outpour of hormones develops mature genitalia which may or may not match the earlier assigned sex. And we cis-gendered people thought puberty was tough enough!

Could Dr. Poppas’ be working with intersexed children — altering their genitals in the pursuit of normalcy?  But what the heck is normal and what’s so special about it? What advantage are you really going to have by having a normal sized clitoris?  And what’s so normal about going every year to have a doctor hold a vibrator against your private parts to make certain you still have feeling down there? Seriously it sounds like it’s just going to cause more problems than it would solve and the person whose life is actually affected — the child — has no say in the matter. Something is definitely wrong with this picture.

-Penguin Jim

Edit (7/2/2010): Hey! Here’s a new vocabulary phrase for you!  Intersex Genital Mutilation or IGM. (Thanks, Helen of Bird of Paradox! Helen of Troy is so yesterday… or 5th century BC) Also check out Organisation Intersex International or Oii for some more resources on Intersex issues.

Vagina Dentata!!! (Rape-aXe Condom)

Gizmodo: Condoms With Teeth Fight Rape In South Africa.

Condoms With Teeth Fight Rape In South Africa

Over 30,000 Rape-Axe condoms are being handed out free at South Africa‘s World Cup. While they won’t stop rape, the condoms (worn by women) have jagged-teeth inside to tear penises up, and can only be removed by doctors.

Sounds grim, but then I imagine rape isn’t any fun for the woman either. The inventor, Dr Sonnet Ehlers, was inspired to create the painful condom after she met a woman who’d been raped. The woman apparently told Ehlers “if only I had teeth down there,” which encouraged her to look at ways to make men regret their actions.

Women fearful of being raped can insert the Rape-Axe condom inside themselves like a diaphragm or tampon. If her worst fears come true, and a man attempts to rape her, the Rape-Axe’s inside hooks attach themselves to the penis and don’t come off, instead getting even tighter and stopping the man from being able to urinate. The only way to remove it is by seeing a doctor—which will obviously help with prosecution.

After the World Cup, Ehlers will be selling the Rape-Axe condoms for $2 each.

Holy crap.  I want to say “Yay for anti-rape!” and simultaneously cringe.  I read this little posting on Gizmodo and simply had to find out more information.  There were just too many questions I had.  Would this encourage escalating rape to murder as retaliation? What will happen when someone uses this to frame a man for rape (and you know if there’s a lesbian sumo-wrestler assaulting an ex for waving at a snicker’s bar then there’s someone out there who’d use this condom as a weapon). How big is this thing? Is it flexible? Why can’t someone take it off after he goes flacid? If the rapist uses a condom will it just stick to the condom? What about blood? Will this spread HIV instead of prevent it? Could there be permanent damage to the penis? What does a doctor have to do to remove it? Is it firm like hard plastic or is it soft?

I went to the Rape-aXe website to find out more info and the following picture and video.

Some answers I found:

Blood and HIV:
They claim that the teeth/barbs/tines will “hardly draw blood” and it encapsulates the front part of the penis so it would contain semen and blood within the condom.

How big is this thing?:
I never found a measurement but the pictures and the animation they have show that the bulbous part at the top encapsulates the top of the head and then the barbed shaft goes down only a couple of inches.

Hard plastic or squishy like a normal condom?:
It’s flexible enough to fit in a tube to be used for insertion (squeezed lengthwise); it is also flexible enough to stretch firmly over a dildo (demonstration phallus?); it can not be inverted; and you can see in the main picture above that it can support it’s own weight.  There are pictures that show one cut up and the walls appear to be thicker than a normal condom.  Here’s my speculation: The rows of teeth are firmer plastic that can’t easily fold back over itself thus preventing inversion and the walls look like the thickness of cheap rubber kitchen gloves. Now I wonder, what is it made of? Latex? Rubber/neoprene?  Some people are allergic to latex.  If it’s plastic-based are they using phthalates (some believe them to be toxic but still used in a lot of sex toys!) to make it squishy?

(edit: The Global Post at one point in their article on the Rape-aXe says it’s made of polyurethane and at another point calls it latex.)

Permanent damage?:

“No, it will not cause permanent damage to the rapist he will have tell tale little scars on him. (He will have some explaining to do to his wife or girlfriend how he encountered those scars.)” – Sonnet Ehlers, creator of the Rape-aXe female condom

I personally consider scarring to be permanent damage but I guess she’s saying there’ll be no functional deficiency post-removal.

The big question I keep seeing from other bloggers and their commenters– Will this encourage rapists to beat or murder their victims? — does not seem to have an answer.  There are lots of opinions out there but no answers I’ve been able to dig up. I think I’ll have to look up what effect self-defense tools like mace have on discouraging rape and violence.  What I’ve been told repeatedly before is if you are being attacked and raped, the best thing to do is just become as passive as possible or even do something freakishly non-sexy and non-violent (the example which I was given with a completely straight face was to crawl around on all fours and bark like a dog… I want that to be a joke but then I realize that might actually work).  Struggling just fuels the desire for violence.

AaronMasseyTV of The Untitled Show brings up a good point: it does NOT directly prevent rape.  It retaliates against rape. Indirectly it could discourage rape by making rapists think twice about what they’re sticking their dick into; it marks someone for legal battles later (which often don’t even happen due to shame, fear, and costs); and it can give a small window of opportunity for escape if the rapist is distracted by an iron-maiden suddenly attached to his penis.

I can also see this giving girls a little more self-security.  I can’t imagine this being kept up there 24/7 but if going into a higher-risk situation like going out clubbing or walking home after dark she can insert this before heading out.

Still, I feel conflicted over the invention.  I hope it works.  Anything to make the world safer is a plus in my book.

-Penguin Jim

Sex is Fun #151 + 153: Male Bisexuality

Listen to SIF #151

Listen to SIF #153

This two-part episode (wtf happened to 152?) aired  in 2008 (did I mention I have a lot of catching up to do?).  Kidder and the gang interview “Lookout” who identifies as Bisexual.   They address some of the common misconceptions of male bisexuals (who seem as rare as unicorns but really do exist).  I wrote an email to kidder about the episode:

I’m glad the team brought this up because I used to identify as bisexual and a lot of people really didn’t understand it. I had plenty of people assume I’d just turn gay, that I couldn’t be faithful, that I was greedy, only into threesomes/orgies, or that male bisexuality just couldn’t exist (even though those same people believed that female bisexuality existed).

I wanted to bring up the concept of the “queer” label. I no longer identify as bisexual but instead identify as queer. Besides avoiding the misunderstandings that come with the ‘Bi’ label I found that I was also very attracted to transgendered individuals who simply don’t fit in the male/female binary system. I tell people I’ve found myself attracted to some males, some females, some in-between, and some beyond but I’m not attracted to everyone. I’ve also heard of the labels pansexual and omnisexual but personally those labels sound like you have sex with everything (I know that’s not what they mean but I look at ‘pan’ and especially ‘omni’ and think ‘everything’). I like ‘queer’ because I’ve found the reclaimed term to be marvelously ambiguous and it’s root meaning of ‘strange’ doesn’t bother me; I like being strange.

Salt Lake Tribune: Children benefit from Prop 8?

Highlights from the article:

“The historical record leaves no doubt, your honor, none whatsoever, that the central purpose of marriage in all societies at virtually all times is to channel procreative relationships into stable relationships to ensure that offspring that result from those relationships are raised in those stable relationships,”[Attorney Charles Cooper] said.

Cooper’s statement drew a series of challenges from Chief U.S. Judge Vaughn Walker, who is presiding over the lawsuit filed by two same-sex couples who claim the ban is a violation of their civil rights.

Walker asked if people get married to benefit their communities or themselves. Weren’t similar arguments once used to keep interracial couples from marrying? And if procreation is so central to marriage, why doesn’t the state refuse to sanction marriage by infertile couples or couples who choose to remain childless?

…

[U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson] said the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly recognized marriage as a fundamental right — one afforded to prisoners serving life sentences and child support scofflaws — while refusing to make procreation a precondition of marriage, as evidenced by laws allowing divorces and contraception.

Read the full article: Lawyer: Children benefit from gay marriage ban – Salt Lake Tribune.

Marriages are about more than sex and sex is about more than procreation.  In biblical times, Eunuchs (whether by choice, castration, infertility, or by birth defect) were often excluded from many social and religious functions and were often considered a lower caste of people.  Mosaic law and old testament culture had a lot to do with procreation as a means of cultural survival.  Things change, however, in the new testament.  Acts 8 tells the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch who is baptized and is commonly believed to have spearheaded the spread of Christianity in the area.  What most people gloss over, however, is that this was a landmark event because it meant that Eunuchs — those with no procreative power to persist the population of God’s people — were welcomed into God’s family.

Family. That’s what marriage, in my glamorous penguin opinion, is about.  If God can welcome the non-procreative into his family.  Why can’t California?

Los Angeles Times: Interview with Roy Ashburn

Article from the Los Angeles Times:
Patt Morrison Asks: An interview with California Sen. Roy Ashburn – latimes.com.

How different has your life been since your arrest?

Totally and completely. Obviously I stopped drinking. All of my normal routines were stopped because of no driver’s license, no car, the penalties that are proper for my offense, and I’m going through those step by step, but I guess the bigger change is within me, and that’s one that I’m learning as I go.

At some point, you must have realized a public career was incompatible with being open about your sexual preferences.

Something happened that I guess caused me to realize that. When I was in sixth grade, the police had a raid in the sand dunes [near San Luis Obispo] and a bunch of gay men were arrested, probably charged with indecent activity. That sticks in my mind — the publicity and the shame around it. One of my teachers was one of the people. The talk among the kids, the talk among the adults, the talk in the community, the press — at that time the choice was pretty clear: If you were gay and open, it was a life of shame, ridicule, innuendo about molesting and perversion. It was a dark life. Given that choice of whether you come out or whether you’re in secret, I mean, there really wasn’t a choice.

So this is the anti-gay politician who was caught drinking and driving… away from a gay bar.  The GLBT community cried out in rage and in triumph at seeing a political enemy fall with a just-desserts sort of irony.  Now in a way he’s been set free.  The interview tells a story that many of us who grew up queer can understand; it’s a story of fear and hiding and doing things that you wish you hadn’t just to stay in that stuffy closet.

As a politician, however, the actions he performed while in office had some big consequences affecting the gay community and it’s going to take some time for some to forgive him (and some simply won’t).  Still I like the idea of giving him a chance.

Ashburn, we understand you and we can forgive you. Start fighting for our rights and I think the community will even welcome you.

Then again if all this seen-the-light stuff is nothing more than a political maneuver then I’ll take my webbed penguin foot and… grumble grumble squawk grumble….