Same Sex Marriage, I Don’t Get It.

You know, I just don’t get it.

I really don’t.

This week, Maine, a state known for its tolerant liberal attitude and a place where “live and let live” is an old old saying, joined thirty other states in banning marriage between certain members of its population.

Like the rest of the dubious majority to which Maine now belongs, the ban was approved by a majority of its voters, 53% of them – well, 53% of the voters who bothered to turn out anyway.

However, the majority of Mainers, unlike a rather large number of Californians and Midwesterners, don’t seem out and out homophobic per se – though as a practical matter, it is rather obvious that they are. The chief opposition, by and large, didn’t vocalize as bigoted screeds by religious leaders decrying the flaunting of God’s will – which apparently only they are personally privy to. The Mormons didn’t descend en mass on the state - declaring marriage a sacred sacrament between a man and four or five fifteen year old girls who may or may not be his first cousins. Evangelicals largely didn’t flood the airwaves with dire threats of fire and brimstone and Angry Tearful Jesus and admonishments to keep homosexuality where it belongs – as secret affairs for outwardly straight married conservatives in deep, deep denial. Opposition didn’t really manifest in the sanctimonious bloviating of conservative politicians bemoaning the “gay agenda” to deconstruct traditional American values – traditional values being, so far as I can tell, tractor pulls and the shooting of holes in every single road sign along the nation’s highways. Nor did the majority of the opposition consist, as it did in California, of the Pollyannaism of community leaders hysterically predicting that same-sex marriage is a gateway drug to free range bestiality, legalization of pedophilia, and dogs and cats living together in anarchy. All these opposing positions were there certainly, but they weren’t front and center the way the hatred and bigotry and out and out lies and deliberate spontaneously generating and perpetuating falsehoods were during the Prop 8 battle in California.

No, the principle argument against equality for all in Maine seemed to be the fear that “they” would start teaching “gay-marriage” in the schools.

You may use your imagination to insert my Pilot to Co-pilot, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Over? face here, if you like.

I don’t get it.

Teach gay marriage in school?

Teach it how?

Like in home economics or something?

Would there be role-playing like for traditional hetero relationships? Some high schools have a class where a boy and a girl are paired up in a “marriage” and given a “baby” – sometimes a doll, sometimes a five pound sack of flour – to care for. It’s supposed to impress on them the challenges of parenthood and marriage. Is this what the opposition means? Girls would be paired up and forced to experience simulated lesbian lifestyles full of hand woven natural fibers and Veganism? Would they spend a week hating men and referring to the cheerleading squad as gender traitors? Would the boys be required to select a simulated same-sex life partner and forgo football for a selection of fabulous shoes and a fieldtrip to the Pink Carousel for virgin daiquiris?

Is that what the opposition is talking about when they say “teach gay marriage in school?”

Or do they mean that it would it be more like how the Christian Conservatives keep trying to sneak their bible into the public schools through the Trojan horse of “Intelligent” Design? Is that what they’re afraid of, that secret pervasive gay agenda? The damned homosexuals want to add Interior Design to shop class maybe? Do they want to teach the controversy? Will they insist that fabric swatches and pastel color wheels be added to the Auto Body Repair class? Will they repaint the gym with rainbows?

I can understand if that’s what the Christian Conservatives mean, because, really, who would know better than them about hidden agendas in the public schools. Right?

Or is it that what they really mean is the schools might teach the realities of actually being gay in America? The hate. The fear. The discrimination. The brutality. The bigotry. The shame. The ridicule. The denial of rights. The isolation. The second class citizenship. The death threats and the actual deaths at the hands of their smugly, morally superior Christian neighbors? How, in the freest nation in the world, yet another group of people has been marginalized by the tyranny of the majority? Perhaps the role-playing class could include a scenario where a hetero couple is arbitrarily denied a marriage license because the rest of the class doesn’t approve of their pairing, or better yet maybe the class could select a “Mathew Sheppard” from one of their number, beat him to death, and leave his battered corpse hanging on a fence in front of the school.

Is that what the opposition really means when they say they are afraid that the schools will be forced to teach gay marriage? Again, I can understand that, if that’s what they mean. Because we certainly wouldn’t want our children to learn about that, would we? I spent my entire life in the military, you want your foot soldiers to fight, to kill, to hate, you don’t want them to see the opposition as human. You sure as hell don’t want your kids empathizing with gays, they might give up the good fight and find a way to live peacefully with their neighbors. Certainly, I can understand why Christian Conservatives wouldn’t want their kids to learn about the reality of being gay in America.

Or when they say “teach gay marriage in school” do they mean that including a line in a textbook like, “In the United States of American, the Constitution guarantees every citizen the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, to equal protection under the law, to full and equal participation in society, freedom from persecution, and the right to live their own lives as they see fit without regard for other’s religious beliefs” will somehow make their kids turn gay?

That’s it, isn’t it?

That’s what they really fear.

If their children learn that it’s OK to be who you are, without fear, without shame, well, they just might be who they are. Happily.

And we sure as hell wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Yeah, I don’t get it.

I don’t get it at all.

Hoist on your own petard

Ain't irony funny?

Take the Mount Blanco Fossil Museum in Crosbyton, Texas - who's motto is "Digging up facts of God's Creation, one fossil at a time..."

Yeah, it's another Creation "museum." Not as slick or glossary as the far more infamous one in Kentucky, this once looks more like your standard Texas tourist trap, full of rubber tomahawks and overpriced kid-sized faux ten-gallon hats.

The webpage describes the place as "a science museum, showing facts and data about the actual fossils in the museum." And then goes on to say, "We believe that evolution is an old-fashioned theory not substantiated by facts, and that what the Bible says is more scientifically accurate" [emphasis mine].

Nothing particularly new going on at Mt Blanco, it's your basic brand of batshit crazy, booger eating Young Earth Creationism, complete with dinosaur skeletons and the same goofy rationalizations and deluded nonsense that has sprung up elsewhere. Creationist doctrine sounds like something a child would make up - or a mental patient. They've even got a bible waving, bearded nutjob, named Joe Taylor who fancies himself as some kind of scientist. You can call ahead and arrange to have Scientist Joe give a lecture to your church or homeschooler group, where he'll answer your questions about how the Earth is only six thousand years old, how man and dinosaurs lived shoulder to shoulder, and how old Noah even managed to squeeze a few of those big scaly beasts onto the Ark, two by two as they say. And for extra credit, go read James Taylor's (Joe's nephew and biomedical 'researcher,' no relation to the singer so far as I can tell) description of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which you can find under the 'Staff' section.

The crux of this crap is, of course, a rigid interpretation of the bible (I was going to say a literal explanation of biblical events, but that's not correct at all - if it were a literal interpretation, well, they wouldn't be adding dinosaurs to the Deluge mythology now would they?) By rigid interpretation, what I mean is that in an attempt to resolve the discrepancies that modern science is raising in ancient belief systems, the Creationists have developed a strict doctrinal world view and then gone looking in both the bible and in science for 'evidence' to support it. They have no more regard or understanding of traditional Christianity, than they do for science - and they'll bend both to fit their pre-defined paradigm. Their utter disregard for validated scientific dating methodologies such as carbon dating and the relatively recent inclusion of dinosaurs into the creationist fabric are both examples of this. It's a form of deliberate mass delusion, and the problem here, of course, is that it is not possible to resolve the discrepancies that saturate this kind of 'science.'

If you have real faith, then it's not necessary to whore-up your beliefs with pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo in order to rationalize away the discrepancies. In fact, doing so shows just how threatened you are by science in the first place, and just how little faith you actually have. If you have true faith, then you let it stand on it's own. But, if you have some major doubts, then it's important that you yell good and loud and do everything you can to distract from those discrepancies, so you don't feel stupid for believing what you yourself think is fairly goofy.

If you're doing real science, you welcome those discrepancies, because resolving disparities between information points is what leads to real advances and improved understanding of how the world actually works. That process continually forces you to update and adjust your worldview as more and more information becomes available, which is why we have things like antibiotics, airplanes, and big-screen HD plasma TV.

But if you're engaged in pseudo-science rationalization of your goofy belief system, like oh say Young Earth Creationists, then those discrepancies are a trap. You can't change your beliefs, because that would mean that you were wrong to begin with, which means you might be wrong now, which means it's only a matter of time before people realize they're being hoodwinked and stop dropping money into the donation plate. (Blimey! 'E's just making it up as 'e goes along!) So you're stuck, hoist on your own petard, and forced into a position where your only option is to pretend the discrepancies don't exist. For example, claim the whole world was flooded to a height above the highest mountain and every animal today is the direct descendant of one to three breeding pairs and eight Iron-age humans who rode out the end of the world in a wooden ship the size of an aircraft carrier that they themselves built in their backyard using common household appliances - and you start to have some serious problems. Not one single branch of mainstream science supports the creationist deluge statement, not one. Everything we know about the world must be wrong. Everything. And that's demonstratively just not the case, for example if the science behind carbon dating is wrong and the Earth really is no more than six thousand years old - then pretty much all of nuclear science is wrong, which means the computer chips you're reading this on right now don't actually work and you're not actually reading this. And that's only one discrepancy, there are literal millions more in every branch of science. See, that's the problem with real science, unlike religion you don't get to pick and chose what you believe in. The devil can only steal your soul if you believe in him, but gravity will kill you whether you believe in it or not. Which brings us back to the creationists, sooner or later you're bound to get trapped in your own bullshit.

Here's the thing - old Joe Taylor and his museum are up to their eyeballs in debt. And they're going to go out of business if they don't come up with some real money, real soon. So, they've decided to auction off the pride of their bone collection, a restored mastodon skull, in order to raise some much needed cash.

They're hoping to get $160,000 or more for it.

And in order to get the full $160,000 dollars at auction, they are listing the skull as at least 40,000 years old. Ah, caught the problem, did you? Yeah, in those lectures Scientist Joe Taylor likes to give, the world itself is only 6,000 years old. But, here's the problem: nobody will pay top dollar for a pachyderm skull that is merely 6000 years old, even if Adam himself was feeding it peanuts in the Garden.

Is it just me, or is there about 34,000 years of discrepancy there?

Funny, isn't it, when threatened with bankruptcy Joe and his band of fervent believers suddenly dumped their convictions? And if they get the money, they'll go right back to them without ever once smelling the stench of hypocrisy? Then again, it occurs to me that maybe they're just saying they think it's 40,000 years old in order to fleece us gullible non-believers. After all, most of us want to believe that the skull is 40,000 years old, they're just telling us what we want to hear. Funny, though, how they turned to real science, including carbon dating, in order to determine the best price for the fossil, isn't it?

Wouldn't you like to be a fly on the wall when one of those homeshooled fundie kids asks that question during the next lecture:

"Excuse me, Scientist Joe, but how come you said the mastodon skull was 40,000 years old at that auction? But you just told us that the world is only 6,000 years old? Where were the mastodons before the Earth was created? Floating in space? What did they eat? Where did they go to the bathroom? I don't get it." (we're assuming a fundie kid would actually break programming long enough to have a stray thought of his own here).

"Well, that's a good questions, Tommy, and you'll have lot's of time to think about it while you burn in hell for all eternity!"

Oh well, either way, as long as you're bullshitting for Jesus, I guess it's OK.

If there really is a God, he's obviously got one hell of a sense of ironic humor.