Quite frankly, I’m surprised more conservatives have not condemned the movie. I was shocked when I visited my parents over Christmas break to find not only my siblings but also my mother obsessing over Frozen. I wondered—did they even watch the same movie? Did they not see the messages I did, messages about self acceptance and freedom from others’ expectations and moral standards, about writing your own rules and moving past childhood trauma? Did they hear the same lyrics? [Read more...]
Now we move beyond grieving for aborted fetuses and beyond grieving for zygotes to grieving for imaginary possible children never conceived. I see. Personally, I would rather try to make this world a better place for the children who already exist. We can worry about imaginary possible children when all the actual existing children have good food, clean water, and healthy living conditions. [Read more...]
A Guest Post by Alix. Way back, years ago (before I had the tools to fully realize I was genderqueer, back in a different life when I was still just a good little girl), I was a dutiful Catholic. I attended Catholic school. I attended Mass twice weekly (once for school on Wednesday, once on Sunday). I was a dutiful Catholic—one who questioned, but only to understand, and who never had er faith rocked—until we moved away when I was ten. We moved in the middle of the school year. The new local Catholic school was full up, so I was enrolled in public school. The new local church we attended once, then never again, because Mom didn’t like it. But I was still, in my heart, a good little Catholic girl. Just a lapsed one. [Read more...]
Our political opponents are human. It’s worth trying to understand our opponents rather than blatantly misrepresenting them or demonizing, mocking, and deriding them. Do we really think our opponents will have any reason to listen to us if we treat them like that? Do we think they will try to understand what we are saying if we don’t even try to understand what they are saying? [Read more...]
As a rule, I don’t like it when people say “this video will make you cry.” So when someone sent me this link with those words, I determined not to cry. It didn’t work. But this video also got me thinking about politics and differing points of view, and how our beliefs influence how we perceive things like this. Watch the video and then join me in thinking on this issue! [Read more...]
In the past two posts, guest contributor Rachel Lazerus has examined Michael Farris’ recent testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In that testimony, and elsewhere across the web, Farris has argued against the U.S. ratifying the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). In a sort of mission drift, Farris has been using his position as arguably the most prominent homeschool activist—he founded the powerful Home School Legal Defense Association—to expand into a range of issues beyond just homeschooling. This is but one example. [Read more...]
Out of my desire to understand his reasoning, I looked up Farris’s citations and read them in their original context. What I found was stunning: the simple reality is that Farris took both Henkin’s and Van Bueren’s statements out of context and misapplied them to his own twisted legal theory. By citing each quote out of context, Farris was able to, as Senator Menendez said, take “a noncontroversial statement and twist it into something that’s rather sinister.” The very basis of Farris’s protestations against the CRPD, then, is a lie. [Read more...]
While I don’t think it has wide circulation today, Homosexuality: Legitimate, Alternative Deathstyle was pretty popular among fundamentalist Christians when it was published in 1986, at the height of the AIDS epidemic. What I want to do here is to highlight two contrasting page spreads, one on the heterosexual life and one on the homosexual life. I find this contrast fascinating, because I’ve never seen heterosexuals’ obsession with homosexual sex outlined so clearly before. [Read more...]
Given that Farris is using homeschoolers’ money to fund his actions and advocacy (including the money my parents have been sending him for the past twenty years, I might add), I’d suggest that those homeschoolers have a right to know what he actually thinks about child abuse and child protective services. If they are supporting a child abuse denialist, as I suspect they are, they need to know that. [Read more...]
I promised in my earlier article on Stephen Baskerville’s Faith & Reason lecture that I would devote more attention to his views on child abuse. Here I am, ready to fulfill that promise! To summarize Baskerville: First, mothers are the real abusers and it is removing the father from the home that causes child abuse. Second, child protective services exists to take children from innocent heterosexual families and sell them off to gay and lesbian couples. Oh yes. [Read more...]
In his lecture, Baskerville argued that the current “war” being waged against Christianity in the United States is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution, and that evangelical Christians are not properly aware of the full extent of this problem. He argued that the “militants” heading up the sexual revolution have created new “gender crimes” designed solely to discriminate against and falsely imprison white males (presumably white male Christians, but to be honest Baskerville seems a whole lot more concerned about white males in general than Christians in particular). [Read more...]
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