Books Lying Open
¤ Middlesex, Jeffery Eugenides
¤ The Color of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Soul-Devouring Worry:
¤ My sweetie dragging along under the burden of insufficient sleep.

Answer of the Day:
¤ Because they're so cute in matching office chairs.

Curse of the Day:
¤ May your right hand be better and hitting than blocking.

¤ What do cats do when they live with flies and other bugs around all the time? Both of our cats, especially Jinx, go into hyper red alert mode whenever they see any sort of insect life. A spider on the ceiling will bring both cats to a stand still of eager tail wagging, and any fly or moth buzzing through an open door will keep Jinx occupied and chasing until the bug vanishes, or she catches it and eats it. She's quite good at catching them too, on the fly or up against a window or screen.

My question though, is what would the cats do if they had bugs around all the time? Get bored and never chase again? Chase sometimes and not others? Chase until they were exhausted, then lie panting and staring?  Most of us live in modern, clean, relatively bug-free environments, and when a bug gets in our hair or a fly lands on our arm or face, we wave at it and get all distracted. Yet we've all seen programs with people in Africa or somewhere people live in the open air and they just ignore insects landing on their bodies, by necessity. If they waved every time one landed on their cheek, they'd spend all day waving.

I assume this would work for the cats, and they'd eventually get bored with bugs. Of course if the cats lived outside they'd be chasing bigger game; mice and birds and such, and maybe bugs wouldn't be of interest to them past kittenhood anyway.  I still want to take Jinx to one of those butterfly houses at the zoo though, just watch her brain absolutely explode at the multiple shiny bogies.

The movie, if you know nothing about it, is set in a sort of sci-fi version of the 1930s, with incredible robots, mad scientists, intrepid female reporters, and it's got an Star Wars type of swashbuckling plot with aerial battles, dirigibles, undersea warfare, and more. The gimmick is that everything in the entire movie, including one of the actors, is computer generated. All of the backgrounds, special effects, lighting, etc. So it's basically like Episode 1 and 2, except with dialogue that's not LOL awful and acting that won't make your eyes hurt. At least that's the hope.

It looks very visually appealing, and even the bad early reviews I read said they loved the look of it. There's just no telling if the movie itself will be any good, or if it's all look and gimmick and cool visuals with no heart or story. Riddick was visually gorgeous as well, and it sucked anyway. I'll be sharing my opinion of the film in Monday's blog, I suspect.

How about more info from CBS News:

A year ago I thought he'd lose badly, no matter who the Democrats nominated, if Iraq was even 1/10th as bad as it is now. I thought all of the scandals, all of the cronyism in Iraq and the administration, the plunging economy, the skyrocketing debt, etc would sink Bush Jr. worse than it did Bush Sr. And yet here we are, two months from the election, and it's still a dead heat. The whole thing really just amazes me.

I thought this was an exceptionally ignorant comment, even for the CAP Alerts guy in his little "smack in the middle of nowhere" hick town. I realize that basic public schooling leaves children woefully-uneducated about the world, other cultures, and especially about their myths, but it just amazes me that anyone would be so ignorant as to think The Bible was the first religious text to include a character who walked on water. That talent is one of the standard god powers in numerous ancient cultures, and like most of the stories in the Bible, it's quite easy to find older myths form other cultures that were the inspiration for the Biblical version of events. Hell, Zoroastrianism basically gave early Judaism the concepts of monotheism, dualism, a savior, and more. What's a minor levitation miracle compared to that?

On a more general level, lots of ancient religions had gods who could walk on water. It was pretty much a default power for Chinese gods, and it shows up in numerous other religions as well, most of which originated thousands of years before Christianity. And if you think about it, why wouldn't walking on water be a common power? Isn't the whole point in having a god to give Him powers normal people don't possess?

Imagine you live thousands of years ago, (Which means no modern miracle skills, like the ability to hack any website, code bug-free C++, keep a cell phone call from cutting out in a tunnel, etc.) and you're creating your god's legends. He needs some miraculous superhero type powers. What'll you give him?

• Immortality is a must.
• Flight never hurts. (Walking on water is sort of a step down from this, so we'll group it in as a subset. As a bonus, it seems somewhat more believable to the new converts.)
• The ability to heal others. (Raising the dead is a step up.)
• Invulnerability.
• Tremendous strength.
• The ability to control the weather.
• The ability to transform things into other things or create things from nothing. (Water to wine, wine to urine, etc.)

That's just seven, or so, but you can throw in more specialized talents if you want a more unique god. Give Him the ability to skinwalk (transformation into animal forms), turn invisible, run super fast, see super far or in the dark, etc. Or just go for omniscience if you want to take the whole enchilada, though this isn't strongly-recommended, since what's the fun in having a god who knows everything before it happens?  How can you write any good legends about Him then?

If you look at the list of potential skills, Jesus was actually a pretty unimaginative character. Sure, the walking on water is cool, and sacrificing himself for the good of his people is a big winner, from a PR angle at least. But the rest of his exploits weren't all that impressive. He was a good public speaker, but not so powerful that everyone who heard him followed him. He wasn't physically strong or a war leader. He couldn't fly, or turn invisible, or make it rain. He could heal and raise the dead, though he did so sparingly, and he could transform things, but only minor stuff. Water to wine, for instance. Jesus didn't crank out any philosopher's stone riches, or turn his enemies into swine or anything really cool like that, unfortunately.

But even if I grant that the CAP Alerts guy didn't have much of a liberal arts education, he's on the internet. He's got access to Google. I did a quick search for people who could walk on water in myth, and after I refined my search string (to remove non-relevant results) I got hundreds of useful hits. Here are just a few from the first page of results, for pre-Christian gods (and others) who could walk on water. All results I found within 5 minutes of looking.

So yes, lots of gods and other mythical creatures have been able to walk on water (or do far better things).

More specific to the movie Hero, the characters in that film who "walk on water" don't do anything of the kind. There is a long, flying, balletic fight scene over a pond, in which two characters swoop around in almost weightless fashion, only touching the water with the tips of their weapons, and then swooping up for several more slashing passes after that. I recall them actually having to run over the water once or twice during the scene, when they got hit or lost altitude, but it was as part of an action sequence, while fighting with swords. There's really no way it could have been less like the Jesus walking on water legend in the Bible, and to say the movie scene was inspired or based on or insulting to the Christian legend is pretty ridiculous.

Elsewhere in recent CAP reviews, I got a laugh out of his outrage over the "spooning" incident in Without A Paddle. (Scroll down to the quoted part in a box for the spooning bit.)  Bizarrely, he seems to think that spooning is some sort of deviant, exclusively-homosexual practice, and the fact that a 12 y/o boy thinks it's hilarious to see non-gay grown men spooning to stay warm in a rain storm is further evidence of the imminent Sodom & Gomorrah fate awaiting the entire US.

I'm sure homosexuals spoon, but so does everyone else, including mothers with their babies. It's about the most natural way for two humans to lie down together, and doesn't necessarily have any sexual connotations at all. Additionally, the term is utterly logical and self-evident to anyone who has ever seen a silverware drawer, and who hasn't seen a couple, of whatever gender, lying like that, even if they're fully dressed in a public park or on the beach or on TV or wherever? As for the movie, through various idiotic mechanizations the three male leads are cold at night in the rain. What are they supposed to do to keep warm? Of course it's stupid and immature humor, but that's what makes comedies work, these days (which is why I haven't paid money to see a comedy in half a decade).  The fact that any semi-intimate male-to-male contact, no matter how slapstick and non-sexual, is cause for outrage over the homosexual agenda, says far more about the myopic world view the CAP Alerts guy has than anything else.

Oh, and this bit in his Napoleon Dynamite review simply baffled me:

I guess "the most foul of foul words" is "fuck?" So someone said "screw" or "bang" or "freak" or any of the hundreds of other words that can be used to mean "fuck" and that's as bad, to him, as saying the word itself?

Lastly, and here's where it gets good, while digging around some other recent reviews, I once again skimmed over his intentionally oblivious review of Bowling for Columbine, and once again the "Matthew Shepherd = Jessie Dirkhising" argument stuck in my craw. Here's what the CAP Alerts guy says, and he's shoehorned in virtually-identical comments about several other movies that had anything to do with gay issues.

His mention of Matthew Shepard here is pretty bizarre, if you think about it. Really, CAP guy is talking about how he doesn't like a Michael Moore anti-gun movie (which we've had here on our DVD shelf for upwards of 8 months without ever getting around to watching it) and he compares Moore's methods to those of the "spin of the homosexual agenda." What? How in the hell do those things compare? 

Got a little trouble with gay on the brain, Mr. CAP?

As for the argument itself, it's apparently gained a great deal of love in the anti-gay right wing circles, and it's so patently full of shit that it functions as a sort of Turing Test/Godwin's Law for me. I.E., anyone I see make the "Shepherd = Dirkhising" argument is automatically a lying hack with zero intellectual integrity. While I think the CAP Alerts guy is probably clinically insane, for a variety of reasons (many of which I elaborate on this reviews page dedicated to him), I don't think he's a complete lying partisan hack, like say Ann Coulter is. He (Mr. CAP Alerts) is wrong about virtually everything, but he's wrong from the heart, and he really believes in what he's saying, no matter how much it sounds like lunacy to the rest of us; it's not just a pose he's striking since it'll help him sell books or get on TV more or discredit his political enemies. He really believes what he's saying, and is completely sure he's right and the whole rest of the world is wrong. The fact that it's an argument principally advocated by the fine and upstanding Rev. Fred Phelps should give you an idea of its quality, but that doesn't seem to slow CAP down a bit.

His argument, which I think is just laughably-weak, is what moved me to email him. I thought there might be a chance, however remote, that he would look at the issue logically and objectively, and realize what a completely failed argument he's trying to peddle. My email is below, but first, let me include some background info, in case you don't know who the people are.

Matthew Shepard has an entry on wikipedia that covers things pretty well. Here's a link-heavy quote of the opening paragraphs:

Jesse Dirkhising is, admittedly, far less famous, despite the fact that he died in an even more gruesome fashion. He was held captive for weeks by two gay men who used him as their sex slave until they eventually killed him. I found a site that simply quotes about 50 news articles about the subject (which might tell you something about CAP's claim that the media ignored the issue) and you can read as many as you want right here.

The main argument made by the anti-gay people, a group that certainly includes the CAP Alerts Guy, is that the media has a pro-gay agenda since they relentlessly talked up the Matthew Shepard murder, while virtually ignoring the Jesse Dirkhising case. I addressed that in my email, which is as follows. Since I was trying to get the CAP Alerts guy to actually read it and maybe give it some thought, I of course tried to be polite and reasonable and stayed rigidly on topic, which is why this differs so much from my usual comments on his particular flavor of lunacy.

You can skip my mail entirely if you wish, since it's repeated below, broken up by the dozens of comments he made.

Greetings.

I enjoy your site and the often entertaining movie reviews a great deal, but I had to comment on something after reading the Bowling for Columbine review. It's in regards to your repeated (I've seen you make the argument in several reviews over time.) efforts to equate the death of Jesse Dirkhising with that of Matthew Shepard. I realize it's something you want to push since you disapprove of homosexuality, but have you really given the argument any thought?

Matthew Shepard was gay, and he was brutally murdered precisely because of his sexual orientation.

Jesse Dirkhising was killed in horrible fashion by pedophiles, but his sexual orientation was not the reason for his murder. 

Unless you are claiming the 2 men who killed Jessie Dirkhising did so because he was straight, it's just a horrible case of child abuse. The 2 cases have nothing in common, other than that both are horrible murders of people who did nothing to deserve to die. The media coverage of Matthew Shepard's murder was largely based on the motive, not the details. There are dozens of much more graphic and brutal and cruel murders every week that don't make the national news either.

Even worse, there are thousands (hundreds?) of sexual abuse murders every year in the US, and I'm not even counting what allegedly happens in prisons. Women are raped and murdered by heterosexual men every day, children are molested and killed by their own heterosexual parents, whores are beaten to death by heterosexual Johns, and so on. Common sense tells us that the vast majority of these crimes are perpetrated by heterosexuals on other heterosexuals. Obviously some percentage of them are by gays on gays, or by gays on straights, but unless you've got some statistics that show gays perpetrate sexual assaults disproportionate to their percentage of the population (and I find that extremely unlikely, given how many straight men feel they can force themselves upon a woman or beat/kill their wife/girlfriend if she gets out of line), then your argument is entirely without merit.

If a feminist site quoted every case of a man raping and murdering a woman as evidence that heterosexuality was evil and should be outlawed and that men should be chemically castrated, how much credence would you give that argument?

You can certainly argue that the media paid too much attention to the Matthew Shepard case, and that this demonstrates that they have a bias of some sort, but give up trying to use Dirkhising as a corollary, since that comparison simply doesn't fly. It's as inaccurate as someone arguing religion is evil since it drives so many priests to molest children. I don't expect you'll give up one of your prized arguments just because it doesn't make any sense, but I'd certainly be impressed by your intellectual honesty (no matter how many other things I disagree with you about) if you were able to reconsider this issue.

I didn't seriously think he would change his argument based on anything I said, but I felt better about myself after mailing him, and at least I'd done some online research to learn more about the issue.  Much to my surprise, he replied a few hours later, and in great detail. My mail is double indented and in purple, his is single indented and in purple.  I resisted Fisking his reply to me, mostly since he wouldn't grasp the sarcasm at all, but I can't entirely resist it now. So I'll just do it a little bit; comments made right now are not indented and in black.

On 9/15/04 6:56 AM, the CAP Ministry wrote:

Greetings. I enjoy your site and the often entertaining movie reviews a great deal, but I had to comment on something after reading the recently added Bowling for Columbine review. It's in regards to your repeated (I've seen you make the argument in several reviews over time) efforts to equate the death of Jessie Dirkhising with that of Matthew Shephard.

That is not the purpose of using the Jessie Dirkhising incident to counter the use of the Matthew Shephard incident to foster sympathy for the homosexual practitioners. It is a counterpoint to those who, like you seem to be doing, defend the practice of homosexuality by implying that heterosexual practitioners want to kill homosexual practitioners.

Well, several thousand gay-bashing incidents a year do tend to leave that impression, yes.

I realize it's something you want to push since you disapprove of homosexuality,

So does God. And I do because He does. By the way, neither He nor I "disapprove" of the one who chooses to practice homosexuality. The one who chooses to do so is as precious to Jesus as you and I. It is the chosen behavior He hates. The deed not the doer. And, yes, it is a chosen behavior. Every single non-autonomic movement of the human body is a choice.

Like homophobia?

but have you really given the argument any thought?

Yes. And you will soon see it is a sound argument.

Matthew Shephard was gay, and he was brutally murdered precisely because of his sexual orientation.

He was brutally murdered because of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. That he was gay was milked by the homosexual protagonists to magnify their agenda. Anyone who was in the same place at the same time as Shephard would likely have had the same thing happen, a homosexual practitioner or not.

Matthew Shepard was the first murder or serious crime by either of his killers, who had done nothing but petty crimes before that, and they tried to use the "gay panic" defense in court, saying they only killed him when they freaked out because he came onto them. Facts which pretty exactly contradict CAP's comments.

Jessie Dirkhising was killed in horrible fashion by pedophiles,

By homosexual practitioners performing their chosen lifestyle.

You'd think there would be a lot fewer gay men if their "chosen lifestyle" involved regular murder of their lover?

but his sexual  orientation was not the reason for his murder.

He was male. And was murdered by two male homosexual practitioners. That he was male is the very reason they attacked Jessie. So, Jessie's "sexual orientation" AND theirs was most certainly the reason the murderers attacked him.

Well no, that's exactly backwards. Straight men rape women, gay men rape men. The sexual orientation of the victim is irrelevant, unless you think no man has or would ever rape a lesbian.

Unless you are claiming the 2 men who killed Jessie Dirkhising did so because he was straight, it's just a horrible case of child abuse.

It was a horrible case of rape murder by homosexual practitioners. Your use of more polite, "politically correct" terms (more than likely just like you have been taught) does not reduce the horror of it.

Honestly, how often do you hear the media say "rape murder" when they're discussing this sort of thing, in any case, gay or not? He makes it sound like I'm trying to minimize the circumstances, and in his gay-obsessed mind, I probably was.  Although I must admit, it's not often I'm accused of being politically-correct, given the sorts of topics I generally blog about in these parts.

The 2 cases have  nothing in common, other than that both are horrible murders of people who did nothing to deserve to die.

Yes, they do. And I have explained that to you above.

The media coverage of Matthew Shephard's murder was largely based on the motive, not the details.

The fabricated motive. The fabricated motive of murder because of sexual orientation.

That the murder was reported as a hate crime added to the media interest, but it certainly wasn't the only reason it made the news. As I say below, there are thousands of brutal sexual murders a year. Only a very few of the cases make it into the major media, and only those with extenuating circumstances to grab viewer attention. I think the media are scum-suckers too, but it's just childishly-ignorant to put much more into their motives than ratings-hunger. 

There are dozens of much more graphic and brutal and cruel murders every week that don't make the news at all.

And the homosexual rape murder of 14 year old Jessie, murdered *because* of the sexual orientation of the murderers AND the victim, did get any mainstream media coverage at all. And I can't think of many more graphic murders that being sodomized, orally raped (with that which just had been used in sodomizing the youth) then murdered by being choked with his own underwear soaked in gasoline.

Even worse, there are thousands (hundreds?) of sexual abuse murders every year in the US, and I'm not even counting what allegedly happens in prisons. Women are raped and murdered by heterosexual men every day,

That is not a homosexual act. Dirkhising's murder was. Shephard's was not. He was not sexually violated in any way. "Sexual" had nothing to do with Shephard's murder. It was street punks doing what street punks do. Someone alone in the same place at the same time who were maybe wearing a color the punks did not like or a shirt they did not like or had a haircut they did not like would probably have been murdered.

I addressed this issue in my reply to him, but what he's saying here is simply wrong.

Even if he were correct, what would be the relevance? Unless CAP guy is saying that every case of gay-bashing ever was fabricated, the fact that this one case might not have been 100% homosexual-motivated is irrelevant; thousands of others are, and most of those get far less media attention.

childen are molested and killed by their own heterosexual parents, whores are beaten to death by heterosexual Johns, and so on.

And none of these excuse the rape murder of a straight youth by two male homosexual practitioners. And the sins of the perpetrators in your descriptive do not excuse the sins of the murderers of Jessie.

As I said several times in my mail, both Matthew's and Jesse's murders were horrible things done by horrible people. He's the one saying they're different, and making excuses for Matthew's killers by calling them street punks and acting as though they were only out to rob and would have killed anyone, when their own courtroom testimony contradicts that theory.

This is the problem when you try to have a debate with someone motivated entirely by ideology. They've only got one trick in their pony, and they have to go back to it every other paragraph. 

Common sense tells us that the vast majority of these crimes are perpetrated by hetrosexuals on other heterosexuals.

That is simply because the homosexual practitioner population is only about 3% at most of the entire population. Indeed, homosexual relationships are *notorious* for being violent beyond the per capita ratio. Brutally so. Your argument is futile.

My point was that there are tons of such cases every year, and that the vast majority of them don't make it into the national news. Jesse's murder wasn't underreported out of some sort of conspiracy; it was just another gruesome homicide that slipped through the cracks.  He never says anything to refute that; he just changes the subject to talking again about how horrible gays are. Remember what I said about a one-trick pony?

Obviously  some percentage of them are by gays on gays, or by gays on straights, but unless you've got some statistics that show gays perpetrate sexual assaults disproportionate to their percentage of the population (and I find that extremely unlikely,

You've been wrong before. And are now. It is raw statistics that reveal the disproportionately violent nature of homosexual relationships.

given how many straight men feel they can force themselves upon a woman or beat/kill their wife/girlfriend if she gets out of line), then your argument is entirely without merit.

Disproportionate!? Let me share with you some real "disproportionate."

Dr. Judith Reisman, a social researcher who has studied sexual behavior for 24 years, released a new study called Crafting Gay Children which revealed that while heterosexuals outnumber they who chose to practice homosexuality about 44 to 1, the incidence of homosexual practitioners molesting children is up to 40 times greater than heterosexuals. Taking figures from a 1991 population study by the U.S. Department of Commerce, Reisman looks at heterosexual abuse of girls by men and homosexual abuse of boys by men. Taking into account the numbers of homosexual practitioners and the numbers of heterosexuals in the population, the data showed that 8 million girls were abused by age 18 by heterosexual men, a ratio of 1 victim to 11 adult men. However, 6-8 million boys were abused by age 18 by 1-2 million adult homosexual practitioners, a ratio of 3-5 victims for every adult male homosexual practitioner: 0.091 victim per heterosexual adult to 3 to 5 victims per adult homosexual practitioner.

Read some more about the notorious Dr. Judith Reisman here, see her work rebutted here, or just do a Google on her name if you want to see more, though you'll have to scroll down a long way to find any mention of her that's not from a right wing website eager to repeat her "research" conclusions. She's one of those anti-gay pro-abstinence puritans who blame every evil of modern society on loosened moral codes. So what do you expect her "studies" to demonstrate?

Her main claim to fame is from spreading ridiculous lies about Dr. Kinsey's early sex research, and she claims that he paid pedophiles to rape children in order to get more information for his surveys. As you can imagine, the Kinsey institute vociferously denies this claim, and most everything else she says. Here's a quick quote from their official response to her various accusations.

Kinsey was not a pedophile in any shape or form. He did not carry out experiments on children; he did not hire, collaborate, or persuade people to carry out experiments on children. He did not falsify research findings and there is absolutely no evidence that his research "opened flood gates for the sexual abuse of children". Kinsey did talk to thousands of people about their sex lives, and some of the behaviors that they disclosed, including abuse of children, were illegal. In fact, many sexual behaviors, even those some between married adults, were illegal in the 1940's and 1950's. Without confidentiality, it would have been impossible to investigate the very private lives of Americans then, and even now.

Continuing with the CAP email:

And there is no "kind" way to put this ... pedophilia appears to be inherent with the homosexual lifestyle. The existence of the North American Man-boy Love Association (NAMBLA) is proof of it. It must be clearly noted that the report does NOT say every adult homosexual practitioner engages in child sexual abuse. Many have told me they could not even consider such abuse. But if only half of the folks who are adult homosexual practitioners engage in such abuse, that would mean the 3 to 5 victims per adult homosexual practitioner who chooses to sexually abuse children would actually be from 6 to 10 victims. And if only one fourth choose to abuse children, the number of victims rises to 12 to 20 per victimizer. If two plus two equals four...

I hope you are getting the true picture.

So the incredibly-fringe, universally-reviled NAMBLA is representative of the millions of gay men who hate everything about it and would never consider molesting a child? Does that mean we're free to assume the CAP Alerts guy is an insanely-racist murdering neo-nazi since various right wing Christian groups are? Does that mean every heterosexual man wants to rape 8 year old girls since there are sex tour packages available online that fly men to Cambodia and other such countries for just that purpose?

Yes, more of those tricky analogies.

And yes, he really did say that not "every" gay male is a pedophile, and he really did estimate that just 50% of them are. You read that right. He honestly thinks that at least 50% of gay men are active pedophiles. Let that sink in for a minute. He's nuts. He really is mentally ill. I can't deny it any longer.

 

If a feminist site quoted every case of a man raping and murdering a woman as evidence that heterosexuality was evil and should be outlawed and that men should be chemically castrated, how much credence would you give that argument?

A male raping a female, though a crime worthy of hanging in my opinion, is not a homosexual act. You are trying to minimize my argument (and it is not working) by introducing non tangent elements - trying to compare apples to oranges.

No, actually it's called an analogy. He says all gay men are pedophiles, and my comparison was what if women said all men were rapists since some men were. It seems like a pretty one to one comparison to me, intended to point out the absurdity of his conclusion.

You can certainly argue that the media paid too much attention to the Matthew Shephard case, and that this demonstrates that they have a bias of some sort, but give up trying to use Dirkhising as a corollary, since that comparison  simply doesn't fly.

It does. And it lands, too. And can take off again .......

It's as inaccurate

That you say it is inaccurate does not make it so.

as someone arguing religion is evil since it drives so many priests to molest children.

Which, by the way, is a homosexual act. And it is not religion that drives errant priests to homosexual abuse. It is homosexuality that does.

Man, everything goes back to gayness for him, doesn't it?  Can you read this whole email without starting to wonder about him? I mean can a guy see, think, and fear GAYGAYGAYGAY 24 hours a day without having some sexual issues of his own?  I haven't given homosexuality this much thought in my adult life, and I live in San Francisco! (Well, near it, anyway.)

I don't expect you'll give up one of your prized arguments just because it doesn't make any sense,

If they did not make any sense, I would "give [them] up." But they make a great deal of sense ... except to you.

but  I'd certainly be impressed by your intellectual honesty (no matter how many other things I disagree with you about) if you were able to reconsider this issue.

My intellectual honesty in not in question just because you think it substandard.

Eric

PS, I'm not gay, I've never engaged in any homosexual activity, I'm living with a woman I love and though we're committing one of the sins you never fail to  point out in a film (cohabitation), I can assure you that I'm not making this email argument out of some inner gayness.

It certainly is in defense of the practice of homosexuality.

Actually, here he's really wrong. Find a single word in my entire email that defends homosexuality. Go ahead, I'll wait. I never said one word about gayness being good or bad, I simply pointed out the flaws in his illogical argument. He chose to take my email, which was entirely neutral about homosexuality, as a defense of it, just because I pointed out that his attempted anti-gay argument was bullshit.

He sure does love his one-trick pony, doesn't he? 

I've never mailed you about the countless other things you say that I disagree with since I respect your opinions on those matters, no matter how much I disagree with them and your basis for them.

You people keep giving me credit for "opinions." When it comes to sin, I have no authorship to the rules. That I say a behavior is sin doesn't make it so. But what God says does. So stop giving me credit for that which is not even my "opinion."

"You people?"  I wasn't aware I was in any sort of group. And I also find his "it's not my opinion, I'm just doing God's will" to be an incredibly gutless argument.

God's not writing your website, CAP Guy. You are. Take responsibility for your own opinions and comments; don't try to hide behind Baby Jesus.

The Dirkhising = Shephard = gay media conspiracy thing 

It was not a conspiracy. It was a maneuver by the homosexual protagonists to manipulate their agenda into wider exposure/visibility.

So it was a secret maneuver by these secretive gays pulling their strings. But that's not a conspiracy? 

though,  is, I think, factual, and so obviously a specious argument that I was moved to comment on it. 

You are entitled to your opinion.

The thing that annoys me most about his email is the whole cowardly, "It's not my opinion, it's God's opinion." As if that makes him seem humble and obedient, while simultaneously absolving him of all blame for anything he'll ever do, no matter how shit-headed. After all, he found some biblical verse somewhere that could possibly be interpreted as backing up whatever he wanted to do in the first place. You realize, of course, that this "I was just following orders." excuse, divine or human orders, has been used to justify most every war and atrocity in human history, and that every army in human history, attacking or defending, has been 100% sure that the God or Gods were on their side. Not to mention every sports team, debate club, tennis player, etc.

Anyway, my reply to him is here, and yes, I tried to avoid going into very much detail, since I didn't want him to be able to so easily duck the issue again.  I doubt I succeeded, at least partially since I wrote this in a hurry before leaving for martial arts class Thursday night.

Anyway, here's my reply to his reply.

Good evening. 

Thanks for taking the time to reply in such depth. Unfortunately, I still don't see that you've addressed the core issues of my email, which were perhaps not stated clearly-enough.

My point was simply this: You can't compare a hate crime (murder of Matthew Shepard) to a case of pedophile murder/child abuse (murder of Jesse Dirkhising) in a direct fashion. They're both horrible crimes committed by horrible people, but that's where the parallels end.

Your response seems to be:

1) Most (50% was your "at least" figure) homosexuals are pedophiles and the media should pay far more attention to this, especially when an especially horrible crime such as Dirkhising's demonstrates it.

2) Matthew Shepard wasn't a hate crime anyway, since his murders were "street punks" and they would probably have beaten and left to die anyone in that situation and the media shouldn't have paid so much attention to his death.

3) Homosexuality is a horrible thing and we know this because the Bible says so.


#1. Are you serious? You honestly believe that as many as 50% of all homosexual (Men? What about lesbians?) are pedophiles? Do you mean that in terms of a gay 25 year old thinking a 17 y/o guy is hot, and since virtually every heterosexual man alive does that when he sees an attractive teenaged girl, it's not much of an argument. Or do you mean that 50% of the gay men out there, no matter their jobs, personalities, criminal records, etc are potentially going to snatch up and sodomize any 12 y/o they can get alone with? That's just comically ridiculous.

#2. The 2 guys who killed Matthew Shepard were petty criminals, and certainly losers, but they had no serious crimes on their records. They were in the bar that night, drinking for hours, and only started talking to Shepard when they didn't have enough money to cover their bill and used him to pay it, from the news reports I've read. Does that sound like the behavior of coolly calculating criminals?

No one's arguing that Shepard's murderers went in there specifically to pick up a gay man and rob him and beat him to death; neither man had any more history of gay bashing than you'd expect from typically homophobic hick-state rednecks. But they obviously used his gayness against him to get him to pay their bar tab and leave with them, and most damning of all, they tried to use the "gay panic" defense in their trial, saying that he came onto them and they freaked out and killed him because of that. Isn't that basically an admission that it was a "hate crime?" It's not as bad as neo-nazi skinheads grabbing random guys in the street and stomping them, but by their own admission, in their court defense, the 2 guys who killed Shepard did so because he was gay.


#3. I'm not going to go into detail about this one, since it's way out of the scope of this email, and nothing anyone ever says to discredit or point out the contradictions in the bible would change your mind on that front anyway. I do have 2 comments though:

Just out of curiosity, and this is obviously hypothetical -- if scholars unearthed and translated a new hunk of the dead sea scrolls that were obviously written at the same time and by the same people who wrote what's in the bible today (leaving aside the numerous translations of the old scrolls, editing over time, deletion of much of it, etc) and the new scrolls said clearly and unequivocally that homosexuality was okay and not a sin and Yahweh was fine with it... would you change your opinion on homosexuality?

Secondly, you realize that virtually everything bad in the history of Western civilization has been defended by the powers that be with biblical citations? Slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide against the native peoples, witch-burning, the inquisition, innumerable religious wars, the crusades, and on and on? Just taking recent American history; slavery was defended with biblical citations, as was the denial of equal rights for non-whites and women.

This is an old argument, and yes, it's possible to find biblical scriptures to back up almost anything, but is the aforementioned company, all on the wrong side of history, really a group you want to place yourself in?

Eric

PS, and FYI, where do you get the "underwear soaked with gasoline" part about Jesse's death? Is that just an intentional lie to make it all seem even more barbaric and awful, or an honest mistake on your part? I hunted up a few articles on the case last night, and none of them say anything about that. This page has a huge compilation of news coverage of the case, and the word "gasoline" appears nowhere on it. Every news article I've seen says they drugged him with amitriptyline, which is apparently a strong sedative and the overdose of that was a contributing factor to his death. Even if you stick to the equivalency between the cases, you should at least remove this obvious factual error from your comments, since it only serves to discredit your argument.

And that's where we stand now. If he replies with anything of interest, it'll likely show up in Monday's blog.