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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

Love & Acceptance?

I am prompted to write this note because of a status that some I know posted on Facebook. Although I agreed with the sentiment, I did not want to just copy and paste it, but I couldn't alter it to say what I wanted to within Facebook's status limits, so I will post this as a note, instead, and say what I really intend to say on the subject.

The whole point was this: "Let's promote love and acceptance; put this on your status if you also know & love someone who is gay." At the same time, it was protesting "Civil Partnerships" instead of "Gay Marriage".

There are three different points I wish to stress here:
1). Being gay is not a disease or a "lifestyle choice"; nor do I believe it is against God's will. Gay people don't need a cure, but have a right (as we all do, constitutionally) to be treated equally by law.

2). Gay people desire simple acceptance. They're not out to corrupt your kids, or destroy society. They just want to be recognised as human beings with the same rights and desires of everyone else, the basic needs of human life: food, shelter, clothes, basic human dignity, a society of caring people around them, and the right to love whom they love, unhindered.

3). I understand some people would reject "gay marriage" because they don't want it in their church. You want the government not to tell churches what choices to make. Constitutional separation of church and state. Bear with me a moment, though: Constitutionally, you must treat everyone the same way. This leaves you with two choices in our current sytem:

A). One is that gays be granted the right to marry, equally, under the existing laws as they are written, because legally church marriages are recognised by the government as a legal biinding contract; in essence it is not just a wedding, but also a "civil union". These are not separated in current law.

B). The second is that we change our laws to preserve the distance between church and state, and EVERYONE gets only a civil union, under the law, but churches are then free to choose whom they will and won't marry. Weddings become less of a legal contract and more of a holy sacrament.

Defining "marriage" as anything, legally, or altering the constitution, are HUGE steps to take, and must be brought before the Supreme Court, eventually, to decide if such things are constitutional.

Bluntly, if you are treating one group of people differently from another, it is going to be considered unconstitutional.

There. I have said my piece. I truly hope not to have offended anyone. That said, I will say one thing more: I am sick to death of these proponents of "the sanctity of Marriage" with a capitol "m" who on one side say that "allowing gays to marry would soil the institution", who then turn a blind eye on simple, court given divorces, and instead of upholding "What GOD has put together, let no man put asunder", allowing the government to dissolve a marriage that was sanctified by the church.
As far as I know, the Catholic church is the only one that does not recognise the court divorce, to end a Catholic marriage, it must be annulled by the church, or anyone who has a civil divorce and remarries is commiting bigamy and adultery.

Go in peace and love.

Thursday, April 14, 2011

Tomorrow will be Tax Day

Well, here we are, already nearly halfway through the month of April.
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote,
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

~Geoffrey Chaucer, "Canterbury Tales"
It is finally spring, and even though young men's minds are all on thoughts of love, older wiser heads are preparing to render under Caesar that which is Caesar's.
And many wonder why we bother to rend to Caesar in the first place, why don't we just keep our hard earned pecuniary rewards?
Well, the honest answer is that Government is not a self supporting industry. Since we expect certain benefits from our government, we in exchange must find a way to fund them.
Although it would be fair if the national debt were to be divided amongst all of us equally, and everyone just payed their share, those on either end of the financial spectrum disagree.
Those with great wealth and power (and thus often those deciding) agreed in the past to set up the Internal Revenue Service to collect funds, and decided an income tax was fairest on most people, but then the tax code was written in such a way as not to punish those of wealth for acquiring it, and the rich got tax breaks.
Those on the other end of the spectrum often cannot afford to pay their fair share, so they are readily agreeable to changes in tax code that shift the main burden to the middle class, as that allows the poorest to participate in society without having as heavy a burden to bear.
Unfortunately, as debts rise, there are more and more on the bottom end that cannot pay their share, while those on the upper end find more and more ways to opt out of paying their share, leaving an increasingly narrow middle class to pay an increasing percentage of the debts of the other two classes, which also tends to push those in the middle further towards the bottom of the scale.
Reform is needed, and yet, replacing the current system with a fairer one could possibly cause harsher conditions for those on the bottom end during transition, at least until something fairer was actually fully in place.
Another real danger to consider in taxation reform, is that one would have to enact the new before repealing the old, so as to fund the transition. This could lead to the old not being repealed, and having the two systems coexist, since government is lax in removing taxes. Nothing is as permanent as a temporary tax, as the current income tax system shows, it was originally intended as nothing more than a temporary measure, and is now the main tax base for the entire budget.
Although I have many questions, I have few answers on this topic.
Nothing is as sure as death and taxes, but at least we can pretend that death has no deadline we must meet.
Taxes wait on no man ( unless you have previously filled out the proper paperwork requesting an extension, in quadruplicate, and sent the proper colored forms to the proper departmental sections. )

Love to you all, and may you find preparing your returns much less taxing this year!

Friday, April 8, 2011

Gay Caveman?

According to the Telegraph, in this article, archeologist may have found the very first evidence of a cross-gendered individual.
Apparently, there were very specific ways to lay the different genders, male and female, to rest in this ancient culture.
Males were laid out with their heads facing one way, females the other. Both sexes had different grave goods interred with them.
Except this guy breaks that mold. Though male, he is facing the female direction, and has the female associated grave goods buried with him.
So, obviously, this man was homosexual. (At least, it appears to be obvious to the archeologists working the dig.)
So, here's one of my big issues with formal archeology rearing it's ugly head again. (Hm, perhaps considering this story that metaphor is in bad taste?)
Why do so many archeologists proclaim that the evidence says specifically "this" or "that", when even a layman can tell the evidence says no such thing?
All that can actually be told from this unique burial is that it is unique. We have no idea for sure what motivated his survivors to entomb him in this unusual manner.
Perhaps they were unaware of his sex, indeed, and he had led a hidden life as a woman.
Even if true, that says nothing of his sexual orientation.
Perhaps he wanted to enter the afterlife as a woman, having been a man in this one.
Maybe he was being shamed for some reason, possibly for how he treated women in his lifetime.
All we have left behind is a unique burial that does not fit the routine patterns found in this culture.
Assuming anything not directly revealed by the dig is resorting to the old adage about assuming: "When one assumes, they make an ass of you and me."
Stating categorically what ancient peoples felt, thought or believed is unwise, at best.
Unless we have a written record to tell us how the people thought, and what their motivations are, we are simply guessing. Often those guesses are biased by our own cultural prejudices, which can be very deceptive.
For instance, when ancients are said to have worshiped their leader as a god (Pharaoh, Caesar), was this an actual worship, or just lip service payed to the national religion, because it was expected?
Contemporary accounts are problematic in answering these questions, as folks then as today were likely to say what was expected of them.
Ancient peoples surely had all of the desires, wants, and needs of modern peoples. However, assuming that they looked at the world the same way we do is dangerous, because it might place modern motives into actions taken for entirely different reasons.
Saying this recent "caveman" was gay makes as much sense as saying that Alexander the Great was gay. Yes, he may have indeed have had a male lover, Hephaestion. However, equating that to being gay in the modern sense of the term may well be a mistake, as in their culture, there was no stigma against male to male sexual intercourse, especially between an older mentor and a younger protégé, which applies to these two men. Both had female wives, for instance.
All we can tell for sure from the historical record is that the two men loved one another deeply. That could have been as much what we would consider a platonic love, as an erotic attraction to the other's body.
I do feel strongly that stories of such strong male bonding occurring throughout history probably does indeed show a history of what we would modernly term homosexual relationships, but the truth may simply be that their relationships may have indeed been much more complex than that.
I apologize if this seems a bit long-winded, but  reading the above mentioned article really got my goat, for many reasons, but I suppose the simplest one is this: what does it matter whether or not this man was gay?
or perhaps a better question to ask, is "Why do we care?"

Namaste.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Sock Gnomes

I was having a conversation with one of my friends, and she brought up how her daughter is always missing socks, they disappear from the laundry, and you can never find a pair.
I shared with her that we have the same problem in our house, that even though I KNOW that we have enough socks to fill a laundry bin (because we have separated out our laundry a few times and discovered this fact) that we still can never find a matching pair, and often cannot even find two socks of the same color.
We have decided this is the fault of sock gnomes.
What else can explain the fact that a bin full of some hundreds of socks, disappears when you need them?
I have two grown boys living with me, ages @ 17 & @ 23. We all wear the same size sock, a men's sizes 6-12. When we moved into this house @ 3 years ago, we went threw and supposedly threw out all mis-matched pairs, and I bought several packages of the same style and color socks for each of us. In a ratio of about 1 in 4 black to white.
Today, none of us can find a single black sock, and most of the socks no longer match. They are different styles, different knits.
Once in a great while, one of the boy's baby socks appears.
Even though they never wore them here, and we supposedly threw them all out or gave them to Goodwill.
It has to be proof of sock gnomes. They must be trading up, giving us back the old socks they took in exchange for the newer ones.
I admit defeat.
I gave up wearing socks completely earlier this year.

Friday, April 1, 2011

Happy New Year!

This will be just a short post to wish everyone a very happy April Fool's Day.
(Or IS it? lol)