Larry Craig: Another Appeal Denied

I noted yesterday that the appeal by former Florida state representative Bob Allen had been denied. While Allen's pretty well known in some circles, few cases of conservative politicians soliciting sex in men's bathrooms had garnered as much interest as that of Idaho Senator Larry Craig (R). As you may recall, Craig entered a guilty plea after his infamous "wide stance" solicitation in a bathroom at the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport and then said that he'd resign only to later not only fail to step down but to file an appeal seeking to retract his guilty plea.

A decision has just come down in the last couple of hours and, like Bob Allen, Larry Craig's appeal has also been denied. The full decision by the Minnesota Court of Appeals has been released, but the gist of it is that Craig's guilty plea will stand because he lacks any legal basis on which to retract it. Or, if you prefer your legalese undiluted:

To be valid, a guilty plea must be "accurate, voluntary and intelligent." State v. Ecker, 524 N.W.2d 712, 716 (Minn. 1994). For a plea to be accurate, it must be supported by a proper factual basis. Id. Appellant argues that the plea was not accurate because it lacked a full record of supporting facts.

Appellant did not appear in person when his plea was filed, but a guilty plea is not invalid merely because it is entered in writing. See Minn. R. Crim. P. 15.03, subd. 2...

But, because appellant did not appear, the written plea petition was the only account given to the district court of appellant's version of the offense. The relevant paragraph of the petition states:

"I am pleading guilty to the charge of Disorderly Conduct as alleged because on June 11, 2007, within the property or jurisdiction of the Metropolitan Airports Commission, Hennepin County, specifically in the restroom of the North Star Crossing in the Lindbergh Terminal, I did the following: Engaged in conduct which I knew or should have known tended to arouse alarm or resentment or [sic] others, which conduct was physical (versus verbal) in nature."

...Appellant argues that because the paragraph lacks a description of the alleged conduct it fails to provide an adequate factual basis.

Appellant's argument is unsupported by the record. A verbatim record was required to be made of the August 8, 2007 proceeding at which appellant's petition to plead guilty was filed and he was sentenced. See Minn. R. Crim. P. 27.03, subd. 6(A) (requiring verbatim record of sentencing proceedings). A defendant is responsible for providing a record adequate for appellate review, including a transcript if necessary. See State v. Anderson, 351 N.W.2d 1, 2 (Minn. 1984) (holding claim of trial error could not be reviewed without transcript). Appellant did not order a transcript of the August 8, 2007 proceeding...

— Source

And it goes on from there, as legalese does, to set out why Craig's appeal simply doesn't hold water.

Larry Craig is still guilty by his own admission. More importantly than the legal offense he committed, though, is his hypocrisy in the whole matter, one that he maintains to this day. Craig, like Bob Allen, could remedy this by simply coming out of the closet and explaining his errors while maintaining that gay men can legitimately hold conservative political views and ideas that don't extend to curtailing the rights of other gay men in order to bolster their standing amongst the homophobic segments of society. He could point out that he served as a Senator in ways that otherwise represented his constituency and that his homosexuality, like all homosexuality, is at most a coincidence that, absent social stigmatization, has zero bearing on the fitness of an individual to serve in office, vote, serve in the military, or otherwise enjoy the rights and fulfill the responsibilities incumbent upon all of us as members of American society, no matter whom we might prefer to twiddle our dangly bits now and again.

Will he continue in his hypocrisy, though? I'd bet on it.

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On California's Proposition 8, or What the Hell is Oozing Out of Our Ground

In case you haven't seen this video already, this redolent summation of the depths of ignorance and paranoia, watch it now. There will be a quiz.

As much as I find the video itself appalling insofar as what it reveals about just how much the stupid can burn, the recent passage of California's Proposition 8 and similar referenda in places like Florida, Arizona and Arkansas leave me asking the same question the benighted woman narrating it asked. What the hell is oozing out of our ground?

There is a meanness in these new laws, a cruelty that is most loudly voiced by the fact that California will not only put a halt to future same-sex marriages but there are those who are now attempting to void those which have already taken place. Surprise, surprise... they're based in Florida:

Mathew Staver, chairman of Liberty Counsel, a Florida-based conservative legal group, said last week that if Prop. 8 passes, Liberty Counsel would seek to invalidate all same-sex marriages already performed in California. Randy Thomasson, president of the Sacramento-based SaveCalifornia.com, said his group would support any lawsuit.

"One of the main reasons for passing Prop. 8 was to have real marriage be a role model for the next generation," he said. "Since these are a bunch of false marriages and false marriage licenses, they are bad examples for little children."

— Source

Anyone who still harbors doubt that much of Florida is a percolating, roiling bowl of fundamentalist mythological contagion need look no further than the anthropoid vector of pestilence that is Matthew Staver and his Orwellianly-monikered Liberty Council to put those doubts to rest. Staver, by the way, is a dean at ignorance-factory Liberty University.

That there is no hope that someone like Staver will ever attain to a degree of empathy reminiscent of the better parts of the human race is without question. There are poisonous things in this world and there will always be poisonous things in this world. The question is not whether fundamentally sociopathic, inherently divisive and morally bankrupt people like Staver and Falwell and Don Wildmon can ever be reformed. I would submit that they cannot. Such people will always remain self-made enemies of the culture upon which they have declared war. This is the point of their existence. They thrive on pain and seek the increase of human suffering as a sign of upcoming divine intervention that will usher in a time when the better part of humanity will be tortured for all eternity by their invisible and vindictive father-figure in the sky. They feed on the decay, the hate, the division and the ignorance produced by their activities as surely as any leech slithering from a festering fen seeks to cling to and suck from the femoral artery of some victim. They are beyond all reproach in the perfection of their destructiveness.

In short, they are what is "oozing out of our ground." Still, they and those like them could not alone have passed the barbarisms that are these new laws, including Proposition 8. They must have had complicity in their efforts to corrupt the notion of human rights and the role of government intervention in the lives of others. I do not think that everyone who voted for new laws like Proposition 8 is a leech like Staver, but I do think that many of these people have been deceived, and deception is possible only in the presence of ignorance. The notion that people who prefer sexual interaction with members of their own gender would be in favor of pederasty, bestiality or any number of other outrageous perversions is precisely a product of that ignorance.

These warriors against rational and inclusive culture exploit this ignorance in several ways, or perhaps it is more accurate to say that they exploit several varieties of ignorance. Let's face it — most Americans don't know many gay people, or at least aren't aware that they know any. To the bulk of the populace, gay people are an unknown. They're something that doesn't exist as a portion of their community as integral to its proper functioning as any heterosexual individual. They're something that one sees in the media, frequently as a caricature. They're an abstraction; gay people aren't human beings so much as a phantasm that is somebody else's "problem." By keeping them in the abstract, anything can be laid upon them. Gay people can be made out to be abnormal, villainous, scheming... in short, hobgoblins coming from some other reality, some other universe, with malicious intent, like some shadowy horde poised at the border and ready to sack the little villages in which far too many Americans fancy themselves to live. The American Family Association is particularly adept at exploiting this strain of ignorance, peddling videos like They're Coming to Your Town. The probability is that "they" are already in your town, have been there all along, and that your town — and any town — is all the better for it.

They exploit, too, an ignorance that puts forth the idea that the highest purpose of human existence is procreation. It's an assertion I see made time and time again — that homosexuality is a perversion because it doesn't result in reproduction, and that reproduction is the goal which gives purpose to all living things, thus making homosexuality itself a force that runs counter to life. What could be worse than that? What reasonable person could be opposed to the continuation of life itself!

The thing is, when one actually looks at life, that's not what we actually see, particularly as biological individualism gives way to social organization. In any number of truly social insects, for example, the vast bulk of the members of the society do not reproduce, yet they contribute essentially to the continuation of their society. When cognition enters the picture, sex often becomes less bound to reproduction and more a means of enforcing social bonds, too. Even among humans, we do not remember the important figures throughout our history because of the number of offspring they had. Indeed, most Americans would be hard-pressed to rattle off the names of the children of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington or John Adams. We don't remember how many children Einstein had. Would it make any difference to us how we view such people if they'd never reproduced at all? We humans are not bound to our biology in the way that animals are bound to theirs. We can think, we can create, and we can go far beyond the limitations of our bodies. To say that the greatest achievement to which any one of us may attain is mere reproduction is to reduce all of mankind to animals in a menagerie. It robs all of us, even those who promulgate this nonsense, of the basic dignity of what it is to be human. We are more than molecular machines who eat and shit and fuck, and if we are not then we may as well tear down all the churches and all the laboratories and all the museums and stop distracting ourselves from this allegedly greatest good that any of us can spew forth from our various orifices. I, for one, think that we can be more than mere gamete factories. I think more of humanity, and I have a crazy notion that even those who have fallen under the contrary viewpoint would as well if they stopped and considered the sum total of civilization instead of having fallen prey to those who have declared war upon the better angels of human nature.

The questions that Proposition 8 and these similar referenda raise for me, and perhaps now for you, too, is whether we Americans will choose to see ourselves as something debased. Are we the product of a history that has finally cut us loose from the muck of basic biology, that allows us to aspire, to achieve, to no longer be identified in terms of merely what we contribute to some gene pool... or are we the product of some long-ago fall from grace that leaves every individual stained with sin? Will we use our powers of imagination and abstraction to cast one another as enemies, as "outsider" and "insider," to divide ourselves into camps that deserve to dwell either in sunlight or shadow based upon some accident of biology or — perish the thought — even some personal choice that involves no lives apart from our own, or will we use these boons to go beyond these superficial differences to find out that we are all essentially the same, that we all want the same things, and that we are all deserving of the same rights to associate with whom we will, to love whom we will, and to find in each of us that which we have to offer to the rest of us and so to allow every other member of our society the right to do the same?

We know what the Stavers and Wildmons of this country have to say on the matter. They are believers in the essentially impurity or each of us, a blood libel that began in a garden at the confluence of rivers. I suppose we know equally well (especially if you've read through all of this!) what those of us who don't believe in any such "fall from grace" and "original sin" think about it. But there is a great mass of American flesh and blood and mind between these two extremes that live their lives without ever seeing the effect that their decisions about "sanctity" have upon those who now must bear the weight of the stigma that they attach to them. Would they reach the same conclusions if they knew these people? If they saw what a same-sex marriage actually looked like in the light of day? If they came to know, on a personal basis, that the hearts and minds of the people who have entered into them were no different from their own save for the gender of the object of affection?

It is easy enough to be cruel toward an abstraction. Despite our fallibility, though, I think that most of us could not be so callous when called to look into the eyes of fellow human beings. Doing this will be a first great stride in doing away with not only one of the final malingering divisions in American social philosophy, but also in ridding ourselves of a pernicious war that allows a few men to exploit the shortcoming of many. America can be better than this. Just as some little bit of knowledge about the principles of refraction would remove the paranoid fears of the silly woman who made the video that began this entry, so would a little knowledge about what a same-sex marriage really is would remove the paranoia that the possibility "they're coming to your town" portends something terrible.

I am privileged to live in a place, one of only two states in this country, that allows same-sex marriage. I'm thinking of a way in which I might be able to use that happy coincidence in such a way as to lend some aid to those who do not enjoy it. I'll write more about that soon. It is enough to say, at this moment, that I feel like I have to do more about this than I have done until this moment.

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First Wednesday in November: Obama Wins

In my recently less-than-sporadic efforts to bring you the latest news, I'm sure I'll be the first to mention that Barack Obama won the election and will be the next president. I'm glad for this. The alternative was clearly a very poor one and, of course, we're all aware by now about the historic context of his victory. This is big stuff, a sea-change, a climax in a struggle that began long before my own ancestors ever arrived in America.

I have followed the election closely for these past couple of months, even though I haven't had time to write about it. I have been all too aware of the hatred and panic, as well, that certain elements of our society have expressed over the impending turn in US history as my email box was besieged by dire and dirty "warnings" from Don Wildmon's American Family Association and their nethermost organ, OneNewsNow. To hear them tell it, we are all about to be swept up in a vast wave of stoned, gay, incestuous prostitutes in leather chaps, bearing pitchforks and crucifixes on the soles of their Birkenstocks. Their weather report, now that Obama has been elected, calls for periods of void-swallowing darkness followed by a rain of brimstone with a 30% chance of pale horses storming through the streets of America. In truth, or at least we need all hope, that these are the final fervent prayers and feverish visions of small people with tiny and malign minds, the kind that are ultimately drowned in the eddying currents of human progress.

In all honesty, one of the things that I most look forward to now that the election has been conducted and the ballots tallied is the impending absence of the whiny, shrill, nasal sound of Sarah Palin. I look forward, too, to the absence of scientific research being held up by the losing side every time they wanted to bring up an example of "earmarks" or "pork." Whether they understood basic research or not, the fact that McCain and Palin cited research into population genetic structure or molecular biology or a new projector for a planetarium — a place of science education — did not exactly endear them to this researcher. Had they won, I had visions of funding for research not entirely unlike my own simply vanishing in a puff of ignorance. They will not have the chance to do this, it seems. I count myself and my colleagues fortunate in this regard.

Aside from the historical coincidence (albeit an important one) of his ancestry, we have instead gotten a president elect who, as far as I can discern, is one of the most intelligent and well-educated in our history, and certainly in my lifetime. There are those to whom such qualifications make him, ironically, a member of the elite which, they believe, is a bad thing. There are those who will still judge the fitness of their governmental leadership on the basis of how much they'd like to have a beer with them, and those people will not shut up and go away based simply on the fact that their strange criterion has been repudiated by the electorate. On the other hand, I think that I would enjoy a beer with Barack. I would be very interested in sitting in a conversation with him without any beverages whatsoever, for that matter. We're not too far apart in age, after all, and more to the point I could easily envision a long and deep discussion of political and general philosophy with him. I felt no such thing in regard to McCain, certainly never have for Dubya, and I fear that were beer present during a one-on-one conversation with Palin, I might have sprayed it through my nose soon after she began wagging her chin. That would be rude, and I prefer not to be impolite when at all possible. The likelihood of any of this happening is nil, of course. I'm just Joe the Bio Grad Student and Obama has a government to run... and I have tarsomeres to measure. Still, my sense is that Obama gets it. He understands that the basic research of ten and twenty years ago is the technology of the present, and that once the pipeline empties it takes a long time to fill back up. America has dodged a bullet in a manner of which few people will ever be aware. It was a bullet aimed at our brain and the majority of my fellow Americans were smart enough to duck. Good for us.

So here we are on the first Wednesday in November. In about 60 days, ShrubCo at last begins its well-deserved dissolution and, we can be sure, a new track will be charted. We live in interesting times. Obama will need to exercise what I can only describe as greatness at a time when greatness may at best suffice only to staunch our collective bleeding as a nation. Anything less than greatness, anything short of a full application of his capacity to reason, to plan, to anticipate, is likely to result in a single term. Considering the smoking craters left by ShrubCo across our societal landscape, if Obama doesn't have greatness in him, it follows that we will need to find someone who does in four years' time. I am hopeful for now; the possibilities are endless and in most ways we have nowhere to go but up. Still, I am also a pragmatist, even in my idealism. I will say the same thing now to myself (and those who have read this far) that I said eight years ago: Let's see what this guy can do.

Having said all this, I do think it is important that Obama begin reaching out to the other side after this long and often fear-mongering contest. One way in which he could do this, I think, is to offer John McCain an appointment in his cabinet. As much as I loathe some of the tactics, even what passed for a strategy, in the campaign now ended, McCain should be given the benefit of the doubt and it should be recalled that he was not some fiend before the Ring of Power that was his quest for the presidency turned his Smeagle into our Gollum. McCain's strength, it has been said, was in foreign policy. He might be well-employed as a Secretary of Defense. Even making the offer would help to heal the divisions that were pried wide open in these past months. This might have another, even more important, effect in the near future.

Obama is in a good position, I think, to have an impact on the upcoming reformulation of the Republican Party. I believe that one thing that the GOP will learn from this election is that the base is not enough and, indeed, the very constituencies that make up what they have come to consider their base are, in fact, a polarizing power that precludes their having the support of more reality-based Americans. In the end, after all, McCain had to distance himself from Ted Hagee every bit as much as he sought to distance himself from George Bush. Obama could drive that point home with a few key appointments, I think. Few things could be healthier for this country, even for this civilization, than the showing of the door to the Dominionists and Millennialists by the party over which they have exercised enough influence to pry perilously loose from the reality of American life. We saw the base (and base they were!) "energized" by Sarah Palin, and we saw the GOP lose big. Joe Scarborough and Pat Buchanan have recently said the same thing, so I don't think this idea is too radical. It's time to disentangle that which was supposed to be the party of fiscal conservatism from the business of attempts to legislate morality. Giving Americans a choice of a party in which these two things are no longer intricately wound together will be a boon for all of us, even if we are not ourselves fiscal conservatives.

Which brings me, sadly, to the thing arising from this election that most drags upon my spirit this morning. It appears that Proposition 8, which would ban same-sex marriage in California, is going to pass by a narrow margin. It is for this reason that I prefaced this long and much overdue entry with the point that Obama's win marks a climax in a long struggle but not the climax. Just as there will continue to be intolerance to people of African ancestry in places in America, even though one will be our next President, just so we should keep in mind that others will still be marginalized as well. Even though they lost the Presidential election of 2008, those small-minded busybodies determined to stick their noses in everyone else's crotches as a test for righteousness are still very much with us and they may very well win this victory, as short-lived as it is likely to turn out, on the West Coast of the United States. They are, and will continue to be, dedicated to a "culture war" in which our own culture makes war upon itself. They will continue to seek to do harm in the name of nothing more than personal belief and preference.

They will be with us, I am sorry to say, for many years to come.

It took nearly 400 years for people somewhat like the man we have just elected President to get the right to self-determination, the right to own property, the right to vote as a whole human being (and not just some fraction thereof), and to marry whomever they liked. It took generations to get to this point, and it took sacrifice and struggle and, yes, the deaths of some very good people brought about by some of the worst people who opposed them. This is the course, too, that gay equality advocates have faced. It was once a crime punishable by death to prefer sexual friction with a member of one's own gender. It is not so now. As long as there are people courageous enough to speak out, progress will continue and the tiny, malign minds will, in the end, be swept away by the current of human history once again.

The leather chaps are, of course, optional.

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Human Evolution: Natural Selection at Work

A hyphal tip to Girl-Geek Academic for this video. It explains perhaps too much about modern human evolution, particularly in my own country, and why it sometimes seems that Jerry Springer might just be in charge of our future. It's all about which traits are selected for and against.

I feel that I understand groups like the American Family Association much better now.

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AFA vs. Hallmark: Gay Marriage Greeting Card Flap Illustrates Fundamentalist Stupidity

It really makes my day when I receive a "Dear Manmeat" letter from Don Wildmon, and the one I received yesterday afternoon was a particularly fun one. The American Family Association is in a lather because Hallmark has started selling greeting cards for same-sex marriages. Now, the friends of gay people can send the same sort of overpriced cardboard bits of sentiment that the friends of straight people can send. The horror!

Hallmark defends gay marriage cards - Urge your local Hallmark store to refuse to carry them

Take Action!
Urge your local Hallmark store owner to join others in refusing to carry Hallmark gay marriage cards in their stores.

You can find your local Hallmark store contact information here. [Note: I have changed the link to one directly to Hallmark; the one in the email tracks the clickthrough to give the AFA numbers it can claim as people objecting to Hallmark's policy even if the person clicking supports Hallmark's decision.]

Please be polite, but firm when you contact your local store.

August 25, 2008
Dear Manmeat,

Hallmark is reinforcing their decision to carry gay marriage cards with a message to supporters of traditional marriage – buzz off!

According to their website, corporate emails, and in response to phone calls, Hallmark is telling those who contact the company it will carry “cards that use specific language and images appropriate for same-sex wedding ceremonies.”

Same sex marriage is not recognized in 48 states, but Hallmark has chosen to become a corporate advocate in advancing homosexual marriage.

However, some local Hallmark store owners are refusing to carry them. Earlier this week, Jordan's Hallmark, which owns seven Hallmark Gold Crown stores in Idaho, announced its stores will not carry gay marriage cards in their stores.

Thank you for caring enough to get involved. If you feel our efforts are worthy of support, would you consider making a small tax-deductible contribution to help us continue?

Sincerely,



Donald E. Wildmon,
Founder and Chairman
American Family Association

Ah, the dumbness, how shall I count the ways?

Let's start with the assertion that Hallmark shouldn't sell gay marriage cards because same-sex marriages aren't recognized in 48 states. How many states recognize bar mitzvahs with legislation that recognizes 13 year old boys as adults? And the survey says... zero. Precisely no states consider thirteen year olds as something other than minors, despite the fact that Jewish religious custom proclaims them to be adults. Hallmark had better stop selling greeting cards for that occasion. The same number of states also recognize officially your daughter's third birthday, your wedding anniversary, or the fact that your nephew got an A in math last year. In short, whether or not a given state has a law recognizing something is absolutely meaningless in this context. Hallmark is in the business of selling greeting cards, not of marking the passage of laws.

But let's pretend for a moment that Hallmark only sells greeting cards for occasions that are sanctioned by state laws. If this were the case, then Hallmark would sell same-sex marriage cards only in states where such unions were recognized, which is only a few. Not the two states which this latest "Dear Manmeat" letter asserts, however, but fourteen states in all which recognize gay marriage in some form or another, whether it is called "marriage" or "civil union" with the same rights as different-sex marriage or with some more limited number of rights. That's nearly a quarter of all the United States; a redundant statement to make, I know, but since the AFA's Grand Poobah appears incapable of distinguishing between two and fourteen, we shouldn't take for granted that he knows how many states there are.

But let's sink deeper into the AFA's fantasy world and pretend that there really are only two states — Massachusetts and California — that recognize gay marriage in some form. Should Hallmark not sell appropriate greeting cards for gay weddings in the other 48 states? Well, I don't know. Do people sometimes mail cards from one state to another? Hmmmm... anybody have statistics? This one's a real head-scratcher. I mean, it's not like someone living in New Mexico might have a gay friend in Massachusetts, right? Nobody from Florida could possibly know anyone in California! Surely, God has commanded that there shall be no mixing between states upon penalty of smiting.

Perhaps the most shocking news to Wildmon and Co. might be that (gasp) same-sex weddings take place even in states where gay marriages aren't recognized. Believe it or not, for a lot of people who get married, the main thing is commitment to one another, not the question of legal status. The fact that there are states heartless enough to deny the right of one human being to sit at the hospital bedside of a sick or dying loved one notwithstanding, people who happen to be of the same biological gender still have ceremonies to declare their mutual commitment in places that don't provide legal recognition of that commitment. Note that none of Hallmark's cards, for this or any other occasion, include phrases like "Congratulations on the government recognition of your relationship." Greeting cards mark personal occasions, not changes in legal status.

Case in point: a few years ago, two gay friends of mine and LL's had a wedding ceremony and reception in St. Petersburg, Florida. Florida doesn't recognize same-sex marriage, and their official civil union had actually taken place in Vermont. They did that in full knowledge of the fact that they would not have anything like the rights and privileges of other married couples when they returned to Florida... but they did it anyhow, as a statement to one another. As the majority of this couple's friends and family lived in America's nethermost realm, however, they also had a purely symbolic ceremony and reception when they got back home. Finding an appropriate greeting card for the occasion was a matter of some deliberation, and having had cards like those Hallmark now sells at that time would have been quite helpful. So, whether Florida had or had not recognized the legal status of this couple at the time, I would have bought such a card to go along with the very nice picnic set that LL and I gave them as a wedding present. You see, there's a difference between a committed relationship, a marriage and a wedding. I don't suppose that a bunch of dunces like the AFA, who apparently can't even count up to 14 successfully, would understand a concept as abstract as that.

So if Hallmark is really telling the AFA's deluded Paul Reveres, galloping clumsily through our cultural countryside and shouting their fool heads off that "The homos are coming! The homos are coming!", to "buzz off," then all I can do is mark the fact that they've made the right decision in this instance. I would have used a different four-letter word than "buzz," and it's quite possible that Hallmark did, too. The AFA's membership likes to pretend that they're too timid to use the more appropriate word "fuck" for "buzz," although any of us who have been on the receiving end of a fundienutter's vitriol knows what kind of language they really use when they think nobody's looking (and they can always pray for forgiveness, which they "know" they'll get... which is a big part of what makes them such immense pricks in the first place).

And about the graphics that accompanied today's daily dose of Donald Wildmon's "meanmeat" fantasy life; am I the only one confused by this? Is an image of two tuxedos too horrible to contemplate? Is that all it takes to shock the flock? Is the email implying with the second graphic that the 12 apostles were involved in gay marriages? I mean, I wouldn't be at all surprised if they were, and I wouldn't think less of them if it were the case that John had jammed his joystick up James. It's hard to think less of something than not at all. Nonetheless, I'm a bit surprised that Don Wildmon would be promulgating that sort of thing as historical fact. Then again, I was a bit surprised when I got an email from him asking me to make his dreams come true on a Saturday night in March, too.

In the end, like most of these moon-faced assassins of joy, Wildmon just needs reassurance that even with gay people getting married, he'll someday find the right man to fulfill his failingly-suppressed needs. He's got the same basic problem that all Christian literalists have. They've signed on to a cult that, on the one hand, is filled to the rafters with homoerotic imagery and on the other hand tells them to disregard the attraction they feel toward it, a conflict sloppily tied up with the promise that if they can just wait for it long enough that they'll get to sit back and watch the pain they've inflicted upon themselves all their lives acted out as sadistic fantasy by stern judges and bloodthirsty horsemen who will torture and behead those who actually enjoyed life. Without the sadism of the apocalyptic vision, which they demand we all believe is a truth rather than the product of asceticism driven to the point of hallucinatory madness, none of this pays off in the end. It is only through the infliction of suffering upon the other that they can derive meaning from the torture they inflict upon themselves.

Attacking greeting cards is no big deal when you're determined to spend eternity lending a hand at driving red-hot pokers into the eye sockets of real people, after all.

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Fleshmap: A Map of Touch and Desire

If you've been wondering where your partner is most likely to enjoy being touched, or how your preferences for where you like to be touched stack up against those of others, or even how much emphasis popular music and literature places upon various parts of the body, your next click should be over to the very interesting Fleshmap.com.

The Fleshmap project is undertaken by artists Fernanda Viégas and Martin Wattenberg. It gathered the opinions of hundreds of respondents of both genders and all sexual persuasions as to where they most enjoy being touched and where they most like to touch others. The results are presented as what looks like a thermograph that highlights areas of greatest interest, such as this one for where women most desire to be touched on the front of their bodies:

Everybody should have one of these maps on the bedroom wall. Your partner will thank you.

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Wachusett Wednesday: Eat and Be Eaten Edition

I spent most of my energy on looking for beetle-infested polypores during yesterday's visit to my field site at Wachusett Mountain. Nonetheless, I saw a number of interesting specimens among the prolific mycofauna and collected a few. This included a couple of very interesting and rarely collected fungi and one truly excellent edible. Two of the fungi presented here, Nyctalis agaricoides and Elaphocordyceps ophioglossoides, specialize in eating other fungi. Cannibal fungi and tasty Lactarius are automatically interesting things, but that would leave out an oddball Cortinarius species known only from Massachusetts that I also present here. The flies were interesting, too, but I mean that in a different way. A species of brown fly with white-banded wings kept the foray particularly exciting as they bit chunks out of exposed skin, undeterred by repeated application of DEET. Yes, it hurt. The collections made yesterday are almost worth it, though.

		The genus Coltricia is collectively known in colloquial terms as the "fairy stools." They're stipitate-pileate members of the order Hymenochaetales. The majority of this order look more like polypores in general morphology and a number of them are resupinates (e.g., they form crust-like growths). This species, Coltricia cinnamomea, is unusual in being a hymenochaete that has a distinct cap-and-stem arrangement; it's probably an example of convergent evolution. The morphology has arisen independently several times in the Basidiomycetes. Despite the similarity of appearances, Coltricia are about as closely related to "true" polypores like Polyporus as humans are to shrews.
		As far as I've been able to find, Cortinarius dionysae has been collected only in Massachusetts. The purple color you see in these photos fades very quickly once the mushroom is removed from the substrate, changing to a pale brownish color within a few minutes as the mushroom dries. The largest pileus was very nearly 10 cm in diameter and the stipe is quite robust as well, terminating in a large bulb at the base. The universal veil leaves a sheath on the lower stipe that has a free collar, reminiscent of those commonly found in Amanita. Unlike most purple corts, C. dionysae has almost no bitter taste. The spores are shaped like lemons, also a bit of a departure from most other members of the genus. The flesh inside this mushroom is mostly white, but strong purple streaks can also be seen, particularly in the cap and top of the stipe. The edibility of this mushroom isn't known, but many corts are poisonous and some of the purple ones can be particularly nasty. I wouldn't suggest being the one to find out; it probably wouldn't be lethal, but it could do some serious damage to the digestive system.
		Elaphocordyceps ophioglossoides is one of the most interesting fungi in the world, and not just because its scientific name is such a mouthful. Most corcycepioid fungi are parasites on insects, killing them in rather spectacular and gruesome ways. Think Alien here. The spores infect a host, sometimes altering its behavior, and eventually the fruiting body emerges from the hapless arthropod's body. E. ophioglossoides, however, is one of a handful of these ascomycetes that have made the jump to some other host, in this case another fungus whose fruiting body is a false truffle in the genus Elaphomyces. Others parasites in the same genus haven't made that jump, though, and the closest relatives of the fungus you see in these photos are parasites of cicada nymphs. In an important sense, this host jumping is crystal clear evidence for an evolutionary mechanism called host-jumping. Researchers Naruo Nikoh and Takema Fukatsu published one of my favorite papers ever written about fungi on this very subject: Nikoh N and T Fukatsu. 2000. Interkingdom Host Jumping Underground: Phylogenetic Analysis of Entomoparasitic Fungi of the Genus Cordyceps. Molecular Biology and Evolution 17:629-638 In the time intervening, and based partly upon their work, the genus Cordyceps has been split up quite a bit. Check out Joey Spatafora's exhaustive website on the group of fascinating fungi, An Electronic Monograph of Cordyceps and Related Fungi, for more about the current state of knowledge about these intriguing parasites.
		It took me about an hour to figure out that this is Inocybe tahquamenonensis, a fungus that isn't at all rare but is seldom collected because it's small and nearly impossible to see against the forest floor. Unlike many members of its genus, this Inocybe is also odorless. Many of the Inocybes have odors variously described as crushed green corn, bleach or spermatic (which brings up some intersting questions of how mycologists might spend their free time that we won't get into here). Personally, I have a very poor sense of smell and in the past relied on former labling (and now associate professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, though his faculty page isn't up yet) and Inocybe expert Brandon Matheny to help me out with collections of this genus. He can actually distinguish subtleties of these stinky mushroom's aromas. I can divide them only into "stinky" and "not quite so stinky" categories. Still, he's promised free beer at the MSA conference next month, so I'm sure he wouldn't mind my bringing along a bag or two full of these mushrooms for inspection by his far more educated nose. Eating any Inocybe is a bad idea. Most of them are poisonous. Some also contain hallucinogens, but the other compounds present insure that you'll have a very bad trip.
		Nyctalis agaricoides grows on dead Russula mushrooms; the slimy, mealy black corpse in these photos was probably Russula compacta as this collection was made from the area dominated by R. compacta that I was in two weeks ago and it is still largely overrun with that mushroom. There are only a few species of Nyctalis and they're a strange bunch. As you can see from these photos, they look like typical agaricoid fungi, but they're definitely not. In the second image, you can see that they lack either gills, pores or teeth. Where the gills should be there is instead a layer of translucent, very stiff gelatinous material that starts out white and turns a buff-brown color in older specimens. While it's technically a basidiomycete, N. agaricoides makes few or no basidia (I couldn't find any in the specimens I collected), and that's probably why it no longer bothers making a hymenium like most of its kin. When it want to reproduce, this mushroom simply clones itself. It walls off a hyphal tip and turns it into an asexual structure called a chlamydospore (here's a photo of the chlamydospores of this species), and these are produced not under the cap like in most basidiomycetes but on top< of the cap, which degenerates into a mass of beige fluff. The spores aren't forcibly discharged, either. They're dispersed by the wind and look for another dead Russula to germinate upon. Each of the offspring is an exact copy of the parent since no sexual recombination takes place. Other sexually-reproducing fungi can also form chlamydospores when circumstances force them to do so, but Nyctalis is unusual in having given up sexual reproduction in favor of parthenogenesis almost completely. A word of warning if you should happen to find any of these and think about bringing them home. They smell bad. Awful. They give off a powerful odor that combines garlic and phenolic compounds that can become nauseating in short order when confined to a room. The spore masses atop the fruiting bodies are very easily aerosolized, too. I learned this yesterday when I opened my collection box and was greeted by a puff of spores that I promptly inhaled. I could not only smell the things, I could taste them. Sucking down a lungful of asexual spores from an organism that lives as a scavenger, and has some mechanism by which it prevents the corpses upon which it thrives from drying out as they normally would, is likely a very bad idea. While it's unlikely that I'll wake one morning to find these pale little ghouls protruding from my ribcage, I would strongly suggest to others who might want to work with Nyctalis to do so under a hood or while wearing a pollen mask. The spores from these specimens were globular and 13 microns in diameter; use appropriate air filtration. I can't imagine anyone wanting to try eating something that grows on slimy mushroom corpses, but I can't imagine these critters would taste anything other than perfectly horrible. I have no idea as to whether they're poisonous. Despite their being fairly repulsive, I find them very interesting and would like to know more about how these things evolved. I'll likely sequence them and check into the literature to learn more.
		Moving away now from fungus that might eat you, here's a fungus that's good to eat. This is Lactarius volemus, which I consider a choice edible. I've collected and eaten these before; the last time was in Florida in 2002. Because of color variation I wound up collecting several of these yesterday, so half went into the dehydrator for archiving and the other half came home with me and wound up in a marsala sauce. They were excellent, far better than I remembered them from the last time I tried them. When any part of this mushroom is nicked, copious watery white latex will ooze out. This doesn't change color after more than ten minutes, but it will stain the flesh a light brown and the gills a darker brown. The odor can be fishy, but it isn't always. While authorities always mention the fishy scent, in my experience that may be a product of some small amount of decay. In any case, it's older specimens that take on the odor. Younger ones are close to odorless and as a rule of thumb mushrooms taste better before they get old. The cap color varies from an orange-brown in younger specimens to the pumpkin orange you see here in mature ones. The stipe is concolorous with the cap or a bit lighter and often fades to white at the apex. The gills are a pale cream-yellow color, often with brown bruises. The whole mushroom is finely pubescent; using a magnifying glass while make that feature more readily apparent. The spores are generally globose; the ones from the specimens I found yesterday were about 8 microns in diameter. Taste-testing the uncooked mushroom resulted in no acrid flavor at all. Cooking it in marsala wine and spooning it over pork chops resulted in a deeply appreciated deliciousness that almost made up for the bits of skin I'm now missing from the back of my head due to the nasty Diptera that think we humans far tastier than any Lactarius could ever hope to be.
		From the "There's a reason that they call it a variable Russula" department: Look at the mushroom in the photos to the left. Take a good, long look, noting coloration and morphology. Now take a look at this Russula, collected two weeks ago. They don't look at all alike, do they? According to current systematics, though, these are the same species, Russula variata. It's hard to believe (in fact, I'm not sure I believe it myself), but aside from the gross morphology, these two very different-looking fungi share all of the same traits. The repeatedly-forking gills, the lack of any color change in FeSO4, the size and shape of the spores and the presence of an amyloid reticulum joining the <0.5 micron-high warts on them... there's little doubt that this is also R. variata. I wonder, though, whether this is more a matter of convenience than a true phylogenetic hypothesis. Despite the taxonomic peculiarity, I have a hunch that what's called R. variata is actually a few species lumped together. Maybe mycologists are spending too much time thinking about spermatic Inocybes and Amanita with constricted volvae!

Flies eat people. People eat wild mushrooms that probably contain a few fly larvae. Fungi eating other fungi. Fungi eating insects. It's an eat-or-be-eaten world out there. Or more properly, it's eat-and-be-eaten.

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AFA's Wildmon Says Culture Wars to End in November

Dr. Donald Wildmon is founder of the American Family Association and an organizer of the Arlington Group. He says passage of the California marriage amendment is critical.

"If we lose California, if they defeat the marriage amendment, I'm afraid that the culture war is over and Christians have lost," says Wildmon, a 30-year veteran of the culture war. "I've never said that publicly until now -- but that's just the reality of the fact.

"If the homosexuals are able to defeat the marriage amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, then the culture war is over and we've lost -- and gradually, secularism will replace Christianity as the foundation of our society," he adds.

— Don Wildmon, July 10, 2008

Californians are likely to uphold the right to gay marriage in the state by voting against a ballot measure that seeks to override a court ruling allowing same-sex unions, poll results showed on Friday.

The Field Poll survey firm found 51 percent of voters oppose the measure, which proposes an amendment to the state's constitution recognizing marriage as only between a man and woman, while 42 percent were in favor...

— California opposes move to ban gay marriage: poll, Reuters, July 18, 2008

Could it be? Will the defeat of Proposition 8 in California really mark the end of the Taliban's influence so-called Culture War in America? Will Don Wildmon quietly close the doors and disconnect the phone banks of the American Family Association, pack his bags and move to whatever country is the Christian fundamentalist equivalent of Afghanistan circa 1999? Will Ann Coulter have to take a part-time job as a hat rack in order to make ends meet? Will Bill O'Reilly at long last answer to his true calling and become a Muppet? Will I actually live to see the day that the shrilling of those who use deity as a periscope to peer between the bedsheets of America and pass judgment upon what they find are no longer met with microphones?

I would like to believe it. For once, I wish I could believe something that oozed from betwixt the labia of Don "Dear Manmeat" Wildmon. I am not that naive, however. I know all too well that the eventual defeat of California's Proposition 8 will only trigger off more excited ejaculations from the radical right. I wish that I could believe that a day was coming as soon as this November that would mark the end of more than 30 years of the degradation of the promise of personal liberty upon which America was founded. I hope fervently to see a time in this country where whatever quirk of nature or nurture or personal choice or whatever it is that decides which gender attracts and which does not attract some person ceases to be a deciding factor in what share of the rights, privileges and responsibilities to which that person will be admitted. There has only ever been one issue in this Culture War, and it is that of who gets to define morality. It has always been about whether our culture will take it upon itself to decide on absolutes that would be applied to acts undertaken by consent of the parties involved that have no effect upon those who do not participate.

I want America's obsession with other people's relationships and other people's sex lives to end. I would like to see Wildmon's prediction about the end of the effort to impose a Christian shariah upon America come to pass. For all of the admonitions about America being a Christian country, I don't see the Wal-Marts and McDonald's empty on Sundays. As far as I'm aware, remembering to keep the sabbath per the third commandment doesn't mention anything about shopping being exempt and yet stores find enough customers to make it worth their while to stay open and nobody is putting propositions on state ballots to change this. Let's not kid ourselves as to what this has always been about and what the nature of this country is and what the nature of the Wildmons and Hagees and Robertsons of this land is.

There isn't enough space between these people and Fred Phelps to pass a thread as it is. The death of Proposition 8 will only push them further into the realms of fury. These Christian Culture Warriors have already come quite close to proclaiming that "God Hates America." What did they say when 3,000 innocent people died horribly in a Manhattan skyscraper? What was the reaction when a hurricane decimated New Orleans? What was it that Ray Comfort has to say about the reason that people are losing their homes and their livelihoods in the conflagrations that have dotted California — and largely in conservative areas, mind you, but it serves his purpose to make such statements?

They all come down to exactly the same thing that Phelps' incestuous little clan waves about on placards at the funerals of those who were shoved into danger's way at the behest of one of Evangelicism's own in the first place. "God hates America."

A little bit of prediction here. If (I think it is a matter of when, not if, but I'll let it go for now) Proposition 8 is defeated, we won't see the end of the American Culture War. We'll simply have Don Wildmon making some bizarre statement to the effect that Jehovah has come down from on high to whisper into his ear and urge him to stand and fight. We'll hear the screechings of the usual harridans and bullyboys as they pray publically for California to fall into the sea. That's all we'll get.

I do think there will come a time when this ends, when America finally tires of this stupid game of ruining people's lives and that last shudder finally runs down its collective spine as it finally shrugs off the last of these hate peddlers and casts them into the obscurity their ilk inhabited in more reasonable eras. I don't know whether that will be within the remaining 20 or 30 or 40 years of my lifetime, but everything I have seen, from the ascendancy of the Moral Majority to the present day, tells me that the defeat of one proposition in California won't be the end of this. I know that what Wildmon is doing is telling a lie to rally his stormtroopers. All is fair, after all, in love and war.

Someday, perhaps there will be a Culture Love instead of a Culture War. That day will not come upon us in November 2008.

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Creepy Old Codger to Tell Humanity What Their Lives Mean in Australia

The Catholic church is throwing itself a shindig in Australia called "World Youth Day" which, in keeping with the typical logic of True Believers is a six-day event. That ought to make it "World Youth Week," but if old men in dresses who know everything tell you that a week is a day then you'd better believe it or fry in The Bad Place, buddy.

It's a big deal to the Vatican types, signified by their dispatch of Cardinal Schönborn, that particularly creepy Archbishop of Vienna, to the event to "moderate" debate on the meaning of life. From Catholic News Agency:

Cardinal Schönborn to moderate debate on creation and evolution at WYD

Sydney, Jun 30, 2008 / 06:18 pm (CNA).- The organizers of World Youth Day 2008, which will be held July 15-20 in Sydney, are preparing a debate on creation and evolution which will be moderated by Cardinal Cristoph Schönborn of Vienna.

WYD Coordinator and Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Fisher of Sydney said, "This is a time for the youth of the world to come together and discuss the critical challenges and issues facing society today." Other issues to be discussed include the correct meaning of sexuality, the millennium objectives, the true role and identity of women, among others.

There will be total of 450 events during WYD, with more than 100 ecclesial movements present to provide young people information on vocations to different ministries within the Church.

Gee, I wonder how that will go?

EVER since 1996, when Pope John Paul II said that evolution (a term he did not define) was 'more than just a hypothesis,' defenders of neo-Darwinian dogma have often invoked the supposed acceptance -- or at least acquiescence -- of the Roman Catholic Church when they defend their theory as somehow compatible with Christian faith. "But this is not true. The Catholic Church, while leaving to science many details about the history of life on earth, proclaims that by the light of reason the human intellect can readily and clearly discern purpose and design in the natural world, including the world of living things. Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense -- an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection -- is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science.

— Schönborn in The New York Times, July 7, 2005

I'm sure he'll have an open mind and encourage all points of view on the matter. He is, after all, a scientist. OK, he doesn't have a degree in anything other than philosophy or theology and he's never set foot in a laboratory and probably wouldn't know a Jukes-Cantor Model from a plasmid, but he says that he's a scientist, and you'd better believe him or you're going to The Bad Place, buddy.

...I see no difficulty in joining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, but under the prerequisite that the borders of scientific theory are maintained. In the citations given above, it is unequivocally the case that such have been violated. When science adheres to its own method, it cannot come into conflict with faith. But perhaps one finds it difficult to stay within one's territory, for we are, after all, not simply scientists but also human beings, with feelings, who struggle with faith, human beings, who seek the meaning of life...

— Schönborn's First Catechetical Lecture for 2005-2006, October 2, 2005

We? Who is this "we"? If Schönborn is a scientist then I must be the Archbishop of Vienna.

This isn't just about science, though. The Vatican is going to steer conversation (read: reveal to the True Believers) the "correct meaning of sexuality" and "the true role and identity of women," too. See, people who actually have sexual relationships and women can't determine these things for themselves. No, it takes an old celibate man to tell us what sexuality and femininity mean. And if you don't believe him, you're going to The Bad Place, buddy. It's not like we get to create the meaning of our own lives. There's an official position on all of this stuff endorsed by an even creepier, even older man who — before I forget to mention it — has superpowers that make him infallible in his opinion on what your gender and sex life mean. The Archbishop of Vienna is just the messenger. He hasn't achieved Perfect Creepiness yet, though he's likely well on his way. One of these days the Archbishop will be greeted in Rome with a puff of white smoke.

While such a little cloud of particulate matter while never usher me into St. Peter's, I'll venture a couple of opinions of my own that I'm sure won't be given expression under Uncle Creepy's tutelage in Sydney. Keep in mind that I'm one of those "neo-Darwinian dogmatists" who insists on testable hypotheses and empirical evidence and other crazy things that don't fit well with religious doctrine as a whole. I won't even bother with the evolutionary piece; "scientist" Schönborn has already told us what he thinks about the scientific method. One might as well ask their plumber to perform heart bypass surgery as put an iota of credence into his ideas on the matter.

I had no idea that women had a "true role and identity." I've always figured they were simply people free to make their own choices and create their own meaning in their own lives. If I'd known that they were all superheroes with secret identities I might have done things a little differently in my relationships, I suppose. I just hope that LL doesn't decide to turn her fearsome heat-vision upon me when she returns from overseas. As far as I'm concerned, though, the "true role and identity" of women isn't any different from "the true role and identity" of men. While the Holy Creeps would prefer them to be baby factories or celibate nuns, they don't have to be. Perhaps a more honest phrasing here would have been "what we want the role and identity of women to be."

The correct meaning of sexuality is whatever we make it as individuals, too. Barring affliction by psychological disorders that blow its importance out of proportion (phobia leading to celibacy, for example, or it's apparently close cousin pedophilia), sexuality is one small aspect of the totality of a human life that has no more intrinsic meaning to it than do our preferences in food or garb. It isn't that important in the larger scheme of things. How it is expressed is a matter to be decided by one or more consenting individuals. It only becomes an issue when either people or the sky-pixies they invent try to peel back the curtains and stick their noses in our bedrooms which, for someone like Schönborn, is practically a full-time job.

I guess I'm going to The Bad Place, buddy. I'm about as concerned over the possibility as I am about the latest NASCAR results.

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Who Needs Medieval Ritualists Anyhow?

Hyphal tip to Ed Brayton's Dispatches from the Culture Wars for this heartwarming story of the true importance of love to the hierarchy of the Catholic church.

A paraplegic Italian man and his fiancée were denied a church wedding by a bishop because the man's injury also left him impotent. The denial came in spite of the fact that the bride-to-be was aware of this aspect of his condition and declared that she was alright with it.

Italian Bishop Refuses Wedding to Impotent Man
Deutsche Welle

An Italian bishop has denied a young paraplegic a church wedding because he is impotent, media in Rome have reported.

Although the man's fiancée is aware of the problem, a spokesman for Bishop Lorenzo Chiarinelli of Viterbo, central Italy, told SkyTG24 television that "no bishop, no priest can celebrate a wedding when he knows of impotence as it is a motive for annulment."

The 26-year-old groom has been paraplegic since he was involved in a car accident. He and his fiancée were married in a civil ceremony on Saturday, June 7, in Viterbo, news agency AFP reported.

Attending the ceremony was their parish curate, who was banned from marrying the couple in church.

First off, I wish this couple all the hapiness they can get their hands on. The man involved certainly deserves it. The woman involved must truly love the guy, willing as she is to forgo certain physical aspects of their relationship.

Who needs these dress-wearing medieval ritualists, anyhow? All they're ultimately good for is propagating superstitions and nonsense that at least some of the world has outgrown including, apparently, this couple. The decision by this moon-faced assassin of joy in a cassock has nothing to do with annulment. Both parties to the marriage are aware of their situation and have given their consent. This garbage about annulment is an excuse made in an attempt to cover up the true nature of this organized bastion of sorcery.

Here's the real deal: it's about reproduction. It's no secret that the Catholic church teaches that sex is all about procreation. The reason this bishop booted a clearly committed couple is that it's unlikely that they'll start popping out new parishioners. It's the same reason that the church opposes contraception, same-sex marriage, masturbation, or anything else that feels good sexually but doesn't result in somebody going through a few weeks of morning sickness.

You have to understand, the church is obsessed with sex. It's just about the most dangerous thing in the world to them. When you have control over people's sexuality you literally have them grappled by the short hairs. It's like having control of their food supply. Were the church to ever relinquish their pubic grasp they'd ultimately be giving up much more, or so they believe. No sex outside of marriage, no sex inside of marriage if it can't result in offspring, no marriage at all for priests... I guess if it doesn't involve a crosier, an altar boy and the word "daddy," it just doesn't fly. After all, it's not really sex if it's not a man and a woman having it, right?

Screw them... or better yet, don't. I hope the groom told the bishop that he could go sit on his pointy hat and the bride came up with a fine suggestion of a place in which the loveless, merciless, dried-up old fart could go store his crosier so as to safeguard it against fading in the light of day. Hasn't this man, who has clearly found a good-hearted and giving partner, had enough pain in his life without this additional humiliating kick in the crotch? The bishop should be restricted to going on demon-hunting expeditions with Gabriele Amorth.

These wizened clerics wield the fear of divine retribution like a cudgel over the credulous. But you know what? It's bogeyman stories, and that's all it is. Nobody goes to hell and nobody goes to heaven. The closest we get is right here, right now. We have the power within our all-too-fallible grasp to make this world into one or the other.

At least we know now which extreme Bishop Chiarinelli favors. I hope he takes his stone-cold heart and all those within that dusty Romanesque autocratic citadel of mythology that countenance his pronouncement and arrives at the destination he seeks in his own life. The world need Chiarinelli like it needs a good manufacturer of buggy whips.

You know, he'll probably try to get this couple excommunicated for violating his version of the laws of god and nature. And so what? No more ooga-booga meals of human flesh and blood for them! Big deal. I'll send them my ma-po tofu recipe as a wedding gift. I'm glad they're ignoring the bishop's obsessive edict that sex is more important than love.

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Takashi Miike's Visitor Q: Salvation Through Destruction

Supernatural horror film is an odd genre that attracts enthusiasts for different reasons. For me, I most enjoy the surreal, absurd elements they all contain and which the best of them consciously exploit. This usually, but not always, is embodied within these films as a kind of sly humor. The films of George Romero, for instance, give society as well as the viewer a little poke in the eye every so often by exaggerating some traits. In Romero's case, this comes across most obviously in his Dawn of the Dead, with its zombies-in-a-shopping-mall depiction of the priorities of American consumerism. What could be more of a "consumer" than a mindless walking corpse that devours the living flesh? Such depictions are both absurd and political.

This mechanism isn't solely to be found in outright horror films, though. I spent last year getting acquainted with the works of Luis Buñuel for similar reasons. His surrealist absurdity and political sensibility as well as his perception of the inherent humor in human nature make for some amazing films. Cet obscur objet du désir, Le Fantôme de la liberté and La Voie lactée rank among my favorite films for many of the same reasons that I so enjoy a good supernatural horror movie. The celebrity bomber in Le Fantôme is every bit as absurd and rationally unbelievable as Hellraiser's Pinhead.

More recently, I've been taking in the films of Japanese director Takashi Miike. Miike is a provocateur, a Buñuel on acid if you like. He goes out of his way to shock the viewer but not for the value of shock alone. Watching Miike at his best is like being awakened roughly from sleep. It may be unpleasant but it gets the job done and it grabs every bit of one's attention. While Miike's films contain horrific elements I don't think calling them horror films does them justice; he has more in common with Buñuel than with Romero or Clive Barker (perhaps a bit more with the former than the latter). I've so far seen several of Miike's better-known works: Audition, Ichi the Killer, Imprint, and One Missed Call (the original, not the gutless American remake). As off-the-wall as all of those films are, nothing in them prepared me for Visitor Q, which may be one of the most original and most disturbing films ever made — and possibly one of the greatest of the last 30 years if not ever. Visitor Q is the Citizen Kane of absurdism, the Godfather of shocking surrealism. It is transgressive, repulsive, poetic and heartbreaking all at the same time. I doubt that there has ever been anything like it.

In Visitor Q, Miike creates the ultimate dysfunctional family, the pathetic Yamazakis. The household is headed, at least nominally, by Kiyoshi, a host and creator of reality television shows who has no empathy for any other human beings and treats their pain solely as fodder for better ratings. His wife, Keiko, is a limping heroin addict who brings in extra money by prostituting herself as a reluctant dominatrix but cannot stand up to her son, Takuya, who takes out the aggression that results from his being horribly bullied upon her by beating her with an assortment of implements he keeps in a special closet in his neurotically neat room. The fourth member of the clan is daughter Miki, a prostitute who, like her father, always has camera in hand to turn her trysts into a sort of reality show. In the opening scene, a chapter entitled "Have you ever done it with your father?" Kiyoshi is Miki's client; the whole thing is videotaped. The shocking, terrible incest that takes place is just a disappetizer that sets the tone for the rest of the film. Be warned, it gets harsher from here and by degrees more absurd than the tragic/comic interactions ensuing when daughter criticizes father's poor sexual performance. To say that this film isn't for everyone and that the squeamish will spend the better part of its run time averting their gaze from the screen might be an understatement.

Into this appalling morass descends Visitor Q, a destroying angel of mercy who insinuates himself into the picture by clubbing Kiyoshi over the head with a rock while he waits for a train and then again a bit later while he walks down the street. Visitor Q sets about both observing and destroying the Yamazakis, sometimes holding the camera as if creating his own show and sometimes provoking the action as every imaginable transgression is engaged in by the family itself. Kiyoshi decides to turn his son's beatings and general degredation by his bullies into a reality show in which he himself will play the father. As the bullies fire Roman candles through the windows of the Yamazaki house, Kiyoshi declares that he "doesn't know how to feel as a father," a partial truth. Kiyoshi feels nothing unless it's rage or shame as we learn in the scene where he rapes and murders his co-anchor when she expresses her loathing of him.

This, however, is only the ultimate transgression in a long list of depravities that includes a graphic depiction of Keiko's newfound pride in her ability to lactate in a demonstration of which she literally floods the family kitchen for the benefit of a bemused Visitor Q who sits watching while shielding himself with a little plastic umbrella. By this point, the family itself and the lives of all involved have been completely destroyed. This last horror is what ultimately saves them; salvation can only come when the self-debasement of these people is total, and this is what the mysterious Visitor makes happen. If we haven't figured this out by now, Takuya lets us know by expressing his gratitude for the devastation — while lying face-down in the pool of his mother's secretions, like a baby re-immersed in the womb.

Visitor Q is a powerful movie in many ways, and one that is going to repulse anyone who isn't every bit as psychopathic as is Kiyoshi. Thus, it is a trial to get through the film, particularly the horror-comedy of a scene of necrophilia gone terribly wrong that results in the dutiful Keiko having to assist her husband with a shot of heroin and a bath of vinegar to get him free of the corpse into which he has inserted himself (ahem). The themes of transgression and redemption ultimately unite in a final scene that itself partakes simultaneously of the two modes. Miki comes home after her own encounter with Visitor Q in which she is treated by the stranger in much the same way as he treated Kiyoshi, leaving her battered and scarred. In the end, though, every wound on every character is healed — both the psychic and the physical. The final scene is masterful; Miike brings together revulsion and peace in a manner I've never seen done before. In the end, he leaves the viewer as he found the viewer; conflicted and ambivalent. It is impossible to say by the end of this film whether the final scene is right or wrong; it is only necessary for the chaos to end.

Visitor Q is a great movie, but the ways in which it is great are often offensive in the extreme to those of us who are fortunate enough not to be Yamazakis. If one can feel empathy for other human beings then this film is challenging in the extreme. Nevertheless it is also an extremely rewarding film for those with a stomach strong enough to make it all the way through as Miike defies us to switch the film off. Love it or hate it, though, there has never been another film quite like Visitor Q. I don't like to use the clichéd word "extreme," but in this case it is truly warranted. In the end, Visitor Q must be experienced; it cannot be explained adequately in a few lines of text. Indeed, the questions it brings up and never fully answers will leave the astute viewer wondering about them for some time to come. This movie is messy, terrible and wonderful. It's 100% Miike without the slightest bit of self-censorship other than what I can only assume is a humorous device of always placing a little blurred circle over genitalia. After all, with its repertoire of incest, rape, murder, necrophilia and various shades of violence throughout, the graphic depiction of a penis would be tame stuff by comparison.

Visitor Q is Miike's dare to his audience. I recommend it highly, but first you must ask yourself how much you can take and then if you can take just a little bit more. This is a spiky jewel, indeed.

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A "Dear Manmeat" Letter from Don: John McCain is His Knight in Shining Armor

I finally got my anticipated "Dear Manmeat" letter from the American Family Association about the horrors (horror! shock! terror!) of gay marriage in California. It took Don Wildmon and his band of not-so-merry men a full five days to draft this thing. I'm not sure why; it's rather short and particularly limited in scope. It's not particularly well-written and the logic of it escapes me entirely. Still, the important thing is that Don still has hopes for me, even after I broke his heart three months ago.

Even compared to other AFA "Dear Manmeat" emails I get from Wildmon, though, this one is bizarre. And here it is:

Sen. McCain is the one person who should lead the battle to protect traditional marriage!

Sen. McCain needs to lead the way in promoting a federal marriage amendment

May 19, 2008

Dear Manmeat,

As you know, the California Supreme Court has legalized homosexual marriage. This happened despite the fact that voters in California passed Proposition 22 with 61.4 percent of the vote. Proposition 22 defined marriage as only between one man and one woman.

The recent 4-3 ruling, if allowed to stand, would destroy marriage as it has been known for thousands of years. It would lead to the logical conclusion of the following:

• Legalization of polygamous and other aberrant unions as "marriages"
  
• Legalization of marriage between an adult parent and adult child
  
• Legalization of group marriage
  
• Overturn all the marriage laws in the other 49 state

Take Action!

• Send a message to Sen. John McCain asking him to strongly support a federal marriage amendment making marriage legal only between one man and one woman. Sen. McCain has said in the past he supports marriage only between one man and one woman. But he voted against the federal amendment when it was voted on in the Senate. Such an amendment would override the legalization of homosexual marriage by the liberal California Supreme Court. It is time for Sen. McCain to take a stand for marriage!
  
  
• Please forward this to everyone on your list. Senator McCain needs to hear from every American who supports traditional marriage.

Ironically enough, this particular epistle from Wildmon seems rather divorced from reality in any number of ways.

First, what the California Supreme Court ruled was that the Prop 22 was unconstitutional. It doesn't matter that it was passed by some particular percentage by a popular vote. The will of majorities is not absolute in American government; the law of the land is the constitution, whether at the federal or state level, and the proper role of the judicial branch of government is the interpretation of constitutional law. If a proposition is contrary to a state constitution, it is the duty of the courts to say so and thus to rule against that proposition.

For all of their protestations about being persecuted, I wonder if the American sharia advocates would be so in favor of mob rule were they not possessed of the notion that they made up most of the mob. I don't wonder for long, though, because the answer to that is self-apparent.

That marriage has been defined in any one way "for thousands of years" is, of course, simply not true. There have been numerous forms of marriage throughout history, including child marriage, same-sex marriage and polygynous marriage. The real statement that Wildmon is trying to make is that marriage has been defined as "one man and one woman" by his favorite group which, of course, includes himself. That's not really true, either, but it sounds good to people who have no knowledge of the history of such things. In fact, the group to which Wildmon and the AFA belong hasn't existed for thousands of years at all; they bear very little resemblance even to early Christianity. Strictly speaking, literalist and fundamentalist Christianity didn't get it's start until 300 years ago or less except among some very small, self-isolating ascetic sects in the Old World, and even those sects denied worldly things entirely and so didn't involve themselves in political aims.

The next part of the letter is particularly mind-boggling, though. It makes the claim that the bullet items are the "logical conclusion" of allowing members of the same gender to marry, but it makes no statements as to why this should be so. There's nothing logical about it; it's nothing more than a series of assertions. How allowing same-sex marriage leads to allowing incestuous marriage certainly isn't clear. What the California court has stated is that there's no compelling interest for the state to prevent same-sex marriage, not that there will be no more rules about who can marry whom. It introduces no new exceptions to existing law, but only extends existing laws to cover all people in the state equally. It does nothing to change marriage law itself.

Nor does anyone appear to be making waves that there should be such changes. Here in Massachusetts, same-gender marriage has been legal for four years. If there are advocates of incest or state-recognized group marriage using that fact here as a basis for their arguments, they must be either very few in number or operating under some sort of deep cover. I suspect the former case. Despite four years of same-sex marriage in this state, the marriage laws of not one single other state have been overturned, nor even altered. Even neighboring states still have the same marriage laws they've has since long before 2004.

Based on precedent, on history, and on the rule of law, then, we can draw but a single conclusion from the American Family Association's latest diatribe. That is, they have no compunction against lying to their followers and then dressing those lies up as logic. What this letter represents is nothing like logic and nothing like inference based upon evidence. It represents nothing but a most cynical manipulation and an attempt to inspire fear for the end of gathering up a frightened peasant mob based upon the premise that a commitment made between two consenting adults of legal age in one state can have some effect upon those in other states who, in truth, have no personal stake whatsoever in that commitment. How the sowing of such discord escapes definition as evil by those who believe themselves to be concerned with morality is beyond me, but it certainly speaks to how twisted the whole concept of morality has become in early 21^st century America.

The AFA tells another whopper when it characterizes the California Supreme Court as "liberal." While I'm not among those who consider that to be a dirty word, the fact of the matter is that six of the seven justices of that court were appointed by Republicans, including Ronald Reagan, Pete Wilson and George Dukemejian. While they might not have been as draconian as Don Wildmon would prefer, none of them were liberals and neither are these justices. This is yet another cynical manipulation by people like those in the AFA leadership of their members who, unless they are long-time followers of California politics, could not be reasonably expected to know anything about the composition of California's courts anymore than it could be reasonably expected that I would have detailed knowledge of the courts in Iowa or Arkansas. The difference is that, as a skeptic, I wouldn't be prone to simply accepting as truth something told me by some self-appointed spiritual leader. The people under the AFA's fiefdom are looking precisely for someone to tell them what to do, a guru-for-Jesus to get them marching in lockstep. Such people will always find themselves at the wrong end of the manipulations of organizations like the AFA which are only too happy to collect the rubes' donations as they goose-step those minions off to the latest poll or petition to advance an agenda that holds no benefit at all for those poor, misled saps.

But why is John McCain the "one person who should lead the battle to protect traditional marriage"? McCain, while not inclined to support gay marriage, has already voted against a Constitutional amendment banning it and has stated that he's just fine with the idea of civil unions — no different from Obama or Clinton in this regard. Why target him and, more importantly, why pin all hope on him?

As much as the religious social radicals like to mouth support for a decentralized government and state self-rule, in truth they care nothing for such things. The reason they are targeting Senator John McCain is that he is the only Republican who stands a chance of becoming president, and the AFA is quite willing to abandon state self-determination in favor of the concentration of power at the federal level if that advances its agenda which is, in fact, nothing less than religious law in America. They would not hesitate to make homosexuality a federal crime if they could. They have protested loudly every time a state has repealed so-called sodomy laws. These are people who are not satisfied with Americans having their own ideas about how to conduct their lives; they've recently launched a campaign to ban adult movies from hotel rooms, for instance. Has anyone ever been forced to watch an adult movie, or to do so specifically to do so at a hotel?

What the AFA wants is, in fact, a puppet in the White House who will dictate proper behavior to Americans, a group that Wildmon's Inquisition holds in the utmost contempt insofar as they believe that Americans are incapable of exercising individual liberty in appropriate ways. This isn't a question of gay marriage and it isn't even ultimately a question of religion. The first has no impact upon those not themselves involved with it and the second of which managed to survive corruption and decadence far greater than anything ever conceived of in the modern world precisely because it is an individual choice, not a state-sanctioned and legally mandated mode of thought. In the end, this is a question of personal freedom. By sowing fear and irrational hatred, the AFA has as its goal the overturning of every single freedom that was reserved not only to the states but to individual citizens. What other purpose for things such as this being thrust in the face of visitors to the AFA's website:


They? Homosexuals, of course, is "they." What happens when they come to a town? A few good things, and nothing demonstrably bad. That's precisely what happens when gay marriage becomes a possibility, too, but the AFA needs that fear in order to subvert both free society and representative government. They don't want presidents and senators and states, they want a religious emperor. The AFA wants a pope to sit in Washington, DC, and they don't have a candidate now so they hope to force the creation of one in the person of John McCain. They want their glory days back, before the religious radicals lost their grip on federal power and before evangelicals and fundamentalists began to split. In the Evangelical Manifesto, there appears the following statement:

The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests.

— page 15

Don Wildmon misses those "useful idiots" that he has lost and will continue to lose as the religious right fragments, as there is an awakening in America to the depredations upon liberty advocated by its flagging leadership, and as religious thought returns to its proper role of an inward searching rather than an outward grab for the power to force adherence with ancient laws that are no more properly applied to this country than would be the laws of some other nation. To counter this, the AFA seeks to create an environment of fear and to conflate the theological with the secular and the posit any outcome other than the one they desire as some sort of disaster.

Those who fall for such hype are still with us, but in the end they will for the most part pass into obscurity. Sooner or later, the people who read Wildmon's ridiculous epistles to the True-Believers will find something that, to them, points out the ongoing manipulation. Sooner or later, there's going to be a larger awakening, and that will be the rousing of freedom against religious tyranny that cloaks itself as an attempt to tell people what is best for them. Nobody likes to be lied to, and those deceived eventually notice the deceit. All that needs happen is for enough people to ask a simple question, and the AFA will pass away. What does the AFA actually do that strengthens families instead of targeting and so seeking to weaken some of them?

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