It’s full of the usual anti-gay marriage and National Organization for Marriage (hate-group) people–or at least just the Catholic side of the Mormon-Catholic fusion lobbying group–and offensively comical characterizations of how those scary gay people are going to take away your freedom. My family received this in the mail, along with a two-page letter. [PDF]

You can also watch a copy of it on YouTube, if you’re curious. As a quick aside: isn’t it funny how the user “MnCatholic” both joined YouTube and posted those videos on September 23rd, a mere three days after the letter from Archbishop Nienstedt is dated yet over a week before everyone else received their DVDs in the mail?

I have a hearing loss, so I’m glued to watching faces so that I can lip-read and figure out context from facial expressions. This was certainly the case for the DVD because it only had Spanish subtitles and no English closed-captioning. I became very distracted upon starting the video, as it became evident during his short remarks that Archbishop Nienstedt’s eyebrows desperately wanted to crawl off his face and go hide somewhere. They spent most of their on-screen time engaged in a vicious tug-of-war session with his facial muscles and often resided in the middle of his forehead.

In his opening remarks, Archbishop Nienstedt condenses his two-page letter accompanying the DVD and states that heterosexual marriages are for “the benefit of children and society,” a claim recycled throughout the film. Marrying for love and not simply to have sex so you can give birth nine months later is a crazy feminist notion not supported by the Church.

His other obvious implication that same-sex marriage wouldn’t enhance familial stability and would even be harmful to children and other peoples’ heterosexual marriages was trotted out during testimony in the Prop 8 trial in California and found to be bullshit. There is no scientific evidence that supports that idea, because marriage produces those benefits regardless of the gender(s) of married couples. You cannot argue from an evidence-based standpoint if you have zero evidence to support your conclusion.

Both of these people are involved in the National Organization for Marriage scene. Robert P. George says that a child should have only one parent of each sex. Maggie Gallagher complains that if you don’t support equal rights, then you get branded as a bigot.

But wait, isn’t it bad to deny gay people their Constitutional rights? Not at all, says Damon C. Owens, a black guy who quotes part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Specifically, he quotes Martin Luther King Jr. quoting Thomas Aquinas on unjust laws, and then Owens says that marriage equality laws are unjust laws. He seems to ignore that Martin Luther King Jr.’s letter continues, “Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statues are unjust because segregation distorts the soul.”

I can’t believe how low these people will stoop, and how much they will grasp onto anything that could be used to justify their irrational beliefs. I’m pretty sure that anonymous donor had some sort of connection to local Catholic and this year’s GOP candidate for Governor Tom Emmer. It sounds a bit tinfoil-hat but it’s not much of a leap. And as a general rule, it seems the Catholic Church is usually a few hundred years behind contemporary science of the day and relies heavily on factually-incorrect Aristotelian science, as seen in their persecution of Galileo.

Anyway, I’m really not interested in re-watching and rehashing this video any further so I’m going to wrap this up by posting still images from the rest of the video because they’re so weird and off-the-wall.

Aside from Owens and the non-sequitor archival footage of Martin Luther King Jr. and a Civil Rights march, there are only white people and a few token Latino people shown throughout the video, with no depictions of interracial marriages. It’s pretty bizarre to watch the Catholic Church pretend to love people of color after centuries of screwing them over but it begins to make sense when you consider that poor Latino immigrants have become the church’s only hope for survival after offending the rest of their parishioners. (Although the Archdiocese prefers to call them “beaners” behind their backs.) However, they also leave the Catholic Church after questioning the point of being shackled by such a corrupt institution that had also helped destroy their native cultures and languages.

This whole thing reminds of the time a childhood best friend once gave me a Kent Hovind booklet about how “the devil” put dinosaur bones into the ground to tempt us to follow him, and that the Nazis believed in evolution (which isn’t even true!), so that makes it bad. There also some weird stuff about New Age movements and Marxism being caused by believing in evolution or something, but otherwise that was the entirety of the argument. I threw it away after reading it, aghast and annoyed that she seemed to consider me Chick-tract level stupid (as in, devoid of critical thinking) and couldn’t give me something with a reasonable argument for creationism as it appears in Genesis. More than 10 years later, I’ve come to realize that no such argument exists and that failing to reconcile scripture with science is just downright ignorant.

Eventually, the homophobic kids who tormented the queer kids will become adults whose homophobic votes matter deeply to both of the major political parties. Most of the politicians on either side of the aisle will throw civil rights for any and all minorities (be it gays/lesbians, women, people of color, or people with disabilities) to the side whenever it is most convenient.

During mid-January 1991, a few hundred people gathered from across the world in an Internet Relay Chat room to share and seek any information they could on what was to become known as “Operation Desert Storm” of the Gulf War. Among the participants were Israeli eyewitnesses to Iraqi Scud missiles.

Charles Blow enjoys his fair share of making up fake, misleading, and otherwise nonexistent “trends” to fill up space around the advertisements and obituaries in the NYT. (In a past weird column, he asserted that hooking up is an entirely new phenomena only done by people under age 30.) One such trend that doesn’t exist in the natural world is the current media meme in which President Obama is quickly losing steam amongst American Jews.

Aside from the general weirdness of specifically singling out Jews, this isn’t really happening at all:

From January to July 2010, Jews gave Obama a 61 percent approval rating, down from 66 percent from July to December 2009. Muslims gave him a 78 percent approval rating during the first half of 2010, and Mormons a 24 percent rating. The overall approval rating is 48 percent, down 15 points from the first half of 2009.

Obama received average job approval ratings from Catholics, and below-average ratings from Protestants.

Despite drops in the overall job approval rating from January 2009 to July 2010, Muslims have consistently given Obama the highest rating and Mormons the lowest. Jews’ approval ratings have remained above average.

Most important is the fact that this isn’t the Orthodox vs liberal Judaism battle that some people are trying to make it out to be, it is a power-grab by the Haredi minority. As such, the silence and shrugs by people who don’t seem to understand it (either willfully or not) are just as frustrating as the attempts to purposely misrepresent the intent behind the bill.

Last week, there was an op-ed in New York Times by Alana Newhouse (of Tablet) that does a really great job at explaining what is going on and what is at stake:

[...] The problem is not simply that some of these rabbinical functionaries, who are paid by the state and courted by politicians, are demonstrably corrupt. (To take the most salacious of a slew of examples, an American Haredi rabbi who had become one of the most powerful authorities on the question of conversion resigned from his organization in December after accusations that he solicited phone sex from a hopeful female convert.) Rather, it is that the beliefs of a tiny minority of the world’s Jews are on the verge of becoming the Israeli government’s definition of Judaism, for all Jews.

It is hard to exaggerate the possible ramifications, first and foremost for Jewish Israelis. Rivkah Lubitch, an Orthodox woman who is a lawyer in Israel’s rabbinic court system, painted a harrowing picture of the future in a recent column on the Israeli Web site Ynet.

“Even if you didn’t go to register for marriage, and even if you didn’t go to a rabbinic court for any reason, and even if you didn’t pass by a rabbinic court when you walked down the street — the rabbinic court can summon you, conduct a hearing about your Jewishness and revoke it,” she wrote. “In effect, the entire nation of Israel is presumed to be Not-Jewish — until proven otherwise.”

Why are the rabbis doing this? The process is not being driven, as some say, by a suspicion of new converts — they’re simply a wedge issue. Nor is it, as others argue, a reaction to the influx of Russian Jews, who when they seek permission to wed in Israel are often asked for evidence that their families were registered as Jews in the old Soviet Union.

No, what is driving this process is the desire of a small group of rabbis to expand their authority from narrow questions of conversion to larger questions of Jewish identity. Since what goes for conversion also goes for all other clerical acts, only a few anointed rabbis will be able to determine the authenticity of one’s marriage, divorce, birth, death — and every rite in between.

And lest one imagine that this is just another battle between the more progressive Reform and Conservative denominations and the more observant Orthodox, it must be noted that the criteria used by the rabbinate are driven by internal Haredi politics, not observance. According to the Jewish Week, at one point the number of American rabbis who were officially authorized by the Israeli rabbinate to perform conversions was down to a few dozen. Even if you are Orthodox — and especially if you are Modern Orthodox — your rabbi probably doesn’t make the cut. (Don’t believe it? Go ask him.)

Given that the conversion bill is the latest in a series of similarly motivated efforts, it seems almost useless to note that the stringent approach to Jewish law that the Israeli rabbinate promotes bears little connection to the historical experience and religious practice of the majority of Jewish people over the past two millenniums. It will do little good, too, to point out that it is well outside the consensus established by Hillel — arguably the greatest rabbi in all of rabbinic Judaism and whom, as Joseph Telushkin argues in a forthcoming book, was willing to convert a pagan on the spot, simply because he’d asked.

And it doesn’t help to argue that giving the ultra-Orthodox rabbinate total control over Jewish practice will destroy religious life in Israel just as surely as clerical control hurt the Church of England and the Catholic Church in Spain and France. Or that the Zionist founders, from Herzl to Jabotinsky to Ben-Gurion, all believed passionately in the unity of the Jewish people and the need for a secular state. [...]

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Modern Tribe has some great Jewish Gifts for all occasions

It is depicted in the mostly-factual film The Last King of Scotland, which itself is haunting. It is a cerebral horror movie. It makes you wish you weren’t watching it and when it’s over, you can’t go back to living until it has worn off.

A year later, Uganda was appointed to the late United Nations Commission on Human Rights. Current membership of the United Nations Human Rights Council includes various countries with distinguished human rights records such as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Pakistan.

Minnesota has a very ridiculous consumer fireworks statute (624.20): anything stronger than a fart is illegal. It was very exciting several years ago when it was amended and we were finally allowed to have “sparklers,” which are basically just those novelty birthday candles you can’t blow out, but on a stick.

I wouldn’t be surprised to find out if it were part of a ploy to make Minnesota into a place where interesting things are outlawed in order to promote tourism and Wisconsin imports.

An internet meme and another wannabe Jihadist (seen here cuddling with Princess Tuna) were arrested for whatever it is that terrorists get arrested for at JFK International Airport a couple weeks ago. Their hot summer destination was very hot: reportedly, Somalia by way of Egypt. They figured they could just fall-in with the local terrorist crew after extensive paintball training. It is pertinent to note that both have been described as “stupid.”

From New York Times:

[His mother] said Mohamed attended the local public elementary school, two Catholic grade schools, a boarding school in Connecticut, a school for troubled youth, three Muslim schools and two public high schools, repeatedly getting into trouble for fighting or mouthing off.

At the two public high schools, North Bergen and KAS Prep, Mr. Alessa made an escalating series of threats against students and staff members through 2005 and 2006, saying that he would blow up the school, mutilate gays and punish women who were not subordinate to men, according to officials granted anonymity to discuss confidential matters. Both schools alerted the Department of Homeland Security.

Carlos Almonte’s past is also, for lack of a better word, troubled:

Mr. Almonte’s conversion, his compulsion to proselytize, and his friendship with Mr. Alessa all alienated his family, though he continued to live with them. The friction culminated in their living room on May 23, 2009, when, according to a police report, Mr. Almonte began preaching about Islam to his younger brother, Elvin, who demurred, and “Carlos became angry and they both began fighting.”

Their mother tried to separate them and Elvin bit her arm, thinking it was his brother’s. Carlos then struck Elvin in the back of the head with a picture frame.

With the appearance of conspiracy theories in recent years regarding a “war on Christmas,” it has become evident that conservative Christians believe that they are losing their supremacy in popular American culture. Commentators such as John Gibson at Fox News Channel claim that “a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians–not just Jewish people” are persecuting the American Christian majority.

In his essay “Christian Privilege: Breaking a Sacred Taboo,” Lewis Z. Schlosser writes:

“Experiences of racism, sexism, and heterosexism each contribute to the oppression of and discrimination against persons from minority racial, gender, and sexual orientation groups… In similar fashion, Christian religious dogmatism contributes to persons from minority religious groups feeling that their religious identity is not valued, and subsequently, they feel discrimination and oppression because of their religious group membership.”

Concepts such as racism and sexism are often described as nonconscious ideology–in which a group’s inferiority is repeatedly reinforced through assumptions and interactions occurring beyond our conscious considerations. (Psychologists Sandra Bem and Daryl Bem use the analogy of a fish that doesn’t know it lives in a wet environment because it has never experienced anything else.) Within this framework, privilege is the perceived normalcy/lack of conscious consideration of exclusive benefits described as “unearned and unacknowledged advantages” that are taken for granted and which go unnoticed.

Sometimes, Christian privilege accompanies the perception that it is the religious minority’s own fault for being marginalized across all matters of American life. By choosing not to be a Christian, such discrimination is simply seen as something to be expected and deal with, and certainly not to challenge. Responsibility is comfortably shifted back upon people whose beliefs are deemed threatening to the status quo, regardless of what little clout they hold in such power dynamics.

Some examples of Christian privilege given by Lewis Z. Schlosser:

• Christianity and its’ religious holidays are so completely “normal” that they often appear to no longer have any religious significance.
• Christians can talk about their religion, even proselytize, and will usually be regarded as “sharing the word,” instead of imposing their ideas upon others or distributing “propaganda.”
• The birth of Christianity’s central figure is used as the major point of reference for our calendaring system (B.C. and A.D.).
• Christians can share their holiday greetings without being fully conscious of how it may impact those who do not celebrate the same holidays. They can also be sure that people are knowledgeable about their religious holidays and will greet them with the appropriate holiday greeting (e.g., Merry Christmas, Happy Easter, etc.).
• Christians probably do not need to learn the religious or spiritual customs of others, and they are likely not penalized for not knowing them.

When you get 36 local women-owned companies and nearly 1,200 women in one room at Minneapolis’ Graves Hotel, there’s only one possible result — high-energy shopping.

Best/worst part: it was written by a woman.