Godless Professors and the Subversion of American Youth

Did you know that universities are subverting the minds of America's young people by turning them into godless socialists? Dr. Mike S. Adams, a professor at University of North Carolina at Wilmington, is dispensing advice at Townhall to a father who is distraught about his daughter coming home with scary new leftist ideas. Jeff Fecke (h/t) has already taken down Dr. Mike bit-by-wingnutty-bit - including his coinage of the oh-so-clever acronym STD for "Socialist Teaching Disorder." I just want to zoom in on one little piece of Dr. Mike's take on university life:

First of all, I want you to understand that many of the crazy ideas you hear your daughter espousing are commonplace on college campuses. Nonetheless, it must have been shocking for you to hear that she supported Barack Obama in the last election principally because of his ideas about “the redistribution of wealth.” I know you were also disappointed to hear of her sudden opposition to the War on Terror and her sudden embrace of the United Nations. Most of all, I know you are disappointed that she has stopped going to church altogether.

Now that your daughter is not going to church it will be easier to get her to accept other policies based on economic and cultural Marxism. Socialist professors like the fact that average church attendance drops dramatically after just one year of college. God and socialism are simply incompatible. One cannot worship both Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.

(If you must, you can read the rest here.)

Although I'm not a real socialist - just a fan of redistribution, thanks to my pastor when I was 14! - I am one of those freethinking university professors. Scandalously, I think it's a good thing when my students start to examine their beliefs and preconceptions.

I just finished teaching a class on religion, gender, and sexuality that might well enrage Dr. Mike. I framed patriarchy in materialist terms and lectured on how poverty multiplies the odds that a woman will terminate a pregnancy. (Socialism!) We discussed the Gnostic Gospels and the struggle between heterodoxy and orthodoxy in Christianity. (Heresy!) We delved into the roots of the Christian valorization of virginity. (Sluttishness!)

At the end of the quarter, students were asked to write a short essay in which they discussed how their views had changed over the past ten weeks. Many of them said that the class upset their certainties. Some of them questioned their faith. How, after all, can you trust the Bible's authority if a politicized Church hierarchy - not divine revelation - determined which books became canonical?

So yeah. Dr. Mike would hate this class. So did one student (out of 85), judging from the final exam. She objected to the feminist framing of the material. She would have preferred ten weeks of Catholic dogma. She transparently didn't bother to engage with the material in any serious way.

The rest of the students - including many current and former Catholics - realized that they didn't have to follow any party line. Not mine; not any religion's. One young Catholic woman had a real crisis of faith mid-quarter. By the end of the quarter, she felt stronger in her beliefs than before. Another young woman who's planning to become a minister wrote of her past and present struggles with her faith.

Did I turn those students godless? Not by any stretch. And that was never my intent. If a person is going to embrace faith as an adult, they're going to have to find it themselves. They can't just continue believing a Sunday School version of it with colorful, sanitized pictures of Daniel in the lion's den and Jesus surrounded by fluffy lambs. They'll have to navigate their way from dogma to actual faith. That's exactly how some of my religious students used the class. They started questions and haven't stopped. And they have matured in their beliefs. (Interestingly, a number of them declare some affinity for Buddhist ideas, even as they remain in their own faith tradition.)

A substantially minority of my students wrote that they consider themselves agnostics or atheists. So did I convert them to godlessness? A few of them did begin to call themselves agnostics during the class, but most of them came into it already rejecting or questioning religion. Many of them felt liberated at being able to "come out" about their unbelief in their discussion groups - something they often had felt unable to do, until now.

These students took my class for one of two reasons. Some had grown up without any religion and felt they needed to close a gap in their education. Others were questioning their religious upbringing or had rejected it altogether, often in the wake of a loved one's death. (It's ironic and sad that religion seems so often to fail people at the very moment when it's supposed to provide the most comfort.) Disproportionately, the students in this second group had been raised Catholic. For most of them, the Church's condemnation of homosexuality was a serious dealbreaker, with its position on abortion and contraception coming in a close second.

This is why the Pope's statement on gender last Christmas made me crazy. There was some controversy at the time about what the English word "gender" connotes when used in Italian (as in the Pope's address), and I can't speak to that as an expert. I know about a dozen words of Italian and I wasn't raised Catholic. But the context - as well as some of the smarter commentary on this - convinced me that he was affirming the church's teachings on the sanctity of heterosexual marriage and traditional gender roles.

More importantly, the Pope was trying to shut down all discussion of all gender issues within the Catholic Church. This is exactly what's driving young people out of the Church. They see the condemnation of homosexuality and the hierarchy's refusal to even discuss it as contemptuous and inhumane.

Dr. Mike, his letter-writer, and (I'm betting) a lot of conservative parents want to short-circuit that discussion too. It's a terrible loss, because their kids want to have it. They need to have it. That goes for everyone from the young fundamentalist to the hard-core nihilist. (And yes, the range in my class was that wide.)

If Dr. Mike were paying attention to his students, he'd realize that whatever their professors do or say, they are at an age where they're bound to question their upbringing. A good university education should help them learn to think for themselves in a more thorough, systematic, and deeper way. It should prod them to question received wisdom and authority. It should expose them to a variety of viewpoints. (Yes, even Dr. Mike's.)

If that's subverting young people, then I'm blessed to be a part of it. One student sent me an email at the end of the quarter saying the class had changed her life; another said the same as she turned in her exam. I don't personally take too much credit, because the potentially life-changing work happened in the discussion groups, not in my lectures. But even so, staying on the job full-time this quarter through weeks of illness and fear was probably the hardest thing I've ever done, and I'd worried that my students got cheated. I blubbed in gratitude when I read that email.

Oh, and as far as I know, I didn't convert a single student to Marxism. Nary a Trotskyist. Not even a mild-mannered socialist-feminist. I guess I'd better try harder.

Found: Twitter's Divine Feline Use

First, you have to get over your chimera-disgust at the idea of cats tweeting. Really, it can be quite natural! Not monstrous at all!

Second, you (well, I) have to get over our anti-Twitter biases.

And then you can enjoy the application for which Twitter was obviously made in the first place: the tweets of the Ceiling Cat.

I stumbled on this chirping deity while exploring the LOLcat Bible, which was helping me procrastinate my actual task of reading up on feminist theological projects like The Woman's Bible. The LOLcat Bible very nearly landed in my Tuesday lecture. Yeah, we're all punchy by now, students and instructors alike, in this, the last week of classes before finals. I now regret not doing it.

The LOLcreation, at the LOLcat Bible.

So here's a sample of feline revelation:

An Iz dump teh sno on teh norfeest, So dat teh hoomins stai insied an cuddle der kittehs an keep dem warm.

Yu kno why kittehs eet teh tinsel from yer Crismus Trees? Cuz wen I wuz leeding dem thru teh desert, dat is wut manna luk liek.

In other words: Proof positive that the 140-character count meshes perfectly with a cat's walnut-sized brain. Not sure if this says more about cats, or more about Twitter.

I should warn you that there's a rival Ceiling Cat tweeting. While it doesn't appear to be the Basement Cat in disguise, this one is less active and creative, but a whole lot more prurient - maybe he's laying the groundwork for a Catichean struggle? Maybe he's just gunning to lead a meagachurch? Anyway, here's his obsession:

Watching you masturbate.

Just call me LL Ceiling C, because judging from my followers: Ladies Love Ceiling Cat. And Ceiling Cat loves watching you... you know.

If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe some of the stuff y'all get up to.

Luckily for you (and by you, I once again mean me), Twitter offers the option: "Block Ceiling Cat."

A Paradox in the Politics of Science

Has anyone else noticed this irony: that a lot of the people who reject well-grounded science (evolutionary theory, climate change, etc.) hold exactly the same stereotypical ideas about gender that pop up repeatedly in evolutionary psychology? Obviously many of the denialists have religious reasons for rejecting sound science, while evolutionary psychologists and sociobiologists are overwhelmingly secularists. Yet they share the idea that men are the pursuers, women the pursued; that men are naturally dominant; that homosexuality is somehow aberrant.

Strange bedfellows, huh? Logically, we can be pretty sure no one working in the field of ev psych or sociobiology believes in creationism. These are disciplines that have spawned some of our most outspoken atheists. Many of these scientists them see their work as progressive, in fact. Many believe their research exposes the roots of human nature, allowing us to mold a kinder, more ethical society. In The Caveman Mystique, Martha McCaughey portrays this impulse as a quasi-religious reformist zeal that arose as practitioners of ev psych and sociobiology moved into the void left by the post-Darwin decline of religion.

To be fair, ev psych and sociobiology often look more regressive than they are because the media skews their findings to match existing gender stereotypes. However, the actual science is still too often rife with speculation and gendered assumptions (as figleaf shows today in a smart post on how these assumptions skew findings). And so it meshes all too easily with the stories that religious fundamentalists tell about our gendered "nature."

On the flip side, I'd be interested to know if there's a subset of creationists who also embrace ev psych. Seems to me that the "ev" part of it would be anathema to them. But otherwise the "psych" half would work pretty well for them, if they could only find a way to compress it into the past 6000 years.

Adam, Eve, and ... Insurance?

A friend and colleague (who just happens to be both gay and Catholic) recently sent me this, brimming with blasphemic glee.

I'm still trying to figure out how this ad will sell insurance. If you have a theory, let me know in comments. Otherwise, just enjoy.

Ohio's Baffling Sexual Politics

Ohio politics mystify me. I've lived here for over eight years now, and the contradictions still leave me spinning. We may be known as a swing state, but don't be fooled. Ohio is often immoderate, a patchwork of extremes. My own little town is a progressive island in the midst of Appalachia, surrounded by the tattered traditions of trade unionism, Bible-thumping fundamentalism, and plain disenfranchisement and despair.

Ohio's sexual politics are just as contradictory. On the one hand my adopted state made the news a few days ago with an abstinence-only sex ed curriculum that promotes rape culture. My county isn't quite within this particular program's scope, but the curriculum does cover the large Columbus market - and public schools along with private ones. Jill at Feministe has all the gory details, including "in the end they all get STDs," which sounds about right. One of my former students told me about a sex ed program at his high school that warned kids if they had sex, they'd likely wind up addicted to drugs, passed out in a New York train station, and possibly missing a kidney to boot.

Ohio is also the home of Derek the Abstinence Clown, another fabulously wise use of your federal tax dollars. 'Nuff said.

On the other hand, Ohio's Presbyterian Church just took a strong progressive position by voting to open the clergy to persons in same-sex relationships. According to this morning's Columbus Dispatch:

The Presbytery of Scioto Valley of the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted 115 to 88 to delete language from the church constitution that says clergy must be in a faithful marriage between a man and a woman or be chaste.

In order for policy to change, a majority of presbyteries nationwide would have to vote to remove the old language, and so far the the results don't look promising. If the new policy fails, unmarried but sexually active heterosexual clergy stand to lose, too. The policy change promotes sexual freedom - and removes the incentives to hypocrisy - for everyone, irrespective of sexual orientation.

Whatever happens, I'm glad that in a state where the Reverend Rod Parsley often seems to dominate the religious landscape, Presbyterians have taken a step toward the equality that any just or merciful God would demand.

Modern-Day Sodomites?

Yeah, I know "sodomite" is a loaded term. I'm not entirely sure it can be applied meaningfully in the twenty-first century. And yet, sodomite is the word that keeps popping into my head with all the new revelations of Ted Haggard's sexual adventures. Let me explain.

Up until the late 1800s, the category of "homosexual" didn't exist. Michel Foucault explores the genealogy of "homosexuality" in the first volume of his History of Sexuality, showing quite conclusively that "the homosexual" is a product of modern sexual science. (Brief crib notes can be found here, if you've always intended to read Foucault but never quite got around to it.) Only in the nineteenth-century did practitioners of the emerging discipline of sexology declare homosexuality to be a stable, life-long orientation that defined a person's entire sexuality. The most influential of them was Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who wrote in his Psychopathia Sexualis that homosexuality had its roots in congenital pathology. He regarded it as inborn and thus impossible to change.

Sexologists haven't always promoted a binary scheme in which people are either heterosexual or homosexual. Alfred Kinsey's famous 1948 report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, placed men along a 0 to 6 scale, with 0 exclusively heterosexual and 6 exclusively homosexual. All five intermediary scores represented various flavors of bisexuality. But by and large, ever since sexology invented "the homosexual," the popular imagination has categorized people dichotomously as either straight or gay.

Before the birth of the modern homosexual, however, we had "the sodomite." While it's certainly the case that some people repeatedly gravitated toward same-sex liaisons, the early modern Western world didn't pigeonhole them as having an exclusive orientation toward their own sex. It just declared sodomy a sin, and the state also made it a crime.

In early modern Europe, many same-sex-inclined people married and had a family. Some were never outed as sodomites, and so they "passed" their whole lives long.

Some of these folks did get busted for sodomy. They were then labeled as sodomites, but that didn't destroy their other identities as wives, husbands, etc. Even then, their sexuality didn't define their whole being, nor did homosexual acts define their sexuality.

However, sodomy - like rape - was typically a capital crime in early modern Europe. So, while the convicted sodomite wasn't labeled a homosexual, he or she was put to death like a murderer or a witch. (The law typically did not distinguish between male and female sodomites, though practically speaking, only penetrative acts counted as sex, and so men were far more likely to actually be charged with sodomy.)

We actually don't know much about the prevalence of same-sex erotic contacts in the early modern period. Nor were states necessarily very vigorous about prosecuting them - which accounts for the paucity of our knowledge, since historians rely heavily on court records for such information. For instance, during the 18th century the Southern German states were far more concerned with regulating heterosexuality, since pregnancy due to fornication or adultery was socially and fiscally disruptive. (For the preceding, I'm relying on Isabel Hull's Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany, 1700-1815.)

None of this is intended to romanticize the sodomite. People died as a result of sodomy laws. Sodomy laws (minus the capital penalties) remained in force in over a quarter of U.S. states until Lawrence v. Texas invalidated them in 2003.

What does this all have to do with Ted Haggard? Well, I think viewing him as a sodomite provides a possible framework for understanding how his wife Gayle can claim that "99 percent of Ted's sexual experiences" were with her:

1. Ted Haggard has been married for most of his adult life and evidently functioned well enough heterosexually to father four children; his wife's claim suggests that they did it more than those four times.

2. According to Grant Haas, the man allegedly paid hush money by Haggard's former church, Haggard engaged in a wide variety of sexual practices, some of it decidedly non-vanilla - and some of it was with his wife.

3. Haggard and his ex-church regard same-sex eroticism as a sin.

Sure sounds like a sodomite to me! Even though nearly all of the reporting has (I think wrongly) suggested that Haggard is a closeted homosexual, all the available evidence suggests that "homosexual" is far too one-dimensional to describe Haggard's variegated and guilt-ridden sexuality. Okay, we could call Haggard a bisexual, or polymorphously perverse (if you want to go all Freudian), but that doesn't quite capture the self-imposed judgment of SIN.

None of this negates what I consider Haggard's only true and massive failing: his hypocrisy. But just possibly, seeing him as a sodomite helps illuminate his sexuality better than any of our usual modern frames. (Anyone want to re-think the Larry Craig scandal through this lens?)

Cornel West, Love, Justice ... and Me

Well, okay. I didn't actually even shake his hand, much less get to talk with him one-on-one. But I got to hear Cornel West speak at my university today, and I was both moved and impressed.

Impressed: because he's got such an stirring delivery. If I tried to riff on the whole scale of emotion and power that he uses, I'd come across as a screeching, bombastic pedant. (Heck, I'm still trying to get comfy with wielding a microphone when I lecture!) But he's got the voice and presence to pull off the sort of oratory that's otherwise reserved for legendary preachers.

Moved: because he's not just way smarter than me, and he's not just a brilliant showman. He calls us to tend to our own spiritual maturity while committing ourselves to rooting out oppression. He takes Socrates' injunction that "the unexamined life is not worth living," mixes it with the blues, and inspires you to recommit to a better self and a better world. Actually, the better self is the bridge to that better world.

I'm not going to try to summarize all that West said. (He was giving the keynote at a conference on a founder of progressive Islam, Mahmoud Mohamed Taha, a Sudanese visionary executed by his government for his beliefs, whom West grouped with Gandhi, King, and Mandela.) Instead, I'll just share a few of the lines that I found most inspiring, yet pithy enough that I got them on paper - no small thing, because the ideas were flowing so furiously.

Indifference is the one trait that makes the very angels weep. It's the very essence of inhumanity.

Optimism deodorizes the catastrophic. Hope allows us to confront the catastrophic.

These weren't just eloquent yet empty phrases. While celebrating Obama's upcoming inauguration, West called on "Brother Barack" to serve hope, not optimism. To speak out against the carnage in Gaza. To explain why he chose Rick Warren in apparent contempt of his LGBT supporters.

This, however, is the thought I've promised myself to repeat every day until it becomes part of my blood and bones:

Justice is what love looks like in public.

Imagine what the world might look like if that became everyone's mantra. Imagine how different our history would be. How radiant our future.

Of course this is way out of season, but I swear it's posted in a spirit of hope, not optimism. (The flower is a Climbing Peace Rose from early September 2008.)

Epiphany and Incarnation

Today is Epiphany. I've always thought it was a lovely word for a terribly important concept. Where would we be without those little burst of light in our brain - be they enlightment or supernovas? Arriving at an intellectual or emotional epiphany feels as satisfying as really dark chocolate or really good sex.

But it's funny, I don't use the word much in its original, spiritual sense. My best understanding is that the holiday got its name from the Three Wise Men's realization that Baby Jesus was actually divine: God incarnate.

Now, I'm not a particularly good Christian. I was raised in the United Church of Christ and a very liberal Presbyterian congregation. I've said before that I can probably best be described as a hopeful agnostic. But if I'm not so hot at believing in a theistic religion, I warm up better to pantheism.

I don't believe we're just animate clay. I feel a lot of awe at the world around me. I find it easy to believe that there are divine elements in the world: in nature, in human beings. That's where, on a much less literal level, I think the idea of Christ's Incarnation is extremely moving and maybe even, well, enlightening. If you understand the incarnation as meaning that there's something divine within all of us (as my yoga teachers said, back when I went to yoga), then the birth of Jesus is a beautiful allegory for the potential we all bear.

Of course, if we all carry a spark of the divine, that's both a gift and a burden. Or rather, I guess it's the sort of gift that implies all sorts of responsibilities.

Even if I've totally warped Christian teaching to suit my own muddled purposes, I do love the idea of a holiday devoted to enlightenment: intellectual, emotional, spiritual.

And so: Happy Epiphany, dear readers. May we all be blessed with starbursts of light in the year ahead.

Yes, my tree's still up, though the gifts are long opened and their contents now clutter the living room. And yes, it took up about a quarter of the floor space in our living room. All the decent cut-yourself trees were oddly triangular and very squat at the base. And yes, that's a small auxiliary tree growing out of it to the right. I wouldn't let anyone chop it off, absurd though it is.

The Song-and-Dance around Prop 8

From Funny or Die via Salon's War Room, here's the musical mockery that Prop 8 supporters so richly deserve.

From Funny or Die

I've never really thought of Jack Black as a god, but he does make a marvelous Jesus. And don't overlook Maya Rudolph and Margaret Cho among the gay-friendly earthlings. Also, I realize this is in atrocious taste, but the credits list a "Wife #1" and "Wife #2" for the anti-gay ringleader.

For the "Health" of the Mother

Remember John McCain's use of air quotes in the presidential debates when he talked about abortions to preserve women's "health"? Remember how the Bush Administration is trying to push through a "conscience clause" for providers of reproductive health services that's so capacious, it would likely redefine birth control pills as abortifacients? Remember how women used to routinely die in this country during childbirth? (Okay, so you need a longer memory for that last point. A century ago, the lifetime risk of death in childbed was about 1 in 20. 'Course, that only applied to women, which might explain why McCain sees "health" as a non-issue.)

Well, as Tracy Clark-Flory reports at Broadsheet, the Bushies are making one last push during these lame duck days to put that new rule in place. The only good thing about this? The ensuing discussion is shedding light on the barriers women already face in getting decent, equitable, timely reproductive health care. From the L.A. Times:

In calling for limits on “conscientious refusals,” ACOG [American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists] cited four recent examples. In Texas, a pharmacist rejected a rape victim's prescription for emergency contraception. In Virginia, a 42-year-old mother of two became pregnant after being refused emergency contraception. In California, a physician refused to perform artificial insemination for a lesbian couple. (In August, the California Supreme Court ruled that this refusal amounted to illegal discrimination based on sexual orientation.) And in Nebraska, a 19-year-old with a life-threatening embolism was refused an early abortion at a religiously affiliated hospital. [My emphasis.]

That last case was new to me, so I hunted it down - first via the ACOG report and then the ACLU analysis that ACOG footnoted (both are pdf files). The ACLU report had the details. Here's the story:

In the spring of 1994, a nineteen-year-old woman in Nebraska, Sophie Smith [not her real name], was admitted to the emergency room of a religiously affiliated hospital with a blood clot in her lung. Tests revealed that Smith was approximately ten weeks pregnant, and the clotting problem resulted from a rare and life-threatening condition exacerbated by the pregnancy. The hospital immediately put her on intravenous blood-thinners to eliminate the existing blood clot and to help prevent the formation of more clots that could kill Smith instantly if they lodged in her lungs, heart, or brain.

Smith’s doctors told her that she had two alternatives. She could stay in the hospital on intravenous blood-thinners for the remaining six-and-a-half months of the pregnancy. She would also need a procedure in which a doctor would insert into one of her primary veins an umbrella-like device designed to catch blood clots before they reached a vital organ. Or she could have a first-trimester abortion, switch to oral blood-thinners, and be released from the hospital.

Smith decided to have an abortion. She wanted to go home to her two-year-old child. Because she was poor, Medicaid was covering her medical expenses but would pay for an abortion only upon proof that it was necessary to save her life. Four doctors at the hospital certified that Smith needed a lifesaving abortion, and Medicaid agreed to cover it.

On the morning Smith was scheduled to have surgery, however, the hospital’s lawyer appeared in the operating room. He announced that the hospital would not permit an abortion – lifesaving or otherwise – to take place on its premises. The procedure was canceled, and Smith was wheeled back to her room.

Ten days of dangerous delay followed. Smith wanted to be transferred to a facility that would perform the abortion, but moving her increased the risk that she would throw a life-threatening blood clot. Moreover, because the blood-thinners she was taking made her prone to excessive bleeding during surgery, Smith’s doctors felt that it was in her best interest to be treated in a hospital. The hospital, however, stood by its decision not to let the abortion take place in its facilities. Notwithstanding the risks, Smith was ultimately transferred by ambulance to her doctor’s office. He performed the abortion and sent Smith back to the hospital, which provided follow-up care.

Even in a culture where a presidential candidate feels free to mock women's health, this story is shocking. It wasn't just Sophie Smith's health that hung in the balance; it was her very life.

I know someone who died in her twenties from a pulmonary embolism. One of my grandfathers died - long before I was ever born - from an embolism. If even Medicaid judged the situation to be life-threatening, you'd better believe it was. An embolism is an immediate life-or-death emergency, not some remote risk.

And yet this hospital saw fit to risk the Smith's life. Of course, if she had died, she wouldn't have been much use to her potential child, either - not to mention her actual one! But I guess that didn't occur to these morally pure hospital administrators. She did survive, but due to luck, and no thanks to the "care" she received.

Historically, of course, the woman's life was always chosen first - not because women had higher standing in the past (they didn't) but because they typically had family members who depended on their care. Even the Roman Catholic Church was on board with this policy until about 1900. After that, it began to revalue the "innocent" life of the fetus as worthier than that of the presumably sinful mother.

In Smith's case, you have to wonder if any particular "sins" exacerbated her situation. She was young. She was obviously poor enough to qualify for Medicaid. She may have been married, though given her youth, odds are that she wasn't. I'm guessing that an educated, middle-class married woman in her thirties might have had better luck. But then again, maybe not.

And remember: Smith's ordeal happened in the mid-nineties. The climate for reproductive choice has only deteriorated since then, with the emergence of new tactics such as pharmacists' concerted refusals to fill birth control prescriptions. Anyone want to imagine what new scenarios might emerge if Bush manages to ram through this new rule?

As Clark-Flory notes, Hillary Clinton and Patty Murray have vowed to fight the rule. An Obama administration won't let it stand. But repeal will take time and political capital, and it leaves women's health advocates fighting a stupid, unnecessary rear-guard battle.

Update 12/4/08: I corrected the text to keep the blame focused on the hospital administrators, where it belonged, not on the doctors. Thanks for pointing out the slippage, moioci.

A Palin-God Ticket in '12?

Just a few days ago I was savoring Katha Pollitt's valedictory address to Sarah Palin, "Sayonara, Sarah." Go read it if you haven't already. Bask in it for a moment. And then come back for today's dose of harsh reality.

Scroll down past the anti-Cathar LOLcat, cutely yet heavyhandedly representing a medieval correlate of spiritual warfare, a doctrine to which Palin has been linked ...

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

... okay. Deep breath.

The Columbus Dispatch is reporting that Palin plans to run for high office again, should it be God's will:

"I'm like, OK, God, if there is an open door for me somewhere, this is what I always pray, I'm like, don't let me miss the open door," Palin said in an interview with Fox News on Monday. "And if there is an open door in '12 or four years later, and if it is something that is going to be good for my family, for my state, for my nation, an opportunity for me, then I'll plow through that door."

I realize that Palin herself is leaving a door open here. No more, no less.

But. Given her lack of reflection, her fundamentalist religious beliefs, and her apparent blindness to her own inadequacies, what do you suppose her God will do? Will he swing open that door?

Let's just say that if Palin's God had a barn, His livestock would be scattered all over the universe by now.

Hearts of Stone

This is just so wrong and terrible in so many different ways:

A 13-year-old girl who said she had been raped was stoned to death in Somalia after being accused of adultery by Islamic militants, a human rights group said.

Dozens of men stoned Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow to death Oct. 27 in a stadium packed with 1,000 spectators in the southern port city of Kismayo, Amnesty International and Somali media reported, citing witnesses. The Islamic militia in charge of Kismayo had accused her of adultery after she reported that three men had raped her, the rights group said.

(Source: Huffington Post)

Let's take apart this atrocity one piece at a time:

• The girl was thirteen.
• She was apparently already married, otherwise the charge would not have been adultery but fornication or similar.
• She was raped. At age thirteen.
• Her story was not believed. This accords with Shariah law, which automatically considers a man's word more credible than a woman's.
  
• She was sentenced to death.
• Authorities allowed the sentence to be carried out.
• The execution was performed in a particularly brutal way.
• Her death was cheered on by a crowd of 1000 spectators.

Of course, Somalia is a mess. There's no rule of law. Various factions are fighting each other.

Even so. If anyone is wondering why feminism hasn't withered away, here's one compelling reason.

And lest we're tempted to "Other" this atrocity and ascribe it to the "backwardness" of other nations and religions: Thirteen-year-olds are raped in the United States every day. Women's basic credibility was challenged in American rape trials until very recently. By this, I don't mean that the accused was (rightly) presumed innocent, but that the accuser was presumed to be a crazy vindictive lying slut until proven otherwise. Even today, victims of sexual assault too often find themselves having to defend their sexual histories in court.

Oh, and don't forget: Even though my country is not ruled by extremist militias, we've still allowed the rule of law to be hollowed out over the past seven years. We have plenty of our own, home-grown (Christian) fundamentalists who believe women deserve punishment for expressing their sexuality (preferably, in the form of a baby, though disease will do the trick, too). And among the rich and privileged countries, we stand alone in employing the death penalty.

A Wedding Blessing

Blue Gal alerted me to today's blogswarm against California's Prop 8.

As you know, here in Ohio we have worries of our own. (Please oh please let us not be the state that throws the election to the Republicans again!) But I have lots of family and friends in California. For some of them, their current right to get married hangs in the balance.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago how the supporters of this proposition are making fools of themselves trying to stir up people's fears. So I won't go there again today.

Instead, I'll just say that the wedding I mentioned in that previous post - between two women who've been together thirty-five years - is going forward this weekend at my mom's church. She's working the wedding, so she'll be the person who deals with the florist and helps the brides find anything they need and cleans up afterward. (Hey, it's not all glamour.)

For years, some of her church's neighbors have demonized it - quite literally - for its support of the town's small gay community. One person dubbed it "the devil church" in the local newspaper's letters section. Hateful graffiti was aimed against it. I'm so pleased and proud that her congregation didn't cave in to intimidation. (I also totally don't get how people who claim to worship a God of love and forgiveness express it through rage and hate.)

While not everyone in her church is supportive of same-sex marriage, my mom feels tickled and honored to be playing a role as her congregation blesses a same-sex union for the first time ever. My mom is seventy-four. She wouldn't have gotten behind even the idea of this twenty years ago. Now she's thrilled for the brides. How did she evolve? Mostly just by getting to know actual gays and lesbians and becoming friends with them.

If Prop 8 passes, this will be both the first and the last same-sex wedding performed in her church. If Prop 8 goes down, it will be the most wonderful honeymoon present possible. As I said, they've been together 35 years. They don't need crystal or china. Just this: Your no vote on Prop 8 (if you live in California) or your reminder to friends who live out there (if you don't).

Taking "Anti-Life" Seriously

Ever since I finished yesterday's post, which is sort of a smorgasbord of weird medical news, I've been mulling over how those three news items are related on a deeper level than their oddness and/or inexplicability.

I do think they've got a real common demoninator. The American culture, birthplace of the "pro-life" movement, is indeed anti-life in a host of ways - though not for the reasons that the anti-abortion leadership adduces. I'm not referring to their overt hypocrisy - their support of war and the death penalty, just for example - though of course that's part of it, and one that plenty of "pro-life" Catholics would condemn just as much as I do.

No, I think what's at stake here in the anti-life position is bigger yet: a kind of gendered denial of our very embodied humanity, which grossly distorts our views on sexuality, pleasure, and generativity. While I'm sure this has its roots in the medieval Christian church's condemnation of sexual pleasure, by now it has assumed distinctly modern forms. It's a stubborn insistence - even in the midst of the richest, most consumption-oriented society the world has ever known - on hating and mortifying our own flesh. This hating-on is bigger than sex and sexuality; bigger than gender and genitals; but it routinely zeroes in on our human capacity for engendering pleasure and indeed life itself.

And so (to hark back to yesterday's themes) too many women remain impervious to reassurances (from partners, the women's health movement, or even doctors) that our bodies are okay just as they are. Powdering one's otherwise healthy, moist ladyparts thus remains an imperative for some women even though it can make them sick. Even though it can kill them.

And so some men prize a rock-hard erection not primarily for the pleasure it can give two partners but because it stands as evidence of manliness, power, autonomy. Not because it lets them merge with another person but because it's a badge of virile individualism and self-sufficiency. Not because it affirms life and joy but (as Susan Bordo suggested a decade ago in her article "Pills and Power Tools") because it's an inert symbol of a drill or missile. Drill baby drill, indeed.

And so the vulnerable bodies of babies aren't worth the public dollars it would take to protect them, even though we creatively finance the Iraqi occupation and air raids on Afghan weddings.

Eros and thanatos may be forever at odds. At the moment, though, I'd say thanatos is winning.

More on Colorado's Zygotemania

Diana Hsieh of the Coalition for Secular Government left a lengthy comment on my post on Colorado's proposed Amendment 48, which would give a fertilized egg the full rights of legal personhood. Her analysis is so helpful that I thought I'd better rescue it from the obscurity of the Kittywampus comment corner:

You might be interested to read an issue paper published by the Coalition for Secular Government: "Amendment 48 Is Anti-Life: Why It Matters That a Fertilized Egg Is Not a Person" by Ari Armstrong and myself. It's available at:

http://www.seculargovernment.us/docs/a48.pdf

We discuss some of the serious implications of this proposed amendment, such as:

* Amendment 48 would make abortion first-degree murder, except perhaps to save the woman's life. First-degree murder is defined in Colorado law as deliberately causing the death of a "person," a crime punished by life in prison or the death penalty. So women and their doctors would be punished with the severest possible penalty under law for terminating a pregnancy -- even in cases of rape, incest, and fetal deformity.

* Amendment 48 would ban any form of birth control that might sometimes prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus -- including the birth control pill, morning-after pill, and IUD. The result would be many more unintended pregnancies and unwanted children in Colorado.

* Amendment 48 would ban in vitro fertilization because the process usually creates more fertilized eggs than can be safely implanted in the womb. So every year, hundreds of Colorado couples would be denied the joy of a child of their own.

Our paper also develops a strong defense of abortion rights -- not based on vague appeals to "choice" or "privacy" -- but on the fact that neither an embryo nor fetus qualifies as a person with a right to life.

An embryo or fetus is wholly dependent on the woman for its basic life-functions. It goes where she goes, eats what she eats, and breathes what she breathes. It lives as an extension of her body, contained within and dependent on her for its survival. It is only a potential person, not an actual person.

That situation changes radically at birth. The newborn baby exists as a distinct organism, separate from his mother. Although still very needy, he lives his own life. He is a person, and his life must be protected as a matter of right.

So, we argue, when a woman chooses to terminate a pregnancy she does not violate the rights of any person. Instead, she is properly exercising her own rights over her own body in pursuit of her own happiness. Moreover, in most cases, she is acting morally and responsibly by doing so. ...

The sad fact is that Amendment 48 is based on sectarian religious dogma, not objective science or philosophy. It is a blatant attempt to impose theocracy in America. That's definitely a scary thought.

Many thanks, Diana, for this careful and systematic analysis. I'd add that this is also an attempt to seize control over women's bodies - both our sexuality and our reproductive potential - in a rearguard action to defend patriarchy.

I'm Not En-Raptured

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

A few days ago, I raised questions about Sarah Palin's religious beliefs. I basically consider people's faith a private matter - unless it impinges significantly on how they would shape policy. So Joe Biden personally believes life begins at conception; he personally has serious qualms about abortion; yet he wouldn't stop others from choosing abortion. I'm fine with that. When making policy, he keeps his convictions in the personal realm, recognizing the religious pluralism of American society.

Sarah Palin is on record as believing that God favors certain pipeline projects (not to mention certain wars in Mesopotamia). She sees direct her faith as directly applicable to the public realm.

This isn't surprising in light of reports that came out this week about Palin's home church. Now, people aren't responsible for everything their pastor says. I'm not going to apply a totally different standard to her than I did to Barack Obama when his former pastor, Reverend Wright, made some highly impolitic remarks.

I do think Palin needs to respond to this, however. Writing in Alternet, Bruce Wilson reports:

Sarah Palin's churches are actively involved in a resurgent movement that was declared heretical by the Assemblies of God in 1949. This is the same 'Spiritual Warfare' movement that was featured in the award winning movie, "Jesus Camp," which showed young children being trained to do battle for the Lord. At least three of four of Palin's churches are involved with major organizations and leaders of this movement, which is referred to as The Third Wave of the Holy Spirit or the New Apostolic Reformation. The movement is training a young "Joel's Army" to take dominion over the United States and the world.

Along with her entire family, Sarah Palin was re-baptized at twelve at the Wasilla Assembly of God in Wasilla, Alaska and she attended the church from the time she was ten until 2002: over two and 1/2 decades. Sarah Palin's extensive pattern of association with the Wasilla Assembly of God has continued nearly up to the day she was picked by Senator John McCain as a vice-presidential running mate.

Palin's dedication to the Wasilla church is indicated by a Saturday, September 7, 2008, McClatchy news service story detailing possibly improper use of state travel funds by Palin for a trip she made to Wasilla, Alaska to attend, on June 8, 2008, both a Wasilla Assembly of God "Masters Commission" graduation ceremony and also a multi-church Wasilla area event known as "One Lord Sunday."

At the latter event, Palin and Alaska LT Governor Scott Parnell were publicly blessed, onstage before an estimated crowd of 6,000, through the "laying on of hands" by Wasilla Assembly of God's Head Pastor Ed Kalnins whose sermons espouse such theological concepts as the possession of geographic territories by demonic spirits and the inter-generational transmission of family "curses". Palin has also been blessed, or "anointed", by an African cleric, prominent in the Third Wave movement, who has repeatedly visited the Wasilla Assembly of God and claims to have effected positive, dramatic social change in a Kenyan town by driving out a "spirit of witchcraft."

(See also this version at the Huffington Post.)

Again, none of this indicates directly what Palin herself believes. Even her appearance on stage at her home church doesn't mean she agrees with every particular of Reverend Kalnins' theology. (I'll admit that seeing video Wilson provides of them sharing a stage is pretty suggestive, however.)

Everything Wilson writes about the Third Wave is consistent with scholarship that I'm intimately familiar with. (I translated a 15,000-word book chapter on the Pentecostal movement a few months back.) Spiritual Warfare is a real and growing movement. Lots of Pentecostal and Charismatic worshipers sincerely believe in the efficacy of demons, curses, and exorcisms. While blending these ideas with a belief in witchcraft is particularly common in Africa, the difference between witches and demons is mighty slender.

I, for one, would prefer political leaders who don't fear demons. Who can separate the secular from the sacred. Who haven't bought stock in Armageddon. And who don't believe in the Basement Cat.

Huckabee Nostalgia

I never thought I'd feel wistful about Mike Huckabee not getting the VP nod. I didn't really think he'd have a chance. He's too extreme in his religious beliefs. He's too retrograde on women's rights.

Ha! After just a day, such troubling questions have arisen about Sarah Palin that I'm wallowing in nostalgia for Huckabee.

Let's run the comparison. First, Palin and Huckabee are both strikingly good-looking. Let's call that a wash even though Huckabee has never been profiled in Vogue. (Neither has ever been on the cover, though a convincing photoshopped fake of Palin as a cover girl made the rounds yesterday.) And yeah, I realize appearance shouldn't even be an issue, but as figleaf points out, John McCain saw Dan Quayle's looks as a great source of electoral appeal, so maybe McCain thinks Palin's beauty will draw some votes.

Now, Quayle was so dumb that he squandered any potential sex appeal as soon as he opened his trap. My first impression of Sarah Palin is that she's brighter than Quayle - although I cringed all the way down to my toenails when she said "nucular" in her first big speech yesterday. My guess is that behind the pretty facade, Palin - much like Huckabee - is reasonably smart and very politically savvy. After all, she mounted a bloodless coup within Alaska's political establishment and defeated a sitting Republican governor in the 2006 primary.

Palin was surely more palatable than Huckabee to the Grover Norquist types because she doesn't seem to share his concern for social justice - the quality that I liked best in Huckabee, along with his sideline as a rock musician. Her plan for lifting Alaskans economically seems to be further exploitation of the state's natural resources. Kinda hard to generalize that to the whole country. (On energy policy, she most closely resembles Dick Cheney - minus the evil scowl.)

When it comes to religious extremism, Palin may just top Huckabee. Especially on the grassroots level, the religious right would have been happy with Huckabee as the VP candidate. But Palin put James Dobson over the moon, according to an AP story:

Focus on the Family founder James Dobson, who initially said he could not vote for McCain but has since opened the door to an endorsement, called Palin "an outstanding choice that should be extremely reassuring to the conservative base" of the GOP. Dobson added that the ticket "gives us confidence he will keep his pledges to voters regarding the kinds of justices he would nominate to the Supreme Court."

Now, the AP is also reporting that while Palin's office says she does not identify herself as a Pentecostal, she has attended more than one church affliated with the Assemblies of God. Last I checked, the Assemblies of God were at the very heart of Pentecostalism. Why might Palin play this connection down in favor of saying she attends a nondenominational church? In a very even-handed assessment, Professor John Fea, a historian of religion in America at Messiah College, notes that public figures sympathetic to Pentecostalism tend to fly under the radar with the more radical elements of their faith, lest they alienate even other committed evangelicals. He expects Palin will likely do the same.

And that's where it gets scary. Maybe Palin herself does not believe that the Rapture is imminent. Maybe she doesn't believe in demonic possession or exorcism. Maybe she has never spoken in tongues. Maybe she's as skeptical as I about faith-healing. I realize there's a fair amount of variety within Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, and maybe Palin doesn't buy the whole package.

But given her church-going history, Palin needs to clarify her beliefs. While I generally think faith is a private, personal matter best kept out of the public arena, her beliefs becomes our business if she thinks demons are at work in our lives. Or if she believes the Apocalypse is nigh and that we ought to be hurrying it along. Or if she embraces dominion theology - which basically calls for theocracy - as blogger Dogemperor thinks is possible. (My understanding of Pentecostalism isn't deep enough to evaluate Dogemperor's arguments, but I'm inclined to be convinced because his/her analysis of Feminists for Life is spot on.)

Even if Palin only believes in the warmer, fuzzier elements of Pentecostalism, like faith healing, I'm still, well, skeptical. We've already had one president who was completely divorced from the reality-based community. We sure don't need another. And on the whole, Pentecostalism is more loosely tethered to reality than Huckabee's Southern Baptist church.

When it comes to reproductive rights, Palin is about as reactionary as Huckabee, who said he would sign a bill like the one in South Dakota that would have permitted abortion only to save a woman's life. During her gubernatorial campaign, a staffer said Palin would ban abortion even in cases of rape and incest. However, he also said she'd allow a health exception, which is a loophole that nearly every hardcore anti-abortion activisit wants closed. I have a feeling Palin will be forced to back away from the health exception. Interestingly, she told the press back in 2006 that she favors contraception - which despite being the obvious way to reduce abortions won't sit well with much of the "pro-life" establishment. I'm curious whether she'll stick to her guns.

As I mentioned yesterday, Palin has been lionized by pro-lifers for knowingly giving birth to a baby with Down syndrome. In comments, Heather rightly pointed out that I'd parroted their way of framing her decision (she chose to have the baby "anyway"), which offends many within the disability community. But that is fairly consistently how the pro-lifers view it - as a noble sacrifice:

Palin has been held up by many evangelicals as a model for her decision to give birth to her fifth child in April after learning that he has Down syndrome.

"I think that's a plus in her favor with conservatives," said the Rev. Don Argue, a past president of the National Association of Evangelicals and chancellor of Northwest University in Seattle. ...

[Dobson] called her refusal to abort her fifth child "bravery and integrity in action."

(Source: Yet another AP article.)

Of course, if - like Dobson - you believe there's only one moral response, why single Palin out for unusual bravery?

And why celebrate her "choice"? If McCain and Palin (and Huckabee) have their way, there will be no choice. Period.

Ugh. I think my Huckabee nostalgia has been cured. But I don't feel one bit better.

The Wages of Sex, According to Rod Parsley

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

The Columbus Dispatch reports that Rod Parsley’s world-domination enterprise, aka his “church,” has established an anti-abortion counseling center in Columbus, located conveniently just across from a Planned Parenthood clinic.

Parsley's center looks like a doctor's office, though there is just one medical professional employed there, a registered nurse. Other nurses and doctors will volunteer their services there, [director Debbie] Stacy said. …

It will offer free pregnancy tests and ultrasounds to encourage women to give birth, Stacy said. It also will make referrals for other medical services, but not for abortions.

(Source: Columbus Dispatch)

This is nothing new, of course. Such “crisis pregnancy centers” exist all over the United States. But the Dispatch report offered this one truly telling detail:

Inside, women will find a portable ultrasound machine and pamphlets about sexually transmitted infections, RU-486, sometimes called the "abortion pill," and how to say no to unwanted sex. The reading material all focuses on abstinence. The center does not distribute information about birth control.
(my emphasis)

And this too, is nothing new. It's just one more piece of proof that for doctrinaire opponents of reproductive justice, the point is not saving "unborn lives." It's making sure that if you do indulge in sex, you'll be penalized for it - with a baby.

I'm sure the resulting babies will be thrilled to know that they were their mom's punishment for bonking without a license.

Ordain a Woman, Go Straight to Hell

According to the AP, the Catholic hierarchy is cracking down hard on the groundswell within Catholicism that favors ordaining female priests:

The Vatican is slamming the door on attempts by women to become priests in the Roman Catholic Church. It has strongly reiterated in a decree that anyone involved in ordination ceremonies is automatically excommunicated.

A top Vatican official said in a statement Friday that the church acted following what it called "so-called ordinations" in various parts of the world. ...

The church has always banned the ordination of women, stating that the priesthood is reserved for males. The new decree is explicit in its reference to women.

Not that I thought Pope Ratzinger was going to deliver any surprises in this area - I remember hims well from his hard-line days as a Cardinal - but I didn't expect this re-entrenchment, either.

I'm not a Catholic and never have been, so I don't have a personal stake in this. But it's a matter of justice for Catholic women who don't want to give up their faith, yet also don't want to accept permanent second-class status. Most other Christian churches are much further along in reforming their clergy to include women.

Since the AP report didn't delve into the background, I did a little research to determine what that rather snide reference to "so-called ordinations" might mean. There's an organization called Roman Catholic Womenpriests that's been busy ordaining women as priests, and they're mad as - well, mad as heck - at this latest threat from the Vatican.

We hold up heroic women in the church’s tradition like Hildegard of Bingen, Joan of Arc and St. Theodore Guerin who obeyed God, followed their consciences and withstood hierarchical oppression including interdict, excommunication and death.

In obedience to Jesus, we are disobeying an unjust law. The Catholic Church teaches that a teaching or law of the church is authoritative only if it is “received” by the sensus fidelium, the community of faith. If the community of faith does not accept the law, it has no effect on us. All people have a moral obligation to disobey an unjust law. St. Augustine taught that an unjust law is no law at all. Since 70% of U.S. Catholics favor women’s ordination and a growing majority of Catholics worldwide also favors women’s ordination, we do not "receive" or accept the Church's prohibition against the ordination of women and the church’s continued reliance on sexist metaphors, beliefs and assumptions for denying ordination to women.

Pope Benedict XVI, written when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, in the commentary section of the Doctrine of Vatican II, volume V, page 134, stated: "Over the Pope as the expression of the binding claim of ecclesiastical authority, there still stands one's own conscience, which must be obeyed before all else, if necessary even against the requirement of ecclesiastical authority."
(Source: Womenpriests press release)

So! The Pope would be hoist on his own petard, if he cared about such things. But I'll bet he wasn't thinking about women when he wrote those highfalutin words about the primacy of conscience. Maybe women's consciences aren't quite as pure or reliable as men's?

Other internal critics within the Catholic Church eschew the Womenpriests' civil disobedience tactics but note that eight out of ten Catholic scholars worldwide support the legal ordination of women.

The preponderance of evidence does support the idea that women enjoyed roles as teachers in the early church, particularly if you consider the apocryphal texts. (No, I'm still not a theologian or historian of religion, but I'll fake it for a moment because this material was part of the class on gender, sexuality, and religion than I'm still helping teach for the next week.) The lineage of women leaders is much longer than Joan of Arc; it goes all the way back to the birth of Christianity.

For example, the Acts of Paul and Thecla tells the fantastical story of the virgin Thecla becoming a follower of St. Paul and a teacher in her own right. In the process, she had to survive burning at the stake, an attempted sexual assault, and being bound to a lioness. After the miracles that delivered her from these perils, she lived to age 90.

More significantly, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip both portray Mary Magdalene as first among the disciples. If she, too, was an early teacher of the gospel, then she was one anointed by Jesus himself.

Peter said to Mary, Sister we know that the Savior loved you more than the rest of woman.
Tell us the words of the Savior which you remember which you know, but we do not, nor have we heard them.
Mary answered and said, What is hidden from you I will proclaim to you.
(Gospel of Mary 5:5-7)

Of course, many orthodox Catholics will object that these are gnostic texts and thus heretical. This only begs the question of why they were deemed heretical in the first place. Might it be because the Church Fathers wanted to eliminate all evidence of the power that the Church Mothers had yielded? (If you're interested in smart, nuanced scholarship that illuminates this history, check out Elaine Pagels' The Gnostic Gospels.)

Definitely heretical: the cult of the Ceiling Cat.

Evangelicat from I Can Has Cheezburger?

Demonic Logic

Demonic kitteh from I Can Has Cheezburger?

So with my Bear home sick with a bellyache, and with a heap of work looming over me, I did what any good slacker parent would do and hauled out my old iBook, thinking he could spend some time playing games while I chipped away at my translating job. Only I hadn't fired up my old computer since I replaced it with the new one a couple weeks ago, and apparently it took umbrage, because even though I plugged it in, it wouldn't start. First it did nothing at all. Then it made some promising clickety clickety noises, followed by a most alarming tooooooot!

Yes, my computer tooted at me. Like a machine possessed.

It did this three more times, with me getting more perplexed and the Bear growing more disappointed. Finally, in a lame attempt at cheering him up, I said, "That sounds about like an A or a B-flat" and went over to the piano to plunk out the notes. Sure enough, it was a quarter tone right between the two pitches.

At which point, my old iBook fired the fuck up.

The Bear dissolved into giggles. And because I've been reading and thinking too much about charismatic forms of religion lately, I thought: oooh! cool supernatural stuff!

Well, I didn't really. But according to the truly spooky findings of a survey conducted in 2005, an impressive majority of my fellow Americans might not rule out my computer being possessed. The Baylor Religion Survey asked if demons exist. A full 43.6% of respondents answered "absolutely yes" and another 22.6% said "probably." Only 12.4% said "absolutely not."

The breakdown of the data is fascinating and disturbing, too. Women and younger people were more credulous than men and older people. Those who never attended church were (probably obviously) far more skeptical than regular attendees, as were those with higher household incomes and more education. But shockingly, 31% of respondents with graduate degrees said they "absolutely" believed in demons. (Maybe they're looking for someone to blame for how long they/we spent writing our theses?)

Perhaps the most interesting difference runs along political lines. Based on the 2004 presidential election, 56.6% of Bush voters but just 27.6% of Kerry's responded "absolutely yes," demons do exist. Leaving aside the still disturbingly high number of Kerry voters (maybe they were thinking of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?), this result shines a bright light on how the all-too-this-worldly demons work their black magic.

If well over half of Bush's supporters definitely believe in demons, then how can we be surprised that at one point, 70% of all Americans also believed that Saddam and Al-Quaeda were in cahoots? Why should we flinch when evangelical leaders blame Katrina on feminists and gays? Why should we expect any sort of rationality in our public life if most America believe the world is overrun by dark, supernatural forces?

As The Political Cat reasoned a few days ago:

As we remarked over lunch today, if there is a god, it is a very stupid one indeed, and guilty of bad aim. It could have taken out the entire military junta of Burma in one fell swoop. Instead, it landed a cyclone on the heads of the weak, the bereft, the poor, the already suffering.

Yeah. There's no way that a god can be both merciful and omnipotent at the same time. Still, I don't think religious people are all deluded, nor do I believe religion is always a force for evil, even though it's too often used that way. The world's religions offer wisdom for those who seek it and are willing to use reason to reject the prejudices that humans have injected into every religion.

But the sort of credulous belief that sees supernatural forces playing games with the universe? That's just not compatible with democracy. Or with compassion.

As for my iBook? It's humming along to the annoying, but healthy, sounds of innocuous online games. Apparently that spooky toot was just its complaint that the battery had run down low enough to reset its internal clock, and it needed to recharge before it could reboot.