Please pardon the interruption.
Service will resume momentarily.

Oct 24, 2003

And incidentally...looks like somebody doesn't like Mel Gibson's new movie, God forbid. I mean... yeah.
Nick ::: 3:01 PM ::: 0 comments

I went to the ATM today and it gave me Monopoly Money! What the fuck is going on?
Nick ::: 2:58 PM ::: 0 comments

Oct 22, 2003

I have a serious case of comment-envy. The largest number of comments on any post on this page is four. Four!

We've had two days straight of the R&B opinions page being a gay rights forum. It's really interesting and I'm dying to send something in, because I have a very interesting and (as far as I know) unique counter to the "homos are sinners" argument, but I know that it won't get printed.

Actually, this is a blog, isn't it?

After grilling a few Christians on the issue I've only been able to discover two passages which are used as evidence: one in Leviticus and one in Romans.

The R&B writers pretty much covered the Leviticus passage, which explicitly states that homosexuality is a sin, right after specifying how many goats to slaughter at church services and right before specifying how long a woman on her period is "unlcean" and cannot be touched. Not such an uphill battle to beat that.

The Romans passage hasn't really been responded to, because the pro-gay faction has intelligently swerved the conversation back to legalization. Simply put, fundie christians have no more right to tell gays who to marry than fundie muslims have to tell christian women what to wear, in the context of secular law. "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's" -- in this case the government's right to legally recognize whatever it wants to.

But the Romans argument is still a bit of a problem for Christians who want to be sympathetic but are afraid of offending the guy upstairs, so I think it's worth bringing up. I actually went and read the passage when I first heard about it, and it's funny, because obviously no fundie christian expected anyone to do that.

This passage explicitly states that God made people gay. The basic idea is that the Romans "knew" god but didn't love him enough, so in a bit of a tiff he issued the reversal of that whole "be fruitful and multiply" thing. Admittedly, the passage still isn't very nice, accusing gays of being bad christians and making homosexuality into a punishment, but in all honesty, there are a lot of obvious disadvantages to that lifestyle anyway.

And then there's the added fact that good ol' Saint Paul wrote Romans. Don't get me started on Saint Paul. I don't like Saint Paul or his books for a number of very good reasons. Chiefly that the man was a bit of an asshat.

But like I said, don't get me started.
Nick ::: 2:57 PM ::: 0 comments

Oct 20, 2003

I wrote this really great entry between classes today. I was working on the last paragraph when the bloody power went out. Stupid power outage. I may try to recreate it, and then I may not. You never know.
Nick ::: 8:16 PM ::: 0 comments