Before I write my own thoughts and opinions on the subjects of women, romance, marriage, dating, cultural norms, and any other topic: allow me to remind you that they are just that: my thoughts and opinions. I’m no expert in these matters, by any standard. There are plenty of women who found Marry Him wrong-minded and shrill, others who found it thought-provoking. Please keep in mind that they are out there, and that their opinions are to be remembered in all of this. In keeping with the internet ethic of “cover what you do best and link to the rest,” I’m going to write what I write best (views from a man whose faith and politics left him) and link to the rest (namely the writings of 1) women, 2) single women, and 3) married women).

Also: background on the book: Lori Gottlieb is a Stanford Medical School alum that made her name in writing confessional books of differing sorts. She’s been on all kinds of shows, from CNN to NPR to writing for the The Atlantic Monthly, and she’s a single mother through a sperm donor. In March 2008 Gottlieb wrote an essay for The Atlantic titled “Marry Him!” which prompted all kinds of letters, a book deal, and an option for a movie off the book. The essay talked about the problems she’s facing as a single mother and that:

A number of my single women friends admit (in hushed voices and after I swear I won’t use their real names here) that they’d readily settle now but wouldn’t have 10 years ago. They believe that part of the problem is that we grew up idealizing marriage—and that if we’d had a more realistic understanding of its cold, hard benefits, we might have done things differently.

The first element that I’d like to point out is the contradiction of Marry Him. The percentage of business that is the job of Provoking Unhappiness is debatable, it’s existence is not- one way to encourage sales is to present the greener grass, to make What You Already Own seem worse than What You Could Buy. Few industries are more defined by this than books and movies on romance, and particularly in the women’s market. Now an entire other post can be dedicated to discussing why this is: be it the rampant sexism that still pervades corporate leadership and marketing, be it the male-centric Western civilization norms that plague our society, be it the stubbornheaded pinko feminist college professors vainly trying to rewrite women’s genetic codes, I don’t care. What I find interesting is that Ms. Gottlieb, after surveying the field of self-help and advice books and finds most of them wanting, decides to…write a self-help and advice book. Considering that part of her critique is the idea that many women are misled into thinking that there’s “someone better out there” by a cottage industry, it is remarkable that Ms. Gottlieb seems to think her own contribution to said industry will help rather than hurt.

Secondly, while I find it amazing that the idea that There Isn’t Anyone Close To Your Ideal Person is so novel and revolutionary to the modern woman as to warrant a full book, I find it even more amazing that the writing of said book has created such squabbling. It’s a hoary tactic to “turn the tables”, but whatever small amount light might be shed from it should be worth it. If a man were to come out with a book suggesting the exact same “settle for Ms. Good-Enough” idea, there would be a limited few reactions:

• The majority of men would probably say something along the lines of “No s***, Sherlock.” There would be few men who’d suggest otherwise. There’s a reason why traditional manners dictates you say “congratulations” to the groom and “best wishes” to the bride: dudes gotta lock down what they can and be happy about it. I’m sure there’s all kinds of evolutionary/sociological reasons for this, I have neither the expertise or energy to discuss them.
• For all those who disagree with the above bullet, what would most likely be said is: “Not for me, man- maybe for you.” To each their own.

I think this second bullet is the more serious point. When it comes to the gender writ-large, there is no reason or urge for me and my friends to defend all men. One of my friends never gets married? As long as he’s happy with it, okay. Another gets married at 22? I wouldn’t do it, but hey, it’s his choice. I think this is partly why there are so few books and even fewer successful books targeted towards advice for men in relationships: there’s no consensus about what makes men happy. Perhaps it is because we don’t have a badly-placed arrogance to presume to speak for all men like we do for women. I don’t know. All I know is that the mere presence of this book speaks quite loudly to the chasm we see between women and men in relation to books, problems, and love.

Thirdly, his video was put out in promotion with the book:

The first time I watched this, I actually started laughing out loud as the litany of qualities grew. I thought it was a joke. Now, surely there’s some editing taking place here on the part of the publisher, but the point remains that if you were to ask men the same thing there wouldn’t be nearly this long a list. Really. I can ask my friends what they want in a spouse, and my guess is that there’d be about 3-5 qualities that were listed, and that men would be negotiable on about near all of them*.

I would never dream of saying that she “has to cook”, and I love to eat. It’s a big deal to me to eat good food, but you know what? It’s much more important to me that she doesn’t undercut me at every turn, that she’s in my corner when I need someone, than that she makes a kick-ass chili.

Okay, I’m rambling at this point, so I’ll just link to lines I’ve liked from around the web, throw a comment in if I’ve got one.

From one of several Jezebel pieces:

It’s sort of refreshing how honest she is, even though hers are thoughts any 28-year-old has already probably had in advance. But then you hit a sentiment like this:

“After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of “not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?”And think, wait a minute, something’s not right with his lady.

Agree to the disapproval of the idea that “marital value” can be specifically quantified as to determine peaks, but I’m more wanting to hit on the “any 28-year-old” line. I saw it a couple places, this idea that guys would be offended or wounded to know that a girl settled for them so women need to keep it to themselves. Allow me to speak for the vast majority of us, ladies: the idea of settling itself is a neutral thing. I don’t care if I knew that she thought me sub-par in significant ways, if Christina Hendricks stood in my corner and chose to hang with me, I take her everyday and 10 times on the weekend. This instinct doesn’t come from a pathetic place, either: pathetic would be staying as she’s cheating on me, not providing me with the necessary emotional support, or generally being bitchy. So please don’t think that you can never tell a guy that you’ve settled for him. He’ll probably surprise you in his response. Hell, I settle for myself most nearly every day, so I think I’d be weirded out if someone wasn’t settling for me.

Another Jezebel piece:

“Checklist” is the new “picky” — a word that gets thrown around to explain why it’s women’s fault that they’re single. Anna Kendrick’s character in Up in the Air had a checklist, and though it did seem to fit in with her arc as a naive young woman who learns that not everything in life can be done efficiently, it didn’t feel terribly realistic. Does anyone actually have a checklist? Or perhaps the more relevant question is: are there really a large number of women out there who want partners but can’t find them because of a rigid list of relatively shallow traits? I don’t know any of them.

I included this because I want to remind every one: this post is by no means conclusive. I’m a man, these are just my angles on the situation. I think the author, Anna N., is fair in raising this point. While the strength of Ms. Gottlieb’s language and the strength of her book’s conceit might have been pushed a little far by editors and a need-to-shock instinct on Gottlieb’s part, I think the above video and my own personal experience say that many women do have far more rigid lists than many men. Men’s standards are like the way Mr. Magoo sees the world: vague blobs and blurry shapes.

Another elephant in the room is this: for many men, the urge for sexual activity is so strong and prevalent that men are oftentimes more willing to fudge it on other levels to satisfy the first desire. So, in other words, when 15 of your top 20 qualities are going to be “willing to have sex” or related terms, your prospects only have to clear 5 hurdles as opposed to 20.

The point remains, however, that there is a good place for dissenting with Gottlieb on the fact that she presents too black-and-white a world.

More Jezebel:

If “settling” means finding a little maturity, dating guys because they are interesting people and treat you with respect and with whom you have things in common instead of dating guys because your mom hates them or they are taller than you, that’s a good start. If you define it as “settling” because he is 5’6″ rather than 5’9″, then you’re the one with the problem.

While I think that this is also right, I think it’s interesting that Jezebel, which is definitely for a more educated and cosmopolitan woman, still suggests that height plays a role for some women of that class. While allowing that my group of guys might be a unique and far-too-progressive group of wimpsters, I think that none or just one of them might be shallow enough to put a height standard out there. I have one friend who dates a woman taller than him (college volleyball player who is stunningly beautiful) and one that dates a girl 14 inches shorter (also a wonderfully funny and charming goofball of a gem of a girlfriend). For my group, having such a specific physical quality be so decisive seems…tawdry, gauche. Interesting to think that either my own group is rare for men of their mid-20s, or that similar groups of women don’t have the same unspoken rules.

All in all, I obviously know too little to say whether or not Gottlieb speaks for enough women. My gut is that Gottlieb was immaturely picky and had the platform to write of her discontent, rather than that she is a common tale. In any case, it led to interesting reading on my part this weekend, and I’m now perhaps a little more aware of the concerns and insecurities of some among the Fairer Sex.

—

*My best guess? Some basic, and I mean basic, physical attribute. I know guys who claim to be “breast men” and would willingly take Kate Winslet, Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Hudson, or Amy Adams. If you can see the commonalities between those women in that department, you are much more discerning than myself. Also: some personality meshing: does she laugh at my jokes, even if she knows they’re stupid? Is she too bossy or demanding of me? Finally, does her lifestyle match up with mine in basic ways. If I can’t fall asleep before 1:30 a.m. and am a neat freak, it’s going to be hard to have a girl who falls asleep at 8:45 pm in her unmade bed with a pile of dirty laundry next to it. I can’t think of any other thing. Seriously, a guys “dealbreaker” list is comically short, generally speaking.

-North Dakotans most satisfied, Nevadans least satisfied with quality of life.

-A senior editor at SB Nation goes to his first mixed martial arts event, and falls in love with it. For those who don’t know, I’m obsessed with the sport.

-Adam Serwer muses over a hip-hop anthology and the question of the form as high art.

-”Over the past half century, technological evolution has made it progressively harder to get big things done in this country, and now it’s just about impossible.” Interesting read from Robert Wright.

-A really dense critique of Citizens United. Not sure if I agree, not sure if I disagree, but it was a great brain workout.

-Blockbuster would still be around with section titles like these. Fightin’ and Boobies indeed.

So sorry for the silence, I’ve been getting acquainted with my new job/internship (don’t know if I can say where, so I won’t), which is taking up a chunk of my day.

If you follow the gist of this blog you can probably guess what dragged me back into the opinion-spouting: the Tea Party convention.

Allow me to start with a qualifier? Okay: the very existence of the Tea Party groups and their shenanigans doesn’t raise my ire, the incredibly crappy analysis of the Tea Party groups by those on the Left does. I’ve long accepted the existence of People Who Disagree With Me, and there are very few opinions out there that I find upsetting. So while I disagree with probably 80% of what the Tea Partiers stand for (and, let’s remember that their very positions are indeterminable at best), the reporting and analysis is so crapulescent that I feel the need to sympathize with the groups. All that to say this: what I’m going to write will, at times, sound pro-Tea Party, but please don’t think I’m one of them. It’s just that one of the rules of this here blog is: “If You’re Going To Criticize, Know Your Stuff And Do It Right.”

Okay.

Michelle Goldberg has a piece out on the conventions that ponders whether the Tea Partiers are joining with the Religious Right. In it:

Speakers joining Palin include Rick Scarborough, Roy Moore, and Joseph Farah, men who are radical even by religious-right standards. Their presence shows that the tea-party movement is no longer merely populist, libertarian, or anti-government, if it ever was. It is theocratic. Indeed, after several months in which the religious right seemed lost and dispirited, it has found a way to ride the tea-party express into renewed relevance.

So. Close. Goldberg seemingly thinks that the mere presence of a person is the same as that person being relevant. This was a fundraising event- in many ways, this convention was a like a multi-day concert, starting with small acts and then bringing in the headliner to close. And as any person who has been to a multi-day concert can tell you, there’s inevitably some crappy bands on the stage at some point in time. I’m sure the organizers were hard up for filling all the slots and accepted any self-promoting doofus who spouted the right words. Now I’m not saying that these “theocrats” are irrelevant, I’m simply asking for more proof that mere presence before I give them the leadership reputations they so desperately want.

Over at Crooks and Liars, John Perr writes:

As a quick glance at the video tape makes clear, the supposed Tea Party movement is simply a continuation of the right-wing’s failed 2008 presidential campaign by other means. (Senator Jim Demint (R-SC) spoke for Sarah Palin, John Cornyn, Michele Bachmann and countless others when he insisted, “We need to stop looking at the tea parties as separate from the Republican party.”) But as the sessions by Pastor Rick Scarborough and Judge Roy Moore at today’s National Tea Party Convention show, the assembled Birthers, Birchers, Deathers and Deniers have seamlessly embraced the extremist religious right agenda. They are Tea Bagging for Jesus and they are in your face about it.

Now, if Mr. Perr’s hope is to pump his page views up by using shallow and caddy analysis, he’s welcome to do so. This is America: we all gotta make a buck somehow. If his hope is to expose a right-wing group conspiring to turn America into 1930′s Alabama…he’s missed the mark. And if he is hoping to advance America to more enlightened policies through fact-finding and thorough analysis, he’s a disastrously bad writer and thinker. I’m saying:

1. If I have to hear “tea bagging” one more time, I’m liable to calmly push myself away from the computer, walk outside to my car, grab the tire iron from my car’s maintenance kit, and beat the brains out of the first adorable baby chick I can find. Liberals: you’ve been warned. The name calling has got to stop.

2. What 2008 presidential campaign did Mr. Perr see? If I recall, McCain voted to bail out the banks, a key gripe of the Tea Partiers. The Left does itself no favors by putting out this kind of incorrect crap. Try and actually learn the other side’s arguments, then tear them apart. By doing the mock-but-don’t-understand song and dance, those who oppose the Tea Party movement preach to the choir and do little damage to the movement they claim to oppose.

3. This is a complaint for both sides, but Mr. Perr’s the closest one at hand: stop calling things “extremist” unless they are held by less than 10% of the population. Pundits of both the Left and Right have used up all the “extremist” label currency there is out there. The evangelical church is learning this the hard way: for years they labeled non-evangelicals as radical secularists, and when the kids grew up and moved out (see: me) they saw that those who disagreed with them weren’t fire-breathing Marxists who read the Jim Eliot story for comic relief. Plenty of people in this country support the Tea Party platform, thereby negating the label “extremist.” It’s our job as non-Tea Partiers to convince others why the movement is wrong. Mr. Perr’s not helping in the least.

Here’s some reality: while it is tempting to make the argument “Prayer + Gay-Bashing + American Flags = Theocracy QED hurrhurrhurr”, it is utterly useless to do so. If an argument is a defense of positions used to persuade or convince, that little formulation is an anti-argument. Furthermore, while it might seem like a time-saver to just label the entire movement as Birthers or racist or Christianists, that maneuver also serves no purpose in the political arena. The second someone does that they’ve immediately stamped themselves with the label of “Don’t Care Enough To Learn The Details Before Criticizing”. Case in point: the closest to fair-minded reporting I’ve found is this piece from TPM which at least acknowledged that there’s a chunk of Tea Partiers who were calling for a boycott because of the presence of some Birthers. And the TPM piece is probably only about 65% fair.

Any reader who isn’t all-in-for-liberalism will look at the writing about the Tea Parties and Sarah Palin and wonder if the liberal press is shoddy enough in its coverage and analysis of these events, are they any better on anything else? Know your enemy, people.

In what has to be one of the most awful cases of co-opting someone else’s thoughts to make yourself look smart, I’ll liberally (heh) blurb Glenn Greenwald here:

All of this underscores both (a) the total incoherence of the ”tea party movement” and (b) how it is, at bottom, nothing more than a cynical marketing attempt to re-brand the right wing of the Republican Party under the exact same policies and principles which defined it for the last couple of decades.  As I’ve noted before, there are many individual participants in this “tea party movement” with valid populist grievances against the sleaze and corruption of both parties in Washington, but it’s all being directed towards a pedestrian goal that has nothing to do with any of those sentiments:  namely, the re-empowerment of the Republican Party in completely unchanged form.  Palin last night righteously condemned the Wall Street bailout even though she (like Glenn Beck) supported that bailout.  She wears the banner of “freedom” and “individual liberty” even as she mocks the notion that our laws and Constitution — the instruments by which we restrain government power — ought to limit what the President can do in the name of national security; cheers for the omnipotent Surveillance State; and demands that her religious beliefs form the basis of government intervention in people’s lives.  She rails against government debt while supporting the policies largely responsible for its explosion:  namely, limitless increases in military spending and endlessly expanded wars and imperial policies (primarily in the Middle East and oh-so-coincidentally aimed at Muslims).

Please read the whole thing.

A-men. The only place of disagreement I have with GG is the idea that this is somehow a near-100% top down re-branding. I think there’s a significant number of people in the Tea Parties who are truly pissed off at the GOP. I think the GOP and Leaders of the Right would love nothing more than to rebrand themselves to become more popular, I just don’t think that some of the Tea-Partiers are willing to give them the satisfaction.

I’ve written about the ineffective incoherency of the Tea Party movement before. I had a close friend of mine (who’s a die-hard Tea Partier) read it and he admitted that the criticism had some validity. He disagreed with my conclusion at large, but he said that it was some of the first criticism he’d read/heard that was actually familiar with the Tea Partiers. If I, a somewhat-interested doofus, can do that, I think it’s fair to demand from our intellectuals the same level of familiarity.

I don’t believe I’ve talked about him here, but if you want good reporting on the Right, the stuff that comes out pretty straightforward and just-the-facts-y, you can’t do any better than Dave Weigel at The Washington Independent. His report on the convention is superb. And what it reveals is this: this weekend was a ragtag get-together thrown by a guy named Judson(!) for a bunch of wealthier middle-aged men and women who’ve regained (or discovered for the first time) the heady feeling that comes with convincing yourself you are at the vanguard of a massive social revolution. That’s it and that’s all, folks.

—–

- If you didn’t see it, here’s Prez O rumblin with the Republicans. Even if you don’t like politics, you should watch. It’s the most remarkably forthright discussion of politics I can remember seeing. Granted, that means about 65% real talk, but let’s take what we can get, hmm?

- The Rapid Evolution Of Text, Out Less Literate Future. Will there be beautiful writing in the future? I’m more sanguine than the writer, but still good stuff.

- Media Theory Nerdery: great summary of the New Conventional Wisdom for the future of journalism in futurist circles.

- Jozen speaks out in defense of smiley faces, loofahs, and singing along with Whitney Houston and still being considered a man. As a man who sings along to Beyonce and the odd Sarah Vaughan track: co-signed.

- The facade of College Town Liberalism crumbles slightly, as a New Haven, CT bookstore allows Hispanic staff to speak Spanish only out of the earshot of customers.

- Rod Dreher on the pains of conversion.

- Australian paramedics ask for bans on pool cues and glasswear in pubs for public safety. Australian drunk = awesome drunk.

—–

I’m going to get my thoughts out real quick, then get out of the way. First off, this is from George Orwell’s Reflections on Gandhi, which now might be my favorite thing he’s ever written. Just an amazing piece with lines that make you laugh and lines that make you cry and lines that make you think.

Secondly, having made a weirdish transition to a “post-Christian”, vegetarian, sorta HinduTaoistBuddhist approach to life (I know, I know, very Boulder of me)…this piece is devastating to several presuppositions. I’m keeping my thoughts short because stumbling upon this earlier today has led to serious contemplation. I’m going to (after the jump) excerpt the killing-est, devastating-est blurb from the essay, but the whole thing is worth reading.

Suffice it to say, there was a bit of idealism in my new theology, some form of an aspiring saint, but this part just slammed me in the stomach. It’s one of those paragraphs where I could italicize or bold any and each sentence for emphasis.

Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true.  Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi—with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction—always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he  would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth.

This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which—I think—most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that  “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

—–

“Sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid” was powerful enough to put me in a contemplative funk for about a week.

In a time of unprecedented abundance and freedom that’s largely the product of the modern, technological approach to the world, we do find it harder than ever to know who we are. And so we find it harder than ever to know what to do. But we’re still stuck with answering those questions to live well—or nobly and happily—with what we’ve been given. There’s little that’s more hellish than my being stuck with the perception of “pure possibility,” the perception that every door is open to me with no guidance at all concerning which one to choose. That’s the lesson, for example, of the novels of our physician-philosopher WALKER PERCY, not to mention the philosophic film GROUNDHOG DAY. The pure democracy imagined by Socrates or communism as imagined by Marx or the realm of techno-freedom imagined by our libertarians (all of which amount to the same thing) are all descriptions of the hell we have mistaken for heaven when we misunderstand who we are.

…

We, in our pride, don’t want the zoned-out contentment we imagine cows have. We want to remain alienated enough to appreciate Johnny Cash, without going through the hell of being Johnny Cash. We want to be artistic and sensitive as we can be while being, unlike John, cheerful and productive members of our high-tech society. And anyway, if our moods got too good, we would stop obsessing enough to fend off the real threats to our very being—like terrorists, asteroids, and such. The search for the perfect mood inevitably leads us to realize that the good stuff (like love and pride) depends on the hard or bad stuff (like worthwhile work and death), and once we achieved that sort of wisdom, it seems to us, we wouldn’t want our moods chemically altered after all.

“The hell we’ve mistaken for heaven when we misunderstand who we are.” Zoinks, that’s powerful. Not really sure if I agree or disagree with all of it, but the post is definitely one of the most thought-provoking and just-plain-ol-good things I’ve read on the internet in quite a while.

The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

The interviewer is Marilyn Sewell, a Unitarian Universalist. The interviewee? Christopher Hitchens, famous polemicist and atheist.

I think there’s a lot of people who, when hearing that I no longer identify as an evangelical Christian, presume I’m either an atheist or have found another religion (Catholicism, Orthodox, Islam, Zoroastrianism, whatever). Hardly.

To be honest, I don’t know what I am. I do know that the tradition I have the most experience with is evangelicalism, and that history will forever color my views. I do know that I’ve found evangelicalism hollow, and, I cannot stress this enough, the disappointment is not for lack of trying. I have bona fides like few people I know. Whether you want Vacation Bible School stories, Christian Rock concert stories, or Veggie Tales stories (to my eternal shame, I still own a Bob The Tomato doll that dances and sings when you squeeze the stem): I got loads of ‘em. But I went through all that to end up in my mid-twenties feeling utterly bereft of comfort or love from that life. I still have deep affection for those of my friends and family who are still satisfied by their walks of faith, but I have lost all personal fulfillment from it.

I go to all of those lengths to say: Hitchens is absolutely correct in his comment. While I no longer subscribe to that faith, I can still intellectually recognize that there are rules to Christianity, and that those hyper-liberal types like Unitarians are idiots. Rather than grapple with the messy facts of a religious code and how they meet our real-world experiences, Unitarians want to have a nice, neat, conflict-free bundle that they can buy to rid themselves of cognitive garble.

I’m no longer an evangelical, but that does not mean I’m no longer searching. It does not mean that I’m no longer wrestling with what I feel is truth. Liberal (and I mean that in a theological sense) Christians, rather than admitting what I just wrote, instead choose to spout irrational twaddle and crow that they’ve solved the puzzle.

Sure, it’s funny, and sure, it’s pretty cool that I get to hear “prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective” in a rap song, but guys: you’re killing my nerd cred. The amount of self-satisfaction I get from being the only guy in the room that likes monetary theory can’t be understated.

“I want to show you from their website. I’ve taken the time to research what homosexuals do in the privacy of their bedroom. It is inhuman, it is animalistic, and it cannot be right. I want to show you these pictures.

I want to say homosexuals eat each other’s poop. Homosexuals stick their hands into their rectum. Homosexuals stick all sorts of deviant sexual things into their rectum. I want to show you this is from their website. So the first picture that I want to show you, you can see this man has just eaten the other person’s poo poo and is rubbing it on his mouth, and I’m going to ask that we print for each of you a photocopy of this story so you get it fully.

Then, of course, they are grabbing each other’s gentials (sic), that is level number one, touching each other, grabbing each other. Then number three, now they are licking each other’s anus and are licking poop. And they call poo poo, chocolate. You see it is a change of words. I want you to see, Sheikh please forgive me but I want these people to see, they say a picture is worth one thousand words. This is a man eating the other person’s poo poo, can you see that one? Please from BBC, I want you to tell them, we know what they do.”

(H/T: Towleroad)

First of all, rarely have I read comments that so clearly demonstrate a man’s ignorance and the power of myth. That Ssempa is treated with respect, that his opinions are given any creedence, is a testament to the ignorance of many Ugandan people (please note that I’m not blaming them for their ignorance, just stating that they are ignorant of the true nature of homosexuality). He went to “their website”?! Maybe he can tell me their email address so I can know how to get in touch with the gays. And he then sees some evil plot in calling “poo poo” “chocolate”? My head is spinning.

But it is all too true that there are millions of people around the world who believe these kinds of kind of stories. It wouldn’t surprise me if Ssempa actually believed that all gay people like to eat solid waste. And the fact that this preposterous myth is used as motivation for violence and discrimination is deeply, deeply, saddening.

What is inexcusable, however, is when people who know better (coughcough Rick Warren cough) are reluctant to rebuke or correct these myths. It is, in fact, deeply patronizing of Western Christian intellectuals to allow this kind of crap to flourish in 3rd world churches. If an American made these comments, he or she would (rightfully) get the Fred Phelps treatment of Robust Condemnation. But if it happens to be said by A Bedraggled Dark Person Who Lives In A Land Without Clean Water, silence reigns.

For the second time today, and in the interest of me doing my small part to help destroy some myths, allow me to quote a Barna Group study. And, may I be clear: this isn’t just for Ugandan Christians. Americans, you too need to pay attention.

After researching and polling the opinions of both homosexual and heterosexual Christians, The Barna Group found that:

“Out of the 20 faith-oriented attributes examined in the Barna study, there were just a few in which there were no significant differences between the heterosexual and homosexual populations. The areas of similarity included the facts that a small minority of people in both groups believe that Satan is real; equivalent percentages of these groups feel they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs with others who believe differently; similar numbers of people from each group contend that good people can earn their way into Heaven through their goodness; and rates of participation in house churches is about the same for both groups.

“People who portray gay adults as godless, hedonistic, Christian bashers are not working with the facts,” declared the best-selling author of numerous books about faith and culture. “A substantial majority of gays cite their faith as a central facet of their life, consider themselves to be Christian, and claim to have some type of meaningful personal commitment to Jesus Christ active in their life today.

“It is interesting to see that most homosexuals, who have some history within the Christian Church, have rejected orthodox biblical teachings and principles – but, in many cases, to nearly the same degree that the heterosexual Christian population has rejected those same teachings and principles. Although there are clearly some substantial differences in the religious beliefs and practices of the straight and gay populations, there may be less of a spiritual gap between straights and gays than many Americans would assume.”

(added emphasis)

I know it’s tempting to continue to choose narrative over facts, and I know it’s difficult to change your worldview when presented with new facts, but when people’s rights and lives are on the line, I hope you have the courage to do what’s right: admit your wrong and start educating the people around you.

Part of the reason why I enjoy them is because I’m a statistics nerd. I love raw, real, data. In contrast to the hypothesizing and postulating-from-30,000-feet that most people call “discourse”, a well-gathered statistic is near irrefutable.

So while so much of the evangelical leadership is searching for “relevancy” or some other b.s. church management theory, Barna Group is over in the corner, crunching numbers. And those numbers are terrifying to those who are concerned with the future of the American church. Peruse the polls I’ve linked to. Not one of them is encouraging to the future of a healthy evangelical church in the United States. And what is the reason for this decline? Why are Mosaics (people between the ages of roughly 16 and 29) so negative about evangelicals (only 3% of them have positive views)? Allow me to blurb from one of the Barna Group reports:

The study explored twenty specific images related to Christianity, including ten favorable and ten unfavorable perceptions. Among young non-Christians, nine out of the top 12 perceptions were negative. Common negative perceptions include that present-day Christianity is judgmental (87%), hypocritical (85%), old-fashioned (78%), and too involved in politics (75%) – representing large proportions of young outsiders who attach these negative labels to Christians.

…

Interestingly, the study discovered a new image that has steadily grown in prominence over the last decade. Today, the most common perception is that present-day Christianity is “anti-homosexual.” Overall, 91% of young non-Christians and 80% of young churchgoers say this phrase describes Christianity. As the research probed this perception, non-Christians and Christians explained that beyond their recognition that Christians oppose homosexuality, they believe that Christians show excessive contempt and unloving attitudes towards gays and lesbians. One of the most frequent criticisms of young Christians was that they believe the church has made homosexuality a “bigger sin” than anything else. Moreover, they claim that the church has not helped them apply the biblical teaching on homosexuality to their friendships with gays and lesbians.

(all emphasis added is mine)

I can’t tell you how refreshing it is to read this. After a decade of youth pastors with soul patches and tattoos, worship bands with DJs and guitar solos, Christian “alternatives” to pop culture, and every other pathetic attempt to re-decorate a moribund movement, someone finally gets it right: young people don’t like you, Evangelical Church, because you’ve been a whiny, selectively compassionate, un-Christ-like group that has tolerated un-Christ-like jerks in your leadership for far too long.