is nothing sacred?
‘Body Of Christ’ Snatched From Church, Held Hostage By UCF Student
I smiled. I just love The Onion. Then I realized this was an actual news headline about an actual event. On Earth.
I hadn’t planned on writing about this. I’m trying to maintain a semblance of focus in this blog. But then the student’s father began defending his son in comment threads on Catholic blogs, and I had my parenting angle. Which I’ll get to. First, though, for the three of you who don’t know what I’m on about — the story that ran below that headline:
Church officials say UCF Student Senator Webster Cook was disruptive and disrespectful when he attended Mass held on campus Sunday June 29. It was during that Mass where Cook admits he obtained the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is a small bread wafer blessed by a priest. According to Catholics, the wafer becomes the Body of Christ once blessed and is to be consumed immediately after a minister passes it out to churchgoers.
Cook claims he planned to consume it, but first wanted to show it to a fellow student senator he brought to Mass who was curious about the Catholic faith.
“When I received the Eucharist, my intention was to bring it back to my seat to show him,” Cook said. “I took about three steps from the woman distributing the Eucharist and someone grabbed the inside of my elbow and blocked the path in front of me. At that point I put it in my mouth so they’d leave me alone and I went back to my seat and I removed it from my mouth.”
A church leader was watching, confronted Cook and tried to recover the sacred bread. Cook said she crossed the line and that’s why he brought it home with him.
“She came up behind me, grabbed my wrist with her right hand, with her left hand grabbed my fingers and was trying to pry them open to get the Eucharist out of my hand,” Cook said, adding she wouldn’t immediately take her hands off him despite several requests.
Cook is upset more than $40,000 in student fees have been allocated to support religious organizations on campus for the 2008-2009 school year, according to student government records. He denied he is holding the Eucharist hostage to protest that support.
Regardless of the reason, the Diocese says its main concern is to get the Eucharist back so it can be taken care of properly and with respect. Cook has been keeping the Eucharist stored in a plastic bag since last Sunday.
“It is hurtful,” said Father Migeul [sic] Gonzalez with the Diocese. “Imagine if they kidnapped somebody and you make a plea for that individual to please return that loved one to the family.”
The Diocese is dispatching a nun to UCF’s campus to oversee the next mass, protect the Eucharist and in hopes Cook will return it.
You will no doubt be shocked to learn that the student has received several death threats. As a result of that exalted terrorism, he has now returned the Divine Saltine.
Despite the fact that almost everyone in the story is acting like a baboon, this is not just a toss-off piece of silliness to me. It taps fascinating issues around the intersection of sacredness, tradition, tolerance, the media, force, academia, healthy snacking, and free expression. Most such stories are merely about baboons, but this one I simply can’t get out of my head.
Question #1: Why does the David Mills video I’ve denounced strike me instantly as a profoundly stupid gesture, while this strikes me just as instantly as an interesting and thought-provoking transgression?
The reason, I think, is that the act of crossing the church threshold with that wafer (whether he intended this or not) is a kind of Gandhian gesture. Doing something so seemingly innocuous and eliciting an explosive, violent, even homicidal response is precisely the way Gandhi drew attention to cruel policies and actions of the British Raj, the way black patrons in the deep South asserted their right to sit on a bar stool, while whites (enforcing a kind of sacred tradition) went ballistic.
No, the analogy is not perfect. Cook was not defending a right. But he did similarly draw attention to an element of belief (crackers are different once a priest’s hand has waved over them) that can tip quite suddenly into dangerous lunacy at the slightest provocation. Isn’t that a point worth making?
Mills’ feces-and-obscenity-strewn video, on the other hand, had offense not as a byproduct but as its intentional essence. Of Cook, one can say, “he just walked out the door with a wafer,” and the contrast with the fireworks that followed is clear. But saying, with sing-song innocence, that Mills was “just smearing dogshit on a book while swearing, gah,” doesn’t achieve quite the same clarity. Even though it shares the act of questioning the sacred, it’s much less interesting and much less defensible.
Question #2: Is nothing sacred?
Becca and I debated this at length. She said that all declarations of sacredness should be respected and left alone. I countered by saying the very idea of sacredness is worth discussing, and that the best way to draw attention to something of this kind — like an unjust law — is by violating it and allowing the results to play out. Should we “respect and leave alone” the opposing, irreconcilable claims of sacredness that keep the Middle East aflame? The sacred idea that men should have dominion over women? The list goes on.
But the question remains: Should anything be held “sacred”? I think the answer is yes and no, because the word “sacred” has two different major meanings.
Sacred is used to denote specialness, to mark something as awe-inspiring, worthy of veneration or deserving of respect. In this first sense, the nonreligious tend to hold many things sacred — life, integrity, knowledge, love, a sense of purpose, freedom of conscience, and much more. One might even hold sacred our right and duty to reject the second meaning of sacred: something inviolable, unquestionable, immune from challenge.
This second definition of sacredness is much like the concept of hell — it exists primarily as a thoughtstopper. As such, it has no place in a home energized by freethought. One of the most sacred (def. 1) principles of freethought is that no question is unaskable, no authority unquestionable.
Which bring me to Question #3, the parenting angle. If this were my son, and he had undertaken this as a kind of civil disobedience, would I be proud?
Immensely. Intensely. Uncontainably. It’s Kohlberg’s sixth stage of moral development, and it makes me weak in the knees.
Encouraging reckless inquiry in your kids means laughing the second definition of “sacred” straight out the door. Given that understanding of the dual meaning of sacredness, it should now make sense that I consider it a sacred duty to hold nothing sacred.
my (much) better half
- July 15, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting
14
Back now from Family Reunion A, a good time at the Lake of the Ozarks. The B-Side Family Reunion (Becca’s side) is in ten days in the mountains of North Carolina. Between the two is a mountain of catching up. My word, I hadn’t even heard about Crackergate (my new all-time favorite entry in the category of unintentional self-parody) until just now.
I’ll start the week with a brief hymn to my wife Becca, who has once again accidentally reminded me that whenever a pollster asks how many adults live in our home, the correct answer is “one.”
It was late. We had stayed at the lake until after lunch on Sunday to give the kids one last chance to put an eye out with a SeaDoo. Now we’d driven 400 miles with 40 to go before not even home, but a one-star motel in Clarksville, Tennessee. And we were in the twentieth minute of a game of Initials on which Connor (shortly 13) had insisted.
The rules are simple. One person offers the initials of another person, famous or non. The others ask yes-or-no questions until they figure out who it is. Unlike Twenty Questions, this one has no mercifully pre-programmed end. You go until you stop. I like this game between 9am and 9pm. It was 10:15.
“RR!” the boy repeated for the nth time, exasperated. “Come on, you guys, jeez!”
We’d established in the opening minute that RR was a famous fictional male, dropping Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers, and Ralph Reed off the table. Just ten minutes later, we had established that RR was a superhero.
“I can’t believe you guys! RR,” he whined, leaning on the second letter as if it helped. I desperately wanted silence, which only seemed likely if we guessed the damned identity of R frickin’ R.
“Do both Rs stand for regular names?” I asked.
“No, it isn’t!”
Aha. “Is the first one a title? Like ‘Reverend’?”
“That’s right, Dad. It’s the famous superhero, Reverend Rick.”
Smartass. “Is the first R an adjective?”
“Adjective…I always get those confused.”
“Descriptive word. Like red or round.”
“Yes! It’s an adjective!”
Aha. “Is the first R red?”
“YES! Jeez, it’s about time. Now you’ll get it.”
Then ten more minutes passed, his frustration rising every time I offered Red Rover? or Red Roof-inn?
“Are you sure this guy is a superhero?” Becca asked.
“Holy buckets, you guys, I can’t believe it! Yes, he’s a superhero, now COME ON! Red R!!!”
At last we did the unthinkable and surrendered, hoping he’d accept.
“You’re gonna be so mad at yourselves,” he promised.
“I’ll flip the car to punish myself.”
“Okay, here it goes. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Red Robin.”
Becca and I looked at each other.
“How could you not get that?!” he whined. “Red Robin, jeez!”
“I’m sorry, Con,” I said, holding my fire for the moment. “Who is Red Robin?”
“WHO IS RED ROBIN?!” He couldn’t believe it. “You’ve never heard of Batman and Red Robin??”
“…”
Twenty minutes of guessing, twenty minutes that could have been silent save the rhythmic thrum of the tires — twenty irretrievable minutes passed before my eyes. Gone forever. “Connor,” I said, “it isn’t…”
Becca’s hand came to rest lightly on my arm, and I stopped in mid-sentence.
“Red Robin,” she said. “I can’t believe we missed that.” She squeezed my arm affectionately.
“Jeez,” I said. “Red Robin. Of course.”
He settled back in his seat, victorious. Becca patted my arm, and a sign promised Clarksville in 23 miles.
____________________
[For any DC Comics fans out there: I have since learned that, yes, there is apparently an obscure Red Robin in a 1996 comic book series called Kingdom Come. But Connor knows Robin only through the Batman films.]
thinking by druthers 3
[Third installment in a series on confirmation bias. Back to Part 2.]
The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking. All the evidence for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.
Michael Shermer, in Scientific American, October 2006[Conspiracy theories] use the ‘reverse scientific method’. They determine what happened, throw out all the data that doesn’t fit their conclusion, and then hail their findings as the only possible conclusion.
Thomas Eagar, professor of engineering, MIT
I was cleaning moldy tuppers out of the back of the fridge the other day when Connor (nearly 13) piped up from the computer. “Hey Dad,” he said. “Have you ever heard about these conspiracy theories?”
Oh jeez. “Which ones?”
“All kinds of different ones. You wouldn’t believe what people believe!”
Since people on either side of conspiracy theories use that same sentence to mean opposite things, I asked him what he meant.
“Like some people think we never landed on the moon. But we did!”
I pulled a container of primordial soup from the lower shelf without saying a thing.
“We did…right?”
I dumped the container down the sink. “Well I certainly think so. What do you think?”
“Of course!” His voice had the slightest unsettled catch. He’d never heard it questioned before.
I used to describe two different and opposite extremes of non-thinking to my critical thinking classes. Complete gullibility is one extreme. Our family spent the 4th of July with several neighbors. At one point, one woman said that people have always teased her for her gullibility. “Well,” I said, “when they say that, just point out that the word ‘gullible’ isn’t even in the dictionary.”
A look of surprise crossed her face. “Really?” she said. “I had no idea.”
But just as bad as extreme suckers are extreme cynics, whose every other sentence is “Don’t be so naive.” The sucker believes without thinking; the cynic disbelieves without thinking. Everything is a scam, a sham, a hoax, a conspiracy. The two are opposite excuses for suspending the hard work of figuring the world out, and both are useless.
“All of these things are pretty crazy,” Connor continued, “but there’s one…well, it’s pretty convincing.”
“Oh yeah? Which one?”
“Well,” he said, his voice dropping to a — well, a conspiratorial whisper, what else– “It looks like the World Trade Center was actually brought down by explosives inside the buildings..not by planes.”
I’ll assume everybody’s heard this idea — that the Bush Administration brought the towers down to justify the invasion of Iraq. I have several extremely rational friends who were convinced of this at some point, though most have now given it up. Some even have Dick Cheney himself controlling the planes by remote, presumably while saying, “Bwahahaha!”
“What reasons do they give, Con?”
“Tons of stuff! One thing is that the buildings wouldn’t fall the way they did if a plane flew into them. They fell straight down. And you can see it in the video — boom boom boom boom, one floor after another, straight down, just like if there were timed explosions on each floor!”
It took me a minute to figure out how to proceed. You don’t want to just step right up to the plate and take his bat away.
“That’s interesting,” I finally said. “Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“Is it true that the buildings wouldn’t fall that way if planes flew into them?”
“Well — I dunno, that’s what this guy said.”
I nodded a bit. “And other people say something different.”
“I guess so.”
And there’s the problem. We talk about critical thinking as if it’s a question of evidence, but we often have no direct access to the evidence that we claim convinces us. What first-hand evidence do I have that the earth orbits the sun? Almost none. First-hand evidence that we’ve walked on the moon? First-hand? None. In both cases I have relied on intermediaries to bring information to me, and I have believed them.
See the problem? A Catholic could say the same about the belief that crackers turn into Christ. They have relied on intermediaries to bring information to them, and they have believed them. Very little of our knowledge today is unmediated, so much of the task is now assessing the messengers and their methodologies rather than the inaccessible facts themselves. In other words, in order to decide whether my confidence is warranted, I use what I do know to ask whether their confidence appears to be warranted.
More on that in druthers 4. Right now, let’s finish with the conspiracy.
I told Connor that conspiracy theorists tend to present at least one “impossibility” about the official version which may or may not actually be impossible, and offer a blizzard of “evidence” that almost never justifies the confidence with which it is asserted. So even if you don’t know anything about structural physics or the melting point of steel, you can take a pretty good stab at a complicated conspiracy theory by stepping back and asking which scenario is more likely. Generally they won’t even be close.
In this case we have two main alternatives:
-
1. Islamic terrorists struck a blow at the U.S. by hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings.
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2. The government of the United States intentionally murdered thousands of its own citizens to justify a war.
I loathe the current administration. It will take two generations at least to recover from the damage done in these eight years, if indeed we can recover at all. The combination of ignorance, arrogance, and dishonesty in this White House will be hard to top. I hope we never try.
In short, the 9/11 conspiracy theory plays right into my biases. And my son’s. But I’m a fan of the real world, so I need to control for those biases.
That Islamic jihadis, fueled by religious and cultural hatred, committed this act against a perceived foreign enemy is plausible. That the Bush White House did the same thing to their own tribe requires positing a cartoonish level of baby-eating evil and duplicitousness that should shame any rationalist who suggests it. Add to this the fact that Americans have never required all that much incentive to support a war or invasion, and the 9/11 conspiracy vanishes into the swamp of ludicrous, bias-fueled fantasy.
So we didn’t have to get into the details of the conspiracy claims or their rebuttals. I simply wanted to give the boy some general food for thought that could come in handy the next time he hears an incredible claim confidently made.
hopeful music
Last night a memory bobbed to the surface of Delaney’s brain — something I’d said in passing a good two years ago when she was four.
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“Remember that music that’s been playing for my whole life?” she asked at bedtime. “I wonder if it’s still playing.”
“Huh? Oh…that! Yes, it is!” I retold the story, thrilled that she finds it as cool as I do:
“There was a composer who lived a long life and died not too long ago. His name was John Cage. His music wasn’t like anyone else’s because he didn’t just want to entertain people. He wanted them to think and wonder and even laugh. Mostly he wanted them to think about music in a new way.
“He wrote one piece I especially like. Wanna hear it?”
“Sure.”
I sat in silence for thirty seconds. “Okay, that was it. Well, just part of it.”
She looked puzzled. “Just…being quiet?”
“Well…was it really quiet?” I asked.
“No! I heard Max [the guinea pig] making little noises. And the ceiling fan going whoosh whoosh.”
“That’s the idea. This composer wanted us to hear all the sounds around us and to think of it as music that’s playing all the time. So he wrote a piece of silence to make us hear all the stuff we usually ignore.”
“That’s so cool.”
Many of you will have heard of this piece, which is called 4’33” and consists of four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. It can be performed, Cage said, on any instrument or combination of instruments and in any number of movements. But that’s not the piece she was asking about. “And he wrote another piece for organ called ‘As Slow as Possible.'”
“That’s the one!”
“And then some people decided to play it really slow — so slow it would last for 639 years. They found a little church in the middle of Germany that wasn’t used anymore, and they built a special organ just to play this one piece of music.
“It started playing seven years ago on September 5th, 2001. But the music starts with a rest — a silence in music — so the first thing you heard was nothing! For seventeen months!”
“Haha! Weird!”
“And right in the middle of that silence — you were born.”
“Awesome,” she whispered.
She was right. Somehow, juxtaposing her birth and that silence was awesome. Even better: The bellows sprung to life on that day in September, and pumped away for twenty months as the only sound in the church. Once again, music without music.
“Then one day in the middle of the winter, when you were one and a half, the first notes started to play. Hundreds of people gathered in the little church to hear the notes start. Most of the time, though, the notes are playing with no one there. Little weights hold down the keys. Then every two years or so, it’s time for the notes to change again, and people come from around the world to hear it.”
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“And it’s still playing right now?”
“Yep, it’s playing right now. And here’s the thing: It will be playing on the moment you graduate from high school and when you graduate from college. It will be playing when you get your first job, when you get married, and when your kids are born.
“The music that started the year you were born will still be playing at the end of your life. It will be playing when your grandchildren are born and when they die, and their grandchildren, and their grandchildren, and on and on, for 639 years.”
“Awesome!”
“Just think how different the world will be then.”
“I wonder if they will be different creatures from us then [one of her favorite ponders]. Like we used to be different animals a long time ago.”
“Fun to think about, eh?” I kissed her on the head and she drifted off.
The Cage project will strike some people as bizarre or silly. There was a time it would have hit me that way, back when I thought 20th century art and music was one big con game. But the more I think about the slowest piece of all time, the more it moves me.
The church is in Halberstadt, Germany. Suppose someone had started playing a piece of music in Halberstadt 639 years ago, in 1369. The Ming dynasty in China was one year old. Europe continued to reel in disorder one generation after the Black Death. The music would have ushered in the dawning of the Renaissance, the voyages and outrages of the New World explorers, and the scientific and artistic revolutions of the 16th century.
Luther’s Reformation and the religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries would have raged around it. It would have been playing as the town itself changed hands from Prussia to Napoleon’s Westphalia and back to Prussia before becoming part of Saxony, then Germany, playing as Allied bombs fell in 1945, as the town was closed into communist East Germany and as it was returned to the heart of reunified Germany.
Would that piece have found its way to the last barline?
Starting a piece of music implies an intention to finish it. So starting a 639-year piece is, among other things, an extraordinary statement of human hope. it implies that we may still be here in 639 years, and that the intervening generations, with all their own changing concerns and values and ordeals, will nonetheless pick up the baton and run with the project we have begun. It is, in other words, a perfect metaphor for human life itself.
The aesthetics of the piece, as with so much of the music of Cage, are immaterial. It’s the idea that moves me. To hear the chord currently being played is to connect yourself to the recent past and the distant future in a way never before quite possible. That’s part of the reason that every time the chord changes, hundreds of people come from around the world to hear it happen.
The last chord change was in May of 2006, the month I resigned my college professorship. The next change is this Saturday, July 5, 2008.
Thanks to the hopeful gesture of even beginning such a thing, I can picture it finishing. So long as we can keep from killing each other, cooking the planet, or blowing up Halberstadt with technologies still undreamt — and if Jesus can hold off a little longer on his glorious return — then maybe, just maybe, our optimism will have been justified.
see you in a bit
- May 30, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting
- 19
I’ve been ordered by my family to go one week without opening the laptop, starting tomorrow. Thought I’d share a funny moment from this afternoon before I go.
I was sitting at the breakfast table, panting and sweating after mowing our STEEP front yard, when Laney (6) asked if I could play catch with her.
“Aw sweetie, I’d love to, but you know what I just did?”
“You mowed the lawn.”
“And if I juuuust finished mowing the lawn, then I am…what?”
“Uh……free?”
three koans at turner field
- May 27, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids, Parenting
- 14
We all went to see the Braves play the Diamondbacks on Sunday, our first trip to Turner Field since moving to Atlanta — and it was exactly as captivating as I had expected. Not a sports guy, you see. But in the stands, as one by one the kids joined me staring at the sky, wondering why baseball is called a spectator sport, I was peppered with questions so difficult to answer they were practically koans — those essentially unanswerable, Buddhistic questions on the order of “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” or “Is there another word for synonym?”
Here are three, each a perfect illustration of the asker. After reciting each koan aloud, sound the bell and lose yourself in contemplation:
KOAN #1 (Delaney, 6)
What makes gravity?
KOAN #2 (Erin, 10)
Hey, why aren’t there any girls on the baseball team?
KOAN #3 (Connor, 12)
Why is card-counting against the rules at casinos if it’s really just a way of carefully paying attention?
sex and the balls of the evangelical
Life in Lubbock, Texas taught me two things: One is that God loves you and you’re going to burn in hell. The other is that sex is the most awful, filthy thing on Earth, and you should save it for someone you love. –Butch Hancock, country singer/songwriter
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COLORADO SPRINGS — After dessert, the 63 men stood and read aloud a covenant “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.”
The gesture signaled that the fathers would guard their daughters from what evangelicals consider a profoundly corrosive “hook-up culture.” The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing, was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed. (from “Dancing the Night Away, With a Higher Purpose,” New York Times, May 19, 2008.)
The photo is of a “Purity Ball” in Colorado Springs, where evangelical dads pledge to protect the “purity” of their daughters until marriage. It’s one of a growing number of such balls from coast to coast. “It’s a huge effort,” said one evangelical father. “A single ball won’t do it. Spreading the message that abstinence works takes a lot of balls.”1
Let’s begin by recognizing my common ground with these evangelical fathers. I too want to keep my daughters from becoming pregnant (and my son from getting someone pregnant) before certain events run their course. “Certain events” for me include education and time getting to know one’s adult self; for evangelicals, it’s marriage. So let’s just say we’re both happier with the idea of a daughter who is pregnant at 25 than at 15. I’ll call that common ground. But then the ground opens up. The Times article continues:
“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” [event host] Mr. Wilson, 49, told the men. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”
(“Rapunzel, Rapunzel…”)
“The culture says you’re free to sleep with as many people as you want to,” said Khrystian Wilson, 20, one of the Wilsons’ seven children, including five girls. “What does that get you but complete chaos?”
This is another constant refrain: you have a choice between being Raped by The Culture (one monolithic thing) or being Rescued by the Men of God. Either way, there’s a man on top.
I for one never got the memo that I could sleep with as many people as I wanted to. That’s a bad idea for reasons that go beyond “purity.” The invitation to promiscuity is out there, but so are other voices. How about teaching kids to discern between good messages and bad, even when Dad is not in the room?
For the Wilsons and the growing number of people who have come to their balls, premarital sex is seen as inevitably destructive, especially to girls, who they say suffer more because they are more emotional than boys.
There was a time when I’d revel in the double entendres of that sentence, but I’m far too mature now. Instead, let me point out the continuing message that girls are weak and in need of male rescue.
Recent studies have suggested that close relationships between fathers and daughters can reduce the risk of early sexual activity among girls and teenage pregnancy…Abstinence is never mentioned at the Colorado Springs Purity Ball, but a litany of fathers’ duties is — mainly, making time to get involved in their daughters’ lives and setting an example.
Excellent! Again we overlap as evangelicals find their desires in sync with the research. But as the name “Purity Ball,” the white dresses and the constant pledging make clear, S-E-X in general and abstinence in particular are the unmentioned elephants humping in the corner. As is so often the case in the evangelical movement, any research that is inconvenient to their preferred narrative is simply ignored. The abstinence-only approach, like so many of our well-intentioned crusades, makes things worse:
But studies have also shown that most teenagers who say they will remain abstinent, like those at the ball, end up having sex before marriage, and they are far less likely to use condoms than their peers.
An inconvenient truth.
In a ballroom after dinner, bare but for a seven-foot wooden cross at one end, the fathers and daughters gathered along the walls. Kevin Moore, there with his three girls, told the men they were taking a stand for their families and their nation. Then he and Mr. Wilson walked to the cross with two large swords, which they held up before it to make an arch.
Is it chilling in here, or is it just me? Read that bolded passage again — an amazing condensation of religion, militarism, nationalism, authority, and patriarchy. That’s our favorite soporific, a seductive brew that bubbles up over and over in human history, right before everything goes to flaming hell.
Each father and his daughter walked under the arch and knelt before the cross. Synthesized hymns played. The fathers sometimes held their daughters and whispered a short prayer, and then the girls each placed a white rose, representing purity, at the foot of the cross.
The girls, many wearing purity rings, made silent vows. “I promise to God and myself and my family that I will stay pure in my thoughts and actions until I marry,” said Katie Swindler, 16. Every half-hour, Mr. Wilson stopped the dancing so that fathers could bless their daughters before everyone.
Yeesh. Yeesh.
One of things that most deeply saddens me about all this is the way it demonizes sex. Yes, it’s a powerful thing. It can turn your world upside down in several ways, not all of them good. But I want my kids to know that it’s also beautiful and amazing and fun and good. It’s the reason we’re here, after all. In evolutionary terms, it’s the best thing there is, which is why it’s fun.
Connor and I have talked about the fact that our bodies “want” to have sex for evolutionary reasons as well as emotional ones. Imagine two populations, I said. One is wired up to enjoy sex; the other is indifferent to it. Which one is going to pass its genes along, and which will die out? He got it immediately, even declared it “so cool.” And when his body starts insisting that sex is a good idea, he won’t be blindsided by the feeling (unlike some kids in Schenectady). He’ll understand it, which gives him a better chance of staying in control of it. If instead kids learn that these feelings are evil and inspired by Satan, they’ll spend their adolescence convulsed with guilt and retain a deeply dysfunctional view of their bodies and of themselves.
Equating abstinence with “purity” sends the instant message that sex is not a great good but something that renders us impure. Evangelicals counter that it suddenly goes from purely impure to wholly holy after marriage — but by then you’ve rather insulted and debased it, haven’t you? Just imagine the confusion in these kids’ heads when that coin suddenly flips.
[Thanks to Hemant Mehta, I think, for bringing Purity Balls to my attention.]
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1Unfortunately I made this one up.
Visit the new BY THE NUMBERS page for some interesting sex ed stats.
View the documentary Abstinence Comes to Albuquerque on Google Video (2006, 27 min.) The compelling story of a faith-based organization using federal funds to bring abstinence-only sex education into public schools in Albuquerque.
ode to a mother-in-law
< Sadly, the very first thing that comes up
in a Google Image Search for "mother in law"
There’s a laugh line in my seminar that isn’t meant to be a laugh line. It’s entirely serious, but they always chuckle.
In the section on extended family issues, I recommend letting your kids go to church once in a while with trusted relatives — and they chuckle at the word “trusted,” just a bit. It’s a knowing chuckle, of course. There are both trustworthy and untrustworthy religious folks, and many of us have both in our extended families. The untrustworthy are the sneaky proselytizers, the ones who tell our kids in whispers that Jesus loves them, that “I’m praying for your mama and daddy,” or even drop little hints of hellfire — not as a threat, of course, but as the thing they’re working so hard to save mama and daddy from.
The trustworthy are those who preface their input to my children with “I believe” statements instead of presenting everything as…well, gospel, and respect our decision to let the kids work it out for themselves in the long run.
It is my very good fortune to have a mother-in-law in Category #2.
The daughter of a Southern Baptist minister, graduate of a Baptist college, and devout churchgoer, she nonetheless has been absolutely fabulous about respecting our choices with the kids. I am quite certain she’d rather her grandchildren were being raised in the church, but she’s never pushed the point. When our kids do attend, perhaps 3-4 times a year, it’s always with her.
Her stock has begun rising even further with me lately. A few weeks ago I heard (secondhand) that a member of her church asked if it bothered her that neither of her sons-in-law is a Christian.
“Pfft,” she said. “You listen here. Those two boys treat my girls like queens. I can’t ask for more than that.”
She’s also been known to suggest that I’m more Christian than many Christians she knows. Considering the source, that’s a compliment I’m very pleased to take.
As I talk to nonreligious parents around the country, I encourage them not to assume too much about their religious relatives. Even those who are very serious about their own faith are often more willing to bend than we sometimes think. It’s not always the case, of course. Some will do their level best to put you in hell well before you’re dead, and once you’ve seen that in action, it’s more than an assumption. But I’m convinced that we jump to that conclusion too often. And I’m glad to hold up my own mother-in-law as an example.
Happy Mother’s Day, Babs!
tickytacky
- May 05, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In My kids, Parenting
- 31
Saturday was the 89th birthday of Pete Seeger, and Saturday afternoon I found myself listening to a Seegerthon on a radio station in Waco, Texas. I was on my way to give the full secular parenting seminar in Dallas, driving from Austin, where I’d given a secular parenting talk.
During my 24 hours in Austin, I learned, and instantly adored, the unofficial slogan of the city:
Austin is weird in that college-town, blue-dot-in-a-red-state way. Nonconformity was on my mind anyway, since the parenting seminar (which I gave on Sunday in Dallas) includes a segment on the importance of helping kids resist pressures to conform and find the courage to be a dissenting voice when dissent is called for.
Ten miles out of Waco, I heard Seeger sing a song I haven’t heard in maybe 25 years — a pretty little waltz concealing a howl of protest against numbing conformity:
Little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of tickytacky
Little boxes, little boxes, little boxes, all the sameThere’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.
Even in the middle of relative nowhere, the song seemed to comment on my surroundings — the thrum of tires on the road, the repeating green EXIT signs, McDonald’s and Burger King signs looming over alternating exits, little tickytacky developments scattered around the Waco fringe.
And the people in the houses all went to the university
And they all got put in boxes and they all came out the same,And there’s doctors and there’s lawyers, and business executives
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.And they all play on the golf course and drink their martini dry,
And they all have pretty children and the children go to schoolAnd the children go to summer camp and then to the university
And they all get put in boxes and they all come out the same.
Gotta talk to the kids about that sometime. Work it into a conversation, the whole thing about not being a sheep, about being proud of being different, even knowing it can make things harder.
Wait. Pfft! Not a conversation! Why yak it when you can sing it?
And the boys go into business and marry and raise a family
In boxes made of tickytacky and they all look just the same.There’s a green one and a pink one and a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of tickytacky and they all look just the same.
After four days in Texas, I got home tonight in time to sing it to the girls at bedtime. Instant hit. They asked what it meant, what tickytacky is, what a martini is. We sang it again.
I kissed them, turned off the light, and went into my room to blog. I could hear them singing it quietly in the dark, giggling each time they got to “tickytacky.”
Nine-thirty — time to go sing to the Boy!
middle school kabuki
- April 30, 2008
- By Dale McGowan
- In Atlanta, My kids
- 9
We live in a lovely subdivision of rolling hills. The parking lot of the neighborhood pool at the top of our block is the only relatively flat patch. I take the kids up once in a while so the girls can ride their bikes in a circle. Connor often comes along to take shots at the basketball hoop on the side of the lot. I drag along a beach chair, sit in the sun and watch the show.
A couple of days ago, our trip to the lot gave me the opportunity to watch a fascinating, age-old dance — the passive-aggressive kabuki play of middle schoolers exploring interpersonal ethics on the fly.
As Connor (12) dribbled the ball around the corner and entered the lot, a complication came into view. Three other middle schoolers were sitting on the curb by the basket — not under the basket, but juuuust off to the left, 5-6 feet from the drop zone. They saw Connor, paused for that telling second, then continued talking to each other. Connor also saw them, stopped dribbling for juuuust that telling second, then continued toward the hoop.
Anyone who thinks they greeted each other and proceeded to work out the emerging conflict of interest has neither met nor been a middle schooler. Neither did they come to blows. The three continued to sit, passively asserting one of the oldest and dodgiest rights in legal history (known various as squatter’s rights, “possession is nine-tenths of the law,” “I Was Here First,” or “You Can’t Make Me”) and silently daring the Boy to infringe on that right.
The Boy, on the other hand, was silently countering with the Greater Need principle, also known as “You Can Easily Slide Over, but This is the Only Hoop.” Both sides were relying on the obviousness of their respective claims.
He began shooting. The three continued talking as if basketballs were not landing inches from them. Connor did the best shooting of his life, since each successful two-pointer went straight down and could be recovered with a quick lunge before it brought things to a head (so to speak). At last one shot hit the rim and went wide left. Three heads ducked. Still no eye contact, though Connor smiled nervously as he ran for the errant ball (preparing himself for the “Heh heh, isn’t this a funny situation we’re all enjoying” defense).
Push, for some reason, never came to shove. After ten minutes and no ball-squatter contact, the girls were ready to go home, and we all did.
It’s interesting to guess what would have happened if someone had actually taken a ball to the head. Since both sides were showing a lack of common sense, outrage over the other’s failure to see what had been the “obvious” solution tends to be the only remaining option for both sides. Instead, it was middle school kabuki to the end.
