Lunatic articles travel in packs

Here are two articles that could have been in the Onion but are meant to be serious.

First we have "The Danger of Celebrating Halloween".
http://www.charismamag.com/index.php/prophetic-insight/23723-the-danger-of-celebrating-halloween

This was posted on the CBN web site but was removed so I guess it was even too loony for Pat Robertson. My favorite part?

"During this period demons are assigned against those who participate in the rituals and festivities. These demons are automatically drawn to the fetishes that open doors for them to come into the lives of human beings. For example, most of the candy sold during this season has been dedicated and prayed over by witches."

Next we have this wonderful gem and title pretty much sums the article up:

"The Golden Girls: How One TV Show Turned A Generation Of American Boys Into Homosexuals"

http://christwire.org/2009/10/the-golden-girls-how-one-tv-show-turned-a-generation-of-american-boys-into-homosexuals/

My favorite part of this article:

"The 1980s was an epoch of President Reagan’s manly wisdom and the terrifying threat of Cold War annihilation. America had sobered up from the flashy lights of 1970s disco. We were skipping all night cocaine and sex parties to focus on our careers. Spiritual leaders like Jerry Falwell were telling us that Christianity was in the majority again. On the other side, there was a subculture of homosexuality creeping up on our youths. It gave them an excuse to wear tight jeans and to sneak off to public parks for quick releases with hairy men of different ethnicities."

For the record I was not a fan and am not a fan of Golden Girls.

Tip of the Antennae to an anonymous blogger friend with whiskers for calling my attention to the first article.

File these under humor(I think).

Now we know...

...the true cause of divorce and all the other problems besetting marriage as an institution.

Of course it's the gays!

NARTH Field Research?

Sorry I can't resist noting this article from EdgeBoston, Boston's Gay publication. It seems that an "ex gay" counselor was convicted of sexual assault on a man. What's interesting is what Edge alleges about this person:

"Austin was affiliated with NARTH, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and had presented a seminar at a NARTH convention in 2004 called 'Understanding and Treating Compulsive Sexual Behavior in Men with Value-Incongruent Homosexual Issues: A Multidimensional Approach.' "

Maybe he was doing field research for another seminar?

Over at Gay Species...

Check out this wonderful autobiographical post on Darwinism and Gays by D. Stephen Heersink. I don't think I am spilling anything by giving his conclusion because there is so much great stuff in his post.

"Darwin is every Gay and Lesbian individual's HOPE for the future, for every individual "queer's" HOPE for diversity and pluralism, because Darwin's theories insist upon it. Can Queers not correlate the denunciation of GLBT and the denunciation of Darwin as having a related "associated basis?" Are you that dense? Are you "excluding the middle" of inferential reason? Reasons, invalid though they be, exist for the shared denunciation."

Gay Children?

One of the things I am always impressed with is how early many of my gay friends report knowing they were different. This feeling of difference jibes with my own feelings growing up male but not feeling that that was right-that I too was very different inside. So why am I disturbed by this article in the Village Voice titled "Queer in the Crib?"

http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0725,reischel,76971,15.html

What's disturbing about this article is we have yet another way to use kids to project adult beliefs and desires. The article for instance, has a five or six year old dressed in leather with handcuffs-quite the old guard looking s/m practitioner. Young kids certainly develop a sense of their gender and sexual identities and do a lot of experimenting. I react the same way when I see little boys forced into sports because daddy is a frustrated ball player or little girls forced into ballet because mommy is a frustrated dancer.

One of the specialists quoted in the article says:

"We needed a category that would be descriptive of children that were not old
enough to declare gender or sexuality in the adult sense," he says. 'Because,
obviously, a five-year-old is not going to know what they are in terms of
sexuality or gender.' "

And it looks like people are setting on "gender variance" as a way of describing kids who don't seem to fit the normal pattern of gender related behavior. I am just not sure this is a good idea. Labels can be valuable but labels develop a life on their own and that is not always a good thing and could lead to an unnecessary intrusion of "services" into kid's lives. There is a principle in quantum mechanics which says that the observer affects the experiment. Kids aren't experiments, but the idea is the same.

Parents ought to be there for kids and help kids develop and influence that development in positive ways...but not turn them into little poster children. Kids do develop a sense of who and what they are early and need to be able to turn to parents for advice. Lord knows my parents couldn't give me any help with my struggles prepuberty let alone puberty, but this article is a sort of pandering which I don't see as being good for kids. Kids need space and time to develop on their own, not to become pawns the the culture wars or become little sexualized robotized consumers.

A thoughful atheist's blog.

For a bit of civilized refreshment and dare I say, pleasure, my readers might enjoy visiting Gay Species. I stumbled across this blog totally by accident and the best way to describe this blog is that it is classical without being typological.

Here are some links to interesting posts at Gay Species to get you started:
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/tuberculosis-in-news-not-news.html
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/possibility-of-spirituality.html
http://gayspecies.blogspot.com/2007/05/musings-on-religious-instruction.html

The blogger, D. Steven Heersink, notes that his mentors are:
Aristotle, Epicurus, Hume, Smith, Darwin, Popper. Hayek, Searle, and Solomon.

I'd like to get all of them together for dinner.