Balls.

The stupid regards the stupider. Pic: Rod Fleming

Balls: why ‘Gay Marriage’ is as dumb as it gets.

I have had the dubious privilege of being exposed to some really stupid ideas in my near six decades on this dear planet. Some of these came when I was engaged as a Media Consultant to a quango that helped new entrepreneurs, which, to avoid embarrassment, shall remain nameless.

Consider, a propos of this, the Glow in the Dark Golf Ball. This thoroughly spiffing notion was — yes, a golf ball that was luminous and so emitted a faint, ghoulish green glow in darkness. Don’t believe me? Here’s a picture of a well-known Scottish idiot. ‘Lord’ Peter Fraser with one of these balls at the launch ‘Media Event’. (And people wonder why journalists are prone to drink.)

No matter that to have any purpose, this technological miracle had to be used in complete darkness, meaning that players could not see the pin, the green, the bunkers, the trees in the way, the fairway or the fucking golf course, because — it was totally dark. I never followed up on the sales of this piece of unadulterated brilliance.

Then, thanks to the same organisation, a belter that had me so choking with suppressed laughter that I had to invent a prior engagement and leave. What was it this time? A top secret, eyes-only, breakthrough development that could help address water shortages the world over. Or so I was told. You know what it was? It was a little white plastic wall about 20cm or so tall that had suckers fitted all round. The idea was — wait for it — that you stuck this in your bathtub and then you could have a bath using only half the water.

Have you any idea how hard it is not to collapse on the floor laughing when confronted with noodle-headedness like this? And, you know, I am not known for suffering fools gladly.

2015 had its crop of the blindingly stupid, but few matched the moment when millions all over the world cheered the US Supreme Court’s decision that same sex marriages were indeed constitutional. Now I have no argument with the decision, which was a weighty one pondered over by the best legal minds in that most litigious of nations; I am confident that the judges’ decision was a reasonable and realistic interpretation of the letter of the US Constitution. Well done them.

What was just agonisingly stupid was the reaction. And I admit, I got carried along, for a while, till I actually thought it through and realised how boneheadedly dumb all this is. Not, I hasten to add, because I have an intrinsic objection to two individuals with willies — or for that matter fannies — setting up home together and desiring the same privileges (they’re not rights) as a couple possessed of a willy and a fanny might enjoy.

No, what was so utterly, exasperatingly stupid about all this is that marriage is a contract of property ownership which places a woman’s fertility under the control of a man. It is the very keystone of the patriarchy, the leaden weight that suppresses us all. We should be doing everything we possibly can to utterly eradicate the patriarchy, to crush and destroy it, to tear up its ridiculous rules and conventions and to throw it into the dustbin of history where it belongs.

And you’d think that LGBT (if the term has any meaning today) people would be the very first in line to smash the patriarchy, their mattocks and pickaxes at the ready. But no, there they all are, straining at the leash to jump on the patriarchal bandwagon, to access the privilege that they know the patriarchy will give them for being its poodles. Talk about turkeys voting for Christmas? This is worse. Let’s be quite clear: the patriarchy cares not a fig for the concerns of gays or lesbians. If it can shut them up and turn them into fully mind-controlled drones, it’s happy. That’s all the patriarchy ever wants — your soul, your mind and your body. Just be its obedient poodle and accept the place it gives you, work out your life and die. It’s happy. You fed it. You succoured it. You nourished it. And what did it give you in return?

A little bit of ephemeral status. It’s not even yours, it’s just on loan, like a worn and tattered library book. Yet you suck it up, denying yourself, lying to the world, lying to your friends, your lovers and yourself. All so the patriarchy will stop hating you. But it never will. The patriarchy is hate. It’s nothing more. It can’t give any more because that is all it is: hatred. Hatred, destruction and enslavement; and you, my LGBT friends are now enslaved to it, by the simple process of taking its shilling, of accepting the horrible contract of slavery that it offers, of surrendering yourself to it for an illusion.

You should have seen by now that the patriarchy has not changed its attitude towards you. It still hates you. It might have given you this fig but it is a poisoned chalice and you are its victim, not the victor.

You died years ago, of course; your death went unremarked. You stopped being important, you stopped being cutting edge. You gave all that up for a suburban house and a bad suit, a middle-management job that will wear you out, watching the partner you once found so beautiful age, hair and teeth fall out, as you are both worked to your graves. Well done. Your achievement is incredible. You have become the tool of the patriarchy, its latest set of fangs with which to rend those who oppose it. I applaud you.

But now, with your soul ripped out and sold to the patriarchy for an illusion of acceptance — because do you really think it accepts how you have sex? Really? If you do, you are either delusional or you don’t understand the patriarchy. So its acceptance of you, two balding men in bad suits taking turns to bugger each other, is entirely bogus. It just lets you think you’re accepted so it can exploit you more. That’s all.

And you, the proud lesbian ‘married’ couple — do you really imagine that you are accepted? The only condition that the patriarchy accepts for a woman is her enslavement to a man. You know that; you always knew that. This honeymoon of dreams is just that — a dream. The patriarchy has sold you the mother of all stitch-ups — look like a couple of nice schoolteachers and don’t say too much about that cunnilingus thing — and as long as you throw the butch lesbians, transmen, actual transsexuals (as opposed to those autogynephilic cross-dressing men, who, because they are men, retain all their male privilege; that’s how they get away with regularly browbeating and bullying women — or had you not noticed?) and feminine gays to the wolves, nay, assist the patriarchy in their defenestrations — literal or metaphorical — go to work every day and be a good girl, no rocking the boat now, it will shut up and accept the terms of your bondage to it. As if it would ever do anything else.

I’m not against love and I don’t care a monkey’s who expresses it to whom and how. I have been in love many times and there is not one of those that I would erase, not one that I would deny. Love comes in all forms from the powerful sexual love we feel with a lover to the slowburn of the love for a child that, perhaps is really the only love that lasts; from the bittersweet love for a parent to the undemanding love of a true friend, one that will never deny you; even to the love for those we tame, our animals and the places we grew up in and put our evanescent marks upon, I have known and know now all of them. Every one and I would not deny a single one.

But why should we accept love on the patriarchy’s terms? Why should we buy into its ersatz fakery, a mockery indeed of love, in the ridiculous farce of a ceremony that has served, these last 6000 years or so, to enslave one partner to the other, to make a man possessor of a woman. Does it make this offence against human dignity any less galling that both parties happen to have the same sort of genitalia? How does that work? How do we end up slavering in ecstasy over a condition of enslavement to new groups of people?

If we want to be free, we begin by destroying the patriarchy, extirpating it root and branch, together with all its horrible social codes and contracts of servitude. We begin by getting rid of formal marriage and understanding that people are free to make whatever interpersonal arrangements they desire, when they desire. That is the definition of a free society, or a major part of it at least.

‘Gay marriage’, ‘marriage equality’, call it what you will, is the nastiest and most successful con-trick the patriarchy has turned in decades. It’s about time we got our heads out of the trough of swill it feeds us and recognise that we have been duped.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Balls. appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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Marriage Equality and the Decline of Religiosity

In western Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, a revolution has taken place over the last few years.

Go back 200 years and we in the West were hanging gay men; a hundred years ago, more or less, we locked up Oscar Wilde for being gay and fifty years ago one of the greatest geniuses, ever, to have been born in the United Kingdom, Alan Turing, was forced to undergo chemical castration and driven to suicide, just for being gay.

Yet today, we celebrate gayness. When a State solemnises a marriage, it gives validation to that marriage, and the couple undertaking it, in the name of every citizen of that State. It is saying, ‘We the people approve of and celebrate your love, and we wish you both the greatest of happiness.’ It places all the authority and approval of the State on that marriage, in our names.

So we have, in fifty years or less, gone from persecuting and imprisoning or mutilating gays, to absolutely supporting them.

What does this tell us?

The principal agent in the suppression of non-heteronormative sexual orientation or gender identity was and remains, the organised Abrahamic religions. We see, in parts of the world where these still hold real power, that they ruthlessly suppress gays and transgenders wherever they can, calling for, and all too frequently enacting, even judicial murder, just for the ‘crime’ of not loving in accordance with their texts.

Let’s make no mistake, they would still be doing exactly the same thing in our more enlightened jurisdictions if they could. Even Pope Francis had to pretend to soften towards gays and transgenders, in order to make the public face of the Catholic Church more appealing — even though that was quickly shown to be no more than PR spin, and the Church is as transphobic, homophobic and for that matter misogynistic as it ever was.

So by definition, the increasing acceptance of the rights of gay and transgender people is an inverse measure of the level of authority over society that these religions maintain.

This is useful because, particularly in the case of the United States, we are used to thinking that religion wields much greater power. I have written elsewhere that ’45% of Americans are retards’ and in the context of that article, this is true. To deny evolution is to be wilfully, egregiously stupid. It is to actively prefer ignorance to knowledge.

Until the early 1980s America was following a trajectory of secularisation that broadly paralleled that of Europe and the developed world generally. There was declining faith and an increasingly open society. However, in that decade, Jerry Falwell, a religious snake-oil salesman exploiting the tax loophole that allows so many like him to get rich, led, from the foetid and dark recesses of conservative America, a phenomenon called the ‘Moral Majority’.

Well, it was neither a majority nor moral; but what are a few lies in the name of Christianity? Doesn’t Justin Martyr, the first Christian apologist, recommend it?

Despite not being a majority, this bubble of pure reaction managed to set the United States back by decades. From being, without question, the world’s absolute leader in the sciences, America is now one of the also-rans. The large Hadron Collider at Cern is where it is due to the success of Falwell and his supporters. The list of scientific programmes that have been deferred, underfunded or scrapped because of the influence of these throwbacks is tragically long. And from being the world leader in pollution control and environmental protection, the United States became a pariah, actively doing all it can to prevent such progress.

It beggars belief, today, that it was the Republican Party that ended slavery in the US, not the Democratic. Then, Republicans were the voice of progress. We cannot say that Falwell did not harm us all. So knowing the extent to which religiosity remains an important issue in American society is important for all of us.

When you live in a secular state, religion is something you think about very little. Most people are practical atheists. They don’t go to church and they don’t pray. If asked if they believe in God, they might shrug, or they might be ambivalent. The fact is they don’t think about it enough to have an opinion, which is pretty much the definition of an atheist.

Yet if asked what religion they are, most will answer that it is the religion they were brought up in — even if they haven’t been to church in decades. There are practical atheists who will still categorise themselves as belonging to a religion simply because they don’t think about it enough to have another opinion. This falsely skews the numbers and that makes it difficult to use the results of surveys to determine how secular a society is.

Charlatans and cheats like Falwell and his followers exploited this problem to make it look as if the majority of Americans were religiously deluded. In a society so rigidly conformist, nobody wants to rock the boat, especially over something they haven’t thought about in years.

The famous ’45%’ probably falls under the same category. American education is in a dreadful state, with publicly-funded schools regularly being caught teaching ‘creationism’, as has been seen this week in Louisiana. At the same time, most private schools in America are religious in nature. All of these routinely decry evolution and science. If you’re brought up in a system like that, it’s easy to say you don’t believe in evolution.

Even if that were true, however, and 45% of Americans really don’t believe in something that can be conclusively demonstrated even to an idiot, 45% is not a majority. 45% of Scots voted for Independence last year, yet Scotland remains a colonial outpost of the British State. Why? Because 45% is NOT a majority. And this figure, for America, has remained roughly the same for over thirty years. So, because there is a powerful correlation between religiosity and science-denial, all the time Falwell was claiming his ‘majority’ he was lying.

Because of these problems, the extent of religiosity in the United States (and elsewhere) has always been overstated. That is why marriage equality is such a useful indicator.

 

To a religious person,  marriage equality is anathema. If you are of the Abrahamic religions you must be against it. Yet we see now that sizeable majorities in the US and elsewhere are in favour of marriage equality.

This means that far more people must non-religious than are saying so. The increasing number of ‘nones’ — much heralded by well-known atheists like Lawrence Krauss and Richard Dawkins — must still be an underestimate.

In his book, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M Pirsig talked about splitting factors. These, when used properly, like a surgeon’s scalpel, could divide a problem in two and thus resolve it. Marriage equality is a case in point. Although there are others, for example abortion rights, that might also serve, these involve other ethical questions; after all, while more is made of it than should be, an organism’s life must be ended.

There is absolutely no such ethical consideration about marriage equality. It is an expression of love. No organism is harmed. Nothing dies and nobody gets hurt. The only thing that is transgressed is ‘scriptural morality’. One may agree with it because one believes that people have the right to live and love as they will, so long as no harm is caused to others; but to disagree with it requires that one decides that marriage is not about love but is instead a contract between a man and a woman expressly and solely for the purpose of procreation, which must always conform to the rules of patriarchal religions.

The question therefore obliges the responder to decide which is more important: the demands and proclamations of religion, or the rights of the individual. One either agrees that religion should control how people live and love, or that people have the freedom to love as they will, and more than that, with official sanction in our names.

Every person who comes down in favour of marriage equality is saying that whether or not they do personally consider themselves to be of religion, or believe in a god, they consider the rights of the individual to be more important.

That is the definition of secularism and with any luck, in the near future the US Supreme Court will make it clear, by endorsing marriage equality and striking down objections to it on Constitutional grounds, that the United States is indeed a secular democracy, and that the lies and deception of the Falwell era are finally rejected.

We look forward to welcoming this nation back into the modern world, a world that needs it. It will be a moment to be profoundly savoured.

Rod Fleming on Google+

The post Marriage Equality and the Decline of Religiosity appeared first on Rod Fleming's World.

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