Pantheacon keeping me busy

Posted on February 17, 2013 by

I’m at Pantheacon right now, and it’s keeping me busy, but I hope to have some reports to share when I get back. This is my first time, and especially for a newbie, the array of presentations available is impressive. It’s also pretty cool for this East Coast chick to get to meet some of the folks from other parts of the country.

In the meantime, if you’re in the DC Metro area, mark your calendars, because next Sunday, the 24th, Ix Chel Wellness, run by recently certified acupuncturist Adam Miramon, is having an open house at their Takoma Park location. If you want to find out more about acupuncture or Reiki treatments near you, this is a great opportunity. (http://www.facebook.com/IxChelWellnessTakomaPark)

Posted in Uncategorized

Kindle the fire in my deep well

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

Kindle the fire in my deep well, lady,
being the light in the midst of the dark,
healing the old wounds, the deep ones, the scarred ones,
believing in life in the middle of winter.

Kindle the fire in my deep well, lady,
to burn like a star on the surface of water.
Let my emotions give fuel to my will,
transform in the light of your brilliant blue flame.

I’m turning my attention away from the social stuff back to my own practice, to pause over this weekend and reach inside, reach up to the moon and out to the cold earth. It’s really, truly cold here for the first time this winter, and there’s just enough snow to make things a little interesting.

Next weekend is Imbolc, and even in the midst of the cold and the dark, I can tell the light is beginning to return, that the cold won’t last forever. So I honor all those things at once – the snow and the moon, the light and the dark, and I use this time to gather my will to take the next steps, to work to make change in the world.

These are some of the words I’m using to do that and to honor Brigid. May you find your own inspiration to do so as well.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 9 Comments

Virginia religious liberty: ACLU petition to lawmakers

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

The Virginia ACLU has a concise rundown of concerns with bills that threaten religious liberty, and an opportunity for you to contact your legislators about those bills.

I was thinking about the problems I had with a proposed amendment to the Virginia constitution, and I realized that I wrote something about this a while ago…oh, right, when I had to explain to a lawmaker that unless he wants me or someone like me opening a math class with an invocation to Kali to slay the demons of confusion, he really shouldn’t go there.

And now we’re back to the theme of empathetic imagination. We’ve seen this before: conservatives, or at least Christians, are so darn’ tootin’ sure that everyone is just like them, or that they can cow those who aren’t, that when they push through “religious liberty” and “freedom of prayer” measures, they only ever think about how good they’ll feel when praying to Jesus, and they assume – wrongly – that everybody who wants to pray to Jesus can get along. They never think about what the Jewish kid feels like, or the atheist, or, Powers forfend, the Wiccan.

And they never, ever think about how they might feel if the Wiccan was doing the praying.

You can tell, because when they do think about that, they come out in favor of  real religious liberty, the kind that the First Amendment was created to ensure.

So when necessary, remind your legislators what will happen if the microphone is in the other hand. Help them out with their empathetic imagination, because it’s a way to advance civil liberties for all of us. And besides, it’s fun. Goddess knows we have to keep our sense of humor somehow while we’re doing this, and hearing the tone of voice of a legislative assistant who is imagining a prayer to Kali for the first time ever can be just that little bit to keep us going.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Recognizing reality: women in combat

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

The only reasonable response to the fact that the armed forces are dropping their ban on women in combat positions is: It’s about damn time.

Women have been exposed to combat in various ways for 20-odd years, depending on how you count. Certainly since September 11th women have been in a war with no front lines. More importantly, they’ve been a vital asset for working with civilian women in the population. The ban on women in combat has been a polite fiction, a way of soothing peoples’ consciences at the cost of harming the careers of military women.

I agree with Hecate and Echidne that I wish we didn’t have wars and combat, and I’m sorry that anyone is fighting in them. But while we do, one of the very least things we can do is be darn well honest about what women are doing in those situations.

Of course the religious right is losing their collective minds over this, but that means they haven’t been paying attention to reality in the meantime. I’m also particularly amused that this happens just a few weeks after the Military Officers Association of America, a private organization that my dear spouse joined for the job-networking benefits after he gets out of the service, announced that the winner of its annual essay contest was a piece about how women shouldn’t be in combat. It was full of the usual essentialist tripe; something about women as the creators of life shouldn’t be in a situation of death really rubbed me the wrong way, and another part basically saying that America wouldn’t have been able to handle it if pictures of a woman’s dead body (possibly with, gasp, private parts showing!) were shown on TV made me convinced that the author hasn’t actually looked at American TV in the last 20 years.

Very little will change because of this, almost certainly nothing that your average civilian will notice. Still, it’s a step in the right direction, and it will matter to the women who have been held back because of it. So: it’s about damn time.

Now we need to fix the problems some of those servicemembers, male and female, face when their spouses aren’t recognized as spouses. DADT repeal was a good step – that was also recognizing a basic reality. Now we should treat their families on equal footing. DOMA has to go.

Posted in feminism, QUILTBAG issues

Lies and double talk, double talk and lies

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

Yesterday I made an Orwell reference (Eastasia) when talking about conservative Christians and their growing opposition to contraception. It was kind of passing comment, but it deserves its own post.

Unfortunately, I’m not the person to write that post. You might say I’m memory-challenged in this area, because I can’t remember things that happened before I was born – like when Roe v Wade occurred and nearly every church organization besides Catholics agreed that abortion was a difficult issue, but one that a woman and her doctor could handle by themselves. Fortunately, Fred Clark was there, and he has been writing about it. Here’s another piece on how Hobby Lobby and evangelical groups are trying to rewrite the past for political gain in the present:

Absurd? Sure. But once you rule out all regard for fact and memory, then there’s no avoiding the absurd. If evangelicals let their leaders get away with this “abortifacient” lie and with the Orwellian pretense that it’s not a contradiction of their past teaching, then those leaders can get away with anything.

The parade of absurdity goes on when a Catholic hospital insists that potentially viable twin fetuses couldn’t possibly be considered human beings for the purpose of a wrongful-death lawsuit.

The ones who lose in this, over and over again, are women. Period. Salon had a piece that links to a shocking study about how often pregnant women’s rights are infringed simply because they’re pregnant. Increasingly, this is done by law enforcement officials simply deciding that certain laws about children apply to fetuses – a sort of personhood-by-sherriff move. Salon describes this as an anti-abortion tactic. It’s not. It’s an anti-woman tactic. They’re not stopping abortions by pretending that pregnant women aren’t allowed to drink wine or be in a bar, they’re controlling women’s behavior. The study’s author concludes:

There is no gender-neutral way to add fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses to the Constitution without subtracting all pregnant women from the community of constitutional persons.

The double talk shows that the motivations they claim are a lie; the only truth behind it is a desire to control women.

Posted in feminism | 2 Comments

Empathetic imagination

Posted on January 25, 2013 by

I have a backlog of things I want to blog about. There’s a good reason for this: I’ve moved into the active writing phase of working on my dissertation. For the next year, give or take, other writing comes second, so I may be quieter than usual hereabouts. On the other hand, today there’s a number of things that I think are loosely related that I want to write about, so here goes:

It’s moving to hear about a politician who learns first-hand what it’s like to struggle through a certain situation, and gains empathy in the process. That’s a touching story, but it shouldn’t be a necessary one. We should be doing this kind of work, of putting ourselves in the position of those we’re thinking about and dealing with, on a regular basis. Among other things, we don’t have time for everybody to learn this first-hand.

Other politicians are seriously lacking in this empathy. They can talk about their distress when their “people are literally freezing in the winter and they’re without food and they’re without shelter and they’re without clothing,” in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, but why haven’t they been worrying about these very same bad things happening to people every day? Those others must be, in some indefinable way, not theirs. It makes me want to ask the old Christian Sunday school question: Who is your neighbor?

This is not just the lack of something, it’s also a necessary precondition to hatred. Here are two separate examples of conservative Christians who are associated in various ways with hate groups denying not only the value of empathetic imagination, but the very possibility of it: First, homophobes are incapable of imagining that someone who is straight would want to support rights for QUILTBAG folks, and second, an argument that assumes only parents and children are capable of caring for each other across generations.

Actually, I’m not anti-social for refusing to have children because I’m capable of caring about people – both older than me and younger than me – who are not my family. That’s how Social Security, and Medicare, and Medicaid, and a whole host of other things work.

I don’t care whether you call it the Golden Rule or the Rule of Three or the Law of Return or what, but the hard work of extending that kind of empathetic imagination is at the heart of how I do ethics. It’s sad to see the hypocrisy exposed in a politician who is suddenly shocked, shocked, to discover that his party doesn’t care about people who are having a hard time. It’s more revealing to notice people denying that this empathetic imagination can exist at all.

When you hear someone say that, look out – because they most certainly will not be willing to extend it to you if you once step out of their little box of “people like me.”

Posted in Uncategorized

QUILTBAG chilled

Posted on January 24, 2013 by

We’ve all heard that the Old Testament calls homosexuality an “abomination,” right? It’s the homophobes’ favorite clobber verse. One of the best responses to this is to point out that this comes in the midst of a long list of other things which were also forbidden under the laws established in Leviticus, notably the dietary restrictions of Judaism. If you actually study the material, it emerges that there are two kinds of restrictions against “forbidden” things being distinguished: one is sort of like civil law, while the other is a religious objection. Things that are religiously disallowed are described with the word translated by King James’ merry band of religious demagogues as “abomination.”

One of the strongest arguments that liberal Christians use is that since the dietary laws of ancient Judaism are no longer observed by contemporary Christians, perhaps some of those other religio-cultural restrictions ought to be reconsidered, too. Conservative Christians have been arguing against this in various ways for a long time. But now there’s a new argument I’ve never heard before:

Refrigeration.

Yup, somebody actually went there, wrote articles of incorporation, and elected himself Mayor of There.

Via Right Wing Watch, you can hear a conservative Christian arguing that refrigeration is what makes it not a sin to eat shellfish et al. anymore.

You see, conservative Christians like to argue that 1. their God is way cool because he gave his followers religious laws that were actually secretly hygiene regulations to protect them against food poisoning and 2. their certainty about why these things were demanded by their God is what allows them to split those two categories of civil and religious law into three categories: civil law, religious law that we don’t have to follow, and religious law that it is our God-given duty to impose on all our fellow citizens by any means necessary.

This is the first time I’ve heard that argument flipped around in this particular way, though. It’s probably part of the continuing struggle of these folks to find secular justifications for their religious positions. (See also: so-called intelligent design, etc.) Just for giggles, let’s follow it to its (pseudo) logical conclusion: if you could invent something that would make being queer no longer a health risk, would these Christians then say being queer was a-okay?

Never in a million years. (Until, of course, the next time that their position changes and they decide that they’ve always been at war with Eastasia, I mean, supporting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s ideals and against contraception.)

I’m writing about this not just because it’s laugh-out-loud ridiculous, but because it highlights a really evil form of hypocrisy that homophobes engage in. Homophobes and hate-peddlers create social conditions that make it hazardous to be queer and then use that as evidence that they were right all along. They do this all the time and in some really despicable ways.

Aside from all the other things that caused social scientists to shred it into conveniently toilet-paper-sized pieces, that’s something else that’s wrong with the Regnerus study. Even if it had been a well-designed study, if it found that kids raised in QUILTBAG households had adverse outcomes, that wouldn’t be some kind of truth handed down from a mountain. It would be a reflection of our current social and cultural milieu. If we denigrate certain people, maybe that makes their lives – and their kids’ lives – harder, don’t you think? And maybe if we start treating these folks like full human beings with equal civil rights, things will get better…

So actually, there is a way to “refrigerate” being queer, to turn it from something potentially hazardous to your health into just another part of daily life: stop the lying homophobes from continuing to denigrate their fellow human beings.

It’s not QUILTBAG folks who need to chill out. It’s the haters.

Posted in civil rights, QUILTBAG issues | 2 Comments

Packing up pinecones

Posted on January 18, 2013 by

Since the sun came out in force again today, I am more aware than ever of the approach of Imbolc. I’m moved to pack away the pine cones that have been my seasonal decorations since just before Yule.

pinecones

I haven’t decided what, if any, kinds of things I’ll add to my altar next. For the time being, I can’t help but think of it as a blank slate, appropriately open to inspiration as I prepare to honor my beloved Brigid, whose flame and well alike are an outpouring of creativity.

In the meantime, I’ve tried sitting at a cold altar, and the results were interesting. By not having the presence of the Element concentrated in a specific representation – especially for Air and Fire – I was challenged to experience the presence of that Element in other ways. It made me recommit to strengthening my own internal connections with each Element.

I know that for myself I want to work on those connections in part to develop my ability to call the Quarters. Whether in individual work or group ritual, I find it easy to slip into concentrating on the words, and perhaps the actions, of calling, and to neglect the internal aspect of envisioning and connecting with the Element being called. Anybody else have that problem?

I had already thought about committing to a practice of concentrating on each Element for a week’s worth of meditations, and this experience has made me more determined to do so. I’ll start that after Imbolc, I think, in part because my habits for the new year are still settling in right now. One of the ways I’m going to approach that work will be to do concentrated visualization of all the different aspects of the Element that I can think of, hoping to build up a complex, many-layered composite of diverse experiences of air (the physical thing) that then transforms into a visualization of Air, the Element. I’m hoping that if I succeed in this diverse but unified visualization, it will become a sense of the “personality” of Air that I can tap into more easily in the future.

Have others done work like this? What did you find about it?

I did find that because the presence of Earth on my altar was the same as always, my attention was more drawn to it. As I go through these weeks, I’m definitely going to use the process of “highlighting” one Element on my altar as part of building up this visualization and tying it to my practice.

Hopefully I’ll have some interesting things to share as I go through this process. But that’s for after Imbolc. I don’t want to rush the Wheel; right now we’re still in the season of Earth (by my reckoning), and as we turn towards the Sabbat, I’m finding ways that Earth and I are opening and creating space for the newness that will come. Right now, it’s packing up pinecones. What is it for you?

Photo by the blogger; if you use it, please link back.

Posted in exercises, magic, meditation | Tagged , ,

Virginia State Senator proposes bogus “religious freedom” amendment

Posted on January 15, 2013 by

Virginians, contact your state legislators to ask them to oppose SJ 287, a proposed amendment to the state constitution that is yet another semi-stealthy attempt to justify government support for Christianity.

Hemant Mehta over at the Friendly Atheist has the rundown. In short, state senator Bill Stanley (R-Glade Hill) is convinced that not allowing people to pray in public is the root of “moral decay.” Never mind that people are allowed to pray in public – yes, including at schools – in exactly the way his proposed amendment purports to “clarify.” He’s convinced that taking God out of school and government meetings is why things are going to hell in a handbasket, so by golly, he’s going to clarify that right. And that’ll fix things.

At best, this language will be meaningless, because the rights “clarified” are already protected. At worst, this language will be interpreted, as he intends it to be, to support and defend sectarian government prayer and to encourage established prayer in schools, which people who are interested in real religious freedom (you know, the kind that applies to everyone, not just Christians intent on pushing their religion on others) will have to fight in court, which will cost Virginia money and be pointless.

The other potential land mine hidden in this text is a provision “that no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his religious beliefs.” Three guesses what that is all about, and the first two don’t count: evolution. Allowing kids to opt out of lessons because they don’t believe in them is a terrible idea. Evolution is central to modern biology, and you can’t get a meaningful science education at the high school level without facing the science of evolution.

(By the way, don’t think this will stop at the science classroom. A Fox News contributor recently raised red flags about the distributive property in mathematics. He was concerned that this was Marxism in disguise, you know, redistributing the wealth. It’s actually just a basic feature of how arithmetic and algebra work, but when did facts ever stop these folks?)

You can read the entire text of the bill here. Contact your legislator here.

This is what I wrote to my legislators. If you’re not clergy, you might take that line out.

I urge you to oppose SJ 287 because this proposed amendment to Virginia’s constitution does not actually do more to protect religious freedom; on the contrary, it is an attempt to try to inappropriately insert Christianity into government and school business.

The amendment purports to protect the right to pray; this right is already protected by our national and state constitutions and established case law. The amendment also proposes “that no student shall be compelled to perform or participate in academic assignments or educational presentations that violate his religious beliefs,” a suggestion which could seriously undermine Virginia’s efforts to educate its population in science as necessary in order to succeed in today’s economy.

As a clergyperson, I take freedom of religion extremely seriously. This bill is not a genuine attempt to ensure freedom of religion to all in the spirit of Thomas Jefferson’s original statute; it is an attempt to justify government promotion of Christianity, and that is the opposite of freedom of religion. Please vote against this proposed amendment at every opportunity.

Posted in religious freedom | 3 Comments

Dupont Henge today

Posted on January 14, 2013 by

The Express had a little article on Friday saying that today at 12:30 the sun will shine directly down the tunnel of Dupont Circle’s south entrance. Anybody want to go see?

I should have kept a copy of the article, because now I can’t find it online. From what I recall, an attentive Metro rider noticed this phenomenon one day and then calculated when it would happen again – once on either side of the winter solstice, it turns out. He went to the occurrence in November to confirm his calculations, and it worked.

The article quoted him as saying a couple of interesting things about how observing natural phenomena like this has been linked with seasonal celebrations. For me, it was neat to see people discussing that kind of awareness of how we shape our relationship with the natural world in a non-Pagan context.

Posted in nature | 1 Comment