Things I Never Thought I'd Hear Part 521

[omorka]

Pro-Obama bluegrass. I kid you not.

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It seems to me as if the McCain campaign is running a Discworld play. They're trying to change the narrative, rather than the reality on the ground, in the belief that changing the story will affect reality for them. Now, I'm a postmodernist and a witch; I have a certain amount of sympathy for the idea that the meaning does affect the expression, and changing the former can change the latter. But you have to actually do the work on the material plane, too. You can do all the prosperity spells you want, but if you don't show up to work, you still won't get paid.

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Does anyone else think it's ironic that the LDS church is one of the primary forces pushing Prop 8 in California so hard? Or are they figuring this is karmic payback, so to speak? The government made them give up their religious beliefs about plural marriage to become a state, so they're angry that anyone else gets to have a definition of marriage that might include two women? It's especially piquant when the NeoPentcostal fundies start arguing that gay marriage is morally equivalent to polygamy. (Just once, when one of them does that, I want someone to ask them on camera if that means that they think the Biblical patriarchs and kings were sinners.)

Comments

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

No, it is not ironic.

The LDS church historically has been VERY prejudiced; I learned recently that, in their original dogma, the innate sinfulness of a soul determined what color they would be born as. (That was back in Joseph Smith's days, bear in mind.) This isn't payback- this is bigotry against homosexuality, plain and simple.

(And the answer is, yes, David and Solomon were indeed sinners- that's why David's older sons ended up getting killed and why Israel was permanently divided after Solomon's death. Solomon in particular is held up as an example of how a king was punished for "ungodly behavior".)

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Er . . . the thing about the skin color isn't a secret recently discovered at all; that's right there in the sacred texts. Anyone who read them (and I would devoutly hope that anyone who wanted to criticize the LDS has read at least the Book of Mormon) already knows that about their history, and when their head prophet declared that that no longer held. That sort of religious faux-justification for racism is not that unusual for American Christian sects; look at the story of Ham that Southern Baptists and other US Protestants used to tell. I have a hard time seeing the LDS version as any more bigoted than its time demanded of it. Doesn't justify it, of course, but people largely don't blame the Baptist churches for supporting slavery anymore; singling out the LDS on that front seems a little odd.

[awbryan.livejournal.com]

Well, given their limited budget and even more limited ground operation, manipulation of narrativium is about all the McCain campaign has left at this point. Narrativium is a much cheaper way to get his supporters to the polls and convince undecideds than a thousand field offices.

Too bad he just doesn't have enough supporters even with undecideds for that to work. It's like Bush the Lesser trying to Discworld his way into being a great but misunderstood president -- there's not enough there there. On Roundworld, narrativium needs a substrate to work from.

(This is my primary problem with PoMo as an all-encompassing philosophy, btw -- most of its theorists seem to think it's 100% true all the time, which taken to its logical end leads to delusions that you can wish away gravity, falling stock values, and "THE math" of the 2006 election results.)

The further irony on Prop 8 is that the old proto-Hebrew patriarchs were undoubtedly where the LDS got the idea for polygamy in the first place. But don't worry, it's all part of the programming that says that How Great-Grandma Lived Is The Only True Way To Live, And Has Been For All Eternity. Why the LDS tries to tell other states what to do when they have one all to themselves mystifies me. Don't like it? Move to Utah!

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

I didn't mean it had just been discovered, I meant I had just discovered it.

And yes, in general I believe the Mormon church as a whole is more prejudiced than the average- prejudiced against women, prejudiced against non-Mormons in general, prejudiced against people moving into Mormon-dominant towns from Outside. Unlike the Baptists, though, the LDS are unified and generally disciplined- which is why we are able to point to the Mormons on Prop. 8 clearly, where we couldn't point to any church in particular for, say, segregationism.

[redneckgaijin.livejournal.com]

On Discworld, Bush would likely have been doomed to failure, or at least anonymity; he's the eldest of three brothers.

[quantumduck.livejournal.com]

High highly charged political debate over Prop 8 on The Unofficial Apple Weblog had great examples of several people insisting that the Bible defined marriage as being between one man and one woman. These same people were able to quote scripture to defend other views too, so it's not like they hadn't cracked the book at SOME point.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

I think it's pretty well established that we can point to the Southern Baptists, per se, for large chunks of segregationism. That's not to say that other churches weren't also complicit - clearly they were - but there's a lot that can be laid at their feet.

The LDS is an authoritarian lot, to be sure. But I wouldn't pick them out as being any worse than a dozen other non-NeoPentecostal Fundamentalist Protestant churches (despite them not being, technically, fundamentalist or Protestant). Having been the secretly-heretical daughter of a Catholic and a Lutheran in Baptist Country, I can attest that you don't have to be that well organized to make it clear that Outsiders are Not Welcome.

[omorka.livejournal.com]

Well, to be fair, it's the case that the Big J was quoted as saying that a true marriage is between one man and one woman, but that's a Greco-Roman idea, not a Hebrew one. Later on in one of the Pseudo-Pauline epistles, the author has to explain that a deacon must be the husband of only one wife, so it's not as if it was universal even after the J-man's untimely demise.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Man, couldn't they come up with any more lyrics than that? I'll see you, and raise you Obama mariachi (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fd-MVU4vtU) and Obama zydeco (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLvgwHGlpdQ).