Civil Commotion

The ink was scarcely dry on Joe Biden’s executive order protecting LGBTQ than Godly Folk were up in arms. Albert the Pious claimed an unconstitutional affront to his religious freedom, and Tony Perkins warned that schools would soon demand that boys and girls shower together.

I mean … really: Are these guys that stupid? The huff-and-puff reminded me of a famous passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s The Antichrist:

Christianity is the revolt of everything that creeps on the ground against everything that walks upright. The gospel of the lowly lowers.  

§ 43

It takes a lot of subterranean malice to be a good Christian.

What do you know? Some local yahoo has hung a Nazi flag from a tree on his property.

A woman says she’s scared for her life after her landlord hung a Nazi flag near her trailer across from the Wakefield community.

The flag is on private property and overnight someone scaled the tree and blacked out the swastika, but many in the area say they’re still concerned since another controversial symbol remains nearby.

“It’s a sad state of affairs,” said Tamera Hayes.

Well, you know, the First Amendment, et cetera, et cetera. Even so, somebody covered the blacked-out swastika with a Confederate battle flag, and then the entire mess was covered with an American flag. So far as I know it’s all gone now — but the last I heard was almost 24-hours ago; the flag wars may be continuing.

Seriously, I think the man’s Nazi flag should hang undisturbed. It’s not going to change anybody’s mind, and it’s like a giant, blinking-neon sign that warns, “AN ASSHOLE LIVES HERE.” That’s a good thing to know.

Four years of Trumpism trained Tony Perkins to abject sycophancy, and he hasn’t yet rediscovered how to make sense when he is in opposition.

Sadly, the Biden administration is planning to go much further in its assault on biological reality and is expected to order schools to abolish girls’ sports and force boys and girls to use the same showers and locker rooms, and maybe even bunk together on school trips.

The party that claims to be the party of science is advancing policies on day one that deny reality.

Who could have foreseen that an executive order prohibiting LGBTQ discrimination could have such consequences? Not me.

This is all, of course, too ridiculous to bother discussing; Perkins has gone off to La-La Land. Unfortunately, much of the Evangelical Right lives in the same dark fever swamp, and will take him seriously. Further, because they are probably anxious anyhow now that the First Felon has been dismissed, this kind of inflamed rhetoric is likely to become the new-normal.

Never forget: Y’all are no damn good, and only the undeserved mercy of an invisible, supernatural being, can save you from a deserved eternity of torture.

The other possibility is that the Christian narrative exploits loonies.

Dr. Jerry Coyne takes-up today an effort to ‘cancel’ Ronald Fisher, a prominent biologist who favored some ideas birthed in the eugenics movement.

Unfortunately, Fisher was also an exponent of eugenics, and for this he’s recently starting to get canceled. Various organizations, like the Society for the Study of Evolution and the American Statistical Association, have taken his name off awards, and Fisher’s old University of Cambridge college, Gonville and Caius, removed their “Fisher window” (a stained glass window honoring Fisher’s statistical achievements) from their Hall last year. Further disapprobation is in store as well.

I’m never certain what is meant when people talk about, and condemn, eugenics.

It was once a commonplace here in the south, for instance, to summarily sterilize black women held in public custody, penal or otherwise, and the specific purpose was to minimize the birth of black children. That seems to be within the meaning of eugenics, and I’m sure we can all agree that it’s wrong. But, for centuries, matchmakers coupled young people on the basis of appearance, smarts, proclivities (and probably still do) — and I read a while back that matchmakers are enjoying a sort of revival. Doesn’t that fall under the rubric of eugenics, too?

Is it eugenics, and odious, to discourage a daughter from marrying into a family with a documented congenital illness, physical or mental?

There is a good deal of talk that goes around that may rightly be described at least as eugenics-sympathetic, and nobody thinks or says much about it. Nor is it necessarily malicious in intent; no parent, for instance, should be expected to apologize for being uneasy about the prospect of a daughter marrying into a family with a history of a serious congenital illness.

I’m only thinking out loud here, but it appears to be the case that a relatively narrow range of offensive behaviors has been extrapolated to condemn a commonplace, and entirely reasonable, subset of day-to-day thought. Surely the subject would benefit by identifying just what we mean when we say ‘eugenics.’