http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK6xgNTVtbo

So, theocracy then, is it? The Rule of the Bible vs. the rule of law? You do realize that that’s Sharia, only, you know, using a different book, right?

Hat tip Right Wing Watch.org.

Via the UK’s Mirror:

Andy Kelso, 64, claimed he received a message from God to spread the word of The King of rock ’n’ roll.

So he ditched his dog collar for a white jewelled jumpsuit and now belts out Elvis classics to packed audiences in pubs and clubs – and even churches.

[...]
He quit as Reverend at Christ Church in Matchborough, Redditch, Worcestershire, last year after more than a quarter of a century as a Church of England vicar.

But he says his former congregation are fans of his act.

Andy said: “I recently went to a care home where most of the patients had dementia.

“I was wondering how I would go down but as soon as I appeared as Elvis and started singing, the residents came alive and started singing and dancing.

“It was amazing and very humbling.

Yes, that’s all very interesting, but what’s more interesting is that we have proof of Elvis’ existence. The way you’re touching people’s lives now, through Elvis, is real. It’s true. And that’s a far more worthy profession, if you ask me.

The bit at the end of this article about Elvis “never stopping believing in Christianity” despite leaving the church is amusing, since everyone seems to want to claim The King as their own.

I am also very intolerant of intolerance and bigotry — I really hope that fact bleeds through, because it’s pretty much at the core of my character. I’ve dressed down co-workers and acquaintances for ridiculous bits of bigotry in the past, even at potential personal cost. Two specific incidents spring to mind immediately: “that’s so gay!” used to refer to something the woman didn’t like, and “what does WIFE stand for? Washing, ironing, fucking, et cetera!” from a friend’s newly-introduced male fiancee. In both cases, I tried to register disapproval in such a way that it was both about their words being unacceptable generally, and because I was personally offended. In the latter case, my friend — let’s call her Laura, which is neither her name nor initial — and others were present, and she did not chime in, so the encounter ended effectively immediately after I registered my disapproval. The conversation moved on from there.

I am lucky that, in Laura’s case, the bigot did not escalate, causing problems between them and a rift in our respective friendships. It turns out that latter encounter might have done some unintentional splash damage to Laura. If I had stopped and thought about it a little longer, I might have realized that I was putting her in a tough spot — something that seems rather obvious in hindsight, actually, given the circumstances.

My hot head bled through onto the internet recently on this thread at Stephanie’s, exposing a few gaps in my understanding of a commonly-used phrase, “white knighting”. Those gaps owe almost completely to there being two definitions at play here. The first and the one I thought most commonly used was created on the internet by anti-feminist types for the purposes of shaming any man attempting to stand up for women, declaring that they simply wanted to get into their pants (e.g. doing it “for the cookie”, the pat on the head, or literally for sex). The other has apparently existed in feminist theory since the 60s, calling a white knight someone who swoops in to defend a woman while simultaneously disregarding their situation, whether they needed or wanted help, and whether they were particularly inclined to even have that fight at that exact moment.

Erasmus asked Giliell why sometimes the women who were present didn’t react well to his speaking up about sexist behaviour. Giliell said:

I think the problem you have here is “white knighting”
It can become pretty condescending pretty quickly although you never notice. You can quickly come off as knowing better what women feel than they themselves.
That’s why I said “casually”.
But I admit that it’s not easy and I can’t give you a recipe for all situations and contexts. Personally I’d say you’re doing it right if I get the impression that you would back me up if I chose to get into that topic, but I’d be pissed off if came off as fighting the fightfor me.

Through some more conversation, I made a declaration, because I’m personally tired of seeing bigoted nonsense slide in casual conversation:

Accusations of white knighting be damned, I’m sick of hearing about these blow-ups over and over. If I’m present, and I hear something sexist and recognize it in realtime, I’m saying something about it. If someone thinks I’m doing it to get into their pants, they’re wrong. I’m doing it to make an ordinary situation extraordinary, so that the next time someone comes along demanding extraordinary evidence for something otherwise ordinary, I can provide it.

I don’t want to fight others’ fights when that help isn’t requested, but I want to have the fights that I personally want to have, for my own reasons, when I want to have them. If I take someone on for saying something ridiculous, my modus operandi is to expect people to dogpile on me, not to join me. That way I’m pleasantly surprised, and I’m not also dragging people into fights they don’t want to have. So before this whole conversation, I figured if I’m picking a fight, I’m the one involved in it by default, not others.

The fact that I was misconstruing the white-knighting to mean what the feminist backlash brigade has made it mean, is secondary here. I realize my error shortly, don’t worry.

Giliell points that fact out to me, and also explains why going into full-out attack mode isn’t always the best choice:

Let’s just assume that we’re in such a situation. We’re in mixed company, chances are good that I’m the only woman, or one of a minority of women.
Some guy, some popular guy in this group makes a sexist remark.
Now I have to calculate my options quickly: Do I let it slide because I’m afraid of the backlash? Do I confront him?
You’ve been faster than me and you remark: “Duh, that’s sexist bullshit.”
Now my sitution has changed. I know that should I choose to confront him, I’m not going to be attacked by every other person in this group, I know I have an ally. Yeah, warm tickling in my toes. Maybe I’ll still let it slide, because it’s been a long day and I’m exhausted, maybe I’ve been arguing some point or other all day long and actually just want to have a gin tonic and some chatter and after all I’m not the fucking feminist action squad with a purple light on my head who has to turn up each and every time.
But should you insist to go on, to carry on the fight on my behalf, you’re forcing the topic on me.
Again, it’s not about “saying something”, but about what you say and how you say it.

Further, with inline blockquoting of my response:

When I pick my battles — and I often pick them poorly — I don’t expect others to be forced into acting on my behalf, I often expect people to gang up on me instead.

Yeah, but it’s inadvertedly going to happen.
Let’s remain in our little fictional meeting. You’ve made your casual comment and I think “thanks Jason for noticing. Isn’t it exhausting? I should say something but I really, really don’t want to have this conversation again.”
It can end there. Maybe later when everybody goes home I’ll remember to acknowledge this to you.
But let’s say that instead of making a casual comment, which has all the positive effects you mention, like me feeling more comfortable and welcome, like showing the dudez that this is not acceptable and so on, and letting me choose to go for confrontation or not, you start a fully fledged attack. Now, since the topic is sexism and misogyny I will of course be drawn into it, being the only woman present. It’s a situation I can’t win. Either I enter the fight, which means that you guys just decided what I have to do and what not with my time and energy, or I back off and have a guy “fix it for me”, sending out all the wrong signals in every direction.

So the conclusion I drew from this conversation is that general sexism and even explicit sexism can be confronted without appearance of white-knighting pretty easily — and even by means of my quick “dude, that’s sexist bullshit” — without turning the fight nuclear and doing splash damage to the other participants in the conversation. In cases where the sexism is specifically targeted at an individual, try to take cues from them before defending them. In some cases leaping to their defense is merited and wanted, but in others it’s not. If they’d rather walk away from the conversation, that’s their prerogative, and my going on the offensive offers them with a poor choice: either let me defend them, thus get “white-knighted” (by the proper definition), or have that fight then and there, resulting in my having inadvertently curtailed their option to let it slide or leave the conversation altogether.

The best option, then, appears to be to register disapproval and try to have the conversation move on from there. You make it known that the behaviour isn’t welcome in the conversation without turning it into a fight. If the bigot then escalates, you’re significantly less responsible for what happens from then on — the proximally-aggrieved parties are still free to take their leave to find a drink or take the fight to this shitheel at their discretion, and so are you.

If you’re in a group made up of none of the underprivileged group in question, though, and you don’t speak up, you’re doing nothing to correct the underlying problem. You can be damn well certain that if I’m in a situation where I’m “one of the guys” and the topic of conversation turns rampantly sexist, I’m saying something, even if that means I won’t get invited back to that particular circle in the future. Because, you know, I’ll learn to live with myself somehow without their camaraderie.

I will note, though, that the specific case of Laura’s fiancee making that comment should have been taken as a warning sign — their marriage apparently ended a few months after it had happened, with his having cheated on her, by some accounts repeatedly. Clearly he was not the most enlightened of chaps. I’m sad that my attempt at enlightening him failed so miserably, and that it ended in undue hardship for Laura, but I suspect my friends and I probably couldn’t have handled the tough situation any better than we had managed on that day. Even with hindsight, there weren’t a lot of good options. Though we’ve since drifted apart, if I could have successfully parlayed a full-out assault into less overall pain for my friend even at the cost of ending our friendship prematurely, it still wouldn’t have been the right thing to do right then.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj22DbRoAPM

“Dude, he’s going in!” “Stick to the plan!!”

Except it also seems to be bringing all the asshats out of the woodwork with their religiously-motivated bigotry. And this guy, Pastor Charles L. Worley of Providence Road Baptist Church in North Carolina, gets a gold star.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2n7vSPwhSU

While one pastor calls gay rights akin to Hitler, another is perfectly willing to unabashedly suggest making gay concentration camps. How completely rational. Every value you exhort in this video, I’m aginn’ it, and you personally make me pukin’ sick. You and your three or four “amen” sycophants.

Hat tip to, well, everyone bringing this video up pretty well everywhere.

One question asked at the DC panel today at the Kapow comic convention in London, was about DC co-publisher Dan DiDio’s interview with The Advocate. Specifically over the decision not to change any character’s sexual orientation when relaunching the DC Universe. At the time Dan stated they would introduce new LGBT characters rather than switch orientation, but the question asked why DC would switch race, size, age, all sorts of identifying features, but not orientation.

Surprisingly, Dan stated that they had changed DC’s policy in this regard. And they ae about to reintroduce a previously existing DC character who was previously straight and now will be “one of our most prominent gay characters.”

As Senior VP Sales Bob Wayne explained, just like the President of the United States, the co-publisher’s policy on this “has evolved.”

Fox News is reporting this as “Could Superman be gay?”

I seriously doubt that, for a number of reasons. One of which is cynicism — why make your flagship character less likeable to the less tolerant crowd who can’t empathize with someone who’s a straight white male, and have to retcon Lois Lane, one of their only moderately strong woman characters ever, out of the picture? So it’ll be someone less prominent than Superman, but hopefully still A-string. If I have to find out that their most prominent gay hero is going to be Booster Gold, someone on the same tier as Northstar, I’ll be pissed.

I’m betting it will be Batman. And it’ll probably be that he’s bi, given his proclivities for shacking up with twenty-year-old “wards” and knowing his previous issues with relationships with women. That wouldn’t be a bad pick, honestly.

Seriously though, I’m hard-pressed to think of an A-list superhero who’s been single and at least mostly-unresponsive to female advances. I suppose anyone could be feigning interest to stay in the closet, though.

Someone is always wrong on the Internet. The idea that the most free-wheeling part of the Internet–blogs–would be a place where conflict is resolved seems laughable. The detachment of argument from social cues normally used to moderate our conversations combined with the intentional sloughing off of civil norms means that the only resolution that happens here might be the screen resolution of your computer. It would be easy to say that the Internet is where conflict is born, not resolved.

But that would miss an important point.

Almost all the conflicts I’ve observed in this milieu are problems that were already out there somewhere but in many cases hidden and thus unacknowledged. We can ask, if a conflict resides latent in meatspace, does it make a noise? And the answer is:

Go find out what the answer is.

Or just head over to tell him that he’s wrong.

Intended to restore order and settle the three-month-old student crisis, Bill 78 requires protest organizers to provide eight hours of warning for events, including a detailed itinerary, or be subject to heavy fines running into the thousands of dollars.

The Liberal government’s legal solution to its tuition hike conflict has had the opposite effect, fuelling the growing student movement.

Yesterday has a good example of how it looks like a systemic attempt to ratchet up the violence by the anti-protester side: police pepper-spraying some apparently paying customers at a bar patio. What set them off? Evidently, one of the patrons insulted the jack-booted thugs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGGVPZN9Jjw

So the problem is that students are striking, and the intended effect of the gigantic tuition hike — more money for the government — is actually having the exact opposite effect, drying up the revenue stream. What’s with the intentional escalation, then? Bill 78 couldn’t do anything even remotely like helping!

What might help, on the other hand, is eliminating tuition altogether, paying for that education via a capital gains tax. Quebec currently has a 0% rate of tax on capital gains. People making money from money are not taxed, but people trying to obtain an education are. This ties in quite well with my post on the Experience Privilege.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7A2AXX56Lk

The icing on the cake, I think, is when he says that gays can’t reproduce, so they must “recruit”. Like being a minority and trying to get equality is a numbers game — that they’re fighting for rights to marry one another (and have all the same legal rights as heterosexual married couples), just so that they can more effectively form two-person recruitment cells or something. The very presence of a pair of gay men in your neighborhood will cause further gayness! Maybe they’ll go door-to-door asking “have you heard the good news about buttsex?” Or something.

I can’t even try to argue this seriously. There’s no “there” there.

The decision means Lahey, a former bishop of Antigonish, can no longer work as a cleric nor preside at any religious services or sacraments.

“This decision reminds all of us of the serious harms that come from all forms of pornography, especially child pornography,” Antigonish Bishop Brian Joseph Dunn said in a statement.

“It also means that this action concludes both the criminal and canonical processes that are connected with this matter.”

Emphasis mine. I guess we’re lucky they didn’t also try to implicate Teh Gay Menace at the same time somehow!

That’s my big problem with this whole wagon-circling thing the Catholic church always does every time one of their clergy is caught with their pants down and their hands in some kid’s trousers. It took them three years for the church to impose any kind of earthly penalty outside the secular ones, after a court of law convicted him on the evidence — and their big penalty is telling him “you’re no longer allowed to perform our crazy rituals”. After three years of being allowed to continue performing those same crazy rituals. That’s it.

What’s more, I’m sure he’ll just be expected to say a prayer or two, and that’ll make things right with God. He wasn’t excommunicated from the religion, like those doctors who perform abortions to save the life of the mother when the fetus was medically unviable anyway. He wasn’t made into a teachable moment to other priests about the actual problems with child pornography and child sexual abuse. And when they actually did do something, they even had to stick that shiv in to make it about some larger problem they have with ordinary society, even though the link is tenuous at best.

The problem with child porn is not that porn itself is necessarily bad. It is that there is a power imbalance, and any consent obtained from the child (if the molesters even bothered with those pretenses!) is therefore tainted. There’s a reason we set an age limit on consent — because it takes a certain level of maturity to reach fully-informed consent and there are drastic consequences for the victim if they are not that mature.

The likelihood that this event will prevent other religious nutters who also happen to be kiddy-fiddlers from working their way into positions where they have the trust of parents to be around their children? I’d place it at very nearly zero.