Pronouns are a big deal for transgendered people. Calling a trans man (female to Male) ‘she’ is at best misinformed and at worst purposefully hurtful and can be a very painful thing. Calling a non-binary ‘he’ or ‘she’ is just as inaccurate, which brings up another problem- the English language isn’t equipped for gender neutrality.

They go on to discuss several options for more appropriate pronouns, and the pros and cons of each. It’s a very insightful and thorough post, while still being concise and understandable. The post title sums it up well in that it is both “an explanation and a request” (for respectful behavior), which is why I think it’s so important to pass this on to my readers — especially those of you who don’t usually encounter, and so probably don’t spend much time thinking about, gender identity issues. It’s definitely worth your time. What are you waiting for — read it!

A perfect example of what I’m talking about is Obama’s meeting with House Republicans at their retreat in Baltimore last week. If you’re the sort of person who reads this blog regularly, you’ve probably at least heard about this if not seen it. I finally sat down and watched the video all the way through, and I’m still in awe — of Obama especially, but really of everyone. It was an awesome thing to do. Everyone was very civil — the Republicans had time to explain their questions fully and did so in a way that was earnest and not belligerent, Obama answered with real details and arguments rather than talking points and catchphrases. This is a great example what a real political dialogue can look like. Could we please have more? Lots more?

If you haven’t watched it yet, I’ll make it easy for you. Here’s the meatiest part, the Q&A session (via C-SPAN).

Lately GMH has been making me sad, but not quite for the usual reason. Here are a few recent, poignant examples of this depressing flavor of “inspirational.” All the bold and extra spacing is original, from the site.

Last Sunday, my dad was at a church service in Austin, TX. An obviously homeless man sat next to him in the pew.

During the offering, the man put $2 into the basket.

Selflessness GMH.

That’s right, we’re supposed to be hopeful about humanity because a man who really couldn’t afford it somehow scraped together some money to give to a church. Aren’t churches supposed to be helping the poor, not taking their money? I don’t know what it means to be “obviously homeless,” but I assume it means he appeared unwashed, with ragged or dirty clothes, and maybe seemed noticeably in need of medical or dental care. I’m pretty sure he could have put those couple dollars to better use at a laundromat, or Goodwill, or a grocery store. What’s the great thing the church is going to do with it — buy some new hymnals? Send some solar-powered audio Bibles to Haiti? Best case scenario, they put it towards a soup kitchen, a shelter, or other resources for the neediest in society. I think Jesus would want this man to keep his two dollars, this week and every week, at least until he is able to get his own life back on track. (Or for him to give away as much money to the church as possible, so God would make him rich. Either way.)

Today, the pastor of my church anounced that his 19-year-old daughter was pregnant out of wed-lock.

As the pastor’s wife began to cry, a little boy ran up to her and hugged her saying, “It’s okay! Babies are the best thing in the world, no matter what.” GMH

I’m sorry, no. It does not give me hope to think that this 19-year-old girl — just getting started with adulthood and figuring out what life she wants for herself — is going to be putting her life on hold indefinitely to raise a child she is probably nowhere near ready to care for, even if she had a stable partner to help, which it sounds like she doesn’t. It does not give me hope to think of the child who will grow up around grandparents (and presumably also parent/s) who were sorrowful and ashamed when they anticipated the baby’s birth, rather than proud and eager to move forward into a new and exciting part of their lives. Without further details, I am also left to assume that this girl probably missed out on anything resembling comprehensive sex education, at home or at school, all in the name of purity and devoutness. I am left to assume that if she had been more informed about how babies are made and not made, this whole thing could have been avoided. Look, I like babies too. Babies are great. But at some point we have to admit that being pregnant is not an awesome development for every female person at every point in time. Pretending otherwise is just sad.

I recently rung up a young boy and his mother. When he saw me at the register, wearing a hijab, he grinned broadly at me. As they were walking away afterwards, he tugged on his mom’s sleeve and said,

“Did you see her, ma? She’s gorgeous! I bet that’s why she’s all covered up.”

He GMH.

This anecdote fails to give me hope for precisely the reason it seems to give hope to others: this little boy is exactly right. I wouldn’t stop a woman from wearing a hijab if she really wanted to; I appreciate the importance of cultural history and tradition in some people’s lives. For some, the hijab is basically just a form of traditional dress, so who cares about where it came from. But it is important to remember that the origins of the tradition are pretty suspicious from a gender equality standpoint. There is no clear commandment in the Koran that women must cover themselves in precisely this way. The commonly cited passages sound more like suggestions, and are not specific. An ultimately more revealing passage can be found in the hadiths: “O Allah’s Apostle! I wish you ordered your wives to cover themselves from the men because good and bad ones talk to them.” Yes, by request rather than by divine order, these women (well, at least Muhammad’s wives) must be covered (in some way or other) because they are getting nonzero attention from men, and this ought to be stopped. That is the philosophy behind this tradition. So yes, it would seem that you are all covered up because you are too gorgeous to be seen by men around you. It’s nice that a little boy thought you looked pretty even though you were dressed differently than most of the people he saw in your store, but his comment is so emblematic of a larger problem that it doesn’t give me hope, it takes some of my hope away.

Dear Prudie,
I have a marketing problem. It seems that since the economy has taken a downward slide, many of my friends and customers have turned to enthusiastically selling multilevel marketing products. I find that I am getting pitched every time we meet for lunch, go shopping, or have a cocktail. I have been presented with energy drinks, vitamins, phone services, and travel companies, to name a few. I have also been told by some of my customers that if I don’t support them in their new business venture, I can plan on not getting any future business from them. I believe these people are being taken advantage of and their excitement is only temporary, as they are riding the high of what was promised to them for potential earnings. How can I tell my friends and customers that I do not support multilevel marketing schemes and I don’t want to hear about their newest business opportunity?

—Please Stop the MLM Madness

Multi-level marketing schemes are ones where you get recruited to sell a product — it could be something specific, like Herbalife which sells vitamins and herbal “supplements,” or a virtual smorgasbord of different things, like Amway/Quixtar. This is presented as a great opportunity because you can “be your own boss,” and the like. Not only are you a salesperson for this business, earning commissions on your sales, but the person who recruited you gets commissions on your sales. And the person who recruited that person gets commissions on the sales of the people they personally recruited, and all of those people’s recruits (including you). And so on. If you recruit people, they’re sure to recruit others, who will recruit still more, and you too can make a fortune! So goes the claim.

Of course, it’s nonsense. Not only is it impractical — because the products are typically overpriced and are easily beaten in value by something your potential customers would find at the mall before they call you up about it — it’s also nonsensical. It’s different in a tiny technicality from a pyramid scheme (no commissions on recruitment, only on sale of products) but it’s doomed to fail for the same reason. There just aren’t enough people on the planet to sustain it in a way that’ll be profitable. Profitable for you, I mean. This whole thing is plenty profitable for the people that start these outfits, because they’re churning out these cheap silly products for you to buy for your inventory at marked-up rates (and then fail at selling to your friends and family at even more marked-up rates).

Bottom line: this is not a good idea. It may look good on paper, but it is ultimately a false promise. A tiny fraction of people participating in multi-level marketing turn a profit from sales, and an even tinier fraction of them quit their day job and make a fortune off it. The economy has been hard enough on everyone as it is. Don’t take it as an opportunity to throw even more of your money away. And remember that it’s not just yourself you’d be putting at risk, it’s the people you’ll be pressured to rope in with you, and in particular — as this letter reminds us — the friends and family you’ll be putting in a really difficult situation.

Anyhow, Prudie answers:

Dear Madness,
With your friends, you need to say you wish them the best, but like everyone else, you’re on a tight budget and simply can’t purchase these items from them. If they press you, say you’re being approached all the time, and you’ve just had to make a blanket decision in order to keep yourself from going broke. As for your clients, I’m assuming you actually provide a useful and necessary service to them. How nice that they want to exploit that to coerce you into buying useless and unnecessary products. It’s up to you to decide if a firm refusal is the best way to go, or if being more flexible would be better for you. If it’s the former, explain to them you understand how tough it is out there, but you hope to keep them as customers because they value what you offer, and that one way you keep your prices competitive is not going off your budget. If it’s the latter, you can consider buying their junk a cost of doing business. But before you sign up, explain that you are able to spend only a specific amount of money and will not go beyond that.

—Prudie

I’m sorry that anyone might have to set aside a budget for playing along with a scam, but I agree with Prudence here that it might be the best thing for business if you can keep your involvement limited. Limits are really the key with this kind of stuff! Don’t let yourself get sucked in. For a lot more information about MLM, including hard numbers such as income statistics, and a bunch of citations, please take a look at Brian Dunning’s Skeptoid episode from last October. It’s great! You might also be interested in Russell Glasser’s site, The Perils of Amway, which has two epic personal accounts of individuals who were involved with Amway but found their ways out.

I couldn’t find any explicit explanation of the name on their site, but I assume their intention is to imply that their work is the “next chapter,” as it were, of the “Acts of the Apostles” (or the “Acts of the Holy Spirit,” whatever you prefer to call it). Their About section says that “Acts 29 Network exists to start churches that plant churches.” They go on to say that their intention is “to plant 1,000 new churches in the next 10 years.” (That’s one new church about every three and a half days, so… good choice not to have a starting date prominently displayed. Good luck with that!) The page explaining their doctrine says that they are “first Christians, second Evangelicals, third Missional, and fourth Reformed.”

Well, okay, so what does this doctrine actually say? Most of it is pretty straightforward. I did like the line: “First, we are Christians which distinguishes us from other world religions and cults.” Heh. Okay, if you say so. As Evangelicals they “believe the Bible to be the inspired, the only infallible, authoritative Word of God,” and you already know what I think about that subject. I’m curious which parts of the Bible they’re choosing to care about when they say that, as Missionals, they “believe that our local churches must be faithful to the content of unchanging Biblical doctrine,” and I also wonder how their churches can do that and simultaneously “be faithful to the continually changing context of the culture(s) in which they minister.” All the bullet points under the list for being Reformed sound pretty traditional to me; some other time I’ll look into what the term means in this context.

Of perhaps more note are the things which Act 29 Network does not endorse. There is a long list.

For example, they write, “We are not fundamentalists who retreat from cultural involvement and transformation, but rather missionaries faithful both to the content of Scripture and context of ministry.” They also write, “We are not liberals who embrace culture without discernment and compromise the distinctives of the gospel, but rather Christians who believe the truths of the Bible are eternal and therefore fitting for every time, place, and people.” (Aside: note the implication that “liberal” and “Christian” are mutually exclusive… also, that liberals don’t use “discernment.”)

First of all, I’m not sure I would say that fundamentalism is generally known for advocating retreat from attempts to transform culture. But even if we take that for granted, what exactly does it mean when they say they’ll be faithful to the context of ministry, if they think there is one set of rules for everyone at every time in every place? It sure sounds like they respect cultural differences, but they have two distinct bullet points in this list proclaiming that they are not “relativists.” I guess they remain faithful to the context of ministry by telling people to change only in the specific ways they need to. But they’re not fundamentalists! They just think the Bible has only one set of truths which absolutely everyone ought to live by!

They also have a statement called Acts 29 and Alcohol [PDF] which lists vomiting as among one of many sins resulting from drunkenness (citing three verses, none of which seem to really say that it’s a sin, just that it’s nasty). I guess you’re just out of luck if you get the flu or food poisoning!

But my favorite thing that Acts 29 Network doesn’t like, other than fundamentalists, liberals, and vomit, is egalitarianism. Yeah, that totally crazy notion that people should be treated as equals, with the same rights. In a blockquote so you can’t miss it:

We are not egalitarians and do believe that men should head their homes and male elders/pastors should lead their churches with masculine love like Jesus Christ.

Well, that sheds some light on this mysterious no-girls-allowed event that Act 29 is apparently promoting in Columbus, OH called Act Like Men. I know many evangelical Christians think wives should be subservient to their husbands, but I always thought “egalitarian” was an unambiguously positive word. If you were going to say that you didn’t think men and women have equal worth, I’d expect you’d find some more positive way to say it. Maybe you “believe in traditional gender roles,” or perhaps you “believe in celebrating the naturally different strengths of men and women.” Both of those are crap (the first slightly more than the second), but at least they don’t sound so blatantly awful. It’s really demonstrative of exactly how anti-woman this group is, that they don’t even perceive a negative connotation from saying, “We are not egalitarians.” Even a genuinely stingy person would probably describe themselves as frugal instead.

I know that some people are less than thrilled when I do these “somebody is wrong on the internet” kind of posts. To be honest, it’s not my favorite thing either. But it feels important. This isn’t just somebody; this is a large group of somebodies trying to start a new church every three or four days. This is truly a network of organizations, spread out all over the world. The Resurgence blog, just one part of the Acts 29 Network, has a sidebar promoting their Facebook page where they have over 14,000 fans.  They have more fans than Fareed Zakaria, even if you add together the page for just himself and for his CNN show. I know that’s a silly, random measure, but I think it’s enough to say that if it’s worth discussing Zakaria’s opinions here, it’s worth discussing Acts 29′s.

Also, I hope that a couple of those 14,000+ fans, and some prospective future ones, stumble across this post and give it some real thought. Does this group’s belief system really make sense to you? (If so, please explain it to me.) Is this really the kind of group you want to be a part of?

Did you catch this story in the New York Times? I rarely read anything in the N.Y./Region section, but this was really interesting.

It is winter. A third of the city is poor. And unworn clothing is being destroyed nightly.

A few doors down on 35th Street, hundreds of garments tagged for sale in Wal-Mart — hoodies and T-shirts and pants — were discovered in trash bags the week before Christmas, apparently dumped by a contractor for Wal-Mart that has space on the block.

Each piece of clothing had holes punched through it by a machine.

They were found by Cynthia Magnus, who attends classes at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on Fifth Avenue and noticed the piles of discarded clothing as she walked to the subway station in Herald Square. She was aghast at the waste, and dragged some of the bags home to Brooklyn, hoping that someone would be willing to take on the job of patching the clothes and making them wearable.

According to a Wal-Mart spokesperson, this is atypical; they say they usually donate their discarded clothes to charity and don’t seem to know why or how this happened. Not so for H&M, apparently.

During her walks down 35th Street, Ms. Magnus said, it is more common to find destroyed clothing in the H & M trash. On Dec. 7, during an early cold snap, she said, she saw about 20 bags filled with H & M clothing that had been cut up.

“Gloves with the fingers cut off,” Ms. Magnus said, reciting the inventory of ruined items. “Warm socks. Cute patent leather Mary Jane school shoes, maybe for fourth graders, with the instep cut up with a scissor. Men’s jackets, slashed across the body and the arms. The puffy fiber fill was coming out in big white cotton balls.” The jackets were tagged $59, $79 and $129.

And nobody from H&M seems to be talking about it. Reporter Jim Dwyer writes, “various officials did not respond to 10 inquiries made Tuesday by phone and e-mail.” No one has answered the letter that Cynthia Magnus wrote. Are they embarrassed by their flagrant disinterest in helping the poor? By their demonstration that they’d rather destroy these clothes than let some charity case wear them? Being quiet doesn’t make it any less embarrassing; if anything, it makes it more so.

Well, kudos to Ms. Magnus, and Mr. Dwyer, for bringing this to our attention. I never really thought before about what happens to unsold merchandise. I suppose I just assumed it sat on the shelves until it eventually sold, but then again I’ve never really grasped the concept of “new fashions for spring” sort of stuff. I would guess most places donate unsold clothes, but this article definitely makes me want to start asking.

Sadly, but I think understandably, The Resurgence does not have any mechanism for leaving comments on their posts. I have a lot of questions I’d love to discuss with the post authors. There is a feedback form, and I sent in a message that way inquiring about how best to ask questions on specific post content. (I sent it anonymously, even though it asks for first and last name, so who knows if they will deem my message worth replying to.) In the meantime, I’m curious if anyone out in reader-land might have an answer for these questions that really stick out in my mind.

In a recent post about intercessory prayer, Pastor Winfield Bevins writes,

There are five major areas of intercession that we should pray for in our daily prayer life. Each one represents a circle of influence and authority that God gives us to pray for. When praying we should start with the first area and then work our way down to the last.

The circles listed below are family and friends, church, city, nation, and world. All of those are ostensibly things “that God gives us,” provided you believe in a God who gives us things. On my first reading of this paragraph, though, I thought that Pastor Bevins was saying that God in some way delineated these circles, these divisions. Are the five circles just a helpful mnemonic, so that everyone worth praying for gets covered, or is there some basis for choosing these particular five, scriptural or otherwise?

Also, it feels to me like there is a high degree of “should” in this short passage. What happens if one doesn’t pray for each of the five areas, or doesn’t pray for them on a daily basis? What happens if one starts with the last area and ends with the first, or jumbles up the order entirely? What is the basis for knowing that these are the ways one “should” pray? I know not everyone who prays believes that there are strict how-to rules, but I’m curious, in the case of those who do, what the supposed consequences of failing to follow them are. Does your prayer just not get heard? (Like calling a fax machine line from your telephone?) Or does God actually get upset at you for not following protocol?

On “Our World,” the final item in this list, Pastor Bevins writes,

Lastly, we should pray for the people and governments of the world. Although you may never leave your country, you can still have an influence in the lives of others across the world by praying for them. Remember, it is God’s desire to save the elect. Ask the Lord to speak to you about a certain country that you should pray for. God promises to listen when we pray.

Okay, tell me if I have this straight. God wants to save people. If you ask God to tell you who to pray for, and then pray for them, God will “listen” and, it is implied, actually help those people. Why doesn’t God just help those people in the first place? Why does he have to wait for some random person to pray the prayer he told them to pray?

Also, there’s this whole issue of “God’s desire to save the elect.” The elect basically means “the chosen people.” This sounds to me like a way to weasel out of any apparent failures of prayer. (As in: You prayed for the people of such-and-such country and then they had a bloody civil war and/or their cities were destroyed by earthquakes and/or everybody died of cholera? Well, I guess they weren’t the elect!) And aren’t the elect already, you know, elected? Why is it necessary to pray for people if they’ve already been chosen as part of the group God desires to save?

I realize that many of my readers don’t share Pastor Bevins’ perspective, and may not be able to clarify his meaning. I am genuinely curious, though. What is the thought process behind this understanding of prayer?

Of course, the “Paleolithic diet” has added appeal because it’s old. If traditional is good and ancient is better, why not go all the way to prehistoric?

[Fitness coach John] Main says at least half of his gym’s 80 or so members follow the diet pretty consistently, thanks to his convincing pitch that “this is how our human bodies have evolved to consume and process our nutrition” before the “onset of modern agriculture.” (“Modern agriculture” can sound like a disease in Paleo-speak.)

… [Colorado State professor Loren] Cordain writes that our Paleolithic ancestors were “lean, fit and free from heart disease and other ailments that plague Western countries.” Now, he adds: “Look at us. We’re a mess. We eat too much, we eat the wrong foods, and we’re fat.”

Any critical notions are constrained to one paragraph which begins, “Of course, there are skeptics.” Because you know how those skeptics are! Always being disagreeable, with their actual claims about human evolution and the human body’s ability to process various foods! As the reporter returns to Jennifer Jeremias, the star of the article, we read: “What’s important is that she’s never felt healthier.”

I’m not saying this is necessarily a bad diet. Like I said before, it sounds pretty much like normal calorie-counting with an added gimmick. However, it’s dangerous to endorse the idea that if humans did it a long time ago, it must be healthier than and generally superior to anything we do today. There are plenty of other so-called traditional or ancient health/medical practices that definitely result in harm, and even if this one is harmless, it teaches and normalizes an ideology that opens the door to danger.

What blows me away about the whole ancient=healthy idea is the fact that most of the people attracted to it have a great standard of living in the present, and they have no idea how bad things were long ago. Sure, people in the Paleolithic may have had a diet with the “proper balance of omega-3 and omega-6 fats,” but they didn’t have, for example, meat thermometers to make sure they never got sick from undercooking it. Pretty sure they also didn’t have refrigerators or freezers. We also have penicillin, vaccines, a deeper understanding of anatomy and genetics — heck, we have the germ theory of disease! I could go on and on. Modern life isn’t looking so unhealthy now, is it?

And let’s not get our facts muddled up, please. I agree that it’s unlikely that many people in the Paleolithic era died of type 2 diabetes or heart disease, but I’m pretty sure that has less to do with the precise details of their diet and more to do with the fact that the average life expectancy was 33.

The bottom line: there’s nothing wrong with a diet that’s high in valuable nutrients and low in calories, but there’s no reason to involve any pseudoscientific hype.

• Women spend more time playing online role-playing games than men.
• Women “play more intensely” than men and “are happier playing.”
• Women play “less aggressively” than men, especially when gaming with a male romantic partner.
• Women prefer in general to play games with others, while men prefer to play alone.

Reporter Alex Pham sums it up in a nutshell, saying

Why does this matter? In part, because developers have puzzled for years to figure out ways to get women to buy and play more games. Figuring out what motivates them to play is a key step.

I think this study sounds right in line with what commenters Chris Guin and Emily K were saying on Wednesday’s post. Gaming on the Wii, “dancing” to DDR, games with complex and inclusive storylines… all these things attract more people to video games one one level simply because they increase the diversity of available games, and thus the probability that there’s a game out there someone will find interesting. But it seems that the particular aspects of group gameplay or more engaging storylines are especially appealing to women, in the aggregate.

Oh, and happy new year, everyone!