Or maybe from giving herself too many "whirlies" in the nuthouse commode?
Folger, long intent on carving out a niche as the unofficial commandress-in-chief of roaring, scripture-spraying lunatics, again makes up things as she goes along in a WorldNut Daily column which -- and I know people say this a lot, but trust me this time -- easily outdoes the Onion in terms of sheer parodic value.
But Folger's claims are serious, and center on her conviction that gay marriage is a precursor the the End Times, which is why the recent court decision declaring a no-gay-marriage California law enacted eight years ago unconstitutional was so God-awful. The only time gay marriage was ever sanctioned, she writes bitterly, was around the time of the Noahchian flood, and look what happened to humanity then!
Folger, both here and in a "book" she "wrte," cites an expert, Jeffrey Satinover, who, she says, "holds an M.D. from Princeton and doctorates from Yale, MIT and Harvard." Impressive credentials, those -- and all the more so given that Princeton University does not even have a medical school. (University Medical Center at Princeton, not to be confused with Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, is affiliated with the Robert Wood Johnson College of Medicine.)
Folger blares:
"Both the Massachusetts Superior Court and the California Supreme Court by a one-judge margin redefined what marriage has always been in every culture and every religion for more than 5,000 years of recorded history."
Would Folger complain if the Supreme Court voted 5-4 in favor of overturning Roe v. Wade or the various decisions barring the teaching of the Christian creation fable in public schools? I need not even ask. Besides, how pronounced a majority does she deem sufficient? Do opinions have to be unanimous to stand? In that case, she should quit her lowing because I and many others disagree with her.
You have to love stuff like this from a Bible-banger:
"Don't even believe in the Flood? Doesn't matter. Some things are true whether you believe them or not."
And irony meters everywhere go BOOM! Here's a corollary, Janet: Some things are false no matter how hard you wish they were true. Regardless of how strongly these blithering freaks agitate against reason and make startlingly incoherent claims in the face of mountains of contrary evidence.
Folger is a great example of the sort of simpering, posturing airhead who relies on the "you can't prove it's NOT true" approach when making claims that are unsupported and in many cases virtually unsupportable (e.g., for various reasons, a global flood is not within the realm of geological possibility). She is so parochial-minded and dishonest that she thinks that because gay relations and this nonexistent flood both occurred within a hundred years of each other, the latter was a consequence of the former. By that logic, the advent of HIV inspired cell phones, the Internet, and Paris Hilton.
You might think that the typical reader of this hilariously shrill crapburst would immediately understand that if Folger is too lazy to even verify the credentials of sources she uses to support ideas in her "book" and her "columns," and that her easily identified errors of fact should arouse suspicion with regard to anything she says about metaphysical bullshit that technically cannot be "disproved" so readily. If so you would be deluded, because unfortunately, by the time people reach a station at which the treat WND as anything but a joke, they have already 1) made the tacit admission that they couldn't care less about facts, 2) identified themselves as brainwashed, 2) shown themselves to be mentally challenged in some way, or 4) all of the above.
A lot of Americans do not approve of the idea of gay marriage (and hence take the intrusive, asshole step of wanting it to be against the law), and plenty of them are not bonkers. But in another example of the irony that makes religion what it is, people like Folger are, in spite of themselves, perhaps gay marriage's biggest effective proponents. For if one evaluates the manifest sanity and cognitive candlepower of the loudest opponents of gay marriage and compares them to its loudest supporters, it's clear that the screeching loons and occupants of serotonin crisis centers invariably fall on the "anti" side. And when the chief proponents of a movement are shit-smearing wackabilly, it's time to take stock of that movement and, in many cases, do exactly what they don't want done.
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Janet Folger:
"Don't even believe in the Flood? Doesn't matter. Some things are true whether you believe them or not."
These people have become a national embarrassment. Can our publicly funded media stick Janet Folger and friends back into the collective basement instead of parroting them as "experts"?
Posted by: Bubba Sixpack | May 24, 2008 3:47 PM
I don't doubt for a minute that this Dr Folger lady is a harboring a religious obsession along with homophobia, but in some ways those who would like to see equal treatment under the law for consenting adult partners regardless of their sexes are only asking for trouble by insisting on the term "marriage". Marriage really is a religious ritual in which people (not always just couples) agree to bond socially within the guidelines of the religious community to which they belong. If you don't like the one you belong to, find a different one, or make one up (that's how they all got started anyway). But whether you belong to a religion or not, one should be able to record their domestic status contractually so the issues of benefits and domestic perogatives are spelled out should there be any question or disagreement. Likewise for liabilities and obligations. If the gay community would insist that the public debate were framed as an issue of domestic parterships and contracts, they'd find they'd get farther along legally. Leave the question of what is marriage to the religious nuts, who as we see when it comes to issues of divorce or polygamy (not just sexual equipment) are always in dire conflict with those with differing views.
Posted by: doug l | May 24, 2008 3:48 PM
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_same-sex_unions
Posted by: Marion Delgado | May 24, 2008 6:49 PM
At an early stage of childhood kids can be entertained by the Peekaboo game because they are at the edge of overcoming the illusion that if they can't see something it doesn't exist. They play with their fears and overcome the delusion.
These people, presumably, have passed this stage. But instead of advancing to adulthood they taken the shock of this new understanding and take it to far. They are now trapped in an inversion of their original delusion. They have shifted to automatically assuming that things they can't see and can't find sound evidence for, but guided by their desire for them to be, are real.
By this logic the simple fact that we can't disprove the existence of a herd dancing unicorns on Saturn there must, therefore be dancing unicorns on Saturn.
On the positive side they do reside in a colorful and magical universe. Full of unicorns and gnomes and ghosts -holy and otherwise-, and demons and wand waving wizards. In fact, full of everything that hasn't yet, or can't, be proved to not exist.
Posted by: Art | May 24, 2008 8:00 PM
This woman is an idiot. She can't even get correct the date the Babylonian Talmud was written. Most of the Babylonian Talmud was written well after Jesus not "1,000 years before Christ." I'm also puzzled by how she thinks she should pay attention to a work which contains some pretty anti-Christian passages. That's pretty serious picking and choosing.
And if this woman thinks the Talmud is a historically accurate book, does that mean she believes other stories in it like the one where Alexander the Great meets the Amazons?
Posted by: Joshua Zelinsky | May 24, 2008 9:16 PM
Ostridgeilalogy.
Posted by: Bill from Dover | May 24, 2008 11:50 PM
So, doug,
Atheists can't get married? And if there's a gay church, their marriages don't get sanctioned by the government? Marriage isn't a religious concept it's a cultural one, (unless your tax forms don't ask your marital status, or you haven't separation of church and state). If the church wants a word of its own they can keep "holy matrimony"....although gay churches can keep that too.
Posted by: BAllanJ | May 25, 2008 11:10 AM
Re: Dr. Jeffrey Satinover.
Go to his web site, click on his "Biography" and find this:
Dr. Satinover is a former National Merit Scholar (W. H. Taft HS, 1965, Woodland Hills, CA) and holds degrees from M.I.T. (S.B.), Harvard (Ed.M.) and the University of Texas (M.D.). He completed psychoanalytic training at the C. G. Jung Institute of Z�rich. He is a former fellow (resident) in psychiatry and child psychiatry at Yale where he was twice awarded the department of psychiatry�s Seymour Lustman Residency Research Prize (2nd place). He was the 1975 William James Lecturer at Harvard.
Lord knows I confuse Princeton with the University of Texas all the time :) ... it's an easy mistake to make, especially for someone as busy with wingnut work as Folger must be.
There's an odd dichotomy in Wingnutopia in respect to academics and their laurels. Many spokesnuts badmouth "eggheads" for their perceived lack of faith and their adherence to the scientific method and reliance on trivial things such as evidence. Yet when those nutters can bolster their ravings by enlisting a person with a few credentials, they're not afraid to let names such as Harvard, Yale and Princeton drop like ripe fruit.
Strange. I thought those places were the very seats of godlessness. :P
Posted by: writzer | May 25, 2008 2:48 PM
I don't much care for her coffee, either.
Posted by: revere | May 25, 2008 6:06 PM
I don't think so. Marriage is basically a bargain people strike and publicly commit to.
In some cultures, there's a religious overlay, and in some cultures, there's not. In the cultures where there is, that seems to be a post hoc attempt to get a god on the side of The Family, and let him take credit for something people are prone to do anyway.
Making marriage a "sacrament" is one of the ways religions co-opt otherwise irreligious stuff that people naturally care about, making itself seem more important.
Marriage per se is not a sacrament. (I'm married and I have no sacraments.) You can wrap a sacrament around it if you want, but defining marriage as a sacrament, and the institution of marriage as the property of religious people... well, that's just false.
IIRC, there are/were a lot of "primitive" tribes that have/had marriage but didn't regard it as a religious thing. I suspect marriage predates religion.
Posted by: Paul W. | May 26, 2008 3:36 PM