Sex with ducks

[pasithea]

Swiped this link from ff00ff

I love these musicians. Heard a couple of their other songs but this one is kind of over the top.

And now, because I've heard the same nonsense from right-wingers about how gay marriage will lead to people marrying animals, a short comment.

Sure! Let's go for it! Just as soon as a horse is able to recite their wedding vows and pick up a pen and legibly sign their name, why shouldn't they be allowed to marry?

Oh gee. Ya'know. I'm thinking that whole leads to marrying animals thing may be obviously ridiculous. Hmm.

Gay marriage also doesn't lead to adults marrying children for the same reason that children can't get credit cards, drive a car, run a corporation, join the military, etc. They might be capable of signing, but they lack the sophistication to understand the full ramifications of their actions. Yes, I'll grant you that this is also true of many adults, but we give adults nearly 20 years of buffer.

The animal one is really just mindbendingly stupid though. I mean seriously. Do you think for a second that if animals could sign legal contracts that cows wouldn't have sued the holy fuck out of McDonalds by now?

Can we be done with this discussion now. I read the bible cover to cover. Nowhere in it is there a commandment that says, "Thou shalt be really really stupid."

Comments

[paka.livejournal.com]

Nowhere in it is there a commandment that says, "Thou shalt be really really stupid."

It's my impression that a lot of the OT is written with the assumption that people are going to be really really stupid. You know; lop the foreskins off the kids 'cause we assume they aren't going to take the time to clean themselves down there, forbid eating vultures because if we don't someone's gonna try it and kill themselves, spell out that you need to have accurate measurements before someone tries to cheat on it, yadda yadda, all wrapped up in dogma (so that people will do it) associated with mythology (so that people will remember it).

Ironically, I think that one sentence in Leviticus about not sleeping with a man as with a woman - the thing so beloved by the religious right - is one of those "we assume people are stupid" parts. The language is really specific; like we all know, if there's a hole, someone male has thought about sticking their penis into it; I've heard that contemporaneous Egyptians were cool with same-sex relationships (Akhenaten may have been bisexual, the evidence is debated) but had a horror of anal sex; and if you're a batch of nomads with limited access to baths and condoms anal sex isn't exactly the healthiest activity in the world.

[dv-girl.livejournal.com]

Hmm. You know. That gives things an odd sense of balance.

Early religious law was because educated people were telling ignorant people how to live a healthier life.

Modern dogma is ignorant people telling educated people to follow the same set of rules.


I guess the lesson here is that no good deed goes unpunished.

[paka.livejournal.com]

Seriously, you look at a lot of Amerindian taboos and a lot of it is this flatly dogmatic stuff rooted in the reality of a world which isn't always that safe. Then my counter-example is the Kalevala, which is a really entertaining read but it's basically an information dump in mnemonic form.

I dunno about you, but modern society presents the people behind the OT as chosen people who'd clued in on monotheism as this enlightened deal, but really, they weren't. They were just more pre-industrial guys trying to survive and treat each other more or less fairly, and that context makes the OT make more sense to me. Which is great, except I'm not actually a Bronze Age nomad.

Religion has to evolve or else it's stale, useless, like the worst sort of dusty museum exhibit. To be a Jew/Christian/Sikh/Voudounista/Asatruar/etc now by definition can't be the same thing as what it meant in the 900s, and that's not just okay, that's actively good. I think it's ironic that the worst dogmatic people in this country are usually some sect of Protestant, given how Protestantism started out.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't know, there are a lot of highly dogmatic Catholics floating around.

I think the least dogmatic Protestants are the Unitarians and the Episcopalians, though I've heard good things about the Evangelical Lutherans (who are apparently in full communion with the ECUSA); an Asatruar friend of mine grew up Evangelical Lutheran and is still actively friends with everyone he knew from church.

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Oh, there's an interesting article on the supposedly anti-homosexual passages in Romans that I bet you would like -- it deconstructs them through the lens of history, including historical commentary, and shows an alternative reading that is likely to be more representative of the "original intent", as it were (which, argues the article, has nothing to do with homosexuality being "bad" whatsoever). It basically takes apart the semantic representation of the text and shows how it actually fits together, versus how bigots would like for it to fit together.