Chronically Pissed

An Affair To Remember

Isn't it the book of Matthew that says "Why do you look at the speck of shit on your neighbors dick and pay no attention to the plank of extramarital jism on your own?" 

I'll get to Michael Jackson tomorrow. I'm not done with Sanford & Co. yet...

I'm hearing a lot of rational, humane voices on the right and left saying that we should all back off and let Mark Sanford deal privately with his own mistake. "This is not a partisan issue." "Infidelity has no party affiliation," they say. Bullshit. Let me explain very plainly why the Ensign and Sanford affairs, when put into context, are a very big deal (aside from the obvious fact that Republicans have never atoned for the crime of putting the country through the impeachment of a president over a blowjob - and that they still use Clinton's philandering as a catch-all retort to any argument).

The Republican Party has made sexual morality the cornerstone of its movement for the last 30 years. In doing so, they have aggressively sought to deny certain freedoms to the gay community, ostensibly in the "defense of marriage." They have exploited the issue of gay marriage to rally their base, disingenuously conflating the religious sacrament - which churches are certainly welcome to define as they see fit - with the civil institution that recognizes the joining of couples for some simple, secular, logistical, monetary, and legal matters. Pull out your marriage certificate and see if you can find the word "God." (Mine, from Pennsaylvania, makes no mention of any deity.) 

And so, while I would generally agree that such matters are the supremely private domain of the two parties involved, Messieurs Ensign, Sanford, Vitter, Craig, Gingrich, Foley, Hyde, Livingston, McCain, et al, relinquished their right to that privacy when they became sanctimonious legislative moralizers. Sure, Democrats have been complicit in continuing this civil rights debacle - many of them voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, which Bill Clinton signed into law - but I think we can safely stipulate that the Republican Party is what stands between gay couples and marriage equality. The 2008 Republican National Committee platform calls for "a constitutional amendment that fully protects marriage as a union of a man and a woman, so that judges cannot make other arrangements equivalent to it." It goes on to say:

Republicans recognize the importance of having in the home a father and a mother who are married. The two-parent family still provides the best environment of stability, discipline, responsibility, and character. Children in homes without fathers are more likely to commit a crime, drop out of school, become violent, become teen parents, use illegal drugs, become mired in poverty, or have emotional or behavioral problems.

(I'll grant you, it does not say anything about whether the father should or should not be fucking other men, women, or teenage boys on the side.)

Republicans are driving the movement to deny monogamous gays the same privileges that are afforded to adulterous heterosexuals. If they really want to defend marriage, perhaps they should start by making divorce and adultery illegal - punishable by prison time. Or castration. Or, better yet, as the Bible prescribes, death. 

But that's not what they want. They simply want to cling to this last shred of puritanism as evidence that this is still their Gods' land. They will not go down...ahem, I mean, they will not be defeated by the abortionists AND the gays! This isn't about defending marriage. This is about pride. This is about proving that provincial values are not inferior to big city, northeastern elitism. And perhaps they'd have a shred of credibility if their legislative fear of the Almighty extended to their own personal lives...but apparently it does not.

Forgive me if it sounds like I'm equating homosexuality to adultery. I'm not. I'm saying that this is not merely another isolated incident of personal failure. There is a lesson that must be learned from the parade of hypocrisy that began when Clinton's staunchest impeachment opponents (Gingrich (R), Hyde (R), Livingston (R)) turned out to be fellow cheaters, continued with the whoring adventures of Sen. David Vitter (R-LA), the gay bathroom stall antics of Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID), the gay congressional antics of Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), and climaxed...ahem, I mean, came to a head...or rather, culminated with the revelations of infidelities by Promise Keeping Sen. John Ensign (R-NV) and Gov. Mark Sanford (R-SC) within the same week. (Please visit www.republicansexoffenders.com for a more comprehensive litany!) 

When the greatest proponents of a particular moral philosophy can not live up to the tenets of that philosophy, the philosophy itself must be called into question and we must, at the very least, limit their ability to limit the rights of others based on that philosophy. 

Welcome

If you're new to Chronically Pissed, welcome. I've been less than prolific lately, but i'm feeling more loquacious these days, so that may well change. I hope you'll check back regularly - or better yet, use the subscription form on the right and be notified of new posts. Thanks for stopping by.

Pissed as ever,
CP

An Open Letter from the Institution of Marriage to the Republican Party

Dear Republicans:

Listen guys...I want to thank you for your tireless efforts to "protect" me from the gays, but at this point, I'm going to have to ask you to lay off. I mean, I wouldn't want a piece of rotting shit defending me against E. coli.  Would you? I'm sure you mean well, but it's beginning to look like all of your impassioned pleas in my defense are a bit of a dog and pony show, given your inability to keep your own dicks inside the pants your wives washed and ironed for you.

 

To tell the truth, I'm not really all that offended by your shenanigans. I've been around for a very, very long time and frankly I got tired of being indignant about affairs back in the fourth century. Yes, I was originally conceived as a union between a man and a woman, but that was way back when y'all thought the earth was flat and slavery was cool. So maybe you could stop pretending to think that homosexuals are somehow going to ruin me for future generations. 

I've survived thousands of years of philandering by horny pricks. I've been entered into for reasons as dubious as money, green cards, business arrangements, and social status. My preference, truth be told, is for two people who care enough about each other to say to the world "Hey everyone...We dig each other so we're gonna live together and share stuff. Just wanted you to know." I don't really care what color, creed, class, or particular set of genitals either party has. 

What I'm trying to say, Republican Party, is that this arrangement of ours isn't really working out. At this point, it's just getting a little embarrassing. So let's do the adult thing and get a divorce, you and me.

I hope we can still be friends.

Love,

The Institution of Marriage

R-Ensign-ation

In this clip, Sean Hannity admits that "if you’re going to be a family-values candidate and a family-values politician, and you don’t live up to that, I think you should resign." He then goes on to say, essentially, that he won't officially call for Ensign's resignation because he doesn't "know where he stands." (On family values, I presume - as opposed to where he stands while fucking the wife of one of his employees.)

So do I understand correctly that Sean Hannity's position on political sex scandals demands resignation if and only if the offender is/was a "family-values candidate?" Because in the next clip, an infamous one from the August of 2008, Hannity says of John Edwards: "I'm wondering - if you can't keep the promise to your family, can't keep the promise to your wife, you're having an affair, you're lying about the affair repeatedly, why should the American people trust you when you say you're not gonna lie to them?"

Yes, Hannity and his friends attempt to make the case that Edwards ran on a moral values platform, which would make him as big a hypocrite as Ensign (and Vitter, Craig, Foley, McCain, Gingrich, Hyde, Livingston, et al), but I think a pretty thick line can be drawn between Edwards and men who join the Promisekeepers and rail against gay marriage on the grounds of protecting the institution.

Look, I've said it before, I don't care what other people do with their genitals. It's none of my business. Besides that, there are several thousands of years of recorded history that ought to have diminished the shock value of news that a man has fucked a woman who is not his wife. The issue at hand is hypocrisy. I don't think John Ensign should resign because he fucked a woman who was not his wife. I think John Ensign should resign because he fucked a woman who is not his wife while being publicly pious about the Christian definition of marriage. Like many of his friends, he's a fucking fraud who has been complicit in denying marriage to same-sex couples while desecrating the institution he was so desperate to protect.

Tiller's Wall

When I was 14 years old, I chose Thanksgiving dinner as the occasion to out my mother as a pro-choice baby killer in front of our extended family. We had never had a frank discussion about the issue, but I had long suspected her to be on the side of darkness and evil. And so I provoked an argument at the table during which I skillfully elicited the most common pro-abortion arguments, each of which I met with a scathing, well-rehearsed version of the most common Pro-Life ripostes.

Eight years of Catholic schooling had primed me for this battle, particularly through the holy sacrament of Confirmation in seventh grade, when my classmates and I were deemed old enough to make a clear-minded, lifelong commitment to God. I accepted their flattery of my nascent adulthood, sure of my ability to make such a profound oath, and ready to pour myself into His work. For obvious reasons, I was particularly incensed over the daily murder of thousands of innocent babies. I'd learned of the early development of their brains, hearts, hands, and feet; I'd been told of their silent screams in the womb upon being surgically stabbed in their brainstems; I'd seen photos of the industrial-sized garbage bags into which they'd been suctioned and cast heartlessly into a dumpster behind some seamy clinic.

At 14, it was perfectly clear to me that a holocaust of the unborn was underway as humanity stood idly by. At 14, I could not understand how the world outside the walls of St. Such-and-Such elementary school could be so awash in apathy and evil. At 14, I had reached Christian adulthood. I had been furnished with all of the information necessary to distinguish right from wrong. Whatever "knowledge" I might later acquire, none of it would alter the essential truths I'd learned as a child of God. 

At 32, much has changed. 

In the recent hullabaloo over President Obama's commencement speech at the University of Notre Dame, while watching footage of the protestors and commentary by leaders of the pro-life movement, I was struck by something: In their words and actions, I saw myself at 14. I saw a multitude of grown men and women who, with regard to this particular issue, had never progressed beyond the moment at which, probably with the authenticating blessing of some church or another, they believed themselves to be in possession of ultimate truth. Within this realization, I saw a framework that might help me begin to understand the ever-confounding phenomenon of otherwise intelligent human beings clinging to religions and the simple-minded, black-and-white moralities that spring from them. Put simply, these people are spiritually retarded. 

Hear me out...

We accept that people have widely varying levels of intelligence, sociability, athleticism, artistic talent, etc. Sometimes extremities are exhibited within an individual. (Take autism, for example, which can render a person mathematically brilliant but socially inert.) Furthermore, recent studies have suggested a hard-wired, genetic basis for human spirituality, indicating that it may be just another component of our evolutionarily developed physiology. So, what if we add a new faculty to the mix and call it spirituality? Yes, this is a tough word for us non-believers, as it has long been proprietary to the mystical realm, but I believe that there is room for it in the secular domain. One's spirit might be described as that which is unique to an individual, that collection of atoms and experiences, the ineffable "it" that is, essentially, just the sum of one's parts. Indescribable, after all, is not necessarily (or ever) synonymous with supernatural. The active duty of the spirit, then, would be to synthesize these so-called mysteries of the human experience on an ongoing basis, enabling its corporeal counterpart to cope in a complex cosmos in which not everything can be concisely chronicled or comprehended. A spiritually retarded individual, then, would have great difficulty doing that without reliance on imaginary friends and steadfast devotion to simplistic moral formulae.

I feel sure that my own stance on abortion (pro-choice, pro-abortion...whatever you'd like to call it), for example, cannot be wholly attributed to the intellectual impact of a liberal education (though I would wager that there is a high positive correlation between advanced education and reduced opposition to abortion). As I look back at my 14-year old self, as I compare my present self to that child, I feel sure that the maturation of a specific component of my being - my spirit - has allowed me this new perspective. I did not arrive at the conclusion that abortion is permissible simply because I abandoned religion. These things occurred simultaneously, as my spirit evolved beyond the point at which most become stunted.

Think of it as a wall that exists in the minds of the spiritually retarded that is not so different from the wall that prevents an individual with Down's Syndrome from advancing beyond the mental capability of a four year old. This spiritual wall - a manifestation of the deity of their choice - does not necessarily prevent a spiritually retarded person from grasping or excelling in math, history, science, sports statistics, or any other tangible piece of information. Rather, it incapacitates them in the face of the abstract and demands their submission. The wall is the answer to all of the questions that cannot be answered. 

The height of the wall varies from person to person and can change over time. Some build them up, some modify them, some tear them down. And so the spectrum ranges from poor, dumb schmucks like the parents of Terry Schiavo, who simply weren't intelligent or mature enough to bring themselves to terms with the medical reality of their daughter's situation and so relied on religion and religious whackjobs to justify their position, to people like Andrew Sullivan, an intensely intelligent, conservative writer who has lowered a portion of the wall to allow for his homosexuality while retaining enough to remain anti-abortion and a devoted Catholic. There are an infinite number of variations when you account for all of the ways in which varying levels of measurable intelligence intersect with the ethereal wall.

When I started this post (a couple weeks ago), I did not intend for it to be about abortion. The events of the past week, however - the killing of late-term abortion provider, George Tiller - compel me to stay with the issue. As a person without a wall - spiritually high functioning? - I am obviously pro-choice. Also, I am not the least bit anti-abortion. An important distinction. See, I don't care if we reduce the number of abortions. Yes, I would like to see us provide high quality sex education and birth control, which would drastically cut the number of unwanted pregnancies, which would, in turn, drastically reduce the number of abortions - but with regards to the procedure itself, I wouldn't particularly care whether the number increased by a factor of one hundred. Once divorced from the notion that sperm and egg unite to create a mystical and immortal being within the clump of cells that have begun to multiply inside a woman (regardless, mind you, of whether she's just been raped, paid-for-sex, cheated on her husband, seduced a twelve-year old boy, made passionate love to the love of her life, earned her green card, or finished with #327 in her quest to participate in the biggest gang bang of all time), there is simply no good reason to oppose the procedure.

The way I see it, spiritual retardation is the only explanation for opposition to first-trimester abortions, which account for very nearly ALL abortions. It is a mundane medical procedure in which a clump of cells is removed from a woman who would rather not see those cells reach full gestation. It happens naturally to a large percentage of women who don't seek the procedure. Only spiritual retardation can convert it into something more profound than that. Progressing further into pregnancy, human squeamishness enters into the equation and makes this conversation more difficult. Fortunately for humankind, people aren't running around clamoring for second and third-trimester abortions for the sheer joy of it. Abortions in the second and third trimester are almost always sought for medical reasons - some involving the health of the mother, others involving a horribly disabled, disfigured, and or diseased fetus whose quality of life stands to be improved by the work of brave and merciful people like Dr. George Tiller. 

Here's what's interesting: Dr. Tiller was at least mildly spiritually retarded himself, having been murdered in the vestibule of his Lutheran church, where he was serving as an usher. As I said, the spectrum is vast, accommodating both Dr. Tiller and his severely spiritually retarded murderer. It seems to me that both of them would have been better off without their respective walls - Tiller wouldn't have been at church and Scott Roeder wouldn't have had any reason to kill Tiller. Still, a wall is a wall - and Dr. Tiller's wall, low as it may have been, lent credence to the prevailing notion that walls are necessary and good. His inability to tear down that last brick or two ultimately denied him the spiritual credibility to question the validity of Scott Roeder's wall.