"African traditional systems kind of protect or have protected its population against this tendency," he said. "Because in several communities, in several cultures in Africa homosexuality or for that matter any affair between two sexes of the same kind are not countenanced in our society."

And here's Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, at the heart of the "Vatileaks" corruption allegations, disagreeing with the plainly verifiable fact that homosexuals are no more likely to sexually abuse children than heterosexuals.

Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone...said that some psychiatrists had found a relationship between homosexuality and paedophilia. ‘That is the problem,' he said.

Things are going to just get worse for the Roman Church.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/20/papal-candidates-link-gays-to.html/feed 85 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/catholic-school-forbids-girls.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/catholic-school-forbids-girls.html#comments Mon, 04 Feb 2013 18:23:28 +0000 Rob Beschizza http://boingboing.net/?p=210624 why no such demand was made of male students." [NBC - Thanks, Heather!]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/04/catholic-school-forbids-girls.html/feed 49 http://boingboing.net/2013/02/01/catholic-priest-child-sex-abus.html http://boingboing.net/2013/02/01/catholic-priest-child-sex-abus.html#comments Fri, 01 Feb 2013 17:21:50 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=210133

After years of legal battles, The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles has grudgingly released files on priests accused of sexually abusing children. An announcement from the church about the document dump is here (PDF). You can browse the files yourself at clergyfiles.la-archdiocese.org.

Reuters: "The 12,000 pages of files were made public more than a week after church records relating to 14 priests were unsealed as part of a separate civil suit, showing that church officials plotted to conceal the molestation from law enforcement as late as 1987."

Scanned documents from church files on each of the priests known to have molested children are here, listed in alpha order of the each priest's name. Major trigger warning. They include explicit accounts of abuse testimony, and in some cases, letters of denial from officials within the church.

The Archdiocese this week also removed Cardinal Roger Mahony from his duties, for his role in enabling and keeping quiet the methodical and widespread molestation. The removal is "unprecedented," but many victims and advocates believe Mahony deserves greater punishment. Auxiliary Bishop Thomas J. Curry, who helped Mahony hide abusers from police in the eighties, has resigned his post as regional bishop in Santa Barbara, CA.

The current Archbishop of Los Angeles issued this statement on the documents release (PDF).

I find these files to be brutal and painful reading. The behavior described in these files is terribly sad and evil. There is no excuse, no explaining away what happened to these children. The priests involved had the duty to be their spiritual fathers and they failed.

Too bad hell isn't real. More from the Los Angeles Times on how these files show new evidence of attempts by Curry and Mahony to block police investigations:

In a 1988 memo about Father Nicolas Aguilar-Rivera, a Mexican priest accused of molesting more than 20 boys during a nine-month stay in Los Angeles, Curry expressed a desire to keep a list of parish altar boys from investigators.

"The whole issue of our records is a very sensitive one, and I am reluctant to give any list to the police," Curry wrote.

At the bottom of the memo, Mahony replied: "We cannot give such a list for no cause whatsoever."

The police charged Aguilar-Rivera, but after receiving a warning from Curry, he went to Mexico. He remains a fugitive.

Image: Shutterstock.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/02/01/catholic-priest-child-sex-abus.html/feed 54 http://boingboing.net/2012/07/25/more-men-join-the-ranks-of-for.html http://boingboing.net/2012/07/25/more-men-join-the-ranks-of-for.html#comments Wed, 25 Jul 2012 16:28:18 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=172999

On Monday, I published a letter from my husband, Christopher Baker, to the Boy Scouts of America. In that letter, Baker returned his hard-earned Eagle Scout award and explained that he no longer wanted to be associated with an organization that discriminated against gay teenagers and GBLT parents. By the end of the day, I'd posted six updates to that story—adding letters from other Eagle Scouts who had joined my husband in resigning from a fraternity they had loved and had worked incredibly hard to join.

The Boy Scouts of America is a private organization. The Supreme Court has said they have the right to discriminate. What these Eagle Scouts are saying is that legal precedent doesn't make the discrimination right. Overwhelmingly, they've said that it makes them sad to see the organization that meant so much to them go against the very values of inclusion that it taught them as children. As Baker wrote, "banning openly gay scouts and leaders is not a neutral position any more than separate-but-equal was a neutral position on race."

Yesterday, I received more letters from other Eagle Scouts who want the Boy Scouts of America to know how disappointed they are, and that they choose to stand with the persecuted rather than with the people doing the persecuting. In this post, you can read inspiring words from 13 Eagle Scouts who asked that I share their letters. In most cases, I've included a photo of the letter, and quoted text for easy reading. They're worth reading. These are amazing men.

Well, amazing men, and one woman. I'm starting out this collection with the letter of Dr. Julie Praus.

Julie Praus

I received my Eagle award in 1976, at age 15. A member of Troop 28, Devils Lake, ND under the name Douglas James Praus. I went on to become a National Merit Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, went to medical school, became a psychiatrist, served for 12 years in the US Air Force, raised 3 sons, made a distinguished career as a physician. I transitioned gender in the midst of all that. I'm very 'out', and serve the GLBT population as well as the general population in the twin cities area.

I've found that being an Eagle is a member of a very select club. I've met them in universities, the military, and in medicine. They've all been of sterling character, and I've been honored to be in their company.

I read with dismay about the 'secret committee' that decided that gay scouts and leaders were not welcome within the BSA. This seems utterly indefensible and reprehensible. Do you think there were no gay or trans scouts or leaders? After a long time of reading the medical and psychological literature on this, and knowing many in the GLBT population, I find nothing to back up your decision, and must view this decision as an act of bigotry and ignorance. Please reconsider. The moral code I learned as a scout is one that I treasure to this day, and lends honor to one who follows it. I feel that this decision to exclude gay scouts and leaders dishonors the many who have served and learned scouting, and the BSA today.

Sincerely,
Julie M. Praus, MD

Zachary Maichuk

The Boy Scouts have been an important part of my life in more ways than I can describe. My father was my first scoutmaster, and scouting was a family affair. I spent more summers than I can count at scout camp, first as camper, then as staff. Those summers were important to shaping who I am as a man today. After I finished college, I made the decision to go into the Peace Corps based on my Boy Scout ideals. I had, after all, just spent 4 years giving myself a degree, and it was only right that I give the next two to serving both my country and the starving and needy.

In The Gambia, I worked with two different scout troops in the local villages. One of those troops still has my old handbook as a guide. I also wrote an “appropriate technology” manual to help with the development effort, and much of the information, from basic knots and lashings to the creative low tech cooking and baking devices, were based off the knowledge I had acquired from my years as a scout. My choice to pursue my doctorate in psychology has its roots in my scouting experience. One of my mentors from scouting pushed me to become a doctor, and as a therapist, I have an opportunity to help others alleviate their suffering. The art I do, my leatherwork, would not have been available to me if it wasn't for the old scout leather kit I found in the basement, and my time at the Handicraft Lodge. I even still today carry my trusted Swiss Army knife with Boy Scout Hot Spark, just so I can always be prepared.

It is with this knowledge that you can understand how hard this decision has been for me to make. My path to Eagle Scout has been so important to making me who I am. But there is a sad reality in that I cannot continue to keep this honor and still live up to what this honor is supposed to mean.

I cannot accept the exclusion of homosexuals from the organization of the Boy Scouts of America. I am a doctor of clinical psychology who has studied trauma and sexual abuse, and as mentioned in your own youth protection videos, I know that there is no connection between sexual orientation and child predation. I also have a bachelor’s degree in religious studies from Rutgers University, and I know that religious objections to homosexuality are neither universal, nor as clear cut as popular culture would like to maintain. I have been trained as a scientist-practitioner of a social science, and I know that sexual orientation is biological, cannot be taught or passed on through association, and more harm is done by forcing a person to deny innate orientation.

There is no good reason to exclude homosexuals from Scouting, and no harm will befall our Scouts by ending this unjust practice. But beyond the facts and the science, there is also a deeper, more moral reason for ending this practice, and it is rooted in the Law we were all taught to follow:

A Scout is Trustworthy, and it would be dishonest for me hold onto my attachments to an organization I know is harming others with discriminatory policies.

A Scout is Loyal, and I cannot count the number of people I would be betraying by not opposing ongoing exclusion in scouts based on sexuality. My friends Mark, Gabe, Amy, Daphne, Toni, Rebecca, Dawn, Jessica, Jeff, Isaiah, and many others have taken their turns looking out for me when I was in need of a friend. My various co-workers Joe, Jack, Alix, Louis, Jerry, and Melody were important team members at one time or another, and one was even blacklisted from our organization because of this unjust rule. My childhood friends like Jason and Eric grew up with me, and have maintained friendships over the years. If I were to not oppose the Boy Scout's policy against homosexuals, I would be disloyal to these very good people in my life, people who have been very loyal to me.

A Scout is Helpful, and promoting any discrimination hurts, not helps, those discriminated against, and the society that allows the discrimination.

A Scout is Friendly, and discrimination is not friendly. And teaching scouts to discriminate does not produce friendly scouts

A Scout is Courteous, and there is no way to politely treat a person like they are less than human because of the way they were born.

A Scout is Kind, and likewise there is no kind way to discriminate.

A Scout is Obedient, but obedience is not blind. As a scout I was always told to stand up for what is right and help those in need. The choice being presented is to be obedient to an unjust rule, or being obedient to a core ideal. I choose to be Obedient to what Scouting is supposed to stand for, not an unjust bylaw.

A Scout is Cheerful. Cheerfulness is about optimism. It is about bring out the good and joy in self and others. Cheerfulness is about encouraging the morale among all those around. You cannot be cheerful as you harm others or treat them as less than human. Discrimination does not sit on the bright side of life.

A Scout is Thrifty. A scout uses his resources not for himself, but for the service of others. Were I to keep this award and ignore the harm the policy is doing, I would be acting in greed, and against the value of thriftiness.

A Scout is Brave. It would be easier to look the other way. It would be easier to support the status quo even if it is doing harm. It would be easier to shut up and just write off this injustice as the way things are. But it is brave to stand up, and risk the repercussions involved in pointing out and demanding change in the face of what is an unjust policy. As such, I am calling on you to be brave, and risk the change that will be best for all involved.

A Scout is Clean, and injustice, discrimination and prejudice tarnish the soul.

A Scout is Reverent. I have a Bachelor's degree in religious studies. The so called religious objections to homosexuality are not as clear cut as people like to believe. What is clear that the God I revere desires Justice and Love, and hatred in God’s name is sacrilege.

In addition, I swore, on my honor, to do my best to do my duty to God and my country. My duty to God dictates I act towards all people in the name of Love and Justice. My duty to my country demands I fight for the freedoms and rights of all my countrymen despite race, creed, religion, gender, or sexual orientation. I swore to obey the Scout Law, and I have shown above how I must do this to honor that law. I swore to help other people at all times, and ignoring this unjust discriminatory process is contrary to the ideal of helping others. I swore to keep myself physically strong and mentally awake, and cannot allow myself to cloud my mind with immoral justifications for immoral rules. Finally, I swore to keep myself morally straight, and standing by silently as others are discriminated against is morally bankrupt.

So it is with great sadness that I feel I must return my Eagle Scout Award, not because I am ashamed of the values of Scouting, but because I know to keep it in the face of the current discriminatory policies against homosexuality is a violation of those core values I was taught to honor as a Scout.

Sincerely
Dr. Zachary Maichuk

Barry Ferns

I am an Eagle Scout (1964) and Vigil Member of the Order of the Arrow (1968 or 1969). I am not Gay but that is irrelevant.

Your recent reiteration of the policy of excluding Gays and Lesbians (hereinafter “Gay”) is causing my beloved organization a lot of harm. The Boy Scouts was always about building character and honor. It can not be an exclusive organization.

In the 60's, it was thought that being Gay was a choice. After reviewing the data, that simply is not true. I have known many Gay individuals and can attest to that. So, if that is the case, how can we turn our backs on so many Gay young people? As for adult volunteers, I have never seen anyone try and force or persuade a young person to chose a Gay lifestyle. The Scouts need all the volunteers it can get.

I am hearing a lot of negative things about the Scouts because of this policy. My own son will not allow his son to join the Scouts. I have a hard time persuading him to do otherwise. There of millions of us out there who feel the same way I do. Please, reconsider this policy.

Very truly yours,
BARRY FERNS

It pains me to write this letter.

I remember being six years old, sitting in the cool wooden chairs of the Washington Elementary school auditorium in Washington, Oklahoma. I sat there with all the other boys, writhing in summertime excitement, glad to be dismissed from class for an unannounced presentation. I didn’t know what the presentation was going to be about or why only the boys were invited to attend, but I didn’t care: school was recessed for the day and that was enough.

As we were told to settle down by the principal, a gentleman walked out in olive green shorts and a khaki shirt with a belt that had things hanging from it–a compass, a pocket knife, a canteen–and a hat with a wide brim. After we had finally settled to near silence, the man in the wide brimmed hat pronounced with a jolly, incredulous voice that he could cook an egg in a campfire with only an orange peel. I was intrigued. Who was this weird guy who is hanging out where fires burn and eggs might need to be cooked using no more than an orange peel? Then he told us that he learned this trick when he was our age and went on his first camping trip with the Boy Scouts. He went on to regale us with anecdotes about survival skills, honor, good citizenship, and lifelong friends, and I soaked every last story up with rapt amazement. Then came the zinger: signups were being accepted for a new Boy Scout troop right here in Washington. I couldn’t believe it. The time between getting out of that meeting and my parents picking me up couldn’t come fast enough. I needed them to sign me up as soon as possible. I joined the Boy Scouts that Summer as a Tiger Cub, one of the youngest members of the brand newTroop 247.

This was 26 years ago. Eleven quick years later, I would be standing with my father and Scoutmaster on a stage at St. Thomas Moore Catholic Church in Norman, Oklahoma receiving my Eagle Scout medal in front of proud Grandparents, family, and friends. What stood between those years was the single most defining experience of my youth: my time with the Boy Scouts. While others spent their summers indoors playing video games and hardly leaving their neighborhoods, I was white water rafting, spelunking, hiking, laughing, and, most importantly, learning the values of friendship, dependability, and a respect for the diversity of people on whom I needed to rely to accomplish all of these activities.

Therefore, because of this wildly fulfilling experience, it saddens me that the BSA has decided to reaffirm its disgraceful policy of bigotry and fear mongering. When I was a Scout, my troop had a diversity of races, faiths, and, as it turns out, orientations. Not one of these qualities ever prevented me from valuing our time together or developing cherished friendships, in fact, I loved that I hung out with a group of guys who were different because collectively we were uniformly awesome, but I digress.

I’ve struggled with my relationship with the Scouts since the initial ban of homosexuals several years ago, a backwards looking, arbitrary rule that took my breath away. How could this organization from which I have profited so much turn out to be the shining, happy face of bigotry? Although bigotry is too simple of a concept. The BSA’s ban was calculated, it was a political move to make some sort of a twisted appeal to the factions of our society that have celebrated and congratulated themselves for too long under the self-applied moniker of the “moral majority.” This calculation on behalf of the BSA sickens me and makes me sad beyond words. The BSA, the organization whose Eagle Scout rank I placed above even my hard-earned Master’s degree, thew an entire faction of the most vulnerable under the bus to appeal to the bullying tactics of a vocally bigoted, increasingly discredited niche. Shame on you!

What does your “stance” say to the 12 year old boy who has found repose in the welcoming arms of the Scouts from the bullying and harassment because he is seen as different? It says to him that his difference is shameful and unwelcome. My Boy Scouts have legitimized and empowered his attackers. For shame!

I get emotional thinking back to the joys I had with the Scouts. The Summer camps, spending time with my Dad and friends, the hours of exploration and the feeling of having friends who understood me. And it hurts to know that at the conclusion of this letter, I will have refuted the organization under whose umbrella all of this joy was possible. But then I think of the couple who love one another and have dedicated their lives to the purpose of serving one another and the pain they must feel at having respectable organizations publicly say that not only are they not welcome in the organization, but their love is an abomination. I think about this and I know that my pain in refuting the Boy Scouts is significantly less by degrees. This knowledge does not make my rejection of the Boy Scouts easier, but it does tell me that it is right.

It is with hope that one day the Boy Scouts of America will find their purpose that I quit the organization. Know this: I am hopeful things will change, not because they are politically calculated, but because they are right. In the meantime and under your current disgraceful policies, I return to you my Eagle Scout credentials. My medal is a couple thousand miles away in a box in my parent’s house, so I do not have that to return to you, but please accept my membership card instead. As you can see, it’s well worn. I used to carry it in my wallet and enjoyed showing it to people.

Regretfully,
Dustin Robert Lee
Somerville, MA
former Eagle Scout of Troop 247

I attained the rank of Eagle Scout on a date I will never forget, 02/02/2002. I was one of six friends who reached Eagle at the same time in Mundelein, Illinois. It was such a significant occurrence in our small suburban town that we made it into the newspaper. We grew up together, starting as Cub Scouts, where my mother was the den leader and the other five boys’ parents were all leaders in some fashion.

The six of us followed each other throughout scouting. Though one of us drifted apart from the others, the connections forged in scouting has kept us close, sticking together through all manner of events, both happy and sad; each of us taking turns leading the group in our own way. To this day, the five of us are close friends, attending each other’s weddings and those of our friends; maintaining strong friendships, supporting each other through the good times and the bad.

Unfortunately, it’s now with a heavy heart that I must do what time and the strain of the world tried so hard to do: I must break from my brothers; my lifelong friends. I can no longer stand with them as a proud Eagle Scout. Though I will retain the values, morals and skills that scouting has taught me, I cannot, in good conscience, remain an Eagle. That honor has been corrupted by the BSA’s blatant discrimination and bigotry.

The BSA’s policy of “not granting membership to open or avowed homosexuals” is not a practice in line with the teachings of the Boy Scouts. Instead, this is the practice of bigots. Scouting taught me to stand up against the unethical and that it is wrong to exclude someone for any reason, whether it be race, religion, gender, sex, physical ability or sexual orientation. I was taught to stand up for those who need my help. I am a straight man and I choose to stand with those whose voices you choose to suppress and ignore.

I am relinquishing my Eagle Scout medal and patch to the BSA’s care because the honor the rank holds has been tainted. The rank of Eagle no longer holds meaning when it is backed by an organization that represents such bigotry and contempt for others. It is my hope that, one day, the BSA will see its mistake. On that day, I will proudly stand as an Eagle Scout once again.

Sincerely,
Matthew Munley
Assistant Senior Patrol Leader, Troop Guide, Troop 388
Order of the Arrow, Ordeal Member, Lodge 40

I attribute my curiosity, my morals, and my self-reliance to the principles that I learned in scouting. Being a scout gave me purpose as a youth, and I have never regretted my years of service.

Due to the actions of your board on July 17, however, I have come to regret my continued association with the BSA. In no uncertain terms, I say to you gentlemen that you are cowards. By continuing to remove dedicated leaders and aspiring scouts from their positions because of their homosexuality, you are weakening scouting and causing trauma and isolation to the most vulnerable boys in our community.

When I was a Cub Scout, there was one boy in our pack who had been born with a cleft palate. Due to his speech impediment, he spoke rarely and quietly. Naturally, the rest of us teased him and made him an outcast until our pack leader sat us down and explained things. He impressed upon us this boy’s desperate need for friends and inclusion. He made sure that we knew that excluding others, no matter the reason, was completely unacceptable and against every law of scouting and brotherhood.

I want you to think about the boys you are casting out of your organization, and I want you to wonder how many of them need support while their families, their schools, and their churches turn their backs on them. I want you to think about the pain you are causing, the depression you are enabling, and the suicides that you are contributing to. I want you to recognize your weakness of character as you fail in your duty as men to protect the powerless.

As a Tiger Scout, Cub Scout, Webelos Scout, Boy Scout, Eagle Scout, Patrol Leader, Senior Patrol Leader, and Order of the Arrow Brotherhood member, I learned that what is easy is not always right. Something is not moral just because it is legal. You may have convinced the Supreme Court that your bigotry is lawful, but you will never convince me that this policy is anything but dishonorable negligence in your role as leaders.

One day, I am sure, the Boy Scouts of America will stop turning aside the boys who need it most. Until that day comes, I will be ashamed to have my name associated with yours. Remove me immediately from the ranks of Eagle Scouts, and find enclosed my Eagle Scout award. Until you begin to live by the values of inclusion, kindness, and civility that you espouse, I refuse any association with the Boy Scouts of America.

Ian Birnbaum
Dallas, Texas
Former Senior Patrol Leader, Troop 485
Order of the Arrow Brotherhood Member, Lodge
Aina Topa Hutsi
Eagle Scout, 2002-2012

With this letter I am returning my Eagle Scout medal, badge, scarf, and merit badge sash, thereby relinquishing all previous and current association with Boy Scouts of America.

I act in solidarity with all gay boys, fathers, and mothers who will no longer be allowed to participate in this organization and its activities which I, as a boy who was not yet even considering his sexual orientation, was accepted into and benefitted from.

I act to prevent the indoctrination of assumedly heterosexual boys and families who might accept BSA’s current ruling as anything more substantial than sanctioned ignorance (at best) or institutionalized homophobia (at worst).

Reflecting upon the Scout’s oath which I was led to memorize and repeat--and believe--I recall that bigotry and discrimination are not included in said values. As a Scout I was educated, via multicultural-appearing pamphlets and rank-advancing service projects, to appreciate and embrace diversity. I was expected to recite “with justice and liberty for all,” then acknowledge a Christ portrayed as all-accepting by stating the Lord’s Prayer in conclusion of every troop meeting. Given this “moral” education and current BSA policy, a hypocrisy exists with which I cannot ethically accept or abide in any way, shape, or form.

Until this egregious and antiquated policy is reversed, I will only speak of BSA with direct and legitimate criticism. I will not deny the discipline, skills, and solidarity I gained as a Scout. However, until these experiences become available to all youth and families, I remain a Former Eagle Scout.

I am quite proud of my effort and accomplishment achieving this rank circa 1981, and I tremendously appreciate the support of my parents, leaders, and community in this success. Thanks to all of you! I am no longer and not at all proud or appreciative of Boy Scouts of America. Rather, I am sad, disappointed, disgusted, and taking great umbrage.

I imagine questions my own son--almost five years old--might ask when he learns an enticing club from which I, his father, joined and retired, categorically rejects and denies some of his friends and community members for sake of whom and how they love. The tough answers I will give, so long as this letter speaks in vain and intransigent prejudice persists, will unfortunately enlighten my boy (be he straight or gay or otherwise) to the ways of this culture in it’s very poorest inculcation.

For myself and my inclusive family, Boy Scouts of America now serve to represent the sick and ailing shadow of American society rather that the optimistic shine I was sold on as a Tenderfoot, honored for as an Eagle, and expected to uphold as the contributing member of society I have since become.

Sincerely,
Mark Dooley, Former Eagle Scout and Senior Patrol Leader Troop 301 Hutchinson, KS
MA Clinical Psychology, Master of Environmental Studies, Licensed Mental Health Counselor, Child Mental Health Specialist, Certified Sexual Assault Services Provider, WA State Approved Clinical Supervisor

I was very active in Scouting in the mid 1970s in my council in XXXX. I held all possible positions in my troop XXX. I was on the staff of Camp XXXX, was a Brotherhood member of the Order of the Arrow and served as lodge secretary. I earned 24 merit badges. In the years since my youth I have served as a merit badge councilor and have assisted local troops in other capacities.

It was with a great deal of pride of accomplishment that I earned and was awarded the Eagle Scout award in 1975.

But it was with a great deal of disgust that I heard of the Boy Scouts of America’s recent reaffirmation of their anti-gay policy.

I have known of this policy for some time, and each time it was in the news I hoped that the BSA would take the opportunity to revisit the policy and to do the right thing, to change the policy and make the BSA an inclusive organization that would welcome all boys and leaders, regardless of sexual orientation.

Well, you had the opportunity, and you blew it. You could have followed the lead of other youth organizations that have recognized the needs of all those who could be served by the otherwise excellent programs that develop skills and confidence in young men. But you did not.

Today I am returning my Eagle Scout medal because I do not want to be associated with the bigotry for which the BSA stands.

I had at one time considered a career as professional Scout. I have looked upon the principles that I learned as part of the Scout Oath and Law as ideals to guide my actions. But in the years since I left active participation in Scouting I have learned that being Loyal, Courteous, and Kind to my fellow humans includes being tolerant, accepting, and inclusive of others despite their differences. Bigotry is not part of anything that I learned from Scouts — but that is what you are teaching to the young men in your program today. Shame on you for doing so.

While I recognize that the BSA is a private organization and has the right to include or exclude from its membership anyone it wants to, this is an organization that I no longer wish to have anything to do with.

William Lynch

Lynch had this today about his letter, posted below: "I am not an activist (and in fact, even lean a little to the right of center), but after reading what many of my fellow Eagle Scouts have done since the BSA announced their decision, I could not in good conscience sit idle. I made an individual decision to return my medal to the organization until such time that the policy is reversed. Included with my medal was the attached 2-page letter which took me nearly 4 hours and many tears to write."

Recently, I was disheartened to learn that the BSA has made a national executive decision to continue a long-standing policy of exclusion towards persons of “undesirable” religious affiliations and sexual orientation. This policy is unjust and wrong. I feel that I MUST take a principled stance and join my fellow Eagle scouts in returning my medal (enclosed).

I earned the rank of Eagle scout in 1993 through Troop 770 in Winston Salem, NC and Troop 17 in Enon, OH. It was an arduous process that didn't end until a few months before my 18th birthday. Most of my peers had long since moved on, as I longed to do so myself. Scouting was tough, but I loved it. I buckled down and finished my last merit badge and service project because I'm no quitter. But I feel that I must quit now. Earning the Eagle scout honor was very hard-won personal victory, especially for a small boy who would rather stay inside and read comic books than be outdoors canoeing and camping. It was tougher than MBA school. It was tougher than starting two businesses. It was tougher than the martial arts I would take up as a twenty-something. But scouting wasn't tougher than Engineering school and scouting wasn't tougher than helping my wife through her own dark times early in our marriage. It certainly wasn't tougher than writing this letter.

However, without scouting, I don't know that I would have been tough enough to do any of those things. Scouting taught me to get out of my comfort zone and do things I did not believe I could do. Scouting taught me that anything is possible if I believed in myself. Myself, not a magic being.

Perhaps my greatest achievement in scouting was possibly saving the life of a fellow scout during the summer of 1987 or 1988. On one of our many hikes at that vast reserve of Camp Raven Knob in the western NC mountains. There were probably about 30 of us on the hike, and for some reason, I was walking at the head of the group that day. A juvenile copperhead snake was crossing the trail and I don't think anyone else had spotted it. I put my arm up to stop the boys behind me and the counselor came forward and tossed it into the woods with a stick. I had learned that juvenile copperheads were the most dangerous, because they hadn't learned to control the amount of venom injected with a bite and would inject far more than an adult. The boy next to me (or one of the others) may well had been bitten if I hadn't stopped the group.

No one can say what would have happened that day if I had been excluded way back then but possibly because I was there, we do know that no one was bitten in my group. The fact of the matter is that scouts look out for each other, just as I know that you and the executive council must believe that you are looking out for today's scouts by continuing the policy of exclusion against gay and atheist boys and men. Unfortunately, I believe this policy is anachronistic for the 21st century and the anonymous, closed-door methods that you have chosen to review this policy are a further stain to the BSA organization. What was once known as the most wholesome organizations of America is now seen as one of it's last bastions of bigotry.

I cannot in good conscience continue to allow myself to be associated with an organization with such seemingly divergent views from my own, not to mention inconsistent with the fundamental values that I learned in scouting. As an information security consultant, I see everyone's dirty laundry. It's critical that I maintain my own credibility and trustworthiness. It is my belief that I can no longer do that by maintaining an association with the Boy Scouts of America.

Effective immediately, I will no longer refer to myself as an Eagle Scout. Although it brings me great sadness to acknowledge this separation, what makes me even more sad is that you would no longer have me, a self-identified atheist for most of my adult life, as a member anyway. Having no children, I have given little consideration to continued scouting involvement for the past 20 years, but I would like to think that I have much to offer the younger generation in terms of skills and experiences. Yet the Board would deny us both because of who I am.

Although I consider it to be a vary small part of who I am, being an atheist is still very much a part of who I am and influences many of my decisions, both conscious and unconscious. On that note, I would like to say that I believe the decision to continue the exclusion policy was wrong not only from a moral perspective, but also from a rational one. If you desire to change the attitudes of persons of “undesirable” religious affiliations and sexual orientation, would not the best way to do that be to include them and try to set a “better” example? Or is the Council so terrified that there might be something to be learned by counter example of the “undesirables”?

Furthermore, it seems that the Board rejected the obvious compromise of allowing the exclusion policy to be implemented at the unit level, rather than at the national level. It's my understanding that this reflects what is actually happening in practice in most areas today anyway. All I can say is that I know my adult life would have been different, probably in negative ways, if not for my time in scouting. I believe that everyone has something to contribute. The exclusion policy not only denies the experiences that I had to other decent human beings, but also diminishes the experiences of those who are included.

I appeal to you to reconsider the exclusion policy of the Boy Scouts of America. If you do, I think I would like to come back to scouting.

Sincerely,
William Lynch
Former Eagle Scout, Troop 17, 1993-2012

It's worth remembering that this is not a new movement. This policy has been around for a long time ... and Eagle Scouts have been resigning all along. Eric Ray sent the Boy Scouts of America this letter in 2000.

As an Eagle Scout, I feel I must make my voice heard about the Boy Scout policy on discrimination. For years I remained silent on these issues mostly because they did not apply to me. However, one of the most important principles in a constitutional society is that the denial of civil liberties to one group is a threat to the liberties of all groups.

Initially, I was most concerned specifically about the policy banning atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers from the BSA. While I certainly had religious beliefs when I became an Eagle Scout in 1990 at the age of fourteen, I have since moved away from organized religion. I find it deeply troubling that today I would not even be eligible for membership in the organization simply because of my agnosticism. So am I no longer to be considered a "moral" person because I do not subscribe to a literal interpretation of religious scripture? I would submit to you that it is not I who has changed, but rather the Scouting organization that has not lived up to its own values.

Recently, I have become interested in the Scouting policy of banning homosexuals as members and leaders. I suppose one of the reasons this had never gained my attention earlier is the fact that such discrimination is not mentioned anywhere in BSA handbooks or policies! I had mixed feelings about the recent Supreme Court decision of Dale vs. BSA. While I agree that a private group does have the right to determine its membership criteria, I believed that the principles embodying the Boy Scout organization would preclude it from hiding behind such protections.

It is truly a sad day for me when the Boy Scouts of America is placed in the same category as a White Supremacist organization such as the KKK. Despite my years of happy membership in the organization, I am now ashamed to be a member. While I disagree strongly with the BSA becoming a discriminatory private organization, rather than an inclusive public accommodation, I believe that the organization has the right to become what it wishes. However, in order be consistent with remaining truly private, the BSA must now voluntarily completely separate itself from government assistance, whether this be direct financial support from the United Way, associations with public services such as fire or police departments, subsidization of campgrounds at military installations, as well as the symbolic position of head of the BSA held by the President of the United States.

To accept government assistance while discriminating against entire classes of citizens is to violate the principles of honesty and integrity which the Boy Scouts hold so dear. Perhaps the most troubling aspect of this situation is the expulsion of Boy Scout members simply because they vocally disagree with BSA discrimination policy. Such activities are the antithesis of democratic principles.

Thinking people can disagree on such matters, but to eliminate opposition is the act of tyranny. To this end, I am enclosing my most cherished possession from Scouting, my Eagle Scout badge, as an act of protest. While I'm sure such commonplace actions are of little consequence, I would hope that you would consider just one thing. The Boy Scouts of America organization was created for its members. If the Scouts themselves leave it, then what is left?

Sincerely,
Eric S. Ray, Eagle Scout

Read the original post, featuring a letters from my husband and six other men, plus links to more

Join Scouts for Equality, an organization founded by Eagle Scout Zach Wahls.

If you want to write to the BSA, here's the address:
BSA National Executive Board
1325 Walnut Hill Lane
PO Box 152079
Irving, Texas 75015-2079

Music for Marriage Equality is working with Washington musicians to approve R-74, a referendum that will put same-sex marriage to the popular vote on Washington's state ballot in November.

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis recorded this lovely song, which includes vocals by Mary Lambert, to benefit Music for Marriage Equality. The cover art (above) for the single is a photograph of Macklemore’s uncles, who served as inspiration for the song and were a model of a committed and loving relationship while he was growing up.

Here's Macklemore on the process of writing the song:

 This song, which I wrote in April, is a response to what I have observed and experienced, and is also an act of personal accountability. It was not easy to write, and I struggled with how I, as a straight male, could genuinely speak upon this issue.

Initially, I tried writing from the perspective of a gay, bullied kid, but after getting some feedback, I felt it wasn’t my story to tell. What I do know, and where I wrote from, is my own perspective growing up in a culture where “that’s gay” was commonplace, with a huge stigma on those who identified and were perceived as gay.

Growing up in the Catholic Church, I saw first-hand how easily religion became a platform for hate and prejudice. Those who “believed” were excused from their own judgments, bypassing the stark issue of basic civil rights.

But, more influential to me as a kid than the church was hip hop, my cultural foundation that influenced my worldview.

Unfortunately, intolerance of the gay community in hip hop is widespread. The best rappers will use homophobic language on albums that critics rave about, making hip hop and homophobia inextricably linked. We have sidestepped the issue entirely, become numb to the language that we use, and are increasingly blinded to our own prejudice.

The consequence and impact of what we say, and the culture of shame and abuse it creates, has very real, sometimes deadly impacts upon LGBTQ young people looking for acceptance and belonging.

You can hear the song now for free (below), buy it on iTunes next week or pick up a limited 7" vinyl single to support marriage rights for everyone.

You can also stay in touch with Music for Music Equality on Twitter and Facebook

Cardinal Timothy Dolan has led the charge against same-sex marriage, describing gay and lesbian unions as “unjust,” “immoral,” and unnatural. “This is a very violation of what we consider natural law that’s embedded in every man and woman and we’re really worried as Americans that it’s going to be detrimental to the common good,” Dolan said in a radio interview in June, as New York prepared to legalize marriage equality. “[W]e still worry about the detrimental effect upon society, upon culture, and certainly upon our individual churches.”

But church documents showing that Dolan paid off priests who had been accused of sexually abusing minors suggest that the prominent Catholic leader was willing to overlook these very same religious convictions to help colleagues accused of egregious wrong doing. The documents, obtained by the New York Times, also show that Dolan lied to reporters when he initially dismissed news of the payments as “false, preposterous and unjust.”

When a religious leader is found out to be a lying hypocrite, the members of the religion become much more devout. Church leaders should do this kind of thing more often.

Via Cynical-C

(via Mia Farrow)

“No one with daughters the age of Sandra Fluke, and I have two, could possibly abide the insult and abuse heaped upon this courageous and well-intentioned young lady. Mr. Limbaugh, with his highly personal attacks on Miss Fluke, overstepped any reasonable bounds of decency. Even though Mr. Limbaugh has now issued an apology, we have nonetheless decided to withdraw our advertising from his show. We hope that our action, along with the other advertisers who have already withdrawn their ads, will ultimately contribute to a more civilized public discourse.”

A Message from Carbonite CEO, David Friend Regarding Ads on Limbaugh (via Reddit)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/04/advertiser-we-wont-reinstat.html/feed 160 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/19/dirty-dirty-dirty-of-playb.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/19/dirty-dirty-dirty-of-playb.html#comments Fri, 20 Jan 2012 00:17:32 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder http://boingboing.net/?p=139880

[Video Link] Soft Skull Press has kindly given Boing Boing an exclusive excerpt of Mike Edison's history of Playboy, Penthouse, Screw, and Hustler magazines, called Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers -- An American Tale of Sex and Wonder.

A wild and uncompromising history of four infamous magazines and the outlaws behind them, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is the first book to rip the sheet off of the sleazy myth-making machine of Hugh Hefner and Playboy, and reveal the doomed history of Hefner's arch rival, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, whose messiah complex and heedless spending -- on a legendary flop of a movie paid for with bags of cash, a porn magazine for women, and a pie-in-the sky scheme for a portable nuclear reactor -- fueled the greatest riches to rags story ever told.

The adventure begins in the early 1950s and rips through the tumultuous '60s and '70s -- when Hustler's Larry Flynt and Screw's Al Goldstein were arrested dozens of times, recklessly pushing the boundaries of free speech, attacking politicians, and putting unapologetic filth front and center -- through the 1990s when a sexed-up culture high on the Internet finally killed the era when men looked for satisfaction in the centerfold. As America goes, so goes its porn.

Along the way we meet many unexpected heroes -- John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, Helen Gurley Brown, and the staff of Mad magazine among them -- and villains -- from Richard Nixon and the Moral Majority to Hugh Hefner himself, whose legacy, we learn, is built on a self-perpetuated lie.

Mike Edison is the former publisher of High Times magazine, a Hustler and Penthouse correspondent, and the former editor-in-chief of Screw magazine. He is the author of 28 pornographic novels and the legendary memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go -- Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World. Edison lives and works in New York City.

Before you continue, read the following:

WARNING: ADULT TYPE MATERIAL

IF YOU ARE LIABLE TO BE OFFENDED BY SUCH MATERIAL KINDLY LAY OFF AND CLICK THE BACK BUTTON ON YOUR BROWSER.

THANK YOU.

The contents of this publication are neither obscene nor pornographic according to the guidelines set by the United States Supreme Court.

Excerpt from Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers -- An American Tale of Sex and Wonder, by Mike Edison. Published by Soft Skull Press. Copyright 2011 by Mike Edison. Reprinted with Permission.

My first exposure to the joys of fellatio, were, typically, in print form -- via a late-sixties totem called The Sensuous Woman, by a woman so mysterious that she only went by the first initial "J."

It would have had to have been about 1976 when I first encountered this mind-blowing Baedeker. My pal Eric had somehow secured a copy of this licentious wonder, though I am pretty sure he boosted it from his folks. They were hippies and probably did it all the time.

We were about thirteen, and I was, at least, as previously mentioned, at the vanguard of my personal L'age D'or Autoerotique, Eric and I also shared our first homosexual experience -- in the form of a "Captain Fantastic" -- era Elton John poster that he had picked up at Spencer Gifts. We loved E.J. but there was something about him, wrapped up in rhinestone and furs, that we just couldn't put our fingers on.

The Sensual Woman, however, was someone we understood right away . I learned so much from "J." For instance, you should "bring your own grapes to an orgy." Who knew?

Her descriptions of blow job techniques were particularly piquant. Thirty-five years later I can still vividly recall her Coleridge-like descriptions of "The Butterfly Flick," the "Silken Swirl," and "The Hoover ". Like all fourteen-year-olds, I had heard rumors of this sort of behavior, but The Sensual Woman cemented it. Sex was going to be great.

One of the nice things about this book is that it has no pictures, which is intellectually very liberating, and immediately differentiates it from its near-contemporary, the Joy of Sex, which, as anyone who has seen one of the early editions can tell you, featured a couple of filthy hippies getting it on in a marathon of awkwardly contrived illustrations, being to the Kama Sutra kind of what the roller derby is to the Bolshoi Ballet. My parents had a copy of that workbook, and when I finally got around to stealing it, it did nothing if not deflate my imagination. I am certain that it did nothing for theirs.

But, back to the cocksucking. Aside from its obvious delights -- be you homo, hetero, male, or female -- to coin a phrase, it is a mouthful. You can ask Lenny Bruce.

Or you could have, in 1961, when he was arrested for dropping the ten-letter C-bomb during a gig at the Jazz Cafe in San Francisco.

It was a good night, by all accounts. He twirled lots of his best bits, including "Jewish & Goyish" ("Dig -- I'm Jewish. Count Basie's Jewish. Ray Charles is Jewish. Eddie Cantor's goyish.... If you live in New York or any other big city, you are Jewish. It doesn't matter even if you're Catholic, if you live in New York, you're Jewish.... Negroes are all Jews... Underwear is definitely goyish. Balls are goyish. Titties are Jewish....") and "To is a Preposition, Come is a Verb" -- the direct antecedent to George Carlin's "you can prick your finger, but you can't finger your prick" routine. In fact, Carlin owes most of his fancy wordplay to Lenny. Seven dirty words? Hmmf! Lenny spit out nine, and in alphabetical order! Ass, balls, cocksucker, cunt, fuck, motherfucker, piss, shit, tits -- years before Carlin made his bones with seventy-seven percent of the same shtick.

A big part of Lenny's game was to perpetrate the language until it collapsed on itself, until words became just... words.

"By the way, are there any niggers here tonight?" he began one routine. All he got for that gambit was crickets. You could hear the air.

So he says it again, and then after another uncomfortable, career-killing silence, asks the crowd, almost apologetically if they think he is "that desperate for shock value?" And then Lenny lights'em up. "I see one nigger couple back there, and between those two niggers sit three kikes..." BIG laugh. Apparently there are some kikes in the audience. Now he's got'em on his side. "Thank god for the kikes! Two spics, one mick, two dykes, and one spunky funky honkey... six guineas, seven wops," he's rattling on like a hop-head auctioneer, and no one seems to mind that making a distinction between "guineas" and "wops" makes little or no sense at all. Lenny is in a groove. "Anymore boogies? See more sheenies?" He's doing the final accounting -- "Six greaseballs, six dykes, eight kikes, and four niggers..." And one big motherfucking round of applause.

"It's no joke, he totally changed the face of comedy," says [Paul] Krassner. "When other people were doing Chinese waiter jokes, Lenny was talking about teacher's salaries. When other people were making jokes about their mother-in-laws, he was talking about abortion rights." In San Francisco, a cop, a fucking beat cop, was assigned by his self-righteous sergeant to arbitrate First Amendment rights in a town famous for pirates and pansies. He told Lenny "That word you said... you can't say that in a public place. It's against the law to say it, and do it." It was, the cop told Lenny, disgustedly, "a favorite homosexual practice." Lenny, always the humanist, was equally disgusted -- disgusted that the cop's wife didn't suck the cop's dick. Never mind going to jail for telling a dirty joke, that was criminal.

The obscenity trial that followed, like all cases of the kind, was farcical:

Mr. Wollenberg (Lenny's Lawyer): Can you give us the exact words or what your recollection of those words was?

Arresting Officer: During the chant he used the words "I'm coming, I'm coming, I'm coming"...

Mr Wollenberg: And then was anything else said by the defendant?

Arresting Officer: Then later he said "Don't come in me, don't come in me"....

Mr. Wollenberg: You are quite familiar with the term "cocksucker" are you not?

Arresting Officer: I have heard it used, yes.

Mr. Wollenberg: As a matter of fact, it was used in the police station on the night Lenny Bruce was booked there, was it not?

Ah ha!

Agatha Christie, Colonel Mustard, and Inspector Clouseau, with the bungling help of the Keystone Cops and the cast of Police Academy III, could not have provided a sillier scenario. One thing about obscenity trials that makes them different than other criminal trials is that in an obscenity trial, the premise is to determine whether a crime has actually been committed, as opposed to say, a murder trial, where you presumably have a body that has been done grievous harm, and now the job is to figure out whodunit.

But with an obscenity case, you have the alleged culprit -- and the gig is to figure out if what he did is actually a crime -- which is not necessarily the kind of power you want to put in the hands of twelve more-or-less randomly selected citizens of varying degrees of piety, literacy, and humor. If the Supreme Court of the United States of America has had zero luck defining obscenity (viz. Justice Stewart "I know it when I see it" Potter), is it really such a hot idea putting the power to swing the ax limiting free expression into the hands of punters pretty much picked off the line of the DMV? The First Amendment is a tricky beast. Not all speech is protected. For instance, libel and slander are not protected. But there are legal definitions for both. Also, as is well known, for obvious reasons, you can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater, but you can shout "bitch, faggot, and nigger," and there are many popular entertainers who make their living that way. Hopefully they know the debt they owe Lenny.

"Hate speech" is generally protected, but "fighting words" may not be. You can advocate the destruction of slopes, spades, rag-heads, rednecks, hymies, and half-breeds, and march down Main Street with a bed sheet over your head preaching 600-thread-count Egyptian-cotton purity, but if we were in a bar and you were to call me a cheap kike bastard to my face, and I took a poke at your nose with my fist, you don't get to claim "freedom of speech," even though technically you may have been correct.

Political speech is generally regarded as "the highest form" of protected speech, and the best example is probably flag burning, which the Supreme Court has very specifically ruled on as being covered by the aegis of the First Amendment. And yet every few election cycles there is always some ill-educated rube who wants to run for office on the platform of adding a constitutional amendment banning it, and a fair amount of yahoos line up behind it in the name of "Freedom."

Obscenity is not protected speech, but pornography is. I have heard it said that pornography is the legal version of obscenity, which is cute, but not entirely accurate. Certainly most of the art and literature that has been deemed obscene over the years is of a sexual nature, but certainly no one would conflate what Lenny was spouting with pornography as such.

The working definition of obscenity, set in 1957 by the Supreme court's decision in Roth v. United States was "whether to the average person applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest," which was the Court's way of saying, "Hey, you guys figure it out for yourselves, and quite bugging us every time someone gets their knickers in a twist."

But the race was fixed. Never mind that San Francisco was the Cocksucking Capital of the Western World, or that down the street and around the corner from where Lenny was performing there was a run of strip clubs as degenerate as any in the contiguous forty-eight, run by the descendants of the pirates who ran the Barbary Coast. In a world that was willfully ignorant or blissfully dishonest about their own vices, "community standards" meant very little.

* *

WARNING: ADULT TYPE MATERIAL

IF YOU ARE LIABLE TO BE OFFENDED BY SUCH MATERIAL KINDLY LAY OFF AND PLACE BACK ON PILE NEATLY.

THANK YOU.

The contents of this publication are neither obscene nor pornographic according to the guidelines set by the United States Supreme Court.

So advised Screw magazine on the cover of its first issue -- under a photo of a woman in a bikini luridly fondling a giant, kosher salami -- none of which seemed to impress the local law enforcement, who busted Screw founder Al Goldstein and his then business partner Jim Buckley for obscenity sixteen times in their first three years of publication. An early trial saw the Socratic method applied to a typical Screw cut-and-paste job of Jesus on the cross. Was his cock erect? It was hard to tell. More frequently the same debate was focused on New York Mayor John Lindsay, but the question was the same.

"Lindsay was a typical liberal scumbag," Goldstein says, "a fucking phoney and a hypocrite." And when Lindsay wasn't featured in Screw jerking off, or with his dick buried in another man's ass, his head was popping out of a toilet bowl to illustrate his esteemed position atop Goldstein's Shit List.

The real obscenity was that Lindsay and his goon squad insisted on busting not just the publishers, but the newsstand operators who sold Screw -- which debuted on the mean streets of New York on November 4, 1968, the same day Richard Nixon was elected -- including many of whom were blind. "How could they even know what they were selling?" asked Al after finding himself in a jail cell with Buckley and half a dozen sightless news vendors. Just eight hours earlier, the new issue of Screwhad hit the stands featuring a typically crude composite of the Mayor with his cock hanging out. Goldstein told Buckley to keep quiet because he was afraid that if anyone found out who they were they'd be the first men in history to be beaten to death by a gang of blind men wielding canes in a jail cell.

One blind news dealer was tapping around the cell, trying to find the urinal. They were in "The Tombs," New York City's notorious downtown jail, called that because it was like a mausoleum for the living. The whole place smelled like piss, it was hard for a blind man to know where to go. The poor bastard tripped over a junkie and nearly slipped in a puddle of puke. Al helped him, but when the fellow asked him his name, he lied. "I was overcome with Jewish guilt. That's when I knew I was in a fight with that cocksucker Lindsay." Lindsay became a frequent target, as would be every other sitting mayor over Screw's thirty-five year run, but there was hardly anyone who wasn't targeted and put on trial for the high crime of hypocrisy. An early ad boasted that in less than half a year Screwhad managed to insult, degrade, or otherwise put down such establishments as "the artificial vagina, all governments of the world ... our lawyers and staff ... motherhood.... And everyone living and dead in this and all other worlds." Early on, Hefner was a popular whipping boy:

Playboy, a magazine for fags?

Every man fucking well can't afford a Mustang, let alone a blonde angel in a see-through blouse. Secondly, there is no such life more vapid that that which Playboy continually stresses -- nothing that could be more sterile than a constantly phony smile on a constantly bored chick... Playboy's philosophy could only emancipate the Pope, for only in celibacy can one feel more frustration than Hugh Hefner offers through his papers... His magazine is written and edited for the homosexual and maintains near perfect fidelity to their concepts about the female of the species...

Can Playboy get it up?

The words spilling out of his glossy dream factory cushion the Playboy reader against his constant fear that his latent homosexuality will spring forth one day as he seeks hungrily to gobble up every cock within swallowing distance... the Playboy world is peopled by hairless women and cockless men... a world of hypocrisy sham and deceit...

"I've written about my bisexuality, and this is when it was hard to do, in 1968," Goldstein says with pride. "You can see pictures of me in 1956 with my black girlfriend. This was not done in the '50s. I've always marched to a different tune. I started a gay tabloid after Screw. It was called Gay and edited by Jack and Lige from the The Homosexual Citizen. Unfortunately it didn't sell very well."

Kikes, niggers, wops, dykes, cocksuckers... it was all in good fun. "When I was growing up in Brooklyn," says Goldstein, "We used to mock each other mercilessly. We called each other everything we could think of -- and your mother, too. She was a filthy dick-sucking whore who liked to fuck dogs. It was always test to see if you could give it and take it. It's a real New York thing." Their most abused target, though, was always Goldstein himself, who would threaten to fire his staff if they did not attack him sufficiently in the pages of Screw. "Nowhere am I more hated than in the pages of my own paper," Goldstein boasted in his memoir, I, Goldsein: My Screwed Life. "I tell my editors to give me everything they've got. They have to make fun of my tiny cock and call me a penny-pinching overweight Jew faggot all the time or I'll fire them. Of course they are the biggest bunch of repressed virgins I could hire, and they loathe me, so it isn't so difficult. " As the ultimate self-hating Jew ("I am the litmus test for anti-Semitism. I am the worst Jews have to offer.") he had become his own mascot -- Alfred E. Neuman meets Godzilla, as characterized by Sigmund Freud and rendered by Ralph Steadman in shmaltz-based paint. Those New Yorkers who weren't reviled by him loved him. Even the uniforms that were busting him wanted to shake his hand. Al kept them laughing, and let them know where they could score a reliable rub-and-tug on a cop's salary.

* *

Hugh Hefner and Bob Guccione may have thought they were pushing the envelope, Guccione especially, but it was Hustler who would boldly go into the Final Frontier of Parted Labia and Rosebud Clitora. Flynt had always thought that the ol' honey pot was as interesting as a woman's face, and he knew that real American men felt the same way. They lived not in fear of the vagina, they lived for it.

Discerning men had always fetishized female genitalia, much the same way women had made penises the stealth topic of discussion at boozy suburban kaffeeklatsches disguised as "book clubs" since the advent of chardonnay and the vodka cocktail. Except that men don't talk about it so much, because, frankly, it takes a bit more poetry to describe the flower that is the vagina than the blunt object that is the cock, and honestly, most of us aren't up to the challenge of waxing poetically on, say, the subtleties of the classic Midwestern, dolphin-nose pudenda, covered in glorious and forgiving dirty-blond fuzz, smelling bright and fresh and clean and happy like the first day of summer -- or, say, something from the Italian school, not uncommon in Boston or New York, and no less intoxicating, with its lithe, knowing labia and friendly caterpillar of tangled, brunette bunting and invigorating bouquet of Old World brine and spicy, cured lunch meats.

Which is not to say that women -- or men, as the case may be -- do not appreciate the subtleties of the penis, or the magic that is a man's testicles. I am just positing that there may be less to work with there, poetically speaking.

Unlike Playboy, which, led by Penthouse, eventually took its flights of marginally risque cheesecake down the primrose path; and Penthoues, which had begun with a more profound call to tumescence, Hustler just blew the barn doors wide open and broke every rule heretofore known to the art and craft of photographing the female form.

In my experience with women, such as it is, not one or them has done anything remotely close to the things that the ladies in Hustler do routinely to show off the depth and hue of their internal organs. But there they were -- legs in the air, or bent over demonstrating a Monk's Delight of positions, peeling back their labia to reveal the bubblegum-pink of their most intimate passages, what would instantly be denounced as the workings of a sick mind that had crossed over perilously from acceptable erotica into a deranged vortex of clinical gynecology. The first issue of Hustler "showing pink" sold 500,000 copies. Within two years they would be selling three-million.

* *

When Hefner made his splash on reality television in 2005 at the age of 79, a farcical view of what life in the Mansion was like for his flock of "girlfriends" (which numbered as high as seven at one time), he outed himself as a cynical and feckless relic who had fallen hopelessly in love with his own kayfabe. He was, in wrestling parlance, a "mark for his own gimmick."

Nonetheless, The Girls Next Door -- he was still sticking to that old chestnut -- was an immediate hit, with more people watching than were reading the magazine, although viewership would ebb and flow dramatically, bobbing from 2.5 million for a season opener to less than a million a few weeks later. But more importantly, it wasn't even men watching this nonsense, it was women sucked in for the soap opera escapades of an over-the-hill millionaire and his pay-for-play roommates. Sure, it was a revenue stream, but it upheld none of the core values of the brand. Rather, it pushed Playboy farther into the depths of juvenilia and middle-American mindlessness.

But that was Hef. He had always told us that sparkling conversation was foreplay, and then he went for the most brainless Barbie dolls money could by. He went the distance to find the most negative-stereotype-reinforcing women that Hollywood had to offer -- no little feat -- and then lorded over them in his pajamas while they swam naked on his TV show. As one of my gal pals charged when the show premiered, "He obviously doesn't like real women, so from where I'm standing, it's pretty clear he doesn't like women." And then the stories started leaking out. The thin white line of rabbit fur had been crossed by women telling bunny tales out of school. Before this, oddly, such was the power of Playboy that no one had ever kissed and told before.

Jill Ann Spaulding -- a professional poker player who had been photographed for Playboy.com and aspired to be a Playmate and made it all the way to Hef's bedroom before being cut loose from the organization after refusing to have sex with him -- wrote a book and wailed in a much circulated interview with celebrity wag Chaunce Hayden that "He just lies there with his Viagra erection. It's just a fake erection, and each girl gets on top of him for two minutes while the girls in the background try to keep him excited. They'll yell things like, 'Fuck her daddy, fuck her daddy!' There's a lot of cheerleader going on... There's also gay porn on in the background...I think he needs to see that stuff..."

Like everything else in his life, Hef's penis was on a schedule. The girls were ushered in on "sex nights," every Wednesday and Friday. Sometimes he gave the girls Quaaludes, what he called "leg openers."

Beginning with his "primary girlfriend," who gave him oral sex while the other girls pretended to get it on with each other (in reality none of the them even like each other), they each had a go at his "fake erection." The finale is Hef having anal sex with the Girlfriend No. 1, the culmination of which is greeted by a round of applause.

* *

Larry Flynt was the last man standing. The Appalachian Chicken Fucker had beaten the odds laid down by Al Goldstein, Bob Guccione, and Hugh Hefner.

Well, maybe not standing so much as ruling from a gold-plated wheelchair, in an office that looks like a combination bank and brothel, circa 1863. There are lush-looking Remington paintings dotting the walls and Tiffany lamps and Chinese vases everywhere, but when you get close, you can see that it is all window dressing, none of it is real. But, as Flynt was fond of saying, "I don't need taste, I have money." He speaks with a slight slur, the lasting effects of a stroke he suffered as a complication of his massive intake of painkillers before his final operation. More importantly, his name is on the outside of the building, his building, which towers over Beverly Hills. His net worth has been estimated at about $400 million.

"What set me apart from the others," Flynt told me, "I'm a business man. Guccione was an artist. Goldstein was an excellent writer, but not a good businessman. Hefner just got lucky, he was in the right place at the right time. Absolutely he made a contribution, he was a pioneer. Hef did a great deal for the sexual revolution. You have to give him accolades. He is a very nice guy, pleasant to be around, but he still thinks its 1953, he's still there, and that's why he is falling apart." Flynt had famously denounced religion, but he surprised everyone when he eulogized Jerry Falwell in 2007: "My mother always told me that no matter how much you dislike a person, when you meet them face to face you will find characteristics about them that you like. Jerry Falwell was a perfect example of that. I hated everything he stood for, but after meeting him in person, years after the trial, Jerry Falwell and I became good friends... I knew what he was selling and he knew what I was selling."

"If I were selling peanut butter instead of porn," Flynt told me, "I'd still sell it with a vengeance."

Buy Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers -- An American Tale of Sex and Wonder on Amazon

The Irish Children's Minister Frances Fitzgerald said that priests who are given admissions of child abuse during the sacrament of confession will not be exempt from new rules on mandatory reporting. During his homily to worshippers at Knock shrine in County Mayo, on Sunday, the archbishop of Armagh and primate of all Ireland said: "Freedom to participate in worship and to enjoy the long-established rites of the church is so fundamental that any intrusion upon it is a challenge to the very basis of a free society."

The discussion seems to center on future abuses revealed during confession, but I wonder if it's really about the ongoing use of the sacrament to hide internal discussions of undisclosed abuses from the possibility of legal scrutiny.

Child protection measures apply regardless of religious rules [BBC]]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/08/30/irish-catholics-object-to-chil.html/feed 114 http://boingboing.net/2011/06/13/europride-and-gaga-i.html http://boingboing.net/2011/06/13/europride-and-gaga-i.html#comments Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:31:36 +0000 Jasmina Tesanovic

(Lady Gaga performs during a gay pride concert in downtown Rome. Stefano Rellandini / Reuters)

The gay icon Lady Gaga was there wearing her green wig, together with up to one million people marching chanting singing in a carnival gay pride march.

Rome is the capital of Vatican too, the place where Pope lives and preaches from his balcony every Sunday morning about how people should live and love. Lady Gaga's motto this Sunday was the power of love. She recalled her Italian origin and name ( La Germanotta) and, in a passionate speech, demanded immediate equal rights for the gays, meaning the right to get married, have children etc. While singing her new song Born This Way, an anthem to diversity...

But only few days ago, the Pope announced his firm opposition to equalize even straight informal marriages, that is, unions not sanctioned by God in a marriage sacrament. Where the Catholic church is concerned, gay marriages are not only a taboo topic but even a place of severe demonization and homophobia.

The Italian state has fought a long and heavy battle against the Catholic church, which reached a certain status quo with the "Concordato" in 1929, signed when Mussolini was in power. With this arrangement canonic law became the civil law too, regulating marriages, prohibiting divorce, freedom of choice, sexual diversity...Only in the seventies did civil society activism manage to pass Italian law that made divorce and abortion possible, as well as non legalized marriages.

However gay rights never became a focus in Italian society. Civilian gays have been battered, criminalized and persecuted, notwithstanding the huge sex pedophilia scandals running among Catholic priests who have been getting away quite easily all these years with their criminal abuse of power. Italy today is still a macho society mirrored publicly by its premiere Silvio Berlusconi who very often justifies his sex scandals with minors and prostitutes with the words, at least I am not gay.

By contrast, a gay politician of Rome caught with a transvestite prostitute had to resign because of his public image being ruined.

This parade yesterday in Rome was extremely well organized by the LGBT community even though many antipope offensive banners were flying together with the drag queens, masques of famous icons, wigs, rainbow flags; Pope Ratzinger was renamed Natzinger.

Gay politicians from the Italian parliament gave speeches pointing out that Italy is ranking at level 0 in the European community regarding minority rights. The Cinderella of Europe, as Italy is called as of today, would not be accepted to join the European community nowadays. Yet Italy remains a G8 powers and a founder of united Europe.

Italian double standards baffle other European countries as well as the progressive italian citizens. Only a couple of months ago, the right winged regional government in Piemonte northern Italy, tried to impose a new measure on abortion. Women who have the national constitutional right to abortion, would have to face a restrictive treatment with the pro life volunteers manning hospitals.

The right winged elected politician, immediately after his victory, announced his antiabortion and anti gays policy. Somehow women and gays are always the primary target of conservatives and the civil rights of gays and women should also be the first test for the real level of democracy in a country. Democracy must include all citizens, notwithstanding their diversity.

Yesterday Italy also voted against nuclear power after Germany said a definite no, after Japan suffered the tsunami catastrophe with numerous leaks, 25 years after Chernobyl, in the midst of global warming tragedies, and religious antiDarwinist denials.

Looking at the parade in Rome, with the association of parents of gay children proudly marching for the rights of their posterity, I wondered what kind of world is coming, and how responsible and guilty are we today for making it worse rather than better.

Blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/06/13/europride-and-gaga-i.html/feed 42 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/sultan-berlusconi-on.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/sultan-berlusconi-on.html#comments Fri, 18 Feb 2011 07:44:02 +0000 Jasmina Tesanovic
[video link]

Silvio Berlusconi will be the first head of a G-7 state to be arraigned in court on charges of paid sex with a minor.

A few days ago, the court from Milan issued a subpoena for the Italian premiere, on a charge that could carry a penalty of 15 years of prison. This April 6, sugar daddy Silvio will face three adult female judges from Milan, the Italian women that the press here in Italy call his "Nemesis."

A right wing commentator of the TG1, one of the TV channels owned and controlled by Berlusconi himself, said: I believe in his innocence, but by the time he proves that, his reputation will be gone forever. And to tell the truth he worked hard on that himself! What on earth did he think he was doing when he meddled with minors and showgirls?

The Church as well as Catholic believers are divided. It's not about sex, says one of the high ranked church officials: hardly any Italian anymore confesses those misdeeds as sins. It's his way of doing it. Then there's the hardcore of Italian machismo, who aspire to that level of misbehavior themselves, and frankly admire Berlusconi for his orgies.

"Ruby The Heartstealer," the Moroccan illegal belly-dancing minor, was the last-known in the lengthy chain of Berlusconi's sweethearts. Ruby may have triggered a final avalanche of shameful publicity that will crush the lascivious premiere... but, Ruby nevertheless just cheerily appeared in Italian television, in black lingerie, peddling a tell-all book. Italians have always adored sexy foreign girls: Belen Rodriguez, the Argentinian top model, is the star of the Sanremo music festival although she cannot sing, and also the spokesmodel for a wireless Internet service, though her appeal is by no means high-tech. Italy's high-fashion business puts a premium on female beauty, not to mention a bald market price.

So what did Berlusconi do so wrong in his unfortunate dalliance with Ruby, and the numerous other girls that he invited to his home and paid generously? The court in Milan issued 27 pages of evidence. Ruby was a minor when she was partying "bunga bunga" style at his place, and he knew it. Ruby was caught stealing from friends, and he freed her from the police although the cops had her in custody as a minor. Ruby was an illegal immigrant, and he smilingly promised to forge her papers for her.

Finally, he arranged to deceive the Italian police by absurdly claiming that Ruby was the niece of recently deposed president Hosni Mubarak, in order to set her free. In short, Berlusconi abused his political position and flouted the law so as to keep his harem running smoothly. This cost him hundreds of thousands of euros given away to girls as presents, cars, and lodgings. Ruby at a certain point asked for 5 million euros in hush money, and that didn't seem to be a problem.

Berlusconi answered to the subpoena with a stonewalled denial and a large smile: he refuses to speak to press about sex scandals, he bluntly refuses the authority of the Milanese court, and has no fears of the consequences to the state or himself. He is trying however to move the case away from the court in Milan to a kinder jurisdiction that he can control, or possibly buy.

Last night, at the festival of Sanremo, the Oscar wining Italian author and actor Roberto Benigni, gave a long, emotional speech about the subject of a united Italy. March 17, 2011 is the sesquicentennial of the country's unity, and San Remo was draped in tricolor Italian flags. 2011 is a symbolic year for Italian democracy and the Italian national way of life.

The new economic data are showing Italy as the slowest-growing EU country. The expectations of Italian young people are very low, if not nonexistent. The nation is torn by the anti-federalist demands of right-wing parties, which want to split the country into rich regions (theirs) and poor regions (everyone else). Long-standing cultural differences among Italian regions are being exaggerated and manipulated, as the power-brokers quarrel over the shares of a pie that grows smaller. Petty regional bosses are fighting for more autonomy and their own power centers.

Divide and reign, united we stand. We are stronger together, said Benigni in his moving speech. He analyzed word by word an idealistic poem written by a twenty-year-old Risorgimento martyr for Italian unity: the Italian anthem. We cannot give democracy away, we cannot squander it, Benigni appealed.

Today, Wikileaks on Italy is published by major dailies. These leaks from the American state department have become a kind of news agency that bluntly states truths about Italy that every Italian already knows. Americans are increasingly worried about Italian national stability, and not merely because of its leader's reckless sex scandals. His relationship to the autocratic Putin, his prolonged overtures to the tyrant Moammar Gadhafi, his crooked money interests, organized corruption methods and mafia connections... His rude remarks to other heads of state and his sheer unpredictability all worry the American Big Brother. But he is still useful, they conclude.

Meanwhile, in a YouTube clip mentioned on the front pages of all the Italian press, Roberto Benigni is singing, with his quivering tender voice, the anthem to the tricolor flag inspired by the legendary Dante and his vision of beautiful Beatrice. Next to this glorious peak of Italian high culture, we have excerpts of the young Moroccan girl's evidence, where she explains that: "Bungabunga" means an orgy of nude dancing girls. This jolly term was borrowed from Gadhafi by the premiere's amazing seedy entourage of pimps and madames, most of them happily employed in Italian political life, when not busy catering to Berlusconi's private amusements. Bungabunga participants get power and money in the all-too-blatant privacy of the sultan' s castle, and in Italian public life as well; they fight the outside world to protect their cozy racket, and fight each other inside over their share of the spoils.

The Italian women of all ages and views, who held a one-million demonstration a few days ago all over Italy, protested that the sultan of the nation has no right to transform Italy into a bordello. It's a democratic state and a major Western power, not a brothel for an ultra-wealthy mogul. But to say that and to prove it are two different things. Is Italy just a "geographical expression," as the foreign diplomats used to say before the Risorgimento?

Jasmina: blog, Twitter ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/18/sultan-berlusconi-on.html/feed 22 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html#comments Sun, 13 Feb 2011 07:23:22 +0000 Jasmina Tesanovic
Photo (click for large) by Francesca Ottobelli: anti-Berlusconi protesters in Italy today.

"If Not Now, When?" was a national demonstration of Italian women, against Berlusconi and, to put it bluntly, his porno-democracy. The demo had other slogans as well: Resign! Basta! I don't give up! ADESSO, NOW!

A flash mob in 280 cities of Italy and 50 cities abroad, millions of people, mostly women, but also men and children. The demonstrations have been growing in the months since Berlusconi got caught up in the sex scandal vertigo with minors, prostitutes, pimps and orgies.

A week ago in Milan, in a big rally, the prominent intellectuals in Italian public life threw themselves into the campaign: the distinguished professor and writer Umberto Eco, Roberto Saviano the star of the antimafia campaign, the judges of of the constitutional court, trade union leaders and many others. But as one of the speakers, the orchestra director Pollini remarked : Berlusconi will never step down.

Berlusconi did not leave public life. On the contrary, he sped up his counter-campaign, attacking the judges in Milan who brought the latest of many legal cases against him. He even threatened to take his case to the European Parliament and sue the nation of Italy. He organized rallies in his support , claiming that his innocent altruistic interest in young girls had been cruelly misunderstood. He also accused the investigators of orchestrating a communist-biased coup against himself as head of government.

But his luck may be turning these days, after sixteen long years of media monopoly and political domination. Even the Catholic daily, Avvenire, came out with a big editorial claiming that decent Catholic women should be in the public squares on the 13th of February. It's rare of the Church to urge women to take to the streets to defend their dignity. Then there is the dignity of the state to consider, for the ludicrous shambles of Italian public life has become a matter of international concern.

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)

(photo: Sara Zampieron, Click for large)

A British comment in the Guardian justly noted that European Union as the monitor of high democratic standards within the community of states. Yet while they preach good governance to applicant countries like Turkey and Serbia, they ignore the calamitous decline of democracy in Italy, an EU founding state. Italy has become a European laughingstock, all harems, dictators, old men and underage girls.

An irate 18 year old guy in Italy demanded publicly: how am I supposed to get a girlfriend of my own age, since Berlusconi, the grandad of the nation, is buying them all? I don't have his years, his money and power, I don't even have a job or a decent education. University and hospital funds are cut, jobs are in recession and Berlusconi's parliamentary allies are cutting the country apart with regionalist laws. Berlusconi' s government still holds the majority in the parliament. The president of Italy had to admonish him that the country is not his private property.

The president also alleged that Italian democratic institutions are sound, but clearly Berlusconi doubts that and so do the millions of Italians today in the squares all over Italy. In Torino, the capital of Italy in its unification years ago, a protester said: we are the head of the boot extending toward Africa.

The demo today lacked party or ideological symbols: it was a flash mob with umbrellas and screams; RESIGN. It was extremely successful, unitary and grand. It brought out of the closet what is left of Italian decency after long reign of a small macho dictator, who has publicly realized the worst dreams of Italian macho culture. As a woman demonstrator put it: some men after all do prefer a partner to a harem.

Today women of all ages and political opinions were in the squares and streets; I saw Italian women, foreign women, clandestine women, special needs women, female beggars and hobos, girls, babies, even nuns!...and I saw men, boys, old men... The performance was to open the umbrellas, scream RESIGN and spread colorful woolen threads among the crowd to bind those different people. Music played: Patti Smith, Fabrizio de Andre. Girl bloggers asked for a ban of internet use of nude bodies. Women have a value, not a price! Men made fun of their macho patriarchal language with banners and in drag clothes. Pornocrazia!

Today 13th February is the "international day of mistresses." Tomorrow it's Valentine's day, the day of love. Whatever this meeting will bring to future of Italy and the reign of Berlusconi, it's clear beyond doubt that nobody doubts Berlusconi's guilt. They despise his use and abuse of girls and money. Now the big question is -- does public indignation matter? The old Sultan will leave his thone someday, and if not now, when?

Women toppled their rich, remote, corrupted regimes in Tunisia and Egypt. If not here, where? So why not in Italy too?

Jasmina's blog: jasminatesanovic.wordpress.com

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)

(photo: Francesca Ottobelli)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html/feed 69 http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html#comments Tue, 01 Feb 2011 06:04:45 +0000 Richard Dawkins
[Image, via Wikipedia: The Flammarion engraving (1888) depicts a traveller who arrives at the edge of a flat Earth and sticks his head through the firmament.]

A scientific experiment avoids confusion by holding as much as possible constant, while systematically varying some factor of interest. When you are trying to think through a complex train of thought it can be helpful to do something similar, especially when sorting out separate arguments that might be confused. My previous Boing Boing post, "Should employers be blind to private beliefs?," could be seen as raising four separate questions. These were in danger of being confused with each other, and it is helpful to consider them one at a time, setting the others on one side temporarily--the equivalent of holding other variables constant in an experiment. The four questions were:

1. Should Martin Gaskell have been turned down by the University of Kentucky? I got rid of this one by explicitly stating that I was not concerned with it. I shall continue to ignore it here.

2. Should employers ever discriminate on grounds of the beliefs of candidates? If the answer to this is no, there is no point in going on. I tried to dispose of it by reductio ad absurdum. I postulated hypothetical extremes (flat earth geographer, stork theory doctor, astronomer who thinks Mars is a mongoose egg). I presumed that everybody would agree to discriminate against such obviously preposterous extremes, and that we would therefore have a non-controversial baseline from which to move on to more subtle questions. As it turned out, I was wrong: I underestimated the emotive impact of the very word 'discrimination'. I may also have underestimated the power of the relativist doctrine that all opinions are equally worthy of respect. But in any case my purpose was not to erect a straw man and knock it down. I wanted to find a baseline of agreement, which would enable us to set Question 2 on one side, while we went on to the other questions.

3. Should employers discriminate on grounds of religion per se? Here, I had thought we could establish a baseline agreement that there are at least some religious beliefs that nobody would wish to discriminate against. None of us, certainly not I, would rule out Georges Lemaître when employing a physics professor, on the grounds that he was a Catholic priest. But there could be beliefs, which might happen to have their origins in religion, but which some people might otherwise have considered grounds for rejecting a candidate under Question 2. We are not talking about discriminating against religion per se but against a counterfactual belief that happens to come from religion, and this leads me to Question 4:

4. Suppose you are one of those who will allow a yes answer to Question 2, and are prepared to contemplate at least some discrimination, say against flat-earthers. Would you allow religion to serve as a special, privileged, protective shield against such otherwise-agreed discrimination: a shield not available to non-religious flat-earthers? Should those who are prepared to discriminate against stork-theorists make an exception if it turns out that their storkism stems from religion? In other words, should we discriminate against non-religiously inspired storkers and, implicitly by comparison, discriminate in favour of religiously-inspired storkers? As I understand it, the law, at least in some countries, does sanction exactly that. You can legally rule a candidate out because he believes in something obviously absurd, but not if he can hide his absurd belief behind the protective screen of religion. This makes Question 4 a worthwhile question. But it is a question that simply doesn't arise for anybody who answers No to Question 2, which is why it was worth getting that question out of the way first.

But my main purpose today is to move on and raise - though not necessarily answer - some further issues raised by this whole discussion, which I think are genuinely interesting.

To start with, there is the intriguing psychological question of the extent to which the human mind is capable of compartmentalizing itself. A good example is the astronomer who publishes respectable work, involving calculations assuming that the universe is billions of years old, while privately holding the contradictory belief that it is only thousands of years old. If such split-mindedness is a real psychological phenomenon, that is a fascinating fact about the human brain, well worth studying in its own right. How closely intertwined are the mutually contradictory beliefs? Are they literally held simultaneously, or does the victim believe one of them on some days and the other one on other days, so that he is never literally in a state of believing a contradiction? Is this related to the well-attested multiple personality syndrome? Are there any limits to the degree of contradiction that one mind is capable of tolerating inside itself? Should the simultaneous holding of mutually contradictory factual beliefs be regarded as evidence of insanity? Do we all from time to time, in a mild way, accommodate mutually contradictory beliefs inside our heads?

Then there are some important questions of law. Why should religion in particular be singled out as grounds for shielding beliefs from scrutiny? If a South African enthusiast for apartheid pleaded that his insistence on racial separation stemmed from his deeply sincere adherence to the Dutch Reformed Church, should we respect his racialism in a way that we would not if he traced it to a deeply sincere prejudice instilled into him by his parents when he was at a sensitive age?

Should the law take a more lenient view of a wife-beater if he could plead that his behaviour was mandated by his holy book? This was explicitly done in recent years by a (female) judge in Germany. As the New York Times reported, Judge Christa Datz-Winter "cited the verse in the Koran that speaks of a husband's prerogatives in disciplining his wife". The judge further justified her decision on the grounds that "In this cultural background, it is not unusual that the husband uses physical violence against the wife." This judge not only allowed religion to over-rule human decency, she also allowed it to over-rule the law of Germany in the particular case of a couple who were Muslims. The New York Times went on to comment, "For some, the greatest damage done by this episode is to other Muslim women suffering from domestic abuse. Many are already afraid of going to court against their spouses. There have been a string of so-called honor killings here, in which Turkish Muslim men have murdered women."

How about clitoridectomy? Should the law protect girls from such mutilation except in cases where the mutilator pleads religious justification? In Britain today this barbaric custom is practiced. It is against the law, but the police turn a blind eye for fear of being thought 'Islamophobic'.

Should we exempt halal and kosher slaughterhouses from prosecution under laws against cruelty to animals, on grounds that religious considerations trump humanitarian ones? Such exemption is widely demanded and accepted but never, as far as I have seen, coherently justified.

During the Vietnam war, conscientious objectors had to prove to a draft board that their objection really was conscientious. By far the easiest way to prove this was to plead religious conviction, but only if the religious conviction was long-established. A young man whose parents were Quakers had no trouble at all. I suspect that a young man who had written a PhD thesis on the moral philosophy of pacifism might have been given a harder time. If so, this needs to be debated. Why does our society, as represented in our laws, give religious conscience a free pass, where a secular philosophical conscience has to work really hard to earn it?

Moving on from law, we have the issue of fact versus opinion. There are those of us who see a radical distinction between a factual belief like "I believe the Earth is flat" and an opinion like "I believe Richard Nixon was a bad man." Some relativists, on the other hand, blur fact and opinion, see no reason to privilege fact over opinion, and take the view that all opinions are equally valid and equally worthy of respect.

One of the reasons I am willing to describe flat-earthism and young-earthism as ridiculous is that they are contradicted by publicly observable facts. But there are other beliefs about fact, including scientific fact, that are not obviously true or false, perhaps because the evidence is incomplete or open to varying interpretation, or perhaps because terms are not clearly defined. "I believe the Permian extinction was caused by a meteorite impact" is a belief about a matter of fact, but neither it nor its negation are obviously silly in the way flat-earthism is. I think it would be very wrong to discriminate against a geologist on grounds of his belief about the Permian extinction. There might be other factual beliefs that are intermediate, where we might have a genuine argument. Some might nominate climate change denial as an example. Others might suggest Holocaust denial as a borderline intermediate case, a bit further towards the loony end of the spectrum.

By choosing flat-earthism and storkism as my hypothetical examples, I was trying to establish a baseline, setting aside the argument over whether discrimination of any kind is ever permissible. The purpose of choosing these palpably ridiculous hypotheticals was to make it possible to move on to the more difficult cases, where we might hope to have an interesting discussion.

If there are some people who cannot accept even this baseline, and reject all discrimination of any kind, they presumably will have nothing to contribute to the supplementary questions I have raised in the latter part of this article. But I hope others may find them worthy of honest debate. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/02/01/further-reflections.html/feed 141 http://boingboing.net/2011/01/18/vatican-ordered-bish.html http://boingboing.net/2011/01/18/vatican-ordered-bish.html#comments Tue, 18 Jan 2011 08:23:44 +0000 Xeni Jardin Vatican warned Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report all suspected child-abuse cases to police -- a disclosure that victims' groups described as 'the smoking gun' needed to show that the church enforced a worldwide culture of covering up crimes by pedophile priests." (AP)]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/01/18/vatican-ordered-bish.html/feed 58 http://boingboing.net/2011/01/04/the-price-of-everyth.html http://boingboing.net/2011/01/04/the-price-of-everyth.html#comments Tue, 04 Jan 2011 07:40:01 +0000 Mark Frauenfelder

"According to Eduardo Porter of The New York Times editorial board, prices are more interesting than most of us realize. And the prices that never appear on a price tag are the most fascinating of all. In his new book The Price of Everything: Solving the Mystery of Why We Pay What We Do (2010, Portfolio), Porter explores the surprising ways prices affect every aspect of our lives, including where we live, who we marry, how many kids we have, and even how religious we are."

Here is the introduction to Porter's book.

PRICES ARE EVERYWHERE

Anybody who has visited a garbage dump in the developing world knows that value is an ambiguous concept. To most people in the developed world, household waste is worthless, of course. That's why we throw it away. Apparently, Norwegians are willing to pay about $114 a ton for somebody else to sort their recyclables from the general garbage. A survey of families in the Carter community of Tennessee several years ago found they were willing to pay $363 a year, in today's money, to avoid having a landfill nearby.

But slightly beyond our immediate experience, waste becomes a valuable commodity. In Kamboinsé, outside Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, farmers pay municipal trash haulers to dump unsorted solid waste on their sorghum and millet fields as fertilizer -- bits of plastic included. The going rate in 2003 was 400 francs per ton. In New Delhi, a study in 2002 found that waste pickers earned two rupees per kilo of PET soda bottles and seven rupees per kilo of hard plastic shampoo bottles. A child working on foot on Delhi's dumps could make twenty to thirty rupees per day.

Waste, in fact, confronts us with the same value proposition as anything else. The price we put on it -- what we will trade to have it, or have it go away -- is a function of its attendant benefits or costs. A bagful of two-rupee PET bottles is more valuable to an Indian child who hasn't eaten today than to me, a well-fed journalist in New York. What she must do to get it -- spend a day scavenging among the detritus of India's capital, putting her life and health at risk -- is, to her, not too high a price to pay because life is pretty much the only thing she has. She has little choice but to risk it for food, clothing, shelter, and whatever else she needs. I, by contrast, have many things. I have a reasonable income. If there's one thing I have too little of, it is free time. The five cents I could get for an empty PET bottle at the supermarket's recycling kiosk are not worth the trouble of redeeming it.

The purpose of this comparison is not to underscore that the rich have more opportunities than the poor. It is that the poor choose among their options the same way the rich do, assessing the prices of their alternatives. The relative costs and benefits of the paths open to them determine the behavior of the poorest Indian girl and the richest American man. These values are shaped by the opportunities they have and the constraints they face. The price we put on things -- what we will trade for our lives or our refuse -- says a lot about who we are.

The price of garbage provides a guide to civilization. Pollution is cheapest in poor countries. Their citizens are more readily willing to accept filth in exchange for economic growth. Yet the relative price of pollution rises as people become richer. Eventually it be comes expensive enough that it can alter the path of development. China is a dirty place. Yet underlying its dismal air and foul water is a choice that balances the costs of pollution in bad health, poisonous rivers, and so forth against the cost of cutting back production or retooling plants to control their effluvia. It is a different choice from that of Switzerland, where preserving environmental assets -- clean air, trees, wild animals -- is considered more valuable than providing manufacturing jobs to unemployed farmers. Twice as many Swiss as Chinese are members of environmental organizations. More than a third of the Swiss population believes environmental pollution is the most important problem facing the nation; only 16 percent of Chinese feel the same.

But as China grows, the price of building one more coal-fired power plant, measured in terms of its contribution to acid rain, global warming, and the rest will one day exceed the value the Chinese place on the extra output. As it keeps growing, it will likely evolve out of the most noxious industries, like steel and chemicals, into less polluting sectors, like medical and financial services. It may even one day buy its steel and chemicals from poorer countries with a higher tolerance of foul water and air. In other words, it will behave more like Switzerland or the United States. One study concluded that emissions of sulfur dioxide peak when a country's income per person reaches around $8,900 to $10,500. In the United States, sulfur-dioxide emissions soared until the passage in 1970 of the Clean Air Act. Since then, emissions have fallen by half.

HEREIN LIES THE central claim of this book: every choice we make is shaped by the prices of the options laid out before us -- what we assess to be their relative costs -- measured up against their benefits. Sometimes the trade-offs are transparent and straightforward -- such as when we pick the beer on sale over our favorite brand. But the Indian scavenger girl may not be aware of the nature of her transaction. Knowing where to look for the prices steering our lives--and understanding the influence of our actions on the prices arrayed before us--will not only help us better assess our decisions. The prices we face as individuals and societies--how they move us, how they change as we follow one path or another--provide a powerful vantage point upon the unfolding of history.

Nearly two decades ago, when he was chief economist of the World Bank, Lawrence Summers, President Barack Obama's former top economic adviser, signed his name to a memo suggesting it would make sense for rich countries to export their garbage to poor ones. Because wages are lower in poor countries, he said, they would suffer a lesser loss if workers got sick or died. "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that," it said. Moreover, pollution mattered less in a poor country with other problems: "The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand."

Leaked a few months before the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the memo confirmed to critics that the World Bank believed poor countries were dumps. The reasoning "is perfectly logical but totally insane," wrote the late José Lutzenberger, then Brazil's environment minister, in a letter to Summers. Furious, Vice President Al Gore torpedoed Summers's chance to become chairman of then-president Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers. Summers apologized, explaining the memo as an attempt to offer "sardonic counterpoint" to sharpen analytical thinking about the trash trade.

Lutzenberger had a point. Wages are not the only benchmark of people's value. The price of dealing with garbage in impoverished countries is often zero not because their citizens care nothing about pollution, but because their governments don't enforce pollution-related laws. But Summers had a powerful point too: in poorer countries, an untainted environment is less valuable than other things that are more abundant in richer nations--schools, for instance. Many developing nations would serve their interests best by trading trash for the chance to build an extra one.

THE PRICE OF CROSSING BORDERS

Most of us think of prices in the context of shopping expeditions. In the marketplace, prices ration what we consume, guiding how we allocate resources among our many wants. They prompt us to set priorities within the limits of our budgets. Just as prices steer our purchasing patterns, they steer the decisions of the companies that make what we buy, enabling them to meet our demand with their supply. That's how markets organize a capitalist economy.

But prices are all over the place, not only attached to things we buy in a store. At every crossroads, prices nudge us to take one course of action or another. In a way, this is obvious: every decision amounts to a choice among options to which we assign different values. But identifying these prices allows us to understand more fully our decisions. They can be measured in money, cash, or credit. But costs and benefits can also be set in love, toil, or time. Our most important currency is, in fact, opportunity. The cost of taking any action or embracing any path consists of the alternatives that were available to us at the time. The price of a five-dollar slice of pizza is all the other things we could have done with the five dollars. The price of marriage includes all the things we would have done had we remained single. One day we succumb to the allure of love and companionship. Years later we wonder what happened to the freedom we traded away at the altar. Economists call this the "opportunity cost." By evaluating opportunity costs, we organize our lives.

Just to be born, the scavenger girl in Delhi had to overcome Indian parents' entrenched bias against girls -- which has led to widespread abortions of female fetuses. The Indian census of 2001 recorded 927 girls aged six or less per 1,000 boys. This compares to 1,026 girls per thousand boys in Brazil and 1,029 in the United States. The bias is due to a deeply unfavorable cost-benefit analysis: while boys are meant to take over the family property and care for their parents in old age, daughters must be married off, which requires an onerous dowry. To redress the balance of incentives, regional governments across India have been experimenting with antipoverty programs aimed at increasing parents' appetite for girls. In 2008, Delhi launched a program to deposit 10,000 rupees into the account of newly born girls in poor families--making subsequent deposits as they progress in school. The objective is to build a cushion of resources for them to marry or pursue higher education. A social insurance program launched in 2006 in Haryana pays parents who only have daughters 500 rupees a month between the age of forty-five and the age of sixty, when it is replaced by the general public pension.

I remember a conversation I had a few years ago with an illegal immigrant in Stockton, California. I worked at the Wall Street Journal writing about the Hispanic population of the United States. The immigrant was educating me about the relative merits of having his two young children smuggled from Mexico "por el monte" -- a grueling hike across the desert -- or "por la línea," across a regular checkpoint using forged documents. The choice was hard. He couldn't have made more than $8 or $9 an hour, picking asparagus, cherries, and everything else that grew in California's San Joaquin Valley. He would have to pay about $1,500 each for a "coyote" to guide his kids across the desert. Yet he figured that getting a smuggler with fake documents to bring them across a border checkpoint would put him back about $5,000 per child. The conversation laid in stark relief the type of bare-knuckle cost-benefit analyses that steer people's lives.

Over the last decade and a half, the Border Patrol's budget has grown roughly fivefold. Average coyote fees increased accordingly, to about $2,600 in 2008. Yet the price that rose most sharply is measured in the odds of dying on the way, as a border crossing that used to take less than a day around San Diego became a three- to four-day trek through the Arizona desert, evading thieves and the Border Patrol, lugging jugs of water. In 1994, 24 migrants died trying to cross the border. By 2008, the death toll was 725. The calculation of the immigrant I spoke to was straightforward enough. To bring his children into the United States through a checkpoint, he would have to work longer to earn the price of passage. But it would lower the risk that his children would perish along the way.

The debate among Americans about illegal immigration is itself a discussion about prices. Critics charge that illegal immigrants lower the price of natives' labor by offering to do the job for less. They argue that immigrants impose a burden on natives when they consume public services, like education for their children and emergency medical care.

These arguments are weaker than they seem. Most illegal immigrants work on the books using false IDs, and have taxes withheld from their paychecks like any other worker. They can't draw benefits from most government programs. And there is scant evidence that immigrants lower the wages of American workers. Some industries only exist because of cheap immigrant labor -- California's agricultural industry comes to mind. Absent the immigrants, the farm jobs would disappear too, along with an array of jobs from the fields to the packing plant. We would import the asparagus and the strawberries instead.

Illegal immigrants do affect prices in the United States. One study calculated that the surge in immigration experienced between 1980 and 2000 reduced the average price of services such as housekeeping or gardening by more than 9 percent, mainly by undercutting wages. Still, it had a negligible impact on natives' wages because poor illegal immigrants compete in the job market with other poor illegal immigrants.

Immigration policy has always been determined by who bears its costs and who draws its benefits. Illegal immigrants are tolerated by the political system because their cheap labor is useful for agribusiness and other industries. It provides affordable nannies to middle-class Americans. This suggests that despite presidential lip service to the need to reform immigration law, nothing much is likely to be done. Creating a legal path for illegal immigrants to work in the United States would be politically risky and could provide a big incentive for more illegal flows. By contrast, cutting illegal immigration entirely would be prohibitively costly. The status quo is too comfortable to bear tinkering like that.

The ebb and flow of immigration will continue to be determined by potential immigrants' measuring the prospect of a minimum' wage job -- perhaps a first step up the ladder of prosperity -- against the costs imposed by the harsh border. The price may occasionally be too high. As joblessness soared following the financial crisis of 2008, many potential immigrants decided to stay at home. The Department of Homeland Security estimates the illegal immigrant population dropped by 1 million from its peak in 2007 to 10.8 million in 2009. But this will prove to be no more than a blip in the broad historical trend.

PRICES RULE

Considering the capacity of prices to shape people's choices, it is rather surprising that governments do not use them more often to steer the behavior of the governed. For instance, public-health campaigns might be a nice way to educate people about the risks of certain behaviors, such as smoking and drug abuse. But they are nowhere near as effective as prices when it comes to making people stop. Four decades after President Richard Nixon launched his "War on Drugs," drug abuse remains stubbornly popular. Between 1988 and 2009, the share of twelfth graders who admitted having done drugs in the last month increased from 16 to 23 percent. The share of teens who had smoked a cigarette in the same period fell from 28 to 20 percent.

This is a paradox. Though it is illegal for minors to purchase cigarettes, adults can readily get them. Drugs, by contrast, are illegal for everybody. Being caught with even a smidgen of cocaine in the state of Illinois can lead to one to three years in jail. Yet the difference is less paradoxical considering how the price of these vices has evolved. A battery of city, state, and federal taxes has roughly doubled the price of a pack of cigarettes since 1990, to about $5.20 on average. On July 1, 2010, the minimum price of a pack of cigarettes in New York City rose $1.60 to $10.80--of which $7.50 are taxes. By contrast, the retail price of a gram of cocaine on New York's streets cost $101 in 2007, about 27 percent less than in 1991. The price of heroin collapsed 41 percent to $320 a gram. Falling prices refltect the failure of policies to stop the supply of illegal drugs into the American market. But it also suggests a potential solution: at a sufficiently high price, teens would cut back. Compared with a failed drug war, legalizing, regulating, and taxing drugs might be the more effective route to curtail abuse.

Consider what we could achieve by tinkering with the price of gas. In the United States, cheap gas allowed people to move to bigger homes farther from work, school, and shopping. Just in the last decade or so, Americans' median commute to work rose from nine to eleven miles. The typical home grew from 1,750 to 1,807 square feet.

Europe rarely sprawled so. Its cities were constrained by history. They were built hundreds of years ago, when moving long distances was costly in time and effort. During the French Revolution, it took King Louis XVI twenty-one hours to flee 150 miles from Paris to Varennes. Modern sprawl was contained by gas taxes. Europeans pay two to three times as much as Americans for gas. That's partly why Houston in Texas has roughly the same population as the German port city of Hamburg but 2,500 fewer people per square mile.

For all the differences between the configuration of American and Western European cities, they are both strikingly different from development in the Soviet bloc, where market prices played little or no role in allocating land. Seventy years of communist allocation by bureaucratic fiat produced an urban scene pockmarked by old factories decaying on prime locations downtown while residential housing becomes denser farther from the center, through rings of Stalin-era, Khrushchev-era, and Brezhnev-era apartments.

A study by World Bank urban planning and housing finance experts after the collapse of the Soviet Union found that 31.5 percent of the built-up area in Moscow was occupied by industries, compared to 6 percent in Seoul and 5 percent in Hong Kong and Paris. In Paris, where people pay a premium price to live near downtown's amenities, the population density peaks some three kilometers from the center of town. In Moscow it peaked fifteen kilometers away.

Prices make sense of many disparate dynamics over the span of human history. Advances in transportation technology that reduced the cost of distance enabled the first great wave of economic globalization in the nineteenth century. The obesity pandemic was bound to happen when bodies designed to survive in an environment of scarce food by gorging themselves whenever they could found themselves awash in cheap and abundant calories brought by modern technology.

There are few better ways to understand the power of prices than to visit the places where they are not allowed to do their jobs. During a trip to Santiago de Cuba a few years ago I was driven around town by a bedraggled woman who, to my surprise, turned out to be a pediatrician at the city's main hospital. She had a witchlike quality--knotty and thin as a reed. Two of her front teeth were missing. She told me they fell out during a bout of malnutrition that swept through the island after the Soviet collapse in 1991 cut off Cuba's economic lifeline. The doctor owned a beat-up Lada. She was very smart. But otherwise her life seemed no different from that of any street urchin, living off the black market at the limit of endurance, peddling a ride or a box of cigars that fell off the back of a truck. She charged ten dollars for driving me around town all day. I couldn't help wondering how the collective decisions that shaped Cuba's possibilities at the time could make it so a pediatrician found this to be a worthwhile deal.

WHEN PRICES MISFIRE

As with anything powerful, prices must be handled with care. Tinkering can produce unintended consequences. Concerned about low birthrates, in May 2004 the Australian government announced it would pay a "baby bonus" of three thousand Australian dollars to children born after July 1. The response was immediate. Expectant mothers near their due dates delayed planned cesarean sections and did anything in their power to hold their babies back. Births declined throughout June. And on July 1, Australia experienced more births than on any single date in the previous three decades.

Taxing families based on the number of windows in their homes must have seemed like a good idea when King William III introduced the window tax in England in 1696. Homes with up to ten windows paid two shillings. Properties with ten to twenty windows paid four shillings and those with more than twenty paid eight.

The tax was logical. Windows being easy to count, it was easy to levy. It was fairish: richer people were likely to have bigger houses with more windows, and thus pay more. And it got around people's intense hostility to an income tax. But the king didn't count on people's reaction. They blocked up windows in their homes in order to pay less. Today, blocked-out windows in Edinburgh are known as Pitt's Pictures, after William Pitt, who brought the tax to Scotland in 1784.

Seemingly modest actions can reverberate throughout society by altering, if only slightly, people's evaluations of costs and benefits. Such is the case of the 55 mph speed limit imposed across the United States in 1974 as a way to conserve gasoline in the wake of the first oil crisis, when Arab countries proclaimed an oil embargo in response to the United States' decision to resupply the Israeli military after the Yom Kippur War.

Conserving gas was a reasonable objective at the time. The strategy, however, was fatally flawed because it ignored the value of drivers' time. At the new legal limit, a seventy-mile trip would take about one hour and sixteen minutes--sixteen minutes more than at 70 mph. Considering that the wages of production workers in 1974 averaged around $4.30 an hour, those sixteen minutes to commute to and from work would cost a typical worker about $1.15.

In 1974, a gallon of leaded gas cost fifty-three cents. To break even, an average driver would need to save 2.17 gallons per trip. For this to happen would have required a big leap in fuel economy: a 22 percent increase in the fuel efficiency of a Chevy Suburban, for example, or a doubling of the fuel efficiency of a Honda Civic. Of course, lowering the speed limit did not achieve this improvement. So drivers ignored the new rule.

In 1984, drivers on interstate highways in New York were found to flout the 55 mph limit 83 percent of the time. They dished out $50 to $300 to buy CB radios to warn one another about cops nearby. Between 1966 and 1973 there were about 800,000 CB licenses issued by the Federal Communications Commission. By 1977 there were 12.25 million CBs on the road. Cops then reacted to the reaction, installing radar. Drivers reacted with radar detectors. Some states passed laws making radar detectors illegal. I doubt the United States Congress expected this chain of events when it passed the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act. By 1987 it increased the maximum limit to 65 mph and in 1995 it repealed the federal speed limit altogether.

WHERE WILL PRICES TAKE US?

Archimedes of Syracuse, the great mathematician from the third century BC, said that to move the earth he needed only a lever, a fulcrum, and a firm place to stand. Moving people requires a price. The marriage rate has fallen not because of changing fashions but because of its rising price, measured in terms of the sacrifice it entails. We have fewer children because they are costlier. Economists suggest that the Catholic Church has been losing adherents not because people stopped believing in God but because membership became too cheap compared with evangelical Christianity, which demands a bigger investment in its churches from members and thus inspire more loyalty.

The Price of Everything will take us to the store, where we will discover how price tags operate on our psychology, subtly inviting us to buy. But we will endeavor beyond quotidian commercial transactions, to investigate how other prices affect the way people live. In many cultures, husbands pay for multiple brides to amass as many as possible and increase their reproductive success. In others, parents abort female fetuses to avoid the cost they would incur to marry off their daughters. Many behaviors that we ascribe to "cultural change" arise, in fact, as we adapt our budgets to changing prices. We will ponder why employers pay for workers rather than enslave them. We will discuss why it is that as we become progressively richer, the commodity that increases most in value is our scarce free time. And we will find that despite clinging to the notion that life is priceless, we often put a rather low price on our lives.

And we will find that prices can steer us the wrong way too. We still don't know how much we will have to pay, as a civilization, for the economic distortions caused by the upward spiral in the price of American homes between 2000 and 2006. A century down the road, the cheap gasoline of the 1900s might come to be seen as the cause of incalculable environmental damage. Prices can be dangerous too.

Copyright 2010 Eduardo Porter

Eduardo Porter has been on the staff of The New York Times since January 2004, covering economics, and joined the paper's editorial board in July 2007. He began his journalism career in 1990 as a financial reporter for Notimex, the Mexican news agency, in Mexico City. He was a correspondent in Tokyo (1991-1992) and in London (1992-1996). In 1996, Porter was appointed editor of the Brazilian edition of América Economía, a business and economics magazine based in Sao Paulo. In 2000, he became senior special writer for The Wall Street Journal, based in Los Angeles, covering the Hispanic population in the United States. He is a graduate of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. He has an MSc in quantum fields and fundamental forces from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London.]]> http://boingboing.net/2011/01/04/the-price-of-everyth.html/feed 28 http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/catholic-mischief-in.html http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/catholic-mischief-in.html#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 05:00:53 +0000 Richard Dawkins

Even those who agree with the great Christopher Hitchens that religion poisons everything might be surprised to learn that the toxin extends its reach even to football (soccer). Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, has two major football teams - indeed they are Scotland's two top teams - Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers.

By long tradition, the fans of these two teams break down by religion: Celtic represents the Catholics and Rangers the Protestants. Historically, the reason is the long association between this region of Scotland and Northern Ireland. Belfast and Glasgow have more in common than their depressed ship-building industries. The large Catholic population of Glasgow is mostly of Irish origin, while Orange Parades such as this one through the centre of Glasgow are all-but indistinguishable from their counterparts in Belfast.

If, in a crucial match between Rangers and Celtic, a referee's decision is unpopular, there is a high chance that he will be accused of sectarian religious prejudice, something that, I imagine, is not often seen in baseball or American football.

(photo courtesy BBC News)

This is the background to bitter storm that erupted recently, in which I seem to have become embroiled although I am neither Scottish nor a soccer fan. Hugh Dallas, czar of referees for the Scottish Football Association was fired because he passed on, in an eMail, a joke about Roman Catholic child rape. The pope is not, so far as we know, a pederast, but there is good evidence that he was deeply involved in covering up the crime and contributing to its repetition by priests moved to other dioceses and parishes. Anyway, this was the subject of the joke that was sent to Hugh Dallas, and he passed it on to somebody else.

The incident was brought to the attention of Peter Kearney, Director of the Scottish Catholic Media Office, also based in Glasgow. Kearney demanded that Dallas should be fired, and the Scottish Football Association, under its Chief Executive Stewart Regan, did indeed fire him, together with two other officials in his office.

When I read about this, alerted by a Scottish contributor to the discussion forum on my website, I was outraged that a man should lose his job because he passed on a joke. It seemed to me to be a classic example of our society's craven kowtowing to the religious lobby. The rest of us, it seemed to me, learn to take jokes on the chin. But the moment a religion is 'offended', we are all expected to tut-tut and grovel, and somebody gets fired.

I was also outraged that the BBC website on which I read the story had censored the punchline of the joke, again obviously to avoid giving 'offence'.

ffence'. I was angry, and I immediately published the details here including a picture of the 'offensive' joke, with the punchline restored.

I also published the addresses of the Scottish Catholic Media Office and the Scottish Football Association and encouraged my readers to flood both with copies of this and other pope jokes. I also people to do what they could to make the 'offensive' joke go viral.

The story was picked up by Pharyngula and, the following day, by the Daily Telegraph, Britain's leading conservative newspaper, and the Scotsman, Edinburgh's - and arguably Scotland's - most respected newspaper. The Telegraph, under the headline, "Leading scientist Richard Dawkins slams Scottish Football Association over sacking of Hugh Dallas", quoted my original blog almost verbatim and offered no comment of its own. The Scotsman's report was briefer. Its headline "'Weasel' attack on Catholic spokesman in Hugh Dallas furore" is a reference to the fact that in my original blog I had called Peter Kearney a nasty little weasel. Kearney retaliated in the quote that he gave the Scotsman: "Dawkins demonstrates again that his intolerance knows no bounds."

Readers of Boing Boing may judge for themselves.

Which is the more intolerant: getting a man fired for passing on a joke, or calling somebody a nasty little weasel for doing so?

My only regret is the implied insult to weasels. Kearney cynically exploited the sectarian tensions in Glasgow to engineer that a man lost his job.

Anybody wishing to pass on a joke or other pleasantry to Peter Kearney will wish to know his address at the Scottish Catholic Media Office: mail@scmo.org.

As one commenter on my website rightly said, the Catholic church in Scotland is quick to squeal about sectarian discrimination, while doing everything to maintain it in sectarian schools.

Comments on the various websites are mostly supportive of my position. The main criticisms are

1. Hostile spamming is not a good tactic: an abuse of the power of the web, some might say. I have sympathy for this criticism. I think the tactic is defensible but only if the provocation is high. With hindsight I think that what I called the cowardice of the Scottish Football Association was not so reprehensible as the Catholic lobbying itself, and I think I should have limited the campaign to the Scottish Catholic Media Office.

2. Calling Peter Kearney a nasty little weasel is the kind of thing that gets me described as strident and shrill. It is better to stick to reasoned argument, and indeed I usually try to do so. In mitigation, once again, I plead the exceptional provocation offered by this nasty little weasel.

3. Many people wrote in from Scotland to say that I didn't appreciate the complicated socialcontext of the long-running feud between Celtic and Rangers, and the need for Scottish referees to bend over backwards to avoid sectarian bias.

It is almost as though, if a Scottish referee makes a joke about the pope, it is taken as evidence of pro-Rangers bias.

Oh please! Get your priorities right. There are more important things than football. When cardinals and popes cover up the crime of child rape, those of us who object are not being 'sectarian' or ' anti-Catholic' or pro-Glasgow-Rangers. We are being human.

]]> http://boingboing.net/2010/12/07/catholic-mischief-in.html/feed 123 http://boingboing.net/2010/03/05/bob-harris-trip-to-t.html http://boingboing.net/2010/03/05/bob-harris-trip-to-t.html#comments Fri, 05 Mar 2010 07:11:23 +0000 Bob Harris

(As part of his research for a book he's writing on microfinance, Bob Harris took a trip through the Peruvian Andes, including Cusco, Lake Titicaca, Machu Picchu, where he studied the architecture, refused to try corn-and-human-saliva beer, imbibed in coca tea ("maybe the best damn thing I ever drank"), and visited with people who live on floating islands made out of reeds. His photos and comments are fascinating. -- Mark)

We begin in transit, killing time in the Lima airport. I hope you'll enjoy the titanic clashes of cultures...

The culture shock of being faced with difficult, obscure translations...

... later on, inscrutable symbols beyond an outsider's comprehension...

... and the occasional midnight bathroom scorpion:

Our arachnid friend was in the town of Ollantaytambo. In the loo of a sweet little guest house. Right by the toilet, middle of the night, exactly like in my nightmares when I was little. The joys of travel.

I probably should have asked for a non-scorpion room.

Anyway, let's get some standard tourism out of the way. Here's a sight famiiar to anyone who has ever visited the travel section of a bookstore:

This young lady is one of many who eke out a living in tourist areas by posing for pictures for one nuevo sol (about 35 cents USD). You're surely seen guidebooks with a similar image on the cover.

I wonder how many guidebooks and magazines actually pay their subjects more than $0.35 for the profitable use of their image? (Come to think of it, what should I have paid for this free online use? I honestly have no idea. My bargaining skills in Quechua being non-existent, I gave her considerably more than her usual rate. I hope it was enough. But I also hope I didn't accidentally incentivize a job that doesn't develop other skills that would help her improve her life. I mention this because seeking a solution to such questions is what my next book is largely about.)

Speaking of Quechua -- in which "Rimaykullayki" means "hello" -- it's the living language of the Incas, still spoken (with major regional variations) by about 7 million people throughout formerly Inca lands from southern Colombia to northern Argentina. In Peru, it has official status, so some Andean street signs are multilingual -- here's "Avenue of the Sun" in Spanish and Quechua:

Of course, it's not just the languages -- you see Spanish sitting physically on top of Inca pretty much everywhere you look.

Historians currently peg the beginning of Inca civilization's greatest expansion roughly around 1493 -- just months after a Spanish sailor named Roderigo de Triana first sighted the New World from a ship called La Pinta.

(As a side note, Roderigo dutifully shouted the news to his captain, Christopher Columbus, who promptly claimed that he didn't see anything. This may have been because the expedition's financiers had promised a huge reward to the first person to see land. Sure enough, a little while later, Columbus announced that he himself finally saw land, and he was given the reward. Roderigo soon converted to Islam, moved to Africa, and disappeared from our elementary school history books. Columbus went on to become substantially less nice to the people he was about to meet.)

After Columbus came firearms, armor, smallpox, and eventually Francisco Pizarro, who executed the last Inca emperor in 1533. When the conquistadors reached Cusco, the grand Inca capital, they made a point of de-Inca-fying everything, plopping their Spanish stuff right on top.

The results are abundantly visible all over the place:

The Spanish building at top center was for many years the local Archbishop's palace -- constructed directly atop the walls of the palace of the Inca emperor.

Down the street, here's what was once the site of the Temple of the Sun, one of the holiest spots in the Inca Empire -- until the Spanish razed the original edifice and built the Church of Santo Domingo atop its foundations:

The surviving Inca stonework here has to be seen to be believed. For example, major earthquakes in 1650 and 1950 severely damaged the Spanish structure, but the Inca bits remained almost perfectly intact. These windows, for example, still line up perfectly, even after the whole building around them fell twice:

Back at the old archbishop's place, here's the famous 12-sided stone, only the most rococo of thousands of massive, ludicrously shaped rocks that jigsaw together so well that you generally can't even slip an index card between them:

The Incas moved and shaped these stones, most of which are bigger than you are, and then built hundreds of such walls -- all of course with no power tools, no known use of the wheel, no draft animal bigger than a llama, and no written language beyond intricately knotted cords.

How huge did Inca stonework get? Here's Sacsayhuaman, a fortification in which some stones are up to 20 feet high and may weigh nearly 200 tons:

Sacsayhuaman was intended to protect Cusco. Right up until the Spanish cornered the defenders inside, slaughtered them, and then began quarrying the non-huge rocks for imperial construction projects.

After executing the Inca leaders, selling the survivors on Christianity involved a different form of building on existing foundations. Take a look this small slice of the main cathedral in Cusco:

In Inca mythology, the most powerful earth deity, Pachamama, was frequently represented by a triangular shape symbolizing the mountains. Coincidentally enough, on the local Catholic god guy... a big triangle for a halo. (Pachamama, being an earth mother, also led to representations of Mary wearing garb so voluminous as to become triangular herself.) Mary and Joseph, meanwhile, have big spiky sunburst halos -- which just coincidentally resemble Inti, the Inca sun god.

There's tons of this sort of syncretism all over the place. Here's the Last Supper as portrayed inside the cathedral (cribbed from the web, since photographs are forbidden):

In Cusco, the Last Supper seems to have included potatoes (unknown outside the New World before Columbus), a homebrew corn-based beer called chicha to drink (see below) and local chinchilla instead of lamb as the main dish.

Let's take a minute to digress on local beverages. Chicha is a local corn-based homebrew beer as ubiquitous as it is kinda gross -- the fermentation is accelerated by enzymes in the maker's saliva:

That colorful plastic on a stick is the local signal that the occupants inside -- puh-tooey! -- have just brewed up a fresh batch of corn-and-spit beer. Mmm-mm.

Nasty as it sounds, it's also cheap as... well, corn and spit. So for poor folks with no better way to enlarge their livers, its a cheap buzz, and for the homeowners, it's an easy profit.

In some neighborhoods around quitting time, there can be almost as many chicha flags as there are buildings:

Since I'm not doing one of those Man Eats World-style cable shows, I didn't try chicha myself. Sorry to disappoint. Just, well, eww.

Besides, I was too busy getting buzzed on the coca tea:

Just take loose coca leaves, add boiling water, let steep, add sugar, and drink. Maybe the best damn thing I ever drank.

It tastes sort of like sweet spinach, but with the stimulant kick of good coffee and an analgesic effect I'd place somewhere between naproxen and vicodin. (I have a bad back, so I feel confident in my ability to scale analgesics.) One pot, and pretty soon my head felt better, my feet felt better... hell, my childhood felt better.

Seriously, it's fantastic medicine for that altitude and climate. Too bad putting a handful of those leaves in my pocket could get me arrested back home, thanks to the War On Some Drugs.

Anyway, back to the cathedral. Let's step back into the square for a wider look. Check out the flags:

On the right, the national flag of Peru. On the left... a rainbow flag, remarkably like pride flag used by the North American gay community since the 1970s.

Here, it's not a gay thing. It's simply the Cusco city flag, said to be inspired by banners flown by Incas fighting the Spanish. There's spotty evidence for the claim, and Cusco only adopted the flag in 1978 -- the very same year Gilbert Barker designed the gay pride flag in San Francisco. Still, in Cusco, rainbow = Inca, flag-wise.

Does this lead to confusion? Oh dear god yes. In moments of broad comedy that sound more like an episode of Family Guy than real life, I've been told that American tourists are sometimes shocked on arrival to discover that the entire city of Cusco is so totally Out. Others pose happily in front of the flag, demonstrating solidarity with a culture they are misunderstanding completely.

The city of Cusco periodically discusses just changing the whole thing.

Moving on...

It's all well to criticize the Spanish destruction of the Inca empire, but let's also disabuse ourselves of any assumption that the Incas were morally superior. After all, they probably didn't get to be the most powerful empire in the hemisphere by asking nicely.

Let's move a few hundred miles south, to Lake Titicaca near the Bolivian border, and meet the Uros people, who were at one time oppressed and even enslaved by the Incas.

Lake Titicaca is at about 12,500 feet -- about 2.4 miles up in the air. By comparison, Denver is at 5280 feet, altitude sickness starts affecting sensitive people at just 8000 feet, and the MacBook I'm using is only rated by Apple to function up to 10,000 feet. (Above that, the thin air can supposedly cause a dynamic imbalance in the spinning hard drive.) Lake Titicaca is, in a word, somewhat high.

As a result, it's one of the most vividly colorful places on earth. You're missing almost two and a half miles of air that normally stand between you and the sun god, plus you're near the equator, so Inti is bashing you pretty straight on. So the blue is BLUE. The green is GREEN. My camera couldn't possibly do it justice. The colors are so bright they almost vibrate:

And on this beautiful lake -- several kilometers out, just, like, floating out there -- live several hundred members of the Uros, a people whose culture predates the Incas.

Roughly half a millennium ago, the Uros were under such frequent and violent assault that many finally fled onto the lake itself, building floating pontoon islands out of the lake's abundant totora reeds.

Centuries later, many of the Uros are still there. Floating on their reed islands.

They're still raising their kids in reed huts, paddling reed boats, and constantly weaving and re-weaving the whole kaboodle, since water and weather are constantly eroding most of their world.

There are anywhere from about 45 to 60 of these islands at any time, generally housing from 2-5 families each, depending on population and who is getting along with whom. (A bad family spat, for example, may lead to the construction of a new island.) The island in the above picture was abandoned shortly before I arrived; the elderly couple who had previously lived in the house on the right had recently passed away.

The islands are squishy to walk on, something like trying to stride across a mattress. If you stomped, you could put your foot right through the matting. So you walk carefully.

Say hello to Olympia. She and her husband were born on one of these pontoons, are raising their children out here, and will probably live much of the rest of their lives in the same small hut:

Olympia invited me into her home and showed me around. (She surely does this with travelers almost every day.) The whole hut is probably about the size of your living room.

Here's where they cook, just outside:

These are their three daughters:

It may not be clear in the photos, but everyone looks kinda sunburned. A scientific survey completed in 2006 determined that this general region receives the highest jolt of UV radiation of any continuously inhabited place on earth. And nobody here can afford frequent sunscreen.

I brought (as any traveler should) pencils and paper as gifts for the kids, since school supplies are way expensive for these folks; their only income is from selling crafts and trading fresh fish, handicrafts, and other goods with non-lake-dwellers. Speaking of crafts, that handwoven mat that Olympia is sitting with, above -- that's currently sitting on my couch here in L.A., awaiting a frame. It's gorgeous, it tells the story of the Uros, and it was the biggest thing she had for sale. I will treasure it.

The fishing is done primarily with what the Uros call "plastic boats," since they're not made of reeds:

But they still make traditional reed boats like the one below, which took five men two months of labor to build, and lasts only two years before the lake water eventually reclaims it:

These boats are more for making a few bucks by taking visitors like me out for a lap. Fair enough. Cesar here manned the oar and was kind enough to share a few more details of life here:

He's 25 and commutes by boat to the lakeshore city of Puno for school, medical care, and other things most first worlders take for granted. He's also not actually a full-blooded descendent of the Uros -- nobody here is. Over the centuries, the Uros eventually intermarried with neighboring Aymara-speaking peoples, and the Uros's language disappeared long ago. Uros traditions continue, although it's all getting harder to maintain as the living standard on the shore continues to lure people away.

The government is now heavily subsidizing the Uros, partly for humane reasons, and partly because they're increasingly a tourist attraction. As my own presence here confirms. This is strange to contemplate. Another generation or two (if not already or very soon), and people may only live here to attract visitors, reducing an entire centuries-old culture to little more than a publicity stunt.

I'm trying to imagine what it would be like to have all of your traditions and culture, handed down for hundreds of years, collapse into a tourist trap that rapidly -- to grow up while that's going on, and then wonder who your children will even be. I'm trying, and failing, to imagine that.

I hope that buying the beautiful weaving from Olympia will help her family and support her work, and not encourage her to continue an unnecessarily hard way of life they will someday maintain only for show.

Moving on.

Further into the lake (and with a beautiful view of the Bolivian Andes), is the island of Taquile:

Thanks to physical isolation, Taquile has yet another distinct culture. Possessions are generally collectivized -- even the sheep feeding on the Inca-era terraces:

Family lineage is identified by color-coded clothing:

Conflicts on the island are resolved every Sunday in lengthy group discussions in the main square:

Too bad Copenhagen couldn't be organized this smoothly. I can think of some people who could seriously learn from Taquile.

Heading back to dry land, however, things got less inspiring for a while.

The nearest airport is in Juliaca, a city just slightly larger than Akron, Ohio. Not the most enticing place I've been. To give you an idea, this Peru tourism website, whose whole point is to make things sound as appealing as possible, has this to say about Juliaca:

very unattractive... [it] competes with Chimbote on the northern coast for the title of the most unpleasant city in Peru. Most of the buildings in the city are very ugly... the bitter cold winds make being out at night almost unbearable..."

As a bonus, cars, 3-wheel cabs, motorcycles, pedicabs, bicycles, and pedestrians compete in a downtown oddly bereft of traffic lights, so everyone just sort of shoves their noses in and pushes. I've been in third world traffic from Cairo to Bali to Kuala Lumpur, and this was as hostile as anything I've ever seen. Before becoming congealed in traffic, my taxi driver almost ran over a dog, a teenage school girl, and an elderly woman, all within a two minute period -- accelerating, honking, daring them not to dive out of the street. This seemed to be the etiquette; other drivers did the same. When I asked him to please slow down and not risk hitting people, the driver pulled the car over and began yelling abusively.

Hokay.

According to the locals I spoke with, much of the economy is built around contraband of many varieties -- Peru and Bolivia maintain no border controls on Lake Titicaca, creating an enormous smuggling route for anyone trying to get stolen or illegal goods from the rest of South America into Peru for sale or export. And Juliaca is the hub.

For what it's worth, the lone cop I saw looked like a total prop:

Yes, the cop stayed in a little box on the sidewalk, blowing a whistle and waving at traffic that barely paid the slightest mind. Yes, the box was provided by Inca Kola. And yes, a man is about to urinate on the wall.

It's not really a law-and-order place, I guess.

On Christmas Eve of last year, someone threw a tear gas grenade into a nightclub here, where 1200 people were dancing in a room built for half that many. In the confined space, five people were asphyxiated and 10 were severely injured in the rush to flee. The police never found out who did it, but it's believed to have been a prank by some teenagers. For fun.

Outside, neighbors who lived near the nightclub took advantage of the situation and tried to set fire to the building, the better to rob the panicked, fleeing survivors.

Afterward, seven people were arrested for trying to steal valuables from the dead bodies.

Tough town, this Juliaca.

A couple of years ago, a poor man was discovered stealing cooking fuel here. A mob tied him to a lamppost with wire and burned him alive.

A couple of months before that, the mayor of an outlying village was accused of corruption, and the entire town beat him to death.

That said, they do have a giant slide:

So there's that.

Let's get back on the road, shall we?

Here's the Altiplano, Peru's answer to the South African highveldt -- a high plain often seemingly as flat as a putting green for as far as the eye can see:

Occasionally you hit a speed bump at a toll station. These are accompanied by the following warning:

The sign is meant to communicate that the large bump may destroy your suspension if you don't slow down. My crappy Spanish, however, always interpreted the sign more literally -- as Spring Break.

Cool! Turns out it's Spring Break in Peru every 50 miles or so.

Moving on.

This is the central wall of the Temple of Wiracocha, a pre-Inca ruin 80 feet high and 100 yards long. Prior to the Spaniards doing to the Incas roughly what Juliaca does to propane thieves, this central wall supported a church the size of an entire football field, surely one of the largest structures on the continent when the Spanish arrived:

The sheep is a comparatively recent addition.

Further north, we pass Cusco and enter the Sacred Valley, a vast fertile swath along the Urubamba river that was to the Incas what California's Central Valley is to modern supermarkets.

It's gorgeous. Depending on your altitude, the Sacred Valley can look like anything from the most fertile bits of Appalachia...

... to a drive through the back roads of Utah:

Next stop, Moray, site of what may have been a massive Inca crop laboratory, 14 stories deep and 150 yards across:

The theory goes that all those concentric circles create different microclimates, with the center several degrees warmer than the outermost rings. Many scientists now believe that in addition to using the center for various religious rites and sacrifices, the Incas also used the entire area as a microcosm for the terraced hillsides throughout the valley -- and a laboratory for determining which grains would grow best at which altitude and direction of exposure to the sun.

I would not have thought that an Inca crop lab would be so cool. But then, I'd have also said the same about this Peruvian salt mine:

Normally, somebody says "Peruvian salt mine," I'm not thinking, wow, cool. But this was:

About 600 years ago, the Incas discovered a natural spring that provided a constant trickle of extremely salty water. With some careful terracing, they created this massive field of 3000 evaporation pools. The trace mineral content varies from pool to pool, with distinct applications in agriculture, animal husbandry, and human consumption.

If you own one of the plots, you get to the actual salt by just walking out onto the terraces and harvesting it. This feels a lot like walking on snow when it's 80 degrees outside:

The only similar experience I'd had was crunching around the Gilmore Girls set during a Christmas episode being shot in Burbank in October. But if I'd lost my footing there, I wouldn't have gone careening down the side of a mountain.

Moving on.

Nearby, here's Ollyantaytambo, site of an Inca fortress the Spanish never conquered:

At its feet, the town of Ollyantaytambo is among the best-preserved Inca villages in Peru:

Many of the residents of Ollyantaytambo speak Quechua, retain some elements of traditional dress and custom, and live in Inca-built dwellings along Inca-built streets, eating potatoes and corn grown from hybrids and techniques pioneered by the Incas. It's pretty damn Inca here.

If you're planning a visit, the Casa Del Scorpion guest house is just out of camera range here to the left.

Watching the train to Machu Picchu chug past these half-millennium-old terraces was oddly jarring -- like watching two widely-spaced centuries overlap right before your eyes:

Speaking of Machu Picchu... let's go. (Warning: my words are going to completely fail. So will my camera. Most of these pictures will look just like every other picture of Machu Picchu. Some things -- Iguazu Falls, the pyramids of Giza or Teotihuacan, the Grand Canyon, etc. -- are just they're too big and wonderful to encapsulate in a snapshot.) 8000 feet in the air, in the saddle between two bullet-shaped mountains far enough into the Peruvian jungle that neither cars nor planes can take you to the spot...

... there's a 550-year-old ruin larger than Times Square. Constructed entirely of rocks that seem to have no earthly business being there.

Archaeologists aren't even sure what it was for. Possibly a retreat for the emperor Pachacutec. Whatever it was, the Spanish never plundered it -- heck, they never even found it -- so the whole thing is unusually pristine.

The place is often overrun by tourists, but if you look closely, you'll see that I lucked out and almost had the whole deal to myself. It was a random Thursday at the beginning of the wet season. Must be a good time to visit.

The view above is taken from a small building theorized to be a sort of observation post, now known as the Caretaker's Hut. Here's a look back up from what would be street level, were the town still active:

To give you a sense of scale, each one of those terraces is about 5 feet high. So climbing up to the hut from here is like taking the stairs on a 20-story building.

Here's the most sacred spot in the place, a stone called Intihuatana ("hitching post of the sun"):

Despite its simple appearance, it's oriented to point directly at the sun on the winter solstice, with the travel of its shadows subsequently providing an excellent guide to the seasons. This stone and the temple around it may have been the center of all Inca social and political planning.

And here are what seem to be the primary caretakers, keeping the grass neat with their grazing:

They also line up single file to use the stairs, which was more civilized than any human act I saw in the entire city of Juliaca.

A lot of tourists don't want to visit during the wet season, but if you like dramatic shifts in mood, it's the way to go:

And when the mist clears, rainbows appear in the valley below:

500 feet over the rainbow would be a good place to end this entry... except there's one thing even more beautiful that I want to show you.

It's the real reason I went, the main thing I was visiting in Cusco, and the actual subject of this chapter of my book on microfinance. (The rest is just window dressing, really.)

Here's the loveliest place I visited in Peru:

Arariwa may not look gorgeous, but it's a microfinance institution that brings financial resources to the working poor throughout the region -- craftspeople not unlike Olympia, say. Plus farmers and tradespeople and small businesspeople of every kind.

Microfinance is changing millions of lives -- so much so that its biggest pioneer, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. Unfortunately, it's not yet very well known in America. So for my next book, I'm taking all the money I made swanking around doing luxury travel reviews last year and putting it to good use -- funneling every dime into backing a bunch of loans* (1036 as of today; eventually I hope to do many thousands) in more than 40 developing countries. I'm using Kiva.org as my primary investment platform so far, but I'll be checking out include Babyloan.org, MYC4.com, and MicroPlace.com, among others. (They're all a little different, but generally in the same ballpark.)

And I'll be spending much of 2010 following the results in a half-dozen interesting places, then writing about what I see, learn, and occasionally fall off of or getting bitten by on the way.

That's the next book. Peru was just my first stop.

About 35 of my Kiva loans are to borrowers hooked up via Arariwa ("guardian of the harvest" in Quechua), and while I was in Cusco, I met some of the good folks at Arariwa who get the money to the people who need it, teach them how to handle it, offer health and reproductive information, and devote their lives to equipping the poor to, basically, not be poor anymore.

Want to know what was really gorgeous in Peru? People like Clotilde here, the head of education (and caretaker of a gazillion other things) for Arariwa, and one of the sweetest people I've ever met:

Clotilde here kindly opened her office, offered her time and support, arranged for me to visit with a few borrowers, and put up with my crappy Spanish. You just can't ask for more than that.

(Also, a grateful shout-out to Kiva Fellow Sheethal Shobowale for introducing me to Clotilde, shepherding me around more than once, and frequently making my Spanish comprehensible to others. This was all above and beyond. It was a privilege.)

I'd just like anyone reading this to get the feel for how real and cool and normal and important this stuff is. And in a way, how totally ordinary. Clotilde is an exceptional person -- but I also think everyone reading this is in their own way, too. (Yes, I get how sappy and contradictory that sounds. Deal with it.)

And that's it from Peru. Next stop will probably be India and Bangladesh in a few months. Will send more from there.

Thanks for reading! May your chicha be fresh, your island well-thatched, and your loo scorpions slow-moving.

*Sticklers may want me to clarify that a "Kiva loan" is typically the refinancing of an existing loan already made by the local lending institution. To which I say, whoopty. It's still helping to get food on the table where it's needed.

Retired Catholic Archbishop Rembert G Weakland, who has been accused of covering up widespread child rape by priests in Milwaukee, has a forthcoming memoir in which he wrote the following bits of wisdom:

"We all considered sexual abuse of minors as a moral evil, but had no understanding of its criminal nature."

Weakland, who retired in 2002 after it became known that he paid $450,000 in 1998 to a man who had accused him of date rape years earlier, said he initially "accepted naively the common view that it was not necessary to worry about the effects on the youngsters: either they would not remember or they would ‘grow out of it’."

Nine years ago, William Lobdell was assigned to cover religion for the LA Times. He was a born-again Christian when he got the gig. In 2001 he started studying to convert to his wife's religion, Catholicism. That was when the trouble began for Lobdell. He began reporting on the molestation scandals in the Catholic church:

I discovered that the term "sexual abuse" is a euphemism. Most of these children were raped and sodomized by someone they and their family believed was Christ's representative on Earth. That's not something an 8-year-old's mind can process; it forever warps a person's sexuality and spirituality.

Many of these victims were molested by priests with a history of abusing children. But the bishops routinely sent these clerics to another parish, and bullied or conned the victims and their families into silence. The police were almost never called. In at least a few instances, bishops encouraged molesting priests to flee the country to escape prosecution.

I couldn't get the victims' stories or the bishops' lies -– many of them right there on their own stationery -– out of my head. I had been in journalism more than two decades and had dealt with murders, rapes, other violent crimes and tragedies. But this was different -– the children were so innocent, their parents so faithful, the priests so sick and bishops so corrupt.

In 2002, Lobdell decided not to go through the rite of conversion. He stopped going to church.

Next, he started looking into Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the TV network that feature Billy Graham, Robert H. Schuller and Greg Laurie and other famous televangelists. He didn't like what he saw there, either -- a bunch of fantastically rich preachers who claimed to have a God-given power to cure people with grave diseases.

TBN's creed is that if viewers send money to the network, God will repay them with great riches and good health. Even people deeply in debt are encouraged to put donations on credit cards.

I spent several years investigating TBN and pored through stacks of documents – some made available by appalled employees – showing the Crouches eating $180-per-person meals; flying in a $21-million corporate jet; having access to 30 TBN-owned homes across the country, among them a pair of Newport Beach mansions and a ranch in Texas. All paid for with tax-free donor money.

...

At the crusade, I met Jordie Gibson, 21, who had flown from Calgary, Canada, to Anaheim because he believed that God, through Hinn, could get his kidneys to work again.

He was thrilled to tell me that he had stopped getting dialysis because Hinn had said people are cured only when they "step out in faith." The decision enraged his doctors, but made perfect sense to Gibson. Despite risking his life as a show of faith, he wasn't cured in Anaheim. He returned to Canada and went back on dialysis. The crowd was filled with desperate believers like Gibson.

Link

Reader comment:

Troy says:

Interesting post on the LA Times reporter "losing" his faith. While I agree wholeheartedly with the recent lawsuits against the Catholic church and that the authorities haven't gone far enough in sticking it to the Bishops, Cardinals, et al. and I also agree that TBN is a den of bad taste -- and even worse theology -- I would exempt Billy Graham from all that.

Did he appear on TBN? Yes he did. Did he buy into their health/wealth/prosperity theology? Hardly. Did he use their airwaves to get his message out? Undoubtedly. Graham himself was never wealthy (he earns about $200K/yr while his Association brings in over $100M) and always took a salary from his Association. I don't think he earned dime one off of any of his books, films, etc. I won't cry for him materially -- "he's got enough to eat and then some," but he lacks the conspicuous wealth of many of the others -- including Greg Laurie's Harley collection. Also witness Rick Warren giving back to his church his entire salary for the past 25 years or so and living in the same house since the 1980s and he has a ginormous cash-cow in his books -- which he does not use to enrich himself. There's no sin or hypocrisy in professional ministry per se, but there should be limits I believe in compensation -- especially when the world is watching and cutting no slack.

Anyway -- I would argue that Lobdell put his faith in the wrong thing to begin with. Christ didn't call us to put our our faith in a church -- an organization of people after all -- but in Him. An e-mail is too short to get into all that. We love our church, but we still do background checks on child-care workers and our pastor lives in a 2 bedroom in a gnarly part of Riverside (some would say all of Riverside is gnarly I realize!). No one, but a fool believes in human perfectibility.

On December 14, after it was revealed that patients’ medical data went missing from a data-management company in Ohio, the healthcare provider’s spokesman intoned, “(W)e take this sort of thing very seriously,” according to a Pennsylvania TV station.

Taking things seriously isn’t limited to privacy slip-ups. A Texas district attorney, reacting to a Dallas newspaper’s successful campaign to unseal Catholic Church documents about alleged sexual-abuse cover-ups, said, “We take these kinds of abuse scenarios very seriously” (The Dallas Morning News, December 15). Link

Update: For more, see the punchline to yesterday's Penny Arcade strip -- Thanks, Jamie!]]> http://boingboing.net/2007/01/09/when-pr-flacks-take.html/feed 0 http://boingboing.net/2006/10/02/residents-of-sadr-ci.html http://boingboing.net/2006/10/02/residents-of-sadr-ci.html#comments Mon, 02 Oct 2006 07:22:44 +0000 Xeni Jardin Residents found a picture of "Buddy Jesus" from [Kevin Smith's] 1999 film "Dogma" posted in the streets, accompanied by a badly photocopied pamphlet bearing a crude approximation of a US military crest and outlining a US "plan" to subjugate the neighborhood.

"That picture abuses our Imam Mahdi and his holy character, and mocks our sacred figures," said resident Abu Riyam Sunday, apparently mistaking the satirical movie still of Jesus for one of Shiite Islam's historical imams, whose images adopt a Jesus-like iconography. Link (thanks, Mitch Wagner)

Reader comment: ttrentham says,

Kevin Smith posted on his own blog about it today: Link.

This story is really unfair to Muslims -- thanks AFP. It makes them sound like morons, confusing obvious iconography of Jesus for that of one of their Imams. Anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that Jesus is also a sacred figure to Muslims (though in a different way than for Christians, clearly). Shoddy journalism on AFP's part -- shockingly insensitive and ignorant of the beliefs of 1 billion people. No wonder we have trouble understanding each other. See this Wikipedia link for a good explanation.

Although I don't know what the residents of Sadr City thought the "Buddy Christ" picture to be besides what the AFP story says, I think Chris underestimates the number of people who realize the significance of Jesus in Islam. One man AFP interviewed "apparently" thought it was the Imam Mahdi. I can't find any imagery for the Imam Mahdi, but iconography for figures important to Shia Islam are actually similar to "Buddy Christ". For example, pictures of Imam Ali: JPEG LINK.

I'm not sure how much recognition there would be of the Sacred Heart motif in Sadr City. The muscular and rather alive (as opposed to crucified) Western image of Jesus in the Buddy Christ does suggest Imam Ali. Also, the beard has a certain thickness that is close to representations of Imam Ali, as for example here: JPEG LINK.

I admit that Imam Ali appears in green with a hood, so it's not a close match. I've also never seen pictures of the Imam Mahdi.

Since "Buddy Christ" is not a typical western representation of Jesus (albeit playing off Sacred Heart images), it is entirely possible that the residents of Sady City assumed it was some mockery of Imam Ali or the Imam Mahdi by the occupation forces.

Although Chris' concern is commendable, for a Shia Muslim in Sadr City that iconography of Jesus might not be "obvious". The AFP doesn't paint Muslims as "morons", but it does show that the very Catholic Sacred Heart imagery might not be immediately apparent to some Muslims in Sadr City.

I don't know where the guys commenting about islam live, but I've lived all my life - 31 years now - in a city that is half catholic, half muslim, and most muslims here doesn't realize that Jesus is a prophet in islam. It's even usual to make jokes about Christ, just as some people makes jokes about Muhammad.

And I've never seen a muslim complain about profanation of christian images. For example, some time ago the spanish songwriter Javier Krahe cooked a crucifix for a TV program and the only ones who got offended were a few too delicate christians, but nothing serious (Link to video).

It is true, anyway, that muslims -at least where I live, Melilla, Spain- are not very comfortable about making jokes about christianism, for they have more respect for that religion than, e. g., judaism, and some think there shouldn't be jokes about any religion, at least the monotheistic ones. But I don't think any muslim feels particularly offended by the jokes about Jesus.

Will we please stop philosophizing over other religions just because we "live in the neighborhood"? Take it from someone born Muslim but who isn't religious, ALL Muslims consider Jesus a prophet and holy. In fact, it is one of tenants of Islam. You cannot be Muslim UNLESS you believe in the following:

(1) believe in God,
(2) believe in His angels (Gabriel and the whole shabang),
(3) believe in His books (New Testament, Old Testament, Quran),
(4) believe in His messengers and, finally,
(5) they do not differentiate among the messengers whom they claim to believe in. Anyone who differentiates among the messengers is, ipso facto, not a believer.

So let's stop making up stuff because of neighbors and actually start reading, eh?

From Rachel (AKA Rev Magdalen's blog):

On February 3, 2006, Judge Punch heard testimony in the case. Jeff entered into evidence 16 exhibits taken from the Internet, 12 of which are photographs of the SubGenius event, X-Day. Kohl has never attended X-Day and is not in any of the pictures. Rachel is depicted in many of these photos, often wearing skimpy costumes or completely nude, while participating in X-Day and Detroit Devival events.

The judge, allegedly a very strict Catholic, became outraged at the photos of the X-Day parody of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ — especially the photo where Jesus [Steve Bevilacqua] is wearing clown makeup and carrying a crucifix with a pool-noodle dollar sign on it while being beaten by a crowd of SubGenii, including a topless woman with a “dildo”.

His Honor also strongly disapproved of the photos of Mary Magdalen [Rachel Bevilacqua] in a bondage dress and papier maché goat’s head. The judge repeatedly asked, “Why a goat? What’s so significant about a goat’s head?” When Rachel replied, “I just thought the word ‘goat’ was funny,” Judge Punch lost his temper completely, and began to shout abuse at Rachel, calling her a “pervert,” “mentally ill,” “lying,” and a participant in “sex orgies.” The judge ordered that Rachel is to have absolutely no contact with her son, not even in writing, because he felt the pictures of X-Day performance art were evidence enough to suspect “severe mental illness”. Rachel has had no contact with Kohl since that day, February 3, 2006.

Since the news of Reverend Magdalen's legal proceedings broke, people have been asking Magdalen to post the actual transcripts of the court proceedings, so that they can read Judge Punch's words for themselves and verify that she was speaking the truth. The transcripts of the case were to become available by March 6th. However, for the entire week since March 3rd, Magdalen has been absent from the Internet, and she has not been able to make the transcripts available.

The reason for Magdalen's absence (and the lack of the transcripts) became clear as of Thursday, March 9. On that day, I learned that the judge had ordered Magdalen to cease all communication on the Internet regarding her son. This was not a written statement – the judge had verbally ordered her to remain offline, and no written order was available. Magdalen stated that even though the order was verbal, the court considered it to be an official order from the judge, and so she has had to remain offline since then.

However, as of March 15th, Magdalen had obtained legal reputation from none other than the law firm of Lipsitz Green Fahringer Roll Salisbury & Cambria, LLP. (This firm includes Larry Flynt and Marilyn Manson among their clients.) Magdalen's legal team is challenging this order. When the order is overturned and she is online again, she will have quite a story to tell.

IMPORTANT: Because Magdalen has a new legal team, donations to her legal fund are to be sent to a new address. Paypal donations can still be sent to magdalen@subgenius.com. Checks or other payments can be mailed to the attention of:

Christopher S. Mattingly
Lipsitz Green LLP
42 Delaware Avenue
Suite 300
Buffalo, New York 14202-3857

Since Rachel Bevilacqua isn't allowed to update her blog, I've got a summary of the case with updates at this page.

Rev. Ivan Stang has a page with more of a history of the custody case (before it took a twist and we all became involved).

…On February 3, 2006, Judge Punch heard testimony in the case. Jeff entered into evidence 16 exhibits taken from the Internet, 12 of which are photographs of the SubGenius event, X-Day. Kohl has never attended X-Day and is not in any of the pictures. Rachel is depicted in many of these photos, often wearing skimpy costumes or completely nude, while participating in X-Day and Detroit Devival events.

The judge, allegedly a very strict Catholic, became outraged at the photos of the X-Day parody of Mel Gibson’s movie The Passion of the Christ — especially the photo where Jesus [Steve Bevilacqua] is wearing clown makeup and carrying a crucifix with a pool-noodle dollar sign on it while being beaten by a crowd of SubGenii, including a topless woman with a “dildo”.

…Judge Punch lost his temper completely, and began to shout abuse at Rachel, calling her a “pervert,” “mentally ill,” “lying,” and a participant in “sex orgies.” The judge ordered that Rachel is to have absolutely no contact with her son, not even in writing, because he felt the pictures of X-Day performance art were evidence enough to suspect “severe mental illness”…