Month: February 2013

Guns

The most popular sign on gun stores these days seems to be “Salesman of the Month: Obama.” People are buying guns now, afraid that they’ll not be able to do so later.

The rhetoric is ever more strident. “I’ll give up my gun when they pry it from my cold dead fingers” is a model of sobriety compared to “I came into this world kicking and screaming and covered in someone else’s blood, and I have no problem going out the same way.”

I was a conscientious objector 40+ years ago, and I’ve never fully changed my mind. But I never could justify the kind of pacifism that says police shouldn’t be violent, or that one is not allowed to defend one’s home violently against intruders — even by deadly force. I don’t think it’s wicked to keep my cards close to my vest on whether my home is “protected by Smith & Wesson.”

And yet I must ask what a Christian is to do as a Christian.

I serve Matins every Sunday morning. Part of Matins commemorates Saints from the Synaxarion for that day.  I don’t know how many times we’ve commemorated, say, “Patriarch Tikhon, who was slain by the atheists in the year 1917,” or “Saint Blaise, who was beheaded by the Governor Agricolus.” I have yet to chant the praises of “St. Rambo, who, when the atheists came for him, slew them.” Not once.

I suppose I could glower “I’m no Saint. Go ahead and make my day.” But I want to be a Saint (even if nobody but God knows it). Every Christian should want that.

Even if I never had to shoot anyone, buying the hardware and ammunition, going to the firing range, shooting at human figures, cleaning the gun, dreaming of a better gun, rehearsing how to get to the gun to shoot someone if surprised — those things mark the soul in and of themselves, even apart from the time they take from more edifying passtimes.

I think I know which way I’m leaning on whether to “buy while you still can.”

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Moving the gay conversion cheese

Joshua Gonnerman is a “chaste” gay Christian whose writings I look forward to. I put “chaste” in scare quotes only because some use it as a synonym for “sexually abstinent,” whereas I think chastity, one of the virtues, is much more than mere abstinence.

False Hope and Gay Conversion Therapy is an adaptation of something Gonnerman wrote elsewhere. From everything I know or think I know, his guarded assessment of reparative therapy is more than warranted. The whole piece is worth digesting.

But buried within it, something in particular caught my attention that I hadn’t noticed about reparative therapy claims before:

Out of ninety-eight original subjects, sixty-one were able to be categorized at the end of the study. The other thirty-seven either explicitly refused or were regarded by Jones and Yarhouse as passively refusing through non-communication to continue. Of the final sixty-one, just eleven subjects (18 percent of completing subjects, 11 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Conversion,” while seventeen (28 percent of completing subjects, 17 percent of beginning subjects) were registered as “Success: Chastity.” (As a chaste man who is also gay, I am inclined to dispute categorizing chastity as a success for orientation change.)

(Emphasis added)

I hesitate to call it “paraphrase,” but here’s my take on the “Success: Chastity” notion:

If you’re promoting your techniques (1) as secular and (2) as intended to produce a change of orientation, then counting the behavioral change of sexual abstinence, without a change of orientation, is cheating. Only if your techniques were acknowledged as religious (What secular interest is there in abstinence of consenting adults? Few at best, no?) and pastoral would abstinence count as any kind of success at all, and if the abstinence were only technical (e.g., only gay porn, no gay partner), it would be dubious to count even such abstinence as “success: chastity.”

I think “success” from an authentically Christian standpoint need not include change of orientation, but requires more than mere technical abstinence. The same is true for unmarried Christian heterosexuals, for whom chastity is not attained by limiting non-marital activity to “heavy petting.” It requires guarding the imagination as well. I’m an equal opportunity blue nose.

And [Begin preemptive strike] it’s certainly possible to cast out the demons of fornication and sodomy and end up possessed by seven worse, starting with pride. [End preemptive strike]

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Property tax death march

I’m not going to waste time speculating about motives, except that it’s hard to imagine that nobody was aware of engaging in sophistry when they sold towns on the need for big-box stores. Nathaniel Hood looks at a microcosm of the larger pattern in WalMart vs. Local Pub.

The WalMart in question pays the equivalent of $23,284 per acre in property taxes. Since it’s at the edge of town, it required a lot of new roads and other infrastructure from the city.

Pub 500 pays the equivalent of $82,125 per acre. It sits on a streetcorner that’s been there since at least 1870. A few new pipes were required from the city when it built (I don’t know what happened to the building that was there before).

Many other numbers cut in favor of small business when you look at them. Maybe the only ones that don’t are “does it have in-house sophists to sell itself to local officials desperate enough for renewal of their cities that they’ll drink the Growth KoolAid?”

Unless you’re affiliated with the WCTU and think Pub 500 should pay disproportionately because it’s evil, what justification can you give for what amounts to a whopping subsidy to WalMart? 

A pretty strong case can be made that we cannot afford to maintain a lot of the infrastructure we’ve been enticed to build by the growth sophists and the lure of “free” federal money to help. A rude wake-up call is coming.

A number of my sidebar “sustainability” links deal with these issues, as does the Congress for the New Urbanism, from a more professional and less activist angle.

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Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.