The Atlantic - Latest Comments in Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Kylopod — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:44:22 -0000

Dinesh D'Souza is one right-wing reactionary who has noticed the parallels and pursued them with alarming consistency.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Doctor Science — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 03:06:58 -0000

Oh, I agree with you. I meant that all those traditional forms of marriage had in common that the man and woman were unequal parties. Sara and Hagar certainly had traditional marriages -- that is, they both had less power than Abram, but Hagar had *much* less.

And if you look at the story of Jacob's marriages, the whole bride-substitution thing makes it seem as though the legal part of the marriage was between Jacob and *Laban*.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

bread & roses — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:42:07 -0000

I'd just like to point out that this should be more like "in Europe, the US and a few other places from maybe 1940 back to somewhere vaguely in the Victorian age." Because in other times an places, plural marriage (one man, one to many wives), and arranged marriage have been the norm. Were Sara and Hagar part of a "traditional marriage"? How about Lot and his wife and daughters? How about Alexander (the great) and Hephaestion (his older lover) and Pliny (his younger, eunuch lover) and Roxanne (his wife, who he took as spoils of combat)?

The champions of "traditional marriage" don't know their history or their bible.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

bread & roses — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 00:32:10 -0000

In other words, homos can only want to have sex, not form a family or contribute positively to the community as one./

Clearly Dreher has never heard of lesbian bed death.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Hugo Pottisch — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 20:01:15 -0000

hell you reading the wrong book boy. no way you can throw the first stone... I saw you the other night. love your enemy and kiss the other cheek and such.

but i agree - it is tough. here there some sweet gays who long for long-term relationships and even marriage and all they get is that they would threaten straight couples from controlling their short-term sexual desires. i can't even imagine how gays feel about this - it is so bizarre. they want marriage and can't have it because they all just want one-night stands. it can fry one's brain even if you aren't gay. And sorry for the long one.. but...

...I feel some remorse. Once you think about what worldview Dreher is coming from and how imprisoned and fearful he was raised and experiences life - it all hanging on a few words here and there... of course he is protecting The Word. His sexual identity and his security and happiness in relationships depend on it all. My guess is that two gays in a long-term relationship have a more honest and real relationship - based on who they are and how they accept each other - than Mr Dreher legally ever could. We can pity him. His relationship's faithfulness for example sounds to be based on fear of godly punishment and not respect for the human involved. Doesn't sound lovely but of course it needs protection by those involved in it all. I, surprising as it is to me too, can feel remorse for thinking this guy is "stupid" or "evil" etc.

Liberate yourself from mental slavery, a wise man once said. Dreher is simply not there.

Preacher man don't tell me heaven is under the earth...
I know you don't know what life is really worth.
Jah!

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Bruce — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 18:36:12 -0000

forgiveness implies remorse...atleast in my book?

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Hugo Pottisch — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 15:07:06 -0000

I for one would love to see a distortion of what it currently means to be fully human... and hence godly.

The Church has never and does not accept women as fully equal to real humans e.g. look at higher management of the church but also politics all over the world and in all religions including Buddhism.

Maybe it is asking too much too early to accept gays as fully equal to humans... for fearful males that is. Confident men have nothing to fear by definition. They will not fear to fall for "individual desire to become the sole legitimate arbiter in defining sexual truth". What the fuck does that even mean, "defining sexual truth"?

If God were truly created in the image of man - as biblical texts prove - I hope he evolves into a more confident man... and finds a partner in crime. Me thinks that once we accept women as equal, e.g. female pope or female US president, we will see that female desire is just as bad or good as male desire. Once we accept that women do desire men and other women and beyond mere family instincts but actual sexual instincts... that it does not mean that women will fuck around all their lives and that it does not mean that they will marry their childhood sweetheart and live happily ever after... well once that happens we will see nothing wrong with some men desiring men.

It is clear that it is only a question of time now and I therefore agree with Jay C that we can all start forgiving fools like Dreher.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

LKT — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:57:18 -0000

I was going to comment above with the comment about Dreher's brand of Christianity (Orthodoxy) to say it's not exactly right to say 'Orthodox' and have that mean one single thing. I think the same is true of "liberal Christianity," of which I am one representative. A lot of us are labeled "liberal Christians" solely on the basis of thinking homosexuality is not a sin.

My point being simply we need to be careful in saying that labeling somehow completely defines a group of people. I took a class in seminary with an Orthodox gay man who wrote a marriage service for gay men in an Orthodox style. Not that that's mainstream, but it does exist.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Doctor Science — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:40:43 -0000

To clarify: by "traditional marriage" I mean "marriage as defined from c. 1919 back as many thousand years as you care to guess".

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Doctor Science — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 14:38:25 -0000

I think you-all are missing the big, unspoken issue. The issue is the status of women.

The very existence of same-sex marriage truly does threaten traditional marriage. Traditional marriage is between legally unequal persons: one full, real human being (aka "man"), plus one person with modified or partial legal rights (aka "wife"). But if women are truly legally equal to men, then same-sex marriage becomes an inevitability, because things that are equal to the same thing are equal to each other.

As long as the only egalitarian marriages are ones like mine (between a man and a woman), Rod can pretend that they are all "really" traditional marriages, they don't disturb his worldview. But once Andrew Sullivan and his husband or Ellen Degeneres and her wife are in the picture, the illusion shatters: their marriages do not have the correct penis:person ratio (1:2), and their very existence undermines the idea that every marriage is between a dominant and a submissive, with the penis to tell you who's who. [insert comments about Mr. Dreher's choice of nickname here]

When Dreher says SSM is the culmination of the sexual revolution, he's right: the prime mover of the sexual revolution was reliable contraception for women, which let us have sex without constant, grinding fear. IMHO that's the "individual desire" Dreher is truly afraid of: women's desire, women as sexual agents, doing what (and who) we want -- instead of our duty to men, and by extension to God.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Tony Comstock — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:51:16 -0000

That's Rod's problem. He is only capable of understanding sex as orgasm, as pure release with no larger context; and he's so profoundly ashamed of his desire for that release that he can only justify his sexual desires against the species' need to procreate; and without that possibility, sex is merely the pursuit of orgasm.

I wonder what Dreher would have to say about this couple. Are they also "distorting what it means to be human"?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOUqb-oJb-4&feature=channel_page

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

exitr — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:35:58 -0000

@ Deborah: Thank you for that mildew tidbit. I will henceforth apply the Mildew Test of Relevance to any injunction I hear to follow the Bible.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Bruce — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:24:37 -0000

Good for you my fiend (trying to sound as non-Mcainian as possible). Hopefully he'll recover from what i can only assume is cancer? How where they treated? Did your uncle have any visiting rights at all? Sorry for prying!

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Persia — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:21:17 -0000

That's lovely.

Vermont Freedom to Marry has a wonderful ad out about a lesbian couple who'd been in a similar situation, and it was so heartbreaking and sweet and wonderful.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Persia — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:20:10 -0000

For that matter, what about childless couples, people who marry after menopause, infertile couples who choose to adopt? What are they doing if not 'putting their pleasure first' in Dreher's eyes?

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Persia — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:17:42 -0000

My own genius governor keeps talking about 'one man one woman for human history,' and I keep wanting to have him read that Bible he's apparently taking orders from. Ugh.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Caleb Das — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:17:32 -0000

Man, if being gay is supposedly the ultimate pleasure trip/indulgence, I wonder why the rest of us don't try it. Is that what will happen when Rod gets a crisis of faith? How could it not? I mean, fuck, I bought an Xbox 360 to indulge my pleasure centers when instead, as the godless nihilist Dreher believes I am, I could have just had gay sex. WTF. Or maybe gay people possibly want more than just sex, being not fully human same as the rest of us.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

TKOEd — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:10:05 -0000

What Tony said.

I love when bigots try to rationalize their bigotry with faux intellectualism

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Sime — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 13:03:09 -0000

Thanks for introducing Mr. Rod Dreher.

Let's see:

Thinks failing to live by Christian sexual morality contributes to the death of the soul.

Considers it a fact that there can be no compromise on this issue, as it goes to the heart of how believers understand themselves, thier relationship to God, and to the nature of truth.

Thinks the legitimization of homosexuality would be a profound distortion of what it means to be fully human.

Thinks that the fact that only 3.5 percent of his 2009-posts dealt with the issue proves that he has not in any way a "gay fixation"...

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Deborah — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:57:30 -0000

I think Dreher is addressing liberal Christianity, which likely edges into issues of evangelical beliefs for the younger evangelicals. Liberal Christians believe in Christ but not in the literal take on, say, the nativity, even though it's a lovely and poetic story. And they don't apply sexual rules that worked for a small sheep-centric society in which puberty is at 16 and marriage at 17 to modern people who have puberty at 12 and marry at 30. It's not just gays that are condemned by the pleasure principle as Dreher sees it; everyone who has sex outside of marriage is out, too, as well as gay marriage.

Since the Bible spends a lot more time on mildew than on gay sex, and I have yet to see Evangelicals taking their mildewed shower curtains in, I've never understood the whole "we need to go by what's literally in the bible" tack as it's not taken for mildew.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

James F. Elliott — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:54:15 -0000

Dreher is Orthodox, not evangelical.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Bruce — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:40:03 -0000

LOLz...yes, the great Leader...well...it's pretty funny logic...teh gay don't exist in iran...yet people are stoned/hung/whipped for it ever year...

I like to look it like this...if they (christianists) could get away with it...they would institute similar laws...since they can't, they bitch and moan about it all day long...they're marginally more civilized than their middle-eastern far distant cousins. They've only honed more sophisticated/less brutal methods of coersion.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Incertus(Brian) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:36:46 -0000

In fairness, when Dreher is using "us" in that quote, he's talking about evangelical Christians. I think he just assumes that people outside his personal worldview are going to want to obviate 2000 years of Christian moral tradition, because that's what we wake up in the morning and work toward. It's our morning jog.

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Gramsci — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:33:52 -0000

Dreher is what the GOP calls a "Christian" and what Jesus called a "Pharisee."

Re: Tell Us How You Really Feel, Rod

Tony Comstock — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:33:09 -0000

He's basically equating gayness with pleasure, ruling out every other option because it fits his argument.

I'm still fuming, and you've hit on why.

Over the last year, my uncle's friend (referred to in the previous post) has had some serious heath problems, and my uncle is has made the three hour trip with him into the city with him for various tests and treatments at least two dozen times.

I'm sure it gave my uncle great pleasure to see his beloved's formerly chisselled physique hollowed out by illness and stress.I'm sure it gave my uncle great pleasure watching his beloved undergo painful treatments. I'm sure it gives my uncle great pleasure to have the chance to worry over his beloved's uncertain prognosis.

At it turns out, just this week the word came down that the last scan looks a like an "all clear." When I got the e-mail I shed tears of joy that my uncle will continue to be able to love someone he has loved so long and so well.