Alone and Unobserved

I know none of my readers are particularly excited by the prospect of my adding ads to the site, even if they’re just unobtrusive Google text ads. And I haven’t even 100% decided to do it. But the fact that I cannot log into my AdSense account—an account I created who knows how many years ago, and whose username and password I long ago forgot—is currently driving me to the edge of frothing, homicidal rage. And Google’s “help” pages are, as usual, worse than unhelpful.

Google consistently maintains that the following contradictory positions are true:

• My main Google account has no AdSense accounts associated with it.
• My main Google email (the one that’s part of my main Google account) cannot be used to set up a new AdSense account, because it is already associated with an AdSense account.

At this point my eyes are already bulging with rage, and I remember why I gave up on ever using AdSense in the first place. But, because I am a sense-challenged, pain-loving fool, I visit Google’s Help Center (motto: “Where Your Will To Live Goes To Die”) to see what can be done to recover my account.

Well, according to a labyrinthine series of help articles, the following must be done!

• If I no longer remember my “login,” I should check the original email I got from AdSense with that information in it. (The original email has no such information in it. The original email has NO useful information in it. Maybe because, back in the day, when I “submitted my application” [i.e., clicked on a button in Blogger] they had a functional account recovery process. Or a different, non-functional one.)
• Failing the above, I should submit a recovery request with several pieces of information I could only get IF I HAD ACCESS TO MY ACCOUNT. Which, I’m not sure if you’ve caught on to this yet, I DO NOT.
• Failing the above “Failing the above”: I should submit an application for a new account (remembering to lie when it asks if I have an existing account) and let them find out my deception—no really, this is from the official account recovery email I got—and then ask them to close my old account, approve the new one, and merge them together.
• Oh, but I can’t just have them close the account and open a new one with the same email, because that email is… already taken. But not usable. And also not associated with any AdSense accounts. Except it is.

So after trying to perform this last-ditch, “lie to us, and then apologize” smoking-earth account recovery maneuver several times, each time generating THE EXACT SAME EMAIL that sends me to the EXACT SAME FUCKING WEBPAGE with the EXACT SAME GODDAMN MOTHERFUCKING USELESS OPTIONS I’VE ALREADY TRIED SIX TIMES:

I am done. I will no longer be trying to access, recover, use, or otherwise acknowledge the existence of my alleged AdSense account or Google’s goddamn dickshit horsebuggering AdSense program in general.

And there was much rejoicing.

Here is a list of things that Medieval Christians really believed about Jews: They murdered Christian babies. Both male and female Jews had periods, and they used Christian blood to replenish the losses. As punishment for murdering Jesus, they all suffered from hemorrhoids and open sores. Jews were all born blind, and they rubbed Christian blood over their eyes in order to see. Christian blood could protect one from leprosy. And so on.

No, really, there’s more.

Go read this post on Nervous Acid, then come back here. It’s long, but it’s worth it! I’ll wait.

Norman Brannon was unpacking the press release by Concerned Women for America in his post, but you have to remember—the Mormon church was behind the Prop 8 campaign and financed the spread of this blood libel, and, for all we know, continues to do so. And you know what’s different about the leaders of the Mormon church and a Christian peasant going on a pogrom in the fifteenth century? Mormon church leaders know they’re lying when they try to make people hate gays. When they cynically, calmly tell their followers that the homosexuals are out to force the Mormon church to perform deviant gay weddings in their sacred temples. When they paint themselves as the victims.

This is why they and their ilk deserve no pity, no civility, no quarter. They need to be exposed and vilified for who and what they are, and what they stand for.

They need to be openly castigated with the truth.

This is part of the Mormon church’s official response to Judge Walker’s decision ruling California’s Proposition 8 unconstitutional:

“We recognize that this decision represents only the opening of a vigorous debate in the courts over the rights of the people to define and protect this most fundamental institution—marriage.

“There is no doubt that today’s ruling will add to the marriage debate in this country and we urge people on all sides of this issue to act in a spirit of mutual respect and civility toward those with a different opinion.”

Listen, Mormon church. When you spent millions of dollars on a smear campaign against homosexuals and their families and roped as many of your faithful as possible into canvassing California neighborhoods and calling California homes to repeat the same lies and drum up the same groundless fears, and when you lied and prevaricated and covered up your involvement, the time for civility was long, long past.

And guess what! That was TWO YEARS AGO. So suck it up, you disgusting bigots, and lie down in the bed you made for yourselves. You deserve to be made into a laughingstock and a pariah for being the hate-mongering institution you are.

It tears me up inside that some of my family members and friends still buy into your lies. But I don’t. And until you stop threatening my right to live my life unhindered by your ruthless, coercive morality, I do not owe you any civility whatsoever—and neither does anyone else who is affected by your vicious, insidious lies and hate.

So go fuck yourselves. And prepare to continue losing this fight.

I consider myself a logical person. I always have. Which is why, I suppose, even when I was a believer I tried to use logic to explain my beliefs. As a proselytizing missionary I spent countless futile hours reasoning with believers in other faith traditions, trying to get them to see the inconsistencies in their belief system and to demonstrate—with words, with logic, with the force of conviction!—that my beliefs were superior and they should convert to Mormonism. You may or may not be surprised to hear that I rarely got anywhere with these tactics, except to find myself embroiled in endless debates with college students and professors and other people who like to hear themselves talk.

After ditching Mormonism and then Christianity and finally theism altogether, I was still in that mindset. If people only thought about their beliefs, they’d realize they were logically untenable and they’d abandon them! This also rarely (never) worked.

I am an atheist because there’s no reliable, reasonable evidence for the existence of any kind of god, and there’s plenty of evidence against the existence of specific gods. That’s logic. But it’s not convincing to someone who relies on the warm fuzzy feeling in their chest to decide what’s true.

So I’m done doing that. I’m still gonna blog about what I believe and what matters to me, but no more trying to convince people. Because you know what? I’ve stopped believing that I can touch the center of people who rely on faith for decision-making. That I can reason them out of their belief. Because a belief that isn’t supported by evidence cannot be based on logic, and can’t be reached by reason.

There you go. I stayed up thirty-six hours straight over the past couple days watching an addictive and remarkably illogical TV show called Fringe so I’m not really strong on “reason” or “argument” right this second anyway.

I was reading Dooce’s most recent post, a letter to herself on turning “four hundred and twenty months old” entitled “That old hag.” And I was like, oh, fun, let’s plug that into the Google search bar and let it do the math for me to find out how old she is. So I typed in “420 / 12″ (boy does Google have some fun suggestions for people who type in “420,” by the way) and up pops… “= 35.”

After I calmed down a bit I did the math myself, and it turns out Heather Armstrong was born in 1975, which makes her a little less than five-and-a-half years older than me. It doesn’t seem possible that someone who was born in 1975 would be turning thirty-five this year. I mean, 1975 is RECENT and thirty-five is OLD.

In other, related news, a couple days ago I called home and spoke with my dad about possibly coming home in November so I could be there for my birthday, his birthday and Thanksgiving.

“Do you guys have anything planned for then?” I asked, meaning “Do you have any (i.e., out-of-town, not-going-to-be-home-for-a-visit plans) for that period?”

And my dad looked at my mom’s big calendar where she writes down absolutely everything and he was like, “Nope! The only thing on here is

And then he asked what that horrible strangled, kicked-in-the-gut noise coming from my end of the line was.

Which is all a long way of saying

Some of my older friends (i.e., the ones who are in or past their thirties and are not too happy with my moaning and gurgling that thirty is “the edge of decrepitude”) have tried to reason with me, saying that their thirties are/were their favorite age—not a kid anymore, but not yet an old fart.

My problem isn’t really that thirty feels “old.” I don’t think thirtysomethings are decrepit (or at least I wouldn’t say so to their faces) and I don’t think I’m immediately going to start experiencing joint pain and stiffness and hair loss (who am I kidding? I suffer from all of those already) immediately after my birthday.

But thirty does feel like the end of my life as a kid. I’ve been a kid for years, it seems. Avoiding responsibility, playing and goofing off whenever I wanted to, eating unhealthy food, spending my money on random shit. Thirty-year-olds don’t seem like old fogeys, but they do seem like ADULTS.

And I don’t know if I’m ready to be an adult yet.

[Updated because I apparently cannot do arithmetic of any kind. Like that's a surprise. I'm OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLD.]

I don’t know how many times I’ve told my deconversion story, in whole or in part, on this blog or elsewhere, but my impression has been—for years at this point; yes, I’ve been an ex-Mormon atheist for that long now and it blows my mind—that the fundamental seed of my apostasy, the moment I first broke from the faith, was when I was about twenty-two and finally began to accept myself as a gay man.

In fact, I’ve found myself defending this position several times, when people have implicitly and explicitly accused me of leaving Mormonism so I could go “sin” and “be gay.” I’ve been forced to say repeatedly that my being okay with being gay, as the first point of doctrine I disagreed with my church on, was a (perhaps the) deciding factor, the first step in my journey away from religion, but wasn’t the REASON I ended up leaving. After all, I pointed out, there are any number of practicing Mormons who are also okay with gays or with being gay and they haven’t felt the need to leave. I left the Mormon church because I disagreed with virtually every point of doctrine, including the existence of deity.

I realized today that I’ve been fundamentally wrong this whole time. Not about Mormonism being full of shit, or about the existence of deity, or about religion being a net negative in today’s world, but about when I felt the first disconnect with religion.

It all comes back to patriarchy. You see, I was a feminist long before I realized I was a gay man. I was a feminist in the making before I started kindergarten. Why? Because when I was a kid I wanted to be a girl. When I was REALLY young I very nearly thought I was a girl. I had no interest in the “boy” things other boys were obsessed with—I wanted a Barbie and a My Little Pony and a Rainbow Brite and pretty dresses and I wanted to be a princess AND a sorceress AND an enchantress and forget that moron He-Man, I wanted to be SHE-RA.

I identified strongly with my mom over my dad, and, especially when I was super-little I had trouble accepting that my (one-year-older) sister and I were not functionally the same person. (I mean, we did everything together, and we always would, right?) So when I found out what the Mormon patriarchy expected of young women, I took it very personally.

My mom had her own visible struggles with patriarchy as well. She told us how her father was a Scoutmaster when she was a tween and she fought long and hard for the right of going on campouts with him and her brothers without success, and I watched her do her best to turn the local Young Women’s camping program into something resembling an actual outdoors exploration course.

It upset me that my mom, who was so smart and capable and (let’s face it) ambitious, especially when compared with my go-with-the-flow dad, was expected to accept a background role and take orders from all the stupid MEN around her just because she was a woman. My mom tried to be philosophical about her lot; denying her natural gifts was God’s way of teaching her to be patient, and a better person, and what-the-fuck-ever-else, but I didn’t, couldn’t buy it.

Polygamy bothered me for a similar reason. Why had men been “given” (yes, that’s right—GIVEN) more than one wife, but women were only allowed to marry one man?

Why were there so few independent females in the scriptures, which were otherwise crowded with independent men? Why were there vanishingly few female prophets?

I’m sad to say I learned fairly quickly that voicing concerns about this got me labeled as weird and girly, and I learned even quicker that these were “bad” things to be. As I got older and became more convinced that I actually was male I found myself participating in the patriarchy, both overtly by becoming a deacon at age twelve just like all the other guys, and by laughing uncomfortably at my friends’ sexist jokes. But I was still never comfortable with the whole thing, just like I was never entirely comfortable being male.

Another thing I’ve often said is that I was a “true believer” back before I started explicitly questioning Mormon doctrine when I was in my early twenties. But I’ve been wrong about that, too. I certainly tried hard enough to be a true believer—doing everything I could think of to convince myself and everyone else that I believed. Hypnotizing myself into suppressing my doubts. Testifying to others with passion, zeal and throbbing sincerity that I not only believed, I knew that the Mormon church was the true church of Jesus Christ on the earth.

But the seed had already been planted. The seed of feminism, of fairness, of this isn’t right, this can’t possibly be right, because it contradicts everything that makes sense. And once I took that next step of acknowledging that I was gay, and accepting myself for who I was, it couldn’t be held back any longer. Because if I was gay, then not fitting into the straight male paradigm was completely irrelevant! I could be as girly or as feminine as I liked. Everything else in my ex-religious journey, I’m convinced, followed from there.

The Mormon church, like almost every other existing religious sect, is fundamentally patriarchal. It is anti-feminist, anti-fairness. Anti-sense. Not just because its doctrines are not true, but in its philosophy, organization, culture and outlook. It pains me to say this, because so many people I love and value are still part of it, and have defended and will continue to defend its destructiveness to me and to others. I just hope that if enough people point out the reality of religion and Mormonism that we can make a difference in the future of girls, women, boys and men everywhere.

Sometimes a guy will walk past me (it could be anywhere, but we’ll pretend we’re in a coffee shop) and I’m instantly 100% certain he’s gay. I also notice that he’s cute. Not quite as cute as I am, but I’m willing to overlook that, because I’m a big person that way.

And then he doesn’t even glance at me. Not even once! I watch him closely for the next three hours, and he blithely continues sipping his coffee and leafing through his magazine as if he is completely unaware of my existence.

What, does he think he’s too good for me? Is he deluded about his own looks and doesn’t realize I’d be doing him a favor by dating him? WHY WON’T HE ACKNOWLEDGE MY CONDESCENSION.

It all ends, of course, with me walking up to him, slapping the coffee out of his hand and shouting something about how “it’s YOUR loss, BITCH. We could’ve HAD SOMETHING.” And then I go home and listen to Morrissey and post something angsty and emo on my LJ. Through my tears.

A couple days ago I posted the following status to my Twitter and Facebook accounts:

I’m amazed at how many straight men who claim to support gay rights & not to be homophobic will still use “gay” as an insult w/ each other.

I got a lot of responses (all supportive), but the main common thread was… everyone misunderstood what I was going for. And it was my fault! In trying to cram my idea into 140 characters, I left out everything I really meant to say. It happens; some ideas just aren’t concise enough for Twitter. So here’s the blog-length version.

First, some preliminaries: I have no problem with people using “gay” as a purely descriptive term to mean “homosexual.” I actually prefer “gay” to “homosexual,” since the only people who seem to use the latter term anymore are gay-hating homophobic fundamentalist Christians.

I’m not a fan of people using the word “gay” to mean “worthless” or “shitty,” as in “The iPad is so gay. It doesn’t even have Flash on it.” I’m gay, and I find it offensive when people equate that with “worthless piece of shit.”

But that’s not where I was going with my tweet. Or rather, that’s exactly what my tweet meant, but it’s not what I intended for it to mean. A better tweet would’ve been

I’m amazed at how many str8 men who claim to support gay rights & not to be homophobic are still offended if someone assumes they’re gay.

I don’t hang around or even associate with people who are openly homophobic. In fact, I don’t usually associate with people who aren’t willing to openly disavow homophobia and champion gay rights when the occasion presents itself. So it always surprises and disturbs me how negatively some of my straight friends react when someone mistakenly assumes they are gay because they are hanging out with me and my gay friends.

It comes down to this: if you are offended by being called “gay,” or having someone imply that you are homosexual, or that you like taking it up the ass (if you’re a guy), or that you like eating pussy (if you’re a girl), then you need to accept the fact that, in this sense, you are homophobic. You may be pro-gay-rights, you may be pro-marriage-equality, you may have tons of gay friends, but if you become angry when someone calls you gay, then you need to examine that feeling very carefully and recognize it for what it is: deep-down, visceral bias.

Similarly, when someone calls the library and I answer and say “Hi, this is Sean, how can I help you,” and they spend the next five minutes of the telephone conversation calling me “ma’am,” and I get pissed off, I need to confront my own sexism. Because being called a girl or a woman, or even having someone assume or imply that I’m female, is still apparently offensive to me. And what does that say about my real feelings towards women and their value and worth if being equated with them offends and angers me?

I’ve talked about bias and privilege here before, and about how easy it is to recognize others’ bias and privilege and how hard it is to recognize our own. Well, here’s a fun exercise: What ethnic group are you offended to be mistakenly included in? What sex, gender, sexual orientation or sexual preference are you offended to be mistakenly conflated with? What group do you violently disclaim any membership in? I submit that the root of all of these reactions is likely to be some kind of bias. But that’s a good thing! Because it’s so much easier to get over your bias and prejudice once you’ve recognized it.

What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? What was your reaction to this post? Let me and my other readers know in the comments.

[Note: I'm not singling out anyone in particular with this post. Trust me: if you think it's about you, it probably is—but it's also about a lot of other people, too.]

As you may or may not know, I use Goodreads to keep track of the books I read, and to rate and review them when I have the inclination. I recently read a book of poetry that completely blew me away, and my reaction to it turned out more like a blog entry than a review. So I thought I would cross-post it here.

The First Risk by Charles Jensen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I don’t remember finding out about Matthew Shepard’s slaying. I was seventeen when it happened, a self-hating closeted gay Mormon, halfway through my first semester at Brigham Young University. Did I think he deserved it, the way I thought gays deserved to die of AIDS for their sins? I hope not, but I’m afraid to remember too well.

I am the failure of the body to remain a boy,
I am the remains of a boy, the body of his failure. (“I Am the Boy Who Is Tied Down”, p. 7)

The first section—”Safe”—interweaves various viewpoints on Matthew Shepard’s last moments with three poems describing Venus’s grief at the death of Adonis. The language is brutal, visceral, and the tone moves from cold and dissociated to immediate and passionate. Reading this section, it was like I was hearing about the killing for the first time. And this time, at least, I know I didn’t think he deserved it.

When I finally came out to myself as a gay man, and began to accept myself and to stop blaming myself for who and what I was, I took an entire summer to watch what I saw as the “gay canon,” films I had been too afraid to watch until that point. One of the first of these was Almodóvar’s masterpiece, All About My Mother.

I tell you, chica,

If you want something done,
Do it with a knife. (“La Agrado Explains Plastic Surgery”, p. 25)

The second section—”City of the Sad Divas”—is a collection of poems associated with All About My Mother and its characters: Manuela, who has lost her son; La Agrado and the other transsexual hookers; Huma Rojo and her heroin-addicted lover, Nina; and the city of Barcelona itself, where much of the action takes place. In these poems, the reader does not relive the film; rather, the violence and passion and filth of the film are held at arms length, looked over with a dark and dubious eye, considered, and then let go.

I’ve always hated Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, although it is often gorgeous to watch, because I never believed for a minute that any of it was happening. All of the characters annoy me, the plot annoys me, and Scottie’s obsession and eventual unraveling annoy me.

To be golden-haired means
you are destined to be idolized;

brunettes have less fun
but keep better secrets. (“Hair and Make-Up Notes, Scene 92″, p. 50)

The fourth section—”The Double Bind: A Critical Text”—presents a critical analysis of Vertigo, and includes all kind of tantalizing details about the cast, director and the narrative and directorial choices in the film. I have no idea if any of these details are true; that is not the point: they are simply too delicious to resist. Each snippet, naturally, is accompanied by an associated poem. One thing that must be said in Vertigo‘s favor is that it is beautifully shot, composed and scored. Unlike the previous collection, these silky little poems do much more to evoke the actual feel of parts of the film.One result of reading this section is that I have the sudden desire to see Vera Miles play the Kim Novak role (and, really, anyone else play the Jimmy Stewart role).

I’ve already reviewed the fourth section, “The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon,” on Goodreads. I have nothing to add to that review except this:

This is good poetry.

View all my reviews on Goodreads >>

In the book review that got him embroiled in the current wave of compatibility/accommodationist debates, Jerry Coyne writes,

[S]upernatural phenomena are not completely beyond the realm of science. All scientists can think of certain observations that would convince them of the existence of God or supernatural forces. . . . [I]f a nine-hundred-foot-tall Jesus appeared to the residents of New York City, as he supposedly did to the evangelist Oral Roberts in Oklahoma, and this apparition were convincingly documented, most scientists would fall on their knees with hosannas.

When I read that, I raised my eyebrows and said to myself, “Huh. That wouldn’t be enough, in itself, to convince me that there is a god.”

Now, the appearance of a 900-foot-tall Jesus would be very hard to explain, there’s no getting around that. And it would depend on what you meant by “god.” But, for instance, I honestly can’t think of any evidence that would convince me of the existence of the Christian god (an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, unchanging being with no body that exists everywhere and nowhere), or of the Mormon god (an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving, unchanging being with a shining, immortal physical body). These are just such far-fetched assumptions—”all-knowing,” “all-powerful,” “immortal”—that you’d need an infinite amount of evidence to support them. And, given the amount of suffering in the world, the evidence for the existence of a benevolent, all-powerful being is rather less than lacking.

Of course! I’ve heard the religious people say. If God appeared in all His glory and convinced everyone of His existence in an instant, it would take away everyone’s ability to have faith in Him!

Ah. So either we can imagine the existence of an invisible, implausible, omnipotent being who meddles in our lives continually but is so phenomenally successful at erasing all his tracks that we have no evidence for his existence at all,

OR

there is no such invisible omnipotent imaginary being. We are who we appear to be: flawed, intelligent animals, who must learn to live together in a flawed but amazing world with other flawed, amazing creatures, with no help or hindrance from “on high.”

I know which option I find more compelling, more defensible, more reasonable, and ultimately more satisfying. What about you?