Spillover #13

35 thoughts on Spillover #13

1. I hope that this is not inappropriate to do here, but I want to show my support for Panti Bliss (Ireland’s most famous drag queen):

   She stated on RTE (Ireland’s national broadcaster) that actively working to reduce gay rights is homophobic and mentioned the Iona Institute, which is very Catholic, as you may imagine.

   When the Iona Institute formally complained and threatened legal action, RTE caved and removed the clip from the webpage and paid an undisclosed amount of money to those who felt verbally mistreated.

   She arrived on stage at the Abbey Theatre (Ireland’s national theatre) and gave a ten minute speech.

   Her words:

   “Now it turns out that gay people are not the victims of homophobia, homophobes are the victims of homophobia. Let me just say that it’s not true. Because I don’t hate you. I do, it is true, believe that almost all of you are probably homophobes, but I am a homophobe, I mean, it would be incredible if we weren’t. I mean because to grow up in a society that is overwhelmingly and stiflingly homophobic and to somehow escape unscathed would be miraculous. So I don’t hate you because you’re homophobes; I actually admire you. I admire you, because most of you are only a bit homophobes, and considering the circumstances, that’s pretty good going. But I do, sometimes, hate myself. I hate myself because I fucking check myself when standing at pedestrian crossings. And sometimes I hate you for doing that to me.”

   This is the link:
   http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/03/panti-noble-oppression_n_4717909.html

   1. It’s not inappropriate at all, khw – although it wouldn’t have been inappropriate on the Open Thread either (for next time you’ve got something to share).

      1. I’m sorry, tigtog, tho’ it was a good-faith mistake.

         please erase the post,
         thanks

         1. arrgh
            brain freeze!
            that’ll learn me not to try reading late at night
            Sorry again!

            1. no worries at all, khw – happens to the best of us! I just wanted to make sure you were aware of the Open Thread option, because you’re likely to get more eyeballs on it there.

2. @Fat Steve from the “Bill Cosby, Serial Rapist?” thread

   I’d probably agree that characters like Fat Albert, Mushmouth, Dumb Donald, etc do lack a certain sensitivity to outsider groups.

   LOL, very well said.

   So while I can see Tim’s point, I found it pretty clear that you were saying you ‘loved’ Fat Albert you meant loved as in the distant past, i.e. as a child, not as in yesterday.

   Yes indeed, I’m talking about the way way back, and this is certainly not a program I’d recommend to children today.

   1. @Tim from the “Bill Cosby, Serial Rapist?” thread

      OK, I was probably somewhat harsh — I don’t blame you for liking the show as a small child. But Cosby’s “Fat Albert” routines were a serious trigger for me, even as I enjoyed some of his other material. I may be thinking more of the stand-up stuff, as we had some of his LPs (that’s dating myself).

      I understand how the pain of the past stays with you. I’m sorry you had to deal with the bullying, and I’m sorry I didn’t consider the potential impact of my mention of the tv show when I wrote that sentence.

3. Anyone else having problems getting their comments to post properly? Weird, let’s see if this works.

   1. Is it the link I’m trying to put in a comment that is the problem? I’m flummoxed.

4. @Sharon M

   First, I did not actually think you said it was OK to hate Muslims. In fact, I read your comment as explicitly saying it was not OK to kill Muslims. Here is that section of you comment in context:

   I don’t like Christians very much right now, and for damn good reason. It doesn’t hurt them because they have Christian privilege.
   I really don’t like law enforcement (an understatement) because of their record of brutality.
   Boo hoo for them: they have the power of life and death literally over us, so my fear and dislike of them is justified.

   Hating Muslims is tied in with racism and xenophobia, hating sex workers, and abortion clinic workers IS NOT the same as disliking cops, because these occupations are marginalized.

   That statement almost immediately following the one about not liking Christians looked to me like you were saying that it is OK to hate Christians, but not OK to hate Muslims, somehow connected to/because of their race and foreign origins. I’m actually not sure what you were getting at here, so I should not have made that comment and I apologize for it.

   Cops: You first said you didn’t like “law enforcement,” which is kind of vague. I don’t have much respect for our “justice system” (criminal or civil); you could even say I hate it, and I definitely hate the Prison-Industrial-Complex. I wouldn’t say I hate the people in it, or at least not all of them. You then said:

   I had a cop tell me that stereotyping all cops as bad was the same as his dislike of a certain woman, and him stereotyping all women based on her.

   This suggested that you had in fact conveyed to him, directly or indirectly, that you thought all cops were bad. Then later, after my reply, it turned out you were talking about a specific cop who had shot a dog, brutally a guy, etc. I agree that individual is very hateful or hateable if you will. I’m sorry you had to encounter him and I commend you for confronting him about it, which I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do. Still, I don’t accept that all cops are bad.

   Catholics: I had a bunch of thoughts on this but I’m already getting lengthy with something nobody may even read, so I’ll just note that another blogger I read often runs items about some nasty thing the RCC is doing and asks her readers to direct their critiques toward Church policies and not “Catholics.” By coincidence, yet another blogger was talking yesterday about racism, prejudice and bigotry, and the differences and overlaps in meaning between them.

   So maybe that is a way to look at different perspectives. In my experience and observation, bigotry and hatred are corrosive not only or even primarily to the targets, but more so to the bigot/hater hirself. I used to have a pretty broad hatred myself of straight or what you might say cis hetero people but moved on from that because it was depressing and exhausting and I realized that it was not really valid for me. So I don’t really agree with your perspective but you could say I can see it from here and I think I can understand it.

   So that’s pretty much what I have to say on this as people have moved on unless for some unlikely reason you or anyone else wants to respond again and I will read it respectfully.

   Best wishes, really.

   1. Hating Muslims is tied in with racism and xenophobia

      Muslim isn’t a race, and there are plenty of native Muslim Americans. Hating Muslims is wrong for the same reason hating any extremely diverse group of one billion people is wrong, though it does intersect with race/nationality. Muslims have immense privilege in many parts of the world, even more so (by a lot) than Christians in the US, so please don’t speak as if the US was the only country.

      Lastly, all religious people have privilege over atheists in most countries, especially places like the UK where you can be literally thrown in jail for publicly explaining your lack of religious conviction.

      1. Lastly, all religious people have privilege over atheists in most countries, especially places like the UK where you can be literally thrown in jail for publicly explaining your lack of religious conviction

         As a UK resident who happens to be an atheist, I really don’t think this ‘especially’ is true any more. The last blasphemy laws in England and Wales were repealed – after several years of disuse and refusals to prosecute intentional breaches – in 2008 (Northern Ireland and Scotland still have some on the books but the chance of a successful prosecution with both UK and EU human rights legislation also in force is minimal); both the leader of the Opposition and the Deputy Prime Minister are non-religious and (almost) no-one cares; religion plays an decreasingly large part in everyday life and is generally treated as a private matter; Dawkins, even with the blasphemy laws still in force, was able to explain his atheism on state TV during the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures back in 1991.

         There are a few laws still on the books which give Protestant Christians a little bit of societal privilege, and general inertia (e.g. customary days of work being Saturday and Sunday for many jobs) that gives a bit more – and having our secular morality based on Christian morality without the supernatural bits gives LGBT people and women the usual problems … but there’s no way that it then follows that all religious people are privileged over atheists in the UK – Muslims certainly are not, and I’m not sure that followers of other non-Christian religions are either.

         1. No, I’m sorry, this isn’t true. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 is a blasphemy law, and people are arrested or threatened with arrest for criticizing religion. The UK routinely censors expressions of anti-religious belief.

            1. Can we collectively get in the habit of offering a cite or three when responding forcefully to anybody who queries a claim we’ve made earlier? It will save a great deal of time for everybody.

         2. Your government also is pushes an internet censorship and monitoring scheme not all that much behind China’s (and in fact some of the work has been outsourced to Chinese internet censorship firms), which blocks access to atheist websites (as well as LGBT sites).

         3. @tigtog: sorry, yes – will do.

            @ldouglas

            No, I’m sorry, this isn’t true. The Racial and Religious Hatred Act of 2006 is a blasphemy law,

            It prohibits actions intended to cause religious hatred. The amendments prior to it passing specifically removed the “abusive or insulting” clauses (which should never have been in there, obviously; at best they were highly careless copy-paste from the racial hatred clauses)
            Very few charges seem to have been actually brought under the Act: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201011/cmhansrd/cm111017/text/111017w0003.htm#1110189000655 (only one successful and I can’t find what it was for)

            http://www.secularism.org.uk/one-prosecution-so-far-over-reli.html references one example from 2009, which could hardly be said to be censorship of “fair criticism of religion” [1] or “a blasphemy law”, and http://www.newlawjournal.co.uk/nlj/content/prosecutions-unlikely-under-new-hatred-act has some lawyers believing in 2007 that it has sufficient protections to make it virtually impossible to use. I can’t find the other cases brought under that Act, though.

            [1] That one seems pretty close to the Act’s original aim of preventing people from expressing very mildly dog-whistled racism and then going “No, I’m not being racist, I said Muslims”, as previously happened.

            and people are arrested or threatened with arrest for criticizing religion.

            Or for preaching it (as the fundamentalists did spin it) – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cumbria/8687395.stm or http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2013/07/04/video-homophobic-street-preacher-arrested-in-london/ – but I would hardly take those events as evidence that in general LGBT people are privileged over religious people in the UK or even that the UK police in general are LGBT-friendly.

            The Public Order Act is capable of being used as a widespread anti-speech law – and has been, many times – but as the two cases above show, it and “breach of the peace” can be used against anyone the police take a dislike to.

            The UK routinely censors expressions of anti-religious belief.

            I can certainly find evidence that a number of UK universities based in or near London are doing so on their property … but the UK as in the state/government? Routinely, even? Could you give some examples of that, please, because I’m having difficulty finding any.

            which blocks access to atheist websites (as well as LGBT sites).

            I in no way defend the actions and incompetence of the current government (in that regard or others), but I find it hard to think of a category of site that the filters haven’t wrongly blocked somewhere. Blocking Muslim sites (allegedly, just those associated with terrorism) is one of the explicitly stated aims of the filtering, after all. Meanwhile, here’s a Christian Church website being blocked by the filters – http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2012/another-church-blocked-by-mobile-networks – and here’s another one – http://www.libdemvoice.org/porn-filters-block-cathedral-website-including-invite-to-crib-service-37630.html

            You’re making a strong case that the UK needs better general free speech protections (both cultural and legal) to which I would wholeheartedly agree: see also restrictions on protest – but I don’t see evidence that the speech restrictions are being applied to atheists more strongly than they are applied to members of minority religions. (And speech restrictions are only one form of privilege, too, of course)

   2. Sharon M

      First, I did not actually think you said it was OK to hate Muslims. In fact, I read your comment as explicitly saying it was not OK to kill Muslims. Here is that section of you comment in context:

      I don’t like Christians very much right now, and for damn good reason. It doesn’t hurt them because they have Christian privilege.
      I really don’t like law enforcement (an understatement) because of their record of brutality.
      Boo hoo for them: they have the power of life and death literally over us, so my fear and dislike of them is justified.

      Hating Muslims is tied in with racism and xenophobia, hating sex workers, and abortion clinic workers IS NOT the same as disliking cops, because these occupations are marginalized.

      That statement almost immediately following the one about not liking Christians looked to me like you were saying that it is OK to hate Christians, but not OK to hate Muslims, somehow connected to/because of their race and foreign origins. I’m actually not sure what you were getting at here, so I should not have made that comment and I apologize for it.

      Cops: You first said you didn’t like “law enforcement,” which is kind of vague. I don’t have much respect for our “justice system” (criminal or civil); you could even say I hate it, and I definitely hate the Prison-Industrial-Complex. I wouldn’t say I hate the people in it, or at least not all of them. You then said:

      I had a cop tell me that stereotyping all cops as bad was the same as his dislike of a certain woman, and him stereotyping all women based on her.
      
      This suggested that you had in fact conveyed to him, directly or indirectly, that you thought all cops were bad. Then later, after my reply, it turned out you were talking about a specific cop who had shot a dog, brutally a guy, etc. I agree that individual is very hateful or hateable if you will. I’m sorry you had to encounter him and I commend you for confronting him about it, which I’m not sure I would have had the courage to do. Still, I don’t accept that all cops are bad.

      Catholics: I had a bunch of thoughts on this but I’m already getting lengthy with something nobody may even read, so I’ll just note that another blogger I read often runs items about some nasty thing the RCC is doing and asks her readers to direct their critiques toward Church policies and not “Catholics.” By coincidence, yet another blogger was talking yesterday about racism, prejudice and bigotry, and the differences and overlaps in meaning between them.

      So maybe that is a way to look at different perspectives. In my experience and observation, bigotry and hatred are corrosive not only or even primarily to the targets, but more so to the bigot/hater hirself. I used to have a pretty broad hatred myself of straight or what you might say cis hetero people but moved on from that because it was depressing and exhausting and I realized that it was not really valid for me. So I don’t really agree with your perspective but you could say I can see it from here and I think I can understand it.

      So that’s pretty much what I have to say on this as people have moved on unless for some unlikely reason you or anyone else wants to respond again and I will read it respectfully.

      Best wishes, really.

      Thank you Tim, I appreciate it. 🙂
      I wasn’t going to come back here tbqh. People didn’t assume good faith on my part, plus I felt attacked for no good reason.

      I’m actually not sure what you were getting at here, so I should not have made that comment and I apologize for it.

      Rereading my comment, *I’m* not sure what I’m getting at either!
      This isn’t an excuse, but maybe this will explain it: When I comment, *sometimes* just bam, type it out, and assume people will know what I’m talking about. Does that make sense?

      On the “law enforcement”. I mean police officers in general. I do recognize the good ones, but I don’t see them calling out the bad seeds.

      On Catholics: this sounds strange but I have more respect for them then other Christians. The Nuns on a Bus, the nuns and priests who protest (and get arrested) against the School of the Americas,
      the Blessing of the Animals, and St. Francis.

      I hope this makes sense. 🙂

5. From the Catholic Hospital thread:

   Believe it or not, there are leftist, feminist, pro-choice Christians out there

   Maybe they should speak out louder against the fundamentalists.

   Brennan says:

   Being one of those people, I hear that a lot. I don’t know what kind of influence people think we have over the fundamentalists, but the reality is that we have less than none. If we told the fundies that the sky is blue, they would want a chapter and verse proof-text, would spend an hour arguing that it’s actually orange, and then would spend the next month denouncing the lies and heresies of those audacious blue-sky-claiming so-called Christians. They consider us the lowest of the low–far worse than the so-called “heathens” since we’ve read the same book as them and then dared to suggest that God doesn’t work the way they preach. They take great delight in informing us of the grisly fates that supposedly await “false prophets.” Conversations with true right-wing fundamentalists tend to be incredibly frustrating endeavors. I suppose we could put out a press release every time one of them says something obnoxious (“Breaking News: Church Says Gays Don’t Cause Hurricanes”) but even if we did it wouldn’t get much traction since we don’t get nearly the media coverage that they get. At the end of the day, we tend to choose the battles where we have greater than a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.

   Okay, here is the thing. I really, really don’t give a damn whether or not a single Fundamentalist is “converted” to a fluffy, happy, less hatey, more progressive flavor of Christianity. I want them to stop having political influence, and to shut the fuck up. And until fluffy, happy, less hatey, more progressive flavor of Christians start to step up and CALL THIS SHIT OUT Every. Time. it happens, publicly, loudly, and without mincing a damn word about how it is apparently what Christianity is supposed to be, nothing is going to change. They will still have pull. They will still be loud and vocal, because no other Christians are calling them out on their shit on a regular basis on a public stage.

   So yes, you SHOULD be issuing a press release whenever they spout their haterade. This battle is a big one, and an important one. It isn’t only the job of the non-Christian oppressed to have to constantly counter the hatred and the misinformation they publicly spew, and yet that is all who I see dealing with this shit.

   I was raised in a fluffy, happy, less hatey, more progressive flavor of Christianity, and I get that the whole mindset is to be kind, gentle, and non confrontational. But it is doing a disservice to the populations that they are trying to serve if they are letting fundamentalists publicly spout bullshit on “behalf of God” that dehumanizes, or demonizes said populations without publicly countering it. And that is a huge failing of “liberal” churches, this unwillingness to face fundamentalists head on, as if it would somehow taint their faith.

   I mean, if I was dealing with a man who was trying to be an ally and he said to me “Well, I would call out sexism whenever I heard it, but no man would really listen to me or other men trying to call it out, so you really just have to choose your battles” I would have to work very hard to NOT kick him in the shins.

   1. Thank you, shfree. You make me wish we had a “like” button.

      1. I would add- don’t use the cop out ” they’re not real christians” or any of its variations. Yes they are.

         1. Yeah, they do get to self-ID. The fact that they believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God is the only card they need.

   2. Thank you for this.

6. Regarding Comrade Kevin’s link in the Self-Promotion Sunday thread to a story (described as some fact and some not) which he wrote about a “transgender relationship,” and his response to the suggestion that he should have included trigger warnings.

   Kevin said:Not every transgender character is lily white and without flaws. In our quest to make sure that transgender folks are treated with basic decency, it’s entirely possible that, like everyone else, they have very human flaws. Transgender folks ARE human beings, last I checked. In our quest to make the world safe from transphobia, surely we can entertain people as 100% of who they are.

   And I responded:

   And you’re qualified to understand 100% of who a trans person really is, because?

   PS: I’m not sure “lily white” is an expression you should be using, either.

   1. Thanks for reproducing that here, Donna- I didn’t catch it before it was modded out of the other thread.

      Content note applies to the following, since I’m going to give specific examples of the cissexism in the submitted link.

      Comrade Kevin, you’ll notice that I didn’t mention Johnny’s flaws, which are completely irrelevant. Being unable to communicate your ambivalence/unhappiness about the nature of a semi-fictionalized relationship isn’t an excuse for cissexism, and ‘unreliable narrator’ is a completely useless content note because it’s so vague. It doesn’t give me any hint that in your quest to “make the world safe from transphobia” and “entertain [Johnny] as 100% of who [he is]”, you’re going to misgender and mislabel him. Nor does it tell me that you’ve gone so far as to set yourself up as the arbiter of whether or not “female to male transsexuals born as biological women” have sex “like men”. (Spoiler: all trans men have sex like men, because that’s what we damned well are.)

      I feel like there’s more that could be said here, but for the sake of my mental health, I’m going to leave it at that for now.

7. Because I unpublished a bunch of comments from the Self-Promotion Sunday thread, I just want to reassure everybody whose comment was deleted that they are welcome to reproduce those comments here on Spillover. None of the comments were deleted for unacceptable content per se, they were just breaching our Netiquette guidelines by extending discussion on a Linkfest thread.

8. @ldouglas on the Shameless Sunday thread: mods have said before that lengthy descriptions of why content notes are being attached can themselves trigger casual readers. bookshopcat was just sticking to protocol afaict. I personally quite approve of this measure; though I have very few triggers/phobias, they’re quite oddly specific and quite acute, and “this article contains discussion of [triggery thing]” serves me much better as a warning than “this article is all about [discusses triggery thing] and I hate it”.

   1. Yeah, I don’t know if my follow-up post got added before the thread was shut down, but I initially assumed Kevin was trans* and it seemed like a kind of policing response; realizing that my assumption was unfounded made me re-evaluate who was overreaching. Which is a long way of saying, you’re absolutely right.

9. Hating Muslims is tied in with racism and xenophobia
   

   Muslim isn’t a race, and there are plenty of native Muslim Americans. Hating Muslims is wrong for the same reason hating any extremely diverse group of one billion people is wrong, though it does intersect with race/nationality. Muslims have immense privilege in many parts of the world, even more so (by a lot) than Christians in the US, so please don’t speak as if the US was the only country.

   IDouglas

   No, I know IDouglas. I should have clarified: in the United States, many people automatically assume Muslims are a race who live in Iran/Iraq/Afghanistan et al. Plus America needs an new enemy every few decades, and 9/11 gave us a new shiny 2 Minute Hate fest.

   It wasn’t my intention to center the U.S. honest. 🙂 I know they’ve massive privilege and political power in other countries, which the Christian Dominionist movement in the U.S. goal is.

10. In response to this comment from a lawyer:

    Bro. Stop. Just stop. I understand that you have never been in a position where your contribution wasn’t treated as a meaningful component of the discourse (privilege, and all). Every time you comment, it becomes an “all about you” show. White people shooting black children is NOT ABOUT YOU. When someone from a marginalized group is asking you to stop (and especially when it’s MULTIPLE respected commenters), it’s probably because you’re being a jerk.

    Stop. Just stop.

    1. This.

    2. Seconding this.

       A lawyer, you have been told multiple times in multiple threads by multiple people–including mods–that you come off as a condescending, self-centered, stage-hogging, mansplaining jerk. You have been told multiple times that you are not the most important person in the room, that other people’s perspectives and thoughts are more relevant and insightful than yet another of your ten-inch comments talking down to us about legal technicalities. You’re not the only lawyer here, and you’re not the only decently informed person, either.

       Further, you do not get to police the way black people respond to yet another reminder that their children’s lives don’t mean shit to this country’s legal system. You are not the arbiter of “reasonable responses to white supremicist injustice.”

       Nobody asked for your expertise. You responded to a comment that was quite clearly an expression of speechless horror, and you responded at great length, explaining a legal technicality that had nothing to do with the original comment.

       I wouldn’t think of telling someone ELSE how to fight their fight (are you sure you’re reading?) but I’m not willing to let them, much less you, tell me.

       Yeah, God forbid you ever show any consideration for anybody else on the site, particularly those people who are coming to terms with yet another reminder that they and their children are in danger every time they leave the fucking house. Has it ever occurred to you that maybe, just maybe, you might try seeing things from the perspectives of your critics, just as an experiment?

       By the way, douches are patriarchal bullshit that are based on the misogynist notion that vaginas are dirty and nasty and are actively bad for women. Hence, “douche” is a completely acceptable insult on a feminist website, as far as I’m concerned.

       1. By the way, a lawyer’s comment had not posted when I wrote my tomayto/tomahto comment, which was a response to Fat Steve’s comment about one law for whites and another for blacks, and when I posted, my comment was right under it. Just in case anybody was confused…

       2. By the way, douches are patriarchal bullshit that are based on the misogynist notion that vaginas are dirty and nasty and are actively bad for women. Hence, “douche” is a completely acceptable insult on a feminist website, as far as I’m concerned.

          This has come up on here before, which is why I used the term. However, as I’m sure not everyone reading was privy to that consensus, so if there are any women offended by it, let me know and I’ll stop using it.

          1. FWIW, I thought it was really weird he called you an idiot.

    3. Yes to every comment on this thread. I don’t even disagree with some of A Lawyer’s points, and that comment’s still rage-inducing. Dude, just stop, ok? Or at least stop being an attention-hungry flouncy “ally”.

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