A Voice in the Dark

There are a few things I hear over and over again, and they fall into a certain pattern:

“People who have this experience will end up doing this thing.”

There’s a huge variance in what these experiences and things are. If you dress in women’s clothes, you’ll become gay. If you watch porn, you’ll be a rapist. If you lift weights, you’ll become violent. If you play video games, you’ll kill people.

But what if that’s what you want?

Imagine that you’re a child who has been repeatedly brutalised on the playground, and someone reassures you that this happens because you’re just not a violent person. What if you conclude that because you are tired of this, and do not want it to ever happen again, the answer to your problem is to become a violent person? How should you do that?

Well, according to popular belief, you do that by lifting weights. So you might go start lifting weights, and after a few weeks decide that you’re sufficiently experienced in weightlifting to be a violent person. So you go out and act like a violent person.

But the weightlifting isn’t what did that - it was your desire to become violent, which you pursued by lifting weights, which did not actually make you violent. What made you violent was the decision to become violent. You became a violent person, not when you started lifting weights, but when you made the decision. Lifting weights was your gateway because you decided you needed a gateway - not because it naturally and normally leads where you were going.

You can’t ask “why is Johnny violent?” and then glibly respond “well, he wasn’t violent, but then he started lifting weights and became violent”. You have to ask the meta-question, why did Johnny lift weights?

The same thing goes for all of the above. And where this begins to get dangerous is that we say things like this to our children, that if you do this you’ll be that, and this carries two messages we don’t want to convey. The first is that if you actually want to be that, you should do this - and the other is that if you do this for any reason at all, you’re doomed to be that whether you want it or not.

This confuses the question of what really causes people to be the way they are. You have to ask why the two things are connected; the meta-question is actually more important than the naive causal link you might draw from a few ultimately unrelated data points.

Filed under: Parenting, Philosophy
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By now, everyone who cares has heard that Oklahoma Representative Sally Kern thinks homosexuals are a bigger threat to the nation than terrorists.

Well, the trouble is, she’s right. We have had one successful attack by terrorists on the World Trade Center, and a whole slew of successful attacks by homosexuals on state legislatures. If you consider gay marriage comparable to death - and in christian theology, gay equals sin and sin equals hell and hell equals death - every gay marriage is two deaths. In 9/11, there were about three thousand actual deaths (but, one would assume, no gay marriages). Between May of 2004 and May of 2005, over six thousand gay marriages were performed in the state of Massachusetts. That’s twelve thousand deaths, four times the toll of 9/11, in one state over the course of one year.

Bear in mind, you have to first accept the premise that open practice of homosexuality is equivalent to death. If you don’t accept that, and you believe the only thing comparable to death is… oh, I don’t know, death?… then the statement is ludicrous. Who cares if Joe and Bob are gay and hump each other in the butt? It’s not killing anybody.

But from Sally Kern’s perspective, it is. It’s killing Joe and Bob, they just don’t know it. And as long as Joe and Bob are running around saying “it’s okay to do this”, they’re effectively promoting suicide. So she feels it’s her duty to speak out about it, and to do something about it, and to enact laws that prevent it.

The problem is not that her perspective is wrong (even though it is). The problem is not that her perspective is offensive (even though it is). The problem is that her perspective is a religious perspective, and therefore has no place in American government. It is her duty as a representative of the American people to present a professional image and avoid the appearance of impropriety, but frothing at the mouth about gays certainly isn’t professional. It looks like she’s dangerously insane, even though she clearly isn’t - she just feels strongly about the subject.

I also feel strongly about the subject. I don’t agree with Sally Kern. Indeed, even though I understand her position, I disagree with just about everything she said; the introduction of homosexual topics to preschool classes isn’t intended to make preschoolers gay, it’s intended to ease the social interactions of the many children who have been adopted by gay couples. You can certainly have a problem with the idea that Joe and Bob are talking to your five year old about their sex lives, but if Joe and Bob have a five year old themselves, isn’t your child going to wonder why his classmate doesn’t have a mommy?

And, most importantly, shouldn’t any reasonably qualified parent understand this concept? What happens when the first black child joins a class? The first Asian child? The first non-English speaking child? The situation needs to be explained, and the conditions monitored, until the child is accepted as part of the group. Nobody complains that you’re trying to make the other children black, or Asian, or Spanish-speaking… except dangerously insane people.

How would Sally Kern explain it? “Little Timmy is the poor innocent victim of two evil sinful people who are going to HELL, and they’re raising him to be a Godless heathen sinner who will burn in hell himself. You should bring him to Jesus!”

Absolutely unacceptable in a public servant. Get that bitch out of office.

Filed under: Gay Rights, Parenting, Politics, Religion
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A Jewish acquaintance besieged me with all kinds of data demonstrating that Jewish children in mixed communities, as opposed to strictly and exclusively Jewish communities, are more likely to leave the synagogue.

Well, yes. People who are offered a choice will make a different one more often than people who are actively protected from the notion that a choice can be made at all. What I fail to understand is how a child who remains Jewish because he doesn’t know there’s an alternative is in any way a good thing. Is he going to raise his children to take pride and joy in Judaism? No. He’s going to raise them to think being Jewish is a burden, a curse, something to be lamented rather than enjoyed. And I think that’s even more of a crime than leaving the fold.

Filed under: Parenting, Philosophy, Religion
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My two year old is beginning to assert authority over things to see where he does and doesn’t have it. Earlier tonight, he decided to assert some authority over his diaper.

The usual process is that if he hasn’t pooped, he takes off his own diaper and brings it to mommy or daddy to wrap up into a little bundle. Then we give it back, and he takes it to the trash. As he returns, he gets a new diaper (we use Pull-Ups), and we hold it while prompting him to put his left and right foot into the new diaper.

Tonight, he wanted to wrap up the diaper. When we didn’t let him (he’s not quite coordinated enough to do it), he refused to take it to the trash. So we began negotiating. My first offer was that he should take the diaper to the trash. He countered that I should take the diaper to the trash. I told him it was his diaper and his pee and he needed to take it to the trash. He thought about this for a moment, then opined that it was my diaper and my pee that I should take to the trash. The logic behind this seems to be that when I took the diaper to wrap it up, it became my diaper.

So I decided to try a typical parenting trick: hide the diaper in something else that the toddler can be convinced to throw in the trash. This wasn’t just an effort to get the diaper thrown away, but a test to see how smart my child is. So I grabbed an empty Pringle’s can, stuffed the diaper into it, and told him to throw it away.

To my wife’s great amusement, my son became highly offended and scolded me. “Daddy, don’t put the diaper in the chips,” he said. “That’s naughty.”

Eventually, we got him to throw the diaper away by saying that if daddy had to throw away the diaper, Logan had to sit in the naughty chair for two minutes. This was okay with him until he realised he would have to sit in the naughty chair without a diaper, where he would undoubtedly have no choice but to let it touch his penis. He’s deathly afraid of that for some reason; apparently, your penis is only allowed to touch diapers, wipes, and washcloths. (You should see him getting in and out of the bathtub. It’s a source of endless amusement for us.) So he panicked and cried and ran the diaper over to the trash can.

There’s really no other point to this post. It’s just your basic “I need to tell you about my kid” parenting story. If you’re not a parent, you probably don’t get it. If you ever become one, you will.

 

Filed under: Parenting
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