Archive for April, 2007
Ah yes, time for me to have fun with every blogger’s favorite punching bag: Fred Phelps and his extended family–ah, I mean Westboro Baptist Church.
I’m not going to go terribly in depth today. Rather, I’m going to attack their use of the word “fag” to describe anyone and everyone who supports gays, is gay, or simply isn’t a member of their church.
The other day, I was thinking about how the word “fag” (or “faggot”) used to mean a bundle of sticks. It made me chuckle to think that WBC was railing against sticks. I knew I couldn’t have been the first person to think this, so I cautiously ventured on to their website to find out their own reason for using the word.
Their reasoning is…rather strange. Apparently, some Bible verse (in the book of Amos of all places) says, “I have overthrown some of you, as God overthrew Sodom and Gomorrah, and ye were as a firebrand plucked out of the burning: yet have ye not returned unto me, saith the Lord” (Amos 4:11), and it is this verse upon which they base all of their usage of “fag.”
Now, they claim that the word “firebrand” is translated from the Hebrew word “uwd” which means “to rake together.” Through some convoluted and rather iffy logic, they conclude that God was talking about homosexuals in a metaphorical sense, in that “they fuel God’s wrath, they burn in lust, and they will burn in hell” (straight from their site). In other words, firebrand can be replaced with faggot, which they use primarily to reference homosexuals.
Strangely enough, they say that this verse is talking about Soddom and Gommorrah. However, this is patently not the case. If any of them had graduated from the third grade, they’d realize that the “you” preceding firebrand is actually referring to the Israelites, who God is giving a really hard time and wondering why they aren’t returning to him (read Amos 4 and you’ll see what I mean). Now, the good folks at WBC claim that anyone who turns from God automatically becomes gay (I’d like to know how they back that up theologically), so I suppose the intent of the verse means the same thing to them as if it was talking about Sodomites. Doesn’t make them any more right (or even credible), so I can still make fun of them.
Anyways, now that I know the real reason they use the word fag, I don’t need to pretend they hate sticks. They’re just poor linguists who reference the most obscure Bible verse ever to justify hating everyone. Right.
Sphere: Related ContentThat’s right, Mozilla has finally released version 2 of the Thunderbird email client. Pop on over to the Mozilla site to download it.
I can’t believe there is such a thing. I also can’t believe you get $25,000 for winning. Freakin’ 13 year old with lightning thumbs…
I had an interesting thought the other day. People who are avidly pro-life claim to be acting in the best interests of the baby. But is this completely true? Sure, they’re protecting the baby from being killed, but what about after?
The majority of women who get abortions do it because they don’t feel ready for a child. They’re generally poor and uneducated, living in the bad part of town. They may be drug-users or alcoholics who fear their own destructive behavior would hurt their newborn. Or perhaps they simply don’t want the child.
Now, let’s say abortion is outlawed. These women who would be most likely to get abortions must now have their babies. These babies will now grow up in poor environments. They may be unwanted, or they may have an alcoholic or crackhead for a mother. Numerous studies have shown that kids growing up in situations like this are most likely to either follow in their parent’s footsteps (become poor, uneducated, teenage mothers) or turn to a life of crime. In short, their lives really aren’t going to be very good at all. This is not to say that some won’t rise above that kind of life, but unfortunately, those kids are among the minority.
So, if you really did care about the well being of the child, you’d recognize that forcing them to be born is as much a punishment to the child as it could be to the mother, especially if they’re unwanted. Following the legalization of abortion in the United States, infanticide rates dropped rapidly, and more than 20 years later, crime dropped even more (as a direct result of all those future criminals not being born).
While I certainly don’t condone abortion as a drastic form of birth control, I would rather it be left open for women to make the choice. Believe it or not, women know if they’ll be a good mother or not, so I’d rather they had an abortion than be forced to give birth to a child who won’t be wanted or taken good care of. That’s why I’m pro-choice. Well, that and I’m a gay God-hating liberal who runs over kittens in his girly-man Prius. (In case you missed the sarcasm, I’m actually none of those. Just FYI.)
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