Is It November Yet?

Ready for things to start cooling off in more than one way.

Growing Up Gay And Mormon

The Article: Forced Out of School and Church, Watching Friends Commit Suicide: What It’s Like Growing Up Gay and Mormon by Carey Purcell in AlterNet.

The Text: By the age of 18, Ryan Shattuck had crossed several key moments of being a young Mormon man off of his checklist. He had attended seminary classes throughout high school, was enrolled in Brigham Young University for college and was going to Mexico for a two-year mission. But one of the most important — and probably most life-changing — things on the list was one Ryan did not think he would ever be able to do: marry a Mormon woman.

A fourth-generation Mormon, Ryan knew he was gay by the time he was 16 years old. A homosexual lifestyle is not approved by the Mormon Church, which resulted in great internal conflict for Ryan. This conflict would affect much of his life going forward: he lost several people to suicide; he organized a support group for gay Mormons that would result in him leaving college; and eventually, he left the church.

Growing up Mormon, according to Ryan, is like growing up in a bubble. When talking about his upbringing, he is often asked why he did certain things or followed specific protocol, and his answer is that he didn’t consider different alternatives because there were none. The path of a Mormon child is a straight and narrow one, and it wasn’t until he went to college that Ryan began to stray from that path.

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All Hail The Mighty EconoGod

But question: does he smite with recessions or shitty political leaders?

The GOP Slouches Toward Theocracy

The Article: GOP insider: Religion destroyed my party by Mike Lofgren in Salon.

The Text: Having observed politics up close and personal for most of my adult lifetime, I have come to the conclusion that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism may have been the key ingredient in the transformation of the Republican Party. Politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes—at least in the minds of its followers—all three of the GOP’s main tenets: wealth worship, war worship, and the permanent culture war.

Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.

The results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.

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A Different Kind Of Therapy

With that said, if someone’s ‘lifestyle choice’ is as ugly and fried as Michele Bachmann’s, it might just be worth it to throw the patient out and chalk them as a loss.