An Accusatory Confession

I suppose it really shouldn’t surprise me, but it’s amusing to see just how fascinated some folks are with the mechanics of gay sex. It wasn’t that long ago that Phil Robertson treated us all to a sermon the advantages of sticking your penis in a vagina rather than into an anus. No, I’m not talking about his more recent rape fantasies. I’m referring instead to Phil’s interview with GQ Magazine, the one in which he shared this little gem:

It seems like, to me, a vagina—as a man—would be more desirable than a man’s anus. That’s just me. I’m just thinking: There’s more there! She’s got more to offer. I mean, come on, dudes! You know what I’m saying? But hey, sin: It’s not logical, my man. It’s just not logical.

Countless conservative Christians came to the man’s aid in the dust-up over that interview, most praising him for taking a Biblical stance on the issue. Okay, so the Bible has some interesting passages, I know, but somehow I just don’t think Phil got that comparison from scripture. But of course what counts as a Biblical stance in some circles would seem to mean whatever most holds some folks feet to the fire. Celebrity Christians don’t curry favor with cultural conservatives by talking too much about anything Jesus said or did. (The Prince of Peace bores them to tears.) No, to get in on that market you have to hurt someone in Jesus’ name.

If the American movie industry has taught us anything, it’s that sex and violence go together like bees and pollen, or better than bees and pollen, I guess, cause, well that’s a damned tragedy too. Anyway, the point is that it shouldn’t surprise us that an industry celebrating verbal violence would invariably sex-up the narratives, albeit with an ironic angle on the topic.

So it should come as no surprise that Phil Robertson is not the only one to add a little pornography to his apologetics. Take for example Brian Klawiter, one of the latest folks to put his business on the line against homosexuality. It seems that Brian’s auto repair business won’t be serving those of an homosexual orientation. According to Media Matters, Klawiter has the following to say on the topic:

My company will be run in a way that reflects that. Dishonesty, thievery, immoral behavior, etc. will not be welcomed at MY place of business. (I would not hesitate to refuse service to an openly gay person or persons. Homosexuality is wrong, period. If you want to argue this fact with me then I will put your vehicle together with all bolts and no nuts and you can see how that works.)

He later offered that he would repair a vehicle, apparently even for gay customers, providing they didn’t make a display in his shop. …which is almost reasonable, or at least it would be were it not for the rather irrational fear that his business may soon become a hot-spot for make-out sessions among the homosexual community. Anyway, the point I’m trying to make here is; look at that man’s poetry!

Putting a car together with nothing but bolts?

Nailed it, bro!

But seriously, does anyone else get the idea that some people are just a little overly concerned with the mechanics of other people’s sex lives? I’m not just talking about the moral question about what other people oughtta do. That’s old hat. What I’m talking about is a rather insipid interest in just how the act gets done.

As if we all know what act we’re talking about to begin with!

It does seem a common assumption amongst straight people that gay sex means butt-sex. If you remind straight folks that gay sex could also mean lesbian sex, well that just throws a wrench in the whole works, and then some guys start to pine for their late-night cable sessions. That standard bit of hypocrisy aside, what the fuck would any of us straight guys know about it anyway? There are lots of ways to get down, even among the square crowd, so why is anal penetration the heart of this issue?

…perhaps we could even ask why love isn’t the heart of the issue, at least for gay marriage, but that would just be way too mature. People would yawn and wander off to talk about something else. So, it won’t be the way folks talk about gay rights three beers into a Friday night, and it won’t be the way they fill the seats of a straight-shootin’ church on a Sunday.

Love? …yawn!

Pat Robertson will get us right back on track with a little bit of porno-preaching here (compliments of the Huffington Post). According to Pat, the gay rights crowd won’t stop at acceptance or equal rights, they want us to do it too, and by ‘it’ I mean whatever icky it your mind can iterate! …or his anyway. You can give the whole rant a listen on the Huff Post link. It’s a “weird world” we live in, Pat assures us, and I almost agree. It certainly is a weird world that he lives in.

You’re gonna say that you like anal sex, you like oral sex, you like bestiality,” he added. “Sooner or later, you’re going to have to conform your religious beliefs to the group of some abhorrent thing. It won’t stop at homosexuality.

Yep, there you have it, gay rights means anal sex for every-one, and that’s just the start.

No doubt the whole thing leads to dancing!

Not to worry though Pat, Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association assures us that God and humanity are both naturally disgusted by the very act of gay sex. Check out his speech, quoted here on Towleroad. According to Fisher (and I’m using Towleroad’s transcription), God himself can hardly stand the site of gay sex:

When God sees it, it causes him to recoil. And when we think about the actual act of homosexuality, we have exactly the same reaction. Most people think about that, they don’t want to think about that, they don’t want to visualize it because it is disgusting. And if people aren’t politically conditioned to accept it, their natural reaction is that’s just not normal, that’s just not natural, that’s not what human beings were designed for, that’s not what they were made for.

…so, yeah.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’ve certainly heard enough of this argument from other sources to get the impression these guys are hardly working a novel line of reasoning here. And I’m continually amazed that so much free-form sex-fantasy counts as Biblical reasoning. Some of these guys really are dancing to the beat of a different drum here; they just don’t seem to know it.

My point is that there is actually something a bit perverse about all this, not the gay sex of course, but the narratives these guys tell about it. Long before these crusaders get to the politics, read the scriptures, or try and address the psychology of the issue, a good number of them have already defined the entire thing in terms of the sheer physical act of anal sex. If that is what the issue means to them, it certainly isn’t because gay rights advocates have been framing the issue in those terms. Quite the contrary! It’s almost as if some folks might be using their attacks on the gay community to explore a few creepy themes of their own. And no. I’m not suggesting that this is latent homosexuality. That would be a tired old cliché. Homophobia is it’s own kink. It’s one that some folks seem determined to share in the most public of places.

Cognitive Bias Goes to Church: Irritation Meditation Number 4 (This Time With Smilies!)

18 Monday Feb 2013

Posted by danielwalldammit in atheism, Irritation Meditation, Religion

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

Actor-Observer Bias, atheism, Cognitive Science, Faith, Fundamental Attribution Error, Judgement, Memes, Psychology, religion

I found this piece on Stumbleupon, I believe. As far as Memes go, I actually kind of like this one. And by ‘kind of” I mean ‘really’ …kind of.

You see, I look at this meme, and a part of me wants to shout; “Yeah Boyeeee!” (…preferably in the face of some believer who has just suggested one of the alternatives). It’s damned frustrating to deal with that kind of commentary. You know how it goes; “The only reason you don’t believe is blah blah, blah…” …Blech! Seriously I’ve heard that line way too many times (and apparently so did someone else). So, it’s nice to see a bold affirmation that one’s own judgement really is the basis of, …well, ones own judgement!

…as opposed to some dismissive third person narrative.

Still, I wonder, would this look any different from any other religious perspective? If I asked for ‘Reasons I believe in God’, used the exact same sentence for the red color, and then made just a few strategic changes to the decoy list (Peer Pressure, Social Conformity, Afraid of Death, Raised That Way, Mental Disturbance, Haven’t Really Thought About It), I imagine we could present this to a few believers and generate exactly the same sense of vindication that I feel looking at this meme right now. “Damned right,” I can just hear them saying about that red line. …some might even add a “Praise Jesus!” or something like that, but my mind’s ear just doesn’t really want to go there.

Seriously, …yuck!

My point is of course that trivializing generalizations are a stick in the side of lots of folks, not just atheists. This is just the tip of the iceberg, a larger problem looms beneath the surface. And no, I didn’t just choose that image, because I live in Alaska; I actually thought about it and decided that it would be the best metaphor I could… well, anyway… the point is that this is part of a larger problem.

In the classic formulation of the problem, humans seem to possess a nearly universal tendency to explain other people’s actions (particularly those we don’t like) as a function of some consistent feature of their own personality while explaining our own actions in terms of situational factors. This tendency has generally been described as the Fundamental Attribution Error, or alternatively, as a function of Actor-Obeserver Asymmetry. What does this mean? Well, it means the reason you didn’t pay your bill on time this month is because of those unexpected medical expenses, the repair bill for the car, and well, it was little Johnny’s birthday, and you had to get him something… (You know the story). The reason your friend didn’t pay you the money he owes you? Well, he’s just a lazy bastard!

Okay, so that’s classical attribution theory, at least if you add a little salt to the vocabulary. Recent studies have shown that this basic contrast between situational versus dispositional explanations doesn’t quite explain the full range of data on this topic. Not to worry, a replacement theory is available, and it seems to illustrate the same point, albeit with a little less flair. The folk-conceptual theory approaches this same phenomenon by suggesting that people apply a range of different folk models to explain their own behavior and those around them. Depending on just how much one identifies with a person whose behavior they seek to explain, he/she is likely to adopt radically different descriptions of the behavior in question. One of the variables, for example is a difference between offering a reason for a behavior as its explanation and offering a history of reasoning as its explanation.

Case in point?

Saying; “I don’t believe in the Christian God, because the problem of evil renders this notion incoherent,” or conversely, saying; “I believe in God, because aspects of DNA coding appear to be irreducibly complex, and hence they require more of an explanation than chance evolution could provide.” What both of these explanations for a belief have in common is that each serves to explain a belief and at the same time to advance an active case for it. Conversely, saying “That guy Johnny, well he believes what he believes, because he has a deep fear of death (or Hell).” This latter sort of explanation describes a stage in a causal chain of behavior, one which doesn’t actively make much of a case for Johnny’s beliefs. In fact, the explanation undermines his credibility. The bottom line here is that we are looking at two different types of explanation, and the choice of which type to offer depends an awful lot on the disposition of the speaker towards the behavior/belief in question.

People thus have different ways of explaining behavior that they value and behavior that they don’t, and those differences serve more to shift the narrative around our feet than they do to set up a straight-forward evaluation of the issue. I really do think this is the key to the problem addressed in that meme above. People use dismissive explanations for beliefs they don’t identify with while presenting the reasons for beliefs they do identify with in terms of their own judgements.

You can see this consistently in the sphere of religious and philosophical discussions wherein you and I can supply all manner of thoughtful reasons for the judgements we’ve made, but that guy over there? Well, you know where he was raised and how his parents are! And all those people in the church on the corner? Well, they just have to believe in something; it fills a void somehow; they really are just brained washed aren’t they!?!

…and so on.

I’m including you in the good and thoughtful narrative of course, dear reader, but that’s just because you are reading my blog. When you’re gone I’m going to tell my other friend that you just had a traumatic experience.

😛

The bottom line is that it’s difficult to disentangle the full range of human motivation, and when we do this for religion, the tendency is to do it in a way that privileges one’s own judgement while trivializing that of others. Folks we identify with can enjoy praise by association, and those that we don’t, well damn them anyhow, right? They really need to learn to think for themselves!

So, why do I like this meme? Well, it took me down that path just now, and lucky you, I brought you along for the ride. I guess this is yet another instance of ‘liking’ something not quite meaning that I agree with it.

This meme is a good answer to half of the actor-observer bias.

…and it’s a damned good illustration of the other half.

I suppose that is something of a win-win situation.

😕

‘A Way With Animals’ and A Goddam Horror Story: Prepare to Cringe!

25 Sunday Nov 2012

Posted by danielwalldammit in Animals

≈ 21 Comments

Tags

Animal Shelters, Animals, Communication, Dogs, Fear, Interspecies Communication, Nightmares, Psychology, Self-Esteem

“I have a way with animals.”

Yeah, I’ve heard that one before.

I’ll bet you’ve heard it too.

But did you hear it from somebody with a face not 6 inches distant from the bared teeth of a large growling dog?

No, the dog wasn’t aggressive. You’d probably bare your teeth too if a perfect stranger picked you out of a crowd, strode up quickly, and proceeded to throw his arms around your neck without the slightest warning. Okay, maybe you would just shove the man away, but that is the privilege of hands. The dog didn’t have that option, and sitting on a short leash, it really couldn’t get away from the man either. No, the dog’s temperament seemed fine to me; it just didn’t know what else to do about the situation.

In fact this was a very patient dog; it had done its very best to tell the man to go away.

The man just wasn’t listening.

A minimally observant person would have noticed from the dog’s posture that it was already nervous, sitting there in a crowded pet store with dozens of people moving about. This was the first hour of an adoption event; we were still trying to get all the animals squared away and establish a routine for the day. Despite walking the animals before and after transporting them, we had already had our first accident in a cage. This fellow was sitting on a leash while someone tended to the mess and others (myself included) shuffled animals left and right into the portable kennels we had set up for the occasion. We tried to keep things calm, of course, but it was simply in the nature of such events. The room had a lot of stress to go around at that particular moment and this dog was definitely feeling it.

The man didn’t have a clue.

A minimally observant person would have noticed the dog’s tail, angled as it was a bit downward, almost tucked under him. He would have noticed the whites of the dog’s eyes, something you don’t see so often from a contented canine. A minimally thoughtful person would have realized these signs added up to a moment one ought to respect the poor animal’s boundaries. Of course, a person with minimal sense would have refrained from hugging an animal less than one minute after seeing it for the first time, let alone a dog that was clearly stressed. But of course there was no need to pay attention to such signs, or to observe normal protocols like a chance to sniff the hand, or at least to observe the man long enough to gauge his intent; our man just had a way with animals.

What could possibly have gone wrong?

At the onset of the hug, a few additional clues ought to have brought this man to his senses. Minimally effective ears would have detected the sound of the dog growling. Hell, I could hear the dog growling from across a row of cages and well past a number of talking people, but the man in question either didn’t notice this sound or chose to ignore it and all the other signs that his affection had proven anything but welcome. Either he didn’t see the dog baring its teeth or he lived in a world where that was a good sign. The man seemed perfectly oblivious to the final warnings he was getting even as he cooed nonsense at the dog, desperate as it was to get away from the assault of an idiot’s love.

That poor dog had been doing its best to tell this guy to leave him alone, but none of that message was getting through. There really wasn’t anything left for the poor animal to do but bite him.

Who the Hell could blame the poor creature?

Probably everyone, actually, at least in practice. See, that was the part that really disgusted me as I envisioned the horrible face wound that was surely about to open up in the middle of a Petsmart. It would be ugly. There would surely be stitches, and I wasn’t at all sure the man would come away with both eyes intact. But I also knew that the dog would not survive the long-term fall-out from this event. I could see myself in a room with a kennel tech, helping him to put down this poor creature guilty of nothing less than defending itself. Whatever injuries this guy’s own foolishness would earn him, they would likely mean the death of the dog.

I was in charge of this adoption event; all of this carnage would of course be my responsibility.

So, there I stood, with a dog-attached leash in one hand and cleaning materials in another, several cages directly between me and the unfolding disaster, and a small group of folks engrossed in conversation blocking the aisle. I had no quick way of getting to the dog or the human, and I thought surely the bite was coming at any moment. So, I chose what I hoped would prove the right volume and tone to get the oblivious man’s attention and asked him to please step back from the dog.

Completely oblivious to the dog’s teeth, the fellow turned and told me not to worry, he had a way with animals.

And the dog bared it’s teeth just a little more.

As I listened to the fool talk and struggled to find words he would actually pay attention to, one of my volunteers turned around to see what had me so alarmed. Upon catching a glimpse of my expression, she quickly followed my own line of sight to find the dog still baring its teeth mere inches from the smiling man. A moment later she pulled the animal back away in one smooth but firm motion. Her eyes met mine and we both gave a sigh of relief as she showed the dog into its newly cleaned cage. The animal-loving man moved on to pester another dog, one that didn’t seem to mind.

I still cringe when I think about that smiling face inches from the dog’s teeth. To this day, the man doesn’t know how lucky he was. How lucky I was.

How lucky the dog was.
***

The image comes from the Naperville Animal Hospital.