Hi, my name is IC, and I throw tantrums

Libby Anne is working through a critique of the Pearl's "To Train Up a Child".  She's off to an excellent start with her second installment, where she writes the following words:

Being a parent involves a lot of inconvenience. You have to be willing to have your reading interrupted and your coffee spilled. If you treat your children right and set good patterns—things like communication, listening, cooperation, and constructive compromise—your life with your children will be a bit harried at times, but it will also be rich and fruitful and not out of control. 

This point was a big deal to me, a father of six rambunctious coffee spillers.   I throw a lot of tantrums.

If you have been following this blog for the past month, you may be aware that we recently got a dog.  I hate dogs.  I hate all pets.  I hate fish, gerbils, snakes, alligators, unicorns, and ant farms.  Any pet that gets in the way of my clean house and immaculate children ticks me off, disgusts me, and makes me want to ship myself off to the Humane Society to compensate.

Nonetheless, we got a dog.  And she is perfect.  She's a pit bull/fox terrier/black lab mix, gentle as a flea, and is very responsive to verbal training.  She never does something naughty more than a few times before she learns to do that which is required of her.  I'm falling in love with a pet for the first time in my life. This is a new feeling for me.

And then there's Analisse.  She's our three year old.  Every step forward that Luna (the dog) takes, Analisse, aka "The Freak" takes one backwards.  She is fascinated with Luna's water bowl.  She fills it to the brim, allows it to overflow, pours it all over the floor, dumps the dog food into it and then sits there, watching it expand (that's actually REALLY COOL to watch, so I don't blame her!), fills the bowl with tennis balls, and on and on.  More than once, I have walked into the office with socks on and stepped in a puddle of water.

I hate wet socks.

If you were a fly on the wall, this is what you would hear:

"RENAYA!  LAURA!  FREDERIC!  EVERYONE!!!!!  What in the h*ll is wrong with you kids!?  Aren't you watching your sister!!  Hey Freak!!!  How many times have I told you NOT TO TOUCH THE DOGS WATER BOWL!!!!!!!  Kids!  Clean this sh*t up!  Get towels, rags....er...whatever!  Just get it done now!!!!"

Yeah.  So, is it true that I expect all the kids to monitor Analisse in everything that she does?  Do I expect Analisse to dump her innate fascination with all things water bowl?  After all, this is new to her and she's a wonderful little kid, experiencing new things in life.  Is it right for me to get mad at the kids and make them run around, frantically trying to make me happy?

The answer to all the questions above is pretty obvious.  I'm not being fair to my children and I know it.  The dog even knows it, as she cowers in her kennel until I am done waving my arms and jumping up and down. For all she knows, it's her fault.

Anyway....that's why that quote hit home for me.  Much to improve.  Many steps to take forward.  I cannot afford, at this point in my parenting career, to be complacent in my attitude and parenting, nor can I afford to take any steps backwards.

This ends today.

Danger! Your Teenage Son is a Rapist!

Libby Anne wrote an excellent piece about how evangelicals view teenage boys in light of whether they allow them to babysit young children or not.

She writes:

[Evangelicals appear] to think that the fact that many (most?) teenage boys would give their right hands for a girlfriend and the chance to have consensual premarital sex means that these same boys would just as readily channel their sexual energies into sexually molesting children.

And that  is the crux of her article, which brings me to a curious thought.

I am convinced that mainstream Christianity, evangelicals, and fundamentalist, et al, have the cause and effect backwards.

They think young boys and men are so sexually driven, they would stop at nothing to rape your child.  Thus, you have to beat into their heads the idea that they are sexual beasts and must be saved from themselves.  They are taught that they have only a desire to do bad things and cannot, of themselves, be good.  Once they firmly believe this, and only then, can they have the tools to NOT rape a child.  But even then, it isn't good enough.  They simply cannot be allowed to get into a situation that puts a child at their fingertips while alone.

Again, this is back-ass-wards.

If you tell a child they are bad, they believe this about themselves.  They do!  I know.  I was called a liar my whole childhood.  I believed it with my whole heart - until a few months ago.  I had flogged myself for decades, constantly looking over my shoulder to see if the person I had just spoken to had really believed me or not.  One day, I had an epiphany of sorts and realized that I was a very truthful person.  So truthful, in fact, that I hurt myself all the time, due to it.  I was so honest, Abe freaking Lincoln would burn in hell for his lies and I would be granted eternal bliss in a Purgatory-less heaven.  Angels had nothing on me.

(Except for that one time, where I lied....oh nevermind.  The CIA reads this)

To my point, if you are constantly barraged with the idea that you are a sexual predator, capped only by rules and carefully prying adults, why would anyone be surprised if you end up believing the lies and becoming the evil they tried so hard to save you from?

In short, it is my non-objective, completely subjective, and entirely biased opinion, that the purity culture breeds deviants.  

Maybe it's time we began to educate people about sex instead of scare the living sperm out of them.

OMG! Libby Anne Reads My Blog!!!!

Okay.  I knew she cursorily kept track of my writing from a distance, so I'm not really that freshly excited.  But, nonetheless, I have been writing for two years now and she was one of my original commenters.

At that time, I still considered myself a Christian and a large portion of my blogging was spent discussing the non-fundamentalist ideas of Christianity and fighting against spiritual abuse, patriarchy, female submission, pastoral authority, etc., from a biblical point of view.

Six months later, I dropped any sort of belief in a god.  

I still wrote about the above subjects, albeit from a different angle - from the outside looking in.  I felt I had a unique perspective, being that I grew up heavily fundamentalist, and then married as a patriarchal, quiverfull husband, had six children, required my wife to submit, then dropped it altogether.

I knew these people that ran the movement, intimately.  I knew how they thought.  I knew how they viewed the Scriptures and how they interpreted them.  I knew it all.  Some people, then and now, still think they can convince me to come back to Christianity, being that obviously, my brand of it was the wrong brand.  The problem is, Christianity is based on exactly one holy book and I have read that holy book from cover to cover, scores of times.  I know all the evil parts of the Bible.  You can read through my blog to see my thoughts on many subjects.

Now that you know a little background, I'm going to complain a little bit.

Libby Anne said:

[Incongruous Circumspection] deal[s] specifically with Christian Patriarchy, fundamentalism, and leaving [the movement]. [... Incongruous Circumspection's] main focus is healing from and countering harmful religious messages and spiritual abuse.

That is true.  I am typecast.  And I am trying valiantly to remove that stigma from myself.  I want to branch out into believable fiction, essays, things college students would read and worship, inviting me to speak at conventions for writing, alternate views of popular religious stories, political pieces, memoirs...you name it.

I have beaten patriarchy to a dead pulp and I keep beating it more and more.  The pulp is quivering beneath my blows and begging me to hit it..."just one more time!"  Granted, my most popular posts are still about fundamentalism and the tangents that heads off into, so I am aware that my readership is still interested.  Any great writer (not that I consider myself among the greats) writes for his audience while maintaining some personal authenticity.

Thus, it is imperative that, while I expand my subjects, I also expand my readership.  I hope that the next time my dear friend whom I've never met, Libby Anne, lists my blog amongst other blogs, I fall into a category of my own.

The..."Um...I have no idea how to categorize Incongruous Circumspection. It's just...so damn good!" category. 

The Pretzelified Theology of Women in Combat

I don't normally use tweeny, textual generation acronyms, but this expose of Douglas Wilson's article on women in combat and what the Bible has to say about it calls for one of them.

O (tF) MG!

Seriously, give it a read.  If your eyeballs don't pop out of your head before the rest of your noggin simply explodes, you win a medal.

Libby Anne does a phenomenal job here.  And to think, Doug Wilson has been called a "great thinker".  My god!

Enjoy...

Jesse Lee Petersen: Why are his allies quiet?

It has been six days.  Six days since Kirsten Powers "hijacked" the Sean Hannity show on Fox News to make a valiant attempt at confronting Jesse Lee Petersen and his idiot rant on his misogynistic beliefs - in a sermon, no less.  Yes, it has been six days since Sean Hannity was confronted with the issue on his show, right under his nose. 

Six days of silence. 

Well, not really silence.  Hannity, at 10:38PM EST that evening posted a short transcript of the confrontation and yet focused exclusively on the "hijacking", rather than the content of Kirsten's words, especially what she was referencing.  Jesse Lee Petersen and his allies at bondaction.org posted their own version of the events, painting Kirsten Powers as a liberal-minded woman who savagely attacked the innocent lamb, Petersen.

Nothing is farther from the truth.

The fact that Kirsten Powers had to do the deed makes me ill.  Sean Hannity, as has been reported elsewhere, was dredging up an old partisan head-fake, attempting to get the guests to argue about the fact that Obama does not deserve credit for the death of Osama Bin Laden.  Out of the blue, Kirsten confronted Petersen and Hannity, understandably, looked like a deer in the headlights. 

I understand the nature of fast segmented discussion shows and that Hannity was trying to save his show from going off the rails.  To the casual observer, it appeared that Powers had a personal vendetta against Petersen and I suspect this may have been what Hannity focused on, though his judgement was severely clouded by the fact that he sits on the board of Petersen's BOND organization.  The fact that Hannity did not dig into the accusations on his show is not at issue here. 

The problem is the six days of silence.

Worse yet, Petersen posted this misogynist rant on his own YouTube channel on March 5, 2012.  That was a full two months before he appeared on the May 1 show.  Does Fox News, especially the show that is going to be using this man as a credible pundit, not vet their guests before each and every appearance? Also, why have Sean Hannity or his handlers not done their due diligence and researched what Powers was referring to?

Or have they?

Forget about Sean Hannity for a minute.  What about others on the conservative side?  Anyone!  I don't care who steps up to the microphone and simply distances themselves from Petersen's beliefs.  But strangely, every one of his allies are silent.

When Hilary Rosen coughed up a gaffe on a news commentary show about Ann Romney not having worked a day in her life, the allies of Ann Romney were there to defend her in 3.2 seconds.  For two weeks, it was all Fox News could talk about.  Does this mean they only defend stay at home mom's (women in their rightful place, according to Jesse Lee Petersen, that is, as long as the husband is telling her what to do)? 

And a finer point, Jesse Lee Petersen is a liar.  He stared at Powers with a smirk on his face and tried to spin his words from March 5, 2012, pretending that he was only referring to "liberal" women.  That is a lie from the pit of hell.  If you watch his sermon there are many quotable quotes to catch him at his lie, but let me grace you with one of the better ones:

"I think that one of the greatest mistakes that America made, was to allow women the opportunity to vote.  We should have never turned it over to women." (8:29)

Yes, he was obviously just talking about liberal women.

Will Sean Hannity stay on the board of BOND and stand behind his man?  Will he stand up for every woman that has ever lived, who have worked so hard to become equals in society with men?  Will others yell from the rooftops and give two weeks of programming to decrying the words of Jesse Lee Petersen?  I'm not speaking of P.Z. Myers, Libby Anne, Vyckie Garrison, and many more who already disagree with Jesse Lee Petersen in other areas.  I'm referring to his allies.  Those that call him friend and expert commentator.

Why are you silent?