The One with the Questionable Campaign

So, I have a Morally Ambiguous Situation™ here, and I wonder the general opinion of my. . .2 readers.

This happened.  The gist of it is that this pastor said that all gays (and lesbians!) should be rounded up and locked electric fence-style, men seperate from women, so that the gay gene would die out.

Never mind this doesn't make any sense, as I believe (but don't quote me on this) that most gay people are spawned from hetero parents.  I believe that the pastor in question is a horrible representation of Christianity, and is one of the worst kinds of people.

But. . .I don't know if the article's suggestion of retribution is the best way to go.  He suggests that everyone send a donation to some gay-friendly organization in the pastor's name so the pastor will be innundated with thank you letters from the organizations.  The author provided the pastor's address, phone number, and e-mail with which to do the signing up.

Now. . .at last count, I saw 190 people who had said they were doing this, sending some donation to a group in the pastor's name.

This is where it gets a little sketchy for me.  Is this pastor dead wrong?  Absolutely.  Does he need to be prevented from speaking in public ever again?  Yes.  Yes he does.  Is he the reason so many people hate Christianity?  For sure.

But this seems. . .over-reaching to me.  I don't know.  I can't reconcile it in my head.  What, exactly, are these people hoping to accomplish?  It's awesome that all these organizations are getting donations, but. . .why does it have to be done this way?  I can't decide if someone as douchey as this pastor is also giving up his right to privacy and not wanting to receive literature from these organizations by being douchey.

And then there were a couple of comments left on this article that REALLY bothered me.

One lady ". . .did this for a 'Pro-Life' neighbor, made a donation to Planned Parenthood in his honor. They sent him a letter of acknowledgement. I never heard another word from him about the sinful pro-choice people;-)."

Like. . .it's the guy's right to be anti-abortion, and he's being sort of harassed about it.  What if the guy had sent pro-life literature to this lady?  Would that have been OK, too?  Granted, I don't know if he made a big deal about it or if he was a jerk or whatever, but I don't. . .think it should matter.

Then. . .

"This is an idea I did 30+ years ago to a preacher at a liberal arts college I was going to. Being Southern Baptist and feeling I needed to experience his god...got a postcard from the LDS church out of a magazine and filled in his information. Four years later...he was still wondering why he was getting twice yearly visits from LDS missionaries in the dorm. Last I heard...he had at least two copies of the Book of Mormon and one of the gigantic tome with all the writings in it."

This seems invasive, too.

But it was this one that really raised my hackles:

"I had a similar neighbor and he had a pro-choice bumper sticker on his car. I went over one veeery early morning and overlaid it with a pro-choice bumper sticker. It was weeks before he discovered it."

I feel like this one, if you want to be dramatic, borders on tresspassing and destruction of someone else's property.  At the very least, it made her even more douchey than the pro-life neighbor.  Why do people feel (on both sides of the fence) that if someone disagrees with them, they have the right to mess with the other person?

So what do you think?  Is it good to harass people through the mail?  Are you in the right?  Is the only opinion that matters yours?

This whole thing really bugged me, so I want to know what other people think.

The One Where I Can Prove Justin Bieber is Satan

So, you guys love me, right? And you would never, ever judge me for a small indiscretion? Or even a large indiscretion?

I have a confession to make.

I mentioned in my last post that my brother gave me an iTunes gift card for Christmas. This? Was exciting. I haven't had any new music on my iPod in. . .maybe years. Since 2008, probably. I had 2,638 songs on it prior to the gift card, so it's not like I was hurting for stuff to listen to, but I wanted some of the newer stuff.

Now. . .I have artists that I love, that I like, that I tolerate, that I dislike, that I hate, and artists that I dislike, but for some reason, whose music is so damn catchy I can't help but like it.

Examples of this last category include but are not limited to Ke$ha and Eminem.

And. . .I'm going to make the confession, you guys, and I hope and pray you don't think any less of me, and if you do, I'll send you some baked goods to convince you that I'm not, in fact, a terrible person going to some circle of Hell.

I need to clarify this because there is, in fact, a difference between liking an artist and liking their music. Karen (who often helps me justify bad decisions lapses in judgement), when I told her of my indiscretion, said, "No, it's cool. There's a BIG DIFFERENCE between liking an artist and liking an artist's music." She also pointed out the fact that Justin Bieber likely had NOTHING to do with the actual composition of the song in question (which I'm getting to). . .other people did that for him. He just took his lesbian haircut and sang it.

So thank you, Karen. You've made me feel better about the horrible thing I've done.

And that horrible thing was to download Justin Bieber's first single.

Hear me out.

It's catchy. It's really, really catchy. And yeah, it's dumb, and yeah, Justin Bieber needs to be slapped, but it's got Ludicrous in the middle rapping "She woke me up daily/don't need no Staaah-buuuucks!" And that sort of makes it awesome. And, if it's any consolation, I can't even stand to listen to any of his other songs. I switch them off when they come on the radio. This is the only one that doesn't make me feel vomitous and stabby.

So I downloaded it. I downloaded it, and I've been listening to it on the car on my way to work. This, of course, compounds my fear of driving in that I'm afraid that something horrible will happen, and I'll have a wreck, and I'll be mangled by the side of the road with Justin Bieber blasting out of my stereo.

ANYway, this is all beside the point. the point is, I had a $25 gift card, and I'd bought a couple of songs already at this point. When I bought the Justin Bieber song, and I wish I had taken a screenshot of this, but once that transaction happened, I had $16.66 left on the card.

$16.66.

So basically all I'm saying is that Justin Bieber is Satan. Or, at the very least, the Antichrist.

Don't judge me.

So what about you? What's your guilty pleasure entertainment?

The One With the Gay Lion

As I sit here in Panera and write this, a girl that I went to high school with, who HA. TED. ME, is sitting across the room. I feel like she keeps looking at me, and every time I look over at her, and she glances up, I look away. I probably look like a stalker. She, apparently, has not ended her infatuation with men of other ethnicities. The guy that she dated all through high school and through most of the years I was in college was a black guy, and the guy she's dating now ("Jerry" according to the guy who just called out that their order was ready) is Hispanic. None of that is relevant to anything, except that it's making me nervous that she's sitting there, and I haven't seen her in. . .at least 5 years.

So I started work on Monday, and I must say, I'm enjoying it quite a bit. Basically what I'm doing is working for a company that works with publishing companies. The project I'm working on is something they were commissioned to do for either Texas schools or Ohio schools (I can't remember which), where they are "measuring" the textbooks used to see if, by using these textbooks, the students are getting the proper amount of knowledge for use in either college, or after college graduation.

I have to admit here that when I was initially told I was going to be "measuring" books, I thought they meant that literally. Like, I was going to be seeing how long the books were. This was before I knew what the project was (I'm assuming that the length and width of a book has nothing to do with its readibility.) So I load the scanned books into this software program that "reads" them and highlights information as either being text, pictures, graphs, or whatever, and I go through and delete all the information that doesn't need to be run through and analyzed. Stuff like pictures, page numbers, chapter titles, headers and subheaders and stuff like that.

I'm pretty sure that my description of this is really, really dull, but I'm actually really enjoying my job. I can wear jeans to work, I can listen to music while I'm working, and nobody bothers me. My supervisor comes over, like, once a day to check and see how things are going, and the woman that works with my supervisor comes over to bring me hard copies of the books I'm working on, but other than that, that's it. Plus! They have a fridge full of soda (Diet Coke included) that I can help myself to. It's pretty much ideal.

The only issue I'm having is that while I'm going through these books, I have a tendancy to want to stop and read them. A lot of these have really interesting essays and stuff like that (I'm doing mostly English and grammar and rhetoric books) and I have to fight to keep from reading them a lot of the time.

The other day, I was editing a section on arguments, and an essay (that I didn't read in its entirety, but that I read parts of) caught my attention. The author was arguing that The Lion King is racist and homophobic. Her (I think it was a woman) point was that the hyenas (which were dark, which means they were black) were sequestered to the otuskirts of the Pridelands, along with Scar (whosed mane was also black), who, apparently, represents gay people. The point was that the "black" and the "gay" characters were being shunned.

This? Blew my mind. I can pretty much find gay undertones in anything you put in front of me, but I have never until now even considered that there was anything gay about Scar. If you were to say, "Sarah, find something gay in The Lion King," I would point to Timon and Pumbaa. Scar might sound a little bit British, but other than that, I just don't see it.

I was going to do some more in-depth research on this, looking at other places online, to see if anyone else had said anything about it, but I haven't done that yet. What I have done, however, is present the theory to D, who I expected to find it just as ludicrous and I did.

That is not actually what happened.

This is:

"Yeah," he says. "I had never really sat down and thought about it, but yeah. I think he represents the gays."

I asked him to elaborate, and he says, "Well, he's thinner, sleeker than the other, 'straight' lions. . ."

"He's ostracized and doesn't get enough to eat!" I argued.

"I don't know," says D. "I feel like there's nothing stereotypically gay about him, but that you just kind of understand that he is."

"I don't understand he is," I say.

I can't necessarily remember the rest of that conversation, but the basic gist (jist?) is that I am, apparently, the only person ever who didn't see that Scar was gay. Anyone else? I don't know how many people actually read this, but I'd be interested to get some other input. Do you think Scar is supposed to be gay? Am I missing a huge thing here? (Yes. I realize how 'stereotypically' gay he looks in this picture. It's called irony.)

I'm really disturbed by this whole concept. Not that he's (maybe) gay, but that I didn't see it. Then again, I tend to miss obvious gays. The subtle gays, I'm like, "Hey! He likes men!" But if it's right there in front of me? I tend to miss it. Par example, when I saw Adam Lambert for the first (and only) time on the one episode of American Idol I was roped into watching, I insisted he wasn't gay.

Yeah.