Anoka, our little blight on the prairie

Rolling Stone has an excellent article on One Town’s War on Gay Teens, featuring Minnesota’s own Anoka school district, where Michele Bachmann and the Minnesota Patriarchy Council hold sway. I recommend it highly, but I also warn you: it’s a hard read, since it personalizes the kids who killed themselves after incessant taunting and bullying. I choked up a few times myself.

I’m going to leave out any discussion of the kids, because I hate crying on my keyboard — go read it yourself, if you think you can take it — and want to focus on one issue. The Anoka school district claims that it has no responsibility at all in these deaths, and instead blames gay activists for driving these kids to suicide; how, I don’t know. It’s probably a variant of the same accusation atheists face, that it’s their own fault for being themselves and provoking critics by openly existing. They also occasionally mention that right-wingers are responsible, but that rings hollow, since at every step the district has been dancing to the fundamentalist Christians’ tune.

The Southern Poverty Law Center and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging the school district’s policies on gays are not only discriminatory, but also foster an environment of unchecked anti-gay bullying. The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination, maintaining that its broad anti-bullying policy is meant to protect all students. “We are not a homophobic district, and to be vilified for this is very frustrating,” says superintendent Dennis Carlson, who blames right-wingers and gay activists for choosing the area as a battleground, describing the district as the victim in this fracas. “People are using kids as pawns in this political debate,” he says. “I find that abhorrent.”

Read further into the article, and there are all these little revelations that show that the district has been pandering thoughtlessly to the Religious Right all along; they are so thoroughly steeped in the cult of Christian conservatism that they are unconscious of the problem.

It had been a hard day: the annual “Day of Truth” had been held at school, an evangelical event then-sponsored by the anti-gay ministry Exodus International, whose mission is to usher gays back to wholeness and “victory in Christ” by converting them to heterosexuality. Day of Truth has been a font of controversy that has bounced in and out of the courts; its legality was affirmed last March, when a federal appeals court ruled that two Naperville, Illinois, high school students’ Day of Truth T-shirts reading BE HAPPY, NOT GAY were protected by their First Amendment rights. (However, the event, now sponsored by Focus on the Family, has been renamed “Day of Dialogue.”) Local churches had been touting the program, and students had obediently shown up at Anoka High School wearing day of truth T-shirts, preaching in the halls about the sin of homosexuality.

Every goddamn school district in this state gets these lying whores for Jesus showing up to do “assemblies”. Here in Morris we’ve had the “You can run, but you can’t hide” ministries show up, or other variants. They’ve usually got some ridiculous “cool teen” schtick — they’re body-builders or wrestlers or rappers — and they bill themselves as presenting a positive, anti-drug message, something that they can superficially pretend is secular, and then they turn on the prayer and Jesus babble, and it’s transparent as hell — these are simply evangelical Christians in crappy camouflage, and the schools just let them sail on in and preach to the students.

It seems to happen at some school around here every year. It’s repulsive. I often don’t hear about it until after the fact, because here’s another giveaway: they don’t advertise publicly, they advertise in the churches.

So the Anoka school district wants to claim that the anti-gay bullying is not their fault, but they annually have a “Day of Truth” led by Exodus International or now, Focus on the Family (as if that’s an improvement)? The district turns the hyenas loose in the hallways, but denies responsibility if someone gets chewed up.

It’s not just the students. The schools have gay teachers and staff, who are silenced, and the straight teachers lead the way in gagging any protest.

“There has been widespread confusion,” says Anoka-Hennepin teachers’ union president Julie Blaha. “You ask five people how to interpret the policy and you get five different answers.” Silenced by fear, gay teachers became more vigilant than ever to avoid mention of their personal lives, and in closeting themselves, they inadvertently ensured that many students had no real-life gay role models. “I was told by teachers, ‘You have to be careful, it’s really not safe for you to come out,'” says the psychologist Cashen, who is a lesbian. “I felt like I couldn’t have a picture of my family on my desk.” When teacher Jefferson Fietek was outed in the community paper, which referred to him as an “open homosexual,” he didn’t feel he could address the situation with his students even as they passed the newspaper around, tittering. When one finally asked, “Are you gay?” he panicked. “I was terrified to answer that question,” Fietek says. “I thought, ‘If I violate the policy, what’s going to happen to me?'”

The silence of adults was deafening. At Blaine High School, says alum Justin Anderson, “I would hear people calling people ‘fags’ all the time without it being addressed. Teachers just didn’t respond.” In Andover High School, when 10th-grader Sam Pinilla was pushed to the ground by three kids calling him a “faggot,” he saw a teacher nearby who did nothing to stop the assault. At Anoka High School, a 10th-grade girl became so upset at being mocked as a “lesbo” and a “sinner” – in earshot of teachers – that she complained to an associate principal, who counseled her to “lay low”; the girl would later attempt suicide. At Anoka Middle School for the Arts, after Kyle Rooker was urinated upon from above in a boys’ bathroom stall, an associate principal told him, “It was probably water.” Jackson Middle School seventh-grader Dylon Frei was passed notes saying, “Get out of this town, fag”; when a teacher intercepted one such note, she simply threw it away.

The district is aware that there is a problem — dead kids are very bad PR — and has been waffling ineffectually about doing something or other. Pointless meetings are always the preferred solution for a bureaucracy.

Just to be on the safe side, however, the district held PowerPoint presentations in a handful of schools to train teachers how to defend gay students from harassment while also remaining neutral on homosexuality. One slide instructed teachers that if they hear gay slurs – say, the word “fag” – the best response is a tepid “That language is unacceptable in this school.” (“If a more authoritative response is needed,” the slide added, the teacher could continue with the stilted, almost apologetic explanation, “In this school we are required to welcome all people and to make them feel safe.”) But teachers were, of course, reminded to never show “personal support for GLBT people” in the classroom.

Never show personal support for GLBT kids. That’s the killer right there.

I have some suggestions for the Anoka school district that would be helpful. First, repudiate the Minnesota Family Council and Focus on the Family. These are hate groups that have no business advising the school administration; they should be recognized immediately as symptomatic of the bigotry problem they have. Second, adopt a strictly secular policy on all official school events. No more preachers, no more evangelical assemblies, no more church sponsorship of days or picnics or t-shirts or whatever the hell trick they try to pull. God is the poison here, get it out. That’s not to say that Christians must be oppressed, but that we need to learn that Christianity is a personal, private preference that does not instill a moral message. Third, crack down hard on the students: seeing a few bullying jocks getting kicked off the football team for cracking jokes about faggots would send a strong signal right there.

That’s a school district that definitely needs more atheists. Maybe the SSA needs to seed the place with a little rational thought.

A bureaucracy doing its job

An organization in Bath called “Healing on the Streets” (HOTS) plastered flyers around town advertising their services.

Need Healing? God can heal today! Do you suffer from Back Pain, Arthritis, MS, Addiction … Ulcers, Depression, Allergies, Fibromyalgia, Asthma, Paralysis, Crippling Disease, Phobias, Sleeping disorders or any other sickness?

We’d love to pray for your healing right now!

We’re Christian from churches in Bath and we pray in the name of Jesus. We believe that God loves you and can heal you from any sickness.

And then…a miracle happened. It’s utterly unbelievable, at least to an American.

The Advertising Standards Authority declared them to be irresponsible, false advertising and ordered them taken down.

Can we import them over here and put them to work? I’d like to see all the churches shut down. Also, all those annoying advertisements about “natural male enhancement” products.

HOTS Bath is stunned. They don’t understand.

All over the world as part of their normal Christian life, Christians believe in, pray for and experience God’s healing; our ministry, in common with many churches, has been active in praying for God’s healing (of Christians and non Christians) for many years.

That’s a fairly typical Christian response. They always act like they’ve been poleaxed whenever they discover someone who sees through their lies and notices that their claims are bullshit.

“It’s Part of their Culture”

Richard Dawkins recently spoke at the Jaipur Literary Festival, which was marred by outrage against Salman Rushdie. Does this sound familiar?

The organizers of the festival were placed in an impossibly difficult position. Let down as they were by the spineless Rajasthan government, who had eyes only for the Muslim vote in the current elections, they did their best. They were personally threatened by a baying mob of bearded youths who invaded the festival compound promising murder and mayhem if Rushdie was allowed so much as a video link (as Germaine Greer said at the time of the Danish cartoons row, “What these people really love and do best is pandemonium”).

I’ve got nothing against beards, obviously, but it’s become almost comical how identical these mobs all look: it’s not the facial hair, it’s the attitude, the screaming, ranting hatred, the threatening air, the unthinking uniformity of their anger.

The contrast is also bizarre. Behold the New Atheists, calmly pointing out the absurdity of faith, making no threats, stating that there are better ways to make decisions and progress in our understanding than by wallowing in tradition and treating ancient tracts as holy…and they are accused of being shrill, militant, uncivilized rowdies, driving gentle Christians to the fainting couch.

Meanwhile, Muslim mobs riot, and they get a split reaction: Right-inclining reactionaries call for their execution and/or deportation, which is just as wrong-headed as the Lefty apologists who make excuses for them, demanding that we respect their religious traditions and avoid provoking them by calling their gods into question (and by the way, please don’t question ours, either, say the Christians, because that fainting couch is getting crowded).

But you don’t respect their humanity or their rights as citizens by pandering to the lies in which they’ve been steeped. They have every right to argue their case, but demanding that their critics by silenced or executed is not an argument, and we must reject that approach, on all sides.

Dawkins has more to say:

In my speech I compared the Muslim fatwa-mongers to the Papal Nuncio who, in 1580, encouraged Englishmen to murder Queen Elizabeth because she was “the cause of so much injury to the Catholic faith . . .” I went on to say:

Our whole society is soft on religion. The assumption is remarkably widespread that religious sensitivities are somehow especially deserving of consideration – a consideration not accorded to ordinary prejudice. . . I admit to being offended by Father Christmas, ‘Baby Jesus’, and Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer, but if I tried to act on these prejudices I’d quite rightly be held accountable. I’d be challenged to justify myself. But let somebody’s *religion* be offended and it’s another matter entirely. Not only do the affronted themselves kick up an almighty fuss; they are abetted and encouraged by influential figures from other religions and the liberal establishment. Far from being challenged to justify their beliefs like anybody else, the religious are granted sanctuary in a sort of intellectual no go area.

It should be part of our intellectual, Enlightenment culture that every idea — atheist or religious — should be open to argument and criticism, with no exceptions. And if your culture demands obedience to dogma, violent reprisals to criticism, and murder of any opponent of your views, then I’m going to recognize the fundamental conflict between your views and the goals of a civilized, forward-thinking society, and dismiss your culture as an enemy of reason, and oppose you by committing our version of your hateful acts: by promoting the health, welfare, and education of your children, and mocking the stupidity of your beliefs.

Good work, France!

French courts have upheld the Church of Scientology’s conviction, and Xenu and pals are going to have to cough up €600,000.

A French appeals court on Thursday upheld the Church of Scientology’s 2009 fraud conviction on charges it pressured members into paying large sums for questionable remedies.

“Large sums for questionable remedies”…you know that applies to every religion, right? So when will the Catholic church be put in the docket?

Although, admittedly, €600,000 would be pocket change to the Vatican. I think the sum ought to be vastly larger to cover 15 centuries of lies.

…and South Dakota follows suit

There was no opposition to a bill that encourages South Dakota public schools to study the bible. This one is as sectarian as they come.

Scripture study and science projects? That’s the prospect some students in South Dakota may face after a substantial majority in the state’s House of Representatives helped pass a resolution to encourage public school districts to incorporate Bible education into curricula. The House passed the resolution last week by a vote of 55-13 after a short floor debate during which no member from either party voiced opposition.

The sponsor of the bill, Steve Hickey, is a pastor, of course. This is clearly a law intended to promote Christianity and Christianity alone in the schools.

Hey, let’s not forget Pennsylvania in the roster of bad, lazy state legislatures. They passed a resolution declaring this the “year of the bible”. That one is just plain dumb: citing vague “great challenges” that the US is facing, it wants Pennsylvanians to turn to an ancient magic book to find strength. They won’t. Real problems need to be confronted with real solutions and hard work, not superstition and a retreat into fairy tales.

Spanking Scofield

Oh, this just made my meeting-attending, class-preparing, paper-grading afternoon to see Be Scofield scorned on the Black Skeptics.

When the Scofields and Karen Armstrongs of the world talk about how the new atheists just aren’t aware of the liberal, tolerant, sativa smoking, feminist, genderqueer god concept, my response is “I don’t believe in that motherfucker, either.” She’s just as poorly evidenced as the old fashioned patriarchal god. She’s also not the predominant god concept impacting the African American community.

That felt soooo gooooood.

But now, back to the papers…

Hungary joins the United States in pandering to the wingnut brigade

I was feeling lonely. The daily spectacle of the Republican presidential candidates prancing their “family values” about the stage had me wondering…is there any other country in the world that would give such idiots such prominence?

And yes there is. Hungary. They just passed a new law that sounds so…American.

The new law says the family, based upon marriage of a man and a woman whose mission is fulfilled by raising children, is an "autonomous community…established before the emergence of law and the State" and that the State must respect it as a matter of national survival. It says "Embryonic and foetal life shall be entitled to protection and respect from the moment of conception," and the state should encourage "homely circumstances" for child care. It obliges the media to respect marriage and parenting and assigns parents, rather than the State, primary responsibility for protecting the rights of the child. The law enumerates responsibilities for minors, including respect and care for elderly parents.

Hungary also has a new constitution, with some good points mingled among the bad.

The constitution calls for the protection of life from conception and bans torture, human trafficking, eugenics, and human cloning. It recognizes marriage as the “conjugal union of a man and a woman.”

Something about their obsessions suggests the grasping hand of the Catholic Church in all this.

Islamic science has come to this pitiful end

The words of the Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu ‘aleihi was-sallam) have been tested scientifically, and found hilarious. In work carried out under the direction of Dr. Jamaal Haamid, students at Qassim University examined a saying by the prophet, and have published it in a freely available pdf, The Hadeeth on the Fly, which you can download if you desire. Or you could just read this post, which summarizes entirely the complete content of the short paper, which is pretty much unpublishable and unbelievable anyway.

Here are the holy words.


(Notice that I include the original Arabic so there can be no confusion!)

If a housefly falls in the drink of anyone of you, he should dip it (in the drink), for the one of its wings has a disease and the other has the cure of the disease.

I do find that rather disturbing: so in Arabia, if a fly touches your water, you’re supposed to catch it, dunk it in deeper and slosh it around, to prevent disease? Arabian flies buzz around with pathogens segregated to just one wing, while the other one is healthy? How do they do that?

OK, setting aside the sanitary habits of Arabians and the mechanism by which this holy aphorism could be true, our intrepid students do carry out the obvious experiment: they drop a fly in a flask of sterile water, and then they pluck out the fly and immerse it completely in a second flask of sterile water. But then it all goes horribly wrong.

Here is the result of experiment #1.


Plate 2- Cultured water sample taken from a flask containing sterilized water and where a fly fell (without submersion). Growth of pathogenic (disease causing) bacterial colonies of the E. coli type were identified after taking samples from the water in the flask for culture.
Plate 1- Cultured water sample from the same flask following the complete dipping of the fly. An entire disappearance of the bacterial growth seen in Petri-dish 2 is clear. The new bacteria growing in plate 1 was identified as Actinomyces, the one from which useful antibiotics can be extracted. This explains the complete inhibition of growth in plate 2

Plate 2 on the right is the one from water merely touched by a fly. There is no explanation for how the plate was produced, or how the bacteria were identified; the strange brown sludge suggests poor technique, though, and I’ve cultured E. coli myself — and that hideous thick fecal-colored glop looks nothing like E. coli.

Plate 1 on the left, made from water in which the fly was fully immersed, looks nasty too. It’s a poor photograph, but that looks like a thick lawn of colonies everywhere. How do they know it’s Actinomyces? I have no idea, they don’t say. It’s also a mistake to simply declare it beneficial — Actinomyces are opportunistic pathogens.

Experiment #2 was a different fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Experiment #3 was a third fly, two flasks of water, same result.

Having done the experiment to death, our brave students retired at the third repetition, wrote it up with no methods, no discussion, no literature cited (except for their holy book, of course), and no reliable, believable data. They also didn’t do the other obvious experiment, of snipping off the wings and examining the bacterial flora living on the left vs. right, but then, maybe they’re leaving that for the advanced students.

Any 10 year olds looking for a quick and easy science fair project, there it is. I’m sure you can replicate this experiment trivially — but please, talk to a real microbiologist first and learn how to streak a plate. You might also learn something about a control plate, which our U of Qassim students didn’t bother to do.

Of course, this work wasn’t carried out by 10 year olds. It was done by university students in a “Med 497” (a medical course?) in a department of medical microbiology. I strongly urge anyone visiting Saudi Arabia to avoid getting sick. They might try to treat you by swishing a fly around in your coffee.

(Also on Sb)

Rep. Larry Pittman of North Carolina: Christian, seminarian, and ordained minister

That mini-biography in the title is to help put this story in perspective; it’s also completely unsurprising. Pittman wears his Christianity prominently and proudly, and it seems to be the only qualification he thought important in his run for office. And now he’s using his blessed Christian morality to define his work in the legislature. He was very irate at the easy life of a death row inmate, so Pittman wrote a letter to the General Assembly with some suggestions. He thinks:

Doesn’t it warm the heart to know that the barbaric medieval mentality is still making the laws in America?

He does have some second thoughts about his list. He now regrets broadcasting it, and wishes he’d only sent it to a sympathetic fellow Republican. It’s the standard Christian sentiment: it’s not the sin of violent, uncharitable thoughts that is wrong, it’s being caught expressing them.