Zealots base their religious beliefs around a supposed right to harm people

I didn’t think I’d be able to post so soon. I thought I would post on this upcoming Wednesday at the earliest. I thought I’d be playing a concert this evening. But illness intervened. It started on Thursday as a sore throat on the way home from supper with Brother, Sister, and Niece. Now the symptoms include aches and shivering. We have a second concert to play tomorrow and another on Tuesday. Me participating in the one tomorrow looks doubtful. Hopefully, I’ll be able to play on Tuesday. On the flight back to Detroit I watched the Canadian movie Wildhood. Link, about age 17, is dealing with an abusive father. He has been told his mother, a Native (in Canada, a First Nation) woman, is dead. Link discovers she was alive long after his father said she had died. Link flees with his brother Travis, about age 12, and searches for her. Along the way they hook up with Pasmay, a young First Nation man, who is into native dancing and attends pow-wows to pursue his passion. Much of the movie is about the journey to find Mom. It’s also about getting Link in touch with the First Nation side of his heritage. Link and Pasmay also fall in love. It was this gay aspect that led me to the story. But it also seems incidental, of little consequence to the main story. I might think differently about that if the journey was also a sexual awakening of either Link or Pasmay. But... Was Link’s father abusive because he knew his son was gay? There is a brief comment by Dad that a lot of fathers say to their straight sons. Pasmay implies his feeling of not fitting in and a chosen life of wandering is because he is gay. Perhaps that echoes the possibility that Link’s mother left because she felt she didn’t fit in because she married a white man. An unanswered question is whether Link and Travis have the same mother. This journey has significant emotional consequences for Link, but doesn’t seem to for Travis. The young boy seems to be along for the ride as an escape from abusive Dad. One of the trivia items for this movie on IMDb is that Bretten Hannam, both writer and director, is also of the LGBTQ community (non binary) and also First Nation. They made the movie to counteract indigenous misrepresentation in film and TV. Overall, I enjoyed the movie. While in Austin I finished the book Record of a Spaceborn Few by Becky Chambers. This the third book in a series. The first two are The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet and A Closed and Common Orbit. As with the second book there is a brief reference to an incident in the first book and the books all share a common setting, but otherwise the characters and plot are independent. The setting is the Fleet. When earth became uninhabitable cities were deconstructed to build huge starships. The builders recognized the ships would be home for decades and generations, so they had better be places where people would want to live for a long time. The Fleet has fulfilled its primary purpose of finding habitable worlds and some people have settled on them. Humans have encountered other intelligent species and joined the Galactic Commons. But many people still prefer to live on the Fleet. So the Fleet was given a sun to orbit, one without a planet big enough to settle on. This is the story of shipboard life. The story alternates between a few characters. Tessa is a mother whose daughter is badly frightened of viewing open space. Isabel is an archivist, documenting important events that happen in the Fleet. She hosts a member of another species whose reports explain aspects of shipboard life. Eyas is a caretaker of the dead. Bodies are composted and turned into fertilizer for crops. On death Eyas recites a liturgy that explains their understanding of composting, a beautiful ode. Residents are taught to respect compost as the remains of ancestors. Kip is a teenager who is anxious to grow up and to leave the Fleet and get as far away from Mom and Dad as possible. Sawyer is a young man who gets tired of living in a culture ruled by another species and wants to move to the Fleet. The book provides an answer to my question of what would people do if their basic needs are taken care of. That alien species that visited Isabel explains how this works in the Fleet. If a person is resident on the Fleet they get air, water, food, lodging, and public services. There are no exceptions. The allotments for each person are the same. People have jobs because tasks need to be done. These tasks include growing food, serving as doctors, piloting shuttles between ships in the fleet, serving as archivist, caretaker, sex host, and many more. Residents choose jobs based on their desires and skills. Not choosing a job is highly frowned upon. The exception is sanitation. Everyone must rotate through that disgusting job. The jobs are not paid. Want to turn your allocation of beans into bean cakes and share the product? That’s when barter with fellow residents comes in. One can also barter with the public food stores for a larger allocation. Galactic Commons credits are used with trade between the Fleet and the Galactic Commons. Creds can also come from family that live on a planet of transport ships. But creds mess up the barter system. This alien observer noted that while residential allotments in the Fleet are quite adequate they seem meager compared to housing on alien planets run on capitalism – well, they may seem meager to those well placed in society, such as a researcher into how humans live. But that comment doesn’t include those at the bottom of the society – such as Sawyer living on one of those planets. I enjoyed this book, as I did the previous two books in the series. I enjoyed it enough I recommended it to a nephew, then left the book behind for him to read (I didn’t warn him that Isabel has a wife). I’ll have to buy the fourth. I’m still a day behind in reading Daily Kos. In my reading since Monday when I returned I saved a big bunch of articles in my browser tabs. Some I’ll get to over the next several posts, some I won’t. An Associated Press article posted on Kos reports that former First Lady Rosalynn Carter died at the age of 96. The article has a good summary of the difference she made in the life of America. Hunter of Kos discussed the growing push by conservatives to end no-fault divorce. Like Roe v. Wade it has only been law for a half century. In that time it has shown to be very good.

As the CNN story explains, a new framework for divorces that requires no proof of adultery, abuse, or other wrongdoing simplifies the process, reduces trauma (including for the children,) and avoids the need for couples to come up with fraudulent reasons for a divorce that both parties want. But mostly, it's had a dramatic impact on household violence.

As in reducing household violence through “a reduction in female suicides and a reduction in intimate partner violence.” But what if “you don't want to let victims get out of abusive marriages?”

If Trumpism is premised mostly on authoritarianism and xenophobic paranoia, religious fundamentalism seems premised mostly on enabling and enforcing abusive relationships—on oppression as an alleged article of proving "faith." It is universal; all religious fundamentalism is premised on an alleged right to do harm to other groups if those other groups have it coming. And no, I don't think the media will be calling that out anytime soon. But the rest of us can say it out loud: Anti-divorce, anti-birth-control, anti-20th-century zealots base their religious beliefs around a supposed right to harm people. It's not enough for them to live according to their own beliefs: You must also live by those beliefs, or they—as business owners, as community members, or as a spouse—are allowed to hurt you until you do.

Dartagnan of Kos discussed a Washington Post editorial from last week pointed out the political polarization in America may threaten marriage. Democratic women are rejecting Republican men as potential suitors. But the editorial doesn’t say why it is happening. Then it says someone needs to compromise and implies quite strongly it isn’t the men. Dartagnan wrote:

Well, here’s why: It’s because by aligning themselves with Trump, men are—implicitly and explicitly—declaring their allegiance to what he represents. Putting children in cages and tearing them away from their parents? Mocking those with disabilities? Making fun of and belittling American servicemen? Lying about serial marital infidelity? Insulting and degrading women? Demonizing people of different backgrounds and different faiths? Refusing to take responsibility for … anything (except, perhaps, for overruling Roe v. Wade)? These are the “values” that Republican men are projecting to women when they align themselves with Trump. They’re values rooted in intolerance, bigotry and hatred. So, perhaps the more important question the Post should have explored is: Why any woman would want to commit the rest of their lives to such men? Why would anyone want to raise children with them?

Should progressive women let go of their own values to preserve marriage? It would take a cultural shift. But that’s already happened because of men who voted for the nasty guy. Kavitha Surana of ProPublica, in an article posted on Kos, reported that the problems and injury facing women who can’t get an abortion are causing some Republican legislators in some states to consider a compromise, language to clarify “medically necessary.” But few of those changes have been enacted into law. Anti-abortion groups are very good at targeting Republican lawmakers who step from the straight and narrow. They use scorecards and threats of primary challenges against those who stray. And those lawmakers are very good at caving, even though high percentages of their constituents approve of the change. Even with the threat they recognize they could lose for opposing clarification reforms. As for the anti-abortion crowd...

Their fervor to protect the laws reflects a bedrock philosophy within the American anti-abortion movement: that all abortion exceptions — even those that protect the pregnant person’s life or health — should be considered the same as sanctioning murder.

Strange, but not surprising, that refusing to treat the mother until she is in such dire health that she dies, is not considered murder. Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. The team at NPR’s Throughline spoke with Jeremi Shri, who wrote the book Henry Kissinger and the American Century. They discuss his rise to prominence – fleeing Nazi Germany as a teenager, joining the US military and working in intelligence because he could speak German, and parlaying that into joining the top of society, including becoming Secretary of State. His analysis would describe the situation and include a solution – and one had better choose his solution, even if a lot of civilians would die. Greg Dworkin, in a pundit roundup for Kos, quoted several pundits on Kissinger’s legacy. Some call him a war criminal. That includes this tweet from Rep. Gerry Connolly:

Henry Kissinger has passed at 100. His legacy badly needs reassessment. He unleashed some of the worst violence of the last fifty years in Chile, Cambodia, Iran & Vietnam – just to name a few. His indifference to human suffering will forever tarnish his name and shape his legacy.

And a tweet by Maggie Koerth:

Kissinger obit headlines could be used to teach a journalism school master class in how appealing to neutrality sometimes results in the worst kind of bias.

Ken Armstrong tweeted an example of what Koerth was talking about:

The most predictable sentence in journalism is the last sentence in an obituary's 1st paragraph. Today, for Henry Kissinger's obituary, we have: NY Times: "He was 100." Washington Post: "He was 100." Associated Press: "He was 100." But Rolling Stone went for something different: Henry Kissinger died on Wednesday at his home in Connecticut, his consulting firm said in a statement. The notorious war criminal was 100.