Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Three's Company: Polygamy Pushes the Envelope
(An excerpt from an actual Christian web site devoted to "building the family").
Been watching TLC's 'Sister Wives'?
Have you been surprised how loving, and normal, they seem? Would you be surprised to learn there are many non-Mormon Christians who have felt God prompting them to live this way? Maybe you are curious and trying to figure out if this lifestyle truly can work. Or maybe you are a believer in Christ and you are witnessing all of the practical benefits but still trying to figure out how to make sense of this in light of the Bible. But you are asking yourself “Does the Bible, and it's Author, accept this?" Read on.
In the show Kody Brown makes this statement: “Love is to be multiplied not divided.” The idea of marriage, or a union with a male and female, transcends all religious, cultural, and ethnic boundaries. People from every nation or sphere of the world join together and partner with one another in order to build a family. More than 80% of cultures throughout history have also practiced some level of polygamy.
What does God say?
But the real question is: does Jesus Christ, the Lord of the universe, approve of this type of family where one man joins with more than one woman? We at Biblical Families, an evangelical organization dedicated to historical Christianity, see that the Bible teaches and approves of this type of idea of love multiplying. Both the OT and NT teach that God is honored by this type of lifestyle.
Throughout the OT many of God’s holy men lived a lifestyle where they multiplied God’s love. Men like Moses the writer of the first five books of the Bible had two women at the same time in a union, Abraham, who had at least two and maybe three at the same time, Jacob who had four in a union, and numerous others like Gideon, King David, and King Solomon. Likewise, in one place in the OT God even presents himself as in a union with two wives (Ezekiel 23:1-5,7,11).
The NT never alters this idea of love. The theme of love is carried forth by Jesus Christ whose teachings along with the apostles verified this lifestyle as holy, normal, and to be accepted. The God-Man, Jesus Christ, even represents the three types of lifestyles in the Bible. He lived for awhile in a celibate condition, he then died, arose again, and then joined himself to the first church ever birthed in history, the Jerusalem church, which represents a monogamous relationship, and then as other church bodies were birthed he joined or united with them thus displaying a love relationship or union with those multiple members that make up his one body, or family (see 1 Cor. 12:-20,27; Eph. 5:25; 1 Cor. 11:2).
How can this work?
So how can one family have multiple wives in it and there be peace, harmony, joy,satisfaction, and the blessings of the Lord in that family?
Here at Biblical Families we are teaching and sharing with people how this is possible. In the Christian faith this is not only possible but a very real testimony of the power of grace and the Holy Spirit working in the lives of those that believe. As the Bible says, where the Spirit of the Lord is there will be the fruit of the Spirit which is “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law (Gal. 5:22).
First I've heard of it, myself.
It seems the alarming traditions of fundamentalist Mormons are starting to overflow the container into "Christian" practice. TV shows like Sister Wives (and even Big Love, a satiric comedy/drama) seem to be giving lots of people ideas.
It was a long time ago that the "jiggle show" Three's Company was wildly popular. Not sure if it spawned a host of real-life imitaters or not, but it was, after all, only a sitcom (and those were more conservative times).
I know there is a movement called polyamory. This means any number of consenting adults can live together, with sexual sparks flying in every direction. Let's hope their offspring don't get together, or we'll have a genetic catastrophe. Polyamory is illegal, but every time the polygamy issue comes up, so do they, creeping out most of us to the point of disgust.
I haven't looked at any polyamory sites, can't bring myself to do it. Once in a fit of madness I googled "marry your pet", and found an actual web site which was, I suppose, tongue-in-cheek (or maybe that's the wrong way to put it).
Some years ago, we had the spectre of a woman marrying herself. Not a bad idea: think what the sex would be like! Contraception guaranteed. It has a lot to say for it, but what happens when it's time for a divorce?
I do wonder sometimes just what's going on here. To be perfectly frank, this strikes me as license for a man to screw a whole bunch of women and still maintain his "faith". I cannot imagine that this practice would allow polyandry, i. e. a woman marrying more than one man, a subject which occasionally crops up on Sister Wives (and which Kody once pronounced "vulgar": a pretty good word to sum up the whole show).
I know I harp on this, it's an obsession and a fascination. In the recent season ender, Robyn had her much-anticipated baby (named Solomon!) at home, moaning in a way that seemed creepily sexual, then popping out ten pounds of Brown baby. One wonders how many more will follow, especially since Robyn has promised Meri to be her surrogate (ANOTHER Brown baby? When will it stop, particularly since the Browns have no discernable source of income?)
Last week she said she'd been having anxiety attacks and was taking antidepressants. On the Robyn-giving-birth episode she made the baby a cute little sampler which she called a "peace offering" to Robyn: she felt guilty about treating her so badly. Treating her so badly? It made me wonder just what they edit out in these things. At any rate, it helped explain the marital friction and the antidepressants. Sister wives, when faced with towering problems like this, must put up or shut up.
But this was the kicker. I've heard it before, so it may even be true (though I admit this comes from Perez Hilton):
OMG! One Of The Sister Wives Was Married To One Of The Other Wives' Brother!
Just when you thought Sister Wives couldn't get any more disturbing, here comes the INCEST!
Star Magazine reports that polygamist and reality show stars, The Brown Family, are more about keeping things within the family than we all thought. In a shocking twist, it was revealed that Kody Brown's second wife, Janelle, was brought in as his wife shortly after she divorced her first husband - Kody's first wife's brother!
What the what?
In one BOMBSHELL of a secret, it was uncovered that Janelle was married to Adam Barber in 1988. Adam is Meri, Kody's first (and only legal) wife's brother. The two divorced only after two years of marriage and three years after that, Janelle joined Kody's polygamist fam.
A family insider reveals:
"I know she was originally very upset over Janelle dumping her brother. I think there has been a lot of unspoken tension between her, Janelle and Kody all these years."
I'd say.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
Order The Glass Character from:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K7NGDA
Barnes & Noble
Thistledown Press
Monday, November 28, 2011
The Gift(s) of the Magi
This is a piece I tried to track down for years. It was on a Robert Shaw Christmas album (vinyl), but not on any known CD. Finally I found it on a tape, but it was a different version. I'm not sure who the conductor is here, or which orchestra it is because when people post classical music videos they don't ever mention these things, and it seems to me that nobody minds very much. It's just nice music, "relaxing" (which is what most people say about classical music).
I was born and raised in it (not on it, that’s a different thing), and while it may have been pitched at me like a religion, I nonetheless learned something about the fine but crucial distinctions between different artists and conductors and orchestras. My Dad, who was for the most part a son-of-a-bitch who didn't love me, did seem to care if I knew something about music. Most of it I learned just by having it around me all the time, dinner music and the music he played every night as he sat in his reclining chair with a vibrating pad on his back.
Strangely, this wasn't one of the pieces I heard then. I discovered it much later, when the Magi still meant something to me. I also dug up, just now, some information about the deluxe nativity scene which adorned our mantelpiece at Christmas. The figures were probably made by someone named Fontanini. At least there's a strong resemblance. The camel was marvelous, about 7 inches high, and I always wanted to play with it. I see now why my parents wouldn't let me.
As for Respighi's Magi, I respond to this sort of music almost excruciatingly, as if my brain is somehow wired wrong. Well, I might be convinced of that today, having just received ANOTHER rejection for Harold from a publisher that hadn't read the manuscript. It was based on my query alone, which I guess didn't sufficiently condense 300 pages into one or two.
I think I can write, but sales? The whole thing escapes me. "Just get an agent," I am told, but that's kind of like saying, "Just win the lottery, it will solve all your financial problems." Which it probably would.
I think this is Advent now. I'm not with the church any more, which sometimes causes me considerable melancholy (but not enough to go back). It's weird how many things suddenly dropped out of my life around 2005. I used to be a semi-professional astrologer, studied it from about age ten, used to cast individual birth charts for people, and now I can't see any use in it at all. It's just a bunch of hooey. Christianity is almost never truly lived out by anyone, least of all clergy. I don't know if I've ever seen more emotional hangups concentrated in any other group of people.
So this time of year is, well. . . But hark, there's better news, for I have four small children in my life now. So the Christmas projects are in full gear. This week we made felt stuffed animals (I found my tiny battery-operated sewing machine in the closet, and it actually works), snowmen and gingerbread men and teddy bears. Very messy and labour-intensive, but absorbing and fun. But I find I feel overwhelmed these days. Underwhelmed, too. Funny how those two often coincide.
If this year is like all the others, in the next few weeks I'll receive most of the rejections I get in a year: the most succulent one is usually reserved for Christmas Eve. Most likely the one I had prayed for, or at least fervently hoped for. This can trigger a sense of futility that is downright embarrassing. All out of reach, though just barely, like a balloon that keeps popping up above my fingertips.
I'm not supposed to want this so much. What do I think it's going to do for me? I don't know, solve all the problems in my life, I guess. Why not?
Next weekend, gingerbread. I hate making gingerbread and have never been successful at it. Last Christmas Caitlin and Ryan convulsed when I threw the dough at the wall (it stuck). I hate cooking with molasses, molasses is the devil, dark and sludgy and evil-tasting, but the recipe calls for it.
What if my life ran out next year? What if 2012 is the last year I will ever live? Oh, stop it, Margaret.
Friday, November 25, 2011
Why women (still) love Harold Lloyd
Why Harold Lloyd?
Why did I write a novel
(it’s called The Glass Character, folks!) about this arcane subject, this
long-ago figure, this non-Chaplin, non-Keaton movie hero from the distant past?
I think it's because he isn’t
so distant.
I think that in spite
of all the time that has gone by, there’s something spookily contemporary about
him.
He’s not the outlandish
figure you see in silent comedy: no crossed eyes, no tramp suit or corpulent
body. No, he’s the average guy, striving to keep his head above water as life
throws him one curve after another.
And he makes it, but only
just.
People haves wrongly called Lloyd a “go-getter”. Not so.
He does everything for
love. Everything. There is a romantic idealism in his devotion to love that is almost
Elizabethan.
Only in one film does he reveal the more ferocious aspect of his love for women. At the end of Why Worry? (my personal favourite), he literally grabs Jobyna Ralston and kisses her with volcanic intensity. She tenses, then goes completely limp in his arms, doing a very slight leg-pop in delirious sexual surrender. (If I could find a picture of this, I'd post it.)
But even at the end of Why Worry, the “kicker” reveals that Harold van Pelham has grown up. He’s actually working, rather than lazing about complaining about his health. Then he gets the call that his wife (Jobyna, of course) has just had a baby, and he races off to see them in a sort of mad car chase without the car.
Don’t get me started on
Harold, for I don’t think I will be able to stop. Yes, I know - writers always say this (because they have to), but I believe this story has the potential to reach people, a
lot of people in fact, but I feel like I am on this ice floe and don’t know if I will ever
get off it.
Help me, Harold! I want to
tell your story. Not because you’ve been forgotten, but because I feel like you’re
still here.
Thursday, November 24, 2011
Why is everyone so goddamn FAT?
I have a
question. Call it the question of the day.
Why is
everyone so goddamn fat?
I’ve been wondering about this for a long time now. Everyone’s read the statistics, though as you may realize, I hate statistics and seldom quote them. But they do reflect a certain trend.
People
are getting huge. I mean, HUGE. Sometimes I wonder where it’s all coming
from. In the past ten or twelve years, the population has ballooned to the
point where half of us are too damn fat, and a third of us are way WAY too
fat.
If it’s
only in the last ten years or so, what happened? As far as I can remember, back
then everybody was obsessed with their weight. Everybody wanted to be thinner.
There was diet book, after diet book, after diet book coming out and hitting
the top of the best-seller list.
I had to ask myself: why keep buying these things, when you obviously can’t follow them? Why the endless search for the Holy Grail of diets, the one that will take weight off and keep it off forever and evermore?
Meanwhile,
in the midst of this best-sellerism – which still goes on today, only in a more
scientific, theory-oriented way (can’t eat carbs with protein, have to follow
your blood type, primordial cave man diet, What would Jesus Do diet –
presumably, consisting of loaves and fishes) – we’re getting so damn
fat, it’s shooting past the upper limits of the scale.
I
shouldn’t have watched this show at all, I’m ashamed to admit it, but it was
like a circus side show: once I fell into it, I couldn’t get out. It was called
Taboo and it explored the weird, weird, weird, weird things
people do (including having sex with the Berlin Wall), always with some expert
coming on to say “their behaviour falls within the realm of normal activity”.
One of these “normal” guys, somewhere in his 30s and living on disability, was
probably close to 400 pounds . His “thing” was to dress up and
act like an infant, goo-gooing, sucking things, toddling around in enormous
fuzzy sleepers and being fed glop.
Being
fed? His “caregiver”, whom at first I thought was his mother, was probably at
least 200 pounds heavier than the guy. Her body
was just not in a human shape, at all. It was like a misshapen cookie that had
melted in the oven, everything all over the place. When she stood, which was
difficult for her, her stomach touched the floor, and her breasts reached past
her knees. This was supermorbid obesity at its most shocking.
The
woman had no upper teeth, and maybe that’s a separate post because an awful lot
of people on reality TV have no teeth. It’s a related issue, maybe. Toothlessness
may explain why this guy lives on baby
food, but what about the adult diapers? Does she change them, and – no, we
won’t go there. It’s just too horrific.
But
let’s turn to the more mundane examples of hugeness that we see every day. I just
don’t remember seeing this level of obesity in the past. I don’t remember
someone lumbering on the bus who weighs maybe 400
pounds , I mean a young guy in his twenties. And I can’t help but think how
on earth he’s going to get to 40, or even 30.
There
are theories. The weirdest one I saw involved wheat: there’s a scientist
out there who says the new strains of wheat are designed to make you fat.
Supposedly, if you give up wheat, i.e. go gluten-free like many people do
anyway, the excess tonnage will just drop off and stay off.
(Original McDonalds hamburger)
There
are portion sizes: yes, my-oh-my! My husband and I like to go to
Denny’s, mainly because it’s relatively cheap and they know how to cook an
omelette. But every time we go to Denny’s, we seem to see a family who are all
of them huge: most heartbreakingly, even the small children who are encased in
soft, puffy fat.
Look at the menu, and you’ll see why. The Grand Slam has been replaced by a sort of grotesque Grand-Grand-Grand slam with four eggs and six sausages and God knows how many pancakes. Reminds me a bit of their bacon extravaganza, in which they offered such greasy delights as a bacon sundae.
If
you’re still hungry after being slammed, you can order deep-fried hush puppies
(presumably, not the shoes) with ice cream and syrup for dipping. And Denny’s
is hardly alone. McDonalds Quarter Pounder is now a Third Pounder. Most people
who go to McDonalds can’t do math, so maybe they don’t realize how much larger
it is. Wendy’s had a three-patty bacon cheeseburger which gave me chest pains
just looking at the menu board.
Meantime, in spite of all the emphasis on fitness and going to the gym, people just don’t, for the most part: they park as close to the mall as possible to avoid walking for two minutes. I wish I could find the cartoon, one of the best ones I’ve seen, in which a couple in a department store has the following conversation:
“Now
let’s see, where’s that treadmill they have on sale?”
”It’s way over on the other side of the store.”
”It’s way over on the other side of the store.”
“Oh to
hell with it then, let’s forget it.”
Never
once seeing the irony.
We save
steps. I’m a walker – it’s the only consistent exercise I’ve ever done, but
I’ve been at it for more than 20 years – and people are constantly trying to
give me rides, even complete strangers. Needless to say, I tell them no. But
there’s something about walking. It’s stigmatized. It’s just not done. Even
cycling is better, but still seen as something of a fruitcake activity around
here, something they do in Stanley Park
I get
mowed down regularly, which says something about the car-oriented society that I
believe has evolved around malls. I have learned to look obsessively over my
left shoulder to avoid that dreaded, heedless right turn. They don’t see me, so
I have to see them to avoid ending up one inch thick on the pavement.
I get
despairing sometimes, I really do. For the statistics aren’t good. Fatness is
still escalating. This makes me wonder: where have all the fat people come
from? They must have been much thinner than this a decade ago.
God
didn’t just pull out a whole lot of enormous balloons and blow them up and launch
them out there. Surely people have done this to themselves.
If the
statistics have changed this alarmingly, it means that people who used to be
normal weight are now increasingly overweight, or even obese. Women’s clothing
reflects this change. It seems everything I try on is stretchy – not just a
little stretchy, but stretchy like chewing gum, so that it doesn’t snap back
and ends up like an exhausted rubber band
Not only
that: sizes have changed. I’ve been fighting weight swings all my life, and in
high school I often wore a Size 14 or 16.
Now I am
sure I am fatter than I was then, and can wear a 10 or 12.
So what has happened? Can you guess? This is called “vanity sizing” , and it has been done to keep women from committing suicide over their appearance.
It was
long ago that Oprah, having skinnied down alarmingly on some kind of powdered
protein, suddenly proclaimed, “Diets don’t work!”. She seesawed up and down
after that, then kind of settled where she is now, probably a good 200
pounds . She spent one show sitting in a chair and addressing her viewers
about her weight. No narcissism there! Her personal trainer came on and said
she had “unresolved issues”, but Oprah has always maintained that having people
like Dr. Phil on her show was just as good as therapy.
Be that
as it may.
I have
no doubt that the massively obese have “issues” beyond just trying to fit behind the wheel of a car.
There is a strong connection between obesity and sexual abuse (as there is with
any addictive behaviour). It’s burying yourself, really. Not to mention lugging a huge burden around.
The symbolism is very potent, and hands a clear victory to the abuser.
I’ve
seen people come on talk shows who represent the Fat Acceptance Movement, and
in every case they round up an expert (there must be a TV-related agency called
Rent-an-Expert) who says obesity has no significant negative effect on health.
Just as easily, one can find experts who tell us exactly the opposite. I’m sick
of experts, myself.
I’m frightened of the escalation, because it hasn’t topped out yet, and I wonder when it will. Obesity is fast becoming normalized, and we’ve learned to accept it as never before.
When I
was a kid, we had a neighbour named Ruth. My mother didn’t have friends so much
as caseloads, so she befriended this woman along with the blind lady, the woman
who was “barren” and could not have kids, and the lady with the hydrocephalic
daughter. At my estimate, Ruth weighed somewhere between 250 and 300
pounds , but no more than that. She was considered huge, enormously obese,
to the point that she seldom left the house. On the rare times when she did,
people disapproved. They didn’t really think she should be showing herself, and
if she insisted on it, why didn’t she wear a corset or something? For that was
the age when even the thinnest women wore iron girdles to shape their bodies
and keep things from moving.
Doesn’t
happen any more. We don’t wear girdles, except for those awful Spanx things
that cover you from neck to ankles and are supposedly “comfortable”. And even
though they claim “anyone” can wear them, “anyone” does not include a woman who
weighs 400 pounds .
Will we
ALL be obese in twenty years? Will people start exploding from the internal
pressure (I have actually heard stories of skin splitting: and what happens
when someone who has had a massive tummy-tuck gets fat again)? Will gastric
bypasses, which often backfire (look at Carnie Wilson) become as routine as
tonsillectomies used to be? Will we require significant mutilation and the risk
of death to try to regain some semblance of a recognizable human shape?
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