Are all communists bad?

I've had an interesting conversation repeated a few times lately.  It's on the question of whether "socialist" is a designation, like "fascist," which is automatically negative, and which should lead us to condemn any person who self-identifies this way.  "Communist," of course, gets an even stronger reaction.

Internet communists can be a funny bunch; they enjoy throwing around Soviet symbology, I guess mainly to shock people.  And I haven't noticed much economic literacy among them, even compared to me -- and I'm no whiz at it myself.

But they don't strike me as evil people.  They don't actually want to eat the rich.  They want to redistribute property.  It can be a bit utopian; they imagine it will be easier than it is.  And I bristle when they say things like "we can't expect a solution from the system, we need a revolution!"  No.  I'm steadfastly anti-revolution.  People imagine it will be a shortcut to drastic change, but really revolutionary change takes time and there is no shortcut.  A revolution usually results in massive loss of life, but the actual change is always much smaller than you'd think.  The French revolution, for instance, was short-lived and ended in another monarchy.

Though my real beef with communism is that it doesn't work -- in no case has it ever actually succeeded, except when it becomes less purely communistic, as China has in recent years.  There are two reasons for this, and I can't say which is more important: first, there are massive coordination problems with distributing necessary goods to a nation, and cash is a really easy way to solve these.  It's imperfect, but "one guy in an office figures out what shoes everybody gets" is even worse.  The second reason is that no communist nation was actually democratic, no matter how much they claimed they were.  This is probably a function of them having been produced by revolution instead of actually the will of the people.  Totalitarianism is horrible and we all know it's horrible, so it should be utterly unsurprising that communist nations which were also totalitarian were horrible.  Fascism and communism seem very similar, not because fascism is really socialist (it's not) but because they're both totalitarian.

Now I'm always the first to say that ignorance is a very serious problem.  If dumb communist kids actually got the government they think they want, it would probably turn out badly, so I would oppose that.  Yet I still do have a different moral feeling toward an ignorant communist than I do toward a neofascist, because the communist is (perhaps very ineffectively) advocating for an end to poverty, while the neofascist is advocating for an end to Jews.  I can look at the (totally imaginary) end states that each hopes for, and can say that I admire the utopia of the communist (which would never happen) more than I do the utopia of the fascist (which, no matter what grounds it was based on, would almost certainly involve depriving some people of human rights even if it worked as planned).

The next objection to communism is that it discounts property rights.  The libertarian says taxation is theft; the communist says property is theft.  The reason for the totally different deontological statements is that nobody really knows what sort of property rights are natural, or how you get them.  Does everyone have an equal right to the goods of the earth?  Or do we earn a greater or lesser share depending on how hard we worked or what we got from our parents?  As I have become more and more of a consequentialist over the years, I've concluded that property rights only exist in the service of human life, liberty, and happiness.  So we should have what property rights help people to flourish, whatever those are.  If it means that some billionaires lose a lot of their property, I don't really care provided it actually serves the good of everyone.  Meanwhile if property distribution isn't completely equal, but that's the best way to make sure everyone has the necessities of life, I'm fine with that also.  The question between capitalism and socialism, for me, is not a moral one, it is a factual one, a practical question of what works best.

Now advocates of capitalism will point to their successes and communism's failures.  They will mention the people that capitalism has pulled out of poverty, and the famines that devastated the Soviet Union and North Korea -- human-created famines which amount to genocide.

But one may also point of the death toll of capitalism.  Isn't every person who starved to death in a non-communist nation a casualty of capitalism?  After all, the food, today at least, is available.  Capitalism boasts of the ability to distribute goods more efficiently that communism, but it too sometimes fails.  More specifically, I might mention horrible disasters that can be laid at capitalism's door:'
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire
The Bangladesh garment factory fire
The Irish potato famine -- did you know that during the famine Ireland was exporting food?  The Irish just couldn't afford to buy it.
The Opium Wars in China -- honestly, the British East India Company could get its own whole list; China wasn't the only country it ravaged for money.
Belgium's rape of the Congo
Child slavery in chocolate plantations
And I could go on and on.  Water pumped out of aquifers to bottle for profit, while local villagers' wells all go dry.  Farmers evicted from their land so the government could hand it to a multinational corporation.  Terrible conditions in rubber plantations.  Terrible conditions in sweatshops.  Most countries are capitalist and in all of these, there is poverty, death from inadequate healthcare, death from unsafe workplaces, and so on.

But! You might add.  That's not real capitalism, that's crony capitalism.  To which I would say, exactly.  Pure economic systems exist only in the mind.  Advocates can always imagine it could be done more perfectly.  In reality, we should acknowledge the common failure modes exist because it is easy to fall into them.

So what would I advocate?  Some kind of balance, probably.  I have abandoned the idealism that once convinced me everything could regulate itself if only it were allowed to.  You want Oliver Twist?  Because that's how you get Oliver Twist.  Some regulation is going to be necessary, even while it's clear we haven't done enough to separate the regulatory bodies from the industries themselves.  We don't need a revolution on that, we need some tweaks.

When I hear someone say, seriously, that they would like to tweak things in a more socialist direction . . . I'm really fine with it.  There's a lot more socialist things could be before it got anywhere close to wiping out private industry.  Say, a guaranteed minimum income.  Or universal healthcare.  That stuff could be good, possibly, if done very carefully.  Certainly seems as likely to work out well as the opposite.  Now I doubt these people are going to get what they want, either, but they'll try and if they manage a few baby steps, I'd be cautiously hopeful.

And as for communists?  I think it's great that they have made the moral judgments that property rights exist to serve people and that equality is good.  I would agree with them on that; I think this is a moral and compassionate stance.  But I also think that they need to seriously study history and economics to try to find ways to change our current society more in the direction of their dream.  Waving red banners and sharing Soviet memes (which are very offensive to Holodomor survivors, by the way) aren't going to help them get there.

Millionaire shortbread

I made millionaire shortbread today.  If you don't know, it's a bar cookie with a layer of shortbread, a layer of toffee, and a layer of chocolate.  It's amazing.

But I thought I'd post because I combined two different recipes, and I'll never be able to remember which those were if I don't write them down!



Shortbread (from here)

2 sticks (1 cup) salted butter, at room temperature
1/2 cup granulated sugar
2 cups all-purpose flour

Cream the butter and the sugar and then mix in the flour.  Put in a big pan (I used my 9x`13 pyrex) and bake at 350 for 18-20 minutes.

Tip: you need to do this part first.  I didn't, which caused problems later.  Get the shortbread in the oven before starting the toffee.

Toffee (from here)

1 cup (2 sticks) butter
1 cup sugar
pinch salt

Melt the ingredients together in a heavy pot on medium heat, stirring often.  In about 20 minutes it will turn brown and reach 290-300 degrees.  It's done now and you need to immediately assemble the millionaire shortbread.

Assembly

Pour the toffee over the (hopefully done and slightly cooled) shortbread.  Sprinkle chocolate chips over the top.  Wait for them to melt and then spread the melted chocolate over the toffee with a spoon.  Cut into squares while it's still warm.  Let cool for at least an hour.


I highly recommend these if you, like me, feel like you haven't yet eaten enough decadent food this season!

Solstice soup and the carbon cycle

I've been celebrating solstices and equinoxes, in a quiet way, for three years now.  I know it must have been in a quiet way, because although I definitely have been posting about it on facebook, my own husband thinks "nobody celebrates Solstice."  Ha.

I like astronomical holidays because they are for everyone.  You don't have to believe any given thing; the sun still moves the way it moves.  And it brings a lot of thoughts and reflections: about darkness and light, about change, about the cycles of life.

In my epic fantasy series (still mostly a series of outlines) the people celebrate four feasts for the four elements.  Spring equinox is the Water Feast, celebrated by dancing in the fields, preferably in the rain, and announcing engagements; summer solstice is the Air Feast, celebrated by lots of singing and flute-playing, and also weddings; autumn equinox is the Earth Feast, celebrated by eating a lot of harvest foods; and winter solstice is the Fire Feast, celebrated by bonfires and staying up all night toasting things on the fire and singing carols.  I like making up fantasy religions.

Unfortunately I can't actually adopt their customs without a tribe of people to do them with me, though I still do like the idea of spending Solstice burning fires.  Our fireplace is still not usable since we need to get the chimney cleaned, so I just lit a bunch of candles.

This year my big thought was about the carbon cycle.  It's not something I really understood until recently, with the help of some science fiction books about terraforming and a lot of news articles about climate change.  What we hear in school is that plants turn carbon dioxide into oxygen.  But somehow I never thought where the carbon goes.  Of course the carbon, together with the water the plant absorbs, become the body of the plant, largely in the form of hydrocarbons--carbohydrates, cellulose, even fat.  That's how the plant stores its energy.  When you eat the plant (or any animal does) you release that energy again, but to use the energy you put the carbon back into the oxygen you breathe, which makes carbon dioxide.  (I'm totally leaving out the nitrogen cycle here, which is also super cool.)

But!  Not all of that hydrocarbon gets eaten by people.  Some of it decays, so that the carbon goes back into the atmosphere--that's why you can't reduce the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere just by planting things and cutting them down.  To reduce carbon dioxide, carbon has to be sequestered--either by large living plants keeping it in use for a long time, or by burying it deep in the ground where it can't be released, as in coal, oil, and natural gas.  The stores of carbon deep in the earth are the result of millennia of carbon sequestration, which gradually reduced the carbon in the atmosphere until it reached modern levels.

That stored carbon is a mixed blessing.  On the one hand, you can get all that energy--millennia of sunshine, all stored up in the carbon.  On the other hand, you can bring our atmosphere very suddenly to prehistoric levels of carbon dioxide.  We have to be very careful and respectful when it comes to that bottled sunshine.  I wonder what colonists on another planet might think, after generations of trying to sequester carbon to make their atmosphere breathable, of the heedless way Earthers just burn the stuff up.

But this isn't meant to be a downer on fire.  Fire is awesome and powerful.  It allows us to live through the winters and make our food nourishing enough to sustain our massive brains.  It's like a little sun, because it releases the sunlight from past years.  And it echoes the way our own bodies burn carbohydrates for energy--fire breathes out carbon dioxide just like we do.  Can you picture a tiny little fire in each of your mitochondria in each of your cells?

In the summer, the earth breathes in.  It stores the sunlight in millions of plants, filling its atmosphere with oxygen.  In the winter, it breathes out--as our fires and our bodies both use up the stored energy, and release carbon dioxide.  We need both the breathing in and the breathing out to stay alive.  It's a beautiful, complex dance to think about.

Anyway, on to the soup.  This is my mother's Christmas Eve soup, which she got from her mother.  Trouble is, no one in the family agrees with me that Christmas Eve is for soup, so I thought I'd make it for Solstice instead.  As an extra benefit, it can be vegan, which was nice given Solstice was on a Friday.

Solstice Soup

1/2 yellow onion
4-6 carrots
4 stalks of celery
1 quart V8 juice
1 cup water
1/2 cup pearl barley
1 can white beans
1 can green beans
1/2 cup frozen chopped spinach
1/2 cup peas
1 tsp vegetable soup base*
1 tsp Old Bay
dash Worcestershire sauce**
salt, pepper, garlic powder to taste
dash Tabasco or cayenne if you like spice

Chop the onion and saute on medium high heat until it is starting to brown.  Add the liquid, chopped carrots and celery, and barley.  Cook for 30 minutes and then add all the other ingredients.  Feel free to sub in or out whatever vegetables you like and have.  Taste as you add the seasonings and don't stop till it tastes right.

*I used Better Than Bouillon, but a bouillon cube would also work.  Beef flavor is good if you don't have vegetable.
**This is technically not vegan because it has anchovies.  A dash of soy sauce or aminos might be good.

I served it with biscuits and there was only a little bit of whining.  At first Miriam whined because she "hates soup" (she does??) and then I told her it had green beans in it and she loved it, but then Marko whined because he does not like green beans.  Oh well.  It got et.

It's not "nerd blackface," okay?

I really love Big Bang Theory.  I recently watched the 11th season (hooray for the library, which had it) and liked it as much or more than the rest.  However, I've heard more than once that it is a bad show and I should feel bad for liking it, because it makes fun of nerds.

My opinion is that comedy always makes fun of people.  Some comedies make fun of bumbling dads and control-freak moms.  Some comedies make fun of young, single New Yorkers.  To have a comedy about somebody means that person or group gets made fun of sometimes.  My favorite other comedy is The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, which makes fun of just about everyone: black people, gay people, Jewish people, Asian people, rich people, poor people.  And yet all these characters are humanized as well--they have moments when you realize that even though they are complete stereotypes, they are people and can rise above your expectations.

Of course there could be mean-spirited comedies, where the same people are always the butt of the joke and never humanized or allowed to do anything good.  I can't think of a comedy that is like this because I watch so few, but I know I've seen reality TV that was about mocking people.  It's ugly and mean, and I can certainly entertain the idea that a comedy is too mean to be a good show.

But is Big Bang Theory like that?  I don't see it.  Every character has a chance to shine as well as get laughed at.  Pick-up artist Howard gets a chance to explain how rejected he feels because women think he's too short and needy to date--and to eventually learn how to treat women.  Raj opens up about his shyness and is sometimes a great friend.  Leonard, we are meant to sympathize with a lot as the most "normal" of the bunch.  And Sheldon . . . we are drawn into his character more than any other.  Does he do weird and often inconsiderate things?  Sure.  But he also gets a chance to explain his feelings.  In one episode, he makes Leonard wear a scratchy sweater for days to explain what it's like for him when something isn't finished.  He isn't being picky, he's really having a hard time, and we are meant to understand this.  And of course he slowly grows as a person and accomplishes things we never would have thought possible.  All of this humanizes nerds by showing us the stuff they've gone through, the things they think, the ways they change.  They're real characters, never just the butt of a joke.

Then, of course, there are the other characters.  Penny is a "cool girl" who gets mocked just as mercilessly as the nerds.  Amy and Bernadette are just as nerdy as the men but aren't into their fandom, and they get teased too.  Occasionally "jock" type guys appear on the show and are mocked too.  It seems pretty equal-opportunity in its humor.  If I could change one thing, I'd have more women who play D&D and hang out in the comic book store . . . because geek girls exist despite men always telling us we don't.  But they do appear from time to time.

Maybe I'm missing the point of the criticism.  Maybe "nerd blackface" means, "non nerds are playing nerds and that's as offensive as white actors playing black characters in movies."  But "nerd" is not a race.  It's a social designation.  Part of an actor's job is portraying different kinds of people.  How fine-grained is this?  Can a biologist portray a physicist?  Can a Star Wars fan portray a Star Trek fan? 

Of course, even then, this wouldn't condemn Big Bang Theory, because the show is not a bunch of non-nerdy actors portraying nerds.  Several of the actors are really into the stuff they're pretending to be into.  Amy is played by Mayim Bialik, who actually is a scientist.  And many of the guest stars are nerdy heroes, like Stephen Hawking or Bill Gates, playing themselves.

Basically, I don't understand how you can criticize the show without saying, look, you can make fun of anyone else on the planet, but not nerds.  Nerds are permanently off-limits for comedy.  There is comedy about black people and Asian people and gay people, but nerd comedy is a bridge too far.

But! you might say.  Isn't Sheldon's character making fun of the disabled?  He's obviously on the autism spectrum, and he's super annoying!  Everyone is always talking about how annoying he is!

That's actually a big part of the appeal of the show, for me.  Yes, Sheldon has autism (undiagnosed).  He's brilliant, but very routine-oriented and he puts other people out a lot, following his routines.  Sometimes they get impatient and even mean to him because of it.  Other times he's able to show them how important their tolerance is to him.

I guess what I love is that autism isn't treated respectfully, in hushed tones.  Sheldon isn't babied or treated like a hero for existing.  Like every other character, he's mocked for his foibles but has time to shine as well.  Like anyone else, autistic people can be jerks sometimes.  Sometimes their challenges become a challenge for the people around them, and we have to work hard to be patient.  Or else we totally fail to be patient.  That's a thing that happens too, and BBT isn't afraid to laugh about it.

That's what makes it much more meaningful when Sheldon achieves things.  He is one of the best scientists of the batch (equalled, maybe, by Amy) but in his personal life, he really struggles with basic milestones.  Yet, one by one, long after the others, he reaches them.  And though humor surrounds them, we have some serious, real feelings in those episodes.

The last reason I find the show's portrayal of autism to be so important is that real autistic people I know have learned social skills from it.  We can see both Sheldon's point of view and the other characters', so an autistic person watching can think, "Oh, this thing he's doing, which makes sense to me because I do it too, is causing these problems for himself or others.  And here's the solution he discovers by the end of the episode!"  Amy, in particular, is good for this.  She's able both to empathize with Sheldon and to explain the social tactics that will get him out of his mess. 

Should BBT be the only show that ever has nerds in it?  Obviously not.  We should include nerds in more things than comedy shows that make fun of people.  But . . . there are lots of shows like that.  There's Star Trek.  There's Doctor Who.  There's Bones.  Likewise, there need to be lots of characters with autism on TV, so people understand that all autistic people are not just like Sheldon -- they're unique individuals with their own foibles and talents.  But that's hardly BBT's fault.

In short, it's not an offensive show.  It's a comedy show like many others.  If you don't like it, I don't care.  Go somewhere and watch something else, and don't yuck other people's yum.  I love it and am not going to stop loving it just because you don't find it funny.  I like to hear people like myself and my friends and family tease each other.  I like to watch successful scientists tell stories of their awful childhoods--that are over-- while they have fulfilling lives complete with romance and money and scientific discovery.  As a nerdy person myself, it encourages me and makes me smile.  I think that's about as much as anybody can reasonably expect of a sitcom.

Will I NaNo again?

Usually I don't have a real excuse for posting so little, but this time I do: it's National Novel Writing Month.  Last year, NaNoWriMo got me back into writing novels after a five-year break, so the entire experience was exhilarating and I finished in 15 days.  This year, I've had a much harder time.  Part of it was that I wasn't as well prepared.  Part of it was that the story I chose was unexpectedly difficult . . . or, perhaps, expectedly difficult.  Main characters who are aliens are hard enough to write about.  It's doubly hard when your heroine has a voice in her head which is another character.  It's just . . . complicated.  And the plot . . . oh, the plot.  I get stuck every chapter.

The normal way to do NaNo is to start with a completely blank document and write as much as you can without stopping.  It doesn't matter if it's junk and will ultimately get deleted.  It's a DRAFT, we are reminded.  Don't go back and read what you wrote, ever.  Don't edit anything.  Don't stop to pick the exact right word, just write and write and write.  And when you're done, you will have 50,000 words which are a) not very good, and b) not really enough to be a finished adult novel.

I'm realizing that this approach is the opposite of the one that has worked well for me in the past.  While I do very much like to get into the zone and really plow ahead on a novel, over the course of a couple of months, I am not much of a drafter.  In school I always wrote the final draft first, and then went back to make a fake rough draft to satisfy the teacher.  In writing, a "second draft" always winds up being either a complete rewrite with a totally different plot, or else a good draft which has been perfected by daily editing over what I wrote the previous day, followed by pass after pass of editing afterward.  There is no cruddy first draft because it's just really really hard to add good words if your words weren't good the first time.

Of course this is a me thing, not an everyone thing.  A lot of people do draft after draft.  Other people are just starting out noveling so they really just want to make themselves go the distance in a way they never have before.

The way I got around it this time was to "cheat" -- that is, I wrote 21k before November even started, so that by the time November was over I would actually have the novel done.  And that worked well for me, except for the constant stalling over plot problems.  If I were to do it again, I'd do more outlining before I started, and go back to daily editing of the previous day's work, which always gets me back in the right frame of mind.

I love, love, love the community of NaNoWriMo.  I have a facebook group I love, where we rant about the difficulties of writing and challenge each other to word sprints (which I do badly at, but it's nice to know your friends are writing at the same time).  I like to track my word count, to a point.  That is, I like watching it go up, but I sometimes get too focused on it.  Sometimes making your word count go down by a thousand words is much better progress than writing a thousand more. 

So will I do it next year?  Maybe.  Depends on what I'm working on and how ready I am.  I think it's important to dive in when you're ready, plotted out, and inspired, rather than when the calendar says you should.  And that's why I'm planning, when the alien story is done, to start right back in with another novel: plotting first, then some test writing (writing scenes in different POVs to see what works--that was very helpful for the current novel), and then starting in as I'm ready.  Probably not 1667 words per day, like I've been doing, but a little at a time, when I actually have something to write and know where I'm going.

So what am I up to now?  I'm basically in the final showdown and I don't know what to do.  I've won NaNo (50k words in November -- I have 58k at this point) and my total wordcount is almost 80k, which was what I wanted.  But I have to beat the bad guys!  Plus, there was supposed to be kissing!  We'll . . . we'll see.  I just want to get it done, and then maybe see as it's as awful as I secretly suspect.

How to eat if animals matter

So after that rather mean post about vegans, I feel like I should say something a bit more positive.  I actually think considering animal welfare when you eat is an admirable thing to do.  I just think there are a lot of ways to do that besides cutting out all animal foods forever and shaming everyone who doesn't.

My personal view is to assign animals moral value, but less than people have.  So if I'm doing some kind of moral action, like donating to a charity, I pick human charities because there is so much need there.  Yet it's not really zero-sum; you can care about animals without taking away anything from humans.

Going vegan is one way to do that.  Now being vegan does not mean that your food choices harm no animals.  Animal habitats are destroyed to make farms.  Insects and other predators are poisoned to protect your food supply.  It's a fact of nature that everything is in competition with everything else; for humans to eat we have to take resources that animals want to use.  Perhaps at some future date we'll reach a situation where that isn't the case, but for now, perfect moral purity toward animals is not a reachable goal and I have lots of side-eye for people who think they've met it simply because they're vegan.

That said, a vegan diet causes a lot less animal death and suffering than an omnivorous diet, so that is a good choice if you think you can.

The trouble is, most people don't feel like they could be vegan.  There are an awful lot of delicious animal foods out there, and life is hard, and sometimes you just want a pint of ice cream or a Big Mac.  And I think rather than sit with the idea that we are less than perfect, we prefer to define perfection such that we're not violating it: "animals don't even matter."  Isn't it easier to eat that Big Mac if you assume they don't?

I prefer to carve a middle way where I accept that my moral actions aren't perfect, that there is always more I could be doing, but that I'm doing small things in what ways I can.  Some years ago, my big thing was to avoid cruelty to humans in what I buy, which meant no Hershey's or Nestle products and as few new clothes as I could buy.  The chocolate situation was easily solved when I discovered Aldi sources its chocolate ethically, but I'm less certain about clothes.  I am not sure which clothing companies are more ethical than others.  If I stick to used clothes as I usually do, am I sure I'm helping, or am I just preventing my few measley dollars from going to a third world country where they could do some tiny amount of good, if not as much good as if the workers were paid fairly?  I don't have the bandwidth to unpick this dilemma right now, so I'm putting it on the back burner for the moment, to pick back up later.

Where food is concerned, I've been wanting for a few years to cut back on animal products, but I've been stymied by my own exhaustion and my family's needs.  Marko badly needed to put on weight, so I was sneaking eggs and butter into everything I could.  (And then Marko wasn't eating it, so I was eating it, and that's why my gut looks like this.)  But things are getting a little easier: Marko has hit the ninth percentile in weight, which is considered healthy.  Marko and Michael have both been requesting meatless meals, because neither one likes meat, and the thought of making dinners they wouldn't whine about is a plus.  And John is in the process of converting to Orthodoxy, which means he isn't going to be eating animal products on Wednesdays and Fridays.  So it seems like a good time to try a little occasional veganism!

All right, so what sort of things might a person do, if you wanted to prevent some harm to animals but weren't interested in going completely vegan?  Here are a few ideas:
1.  Try to find cruelty-free animal products.  It can be hard to be sure of how animals are treated when you're buying something at the store (for instance, "cage free" doesn't mean the chickens are better treated at all) but often it's possible to buy things from local farms.  Eggs are the easiest thing to find this way; kids often sell them as a hobby.  The price will be higher, but you can combine this with eating less of them overall.
2.  Try one meatless or vegan meal a week.  Or make all your breakfasts vegan (avocado toast, anyone?) or all your lunches.
3.  Reduce the amount of meat on your plate at a meal--take more vegetables or serve a second vegetable dish.  Or make tacos with two cans of beans and only half a pound of beef.
4.  Give up one single animal product, like eggs or beef.  Apparently giving up beef alone would almost solve our climate problem, if everyone did it.  If animal misery is what you worry about most, I'd give up eggs.  Dairy cows are treated comparatively well, so if there's one thing you keep, I vote milk.
5.  Stop making whole meals out of animal products (e.g. a burger) but keep using eggs in recipes, chicken broth in soup, or cheese as a garnish.


For most of my life I've eaten vegetarian (not vegan) at breakfast and lunch because I don't like meat enough to go through the trouble of cooking it more than once a day.  And now that John is becoming Orthodox, I'm working in some vegan dinners to serve on Wednesdays and Fridays.

It happens that I love vegan dishes.  Only thing is, they're often not very satisfying.  I don't feel like I've eaten a meal.  However, I don't tend to have tofu or almonds or non-dairy milk around to replace animal products.  So I've been trying out different recipes looking for things that actually seem like a meal.

What I've found is that you need to replace meat with more than just protein.  Protein is only one of the things meat provides a meal.  Meat also provides
-fat
-umami flavor
-variety
-interesting textures

So when I'm looking to make a meal without meat, I can't just make my usual casserole and leave the meat out.  Instead, it's a more satisfying meal if I replace the meat with a number of different things, to make sure there is variety, umami, and fat in the finished meal.

For instance, I've started to make meatless chili, but just leaving the meat out makes it very dull.  So I make a more complicated chili with sweet potatoes, two kinds of beans, onions browned in oil, and bell peppers.  To ramp up the flavor, I make sure to put in plenty of cumin and a splash of lime juice.

Here are some things that I think are really good in vegan meals:
-mushrooms
-soy sauce
-tomato paste
-fermented foods -- miso and marmite are two I'd like to try, but even sauerkraut is a nice addition
-squash of all kinds
-bread on the side -- I feel it helps round out a meal.  Foccaccia is a yummy vegan bread.
-seeds or nuts -- sunflower seeds are great on a salad, or sesame seeds on a stir-fry
-avocados.  Yum.  Like if butter were a fruit.
-anything browned, caramelized, or smoked -- that adds a lot of deliciously complex flavor
-vegetable stock.  I got some Better Than Bouillon vegetable stock the other day and it is very tasty.  Don't cook in water if you can cook in stock!

To reward you if you've come this far, a recipe!

Black Bean Soup

1/2 cup dry rice
1 can black beans
1 can diced tomatoes
1-2 bell peppers, any color
1 onion
1/2 cup frozen corn
1 quart water or stock
2-3 Tbs oil (olive is fine)
salt, garlic powder, cumin, chili powder, all to taste
splash lime juice


Cook up the onions in the oil till they're starting to brown.  Add all the other ingredients except the corn and seasonings and cook about 20 minutes, till the rice is done.  Add the corn and season to taste.  Serve with crackers or bread.

Nobody likes vegans and prolifers

 

You know that joke?  "How can you tell if someone's a vegan?  Don't worry, they'll tell you."

It's kind of true.  I briefly followed a vegan online and the vegan posts were unending.  You know the kind of stuff: rude assumptions about meat eaters, references to people "forcing their children to eat rotting corpses," pictures of slaughterhouses, adorable pictures of pigs, Holocaust references.  I got tired of it and unfollowed.  It just felt extreme.

It occurred to me that this is the same kind of thing I'm used to seeing from the prolife movement: constant posts, graphic pictures, attributing evil to prochoicers, and Holocaust comparisons.  Nobody likes it; it makes them uncomfortable, but the prolifers, like vegans, just can't stop.

And it makes sense, really.  Prolifers and vegans both believe that they are witnessing a moral disaster, worse than a nuclear bomb or a genocide.  It's pretty hard to stay moderate and appealing when you legitimately think thousands or millions of morally significant beings are being murdered every day.  But the backlash comes from the same place: nobody likes to feel they are being accused of supporting a moral catastrophe.  That's why people sneer at vegans, mock their food choices, or start arguments about the health of their diet.  It's why a prolifer I know got egged outside a clinic.  It's downright offensive to accuse people of being okay with something deeply morally wrong.

The trouble is, the rights of animals and embryos are on the fringes of morality.  I've said before that basic morality is provable through reason, but the actual foundation you choose to underlay it all is a bit arbitrary -- you have to choose who to include in your circle of morally significant beings, and you have to choose whether to value life, liberty, or happiness most.  The result is that we'll all agree on the morality of some things, like slavery or murder, but in fringe cases like animal rights or abortion, we will diverge -- all while considering ourselves to be reasonably moral people.

Unfortunately arguments about these things tend to miss the point.  We assume people share our moral foundations, so we attribute evil motives to them ("they hate babies"/"they don't care about suffering") while failing to address the real differences in morality.

The difference here is mainly the circle of morally significant beings.  A prolifer puts the boundary at "members of the human species."  If it's a human, and it's alive, it's equivalent to any other living human.  An eight-cell zygote is exactly as significant as you are.  A vegan, on the other hand, tends to place it at "beings that can experience happiness or suffering."  So they will find it absurd to value the zygote more than a chicken, because the zygote has no awareness we know of, nor any brain to be aware with, while the chicken clearly suffers when locked in a battery cage.  Sometimes they accuse the prolifer of lying about their motives, and simply wanting to oppress women.  (And some prolifers really do seem to want that; but most, I think, are completely honest.)

Given that the decision which to value is mainly arbitrary, or else handed down from a religion, it's unlikely to be fruitful to argue about these principles.  Instead, I think both groups might benefit from selling a milder form: Okay, say an embryo isn't exactly as valuable as a toddler.  Or a chicken isn't exactly as valuable as you are.  That doesn't mean these beings have no moral value.  If you could preserve these lives without sacrificing the life, liberty, or happiness of adult humans, wouldn't you want to do that?  I don't think a chicken is equal to a human, but all things being equal, of course I'd prefer it if chickens weren't debeaked and locked in battery cages.

To get here, people have to discard the "you're a moral monster" part of the argument.  Instead they should try to stay positive about small changes people could make that wouldn't throw any other moral value (the liberty of women; feeding the hungry) under the bus.  For instance, donating to a pregnancy center that supports women who want to keep their pregnancies but can't afford to.  Or supporting laws that make insurers cover the cost of pregnancy and birth.  Or eating a vegan meal one night a week.  Or buying cruelty-free meat.

Would a prolifer or vegan really be satisfied if people made these choices and didn't go the whole way?  Of course not.  The prolifer won't be happy till embryos have the same exact rights an adult human has; and the vegan won't be happy until everyone gives up meat.  But these are goals they won't actually be able to achieve, not in our lifetimes at least.  So I'm just suggesting that in their outward messaging, they focus on these goals.  Think about it: what are the odds of converting one person to a vegan?  Pretty low.  But you might have better luck converting seven people to once-a-week vegans, and that saves the exact same number of cows.  Likewise, we're not making abortion illegal right now (and if we could, people would still get them) but there are lots of interventions which lower the abortion rate.

I don't know how many vegans or prolifers read this blog, but if you are one, I highly recommend dropping the language about how horrified you are and how terrible people not on your team are.  They aren't terrible, they're working their morality from completely different assumptions.  Now they're doing a great deal of harm, by your standards, but they need to be convinced, not condemned.  And the gentle, positive, incremental way is going to work a lot better for your goals.

Fall takes

1

Well, it's fall now!  And the weather fairies seem to have gotten the message, because on the Equinox it was clear and breezy, and since then it's been cold and drizzly.

Fall gives me weird feelings.  I don't know whether to cheer for the changing weather or dig in my heels ... because for a short time, it's getting better and better, and then suddenly it's too cold and going too fast and all the leaves fall off and then it's winter.  I really hate winter.  I hate not being able to go outside, but I'm very intolerant of cold so I sit inside staring out the window feeling trapped.  It doesn't help that our house has mostly small windows, and isn't very warm.

But we're far from that day just yet.  Last night we got to sleep with the window open and the fan off, which was lovely.  I'm not used to all that silence though.  The window units are like a jet engine.  When we turn them on in the spring, they're way too loud, but my ears got used to them and now expect them.  At least the crickets are still going strong!  I love the way summer nights in Virgina sound like we live in the middle of the jungle.

2

I'm still submitting my novel.  So far I've sent out 72 queries (meaning, a query letter and some number of sample pages) to literary agents.  I've gotten four manuscript requests, and most of the rest were either non-responses or form rejections.  All four of the people who read the manuscript turned it down.  But I did get a few encouraging responses saying the story was good, just not quite what they were looking for, and one actual piece of constructive criticism saying the ending was a little anticlimactic.  So I put the querying on hold for a while so I could rework the beginning a bit (since that's the part most people are seeing and not being interested in) and redo the entire ending.

I've gotten that done, and I think it's a huge improvement.  I blew some stuff up, that's always good, right?  So I'm ready to go back to querying, hopefully with better luck this time.

3

NaNoWriMo is coming soon and I am not sure what to do!  I feel overwhelmed with my life now, and what's going to change before November?  How will I have time to write anything?  But I remember I felt the same last time and I got it done.  So I'm not backing down just yet.

I think I've chosen a story.  I had like seven ideas to choose from, and a big part of me has been saying what I need to write is the memoir, the one about my experience in RC, but I just . . . really don't want to dig all that stuff up again.  So I'm thinking of the interstellar triller with the love story in it.  I came up with the idea when I was twelve or thirteen and reworked it many times without actually writing anything like a novel out of it.  It's hard because my main character is actually two people living in the same body.  How does one narrate a thing like that?  I'm planning on focusing on one of the two people, but they talk to each other and it's going to be a little difficult making all the inner dialog clear.  I tried a few pages in third person and they suck so I'm going to experiment with first person.  Not sure.  Third person is more the thing for adult sci-fi, but of course the right thing is the thing that works for this particular story.

4

So much political stuff going on right now.  I have been getting way too sucked in, and arguing with way too many strangers.  The one bright side is, a lot of the more-liberal Catholic facebookers keep friend-requesting me.  I never know whether or not to accept those.  Like, they seem like nice people and I'd probably like them.  But would they be super disappointed to find out I'm not actually in their tribe?

I have a smartphone now, which is mostly great because I can take good photos and the school can reach me when I'm at the park.  But it just makes my facebook addiction even worse.  I'm thinking of going back to screen-free Fridays.  Or at the very least, facebook-free.  My messenger conversations with friends really get me through the day, and of course there's writing and reading the news ..... BUT, on the other hand, it's one day a week and I have a pile of books to read.

5  

I got the results from Marko's psychological assessment.  Did I mention we did that, back in August?  It took like five months to even get the appointment, and we had to drive an hour away, but insurance covered it so I really wanted to get it done while we've got it.  (Not expecting to lose it but in this climate who can say what's going to happen?)  Marko was luckily very cooperative.  It was really nice having a day out with him, without any of the other kids.  We even got burgers and milkshakes together.  His behavior lately has frustrated me to no end, so I really needed that chance to see his better side.

Well, he has autism.  Which obviously came as no surprise, but this diagnosis is official unlike the previous one.  We got a big packet full of resources to look into, which I stuck on top of the piano to look at later and really need to go through.

The big thing I need to look into is some kind of counseling for his emotions.  The occupational therapy he gets at school is focused on school stuff, like his (in)ability to write.  But his behavior at home has started to be really dreadful in the past six months or so, and a lot of that is because he is having interpersonal issues with his siblings.  He takes everything as a personal affront (them playing games that don't interest him; them playing pretend; anyone who is not him being first at everything) and, since he's learned to control his temper a lot better, he often doesn't melt down but instead passive-aggressively teases and annoys them.  It's like regular sibling rivalry, but on steroids because even when they're trying to be nice, he often interprets it as being mean.  

It doesn't help that Michael has a big chip on his shoulder lately and Miriam has tended to jump straight to banshee shrieking at the slightest offense.  Maybe they're hyper-defensive because of Marko's bad behavior.  Or maybe Marko's behaving badly because they're being so mean.  I don't know, but it's a big cycle and I keep trying and trying to break it, but the only thing that works is separating Marko from the others.  I keep begging him to please, PLEASE, read a book or type a story or play with your cards or ANYTHING that is not interacting with your siblings!  But that's not a long-term solution because he has to learn to interact with peers someday.  I had hoped he'd learn that at school, and he's made some small progress, but not nearly as much as I would like.  So that's what the counseling would be for.

6

Jackie is still so hard.  If she naps, she's up till ten or eleven at night.  If she doesn't nap .... she's still often up late because she took a 30-second doze at the dinner table, or because she was up late the previous night, or whatever.  But if she's up late once, she's tired and cranky and there's no way she's getting through the day without a nap.  It's a cycle I'm constantly battling.  And then I hear about 20-month-olds that both nap, even in the afternoon, and also go to bed at seven and I get sour about it.  Did you know that some children, you can deliberately mess up their nap schedule or take them to an evening activity, and the very next day they resume a normal sleep routine as if nothing ever happened?  SO UNFAIR.

In the daytime her hobbies including nursing for what feels like hours while humming Twinkle Twinkle, pinching my belly, and trying to flip upside-down; biting for no reason; demanding food purely for smashing purposes, and coloring on the walls with marker.  I mean, standard toddler stuff.

Her verbal skills have really exploded though.  From just a couple words, in a month or two suddenly she had dozens.  Other. Me. Blue. Purple. Yellow. Apple. Egg. My. Come on. Man. Out.  Some words she won't even try, like Marko or Michael's names; others she seems to pick up after hearing them once.  I can't say it makes her easier to please -- I mean, the main problem in her life isn't that I don't understand her, it's that I do and still sometimes say no.  That's when she goes ballistic and goes for the eyeballs.

Is Jackie more difficult than the standard baby?  Or am I just so tired it seems that way?  The world will never know.

7

Oh, I do have one thing I'm very proud of!  I finally went to the dentist and got my cavities drilled.  It was both very scary to face and very expensive, so I had every motivation to put it off, but I finally got it done and that's a thing I don't have to worry about again for awhile.

Now is it me, or do dentists univerally pick the worst possible music to play in their offices?  It's always eighties music, and not the good stuff.  Somehow easy-listening eighties music makes the skin crawl up the back of my spine.  It feels like something horrible is going to happen.  And I don't know if it's legitimately terrible music, or if I got this association from how dang often I've been scared in dentists' offices and that's what was always playing.

A few worst offenders: I'm Still Standing, Fly Like an Eagle, literally anything by The Police, Your Kiss is on My List, Take On Me.  Is it the minor keys, the synth, or what?  I don't know, but a whole lot of 80's songs give me the heebie jeebies.

The Catholic way to be gay?

I read a lot of blogs by Catholic gay people.  Especially when I was dealing with my own different conflicts, I found a lot of encouragement from other people who felt they didn't fit in.  But of course, after a lot of reading, I started to feel pretty bad about it all.  It wasn't just that Catholic teaching itself is very hard to follow for a gay person.  It's that everything in the church seemed designed to hurt them and make them feel terrible.

Right now I've been seeing that in spades: nasty articles blaming gay people for sex abuse, saying that gay people have no ability to control themselves, saying that homosexuality is inherently pederastic, and so on.  These people love to make the assumption that any priest who says something welcoming to gay people is both gay and an abuser, and any priest who calls out homosexuality "for what it is" is a holy and virtuous man.  I've even read that when an antigay priest is caught in homosexual activity, it's always a setup.  The whole church is infiltrated with gay people, aka evil people.  How does it feel to be a Catholic gay person, following the Church's teaching to the best of one's ability, hearing stuff like this?

But it's not new.  As long as I've followed the subject, there have been lots of voices saying that gay people have a mental illness, that they should never say "gay" but "struggling with same-sex attraction," and that in order to be faithful Catholics, they have to not only be celibate but handle their orientation in the exact way the lecturer recommends -- which usually means being deeply ashamed of their orientation and never disclosing it to anyone.

It's gotten to the point that whenever I see someone say, "There's no such thing as gay, there are only straight people who are confused about their sexual identity," I roll my eyes.  Isn't that exactly what a gay person would say, if they didn't want the shame and stigma of being gay but also felt bad about lying?

The main points of this position:
-homosexuality isn't natural, but is caused by psychological trauma of some kind
-homosexuality can be cured by proper therapy
-it is important never to call a person "gay" but "same-sex attracted"
-gay people are emotionally immature and narcissistic
-gay men should never be priests because they can't have a spousal relationship with the church
-the "gay lobby" should be opposed in every respect

I don't know how this particular attitude became "the Catholic way to be."  The Catechism certainly doesn't support it.  I do think Benedict's instruction on gays in the priesthood has some hints of it.  And it's very much pushed by Courage -- a group which, to many people, spells out the Catholic way to be gay: be in the closet, while attending a secret support group a lot like AA to talk about your struggle with same-sex attraction.  What I have recently found out, though, is that its roots come from some unsavory places.

The first problematic root of this position is Freud.  The blogger Chris Damian has a five-part series explaining how it is derived from Freud.  Although Freud is appreciated today as having broken some new ground and asked some interesting questions, psychologists today largely don't approve his conclusions.

The second is Fr. John Harvey, the founder of Courage.  I didn't know anything about him till I read of him on Chris Damian's blog, but my eyes about bugged out reading this article of his from 1992, in which he argues pedophile priests can and should be returned to ministry.

"The success of the Saint Luke Institute Program in Suitland, Maryland, should also not be overlooked. Dr. Frank Valcour, Medical Director, reports that 32 of 55 child molesters who had completed treatment by September 1989, were doing well, with no reported instances of relapse and no new allegations of child molestation. 

Valcour concludes that, after making allowances for the possibility of some improper behavior which was not reported and for individuals who are impaired in other ways and thus not fit for future ministry, the majority of those treated have attained a new level of psychological and spiritual health. It would seem, then, that the risk of relapse will continue to be minimal and that these men should be reassigned to ministry under carefully qualified conditions. "

It seems that, after his work rehabilitating pedophile priests--where "the majority" of the priests did not offend again, but it appears about a third did--he turned his attention to gay laypersons.  Just as he thought he could "cure" pedophiles with psychiatric care and 12-step programs, he tried to do the same for homosexuals.  He seems to see both in the exact same way, as disordered, sexual sins, ignoring that one harms a victim and is a criminal offense.   Using the same approach for both is needlessly harsh to gay people, and unconscionably lax when it comes to pedophiles.

Another person who has been active in Courage and written a lot of their material is Dr. Richard Fitzgibbons.  He's written lots of articles on homosexuality that fits the pattern I've talked about above, stuff like this:

"The most frequently seen cause of sadness in the past leading to homosexual attractions in males was the result of childhood and adolescent rejection by peers because of very limited athletic abilities. Many children who have poor eye-hand coordination are not good in the most popular sports and are on the receiving end of harsh and cruel criticism and rejection by their peers. Subsequently, powerful feelings of loneliness, sadness and isolation develop. The craving for acceptance and love from peers results in strong emotional attractions to those of the same sex which leads many youngsters to think they may be homosexuals."

Now of course you don't become gay because you couldn't hit a baseball.  (I believe there is some correlation between homosexuality and Asperger's, both of which have genetic causes, and Asperger's does screw with your hand-eye coordination, so perhaps that's what showed up in his data.)  But I'm just going to go ahead and assume you'll agree this guy is an untrustworthy source when I show you what he said about priest abusers:

"Mental health professionals who are called upon to evaluate priests should report fully on the background of the accuser and should document how they have determined that the specific accusation against the priest is not false. The need for such an evaluation process is clear, given the extent of the false accusations made in our culture today. The same responsibility applies to review boards. 

Since the major unresolved anger that adults bring into their adult lives that is misdirected at others arises from hurts in the father relationship, a thorough history of the accuser’s relationship with her/his father is required. 

Unfortunately, some dioceses have supported false accusations by accusers with criminal records, who even spent time in jail. One such accuser, who had no proof of her accusation, received a financial settlement, followed by an attempt to laicize the priest. 

A veteran Los Angeles lawyer, Mr. Steier, who was involved in over 100 investigations into claims of sexual abuse by Catholic priests, wrote in a declaration to the Los Angeles County Superior Court in 2011, “One retired FBI agent who worked with me to investigate many claims in the clergy cases told me, in his opinion, about one-half of the claims made in the clergy cases were either entirely false, or so greatly exaggerated, that the truth would not have supported prosecutable claim for childhood sexual abuse.....

The background for the work of the review boards is that the allegations of a charge of sexual abuse seem to be the one “crime” in our society in which the accused is considered guilty until proven innocent. This attitude in regard to accusations against priests, in particular, has led many priests to describe the present situation in the Church as a witch-hunt, comparable to that in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1600s."

 Elsewhere he says that informing the congregation of any allegations and asking anyone with information to come forward will simply "create false memories" and "destroy the priest's reputation."

Another leading light in all this is Fr. Tony Anatrella.  I've mentioned him before, because I'm so blown away how much of the fashionable viewpoint on homosexuality comes from him.  He even helped write Benedict's statement on gay priests, linked above.  He came under fire for telling bishops they didn't necessarily have to report sex abuse to civil authorities.  Later, he was accused by four people of sexually abusing them during "conversion therapy."

With all this, one has to ask if any of this viewpoint has any credibility at all.  If its main inventors were that bad at psychology, and that poor on the subject of abuse, why should we trust them on homosexuality?  And why do we have ministries for gay people entirely led by priests or doctors who claim not to be gay -- what qualifies them for this ministry?  I far prefer to listen to people who actually are gay, if I want to know what it's like to be gay and Catholic.

In that interest, I'm just going to signal-boost a few of my favorite blogs, which can tell you all you want to know about what it's really like to be gay.  They tend to be skeptical of the explanations of these "psychologists."  For instance, some come from families where they had good relationships with both  parents; some not.  Some were abused as children; some not.  Some have tried to be "cured" of being gay and had no luck.  Most agree homophobia is a serious problem, within and without the Church.


Chris Damian at University Ideas, who inspired this post
Gabriel Blanchard at Mudblood Catholic
Melinda Selmys at Catholic Authenticity
Spiritual Friendship, a group blog
Eve Tushnet

I would recommend straight Catholics read these regularly to get a sense of what it's like to be gay and Catholic, attempting to follow church teaching.  Stop getting your idea of what homosexuality is and how it can be fixed from wingnuts. 

Bad Venn diagrams

I apparently have to address homosexuality again.  Because when I shared my myths post, everyone kind of ignored what I said and just repeated "but lavender mafia tho."  It's really entrenched and I've been arguing against it over and over, but no one's really convinced and I'm wasting my time.  Instead I'll just throw it all in a post, and if I feel the compulsion to talk to these people again, I'll just linkdrop it as needed.

People like LifeSite News, Church Militant, Crisis, and former nuncio Vigano (more on him later) are pushing a single narrative in regard to sex abuse, the "lavender mafia" story.  Basically they separate priests into two categories, like this:

While they'll admit that there are few rare exceptions (apparently 20% of victims being female is just a tiny blip in the data) they mostly think that if you purged the gays -- who can be easily recognized because they are liberal and push gay rights -- there would be hardly any abuse anymore.

I argue that the Venn diagram looks more like this monstrosity:

In other words, some priests are liberal and some are conservative.  Of both camps, some are gay.  Whether liberal or conservative, gay or straight, some are not celibate.  And whether liberal or conservative, gay or straight, some of the non-celibate priests have molested children.

I've had some trouble because there is no statistical proof of what percentage of priests are gay, which makes it impossible to say if the gay ones are more or less likely to be celibate, or to be molesters, than straight priests.  One thing that is clear is that the rate of homosexuality is drastically higher than the surrounding population.  Estimates range from 1/3 to 1/2 of all priests having a homosexual orientation, though most would be private about it.

The usual "proof" given is that 80% of the victims in the John Jay Report were male.  The authors of the report denied that this meant the abusers were gay, but said it was about opportunity.  Still, they left themselves open to such a claim by calling the 11-14 age group -- the age about half the victims were -- "postpubescent."  Only, most boys in that group would not be postpubescent.  The clinical definition of pedophilia is attraction to children under thirteen.  Psychologists believe that pedophiles do not care about the sex of their victims; it's children in general that they're attracted to.  So I think we can discard this "proof."

The next claim is that priests who are gay (and by extension, assumed to be non-celibate and possibly molesting children) are necessarily liberal.  It makes sense that a gay priest might choose a liberal approach, because it would allow him to be sexually active without guilt.  And certainly there are some who have taken this approach, and if they get into any trouble for their behavior, whether with adults or children, they might claim "I'm being persecuted for being gay!  It's those terrible homophobes in the church!"  That way he can bring liberal lay people and liberal clergy to his defense.

But there are plenty of priests who take the opposite approach: they preach a very conservative, strict ethic on sexuality and even decry homosexuality.  Sometimes they even obsess over it, making it their main mission.  But this is a smokescreen to conceal their behavior.  What better cover for being gay than being a massive homophobe?  That, or they are so deeply ashamed over their behavior that they can't stop preaching against it, even though they also can't stop doing it.

Want examples?  There are lots.

Fr. Maciel, of course.  I don't remember him ever ranting about being gay, but his order was very conservative and gender-essentialist.  The sexes were strictly segregated for chastity's sake -- to the point that those of us who had brothers at the apostolic school weren't allowed to talk to them except under special circumstances.  But we also were not allowed to be undressed in front of other girls; to form particular friendships; or to share beds when we stayed in hotels together, even though we were put 3-4 in a room.  The careful tiptoeing around any sexual circumstance led to a lot of people defending Maciel -- "When could he have ever acted out sexually?  The rules there are insane, it would have been impossible!"  Well, the rules were different for him.  Anyway, he had two mistresses and abused dozens of boys.  To me, that looks like a person who is normally straight, but also a pedophile.

Fr. C. Frank Phillips, of the Society of St. John Cantius founded a traditionalist order of priests who say the Latin Mass.  He was placed on leave after credible allegations of sexual misconduct with adult males.

Fr. Tony Anatrella is the originator of much of the narrative of homosexuality being merely a defect -- you're not gay, he would tell people, but simply straight and confused.  He also helped write Benedict XVI's policy against ordaining homosexuals.  Later it turned out he was sexually harassing people during his "conversion therapy."

Cardinal Keith O'Brien campaigned heavily against gay marriage, calling it "grotesque."  Later it turned out he had been sexually involved with at least four priests or seminarians -- one of them for years.

This seminarian claims there was an active homosexual culture at his conservative seminary.

This article claims several conservative bishops are gay.  From the article:

"[This bishop] spent a million dollars in a campaign to persuade registered Catholics to support a marriage amendment that would define marriage as only between one man and one woman. (It was defeated on November 6, 2012.) In connection with this effort he wrote every priest of the diocese and said the he would "not tolerate any open dissent" to his efforts.
He wrote an article about his official teaching on homosexuality to a local paper. When a woman objected to his interpretation he wrote her a letter: "Catholics are bound in conscience to believe this teaching (that homosexuality is intrinsically evil). Those who do not cannot consider themselves to be Catholic and ought not to participate in the sacramental life of the Church... Your eternal salvation may well depend upon a conversion of heart on this topic." (Star-Tribune 5-11-10)
Our clerical informant insisted that [this bishop] has a gay orientation that was known and talked about since his seminary days. (I never report the identification of a cleric's sexual orientation without at least three reliable independent personal validations. Those I have.)"  [My note: I redacted the bishop's name because I still feel a bit funny about outing the guy.]

Three priests say gay men should not be priests -- I'm including this because I find it ironic that the first of the three did not know that his superior was sexually active with males, and the third was later accused by several women of sexually molesting them during "exorcisms." The former should tip us off that purging gays from the priesthood is a lot easier said than done; the latter should remind us that women are also victims of molesters.



Anyway.  Given all this, I'm pretty annoyed at Vigano's statement.  Not that I disbelieve his main point, that Francis knew about McCarrick and brushed it off.  I mean, we already know that Francis knew about Barros and brushed it off.  He's got a history.  And we also know that JP2 brushed off any number of things and still got canonized.  One can always claim one was naive and believed the guy was innocent.

But Vigano goes well beyond accusing Francis of defending McCarrick -- he blames the whole thing on a lavender mafia.  It's the liberals and the gays!  They're attacking the real church!  Their goal is to change church teaching on homosexuality!  And I don't think all this is true.  Why would gay cardinals want to change church teaching on homosexuality?  They aren't being held back from following it by church teaching.

Basically, here's what I think is going on.  Let's keep the mafia metaphor.  Everyone's got skeletons; everyone's got dirt -- or nearly everyone.  The bishops who don't have mistresses or lovers have covered at least once for those who do.  Vigano himself covered up an investigation against Niedstedt.  For a long time, it was an uneasy truce between liberals and conservatives -- let's sweep the scandals under the rug, even though we all know each other's dirt, because if a scandal came out, the church's reputation will suffer and we'll all be worse off.  (Just like in the Harry Dresden books I'm currently reading -- the wizards and the vampires hate each other, but there's a mutual understanding that you never call the cops.)

Well, the scandals are out and the church is suffering just as predicted, so Vigano thought, "Well, why the heck not?  Let's start slinging mud."  He's bringing out what he knows, because he hates Francis and the liberals.  We'll have to see if some liberal bishops have anything to sling back.  But I think we can predict a lot of ugliness in the future.  And really it's for the best -- even if they're exposing scandals for their own reasons, they'll be exposing them and that can only be a good thing.  Fewer coverups are always a plus.  Maybe people will stop doing it because they don't want to give their ideological opponents ammunition -- when, sadly, the virtues of chastity and charity were not reason enough.

Victims' advocates are coming out saying they don't care to be used as ammunition in a fight between liberal and conservative bishops.  And really, it's a pretty gross thing to do.  I'm also concerned about innocent people caught up in this -- for instance, Fr. James Martin, who has preached against discrimination against gays (though he has never, by the way, advocated for a change in church teaching).  People are saying he must be gay, must be part of the lavender mafia, must want more child sex abuse.  That's a really sick thing to say about a priest who, so far as anybody knows, is celibate.  And there are lots of quietly gay priests, both liberal and conservative, who are doing a fine job as priests, chaste and harming no one.  I would hate to see a witch hunt attempt to drive them out.

It's a straight problem!

A Parody, Inspired By Stuff I Read on Facebook

First, I ought to point out that I'm not heterophobic at all.  I have lots of friends who suffer from opposite-sex attraction (OSA).  (I should note that it is not appropriate to call them "straight" because that implies their sexual orientation is who they are rather than a tiny, disordered part of them.)

But I'd be hiding the truth if I didn't admit what I know about heterosexuals: that they don't just have normal desires toward the wrong object, but an entirely twisted and disordered sexuality and psychology.

Don't believe me?  Consider this:

• 9 out of 10 rapes are male-on-female -- a total of over 200,000 rapes a year
• Girls are four times as likely to be sexually abused by a man than boys are
• Prisons actually have to segregate their populations to avoid heterosexual rapes
• Over one-third of straight marriages end in divorce
• 20% of priest abusers had female victims -- which means the tiny minority of heterosexual priests must be commiting a huge proportion of the crimes

Hollywood is a hotbed of heterosexuality, with most of the actors and writers being active in straight culture.  Much of what they produce has graphic heterosexuality on screen.  Even children's shows include heterosexual romances!  Unsurprisingly, we have found out that Harvey Weinstein and others have committed sexual assault and harassment.  What else would anyone expect from such a rampantly straight culture?

Another place where heterosexuality has infested the culture is colleges.  Parents, be warned: if your child goes to college, they will be exposed to the most depraved heterosexual culture imaginable.  Almost everyone is in a straight relationship or even "hooking up" promiscuously at parties.  As one might expect, there's a lot of rape going on at college too.

But, you'll protest, not all straights are like that!  Some get married and raise families.  Well, sure, but is that really a good upbringing for kids?  700,000 children are abused in the US every year -- the vast majority of that in straight families.  And that's if you don't count children absorbing a heterosexual ideology as abusive, which it almost certainly is -- given that it leads the children to think this gravely disordered "lifestyle" is normal.

Most horrifying is the way heterosexual culture normalizes adult men being attracted to underage girls.  Girls are called "jailbait" if they are attractive and below the legal age.  Heterosexuals would gladly sleep with minors if they thought they could get away with it.  There are whole "jailbait" reddits and actresses playing sexy roles at early ages.  In the past, when heterosexuality was even more normalized, men would even marry girls of 14 or even younger.  Men like Picasso or Robert Koch are glorified, with no one batting an eye at their statutory rapes of minor girls.

So what does all this have to do with the priest scandal?  Given that heterosexuality is this dysfunctional, clearly the only solution is to bar men with OSA from the priesthood altogether.  Even if they are chaste, they must have all the same dysfunction inside them, which is connected with sexual promiscuity and narcissism.  That will lead to problems sooner or later.  The priesthood is an occasion of sin for them, since they have to give counsel to women, act as superior to nuns, and hear the confessions of young girls.  Demand that your bishops banish the straights from the priesthood!  It's the only cure.



Note.  This is just to demonstrate how easy it is to bring up out-of-context statistics, random ancedotes, and naked assertions to make something sound a lot worse than it is.  I don't really think straight priests are a problem. And no one actually knows, so far as I know, what percentage of priests in the US are gay vs. straight.

Debunking some myths about the sex abuse scandal

I've been kind of obsessed with reading up about the sex abuse scandal.  Not to the point of reading the report out of Pennsylvania -- I don't want to actually read graphic accounts; that upsets the heck out of me and I can always read summaries elsewhere.  But I've been reading studies, statistics, and many, many editorials, trying to figure out how this happened and what can be done.  I think maybe I feel drawn to do this because I never followed the scandal at all before.  It broke while I was in boarding school and I was forbidden from reading anything about it -- a rule I followed till 2006.  But even after that, I tended to assume the usual talking points were true -- it was a problem at one time in the past, it's over now, and anyway the Catholic Church is no worse than anybody else in this regard.

But despite my interest in learning more, I've tried to stay relatively quiet.  It's not my problem to solve, and the one answer that keeps coming back to me -- just run far away! -- is not acceptable to most of my friends.

Only, after the initial anger and sadness -- reactions which heartened me, as I saw more and more people acknowledging the problem -- there has been a backlash of the old defensiveness.  Or else people are latching onto it as a way to attack their ideological opponents.

So I thought I'd write a master post with answers to some of the most common bits of misinformation here, so I don't have to keep typing up the same responses and digging up the same links.  My main sources are the John Jay Report (summarized here) and the Australian study, The Royal Commission on Institutional Response to Child Sexual Abuse.  I'm also drawing a little from the work of the late Richard Sipe, expert on the psychology of priests.  Here goes.


Myth #1: Sex abuse by priests is extremely rare and it's much less common than in other organizations.

This claim is often trotted out and I've seen it in many Catholic articles, but none ever cited a source. I've scoured the internet for evidence of it, and I think I've found it here. But it actually says Catholic priests are no more likely to abuse than other religious ministers, not than, say, teachers or scout leaders. It also isn't a rigorous study: they simply asked a few experts who deal with sex abuse whether they see more from priests or other ministers. Certainly I know many other religious groups have a sex abuse problem: evangelicals and Mormons come to mind. But that doesn't mean every denomination has a problem of the magnitude of the Catholic Church.
What hard data I can find is as follows:

• 4% of priests in America have been accused of sexual crimes against minors according to the John Jay Report

• "Of the 4,392 clergy accused, 3,300 were not investigated because the cleric had already died. Of the remainder 1,021 were reported to police and of those, 384 were charged, resulting in 252 convictions and 100 prison sentences; In total, out of the 109,694 priests who were surveyed, 100 were imprisoned." [ibid.]  That makes .26% of all Catholic priests in the US during the time period actually convicted--though this isn't a fair data point, considering 3/4 of the priests involved had died, and in many of the rest of the cases, the statute of limitations had expired.  

• "Even the John Jay study of the Crisis of Sexual Abuse in the United States has only recorded the priests “reported” for the sexual abuse of minors (now well over 5,000 since 1950) from the data supplied by the various dioceses. As more cases are documented the actual number of abusing priests is approaching 10 percent, for instance in Boston and Albany. Los Angeles had 11.5 percent of its active priests in 1983 subsequently revealed to be sexual abusers. The Diocese of Tucson harbored 24 percent abusers on its active clergy rolls in 1988—including retired Bishop Francis J. Green." [Richard Sipe]

• In America, from 2001 to 2005, 2500 teachers have been disciplined for sex crimes against minors, out of three million teachers.  I get .08% out of that -- but over only five years, whereas the John Jay Report covers decades.  I am not sure how you'd convert those numbers, but it still is a fraction the size even of the convictions of the Catholic priests.

• What about the population overall?  It took me a lot of digging but I think I have an answer. "According to the National Center for Missing And Exploited Children, .262% of the population are sex offenders[6]. We know that juveniles are the victims of approximately 66% of sex offenses[7], which means we can estimate that 66% of sex offenders have crimes against juveniles, or .17292% of the population." [source]  That would make Catholic priests significantly more likely to be convicted of a sex crime against a minor -- even given the extensive coverup which hindered convictions from happening. 

Let's turn to the Australian data.  This isn't exactly parallel to the American situation, but I'm referring to it because there is a great deal more information available on sex abuse in Australia thanks to the work of the Royal Commission on Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.  This was a government project to investigate child sex abuse in all institutions, religious and secular, and make recommendations to prevent the same from happening again.

• The Royal Commission found that between 1950 and 2010, 7% of Catholic priests were accused of sex abuse.

• They don't seem to have similar percentages for each religion studied, but the breakdown in cases was 61.8% Catholic, 14.7% Anglican, 7.3% Salvation Army, and the rest Protestant and other.  I compared this to census data from 1986 (since this is in the middle of the time period studied) and found Australians were 26% Catholic, 23% Anglican, .5% Salvation Army, in addition to many other religions.  This shows that, proportionally, Catholics had a much bigger abuse problem than Anglicans.  However, the Salvation Army also had a disproportionate rate of abuse, so it would be untrue to say that Catholics are the only denomination with a problem.  [source]

• Australian data for schools is as follows: "Almost one in three of all survivors we heard about in private sessions (2,186 survivors or 31.8 per cent) told us they were sexually abused in a school setting as a child. Of these survivors, three-quarters (75.9 per cent) said they were abused in non-government schools, of which 73.8 per cent identified a Catholic school and 26.4 per cent identified an Independent school." [source]  This is surprising given that two-thirds of Australian children go to a government school. [source]  However, Australia does have a terrible history of putting Aboriginal children in abusive religous boarding schools, so we may be seeing some of that problem here.

This does seem to demonstrate that while the problems in the Catholic Church are not entirely unique, neither are they exactly the same as everywhere else -- schools, other denominations, or the population at large.  Of course, because there are a lot more teachers and parents in any country than priests, it is far more likely any given child is abused by someone other than a priest.  But we can safely conclude that the Catholic Church has a bigger problem than elsewhere.  And no one denies it has also been compounded by a poor institutional response.



Myth #2: This is a gay problem -- the cure is getting rid of gay priests.

This myth comes in several parts.
1.  The majority of abuse has had male perpetrators and male victims.
2.  That means the perpetrators were homosexual.
3.  The cure is ridding the priesthood of all homosexuals.

The first point is true.  Though very often people will add that the victims were supposedly "postpubescent," thus drawing an inference that the men who abused them were attracted to them because they looked like adult men.  That part is false.  Over half the victims were within a very narrow age window: 11-14 years old, with the average age being 12.  Most boys go through puberty after twelve.  I've taught 14-year-old boys and most of them did not look like adult men.  They looked like gawky children.  My guess is that boys of this age were targeted because this is an age when they are most likely to be altar boys.  They are between the age when they would be allowed to go on trips or to boarding schools, and the age when they might have the courage or strength to fight off an attacker.

Most likely, boys were more accessible to priests during the years mentioned.  And the John Jay report does mention that the share of female victims went up after girls were allowed to be altar servers, so that seems to confirm this view.

The second point is not true.  Oddly, many men who identify as heterosexual and have sexual relationships with adult women also abuse boys.  Fr. Maciel, for instance, had two mistresses as well as many male victims.  Some will claim that this still counts as gay because they did have sexual contact with males, but these men don't fit the expected profile of a gay man.

"Research suggests that child sexual abuse is not related to sexual orientation: perpetrators can be straight, gay, lesbian or bisexual. Research has indicated that ‘men who identify as heterosexual are just as likely as men who identify as homosexual to perpetrate child sexual abuse’. We heard about adult perpetrators who were married or had adult sexual relationships with people who were not of the same gender as the children they sexually abused.  In Case Study 18... we heard about a child sex offender, Jonathan Baldwin, who was a Youth Pastor at the Sunshine Coast Church. One of Baldwin’s colleagues, Dr Ian Lehmann, told us that despite concerns brought to his attention, he did not suspect the relationship between Baldwin and the boy he was abusing to be improper because Baldwin was at the time in a relationship with Dr Lehmann’s adult daughter, whom he later married. Research suggests some perpetrators who sexually abuse children of a particular gender may do so because they only have access to children of that gender.  It is a common misconception that all perpetrators who abuse children of the same gender as them are primarily same-sex attracted and identify as a gay man or lesbian woman."  (RCIRCSA)

" Clergy who exhibited homosexual behavior were not significantly more likely to abuse minors than those who did not. Sexual identity is different, of course, from sexual behavior, and the study did not identify the sexual orientation of all the offenders. The report suggests that one reason the majority of victims were male may be that boys were more accessible to the predators than girls. The data show that the percentage of girls who were victims increased after girls were allowed to become altar servers." (John Jay Report)

And that shows the third point is false too.  If abusers don't fit the usual profile of a gay man, how can they be somehow "rooted out"?  They will not tell seminary directors they are gay, because they don't think of themselves as gay.  If asked, they may point to past relationships with women.  And amazingly, they may preach very loudly about the evils of homosexuality.  Cardinal Keith O'Brien, Fr. Tony Anatrella, and (outside the Catholic Church) Ted Haggery fit this profile.

So, while abusers may be primarily targeting boys, there's no reason to think that simply saying "no gay seminarians" (a rule the Church has already made) or defrocking priests who preach in favor of gay marriage would do a thing to solve the problem.

That said, it turns out a lot of the talk of a "gay subculture" in the priesthood isn't the conspiratorial myth I thought it was.  There is male-on-male predation going on in the priesthood and in seminary, and I do think there may be a connection between that and child sex abuse.  Is it possible that priests molested by older priests, then turned around to molest others?  It certainly could be.  But that needs to be disentangled from the notion of identifying as gay, because the people who are participating it do not all identify as gay, and there are surely lots of priests who do think of themselves as gay who aren't predatory.

It may help to consider that a large proportion of priests may be homosexual.  I've seen numbers ranging from one third to one half of priests.  Especially before the sixties, homosexuality was so stigmatized that a single man might need some kind of "cover" to avoid being accused of being gay.  The priesthood was a popular option.  What this means is that there are not a few members of a "lavender mafia" that need to be purged, but thousands and thousands of gay priests, many of whom are sincerely pious and keep their vow of chastity.  Would people still feel the same about "getting rid of the gays" if they realized that might mean getting rid of their own beloved parish priest, who sat up all night with their dying grandfather and who has never ever touched a child?

The worst part of this is that it's a bit of a smokescreen predators like to cast.  If they can shift suspicion onto people who identify as gay, then all they have to do is not identify as gay and they will be seen as innocent.  I have heard plenty of claims that the sex abuse scandal is over and won't return now that gay men are barred from entering seminary.  All we have to do is wait for all the priests from before that change to die.  But that's going to be a long generation during which children continue to be abused, before we finally realize that we haven't actually rooted out the abusers.



Myth #3:  This crisis could be solved by priests getting married.

Well, this one is a bit of a half-truth.  In its simple form it's false; you can't simply issue a pedophile a wife and have him stop molesting.  More likely, he will molest his own children.  And isn't that a pretty icky attitude toward women, that they should sacrifice themselves to evil and abusive men to keep them from raping anybody else?  And it is a fact that most child molesters are not vowed to celibacy; many are married, including married clergy in non-Catholic religions.

That said, many experts (Richard Sipe, the Royal Commission) do believe relaxing the celibacy requirement would help.  For one thing, Catholic priests are not all celibate, despite their vows.  Richard Sipe claims that about half of priests are sexually active.  He also cites these numbers from a group of 354 priests who are sexually active and report on their sexual activity:

"53 percent of this group are sexually active with adult women.
21 percent are sexually active with adult men.
14 percent are sexually active with minor boys.
12 percent are sexually active with minor girls.
In all 74 percent are involved with adults.
And 26 percent are involved with minors.
65 percent of priests choose sexual partners of the opposite sex.
35 percent of priests choose same sex partners." [source]

When celibacy is practiced this little, is it really celibacy at all?

But it's not the same as simply not having a celibate priesthood.  Instead, it's a situation where everyone has secrets, some of which may be used as blackmail material.  Perhaps this is part of why the bishops didn't move against abusive priests they knew about -- they were afraid of getting caught in their own sexual lapses.

I suspect that not everyone is capable of being celibate.  That's why teens who pledge abstinence still get pregnant, couples using NFP get pregnant, priests with a vow of chastity have sex, and so on.  If they find a willing partner, they wind up giving in.  Most of them do not offend against minors, but choose adult partners.  Still, it creates a culture where everyone secretly knows that the vow of chastity is only an ideal.

Something similar may be the case with the ban on openly gay priests.  The secrecy about orientation may actually drive some of the worst behaviors.  Victims don't want to admit they were victimized for fear of people thinking or knowing the victim is gay.  Predators use the knowledge that a target is gay to single him out.  (How did they learn that the target was gay?  If I believe what I read, from hearing his confession.  There is no bottom of the awfulness.)

If celibacy were optional, you'd see more straight priests.  And if there weren't a policy against gay seminarians, it might not be something you could hold over anyone's head.  Women priests or women in leadership positions were also recommended by the Royal Commission, but obviously that's never going to happen.

Myth #4: This the fault of the American bishops.

Americans tend to assume the problem is with their own bishops.  After all, the paper trail leads right to the bishops' door.  But the pattern is actually global, with scandals breaking out in Ireland, Australia, Mexico, Italy, and elsewhere, all following a very similar playbook.  And there is some evidence that the trail leads past the bishops' door and all the way to the Vatican.  For instance, John Paul II had been informed many times about Maciel, and forbade any investigation.  Benedict XVI was informed of McCarrick's predatory behavior and did not make any move.  And Francis, of course, was told about Juan Barros before installing him as cardinal.

It may be that the very structure of the church is inimical to accountability.  While other churches can fire a priest immediately, through a board of directors or local leadership, Catholic priests can only be laicized by the Vatican.  The tribunal is secret and until recently could only include priests.  And, just like our own legal system, there is a statute of limitations, so priests who abused long ago, even if the abuse is proved, may remain in the priesthood permanently.

I have a suspicion that some of the American bishops might have petitioned that abusing priests be laicized, only to have their requests denied.  They could complain about this publicly -- but the pope put them in their positions and can remove them just as fast.  How would we know?  I recently watched a documentary, Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God, which suggested this.  However, I've had difficulty in tracking down the documents they cited.  (Which is why I find videos a terrible way to get information; it's almost impossible to track down the sources.)  I do recommend the video, and if I track down the documents, I will add them here.

If the rot really does go all the way to the Vatican, the best the laity can do is wait and hope.  The pope chooses the cardinals and the cardinals choose the pope -- there is no part of church structure that allows for lay appeals or lay accountability.  Even nuns have no role.

From the Royal Commission:

"The governance of the Catholic Church is hierarchical. We heard that the decentralisation and autonomy of Catholic dioceses and religious institutes contributed to ineffective responses of Catholic Church authorities to child sexual abuse, as did the personalised nature of power in the Catholic Church and the limited accountability of bishops. 

The powers of governance held by individual diocesan bishops and provincials are not subject to adequate checks and balances. There is no separation of powers, and the executive, legislative and judicial aspects of governance are combined in the person of the pope and in diocesan bishops. Diocesan bishops have not been sufficiently accountable to any other body for decision-making in their handling of allegations of child sexual abuse or alleged perpetrators. There has been no requirement for their decisions to be made transparent or subject to due process. The tragic consequences of this lack of accountability have been seen in the failures of those in authority in the Catholic Church to respond adequately to allegations and occurrences of child sexual abuse.

The hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church created a culture of deferential obedience in which poor responses to child sexual abuse went unchallenged. Where senior clergy and religious with advisory roles to diocesan bishops or provincials of religious institutes were aware of allegations of child sexual abuse, often they did not challenge or attempt to remedy the inadequate responses of their bishop or provincial, or believed that they could not do so."  (RCIRCSA: Volume 16)

Now it's not entirely hopeless.  Occasionally lay people have been able to change the church, either from within or without.  St. Catherine of Siena changed it from within, Martin Luther from without.  And of course all lay people can make changes in their own lives: they can exercise more suspicion about religious environments where their children are, they can believe children who report abuse instead of shaming them for speaking against a priest, and they can report all crimes directly to the police instead of expecting the diocese to handle them.

Most of all, though, I think it's important for people to avoid using this scandal as an opportunity to grind their favorite axes ("it's the gays!" / "it's celibacy!") and focus on accountability and openness.  What needs to change, more than anything, is the clericalism which assumes the laity, and the secular government, can't have anything useful to add and therefore don't need to know anything.  The hierarchy should be encouraged to open up all their records, to come clean once and for all in every diocese about just how bad it was.  All bishops who concealed crimes from the police and moved abusers to new parishes should step down--not to a pleasant retirement and the title Bishop Emeritus, but to a life of quiet penance and reflection.  And the Vatican needs to look to parts of the world where we haven't heard as much: Europe, Latin America, and Africa all have sexual scandals and need the kind of reform the US bishops have been working on, or more thorough reform than that.

Further Reading:

http://app.bishop-accountability.org/

http://www.snapnetwork.org/

http://www.awrsipe.com/