Am I a criminal?

Today I got in another altercation with religious zealots on the streetcorner.  It irritates me when they stand there handing out literature, but I don't do anything about that.  Today though they ratcheted up the annoyance by setting up a loudspeaker and blasting their "Repent you are going to hell" schtick at extremely high volume.  It was so loud that even in my condo 12 floors up and a block away it was unavoidable.  They had it going for a couple hours and I gradually got more and more angry.  Hundreds or maybe even thousands of people are spending their whole day listening to this pounding noise with its wretched message, and I am not okay with that.

This sort of thing is tricky to navigate because Wendy and I see it so differently.  She hates when religious folks make noise like this, but the idea of doing something about it directly leaves her anxious and upset.  I talked about going down there and yelling at the proselytizers, and this left her deeply worried.  I am sure it was partly social anxiety, but she was also worried one of them would shoot me or something.

I react in the opposite way.  I despise letting jerks crap all over everybody and not doing something out of fear.  I got more worked up as time went by and finally hit a point where I couldn't just sit anymore.  It was time to go get in a fight.

Before I arrived at the point of conflict though I had to make a decision.  Would I ask for change, or demand it?  Asking isn't going to get me in trouble, but it also won't do anything.  They will tell me that they are saving souls or some bullshit and keep on with their noise.  If I demand change though then I have to be ready to have my bluff called.  What do I do when they tell me to go to hell?

The fundamental question is this:  Am I willing to grab their loudspeaker and smash it to pieces if they refuse to turn it off?  Am I willing to commit a crime in order to get some jerks to stop polluting the public space?  Am I a vigilante?

I have to know the answer before I go in.  They don't necessarily know if I am bluffing, but I have to know.  I don't want a short stint in jail, but I also don't want to live in a society where we are so terrified of random assholes that we let them lower everyone else's quality of life.

Realistically of course if I grab a loudspeaker, smash it on the ground, and run, the chance of facing any consequences at all are remote.

I decided I was willing to take the risk.  I would prefer to do the smallest dollar amount of damage possible because that mitigates my risk so I would rely on angry yelling at first, and then would hope to steal their cables or something to render the loudspeaker inoperable.  If the loudspeaker needed smashing though, I was ready to smash it.

I stalked towards them, filled with rage, ready to create a tremendous scene, and realized that the noise had stopped.  A cop was standing beside the religious people talking to them, and had clearly made them turn off the loudspeaker.

I stalked up next to them, stood there staring death at the religious guy, and got a glance from the cop that said "Oh crap, another angry person to death with, maybe if I don't meet his gaze he will go away."  

I did not go away.

I waited a minute and then went on an angry rant about how everyone in their homes around here can hear this junk and have been putting up with it all afternoon.  The cop politely told me it was under control.

The level of tension dropped.  The cop went off to talk to another religous person and the leader and I started talking, but the stakes of this conversation were extremely low.  There is a cop 4 meters away.  We can yell at each other, but we both know neither of us is going to take a swing at the other.  Violence will not ensue.  If the cop hadn't been there though, the encounter might go entirely differently.  At that point we might be hesitant to threaten each other because the other person might actually turn to violence, so anyone escalating would have to worry about personal safety.  As it was though we were free to scream at each other knowing that it wouldn't go further than that.

So we screamed at each other.

Dude:  I *had* to make the volume super loud, because of the construction nearby.

Me:  You *chose* to make it so loud that it was a huge detriment to everyone within a block, this wasn't something that happened to you, this was you being an asshole.

Dude:  Hah!  I am trying to save you and bring you into the arms of Jesus.  What were you gonna do about it anyway?

Me:  If I hear that crap again, I am going to come down here, grab your loudspeaker, and chuck it into one of the construction holes where it will smash to pieces.

Dude:  You don't scare me, with all your big muscles! I was in prison! (Actual quote, I swear.) 

Me:  I am not trying to scare you, you moron.  I am *telling* you that if that speaker goes on again, I will destroy it.

Dude:  You are just made of meat, and you will stand before Jesus in judgement.

Me:  Really?  Are you going to threaten me with the wrath of Odin?  How about Zeus?  Or Nanabijou?  Maybe the Easter Bunny?  Your best friend invisible space wizard is a *myth*.

Dude:  You will go to hell!  Repent!

I didn't repent.

Thankfully, through some combination of serious legal threats from the police and threats of vigilante property destruction the loudspeaker has remained silent.  I feel so much better, sitting in my kitchen *not* hearing fire and brimstone coming from the streetcorner.

I should do this more often, it feels great.

On my way to hell

Random guy on the street, wearing a speaker:  Fornication!  Adultery!  Prostitution!

Me:  Fornication?  Sounds great, I am in.  (Making finger guns at the guy, and winking while sashaying slowly towards him.)

Guy:  No!  Fornication is bad.

Me:  But it is so fun.

Guy:  But it is bad.

Me:  But why is it so fun then?

Guy:  You will die someday.

Me:  Yes, definitely.

Guy:  And God will judge you!

Me:  Dude, God is a myth.

Guy:  You will go to hell!

Me:  Hell is where all the fornicators go, right?  I would rather go there, thanks.

Guy:  .......

I think these people who yell religious nonsense on the street really get used to being ignored, and they just don't know how to handle someone who plays back at them.  Next time I will hang around awhile and engage them in religious debate.  Perhaps I can get them to give up and take up a life of godless hedonism. You know, join Team Good.

Ratchet up the intolerance

Recently I stumbled upon a fascinating little bit of writing that got me riled up about relationship anarchy.  The piece I read is a summary of things that happened at a relationship anarchy conference.  For years I have identified myself as polyamorous, and while that is still technically correct, it isn't the best possible descriptor of how I view relationships.  Relationship anarchy is definitely a better box for me to be in.  Polyamory, in the sense of multiple loves, is definitely true... but it also doesn't cover just how much I want to change the way people do relationships.

I don't buy into everything the document says.  The writers have lots of views on economics that can be charitably viewed as highly optimistic, or realistically viewed as naive and absurd.  However, their views on the way monogamy is intertwined with consumerism, colonialism, and religious oppression are right on the mark.

As the years have gone by my attitude towards monogamy has continually shifted.  Initially I saw it as the only way to be, then as the most practical way to be, then as the easy default.  Eventually I stopped doing monogamy and I saw it as not my style, then as a troublesome concern, then as a disaster.  These days I largely see monogamy as simply wrong.

Don't misunderstand - I don't think anybody needs to love or have sex with lots of people.  Any number of partners is fine, from zero to all.  The problem is forcing someone else to have a specific number of partners.  The older I get the more angry and intolerant I get of doing that to anyone.

I have said it before and I will probably say it again - if you told someone they were not allowed to have other friends, or other relatives, or other people that have any sort of relationship, you would be widely viewed as abusive, delusional, evil, or all three.  The same would be true if a friend insisted that they had the right to dictate how many romantic/sexual partners you have.  Certainly people would agree that such demands should be ignored.  But society does the opposite for romantic/sexual relationships, for no good reason.  We by default grant one person power that nobody should have, and imagine that it is not only acceptable, but even necessary or virtuous.

There are reasons monogamy is so popular.  It is because the *&$@?* christian churches controlled Europe while Europe colonized and controlled most of the world.  The church wanted to make sure that the only way people could relate romantically or sexually was with one man owning one woman in a structure *controlled by the church*, and its influence on powerful states covered the world in a wretched pall, removing freedom and flexibility in pursuit of misogynistic ownership of humans.

That isn't a good reason.

Pushing back against this is fraught with issues.  There are all kinds of people I like who are monogamous, and I risk alienating them when I rant against their lifestyle choices.

But that worry is losing out to the worry that I might be wasting my opportunity to do the right thing.  I might be placating the monster when I ought to be taking up arms against it.  I have 45 years left in me, roughly speaking, and I don't want to get to the end of that and look back thinking that I didn't speak the truth.

I don't usually like the plans the anarchists come up with.  I do like their principles though, and placidly plodding along, accepting the status quo as inevitable though not ideal does not fit with those principles.

There are people out there who are going to be smacking their foreheads, thinking "Geez, he is going to get even more confrontational and nonconformist?" 

Yes.  Yes I am.

A red wedding

This weekend I was at Full Throttle's wedding.  It was an odd thing, because he got married ten years ago, but only now decided to actually do the whole ceremony and party bit.  I struggled some with it because it was in a church and I had lots of internal issues with the religious and gender based stuff in a wedding I went to during the summer, and I did not want to run the God gauntlet again.

It is a tricky beast.  I don't want to tell other people how to live, or what sorts of ceremonies they should have to mark their important moments.  I also don't want to sit in a religious service silently seething at the ways it cements and supports entrenched sexist norms.

I ended up just skipping the ceremony and going to the reception.  I could have easily made up any number of lies to get out of going to the ceremony but I felt like I had to pick one thing or the other:  Either Full Throttle is someone I am close to, or he is not.  If he is someone I am close to, I should tell the truth about having problems with the venue and composition of the ceremony.  What possible good is being close to a person if you have to lie to them about things that are important to you? 

On the other hand if he isn't important to me and thus lying becomes more palatable, then why go to the wedding at all?  It makes no sense, to me at least, to go to a wedding if you don't care about the people getting married.

The wedding was Game of Thrones themed.  There were lots of swords for decoration and the music constantly had me imagining tiny cogs and wheels.  Part of that theme was the 'get the couple to kiss' rules, which were that you had to fight and win a duel with a plastic sword, and each victor of a duel had to take the couple's cause in the next duel.

A chance to make an ass of myself in public *and* fight with a sword at the same time?  Sign me up!

Iolo and I decided that we, as the groom's gamer nerd buddies, needed to break the system.  Iolo fought the first duel against the head table, so he ended up becoming the next champion.  I challenged him, and he simply held his blades aside so I could whack him gently and defeat him, forcing the couple to kiss.  This made me the new champion, and while Iolo could simply have challenged me and had me concede we decided that we had already broken the system this way once - no need to do it again.

The next way to break the system was for me to go up and challenge again, while I was still the champion.  I would have to fight myself, and I could just whack myself with the sword, and both win and lose at the same time!  I would both have to retire as champion and be the next champion, so I can only assume this would have spawned a singularity and swallowed up the earth had I done it, but before I put this plan into action I was challenged by somebody else.

Unfortunately this challenge did not go well for me and I lost, getting stabbed savagely in the stomach.  It turns out that plastic swords can do little damage with a slash, but a stab in a vulnerable region is quite another thing entirely.  I was in a lot of pain immediately, and even three days later my stomach is still hurting.  I don't think I have any permanent damage, but it is not comfortable.

This strikes me as quite appropriate.  Much of my relationship with Full Throttle was about playing football in university, and we played full tackle without any protective gear.  I spent many a day limping about, barely able to move after savage hits in our games.  That I would be injured at a Game of Thrones wedding, with Full Throttle as the groom, feels entirely appropriate.

Women in their place, unfortunately

This weekend I went to a wedding.  It was a perfectly normal wedding in most ways, and most people wouldn't think anything of it.  I couldn't help but be frustrated by so much of it though because of the unrelenting sexism.

Giving the bride away is a tradition that needs to die in a fire.  I just don't know how people today can sit there and watch a woman handed off from one man to another like a hunk of meat and not twitch at the injustice of it all.  If you want to be handed off by your parents, fine, there are ways to do that.  I have seen weddings where both people being married were walked in on the arms of both of their parents and this is fine!  Not my style, but it does not bother me at all.

But the thing where much ceremony is made of which man is going to hand over the bride to the groom?  YUCK.

Lots of little things got to me too.  I don't like the pageantry and expense of weddings in general, but that is an aesthetic thing rather than a real moral objection.  But the bridesmaids and groomsmen all being gender coded, and the explicit gender rules for everyone involved in the party really bother me.  I also struggle with the expectation that the women in the wedding party must spend extensive time doing hair and makeup while the men put in a far lesser amount of effort.  The women have to pay for new dresses to match the colour of the wedding, while the men just wear their normal suit.  The men are clearly just fine on their own, but women have to show themselves off to get full value.

Marriage is fine and all, once you strip away all the sexist garbage.  I just can't be comfortable with the way marriage happens to most people though, particularly the way it so ruthlessly polices gender roles and comformity to gender norms.

And this is all to ignore all the objections I have to all the religious stuff associated with weddings, which is another whole rant entirely.

Someday I am going to finally swear off all of this.  I feel stuck when I get invited to weddings that I know are going to be a barrage of religion and sexist crap.  I don't want to alienate friends, but sitting through more of these ceremonies that fly in the face of deeply held values of mine is becoming more and more unpalatable as the years go by.

Poly in the woods

This past weekend I went to Polywood with Wendy and The Flautist.  Polywood is an event whose name is appropriate and evocative - it is a bunch of polyamorous people getting together camping in the woods.  It has been going for three years though this is the first time I have gone.

The event takes place at Raven's Knoll, a small private camping ground in Ontario.  The grounds themselves were kind of new to me as I am used to provincial parks and backcountry camping but this park was something quite different.  Instead of campsites being really separate and carefully marked it was just a mixture of open grassy areas and woods.  We could set up anyplace we wanted, and that was new to us.  While it was a strange setup, I liked it.  We didn't pick the best spot for our site, but now that we know the location we will do better next year.  Raven's Knoll has a great river for swimming, slow moving and warm, and the weather was absolutely ideal.  Unfortunately the river had a bible camp just upstream so skinny dipping was out of the question.

But all that sort of stuff is background, really.  The interesting bit is what exactly did all those poly people get up to in the wilderness?  From the writeup I wasn't quite sure what to expect.  It was clearly pitched as a family friendly event with lots of talks and socializing, but I have met a lot of poly people and I am definitely not the only one who thought 'orgy in the woods!' when I read about Polywood.

Some degree of hooking up with people happened, I am sure, but the event was really about learning and community, and not about the orgies.

That whole learning and community thing went really, really well.  The best talk I went to was one about Relationship Anarchy, where I learned that RA is pretty much exactly the things I believe.  I suspect I am not a normal looking RA type - being a straight cis man married to a woman who I have a child with isn't really the standard there.  RA is about setting aside the relationship escalator and pushing back on all sorts of relationship norms and rules that society sticks us with.

There is nothing wrong with being married, or being straight, or having kids, or any of that.  The problem (as far as RA is concerned) is the assumption that you should do these things, or that those things are any better than the alternatives.  RA insists that we should refuse to place romantic or sexual relationships first by default, and that we should find our own ways express our feelings rather than simply doing the thing we see in romantic comedies and in greeting card shops.

I love all of that.  Everything in the RA talk seemed obvious, correct, and helpful.  Over and over it said "Figure out what things you want and do those.  Refuse to let societies norms push your relationships into boxes that don't work for you.  By the way, here are a bunch of ways that it tries to do that.  Think about them."  Here is the RA manifesto, if you want a far more complete version of what it is about.

All this made me think that maybe I should relabel myself.  Polyamory does describe me in the sense that I maintain and an open to multiple loving, romantic, sexual relationships at once.  It is accurate.  However, RA is more specific and honestly more precise.  I think my life looks a lot like what people imagine when they think of polyamory, but the philosophy of RA appeals to me more, especially when I consider all the poly styles that I find troublesome.  It is tricky sometimes to figure out what to do in this situation, because polyamory is more useful as a shortcut when discussing with random people (as RA is a more niche term) but among people who really understand both I would rather be known as a RA practitioner.  I intend to think and write a lot more about this in future.

The pushback against assumptions was baked into Polywood in a big way.  When people introduced themselves at talks we all stated our pronouns.  The people running the event stated up front that all gender expressions and identities, all sexualities, and all relationship styles were welcome and accepted.  Consent was talked about often and explicitly.  All of this was superb, and it made the space feel like a spot where people could relax and be themselves.  The pressure to conform, and the pressure of worrying that people were leading with assumptions faded.  It will never be gone entirely, of course, but Polywood was really successful at beating those assumptions back.

It wasn't perfect.  One woman lead off her introduction with an obvious unicorn hunting scenario, and that is all kinds of icky.  There were other views there I wasn't happy about.

But. 

The levels of unhappy I harbored were tiny compared to the rest of society.  It wasn't just a pile of people with identical ideas to my own, and so surely some of those other people disagreed with my ideas just as I disagreed with theirs.  But all of the ideas were close enough to my own to make the space in general feel welcoming and happy.  I learned a lot, met some fantastic people, and I want to go again.

And maybe next year I will see about arranging to combine learning and community building with an orgy in the woods too.  Because I am greedy like that.

Bad God

The other day Pinkie Pie woke up and wandered into the kitchen to chat with me.  She opened up with "I don't think God exists.  But if God does exist, he is a jerk because he gives people depression and anxiety."

Heavy start to the morning, that.

I talked to her about how her statement is a common argument against the God of the Bible existing, because yes, either God chooses to allow suffering for no reason, or God cannot stop it, and that makes that version of God either a jerk or powerless... and the God of the Bible is not powerless.

I guess I have raised myself a confirmed little atheist.  (No one is surprised.)

Despite me being pleased about her conclusions, I felt angry. 

Not at Pinkie Pie, of course.  Rather, I was proud of her for figuring this out and happy that she blamed her struggles with mental health on chance, fate, biology, whatever, but happily not on herself.  I am sure she does the same thing most people do which is to sometimes blame these problems on herself and sometimes on the universe at large.  We aren't good at apportioning blame.

But I wish so much I could fix this.  I wish I could fight it, and her suffering makes me scream inside with the want to do *something*, anything, that will stop it.  Anger surges up at the world, at this suffering that must be endured, suffering that I am responsible for but cannot remedy.

At least she knows what it is that she is experiencing and has words for it.  At least she knows she can talk about it with me, and is willing to come for help.  These are good things.

I want so much for their to be more good things though.

Dinner for two

I just read an article about Mike Pence, America's new Vice President.  In it Pence is quoted as saying that he would never be willing to have a meal with a woman other than his wife unless someone else was present.  The article concludes, rightly so, that this is a huge problem for someone in a position of power like Pence is.  It restricts his ability to interact with women, and thus pushes women out of his circle.  Women have enough difficulty getting to the top of the power pyramid as it is.

It is entirely okay for people to have whatever rules they want as part of their relationship.  Whether you are Mike Pence and can't have lunch with a woman, or whether you want to be collared and chained, spending your days playing fetch and being called Rover, if everyone agrees to the relationship rules then they can have them.

But you really do have an obligation to consider how your rules affect the people around you and how they are influenced by the complex social pressures that are inherent in our culture.  If a black person says they want to only date black people, and a white person says they only want to date white people, these are different things.  Racism is real, and you need to spend time thinking about how your attractions and relationships are affected by it if you want to do the right thing by the people around you.  Other entrenched bigotry is the same way.

I chose the two examples above deliberately because they are both about equally unthinkable for me personally.  If I had ever tried to tell Wendy that she couldn't have a meal with a man without a chaperone she would have told me to shove it, called out my heteronormativity, viciously mocked my sexism, and broken up with me.  Not necessarily in that order.

If she had done the same with me I would have assumed she was joking and laughed my ass off.  If she was serious I would have broken up with her right away and wondered how the hell I was so wrong.

The collaring / Rover thing would have been completely different.  My 'hell no' reaction would have been roughly the same, but I would have just said hell no and then kept on doing whatever I was doing before.  Pretty sure Wendy would still have yelled at me if the roles were reversed, and that tennis ball would definitely have gone un-fetched.

In any case Pence's rules are hilarious when I consider my life these days.  If Wendy wanted to have dinner with a man and ended up having sex on the table the only thing that would worry me is cleaning up the mess, and maybe dressing incidental wounds from forks or shattered crockery.

OKCupid has a question on it that goes like this:

Imagine that you come home to find a partner pouring red wine all over a stranger's naked body and then licking it off. Which, if any of the following, would bother you most?

1.  The spilled wine.
2.  The cheating.
3.  The fact that I was not invited to join in.
4.  Actually this would not bother me.

I find this question hilarious because such a large subset of the population would look at it as an impossibility, a ridiculous thing put in there so you can answer "The spilled wine" and have a giggle at how silly it is.

Whereas I honestly want to answer 1, 3, and 4.  I don't want to have to clean up spilled wine, that is super annoying.  I wouldn't actually be bothered by not being invited, but I would hope to be invited once I arrived home and witnessed the event.

It isn't as though this has actually happened to me.  But if it did, I would definitely brag about it.

Sometimes when I think about these things I am amazed at how my perspective has shifted.  On one hand I recognize that I am in the minority, but there is a big part of me that sees Pence's rules and laughs, thinking "Hah, how absurd!" and then realizes that most people see his rules as either normal, expected, or perfectly understandable, and they think my rules are evil, ludicrous, or dangerous.  I am stuck in this place where what I do now seems like the only reasonable way to exist while being entirely aware that hardly anybody else does it this way.  I find myself sometimes hearing people talking about what they can't do and I wonder why in the world that would be so, and then realize "Oh right.  Monogamy.  That thing everyone does."

Monogamy is all right.  But that version of controlling, jealous, heteronormative monogamy that assumes that every interaction between men and women must be about sex and nobody can be trusted to honour their commitments... yuck.

Book burning

A Danish man is being charged under Denmark's blasphemy laws for burning a Quran and posting a video of doing so on the internet.

This is the sort of headline that gets my attention immediately.  It drives me nuts that someone could be prosecuted for the crime of not believing in someone else's fairy tale, but that is what is happening here.  Blasphemy laws are a disaster wherever they are found, in spite of the fact that what they do is make it so that if a bunch of people believe something ridiculous they can get the state to attack anyone who dares voice disbelief of the ridiculous belief.  It doesn't apply if beliefs are reasonable or provable, because that isn't religion.  Perfectly fine to insist that climate change is a myth, because we can prove that using science.  Insult the idea that a person walked on water and rose from the dead?  A crime!

Of course one must consider that the man in question will not do any jail time even if he gets convicted.  He will only be fined, in what I assume is the courts trying to placate the religious nuts without actually wanting to do something serious.

Perhaps I ought to be focusing instead on more serious events like war, or famine, or whatever it is that Trump did today.  You know, things that result in thousands of deaths and massive upheaval.

I don't though.  Trump said another disastrous thing, war still exists, people are dying.  But blasphemy laws in a progressive western state being enforced?  That is interesting, not least because it could very well be me getting dragged into court next time.

I suppose this makes it rather selfish of me to focus on this sort of news since it is insignificant compared to many other things I could talk leap upon.

However, I do think it is a good thing to keep in mind that we ought not to accept small erosions of our basic liberties in stride.  The freedom of expression of religion is important.  That includes the right to not be religious, and in fact to do the opposite of what other religions want.  When the state decides to recognize some religions and not others and is willing to prosecute people for following the wrong one we step ever closer to a theocracy, and that is an awful place for anyone who doesn't happen to be following the chosen religion.

People need to be free to talk about how their book is the literal word of the creator of the universe and post that message online.  Also people need to be free to set books on fire and post that online.  The state should have no concern about either, except insofar as people obey the laws about fire, of course.

The difficulty of understanding teapots

A few weeks ago I was having a conversation with Pinkie Pie about religion and belief in God.  We talked about some of the reasons for believing in God and Pinkie Pie brought up the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the One True God.  She found the idea of the FSM hilarious, needless to say.

I took the opportunity to talk about why the FSM exists as an idea.  I described how it was a response  to various specious 'proofs' of the existence of one god or another.  After all, there isn't anything to convince us that an omnipotent creator isn't a FSM instead of whatever other version of god people have cooked up.

I also talked some about Russell's teapot.  That is, I presume that there is a teapot floating out in space, perhaps full of warm tea with two lumps of sugar.  It is just far enough away from Earth that our telescopes cannot detect it.  Since you cannot disprove the existence of the teapot, I presume that it does exist.  Just like the FSM this is an argument that shows how silly the 'God exists because you can't prove he doesn't' line of reasoning is.  The burden of proof on someone making a specific claim that lies outside any observed phenomenon lies with the person making the claim, not those who would ignore it.

I thought I was so clever.  Teaching my child about reasoning and argument and debate.  Look at me imparting wisdom to a young mind and inoculating her against propaganda!

On Friday Pinkie Pie was watching Futurama with a friend of hers and the FSM came up in the episode they were soaking in.  Pinkie Pie then proceeded to explain the FSM and Russell's teapot to her friend.  What Pinkie Pie got across was that in space there is a giant spaghetti god and also a teacup full of tea with sugar.  The teacup is there, but also not there, and it is tremendously funny.

The part about the burden of proof didn't quite make it into her explanation.  Nothing about skepticism, science, or debate was covered.  Just hilarity and various foodstuffs in the cold dark of space.

There are days where I am convinced I am a good parent and teaching my child things is useful.  Then there are days full of giggles and space food and the crushing sense of impending doom that comes from knowing that these children are one day going to be running the world and the people trying to teach them about it are failing miserably.

Another post mortem for the pile

My Facebook feed is full of US election post mortem essays.  Everyone wants to weigh in on exactly why it went down the way it did, what it means, and what we can do about it.  Obviously given my political leanings and friend group it is mostly horror at Trump's victory and despondency at the damage he will do.  There is also a lot of misery at the state of the world that such a person could win.

I have many thoughts about the things I have read.

Many articles talk about how Trump won because of misogyny and racism.  This is both true and not true.  Clinton's loss was by a tiny margin, and it is entirely possible that if she were male but otherwise the same that she would have won.  If 1% of Americans swapped their votes from Trump to Clinton the result is a big win for Democrats.  That isn't much of a difference in voting for a huge difference in result.  (Go first past the post!  :P)

But you would be wrong to just chalk it up to "Americans are bigots" and be done with it.  Clinton was absolutely establishment and represented the status quo.  She has massive ties to big banks and shady shit like million dollar gifts from oppressive theocracies.  An awful lot of people were angry at the status quo and voted Trump in protest because he was the one they thought would shake things up.  And he will, at that.  Of course the result he is aiming for is to empower the rich and crush the poor, and he will do as much racist and sexist crap as he can get away with while pursuing those goals.

It is entirely true that Trump won in part because of the anger of people frustrated by their stagnating economic situation.  He won't help them at all, but that anger did help him.  So what do we do about that?

Lots of lefties think that the coastal elites ought to try to understand the rural Americans who so strongly support Trump.  They figure that we should have nice chats with them to understand their problems and get across that billionaires who inherited their wealth who promise to crush immigrants and get rid of health care make things worse, not better.  They think we should explain carefully and without derision how wrong racism and sexism are, how important women's and trans rights are, and how immigrants actually make America stronger and richer.

But let's be real for a second.  Will it be politically expedient to try to get the bigots into the leftist fold for the next election?  Probably.  Do we have some kind of moral obligation to treat awful behaviour with kind words and understanding?  Fuck no.

This article talks a lot about how lefties can understand white working class America, and makes it clear that focusing on things like transgender bathroom issues rather than economics is a problem in terms of elections.  But the article ignores the fact that the Republicans talk a *ton* about abortion and bathrooms, and that it is all well and good for white, cis, straight people to ignore social issues - everything already works pretty well for them, thanks, but it is pretty shit to just insist that the Democrats ignore those issues and leave marginalized minorities to rot in the name of expanding the economy.

Might it *work* to ignore social problems (which is fucking racist and sexist and bigoted, by the way) and try to win elections by talking only about the economy?  Maybe, but it would be a terrible thing to do.  It would tell those working class white people that yes, their problems are the real problems, and we needn't worry about all those trans women of colour.

There are also people talking about how the real problem is the Christian values of rural white America.  I am pretty sympathetic to this view, because Christianity as a whole tends to teach that faith is a virtue.  Believing in things that make no sense because an old man who is part of your in group tells you so is a cornerstone of Christian belief.  So when Trump walks in saying all kinds of ridiculous things that speak to the fears and biases of that group they are primed to believe him.

Personally I think faith is a terrible vice and responsible for much of the ills of our world.  This is one of my biggest gripes with religion - the teaching that it is good and right to believe in whatever you are told by authority.

However, we can't just call it done there either because plenty of people who aren't white working class Christian types voted for Trump.  We also can't just ignore huge chunks of society either, and we need to find a way to try to get through to them.  I suspect it is mostly an issue of time because churches and religiosity in the West are crumbling and their influence in on the wane.  Changing these attitudes will happen but it is a slow process.

One thing I think people on all part of the political spectrum ought to do is consider how they view the electorate based on election results.  Trump won with 25.5% of the vote.  If he had gotten 24.5% of the vote, Clinton crushes him.  That is huge in terms of who is president, but it hardly changes the electorate at all.  If you are despondent at the state of American voters that Trump won, but would be totally fine if he lost, you should think carefully about why it is that you would be okay with 24.5% of the people voting for him.

Separating the electorate from the results is important.  Yes, who gets to be President matters a lot, and we should talk about that.  But we shouldn't pin all of our attitudes towards Americans on the result of an election that Clinton won, by popular vote, and which she would have won by electoral college with only a tiny shift.  One really stupid quote from Trump, one more great speech by Clinton, and maybe the entire thing changes, and the electorate is still the same either way.

Don't give in to despair.  Trump is evil, and awful, but you must remember that we have had worse.

Go back a few decades.  Trump's attitudes towards women, people of colour, and queer folks of all stripes wouldn't have been outlandish, they would have been expected.  His faults, great as they are, are only so glaring because the world has come so far.

Trump is one step back, but we can see that the world continues to step forward.  We will continue to step forward, and setbacks will continue to come.  Slow, bumpy progress is inevitable.  The pushback against progressive thought is occurring because *we are winning*.

Remember that Toronto had Rob Ford.  Much of the same rhetoric, much of the same evil.  It seemed like all was lost, but we got past it.  Now we move on.

So go out there and do something Trump would hate.  Be generous to the downtrodden, welcome an immigrant, be as queer as queer can be.  He will eventually be gone, and we will push on.

A thwarted attempt at outrage

I saw an article about a court ruling in the United States surrounding the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.  It was one of those things that I expected to be outraged by... sometimes you just want a reason to rant at the world.  The essence of it is that there is a convicted criminal who wants special treatment on the basis of his religion, which is pastafarian of course.  He claims to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the precepts of the church that worships it.

A judge denied him that right though, and although I was primed to be bitter about it I actually find the judge's reasoning pretty defensible.  Religious exceptions are designed to be about sincerely held beliefs and followers of the FSM don't actually think they need to put colanders on their heads.  They just do it as satire, to push back against mainstream religions.

I love that satire!  I think the FSM is amazing and love the mirror it holds up to a lot of ridiculous religious practices, not to mention religious assertions of 'fact'.

But it is true that religious exemption laws are actually there to allow people with these convictions and cultural practices to be able to pursue them without state judgement.  They aren't there as a vehicle for satire or rebellion against mainstream religion.  In that sense the judge is totally correct; the purpose of the laws definitely is not to support things like pastafarianism.

On the other hand religious freedom laws are often totally ridiculous because they specify religious grounds for exemptions instead of just making it about sincerely held beliefs.  I think it is wrong (and definitely a violation of the principle of separation of church and state) that people are able to claim exemptions on religious principles when other principles will not be accepted in the same way.

This is one of those situations where I hate the way things are but I recognize the problems with any sort of solution I propose.  I cannot abide religion being put on a pedestal and being given special treatment, but I also don't want the state to be obliged to accommodate an individual who sincerely believes that they need to be covered in peanut butter at all times.  Limiting such protections to large religions at least makes sure that anything protected is something a lot of people are already doing, so it probably isn't all that hard to deal with.

I don't know how to suggest a better way, exactly.  Can we really say that we will provide exemptions to rules for sincerely held beliefs, so long as those beliefs are sincerely held by enough people?  How many people?  What sorts of beliefs?

Most exemptions are, I think, simple things like clothing and allowance for worship, which honestly aren't that big a thing to just grant to everyone.  But if you want to write a law about this sort of thing you need to be reasonably specific about what is allowed and when I try to think about how I would write up a law that specifically allows for rules exemptions but has limitations to make sure we don't cause massive obstructions to our basic systems I end up feeling despair and getting nowhere.

The grand plan

The Catholic Church in Canada is weighing in on the issue of euthanasia.  A bishop has issued a statement condemning it and it played to a large number of Catholic churches this week, talking about how Catholics who ask for assisted dying or whose families support it risk the church refusing to perform last rites or funerals.

Personally I would consider the church butting out of services for the dead and dying a big bonus, but I do have real issues with the opposition to assisted dying.

The most common reason I have seen trotted out to support the anti-euthanasia movement is that it is against God's will.  It is a standard variant on the idea that you shouldn't do anything to thwart the divine plan, but this argument is complete hypocritical crap.  The church doesn't mind you going to the doctor for treatment... isn't that against God's plan?  They don't mind you exercising to try to get healthy, but wouldn't do so compromise God's plan for you to die of heart disease at a younger age?  Fundamentally it is absurd that people can apparently defy the plan of a omnipotent diety, but it only counts as defiance when a follower of said deity is personally uncomfortable with the defiance in question.

That is all to ignore the ridiculous idea that laws should be there to enforce God's plan for people.  God itself isn't up to the task, and it needs police officers to provide proper incentive?

The rest of the arguments against assisted dying are almost entirely based on misinformation.  People often assume that a middle aged person can just walk into a doctor's office and sign up to have their parents summarily executed because they have become inconvenient.  However, when you look at how assisted dying has been implemented in other countries or actual proposals for Canada you find that the barriers to taking part are enormous.  It takes a serious commitment on the part of the person wanting to die, examinations and testimony of a variety of health care professionals following strict rules, and lots of time.  There are in fact so many layers of red tape in both current practice and proposed practice of euthanasia that it is far too hard to access, to my mind, rather than too easy.

No, doctors are not going to let children whack their parents for their inheritance.

No, healthy people who want to commit suicide will not be helped by this system.

No, children born with developmental disabilities will not be euthanized.

No, doctors who do not wish to participate in euthanasia will not be forced to do so.

All of these are worthy considerations, of course, because if some idiot wrote up rules for euthanasia in fifteen minutes they might not think of these cases.  But that isn't what is happening.  The process has crowds of experts from many fields (including, of course, people who are looking at undergoing assisted death themselves) and has examined successful systems elsewhere as well as looking at creative ideas at home.  Huge amounts of time and effort has been poured in to ensure that the system is not abused.

We normally think that keeping an animal alive in constant agony is immoral.  Euthanasia for animals who have nothing left in life but deep suffering is normal and expected.  We owe the same consideration to those among us who are suffering so much that joy is gone from their lives, and who will die before that situation can change.

Putting faith in context

I watched a rather interesting and fairly long video recently that got me thinking about how we might decide on the practical benefits (or lack thereof) of religion.


Haidt finds himself in an argument with a bunch of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Harris, and others), and because I find both sides interesting I read more about the disagreements here.  Needless to say I don't fully agree with anyone, but I do think looking at how they think and what they say about each other's positions is likely to be really thought provoking for anyone who is interested in thinking about the effects of religion divorced from any question of whether or not its supernatural claims are true.  Everyone involved in this debate thinks God doesn't exist; they just can't decide what should be said about religion given that basic fact.

One of the things that stirs up a lot of controversy is the fact that in numerous studies religious people give more to charity than atheists.  The difference is only 10%, but it is there.  Note that this is after giving to religious organizations is stripped out, and that similar findings exist for blood donation and volunteering.  Haidt uses this as a reason for us to consider the usefulness of religion and sanctity in general, and suggests that we might well be able to harness the power of belief to improve society.  It is a worthy area of consideration because if we can make people's lives better than we ought to try to do that, I think, even if the methods might be distasteful to some.

The obvious counter argument is that religion, and sanctity in general, rely on falsehoods.  At the very least they require guesses to be presented as facts and hopes to be presented as truths.  We could argue that doing so is inherently wrong but that would hold up truth as something worth pursuing regardless of its effect on human well being, and I don't buy into that.  I think truth is worth pursuing, but I think it is worth pursuing because it improves human well being, not because of any value inherent in it.  Truth itself is not sacred, it is just a really good tool.  Given that, I think that there is a huge downside to religion because I think truth itself is more valuable.  However, I can't prove that; it is just my supposition.

A more appropriate counterargument, I think, is that the data showing that religious people are more giving is based on a highly biased sample.  If you ask people in the US about their giving you may find that religious people give more, but you are asking that question in a country where serious president candidates say that an atheist cannot possibly be a good president.  In that country bans on muslim immigration are being proposed, and muslims are increasingly being brazenly attacked on the street, certainly in some part due to inflammatory comments by political leaders.  In that same nation atheists are even *less* trusted than muslims, but they suffer far less because they cannot be easily identified by their appearance.

In a nation so thoroughly dominated by a single religion you can't seriously expect that the charitable behaviours of religious and nonreligious people will be unaffected by that fact.  Having your holidays be celebrated by most businesses, being able to wear your religious artifacts without question, and being able to get away with assuming that everyone is of your religion unless stated otherwise changes your place in the world.  The question is, would religious people give more if they were the minority who was pushed out of top positions of power?  If atheists ruled the US and the idea of a Christian president was laughable would those surveys still show religious people giving of themselves to others more than the majority?

I doubt we would see the same thing in that reversed scenario.  I can't prove it, obviously, but I can suggest that people who are in a minority that is pushed to the margins spend greatly of themselves just trying to carve out their own space.  They have less time / money / energy to spend, and they probably are less inclined to spend it on others.  If you could do surveys about giving and generosity across many cultures and locations my suspicion is that you would find that the dominant groups were more generous to charities regardless of their religion or lack thereof.

Again, I can't prove that.  But I don't think I need to, particularly.  What I can say with confidence is that in a world where Abrahamic religions are extremely dominant you find that those in those religions donate slightly more to charities than those who do not believe.

That statement does not lead at all to saying that religious people would give more or less to charity in an unbiased sample.  Unfortunately I don't see any good way to acquire such a sample, but if we ever do I will be terribly curious to see what it contains.

Fixing what ain't broke

Canada is under attack from a nefarious villain.  You know this villain, and its name is Niqab.  It is light, and scarfy, and a tremendous danger to Canadians.

Or so Stephen Harper wants us to believe.

Now he is insisting that he will push forward legislation to ban the niqab for those employed in the public service.  He won't ban crosses, or kippahs, because people who wear those vote for him.  No, he is bound and determined that niqabs be banned because by doing this he can whip up support among the openly xenophobic and racist members of society.

No one is complaining about the oppression of having to talk to someone in federal service who wears a niqab.  Hell, no one is even really sure who in the federal public service might be wearing a niqab, if anyone.  But this is a problem that must be solved, and the fact that it isn't a problem shouldn't stop us.

Let us, for a moment, step aside from these distraction tactics and look at the big picture.  Harper's government has been found in contempt of Parliament.  He has tried to eliminate fact based decision making by muzzling scientists and removing the long form census.  Our economy is in recession, our debt has skyrocketed under his leadership, and his government has been wracked with scandals revealing disgusting levels of corruption.

If you are big on the economy, Harper is a disaster.  If you are big on accountability, Harper is a disaster.  If you are big on honesty and transparency, Harper is a disaster.  Same goes for the environment and Canada's international image.

There is literally no reason to vote Conservative aside from liking their racist rhetoric.  So while I definitely recommend you vote NDP, I can say for sure that one way or the other we need to vote the bums out.  Even if it means installing Trudeau, the lesser of two evils.

Sexy time

School has just started up again so there is a lot of renewed interest in Ontario's new sex education curriculum.  Many parents are angry about the idea of their children being taught that gay people exist and that we should tolerate their existence.  They are also upset that their young ones might learn the names for their body parts, or that people should only be touched if they consent to it.

Oftentimes these objections are couched in terms of 'appropriate' ages for specific learning, but the real goal is obviously not to find an appropriate age, but rather to try to use ignorance to keep young people from having sex.  These objections don't usually aim for a slightly different age, but hope to keep the information away from children forever as a method of sexual prevention.

Which pretty obviously doesn't work.  You can look at nearly all of human history and notice that although people throughout that history often had no idea what the proper terms for their body parts were, or in fact no such proper terms existed, still people managed to have an awful lot of children at shockingly young ages.  Ignorant teenagers have been getting pregnant extremely regularly for as long as ignorant teenagers have existed, so we know that ignorance is no way to stop teenage horniness.

It isn't all just parents being terrified that their children might learn how they came into this world or what the bits of their genitals are called though.  There is a heaping helping of homophobia, and even sometimes a suggestion that the schools are forwarding 'the homosexual agenda'.  Which is pretty hilarious because the curriculum doesn't promote being straight, being gay, being bi, or anything in between.  It just tells children that gay people exist.  That's it!  Is 'the homosexual agenda' the aim to have people acknowledge that gay people aren't fictitious?  Not much of an agenda, that.

(You should know that when your argument is "I don't want my children to be taught obvious facts." you really aren't getting the entire purpose of SCHOOL.)

It is all such a maddening disaster.  I think it is important that people be able to choose to take their children out of school because we need to allow parents that freedom.  For example, I might decide that music in school is pointless and figure that Elli would learn more from field trips to a local museum.  I won't decide that, but we clearly need to let parents do that.  Unfortunately the parents that are yanking their kids from sex education aren't providing some useful alternative, they are just recoiling in fear from the notion that sex might not be hidden away like a shameful secret.

On a vaguely related topic, I am pleased to note that the latest version of Dungeons and Dragons specifically notes under character creation that characters can be any gender the player wants, including non binary and trans identities.  It also talks about gender presentation and sexual orientation, making it clear that any choice is okay and acceptable when someone is making up a character to represent them.  That gets a giant thumbs up from me.

That's right parents, the new school curriculum is preparing your children for a life of basement dwelling, fireball casting, dragon slaying nerding.

Breasts, the public display of

There is controversy afoot in New York surrounding the right of people to go topless in public.  There is, according to one Ruben Diaz, a minister and politician, a problem with topless women being in Times Square where they attempt to get tips for being in photographs with tourists.  (Also presumably locals, but that probably isn't a thriving business.)  They aren't *entirely* topless necessarily as body paint is often strategically used to apply minimal covering.

Diaz, realizing that he can't push through legislation specifically targetting and limiting the rights of women, has decided that he should just aim to prevent anyone regardless of sex from going topless.  Won't somebody Please think of the children?



While we should celebrate that we finally live in a time when politicians feel obligated to hose everybody in an attempt to be sexist assholes instead of just explicitly targetting women, this is still really awful.  I mean, it is great that Diaz knows he can't just make a law that explicitly limits women's rights because he personally views them as sex objects but I wish he had to give up instead of pushing this terrible workaround.

Nipples aren't dangerous.  Nearly everybody gets to view them many times throughout their lives, though admittedly men's nipples have a fairly flat distribution while women's nipples get seen a lot more by the very young and by those who are old enough to figure out how to use the internet and not get caught watching porn.  If Diaz wants to run in a panic away from topless women he is welcome to.  He is even welcome to keep his children away from Times Square where all this wanton toplessness is located.  I will laugh at him and call him a bigoted idiot for doing so but he would be well within his rights and I certainly wouldn't want to trample on those.  Unfortunately he doesn't see this the way I do and thinks that police officers armed with guns are the appropriate response to nipples rather than simply letting other people do what they want.

Usually the US is really big on letting private transactions between individuals be none of the government's business, but boy that sure goes by the wayside when somebody might be getting turned on by it.  Can't have that!

Normally this would be where I take some cheap shots at Republicans but Diaz is actually a Democrat.  A Democrat who is against abortion and marriage equality, mind, so he is firmly in the 'asshole' category, but not a Republican nonetheless.

I am just so far away from this sort of viewpoint it is hard to fathom it at all.  I think the idea of having it be illegal to be naked is an astonishing and evil thing - my body being seen for what it is should never be grounds for imprisonment.  Of course private institutions should be free to have whatever dress codes they want on their grounds, but on public property the idea that my body being seen is grounds for violent assault upon me is ludicrous.

Being better

Dan Savage's column this week featured a letter writer who had been against gay rights in the past, but for the past fifteen years has been a supporter.  He found himself in difficulty when new friends found out about his previous attitudes.

This is a tricky topic.  We want to encourage people to change their minds and become more supportive of social justice causes, but what is the best way to do that?  How should we approach the topic of people who come around on something - that is, what do you say about someone's checkered past?

I am certainly not blameless in this.  For example, when I was young I never thought that being gay was wrong or destructive or anything of the sort but I didn't really get why activism was necessary and failed to grasp how I could stop being part of the problem.  I hadn't ever met a gay person to the best of my knowledge (almost certainly I had met some but didn't know it) so it seemed like a very far away thing.  In my late teens I would definitely have voted for marriage equality but I didn't understand the necessity of it all - as long as same sex couples had all the rights, who cares if they get the actual title of marriage?  I thought that having civil unions with full rights wasn't necessarily right but I didn't get why that separation was so important.

Part of that was just my general disdain for titles but part of it was simply not understanding how reserving rights for specific groups perpetuates oppression and stigma.  I talked to a lot of people, read a lot of things, began to understand why such distinctions are a problem, and now I won't put up with people who thoughts as I once did.  I will happily spend time trying to make them understand and won't write them off right away... but if someone really does hold to their homophobia then they don't get to be my friend.

My record on trans issues is similar in that I was never a hater but I really didn't get it and a lot of my speech and small actions were definitely not trans friendly.  I have educated myself and gotten better but there is still more improvement to be made.

Given these things I can't be too harsh on people whose attitudes haven't shifted to align with mine yet so long as they aren't being terribly destructive in the meantime.  A person who thinks that a marginalized group ought to be treated fairly and well but who doesn't understand why particular legislation is necessary or can't figure out why their normal figures of speech are a problem is someone I can work with.  That was me a couple decades ago!

I can't deal with the real hatred though.  People that feel that being gay is a sin, or those that spend their time trying to crush trans people by making up ridiculous arguments about sexual assault in bathrooms enrage me and it would take some kind of Herculean effort to erase such atrocities from the ledger.  

I suppose that I always felt like such a freak, such an outsider, that it never made sense to me to persecute others who didn't fit.  The in groups that might perpetuate such things wouldn't accept me so why should I side with them against others?  To be honest until I got to university I never felt like I had found a group that did accept me and I mostly just wanted to keep my head down and be ignored.  Not everyone who feels like that responds the way I did - there are plenty of people who are persecuted who desperately punch down any chance they get - but that was certainly a part of the way I was shaped.

Who knows which of my attitudes these days will be considered regressive and cruel a few decades from now?  I have heard speculation that my meat eating tendencies will be thought unacceptable within my lifetime but I don't buy it.  Really all I know is that there is much more to learn and I will certainly have more changes to make to the way I think and the way I speak.  I wouldn't have it any other way - complacency is a sad state.

A rainbow

Same sex marriage is now legal in the US, so says the Supreme Court of the United States.  Hooray!  We should be happy this happened, especially because the US has such a huge cultural influence across the world and this may lead to the same decision in other nations.  It is important to keep in mind though that this isn't the end of the gay rights movement, just another milestone along the road.  There are still plenty of things that need fixing and improving but we can be happy at least for one less thing to worry about.

I have seen a lot of people arguing that this decision was the wrong one.  There are two basic tacks they take:  First, that same sex marriage is wrong, against God's will, counter to our biological imperative, or other nonsense.  These people are just foolish, cruel assholes and I have little else to add.

The second argument is that this change should not have come about from the Supreme Court, but rather through the slow and piecemeal process of individual states legalizing same sex marriage.  That was obviously happening and the inevitable tide of progress was sweeping over the US just as it is the rest of the world but the final holdouts would have lasted quite some time I think.  This argument involves a bunch of legal issues and suggests that the decision was made badly because it incorporated the idea of dignity, trampled on states rights, or wasn't explicitly supported by the constitution.  This set of arguments isn't as obviously bullshit but it is bullshit nonetheless.

The Supreme Court isn't a collection of nine judges that impartially and expertly interpret the law.  It is mostly a collection of hardcore partisans who vote their party line no matter what and come up with reasons to justify their positions.  Is anyone really surprised that the liberal judges voted for legalization and the conservative ones voted against?  Are we pretending that this happens every time because they just *happen* to impartially interpret the law that way?  Nonsense.  When it comes to any politically charged issue like this everything unfolds along ideological lines every time.

We know that marriage equality is coming.  It is a gigantic rainbow coloured steamroller that is crushing the world and no one will escape for long.  The only thing that matters in this case is how soon we can get it done and since the Supreme Court is getting it done faster than individual states then that is how it should get done.  The next issue to come before the court isn't going to be ruined because of a new definition of dignity because the court will just do what they always do and vote the party line with one or two judges in the middle waffling a bit.

No more hiding behind fatuous 'but the purity of the law!' arguments.  The law isn't pure, and if you oppose this ruling on that basis you are placing your personal delusions about law over the plight of a marginalized minority.  This will get you no respect from me.

I will say that there are those that oppose marriage for anyone regardless of gender combinations on the grounds that it is discriminatory to single people.  Some of those arguments have merit.  However, that isn't going to change any time soon so we need to make the best of it with what we have and that involves making sure it is available to both straight and queer people.

Unintended consequences

Sometimes I am a bit of a curmudgeon.  When people try to get me excited about a new thing I often hold back, vaguely suspicious of overly joyous reviews.  Once I get into a thing I am happy to leap in with reckless abandon but my friends saying "Oooh, you have to see this thing!" just doesn't pack a lot of punch.

On the other hand there are a few groups out there who can get me investigate a thing effortlessly.  All they have to do is start a protest against it and I am all about seeing whatever it is that they hate.  Case in point:  One Million Moms is protesting a show called Lucifer.  One Million Moms is a group that uses "Support One Million Moms Help Fight Indecency" as their tagline so I can't help but assume that anything they are against I am completely for.

Rah rah more indecency!  

In particular a show about the devil, running a nightclub, who is too much of a nice guy for religious nuts to tolerate?  Sign me up!

Not that I will necessarily recommend it of course - it might be complete rubbish.  That said, I definitely have to give it a go and find out for myself because anything that those folks find so abhorrent is probably really fun.

I wonder if these protests actually accomplish their goal at all.  I don't think that the people signing the petition would watch anyway, and they draw the attention of people like me to things I otherwise would never see.  Publicity of any sort is generally good, especially when most people will laugh at the concerns of those trying to act as censors.  I am not alone in my desire to watch whatever it is that has people all in a huff!  The Streisand Effect is a dangerous beast and not to be trifled with.

Picture from http://www.rawstory.com/2015/06/thousands-of-right-wing-moms-protest-fantasy-tv-series-on-fox-for-making-satan-too-likeable/