Words

If I had a thousand pounds for every time I've heard people complain that the use of the word 'gay' to describe what these same people tend to refer to as the 'homosexual life style' had deprived them of the only word available in the English language to talk about the really important things in life, like, oh I don't know, party lights, streamers, summer dresses, just general joy and loveliness, I still wouldn't have enough money to wrest the term 'tea party' back from the misinformed bigots who seriously believe their pathological state of unreason to be 'political'. This thought came to me as I sliced into a rather good cake earlier today and wished that I had a few good friends with me to share it. A tea party, I thought, how nice. How nice that would be.

News from the very dark cave

The region of Emilia-Romagna has recently established that couples, including those with children, (in lay speak, 'families') are entitled to welfare provisions whether they're married or not. This has attracted the anathema of the local befrocked wingnut cardinal, a certain Signor Caffarra, the sour-faced old biddy on the right. He has announced that 'God will judge them.' Until such judgement is carried out, as the Great One's self-elected mouthpiece, he accuses the council of wanting to 'devastate the social fabric' and invites civil disobedience against 'a gravely unjust law that doesn't deserve to be respected'. It's hard to see exactly how one can disobey a law which simply extends already existing social services to a larger number of people, but logic isn't one of the Vatican's strong points and the usual fuss has been made.

In the meantime, a 75-year-old Syrian woman in Saudi Arabia has sentenced to forty strokes of the whip and four months in one of the Holy Kingdom's jail, followed by deportation. Her crime? She allowed two men into her house who weren't members of her family. They were bringing her some bread. Ah, families!

Shock horror: Homophobic obscurantist has top job

I discovered an interesting fact about Italy's National Research Council (CNR) today, thanks to a letter in Repubblica. The CNR is a state-financed public organization that, according to its website, exists "to carry out, promote, spread, transfer and improve research activities in the main sectors of knowledge growth and of its applications for the scientific, technological, economic and social development of the Country." (I love that capital 'C'.) This is a laudable aim but it's a little hard to square with an event entitled Evoluzionismo: il tramonto di una ipotesi (Evolutionism: the twilight of an hypothesis), organized (although not apparently financed, for which much thanks) by the CNR, and intended to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. This is rather like celebrating the anniversary of Mother Teresa's birth by holding a lap dancing competition but there you go, there's nowt so queer as folk, especially scientific folk. Especially scientific folk in Italy's top scientific body.

The conference was organized by the deputy president of the CNR, a certain Roberto de Mattei. You'd expect someone in such a prestigious position to have a pretty impressive scientific curriculum, and you'd be right. Let's have a look. De Mattei is professor of that rigorous discipline, the history of Christianity and the church, in a place called Università Europea di Roma. No, I hadn't heard of it either, but that's hardly surprising. It's run by the Legion of Christ (currently under investigation by the Vatican) and only started handing out degrees three years ago, after being granted permission to do so by the then-Berlusconi government. The Legion of Christ is justly famous for its level-headed approach to molesting children scientific endeavour, as is another richly spiritual organization, the Lepanto Foundation, of which the same De Mattei is the president. Judging from its site, which claims that the stated mission of the foundation is to "defend the principles and institutions of Western Christian civilisation", the Lepanto Foundation is a sort of vanity press for the works of its main man. These include: "Turkey in Europe: benefit or catastrophe?" (I'll leave it to you to work out the answer to that one) and "Holy War, Just War". Just the sort of thing that qualifies a man to become second in command of a national research council and to make him supremely competent to talk about evolution. Sorry, evolutionism.

And if you're still not quite convinced of the man's credentials, here's the clincher. After the 2000 Gay Pride in Rome, which culminated in Piazza San Giovanni, de Mattei and some chums went along to the square to perform, in laboratory conditions naturally, a rite of expiation. So that's all right then.

(One last thing. The acts of the conference, edited by de Mattei, have since been published 'with a modest financial contribution' from the Publications and Scientific Information Office of the CNR.)

Disease is not mass

If you have a scrap of rationality and the merest modicum of scientific knowledge, here's a video which will make you laugh until you weep. You just have to get to it before the lawyers pull it down.

Thank you, Rob.

Strange fruit

Two items in today's newspapers here that throw an oblique light on each other and on Italian society as a whole. The first is about the decision of the Ku Klux Klan to conduct a recruitment campaign in Italy on the grounds that recent government legislation against immigration provides a more attractive model (in KKK terms) than that of any other western government. This fertile ground has been prepared by the notoriously racist Northern League, with the connivance of their Berlusconian cronies, and an almost inaudible demurral from the opposition, presumably on the ignoble principle that defending immigrants on your own patch does no elected politician any good. (Recent anti-immigration laws here have been roundly condemned by the United Nations and the EU, but have no doubt gone down a treat in BNP headquarters.)

The second is an EU ruling that crucifixes should not be displayed in classrooms, following a case brought by an Italian woman whose request that the cross be taken out of her children's classroom was ignored at every level of the judical system. The government, which now has to pay the woman 5000 euros for 'moral damage', will be appealing. The Vatican, in the meantime, is 'pausing for reflection'. This decision will no doubt be grist to the mill of those who whine on about 'islamification', although the woman who brought the original complaint was defending the right of her children to be educated in a superstition-free zone rather than one in which a variety of nonsenses jostled for space. Good luck to her. Good luck to us all. If the EU's ruling is ignored or overturned, what's to stop all the new KKK recruits dressing their children like the unfortunate tyke in this photo?

Masai root juice

If you need help with problems regarding your love life, business activities, personal enemies and sexual equipment (and, let's face it, who doesn't?), happen to live in or near Johannesburg and have a spare nine euros in your pocket, this post from the always interesting WH in SA might be just what you need.

Whoops!

Looks like the Dalai Lama got his kids mixed up. The reincarnation of Lama Yeshe has decided he'd rather study film and behave like, well, a normal twenty-four-year-old. You can hardly blame him. According to this article in today's Guardian, he had a horribly deprived childhood. The last detail is particularly blood-chilling:

According to the foundation biography, another leader suspected Torres was the reincarnation of the recently deceased Lama Yeshe when he was only five months old. In 1986, at 14 months, his parents took him to see the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala, India. The toddler was chosen out of nine other candidates and eventually "enthroned".

At six, he was allowed to socialise only with other reincarnated souls – though for a time he said he lived next to the actor Richard Gere's cabin.

Answers in Genesis?

What on earth did Sweden do to deserve this? Presumably we could find out by visiting the site responsible for this hoarding, placed in a rather colourless corner of, I imagine, the United States. But I don't think we'll bother, do you?

Update from the very dark cave

According to a story in today's Sun, a woman in Britain who's been told that her unborn child has one body but two heads - an extreme example of conjoined twins -has decided to go ahead with the pregnancy. She's a 'staunch' Catholic, apparently, which gives her the right to do what she wants with her body, while denying it to everyone else. She's also unmarried, and appears to have no intention of marrying her partner, also Catholic and clearly from somewhere very close to her in the local gene pool, but hey, nobody's perfect. Why embrace an entire religion when you can cherry-pick? Besides, where's the money in marriage?

On a slightly lighter note, increasing numbers of god-fearing Christians in Texas are putting the fun back into fundamentalism by attending cowboy churches. Around ten percent of baptisms in the state are now conducted by men in chaps and stetsons. And that's not all. According to the MSNBC report:

At a recent Sunday morning service at the Cowboy Church of Ellis County, the Rev. Jess McCabe, a visiting pastor, held up different sizes of deer antlers to illustrate his sermon about how people grow as Christians.

"That's one thing about cowboy church — we all got room to grow," McCabe told the congregation with a smile.

Well, hi ho, Silver!

More of the same old religious shite

It's barely worth commenting on the fact that the centre-left majority on Rome was yesterday unable to approve either of two motions to grant some sort of legitimacy to civil unions. Neither would have made any difference but, given that we live in a world of political gestures as much as of acts, every litle helps. The left-left proposal, to establish a register for civil unions, was thrown out by Vatican groupies in the centre-left. The centre-left proposal (if such a feeble almost lifeless creature can be considered such), to ask the government to have another little think about the whole business, was also summarily thrown out, this time by the left (and everyone else). Once again, it's a case of Vatican 1, Italy 0.

It wouldn't be worth commenting at all if someone called Elio Sgreccia, archbishop and president of the pontifical academy for life (you couldn't make it up), hadn't decided to gloat. This grotesque old porker has announced that homosexuals shouldn't be discrimated against, but simply steered as rapidly as possible into the arms of a psychologist for the necessary therapeutic help (presumably the kind undergone by crystal-meth-and-male-massage addict, Ted Haggard).

Let's assume the bigoted toad isn't being merely cynical, but actually believes what he says. Let's give him the benefit of that doubt. In which case, it might be pertinent to ask ourselves whether a man who has almost certainly never had a meaningful relationship in his adult life with another human being (I'm being generous here), who has never engaged in any useful activity other than telling people what they should and shouldn't do, who has never paid a penny in tax or known what it means to worry about a bill, who has evidently sublimated his healthy sexual instincts into the pleasures of the table - a man, in other words, who has served no useful biological or social purpose of any kind might not be a more suitable case for psychiatric treatment than, say, me. Or millions of others.

Physician, heal thyself.

Hate (crimes)

The Italian government is in one of its periodic kerfuffles about gay rights and the lack of them. A clause introduced into the long-suffering security bill currently passing through parliament aims to impose sentences for acts of violence or discrimination on the basis of race, sex and sexual orientation. Analogous to the kind of hate crime legislation that's disturbing sensitive family-loving souls in the States, it's based on the Treaty of Amsterdam and is as bland as semi-skimmed milk.

But you wouldn't think so from the way self-mortifying catholic Paola Binetti (see illustration) sprang into action, refusing to vote with the government, rambling on about natural law, etc. She was followed by the usual suspects, not least the ever-present justice minister, Clemente Mastella, a man for whom nepotism and corruption are essential components of the air he breathes, who doesn't appear to see that justice is only justice when applied to all. Giulio Andreotti, man of honour and best buddy to the Vatican, also piped up with a moral qualm or two.

Now it turns out the clause refers to the wrong part of the Treaty, so doesn't exist. This may be a way of solving the problem (in the sense of burying the whole business beneath a ton or two of sand) or of prolonging it. I suspect the latter. But the real problem isn't this scrap of legislation, which any normal country would have voted through unblinkingly. It's the presence of people like Binetti in the newly-formed Partito Democratico. There may be a place for religious bigotry in the government (though I doubt it), but that place shouldn't be a centre-left grouping that has absorbed a sizeable chunk of what's left of the Italian Communist Party.

If she wants to preach her poisonous nonsense in parliament wouldn't it be fairer to herself and everyone else if she joined one of the parties for whom prejudice and discrimination are daily bread? Ex-bovver boy Francesco Storace has just set up a little party for himself and a few chums called, in a moment of exceptional candour, La Destra (The Right) - presumably because there's no money involved. Wouldn't that dark but cosy enclave provide a more congenial home for the wearisome bigot and and her bible-thumping family-values-loving friends? And wouldn't it be refreshing if the newly-appointed leader of the PD, Walter Veltroni, interrupted his ongoing tête-a-tête with Silvio B. to suggest that she take her criminal hatred elsewhere because no democratic party worthy of the name was prepared to tolerate it?

Mnemonics

I've noticed that many of my labels (the little words at the bottom of each post - I know you knew, but still...) have only been used once. This seems a very uneconomical practice, so I thought I'd try to boost the numbers of a few by reviving a mnemonics exercise I was taught many years ago. It goes like this. If you want to remember something you should associate it with something else in as kinetic, colourful and, if possible, obscene a way as possible.

Now I'm not going to do this for you. I'm simply going to give you the pairs of words and let you do the associating. Here goes (and I'll start with an easy one):

Borghezio - buttplug
Larry Craig - body snatchers
bars - pottery
circumcision - Paris Hilton
Ratzinger - very dark cave
fatwa - eucharist
heritage - dementia
Rupert Everett - soap

I'll be testing you in the weeks to come. Don't let me down.

News from the Very Dark Caves

According to an article in today's Guardian, the Church of England feels that 'intelligent design' could become part of the science curriculum in state schools. Well, not exactly part of the science curriculum, but as a suitable subject for discussion 'within the context of lessons exploring how our understanding of science has developed historically'. In other words, it's being recognised as 'a way of looking at the evidence'. As in, with your eyes closed.

Intelligent design is literal creationism veiled. It has no part in the history of science, nor in our understanding of how science has developed. It's a Trojan horse invented by American fundamentalists to downgrade and subvert the centrality of reason in favour of hogwash. How many times, and in how many ways, does this need to be said?

Literal geographies

You can't miss them. They're a mile or so away from the Very Wet River.

(And light years away from the Heights of Sensitivity.)

From a site called Bits and Pieces, full of amusing stuff.