I heard yesterday that the Federal Government has now spent over $3.5 million on an ongoing HHS study on "why lesbians are fat". More specifically, they are trying to find out why nearly three-quarters of lesbians are overweight or obese, while obesity risk doubles in gay men compared to heterosexual men.
The person who advanced the news item had a typical conservative viewpoint on it. How ridiculous, that we should be wasting taxpayer dollars, the money that is paid to the government even by people who struggle to make their own mortgages and food budgets, on fat homosexuals! It is doubly silly from the viewpoint of a conservative Christian, who will naturally believe that the simplest way to solve the problem is to not openly encourage and laud open homosexual behavior, due to the various harms that it already causes on its own, regardless of what it may do to your figure.
I'd like to look at it differently for a moment. The people who should be most up-in-arms about this study are actually the homosexuals themselves, especially the activists. Why? Consider the ramifications of this: What if they found something?
No, really. Think about this for a moment. What if scientists, backed by Federal Government money, found a link? What if they found a chemical imbalance, or even a faulty genetic expression, that increased the chances of both homosexual desire and obesity? What if we could "cure gay" and "cure obesity" at the same time, with a single supplement?
What if they succeeded?
Wouldn't the gay activists all be thrilled? For all these years, they have been painting themselves as the eternal victim. These poor young folk, you see, none of them want to be gay. None of them hope they are gay. They are only now embracing this desire because it's the only way they can feel good about themselves! They are what they are, and there's nothing they can do about it! If they could "not be gay", they'd do it in a heartbeat! They've tried so, so hard, the poor dears!
No doubt there are many of the rank-and-file who would jump at the chance. But would people who have built a livelihood on their victim status, people like Ellen Degeneres or George Takei, would they jump at the chance to take a simple supplement that would make them attracted to the opposite sex?
What if Science proved, for a fact, that homosexual desire was the result of a chemical imbalance?
How would the gay activist groups respond if parents started asking for their children to receive the supplement? What if pediatricians recommended it? What if it was the best possible way to prevent child and adult obesity? Would the government consider this a good thing or a bad thing?
What if the Federal Government issued a mandate through the Department of Health and Human Services - which both funds this study and has unprecedented control over our healthcare system thanks to the "Affordable" Care Act - requiring all Americans to have their sexual desire chemicals balanced in the name of preventing another "Obesity Epidemic"?
Suppose it was confirmed, in a way they could not ignore, that homosexual behavior was the result of something going wrong?
Remember the brouhaha about waterboarding Muslim terrorist suspects at Gitmo? What if the chemical imbalance can be shifted the other way? What if it gets out that American doctors can turn captured Islamists gay? What are the moral implications of that?
Frankly, it should be the gay activist groups who riot against the Federal Government spending money on a study that has a possibility of "curing gay". And in the grand scheme of things, with Obamacare costing nearly three trillion dollars in ten years, Obama's new environmental regulations costing Americans over 400 billion dollars, and nearly 800 million dollars paid in 'wages' to Federal employees who are on paid leave while awaiting verdicts in disciplinary actions, this particular little study is peanuts. There is so much more that a conservative Christian can work on before we even worry about a government study linking obesity with homosexual identity.
Can the gay activists say the same?
Wednesday, July 15, 2015
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
The Ying and the Yang
Does everyone know what a yinyang is? At this point, I would be surprised if you did not, especially among my usual body of readers, who tend to be well-educated. Let me lay out out, just to be sure. A yinyang is that funny symbol with a white swirl and a black swirl meeting each other, in identical sizes and shapes, making up a circle when placed together. The white swirl has a black dot in its largest area, and the black has a white dot in its largest area.
The yinyang is a Traditional Chinese symbol. European mythology has generally contrasted light and dark with good and evil, or with purity and sin. Buddhists don't do this. The yinyang represents, not enemies matching each other with equal power, but two differing and unopposing powers of equal strength, who need each other to survive. The white brings out the black; the black brings out the white. Remove one, and they both suffer. In the excellently-written "Avatar: The Last Airbender" series, the Moon and Ocean spirits are depicted as a black and white fish swimming around each other. The Moon and the Ocean, as mythical creatures as well as scientific entities, act upon each other, but are not considered adversaries.
The element "yin" is female, and the element "yang" is male.
So let's pretend for a moment that you are an old practitioner of Chinese Traditional beliefs. You have a little shop in town, where you sell yinyang pendants, other pendants like the multicolored, five-pointed star, herbs and spices, and about eight different flavors of Pocky. The adults like the spices, the teens like the pendants, which they wear carelessly (but that doesn't bother you), the kids love the Pocky.
One day, a young woman enters your shop, wearing a pendant that depicts a big black spot. Trying to make conversation, you admire her black spot pendant. To your surprise, she screams and curses at you and tells you that it is a yinyang. Puzzled and confused, trying to pull yourself together under her onslaught, you try to explain the concept of the yinyang and why it is not a black spot... why the yang is as important as the yin and the yin as important as the yang. She tells you that you're a racist bigot and an idiot, threatens to burn down your house, and storms out of the shop, leaving you shaken.
Over the next few months, you start seeing this more and more. People enter the shop with black pendants or white pendants and insist that they are yinyangs. You don't really care if they want to wear black or white pendants. You are a bit concerned that they think these are yinyangs, but any attempts to explain otherwise are met with open hostility and, at times, threats. You keep up your shop, you are happy to explain your traditions to those who ask, and you delight in explaining how yinyang equivalents can be found in almost any other culture out there, including their own... but you have learned to tense up and shut up when you see someone wearing a black pendant or a white pendant.
Then the government, one day, declares that since you sell yinyang pendants (to anybody who wants them, as always), you are required to manufacture and sell white dots and black dots to anybody who wants them (which you honestly wouldn't mind doing and have already done a few times), and you are specifically required to label them as "yinyang pendants" (which is the part that bothers you). On that very same day, people come into your shop, screaming insults at you when they realize you haven't decided whether to lie about Traditional Chinese symbols for the sake of your income or close your shop entirely. "Your rights aren't being affected," they insist, "because you are allowed to say that the black and white symbol is a yinyang as long as you do it very quietly in your house while you're engaging in acts of meditation." Then they start mocking you. "The government hasn't redefined yinyang at all, and I bet you can't prove otherwise!" they say, and when you try to explain the history of your people and the yinyang equivalents of other cultures, they tell you that you are stupid and uneducated, and, therefore, nothing you say matters.
But most of all, since you have never objected when they simply wore the black or white dots, and, though you may have been perturbed when they said it was yinyang, you would not have forbidden them through the government from making their claims, you are saddened and perplexed by their insistence that you not only follow their terminology, but sell those black and white dots specifically as yinyangs in your own shop.
And now, in the aftermath of the government's decision, what seems strangest to you is that the people who won, the people who decided to "redefine" your symbol and shut you up with threats of government punishment should you disagree, seem to be the angriest of all the parties once involved in the now-stifled debate of whether a yinyang can exist without the yin or without the yang.
The yinyang is a Traditional Chinese symbol. European mythology has generally contrasted light and dark with good and evil, or with purity and sin. Buddhists don't do this. The yinyang represents, not enemies matching each other with equal power, but two differing and unopposing powers of equal strength, who need each other to survive. The white brings out the black; the black brings out the white. Remove one, and they both suffer. In the excellently-written "Avatar: The Last Airbender" series, the Moon and Ocean spirits are depicted as a black and white fish swimming around each other. The Moon and the Ocean, as mythical creatures as well as scientific entities, act upon each other, but are not considered adversaries.
The element "yin" is female, and the element "yang" is male.
So let's pretend for a moment that you are an old practitioner of Chinese Traditional beliefs. You have a little shop in town, where you sell yinyang pendants, other pendants like the multicolored, five-pointed star, herbs and spices, and about eight different flavors of Pocky. The adults like the spices, the teens like the pendants, which they wear carelessly (but that doesn't bother you), the kids love the Pocky.
One day, a young woman enters your shop, wearing a pendant that depicts a big black spot. Trying to make conversation, you admire her black spot pendant. To your surprise, she screams and curses at you and tells you that it is a yinyang. Puzzled and confused, trying to pull yourself together under her onslaught, you try to explain the concept of the yinyang and why it is not a black spot... why the yang is as important as the yin and the yin as important as the yang. She tells you that you're a racist bigot and an idiot, threatens to burn down your house, and storms out of the shop, leaving you shaken.
Over the next few months, you start seeing this more and more. People enter the shop with black pendants or white pendants and insist that they are yinyangs. You don't really care if they want to wear black or white pendants. You are a bit concerned that they think these are yinyangs, but any attempts to explain otherwise are met with open hostility and, at times, threats. You keep up your shop, you are happy to explain your traditions to those who ask, and you delight in explaining how yinyang equivalents can be found in almost any other culture out there, including their own... but you have learned to tense up and shut up when you see someone wearing a black pendant or a white pendant.
Then the government, one day, declares that since you sell yinyang pendants (to anybody who wants them, as always), you are required to manufacture and sell white dots and black dots to anybody who wants them (which you honestly wouldn't mind doing and have already done a few times), and you are specifically required to label them as "yinyang pendants" (which is the part that bothers you). On that very same day, people come into your shop, screaming insults at you when they realize you haven't decided whether to lie about Traditional Chinese symbols for the sake of your income or close your shop entirely. "Your rights aren't being affected," they insist, "because you are allowed to say that the black and white symbol is a yinyang as long as you do it very quietly in your house while you're engaging in acts of meditation." Then they start mocking you. "The government hasn't redefined yinyang at all, and I bet you can't prove otherwise!" they say, and when you try to explain the history of your people and the yinyang equivalents of other cultures, they tell you that you are stupid and uneducated, and, therefore, nothing you say matters.
But most of all, since you have never objected when they simply wore the black or white dots, and, though you may have been perturbed when they said it was yinyang, you would not have forbidden them through the government from making their claims, you are saddened and perplexed by their insistence that you not only follow their terminology, but sell those black and white dots specifically as yinyangs in your own shop.
And now, in the aftermath of the government's decision, what seems strangest to you is that the people who won, the people who decided to "redefine" your symbol and shut you up with threats of government punishment should you disagree, seem to be the angriest of all the parties once involved in the now-stifled debate of whether a yinyang can exist without the yin or without the yang.
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