Missing their Marks

But I'll be damned if I miss this day

It was National Let’s Talk About Pee-Pee Doings Day yesterday. There was no advance notice. It was just a spontaneous outburst, like a disjointed Buffet where the prep cooks and chefs were imbibing something at their homes and Zoom-called their recipes in after everyone was already fed.

I have to add this disclaimer: I’ve had sex. I’ve had different kinds of sex: enjoyable, disappointing, amusing, amazing, missionary and non-missionary (though I’ve been loathe to think of clergy while having it), hilarious sex, procreative and non-procreative sex, mono and stereo sex, indoor and outdoor sex, premarital/marital/postmarital sex, consenting adult sex, consenting adolescent sex with other consenting adolescents. I’ve even had times where I wished for sex more than I was actually acquiring it. This gives me some degree of expertise on matters sexual and some degree of bias about the sex I prefer. More specifically: I prefer sex that involves me but don’t require anyone else to meet that standard.

With more than a half century of sex under my belt (usually), I’ve had considerable time to observe that many human beings overemphasize the importance of sex. Biology 101 and even high school biology makes it clear that living organisms perform five essential things: Breathing, ingesting, digesting, excreting and reproduction. Not many human organisms obsess over three of those functions. And no biological rules exist to preclude human organisms from choosing other functions to participate in or to observe other humans participating in. You can even zipline, bungee jump, consume bodice-ripping novels of dubious literary merit or watch people fish. Biology doesn’t give a shit.

It does appear that some humans engage in one aberrant behavior: they think more about the sex other people are having more than they think about their own. As a result of this aberration, some are even prone to make judgments about the right and wrong way others are having sex. Taken to the extreme, these self-appointed aberrants have even been known to advocate that human collectives should incarcerate, injure or kill other sex-havers and some are even absurd enough to explain away their arrogant intrusion into other people’s sex lives as something driven by possible beings they define as ‘deities’.

Their ‘deities’ may even possess copious quantities of fire which they may choose to burn humans forever, humans who don’t turn into char or ash but simply wail, scream and groan for the whole of eternity, while regretting their choice to do wrong sex.

It’s not like the Olympics where you can gain medals and plaudits for performing sex with the most desirable outcomes or go away embarrassed that you left the competition being only the 12th best sexual performer on a planet of 7 billion humans. Instead, these judgy, aberrant observers sincerely believe (or pretend to sincerely believe) that mostly invisible large creatures exist who create humans, provide them with internal chemical stimulants that provoke them towards the commission of sex acts, then pounce on the oblivious actors with deeply malicious and eternally sadistic fire tortures.
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INTERMISSION: now would be an opportune time to excrete a bodily fluid known as urine into an appropriate receptacle, which should not include the surface or interior of another human in case a deity is stalking and observing you. Please use the body parts most commonly utilized for sex actions because a deity or deities find these dual purpose body parts to be a source of their eternal amusement, without the use of fire.
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Returning to the topic at hand, I’ve instructed the ushers to remove from this auditorium those of you who chose to return without covering your pee-pees with clothing. They will escort you to the dressing rooms so I may properly berate or rate you at the conclusion of my Teddy Talk.

Ahem. <fanning self>

These legendary deity creatures have directed some humans to record all the rules of acceptable and unacceptable human behaviors into readable form and if you’re illiterate it can sure suck to be you since you won’t be aware of the potentially painful plot twists. The resulting books are collectively known as Holy Scriptures, Sacred Texts and/or the Word of (God, or whatever other name they’ve given their pet deity).

Yet those with the inclination to read those books remain uncertain on the definitions of acceptable and prohibited sex. The most widely distributed and most translated Sacred Text has a prequel that includes incest, rape, sex slavery, blood sacrifices of animals and children, plots to get relatives inebriated so they’ll participate in sex, sex within marriages and civil unions, sex with paid sex workers, mistress sex, sex between men, and the desire to have sex with angels. It introduces more sex possibilities than any known human has ever desired or thought of except for the prequel’s author(s), and maybe a couple of guys working in a mythical land called Hollywood.

That text suggests most of those acts are allowed for some humans but prohibited for most. Due to inconsistencies in translation and the biases of interpreters, it’s not always clear what the Deity intended to convey to his human creations until it gets to the Decalogue which indicates that 1) adultery is wrong sex, and 2) desire is wrong if one human wants a neighbor’s house, silver, gold, ox, donkey, servant or wife or any possession of any neighbor. There’s several other wrongful actions in the Decalogue such as murder and not resting on one day out of seven, but none draw the attention of the Deity promoters as much as the prohibitions of sex and desire.

In the sequel, the entire Decalogue is reduced further by the living earthly entity of the Deity, a ‘son’ transmitted to the womb of the wife of a human, implying that only the Deity gets to do that without the fire lake outcome. The text is completely silent on the method of this transmittal process. I interpret that to mean the Deity posses a Swiss army device that combines the capacities of a 3-D printer, an Insta-Pot and a Star Trek transporter.

Upon the son’s emergence from the womb as a visible presence, a significant chunk of his childhood is spent telling adults what to think and impressing them with his thinks. The Sequel then skips much of his adolescence and most of his adulthood for reasons beyond the idle speculation of historians, deity-promoters and atheists. Deities have a long established record of an affinity to mysteries and unknowable magic stuff.

The much older Deity reappears, consorting with a group of friends that he shares meals and wine with. In his remaining brief time as a human, he tells them coveting material things is wrong and one should be content with food and clothing, according to those friends. Some interpreters suggest he warned about desiring stuff and desiring sexual relations with others, that both are discontents of the heart that can lead one astray. And chastity/purity plus contentment are the only essential actions to distinguish between the good and the bad outcome with the fire.

There is no record in this Sacred Text that the Deity ever specifically mentioned homosexuals at all. He did mention eunuchs as people who could not have sex whether they were castrated, chose to be asexual or were born with incomplete genitalia, rendering them physically incapable. And when he was asked which of the instructions in the Decalogue was most important, he indicated that loving the Deity with one’s heart, soul and mind was first and if one loves his neighbor as much as loving one’s self, that pair covers the entire Decalogue.

None of his friends or early followers reported him saying a word about people filled with self-hatred. Was he indicating that loving one’s neighbor with similar hatred was the path to understanding the Deity? No scholar, friend or follower indicated that. But combined with his instructions about eunuchs, it also doesn’t indicate that having sex is an act of badness. He also gave instructions that the odds against rich men obtaining favorable rewards from the Deity were nearly impossible. Taking all these instructions together, he’s clearly saying that people should expend their greatest energies loving the Deity and being nice and considerate towards their neighbors instead of obsessively pursuing sex and money. He never said obtaining sex or money was bad overall. He was telling people how their priorities should be arranged.

He didn’t say “Quit working and earning” nor “Never seek nookie.” But keeping those desires in check make it easier to put more effort into loving God and being kind to others. Obsessive pursuit of anything else would also impede the instructions to put the Deity and the Deity’s laws first.

That same Deity gave instruction about the danger of passing judgment on others. If people obsessively judge the actions of others to be bad, their narrow definitions of badness will lead to condemnations, not kindness and they will be likewise judged and condemned based on narrow definitions instead of the kindness they were instructed to prioritize.

Now, having exhausted your attention to these scriptural matters, I kindly direct you to current matters that provoked this newsletter. Namely:

1) I write all of them and encourage people to buy paid subscriptions in pursuit of basic needs like my food and clothing.

2) Yesterday a member of Congress noticed that another member in an office across the hall voted to oppose the Equality Act — an anti-discrimination bill that would extend civil rights protections to LGBTQ people by prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity. So she posted a flag outside of her own door to remind the other elected representative that others consider it important to treat homosexuals and transsexuals with kindness. Part of her purpose in doing so was because she’s the mother of a transsexual. Her effort was in vain as the Representative opposed to equal treatment responded by posting this message on the hallway wall:

There are TWO genders: MALE AND FEMALE. “Trust The Science!”

And tweeted that the Equality Act would “destroy women’s rights and religious freedoms.” She did not explain what religion she practices nor how the bill would harm women’s rights. And there is no scientific consensus that there are just two genders.

3) Also yesterday, a man with a good record of practicing Constitutional law who switched to the practice of journalism weighed in on another subject. Previously, the man has developed a reputation for attacking liberals for not being concerned enough that our federal government has the power to spy on us willy-nilly. He also singles out specific members of the press by indicating they don’t get their stories as right as he does. These past efforts have not endeared him to his journalism peers and he makes no effort to make amends when some provide evidence that he’s the one making errors.

On Wednesday, he decided to turn his critical skills to say that people who identify as bi-sexual are more likely to choose different-gender partners in longterm relationships instead of same-gender partners. He implied that people are either deluding themselves or others by their self-definitions.

His message begs several questions such as: Who cares? Do bi-sexuals make longterm choices to bear children or to better blend in with dominant cultural norms? Does he possess any specific expertise about bisexuals or provide any insight useful to sociologists? And is this identification a problem requiring a solution?

That’s why I became convinced that yesterday was National Let’s Talk About Pee-Pee Doings Day. I’m not discussing it today to display my rebellious streak. I just happened to be very busy yesterday and decided to add my two cents belatedly.

I'm of the opinion that Glenn and Marjorie are obsessively doing things that conform to none of the instructions provided in the Holy Bible. They might want to consider how to love their neighbors better if they self-identify as Christians or as sociology and/or science experts. Otherwise they may lose credibility and lose the support of readers and voters and certain deities. They may even tempt their neighbors to violate Sacred Text laws and judge them to be intemperate, repetitive assholes.

I’m very content not to make that judgment, preferring to ask WTF? I’m not even a Christian. I’m an Agnostic who reads the details of stuff. Before yesterday’s spontaneous celebration of Pee-Pee Doings under discussion, i was already aware that the most widely translated and most broadly distributed book in human history contained numerous rebukes of male homosexuality, extremely few about female homosexuality and not one word to define abortion as good or bad.

So when I hear Deity promoters in the clergy, in politics or journalism provide interpretations that aren’t well supported, my default position is to ask What the Fuck? not Who to Fuck? And to hope that people of every gender can self identify as they wish and still retain Equal Rights to utilize all their body parts.
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I’m not going to get obsessive about these matters but I think John Prine can help fill in some missing blanks.