Count Four

Veto

And, of course, it all comes back to consumerism.

Red States

A fun cartoon this morning from Tom Toles of the Washington Post. (may require registration)

Weddings

Weddings are curious things. They’re a public celebration of a union between two persons, but they are also frequently a means by which the dominant heterosexual culture reinforces that dominance through the use of religious imagery. And as such they can be a very uncomfortable place to be if you don’t happen to fit into that particular model.

I attended an Episcopal wedding last week wherein the priest, a woman, continually invoked the divine (unsurprisingly), but also continually spoke of the union of man and woman as the sole model for relationships as that model had been set out by the divine. I suppose it was because this was the first wedding I had attended in a while, and the first after the explosion of news and progress (and setbacks) on the issue of secular gay marriage, but the whole experience was an exceedingly uncomfortable one. It was as if my entire existence were being denied, that I had no part in this plan, and that, by inference, I should not exist at all. Forget about the queers, they don’t fit into the divine plan.

Which is precisely how violence against gays and lesbians arises – through this exclusion from the norm. If they don’t fit in, if there is no place for them, then it’s okay to exclude them, or to do violence against them. The divine has shown that there is no place for their kind in “real” society, so why should we even tolerate them to live.

I don’t know that I’ll be attending many more weddings of friends. I can’t say for certain that I never will again, but if the public celebration is to be a time where I and mine are to be explicitly excluded, in spirit if not in body, they are no place for me.

Plugin Fixed

Testing to see whether the plug-in I was trying to fix in Word Press works or not.

It does.

Gradual Changes

I haven’t managed to get one of the plug-ins to work, but I did manage to fix another error that was numbering everything instead of naming it when folks went to the “permalink” option (i.e., the first post is now listed by date and name, and not by number). Will work on the plug in more later, as well as a new design. While I like the default design – it’s very clean and near – I’d prefer something a tad more individualized. All in all the process has been pretty smooth. I’d definitely recommend Word Press as a blogging tool.

New Start

Decided to dump my old blogging software and switch over to Word Press. Still working on fixing stuff like the categories and other fixes, but not this evening – 10:40 pm on a school night is not the time to be finding a new FTP program and/or puzzling out unix codes.