Not that there's not anything wrong with that--veinglory

Interesting times we live in. Take for example this student newspaper editorial from historically African American all male More house college. Putting aside for a moment the WTFage of wanting to go to an all male college (unless one is gay), the gist of it is 'be as gay as you like, so long as you aren't feminine'.

And I quote: "It's not so much that "straight" men of Morehouse are uncomfortable with the gay lifestyle, but more so because it is constantly and quite robustly thrown in their face. Does being a gay man include adopting the traits of a woman? Because if that's the case, there's a more fitting school, and it's called Spelman College.

I'm all for being who you are. If you like women, go on and date women. If you like men, be my guest and date men. But if you are born a man, you should be just that--a man. If I have to look twice to tell if I'm looking at a man or woman on an all-male campus, then something is tragically wrong.

At this rate, Morehouse College may find itself in a difficult situation. What happens if and when one of our gay Morehouse brothers decides to go the next step and undergo a sex-change operation, and is then physically considered to be a woman? Does Morehouse have the right to ask that student to leave?

A massive population of feminine males and possible transgender students could critically damage the reputation of Morehouse and perhaps decline the amount of admissions, "

Just when I think I have seen it all, a writer like (I shit you not) Gerren Gaynor comes along to show how far people will go to hold the line. You want to screw men, fine, all men together... groovy. You want to be feminine, that's hideous.

Obviously. When it comes to women it seems that messing with 'separate but equal' is a slippery slow towards... honestly I am not sure. Something very very bad, apparently.

see also:
Morehouse College under fire again for alleged homophobia,
A Morehouse Student Publication Editor Apparently Fostering Homo- and Transbigotry,
I Too Sing Morehouse: Openly Gay Senior Michael Brewer Responds To Homophobic Article.

The Devil You Say! A Book Review of “The Prince of Darkness: the Devil in History, Religion and the Human Psyche” by Joan O’Grady.

The devil always seemed to me to be a made up bogeyman, whose rubber mask started to slip as soon as you looked too closely. I never gave much though to Satanism except when some redneck yelled at me for being a Satanist because I carrying a Darth Maul backpack. (No lie, I was dressed conservatively that day when I got bailed up by some weirdo for having a ‘demon’ on my bag – that’s Illinois for you).

I was dimly aware of the various modern Satanist denominations – the Order of Perdition etc… The commonest themes of these are that pleasure is not sinful if it does not harm to others (borrowed from paganism?) and that there is no God or afterlife, only ourselves (unabashed atheism). These groups are a mix of hedonism, religious libertarianism and wry satire – in allowing themselves to be consistently misunderstood. Others worship more literal devils in various black, white and grey shades.

It was with this in mind that I picked up ‘The Prince of Darkness’ to try and take a longer, straighter view of the devil without as much embedded doctrine as is to be found in tomes like the Satanic Bible. What I found made me realise how enduring the image of the Dark Prince is, across cultures and times – and how informed and sophisticated some modern Satanists are in drawing on these enduring beliefs for their own purposes.

O’Grady deals with ancient Satanic beliefs briefly but clearly before taking a fascinating journey from the advent of the New Testament to modern literature and psychology. Each chapter is seeded with insights. For example in Chapter Four, which takes us from the Desert Fathers to the Scholastics, we see that the Devil has a complex role even within the Christian Church. St. Thomas Aquinas wrote “Evil is the price to be paid for a non-static cosmos.” That is just as the ‘death’ tarot card has the real meaning of change and transformation, the ‘devil’ (struggle) is necessary for us to experience change and growth.

The main difference between the message of O’Grady’s book and the message of the modern Satanists is one of perspective. O’Grady describes how Christianity tends to assert that all evil flows from humans (and angels) misusing their free will and valuing themselves (sin and egotism). O’Grady quotes a story told by the ancient Persian poet Farid-Ud-Din Attar, where the devil says to Moses “Remember this one lesson… Never say ‘I’; otherwise you will find yourself in the same condition I am.”

Satanism claims that “I am mine own God” – and that the Devil was “the first individual - the first being to acquire consciousness and perceive itself as something not separate, but unique in the cosmos.” For them hedonism and individuality is the path to growth, not the primrose path to hell. In this age of self-esteem and rugged individualism, it is strange and enlightening to considered that Satanism may indeed by the more ‘modern’ of the two religions…

Stereotypes and Straw (Wo)men

"Women's instincts are finer and truer than men's, because women, as a rule, are morally better than men; and it is a fact, known to every observant person, that women are less unreasonably conventional in their views of this matter than men are. It is men, and not women, who loosely class together as bad all works of fiction which deal with forbidden things of character and conduct, without intelligently discriminating between those which deal with such matters in artistic fashion and exalted purpose and those which make them as an allurement to attention." (Eggleston, 1890--The Nude in Literature, The Author).

It important to realise that no stereotype is all bad. That may feel odd to some people, but it is important.

Stereotypes are two things. They are generalisations, which are lazy and do not respect individuality... but otherwise no great sin. And they may also be fallacies, so the quality being generalised may not even really differ between the two groups.

But if a person doe not think, for example, that men and women have a different level of worth--stereotypes are just sloppy and mistaken. And that means they are correctable.

If you realise that a person who stereotypes women attributes both good and bad qualities to them, there is a basis for discussion. You may rankle at the negative stereotypes, but your point might be more effectively made by looking at the positive ones.

And if the positive stereotypes somehow ring true, perhaps there is more than one person in the conversation who needs to check their facts and reconsider their position?