(Ex-)Gay Rights For (Ex-)Gays!

Via Morons.org, more wingnuttery from across the Pacific:

When Justin Watt, a blogger from Santa Rosa, California, saw a photo of a billboard advertisement for so-called “reparative therapy” from “ex-gay” ministry Exodus International, he was offended and insulted. The billboard read, “Gay? Unhappy? www.exodus.to” Watt made a statement about his views on Exodus’s tactics by altering the image to read “Straight? Unhappy? www.gay.com,” and then posted it on his Web site. Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay legal group representing Exodus, sent Watt a letter threatening legal action if it wasn’t removed. The ACLU Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender Project and the ACLU of Northern California responded, calling on the groups to drop their attempts to censor Watt and pointing to case law holding parodies to be Constitutionally-protected speech.

Most mainstream mental health and medical groups have denounced reparative therapy, stating that there is no evidence that reparative therapy is successful and that the practice may in fact be harmful to those who undergo it.

This puts me in mind of an amusing mock-questionnaire I first encountered about 10 years ago in a seminar on masculinities:

Heterosexual Questionnaire

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?
2. When and how did you decide that you were a heterosexual?
3. Is it possible that your heterosexuality is just a phase that you may grow out of?
4. Is it possible your heterosexuality stems from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?
5. If you've never slept with a person of the same sex, is it possible that all you need is a good gay or lesbian lover?
6. To whom have you disclosed your heterosexual tendencies? How did he or she react?
7. Why do you heterosexuals feel compelled to seduce others into your life-style?
8. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality? Why can't you just be what you are and keep quiet about it?
9. Would you want your children to be heterosexual knowing the problems that they'd face?
10. A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual. Do you consider it safe to expose your children to heterosexual teachers?
11. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?
12. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?
13. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual like you?
14. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don't you fear (s)he might be inclined to influence you in the direction of her/his own leanings?
15. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality, and fail to develop you natural, healthy homosexual potential?
16. There seem to be very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable you to change if you really want to. Have you considered trying aversion therapy? (Source)
    

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Australian soprano the whore of Babylon

Remember the furore over the Harry Potter books, and how unsuitable they were supposed to be for children? Well, in the US village of Bennett, Colorado the wingnuttery has been turned up to eleven, following the suspension of a state primary school teacher for the crime of exposing her students to opera.

The uproar began when Waggoner showed a video clip of Gounod's Faust, narrated by Joan Sutherland and featuring singing sock puppets. She had hoped to pique the curiosity of the first, second, and third graders in one of her classes about opera, and chose Faust to teach the children about bass and tenor voices, the use of props, and "trouser roles" in opera.

This led to accusations that the married mother of two was a lesbian promoting homosexuality; the plot of Faust, where the title character sells his soul to the devil to recapture his youth, led to her being labeled a devil worshipper.

What the fuck is happening to that country? I keep having this mental image of Planet Earth with a vast watery gap between the north Pacific and the north Atlantic oceans, and with the United States of America floating in orbit somewhere nearby (like Valinor at the end of the Second Age, for all you Tolkien enthusiasts).

Word around the campfire is that Waggoner's suspension is payback for the fact that the school Christmas play failed to include Christian songs.

Waggoner did not put Christian songs in the play. This outraged some townsfolk. She had to go.

"I did the same concert a week later in my own church with Christian songs," Tresa Waggoner said. "But in a public school, you really can't do that.

"I was told by some that the school for the last 30 years did Christmas music. They were outraged. But they never came to me."

They "hung me out to dry," she said.

Meanwhile, a Missouri high school teacher has resigned pre-emptively after catching fundie heat over her school's performance of Grease and its proposed performances of The Crucible and A Midsummer Night's Dream. This "Christian Exodus" we hear tell of--can they get a wriggle on?

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A good Saturday night ruined . . .

In his latest attempt to out-Coalition the Coalition, Big Daddy K has unveiled Labor's latest policy intiative. In a nutshell: it wants to take away your God-given right to access pornography from the internet. (Well, not entirely. If you're perverted and "Morally Dis-armed" enough to want to access such material, you can specifically request it.)

This, my friends, is how Federal Labor is going to pull itself out of its post-preselection doldrums. Pathetic.

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Call centre blues

A. (Telephone rings . . .)

B. Hello?

C. (Silence, for about five seconds . . .)

D. (Voice on the other end of the line, invariably in a South Asian accent) Good evening, Mr Vandelay, how are you today? I notice you are currently with telephone carrier X, but did you know that telephone carrier Y offers . . .

Somewhere around point C (since I know by now what point C generally entails), I hang up. But this approach, it appears, is not adopted by everybody who wishes to avoid the telemarketers--and call centre workers in India are not happy:

WORN down by racist abuse and sexual harassment from angry Western
customers, Indian call centre workers are lobbying to have repeat offenders
barred and to have complaints lodged with police around the world.
Vinod Shetty, of Mumbai, secretary of the newly formed Young Professionals
Collective, said staff were subject to so much abuse that thousands of its
workers were quitting in despair.
The problem has become so bad that remaining workers are being forced to extend their shifts to 12 and 13 hours a day to fill the gaps.

Abusing people who at the end of the day are simply doing what they are being paid to do is not on, obviously. Still, however inexcusable, you have to admit that the phenomenon is not surprising.

(Nor, it must be said, is the fact that Indian call centre workers are collectivising as a consequence, as the SMH piece indicates.)

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Worst Joke Wednesday

I was listening to "The Deep End" on Radio National and washing the dishes when I came up with a really, really terrible pun.

Man 1: "I went to the David Byrne concert last night."
Man 2: "Oh yeah? How was it?"
Man 1: (Shrugs.) "Same as it ever was."

Yowzah yowzah yowzah!

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Anna's Pasta Forno

Hot on the heels of Anna's Pasta Sauce comes . . . Anna's Pasta Forno.

Yes, it's time for yours sincerely to indulge in a little spot of nostalgia and blatant ethnic stereotyping. Well--I am part-Calabrese, so it's my birthright, dammit! Anyway, some of my fondest epicurean memories involve Christmas and Easter celebrations at Nonno and Nonna's house. These would manifest themselves in two varieties. The first I like to think of as "entree surprise"--the surprise being that the full plate of gnocchi you just devoured, and which you can feel expanding in your gullet in a fashion not dissimilar to Aunt Marge in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, was only the first course. The second (my favourite) was usually a bring-a-plate affair, and saw my grandparent's humble dining table transform before our very eyes into a smorgasbord that would give Homer Simpson a run for his money. And one of the most popular stops along the way--along with the mountains of cottolette (that's crumbed veal to you--but so much more than crumbed veal) my mother generally supplied--was Anna's Pasta Forno.

And it's incredibly easy to make.

Bolognese sauce
500g beef mince, browned
Anna's Pasta Sauce (minus the pork ribs or sausages, and of course the meatballs)

Bring to the boil and then simmer for . . . well, you're supposed to simmer for about an hour, but 25 minutes should suffice. Simmer until you think the sauce has thickened enough--you have to trust your own judgment with these home-spun recipes.

The Pasta Forno
500g rigatoni or penne, cooked
500g Mozzarella cheese, grated
1 tin SPAM (yes you read that correctly) or equivalent quantity of leg ham, chopped
6 hard-boiled eggs
The aforementioned Bolognese sauce

Spread a small quantity of sauce over the base of a lasagne dish. Layer pasta with remaining sauce, ham, egg and cheese. Finish with a layer of cheese. Bake at 180C for about half-an-hour, or until golden. Boo-ya.

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Harsh.

Please speak softly in this area as Phys. Ed. majors are trying to read the graffiti, and some of those words are really long.

-- Sign appended to the wall of a computer lab in the School of Education at UWA.




(P.S. My tardiness in updating this blog, for which I must apologise, is due wholly to my return to full-time studies--an experience that has been a little overwhelming, to say the least, for your friend and humble narrator. For the same reason--and at least until I get my house in order--I'll be blogging a little less frequently than has been my wont.)

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