Day 10: Warren Christmas & Pope Maledict

OK, I get that Obama is trying to do the Big Tent thing, and getting a prominent evangelical to deliver the invocation at the Presidential inauguration is part of that. But: Rick Warren? The guy who endorsed California's Proposition 8, to strip gays of a right they already had? And of course, he wouldn't vote for an atheist -- 'cuz everyone knows getting hints from the Big Guy Upstairs is soooo important to a president, right? I mean, look how well that worked out for GWB on the Iraq thing.

To put it into perspective: Would it be Big Tenting, to invite a pastor who was on record as wanting to revoke the franchise from blacks, and who wouldn't vote for a Jew because, really, you need Jesus to hold your hand in the Oval Office?

But speaking of The Bigots vs. Gays game, the Pope has issued a warning of the perils of TEH GAY and, indeed, the whole notion that gender is a social construct. Apparently, blurring the lines between the sexes will lead to the "self-destruction" of humanity, just as surely as if we trash the environment:

We need something like human ecology, meant in the right way. The Church speaks of human nature as 'man' or 'woman' and asks that this order is respected.

This is not out-of-date metaphysics. It comes from the faith in the Creator and from listening to the language of creation, despising which would mean self-destruction for humans and therefore a destruction of the work itself of God.

As a matter of fact Benny, yes it is out-of-date metaphysics: to insist that Male and Female are some sort of transcendent "natures" is Neo-Platonic horseshit, and the phrase "comes from faith in the Creator" is here synonymous with "invented out of whole cloth way back before we knew enough biology to study it properly". Male and female are facts of purely earthly biology, and inconsistent ones at that -- never mind that many organisms get along without sexual differentiation, or switch sexes as needed; even among humans there are those whose anatomical and/or chromosomal characteristics are ambiguous or inconsistent. And the specific cues we customarily use to indicate gender (and the roles we assign) are almost purely social constructs.