Archive for the ‘‘Family Values’’ Category
The Religion Of The Breeders
One might perhaps write the history of religion – and it might perhaps already have been done – in terms of the tension between breeders and non-breeders. In the right corner, ladies and gentlemen, those who can and want to breed and are successful in breeding, and who have therefore developed a religion that identifies […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
The Values Of What Family?
The essence of Protestantism being minute attention to the writings of St. Paul at the expense of the rest of the New Testament and the Tradition, it is somewhat strange that American preachers are so fond of the expression “family values”. It does not appear to mean anything connected with the Pauline admonition to remain […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
Family Planet
The strange Family designator is by no means confined to religious organisations. The strange Family designator is by no means confined to religious organisations. The American for “general practitioner” is “family physician”. I expect that Americans are so used to that term that they fail to notice how peculiar it really is. A British person […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
Back-Scratching Values
People expect to be praised for what they do for their families. It is, of course, better that they act well towards their families than act badly, but this is not really altruism but rather self-interest. Most families are mutual-support networks, and most mutual-support networks are families; of the other networks, most are structured as […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
Permission To Despise
Peace, liberty, justice, tolerance and compassion are all moral values. But when family-values conservatives talk about “Values”, it is never such things they mean. In the conservative idiolect, “values” appears to signal nothing but the intention to be extremely unpleasant to anyone not organising their sexual lives in the way the conservatives (pretend to) organise […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
Damn Foreigners Don’t Have No Families Like Us
It is well-known that an elderly lady stood up at a John McCain rally and referred to Barack Obama as an “Arab”. McCain himself seized the mike and contradicted her; or rather, he described Obama as a “decent family man with whom he happened to disagree”. Kudos to the Republican candidate for resisting what was […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
No Families For Jews And Democrats
The “Family Values” code becomes easier to unpack after contemplating the recent “League of Polish Families,” which indulged in anti-Semitism and praised Franco. Apparently, then, Jews and Spanish democrats do not live in families, or else families are only to be protected when they are neither Jewish nor democratic. In the US, the “Family Values” […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
An Alliance Of Wannabe Alpha Males
Many strains of evangelical Christianity lay great emphasis on the doctrine that wives must submit to their husbands. Some of the teachers take care to counterbalance this with the doctrine, out of Ephesians, that the husband must sacrifice himself for his wife; others do not. We may contemplate the possibility that men whose natural inclination […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
The Tonsure And The Headscarf
The Mormons believe that your family group stays with you for eternity. All members of a family must then be saved or damned together, which suggests either a peculiar coordination of spiritual states, or else that everyone rides the patriarch’s coattails to heaven or hell, whichever he deserves. God cannot, therefore, be regarding the other […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
The Answer Is Forty-Two
Question: Why don’t American fundamentalists go the whole hog and burn sexually active women at the stake, on prime-time television? Answer: Because, as the clothing of the women burned away, their breasts would be briefly exposed – that is, before being consumed by the flames – the indecency causing immense spiritual harm to the children […]
In: THE LONGEST CON, 'Family Values'
