Blogaround

A very happy dog, with 2 tiny flowers perched behind its ears. Image source.

1. Abigail and the Courage to Take Charge (posted May 19) "Of course in modern times, a good complementarian wife would have given gentle input before simply submitting to her husband even if she disagreed with his choice. But not Abigail."

2. Josh Harris Apologizes (posted May 11) I don't hold anything against him- he was only 21. I publicly advocated a lot of super-Christian stuff when I was 21, stuff that I now recognize as really messed-up.

3. Bill Gothard and the Dynamics of Abuse (posted May 11) "In fact, abusers typically choose their victims carefully while acting in an upstanding way toward those they are not victimizing. This helps hide their abuse by ensuring that no one will believe their victim if they speak out."

4. Did God Give Me Cancer? (posted May 18) "And yet, this is the very dogma folks like John Piper seem to relish in. In fact, he’s written an entire book entitled – and I’m sad to say I’m not making this up – Don’t Waste Your Cancer."

5. “Do I look like a boy, or a girl?” (posted May 16) "Ensuring that people always read my children’s gender correctly would require ensuring that each conforms to very specific societal norms of dress for both hair and clothing. In other words, it would require a sort of forced uniformity."

6. How North Carolina’s HB2 Affects Parents (posted May 17) "Every parent or other caregiver who has ever had to retrieve an escaped toddler from the opposite-gender changing room at the gym understands these feelings."

(Lots of good posts from Libby Anne this week!)

7. Love > tolerance; but (love – tolerance – subsidiarity) < love (posted May 16) "That means you don’t have to help a homeless person unless it’s your own sister. And it means that no one else has to help your sister, or to help you help your sister. So you’re all on your own, and we’re all screwed."

8. sinful hearts: the consequences of Inherited Sin (posted May 13) [content note: abusive theology] "So if our partner spends a lot of time telling us how untrustworthy we are, how terrible we are, how we deserve having our possessions destroyed, our body beaten, our souls violated, where is the space to call this abuse in the context of Inherited Sin?"

9. I saw "Captain America: Civil War" and I think it was pretty good. I really liked the beginning, when there was discussion on whether the Avengers should be under some kind of regulation and be held accountable for the destruction they cause and innocent people who die because they are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Totally agree with Ironman on this. Actually, this is why I don't like action movies in general- people are always fighting, destroying buildings, destroying cars- like, don't they care? Who's going to pay for that? And what about the innocent people in those cars or buildings, who probably just died off-screen? Yes, definitely a big issue for superhero movies, this definitely needs to be addressed.

Unfortunately, a bunch of other emergencies came up and the Avengers all got involved in various fights, including fighting each other, and never really returned to that discussion. Ahh man. (I'm aware that this is probably when everyone else thought the movie finally got exciting.)

Anyway, I hope Ant Man has to pay for that airplane.

10. 7 Ways Social Justice Language Can Become Abusive in Intimate Relationships (posted February 17) This is really important- but this article is just a start. There is a lot more that has to be said about this topic, and I'm not even sure of my opinion on it.

As an example: I'm not totally on board with the whole "tone-policing is bad" thing. (I'm defining "tone-policing" as "criticizing a person's 'tone' [perhaps by saying they sound angry or impolite] as an excuse to avoid considering the actual point they're trying to make," which is more or less how it seems to be defined in feminist stuff I've read.) Yes, definitely it's a problem when someone is like "well you should try to say it in a nicer way, then people might listen to you" when the person they are criticizing has every right to be angry, and they are suffering injustice that MUST be addressed, without first having to be burdened with explaining it in a way that privileged people deem as acceptable.

BUT. Does "tone-policing is not okay" mean "any time anybody says anything racist, sexist, anti-LGB, anti-trans, etc etc etc [and all of these terms are VERY broadly defined to include all tiny microaggressions, like asking a woman "and how does your boyfriend feel about you cutting your hair that short?" which implies that if a woman is in a relationship, then her body is not her own, she has to get permission from her male partner before she cuts her hair] then you can totally yell at them. You don't have to think about how they feel, you don't have to try to be nice, you don't have to care about if they're even able to understand why you're yelling at them"? Because, I'm not really comfortable with that. I think there is something to be said for being nice to people who unintentionally perpetuate the harmful ideas that are native to our society.

I don't believe this concern about fighting against tone-policing is a question of "taking it to the extreme"- instead, I think if we define "tone-policing" more clearly, then such situations will be automatically excluded. There must be some better and more clear definition, which does not lead to "tone-policing is bad, and therefore you can be as yelly and mean as you want when someone says or does something that feminism disapproves of."

11. Leaked Documents Reveal Studio Executives Knew About ‘Gods Of Egypt’ Before It Released Onto Public (posted May 25) From The Onion (fake news).

12. Beware the Jelly Creationists (posted May 25) "Hardcore young-Earth creationism is rigid and inflexible, and easy to disprove. It’s not easy to get its adherents to admit you’ve disproved it, because they engage in all kinds of ad hoc rationalisations, but eventually many young-Earth creationists run out of these rationalisations and are forced to change their minds. Jelly Creationism, by contrast, is compatible with almost anything short of evolution by natural processes, and so almost nothing you say will change its adherents’ minds."