Gender hierarchy: For a new baby girl

Hierarchy can kill people. Take the case of Korean Air, which suffered a high rate of crashes until the airline was re-structured so that the crew was required to address each other informally, in English. What had happened was that the planes had quite literally crashed and burned because inferiors were too polite to do anything but hint to the obviously-fallible superior that perhaps his decisions were wrong. This was documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, which I gave my father for Christmas.

My father recently remarked on this particular chapter that “Without thinking about it, that’s how I ran my Emergency Room.” Often, doctors make decisions based on statistics, on medical history and the patient, but doctors are also surrounded by nurses and other staff members who, while supposedly subordinate to the physician, may know something or think of something the physician hasn’t considered. Dad ran a fairly egalitarian ship. He said this gave him peace of mind, and the nurses, naturally, appreciated it. “There were doctors they didn’t like, and eventually, I figured out that these were the doctors who were hierarchical.” Nurses tend to spend more time with patients than the doctors do, at least in the hospital, and sometimes, the tidbit of information that could make all the difference has escaped the doctor’s attention. Not treating nurses like subordinates can save your patients’ lives in some cases.

Not treating one gender as subordinate can save lives as well. Gender hierarchy can result in mass infanticide of the less-favored gender, as in the case of China and India. Both of these countries score fairly high on the power distance index, meaning they embrace hierarchy and the idea that some people are lower in the order of things than others. Both countries also support the idea that, within the family structure, the male is more socially valuable than the female. In India, females are a potential financial burden, since the family must provide a dowry for her. In theory, this is her insurance against disaster; the dowry is in place to help provide for her if something happens to her husband, for example, since she is not necessarily expected to be able to provide for herself. In practice, however, this promotes female abandonment and kitchen fires. This is not in any way to say that Indian daughters are not loved by their parents. Many are. But many are also left by the wayside in the search for the all-important boy, particularly if the family’s resources are strained by overpopulation or poverty.

Many African and Middle Eastern countries with high power distance scores, correlationally or not, practice female genital mutilation, which can among other things result in death. FGM is a complex topic, of course, but it stems from the idea that women should not be like men, and that women need to be untainted by inappropriate sexual desire. Again, many families who inflict this practice on their daughters sincerely love them. They want the best for them. They want to protect the women from evil influence and elevate their status in their local communities. Interestingly, the practice appears to be slightly less common in countries within the region where women must be accompanied by male relatives when they are out in public — though this may essentially infantize them in the name of safety and propriety, and financially cripple them if male relatives cannot provide.

Before you blame these practices on some religion or culture that you do not espouse rather than on the social order per se, ask yourself — if you are hierarchical — how far you would go to ensure your daughter, sister, fiancée or wife remained sexually and spiritually pure. Do you believe, for example, in the curse of Eve, and consequential suffering in childbirth? If so, why not suffering in every part of the reproduction process? Especially if you could thereby protect your loved ones from the depths of hell, since sexual purity is probably more closely tied to salvation than other sins like pride or slander that you’re personally guilty of every day, and True Love Waits just doesn’t work that well? Doesn’t the Bible say that if your eye offends you, you should pluck it out, for it is better that one part perish than that the whole body perishes in fiery torment? Doesn’t the Bible say that women are weaker vessels, and isn’t it your duty to protect weaker things, even from themselves?

And if, now that you have considered these points, the question of circumcising women is still met with anything short of “No Way,” aren’t you in fact blaspheming the God who created them exactly the way they were born, in his own image?

The second of my nieces is five days old today, and I am thankful that she is coming into a world where she will not be mutilated for being a girl. Where she will have the opportunity of a good education, the opportunity of independence. Where she will know she is loved as a person, as much as any brother she will ever have. I hope she, along with her sister, realizes how strong she can be, how fierce and how protective, and I hope she never accepts the words of those who would tell her otherwise.

I heard from many sources growing up that I was weaker because I was a girl — though never from my parents. Girls, people said, were prone to make overly emotional decisions about things and were physically weak, which was why gender hierarchy was important. Ironically, I was one of the most self-disciplined children you probably would have ever met, and I had a methodical, pragmatic way of approaching things, eschewing candy and saving every dollar I earned for some future importance, which turned out to be college. Since then, I have worked with many men and many women, both in blue-collar and professional atmospheres, and it least in my experience, contrary to everything I heard about “feminists” growing up, it has been the men who were more prone to verbal outbursts, grumbling and manipulative behavior than the women.

Physically, of course, I am much smaller than the average male, but the things I did as a child, the ballet and the gymnastics and whatever else, helped to make me reasonably coordinated — to the point that it’s actually rude of me to expect that men will be as good as I am at physical things just because they’re men. I went snowboarding with a 28-year-old male recently, and excitedly took him to do things that I had judged easy. He’d only been a few times, but I thought, he’s a wrestler-turned-Marine-turned outdoor enthusiast with abs of steel; this won’t be challenging for him. It’s not all that challenging for me, though I’m not that good yet either. However, he found it frustrating enough that it was less than fun for him, and it was sort of a disappointing afternoon for both of us.

Let’s be clear here: Many males (and females) outdo me without breaking a sweat. Others don’t, though. Frankly, I could meet the male’s minimum physical requirements for getting into the aforementioned Marines. Which is why I think the armed forces having different standards for men and women is silly — I work out pretty much never, unless you count what I do for fun. Now, granted, there is no way I could throw a 200-pound soldier over my shoulder and carry him to safety, but for better or worse those aren’t in the requirements for Marines. My snowboarding pal, on the other hand, would meet any such standard you could throw at him, but even so, he isn’t guaranteed physical dominance in every realm, even going head-to-head with a 118-pound 30-year-old female with a desk job — and he would readily admit this. Which is why any man or woman who claims otherwise seems either ignorant, or like they’re part of some self-fulfilling prophecy where women never do anything active.

What does this have to do with females being circumcised and strangled? For one, the idea that they will be less adept, and more of a liability. The idea that they will not be strong in a way that is culturally acceptable. The idea that they should never have anything that swings between their legs — metaphorically, physiologically. And hence, everything that is naturally female — the shapes they are born with, their bold, bear-like motherhood, their intuition or grace or aesthetic sense, their ability to endure, their ability to sit still and learn — is pushed into oblivion in the name of making them less like men. And, yes, a tent of cloth looks less like a naked man than a naked woman does, but the natural differences are still distinct enough that very few people would find them confusing.

On Homeschooling

The other night, as I lounged on a couch more posh than comfortable, imbibing a flight of Syrah at the local wine bar, a friend — everyone is a friend in this town — leaned across the very large coffee table and told me she was homeschooling her kids. “You were homeschooled, right?” She asked “What did you think of it?”

That is a question I have contemplated frequently over the last 20 years or so. By and large, I think it just depends. It depends on the kid, and it depends on the parents. Mostly the parents. I had great parents for the job; a visual artist and a botanist-biologist-turned-medical-doctor who was willing to work part-time so he could participate in our education. But even still, it wasn’t perfect. Our greatest boon was that it saved us from boredom and potential bullying, and that it gave us an enormous amount of freedom to develop our own particular skills. If my little brother Daniel sang at all hours of the day, nobody gave him a pill and told him to shut up. If Samuel wanted to spend the afternoon running around the yard tackling invisible people and doing flips, he could do that. And if I wanted to read until my head ached, I could do that, too.

My first official English lesson was in college. Until that point, I had never formally studied rhetoric, English grammar, composition, MLA style, or anything else relating to how to write. Yet I had been writing since I was six years old, and by the time I left for college, had already written two (not exceptionally good) novels. I had spent at least 8,000 hours of my life reading everything from Beverly Cleary to Shakespeare to the Encyclopaedia Britannica — figuring 3 hours a day, 300 days a year, on average, from ages 9-18, which is actually a pretty conservative estimate.

In mimicry of all I read, I wrote plays, I created satirical advertisements, I published handwritten family newspapers, and I kept journals. I constructed argumentative letters, bolstered with historical research and social commentary, if my parents forbade me to do something that I considered particularly innocuous. Occasionally I even had to produce a report on something. Like photons. Or the changing chromosomal structure of wheat over time. Which reminds me. We had no formal science curriculum either. We had science journals. We had our gardens, supplemented by my father’s drawings of photosynthesis. We made diagrams of how much our corn plants grew every week. We did simple experiments as young children, and read more as older children. We took vacation only on holidays, weekends, and family trips. We did math every day (Saxon math, which included a smattering of chemistry as we advanced). Spelling every day. Latin every day — I learned the names for things in English grammar when we studied Latin. I learned about transitive versus intransitive verbs, nominative versus accusative case, and how languages can differ from one another. We were not required to do art, but we had ample material, and drawing was one of our favorite pastimes. Sometimes, we had life drawing class. We observed, as our mother pointed out, how the head is shaped like an egg, with the eyes lined up in the approximate middle of the face. From outside sources, I took violin for awhile. Choir for awhile. Sign language, quilting, softball, ballet, gymnastics, swimming and skiing for awhile. Sometimes, individually, we went in with my father to his clinic and did our schoolwork in his office. If we got bored, we helped the front desk file charts, or, with a patient’s permission, sat in on a consult or a minor surgery. Or we would pull my father’s medical books off the shelf and read those. There was a really interesting one on reproduction and gestation, with super-glossy pictures.

It was not exactly an orthodox education, and I have sometimes wondered if, given the opportunity of the right public or private high school, I might not have gotten into a more prestigious university. I also wonder if my drive to read and write so much would have survived in an environment where I sat behind a desk for 8 hours a day listening to someone drone on about whatever the subject was. Curious, in eighth or ninth grade, I visited a private school with some of my friends, and I was horrified at how much time they spent being counterproductive. In math, the teacher went over how to find the circumference of a circle, and even though I already knew how to do that, the way he was teaching it confused me. In Spanish, we repeated nouns in unison with atrocious pronunciation. Thereafter, I did not set foot inside a lecture hall until college.

My first semester at college, I enrolled in a journalism lab, Biology 101 and various other 101-level classes. I neglected to actually enroll in the journalism lab’s accompanying class, and turned in my first story for the school paper still without ever having been to a formal writing lesson. One of the other students in my lab recognized my name when I introduced myself, and said that my first lead had been read aloud to her class as an example of fine student journalism. At this point, I had no idea what a lead even was. I had just written what seemed interesting in the first paragraph to get people to pay attention to what otherwise was not a very interesting story.

The first day of Biology, our teacher told the full class of us that he was going to be rigorous, and proved it by jumping straight in. We could work with lab partners on a quiz we were given, and that first time, I made the mistake of assuming that the other kids would know more than me because they’d had High School biology. But they didn’t; we got only 3 out of 5 questions right. After that, I took what they said with a grain of salt. As the semester wore on, more and more of the class dropped out, until there were only a handful of us. Not all of them were passing, either. I didn’t quite understand this, since they seemed to be studying and coming to class faithfully, which was all I needed to do to ace the tests. I did spend a lot of time with my nose buried in my Biology textbook that semester, trying to understand the concepts enough to reformulate them to myself. As far as I know, I was the only person in class that semester to get an A. My teacher told me I should go into Biology. I ignored him, because I liked writing better.

I was also taking a freshman-level English composition class. As directed study. Which meant that I had a textbook to read, several papers to write, and that I met with my professor for ten minutes every week, one-on-one. Those ten minutes were intense, but decided I liked this, since it meant that, once again, I did not have to sit in on boring lectures, which saved me about three hours every week. That Biology class was taking up quite a bit of my time.

Years later, after two semesters of teaching three to six classes per week, with limited student retention of the lecture material, I decided to scuttle Friday class periods in favor of each student coming in to meet with me for ten minutes to discuss their papers in person, in remembrance of those meetings with my English professor. Those ten minutes counted heavily towards their participation and attendance grades. They liked it. I liked it, mostly because it gave me face time with students who never would have otherwise ventured into my office.

So over the sound of acoustic guitar and clinking dishes, I told my friend that, mostly, for me, it had been a decent education. Not least of all because it allowed me to second-guess some of the traditions in more mainstream institutions of learning.

Language, IQ and firstborns

For the past couple of decades, I’ve come in and out of contact with articles saying that firstborn children tend to have better verbal skills, on average, than their younger siblings. This, of course, gelled with my own experience as a preternaturally linguistic firstborn child — my mother recorded my early verbal expressions faithfully, reporting that I had managed to come up with an eleven-word sentence at something like 18 months. Or maybe 20. Frankly, I do not remember.

Recently, I’ve been watching my niece, who will be 19 months old on Friday. She is the first, and for a couple of weeks more, only, child. I’ve been watching how she will bring her books, one by one, to her Daddy on his days off (or her Mama any other day), and sit by him while he asks her to point to the ball or the pig or the hat. She likes these games, and seems to understand that they are symbols of objects in the real world. She repeats the words. She knows how genitive case works: she picks up the checkbook when we are alone in the house and says “Daddy’s.” She finds my mother’s green throw blanket and tells me: “Mimi’s.” She knows how to make sentences using “it’s” both in the abstract and the concrete. “Oh! It’s cold,” she will say when we step outside and the chill of winter hits us. “It’s Samah,” she will say, pointing to my brother Samuel as he comes in.

When we explore the kitchen, she knows which cups are for “water” and which cups are for “coffee.” She likes to smell the coffee in the morning, and dip her finger in for a taste. Her world consists primarily of adults who give her their undivided intellectual attention, or at least a running commentary on what things are and how they work. She seems to have a head start on language comprehension, which may continue even after the new baby arrives.

Seeing all of this, I wanted to research again the correlation between firstborn children and verbal skills. What I found was that, on average, firstborns have higher IQs than their younger siblings. Not by a huge amount… a whole 3% more than the second-born, and 4% more than the third-born… but the edge seems to come from the way they are raised. Firstborns also have a tendency to excel academically and find positions in management, which may have less to do with their actual intelligence than it does with their attitude about their place in the world. My sister, who is almost two and a half years younger than me, was physically almost as big as I was for a large portion of our childhood (she eventually became bigger) and she was fearless in ways that I was not. Samuel, over five years younger than me, was so aggressive that he would tackle anything in his path, including me, just for the fun of it. When he was about three, he permanently damaged his upper lip because he was chasing me around the back yard, and I sprang up on the deck to evade him, which he mistakenly believed he could do as well.

They could be little hellions, both of them, and they often banded together to challenge me. So I had to outsmart them. I had to impress upon them (however disingenuously) that I was vastly superior, and that no amount of trying would ever result in my downfall. However, I had to do this in a way that would not be suspect, such as writing plays for us all and making them take the less interesting roles. I had to think defensively, and I got good at climbing trees at rapid speed to avoid being sprayed with the garden hose. I also got really good at being boring; reading and rolling my eyes at them until they left me alone. By the time Daniel and Isaiah came along, I was old enough to mother them, teach them how to read and write fiction, and give them all advice on fashion (white tennis shoes look like toilets on your feet and no, that a bent staple around your ear does not pass for an earring), whether they paid attention or not.

I left home shortly after turning 18, and stepped into the world of non-homeschooling, where my classmates were my own age and older. I expected things to be challenging because of this, but overall, my upbringing blended pretty well into the next phases of life. In my eight years of undergrad and grad school, I got one B. Otherwise, it was fifteen semesters of 4.0s. Not because I was a genius, but because I had trained myself to be patient, to be studious, to be creative, and to be nimble. And also, probably, because I expected to do pretty well in spite of the fact that I had decent competition. Since then, I have been relatively lucky in my professional life. Perhaps nothing, though, set me on these paths so much as the fact that I was born first, into the family I was born into. It’s an interesting thing to contemplate.

It might be a little bit complicated

My cousins Anna Sophia and Elizabeth Botkin have sent me their latest book for Christmas, It’s (not that) Complicated: How to Relate to Guys in a Healthy, Sane, and Biblical way. They inscribed it to “our dear Katie, with much love from your cousins.” Honestly, such things always choke me up a little, because I know they sincerely mean it. However, love has never stopped me from saying something I think should be said, and I feel compelled to, as graciously as I can, argue some of their points.

They write: “The first time we ever spoke on the subject of boys and relationships, at ages 16 and 18, we shared the podium with a scion of Sigmund Freud… To encourage his female audience to exult in being girls, our Freudian professor pulled out statistics proving that today is a bad time to be a boy. He showed that their performance in nearly every field is dropping at an incredible rate. IQs are dropping, grade averages are dropping, crimes are rising. Women are outstripping them in every field. He said he didn’t know the reason.

“At the time, we didn’t know the reason either, but we were on the trail to finding out… America began moving more deliberately in this direction in the 1930s, when a group of European socialists got a foothold in American education and media. They were primarily working toward a goal that Karl Marx’s disciple Wilhelm Reich articulated: ‘to dethrone the patriarchal power in man.’ … shady socialists have tried a new tactic for un-manning men, and discovered a most effective weapon[:] Women” (pp. 41-45).

There are a number of scholastic errors here. The first lies in assuming that this man, whom my cousins did not know and otherwise disagreed with, was citing valid data. In addition, no actual studies of their own accompany the sweeping claim that, for example, “Women are outstripping [men] in every field.” In my own experience, this is simply not true, and here are some interesting statistics on women’s vs. men’s earnings to help back up my viewpoint. In all comparisons of full-time, year-round workers, men are still earning more than women. That holds true in comparing individual fields, education levels, races, ages, and so on. Additionally, married men earned 60% more in 2009 than they did in the 1970s, compared to a 16% increase for unmarried men. That is to say, being married to a pool of women who increasingly work outside the home has not hurt the pocketbooks of this nation’s husbands. Perhaps their wives’ work contacts or business acumen even helped them gain upward mobility.

The claim about IQ intrigued me. The accuracy of IQ tests is a matter of some debate, but here is a study from 1997 that notes “It is a fact that IQ test scores have risen considerably through the years, but the reasons for these changes are uncertain.” I decided to look specifically for any studies showing a drop in male IQ, and found one noting the effects of pollutants on Korean children. On a full-scale IQ test, “boys in the highest DEHP-exposure group scored 1 to 2 points lower … No such trend of some phthalate-linked drop in full-scale IQ emerged among girls.” That is to say, females seem to handle bodily toxins slightly better than males do, and high levels of pollution are making boys dumber. Their actual genetics may be the reason. Time notes that “in women, cells can perhaps be protected by a slightly better variation of a gene on the second X chromosome. Men don’t have this luxury and don’t get this choice.” If God himself designed the chromosomes, then he designed women to last longer than men.

This leads to my second point, and my cousins’ second scholastic error. Why did they not ask themselves why this professor might be telling a roomfull of girls that they had reason to rejoice in their birthright in the first place? One reason might be the worldwide preference for male over female children. “As we tried to understand the issue better,” says Rei Inamoto in Fast Company‘s recent article on gender, “we realized that this is not an issue of daughters versus sons. It’s an issue of the self-perpetuating and devastating belief that women have little value.” In the face of such a preference for males, it might not be such a bad idea to tell girls that, for example, God made them to last.

The third scholastic error was using presuppositionalism to provide their rationale. Presuppositionalism does not ask “why is this so?” Instead, it says “I am starting from the viewpoint of X, Y or Z, and I am going to look for something to back that up.” It could be argued that everyone presupposes to one degree or another — we all have our ideals and preferences through which we view the world — but the scientific method, after all, insists on approaching something with neutrality in order not to effect the outcome. To find a quote from a Marxist against patriarchy does not prove that Marxism has destroyed patriarchy. In fact, this is a logical fallacy:

A: Marxists are against patriarchy

B: Americans are against patriarchy

C: Therefore, Americans are Marxists or have been unwittingly duped by Marxists

My cousins are adherents specifically to Christian presuppositionalism, but even if you believe in the validity of Scripture, that does not necessitate that you hold the viewpoints found in their book at large. In fact, many Christians and Biblical scholars do not. But that is a debate for a different time.

Instead, I’d like to close with my favorite line from the book: “Being in this for the husband is just riding to hell in a hope chest.” That made me laugh, and put a bookmark on the page.

Ghost of Christmas past

This is the third Christmas I have spent away from my own family. The first was in 2001, in East Berlin, when I was 20 years old. I was studying abroad in France, and I managed to procure an invitation from a German boy exactly three years my senior who had visited my family in Idaho in 1997. I took the train to Berlin, met him at the station, and went back with him to his mother’s white-paneled apartment on Dietrich Bonhoeffer Strasse, where he and his brother had been staying since before the wall came down. For a few days, I walked around the city with them hearing stories of how things were before (“there were towers with men, and in the middle, there were sharp dogs”). On Christmas eve, we went to church together. They had brought in a fresh evergreen tree, attached real candles to it, and that evening we lit them. Then they sang for their presents, and made me sing for mine… mostly chocolate, and I ate so much of it that my wool pants became tight.

In 2004, I was in France again, and this time I went to the Alps. The mountains were so massive and blindingly white that when I emerged into the Alpine village, I felt almost frightened; as if it all would tumble down and crush me with its sheer magnificence. For company, there was one of the kindest extended families I had ever met: Pierre, Christine, Sophie, Sebastian, Antione, the other Pierre, Giles — and then me — all crowded into one small rented chalet. They had invited me because I would otherwise have been an orphan. In the evenings, we played French versions of charades and murder, laughing until we were hoarse, and we went to a small bar we found in the village to dance late into the night. On Christmas eve, we ate fondue, or maybe crepes, and then we exchanged gifts. I gave everyone a really gross-looking giant homemade cookie containing chocolate, which caused Pierre the elder to remark: “tu es originale.” On Christmas day, I took the train back to Rouen, and did not speak a word of English to anyone, not even myself.

This year, I traveled to Southern California, close to the area where all the military bases are, to be welcomed by a Naval chaplain and his wife of Scandinavian descent. The Naval chaplain’s four sons had chosen a book for him on Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Louis set it under the tree. On Christmas eve, we ate aebleskiver, cooked in a cast iron pan specially made for it, and opened one present each. I received a box of chocolate. Then we went to a Lutheran candlelit service, which reminded me of the Lutheran service in German I had attended precisely ten years before. We even sang Silent Night. This time, Louis’ four-year-old niece, who had decided she wanted to sit on my lap, fell asleep on my shoulder a few minutes in. Louis took her from me with the closing blessing and carried her to her parents’ car, carefully, through the semi-chill of inland Orange County at 11 p.m. in December. We went back and prepared for the morrow by staging a tableau of crumbs, complete with a formal note to Santa: “Dear Santa, please accept these milk and cookies as a token of our appreciation.” I never believed in Santa as a child, but somehow this pleased me immensely, and I flung my arms around Louis, there in the living room with the tree lit up behind us, and giggled like I was six years old.

Fiji handling

Summing up a trip to a resort with a tale of how good the massages were seems intrinsically dull. It should all sort of go without saying. However, being under the hands of a capable masseuse after a very long day of travel is, in the flesh, so pleasant that my immediate reaction was to want to capture it for posterity.

Hence, I started my trip to Fiji’s Royal Davui with a ritual consisting of an hour full-body massage, while the waves lapped just outside and the wind made the palm fronds sigh, a facial “with a power packed serum containing actives to restore radiance,” and a hair and scalp massage. I meandered down to the restaurant after the nearly two-hour treatment, to be greeted by a fellow traveler exclaiming “wow, you have great skin.” Slightly embarrassed, I protested that in fact, I do not have great skin; I actually have an annoying combination of sensitive, starting-to-age dry skin and lingering acne-proneness.

The claim is that the treatment minimizes the effects of jet lag, and after having traveled for 24 hours to reach the Island, and stayed awake sans caffeine for another 13, I felt remarkably functional as I tucked myself in. Whether it was the spa treatment or the peaceful setting, I slept better than I normally do in an unfamiliar place, and woke up the next morning well-rested and ready to explore. Which I did, for the next five days, pretty much non-stop; in water, over water, under water. I finished things off with another massage for good measure, which, to be honest, I would never allow myself the luxury of normally.

Almost famous

I always wondered what it would be like to be famous. You know, have nice people admire you from afar, want to hang out with you before they’d even met you. Put your photo up on their bulletin board at college. Do a secret dance when they actually did meet you a decade later. It would sort of be like romance, and all the more so if the person did kind of have an intellectual crush on you (because, naturally, were I ever famous, I would be famous for intellectual reasons).

So Louis and I were eating pizza in my living room after a several hours of wrangling with the tree in my yard, and I remembered that he had said something about having this Argonaut column up on his bulletin board his Freshman year at University of Idaho. He couldn’t recall who it was by, but the way he described it didn’t sound all that familiar. Something about boozing, only it was anti-boozing. But, because I’m organized like that, I pulled out a folder from my living room file cabinet, and started rifling through old Argonaut articles. Towards the back of the folder I found one from October 4, 2002, entitled “Justification 101: Survey of drinking methods,” complete with a photo of me with a short haircut and a round face, freshly back from Taiwan, where I’d eaten fried food for a month. Katie Botkin, Assistant A&E editor. I handed it to Louis.

“That’s the one,” he said. “I can’t believe it’s you! I had this up all year! I thought you were so sarcastic and witty. I wanted to meet you and have a beer with you. I looked for your columns, and I cut another one out. But you didn’t write every week.”

“Not columns,” I said. I grinned. I’d forgotten about that short little piece, which I’d probably written in an hour or so, and took it back to look it over. It contained a list of 16 reasons people might give for getting drunk, and snarky retorts to all of them… Now that I was reading it, writing it came back to me. I, from my mature 21-year-old viewpoint, had created it to appeal to Louis’ crowd; the raucous 18-year-old with a brain beneath his sense of humor.

“Justified by ‘the beer tastes good.’
“Get real. Beer, in this instance, is only the ends to a mean; otherwise the beer companies wouldn’t market something that tastes like soapy 7-UP.
“Justified by ‘I can really hold my liquor.’
“I can really hold my salsa, but you don’t see me chugging it at parties.
“Justified by ‘it’s just so funny when I get drunk.’
“Yeah. Because it turns you into a moron. They hired court jesters back in the day for this purpose.”

I looked back up at Louis. “So, you’ve been a fan of me for nine years,” I said “And now you’re dating me.”

“I have to tell my college roommate,” he said.

Faith-based laws and lack thereof

Recently, there has been a not-so-subtle dislike of anything resembling Sharia law in the United States. Conservative Christians may accuse more liberal secularists of turning a blind eye in the name of tolerance and religious diversity, but all the while Christians defend legislation that could do far more to protect Sharia law than anything the secularists would be comfortable with.

If you have laws in place that prevent government interference in faith-based initiatives, for example, then that should apply whether the faith in question is fundamental Baptist or fundamental Islam. Because governments are intended as ruling bodies — as the instruments of justice and order — the lack of regulation or the lack of punishment for anything that falls within the religious sphere is therefore a political statement. If you’re worried about the observation of Sharia law, you might not need to look much further than your own resistance to the watchful eye of Big Brother.

And making sure that it’s fundamental Baptist rather than Islam isn’t going to do much more than change the name of the deity. Oddly or not, and despite Christians’ claims that they are operating under grace, horror stories of fundamentalism don’t seem to change much from one religion to the next. Even if stoning for adultery isn’t currently legal in many countries, the stronger can still bully the weaker, the crowd still bullies the non-conformist, and maintain their “right” to do so by saying it is the will of God. To the strict fundamentalist, uncovered sin against God, whether you call Him Jehovah or Allah, requires corporal punishment or death. At the very least, it requires being cut off from the faithful in some way. The infractions are similar. The social structure is similar. The obsession with female modesty, female “protection” and female submission is similar.

In Idaho, we have laws still in effect that might be based on Sharia or might be based on the Old Testament. If things like fornication and “video voyeurism” are illegal (and they are), then many of you are unwittingly criminals. Theoretically, you could be jailed for these moral failings.