A number of years ago, my buddy Mitchell gave me a pair of these as a gag X-Mas gift. (along with one of those boob beer can toppers)
Fundies. Underwear built for two.
The name and potential "use" of this gag gift reminded me of another kind of fundie, this one usually caught with his or her private parts occupying the same area as those of someone not their wedded partner.
Baptist minister and Focus on the Family fundie George Rekers was caught with a very young fellow he met off of rentboy.com recently and news outlets and blogs like my own gave the play-by-play. It's fair to say that unless his wife regressed 40 years and had a sex change, Lucien ain't Mrs. Rekers.
He is the latest in a string of so-far-right-they're-staring-at-their-own-asses bigots caught doing things they have damned others for. Guys like Rev. Tommy Tester (arrested whilst wearing a skirt propositioning a cop for a blowjob), Congressman Mark Sanford ( The Argentine Affair), and Ted Haggard (meth and men) are the faces of the epidemic of religion gone bad. But it is not a new phenomenon. Remember Jimmy Swaggart and his whores?
It is not a problem with religion so much as when one uses the excuse of faith to rid themselves of what disturbs them the most- their own very human desires. Their internal shame is directed outward as hate towards the people who contently live in a way that the suffering fundie wishes he could. If he wants to leave his wife but the Church prohibits it, he pushes for sanctions against female freedom and for male household dominance. If he really wishes to have a partner of the same gender, he will invest his efforts in the pseudoscience of "curing" homosexuality. Should he desire someone of a different race or religion, personal ignominy forces the person to project racism.
Self-loathing is the disease and there will always be a religion asserting that they can fix your every ill. And if you are brought up in orthodoxy, you will have been indoctrinated with not only self-doubt but something to cling to while you struggle with your right to exist. Theology instills a near-impossible moral ideal and mandates blind allegiance with damnation and derision for those who violate the command of the laws. Moral codes were often instituted by various societies, but these were magically beamed into print by someone claiming to know the will of the supernatural. The books themselves may have been apocryphal by design but are now taken so literally that no human being can completely comply.
So we confess to priests, cry to the heavens, apologize for sins we may or may not have even thought of committing on Yom Kippur, and pray for perfection. And when we fall short of the instilled archetype, we project that insecurity onto others and punish them for sins real or imagined. And it is not our place to do so.
Should there truly be a metaphysical overseer of the worlds, this ethereal being would likely view morality in a far different view than in the books created by the most intelligent of creatures. The vengeful old bearded man in the sky is an image of man's views on God, and it is an insult to the most extreme degree. Why would the sublime create such variations of creatures for man to instill terror on them? Minorities, be them human or otherwise are simply variations. Where some commit atrocities through free will, others are scorned simply for being born the way they are. God doesn't hate, man does.
If I was floating around the cosmos as the ultimate steward of the universe, I'd be pretty angry with those men who vainly choose to alter my design. The preacher who promises to "repair" my natural method of population control would be the true heretic in my eyes.
Maybe that is the point to these recent "outings". Entertain for yourself the possibility that their holier-than-thou existence was contrary to the plan of the Creator. Maybe this is some sort of holy revenge for the sin of trying to fix what wasn't broken in the first place.
Just a thought.
This post was originally created on May 12, 2010 (by me and copyrighted) but I thought that today was an appropriate day to bring this one out again for you lovelies. xo M
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