Megan Stewart's Open Salon Blog

I admit it! I love GCB!

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:04:27 -0400

One of my early memories from second grade was of playing with a group of girls on the monkey bars, when a few of the girls began saying mean things about someone else. I don’t remember who that someone was; I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me. What I do remember clearly was the thought I had immediately afterwards: “Girls aren’t nice. I’d rather play with boys.”

Recently, my Christian roommate from college went on a Facebook tirade about the new ABC series, “GCB,” a show based on a novel called “Good Christian Bitches.” She found the show offensive, and encouraged her friends to sign a petition to take it off the air.

There are many things wrong with “GCB”: There’s the title: though my younger friends use “bitch” affectionately among their girlfriends, in my generation the term is only slightly more acceptable than Rush Limbaugh’s “slut.” Any wealthy white church in Dallas is going to be a megachurch, not a small chapel where everyone knows and gossips about each other. Few Protestant churches hire single men as pastors; the “GCB” church appears almost Catholic.

And yet I love “GCB,” a modern retelling of Mary and Martha, a biblical tale which pits the egalitarian Mary, who’d rather hang out with the guys, against her complementarian ("submission of wives") sister Martha.

I wanted to tell my friend I identified with Amanda. I’d had experiences like those portrayed on the show. And though queen bees can exist in any culture--even second grade--they tend to flourish in patriarchal cultures. Especially in the South, as fans of Flannery O’Connor can attest. Even my friend once compared the other women in one Baptist Church she attended to “Stepford Wives.”

I have a family history of Mormon polygamy and recently read some accounts from the 1800s written by women involved with the anti-polygamist movement, who described fellow sister wives as the most hostile toward their cause. Though polygamist wives were treated as slaves by their husbands, and older wives and their children left to fend for themselves, anti-polygamists were deemed inferior Christians by their sisters.

“GCB” is a timeless story.

Is Rob Bell Going to Hell?

Sat, 5 Mar 2011 13:03:52 -0500

Emergent church leader Rob Bell couldn’t ask for better publicity on his upcoming book, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived. As Dan Brown (Da Vinci Code), William P. Young (The Shack) and Rhonda Byrne (The Secret) can attest, the surest way to get your book on the bestseller charts in America is to have it labeled a heresy.

Love Wins hasn’t been released, but has already generated a Twitter storm. Comments on Justin Taylor’s blog resembled the New Testament afterlife dispute between the Pharisees and Sadducees.

I watched the YouTube video that has evangelicals like Taylor, Kevin DeYoung and John Piper proclaiming Bell a universalist--someone who believes everyone will go to heaven--but couldn’t see what the uproar was all about.

Maybe this is because Bell begins by asking whether Gandhi is in hell, which is exactly the sort of question my Presbyterian youth pastor in Boulder might have asked.

But therein may lie the problem. Evangelicals have been crowing for years about the decline in attendance in liberal mainline churches, Baby Boomers who, in a negative reaction to the “social gospel,” migrated to more conservative evangelical churches.. The notion the door might swing both ways, and the millennial generation could reject the “social conservative gospel,” must be frightening to them.

But it’s not surprising to me. A few years ago I returned to college in midlife. In an undergraduate essay writing class a young man who was raised listening to Focus on the Family shared his personal conflict upon discovering a close friend was a lesbian. A young woman wrote an angry essay about her abstinence ring. A discussion in a medieval England class on Beowulf turned into a discourse about whether Christianity was inherently misogynistic, until one young man finally yelled, “The devil is the father of lies, not the mother!” A home-schooled journalism student emphasized her concerns about Eritrea and Darfur.

Evangelical leaders couldn’t have laid heavier burdens on young Christians had they tried. It makes sense a new generation might seek a more inclusive heaven and hell.

The KKK, WikiLeaks and the Starr Report

Wed, 8 Dec 2010 12:12:53 -0500

“The U.S. Government Printing Office (GPO) began providing public access to the Starr report on Friday, September 11, 1998, following the enactment of U.S. House of Representatives Resolution 525 authorizing public disclosure.”

--U.S. GPO news release

The book “Freakonomics,” contains an account of Stetson Kennedy, who single-handedly weakened the Ku Klux Klan during the 1930s by infiltrating the organization, learning all their secret passwords and handshakes, then arranging with the producers of the Superman radio program to broadcast them as part of a series on Superman versus the KKK. “Freakonomics” authors, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner observed that today Kennedy would have used the Internet to reveal such information.

Today’s equivalent of Stetson Kennedy would be Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. More accurately, Pfc. Bradley Manning, who dumped the information on Wikileaks is the equivalent of Kennedy, and Wikileaks is the equivalent of the Superman radio show. In governments, as in the KKK, secrecy creates a sense of power. Like Toto pulling back the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, exposure reveals all such power as an illusion.

That’s why, on Sept. 11, 1998, the U.S. House of Representatives, led by House Speaker Newt Gingrich, voted to release to the Internet the Starr report detailing Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinski.

In a recent Fox interview, Gingrich described Assange as an “enemy combatant.”

As a former computer programmer, involved in some of the original testing of the Internet, I chuckled at Gingrinch’s attempt to pin responsibility on President Obama for the accessibility of classified documents. Software takes a long time to write, test and implement. Government bureaucracy that most likely exists in the military would slow that process even further. Any software in use by the Army last year would have been developed during the Bush or possibly even the Clinton or Bush I Administration.

Gingrich is shocked! Shocked! that a private in Army Intelligence has access to intelligence!

Leave it to Gingrich to portray personal embarrassment as a national security threat. His release of the Starr report pulls the pillowcase off his head to reveal his own contempt for “national security.” Besides, a government that forces grandmothers and children to parade virtually naked through airport scanners, or to have their genitals groped, has no grounds to complain about Wikileaks.

A Graduation Speech Long Forgotten

Thu, 20 May 2010 14:05:28 -0400

While my Facebook friends celebrate their children’s college graduations I’m reminded of a small controversy surrounding my stepdaughter’s graduation speaker. Darcy attended Scripps College in Claremont, a nice older suburb east of Los Angeles. Scripps is one college in a group that included Scripps, Harvey Mudd, Claremont-McKenna, Pitzer and Pamona. Darcy was on a full-ride merit-based scholarship, as were most of her friends at Scripps. Many of the students were too rich to be impressed by a Loveland High cheerleader, homecoming queen, valedictorian, straight-A student and runner-up for Miss Loveland Valentine.

This is not in any way to demean Scripps which was an incredible academic experience for Darcy. The campus was beautiful. As you strolled around the flower, palm and lavender tree-strewn campus admiring the Spanish architecture, the only things marring your view were the abundant posters offering counseling for young women suffering from anorexia and bulimia. And the wet-concrete inscription, “One must eat to excrete,” a sidewalk philosophy possibly contributed years earlier by a former Harvey Mudd student.

Scripps was the sort of fat-cat, liberal arts women’s college where you might expect Hillary Clinton as graduation speaker. In fact, Hillary did speak there, a few years later. But in 1997, the year Darcy graduated, the year Colorado State University invited Boston Globe journalist Ellen Goodman as graduation speaker, the all-female student body at Scripps was dismayed to discover their graduation speaker was a four-star Army general who’d led the NATO forces in Bosnia. Even Darcy, who’d dated a Marine from nearby Camp Pendleton, saw this as weird.

I was actually sort of intrigued by the controversy. Though I was around seven months pregnant at the time, I squeezed my way through the seats, and waddled down the aisle as close as I could to take a photograph of a slim, photogenic greying man in military dress with an engaging smile.

Neither my husband nor I remember anything about the graduation speech. My husband spent most of the time chasing our toddler around. I’m not sure what my excuse was. Not until the 2004 presidential election, when Gen. Wesley Clark was a Democratic candidate, did it occur to me he might be the man I’d photographed. I pulled out the photograph, and, sure enough, he was.

We make an awfully big deal about graduation speeches. When it comes down to it, even if we're sober, I’m not sure most of us remembers those lofty platitudes. I can't even remember who spoke at my college graduation, let alone what they said. I do remember the crude jokes my boyfriend and brother exchanged at lunch afterwards. All the advice, no matter how well-meaning, slipped away, if it even connected in the first place. All that remains are the controversies.

Why I am an Exploitation of Gold from Sewage Denier

Sat, 6 Mar 2010 14:03:48 -0500

You wouldn't trust a climatologist to test you for colon cancer. You wouldn't trust an oncologist to design a highway overpass. So, why would you trust a civil engineer to tell you whether or not global warming exists?

After reading a recent letter in my local newspaper touting one Dr. Ian Plimer as an expert on climate change, I decided to check out his published research via Colorado State University's Web of Science database. I discovered that most of Dr. Plimer's papers were apparently related to metalurgy, such as one titled "Exploitation of gold in a historic sewage sludge stockpile, Werribee, Australia," a topic about which as a former computer scientist I know little. In my ignorance, I will simply assume this refers to a process of alchemy by which gold is harvested from sewage, the theory for which I could easily dispell using a computer science maxim that states "garbage in, garbage out" and proudly proclaim myself one of the many "scientists" who disputes the theory of "Exploitation of Gold from Sewage."

However, Plimer did have one published paper related to climate change, titled, "Climate change, a geologist's view," possibly a duplicate, in both the March and April 2009 editions of Materials World, which is not a song by Madonna, but a magazine "specifically devoted to the engineering materials cycle, from mining and extraction, through processing and application, to recycling and recovery." An important subject, to be sure, but not exactly related to climatology, a topic I've located in the past through publications like Journal of the American Meteorological Society or Journal of Applied Physics. Still, I requested the article through Inter-Library Loan, which at two pages was, shall we say, succinct, for a scientific research paper.

Even the title of the article was misleading: the author information stated that Plimer isn't a geologist at all, but a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Adelaide in Australia. The distinction may be insignificant down under in Australia, where they harvest gold from sewage, but not here in the good old U.S. of A. where we know the difference between bridges and rock formations. That Dr. Plimer isn't qualified to speak on the topic of global warming hasn't evidently prevented him from putting himself forth as an expert on the subject.

The paper wasn't research at all, but only a statement of Plimer's own "conclusions," and states no sources for its information, some of which seemed to contradict common knowledge as well as what I learned in the atmospheric science class I took last year at CSU. The gist of Plimer's paper is that climate change has historically been caused by natural causes; therefore, it cannot now be caused by human activity. This former premise has been known for some time: historians believe events like the sacking of Rome and the Viking invasions were the result of cooling climates in northern Europe and Asia. This is why the U.S. Pentagon is one of the biggest funders of climate change research. But Plimer's conclusion doesn't necessarily follow, because the precise atmospheric conditions that exist now have never existed before.

Oh, but Plimer argues that they have, and that previously high levels of CO₂ in the atmosphere were caused by volcanic activity and associated with cycles of cooling and glaciation. This is oversimplistic. If you've ever been to Yellowstone, you probably noticed the air smelled like rotten eggs. A real geologist--as opposed to a civil engineer--might know that volcanic eruptions don't only release CO₂ into the atmosphere, but also sulfate aerosols. Sulfate aerosols reflect incoming sunlight, thus resulting in surface cooling, regardless of the levels of CO₂.

The 1991 erruption of Mount Pinatubo ejected an estimated 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, creating gorgeous sunsets and resulting in the two coolest years of the 1990s, 1991 and 1992. Volcanic erruptions are so effective in cooling the earth's climate that I understand one researcher at NCAR in Boulder is modeling the possibility of shooting sulfates into the atmosphere as a means of simulating volcanic activity and combating the effects of global warming.

If Dr. Plimer were a climatologist, rather than an expert on harvesting gold from sewage, he might have known that.