I’ve been out there pounding the pavement to publicize my book, Qing A’s, guest blogging, and reading aloud (here’s a video in case you want to see what that’s like). Idle thought time once dedicated to slanting truths has been devoted to brand new dilemmas: How can I transmit a consistent message without using the same words over and over? Should I care that people are making fun of the way I talk? When a woman emails to let me know I make her want to puke, how do I resist the temptation to write something nasty about people who take time to internet-harass strangers? (For this last dilemma, I shrug it off with wisdom my mother dispensed in 1989 when I complained that my drama teacher was a sadistic tyrant: Most likely she’s an unhappy person.)

An interesting item on The Huffington Post has me back on the beat. Yesterday Frank Schaeffer, author, former Religious Rightie, son of Francis Schaeffer (the theologian many people credit with drawing evangelical Christians into the political arena) blogged to assert a connection between mainstream evangelical Christianity and Hutaree Christian militia group in Michigan, who are accused of plotting to kill cops and lead an antigovernment uprising in an effort to expedite the end of days. His piece is called “The Evangelical ‘Mainstream’ Insanity Behind the Michigan ‘End Times’ Militia.”

Hell hath no fury like a believer scorned, I think the saying goes. I’ve certainly met my fair share of former evangelicals angry at the church for wasting their time and shielding them from the truth, so the vitriol of Schaeffer’s piece isn’t all that surprising. And one of the many things I’ve learned in the last month of book promotion is that it’s tempting to sell a book the way one scares off a cougar in the wild–make a racket and seem bigger than you actually are.

Presenting himself as a man who “knows them well” despite having publicly left their ranks in the 1980s, Schaeffer argues evangelicals gobble up Rapture-fantasy Left Behind novels by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins because they “provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the “elite.” They do theologically what Sarah Palin does politically: divide the world and America into ‘Them’ and ‘Us.’” The popularity of these narratives suggest to Schaeffer that mainstream evangelicals “hate America (as it is)” and are eager to get the whole premillenial dispensation thing on the road. He argues that the Hutaree militia were just getting ready to act on impulses most evangelicals share.

I object, but I am with Schaeffer on this: many evangelical and conservative leaders have profited from selling followers on their own victimhood, rising to power on promises to effect change on social issues they don’t touch while instituting financial policies that keep their constituency battered, primed to keep buying that victim line, which all perpetuates a feeling among conservative evangelical Christians that they’re disenfranchised even when they hold power.

Here’s the objection: it’s a giant mistake to suggest that evangelicals are divesting in hopes for this life. That fat-slice demographic is also one of the most charitable in the country and the most likely to volunteer, they’re giving birth and adopting, they’re stubbornly involved in mortal-world politics, and their ranks includes both die-hard creationists and leaders who signed onto the Global Climate Change Initiative. The picture is messier than Schaeffer makes it.

But my real bone to pick juts out of Schaeffer’s conclusion:

The truth is that the “crazies” in Michigan are just acting on what millions of evangelicals say they believe and I don’t only mean about the so called End Times. I also mean that these days the Tea Party movement is spouting a rhetoric of doom and extremism that holds that the American government and even the nation is no longer legitimate. Add in the theology and you have a self-fulfilling “prophecy” of Armageddon.

Not so fast, Frank. It’s dead wrong to use “evangelicals” and “Tea Party movement” interchangeably, let alone to infer that one rabid group of murderous Christians in Michigan represents the world of evangelical Christians at large. Check out what Richard Cizik, former chair of the National Association of Evangelicals said on this issue:

As far as I can tell [the tea party movement] has a politics that’s irreligious. I can’t see how some of my fellow conservatives identify with it. The younger Evangelicals who I interact with are largely turned off by the tea party movement — by the incivility, the name-calling, the pathos of politics.

Tea parties stir evangelicals’ fears – Ben Smith – Politico

That Schaeffer dropped out of the movement as the power of the Moral Majority was about to crest makes his take on the zeitgeist of the evangelical life feel slightly trapped in the amber of that feathered-hair moment. Schaeffer may be able to speak to the dominant, dominionist thinking among evangelicals in the 1980’s, but the leaders of that era are dead, dying, or marginalized, progressively eclipsed by leaders in the emerging church, who make the fundamentalist evangelicals pretty nervous indeed.

And look–if the problem, as Schaeffer would have it, and okay, as I’d have it too, is radical insularity, the US V. THEM attitude in conservative communities that leads people to swallow the death panel/birther bullshit (which will hopefully inspire only relieved, weary laughter in a few years’ time), if anxiety about division in this country is the problem, how about let’s not make it worse by implicating all evangelical Christians in the crimes of a lunatic few?

Gallup says about 30% of Americans are biblical literalists, or, as Bill Maher would have it, believers in a talking snake. Are we going to rescind their right to vote? Steal their Bibles? Shut down their churches? Quarantine their towns? Of course not. And any attitude that could be construed as a desire to do so (read: generalizing, mocking, levying the idiotic “they hate America” accusation) only serves to convince people Sarah Palin has a point.

Look, Part Two: a neighbor of one of the Hutaree members told The New York Times, “In Michigan, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal to be in a militia.” So maybe the problem isn’t evangelical Christianity after all. Maybe we should be more concerned about the bitter clinging that results from  economic apocalypse in the Mitten State.

…Sunday morning I joined 2500 other atheists streaming into the Melbourne Convention and Exhibition Centre for The Rise of Atheism: the 2010 Global Atheist Convention.

The rise and rise of atheism | Rachel Holkner | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

First of all, guys: next year can we pick a less sinister name for the convention? The Rise of Atheism sounds like the subtitle in a science fiction trilogy, like maybe the title should be No Help From Above, and I fear it neatly feeds the input slots of the conspiracy theory processors whirring across the anti-atheist basements of America. How about I Got 99 Problems (But God Ain’t One)?

The real notion I snagged on here is that atheists want to organize. My experience of nonbelief is that it not only comes with a built-in hole in the place of anything to rally around, but that it also makes me resistant to joining ideological groups.

Last week I gave an interview on a Christian talk show, and my interlocutor asked, “When I say you’re a SECular JEW from BERKeley, CaliFORnia, people pretty much know where you’re coming from, don’t they?” And I said I wasn’t so sure, because labels aren’t particularly helpful in defining someone who doesn’t subscribe to any organization. I resist the idea of letting an institution present the tenets of my morality.

But when I give the atheist convention a chance, I realize we do have some things to discuss. Do we share a gravitational center of morality if it isn’t god? How about the corrective powers of conscience and man’s duty to man? How do we interact with believers?

I was disappointed to read that “many participants came looking for techniques to discuss atheism with religious family, friends and door-knockers,” since the bossiness of evangelism to me only seems redeemable by the sincere (if misguided) belief you’re rescuing someone from eternal suffering.

And I have two other concerns about this atheist convention. The first, demonstrated here:

However, when a Christian stood up to ask a question of [evolutionary biologist Richard] Dawkins, there was a vibe not only of hostility, but impatience and frustration – even a sense of violation, as no one expected anyone with honest-to-god beliefs to pay the not-inconsiderate ticket price to learn about atheism.

The rise and rise of atheism | Rachel Holkner | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk.

Friends, that’s the same fearful insularity poisoning many churches. Atheists should welcome questions and challenges from believers, shouldn’t we? Why shy away from a little repartee?

This leads me to the second thing troubling me, something I smashed headlong into last week when a Q&A I did with Benyamin Cohen, author of My Jesus Year, went up at The Huffington Post, and spurred a flurry of responses, some of which suggested I wasn’t really an atheist if I wished to have the comforts of religion, or if I had nice things to say about Christians.

It’s an odd position to put me in. How do you prove you don’t believe in God? Because I don’t. I never have (in spite of some very public efforts to force myself), and although I also don’t believe in psychic powers, I doubt I ever will.

And so here’s what I worry about: that anybody has the right to accuse anyone else of not being a true nonbeliever. How silly is that? That this convention could be part of a gathering movement toward the exclusionary attitude that if you don’t not-believe the way they not-believe, you’re actually not a nonbeliever.

Whoa, double negatives. Sorry.

In other words, that variety within the kingdom of nonbelief is unwelcome. Isn’t that the same exclusionary arrogance that rankles many atheists about religion?

Image via Wikipedia

So I finally ate to the bottom of my box of Glenn Beck Anger Flakes (for a fair and balanced breakfast). It took a while. The flakes themselves are these razory shards with little bald eagles on them. They have a weird Lipton tea taste, and they make me want to upchuck when people talk about poverty, and I found when I ate them for breakfast on consecutive days my right hand would involuntarily contract into a fist and everyone started to look like a Communist.

But! My perseverance paid off this morning in the form of a vacuum-packed plastic decoder ring I found down in the anger dust. It’s size-adjustable, and has a big disc bearing a hologram sticker that from one angle shows Beck making an outraged face and from another, an ad for 1-800-Pet-Meds. When I wear it while I watch video of Beck shouting hoarsely, or sliding on his glasses to read aloud from a giant 3-ring binder, my mouth goes numb and I get kind of poltergeist-possessed with the subtext of his message.

Buzzing off Anger Flakes, pinwheels aswirl in my eyes, gums bleeding, this morning I did what no one in their right mind would do: I jammed the decoder ring on my thumb and watched Glenn Beck’s whole CPAC speech.

Why did I do this to myself? Why, oh why. I did it for you, America. I let those voices into my head so that I could condense and relay them back to you. You’re welcome. Here’s what you should be happy you missed, but what you really ought to know if you’re going to join that anti-Glenn Beck Facebook group for the dog in the tinfoil hat:

Glenn Beck’s Keynote Address at CPAC 2010.

Enter Glenn Beck to strains of Muse’s “Uprising” (They will not control us/ we will be victorious). He shakes hands with his introducer, who had dubbed him Professor Babe Ruth, had called his TV program “a graduate program in political philosophy.” Beck begins, “I hate Woodrow Wilson with everything in me.”

Decoded: Part rebel, part wonk, I will turn you flatly against things about which you probably have an imperfect understanding because my vehemence on the subject suggests I care enough to have done the research for you.

Beck: “I remember when Ronald Reagan talked about morning in America. If you ask people all across the country, do you think their children will be better off than they are today, the answer will be a resounding no.”

Decoded: Bam, Ronald Reagan nod in the first fifteen seconds. Suck it, O’Reilly. Also, that pessimism you sometimes feel? Roll with it.

Beck: “And it’s not just from Republicans, or conservatives, it’s also from the entire, uh…uh…whatever. It’s the entire spectrum is saying that.”

Decoded: Progressives, I dare not speak your name. Yet.

Beck: “I don’t use teleprompters. I just speak from here, and sometimes… (grins to tremendous applause)”

Decoded: My people, you know me, Mister Authenticity, Mister shoot-from-the-hip, wear-it-on-the-sleeve, no prompters or palm notes, no filter or sources or booo-ring research, just cold-noodling it out with my thinking cap on; Mister Sometimes I Cry for The Future of This Great Nation Because I Love It So, Mister I Only Shill for Gold and Seeds to Plant Crisis Gardens for the End-Times Because I Earnestly Want You to Be Ready.

Beck: “It is still morning in America. It just happens to be a kind of head-pounding, hungover, vomiting for four hours kind of morning in America.”

Decoded: Even though I’m a recovering alcoholic, I use hangover metaphors to connect with the binge-drinking set. Where my frat boys at?

Beck: “What made us sit there at the john vomiting for four hours? What are we suffering from? If you say Obama it’s too simple of an answer, because it’s not Barack Obama.”

Decoded: True political domination requires a holistic approach. Also, I am obsessed with vomiting.

Beck: “Can I just ask to bring a friend up?” Assistants wheel out a blackboard, to wild applause. “It’s sick when a chalkboard gets a standing ovation. You have no idea what it’s like to travel with one of these things. Trying to get this in an overhead luggage compartment is impossible.” Assistants lay down ten long piece of chalk. Beck takes one up, writes, Progressivism

Decoded: Don’t I remind you of a passionate high school teacher, who just teaches for the love of his subject? I can’t use a dry erase board because that would remind you of your soul murdering job, your harrowing cubicle. And like my giant blackboard, I will not be stuffed into your tiny compartments!

Beck: “This is the disease in America. It is progressivism. And it’s in both parties. I’m so sick of hearing people say, Well the Republicans are going to solve it all. That’s like someone sticking a screwdriver in your eye and you saying, Stop! Stop!, and someone else takes it out and puts a pin in your eye. I don’t want stuff in my eye! Stop stabbing the eyes!”

Decoded: No way am I tethering myself to the anvil of the Republican Party. Also, listen to me talk of puking and stabbing. You’re getting angry…very, veery angry…

Beck: “Progressivism is the cancer in America and it is eating the Constitution.”

Decoded: Though unschooled, I am a doctor. My specialty is Founding Fatherology.

Beck: Takes out a little pamphlet “someone” mailed him on progress and democracy in Rhode Island. It was printed in 1938, by Communists suggesting the Constitution was obsolete, as it was over 100 years old, and alleging allies in progressives and FDR.

Decoded: Don’t worry about my sloppy use of dubious, selective sources. Authentic truth resides in these long-forgotten, out-of-print documents that so-called scholars overlook.

Beck: Asks us to consider the difference between Revolution, associated with Communists, and Evolution, associated with progressives. He writes the two words on the board. “There’s no difference except one requires a gun and the other does it slowly.”

Decoded: Communists and progressives are essentially interchangeable, but at least communists have the stones to handle a firearm.

Beck: “I’m a recovering alcoholic. I screwed up six ways to Sunday and I believe in redemption. But the first step to redemption is you’ve got to admit you have a problem. Hello, my name is the Republican Party and I’ve got a problem. I’m addicted to spending and big government.

Decoded: While progressives are Communists, Republicans are just drunk. Someone call A&E’s Intervention.

Beck: Brings up Tiger Woods’ public apology. “Some people don’t believe he’s repentant. He’s only sorry ’cause he got caught. If drinking wasn’t causing me a problem in my life I’d probably be drunk right now. And…If you’re making it with a whole bunch of unbelievable babes and no one has a problem with it (gestures to indicate all systems go)…”

Decoded: Sorry, the decoder ring jammed on this one, because it’s way too freaking yucky.

Beck: “All [Republicans] are talking about is, We need a big tent. How can we get a bigger tent. What is this, a circus? America is not a clown show. America is an idea, an idea that sets people free.”

Decoded: Republicans are not taking you seriously, America. They want to trap you in a tent and patronize you with balloon animals.

Beck: “I’m tired of feeling like a freak in America. You don’t agree with me, that’s okay! There are three hundred million of us, we’re never going to agree.”

Decoded: Well, maybe big tents aren’t so bad, just as long as they’re not erected by Republicans, who are drunk.

Beck: “What does it mean to be a conservative? I know what it means to me. Personal responsibility. If I’ve done something wrong, it’s up to me to pay the price. Don’t talk to me about your childhood. Do you want to hear about my childhood? No!”

Decoded: I know it seems like a weird contradiction that I’m constantly gesturing to lessons from history (the patented Glenn Beck version) while I deny that solving problems requires determination of their root cause. I only mean I don’t want to hear your personal grousing.

Beck: “What we don’t have a right to is healthcare, housing, or handouts. We don’t have those rights.”

Decoded: You shouldn’t feel bad when your neighbor’s home is foreclosed, or when their non-metaphorical cancer goes untreated and they die. It’s probably not because of the vagaries of the economy or racial and socioeconomic inequality or the inhumane practices of insurers. They probably made dumb choices! They should have bought gold.

Beck: “I’m the first person to go to college in my family. I went for one semester. I took one class. Do you know why? I couldn’t afford it. Now I never once thought, This isn’t fair. I never once thought I was owed an education. When I couldn’t afford to go anymore, I went to work.” Beck got books from the library and bookstore and read late into the night. “I educated myself. My education was free, and I’m proud of that.”

Decoded: Oops, I know I said I wasn’t going to talk about my background, but I only meant you shouldn’t talk about your background to explain your problems. You can totally brag about it. And I’m here to tell you: you can get a university-grade education all on your own. Anyone telling you different is an elitist.

Beck: “In America you can choose to be greedy. Money is like sand. The harder you try to hold onto it, the faster it slips through your hands. Better yet, it’s like the ocean. Back that truck up, get as much success as you want. If someone stops you on the exit to that beach and says, Can I get some of that water, say, you bet, take as much as you want, there’s enough for all of us.”

Decoded: Metaphors are really hard.

Beck: Not everyone gets a trophy. What is the point of competing for a trophy if everyone gets a trophy?

Decoded: Competition is the meaning of life. Because really, what’s the use in living if you can’t feel superior to anybody?

Beck: I have for four years been ringing the bell: economic holocaust is coming. I’ve been trying to get you to save your money! The worst is still ahead of us. But no one in Washington has the spine to tell you that.

Decoded: Gold, you guys. Get some. Also, crisis gardens. And, just beta-testing these, but if I said “titanium suits of armor” and “downloadable handbook of known socialist facial expressions” would you say, “Tell me more?”

Beck: After noting that the Statue of Liberty was designed to “mock Europe,” he reads the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed on the statue’s pedestal in two different voices. The first read demonstrates the problem with America, he says, and when we correct our problem we will “blaze to life.” He reads the “give me your poor” part of the poem as a gentle plea, then sneers, “What are we, a hospital?” He then reads the poem with great rumbling relish, growling, “Keep your ancient lands, your storied pomp!”

Decoded: Fuck empathy. Also, I’m a lover of art. At least the macho stuff they put on statues and memorials.

Beck: Some people ask me when there’s some celebrity that’s vomiting on themselves in some rehab center what could we have done to save them? The answer is, nothing.

Decoded: He who vomits, vomits alone.

Beck: This is a pretty good bottom. But if we don’t stand up now and recognize it, it’s going to get much, much worse.

Decoded: Fear. It just feels right.

Beck: It may be a hard day. We may have been all night retching, holding onto that bowl, because we went out for a party. And it may be a hard struggle and we may work until late in the night, and our kids may be crying and we may be losing the house. But we will make it, and at night we will be beat tired, and when we put our head down to sleep again that night we can be happy, because we know tomorrow it will again be morning in America.

Decoded: We may vomit, and our children may annoy us, but at the end of the day we can rest easy knowing our boots have sturdy straps on them, and for those who don’t have straps on their boots, that’s their fucking problem.

OK, guys, I’m off to go have a good hard cry and wash my mouth out with Soft Scrub Lemon Bathroom Cleaner. And this decoder ring is going in the recycling. It’s turning my finger green and doing something to my peripheral vision.

Now, now. Order in the court, order in the court. Let’s give the agenda a chance. Maybe there’ll be a multiplicity of viewpoints on the issue. Laypeople are welcome, so let’s head on down. First up, an address by Alan Chambers, president of Exodus International, the group involved in the Uganda conference that led to a bill threatening to imprison and kill gays there. Hm. Maybe I’ll clean out my purse in the lobby and wait for the next panel.

OK, later we’re looking at an analysis of the American Psychological Association’s task force report on homosexuality, which concluded that “efforts to change sexual orientation are unlikely to be successful and may results in some risk of harm.” Oh, that sounds promising. Who’s leading the panel? Rena Lindevaldsen, Associate Professor at LU’s law school. Hang on, Googling. Let’s see, says here she “filed the first lawsuit to enjoin San Francisco’s efforts to “marry” same-sex couples, and obtained two orders enjoining public officials in New York from officiating same-sex unions.” Um. Sounds like professional neutrality on the APA report might be in short supply. Do you want to go check out some antique shops?

Wait, this is weird. When I started writing this post, there was a panel scheduled for later today titled “The Child’s Right to Self-Determination,” but it’s since changed to read “The Client’s Right to Self-Determination.” And the font’s still all wonky from the change. And the guy leading the panel, Tim Clinton, wrote an article for ParentLife on educating children about what being gay means. What an odd coinky-dink.

So today seems like it might be a bust, healthy-debate-wise. Let’s knock off for some Bahama Mamas at Applebee’s. What’s going on tomorrow? Here we go, the umbrella title for tomorrow’s events is “Homosexual Rights and First Amendment Freedoms: Can They Truly Coexist?” Interesting. That means…what, homophobia is a free speech issue?

There’s a panel on how gay rights are eroding the rights of employers who don’t want gays on payroll, another called “Hate Speech and Free Speech: Will the Advancement of Homosexual Rights Silence Others?” We’re looking at panels led by law professors from Brigham Young and Pat Robertson’s Regent University, representatives from the anti-gay Military Readiness Institute and the National Association for the Research and Therapy of Homosexuality, and there’s a guy from Concerned Women for America who helped draft the Defense of Marriage Act.

Hm. Maybe I’ll just stay home for a John Waters marathon.

Look, I know the homogeneity of this line-up is about as surprising as feathers on a chicken. But it bums me out!

I was just telling someone in an interview for my book (plug, plug) that persistent evangelical Christian ignorance around the realities of gayness stems in part from the fact that conservative Christian communities are very hard places for gay people to carve out an existence. So if you’re gay and born into a predominantly evangelical community, chances are you’re going to leave when you’re able. Of course this means that there’s a real diversity vacuum in conservative communities when it comes to sexual orientation, so perceptions of gayness are built on myth, and misconceptions go unchallenged.

I want to believe in the semipermeability of evangelical thought. I want to believe that homophobia can be confronted in evangelical churches through patient, unflinching exposure to the truth. But it won’t work if they snap shut all the blinds.

This event is sponsored by a college, a college that wants to be taken seriously as an accredited institute of higher learning, where a free marketplace of ideas is supposed to be the hallmark of intellectual rigor. So allow me to slip this suggestion into the imaginary box I’m drawing in the air of the web: how about next year’s conference on the consequences of same-sex attraction actually includes some gay people?

You can listen to the conference via webcast. It kicks off at 2PM today.

UPDATE: I’ve got to amend my suggestion a little, since currently on the webcast is a gay speaker who “overcame” his sexual orientation. He doesn’t satisfy my call for voices of dissent, since he’s saying things like “holiness is the opposite of homosexuality” and “if Rogaine for Women can say it’s strong enough to overcome genetic baldness, can’t we say Jesus Christ is strong enough to overcome genetic homosexuality?” Good gravy. Gay or straight, I’d like to see this conference feature some voices making the case for gay rights. That’s what I meant.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Snowblivion is well under way here in the District of Columbia, twenty inches so far. Post offices are closed, power lines down, and skylights are beginning to buckle in the century-old rowhouses of Capitol Hill. The view out my window this morning was pretty, the whole street gooped with vanilla frosting and the trees white burrs. Cars are buried and the candy-colored rowhouses across from me are white up to their knees. The snow’s still coming down confetti-like. It looks like it might take us a while to dig out. DC’s lone snow plow can only do so much, you know.

DC residents were well-apprised of this probability. TV told us to prepare to SHELTER IN PLACE, which made me suspicious that the local news had a mutually beneficial agreement with Harris Teeter. To have gone to market to pick up odds and ends Friday morning was to have seen competitive, fear-propelled hoarding that recalled Supermarket Sweep. Carts spilling over, people fidgeted in line as if trying to get home once the snowfall had started meant certain doom. DCist reports that a woman screamed at the uncaring facade of a closed Whole Foods, “Let me in! I don’t have any coffee at home!”

I’m holed up now, drinking lots of tea and trying to psyche myself up for the first shovel of the day. Working from home means I spend most of my life, you know, home, so getting snowed in should differ only in the picture out the window, right? But the difference is a matter of choice about when you come and go. Deprivation of that choice is the factor that threatens to turn Jack Torrance into Heeere’s Johnny!

So we snow prisoners need distractions. I love sledding, but my neighborhood is flat. And when you say “snowball fight,” I hear “broken nose.”

I take walks, but most of my kicks are kicked indoors. What to do? Taxes beckon and the tub wants regrouting, but why spoil a perfectly dreamy weekend with thoughts of suicide?

The internet, as always, wants to play, but you know you need to take a break from the computer when you gaze dreamily at the little asterisks of snow floating down and think, “That looks like a screensaver.”

So let’s put our heads together and come up with some ideas about how to enjoy the time. I’m snowed in alone, so I leave out lots of appealing plus-one options like Scrabble, dress-up photo shoot, zombie makeover, mind reading, and bedroom exploits.

1. Read. I know–booooring. But seldom do we get whole days to guiltlessly spend in bed when we aren’t too sick to hold up a book and make sense of the little black hatches. I’m finishing Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist.

2. Play Stump the Chef. OK, you’ve got Sriracha, several packets of miso, dry lentils, canned tuna, pink sea salt, a brown banana, some kale nearing the end of its youth, a sense of loss, onion skins, three D vitamins, mint floss, a turtle’s foot, cherry LifeSavers, Gran Marnier, and a jar of sand from Kitty Hawk. Make lunch.

3. Pull out the Arts and Crafts stops of your childhood. Dioramas. Potato stamps. Friendship bracelets. Origami. Tie-dye. Papier mache dinosaurs. Take your pick. I like to make little watercolor paintings from photographs, which often makes me feel like a mental patient, but it’s wonderfully involving and sometimes they turn out well. And hey, maybe when the post office opens again you can sell some stuff on Etsy, the retailer fearlessly exposing the flaws in democracy.

4. Organize yours books by spine color. This doesn’t count as a clean-up activity, really, because it’s fun and totally unnecessary. I know people who organize alphabetically or by subject, but books look sculptural and pretty in rainbow order, and you’d be surprised how easy it is to remember the color of a book you’ve read. Also way easier to maintain organization this way.

5. Write real live letters on real live paper to real live people you’ve been meaning to email. This is a radical suggestion, I know, and it tows behind it the threat that you’ll have to keep doing it in the future. But remember how nice it used to feel to get handwritten letters in the mail, instead of just water bills and coupons for Papa John’s?

6. Tackle that 1,000-piece Taj Mahal jigsaw puzzle. Because this is the only time in life it will be acceptable to do such a thing.

Now there’s a mountain of snow I’ve got to suit up to shovel (pom-pom hat, down coat, wool gloves, swim goggles, landlord’s Levis for ease of motion). Stay cozy out there, and please add your thoughts about how to beat back cabin fever. Really. Help. I need more ideas.

Only one of the parties in question is pleading good intentions (although Mr. Torn, I don’t think a method-research alibi would be a hard sell). According to Laura Silsby, a member of the New Life Children’s Refuge group, which is awaiting word about whether or not they’ll face child trafficking charges for taking the Haitian children without processing any paperwork, “In the chaos the government is in right now, we were just trying to do the right thing.”

Well, one gold foil star for good intentions, but geez this looks bad. Silsby’s statement amounts to something like, I stole all this stuff because you guys looked really busy at the register.

Her group, hailing from the Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho and East Side Baptist Church in Twin Falls, had collected the children, ranging in age from two months to 12 years, and were attempting to move them to a seaside hotel in the Dominican Republic, which they’re trying to convert into an orphanage. They claim not to have been taking the children for adoption, but simply to remove them from harm’s way.

But that isn’t the full story. According to literature quoted in USA Today that has since been removed from the East Side church’s website, the mission to rescue Haitian orphans was designed in part to “share God’s love with these precious children, helping them heal and find new life in Christ” (though 80% of Haitians already have life in Catholicism).

The urge to “rescue” Haitian children by removing them from Haiti doesn’t twinge in Christians alone, as self-deprecatingly revealed by True/Slant’s own Laurie Essig in a post titled My Post-Colonial Fantasies of Adopting Haitian Orphans. This urge rises, perhaps, at the intersection of two powerful beams of feeling: pity for the suffering of innocents, frustration at our own feebleness watching that suffering on television as we trot on a treadmill.

But as Essig’s post indicates, in most of us that urge is tamped down by our understanding of the implicit colonial condescension in it, the desire to “civilize” the children, to upgrade them to our superior culture. And maybe in others of us the urge is flattened altogether by our knowledge of the fallout from 1975’s Operation Babylift, in which over 3,000 children were removed from South Vietnam at the end of the war, ravaging families and leaving a legacy of severe cultural dislocation for many children (if you haven’t seen the incredible documentary Daughter from Danang–which illustrates that fallout through one Tennessee woman’s frustrated effort to reconnect with her Vietnamese family–DO).

But the urge is managed differently in many Evangelicals, which is why I knew this group of Idaho do-gooders were Christians before NPR had the chance to tell me. Part of the reason is that for Evangelicals the knee-jerk colonial feeling of superiority dwells also in the realm of faith: evangelical Christians by definition feel they have the truth, and that they’re commissioned to share it with the “lost regions” of the world. So they don’t shut off the impulse to preach. When you listen to evangelicals talk about international missionary work, the phrase “spiritual darkness,” with all its Conradian echoes, recurs quite frequently in reference to Third World countries.

A less troubling reason evangelical Christians manage the adoption urge differently is that adoption is relatively common in evangelical culture. This owes to the biblical imperative to look after the physical and spiritual orphans of the world, and also to the reasoning a pastor’s wife–who had raised an adopted daughter herself–once fanned out for me: “If you’re going to be against abortion, you’ve got to be willing to adopt.”

Muting the babble of reasons for the sake of brevity, let’s skip to the result: it seems like mostly a good thing that so many Christian families are willing to adopt. I’d venture a guess that most of them are happy to endure the proper legal avenues to do it, making the New Life Children’s Refuge about as representative of adopting Christians as Rip Torn is of aging actors.

I don’t have kids, so I don’t relate to the terror many parents feel at the specter of their children, uh, eating from the Tree of Knowledge. Several of my high school peers did get pregnant as teens, and a high school Physics teacher friend of mine has seen several young girls go under, unsupported, with child. Teen pregnancy seemed to me then and now as a terrible interruption of opportunity, but moved me then and now much less than the problems of drunk driving and gun violence, which constituted a much more permanent interruption. I guess you can trace all these problems back to the origin point of teenage recklessness, which seems more fundamentally dangerous than kids finding out how a blow job works, though even trickier to address with a good old fashioned book ban.

But okay, teen pregnancy is a problem, and I get that it’s disturbing for little children to feel any sex-pressure at all. So ban dancing, lower their hemlines, strangle the buffet of contraceptive delights available to teens; throw purity balls, slide promise rings on their fingers a size too small, have them sign abstinence pledges in blood–but what’s the point? Kids are still going to do it. The only thing it seems anybody can do is educate them about sex, and make them feel like they’ve got somebody to talk to if they get into trouble. Puritan rules for sex education do nothing but tamp down the worries of Puritans.

And yet…my ultra-liberal sex education experience at Berkeley High School provides an example of the dangers of the other extreme. Our sex ed class was called “Social Living,” and made space for far more than gross-out slides of genital warts (though we partook of those too, and boy do those images sear themselves into memory). I recently  revisited my folder from Social Living, which I saved knowing it would be a powerful time capsule, and found handouts on depression, on leisure habits, a True-False quiz on homosexuality. So on the one hand we covered a great range of issues that helped us reckon with the realities of the adult life hurtling toward us, and I do think the class worked wonderfully as a deterrent against a closed mind.

On the other hand, the openness of the class was also problematic. Our teacher had written a book called Ask Me If I Care, in which she’d used actual student journal entries from the class to explore teenage notions of identity, the body, and family.

The book is shockingly raw in lots of places, and even though I thought it was SO COOL when it came out–a counterpoint in its earnest validation of teenage feelings, when most adults were like, Yeah, yeah, cry it out, it’ll all be over soon–now it looks quite exploitative of the private lives of teenagers. Like, in my Social Living folder I rediscovered personal letters I’d written to my best friend, to myself, to my father, who had recently died, all completed on assignment. And written on each of these letters are my teacher’s inquisitive notes, notes that now make me wonder, Who was this lady who got access to all my private thoughts?

Worse–and I’m hesitating to say this, because it’s going to sound unrepresentatively conservative–I’m not sure it was a great idea to have an atmosphere where teen misbehavior was received by such a welcoming ear. Our teacher was so nonjudgmental that sometimes the class careened off into one-up-manship, and because we knew our teacher had written a book about her students, we especially wanted our stories to impress her.  It was intoxicating to freely confess in public, so confess we did, which made non-confession seem uptight. I drank this much, I tried this drug, I slept with four chicks last weekend. I remember really sweating it out when we’d talk about sex in class, because at 15 I wanted to show my classmates how modern and open-minded I was, when in fact, with regard to sex, I was more G-Rated than a Disney princess. So did Social Living make me prematurely sexually adventurous? Uh, no. Did it make me feel bad that I wasn’t? Oh, yes.

Clearly I don’t have any solutions. Solutions, I guess, would have to come from somebody who knows more about kids than I do. Although maybe this tale of two extremes serves once again to prove the point of the wooden statuette I keep on my desk, a little monk shaking his finger as he declares in German, “Be moderate!”

This story is one of these stink bombs that’s really easy to detonate on the internet. We can all hold our noses and cry MOST FOUL, launch a thousand email forwards, and Rachel Maddow can deliver a deliciously smug epitaph on the whole thing that makes us feel that on the scoreboard that matters (our ego!) the right side won, and finally the offending party can be shamed into correction.

But I say I’ve been Rubix Cubing this story because there’s more to solve, complicated stuff to address that can’t be simply vaporized by MSNBC’s Bible-free rifle of eyebrow-sarcasm.

This story keeps making me think of the sniper character from Saving Private Ryan, Private Jackson, who pecks the cross pendant around his neck and steadies himself while locking his sights on a target with a recitation of Psalm 144, arguably a more Holy War-evocative verse than John 8:12: “Blessed be the Lord my strength,” he mutters, “which teaches my hands to war, and my fingers to fight.”

Here, check it out, someone rather artificially spliced together three scenes featuring Jackson. The first is from the harrowing D-Day scene at Omaha Beach, the second and third from a confrontation in a little French village. Be warned, there’s lots of gunfire and some splashing blood, and watching it may set you on edge for the rest of the day:

I keep circling back to this character because his Bible verse recitation wasn’t controversial when the movie came out in 1998. His Christianity was simply a kind of character shorthand, a tag by which we could easily distinguish Jackson from his fellow soldiers (just like other soldiers were tagged New York-pride guy, wimpy interpreter-guy, and Tom Hanks).

Of course, as Maddow points out, it’s the context that matters. Saving Private Ryan was about a different war and came out in a different era. Today there seems to be a collective consensus that Americans ought to speak in one voice to refute Al Qaeda’s insistence that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are part of a Holy War between Christians and Muslims; such a danger didn’t exist in World War II and was looming invisibly in the calm of 1998, which is what makes Jackson’s prayer seem like a personal ritual rather than something related to the specific identity of his enemy.

So maybe it’s unfair for my brain to draw a dotted line between Jackson and the Trijicon scopes.

Still, I think the Jackson character helpfully makes the point that for some soldiers religion is the structure that makes the wilderness of combat manageable. Just because the entire world has changed doesn’t mean that those soldiers will lose their hardwired need to hold the hand of God–no atheists in foxholes, etc etc (except my grandfather, who prayed [so he claimed] to my grandmother alone).

Maddow’s love note to Trijicon–”you self-centered, self-righteous, endangering-the-troops idiots, congratulations, you’ve just spawned 1,000 anti-American propaganda videos. Hope you’re enjoying your war profits”–doesn’t…leave a lot of room for nuance? And as I’ve written on this site before, I think Christian-shaming has terribly inverse consequences. Maybe a less middle-fingered way to put it is that individuals can worship as they see fit, but anything that might characterize the whole fighting force as Christian is a massively bad idea. Less catchy than Rachel’s thing, but I don’t have to compete against Jersey Shore, so.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Late this morning I pushed my bike through an unusually dense throng of disoriented tourists at Union Station in DC, all weirdly wearing the same powder-blue ski cap with a little tassel thing on top. It wasn’t until I was metro-crunched against the chest of a man in all black wearing an incongruously whimsical scarf striped with baby blue and baby pink–a scarf I then noticed on almost every other passenger–that I remembered, oof, of course, it’s March for Life Friday!

On metro another passenger adjusted her weight on her cane and asked the man in the scarf which side he was on.

“Pro-life,” he said tersely.

She said she used to work near the mall and hated hearing all the hollering that went on at the march, from both sides.

“We don’t do any hollering,” the man said.

The woman sighed. “You all say that, and then once you get there you start hollering anyway,” she said.

And indeed the man did start hollering at a very old man in a trenchcoat who cluelessly blocked the door at Metro Center, “Pops,” he shouted, “Pops, get the heck off the train and let us all get off here, why doncha.”

Most years I don’t pay the March for Life any mind. In DC we get a lot of out-of-towners doing noisy, futile laps around the Mall. You’ll find the trashcans of Capitol Hill stuffed with protest signs by most Saturday evenings, and after a while all protests start to feel very tempest-in-a-teapot. Plus the theatrics of this particular march are the same, year after year–teenage girls standing still with their eyelids serenely closed, life written on a square of tape over their mouths; middle-aged men waving crosses and gory fetus pictures (which helpfully illustrate that the anti-choice argument is most of all an appeal to the gut).

Normally I just avoid metro and the Mall and that’s that. I don’t think about it. But news this week made me tense up on the metro car when I figured out the banner under which these protesters were set to march: NARAL has been doing an investigation into ”crisis pregnancy centers” in Virginia, and found a disturbing trend of misinformation, including some instances in which counselors have been telling women that abortion causes cancer.

According to the NARAL investigation, some women were told that 28 percent of women attempt suicide after an abortion and that a doctor performing an abortion could accidentally “suck out your bowels.”

Victoria Cobb, president of the anti-abortion Family Foundation, said NARAL is making its claims because the crisis centers are “eating into their profits.”

“Women deserve to know more than what NARAL wants them to know,” Cobb added.

NARAL says Va. Crisis Center Pregnancy Centers Mislead Woman – Richmond Times-Dispatch

I recognize that abortion is a complicated matter, philosophically–on the one hand, at stake is a cluster of cells; on the other, the cells end up being a person–and I see the merits of arming women with a full spectrum of information.  But lies don’t fall on that spectrum.

Pro-lifers can march their march, make their case using the instruments of their argument, the Bible and the fetus.  But when pregnant women are seeking help and information, to work around the legality of abortion by dissauding them with scary lies is cheap, manipulative, and above all underlines the reality that pro-lifers don’t trust women to make choices for themselves. 

Now wish me luck getting home.

Anyway. Did you see this NYT story about the pre-termination hearing of a John Freshwater, a science teacher in the small Ohio town of Mount Vernon?

Mr. Freshwater, an eighth-grade public school science teacher, is accused of burning a cross onto the arms of at least two students and teaching creationism, charges he says have been fabricated because he refused an order by his principal to remove a Bible from his desk.

Fate of Science Teacher With a Bible Divides an Ohio Town – NYTimes.com.

Um. WHAT.

Mr. Freshwater, who declined to be interviewed, has said he did not mean to burn a cross on any student’s arm. Instead, he said he intended to leave a temporary X on the skin using a device called a Tesla coil during a science demonstration.

Oh, phew. Creepy but weakly plausible explanation, Freshwater. Glad we settled that. Nothing more to see here, right, NYT?

One high school teacher said she consistently had to reteach evolution to Mr. Freshwater’s students because they did not master the basics. Another testified that Mr. Freshwater told his students they should not always take science as fact, citing as an example a study that posited the possibility of a gene for homosexuality.

“Science is wrong,” Mr. Freshwater was reported as saying, “because the Bible states that homosexuality is a sin, and so anyone who is gay chooses to be gay and is therefore a sinner.”

A third teacher testified that Mr. Freshwater advised students to refer to the Bible for additional science research.

School officials said Mr. Freshwater’s science classroom was adorned with at least four copies of the Ten Commandments and several other posters that included verses from Scripture.

OK, no. Unacceptable. I’m sorry, but if you subordinate scientific research to your literal reading of the Bible, you should not teach science in a public school. And if you teach anywhere, using your lectern to spread hate is plain wrong, even when it feels necessary, as it did when a sweet student once told me he was rooting for Sarah Palin because she was “BAD ASS.” I pinched myself and said, “I see.”

Listen, if you want to keep your child at home to teach him the geological record is a liberal media myth invented to ruin Christmas, that God sneezed the universe into being a few thousand years ago, if you want to enroll him in a private school that teaches him every time we lose an eyelash a fairy bursts into flames, that handling a newspaper results in sexual perversion; if you want to handicap him academically, socially, and professionally, strip him of choices and distrust his ability to reason for himself; if you want to subject yourself to the humiliation of being dragged onto Sally Jesse Raphael (is that not still on? I don’t have a TV) so that said child, now grown, can shock the audience with tales of how your ignorance set him back years; if that’s your choice, it’s also your business. But public schools are no place for private superstition.

While it’s true that there are certain subjects that allow for instructor interpretation (my field works as an example; students often enter my writing course trailing dogma from other classes that doesn’t complement mine at all, which allows them to, you know, use their brains to figure out what they believe), and still others where the prevailing ideas change radically over time. In an excellent course I audited at the University of Virginia, Edward Ayers discussed the history of the history of American slavery, how the attitudes and available information in a given period inform our reading of the past (the Civil Rights Era is an obvious example, but consider, too, the tide-changing WPA Slave Narratives of the 1930s).

I guess you could say science is vulnerable to change in that way–susceptible to our evolving (heh) knowledge of forces and climates and rocks and stars and sea creatures. But I don’t think empirical facts ought to be vulnerable to religious interpretation.

Because don’t public school teachers have the responsibility to prepare children to enter the public sphere by educating them in publicly-accepted knowledge, so that they can participate in public society and have lots of American-dream-style choices? And if teachers have such disdain for publicly-accepted knowledge, and want to predetermine what choices a child shouldn’t have, shouldn’t they just go private, or go homeschool?