Living by Leviticus

An original piece by Lance Christie, in its entirety:

LIVING BY LEVITICUS

by Richard Lance Christie

U.S. religious fundamentalists argue that homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and therefore cannot be condoned under any circumstance. Many also argue that the Bible is the literal revealed Word of God and advocate strict compliance with Biblical Law in both personal behavior and public codes of law.

Reading the Old Testament, I find the following requirements to stand alongside the condemnation of homosexuality as an abomination in Leviticus 18:22:

Exodus 21:7 sanctions selling my daughter into slavery. Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations. Obviously the Amendment to our Constitution prohibiting slavery is anti-Biblical. In an upright Bible-based theocracy, we should be able to own Mexicans and Canadians.

Leviticus 15:19-24 allows me no contact with a woman while she is in her period of menstrual cleanliness. The problem is, how do I tell? I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

Exodus 35:2 prohibits working on the Sabbath and clearly states offenders should be put to death. I'll see you and your sack of stones at the local convenience store next Sunday! Or is that Saturday...

Leviticus 11:10 says that eating shellfish is an abomination. It is not clear whether customers at Red Lobster eating clams are committing a lesser abomination than homosexuality.

Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear corrective lenses. Does my vision have to be 20/20 before I can attend church, or must I limit attendance to churches which do not have altars in them?

Leviticus 19:27 prohibits men from getting their hair trimmed, including the hair around their temples. How should the male customers emerging from Pete and Company Hair Salon die?

Leviticus 11:6-8 states that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean. Obviously, the football players are engaging in abomination unless they wear gloves on the field. Or have they gone from pigskin to vinyl footballs these days?

Leviticus 19:19 prohibits planting two different crops in the same field, or wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread (e.g., cotton/polyester blend). Looks like we've got plenty of abominations occurring there.

Leviticus 24: 10-16 obliges the community to gather together and stone to death those who blaspheme the name of God with curse words. All I ask is that you start with the rappers.

Leviticus 20:14 states we must burn to death those who have sex with their in-laws.

I will believe people's claims that God's revealed word in the Bible is literal, eternal and unchanging when I see them down at the Wal-Mart or convenience store stoning the employees who are working on the Sabbath, punishing men who have had their hair cut, burning people who have had sex with their in-laws to death, refusing to eat shellfish and picketing restaurants that serve them, stoning to death people who utter curse words, advocating and practicing slavery, and railing against anti-Biblical abominations such as the USDA for advocating companion planting of crops and the garment industry for producing clothes made out of fabric containing blends of threads. If they're doing all that, then I will believe that their opposition to homosexuality as an abomination is an expression of their devotion to strict compliance with literal Biblical principles.

Speaking of literal Biblical principles, much of the concern about homosexuals forming families and obtaining some or all of the privileges of marital union through "civil union" or other state-recognized institutional forms is based on the notion of defending Bible-based concepts of marriage endorsed by God.

The Presidential Prayer Team is currently urging us to: "Pray for the President as he seeks wisdom on how to legally codify the definition of marriage. Pray that it will be according to Biblical principles. With any forces insisting on variant definitions of marriage, pray that God's Word and His standards will be honored by our government."

Any religious person believes prayer should be balanced by action. So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment to codify marriage on the principles stated in the Old Testament of the Bible. Except for Paul's remark that it is better to marry than to burn, there are no principles concerning marriage in the New Testament and Jesus did not speak on the matter:

A. Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Genesis 29:17-28; II Samuel 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Samuel 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chronicles 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Genesis 24:3; Numbers 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Nehemiah 10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deuteronomy 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe. (Genesis 38:6-10; Deuteronomy 25:5-10)

The next time you hear somebody fulminating in favor of a Bible-based theocratic government in the United States, bear in mind that these are the literal Bible-based commandments in question. If the advocate confronted with these principles denies they would implement any one of them, then they are admitting that they will institute principles according to their own human judgment - no doubt claiming divine inspiration - rather than a literal adherence to Biblical rules and laws.

Krugman on obesity

Paul Krugman had a couple of op-ed's on obesity in the New York Times recently. From "Girth of a Nation" (via Smirking Chimp)

I've been looking into the issues surrounding obesity because it plays an important role in health care costs. According to a study recently published in the journal Health Affairs, the extra costs associated with caring for the obese rose from 2 percent of total private insurance spending in 1987 to 11.6 percent in 2002. The study didn't cover Medicare and Medicaid, but it's a good bet that obesity-related expenses are an important factor in the rising costs of taxpayer-financed programs, too. Fat is a fiscal issue.

(Yes it is: and it's tied, like so many other seemingly single issues, into a web of a multitude of others, like self-esteem and mental well-being, "free market" values and government oversight, education priorities, etc etc et al ad nauseaum)

There is, understandably, a movement to do something about rising obesity, especially among the young. Bills that would require schools to serve healthier lunches, remove vending machines selling sweets and soda, and so on have been introduced in a number of state legislatures. By the way, Britain - with the second-highest obesity among advanced countries - has introduced stringent new guidelines on school meals.

But even these mild steps have run into fierce opposition from conservatives. Why?

In part, this is yet another red-blue cultural conflict. On average, people living outside metropolitan areas are heavier than urban or suburban residents, and people in the South and Midwest are heavier than those on the coasts. So it's all too easy for worries about America's weight to come off as cultural elitism.

More important, however, is the role of the food industry. The debate over obesity, it turns out, is a lot like the debate over global warming. In both cases, major companies protect their profits not only by lobbying against policies they don't like, but also by financing advocacy groups devoted to debunking research whose conclusions they don't like.

And a week later, this is "Free to Choose Obesity?"

How can medical experts who see obesity as a critical problem deal with an ideological landscape tilted in the direction of doing nothing?

One answer is to focus on the financial costs of obesity, and the fact that many of these costs fall on taxpayers and on the general insurance-buying public, rather than on the obese individuals themselves...

It is more important, however, to emphasize that there are situations in which "free to choose" is all wrong - and that this is one of them.

For one thing, the most rapid rise in obesity isn't taking place among adults, who, we hope, can understand the consequences of their decisions. It's taking place among children and adolescents.

And even if children weren't a big part of the problem, only a blind ideologue or an economist could argue with a straight face that Americans were rationally deciding to become obese. In fact, even many economists know better: the most widely cited recent economic analysis of obesity, a 2003 paper by David Cutler, Edward Glaeser and Jesse Shapiro of Harvard University, declares that "at least some food consumption is almost certainly not rational." It goes on to present evidence that even adults have clear problems with self-control.

Above all, we need to put aside our anti-government prejudices and realize that the history of government interventions on behalf of public health, from the construction of sewer systems to the campaign against smoking, is one of consistent, life-enhancing success. Obesity is America's fastest-growing health problem; let's do something about it.

Antiterrorism = food supply decentralization

From the Washington Post via Daily Kos:

The analysis by Wein and graduate student Yifan Liu considered what might happen if terrorists poured into a milk tanker truck a couple of gallons of concentrated sludge containing as much as 10 grams of botulinum toxin, a potent bacterial nerve poison now popular in low doses as a wrinkle eraser.
Because milk from many sources is combined in huge tanks holding hundreds of thousands of gallons, the toxin would get widely distributed in low, but potentially lethal, concentrations and within days be consumed by about 568,000 people, the report concludes.

The article was focusing on the conflict between scientific freedom and national security, but the larger and continually marginalized issue is at the heart of the report itself: a centralized food production and distribution system is infinitely more vulnerable to sabotage/terrorism than a diffused network of local and regional food systems. See additional discussion here
and here