So, Lis has gotten grumpy at me for not blogging in the past weeks. . .

See, given that I've been working a lot, and at rehearsal, I've not been near a computer recently. But I have been talking to Lis and she keeps saying, "I wish you would blog that." and she's now actually grumpy at me for not posting the stuff I've been telling her, so I'm going to try to catch up with a couple things that she's insisted I blog about in the past week or so.

First, here's one about abortion.

See, one thing I really try to do is to understand points of view with which I don't agree. Which is one of the reason why I make sure to read the LJs and blogs of people who I respect who have very different political, religious, and moral beliefs than I do.

One thing I can sometimes do is to take a postulate, put it in my head as if I believed it, and see what that would lead me to feel and to believe.

So I took the postulate "a person becomes a person at the moment of conception", and decided to see what that would lead me to believe.

I now understand the protests against fetal stem cell research. Because, you see, if you believe that postulate, then using fetal stem cell research to cure chronic degenerative diseases is precisely the same as bathing in the blood of slaughtered babies to restore one's youth. Not "analagous to" -- but precisely the same.

With that postulate, then legalized abortion is even more wrong than legalized slavery, and the comparison of Roe v. Wade to Dred Scott is mild, rather than over-the-top.

With that postulate, blockading abortion clinics becomes a moral imperative.

Hell, with that postulate, even the murder of doctors -- and even receptionists -- who work at clinics begins to look understandable, if not rational or forgivable. But it's no more crazy than John Brown's actions at Harper's Ferry.

And then I take that postulate back out, and look at it, and look at how ridiculous it is, and the whole edifice collapses into radical crazy psychosis. Because a human being ISN'T a human being at the moment of conception. I mean, heck. Exodus 21:22 is pretty damn clear about that fact. (I found pro-life sites that try to twist the Hebrew words in all sorts of bizzare ways to attempt to obscure this fact, but they're clearly not working from the actual text -- they're trying to pick and choose among ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS to attempt to obscure the fact that the loss of a fetus is seen as an injury to the mother and not a death of a human. They come up with this insanely stupid argument that this refers to a PREMATURE BIRTH and not a miscarriage, which I think would pretty much surprise everyone who's been USING this rulling for the past four millenia. The Hebrew is pretty damn clear.)

But I nonetheless understand more where people are coming from.

Another thing that Lis wanted me to blog

So, Maralyn is this woman I work with.

She's a nice enough person, but she's maybe a little untrained in critical thinking skills. I'm trying to find a nice way to put it, and that's what I came up with.

She's also vaguely interested in Judaism, because her father was Jewish, and she never learned much about Judaism growing up. So she asks me questions sometimes, which I'm more than happy to answer.

"Hey, Ian," she called across the cafeteria at lunch yesterday, "I got a question about Jewish stuff."

"Sure, shoot, whaddya wanna know?"

"It's about sex with a sheep," I thought I heard her say.

"A SHEEP?"

"No, not a SHEEP -- a SHEET. With a hole in it."

"Oh. THAT thing. Yeah. It's not true."

"Whaddya mean it's not true?"

"That whole thing about how Orthodox men and women have sex through a sheet with a hole in it? Yeah, it's total bullshit. No truth to it at all."

"How do you know?"

"Whaddya mean 'how do I know?' I know. It's not true."

"Yeah, but I read it once somewhere."

"I don't care. It's not true."
"But you're not Orthodox, so how would you know for sure?"
"Because a lot of my friends are Orthodox, I hang out with rabbis, my mother's a religious leader, I teach Hebrew School, I study this stuff, and I learned about this one and why it's not true."

"I don't believe you."

"Why not? Why would I possibly lie about this? Look -- my theory is that people saw people doing their laundry, and there's this kind of undershirt thing that Jewish men wear which looks kind of like a poncho, so my theory is that other people saw those talitot katanot hanging up on the clothesline, and thought it looked like a sheet with a hole in it, and made up the story."

"I think you're wrong -- I read it somewhere that it's true. I mean, you knew what I was talking about when I said it, right? You'd heard of it!"

"Yeah, sure -- I'd heard of the fact that there was this lie going around. But I know it's bullshit."

"I think you're making that up."

At this point, of course, everybody else in the entire cafeteria is totally cracking up.