Prebylutheranism 2nd Anniversary Spectacular! (My Top 10 Posts Ever)

Just because.

The other day was the second anniversary of my foray into blogging, and what a long, strange trip it’s been. I haven’t proven to be the most consistent blogger on the Web, or the one with the biggest following, or the smartest, or the funniest, or the most talented, or the best-loved, but I’m certainly…one of them?

I guess?

But one thing I am sure of is that starting this blog was a good call. Some of the things that have happened since I began it:

• I’ve been published by Cracked a couple of times;
• My work has appeared in Reader’s Digest;
• I’ve scored a book deal;
• I’ve been made a weekly columnist at Christ and Pop Culture;
• I’ve almost finished a novel (which is more of a distraction from blogging than anything, but whatever).

I thought that for this august occasion (which, ironically, is a June occasion), it might be fun to run down my blog’s top 10 posts, along with some of my commentary on them. Unless it’s not fun, in which case, I’m sorry.

A Brief and Somewhat Unfocused Rant About the Hobby Lobby Case

Reportedly, Hobby Lobby CEO Dave Green saw this sign outside the courthouse and said, “Oh wait, Hobby Lobby ISN’T a church? My mistake.” Then he retracted his lawsuit and went home.

Okay, so.

Several people have asked me to blog my thoughts about the high-profile case that’s before the Supreme Court right now. I’m honestly not sure why, since my political views tend to be pretty bland and wishy-washy, but maybe that’s what the blogosphere needs. Maybe I can be the anti-Matt Walsh: angry with no one, and reasonable towards everyone.

I can at least give it my best shot.

So, here are my primary thoughts.

A Break-up Letter to Matt Walsh

Dear Matt Walsh,

It’s not you. It’s me.

Or was it the other way around? Yeah, that. It’s totally you.

Toward a Progressive Pro-Life Ethic

I’ve posted the occasional pro-life rant on this blog, but I’ve never seen this blog as a particularly political one, in part because I don’t consider my political views to be all that interesting (they’re sort of a generic, post-evangelical “I-don’t-want-to-call-myself-progressive-but-I-guess-that’s-what-I-am”-ness, in case you’re wondering). However, this blog seems to get a lot of hits when I write about abortion, so let me see if I can use that (sort-of) platform to try to do some  good in the world.

Kermit Gosnell’s House of Horrors: Instead of Giving Up on Life, I Thought I’d Try Writing About It

If you haven’t heard about Dr. Kermit Gosnell and his abortion clinic of horrors by now, all I can say is: get an Internet connection.

The mainstream media, for whatever reason, did its best to keep it quiet, but eventually social media called them out on it. (I usually roll my eyes when I hear the words “liberal bias,” but I’m starting to think I should take those words a bit more seriously.) The whole thing is just a horror story of filth and torture, and it’s definitely not for the weak of heart. Here’s a quick summary: beheadings by scissors, piles of rotting dead babies (with some live ones mixed in), feet preserved in jars.

If you really want to know more, you can go here (if you like to read), or here (if you prefer soundbites, pictures, and links to fluff pieces about ’90s pop culture). At the moment, I’m far too pissed off to write anything coherent, but I have to write something, so let me give you the following thoughts:

Drawing dicks on the walls.

Oh,
If you’re feeling small,
And you can’t draw a crowd,
Draw dicks on the walls.

—Ben Folds Five

[NOTE: This is something of an update to this post.]

Their mascot’s a ginger, so you know they’ve got soul.

I stood in the restroom of a Wendy’s wedged between an IHOP and a shady-looking tech college, doing my best to dry my hands. The nozzle of the air drier was missing, causing lukewarm air to spill into the room in a thousand different directions.

My hands were getting drier, but my shirt was getting wetter.

Gun Nuts and Abortion Nuts are Exactly the Same (and if this post doesn’t offend absolutely everyone, I should just give up)

[See an update to this post here.]

Yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that  declared abortion to be legal in the U.S. It was also the day of the latest school shooting, this one a slightly-less-headline-grabbing version than the last. And as I listened to the usual parade of opinions on abortion (which pretty much haven’t changed at all since Roe), and waited for the NRA’s latest asinine statement on how guns are the solution to all our problems, a thought occurred to me:

Gun-rights advocates and abortion-rights advocates aren’t all that different.

The gun nut is just the abortion nut dressed up as a redneck. The abortion nut is just a gun nut drenched in estrogen. I imagine that thought will offend nearly everyone (WOO-HOO! TRAFFIC!), but before you stomp away angry, let me explain what I mean:

OMG PRO-LIFERS ARE HYPOCRITES (And so are you. And so’s your mom, probably.)

I’m not really the first person you would expect to be pro-life. I’m a registered Democrat; I voted for Obama once and will vote for him again; I’m one of the biggest apologists I know for public safety nets and universal health coverage. By all stereotypes, I should probably be giving my personal thumbs-up to abortion, as well. I can’t get myself to go there, though.

The reason for that is pretty simple, I think. Abortion, however you may want to dress it up verbally, is the taking of a human life. It’s nice and all that the human life in question has little if any self-awareness and few loved ones depending on it; it’s unfortunate that the human life in question inconveniences another human life; and of course I admit that I myself will never be so inconvenienced. (Because I have a penis. Heehee, penis.) None of that changes the fact that a human life is being taken when an abortion is performed. And you can tell me all you want that the “human life” I’m referring to is not (yet?) a human being, and therefore not deserving of my pity; I would respond, naturally, by beating a bunch of adorable kittens with a gigantic baseball bat. (I mean, what’s the problem? It’s not like they’re human beings.)

If You Can’t Be Female, at Least Be a Celebrity

I’m currently about halfway through Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics by Ross Douthat of the New York Times. Douthat is NYT’s token conservative Catholic columnist, and I have to admit that, whether I want to agree with him or not (short version of my viewpoint: as a grad student, I’m far too steeped in postmodernism to form actual opinions anymore), he tells a compelling story regarding how American churches abandoned orthodoxy, allowing for the rise of heresies like the the Jesus Seminar, Dan Brown’s revisionist history, and Benny Hinn’s outfits.

Of particular interest, though admittedly less amusing than poking fun at Dan Brown (short version: that guy sucks), is his take on what happened to the two major branches of mainstream Protestantism in the ’60s and ’70s. To summarize Douthat’s analysis, both Mainline and Evangelical stripes got hooked on political activism for its own sake, and in the process were turned into their respective parties’ lapdogs instead of being the protectors of the Gospel that they should have been. The Mainline decided that every political cause was basically the Civil Rights Movement and started doing whatever the New Left told them; Evangelicals decided that every political cause was the Pro-Life Movement, and proceeded to be yanked around by Reaganomics and Neoconservativism for the next four decades.