Joe Stanley

thecallus:

Taxes aren’t voluntary.

Hey, so here’s a tiresome encapsulation of a stupid argument: if you don’t have to pay for birth control because you’re Catholic, I don’t have to pay for the military because I’m Catholic. See what I did there? It’s not my argument - Jesus was just really against killing people.

Take it a step further: if you don’t want to pay for birth control, you HAVE TO pay for food stamps and health care. And much more, because we have a lot of hungry, sick people in America. My Catholic education (maybe I’m rusty?) taught me that God believes in generosity. We have the capacity to feed the hungry and heal the sick, so that’s what I compel you to do.

If you’re a Christian who thinks the state must comply with your beliefs, get ready for loads more taxes! Remember tithe? Except that’s not the angle the self-proclaimed “evangelical” right is taking, at all - they think private giving should be the only mechanism for providing social welfare. It’s a really important ideological divide that throws an existing provider of Christ’s compassion into turmoil, and for what purpose? Well, simple: “deficit” (tax) reduction.

It sure as shit isn’t because Jesus cared if the goddamn Democrats fed people instead of your church group. Promise. He was kind of consistent about that.

Now, consider the other side: I’m non-denominational. How do we handle my beliefs? What about protecting my freedoms? Religion isn’t a little black dress for me to slip my partisanship into. And I indeed live with tax expenditures that make me fucking furious, like GM or the Nth Middle Eastern war. But this is how we operate a nation: law. Reason. And, yes, compassion.

If churches alone could feed the hungry, there’d have been no need for food stamps. If we cared for the sick, we could have lived without Obamacare. These are Christian goals achieved via compromise and negotiation with secular society. So sorry: we need birth control. It won’t cost near as much as your latest crusade, so.

So fucking can it.

ihavethisblog:

We were talking about globalization and cross cultural exchange

And people were like

“globalization is great! I love yoga! I love Tibetan prayer flags! We get all these great things from our contact with other cultures!”

And then someone was talking about dreamcatchers and that kind of shit

So I raised my hand and started talking about how being native isn’t a trend and you can’t just take a part of someone’s culture and assign your own meaning to it.

And then there was a thing where people pulled the whole “these cultures help us feel connected to something spiritual”

And I just started going off about fetishization and how people just take the parts of a culture they think are pretty and fuck over the actual people from whose culture they’re stealing.

And then residential schools

And genocide

And racism

And power

And imperialism/colonialism

…

And then I was shaking and almost tearing up and my professor was like

And everyone stared.

And then I said

“These things mean something. My existence means something. These are people’s lives. It’s easy to think of cross cultural contact as this great thing when you’re the one getting all the benefits but it’s more complicated than that. “

I was really mad at myself for getting all red-faced and tremble-y but I thought that closing was tumblr-worthy.