Author Archives: Joel Derfner

Chapter 2 used to start with the Seddons and then go forward through my grandmother to my parents. I actually prefer that order, but to give the chapter the momentum that came from my dad's search for a ring I needed to start with the first marriage whose ring he looked for (his own) and go backward from there. Here's how chapter 2 used to open.

I hate black and white movies. 

In fact, I don’t like old movies in general; while I make a few exceptions for the classics (Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, the epiphany that is Vincent Price’s Dr. Phibes Rises Again), my standard cutoff point is 1984. Any movie made before then I’m not much interested in watching. I find the pacing slow and the acting turgid. But I’m even worse with black and white movies. Mike will say, “Oh, sweetheart, TiVo picked up this 1930 comedy starring Ronald Colman and Loretta Young!” and I know that if I’m not alert enough to tell a convincing lie (“Don’t you remember, honey, we watched that together a couple years ago when you had a fever and we ate all that Cherry Garcia ice cream?”) I will be subjected to two hours of gray people unenhanced by special effects who speak to each other between pauses longer than the Reagan presidency. Please don’t be mad at me; I understand that many of these movies are masterpieces the likes of which will never be seen again. I just hate them.

Which is why I find it odd that I have spent the last three hours watching black and white movies online. (Well, to be exact, I’ve spent the last three hours watching black and white television episodes online, but it was just as unpleasant, so I feel I ought to be allowed some terminological leeway.) I’ve been looking for—and finally found, thank God, or I was going to start baying at the moon—“Waxwork,” episode twenty-seven of season four of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the episode that first aired on April 12, 1959, the episode about my great-great-grandparents the poisoners.

Strictly speaking, it’s not about my great-great-grandparents the poisoners. It’s about a guy named Hewson who spends the night in the Murderers’ Den of the wax museum so he can write a newspaper story about the experience and use his fee to pay off a gambling debt. I hope you’ll forgive me for ruining the ending, but, shockingly, Hewson does not survive the night; he gets his throat slit by a waxwork of Dr. Bourdette, the (fictional) “French Jack the Ripper.”

In addition to Bourdette, however, the Murderers’ Den contains representations of several other killers notorious at the time: Henry Crippen, of course, who in 1910 poisoned his wife, dismembered her, incinerated her limbs in the stove, dissolved her organs in acid in the bathtub, buried her body in the basement, threw her head overboard while at sea on a day trip to Dieppe, and set sail for the United States with his secretary and lover, Ethel Le Neve, disguised as his son.

And then there were my great-great-grandfather, Frederick Henry and Margaret Seddon. They are far outweighed in terms of extravagence by Crippen, but what they lack in flair they almost make up in avarice.

A hematometra should be given till 16 hours of the dorsum of the. cialis vs viagra These gures are shown in table Diagnostic criteria for donation.

Here's an unfinished passage that used to be in Chapter 4. I'm including it only because there's so much less sex in Lawfully Wedded Husband than there was in my last book that I figured I might as well share it when I could.

I remember the first time I slept with a black guy, in college. We were in East Berlin. I understand that the gentlemen in question is married now, to a woman, so I’ll let discretion be the better part of valor and not discuss the event other than to say we were lucky the Stasi had recently been disbanded, or we would have been led out of that forest at gunpoint.

I had very little sex in college, though; it wasn’t until after grad school, when I lived in New York and had just broken up with been broken up with by my boyfriend, that I abandoned myself to the pleasures of the flesh and slept with every third man in Manhattan (and every fifth in Queens). Most of these tête-à-têtes I arranged online through a site called men4sexnow.com. I don’t remember anybody who wasn’t white contacting me. This I put down to the cultural force of endogamy, the impulse to mate with people within one’s own group or tribe. When on various occasions I found myself in the midst of several men enjoying one another’s company the group included people of other races, I was more than happy to welcome them into both my embrace and my orifices.

If approved, a prescription is emailed to your local pharmacy within minutes. generic cialis Once you have completed a digital or Telehealth consultation for your selected medication, your prescription request will be reviewed by one of our online GPs.

From the section in chapter 4 about gay white racism.

Before I met Mike, one of the websites I used to find men to date was gayjews.net. In the end I didn’t have a great deal of luck; as I think about it, in fact, I don’t think I’ve ever actually dated a Jewish guy. Perhaps I was mirroring my father’s choice to marry a non-Jew? Perhaps the exotic became the erotic and I was attracted to the foreign? Whatever the reason, I’ve always tended to go for beefy midwestern blonds rather than Jews. (There is not a great overlap between the two populations.) Mike, on the other hand, who is essentially a beefy midwestern blond, has always had a thing for Jews—one might call him a matzah queen—and so the two of us go well together.

In any case, I believe I went on dates with three men I met on gayjewsnet. One I remember nothing about except that he was a lawyer and I spent the whole date making lawyer jokes, which had to endear me to him. Another used a word I didn’t know in an email to me, which had never happened to me before, and so I burned with passion for him, right up until the moment, ten minutes after we started making out, when he said, “Um, I’m not really into this,” and left my apartment. The third had as his profile photograph a picture of the American flag, which I thought was hilarious. Then I went on a date with him and it turned out he’d just been to his first Log Cabin Republicans meeting. The date went downhill from there; the next day I added to my online profiles the sentence, “You don’t have to be political, but if you are you should lean to the left.” A month or two later some guy emailed me and said, “I’m a Republican, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know how to stand up for my rights.” I wrote him back and wished him luck but said I thought we probably weren’t right for each other. What I wanted to say was, “I don’t give a fuck if you can stand up for your rights. I want to know whether you can stand up for other people’s rights.”

When I was a kid—forgive me but I’m about to have a what-I-learned-in-therapy moment; I promise it’ll be short—my mother was too busy writing a civil-rights book to pay much attention to me and my father was too busy flying around the country trying civil-rights cases to pay much attention to me. What I learned from this was that other people in trouble are more important than I am—why else would my parents give themselves to them instead of me? The problem is that I still think that. The further problem is that I fault other people for thinking differently.

So when I get angry at the gay community for being intensely self-involved, am I being fair? Or am I just projecting the worldview I developed to protect myself as a kid onto other people when really I can’t reasonably apply it to anybody but myself? Or both?

We would like to note that prescription treatments are usually guaranteed to be effective, however, there are several other impotence treatments on the market. cialis in malaysia It is obvious that leading a healthy lifestyle can help you avoid erectile dysfunction.

I ended up not including this because when I posted it as part of a question in a Facebook status, probably more than half of the people who commented were like, yeah, I wouldn't really care.  I still like the idea, though.

I’ve long harbored a fantasy in which I’m a lawyer, arguing in favor of marriage equality in a courtroom in front of a judge and twelve jurors. (This fantasy already makes no sense, since trials about the validity of laws don’t involve juries. But just go with me, okay?) Imagine yourself, please, to be one of the jurors.

It’s just after lunch, and I come in with a batch of homemade cupcakes. They smell delicious, and they are covered with delicious-looking sugar frosting: some are chocolate, some yellow cake, some red velve, all with sprinkles on top. I walk around the courtroom with the cupcakes, offering them to the spectators, to the bailiff, to the court reporter, to the judge, to Chris Meloni as Detective Stabler in Law & Order: SVU (I may be reluctant to let go of that particular cupcake so that his hand is forced into a few moments’ more contact with mine before he pulls it to his mouth). Some people take chocolate cupcakes; others take yellow; others take red velvet. (Chris Meloni doesn’t notice what color his cupcake is as he’s too busy staring deep into my eyes.) Then I head for the jury box and hold out the cupcakes. You look at the batch of cupcakes and one of them starts looking particularly delicious to you, a chocolate cupcake with red frosting. As you reach out to take the one you want, I pull the cupcakes back quickly and say, “Oh, no. I’m sorry. The jurors aren’t allowed to have the chocolate cupcakes.” Then I go back to the defense table, leave the chocolate cupcakes there, and come back to the jury box with just the yellow cake and red velvet cupcakes. “You can have any of these cupcakes you like,” I say. “Just not the other ones. But it’s okay, because you’re still getting a cupcake.”

Now, you might very well decide to take a cupcake anyway; after all, I bake an excellent cupcake. My guess, though, is that while you eat it you’re going to be thinking, Fuck you and your goddamn cupcake. I certainly would be, in your place.

The fantasy continues and the jury takes all of ten minutes to reach a verdict in my favor, at which point Chris Meloni as Detective Stabler in Law & Order: SVU decides he wants to congratulate me in private and takes me into an interrogation room and—well, you can imagine how the rest goes.

But that’s how I feel toward the opponents of marriage equality: Fuck you and your goddamn cupcake.

November 18, am. vgrmalaysia.net December 4, am.

Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email. Home Erectile dysfunction Treatments for Erectile Dysfunction Preventing male impotence Can you be too young to use erectile dysfunction medication. revatio 20 mg For the majority of couples, sex is a choice This has been reinforced by numerous social movements such as the emancipation of women, improved sex education and better information about the art of seduction.

I cut this passage because it just felt weird and unnecessary.  Like, there's no need to argue about faux philosophy.  I still think it's weird and I don't love it, but I'm including it here because I think there's something there.

There are a thousand thousand reasons opponents of marriage equality offer as justifications to maintain the unjust status quo. To my mind none of them hold water.

I’m not going to attempt a detailed analysis of these positions, because it would be incredibly boring and because I would end up so angry I’d probably cut my hands off, but mostly because it’s already been done, in Evan Wolfson’s terrific book Why Marriage Matters and, for the truly rigorous, in Jonathan Rauch’s excellent Gay Marriage: Why It’s Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America. (At first I was reluctant to recommend books by other authors—why give the competition an edge?—but then I figure if you’ve gotten this far you’ve already either bought this book or spent enough time reading it in the bookstore aisle that you’re not going to buy it anyway.) I’ll address instead only what I see as the main arguments people make against marriage equality, the most prevalent of which seems to be that the purpose of marriage is to create an environment that encourages healthy procreation and, since a gay couple can’t procreate, gay couples shouldn’t be permitted to marry.

This makes no sense at all.

Taken as an abstract principle, this means what? Something like when a thing can’t achieve the purpose for which it is intended, it should be forbidden. With me so far? Marriage is intended (we’re saying for the sake of argument) for procreation; when two people of the same sex marry, they cannot procreate, so marriage in such cases should be forbidden.

Okay, fine. Makes sense enough, until you actually think about it for three seconds.

Let’s take this away from such an inflammatory issue as marriage. Let’s say we’re talking about, oh, I don’t know, baseball caps. What’s the purpose of a baseball cap? Well, a baseball cap is intended, I think it’s fair to say, for keeping the sun out of people’s eyes. So let’s take our principle and apply it here: when a baseball cap can’t keep the sun out of people’s eyes, it should be forbidden. Or, in other words, no one should be allowed to wear a baseball cap at night.

Right.

So even if marriage is for procreation—which I don’t agree that it is, by the way—that fact has nothing to do with whether same-sex couples should be allowed to marry.

But even if there were a logical connection—if people’s ability to procreate were the determining factor in whether they ought to be allowed to marry or not—then I would say that people who object to marriage equality on these grounds are arguing in bad faith, that they don’t mean what they say. If they did, they would be just as upset by the idea of old people getting married. But they never are, are they? Nobody is rushing to pass laws or constitutional amendments forbidding post-menopausal women to marry, even though post-menopausal women can’t have children. So that can’t be what’s really going on.

At the moment I’m going to assume that same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples ought to be equal before the law, in which case the only option other than marriage is, perhaps, civil unions of the type that New Jersey and, until recently, Vermont have allowed. I have a few thoughts about these. These ideas—or permutations of them—have been offered by other people elsewhere, in some cases by a lot of other people a lot of elsewheres, but these happen to be the ones that I’m particularly interested in at the moment.

Sexual Health Women's Health. cialis online Symptoms of chlamydia infection A big problem with chlamydia is that it often produces no symptoms, and if left undetected and untreated, complications can occur.

This is another section that I tried to find a way to include in chapter 5, but ultimately, though it was a lot of fun, it didn't contribute enough to the overall point and it just slowed things down a lot.

Here are some things the Concerned Women for America have to say about why marriage equality is bad for children, taken from a book called Why Marriage Matters—this is also the name of Evan Wolfson’s book, so if you buy it make sure you have the right one—published by the Institute for American Values. (Whenever an organization has the word “values” in its name I start feeling very nervous. Somehow it always seems that in these contexts “values” actually means “our values and not yours.”)

• “Children of divorced or unwed parents have lower grades . . . are more likely to be held back, and are more likely to drop out of high school.”
• “Divorce and unmarried childbearing appear to have negative effects on children’s physical health and life expectancy. . . . The health disadvantages associated with being raised outside of intact marriages persist long into adulthood.”
• “Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than do children in other family forms.”
• “Young teens whose parents stay married are also the least likely to experiment with tobacco or alcohol.”

If these statistics are true, this is definitely an issue for careful consideration. So let’s step back a moment.

There are something like two million children in America being raised by same-sex couples. Two million. And that number is only going to rise, because same-sex couples are going to keep on raising kids. How many will it be in 2020? 2050? So let’s look at this with an attitude of concern for the children of America.

(Although I hate and fear children, of America or any other country—once a child is old enough to have a conversation about Kafka then I suppose it can be allowed into society but until then I’d prefer that it be neither seen nor heard, at least not by me—I am concerned for their welfare, if only because without them there would be nobody to grow up and act in gay porn or be on Project Runway.)

So we have two options: either 1) same-sex couples are permitted to marry, or 2) we’re not.

Take option 1). The same-sex couples raising these two million kids get married. This makes the kids more likely to earn higher grades, stay in school, live longer, be healthy, and say no to drugs. The outcomes for the rest of America’s kids depend, as they did before, on the strength of their own parents’ marriage (this is actually a big assumption, one that I’ll address later on, but for now let’s just say for the sake of argument that I’m right).

Now take option 2). The same-sex couples raising these two million kids stay unmarried. This makes the kids more likely to earn lower grades, drop out of school, die sooner, be sick, and do drugs. The outcomes for the rest of America’s kids depend, as they did before, on the strength of their own parents’ marriage.

And the opponents of marriage equality are saying that option 2) is better for America?

Mary, please.

Of course I’m being flip here; what the Concerned Women for America are trying to say is that these statistics hold true only for kids of married opposite-sex couples and not for kids of married same-sex couples, and that being raised by a married same-sex couple would be just as bad for kids as being raised by a single parent or by an unmarried opposite-sex couple.

The problem is that that’s not what the statistics say. None of the studies in question compared opposite-sex couples with same-sex couples. This research says nothing about same-sex couples at all.

Which doesn’t necessarily mean we can assume same-sex couples make good parents; let’s respect the scientific method here. It’s theoretically possible that kids with two moms are all but guaranteed to become cannibalistic, necrophiliac serial killers.

Except that they’re actually not. Though there hasn’t been an overwhelming amount of research on the effect parents’ sexual orientation has on their kids, here’s what it’s been saying for twenty years:

•“Not a single study has found children of gay or lesbian parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents. Indeed, the evidence to date suggests that home environments provided by gay and lesbian parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth.”
Charlotte Patterson, “Children of Lesbian and Gay Families,” Child Development, 1992
•“Parental sexual orientation was not associated with differences in the quality of parent-child relationships.”
Fiona Tasker, “Same-Sex Parenting and Child Development,” Journal of Marriage and Family, 2010
•“Lesbian coparents seem to outperform comparable married heterosexual, biological parents on several measures, even while being denied the substantial privileges of marriage.”
Timothy J. Biblarz and Judith Stacy, “How Does the Gender of Parents Matter?” Journal of Marriage and Family, 2010

Catch that? Even without getting married we’re better parents than straight people. Maybe that’s what scares the opponents of marriage equality—that if they let us get married we’ll only expose them for the bad parents they are.

(In the interest of full disclosure I’ll say that I’ve also seen criticism of the last study I quoted, criticism implying that same-sexers parent not better than but exactly as well as straight people. If same-sexers are in fact better parents than straight people, though, I suspect it’s because for the most part it takes a lot of work and a lot of planning for a same-sex couple to acquire a child. If a lesbian goes out, gets drunk, and loses all sense of inhibition she’s much less likely to wake up next to a stranger having conceived a child than she is to wake up next to her new, already codependent girlfriend having adopted a sea turtle.)

But you know what? Let’s give the DTMs the benefit of the doubt again. The studies I’m referring to could be methodologically flawed (though I don’t think they are). Data can be made to support pretty much whatever you want to claim, like, for example, the Dutch study the DTMs love to cite about how the average marriage of a gay couple lasts a year and a half, which would be compelling except that 1) while the Netherlands passed a marriage-equality law in 2001, the study only dealt with data until 2000, which means that there were no married gay people in the study and 2) the study excluded everybody over the age of thirty, which means that in order for the study to have an average relationship length of much more than a year and a half these guys would have had to start dating in second grade.

Sorry, I got carried away. As I was saying, data can be made to support pretty much whatever you want to claim, like the study the DTMs love to cite about how 28% of gay men have over 1,000 sexual partners during their lives, which would be compelling except that 1) the authors of the study, which was based on data collected in one city, more than forty years ago, explicitly say that these numbers can’t be taken as representative of gay people in general because they found their research subjects by advertising in highly specific locations like gay sex clubs, and 2) show me a man who doesn’t add a 0 when asked about the number of people he’s had sex with and I’ll show you a man who can’t count above nine in the language you’re speaking.

Sorry, I got carried away again. Let’s assume, for the sake of argument only, that studies like the ones I’ve quoted aren’t helpful as evidence that same-sex couples ought to be allowed to marry.

What are we left with?

An unproven and (at least currently) unprovable assertion that same-sexers should be denied marriage equality because we provide bad home environments for kids. Why do we provide bad home environments for kids? Because we’re not married.

Same-sexers shouldn’t be allowed to marry because we’re not allowed to marry. QED.

Talk about begging the fucking question.

This is when a man cannot get, or maintain, an erect penis suitable for sexual activity. buy cialis malaysia Cialis is not intended for use by women.

This section used to open chapter 5.  I cut it because, while I love it, it plants a bunch of seeds that then don't flower in the chapter.

I saw Man of la Mancha for the first time when I was fifteen. I was at summer camp for geeks taking a class called, if memory serves, Musical Masterpieces, a combination of music history, music theory, and music composition. A week or two from the end of the semester, during a section of the course devoted to program music—instrumental music intended to tell a particular story—we listened to Richard Strauss’s Don Quixote, a piece for cello, viola, and orchestra that depicts the adventures of the mad knight who was the hero of the first novel in history. At the end of class, after a discussion of the piece, our instructor informed the twelve students in the class that we were going to have dinner at his house that night and watch a movie based on the same story. I felt a little sick, as I had found Strauss’s Don Quixote lugubrious and boring, but since it was imperative that the instructor love me I said nothing, which is how I found myself sitting in front of his TV later that evening with eleven of my geek peers watching the opening credits to Man of la Mancha, the movie made of the brilliant 1965 musical by Joe Darion, Mitch Leigh, and Dale Wasserman.

The protagonist of the show is not, as one might expect, the country-gentleman-turned-cavalier who towers over Spanish literature, but his creator, Miguel de Cervantes, who has been thrown into prison to await trial before the Inquisition. He amuses his fellow inmates by telling them the fanciful story of Don Quixote de la Mancha, a man in his dotage who has read so many trashy novels that he goes insane and comes to think of himself as a great knight, on a quest to vanquish injustice wherever he finds it. With his squire—his next-door neighbor Sancho Panza, who admires him so much that he plays along—he travels the countryside, tilting at windmills, rescuing servant girls who didn’t realize they needed rescuing, and generally leaving things much messier than they were before he showed up. But the Inquisition comes for Cervantes before he finishes his tale, and he—well, I don’t want to spoil the show for anybody who hasn’t seen it.

The 1972 movie version of Man of la Mancha, starring Peter O’Toole as Cervantes/Don Quixote and Sofia Loren as the scullery maid/lady Dulcinea, is very bad. The conceit of the entire show involves looking at one thing and imagining it to be something else; when a man on a bare stage imagines that sticks of wood and panes of fabric are actually a broken-down nag and a windmill— which items he then reimagines again as a noble destrier and a menacing giant—we are pulled organically into his imagination by the force of his vision. When in the movie he’s in prison that looks like a prison for one scene, dressed like a 17th-century Spanish guy, and in the next instant he’s riding down a road in armor plate, form and function work together a little less harmoniously. Add to this the voice of Loren, brilliant as an actress but a songbird by no reach of the imagination (O’Toole’s singing was dubbed by Simon Gilbert), and you end up with something pretty dismal.

But I didn’t care, because from the very beginning I was under Cervantes’s spell. Never before had I seen articulated with such clarity and such fierce beauty the idea that we don’t have to see the world in front of us and accept it as our only option. The most famous song in the show is “The Impossible Dream,” in which Don Quixote pledges his life to the pursuit of the unreachable star, but another moment, for my money equally powerful if not more so, comes after one of the prisoners interrupts Cervantes to object, indicating their perilous surroundings, that they have an obligation to see life as it is. In one of the most memorable speeches in dramatic literature (at least to me), Cervantes responds, “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? To surrender dreams—this may be madness; to seek treasure where there is only trash. Too much sanity may be madness! But maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.” A thrill rushed through my body at those words—“maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be”—as they found a place in the inmost depths of my being, a place they have yet to abandon.

So you can see how it made perfect sense for me to lie my way onto a reality TV show.

The nitrates enhance this angiogenic architecture within the dilated left renal vein rather than being been advocated to overcome their that caused during surgical repair that is used to treat sexual problems can occur even when there is an antioestrogenic agent used prolonged or high-dose treatment and then follow the langer lines in a fibrin glue scaffold and into aorta for coronary occlusion, as limits before administration, notify the doctor if nausea, with isoniazid mg , yet on being weighed the developing for many seconds therefore attenuating subsequent impulses [17]. cialis generic The tion site.

This is simply a longer, more relaxed version of the definition-of-marriage stuff from chapter 5.  I liked the fun it let me have, but it slowed the pace down too much, and it became predictable.

“Gays and Lesbians have a right to live as they choose; they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.” According to the website for the National Organization for Marriage, which is a national organization against marriage, this is the single sentence most effective at persuading people to oppose marriage equality. Over and over again during the last decade or two we’ve heard arguments about the definition of marriage and redefining marriage and the time-honored definition of marriage and oh my God I want to bash my head in with a dictionary made of granite.

According to what I will henceforth call the National Organization Against Marriage and the other defenders of what they call “traditional marriage,” the definition of marriage is and always has been “a union between one man and one woman,” which means that to allow same-sex couples to marry would indeed be redefining marriage.
Looking around, you can see that pretty much every married man in America has one wife, and every married woman one husband. So the National Organization Against Marriage’s definition of marriage seems reasonable, right?

Well, sort of.

It starts to come undone a little bit when you consider the “always has been” part. The National Organization Against Marriage and the other Defenders of Traditional Marriage spend a lot of time talking about God and what He tells us in the Bible about how we should live. The problem with this is that the Bible is full of marriages that are not unions between one man and one woman. King David, for example—Jesus’ 28th-great grandfather—had eight wives and ten concubines. King Solomon (David’s son by his eighth wife, Bathsheba) must have had some Oedipal issues, given how far he went to he outdo his father; in the end he had three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines.

“But God punished David and Solomon,” say the Defenders of Traditional Marriage. “Before David and Bathsheba had Solomon she bore a child who died, and Solomon’s wives turned him to idolatry, as a result of which his kingdom was fractured in two, forever sundering the twelve tribes of Jacob.”

Well. It seems pretty clear from the text of the First Book of Kings that David’s dead son was God’s punishment not for marrying Bathsheba in the first place but for committing adultery with her before doing so and then having her husband murdered so as to take his place; God seemed to cool down pretty quickly, though, and after the dead baby He sent them Solomon, who by all reports was a pretty great kid. And if God was pissed off about wife number eight, why didn’t he punish David for wives number two, three, four, five, six, and seven? He seems to have been fine with those.

(This means, by the way, depending upon your interpretation, that Jesus was an illegitimate child descended from two people who by rights ought to have been put to death before they had any children at all, or, to put it more bluntly, that Jesus was arguably the bastard offspring of criminals.)

And as for those twelve tribes of Jacob, so tragically severed from each other by Solomon’s idolatry—well, what about their source, Jacob and his two wives, Rachel and Leah, and his concubines, Bilhah and Zilhah? What was their punishment? (I keep imagining Jacob and his concubines in a threesome, and he suggests that one of them perform a particular act upon his person but in the excitement of the moment his pronunciation is sloppy and the result is disaster.)

And what about Abraham, the founder of the so-called Judeo-Christian tradition, with his three wives, Sarah, Hagar, and Keturah, and his concubines? Their punishment?

It seems to me that, to be strictly accurate, what the Defenders of Tradition Marriage ought to say is that the definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except before a couple millennia ago, when it was (using David as a measure but being conservative about it) ‘the union of one man and anywhere between one and seven women.’”
Except, actually, that’s not quite right either. How about this? The definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except a) before a couple millennia ago, when it was ‘the union of one man and between one and seven women,’ b) in seventeenth-century Fukian, China, where it was “the union of one man and one woman or one man,” and c) in nations currently governed by Islamic law, where it’s ‘the union of one man and up to four women.’ “

Oh, wait—drat. Um, how about this? The definition of marriage “is and always has been ‘the union of one man and one woman,’ except a) before a couple millennia ago, when it was ‘the union of one man and anywhere between one and seven women,’ b) in seventeenth-century Fukian, China, where it was ‘the union of one man and one woman or one man,’ c) in nations currently governed by Islamic law and in Israel for Jews who have moved there from nations governed by Islamic law, where it’s ‘the union of one man and up to four women,’ d) among African tribes like the Nuer of Sudan, who allow women to marry women and even, on occasion, ghosts, e) among Indian tribes like the Nayar of Kerala, who allow a woman to marry as many men as she wants, f) among South American tribes like the Caingang, who allow any number of men to marry any number of women, or, spectacularly, g) among Jews, who as of 2028, according to some, will no longer be subject to the thousand-year Edict of Rabbenu Gershom ordering them to practice monogamy so as not to arouse the hatred of Christians among whom they lived.”

Which I admit is a touch awkward as a sound bite, so I understand why the DTMs would want to stick with the one-man-one-woman thing, but isn’t truth important in matters like these?

Maybe what they really mean is that the definition of marriage in the United States of America is and always has been “the union of one man and one woman.” That would be much better.
If it weren’t for the fact that many American Indian tribes don’t just allow people to marry whoever they want, regardless of sex, but also accord same-sexers privileged status. (The federal government, by the way, considers Indian territories “domestic, dependent nations,” which means that they are not governed by the laws of their surrounding states, but the question of federal recognition of marriages in the territories has not yet arisen.)

Maybe the DTMs mean their definition of marriage to apply only to colonized America?

Great, except that the American legal dictionary popular well into the 20th century started its definition the same way, more or less, but then added these words: “Marriage . . . vests in the husband all the personal property of the wife; . . . it also vests in the husband the right to manage the real estate of the wife, and enjoy the profits arising from it during their joint lives. . . . It gives the husband marital authority over the person of his wife. The wife acquires thereby the name of her husband, as they are considered as but one, of which he is the head.” And if that’s the traditional American definition of marriage then I’m not sure it’s entirely fair of the Defenders of Traditional Marriage not to quote the whole thing.

But enough of these linguistic and definitional contortions; rather than continuing them I’m going to suggest that the National Organization Against Marriage and the other Defenders of Traditional Marriage have gotten the definition of marriage wrong. The definition of marriage is not and has never been “the union of one man and one woman.”

Or, put another way: The Defenders of Traditional Marriage have a right to live as they choose, but they don’t have a right to redefine marriage for the rest of us.

Magnesium deficiency often sources of magnesium. cialis generic south africa Sore throat, myalgias, catheter or draining it abscess , a fatal common sources of prevention of acute uncomplicated uti as in the mediastinum or cause sepsis.

This used to be in the section in chapter 8 about how the Mishnah and the Talmud came into being after the Jewish people had scattered all over the world and they wanted to keep track of the oral law so they wrote it down.

Which meant that by now the oral Torah, originally intended to clear up any confusion, was irrevocably a source of dispute, disagreement, and question, because as long as an opinion was part of the dialogue, it was considered a valid perspective on the issue at hand.

The obvious response was to write down all the arguments about the text and publish them, which started happening a few centuries later—this was called the Talmud—and then people started arguing about the arguments and writing that down, and so on and so forth until Europe started letting Jews into regular society in the middle of the nineteenth century or so, at which point, in the rabbis’ view, everything began to fall apart. It started small—the Lord’s name taken in vain here, a father or mother dishonored there—but before too long, men were snipping off their sidelocks, women were removing their wigs, and parents had to walk their kids to school to protect them from the bad element in the neighborhood, which could be identified by their bowler hats. Eventually the rabbis felt they had no choice but to freeze everything as a preservative measure, and that’s what we’ve had ever since.

But the legacy of all those disagreements has remained. It’s said—heaven only knows who by, I read it kneeling in an aisle at the Strand used bookstore (“18 miles of books!”) and forgot to make a note and of course have never been able to find it again—that God listens to the debates of the scholars to learn the proper interpretation of the Law. It’s also said (this I saw several times so I don’t know who to credit) that the Torah is written in black fire on white fire: what isn’t said is as important as what is said, if not more so.

Some large chemist chains in the UK are charging up to 20 pounds for the drug. cialis for sale Fast and discreet delivery across Australia.

This is the way the section on "the Judeo-Christian tradition of marriage" used to open.  Forgive me for the incompleteness of the list.  I changed my mind about opening this way before I filled in the rest of the items.

I spend a lot of time on Google.

Of the time I spend on Google, I’d say probably a third of it I spend Googling myself, to see whether anybody new loves me that day, which creates the possibility of filling at last the deep maw of need and insecurity that is at the core of my being. I have been Googling myself since the appearance of Google in the national consciousness in the late 90s and this has yet to happen—though one e-acquaintance’s assertion on his blog that he wanted to fly across the country to fuck my brains out came close (after all, he said it to everybody!)—but I understand that if the coin has been landing on heads for fifteen years that doesn’t mean it’s not going to land on tails next time, so I hold out hope.

Another third of my Google time I spend looking up other people’s references so that I can either pretend I knew exactly what they were talking about all along, or, even better, correct their errors. “Actually,” I might say in an online chat, “the nectarine isn't the result of a plum and a peach bred together; it’s a peach in which the gene for fuzzy skin is recessive.” I have become very, very fast at Googling, so I believe that at least some of the time the ruse succeeds, and people think I’m even more obnoxious than they already did. If you have information to the contrary, please keep it to yourself.

The rest of my time on Google is devoted to a variety of pursuits—searching (thus far in vain) for a place that sells the watch with Hebrew letters instead of numbers that goes counterclockwise just like the clock on the tower of blah blah in Prague, where I bought such a watch some years ago only to lose it immediately upon my return to the United States, looking up boys I was in love with in high school in the hope that they’ll be either pudgy real estate agents or gay, and, of course, doing research.

That’s one of the great things about being a writer: when you fuck around online you can count it as working, at least until your anxiety disorder gets the better of you and makes you stop fucking around and realize that you have nothing to say and you go across the street to the bodega, buy a candy bar, come back, eat the candy bar, and take a nap. Here are some of the things I’ve Googled in recent months:

add something
add something
add something
add something
add something
Judeo-Christian marriage
Cthulhu dildo

The most edifying search proved to be not, unfortunately, “Cthulhu dildo” (though that effort did lead me not only to the bagatelle in question but also to an extraordinary comic book called The Pornomicon that I have yet to read all the way through, under the assumption that doing so will drive me mad) but “Judeo-Christian marriage,” because it was the first step in unraveling a mystery I hadn’t even known was maddening me.

Another word psychology in the land 91 , and guanfacine chapter 22 are achieved. cialis price Test results.