God, Are You There? I Need a Scandal Down Here.

Is this sort of material really what the Chronicle aspires to publish? I thought this was a journal of serious thought and discussion…

I’m generally in agreement with Dr. Essig on this issue, but this was not the Chronicle’s finest moment.

I don’t care for Jim DeMint’s politics either, but this article is pathetic and should never have passed the Editor’s desk.

This one and the “I want my students to fail” article have really set the tone for my Monday. How much more dripping cynicism can I handle before 8am?

Liberals are the real purveyors of hate. This is low. This is right down there in the gutter with Wanda Sykes wishing that Rush Limbaugh’s kidney’s would fail. Why would you wish ill on someone just because you don’t like their politics? And worse drag God into it? The worst thing I have ever wished on someone is that they would lose an election, get recalled, or impeached.

Matthew 7:5

Laurie, don’t pay attention to your detractors. It is obvious they just don’t get it. They should, but they just don’t. Kinda like the majority of voters….and that is what is sad….

First of all, Ms. Essig, you know nothing about God; if you did, you’d know you don’t pray to Him out of evil intentions and for bad things. God knows no evil and can’t even look on evil…so I would this this request of yours is being sent in the other direction. You’re using a tool satan used in the garden of Eden and has used continually ever since in his pathetic attempts to destroy people…you put out enough truth to suck people in but then add or omit a key word or phrase that distorts the meaning and makes all the difference! Senator Demint did not say he doesn’t believe “unmarried women” should not teach in our schools….he said he has concerns about “PREGNANT unmarried women” teaching because of the impression and impact it has on young children! And he’s absolutely right! We should be more concerned about the moral impact we’re having on our children than the feelings and discomfort temporary reassignment might have on the teacher! After all…there still IS such a thing as right and wrong, Ms. Essig…although I seriously doubt that you’ve ever been taught that principle! You twist the truth again later in your article; Senator Demint and others who think like him aren’t asking for “more money for the rich”…not at all! They merely expect everybody to be able to keep that which is rightfully theirs…the money for which they have worked and that which they earned…we don’t take kindly to anybody—government or other thieves—coming in and stealing what is ours! If you and your progressive friends want to give away any portion of your hard-earned money…or all of it!…to the government to let them give it to those you say we should be supporting, go for it! But I don’t see you doing that! No, in fact, it is those meanspirited, hateful Republicans you pray against, Ms. Essig, who give far more percentage-wise to charities and others who in turn give it to the less fortunate. Wasn’t it Al Gore…Mr. Climate Fraud himself…who gave only something like 1% of his immense wealth to charities? I would imagine, Ms. Essig, if you check Senator Demint’s giving record, it would eclipse that by a long shot! You are sad in your hate and bitterness, Ms. Essig!

I thought Professor Essig partially redeemed herself here for the pervious “Ewww!” post about vaginas.

She actually raises an interesting theological issue which, being a 90/10 atheist-agnostic myself myself, I’m curious to see the believers work out: Does quantity count with God in prayer? If 100,000 people pray for something good for society, is God any more likely to answer that prayer in the affirmative than if just one person prayed for it? Or if 90,000 prayed against it? Should prayers start to resemble national election campaigns? Can corporations–who are legally “persons”–pray, too? Should http://www.moveon.org become http://www.prayon.org? If the number of prayers on either side of an issue are very close, does God do a recount? And if the recount is contested, is their a Super-Supremiest Court who can step in and decide the matter?

righthearted has, of course, no idea at all what you do and don’t pray to God (or Allah or G-d or Yaweh, or…) for. He or she knows only that certain religions have certain precepts about prayer. But knowing that a) there are bad people in the world, b) bad people are sometimes religious people who probably pray, c) bad things are probably quite often prayed for, and d)s**t happens, one might reasonably conclude that God sometimes answers prayers for bad things in the affirmative. Either that, or He [again, sic] is somehow powerless to stop s**t from happening. And what one prays for certainly doesn’t have to be socially beneficial for the prayer to be granted. As the late, great Reverend Ike (Frederick J. Eikerenkoetter II) said, “If you pray to God for a Cadillac, you’d better be sure to tell Him what color.”

Professor Essig’s “bitterness” and “cyncism” that seems to get the goat of her conservative detractors is mostly, at bottom, her being right on about the relentless hypocrisy of the preachy “family values” types, from ministers such as Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Ted Haggard, et al, about one in every twenty-five American Catholic priests (and this doesn’t include their higher-up enablers), and such politicians as Gov. Sanford, Sen. Craig, Sen. Ensign, Rep. Foley, and Rep. Gibbons, the former Chairman of the Young Republicans, and “experts” like Dr. Ekkers.

And Professor Essig’s post is by no means “incoherent.” If it were, her detractors wouldn’t have their knickers in such a twist.

“Funny” is a quality one can’t prove. I happen to think Professor Essig’s post is pretty funny, especially the tongue-in-cheek pre-empting of the conservatives’ tendency (just watch the “700 Club”) to call for the public to pray on behalf of one of their pet causes.

Let’s go along with righthearted and all keep what we earn! No more military! No public schools! No fire departments! No police! No roads! No parks! No subsidy for agribusiness! Hey, this would be great — no one would tell the drug companies, for example, their products have to save more people than they kill, so some of us could make MORE money! Oh, wait – I work for a public university, and there wouldn’t be any of those either – so maybe I wouldn’t have ANY money – maybe I wouldn’t even have an education, since I attended a public university. This isn’t sounding so good. . . . .

I disagree with the people who said the column should not have made it past the Chronicle editors. By virtue of her position at Middlebury, Dr. Essig is obviously a respected scholar of Cultural Studies. The Chronicle is doing us all a great service by exposing us to what can pass for deep thought in those circles.

To those of you who were offended by Laurie Essig’s post: Please take the time to read the following excerpt from the thoughts of respected journalist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times:

“So many conservatives focus on morality as a function of personal, private behavior, such as sexual orientation, while ignoring more basic issues of poverty and social justice. And it astonishes me that they seem driven by the Bible, when Jesus was profoundly concerned with social justice and was hostile to nit-picking judgmental codes.

There certainly are immense moral challenges in this country, but aren’t they more along the lines of children who don’t get health care? Or school kids who don’t get the same opportunity in life because they go to third-rate inner-city schools? Or kids who are trafficked into a modern version of slavery? ”

-http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/06/senator-jim-demint-and-morality/

I appreciate Prof. Essig’s courage in breaking with the academic tradition of the passive-pedantic voice. I think it is highly instructive of her and keeping with modern academic tradition for anti-gay bigots to find themselves with the shoe on their own foot.
What I came away with was the notion that just as the Catholic priesthood served as a cover for pedophiles, so does the so-called Religious Right often operate as a cover for pedophilia and much more in the way of exploitative sexual practices.
People with strong homoerotic feelings should feel free to act upon them, not go about suppressing them and repressing those who are “out.” It is to do as Hitler did, wondering if he was a bastard child of a Jew and his housemaid mother, campaigning against Jews.
I think it’s the height of irony and of tragedy that the anti-gay movement is strongly driven by self-loathing, closet-gay hypocrites. I think it is wise to once again utter the McCarthyite riposte to those so concerned with other people’s sexuality, “Have you no sense of decency?”
The solution to this hateful and judgmental and dysfunctional social movement posing as religion is to normalize homosexuality. Afterall, probability says that one or more of Jesus disciples was gay. And if you’re gay, out or closeted, He loves you just the way God made you.

A pretty ho-hum lefty hate piece–or then again, perhaps an unintentional self-parody. . . .

‘Perhaps far more scary’ — good grief; not only is Essig’s essay repulsive, her writing is hackneyed and obvious. She’s boring. Surely the Chronicle can do better than this?

Hey Laurie, just three words:

Keep it coming.

p.s., to all of you who wonder why the CHE “published” this, etc. This is a BLOG. It’s posted by the AUTHOR. There is no editor (unless Laurie has her own personal editor on retainer). As best as I can tell, there are no editorial guidelines. CHE has identified a corral of “academics” who get to post thoughts about things they are thinking about, as members of the academic community. And guess what, there are conservatives in there too! And a couple of them could use an editor as well, but that’s beside the point.

What a croc. This is the sort of crap that gives higher ed a bad name and provides evidence to those who accuse academics of ideological blinders.

Alex, I’m sure you get this a lot, but I think it’s great that the person in charge of blogs at the Chronicle is named Kafka. Pretty sophomoric, but there it is…

Marktropolis: love your word choice, i.e. the ‘corral’ of bloggers here at CHE. Herd ‘em up, indeed — groupthink forever, so long as it’s lefty-licious!

YEOW!!! I was deeply engaged in researching to see if Crystal Palin’s success on “Dancing with the Stars” could be part of a great right wing conspiracy. We have so many subjects of great substance to deal with these days.

This essay is just plain sick. Okay, we all need to vent about subjects that drive us nuts. Though I’m not Catholic, I’m starting to see the value of confession more and more as I mature.

Pleading to God to smite Jim DeMint is simply unhealthy not to mention unbelievably disrespectful to those of us who believe in God or might be politically conservative.

It would be so refreshing to see someone who has real problems with major conservatives to identify the issues, refute the issues with logic and facts, and propose meaningful alternatives and cut out the name calling, personal attacks, demonizations, or whatever the kind of emotional screaming this blog represents.

Personally, I don’t see DeMint as a good standard bearer for the Republican party or conservativism. He’s too much the idealogue though he does not articulate his position too lucidly. He does not seem to have any sense of pragmaticism or intellectual curiosity.

It is dangerous to be conservative these days. The marital status of one’s parents will be called into question even ones who have celebrated their golden anniversaries. Their souls will be subject to pleads for eternal damnation. They will also be invited to engage in all kinds of perverted sexual behavior often doing so to oneself while being accused of killing children, senior citizens, and disabled citizens. The irony of the tea party movement is that so many tea party people are so unhip and not in tune with the dirty elements of pop culture, they don’t even know what a sick and perverted insult is being thrust upon them when called “tea baggers.”

Oh well, God have mercy on the athiests and those who want to waste your time directing your wrath at lowly American politicians. There are bigger miracles in the universe on God’s to-do list.

Seriously, folks, some of us on the agnostic/atheist side of things grow a little weary of the bleating of religionists that they’re being “disrespected,” discriminated against, etc., etc. We who fail to subscribe to one of the panoply of theisms abounding in this society find ourselves inundated with the likes of “In God We Trust,” “…one nation under God,” opening prayers for this, that and the other, “God bless America,” religious wealth being off the tax rolls, heads of state having to give credence to various potentates of religion by having audiences with them, seeking their counsel (if only for show), “our prayers going out” publicly to someone somewhere practically moment of every day, idiot intrusions into science classes, special dispensations for oddball religious customs in the courts, vast commercial empires disguised as “houses of worship,” homophobia coupled with secret pedophilia, etc., etc. No wonder we get a little testy and a few of us write books as in-your-face-certain about the dubiousness of the existence of “God” as a thousandfold more number of books have been in more in-your-face-certain about not only the existence of one “God” or another, but about the tortures of hell we’ll suffer if we don’t sign up to believe in Him. (It’s always “Him,” never “Her” or “It.”) Religious types are so touchy. They’ve had it more or less their monotheistic way since Constantine, yet they’re always yelping when some non-believer “disrespects” their mumbo-jumb even for a second. Meanwhile, they’ve been “disrespecting” non-believers–not to mention torturing, slaughtering, shunning, imprisoning them–for millenia. A clever little mock prayer is but a speck of sand in the flaming maw of the religionists, and they ought not to whine about it.

The author failed to address whether, when confronted with the natural process of graying hair, Mr. DeMint asked himself, “What would Jesus do?” Besides that, I LMAO. Thank you.