Rams Do It, Cats Do It, Giraffes Just for Laughs Do It...

Last week Newsweek published an incendiary feature editorial on the Biblical arguments supporting same-sex marriage. While the article is not as acerbic as Alex Frantz's ironic list of additional Biblical Constitutional amendments (which I blogged about here), it was still nice to see a major magazine take the Religious Right to task for cherry-picking which bits of Bronze Age mysticism are still relevant in the modern world. Along those lines, for a far more detailed study of the Biblical stance on homosexuality, check out this aggregation of entries from the Church Discipline blog. (A particular eye-opener is the July 28, 2008 entry, which includes this quite explicit National Geographic video on homosexuality among animals. Seriously, folks, once you've witnessed one dolphin giving his buddy a blow-hole job, your notion of what is and is not "natural" will be forever altered.)

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Thanks go out to cs10, who just notified me that I have been using "November" in all of my December word count entries. (Before she was a kill-bot, she was an editron. In her presence, one does not fuck-up the English language... er, I meant "In her presence, the English language is a thing up with which one does not fuck.")

It's all fixed now, love! Thanks for the tip. You can retract the laser scalpel. Never mind the retina... I've got another one.

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Today's writing totals:
Blog: 123 words
Novel: 404 words (character outline)
DAILY TOTAL: 527 words

DECEMBER RUNNING TOTAL: 9,577/15,500 words

Extra Post: The Sanctity of Marriage

While researching the previous entry, I came across a lovely, but unattributed list of proposed additional constitutional amendments to further pull marriage into alignment with the Bible. (Scroll down to Brutus' 12/10/2008 post here.) After a bit of sleuthing, I found the original author. (Hooray, Google!) Below is an excerpt from the Alex Frantz's blog Public Nuisance, August 18, 2008. If you copy this, please do credit the original author, as I do so loathe plagiarism:

So here, in support of the Prayer Team's admirable goals, is a proposed Constitutional Amendment codifying marriage entirely on biblical principles:

1 Marriage in the United States shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women.¹ Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines in addition to his wife or wives.²

2 A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed.³ Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden.⁴

3 Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce.⁵

4 If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe and be otherwise punished in a manner to be determined by law.⁶

1: Gen. 29, 17 - 28; II Sam. 3, 2 - 5.
2: II Sam. 5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21
3: Deut. 22, 13 - 21
4: Gen 24:3; Num 25 1 - 9; Ezra 9:12; Neh. 10:30
5: Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9
6: Gen. 38 6 - 10; Deut 25 5 - 10

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(Note: I desperately want to fix the Biblical punctuation in the footnotes, but that kind of goes against the whole notion of "quoting," I suppose.)

Plot Crystals

I found an interesting website on plotting a novel. The process is called "The Snowflake Method", created by Randy Ingermanson. He proposed a "crystallization" process, in which the author begins with a one-sentence summary and builds upward from there. I really like the systematic nature of the approach. I don't think I have time to use the process for NaNoWriMo this year (which starts in exactly 24 hours... it being 12:00 AM the morning of October 31 at this moment), but I think it could be a valuable tool for rewriting my first novel, which has had me stymied since the spring of 2006.

It's interesting to note that Ingermanson is a Christian physicist who writes Biblically-inspired science fiction. That's an extremely small pond. Mind you, he is no longer a practicing superstring theorist, but he's still a scientist with a Ph.D. from Berkeley. It's been my experience that very very few physicists are able to bridge the cognitive distance between the Biblical and the scientific. For me nineteen years of religious education unraveled after only ten weeks of college education.

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I have added the ability to subscribe to this blog via RSS. The URL you will want to use is here. The next task is learning how to "fold" my blog entries, so that only an excerpt appears on the front page. That requires mucking about inside the HTML.

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Today's writing totals:
Journal:528 words
Blog: 236 words
DAILY TOTAL: 764 words

OCTOBER RUNNING TOTAL: 14,167 words