Semi Truths A highly irregular weblog dedicated to Truth, Justice, and American Cheese…!

May 25, 2014

A Dirty Truth

Filed under: Guns — semi @ 12:35 pm

Glock-Oil-Drip

To my gun-defending friends: deep in your heart of hearts, you know that more guns is not the answer.

You will say that if only more people were armed, then they could fight back or the madmen never would have targeted them in the first place. You know that’s not true.

What saved those girls in the sorority was a locked door. The gunman wasn’t worried about any of them defending themselves. He was on a suicide mission.

You say I would feel differently if gunmen broke into my home. No, I wouldn’t. If a madmen with a gun breaks into my home, the problem is not that I am unarmed, the problem is that guns are too readily available.

Let me repeat that. Guns are too readily available. If the solution really were to arm more people, then more people would be arming themselves. That is certainly what the NRA/arms manufacturers alliance wants. Mass shootings are good business for them.

You know it’s all a lie. You know that the solution is to reduce the number of guns in our society. You just love your guns to much to allow yourself to utter the truth. And until you do, until you support your friends and neighbors and call for common sense control, your own hands are covered in blood.

March 13, 2014

A Frozen Agenda

Filed under: Satire — semi @ 11:35 pm

Shortly after seeing Frozen in the theaters, I began noticing mirthful comments in social media about how some conservatives believe that the Disney movie is secretly promoting a “gay agenda”. Like most sensible people, I ignored these at first, assuming that it was all just an internet meme that would pass as quickly as the earworm that is Let It Go.

But that tune is still playing in my head, and these comments keep popping up. I responded to one or two posts with “What gay agenda? What are these people talking about?”

Here’s what these people are talking about.

Disney Studios has created a film that appeals to viewers of many ages, but particularly children and parents of young children. Frozen has become a popular cultural touchstone (no pun intended) and it is expected that many people feel ownership of the film and, in the process, overlay their own experiences on top of it. Equally unsurprising is that a subset of “traditional marriage” advocates, aware that they are losing the fight, start looking for signs everywhere of assaults against their firmly held convictions. They believe that they are in a cultural war and their enemies are multitude.

But I’ve seen Frozen and I didn’t walk out any gayer than I was when I went into it, so what’s the deal?

The first inkling I saw of this was an oft-shared post from A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman, penning a 3000+ word article claiming that watching Frozen (three times!) was like “like being in two places, experiencing two vastly different movies, that were visually identical”, so subtle was the gay agenda. However, the details she so meticulously spells out must only make sense if you are already looking at it with gay-agenda glasses, because they were completely lost on me. At the very top of her argument, she insists that the movie was really written for Broadway, and of course we all know what that means: show tunes!

I needed to look a little further to determine how I was being secretly inducted into gay society, and finally came across an article in the National Catholic Register by one Steven D. Greydanus, a film critic and author. At last, here was someone who actually knew how to write and form an argument, even one laced with some pretty substantial leaps of reasoning. He breaks down his hypothesis into three points:

Elsa was born different. She has a secret that she must keep closeted. She inadvertently outs herself at her coronation, escapes away from normal society to build a fabulous castle, and eventually learns to accept and celebrate her true nature.

Yes, that is a very powerful argument. It also describes pretty much every teen angst movie ever made, not to mention such obvious gay-promoting films as Star Wars, Spider-Man, and E.T. (We may as well rename those Star War on Marriage, Spider-Gayman, and E.H: the Extra-Homosexual.)

Let’s move on.

Greydanus’ (lord, how he must have been teased about that name in middle school) second point is about the seemingly unnatural relationship between Kristoff the iceman and Sven, his reindeer. As we all know, bestiality and homosexuality are exactly the same thing! Despite what you hear about gay people just wanting to lead normal domestic lives, the actual gay agenda is promoting every opportunity to have sex with anyone and anything, be it man-on-man, man-on-reindeer, or man-on-pizza. Again, this makes sense only if you are obsessed with sex, much like Mr. Gay-anus.

The final nail in the coffin is so subtle that, if you’re not paying rapt attention, the gayness will shoot directly into your subconscious. Apparently, during the brief scene at Wandering Oaken’s Trading Post and Sauna, Oaken says “Hello, family” to — are you ready for this? — a young man and four children waving from the sauna.

Isn’t it obvious?!? That is clearly Oaken’s young lover and their adopted kids, because there’s no woman Oaken’s age visible in that brief shot. In that subliminal, if-you-blink-you-will-miss-it moment, the folks at Disney have completely torn apart the image of the traditional family and replaced it with the true homosexual vision: buff men and healthy children dressed only in towels.

It is easy to dismiss people like A Well-Behaved Mormon Woman (Kathryn Skaggs, a self-described “54-year-old grandmother who married at age 18 and never went to college”) and Stephen Gayness, but their erudite arguments (Mr. Greatanus uses words like “heteronormative establishment”) belie a yawning chasm between perception and the practice of genuine, progressive open-mindedness. I raised my children to be accepting of difference, to honor diversity, and to champion justice. Ms. Skaggs writes of “a liberal culture tenacious at normalizing immorality, stripping those of faith from their ability to speak out in opposition.” Following the lead of the Fox “news” bogus War on Xmas, these pundits are building a new front on their cultural battlefield in a war that only they are fighting, but which nonetheless will leave casualties across our society.

February 19, 2014

A Modest Proposal

Filed under: Crime and Punishment,Politics — semi @ 11:14 pm

Every time I suggest here that maybe a few more rational handgun laws would be a good idea, I get flooded with responses from gun nuts (sorry, I mean concerned second amendment supporters; no, wait, I do mean gun nuts) asking how I would feel if I saw my wife or daughters being raped (these people spend a lot of time thinking about rape), or they post an article about some grandmother in Detroit frightening off intruders with her assault rifle. It comes down to two opposing and seemingly irreconcilable approaches: the gun people seem to think that the solution to gun violence is for more people to have guns; the idea being that, once everyone is armed, no one would dare actually pull the trigger. Call it the mutually assured destruction, or MAD principle. On the other hand, silly people like me have this crazy idea that a better way to reduce gun violence is to, you know, reduce guns.

So I have a modest proposal, a compromise that I think both sides can agree on: let’s just arm only women.

This meets the gun supporters’ repeated concern about the safety of their wives and daughters. As for my side, it’s not a perfect solution, but let’s be honest: what do George Zimmerman, Adam Lanza, that guy who shot that other guy in the movie theater, that guy who shot that other guy in WalMart, all have in common? Yeah, they’re dudes. Clearly, the problem is dudes with guns. So let’s make all guns with biometric triggers that simply won’t fire if held by someone with a y chromosome. After all, if women can’t be trusted to make their own reproductive health decisions, why should men be trusted to manage their own penises? I mean guns.

February 27, 2013

It Must Be True

Filed under: Charlottesville,Satire,Virginia — semi @ 10:49 am

VA’s Republican Governor has proposed a special sales tax on consumers who shop with coupons. “Because they pay less for their groceries,” he said, “they are not paying their fair share of sales tax, even though they take up as much room in the store.” Sound ridiculous? How is that any different than taxing hybrid cars for not using enough gasoline?

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