Sunday, November 29, 2009

Baby bites

Some of my cooking skills are now going to making baby food for the littlest human in the house. I am absolutely no expert on baby nutrition, but I would like to think that I am at this point at least in the 90th percentile of well-informedness about baby food and nutrition among the group of baby mommies. So the recipes I'm making for Benjamin are based off of carefully pondering over the labels on commerical baby food, reading and re-reading all the literature that magically appears in one's mailbox once one has a baby in Sweden (from Nestlé, Semper, and other baby food companies, as well as from the pediatric clinic and the Swedish food administration), as well as some pretty good websites about baby food and nutrition.

One thing that I've noticed is that recommendations about what babies can and can't eat are even less universal than recommendations about what a pregnant woman can eat.

We're told that a breast-milk only diet until 6 months of age is best, but that it's okay to start giving some solids at 4 months if you choose to. I believe that most BVC (pediatric) nurses in Sweden say the 6-month thing because social services requires them to say so, and it's a shame that they have to feel conflicted when they feel a specific baby needs something more (as Benjamin did). However, I have a super BVC nurse who is very supportive of the super-fast food track Bennie has been on since I finally waved the white flag at 5 months. He was barely gaining any weight and was very displeased and impatient every time we nursed. Once we started him on solids, he sucked down everything we put in front of him. Already now at 7 months he's eating sandwiches and even biting and chewing bananas with a relative minimum of help. I'm sure some nursing or baby experts would hit the roof, but Benjamin has never once choked, never vomited from not being able to handle bigger bits of food (as I've seen other babies do), had most foods, especially common allergens, introduced one at a time, has never refused anything that we've given him, and is now following his weight curve very nicely. He still breast feeds on a schedule that works for us, and most importantly, he's so happy most of the time that we're starting to suspect that someone has spiked his toys with baby-nip.

The list of no-no foods we get from the pediatric nurses here in Sweden seems to be more relaxed than most; before they're a year old, the babies are not supposed to have veggies like spinach or beets (nitrates are hard on a baby's kidneys), excess salt (also kidneys), or honey (spores that can produce botulism). They also suggest we avoid sugar, nuts, and milk as a drink, but for far less "dangerous" reasons -- avoiding bad habits, avoiding choking, and avoiding replacing iron-rich foods and formula with milk, in that order. Aside from those things, everything else is pretty much A-OK from 6 months, as long as it's a reasonable consistency and the diet is varied. I've seen plenty of sites from other countries that say carrots and blueberries are a no-no until 1 year of age, despite the fact that they're sold as 4-month foods here, and I have Australian friends who have made spinach curry for their babies (which means I know, knowing these women, that no doctor has forbidden spinach for their babies). And of course, all the other moms my age here were subject to completely different recommendations when they were babies -- they ate spinach, were started on sugary juices are solids at the age of 6 weeks or something crazy, etc.

The point is, sometimes they seem to be talking out of their asses. Or at the very least, the recommendations might actually have about as much meaning as a swimmer shaving his legs. My son might or might not have a marginally larger chance at perfect health because I follow the prevailing recommendations where I live and don't feed him spinach, but perhaps the fact that he eats blueberries and carrots will cancel it out, who knows.

One site I've used a lot, at least for inspiration or comparison, is Wholesomebabyfood.com. It's run by a mom who has studied nutrition and fed all of her kids, including a set of twins, on homemade baby food. The site contains recipes for everything from single-ingredients purées to whole meals and finger foods for older babies, nutritional facts about different foods, information about storing and freezing, and even things like introducing cups and straws. The age recommendations for introducing different foods are also a bit more on the conservative side, but the plus side is that the site explains why they think a certain food might not be appropriate before 8 or 10 months -- and therefore it's easier to decide if you think it will work for your baby earlier or not.

The following recipes are perhaps not perfectly balanced for baby nutrition, but I do think I've done a pretty good job anyway. I make them fairly chunky, so by typical recommendations these foods might not be right for most babies before 8 months or even later. My baby food is also very thick (as in, not watery), as Benjamin is very particular about this as well (he's like the anti-baby...) so for other babies you might need to add extra water or formula and therefore these recipes would make more portions. Peas and tomatoes can also be tough on small tummies, the former because of the skins and the later because of the acid, but Benjamin hasn't had a huge problem with either. Milk, wheat (as in the pasta, couscous or flour) and fish are among the 8 most common allergens, so you want to be extra careful to first introduce them alone for 4 or 5 days (that is, make sure fish or wheat or dairy is the only new food the baby eats that week). But anyway... here they are:

Cod Casserole
2 dl rice
400 g cod or other white fish
600 g green peas
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl whole milk
dill

Cook the rice as directed. Boil the cod and peas until the cod is thoroughly cooked and the peas are soft. Purée the cod and peas -- and if you feel you need to, the rice -- until they are the desired consistency. Mix the oil and flour in a saucepan; add milk and simmer for a couple minutes until the sauce has thickened a bit. Add a bit of dill. Mix everything together to make a pretty green mush! This ought to be 8 full baby meals -- that is, the amount of food you'd find in a store-bought jar.

Baby Thanksgiving
400 g chicken (I used frozen thighs; make sure you get the type without salt added)
500 g sweet potato, cut up into cubes
500 g frozen green beans (not canned; that has salt)
1 T canola oil
1 T flour
2 dl milk
sage, rosemary, thyme

Pretty much the same as the last one, just with a different kind of meat and veggies! I boiled the sweet potatoes for about 20 minutes, adding the chicken after 5 minutes and the beans after 10 or so. You want it all cooked through and soft anyway. Then it was into the mixer to purée it all. The sauce is the same as well -- mix the oil and flour and then add the milk and simmer until thickened -- but this time I added some sage, rosemary and thyme instead of dill. Mix it all together, this time you get orange goop instead of bright green. And this is also 8 portions.

Lasagna
350 g couscous or crushed pasta
2 T canola oil
250 g zucchini
250 g mushrooms
500 g canned crushed tomatoes (or perhaps tomato sauce if you find it without added salt)
2 T flour
6 dl milk
50 g shredded cheese
basil, oregano, parsley, garlic powder

Cook the pasta as directed. Grate the zucchini and mushrooms on a cheese grater. Cook zucchini and mushrooms in the oil in a big pot until they're very soft. Add the tomatoes and pasta. Add spices. If needed, purée the pasta mixture in your mixer, but it might not be necessary. In another pot, milk the flour with a little bit of the milk until smooth. Add the rest of the milk and simmer for a few minutes. Add the cheese, whisking constantly so it melts without sticking to the bottom or lumping. Mix the cheese sauce and pasta mixture. This one is probably about 12 full-meal portions for baby. I actually thought it tasted pretty good myself, or at least would have with salt!

A note about the lasagna: it contains no meat, is a bit on the low side as far as protein goes, and I don't believe it contains a good source of iron. So it's not the kind of thing a baby should be eating every day, as protein and iron are big deals for baby. But I'm sure it's okay as part of a large variety of foods and meals.

Freezing
I put together a collection of small tupperwares (okay, fine, small plastic food storage containers) so that I can freeze up Bennie's food in portion sizes. You want tupperwares that hold at least 200 ml, but preferably not so much bigger than that, and that have pretty flexible sides. Glop the baby food into them portion by portion, and then when they're frozen they can be popped out (perhaps after letting them sit with their bottoms in cold water for a short while) and stored in freezer bags. It means I get away with making baby food once a week instead of hecticly trying to cook and mash and purée and whatever at every meal. The point with being able to pop them out of the tupperwares is so that you don't have to use up all the baby food before you can freeze more.

I heat Bennie's food in the microwave, as I don't believe the hype about it destroying nutrients and turning babies into cyclops, but you can thaw it out in the fridge as well.

Freezing single-ingredient baby food in ice cube trays also worked really well at the beginning, before Bennie was eating more complete meals. The Wholesomebabyfood.com site has very good info about freezing.



So, uh. Do my mood swings between political rants and housewifey baby food recipes seem too violent for you? No? Glad to hear it!

Monday, November 23, 2009

Did you bring enough for everyone to share?

In our last episode, we eluded to our disgust with many Swedes' definition of "democracy".

Today's vocabulary word is "rich". And while we're at it, "poor". And "divide". And... well, either way, as often is the case, this post includes math (or perhaps lack thereof?).

Background info for non-Swedies: Sweden has been more or less run by socialist governments for most of the last century. Since the 2006 election, however, we have had a "conservative" government. If you're an American, IMMEDIATELY shift your idea of "conservative" to somewhere around the vicinity of Al Gore and Barack Obama for the remainder of this discussion.

Here you have an article that outs itself right from the start with its headline -- which is unfortunately very hard to translate properly: "More rich child-families". That is, of all the families in Sweden that have kids, they're saying more of them are rich now. (Well, fine, go ahead, YOU try to translate "Fler rika barnfamiiljer" and have the meaning come out right. Not so cocky now, are you?)

The immediate problem is how you define "rich". Is it going to be like the "rikemansskatt," the "rich man's tax" that means people with an income over a certain point pay not just municipial but also state taxes here -- and which is paid by something like half of the working population?

Yes, I do, in fact, believe there's a similar definition of "rich" being bandied around here. If you dig deep into the article (that is, read it), you'll find that the number of children living in what the article is calling "rich" families has increased from 18% to 30% since 2006.

Awesome, 30% of all families in Sweden are rich! Oh wait, it's not awesome, because rich people are evil. Boooo, 30% of all families in Sweden are evil!

But I digress... I think.

How have they defined rich? They have an index where a score of 1.0 means just being able to afford everything you need. "Rich" is what you are, then, if your family has a score of 2.0. I'm going to guess that, by that definition, my little family is "rich".

What I'm trying to say here is: I reject any definition of rich under which the label is slapped on me for being able to make a mortgage payment and feed my cats; I reject any definition of rich that encompasses 30% of the population. That is, of course, unless the other 70% are eating garbage from the dumpster. If we were talking about the world population, then I know that I am (rich, that is) and that they are (33% surviving on less than $2 a day, that is). But we're not. We're talking about Sweden, and so you have to wonder what definition of "poor" is going to be thrown up to match the wide-berthed definition of "rich".

The "poor" families in the article have a quotient of less than 1.0; they are, in other words, unable to afford the package that has been defined as the "basic standard". The article, sadly, fails to give a statistic matching the "30% are rich". However, they do say two things that at least help us to extrapolate: number 1, the percent of kids living in poor families hasn't changed since 2006. Number two, the Swedish region of Skåne has the highest percentage of kids living in poor families, and there it is 9.3%; the lowest is apparently in Jönköping, where the percentage is 3.5%.

This is the point at which all of my fellow aware Americans raise an eyebrow at how awesome it must be to have a country where well over 3 times as many kids are rich than are poor, and only then using a very mild definition of poor by global standards.

Well then, here comes my pissed-offedness: how is this information viewed, in talking-point form? "Divide widens," says one headline, and this blog links the article as evidence that the conservatives are "consciously creating a 'hungry' lower class of uneducated, sick and unemployed (who just need to 'lift themselves by their bootstraps') which can then be exploited and help to drive down wages."*

I cannot agree that these statistics are evidence of any gap having widened. When I asked a left-wing friend of mine "which is better, some people having grade A health care and some people having grade B, or everyone having grade C?" he actually answered me that it would be better if everyone had grade C -- and I don't think his view is uncommon, consciously or unconsciously, among Swedish socialists. But even I can agree that there is a "divide" in the former, A vs. B, situation (I just don't think that that divide is automatically a bad thing). But seriously, I do not see how an upwards shift in the poorkids-averagekids-richkids scale is by any definition a "widened divide". If it used to be the case that 50% of the population earned $10,000 a year and the other 50% earned $20,000, but this year the ratio is 40-60, does that constitute a "bigger divide"? I'm sorry, I'm just not grasping the math.

But for me, the best part is this: as I said in the opening of my rant, the conservatives have been in charge since the 2006 election. Those of you with your SAT glasses on will have noticed that that's also the year being examed in the article -- the increase in "rich" kids and the non-change in number of "poor" kids is since 2006. So if these however-many-but-less-than-9.3% of Swedish kids who are poor were created as a class by any set of public policies... well, whose were they, then? I'll even speculate that it's quite a feather in the current government's hat that the lower group hasn't increased in size given the current economic climate.

I really am at a loss for words about how a person's political viewpoint can allow them to believe that we live in a WORSE world if the average child's family resources has gone up without the lowest income group increasing in size. I will never understand the world view that sees it as an automatically and indepedently bad thing that life has improved for someone. The Robin Hood rhetoric is perfectly acceptable for me when we're talking American-top-1%-rich and American-Mommy-sells-crack poor, but as for this stuff I'll just continue to be amazed at our ability to whine about being possibly the most privileged 9 million people on the planet.


*Original: Man skapar medvetet en ”hungrig” underklass av lågutbildade, sjuka och arbetslösa (som bara behöver ”ta sig i kragen”) för att sedan kunna utnyttjas och hjälpa till att driva ned lönerna.

Sunday, November 22, 2009

How do you say "oxymoron" in Swedish?

I don't affiliate myself with a specific political party in Sweden. I am pretty solidly sure which side I'm on when the parties are organized into two blocs, but the bloc I side with contains 4 parties and I am on pretty good terms with all of them.

The one that calls themselves the Liberals, though, is the Swedish Folkpartiet. I was a member of their youth and student organization when I studied here. They say that almost all Swedish teachers are Folkpartister. However, I don't find their recent shenanigans to be all that Liberal. As much as I, as a teacher with an American background, support their ideas about a slightly more strict Swedish school system where attendance, homework, behavior and performance actually matter and are documented, I don't see what those things have to do with Liberalism with a capital L. Even less so do I understand why so many ideas about making immigrants take Swedish tests or sign a contract promising that they won't break any laws etc. has to do with a more negative-freedom-based type of political ideal.

That's why I'm glad to see today that Folkpartiet has voted down an obligatory "citizenship course" for immigrants as part of their integration program. Since I come from a country where one must pass a test in the English language and in civics in order to become naturalized, and I don't feel either of those is a bad idea, I can't say I would protest against such a program in Sweden, either. Especially since, theoretically, Sweden does, or ought to, provide training in both to all immigrants, whether they are seeking citizenship or not. But speaking the working language of your environment and knowing how the country is run and how you can vote -- these are good things for anyone who has planted themselves and their families in a new place.

An obligatory course in "Swedish values" is, however, bullkaka. I'm really rather sick of hearing the word "democracy" thrown around in this country, both inside and outside of a school context, without any sense that anyone knows what it means. Suggesting that all people who come here from another country need a chance to "reflect on the values they grew up with" and how they might not match those of the Swedish culture is not only a poor attempt at subtlety, but is also something that meshes rather poorly with the democratic ideal of freedom of opinion. Even our Minister of Intregration Nyamko Sabuni, who I generally have a lot of respect for, makes it clear how silly the idea is without perhaps meaning to: "Sabuni also said that Sweden is in a class by itself, when you compare values with those of other countries, for example that self-actualization comes before family."* What does she mean by that? Is this one of the Swedish values she thinks needs to be impressed upon immigrants to Sweden? Aside from making it clear that we're not just talking about a helpful civics course here, her choice of which Swedish "value" to use as an example makes you wonder if we really would even want everyone to think the way we do.

It's a good thing I'm already a Swedish citizen, and that the only thing I had to prove in order to become one is that I had 1500 Swedish kronor I felt like spending. If I somehow had had to promise to stick out from the crowd as little as possible or drink snaps at Midsommar or watch Donald Duck on Christmas or whatever the hell else is integral to this mystical and very unique class of values that Swedes have, I'd have been fucked.

*Original: Sabuni uppgav också att Sverige hamnar alldeles ensam på utkanten, när man jämför värderingar med andra länder, till exempel att självförverkligande går före familjen.

Professor Baby Longsleeps

Every time Benjamin takes a nap that's longer than 30 minutes, I feel like I've won a prize.

That is all.

Saturday, October 31, 2009

Mushroom and Pumpkin Risotto

We had good friends over for dinner tonight before our male halves went to play a gig with their jazz band. Fredrik disturbed this friend deeply by mentioning his new-found distaste for meat -- "this just doesn't sit well with me," O. said, looking a little distraught. I suggested it might be because, since they work at the same company (and also worked at the same company before that), are members of 3 or 4 or ten bands together, constantly start and stop and start and stop and start again using tobacco together, and otherwise seem to live intertwined and parallel lives, that O. might be afraid a meatless future is also on the horizon for him. It didn't help that his wife said she wouldn't have a problem with that either!

I used some of the several kilos of pureed pumpking I now have on hand to try my hand at a mushroom and pumpkin risotto. It was quite good except for two things -- one, it had too little salt. But everyone knows that about my cooking at this point, so no shocker there. Two, it really is a bit light on fat and protein to be served alone. But bah, if we add more cheese or... I dunno, drink a glass of heavy cream along with it? Then it's fine! Noone complained, anyway. :)

Mushroom and Pumpkin Risotto (6 portions)

3 T butter (45 g smör)
3 cloves garlic, finely chopped (3 vitlöksklyftor, finhackade)
1 yellow onion, chopped (1 gul lök, hackad)
1 lb assorted mushrooms, chopped (450 olika sorters svamp, hackade)
3/4 c cracked wild rice (2 dl vildris)
1 1/2 c long-grain rice (4 dl parboiled ris)
20 oz. pumpkin meat (600 g färdigpurerad pumpa)*
5 c vegetable bullion (1,2 l grönsaksbuljong)
1 t salt (1 tsk salt)
1 t sage (1 tsk salvia)
1 t thyme (1 tsk timjan)
6 T dried cranberries (6 msk torkade tranbär)
6 T grated parmesan (6 msk riven parmesan)

In a large pot, saute garlic and onions until tender. Add the mushrooms and continue to saute until they are soft. Add the rice and cook another minute or two. Mix in the pumpkin until it coats the rice and then add the bullion, sage, thyme and salt. Bring to a boil; lower heat and simmer for about 30 minutes, adding more liquid if needed. Sprinkle over the cranberries and cheese after dishing up on individual plates.

Calories per serving: 455
Protein: 11 g
Fat: 10 g
Carbs: 79 g


*I believe pumpkin typically comes in 15 oz (450 g) cans. I'm sure this amount it fine. I just happened to have 20 oz from the pumpkin I baked this morning.

Friday, October 30, 2009

Hazelnut patties -- engh, okay.

Well hello there. I'm writing twice in the space of a couple days. Imagine that!

So, Fredrik's announcement that he now believes it's unnecessary for us to kill da widdle baby aminals in order to eat, I was actually quite pleased. I've never been a stranger to such thoughts myself, and as a matter of fact, I ate vegetarian for about a year before marrying my carnivorous ex-husband a decade ago. I actually believe that pairing up causes the world to have far fewer vegetarians than it would have otherwise.

But I also was a little pissed off, in a playful sort of way. Here I've spent a good long time trying to find recipes that both he and I like and that contain plenty of vegetables, balanced nutrients, and all that other blah-de-blah. And it happened more than once that, when I asked him what he thought of a new recipe I tried, he could comment "It's okay, but there's no meat in it!" Indeed, an entire series of "All-meat parties," a potluck gathering that entailed very specific rules about the dishes people brought, was spawned because Fredrik and another friend joked about faintness and iron-deficiency when presented once with a meatless meal. On top of that, I'm the shopper and usually the cooker in this family.

What this means is that I welcomed his new-found interest in vegetarianism with both a sort of inner "yay, new project!" excitement as well as a desire to get him to work for it! First I suggested that we start by cutting back on the mammals rather than attempting to entirely quit meat cold-turkey (ha.). I think I could easily adjust to life with beef and pork, but I'm not quite ready to give up cheese, even though I know that a little baby cow has died for my cheese...

I also said he'd best have picked out at least 2 vegetarian recipes that he wanted to cook this week, before I made my weekly trip to the store.

I noticed a trend when he started sending me recipe ideas and I compared them to my own ideas: I was attempting to come up with recipes that simply didn't contain meat -- indeed, that perhaps never were intended to contain meat in their natural form -- but Fredrik seemed to be finding recipes that contained meat-replacements -- spaghetti "meat sauce" made with soy-based fake meat and a recipe for hazelnut patties were his first offerings. :)

He made the hazelnut patties last night, along with a very good tsatziki (which was our best guess as to what might taste good with hazelnut patties...). I won't share the recipe with you because, quite frankly, we weren't impressed and decided not to make it again in the future. It's possible that we could turn it into something good, but we'll have to come back to it later.

In the meantime, I'm very excited about a cheesy spinach pasta I'm going to try!

I'm also pretty jazzed about pumpkin. I just made about 2 kg of pureed pumpkin after following the directions in these videos: Processing pie for pumpkin. I used a big jack-o-lantern pumpkin, but it turned out just great for cooking purposes. I've got a couple small pumpkins that I'm going to process for baking, and I'm looking forward to playing around with cooking with the rest. And Bennie thought it was tasty just as it was!

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Vege... wha?

My husband has decided that vegetarianism is the way to go.

Seriously, just like that.

Like, say you're lying in bed with a book, next to your husband and his book, winding down at the end of the day. And he sort of mumbles lazily, "I think I'll have lunch with my coworkers tomorrow instead of taking leftovers." Or "By the way, I'm playing squash on Thursday after work, hope that's okay." Although this was sort of more like "by the way, I think animals are conscious and experience suffering and therefore we ought to quit eating meat. Oh, and the cats are due for their vaccinations."

Okay, interesting! But like I said to him, it's a crying shame he doesn't like cilantro...

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Abyss

Benjamin is lying in his buggy basket on the floor. Sleeping soundly after having a whole big bottle of milk that I thawed out yesterday but didn't end up using. Twisting and turning in silent irritation over the flies that keep landing on his face, but not waking up. Generally looking like an angel.

Mom is sitting on the couch, staring at him and bawling her eyes out.

I will never forgot turning my fingers into bloody stumps on the jagged walls of the deep, dark nightmare of losing our first baby and seeing it treated like a piece of trash.

I will also never, ever forget that I have gotten off easy. A woman I've never met but would like to call my friend has had the completely unnecessary and cruel experience of living through a repeat second trimester loss. Another acquaintence has survived the unspeakable experience of one full-term stillbirth, followed later by the death of her 5-day old little boy. Since Benjamin came less than a year after our loss, the period of time in which I was forced to wonder "What do you call a mother without a child?" for my own sake was forgivingly short. I feel deeply humbled by the stories that I know are worse than mine, and desperately hopeful that they will eventually have a similarly "happy" ending.

That is why I want anyone who has children to read the following blog. Over and over again. Until your eyes bleed, seriously.

Mirne's blog.

I know too many women who understand, or at least have a fraction of an idea about, the terrible road Mirne has just started down -- and I hate the vile taste of having to add: for the third time.

What's the uplifting punch line? None, I'm afraid. Sorry to bring you down. But you knew the name of the blog when you came in.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Harald is a nag.

Alright, alright. I'm starting to have time to blog again. And even to cook sometimes.

On the other hand, my computer has now started to show signs of old age (the warranty expired a month ago, after all), so aside from no longer having working speakers, it decides to type not one but two "I" characters every time I hit the "I" key. You will have to, therefore, forgive any consequent misspellings.

Tomorrow I hope to post some recipes, but tonight I'll leave you with this: Fredrik has just walked into our bedroom to tell our son, who I put to bed 3 minutes ago after his extensive good-night routine, that "every night you start to cry, and every night I put your pacifier back in and tell you that every night you start to cry and I put your pacifier back in..." I feel that if Benjamin doesn't learn to fall asleep on his own soon, this meta-routine will get out of hand.

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Benny, let me tell you about Erectile Dysfuntion...

So I've just finished the day's 15th or so breast-feeding session, after earlier contemplating the idea that I might get sideways, angry glances for doing so in public in Las Vegas (you know, where prostitution and marijuana are legal, right?), and wouldn't you know, I find something at CNN.com that gives me a related opportunity to say "Grow the fuck up, America":

Congressman wants to ban ED ads.

Admittedly, my last post about what people don't want their kids to see on TV would have been a "Grow the fuck up, Great Britain," but still. Seriously. Ms. Shelley Hix replies to the article:

"Thank you Jim Moran. I have voiced oposition to these ads since day one. I have teenage grandsons and have to be on guard every single minute they are visiting and watching TV. While we are on the subject of ads, the women’s feminine products are getting more explicit by the day. It’s time to get them under control also."

Dear god! Her teenage grandsons! Someone might be forced to explain erections and menstruation to them (things which I'm sure they know NOTHING about yet), and gosh darnit all to heck, do they expect the boys' FAMILY to have to discuss it with them? Heavens to Betsy, the nerve of some people and their naughty TV ads!

Sunday, April 26, 2009

Time in a bottle

So, as I'm sure you've figured out, this is why I have no time to blog:

Photobucket

No time to blog, I say? Hell, since April 17, I barely have time to piss...

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Reality Check

Needless to say -- as I'm sure it has escaped no one's notice by now that I am an inveterate atheist -- finding time for prayer is not a difficulty I anticipate having with motherhood.

I'm pretty sure Fredrik and I had this discussion before, as I felt a strong deja vu after reading this article. But what I can't get over is the bit about how the first woman's faith was tested when watching her mother-in-law die.

It is an extremely common story. I had faith in God, then something bad happened to me or near me, and that shook my faith. Of course, it always ends with the person's faith being restored along with a new sense of God's mysterious ways or some such; otherwise the story wouldn't be told.

The thing I always wonder about these people whose faith takes a beating when something bad happens to them is: are they delightfully sheltered and obtuse, or are they simply self-centered and smug? As far as I can see, these are the only two options.

By the time you're old enough to watch your 82-year old mother-in-law go through a long period of suffering before death, you ought to be acutely aware of the fact that suffering happens, and that many people in the world endure much worse. I am not by any means trying to diminish the pain that this woman went through before succumbing to death, and it is rare that I would advocate any "ratings system" for how horrible one situation is compared to another. But that death often comes after pain and suffering, especially for people toward the end of our average life span, cannot -- or SHOULD not -- be a surprise to anyone, and when placed in comparison to the kind of lives that are led by starving children and mistreated women in war-torn countries, I find it odd that it would be the common and inevitable that would shake a person's faith.

So like I said, the first option is that a person having this experience has simply led a life so free from information from the outside world that they are unaware such suffering, and much worse, exists. At some point -- in the case of this woman I'd have to estimate at mid-life -- they see some version of it with their own eyes and, amazingly, are shocked.

The second option is that these people of faith are well aware of the fact that the clothes on their backs have most likely been sewn by children in sweat shops where $1 separates them from actual technical slavery, or that children in their own country can be mowed down in the middle of the street by drunk drivers. The fact that they are not shaken until suffering enters their own lives, that their own pain can make them reflect on what God is up to, would therefore seem to suggest that they've lived a life lacking in humility. "That people suffer tremendously in this world is something I am aware of and it has never given me pause about God, but that I should suffer phases me, as I am different -- special, better than others, and God isn't supposed to punish me."

Perhaps I appear incredibly unfair and hypocritical. But bear with me, it's subtle. I fully respect the right of a person to cry bitterly over a hang-nail if the hang-nail is the worst thing that has ever happened to them. But only if they can do so while acknowledging that other people suffer as well, and that their hang-nail just might be small beans to another person. That's the most important part of having empathy for another person, is understanding that the pain they feel cannot be measured by putting a metric on the triggering event, as if it can all be put on a scale. And there are few of us who haven't had the experience of understanding a situation or a hardship better only when we have experienced it ourselves.

That's exactly why I raise my eyebrows at this "God" aspect of insight or lack thereof; it's why I can be amazed at a 40+ year old mother having her first or strongest epiphany about how the life that she believes was endowed by and is controlled by an omnipotent being isn't always fair -- and more importantly, coming out on the other side of the experience without modifying the skewed view of how terrible and tragic your own situation and suffering are in the grand scheme of things. These stories always end with "and then she found her faith in God again" -- like I said, otherwise they wouldn't be told, because there's no news value in "and so she finally came to her senses" -- but not because she comes to realize that her own suffering was really minor in the vast cesspool of all that is wrong with the world, not because she realizes that "Hey, my mother-in-law was 82 years old, had children, grandchildren, a fulfilling, long life," etc., but because she somehow finds a support group that convinces her that God works in mysterious ways and that he has a reason for inflicting unspeakable hardship on his better quality minions.

I react strongly because I have intimate, first-hand experience with how this kind of golden opportunity for a person to develop a little more understanding for their fellow man is totally lost in favor of some sort of bolstering modification of ones own sense of superiority and worth of pity. So I'm reacting more to those people than to the woman in the article, who I, of course, do not know, and I can't say that she doesn't now spend a few weeks each year feeding the poor in Africa and teaching her children how that might fit into God's grand scheme. No, you're right, I certainly don't spend a few weeks each year feeding the poor in Africa, either. But I am not in the difficult position of justifying myself in regards to a faith that would encourage me to do so.

I'll refrain from saying that, since she's Catholic, her attitude toward Africa is more likely to be saving them from condoms than savings them from starvation. Damn, I didn't refrain. It's like I have tics.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Period of Adjustment

I wonder how long it will last -- this tingliness that goes up and down my spine every time I realize that I have a brand new, shiny president with an actual brain: U.S., Europe need to drop attitudes, Obama says.

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Life Music

I feel so delightfully teen-aged. Here I sit, poking my belly and trying to urge this kid to get on with it, but also listening to some recent hit ballads over and over again and getting all schmarmy about the lyrics and how awesome they are. Now, I'm not about to carve Sonja Aldén's name into my arm and claim she's the only human being on earth who really GETS ME and KNOWS MY SOUL (yes, for those of you who are my age, this IS a Kurt Cobain reference), but I figured I would share.

This is the song of Lori's 2007:



The song of Lori's 2008:



And now, 2009, with an unfortunately virus-stricken Sarah Dawn Finer:



Hopefully next year's Melodifestival will include a song about winning the lottery and seeing all your dreams come true -- I would gladly take that as my autobiographical song for 2010. ;)

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Suspend your disbelief and outrage

I am becoming increasingly aware of how possibly strange it is for me to be writing a blog in English that often takes up Swedish issues and fires retaliatory missiles at newspaper articles written in Swedish. Hopefully, though, I can explain enough of the article in question to give you an idea of what I’m ACTUALLY musing/ranting about, which is hopefully something interesting in a more general sense.

This is where we start: "Tingeling"-försoningsblommor från SVT

Now the explanation for people who are not fluent in the Swedish language or the Swedish culture.

Every year since 1955, a competition has been held called the Eurovision Song Contest. I have heard it compared to American Idol in people’s attempts to explain, but I don’t think that’s a fair comparison (and not just because I like Eurovision and don’t like Idol). Each country in (an ever-expanding definition of) Europe who wants to and who follows the rules* can send a song to compete in the contest. In a process that can only be called a whorish mutating of democracy**, viewers call in to vote for the song they like best (but are not allowed to vote for their own country). Whichever song gets the most votes wins, will most likely be played to death on the radio, and next year’s contest will be arranged by that country, bringing them no small amount of tourism, attention, and other positive revenue.

Of course, the countries that participate in ESC all have different strategies for choosing which song will be sent. It often starts with people sending recorded songs in to a committee to be judged. I heard a few years ago that only 11 songs came in to the committee in Moldova, and in many countries the committee just picks a song and gets ready to send it to the European contest. In Sweden, well over 3000 songs are sent in each year, often representing some of the most famous song-writers and artists in the country. These contributions are narrowed down to 32, and in “Melodifestivalen,” a series of televised semi-finals and second chances and finals competitions, a finalist is picked by a manner of telephone voting similar to that of the European final. These competitions, especially the final, have a large viewer base, and there’s always some sort of “intermission entertainment” to amuse us viewers while the voting is going on.

This year, the European final is being held in Moscow, since Russia’s song won last year’s competition. Because of this, the intermission entertainment in this year’s Melodifestivalen final was, shall we say, Russia-themed. Two fairly un-funny comedians, Pihlman and Pål, who bored me and others to death in all of the semi-final intermissions did a sketch where they were trying to “sell” some Russian mafia guys on performing their song “Tingeling.” The two eventually manage to convince them to perform the song on-stage in Stockholm at the Melodifestivalen final, at which point they cut away from the film and the live performance began.

The live performance was a blatant play on every possible stereotype that Swedes, and many others, have about Russian people. You don’t have to understand Swedish to get the idea, so if you’re able to, have a look at the video: Tingeling på ryska. Fast-forward to the stage performance, which comes after about 4 minutes and 25 seconds. You’ve got Slavic folk musicians, Red Army uniformed officers, slutty female eye-candy dancers (this was probably the most offensive to most Swedes), Russian nesting dolls, techno disco, an alto opera singer, those Cossack-type dancers, The Internationale, and even a “dancing bear”. “One more time for the Motherland!” says the singer towards the end.

Someone in our board-games-and-Melodifestival circle of friends had read the day before that DN’s ESC reporter thought it was the “worst intermission act I’ve ever seen in Melodifestivalen.” Since I’ve never been a fan of the judgement of the journalist in question, I wasn’t surprised when I thought the whole act was hilarious. Fredrik, and if I recall correctly another friend, agreed. In case it wasn’t clear enough that the act was meant as sarcasm, as irony, as a joke on the Swedish people and their stereotypes about Russia, it was made even clearer by the show’s host when she encouraged the public to change the channel right before the performance and said “Um… thanks… I suppose I should say…” when the act was over. It was, in other words, MEANT to be terrible, and that was the whole joke.

Obviously, neither Russia nor Sweden got the joke.

The Russian embassy is apparently in a huff. Their spokesman has said, “I find it hard to believe that Sweden would show such ignorance in their interpretation and image of Russia.” His sentiment is seemingly echoed throughout Sweden. A DJ from the radio station I listened to went to the Russian embassy and stood outside with a big sign reading "Forgive us!" and she's either a very good actress or she was actually very seriously upset. You can see in the comments after the linked story that people found the act to be “cultural racism” and “pure ignorance of real Russian culture” and simply “make me embarrassed to call myself Swedish.” Swedish television sent flowers and an apology to the embassy, but now seem to have taken it back, which is either a very good idea or simply very clumsy, I'm not sure.

Heavens. Long explanation over, waxing about people’s ability to think in layers begins.

I’m fond of actor and comedian Denis Leary. Currently he stars in a television series called “Rescue Me.” I’ve never seen the show, but I recall when there was an outrage over one episode of the show. In it, Leary’s character rapes his ex-wife. I say rape, because I believe that that’s the proper label for what occurred in the scene in question, though I know that there are many people who would NOT consider it rape. Many people believe that being married, or having been married to or intimate with a person, or perhaps other circumstances that add subtlety to the scene, do not qualify it as rape, whereas others of us recognize that the mere fact that a person says no is all that matters.

Because of these very heated points of contention in what does or does not constitute rape, I can understand why some activists might have had a knee-jerk reaction when seeing the scene. They imagine that, since the main character of the show is using physical force to have intercourse with his ex-wife when she fairly clearly isn’t consenting, that the show is therefore condoning this action and/or perpetrating the myth that a woman simply can’t say no once she’s married, or any other similar claim that, no matter how outrageous, an unfortunately large number of people seem to believe.

But I contend that to blow up in outrage over a scene like this and for those reasons is actually rather childish, in a way that makes me both despair of and understand why American movies are often so very void of any shred of nuance. People are apparently unable to distance themselves from the idea that main character = good guy and therefore main character’s actions = actions endorsed/encouraged by the media’s creators.

If you watch the movie Leaving Las Vegas, do you feel that Nicolas Cage is encouraging you to become an alcoholic and actually attempt to drink yourself to death? Or that the inclusion of Elizabeth Shue’s character is the producers’ way of telling us that prostitution is A.O.K.? Do we see the series “Dexter” as a rubber stamp of approval for serial homicide, or “The Sopranos” as an endorsement of mafia life? What is the difference between our ability to distance ourselves from these flawed characters and from Leary’s character in “Rescue Me”? My theory is that these other shows and characters make more of an effort to rub our faces in how flawed or criminals or pathetic the main characters are – an unnatural attempt. We need to constantly be reminded that so-and-so isn’t a perfect person and that he does bad, naughty things that we shouldn’t do in order for someone, somewhere to not get pissed off about how the show or movie is saying it’s okay to kill-maim-rape-drink-steal-etc. In most cases we can’t even rest unless this flawed person get their come-uppance in some obvious blaze of fanfare at the end. So the problem people have with “Rescue Me” is, sadly, that it’s too realistic; it allowed for a person to have bad sides and good sides without something separating them, Sesame Street style, FOR us, and without the episode ending with him getting corn-holed in a prison cell or something similar.

I believe Leary’s response to the outrage was something similar; something about how TV and films have to be able to show people who might exist in the real world without pretending that everyone who does something bad always gets punished and without pretending that firefighters can’t be rapists (which is actually a backlash for the idea that rape isn’t just something done by strangers in back alleys!).

But unfortunately, all you have to do is look at the majority of American TV and films to see that we’re not adult enough to handle anything between superhero and supervillian, and we’re woefully unable to see the occurance of an event on screen as anything other than a thumbs-up to said event in real life.

I say American TV and films, but not because I think they’re alone in having this problem. Whereas the strategy of an American film might be to make sure a character who is a rapist is positively vulgar in every other possible aspect, the strategy of, say, a Swedish film would be to avoid the topic altogether as to not have to make the judgement call between what’s realistic and what’s right.

You may feel that I digress. Perhaps a bit. But not as far as it may seem.

I believe it’s the same inability to separate the “main character” or the producer or presenter of a program or an idea from the actual endorsement of that idea that causes people to soil their panties over the “cultural racism” that was the now-famous Tingeling sketch. Most people are apparently unable to see the irony. But even those that do have claimed that that’s no excuse; that it’s still racist and unfair to display stereotypes even when we’re making it perfectly clear that they ARE stereotypes and that we’re actually making fun of ourselves for having them. I also believe that it’s deeply hypocritical for Swedes to get a bug up their ass about this “cultural racism”.

If the sketch begins with a scene involving a mafia boss, does that really mean we're saying ALL Russians are mobsters? Or is the only way to not be racist to pretend that there's no mafia in Russia? Seriously? So just like with the episode of "Rescue Me," what occurs in real life and being honest about it is not quite as important as trying not to mention it or trying to make it a bit prettier.

I suppose you might say that it's one thing in a drama and another thing when we're using it for comedy and joking. I'm not convinced. If I were to say, in a serious discussion, "There are a lot of alcoholics in Russia," which is statistically true (5% of the population drinks an average of 27 liters of pure alcohol a year), you don't think I would get a new one ripped for me and be accused of utilizing stereotypes? (Note that the alcohol stereotype was not used in the Tingeling sketch, which seems like an excellent judgement call.) But the thing is -- and now I'm getting ahead of myself in my argument -- it's apparently fine to state in a debate article in a Swedish newspaper that "tens of millions of Americans are high school drop-outs and illiterates" without anyone getting pissed off, despite the fact that it's at best a twisted version of the truth.***

One commenter asks if the assertion that Tingeling was okay doesn’t mean that we can go ahead and tongue-in-cheek freely about Swedish stereotypes about Jews or Gypsies. My answer to that is, according to a little sampling, both yes and no.

A few years ago, the host of Melodifestivalen dressed up as a Native American – leather, beads, huge feathered headdress, and a stereotypical deep-voiced grunting language that was translated by the other host. And lest I forget to mention it, he was wearing leather chaps and no pants. If Jon Stewart had done so at the Oscars, I believe an outraged walk-out would have occurred. But there was no outrage over Henrik Schyffert’s Native American. SVT certainly didn't send flowers and an apology to the American embassy. Bare-assed grunting Cherokee is apparently okay with the Swedish people.

There used to be a cat food commercial that ran here in which a Japanese or other similarly far east woman brought home food for her cat. The food had Chinese lettering and a picture of a cat on it and, with full-on Manga-style facial expression and cutesy Japanese accent, the girl proudly stated that she’d brought home yummy food for Fluffy. Her live-in Swedish boyfriend cringed at the idea of giving their cat this clearly inferior product, and instead fed the critter Whiskas or Friskies or whatever instead. This commercial ran for quite a while, and I never got an inkling that anyone but me found it offensive.

So how come bare-assed Cherokee and the “don’t you know that Chinese people EAT cats!” Manga-girl commercial are okay in Sweden but did not sit well with me? Because Native Americans and far-east Asians are too far away for Swedes to give a damn about. There are none of the former and virtually none of the latter here. I, on the other hand, grew up in a culture that contained and was acutely aware of both Native Americans and Asian immigrants. I’m not claiming that Americans are more cultural sensitive than Swedes, but rather that we all become acutely aware of offending a certain group if that group is right around the corner and has stood up for itself before we learned to join in and stand up for them, too.

But what about when Swedes ruthlessly make fun of Norwegians on television? Or Danes? Or of actual Swedes with funny dialects? You bet your ass that that’s okay, too. And I feel that, if you’ve read my blog up to this point, you don’t need me to go on a tirade right now about how very accepted it is to make fun of Americans. And not just make fun of us, but to use cultural stereotypes about us in actual serious situations. It is considered perfectly acceptable for a Swede to make a general statement about how Americans are and how that relates to why Swedish health care or education or parenting style or literature or whatever the hell else is better, and no one else involved in the debate seems to have a hard time accepting it as fact, because they’ve grown up with the same stereotypes. None of them seems to reflect on the fact that the country with the world’s third largest land area and third largest population, almost entirely made up of people whose families have been in the country for a number of generations that can be counted on one hand since immigrating from all possible corners of the earth is probably the last culture that you can make sweeping generalizations about just because you heard once from your big brother that…

But now I seem to digress again. And yet, again, I don’t really. Why is it okay to rip on Norwegians and Danes and Skåningar and Dalmän and Americans, often right to their faces and without remorse? Just as Native Americans and Chinese are too far away to require sensitivity from the Swedish people, Norwegians and Danes are too close. Americans are also too close, not by virtue of geography, but by virtue of the fact that Swedes, like many others, have developed a sense of entitlement and ownership of American culture, so the same thing that allows them to make ignorant generalizations about Americans is what allows them to do it without remorse.

So you have direct racism – that is, remorselessly using our stereotypes as if they were true – towards Indians, Asians, Scandinavians and Americans – and that’s okay. What is it that makes this at best INDIRECT racism – exploring and admitting our own stereotypes about a people – so much more wrong when applied to Russians? Do they belong in the same no-man’s land in the middle with Jews and Arabs and Bosnians and others that we feel are not distant enough and yet not close enough to us to make fun of? If that’s the case, then I’m still skeptical, since I’m pretty sure exploiting stereotypes of Spaniards and Italians and Germans is also well on this side of acceptable in this country, and you have to wonder if we all have a list somewhere in the subconscious part of our brains that lists which groups are okay to splash stereotypes on and which are off-limits.

The thing is, if you’ve read this far, you might think that I think that this is an all or nothing proposition. You may think that I believe all cultures should be open to ridicule and joking. Or you may think that I believe you shouldn’t make fun of any culture at all if you feel it’s not okay to make fun of a certain, specific culture. But the thing is, I don’t actually think that’s true. I accept the fact that we find it okay to rip on Norwegians in this country but that we don’t think it’s okay to joke about stereotypes about Jews. I even think it's okay to joke about Americans -- we often deserve it -- as long as people might try to stop their crappy habit of wildly generalizing about us even in serious and important discussions and debates. But this is because, just like in judging characters in movies and books or judging an individual for who he is rather than what country he came from, I believe there has to be nuance in everything. What upsets me is not the fact that cultural stereotypes for the sake of jokes are acceptable in some situations and not in others, but rather, the self-righteousness of people who seem to think that it's all black and white AND that they themselves are paragons of virtue in regards to never, ever being racist, when in fact they bear on their shoulders racism so deeply rooted that they do not recognize it as such. And some of which is much more insidious than just thinking the idea of the Russian mafia singing a song called “Tingeling” is entertaining.

And if you look at a lot of the bits that went into Tingeling, tell me, which parts actually WERE offensive and which parts simply are, well, Russian? Can a coherent argument be made for what went over the line? Were the big dancing Russian nesting dolls racist because they were, well, dancing? Or the Russian folk musicians because they were probably Swedish and not Russian? To insert an obscure Larry Wilmore joke here, I expect all the outraged people to soon progress to talking in a maskedly condescending tone about how beautiful Russian children are.

At the end of the day, I just think that society’s definition of what is racist and what is not is about as solid as whether low-riders or boot cuts are in this season. Being pissed off about how your license money (that you pay in order to have independent television free of political influence, ha!) is going to this horribly insensitive travesty of prejudice is mostly about you making sure everyone else hears you being outraged and notices that you’re playing by the rules du jour.

For those of you who can read Swedish and would enjoy a much more articulate and organized musing about what is racism and what is not, have a look at the third installment in Maciej Zaremba’s “I väntan på Sverige”: Vilse i mångfalden.
*Georgia's intended entry for this year has been disqualified, as it was called "We Don't Want to Put In" and was obviously a political dig, with Russia as the host country to boot. Lebanon was interested in competing a few years ago, but was rejected because they said they would skip over the Israeli entry in their broadcast of the program.

**Aside from the obvious bits about how pay-per-call telephone voting is not exactly fair and balanced, you have the fact that, say, Monaco (36,000 inhabitants!) contributes just as many points to the final tally as Russia. I chuckled one year when the woman giving the Russian points said something like "Hi, this is Russia's 100 million people calling to give the votes to all you who consider yourselves Europe!" The fact that most countries, especially the eastern ones, tend to vote for the neighbors seems to bother everyone but does not strike me as odd -- it's not strange that they would like similar music or would have heard those songs more often and had a chance to get used to them etc. And when Greece chooses to do their song IN Greek, well, is it any wonder that Cyprus is more likely to vote for them than any other country?

***The article, about how the Swedish job market is being filled up by low-paying, "demeaning" jobs, was on DN.se 5 years ago. I wrote a short essay on it for my Swedish class. It can no longer be found on their website.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

We like sinners, but not THAT much

What is the purpose of the church? Of Jesus's death on the cross? Of the idea of original sin? If I may humbly assume that I've understood the whole idea, none of us is free from sin, which is why Jesus needed to die. Our relationship with the church and the sacrament of Communion exist as ways of bringing his forgiveness to us sinners born 2000 years after he died.

Right?

Nah. The world's churches want us to take that with a grain of salt.

Some -- like many of the evangelical types in my homeland -- have quite simply become clubs into which the only most (seemingly) my-shit-don't-stink non-sinners are allowed and all others who deviate from their idea of Christian perfection are shunned. A club where only people that don't exist, according to the club's charter, are allowed. Heaven forbid they step down from their high horses in order to actually act according to God's word and accept fellow sinners into the flock, attempting to help them, rather than persisting in the weekly round of patting each other on the back for being squeaky clean that allows them a sweet amnesia over how very un-perfect they are the rest of the week.

The Catholic church in Brazil apparently has a less restrictive entrance exam, where child rapists are still within the stomachable level of sin, but health care providers that take proper care of abused children are just going to have to start their own little club in hell: Excommunicated doctor hailed for abortion on child rape victim.

That's okay, excommunicated doctors, being in with the in-crowd isn't all it's cracked up to be.

Sunday, March 8, 2009

Feminist? Yes, as a matter of fact, I am.

Not everyone has the distinct privilege of having some people in their life that see them as a truckling slave of the patriarchy and some other people in their life that see them as a condescending amazon harpy. I'm tickled to be able to straddle both sides of that fence. In honor of International Women's Day, I have some delcarations to make.
    I will not be ashamed of the fact that I:
  • like to cook, bake, sew, clean, and take care of other people.
  • don’t know much about cars, beer, weapons, or sports, and I couldn’t care less.
  • think my family is more important than my career.
  • cannot do nearly as much when pregnant as I could before I was pregnant, and am not afraid to say so.
  • cry easily, and don’t try to hide it.
  • will let my daughter play with dolls if she wants to.
  • have chosen to be a school teacher rather than a research scientist based on what I enjoy doing rather than on other people’s expectations of what good girls or smart girls can, cannot, should, or should not do.
  • believe that biology has a hand in determining general differences in how women and men think and act and what they value and aspire to.
  • get irritated with small minds who consider me a subservient, misled, ignorant, old-fashioned victim with no right to call herself a feminist, all because of the above.
  • expect to be seen as an individual and not as a constantly on-trial representative of my gender.
    Nor will I be ashamed of the fact that I:
  • have little to no interest in make-up, fashion or shoes.
  • am a mammal and have hair pretty much everywhere.
  • expect to be treated with respect at work and with acknowledgement of my intelligence and hard-won knowledge, with the same wage as if I were a man, and have raised a royal fucking ruckus when I am not.
  • expect my husband to do more while I’m pregnant because I’m able to do less.
  • think love and respect must always be earned and are never unconditionally deserved, even by your own children or parents.
  • will let my son play with dolls if he wants to.
  • have chosen to temporarily work as an engineer because it pays better and is more flexible than being a teacher, and that’s what I need in my life right now.
  • believe that no level of knowledge of the biological differences between men and women and their general consequences for how we think and act should ever drive us to adopt overly generalized, simplified educational, political or social structures or stop our efforts to treat men and women equally and give them the same opportunities.
  • get irritated with small minds who consider me a man-hating, baby-hating, career-obsessed bitter traitor and lump me in with all other self-professed feminists that I actually strongly disagree with, all because of the above.
  • expect to be seen as a nuanced and shifting shade of gray instead of a constantly on-trial representative of one political, ideological, or philosophical black or white.

Even though most people's definition of the word differs from mine, I still like to call myself a feminist, and I think it sucks that other sensible people have to feel that the label can't apply to them.

Thursday, March 5, 2009

So very unsurprised

Ha. Ha ha.

Mormon Utah Best at Porn Surfing.
    Summary:
  • Utah has the most porn surfers in the country, with 5.4 of 1000 households having some kind of subscription to pornography sites.
  • Of the 10 states at the top of the porn surfing statistics, 8 of them were red states in the 2008 presidential election.
  • Of the 10 states with the least porn surfing, 6 of them were blue states in the 2008 presidential election.
  • States with laws against homosexual partnership exhibit 11% more porn surfing than the average.
  • Statistics were based on a study of porn sites' customers during the period 2006-2008, published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Monday, March 2, 2009

Today I like Maciej Zaremba

A friend of mine tipped me off to the fact that DN is running a new series of articles by Maciej Zaremba entitled "I väntan på Sverige". When I see the name, I have a very distinct tingling the tells me I've read an article by this person before, and had very strong feelings about it, almost assuredly even to the point of trying to write to the author. The thing is, I don't remember if I wrote to the author in order to tell him or her that I thought they were a genius or that I thought they were a drooling idiot. Or wait, now I'm feeling like this article from the past wasn't in DN, but rather, in the newspaper or newsletter for Liberala Studenter? Yes, that's ringing a bell...

Anything is possible, but I can at least say that today's article falls in the genius category. Svensk? Var god dröj! explores the long, unorganized, and pretty hopeless process of integrating a refugee with today's rules and practices. Much of the article condemns SFI, the system of courses in the Swedish language for new immigrants, but the author even discusses a myriad of "fluff" courses that some of the article's subjects have been sent to, where they learn about hygiene and walks in the forest and visits to IKEA. I knew it was bad, but I had no idea it was THAT bad.

The problem with these "fluff" measures is not, as some particularly boxed-in thinkers might assume as soon as they see me or someone else complaining about it, is not that it's "a waste of taxpayer's money" and all that happy reactionary jazz. It's that it's a waste of the refugee's time. I know that integrating into Swedish society as far as understanding how people think and work and paying taxes and taking the bus and all those kinds of things are hurdles that have to be hopped over, and it's cool that someone has thought of that at all, but the twin assumptions that a fully educated dentist or doctor from Baghdad both needs to learn how to wash his hands and feels it's a good use of his time doing so before he starts learning the language is so wrong in so many ways.

Translated highlights from the article:

When explaining that there apparently is no authority or bureaucracy in Sweden that keeps any records of what refugees' career and educational backgrounds are, Zaremba reflects on how ironic that is given that "For decades, the State has registered which tiles Svensson has in his summer house as well as when he masturbated for the first time. No aspect of our daily lives has been deemed too trivial to keep track of."

"When we take for granted that a curriculum designed for study-shy teenagers in Täby is also the best for Iraqi corporals and Ethiopian doctors -- does that speak of our passion for equality or just our arrogance?" I don't require a second thought before answering arrogance, hands-down. The best and most ambitious goal of the official Swedish curriculum and documents describing the teaching philosophy of the country's school system is to try to make sure the entire learning experience is adapted toward each individual student's specific needs. But as a teacher, I can promise you that that's a theory; in practice, noone meets more resistance from the Swedish Task Force for Equality, Hypocrisy and Shooting Ourselves in the Feet than a teacher who attempts to claim that two different students might need two different types of pedagogy. T use example from the article, they can't fathom how we could claim that Kurdish illiterates and Iranian academics do not belong in the same classroom, but they see no problem with assuming that both people need to be taught about good hygiene whereas a recent arrival from Poland or Germany does not.

This is why, sadly, the Warsaw school described in the article -- where they intensively train doctors and other healthcare personel in Swedish, English, French, Danish, and you-name-it so that they can hit the ground running when arriving in a new country -- is a concept that is a long way from being copied here in Sweden, despite the fact that it's obviously successful and puts SFI to shame. It's truly sad that a school in Poland is so much better equipped to integrate people into Swedish society than the standard offering IN Sweden, but it's not surprising, either.

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Talking to children is scary

Have I mentioned how often I think "Wow, people are idiots"? Well, it's often.

According to this article from CNN.com, the BBC is receiving complaints about a new host on one of its children's programs. The host, Cerrie Burnell, whose right arm stops below her elbow. People are apparently complaining that this one-and-a-half-armed woman is "scaring their children." A quote from the article:

In one chat room, a father lamented that Burnell being on the show forced him to have conversations with his child about disabilities.

Now, those of you who know me a little, what do you suppose I'm going to say? Say it with me now, everyone together: DON'T WATCH THE SHOW, THEN.

But aside from that obvious nugget of wisdom, what the hell makes people so scared of talking to their children? First of all, are people who spawn kidlings unaware of the fact that there are certain talks that they simply cannot avoid having with their children? For those of you who are about to argue that the dad in the quote simply wants to be able to choose the right time and place, nope, nope, zip it! Let me refer you, first of all, back to the "DON'T WATCH THE SHOW!" golden rule, but also remind you that people with disabilities exist on subways and in stores and in the schools that his children attend and generally out in the world all over the place. Is he going to ask them to hide themselves from his kids as well? "Well, yes, sir, it's true that I have no legs and therefore ride the subway because it's just a wee bit easier than driving a car, but I feel so gosh darn sorry for YOU and YOUR dilemma that I'll just try to make sure I take the 9:06 instead of the 9:12 in the future, how's that?"

The bottom line, though, is really just this: what is so difficult about talking to your kids about disabilities? About sex? About the fact that there are bad people in the world? Why is it that parents seem to feel the best thing for their children is to pretend these things don't exist -- sometimes indefinitely, or sometimes to the point of expecting the kids' schools to take care of those nasty little issues for them -- rather than just sitting and having a normal conversation? What are they afraid could go wrong? Are they afraid that they might not explain everything exactly perfectly and that the kid might not grasp the concept entirely?

For Pete's sake, so what? Believe me, I'm a teacher, I'm familiar with the idea of a kid not grasping a concept entirely. Guess what? They live. And you have a chance to answer their questions and explain again the next day.

Since both my sister and I are the product of artificial insemination by anonymous donor, I'm familiar with being on the child's side of a concept that is truly difficult for a child to grasp. One of the few things my parents managed to be smart about during my upbringing was attempting to explain this to me from the very beginning. Guess what? I didn't quite get it right away. I thought I was a robot, actually, that was the interpretation I ended up with. (This is partially because my parents barely seemed to understand the science behind the whole thing themselves, quite frankly, but I digress.) But guess what? I was all like, "AWESOME, I'm a robot. I ROCK." I somehow survived until the next attempt at explaining and the next attempt, and eventually I understood what it was all about. I was admittedly a little bit bummed over not being a robot anymore, but dude, it was fun while it lasted.

No, I have another theory. I think that the reason parents don't like broaching so-called difficult subjects with their children is because they're embarrassed about it, and in two -- no, wait, maybe three -- different ways. The first is that they're simply too prudish to talk about sex or disabilities or mean nasty people without blushing. The second is that they're afraid their kids are going to go to pre-school or wherever and says "MY DADDY HAS A PENIS AND MY MOMMY HAS A VAGINA!" (the problem therefore ACTUALLY being too much of a wuss to talk to other PARENTS about difficult subjects). The third is that they might even feel that their own knowledge on the topic is lacking enough that they wouldn't be able to explain it to someone else.

My answers to that? Suck it up, suck it up, and blame your own parents for a vicious cycle.

Friday, February 27, 2009

Mother Tongue

Today, my last day at work before going on maternity leave (yay!), I went out to lunch with 3 girls from work -- two that I work with now, and my former boss who is currently still on maternity leave with her second child. Since all three of them have small children in the daycare age, children and daycare and school and such things were a natural topic of conversation.

Part of the conversation ended up being about language, as we discussed my former boss's interest in sending her children to the International English School in Linköping, and our intention to have our kids start in daycare and Swedish school as early as possible since we speak English at home. I was inspired to write by the fact that another of my co-lunching co-workers had a hard time understanding why we intend to speak English at home with our child -- not just me, but even Fredrik.

The concept of a native language, or a mother tongue, is typically defined in a far too narrow way, in my opinion. What would you say the definition of "native language" is? Or "mother tongue"? Are they even the same thing? Is it whatever language you learned first? Is it the language you speak most often? Is it the one that you're "best at" -- and what does that mean? The most important question is: does one communicate best in one's native language? I contend that the definition ought to be the other way around -- the language in which one communicates best should be the definition of "mother tongue," and contrary to the typical definition of these concepts, a person can have more than one. That which determines what a person's mother tongue is is highly dependent upon the situation. A person's mother tongue can change throughout their lifetime, or even throughout the day.

Fredrik was born in Sweden of Swedish parents, and the first language he learned was Swedish. He started learning English at a young age, a phenomenon that is simply unavoidable in this country, even if you try to cover your eyes and ears. But he played video games in English and was most likely exposed to a bit more of the world at an earlier age than other people might be, and this, coupled with a natural gift for languages, made him the type of person who could correct his English teachers in school. He knew the words, he knew the grammar, and he could read and write fluently. But of course, no one would call English his native language or mother tongue just because of that -- so ABILITY and correctness in a language is clearly not the deciding factor.

I was born in America of American parents, and spoke no other language but English for the first 24 years of my life. I studied a bit of French in high school and took my language requirement in ancient Greek at St. Olaf, but I was never able to have more than the very simplest of 5-minute conversations in French, and given that I never met a 2500-year old Greek, those skills were nothing to brag about, either. There is no controversy in claiming that English was definitely the only contender for Lori's native language.

But then something happened in the year 2000. Fredrik started calling me on the phone. Within a few minutes, his somewhat clumsy accent gave way to a less nervous, more fluent and phonetically correct English. Within a couple of phone calls, he spoke well enough that one could accurately say that he spoke American English and not British English (most Swedes cannot claim to speak either, since the distinction requires a level of consistency with relatively subtle differences that is simply too difficult to achieve for a speaker with little practice). But this also shows that formal correctness with a language is not what makes you native or even fluent -- the words and the grammar were clearly in his head, dormant enough to require -- and simultaneously good enough to make sufficient -- a short warm-up period.

In 2001 we became a couple and started spending gobs of money and time and plane tickets. In 2002 I moved here. In 2003 I started studying an intense course in Swedish, and by the time 2004 began I spoke fluently. Despite my need to learn Swedish in order to become a productive member of society, we have always spoken exclusively English to each other at home. We tried a few times to speak Swedish in order to help me learn, but it just didn't work. We became angry with each other, we misunderstood each other, we felt strange and foreign and not like ourselves. This is despite the fact that I spoke the language fluently, and Fredrik had spoken it since he took his first steps. We made a discovery: a relationship can have a mother tongue. The mother tongue of our relationship was clearly English, and we were suddenly transported into some other strange, unfamiliar, uncomfortable relationship when we tried to speak Swedish.

We discovered something else: people have opinions about these things, and they're not afraid to butt their noses into other people's business. (Just as a side note and a clarification: I do NOT mean that my co-worker was irritating or nosy today; just want to make that clear.) Despite the fact that I was the best student in my Swedish class, became fluent in everyday situations after a few months and was more than ready for the Swedish world by the time the course was over, people still wondered why we didn't speak Swedish at home. They insisted on grounds such as "Lori would learn faster" or "It just doesn't make sense since you live in Sweden" and god knows what else. There are people who STILL don't understand that we can speak English at home and protest that this can affect my ability to "learn the language" -- and yet these people seem to agree that I speak Swedish so well and without an accent that they didn't even know I wasn't Swedish until someone said so. Most people understand when we explain that we were together for three years before I was able to have a simple conversation in Swedish and that our relationship is very dependent upon the ability to express ourselves on a very high and academic level, and that by the time I was able to express myself on that level in Swedish, there was little point in shaking things up at home. Those that don't understand that explanation usually get it after the following example: if a Swedish couple moves to America, do we really expect them to start speaking English at home just because of geography? No, of course not.

So now that we've established the concept of our relationship having English as its mother tongue, what about Fredrik? He went from being a normal Swede -- a person who speaks Swedish almost exclusively, even if Swedes are exposed to a good deal of English on a daily basis -- to being a person who spoke only English at home (and sometimes Swedish, sometimes English at work, as he started working quite a bit with Asian customers). Is it really possible that this drastic change does not affect a person's "mother tongue"? Again, I think most people see mother tongue or native language as something that gets cemented during your childhood, but I contend that that is simply not the case.

Ask yourself how many times Fredrik has said "I love you." Now ask yourself how many times he has said "Jag älskar dig." Unless his relationship with his co-workers is a lot more sensitive than I've imagined, his quotient of "I love you" to "Jag älskar dig" is astronomical after 8 years of having English as his household language. This goes for almost any expression of feelings, emotions, or vulnerability. It certainly extends into other areas as well -- topics such as household chores, cats, politics, pregnancy, etc. are to varying degrees more often discussed in our household than they probably are at Fredrik's workplace. There are several possible consequences of this. One is that he might be just as good at talking about such a topic in English as he is in Swedish. Another possibility is that he's just as BAD at speaking about the topic in both languages -- there can be quite a bit of interference when there's a 50/50 shot of coming up with the right word in your head at the right time. And the other possibility is, of course, that he is better able to discuss such a topic in English, since it is more often discussed at home than it is at work.

The same phenomenon applies to me. I speak Swedish at my place of work, so my fluency in work-related conversations is much better if the conversation is conducted in Swedish. A few weeks ago I had to help a guy from our Stockholm office solve a problem with a test run. He's originally from Scotland, and has been in Sweden for 4 years or so. But it simply wasn't an option for us to speak English to each other while trying to solve the problem. We're both fluent enough in Swedish and so used to using it when talking about telephone hardware and builds and fixtures and test software and everything else that goes into our job that speaking English simply slowed us down; we lost too much time having to translate in our heads. And then there are certain topics that I never encountered before moving to Sweden, so my ability to talk about them in English is next to zero. I still have a hard time translating the word "besiktning" in a way that satisfies me. But that's because I never bought a brand new house in the U.S., nor do we have to get our cars inspected every year in the rigorous manner that is required in Sweden. I got my teaching degree in Sweden, so certain pedagogical concepts -- especially the ones that are related to Swedish school laws and procedures -- just do not have translations in the readily available part of my brain's storage. Hell, they might not even have translations in the dusty, locked-away parts, either -- what is "läroplan" in English? That's practically an unanswerable question; it is one thing in England and another in Ireland and a most likely non-existent or state-by-state thing in the U.S., none of which I know the word for because I was not trained to be a teacher in any of those places.

So what is my native language? What is Fredrik's mother tongue? Does it really make sense to say that Lori's mother tongue is English, period, end of discussion, if there are situations in which I struggle to speak English and throw in a bunch of Swedish words because, when it comes right down to it, my thoughts are in Swedish when I'm in those situations? Is Fredrik's native language Swedish simply because that's the one he learned first, even if there are certain areas in which he has participated in countless discussions in English and perhaps never discussed the topic in Swedish, and would therefore surely find himself having a good deal of difficulty doing so if the occasion ever arose?

This brings us, then, to the new bit that people are having difficulty understanding. We've decided that our kid needs to start in daycare as soon as they are allowed -- 12 months -- so that they can start learning Swedish as soon as possible. By this we mean that we intend to continue speaking only English at home, even with our kid. And people don't quite get this -- and, in fact, some people get downright upset about it.

Yes, it is true that many international couples like us follow the pattern where the Swedish parent speaks Swedish with the kids, the non-Swedish parent speaks the non-Swedish language with the kids, and the parents continue speaking to each other in whatever language they always have (alternatively they speak their own "native languages" even when having a conversation with each other, so that the kids consistently hear the same language come out of the parents' mouths). People seem to think that it would make more sense for us to do this -- I speak English and Fredrik speaks Swedish. But I'm telling you, I simply don't believe it would work. These people insist that we can continue speaking English to each other, but seriously -- it's a situation that I simply cannot imagine, even if I understand that it can work really well for other people.

The first reason is that communication on a very high level is simply too important in our little Paulsson-Ceangailte family. I find it hard to see myself being comfortable with my husband speaking one language to me and a different language to my child. In my mind, that situation would throw up invisible barriers between us and even give me a sense of some kind of bizarre tear in the space-time continuum whenever the three of us were in the room together. It would, for me, create a sitaution in which the relationships husband-wife, mom-kid and dad-kid exist, but where the full harmony of mom-dad-kid could never be complete. The lunch companion who is my former boss -- who, by the way, is German, so this issue is very real for her as well -- was very insightful when she compared these feelings to the fact that some families think it's very important to have the same last name or any other kind of "solidarity" that perhaps another family doesn't think is so important. For me, everyone speaking the same language -- no matter how TECHNICALLY excellent we all are at both English and Swedish -- is a necessary kind of solidarity.

The second reason -- or arguably, a deeper explanation of the first -- is that I believe English is Fredrik's "family situation" mother tongue. Yes, I can fully understand why it seems odd to my other lunch companion that Fredrik would speak English to our child even when I wasn't around. And I can't swear on my life that he will, I can't know how it will be until the kid is here. But my feeling is that it is far less natural for Fredrik to speak Swedish to our child than my co-worker imagines. In her mind, Swedish is Fredrik's mother tongue, and the assumption is that it is always more natural for him to communicate in that language. I contend that life just isn't that simple.

However, since my co-worker is a nice and reasonable person, I must point out again that I didn't feel she was butting in at all, and she very much so understood my point of view after I explained it this way: if it's more natural for Fredrik to say "I love you" than it is for him to say "Jag älskar dig," then that right there is exactly why I hope he chooses English when speaking to our child. Language exists so that we can communicate with each other, and real communication is not about technical and grammatical correctness but rather about expression of thoughts and feelings that feels natural both to the speaker/projector and to the receiver. (This is why there isn't one universal sign language in the world and why useful, practical, expressive forms of sign language are ones that have not been forced into a correlation with the surrounding written and spoken language.) Yes, I definitely want my kid to be as much of a word smith as Mom and Dad are, but the fairly natural assumption of "the kid will learn Swedish better if Fredrik speaks Swedish with it" becomes more suspect if we assert that even Fredrik expresses himself better in English than in Swedish in certain situations. And when we really consider the language development aspect, we realize that we're talking about a child who probably won't have babbled more than a word or two before being immersed in a Swedish-speaking environment, and that the few months of delay before our children start talking (which tends to be true even for the bilingual-from-birth children) will quickly be vastly eclipsed by the excellent language skills our children will undoubtedly have because of being raised by parents who value reading, education, curiosity, language skills, communication -- and having a Mom that's a certified teacher to boot. Seriously, our family is the type that the Swedish socialist bloc is bitching about when they complain about how unfair life and school are for kids who DON'T have parents like us.

Whatever Fredrik decides, or whatever comes to him most naturally, at the end of the day I put much more value in our kid feeling and hearing genuinely and naturally expressed emotion and humor from Dad than in having a few months' head start on the Swedish language.

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Fecundity

A friend of mine gets on my case whenever I haven't blogged for a while. I tell him that I haven't been seriously annoyed and sitting in front of a computer simultaneously for a while now, so he'll have to deal.

A lot of the not sitting in front of a computer has to do with me having "symphus pubus disorder," which means I have an unusual amount of pain associated with the loosening and widening of my pelvic bone that occurs in every pregnancy to prepare for the birth. The Swedish term "foglossning," which basically means "coming apart at the seams," is a much more telling description of what is physically happening (the "seams" in the pelvis are softening and widening, so the two halves move much more independently than normal) and of how much it hurts.

Anyway, this means that sitting (or standing, or walking, or going from sitting to standing, or getting into or out of bed, or turning over in bed, or... well, everything but sleeping) makes me hurt more. My computer has mostly been sitting at the end of the bed and being used to watch episodes of Scrubs.

Yesterday I managed to get my midwife to confirm that many people who experience foglossning still have it even after the baby is born. Oh, and that it gets worse with every pregnancy.

JOY.

So my goal is to be so rich by the next time I'm pregnant that I can take much more time off before the baby comes and just lie around with my feet propped up. Or rather, let's be honest, the goal is for FREDRIK to be rich enough by that time. I always thought that I was smart enough to end up rich some day, and I've come to terms with the fact that that smartness involved marrying someone even smarter and with much more applicable talent.

My talent appears to be in the baby-making category. Okay, we'll ignore the fact that the last attempt didn't go so well. On this attempt, I got knocked up on the second try, for starters, and I'm currently passing all the midwife's tests with flying colors. My hemoglobin is up (despite not taking daily iron supplements), my blood sugar is stable, my blood pressure is low and there's no "egg white" in my urine (that just sounds so weird, doesn't it?), my symphus fundus measurement is spot on (read: I'm as fat as I'm supposed to be), and this kid is already head-down and engaging. Locked and loaded! There are other things that are working as intended as well, but quite frankly, I'm not sure I know you well enough to discuss them with you. And yes, indeed, I take credit for it all! I'm sure it's all because I'm super awesome and have done everything right.

Okay, so I will blog again soon, I hope. Don't fret. The post will probably be about Republicans saying stupid things about Guantanamo, or Mona Sahlin saying stupid things about taxes, or maybe a recipe for lime pie.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Freedom from Religion

Right when Fredrik is in the middle of a discussion with me and on Richard Dawkins' website about why America ended up so religious compared to the many very secular countries in Europe (you can find some of this discussion here), it seems that the Swedish government has today put forth a motion to make marriage gender-neutral in Sweden -- that is, to allow same-sex couples to marry.

For those of you who don't know: in Sweden a same-sex couple can currently have a "registered partnership". Entering a registered partnership is quick and painless -- it doesn't involve any more paperwork than getting married, for sure -- and two registered partners have the exact same legal rights and obligations as a married couple, save one: the default parenthood of one partner if the other partner has a baby. That is, when our baby is born, Fredrik will automatically be registered as its father, because we are married and our marriage means, among other things, that he is presumed to take father-type responsibility for any baby that I give birth to (without any illusion or give-a-damn about whether or not he is actually the biological father). If we were NOT married, which is the case for the parents of over 50% of the children born in Sweden today, we'd have to go down to Socialen and both of us swear that he's the baby daddy -- again, without any actual paternity test or anything. It's just a matter of taking responsibility for the baby, and a married man is seen to have done that in automatically and in advance when he said "I do". Homosexual couples in a registered partnership are put in the same category as "sambos" (couples who just live together, who also basically have the same rights as married couples, by the way) in this respect; in the case that one of them gives birth or adopts a child, the other has to take 5 extra minutes to fill out a little paperwork in order to become the child's other parent. As you can tell, I don't see this as a terrible inconvenience, even if my friends that have had "love children" think the process is a wee bit embarrassing.

The other point to be made before dissecting an article on the subject is that I think same-sex couples should be able to be married and that all such domestic/family partnerships should be entirely gender-neutral -- and neutral in a lot of other ways, really -- so while I think the difference between marriage and registered partnership is paltry and inconsequential, I see no need for there to be a difference and understand the feeling of inequality that looms in the air as long as the difference exists.

So when I saw a quote on DN.se today from Göran Hägglund, leader of the Christian Democrat party in Sweden, I became a little perplexed. Ponderous, if you will.

See, the majority and Government in Sweden right now is a "conservative" one, or moderate or liberal or whatever combination of "we're not socialists" is your favorite label. The Christian Democrats are a part of this majority and Government, along with 3 other parties. But while the motion to make marriage gender-neutral is being put forth by the Government, the Christian Democrats (which I will call KD) are not a part of the motion. They don't like this gender-neutral marriage business -- and since they're called the Christian Democrats, it doesn't require a long explanation as to why.

What might surprise you, on the other hand, is that I voted for them in the last election. So you can imagine that I'm a big vexed and kerfuffled over the fact that they're dissenting from the rest of the government on this question. And the quote from Göran Hägglund that vexed and kerfuffled me was that this motion is a "threat to religious freedom."

Wha... uhh?

See, I was not 100% shocked that they didn't want to be a part of making same-sex marriage legal in Sweden, even if I was a bit sad that a party that I liked quite a lot was actively differing from my own opinions (some of them passively differ from my opinions about abortion, in the sense that the pro-lifers in Sweden tend to be members of KD but even they know that they'd be wasting their breath). But when I saw this quote I thought... no, Göran, honey, you're not going to go down that road, are you? Please tell me that "Think of the CHILDREN!" isn't going to be mentioned in the accompanying article anywhere?

Luckily, I didn't end up disappointed at all. The article explaining Hägglund's and KD's view, which you can read here, does not go down the "Think of the CHILDREN!" road at all. Rather, they suggest that making marriage gender-neutral while simultaneously making no change to who is allowed to perform marriages will most likely put people -- churches and mosques, specifically -- in the position of being forced to perform marriages that violate their religious beliefs. While allowing churches and other religious institutions to continue to decide who they are willing to marry is an idea you can dabble with for a little while, it doesn't take long to see that that is not a good solution (if you don't believe me, think of the business of pharmacists being allowed to refuse to dispense birth control pills in the U.S...). So KD's suggestion is that marriage become a 100% civil/secular contract and the right to join people into their civil/secular contract be completely taken away from religious institutions.

This is, in my opinion, perfectly spot-on.

It makes more sense. A marriage in the church has no reason to have anything to do with being entitled to half of a house or right to visit a person in the hospital or change which cable channels you get even if the account is in the other person's name. A civil marriage has nothing to do with loving and cherishing the other person and promising to do so until you die, so help you "some fictional character" (as Magnus Betnér has apparently put it). A common argument from anti-gay-marriage activists is that man-woman marriage is "tradition"; that it's "always been that way" -- well, then we're only working harder to preserve the tradition by making a church wedding nothing more than an exchange of words and a promise to God, as that's what it was from the beginning before all of this legal business came in much later.

It preserves religious freedom entirely -- no, strengthens it, I'd say. It would sever unnecessary ties between church and state, and a church wedding would be "voluntary" to a much greater degree than it is now. I find this not only a benefit to the churches and mosques -- who I whole-heartedly believe should be able to reject performing same-sex marriages if it violates their religious principles -- but it addresses a pet peeve of mine: it would mean that far less non-religious people would get married in churches. Let's face it, the vast majority of people get married for the legal and civil benefits, and the fact that many of them do it in a church -- despite it being practically the only time they set foot in a church in their lives -- is because it's traditional and/or convenient and/or pretty. But if the church no longer had the right to perform the legal side of the union, this vast majority of people who are seeking just that would have to actively choose to "add on" the churchy part, and I rejoice in the idea that they would not make that choice. This brings us back to Fredrik's discussion about why America is religious and Sweden is secular (de facto, when the de juro situation is quite the opposite in many respects), as it just bothers the living fuck out of me as an "it's the principle of the thing!" American atheist that people go around having church weddings and baptisms despite their non-belief just because it's a pretty building or because "everybody else does it" or because it means their kid gets presents.

It would even help make it so that marriage could have a more flexible definition in other aspects, aside from the question of same or opposite gender. Have you all seen the movie I Now Pronounce you Chuck and Larry? Two straight guys enter a registered partnership so that the kids of the one guy, who is injured and unemployed, can benefit from the health and life insurance of the other guy, who gets said benefits from his job and can transfer them to his family. The climax of the movie revolves around them having to prove that they're in love and actually have sex, etc., because of suspicions that they're "defrauding" the city and/or the insurance companies with their partnership. But why should this be fraud? If two friends are close enough so that one wants to help raise the other's children and make sure they are provided for, should sex be a prerequisite for whether or not they're allowed to enter into such a union, contract, or agreement? But wait, I haven't said what genders they are -- what if one is a man and one is a woman? Then no one would question it -- hell, if sex were a pre-requisite for being allowed to be married, half of all married couples with children would be going through some sort of forced divorce right now (and wouldn't THAT be in line with society's goals!). But what if it's two men? See -- why does that make a difference? But now I'm either preaching to the choir or to the deaf, so perhaps I'd best move on.

I see a few comments after the article claiming that KD's suggestion is "impossible to implement." I don't for the life of me see why not -- especially since a full seperation of the religious and the legal side of weddings has been in place for years in many other European countries.

Another comment at the end of the article shows a typical lack of understanding for what discrimination and freedom of speech, among other legal and philosophical concepts, actually mean. *"I would like to see KD's proposal go through, but their reasoning doesn't hold," the commenter writes, my translation. "We have freedom of religion, yes, but it doesn't mean that I can do whatever I want in religion's name. If I believe that my gods are pleased if I sacrifice children or circumsize women, I still can't do it, though I can believe it. Neither can a priest say whatever they want just because of religion." This person's understanding of freedom of religion (as well as freedom of speech, and the concept of discrimination) is no more mature or better developed than the adversary I imagined in the beginning of my post -- the super-fundamentalist Christian who claims that homosexual marriage (or indeed, even allowing homosexuality at all) infringes on their freedom of religion simply because they can't raise their children (OMG Think of the CHILDREN!) in a society that is queer-free. Refusing to perform a purely religious ceremony (as it would be according to the proposal) that would violate the religion itself is not discrimination, nor can it be classed in the same category of "secular morals trump religious ones" as forbidding human sacrifice or female circumcision. Otherwise, you'd have to believe that it's discriminatory for a Christian priest to refuse to perform a female circumcision or a marriage between an old man and a 10-year old girl -- but then you'd be contradicting yourself, no? Plus, the statement that a priest can't say whatever he wants and refer to his religion for protection is, in my opinion, simply false. We're treading dangerously into the territory of confusing civil rights with the right not to have our precious little feelings hurt.

Marriage was, from its very beginnings, a religious institution. One which people make a promise to god and in front of their families -- and, if I'm permitted a side note, was most often polygamous and non-voluntary in its origins (so spare me the drivel about "traditional marriage"). For the sake of the society we live in today, the blending of this religious tradition with a legal one -- shared property, rights and responsibilities as supported by a legal system -- by using the same name for it can be seen as a regrettable mistake. Allowing the same people to seal both contracts was an even bigger mistake, or at the very least something that ought to get thrown out the window in a democratic society in which citizens are supposedly able to enjoy freedom from establishment and freedom to practice.

So it's cool to see that I'm in full agreement with Göran. Though I don't know... can my "it's the principle of the thing!" American atheist heart continue to allow me to vote for the CHRISTIAN democrats? That's a toughy.



*"Jag skulle gärna se KDs förslag av andra skäl, men KDs resonemang håller inte. Vi har religionsfrihet ja, men det betyder inte att man får göra vad som helst i religionens namn. Om jag tror att mina gudar blidkas av att offra barn eller omskära flickor, så får jag inte göra det (men tro det). Inte heller får man som präst säga vad som helst med hänvisning till religionen."