{"id":349,"date":"2005-01-10T23:37:00","date_gmt":"2005-01-10T23:37:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=349"},"modified":"2005-01-10T23:37:00","modified_gmt":"2005-01-10T23:37:00","slug":"349","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=349","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Beat misery through blogging<\/strong><\/p>\n

After a very unsatisfactory day involving the county clerk, an underperforming car dealer employee (no one named “Candy” has ever won a Nobel prize), and a Chesapeake Bay retriever, I wish that Mondays came with “rewind” buttons. But they don’t. <\/p>\n

So onward–to movies.<\/p>\n

We ended our trip to Utah and watched another Mormon-themed movie, Latter Days<\/em><\/a>. You won’t find Richard Dutcher<\/a> anyone near this one: the plot involves the seduction of a Mormon missionary in Los Angeles by a gay neighbor, the impossibly gorgeous Wes Ramsey.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, anyone moving to Utah should pick up a copy of Green Jell-o and Red Punch: The Heinous Truth about Utah<\/em><\/a>. It’s a guide to Utah culture in the spirit of Augusten Burroughs’ Running with Scissors<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Then, in the spirit of the bumper sticker, “Doing my part to piss off the Religious Right,” we watched Kinsey<\/em><\/a> at a theatre in downtown Fort God<\/p>\n

According to some<\/a>, pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey (together with Hugh Hefner and, I don’t know, maybe Helen Gurley Brown) nearly destroyed Western civilization.<\/p>\n

For Kinsey’s fans, finding out that masturbation or homosexuality did not make you insane was liberating<\/a>.<\/p>\n

It’s a conflict between inductive and deductive reasoning, in a way. Kinsey, a natural scientist, was inductive: he gathered data–lots of data–and then drew conclusions. His detractors are deductive: they want to start with stated truths (“Thou shalt not . . .”) and make experience fit those truths.<\/p>\n

For example, if “X” percent of married American women have sex outside of marriage, it becomes more statistically “normal.” Does that make it acceptable, or is it still wrong? There is the battleground.<\/p>\n

Kinsey could not answer that question: emotional and spiritual realities were outside his method. His data collection too, especially on the first book on male sexual behavior, had some problems. But at least he provided data of types that no one before him had provided, and so he forever changed these moral debates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beat misery through blogging After a very unsatisfactory day involving the county clerk, an underperforming car dealer employee (no one named “Candy” has ever won a Nobel prize), and a Chesapeake Bay retriever, I wish that Mondays came with “rewind” buttons. But they don’t. So onward–to movies. We ended our trip to Utah and watched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-349","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":783,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=783","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":0},"title":"Culture notes from the road","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 21, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Suddenly, I am an expert on Christmas culture in Pueblo, Colorado. (Link may expire.)I think that the writer found this questionnaire on my web site. It was given to me by a student a few years ago (some of the questions are now outdated), and so she just assumed that\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2991,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2991","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":1},"title":"Home Country: A Southern Colorado Catholic Splinter Group","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 4, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I visited Florence, Colorado, yesterday and noticed that the congregation of St. Jude the Apostle of the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ\u00a0 (not to be confused with the Ecumenical Catholic Church) had apparently evaporated. At least their sign was missing from the old brick church on Second Street by which\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"Gateway Chapel, Florence, Colorado","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/08\/st._jude__co.2.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8142,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8142","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":2},"title":"Why Pagans Aren’t at Home in “Interfaith” Groups","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 23, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"In 2009, the CESNUR organization for the study of new religions held its annual international conference in Salt Lake City. The panels, papers, and speaker events ended with a dinner at the historic Alta Club, which is drippingly gorgeous in a sort of late Victorian\/Arts & Crafts style. I would\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":269,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=269","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":3},"title":"Peyote progress The Utah Supreme\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 25, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Peyote progress The Utah Supreme Court has decided that Native American Church members may use peyote even if they are not on the rolls of a federally recognized tribe. James Mooney, the NAC leader spectacularly busted a few years ago, is celebrating, but the feds, of course, see peyote as\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1257,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1257","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":4},"title":"Blogging Hermits","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 26, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"What is it with blogging hermits\u2014or quasi-hermits?Would Henry David Thoreau have had a blog? I am sure of it. Anyone who would edit his autobiography so that two years of experience fit neatly into one literary year has demonstrated the capability of self-romanticizing that blogging requires.Sunday's Denver Post had a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"blogging\"","block_context":{"text":"blogging","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=blogging"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1164,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1164","url_meta":{"origin":349,"position":5},"title":"Off to CESNUR","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 11, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"After the better part of two days on the road, M. and I arrived this afternoon at a Homestead Suites hotel in Salt Lake City, where I will be attending the CESNUR conference.The trip started off on a sour note, because my previously trusty-if-aging G4 PowerBook laptop developed a series\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"CESNUR\"","block_context":{"text":"CESNUR","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=cesnur"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=349"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/349\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}