Honestly I'm so out of energy for playing nice with the forced birth crew. The pearl-clutching, sanctimonious high horse bullshit about ~*☆loving the babies♡*~ while meanwhile there are currently pregnant children who can't abort their rapist's baby without crossing state lines, as if they were the criminals. There are currently pregnant adults who will now be at severely escalated risks for domestic violence and who are now less able to leave. We need to start protesting outside state houses and CPCs and anti-choice churches with giant signs with the faces and ages of the dead kids and with graphic pictures of uterine prolapse and rupture. Oh, we're too close to your door? I'm sorry, the state laws let us protest right here and heckle anyone entering to the point where you need an escort.

Banning abortion weaponizes the very bodies of those with working uteruses against them and treats them like breeding stock.

"The cruelty is the point" yeah? And? If that's really the case, if the point is to sadistically inflict pain and suffering and torture and death, then it's high time we started treating that like the threat it is and responded with proportionate force.

I'm done giving them the benefit of the doubt as to the sincerity of their beliefs. If you're anti-abortion and you claim to not be an overtly misogynistic, abuse apologist, rape apologist, child-hating prick, then you can prove it to me by whatever standard you use to judge whether or not a girl is lying about being raped and/or by whatever capricious and callous standard you use to determine whether a pregnancy is sufficiently life-threatening to the parent to justify an abortion.

Oh, you don't think you should have to justify your beliefs to me? Yes you do, because your christofacism is killing people and you have blood on your hands.

On another night when I'm less angry about this, I might point out that there is a lot of common ground to be had when it comes to working on the issues that make abortions necessary, because yeah duh obviously an abortion is the option of last resort, when all efforts to prevent unwanted pregnancies have failed and when other medical interventions to protect wanted pregnancies are not feasible. No one wants to find themselves in the position of having an unwanted pregnancy or a wanted but dangerous pregnancy.

But tonight I will simply leave off by saying that I frankly don't give a single shit about reducing abortions until we've created a society where poverty (including and especially child poverty and women's poverty) has been eliminated, where rape and abuse are exceptionally rare and swiftly addressed, where a variety of birth control options are universally available, and where OBGYN care is state-of-the-art, maternal and infant death rates are extremely low, and good healthcare in general is universally available regardless of income or demographic or location. And even in that glorious future society, abortion will still always be necessary in some situations and an important advancement in human rights over our bodies and health and futures.

If Christ ever really existed (there is no actual historical or historical record outside the fantasy writings of The Bible that he ever did) Jesus would have been born in the land that is now called Ethiopia — meaning Christ would have been very dark skinned.  

I can’t tell you this upsets so many bigots — er I mean Christians.

Not sure what @riggio037 is getting at here and would love some citations, because even a basic Google turns up historical Jewish and Roman (non-Christian, importantly) records.

Regardless, Jesus would be brown-skinned (not necessarily this dark since there was plenty of diversity in skin-tone at the time) and people need to deal with that if they want to keep up the Christian irony of idolising him.

Of all the redemption arcs in popular fantasy media, I feel like Theoden's in The Lord of the Rings is the most overlooked.

The movies emphasize the magical control that the evil powers exercise over Theoden, but in the books, it's more obviously a depiction of bad kingship, in the British medieval sense. Theoden takes bad advice; he neglects his family; he fails to reward his knights; and he leaves his people vulnerable to attack. He also does not honor his kingdom's promises to help nearby kingdoms, as we can tell from Boromir's account of what Gondor has been going through.

Gandalf doesn't just cast out the curse and magically fix everything. He encourages Theoden to free himself from his bad advisor, but Theoden has to take all the subsequent steps. And those choices are not easy; after so much neglect, his knights are scattered, and his only option for defending his people is to gather them at Helm's Deep. The siege does not go well. His people are afraid and despairing. But nevertheless, he holds firm and charges out to meet the enemy -- and Gandalf literally meets him halfway, bringing with him the lost knights, whom Theoden welcomes and rewards after the battle.

Theoden could have just gone home after that. But when Gondor calls for aid, Theoden proves his worth by honoring his promises. He keeps his oaths not only to his people but to his allies.

And the climax of his redemption in the book is not his death, but his leadership. The ride of the Rohirrim against Sauron's armies is described in lavish detail, with an uncharacteristically heated pace: Theoden leads the entire line of Rohan, his banner streaming behind him in the wind as they race toward their foe. And that's the end of the chapter.

I love Theoden's arc so much, and especially that moment so much, because the message is not that he has to win battles or seek power. He just has to keep fighting. Theoden's greatest enemy isn't really Sauron: it's despair. And over the course of the book, he keeps choosing hope and action over despair and hesitation, until finally he can lead his people with courage.

As someone who struggles a lot with despair, I really needed to hear that story.

and it’s contrasted against Denethor’s arc; who also struggles against despair, and doesn’t overcome it.

yooooo. so I literally wrote a 20 page english paper about the Hope/Despair theme in Tolkien’s work once. It was like ten years ago and I don’t think I have it anymore, but oh boy do I have feeeeeeelings about this topic. And I have drunk a little bit of wine tonight! So here are my unasked for thoughts:

Yes, Theoden’s greatest enemy is despair! Everyone’s greatest enemy is despair. It’s the biggest fucking theme of the series IMO and it makes me crazy how often it gets overlooked.

lord of the rings is a story written by a man whose experience of war was crouching in the bottom of a trench. People like to make a lot of hay about the charge of the light brigade and it’s similarity to the ride of the rohirrim, but no. Tolkien’s experience of war was getting fucking trench fever, not watching cavalry charges. Tolkien’s experience of war was listening to the shells fall around him, knowing that death could come at any moment. He experienced war in a way where the soldiers on the other side of the line were a faceless threat, and the closest and most present enemy was his own fear.

this is the hill I will die on. This is why I hate it when people talk about LotR as a morally cowardly story about fighting mindless orcs that exist to be cannon fodder. No. Lord of the Rings is about seeing the dark coming on the horizon, and fighting yourself. Fighting the fear and despair that rise up inside you. Struggling with your own terror and powerlessness, knowing that you are small, and nothing you do will matter in the face of this massive conflict—  you’re just here, one more meaningless soul to feed into the machine guns. Lord of the Rings is about taking a deep breath, and bracing yourself, and deciding that if nothing you do matters, all that matters is how you do it. The ring can’t possibly be destroyed— we choose to form a fellowship anyway. Helms deep will surely fall by morning— we still choose to fight. The quest can’t possibly succeed— and yet we choose to march into the teeth of mordor to distract the enemy. It’s not hope, exactly? But’s it’s not not hope.

I did at one point have twenty pages written about this. Tolkien was a deeply christian man— he believed in eucatastrophe. Salvation. A better world to come, after suffering, if you bore your suffering well. But he was also a world-class Beowulf scholar with a kinda viking-warrior-type view of the world. And do you know what the vikings believed? (Pls don’t anybody @ me for saying viking, I know it’s a verb and not a culture). The vikings believed that the time of your death was preordained, and that all you had control over was how you met it.

And that is some seriously Rohirric shit!! Like, we’re all mortals doomed to die, Ragnarok is coming, and this whole world is an inevitable grind down into oblivion… but if we’re fighting a long defeat, all the more reason to fight it gloriously!! That’s epic. Eomer approves the hell out of that message.

I’m gonna be a real nerd now, and quote from a poem called the Battle of Maldon.

That’s a translation from an Old English poem that’s literally a thousand years old, but it always gets me how much it sounds like something Tolkien would write. Theoden and Eowyn are practically leaping out of that poem: We’re all going to die, I choose to meet my end fiercely. We’re all going to die, so I want to die beside my king.

It’s an acceptance of death, and even of failure, but not of defeat. Because— to get back to what I was talking about earlier— Lord of the Rings isn’t actually a story about battlefields. It’s a story about being at war with your own heart. Despair or faith? Hope or defeat? Tolkien wants you to know that even if your city is overrun by orcs, or you’re killed in a meaningless push for another 50 feet of french mud, you can still hold on to your courage with both hands and not cede up your soul to despair-- and that’s the battle Tolkien thinks is really worth writing about.

It’s a battle that every major character in the story fights. Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Theoden, Denethor, Merry, Pippin, Boromir, Galadriel, Eowyn, Faramir, Eomer, Saruman, Gollum, Aragorn. Some of them hold onto hope through everything. Some of them break utterly. Some of them are defeated, and then with help find their footing again, and make a redeeming last stand.  

But the point that Tolkien hammers home again and again is: Death and failure are natural parts of life, and should be accepted. Despair shouldn’t be.

Tolkien says: hope is hard, actually. Fuck that Game of Thrones grimdark bullshit. Hope is hard fucking work. And even if you don’t have hope? Fight like you do. Because the world needs people working to make it better. Do the best you can with what you have, and whether you can see the mark you’re making on the world or not, the simple fact that you’re trying means the world is a better place.

Anyway, I fucking love these books. I am going to stop drinking wine, and go to bed now. :)

Ivan Mestrovic, Archangel Gabriel