Gangs, drugs, metal, punk, what?

I stumbled onto this short item on a gang shooting in South LA. I was curious about the gang, and it turned out to be The Defiant Ones, a black motorcycle club that started in the '50s.

Trying to find more info on them, led me to a flickr set of the 1982 LAPD gang handbook.

One of the weird things about the handbook is that they say that the white gangs mostly label themselves as "stoners," e.g. Downey Stoners, La Mirada Stoners, Paramount Stoners. So, I start googling for some of those, and run across a 1985 article about Fight For Freedom, some white punk rock gang, which sounds pretty hilarious.

In there, they quote credulously from Gregory Bodenhamer, who apparently ran a program called "Back in Control." Though in the article, he's fairly sane, it turns out that Bodenhamer thought that kids needed to be depunked and demetaled, and ran some crazy brainwashing camps in the '80s, which this rambling blog entry connects to the PMRC, Focus on the Family, the evangelical DC prayer group called The Family, and Hilary Clinton. Bodenhamer is also quoted in this goofy article about druggy metal heads.

Like hulahoops and pet rocks

A new Catholic investigation finds that widespread child molestation by Catholic priests was society's fault, blaming individualism and shifting norms..

But it certainly wasn't celibacy or gays in the clergy.

Hey, c'mon, it was the '50s through the '80s, who didn't toke a little hash and molest some kids?

Mein Gott in Himmel!

I've been trending more and more atheist lately, until yesterday, when my back went out. Amy's at a conference, and I'm in so much pain that I can only assume that God exists and he's punishing me for being very, very bad. If only my playacted pagan Thor worship could save me!

Child of Lesbians Snatched by Baptist Extremists

My retitling is a little sensationalist, but what do you do when a story like this happens?

In it, a kid (had to two moms in Vermont) get kidnapped by one of her mothers — the one who renounced homosexuality under the thrall of some hardline Southern Baptists — who was aided by a pastor and an employee of Liberty University in traveling through Canada and Mexico to Nicaragua, where the poor kid's no doubt been raised under a lunatic pre-modern Christianity.

Your right to believe a crazy-ass religion does not give you the right to steal a child, nor the right to keep the kid from their non-crazy parent.

Bound by the inductile chains of logic

Don't believe in evolution because of what the Bible says? You shouldn't believe in the water cycle either.

Welcome to Hell

Inspired by this question on AskMe about Hell in art, I started perusing google and google scholar, looking to see if there was an art theory term for the iconography of Hell. Infernography?

I haven't found anything conclusive yet, no secret codeword to unlock the libraries of the internet, but I have found a bunch of neat art (too much for an easy reply).



The Harrowing of Hell refers to Christ's descent into Hell, an apocryphal bit of the Apostles' Creed that's inferred from Christ's resurrection, also known as the Anastasis. I stumbled onto the phrase by finding this PDF about the Harrowing of Hell relief at Bristol Cathedral.

The Encyclopedia of Comparative Iconography (PDF) gives a decent bit of info on the genre, though with fewer images than I'd prefer.



I knew the term for the mythic descent into the underworld, Katabasis, and so searching for that and for famous katabasi (a cod-Greek word I just made up), yielded both Lazurus and Castor and Pollux. (As a side note, I'd like to explore Nekyia a bit in my work).



More as I find 'em.

ACLU stands up for Christian students

For the next time some conservative you know pitches a bitch about the ACLU being anti-Christian or never defending Christian expression: ACLU supports Ten Commandments on student lockers.

Sure, the ACLU is organized state by state, so they don't necessarily all agree, but I like to keep things like this in my back pocket so that when someone gets off on, say, the ACLU fighting against crosses on public land, I can remind them that the ACLU backs principles pretty much across the board, regardless of consequence.

Praise!

If all Christianity sounded like this, I'd go to church. Listen to that backbeat!

Hallelujah

David Bazan of Pedro The Lion used to be the only good Christian rocker. Now he's not really Christian.

Music here.