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More on P'Con's gender-exclusive ritual. I'll fold these into the larger post at some point.

Feb 20

wide-worlds-joy: Transgender Bullshit

Feb 21: 10+ posts
(unknown) at Enlightenment through The Power Of The Spirit: The Urgency ot Understand Pantheacon

apel: PantheaCon Gender Conflict
Deborah Castellano at Dropout Dilettante: PantheaCon and Z. Budapest

elf: Selective Inclusion vs Bigotry

firecat: What if; LJ crosspost

( 15-or-so more posts inside the cut. )

Some context: Random factoids about last year's P'con trans!fail. The Wild Hunt's roundup, which has more commentary than I do for linkspams.

Z Budapest's ritual, as described in the program book this year:
The Sacred Body of Woman (Self-Blessing)
Z Budapest

This skyclad rite honors the body of each and every woman
present, the beauty and grace of the feminine form in all of
her infinite variety. Allow yourself to be embraced by the glorious
love of your sisters, with voices raised in sacred song in this central
ritual of the Dianic Tradition. Genetic women only.

WARNING: some of these posts are transphobic. A lot contain various levels of hurtful cluelessness, either in the posts themselves or in the comments. I've tagged a few that were overtly obvious to me (the ones that directly state that genitalia = gender), but I may well have missed things just as offensive. Click at your own risk.
Also: the dates on these are by whatever the blog says, which may not match your local time zone. Also, they're arranged alphabetically within a date, not by timestamp; some will be out of order.

( Early, pre-convention reactions )

( Reactions the day/night of the ritual )

( Next-day reactions )

( Later reactions )

Some of the people discussing the P'con ritual have said, "it's a public convention; every event should be open to every person who bought a membership." And while that is, on the face of it, entirely fair, it's also limiting. "Fair" sometimes means "nobody gets what they *really* want," and I want us to find ways to avoid that.

I don't want PantheaCon to stop having some-people-only rituals. I want Pagans in the military to be able to have their own services based on their shared experiences, and for parents-with-kids to be able to do the same, and for workshops to be for "people who already know how to do some drumming and want to learn complex techniques for energy raising." I like the small, focused rituals and workshops, even though there's very few of them I can attend. I like Pantheacon being a place that doesn't have to have nothing but 101 level workshops, doesn't have to be nothing but watered-down ecumenical services.

There's something very empowering about getting together with a group of people with whom you share an identity, and making sacred space focused on aspects of that identity. It's especially powerful to do so with a larger group of people than you ever could find locally--something those of us living in the SF Bay Area sometimes forget.

( We have so much, so many, so beautiful. )

For years, we've had a cookie table at parties. Everyone knows that. You have a party, and you have a table with drinks, and a table with cookies. And of course, you have some Oreos*, and you have some chocolate chip cookies, and they can all be side-by-side there on the table.

Only sometimes, some people don't want oreo crumbs getting on their tables and ruining their choc-chip dining experience. And the oreo eaters want to enjoy the cookie with inner frosting without the intimidating factor of the larger, more dominant chocolate chip cookies grabbing all the attention. So some parties have *two* cookie tables, or even just one table and they tell everyone to only bring one kind of cookie. And those who like the other kind of cookie grumble about that, but hey, they really can go to different parties.

( This is about PantheaCon. Really. )

Just back from Pantheacon. For the last day and a half, what's been on my mind is the Sunday afternoon panel, Open Discussion of Gender and Transgender in Paganism, which I attended. (I volunteered to speak on behalf of all of Discordianism, but Eris did not demand I seize the floor, for which I'm rather grateful. She has, however, been pushing cookie-related metaphors at me ever since, and I hope to get those coherent enough to write about them.) The discussion was described,

To encourage open communication on the issue of gender and transgender in Paganism, and to continue the discussion we started at last year’s Pantheacon, the Circle of Cerridwen is facilitating this open discussion. All people, regardless of gender identity, are welcome to attend. This moderated discussion will be held in sacred space and will use a talking stick.

( Could've been worse; could've been better. )

D is for Disc of Shadows. Time was, back in the early history of modern Pagandom (say, 1968 or thereabouts), everyone had a Book of Shadows. Those who didn't actually have one, at least claimed to have one, possibly written by their grandmother who was of ancient Celtic lineage on one side and Native American heritage on another, and all the rituals, recipes, and poetry within the book were staunchly claimed to be genuine fragments of pre-Christian lore, handed down in secret through the ages, somehow manifesting with 20th century grammatical patterns with some random thees and hasts thrown in as if for flavour. Eventually, the grandmother's BoS fell out of fashion, but the concept of a Book Of Lore, which far predates the modern Wicca craze, stuck around.

In some traditions, the BoS is written entirely by hand. In others, that wasn't required, as long as you found a way to copy a mentor's BoS without risking its secrecy. There are a lot of 70's-era third-generation-photocopy BoSes floating around Pagandom.

( Then we got digital. )

C is for Copyright. I've been meaning to make a post about this for years--how copyright ties into my religious thoughts. I'm nervous about it, because my past history says whenever I post about topics this meaningful and personal to me, I get rantish and sometimes go off the deep end into batshit-crazy. But I think it's time.

On Pagan email lists, there's often a lot of rules about copyright, most of which is "do not clog up our discussion list with random chapters or spell instructions from whatever book you're in love with this week." Often this is claimed to be for copyright purposes--"it's against copyright to do this! Don't break the law!" Setting aside the oddities of copyright law and vagaries of fair use that might make it perfectly legit to share content intended for discussion, the idea that "don't break the law!!!" should be compelling to witches is, well, baffling.

Less than ten years ago, gay sex was illegal in many US states. Did witches demand that gay people be celibate, lest they risk being criminals? A bit more than 50 years ago, "witchcraft" was illegal in the UK; "don't break the law" was hardly the rallying cry among new Pagans. If Pagans have reasons to obey copyright restrictions, they should be based on our ethics and the kinds of communities we want to build, not based on laws inflicted on our society by, for the most part, white Christian men who want to control all the money.

( Which doesn't mean I think blatant copying is okay. )

I've signed up for the

scifibigbang; I have a Sime/Gen plotbunny that's been haranguing me for years.

I'm nervous. Aside from all the nervous I normally get when signing up for fic fests, there's the facts that (1) I've never written anything 20k words long; (2) never written in this fandom, although it's been etched deep in my brain since I was a teenager; (3) the common habits in this fandom are not standard media fandom ones (it's big on OCs and original settings), and (4) it's a small fandom, so I have to wrestle with "how much canon info would I need to explain things to people who don't know the fandom vs how much is too much for people who do?" And um. (5). I'm *busy.* And have other writing (Bloom County fic) and whatnot (ebook formatting) I should be doing, especially the whatnot.

So I'm looking for a cheerleader, brainstormer, someone who knows the fandom and fanfic-writing and I can bounce ideas off of, and nudge me to actually do writing instead of just putting together outlines, and eventually, I need a beta.

( And a hand-holder. )

OCR'd the PDF, reformatted it (roughly; I'll finish later), and wanted to share some of it around. Lots of nifty parts in there; I'm enjoying both the rationale and the sharp focus--keeping it limited to specific legalities, rather than the broader issue of "is gay marriage okay?" The ruling focuses on the fact that Prop 8 removed a right, rather than that it "changed the constitution." That made it suspect, and the fact that the "right" may or may not have been necessary is considered unimportant: the thing is, gay people had this right, and it got taken away from them and not from others.

The quote in every news article (Prop 8 Trial Tracker calls it the "money line"): "By using their initiative power to target a minority group and withdraw a right that it possessed, without a legitimate reason for doing so, the People of California violated the Equal Protection Clause. We hold Proposition 8 to be unconstitutional on this ground."

Other quotes ( continued under the cut )

1) Prop 8 has been ruled unconstitutional. Again. Full ruling at Scribd; 133 pages (so, ah, it'll take me a while to sort through it and find the nifty passages, and I'm not sure if I'll put it at

legaldocs, although I'll probably want to). The $%# text is ENCRYPTED, so I can't copy/paste it in pieces & can't save it out of the PDF; I'll have to convert to image & OCR the whole thing to do anything with it.

(I just love it people uploading to Scribd encrypt PUBLIC DOMAIN documents. Grr. Anyone got a better link? It's not yet up on the 9th Circuit page for Perry v Brown.)

2) PaganSpace is going corporate; member buy-in is available. (This shouldn't clutter up the Prop 8 ruling info, but it's not worth making a second post about.)

The ACLU is suing a library over its filter policies. There's a discussion at Mobileread, which has gotten around to "what libraries reasonably should/should not allow," with much muttering about the problem of porn-internet in public-ish places. Someone said "Libraries should, first and foremost, be safe and comfortable places for all patrons," and I kinda lost it. I replied:

No, they shouldn't. Libraries should be repositories of knowledge and culture, and those are often both uncomfortable and unsafe. A library that doesn't carry disturbing material has failed in its mission--we don't need to spend tax money to collect and preserve content that nobody finds offensive; people will spend their own income on that. They'll even set up institutions to distribute that information; there's no shortage of organizations that are happy to distribute ~~propaganda~~ information they find interesting and nonthreatening.

Libraries--tax-supported government-sponsored libraries--should be dedicated to distributing information that some people want forgotten or suppressed, not just information that everyone agrees is suitable for everyone else to read.

People who are uncomfortable with subversive or controversial ideas should not spend time in libraries.

-------------
( semi-religious commentary )

C is for Cookie. Everyone knows that. Cookies are little treats, something with a hint of nutrition, unlike candy, but not enough for anyone to quite call them "food" with a straight face. Cookies are often used as a reward, a prize for good behavior, and while this has been tied to a swarm of problematic lessons wherein food is substituted for affection, I'm going to concentrate on the cookie-rewards that are adjunct to, not instead of, other rewards for "good" behavior.

Children are given cookies for doing tasks that adults supposedly do without a reward--wash dishes, fold laundry, finish homework. When it goes well, the cookie is supposed to cement the idea in the kid's head that "this task contains a prize for completion," not "if you do what I tell you, you get a cookie." For adults, the prize is more abstract... washing dishes gets you a clean kitchen and easy access to plates for the next meal; folding laundry gets your clothes arranged the way you like them; finishing the tax forms or sales project gets you a more stable income. Distant rewards, sometimes, but still rewards.

( I bet you're wondering how long it's going to take me to get around to religion. )

Stardate 5945.9, Base Security Chief Dubrovnik to Commodore Mendez:

SIR, I WILL RESIGN IF A METHOD IS NOT FOUND TO PREVENT THE ANARCHISTS AND THEIR FRIENDS FROM SNAKE-DANCING DOWN THE CORRIDORS AFTER HOURS SINGING 'MOMMA'S GOT A SQUEEZE-BOX' AT THE TOP OF THEIR LUNGS.

--from "The Weight" by Leslie Fish

--------------
I think I'm gonna memorize that quote.

There's good reasons some of us are devoted to scanning & converting as much of it as we can reach, and it's not just "because that's our heritage, dammit;" we're also missing out on some excellent writing by people who were awesome long before the internet became the repository for All Random Data Ever.

FWIW: Leslie's given permission for "The Weight" to be scanned, proofed & uploaded. There's a group of us in the "proof" stage. It's slow going. And there's artwork. That's going to be slow, too. In the meantime... I've gotten to read a ~200,000-word Leslie Fish Trek TOS novel. Yay!

I've been getting set up as publishing editor for forbiddenfiction.com, and yesterday finally sorted out "how to make a complete epub, from scratch" (well, in Sigil so mostly from scratch) "with all the bits & pieces in the right places and embedded fonts and a TOC and all that."

Next step: Figuring out why it looks DIFFERENT on each of my ereaders, and what can be done to fix that. (The cover displays differently. Gah. How do I make the cover auto-fit the screen? Or do I just not bother?) I may go with "don't bother" and "encourage cover designers to put title near top, not bottom, since top will always show up on ereaders."

BOOK! Wif chapters an' fonts! And indented paragraphs instead of spaces between them! I did my first CSS coding!

Next (after making a decision about cover art): Document stylesheet details. Pester other techie to write script to auto-HTMLize most chapters. Yadda yadda.

YAAAAAY!

Also, weird dreams: something about papers? Computer cards? When I'm doing intense document conversion, I often wind up with piecemeal dreams about keyboards and screendata. Also, followup tag dream, the kind that's just starting when you wake up, in which I was having some kind of conversation with Lucius Malfoy and Mark Vorkosigan. My brain is apparently deeply, deeply disfunctional.

Current Mood: ecstatic

B is for Burial. A lot of people these days wind up getting cremated after death. Coffin burials, after all, are expensive; coffins themselves aren't cheap, and then there's the need to buy a plot in a cemetery and possibly a headstone or other marker--with all the regulations about bodies, cremation is about the only option for a lot of low-income families. And besides, cremation allows you to keep the ashes, a constant reminder on the mantle of your lost loved one, or distribute them to friends & family members (in some states; in others, it's required by law to keep them all together--because the laws about not distributing body parts weren't changed to allow ashes to be treated differently). Or they can be spread just about anywhere, and while there are strict laws about this, it's not like any police force can monitor every park or meadow or street to stop someone from dropping a few handfuls of ashes in the deceased's favorite spot. Cremation allows for a connection between life & death--he loved [x place], and now he's always there.

( It's not what I want )

I clicked over to Archive.org on a whim, looking for potentially interesting texts, and put "wicca" in the search box. Apparently, Obama is maybe Wiccan:

A great deal of circumstantial evidence suggests that Barack Obama's parents and American grandparents were followers of the Pagan/Celtic Wiccan faith (i.e., that they were 'witches') Not only were they from an area in Kansas more or less famous for it's concentration of Wiccans, but they traveled half way across the country to attend a church which is openly composed of Wiccan families, and in which a Wiccan altar dominates the entrance.

It is also known that Obama's mother returned to the Seattle area with Obama, possibly to avail Obama of the East Shore Unitarian liberal leadership program for children.

Wiccans openly and actively supported Barack Obama during Obama's campaign, and a prominent Wiccan Priestess ('Witch') plainly states that Obama is using Wiccan Spells to influence people's minds during the elections! The Obama logo even appears to use a "conjuring circle" (see the graphic art of the Wiccan supporters and the logo of East Shore Unitarian), which represents the basis of Wiccan magic - redirecting the power of the earth's rotation (note the earth 'rotation' lines also featured in the Obama logo.)

*Blink.* It just gets harder and harder to be a Discordian.

Swiped shamelessly from Robert Anton Wilson's blog, or whatever that was, and I remain very glad it's still up. He contemplated a unit of measurement, the jesus, and noted how our jesi have been growing rather dramatically. (I'd say "exponentially," except I don't grok enough math to know if that's true. But they do double at shorter and shorter intervals.)

R.A.W. says:
Our psychic universe is expanding even more rapidly than the physical universe. Let us define the measurement of known scientific facts in the year 1 A.D. as "one jesus," using the name of the celebrated philosopher born that year.

( We may have passed 10k jesi in the early 90's. )

Representative Darrell Issa has introduced a new bill, supposedly a more net-friendly "fight piracy" bill than SOPA and PIPA. It's called the OPEN (Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade) Act--and he's doing something new with it.

Keep The Web #Open has a copy of the bill, with places to annotate and comment, so that people (that'd be us, folks) can suggest minute changes in phrasing or mention loopholes or opportunities for abuse.

The media corporations don't like it; they say it ~~doesn't let them stomp on people at will~~ has "ineffective penalties." I consider this a strong mark in its favor, although I haven't yet gotten through the text. (Stupid scroll box. I've got it pasted into Word.)

It's about 7000 words, which should be fairly quick reading for people who're familiar with the structure and flow of these kinds of documents. (Otherwise? It's, ah, dense, and written in Politicalese, which is like Legalese only more shifty. Look out for the shifty bits.)

I encourage people to read, login and comment, because that's one of the few ways we can let legislators really know we want an *active* voice in new laws, and that we'd like to avoid a repeat of the Jan 18 swarm o' phone calls. We'd much prefer to be consulted *before* the laws get to the almost-voting stage--and now, because of the internet, we can; a legislator no longer has to sit through long committee meetings with one-at-a-time speakers to get public opinions on a proposed law.

ETA: The site has the shortest TOS I've ever seen; it looks like all comments etc. go into the public domain immediately, so keep that in mind.

B is for Book. When I give newbies advice about Pagan books, I tell them to steer clear of anything written in the past ~20 years. Not that there haven't been some excellent books in the last couple of decades, but they're by far overwhelmed by the pure derivative fluff that flooded the market once "Charmed" got high enough in the ratings. And a newbie, by definition, has no ability to separate wheat from chaff.

In most cases, a newbie is likely to pick books that are fluff--because those pander to what the newbie is likely to already believe: that the purpose of religion is Happy Times For Everyone, that deities are all loving and generous, that all deities are really kinda-sorta one deity, that it doesn't matter if you have particular tools or skills or emotions to be a Pagan.

And it doesn't matter--to be "a Pagan." ( However, not all Paganisms are interchangeable )

I emailed Barbara Boxer. Dianne Feinstein's contact link doesn't work. (How conveeeeenient.) However, it does look like Feinstein is aware of some of the problems with PIPA--she tried to arrange a meeting between Disney officials and tech companies. Disney refused; they see no value in negotiating anything at this point.

I'll continue to look around for a "send Feinstein an email" link. I may call them both, too. But I can put more content in an email; a call would need to be concise and sharp, and I'm less sure of my ability to leave a useful 30-second message on an answering machine. I suppose I could also write them both real printed letters, which would presumably get somewhere before the 24th, but there's no way to know if they got read. (Not that I have any way of knowing if email gets read.) Hmm.

( Body of text I put in the email box at Barbara Boxer's site )

SOPA STRIKE - Largest online protest in history lists dozens of participants, among them Wikipedia and BoingBoing. (Reddit's supposedly part of this, but it hasn't blacked out yet.) While Google's search engine isn't gone, it's got a blackout logo and a link to more info about SOPA & PIPA.

The EFF action center has an overview of the dangers of the acts, and CDT has put together a list of over 1000 organizations and individuals opposing SOPA/PIPA. The Reddit Blog (not sure how long it'll be up) has a technical examination of SOPA and PROTECT IP.

( Rambling inside )

A is for Acolyte. (Plus altars, ancestors, athame, air, aura... but acolytes is what I'm going to talk about today.) It's one of those words Pagans don't much talk about; it's from Christian religious services ("One who assists the celebrant in the performance of liturgical rites") and many Pagans insist so strongly that we're non-hierarchical and that must mean we don't have any assistants.

But we do. In some covens, it's the Maiden's role to assist the High Priestess. She makes sure there's charcoal for the incense, and a way to light candles, and a cloth to cover the cakes until it's time to share them, and other little tasks like that. She may be responsible for guiding people, if the ritual involves staged events. She may make sure everyone's seated for the trance meditation, or hand out crystals for energy focusing, or pour the water into the scrying bowl.

A lot of public Pagan rituals suffer from "too many chefs, not enough dishwashers." ( Or is that too many Batmen, not enough Alfreds? )

pt_tangles posted about doing the Pagan Blog Project ("This project is a way to spend a full year dedicating time each week very specifically to studying, reflecting, and sharing your spiritual and magickal path."), and that seems like a useful and nifty thing for me; it's structured enough that I'd feel like I have a reason to post, and open enough that I wouldn't feel I couldn't do half of the project. (I'm not doing the Fannish Snowflake project because the first couple of days' options confused me.)

Trouble is, it was supposed to start on Jan 6. I've missed the first two weeks. Hmm. I could:

write up the A & B entries and backdate them,
write up the first two entries and post them this week, catching up on Friday,
start next Friday with A,
start next Friday with C.

( Topic pondering under the cut )

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elf

Remember:

The hidden stone ripens fast,
  then laid bare like a turnip
    can easily be cut out at last
but even then the danger isn't past.
   That man lives best who's fain
to live half mad, half sane.
—Jan Van Stijevoort, 1524.

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Linkspam what thou wilt

Gender Controversy at PantheaCon 2012 Linkspam

Selective Inclusion vs Bigotry

With a capital T and that rhymes with C and that stands for Cookie

Transgender Discussion Panel @ P'con

Libri Umbra Digitalis

The lawyer and the lawbook only go so far

Need beta/cheerleader(s): Sime~Gen

Prop 8 ruling quotes.

Two things

The purpose of libraries

Come to the Dark Side...

I am proofreading.

I made a book!

Cycles of Life

The whackos just keep getting wackier

The Jumping Jesus Phenomenon

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Out with the new, in with the old.

Phoning senators about PIPA: how do you pronounce OMGWTFBBQ anyway?

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