It’s Valentines Day.  This morning I heard a giggle-inducing bit
on NPR’s Morning Edition, where Steve Inskeep and Renee Montagne read
several ads targeted toward the occasion and trying to sell things as
diverse as furnaces and laser hair removal.  Long live romance…
long live commerce.

In New Mexico, it is Extraterrestrial Culture Day, the second Tuesday
in February, just happening this year to coincide with Valentines
Day.  I don’t know what Daniel Foley, the state representative
from Roswell, had in mind when he proposed the memorial four years
ago.  I imagine there was an element of tongue-in-cheek humor in
it, as well as some commercially motivated civic boosterism.  I
don’t really care why he did it.  I simply appreciate the
opportunity to consider and discuss ET culture.

I think it would have been more appropriate to have made it ET Cultures
Day, because there must be more than one distinct culture out
there.  Even among the Grays that we know who have visited us
there is cultural diversity.  There are the somewhat primitive
Grays, the ones with the beady little eyes, who messily investigated
the interior anatomy of cattle and invasively used a few humans for
their genetic experiments.  Then there are the more highly evolved
ones with the big wraparound eyes who are trying to help preserve our
ecology.  But I digress….

I have been reflecting on the Xangan youths who have been posting
photographs of their genitals.  I suppose it had to come to
this.  I wonder what Gregory Bateson would think of it, what
Desmond Morris’s take on it is, and what Marshall McLuhan would have to say.

Often I wonder what Gregory Bateson
would think of one thing or another, because he had a gift for seeing
aspects and ramifications of things that might escape many
people.  In the 1960s, when I found his writings for the first
time, they excited me because he challenged me to run to a dictionary
and expand my vocabulary so that I could understand the words with
which he informed my vision and expanded my mind.

Gregory was a twentieth-century Renaissance man: an anthropologist,
psychologist, cybernetic theorist, ecologist, etiologist, social
scientist, ethnographer, biologist… a limitless thinker with a
holistic perspective.  He coined the word, “cybernetics”, for the
then-new science of computers.  I am sure he would be interested
in the way our culture has evolved to incoroporate these machines, and
I imagine that he would be amused by some of the effects.

Desmond
Morris is a zoologist and anthropologist whose specialty is sex: 
mating behavior and the behavioral differences between sexes.  He
said, “Biologically speaking, if something bites you it’s more likely
to be female,” and, “…the city is not a concrete jungle, it’s a human
zoo.” 

His book, The Naked Ape,
published October 12, 1967, described many social and cultural
practices in zoological terms.  He pointed out, for example, how
cosmetic enhancements such as lipstick mimic the effects of sexual
arousal.  I’d bet he also took note eventually of the use of
collagen injections to emphasize that cosmetic effect.

He identified twelve steps which Western couples pass
through on the way to sexual intimacy. Occasionally a step may be left
out, but they almost always occur in this order:

    1. Eye to body
    2. Eye to eye
    3. Voice to voice
    4. Hand to hand
    5. Arm to shoulder
    6. Arm to waist
    7. Mouth to mouth
    8. Hand to head
    9. Hand to body
    10. Mouth to breast
    11. Hand to genitals
    12. Genitals to genitals

With adolescents now tending to gather online more than they do at
the
mall or malt shops, it makes sense that they are passing through the
first three steps to mating electronically.  Showing off one’s
body on a blog seems to me to be much healthier and safer than doing it
in the smoky, alcohol-soaked meat-market singles bars frequented by the
generation of these young people’s parents.

Marshall
McLuhan was a social scientist who specialized in exploring and
speculating on the effects of technology on culture.  He had a
real way with words, was a master of the one-liner, the succinct sound bite.  He said, “The medium is the message.” 
He said, “The future is our permanent address;” and, “If it works, it’s
obsolete.”

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he had foreseen
the way the web has influenced mating behavior.  He might point
out the layers of safety, the “comfort zone” provided by the distance
the web imposes between participants.  He would also surely make
note of the prevalent attitude of skepticism engendered in those who
understand that the fourteen-year-old girl they’re eye-emming might
very well be a middle aged man.

Just because I found them and want to share them, here are a few more McLuhanisms:

More can be found here.

Mrs. Grundy, in the guise of some Xangans who consider themselves grownups and who act like vigilantes,
is up in arms about violations of Xanga’s Terms of Use.  Anyone
who registers for a blogsite here promises to abide by those
terms.  Few people read them, I’ve been told.  I read them
and took them seriously when I first came here.  I was a newbie on
the web at the time, and had not yet been initiated to the practice of
either checking the box without looking at the fine print or scrolling
through the terms of service rapidly, picking out the occasional
outstanding word for its comic effect.

I felt severely limited by the constraints laid out in the Terms of
Use.  When I started posting episodes of my memoirs, I mentioned
my fear that a truthful telling of my story would get my site shut
down.  Everyone who commented assured me that I was unlikely to be
shut down for vulgarity or obscenity.  Some of them cited examples
of well-known and generally loved Xangans who were routinely vulgar
and/or obscene in their posts.  Some people included links to
examples.  There were several veiled and ambiguous references to
the elusive and mythical Bianca.  The consensus was that only the
most blatant, egregious and extreme violations would receive any
response from admin.

This may or may not still be the reality around here.  As I see
it, whether Xanga admin responds to the Grundian pleas to shut down
“pornographic” sites depends on several factors, regarding none of
which I have enough data to be able to predict admin’s response. 
I don’t, for example, know whether the Xanga Team, which consists
largely of young men, will define “pornography” by the same criteria as
Mrs. Grundy does.  Nor do I know whether Xanga has adequate
personnel to police its multitude of sites to Mrs. Grundy’s
satisfaction in a timely manner. 

These unknown factors do not even address other factors such as the
ease with which the owner of a shut-down site can register for a new one
under a different name and email address, or the slippery, ambiguous
and highly open-to-interpretation nature of the Terms themselves. 
Having read and reread the terms several times, I am inclined to
dismiss much of the whole mess as bullshit
– ooops! That was vulgar,
wasn’t it?  “Vulgar” is not allowed here. What I meant was that
the Terms of Use strike me as being partially PR pap and the rest
hypocritical CYA or legal boilerplate.

Here, let me show you what I mean:

It
was pointed out to me that the members of the vigilante blogring that
was formed to address the “pornograpy problem” have been conducting
their business in protected posts.  My informant likened this
activity to that of various secret police organizations.  Their
tactics are similar, yes, but their status is unofficial, which is why
I term them vigilantes.  Someone else likened these people to the
KKK, perhaps the best-known of all the vigilantist American secret
societies.  I do not doubt that these people would, if they had
the power to do so, shut down the sites they find offensive. 
Lacking that power, they content themselves with informing to an
administration that may or may not appreciate their efforts or share
their views.

One of the most debatable aspects of this hoohaw is what these vigilantes mean when they say, “pornography”.  Dictionary definitions refer to the intent of the material being published, rather than to its content,
making it quite difficult to pin down.  Pornography is a
layperson’s word, anyway, without legal meaning.   The laws
governing “pornography” deal with the concept of obscenity.   In the entries I read through the links posted under the “censorship”
challenge, I saw references to nudity and to depictions of
genitalia.  Nobody whose posts I read referred directly to any
depictions of overt sexual acts.  The sites so offensive to them,
they said, were ones where the site’s owners were displaying their own
genitalia.

Some of the participants in this crusade are trumpeting the necessity
of protecting “children” from themselves.  This troubles me as much as
I am troubled by the general lack of civil rights among the young. 
Although I know that as a member of this culture I am stuck with it, I
do not agree with the implication of the term, “minor child,” as
generally defined.  De jure, yes, adolescents who are sexually mature
and often sexually active are still “minor children” after they have
become de facto adults.  It is hard for me to think of people as
children when they are obviously sexually mature and are quite
blatantly displaying their mature bodies and seeking mates.

Here is what the U.S. Supreme Court ruled on “obscenity.”

Guidelines (a) and (b) would, for me and many other Americans, both
Xangans and non-Xangans, exempt any and all simple depictions of nude
anatomy from classification as “obscenity.”  Unlike Mrs. Grundy, I
see nothing pornographic or obscene in a plain picture of
genitalia.  Now all that remains to be determined is whether the
“community standards” are those of the Xangan community or its
administration.  If we were allowed a democratic vote on the
issue, I suspect that Mrs. Grundy would be shut down.

The aspect of this matter that I find most troubling is the fear that
is so obviously motivating Mrs. Grundy, and the hostile reaction
stirred up among the young people she is trying to suppress. 
Having made the conscious
choice to turn my life over to Love and to try in all things to be
motivated by Love rather than fear, I cannot even imagine my
participating
in this ill-conceived crusade against young persons whose minds and
souls have not been so programmed with fear of biology and loathing for
the naked human form.  Nor can I participate in the angry uproar
of
retaliation.  I can, and do, sympathize with the oppressed and
pity the
oppressors for the fear that oppresses them.

I still haven’t worked myself up sufficiently to adequately respond to the latest Featured_Grownups
“challenge”, to write about Xanga’s terms of use.  After having
been so thoroughly misinformed that the topic was “censorship”, and
having responded to a non-existent “discussion” — and initiating a
pair of new discussions, on censorship and vigilantism — I do want to
get a piece of my mind into the TOS fray, and will do so if this
flighty mind of mine cooperates before the thing goes entirely stale
for everyone.

---

My meandering piece last night, written as intro to Greyfox’s entry about  his mother dying, drew this pair of comments:

They are both correct, really.  I suppose I did imply the
inference that mistral drew.  The idea that a decomposed corpse
will be reanimated seems to me to be not just absurd but
horrifying.  I certainly meant that belief is not the same as knowledge. 
I so frequently repeat myself and restate things I’ve said before, that
I often just allude to some of them as I did there without further
explanation.  Anyone who hasn’t read any of my rants on belief
versus knowledge might not get it.

I will say it again:  we have no need to believe in anything that we know. 
Belief is for the things we don’t know but that we either hope or fear
are true, or which we have heard or read so often that unless we
question, investigate and experiment, they seem to be true.  The
less we believe, the better off we are.

---

Somehow, Greyfox’s series of
phone calls about  his mother’s impending death reminded me of
when I got the news that my mother had died.

It was a call from the Alaska State Troopers.  As long as I have
been in Alaska, and probably since there have been State Troopers here,
they have acted as messengers for “emergency” messages.  I suppose
that the particular dispatcher involved determines the definition of
“emergency,” because it was a call from a sympathetic female trooper
that connected me with Angie
after her investigator had found a reference to my living in Alaska in
my mother’s obituary.  It was in no way an emergency, but that
woman was so intrigued and inspired by the story of a woman searching
for her birth mother that she bent the rules, connected us, and even
called me back later in the day to find out how it had gone.

The call that told me my mother had died was more in line with the
usual type of calls the troopers make.  For people who live in
remote areas, they might deliver the message by radio, aircraft,
snowmobile, or boat.  When I got home from having worked two weeks
in our food booth at the state fair, there was a note on my door, to
call the troopers for an emergency message.  I did, and was told
that my mother had died more than a week before I got the message.

They had no information for me on who had made the call to them. 
I started trying to call relatives for more information.  The
first one I reached was my eldest daughter Dorrie.  She said that
she had made that call to the troopers, four days before my mother
died, and told them that she was dying.  Knowing about it then
wouldn’t have done any good.  I couldn’t have flown to her side
and even if I had it wouldn’t have changed a thing. 

It took me some time to get closure regarding my mother’s death. 
I had a series of dreams in which I was trying to call her but couldn’t
remember her phone number.  That may have been about more than her
death, actually.  Even when we were in the same room, Mama and I
didn’t really connect most of the time.

---

NEWS

Did the pipeline dodge the latest bullet? 

Some years ago, a drunken man shot up the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, caused
some minor damage and a small oil spill, and got in a heap of trouble
over it.

Now there’s news of a Wilkes-Barre, PA man, arrested in Idaho late last
year, who allegedly had plans to detonate trucks filled with propane
along our pipeline, along with blowing up a big oil refinery in the
east, another in the west, and the Transcontinental (natural gas)
Pipeline running from the Gulf Coast to the Atlantic Coast.

Michael Curtis Williams claims that he is a patriot who was trying to
uncover an al Qaeda cell in the U.S.  He was busted in December in
a sting operation initiated after Judge Shannen Rossmiller from Conrad,
MT, scanning a terrorist website, found Williams’s request for funding
to buy the trucks to fullfill his plan.  He is being held for
possession of one hand grenade.
———————–
Latest news from the Yukon Quest
has Lance Mackey, Hans Gatt and Hugh Neff, “moving around” after a rest
at the Mile 101 dog drop, between Angel Creek and Central, the first
two checkpoints on the thousand mile sled dog race (not dog sled
race:  it’s the first nose over the finish line that wins),
looking as if they’re getting ready for the run up to Eagle
Summit.  Weather reports say a snowstorm with high winds is moving
in, expected to hit Eagle Summit before dark today.
———————–
At Felony Flats this morning, my favorite mungo (a dumpster diver, scrounger or salvager), Greyfox, found a dumpster full of primo mongo
(stuff worth keeping that has been thrown away).  In an excited
phone call earlier he said he’d gotten a lot of bedding, throw rugs,
and sixty hours of old-time radio on twenty cassette tapes, and was on
his way to back his car up to the dumpster again for another
load.  As I have been composing this entry, he left two more
messages on the CallWave, so excited, telling me to call for an update
as soon as it’s convenient.  That’s what I’m going to do next,
after I get something to eat.
 

My husband Greyfox, to whom I often affectionately refer as the Old

Fart because that is how he often refers to himself and he’d rather be

called that than “asshole”, is a shaman.  Just because I show
him

no deference, it shouldn’t be taken as a sign I don’t respect

him.  He has earned a great deal of respect in my eyes through
his

success over the past two and three-quarters years at transcending

multiple addictions and getting a fairly good handle on his

narcissistic personality disorder.  Few men of his age would
even

consider it possible or worth the effort to try to do what he has been

doing, much less be so successful at it.

But I digress….

He’s a shaman.  In case you’re not familiar with any shamans,
they

do much of their work on the Other Side, in the shamanic

Otherworld.  One of their functions is to confer with
spirits,

both the ascended and helpful kind and the confused, lost, disembodied

spirits of those who don’t know they are dead or can’t figure out
where

to go once their body stops moving.

Experiences of that sort tend to give one a different perspective on

life and death than that held by the cultural mainstream around

here.  Add to that the fact that the man has vivid memories
of

having lived (and died) in bodies other than the one he now inhabits,

and the fact that he and I and a few of our friends have been around

together a few times, share common memories and can reminisce about

combat and carousal in the Roman Legions or the height of the culture

at Teotihuacan and its fall, and you have a person with an unusual
view

of death and dying.

We (and I don’t hesitate to speak for him on this because it is a
topic

on which he often speaks to me at length and with great vehemence) do

not believe in
life after death.  We know

from experience that death is something that happens to the body, not

the spirit.  Neither of us is sentimental about mortal

remains.  Our reactions range from bemused to appalled at the

lengths to which some people will go to glorify, preserve, or recover

from some remote death-site, a decaying corpse.  Greyfox’s

somewhat contemptuous blanket term for such practices is, “corpse

worship.”

Dying can be traumatic, when it doesn’t happen quickly or
easily. 

Life, as nobody is likely to deny, is often traumatic, painful, and

stressful.  Death itself, in such cases, can be release and

relief.  We often miss people when they are no longer in our

lives, but it would be hypocritical for us to express any grief over

their transition into spirit, especially when their lives had been
long

and fulfilling and/or had grown difficult and painful. 

Interactions with our friends and family can be difficult when they
are

of the common mainstream mindset and we are coming from this different

point of view.

…awww, rats.  I could go on an on, but it won’t be as
informative as it would be if you just go and read the post
Greyfox wrote this afternoon at the library and asked me to
proofread and post for him this evening.

There’s a double or triple entendre in my title here.  I don’t
always point out the double entendres, though I use them often.  I
never explain them, so go figure for yourself.  Just remember that I was spang in the middle of the 1960s.

I am glad I had that impulse yesterday to write my essay on censorship
before I read the entries that had started the discussion.  If I
had seen what those people’s knickers were all knotted up about, my
piece would not have been the pure take on suppression of expression
that it became.

The actual discussion was, and apparently still remains (despite some
justified charges of “beating a dead horse”), a multi-faceted affair
about flagrant violations of Xanga’s terms of use.  In comments, I
introduced the term, “vigilantism”, into the discussion (but not the
concept represented by that word – it was there from the start). 
At least one person is at least pretending not to understand what I
mean by that. 

I will have to return soon to this horse’s twitching corpse to get in a
few more licks.  I think I may take some notes as I ruminate on it
today, and perhaps outline my follow-up.  The “discussion” is
complex, and unless I organize my thoughts I will surely fail to get
them all down on the page.  Again, I suppose I need to avoid
reading any more of the entries than I already have, lest that further
confuse the issue for me.

Right now is not a good time, or I would begin writing that essay
now.  I have a limited time at the keyboard while Doug is hauling
in firewood and walking out to the mailbox.  I’ll have the
computer to myself after he goes to bed this evening.  Our
separate schedules have revolved around to where I’m now on the swing
shift and he’s getting up in the middle of the night.

Weather in my part of the world is big news locally, even though it
isn’t at all severe right here in the neighborhood.  We’re about
100 miles out of Anchorage on the highway that extends into the
interior, to Fairbanks.  There is one other highway out of
Anchorage.  It runs the other direction, down the Kenai Peninsula
to Seward on the coast. 

That other highway was closed yesterday from about 30 or 40 miles out
of Anchorage to Cooper Landing, which is on the other side of Turnagain
Pass.  There had been two avalanches that blocked the
highway.  Some people who had been trapped inside their car by one
of the avalanches were rescued and the road closure was supposed to
have ended at noon today.

This morning, the state announced that the road closure was extended
until 6:00 this evening.  State Troopers said that the snow was
falling at a rate of two inches every fifteen minutes at Mile 44 of the
Seward Highway.  If that continues, I’d be surprised if the road
opens then.  The plows couldn’t keep up with it.

Closer to home, in the lower parts of this valley we live in, the roads
are icy.  Greyfox reported yesterday that his car was losing
traction and fish-tailing even in four-wheel drive on a
straightaway.  This morning, he said it’s no better.  I
haven’t been out on the highway here, but I’m assuming from the lack of
recent precipitation that the surface is probably dry and traction is
okay. 

We need to make a water run within the next few days, so I hope the
storms don’t get here before we get it done.  It’s no big deal,
really.  We have drinking water, enough to last a week or
more.  If we have to delay the water run, I’ll have to “bathe”
with wet wipes.  The dirty dishes will accumulate.  Doug
won’t mind that until the time comes to wash them all.

Later, all.

Among some of the Featured_Grownups,
there is currently a discussion of censorship.  I have not yet
read anyone else’s entries.  This is not because I am not
interested in their views.  It is primarily because I might be
induced to enter into an argument or influenced to try not to repeat what others have said already, so I
want to get my ideas down here before I am exposed to anyone else’s.

Don’t let that mislead you.  For the most part, my ideas on
censorship are other people’s ideas.  I can barely speak on the
topic without quoting someone.  Here are a few of my favorite quotes on, around and about censorship:

Greyfox phoned and woke me this morning as soon as he saw the front page of the Anchorage Daily News. 
It was a story that we and all our neighbors had followed with outrage
and horror about a year and a half ago.  I wrote about it here at
the time.  Here is the latest:

Most of the kids involved here had been taken away from their
drug-addicted mother, so there had been plenty of trauma in their lives
even before the state handed them over to the Kelleys.  I 
have a strong and sickening feeling that in order to cover their own
asses some people in the OCS decided to alter records or cover up
facts.  If that is not the case, then they simply did not know a
lot of things that they, as part of their job, are supposed to know.

There is more at that ADN link above.

I had something in mind to blog about for today, and may get to it later.  For now, this is what’s on my mind.

February 14…

Valentines Day, obviously, but that’s not all.

It is the second Tuesday in February, and that means that in New Mexico it is officially Extraterrestrial Culture Day. 
State Representative Daniel Foley from Roswell proposed this
memorial.  “They have some sort of culture, whether it’s something
we understand or not,” he said.  His proposal claimed that
extraterrestrials have contributed to the recognition of New Mexico.

The New Mexico House of Representatives approved it in March of
2003.  As a memorial, it doesn’t have the force of law and I don’t
suppose anyone outside of Roswell will get the day off.  In fact,
in Roswell it may be such a big day that nobody can be spared to take a
day off.  If I were planning to go somewhere to celebrate ET
Culture Day, Roswell would be the place.

I hadn’t known about this until I heard someone on the radio mention today
that tomorrow is Extraterrestrial Culture Day.  As soon as Doug
gave up the computer and went to bed, I went to Google to check it
out.  I found one source, the South Jersey Courier-Post Online,
that listed it as February 9 in the “Multicultural Calender”
(sic).  They were probably copying that date from a previous year
in which February started on a Monday.  If they can’t spell
calendar correctly, how can they be expected to get their dates right?

I love New Mexico… ice caves, lava tubes, El Malpais, the Gila
Wilderness, Mimbres and Mimbreños, the Burro Mountains and Florida
Mountains, the mineral museum in Socorro, Rockhound State Park, the
Rockhound Roundup… and Roswell.  What’s not to love?

New Mexico has a few things in common with Alaska, too.  Some of
them are cultural and politico-economic, and at least one of them is
just sorta weird and mildly interesting.  As far as I know, we are
the only two states that are commonly mistaken for foreign countries by
other Americans.

I have long been familiar with the common phenomenon of trying to place
a catalog order by phone and, when I get to the, “Alaska,” part of my
address, being told that they only ship to the United States.

When I was on my honeymoon in Silver City, New Mexico, I was delighted to find in a copy of New Mexico
magazine, the regular feature, “One of our Fifty is Missing.” 
Readers send in their anecdotes about encountering geographically
challenged Americans who don’t recognize New Mexico’s statehood. 
I wrote in and told them it should be “Two of our Fifty are Missing.”

So, what do you plan to do to celebrate Extraterrestrial Culture Day?

Augustine Volcano in Lower Cook Inlet quieted and was downgraded to concern level orange. 

Cleveland Volcano, out in the Aleutian Islands, erupted and emitted an ash cloud.

Augustine is within line-of-sight of populated parts of the Alaskan
mainland, is ringed with seismic sensors and overseen by two
webcams.  We have had daily bulletins reporting its activity
throughout this eruption sequence.

Cleveland is remote from the populous areas, has no seismic network, no
webcams.  The eruption and ash cloud were reported by pilots who
happened to see them as they flew by.

Augustine made the national TV news and appeared in the syndicated newspaper feature, Earthweek.  Our local radio stations kept us informed of ashfall hazards several times a day.  Even the Alaska Volcano Observatory doesn’t know what’s going on out at Cleveland.

---

Yesterday in my Neighborhood
The temperature was about 23 degrees.  The snow was soft but not
wet or slushy.  The air was moist and breathable.  Bareheaded
and gloveless, I was comfortable enough to go out the cul de sac.  I could feel the warmth of the sun on my face. 
I found a few traces of ash on the snow, some large flakes that might
have come from someone’s chimney, or could have come from the
volcano.  Other than those few bits of ash and even fewer
fragments of trees scattered on the snow, the berms and tracks left by
the snowplow, and one other set of footprints besides mine, the surface
was pristine.

Today, it doesn’t look like this.  The sky is overcast.  The
temperature is 30 degrees, right at the slush threshhold.  The
wind blew yesterday, knocking some of those big clumps of snow out of
the trees.  The snowpack is pocked and ragged-looking.  If we
get any precip today, it will be freezing rain.  Next time I go
out there, it will be a whole different world.

I have written on several occasions about my appreciation for the First
Amendment, particularly the right of free speech.  I’m not sure I
am capable of keeping my thoughts to myself.  If I did, I would
probably explode.

This, the efficacy of self-expression for letting off steam, is one of
the weaknesses in our system.  We protest and picket, satirize and
criticize our imbecilic politicians and some of us get the feeling from
this that we are doing something.  Perhaps, in a system where we
were not allowed to express our dissent, we would be more likely to
rise up and overthrow the corrupt system.

That’s one hazard in free speech, one that’s been on my mind for a while.  Today, I learned about this other one:

Reverend Fred Phelps (right, above) of Westboro Baptist Church, Topeka,
Kansas, and his congregation made up mostly of members of his extended
family, have been pushing the limits of free speech.  They plan to
picket Coretta Scott King’s funeral this week, and have picketed the
funerals of miners killed in West Virginia and soldiers killed in Iraq.

Many news stories report that they go beyond the bounds of “speech”,
into stalking, assault and harrassment.  They have intimidated the
police in their hometown.   Images on their website could be
considered pornographic, and much of Phelps’s invective is
obscene.  They evade the prohibition of “fighting_words,” only narrowly.

Ostensibly, they want the U.S. to outlaw sodomy, but one of the members
has said that even if that was done, they would find some other cause
to picket.  I’m still thinking about all of this.  I may have
more to say
about it later on.  My intuitive feeling is that Rev. Phelps is a
cynical hypocrite who doesn’t actually believe everything he preaches,
but is using these inflammatory ideas as a ploy to gain power and
attention.  Feel free to comment, whether you agree or not. 
It is your right, after all.