How Do We Talk about FAT?

We read:

"Is it OK for doctors and parents to tell children and teens they're fat?

That seems to be at the heart of a debate over whether to replace the fuzzy language favored by the U.S. government with the painful truth - telling kids if they're obese or overweight.

Labeling a child obese might "run the risk of making them angry"."

Source

When I was a kid at school, fat kids got called "fatty" and if you were being derogatory "fatso". They all seemed to survive it pretty well.






The "Indian Names" Nonsense Bubbles on

The Methodist McMurry university in Texas seems to be the latest victim of the strange compulsion to avoid naming college sporting teams after anything Indian. See here. They have long called their athletic teams "The Indians" but the NCAA has both banned that and now rejected an appeal against the ban.

Apparently their team name was an example of 'nicknames that demean and offend our Native American sisters and brothers.'. The reasoning supporting that conclusion must be mightily convoluted. It certainly escapes me. The following comment by a McMurry graduate seems a lot more straightforward to me: "'Forcing a school to get rid of its Indian mascot,' he added, 'does nothing more than discriminate more against Indians.'"

The idea that "must not mention Indians" is respectful of them is reminiscent of Orwell's inverted "Newspeak". It seems disrespectful to me.





What is a "Christianist"?

Andrew Sullivan defines "Christianism" as politicized Christianity. The intention is clearly derogatory.

Funnily enough, I used that term too -- way back in 1970. But I used it to refer to people who were not Christian believers but who were nonetheless culturally Protestant -- as I am. So Sullivan uses it for people who ARE Christians and I use it for people who are not.

Objecting to politicized Christianity is nothing new. Many fundamentalists reject involvement in the affairs of "the world" -- Jehovah's Witnesses, Seventh Day Adventists, Exclusive Brethren etc. After all, Jesus said to Pilate: "My Kingdom is not of this world".

But Sullivan is clearly not of that ilk. Although he defines it as politicized Christianity, he uses the term much more loosely -- usually to refer to anybody who is both a conservative and a Christian. See his recent diatribe against Hugh Hewitt and Hewitt's reply. In particular, he uses it to refer to anybody who rejects homosexual marriage on Christian grounds. He claims to be a Christian himself but that claim would seem as shallow as the rest of his thought. Romans chapter 1 makes it clear that homosexuals are condemned by God. So unless you can be a Christian without accepting the New Testament, ALL Christians are "Christianists" and Sullivan is not a Christian.

So much for a silly usage which serves essentially as no more than a hate-speech term for conservative Christians.

Keith Burgess Jackson has a few words on Sullivan's motivations too, as has Dean Barnett.