Last Friday, the blogger known as Archbishop Cranmer made a bold claim: “Advertising Standards Authority persecutes His Grace,” the headline announced.
The ASA sent him “all manner of official papers, formal documentation and threatening notices which demand answers to sundry questions by a certain deadline.” The correspondence was part of an investigation into an ad (which you can see here) that appeared on Cranmer’s blog, urging people to sign a petition on behalf of the Coalition 4 Marriage. Complainants said they found the ad “homophobic” and “offensive,” and although the investigation was not into Cranmer specifically, he was required to respond to that particular charge.
I was immediately quite irked by what seemed to me to be an attempt to silence an ad that, in the scheme of things, is no big deal. As a supporter of same-sex marriage, I want to see the debate won by reasoned argument, not by getting someone with a bit of clout to shut the other side up.
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I signed up for Netflix in Canada last year, tempted by my American chums’ promises of the thousands of movies that awaited me. Having finally sussed that my bandwidth problems were due to the entire neighbourhood stealing my internet connection (I exaggerate; it was maybe half), I decided it was time to treat myself.
It was initially a disappointment. The Netflix range in Canada was a fraction of what users had in the US. Nevertheless, I found enough to entertain me, and I decided that rather than pay every month for a limited service, I would do a month off, a month on, a month off.
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“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
– Not Voltaire
Friday afternoon saw a bit of muttering on Twitter over the plight of Archbishop Cranmer, the pseudonymous Christian blogger claiming persecution for carrying a Coalition 4 Marriage advertisement on his website.
According to Cranmer, the Advertising Standards Authority contacted him after receiving 24 complaints that the advert was offensive and homophobic, and now he is the subject of a “formal investigation.” Cranmer must explain his “rationale for the ad and comment specifically on the points raised in the attached complaint notification.” The ASA wants to see
… robust documentary evidence to back the claims and a clear explanation from you of its relevance and why you think it substantiates the claims. It is not enough to send references to or abstracts of documents and papers without sending the reports in full and specifically highlighting the relevant parts explaining why they are relevant to the matter in hand.Continue reading »
(This was first published in 2009.)
I’m a Christian. I’ve been a confirmed Anglican since 2003. I’m a regular churchgoer and continue to be involved in all kinds of areas of parish life.
I am also an agnostic. I accept the intellectual arguments for atheism, and recognized about 18 months ago that I had long since given up on theism. I believe God is a human construct.
Where the mainstream arguments of atheists fall down, I think, is in assuming that because there’s (probably) no God, there’s no place for religion. In my experience, this just doesn’t follow. I’ve had to radically reinterpret my faith recently, but its language, rituals, symbols and meanings have remained. To me it’s all about metaphor, and the outward practice of religious worship is about acknowledging the sacred dimension of life and taking time to remind oneself to live in it.
Everyone has some way of connecting with the sacred. It might be nature, music, a relationship, an intellectual pursuit. Mine just happens to be a religion, and it’s not inherently better or worse than anyone else’s means of engaging the sacred. I frequently hear from atheists that we “don’t need religion,” as if “not needing” were enough of a reason to abolish it. “Don’t need” is in itself ambiguous. What is need? Do you need a beautiful sunset? Do you need your wife? Do you need Beethoven’s symphonies? There’s a sense in which we don’t need these things at all. We could live without them; we don’t need art in the way we need oxygen, for example. Why must the next logical step be abolishment? There’s another sense in which we can’t live without these things.
I need religion only in the way other people need an art or a beautiful landscape or a loved one. An emotional crutch? Only if you can call Mozart or marriage or movies an emotional crutch. We don’t all need these things, but we all need something.
North Carolina’s Amendment One was a constitutional bill so anti-gay that even David Blankenhorn, the defence’s sole expert witness in the Proposition 8 trial, disavowed it. And yet, yesterday, voters in the state passed it by a majority of 60% to 40%, robbing gay families of all legal protections afforded to heterosexual married couples.
Unlike California’s Prop 8, and contrary to most news headlines this morning, the amendment didn’t merely define marriage as the union of one man and one woman. It declared that the marriage of one man and one woman would be the only valid relationship. And the declaration wasn’t merely a law; it was enshrined in the state constitution of North Carolina. Three fifths of the electorate said to gay families, “Fuck your rights.”
The lost, drained expressions in the photo above (from The Guardian) tell all.
I’m left feeling incredibly sad for the gays and lesbians affected by this pernicious legislation. It means the love between two men or two women will never be recognized in law as anything more than the relationship between two people who just happen to occupy the same apartment. It means more stories like that of Shane and Tom. They shared their lives together for almost six years before Tom died, leaving Shane bereft and with no legal recognition of their mutual love and commitment. This video is hard to watch, but it illustrates compellingly the basic dignity and rights that straight, married couples take for granted, which vicious, homophobic legislation like Amendment One denies same-sex couples.
The fight to pass Amendment One, like similar legal efforts, was driven by those who claim to be “pro-family.” This is a misnomer. What pro-family really means in this context is “pro any family exactly like ours.” Such activists have no qualms about hounding, destroying and discriminating against families that do not conform to their so-called traditional values. They are anti-family, and they should be ashamed of their actions.
Pitching an article to a magazine, newspaper or website can be daunting, especially if you’re still early on in your freelance writing career. But here’s the thing to remember: The editor doesn’t know you’re scared. She only sees what you allow her to see. Be bold and confident, and you’re in the running for a successful pitch.
Most pitching these days is done through email. Your first task is to make sure you’re contacting the right person. Search the website for information, and if it’s not there, make an enquiry. I often send a preliminary email that looks something like this:
Hi,
I’d like to pitch an article idea to your magazine. Could you advise me who’s the best person to contact for that? Also, do you have any guidelines or preferences that apply to proposals?
Many thanks,
David L Rattigan
St Catharines, Ontario
Once you’ve established who to contact, start writing — but take time to think it through. Nothing’s worse than an unnecessarily vague, rambling pitch that reads like it was fired off on a whim. (I’ve done it, and I didn’t even get a “No, thanks.”) Like it or not, as a freelance writer, you’re a marketer, and your job with an article proposal is to clinch a sale. To do that, you need to convince the client of three things:
- The article fits the publication;
- The publication needs the article;
- You are the best person to write it.
Begin with a greeting and a personal introduction, being neither too formal nor too casual. Stick to what’s relevant to the pitch, whether it’s your career background, education, personal expertise on a subject or a life experience.
Then make the pitch. Hook the editor just as you would hook the reader of the final article. Wow him with your main idea, summarize what you want to write, and tell him why he needs it. Perhaps it addresses a contemporary issue relevant to the publication’s audience, and you’ve noticed that they’ve yet to cover it. Maybe it’s on a topic that will soon be big news, and this is the opportunity to get a big story out there before every other website jumps on the bandwagon.
Finally, convince the potential client you’re the one to write it. Perhaps you have the technical background the subject requires, connections to someone at the heart of the story or a personal link to the issue. My first pitch to a particular major publication succeeded at least in part because I gave the editor a threefold reason why my perspective mattered to the subject: I was native to the city in the story, I was a member of the (international) institution it involved, and I was also part of the narrow demographic the story affected.
End by thanking the editor for her time, inviting her to respond and leaving things open for future pitches. I typically end a pitch with something like this:
I think this would be a really good fit for [name of publication], and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it. I’d also love to talk more about writing in related areas.
Many thanks for your time,
David L Rattigan
St Catharines, Ontario
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This article was originally published at The Good Writing Blog
The term “writerly” fans a flame inside me. It’s a virtuous word that speaks of crafting words into sentences and paragraphs with passion, imagination and love.
I just searched for a definition of “writerly” and found this:
1. of or characteristic of a writer
2. characterized by the qualities of a writer’s craft, esp. by those that reflect a self-conscious display of literary techniques
But “self-conscious display” suggests pretension, and being pretentious is not what I think of when I hear “writerly.” Pretension is when someone tries far too hard to be writerly and ends up with a convoluted mess. When I write something I consider writerly, in a sense it’s because — albeit with mental effort — I stumbled on the turn of phrase that flowed most simply and effortlessly.
For example, when I typed that opening paragraph, my first attempt mixed two or three other metaphors along with that of fanning a flame. Just because I’d strained to sound literary, it didn’t sound good. It lacked simplicity and sounded forced. In the end, I whittled it down from three or four sentences into two, and what remained sounded both creative and effortless to me. Pretension would have been to throw as many adjectives, verbs, adverbs and metaphors in there as came to mind, without discrimination.
Not everything I write is writerly. This blog’s tagline reads, “Advice from a good writer who aspires to greatness.” I’m confident enough to say I’m good, but I don’t pretend to be great, and in the same way, I aspire to writerliness. I don’t always get there, but I try.
Here’s something I really enjoyed writing recently: the first in a regular online column, The Charm of Evil, in which I share my thoughts about the horror genre, mainly in film. I enjoyed the experience because I felt I was producing something writerly. When I read the final version, I felt proud. The end product went beyond perfunctory. This is good writing, I thought.
Do you want to make your writing more writerly? Here’s some advice: Cut out the crap. Simplicity is beautiful. Play around with words, experiment and shift things around with abandon in search of what works, but do settle with what works. Don’t throw impressive-sounding words out there like dung and hope some of it sticks, because even the bits that stick will still be dung. Instead, present the one idea in which you have total confidence. Edit your own work ruthlessly, because just getting words on the page is only part of the job. Shaping those words with care into their final form will make you a great and writerly writer.
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This was originally published on the Good Writing Blog
Image: Markus Rödder
The anti-gay movement is fighting back hard these days. And when I say anti-gay, I mean virulently. With Anglican Mainstream and Core Issues, two groups in the news at the moment for their now-cancelled “ex-gay” ad campaign on London buses, we’re not talking about mere “traditional Christians,” but egregiously homophobic organizations.
I’ve documented Anglican Mainstream’s history of hateful rhetoric and actions fairly extensively on Ex-Gay Watch. In 2006, for example, the group published the book God, Gays and the Church: Human Sexuality and Experience in Christian Thinking, in which they reprinted a viciously homophonic tirade that contained comments such as these:
And, gentle reader, [the porn section of a gay bookshop] is where most [gay men] will spend the rest of their lives, until God or AIDS, drugs or alcohol, suicide or a lonely old age, intervenes.
Gay churches survive as places where worshippers can go to sleep it off and cleanse their consciences after a Saturday night spent cruising for sex at the bars.
Here is the terrifying fact: If we as a nation and as a Church allow ourselves to be taken in by the scam of monogamous same-sex couples, we will be … legitimizing every kind of sexual taste, from old-fashioned masturbation and adultery to the most outlandish forms of sexual fetishism. We will, in other words, be giving our blessing to the suicide of Western civilization.
The homosexual rights movement is rotten to the core. It has no future. There is no life in it. Sooner or later, those who are caught up in it are going to wake up from the dream or else die. … How many more children are going to be sacrificed to this Molech?
Anticipating criticism, Anglican Mainstream’s Canon Dr Chris Sugden cited “equal opportunities” as a reason for publishing the essay. “We owe it to” the author, Ronald G Lee, to give his story a hearing, he wrote, adding that “we love those struggling with same sex attraction too much to do otherwise.”
In 2011, an Anglican Mainstream book review invoked the “precious blood” of WWII soldiers to portray gay rights as a threat to Western freedom. The article also contained a video, with the advice to fast-forward to 53 seconds for an anti-gay right-wing TV commercial in which a child reacts with disgust and terror to a nightmare about having gay parents.
In 2012, Anglican Mainstream threw its support behind Lesley Pilkington, a Christian psychotherapist barred from practice after telling a gay client — who turned out to be undercover Independent journalist Patrick Strudwick — that his homosexuality could be traced to low self-esteem, suppressed memories of sexual abuse and a family history of Freemasonry. (He denied any of the three even existed.)
Not long afterwards, Dr Lisa Severin Nolland told a Christian conference (charmingly entitled The Lepers Among Us) that gay rights would lead to the corruption of children in schools, where they would be encouraged at an early age to sexually experiment with “cock-and-ball torture” and “eating faeces.”
Northern Ireland-based ex-gay group Core Issues has joined Anglican Mainstream recently to pool resources, organize conferences and promote the scientifically dubious message that gay men and women can successfully change their sexual orientation — a cure for homosexuality. Their latest joint effort to sell their claims has met with unsurprising hostility, and London Mayor Boris Johnson yesterday put a halt to their plan to cover the city’s buses with the slogan “Not gay! Ex-gay, post-gay and proud. Get over it!”
As I noted on Ex-Gay Watch, to be taken seriously, they must also battle this week’s news that Robert Spitzer, the US psychiatrist behind a 2001 study supporting ex-gay therapy, has retracted his findings. A major plank in the ex-gay argument (although it had been routinely debunked for years by all except the ex-gays who relied on it for propaganda) has fallen through.
And the campaign is also faced with the embarrassing fact that the professional body the British Psychodrama Association has revoked the membership of Mike Davidson, Core Issues’ director. Nevertheless, Anglican Mainstream and Core Issues surely knew their announcement would be met with calls for a ban, and they are doubtless pleased with the publicity Boris Johnson’s actions have given them. If nothing else, they will enjoy their shining moment of martyrdom.
I wrote these words just over a year ago, and I republish them to give friends and readers some idea why this non-theist continues to find meaning in the Christian Easter tradition.
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The Ash Wednesday words “From dust you came and to dust you shall return” have particular resonance for this Anglican agnostic. You only live once; you’re here and then you’re gone; therefore “turn from sin and be faithful to Christ.”
It’s a call to seize the moment, to begin a quest to make our own meaning out of life’s meaninglessness, turn away from the things that hinder us, do what we know we should do, live how we know we should live, and be as we know we should be. Why? Because we only live once. It’s our one and only shot.
I wish there were a literal resurrection and that life really were a journey towards an afterlife, but I don’t have any reason to think it is. The Lenten journey — from Ash Wednesday’s brutal confrontation with life’s fleeting nature, through the agony of Maundy Thursday and the death of Good Friday, to the resurrection of Easter Sunday — is a journey from meaninglessness to meaning, from the bare bones of existence to a life that matters.
The silly but much-cherished rule of never using the grammatical passive in writing has bred some strange notions of what exactly the passive is. To some, “passive” apparently means “any construction that twists the grammar of a sentence so badly that it sounds instinctively wrong to just about everyone.”
That would certainly seem to be the understanding of Matt Cherette’s friend Frank, who claims to have rewritten a Wikipedia article “entirely in the passive voice.” The newly edited Wiki entry for Kim Richards, star of Bravo’s reality TV show The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills was made “nearly unreadable and, at the same time, infinitely better,” Cherette said.
Problem is, most of it is not passive at all — it’s just bad grammar. Says linguist Geoff Pullum, of Language Log:
The humorist’s view of what the term “passive clause” means is apparently something like: “badly written or ungrammatical clause with faults such as inept early positioning of things that should have come later, usually with an occurrence of the copula”. Or something along those lines. It’s closer to the notion of Yoda’s syntax than it is to a characterization of the English passive.
This misconception is borne of the vilification of the passive, which means that any number of tortuous grammatical constructions are met with horrified gasps of “Passive!” Pullum (I’m a bit of a fanboy, I admit) has addressed the “no passives” fallacy time and again, such as in the article “50 Years of Stupid Grammar“; in it, he takes to task EB White and William Strunk, whose book The Elements of Style has pushed the “no passives” rule on generation after generation.
The truth is that, while the passive is frequently a poor choice, it is often a fine or even the better choice. As I summarized recently:
A good writer uses her ear rather than relying on grammatical prescriptions often invented with little regard for context. If in doubt, write it both ways — active and passive — and read them aloud. Go with what sounds natural, succinct and clear. The best construction is usually obvious.
