Welcome the Franken Family
They had only read books that had described families that were quite clearly altogether different than clan Franken. Those books were usually the history books that described a less enlightened age when family units were morphologically the same and would suffer from a bland longevity wherein family units stayed together for decades.
That was the time before researchers had discovered that true satisfaction could only be discovered in a rotating pleroma of family members.
The Franken’s were just such an example of such a family. Gathered around the table for the Martin Luther King Holiday the Franken’s were recognized throughout the community as being the poster children for what destiny had always intended for the family to be. Father Franken (Shelby) was born with two left arms but due to the work of the Handicapper General of the United States (a new cabinet position established in 3066) he had risen to be a professional athlete and Captain on a all right-handed girls volleyball team.
While during his time on the Volleyball team, Shelby had met, wooed, and finally had a child with Terry. Terry, standing 4′ 2″ was one of the stars of the Sarasota Spikes — a team which was a member of the multigenerational, multigendered, multiracial “National Organization Uniting Volleyballers Each Advancing Uniformity (NOVEAU).” The league was not so constricted so as to compete only in Volleyball. Many years they would spend half the season competing against an All-Start Rugby team from the United Arab Emirates — who of course had ceased being uniquely Arab centuries ago. Terry made the team because of the Handicapper General’s rules that Volleyball teams were required to have an equal number of people under 5 feet as they had people playing for them who were over 6 feet.
Shelby and Terry didn’t particularly like each other when they first met, but on the one weekend a year where they were required, by league rules to cohabitate with one another, they discovered they disliked each other less than they disliked everyone else on the team. As such true love was inevitable.
Shelby’s original last name was Fran. Terry’s original last name was Kenn. As such their “married” name was “Franken.”
Of course, Shelby and Terry were never really married. Marriage was one of those ancient vestiges from “the way things used to be.” However, they did have children. Turns out that both Shelby and Terry were quite fertile. Shelby ended up birthing 3 of the children, while Terry birthed four of the children. Neither Shelby, nor Terry, were certain who the original sperm donators of their children were but as that was a custom long disregarded neither one cared.
Naturally, other children had been adopted by Shelby and Terry. Indeed, there were times when the joke was that there were no children who weren’t adopted by Shelby and Terry — such was their magnificent generosity. Shelby and Terry loved all children the same, yet despite all this love Shelby and Terry had been taken to court several times by children unknown to them claiming that they had a need that Shelby and Terry didn’t meet, and as such Shelby and Terry were involved in child abuse. Fortunately, on these cases the US Handicapper General would often step in to rescue Shelby and Terry’s good name by writing a check from the US Government for the well being of the children bring suit in the name of Shelby and Terry Franken.
Five of the “biological” children were vertically challenged like Terry. Three of the seven were born with two left hands. Two of them (Norm and Norma) were miserable birth defects being neither short nor blessed with the absence of right arms. Despite these birth defects Norm and Norma were treated as part of the family.
In later years Norm and Norma made up for their birth defects by having children together. When that happened they were never considered abnormal again.
It should be noted here that Shelby and Terry had not been the only parents of this anti-family family. The whole Volleyball team had rotated in out of the bedroom that had been originally claimed by Shelby and Terry. One of the things that made the Franken Family so admired was that it was so undefinable. Even the children didn’t know completely what it meant to be a member of the Franken Family.
One thing that the whole family had in common was the same pigment skin color. One of the requirement of NOVEAU was that pigment be of a very particularly mottled character. In such a fashion NOVEAU reasoned that they could broaden their appeal while at the same time serving as an example of the necessity for all colors to bleed into one. Indeed, so strict was the NOVEAU League on this rule that any fan attending a game also had to have mottled skin pigment.
One thing that NOVEAU emphasized was the elimination of distinctions since distinctions were the reason for all disharmony and hard feelings in the world. This policy explained why NOVEAU was not just about volleyball. Indeed, anyone attending a NOVEAU match were not exactly sure just what they would be spectators of. Sometimes, it was certain to be Volleyball, while at other times it could be rugby, shuttlecock, darts, or fencing, or even some combination of all the above. At those times the rules that would be followed were called “Watterson-ball” rules, named after the first President of the League — Bill Watterson.
If they had lived in 2020 Shelby and Terry and the children would have been called “Cross-dressers” but since all distinctions everywhere had been eliminated there was no way to know what cross-dressing would look like. Shelby enjoyed the skorts while Terry was a big fan of the Kilt. (They used to call them “Scottish Kilts”) but the whole notion of “Scott” had long been lost.
Being stars in the NOVEAU league Shelby and Terry traveled extensively and they were constantly amazed to occasionally come across locations where distinctions still existed. These poor people lived as social outcasts considered as the derelicts of society. Despite all the global and local peer pressure these offscourings of the planet marshalled on determined that the now obsolete categories of gender, race, ethnicity, and intelligence mattered.
Shelby and Terry were of course “Christians,” though they often commented to one another that they didn’t see much difference between themselves and the other members of their Volleyball team who were not “Christians.” It certainly wasn’t something that anybody spent any time talking about. After all, if faith has to know its place, and the place for faith certainly wasn’t on a table tennis court.
Shelby and Terry had learned their faith from an early age. They had been dedicated as infants and from the tenderest of years they had been members of “Most Conservative Presbyterian Church Possible in the World (MCPCP)” There they were catechized how God found it blasphemous to even think in terms of gender, age, race, intellect, or ability. Before they could speak they were taught that being a Christian means being saved from nature and entering into the grace world where the carnal distinctions invented by man are forever eliminated into an ocean of God’s great undiscriminating love for everything and everyone.
Indeed, for Shelby and Terry their Christian faith meant everything to them, although they had a hard time understanding how there was a time when Christians would have condemned Shelby and Terry for being not true to Christ or the Christian faith just because they were intersexed queers who were pressing the Crown Rights of King Jesus to eliminate antiquated notions of marriage, family, nation, gender, race, intelligence, and age.
Still, Shelby and Terry just knew in their hearts that they were doing the King’s work and they were resolved that together via their work with NOVEAU, they would stamp out the remaining bigotry that remained in this sin sick world of God blaspheming distinctions.
Andy Sandlin says; “Christianity Erases Racial Identity.” Don’t be like Andy
“Racial identity is incompatible w/ the Christian Gospel. The Gospel was created partly to overcome racial identity. The Gospel was created to forge religious identity.”
Andy Sandlin
1.) Sentence #1 explains thus why Jesus had to be descended from David.
2.) Is Jesus, who is now at the Right hand of the Father, no longer to be referred to as “The Lion of the Tribe of JUDAH?”
3.) The Gospel was created in order so that the Ethiopian could no longer be used hypothetically as one who could not change his skin?
4.) How can it possibly be the case that given this view that Christianity is not pure on Gnosticism? Seems the Manicheans were correct after all.
5.) More of the modern Gospel that teaches that grace destroys nature. Once you love yourself some Jeebus you no longer are “Red or Yellow, Black or White, because after all you’re all the same in God’s sight.”
6.) Since the Gospel was forged to create religious identity clearly we can also do away with biological gender identity since it must be the case that if the Gospel was created to overcome racial identity it must also be the case whereupon the Gospel was created to over come gender identity.
And he, as well as those who share this opinion, are not that uncommon among those reputed to be pillars in the Church.
Dr. Andrew Sandlin’s Warning About the Second Coming of Lincolnian Nationalism
I will speak only for myself that this has never been my vision of Christian Nationalism and that in point of fact any Christian Nationalism that would be “presided over largely by concentrated political order,” could not be in any way taken as a serious establishment of Christian Nationalism.
It seems the Boomers like Sandlin have this fixated image in their head that all us Christian Nationalists desire the second coming of the Abraham Lincoln’s Nationalizing of America. It is just asinine that any Christian would have to say to Andy, “No, Andy, I do not desire the second coming of Lincoln’s Nationalism. How could you be so stupid to think I would want that?”
Oh sure… there are some crackpots around who wet their pants over visions of some kind of version of Lincoln’s Marxists.
4.) Really, in my estimation, the thing that really blisters Andy’s chaps is the perfectly Biblical idea of CN “positing of an ethno-state bound together by kinship.” However, Andy is just going to have to get over this. As we have noted ad nauseum here nations are merely family writ large. Nations by their very definition have a ethnic core that cannot be negotiated w/o losing the whole concept of “nation.” Christian Nationalists merely desire that their blood informed nations (just as their blood informed family units) be defined and animated by Christian categories. There is nothing startling/shocking in this idea of Nationalism.
However, Andy has sipped from the grog that is the spirit of the age and, like Doug Wilson and so many other evangelicals who have bellied up to the bar of the zeitgeist, he and they just can’t hold his or their liquor.
Michael Hoffman Exposes Doug Wilson’s Inane Take on Israel
I don’t often make a link the center of something I post here but this is an exception.
People here, are not surprised to read me saying again that I have significant problems with Doug Wilson. I have often said that I wish I could buy Doug for what he is worth and turn around and sell him for what he thinks he is worth. The problem isn’t what Doug knows. He knows a good deal for which he should be extolled. The problem is what Doug thinks he knows but just isn’t so.
Many people take Doug as a cornucopia of encyclopedic wisdom. Those people who make Doug their “go-to guy” are themselves exercising all the wisdom of a duck flying in to land next to a decoy. There are those who will merely see envy in my observations regarding Doug. All I can say to that is that it isn’t true. Were Doug orthodox I would be doing cartwheels and being his chief cheerleader. I would urge people to move to Moscow. I would slay all those who rise up against him. But… people will say what they will all because I point our Doug’s errors and lamentable inconsistencies.
Here is a huge error of Doug’s pointed out by someone else who has done the legwork.
https://michaelhoffman.substack.com/p/churchianitys-support-for-israeli
The errors in Wilson’s thinking that are pointed out here are just embarrassing and if it was anyone else besides Wilson it would go a long way towards ruining their credibility across the board. However, Doug has gained that “Teflon” ability and so his groupies will just shrug off the truths that Michael Hoffman reveals.
Read Hoffman’s piece and let me know what you think in the comments.