Fuck the Bible Belt (and wear a condom when you do); Why can't we learn from their mistakes?

As you can see from this Wikipedia-borrowed map, if Florida is America's dick, the Bible Belt is like our very own version of the clap.

In what began as a passing effort to back up my long-held belief that America's Bible Belt represents a haven for ignorance, intolerance, and backward thinking*, a few weeks back I casually searched the internet for the rates of STIs in the U.S. by state.

This seemed like the perfect starting place to see how strongly the numbers showed the logically-obvious correlation between the Christian fundamentalist stance against contraception and comprehensive sex education and potentially higher rates of sexually transmitted infections. Here's what I found:

As of 2009, the top 5 states by rate of infection by STD (Source)

Syphilis:

1. Louisiana

2. Georgia

3. Arkansas

4. Alabama

5. Mississippi

Chlamydia:

1. Mississippi

2. Alaska

3. Louisiana

4. South Carolina

5. Alabama

Gonorrhea:

1. Mississippi

2. Louisiana

3. South Carolina

4. Alabama

5. Arkansas

As you can plainly see, I was not off the mark. In fact, if you combine these 3 lists into a composite of the top 5 most-infected states, you come up with this:

Most STI-ridden States

1. Louisiana

2. Mississippi

3. Alabama

4. Arkansas

5. South Carolina

Using polling data from Gallup from 2008 (as close in date as I could conveniently find to the 2009 U.S. STI data), I now present you with a list of the top 5 most religious states in the U.S. from the same time period:

"Most Religious" States

1. Mississippi

2. Alabama

3. South Carolina

4. Tennessee

5. Louisiana & Arkansas (tie)

Look familiar? Tennessee is the only of these five "most religious" states that does not also appear in the top 5 list for rates of sexually transmitted infection (though they did crack the top 10 in both syphilis and chlamydia).

None of this was at all shocking to me, of course, but it's always nice to see the data back you up. So why, then, do I feel worse than when I first thought about this? Why, instead, am I just pissed off?

I'm pissed because, rather than heeding the warnings stats like these provide, or listening to the experts who analyze them for a living, in 2012 some states are STILL pushing for abstinence-only in their schools. My home state of Wisconsin, for one, took a massive, Bible-Beltian step backward, spurning its progress-minded citizens and passing legislation instituting abstinence-only sex education in its schools.

I first read about an abstinence-only bill that was moving forward in Utah, posting the article on Facebook and commenting that I was disgusted to see such a thing even being discussed in 2012. This is not to say I don't expect this kind of bogus shit from Utah. Mormons are as anti-progress (at least in the social realm) and shortsighted as their born-again and Baptist brethren in the Southeast, but their governor vetoed the bill.

A day or two later I learned this was also going on in Wisconsin, and Gov. Scott Walker is likely to sign the bill (already passed by the state Assembly) into law soon. I had no idea this kind of thing was on the radar there, and it made me nauseous. Despite knowing things had gotten pretty fucked up since Walker and the Republicans in the state senate took over, I clung to some naive notion that somehow, in Wisconsin, even religious Republicans weren't that fucking stupid.

I found out the goings-on in Wisco from my brother's facebook status, some of which I pasted below.

ABSTINENCE ONLY? DO YOU REALLY THINK THAT'S GOING TO FLY? NOT EVERYONE SUBSCRIBES TO YOUR RETARDED RELIGIOUS BELIEFS! GOD ISN'T REAL! HE IS A JOKE, AND THEREFORE HIS IDEAS SHOULD NOT INFLUENCE THE GOVERNMENT OF ANYONE. IF YOU COULD PULL YOUR HEADS OUT OF YOUR SELF-RIGHTEOUS HYPOCRITICAL ASSES FOR ONE SECOND YOU'D SEE HOW STUPID THAT IS, AND AGAINST THE VERY NATURE OF HUMANS. YOUR KIDS ARE GOING TO HAVE A SEX DRIVE, AND IT IS MENTAL ABUSE TO MAKE THEM THINK THAT THERE IS SOMETHING SHAMEFUL ABOUT IT. ABSTINENCE ONLY IS GOING TO LEAVE OUT CRITICAL PIECES OF INFORMATION THAT YOUR KIDS NEED, BECAUSE THEY ARE GOING TO HAVE THE DESIRE FOR SEX WHETHER YOU MAKE THEM THINK IT'S SINFUL OR NOT. YOU ARE STUPID PEOPLE

Granted, this is a rant, but you won't find me criticizing any of it. He's spot on in his points, if over-the-top in tone, and he cuts to the heart of solving this as a social issue. Stop pandering to religion.

We need to come together to see that science, logic, reason, and facts are made the basis of our public policy, rather than the dusty, inapt pages of the Bible, Koran, Torah or any other antiquated, mystical text. And no, there is not room for both. In the public realm, in order to continue improving rather than stagnating and falling backwards, we can't waste time by coddling religion, especially ones that would have us unhealthily ignore and repress our sexuality**.

J. Scott

*- By no means do I wish to suggest these qualities are absent elsewhere in the U.S. or abroad, but I find this region particularly representative of the greater worldwide problem of religious zealotry.

**- To say nothing of the many other ways religion holds us back.

Late Twentieth & Early Twenty-First Century Nomad: Thoughts on the word Home by a Guy who's had too many to remember

The above image, which just happens to be among my very favorite, was captured when I was in the fifth grade or so--some 15 years ago as I write--and it pictures me (far right) with two of my favorite people. Jake (left) is my younger brother and Brandon (center in the Green Bay Packers shirt, Go Pack) is my best friend dating back to our days at North Hudson Elementary. When looking at this photo, though, I'd say the strongest feeling I get is a sense of home. It was taken at my grandparents duplex apartment in North Hudson, WI, a very small town in west-central Wisconsin. This is just one of the many, many buildings I've called home, but it's the only of those places that I now think of when I consider the term "home."

That apartment was not where my grandparents lived when I was born (not that I'd have remembered) and they lived in several other places before passing away as residents of nursing homes, but it was the place they lived the longest while I knew them. In addition, I stayed there with them, periodically at first and then more and more consistently as I grew older, splitting time living with them and my parents who, for all their moving, only twice for very brief periods left the greater area of Hudson, WI, where I managed to attend all but a single semester of my K-12 education. Because my parents rarely lived in the same rented house, apartment, or trailer home for more than a year growing up, this apartment on Eighth Street serves as a primary centering point for my childhood memories.

Growing up, our family was perpetually on shaky financial grounds. My parents each bounced between low-paying jobs, and the combination of shitty wages, bad spending (exacerbated by my mother's gambling), and two kids strained my parents well beyond their means at all times. For this reason, we were forced to relocate constantly on a seemingly endless cycle of not being able to afford our rent, finding something cheaper (or staying with the grandparents until we could afford something cheaper), making some very minimal progress to "get ahead" and relocating to a nicer place, only to once again fall behind, failing to pay the rent and having to go back to something cheaper yet again.

It happened for slightly different reasons each time. Sometimes my dad would lose a job, other times my mom would quit hers, and sometimes it was just shitty luck (wrong bill, wrong time, etc.), but it was always something. In all, working on a few occasions with my mom and brother to try and remember all the places I've lived in western Wisconsin, I've come up with around 25 apartments, duplexes, triplexes, condos, trailer homes, and houses, and I am currently working on mapping each one. Sometimes we lived in the same apartment complex but a different unit, other times in the same trailer park but in a different trailer, etc. and I counted these separately, but that's still considerably more than average. (The average American moves 11.7 times in their lifetime). By the time I was 15, I felt like I'd hauled more shit in my life than most professional movers.

Since living with my parents in Wisconsin as a child, of course, I've also lived in a few other places. While attending the University of Minnesota and after, for a total of five years, I lived in Minneapolis. For each of those years I lived in a different place. Freshman year I lived in a dorm, Sophomore year I lived in a nice, too-expensive apartment near campus, Junior year I lived in a cheaper apartment not far from there, and the year I eventually left school without graduating despite wasting a shit-ton of money I lived in a house a short distance from campus. The year after that, at first unemployed and eventually accepting a banking job at Wells Fargo*, I lived in an apartment not far from the previous year's house.

Accepting that working at Wells Fargo was never going to work for me, I resigned myself to returning to an industry I'd worked in the previous two summers--roofing sales. I called in sick to WF knowing it would result in termination because of a growing pile of call-ins, latenesses, and customer and coworker complaints of smelling like alcohol from the late nights of drinking to forget I'd become a banker. I walked in knowing I was getting fired and got a chance to tell the branch manager, "This is the easiest firing you'll ever have in your whole life. I could not be more excited at the prospect of not working here any more." We proceeded to bullshit about my future plans, as well as sports and chicks, for over twenty minutes.

I didn't care because I'd hopped on board as a salesman for a roofing company called CMR Construction. Not even the franchise owner knew what the CMR stood for, by the way. "Make something up if a customer asks," he said. That should tell you what you need to know about that industry. This job was in Midland, TX and it took me all of 22 days to realize how much that place sucked. My roommates--roof salesman as well--and I bailed on west Texas for the monumentally better Denver, CO because we'd heard a massive hailstorm had created a lot of work in the area for ICs like ourselves. Without a specific promise of a job, but knowing the industry was such that anyone with experience could get hired by any company, once we'd made up our minds we couldn't even wait until morning to bail on the tumbleweeds and pump jacks for mountain views and architecture.

While living in Denver I flew home for my birthday and wound up having surgery to remove my gall bladder, which had become infected and threatened to burst. I missed my return flight because of the surgery and ensuing recovery, and shortly after I left the hospital I was fortunate enough to become infected with H1N1 flu, which, as everyone remembers, is a particularly shitty kind of flu to get. Anyway, this happened in October and I didn't make it back to the Denver area until late February. Then, on April 1st, a hailstorm hit Chicago. I lived there, working the storm for yet another roofing company, from April 3rd through August of 2010 before leaving that company and the roofing industry behind yet again.

At that point I lived with my parents in Wisconsin again for a few months before securing my present job here in California through my brother and moving out here in February of last year. Thus far I love it in SoCal, but I'm not yet at the point of seeing myself in any one place forever. For all of the stress it caused me growing up, and the embarrassment of the many, "Oh, I'm sorry, I forgot to tell you we moved... again," conversations with friends, I've come to appreciate my unusual circumstance for its novelty and as a source of additional perspective. I somewhat like being able to say, at 26, that I've lived in approximately 40 dwellings in more than ten cities and six states. Beyond that, I like knowing that I'll certainly be adding to those numbers in my lifetime.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had that duplex apartment on Eighth Street in North Hudson, Wisconsin as a consistent place to bring my friends and to get together with family. I hope I never forget playing in the now-developed forest that once stood behind that apartment or the once-open adjacent lot that is now a road and row of houses. I use these images and memories to ground me and to know that, no matter where I am, where I live or where I'm going next, I already have a home.

~Jeff N.

*The job that caused me to start smoking weed everyday because they always yelled at me for smelling like booze from my previous night's drinking. How else was I going to get myself through working for such a soulless fucking entity? Certainly not without being fucked up on something.