Sum Blog 3 Westboro Baptist Church

Watching the documentary in class I could not believe how the Westboro Baptist church could do the things the do so I decided to do my blog on them. The Westboro Baptist church believes that they are the only true church to God. They have extreme beliefs on how everyone is going to hell incept for them. They teach their children to do the same and show them how to protest what the church believes is wrong. The church has isolated itself from others and discriminates against many. With doing this they are also being discriminated by others.

The major controversy with this church is how they picket soldier’s funerals. They believe that the soldiers were killed because they were doing homosexual activities and that God doesn’t like homosexual activities so he killed them. They rejoice when bad things happen to others that the church deems as bad people.  

The church is practicing all of the three B’s they have something they believe in, they have a sense of belonging and their behavior is that they will do anything for the church. The isolate themselves from society and they strongly believe that their way is they only way to be. The only group that they feel like they belong in is their group and being around people who believe in what they believe in. The whole group participates in pickets and doesn’t question the reason for picketing. To others this group may seem like a cult but to them they do not view themselves in that sense.

While Googling the Westboro Baptist Church I found a very interesting video of the women from the documentary that we watched doing a parody to a Lady Gaga song. I found this to be very interesting because they are putting their beliefs to music. 

Sum Blog 2 Gender

Just like anything else in society we have placed gender in to two boxes, male and female, based on biological sex. We learned that sex is based on the biology of the person what bits they were born with and that gender is the personal traits that are attached to being either male or female. Before you are even born you are placed into these boxes and are socially constructed to act the part of that gender. You are born in to the roles that society wants you to act out.

Boys are expected to like the color blue, play rough and to not show emotions. Girls are expected to like the color pink, play nicely and to be emotional. The color schem starts right from birth if you are a boy you are put into a blue blanket and if you are a girl you are put into a pink blanket. As a side not when my brother was born the hospital ran out of blue blankets and they ended up having to put him in a pink blanket. Since we are programed that pink is for girls people would say to mom “oh what a cute girl you have” the first few she would correct then after a while she would just say “yea isn't she.” This goes to show that we base the sex/gender on the color of the blanket. Once we are categorized we are then programmed to “do gender”

When we run into people who do not fit these categories we become confused. If someone is ambiguous, meaning there are no indications to what sex/gender they are, we try to put them into the male/female categories. We want everyone to fit perfectly in the image that we have of how things should be.

Recently I came across and add for push-up bras and since I don’t want to ruin the add I am going to end my discussion here and let you watch for yourself and see what you think.

SumBlog1

In this first part of class we have been learning about race, class and ethnicity. To start I will be giving the definition of each from what Professor Berry has told us. For race we were given to definitions one is a way to categorize based on biological traits: this to me means that we are being categorized by what we look like. The second definition is 'race' the socially constructed category of people who share biologically transmitted traits that members of society consider important: this is also dealing with how we look and it is that society places people in boxes that fit the color of their skin. The second term is class which is defined as a system of stratification based on achievement: this is to say that a person is born into a class and they can work their way up or not work and move down. as a society we look at what a person is 'worth' and place them in a box. The last term that I will describe is ethnicity which is a shared cultural heritage this is shared ancestry, language and traditions. People who come from the same background share the same ethnicity and if someones ethnicity is different they are put into a separate box.
As you can see my main thing about society is that it places people in particular boxes. Society views white, middle class and English speaking people to be the majority and if someone is different we place them in a box and look down on them. In the intro it talked about poor people and how we look down on them and when we do help them we place them in parts of town that no one wants to live and we don't give them the means to move up in the world. Before that it was black people it took many years for African Americans to have the same rights as the majority(ex. Whites)
Thinking about how we as a society base our opinions on if someone is the same or different made me think of the song People are Strange original by The Doors but I like the Twiztid version. This video talks about how the strange are looked down upon and forgotten about.