“Take Me to Church” is essentially about sex, but it’s a tongue-in-cheek attack at organizations that would … well, it’s about sex and it’s about humanity, and obviously sex and humanity are incredibly tied. Sexuality, and sexual orientation – regardless of orientation – is just natural. An act of sex is one of the most human things. But an organization like the church, say, through its doctrine, would undermine humanity by successfully teaching shame about sexual orientation – that it is sinful, or that it offends God. The song is about asserting yourself and reclaiming your humanity through an act of love.
- sex is not “an act of love” or “one of the most human things”
- rhetoric like this is what denies me my humanity
- rhetoric like this is what teaches me shame about my sexuality
- when are people going to quit acting like combining sex and Church stuff is new and subversive? ’cause it ain’t.
- if you want to criticize oppressive organizations like the Church, there are so many ways you could do that
- and instead you went with this
- and in the name of being “tongue-in-cheek” and celebrating things that are already celebrated, you call me unnatural and less than human and you pat yourself on the back for it
The Ace Theist 
February 28th, 2015 at 9:11 am
I no longer remember which book it was, but I read some sort of fantasy book ages ago which had a non-human (I think a Norse-Myth-style dwarf, but I could be misremembering) go off on a pretty neat rant about how the two things most often deeply associated with human nature – “screwing and killing” – are literally the two things almost every other macroscopic species on our planet and most of the ones NOT on our planet (again, fantasy book) are just as good at – or better at – than we are.
I don’t even remember what point the character was making, beyond presumably something about humans having thoroughly skewed views about the nature of ourselves which he was probably linking in to some screed about his own species being better or something, but I do remember it was a pretty nice speech.
February 28th, 2015 at 9:57 am
Let me know if you can remember the name of that book. :)