Here are a couple of parodies of that National Organization for [Hetero] Marriage ad. The first one’s great. The second one is funny but… weird.

Via Kottke, here are some vintage DHARMA Initiative ads from the 1970s, and here’s a trailer for an upcoming movie that looks pretty cool.

Makes me think of this.

Since I’m easily susceptible to guilt, religious food restrictions bring up complicated issues for me.

We’re in the middle of Passover right now. For some reason I’ve been more conscious about the holiday this year. I’ve been trying harder to observe the dietary laws of Passover than in the recent past.

When I was a kid, it was easy — I had no choice. My mom made my lunch every day, and I’d open up my lunchbox or brown paper bag at school to find tunafish on matzoh, or peanut butter and jelly on maztoh, or something similarly depressing. I couldn’t wait to get through the holiday so I could eat regular bread again. Even when I was a teenager and started to make my own lunch, I obeyed, because I was living under my parents’ roof.

When I got to college I mostly stopped observing. Then one year during law school I decided to observe for the whole eight days. Since that year I haven’t been particularly observant. I often start out intending to avoid forbidden foods, but I slip up because I like them too much. And once I slip up, I decide, well, since I’ve broken the laws of Passover, there’s no point in continuing.

But this year I’ve been paying more attention to it. I’ve slipped up a few times, but I’m still continuing to try.

Why? After all, I don’t believe in God. I didn’t affirmatively choose not to believe; it’s just that I realized one day that it makes no sense to me that there would be a God. But religious belief is not the only thing that binds Jews together. To me, my Judaism is a connection to my heritage, to my culture, to the great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents whom I never knew, to the distant relatives who died in the Holocaust.

But since I don’t think I’m going to suffer spiritual punishment if I disobey the dietary laws, it’s hard to get myself to stick to them.

One thing that makes the traditional observance of Passover so difficult is that the prohibition goes beyond leavened bread: corn, rice, and beans or other legumes are also forbidden. Since you can’t eat corn, nothing containing corn starch or high fructose corn syrup is allowed, either. I’ve often wondered why this was the case, so yesterday I googled why can’t you eat rice on passover and found the answer: it’s because several hundred years ago, rabbis decreed that these things could be confused with leavened bread, so we should avoid them. It’s not biblical — it’s just traditional. That’s how you get from Exodus to not being able to drink regular Coke.

(My friend Dan blogged about this last week, but I guess I had a brain fart and forgot.)

This is silly — how can you possibly confuse HFCS with leavened bread? But we Jews like to suffer, so apparently anything that adds more annoyance to our daily life is good as long as it makes us think about God. And in an economy where it’s nearly impossible to avoid food products containing HFCS, the opportunties for suffering abound. The whole point of the holiday — celebrating the escape from slavery — is lost, because we’re too busy avoiding certain foods. Of course, it also increases the number of opportunities to be reminded that it’s Passover, which I guess is a good thing, but it makes for a not very fun occasion. So I’ve given myself permission to eat rice and corn, although I still tell myself it’s wrong.

My own Jewish dietary rules have no rhyme or reason to them. Much of it comes from upbringing. For instance, even though pig isn’t kosher and you’re not supposed to mix meat and dairy, I’m okay with eating bacon cheeseburgers, because my parents eat them occasionally. I’m generally okay with eating sausage if I’m out at brunch somewhere. We never ate bacon or sausage at home growing up, but we sometimes ate them at restaurants. As for pork and ham — we never ate those, at home or elsewhere. I still feel uncomfortable eating pork, and I feel exceptionally uncomfortable eating ham. I ate ham for the first time a few years ago, and that’s only because they were out of sliced turkey at the grocery store and I was curious. It tasted good but I haven’t had it since.

Matt can’t make any sense of my reasons, and neither can I. Why are bacon or sausage okay but not pork or ham? And why is ham worse than pork? Because these are the same rules my parents seemed to follow when I was growing up. It makes no sense, but it’s how I was raised.

Tradition!