G. Frink's

A young child's unbearable, inescapable suffering creates Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID).

To survive, the child separates the pain into different personalities, usually each with separate memories.

DID's origin in almost inexpressible pain makes Showtime's dark comedy United States of Tara something of a paradox.

How can civilized people laugh at the consequences of extreme suffering -- suffering which often involves both long-term sexual abuse and torture?

While deciding, let's use the following video to look more closely at DID:

Or view this more lyrical and far more disturbing video.

Now preview the first episode of "United States of Tara" here, entering the password "tara" when prompted.

Shall we laugh at Diablo Cody's dark comedy, or at least give it a chance to prove itself?

Showtime's United States of Tara is written by Academy Award winner Diablo Cody.

The dark-comic show's central character is Tara.

Tara suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), and when stressed cycles with comic effect between her four personalities.

The following video lyrically and with disturbing illustrative images explains DID's symptoms and origins:

Return to DID funny? Ha!

Toni Collette as Buck, Alice, Tara and T.

Tara of Showtime's dark-comic United States of Tara has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) and when stressed, cycles rapidly between her four, vocal personalities.

Screenwriter Diablo Cody plans to live-tweet her show, when it debuts on Jan. 18, and that's both a brilliant innovation and one the show needs. If she can pull it off.

Because it will, I believe, be an extraordinary challenge, even for the Academy Award winner.

The often both intellectually and emotionally intense land of Twitterettenam is likely to generate a flood of head-wrenching questions in response to a show which offers a comic representation of the life of a mother with an acute psychiatric illness. A woman with two adolescent children, a husband and a sister who all love her. Albeit often amid pain-wracked confusion.: ... [there's more] ...

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Purity ring - (c)Rlmabie

Premarital teenage virginity pledges don't delay premarital sex and do result in more unsafe sex, concluded a large, well-designed study by Janet E. Rosenbaum at the Johns Hopkins School Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Earlier, nonpartisan studies of abstinence-only sex education similarly concluded that it doesn't work.

This study compared similar pledgers and non-pledgers and did find one, telling difference, as CNN reported: ... [there's more] ...

Sunday with predictable effects, pastor Rick Warren threw a bucketful of loaded words on the waning fires of controversy which erupted from his earlier comparison of homosexuality to incest and pedophilia.

Giving his critics no credit for good faith, Warren began with a false denial of his earlier incendiary assertions and climbed a tree of polemic, concluding that those who took offense at his views were suffering from "Christophobia."

An inaugural invocation by evangelical Baptist pastor Rick Warren and call for national voluntarism isn't what Focus on the Family Action anticipated [.pdf] in the trench warfare days prior to President Elect Obama's landslide Nov. 5 victory.

Do you have visions of sugarplums and exploding Southern Babtoy Corp. game-toys dancing in your head?

It isn't too late to get a warning-never-included, problems never recorded, S. Babtoy Corp. never accepts responsiblity, this-isn't-a-game toy that uses you or your children or your grandchildren to amuse itself.

If you're a Southern Baptist, you may already have one, or several.

The Southern Baptist Convention doesn't know.

Or, official behavior says, want to know. Which pastors and staff are child predators.

The SBC studiously refuses to create, keep and maintain a database of Baptist clergy and staff who are pedophiles.

It's so much easier and inexpensive to duck responsibility and accept the collateral damage in children harmed.

Newsweek's David Walters wrote Monday:

Times are tough, even in the salvation market. After decades of growth, the nation's largest group of Protestants, the Southern Baptist Convention, is reporting losses (in church membership and recorded baptisms) for the third year in a row. Baptisms are at a 20-year low, a figure liable to put an eternity-conscious church into a severe depression.

Cutbacks at Southern Baptist seminaries and agencies are even hitting the denomination's bold, new marketing strategy designed to spread the gospel (and increase the flock) to every soul in North America by 2020. The campaign, called "God's Plan for Sharing" (Yes, GPS), includes a new image media campaign, "We Are Southern Baptists."

Yes, the Southern Baptist Convention's membership/money machine is breaking down, and the SBC leadership has another big, slick (albeit unfunded) repair plan.

While the money lasts, it is easier to leave unsolved major management and governance problems, to let internal divisions go unhealed, to earn notoriety for failing to take an obvious step against clerical pedophilia and roll out another solution seeking the success of 1954's "A million more in '54" church-growth campaign.

Mike Glenn, pastor of Brentwood Baptist Church in Nasheville, told the Tennessean about GPS:

Sometimes when things aren't working, rather than being honest, we just work the old thing harder. … Once, there was a time when these big, national campaigns would work. But those days are over. They mean well and they'll peddle this thing as hard as they can peddle it, but it's for the 1950s and 1960s, and that world is gone.

California Attorney General Jerry Brown's Prop. 8 argument appears to me to be well-grounded and prudent.

Submitted to a Candid World observes that the California Supreme Court has ruled several times that wholesale modifications of the constitutional structure cannot be accomplished by referendum.