1. Disturbing - Trailer for the upcoming documentary "Kidnapped For Christ." American teens are abducted by their families and sent abroad to be de-gayed - in Jesus' name, of course. 2. Amusing - "Every Sperm is Sacred" from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life. This really should be the theme song for the "pro-life" movement.
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According to HuffPo, a Democratic state senator in Oklahoma has countered all this zygote personhood nonsense with a satirical measure which would make male masturbation as well as any non-procreative ejaculation a crime. Doesn't each precious squiggly-wiggly deserve protection against casual spillage? (Wet dreams, one assumes, would merely result in a fine and perhaps community service.) Progressive lawmaker Constance Johnson reasons that any sperm not intended to fertilize an egg is an "an action against an unborn child." What's good for the goose and all that, dontcha know.
Smelling menstrual blood in the air - as opposed to, say, the frankincense-laced aroma of nervous altar boys - Cardinal Francis George of Chicago is jumping into America's contentious contraception debate.
You remember Cardinal George. He recently compared equality advocates to the KKK. Now his focus, such as it is, has shifted elsewhere. Michael Sneed reports for the Sun-Times: In a letter earmarked to be read this weekend at all Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago, Cardinal George is throwing the gauntlet down at the Obama administration for denying Catholics religious liberty. “We cannot and will not comply with this unjust law,” states the cardinal, who is vehemently opposed to the new Obama administration rule requiring religious organizations to include contraceptive health insurance coverage. “People of faith cannot be made second-class citizens because of their religious beliefs." (Please, Your Worshipful, give us a fucking break. Has the Roman Church started paying taxes?)
The only thing Catholic leaders obsess about more than gay couples tying the knot is women's vaginas.
Sorry humanity, but Pope Benedict and his bejewelled minions are too busy funding anti-LGBT causes and anti-choice activists to feed hungry children in Third World countries. And now there's another political cause célèbre upon which church prelates can squander their time and energy (not to mention the faithful's money).
Like social conservatives, the Vatican believes that the national debate over abortion has been won - in the court of public opinion, anyway. Perhaps it has. So now these Princes of the Church and their evangelical counterparts are working diligently to enact "personhood" amendments and ban certain contraceptive pills and devices. Birth control and family planning, it seems, is the nouveau no-no.
Laurie Goodsteing at the New York Times applies foundation: (T)he nation’s Roman Catholic bishops were fully prepared for battle. Seven months earlier, they had started laying the groundwork for a major new campaign to combat what they saw as the growing threat to religious liberty, including the legalization of same-sex marriage. But the birth control mandate, issued on Jan. 20, was their Pearl Harbor. Hours after President Obama phoned to share his decision with Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of New York, who is president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the bishops’ headquarters in Washington posted on its Web site a video of Archbishop Dolan, which had been recorded the day before. “Never before,” Archbishop Dolan said, setting the tone, “has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights.” The speed and passion behind the bishops’ response reflects their growing sense of siege, and their belief that the space the Catholic church once occupied in American society and the deference it was given are gradually being curtailed by an increasingly secular culture.
It has frequently been noted that if men had to suffer the pains of childbirth, issues such as this would be, well, non-issues. Tacitus correctly observed: Experientia docet.
UPDATE: As is his wont, President Obama has offered the Religious Right a compromise. As is their wont, ultraconservatives are bitching about it.(Pictured: Cardinal Francis George, Woody Allen as Sperm)
I'm astonished that the Republican Party, having already thrown low-income families and committed same-sex couples under the election bus, would move to curry favor with the promoters of "racial purity." In a sane world, this sort of low pandering would cost them every Jewish, black, Latino, and Asian-American vote in the nation. But people that drink the Religious Right Kool-Aid apparently don't care who they rub elbows with - as long as it's not a citizen that identifies as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender - or a citizen who is desperately poor or dying from lack of medical care.
A veritable who's who of Republican luminaries will be politicking at the 2012 Conservative Political Action Conference: Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum, House Speaker John Boehner, Texas Governor Rick Perry, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, Herman there's-a-snake-in-my-pants Cain, Michele I'm-available-for-any-cabinet-post Bachmann, and of course Sarah I'll-take-whatever-position-Michele-declines Palin. But it should be noted that while these right-wing politicians are glad-handing Tea Party activists and born-again Christians, leaders of the Grand Old Party will also be hobnobbing with racist militia types and other white nationalists.
Following speeches from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Rep. Michele Bachmann, CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, founder and head of VDARE.com. VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers and is named after Virginia Dare, who is believed to be the first child of English parents born in the Americas. Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, expresses his fear of the loss of America’s white majority, blames non-white immigrants for social and economic problems and urges the Republican Party to give up on minority voters and focus on winning the white vote. He has also said that a New York City subway is the same as an Immigration and Naturalization Service waiting room, “an underworld that is almost entirely colored.”
And they still call themselves "the party of Lincoln." Ironic, no? (Editorial cartoons courtesy Mike Luckovich and John Cole.)
As you've heard, Rick Santorum won the Republican primaries in three states on Tuesday, causing social conservatives across the nation to experience innumerable orgasims. This may not be important in the grand scheme of things - but self-promoting real estate mogul Donald Trump wants us to know how hefeels about the situation. (Having just thrown his weight - half of which is rumored to be somebody else's hair - behind fellow gazillionaire Mitt Romney, this must be an embarrassing, ahem, development for him.) Frances Martel reports for Mediaite: The Donald sat down with Greta Van Susteren (of Fox News fame) to react to, among other things, Santorum’s three-for-three win last night in Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota, and was profoundly unimpressed, repeating several times that Santorum lost his Senate seat “by a record number” and suggesting he pursue a career as a lawyer, instead... He then went on to compare Santorum to a “student who gets thrown out of high school for bad marks but then wants to go to the Wharton School of Finance,” a school Trump knows quite well... His tone on the matter got increasingly aggressive, culminating in him saying “somebody beat him by tremendous numbers and all of the sudden he says he wants to be president? Give me a break!”
The wags at Talking Points Memo have spliced together their always-delicious compilation of Tuesday's shenanigans:
"When I look at the economy I think Obama can't win, but when I look at the Republicans I think he can't lose. The economy is starting to get better. The Republicans aren't." - Paul Begala
UPDATE: So how hateful are the participants at CPAC 2012? On Thursday, right-wing columnist Cal Thomas told a crowd of conservatives that MSNBC's progressive host Rachel Maddow should never have been born. Said Thomas: "I’m glad that you played the Rachel Maddow clip because I think she is the best argument in favor of her parents using contraception. I would be all for that."
Maddow, a popular lesbian commentator on the news network, has often been the target of anti-gay activists. No one at the conference condemned Thomas for his crude remarks, which isn't terribly surprising since most conservatives loathe the idea of LGBT equality. Only recently, the "Christian women" at One Million Moms - a limp limb of the AFA whose membership number is subject to dispute - demanded that retailer JC Penney fire spokesperson Ellen Degeneres because her sexual oridentation runs counter to their "values." Penney's CEO Ron Johnson essentially told the group of busybodies that they were welcome to shop elsewhere.
Perhaps Newt Gingrich will build a straights-only shopping center on the site of his proposed moon colony.
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has declared that Judge Vaughn Walker ruled correctly in his 2010 decision which said California's Proposition 8 violated the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the state's constitution. Below is a snippet from Judge Stephen Reindhardt's majority opinion:
"Proposition 8 serves no purpose, and has no effect, other than to lessen the status and dignity of gays and lesbians in California, and to officially reclassify their relationships and families as inferior to those of opposite-sex couples. The Constitution simply does not allow for laws of this sort. The People may not employ the initiative power to single out a disfavored group for unequal treatment and strip them, without a legitimate justification, of a right as important as the right to marry."
As reported by the Huffington Post: A three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that a lower court judge correctly interpreted the U.S. Constitution and Supreme Court precedents when he declared in 2010 that Proposition 8 – a response to an earlier state court decision that legalized gay marriage – was a violation of the civil rights of gays and lesbians. However, the appeals court said gay marriages cannot resume in the state until the deadline passes for Proposition 8 sponsors to appeal to a larger panel of the 9th Circuit. If such an appeal is filed, gay marriages will remain on hold until it's resolved... Backers of Proposition 8 said they would ask the Supreme Court to overturn the 9th Circuit ruling.
Of course they will. Do you suppose social conservatives ever wonder why they're always on the wrong side of history?
Tony Perkins of the odious Family Research Council just sent out a toxic email blast that duplicitously refers to the battle over Prop 8 as a "Hollywood-funded lawsuit which seeks to impose San Francisco values on the entire country."
Sometimes I regret adding ProPup's email address to this creepy Christofascist's "friends list." Still, I suppose, we must keep track of the latest fearmongering tactics devised by hate groups. Perkins continues his anal-retentive tirade:
"This ruling substitutes judicial tyranny for the will of the people, who in the majority of states have amended their constitutions, as California did, to preserve marriage as the union of one man and one woman. However, we remain confident that in the end, the Supreme Court will reject the absurd argument that the authors of our Constitution created or even implied a 'right' to homosexual 'marriage,' and will instead uphold the right of the people to govern themselves."
That sound of wailing and gnashing teeth you hear is coming from anti-gay bigots on the West Coast ...
It appears that Washington will become the seventh state to allow same-sex nuptials, following in the footsteps of Iowa, New York, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut - not to mention the forward-thinking District of Columbia. On VerdictJustia.com, Joanna Grossman, law professor at Hoffstra University, reports that Marriage Equality is all but assured for committed gay and lesbian couples living in the Evergreen State: The state senate passed Bill 6239, by a vote of 28-21. That bill would repeal an existing statutory ban on same-sex marriage and replace it with an explicit authorization of such marriages. The state’s house of representatives is expected to pass the bill by a wide margin, and the state’s governor, Christine Gregoire, has stated publicly that she will sign the bill... (O)ne might have predicted that older legislators would have had to be gradually replaced with younger ones, for the legislature to accept same-sex marriage. (Young people are dramatically more likely to support same-sex marriage than older ones, regardless of political affiliation.) That Washington State was able to embrace same-sex marriage now is thus surprising, as well as heartening. Meanwhile, same-sex marriage bills are working their way through a variety of other state legislatures, including New Jersey’s and Maryland’s. Same-sex marriage is an inevitable, eventual reality. But as in a game of Othello, the chips are starting to flip. Polls show ever-growing support for same-sex marriage, and even deeply entrenched opposition may dissipate sooner than we thought.
America's anti-equality forces, hopped up on hate, are coiled and ready to strike. From USA Today: Washington's bill may be challenged by opponents, who are expected to make a push to have the question of same-sex marriage put on the ballot in November, Murray said. Pastor Joe Fuiten, one of the leaders of a campaign for a referendum that would overturn the bill, said he and others oppose the measure because it would change the definition of marriage and affect what children are taught in schools... Fuiten said the opponents' camp in Washington is made up of about 40 organizations...
Let's take a look at one of those anti-gay hate groups. Like the Southern Policy Law Center, The Progressive Puppy only uses the word "haters" to describe individuals, advocacy groups, or religious denominations that knowingly lie in order to smear LGBT citizens. (Examples: Maggie Gallagher and Brian Brown of NOM are haters. OK Rep. Sally Kern is a hater. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is a hater. The Two Ricks, Perry and Santorum, are haters. Donald and Tim Wildmon are father/son tag team haters. The leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention are haters.) These homobigots realize that they're spreading misinformation about committed same-sex couples. They are aware that they're breaking the 9th Commandment by bearing false witness against their neighbors, but they do this willingly for two reasons: One, they believe in the old adage; "The ends justify the means." And secondly, perhaps more to the point, seasoned propagandists and Religious Right zealots earn BIG paychecks by fleecing their sheeple. Fair-minded Americans shouldn't expect them to give up those cash cows anytime soon.
There are few more mean-spirited and deceitful anti-equality orgs in the country than Washington's Family Policy Institute, led by homo-obsessed Christian extremist Joseph Backholm (picture above). FPIW squandered $200,000 of its donors' hard-earned money to defeat Referendum 71, which merely added a few basic civil rights to domestic partnerships. The referendum passed by a wide majority.
Carlos Maza writes on Equality Matters: Although FPIW presents itself as a typical “pro-family” organization, the group openly promotes anti-gay propaganda has ties to some of the country’s most notorious anti-gay hate groups. On its website, FPIW offers visitors a number of “Marriage Legislation Resources” explaining “why you should care” about the threat posed by marriage equality. The page links to a number of documents containing typical anti-equality talking points, including a list of classic horror stories about gay marriage and religious liberty. Also included in the “Resources” page is an article by George Dent – Professor of Law at Case Western Reserve University – titled “No Difference?: An Analysis Of Same-Sex Parenting.” The article contains a number of anti-gay smears, including the myth that homosexuals molest children at higher rates than heterosexuals. (Below are a few sickening blurbs from that pdf document:)
The claim that living with a same-sex couple does not affect a child’s sexuality is implausible. It would be surprising indeed if children’s own sexual identities were unaffected by the sexual identities of their parents. (This assertion is really ignorant. Gay and lesbian youngsters of my generation - and I blush to admit I'm referring to the sixties - were all raised by moms and dads in a traditional family structure. So why didn't our folks' heterosexuality make us straight?) The tendency of male homosexual acts to spread disease may help explain the revulsion many people feel about them. Lesbians also suffer high rates of certain diseases and drug abuse. Homosexuals also have higher rates of suicide, mental illness, and drug and substance abuse. (All of these spurious claims are linked to a discredited researcher/clinician named Paul Cameron who was thrown out of the American Psychological Association and the American Sociological Association for his unceasing ethical violations and for misrepresenting the findings of legitimate scientists.) Every child raised by a gay male couple has at least one unrelated male adult in the home. There is no reason to think that such a child will fare better than a child living with an unrelated heterosexual male. The high rates of child sex abuse among homosexuals and bisexuals are also a cause for concern. (This is perhaps the vilest lie of all, and anybody with an LGBT friend or family member knows it to be false.)
Thanks to the efforts Christian conservatives, the abuse never stops.
In One Town's War On Gay Teens, Rolling Stone Magazine offers an in-depth look at the Anoka-Hennepin School District (Republican Michele Bachmann's beloved alma hater mater) and how religion-fueled bullying, cavalierly dismissed by board members and ultraconservative educators, leads to the suicides of so many LGBTQ youngsters. In the midst of these sadly preventable tragedies (and the relentless bullying that preceded them), a handful of students had attempted to form a Gay-Straight Alliance Club - but of course that idea was shot down by local pastors and school administrators. From there, circumstances quickly deteriorated ...
Sabrina Rubin Erderly writes in the article: Sam's death lit the fuse of a suicide epidemic that would take the lives of nine local students in under two years, a rate so high that child psychologist Dan Reidenberg, executive director of the Minnesota-based Suicide Awareness Voices of Education, declared the Anoka-Hennepin school district the site of a "suicide cluster," adding that the crisis might hold an element of contagion... At churches like First Baptist Church of Anoka, parishioners believe that homosexuality is a form of mental illness caused by family dysfunction, childhood trauma and exposure to pornography – a perversion curable through intensive therapy. It's a point of view shared by their congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who has called homosexuality a form of "sexual dysfunction" that amounts to "personal enslavement."
Erderly observes that when the district's sex-ed curriculum was being considered in 1994, born-again evangelicals infiltrated the review committee and decreed that tolerance for students who identified as gay was "an insidious means of promoting homosexuality." Sanctimonious and inflexible, the decision-makers at Anoka-Hennepin devised the district's now-infamous "No Homo Promo" policy, which effectively paints targets on the backs of LGBTQ kids and provides anti-gay bullies with tacit encouragement and scripture-based motivations.
In response to the actions of this tight-knit community, the Southern Poverty Law Center and National Center for Lesbian Rights have filed a lawsuit on behalf of five students, alleging that the current policies on gay, lesbian, and transgender teens are not only discriminatory but also foster an environment of hatred and prejudice. "The Department of Justice has begun a civil rights investigation as well. The Anoka-Hennepin school district declined to comment on any specific incidences but denies any discrimination..." (That's what holy hypocrites do. They deny their bigotry.)
In situations like this, the worst offenders can usually be found spitting venom from behind pulpits or trumpeting propaganda beneath the GOP's circus tent. As progressives know, politics these days - particularly Republican politics - are so intertwined with religious dogma that the two are virtually indistinguishable. Notes Erderly: Though Bachmann doesn't live within Anoka-Hennepin's boundaries anymore, she has a dowdier doppelgänger there in the form of anti-gay crusader Barb Anderson... Her agenda mimics that of Focus on the Family (including) promoting prayer in public spaces, "defending marriage" by lobbying for anti-gay legislation, and fighting gay tolerance in public schools under the guise of preserving parental authority... The policy became unofficially known as "No Homo Promo" and passed unannounced to parents and unpublished in the policy handbooks; most teachers were told about it by their principals. Teachers say it had a chilling effect and they became concerned about mentioning gays in any context. Discussion of homosexuality gradually disappeared from classes. "If you can't talk about it in any context, which is how teachers interpret district policies, kids internalize that to mean that being gay must be so shameful and wrong," says Anoka High School teacher Mary Jo Merrick-Lockett. "And that has created a climate of fear and repression and harassment." (I hope you'll take the time to read the entire piece.)
There are few things more despicable than religious zealots who loathe gay, lesbian, bisexual and non-gender normative youths so much that they gleefully set the stage for ostracization, verbal harassment, and physical assault. Then they sit back and enjoy the Theatre of Suicides they've produced and directed. This they do in Jesus' name - or so they delude themselves into believing.
Pictured Top: Anoka-Hennepin School Superintendent Dennis Carlson, editorial cartoon courtesy Adam Zyglis Pictured Middle: Homobigot Barb Anderson and Michele Bachmann caricature via Donkey Hotey @ Flickr
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