Conservatives are so cute! At least when they try to figure out why no one likes their party. It just never occurs to them that it might be, you know, their policies. Look: conservatives like their policies. It is the party of the rich that does the work of the rich. And a bunch of Christians and racists. Conservatives don't talk about the racists for a couple of reasons. One is that it is who they are. Another is that they don't believe in racism. Except reverse racism, where the powerless make the powerful cry. But that's just part of doing the work of the rich. Let us say no more about racism! But Christians? There's something there. And Jonah Goldberg thinks he understands why Asians are not voting for the Republican Party. Back in December he wrote"The GOP: Not a Club for Christians." That's an aspirational title, because Goldberg fully admits that the Republican Party really does act like a Christian group:
I've attended dozens of conservative events where, as the speaker, I was, in effect, the guest of honor, and yet the opening invocation made no account of the fact that the guest of honor wasn't a Christian.
Now Goldberg doesn't take offense to this, because he understand that he is one of them. After all, he's the speaker. But what about a Jew or a Buddhist or a Muslim who just happened to be in the audience? He might feel like an outsider. Read more »
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) has appointed Rep. Tim Scott to fill out the remainder of Sen. Jim DeMint's term in the U.S. Senate. Mr. DeMint, you'll recall, announced his resignation recently so he could go run the Heritage Foundation and turn it into a Tea Party enclave. I'm sure the fact that the previous president of the foundation raked in over $1 million in salary versus the paltry six figures earned by a senator had absolutely nothing to do with it. As ThinkProgress notes, Mr. Scott's views on issues are virtually the same as Mr. DeMint's, and in his brief career in the House — he was first elected in 2010 — he has made some interesting news:
Proposed a bill to cut off food stamps for entire families if one member went on strike. One of the most anti-union members of Congress, Scott proposed a bill two months after entering Congress in 2011 to kick families off food stamps if one adult were participating in a strike. Scott's legislation made no exception for children or other dependents. Wanted to spend an unlimited amount of money to display Ten Commandments outside county building. When Scott was on the Charleston County Council, one of his primary issues was displaying the Ten Commandments outside the Council building. According to the Augusta Chronicle, Scott said the display "would remind council members and speakers the moral absolutes they should follow." When he was sued for violating the Constitution and a Circuit Judge's orders, Scott was nonplussed: "Whatever it costs in the pursuit of this goal (of displaying the Commandments) is worth it."
By Richard K. Barry
TV evangelist Pat Robertson has never been right about much, most recently admitting he erred in his understanding of God's message that Mitt Romney would win the election. Now he's on to his favourite rant this time of year, which is that atheists want to take Christmas away because, he says, they're miserable and want to make Christians miserable too.
Yes, Christmas is about to be taken away. Ask Bill O'Reilly if you don't believe Pat. That's another fine source of accurate news.
Anyway, here's Robertson's rant, for your holiday entertainment:
One result of the election that goes beyond just counting the votes:
Christian conservatives, for more than two decades a pivotal force in American politics, are grappling with Election Day results that repudiated their influence and suggested that the cultural tide — especially on gay issues — has shifted against them. [...] "Millions of American evangelicals are absolutely shocked by not just the presidential election, but by the entire avalanche of results that came in," R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, in Louisville, Ky., said in an interview. "It's not that our message — we think abortion is wrong, we think same-sex marriage is wrong — didn't get out. It did get out. "It's that the entire moral landscape has changed," he said. "An increasingly secularized America understands our positions, and has rejected them."
Yes, and it's about time, too.
I don't have a problem with religion and religious folk having a point of view about morals. I don't even object to them having lobbyists in Washington or state capitals to make their points to people in power. What I do not like is having religion turned into political power and Biblical tenets written into law, especially when they're used to oppress one particular group of citizens.
So if America is rejecting the "moral landscape" as it has been constructed by those that would break down the barrier between church and state, turn back the clock on women, and deny the basic rights of citizenship to the gay community, that's a good thing.
It was the end of times, it was the beginning of times
By Capt. Fogg I called God this morning after breakfast-- you don't want to talk
to him before he's had his coffee -- and I just had to ask him about the
Texas Problem. I mean, I have friends there and I'm concerned that if
he applies the Sodom and Gomorrah standard of needing ten good people to
be granted immunity from destruction, they're going to get blasted. Hell, I think the place is long overdue, but maybe my friends could be
given a warning or something. There's precedent. But
no, he says. I try to be fair and Texas has a vastly larger population
than those mud-brick slums did and I have to grade on the curve. No
problem if I only needed ten, but I figure I'd need about a million to
keep me out of smite mode what with the population explosion and all,
but one of the problems is corporate personhood. I mean, do I consider
Texaco to be a person? Is ZZ Top one person or three? (That would
count on the plus side, like Janis.) And of course I have to think
about certain Texans as perhaps counting for more than one minus point
on account of extreme douchebaggery and assholeness. I'm thinking of
certain current and former governors. I'll tell ya,
those people who insist that they're my exclusive authorized agents
really get to me and they sure as hell don't stick to anything like 15%. I don't see a dime out of any of them, not that I need it, mind you,
but it's the principle of the thing and if anyone is going to give out
the kind of conflicting and ambiguous commandments I enjoy, it's not
going to be some pencil neck twit with a comb-over like Robert Jeffress.
The man is an insult to my authority and I can't believe I created
somebody who can tell you that Obama is just like Hitler with a straight
face. Not that his face is all that straight, come to think of it, and I
have to wonder what's happened to quality control. I don't recall
having outsourced it to Dumbfuckistan like I was a Republican or
something. Anyway, sure, the dipshit is right. Mormonism is
a cult, just like any other followers of any of the other uppity pricks
who insist I gave them some kind of exclusive commission or something. Jesus? Hey, I never touched that girl and that Saul or Paul or Raul or
whoever he calls himself is full of shit. Has been since he fell off
his jackass, as if that were a coincidence. So if you believe that mierda,
you're no smarter than if you believe Joe Smith wasn't just trying to
get laid by pretending he had my private number. I don't have a private
number, as you well know. Ahem. You try taking seven billion calls a day and see what it does to your mood! Actually, I was just thinking about Texas myself this morning, 'cause I read in the paper they banned wearing those fucking "Vote the Bible" T-shirts
in polling places. They get some credit for that, but how much do I
subtract for them not stoning the cocksuckers* who insist I wrote that
pile of political shit myself. Why the hell would I ban cheeseburgers
but allow slavery? Think I'm fucking stupid? I'm thinking damnation is what I'm thinking and maybe some shitload of boiling brimstone as an amuse bouche
and fuck y'all with this rapture-crapture. It's crowded as hell here
and I closed the border a long time ago, what with Cousin Krishna
pestering the female help and cousin Wotan stinking up the john every
morning. That Ganesh is eating me out of house and home you know -- he
has an elephant stomach to go with that elephant head. Look -- I don't
need any more damn company, OK? Y'all can stay where you are and it was a
damn decent place when I gave it to you and the warranty was up a long
time ago. No deposit, no return. Live with it. Anyway,
yeah, Texas is a pain in the ass, but not the only one in your part of
the mudball planet. The way you treat each other and blame it on me has
put me off my feed and the old lady is bitching about my temper and
about how I'm not doing enough about that human infestation I started on
her otherwise perfectly nice planet and I'm thinking smite night
Fogg. I mean it. It's ass-kicking time. You either get rid of the
trash yourself, or I'll jiggle the ballot box and give you Romney and
Ryan and maybe Reverend Phelps as Secretary of State. Noah is long gone
and no stupid boat is going to save your asses this time. And by the
way, stop calling me. I'll call you, and that's all the warning you're gonna get.
________________________________
* And by the way, about that particular practice -- I don't give a shit
what you do as long as you don't do it in the road and scare the
horses. If I don't participate, it's because I don't have that
appendage -- or any other. Why the fuck would I want to look like you? What? In my image? Monkey's image, dude. Monkey's image. I told you I didn't write that book. (Cross-posted from Human Voices.)
The big news yesterday -- no, the HUGE news -- was President Obama's interview with ABC's Robin Roberts, set up specifically so that he could air his own personal views about gay people being able to marry their same-sex partners: After much soul-searching and a couple of decades of "evolving," he was finally ready to say out loud that he's all for it.
He did go on to say that it should be left to the states to decide their own policies concerning the legalities of such unions, but the die was cast, the mold was formed: a sitting president took a positive public stand, albeit a personal one, on the issue of gay marriage.
As might have been expected, the fundie leaders in the Right Wing Religiousphere took it hard. Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council was all over the airwaves protesting the president's comments. (Kudos to CNN's Soledad O'Brien, the product of mixed-race parents who married when most states outlawed such marriages, for turning an interview into a real debate, thus punching bloody holes in Perkins' many lame arguments:
Small-government advocate and current Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney came forward like the good soldier he is and said, no ifs, ands, or buts (for now) -- no, no, no to gay marriage, or even civil unions, or anything else that might require Big Government (that would be him if he wins) to step in and make more rules disregarding civil rights.
Leaders of states that probably weren't going to go Obama's way in November anyway jumped in to remind him that he was committing political suicide over this.
Some black church leaders voiced their opposition to Obama's views, sending a message that might possibly still resonate in November.
So, yes, even though his comments to Robin Roberts won't amount to a hill of beans in the legal world and won't change a thing in the states that are rabid about banning gay marriage (two days ago, North Carolina became the 30th state to ban same-sex unions), Obama's admission of his own personal feelings is the stuff dreams are made of. Both sides will see it as a world-class political haymaker.
But what made the president's comments so memorable was the fact that, while he would have preferred to sidestep this particular bombshell of an issue forever if need be, it appears it was his wife and his daughters who ultimately convinced him that, while he might be president of these United States -- an all-powerful position requiring the wisdom of Solomon and the unbiased judgment of, say, the theoretical Supreme Court -- his earlier published views on the subject were about as wrongheaded as it gets.
They talked to him about love and how it works in mysterious ways, and his daughters let him know how much it hurt them that, by his own admission, the best he could come up with was that he was still "evolving" on this particular issue.
There were many juicy quote-bites one could pull out of that interview, but this one got me right where my heart beats loudest:
You know, Malia and Sasha, they've got friends whose parents are same-sex couples. And I -- you know, there have been times where Michelle and I have been sittin' around the dinner table. And we've been talkin' and -- about their friends and their parents. And Malia and Sasha would -- it wouldn't dawn on them that somehow their friends' parents would be treated differently. It doesn't make sense to them. And -- and frankly -- that's the kind of thing that prompts -- a change of perspective. You know, not wanting to somehow explain to your child why somebody should be treated -- differently, when it comes to -- the eyes of the law.
Okay, I'm a sucker for a good dad, no matter what kind of house he lives in, so it's understandable why I might latch onto that one particular part of the conversation. But I watched the entire interview; I watched the body language and listened to the tone of voice. I saw an everyman wrestling with his ethos, not a politician striving to convince, and I rejoiced.
**********
So, okay again: It didn't hurt that Joe Biden, our beloved, wacky veep, got to gushing about his own feelings on gay marriage on Sunday's Meet the Press. The next day, The Washington Post's Dana Milbank called it a "gaffe" (a word that seems to cling to Biden as tightly as his own shadow) and the press took off running. (Note to Joe: It's far better to be gaffe-prone than to be mean-prone. So far, you're okay, man.):
The vice president said he is "absolutely comfortable" with same-sex marriage, committing the classic Washington gaffe of accidentally speaking the truth. This bit of straight talk made Obama's position — neither for nor against such unions but in an evolutionary state, not unlike the Galapagos finch — all the more untenable. On Monday, Biden took off for a campaign event in Tennessee, leaving Carney on cleanup duty. But the more Carney swabbed the mess, the more it spread.
I frankly don't get it. How exactly did Joe Biden's own personal views on gay marriage conflict with anything the president might have said about that same issue? There is no actual blending of the pair simply because they're Leaders One and Two. They aren't contractually obligated to agree personally on all issues. I didn't see it as "one-upping" the president, I saw it as Biden being Biden. Especially when he got to the part about Will and Grace. (Debra Messing, "Grace," says it's right up there in the top five moments of her life, so you see it's striking chords everywhere.)
Well, apparently even the president felt that Joe had overstepped "his skis" or some such. But publicly he's okay with it, and I get the feeling that he, like me, loves old Joe, gaffes and all. (And who wouldn't?)
Immediately after the Sunday news shows, it was out there, people were talking, and the entire White House had to grind to a halt and address the elephant in the room. Does the president support gay marriage or doesn't he? So on Wednesday, President Obama sat down with Good Morning America's Robin Roberts and talked at length about the issue he had so studiously worked to avoid:
Yes, it was calculated and ultimately political, but the essence of it, the way the president chose to address it, was as much heaven to me as it had to be hellish for his political opponents, those so intent on ousting Barack Obama they have no problem casting him as evil incarnate -- the devil himself.
I saw a man who might finally understand that there are times when it's not only essential but soul-satisfying to separate the thoughts of the person from the decisions of the presidency. That "evolution" doesn't work as a handy substitute for equivocation. And that sometimes political expedience isn't all it's cracked up to be.
My mother was Finnish-Lutheran and my father was Italian-Catholic. They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary just nine months before my mom died, and they loved each other to the end. What if the powers-that-be had arbitrarily decided that Finns and Italians couldn't marry? Or that Lutherans and Catholics couldn't marry? How different is that from deciding that blacks and whites couldn't marry or that same-sex partners couldn't marry? They're all consenting adults with the capacity to love one another, and if marriage is the desired tie that binds, it's a sad and sorry law that seeks to outlaw fidelity instead of celebrating it.
I think the president always got that. He only just now, thanks in part to the women in his life, found the cojones to say it out loud.
Don't expect me to be going over every single attack on women's rights
just because I'm writing about modern-day, 21st-century, 2012,
just-in-the-last-month attacks, which, as you might have noticed, are
escalating at such a dizzying pace we can no longer ignore the rumblings
of war.
It's ugly and it's all out there. Even Rush Limbaugh's scrubbed transcripts
of his diatribes against Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University
student who had the temerity to attempt to testify before certain
members of congress about the need for free contraception. Even
Patricia Heaton's deleted tweets about that same student (aka G-Town Gal). They're out there. They're not going away.
No, we're here today to look at the big picture: How did this latest
war of the sexes start? What was the catalyst? And what can we do to
grind it to a halt now that it's started?
The obvious answer to question number one is that it's all Obama's
fault. As a part of his health plan (the catalyst), he told insurance
companies they would have to offer contraceptive care at no cost to
women. (That would mean, for most, no co-pay.) Birth control
aids would be free and available everywhere, and since it was mandatory,
not to mention laudatory, not to mention commonsensical and a long
time coming, that was supposed to be it. End of conversation.
Ha! We wish!
President Obama's first mistake was that he thought he was taking steps
toward helping women more effectively and responsibly manage their
reproductive years, when what he was actually doing was antagonizing pissants who have been posing as Manly Men for so long they're not about to be ousted from their comfy zones.
A whole host of Catholic Bishops, pseudo-religious politicians, and paid-to-be-mean pundits jumped on the bandwagon called Control the women by denying birth control,
and weren't they surprised when the women they were so itching to
suppress wouldn't give in? A real donnybrook ensued, with everybody
weighing in, pro and con, and here we are, in the middle of it all,
coming out swinging, and if they want a war, okay, they've got one.
Some highlights:
The Susan G. Komen Foundation is taken over by a right-wing zealot
who makes it known from Day One that Planned Parenthood can kiss SGK
goodbye. Susan Komen's sister/founder helps figure out a way to do it. A huge, unprecedented fuss ensues. Right-wing zealot goes on to
greener pastures. The sister stays and apologizes -- a Pyrrhic victory that nobody feels good about.
Long probes up the vagina with cameras on the end used not as medical tools but as instruments of shame -- Zap! Gone! Battle won!
Gooey cold stuff massaged onto a bare belly so a government-issue
wand can be waved, not to detect a zygote already determined by other
methods to be there, but to establish once and for all that a woman
doesn't actually have control over her own body -- still working on it but we've got them in our sights.
Dozens of state legislatures scrambling to make laws against contraception and abortion so harsh Draco the Greek, if he were still alive, would be crying foul -- this one may take a while.
The legal issues, having some semblance of form and substance, are
easier to deal with. There are wise and learned people on our side
ready to take them on. But there's another, uglier issue and it's one
we've faced many times before. It's our old but formidable nemesis:
blind, consuming hatred toward people of our gender.
With the rise of the Tea Party and pressure from the Religious Right-to
Life-Until-It-Actually-Becomes-A-Child, fortified by resident misogynist
Rush Limbaugh and hardline Catholic men in red robes and black robes
and pullover sweater vests, the battle to enforce the reproductive
rights we've already fought long and hard for is a battle we can't
afford to lose.
The spotlight is on Rush Limbaugh at the moment, but it's Rick Santorum
we need to keep an eye on. He showed his hand when he talked about his
reaction to John F. Kennedy's 1960 speech to the Baptists, where JFK said he would fight hard for the separation of church and state.
Santorum wanted to throw up when he read that. Why? Because it's
disgusting and unforgivable that Kennedy had the chance to pave the way
for an American Pope and he didn't take it. Rick will remedy that when
he's president. And guess who will suffer the most under his reign?
The obvious goal is to make sure Rick Santorum never becomes president,
but once that threat is gone we'll still be fighting those others
working to take us down. We thought that war was over, but all we
really won, we know now, was détente.
Men (and, incredibly, other women) are fighting against those of us who
go on believing our reproductive rights are sacrosanct. Suddenly
they're coming out of the woodwork, no longer pretending that Roe v.
Wade is all that's keeping us apart. Now it's about contraception -- a
real puzzler, since birth control is the obvious remedy for unwanted
pregnancies.
Only women can incubate babies. It's a fact. If they get knocked up and
it's not a good time, the sex police want us to believe they have no one to blame but themselves. Really? What other species on the planet punishes the female for being
impregnated by a male? Birth control is a two-way street. It's
irresponsible and gutless to pretend that women did this to themselves,
and yet we're hearing it louder and clearer every day.
And why is that? Because to the people who are coming at us with the
same hoary arguments, it's not about the control of birth, it's about
the control of sex. That nutty comment by Santorum backer Foster Friess
about birth control being as simple as holding an aspirin between our
knees? The admonishment from Rick Santorum that all birth control
should be banished because it can only lead to badness? Rush Limbaugh's
crazed, three-day masturbatory fantasy about the reasons women want
free birth control? Sex, sex, and, yet again, sex.
It's the same tiresome struggle, but this time we're going to win. Why? Because we have a secret weapon.
It's men. There are more than just a few good
ones out there and they're on our side. They're men who work with us,
talk with us, and see us as equals. They're men who live with us and
see our roles as complementary and not competitive or without merit. They're men who can love unconditionally and have grown so far beyond
the ancient need to keep women bound and tethered, they're willing to
fight beside us until this war is ended. Some of them are already at the front lines.
So put that in your pipe and smoke it, you dirty old men of yesterday. A
new day dawns and you've been left behind. It has to be this way. It's the way human progress works.
Convinced that President Obama's contraception battle with the Catholic Church is not a "short-term tactical blunder" but yet another example of the president's "strategically shrewd" long game, conservative-turned-Dem-loving-ratiocinator Andrew Sullivan this week dabbled in a potentially promising career as a conspiracy theorist with a column at The Daily Beast that shocked Washington insiders and rubes, Democrats and Republicans, Obamabots and Birthers alike:
The more Machiavellian observer might even suspect this is actually an improved bait and switch by Obama to more firmly identify the religious right with opposition to contraception, its weakest issue by far, and to shore up support among independent women and his more liberal base... And if this was a trap, the religious right walked right into it.
Not only did the right-wing establishment walk right into it, their constituents turned out en masse to vote on it, handing three presidential primary victories to the rigidly conservative and proudly orthodox Catholic Rick Santorum.
Is it therefore impossible to assume that President Obama expected that such a hot-button issue would effect turnout among conservatives, and therefore timed the contraception ruling in order to boost Santorum's odds of besting the only candidate with even a remote chance of beating Obama in November, presumed nominee Mitt Romney?
As Sullivan observes, riling the "righteous" conservatives is especially important, if only because their extreme views on religious issues have done nothing to improve their popularity among the more moderate masses.
If the Catholic bishops and the religious right eventually reject the proposed Obama compromise, they will be digging themselves even deeper into a hole that is quickly losing traction. Citing the civil union-versus-marriage debate and the religious right's ongoing pursuit to criminalize abortion, Sullivan writes that, "[t]ime after time, they have rejected compromises on social issues because of fundamentalist rigidity, not Christian engagement with a changing world." And as the polling shows, they're losing ground on each of these aforementioned issues.
As this and other social issues come to the fore in an election pundits claim will be "focused almost entirely on jobs," the clear beneficiary is Santorum.
Given the Republican Party's lukewarm enthusiasm for Romney, Santorum's hard-line stances on abortion, gay marriage, and other hot-button issues very well may propel him toward the nomination.
Anything Obama can do to help that potentiality become a reality is just good politics (especially when the majority of Americans support the specific policies being used to divide Republicans, as they do in the case of contraception).
Such political gamesmanship may not land Santorum the nomination, but fracturing Republican voters between the unelectable true-blood conservative and the electable but unlikeable "milquetoast Massachusetts moderate" plays well for the incumbent no matter how you slice it.
In a not-so-subtle hint to the Santorum campaign on what ought to be the focus of their attacks in the coming months, Sullivan states that the contraception issue "could not be more tailor-made to benefit" Santorum.
It could finally unite the Christian fundamentalist right behind him -- especially since Romneycare contained exactly the same provisions on contraception that Obamacare did before last week's compromise was announced. That's right: Romneycare can now accurately be portrayed as falling to the left of Obamacare on the contraception issue.
"[This] could be the issue that wins him the nomination," Sullivan says.
Or it could not be. Santorum could fall short of winning the nomination and succeed only in postponing Romney's expected victory, bleeding the eventual nominee's campaign coffers, dividing the Republican Party along social lines, and riling socially liberal and moderate Americans behind the incumbent's less dogmatic, more pragmatic compromise.
Win or lose, Santorum's surge into the #1 slot in the GOP primary race may prove nothing more than what is already obvious: that Barack Obama is more than a "chess master." He's one BAD motherfucker!
Infidel753
was born in New York state, grew up in California, and now lives in
Oregon. His area of academic specialization was the Middle East. He is
a life-long atheist and long-time liberal with a special interest in
social issues and technology.
(Ed. note: This is Infidel's fourth guest post for us. You can find his first, on the ignorant fundamentalism of the Republican Party, here; his second, on the incoherence of the Occupy Wall Street movement, here; and his third, on the parasitism of Romney and Bain, here. -- MJWS)
**********
I suppose this proposed Virginia law, which I first heard about via Progressive Eruptions,
was the final straw -- but I've known for a long time that there's far
more at stake this year than in an ordinary election. We're facing a
bizarre, atavistic evil here. It does not control the whole Republican Party -- yet -- but wherever they attain power, so does it.
It's
not enough that our country has become a land where a few people who
have learned to game the system accumulate obscene wealth by destroying
jobs and producing nothing of value, while the incomes of the workers
who produce everything of value stagnate. It's not enough that taxes on
the wealthiest have been cut relentlessly for half a century until, we
are told, the government can no longer afford to provide even the
threadbare safety net we've come to know. It's not enough that the
opposition elite's hand-picked candidate for the presidency is a man
whose career exemplifies these nation-wrecking trends. No, there's
something even more dark and horrible looming behind all that.
This
is a war against modernity and modernity's central premise, the value
system based on the individual's right to self-determination so long as
his or her actions do not interfere with the self-determination of
others, in favor of the older value system based on arbitrary taboos and
edicts recorded in ancient religious texts, where our lives should be
shaped not by our own desires but by the plans supposedly drawn for us
by an imaginary deity. I could fill paragraphs with examples of the
sophistry and obfuscation I've seen Republicans use to re-frame
opposition to abortion and birth control so as to avoid mentioning the
issue of women's self-determination -- to make the question about anything
other than individual choice. That's the basic clash of world-views
here: is your life your own, to be run based on your own wishes, or are
you created as a utensil for some divine plan?
Theirs is clearly a
religious world-view, even if the divine plan was replaced by the will
of the state in earlier, semi-secularized variants of it (Fascism and
Communism). Hence, too, the sin-and-punishment model exemplified by the
Virginia law. Any supposed medical purpose is window dressing; the
point is to humiliate a person who (must have) violated a sexual taboo
and is now trying to evade the divinely-ordained punishment. If the Old
Testament's dietary laws were still taken seriously by fundamentalists,
they might be proposing laws to require similar degrading treatment for
people who seek medical help for food poisoning after eating shellfish.
The
sin/punishment model suffuses all their thinking. Republican rhetoric
about the poor and unemployed is laced with a penalizing stance.
Drug-test them, take away their benefits, impose this or that rule --
punish, degrade, humiliate. In the religious model, suffering is
redemptive, so the more of it the better. It's sadism and deliberate
cruelty, puffed up with a stance of moral superiority.
One sees
the same in the conservative austerity policies being forced on southern
Europe by the EU bureaucracy, privileging deficit reduction over jobs
at a time of brutal unemployment. Never mind that the economic
contraction caused by austerity is destroying the basis of future growth
which would actually reduce the deficits. Solving the problem is not
the point. The bureaucrats ignore the terrible suffering austerity
creates -- if anything, they seem to relish it. Sin must be punished.
The moral superiority of the north over the south must be asserted. And
of course Republican deficit hawks in the U.S. are eager to impose the
same sick model here.
It's no wonder that gays are such a target
of choice. Their very existence is not allowed by the taboo system. In
the fundamentalist world-view, there are no gay people, just a special
case of sinful temptation and the necessity of resisting it. Even if
gay sex can't be criminalized any more (and don't doubt for a moment
that these people would still do that
if they could), gays must be excluded from marriage, excluded from the
military, excluded from teaching, excluded, excluded, excluded. The
casting-out of the taboo-breaker, the branding with the scarlet letter,
the public verdict "there is something wrong with you, you are not fit
to be among us" -- that is the point.
Everywhere
where they took power in 2010, they've been showing their true colors.
Attack gays, attack women's self-determination, attack the poor.
It's
always mostly about sex, of course. Repressed people are always
fixated on it. There was never any real-world possibility that
shellfish would be an issue. 95% of the Christian Right's obsessions
are about other people's sexual self-determination and how to stop them
from transgressing taboos. And like other psycho-sexual criminals, they
escalate over time. So they have now reached the point of decreeing
that women in Virginia who seek abortions be subjected by law to a
procedure that meets the legal definition of rape. And make no mistake,
if they get away with that, the next thing they come up with will be worse. It won't stop until somebody stops it.
The opposition today no longer embodies the spirit of Eisenhower and Goldwater,
but that of the robber baron and the Grand Inquisitor of centuries
past. Its face is no longer Reagan's sunny optimism, but the rapist's
triumphant snigger.
There is one other matter which is seldom raised, but which is desperately important for the future of our country.
The world is entering an era in which proficiency in science and technology will outweigh everything
else. The pace of technological change has accelerated beyond what
seemed possible even a decade or two ago. In the world of the near
future, it is the nations with the best brains that will lead. A nation
that bets on cheap labor will not lead. A nation whose science classes
teach that the Earth is 6,000 years old and that solid scientific fact
must be rejected if it contradicts primitive dogma, will not lead. A
nation where every proposal for major government investment in public
education is met with whining about the burden on the taxpayers, will
not lead. The right wing is setting up our children to be the hewers of
wood and drawers of water for the Germans and Japanese.
We've got
to win this thing. Re-electing Obama is necessary (think Supreme Court
picks) but not sufficient. We must take back the House from Boehner and
the teabagging lunatics who are so extreme even he
can barely cope with them. We must restore a filibuster-proof majority
in the Senate, plus a margin of error to allow for a few Blue Dogs. We
must make sure Elizabeth Warren
gets in this year, so she'll be in position to run for President in
2016 and finish the work Obama started. We must get Walker and the
other union-busting Kochroaches out.
But beyond that, we must smash the troglodytes and bullies on the
other side so hard and bury them so deep that they can never, ever dig
themselves out to torment and destroy the decent people of this country
again.
It will always be impossible to convince all religious people that religion isn't the mother of religious fanaticism and of the self-righteousness that makes fanaticism so dangerous. In fact they may be right in that such ego disorders seem to be a general human failing, albeit one that so often finds a home in Churches, Mosques and Synagogues -- but that doesn't soften the fear that from the frustration believers in old religions feel about the implacable advance of what I like to call enlightenment, a movement will arise like movements in the past to overthrow an age of reason and science and relative freedom.
"any action in which a man ejaculates or otherwise deposits semen anywhere but in a woman’s vagina shall be interpreted and construed as an action against an unborn child.”
There seems to be nothing in that statement that might hint it did not originate in the 5th century before the Christian era and nothing to suggest that it wasn't a measure introduced by a Republican, but alas, neither is true. Oklahoma State Senator Constance Johnson is a Democrat and she has introduced an amendment to pending Senate Bill 1433; a typical "life begins at conception" bill, that says that the resulting fetus
“at every stage of development (has) all the rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents of this state.”
Ms. Johnson wants to extend that right to a sperm cell, although apparently she thinks egg cells are exempt -- since otherwise not getting pregnant might also be as murderous as masturbation. Still, the "every sperm is a baby" bill doesn't have a chance, but apparently Rick Santorum does, and probably for few other reasons than his own ridiculous positions on interfering with private lives in the name of small government and Big Religion. Santorum has attracted a plurality of Republican loonies in Missouri, Colorado and Minnesota.
It's hard to think that Rick has a real shot at the presidency, but you know, I've been looking at Costa Rica lately.
I'm generally very intolerant of the "both sides are equally bad" arguments that depend on fraudulent accounting and false equivalence to forgive the side with the preponderance of guilt, but Geez - what does it say about Oklahoma Democrats that she is allowed to speak for them?
I have to report that this amendment may have been a spoof designed to point out the idiocy of the bill to which it was appended, but at the time I wrote the above, that information wasn't available.
The headline in yesterday's paper summarizing the President's State of the Union message is 3/8 of an inch tall. The headline just under it, reading RICK SANTORUM RALLIES IN STUART is in bold face type and is much bigger. Welcome to the monkey house.
Santorum was here on Florida's Treasure Coast Tuesday, holding forth at the Community Christian Academy to parents and grade school students, a horror of which some are particularly proud. It's an "up-close look at politics in action," said school officials.
That live action, these politics, included a prayer by the 'Reverend' Dan Holland, affiliated with the school and the pastor of Community Baptist Church in Stuart, Florida.
"I like what he said in the South Carolina rally, where he said ' I come from a place where they have a Bible in one hand and a gun in the other'"
Rick Santorum doesn't need a script, because he really isn't saying much and with such an audience, it doesn't matter whether he makes sense or mangles facts or makes them up. Rick speaks from the pulpit and anything said Ex Cathedra will not be questioned by this crowd. Besides, it's precisely what they want to hear: Barack Obama is the worst president this country has ever had, who hates capitalism, wants to take away what God wants you to keep to yourself and is destroying our natural order of things. Don't forget this is a religion that demands that women be subservient, hints that black people should stay in their place and since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would vote for anything that hated Democrats.
Santorum's ever predictable message was about "family Values" "fiscal responsibility" and "ridding the White House of Barack Obama." One can take the last of the three as the real message since my idea of family values does not include veiled calls to armed crusade and lying about the economy.
An all-white group of 350 heard him say:
"we have to have a candidate who stands proudly, consistently, aggressively, forcefully for the values that made this country the greatest country in the history of the world."
Presumably that greatness was attained with Bibles and guns and anyone suggesting that we are in any way sinners, transgressors or less than perfect instruments of God's Christian ambitions, can go straight to Hell along with that apologist Obama.
They heard him howl about That Commie, apologist, freedom hating Obama bailing out Wall Street from the excesses and crimes the Republicans encouraged them in instead of using "free market forces" which would as any legitimate economist would likely tell you have brought that "greatest country in the history of the Universe" down to the level of Haiti. Still, the problem of galloping poverty isn't lack of resources, said Santorum, contradicting himself,
"the problem is in the home, the problem is in the churches, the problem is in the community. The people living in these woods are not the federal government's problem. . ."
Let's use poverty, disease and misery to fill the pews, because a just society is a commie, secular humanist Christ-hating society.
Perhaps he could have explained to me why the Republican's promise to provide jobs instead of food stamps while it's 'not the government's problem' isn't honest or consistent -- or how unlettered country folk with bibles and guns are going to help in the new anarchistic utopia he offers them -- but trying to present Rick Santorum as a rational candidate with any further agenda than dismantling all the rules that keep markets free, creating a new Christian aristocracy and most of all, hanging up that "White's Only" sign over the door at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is a scam and a con and a farrago of flim-flam as great as any in the history of the world.
People like me can wonder how dismantling our entire economic system, refusing to pay the bills, can be called Conservatism, or any of the other radical, ultra-Chauvinistic, Denialist and dishonest rhetoric that smells more like Attila's unwashed hordes, but the blue-hair church ladies, their God smitten and brainwashed children and the rest of the angry Community Christian Academics don't seem to care. There's just something wrong out there and they don't know what it is and the sick Mr. Rick and his sanctimonious rabble are at hand to point out the enemies and heretics for the burning.
Appearing on Saturday at the extremist social conservative / theocratic "Thanksgiving Family Forum" in Iowa alongside Cain, Parry, Santorum, Bachmann, and Paul (but not Romney, who declined the invitation, and Huntsman, who wasn't invited (appearing on SNL instead, where he was quite funny), Newt Gingrich blamed secularism for America's problems:
A country that has been now since 1963 relentlessly in the courts
driving God out of public life shouldn't be surprised at all the
problems we have. Because we've in fact attempted to create a secular
country, which I think is frankly a nightmare.
This is hardly new. Back in June 2009, Newt appeared with Mike Huckabee and Oliver North at the Rock Church in Hampton Roads, Virginia, to speak on "Rediscovering God in America." He had a different word for secularism then:
I
am not a citizen of the world. I am a citizen of the United States
because only in the United States does citizenship start with our
creator... I think this is one of the most critical moments in American
history. We are living in a period where we are surrounded by paganism.
What the hell does "only in
the United States does citizenship start with our creator" mean? That
America is oh-so-special because it's fundamentally a Christian nation?
Well, I suspect that Locke and Jefferson, among others, would take issue
which such a ridiculous claim. America was built on a philosophical
foundation of natural rights, not a theocratical foundation of Christian
dogma.
And
then there's the "surrounded by paganism" claim. Of course, it should
go without saying that non-religiosity, including secular humanism, is
not "paganism," which is, broadly speaking, a religion itself -- sorry,
but I'm not a polytheist -- but such a simple truth just can't go
without saying when it comes to the lies, deceptions, delusions, and
ignorantly ideological utterances of Newt and his ilk.
Besides, I'm not sure Newt was being so Christian when he was getting blown
by his various mistresses (but not, he claimed, committing adultery,
because oral sex apparently doesn't count) -- or when he demanded a
divorce from his first wife Jackie in her hospital room, where she was
recovering from uterine cancer surgery -- or when he refused to pay
alimony and child support after their divorce -- etc., etc., etc.
How all very... pagan of him.
And how all very typical.
He's still the same old Newt
Still a hypocrite, still pandering to the Christianist right, still making utterly ridiculous pronouncements based on ideology and opportunism, all while masquerading as a serious man of ideas.
Ed. note: I'm pleased to present a new guest blogger at The Reaction, Infidel753 (not his real name) of the excellent blog of the same name. I've been a fan of his for some time now, and it's a pleasure to welcome him, and to be able to provide another platform for his writing. If you're not familiar with his blog, I encourage you to check it out, which offers astute political analysis, as you'll see in this post, and some great link round-ups. His bio is below. -- MJWS.
**********
Infidel753
was born in New York state, grew up in California and now lives in
Oregon. His area of academic specialization was the Middle East. He is
a life-long atheist and long-time liberal with a special interest in
social issues and technology.
It would be nice if, someday, there were once again two parties I could consider voting for.
I know of people who think in terms of weighing the relative merits
of the Democrats and Republicans to decide which is better, as if it
were still the 1970s. I don't have the option of thinking that way, not
now.
As I've pointed out many times, what we have in this country right
now is a Christian Right party and a secular party. The Republican
party is now mostly in the hands of people who think America was founded
as a "Christian nation," who reject separation of church and state, who
want to make abortion a crime again, who view homosexuality and pretty
much any unconventional way of life as a sinful aberration to be driven
back underground if not outright banned. People who reject science, not
only in the obvious sense of rejecting the most solidly-established
fact in all of science (evolution) -- but in the broader sense of being
impervious to empirical evidence, on issues from global warming to
Keynesian economics to the effects of abstinence-only sex "education",
when it conflicts with their gut feelings and preconceived notions.
In
their version of America,
I would be a second-class citizen on at least two grounds. In their
version of America, science would shrivel from official harassment and
lack of funding every time it ran up against one of the random taboos
embraced by ignorant fundamentalism. In their version of America,
everyone who didn't aspire to live according to the conventional
family-values model* would be pushed back into hiding or into the
disguise of superficial conformity; either way, into hypocrisy and
silent misery.
This means that I don't have a choice. The Republicans are simply
not an option for me. As it happens, the Democrats are also a lot
closer to my own views on all the fiscal/economic stuff, but even if
that weren't the case -- even if it were the Republicans who favored
humane and reality-based economics while the Democrats touted
laissez-faire Randroid insanities -- it would make no difference. The
Republicans still would not be an option, not as long as they remained
under the sway of
de facto theocrats. Because if their version of America ever became reality, it wouldn't be my country any more. It wouldn't want me.
And, again: Can we afford to let someone who believes God-knows-
what about Armageddon and the "End Times" become President and get
control of 10,000 nuclear weapons? Think about it.
(An excellent source on what the right wing in the U.S. has become is
Right Wing Watch.)
In the long run, of course, they won't win. Fundamentalists are a
shrinking minority in the US, while the number of non-religious people
is growing rapidly. Even if the Republicans did gain enough power to
implement a lot of the Christian Right agenda, it wouldn't last forever.
But it might well last for a long time. Religious fanatics are a
minority in Iran, but they've been in power for 32 years now.
Eventually -- whether it takes one year or twenty -- people like
Romney and Christie will win out within the Republican party and it will
return to being a party one merely disagrees with on most things, as
opposed to being dangerously crazy. Until that happens,
it is not an option.
[*It occurred to me some time ago that this is one key difference
between primitive and modern societies. In a primitive society, there
is one standard way of life to which everyone is expected to conform. A
modern society accepts a multiplicity of possible ways of life as being
equally legitimate.]
The Republican presidential field is still embarrassingly weak (and even more embarrassing because the best Republican candidate by far, Jon Huntsman, isn't really catching on at all), and there is still a good deal of talk about some savior coming to the rescue.
With Huckabee not running this time, social/religious conservatives perhaps more than any other core Republican constituency seem to be driving that talk. Much of the rest of the party is already represented, after all, particularly the moneyed establishment (Romney) and the Tea Party (Bachmann, Paul). The theocrats only have Santorum, a distant also-ran with zero electability, and Gingrich, a joke of a candidate who's in it to glorify his ego and fill his coffers, and also Bachmann, though she doesn't seem to be what they're looking for.
The so-called "social conservatives" (actually moralizing right-wing evangelical theocrats) used to be a powerful force in the party, if not the dominant one, but they've been reduced to a bit of an afterthought, even though they still wield enormous influence at the grassroots level. And so it would be foolish to ignore them.
And who are they now looking to as their savior? Why, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, of course, who has done a great deal to appeal to them, presenting himself as their kind of theocrat. They're pushing him to run and no doubt he'd be a formidable candidate if only for their support. Could he actually win the nomination? Maybe. Or maybe he'd be the #2. (How does Romney-Perry sound?) Either way, social conservatives aren't about to let this election cycle pass without trying to wield their influence, and they may just be able to do that through Perry.
For more on this, see Amy Goodman's piece at Time: "Christian Right leaders have sought to find a new – preferably electable – candidate to carry the social conservative banner." They've picked Rick Perry.
As Mother Jones is reporting, the theocratic, evangelical right may finally be realizing that it is losing its battle against marriage equality. As Jim Daly, president of James Dobson's Focus on the Family puts it:
We're winning the younger generation on abortion, at least in theory. What about same-sex marriage?
We're losing on that one, especially among the 20- and 30-somethings:
65 to 70 percent of them favor same-sex marriage. I don't know if
that's going to change with a little more age -- demographers would say
probably not. We've probably lost that. I don't want to be extremist
here, but I think we need to start calculating where we are in the
culture.
They're not winning on abortion and they're certainly not winning on same-sex marriage.
Now, Daly certainly doesn't speak for the entirety of his movement, but "it can't help the anti-gay religious right to have such a prominent
social conservative say that the crusade against gay marriage has
essentially been lost and that it's time to accept that reality and move
on."
The Religious Right isn't coming around on same-sex marriage, certainly not, and I suspect that Daly won't find much agreement among his fellow Christianists. Still, it's somewhat encouraging that reality -- if not yet freedom, equality, and justice -- is breaking through into the darkness.
I've said quite a bit about gun control; pretty much all I'm going to say, actually. There is something far more pernicious, more dangerous and more in need of control however and that's God. It's hard to deny, although that doesn't prevent most people from denying it, God has been on the wrong side of things as often as the right side: slavery, conquest, persecutions, genocide. You name it, God has been the universal justification as often as the universal opponent.
So it isn't surprising that God now seems to be against Net Neutrality. Sure he is -- and our founding fathers who don't seem to have believed in the kind of god who gets involved in such matters as free markets thought so too. That's the thing about God's likes and dislikes and mysterious plans: people just make them up as they go along.
Take David Barton, for instance, allegedly one of the country's most influential Evangelicals. He thinks that government should stay out of the lives of selected people and should, in the name of freedom and less intrusive government, regulate the most private and personal consensual sexual behavior. That's nothing new, of course, but it may surprise you that according to the Gospel as invented by Barton, God hates net neutrality and wants the internet dominated by the powerful and rich. God and the Puritans brought us prosperity because we're not socialists. The rest of the world got their prosperity from the Devil apparently and Jesus was just joking about rich men and heaven. How can we question that?
God wills it -- just like God willed the Crusades and the extermination of European Jews: just like he willed the divine right of kings and the right of the Church to approve their power. He demanded a secular Democracy in the Colonies, some of them, while simultaneously mandating the power of George III, Rex Dei Gratia.
Face it, it's long since been far out of hand and the will of god has become indistinguishable from the background noise of commerce. Did God have an interest in boosting tobacco sales. He obviously, if we're to believe this radio troll, has an interest in the rights of corporations which exceeds his concern for the poor. Does God like free markets, or does he like kings? Does the Bible speak against Net Neutrality or call it Socialism. Does God hate Socialism or does he like you to share everything you have with the poor and sick? Depends on whom you ask and of course I won't be asking the Religious Right, which I can't tell from the Religious Wrong of late.
One thing our constitution does uphold, is the free exercise of religion, so lunatics and tyrants and even evil men like Barton get to rave on unmolested. The government can't really exercise God control and more than God can control the evil spewed out by Barton's forked tongue. It's up to me and you to be aware that whether or not it was God, Guns and Guts that made America "great" those things will serve any master with equal ferocity. Mention God and nobody can shut you up, nobody can really contradict you and millions will follow you through the gates of hell, raging and bellowing, cheering and jeering like the lost souls we are.
One of the things I have liked about Congressman Ron Paul is that he's often been on the side of deregulating private life and consensual behavior, but either he doesn't mean what he says or he is willing to say what he doesn't mean in order to curry favor with the Great Regulators of the Religious right.
"The Defense of Marriage Act was enacted in 1996 to stop Big Government in Washington from re-defining marriage and forcing its definition on the States. Like the majority of Iowans, I believe that marriage is between one man and one woman and must be protected."
That resonates in my ears as a statement of his religious persuasion and of course he was speaking to a group of religions conservatives representing denominations opposed to letting people decide for themselves about such matters. Other religions might have other ideas and indeed some do. In other words these are people quite open about forcing their definition on Americans.
I find it curious that proponents of defining marriage according to religious definitions always use the word "is" where one expects "should be," "ought to be" or "must be" and there must be a reason for it. Marriage, after all is a human institution and marriage customs vary amongst groups of humans. Perhaps "is" is a way to pretend that it's written into the fabric of the cosmos like general relativity or the uncertainty principle. It isn't.
Of course Paul couched his opposition to doing away with the Defense of Marriage act in terms of states rights and whether or not he was following in the tradition of all the other "states rights" defenses of so many other things we now see as unjust, it's a defense of something with as limited a future as our embarrassing misogyny laws of recent memory. A minority of the country oppose preventing people from marrying whom they will and I can't help but find my feeling that the history of humankind's progress toward democracy is once again being thwarted by the notion of a divine will that opposes our allegedly innate liberty.
When someone who has been so stalwart in defending the Constitution and restraining government power, promotes such peremptory views on the most personal of choices, it seems a jarring discontinuity that makes on question the man and everything else he's described as being unconstitutional. It's hard to understand why he's willing to use government power to defend a certain Faith when that is something the government is expressly forbidden to do.
Yes, I know. I've been talking a lot about religion of late, but to me, there is no other force in American affairs more intractable than the movement to force compliance to religious standards on people who have or wish to have no affiliation with those standards and prefer the right to make personal choices according to their own consciences. That ability, that kind of freedom is the beating heart of liberal democracy. If we lose that, we lose it all.
It's sad to see Congressman Paul speaking this way. I once had high hopes for him, if not as Presidential material, certainly as a voice of reason and restraint at a time when the Republican party seems increasingly controlled by anti-democratic, anti-libertarian influences. Now he seems far less of a libertarian, far more of an authoritarian and indistinguishable from any other politician grovelling before the powerful.
A blog on politics, philosophy, science, sports, and the arts -- featuring news, commentary, and analysis by Michael J.W. Stickings and the Reaction team.
Conservatives are so cute! At least when they try to figure out why no one likes their party. It just never occurs to them that it might be, you know, their policies. Look: conservatives like their policies. It is the party of the rich that does the work of the rich. And a bunch of Christians and racists. Conservatives don't talk about the racists for a couple of reasons. One is that it is who they are. Another is that they don't believe in racism. Except reverse racism, where the powerless make the powerful cry. But that's just part of doing the work of the rich. Let us say no more about racism!
