What is it about Islamic fundamentalists?

Anybody who knows me (statistically, damned few of you) is aware that I am not a faithful churchgoer. And some of you probably worked that out from my nom de blog.

However, for all that unbelievers in America face discrimination, idiocy and occasional threats, we have it better than people in some parts of the world.

I tend to reserve most of my bile for Christianity, mostly because it's the religion that keeps trying to take over America. Which happens to be where I live. I don't happen to appreciate people trying to shove their beliefs down my throat - I'm not going to compare it to rape, but there are philosophical similarities. Much in the way that a house fire would be similar to a nuclear holocaust, but still...

In fact, due to the excessive and overwrought hatred of Muslims that is typically found among members of the Right Wing, I've tended to shy away from pointing out the less-brilliant aspects of Islamic beliefs. But let me just say this.

Muslim societies, on the whole, are less advanced than those of us in what they call the "West." Their educational levels frequently aren't even on a par with Mississippi, they are roughly as set in their ways as the Catholic church, and they share many beliefs with the Westboro Baptist Chuch. And they have an unpleasant tendancy toward violence similar to members of the NRA.

Bangladesh, for example, is nominally a secular democracy, but they seem to have forgotten what "secular" actually means. When Bangladesh gained independance from Pakistan in 1971, they set up a constitution that included "Four State Principles" - Secularism, Democracy, Nationalism and Socialism (factors which were upheld in Bangladeshi court in 2010).

However, with a population that is almost 90% Muslim (89.4% in 2010), they seem to be adding two more principles: Bigotry and Intolerance.

And Violence. So maybe three principles. (I could add "Murder," but it would rapidly grow into a Monty Python sketch about the Muslim Inquisition.)

See, there's an atheist blogger in Bangladesh named Asif Mohiuddin. In January, he was attacked in an apparent murder attempt, by three men who tried (but failed) to stab him in the throat. A month later, on 15 February, another atheist blogger, Ahmed Rajib Haider, was hacked to death in a machete attack in Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh.

For the crime of making himself a target, the surviving blogger, Asif, was arrested last Wednesday, and his blog on www.somewhereinblog.net ordered shut down by the government. He was the fourth blogger in two days to be arrested for "defaming Islam.".

The government is cracking down on athiests because Muslims are rioting. Which is, of course, the perfect response: you should always give in to violent threats. On 13 March, the Prime Minister's office formed a committee tasked with identifying "blasphemous" bloggers.

Earlier in the week, four online writers were arrested on charges of hurting Islamic religious sentiments in a country where 90 percent of people are Muslims.

Following recent protests over the war crimes tribunal, the government has blocked a dozen websites and blogs to stem the unrest. It has also set up a panel, which includes intelligence chiefs, to monitor blasphemy on social media.

Under the country’s cyber laws, a blogger or Internet writer can face up to ten years in jail for defaming a religion.

What is it about radical Islam that causes them to attack and kill anyone they disagree with? If girls try to go to school, they get shot. Cartoonists who draw pictures of Mohammed are attacked with axes. Being "too Western" or committing "sexual impropriety" will get a woman murdered by her family.

Now, among Christians, the percentage of fundamentalists varies: in the Bible Belt (sociographically, the "East South Central Region" - Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Alabama), it stands at about 58%, while in New England, it climbed slightly during the Bush era to 13%. If we assume that the same percentages hold for the Islamic peoples, that's still a buttload of fundamentalists. And in any religion, it's the fundamentalists who make the worst neighbors.

Here's the thing. Islam has been round for about 1400 years. Know what Christians were doing at about the same point in their history? Crusades and Inquisitions: killing people of other religions, and locking people up for daring to speak against them. The only difference is, modern Muslims have access to more technology than Christians did in the Middle Ages.

You have to wonder if this is a cycle that all major religions go through.

A few thoughts on religious extremists

Anybody who meets me will slowly come to realize that I have no time for religious extremism. Adding even more stupidity to an already illogical belief system is just compounding the brain damage.

On a (potentially unrelated) side note, I like to say that I use Facebook much in the way most people use their refrigerator door: as a place to hang things I find interesting/funny/unbelievable. I think it's a better idea than sticking things to my computer with refrigerator magnets.

(This is not a non-sequiter - it just looks like one. I once worked with an older woman, and one day I caught her using a magnet to put a picture of her grandkids on her hard drive. And just to make it better, she was putting it over her air vents. She didn't appreciate my input on the subject.)

My sister, the Episcopalian priestess, gets a little cranky with my lack of respect for her chosen profession. (By the way, she really dislikes the term "priestess." Just so you know...) She even wrote me, on Facebook, to ask why I kept putting down Christianity, and no other religion. You can probably insert a little "why do you hate god?" into that, too, if you'd like. Entirely subtext, of course.

My answer included the fact that there were plenty of other people out there bashing Islam, so they don't need any help on that front.

But overall, my opinion of religion is pretty much like the somewhat-overused joke:

Religion is like a penis. It's fine to have one and it's fine to be proud of it, but please don't whip it out in public and start waving it around... and PLEASE don't try to shove it down my child's throat.

There's a thousand variations on that one, but there it is.

With all that being said, I came across the following video clip, which is worth the ten minutes out of your day that it will take to see it. It's a bit from Russell Brand's talk show, where, inexplicably, two members of the Westboro Baptist Church agreed to appear.

For any of you that are unaware, Westboro Baptist is a cult dedicated to the idea that the Prince of Peace wants them to picket funerals and sporting events holding up colorful signs saying that "God hates fags" and explaining that you're all going to hell.

There's a lot of people out there, who've spent a lot of time and venom talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, so I'll let you look them up on your own. (At this point, all you need to google is "Westboro," so it isn't like the material is difficult to find.)


So, a couple of takeaways from this.

1. Russell Brand has a talk show? I mean, admittedly it's on FX, so how many people actually see it? But still... really?

2. Nobody should be surprised about them appearing on this show. The Westboro Baptists have made a life out of putting themselves on display, so this is just a logical extension of their standard behavior.

3. The guy with the hair, Steve Drain, can at least fake having some kind of charisma. The head-shaver, Timothy Phelps, can hardly hide his disdain for this crowd of heathens. Even when he tries for a crappy joke, his hatred for everyone and everything peeks out: "Well put. Other than the accent, very well put."

3a. Really? You dislike the fact that he's British? When there's so much else to hate there?

4. That being said, Russell Brand definitely came out on top here. (There's no double entendre there. Trust me.) He was polite, kept his audience in line, and, although he was in full Tease mode, he managed to keep it friendly and avoid most of the snark. But he didn't really take it easy on them, either.

Brand: "Have you considered that the Bible, like all religious doctrine, may be allegorical and symbolic to direct us toward one holy entity of love, as opposed to a specific litiginous text to direct the behavior of human beings? The Bible wasn't literally written by a cosmic entity. It was written by people."

Drain: "It was written by the holy spirit."

Brand: "The holy spirit ain't got a pen!"

And really, that's the only way to deal with people like that. Point and laugh.

Sex lives of the rich and hypocritical

You might think that a person's sex life should be their own business. On the other hand, if you're like me, you might also think that, since Rick Santorum believes that he has the right to shove the government straight up every woman's vagina, then his own "love" life would be open season. So, just for fun, let's look at some of those pesky things they call "facts."

Fact 1: Rick Santorum married the former Karen Garver in 1990, and they have seven children (eight, if you count pickled Baby Gabriel).

Fact 2: Ricky has publically stated that he is completely opposed to all forms of contraception, and that sex should only be for procreation.



(Sadly, the original publishers, CaffeinatedThoughts.com, an evangelical Christian website, got a little cranky that people were taking chunks of their interview and showing what Santorum actually said, usually in context. So they make the usual "copyright infringement" argument every time somebody extracts a bit of it. Ironically, since they hosted it on Youtube, they can't hide it away without losing access themselves. Drag forward to 17:55 for this bit.)

One of the things I will talk about that no president has talked about before is I think the dangers of contraception in this country, the whole sexual libertine idea ... Many in the Christian faith have said, "Well, that's okay ... contraception's okay."

It's not okay because it's a license to do things in the sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be. They're supposed to be within marriage, for purposes that are, yes, conjugal ... but also procreative. That's the perfect way that a sexual union should happen. We take any part of that out, we diminish the act. And if you can take one part out that's not for purposes of procreation, that's not one of the reasons, then you diminish this very special bond between men and women, so why can't you take other parts of that out?

And all of a sudden, it becomes deconstructed to the point where it's simply pleasure. And that's certainly a part of it—and it's an important part of it, don't get me wrong—but there's a lot of things we do for pleasure, and this is special, and it needs to be seen as special.

As Ms Santorum is barely out of her 40s, there is no reason to assume that she's gone through menopause, although it's always possible. Adding these facts together, we have to assume that the Santorums did not mate like mad minxes during the nearly six years of her life that Karen has spent pregnant, or for the brief period of any hypothetical menopause which she might or might not have experienced.

Therefore, I think that it's safe to assume that, either Rick Santorum is completely hypocritical on the subject of birth control (always possible), or he and his wife have had sex between eight and twelve times total. Approximately once every two years.

You could fantasize that they make it special: a glass of wine, maybe some candles, with her in her most fetching flannel nightgown and him in nothing but a sweater vest.

But I suspect that that the dark deed is most likely performed with a minimum of foreplay, with the lights out, missionary style. I picture Ricky pumping away grimly, trying to finish as quickly as possible, before either of them starts to enjoy it. And when the vile depravity comes to an end, they both roll over and quietly sob themselves to sleep.

Intelligent Disdain

In Missouri and Indiana this month, bills have been put forward in the legislature to return "intelligent design" to the classrooms. Because their children are apparently not stupid enough yet.


I occasionally hang out on a blog called Stone the Preacher (it's run out of Hope Chapel in Hermosa Beach, CA); I ended up there rebutting one of the standard canards of the fundamentalists (I think it was "atheists have no morals," but at this late date, I'm really not sure), and I kept going back, probably because I thrive on conflict. And run-on sentences. And recently, Pastor Steve, a young-earth creationist, made the mistake of mentioning "intelligent design."

I've always loved that phrase because of its inherent idiocy. "Intelligent design" is creationism wearing glasses and a clown nose, and the adjective is so clearly in conflict with the noun that people should be unable to avoid stuttering when they say it. Every attempt to sneak it into schools gets thoroughly destroyed in the courts, but that doesn't stop them from trying over and over again (for example, in Missouri and Indiana - and probably in some other state any day now).

Let's be honest: evolution explains why some of the ridiculous design flaws exist in the world. There is no "intelligence" in the "design" of the world, and examples are everywhere. Comedians have been pointing them out for years.

"God is a mechanical engineer! Look at this marvelous collection of joints and levers!"

"No, God is an electrical engineer! Look at the intricacy of these neurons and synapses!"

"No," said the city planner, "God is obviously a civil engineer. Sometimes, when nobody's looking, it's just easier to run a sewer pipe through a recreational area."

But fundies, being fundies, keep soldiering on, like particularly pious zombies on a quest for children's brains.

Let's consider the evidence. And remember, the people who believe this silliness also believe that God doesn't make mistakes.

1. As we develop in the womb, we form three sets of kidneys. The pronephroi ("forekidneys") appear in the fourth week; they degenerate pretty quickly, but the ducts are recycled to build the mesonephroi ("midkidneys"). And then those degenerate and the tubules are recycled in the metanephroi ("hindkidneys"), which are our permanent kidneys.

This almost seems like an elegant bit of engineering, but really, it's more like building an Eiffel Tower as scaffolding for another Eiffel Tower, which is used as scaffolding for a final, bigger Eiffel Tower, and you rip down each one as you go (I don't remember where I saw that metaphor, but it's perfect). It's an unnecessarily complex process, and it's just evidence that evolution had a number of false starts along the way, and had to go back and refigure what it was building.

(On the subject of kidneys, why is the gene for polycystic kidney disease dominant? Why make it 50% likely that you'll inherit a painful, life-threatening condition?)

2. The female quoll (an Australian marsupial) has only six teats, but gives birth to a litter of 18, meaning that the 12 slowest or weakest die of starvation. A 66% death rate makes sense to you? Was God weeding out the weak ones? Why didn't He just build them right to begin with?

3. While you’re in Australia, look up the mystery of a kangaroo’s teeth, for that matter. The grasses they eat are tough, and wear down the front teeth of the 'roo. So, to make up for this, they evolved were designed with an unusual ability: as the front teeth wear down, they fall out and the back teeth move forward to replace them.

Which sounds great, except that they don't have the ability to grow new teeth. So by the time they're 15 or 20, they run out, and starve to death. Apparently, God hates kangaroos, and wants to see them suffer.

4. Birds of the family Sulidae (boobies and gannets)...

...heh, heh... I said "boobies"...

4. Birds of the family Sulidae are diving birds, plunging into the water from the sky. One of their adaptations to this is that they don’t have external nostrils – the water would get shoved up their noses on impact. But even without external nostrils, they have everything else that makes up a nasal airway inside their beaks. It’s just that the nostrils are sealed off at the outside. Having nasal airways that can’t work is pretty pointless design. Although evolution tells us why they’re there, it makes you wonder why God would choose to install a completely pointless structure inside the bird's beak. Did He build it from spare parts from another bird?

If these things, and so many others, are designed, that’s some pretty shoddy craftsmanship.

Maybe God occasionally gets drunk on sacramental wine while He's working?

That frothy mix

I have to assume that Rick Santorum is still in the race to be the GOP nominee because he hopes that some simultaneous outbreak of monkey pox will wipe out the rest of the field. That, or, as a good Catholic, he enjoys a little flagellation every so often - it's good for the soul.

He is probably the thirteenth or fourteenth least-electable candidate in the history of humanity, but we can't seem to get him to just shut the hell up and go away.

Even before the primary, Santorum was surging in Iowa (eeewww!) at 15%, but he still can't seem to consistently break 5% nationally. Not that he isn't optimistic (or possibly sadistic): he put it a few weeks ago, "I'm counting on the people of Iowa to catch fire for me." (Which seems unnecessarily cruel, but what do I know?)

The problem is that Santorum is just the latest flavor of not-Romney to hit the shelves. It's his turn to be touted nationally for the next few weeks, until somebody remembers that we're electing a president, not a pope.

Santorum has two major disabilities that are going to prevent his election: his sanctimonious, unpleasant nature, and his aggressively ignorant and regressive social policies. His entire platform, as far as I can tell, seems to be abortion and gay marriage - everything else is secondary. If he were, by some miracle, to be elected president, we'd have an uninterrupted 4-year fiesta of fag-punching.

We know that Santorum is so homophobic that he'll only eat a corndog with a knife and fork, but is he also racist? Well, that one's a little trickier. He has, for a long time, been consistently in favor of the full GOP stand on immigration: no amnesty for illegal immigrants, and likewise no benefits for them; deport criminals, strengthen border security, and even the somewhat trickier "English as the official language" stance. And while that has overtones of "scary brown people," it's the Republican party line. So no points there.

On the other hand, it's somewhat telling when you stand in front of a group of white people from Iowa (a redundant statement, but let's move on) and explained that "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."



His first explanation was that he didn't remember making the comment. Faced with the video, he huddled with his campaign, but the best they could come up with was that he "mumbled it... I was starting to say one word and I sort of came up with a different word and then moved on."

What he couldn't seem to explain was what that "one word" was. "Blaa" is a pretty unique sound. Who does he not want to help? Bloggers? Bluefin tuna? Blink 182?

Blacks?

But let's move beyond that. What would a Rick Santorum presidency do for America? Well, let's consider his belief system for just a moment. What does Rick Santorum believe in?

His career should have been over after he tried to make political points leading the charge in the Terry Schiavo case, exploiting the pain of the family of a provably brain-dead woman. But he weathered that (presumably, the $250 thousand he earned in campaign contributions from the Schiavo debacle helped a lot).

Rick Santorum believes that birth control is directly responsible for the moral decline of America, saying "the dangers of contraception in this country, the sexual liberty idea and many in the Christian faith have said, you know contraception is OK. It’s not OK because it’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be."

He wrote an article in 2002 blaming pedophilia in Catholic priests on "moral relativism" and "cultural liberalism."

This is a man who said that John McCain, who was tortured while a POW in Vietnam, "doesn't understand how enhanced interrogation works."

He tried to require the "No Child Left Behind" law to ensure that creationism was taught in schools.

In 2007, the Center for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington named him one of the twenty most corrupt members of Congress.

Will Bunch, the senior writer and columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News has covered politics in Pennsylvania since shortly after Rick Santorum was elected for the first time. He wrote a fascinating article from a Philadelphian's point of view entitled "The Rick Santorum That America Doesn't Know." Take a few minutes and read it - it's worth your time.

But the worst thing I know about Rick Santorum is what happened when his wife Karen was 20 weeks pregnant. Her non-viable fetus was not expected to survive, and the mother developed an infection. And Rick Santorum, who is opposed to abortion for any reason, allowed the doctors to give his wife pitocin to speed the birth. And while that may have been wildly hypocritical, what followed was completely insane.

After spending the night with the dead fetus on the bed between them, they took the body home with them, and forced their children to cuddle with it and sing songs to it. Ms Santorum even proudly wrote a book about it.

Where the hell was Child Protective Services when this was going on? Where was the Health Department?

The worst thing that could possibly happen to America would be a Rick Santorum presidency: I wonder how long it would take him to appoint a Grand Inquisitor?

And yet, he is suddenly one of the two front-runners in the GOP field. Is the Republican Party so desperate to find an alternative, any alternative, to the robotic hair-helmet that is Mitt Romney that they're willing to embrace anyone at all?

Jesus Christ!

A couple in Anderson County, SC has decided that Jesus decided to appear to them on a receipt from Walmart.

Jacob Simmons and his fiancee, Gentry Lee Sutherland, said they bought some pictures from Walmart on Sunday, June 12.

The following Wednesday, the couple had just come home from a church service when Simmons spotted the receipt on the floor of Sutherland's apartment. He says the receipt had changed. "I was leaving the kitchen and I just looked on the floor, and it was like it was looking at me," Simmons said.

It's just like in Scripture - "...and on the third day, he arose again, and ascended into Commerce..."



Just to be fair, let's leave aside uncomfortable questions like "could they find a more redneck religious icon than a Walmart receipt?" and move on to the more interesting questions. Like "Why did Jesus choose to appear there?"

Why would Jesus, much like an anal-probing alien, choose to appear in South Carolina, the colostomy bag of America?

Could it be because Simmons and Sutherland are an unmarried couple cohabitating in a single apartment, and Jesus wanted them to know that they're going to hell?

Was He just trying to pass along the message "Yo, hick! Can you clean this pigsty? I've been laying here for three days!"

Perhaps it was a marketing ploy by Walmart: "I'd come back from the dead for savings like these! Even if they are destroying the economy!" (And really, this is sheer genius as advertising goes: it's a ploy that will go over big in the Bible Belt.)

But to be honest, I think that Mr Simmons has misidentified his picture. Because really, it looks more like Charles Manson to me.



But I'm pretty sure that this miraculous appearance doesn't mean "Go start killing everybody in the neighborhood (or as they call it in South Carolina, "urban beautification"). Jesus has been aggressively marketing Himself of late, appearing on telephone poles, rocking chairs, and even some crackhead's cell phone.

I'd say that for answers, we should turn, as we always do, to that other bearded guy in robes.

The American Taliban

Well, Rick Santorum has joined Michele Bachmann in signing the Family Leader pledge, also known as

THE MARRIAGE VOW
A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY

As far as I can tell, that small "i" in the word family is supposed to denote humility or some crap. It's also the only sign of humility on the whole damned Family Leader website (other than repeated uses of the words "humble" and "humility," of course). They're associated with both "Focus on the Family" and the "Family Research Council," two of the most strident right-wing Christian conservative groups out there.

The president of Family Leader is Bob Vander Plaats, and he's a special breed of crazy. He's tried to explain in the past that same-sex marriage will inevitably lead to the suspension of the Constitution, the removal of property rights for individuals, and the destruction of the Second Amendment. (Yes, I'm serious about that.) His former campaign manager describes him as "obsessed with the gay-marriage issue."

Since most of the items on the Family Leader's little list have been staple Republican issues for years, I'm not entirely clear why so many of the other front-runners in the 2012 GOP Goat Rodeo are backing slowly away from it. Except that maybe, when you put it all in one place like this, it becomes a little more distasteful to the average American.

Because, really, what this "vow" wants is to put the Christian Taliban in place in America.

There have been a number of objections to parts of this pledge. For example, the first bullet point listed during the preamble to this steaming pile of piety is fascinating.

• Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an AfricanAmerican baby born after the election of the USA's first African-American President.

As Cheryl Contee put it at Jack & Jill Politics:

Given that families were broken up regularly for sales during slavery and that rape by masters was pretty common, this could not be more offensive. I mean, putting aside the statistics on this, which are likely off-base, I could not be more angry. When will Republicans inquire with (sic) actual Black people whether or not we’re ok with invoking slavery to score cheap political points?

But let's take a look at the actual "Candidate Vow" that Bachmann and Santorum signed on to support, shall we?

Personal fidelity to my spouse.

So, we're not likely to see this supported by Newt Gingrich, are we? Or, for that matter, most Republicans. Somewhere between John McCain's divorces and John Boehner's rumored affairs, I don't see the GOP adopting this as a plank, really.

Respect for the marital bonds of others.

Unless you're gay-married. Because that's just icky.

Official fidelity to the U.S. Constitution, supporting the elevation of none but faithful constitutionalists as judges or justices.

See, now, there's a tricky issue, right there. Because a "faithful constitutionalist" wouldn't have allowed any Constitutional Amendments, would he? So that whole "Bill of Rights" thing? Yeah, that's out the window. We wouldn't have had to ban Prohibition, but, then again, we wouldn't have had Prohibition in the first place, so I guess there's that.

Oh, and blacks would only be three-fifths of a person. You know, it's the little issues like these that make me wonder about "constitutional originalists."

Vigorous opposition to any redefinition of the Institution of Marriage – faithful monogamy between one man and one woman – through statutory-, bureaucratic-, or court-imposed recognition of intimate unions which are bigamous, polygamous, polyandrous, same-sex, etc.

Yup, there's that gay marriage thing again.

Recognition of the overwhelming statistical evidence that married people enjoy better health, better sex, longer lives, greater financial stability, and that children raised by a mother and a father together experience better learning, less addiction, less legal trouble, and less extramarital pregnancy.

Wow. Coming from people who refuse to accept the overwhelming scientific evidence for evolution and global warming, that's almost humorous. But what the hell does it really mean? "Recognition of the evidence?" Doesn't really say anything, except "yeah, I guess that's right..."

Support for prompt reform of uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy, and marital/divorce law, and extended "second chance" or "cooling-off" periods for those seeking a "quickie divorce."

"uneconomic, anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy"? Wow, that would be a fascinating list. Of course, since you've already accepted their bullshit studies in the previous paragraph, I guess the list of what you have to support has probably already been made.

Earnest, bona fide legal advocacy for the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) at the federal and state levels.

That's funny. You'd think that the part of DOMA that keeps states from having to accept gay marriages from other states would bother those "constitutional originalists," wouldn't it? You know, that whole Full Faith and Credit Clause (Article IV, Section 1, US Constitution), where it says that "acts, records and judicial proceedings (from each state) shall have the same full faith and credit in every court within the United States and its Territories and Possessions" as they do in the original state.

Steadfast embrace of a federal Marriage Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which protects the definition of marriage as between one man and one woman in all of the United States.

See? Once again, "constitutional originalists" who want to amend the fucking Constitution.

Logic. It's not just for breakfast anymore.

Humane protection of women and the innocent fruit of conjugal intimacy – our next generation of American children – from human trafficking, sexual slavery, seduction into promiscuity, and all forms of pornography and prostitution, infanticide, abortion and other types of coercion or stolen innocence.

You know, right at first glance, that looks like a really good part of this whole vow. It's a list of stuff everybody should be against, right?

Well, look closer. Once you get past the "human trafficking" and "sexual slavery," you'll notice that "abortion" is right there next to "infanticide," you'll note that they're not only trying to ban prostitution, but pornography. (We'll be dealing, of course, with their definition of pornography.) And can you please explain what they mean by "seduction into promiscuity" or "other types of coercion or stolen innocence?"

I mean, come on! Do you know how many things have been said to lead to promiscuity? Music of just about every kind, whether rock, rap or pop - go back far enough, even jazz has been accused of being "devil music." The media in general might be at fault. Even dancing at all is immoral. (You didn't think that the screenwriter for Footloose - Dean Pitchford, if you're curious - got the idea out of nowhere, did you?)

It isn't just sexy clothing that lead our children away from the Paths of Righteousness, it might even be something as simple as pants.

The list is endless. So how far do you think these people will want to press the issue?

Support for the enactment of safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. Military and National Guard personnel, especially our combat troops, from inappropriate same-gender or opposite-gender sexual harassment, adultery or intrusively intimate commingling among attracteds (restrooms, showers, barracks, tents, etc.); plus prompt termination of military policymakers who would expose American wives and daughters to rape or sexual harassment, torture, enslavement or sexual leveraging by the enemy in forward combat roles.

The gays again. This time in our military. (Maybe Vander Plaats really is obsessed with homosexuality. Methinks he doth protest too much...)

And incidentally, the womenfolk aren't strong enough to be in the military! They need to be back home pumping out babies!

Rejection of Sharia Islam and all other anti-woman, anti-human rights forms of totalitarian control.

Um... does that include the stuff in the Bible, too? Because I might be willing to support this if it did.

Recognition that robust childbearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.

You know, that doesn't necessarily sound all that scary, because many of you might not be familiar with the Quiverfull movement. Yeah, they're out there.

Commitment to downsizing government and the enormous burden upon American families of the USA's $14.3 trillion public debt, its $77 trillion in unfunded liabilities, its $1.5 trillion federal deficit, and its $3.5 trillion federal budget.

Except for those parts of the government that do the stuff we want, and the new parts to support the requirements of this vow right here...

Fierce defense of the First Amendment's rights of Religious Liberty and Freedom of Speech, especially against the intolerance of any who would undermine law-abiding American citizens and institutions of faith and conscience for their adherence to, and defense of, faithful heterosexual monogamy.

Free speech, but only for our side. You have to admire that one.

OK, so maybe I do see why the other GOP candidates aren't signing on to this.
_____________

Update (7/11/11): Although the link I used shows the original, it seems that FAMiLY LEADER has removed the only-offensive-if-you-know-a-black-person bullet point about slavery. And seriously, you can't blame them - there can't be more than 12 black people in Iowa, can there? And you can't expect Bob Vander Plaats to know all of them, can you?

Lemmings

Well, it's a new week. Apparently the world ended on Saturday not with a bang, but with a whimper. If you're reading this, you're apparently a hopeless sinner, doomed to five months or so of torment before being sent to the fiery pits of hell, or perhaps (just maybe) Harold Camping was wrong.

Christianity tends to get a pass in our society. The most outrageous ideas popping out of the mouths of the sincerely religious are allowed to stand unchallenged (although other religions don't get the same respect).

But not this time, really. Most of us heard about Camping and his idiotic ideas, and most of us thought he was an idiot. But there were some poor gullible bastards who were taken in. Many of them were taken in completely.

A man in Nairobi killed himself because of Camping's prediction. A man in California tried to euthanize his pets. People have spent their life savings, families were torn apart.

And a woman in Antelope Valley tried to kill herself and her two daughters, by slitting their throats and wrists.

Fortunately, "murder/suicide" now joins "spotting fraud" as just another thing she sucked at.

Some people suggested that Camping had emailed a suicide note to the Family Radio employees and killed himself. Sadly, that didn't prove to be the case. He showed up the next day, confused that he'd proven to be a lying sack of fuck. As I write this, the Family Radio website hasn't changed their "Judgement Day - May 21, 2011" screen:

But I clicked on that microphone in the upper right, and that vicious, unwavering bastard is holding a press conference claiming that God has now judged the world, and it will still end on October 21st.

This evil fucknozzle has earned over a hundred million dollars with this scam, and he is still trying to keep it going.

The saddest part to all this is, Camping's followers will most likely just become more devout because of this. What needs to happen is that his victims need to sue him for his immoral con game. But it won't happen.

Because the one thing that lasts forever is stupidity.

The Right's Doublethink

One unexpected side effect of the Internet was, not the unprecedented access to information available to the public, but the widespread propagation of openly ignorant, easily debunked bullshit. The easy availability of knowledge has been balanced by easy availability of conspiracy theories, lies, and unintentional errors. Add to that the unprecedented ability to cherry-pick preferred oversimplified answers to complex situations, and one thing becomes obvious.

Despite the potential inherent in what evolved from the ARPANET, it has become apparent to those of us who think about stuff that we've actually entered the Misinformation Age.

For example, today’s front page story on that flaming stack of ignorance and mendacity calling itself Conservapedia is a fascinating story called “Atheism and obesity,” where they determine that, apparently, if you don’t believe in God, He makes you fat (as you could probably tell from the title, but I thought I’d spell it out for you).

The crux of this theory (so to speak) is a Gallup poll, which reached the conclusion (repeated in the first line of the Conservapedia story):

Very religious Americans are more likely to practice healthy behaviors than those who are moderately religious or nonreligious.

Now, I could get all statistical and point out that a poll measures how people answer questions, not how they behave. And religious people are more prone to guilt, so wouldn’t they be more likely to lie when answering questions like “Do you do things you aren’t supposed to?”

But that would be the easy answer. (Plus, some actual atheists, as opposed to one nameless doubting agnostic, are cheerfully ripping this one apart.)

Instead, let me point out that, two weeks after the Gallup poll was released, we hear from New York that 1300 people are now in danger of contracting Hepatitis A, because they all took drinks from the same communion chalice. And remember, very religious Americans practice healthy behaviors. Like sucking down the backwash of other diseased Catholics.

Should I point out that they’re all at risk because they came in contact with the blood of Christ? Has He been shooting up with dirty needles again? Or should I just move on, since it's probably endangering your immortal soul to be taking religious advice from people with the balls to rewrite the "inalterable Word of God"?

Maybe the easiest answer is to show the following two maps? First, this.



See that? That shows how religious Christians claim to be, in various parts of the country. The greener, the Godlier, right? OK, then. Now check this out.



Now, that one shows the distribution of weight, per capita, in these United States. The more red, the more rotund.

See how the dark green and the dark red tend to match up? It’s kind of like Christmas, isn’t it? I guess you can’t spell faith without F - A - T.

Not a new thought to me, by the way. We already knew this; it's one of those pesky "fact" things that the GOP is so desperate to rewrite.

What Did Jehovah Witness?

So, earlier this week was the boss' birthday. We are all extremely fond of Sharon, so we got her a card and a gift certificate at a church bookstore she likes. And that's when I learned something new.

We were carefully sneaking the card from desk to desk to get it signed by everybody, and it got to Jeanie. She was doing something involving reports and graphs and charts, and so the whole "card" business came to a halt for a while. But shortly (and I'm not sure it was on purpose, but at least Jeanie waited until Sharon was out of the office), she came marching over to another co-worker, slapped down the card, and said, relatively forcefully, "I'm not going to participate."

You see, Jeanie is a Jehovah's Witness.

(I say that like it explains things. I only know this because a couple of us were so curious about the reaction that we looked it up.)

If you are a normal human being, the only thing you know about the Jehovah's Witness movement is that they come to your door, try to hand out copies of the Watchtower and ruin your weekend, and are generally the annoying kind of Christian.

(Full disclosure - I'm probably not a normal human being, either. The Trophy Wife cheerfully recounts how, early in our marriage, two Jehovah's Witnesses came to the door one Saturday morning, while we were dealing with kids and weekend mornings and the like, and I stood out on the porch - trust me, you never let them into the house! - and talked with them for two hours. It was less than fifteen minutes into it when they were diving into their bibles and flipping pages, and I just kept going.)

To be honest, we already knew that Jeanie doesn’t celebrate holidays (because whenever the subject comes up, she smugly informs us “I don’t celebrate holidays”), but this particular sect of Christianity also doesn't celebrate birthdays, as it turns out.

They base this on the two explicit uses of the word “birthday” in their translation of the Bible: Genesis 40:20-22, and Matthew 14:6-10. Because two pagan rulers (the Pharoah and Herod) did mean things to people on their birthdays, everybody loses. Apparently, God’s like a kindergarten teacher.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses use the New World Translation (NWT) of the Bible, which no other religion uses. So maybe they can be forgiven for ignoring the reasonably positive reference to birthdays in Job 1:4-5, since the NWT uses the phrase “his day” there. (What would “his day” be, again? Oh, well...)

Some people, in fact, argue that there are a lot of translation issues in the NWT, but a lot of that boils down to semantic quibbling, really; it’s their religion, and if they want to rewrite parts of the Bible to fit their beliefs, I suppose that’s their business. (It doesn't mean we can't make fun of them, of course. I'm just sayin'...)

Working in a hospital, I've tripped over the Jehovah's Witness beliefs before. You see, they can't seem to believe that God wants them to survive a gunshot wound: based on the Old Testament provisions against “eating blood,” JW’s can’t get transfusions (apparently you can eat through a hole in your arm – who knew?).

Well, OK, they can get some transfusions: there’s a whole list of allowed and prohibited practices, which gets changed every so often, usually for no logical reason - for example, hemoglobin, which makes up 97% of red blood cells, has been allowed by some dissident Witnesses since 2004 (but transfusions of red blood cells are usually still verboten). There is significant controversy on this point.

So, essentially, a Jehovah's Witness with hemophilia would just be proof that God has a sense of humor. Admittedly, a really, really dark sense of humor...

There’s a group of slightly less insane JW’s who are trying to get this particularly dangerous prohibition done away with. Good luck with that.

(Incidentally, on one of the major roads near my house, there's a Jehovah's Witness hall, with a sign out front in both English and Spanish - I live in New Mexico, what can I say? And driving past it, when you catch Testigos de Jehová out of the corner of your eye, I keep having to repress the giggles of my inner twelve-year-old. Because my mind always reads it as "Testicles of Jehovah." Every time. I can't help it.)

Now, there's one more thing. In the end (and yes, when you get down to it, the JW are another End-Times cult), only 144,000 people going to heaven. Which compares badly to the fact that there are over 16 million Jehovah’s Witnesses worldwide.

Now they do believe in a kind of an "anti-rapture" - instead of the holy folks going to heaven, the evil will be taken away. ("As regards the wicked, they will be cut off from the very earth; and as for the treacherous, they will be torn away from it."—Proverbs 2:22 NWT.)

(Of course, if you read all of Proverbs 2, it's a declaration that you should lead a good life in most translations - but let's just ignore that, shall we?)

So, let's see. If you're a Jehovah's Witness, you can't have birthdays or holidays, because you should suppress all the fun in this life. Which will frequently be a very short life. And you almost definitely won't go to heaven.

Yeah. Sign me up for that.

Complete Mor(m)ons

Some years ago, while I was still in the Air Force and stationed in Wyoming, the base got a Mormon chaplain. Now, the military has had Mormons in the chaplaincy since 1917 when three Mormons, including Elder B. H. Roberts of the Seventy, were appointed. But they aren't real common.

And since my wife was working in the chapel at the time, I got to see the reaction of the other chaplains to this guy. I'd never really paid attention before, but apparently, certain flavors of Christianity believe that the Mormons don't qualify as Christian.

So I looked into it. And, you know, with just a little research, you can pretty much see what they mean. In fact, some of their more off-the-wall beliefs start to sound a lot like Scientology.

The Mormons belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or LDS for short ("Mormon" comes from their earliest religious text, the Book of Mormon). The LDS have some good beliefs: the healthy lifestyle (no alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea - except herbal tea), the much mellower attitude toward strangeness - although they have damned little acceptance of outsiders, they do make some of the best neighbors of any "true believer," after Wiccans.

But you pretty quickly get into weird ground. There's the spiritual aspects: the pre-birth life, the ability to have spirit children in one of the three heavens (the Celestial kingdom, the Terrestrial kingdom and the Telestial kingdom). But they believe that all other modern Christian faiths have departed from true Christianity, and the LDS church is a restoration of 1st century Christianity and the only true and authorized Christian church.

They have a doctrine called "exaltation" which (as stated in the Doctrine & Covenants 132:20) allows true followers to become gods in the afterlife.

Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.

They also believe that God (Elohim) lives with his many wives on a planet (or by a star) named Kolob, God wants you to wear special underpants, and Joseph Smith really did not want to start polygamy, but a powerful angel with a sword threatened him and made him do it.

There's basic structural changes to how the Earth was formed: apparently, Elohim wanted to build Earth to give his billions of "spirit children" real bodies. His two oldest sons, Jesus and Lucifer, offered plans on how to do this. Elohim went with Jesus' plan, and Lucifer got angry and started a big war between the spirit children. After this war, any spirits that had stayed neutral were cursed to be born with black skin. (Hence the long-standing racism in the church.)

Elohim and one of his wives came to Earth as Adam and Eve and had a buttload of kids. Centuries later, Elohim left Kolob again to have sex with the Virgin Mary, to give a body to Jesus. Jesus took three wives (Mary, Martha and Mary Magdalene), and had a bunch of kids with them (and, of course, Joseph Smith was one of the descendants of Jesus).

After His resurrection, Jesus came to the Americas to preach to the Indians, who the LDS believe are really Israelites. In fact, according to Prophet Spencer W. Kimball in 1960 (and the words of a Mormon prophet on church business become canon law), as they convert to Mormonism, Native Americans skin lightens to a more Caucasian hue.

Yes, that's right. It turns out that Mel Brooks was divinely inspired by Elohim.



Which, of course, brings us to the story of Joseph Smith himself. In 1820, Joseph Smith said he had his first vision, which he said was God telling him that all of his sins were forgiven, and that all other churches were false. (You know, like he'd told Mohammed that all churches were false over twelve centuries earlier. It's weird how many people claim that God tells them this.) Smith made his living by putting a rock in his hat (calling it a "seer stone") and claiming that it would lead him to buried treasure. And then a few years after his first vision, an angel named Moroni showed him where to find a breastplate fitted with two "seer stones" (we'll just call them his "magic glasses") and some golden plates inscribed with the story of those Jewish Native Americans I mentioned before.

After being unable to bring back the plates from where they were buried, because apparently he was using the wrong helpers, he finally got the plates and locked them in a box, because the angel told him that nobody else should see them (and that didn't sound suspicious at all). But the magic spectacles would let him translate them, and write them out in book form, and he could publish the books. (He made some of the later translations by sticking a rock in his hat again, but who among us hasn't misplaced their glasses, right?)

It's weird that nobody has ever found evidence of a gold mine used by the indigenous people of North America, particularly not in the New York or Pennsylvania areas where Smith was living at the time.

Smith was mostly illiterate (education being what it was then) - he could read some, but really couldn't write. So he had to sit in the kitchen on the other side of a blanket (or a screen, or a curtain, depending on the source you read) and dictate, first to his wife, and later to a guy named Harris.

A few years later, Smith had about 118 pages translated, and Harris lost the first translation (let's call it a "rough draft"), the angel took the plates away, and Smith lost the ability to read words from a rock in his hat. Until a few months after that, when he magically got the ability back, and God gave him a new set of plates, so that Smith could to rewrite the story - it had to be changed, of course, because the first draft might be in the hands of Satan by now.

(An uncharitable reading of the events of those days might be that Harris' wife, tired of her husband getting conned, took the pages and hid them, saying that God could just dictate them again and they'd be exactly the same; so Smith had to come up with a cover story to work around that. But we aren't uncharitable people, are we?)

So there Smith sat, dictating to some scribe or another. ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!") From words he could see on a rock. In his hat. Which came from plates that God had recalled and replaced. (Maybe Smith hadn't been making payments - gold plates cost money, after all...)

So Smith gradually had the translations written out again, and set up his church. Of course, since people might not believe in plates that had been returned to heaven, Smith had eleven followers write statements saying that they'd seen, or even touched, the plates. The plates that the angel Moroni had said that nobody but Smith could ever see. (Maybe that's why God took them back! Hey, I think we've solved a mystery here!)

Weirdly, God couldn't be bothered to create a better story than he'd used before - he cribbed widely, from the New Testament, the Old Testament, and even from a crackpot book called View of the Hebrews: A History of the Ten Tribes in America, which claimed, yes, that the Native Americans were really Jews. (God as plagiarist; what the hell, right? But it had worked for Mohammed centuries earlier.)

Some years later, after escaping from the law in Ohio on charges of banking fraud, possibly marrying (or possibly just screwing) a 15-year-old named Fanny Alger, marrying several dozen other women and then claiming (since it was illegal) that he'd never supported polygamy, starting the Mormon War of 1838 in Missouri, bribing a sheriff to escape from jail, mobilizing the Mormon Nauwoo Legion to quell uprisings in the church (they later surrendered to the state militia), and finally going to jail and getting shot by unknown assailants, Smith died.

Today, the Mormons have almost nineteen million members worldwide, with at least 46 different schismatic versions of the religion still remaining, and at least 25 defunct, dissolved, or deceased sects fading into history.

But on reflection, I guess I can see where Mormonism doesn't really fit in with the more "standard" versions of Christianity.

Porn Jesus

See, back in 12th century Italy, some unknown painter made an "icon crucifix" (Jesus nailed to a tree, surrounded by a bunch of things - people, in this case - who were important to the story), and hung it in a small church in San Damian. It became popular when some rich guy from Assisi named Francis got sick, and hallucinated that the crucifix spoke to him. (Not as uncommon as you might think - my son had a fever when he was a kid, and thought that one of the posters on his wall grew green tentacles that were reaching for him.)



It's a decent painting, but nothing special. Jesus just hanging there, with sparks apparently flying from his head, and the people standing around talking about how he didn't put enough work in his lats or quads, and his pecs were pretty much non-existent, but look at those abs! Boy's been doing his crunches, all right. Ripped! (I mean, you know, stylized in a way that was popular back then, but tight. Prominent.)

Unfortunately, when something becomes popular, some people copy it without really paying attention to some of the details of what they're doing. And maybe some proportions get gradually farther off, some lines are emphasized more, and sometimes, the errors mount up in ways that nobody anticipated.

Like this crucifix in Oklahoma.



I mean, good Lord! They said Jesus was hung on the cross, but I don't think that's what they meant! Is this how they roll in Oklahoma? "My God's Cock is bigger than yours"? Why else would Jesus be packing heat like that?

I've got to say, it's a nice touch that the people aren't just standing around talking, but are openly staring at His midsection. After all, even in the Zero-th Century, you've got to be impressed by the Holy Staff. It's like a baby's arm! Possibly a whole baby!

It's an interesting way to build up your diety, really. I mean, it's obvious that after Jesus, no man was likely to satisfy Mary Magdalene again. God loved His only Son, and blessed Him with a Python that would send most women screaming in fear.

(Except that He's Jesus, so fear isn't allowed. Wow, leave it to those wacky Catholics to bring a whole new, somewhat disturbing meaning to "Thy Rod and Thy Staff, they comfort me.")

Shouldn't It get its own halo? Hell, at what point is it classified as a birth defect? (Except, of course, it's Jesus, so It must be the perfect Penis. So never mind.) The man's a tripod! He had to sleep on his side or risk spraining Something.

Thank God that the ancient Romans had cesarean sections, because you know that Jesus would have gotten wedged halfway out of the birth canal. ("Here, Joseph, would you like to cut the... NO! Not that one!")

Talk about your grail runneth over! Imagine the bris - it must have lasted all night! (Is that the root of the word "hubris"?) I guarantee that the rabbi saved the foreskin, which means that somewhere in Bethlehem, there's a Torah bound in one impressive relic.

Of course, with gay porn like this hanging around the altar, you do have to wonder why the Catholic church still opposes gay marriage. Come on, guys! Come out of the closet! You're still celibate (well, the good ones are), and your Pope openly wears a dress! Does it really matter if you swing right or left when you aren't technically swinging at all?

More people who want to kill you in the name of their god.

Does anybody remember how, early last year, the Department of Homeland Security released a study on rightwing extremists, and the entire right half of the blogosphere just completely lost their shit, claiming that Obama was declaring war on conservatives, and openly lying about the meaning of the phrase "Christian identity groups"?

Yeah, good times.

They ignored the fact that the study had taken several months to put together, and had been ordered by the Bush Administration, but that's pretty standard for the right ever since the that black guy got elected president. That's how they roll. Panic, paranoia, fear-mongering, and incoherent screaming - the four planks of the New GOP.

Well, last weekend, we learned about a group calling themselves the Hutaree, another militia group paranoid about the rise of the New World Order, accusing Obama of being the Antichrist, stockpiling weapons, selling explosives - you know, the usual schtick. We learned about them because the FBI and local authorities rounded up a bunch of them, accused them of trying to overthrow the government, plotting to kill law enforcement officers, and a couple of related charges.

Theirs was a cunning plan. They were going to kill a cop, run back to their fortified bunkers with their guns and their explosives and their faith in the Four Horsemen of the Apocolyse, and wait while the country exploded into civil war.

With a brilliantly simple plan like that, how could they lose?

Well, today, a federal magistrate in Detroit affirmed the charges, rebutted defense lawyers' claims that these were moral, upstanding Christian members of the Michigan citizenry; in fact, the magistrate specifically said that they looked like they posed a threat to the community, and were probably a flight risk.

I do have one little argument with the charges against them. They're charged with attempting to use "weapons of mass destruction." As far as anybody who hasn't spent months poring over the Federal files can tell, that's because they were making improvised explosive devices. Homemade landmines - all conventional explosives.

Unless these fine Prayer Warriors had a hidden stock of nuclear weapons, or at least chemical or biological agents, the Departement of Homeland Security needs to stop weakening the definition of "weapons of mass destruction."

Ordinary explosives don't qualify. Unless you place them directly on a city's main gas line, even if you blow them up in the middle of a crowd you might get 15 or 20 people, tops. Let's hold back the World-Ending-Threat labels for something that might actually take out more people than you can fit in a small room, OK?

Meanwhile, I do have one piece of bad news. Know how we've been forced to view Islam as a "terrorist religion" based on the actions of a few extremists? Completely ignoring the other 1.5 billion followers of what is, by some reports, the world's fastest growing religion. Well, I'm sorry, but, following that inescapable logic, we are now forced to consider the Christian church to be a terrorist religion, with it's requirements that anybody who doesn't fit in or who talks back must be killed.

Keep your eyes on those pasty white people hanging around the Episcopalian church. They're obviously a threat to our way of life.

The Catholic Church needs to be honest about something.

OK, so let's be clear on one thing. The rape of young children is wrong. Male or female, it doesn't matter. Anyone who rapes a child should be force-fed his own genitals, lightly fried on a bed of blanched poison oak leaves. And then kicked in the stomach until they bleed out their ears.

Does that seem unforgiving of me? I'm sorry. Maybe I'm just cranky right now.

So, let's be clear on what's going on right now.

See, we have to take the Wayback Machine back to before Cardinal Joey the Rat was declared to be the Pope; this would be after he was a member of the Hitler Youth, but before he told the people of Africa that condom use would send them to hell, and still wouldn't prevent AIDS, so there, nyaah.

Now, back then, there was this priest named Peter Hullermann.

It seems that a psychiatrist, Dr. Werner Huth, told the Catholic leadership of Germany (which included the current Pope Benny) that this priest needed to be kept away from young boys and alcohol. Father Hullerman liked to get loaded and rape altar boys. And the nascent Pope ignored it. Transferred Father Hullerman to a different diocese. And then another. And another.

In Milwaukee, the Reverend Lawrence C. Murphy was sexually abusing deaf boys for years in his school.

For decades, a group of men who were sexually abused as children by the Rev. Lawrence C. Murphy at a school for the deaf in Wisconsin reported to every type of official they could think of that he was a danger, according to the victims and church documents.

They told other priests. They told three archbishops of Milwaukee. They told two police departments and the district attorney. They used sign language, written affidavits and graphic gestures to show what exactly Father Murphy had done to them. But their reports fell on the deaf ears of hearing people.

This week, they learned that Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, received letters about Father Murphy in 1996 from Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland of Milwaukee, who said that the deaf community needed “a healing response from the Church.” The Vatican sat on the case, then equivocated, and when Father Murphy died in 1998, he died a priest.

In Ireland, hundreds of abused boys were hidden by the Catholic Church; at least two have come forward who were forced to sign confidentiality agreements saying that they wouldn't bring charges against the church. This is in the wake of charges against the church in Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.

Now, the fact that a major gay prostitution ring was being run out of the Vatican might look bad, right? Well, ironically, it was discovered in the same week where the Archdiocese in DC announced that they wouldn't offer health coverage to any spouses of employees, because there might be a chance that they'd have to cover a gay couple.

With all this going on, we get an op-ed from Bill Donohue, head of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. Now, Bill is usually good for a laugh now and again, as he rants his spittle-flecked way through whatever minor issue is raising his blood pressure this week. But he's outdone himself here.

Employers from every walk of life, in both the U.S. and Europe, have long handled cases of alleged sex abuse by employees as an internal matter. Rarely have employers called the cops, and none was required to do so.

Now, Bill, here's where you're sticking your foot in it already. There's kind of a big difference between Bobby from Records grabbing Susie's butt, and Father Murphy jamming his cock into the rectum of a ten-year-old boy, isn't there?

Beyond that issue, the focus on sexual abuse in the Catholic Church is far out of proportion to the attention given by the media to the sexual molestation of minors when committed by non-Catholic clergymen. According to a report by the New York Times in October, the Brooklyn district attorney's office had filed charges in 26 cases of sexual abuse involving members of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community.
Just this month, Rabbi Baruch Lebovits was found guilty on eight counts of sexually abusing a Brooklyn boy. Yet the Times, which has run several stories on the decades-old cases in Ireland and Germany, never reported it. And none of it merits the kind of attention given to priests.

Hell, Bill, the answer is right in the question, isn't it? Rabbi Baruch went to jail, didn't he? (Oh, and it seems that there was, in fact, media coverage of it...)

(And just like clockwork, we have somebody trying to blame Obama with pedophile Catholic priests. Because Obama is responsible for every problem in the world, even the ones that started decade or even centuries before he was born. Which makes just as much sense as trying to blame the "permissive sexual culture that prevailed everywhere, seminaries included, during the silly season of the ’70s" - you know, I lived through the 70s, and I don't recall the rape of young boys being a popular spectator sport.)

Now, let's compare the case of Rabbi Baruch, currently getting gang-raped in the shower somewhere in the New York penal system, against the case of, say, Cardinal Bernard Law, who, after it was shown that he covered up the sexual abuse of altar boys in Boston for years, was promoted to a position in Rome, is currently "responsible for one of the four most important basilicas in Rome," and is hiding out in Vatican City, which doesn't have an extradition treaty with any country.

See, here's the problem, Donahue. You don't allow your priests to have sex. You don't even let them masturbate without it being called a sin. Which leaves you with a group of adult males, with all the hormones God put in them, denying their own sexual identities. That energy has to go somewhere, right?

And meanwhile, the Catholic Church reserves the right to lie (by omission, in this case). Baltimore passed a "truth in advertising" ordinance, which would have required pregnancy counseling services to advise women if they do not refer women to abortion providers or give help with birth control. And the Catholic diocese has sued to get the ordinance overturned, because they don't want to have to tell women those little facts.

Apparently, nebulous concepts like "the truth" aren't actually that important to the average Catholic.

__________

Update (4/1/2010): And because Bill Donohue is basically a dishonest fuck, he's now claiming (and his Catholic League took out an ad in support of this viewpoint) that the problem isn't pedophilia, it's all the fault of those pesky gays! Because most of the victims were 12 or 13, so they were "post-pubescent"!

Here, Donohue. Let me see if I can help you out a little. Here's a handy list of the age of consent for pretty much every state in the US. Please notice that there isn't a single state, not even South Carolina, where it's legal to have sex with a 12-year-old.

Let me just say it now, for the record. Bill Donohue is a worthless bag of pus.

Conservative Christianity is a myth

There are a lot of people in America attempting to claim that they believe in two philosophies simulaneously. Now normally, this wouldn't be a problem, but since the two philosophies are in complete opposition to each other, it seems a little bit hypocritical to try and embrace both at the same time.

These two philosophies are Republicanism and Christianity.

You wouldn't think that these two viewpoints would be completely at odds - after all, religions tend to be conservative by their nature - but if you really look into things, you'll see that Christianity is fairly incompatible with the current version of the Republican Party. Conservative Christians are the moral equivalent of Peta Members For Animal Testing, or maybe Gun Runners For Peace. Pro-Life Abortionists. It's a self-defeating philosophical stance.

Now I've explained at great length how the Bible doesn't oppose homosexuality, and how you have to twist yourself into theosophical knots in order to get the Bible to oppose abortion. So, rather than going over that ground again, let's look at some other issues that are key to the Republican way of life.

You can make the argument that the Republican Party currently only has two political goals.

1. Oppose anything that this uppity president supports.
2. Prevent Congress from doing anything.

And, while that may be a valid argument, there are issues that the average right-wing tool will have talking points that are loaded and ready to fire.

Now, I covered some of this before. Let's look at the current fascination with immigration. Apparently, if you listen to the teabaggers and their ilk, particularly if the odious Tom Tancredo is in the neighborhood, not only are the Mexicans going to come in and steal all of our high-paying jobs, but they're going to hold the door open so that the islamofascists can get in, too.

Which means that they never read Exodus 22:21: "Thou shalt neither vex a stranger, nor oppress him: for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt."

Or the New Testament. From Hebrews 13:2: "Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares." Or Matthew 25:44-45:

Then shall they also answer him, saying, "Lord, when saw we thee anhungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?"

Then shall he answer them, saying, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.”

And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

You can also read that one when you're talking about Social Security, welfare, the national healthcare debate, or any of a number of hot-button topics for the Republicans. In fact, on that same subject, let's consider James 2:14-18 (just so it's more clear, let's use the NIV translation this time).

What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes and daily food. If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed," but does nothing about his physical needs, what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.

The teabaggers like to claim that they oppose taxes in general, and the increased taxes that they foresee Obama levying on them in specific. (Of course, they stick their fingers in their ears and squeeze their eyes shut if you point out that Obama passed what is arguably the biggest tax cut in history).

But what did the Bible say about paying your taxes? That's covered in Luke 20:24-25.

Sh(o)w me a penny. Whose image and superscription hath it? They answered and said, Caesar's.

And he said unto them, Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar's, and unto God the things which be God's."

The environment? At the same time that God gave Adam and Eve "dominion over… every living thing that moveth upon the earth," He told them to "replenish the Earth." (Genesis 1:28). In Leviticus 25:23, God says "The land shall not be sold for ever: for the land is mine, for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." Sojourner is usually translated as "tenant," by the way. So do you think God's going to renew your lease?

Please, try to explain how you can claim to follow a guy who was crucified, and still support capital punishment or the torture of prisoners? Basically, it looks to me like the only Bible that the average Republican will follow was written by Anton LaVey.

Jesus Christ, they're idiots!

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