Oops

 

Banning books, attacking education, dividing communities

 

Fighting Trump and White Supremacists

Mother Jones:

“They may not be ready for the Ku Klux Klan yet, but as anti-white hatred escalates, they will.” 

That was Rachel Pendergraft, a spokeswoman for the political arm of the Ku Klux Klan (yes, this exists), talking last year about the way the Trump campaign was helping racist and white supremacist groups reach a growing audience. Mother Jones interviewed her as part of a big investigation, which found that these extremists were seeing Trump as legitimizing their once-hidden views. 

Hearing people like Pendergraft talking this way—taking off the hood, as it were—was shocking enough. But here’s what really stunned us in reporting out that story: Not only were extremists excited by Trump’s campaign. Not only were they using it to recruit on a scale they hadn’t imagined before. They felt that the campaign was signaling to them actively and deliberately—and the more we dug, the more we realized they were right.

From bones to security

The church decorated with bones.

Global warming is making plants grow around the northern latitudes.

Surviving Mengele.

Bee venom is good for something... destroying HIV cells.

A woman speaks out about how men should be taught not to rape... and gets truly ugly threats about rape.

Unknown microbes found in Antarctic ice lake.  Isn't this how the horror story begins?

The frightening buildup of hate groups in reaction to a black president and the gun control movement. (pdf)

Getting rich off of schoolchildren.

Policy Basics: Top Ten Facts about Social Security

I'm going to have to shop at J C Penney now...

Because the One Million Moms group is trying to start a boycott of the store for daring to use Ellen DeGeneres as a spokesperson. J C Penney has refused to submit to bullying and will continue to use DeGeneres. Ellen DeGeneres believes in honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. Apparently to some people her being gay negates all those 'Christian-claimed' traditional values.

Update: new video.

The fungus among us...

Why does the far right seem to ooze out from under the rocks when the economy is shaky and politics are polarized? Easier to blame others and reach for guns rather than work together to fix things?:

The far right is on the rise across Europe as a new generation of young, web-based supporters embrace hardline nationalist and anti-immigrant groups, a study has revealed ahead of a meeting of politicians and academics in Brussels to examine the phenomenon.

Research by the British thinktank Demos for the first time examines attitudes among supporters of the far right online. Using advertisements on Facebook group pages, they persuaded more than 10,000 followers of 14 parties and street organisations in 11 countries to fill in detailed questionnaires.

The study reveals a continent-wide spread of hardline nationalist sentiment among the young, mainly men. Deeply cynical about their own governments and the EU, their generalised fear about the future is focused on cultural identity, with immigration – particularly a perceived spread of Islamic influence – a concern.

"We're at a crossroads in European history," said Emine Bozkurt, a Dutch MEP who heads the anti-racism lobby at the European parliament. "In five years' time we will either see an increase in the forces of hatred and division in society, including ultra-nationalism, xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism, or we will be able to fight this horrific tendency."

I have to admit I was shocked at the rabid savagery aimed at protesters of the Iraq invasion during Bush's reign of terror. The delight at going to war.. any war... after 9/11. The belittling of the humanity of the citizens of Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan, etc etc. The bizarre embrace of torture with assurances it wasn't really torture and besides the detainees were islamofascists and Jesus would have approved. The suggestion that using nukes really wouldn't be so horrible. We have our own American Taliban and Nazis right here, despite our best efforts in education and exposure to other cultures.

They must hatch like toadstools, surrounded by bullshit and darkness. Sunlight is the only cure.

Exactly.

Republicans love America

And hate everything in it. Everything.

Arizona

Purging anyone brown from the state:

Maybe lawyers can restore the integrity of the Constitution, a document that forbids states like Arizona and towns like Freemont from fueling diasporas with their own immigration policies.

But what can lawyers do about jackals always tracking the immigrant's dusty footprint?

What do we do about the pregnant 31-year-old woman who was the target of another U-turn stop because of a faulty license-plate light on the back of her car? She was slammed into the hood of her vehicle when she did not readily consent to a search for non-existent narcotics. A U.S. citizen of Latin descent, she clearly remembers being told: "I can be an asshole if you're going to be a bitch."

What would you tell the 17-year-old child, an American, who was followed into a gated community on her way home from school? When asked for identification, she produced a valid Arizona driver's license. The officer insisted upon further proof, claiming he was required by law to get more documentation.

Though she speaks perfect English and knew the law wasn't scheduled to go into effect until this week, she was frightened half to death. She allowed the officer to tail her another couple of blocks to her home, where she retrieved her passport for inspection.

Each of these crude assaults upon dignity happened without benefit of SB 1070. Each happened to an American.

While Jan Brewer, state Senator Russell Pearce (1070's author), Barry Wong, and Joe Arpaio sport conservative mufti, this is neither a right nor left issue. The feckless few, Goddard, Giffords, and Mitchell, are not without incriminating shadow.

Historically, America attacks immigrants, only embracing the foreigners long after the Yankee has pummeled them to within an inch of their ethnicity. Progressives and those who should know better have their place in this roll call of sulfurous shame.

And the result?:

Area businesses also say they're seeing the effects of people leaving the state.

Steve Salvato, manager at the family-owned World Class Car Wash, just around the corner from Belleview Street, said business is down 30 percent. Salvato said the car wash relies mostly on Hispanic customers and points to the new law for the recent decline in business.

"A lot of people have just packed up and moved," he said, adding that a strip mall across the street used to be bustling on weekends. "Now it's like a ghost town."

A nearby Food City grocery store reports a 20 percent to 30 percent drop in business.

While the Obama administration is deporting more illegals than Bush ever did:

In a bid to remake the enforcement of federal immigration laws, the Obama administration is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants and auditing hundreds of businesses that blithely hire undocumented workers.

The Immigation and Customs Enforcement agency anticipates deporting about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration's 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. The pace of company audits has roughly quadrupled since former President Bush's final year in office.

The effort is part of President Obama's larger project "to make our national laws actually work," as he put it in a speech this month at American University. Partly designed to entice Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, the mission is proving difficult and politically perilous.

Obama is drawing flak from hawks who contend the administration is weak on border security and from doves who are disappointed that he has not done more to fulfill his campaign promise to help the country's estimated 11 million illegal residents. Trying to thread a needle, the president contends enforcement -- including the deployment of fresh troops to the Mexico border -- is a necessary but insufficient solution.

Jefferson v Calvin and the Women-hating Anti-Choicers

This is a confusing decision to me. The Texas State Board of Education takes out Thomas Jefferson and puts in John Calvin. Why Calvin? He's not even part of the 'Enlightenment'.

From Wikipedia:

The Age of Enlightenment (or simply the Enlightenment) is the era in Western philosophy and intellectual, scientific and cultural life, centered upon the eighteenth century, in which reason was advocated as the primary source and legitimacy for authority.

And if you notice, it says the age of REASON, not religious dogma. Anyway, back to the Texas crew:

According to TFN: "the board stripped Thomas Jefferson from a world history standard about the influence of Enlightenment thinkers on political revolutions from the 1700s to today. In Jefferson's place, the board's religious conservatives succeeded in inserting Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin. They also removed the reference to 'Enlightenment ideas' in the standard, requiring that students should simply learn about the influence of the 'writings' of various thinkers (including Calvin and Aquinas)."

So they are getting rid of one of our very own American philosophers and thinkers and presidents to drag in a fifteenth century religious theologian.

Why?

More research (all from Wikipedia):

*Calvinism (also called the Reformed tradition, the Reformed faith, or Reformed theology) is a theological system and an approach to the Christian life.[1] The Reformed tradition was advanced by several theologians such as Martin Bucer, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and Huldrych Zwingli, but it often bears the name of the French reformer John Calvin because of his prominent influence on it and because of his role in the confessional and ecclesiastical debates throughout the 16th century. Today, this term also refers to the doctrines and practices of the Reformed churches of which Calvin was an early leader. Less commonly, it can refer to the individual teaching of Calvin himself.[2] The system is best known for its doctrines of predestination and total depravity, stressing the absolute sovereignty of God.

*The Calvinistic doctrine of predestination is a doctrine of Calvinism which deals with the question of the control God exercises over the world. In the words of the Westminster Confession of Faith, God "freely and unchangeably ordained whatsoever comes to pass."[1] The second use of the word "predestination" applies this to the salvation, and refers to the belief that God appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation by grace, while leaving the remainder to receive eternal damnation for all their sins, even their original sin. The former is called "unconditional election", and the latter "reprobation". In Calvinism, men must be predestined and effectually called (regenerated/born again) unto faith by God before they will even wish to believe or wish to be justified.

*Total depravity (also called total inability and total corruption) is a theological doctrine that derives from the Augustinian concept of original sin. It is the teaching that, as a consequence of the Fall of Man, every person born into the world is enslaved to the service of sin and, apart from the efficacious or prevenient grace of God, is utterly unable to choose to follow God or choose to accept salvation as it is freely offered. It is also advocated to various degrees by many Protestant confessions of faith and catechisms, including those of Lutheranism,[1] Arminianism,[2] and Calvinism.[3]

Dusty Crickets offers this review of Calvin in comments:

From a link I tagged from over at PZ's place...

"...John Calvin is considered the founder of the Puritan ethic. The theocracy he established in sixteenth-century Geneva, Switzerland, prohibited dancing, drinking, gambling, card playing, ribaldry, fashionable clothes, and other amusements. Theaters were closed and attempts were made to drive taverns from the city.

Proclaiming "the chief duty of man is to glorify God," Calvin required religious instruction for all, public fasting, austere living, and evening curfew. According to the town records, a man was imprisoned for three days for smiling during a baptism.

Sex researcher Aileen Goodson, Ph.D., states the Puritans who came to America emphasized biblical interpretations that considered the human body as inherently impure and depraved. She further reports they "had neither the time nor the inclination for frivolity. Their body guilt and shame became the law of the land, and this law was even more extreme in the United States than overseas."

The anti-sex attitude of the Puritans is also described by historian John Demos. He reports that throughout the seventeenth century, the Puritans in Plymouth Colony had "a steady succession of trials and convictions for sexual offenses involving single persons. 'Fornication,' in particular, was a familiar problem."

Although the Puritans had serious and even pathological hang-ups about pleasure, they were into violence. Calvin's Geneva beheaded adulterers. Religious dissenters were hanged, decapitated, or burned at the stake. Christopher Hitchens describes Calvin as "a sadist and torturer and killer, who burned Servetus (one of the great thinkers and questioners of the day) while the man was still alive."

Massachusetts Puritans also had a law, based on Leviticus 20:9 from the Old Testament, that a child who curses his or her parent shall be put to death. Calvin would have approved, for his government used the same verse to justify beheading a small boy in Geneva for striking his father.

As a result of the command at Exodus 22:18, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live," Puritans were responsible for the insanity of the Salem witch trials......."

http://www.humanismbyjoe.com/Puritans_Dark_Side.htm

and so on.

Lovely. So why on earth is Texas trying to drag us back into the Dark Ages? Just who are they writing these 'history' textbooks for?

These guys:

These men are going to prevent you from controlling your own body. Because they are men and you are a woman. Because JESUS says so. And He's a man.. or something.

Anti-Abortion Extremists Go to “Hell”

In the escalating fury of anti-abortion groups since George W. Bush left office, Operation Rescue/Operation Save America (OR/OSA) has announced that protesters will storm “the gates of hell” to shut down family planning clinics in Charlotte, N.C. the week of July 17-24.
Even though OR/OSA’s head extremist, Phillip “Flip” Benham, was recently arrested in Charlotte for stalking and for violating a South Carolina law against residential picketing, his organization is still determined to harass doctors and patients. But as part of its National Clinic Access Project, the Feminist Majority Foundation is trying to prevent Benham and the other protesters from setting up ladders and scaffolding on the property of the Family Reproductive Health Clinic and using amplified sounds systems to scream at patients from ladders on the other side of a 6-foot fence.
Even more unsettling have been threats against abortion-providing doctors in Charlotte, as Benham has plastered the clinics and home neighborhoods of two doctors with menacing “WANTED” posters that include threatening language as well as their names and addresses of their private offices and homes. The posters encourage people to contact the doctors, “expose [them] to the powerful Gospel of Christ” and make them stop “killing babies.” At least three abortion providers who were murdered in the past had been similarly targeted with “WANTED” posters that were distributed publicly.

And these guys: Catholic bishops want to control your uterus. They know what's best. Amazingly the sisters don't agree! The nuns support health care reform ... because they remember what it was like to be human?

And these guys: Utah considers stoning, shaming and the stocks?

Utah Anti-Abortion Bill Citing ‘Reckless Act’ Is Withdrawn

DENVER — A sweeping anti-abortion statute in Utah that would have allowed up to life in prison for a woman whose fetus died from her intentional or reckless behavior was withdrawn by its sponsor on Thursday and will be revised to be narrower in scope.

The original bill, which was sent to Gov. Gary R. Herbert, a Republican, for his consideration — and set off a firestorm of anxiety and criticism from abortion rights and women’s advocacy groups around the country — now goes back to the Legislature, neither signed nor vetoed.

The sponsor, Representative Carl D. Wimmer, a Republican, said he had removed a key clause that would have allowed prosecution under Utah’s criminal homicide laws for a “reckless act of the woman” that resulted in death to a fetus. Language will remain, he said, that makes a woman’s “intentional” actions, if resulting in the death of her fetus in an illegal abortion, a felony.

And:

Frustration Makes Pro-Lifers More Anti-Abortion Than Ever

Anti-abortion advocates coined the moniker "pro-life" because they wanted to connect with the majority of Americans who supported abortion restrictions. A new poll shows just how anti-abortion the "pro-life" movement really is.

The new poll,by Gallup, shows that, since the nineties — and the wholesale adoption of political evangelicals into the Republican Party — anti-abortion Republicans have become increasingly opposed to abortion. In a bit of good news, the increasingly crazed rhetoric from those people has seemingly driven more Democrats to the pro-choice position.

This is why Texas is rewriting textbooks, to placate the ignorant, the hateful, the fearful, the stupid. This is why our country will look like this in a few years....



Update 3/20: Credo Action has a petition to fight against the rewriting of history Texas is doing.

Not being able to punch school-aged gay kids

Is being threatened by tolerance!!

Who will the poor bullies be able to threaten then? Who's thinking of THEM???

Mocking those who hate

You can make your own sign! Click on pic for background and site. Here's mine:



There is nothing else you can do to these vile people.

Update... and then there are just the non-thinkers...



Update: Phila of Bouphonia has the last word.

Mob riots brought to you by your health insurance.

Crooks and Liars:

The DNC has a winner here, going straight for the jugular with these assholes.

"They lost the election. They lost on the Recovery Act, the budget and children's health care," the script reads. "They've lost the confidence of the American people after eight years of failed policies that ruined our economy and cost millions of jobs."

Now, desperate Republicans and their well-funded allies are organizing angry mobs - just like they did during the election. Their goal? Destroy President Obama and stop the change Americans voted for overwhelmingly in November."

Who is behind these fake mob attacks.

Joe Sudbay of AmericaBlog:

The Republican National Committee doesn't want to hear from people who are upset over its thuggish tactics at Town Hall meetings. The DNC launched an ad, Enough of the Mob, which asked people to call the RNC. Heard from readers, Tim Beauchamp and ShirleyGoodnessandMercy, that the RNC is dumping those who call about the ad.

Stuff you can do. And here.

Commenters at Digby's Hullabaloo's post have suggestions.

Who the individuals in the mobs are:

A telling anecdote recounted by Pat Buchanan to New Yorker writer George Packer last year captures the dark spirit that still hovers around the GOP. In 1966 Buchanan and Richard Nixon were at the Wade Hampton Hotel in Columbia, S.C., where Nixon worked a crowd into a frenzy: "Buchanan recalls that the room was full of sweat, cigar smoke, and rage; the rhetoric, which was about patriotism and law and order, 'burned the paint off the walls.' As they left the hotel, Nixon said, 'This is the future of this Party, right here in the South.' "

That same rage was on display again in the fall of 2008, but this time the frenzy was stimulated by a pretty gal with a mocking little wink. Sarah Palin may not have realized what she was doing, but Southerners weaned on Harper Lee heard the dog whistle.

The curious Republican campaign of 2008 may have galvanized a conservative Southern base -- including many who were mostly concerned with the direction Democrats would take the country -- but it also repelled others who simply bolted and ran the other way. Whatever legitimate concerns the GOP may historically have represented were suddenly overshadowed by a sense of a resurgent Old South and all the attendant pathologies of festering hate and fear.

And:

The right, by contrast, seems perpetually fired up, and not just on health care. At a town meeting last month, Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) was booed and heckled when he wouldn't concur with a noisy "birther" who argued that President Obama had been born in Kenya. This bit of social psychosis is limited almost entirely to Republicans: 77 percent of Americans, according to one recent poll, believe that Obama was born in the USA, but only 42 percent of Republicans do.

When future historians look back at this passage in our nation's history, I suspect they'll conclude that this Obama-isn't-American nuttiness refracted the insecurities and, in some cases, the hatred that a portion of conservative white America felt about having a black president and about the transformation of what many thought of as their white nation into a genuinely multiracial republic. But whatever the reasons, a mobilized minority is making a very plausible play to thwart a demobilized majority.

Media Matters.

We've seen this before. Think back to the recount of the election in 2000 and consider what we got then by not saying enough. We will not be hijacked again.

Update: Don Briggs of the Daily Kos: Tea Baggers FAIL to disrupt Health Care meeting, lessons shared.

How one man can change the hate-filled air waves

Read Spocko and learn.

The Taliban doing what they intend to do

For the rest of the Islamic nations:

Taliban gunmen have been filmed executing a surprised couple whom they repeatedly shot for the alleged crime of adultery.

As with any other rabidly fanatical religion, the Taliban are not interested in building up a nation that will prosper, businesses that will flourish, schools that will enlighten, but in dominating those who are helpless. Interesting to see that shooting the inhabitants is first on their list when they take over a new territory. Keep them afraid and cowed.

What does that remind me of?....

Stupid doesn't begin to cover it

Ignore the fact this investigation was ordered by the Bush administration

And blame the Obama administration. Anything to cultivate the feeling of victimhood and persecution:



Think Progress:

To recap, the Obama administration was apparently following the lead of the Bush Homeland Security Department in assessing the very real threat of violent right-wing extremism. Indeed, Bush appointees such as FBI Director Robert Mueller have acknowledged the threat of right-wing extremism multiple times.

They're blathering about the focus on recent veterans and how that is unfair. But we've known this since Bush started scraping the barrel to fill military recruitment quotas. I'll repost this:

Wednesday, February 14, 2007
Look who we are training to be killers
To have knowledge of explosives, of methods of torture, of all kinds of weaponry:

The number of waivers granted to Army recruits with criminal backgrounds has grown about 65 percent in the last three years, increasing to 8,129 in 2006 from 4,918 in 2003, Department of Defense records show.

During that time, the Army has employed a variety of tactics to expand its diminishing pool of recruits. It has offered larger enlistment cash bonuses, allowed more high school dropouts and applicants with low scores on its aptitude test to join, and loosened weight and age restrictions.

It has also increased the number of so-called “moral waivers” to recruits with criminal pasts, even as the total number of recruits dropped slightly. The sharpest increase was in waivers for serious misdemeanors, which make up the bulk of all the Army’s moral waivers. These include aggravated assault, burglary, robbery and vehicular homicide.

Update 2/15: The Heretik notices.

And here is Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money in 2006:

Scraping

Eric Martin links to Fred Kaplan's nice illustration of how reduced recruiting standards matter for military performance:

The pattern is clear: The higher the score on the aptitude test, the better the performance in the field. This is true for individual soldiers and for units. [...]

Smarter also turns out to be cheaper. One study examined how many Patriot missiles various Army air-defense units had to fire in order to destroy 10 targets. Units with Category I personnel had to fire 20 missiles. Those with Category II had to fire 21 missiles. Category IIIA: 22. Category IIIB: 23. Category IV: 24 missiles. In other words, to perform the same task, Category IV units chewed up 20 percent more hardware than Category I units. For this particular task, since each Patriot missile costs about $2 million, they also chewed up $8 million more of the Army's procurement budget.

As Eric notes, a bigger Army, under the current recruiting scheme, will inevitably require the admissions of less desirable applicants, reducing overall effectiveness.

Update:

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing extremism, being fueled by the recession and the disturbing increase in activity from white supremacy groups after the election of the nation's first black President. Basically, fear and economic uncertainty breed a certain strain of anger that could morph into violence. And in particular, the targets here are anti-government hate groups, who may recruit and radicalize American citizens, including veterans.

Of course, this has set off conservative media, who claim that the President is directly targeting conservatives with this report. Never mind that the report initiated with the Bush Administration, and was a companion to a similar report on left-wing groups potentially using cyber-attacks (Here's a separate report referring to left-wing groups back in 2001). Somehow conservative media groups take a look at murderous extremists like Timothy McVeigh and see themselves. Here's Dave Neiwert, an authority on the subject:

Because, you know, the report -- which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle -- couldn't be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is "rightwing extremists," "domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups," "terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks," "white supremacists," and similar very real threats described in similar language.

Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.

Update 4/16: Here's the full article by David Neiwert.

Response to a person frightened by gay marriage

Susan took issue with this post and left a comment. I respond in bold:

Blogger Susan said...

on April 10, 2009 at 7:03 pmSusan Salisbury
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

(Susan, you should have deleted this bit ... it looks like you have copied and pasted this rant about the blogosphere.)

The statements made in this video are true.
Read Parker v. Hurley, 474 F. Supp. 2d 261 (D. Mass. 2007)– in this case a federal court held that Massachusetts parent have no right to withdraw their children from school during times when it teaches that homosexual marriage is normal and desireable. If you favor homosexual marriage– you may think this is a good decision but it is disingenuous in the extreme to claim that the legalization of gay marriage in Massachusetts which lead to this teaching and this decision has no impact on those parents. Their children are being taught that their parents are bigots. So there is state enforcement of the pro gay marriage view through the children.

What I don't understand is why you are unable to teach your children in your church and in your home that gay marriage is something you are against and why you believe this does not mean you are a bigot. Children are able to understand philosophical conundrums, conflicts, differences and will be exposed to these concepts whether you control what the teachers say or not.

What do you think people of different faiths teach their children who go to public schools in the US? What do you think Hindu parents teach their children? Muslims? Buddhists? And anyway, public school should NEVER teach one faith, philosophy over another, EVER. Public school by default should be 'faithless'. And why on earth is being gay somehow locked into a religious argument? Being gay is not a choice like choosing a religion. Why is being gay such a threat to God?

There are many things I disagree with that my children have been taught or exposed to and I have explained my position and listened to what my children think. You want them to be able to think for themselves, weigh the arguments, choose their path. They will be doing these actions throughout their adult life, so the training starts now.

That is unless you think that they should NOT think for themselves and that the only true way is total and absolute submission to your church's tenets. Then you believe they cannot be exposed to ANY concepts that threaten their precarious grip on their religious beliefs and you must sweep before them cleaning up everything that challenges them.

Then the question would be why is your and your children's belief in God so weak, so easily threatened that it cannot stand up to questions, challenges, denials?

Catholic Charities adoption agencies were given the choice to either treat placement with gay couples as equal to placement with heterosexual couples or lose their license to run an adoption agency. They gave up their state license.

Children who languish in orphanages have been quoted as saying they'd love to be in ANY loving home with anyone who wants them. They don't care where the love comes from. And I do mean love not the bizarre belief that gays are pedophiles. They aren't. There have been many children who have been raised by gays. Listen to them.

Contrary to other comments that have been posted in response to this story, the California Supreme Court held in North Coast Women’s Care Medical Group, Inc. v. Superior Court (Benitez) (2008) 44 Cal.4th 1145 [-- Cal.Rptr.3d --; -- P.3d --] that a doctor may not refuse to provide artificial insemination services to an unmarried woman who was a lesbian because of religious objections to pregnancy outside of marriage.

Good. The doctor who has religious qualms should ask himself (herself) why he is in this specific area of medicine.

so the video is true and the people who think it is filled with hate are at least wrong as to the facts alleged in the video. The truth is that the pro gay marriage group seeks to impose its views on those who disagree with them.

I disagree with you and am not trying to silence you. In fact here I am responding to your comment which I doubt you will ever come back to read. I am not imposing anything on you but living my life. For those who are gay, I believe they want to live their lives without interacting with you as well. Can you leave them alone? Obviously you have not even considered what it is like to be on the receiving end of your 'not filled with hate' actions.

If that is not the case, I challenge each of you to show where you have been willing to sponsor exemptions for people who disagree with you— where you have been willing, for example for President Obama to keep the conscience clause in place ( allowing physicians to refuse to perform certain services like abortions) where they have a firmly established religious belief that such procedures are immoral.

Why on earth would I want to be operated on by a doctor whom I assume has my best interests in mind but turns out that he is using his religious tenets to guide him? What does his religion have to do with my health, safety, and life? And yes, I do 'sponsor' people I disagree with all the time. I believe in tolerance.

I’m still waiting. Where are the pro- gay marriage people who think that Mr. Parker had a right to control what his children are taught about gay marriage? Not on this blog, I’m pretty sure.

Actually I'm not really pro-gay as much as anti-fundamentalism, anti-hate; more pro-diversity, pro-tolerance, pro-people. There is no 'gay agenda' by the way, as much as you think there is an evil conspiracy to invade your churches and your minds. The way Mr. Parker 'controls' (interesting choice of verb) his children's teachings is to do it at home and at church. His children should be able to handle the fact that life is filled with things that will challenge and question their faith. Every day. Or do you expect to sweep ahead of them forever, demanding that everyone stop doing things that disturb you?

Where are the pro-gay people who think that Catholic Charities has a right to keep its license to operate an adoption agency even if they have moral qualms about placing children with same sex couples?

Again, I think most of you think that people should not have the right to disagree with you about homosexuality and gay marriage. You think anyone who disagrees with you is a bigot and should be punished or sanctioned for expressing his or her opinion, so far as I can see. You think it is a good thing that public schools and the law should line up to force YOUR point of view on those who disagree with you.

Have you looked at the definition of bigotry?

The state of mind of a bigot; obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them.

Some of think that’s fascism and tyranny. You all seem to like it as long as it is the fascism you have chosen.

And have you looked up the term fascism?

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 218:

Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Do you really know what you are talking about? You are angry that your bigotry is being called what it is yet you profess that your God is love. You talk about fascism without realizing you qualify for the term. You are angry because you are afraid and out of your comfort zone. How do you deal with it? To demand that society return to the benighted days when gays were ashamed and silenced. Why? What threat do they possibly pose to you? If you haven't noticed, society is moving on.

Thank God.

Nom nom nom and anti-nom

(NOM: the National Organization for Marriage has just ruined a wonderful lolword.)

They have absolutely flipped out over the Iowa acceptance of gay marriage.

National Organization for Marriage’s new tactic: fear-mongering without using the word ‘religion’

The National Org for Marriage has made a moronic video stuffed with untruths.... so make sure to watch the video response at the end of the post.

Update 4/13: A hilarious riff on the NOM ad:

Keep him safe.