Janet Mefferd, the looney tunes radio show host, discussed Anderson Cooper’s coming out of the closet on her show, but she was careful to warn her listeners that they might want to have a bucket handy because, apparently, just knowing that someone is gay might make them vomit.
I don’t know about you, when your kids are sick like mine sometimes are and they’ll come down in the middle of the night, ‘mommy I have a stomach ache,’ I always give them the same words of advice, ‘get a bucket, put a little bit of water in it and put it next to your bed and that way if that upset stomach does what it might do, you’ll be prepared.’ So in that vein I would like to give you the same advice, given what I’m about to talk about you might want to get yourself a bucket with a little water in it and that way if you feel a little sick and it manifests itself in a physical way you’ll be prepared. I wasn’t going to even talk about this but I can’t resist because this has got to be the neo-pagan story of the day. Did you know—I know this isn’t going to be a shock to you—Anderson Cooper is gay. I know, what a shock, I’m reeling from this news, I had no idea, yes I’m being sarcastic. But there is something very funny about this because Paul Brandeis Raushenbush over at the Huffington Post has a headline on his story about Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, announcing that he is gay and it says “Fact is.. Anderson Cooper Thanks God He’s Gay.” …
If this were pagan, Ancient Rome, Jerry Sandusky wouldn’t have been in trouble at all because homosexuality and man-boy love was so common and so accepted that outrage would’ve been inconceivable. It is only the vestiges of Christianity in our culture that give people the moral framework by which you can look at a Sandusky and feel revolted. And you know what the way we are going, Jerry Sandusky thirty years from now may be a normal thing. You already have pedophiles who are trying to be normalized at the American Psychological Association, I think that’s the name of it, they’ve succeeded in having homosexuality removed from the playbook as some sort of disorder and now they’re working on pedophilia and I’m sure they’ll be successful because that’s where it is all headed.
Anderson Cooper did receive from God an ability to love, but not that kind of love. That’s not love, it’s not love. All you need to do is go back to Romans Chapter 1. This is an absolute pagan expression that has twisted love beyond recognition and turned it into something that is not God’s design at all. This is a lie from the pit, and we must oppose it. And unfortunately, we have so-called evangelicals getting on this train to nowhere.
Is there a more idiotic word to use as a pejorative these days than “pagan”?
31 comments
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TGAP Dad
July 10, 2012 at 10:05 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I am always baffled by the homophobes equating gay with pedophilia. Jerry Sandusky wasn’t gay, but he was (and is) a pedophile.
hexidecima
July 10, 2012 at 10:10 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Gee, Janet seems to think she, and she alone knows what God “really” gave to Mr. Cooper. Well, dear Janet, since you’ve made these claims I do expect you to show that you are the OneTrueChristian. I do expect you to start healing people, speaking in tongues, drinking poison, and all of the other things that your magical holy book says that the true believers will be able to do. it is amusing though, Janet, that you ignore the very book that you prate from, and actually ignore the supposed savior in favor of Paul. What a nice Paulianist you are, Janet, decideing that rather than “love one another” you go for some people you don’t like deserve death. Yet again, we see that religion shows no truths, but is only a way for hateful people to justify themselves.
brucecoppola
July 10, 2012 at 10:12 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
No, “Godless and Pagan” ie even more idiotic. Saw it most recently on a trailer for IndocriNation, a wingnut movie on the evils of public education posted over at Zingularity (“public schools are Godless and pagan by precept and design”…ooh, scary!). I thought pagans were the ones who worshipped them non-Abrahamic gods.
brucecoppola
July 10, 2012 at 10:14 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
*IndoctrinNation.
Gregory in Seattle
July 10, 2012 at 10:16 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
As with many phobias, homophobia responds well to acclimation therapy. An extreme reaction is common when therapy starts, but through gradually increasing exposure times, one can learn to overcome an irrational fear.
thisisaturingtest
July 10, 2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Her whole opening spiel about “prepare to be sick” speaks volumes to me. With these folks, at bottom it has nothing to do with “god” and everything to do with “ewwwww!!” “God” is just the excuse; “ewwww!” is the real reason.
Mr Ed
July 10, 2012 at 10:17 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
If you think the reason that Jerry Sandusky was wrong was because he he had sex with some one of the same gender and not because he had sex with children then your god given moral code is wrong.
chisaihana5219
July 10, 2012 at 10:18 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It’s not her ranting about god vs. gay that bothers me. It’s the way she treated her children when they were sick. No comfort, no concern, just “go get a bucket”? What kind of a mother does that? Oh, never mind.
Who Knows?
July 10, 2012 at 10:25 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The only effect the news of Anderson Cooper coming out had on me was, it gave me a woody.
Randomfactor
July 10, 2012 at 10:27 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
She was partly right…what she wrote DID make me throw up a little.
But it’s not Cooper’s fault.
joe_k
July 10, 2012 at 10:34 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
It amuses (read: horrifies) me that she appears to believe that in ancient Rome, what we would now call paedophilia was normal, but that in the ancient Israel of the Bible, god had told the Israelites that the age of consent was 18, or something…
Oh, wait, her argument is that it was wrong in ancient Rome because that was ‘man-boy love’ rather than raping young *girls*, which is of course perfectly alright.
*Facepalm*
Budbear
July 10, 2012 at 10:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I wonder if her head would explode if she ever learned that the “homosexuality and man-boy love” of “pagan, Ancient Rome” continued as normative long after Rome was christianized, along with other traditional Roman behaviors and entertainments. Read a little St. Augustine beeyotch.
dingojack
July 10, 2012 at 10:41 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
“If this were pagan, Ancient Rome, Jerry Sandusky wouldn’t have been in trouble at all because homosexuality and man-boy love was so common and so accepted that outrage would’ve been inconceivable”
Citations required.
Dingo
matty1
July 10, 2012 at 10:49 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I’ve said it before but this is yet more evidence the wingnuts have a fundamentally different view of morality, especially sexual morality than non wingnuts. I don’t just mean the homophobia but the whole basis of their thinking.
To me (and I hope most of you) the relevant moral issue is that you shouldn’t do things to people without free and informed consent. Children don’t have the capacity to give such consent, whereas adult homosexuals do.
However to Mefferd and those who think like her consent is irrelevant, behaviour is moral or not depending on whether it matches an arbitrary set of rules. What is more they seem to imagine everyone else thinks the same way but with fewer rules in the list – that is why you get arguments like “but if you allow that you have to allow this” to them both are striking a rule off the list and they simply cannot conceive a morality that derives rules of conduct from principles rather than finding them on a pre-written list.
Jasper of Maine
July 10, 2012 at 10:55 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I am not opposed to causing these people to throw up.
Bronze Dog
July 10, 2012 at 10:57 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I agree with matty1. They consider informed consent to be irrelevant to sexual ethics. It would also explain my observation that the people who try to ignore, minimize, excuse, and shift blame for rape tend to be wingnuts.
greg1466
July 10, 2012 at 11:36 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
That’s the second time now I’ve seen one of these wingnuts state that in the old Roman/Greek ‘gymnasium days’, homosexuality and pedophilia (as if they are the same thing) were socially acceptable and it’s only because of Christianity that we can see Jerry Sandusky as an immoral criminal. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Sandusky is a Christian. I’m also going to make the stretch to point out that all of the priests who have been diddling kids for the past 2000 years are/were also Christian.
oranje
July 10, 2012 at 11:43 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Aside from the rest of the idiocy, I wish they would stop conflating the cultures of Greece and Rome.
eric
July 10, 2012 at 11:53 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Still scratching my head about how this is the neo-pagan story of the day. Is Cooper now wearing a pentagram or something?
Maybe I missed a meme; is pagan the new fascism? The adjective fundies add to any old noun just to signal they don’t like it?
thisisaturingtest
July 10, 2012 at 12:49 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@#17, greg: “I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that Sandusky is a Christian.’
Yup- Methodist. So your point is a good one. Christians should be aware that their boast that “Christianity is the only way to know the difference between right and wrong,” that morals are absolute and not relative, is a pretty empty thing to say when they don’t practice what they preach- when, in fact, it’s most often Christians who offer the best proof that morals are relative things.
fifthdentist
July 10, 2012 at 1:09 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Mr Ed, I’ve challenged people to come up with a Bible verse condemning the raping of children.
Lot’s offering up of his daughters for gang-rape was apparently considered just good manners for YHWH.
There’s nothing in god’s supposed top-10 list prohibiting the raping of children. In fact, it seems that captive girls were to be spoils of war for god’s chosen. And as in that time people were married early, the only virgins available likely were running on the rather young side.
But leave it to Christianists to be woefully unaware of what their book actually says. It is long and boring, but hey, they’re the ones claiming to “follow” it.
Glad I read a few comments down before hitting submit. Consent to them apparently means the consent of daddy. That’s why fathers can today ritualistically “marry” their daughters in purity ceremonies. And in the good old days they could sell their daughters’ vaginas — sorry “property” — to the highest bidder.
d cwilson
July 10, 2012 at 1:28 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Wingnuts certainly have a strange idea as to what constitutes “consent”. I remember when Virginia’s vaginal probe bill was hitting the national media, many wingnuts were saying that because a woman consented to having sex, getting a vaginal probe inserted into their hoo-hah shouldn’t bother them. It’s as if, having consented to having one thing inserted into them their bodies, they’ve given consent to have anything and everything shoved in there.
fastlane
July 10, 2012 at 2:17 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
d cwilson, I’d love to apply that same logic to the penis side of the conservative base.
Hey, you’ve already stuck your penis in that woman’s vagina….allow me to introduce you to this wood chipper. (I know, I’m a bad man.)
kagekiri
July 10, 2012 at 2:38 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Fricking Christ on a stick, what Bible is this nutbag reading?
Romans 1 says God MADE people gay as punishment. So no, homosexuality is not pagan, it’s God-given according to the verse they just cited.
If they’re going to use a bullshit book written by ancient ignoramuses to try to impose their draconian and otherwise totally unjustified will on others, they should try to at least read it correctly. Otherwise, we’ll just point and laugh.
Well, I guess we’d be doing that anyway, but still…
Noadi
July 10, 2012 at 3:57 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
The reason sex with children was okay in Rome was because the children being raped were slaves. They were property with no rights. The same goes for a lot of homosexuality in Rome (also there was a difference in being the penetrator vs the one penetrated, it would have been a huge scandal for a Roman man to be found being penetrated by a lower status man or a slave).
Of course since a lot of wingnuts don’t seem to grasp why consent is important I’m sure these facts wouldn’t get in the way.
Dr X
July 10, 2012 at 9:05 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Her kid wakes up ill in the middle of the night and her response is go get a bucket and go back to bed?
jnorris
July 10, 2012 at 9:45 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Please correct me if I am wrong, but I thought he came out two or three years ago. What was I thinking or what did I miss?
matty1
July 11, 2012 at 4:53 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
@27 It may depend on what you mean by out. Reading the statement he has apparently been open with people he knows personally for some time and never tried to deny his sexuality, he just didn’t make public statements about it. As I have said elsewhere I find it sad that in order to stand up for equality people have to shout from the rooftops something that is none of our business.
stace
July 11, 2012 at 8:11 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Hey, Janet, just think of that urge to throw up as the flowering forth of your repressed gay self.
podkayne
July 11, 2012 at 9:03 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
Conflating homosexuality with paedophilia in less than a sentence… a new record?
podkayne
July 11, 2012 at 9:10 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
And what’s the little bit of water in the bottom of the bucket meant to achieve?