FEEEMALE!

Country singer Keith Urban (image via Shutterstock).

I don’t listen to country music, that would be obvious to anyone paying attention to my musical choices every day. Bluegrass, sometimes. Rockabilly, yeah. Keith Urban’s choice of a song to perform just added yet another reason onto my pile of reasons for not listening to country music. The song was not written by him, it was written by Shane McAnally, Ross Copperman, and Nicolle Galyon. Yes, it took three whole people to write this…song.

When you hear somebody say somebody hits like a girl
How does that hit you?
Is that such a bad thing?
When you hear a song that they play saying you run the world*
Do you believe it?
Will you live to see it?

*A reference to a Beyoncé song.

[Chorus]
Sister, shoulder
Daughter, lover
Healer, broken halo
Mother nature
Fire, suit of armor
Soul survivor, Holy Water
Secret keeper, fortune teller
Virgin Mary, scarlet letter
Technicolor river wild
Baby girl, women shine
Female

Ummm, some of those words don’t belong together. A whole lot of those words just don’t belong, period. ‘Baby girl’? Really? Hmmm. Oh look, it’s the madonna/whore thing again. Gee, that’s all kind of old and tired. I can’t imagine these people patting themselves on the back for this dreck. How was this written? Mad Lib Songwriting?

When somebody laughs and implies that she asked for it
Just cause she was wearing a skirt
Now is that how it works?
When somebody talks about how it was Adam first
Does that make you second best?
Or did he save the best for last?

Sigh. I think I’ll go pound my head into a concrete block.

Repeat the awful chorus here.

[Refrain]
Yeah
Female

[Bridge]
She’s the heart of life
She’s the dreamer’s dream
She’s the hands of time
She’s the queen of kings

Yeah, no. No, no, no. Just a different version of making women less than real, mystical, and up on another weird-ass pedestal. We’re people. Regular, typical people. We even fart and burp, oh my! And if I’m the hands of bloody time, why can’t I turn the clock back? I’m staring at 60 here.

Repeat the awful chorus again.

[Outro]
Mhm
Female

This um, song, was supposedly written in response to the Weinstein allegations. I, uh, I can’t even. Just can’t. As for Mr. Urban, who I had never heard of until today:

I think it’s just time for a recalibrating of the past, you know? Things have been a certain way for a long, long time, and I think you’re seeing a turning of the tide for that. This song just spoke to me. I just wanted to get in and record it right away. I am surrounded by females in my life. I grew up in a house with boys, no sisters. Now I am in a house that’s all girls. So this song speaks to me on a lot of levels.

Oh gods. No. No, you’re not helping. That ‘song’ is not helping. Not at all.

From all over the internet. Lyrics from here.

Facepalms Abound.

Oh, all the Religious Reich is getting het up, over this, that, and everything. One hissy fit after another. I’ve chosen two for now, Bryan Fischer and Jim Bakker. Bryan Fischer is one nasty piece of work, a tremendously poisonous and hate filled person. Virginia Delegate Bob Marshall attracted Fischer and those like him, as Marshall was running against Danica Roem, a transgender woman. [Danica Roem won, YES!] Marshall took the time on election day to call into Fischer’s program.

“I’m asking your listeners to pray the prayer that King David did when his son Absalom was in rebellion,” Marshall said. “He prayed that his counselor would not give solid advice. We need to, one, proceed first with prayer, then thought, then action. You can’t be a sideline Christian and think you’re going to keep your rights in a society that’s becoming ever more secular every day.”

Aww, guess the prayin’ didn’t work. How, exactly, does a person who happens to be transgender interfere with your rights? How, exactly, does that interfere with you being a christian of any flavour? I can’t stand you self-righteous, hateful assholes with your hypocritical piety, but I’m not going around announcing my rights are being taken away because you exist. Anymore, I find myself thinking that the monastic system is ripe for a big comeback – let us fund monasteries, a monastery for everyone! You can have family monasteries, monasteries for men, for women, for all the different flavours of fanaticism christianity. Then we would see if you’d put your money where your mouth is, and you would all retire from this evil world and concentrate on the next life, which is what is supposed to matter more to christians. I’d be happy to help fund monasteries, if it would get you immoral idiots where you belong, on your knees and out of the way. No more television. No more internet. No more newspapers. No more politics. Nope, just concentrating on how well you’ll do in the next life. (You’ll have to pardon me, I’m doing a great deal of monastic reading right now.)

I’d be willing to bet not one of you, not a single one, would take up a monastic life. You’re addicted to your wealth and you crave power so much, it consumes you. The mere fact that other people exist does not infringe on your rights in any way. If you feel that other people existing does infringe on your rights as a person, then really, a monastery is where you need to be, because you are not capable of being a good member of society.

The full mess is at RWW.

On to Jim Bakker, who is throwing yet another fit:

“Trump is not crazy,” Bakker bellowed. “They want him to be crazy because they want to impeach him. There is nothing they can impeach him over because this thing with the collusion with Russia they can’t prove, but they want to say this man is crazy. They’re trying to get doctors to say the president is crazy.”

No, Trump isn’t crazy. He is a malignant narcissist, which is not a good thing. As for the collusion with Russia, well that is being proved, Jim, every day. More and more proof is just piling up. There are a lot of people concerned about the Tiny Tyrant’s mental state, beyond his being a fucking moron, many of those concerned are those who make up his staff, and work with him every day. The Tiny Tyrant is bad enough, we don’t need a repeat of Reagan’s Alzheimer years.

“I’ll tell you what,” he continued. “If they go through with that, there will be a riot in the United States of America and you’re going to find little old ladies rioting, you’re going to find the church people out rioting because they’re not going to take it any more. This is stupid and insanity what is going on in our country right now.”

Really? Who cares? Just so I have this right, protesting, if done by anyone interested in social justice, is wrong and immoral, but rioting is wonderful and moral if done by christians. Just be sure to conduct your riot on the sidewalks, because blocking the streets is really, really wrong and terrible. Oh right, unless it’s done by christians. Are you going to set fire to your churches? That might be entertaining. I do agree there’s much stupid going on these days, most of it is sitting like a lump in the white house, and the rest of it are all the sitting lumps of his base, including you, Mr. Bakker.

RWW has video of the tantrum.

Lavender Files 10.

Note: Rea Michaels, writer of novels including Cloak of Evil and Duet in Darkness, stands out as one of the only pulp authors to include people of color and interracial relationships in her books and to have representations of lesbians of color on the covers of her novels. The majority of Queer pulp was overwhelmingly white.

The Christian Contagion: Globalizing Hate.

Good old American style Christian hate, it’s never enough, it must be contagious, on a pestilential level.

In the latest sign that the U.S. Religious Right increasingly views its anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice activism as part of a global culture war, American activists will be part of the training team at next month’s European Advocacy Academy, which is designed to make European advocates for “traditional” views on sex, gender and family more effective—and to make them “part of an international network that transcends country borders.” U.S.-based Religious Right groups have actively promoted anti-LGBTQ equality measures in Europe under the banner of protecting the family.

It’s bad enough that the Religious Reich has the amount of power they do in uStates, without it spreading the message of its diseased thinking elsewhere. All societies have their problems, but most of the ones in Europe are light years ahead of uStates, progressively speaking. These Americans are very bad news, and should be considered to be a contagion in the proper sense, and turned away.  The worst dregs of societies everywhere embrace this poisonous hate, drinking down the toxic kool-aid with nary a thought. Fascists of all stripes grab onto such venomous thinking like it was a lifeline, and it does provide them with even more excuses for their particular brand of hatred.

The European Advocacy Academy is organized by European Dignity Watch, a Brussels-based nonprofit group founded in 2010 that says it “defends the most vital foundations of a free society: fundamental freedoms and responsibility, marriage and the family, and the protection of life from conception to natural death.”

Oy. Short form: we don’t give a damn about you, or what you believe, you must live your life the way we say!” RWW has the full story, along with details on some of the speakers.