Ah, the country is swirling down the crapper thanks to toxic conservatives, but at least we can savor the desperate clawing of the terrible people responsible at each other. I give you the Illinois Patriarchy Institute, which is mightily enraged at a recent Supreme Court decision that says employers can’t punish people for being gay.
I and others have been shouting from our virtual rooftops for over a decade that there is no greater threat to First Amendment protections than that posed by the subversive “LGBTQ” movement. Can conservatives not yet see the end of the short pier toward which GOP leaders have long been pushing them? Really?
(Im)moderate Republicans, Libertarian-leaning Republicans, Republicans with dollar signs rather than Scripture reflected in their myopic eyes have been pushing conservatives toward the end of the short pier, hoping that either spines will crumble or conservatives will tumble into the dark waters. Supremacist Court Justice/lawmaker Neil-the-Usurper-Gorsuch just gave conservatives a huge shove toward the watery abyss.
Also, there are gays in the Republican party!
Conservatives get all giddy with chills running up their legs when homosexuals like Guy Benson, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Brandon Straka express Republican-ish views. “Oh gosh, the cool kids like us, they really like us!”
Meanwhile, those smart, articulate, good-looking homosexuals seek to change the Republican Party from within—like a cancer or a Guinea worm (am I allowed to call it the Guinea worm any longer?). We welcome camels into the tent at our peril.
The author suggests that all these Republicans ought to join the Democratic party. No, thanks, they’re awful people, and we are already full up on them. You keep ’em.
Since it’s always possible for an employer to “find” a reason to fire somebody, and at-will employment (which is the base system in the entire country) permits people to be fired for any reason, and it’s really hard for the average employee to demonstrate “constructive dismissal” unless the employer was really careless, the ruling is basically a dead letter anyway. No, your boss can’t fire you because you’re gay. Congratulations. They can, however, spontaneously announce that your position is being eliminated because of budget cuts and fire you, or tell you to mop the floor and then claim you missed a spot and fire you, or just fire you for no reason at all, and if they never openly expressed any prejudice you won’t be able to do anything about it. (And even if they did, you’re still going to need to pony up for a lawyer and you may lose your case anyway.)
… Guy Benson, Dave Rubin, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Brandon Straka express Republican-ish views. “Oh gosh, the cool kids like us, they really like us!”
(eyes-popping emoji)
Yes, it’s still the Guinea worm. Although hopefully it won’t be around much longer, as the Guinea Worm Eradication project has world-wide cases down from 3.5 million in 1986 to only 59 last year. A project lead by the Carter Centre, which was founded by that much-derided President of yours, President Carter.
I really hate Illinois Nazis…
Exclusionary politics can work for a while. But when it works, they keep doing it, excluding more and more people until the core is too tiny.
Huh. Weird that he’d go to the Islamic “Camel in the tent” allegory, rather than one of the many Christian ones that illustrate the same principle. There’s no point to this, I don’t think it necessarily reveals anything about him, it’s just a weird choice.
Short pier?
Crumbling spines?
Watery abyss?
Cancer?
Parasites?
They’ve got nothing but non-literalisms. Making the feel of a threat absent a real one.
And then that implied dig at criticism of racist naming of covid 19.
We all knew that, sooner or later, the tensions between the neocons, wall street and the God Squad would come to a head.
I think the best achievable future for this country would be if the Republican party got whooped so badly that it became more or less a permanent minority party, with mass defections to Democrats. We might then see what would effectively be a three-party system: vastly weakened Republicans, Progressive Democrats opposite them, and a centrist block of Democrats in the middle that both sides are constantly attempting to sway in their direction. Not as good as a genuinely Progressive majority, of course, but I’m thinking in terms of what is achievable, not what’s ideal.
The Democratic party would basically be “the party of everyone who isn’t batshit crazy” until the Republicans figure out how to purge Trumpism from their system. Of course, I’m not sure if there’s much left of the Republican party that isn’t batshit crazy, but polls seem to put the crazies at around 30-40% of the voting populace, and it would certainly be an improvement if their Congressional representation reflected that.
It must be so tiring being a conservative. Angry all the time. And angry all the time at the fact that people whose lives do not affect you in the slightest get to exist outside of your ultimate control, no less. If they weren’t so dangerous, I’d pity them.
There’s no room for joy, no room for tranquility, no room for true sadness or grief (instead of angrily lamenting the loss of Christian or white or male supremacy), no room for curiosity, no room for exploration, no room for sympathy, no room for any of the feelings or motivations that make life worth living. Just an impenetrable anger founded on the pathetic insecure fear that they are not the center of the universe.
What sad creatures they must be, who’ve allowed themselves to be defined by everything they hate and not at all by anything they love.
It looks to me that Trumpism is the culmination of the Southern strategy
it always was a minority idea the problem was that it drove out the old line conservatives leaving only the ignorant, radical right wing and the greedy opportunists to fight it out
time will tell how it plays out.
uncle frogy
Brandon Straka was the person who was deplaned from an American Airlines flight for refusing to wear a mask. American banned him from flying on their flights until the pandemic has ended.
Trumpism is just a mismash of fascist crap muddled together, revived from old 1930’s ideas that the GOP wanted to actually bring to the US, right until we entered into WWII.
Still, it’s always entertaining watching them eat their own.
@12, Heh. I hadn’t heard of that incident. An amusing snippet from the BBC, American Airlines passenger removed for not wearing mask (my added emboldening):
There are Republicans who recognize that Gorsuch is a usurper? Who knew? And why didn’t they speak up when it might have made a difference?
I guess if you wanted to be really precise you could call it Dracunculus medinensis, but most medical and health body still seem to call it Guinea worm.
@aziraphale:
Yeah, that’s the bit that got me cracking up. The irony!
Re: Susan Montgomery @ #8…
That’s why I’ve been expecting a 3 or 4 way split in the Republican party for some years now. The biggest question would be, which faction would keep the name? Also…I would expect one faction to emerge as a dominant regional party in the “Old South” with little or no support/power anywhere else.
@#17, whheydt:
I was just musing earlier that it would be terrific if we could sucker the “Old South” portion of the Republicans into a deal like Scotland or Northern Ireland or Wales have, where they have their own local Congress but it has a final say on nothing whatsoever and can be overturned by the real Congress and/or the President, and they have such a minority in the real Congress that they basically get smacked down on anything they try to do.
because it is not legal to use religion as excuse to fire LGBT persons?
I don’t see how disallowing a religion to threaten, is a threat to the religion.
I think there are qualifications to the 1st Amendments phrase
[ government shall not restrict the free exercise of religion”, ]
IE free exercise doesn’t includes the ability to harm people.
@17 The South and the rest of Jesusland would be the God Squad territory, obviously. The thing is that the factions exist in a symbiotic relationship. The Neocons need to shout about Jeebus when waving their swords because “Go die so my stock prices can rise” isn’t a very convincing war cry. The God Squad needs the cash of Wall Street and Wall Street needs both so they can make money from bible sales, flag sales and the Hot Topic Che Guevara T-Shirts for college liberals. Maybe the blame-shifting of the post-Trump era might overcome the authoritarian narcissism that usually binds them all.
@18
WTF?
let me try that again
that is a fun idea the problem with that is the “old south” is not white people only
there are very sizable populations of none white people in all of that region, besides African Americans which are the dominate minority in many states over 30% to 40% there is also growing populations of Latin American immigrants all across the region low wage workers.now if there was some way we could get all the racist to go some place to be free from minorities…… though that would present the problem of who would do the work they do not want to pay much for.
uncle frogy