The same old bad argument against gay marriage

Riley Balling, patent attorney, is certain that gay marriage will affect his marriage. Why? Well, he splutters on in a long op-ed in the Star Tribune, but all he manages to say is the children, because…the children, that’s why.

For many of us who favor traditional marriage, marriage is about raising children in a healthy environment. Thus, any change to the definition of marriage affects our marriage. Our “traditional” marriages and the children they produce are our greatest source of happiness, and we desire that our children will live in a world that will promote their ability to make the same choices that brought us happiness.

Shorter Riley: “I have defined marriage, and marriage is defined this way, and therefore changing the definition of marriage changes marriage by definition. Oh, and my marriage is all about pooping out kids, therefore your marriage damn well better be too.”

[Read more…]

Who was it that was supposed to be committing voter fraud again?

Here’s some news on a representative bit of Republican Party slime from Riverside County, California, home to some of the slimiest Republicans in known space. From California Watch:

In a complaint filed last week with the county registrar of voters, the Democrats presented affidavits from 133 Democratic voters who said they had been re-registered as Republicans without their consent after they encountered petition circulators outside welfare offices and stores.

One voter complained that his registration was changed to Republican after he signed what he thought was a petition to legalize marijuana. Another said he was told he was signing a petition to lower the price of gasoline, according to the affidavits.

Others said they were offered free cigarettes or a “job at the polls” if they signed some paperwork.

Also among the Democrats who said they were involuntarily re-registered as Republicans: two aides to retired U.S. Air Force Maj. Gen. Richard Roth, a Democrat locked in a tight race with Republican Assemblyman Jeff Miller for a state Senate seat.

According to Democratic Party spokespeople, thousands of people might have been fraudulently re-registered with a Republican Party affiliation. Riverside County is getting slightly more liberal each year for a number of demographic reasons, and yet the county’s Republican Party reported an upswing of 35,000 new Republican voters in the county.

Oh, and here’s a shocker from the California Watch report:

Many of the complainants were Latino or African American.

 

I don’t care, just GIVE ME A CHOICE

A blogger recently posed this question.

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a conservative atheist?

My first, immediate response was to just answer the question: yes, of course I’d vote for the liberal Christian. All you have to do is realize that Karl Rove is an atheist to know that the label “atheist” is not an automatic marker for a good person (just as we know “Christian” isn’t either, with more examples than I can count.)

But then I thought about it a moment more, and realized it is a goddamned stupid question.

I have never, in my entire life, been given an opportunity to vote for an openly atheist candidate for any office. Not once. This is a radically hypothetical question postulating an unthinkable world (to an American, at least) in which atheists can run for office without the bigoted Christian majority making it an exercise in futility, where we actually get a choice. In that reality, I think actually I might seriously consider voting for a non-odious conservative atheist (not Karl Rove, not a Randian asshole) just for the novelty of it all and to see someone, anyone representing my irreligious views in office.

Because isn’t that really the issue, that atheists are virtually locked out of most offices?

Then there are some weird assumptions in the question itself. What if a conservative atheist were answering it? There’d be no conflict of values at all. Notice how it simply assumes that nearly all atheist readers would be politically liberal — which I think is mostly true, despite the strong strain of Libertarianism within atheism.

But doesn’t that imply that if we had an atheist candidate representative of most atheists’ political leanings, the question ought to be:

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a liberal Christian or a liberal atheist?

O Glorious Imaginary Universe of Delightful Choices! Can you imagine going into the voting booth and finding yourself confronted with a decision between two reasonable, intelligent, thoughtful candidates, rather than Dumb Thug vs. the person the other party decided to run against it? Or, as I often find when voting for local offices, Dumb Thug vs. Dumb Thug.

But of course what reality tells us is that the candidate who clothes himself in religious garb and makes their faith an issue in a political campaign is almost always conservative — religion tends to side with stupid, archaic, and authoritarian on social issues. What that means is that if we ever did get an opportunity to make that choice at the ballot box, it would look like this:

If I had to vote for one of two hypothetical candidates, would I be more likely to vote for a conservative Christian or a liberal atheist?

And now it’s no question at all.

#FreeGeronPastitsios

Another state with an archaic blasphemy law on the books is Greece, and they recently cracked down and arrested a 27 year old FaceBook user for using a mocking pseudonym, “Gerontas Pastitsios”, for some famous Greek Orthodox monk. He faces up to two years in prison for “malicious blasphemy”.

There is a petition to have him released and most importantly, abolish pointless laws against free speech.

Election day will be…interesting

Sarah Silverman explains how to get around Republican voter suppression tactics: register to get a gun! (NSFW. But of course, all you workers are working at work, so you’re not going to see this anyway.)

I wonder if the media will pay any attention to the outraged minorities and students who discover they are disenfranchised on election day? I know Fox News won’t, but there’s a possibility the other networks…nah, who am I kidding?

I just realized how the Republicans can win me over

I saw this clip from Stephen Colbert about how the Republicans rely on the cranky old white man vote, and I had an epiphany. Why, that’s me! But then, as this clip goes on, it’s all about how the Republicans are straining to embrace a new demographic and capture the Hispanic vote.

That’ll never work. Hispanics aren’t going to see him as a friend no matter how much spray-on tan he puts on.

But then I had a thought. What the Republicans need to do is increase the supply of cranky old white men. How can they do that? Longevity research! Pour more money into the NIH for work that keeps old people alive for longer…especially that favorite subject of biomedical research, the white male. It’s a win:win! More money for science, more cranky old white men voting longer, more cranky old white men feeling obligated to the Republican party, more medical benefits that assist me as I get older.

I don’t see why they aren’t rushing to adopt this strategy. It’s their only hope.

Is it time to bury Mitt yet?

In a meeting Mitt Romney had with a gang of millionaires, one class traitor dared to secretly record his words…and then turn the recording over to that pinko commie rag, Mother Jones. Mitt Romney unleashed is a thing to behold, the plutocratic beast revealed.

There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what…These are people who pay no income tax.

You know, I think Mitt Romney paid a much, much smaller percentage of his income in taxes than I did last year, or the year before, or the year before that. Who is the moocher here? Who isn’t doing his fair share to support the American government?

There’s much more at the link, and more to come…the magazine is trickling out the juicy stuff. Here’s their summary:

Here was Romney raw and unplugged—sort of unscripted. With this crowd of fellow millionaires, he apparently felt free to utter what he really believes and would never dare say out in the open. He displayed a high degree of disgust for nearly half of his fellow citizens, lumping all Obama voters into a mass of shiftless moochers who don’t contribute much, if anything, to society, and he indicated that he viewed the election as a battle between strivers (such as himself and the donors before him) and parasitic free-riders who lack character, fortitude, and initiative. Yet Romney explained to his patrons that he could not speak such harsh words about Obama in public, lest he insult those independent voters who sided with Obama in 2008 and whom he desperately needs in this election. These were sentiments not to be shared with the voters; it was inside information, available only to the select few who had paid for the privilege of experiencing the real Romney.

It ought to demolish his campaign.

It won’t. The Republican faithful will all delude themselves into thinking they all belong to his club of millionaires, or that they will be, once the mighty Rethugs get power and sweep away all those obstacles to their ascendance, like taxes and black and brown people and all those damn foreigners.

Wondering where all those moochers live? Oh, look: a map.

Hey, isn’t that the Republican base?

Arrest everyone who disagrees with me! Show trials for all!

R. Joseph Hoffman is a flaming authoritarian, about as illiberal as you can get without joining the Tea Party. He’s very, very upset at Terry Jones and that gang of blithering idiots who assembled that terrible movie slandering Muslims, provoking riots in Egypt and Libya. Oh, and also his comrades-in-arms, Jerry Coyne, Eric MacDonald, and me.

I have just one question for PZ: What are you thinking now? God save the First Amendment?

Actually, I suppose he could bothered to read what I wrote on the “work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures”, but that would be too much too ask — R. Joseph Hoffman is very busy raging at the voices in his head. I don’t even know why he bothers to ask what I’m thinking, since it won’t matter what I say, what with his fantasies informing his perceptions. I mean, we went around on this before, and he interprets what I wrote as “Hoffman coddles Muslims”. Go ahead, read what I wrote; you’ll have a very tough time pulling that interpretation out of what I said.

But what do I think of this situation? May reason save the rule of law.

Terry Jones and his compatriots are idiots, but they have a right to say hateful, awful, evil things. I’d say the same is true of the Rev. Phelps, the KKK, the Catholic Church, the Mormons, and R. Joseph Hoffman. I should have the right to say how much I despise them all, and I should also have the right to tune them out and ignore them. I’d actually rather they spoke up and made their positions clear; the threats I get in email don’t trouble me so much as the worry that the ones who’ll actually do something dangerous aren’t so stupid as to open their mouths and announce their intent.

Terry Jones is an intolerant ignoramus, but I don’t worry about him. What bothers me more are the intolerant ignoramuses who riot and murder when they’re offended; I’d rather they went out and made an incompetent propaganda film, for instance. I worry that our president might actually listen when Egypt calls for world-wide censorship, as when the White House explored the idea of having an offensive video removed from youtube (Google said no, fortunately — but they do assist in local censorship efforts).

Decide that a Terry Jones must be silenced, and who is next? I can tell you: atheists. Egypt has arrested Alber Saber for the crime of atheism.

On Wednesday, September 12th, a Muslim friend and neighbor using Saber’s computer reportedly discovered that he was the admin for the Egyptian Athiests Facebook page, which is the largest of several such groups online with over a thousand “likes”. On September 10 the notorious “Innocence of Muslims” had been posted on the site. Over the next two days crowds began to gather outside his house, threatening Saber and his mother.

On Thursday night Saber’s mother called the police, hoping for protection. When the police arrived however, rather than fending the threatening mob outside, they arrested her son.

The charge according to his lawyer and supporters, focuses on videos in which Saber discusses his own Coptic faith or lack thereof. This makes sense as to charge anyone for posting the “Innocence of Muslims” video would set an impossible precedent. Even conservative broadcasters have also shown the video, or sections of it on their shows. It is not yet clear however, which materials will be included in the case against him, which is currently in the hands of the General Prosecutor. The next hearing is expected in four days.

After talking with Saber’s friends it seems likely to me that Egypt’s Islamist leaders are hoping to create a local issue where they can be seen as the tough guys, to distract Egyptians from how the furor in the international arena, in the context of which they seem impotent.

There is no difference between what the Egyptian government has done to this man, and what R. Joseph Hoffman asks the American government to do to Terry Jones:

Arrest him without delay. Deploy the National Guard. Surround the Church.

No. That’s totalitarianism. Free speech isn’t free if you’re only allowed to speak government- and church-approved opinions. It’s surprising how many people cannot comprehend that.

(via Why Evolution Is True)