Rick Santorum finally says something that is true

Give him credit, everyone: he actually gets it right. At the Values Voter Summit, he declares 'We will never have the elite, smart people on our side…our colleges and universities, they won’t be on our side'.

He claims that instead of intelligence and education being allies of the conservative movement, there are only two things that count: church and family. He can keep his church, but he doesn’t get to claim sole ownership of family. Family is whatever human beings bring to it; family evolves; what I consider family, Rick Santorum and his cranky cronies disparage and reject and deny. Family is greater and broader than the narrow, bigoted, and patriarchal version that he wants to promote.

And my ideal of family is not incompatible with intelligence and knowledge and expertise. My families can grow cooperatively and with love and affection while embracing the entirety of human knowledge, seeking more, and adapting to the truth rather than dogma.

My families can go to colleges and universities and come away richer and wiser. At least, those who can afford it…and I want to make that education reachable by more people, unlike Santorum, who wants to limit it and despise it because it undermines his ideology of ignorance.

Speak louder, Catherine Deveny!

That Deveny…she’s always causing trouble. And good for her.

She recently appeared on a panel debate show on Australian TV, Q&A, with Peter Jensen, an Anglican bishop. Jensen is smug, smarmy ass: when he wasn’t whining that we need a respectful discussion about the issues, he was announcing that women should submit to men in marriage, that same-sex marriage is unbiblical, that homosexuality is a disease, and no, the homophobia of the church can’t possibly contribute to gay teen suicide rates. He’s one of those guys who puts on his politeness with his clerical collar, and thinks both make him absolutely right, and able to say the most vile lies with smooth confidence.

Catherine Deveny was brash, smart, and assertive, and openly atheist. She is also a woman. She spoke the truth — that the church is a medieval institution promoting homophobia and misogyny, and that the facts and an unbiased morality of equality do not support Jensen’s claims.

Guess which one got all the negative press?

…I should not have been surprised at the fall-out from Catherine Deveny’s appearance on ABC’s Q&A this week. Deveny’s opposition to Anglican Archbishop, Peter Jensen, resulted in an onslaught of vitriolic criticism and abuse – even from those who claim to support her positions on asylum seekers, same-sex marriage and women’s equality.

Even the Australian weighed in with an editorial reprimanding Deveny and the ABC for failing to show the Anglican Archbishop of Sydney ‘proper regard’ and ‘respect’.

While the Australian characterises (or more accurately, caricatures) Deveny as mocking, crude, crass and intolerant, Jensen is ‘frank, concerned and conciliatory on homosexual health issues’. Deveny, we are told, was guilty of ‘shouting down’ the Archbishop.

Don’t they realize that the proper regard and respect to show a leader of institutionalized dogma is to turn him away at the door, and to spit in his eye every time he demands a respect to his position that he won’t show to women, gays, the poor, the disabled, the disenfranchised? Catherine Deveny, rather than being excesively rude, showed remarkable restraint at having to sit next to the poisonous old fraud.

But no, Chrys Stevenson documents the insults flung at Deveny — she was a crazy bitch who should shut up and brought down the whole tone of the event by dominating the conversation. What about that?

Curiously, as this was one of the rare Q&A’s where the women (Catherine Deveny, Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and Anna Krien) outnumbered the men, the male guests (Peter Jensen and Chris Evans) still managed to dominate the conversation 55 per cent to 45 per cent.

To the contrary of her critics, I think the other panelists were all dreary bores who said a range of things (some sensible, some odious) and Deveny was the only person who made the event interesting. But this attention that the public pays to mouthy women (even when she clearly gave everyone else a chance to speak their piece) ought to be recognized for what it is: being nice is a tool of the status quo; complaining about tone is an attempt to silence the passion and outrage of the oppressed; privilege perpetuates itself by labeling difference as deviancy.

Keep on speaking up, Catherine Deveny!

Let’s not get confused

The television series by Tom Holland that was censored in the UK is a serious, respectful look at the history of Islam.

The movie that has provoked riots and murder in Egypt and Libya is a ghastly bit of hackwork associated with Terry Jones, the fanatical Christian pastor from Florida. Follow that link to see a clip: it’s incredibly bad. It’s got terrible acting, inconsistent and bad fake accents, white actors in blackface (poorly applied blackface, even), beards straight out of Monty Python, sloppy greenscreen work, and it goes out of its way to portray major figures in Islam as gloating gay parodies and pedophiles. It doesn’t just criticize Islam (and when it does, it does so with painful ignorance); it criticizes ethnicities, sexual orientations, and nations wholesale. It is simply a calculated, ugly insult with no redeeming qualities at all.

It does not justify rioting or killing people. But let’s not mistake what it is: the movie is the work of a group of incompetent fundamentalist Christian assholes pissing on entire cultures.

Oops, not just Christian assholes. As noted in the article:

the film was in fact directed and produced by “an Israeli-American California real-estate developer who called it a political effort to call attention to the hypocrisies of Islam.”

It seems to have called attention to the hypocrisies and vileness of the Judeo-Christian Right.

Columbus Day is a terrible holiday

So this guy sails over to the New World, kills and enslaves some local populations, brings human beings back to Europe as curiosities, and also unleashes a whole series of nasty plagues that devastate the people of the American continents over the next several centuries…and we celebrate this event?

How about if we don’t?

Here’s a great suggestion: rededicate the day to exploration, and do it in the name of Neil Armstrong, someone who didn’t initiate a wave of genocide and was by all accounts a decent human being. It serves two purposes: it stops enshrining a rather nasty event, and starts celebrating a noble purpose. Easy. It’s such an obvious idea, I don’t know why we haven’t done it already.

Sign the petition.

Oh. It’s got 90 signatures so far. It needs 25,000. That’s why it hasn’t happened yet.

The Clinton ‘Nightmare’

If you didn’t see it last night, watch it now: Bill Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention. Wow…it’s what I want from a political speech, tons of policy and specifics and evidence.

In case you’re wondering whether he just made it all up, FactCheck.org just called it Our Clinton Nightmare…because they had to do so much checking of details and data, and because it kept turning out that he wasn’t making any juicily dishonest claims. The worst error they found was that he oversold the effect of Obamacare, because most of its provisions aren’t yet in effect; the real reason health care costs are slowing right now is because people are too broke and too uninsured to go to the doctor.

FactCheck did not report on his other gigantic error, though. The closing line of Clinton’s speech, and of every other speaker, was that tedious, stupid “God bless you, and God bless America.” I’ve got to learn to hit the mute button on the remote faster, because that pointless piety was really getting on my nerves.

Despite his flaws, Clinton really is a politician’s politician, talented and undeniably brilliant. If only Al Gore had turned him loose to campaign for him…and now, I seriously hope that Obama is planning to put Clinton to work on his re-election.

Unleash the Bill! Romney doesn’t stand a chance.

Now, of course, Obama has to give a speech tonight that is at least its equal. Romney just had to top a rambling old geezer and an empty chair (and he failed). Obama has to show why I shouldn’t just write Bill Clinton’s name on my ballot.

If you’d like to just read it rather than watch it (although you’ll be missing a master rhetorician at work), here’s the text.

Canadian tragedy

The Parti Québécois won an electoral victory yesterday, and unfortunately the victory celebration for Pauline Marois was interrupted by a man opening fire with a rifle, killing one person and wounding another. When will people learn that murder solves nothing?

I’m afraid I know little about Quebec politics. The killer apparently shouted, “Les Anglais se reveillent. (The English are awakening) There’s going to be payback” in French, with an accent, as he was hauled away by the police. Whose side is he on? Or does it even make sense to discuss the political alignment of a demented mass-murderer-wannabe?

Democrats growing a spine?

I don’t know. I’m skipping yet another political convention — if the Republicans were engaging in non-stop lying, I was afraid the Democrats would engage in non-stop cringing — but the reports I’m reading today make it sound like they were talking strong and standing up for, for instance, a woman’s right to choose and against economic inequity to some degree. Here are a few highlights, and this was Michelle Obama’s speech:

It was a good speech, delivered well. That speech was also well-received by the troglodytes at Fox News, who have decided that Michelle Obama is a “wookie”, a “pig-person”, and fat. Get used to it; that (R) stands for (Racist).

I’m not hearing much about the military and Guantanomo, though, and they’re not slamming the 1% as thoroughly as they should. I’m tempted to at least have the thing running in the background on my TV tonight while I get other work done…except for one thing.

Are they all going to end their speeches with “God bless, and God bless America”? Because that makes me gag with its stupidity and insincerity.

Republicans speak to the invisible man

Marco Rubio spoke to the RNC last night, and reminded everyone that we atheists aren’t Americans after all.

We are special [We are?] because we’ve been united not by a common race or ethnicity [This is true of many countries. What about Canada?]. We’re bound together by common values [Again, trivially true of most countries]. That family is the most important institution in society [Is there a country that doesn’t have and value families?]. That almighty God is the source of all we have [Nope. Wrong. We built that].

Special, because we’ve never made the mistake of believing that we are so smart that we can rely solely on our leaders or our government [Nice sentiment in a speech where he’s trying to convince us to rely on Mitt Romney].

Our national motto is "In God we Trust," reminding us that faith in our Creator is the most important American value of all [Fuck you too, Marco Rubio].

And special because we’ve always understood the scriptural admonition that "for everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required." [Say what? So the rich should pay more taxes?]

We are a blessed people [Nope. We’re lucky. Some of us are rich. But millions are poor and hungry and ignorant. Don’t forget them]. And we have honored those blessings with the enduring example of an exceptional America [What seems to be making us particularly exceptional among wealthy nations is the idiocy of our leaders and the piety of our population, neither of which is anything to be proud of].

I think it was a theme. They brought on Clint Eastwood to make a stumbling address to an invisible man in an empty chair, and Rubio to do the same thing with a bit more polish.

The Republicans can kiss the atheist vote goodbye, but it makes me wonder…are there any atheists left in the Republican party, besides Karl Rove?