Aren’t they cute when they unashamedly reveal their plans?

Bryan Fischer, a host on Christian Hate Radio sponsored by the American Patriarchy Association, recently received mail from a listener appalled at his suggestion that homosexuals ought to be imprisoned. Fischer was quick to reassure his listener that yes, he really does believe that, he will happily repeat the claim multiple times, and that you aren’t a True Christian™ if you don’t agree that homosexuals ought to be treated like murderers or slavers.

Hi!

Thanks for writing me about my comments on my program regarding homosexuality.

It might be worth noting that what I actually suggested is that we impose the same sanctions on those who engage in homosexual behavior as we do on those who engage in intravenous drug abuse, since both pose the same kind of risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. I’d be curious to know what you think should be done with IV drug abusers, because whatever it is, I think the same response should be made to those who engage in homosexual behavior.

If you believe that what drug abusers need is to go into an effective detox program, then we should likewise put active homosexuals through an effective reparative therapy program.

Secondly, I’m afraid you’re simply wrong about the Bible’s perspective on the law and homosexuality.

Paul lists quite explicitly in 1 Timothy 1:8-11 the actions and behaviors that are the proper concern of the law:

“Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for those who strike their fathers and mothers, for murderers, the sexually immoral, men who practice homosexuality, enslavers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine…”

The bottom line here is that, biblically, those “who practice homosexuality” should come under the purview of the law just as much as those who take people captive in order to sell them into slavery.

You express a belief in the Scriptures, and I trust your confidence in Scripture is not selective. If you believe all Scripture is inspired, then you are compelled to accept that legal sanctions may appropriately be applied to those who engage in homosexual behavior.

Thank you for contacting us, and I hope this response will help you think in a thorough and biblical way about this important social issue.

Bryan Fischer
Host, “Focal Point” radio program on AFR Talk, a division of the American Family Association

Well, gosh. His analogy is so powerful that I think we ought to take all the heterosexuals who carry sexually transmitted diseases and subject them to sex aversion therapy (I think it involves a car battery, a couple of cables with clamps, and a porn video) and prolonged jail time. The ones who have the diseases should be made to suffer even more, and while they may be in the minority, the disgust we feel at these infected pariahs should be extended to all who practice the sloppy, fluid sharing, slimy business of male/female sex.

I’ve got some old Biblical misogynist to back me up, too. Paul, in 1 Corinthians, says “It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband.” That’s clear: you should be celibate. The only reason to marry is if you can’t contain your own lustful urges, which are wicked, so that you aren’t fornicating. Sex is dirty, so perhaps an even better solution would be to jail everyone who practices it. That will keep them even purer than marriage.

Ouch. I need to stop trying to think like these guys—it hurts my brain. I think I need to lie down for a bit now to recover.

“I support the freedom to marry for all”

Hey, California, you could learn something from Virginia’s bad example. Let’s all hope the California Supreme Court can do something right.

People of West Central Minnesota who might be reading this: I’ve heard from Roy Zimmerman that we could get him to swing by Morris ’round about 3 April. I’m in the awkward state of being on sabbatical and also doing a lot of traveling, so it’s difficult for me to arrange a performance, but I can take a shot at it. Is there any interest out there? Write to me and I’ll work on it, and maybe draft you to help.

Stop sitting there reading this and growl at someone with power

As a member of the global liberal conspiracy, it is my obligation to occasionally toss out something disgustingly prurient to lead you all into the path of corruption. Here is my contribution today.

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That’s it; a rather dry entry from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Are you aroused yet? Are you frantically closing the screen because it is so NSFW? Are you becoming a communist or a lesbian or a gay man or a Democrat now?

A moronic mother in Menifee, California discovered a similar entry in her child’s school dictionary and must have felt the first twinges of conversion to a werewolf or liberal or something — she was actually just confused, and was baffled by the unfamiliar situation of encountering a calmly stated fact — and did the usual conservatard squawk of protest to the school district. No big deal; anyone can complain about anything.

Unfortunately, the Menifee Union School District reacted stupidly: they yanked all copies of the dictionary from the shelves of all the schools in the district.

Moronic Menifee mom must feel so proud, I’m sure she’s suffused with a deep sense of accomplishment, and she’s probably scanning all of her children’s books right now for another word she can use to make the administrators dance to her tune. She has become a problem. But she’s a minor one compared to the cowards and idiots running that school district.

Menifee, hang your head in shame. Or better yet, could the sensible parents living in that district charge on down to the offices and fucking howl in protest? Don’t sit back and take it. Don’t shrug your shoulders and move on. Get in the faces of these administrators and make them fear for their jobs.

And that’s true everywhere. NO COMPLACENCY. When some dimwit with a delicate sense of propriety can get offended over a dictionary entry, why aren’t you getting offended at a bureaucracy that is censoring simple, straightforward factual information from your schools?

You don’t want your schools to end up like Texas’. Their school board is right now in the process of banning books from the curriculum willy-nilly. For instance, communism is evil, and that’s all the kiddies need to know about it; any text that might actually inform and explain the historical facts about communism are to be expunged, so they can better produce a generation of graduates who are proudly ignorant about everything they hate.

Stupid mothers are a problem. Craven administrators are a bigger problem. But when you’ve got a curriculum set by odious ideologues like Terri Leo, who would ban an author’s name wholesale because she read a title like Ethical Marxism (no, she hasn’t actually read the book, of course), you’re in a whole wide new world of pain, in which your local school has become a temple to ignorance.

We aren’t going to take it anymore. Howl. Be a proud lesbian Democrat liberal communist socialist (even if you’re a Republican heterosexual shop owner) werewolf and get out there and make noise. When a dumb parent can squeak and make administrators jump, we’re fools not to roar.

I detest these people

Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here’s a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free.'” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol’s] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

The masses must be kept ignorant and pacified. The ruling elite will keep the truth locked up, and dole out “truthiness” to the mob.

I think whenever you start talking about different “truths” for different people, you’re using the word incorrectly. There is a truth about the world, and what Kristol is actually suggesting is that there are lies, not truths, to be given to children, students, and those adults he does not fancy having in his privileged club of power.

I’ll also note that their cynical strategy does not work. Cultivating ignorance in the people in the belief that a cunning elite will be better able to manage them leads to situations like we’re facing now: where the ignorant and stupid are encouraged to thrive and take power, and where the Bushes and Becks and Palins rise to the demagogic top and find the mob malleable and easy to push into extremism and insanity. I suspect that an “intellectual aristocrat” would be appalled at the unintended consequences of his wretched plan…

Massachusetts: NON-pointless poll alert!

Today is the day of a special election in Massachusetts, and it’s important — it could weaken the Democratic majority in the senate, and derail what little hope we have for sensible health care. Get out and vote for the Democrat, Coakley, even if you think she is a little yellow dog.

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I guess you have to hate someone

A new Pew survey has some encouraging results about intermarriage in America: people seem to be more willing to accept it. The numbers show that a majority across the board will readily accept a family member of a different race.

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Although I do have to find a few continuing problems there. Who are the biggest bigots in the poll? White people. There doesn’t seem to be anything said about that unsurprising result.

There are also some kinds of marriages that would be unacceptable. Guess who?

The survey finds that most Americans also are ready to accept intermarriage in their family if the new spouse is Hispanic or Asian. But there is one new spouse that most Americans would have trouble accepting into their families: someone who does not believe in God. Seven-in-ten people who are affiliated with a religion say they either would not accept such as marriage (27%) or be bothered before coming to accept it (42%).

I bet most of you would have guessed gay marriage, but that isn’t even mentioned in the survey. We have to go to the Daily Show for a discussion of that, in the context of the New Jersey senate’s recent rejection of a gay marriage bill.

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The woman at the end is particularly oblivious — she’s so proud of how far she has come as a woman and as an African-American, a person who would have been doubly disenfranchised historically, and now, thank God Almighty, she is free at last to engage in a political process to deny someone else their rights. You aren’t truly free until you can stand proudly next to someone you’ve slapped down.

Oh, God, we are afflicted with a leadership of idiots

Here’s what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.

(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)

Be afraid

Perhaps you thought Texas’ malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It’s far, far worse than that.

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Read the rest and tremble. It’s not just evolution, it’s all of science and history that they want to remake in the image of their vicious, petty god — and they’ve got a team of ideologues who will engage in all kinds of dirty tricks to get their way.

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.