No more blasphemy laws, please

It’s very nice of Obama to have occasionally acknowledged the existence of freethinkers in his speeches, but it doesn’t mean much when his administration endorses blasphemy laws.

The public and private curtailment on religious criticism threatens religious and secular speakers alike. However, the fear is that, when speech becomes sacrilegious, only the religious will have true free speech. It is a danger that has become all the more real after the decision of the Obama administration to join in the effort to craft a new faith-based speech standard. It is now up to Congress and the public to be heard before the world leaves free speech with little more than a hope and a prayer.

Free speech doesn’t mean you only have the right to say things that the majority agrees upon — it is also the right of a minority to offend the majority. I don’t know why that is so hard to get across to some people.

Such casual bigotry, delivered with such deft thoughtlessness

A couple of Republican district chairmen took it upon themselves to defend Senator Jim DeMint (R, Crazytown). Uh, maybe.

There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.

I bet that if you sat those two down and asked them if they knew what was wrong with that first sentence, they’d just look at you all wide-eyed and innocent and tell you they can’t see a bit of bigotry or stereotyping there at all.

And their next sentence would be, “Some of my best friends are Jews!”

And after that, they’d defend their argument…“We’re saying Jim is going to make us all as rich as Jews! That’s a good thing!”

The Mormon leadership demonstrates their clarity of vision

Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Mormon Church has made some interesting remarks.

In an interview Monday before the speech, Oaks said he did not consider it provocative to compare the treatment of Mormons in the election’s aftermath to that of blacks in the civil rights era, and said he stands by the analogy.

“It may be offensive to some — maybe because it hadn’t occurred to them that they were putting themselves in the same category as people we deplore from that bygone era,” he said.

Did you get that? He thinks the Mormons, who are trying to deny a civil right to another minority and reserve it to themselves, are exactly like a minority that were denied a civil right and had to fight to get their equality recognized.

I’m not offended. I’ve just determined that the elders of the Mormon Church are a collection of antiquated, dumb old bigots.

So…when can we start taxing the Mormon temples? And when is California going to kick their regressive, but intrusive, little butts out of the state?

Equality everywhere for everyone

Right now, people are marching on Washington with a reasonable demand: equality under the law for all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people. It’s not much to ask for; it’s simply what every human being in this country ought to expect.

I’m not in Washington DC. I’m sitting in wintery Minnesota. You’re probably snug in your homes, too. So what can you do?

How about getting inspired?

Are you feeling it now? We all should hope for a world where all the differences between us are no obstacle to full participation in civic life by all people; whether you’re gay or godless, black or white, the law should treat us all the same.

Unfortunately, there are people who don’t share that dream and want to constrain minority positions, and make non-heterosexuals second class citizens. Equality is not what they want. We have to act to improve our country.

Contribute to the Support No on 1/Protect Maine Equality campaign. If you live in Maine, vote NO on 1 in the election booth.

On the other side of the country, contribute to the Approve Referendum 71 campaign, and if you live there, vote YES on Ref. 71. I have a lot of family in that state, so I’ll be contributing there, and will also be calling up family and reminding them that they ought to vote FOR this one.

Here in the middle of the country, you can donate to the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition. But you know this is an issue everywhere — look for local groups you can help. You’ve got google, even if you aren’t getting up off your butt today, use it! Contribute! Work with your GLBT friends and neighbors! Make a difference!

(Thanks to MAJeff for sending along the information, and for doing his part to enlighten North Dakota.)

Impeach Obama?

The news that Obama has won a Nobel peace prize was weird — and don’t get me wrong, I don’t think he has done badly at promoting peace, I just don’t think he’s made the kind of exceptional effort that something with the prestige of the Nobel ought to reward — but here’s something much, much crazier: WhirledNutDaily has begun a campaign to impeach Obama. You might be wondering on what grounds they would commit this act…but they don’t seem to have anything specific. I just got email from WND begging for donations for their little crusade, and here’s the best reason they offer, from some wingnut radio personality, Tammy Bruce.

“… ultimately, it comes down to… the fact that he seems to have, it seems to me, some malevolence toward this country, which is unabated.”

That ranks right up there with the “he looked at me funny” excuse for starting a fight.

The whole piece is a detestable incitement to take any action necessary to bring down Obama. Look at their ‘reasoning’:

Make no mistake. We’re now in the middle of a bloodless coup –
the takeover of an entire nation by the hate-America crowd – a cold-blooded gang that despises American’s
prosperity, our standing in the world, our trust in God and our generosity and goodness.

    
America is a monument to the triumph of freedom. When Barack Hussein Obama thinks about freedom… he sees a world in which some people, due
to personal initiative and good fortune, will do better than others… live better than others.

    
And in that regard, he is right. But Barack Obama sees that as unfair. Where you see freedom, liberty and the opportunity for
any American to be all that he or she can be, Obama sees greed and bigotry.

    
And, like so many on the far-left before him, going all the way back to Karl Marx, he believes that it’s his mission to promote
“equality of outcome” over
“equality of opportunity”
even if Americans must learn to live in chains to make it happen
(in fact, servitude to the iron will of government will be required).

    
That worldview makes Barack Hussein Obama a very dangerous man and one of the greatest threats to your personal liberty today.

    
That dangerous worldview also explains why he has already gobbled-up major banks and why the government now controls more and
more of our money – yours and mine.

    
And if you wake up one day to discover you’re broke… don’t be surprised…
and while you’re at it, don’t feel bad either because at least everyone will be broke…
destitute… under the iron yoke of government… but everything will be fair
and equal… that’s what extremists, like Obama, mean when they use
the term… "social justice."

    
And he’ll make it happen… he can make it happen… he’s already started to
make it happen.  Barack Hussein Obama is Bernie Madoff with the political power of the presidency at
his disposal.

    
That dangerous worldview explains the sudden and shocking erosion of your freedom to make a living, to run your own business,
whether a Mom-and-Pop grocery store or General Motors.

    
That dangerous worldview explains why his Attorney General, Eric Holder, despises the 2nd Amendment… why, if he had his way,
he would take away our guns, leaving us defenseless against gangs and hoods – and, more to the point, against Obama’s own
shock-troops from
ACORN or SEIU. Remember, it was the healthy and rational fear of government that led to the inclusion of the
2nd Amendment in the Constitution of the United States.

    
And that dangerous worldview explains why Obama intends to take away your freedom to choose your own doctor… your own
treatment. Wherever government controls health care, bureaucrats decide who gets treatments… who gets transplants…
who gets dialysis… who gets costly medication… and who needs to die for the common good.

    
What can we do to stop this monomaniac… this American dictator? There’s only one answer.

    
Article I, Section 4 of the Constitution reads: “The President, Vice President and all civil
officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery,
or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

It goes on and on like that — you can just picture the authors frothing at the mouth.

So I guess I’d have to say that maybe a Nobel was a useful counterbalance to the lunacy going on here.

Supreme Court Justice Scalia is a supremely clueless jerk

The Supreme Court just heard arguments in the case of Buono v. Salazar, a case which is challenging the use of a gigantic cross on federal land, which was initially erected to honor WWI dead but has now become a cause celebre for the wanna-be theocrats who want official endorsement of America as a Christian nation. This exchange with Scalia is simply stunning: the man is an incompetent ideologue who I wouldn’t trust to rule on a parking ticket. Can we have him impeached?

Here’s how he reacted when told that non-Christians might object a teeny-tiny bit to having their dead memorialized with a gigantic Christian symbol.

“The cross doesn’t honor non-Christians who fought in the war?” Scalia asks, stunned.

“A cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity, and it signifies that Jesus is the son of God and died to redeem mankind for our sins,” replies Eliasberg, whose father and grandfather are both Jewish war veterans.

“It’s erected as a war memorial!” replies Scalia. “I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead. The cross is the most common symbol of … of … of the resting place of the dead.”

Eliasberg dares to correct him: “The cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians. I have been in Jewish cemeteries. There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew.”

“I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead the cross honors are the Christian war dead,” thunders Scalia. “I think that’s an outrageous conclusion!”

Far less outrageous is the conclusion that religious symbols are not religious.

Since Scalia is such an open-minded syncretist, I suggest that when he dies, right after all the partying and celebration, we atheists pass around a hat and get a collection going to erect a huge Muslim crescent over his grave. Not only will it honor the dead man, but it’ll let us do double-duty when we all line up to piss on it. Everyone wins!

They really do hate anything to do with science

Would you believe that Tom Coburn (Repugnant, Oklahoma) has introduced a bill to end funding for political science research? He even suggests that people should just watch Fox News or CNN instead, as if those are examples of objective, empirical research.

Well, heck, if that’s the way it works, let’s just get rid of the NIH and NSF altogether, and instead tell people to watch those nifty keen ‘science’ programs about UFOs and Bigfoot on the History Channel. That’s what the scientists sucking on the public teat do all day anyway, right?

Oops. I hope I didn’t give him any ideas.

Texas has state-sanctioned murder

The story of Cameron Todd Willingham (via Digby) ought to be read by everyone. Willingham seems to have been a kind of Texan dumbass, an uneducated, wife-beating piece of work, but he was also the father of three children, who he, by all accounts, loved. Those kids died in a house fire. Forensic ‘experts’ declared the fire an arson, Willingham was arrested, tried, and convicted of murder, and was executed.

Only problem: he didn’t do it. The fire experts were good ol’ boys who were operating on folklore and fairy tales about how fires propagated; real experts have looked at the scene and since declared that it was an accidental fire. Nobody killed those little girls, but their father was killed for their deaths.

That’s not the most disturbing part of the story to me. You have to watch these videos of Judge John Jackson (he was prosecutor in the case, and is now a judge). He openly admits that the evidence for arson was weak, and that he looked at the circumstances to determine Willingham’s guilt. Those circumstances? Willingham was a low-class ruffian with tattoos of skulls who like heavy metal music. Therefore, he was probably a satanist. Therefore, he probably killed his children.

I’m not joking. That was the basis for this smug cracker’s determination of guilt, that led directly to his execution. Why not just criminalize tattoos and Metallica? It would make it easy to round up the riff-raff and exterminate them.

The state of Texas murdered an innocent man, and we can see the whole chain of incompetence, bigotry, and cowardice that led to the tragedy, from this ass of a prosecutor to Governor Perry, who refused to heed the evidence of malfeasance. Why aren’t all of them being impeached or fired, and facing criminal charges in a court of law? Is it because they don’t have any tattoos and listen to patriotic tripe from Lee Greenwood, Brooks & Dunn, and Tim McGraw?

End the death penalty everywhere. Drum the red-necked blundering boobs out of office, at the very least.

Barbarism in Poland

Pedophiles are wretched people who abuse the helpless, and they get no sympathy from me. However, they are still people — sick people, damaged people, often abused people, sometimes psychopathic people. They have to be treated with due process and concern — we want to end the behavior, not the individual. So now Poland has passed a law requiring mandatory chemical castration for pedophiles. That’s a frightening prospect, not just because it’s a punishment that can and will be abused — who judged Alan Turing but the state? — and the attitudes behind it are even worse.

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded ‘degenerates’. Tusk said he did not believe “one can use the term ‘human’ for such individuals, such creatures.”

Not human? Wow. Forget castration, let’s just have summary executions. Perhaps we’ll soon see pedophile meat on sale in Polish markets? Wouldn’t want them to go to waste, after all!

Despite the temptation to go organic, though, I don’t think we want to have free-range pedophiles. Instead, we’ll have to go with battery ‘philes, raised in the cells of the local monasteries and churches. And if you find that offensive, I suggest you direct your complaints to the Polish government officials who have just branded a small portion of their citizenry as inhuman.

Texas doesn’t like Neil Armstrong?

The state of Texas is considering striking the name of Neil Armstrong from the social studies standard. I hate to be the voice of restraint here, but I don’t think it’s as bad as it sounds. The reasoning given is completely bogus (because Armstrong wasn’t a scientist? Give me a break), but the action is not unreasonable. The state should not be in the position of dictating the niggling details of instruction — they should be laying down the law on the broad picture of what is taught, but not how it was taught.

So what the curriculum should do is say that the social studies classes for that grade level should do is discuss the space program, its goals and its effects on American society. It shouldn’t be saying that the teacher has to do this by asking students to memorize the names of famous astronauts — that’s a pedagogical decision that should be made by the teacher. I would hope that most teachers would see that talking about the people in the space program is a great way to humanize the topic, but I wouldn’t want the BOE to be meddling to that degree in the classroom.

Similarly, I think it is fair for a state curriculum to insist that biology classes cover the principles of evolution…but it would be inappropriate to demand that it be done by teaching about Darwin. You can do a fine job of discussing evolution without mentioning ol’ Charles even once.