Quaker cannons in a digital age

While everyone here is distracted by the debate over whether a cracker is tasteless bread dough or a sacred slice of man/god meat, the right-wing source of outrage du jour is a widely published photograph of an Iranian missile test in which one of the missiles was clearly photoshopped into the picture. Gary Farber cuts through the crap and points out that yes, government propaganda agencies will lie to you. So?

If the right wing wants to fuel more hysteria to incite war with Iran, though, it seems like a mistake on their part to emphasize that one quarter of their weaponry are digital confabulations.

But I dislike McDonald’s!

This is horrible news. Some faction of the religious right has called for a boycott of McDonald’s fast-food — because they were a sponsor of the 2007 San Francisco gay pride parade. They claim it’s not about hiring homosexuals, or allowing homosexuals to eat at McDonald’s, or about how homosexual employees are treated, but is instead:

It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars. McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage.

Oh. They don’t object to homosexuals being served food in the restaurant, they just object to promoting civil rights for gay people in the whole dang culture at large. Homosexuals can have the right to consume greasy fast food and work at low wages, but that’s it, we’re drawing the line at allowing them to be treated as full human beings.

And this is horrible news because now I’m going to have to stop by my local McDonald’s and order something. Maybe it’s enough if I just get a diet Coke there.

Keep that sword out of the hands of the Lord

Here’s a much more serious issue than a goddamned cracker: it’s the steady accumulation of military power in religious hands. It’s not overt policy, but we should be worried that there is an increasing association between religiosity and military service — an association between credulity and obscene amounts of physical power. Jeremy Hall is discovering this first-hand.

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What was going on last night?

My drive home last night was a bit weird — there were fireworks going off everywhere, and being a bit disconnected from the calendar with all my recent travel I was puzzled by it all. Was Minnesota celebrating my return?

I shouldn’t be so self-centered. Of course they weren’t. When I got home I saw the news: Jesse Helms is dead. That makes more sense as a reason to get out and celebrate patriotically — one less twisted, ignorant, bigoted pustule dots the face of America now.

Astonishing pusillanimity

This has to be seen to believed. John Conyers asks John Yoo a simple question: “Is there anything the president could not order be done to a suspect?” He can’t give a straight answer. So Conyers reduces it to a simple hypothetical: “Could the president order a suspect to be buried alive?” He still can’t answer! It’s a yes or no question!

What can be done in the face of such a disgusting evasion of simple decency from the Bush administration? Not much, but laugh.

Gary Farber has invented a game, “Stump the Yoo”. Go ahead, think of some outrage you would propose as a hypothetical to John You, just to see him squirm.

Gary suggests, “Can the president order the arms of a suspect eaten by wolves while still attached?“

How about, “Can the president order a suspect to be impaled for his lunchtime entertainment?“

Or perhaps, “Can the president order a suspect to be repeatedly drowned to the point of suffocation?“

Your turn. Can you think of a question that would get John Yoo to say simply, “No, the president cannot order that”?

Obama and ‘faith-based’ initiatives

First, there was this awful news about Obama’s support of “faith-based programs”:

Reaching out to evangelical voters, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is announcing plans to expand President Bush’s program steering federal social service dollars to religious groups and — in a move sure to cause controversy — support some ability to hire and fire based on faith.

Gak. If that were true, he’d be at some risk of losing my vote, and would definitely be on the road to losing my campaign support. That was Fox News, though, so I held off until I heard more…although reporting that Obama supported an agenda favored by the religious right seemed unlikely from that source, unless they also announced he was only going to fund Islamic programs (Oops, did I just start another rumor?).

Next, there was some fast damage control: that early report was wrong, and here’s what Obama really said.

Now, make no mistake, as someone who used to teach constitutional law, I believe deeply in the separation of church and state, but I don’t believe this partnership will endanger that idea — so long as we follow a few basic principles. First, if you get a federal grant, you can’t use that grant money to proselytize to the people you help and you can’t discriminate against them — or against the people you hire — on the basis of their religion. Second, federal dollars that go directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs. And we’ll also ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.

That’s better. Until you think about it. He’s still proposing an expansion of Bush’s faith-based initiatives — he’s going to be handing out billions of dollars to religious organizations. It’s nice that he’s specifically saying there will be restrictions, that the money can’t be used in programs that discriminate, and it must be for secular purposes, but he’s still propping up a religious middleman between government aid and the people, and that’s a tool that will be used to proselytize indirectly, even if they don’t simply flout the rules. This is a bad idea.

I’m going to take the side of Americans United, which has put out a call for Obama to shut down the government’s pandering to religion with these faith-based charities.

Rather than try to correct the defects of the Bush “faith-based” initiative, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama would do better to shut it down, says Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

Obama today announced a proposal to expand faith-based funding during a speech in Zanesville, Ohio.

“I am disappointed,” said the Rev. Barry W. Lynn, Americans United executive director. “This initiative has been a failure on all counts, and it ought to be shut down, not expanded.”

However, Lynn said he was pleased to hear Obama express support for church-state separation and say that he would bar government-funded proselytism and religious discrimination in hiring when tax dollars are involved.

“It is imperative that public funds not pay for proselytizing or subsidize discrimination in hiring,” said Lynn. “Obama has promised that he will not support publicly funded proselytism or discrimination in hiring, and that’s an important commitment.”

The Bush administration has repeatedly insisted that religious charities can discriminate on religious grounds in hiring staff when running publicly funded programs.

Lynn said he is concerned that the Obama plan apparently would allow direct tax funding of houses of worship to run social service programs. That, said Lynn, raises serious issues of entanglement between religion and government.

Americans United has led opposition to the Bush faith-based initiative since it was unveiled in 2001.

The plan Obama proposes doesn’t even make sense. If religious groups have a history of altruistic support for the needy, good for them and let them continue as they have…but funneling government funds through organizations that supposedly already have “faith-based” mechanisms for raising money seems superfluous. That’s the only advantage these groups have, anyway — the ability to fleece the flock to fund their work. Being religious does not give any advantage in obtaining material outcomes.

End the faith-based initiatives. The government should only be supporting programs that work — at least, in my dreams of an efficient administration, anyway.

The bill from Bogalusa

A certain Brown University biology graduate has taken an unfortunate step, one that we asked him to avoid. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana has signed a pro-creationism bill into law, all to pander to evangelical protestant hicks. We know this is a guy with national aspirations, so he’s taking a big gamble that we aren’t going to swing back towards a more sensible secularism, since the only people who could vote for him now are fundagelical god-wallopers who don’t understand science. That may be a fairly big voting base, but I’m hoping that it’s shrinking. Either Bobby Jindal is toast… or we all are.

One bizarre item in that story is that the reporter contacted the Discovery Institute, who quickly disavowed any association with the bill, saying that they did not “directly” support it and that they certainly wouldn’t support any attempt to insert religion into the schools. Like everything that comes out of the DI, they are lying reflexively. Barbara Forrest has an excellent overview of the context and history of the bill — the bill has the DI’s frantic, fervid paws all over it.

I do think we need to call this the Bogalusa Bill, after the district that the sponsor, Ben Nevers (a creationist and a democrat, for shame!), comes from. It’s a name that just trips off the tongue, like a happy fusion of “bogus” and “loser”, said with a lovely New Orleans drawl.