Non-breeding behavior must be punished

Prime Minister Raila Odinga of Kenya has called for the arrest of all gay couples in the country. He’s probably been listening to the American Christian evangelicals who’ve been busily poisoning Africa for the last century or so — the West has been such a blight on that continent for so long. Anyway, what’s interesting is his rationale for outlawing gays — anti-gay ideology goes hand-in-hand with a dismissive view of women.

The premier thrilled the crowd in a largely conservative country when he asserted that the country’s recent census showed there were more women than men and there was no need for same sex relationships.

He termed it “madness” for a man to fall in love with another man while there were “plenty of women” and added that there was no need for women to engage in lesbianism “yet they can bear children”.

It’s naked patriarchal thinking all the way down. There are enough women for all the men, therefore the men should have sex with them. That there are more women than men should imply that the excess women (from this point of view, of course, all women beyond what are needed to service the men are “excess”) ought to be free to be lesbians, but no — they all have a job to do. They must be made pregnant.

It’s as if there is only one reason that human beings would associate with one another, and that is procreation, and there is one purpose for women, and that is to bear men’s children, and in this blinkered view of the human species, recreational intercourse of all sorts is alien and non-productive. In that sense, unfortunately, most of the activities of civilization are also alien to these crazy blind people.

UN priorities are a little screwy

So, various factions at the United Nations have been pushing for anti-blasphemy motions — after all, we can’t go around picking on weak ideas. But do you know who the UN thinks are fair game? Non-heterosexual people.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were once again subject to the whims of homophobia and religious and cultural extremism this week, thanks to a United Nations vote that removed “sexual orientation” from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without cause.

Jesus and Mohammed get a little cranky at the idea of someone being rude to their books of magic spells, but setting a gay man on fire? That’s just an excuse to party.

The United Nations is a wonderful idea in principle, except for the little problem of giving barbarians a vote.

Don’t emulate the horrible things about America, Australia!

So far, this sounds so much like the Constance McMillen story: school has a big dance event, young lady wants to go with a date, the school tells her she can’t because her date is also a young lady. This time, though, the story is set in Australia rather than Mississippi. I know there are many fine people in Mississippi, but trust us on this one, you shouldn’t copy the social mores of one of the poorer and more benighted states in the US.

Savannah Supski was told that she couldn’t bring her date, Hannah Williams, to her school’s formal, and the principal is amazingly clueless. She claims she isn’t being homophobic or discriminating against same-sex couples: she insists that it is entirely because they want to “promote a co-educational experience” — in other words, compel all students to follow heteronormative patterns of behavior — and that if they allowed lesbians to participate, “they [the students] would all bring females”. I doubt that the latter excuse is a real risk, unless Ivanhoe Girls’ Grammar school is somehow magically transforming every student into a raging lesbian, and even if it were, it’s still not a problem. If every couple who showed up at the dance were a boy and a girl, I can’t quite imagine the principal becoming concerned at all the uniformity and trying to think up rules to break it up with some more sexual diversity.

At least Melbourne hasn’t gone quite as far as Fulton, Mississippi: there they organized a fake prom just for Constance and other outcasts, and held the real prom in a secret location so the lesbos wouldn’t show up. Australians probably aren’t quite that sleazy, yet. I hope it’s not one of their aspirations.

The gays in Spain play mainly for their swains

The Pope has been touring Spain for the last few days (I wonder how much that has cost the country), trying to drum up some fervor for Catholicism in a country which was once the devout heartland of the faith, but is now reduced to being only nominally Catholic with just 15% of those calling themselves Catholic actually bothering to go to church. The revenue stream is drying up! Must get the suckers into the pews!

The most amusing episode in the tour is that a mob of gays and lesbians lined one of his parade routes to stage a kiss-in. Those militant radicals! Now they’ve resorted to aggressive smooching!

But not all welcomed the Pope’s message on his weekend visit to Spain, which began on Saturday in the medieval cobbled streets of Santiago de Compostela, a draw for pilgrims for more than 1000 years.

Hundreds of gay men and women couples locked lips for five minutes as the Pope passed by, breaking off to shout “Get out,” and “pedophile”.

“We are here to demonstrate against the Pope’s visit and call for a change in the mentality of the Catholic institution which still opposes our right to different ways of loving,” said one protester, Sergi Diaz.

The Pope, of course, just gave his standard whine about these modern times.

The clash between faith and modernity is happening again, and it is very strong today.

How nice of him to admit that the conflict is between those who look to the future and those who want to turn back the clock. I’m picturing the old guy gnashing his dentures and waving his cane while yelling at those gay kids to get offa his parade route.

Where are the women at? Again?

The Ms magazine blog has an awful little article on the New Atheists that completely misses the point. It’s about the sexes and atheism, of course, but it has little to say except to whine that the New Atheism is just like the old religion, and gosh, look at all those Old White Guys in the fore. Yes, we know; the visible leadership of atheism right now is largely male, but it’s not because they pushed aside the women. The New Atheism is really dominated right now by senior academic types, which means that we are the lucky survivors of the old all-pervasive sexism that we’re seeing so well-represented in the senior cohort now, but it’s shifting, have no fear — the next generation is going to be where the women in charge, as I can see by looking at the younger faces behind this movement now.

So don’t blame the Old White Guys, and don’t regard their gender and age as a debit. What we need to do is promote more equality, and make a positive case for freethought. The Ms article could have explored that by talking to some of the many people involved, and could have even talked to the many prominent female atheists out there, and said something about the direction we’re going, rather than where we come from. It chose not to do that, and instead invented a myth of sexist complacency.

Sadly, there’s little indication that atheists are receptive to the suggestion that they might benefit from diversifying in color or gender.

What a crock. We want to expand, we want to be more welcoming to a wider demographic than only Old White Guys, and I’ve seen it happening: you should have been to atheist meetings 15 years ago. It’s what gives me considerable hope for the future, that I’m seeing increasing numbers of women and minorities and especially young people participating. I still see a lot of grey beards in my audiences, but we don’t want them to go away, and we are advocating greater diversity.

But I’m an Old White Guy myself. The best way for me to make my point is to sit down and let the underrepresented speak. Jen McCreight takes that Ms article apart, and lists all those activist atheist women Ms forgot to consult. Ian Cromwell has a series of videos on race and atheism.

You know, these diverse voices are there — you just have to listen. I’m disappointed that someone at Ms magazine hasn’t learned that yet, and chooses again to perpetuate the idea that all that matters are the Old White Guys.

Arkansans…are you aware of the shame brought on your state?

These are the words of Clint McCance, a school board member in the Midland school district of Arkansas. He was a little bit annoyed that people in his school were wearing purple in remembrance of students who had been bullied into suicide.

Being a fag doesn’t give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then don’t tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die.

Huh. This is the kind of person Arkansans elect to run their schools? And he hasn’t been tossed off the board yet? How…interesting.

There’s a facebook page calling for his firing as well as an online petition. If you want to get more personal (but polite!), it’s easy to find the contact information for the school district. They already have a disclaimer on their web page, but I don’t think that’s a sufficient response to such flaming bigotry.

Boys will be…revolting misogynists

This is a very poor quality recording of a group of fraternity pledges marching about the Yale campus chanting. You should be able to make out what they’re chanting, though: “No means yes, yes means anal.”

These privileged man-children made it a point to march past various sororities letting the women know exactly what to expect from the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity; the president of the frat has since apologized, calling it a “lapse in judgment”.

I don’t think so. I think it goes deeper than that: this was a lifelong failure, the result of a poor upbringing that generates bully-boys who think that terrorizing women with threats of rape is hilarious, and further, a culture that looks on these beasts and forgives them, urging them to go on and bring their misogynistic attitudes to their future careers as captains of industry and masters of politics.

This is not a free speech issue. Of course DKE is free to advertise the fact that they are a slimy nest of anti-woman vermin; one could even argue that they’re doing everyone a favor by making it clear that their frat is the one for low-life scum. But when the Yale University administration sits quietly, waiting for the furor to die down, and when they foster such unconscionable behavior by their students, we’re also free to suggest that maybe Yale isn’t a fit place for our sons and daughters, and maybe that Yale degree should carry a certain amount of social stigma.

As if it weren’t already bearing a mark of shame for being George W. Bush’s alma mater…

Mike Adams is a nasty piece of work

Mike Adams must really hate the “It gets better” campaign, which is trying to give gay kids some hope, rather than letting them die of despair. Being Mike Adams, though, the only way he can deal with it is by lying. So he writes an essay in which he describes eight heterosexual kids who were hounded into suicide by homosexuals, just for parities sake, I guess.

Only he didn’t. All eight cases are based on true events of young Republican nitwits getting slapped down for anti-homosexual bigotry…but the part where Adams says “and then they killed themselves”? Total fabrication. In every case, without exception, the poor ‘victim’ lashed out to sue someone, instead.

It’s repugnant. It attempts to reverse the arrow of victimhood, making the bullies out to be oppressed and blaming the dead for their situation. It’s exactly what you’d expect of a christofascist thug with no moral compass at all. It’s Mike Adams.

At the very end of his eight lies, he ‘fesses up and manages to make it even worse.

These eight cases are all true except for one thing: The Christians who were bullied by gays and gay activists are all still alive. Not a single one has committed suicide. That is because they have centered their lives around Jesus Christ, rather than their sexual identity. And no amount of bullying can change my mind about that.

Please wrap your head around this unfortunate fact: Christians are the overwhelming majority. These eight people were not in circumstances at all similar to the gay kids who were isolated, alone, incessantly treated as filth, and bullied until they surrendered. Those kids were also not necessarily atheists — they were mostly brought up to believe in this Jesus fable, and it is a lie to pretend that gays are automatically non-religious (it’s rather a shame that they aren’t—we’d be rather closer to the goal of a godless majority if suddenly all who reject that callous, judgmental conservative Christianity really were atheists).

It seems that centering your life around Jesus Christ makes you a litigious, arrogant jerk, so maybe that isn’t the best strategy for surviving Christian thuggery. I think the It gets better project is a better model for a moral life; I’d rather see people center their lives around hope than around damnation and death.