I knew they were around here somewhere

When I expressed my disgust with the lunatic fringe on campus that published the North Star, I also said, “We do have conservative students here — I expect that the majority are more conservative than I am — but they also trend towards being more the reasonable, rational, educated sort of conservative.” Sometimes I fear that’s just my optimism speaking out, but then today I just got this nice letter from the College Republicans.

youngrepubs

See? They’re not all far right wackaloons. The t-shirt isn’t exactly to my taste — a teddy bear holding a pistol with a word balloon that says “College Republicans believe in the right to bear arms” — but I can accept it in the spirit of reconciliation in which it was offered. Of course, I’m not going to wear it…even a loose shirt is uncomfortable with the trench excavated in my back right now. The cookie was tasty, though.

"the wisdom of Nixon…" <shudder>

This is a fine analysis of the whole argument that women’s exclusion from the draft is a feminist plot…but the point that the end of the draft was a calculated effort to gut the peace movement was just too true, and a good explanation for why college campuses have been so damned quiet in the last dozen years of non-stop war. (I came of age in the 1970s — I was too young to be at any risk of getting drafted, but just old enough that I was required by law to register, and then they even ended that requirement a few months after I signed in. But I protested our various wars more than most of my students have.)

Call for an end to the National Day of Prayer

It’s supposed to be a non-sectarian, non-partisan, feel-good sort of event, but it’s promoted entirely by the Christian Religious Right, and this year they turned it into a full-blown political rally for the Republicans.

During an event organized by the National Day of Prayer Task Force (a non-profit run by conservative evangelical Christians) and attended by members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Dobson slammed President Barack Obama, calling him the “abortion president.”

In a lengthy rant at an event that was supposed to be about prayer, not politics,  Dobson attacked Obama primarily for his support of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate, which says that most businesses must offer insurance plans to their employees that include access to no-cost birth control.

“President Obama, before he was elected, made it very clear that he wanted to be the abortion president,” Dobson fulminated. “He didn’t make any bones about it. This is something that he really was going to promote and support, and he has done that, and in a sense he is the abortion president.”

It’s a violation of the separation of church and state, and now its proponents are using it as an excuse to enlist a god in their partisan political attacks. So why do we still permit this crap to continue? Go pray on your own, Christians, and stop begging for validation from Caesar.

South Dakotans are obsessed with anal sex

I always suspected as much — they’re a bit strange over there, 40 miles to my west. Steve Hickey, one of those state legislators in Sioux Falls (and a Republican, of course) was compelled to write a long screed ranting about the public health dangers of gay sex by this event:

Hickey told TPM on Wednesday he was driven to write the letter after Nancy Robrahn and Jennie Rosenkranz, a lesbian couple from Rapid City, S.D., announced their intention to become the first state residents to challenge its gay marriage ban. The couple was married on Saturday in Minnesota in a wedding that was officiated by Minneapolis Mayor Betsy Hodges, setting the stage for South Dakota to become the 29th with a marriage equality court case.

Two lesbians getting married drove him to think horrible thoughts about anal sex. That doesn’t even make sense. If he’s going to rant about the public health risks of sex, he ought to know that it is lesbians who have the safest sex lives.

Here’s his wretched letter in full. The comments are full of praise for his brave stance.

A One Way Alley for the Garbage Truck

Rep. Steve Hickey, District 9, Sioux Falls

Consider this an open letter to the medical and psychological communities in South Dakota. The subject is homosexuality, which is about to be a front-page topic for the next few years in our state. I’m asking the doctors who practice in our state, is the science really settled on this issue or is it more the case that you feel silenced and intimidated?

Certainly there are board-certified doctors in our state who will attest to what seems self-evident to so many: gay sex is not good for the body or mind. Pardon a crude comparison but regarding men with men, we are talking about a one-way alley meant only for the garbage truck to go down. Frankly, I’d question the judgment of doctor who says it’s all fine.

South Dakota docs, it’s time for you to come out of the closet and give your professional opinion on this matter like you capably and responsibly do on all the others. Somehow the message we are presently getting from the medical community is that eating at McDonalds will kill us but the gay lifestyle has no side effects. Truth be told it seems self-evident the list of side effects would read far longer than anything we hear on a Cialis commercial.

If many are indeed wearying of our religious community leading on these morality issues, and believe also those of us in the legislature should butt out too, it’s time for the medical community in our state to be honest with us. If you don’t speak up, this issue will be decided by five unelected judges on the Supreme Court regardless of what states like ours have decided by public vote.

This indeed is a matter of being on the wrong side of history considering that historically, homosexuality has been a notable marker of the downfall of past civilizations, not their rise. It’s not hate for a physician to speak up about something that is harmful to human health. It is not unloving to tell people you don’t have to have sex with and marry someone to love and be loved by them. As one who performs marriages and counsels couples as part of my professional life, marriage is the last thing I’d recommend to someone who simply wants to be loved and legitimized. What do other health care and mental health professionals in our state really think?

The South Dakota High School Activities Association is presently considering changing the rules to accommodate transgender kids. Forty-one percent of those who struggle with Gender Dysphoria attempt suicide, that’s twenty-five times the rate of the general population– certainly tragic and urgent but not a word from the medical and psychological communities? So really, we are letting our basketball coaches sort it out while ACLU lawyers look carefully over their shoulders!?

Letting boys play girl sports is not the starting place to fix the suicide problem or the very real daily struggle these students face dealing with something they have been handed in life. Society is broken and people have broken identities. Is it really best for us to break down the one remaining thing that has been working in society to try to fix the broken in our midst? And does it really even do that, or does it merely put them in more places exposing them to additional painful ostracization all the while transferring serious anxieties to other innocent and impressionable ones in those locker rooms? We need to have compassion but there are unintended consequences to consider too.

Before we let lawyers and judges decide this for our state and override the will of the people in the 2006 election, I issue a call to the medical and psychological communities and associations to weigh in publicly and timely on the matter of homosexuality and the human body, psyche and family, particular kids.

I thought his ignorance and his fascination with one specific sex act was amusing, until I read the part where this asshole has the gall to use transgender people’s suicide statistics as a blunt instrument to imply there’s something wrong with them, rather than with the poisonous haters like him who make life miserable for them. There is something deeply wrong with society, and it’s represented by the smug Steve Hickeys of the world, not the tortured kids in our schools who are bullied by the bigots.

But otherwise, he’s picking the wrong target. If anal sex repulses him, he shouldn’t do it, but he should also think about who is doing it. Anal sex is the least common sexual activity between gay men — oral sex and mutual masturbation are much more common. Meanwhile, among the majority heterosexual population, about 25% have had anal sex at least once, and 10% do it regularly. If you’re looking for the common link in anal sex, it isn’t homosexuality: it’s the possession of a penis.

I would urge Mr Hickey to rewrite his screed to instead demand that doctors come out of the closet and speak out on the self-evident health risks of having sex with someone who has a penis.

He could also throw in something about how his religion venerates vaginas that are either untainted by the intrusion of a penis, and/or are one way exits for babies. He should specifically mention the Virgin Mary as the perfect example of how god intends that that pathway is best as a one-way street.

Although, do you really believe Mr Hickey is at all motivated by his concerns for the health of his gay constituents? I don’t think so.

The Heartland Institute quote-mines George Carlin

Mike the Mad Biologist traces a ‘quote’ from George Carlin that the Heartland Institute has been publicizing. It’s comparable to the worst that creationists do — it takes a Carlinesque rant against “big wealthy business interests that control things” and turns it into a Libertarian complaint about big government by changing a few words and deleting almost all of the text. Knowing Carlin’s angry liberal predilections, it was easy to spot that there was something wrong with Heartland’s quote, but dang if doing the empirical thing and actually laying out the full quote from Carlin wasn’t convincing to a high degree.

That’s another point of the post, too. He cites an article by Ezra Klein making the point that it’s not that liberals are free of bad ideas, but that we have this added value of fact-checking — we have our biases, and we have our loons (anti-vaxxers and anti-GMOs, for instance), but the thing is, we can feel shame if we find out something we’re promoting is empirically incorrect. There is a check on any liberal tendency to drift off into la-la land that is totally absent in Tea Baggers and other far right political nuts. They have no shame, they already know how the world must work, and if you point evidence at them, well, the evidence must be wrong.

It’s also the difference between science and religion. Religion already has their answer, nonsensical as it is, and the evidence must be made to conform. Science has provisional answers, we keep gathering evidence to verify and improve, and we’ll change our theories if the evidence contradicts them.

Stepping in to confirm everything that Mike and Klein said, the very first comment is from someone calling themselves Gubbler who lists four things he considers fact-free liberal fantasies.

  • Racial equality, because black people were selected to be sexy animals, according to Steve Sailer, racist fraud.

  • Global warming might have merit, but any effort to change is hysteria.

  • Gay marriage, because Two guys do fecal penetration and that is the premise for marriage?

  • The liberal belief that OBAMA IS messiah!!!!

Thereby confirming that right-wingers are delusional.

We almost elected this mad woman to high office?

Sarah Palin is so stupid, it’s terrifying. Here she is preaching to her fellow lunatics about how liberals are soft on terrorists and are out to help our enemies, when we’re supposed to put the “fear of god” in them.

Waterboarding is how we baptize terrorists. I think I’m going to be sick. This is why we should never ever vote Republican.

We have some screwed up priorities here

You might also take a look at the whole defense budget, which will reach almost $500 billion, and which is characterized as…

…a sound path to responsibly meet the risks and challenges of the current national security environment.

It actually is a reduction in military spending from last year ($526 billion), but it’s still obscenely high.

2012milspending

Is it reassuring to know that we have a military that out spends the military of China, Russia, the UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia, India, Germany, Italy, and Brazil? I guess we can pick a fight with everyone all at once. Maybe the logic is that we can’t afford to have kids fill their heads with book-learnin’ when their most important job is to fill the ranks of the army.

The prophet who couldn’t shoot straight

Read about the real goings-on at the Bundy Ranch. Racism is just one of the lunacies on parade. GOOGLE DOCTORS THAT REMOVE MICROCHIPS. The summary:

Welfare negroes, the United Nations, sexually devious lawyers, satan, a Chinese solar farm, microchips, secret-agent NPS, a Muslim-Kenyan president, hippies, illegals. Take your pick.

Also revealing, and very Mormon: Bundy cast himself as a divinely inspired prophet of god who was delivering instructions to his people, instructing them in the prophecies they were supposed to follow, and chastising them for failing.

He goes on to explain that, although they managed to deter the BLM, they failed to do it “within one hour,” as the revelation had prophesied. So when an hour passes, he decides to get in his bulldozer and march on the BLM himself. The dozer gets stuck in the mud and he receives another revelation.

“It come to my mind real plain — the good Lord said, ‘Bundy, it’s not your job, it’s THEIR job.’ So we come back over here and heard that they had brought some cattle back. So I want you to understand,” addressing the crowd, “This is not my job, it’s YOUR job.

It’s a real comic opera. It’s too bad these kinds of clowns have successfully inserted themselves into American politics.

Poisoning the well with ugly

This is the time in the political cycle when we should be examining potential contenders and shaping the field we’ll have to vote for (or against) someday. Every time, we find ourselves in this position of general apathy until we arrive at the election…and suddenly it sinks in that the Republican is a shameless cretin and the Democrat is a political opportunist chosen because he’s less likely to annoy Wall Street, and then we’re stuck. The media, meanwhile, adopt simple-minded tropes that they push over and over again, to the detriment of actual discussion of policy.

We saw it with Obama: on the left, it was all “he’s black!” “Hope!” On the right, it was all “Socialist!” “Urban!” Never mind that he’s actually a conservative-leaning centrist, all too willing to surrender to the right on human rights and economic issues.

Now it’s happening again. Apparently, the front-runner on the Democratic side is Hillary Clinton. I am unenthused, because I’m not a fan of political dynasties, and because I don’t see Clinton as a particularly progressive sort of politician. But will we discuss those issues? Of course not. As Digby explains, it’s all about the ‘old woman’ distraction.

As I have discussed many times before, this was a theme of the 2008 campaign as well, with people from all sides of the political spectrum feeling free to point out that older women are such repulsive creatures they should not even be seen in public much less run for public office.

I don’t expect to see Democrats saying that sort of thing this time unless a sexy dark horse candidate emerges who doesn’t fit the old hag profile. (No Liz Warren for you! She’s over 60 …) But the Republicans are going to have a field day with it. It will be interesting to see how the GOP women react and if they join in the fun. It wouldn’t surprise me. But in the back of their minds they know that they too are going to be old some day — and that this is how the men they associate with will think of them.

I don’t care how old she is, or how wrinkled she is, or whether she is a grandma (has the issue of being a grandparent ever been a concern for a man running for office?). I want to know…will she fight hard to reduce our use of fossil fuels, and will she oppose Keystone XL? Is she going to do something about the obscene levels of income inequality? Will she support public education for all and increase investment in science? Is she the kind of person who recognizes that art makes a tangible contribution to culture, and will promote it?

That’s the stuff I care about in an election. I know the Republicans will make hay about the looks of the candidates, because they’re superficial and stupid twits, and that’s all they know how to do; but I’m going to be disappointed in the Democrats (and I’m always disappointed with them) if they don’t reply with substance, for a change.

I don’t think Clinton is on my side in most of the issues I worry about, but I could be wrong. It’s not easy to find that information, though, when it should be front and center in any discussion of relative merits, because our lousy media doesn’t care. They’re probably hoping a Kardashian promises to run for office, because that would give them the material they need to sell more soap.