Isn’t it always convenient how God’s law (as interpreted by his earthly propheteers) is always expected to trump secular law, even when the secular law is intended to protect the safety of mere mortals?
This is an account from Connie Schultz’s facebook page, so I’ll put the whole thing here for you fb-haters.
Email from conservative blogger, dated July 9, 2012:
Dear Ms. Shultz,
We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.
Care to comment?
An exposé! Of the elite media! And he’s got the photographic evidence! It sounds so Breitbartian. And the followup is a classic Breitbartian pratfall.
Response, dated July 10, 2012:
Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:
I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.
He’s also my husband.
You know that, right?
Connie Schultz.
I’m sure this will make headlines at the Drudge Report or the Daily Caller or The Blaze or some similar right-wing schlock factory.
Hey, we successfully pharyngulated that Australian poll. Now Prime Minister Gillard is expected to answer the top 3 questions: a question on her opposition to gay marriage, that godless question on the state-supported chaplains, and a question about veteran’s pensions. Two wingnutty questions intended to cast doubt on addressing global warming did not make the cut, and the author of those two, right-wing wing columnist Andrew Bolt, is a bit peeved.
Blogger and News Ltd columnist Andrew Bolt, who drove a surge of votes for two climate questions last week, yesterday posted that the voting push from atheists was ‘‘most odd and suspicious’’, suggesting atheists had enlisted overseas networks to mobilise votes.
Mr Nicholls said he had circulated his question to Australian supporters but anyone could forward it on to others, and dismissed Bolt’s objections as “just because he’s not winning”.
‘‘This is the internet age. The comments (on my question) appear to be just Australians. I have no knowledge or control (over any foreign voting). I’d rather it just be Australians voting but you can imagine why America is interested,’’ he said.
On Bolt’s blog, he complained about us…that is, the Pharyngula readers who voted on the poll.
It seems the author has got US Internet forums to help.
…
Should blog readers fight fire with fire? It does seem odd having US readers demand answers from an Australian PM that they’ll almost certainly won’t hear about a program that doesn’t affect them in the slightest.
Nothing odd about this at all. Of course Americans have an interest in seeing good government in other countries, just as Australians are interested in seeing American not sliding back into tea-party barbarism. The question we voted in were suggested by Australians, and reflect Australian interests. And Pharyngula has a world-wide readership, so it’s kind of silly to claim that a link here just brought US interests to the table.
Also, should I point out that the previous post in Andrew Bolt’s blog was Bolt expressing his opinion of the American presidential elections?
You can do it! There’s a petition asking President Obama to speak out on behalf of jailed Indonesian atheist Alexander Aan. It needs 25,000 signatures by mid-August to get a response from the White House. Easy, right?
Tennessee’s governor, Bill Haslam, recently appointed a well-qualified resident of the state to be the new international director of the Tennessee Department of Economic and Community Development. Her name is Samar Ali. And you can guess where this is going.
The state tea-partiers and Republicans are hysterical. SHE’S A MOOOSLIIIIM!
They bought ads in the newspaper decrying the hiring of Ali because she’s Muslim. Various county leaders are outraged and are passing resolutions condemning Haslam because he hired a Muslim. Oh, and as long as the bigots are emboldened, they’re also tossing in complaints about the fact that Haslam hasn’t fired enough homosexuals.
You know, this is why government is supposed to be secular. As long as the people doing the work of administration keep their religion out of their work, as long as they are responsible to everyone in their state, as long as they are competent, I don’t care whether they’re Christian or Muslim or atheist. Unfortunately, our privileged, selfish Christian conservatives have this mistaken notion that the purpose of government is to act as an arm of the Christian church, and that evangelical fervor is an adequate substitute for competence, and that is doing us great harm.
The Atheist Foundation of Australia would like their prime minister to answer one simple question:
Dear Prime Minister. Against the strongly expressed concerns of mental health professionals, teacher unions and secular organisations, why do you allow the outrageous situation to continue where largely unqualified, religious evangelists have access to young children in public schools, in the form of the National School Chaplaincy Program?
She’s been dodging it, of course, and I suspect that if she were backed into a corner she’d be entertainingly frantic in her efforts to escape. So let’s corner her! And she has made the mistake of making that possible.
Dear members and supporters,
OurSay is giving us the opportunity to directly ask Prime Minister
Julia Gillard a question, and we have chosen to focus on the
outrageous taxpayer funded National School Chaplaincy Program.This Saturday, Gillard will answer three of the most popular questions
as chosen through OurSay. One of these questions could be ours.Please follow these simple steps to make sure that we have a seat at
the table:1) Sign up for OurSay
2) Vote seven times for our question:
3) Recruit a friend to do exactly the same
Click here to get started: http://oursay.org/s/2ea
We only have until Thursday but, if we all came together – we could
make sure that this important issue is being heard by Prime Minister
Gillard and all of Australia that very Saturday.Regards, David Nicholls
President – Atheist Foundation of Australia
PS. Make sure that you sign up and vote seven times to get an answer
from Gillard on Chaplaincy.
It’s a poll with some teeth. Let’s make Gillard dance!
I approve this message: write in Jesus’ name for president in the November elections.
It’s the only principled choice you can make!
I suppose if you’re Catholic you could write the Pope’s name in. I have no problem with that, either. The Supreme Court would probably approve that, as well, given its current constitution.
My father-in-law was one of those quiet guys who had a secret. He had a box full of medals from World War II, which he didn’t display and didn’t brag about, but the grandkids could ask to see them and he’d let them look at them, and maybe say a few reluctant words about what they were for, if pressed. He was a Marine, and not one of those REMFs, either — he’d been one of the defenders on Midway atoll, and had been boots on the ground in the Iwo Jima landing, and had fought in the jungles of Guadalcanal. I may be a pacifist myself, but I had to respect the personal bravery of a guy who experienced some of the fiercest fighting in the war, and he earned every one of those medals.
So now the US military is considering awarding medals for heroism to goddamned drone pilots: people who sit in an air-conditioned bunker far from the frontlines, playing a video game that lets them turn distant human beings into bugsplats. There is no risk here, except maybe for carpal tunnel inflammation, and there is no sacrifice, no bravery, no struggle. They’ve done nothing to earn recognition for heroism.
Maybe it’s just as well the older generation is dying off. I would think it hard to attend a veteran’s meeting and compare your medal for storming a machine gun nest to the medal some guy got for flying a model airplane. Heroes just aren’t what they used to be.
You know, if I violated tax law and then flaunted the fact to the IRS, it’s pretty much guaranteed that I’ll get slammed down hard and fast. So why do churches get a free pass?
Since 2008, pastors of some churches have openly supported and advocated specific political candidates in sermons to members in early October in an event referred to as "Pulpit Freedom Sunday". According to Reuters, videos of these sermons are sent to the offices of the IRS.
According to section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, the provision of the tax code from which these churches derive their tax-exempt status, a compliant organization must not "participate in, or intervene in (including the publishing or distributing of statements), any political campaign on behalf of … any candidate for public office."
The IRS has failed to remove the tax-exempt status of these churches despite their violations of tax code. This must change, and the law must be applied equally to everyone.
Don’t you suspect that many of the officers obligated to enforce the law are also members of these same kinds of churches, and are motivated to neglect their duties by a conflict of interest?
Maybe there should be a requirement that all IRS agents be atheists. That would certainly improve the popularity of atheism!
Unbelievable. They don’t just reject science, they don’t just despise women, they don’t just want to silence labor, Republicans hate art.
Over the weekend, the governor, Nikki Haley, destroyed the South Carolina Commission for the Arts — the cut was such that the 20 people who work there cannot show up to work today, can’t even go into their building, because of liability issues. The arts in South Carolina brings in $9.2 billion and creates 78,000 jobs at a cost of 1.9 million to the Arts Commission. It’s a phenomenally stupid cut — our state has one of the two best arts in education programs in the country! We don’t do a lot well in South Carolina, but this is one of the few we really do. And now we’re about to be the only state in the country without a public arts agency.
Read the whole thing. There’s a contact form there, you can contact the responsible idiots and tell ’em off; you should do that especially if you’re from South Carolina, but I think a world-wide show of solidarity would also be good.
Tell the philistines what you think.
