This is a game Obama cannot win

The president has announced that he has an American birth certificate, like this was really an issue. If he thought this would end the yammering inanity, he was mistaken.

Donald Trump is preening.

He should have done it a long time ago. I am really honored to play such a big role in hopefully, hopefully getting rid of this issue.

Playing the role of a prancing moron who promoted the issue is nothing to be proud of, Donny.

Meanwhile, the Republicans are playing a game of pretending they didn’t never call Obama’s parentage into question, no how.

In a statement after Obama spoke, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called the issue a distraction — and yet blamed Obama for playing campaign politics by addressing it.

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority — our economy.”

A Republican…chastising someone else for not being serious? Watcha gonna do, gomer, fix the economy by shutting down Planned Parenthood, praying, and giving rich people more tax breaks? Yeah, that’s serious.

I agree that Obama shouldn’t have wasted his time with this nonsense. Besides, you know that wingnuts are next going to argue that his birth certificate is a high-tech fake cobbled up by the geniuses at the NSA. Conspiracy theories simply do not die when presented with evidence — they absorb the evidence and claim that it’s further evidence of an even more elaborate conspiracy.

Jerry Coyne’s open letter

Go read Open letter to the NCSE and BCSE. Or read it here:

Dear comrades:

Although we may diverge in our philosophies and actions toward religion, we share a common goal: the promulgation of good science education in Britain and America–indeed, throughout the world. Many of us, like myself and Richard Dawkins, spend a lot of time teaching evolution to the general public. There’s little doubt, in fact, that Dawkins is the preeminent teacher of evolution in the world. He has not only turned many people on to modern evolutionary biology, but has converted many evolution-deniers (most of them religious) to evolution-accepters.

Nevertheless, your employees, present and former, have chosen to spend much of their time battling not creationists, but evolutionists who happen to be atheists. This apparently comes from your idea that if evolutionists also espouse atheism, it will hurt the cause of science education and turn people away from evolution. I think this is misguided for several reasons, including a complete lack of evidence that your idea is true, but also your apparent failure to recognize that creationism is a symptom of religion (and not just fundamentalist religion), and will be with us until faith disappears. That is one reason–and, given the pernicious effect of religion, a minor one–for the fact that we choose to fight on both fronts.

The official policy of your organizations–certainly of the NCSE–is apparently to cozy up to religion. You have “faith projects,” you constantly tell us to shut up about religion, and you even espouse a kind of theology which claims that faith and science are compatible. Clearly you are going to continue with these activities, for you’ve done nothing to change them in the face of criticism. And your employees, past and present, will continue to heap invective on New Atheists and tar people like Richard Dawkins with undeserved opprobrium.

We will continue to answer the misguided attacks by people like Josh Rosenau, Roger Stanyard, and Nick Matzke so long as they keep mounting those attacks. I don’t expect them to abate, but I’d like your organizations to recognize this: you have lost many allies, including some prominent ones, in your attacks on atheism. And I doubt that those attacks have converted many Christians or Muslims to the cause of evolution. This is a shame, because we all recognize that the NCSE has done some great things in the past and, I hope, will–like the new BCSE–continue do great things in the future.

There is a double irony in this situation. First, your repeated and strong accusations that, by criticizing religion, atheists are alienating our pro-evolution allies (liberal Christians), has precisely the same alienating effect on your allies: scientists who are atheists. Second, your assertion that only you have the requisite communication skills to promote evolution is belied by the observation that you have, by your own ham-handed communications, alienated many people who are on the side of good science and evolution. You have lost your natural allies. And this is not just speculation, for those allies were us, and we’re telling you so.

Sincerely,
Jerry Coyne

Richard Dawkins has also commented on it.

I really feel that the NCSE has lost its way on this issue. I want to support the NCSE, but it has become increasingly hard to do. I have heard these arguments over and over again that they have to coddle religious believers because they need them to support science. They don’t. As we’ve said repeatedly, we aren’t asking that the NCSE give atheists even as much support as they do the religious: imagine if they had “atheist projects” or an “atheist coordinator”—there’d be rejection from the Christian community. We’re not stupid, and we know that the NCSE has a delicate political game to play as well, so all we ask is that the organization we’d like to support should be genuinely secular, and stay entirely out of the religion/atheism argument. It’s what they say they’re doing, but it’s not what they’re doing. And the hypocrisy is corrupting.

Nothing will change in what atheist scientists are doing. We will continue to support science and science education, but that doesn’t mean we will feel obligated to support the NCSE.

It’s funny. The organization has such a finely tuned political sense and diplomatic strategy to promote science to the whole of the United States, and have managed to profoundly alienate that segment of our society that is most dedicated to promoting science. That’s quite an accomplishment. Maybe we should stop supporting them because they’re that incompetent at the political side of their mission.

Support Planned Parenthood on Good Friday

We have a weekend of reason and lunacy coming up. On the reason side, atheists will be gathering in Iowa to discuss science and a sensible interpretation of the universe, taking advantage of a holiday none of us find particularly interesting. On the other side, that holiday celebrating the magical ‘death’ and imaginary resurrection of a weird Jewish mystic is regarded as also a good time to come out and oppress people. As is traditional, mobs of fanatics will turn out on Good Friday to surround local women’s clinics and harass and threaten the patients. Good Friday is not a good day to get a pap smear.

Planned Parenthood is well aware of this nasty tradition, and they are asking people of good will to come out and stand in solidarity with women looking for health care and reproductive freedom. There will be a rally at the Highland Park Clinic in St Paul tomorrow — they are asking people to register for two hour shifts. They are unfortunately marred by a couple of multifaith services, but stand with them anyway.

The frothy mix of lube and feces speaks

The apocalypse is near. Americans must gird their loins and prepare to defend themselves against a terrible evil. Rick Santorum has a warning for us.

“Think about how they view you,” he told the crowd of Republicans. “They view you no different than the drug dealer views the little kid in the school yard. They want to get you hooked, they want to get you dependent. They want to get you relying upon them for your wellbeing. And once they’ve satisfied you, giving them that drug, that narcotic, then you’ll be reliant on them and, by the way, you’ll also be less than what God created you to be.”

Can you guess what quotidian horror Ricky is concerned about? It certainly sounds dreadful.

It’s health care.

I know. Just let it sink in.

Rick Santorum and the Republicans are telling people that having access to doctors and medicines and being treated for your illnesses and being in good health is wicked, and that his hateful god intends you to suffer more.

And then…

The crowd thundered applause.

Stephen Colbert treats Republican health care with the respect it deserves.

The malignant Jack Cashill

Perhaps you have no idea who Jack Cashill is — he’s not a person of great consequence, but he is representative of the deranged right. I first ran across him as a creationist activist, which tells you right there that he’s a few bushels short of a hogshead. He was featured on A Flock of Dodos as the fervent but somehow, supposedly, reasonable political voice of creationism. He didn’t have two heads, he didn’t tie anyone to a stake and set them on fire, so by golly, he must not be that bad a fellow…which is an interesting phenomenon, that we so readily set aside significant intellectual differences when we humanize our opponents.

But Jack Cashill has gone on to grander and ever more insane things. He’s a regular contributor to Wingnut Daily, that awful online rag of credulous far right wing pseudojournalism, and he authors the kinds of dishonest hackwork that Teabaggers drool over. His latest effort is penning paranoid conspiracy theory books about Obama, and he’s in the news right now for an absurdly bad photoshop job: he or his sources edited a photo of Obama with his grandparents, snipping Obama out of the picture and then claiming that the photo of the three of them had been the real photoshop job. Too bad their hackwork was so awful that they managed to leave Obama’s knee in their so-called ‘original’ photo.

And now, hilariously, Joseph Farah, the kook who publishes WND, has openly admitted that they “publish some misinformation by columnists”, referring to Cashill.

I knew he was bad from the start. It ought to be a gigantic red flag on anyone’s credibility when they are peddling the kind of intellectual dishonesty that we see in creationism, and it’s no surprise when liars of that sort metastasize into politics.

Your body isn’t yours, it belongs to the conservative Christians

Brace yourselves for a new onslaught of ridiculous Republican anti-woman bills. Alabama is working on bills to declare fetuses ‘persons’ by fiat — they’ll just legally redefine humanity to be a fertilized ovum and all derivatives thereof. They’ll probably get it passed, too.

I suppose if we could get enough dumbass legislators together to declare that vegetables are persons, we’d have to start treating carrots as if they were real people, like laborers and single mothers and college students and Mexicans and all those others the Republicans hold sacred. It won’t make them so, though, not that it makes much difference.

And just to show another tack they’re willing to take, Idaho wants to make all abortions illegal, no exemptions for rape or incest. It doesn’t matter how you got knocked up, lady, you’re having that baby…well, unless you’re the daughter of one of those Republican legislators, in which case you’ll get a ride in daddy’s SUV to that liberal hotbed of sin and perversion, Seattle, where you can get taken care of in a nice clean clinic with caring professionals.

The logic behind this decision is predictable.

“Is not the child of that rape or incest also a victim?” asked Rep. Shannon McMillan, R-Silverton. “It didn’t ask to be here. It was here under violent circumstances perhaps, but that was through no fault of its own.”[…]

The Idaho bill’s House sponsor, state Rep. Brent Crane, R-Nampa, told legislators that the “hand of the Almighty” was at work. “His ways are higher than our ways,” Crane said. “He has the ability to take difficult, tragic, horrific circumstances and then turn them into wonderful examples.”

God is so powerful, he also has the ability to take simple, manageable situations and turn them into tragic, horrific, oppressive circumstances in which the devil’s whores, i.e. all women, can suffer and feel guilt.

By the way, Brent Crane is no more of an authority on this god’s ways than I am, and what he’s really saying is that he can’t think of a rational justification for his evil law, so he’ll just take a shortcut straight to his god the psychopathic joker.

True Americans will enforce One True Way of thinking

Bryan Fischer (if you know the name, you know lunacy will soon follow) has a plan.

Allowing Muslims to immigrate into the United States, a Christian nation by origin, history and tradition, without insisting that they drop their allegiance to Allah, Muhammad, the Qur’an, and sharia law, is to commit cultural suicide. We believe in freedom of religion for Muslims like we do for everybody else. But if they insist on clinging to their religion, they will need to exercise their freedom of religion in a Muslim country which shares their values: death for those who leave Islam, the beating of wives by their husbands, and the labeling of Jews as apes and pigs.

It’s a very incomplete plan, though, and I have a few questions.

What about those who convert to Islam once they’re in America, or those Muslims who already reside here? And what about those of us who are non-Christians? Will we have an American Expulsion?

I understand Mr Fischer isn’t asking for the death penalty for those who leave Christianity (yet). I will assume he isn’t going to regard apostasy as a crime, then. If a majority of Americans leave Christianity — something that could happen in our lifetimes — will this still be a Christian nation?

It’s nice to take a stand against wife-beating and racism. Say, have you noticed that a lot of Christians do both?

Mike Huckabee recently suggested that every young American ought to be required to listen to every David Barton (you know, the liar and fraud who makes up stories of American history) speech at gunpoint. Have you considered, as an intermediate step, simply requiring listening to 24 hours of continuous David Barton fabulisms, at gunpoint, for all immigrants to this country? It would probably scare all of them away.