“I support the freedom to marry for all”

Hey, California, you could learn something from Virginia’s bad example. Let’s all hope the California Supreme Court can do something right.

People of West Central Minnesota who might be reading this: I’ve heard from Roy Zimmerman that we could get him to swing by Morris ’round about 3 April. I’m in the awkward state of being on sabbatical and also doing a lot of traveling, so it’s difficult for me to arrange a performance, but I can take a shot at it. Is there any interest out there? Write to me and I’ll work on it, and maybe draft you to help.

Stop sitting there reading this and growl at someone with power

As a member of the global liberal conspiracy, it is my obligation to occasionally toss out something disgustingly prurient to lead you all into the path of corruption. Here is my contribution today.

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That’s it; a rather dry entry from the New Oxford American Dictionary. Are you aroused yet? Are you frantically closing the screen because it is so NSFW? Are you becoming a communist or a lesbian or a gay man or a Democrat now?

A moronic mother in Menifee, California discovered a similar entry in her child’s school dictionary and must have felt the first twinges of conversion to a werewolf or liberal or something — she was actually just confused, and was baffled by the unfamiliar situation of encountering a calmly stated fact — and did the usual conservatard squawk of protest to the school district. No big deal; anyone can complain about anything.

Unfortunately, the Menifee Union School District reacted stupidly: they yanked all copies of the dictionary from the shelves of all the schools in the district.

Moronic Menifee mom must feel so proud, I’m sure she’s suffused with a deep sense of accomplishment, and she’s probably scanning all of her children’s books right now for another word she can use to make the administrators dance to her tune. She has become a problem. But she’s a minor one compared to the cowards and idiots running that school district.

Menifee, hang your head in shame. Or better yet, could the sensible parents living in that district charge on down to the offices and fucking howl in protest? Don’t sit back and take it. Don’t shrug your shoulders and move on. Get in the faces of these administrators and make them fear for their jobs.

And that’s true everywhere. NO COMPLACENCY. When some dimwit with a delicate sense of propriety can get offended over a dictionary entry, why aren’t you getting offended at a bureaucracy that is censoring simple, straightforward factual information from your schools?

You don’t want your schools to end up like Texas’. Their school board is right now in the process of banning books from the curriculum willy-nilly. For instance, communism is evil, and that’s all the kiddies need to know about it; any text that might actually inform and explain the historical facts about communism are to be expunged, so they can better produce a generation of graduates who are proudly ignorant about everything they hate.

Stupid mothers are a problem. Craven administrators are a bigger problem. But when you’ve got a curriculum set by odious ideologues like Terri Leo, who would ban an author’s name wholesale because she read a title like Ethical Marxism (no, she hasn’t actually read the book, of course), you’re in a whole wide new world of pain, in which your local school has become a temple to ignorance.

We aren’t going to take it anymore. Howl. Be a proud lesbian Democrat liberal communist socialist (even if you’re a Republican heterosexual shop owner) werewolf and get out there and make noise. When a dumb parent can squeak and make administrators jump, we’re fools not to roar.

I detest these people

Why do so many of our political leaders support creationism? Here’s a disturbing glimpse of the way the neo-conservative elite thinks, discussing specifically Irving Kristol:

Kristol has acknowledged his intellectual debt to Strauss in a recent autobiographical essay. “What made him so controversial within the academic community was his disbelief in the Enlightenment dogma that ‘the truth will make men free.'” Kristol adds that “Strauss was an intellectual aristocrat who thought that the truth could make some [emphasis Kristol’s] minds free, but he was convinced that there was an inherent conflict between philosophic truth and political order, and that the popularization and vulgarization of these truths might import unease, turmoil and the release of popular passions hitherto held in check by tradition and religion with utterly unpredictable, but mostly negative, consequences.”

Kristol agrees with this view. “There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people,” he says in an interview. “There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

The masses must be kept ignorant and pacified. The ruling elite will keep the truth locked up, and dole out “truthiness” to the mob.

I think whenever you start talking about different “truths” for different people, you’re using the word incorrectly. There is a truth about the world, and what Kristol is actually suggesting is that there are lies, not truths, to be given to children, students, and those adults he does not fancy having in his privileged club of power.

I’ll also note that their cynical strategy does not work. Cultivating ignorance in the people in the belief that a cunning elite will be better able to manage them leads to situations like we’re facing now: where the ignorant and stupid are encouraged to thrive and take power, and where the Bushes and Becks and Palins rise to the demagogic top and find the mob malleable and easy to push into extremism and insanity. I suspect that an “intellectual aristocrat” would be appalled at the unintended consequences of his wretched plan…

Massachusetts: NON-pointless poll alert!

Today is the day of a special election in Massachusetts, and it’s important — it could weaken the Democratic majority in the senate, and derail what little hope we have for sensible health care. Get out and vote for the Democrat, Coakley, even if you think she is a little yellow dog.

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I guess you have to hate someone

A new Pew survey has some encouraging results about intermarriage in America: people seem to be more willing to accept it. The numbers show that a majority across the board will readily accept a family member of a different race.

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Although I do have to find a few continuing problems there. Who are the biggest bigots in the poll? White people. There doesn’t seem to be anything said about that unsurprising result.

There are also some kinds of marriages that would be unacceptable. Guess who?

The survey finds that most Americans also are ready to accept intermarriage in their family if the new spouse is Hispanic or Asian. But there is one new spouse that most Americans would have trouble accepting into their families: someone who does not believe in God. Seven-in-ten people who are affiliated with a religion say they either would not accept such as marriage (27%) or be bothered before coming to accept it (42%).

I bet most of you would have guessed gay marriage, but that isn’t even mentioned in the survey. We have to go to the Daily Show for a discussion of that, in the context of the New Jersey senate’s recent rejection of a gay marriage bill.

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The woman at the end is particularly oblivious — she’s so proud of how far she has come as a woman and as an African-American, a person who would have been doubly disenfranchised historically, and now, thank God Almighty, she is free at last to engage in a political process to deny someone else their rights. You aren’t truly free until you can stand proudly next to someone you’ve slapped down.

Oh, God, we are afflicted with a leadership of idiots

Here’s what we get in American government: a room full of morons, eyes squeezed shut, bobbing their heads back and forth as they beg an invisible man in the sky to smite health care reform. Witness this and realize that religion is a pathology, an evil mind-rot that makes the stupid even more stupid.

(via the prayercast on RIght Wing Watch, which is full of examples of this kind of lunacy)

Be afraid

Perhaps you thought Texas’ malign influence was confined to corrupting science teaching in their own state. It’s far, far worse than that.

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Read the rest and tremble. It’s not just evolution, it’s all of science and history that they want to remake in the image of their vicious, petty god — and they’ve got a team of ideologues who will engage in all kinds of dirty tricks to get their way.

American pious irrationality expands worldwide

I tend to think that most religious people are not interested in flying planes into buildings or making themselves a belt out of dynamite, but that doesn’t excuse them: they still make irrational decisions with evil consequences, they are simply a bit more remote and indirect. The same people who would be horrified at the idea of personally lynching someone for blasphemy have no problem with praying that someone else will do the job for them, as we all saw in the reaction to that little cracker incident last year. One of the most revolting examples of this principle at work is the recent attempts to create a legal justification for imprisoning and killing homosexuals in Uganda, a situation which, as it turns out, was fomented by American evangelical homophobes. This is not to excuse Ugandans, who were apparently primed to commit violence against gays already, but it was our preachers who sparked the flame.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

That’s pretty much standard anti-gay rhetoric here in the US; we’re inured to it, and unless you’re a victim of it, it’s fairly easy to ignore it — which is why the evangelical haters are still allowed to babble on the news. These wretched liars for Jesus have their audience that loves to hear their nonsense about gays as predators on young boys, being evil and hating heterosexual marriage, and all that other dishonest crap, including their bizarre touting of ‘cures’, but at least we in the US also have vocal proponents of equality and civil liberties. We just need more of them.

In Uganda, though, that rhetoric and false assumption of authority led to horrid abuses of civil rights, like the anti-homosexuality bill. At least now, though, we can get specific and name names for the people responsible for inciting hatred of gays in Africa.

The three Americans who spoke at the conference — Scott Lively, a missionary who has written several books against homosexuality, including “7 Steps to Recruit-Proof Your Child”; Caleb Lee Brundidge, a self-described former gay man who leads “healing seminars”; and Don Schmierer, a board member of Exodus International, whose mission is “mobilizing the body of Christ to minister grace and truth to a world impacted by homosexuality” — are now trying to distance themselves from the bill.

I’m sure they are trying to get away from the guilt…but the thing is, if you read the anti-gay literature here, that’s the direction they want to go in: the criminalization of sexual acts that they find repugnant, the encouragement of loathing of people who don’t love the people they approve. They want homosexuals to be despised, second-class citizens who don’t have all the rights of good Christian heterosexuals. The only reason they are running from it now is that it happened far faster in Uganda than they expected, and they’re suddenly standing their with a smoking gun and blood on their hands, rather than at a safe remove with the apparatus of the state peeling away the rights from people, one by one.

And look who else is involved, President Obama’s friend:

Uganda has also become a magnet for American evangelical groups. Some of the best known Christian personalities have recently passed through here, often bringing with them anti-homosexuality messages, including the Rev. Rick Warren, who visited in 2008 and has compared homosexuality to pedophilia. (Mr. Warren recently condemned the anti-homosexuality bill, seeking to correct what he called “lies and errors and false reports” that he played a role in it.)

First you associate them with evil, then you disenfranchise them, and only when they’re sufficiently dehumanized do you get to kill them. America’s Christian evangelists are on step one, and working hard on step two; Uganda’s problem is that they moved on to step three a little prematurely.

Intelligence is not a requirement for getting elected

These religious conservatives are certifiably nuts.

Rep. Henry Brown of South Carolina and 74 Republican co-sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives actually wants Congress to pass a resolution condemning people for saying “Happy Holidays” rather than “Merry Christmas.”

Seriously? Yeah, seriously. Brown thinks we’re “diminishing the value of Christmas” by not making it mandatory for everyone to praise it. What next? Shall we declare every Christmas season (beginning the day after Halloween, of course) a required event, with all citizens lining up at the local mall every day to stand in ranks, raise their hands in salute to Santa Claus and WalMart, and chant “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas”?

I think I’ll work on diminishing the word’s value by being an out-and-proud atheist who cheerfully (and somewhat ironically) says “Merry Christmas” any time I feel like it. Even if it is over now for another year.

I’m so sorry for you, Indiana

But then, you elected this profoundly stupid man to be your governor, so it’s all your own fault. I was reading an interview with Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana that was just embarrassingly bad.

To me, the core of the Christian faith is humility, which starts with recognizing that you’re as fallen as anyone else. And we’re all constantly trying to get better, but… so I’m sure I come up short on way too many occasions.

Our country was founded -this is just an historic fact; some people today may resist this notion but it is absolutely true- it was founded by people of faith. It was founded on principles of faith. The whole idea of equality of men and women [and] of the races all springs from the notion that we’re all children of a just God. It is very important to at least my notion of what America’s about and should be about and I hope it’s reflected most of the time in the choices that we make personally.

The core of Christianity has never been humility, but arrogance. This is a faith that claims its followers have privileged contact with an immortal, omniscient being, that claims that believers are especially loved by the most powerful intelligence in the universe, and that those who believe most devoutly will be rewarded after death with cushy lives in paradise, while the rest of us burn in torment for eternity. Governor Daniels needs to crack a dictionary.

hu•mil•i•ty
noun
a modest or low view of one’s own importance; humbleness.

There is nothing humble in believing one has an inside line to god. Sure, Christians talk about being “fallen” and “sinners”, but what it’s all about is false modesty: we’re all fallen, but Christians get to be saved, and you don’t.

Our country was founded by people of diverse faiths, many of which modern Christians would not recognize as anything like their beliefs; Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine only get to be kept in the fold post mortem because they’re Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine, but anyone who says the things now that they said in life is a heretic and apostate.

Equality was not one of those principles held to with any consistency by the founding fathers. Slavery was condoned. Slavery was justified by the Bible; what kind of “just God” orders his people to slaughter whole nations and enslave their women and children? Equality was an ideal of the Enlightenment (implemented poorly, in fits and starts, and with its own share of blood and pain), not Christianity. The Christian ideal was a hierarchy on earth and heaven; a monarchy topped by a god.

Mellinger: Is there part of you that is bothered by the aggressive atheism of a [Sam] Harris, a [Christopher] Hitchens, a [Richard] Dawkins? And what I mean is… this atheism is a little different than atheism has been in the past because it does seek to convert people.

Daniels: I’m not sure it’s all that new. People who reject the idea of a God -who think that we’re just accidental protoplasm- have always been with us. What bothers me is the implications -which not all such folks have thought through- because really, if we are just accidental, if this life is all there is, if there is no eternal standard of right and wrong, then all that matters is power.

And atheism leads to brutality. All the horrific crimes of the last century were committed by atheists -Stalin and Hitler and Mao and so forth- because it flows very naturally from an idea that there is no judgment and there is nothing other than the brief time we spend on this Earth.

Everyone’s certainly entitled in our country to equal treatment regardless of their opinion. But yes, I think that folks who believe they’ve come to that opinion ought to think very carefully, first of all, about how different it is from the American tradition; how it leads to a very different set of outcomes in the real world.

There is no eternal standard of right and wrong. It has changed from generation to generation; what was considered right and wrong in the Biblical Middle East would horrify us with its injustice if implemented in 21st century America, and reciprocally, a Judean priest from the 1st century BC would be calling for the wrath of Jehovah to fall upon those licentious, evil people like Pat Robertson or James Dobson, who lead millions into a life antithetical to ancient Jewish custom.

It is revealing that when Daniels speculates about what matters if there is no god, all he can imagine is the worship of power. That tells you exactly how hollow his morality is at the core; he cannot imagine a good life without a priest telling him what is right and wrong.

I’d answer differently. In the absence of a god-given absolute morality, all that matters is how we treat one another in this one life we have. What flows naturally to me is not brutality, which requires an absence of awareness of the suffering of others, but recognition of the fact that my fellow human beings really are my equals: we’re all going to die, we only have these few brief decades of life, and who am I to deny someone else the same opportunities I’ve been given?

Skipping past the obvious falsehood in his comment — Hitler was not an atheist — it is an absurd non sequitur to declare that awareness of our mortality leads directly to oppression and abuses of power and the selfish acquisition of power at any cost. There are no gods, no objective enforcement of a benign morality on us, and that has a couple of consequences. One is that we ought to reject out of hand any claims to morality based on theocratic morality as false; we should not aspire to build a just society on lies. Another is that we should do as Daniels says but patently does not do, and think very carefully. We should build our morality on reason.

I think it’s obvious, actually, even if it is a non-trivial problem. I can at least say that my ideal society would not be led by an autocrat who thought power was a sufficient justification for his actions, the conclusion Daniels thinks is natural for atheists, nor do I think that a culture built around obedience to tradition, as interpreted by a tribunal of priests, is my idea of a desirable society. And I’m an atheist. Why would a mindless ratbag politician like Daniels think that my dream world would be led by a dictator? I get so tired of being told by the ignorant that my goal is to put a Stalin in power, when they dream of a Palin.

I hope you do better in your next election, Indiana. Try to find someone who doesn’t confuse faith with justice next time, OK?

Aww, someone didn’t like what I said. Timothy Stone just had to write to me to argue that he wasn’t really being ignorant…while telling me I’m going to hell for not believing in his god. These guys have no sense of irony (also, the formatting of the email was even more mangled than what I show here. I have no idea why he decided the last half looked better in blue.)

The core of Christianity has never been humility, but arrogance. This is a faith that claims its followers have privileged contact with an immortal,
omniscient being, that claims that believers are especially loved by the most powerful intelligence in the universe, and that those who believe
most devoutly will be rewarded after death with cushy lives in paradise, while the rest of us burn in torment for eternity.

This is an example of someone who really does not get Christianity at all. With all of the doctorate degrees that you have and all of the power that you have, you simply
have failed to understand what God is all about and what humanity is all about. You could not get it more wrong.

The entire point here is that there are two types of people in the world, people who accept God and those who don’t. There is nothing arrogant about that.
It is, what it is. I can’t judge you personally, but I would believe that if a person did reject God and they died that person would end up in Hell.

See you don’t believe any of this, but belief does not matter. It is all real no matter how you try to hide or not. All of the events of all of our lives are being recorded.
You can say you don’t believe all you want. None of this matters. I know you think everything is a myth with the exception of science and the scientific method, but
that is simply not true. That is a lie that you keep telling yourself because you don’t want to accept God. No matter what proof is given, you will never ever believe in
things beyond the this natural world.

What if you tried to give a scientist the facts that Atoms existed and what if he never believed the scientific method, what if he believed his own methods.
My point being that some people have agendas and no matter how much proof or what kind of proof you give them, they still won’t understand.

Heaven and Hell are real. Hell is not meant for people, it is meant for other spirit forms that you don’t believe in.
However, there are some people in there because they just outright rejected God and then they died and it was too late.

I know how you work, you will call me a loon and then brand people like me a moron for what we believe because you think that everything that isn’t scientific
in nature is just myths and fairy tales. You do this every blog post and you beat the same horse over and over again with nothing really new.

Anyway, the only way to make you really understand all of this is when you die. However, it will simply be too late.
My hope is that you turn your life around before you die at least. I may not like what you say, but I would not want you to go to Hell.