A defining issue

James Trumm has a single issue, one that trumps all the others in the election booth, and I have to agree with him. It’s a kind of signal flare that says the person advocating it is a total loon and not to be trusted on anything.

That issue is creationism.

I will never vote for anyone who favors creationism, no matter how commendable their position on other matters. Trumm makes a good case:

Evolution is the canary in the coal mine of enlightenment, of science, of reality itself. When it finds it hard to breathe, that is a clear sign that the atmosphere has become toxic. Again, Chris Hedges, from his new book, American Fascists:

The goal of creationism is not to offer an alternative. Its goal is the destruction of the core values of the open society–the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, to challenge authority, to advocate for change and to accept that there are other views, different ways of being, that are morally and socially acceptable.

This, then, is my single issue, and why Mike Huckabee will only get scorn from me.

Don’t get me wrong—no one is going to get my vote simply because they accept evolution—but someone who does not is suffering from the rot of ignorance, and they won’t be getting my support.

Jane Fonda as the voice of the conscience they wish they had

Since I mentioned my fondness for Jane Fonda the other day, I think I have to respond to this insane wingnut rant I found via Atrios:

Seeing Jane Fonda Saturday was enough to make me wish the unthinkable: it will take another terror attack on American soil in order to render these left-leaning crazies irrelevant again. Remember how quiet they were after 9/11? No one dared take them seriously. It was the United States against the terrorist world, just like it should be.

It’s time to stand tall, speak loudly and defend America against these enemies like Hanoi Jane.

She’s back. Are we going to let her get away with it….again????

Atrios rightly points out that this so-called patriot is hoping for another terrorist attack so he can have an excuse to silence the left, but I also have to point out that Jane Fonda was exactly correct on the Vietnam War; we should not have been there, we shouldn’t have thrown away tens of thousands of American lives in that futile, destructive effort. Our wingnut friend is doubly wrong in both hoping for more terror and in rejecting the valid anti-war message of the left.

I’ll also mention that one of my colleagues at UMM has linked to some wonderful photos of a memorial to the Iraq war dead at my alma mater, the University of Oregon. I suspect the hysteria of the right is due to the galling tendency of the left to constantly point out how terribly, tragically wrong the jingo-chanting war mongers have been. Why is Mike Gallagher “driven to the bathroom, becoming violently ill, over something [Jane Fonda] said”? It’s not because of what Fonda has said, but because of the horrors he has supported.

Despicable D’Souza gets it all wrong

That third-rate right-wing wanker, Dinesh D’Souza, had a article in the Washington Post, in which he attempted to defend himself from accusations of appalling stupidity in trying to blame radical Muslim attacks on the US on liberal culture. Of course, he failed. Instead, he just repeated his crazy claim that it’s all godless Hollywood’s fault.

The thrust of the radical Muslim critique of America is that Islam is under attack from the global forces of atheism and immorality — and that the United States is leading that attack.

David Neiwert ably rips that apart on matters of fact—it’s simply absurd that anyone would associate the chosen targets as symbols of atheism and immorality.

Funny that D’Souza would assume that the “pagan depravity” that angers Muslims and radicalizes them has something to do with hip-hop music and the Oscars, when the only real “pagan depravity” that the World Trade Center and the Pentagon represents is the willingness of entrenched American powers to readily oppress and blithely murder thousands of Arabs in the sake of a nonexistent threat from “weapons of mass destruction.”

I was thinking, though, that D’Souza is also wrong in principle. If extremists and jihadists despise our culture and are using violence and threats to try and compel us to change, isn’t it the grossest kind of cowardice to throw up our hands and say “they’re right, we need to align our culture with that of our enemies”? That’s basically what D’Souza is suggesting—not a military retreat, but instead the abject, unresisting abandonment of portions of Western culture, simply because terrorists demand it.

It seems to me that instead of surrendering, we ought to be celebrating those aspects of our culture that they find most objectionable: things like diversity, secularism, atheism, sex, independent women, and irreverence. And I thought of someone representative of those ideals, who’d also piss off the right wing as much as she would the Muslim freaks.

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Colorado crazy

A Colorado state senator (a Republican from Colorado Springs, of course), Dave Schultheis, is pushing a draft of an absurd bill to open public schools wide to religious indoctrination, all in the name of the first amendment to the constitution. It’s a demand to create a “Public School Religious Bill Of Rights”, with a long list of religious privileges. Some of them are trivial: it ought to be OK for students to give each other holiday cards with religious sentiments (and of course, they already can), or greet each other with religious slogans (like, say, “Merry Christmas”…hasn’t the war on Christmas been done to death already?). Some sound innocuous but are prohibited for good reason; he wants teachers to be allowed to wear religious jewelry and decorate their classrooms to celebrate their religious holidays. That may be reasonable in moderation, like someone wearing a discreet necklace with a cross on it, but just wait until some fanatic demands the right to hang bloody crucifixes and portraits of Jesus all around the room — then it becomes a repressive sectarian doctrine to allow teachers to promote superstitions that are hostile to some of their students.

The general intent of the document is to clearly prioritize religion as the number one privileged subject of the school, which may not under any circumstances be gainsaid. The rah-rah for god is bad enough, but what I found most disturbing was the way it encouraged the use of religion to undermine good teaching. Here are examples:

Teachers may:

(VII) NOT BE REQUIRED TO TEACH A TOPIC THAT VIOLATES HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS AND NOT BE DISCIPLINED FOR REFUSING TO TEACH THE TOPIC;

School boards must set up policies that allow:

(a) A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO OPT OUT OF ANY CLASS OR THE USE OF SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS; OR

(b) A PARENT OR GUARDIAN OF AN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, MIDDLE SCHOOL, OR JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT TO EXCUSE HIS OR HER CHILD FROM ANY CLASS OR THE USE OF SPECIFIC COURSE MATERIAL THAT IS INCONSISTENT WITH HIS OR HER RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.

In other words, if someone follows a religion that says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, you are not allowed to hand them a compass and take them outdoors early in the morning, and if you are a teacher with such a belief you can ignore basic astronomy, even if you are supposed to be teaching earth science. This is a common belief among these loons, that religious freedom means you are not allowed to confront them with reality. You can see where that has gotten this country so far.

Fortunately, other members of the Colorado senate say the bill doesn’t stand a chance of passing. That’s good, and not too surprising, but take heed: this is another strategy for getting creationism and who-knows-what into the schools, by cloaking it under the veil of first amendment religious freedoms.

The Kiss

It’s embarrassing enough that all the Minnesota blogs are snorting in disgust at Michele Bachmann’s kiss, but now those foreign, non-Minnesotan sites are making a big foofaraw, too.

Yes, we confess: Minnesota’s sixth district elected a dumb-as-rocks, simpering, fundagelical Bush sycophant to congress, one who would enthusiastically slobber all over the president on national television.

However, in our favor, we did not re-elect Mark Kennedy to the senate. He was such an outrageous bootlicking Bush toady, we might have witnessed some hot and explicit flunky-on-prez action instead…consider yourself lucky.

To the losers go the spoils

Karen Klinzing, a creationist-friendly Republican who lost her run for the Minnesota legislature, has been rewarded by our Republican governor, Tim Pawlenty, with a nice cushy job…as Assistant Commissioner of Education.

There’s nothing quite so charming as the sight of a conservative hack getting handed a sinecure, and one from which she can work mischief.

(via Lloyletta)

Obama’s Religion is the problem

Man, it’s so annoying when the little sites take a poke at me, hoping to trigger a strong reaction so that I’ll send lots of traffic their way. It’s pathetic, and you know I can’t resist. This particular site is trying to yank my chain by complaining about my lack of support for Barack Obama, and along the way they confirm my point.

What’s interesting to me about all this is that when you get down to it, Obama presents conservatives with a category error. Democrats are liberal, and therefore cannot be religious, q.e.d. It simply fries their circuits that Obama won’t stick in the pigeonhole they’ve constructed for him. It’s going to be a hard election season for them: As Grillmaster pointed out to me the other day, Edwards, Gore, Clinton, and Obama are all comfortable with the language of religion.  The Republican front-runners – McCain, Guilliani and Newt – not so much.

And just for fun, allow me to point out that many folks on the left share the same perspective, albeit from a different angle. A real Democrat can’t be religious!

To be fair to Prof. Myers and those who agree with him, what they’re saying is more properly, “a real Democrat shouldn’t be religious.” They’re entitled to their opinion, whether or not we agree with them.

I’m glad he tried to be fair, although he completely blew it on both attempts. What I said was that I will not support Obama because he is too pious for me, and Pastor Dan is rather freely admitting that the Democratic front-runners are all a squad of name-droppers for God. This is a disaster. When will people learn that the demagoguery of appealing to non-existent super-beings will not do a single thing to correct any of our problems?

While he’s chuckling over how Obama fries Republican circuits, he’s also reinforcing the view that one of the major reasons he is getting a lot of play is precisely because he is a happy god-bot. He’s also glossing over my other complaint about Obama: he hasn’t accomplished much of anything. If he had a commendable congressional record, I’d be willing to overlook his reliance on phantasms and spirits, but he doesn’t have one, and he doesn’t seem willing to work for one, preferring to jump on the shortcut to the presidency that a felicitous charisma and the appeal to superstitious ignorance gives him.

It amuses me that an article called Obama’s Religion Problem proposes to deal with the issue by admitting that he does represent Religion with a capital “R”, but that it isn’t a problem. Wrong. Foolishness is always a problem.