They tried. They failed

Look at that stupid gomer.

Texas tried to pass a blatantly unconstitutional ten commandments law.

Texas lawmakers are scheduled to vote Tuesday on whether to require that the Ten Commandments be posted in every classroom in the state, part of a newly energized national effort to insert religion into public life.

Supporters believe the Supreme Court’s ruling last summer in favor of a high school football coach who prayed with players essentially removed any guardrails between religion and government.

OK, with our current Korrupt/Konservative Kourt, maybe it would have flown. But Texas Democrats didn’t let them have the opportunity!

That’s what we all need to do from now on, stop these disgraceful bill before the Supreme Court can endorse them.

Bill Donohue is mad again

You knew this would set ol’ Bill’s non-existent hair on fire: the Los Angeles Dodgers invited a drag group, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, to a baseball game, and even apologized for a previous disinvitation. Cue a Catholic League tirade.

In a statement released to the press, the Dodgers said they had “much thoughtful feedback from our diverse communities, honest conversations within the Los Angeles Dodgers organization and generous discussions with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.” On May 22, the “Sisters” met with Kasten and LGBTQ organizations, as well as local government officials.

There was no indication that Catholic leaders, clergy or lay, were invited to participate in these “honest conversations.” Only one side was listened to—the side that sponsors hate speech. The fact that gay and trans leaders agree with the vulgar anti-Catholic rhetoric and behavior of the “Sisters” means they now have no moral leg to stand on when asking for an end to bigotry against them.

Knowing full well how the ruling class in this country can no longer be trusted, I told my staff yesterday that it wouldn’t surprise me if MLB and the Dodgers reversed course. To that end, I personally went through our files on the “Sisters” and prepared a report on them.

Cool. So now the Catholic League claims that their bigotry is warranted, because the Catholic church was not invited to a conversation between a baseball team and a LGBTQ advocacy group. Why would anyone expect Catholic leaders to be invited to everything?

Two things intrigued me, though: one is that he told his “staff” something. He has a staff? What is it, one part-time secretary and the building custodian? He’s another of those people with a history of amplifying his constituency with a fax machine and a bullhorn, like Moms for Liberty, Libs of Tik-Tok, and Mel and Norma Gabler.

But the second thing…Bill has a dossier on the the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence? Of course he does. And it makes me like them even more.

SISTERS OF PERPETUAL INDULGENCE
Bill Donohue

1979: This was the beginning of the Sisters. In San Francisco’s Castro
District three men dressed in traditional nun’s habit walked the streets.
One of them carried a machine gun. Then they went to a nude beach. It
was then that they adopted the name the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
1982: A year after AIDS was discovered, the Sisters were upset, but they
did not complain about the lethal sex practices that gave rise to AIDS;
rather, they complained about the “fear and prejudice” that it was
engendering. “Sr. Florence Nightmare” and “Sr. Roz Erection”
addressed the issue.
1987: The Sisters were granted a tax-exempt status after trashing Pope
John Paul II’s visit to San Francisco. The Sisters held an “exorcism” and
a “Condom Savior Mass” in Union Square. At the event, they featured
“the Latex Host” and referred to Jesus as “the Condom Savior.” They
also burned the Pope in effigy.
1987: They staged a “Hunky Jesus” contest, something they do every
year on Easter Sunday.
1989: On their tenth anniversary, they held many events, including one
with “Sr. Psychedelia’s” rise from the dead, and “Pope Dementia’s
Altered Boys.” They wore “only thongs and smiles.”
1989: At the “Condom Savior Mass,” the Sisters read from a text of the
“Condom Savior Consecration.” It said, “The Latex Host is the flesh for
the life of the world. Just as the Creator who has life sent us, we have life
because of the Condom Savior. Those who feed on this latex will have
life because of it. This is the bread that comes down from Heaven, and,
unlike those who eat not and therefore die, those who feed on this bread
shall live forever!”
1990: A staff writer for the Miami Herald said the Sisters were noted for
“carrying a 20-foot replica of a penis” at its street events.
1992: At a rally in Sacramento at the Capital Christian Center, the Sisters
held signs of the Cross with a pink inverted triangle in the place of Jesus;
the inscription read, “Stop Crucifying Queers.”
1992: “On Parade,” a publication of the San Francisco Lesbian/Gay
Freedom Day Parade and Celebration Committee, published an article by
“Sister Dana Van Iquity” which said the motto of the Sisters is “Encroach
not on my crotch!” and “Leave my loins alone.” He described the day’s
events, including “Dykes on Bikes” and “Dykes with Tikes on Trikes.”
1993: At another rally at the Capital Christian Center, protesters held a
sign, “Queer Alert: Fighting for Freedom From Religion.”
1993: Twelve years after AIDS hit, they demonstrated in Washington,
“reeling in anger and despair” over five of their members who died of the
sexually transmitted disease.
1993: The Sisters were banned from the March on Washington’s stage
for being “too controversial and not the appropriate image” for C-Span
and “the movement.”
1993: The Sisters are seen as so offensive that they incur the wrath of
Marshall Kirk and Hunter Madsen, the authors of a landmark book on
gays, After the Ball: How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Hatred of
Gays in the 90s. They say of the Sisters, “‘Fringe’ gay groups ought to
have the tact to withdraw voluntarily from public appearance at gay
parades, marches, and rallies, but they don’t care whether they fatally
compromise the rest of us.”
1994: They served “holy communion wafers and tequila” to the
congregation at a mock Mass.
1999: On the cover of the April 1, 1999 edition of the San Francisco Bay
Times there was a full-page picture of a Sister superimposed on a crosslike photo with his hands stretched out, imitating Jesus on the Cross.
2000: In San Francisco, they held a Good Friday event where they
sponsored a fetish fashion show that provided “a chance to get spanked
and free “Sticky Buns.” Dr. Carol Queen held her “Good Vibrations
Dildo Fashion Show.”
2001: I petitioned the IRS to revoke the tax-exempt status of the Sisters,
citing multiple examples of “vulgar, obscene and bigoted material against
the Catholic Church and its members.”
2002: They celebrated Easter with an “Indulgence in the Park” event that
featured a “clown-drag-nun” fundraiser, along with the annual “Hunky
Jesus” contest.
2004: They spent the entire month of December bashing Christmas in
Los Angeles.
2008: San Diego House of the Sisters—The Asylum of the Tortured
Heart, which was founded in 2005, held a “Midnight Confessional
Contest” that gave prizes to those with the “hottest confessions.” It was
held in a gay bar.
2009: They held a block party in San Francisco where some of the men
danced naked in the street.
2010: At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts winter gala, the Sisters
were asked to perform six musical acts in a “Nunway Noir” drag fashion
show where attendees could “bask in the bloody gore of occult film
screenings.”
2011: In a Daily Beast column, gay writer Andrew Sullivan called the
Sisters’ “Hunky Jesus” event a form of “blasphemy.” He was so angry at
them that he said, “This makes me feel like Bill Donohue.”
2018: The Multnomah County Library in Portland, Oregon hosted “Drag
Queen Storytime with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence,” despite their
history of anti-Catholicism. The event explicitly targeted kids 2-6.
2022: The Sisters gave an award for featuring Lil Hot Mess, “a man who
dresses as a woman for children and one of the leading activists behind
Drag Queen Story Hour.”
2023: A Sister won the “Free Choice Mary” pro-abortion award. The
man, dressed with a nun’s veil, wearing a bra and panties, was featured
holding a baby doll with a sign, “I Had A Choice.”

I gotta appreciate that not only did they raise the ire of Bill Donohue, but they outraged Andrew Sullivan.

I’m also amused that their great crime in 2004 was spending the entire month of December bashing Christmas in Los Angeles.

I like it!

Could be grim…but I’ll probably watch it

On 2 June, we get a new docuseries on the Duggars, Bill Gothard, and the IBLP cult. It’s going to be ugly. It’ll be hours of hateful, stupid people manipulating each other…so kinda like Real Housewives of Beverly Hills, only with more religion.

It’s an interesting new genre: documentaries exposing the seedy, tawdry abuses within religious organizations. I saw one episode of another series, The Secrets of Hillsong, this weekend. So far, I’m not impressed, since it was dedicated to giving Carl Lentz’s side of the story, and we already know he’s a creepy sexual predator…so subsequent episodes better give the victims’ side of the story. It promises to get much juicier and unpleasant in the future.

Sexual abuse is a central theme of the first half of the four-part docuseries. Hillsong founder Brian Houston is the one who confronted Lentz on his inappropriate sexual relations and oversaw Lentz’s removal, but Houston, too, would be ousted from the church in 2022 for his own infidelities—and currently faces up to five years in jail for allegedly helping to cover up his father Frank Houston’s sexual abuse of children. In 1977, Frank founded the original iteration of Hillsong, the Sydney Christian Life Centre, but stepped down when pedophilia allegations against him emerged in 1998. Nonetheless, Frank was invited to pray with former President Trump at the White House in 2019.

Additionally, Vanity Fair reported in 2021 that a college student and congregant named Anna Crenshaw alleged that she was sexually abused in 2015 by Hillsong staffer Jason Mays, who had already previously pleaded guilty to indecent assault. Despite these allegations against Mays, Hillsong briefly suspended then reinstated him. Even back in 2018, according to Page Six, whistleblowers in the church sent a letter to leaders citing “verified, widely circulated stories of inappropriate sexual behavior amongst staff/interns,” and characterized Hillsong as “dangerous and a breeding ground for unchecked abuse.” The letter references an unnamed church leader who had “multiple inappropriate sexual relationships with several female leaders and volunteers and was verbally, emotionally, and according to one woman, physically abusive in his relationships with these women.”

Of course, the allegations levied against Hillsong in FX’s new docuseries expand beyond sexual abuse: Lentz acknowledges deep institutionalized racism that prevented anyone but white men from assuming leadership positions within the international church, while one of Hillsong’s few Black female congregants in Kansas City recalls in the docuseries that she was once physically removed from the church by police when church leaders learned she had spoken out against lacking diversity in the organization. The woman is one of several Black women to allege racial discrimination within the church in the docuseries.

These cults are rotten all the way through, as demonstrated by IBLP and Hillsong, but somehow their followers are so fervent and sincere, even as they are exploited.

Every accusation a confession

See that guy draped with ammo for his gun? That’s Bryan Slaton, a Republican slimeball from Texas, who committed an act that finally got him ousted from the legislature.

A Republican Texas state lawmaker who once proposed to ban children from attending drag shows to supposedly shield them from being groomed for abuse has resigned after he was found to have engaged in inappopriate sexual conduct with a 19-year-old intern.

Bryan Slaton, 45, resigned Monday while facing mounting calls from the state’s Republican party and conservative groups to step down. A state House investigation last week determined that he supplied alcohol to the intern and another young staffer, had sex with the intern after she had become intoxicated, and later showed her a threatening email while saying everything would be fine if she kept quiet about the encounter.

He is not a nice man.

Slaton, who has called for abortion to be a capital offense, had unprotected sex with the young woman and procured Plan B pregnancy-prevention medication the next morning, according to a friend of hers.

By capital offense, of course, he means the woman ought to be executed, not the man who gave her Plan B to protect himself. In fact, he would probably find it useful to have his victims terminated the morning after.

Wait until you get a load of Slaton’s defense…

Proud East Texan Slaton, whose website credits him as having “values and principles that resemble(represent) the great people of East Texas,” (a designation with which the people of East Texas may choose to decline), has not expressed contrition for his acts. His lawyer instead said that “the complaints should be dismissed because the behavior occurred in Slaton’s Austin residence, not the workplace.”

Right. Rape is perfectly fine if you do it in the home you share with your wife and young child. And would you believe he is a devout Christian who has been fulsomely praised for his faith?

Born in Mineola, Texas, Bryan Slaton is a proud East Texan with values and principles that resemble(represent) the great people of East Texas. These values were formed as he grew up regularly participating in church and family gatherings. Bryan attended Ouachita Baptist University, where he earned a double major in Youth Ministry / Speech Communication. He then attended Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary and earned a Masters of Divinity with Biblical Languages. He served in the ministry as a Youth and Family Minister for 13 years.

Man, I look at that guy’s history, his record in office, his consistent sanctimony, and I think…that man’s a monster, I wouldn’t let my children anywhere near him. I bet the Texas lege is packed full of creatures exactly like him.

Your law intrigues me

Japan is instituting some new guidelines for recognizing religious abuse. It would be nice to see something like this in the USA, but that’ll never happen.

New health ministry guidelines in Japan will classify as abuse any acts by members of religious groups who threaten or force their children to participate in religious activities, or that hinder a child’s career path based on religious doctrine.

A few details:

The law stipulates four types of abuse: physical, sexual, neglect and psychological.

Inciting fear by telling children they will go to hell if they do not participate in religious activities, or preventing them from making decisions about their career path, is regarded as psychological abuse and neglect in the guidelines.

Other acts that will constitute neglect include not having the financial resources to provide adequate food or housing for children as a result of making large donations, or blocking their interaction with friends due to a difference in religious beliefs and thereby undermining their social skills.

There go most of the churches in town, as well as the state of Utah.

I can imagine the arguments if this were even proposed here, although they’d be easily defeated by all atheists. “This is a law to protect the children, you love children, don’t you?” “Anyone who opposes this law is probably a groomer, trying to indoctrinate innocent kids.” “Are you in favor of child abuse?” It could be fun.

Groomers for Christ in Texas

The Texas senate approved this bill.

S.B. 1515 would require Texas public elementary and secondary schools to display the Ten Commandments in each classroom. At present, Texas public schools have no such requirement, and this legislation only became legally feasible with the United States Supreme Court’s opinion last year in Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 142 S. Ct. 2407 (2022), which overturned the Lemon test under the Establishment Clause (found in Lemon v. Kurtzman, 403 U.S. 602 (1971)) and instead provided a test of whether a governmental display of religious content comports with America’s history and tradition.

That’s not all!

The Senate also gave final passage to Senate Bill 1396, authored by Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, which would allow public and charter schools to adopt a policy requiring every campus to set aside a time for students and employees to read the Bible or other religious texts and to pray.

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a statement that both bills are wins for religious freedom in Texas.

I believe that you cannot change the culture of the country until you change the culture of mankind, he said. Bringing the Ten Commandments and prayer back to our public schools will enable our students to become better Texans.

Somehow, forcing a sectarian version of religion on school children is now being labeled “religious freedom.”

I’m wondering how all those conservative atheists regard this development.

I like religious pluralism for keeping Catholic fanaticism in check

Here’s a fine Easter message for you: The world would be better if every man, woman, and child were Catholic. You are misusing freedom of religion when you use it to promote pluralism and false religions.

Oh yeah, the Church Militant never fails to provide entertaining intolerance for public consumption. It’s a strange mixed message, though. This guy is yelling about how pluralism is a good thing, and you shouldn’t be angry about it because everyone should be free to make the right choice (Catholicism) and the wrong choice (every other religion), but you should be getting mad that every single minor Catholic festival isn’t promoted as heavily as Christmas and Ramadan and Diwali. But have you ever looked at calendar of Catholic holy days? This week alone we had Holy Monday, Holy Tuesday, Holy Wednesday, Holy Thursday, Maundy Thursday, and Black Saturday. Get to work and complain to your HR department that they aren’t sending out announcements and memos about every single Catholic holiday! If my university started spamming me about every single religious holiday — Catholics aren’t alone in packing the calendar with noise — I’d have to block their email.

And darn those rainbow flags. Offensive to the Church Militant! There are no gay people in the True Catholic church.

Anyway, I’m doing nothing for Easter at all other than grading and making a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. I hear that my granddaughter is going on a family Easter egg hunt, and that’s about as religious as we’re going to get. I guess I better get started on the holy rite of marking my students’ sins with a red pen.

Admit it, Texas: you want to be a theocracy

Also admit that you’re just trying to recover the title of Worst State in the Union from Florida.

Texas legislators have proposed a bill to require the display of the Ten Commandments in every classroom in the state.

Never mind that this is a blatant attempt to establish an official state religion, or that it’s going to face overwhelming legal challenges, or that every non-Christian child is going to be insulted and harmed by this stupid poster, or that every Christian bully is going to be empowered to torment Jewish and Muslim kids (yeah, it’s a Nazi kind of bill.) This is simply a bad law. I’m sure most teachers in the state, even the Christian ones, would prefer that the state support them with better salaries, more supply money, and better facilities.

Maybe they should also dictate that the posters be mounted on steel plates that can be used as shields, because they’re sure as hell not going to do anything more substantial to prevent school shootings.

The Christian rot is everywhere

Hey, isn’t that Achilles from the movie Troy? I had no idea he was Christian.

I am not at all surprised by the revelation that evangelical Christians think they’re waging a holy war against trans people. Now we have even more evidence, in the email lobbyists write to politicians, with both incessantly claiming that God is on their side.

“Under His wings,” one lobbyist wrote in an email. “The Devil never sleeps,” another person sent in an email chain about the distinction between gender and sex. “I pray for the 2nd coming more and more.”

These missives are part of a trove of leaked emails between South Dakota GOP Rep. Fred Deutsch, anti-trans lobbyists, and other state lawmakers about anti-trans policies that are filled with language so deeply religious that, at times, the communications read like scripts from The Handmaid’s Tale. It’s the language, one expert told VICE News, of Christian nationalists who believe they’re engaging in a holy war.

The way these people talk to each other…it’s all Bible references and piety, while they’re advocating to increase the suffering of children. For someone like me, who is rather firmly anti-religious, it’s repulsive.

The repeated notes about “blessings” and “prayers,” as well as sign-offs like “God bless you” and “Under His wings,” proliferate throughout the emails, which frequently reference explicit religious motivations for targeting trans people.

“Know that many have prayed and are praying for you this day. Do not back down, nor should you be afraid. Know that the Lord is with you. The children of South Dakota belong to him. He is jealous over them. Let his jealousies be spoken forth in the House of Representatives of South Dakota today so that his children would be made safe. Know you are HIS representative today. Do not be afraid. Stand firm in what is right,” wrote Vernadette Broyles, a lawyer and president of the Georgia-based Children and Parental Rights Campaign, which mobilizes against “gender ideology,” in 2020.

They can’t muster a good argument or a rational defense for their behavior, so they resort to claiming Biblical authority. It’s lazy and stupid and done for an evil purpose, and damn the evidence. For the Bible tells me so (which it doesn’t, actually — most of this stuff is interpolation and reading their biases into the text) is all they’ve got.

Emails from 2020 show right-wing lobbyists and politicians rejoicing after Idaho passed two anti-trans bills. One of the bills, which is still being fought by the ACLU, bans trans women and girls from girls’ sports, and is rooted in the myth that trans women have a leg up in sports, though evidence has consistently stated the opposite. “Dear Friends,” wrote Young, the Idaho representative, “I cannot thank you enough for your help and support! It is official—Governor Little signed both H500 and H509 today! Many tears and prayers of gratitude! The fight goes on!” Young sent the email to nearly 30 people, some of whom have also lobbied against abortion, including Deutsch.

It’s the same story with the abortion holy war. It’s all based on emotional biases and ignorance, bolstered by a misreading of their holy book. I bet if we had a trove of email from anti-abortion lobbyists and politicians, it would be full of the same sickening god-talk.

It’s also driven by paranoia and a persecution complex. They actually believe that trans people are an overwhelming powerful force bent on destroying a tiny band of Christian martyrs, so they need to eradicate them first.

“Stopping the existence of transgender people and the acceptance of trans people in the public sphere is to them some sort of religious imperative,” Lecaque told VICE News.“It’s particularly fascinating that this group that has all this money, control in state legislatures, control of the house, they had a presidency, is acting like somehow they are David in the struggle.”

None of this is particularly surprising, and none of it is new. Today’s Christian nationalists believe that America is an inherently holy, Christian land, and that it’s their duty to restore God’s kingdom in order for Jesus to return. Part of this means that they think the country’s laws, policies and cultural institutions should reflect evangelical Christian values, VICE News previously reported. As a result, contentious cultural and political issues, like drag queen story hours and “critical race theory” are perceived as Satanic. Indeed, the Devil came up in the leaked emails.

“I completely agree that it is Christian Nationalism, although I tend to refer to it as religious extremism,” Shupe said in an email to VICE News. “Christian Nationalists are a danger to the LGBTQ population, and society in general: a genuine threat to people’s lives and safety. They feign compassion while doing everything possible to strip us of our civil rights and ability to safely exist and participate in society.”

Yes! Christianity is the poison in America’s veins. It’s everywhere. It is the Goliath that you find imbedded in every city, every small town, and every little farm across the country.

It’s not the only cause for the prejudice, though. I have to wonder about the atheists who are happily siding with religious extremists to condemn the trans ‘agenda’.

Who would want this?

Also, where is Ray Comfort getting the money?

That’s a box full of crap you can get for free from LivingWaters/london. Just fill out the form at that link, giving Ray Comfort your address, and he will ship up to ten boxes of his book and Bible tracts about the coronation.

You could have a thousand copies of Ray’s book and six thousand cheesy tracts delivered to your doorstep, totally free. Unless you’re in the UK, EU, Australia, or New Zealand, in which case you don’t get the books, just 10,000 cheesy tracts. Or if you’re outside those countries, you get nothing, and will have to pick up your free tracts in person in London.

From this I have determined that Canada is truly blessed.

I thought about ordering a box, just to bleed a few drops from the bloated vampiric corpse of Ray Comfort’s unaccountably rich organization, but decided not to. My reasons: a) it’s not enough to exsanguinate the parasite, b) it would just encourage him, c) it’s incredibly wasteful and would just have to be recycled, and d) I don’t want to read his stupid book (I’ve read enough Comfort to know it will be awful), I don’t want his tracts, and I don’t need a box of waste paper in my house. The man is giving away free garbage, and that does not appeal.

I still have to wonder, though: does ol’ Ray have some multi-millionaire sugar daddy? Or does he get so much in donations from a horde of deluded Christians that he can afford these ridiculous give-aways? Does he pay taxes on all of his revenues that he then spends on evangelical nonsense?

By the way, Ray Comfort is very, very excited about the coronation…but he’s not going to bother to go himself. He wants his minions to do the humiliating work of distributing his crap to all the people who don’t want it in London.