This is as creepy as the notion of Santa

We often get charming Christmas letters, full of folksy details about the family and the year’s events.

Ho ho ho!

Michelle Bachmann, representative of Minnesota’s 6th congressional district, and her husband Marcus Bachmann, Christian counselor and fake “doctor” (how do you get a doctorate in clinical psychology with a 120-page primer-level dissertation on pre-school education?), are no different.

Well, maybe they are. The Bachmann family distributed a newsy Christmas letter to friends a family a few years ago. Here are a few heartwarming excerpts concerning her children:

Elisa: “was born to be the perfect wife… future mates will have to apply as she does not advertise herself” and “ORGANIZED!”

Caroline: “pulls her jeans over her 14-inch hips…King Henry had his six wives, and if our Caroline had been one of them, I think she would have been called Caroline the Vibrant.”

Harrison: “utter perfection” and a “female fantasy treasure.”

Lucas: “Chick magnate [sic] needs wife to put him through med school, clean house, pay bills and run his life. Must be willing to gamble against onslaught of socialized medicine diminishing return on investment.”

Sophia (the youngest): “A hundred years ago families designated a sacrifice [sic] lamb that forsook marriage in favor of caring for aging parents.”

These sound more like ads for a skin magazine than a holiday letter to friends and family.

Published in: on 8 March 2010 at 21:14  Comments (1)  
Tags: ,

Who’da thunk it? Religiosity implies racism

A meta-study of 55 independent studies has shown that there is a proportional relationship between the level of religiosity within a community in the U.S. and the level of racism within that community.

From the abstract (the full paper is available here):

  • Other races might be treated as out-groups because religion is practiced largely within race, because training in a religious in-group identity promotes general ethnocentrism, and because different others appear to be in competition for resources.
  • Religious racism is tied to basic life values of social conformity and respect for tradition. In support, individuals who were religious for reasons of conformity and tradition expressed racism that declined in recent years with the decreased societal acceptance of overt racial discrimination.
  • The authors failed to find that racial tolerance arises from humanitarian values, consistent with the idea that religious humanitarianism is largely expressed to in-group members.

This one ought to raise a few eyebrows:

  • Only religious agnostics were racially tolerant.
Published in: on 8 March 2010 at 14:51  Comments (2)  
Tags: , , ,

Shining examples of ignorance

Asia is missing 96 million women.

On the face of it, that sounds odd, and a little disturbing.

It ought to. The populaces of Asia, particularly of India and China, are spending a good deal of time and effort neglecting or aborting girls and women.

Why? Because they can. Ignorance of genetics, heaped with old-fashioned obsessions about possessing male heirs and farm hands, combined with 20th- and 21st-century technologies, allow Asian parents to selectively abort female fetuses and neglect the health and care of girls already born.

~~~

A Catholic school expels a pre-school student who has two mommies.

The Denver archdiocese issued this statement:

“To preserve the mission of our schools, and to respect the faith of wider Catholic community, we expect all families who enroll students to live in accord with Catholic teaching. Parents living in open discord with Catholic teaching in areas of faith and morals unfortunately choose by their actions to disqualify their children from enrollment.”

I wonder how many children have been expelled because their parents are divorced, or practice birth control, or fail to take mass or confess on a regular basis. Hmmm?

~~~

A bunch of religious zealots is demanding that Amarillo, Texas, repent.

Repent, Amarillo! is a clutch of wackadoodle fundies who play military dress-up (mmmm, fetish-y!), harass people entering swingers’ clubs, delineate some churches as “unholy”, and publish maps that delineate their targets.

They call themselves the “Army of God” (in Arabic, that translates as “Hezbollah”) and spend their time fulfilling H. L. Mencken’s definition of fundamentalism:

the abject fear that someone, somewhere, is having fun

~~~

And of course, Sarah Palin’s always good for a grim chuckle:

Behold, I have graven thee upon the palms of my hands; thy walls are continually before me. [Isaiah 49:16]


Published in: on 8 March 2010 at 9:19  Comments (2)  
Tags: , , ,